History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Part 53

Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: "O obstinate, accursed, fly!... why do you stop and hold back, when you know that your strength is lost on Christ? For it is hard for thee to kick against the p.r.i.c.ks; and, verily, the longer it takes you to go, the worse it will go with you. Begone, then: take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying worm, thou begetter of vipers!"(353)

(353) Ibid., p. 859.

This procedure and its results were recognised as among the glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective that five devils gave up possession of a sufferer and signed their names, each for himself and his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583, gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in boasts of such "mighty works."(354)

(354) In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, ent.i.tled Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i, pp. 379-385.

Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men.

Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the n.o.blest of his t.i.tles that of "The Great Physician." The result was natural: the treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer, the torturer, and the executioner.

To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.

One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving out the demons by torture.(355)

(355) For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D.

H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, 1882, p. 41.

Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still exist.

In the great cities of central Europe, "witch towers," where witches and demoniacs were tortured, and "fool towers," where the more gentle lunatics were imprisoned, may still be seen.

In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of all representations still shows Satan and his imps scowling, jeering, grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into the flaming mouth of h.e.l.l. Even in the most hidden and sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these representations the painter and the gla.s.s-stainer vied with the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan, and the vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres Cathedral we see a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long devil-scaring formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic, with a little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing from HIS mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in cathedrals and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and all served to impress upon the popular mind a horror of everything called diabolic, and a hatred of those charged with it. These sermons in stones preceded the printed book; they were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther's pictorial Bible.(356)

(356) I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of Caricature and the Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen, 1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen, 1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur l'Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated ma.n.u.script in which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate x.x.xii.

Satan and his imps were among the princ.i.p.al personages in every popular drama, and "h.e.l.l's Mouth" was a piece of stage scenery constantly brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a full display of the diabolic element in it would have stood a fair chance of being pelted from the stage.(357)

(357) See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J.

Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl Hase, Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation from the German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott's Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's Ancient Mysteries; in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants.. . anciently performed at Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and other societies. See especially The Harrowing of h.e.l.l, a miracle-play, edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell, London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid for keeping a fire burning in h.e.l.l's mouth. Says Hase (as above, p. 42): "In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither horns, tails, nor hoofs were ever... wanting, the devil prosecuted on the stage his business of fetching souls," which left the mouths of the dying "in the form of small images."

Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these ideas.

The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the Saints abounded in them; sermons enforced them from every pulpit. What wonder, then, that men and women had vivid dreams of Satanic influence, that dread of it was like dread of the plague, and that this terror spread the disease enormously, until we hear of convents, villages, and even large districts, ravaged by epidemics of diabolical possession!(358)

(358) I shall discuss these epidemics of possession, which form a somewhat distinct cla.s.s of phenomena, in the next chapter.

And this terror naturally bred not only active cruelty toward those supposed to be possessed, but indifference to the sufferings of those acknowledged to be lunatics. As we have already seen, while ample and beautiful provision was made for every other form of human suffering, for this there was comparatively little; and, indeed, even this little was generally worse than none. Of this indifference and cruelty we have a striking monument in a single English word--a word originally significant of gentleness and mercy, but which became significant of wild riot, brutality, and confusion--Bethlehem Hospital became "Bedlam."

Modern art has also dwelt upon this theme, and perhaps the most touching of all its exhibitions is the picture by a great French master, representing a tender woman bound to a column and exposed to the jeers, insults, and missiles of street ruffians.(359)

(359) The typical picture representing a priest's struggle with the devil is in the city gallery of Rouen. The modern picture is Robert Fleury's painting in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris.

Here and there, even in the worst of times, men arose who attempted to promote a more humane view, but with little effect. One expositor of St.

Matthew, having ventured to recall the fact that some of the insane were spoken of in the New Testament as lunatics and to suggest that their madness might be caused by the moon, was answered that their madness was not caused by the moon, but by the devil, who avails himself of the moonlight for his work.(360)

(360) See Geraldus Cambrensis, cited by Tuke, as above, pp. 8, 9.

One result of this idea was a mode of cure which especially aggravated and spread mental disease: the promotion of great religious processions.

