The Age of the Reformation Part 50

But all this, of course, was but dimly sensed by the contemporaries of Copernicus. What they really felt was the new compulsion of natural law and the necessity of causation. Leonardo was led thus far by his study of mathematics, which he regarded as the key to natural science.

He even went so far as to define time as a sort of non-geometrical s.p.a.ce.

[Sidenote: Theory of knowledge]

Two things were necessary to a philosophy in harmony with the scientific view; the first was a new theory of knowledge, the second was a new conception of the ultimate reality in the universe.

Paracelsus contributed to the first in the direction of modern empiricism, by defending understanding as that which comprehended exactly the thing that the hand touched and the eyes saw. Several immature attempts were made at scientific skepticism. That of Cornelius Agrippa--_De incert.i.tudine et vanitate scientiarum et {639} artium atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio_--can hardly be taken seriously, as it was regarded by the author himself rather as a clever paradox. Francis Sanchez, on the other hand, formulated a tenable theory of the impossibility of knowing anything. A riper theory of perception, following Paracelsus and antic.i.p.ating Leibnitz, was that of Edward Digby, based on the notion of the active correspondence between mind and matter.

[Sidenote: The ultimate reality]

To the thinker of the sixteenth century the solution of the question of the ultimate reality seemed to demand some form of identification of the world-soul with matter. Paracelsus and Gilbert both felt in the direction of hylozoism, or the theory of the animation of all things.

If logically carried out, as it was not by them, this would have meant that everything was G.o.d. The other alternative, that G.o.d was everything, was developed by a remarkable man, who felt for the new science the enthusiasm of a religious convert, Giordano Bruno.

[Sidenote: Bruno, 1548-1600]

Born at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth year the Dominican friary. This step he soon regretted, and, after being disciplined for disobedience, fled, first to Rome and then to Geneva.

Thence he wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg [Sidenote: 1569] and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including Oxford.

In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was imprisoned by the Inquisition, and after long years was finally burnt at the stake in Rome.

[Sidenote: February 17, 1600]

In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. At Wittenberg he spoke of Luther as "a second Hercules who bound the three-headed and triply-crowned hound of h.e.l.l and forced him to vomit forth his poison."

But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Reformers as more ignorant than himself. His _Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast_, in the disguise of an {640} attack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an a.s.sault on revealed religion. His treatise _On the Heroic Pa.s.sions_ aims to show that moral virtues are not founded on religion but on reason.

[Sidenote: The new astronomy]

The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he felt in almost boundless measure for the new astronomy, "by which," as he himself wrote, "we are moved to discover the infinite cause of an infinite effect, and are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside, apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as deity is situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us as we can be to ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa Bruno had learned that G.o.d may be found in the smallest as in the greatest things in the world; the smallest being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in energy, and all being united in the "Monad," or "the One." Now, Bruno's philosophy is nothing but the cosmological implication and the metaphysical justification of the Copernician theory in the conceptual terms of Nicholas of Cusa.

Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the senses, dazzled by the whirling maze of worlds without end scattered like blazing sparks throughout s.p.a.ce, drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to celebrate his new faith, the religion of science. The universe for him was composed of atoms, tiny "minima" that admit no further division. Each one of these is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some higher unity until finally "the monad of monads" was found in G.o.d. But this was no tribal Jehovah, no personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle; nearly identical with Natural Law.

{641}

CHAPTER XIII

THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES

SECTION 1. TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE

Because religion has in the past protested its own intolerance the most loudly, it is commonly regarded as the field of persecution _par excellence_. This is so far from being the case that it is just in the field of religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work in the vineyard had been forcibly hauled thither, whereas the other son, admitting his willingness to go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by going bare-foot and long-haired than by proclaiming novel religious views; he would be in vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result, and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the other, respect for each other's rights.

[Sidenote: Intolerance, Catholics]

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Almost all religions and almost all statesmen were then equally intolerant when they had the power to be so. The Catholic church, with that superb consistency that no new light can alter, has {642} always a.s.serted that the opinion that everyone should have freedom of conscience [Sidenote: Freedom of conscience] was "madness flowing from the most foul fountain of indifference." [1] Augustine believed that the church should "compel men to enter in" to the kingdom, by force.

