1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism.
2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 6. Mosheim"s Comm., ch. i.
sect. 13.
3 Warburton, Div. Leg., book ii. sect. 4.
4 Terence, Phormio, act i scene 1.
5 Council of Trent, sess. vi. can. x.x.x. Sess. xxv.: Decree on Invocation of Saints.
6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.
Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence and progress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was known before its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it was embodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu h.e.l.l was that a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate a certain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soul had endured a sufficient quant.i.ty of retributive and purifying pain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body. It was likewise a Hindu belief that the souls of deceased parents might be a.s.sisted out of this purgatorial woe by the prayers and offerings of their surviving children.7 The same doctrine was held by the Persians. They believed souls could be released from purgatory by the prayers, sacrifices, and good deeds of righteous surviving descendants and friends. "Zoroaster said he could, by prayer, send any one he chose to heaven or to h.e.l.l." 8 Such representations are found obscurely in the Vendidad and more fully in the Bundehesh. The Persian doctrine that the living had power to affect the condition of the dead is further indicated in the fact that, from a belief that married persons were peculiarly happy in the future state, they often hired persons to be espoused to such of their relatives as had died in celibacy.9 The doctrine of purgatory was known and accepted among the Jews too. In the Second Book of Maccabees we read the following account: "Judas sent two thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to defray the expense of a sin offering to be offered for the sins of those who were slain, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he was mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they who were slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. Whereupon he made an atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin."10 The Rabbins taught that children by sin offerings could help their parents out of their misery in the infernal world.11 They taught, furthermore, that all souls except holy ones, like those of Rabbi Akiba and his disciples, must lave themselves in the fire river of Gehenna; that therein they shall be like salamanders; that the just shall soon be cleansed in the fire river, but the wicked shall be lastingly burned.12 Again, we find this doctrine prevailing among the Romans. In the great Forum was a stone called "Lapis Ma.n.a.lis,"
described by Festus, which was supposed to cover the entrance to h.e.l.l. This was solemnly lifted three times a year, in order to let those souls flow up whose sins had been purged away by their tortures or had been remitted in consideration of the offerings and services paid for them by the living. Virgil describes how souls are purified by the action of wind, water, and fire.13 The feast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to the Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal basis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, on All Saints" Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung on the tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayer prescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friends from the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidence between the Buddhist
7 See references to "Sraddha" in index to Vishnu Purana.
8 Atkinson"s trans. of the Shah Nameh, p. 386.
9 Richardson, Dissertation on the Language, Literature, and Manners of the Eastern Nations, p. 347.
10 Cap. xii. 42-45.
11 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 357.
12 Kabbala Denudata, tom ii. pars. i. pp. 108, 109, 113.
13 Aneid, lib. vi. 1. 739.
and the Romanist usages. Throughout the Chinese Empire, during the seventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied by illuminations and other rites for the release of souls in purgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up large pictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world, to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf of their suffering relatives and friends in purgatory.14
Traces of belief in a purgatory early appear among the Christians.
Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they are cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaans imagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven, must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they would be washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where they would be purged by good fires from every inward stain.15 After these lunar and solar l.u.s.trations, they were fit for the eternal world of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held by the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects, was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it should be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that the prayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply any belief in the Papal purgatory.16 The severity and duration of the sufferings of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of the living, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on the moral and physical facts of the case according to justice and necessity, qualified only by the mercy of G.o.d.
Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowing some of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrine previously held by the heathen, or else devising the same things himself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of such notions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed, established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme of purgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as an integral part of the Roman Catholic system.17 The doctrine as matured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representatives of the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidly grew into favor with the clergy and sank with general conviction into the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in the eighth century, gives a long account of the fully developed doctrine concerning purgatory, h.e.l.l, paradise, and heaven. It is narrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in a trance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. The whole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resembling several well known descriptions given under similar circ.u.mstances and preserved in ancient heathen writers.18 The Church, seeing how admirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interest and deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge its sweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth to the sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, and effective in the common teaching and
14 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 210, note.
15 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sect. 49, note 3.
16 Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. sect. 2.
17 Edgar, Variations of Popery, ch. xvi.
18 Hist. Ecc., lib. v. cap. xii. See also lib. iii. cap. xix.
practice of the Church, no fear was so widely spread and vividly felt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear of purgatory.
