The Greeks with their brilliant culture and educational system lay for the most part remote from the Holy See of God's Teacher- Church at Rome; so it may be that the environment of the Teacher was really in a region which lay in darkness and the shadow of death, and thus its divine efforts were thwarted and rendered desultory. Thus it becomes important to know the degree of intellectual darkness and incapacity which whelmed the Empire of the West. The tale may best be told in the words of its Inspired Tutor.
"In striking contrast with the Greek character, that of the Romans was practical, utilitarian, grave, austere. Their religion was serious, and it permeated their whole life, hallowing all its relations. The family, especially, was far more sacred than in Sparta or Athens, and the position of woman as wife and mother more exalted and influential. ...
"The ideal at which the Roman aimed was neither harmony nor happiness, but the performance of duty and the maintenance of his rights. Yet this ideal was to be realized through service to the State. Deep as was the family feeling, it was always subordinate to devotion to the public weal. 'Parents are dear,' said Cicero, 'and children and kindred, but all loves are bound up in the love of our common country' (De Officiis, I. 17). ...
"Thus the moral element predominated, and virtues of a practical sort were inculcated: first of all pietas, obedience to parents and to the gods; then prudence, fair dealing, courage, reverence, firmness, and earnestness. These qualities were to be developed, not by abstract or philosophical reasoning, but through the imitation of worthy models and, as far as possible of living concrete examples. 'Vitae discimus, We learn for life,' said Seneca; and this sentence sums up the whole purpose of Roman education -- [in contrast to "We learn for heaven," as we shall see the Christian ideal of education].
"In the course of time, elementary schools (ludi) were opened, but they were conducted by private teachers and were supplementary to the home instruction. About the middle of the third century B.C. foreign influences began to make themselves felt. The works of the Greeks were translated into Latin, Greek teachers were introduced, and schools established in which the educational characteristics of the Greeks reappeared. Under the direction of the literatus and the gramniaticus education took on a literary character, while in the school of the rhetor the art of oratory was carefully cultivated." (CE. v, 298; see p. 358-9.)
"Pagan education, as a whole, with its ideals. successes, and failures, has a profound significance. It was the product of the highest human wisdom, speculative and practical, that the world has known -- [thus confessedly, as the highest, higher than the Christian]. It pursued in turn the ideals that appeal most strongly to the human mind. It engaged the thought of the greatest philosophers and the action of the wisest legislators. Art, science, and literature were placed at its service, and the mighty influence of the State was exerted in its behalf. In itself, therefore, and in its results, it shows how much and how little human reason can accomplish when it seeks no guidance higher than itself and strives for no purposes other than those which find, or might find, their realization in the present phase of existence." (CE. v, 298.)
The splendors of the intellect and culture of Pagan Greece, its whole harmonious system of education, mental, moral and physical, which were the glory that was Greece, were transported thus to Rome and kindled anew there the torch of Reason which illumined and made splendid the power that was Rome. With clerical disparagement that all this intellectual and moral grandeur was accomplished by human reason alone with "no guidance higher than itself," that is, without the heaven-endowed tutorship of priestcraft, CE. yet confesses, that "Pagan education ... was the product of the highest human wisdom ... that the world has ever known," pursuing "the ideals that appeal most strongly to the human mind." It was in literature and in law, in history, in government, and in the practical arts and sciences, rather than in pure science, that the Roman genius rose to its highest reaches. The undimmed lustre of the Roman mind yet casts its splendors over the world of thought; Roman law, "the action of the wisest legislators," yet governs the actions of men and nations throughout the civilized world. A few illustrious names of universal renown must suffice to put into high relief the culture of Rome from the dawn of the Christian era till the pall of the Christian Ages of Faith fell over the Roman world. Augustus Caesar (not to mention Julius), Cicero, Cato, Seneca, the Plinys, Tacitus, Livy, Horace, Vergil, Lucretius, the Scipios, Gaius, Paulus, Papinian, Tribonius, Antoninius Pius, Marcus Aurelius; the roster may be mightily extended and every glorious name be known to every schoolboy.
Thus was the Pagan Roman world intellectually and morally illumined when there befell --
under the tutelage of the vicars of the Perfect Teacher. The story again may be told by the accredited apologists who thus explain "The Aim of Christian Education," in response to the Divine Command. All education for practical objects of this life, for all "purposes which might find their realization in the present phase of existence," was piously and disdainfully rejected. For over a millennium, as will be soon admitted, Christian "education" was virtually limited to candidates for the priesthood and to the vain mummeries of monks; with few and straggling exceptions no one but a churchman was taught a word: the simple proof is, that scarce one person in a thousand of the population of Christendom except priests, could read or write his own name. The "education" of the Clergy will be known by its fruits, of which we shall have some tastes. Thus CE. discloses
"To these Apostles He gave the command, 'Going therefore, teach ye all nations' (Matt. xxviii, 19) -- [a forged Mandate, as we have seen]. These [forged] words are the charter of the Christian Church as a teaching institution. While they refer directly to the doctrine of salvation, and therefore to the imparting of religious truth, they nevertheless, or rather by the very nature of that truth and its consequences for life, carry with them the obligation of insisting on certain characteristics which have a decisive bearing on all educational problems (p. 299-300). ...
"The Educational Work of the Church. Apart from the preaching of the Apostles, the earliest form of Christian instruction was that given to the catechumens in preparation for baptism. Its object was twofold: to impart a knowledge of Christian truth, and to train the candidate in the practice of religion. ... Until the third century this mode of instruction was an important adjunct to the Apostolate; but in the fifth and sixth centuries it was gradually replaced by private instruction of the converts, and by the training given in other schools to those who had been baptized in infancy. The catechumenal schools, however, gave expression to the spirit which was to animate all subsequent Christian education: they were open to every one who accepted the Faith, and they united religious instruction with moral discipline. The 'catechetical' schools, also under the bishop's supervision, prepared young clerics for the priesthood. The courses of study included philosophy and theology, and naturally took on an apologetic character in defense of Christian truth against the attacks of pagan learning. ...
"Philosophy and literature were factors which had to be contended with as well as the educational system, which was still largely under pagan control. ... Fear of the corrupting influence of pagan literature had more and more alienated Christians from such studies. ...
"[In the Middle Ages] education was provided for the clergy in the cathedral schools under the direct control of the bishop and for the laity in parochial schools to which all had access -- [but few availed thereof]. In the curriculum religion held the first place; other subjects were few and elementary, comprising at best the trivium and the quadrivium. ... [I cannot forbear to add this -- The history of education records no greater undertaking; for the task was not that of improving or perfecting, [the brilliant system of pagan education], but of creating [the dull schools of religious instruction]; and had not the Church gone vigorously about her business, modern civilization would have been retarded for centuries [!]
"The monasteries were the sole schools for teaching; they offered the only professional training; they were the only universities of research; they alone served as publishing houses for the multiplication of books; they were the only libraries for the preservation of learning; they produced the only scholars; they were the sole educational institutions of this period. ...
"Two other movements form the climax of the Church's activity during the Middle Ages. The development of Scholasticism meant the revival of Greek philosophy, and in particular that of Aristotle; but it also meant that philosophy was now to serve the cause of Christian truth. ... Having used the subtleties of Greek thought to sharpen the student's mind, the Church thereupon presented to him her dogmas without the least fear of contradiction. ...
"The same synthetic spirit took concrete form in the universities. ... In university teaching all the then known branches of science were represented. ... The university was thus, in the educational sphere, the highest expression of that completeness which had all along characterized the teaching of the Church." (CE. v, 299-303, passim.)
