 Chapter 6 The Fifth Characteristic of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character which I have just been describing. It is this, the Dark Ages were the point during which they are very gradually germinated and came into outward existence things which still remain among us and help to differentiate our Christendom from the past of classical antiquity. This is true of certain material things, the spur, the double bridle, the stirrup, the book and leaves distinct from the old roll, and very much else. It is true of the road system of Europe, wherever that road system has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages with the gradual breakdown of expensive causeways over marshes, with the gradual decline of certain centers, with bridges left unrepaired, culverts choked and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that you got the deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river valley in England where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its low lying banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us in our road system. You may see the modern road leaving the old Roman line and picking its way across the wetlands from one drier point to another and rejoining the Roman line beyond. It is a thing you will see in almost any one of our stretches, Stanford's, Stamford's, Stafford's, etc., which everywhere mark the crossing of a Roman road over a water course. But much more than in material things. The Dark Ages set a mold wherein the European mind grew. For instance it was they that gave us two forms of legend, the one something older than history, older than the Roman order, something of a western reappearing with the release of the mind from the rigid accuracy of a high civilization, the other that legend which preserves historical truth under a guise of fantasy. Of the first, the British story of Tristan is one example out of a thousand. Of the second, the legend of Constantine which gradually and unconsciously developed into the famous donation. The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story, coloring and enlivening all our European life, and what is more, largely preserving historic truth. For nothing is more valuable to true history than legend. They also gave us our order in speech. Great hosts of words, unknown to antiquity, sprang up naturally among the people when the force of the classical center failed. Some of them were words of the languages before the Roman armies came. Cask, for instance, the old Iberian word. Some of them were the camp talk of the soldiers, spade, for instance, and epi, the same piece of English slang, the broad one, which has come to mean in French a sword, in English that with which we dig the earth. Masses of technical words in the old Roman laws turned into popular usage through that appetite the poor have for long official phrases. For instance, our English words, wild, wheeled, wold, waste, gain, rider, road, ledge, say, and a thousand others, all branch out from the lawyer's phrases of the later Roman Empire. In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages, crystallized also by a process which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses, that rich mass of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress which differentiates one place from another, when the communication of a high material civilization breaks down. In all this, the Dark Ages are a comfort to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the process of increasing complexity reaches its term, that the strain of development is at last relieved, that humanity sooner or later returns upon itself, that there is an end in repose, and that the repose is fruitful. The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most engrossed, puzzled, and warped the judgments of non-Catholic historians when they have attempted a Conspectus of European Development. It was the segregation, the homogeneity, and the dominance of clerical organization. The hierarchy of the Church, its unity and sense of discipline, was the chief civil institution, and the chief binding social force of the times. Side by side with it went the establishment of the monastic institution, which everywhere took on a separate life of its own, preserved what could be preserved of arts and letters, drained the marshes, and cleared the forests, and formed the ideal economic unit for such a period. Thus the only economic unit in which capital could then be accumulated and preserved. The great order of St. Benedict formed the framework of living points upon which was stretched the moral life of Europe. The vast and increasing endowments of great and fixed religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries. They were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the fluctuations, proceeding from raid and from decline, would in their violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism. Meanwhile, the Catholic hierarchy as an institution, I have already called it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution, at any rate as a political institution, remained absolute above the social disintegration of the time. All natural things were slowly growing up unchecked and disturbing the strict lines of the old centralized governmental order, which men still remembered. In language, Europe was a medley of infinitely varying local dialects. Thousands upon thousands of local customs were coming to be separate laws in each separate village. Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed history. The tribal basis from which we spring was thrusting its instincts back into the strict and rational Latin fabric of the state. Status was everywhere replacing contract and habit replacing a reason for things. Above this medley, the only absolute organization that could be was that of the church. The papacy was the one center whose shifting could not even be imagined. The Latin tongue in the late form in which the church used it was everywhere the same and everywhere suited to rituals that differed but slightly from province to province when we contrast them with the million diversity of local habit and speech. Whenever a high civilization was to re-arise out of the soil of the Dark Ages, it was certain first to show a full organization of the church under some pope of exceptional vigor and next to show that pope or his successors in this tradition at issue with new civil powers. Whenever central government should rise again and in whatever form, a conflict would begin between the new kings and the clerical organization which had so strengthened itself during the Dark Ages. Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its long sleep. The 11th century was the moment of its awakening. Three great forces, the personality of Saint Gregory VII, the appearance by a happy accident of slight cross-breeding, a touch of Scandinavian blood added to the French race of the Norman race, finally the crusades drew out of the darkness the enormous vigor of the early Middle Ages. They were to produce an intense and active civilization of their own. A civilization which was undoubtedly the highest and the best our race has known, conformable to the instincts of the European, fulfilling his nature, giving him that happiness which is the end of men. As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages, after four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater heights when it suffered shipwreck. With that disaster, the disaster of the Reformation, I shall deal later in this series. In my next chapter I shall describe the inception of the Middle Ages and show what they were before our promise in them was ruined. The end of section twenty-eight, the end of chapter six. Section twenty-nine, Europe and the Faith. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Baloch. Section twenty-nine, chapter seven, the Middle Ages. I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages might be compared to a long sleep of Europe, a sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old society in the fifth century to the spring and rising of the eleventh and twelfth. The metaphor is far too simple, of course, for that sleep was a sleep of war. In all those centuries, Europe was desperately holding its own against the attack of all that desired to destroy it, refined and ardent Islam from the south, letterless barbarian pagans from the east and north. At any rate, from that sleep or that besieging, Europe awoke or was relieved. I said that three great forces, humanly speaking, worked this miracle, the personality of St. Gregory the Seventh, the brief appearance by a happy accident of the Norman state, and finally the Crusades. The Normans of history, the true French Normans we know, are stirring a generation after the year one thousand. St. Gregory filled that same generation. He was a young man when the Norman effort began. He died full of an enormous achievement in ten eighty-five. As much as any one man could, he, the heir of Cluny, had remade Europe. Immediately after his death, there was heard the march of the Crusades. From these three, the vigor of a fresh, young renewed Europe proceeds. Much might be added, the perpetual and successful chivalric charge against the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified it. The idea was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of the Pyrenees, perpetually cavalcated the high adventurers of Christendom. The Basques, a strange and very strong small people, were the pivot of that reconquest. But the valley of the torrent of the Aragon was its channel. The life of St. Gregory is contemporaneous with that of El Cid Campador, in the same year that St. Gregory died. Toledo, the sacred center of Spain, was at last forced from the Mohammedans and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All Southern Europe was alive with a sword. In that same moment, romance appeared. The great songs, the greatest of them all, the song of Roland, then was a ferment of the European mind, eager from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields, and at watching skepticism, which flanks and follows the march of the faith, when the faith is most vigorous, and had also begun to speak. There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that something of the unfruitful Baltic plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke and philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas, was to appear. The plastic guards leapt up, color and stone, humor fully returned, general travel, vision. In general, the moment was one of expectation and of advance. It was spring. For the purposes of these few pages, I must confine the attention of my reader to those three tangible sources of the New Europe, which, as I have said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII and the Crusades. Of the Norman race, we may say that it resembled, in history, those Mira, or new stars, which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky, for some few hours, or weeks, or years, and then are lost or merged in the infinity of things. He is indeed unhistorical, who would pretend William the Conqueror, the organizer and maker of what we now call England, Robert the Wizard, the conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman names that light Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be even partly Scandinavians. They were Gauls, short in stature, lucid in design, vigorous in stroke, positive in philosophy. They bore no outward relation to the soft and tall and sentimental north from which some few of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral names. But on the other hand, any one who should pretend that all this amazing and ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was merely Galo Roman, would commit an error. An error far less gross, but still