28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.
29 London Antiquaries" Archaologis, vol. x.x.xv. art. 22.
30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.
A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters given at that time commence with the words, "As the world is now drawing to a close." 31 This expectation drew additional strength from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence, war, superst.i.tion then weighing on the people. "The idea of the end of the world," we quote from Michelet, "sad as that world was, was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute, meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence and from the grave to G.o.d."
Furthermore, this superst.i.tious character of the mediaval belief in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances, fears, when every landscape of life "wore a strange hue, as if seen through the sombre medium of a stained cas.e.m.e.nt." While congregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the image of the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through clouds of incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by the cathedral, shouting, "The end of the world is at hand!" filling the streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed their naked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul but must shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes of the "Dies Iioe" went sounding through the air. The narratives of the desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, the visions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of the Crusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetual mirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy h.e.l.l.
The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in every nightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the aurora borealis hung out its b.l.o.o.d.y banners. The Huns under Attila, ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons who had made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in peril of the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician.
A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, even from Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, and King James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk who shuddered when pa.s.sing the church crypt, and the simplest peasant who quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o" the wisp.
"Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by the judge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinet to induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed before the wind." As a vivid writer has well said, "A gloomy mist of credulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, the cottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universal ignorance a thousand superst.i.tions, like foul animals of night, were propagated and nourished."
31 Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. ix.
The beliefs and excitements of the mediaval period partook of a sort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like a contagion.32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famous shrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends, relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervid and credulous mult.i.tude, filled with the kindling interaction of enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St.
Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at a.s.sisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August each year that being the anniversary of the saint"s achievement a free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the temple of Juggernaut.33
Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it.
Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its applications and results were constantly and universally thrust into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from foolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestis regni beat.i.tudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni."34 The rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences.
They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their orders were privileged above all other men in the next world.
Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous a.s.sumptions: "And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pa.s.s disguised."
The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order.
The Carmelites also a.s.serted that the Virgin Mary appeared to Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn promise that the souls of such as left the world with the Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly preserved from eternal d.a.m.nation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35
If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of the future life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholastic metaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to the concrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let him read the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso with adequate insight and sympathy peruses
32 Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
33 Quarterly Review, July, 1819: article on Monachism.
34 Perry, History of the Franks, p. 467.
35 Eccl. Hist., XIII. Century, part ii. ch. 2, sect. 29.
the pages of the immortal Florentine at whom the people pointed as he walked the streets, and said, "There goes the man who has been in h.e.l.l" will not fail to perceive with what a profound sincerity the popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threats and purgatorial woes.
The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the fact that it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux, embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartially administered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor and victim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity, and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with an intense distinctness that sears the gazer"s eyeb.a.l.l.s. The Divina Commedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of the age when it was written in this respect, that there is a grappling force of attraction, a compelling realism, about its "Purgatory"
and "h.e.l.l" which are to be sought in vain in the delineations of its "Paradise." The mediaval belief in a future life had for its central thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotion terror.36
The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and the development of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, by deliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated of these organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under the auspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actors in which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given an extremely interesting account of this affair in his volume of travels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in the cells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horrid attire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be the souls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and again pretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at their head. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, they wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to suppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speaking tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to Hamlet, "I am thy father"s spirit, Doom"d for a certain time to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away."
36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in h.e.l.l and in the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the "Dictionnaire Infernal," by J. Collin de Plancy.
37 Maclaine"s trans, of Mosheim"s Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10, note.
38 Manufactures of the Ancients, pub. by Harper and Brothers, 1845, part iv. ch. 3.
When the shadows began to fall thick behind the sunken sun, these poor creatures were thought to spring from their beds of torture, to wander amidst the scenes of their sins or to haunt the living; but at the earliest scent of morn, the first note of the c.o.c.k, they must hie to their fire again. Midnight was the high noon of ghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell with brazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of the rustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, the wavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, would breathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and through his veins, "It is the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and h.e.l.l itself breathes out Contagion to this world."
Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superst.i.tion was the powerful influence of the various forms of insanity which remarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it was believed, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives, were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal visions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, and every thing that would naturally arise in a deranged and preternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions then current concerning the invisible world.39
The princ.i.p.al works of art exposed to the people were such as served to impress upon their imaginations the Church doctrine of the future life in all its fearfulness, with its vigorous dramatic points. In the cathedral at Antwerp there is a representation of h.e.l.l carved in wood, whose marvellous elaborateness astonishes, and whose painful expressiveness oppresses, every beholder. With what excruciating emotions the pious crowds must have contemplated the harrowingly vivid paintings of the Inferno, by Orcagna, still to be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa! In the cathedral at Canterbury there was a window on which was painted a detailed picture of Christ vanquishing the devils in their own domain; but we believe it has been removed. However, the visitor still sees on the fine east window of York Cathedral the final doom of the wicked, h.e.l.l being painted as an enormous mouth; also in the west front of Lincoln Cathedral an ancient bas relief representing h.e.l.l as a monstrous mouth vomiting flame and serpents, with two human beings walking into it. The minster at Freyburg has a grotesque bas relief over its main portal, representing the Judgment. St.
Nicholas stands in the centre, and the Savior is seated above him.
On the left, an angel weighs mankind in a huge pair of scales, and a couple of malicious imps try to make the human scale kick the beam. Underneath, St. Peter is ushering the good into Paradise. On the right is shown a devil, with a pig"s head, dragging after him a throng of the wicked. He also has a basket on his back filled with figures whom he is in the act of flinging into a reeking caldron stirred by several imps. h.e.l.l is typified, on one side, by the jaws of a monster crammed to the teeth with reprobates, and Satan is seen sitting on his throne above them. A recent traveller writes from
39 De Boismont, Rational Hist. of Hallucivatious, ch. xiv.
Naples, "The favorite device on the church walls here is a vermilion picture of a male and a female soul, respectively up to the waist [the waist of a soul!] in fire, with an angel over each watering them from a water pot. This is meant to get money from the compa.s.sionate to pay for the saying of ma.s.ses in behalf of souls in purgatory." Ruskin has described some of the church paintings of the Last Judgment by the old masters as possessing a power even now sufficient to stir every sensibility to its depths.
Such works, gazed on day after day, while mult.i.tudes were kneeling beneath in the shadowy aisles, and clouds of incense were floating above, and the organ was pealing and the choir chanting in full accord, must produce lasting effects on the imagination, and thus contribute in return to the faith and fear which inspired them.
Villani as also Sismondi gives a description of a horrible representation of h.e.l.l shown at Florence in 1304 by the inhabitants of San Priano, on the river Arno. The glare of flames, the shrieks of men disguised as devils, scenes of infernal torture, filled the night. Unfortunately, the scaffolding broke beneath the crowd, and many spectators were burned or drowned, and that which began as an entertaining spectacle ended as a direful reality. The whole affair is a forcible ill.u.s.tration of the literality with which the popular mind and faith apprehended the notion of the infernal world.
Another means by which the views we have been considering were both expressed and recommended to the senses and belief of the people was those miracle plays that formed one of the most peculiar features of the Middle Age. These plays, founded on, and meant to ill.u.s.trate, Scripture narratives and theological doctrines, were at first enacted by the priests in the churches, afterwards by the various trading companies or guilds of mechanics. In 1210, Pope Gregory "forbade the clergy to take any part in the plays in churches or in the mummings at festivals." A similar prohibition was published by the Council of Treves, in 1227. The Bishop of Worms, in 1316, issued a proclamation against the abuses which had crept into the festivities of Easter, and gives a long and curious description of them.40 There were two popular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusing description, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests," when they elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burned leather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altar into a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds,"
when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests wore their surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others"
eyes, and the bell ringers pelted each other with biscuits. There is a religious play by Calderon, ent.i.tled "The Divine Orpheus," in which the entire Church scheme of man"s fall the devil"s empire, Christ"s descent there, and the victorious sequel is embodied in a most effective manner. In the priestly theology and in the popular heart of those times there was no other single particular one tenth part so prominent and vivid as that of Christ"s entrance after his death into h.e.l.l to rescue the old saints and break down Satan"s power.41
40 Early Mysteries and Latin Poems of the XII. and XIII.
Centuries, edited by Thomas Wright. See the eloquent sermon on this subject preached by Luis de Granada in the sixteenth century.
Ticknor"s Hist. Spanish Lit., vol. iii. pp. 123-127.