All these "universities were devoted for the most part to the development of theology." (CE. vii, 368; i, 264.) The "greatest" of these Christian universities was that of Paris, which originated about 1211; "legends of foundation of universities by Alfred, Charlemagne, and Theodosius II, are myths. The students were not boys, but mature men, many clergy. ... Barbarous Latin of the universities and the wretched translations of Aristotle used in commentaries and lectures: the Scholastic method of teaching with its endless hair-splitting and disputations; much time was spent in gaining very little knowledge or hardly any value," were the charges made by the new school of Humanists, headed by Erasmus, "Prince of Humanists," which destroyed the old Christian ideals of education. (CE. xv, 194.)
The wonderful Middle Ages universities, so scorned by the Humanists of the Renaissance, and so fondly cherished by the Church, are not to be confounded in thought with such modernistic institutions as Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia or Harvard -- (which all started on a purely "Christian" standard). A revealing pen- sketch of them all, based on that of Paris, is drawn by Prof. James Harvey Robinson: "There were no university buildings, and in Paris the lectures were given in the Latin Quarter, in Straw Street, so called from the straw strewn on the floors of the hired rooms where the lecturer explained the text-book [a handwritten manuscript], with the students squatting on the floor before him. There were no laboratories, for there was no experimentation. All that was required was a copy of the text-book. This the lecturer explained sentence by sentence, and the students listened and sometimes took notes.
"The most striking peculiarity of the instruction of the medieval university was the supreme deference paid to Aristotle. ... Aristotle was, of course, a pagan. He was uncertain whether the soul existed after death; he had never heard of the Bible and knew nothing of the salvation of man through Christ. One would suppose that he would have been rejected with horror by the ardent Christian believers of the Middle Ages. But the teachers of the thirteenth century were fascinated by his logic and astonished at his learning. ... He was called 'The Philosopher'; and so fully were scholars convinced that it had pleased God to permit Aristotle to say the last word upon each and every branch of knowledge that they humbly accepted him, along with the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the canon and Roman law, as one of the unquestionable authorities which together formed a complete and final guide for humanity in conduct and in every branch of science. ... No attention was given to the great subject of history in the medieval universities, nor was Greek taught." (Robinson, The Ordeal of Civilization, pp. 207-208.)
The school of Erasmus and the other great Humanists who preceded and followed him brought the Renaissance to its fullness of glory in emancipating the mind from the fetters of the Dark Ages of Faith, and destroyed the rotten fruits of a millennium of "Christian education." Thereupon, says CE., painfully confessing the truth, with reservations, once the schools were secularized, they fell rapidly under influences which transformed ideals, systems and methods. Philosophy detached from theology, formulated new theories of life and its values, that moved, at first slowly and then more rapidly, away from the positive teachings of Christianity. Science in turn cast off its allegiance to philosophy and finally proclaimed itself the only sort of knowledge worth seeking. ...
"During three centuries past, the main endeavor outside the Catholic Church has been to establish education on a purely naturalistic basis, whether this be aesthetic culture or scientific knowledge, individual perfection or social service. ... The Catholic Church has been obliged to carry on ... the struggle in behalf of those truths on which Christianity is founded; and her educational work during the modern period may be described in general terms as the steadfast maintenance of the union between the natural and the supernatural. ... It is specially the parochial school that has served in recent times as an essential factor in the work of religion. ... Sound moral instruction is impossible apart from religious education. ... Catholic parents are bound in conscience to provide for the education of their children, either at home or in schools of the right sort." (CE. v, 295-304, passim.) "Parochial schools ... aimed at fostering vocations to the priesthood." (CE. xiii, 555.)
The high Christian educational ideal of fettering Reason with Faith, and the underlying objective of all Church teaching, is again strongly insisted upon by our spokesman for Christian education:
"The Christian Church, by virtue of her Divine charter, 'Going, teach ye all nations,' is essentially a teaching organization. ... Truths which are not of their nature spiritual, truths of science, or history, matters of culture, in a word, profane learning -- these do not belong intrinsically to the pregame of the Church's teaching. Nevertheless, they enter into her work by force of circumstances, when, namely, the Christian youth cannot attain a knowledge of them without incurring a grave danger to faith or morals. ... She assumes -- [therefore, not divinely ordained to her, but self-arrogated] -- the task of teaching the secular branches in such a way that religion is the centralizing, unifying, and vitalizing force in the educational process." (CE. xiii, 555.)
"Apart from Religion the observance of the Moral Law is impossible." (CE. x, 559.)
"The wonderful efficacy displayed by the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of Europe has no parallel." (CE. iii, 34.)
"Her holiness appears in the fruits which she brings forth." (CE. iii, 759.)
The above gems of pious self-gratulation are culled from the plethoric treasure-chest of like paste jewels of ecclesiastical false pretense, and are set in high relief as tribute to the presumptuous genius of Pharisaism. A few more out of many may be displayed as a foil to what follows: "Sound moral instruction is impossible apart from religious education" (CE. v, 304), -- though this seems to be discounted by this formal admission of the entire efficacy of purely secular ethic of Plato and the Pagans: "All moral conduct may be summed up in the rule: Avoid evil and do good" (CE. v, 28); and by this self-evident truth: "Material prosperity and a high degree of civilization may be found where the Church does not exist." (CE. iii, 760.) Whether either of these highly beneficent conditions have been found where the Church in plenitude of power and pride did exist, will soon be disclosed. However, these disproofs to the contrary, "The Church has ever affirmed that the beliefs of Theism and morality are essentially connected, and that apart from religion the observance of the moral law is impossible." (CE. x, 559.)
Yet we have just read from the teeming pages of CE. the glowing tributes to the morally "exalted ideals" of the Pagan Greeks, and that with the Pagan Romans "the moral element predominated"; that "Pagan education, as a whole, was the product of the highest human wisdom that the world has ever known," -- and withal without the Light of the Cross to illumine the Pagan mind and conscience. Indeed, in the next sentences after the last above, CE., waxing philosophical, belies fully its "Morality Lie" thesis, that "apart from religion the observance of the moral law is impossible," by this explicit admission of the natural source and origin of Morality: "The Church admits that the moral law is knowable to reason: for the due regulation of our free actions, in which morality consists, is simply their right ordering with a view to the perfecting of our rational nature. ... The Greeks of classical times were in moral questions influenced rather by non- religious conceptions such as that of natural shame than the fear of the gods; while one great religious system, namely Buddhism, explicitly taught the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God." (CE. x, 559.) We shall wonder, as we read the Christian record, how far the "beliefs of Theism" make for morality in higher or more wholesome degree than "the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God." Morals is from mores, "custom"; it is social, not supernatural in origin; humanly conventional, not of divine imposition and sanction. The "morals," customs, of an age or a people depend always on what is then regarded as socially convenient, on the character of education and example given by their preceptors and their environment.
The foregoing clerical admissions of the purely natural origin and sanctions of morals, of the Moral Law, are perfectly valid and convincing; a more formal and incontrovertible statement of the fact and the principle, taken from a special study of the subject, under the title "Ethics" in CE., by a Jesuit Professor of Moral Philosophy, is added for the complete refutation of the Christian "Morality Lie":
"Morality, or sum of prescriptions which govern moral conduct. ... Ethics takes its origin from the empirical fact that certain general principles and concepts of the moral order are common to all peoples at all times. ... It is a universally recognized principle that we should not do to others what we would not wish them to do to us. ... The general practical judgments and principles: 'Do good and avoid evil,' 'Lead a life according to reason,' etc., from which all the Commandments of the Decalogue are derived, are the basis of the natural law, of which St. Paul (Rom. ii, 14) says, it is written in the hearts of all men, made known to all men by nature herself." (CE. v, 557, 562.)