misleading. In speech, in manner, in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the horse, in the cooking of food, in that most intimate part of man, his jests, the Norman was holy and apparently a Gaul. In his body, hard, short, square, broad-shouldered, alert, the Norman was a Frenchman only. But no other part of Gaul, then, did what Normandy did, nor could any other French province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, organized and creative power during the few years that Marvel lasted. That Marvel is capable of explanation, and I will attempt to explain it. Those dull, blundering and murderous ravaging of the coasts of Christian Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia, few in number, futile in achievement, which we call in English history the Danish invasions, were called upon the opposite coast of the channel, the invasions of the Normine, or the men of the North. They came from the Baltic and from Norway. They were part of the universal assault which the dark ages of Christendom had to sustain, part of a ceaseless pressure from without, against civilization. And they were but a part of it. They were few, as pirates always must be. It was on the estuaries of a few continental rivers and in the British Isles that they counted most in the lives of Europeans. Now among the estuaries of the Great Rivers was the estuary of the Seine. The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end of the 9th century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly becoming the political center of Gaul. So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold of the Roman Empire, that the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement, by intermarriage and with granting of land in a fixed Roman province, was a policy still obvious to those who still called themselves the emperors of the West. In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of tradition, produced this last example, and the barbarian troublemakers from the sea, were given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The maritime province, Lug Danesus Secunda, the delimitation of this province dated from Diocletian. It was already 600 years old. Its later name of Normandy masked this essential fact, and it wasn't is a Roman division. As for that matter are probably our English counties. Was handed over to them for settlement. That is they might not attempt a partition of the land outside its boundaries. On the analogy of all similar experiments we can be fairly certain of what happened, though there is no contemporary record of such domestic details in the case of Normandy. The barbarians, few in number, coming into a fertile and thickly populated Roman province, only slightly affected its blood. But their leaders occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs of existing childless lords, took to wife the heiresses of others, and feoffed groups of small men, took a share of the revenue, helped to answer for military levy and general government. Their chief was responsible to the crown. To the mass of the population the new arrangement would make no change. They were no longer slaves, but they were still serfs, secure of their small farms but still bound to work for their lord. It mattered little to them whether that lord of theirs had married his daughter to a pirate, or had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the management of the estate. All the change the serf would notice from the settlement was that the herring and the plundering of occasional barbarian raids had ceased. In the governing class of perhaps some ten to twenty thousand families the difference would be very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers, though insignificant in number compared with the total population, were a very large fraction added to so small a body. The additional blood, though numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly throughout the whole community. Scandinavian names and habits may have had at first some little effect upon the owner class with which the Scandinavians first mingled. It soon disappeared, but as had been the case centuries before in the earlier experiments of that sort, it was the barbarian chief and his hereditary descendants who took over the local government and held it, as the phrase went, of the universal government of Gaul. These Northmen, the new and striking addition to the province, the Galo Romans called as we have seen Normani. The Roman province, within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second lionese came to be called Normaniah. For a century the slight admixture of new blood worked in the general Galo Roman mass of the province and numerically small though it was influenced its character or rather produced a new thing, just as in certain chemical combinations the small admixture of a new element transforms the whole. With the beginning of the 11th century, as everything was springing into new life, when the great saint who, from the chair of Peter, was to restore the church, was already born, when the advance of the Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to strike its decisive conquering blows, there appeared a sudden phenomena, this new thing, French in speech and habit and disposition of body, yet just differentiated from the rest of Frenchmen, the Norman race. It possessed these characteristics, a great love of exact order, an alert military temper, and a passion for reality which made its buildings, even of ships, though it was not in the main seafaring, excellent, and of churches and of castles, the most solid of its time. All the Norman's characteristics, once the race was formed, led them to advance. They conquered England and organized it. They conquered and organized Sicily and southern Italy. They made of Normandy itself the model state in a confused time. They surveyed land. They developed a regular tactic for male cavalry. Yet they endured but