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PrUeWcmitsMekiieU Pntage 10 emtJs pm e»fy addUhmil,

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BERNARD OF CLAIRVADX

THE TIMES, THE MAN, AND HIS WORK

AN

i^tlitotnal ^tuHp in €iifyt Hectitreit

BT

BIOHARD S. STORKS

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1912

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THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIOM8

Copyright^ 1999^ Br Chablm Scbuiibb's Sohs.

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the victory of Chriet He supreme expectation, ^Umg wenriee tn whUh hoe been rich m reward,^-'

wnrnur or its ubbart, akd skstchuio a ufb or anrouLAB lustbb,

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AUTHOB'S NOTE.

Thb following Lectures were prepared at the invita- tion of the honored Profe&Bors in the Theological Semi- nary at Princeton, New Jersey, to be deliyered on what is there known as the L. P. Stone Foundation. They were subsequently delivered before the Lowell Institute in Boston ; and three of them, the third, fourth, and seventh, have since been read at the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

The course was at first designed to embrace only six Lectures ; and the writer has sometimes regretted that the primary plan had not been adhered to, — two, of the briefer course, being devoted perhaps to each of three of the greater Church Fathers, as to Chrysostom and Augustine, representing, respectively, the Eastern and the Western Church of the earlier period, with Ber- nard, representing the medieval period. Having beg^, however, with Bernard, on account of more recent familiarity with his writings and his work, the lecturer soon discovered that the entire series would be needed to set forth the great Abbot in any tolerable complete- ness; and other possible subjects were accordingly

viii authob's note.

postponed, for a leisure which is now quite certain not to come.

It farther became evident, as the effort to exhibit Bernard was pursued, that in order to anj sufficient delineation of the man and his career, it was indispen- sable to have his Unxes more plainlj in view than it could be assumed that thej had been or were before some of those who might hear or afterward read the Lectures. Simply to present this remarkable leader of thought and action, belonging to a distant century, in an obscure passage of history between indefinite dark spaces, would be neither just to him nor useful to those whose thoughts might for a time be occupied with him. It seemed necessary, at least, to recur to that command- ing work of Hildebrand which wrou^t memorable change in European society ; and the work of Hilde- brand could not be understood except in connection with the disastrous preceding decadence in Church and State, as well as with their subsequent comprehensive progress. So the first two Lectures came to be written, after the others were well advanced, as introductory to those which were to follow. The series thus took the larger compass which it retains, aiming not only to outline the personal figure of Bernard, but to trace rapidly the genesis of the forces which in his time were governing in Europe, from which he commonly took incentive and aid, which he had sometimes persis- tently to withstand, but which shaped always the envi- ronment of his life. Any apparent disproportion between the parts preliminary and those which succeed may be measurably relieved by this explanation.

authob's notb. < ix

It was the purpose of the writer, after deliyermg the Lectures, to supply at once such references and notes as should seem needful, and then to commit them to the press. But he became immediately occupied in pre- paring another longer series, previously promised to anoliier institution, on a widely different theme, and the manuscripts already in hand had therefore to be laid aside tQl time might come for what it was fore- seen would be the considerable labor of selecting and arranging suitable sustaining or illustrative notes. The multitude of cares constantiy engaging the atten- tion of .a pastor in active service, with unexpected and exacting public duties afterward presented, still further delayed the fulfilment of tiie plan. Having, however, accepted an invitation to deliver the series before the Lowell Institute, the lecturer gladly avaUed himself of the chance to revise in a measure what he had written, and to point out or transcribe some of the passages in flie writings of Bernard or his contemporaries, as well as of previous or subsequent authors, which had been before his mind in his earlier work ; and so it comes to pass that after an interval greater than was expected the Lectures and Notes appear in this volume.

The Lectures are to be taken, of course, for what they were designed to be, associated general sketches al Bernard, in different relations, events, and activi- ties of his life ; not as aiming to supply a continuous or complete biogr^>hical or historical account of the man and hiB career. It is hoped, however, that the points of diief importance in his spirit, genius, and labors, as well as in the times which he powerfully affected,

X author's nots.

be found su^ested in them. The Notes are more nu- merous, and sometimes more extended, than thej would have been except for the hope that some may be at- tracted to the volume to whom the authors quoted maj not be accessible, who will still be glad to have before them elucidation or confirmation of statements appearing in the text.

The extracts from the letters, sermons, and other writings of Bernard, and from the monastic accounts of his life, are uniformly taken from his ^^ Opera," edited with affectionate care by Mabillon, and reprinted in Paris, in a. d. 1839. The six quarto parts of this collection are distributed, it will be remembered by those who know them, into two comprehensive ^^ vol* umes ; " and for greater convenience in consulting these volumes the references in the Lectures are always made to numbered columns, rather than to pages^ In the cases of other authors cited the editions used have been, unless by inadvertence, carefully noted. The edi- tion of Ab^lard's ^^ Opera" is that edited by Cousin, and published in Paris, a. d. 1849 ; with the ^^ Ouvrages In^dits" of A. D. 1886.

Not very much appears to have been written in Eng- lish about Bernard, aside from brief essays, or occa- sional notices of him in general Church histories. The most extended and particular sketch of him is un- doubtedly that given by James Cotter Morison in a volume dedicated to Carlyle, and published in London twenty-five years since. It is not altogether lucid in arrangement, or satisfactory in particular discussions, and is sometimes less sympathetic than could be desired

author's note. xi

in spiritual tone ; but it is prepared with coanoientioiis care, is written in a clear and rigorous style, and con^ tains passages of much beauty. An English transla tion of the works of Bernard has recentlj begun ta appear, under the editorship of S. J. Eales, D. 0. L.| two volumes of which are already published.

German historical or bi(^;raphical literature does not seem to have concerned itself eztensivelj with the great French Doctor and Saint, though outlines of his opinions and his labors of course appear in the larger historical works of Neander, Hagenbach, Oieseler, and others, and two German monographs respecting him are well known : the more famous one, that of Neander, ^Der heilige Bemhard und sein Zeitalter;" another, less important, by Ellendorf, ^^Der heilige Bemhard und die Hierarchic seiner Zeit." The early French translation of the Latin sermons has also been recently edited and published by Wendelin Foerster, a. d. 1886.

Among French writers on Bernard, the one most fre- quently referred to by the lecturer has been Theodore Batisbonne, whose ^^Histoire de Saint Bernard et de son Sidde" (Paris a. d. 1875) is written with ardent admiration for the illustrious Abbot, though with a certain cultivated intensity of expression, as well as an occasionally disturbing polemical bias, which de- tract from its value. The article on Bernard in the ^^ Biographic Universelle" is an excellent brief sumr mary of his career ; and there are a number of small volumes treating of him, like the ^^J^tudes sur Saint Bernard " by Abel Desjardins, or one in the series by Capefigne on ^^Les Fondateurs des Grand Ordres."

xii author's notb.

Usuallj, however, these contain little of importance which does not better appear in Bernard's own works. This is equally true of the ^^Vie de Saint Bernard" which forms the first volume of the Bibliothdque Cis- tercienne. It remains an occasion of imceasing regret that M. de Montalembert did not complete that Life of Bernard for which. he had made vast preparation, to accomplish which he was fitted bejond all others, and to which the entire series of his noble volumes on the Monks of the West^ had been designed to lead the way. His failure to complete his magnificent plan involved a real loss to Christendom.

The writer of the following unpretending Lectures, which have no claim to attention other than that derived from their subject, has wished to avail him- self of the labors of others wherever he might, but at the same time to keep his mind free from any determining impression by them, while picturing to himself the Abbot and his work, as presented in his own writings, and in the records made of him by those who were nearest to him in spirit and in time. He fully believes that any fruitful study of Bernard must be conducted along these lines, though excellent suggestions may be often received from those whose minds had been previously engaged upon the same theme. It is a great character, in a great career, which is here imperfectly presented. It can hardly fail to show itself great, from whatever point it may be con- sidered ; and stimulating lessons ought surely to come

1 " Les Moines d'Occident, depuis Saint Benott jusqn'k Saint Bernard;/' Montalembert, Charles Forbes de Tryon, Comte de. Paris, 1863-1867.

▲uthob'8 notb. xiii

from it It may not be easy for one living in the nine- teenth century wholly to nnderstand one living in the twelfth; for one outeide the Roman Catholic Ohurch folly to interpret one trained from infancy in that ancient Oonminnion. It cannot be easy for any one of ordinary powers and labor clearly to exhibit^ even to himseli^ an extraordinary genius for incitement and command, shown in an equally extraordinary work. But it is often ennobling to contemplate that which expands our thou^t even though surpassing it; and the writer of these Lectures, while quite aware of their many deficiencies, cannot but hope that others may be animated by them to studies in which he found for himself long ago, and has found ever since, pleasure, instruction, and a happy inspiration.

Before closing this Note, he desires particularly and gratefully to acknowledge his indebtedness, not only to the Library of the Long Island Historical Society in Brooklyn, but to that of Columbia College, to the Bos- ton Public Library, and to the library of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, for occasional use of important books not otherwise within his reach. The prompt courtesy with which every request for aid of this kind has been answered by those in charge of these libraries has laid him under frequent and great obligation.

The shadow of grie^ as well as the glow of happy remembrance, falls on this volume as it finally leaves Hie writer's hands. He who was most solicitous to have flie Lectures prepared, who welcomed them with an abounding sympathy, whose delightful home at

nv authob's note.

Princeton will be always associated in the mind of the lecturer with his repeated visits to it for the delivery of the course now committed to the press, has in the year just closing passed from the earth to grander and lovelier scenes beyond. An accomplished scholar, an admirable teacher, a wide-minded theologian, an ear^ nest and a reverent Christian, a most cordial, loyal, and animating friend, was withdrawn from earthly circles by the death, before age had touched him, of Professor Caspar Wistar Hodge, D. D. One who knew him well, in his public work and his fireside life, and who will always recall him with affectionate honor till he meets him again in other spheres, counts it a sad pleasure to associate his name, familiar and beloved, with Lect« ures to which he had given warm invitation and a

generous approval

R. & 8T0BBS.

Pbooxltx» N. T., Oetobtr 10th, 189S.

CONTENTS.

■♦■

LECTURE L

The Tsxth Cxntubt: its bxi&bmb Defbesszoh and

Fbab 8

LECTURE n.

The Elbyenth Pentubt: its BxyiviNa Life and

FHOMISE 69

lecture m.

Bbbnabd op Clairtaux: his personal Charactbe-

isncs 183

LECTURE IV.

Bbbnabd op Claibvauz : in ms Monactio Lipb • • 207

LECTURE V. Bbbnabd op Claievaux: as a Theologian • • • 279

L

XYl CONTENTS.

LBCTUBB VL

PAOB

BXBNABD OP ClAIBYAUX: A8 A Prbachbb • . • • 855

LSCTUBB Vn.

BSRNABD OF ClAIBYAUX : IN HIS CONTROYEBST WITH

ABfaATO) 427

LBCTUBE Vm.

Bbbnabd OF Claibyauz : IN HIS Relation to general

EuBOPEAN Affairs 509

LECTURE I.

THE TENTH CENTT7BT: ITS EXTREME DEPBE3-

8I0N AND I'EAB.

i

LEOTUBE L THB miTH centubt: itb eztbemb bspbbbsion and fbab.

It is a pleasant office to which I am summoned, to present to you a few Lectures, not hastily meditated or planned though of necessity rapidly written, on the times and the career of the extraordinary man known in history as Bernard of Glairvauz. I cannot hope to set before you any multitude of facts connected with the theme, with some of which, at least, many among you are not acquainted. But I have a diffident hope of so reviving the impression of these facts, and so showing their significance by setting them in their just relations, as to leave a clearer picture than is commonly familiar, even among those not unused to historical studies, of one who exercised a remarkable authority in his own time, who contributed in an important measure to give direction and tone to its history, the effect of whose life outlasted its term, and whose name will not be forgotten while men still honor genius and virtue, exhibited in high action with supreme consecration.

I may perhaps be permitted to add that my reverent sense of isbe singular beauty and power of the man, and of the wide relations of his work, is by no means of recent beginning. For many years his figure has been to me one of the saintliest and most heroic on the can*

4 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

vaB of European history ; and my attempt now to present him, in connection with the critical and threatening times on which he set his signal mark, has its impulse in an enthusiasm which began long ago, and which does not fail as years adyance.

Will you suffer me, too^ to say a few words, at the outset of these Lectures, on the general usefulness of studies like those with which for a time I would occupy your thought ?

To accustom one's self to a too exclusive contempla- tion of the past, whatever occasional splendid exhibi- tions of noble action or illustrious character it may present, is doubtless a sign and a source of weakness. It tends to give undue predominance to the historical imagination, while leaving the powers which are needed for immediate personal work without adequate exercise. It may subtly foster that timid spirit which is scared by the questionings and repelled by the contests of which each active century is full. Every man has hia work to do in his own time, a work proportioned to his powers, matching his opportunity, and opening to him the real privilege of intelligent existence. To retreat from such work into a merely self-indulgent survey of past struggles, and of those prominent or principal in them, is to exchange duty for pleasure, obedience to conscience for alluring reminiscence. There is here a temptation to which studious nien, espe- cially those of a sensitive spirit, are always exposed; and it becomes only more seductive in times like ours, confused in thought, full of haste and violence in opin* ion and action, with an acrid and vehement controver- sial temper prevalent in it, a temper almost equally moved to sharpness of discussion over matters funda- mental and matters superficial. Against such an in-

V

ITS EXTREME DEPBB88ION AND FEAB. 5

clination, to a withdrawal of our minds from what is presently before us and from its imperious moral de- mands, we must be watchfully on our guard We may not retire to any hermitage in the past, to escape col* lision and avoid obligation, any more than we may fly from the land of our birth, however it echoes with clam- orous debate or now and then rings with alarums of war, to find some dainty and shameful seclusion, free from strife and vacant of impulse, on tropical shores.

But while this is true, it is true as well that to bring a former period of time distinctly before us, to become familiar with its picturesque or presaging movements, to apprehend clearly the moral and intellectual forces by which it was either graced or shamed, above all to come into personal sympathy with those who wrought in it| with mighty endeavor, for noble ends, — this is an exercise of mind and spirit whose instruction and fine incitement can scarcely be surpassed. Our horizon is widened. The discerning and interpreting faculty in us is keenly stimulated, while multitudes of particulars are added to our knowledge. Whatever sensibility we possess to rare and rich chivalric properties in charac- ter or work is freshly awakened. Duty becomes more beautiful, and more commanding in its challenge. Our own possibilities, in narrower limits of faculty and in- fluence, become more apparent, as we enter into intimate contact with the devout and heroical persons whose names are borne, lucid and eminent^ above the turbu- lent series of the ages, — with men accomplished in the learning of their time, eager in its enterprises, effec- tive in its councils, and who brought to it an ethereal temper surpassing its own, by which they became not only helpers of its progress, but founders and architects of whatever was best in it

6 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

We do not always fully recognize the large oppor- tunity thus set before us. We may not absolutely select our associates among the present multitudes who surround us. We may select them with unhindered free- dom as we walk amid the populous spaces which history opens ; and by any true moral conference with the gentle and gracious yet dauntless persons who have wrought heretofore with a supreme ardor for illustrious aims, we ought to be ourselves ennobled, our indolence being rebuked, our timidity expelled, a certain elasticity of vigor coming into our souls, with a gladder consecration to ideal ends. It is possible, at least, to catch some- tiiing on our spirits of the rush of their uncalculating devotion; to take finer illumination from their spiritual insight ; to feel a touch of the sovereign chrism of that communion with God in which they found their super- lative strength. As we enter this fellowship with them we are released for the time from the petty and jarring strifes with which our passing years are vexed; we swing clear of confining limitations to region, custom, the prevalent proximate forms of opinion; we become in a just sense freemen of the world, partakers in stn^- gles nobler than our own, humble associates of elect and anointed spirits. No romance, I think, can stir the soul, no lofty rhyme can so uplift it, as does this vital contact with minds now vanished from the earth, but the impulse of whose life continues with us, of the fruit of whose work Christendom partakes.

Nor is even this a sufficient account of the moral ad- vantage of studies like that which I propose. Our times, which sometimes appear mechanical, commonplace, take deeper significance as we attentively consider the past ; especially as we note the far reach of influence in those by whom its movements were chiefly affected. The tre-

ITS BZTBKME DEPBE8BI0N AND FEAB. 7

mendons force which belongB to any great personalitj, and the sovereign persistence of its influence among men, become apparent We gain a prof ounder sense of the unity of history, as continuous and organic. We see more distinctly the interdependence of centuries on each other, with our indebtedness to many who have labored and struggled before us. Above all, there comes to us a more exhilarating sense of the potency and promise which belong to each Divine element in the progressive education of mankind ; and wherever we touch with rev- erent spirit the history of the Church, amid whatever outward confusions or inward clash of dialectic colli- sions, we are sensible of a certain majestic advance in the scheme of its development, and are freshly assured of the ultimate victory of that religion from which its life and energy have come.

Nothing is more impressive in history than the utter unreserve of power with which men have been moved, in different lands and in separate centuries, by an impulse irom above, to strive as for their life for the supreme cause of righteousness and truth; while almost noth- ing is more apparent than are tiie assisting processes of Providence, moving before or succeeding such men, act- ing sometimes on occult lines, yet with a fit and oppor- tune energy which brou^t its own abundant witness. The history of Christianity, as it lies before us in Euro- pean annals, makes it evident aa the day that with a mighty general progress, though imdoubtedly with fre- quent sad interruptions, the spiritual life in persons and in peoples has been impenetrated with that heavenly force which came to the world in Jesus of Nazareth. Amid whatever infidelities toward the truth, whatever grOBsnesB of manners or sordidness of temper, or pas- sionate fury against the "^ Shalt " and "^ Shalt not " of

8 THE TENTH CENTDBT :

God's law, the tender, majestic, and solemn facts pre* sented in the Gospel are shown extending their sway, not over individuals onlj, but over the minds and poli- cies of nations ; and a multitade of consenting indica- tions appear, pointing to their final universal acceptance among the children of men.

To the Christian student^ here is really the most important of the lessons derived from the past. The gradual mighty upbuilding on earth of that Kingdom of God for which even they looked on whom had not dawned the light of the Advent, for which apostles and martyrs wrought, the vision of which exalted Augustine amid the wrecks of human empire, the vision of which never has passed from the prescient thought of great leaders in history, — this, to the mind devoutly looking backward, becomes as evident as any phenomenon of nature to the eye; while the saying of the illustrious Numidian is verified, that '' as oppositions of contraries lend beauty to language, so the beauty of the course of the world is achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged as it were by an eloquence not of words but of things."!

In like manner, the significance of our times, as con- nected with this Divine scheme for the world, becomes more evident, and the influence of the just apprehen- sion of this is always inspiring. In a broad view of history, the immediate century in which we live ceases to be so undivine as sometimes it appears in an air filled with the whir of wheels, with smoke of factories darkening the sky, amid furious clamors of unimpor- tant debate. Our years stand also in serious, in even momentous relations, with ages past, and with ages to come. The struggle of other times, in which fierce

^ City of God, L zi. e. 18.

ITS BXTBEMK DEPRESSION AND FEAB. 9

greed or desperate ambitions were encountered by con- quering inspirations of faith, prepared the way for the years in whose happier influence we delight. Whatever is best in our civilization is an inheritance from their laborious and painful acquisition ; while the times which are to follow should take in like manner, if not in like measure, endowment from ours. Gk)d's plan in history no more contemplated the periods which are gone than it contemplates the cycle around us, of novelty in l^ought, of restless exploration, daring enterprise, an imperious democracy. As the Master was silently manifest in those times, through the motion of his Spirit in reverent souls, so is He revealed in our day, to those who read the mystic signs. As they had their Tast problems to solve, their dangers to avert, their frightful evils to overcome, so we have ours ; and as out of them great influence came, the issue of their travail, to invigorate and shape subsequent years, so, perhaps in a degree not inferior, may belong to our century a like privilege of power, if in it be the temper, of spiritual efficacy, which in them broke forth into mission or martyrdom.

The earth an arena in which Gk)d's purpose inces* santly works toward the final aim of universal and holy peace ; the centuries of history constituting but one ter- restrial period, in which the experience of moral toil, straggle, and conquest continuously goed on; the con- Tergence of all on the consummating age foreshown of old and surely coming, — these are lessons which con- stantly meet us in any interpreting survey of the past ; and the most imposing and important of centuries, as human annals reckon importance, or those which appear most fruitless and mean, when rightly understood will equally supply these salutary lessons. Even the smaller

10 THE TENTH OENTUBT :

things in the record, which are easily overlooked, will have for us then their vital, sometimes indeed their cosmical meaning ; since out of cloister and cell, out of field and workshop^ as well as out of library, university, cathedral, out of millions uncounted of unremembered but consecrated lives, as well as out of state-debates, movements of armies, eminent careers, has come the Christian civilization in which we rejoice, in whose ampler light the past looks shadowed, but whose own imperfections will be clearlier shown as other centuries follow and surpass it. Nothing in history, which is true, is therefore to us unimportant The humblest work, which was faithfully done, has borne its fruit The age which appears least conspicuous, as we regard it from the midst of present confusions and hurries, will be sometime seen to have had distinct bearing on our years, and on those which are to come.