It is because only of the nauseating persistence of the dingdonging of this pestilent "Christian Morality Lie," by priest, parson and press, that the loathsome record of the unparalleled moral corruption of the Church and of Christendom under the Church, is here in very summary and imperfect manner displayed in refutation of this immense False Pretense. It rings false from every pulpit and Christian apologist today as it has through all the centuries of Creed and Crime of the Church. Here in thumbnail sketch is the summary of Christian results after a millennium of undisputed moral sway: "The Church was the guide of the Western nations from the close of the seventh century to the beginning of the sixteenth" (CE. vii, 370); and for result: "At the beginning of the Reformation, the condition of the clergy, and consequently of the people, was a very sad one. ... The unfortunate state of the clergy, their corrupt morals." (CE. vii, 387.) "The Lateran was spoken of as a brothel, and the moral corruption of Rome became the subject of general odium." (CE. viii, 426.) That there may be no mistake about the insistent pretense of the Church to teach and impose morality, "The Roman Pontiffs have always, as their office demands, guarded the Christian faith and morals," as admitted by the Apostolic Letter of His Holiness Pius IX, dated June 29, 1868, by which he summoned the celebrated Vatican Council which decreed Papal Infallibility in all matters of faith and morals. (CE. i, 176.)
Therefore it was, that "the Church of the Middle Ages, having now attained to power, continued through her priests to propagate the Gospel. ... In the wake of religion follows her inseparable companion, morality." (CE. xii, 418.) We shall now see the Church at work for morality and the moral "fruits" of Christianity through the Dark Ages of Faith. "Those were indeed golden days for the ecclesiastical profession, since the credulity of men reached a height which seemed to insure to the clergy a long and universal dominion, -- until the prospects of the Church were suddenly darkened, and human reason began to rebel ... with the rise of that secular and skeptical spirit to which European civilization owes its origin," as Buckle says and demonstrates and I will briefly sketch, after first letting CE. reveal facts which are the harvest- fruits of Christian Morality.
How, then, are we surprised to read the official confession, that these same Middle Ages were, of all human epochs, "an age of terrible corruption and social decadence"? (CE. i, 318.) Surely the good cleric who penned these shaming words was a moral dyspeptic or must have developed a pessimistic in-growing conscience. We turn the pages of this ponderous Apology for the Faith to find the records of Church history giving the lie to this scandalous and disgraceful confession. There are fifteen great quarto tomes of CE., of over 700 double-column pages each; and surely if this confession is mistaken or untrue, the glorious facts of Church morality, its ever-radiant and redolent "sweetness and light," which cannot be hid, will be made manifest for the confusion of those who might mock over this confession. The following paragraphs are the gleanings from just one, the first, of these fifteen volumes, recording the sacred history of the Church, in which "her holiness appears in the fruits which she brings forth," as therein preserved, and unparalleled "in purifying the morals of Europe" for fifteen centuries and more under her undisputed moral sway. In this one sample volume is the true assay of the "fruits" conserved in them all; a typical cross-section of Church history. Multiply by fifteen the product of these revelations of the "fruits which she brings forth," and even the most unregenerate critic of Christianity must agree with CE, that "the wonderful efficacy of the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of Europe has no parallel" in any religion or history known to mankind.
The following passages are word for word from Volume I -- (unless otherwise indicated), -- of the Catholic Encyclopedia, arranged roughly in chronological order, through part only of one letter of the Alphabet. They give thus a sort of segmentary cross-cut and bird's-eye-view of the moral and social conditions of Christendom through the centuries, with quite imperfect glimpses of that sweet charity one to another which distinguishes those who love their enemies -- in the fashion of King Richard to his brother: "For I do love my brother Clarence so, That I would see his sweet soul In the bosom of good old Abraham!"
Countless instances of Christian "morality" we have already seen in the myriad holy forgeries of the Church throughout fifteen centuries; again are confessed "the many apocryphal [forged] writings in the first five centuries of the Christian era." (CE. i, 132.) Whoever would forge for Christ's sake or his own profit would as readily commit any other crime for the same ends, as we shall see to the limit of abhorrence. But the predilect perversity of the Christians clerical and lay, was the "lusts of the flesh," that distinctive "crime" so proscribed and so practiced by the expounders of "Christian virtue," and the "inseparable companion" of the most religious. That "sex-scandals" were rampant in the earliest days of the several infant Churches is manifest in quite all of the second-century Epistles of the New Testament, as any one may read unto edification. The Agape, or Christian "love feast" was all its name implies; it was "a form of ancient Pagan funeral feast. From the fourth century onward ... the agape gave rise to flagrant and intolerable abuses" (i, 202). From the first century, "the Agapeta, were virgins who consecrated themselves to God with a vow of chastity and associated with laymen, who like themselves had taken a vow of chastity. ... It resulted in abuses and scandals. ... St. Jerome [about 400] asked indignantly, 'Why was this pest of Agapette introduced into the Church?' St. Cyprian shows that abuses of this kind developed in Africa and the East. The Council of Ancyra, in 314, forbade virgins consecrated to God to thus live with men as sisters. This did not correct the practice entirely, for St. Jerome arraigns Syrian monks for living in cities with Christian virgins. These Agapetae are sometimes confounded with the Subintroductae, or women who lived with clerics without marriage." (202.)
St. Cyprian, On the State of the Church, just before the Decian persecution (e. 250), admits: "There was no true devotion in the priests. ... That the simple were deluded, and the brethren circumverited by craft and fraud. That great numbers of the bishops ... were eager only to heap up money, to seize people's lands by treachery and fraud, and to increase their stock by exorbitant usury." (Quoted by Middleton, Free Inquiry, Int. Disc. lxvii-ix.)
"Solicitation, in canon law, is the crime of making use of the Sacrament of Penance for the purpose of drawing others into sins of lust. Numerous popes have denounced this crime vehemently, and decreed punishments for its commission ... in connection with the Confessional, during or before" (xiv, 134). "The crime of abduction was, doubtless, extremely rare among the early Christians. In the fourth century, when men grew bolder, the number of wife-captors became exceedingly numerous. To cheek this" -- a long line of Church enactments listed, down to the Council of Trent (1500's) was futile. (CE. i, 33.) While some of the following descriptions are applied to particular time and place, yet as is evident from the content and ensemble, like conditions existed "always and everywhere" through the Middle Ages, that delectable "civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity." Thus "even in the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom testifies to the decline of fervor in the Christian family, and contends that it is no longer possible for children to obtain proper religious and moral training in their own homes" (555), already so debased was Christianity.
Loving Christian differences of opinion, enhanced by corporal methods of seeking each to force the other to the same opinion, were so ubiquitous and universal that birth was given to a special and deadly new species of human hatred and a distinctive name coined for it: Odium Theologicum -- Theological Hatred, and the maxim: "Hell hath no fury like an offended Saint." The Father of Church History, Bishop Eusebius, has scathing passages, and he refuses "to record the dissensions and follies which they exercised against each other before the (Diocletian) persecution." (Hist. Eccles. Bk. VIII, chap. 2.) And in Chapter 12, entitled "The Prelates of the Church," Eusebius wordily and in figured speech thus in substance describes them: "the different heads of the churches, who from being shepherds of the reasonable flocks of Christ. ... were condemned by divine justice as unworthy of such a charge; ... moreover, the ambitious aspirings of many to office, and the injudicious and unlawful ordinations that took place, the divisions among the confessors themselves, the great schisms and difficulties industriously fomented by the factious, ... heaping up affliction upon affliction: all this I have resolved to pass by," as too shameful to be preserved in detail. Speaking of the Church historian Socrates, who died about 400: "Living as he did in an age of bitter polemics, he strove to avoid the animosities and hatreds engendered by theological differences." (CE. xiv, 119.)
