Hoffman Nickerson

“ To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. ”

“ Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.
There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. ”

“ Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom the heathen is an angel of light.
Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. ”

“ The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. ”

“ The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins. Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive, and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. ”

“ And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. ”

“ By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. ”

“ For the ordinary modern man does not love industrialism as mediæval man loved the world which he had made. The thirteenth century guildsman would cheerfully fight for his guild and his customs, the modern man sacrifices himself to the life of the factory as heavily as the heathen Semites sacrificed men to Moloch. The Inquisition was a measure of defence. Its fires burnt in behalf of things which the mass of mankind saw and felt to be good. The Prohibition movement is an act of aggression, of questionable value even for its own ugly purpose. ”

“ She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.
Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. ”

“ The important thing is that de Montfort was, above all, a soldier, and a soldier of a type not uncommon in French history, from the First Crusade to the wars of the French Revolution, in that he was consumed with a sense of the sacredness of his cause. As in so many determined men of strict sexual morality, in him fairness was all but swallowed up in fanaticism.
Such men are ill understood by men of English culture. It is a commonplace, for example, that no character approaching the type is to be found in the long gallery of Shakespearean portraits. ”

“ Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. ”

“ Together with the rest of the Prohibition claptrap, they deserve to be recorded in triple brass in order to be the laughter, or the pity, of generations to come.
Our generation has made a fine art of anonymity and the use of “dummies” in finance. Therefore it is impossible at this time, and will probably remain impossible, to expose the true sources from which the twentieth century puritans got their propaganda fund. It is common knowledge that many, if not most, of the large employers of “labour” sympathized with the Puritan cause ... as in the sixteenth century. ”

“ When the sacristan of the abbey asked him in wonder why with his handful of men he was attacking so famous a chieftain as the Aragonese, Count Simon drew from his pouch an intercepted letter from Pedro to a mistress of his, the wife of a Languedocian baron, in which the King had written that it was for her sweet sake that he was fighting to drive out the “French.” “I do not fear this king,” said de Montfort, “who opposes the work of God for the sake of a harlot.” Already he was expecting an attack on Muret, the most exposed of his garrisons. ”

“ The demon race of Anjou are seen fully armed, mounted, and charging, while the kings of France have no need of war horse, armour, or weapons, but are sitting enthroned, holding the orb and sceptre, full of the calm consciousness of power admitted and acknowledged. ”

“ To those sufficiently instructed to know Prohibition and industrial strife as alike children of the Protestant spirit, the coincidence is a symbol and a warning.
To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority. Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man. Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens the Christian world to-day. ”

“ Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. ”

“ Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. ”

“ Within two months after his consecration, already he had two agents in Languedoc to take action against the heretics there.
Certainly the Pope was not interfering in Languedoc because he had nothing better to do. It is true that the Empire was not threatening or even in a position to threaten. That huge, ill-knit mass, stretching from the Rhône to the Oder, from Holstein to the Sicilies, and including both Lille and Vienna, was taking one of its periodical sudden plunges from glittering dreams of world power into civil war and blank anarchy. ”

“ The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life, and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures. Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. ”

“ In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. ”

“ The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.
In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous enemy. ”

“ To deny her right to sanction an oath was to destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought to punish the greater crimes against God. ”

“ We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed to us incomprehensible. ”

“ But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly, Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.
If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation, discomfort and pain. ”

“ Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than they, and yet remain true historians of them. ”

“ To the black shame of Puritanism, with its glorification of private judgment, it has never been content when in power with telling its votaries to practise its own peculiar kind of righteousness and leave others to their own consciences. ”

“ The twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign. In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple. ”

“ Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation. But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate. The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative heretics tended to become moral heretics. ”

“ Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense local [Pg 32] patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. ”

“ We have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,” society made the regular administration of law one of the chief concerns of statesmen. ”

“ For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. ”

“ No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—
“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. ”

“ There could be no opposition between different and mutually exclusive types of civilization, as between the French and German types to-day. Usually the dispute concerned merely the opposing claims of two parties to ownership of, and therefore feudal administration over, a patch of land. Accordingly campaigns were apt to be short and inconclusive, and warfare in general somewhat of an adventurous sport. It is true that in the thirteenth century, a time still simple, war had not yet taken on the unreality of aim and the elaborate trappings which are the mark of the later Middle Ages. ”

“ The “industrial revolution” is generally given as the root of the trouble, whereas the industrial revolution merely watered the evil seed sown broadcast by the sixteenth century moral change in Europe. So, also, the Prohibition movement is not seen in its true bearings as a result of the continuing activity of precisely the same spirit which brought about the sixteenth century moral change—that is, the alliance between a narrow religious fanaticism on the one hand and the avarice of the merchant and “captain of industry” on the other. ”

“ Then the American answers and says: “It is true that men must agree, after a fashion, as to that what is right, and it is true that this is hard. But faith is faith and men are facts. Moreover, since we speak of faith, there is a civic faith which seeks to bind men together upon the earth, no matter whence they came there and whither [Pg 219] they shall go. But faith or no faith, men as citizens must sink or swim together, and if they cannot agree about the things of this world, they will certainly perish. About God they can never agree, therefore let them differ as peaceably as they can.” ”

“ Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of [Pg 5] taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. ”

“ In Rome itself the imperial prefect swore homage to the Pope without even a protest. The municipality of Rome was a different matter. Even in the tenth century, long before the Papacy had set itself up against the Empire, the turbulent nobles of the Eternal City had several times driven out popes in fear and trembling. The twelfth century communal movement made matters worse from the papal point of view. Even a pope like Innocent could be insulted in the streets by the Roman mob, so that he feared for his life and quitted the place, to return only after nearly a year. ”

“ The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. ”