Certainly, with particular emphasis, this is true of those changeful and crowded centuries which began in the fifth, with the terrifying fall of the Latin empire in the West, and which closed in the fifteenth, with the loss to Christendom of the city of Constantine. It has been at times a fashionable folly to regard those ages as a dreary and barren parenthesis in history, full only of vehement clambrs, prodigal carnage, lurid superstitions, prelatical ambition, — a period unattractive in itself, and with no more vital relation to our times than Nova Zembla has to the moral and commercial life of our towns. To skip this period, and pass at once from the Old World to the New, has seemed to many a wise economy. On the other hand, it was in fact a period full of stirring prophetic life, of indomitable energies, of moral battles and moral successes, — a period from which benefits come to every hour of our social or

IT8 EXTREME DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 11

political experience. In the vast providential commin- gling of what remained of the Roman civilization with the Teutonic and Slavic barbarisms, under the inex- haustible force of that Christian religion to which im- perialism had yielded, and which barbarism could not subdue or expel, were evolved stupendous forces, spiritual and secular, which moulded States, produced literatures, fashioned and maintained religious establishments, put certain impulses into society whose influence is to-day unspent I cannot think that the careful student of modem history will question the just perspective of Ouizot, when he says, with philosophical deliberation as well as with ardent historic enthusiasm, that ^ there is the cradle of modern societies and manners; that modem languages date from those times, with modem literatures, so far as these are national and original ; that from thence are derived the greater part of the monu- ments now possessed, — churches, palaces, city-halls, works of art, and works of utility, — with almost all the great fiunilies which have played a distinguished part in a£Fairs ; while there are presented a multitude of impor- tant and splendid national events, which strike with ever fresh force the popular imagination. ' It is, as he says, ^ the heroic age of modem nations. What more natural than its richness and poetic attraction? " ^

1 I>*iine part, il est impoaaible de m^imattre qae c'est ]k le berceaa des aocieti^ et des nKBais modemes. De Ik datent les langaee modemes, flt Bp^cialflment la ndtre; lea litt^Faturea modernes, pr^da^ment dana oe qa'eUea out de national, d'original, d'etmnger Ik toate science, k toute imitation d'aatrea tempe et d'antraa pays; la plupart des monomenta modemea, dea monuments oh se aont raasembl^s pendant des siMea et ae laaaemblent encore lee peuplea, ^lises, palais, hdtelB-de-TiUe^ ouTragea d*«rt et d'ntilittf pnUique de tont genre ; presqne tontea les &miUes his- toriqaes, les famillee qui ont jon^ nn rdle et place lenr nom dans les di- ▼enea phasea de notre destin^; on grand nombre d*eTent;ments uationaux, iffiportaati en enz-mdmea et longtemps populaires, les cnuaades, la cheya-

12 THE TENTH CBNTUBT:

What more natural, we may properly add, than that we should give, as opportunity offers, a closer attention to a period so full of vigor, contest, and in many direc- tions, of noble achievement? a period which has left ineffaceable traces on subsequent centuries, and which cannot fail to be re-studied while history proceeds. It would be worth examination if only for the manifesta- tion which it makes of the forces of human nature, the best and the worst coming equally to light, as secrets of the seas are flung into sight beneath stroke of tempests. It becomes more worthy of considerate study as we re- cognize the public tendencies there initiated or con- firmed, or violently thwarted, the vast processes there set in motion, of thought and law, of national enter- prise, or of victorious Christian advance. One speaks temperately in saying that to know that time is to gain a clearer and juster apprehension of much which has followed in Church and in State. It is, in fact, to trace to their rooto many things which our age is proud to possess.

It is under the impulse of thoughts like these that I propose to set before you, as far as I may in this series of lectures, the life and spirit, the genius and wolit, of the great Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux ; to set him dis- tinctly amid the angry collisions of his time, and to show in a measure what influence he exerted on its princes and pontiffs, as well as on its general popular development. I am confident that the careful study of one whose place in his age was so distinguished cannot but be of interest to us. I hope, indeed, that it may

lerie ; en an mot, presqne tout ce qni a pr^oocnp^, agit^ pendant dee sitelee, rimagination du people ftwofaia. C'est ^k ^Tidemment I'Age beroiqne des nations modernea. Qnoi de pins natural qne aa richeaae et aon attrait po^tiqne ! — Hut. d$ la Civil, en t^ranee, torn. iiL p. 222. Paria ed.» 1840.

m HZT&KMR DEPBBBSION AND FEAB. 18

sbow its fruit in generous and ennobling personal sug- gestions. It is not the miracle of a perfect life which we are to contemplate ; not a soul without weakness or sin into fellowship with which I would help you to enter. But it is certainly a significant fact that men of the most diverse opinions, as remote as possible in church rela- tions, have conspired to offer to the Abbot of Clairvaux their tributes of honor. He was formally canonized in the Roman Catholic Church, as you know, by Alex- ander Third, a little more than twenty years Biter his death, ^ and a church-festiTal was established in homage to him. Those registered on the Papal catalogues of saints have by no means always attracted admiration in subsequent time. But in the instance of Bernard it does not surprise us that Thomas Aquinas, in the fol- lowing century, should compare him to a vase of gold on account of his holiness, and to a multitude of pearls on account of the multiplicity of his virtues ; ' that Bona- ventnra should describe him as gifted with a sublime

^ '^Hx ft aiero ipdus obitii aimi decern efflnzennt, com in ooneilio Toroiieiiai, anno 1168 celebrato^ aedente et prandente Alezandro IIL, ea tm primmn agiteri ccBpit. At tommns Pontifez, qaamYie alioqni pro sua evga Beraaidnm Tenentione libentisaime annaiflaet, tantiaper nihilominna difimndam oenaoit ob eaa rationes, qnaa ipse in litteria Ganonizationia postea expoanit. . . . Incidit eigo Bemardi sacra inangoratio in diem is menaia jannarii, anni 1174 ; ab ^na obita viginti annia exactia, mon- aibiia qaataar, et dieboa Tiginti noyem. . . . Sed jam anmmi pontifida Atorandri III. littenay qniboa inter coditea ab Ecoleaia relataa oatenditar Bamaidoa, ptoffwamQa. — StmeU Bemardi Opera, toL ii. oblL 2598-94.

The pontiiloal letten follow, to col. 9600.

1 Annun fiilt omnibaa oa ejna de Deo loqnendo ; mnltitado gemmaram da moribaa et firtntibiia loqnendo» de dnloedine oontemplationia, et devo- tioniau . . . Fneront ergo labia ^na anrea, gemmea, et pretioBa. Yd aumm ftiit beatoa Bemaidna per yoluntatia sanctitatem ; mnltitado gem- maram per momm honestatem, et liitntam mnltiplicttatem; Taa pretio- aran per Tiiginitatia poritatem. — Sermo infuti B. Btmardi; Div, Thorn. Afwm, StrmmiM, p. 116. Yenetiia, 1787.

14 THE TENTH GENTUBT :

eloquence, while of a temper so rich in saintly wisdom that not only his words are memorable, but his life is a constant example.^ It does not surprise us that Ba- ronius should speak of him as a true apostle of Gkxl, the stay and splendor of the whole Church, especially of the Church in France;' that the learned and devout Ma- billon should count his writings next in value to the Scriptures themselves for religious minds;' that Bos* suet should associate him as a witness for doctrine with the illustrious Fathers of the Church, and de« scribe him as appearing, in the midst of barbaric ignorance, an apostle, a prophet, an earthly angel, demonstrated such by his preaching, his works, and by that spirit in his life which still surpassed his prodigies of power ; ^ or that Martdne, in the last century, in his

1 Andisti igitnr Terba pulcherrima altiasimi oontemplAntia, et ora- tionnm doloedinem degustantis BemaxdL RamineB ea ri via, ut aapiaat tibi. • . • Ipse enxm fuit eloquentissimiu, et spiritu sapientia plenm, et flanctitate pt»clanu ; qaem te desideio imitari, et ipsius monita et verb* opera exerceze, propter quod ssepe tibi propono enndem. — MeditaUomm VUm CImaUf cap. zzxTi. Opera, torn. vi. p. 861.

* Yere Apostolicua Tir, immo verus Apostolus missas a Deo, potena opere et sermone, iUoatrans nbique et in oomibas saom Apoetolatam sa* qaentibua aignis, ut plane nihil minua babuerit a magnis Apostolia. . . • Et qui dicenduB sit totiua Ecclesia Gatbolica omamentum simul ac fuki- mentum; Gallicann vero in primis Eoclesis predicandus sit snmmnm de- cus, Bumma gloria, snmma felicitas. — ^»na/. SedeB, (Luos, 174dX torn, zix. p. 78 [an. 1168].

* Yerum ex omnibus libris, quos possnnt, ant debent monacbi evolven. nuUus post sacra Yolumina superest, qui m^ri queat ipsia esse emoln* mento, quemque pree manibus magis habere teneantnr, qnam Opera DiW Bemardi; ... in banc quippe mixta fluunt, quacumque alibi disperaa occurmnt, nimimm soliditaa, yenustas, rarietas, proprietas, brevitas, fer- vor, et eneigia sermonis. — Trad, da Stud, MowuL, torn. L pars iL oap. ilL S 2. Yenet ed. 1729, p. 117.

* Bossuet associates Bernard as a witness for doctrine witli Auguatine, Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement. — (Buvres ehoiaiet, torn. xv. pp. 264-S95. Paris ed., 1828.

ITS EZTBESUB DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 15

extensiTe visitation of monasteries, should note with particolar and affectionate care every memorial of Ber- nard,— copies of his manuscripts, the cross at V^zelai in memory of him, the chair from which he preached at Sens, his chalice and chasuble, his tombstone, and his portrait The remembrance of him was still so vital that it sanctified everything which he might be even supposed to have touched, for the diligent and studious Benedictine.^

But for us it perhaps enhances such eulc^es that Luther also should speak of him as the most Ood-fear- ing and pious of monks, whom he held in higher love than all others ; ^ that Daniel Heinsius, the famous and learned Secretary of the Synod of Dort, should call his ^Meditations" a stream of Paradise, the ambrosia of souls, an angelic food, the quintessence of piety ; ' that the austere and accurate Calvin should describe him as a pious and holy writer, above his time, pungent and discriminating in rebuke of its errors ; ^ while Neander, in our time, has pronounced an encomium on his cen- tury for having submitted itself to his moral authority.^ Nor is it certainly without significance that even Vol- taire should speak of him as able beyond others to reconcile occupation in the uproar of affairs with the austeriiy of life proper to his religious state, and as

I Toja^ liMiaire. Pazis, 1717. P^m. Par., pp. 28» 58, eo, 99, 104; See. Ft., p. 205, d al.

* Table TaDc, eeoozc.

* QqJs flotTitiB Bernardo scribit ? CigiiB ego Meditationes riynm para- diaiy ambnaiam animaram, pabalam itwg^llftmn, mednllam pietatia yocare •oleo(Ont 8). —S. Btr. citera, vol. aec ooL 2618.

a Instftatea of Christ Beligion, iv. 5, > 12; 7, {f 18, 22; 11, ( 11, el al.

* Nieht za venefaten acheint una das Zeitalter, in welcbem ein Mann, voa kainem weltlichen Qlanze nmgaben, darch seine sittliche Kraft, dnreh die Hohe ond Starke seines Oeistes sich so grosses Ansehen nnd so groa- isn Kinflnaa verachaffte. — Der heilige Bemhard, s 522.

16 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

having attained a personal consideration anrpassing in efficacy official authority ; ^ that Gibbon should portray him, in spite of an inveterate prejudice i^ainst saints^ as standing high above his contemporaries, in speech, in writing, and in action, and making himself ^the oracle of Europe. " *

It can hardly remain a matter for doubt that one who was confessedly so conspicuous and so influential in the Christendom of his age, and who has attracted eulogies like these from writers so remote in time, character, opinion, especially in their relations to the themes and institutes of religion, must be deserving of our study. It cannot be otherwise than useful for us to set him dis- tinctly amid his times, to see what mark he made upon them, and to trace as carefully as we may Uie secrets of that extraordinary power which all who approached him appear to have felt ; which made him to them — which should make him to us — a true priest of God, minister* ing grace and force from above. If it be in its nature ennobling to meditate on a life devoted to sovereign ideals, to contemplate a soul ardent, intense, pas* sionate in enthusiasm, while devout, self-forgetful, and wholly disdainful of worldly pleasures and of secular prizes ; if any virtue may be derived from contact vnih a mind which dwelt habitually in the adoring contem- plation of God, and to which the earth was not as real as were celestial r^alms above, — we ought, certainly, to be better and nobler persons for the hours which wo spend with Saint Bernard. He will say to us still, as

1 ** Jamais roligienx n'ayait mienx concilia le tamulte des affaires aveo YwoMtMU de son ^tat ; aacnn n'^tait arrive comme lui Ik cette conaid^ratioii parement penonnelle qui est audessns de raatorit^ m&ne." — JSMOf not l€$ Mcsursy chap. Iv. p. 206. (Eavres, Paris, 1877.

s Decline and Fall, yoI. tU. p. 408. London ed., 1848.

TUB EXTftKMS DEPRBBSIOK AND FEAR. 17

he said of old in cloister or chapel to ihoae who eagerly flocked around him, leaving all things otherwise pre- cious for the delight of nearness to him : ^ If thou writ- esty nothing therein has savor to me unless I read Jesus in it If thou discoursest or conversest, nothing there is agreeable to me unless in it also Jesus resounds. Jesus is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, a song of jubilee in the heart He is our medicine, as welL Is any among you saddened ? Let Jesus enter into his hearty and thence leap to his lips, and lo ! at the rising illumination of His name every cloud flies away, se- renity returns. " ^ His written words may still impress US, as they did those who heard them at first: ^^Not without reward is Ood to be loved, thou^ He is to be loved without the expectation of reward. True love is wholly satisfied in itself. It has a reward, but the reward is in the object which is loved. " ' ^ To whom may I more fitly live than to Him except for whose death I should not live ? But I serve Him in perfect freedom, since love gives liberty. Serve you, also, in that love which casteth out fear, whiich feels no labors, is conscious of no merit, asks no price, and which yet has in it more urgent impulse than everything else. will join you inseparably with me ; it will mani-

1 iLridns est omnia mimaa dhaa, si non oleo isto infbnditar ; insipi* dns erty si son hoe sale oonditnr. Si acribaa, non Bapit mihi niai legaro ibi Joamn. 8i diapntaa ant conferaa, non aapit mihi, niai aonnerit ibi Jeaoa. Jeana mel in ore, in anre meloa» in oorde jnbHaa. Sed est at madidna, Triatatai^ aliqnia veatnim T Yeniat in oor Jeana, et inde aaliat in oa; et ooee ad ezortnm nominia Inmen, nnbilnm omne diffogit, redit aerannm. — VoL prim,, Ser, in CafU,^ xy. C ; coL 2744.

* Hon enim aina prmnio diligitnr Deoa, etai abaqne pnsmii intuitu diUgiendoa ait. • . . Varna amor ae ipeo contentna eat. Habet pneminm, aed id qnod amator. » Fo^. prim,, l^nuL d$ dtiig. Jka. Cap. viL 1 17; €oL 1S4S.

a

18 THE TENTH CEMTUBT :

feat me immediately to yon, dearest Brethren, most longed for, especially in the hours when you pray. " ^ Let us try to bring this man, in his personal image, plainly before us, and to set him clearly amid Hie times in which he lived, since it was by the constant demand of those times upon him, with the responsive impact upon them of his energetic and conquering spirit, that his faculties were trained, his personal character was unfolded and matured, and his work made of memorable effect No effort of the imagination can present any tolerable picture of Bernard except as it places him in close association with the age which felt his impress ; and even his particular century needs to be exhibited in that which it had taken from previous times, and in that which it gave to those that came after, that we may have a fair impression of his almost unique career. It is a crude and careless fancy which imagines the several centuries which passed within the time-limits that I have indicated to have been equally ignorant^ stolid, sordid, proceeding on a dreary level of sluggish dulness, no one being specially differenced from others, and no one offering an opportunity beyond oiliers for noble work. On the other hand, the differences between those centuries were vital and profound ; one of splendid achievement being followed by others of decadence or downfall, in which the life of Christendom seemed threatened, while these in turn gave place to others of larger promise, and in the issue affecting with benefi*

4

A

1 Cni enim Jnstitift yiyam qaam ei, qui si non moBBNtiir, ago mm ▼!▼- erem T . . . Sed senrio yolantarie, quia charitas liberUtem donat. Sarvitt in charitata Qla, qua timorem expallit, laboiaa non aentit, maritnm noa intaator, pnemium non reqnirit; at taman plus omnibus uigat. . . . Ipia Toa mihi inaaparabUitar jnni^t, ipia me Tobia jngitar rapneaantatp horia maxima qnibna oratia, chariaaimi at daaidaratiaaiiiii finatraa. — Fat. prim., J^ftL ezlifi. [ad Saoa, QUm TaU.] ooL Ui.

^

ITS EZTBEHE DEPRESSION AND FEAB. 19

cent impulse the subsequent time. It was in one of the latter periods, as thus morally distinguished, that Bernard found his place and his work.

He was bom in the year a. d. 1091 ; twenty-five years after the Norman conquest of England ; eighteen years after Hildebrand had been consecrated Pope, under the title of Gregory Seventh; while Philip First, the third* successor of Hugh Capet, was in the midst of his long reign of almost half a century in France. The time in which his life was cast was separated thus by an inter- Yal of three hundred years from that age of Charlemagne which still remains prominent and brilliant i it^ropean annals, while the interval had been one, to an extent never surpassed, of fear, of gloom, almost of despair, out of which neither the Church nor the State had fully emerged. An influence from the remoter century still survived, however, in the West It had prompted what- ever effort had been made for better things in the period now closing; and in Bernard's time there was a certain moral life, a certain responsiveness to moral impres- sion, in men and in society, which had not equally ap- peared a century before, while yet the perils of his age were so great, its shames so many, that certainly none since Christendom began has more needed the mightiest ministry which genius, virtue, and a consummate devo- tion could supply. To set the character of his time clearly before you will not be difficult, but it will ask jonr patience for an attentive review. Such confused, imperious, turbulent elements as it presents, in tumul- taous combination or in angry collision, cannot be un- derstood without retracing the centuries out of which fhey had come, and the mark of whose disordered and passionate life was palpably upon them. One would not delay for this if it could be avoided, but I see not

20 IBB TBMTH CKNTDBT:

how it can be. To know the man we must know the age on which his influence was majestically exerted, and on which his name still sheds its lustre ; and we cannot know this without knowing, in general, out of what diverse precedent forces its life had come.

Of course, however, it is wholly impossible within the compass of a lecture, or a couple of lectures, to de- lineate with careful minuteness the features of the cen* turies preceding his. I can only outline, in a rapid free-hand way, some prominent courses of experience and action along which they had moved, with the rude, reckless, infuriated forces working in them, a part of whose outcome was in the ebullient and violent life, civil and social, religious, military, political, in the midst of which we are to place Bernard. To paint in few words a storm at sea were a task from whieb most would doubtless shrink. To exhibit any distinct pano- rama of the almost chaotic period which preceded his life is a work more difficult, which must still be at* tempted. You will not look for grace of movement, or lightness of touch, in the hand which tries it

The lowest point which civilization has reached in Europe since the century and a half which followed the fracturing of the western empire by Odoacer, a. d. 476, was that which it found at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh of the Christian centuries. For the tenth of these, especially, ^' The Iron Age " has been a common name in history since Baronius wrote* His description of it ba the '^sasculum obscurum*' is also fitly and frequently repeated.^ It is not difficult to

^ Novtiin inchoatar sflBcnlnm, quod sua asperitate, ao boni sterilitate feTTBam, maliqae ezndantis deformitate plumbeom, atqoe inopia aeripto- mm appellari ooDBuevit obacuruin. — Bakomius: AjwoI, EochHait,, torn, zv. p. 500. Lnoaa^ 174i,

ITS EXTREME DEPRESSION AKD FEAR. 21

trace fhe events which had led to this disastrous con- summation ; and it is the more needful to do this be* cause that century followed a period, after no long interval, of surprising achievement and extraordinary promise.

The invasion of central Europe by the Saracens, who had conquered large parts of Spain and of southern France, and who thence had swarmed forth for the con- quest of the Continent, had been arrested, as all are aware, by Charles Martel, in the shattering victory gained by him on the famous field between Poictiers and Tours, in the early autumn of a.d. 732, when the ^victorious line of march," which, as Gibbon says, ^^had been prolonged above a thousand miles, from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire, '* was finally broken, by ^the breasta which were like solid ramparts, and the arms which were iron."^ There was thenceforth no formidable threat that Asia and Africa might subjugate Europe, that the Arab might be lord of the Teuton and the Briton, or that the interpretation of the Koran, ac- cording to the startling fancy of the historian, might be taught in the schools of Oxford, and '^her pulpits de- monstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet" It suggests a lesson not unimpressive of our unconscious indebted- ness to the past, that men who could have known little of England, and nothing of this continent, should by ttieir courage, constancy, and sacrifice, have saved both in the subsequent centuries from indescribable moral disaster. Our churches, colleges, Christian homes, have root and nutriment to this hour in the soil soaked with the blood of those who fought eleven

t DwliiiA and Fall, yol. vii. pp. 17-28. London ed., 184a

22 YHB TENTH CENTUBT:

and a half centuries ago, in that fierce and fateful battle. 1

One greater than Charlesi Charlemagne his grand- son, at the beginning of the ninth century, had done a greater work than his, also intimately connected with the rescue and progress of civilization. It is possible, no doubt, perhaps it is common, to place an extraya* gant estimate on the achievements of this extraordinary man — ^^ the genius of the Middle Age " — in connection with the development of Europe. Sismondi's cautious and discreet praise may represent the truth with more exactness than do the exuberant eulogies of others. It is certainly true, as that discriminating historian sug- gests, that the signal brilliance of the reign of the great emperor shines more brightly, like that of a sudden and splendid meteor, because of the darkness which had preceded and which followed it;' and it is perhaps

^ Dr. Arnold's estimate of the . importance of the yietory of Charles Martel is indicated in a passage of his " History of the later Boman Com* monwealth : " "If this be so [that unchecked Roman snccesses in Germany would have Latinized the Teutonic tribes] the victory of Anninius do- serves to be reckoned among those signal deliverances which have affected for centuries the happiness of mankind ; and we may regard the destruc- tion of Quintilius Varus and his three l^ons on the banks of the Lippe as second only in the benefits derived from it to the victory of Charlea Kartel at Tours over the invading host of the Mohammedans.*' Chi^. zL p. 468. New York ed., 1846.

* Le r^e de Charlemagne est un grand m^t^ore qui briUe dans I'ob* scurite, Ik un trop grand floignement pour que nous puissions I'^tadier et le comprendre. On est frappe de son eclat que pr4c«d^rent et que sni. virent d'epaisses t^nibres ; on I'admire, mais on ne sauroit calculer sea effets, mieux que reconnoitre ses causes, et Ton ne peut mtee af&rmer s'il fht avantageuz ou pernicieuz pour rhumanit^. — Biat, du Frangait, torn. ii. p. 421. Paris ed., 1821.

Guizot's estimate of Charlemagne's work differs from this; but he adopts the same image of the meteor, and likens the empire of Charle- magne to that of the first Napoleon. ' Hist, de la CtviL en France, tomu iL pp. 110-118. Paris ed., 1846.

1TB SZTUMB D1SPBE8S10K AND FBAB. 28

equally tme that his vast schemes had in them too^ large an imaginative element to be capable of effective accomplishment at a time so early and so rude. But whatever criticism may be made on his plans and his career, and however fully it must be admitted that his masterful intellect and inexorable energy were indis- pensable to his plans, while they could not naturally survive himself, it remains true that his work was of inunense and permanent significance, and of cosmical value ; that it showed the possibility, at least, of secur- ing on the Continent public order with regulated liberty ; and that, if it did not lay solid and enduring founda- tions for these, the fault was rather in the weakness and incoherence of his materials than in his own pru- dence and plan* He anticipated his age in his large conceptions ; and the peoples were not ready for those general effects which were governing aims both in his counsels and in his campaigns.