We recall the embittered and bloody strifes which waged from the early days of the fourth century between the partizans of Arius, who denied the Divinity of Jesus Christ and consequently the existence of the Blessed Trinity or Three-in-One Godhead, and the "orthodox" or "right-thinking" faction which vociferated that Father and Son were of the same eternal age and "homoousion" or "of the same substance," -- of which puzzle it is assured: "It is manifest that a dogma so mysterious presupposes a divine revelation." (CE. ix, 309.) But that "divine revelation" was let into the clerical mind through the efficacious grace of clubs, stones and knives, by force of fraud and deviltry, as thus witnessed: "The great definition of the Homoousion, promulgated at Nicaea in 325, so far from putting an end to further scussion, became rather the occasion of keener debate and for still more distressing confusion of statement in the formulation of theories on the relationship of Our Lord to His Father. [Other angry Councils with the Holy Ghost were held on the "theory"] at Ariminum for the West, and at Seleucia for the East, in 359.
At both Councils, as the result of dishonest intrigue and an unscrupulous use of intimidation, ... the Homoousion was given up and the Son was declared to be merely similar to -- no longer identical in substance with -- the Father. St. Jerome's characterization of the issue still affords the best commentary: 'The whole world groaned in wonderment to find itself Arian'" (CE. i, 79.) Thus are divine revelations made manifest! The Christian trait of love for enemies is exemplified: "The sudden death of Arius [attributed to poison] was looked upon by contemporary Catholics as an answer to the prayers of the good bishop." (CE. i, 285.) All the "new nations" except the Franks, converted under Clovis, were "Arian heretics"; and for some four centuries maybe a million throats were cut in the name of One God or Three, before the "divine revelation" of Three- in-One won out.
"The accession of Constantine found the African Church rent by controversies and heresies: Catholics and Donatists contended not only in a wordy warfare, but also in a violent and sanguinary way. ... Attempts at reconciliation, at the suggestion of the Emperor Constantius, only widened the breach, and led to armed repression, an ever-growing discontent, and an enmity that became more and more embittered. ... One act of violence followed another and begot new conflicts. ... Even in such condition of peril -- [the bitter reprisals of the Arian Vandals which filled the fifth century], the Christians of Africa were far from showing those virtues which might be looked for in a time of persecution. ... Crimes of all kinds made Africa one of the most wretched provinees in the world. Nor had the Vandals escaped the effects of this moral corruption, which slowly destroyed their power and eventually effected their ruin. ... While one part of the episcopate wasted its time and energies in fruitless theological discussions, others failed of their duty. The last forty years of the seventh century witnessed the gradual fall of the fragments of Byzantine Africa into the hands of the Arabs. ... In this overwhelming disaster the African Church was blotted out." (CE. i) 191-2.) God failed to protect his Holy own!
If prelates and priests, the shepherds of the flocks, wallowed in moral defilement, judge of the state of the witless sheep of the heavenly fold. "Valence, the central see of the Kingdom, had been scandalized by the dissolute Bishop Maximum, and the see in consequence had been vacant for fifty years," till 486. (616.) "Pope St. Agapetus I (535-536) was the son of a Roman priest slain during the riots in the days of Pope Symmachus. His first official act was to burn in the presence of the assembled clergy the anathema which Boniface II had propounded against the latter's rival Dioseurus" (202). St. Angilbert, Abbott, "at this period [about 790] was leading a very worldly life. ... Angilbert undoubtedly had an intrigue with Charlemagne's unmarried daughter Bertha, and became by her the father of two children" (490). "On the death of Pope Formosus (896) there began for the papacy a time of the deepest humiliation, such as it has never experienced before or since. After the successor of Formosus, Boniface VI, had ruled only fifteen days, Stephen VI (properly, VII), was raised to the Papal Chair. In his blind rage, Stephen not only abused the memory of Formosus but also treated his body with indignity.
Stephen was strangled in prison in the summer of 897, and the six following popes (to 904) owed their elevation to the struggles of the political parties. Christophorus, the last of them, was overthrown by Sergius III (904-911)." (ii, 147.) Pope Agapetus II, (946-956), "for ten years, during what has been termed the period of deepest humiliation for the papacy. ... He labored incessantly to restore the decadent discipline in churches and cloisters; and in quieting disturbances in the metropolitan see of Rheims; and at putting an end to anarchy in Italy" (i, 203). Such periods of "deepest humiliation to the papacy" were quite recurrent: "The Popes Benedict from the fourth to the ninth inclusive belong to the darkest period of papal history (900-1048) ... Benedict VI was thrown into prison by the anti-pope Boniface VII, and strangled by his orders, in 974. Benedict VII was a layman and became pope by force, and drove out Boniface VII; died 983. ... Pope Benedict IX had long caused scandal to the Church by his disorderly life. His immediate successor, Pope Gregory VI (1044-46) had persuaded Benedict IX to resign the Chair of Peter, and to do so bestowed valuable possessions on him" (31).
"There can be no doubt that at this period (800's) the law of celibacy was ill observed by priests" (507). St. Arialdo was 'martyred at Milan in 1065, for his attempt to reform the simoniacal and immoral clergy of that city. ... For inveighing against abuses he was excommunicated by the bishop" (707). Pope Alexander II (1061-73) was a leader in "that great agitation against simony and clerical incontinence. ... A faction elected Honorius II as pope -- public opinion clamoring for reform. Alexander was omnipresent, through his legates, punishing simoniacal bishops and incontinent clergy" (286). "The Church at that time (1072) was torn by the schisms of anti-popes" (541). -- "The desperate moral barbarism of the age." (vii, 229.) ]Pope Anacletus II (1130-38) had before his election supported the popes in their fifty years' war for reform. If we can believe his enemies, he disgraced his office by gross immorality and by his greed in the accumulation of lucre. There can be no doubt that he determined to buy or force his way into the Papal Chair. ... On the death of Honorius, two popes, Anacletus II and Innocent II were elected and consecrated on the same day, by the factions in the Sacred College. ... When Anaeletus died, another anti-pope, Victor IV, was elected by one faction" (447).
The "glorious thirteenth century," which the Faithful for some unfathomable reason exalt proudly above all the others of the Dark Ages of Faith, was ushered in with the murderous Holy Inquisition and the unholy crusade against the Albigenses, tens of thousands of whom were butchered and the fairest half of France laid desolate. The motive for this unprecedented butchery and devastation is naively confessed to be "their wealth ... their contempt for the Catholic clergy, caused by the ignorance and the worldly, too frequently scandalous lives of the latter" (268). "With the zeal of an apostle St. Anthony [d. 1231] undertook to reform the morality of his time; ... enormous scandals were repaired" (557). "The barons of the Campagna fought with each other and with the Pope and, issuing from their castles, raided the country in every direction, and even robbed the pilgrims on their way to the tombs of the Apostles. ... William I took captive many wealthy Greeks, the greater number of whom he sold into slavery" (157). "A period of decline followed after the middle of the thirteenth century, when war and rapine did much injury ... suffered again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the prevailing social disturbances" (145). "Pope Alexander IV (1254-61) was easily led away by the whisperings of flatterers, and inclined to listen to the wicked suggestions of avaricious persons. ... He continued Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 277 . FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY Innocent IV's policy of a war of extermination against the progeny of Frederick II. ...