Troops of men and women, crying, howling, imploring saints, and beating themselves with whips, visited various sacred shrines, images, and places in the hope of driving off the powers of evil. The only result was an increase in the numbers of the diseased.

For hundreds of years this idea of diabolic possession was steadily developed. It was believed that devils entered into animals, and animals were accordingly exorcised, tried, tortured, convicted, and executed.

The great St. Ambrose tells us that a priest, while saying ma.s.s, was troubled by the croaking of frogs in a neighbouring marsh; that he exorcised them, and so stopped their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish chroniclers tell us, mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was interrupted by a cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the sacred formula of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the pavement in heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use down to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to crops to be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the animals to be excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and serpents. The use of exorcism against caterpillars and gra.s.shoppers was also common. In the thirteenth century a Bishop of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake Leman troubled the fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by exorcism, and two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated all the May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry on the Munic.i.p.al Register of Thonon as follows: "RESOLVED, That this town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining from Rome an excommunication against the insects, and that it will contribute pro rata to the expenses of the same."

Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by Satan, he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of Satan into the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting of devils into swine by the Founder of Christianity himself.(361)

(361) See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux, Chambery, 1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Grace en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a formula and ceremonies used in excommunicating insects, see Rydberg, pp. 75 and following.

One part of this superst.i.tion most tenaciously held was the belief that a human being could be transformed into one of the lower animals. This became a fundamental point. The most dreaded of predatory animals in the Middle Ages were the wolves. Driven from the hills and forests in the winter by hunger, they not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came into the villages and seized children. From time to time men and women whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into various animals, and especially into wolves. On their confessing this, and often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted; moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of the same impossible crime, were forced by torture to confess it, and sent unpitied to the stake. The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long even in Protestant countries. Probably no article in the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its resultant horrors.

The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further.

No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther. He did, indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly everything that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart; to his disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his words and tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding insanity, he laid stress especially upon the question of St. Paul as to the bewitching of the Galatians, and, regarding idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the birth of children whose fathers were "sons of G.o.d" and whose mothers were "daughters of men." One idea of his was especially characteristic.

The descent of Christ into h.e.l.l was a frequent topic of discussion in the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek studies, held that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a descent was to make himself known to the great and n.o.ble men of antiquity--Plato, Socrates, and the rest; but Luther insisted that his purpose was to conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.

This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church in general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet greater harshness. Beza was especially severe against those who believed insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, "Such persons are refuted both by sacred and profane history."

Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older Church and in the new, this superst.i.tion was developed more and more into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had done much to develop it among the people, so Luther's translation of the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it ill.u.s.trated with engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which ill.u.s.trated vividly all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this ma.s.s of folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.(362)

(362) For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar pa.s.sages in his works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp. 251, 252. As to the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of this article, in visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed, just opposite the pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very spirited figure of an imp peering out upon the congregation. One can but suspect that this mediaeval survival frequently suggested Luther's favourite topic during his sermons. For Beza, see his Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv, 24.

Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and such the practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a thousand years.

How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to dissolve away, how its main foundations were undermined by science, and how there came in gradually a reign of humanity, will now be related.

II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.

We have now seen the culmination of the old procedure regarding insanity, as it was developed under theology and enforced by ecclesiasticism; and we have noted how, under the influence of Luther and Calvin, the Reformation rather deepened than weakened the faith in the malice and power of a personal devil. Nor was this, in the Reformed churches any more than in the old, mere matter of theory. As in the early ages of Christianity, its priests especially appealed, in proof of the divine mission, to their power over the enemy of mankind in the bodies of men, so now the clergy of the rival creeds eagerly sought opportunities to establish the truth of their own and the falsehood of their opponents' doctrines by the visible casting out of devils. True, their methods differed somewhat: where the Catholic used holy water and consecrated wax, the Protestant was content with texts of Scripture and importunate prayer; but the supplementary physical annoyance of the indwelling demon did not greatly vary. Sharp was the compet.i.tion for the unhappy objects of treatment. Each side, of course, stoutly denied all efficacy to its adversaries' efforts, urging that any seeming victory over Satan was due not to the defeat but to the collusion of the fiend.