I could not, of course, even if moved to it, delineate his work in any detail It is enough to remind you that in more than fifty great military expeditions he con- quered a large part of Italy, down almost to Calabria; he practically delivered Spain from the Saracens be- tween the Pyrenees and the Ebro ; he subdued the Bava- rians and the Saxons, and compelled them to accept what was then known as Christianity in Europe; he extended his empire over Bohemia and Carinthia, fought the Slaves, and repulsed in the ancient Pannonia the fierce Avars who had become a terror to every people striving toward better civilization. He gave, for the time, territorial security to central and western Europe, from the North Sea to the Tiber, from near the Iron Gate of the Danube westward to the ocean ; and when he returned to Aix-la-Chapelle, after being proclaime^J

24 THE TENTH GENTUBT:

Emperor of the West at Sb Peter's in Borne, on Christ- mas-Day in the year a.d. 800,^ his dominions embraced substantially two thirds of the ancient western Roman empire, including (German lands which that empire never had conquered, while the forces at his command for compacting the unity and extending the area of these dominions had been hardly surpassed by those of any^ in any age, who had worn and sullied the imperial purple.

His expeditions, you observe, were not mere raids, but were organized campaigns, designed to accomplish permanent effects. In a measure, they did accomplish such ; and though it is true, as Guizot has said, that the disorder which confronted him was not only inmiense but at the time unsubduable, so that when repressed at one point it broke forth at another the moment his ter- rible will was withdrawn, it is also true, as the grave historian reminds us, that all the States which sprang from the subsequent dismemberment of the Empire were founded by these wars of Charlemagne. Only in con- sequence of these wars did such States, rising from the scarred battle-fields of swarming barbarians, become

^ Ipse antem cum die sacratiflsima nataUa Domini ad miBsaram eolem- nia cdebranda basilicam beati Petri apoetoli fuisset ingresecu, et conm altari, ubi ad orationem ae inclinayerat, adsisteret, Leo papa coronam capiti eine impoeoit, cancto Romanorom popalo adclamante: Katrolo Augusta, a Deo eoroTuUo magna et pac\fieo imperatari Bomaiwrum^ vita ii vidoria/ Poet quae laudes ab eodem pontifioe more antiqiuNram principam adoratoB eat, ac deinde, omisao Patricii nomine, Impeiator ei Angostns appeUatna. — Einhardi : Annalet, an. 801.

The long-abiding tradition was broken through ; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman pontiff spoke the words, the Boman people echoed them, — " Karolo Angnsto, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifieo Bo- manomm Imperatori, vita et victoria.*' The German was at laat Angaa- tns. — £. A. Frkeman : Chief Periods of European History, p. 106, London ed., 1886.

TUB BXTRBKB DEPBXSSSION AND FEAB. 26

actual and lasting.^ In view of this efiPect, one need not hoaitate to join in the words which the historian elsewhere nses, which are more emphatic because of the temper of philosophical reserre in which he com- monly wrote : " No sovereign, no human being, perhaps, ever rendered greater service to the civilization of the world."*

But the military work of Charlemagne was never ulti- mate in his plans. It was designed to be conditional and directly tributary to a work of more essential im- portance, more difficult and extensive, in the realms of social and political life. He convened national as- semblies, nearly forty of which are particularly enumer- ated, meeting commonly in cities not far from the Bhine. At these assemblies reports were received from different regions ; inquiries were made as to their tem- per, needs, and respective opportunities ; and out of the answers to such inquiries came what are known as the ^ capitularies, " or little chapters, of the Emperor, con- taining a multitude of what are essentially administra- tive rules. They constitute, as Gibbon noticed, rather a series than a system, while they concerned all sorts of matters, as he also sneeringly observed, — '^the cor- rection of abuses, the reformation of manners, the econ- omy of his [the Emperor's] farms, the care of his poultry,

^ Malgr^ ranit^, malgr^ I'actiyiU de aa pens^ et de son ponvoir, le dterdrs ^tftit antour de Ini immense, invincible : il le r^primait an mo- ment, ma nn point ; nude le mal r^gnait partoat oh ne parvenait paa aa terrible Tolont^; et li od eUe arait paes^ il recommenfait dha qn'elle s'tait Aoign^. . . . Aprto lai, de yraies barri^res politiques des itate pine €fh moina bien oigania^ mais r^ls et durables, s'el^Fent ; les roy- aomes de Lorraine, d'Allemagne, d'ltalie, dee denz Boui^gnes, de Navarre, datent de oetie ^poqoe. — Bitt, de la CivU. en France^ torn. ii. pp. 129; ISl.

s Hiatoiy of France^ yoL L p. 252. Boston ed.

26 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

and even the sale of his eggs. " ^ But they exhibit the first distinct attempt to revise and harmonize the laws of the diverse peoples who had been brought beneath his authority, and to promulgate salutary rules equally affecting separated regions; and some of them, cer- tainly, are marked not only by civil wisdom but by a governing Christian purpose. The mind and spirit of the Emperor appear in them more distinctly flian in his wars.

Of the eleven hundred and fifty articles known to Guizot he reckoned eighty-seven as being of moral legislation, two hundred and seventy-three of political, one hundred and thirty of penal, one hundred and ten of civil, eighty-five of religious, three hundred and five of canonical, seventy-three of domestic, and twelve of incidental occasional rules.' The initiative in these rules proceeded, of course, always from the Emperor,

^ Decline and Fall, rol. ri. p. 289. London ed., 1848.

« See the Analytic Table in Gnizot, '* Hiat de la CiTil.," torn. iL pp. 188-189. Pariff ed. 1846. Inatead of the 65 capitnlariea, with 1,150 articlea recognized by Ouisot as belonging to Charlemagne, Boretina (**Capitalaria Begum Fiancoram") computes them at 118, containing 1,484 articlea. The datea of many are uncertain, howerer, though aome which have been attributed to following kinga may perhaps be mora jnatly ascribed to the grsat Emperor. The originala hare for the moat part long disappeared, and the copies are widely scattered.

Acta ista majoris momenti in palatio regio schedia membranaceia in* scripta, atque ad univeraorum notitiam aut in placito publico proposita, ant per ainguloa archiepiacopatua eptacopis, abbatibua et oomitibua qiui popalo proponerent tranamissa, etc . . . Et authentica quidem, aiTe pala- tina tare in provinciaa tranamissa, omnia fen perierunt, ezcepta acilioet aeheda tenem membrane hodie in monasterio S. PauU in Karinthia auper- atite, et Riculfi archiepiscopl litteris encycUcia in monasterio £k QalU adaenratia. At libri juris ecdeaiastici vd mundani quibna capitnlaria in- acripta habentnr, complurea tam in Qermania et Italia quam in Qallia et marca Hiapanica exarati, ad noRtra usqne tempers devenerunt — Pbjv. Pkrts : Mim, Qtr, Hid,, torn. iiL p. zil

ITS EXTREME DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 27

while to him belonged the definitive decision, though an influence upon them maj doubtless have been exerted by other minds.

To assist in the administration of affairs under these rules, and to keep himself informed of what needed his attention, Charlemagne sent imperial commissioners throughout his dominions, while he unweariedlj trav- ersed them himself, multiplying the impression in every quarter of his ever-present and unlimited au- thority. He protected yet regulated religion itself, with a strong bent toward securing sincerity in its teachers, and the useful effect of it on the people. He set forth an improved Book of Homilies for use in the churches. He presided in synods and directed their discussions, wrote letters of instruction or sharp ad- monition to abbots, bishops, on occasion to popes, looked after religious establishments, and as far as might be controlled their manners ; while at the same time he sought diligently to stimulate industry and extend commerce, and undertook himself large public works, as the building of bridges, or the construction of the canal designed to connect the Rhine and the Danube. It marks almost equally the character of the man and that of his times that one of his capikilaries insists emphatically on the duty of hospitality^ that another enjoins it on each subject to govern himself by the precepts of Qod, doing Him service, since the Em- peror cannot personally look after all; that another forbids the veneration of questionable saints; another proclaims that nobody must think that acceptable prayer can only be offered in one of three languages [Hebrew, Latin, Greek ?], since God may be worthily adored in any tongue, and whoever asks for right things will be heard; while still another commands

28 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

that preaching be always of a sort which plain people can understand.

In manifold ways the great Emperor vigorously ad- vanced the interests of learning. Though not perhaps able to write himself, certainly not with ease and skill, having acquired the art too late in life,^ he undoubtedly read and spoke Latin and understood Greek, and he showed with constant stress his regard for good letters. He founded many schools, especially in connection with convents or cathedrals, and enjoined that in them no distinction be made between the son of the free-bom and the son of the serf. He caused to be made the first grammar of the common dialect, with the first collection of German songs, reciting heroic German deeds.* He cultivated the arts, especially those of architecture and

1 The words of Einliard [Eginhard] aeem dodriTe as to the Empeioi^s inability to write, — except slowly, with difficulty : Nee patrio tantom sermone oontentos, etiam per^grinis linguis ediscendlB operam impendlt. In qnibns Latinam ita didicit, at eqne ilia ac patria lingoa orate sit BoIi« tns ; Qnecam rero melins intellegere quam pronuntiara poterat . . . Dia* cebat aitem compntandi et intentione sagaci sidemm cnrsnm cnriosiarima rimafaator. Temptabat et scribere tabnlasque et codicellos ad hoc in lecto sub cerricalibas circumferre solebat, ut, cum vacuum tempus esset^ ma* nam litteris efflgiendia adsueaceret. 8ed param aucceasit labor prApoa- terua ac aero inchoatns. — Einhardi : Fikt Karoli M., cap. 26.

Ampere, howerer, belieyes this to apply only to the finer and more difficult style of writing practised by skilled copyists : '' Je croii qu*il est question ici, non de la simple Venture, mais de la calligraphie." (Hist. Litt. sous OharL, p. 86, IViris ed., 1870.) In the Convent Library of the Abbey of St. Qall, near (Constance, — perhaps the moat famoua achool in Europe in the ninth and tenth centnriea, — are preaerved what purport to be tableta on which he wrote his difficnlt oopiea, the tableta being en- cloaed in iroiy, elaborately carved, and aet in metallic framea encrusted with precious stones. Some marginal notes, said to be by him, are also on a Paalter in the Imperial Library at Vienna.

* Omnium tamen nationum qu» sub eius dominatu erant jura qnm scripts non erant deacribere ac litteris mandari fecit Item barbara et an- tiquiasima oarmina, quibus veterum regum actus ac bella canebantnrt

ITS BXTRESME DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 29

music. It was by him that the Gregorian chant was introduced into central Europe, in place of the Am* brosian which had preceded it, and which only slowly gave way before it Through his effort, and especially by the schools of music established by him, the churches became possessed of a richer ecclesiastical song, and to him we are indebted for an effect in this direction which has not ceased.^

Especially he sought to gather around himself men of fine parts and of eminent learning, that he might be instructed and the mind of his empire be enriched. So he brought Alcuin from England, Peter of Pisa and Paulus Diaconus from Italy, and associated with them Angilbert, Adalhard, Th^odulf, and others, thus form- ing the ^^ School of the Palace, " in which all the leam-

acripaity memorinqae mandavit. Inchoayit et grammaticam patrii atr- monia. — FUa Kar, M., cap. 29.

Ampire'a comment on these efforts of the great Emperor is certainly a jnsi one : *' Cette id^ de fairs la grammaire d'un idiome r6pat^ barbare, montre la anp^riorit^ d*un esprit qui ne se laisaait pas fasciner par le m^te des Umgues d'antiqnit^, an point de ne pas oomprendre qne sa laogne materneUe poayait dtre caltivee. ... On a vn qu'il fit recoeOlir de ▼ienz chants nationanx ; or, il fallait, ponr conceyoir nne telle pens^e, one grande hanteor et nne grande liberty d'esprit." — Eia^ IM, aoui Charl.^ p. 88. Paris ed., 1870.

> Parmi les enseignemens que Charles prit k tftche d'introdnire d'ltaUe en France, U mettoit beanconp de priz k lamusiqne de TJ^gliae. C'^toitnne cona^quence de son z^le religienz. L'^lise gallicane et germaniqne de- menvolt attach^ an chant ambrosien, de pr6f<6rence an chant gr^rien adopts k Some. . . . Mais Charles leur imposa silence en lenr &iRant obserYsr qne Tean d'nne riviere ^toit pins pure k sa source qae dans les 'casanz qui en aont d^riv^, et que Rome ^tant la source de tonte sagesse divine^ il talloit reformer le rite gallican sur le rite remain. B se fit en- aaila donner par Adrian deux midtres de chant ; il en garda nn pour sa chapelle, qn'il conduisit avec lui de province en province ; il voulnt qne Taatrs At stationnaire k Metx, afin d'y fonder, pour tonte la France, nne ^eole de chant accUsiastique. — Sismokdi: JSiaL des Fran^Uf tom. ii. pp.8a9-«S8. Paris ed., 1821.

80 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

ing of the time was designed to be represented, and in which he with his household became scholars. He col- lected also a library, limited, of course, in the number of its manuscripts, but for the time costly and precioufL He studied rhetoric for himself, with mathematics and astronomy, was conversant with the sacred writings, and read Augustine with delight, especially the "De Civi- tate Dei. " The French language took strong impulse to development in his time, the earliest written exhibi- tion of which is found by historians in the oath taken by Louis of Germany toward Charles the Bald, a. d. 842. Even Gibbon admits, who is usually frigid and un- friendly toward the Emperor, that his '^ encouragement of learning reflects the purest and most pleasing lustre on the character of Charlemagne. '' ^

Not France alone, or Germany, took impression from this extraordinary man. He largely influenced Eng- land, while he towered over the Continent as Mont Blanc over the lesser peaks and ridges rising around it It has been supposed to be in remembrance of him that long after his death the epithet ^' Magnus, " incorporate with his name, continued a frequent individual designation in the far Scandinavia. The East as well as the West honored his pre-eminence; and Haroun Al Baschid,

1 Decline and Fall, vL 241.

Oatonam's testimony is more joetly emphatic : —

Dans ce long r^e de Charlemagne, U faut admirer bien moina la foroe de son ^p^ que celle de see conyiotions. . . . Ce conqu^rant, ce l^gisla* tenr, ce sonyerain de vingt peoples mat unis, est possid^ de la cnrioaitA qui trouble le sommeil des savants. An moment oil il ^meat toat FOcoidttit da bruit de ses premieres victoires, il reprend en soas-CBUvre see Etudes in- completes. . . . Ce sont les occupations, non d*an sopluste conronn^ inaccessible auz affaires comme les empereors de Constantinople, mais da plus actif des hommes, qui mit Bn k cinquante-troiB expMitions miUtaire% et qui chaque annee tenait en i)er8onno Res plaids g^n^raux. — A. F« O&a- NAM : La OvHl. Chre, ekez Us Frcmes, pp. 625-626. Paris, 1872.

ITS EXTBElfE DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 81

lord of Asia from Africa to India, sent ambassadors to him from his own magnificent capital of Bagdad, with presents of silken tents, an elephant, a water-clock, and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. ^ When he was buried in the basilica reared by himself at Aix-Ia-Ghapelle, in A. D. 814, still seated in death on a royal throne and arrayed in magnificent imperial robes, the universal feeling of Europe exalted him above all preceding monarchs. In spite of his personal frailties and sins the monks had visions of him ascending the shining golden stairs, attended by angels, to be welcomed by the Lord. When he was canonized, first by the Anti- Pope, Paschal Third, three and a half centuries later, A. D. 1166, and subsequently by Alexander Third, it was in deference to this wide, persistent, controlling im- pulse* Louis Ninth appointed an annual feast-day to commemorate him with triumphant and solemn ser- vice ; and we, looking back with merely critical inter- est on his times and his career, can see that in an important sense it is true, — if he had been followed by others equal to himself it would have been in every sense true, — what an eloquent and judicious writer on the Boman Empire has recently said, that from the mo* mentof his imperial coronation modern history begins.*

1 EiiilMvdi : Vita, 16. — The particalar description of the clock, given by ^nlwid, or at least l^ the author of the Annals, is worth quoting for a light which it casts on the history of mechanical art : Fuemnt praterea immeim pnefati r^gis . . . necnon et horologium ex auricalco arte me- ehaniea mirifice compositani, in quo dnodecim horarum cursus ad clep- sdnm Teitebatur, cum totidem areis pilulis, que ad oompletionem lioraTani deddebant, et casn suo subjectum sibi cimbelum tinnire facie- bant, additis in eodem ejnadem numeri equitibus, qui per duodecim fenaotras oompletis horis exiebant, et impnlsu egressionis sua totidem feneatfaa, que prins erant apertie, clandebant ; necnon et alia multa erant in ipso horolqgio, qii» nunc enumerare longum est. — Annaiea, an. 807.

* Biyce, The Holy Roman Empire, p. 49. London ed., 1876.

82 THE TENTH CBNTC7BT:

It is an old tradition on the Rhine that Charlemagne, looking from the windows of his palace at Ingelheim only scanty ruins of which now can be traced, observed that the snows melted first and the spring verdure ear- liest appeared on a particular summit across the river. "There, then," he said, "we will plant our vineyards; ** and from that day to this the vines and the wines of the Riidesheimer Berg have been famous in the world. The schools which he founded, with the Christian institu- tions which he quickened and regulated, marked the first outbreak of the spring-time in Europe after a tem- pestuous winter ; and if bitter frosts had not afterward blighted the blossoming promise the Continent would have been filled, earlier than it was, with gladness and strength. The hope which he inspired never wholly passed away. It was the one power for good which subsequent disasters could not crush. A demonstra- tion had been given, on a really colossal scale, of what was possible in European advancement. Something of this was still remembered amid the agony of darkness which followed. And I have referred so particularly to this reign of Charlemagne, not merely because it formed in itseU an astonishing parenthesis in history, but be- cause it was this, fundamentally, which made possible the career of a man like Bernard three centuries later. Those intervening centuries, however, were full of such a frightful chaos in Church and State as has never since been equalled or approached.

Louis, the son of Charlemagne, who before his father's death had received the diadem from his hand, retained nominally the same empire; but the regnant and un-* resting enei^ which before had filled its indefinite spaces being withdrawn, the fabric soon fell in bloody dissolution. Among the sons of Louis it was divided

TIB BXTBEMB DEPRESSION AND FEAB* 88

by compact^ you remember, after fierce conflicts. Through the failure of collateral branches, it was nominally and partially restored, toward the close of the century, under Charles the Fat^ the most wretched of caricatures upon Charles the Great. When he had been deposed, for cowardice and fatuity, in a.d. 887, and after begging his bread from the rebels had died in lonely and abject misery, and been buried in a con- vent grave, ^ all semblance vanished of the former coherent empire, to reappear only after the lapse of three fourths of a century, under the plan and by the prowess of the German Otlia

With the failure of the Empire, the grand and saga- cious plan of Charlemagne, who had sought and for the time had secured the territorial protection and govern- mental unity of a large part of Europe, found tremen- dous vindication. It became apparent that the Empire had not simply originated in personal ambition, though that of course had had its part in rearing the vast but temporary structure. It had had also a vital relation to the needs of the time ; so that when it was gone the threatening forces against which it had raised a tem- porary bulwark broke forth upon its lands with fear- fully wide and destroying violence. The interests to which it had given a transient guarantee were exposed thereafter, without protection, to the perils which it had limited or arrested ; and the future, of which a real promise had lain in it, proved impossible to be reached except through winding and bloody patiis. Barbarism rushed in fnun every side on the feeble beginnings of the better civilization. Learning ceased to be cherished, and the liberal arts which were beginning to germinate

^ At Bfffliipy*^ now Cooittnot. S

S4 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

wiiftiered like flowers in icy airs. Even Charlemagne's collection of German heroic songs is said to have been destroyed as impious by his successors. The schools established for popular training were almost as hope- lessly scattered as was the School of the Palace. Armed enemies burst with a fury unrestrained upon the dis- tributed nascent states, which had no longer strength to resist them. The African Saracens pillaged the coasts of the Mediterranean; they plundered Aries and Mar- seilles ; they ravc^d Corsica and Sardinia ; they sacked and burned the monastery of Montcf Cassino, the cradle of monachism in Europe ; they burned Ostia and Civita Yecchia, and threatened Rome, so that Leo Fourth, in the middle of the ninth century, built a wall to protect the quarter of the city around St. Peter's, which is still called from him the Leonine city. He built, also, near the mouth of the Tiber, fortified towers, from one to the other of which chains were stretched to prevent ihe passage of piratical flotillas.

At the same time the Northmen, the sight of whose swift and daring ships in Mediterranean harbors had startled Charlemagne at the height of his power, and against whom armed vessels had been stationed at ihe mouths of French rivers, breaking forth from ihe popu- lous Scandinavian coasts pierced into France, up ihe Rhine into Germany, despoiling and slaying on every side. In the ninth and tenth centuries nearly fifty in- cursions of the Northmen into France are historically recorded. Where the records are less frequent it is not improbably because convents had been destroyed^ monks had fled, and their painful recitals had turned to ashes. The relentless ravagers pillaged Bordeaux so thoroughly that the archbishop was transferred by the Pope to Bourges, because his province had become

ITS EXTBEMJB DEPBESSIOK AND FEAB. 85

« desert^ They were at Amiensy Gambrai, Rouen, Lidge, at Orleans, Tours, Toulouse, Nantes, at Treves, Gologne, Bonn, and stabled their horses in the basilica at Aiz. Ghartres fell into their possession. Naples, Sicily, and the Greek coasts were visited by their fierce rapacity ; and before the death of Gharles the Fat they had laid siege to Paris, — then limited again to the island in the Seine, — and had been not beaten off but bought Oiff, with a large money ransom and a free pas- sage on the upper Seine, and into Burgundy* For nearly a century France continued to be devastated by them, till the wealthy province of Normandy having become theirs by cession from the crown, a. d. 911, their destroying irruptions were suspended. ^^ From the fury of the Normans, Good Lord, deliver us, '' had become a familiar petition of worshippers in the North of Europe, as a similar prayer against the deadly arrows of the Hungarians had found place in the South.

The ravages of the Hungarians had been yet more dreadful than those of the Normans ; and the memory of them still links itself, in a lurid association, with the national name so nobly represented in our time by Kossuth, Defik, and Andrfissy. Gomposed of tribes of Scythian and Finnish origin, this people, with tents of akin, garments of fur, with scarified faces, and with the terrible Tartar bows which were their characteristic weapons, — though they used as well the sword, the spear, the battle-axe, and the breastplate, — migrating from the East, had broken into the parts of Fannonia which Charlemagne had subdued, and from thence at the close of the ninth century they swept like a whirl- wind over Europe. ^' Such was their Scythian speed, " says Gibbon, ^ that in a single day a circuit of fifty miles

^ Sismondiy Hist des Franyais, torn. iii. p. 210.