The pecuniary assistance these measures brought him was dearly bought by the embitterment of the English clergy and people against the Holy See. ... The unity of Christendom was a thing of the past" (288). About 1300, "all looked forward to the time when the religious orders, whose laxity had been occasioned in great measure by the general looseness of the times, would be restored to their former discipline"
Under Pope Alexander V (1409-1410) "The Great Schism (1378- 1417) rent the Church. As cardinal he had sanctioned the agreement of the rival Colleges of Cardinals to join in a common effort for unity. He thus incurred the displeasure of Gregory XII [who deposed him]. At, the Council of Pisa (1409) he preached the opening sermon, a scathing condemnation of the rival popes, and presided at the deliberations of the theologians who declared those popes heretics and schismatics ... in the riven Catholic world. ... His legitimacy was soon questioned, and the world was chagrined to find that instead of two popes it now had three. ... Whether or not Alexander was a true pope is a question still discussed" (288-9).
Speaking of "moral" conditions in the Holy City and prevailing in the age, CE. thus summarizes the "sweetness and light" of Christendom in the time of His Holiness Sixtus IV (died 1484): "His dominating passion was nepotism, heaping riches and favors on his unworthy relatives. His nephew, the Cardinal Rafael Riario, plotted to overthrow the Medici; the pope was cognizant of the plot, though probably not of the intention to assassinate, and even laid Florence under an interdict because it rose in fury against the conspirators and brutal murderers of Giuliano dei Medici. Henceforth, until the Reformation, the secular interests of the papacy were of paramount importance. The attitude of Sixtus towards the conspiracy of the Pazzi, his wars and treachery, his promotion to the highest offices in the Church of such men as ... are blots upon his career. Nevertheless, there is a praiseworthy side to his pontificate. He took measures to suppress abuses in the Inquisition, vigorously opposed the Waldenses, and annulled the decrees of the Council of Constance Under him Rome became once more habitable, and he did much to improve the sanitary conditions of the city." (CE. xiv, 32, 33.)
Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) was so notoriously infamous and his history is so large and so well known, with his six bastards, including Caesar and Lucrezia Borgia, and his numerous Vatican mistresses and dissolute Papal Court, under whose regime again "the Vatican was a brothel," that he is simply mentioned in his order. When one of his bastard sons "was fished out of the Tiber with his throat cut ... that it was a warning from Heaven to repent, no one felt more keenly than the Pope himself. He spoke of resigning; and proclaimed his determination to set about that reform of the Church 'in Head and members' for which the world had so long been clamoring"; but his grief was assuaged by the attentions of his lady loves, notably pretty Guilia Farnese, niece of the Cardinal, and whose picture as an angel now adorns one of the great frescos of the Vatican. "Long ago Leo the Great (440-461) declared, 'the dignity of Peter suffers no diminution even in an unworthy successor.'" (289, 294, passim.) Maybe so; but, the question, simply is, "the unparalleled purification of morals" produced by the religion of Christ!
About this juncture, and after a thousand years of such conditions in the Church and the Heads of the Church, popes, prelates, priests, and monks, and rife among the degraded people, the protests of Christendom swelling steadily for several centuries broke into the Protestant Reformation by force and arms. A thumbnail sketch of the culmination and the causes leading up to it throughout the Middle Age "civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity," is drawn by CE. in two paragraphs here quoted:
"At the time of Gregory VII's elevation to the papacy (1073-85), the Christian world was in a deplorable condition. During the desolating period of transition -- the terrible period of warfare and rapine, violence, and corruption in high places, which followed immediately upon the dissolution of the Carlovingian Empire [in the 800's], a period when society in Europe seemed doomed to destruction and ruin -- the Church had not been able to escape from the general debasement [to which it had so signally contributed, if not caused]. The tenth century, the saddest perhaps, in Christian annals, is characterized by the vivid remark of [Cardinal] Baronius that Christ was as asleep in the vessel of the Church. At the time of Leo IX's election in 1049, according to the testimony of St. Bruno, Bishop of Segni, 'the whole worldly in wickedness, holiness had disappeared, justice had perished, and truth had been buried; Simon Magus was lording it over the Church, whose bishops were given to luxury and fornication.' St. Peter Damien, the fiercest censor of his age, unrolls a frightful picture of the decay of clerical morality in the lurid pages of his 'Book of Gomorrah.' Writing in 1075, Gregory himself laments the unhappy state of the Church. 'The Eastern Church has fallen away from the Faith and is now assailed on every side by infidels. Wherever I turn my eyes -- to the west, to the north, to the south, -- I find everywhere bishops who have obtained their office in an irregular way, whose lives and conversations are strangely at variance with their sacred calling; who go through their duties not for the love of Christ but from motives of worldly gain.
And those among whom I live are worse than Jews or Pagans.' ... Gregory made every effort to stamp out of the Church the two consuming evils of the age, simony and clerical incontinency. ... Gregory began his great work of purifying the Church by a reformation of the clergy. In 1074 he enacted the following decrees [a series aimed at the two universal vices named]. But they met with vigorous resistance, ... called forth a most violent storm of opposition throughout Italy, Germany, and France. And the reason for this opposition on the part of the vast throng of immoral and simoniacal clerics is not far to seek." (CE. vi, 793-4.) Still, nearly five centuries later:
"Churchmen in high places were constantly unmindful of truth, justice, purity, self-denial; many had lost all sense of Christian ideals; not a few were deeply stained by Pagan [?] vices. ... The earlier years of AEneas Sylvius [Pope Pius II, 1458-64], the whole career of Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI), the life of Farnese, afterwards Paul III, until he was compelled to reform himself as well as the Curia, ... all with disregard for the most elementary virtues. Julius II fought and intrigued like a mere secular prince; Leo X, although certainly not an unbeliever -- [it was His Holiness who framed the famous "witty epigram: 'What profit has not that Fable of Christ brought us,"; Encyc. Brit., 14th Ed. xix, 217] -- was frivolous in the extreme; Clement VII drew on himself the contempt as well as hatred of all who had dealings with him, by his crooked ways and cowardly subterfuges which led to the taking and pillage of Rome.
Now, it is not unfair to trace in these popes, as in their advisers, a certain common type, the pattern of which was Caesar Borgia, sometime cardinal, but always in mind and action a condottiere [bandit], while its philosopher was Machiavelli. We may express it in the words of Villari as a 'prodigious intellectual activity accompanied by moral decay.' ... Not only did they fall away from monastic severities, they lost all manly and decent self-control. ... Worse things than Savonarola had seen were to happen. And a catastrophe was inevitable. Erasmus laughed to scorn the Ciceronian pedantries [of sundry Cardinals named]; he quotes with disgust the paganizing terms in which some Roman preachers travestied the persons and scenes of the Gospels, ... outcry against cancerous vices which were sapping the life of Italy. ... [Some] demanded reform according to Catholic principles [Others] taught education in principle and practice on orthodox lines. ... The Sorbonne objected, however, to any publication of Scripture without approved Catholic notes; and this in a day which might be justly termed one of rebuke and blasphemy. ... Poggio, the mocking adversary of the clergy, was for half a century in the service of the popes. Filelfo, a pagan unabashed and foul, was rewarded by Nicholas V for his abominable satires. Pius II had the faults of a smart society journalist, and took neither himself nor his age seriously. Platina, with whom Paul II quarreled on political grounds, wrote a vindicative slanderous book, 'The Lives of the Roman Pontiffs,' which, however, was in some degree justified by the project of reformation 'in Head and members' constantly put forth and never fulfilled until Christendom had been rent in twain." (CE. xii, 767-768.)