for a hundred years, and after that brief coruscation, they are wholly merged again in the mass of European things. You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin, say in 1030, for the beginning of the Norman thing. You may take the court of young Henry II with his southerners and his high culture in say 1160, most certainly for the burial of it. During that little space of time, the Norman had not only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men, he had also provided the sword of the new papacy, and he had furnished the framework of the crusading host. But before his adventure was done, the French language and the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the Euphrates. Of the papacy and the crusades I now speak, St. Gregory VII, the second of the great recreated forces of that time, was of the Tuscan peasantry, a Trudian in type, therefore Italian in speech by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his career or no is a very test of whether that historian understands the nature of Europe. For St. Gregory VII imposed nothing upon Europe. He made nothing new. What he did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He provoked a resurrection of the flesh. He made corporate the centralized church and the west. For instance it was the ideal, the doctrine, the tradition, the major custom by far, that the clergy should be celibate. He enforced celipacy as universal discipline. The awful majesty of the papacy had been present in all men's minds as a vast political conception for centuries too long to recall. St. Gregory organized that monarchy and gave it proper instruments of rule. The unity of the church had been the constant image without which Christendom could not be. St. Gregory VII at every point made that unity tangible and visible. The Protestant historians who for the most part see in the man a sporadic phenomena by such a misconception betray the source of their animam and prove their intellectual nourishment to be unfed from the fountain of European life. St. Gregory VII was not an inventor but a renovator. He worked not upon but in his material and his material was the nature of Europe, our nature. Of the awful obstacles such workers must encounter all history speaks. They are a conflict not only with evil but with inertia and with local interest, with blurred vision and with restricted landscapes. Always they think themselves defeated as did St. Gregory when he died. Always they prove themselves before posterity to have done much more than any other mold of man. Napoleon also was of this kind. When St. Gregory was dead, the Europe which he left was the monument of that triumph whose completion he had doubted and the fear of whose failure had put upon his dying lips the phrase, I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile. Immediately after his death came the stupendous Gaelic effort of the Crusades. The Crusades were the second of the main armored eruptions of the Gauls. The first centuries before had been the Gaelic invasion of Italy and Greece and the Mediterranean shores in the old pagan time. The third centuries later was to be the wave of the revolution and of Napoleon. The preface to the Crusades appeared in those endless and already successful wars of Christendom against Asia upon the high plateaus of Spain. These had taught the enthusiasm and the method by which Asia for so long at high tide flooding a beleaguered Europe might be slowly repelled and from these had proceeded the military science and the aptitude for strain which made possible the advance of 2,000 miles upon the Holy Land. The consequences of this last and third factor in the reawakening of Europe were so many that I can give but a list of them here. The West, still primitive, discovered through the Crusades the intensive culture, the accumulated wealth, the fixed civilized traditions of the Greek Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It discovered also in a vivid new experience the East. The mere covering of so much land, the mere singing of so many sites by a million men expanded and broke the walls of the mind of the Dark Ages. The Mediterranean came to be covered with Christian ships and took its place again with fertile rapidity as the Great Highway of Exchange. Europe awoke. All architecture is transformed and that quite new thing, the Gothic, arises. The conception of representative assembly, monastic in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, appears in the institutions of Christendom. The vernacular languages appear and with them the beginnings of our literature. The Tuscan, the Castilian, the Langdeok, the Northern French, somewhat later the English. Even the primitive tongues that had always kept their vitality from beyond recorded time, the Celtic and the German. Footnote, I mean in neither of the groups of tongues as we first find them recorded, for by that time each, especially the German, was full of southern words borrowed from the Empire, but the original stocks, which survive side by side with this new vocabulary. For instance, our first knowledge of Teutonic dialect is of the 8th century. The so-called early Gothic is a fraud. But even then, quite half the words or more are truly German, apparently unaffected by the imperial laws and speech. Begin to take on new creative powers and to produce a new literature. At fundamental institution of Europe, the university arises, first in Italy, immediately after in Paris, which last becomes the type and center of the scheme. The central civil governments begin to correspond to their natural limits. The English monarchy is fixed first, the French kingdom is coalescing, the Spanish regions will soon combine, the Middle Ages are born. The flower of that capital experiment in the history of our race was the 13th century. Edward I of England, St. Louis of France, Pope Innocent III were the types of its governing manhood. Everywhere Europe was