Peter Lombard says, "What did the Redeemer do to the despot who had us in his bonds? He offered him the cross as a mouse trap, and put his blood on it as bait." 42 About that scene there was an incomparable fascination for every believer. Christ laid aside his G.o.dhead and died. The devil thought he had secured a new victim, and humanity swooned in grief and despair. But, lo! the Crucified, descending to the inexorable dungeons, puts on all his Divinity, and suddenly "The captive world awakt, and founde The pris"ner loose, the jailer bounde!" 43
A large proportion of the miracle plays, or Mysteries, turned on this event. In the "Mystery of the Resurrection of Christ" occurs the following couplet: "This day the angelic King has risen, Leading the pious from their prison." 44
The t.i.tle of one of the princ.i.p.al plays in the Towneley Mysteries is "Extractio Animarum ab Inferno." It describes Christ descending to the gates of h.e.l.l to claim his own. Adam sees afar the gleam of his coming, and with his companions begins to sing for joy. The infernal porter shouts to the other demons, in alarm, "Since first that h.e.l.l was made and I was put therein, Such sorrow never ere I had, nor heard I such a din. My heart begins to start; my wit it waxes thin; I am afraid we can"t rejoice, these souls must from us go. Ho, Beelzebub! bind these boys: such noise was never heard in h.e.l.l."
Satan vows he will dash Beelzebub"s brains out for frightening him so. Meanwhile, Christ draws near, and says, "Lift up your gates, ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in." The portals fly asunder. Satan shouts up to his friends, "Dyng the dastard down;" but Beelzebub replies, "That is easily said." Jesus and the devil soon meet, face to face. A long colloquy ensues, in the course of which the latter tells the former that he knew his Father well by sight! At last Jesus frees Adam, Eve, the prophets, and others, and ascends, leaving the devil in the lowest pit, resolving that h.e.l.l shall soon be fuller than before; for he will walk east and he will walk west, and he will seduce thousands from their allegiance. Another play, similar to the foregoing, but much more extensively known and acted, was called the "Harrowing of h.e.l.l." Christ and Satan appear on the stage and argue in the most approved scholastic style for the right of possession in the human race. Satan says, "Whoever purchases any thing, It belongs to him and to his children. Adam, hungry, came to me;
42 Sententia, lib. iii. distinctio 19.
43 Hone, Ancient Mysteries.
44 "Resurrexit hodie Rex angelorum Ducitur de tenebris turba piorum."
I made him do me homage: For an apple, which I gave him, He and all his race belong to me." But Christ instantly puts a different aspect on the argument, by replying, "Satan! it was mine, The apple thou gavest him. The apple and the apple tree Both were made by me. As he was purchased with my goods, With reason will I have him." 45
In a religious Mystery exhibited at Lisbon as late as the close of the eighteenth century, the following scene occurs. Cain kicks his brother Abel badly and kills him. A figure like a Chinese mandarin, seated in a chair, condemns Cain and is drawn up into the clouds. The mouth of h.e.l.l then appears, like the jaws of a great dragon: amid smoke and lightning it casts up three devils, one of them having a wooden leg. These take a dance around Cain, and are very jocose, one of them inviting him to h.e.l.l to take a cup of brimstone coffee, and another asking him to make up a party at whist. Cain snarls, and they tumble him and themselves headlong into the squib vomiting mouth.
Various books of accounts kept by the trading companies who celebrated these Mysteries of the expenses incurred have been published, and are exceedingly amusing. "Item: payd for kepyng of fyer at h.e.l.lmothe, four pence." "For a new hoke to hang Judas, six pence." "Item: payd for mendyng and payntyng h.e.l.lmouthe, two pence." "Girdle for G.o.d, nine pence." "Axe for Pilatte"s son, one shilling." "A staff for the demon, one penny." "G.o.d"s coat of white leather, three shillings." The stage usually consisted of three platforms. On the highest sat G.o.d, surrounded by his angels.
On the next were the saints in Paradise, the intermediate state of the good after death. On the third were mere men yet living in the world. On one side of the lowest stage, in the rear, was a fearful cave or yawning mouth filled with smoke and flames, and denoting h.e.l.l. From this ever and anon would issue the howls and shrieks of the d.a.m.ned. Amidst hideous yellings, devils would rush forth and caper about and s.n.a.t.c.h hapless souls into this pit to their doom.46 The actors, in their mock rage, sometimes leaped from the pageant into the midst of the laughing, screaming, trembling crowd. The dramatis personoe included many queer characters, such as a "Worm of Conscience," "Deadman," (representing a soul delivered from h.e.l.l at the descent of Christ,) numerous "d.a.m.ned Souls," dressed in flame colored garments, "Theft," "Lying,"