Speaking again of prevailing conditions at the end of a thousand years of inspired care of the Christian morals, by their Holinesses, the following sentences culled from one article are a little cluster of the "fruits" of Christianity: "The scientific and ascetic training of the clergy left much to be desired, the moral standard of many being very low, and the practice of celibacy not everywhere observed. Not less serious was the condition of many monasteries of men, and even of Women. ... The members of the clergy were in many places regarded with scorn. ... As to the Christian people itself, in numerous districts ignorance, superstition, religious indifference, and immorality were rife. ... Worldly ideas, luxury and immorality rapidly gained ground at the center of ecclesiastical life. When ecclesiastical authority grew weak at the fountain head, it necessarily decayed elsewhere. ... In proportion as the papal authority lost the respect of many, resentment grew against both the Curia and the Papacy. ... This vast ecclesiastical wealth, ... such riches in the hands of the clergy. ... Higher intellectual culture was confined in a great measure to the higher clergy. ... The parochial clergy were to a great extent ignorant and indifferent." (CE. xii, 700-703, passim.)
The Church leaped to arms to prevent any reform of these degrading conditions to which her holy guidance had brought Christendom, and for over a century, until the Religious Peace of 1648, with fire and sword made Europe a slaughter-pen in the desperate effort to suppress the revolt and force its forged faith and its creed of love and morals, which we have just seen exemplified, down the throats of revolted and disgusted humanity. The Dominican "Dogs of the Lord" were let loose in all the bloody fiery fury of the Holy Inquisition; Alva, Tilly and Wallenstein ravaged and destroyed Europe, culminating in the glories of Magdeburg and St. Bartholomew for which His Holiness and his Church sang Te Dewms. "Soon the Counter-Reformation, called into life by the Council of Trent (1545-63) to prevent the loss of the whole of middle Europe, appeared; its success was assured by the aid of the Society of Jesus." (CE. v, 612.) Abetted by the crafty and cruel Society of Jesus, under its renowned leader this miracle is said to have been wrought: "St. Ignatius, alive to the causes which had provoked so many nations to revolt from the clergy ... did the most astonishing feat recorded in modern history' He reformed the Church by means of the papacy when sunk to its lowest ebb; and he took the heathen classics from neo-pagans to make them the instruments of Catholic education. ... In May, 1527, Rome was laid waste, its churches profaned, its libraries pillaged, by a rabble of miscreants.' But,' said the Cardinal Cajetan,'it was a just judgment on the Romans.' ... It was a change so marked that Scaliger termed the Italians generally hypocrites. ... The papacy aimed henceforth at becoming an 'ideal government under spiritual and converted men.' Urban VIII (1623-44) was the last who could be deemed a Renaissance pontiff." (CE. xii, 769.) This was over one hundred years after the boasted "reformation in Head and members."
So here the Augean stables were at length cleansed; the papacy -- for the fourth time in Volume I recorded as "sunk to its lowest ebb," was now to be "an ideal government under spiritual and converted men," and the chronic millennial infamies of Holy Church washed out by a baptism of Faith and "good works meet unto repentance." But was it so?
Adrian VI was Holiness of Rome in 1522-1523: "Appalling tasks lay before him in this [again] darkest hour of the Papacy. To extirpate inveterate abuses; to reform a court which thrived on corruption, and detested the very name of reform; to hold in leash the young and warlike princes, ready to bound at each other's throats, -- these were herculean labors. ... His nuncio to Germany, Chierigati, [made the exaggerated] acknowledgment, that the Roman Court had been the fountain-head of all the corruptions in the Church. Cardinal Adrian of Costello (in 1517) was implicated in a charge of conspiring with Cardinal Petrucci to poison the pope Leo X, and confessed" (i, 160). "Under the direct orders of the pope, Clement VII, Archbishop B. [in 1538] caused many [Protestants in Scotland] to ... be put to death. Modern humanity condemns the cruel manner of their execution; but such severities were the result of the spirit of the age (ii, 374), -- which quite as thoroughly inspired the same Protestants and was as villainously practiced by them when they had the chance. The sixteenth century was "a scandalous age." (CE. ii, 375.) About 1600 a special Papal representative "was commissioned to reform a convent at Naples, which by the laxity of its discipline had become a source of great scandal. Certain wicked men were accustomed to have clandestine meetings with the nuns" (i, 472). Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) was "elected after a struggle of eighty days; at a time when churchmen were being forced to realize the deplorable consequences, moral and financial, of nepotism; ... nepotic abuses came to weigh as heavily as ever upon the papacy ... endeavors to enrich their families" (294). Pope Alexander VIII (1689-1691) "bestowed on his relations the riches they were eager to accumulate; in their behalf, and to the discredit of his pontificate, he revived sinecure offices. Out of compassion for the poor of well-nigh impoverished Italy, he sought to succor them by reducing the taxes" (295).
"The eighteenth century was not an age remarkable for depth of spiritual life" (334). "Here [in the bishopric of St. Agatha, near Naples, in 1762] with 30,000 uninstructed people, 400 mostly indifferent and sometimes scandalous secular clergy, and 17 more or less relaxed religious houses ... a field so overgrown with weeds that they seemed the only crop" (337). In 1799 "people were already rejoicing that the Papacy and the Church had come to an end. But the priest, Count Antonio Rosmini ... published his ideas in 1848 in the treatise 'Of the Five Plagues of the Church,' in which he also particularly recommended the reform of the Church. ... The demand for reform in the States of the Church was in fact not unjustified." (CE. xiv, 264, 265.) Much later like data could be added.
Thus in our search for its sweetness and light, we have as it were scratched the surface of the history of Holy Church, for a thousand five hundred years, as recorded by itself; thus in one volume out of fifteen have we verified the priestly boast: "Her holiness appears in the fruits which she brings forth." The most lurid features, as under long lines of Holinesses, for example, Benedicts, Eugenes, and Johns, fall outside our limited alphabetical scope; we have made no note of the interminable political wars and throat-outtings joyously moted by fifteen hundred years of Popes; nor of the infinite blood-lust and greed of the execrated Holy Inquisition and of interminable successions of Popes, papal Curias and blood-sodden prelates. The choice of every Pope is guided by the Holy Ghost itself, aided indirectly but effectively in a hundred instances by bribery and the dagger. Even this trinity of Holy Electors of the Vicars of God has not always kept the "Succession of Peter" in a straight line; a goodly number of times the Spirit has descended upon numerous doublets and triplets of Holinesses at one and the same time: "At various times in the history of the Church illegal pretenders to the Papal Chair have arisen, and frequently exercised pontifical functions in defiance of the true occupant.
According to Hergenrother, there are 29 [doublet and triplet sets] in the following order," -- naming them, beginning about 200 A.D. and extending down to 1449. (CE. i, 582.) The turmoils and scandals leading to and resulting from these, the priestly anathemas spit at each other, the blood and terror, and the unspeakably debased social conditions which made it all possible -- in the name of Christ, can be but faintly imagined. This is but a fractional and imperfect inventory of the crops of "the fruits which she has brought forth" since her first budding out of the graft of Forgery and Fraud upon the iron stock of Force.
What price Religion! Paganism -- and Christianity! Which -- upon the record -- has been the more shameless and debauched, and wrought the worst for morality and civilization? If, but for the glorious" civilizing effects" of Christianity's "civilization would have been retarded for a thousand years" -- What would not Civilization be today but for the "sweetness and light" of the Church and its Dark Ages of Faith?
"Of course, the beginnings of all profane knowledge can be traced back to the time when 'Priest' and 'scholar' meant one and the same thing." (CE. vi, 447.)
"There is nothing more despicable than an ignorant priest." Cardinal Farness. (CE. v, 788-9.)