Aquinas argued that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have heard the truth a sin, and that "heretics deserve not only to be excommunicated but to be put to death." One of Luther's propositions condemned by the bull _Exsurge Domine_ was that it is against the will of the Holy Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote: "Who ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to slaughter heretics who were nothing else than heretics?" the proposition was condemned, by the Sorbonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of G.o.d and of man. The power of the pope to depose and punish heretical princes was a.s.serted in the bull of February 15, 1559.

The theory of the Catholic church was put into instant practice; the duty of persecution was carried out by the Holy Office, of which Lord Acton, though himself a Catholic, has said:[2]

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed or a.s.sented, as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. . . . It is the princ.i.p.al thing with which the papacy is identified and by which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious a.s.sa.s.sination.

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not the judgment of the church. A prelate of the papal {643} household published in 1895, the following words in the _Annales ecclesiastici_:[3]

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberalism that bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little reasons to defend the Inquisition! Let no one speak of the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the church needed excuses. O blessed flames of those pyres by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and eternal d.a.m.nation! O n.o.ble and venerable memory of Torquemada!

[Sidenote: Protestants]

So much for the Catholics. If any one still harbors the traditional prejudice that the early Protestants were more liberal, he must be undeceived. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, [Sidenote: Luther] confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did.

In his first period Luther expressed the theory of toleration as well as anyone can. He wrote: "The pope is no judge of matters pertaining to G.o.d's Word and the faith, but a Christian must examine and judge them himself, as he must live and die by thorn." Again he said: "Heresy can never be prevented by force. . . . Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be cut with iron nor burnt with fire nor drowned in water." And yet again, "Faith is free. What could a heresy trial do?

No more than make people agree by mouth or in writing; it could not compel the heart. For true is the proverb: 'Thoughts are free of taxes.'" Even {644} when the Anabaptists began to preach doctrines that he thoroughly disliked, Luther at first advised the government to leave them unmolested to teach and believe what they liked, "be it gospel or lies."

But alas for the inconsistency of human nature! When Luther's party ripened into success, he saw things quite differently. The first impulse came from the civil magistrate, whom the theologians at first endured, then justified and finally urged on. All persons save priests were forbidden [Sidenote: February 26, 1527] by the Elector John of Saxony to preach or baptize, a measure aimed at the Anabaptists. In the same year, under this law, twelve men and one woman were put to death, and such executions were repeated several times in the following years, _e.g._ in 1530, 1532 and 1538. In the year 1529 came the terrible imperial law, pa.s.sed by an alliance of Catholics and Lutherans at the Diet of Spires, condemning all Anabaptists to death, and interpreted to cover cases of simple heresy in which no breath of sedition mingled. A regular inquisition was set up in Saxony, with Melanchthon on the bench, and under it many persons were punished, some with death, some with life imprisonment, and some with exile.

While Luther took no active part in these proceedings, and on several occasions gave the opinion that exile was the only proper punishment, he also, at other times, justified persecution on the ground that he was suppressing not heresy but blasphemy. As he interpreted blasphemy, in a work published about 1530, it included the papal ma.s.s, the denial of the divinity of Christ or of any other "manifest article of the faith, clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout Christendom." The government should also, in his opinion, put to death those who preached sedition, anarchy or the abolition of private property.

[Sidenote: Melanchthon]

Melanchthon was far more active in the pursuit of {645} heretics than was his older friend. He reckoned the denial of infant baptism, or of original sin, and the opinion that the eucharistic bread did not contain the real body and blood of Christ, as blasphemy properly punishable by death. He blamed Brenz for his tolerance, asking why we should pity heretics more than does G.o.d, who sends them to eternal torment? Brenz was convinced by this argument and became a persecutor himself.

[Sidenote: Bucer and Capito]

The Stra.s.sburgers, who tried to take a position intermediate between Lutherans and Zwinglians, were as intolerant as any one else. They put to death a man for saying that Christ was a mere man and a false prophet, and then defended this act in a long manifesto asking whether all religious customs of antiquity, such as the violation of women, be tolerated, and, if not, why they should draw the line at those who aimed not at the physical dishonor, but at the eternal d.a.m.nation, of their wives and daughters?