renewed. There were new white walls around the cities, new white Gothic churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law codified, the classics rediscovered. The questions of philosophy sprung to activity and producing in their first figure as it were the summit of expository power in St. Thomas, surely the strongest, the most virile intellect which our European blood has given to the world. Two notes mark the time for anyone who is acquainted with its buildings, its letters and its wars, a note of youth and a note of content. Europe was imagined to be at last achieved and that in a radical dream of permanent and satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh and to have come to live forever among Christian men. No such permanence and no such good is permitted to humanity and the great experiment, as I have called it, was destined to fail. While it flourished, all that especially characteristic of our European descent and nature stood, visibly present in the daily life and in the large as in the small institutions of Europe. Our property and land and instruments was well divided among many or all. We produced the peasant, we maintained the independent craftsmen, we founded cooperative industry, in arms that military type arose which lives upon the virtue's proper to arms and detests the vices, arms may breed. Above all an intense and living appetite for truth, a perception of reality invigorated these generations. They saw what was before them, they called things by their names. Never was political or social formula less divorced from fact. Never was the mass of our civilization better welded and in spite of all this, the thing did not endure. By the middle of the 14th century the decaying of the flower was tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of sophistry in philosophical argument marked the turn of the tide. Not an institution of the 13th but the 14th debased it. The papacy, professional and a prisoner, the parliaments tending to oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed in the minds of the rulers, the new and vigorous and democratic monastic orders already touched with mere wealth and beginning also to change. But these last can always and do always restore themselves. Upon all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Where half the people, there a third, there again a quarter died from that additional blow, the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not recover. Men clung to their ideal for yet another 150 years. The vital forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material perfection to another. The art of government, the suggestion of letters, the technique of sculpture and painting, here raised by a better vision, there degraded by a worse one, everywhere developed and grew manifold. But the supreme achievement of the 13th century was seen in the later 14th to be ephemeral and in the 15th it was apparent that the attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe had failed. The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that science and history were too slight, that the material side of life was insufficient, that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to permanence was lacking, or one may say that the ideal was too high for men. I for my part inclined to believe that wills other than those of mortals were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat daily for the souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual battle fought over our heads perpetually some accident of the struggle turned it against us for a time. If that suggestion be fantastic, which no doubt it is, at any rate none other is complete. With the end of the 15th century there was to come a supreme test and temptation, the fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek, the rediscovery of the classic past, the press, the new great voyages, India to the east, America to the west, had in the one lifetime of a man. For no, the lifetime of one very great and famous man did cover it, Ferdinand, king of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of the noblest English queens, was born the year before Constantinople fell, he died the year before Luther found himself swept to the head of a chaotic wave. Between 1453 and 1515 suddenly brought Europe into anew a magic at a dangerous land. To the provinces of Europe shaken by an intellectual tempest of physical discovery, disturbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement in the material world, in physical science, and in the knowledge of antiquity, was to be offered a fruit of which each might taste if it would, but the taste of which would lead if it were acquired, to evils no citizen of Europe then dreamt of, to things which even the criminal intrigues and the cruel tyrants of the 15th century would have shuttered to contemplate, and to a disaster which very nearly overset our ship of history, and very nearly lost us forever its cargo of letters of philosophy of the arts and of all our other powers. That disaster is commonly called the Reformation. I do not pretend to analyze its material causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were holy material. I rather take the shape of the event and show how the ancient and civilized boundaries of Europe stood firm, though shaken, under the tempest. How that tempest might have ravaged no more than those outlying parts newly incorporated, never sufficiently penetrated perhaps with the faith and the proper habits of ordered men, the outer Germany since Scandinavia. The disaster would have been upon a scale not too considerable, and Europe might quickly have ridered herself after the gusts should be passed, had not one exception of capital amount marked the intense crisis of the storm. That exception to the resistance offered by the rest of ancient Europe was the defection of Britain. Conversely with this loss of an ancient province of the empire, one