The Romanist theory of man"s condition in the future life is this, in brief. By the sin of Adam, heaven was closed against him and all his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up their disembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the "original sin" transmitted from Adam, every human being, besides suffering the other woes flowing from sin, was helplessly doomed to the under world after death. In addition to this penalty, each one must also answer for his own personal sins. Christ died to "deliver mankind from sin," "discharge the punishment due them,"
and "rescue them from the tyranny of the devil." He "descended into the under world," "subdued the devil," "despoiled the depths," "rescued the Fathers and just souls," and "opened heaven."19 "Until he rose, heaven was shut against every child of Adam, as it still is to those who die indebted." "The price paid by the Son of G.o.d far exceeded our debts." The surplus balance of merits, together with the merits accruing from the supererogatory good works of the saints and from the Divine sacrifice continually offered anew by the sacrament of the ma.s.s, const.i.tuted a reserved treasure upon which the Church was authorized to draw in behalf of any one she chose to favor. The localities of the future life were these:20 Limbus Patrum, or Abraham"s Bosom, a place of peace and waiting, where the good went who died before Christ; Limbus Infantum, a mild, palliated h.e.l.l, where the children go who, since Christ, have died unbaptized; Purgatory, where all sinners suffer until they are purified, or are redeemed by the Church, or until the last day; h.e.l.l, or Gehenna, whither the hopelessly wicked have always been condemned; and Heaven, whither the spotlessly good have been admitted since the ascension of Jesus. At the day of judgment the few human souls who have reached Paradise, together with the mult.i.tudes that crowd the regions of Gehenna, Purgatory, and Limbo, will rea.s.sume their bodies: the intermediate states will then be destroyed, and when their final sentence is p.r.o.nounced all will depart forever, the acquitted into heaven, the condemned into h.e.l.l. In the mean time, the poor victims of purgatory, by the prayers of the living for them, by the transfer of good works to their account, above all, by the celebration of ma.s.ses in their behalf, may be relieved, rescued, translated to paradise. The words breathed by the spirit of the murdered King of Denmark in the ears of the horror stricken Hamlet paint the popular belief of that age in regard to the grisly realm where guilty souls were plied with horrors whereof, but that they were forbidden:
"To tell the secrets of their prison house, They could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."
19 Catechism of the Council of Trent.
20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, pars Suppl. Quast. 69.
A few specimens of the stories embodying the ideas and superst.i.tions current in the Middle Age may better ill.u.s.trate the characteristic belief of the time than much abstract description.
An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, and extensive agency of the devil was almost universal. Ascetics, saints, bishops, peasants, philosophers, kings, Gregory the Great, Martin Luther, all testified that they had often seen him. The mediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimes awful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian, idolatrous, elfish, t.i.tanic, spectral, all at once." He was "a soul s.n.a.t.c.hing wolf," a "h.e.l.l hound," a "whirlwind hammer;" now an infernal "parody of G.o.d" with "a mother who mimics the Virgin Mary," and now the "impersonated soul of evil."21 The well known story of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spread through Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith and life of the age in which it arose that a volume would be required to unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that the students of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certain pitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterranean hall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he sped so swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and in that case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadow afterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes for b.u.t.tons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Casting eyes," replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth the devil. "That I can," says the man: "will you have them large or small?" "Oh, very large," answered the devil. He then ties the fiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumps the devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and has never been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wild legend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil on the condition that he should secure a new victim for h.e.l.l once in a century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches, power, and a limited ubiquity; but failing a fresh victim at the end of each hundred years his own soul should be the forfeit. He lived four or five centuries, and then, in spite of his most desperate efforts, was disappointed of his expected victim on the last night of the century; and when the clock struck twelve the devil burst into his castle on a black steed and bore him off in a storm of lightning amidst the crash of thunders and the shrieks of fiends. St. Britius once during ma.s.s saw the devil in church taking account of the sins the congregation were committing. He covered the parchment all over, and, afraid of forgetting some of the offences, seized the scroll in his teeth and claws to stretch it out. It snapped, and his head was smartly b.u.mped against the wall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebuked him, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accident for the edification of his hearers.22 On the bursting of a certain glacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming down the Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other: opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise," and instantly the obedient river swelled above its banks and destroyed the town.
Ignes fatui, hovering about marshes and misty places, were thought to be the spirits of unbaptized children endeavoring to guide travellers to the nearest water. A kindred fancy
21 Deutsche Mythologie, cap. x.x.xiii.: Teufel.
22 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1820: Pop. Myth. of the Middle Ages.
also heard a spectral pack, called "yell hounds," afterwards corrupted to "h.e.l.l hounds," composed of the souls of unbaptized children, which could not rest, but roamed and howled through the woods all night.23 A touching popular myth said, the robin"s breast is so red because it flies into h.e.l.l with drops of water in its bill to relieve the children there, and gets scorched.