86 THE TENTH OBNT0BY:

was stripped and consumed; • . . nor could my dis« tance be secure against an enemy who, almost at the same moment, laid in ashes the Helvetian monastery of St. GkkU and the city of Bremen on the shores of the Northern Ocean." ^ Then began the multiplication ot walled towns in Europe. Over the southern provinces of France rolled unchecked the horrible flood. Gross- ing the Pyrenees, it broke into Spain. Italy was swept by it The royal Pavia was burned, and almost its whole population was slain. To the bounds of Calabria the desolation extended. The savage invaders showed no mercy, as they asked none. Even canni- balism was attributed to them by the popular rumor. Their business was to slay every man ; and if they spared women or children it was only to drag them into a cap- tivity in the prospect of which death lost its terrora For nearly forty years such raids of savage massacre continued, till the power of these enemies of all civiliza- tion was finally broken in great battles under Henry the Fowler and Otho. Afterward they subsided by slow degrees into stationary life ; but up to nearly the last quarter of the tenth century the terror of the Hungarians was hardly for a day absent from the mind of Europe.

Meantime the Slavonic Wends and Ozechs had re- nounced dependence on the Empire, and threatened its frontiers. All Europe was menaced with a swift and awful return of barbarism. Fear was so general and so oppressive that a dreadful apathy was born of it, an apathy which tended to social and governmental atro- phy, and was only interrupted by disaster and convul- sion. Population diminished; and the remark of Sis- mondi is literally true that in reading the scanty records

1 DacUne and Fall, toI. yii. p. 171. London ed., 1848.

ITS BXTBBICB DEPBSSSION AND PRAB. 87

one ]R stmck by a prevailing feeling of solituda^ Har- Tests were neglected, forests widened. Aquitaine was ravaged by wolves. As Michelet has said, herds of deer seemed to have taken possession of France.* As nearly as is possible, perhaps, in extended hnman societies, a state of general anarchy was approached. Bryce has described it well in a few words : ^^ No one thought of common defence or wide organization ; the strong built castles, the weak became their bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl. . . . The grand vision of a universal Christian empire was utterly lost in the isolation, the antagonism, the increasing localization of all powers; it might seem to have been but a passing gleam from an older and a better world. '' '

It was in this dreary and dangerous period that the Feudal System came, with an almost spontaneous and irresistible impulse, to wide development ; and perhaps nothing illustrates more clearly both the needs of the time and the slavish or tyrannous temper presiding in it. Undoubtedly, the beginnings of this celebrated sys- tem may be traced further back, even to the primitive customs of Germanic and GMli^ tribes. But it was finally articulated and firmly established only in and after the tenth century. The edict of Conrad Second at Milan, which is generally recognized as marking the full maturity of the system, was issued in a.d. 1087, when the organization of feudal servitudes became complete.

' L'oztiDOtion npide de la popuUtion rorale fiit la grande cause qui, ■ooi le i^gne dea Oailoviiigieiis, ooTiit rempin anx brigands qui la d^vaa* tknnt; ... en llsant lear r6cit dee ^r^emena, il eat impoeeible de n'ttiw pas atteint d'an sentiment de soUtade. — HiiL d$ Frany^U, torn. ilL pi

879.

^ Les bdtes faaves semblaient prendre possession de la France, ^-ifiil 4e Promote torn. L p. 897. Paris ed., 1885.

* Holy Bomaa Empire, pi 79. London ed., 1878.

88 THB TENTH CIBNTUHT :

The earliest written ^ cuBtomarj, '* as it was called, or public code of feudal customs, was issued in France in A.D. 1088.^ But the customs had many of them become established before, of which this list presents the record ; and the fact that the vast elaborated system, whose in- flnence was so wide both for evil and for good, came into development at that time, throws a vivid light both on its own nature and on those public dangers and needs out of which it arose. In studying it one is apt to get entangled in the teasing intricacies of its ultimate ar- rangements, and the multiplicity of its correlated *^ in* cidents. " But the principle of it was utterly simple. The reciprocal obligation of protection on the one hand, and of service on the other, was its one essential element.

In ethical origin it was a military compact, express or implied, between lord and vassal, for their common defence. After a time it came to be held that every man not noble by birth was bound to attach himself to some special lord ; and so the smaller free estates, or allodial lands, came under the feudal proprietorship, with the military protection, usually of the nearest and most powerful baron. Then the benefices, which had been royally conferred on principal nobles^ making them gov- ernors in their provinces on condition of military ser- vice, became hereditary, constituting fiefs, at the head of which was duke, count, or marquis. On the one hand arose out of this the landed aristocracy, which has formed so striking a feature in the political system of Europe. On the other hand came the hereditary military aristocracy, which allowed no nobld to exer- cise another trade than that of arms without ^ derogat-

1 See Hallam. The Middle Agui, ToL i. pp. 165, 18a London ed.,

185a

ITS BZTBSMB DEPBE8SI0N AND FBAB. 89

iskgj " or Burrendering the advantages of birth and rank* The land was held to ennoble its possessor; and sur- names became common, to facilitate the tracing and the transmission of property and prerogatiye. For the same purpose armorial bearings were introduced, es- pecially in the eleyenth and twelfth centuries. Even the higher clergy often became feudal nobles, and were engaged in actual war, though they might commonly discharge their feudal obligation by sending their vas- sals to the field, or by pecuniary equivalents; while those who in an earlier time had been free peasants came by degrees, under a force as inevitable as that which governs the flow of rivers, to be the bondsmen of the lords.

The whole system was an attempt, artificial, elabo- rate, yet at first almost without foresight of results, to organize feeble dispersed communities for mutual pro- tection and local defence. It shows, in every part, that the safeguards of the Empire had been withdrawn. A wide and fruitful social development had been at least possible, at no distant day, if these had continued ; and a large measure of regulated liberty would almost certainly have either attended or followed social pro- gress. But when the empire disappeared, and the distributed populations broke up into multitudes of separated circles, the State was forgotten, the neigh- borhood became paramount, and the strongest was the natoral chiel Voltaire put into few words the whole genius of the system, when he said that ^^each castle became the capital of a small kingdom of brigands, in the midst of desolate towns and depopulated fields. " ^

> Chaqiie cbftteaa ^tait la capitale d'on petit ^tat de brigands ; ... lea vilka preaqne riduites en solitude, et les campagnes dipeaplte par de loDguea famines. — £mai mtr Um MoBun, cap. xzxviiL

40 THE TENTH GENTUBT*.

There was no longer any recognized commonwealtlL The conception of it appeared an illusorj dream of the world's youth which the hard necessities of life had driven from men's minds, while they hastened to shelter themselves, in frightened squads, upon or beneath the fortressed rocks. All laws became provincial or local. The emperor had been the ^ Lex Animata, " — the living and personal law of his realm. Now that counts or dukes had become local sovereigns, subject only to the feudal authority of the king which was often but nomi- nal, there was no more attempt at general legislation or a system of public jurisprudence. Such an attempt first appears in an ordinance of Louis Eighth, a.d. 1228, con- cerning usury by the Jews.^ Until then, and practi- cally until many years later, no feudal tenant could be bound by a general law within the limits of his fief without his consent ; and the multitudes of local regu- lations, appertaining to the various districts, sprang up almost as rapidly and as widely as did the subse- quent millions of poppies on the battle-fields of France, out of a soil crimsoned and fertilized by the down-pour of blood.

Undoubtedly the system had certain advantages, and was not entirely unproductive of benefit. It at least saved Europe from being conquereds^.and possessed by any one family of kings, — the multiplication of mili- tary centres and of local commanders making this im- possible. It nurtured certain elements of cjiaracter which claim our respect, as fealty to superiors, loyalty to custom, a sense of obligation to proximate authority; while by giving supremacy to local interests it doubt- less wrought for the wider distribution of influences and tendencies out of which came the following civilization.

^ HidlMD, Middle Ages, voL L p. Sm. London ed., 186S.

ITS EXTREME DEPRESSION AKD FEAB. 41

Very few things in this world are of unmixed evilness, and the Feudal System was not one of them. But^ on the other hand, by narrowing men's views to their private security, or the protection of immediate neighborhoods, it tended more and more to dissociate communities. It gave enormous prominence to mere physical force. Its nobles, as Sismondi has said, ^exercising the bcnly without intermission, found it impossible to cultivate the mind, and came to count it a duty not to think. " ^ Genius and character ceased to be conditions of influ- ence. Only the ownership of land gave authority ; and that ownership depended either on birth or on stiffness of muscle. Private wars became frequent and legal, and out of them easily and widely emerged promiscuous rapine. Commerce died under the system, except as it was concentrated and entrenched in powerful cities; and the popular industries, arts, and culture, which commerce would have fostered, were fettered or for- bidden. The true relation of man to the planet was practically reversed. The land became the lord, the vassal was bound to it, and the haughtiest baron must ^ serve his fief. " ' Anything approaching public sen- timent was of course impossible. No passion of pa- triotism could be known. The system was radically unserviceable for public advancement, and whatever of this was accomplished while it continued was accom- plished in spite of it, by energetic forces in human na- ture which it could not destroy or wholly confine. It was ethically commended to those among whom it ex- isted, it is now so commended to us, only by its fitness to guard Europe from the utter and irretrievable an- archy which without it must have succeeded the shat-

^ Hist, des Fnnfau^ torn. iv. p. 116.

' Hiobelety Hist, de Fnnce, torn. iL p. 164. Parii ad., 18SS.

42 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

tered Empire. No other testimony appears to me so impressive to the awful evil and peril of the time — no song or story, no record or legend, no particular event, no special law — as does the fact that this enormous and oppressive establishment was the only barrier which Europe could raise against barbarism and paganism when Charlemagne's plans had failed of success. Those castles on the crags, with moats, drawbridges, frown- ing bastions, menacing banners, and with the small huddles of huts grouped around their rocky founda- tions, where terrified peasants found a partial security, and paid for it by submissive or compulsory compliance with oppressive exactions, — these attest not so much the cruelty of society, or its ambitions, as its fears. The shield of the Empire being withdrawn, only iso- lated rocks, guarded by men with lances and in mail, could take its place. No other asylum was really left^* unless men sought it under the cowl.

It is to be remembered, also, that with such changes in the political and military system of Europe came at the same time a frightful development in the sphere ci religion, — one which cannot be clearly understood ex- cept in connection with the preceding facts.

The World-empire had naturally had the World- religion associated with it, and had promised to be of that religion the sure protector, if also sometimes its salutary monitor. The capitularies of Charlemagne had not sought merely to revise and supplement, and to bring into measurable order and harmony, the rules and customs of the various peoples subjected to his rule ; they had contemplated also, as I indicated before, the continuance, the support, with the practical and almost the doctrinal guidance of the ministers of religion. They contain articles, for example, on the admission

ITB EXTREME DEPBE88ION AND FEAB. 48

of freedmen into the spiritual ' order, and of slaves into monasteries ; on the participation of the clergy in war ; on the treatment of tiiose sentenced to death, who should seek refuge in abbeys ; on the value of external worics ; on amended manners, as the true ornament of the Church ; i^inst the use of amulets and divination, or the searching of the Scriptures for oracular responses. Under them for the first time the payment of tithes was made compulsory, so that pecuniary support was assured by the State to the teachers of Christianity. The Em- peror sought, too, to confine the clergy to tlieir spiritual functions, to bring the seculars among them into mo- nastic life, and to keep the monasteries strictly sub- ordinate to his authority. He settled sometimes the smallest matters of Church discipline, while he equally concerned himself with the larger questions of doc- trinal belief.

It illustrates his attention to the matters of religion that he had the Homilarium prepared and distributed for use in the churches, with sermons arranged for Sun- days and feast-days, and with a preface admonishing the clergy to the diligent study of the Scriptures. He interested himself actively and largely against the he- retical theory of Adoptianism, and for the conversion frmn it of its chief representative, Felix, bishop of Urgellis.^ He originated and shaped, if he did not compose, the famous '^Caroline Books," containing wise counsels on the use of images in churches.' He favored the insertion of the ^^Filioque" in the Latin form of the Nicene Creed, as it had already appeared

1 Sob NMndsr, Hist of Cliriit Rdjg., vol isL pp. 165-168.

* K Oiioli Hag. CApitulan de Ima^nibiu, compoiitam et publicttmn in oone. Fimnooford* et Adiiano Pap» miMiim, A. D. 794." — Opera llQgiie], ton. U. oolL 989-1660.

il

44 THE TENTH CEMTUBT :

in the Athanasian, to represent the double procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son; and during his reign was held the synod at Aix-la-Chapelle, A.D. 809, before which he brought the question, and which decided in favor of the change. He thereupon sent messengers to Pope Leo Third, asking his sanction for it, to which the cautious pontiff made answer, in effect, that the doctrine represented by the clause was correct, but the change in the creed-f orm was not then expedient^ The Emperor had previously presided him- self at the Synod of Frankfort, in a.d. 794, though leg- ates from the Pope were present; and when that Synod, representing the French and German churches, had con- demned the decrees of the Second Council of Nice, he caused a treatise to be drawn up, urging the soundness of its conclusions, and pressing Pope Adrian to affirm and enforce them. His letters to the pontiffs, espe- cially to Leo, were by no means those of one who felt himself inferior in dignity. He gives instruction, ad- monition, and sometimes rebuke, with kingly freedom, and seems not indisposed to vindicate for himself the title which more than one had given him, not wholly in jest, "Episcopus Episcoporum. " *

His son and successor Louis, so far as power re- mained to him, carried yet further this supervision of the clergy. He forbade bishops to retain their horses, arms, and military spurs, their belts thick with gems, and their elaborate and embroidered robes.* He sought

^ See BchaffB Hist, of the Church, vol. iv. p. 4811 New York ed., 1885.

3 Alcnin spoke of him as "Deeuc Eoclesin, rector, defensor, amator;** " cathoUcns in fide, rex in potestate, pontifex in pnedicatione, judex in aqnitate, philosophns in liberalibns stadiis, inelytus in moribns, et omni honestate pncipnuB." — Opera Aleuini [Migne], torn, ii coll. 780, S6i.

* Michelet^ Hist de IVanee, torn, i p, 864^ note; Paris ed., 1886:

ITS EXTREME DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 46

strenQOQgly to reform the monasteries, set forth in a ▼olome the proper rules of canonical life, had copies of this made, and appointed commissioners to go with authority among and through religious houses, and bring nunneries and monasteries to tiie strict and sincere observance of their rules.

Tn all this, you observe, there was no immediate con- flict developed between emperor and pontiff, the civil authority and the religious. The two moved as co- ordinate, on parallel lines, with easy co-operation. There was one religion for Western Christendom, with the Pope at its head ; one government for it, with the anointed Emperor as ruler. The Pope was Ood's vicar on earth in things spiritual, the Emperor in things temporal. It might of course be anticipated that in the progress of time the emperor would come to be held the inferior, as things temporal are confessedly less important than things spiritaal; but in Charle- magne's period no such distinction had appeared. His imperial consecration by the Pope, coming, as he said, imexpectedly,^ had implied no temporal dependence for the crown on the pontiff who conveyed it; and Louis the D^onnaire, by his command, had with his own hands at first assumed the crown, as if expressly to negative the notion of such dependence. A certain distinctly clerical character was in fact communicated to the emperor by his coronation. He became a secular pope, as the pontiff was a spiritual emperor. The con-

Tnne ccBpemnt deponi ab episcopia et clericis cingala balteis aoreis et gemmeis cultris onerata, exquisiteqae Testes, sed et calcaria talos onenntia rriinqiii.

1 Quo tempore impetatoris et angosti nomen aeoepit Quod primo in tantum avenatus est, ut adfirmaret, se eo die, quamvis pr»cipua festin* tas esaet, beclesiani non intraturum, si pontificis consiUum pnescire potU* iaset — Edthardi : Vita Karoli If., cap. 28.

4B THE TENTH ODfTUBT :

senting action of boA vm held to be essential to the welfare of Christendom. In Charlems^pifi's time, and that of his son, the Empire did protect, extend, and purify religion. In this was a source and aa evidence of its strength. At the same time that it regulated monks and prelates, and gave earnest exhortation to pontiffs, its conquests opened larger opportunities to the missionary zeal which never had failed, and carried Christianity, in the form in which^ it then was pre- sented, not only to Wittekind and the Saxons, but to the Slavonians, and to the Chagan of the Avars. Every Christian was held to owe loyalty to the head ci the Empire, as the Defender of the Church, and the Pro- tector of the Catholic faith ; and the unity of the Church found its counterpart in the unity of the State.

So this was called ^ The Holy Roman Empire ; " and while it continued all felt that Christianity took from it security, energy, and imperial eminence. The recent rise of Mohammedanism in the East^ with its threaten- ing pressure on Eastern Christendom, had brought the governing religion of the West into bolder relief before men's minds. The severance from the Greek church, not yet complete but ripening toward the final schism, had made the church whose headship was in Borne more affirmative and self-conscious; and it naturally came to pass that while the pope leaned on the emperor, the emperor felt it to be his mission to guard and to extend the Church; and the combined ^ion of both gave apparently the surest guarantee of the progress of the cause which all Christians had chiefly at heart

The Empire fell; and with the civil disturbances which followed came religious dissension, decline, deg- radation, still more appalling. Whether or not we can trace a direct relation of the one as cause to the other

rrs EXTBEm: depbbssion aivd feab. 47

as effect^ the dreadfal sequence cannot be denied ; and only as we hold it clearly in mind can we underatand to how low a point the moral life of Europe descended. One feels almost, in reading the foul and frightful an- nals, as if the ancient Pagan temper, driven into the air or trodden into the soil before the armies of the Empire, had settled back densely and heavily upon Europe, and was infecting .and poisoning the very springs of spiritual life. The atmosphere of society was not merely obscured by superstition, it reeked with all manner of pestilent forces. This was not true in forests and fields alone, or in remote hamlets. At Rome itself, centre of Christendom, the vilest vices of the times of Tiberius or of Caligula fiercely reappeared. It is almost incredible, the extent to which a frightful corruption there prevailed. The annalists of the Roman Church stand aghast before it ^^The Pomocracy," or reign of Harlots, is the terrible name by which a part of it is most accurately described. Milman's ex- ^ planation of the terrific development is temperate and brief: ^^This anarchy of Italy led to the degradation of the Papacy ; the degradation of the Papacy increased the anarchy of Italy. . . . Europe was resolutely ig- norant what strange accidents, caprices, crimes, in- trigues, even assassinations, determined the rise and fail of the Supreme Pontiff. " ^ No Protestant prepos- sessions color this picture. Even the learned and scrupulous Mirbillon had to confess that most of the popes of the tenth century ^^ lived rather like monsters, or like wild beasts, than like bishops. ''

Prior to the violent taking of the papal chair by Sergius Third, a. d. 904, there had been nine popes in thirteen years. One had died so hated that after his

& Hist Latin Chrifltuuiity, vol iu. p. 152. New Tork ed., 1860.

48 THE TENTH CENTUBT :

death his body was disinterred, stripped, matdlated, and thrown into the Tiber, while those who had been ordained by him were compelled to be reordained. His successor had been already twice deposed from the clerical office for scandalous wickedness, and died in a fortnight after being made pope. His successor was strangled in prison.

The popes who followed reigned only a few months each ; and Leo Fifth, a. d. 908, in less than two months was thrown into prison by one of his own presbyters, who thereupon took his place, to be in turn, within a year, ignominiously expelled. Under Sergius came to power the famous trio of courtesans: Theodora the mother, and her daughters Theodora and Marozia, as dissolute as herself, who for years afterwards gOTemed the pontificate, bestowing it on their lovers or bastard sons. It is not possible fully to tell the story of the time. One or two instances must suffice as indications. One of the favorites of the elder Theodora had been made successively Bishop of Bologna and Archbishop of Ravenna. By her agency he was made pontiff, A. D. 914, under the name of John Tenth. ^ He proved an able and martial pope, himself leading. an army successfully against the Saracens. But aftet fourteen years, Marozia, whom Liutprand called ^'a drunken Yenus,'" had him surprised in the Lateraa Palace,

1 Theodora scortam impndens . . . quod dicta etiam fedisaiiiium mA, BonuuiA dyitatis non inyiiiliter monarcluam obtinebat. Qa» dnas habuit nataa, Marotiam atqne Theodoram, idbi non aolnm coeqnales venxm etiam Veneris ezercitio promptiores. . . . Theodone aatem glycerii mens perversa, ne amasii sai duoentoram miliarioram interpoeitione, qnibos BaTenna seqnestratar Roma» rarissimo ooncnbita potii|tiir, Bavenate banc sediB arcbipresalatnm co^t deserere, Bomannmque, pro nebs, ennunnm pontificiam nsarpare. — Liutprandi : Aniapod., lib. it 48.

* Bespondes, ado, ta : " Nicbil hoc Yenns ebria carat*' — IHcL lit 44

ITS EXTBEMB DEPRBSBION AMD FBAB. 49

thrown into prison, and a little later sufiFocated wiUi pillows. Shortly after, a son of hers, whose reputed father was Pope Sergius, was raised to the papacy under the title of John EleTenth,^ who, however, by another more legitimate son of hers, was ere long cast into prison, where he languished till his death four years later. At last came John Twelfth, the grandson of the same licentious woman, raised to the papacy at the age of nineteen, a.d, 956, of whom no account can be given which would not sully the page and shock the ear. According to the testimony of his contemporary churchmen, he turned the pontifical palace into a vast school of prostitution. Devout women from distant counties were deterred from making pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Peter by the justified fear of nameless out- rage. A synod at Rome, composed principally of (Ger- man, Tuscan, French, and Lombard prelates, but at which bishops and priests of the neighborhood were also present, received testimony against him from high ecclesiastics as well as from laymen, accusing him of simony, cruelty, promiscuous licentiousness, of homi- cide, perjury, sacrilege, of incest in his own family, of drinking wine to the honor of the Devil, of invoking the aid of Pagan gods to give a favorable turn to the dice. In reply the Pope swore by Almighty QoA that if ihey elected another pontiff he would excommunicate them all ; to which they replied with the sharp answer

^ CnmqtM die qoadam papa cnm fratre pancisqne allis in Lataranenal palatio tmei, Widonia et Marocia aaper eoa militea irruentes, Petram fratris ipaiiifl aata oeulos interfeceiiint ; enndem rero papam comprehen- dmte% enatodie manciparant, in qua non malto post eat defnntna. Atnnt eoim, qaod oenrical luper oe eiiu imponerent, sioqne enm peaaime aoffoearent. Quo mortno, ipeina liarotin filiom Johannem nomine, qnem «x Seigio papa meietriz ipea gennerat, papam oonatitnant. — LiUTPBAimi :

4 _

50 THE TENTH CENTUBT :

that Judas had had apostolic power to bind and loose as long as he was faithful, but that when he became a greedy murderer he could bind or loose nobody but himself, and could only tie the knot in tbe cord that hanged him.^

This foul desperado was finally murdered, as was currently reported, in an adulterous rendezvous, by the dagger of the injured husband, and died without sacra- ments. But others who followed him, though scarcely riyalling his incomparable wickedness, brought fearful shame to the pontificate. Benedict Fifth was degraded and banished. Benedict Sixth was strangled in a dun- geon. A usurper, Boniface, assumed the papacy, but was soon compelled to fly, carrying off with him the sacred vessels of St Peter's. He returned, however, to murder the Pope who had taken his place as Bene- dict Seventh, putting him to death in the castle of St Angelo, either by poison or by starvation. And at last came Benedict Ninth, in the earlier half of the eleventh century, a.d. 1033, raised to the papacy at tbe age of twelve years by heavy bribery, whom one of his own successors in the office, Victor Third, declared to have led a life so foul and execrable that he shuddered

^ Noyeritii itrnqne* non a paacia, aed «b omniboa tarn nortri qoAm efc altorius ordinia, voe homicidii, perjarii, sacrilegii, et ex propria OQgnatioiM atque ex doabus aororibos incest! crimine esae accaaatoa. Dieqnt et aliud audita ipeo bonidam, diaboli voa in amore vinam bibiaae ; in lado &l«ee Jovia, Veneria» ceterornmqae demonam auxiliam popoaciaae. • . . Testis omnium gentium preter Romanaram abaentia mulierum, qvm aanctoram apoetolorum limina orandi gratia timent yiaere, cum nonnuUaa ante dies paucoa bunc audierint conjugataa, yiduaa, vixginea, yi oppreaaiaae. — Lixrr- PRANPI : Hist, OUcnis, 12, 4.