nation and one alone, of those which the Roman Empire had not bred, stood the strain and preserved the continuity of Christian tradition. That nation was Ireland. This is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions after the original question. What was the Church in the Empire of Rome? A true answer to this original question gives the nature of that capital revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity and attained to a full consciousness of itself. An answer to the other question, what was the Reformation, begins to explain our modern ill-ease. A true answer to the question, what was the Reformation, is of such vast importance because it is only when we grasp what the Reformation was that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the united body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a wound. The abomination of industrialism, the loss of land and capital by the people in great districts of Europe, the failure of modern discovery to serve the end of man, the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and destruction, till the dead are now counted in tens of millions. The increasing chaos and misfortune of society. All these attach one to the other, each falls into its place and a hundred smaller phenomena as well. When we appreciate as today we can the nature and the magnitude of that fundamental catastrophe. It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to its end and that though those now living will not live to see it, Christendom may enter into a convalescence, may at last forget the fever and be restored. With that I am not here concerned. It is my business only to explain that storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago and within a century brought Christendom to shipwreck. The true causes are hidden, for they were spiritual. In proportion as in historical matter is of import to humankind. In that proportion does it spring not from apparent, let alone material causes, but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit. To pretend an examination of the secret springs once the human mind is fed is futile. The greater the affair the more directly does it proceed from unseen sources which the theologian may catalog, the poet, see and vision, the philosopher explain, but with which positive external history cannot deal and which the mere historian cannot handle. It is the function of history to present the outward thing as a witness might have seen it and to show the reader as much as the spectator could have seen, illuminated indeed by a knowledge of the past and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events. The historian answers the question what was, this or that. To the question why was it, if it be the spiritual order, as are all major things, the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes than those of historic science. It is the neglect of this canon which makes Barron so much work upon the past. Read Gibbons attempt to account for why the Catholic Church arose in the Roman Empire and mark his empty failure. Footnote. It is true that Gibbons was ill-equipped for his task because he lacked historical imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a past age. He could not enter into any mood save that of his master Voltaire. But it is not only true of Gibbons that he fails to explain the great revolution of AD 29-304. No one attempting that explanation has succeeded. It was not of this world. Mark also saw how all examination of the causes of the French revolution are colored by something small and degraded, quite out of proportion to that stupendous crusade which transformed the modern world. The truth is that the historian can only detail those causes, largely material, all evident and positive, which lie within his province and such causes are quite insufficient to explain the full result. Were I here writing why the reformation came, my reply would not be historic but mystic. I should say that it came from outside mankind, but that would be to affirm without the hope of proof, and only in the confidence that all attempts at positive proof were contemptible. Luckily, I am not concerned and so profound an issue, but only in the presentation of the thing as it was. Upon this, I now set out. With the close of the Middle Ages, two phenomena appeared side by side in the Society of Europe. The first was an aging and growing fatigue of the simple medieval scheme. The second was a very rapid accretion of technical power. As to the first I have suggested, it is no more than a suggestion, that the medieval scheme of society, though much the best fitted to our race and much the best expression which it has yet found, though especially productive of happiness, which here and after is the end of man, was not properly provided with instruments of survival. Its science was too imperfect, its institutions too local, though its philosophy was the widest ever framed and the most satisfying to the human intelligence. Whatever be the reason, that society did rapidly grow old. Its every institution grew formal or debased. The guilds from two cooperative partnerships for a proper distribution of the means of production and for the prevention of a proletariat with its vile cancer of capitalism tended to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of Christian Europe, the village showed faint signs that it might become an oligarchy of privileged farmers with some land and less men at their orders. The monastic orders were tainted in patches and down Europe with worldiness, with an abandonment of their strict rule and occasionally with vice. Civil government grew befogged with tradition and with complex rules. All manner of theatrical and false trappings began to deform society, notably the exaggeration of heraldry and a riot of symbolism of which very soon no one could make head or tail. The temporal and visible organization of the church did not escape in such