In 1171, Silo, a philosopher, implored a dying pupil of his to come back and reveal his state in the other world. A few days after his death the scholar appeared in a cowl of flames covered with logical propositions. He told Silo that he was from purgatory, that the cowl weighed on him worse than a tower, and said he was doomed to wear it for the pride he took in sophisms.
As he thus spoke he let fall a drop of sweat on his master"s hand, piercing it through. The next day Silo said to his scholars, "I leave croaking to frogs, cawing to crows, and vain things to the vain, and hie me to the logic which fears not death."
"Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis, Ad logicen pergo qua mortis non timet ergo." 24
In the long, quaint poem, "Vision of William concerning Piers Ploughman," written probably by Robert Langland about the year 1362, there are many things ill.u.s.trative of our subject. "I, Troja.n.u.s, a true knight, after death was condemned to h.e.l.l for dying unbaptized. But, on account of my mercy and truth in administering the laws, the pope wished me to be saved; and G.o.d mercifully heard him and saved me without the help of ma.s.ses."25 "Ever since the fall of Adam, Age has shaken the Tree of Human Life, and the devil has gathered the fruit into h.e.l.l."26 The author gives a most spirited account of Christ"s descent into the under world after his death, his battle with the devils there, his triumph over them, his rescue of Adam, and other particulars.27 In this poem, as in nearly all the extant productions of that period, there are copious evidences of the extent and power of the popular faith in the devil and in purgatory, and in their close connection with the present life, a faith nourishingly embodied in thousands of singular tales. Thomas Wright has collected many of these in his antiquarian works. He relates an amusing incident that once befell a minstrel who had been borne into h.e.l.l by a devil. The devils went forth in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils, coming back and finding the fires all out and h.e.l.l empty, kicked the hapless minstrel out, and Lucifer swore a big oath that no minstrel should ever darken the door of h.e.l.l again!
The mediaval belief in a future life was practically concentrated, for the most part, around the ideas of Satan, purgatory, the last judgment, h.e.l.l. The faith in Christ, G.o.d,
23 Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, 2d ed. p. 256.
24 Michelet, Hist. de France, livre iv. chap. ix.
25 Vision of Dowell, part iii.
26 Vision of Dobet, part ii.
27 Ibid., part iv.
heaven, was much rarer and less influential. Neander says, "The inmost distinction of mediaval experience was an awful sense of another life and an invisible world." A most piteous ill.u.s.tration of the conjoined faith and fear of that age is furnished by an old dialogue between the "Soul and the Body" recently edited by Halliwell, an expression of humble trust and crouching horror irresistibly pathetic in its simplicity.28 A flood of revealing light is given as to the energy with which the doctrine of purgatory impressed itself on the popular mind, by the two facts, first, that the Council of Auxerre, in 1578, prohibited the administration of the eucharist to the dead; and, secondly, that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries "crosses of absolution" that is, crosses cut out of sheet lead, with the formula of absolution engraved on them were quite commonly buried with the dead.29 The eager sincerity of the mediaval belief in another life is attested, too, by the correspondence of the representations of the dead in their legends to the appearance, disposition, and pursuits they had in life. No oblivious draught, no pure spiritualization, had freed the departed souls from earthly bonds and a.s.sociations.
Light pretexts drew them back to their wonted haunts. A buried treasure allowed them no rest till they had led some one to raise it. An unfinished task, an uncancelled obligation, forced them again to the upper world. In ruined castles the ghosts of knights, in their accustomed habiliments, held tournaments and carousals.
The priest read ma.s.s; the hunter pursued his game; the spectre robber fell on the benighted traveller.30 It is hard for us now to reproduce, even in imagination, the fervid and frightful earnestness of the popular faith of the Middle Age in the ramifying agency of the devil and in the horrors of purgatory. We will try to do it, in some degree, by a series of ill.u.s.trations aiming to show at once how prevalent such a belief and fear were, and how they became so prevalent.
First, we may specify the teaching of the Church whose authority in spiritual concerns bore almost unquestioned sway over the minds of more than eighteen generations. By the logical subtleties of her scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of her popular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees, by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretended miracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual, almost visibly opening heaven and h.e.l.l to the over awed congregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrs and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people, and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand convulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to the Carlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne, a letter probably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, and signed by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synod authoritatively declared that Charles Martel was d.a.m.ned; "that on the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of the times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of this great hero burning to all eternity in the abyss of h.e.l.l."