Quamdin enim bonua inter condiacipuloa fuit,1igare atque aolvere Taloit; poatquam rero cupiditatia cauaa homicida factna, vitam omnium oocid«re volnit, quern poatea ligatum aolvere aut aolutum ligare potuit, iiiii 9^ ^■om^ quem infalioiaaimo laquoo atrangulayit ? — Ibid. 18.

/

ITS ETTBEliE DEPBEBSION AND FEAB. 61

to describe it ; ^ of whom Baoul Glaber, writing at the time^ blushed to record the shame of his entrance on his office, the vileness of his conduct, the infamy of his exit' Driven from the pontifical chair by an irresistt ble tumult of popular disgust, he regained it by bloody violence, and excommunicated . the bishop who had been put into his place. At last he sold the office it- self, which he seems to have valued only for the liberty which it gave to his vices, and Gregory Sixth purchased the dignity.^ There were at one time three popes reign- ing in Rome, who were all deposed by the Emperor Henry Third, and to whom a successor was appointed.^ It was of pontiffs like these whose character I have faintly indicated that the Bishop of Orleans said, at the Council of Bheims, a.d. 991, after reciting the crimes

^ Ciyas qoidem post adeptnm sacerdotium vita qnam tnrpis, quam foeda, qaamque execranda extiterit, horreaco referre. See Milman's Hist. of Latin Christ, rol. iii. p. 280, note.

' Ipso qnoqne in tempore Romana Sedes, quie universalis jure habetor IB orbe twrraram, pnefato morbo pestifero per viginti quinqae annorum spacia mtseirime laboraverat. Fnerat enim eidem Sedi ordinatns qoidam paer oirciter annoram XII. contra jns fasque; quem scilicet solapecunia anri et argenti pins commendavit, qoam etas aut sanctitas ; et qnoniam infalicem habait introitam, infeliciorem persensit exltnm. Horrendnm qaippe referre, tnrpitndo illius conversationis et vita. Tunc Tero cam eoiiMnsa totins Bomani popnli, atqne ex pmcepto Imperatoris, ejectns est A Sede, et in looo ejus snbrogatus est yir religiosissimus ac sanctitate per- qiicouB Gregorius natione Romanus ; cnjus yidelicet bona fama quiequid prior foBdaverat in melius reformavit. — Hid, sui temp,, lib. v. cap. 6.

* Desideriua, Abbot of Monte Cassino, afterward Victor Third, wrote : ^'Cumque se a clero simul et populo propter nequitias suas oontemni respieeret, et fama suorum facinorum omnium auras impleri cemeret, tan- dem loperto consilio, qui voluptati deditua ut Epicurus magis quam ponti- fex Tiyere malebat, cuidam Joanni archi-presbytero . . . non parra ab eo aeeqvta pecunia summum sacerdotium relinquens tradidit." See Nean- dai^s Hist of Christ. Religion, vol. iii. p. 876, note.

* Benedict IX. officiated at St. John Lateran ; Sylvester III. in St Pster^s ; Gregory YL in St

62 THE TENTH CENTUBT:

of John Twelfth : ^ Is it a settled matter that to such monstrous brutes, utterly destitute of all knowledge of things human and divine, innumerable priests, distin- guished throughout the world for their wisdom and the temper of their lives, are to be subjected? For what do we hold him who sits blazing with purple and gold, on a lofty throne? If he lacks love, and is only inflated with knowledge, he is Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God. If he shows neither love nor knowledge, he is like a statue, like an idol, to seek counsel from whom is like consulting a block of marble. " ^ Confusion and degradation naturally extended throughout the Church, from such excess of evilness at the head. Rome had come to be the most vicious and wretched city of a de- praved and miserable land. No public works were carried on in it; artistic activities disappeared; the classical monuments were ruthlessly destroyed.' A darkness, noisome and intolerable, radiated from it. As when in the smitten river of Egypt the fish died in the bloody waves, and frogs came from it into houses and bed-chambers, so from Rome, whose mission had been to christianize the Continent, all spiritual plagues came swarming forth. Men like Hugh of Provence, foul with all crimes, bestowed great bishoprics on bastard sons.

1 Nam talibiu monstris ignominia plenis, scientU dirinarum et ha- manaram Tacoia, mnumeroa aacerdotes Dei per orbem terraram, 8Cteiiti4 et vit6B mente oonspicaos sabjici decretam est I . . . Quid buiic» Berer- endi Patres, in sablimi solio residentem, veste purparea et aarea radiantem^ quid bune, inqoam, esse censetis ? — Si cbaritate destitaitor totaq^e tcientia inflatnr et extoUttar, Anticbriatos est in templo Dei aedens, et ae oetendens tanquam sit Deua. Si antem nee cbaritate fondatar nee scientift erigitur, in templo Dei tanquam statua, tanquam idolum est ; a quo ««• sponsa petere, marmora consulere est — SynoduB RemeiuiSf pp. 6(^-61,

* See Hemansy Sacred Art in Italy, vol. 1. pp. 41--4i, 56. London ed., 1869.

rrs irrBEMii dbpbession and feab. 58

Barons conferred abbeys and bishoprics on their infant children. A child only fiye years old was made Arch- bishop of Rheims. Another was put by purchase into fhe See of Narbonne at the age of ten. ^ The f ather, in such cases, took the authorizing letters in the name of the child, ruled the diocese, and clutched the price of unsaid masses. Churches were bequeathed to daugh- ters as their dowries. Simony was a general curse in the churches, since it was the common impression in Europe that at Rome everything was venal, and while men reprobated the example they followed it' When Hildebrand was subsequently appointed director of the great monastery of St. Paul, outside the gates of Rome, he found cattle stabled in the basilica, and the monks waited on in the refectory by abandoned women. Per- jury was so common as almost wholly to escape punish- ment. To a fearful extent drunkenness was the habit in monasteries, and vices viler than drunkenness were common. Robbery was the business of a large part of society, and brigandage infested the public roads. Christians were sold in the Saracen slave-markets.' Learning was regarded as akin to magic. A church-

1 See HalluD, Middle Ages, voL ii. p. 172. London ed., 1858. Bobert- ■on notioet aIso the tact that the Coant of Vermandoia, who secnred the election of the boy five yean old at Rheima, was suspected of having poinoned the previous archbiahop in order to make the vacancy for the child. Hist of the Church, vol. iL p. 384. London ed. 1856.

* Gerbert said, afterward pope : *' Bomanorum mores mundus perhor- reacit." A striking illustration of the prevalence of simony is mentioned by SIsmondi (Hist des Fraufais, torn. iv. pp. 299-301), where the Arch* biahopa of Bheims and Sens, the Bishops of Nevers, Constance, Nantes, Langresy Beauva&s , Amiens, with the Abbot of St. M^dard at Soissons, wen all constrained to confess that they had either bought their places, or liad entered them through purchase by their parents. [▲. D. 1049.]

• See Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. iiL p. 816 ; also» pp. 808, 809, 814, JjoadoB ed,, 1868.

64 TBI TENTH CBNTUBT :

penance made amends for any other sin almost more easily than for that

At this time began perhaps, certainly at this time were widely accepted, those scandalous irregularities in worship which frequently continued into later periods, — like the ^fite des saus-diacres^^ at Paris, where tipsy priests elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered incense of burnt leather, sang obscene songs, and ate upon the altar; like that at Evreux, where the priests wore their surplices wrong side out, and threw bran in each other's eyes ; ^ like those of which Strutt makes men- tion in his ^^ Sports and Pastimes, " — when in each of the cathedral churches a bishop or an archbishop of fools was elected, in those dependent on the Holy See a pope of fools, for whom mock ecclesiastics were pro- vided, with ridiculous dresses, and around whom a mot- ley crowd, while service was proceeding, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate, drank, and played with dice on the altar, afterward putting filth into the censers, and receiving a benediction from the mock bishop or pope. Usually, these vicious spectacles occurred on Christmas- day or near it; but sometimes on other feast-days. When they were exhibited on St. Stephen's day, com- memorating him whose face had shined as the face of an angel, and who had led toward heaven " the noble army of martyrs, '' a burlesque composition called the ^' Prose of the Ass '' was sung as part of the mass, performed by a double choir, with the sound of the braying of an ass introduced as a refrain.^ Customs of this kind are not extemporized, and do not suddenly establish themselves in the liking of large communities, and in acceptance

1 Michelet» Hist de France, torn. ii. p. 99, note. PariA ed., 1836. < Sports and Pastimes, pp. 845-346. London ed., 1831. See also ** BritishL Monaohism," by T. D. Fosbrooke, pp. 46-47. London ed.» 184S^

ITS EXTRBKE DBPBBBSION AND mCAft. 65

by religiouB houBes. They seem natural outgrowths of an age like that the character of which I have sought to indicate.

The belief in the power of the Pagan gods reappeared in Christian Europe. As late as the middle of the eleventh century the story was credited that when a young Roman noble, about to engage in play in the Coliseum, had taken from his finger his marriage ring and put it on the finger of a statue of Venus, the bronze had suddenly closed upon it, and would not relinquish it till the aid of a monk had been invoked who was a magician, and who, induced by a heavy bribe, compelled a demon with whom he had dealings to obtain the res- titution of the ring by the goddess. ^ One of the popes, even, and one of the best and wisest in the series, was popularly believed to have been a magician, — Sylvester Second, the first pontiff of French origin. He had been a student of algebra and geometry, in connection with them had corresponded with learned Saracens, and had himself studied at Cordova. He had written a brief treatise on geometry, containing instructions for meas- uring the height of a tower by its shadow, for calcu- lating the depth of wells, and for solving other simple problems. He had constructed at Bheims a mechanical clock and a hydraulic organ. ^ He had lectured on logic, music, astronomy. He had expounded the Latin poets and satirists. It was easily believed that to gain such unusual and difficult knowledge he had sold him- self to the devil, and that in his death the demon tri- umphed.' William of Malmesbury, writing in the

^ WiUiam of Malmesbnry, De Gestis Regam, lib. ii. $ 205. * This nri^t almost soem to have been an organ operated bj ttaam, from the deecriptioD " per aqun calefacts Tiolentiam/' etc. > ** Homasiimi diabolo fecit, et male finint"

56 THB TBNTH CBNTUBT:

century following the death of Syhester, relates par- ticularly the rumors about him: that he had learned from the Saracens what the flight and the singing of birds portended ; that he had acquired the art of calling up spirits from Hell ; that he had found at Rome a sub- terranean golden palace, with a golden king and queen, and golden soldiers, playing games with golden dice, with a carbuncle in the recesses of the palace emitting a lustre which turned the darkness into day; that he had made the head of a statue which always told him the truth, but through a misunderstanding of one of whose answers he came to his death. ^ That such sto- ries had lived so long, and travelled so widely, shows, as almost nothing else could, how utter were the dark- ness and the decay of the time in which they had their start

Indeed, it is nearly impossible to overstate the mental obscurity, the moral disorder, the almost complete ex- tinction of true and noble religious life among priests and people, in the two centuries which followed the death of Oharlemagne. What Montalembert has said of the fifth century might with almost equal propriety be ap- plied to this period: "Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete. Authority, morals, arts, sciences, religion herself, might have been supposed condenmed to irremediable ruin."^ A certain promise had re- appeared when Otho of Germany became emperor, A.D. 962; but the partial empire then re-erected could not, in the nature of things, have the wide and deter- minate energy which had belonged to Charlemagne's, and the downward drift of the time was not effectively

1 De Gestis Regum, lib. u. §§ 169, 172.

> Monks of the West, vol li. p. 8. London ed., 1861.

ITS EZTBEME D1SPBE8SI0N AND FBAS. 67

interrupted. Hogh Capet had come to the throne in France in a. d. 987, with whom the France since famous in the world began to be ; but his power was restricted, as was that of his successors for a century and a half, and no sharp limit could be put by it to priestly wrong, to the oppressions of secular nobles, or to popular super- stitions and violence.^ Four distinct kingdoms then existed within the territory of France, with iifty*five separate fiefs. Each fortress had its prison, with often its torture-chamber and oubliette. There was no ap- peal to a sovereign authority, and no accessible redress for wrongs ; and though there were learned and virtuous bishops, in (Germany especially, pious monks, devout nuns, many signal examples of a Ood-fearing laity, tiie Church at large seemed almost to have become an im- mense establishment for the gratification of the pride of the ambitious, the greed of the covetous, the de- praved tastes of the luxurious and licentious. Those ac- quainted with the " Annals ^ of Baronius will remember the striking argument for the Divine authority of the Papal Church which he founds on the fact that it con- tinned, and still extended, in spite of such monstrous in- iquities, abhorred of all men, which for generations were enthroned at the head of it, staining it, he admits, with ineffaceable defilements.^ It seemed as if no hope were left of any return to better things.

^ Le poaToir royal et le poQToir national aToient ^t^ aimnltantoont anteitis. . . . Pendant lee sept on hnit premieres annte dn i^gne de Robert II., raatorit^ royale 6toit si compUtement d^tniite en France, que la aoiie dee actions da roi, qnand on lee connottroit dans le pins grand detail, ne noos donneroit aucune sorts d'id^ de Tadministration dn pays. — SuMOKDi : SitL des Fran^iB, torn. iy. p. 84.

* Qois ista considerans non miretar, et obstnpescat, dnm quo tempore • . • ipsa Bomana EcclesiacasnTa, et interitura penitos nderi potoisset, tot improbis, sceleratis, impudieis, pradonibas, inrasoribas, sangainaiiis et gras- •atoribos boo ancnlo (ut audisti) Sedem Apostolicam inTidsntiba^ eamque

68 THB TBMTH GENTUBT :

At just this time, too, at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries, fell upon Eorope that awful dread of the proximate end of the world, ihe traces of which are vividly stamped on ancient char- ters,^ the shock of which seemed the only thing which could possibly be added to complete the frightful chaos of the time. The long tragedy of the tenth century reached in ihis its indescribable climax.

This expectation of the near appearance of the Lord tn the heavens to judge the world had been founded, 910 doubty on the interpretation commonly given to the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse, where Satan is represented as bound for a thousand years, then to be loosed for a season to deceive the nations and gather them against the Church, after which the great white Throne was to be set, with Him upon it before whose face tiie heavens and the earth should flee away. By multitudes this was expected to take place at the eioA of a thousand years from the birth of the Lord ; and as the time drew nearer the expectation widened, till it became a general terror. As early as a.d. 909 this coming end of the world had been proclaimed by a counciL' It had been vehemently declared at the Diet

depntT&tis moribiis oonsporcantibiiB, tam yitioso in primiB ingressu^ qttMA detestando pravoram monun ezemplo, qua etiam occasione ejus dominiiim aibi Imperatores yendicantes, • • . eodem tempore extemi longe poaiti ▼eniant Reges ad Apoatolieam Sedem, qnam recognoBcant, et Tenerentor nnicnm orbia templiiiii» asylnm pietatifl, oolumnam et firmameatiim reri- tatia» etc, etc Quia inqnam iata pmdena ezpendena, non oqgnoacat Bo- znanam Kceledami non hominnm arbitrio regi, qui earn Bwpitia peiden laboimiint, aed imperio Cbristl disponi, et divinia promiaaionibaa one- todiri ^^Awud. EeeUHaat,^ torn. rvi. p. i07. Luom, 1744.

1 Chartera of gifts to churchee often began : " Mondi tennino adptopin- qvante^ rniniaque crebreBoentibns."

' Dom jam jamqne adTentos imminet illiua in mi^eatate tembili, «U onaea eua fnipbtia aoia Tenient paatorea in oompaetom Paatona

m SXnUBU DEPREBSimi ARD niB. 59

of Wfinlmrg. Toward the end of tiie century it had been publicly preached at Paris. ^ The general aspect of the times fayored the impression, and powerfally inclined men to expect the catastrophe. Such was the state of society that it easily seemed as if chains were being shaken from the loosened limbs of apostate an- gels, as if the shames and wroi^ which desolated Europe were the effect of that immortal malice which CM had long curbed, but which He now f<M- secret reasons again set free. Unusual and startling natural eyents reinforced the impression, and appeared to pre- dict the coming dissolution of the existing frame of thing*. Sismondi remarks, with great justice, that belieyers were in the mental condition of a condemned person whose days are numbered, and who sees the time of execution approaehingr^. All prudence was discour- aged, all caze of one's estate, all preparation for future years. ^Partieularly," he adds, ^it rendered quite absurd Ihe labor of writing a history, or any chronicles, for tibe benefit of a posterity which was neyer to see the li^itb"^ But one writing a little later, like Baoul

iBtend," ete. (OondL Trosi4).^GiS8BLBEt Chuirck HUUry^ toL iL p. 159, note. New Toik ed. 1S95.

^ One who baud the lemion (Abbo^ Abbofc of Fleiuy) testififld : "De Sae 9ii0(|iiie Bmpdi oonun populo Mimoudiii ui ScdesiA Perisioniiii sdo* leaoentaliu audiyi, quod atatim, finito mille uinonuD nimiero, Anti- chriitM adTemrity et son longo post tempore, muTenale Jadidnm ■aooadeift.'' Quoted by Baronins, who also aaja: '^Faennt lata in Oalliia piomiilgata, ao primnm pmdicata Pariaiia, jamqne Tnlgita par atbeai, ondita a oompliiribiiB, aocepta nimimm a simpUdoribiia com timon^ a doetioribna vero improbata." (AnnaL BoeMaat, torn. itL ppi 4UM11.)

s Bte tanolt tooa lea fidttea dans la situation d'esprit d'lm oondamn^ doat ka jams sent eompt^ et dont le supplioe appioeha ; alle dton* nvBoUde tovte pnidsnce, de toatsoindeson patrimoine^ de toot pvftparatif poor raTsnir; et en partionUer, die rendoit presqoe ildienle k tnMrafl dTierin una histpirs ao dai ohnmiqiui^ ponr rairantaga d'ma yo^tit^ qni

60 THE TENTH OENTUBT :

(Bodulph) Olaber, could put on record what he himself had seen, or what had been currently reported in im^ mediately preceding years, and through his eyes we may still look on the frightful scene. ^ At an abbey in Orleans, a.d. 988, according to him, the figure of Christ on the cross was seen to weep copiously, announcing coming disaster to the city. A little later a desolating fire broke out in that city, sweeping before it houses and churches in general ruin. Similar fires afterward occurred in many cities, and especially in Rome. A terrible plague appeared, with secret fires consuming and detaching from the body the living members of those attacked, and doing its terrible work in a night. An immense dragon was seen in the air, flying from north to south, terrifying men with its noise and its gleam. A shower of stones fell near Joigny, of different sizes, piling themselyes in heaps, still to be seen there when he wrote. A strange comet appeared, yisible for many weeks, seeming to fill with its menacing lig^t a large part of heaven, but disappearing at cock-crow. A terrible famine descended upon almost the whole Roman world, lasting five years, in which cannibal horrors appeared, children even devouring their mothers and mothers their children in the frenzy of hunger. The Saracens reappeared in Spain. Heresies broke out in Italy and elsewhere.^ One might easily believe, as he

ne deroit januds yoir le jour. — SttL des Fran^ais^ torn. iv. p. 87. Paiit ed. 1828.

^ It is not known when he wu born. His chronicle wis finished in ▲. D. 1047» and he was stfll living in a. d. 1048. Some things indicate that he was by birth a Boignndian. Early reoeired into a monasteiyy where he had a brief and stormy career, he was afterward snooeasively in five or six similar establishments, and is supposed to have died at Clugm, to whose famous abbot, Odilon, his book was dedicated. See Hist Li^ tteire de la Fnnc^ torn. vii. p. 899. Paris ed. 1740.

* HisL foi temporis, lib. ii. cap. 5, 7t 8, 9^ 10, IS ; iii. 8.

riB BXTBEMB DEPBBB8I0N AND FEAB. 61

reports that they did who were the unhappy witneflses of the griefs, tears, sobs, lamentations in tiie midst of Bnch disastrous scenes, that the order of the seasons and the laws of the elements were about to be buried in eternal chaos, and that the end of the race was at hand.^ These closing words of the monk were written prob- ably at a later day, for, even after the tenth century had closed without bringing the expected destruction of the world, the same terrific expectation, though perhaps in a measure relieved, was not dispelled. It was then widely feared that the thousand years should have been reckoned from the passion of Christ, not from his birth ; and that so a«d. 1088 was the year appointed for the pre- destined end. In the last of these years the gloomiest portents seemed to reappear in heaven and earth. The lands were deluged with perpetual rains, so that it was useless to sow in the drowned fields, and the elements speared at war among themselves, or divinely commis- sioned to punish the surpassing insolence of man. A famine followed, more awful than had been previously known ; in which Greece, Italy, France, England, were involved; in which men ate earth, weeds, roots, the bark of trees, vermin, dead bodies; and in which a more general cannibalism than had before been seen came to prevail, children and adults being murdered to be eaten, and human flesh being almost openly sold in the markets.' The multitude of the dead was so

^ Qoantiis enim dolor tunc, qcuuita moestitia, qui singaltiu, qui plane- ta8» qvm U/erfmm a talia oernentibiia data sint, . . . oon valet Btylua ^niapiam ezplicare ehanoteribns. JSstimabatur enim ordo tempomin et damentonnn pnoterita ab initio moderana aeeola in cbaoa decidisse per- pctanm, atqne homani generis interitnm. — BiaL $uitemporis, lib. it. cap. 4.

