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The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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WORSHIP OF THE VIRGIN
In the time of Gregory the worship of the Virgin had not assumed that rank in Latin Christianity to which it rose in later centuries, though that second great impulse towards this worship, the unbounded admiration of virginity, had full possession of his monastic mind. With Gregory celibacy was the perfection of human nature; he looked with abhorrence on the contamination of the holy sacerdotal character, even in its lowest degree, by any sexual connection. No subdeacon, after a certain period, was to be admitted without a vow of chastity; no married subdeacon to be promoted to a higher rank. In one of his expositions he sadly relates the fall of one of his aunts, a consecrated virgin; she had been guilty of the sin of marriage. Of all his grievances against the exarch of Ravenna, none seems more worthy of complaint than that he had encouraged certain nuns to throw off their religious habits and to marry. Gregory does not seem to have waged this war against nature, however his sentiments were congenial with those of his age, with his wonted success.[86] His letters are full of appeals to sovereigns and to bishops to repress the incontinence of the clergy; even monasteries were not absolutely safe.
ANGELS AND DEVILS
It was not around the monastery alone, the centre of this preternatural agency, that the ordinary providence of God gave place to a perpetual interposition of miraculous power. Every Christian was environed with a world of invisible beings, who were constantly putting off their spiritual nature and assuming forms, uttering tones, distilling odours, apprehensible by the soul of man, or taking absolute and conscious possession of his inward being. A distinction was drawn between the pure, spiritual, illimitable, incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, and the thin and subtile but bodily forms of angels and archangels. These were perceptible to the human senses, wore the human form, spoke with human language; their substance was the thin air, the impalpable fire; it resembled the souls of men, but yet, whenever they pleased, it was visible, performed the functions of life, communicated not with the mind and soul only but with the eye and ear of man.
The hearing and the sight of religious terror were far more quick and sensitive. The angelic visitations were but rare and occasional; the more active demons were ever on the watch, seizing and making every opportunity of beguiling their easy victims. They were everywhere present, and everywhere betraying their presence. They ventured into the holiest places; they were hardly awed by the most devout saints; but, at the same time there was no being too humble, to whose seduction they would not condescend—nothing in ordinary life so trivial and insignificant but that they would stoop to employ it for their evil purposes. They were without the man, terrifying him with mysterious sounds and unaccountable sights. They were within him, compelling all his faculties to do their bidding, another indwelling will besides his own, compelling his reluctant soul to perform their service. Every passion, every vice, had its especial demon; lust, impiety, blasphemy, vainglory, pride were not the man himself, but a foreign power working within him. The slightest act, sometimes no act at all, surrendered the soul to the irresistible indwelling agent. In Gregory’s Dialoguesk a woman eats a lettuce without making the sign of the cross; she is possessed by a devil, who had been swallowed in the unexorcised lettuce. Another woman is possessed for admitting her husband’s embraces the night before the dedication of an oratory.
MARTYRS AND RELICS
Happily there existed, and existed almost at the command of the clergy, a counterworking power to this fatal diabolic influence, in the perpetual presence of the saints, more especially in hallowed places, and about their own relics. These relics were the treasure with which the clergy, above all the bishops of Rome, who possessed those of St. Peter and St. Paul with countless others, ruled the mind; for by these they controlled and kept in awe, they repaired the evils wrought by this whole world of evil spirits. Happy were the churches, monasteries, whose foundations were hallowed and secured by these sacred talismans. To doubt their presence in these dedicated shrines, in the scenes of their martyrdom, obstinately to require the satisfaction of the senses as to their presence, was an impious want of faith; belief, in proportion to the doubtfulness of the miracle, was the more meritorious. Kings and queens bowed in awe before the possessors and dispensers of these wonder-working treasures.
Relics had now attained a self-defensive power; profane hands which touched them withered; and men who endeavoured to remove them were struck dead. Such was the declaration of Gregory himself, to one who had petitioned for the head or some part of the body of St. Paul. It was an awful thing even to approach to worship them. Men who had merely touched the bones of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, though with the pious design of changing their position or placing the scattered bones together, had fallen dead, in one case to the number of ten. The utmost that the church of Rome could bestow would be a cloth which had been permitted to touch them; and even such cloths had been known to bleed. If, indeed, the chains of St. Paul would yield any of their precious iron to the file, which they often refused to do, this, he writes, he would transmit to the empress; and he consoles her for the smallness of the gift by the miraculous power which it will inherently possess.
Gregory doled out such gifts with pious parsimony. A nail which contained the minutest filings from the chains of St. Peter was an inestimable present to a patrician, or an ex-consul, or a barbaric king. Sometimes they were inserted in a small cross; in one instance with fragments of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted. One of the golden nails of the chains of St. Peter had tempted the avarice of a profane, no doubt a heathen or Arian, Lombard; he took out his knife to sever it off; the awe-struck knife sprang up and cut his sacrilegious throat. The Lombard king Authari and his attendants were witnesses of the miracle, and stood in terror, not daring to lift the fearful nail from the ground. A Catholic was fortunately found, by whom the nail permitted itself to be touched; and this peerless gift, so avouched, Gregory sends to a distinguished civil officer.
SANCTITY OF THE CLERGY
That sanctity which thus dwelt in the relics of the saints, was naturally gathered, as far as possible, around their own persons by the clergy, hallowed as they were and set apart by their ordination from the common race of man; and if the hierarchy had only wielded this power for self-protection, if they had but arrayed themselves in this defensive awe against the insults and cruelties of barbarians, such as the Lombards are described, it would be stern censure which would condemn even manifest imposture. We might excuse the embellishment, even the invention of the noble story of the bishop Sanctulus, who offered his life for that of a captive deacon, before whom the Lombard executioner, when he lifted up his sword to behead him, felt his arm stiffen, and could not move it till he had solemnly sworn never to raise that sword against the life of a Christian. But this conservative respect for the sanctity of their order darkens too frequently into pride and inhumanity; the awful inviolability of their persons becomes a jealous resentment against even unintentional irreverence. A demoniac accused the holy bishop Fortunatus of refusing him the rights of hospitality; a poor peasant receives the possessed into his house, and is punished for this inferential disrespect to the bishop by seeing his child cast into the fire and burned before his eyes. A poor fellow with a monkey and cymbals is struck dead for unintentionally interrupting a bishop Boniface in prayer.