A panoramic view, sketched by pious clerical pens, has passed before us, depicting in high light the outlines of moral and intellectual culture of two civilizations: the one Pagan, secular, brilliant, of Pre-Christian Greece and Rome; the other "a civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity," with Christian morality and culture this section, added from CE., must determine its intellectual achievements. So insistent and ever- proclaimed are the clerical claims for the education of Christendom, and its "Christian civilization," which, without its glorious and heroic activities, "would have been retarded for a thousand years," that it is but just and fair to let the Church repeat several times what it claims to have done; then let it tell in its own words what it did.
Here are a few of the exalted cultural claims of the Church: "The Church, although officially the teacher of revealed truth only, has always been interested in the cultivation of every branch of human knowledge. But the truth unfolded by reason cannot contradict the truth revealed by God! The Encyclical next shows, by extracts from many Fathers of the Church, what reason helped by revelation can do for [to] the progress of human knowledge"! (Encyc. AEterni-Patris, Leo XIII, 1879; CE. i, 177.) "The Christian Church during this era -- a fact of the greatest importance -- was the guardian of the remains of classical literature." (CE. vi, 485.) "The preservation of the fragments of Greek and Roman classics now extant is largely due to the monasteries, which for twelve centuries after the fall of the Western Empire were the custodians of manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophy and the Latin rhetoricians." (CE. i, 696.) "In addition to their prescribed studies, the monks were constantly occupied in copying the classic texts." (CE. v, 303.)
In the sweet-sounding music of this clerical chorus, a rudely jarring discord is struck by these dissonant notes: "The revival of the classics, lost for a thousand years in Western Christendom. ... The loss of Greek authors and the decline of Church Latin into barbarism were misfortunes in a universal ruin." (CE. xii, 277.) An attempt by Charlemagne to establish even rudimentary education was abortive, and "the accumulated wisdom of the past ... was in danger of perishing," but "When the permanent renaissance of learning came several centuries later, the light began again to pierce through the storm-clouds of feudal strife and anarchy." (CE. i, 277.) We shall see that every scrap of Greek and Latin learning which, after twelve centuries, slowly filtered into Christendom, came from the hated Arabs through the more hated Jews, after Christians first made contact with civilization through the Crusades: "Indeed, whatever influence came from the Mosque passed through the Synagogue before it reached the Church." (CE. i, 676.)
In one singular and unintentional way, however, is it true that "the preservation of fragments of Greek and Roman classics is due to the monasteries, which were the custodians of manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophy," science, and literature. Such manuscripts existed in great numbers in the age of Greek and Roman culture; they were written on enduring parchment. When the Light of the Cross dimmed Pagan culture, and its learning became abhorrent to the pious Christian, the monks needed papyrus for their literary efforts, so they gathered in the manuscripts wherever found; -- and thus they "preserved" them: "Due to cost of vellum, old books were scraped and used again" -- (that is the meaning of "Palimpsest") -- for the scribbling of the precious monkish chronicles and theological folderol soon to be noticed. "In the West much use was made of old manuscripts from the seventh to the ninth century, when, in consequence of the disturbed state of the country, there was some scarcity of material, and the old volumes of neglected authors were used for more popular works. ... The practice continued down to the sixteenth century.
Many Latin and most Greek manuscripts are on reused vellum. A manuscript in the Vatican contained part of the 91st Book of Livy's 'Roman History.' The famous Sinai Bible discovered by Tischendorff was written over by lives of female saints. Parts of the Iliad and the 'Elements' of Euclid were covered by monkish treatises. The 'De Republica' of Cicero, was discovered under the Commentary of Augustine on Psalms, and several of his Orations under the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon." Other such monkish palimpsests were discovered to contain the Institutes of Gaius; eight orations of the Roman senator Symmachus, the Comedies of Plautus, parts of Euripides, epistles of Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius, and others, the 'Fasti Consolaris' of 486, the Codex Theodosianus, are among the precious remains of Greek and Roman erudition which were "Preserved" in this monkish fashion in the erudite monasteries. (NIE. xvii, 762-3.) As for "monks constantly occupied in copying the classic texts," for the preservation and diffusion of Pagan culture, it is a joke! They couldn't read Greek nor good Latin, and nobody else could read at all, -- also, Holy Church and Churchmen loathed Pagan culture and literature.
The Church, however, got an early and fair start on its wonderful career as the organizer and creator of civilization. In 529 [by priest-prompted edict of Justinian] "the schools of philosophy were closed. From that date Christianity had no rival." (CE. ii, 43.) We have read the Imperial Law of Justinian with the fatal title: "Pagans Forbidden to give Instruction"; consequently "the State schools of the Empire had fallen into decay." (CE. xiii, 555.) Thenceforth the Church, inspired by its Holy Ghost, was the sole Mentor and Instructor of Christendom. Before the dazzling Light diffused by the Church blinds us to the view, let us take a farewell look at the Pagan civilization of the Roman world, as recorded under the Antonine Emperors and their successors, such conditions prevailing quite up to the era of Justinian and the Church; -- it will be a millennium and a half before we see a spark of such like:
"The internal peace and prosperity were no less remarkable than the absence of war. Trade and commence flourished; new routes were opened, and new roads built throughout the Empire, so that all parts of it were in close touch with the capital. The remarkable municipal life of the period, when new and flourishing cities covered the Roman world, is revealed by the numerous inscriptions that record the generosity of wealthy patrons or the activity of free burghers. ... Guilds and organizations of all conceivable kinds, mainly for philanthropic purposes, came into existence everywhere. By means of these associations the poorer classes were in a sense insured against poverty. ... The activity of the Emperor was not confined to merely official acts; private movements for the succor of the poor and of orphans received his unstinted support. The scope of the alimentary institutions of former reigns was broadened, and the establishment of charitable foundations such as that of the 'Puellae Faustinianae' is a sure indication of a general softening of manners and a truer sense of humanity. The period was also one of considerable literary and scientific activity. ... The most lasting influence of the life and reign of Antoninus was that which he exercised in the sphere of law. Five great Stoic jurisconsults [named] were the constant advisers of the Emperor, and under his protection they infused a spirit of leniency and mildness into Roman legislation which effectually safeguarded the weak and unprotected, slaves, wards, and orphans, against aggressions of the powerful. ... An impulse was given in this direction which produced the later golden period of Roman jurisprudence under Septimus Severus, Caracalla, and Alexander Severus." (CE. i, 587.)
For vivid contrast, we may here recall the "vivid remark" of Bishop St. Bruno, in the year 1049, that "justice had perished" (CE. vi, 793) and the confession, relating to the beginning of the Reformation five hundred years later: "Churchmen in high places were constantly unmindful of justice." (CE. xii, 767.) The "golden period of Roman jurisprudence" had been replaced by Christian "superstitions in the administration of justice during many centuries of the Middle Ages, and known as ordeals or 'judgments of God.' ... These 'judgments of God' gave rise to new superstitions. Whether guilty or not, persons subjected to the trials would often put more confidence in charms, magic formulas, and ointments than in the Providence of God." (CE. xiv, 341,)
Up to as late as 1538 "the legal lore had hitherto been presented in a very barbarous form." (CE. i, 273.) As for benevolence,: charity, the care of the poor, the protection of the weak against the strong, the cursory Pagan record just quoted must suffice; their continuance in the Christian Dark Ages is sufficiently belied by the shocking social conditions to be cursorily noticed in the general cultural sketch to follow. As for widows and orphans, one of the proudest brags of the clerics, the Church by sword and rack and stake, has made an infinity more of widows and orphans that she ever scantily cared for in her monkish lazzarettos and pestilential lying-in shambles. With respect to slavery, which the Church boasts to have suppressed, this pious lie is nailed by the fact of the gradual shifting of technical slavery into universal serfdom throughout Europe for centuries, and its persistence in "Christian" England, America and Brazil until almost the present generation, and the existence today of millions of slaves in very Christian Abyssinia; and the world knows the part which the Christian soul-savers took in the United States in upholding slavery as a God-ordained institution of the Blessed Bible. But the Church not only aided and abetted slavery; it owned slaves, and it actively engaged in the most revolting forms of slave-trade: "Clement V (1309) decreed that resisting Venetians should be sold into slavery, and Gregory XI and Sixtus IV [of blessed memory] decreed the same for the Florentines, and Julius II for both Florence and Bologna. The Bull by which Nicholas V (1442) encouraged Portugal to what became the organized trade in negro slaves. ... In 1538 Paul III decreed slavery against all Englishmen who should dare to support Henry VIII against the pope"! (Encyc. Brit., 14th ed. xix, 35.)