' Molt! qnoqoe de loco ad locum famem fagiendo peigentes hoepitiif leeepti, noctnqna jngnlati, qnibna snsoepti sunt, in cibum fnerant ; plan- qpia VHO pomo oafeenio vd oro poaria, ad lemota drcnmTentoa tracidato^

62 THB TBNTH CHNTTOT

great that they could not be buried, and wolres flocked to feast on their bodies. Great nombers were tumbled promiscuoualj into vast trenches. A state of fierce cannibal sayagery appeared likely to mark the end of a fallen and rained race, for which the Lord had died in Tain. It was not wonderful that men following their dead relations to the grave sometimes cast themselTes into it, to end at once their intolerable life.

Looking back to that period it seems evident that the mind of a large part of Europe was in a state of semi- delirium. Common life was made up of marvelous things, as Michelet has said,^ it was not merely in- terrupted by them ; and sudi marvels took usually the shape of mysteries of darkness. Apparitions were seen in the daytime. Strange voices were heard in the air. Legends arose in giiastly aspects. Monks saw demons, like those which appeared to Baoul him- self, of one of which he has left a particular description, as he saw the hideous mannikin at the foot of his bed, with its slim neck, coal-black eyes, narrow and wrin- kled forehead, flat nose, lips puffed out, sharp-pointed ears, filthy and stiff hair, dog's teeth, etc., — as he felt the bed shaken by its touch, and heard it say, ^Thoa wilt not tarry here long. " > Such dismal fancies were

que deTorarenmt ; corpora defonctorcun in locis plmiimB ab homo evulm nihilominiu faini aalyrineninti e< My. — R. Olabbb : EitL mU temporit, lib. iv. eap. 4.

^ Lea merveilles oompoBaient la Tie commime. — Hid, de J^^nmee, torn, ii. p. 188.

' Erat aium, qxuuitam a me dignoed pofcuiti statma xnediooiii, odile graciliy Cuie macileiita» oonlia nigerrimiB, fronte mgosa et oontracta, d»> preeeia iiaribii8» oa ezporreetiim, labellia tamentibaa, mento aabtracto et perangnato^ barba caprina, anres hirtaa et pmieataa, oapilliB atantibna et iQCompoeitia, dentibaa caninie, ti $tq. ; totnm terribiliter oonooaait leeta- lam, ac dainda infit ; Kon ta in boc loco nltra maaeUa. -^ Hi$L mi iMapd - Ub. T« cap. 1.

Oiber inatancea of aaoh apparitiona follow in the diaptar.

ITS BXTREKB DEaPRESSION AND FBAB. 68

not limited to the cloister. The army of Otho the Great had seen the sun fading in Oalabria, and had been seized with terrible fear, expecting the instant coming of the Judgment When Otho Third caused the tomb of Charlemagne to be opened, it was reported that the Emperor had appeared to him, and forewarned him of coming death. King Robert, laying siege to an abbey in Burgundy, seeing a fog steaming up from the river, thou^t that the saints were appearing to fight against him, and precipitately fled wi& all his army. ^ His first wife. Bertha, his marriage with whom the Church had disapproved, was reported to have given birth to a monster, with a goose-like neck and head.^ Nothing was too vile or too incredible to be popularly believed ; and the belief in witchcraft got at that time a range and a sway of which after centuries felt the impression. The frightful and bloody scenes which subsequently attested the belief of men in present Satanic arts and raergies are in no small degree to be attributed to this terrible passage in European experience.

Of course some effects of such a dreadful looking for of Judgment were at least partially good. Men became reconciled who had been at enmity. There was a wide if also a temporary reformation of manners. Large numbers of serfs were set free from the bonds which it was expected would soon be dissolved in celestial fires. Immense gifts of lands and treasure were made to the churches, of which some effects that were not evil came to appear in the following century. Especially, what was known as the Truce of Grod (la trdve de Dieu) had its impulse in those years, by which men were forbidden to take anything by violence or to engage in strife from

^ B. OUber, Hist sui temporu» lib. ii. oap. 6.

< PM«r DuuAiiL See Michelet^ Hist de Fnace, torn. ii. p. U% note.

64 THE TENTH CENTUBT*.

Wednesday night to the following Monday morning, under the penalty of death or exile. This was rapidly extended in France, though the time covered by it was variously abridged, and disasters falling on those who disobeyed it were believed to represent the Divine ven- geance.^ It was something, certainly, to fence out regu- larly a part of each week for the business and pleasure of quiet life. But, in the general, the effect of this dreary and fierce expectation of the end of the world was signally evil. It not only suspended industry, paralyzed incipient attempts at conmierce, made men careless of the interests of themselves and their house- holds ; it wrought, as such frenzies always work, for the degradation of mind and character. It made fear the predominant motive in society. It excited in many the reckless fierceness of a complete desperation. A scepti- cal rebound against the whole system of the Christian religion became almost inevitable, after the thousand years from the passion of Christ had been completed without the expected world-disaster. Meantime com- munities were disorganized, any true secular or spir- itual progress was made impossible, the grosser appetites of men seemed often inflamed to a fresh fury as the limits became sharper to the chance of their indul- gence. It was a force not fettering only, but malign and destroying, which the expectation of the end of the world for forty years introduced into Europe.

Some lighter shades no doubt there should be on the lurid panorama which it has fallen to me to trace. No

^ Hoc insaper placait nnivenis, relati vulgo dicitar, ut Trwffa Dami$ii ▼ocaretar ; qua yidelioet non solum falta prandiia, yerom etiam multo- tieiM diyinis suffragata terroribiu. Nam plerique Tesani aadaci temeritate pnescriptam pactum non timuere traufigredi, in quibna protinua aat divina vindex ira, sen humanua gladina nltor eztitit — Glaabb: Miat,^ lib. t. cap. 1.

ITS EXTREME DEPRESSION AND FEAR. 66

faithfal picture of human society in anj epoch can be wholly without such. Love and life were not extin- gaishecL Childhood and motherhood had not ceased. Here and there must have lingered fancy and courtesy, smiles and laughter. Sunrise and sunset did not fail, and Nature had yet bland ministries for men. Home and Church, however unlovely, however oppressive, still continued, and human sensibility was not dead. There must have been those who faced the expected end without fear, and who saw the rainbow, like unto an emerald, around the Throne which was soon to appear. But few traces of such are left on the brief and stem annals; and the general picture of the society of the time can hardly be sketched save in darkness and fire. The very statues of the period, as Michelet suggests, are sad and pinched, ^ as if the dreadful apprehension of the age had sunken into the softened stone. The stem and ghastly mosaics on the walls of the Torcello church and of others bear the same impress.^

It is certainly not too much to say that no other period has appeared surpassing that in the general gloom and fear of Christendom, since the Son of Ood was crucified on Calvary. The earth again seemed to shiver, as imder the cross ; the heavens to be veil- ing themselves in eclipse, like that which of old had shrouded Jerusalem from the sixth hour to the ninth.

^ Yoyes oes TieiUes stataee dans les cath^rales da dizi&me et du onsikike sikde, maigres, muettes et grima^antes dans leur roideur con- tract^ I'air aont&ant oomme la yie, et laides comme la roort. Yoyez comme eUea implorentp les mains jointes, ce moment soobait^ et terrible, oette aeoonde mort.de la r^snrrection, qui doit les faire sortir de leurs in- elEBtbles tristesses, et les tain passer du n^ant k Tdtre, da tombeaa en Dieu. Ceat I'image de oe paavre monde sans espoir aprte tant de roines. — E%$t, d$ Fnmeg, tom. ii p. 188. Paris ed., 1835,

■ Hfsmtain, Sacred Art in Italy, toL L p. 68. London ad., 1849.

5

66 THE TENTH GENTURT.*

It looked as if the gospel had failed ; as if the Church had wholly lost Divine virtue, amid the carnival of lost and blood ; as if the wickedness of man had become too great to be longer endured; as if the history of the planet were about to be closed, might properly be closed^ amid universal dread and death. Unless a wide reac- tion had followed after such extreme wretchedness and despair, the history of Western Christendom must soon have been finished. It is such a reaction which we next have to trace, with the real though limited opportunity which it finally gave to the higher aspirations and nobler forces of a man like Bernard.

LECTURE n.

THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITS REVIVING LIFE

AND PROMISE

LECTURE IL

THE ELETENTH CENTUBT : ITB BEYIYINO UFE AND PBOU ISE.

It is with a positive sense of relief, if not of distinct and glad satisfaction, that one emerges from the fetid gloom which in the tenth century and|the early part of the eleventh overhung and oppressed tiie life of Europe, and enters the comparatively freer atmosphere which thenceforth begins to appear, — meeting a light by no means clear, but destined on the whole to rise and ex- pand on prophetic skies ; encountering movements which held at least some promise of good, and which offered encouragement to such reasonable hope as the preceding turmoil of crime and terror had seemed wholly to for- bid. In this feeling I am sure that you will sympathize with me, while you will not expect that the story which I am this evening to recall will be without its heavy shadows, or will show sudden splendors contrasting and banishing the nearly intolerable previous darkness. Centuries, we sometimes need to remind ourselves, are not divided like house-lots, by fixed and definite arti- ficial lines, the stable on one side being succeeded by the sumptuous house, or the mean booth abutting upon cathedral walls. The beginning and end of each cen- tury are marked by vanishing points of time ; and the influence of each age asserts itself accordingly, with inevitable force, in that which follows, — as the in-

70 THE ELEVENTH CENTURY:

fluence of one stream, merging in another, imparts color to its waters, gives impulse to its movement, or by whirling cross-currents sometimes retards that and makes it sluggish. '^Our clock strikes," as Carlyle has said, '^ when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era. " ^ It is not to be expected, therefore, that the eleventh century, or even the latter part of it, will be found to stand in absolute contrast with the period which pre- ceded, when the mind of Western Christendom, as I have indicated, was not merely limited or grossly oh* scured, but was positively enfeebled; when the public temper was practically demoralized by calamity and by fear, and when society was reduced to perhaps the lowest point of enterprise and courage which it ever has reached since the Christian development began in Europe. It will be enough, I am sure, if we meet the signs of a vigorous reaction against the infectious and baneful forces which had paralyzed or fevered what were still leading communities of men ; if we find in- dications of nobler private and public aspiration, giv- ing us fair occasion to anticipate that the period yet to follow this will show religious and social advance, under fresh moral impulses, and will give opportunity to the eager activity and the consecrated energy of a man like Bernard. Such indications I am confident that we shall find ; and it is necessary to present them with some particularity, that we may have distinctly before us the age in which his work was done, — an age so different from ours as hardly to seem part of the same time-cycle, yet different also from that through whose foul and frightful darkness we have been passing; an

1 ICiscelUnieB, toI. ii. p. 249. BoitoD ed. 18S9.

nS BSYIYING LIFE AND PBOMIBB. 71

age confused, but not hopelessly chaotic, perplexed by many evil forces and perilous tendencies, but with a certain moral life not wholly unresponsiye to other ap- peals than those of battle-axe, bow, and pike.

In some respects Bernard was fortunate, as I hope to show, in both the needs and the promises of his times. They were not mere times of blood and iron. A reawakened spiritual force was coming to exhibi* tion. Thought was already in his day more yariously active. New and vast enterprises moved and lifted the mind of Christendom, which had been so long dan- gerously stagnant. Instructed minds and consecrated spirits could reach multitudes with an effect wholly impossible a century before him, while still ignorance was wide, vice general, superstition familiar. There was a lai^ possibility in the times which he faced, though vast peril, too, as we cannot but see when we shall reach them. The demand which they made on men like the great Abbot of Clairvaux was constant and immense. I by no means affirm that according to the light in which we walk he always rightly interpreted that demand, or folly met it. But I am as sure as of my own life that he meant to do the work for which Ood had sent him, with unsparing fidelity; while I gladly see also that he had an opportunity, and found a measure of incite- ment and reward, for his vast service, which he could not have commanded at any previous time since Charle- magne was entombed. To set in clear outline before oar minds, not merely the institutions, in Church or State, in the midst of which his life went on, the con- flicts which he encountered, or the public crises which he had to fronts but also the tendencies which he mor- ally shared or vehemently repulsed, with the nascent helpful movements of society to which he gave vigor

72 THB BLEYENTH CENTUBT :

and momentum, — this is the work which I wish to accomplish, for myself and for you. Until this is done, we cannot fairly set his figure, fine and strong and commanding as it is, on the canvas of his period. And this cannot be done, except as we review, with a still prolonged patience of survey, the changing but stormy and passionate years which more immediately preceded his life. This evening, therefore, I shall ask you to look, with an attention which possibly some among you may not before have given to it, at the lat- ter two-thirds of that eleventh century almost at the close of which Bernard was bom, and subsequently to which his spirit made its majestic impression on the life of mankind.

Even before the second expected year of general doom, A. D. 1038, had come and closed, the anticipation of the approaching end of the world had ceased, as I have in- timated, to overwhelm so utterly as at first the minds of men. By far the more vivid apprehension had fas-* tened upon the year a.d. 1000 as the term of earthly history; and though, after that, the consummation of the thousand years preceding the Judgment was car- ried forward by many imaginations to the year which was to mark a full millennium from the Lord's Ascen- sion, it was not in human nature to be again startled and oppressed as men had been startled and terrified before. There was still apprehension; and society could hardly in the nature of things settle itself on sure foundations, while the possibility was yet present to men's minds that within a generation the moon and the sun might be turned into blood and stars be seen to fall from heaven, that the air might be blazing with the majesty of Christ's Throne, and the earth be dissolved into vapor of smoke. But as month followed month, and

ITS BBYniNQ UFB AND PB0HI8B. 78

Uie years trod on in silent succession, as children were bom, and the weak and the aged died peacefully in their beds, as cabin and convent remained undisturbed, while seasons more or less fruitful and benign followed each other, the expectation of immediate destruction inyolving the earth and all upon it, though not finally expelled, grew fainter, remoter, and terrified less. And when the year a. d. 1033 had come and gone, while still the moimtains stood as before and rivers flowed in their ancient channels, and nothing more alarming than oc* casional meteors had appeared in the sky, the upspring of confidence was swift and signal on many sides ; and a strong impulse began to declare itself toward better administration in the Church and in the State, making these more appropriate to an undisturbed planet, and to a race continuing to possess it

It was only natural that such a rebound of spirit toward better things should then become evident. The old life, fierce and wild, but resolute, intrepid, and by no means wanting in sagacity or in enterprise, — this, which had been in the barbarous tribes before Chris* tianity had touched them with its power, and which had been refined and softened but not destroyed by the influence of that, as well as by contact with the Southern civilization, was still energetically present in Europe. Much of a savage childishness was in it ; its thought was crude, its passions were impetuous, its fancies were often grim and ghastly; it had not much of cultured wisdom, of self-restraint, or intelligent piety ; but cour* age belonged to it in large measure, Vith something of fortitude and of patience, with somethii^ even of ex* ecutive skill. And it was not possible that such a dijGFused and animating life should remain content with things as they were. It must push forward, in spite

74 THE ELETBNTH CENT0BT:

of all obstacles, and in the face of whatever might re« sisty toward ampler and sweeter conditions of existence, a more tranquil, prosperous, and prophetic development of what in society was wholesome and safe. The re- ligion, too, which it had more or less roughly received, gave helps and incentives toward this social and moral movement

The vast inheritance of historical Christianity was now a secure possession of Europe ; and while they were not many, outside at least of convent and church, who could read familiarly the records of the Scripture, while the copies of these were by no means abundant, and while amid the obscuring rites with which the gospel had come to be encrusted its own radiance was painfully dimmed, was even at times intermittently hidden, — there still were those, in cottage and castle as well as in cloister, who knew something intellectually of the facts, the doctrines, and the promises of that gospel, and who had felt in their experience an impulse and uplift from the Faith. Supernal worlds were recognized by them ; and from those high, inexhaustible sources an influence fell to strengthen and ennoble, as well as to enlighten. That the Son of Ood had been upon the earth, giving new sacredness to it ; that by His cross atonement had been made for the sins of the penitent ; that through His mediation the Spirit of God was sent to purify human souls; that His was a law above all human code and custom, that He was at last to judge the world, with each man upon it, and that beyond that Throne of judg- ment extended an 'existence unlimited by years, of pain or of peace according to men's relationship to Him, — these were conceptions which the general mind of Chris- tendom had absorbed, and which in some had become intense and powerful convictions. The distinct im-

ITS BEYITTNO LIFE AND PROMISE. 76

pression of them was sometimes shown even bj those in whom it might least have been expected, — bj vicious prelates, profligate princes, the robber knight, the dis- solute woman, or the debauched and blasphemous monk. However stained with defilements, which all felt to be alien to it, the Church remained to the mind of that age the living monument, the teaching witness, of these transcendent and vital realities ; and from the sense of eternal responsibility to Him who had returned from the earth to the heavens, the temper of the darkest and most degraded of all the centuries had not been able to shake itself free.

So it came to pass, then and afterward, almost as with the certainty of natural law, that the expectation of something better to be attained wrought with a secret energy in men's spirits. The Golden Age of heathen poets had been in the past. Amid the portentous glooms and terrors of the tenth century it had seemed as if the Golden Age of Christendom was also there, if anjrwhere, to be looked for. But when that frightful time had passed, and the fetters of an awful fear had fallen with it, the old life-force reasserted its vigor, and Chris- tianity began again to show itself a power to renew and reinforce. It was felt that the earth was too near to God's thought to be permitted always to remain in bloody ruin. The centuries which were dated from the Angelic Hymn, — it could not be that they were to close amid wrecks of society, with the furious crash of chaotic battle. Sometime or other it must come to pass that the world at large would join in the anthem of Glory to God in the highest, with peace on earth to men of God's pleasure. So, from this time on, we trace a new impulse moving amid the sluggish centuries. Men themselves may not have been fully aware of it

76 THE ELEVENTH CENTUBT:

at the time, but we looking back can discem it in his- tory, as one sees the dawn brightening into day through imperceptible gradations, as one notes the change from the blue to the violet in the tints of the spectrum. In this fresh impulse is the key to almost everything which follows, in religious or in social life, onward to the end of the life of Bernard.

The empire was now partially re-established, though certainly more in name than in power, in the German line ; and from the close of the tenth century to beyond the middle of the eleventh, the emperors, Otho Third, Henry Second, Conrad Second, Henry Third, were commonly princes of political ability. From the year a.d. 996 to A. D. 1081, Robert the Pious had been upon the throne of France ; of whom Michelet says that in his simplicity of mind he seemed to have disarmed the Divine anger, having the peace of God incarnate in him.^ His son, Henry First, reigned after him till a. d. 1060 ; and the grandson, Philip First, followed them on the throne till A.D. 1108. The power of these kings was never great; they were sovereigns hardly more than in title; and both in private life and in public affairs their counsels were often perplexed and timid, their activities lim- ited in reach and effect. But such prolonged and con* tinuous reigns gave a certain quietness to the general mind, with at least a measure of assistance to the new forces beginning to appear. The French nation was all the time growing toward power, perhaps in part by reason of the recognized weakness of its kings. ^ Cities

1 C'est Bona ce bon Robert qae se passa cette terrible €poqae do I'an 1<K)0 ; et il sembla que la eolhre divine fftt d^sarm^e par oet homme sim- ple, en qui s*^tait comme incam^e la paiz de Dieu. — Hist, dt Franee^ torn. ii. p. 144. Paris ed., 1885.

* Sismondi says of these kings : " lis n'ont fait, darant ce long temps, que aommeiUer sur le trdne ; ils n'ont montrtf qae foiblesse, amour da

ITS BEYITINO LIFE AND PBOMISK. 77

were slowly gaining in population, increasing in im- portance, and becoming more sensible of their place in {he world. Industry revived, and manufactures were extended, of humbler things as well as of armor, rich dresses, or decorated furniture. Not only carpets, tap- estries, embroidered cloths, were wrought, with the magnificent ecclesiastical apparatus of altars, censera, chalices, reliquaries, candelabra, — a rude ceramic art appeared, and common utensils were more skilfully fashioned. By degrees commerce got itself liberated from the almost complete paralysis of the past, and b^an to knit communities together in the vital though frail and precarious threads of mutual relationship.

Even the weather seemed to take new aspects to the rekindled courage of men. After the year a.d. 1088, according to Olaber, the rains ceased, the clouds were dispersed, the smiling heavens reappeared, and hillside and plain were once more fruitful. There was strange abundance of food and wine, prices were reduced, the poor were supplied; it was, he says, like a return of the Mosaic Jubilee.^ The French language began to

npoe on amoar des plaisirs ; ik ne se aont pes signal^ pur une aeule gmndft action. La nation fran^aise, an contraire, qui marque ses fastet pv les ^poqnes de leur r^e, s'agrandit et s'ennoblit d'annte en ann^ acqnieit k chaqne g^n^ration des rertna noaveUes, et devient k la fin de eette mftme p^riode V6co\e d'h^roisme de tout Toccident, le modMe de cette perfection presque idMe qn'on designs par le nom de cheyalerie, et que les gnerres des crois^ les chants des troubadours et des trouv^res, et les romsDS mfime des nations voisines, rendirent propre k la France." — Hist, des Francis, touL iv. pp. 197-198. Paris ed., 1828.

1 Anno a passione Domini miUesimo memoratss cladis penurias subee- qnente, aedatis nimbomm imbribus respectu diTinn bonitatis et mis- erioordiaB, ccepit laeta fades coeli clarescere, congruisque sthereis flare, placidaqne serenitate magnanimitatem Conditoris ostendere. . . . Eodem denique anno tanta copia abundantiee frumenti et vini, ceteraromque fru- gnm extitity qnanta in subsequente quinquennio contigisse sperari non

78 THE BLEVKNTU OENTUBT :

take at ibis time the form which in subBtance it has retained ; it became the language of caatlea and courts, one of the principal dialects of Europe. About the middle of the eleventh century, Edward the Confessor introduced it into England ; ^ and after William of Nor- mandy had been crowned at Westminster, a.d. 1066, it was for a long time the legal language of the British realm. The power of the Saracens was now practi- cally broken in Europe. They had been dislodged from Sardinia, a.d. 1022, by the combined forces of the Genoese and the Pisans. In the latter part of the century they were conquered in Sicily by the Normans. In the fifty years between a.d. 1026 and A.D. 1076 movements of Europeans to visit the Holy Land were carried forward in large propor- tions; and the spirit of enterprise thus expressed, with the results of that enterprise in increased knowledge and widened thought, aided the general tendency of Christendom toward more benign and salutary conditions.