[Sidenote: Zwingli]

The Swiss also punished for heresy. Felix Manz was put to death by drowning, [Sidenote: January 5, 1527] the method of punishment chosen as a practical satire on his doctrine of baptism of adults by immersion. At the same time George Blaurock was cruelly beaten and banished under threat of death. [Sidenote: September 9, 1527] Zurich, Berne and St. Gall published a joint edict condemning Anabaptists to death, and under this law two Anabaptists were sentenced in 1528 and two more in 1532.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

In judicially murdering Servetus the Genevans were absolutely consistent with Calvin's theory. In the preface to the _Inst.i.tutes_ he admitted the right of the government to put heretics to death and only argued that Protestants were not heretics. Grounding himself on the law of Moses, he said that the death decreed by G.o.d to idolatry in the Old Testament was a universal law binding on Christians. He thought that {646} Christians should hate the enemies of G.o.d as much as did David, and when Renee of Ferrara suggested that that law might have been abrogated by the new dispensation, Calvin retorted that any such gloss on a plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin went further, and when Castellio argued that heretics should not be punished with death, Calvin said that those who defended heretics in this manner were equally culpable and should be equally punished.

Given the premises of the theologians, their arguments were unanswerable. Of late the opinion has prevailed that his faith cannot be wrong whose life is in the right. But then it was believed that the creed was the all-important thing; that G.o.d would send to h.e.l.l those who entertained wrong notions of his scheme of salvation. "We utterly abhor," says the Scots' Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those that affirm that men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion so ever they have professed."

[Sidenote: Tolerance]

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ventured to protest in the name of their master. In general, the persecuted sects, Anabaptists and Unitarians, were firmly for tolerance, by which their own position would have been improved. [Sidenote: Erasmus] Erasmus was thoroughly tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise specially devoted to the subject, uttered many _obiter dicta_ in favor of mercy and wrote many letters to the great ones of the earth interceding for the oppressed. His broad sympathies, his cla.s.sical tastes, his horror of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not have permitted him to resort to the coa.r.s.e arms of rack and stake even against infidels and Turks.

The n.o.blest plea for tolerance from the Christian standpoint was that written by Sebastian Castellio [Sidenote: Castellio] as a protest against the execution of Servetus. He {647} collects all the authorities ancient and modern, the latter including Luther and Erasmus and even some words, inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by Calvin himself. "The more one knows of the truth the less one is inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely observes, and yet, "there is no sect which does not condemn all others and wish to reign alone. Thence come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments, burnings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture and torment that is plied every day because of some opinions not pleasing to the government, or even because of things unknown." But Christians burn not only infidels but even each other, for the heretic calls on the name of Christ as he perishes in agony.

Who would not think that Christ were Moloch, or some such G.o.d, if he wished that men be immolated to him and burnt alive? . . . Imagine that Christ, the judge of all, were present and himself p.r.o.nounced sentence and lit the fire,--who would not take Christ for Satan? For what else would Satan do than burn those who call on the name of Christ? O Christ, creator of the world, dost thou see such things? And hast thou become so totally different from what thou wast, so cruel and contrary to thyself? When thou wast on earth, there was no one gentler or more compa.s.sionate or more patient of injuries.

Calvin called upon his henchmen Beza to answer this "blasphemy" of one that must surely be "the chosen vessel of Satan." Beza replied to Castellio that G.o.d had given the sword to the magistrate not to be borne in vain and that it was better to have even a cruel tyrant than to allow everyone to do as he pleased. Those who forbid the punishment of heresy are, in Beza's opinion, despisers of G.o.d's Word and might as well say that even parricides should not be chastized.

Two authors quoted in favor of tolerance more than {648} they deserve to be are Sir Thomas More [Sidenote: More] and Montaigne. In Utopia, indeed, there was no persecution, save of the fanatic who wished to persecute others. But even in Utopia censure of the government by a private individual was punishable by death. And, twelve years after the publication of the _Utopia_, More came to argue "that the burning of heretics is lawful and well done," and he did it himself accordingly. The reason he gave, in his _Dialogue_, was that heretics also persecute, and that it would put the Catholics at an unfair disadvantage to allow heresy to wax unhindered until it grew great enough to crush them. There is something in this argument. It is like that today used against disarmament, that any nation which started it would put itself at the mercy of its rivals.