The Church mightily prides itself on its suppression of the bloody sports of the arena, the gladiatorial combats, because the monk Telemachus, after 400 A.D., jumped into the arena (with two Pagan companions) and protested against them, which act incited the Pagan throng in the Ampitheatre to urge their abolition. But for four hundred years not Church nor Christian had raised a voice of protest; and during as much of this period as it had the power, the Church was merrily murdering Pagans and heretics; and the cruelties of free combat in the arena were speedily replaced by the infamous torturings and slow burnings of countless human beings for Christ's sweet sake: while bull-fights adorn every holiday and holy day of the "Most Christian" countries today. Fie for Christian "reforms"!
Following upon the Pagan cultural civilization depicted by CE. existing in the closing epoch of the Roman Empire, we have a lengthy account by the same clerical scholars of the Christian culture of the ensuing Age of Faith: "The learning and opinions of the first [Christian] few hundred years were comprehensively set forth in the tremendous work of Isidore of Seville (d. 636). During the next few centuries, which were comparatively barren of literary achievements, the only men to achieve any celebrity were [five named up to 1003]." ... Others are named up to 1280, -- "For all these Albertus Magnus had opened the door to the rich treasure- house of Greek and Arabian learning." (CE. vi, 449, 450.) The principal product of Christian erudition up to these times was ludicrous lying legends and saint and martyr tales: "Needless to say that they do not embody any real historical information, and their chief utility is to afford an example of the pious popular credulity of the times" (CE. i, 131). The state of Christian historical lore through these ages may be appreciated by the following summary:
"The historical literature of the Middle Ages may be classed under three general heads: chronicles, annals, and lives of saints. ... As a matter of fact, profane history, as dealt with by Pagan historians, no longer appealed to Christian writers. History, as viewed from the Christian standpoint, took into account only the Kingdom of God, and to the new generation [of Christians] the center of such history was the narration of the misfortunes undergone by the Jewish nation, a subject ignored by the Roman historians. Christians had need of a new general history in sympathy with their ideal. ... Under Charlemagne ... the great internal misfortunes and dissensions of the kingdom are carefully ignored, so as not to cast discredit on the reigning princes. ... The majority of these local chronicles reproduce the traditions, popular or local, of the monastery which they concern and confine themselves to recording gossip and various kinds of information, ... without asking themselves whether the version of these sources had been tainted with legends, and they did not take the trouble to examine the origin and value of their information. ...
The authors were bounded by a limited horizon, often equipped with merely a rudimentary training. Such chronicles, moreover, were often written with the same purpose as the lives of the saints. Those, having a general tendency to enhance as much as possible the glory of their hero, were nothing more than panegyric. Monastic chronicles and annals were not free from this tendency, and often begin with an account of the life of the saint who founded the abbey, concerning themselves more with asceticism than with historical facts and events, which would be of much value to us today. In conclusion, the first part of these chronicles, written for the most part since the eleventh century, almost always recount legends, often based on oral tradition, but sometimes invented for the purpose of embellishing the early history of the monastery, and of thus increasing the devotion of the faithful. ... Chronology especially was often treated carelessly." (CE. 1, 531-536, passim.)
With respect to literature and history we have thus a millennial blank of Christian achievement: but the Church's forte was Science, for "the Church fosters and promotes the sciences in many ways," -- so long as they do not contradict the "sacred science of Christianity." This we may see exemplified in the following clerical summarization.
"Speculations concerning the rotundity of the earth and the possible existence of human beings 'with their feet turned towards ours,' were of interest to the Fathers of the early Church only in so far as they seemed to encroach upon the fundamental Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, and the consequent universality of original sin and redemption. This is clearly seen from the following passage of St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9): For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches no falsehood; and it is too absurd to say ... there is a race of human beings not descended from that one first man.' This opinion of St. Augustine was commonly held until the progress of science ... dissipated the scruples arising from a defective knowledge of geography. A singular exception occurs to us in the middle of the eighth century.
From a letter of Pope St. Zachary (1 May, 748), addressed to St. Boniface, we learn that the great Apostle of Germany had invoked the papal censure upon Vergilius. Among other alleged misdeeds and errors was numbered that of holding 'that beneath the earth there was another world and other men, another sun and moon.' In reply, the Pope directs St. Boniface to convoke a council and, 'if it be made clear' that Vergilius adheres to this 'perverse teaching, contrary to the Lord and to his own soul,' to expel him from the Church, deprived of his priestly dignity'! This is the only information that we possess regarding an incident which is made to figure largely in the imaginary warfare between theology and science. ... The case of the Irish monk who suffered the penalty of being several centuries ahead of his age remains on the page of history, like the parallel case of Galileo, as a solemn admonition against a hasty resort to ecclesiastical censure," as CE,. naively remarks. (CE. i, 581-2.)
Summing up the vivifying cultural achievements of over a thousand years down to the beginning of the end of the regimen of Church embrutishment of men, this ludicrous composite of confession of debasement and self-laudation greets us: "The Middle Ages did not bequeath to Rome any institutions that could be called scientific or literary academies. As a rule, there was slight inclination for such institutions. ... A special reason why literature did not get a stronger foothold at Rome is to be found in the constant politico-religious disturbances of the Middle Ages. ... Medieval Rome was certainly no place for learned academies. ... From the earliest days of the Renaissance the Church was the highest type of such an academy, that is, of the broadest kind of culture"! (CE. i, 83, 84.) Yet despite this highest type of academy as was the Church, the broadest kind of culture which, it personified and radiated, the full splendor of the Renaissance had been reacting upon and illuminating the Church for two or three centuries, when we discover this amazing lack of clerical learning and intelligence confessed by the Church. The Protestant heresy was at its zenith; in 1559-74 the Protestants published an Ecclesiastical History called "Centuriators," in thirteen volumes, "showing century by century, how far the Catholic Church had departed from primitive teaching and practices," as CE. describes it. This heretic work caused "keen distress and dismay in Catholic circles; and provided the Reformers with a formidable weapon of attack on the Catholic Church. It did much harm.
The feasibility of a counter-attack appealed to Catholic scholars, but nothing adequate was provided, for the science of history was still a thing of the future. Its founder was as yet but 21 years of age" -- Baronius, later Cardinal. He studied hard, and later produced his Annales, 12 volumes, "which he had foreseen in a vision would be the term of his work," and by which the "Centuries were eclipsed," -- but in which he ruthlessly destroyed by sane and fearless criticism so many thousands of Church saint-and-martyr myths, that "the Annals were condemned by the Spanish Inquisition" (CE. ii, 305, 306).
Such was the net -- and gross result of fifteen hundred years of the much-boasted zeal for learning and teaching of the Divinely- appointed sole Teacher of Christendom, in the broad fields of historical knowledge, literature, and general intellectual culture. In the grand realm of the Sciences, which the Church has ever cherished and encouraged, may we hope for bigger and better results?