All things thus predicted a change toward a more genial environment of life, with a finer and deeper quickening of its force ; aud of course reformation was first to be sought in the administration and spirit of the Church, from which, as it had been, such immense evils had incessantly flowed. I have spoken in the previous lecture of its general condition, as represented

potoit Aliquia ttum viotna hamAnua, pnster earnm aea delidosa pol- meaUria. nullioa entl pretii ; eimt aatom instor iUius antiqm Moaaiei BMgnl Jiibel«L — HitL mt Ump,, lib. It. cap. 5.

^ IngQlphoBy who lived at the time, aays that " all the noUea [m. Eng^ land] began to apeak the Gallic tongue in their leapeetiTe oooita, aa thoQgh it were the great national language, and to exeente their ehai^ tan and deeda aftar the fiuhion of the Freneh.** — ITul. Orv^imMd^ a. ix 1048.

ITS BEYIVINO LIFE AND PROMISE. 79

by the pontiffs who in the tenth century had oocupied and degraded in a dreadful succession the Papal chair. The disgust of Christendom, though long slumbering, and when first awakened languid and inert, had been at last sharply aroused against pontiffs like these ; and wherever Christian faith survived, the necessity of a prompt purging of the Church was deeply felt It had happened, too, that at the very end of the period which I have partially sketched, in the year a.d. 1088, per- haps the worst and most infamous of the popes, Bene- dict Ninth, had been raised to the pontifical throne; and from that time on to the term of his reign, a.d. 1048, he was adding intensity to the general disgust His pontifical career seemed the last tremendous bolt shot out of a period rumbling with thunder and terrific with awful glooms. Among all men who knew his story, not among the thoughtful and pure-minded only, his name was infamous. Raised to the throne at the age of twelve years, twice at least expelled from the capital by the outraged citizens, and driven into exile before the fierce loathing and hate of clergy and laity, he at last sold the Papacy, as I have said, that he mi^t be freer for his profligate pleasures. Failing, however, to find satisfaction in the varied abominations of his detestable private life, he forced himself again into Borne, where two rival popes now contended for his place. At last, one of his competitors having been poisoned, and the other being a man of character and influence, Benedict was persuaded or bribed to retire to a convent^ where he died. A popular Italian legend described his ghost as afterward appearing in the form of a bear with the ears of an ass, and as saying, when tsked the meaning of this horrible guise, ^^ Because I lived without law or reason, (Jod, and Peter, whose see

80 THE ELEYENTH CENTUBT:

I contaminated by my vices, decree that I shall bear this image of a brute, not of a man. " ^

This intolerable career of Benedict Ninth filled to the brim the shame of Christendom, at the lust^ simony, cruel greed and treacherous crime, which had so long been enthroned at the religious summit in Borne, and after him a succession of better pontiffs appeared : Leo Ninth, subsequently canonized, under whom the schism between the Eastern and Western churches was finally consummated, with mutual anathemas; Victor Second, who carried forward the work of reformation initiated by Leo, and under whom, as imder Leo, theological discussion asserted its importance, as in the scrutiny to which Berengarius of Tours was subjected ; Stephen Ninth, who exerted himself with vigor against simony, and against the immoral license of the priesthood; Nicholas Second, who carried on the plans of Stephen,' and under whom was issued a decree giving a needed regularity and order to the election of the pontiff, by putting it in the hands of the higher Roman clergy. Then came Alexander Second, who had to fight against a competitor for the pontifical chair, but who in the midst of that strenuous conflict assumed to confer the English crown on William of Normandy, who exerted himself to shield the Jews from the cruelty of Chris- tians, and who favored and furthered the measures of reform before introduced. And finally came Hilde- brand, whose influence had been in fact controlling in the recent successive pontificates, and who in a. d. 1078 was raised himself to the chair of St Peter, by the united voices of the Roman clergy, nobles, magistrates, and principal citizens, thenceforth to preside there, under

1 HemaiiB, Hist. Med. Chriat. and Sacred Art^ vol. i p. 86. London ed., 1860.

t

ITS RBYIYINO UFB AND PBOIOBB. 81

the title of Gregory Seventh, until his death, a.d. 1086.

We haye reached one of the crises in history. Let ns pause a moment to assure ourselves of the right point of view, from which to survey the fierce tangles and bloody collisions which were rapidly to follow. This point of view has perhaps sometimes been missed, even by those whose learned diligence has in many particu- lars made us their debtors.

In spite of the almost desperate condition to which Europe had descended after the Empire, through deso^ lating craft, violence, fear, the rage of rapine, the utter absence of general law, and the frenzy of appalling superstition, tho desire continued, as Imve said, which here and there became a hope, of m^^epropitious peri- ods to come. Though historical records were few and scanty, the tradition survived of the better time which had sadly passed when the empire of Charlemagne fell with his life. It was at least dimly known that the distractions and degradations of two hundred years had followed a season which under him had been one of rela- tive peace and promise ; and it was widely if vaguely felt that a return to such conditions might not be im- possible. But certainly no power, civil or military, remained in Europe which could hope to attain the continental prominence or the general sway which had be- Icmged to the fallen Empire. Not one of all the kings or kingdoms then appearing could look for more than local dominion. Indeed each was compelled to fight for life, and to hold possession through constant struggle. If, therefore, there were to be again a power recognized and obeyed in all the lands, it could only be the power of the Church. The World-religion had not died, though the World-empire had vanished as a dream. The pope

6

82 THE 1SLE7ENTH GENTUBT :

was in presence, though the emperor, in any&ing else than a transient semblance of his former prerogative, was no more seen. To aggrandize the pope was, there- fore, apparently the only means by which to restore unity to Europe. What Church and Empire had com- bined to accomplish in the earlier time, the Church alone was now left to attempt; and the separate con- tending secular powers must be made subordinate, aa not hitherto, to the religious.

In this inarticulate but real and strenuous tendency of the age is the key to what followed, from the en- thronement of Hildebrand as pope to the time of the birth of Bernard, and beyond that It was this which gave to the determined and powerful pontiff his im- mense opportunity. It was this which sustained his defiant courage in the fiercest of his contests. It was this which made possible, which practically inspired, the enormous movement of the Crusades. It had only come to clearer distinctness, and attracted to itself the more earnest conviction of governing minds, when the great Abbot whom we are to interpret entered on his extraordinary career. If we hold in mind this general conception as to the temper and trend of the time, we shall more easily understand what was yet to intervene before his appearance in public life, and shall possibly observe with keener sympathy the unsurpassed force and patience with which he wrought, when his day had come, for effects which he thought radically essential to civilized progress, the value of some of which to our own time we must frankly admit

Before us, as before the Europe of his time, the great — one might almost say the enigmatic — figure of Hildebrand rises to an eminence hardly surpassed in the annals of mankind. In the vehement controversies

rrS REYIYINO UFB AND PB0MI8B. 88

which agitated Christendom in his time, which swept nations into arms, the swell of which has not yet wholly subsided, his name has been clothed with an evil re- nown by those who have dreaded and detested the prin- ciples of which he was the foremost champion. He was accused by those of his contemporaries who hated him, as multitudes did, not of arrogance only, and destroy- ing ambition, but of falsehood and perjury, of heresy and infidelity, of using magical arts, and even of adul- tery ; and the intensity of the hate which he awakened seems closely to have matched the gresttness of the work which he undertook, and the energy and tenacity with which he pursued it Even by the modem dispassion- ate student, after eight hundred years have passed since his death, it must be admitted that his temper was haughty, his genius at once vehement and subtile, and that he seems to have veiled his intentions, when they could not be exhibited to advantage, under forms of words ambiguous or deceptive. He is not to be ac- cepted without reserve as hero and martyr. One is almost tempted to repeat, more in earnest, those prob- ably affectionate and ironical words in which his friend Peter Damiani reproachfully addressed him as ^^ Saint Satan."

But this, at least, must be said of Hildebrand : that those who knew him, and who chose him as pontiff, de- scribed him as '^ a religious man, of manifold science, endowed with prudence, a most excellent lover of justice, strong in adversity, temperate in prosperity, chaste, modest, sober, hospitable, from his boyhood well edu- cated and learned ; " ^ and, further, that according to his

1 Ifl^gimaB nobis in pastorem et snnimam Pontificem viruni relif^iosum, femins acientie prudentia pollentem, equitatis et jiistitiee pncstuutisai- anun mmatorein, adTersis fortem, proiperis temperatam, juxta Apoatoli

84 THE ELE7ENTH OENTUBT :

conception of things the highest aims were always before him. He labored and suffered, he wrought and fought unflinchingly to the last, for ends which seemed to him Divine; and he gave in some directions a prodigious momentum to tendencies which needed to be broadly revived and effectively reinforced for the progress and welfare of Europe.^

To his forecasting and imperious mind it was evident as the day that of the two forms of organized power then existing on the Continent, — the secular, represented by civil and military governments, the spiritual, present- ing itself in the universal Ghiirch, — the former was in all respects the inferior, to be directed, curbed, if need came to be crushed, by that whose prerogative was es- sentially higher. The secular State was always local ; the Church alone was ecumenical. The former was in natural antagonism, usually, to others of its order; only the spiritual power stood by itself, without rivalry as without peer. The State contemplated temporal in- terests, in a coarse and blind way; the Church was intent, with an inerrant wisdom, on immortal welfares. The State organization depended on accidents of prox-

dictum bonis moribns ornatam, padicmn, modestam, sobrium, CMtmn^ hospitalem, domam mam bene regentem, in gremio hajns matris Eccle- 810 a paeritia satis nobiliter educatom et doctum, . . . qaem a modo nsque in sempiturnom et esse et dici Oregorium Papam et Apostolicmn» volomiis et approbamos. — DeetUum tleetionis; Acta Bomtt, dec kaL maje.

See Baronius, Ann. Eccles., torn. zvii. p. 857.

1 Ordericus Vitalis, who entered the monastery of St. Evronlt in the same year in which Gregory died, no doubt reports faithfully the impres- sion of him which prevailed at the time among the devout and God-fearing monks : " His whole life was a pattern of wisdom and religion, maintain- ing a perpetual conflict against an, . . . Inflamed with zeal for tmth and justice, he denounced every kind of wickedness, sparing no offendtts^ either thiongh fear or favor." — Eedes, Hid. b. viL eh. 4.

ITS BETIYINO LIFE AND PROMISE. 86

imity, and was largely fashioned by greed, ambition, and an imperious self-will ; the spiritual organism came from Grod, through His Son, and had His mind abiding in it. The vastest empire of the earth might entirely pass away, as even that of Charlemagne had done ; the Church was as permanent as it was all-embracing, and not the fiercest gates of hell could at last prevail against it The State, therefore, must be everywhere subordi- nate to the Church, serving it in a dependent and an ancillary office, while the ultimate regulation of all affairs, private or public, belonged to this supreme in« stitution. The only hope for peace in Christendom, or for moral progress, in Hildebrand's view, was in the unflinching embodiment in practice of this prophetic, superlative idea.

He was the magnificent idealist of his time, its sovereign transcendentalist in the sphere of affairs; while his stubbornness of purpose amHmrtsCtical skill were not surpassed by any counsellor of kings or any captain of troops. He held himself the responsible minister on earth of the Divine jurisprudence; the authoritative head of the one institution which had the ages for its own, the continents for its area, and whose mission it was to shield, to instruct, and essentially to unify all peoples of mankind. To the fulfilment of this incomparable and awful office he had been called by the voice of the Church, articulating the will of the Holy Ohost; and to it his life was thenceforth devoted. He abjured pleasure, renounced ease, was careless of secu- rity, was ready for any hardest labor, that he might make his life an offering to what he esteemed the sovereign idea and interest of mankind, — ''pro Ecclesia Dei."

You know, in general, the story of his career. Of lowly birth, the son of a carpenter in a small Tuscan

86 THE ELEVENTH CENTUBT :

town, the German name Hildebrand was given him at baptism, transformed to ^^ Hellebrand " in the Italian pronmiciation, — a name which his admirers afterward interpreted as ^^ a living flame, *' which those who hated him understood to mean ^^ a brand of hell. " ^ The Ger- man name has been taken bj some as possibly indicat- ing that German blood mingled with Italian in the veins of him before whom afterward the German em- peror was to be humbled; but of this there seems no other indication. The humbleness of his birth, in con- trast with the dignities to which he was raised, illus- trates well that democracy of the Church which even Voltaire discerned and honored.* Whatever else the Church might lack, it had always this moral superi- ority above the other governments of the time, — that it estimated talent more highly than strength, it honored the moral sensibility and energy which in camps were contemptuously despised, and it offered opportunity to the humblest child, whom feudalism regarded as next of kin to the clods, to raise himself, if mind and will were equal to it, to the highest office. One cannot wonder that such a scheme of government stood near and noble before the hearts of the people, any one of whose children might through it become a chief over princes.

It was natural that the bright and eager Tuscan boy should be sent to Rome, to be educated there, in a mon- astery on the Aventine hill, and that from thence in his

^ Pro varia dialecto yarie nomen hoe scribitar, — Hiltebrant, Hilde- brandy Heldebrant, et (snayioria pronnntiationia caosa) etiatn Hellebrand ; qnod postremum, quia vane accipi potest, inimicis Oregorii et nialedicia occasionem dedit. Tn/emaUm tUionem; qnamvia Helle, non solam anb- ftantiye infernnm, sed adjective etiam Clanxm aignificet — S. Cfreg, VIL^ VUa^ PatUo Bemried, note 2.

* Sisai far les Mobuxs : (Enyroa, uL 571, 606» 607. Parii ed., 1877,

ITS REVIVING LIFE AND PROMISE. 87

joxmg manhood he should enter as a monk into the greaty wealthy, and at that time the strict monastery of Clagni in Burgundy.^ Some of the friendships there formed continued through his life; and amid whatever subsequent power or splendor of surroundings, he seems to have retained the habits of an anchorite, eating only vegetables, and mentioning once to Peter Damiani that he had come to abstain from leeks and onions because of scruples which he felt at the pleasure which they afforded.

Having already once gone from Olugni to Rome, during the shameful pontificate of Benedict Ninth, he again and finally went thither, a. d. 1049, with Bruno^ Bishop of Toul, who had been appointed pope by an assembly at Worms, and who afterward became famous as Loo Ninth. By this pontiff, who leaned always upon the counsel of Hildebrand and desired to keep him near at hand, he was appointed Superior of the monastery of St. Paul without the Gkites, — an establishment then fallen into decay, almost into ruin, through the gross vices prevailing in it, and the unchecked violence of neighboring nobles. Hildebrand restored the ancient rule of the Abbey, with ito austere discipline ; he aug« mented its revenues and recovered much of its former property, which had been diverted into lay hands by

1 Th« name of the famons abbey is yarionsly spelled, ClngDi, Olagoy, Cliuiy, dmii It is oniformly spelled in these lectures in the first fonn, as that b the one which appears in the charter on which it was originally founded, which mns thns —

** Que tons lea fidMes qui sont et qni seront jnsqa'it la oonaommation des aiMea aachent qne» poor Tamoar de Dieu et de J.-C. notre Sauvenr, j*ai donn^ anx Saints Apdties Hene et Paal, avec ses d^pendancea, la terra de CuroNi qni m'appartient, et qni eat sitn^ snr la rivi^ra de Grone," ete. ** Chart* de Fondation," by William of Aqnitaina. See *'8t Bexnaid,'* far 11. Oapefigne, p. 108.

Th* monka came to it a. d. 909.

88 THB ELBYKHTH CENTUBT:

brigand seignenTB; and he gave endence, even then, of the extraordinary facally for administration, and the yet more extraordinary gifts for conmiand over men, which were afterward to be shown on a larger arena. To his ardent imagination Saint Panl himself seemed personally manifest, in a vision inspiring him by significant gesture to the arduous work of cleansing and restoring the ancient foundation.^ The monks yielded to his intrepid and imperious energy, and at- tributed to him an almost supernatural power of dis- cerning the thoughts of men.

After the death of Leo Ninth the succeeding popes were appointed largely through the influence of Hilde- brand ; and upon the death of Alexander Second, April 21, A. D. 1078, the Tuscan monk, who had not yet been ordained a priest, but whose genius and spirit had had clear recognition among the clergy and the citizens of Bome, was elected by them to the pontificate with tu- multuous unanimity. In the following June, after a delay which his enemies considered wholly hypocritical, which his friends attributed to modest sensibility, and a just awe in presence of such immense responsibilities, having a few days before been ordained priest, he was consecrated pope.

He had before him from the outset two ends to be attained, — the enfranchisement of the Church, through its established and unquestioned supremacy over secular powers, and the reform of it to purer morals, and to what was to his mind a majestic and beneficent spiritual life. As di£Ferent as it is possible for one to be, in par-

1 AppMtena ei B. Paulas in basilica sua stabat, ac palain manibas tenens ■leroora boam, de pavimento lovabat, ac foras jactabat ; . . • junitqiit •om palain apprehendere, et fimum (sicut ipse fecerat) ejioere. — Fiia & Qng. yiL, Fauh Bemried, cap. i. &

ITS BETITING UFE AND PB0MI8B. 89

ticalars of doctrine, and in all the outward circum^* stances of life, from those who are known as ^^ Puritans " in our history, he was the supreme Puritan of his cen- tury; and a descendant of tiiose who made the early New England religious and famous may frankly admit admiration for him, with a certain measure of sympathy in his aims. What to him was the Divine righteous- ness, he meant to make the universal law of the Church, and through that the law of all the peoples whom the Church could command. In his intense enthusiasm for this 18 the key to his crowded and battling life. Against simony, of course, and the purchase of ecclesiastical office either by money or by promise, he vigorously fought; against the appointment of bishops and abbots by secu- lar princes, and the investing of them by laical hands with the crozier and the ring, making them in effect feudal dependants upon a sovereignty which was only of the world ; ^ against the foul, unnatural vices which Leo Ninth had vehemently denounced, which were still fla- grantly common in convents; against the concubinage in which multitudes of the priests openly lived; and, as fiercely as against anything else, against the lawful marriage of priests, which, in spite of the efforts of preceding popes was still recognized and common throughout Europe, — against all these abuses and of-

i Si qnis deinceps epiBOopatnm vel abbatiam de mann alicqjos laicie penoiue sosceperit, nuUatenns inter episcopoa yel abbates habeatur, nee nlla ei nt episcopo ant abbati aadientia concedatnr. Insnper ei gratiam bcati Petri, et introitam ecciesisB interdicimns, quoad osqne locnm, qnem sob eifmine tarn ambitionia quam inobedientice, quod est sceloa idolatrift, deaernerit. Similiter etiam de inferioribua ecclesiasticis dignitatibos con- ttitnimas. Item, si quia Imperatornm, Ducnm, Marchionum, Comitnm, ▼el qnilibet atecolariam pntestatum, ant personarum, inyestitoram epiaco- patna, yel alienjoa ecclesiasticiB dignitatlB dare pneaampaerit, cgnadem tentantis vincnlo ae aatrictam adat. — Lab Cane. p. 842.

90 THE ELEVENTH CENTORT :

fences^ as he held them to be, and as some of them were, Gregory put forth his utmost energy, and against them he wielded the anathemas of the Church with an unwearied hand.

As a matter of course, these efforts wrought always toward the effect of making the pontiff supreme through- out Christendom. That was his aim. But it does not appear that personal ambition was at the root of his plans, or had over them a goyerning influence. The supremacy of the Church, of which he was fcr the time the head, its supremacy throughout the civilized world, for the welfare of man and the glory of God, — this was the ideal which rained upon him its ceaseless influence. To this end he meant to have, it was in his view in- dispensable that he should have, every bishop a rep- resentative of the pontiff at Rome, dependent upon him and removable by him, and to have all priests his obe- dient servants, while special legates should be his min- isters in every court and every council. The " Dictates '* promulgated by him at the council in Rome, a. n. 1076, as presenting fundamental maxims of the Church, ex- press and illustrate his whole theory. Among them are these : —

" The Roman Church is founded by God alone.

^ The Roman pontiff alone is justly called universal.

^His legate takes precedence of all bishops in a council, though he be of inferior rank; and he has power to pronounce against them the sentence of deposition.

^ The pope may depose those absent

*^ All princes shall kiss the feet of the pope alone.

^^ It is lawful for him to depose emperors.

*^ No council may be called a General Council with- out the pope's order.

ITS BETiyiNG LIFE AND PROMISE. 91

" No capitulary, no book, can be esteemed canonical without his authority.

^ His sentence can be revoked by no one, and he alone can revoke the sentences of all others.

'^He can be judged by none.

^ No one may dare to pronounce condemnation on one who appeals to the Apostolic See.

^The Boman Church has never erred, nor forever- more will it err, the Scripture remaining [restante].

^ Without convening a synod he [the Roman pontiff] may depose or reconcile bishops.

"No one is to be esteemed a Catholic who does not wholly accord [concordat] with the Boman Church. "1

Here is the scheme of Oregory, definitely and defi* antly set forth before the Church and the world. He claimed for the papacy the greatest conceivable author- ity on earth, such as, according to the emphatic words of Yillemain, " rendered every other power useless and subaltern ; '' ' and this was the scheme which he was determined to make actual in Europe, as against all feudal institutions, all kingly authority, all art and^ craft of soldiers and princes, all resistance of ecclesi- astics of whatever degree. In that way, and no other, should the states of the Continent be compacted to- gether in a permanent unity. In comparison with so colossal a scheme, Napoleon's conception of a universal empire on the Continent, with France at its head, ap- pears coarse and commonplace. Compared with it the subjugation of nations to the ancient imperial Rome had been a matter wholly superficial. The largest

1 Baronias, Anoalee Eccledast., torn, xyii pp. 480-481. Lac», 1746. * Jamais puissance plus grande n'avait et^ cr6^e ; elle rendait toat aatre poavoir inutile et rabalterne. — BUi. dk Qrig, VIL, torn. ii. p. 61.

92 THE BLEYENTH GENTUBT :

schemeB of military conquest and political subordina^ tion which had ever occupied the genius of Charlemi^e were low and limited as measured against this. Only one of the great minds in history could have accepted such a scheme, and have presented it in such majestic and intolerable distinctness. Only a wide reach of circum- stances could have suggested it; and perhaps only the tremendous concussion of doctrines so sweeping and so unsparing could have smitten with the shock which then was needed the dulled mind and half-awakened spirit of the populations to which they were addressed. Atrocities of action had been familiar at Rome. Prof- ligacy of manners, an even eccentric vileness of char- acter, in the head of the Church, would hardly have startled communities which still remembered Benedict Ninth. But it was not possible for Europe to be in- sensible before this claim of a right which annulled or suspended all other human obligations, — before this as* sorted authority of one man to govern on earth, and to open or shut the gates of heaven.

It must always be remembered, too, in justice to Gregory, that it was not a corrupt Church, as he re- cognized corruptness, it was not a Church of simonia- cal ecclesiastics, of licentious, ignorant, and indolent priests, of worldly, luxurious, half-military prelates, which he thus sought to make universal. He meant to make it pure, as I have said, through a return to austere discipline, and by the promotion of an ascetic piety. He meant that its purity should match its su- premacy; that piety should be fostered, the poor be protected, a celestial life be presented in the world, by that Divine organism, as to him it appeared, against which the power of the most audacious and insolent ruffian, of the haughtiest baron, of the proudest sov-

ITS BBYIYING UFE AND PBOMIBE.

ereign, if his plans could be realized, should dash itself in vain.^

His personal standard of practical religion appears in a letter written by him to the Counters Beatrice and her daughter Matilda : ^' From love to 6od tb show love to one's neighbor, to aid the unfortunate and the op- pressed,— this I consider more than prayers, fastings, vigils, and other good works, be these never so many ; for I cannot hesitate to prefer, with the Apostle, true love to all other virtues. " ^ When Matilda, of England, offered him anything which was hers for which he might express a wish, his reply was a noble one : ^ What gold, what jewels, what precious things of the world are more to be desired from thee by me than a chaste life, the distribution of thy goods to the poor, love of God and of thy neighbor ? " ^ He personally interposed on behalf of poor women in Denmark who were being persecuted as witches, and admonished the remote and half-civil- ized king to put an end to such an abuse or suffer himself the Divine retribution.^ He touchingly expressed his

' The ''AcU Pontificalia" describe perfectly, as I conceive, the pur- pose of Gr^goty : " Noluit sane at Ecclesiasticns ordo manibns laicorum salgaoeret» aed eladem et morum sanctitate, et ordinia dignitate pns- emineret." — Opera S. Ghreg. VIL [Migne], col. 114.

* Ex amore qnidem Dei proximum diligendo at^aTaie, misetis et op* presaia aabyenire, orationibns, jejaniis, yigiliis et aliis qnampluribas bonis operiboa prapono, quia ▼eram charitatem cnnctis Tirtatibna praferre com Apoatolo non dabito. — /(id, lib. i. ep. 1.

* Qnod enim aomm, qua gemmBS, quie mundi hvgna pretiosa mihi a te magia aant exapectanda, quam vita casta, rerum tuarum in panperes distri- botio, Dei et proximi dllectio f — Ibid,^ lib. vii. ep. xxyi.

* Pneterea in muUerea ob eamdem causam simili iramanitate barbari ritoa damnataa qnidquam Impietatis fadendi vobia Um esae nolite putare, sed potioa discite divina nltionis sententiam digne poanitendo avertere quam in iUaa insontes frustra feraliter saeviendo iram Domini multo magia provocare. Si enim in his flagitiis duraveritis, procul dnbio yestra

ia oalamitatam rertetnr, etc. — Vnd.^ Ub. yii ep.

94 THE BLEYENTH GENTUfiT .*

own sense of sin, and his hope of salvation through the merits of Christ alone. ^^ When I look at myself," he wrote to his friend the Abbot of Clugni, ^^I find myself oppressed with such a burden of sin that no other hope of salvation is left me save in the mercy of Christ alone ; " ^ and in a pontifical letter circulated throughout Germany a.d. 1077, he says, with what seems a sad sincerity, " We know that we have been ordained and placed in the Apostolic chair to this end, that we should seek in this life, not our own interests, but the things of Christy and should walk forward through many la- bors, in the steps of the Fathers, to future and eternal rest through the mercy of God. " ^ I cannot for myself resist the conviction that he felt himself a Divine min- ister, authorized and instructed to make spiritual ideas, laws, and welfare supreme in the world ; to limit and suspend the authority of princes, which had sprung from self-will, and had been confirmed by craft and blood, before that of the priest, derived from God ; to main- tain and administer the universal theocracy of which he had become the temporary head, but in which, as he thought, the Most High would be honored, and the peace, holiness, and joy of mankind be illustriously secured.

^ Ad meipsnin cam ndeo^ ita me gnvatom ptoprus o€tioxiit poncUre invenia at naUa remaneat spea salaUs, niai de sola misaricordia Christi. Nam si non aperarem ad meliorem yitam, et utilitatem sancte Eccleaia ▼enire, noUo modo Rom«y in qaa coactna, Deo teste, jam a viginii aania inhabitavi, remanerem. — Opera S, Gfreg. FIL, lib. ii. ep. zliz.

' Blagia enim yolamas mortem, si hoc oportet, sabire, quam, propria Tolantate delicti, at Eoclesia Dei ad confasionem yeniat oonaentire. Ad hoc enim nos ordinatoa et in apostoHca sede conatitatos esse cognosetmna, nt in hac vita non qum nostra sed que lean Christi sunt qosramna, et per maltOB labores Patrum sequentes vestigia ad futuram et aetemam qaietem, Deo miserante, tendamus. — Ibid,, lib. iv. ep. zziy.

ITS BEYIYINO UFE AND PROMISE. ftS

Of course a scheme so vast as this, and so reyolu* tionary as against customs of life and institutes of goyemment everywhere recognized, had to encounter the fiercest resistance on many sides. It could not be set in operation at all except against the instant oppo- sition of every greedy and profligate monk; of every bishop or abbot who had entered upon his office by purchase or promise; of every noble who wanted a priesthood to give license to his lusts ; of the Qerman Emperor most of all, who had inherited a great title with an important secular power, whose predecessors had appointed and deposed popes, and to whom it seemed the wildest fantasy that the Bishop of Rome should claim supremacy over one who represented, though in a measure so far inferior, the early preroga- tive of Charlemagne. Even the purest class of the priests, those who were married, in happy homes, with wives by their side and children around them, looked with equal fear and horror on this pontifical purpose to east dishonor on their wives, and to take from their children inheritance and name. Archbishops were stoned in their pulpits when they read the decrees; abbots were dragged from the assemblies, and hardly rescued alive. The rancor excited had almost no pre- cedent A man at Cambrai was burned alive for up- holding the decrees. ^

Of course, too, Gregory had no armed forces at his command sufficient to carry into effect his amazing and daring plan. Indeed, he was not always secure in the capital, or in St. Peter's; and it is a noticeable fact fhat^ as Alexander Second had not been in quiet posses- sion of Rome when he sent his blessing to William of Normandy, with the consecrated banner bearing the

^ Qngoirj himaelf is the aatbority for Uui. — Opera, lib. iy. ep. sl

96 THE ELETENTH CENTUBT:

Agnus Dei blazing on it in gold embroidery, and as- sumed to transfer the kingdom to him, so Gregory was attacked in church, was taken prisoner and subjected to outrage by Roman brigands, at the very time when, as sovereign pontiff, he claimed authority over kings and emperors, whose privilege it was to kiss his feet.

But he had, at the same time, vast powers with which to work, and an equipment of instruments which no king could rival, with some signal opportunities for success. The genius of the Roman Church had always expressed itself not so much in eloquence of speech, or in copiousness of writing, as in careful, compact, and effective organization. The entire control of that or* ganization, which had now been matured and consoli- dated by time, was in the hands of Gregory, to be used by him with the steadiness and strength of his extraor- dinary will. The imperial place of the great capital in the world had never been practically lost Remote tribes, the descendants of those who had stricken and shattered the early Empire, still looked with wonder- ing awe to <he city enthroned upon the hills to which it had given a world-wide fame. Especially, every priest of the Church stood in conscious relation to the pontifical capital His education affiliated him with it Its language was his ofiicial vernacular; and no doubt because he saw the constant effect of this, Greg- ory forbade the translation of the ofiices of the Church into any other tongue, — as, for example, the Slavonic.^

^ Thns he wrote to Wntislas, Duke of BohemU : —

Quia vero nobilitas toa postnlayit quod secundum Sdayonieam tin- guaxn apud roe dinnum celebrari annueremue Officium, scias dos boic petitioni tUK nequaqnam posse favere. £z hoc nempe snpe volrentibus liquet non immerito aacnm Scriptunm omnipotenti Deo placaisae quibiia-

ITS EBYIYINO UFE AND PBOMISB. 9T

Being diyorced, too, from family ties, if the scheme of the Pontiff could be accomplished, the Ohurch would become the only country of every priest, with Rome for its imposing centre. If, then, that Church were purged of scandals, redeemed from iniquities, revitalized with a unifying life, he at the head of it would hold Ohris- tendom in his hand, to govern and guide it at every point

His own character gave him prodigious advantage. Those who reviled him knew that their reproaches were in large measure a mere gnashing of teetL The dignity of his life, his patience, fortitude, and stead- fastness of spirit, were in illustrious contrast not only with the wretched and infamous prelates who had often preceded him, but with the character and life of such principal antagonists as Henry Fourth, of Germany, and Philip First, of France. The men of nobler thought and temper were widely in sympathy with him, while Hie poor, who had been oppressed with relentless se- verity by soldiers and nobles, were elated by his power, and anticipated a refuge more accessible and secure than they perhaps found in his sublime appellate au- thority. The superstitious temper of the time supplied precisely the element which he needed to make his as- saults on his opponents effective. When calamities threatened part of Germany, and the monarch had de- fied him, it was currently reported that the very im- ages of Christ in the churches had broken into bloody sweat, that real blood had appeared, excluding even the accidents of wine, in the sacramental cup. When the Bishop of Utrecht had disregarded the anathemas

dam loeif etm oeenlUm, ne, d ad liqnidimi cnnctis patsret, forte

•t mlijaoeffet deapeotai^ ant pra^a intellacta a mediocribus in er rarem in*

dBMiit— 'Cipfraii lih Tii ep. xL

08 THE ELEYENTH GENTDBY:

of the PontifE, and encouraged the king also to defy them, it was believed that his death, soon following, had been attended with strange anguish, and that he himself had seen devils around him, and had declined offered prayers as of no avail. ^ There was something more terrible to men's imagination in that perplexed and anxious time than warriors in mail, — even the in- visible celestial hosts, of which the silent air was fulL There was a power more awful than that of barons or kings, though their castles were strong, their troops many, their torture-chambers terrible to think of. It was the power which, after men were killed, had au* thority to cast their souls into hell. The mind of Europe thus generally responded to the words of Oreg* ory when he admonished a prelate favorable to Henry, and through him Henry himself, that the power of kings and emperors, and all combined endeavors of mortals, as opposed to the apostolic rights and the omnipotence of God, were only as a vanishing spark and as light chaff. ^ So the amazing spectacle became possible of a weak and sickly man at Rome, of slight frame and low stature, as he is described, sixty years old, without armies, with- out princely allies, sometimes destitute, as he said, of all help of man, contending fearlessly, to a great extent successfully, to establish a system against which the most powerful rulers of the Continent fought with the instinct of self-preservation, sometimes with the fierce energy of despair. It would have been, it seems to us, the destruction

1 Villemain, Hist, de Gi^. YIL, torn, ii p. 66.

* Atqne hoc in animo gonwt, quod regam et impentomm TirtoSy et uniyeraa inortaliam conamina, contra apostolica jura et onmipotentiaiii <ammi Dei quasi favilla compatentnr et palea, nuUios nnqiiam instincta Tel fiducta adversos diTinam et apoetolioam auctoritatem olwtinata temeri- tBte te rebellem et pertinacem fieri libeat — 6>p«ra, lib. iii op. Tiii.

ITS BEViyiNG UFE AND PBOHISB. 99

of civilization, the conversion of the Church into an engine of remorseless oppression, if the scheme of Hil- debrand had wholly prevailed. We find a measure of the progress of the centuries in the hopeless absurdity of putting such a scheme into practice to-day. But we may not foi^t that, as the matter appeared to him at the time, it was more than a contest even for the unity of Europe ; it was a contest of the spiritual against the I^ysical ; of faith against force ; of the poor and obscure against haughty oppressors ; of that which was founded in the Divine order against that which had sprung from human self-will ; in a word, it was the contest of Ood in His Church against the world, the flesh, and the devil. We may call the conscience which had formed itself in him a special, official, and secondary con- science, as artificial in nature as it was imperative and unsparing in impulse. I think, for myself, that it may be properly thus described. But it was his conscience at the time ; and at its dictation he flung his life into the prodigious crucial combat with an unsparing energy. With absolute fearlessness of what man could do, he bore his own part in it. With an unrelaxing zeal he pursued it, till the day when he died at Salerno, in the early summer of a. p. 1085, a fugitive from his capital, a pensioner on his friends, exclaiming, with almost hi& latest breath, ^^I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity ; therefore I die in exile. '' The stormy pon- tificate of twelve years was ended there. The nearly seventy years of his life were finished, under heavy shadows, and the commanding and vehement spirit left at last the meagre, wearied, and wasted frame. But the consequences of his intrepid life and remarkable work long survived, and to their importance no reader of history can be blind.

28f^030A

100 THE ELEYEatTH GKNTUBT :

Undoabtedly, the fiercest clash of the conflici,^ tha echo of which has ever since resounded in the world, came in his persistent contest, ending only with his pontifical life, with Henry Fourth of Germany, whom he had recognized as king, and to whom he permitted the title of emperor, though refusing to crown hiuL Henry fought against Gregory by intrigue and by arms, with all the fury of his ambitious and passionate na- ture. A council of bishops, abbots, and lords, from all parts of the empire, convened by the king at Worms, A.D. 1076, pronounced Gregory an apostate monk, who had unlawfully seized the papacy, who used magical arts, who degraded theology by new doctrines, who mingled sacred things with profane, separated wives from their husbands, preferred adultery and incest to lawful marriage, deceived the people with a 6ctitious religion, was ruining the papacy, and was guilty of high treason. Therefore it proceeded to depose him, — a sentence which was hailed with joy by multitudes on the south of the Alps as well as in Germany. Greg- ory responded with a terrific anathema, and in turn declared Henry deposed, and loosed all Christian sub- jects from allegiance to him. With an emphasis pos- sible to no other man, he set before Europe his favorite doctrine that civil and military dignities had been the product of an age which knew not €rod ; that dukes and princes had come to exist because they had dared, in their blind passion and intolerable pride, to set them- selves up by instigation of the Devil, and with the commission of every crime, as masters over men who had been created their equals; and that when they sought to make the priests of the Lord follow in their path, they were only to be compared to the Devil him- self, who had said aforetime to the chief of all priests,

ITS REVTVING UPB AND PROMISE. 101

the Son of God, ^ all these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. " ^

The fierce swing of the papal words was enough of itself to startle rude minds ; and the terrible democracy of his appeal to peoples to disregard the authority of a king who had incurred the censure of the Church, — the apparently triumphant energy with which this son of a Tuscan mechanic, enthroned by the Church, faced the arts and the arms of one bom in the purple, and called the faithful, of whateyer rank, to disown and destroy his unrighteous power, — this stirred to its depths the mind of the Continent, as it had never before been stirred since Charlemagne became Emperor of the West It frightened, long afterward, the eloquent Bossuet, when he thought of such a power as capable of being employed even against his magnificent sov- ereign. Undoubtedly, the Declaration of the clergy of France touching the ecclesiastical power, formulated by him, had here in part its motive.^ Certainly the claim

^ Quia neseiat veges et daoes ab lis babniasfr principinoi, qui, Deiim igno- lantea, aitperbiay TapiiiiB» perfidia bomiddiis, postremo imiyeraU pene scele- ribna^ mnndi prindpe diabolo videlioet agttante, taper pareB, soilioet lioauiiesy domioari c«ca capiditate et intoleTabili praeumptione affectaTe- nat? Qui videlicet, dnm saoerdotes Domini ad vettigia sua inclinara ecmteadufit, cai nctins comparentur qnam ei qui est eapnt saper omnes filios soperbtflB, qui ipsam sammiim pontificem saoerdotom caput Altissimi VQimn tentaas, et omnia illi mondi r^gna promittens, ait : Hibc omnia tiU dabo^ si proddens adoraTeris me f — Opent^ lib. viiL cp. zxL ; coL 696.

* His words are as dear and empbatlc as laagnage permits [▲. d. 1682] : —

Qne Saint Pierre et ses snccessenrs, ricaires de I^sus-Cbrist, et que tonte rtglise mdme, n'ont re^n de puissance de Dieu qne sur lea choees spiritu- eOes et qui oonoement le saint, et non sur les dioses tempordles et civiles : lisus-ChTist nous apprenant lui-mdme que son rojaume n'est point de oe monde, et, en nn autre endroit, qu'il faut rendre k C^sar ce qui est k.C^sar, et k Dieu oe qui est k Dieu. • . . Nous d^clarons en cons^uenoe que les rois et lea aoaTerains ne sont soumis k aucune puissance eod^siastiqQe, par

102 THE ELEVENTH CENTUBT:

of right put forth bj Gregory was of stapendong height and reach. But he shrank not for a moment from the conflict which it challenged. Faith in the Ohurch appeared to him, as in fact it was at that time in Europe, the only universal unifying force. The purified Church was not merely to train saintly men for the heavens, it was to educate, purify, and govern by its law the nations on the earth* He wrote to the legates sent by him to Oermany, ^^You know that it appertains to the provi- dential mission of the See Apostolic to judge in what- ever businesses concern Christian commonwealths, and to regulate them by the dictates of righteousness. " ^ He wrote to the same effect, not to Henry alone, or to Philip First of Fnuice, but to William the haughty conqueror of England, whose aid he desired, whose lack of ardor in his cause he reproved, and whose severity of temper he perfectly knew. To him he compared the pontifi* cate to the sun, and royalty to the moon, while he

Tordre de Diea, dans les choses temporeUes ; qu'ils ne peuvant 6tre dipo&is diractement ni indirectement par rautorit^ des defis de Teliae ; que lean Sleets ne peuvent 6tre dispeiiB^ de la soumiflsion et de rob^iseance qa'ila lear doivent, on abeoua du serment de fid^t^ ; et que cette doctrine, n^ oessaira pour la tranqoiUit^ publique, et non moins ayantageose k I'l^liae qu'k r^taty doit dtre inviolablement anivie, comme oonfonne k la parole de Dieu, k la tradition dea saints p^res, et auz ezemplee des saints. — (Buvm ChxrigUs de Bossutt^ torn. y. pp. 386-386. Paris ed., 1822.

Bossuet's snbseqnent defence of the Declaration was elaborate, learned, and very eloquent ; but he seems to have shrank, six hundred years after, ftom direct collision with the words and acts of Gregory.

^ ScitiB enim quia nostri officii et apostolica sedis est providential ma- jora Ecclesiarum n^gotia discutere, et dictante justitia definire. Hoc autem quod inter eos agitur negotium tant» grayitatia eat tantiqne peri- culi» ut 81 a nobis fherit aliqna occasions neglectum, non solum illis et nobis, sed etiam nniyersali Ecclesia magnum et lamentabUe pariat detri* mentum. — JBpist., lib. iv. ep. xziii.

The business in hand at that time was to decide whether Henry or Badolph ahould be Emperor of Germany 1

1TB BEYIYINO UFB AND PBOIOSB. 108

promiBed to the successfal and masterfal king further increase of pow^r as the reward of an increase of piety. ^

No doubt he was ambitious of success. No doubt what Yillemain has excellently described as ^^ the clever instinct of power " [^ cet habile instinct du pouvoir ''] taught him that such fierce domination of tone would have its effect on the stubborn natures which he ad- dressed But he certainly seems to have been sincere in his primary conviction that the purified Church should govern the Continent, govern the world; and that the secular order, even as represented by conquer- ing kings, should be subordinate to the spiritual which Christ had ordained, of which the Holy Ohost was the perpetual vivifying energy, and of which it had come to pass that he for the time was the consecrated head.

His missionary activities went on all the time, while he was contending with such incessant and vehement vigor against the devices and arms of Henry. In Hun- gary, Bohemia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, his efforts to extend Christianity were constant He sent teach- ers, animated by his contagious enthusiasm, to those remote and inhospitable countries. He sought assidu- ously to draw young men from them, to be instructed at Rome in learning and religion. He was not afraid of the fury of the greatest He was not unmindful of the crimes of the weaker. The Bishop of Cracow had been

^ Sioat enim ad mandi pulchritadinem, ocalis carneis diTereU tern- poribnB repnasentandaiD, solem et lanam omnibas aliia eminentiora dispo- ndt Inminaria, aic, ne creatura, quam soi benignitas ad imaginem siiam in hoc mando cnaveiat, in erronea et mortifera traheretar pericula, providit in apostolica et r^gxa dignitate per divena regeretar officia. Qua tamen nugoffitatis et minoritatia distantia religio sic ee movet Christiana^ at cnia et diapenaatione apoetolic» dignitatis post Deam gnbernetor regia. — OperOf Hb. tIL ep. xxT.

The woxda of Qxegoxy were repeated by Innocent Thirds a centuiy ktsb

\^

104 THE ELEVENTH CENTUBT:

assassinated, by the order of Boleslas, king of Poland, whom his reprimands had offended. Instantly, from the watchful pontiff, flashed forth an interdict on the kingdom. The churches were shut to all divine offices, the violent king was deposed, excommunicated, driven from his kingdom, and in his flight is said to have been killed and devoured by dogs. Whatever the faults of \ ' ' Hildebrand were, aside from the prolific primary error 1;, ' ^ of confounding the pontificate with Christianity, it can- not be said that he was swayed from what to him ap- peared his just purpose by any threats or any flatteries ; that he yielded or cringed before power; that he bur- dened the weak because they were weak, or tolerated and pardoned the sinner who was strong. He sacrificed the dearest ambition of his life — the initiation of a crusade to recover Jerusalem, which he had hoped to lead in person — to his determination to have Europe compacted, educated, and governed by a purified ChurdL Only once, I think, did he for a moment relax his de- crees against the continuing and demoralizing simony, or on behalf of clerical celibacy. Toward the end of his life, when the difficulties in his path appeared insur- mountable, when it looked as if the papacy itself must be fatally stricken by the forces against it, and chaos must follow, he undoubtedly did this, allowing a tempo- rary suspension of the rigor of his rules. ^ With this ex- ception he held to his standard of what to him appeared the purity of the Church, with its proper lordship over continent and world. He went even to the perilous

^ His letter to his legates, in part, lan : Quod yero ds saoerdotilNis inter- rogastifl, placet nobis ut impnesentianun, torn propter popnlomm torba- tiones, tnm etiam propter bononun inopiam, scilicet quia paudSBimi sunt qui fidelibus Ghristiams offida religionis peraolvant, pro tempom rigoram canonicnm temperando, debeatis sufferrs. — Opera, lib. ix.ep.iiL

ITS REYiyiNG UFE AND PROMISE. 106