a welter. The lethargy, avarice and routine from which that organization suffered has been both grossly exaggerated and set out of perspective. A wild picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But in an agree the temporal organization of the church had decayed at the close of the Middle Ages. It was partly too much a taking of things for granted, a conviction that nothing could really upset the unity of Europe, partly the huge concentration of wealth in clerical hands which proceeded from the new economic activity all over Europe, coupled with the absolute power of the clergy in certain centers and the universal economic function of Rome. Partly a popular loss of faith. All these between them helped to do the business. At any rate, the evil was there. All institutions, says Machiavelli, must return to their origins, or they fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of United Europe, breaking out here and there sporadic attempts to revivify the common life, especially upon its spiritual side by a return to the primitive communal enthousiasms in which religion necessarily has its historical origins. This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it remarkable that each sporadic and spontaneous outburst should have its own taint or vice or false color. What was remarkable, and what made the period unique in the whole history of Christendom, save for the Aryan flood, was the incapacity of the external organization of the church at the moment to capture the spiritual discontent and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of which these errors were the manifestation. In a slower time, the external organization of the church would have absorbed and regulated the new things, good and evil. It would have rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn. It would have canalized the exaltations. It would have humanized the discoveries. But things were moving at a rate more and more rapid. The whole society of Western Christendom raced from experience to experience. It was flooded with the newly founded manuscripts of antiquity, with the new discoveries of unknown continents, with new commerce, printing, and in effect perhaps rather than a cause, the complete rebirth of painting, architecture, sculpture, and all the artistic expression of Europe. In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted return to early religious enthusiasm were not digested and were not captured. The spiritual hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not exposed to the solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient indignation. They were therefore neither withered nor eradicated, for the spirit had grown old. The great movement of the spirit in Europe was repressed, haphazard and quite as much haphazard encouraged, but there seemed no one corporate force present throughout Christendom which would persuade, encourage, and command. Even the papacy, the core of our unity, was shaken by long division and intrigue. Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of special heresies the business was local, peculiar, and contemptible. Wycliffe, for instance, was no more the morning star of the Reformation than Catherine of Braganza's Tangier Dowery, let us say, was the morning star of the modern English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of men who were theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society and morals, each with his special metaphysic of the sacrament, each with his system. Such men have always abounded, they abound today. Some of Wycliffe's extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen, later, to have held. Others, such as his theory that you could not own land unless you were in a state of grace, were of the opposite extreme to Protestantism. And so it is with the whole lot, and there were hundreds of them. There was no common theory, no common feeling in the various reactions against a corrupted ecclesiastical authority, which marked the end of the Middle Ages. There was nothing the least like what we call Protestantism today. Indeed, that spirit and mental color does not appear until a couple of generations after the opening of the Reformation itself. What there was was a widespread discontent and exasperated friction against the existing rigid and yet deeply decayed temporal organization of religious affairs, and in their uneasy fretting against that unworthy rule. The various centers of irritation put up now one startling theory which they knew would annoy the official church, now another, perhaps the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied something as old as Europe, such as the right to property. Now a new piece of usage or discipline, such as communion in one kind. Now a partial regional rule, such as celibacy. Someone stark mad. Others, at the contrary extreme, did no more than expose false relics. A general social ill ease was the parent of all these sporadic heresies. Many had elaborate systems, but none of these systems was a true creed. That is, motive. No one of the outbursts had any philosophic driving power behind it at all, and each were no more than violent and blind reactions against a clerical authority which gave scandal and set up an intolerable strain. Shall I give an example? One of the most popular forms which the protest took was what I have just mentioned, a demand for communion in both kinds and for the restoration of what was in many places ancient custom, the drinking from the cup after the priest. Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation against external organization of the church was the power at work? Could any point have less to do with the fundamentals of the faith? Of course, as an implication of false doctrine as that the priesthood is not in order, or that the presence of our Lord is not in both species, it had its importance. But in itself, how trivial a kick? Why should anyone desire the cup, save to mark dissension from established custom? The end of section 31 section 32 Europe and the Faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach section 32 chapter 8 concluded. Here is another example. Promenade among the later expressions of discontent, you have the Edomites. Footnote, the rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Whitecliff and is, like his career, about 100 years previous to the Reformation proper. The sects are of various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling rapidly in numbers, kept their full doctrines for now 400 years. Others, like the Joanna South Cotites, hardly last a lifetime. Others, like the Modernists, a Decade or less. Others, like the Mormons, nearly a century. Their close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado in 1891, whose friends thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Whitecliff fights, certain members of the Edomites, until lately, survived in Austria. Who, among other tenants, rejected clothes upon the more solemn occasions of their ritual and went naked, raving maniacs. The whole business was a rough and tumble of protest against the breakdown of a social system, whose breakdown seemed the more terrible because it had been such a haven. Because it was, in essence, foundered upon the most intimate appetites of European men. The heretics were angry because they had lost their home. This very general picture omits Hus and the national movement for which he stood. It omits the Papal Sism, the Council of Constance, all the great facts of the 15th century on its religious side. I am concerned only with the presentation of the general character of the time, and that character was what I have described. An irrepressible, largely justified discontent, breaking out. A sort of chronic rash upon the skin of Christian Europe, which rash, the body of Christendom, could neither absorb nor cure. Now, at this point, and before we leave the 15th century, there is another historical feature which it is of the utmost importance to seize, if we are to understand what followed, for it was a feature common to all European thought, until a time long after the final establishment of permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature which nearly all historians neglect, and yet one manifests upon the reading of any contemporary expression. That feature is this. No one in the Reformation dreamt a divided Christendom to be possible. This flood of heretical movement was ecumenical. It was not peculiar to one race or climate or culture or nation. The numberless, uneasy innovators thought, even the wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a whole. They desired to affect the universal church and to change it and block. They had no local ambition. They stood for no particular blood or temperament. They sprang up everywhere, bred by the universal ill-ease of a society still universal. You were as likely to get an enthusiast declaring himself to be the Messiah in Seville as an enthusiast denying the real presence in Aberdeen. That fatal habit of reading into the past what we know of its future has in this matter most deplorably marred history and men, whether Protestant or Catholic, who are now accustomed to Protestantism, read Protestantism and the absurd idea of a local religion, a religion true in one place and untrue in another, into a time where the least instructed clown would have laughed in your face at such nonsense. The whole thing, the evil coupled with a quite ineffectual resistance to the evil, was a thing common to all Europe. It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or to recede, but this movement was destined to advance with devastating rapidity and on that account of what I have called the second factor of the Reformation, the very rapid accretion in technical power which marked the close of the Middle Ages. Printing, navigation, all-menturation, handling of metals and every material, all these took a sudden leap forward with the Renaissance. The revival of arts, that vast stirring of the later Middle Ages which promised to give us a restored antiquity, Christianized, which was burnt in the flame of a vile fanaticism and has left us nothing but ashes and incommissable selvage. Spiritual knowledge, the expansion of physical experience and technical skill, moving in the century before the Reformation at such a rate that a contemporary spiritual phenomena, if it advanced at all, was bound to advance very rapidly and this spiritually eruption in Europe came to a head just at the moment when the contemporary expansion of travel, of economic activity and of the revival of learning had also emerged in their full force. It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that the coalescing of the various forces of spiritual discontent and revolt began to be apparent. Before fifteen-thirty the general storm was to burst and the Reformation proper to be started on its way. But as a preliminary to that matter the reader should first understand how another and quite disconnected social development had prepared the way for the triumph of the reformers. This development was the advent of absolute government in civil affairs. Here and there in the long history of Europe there crops up in isolated accident, very striking, very effective of short duration. We have already seen that the Norman race was one of these. The irony in civil government, which accompanied the Reformation, was another. A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest and most enduring of historical things. Countless centuries of the old empires of the East were passed under such a claim. The Roman Empire was based upon it. The old Russian state was made by it. French society luxuriated in it for one magnificent century from the accession of Louis XIV till Fontenoy. It is the easiest and, when it works, the most prompt of all instruments. But the sense of an absolute civil government at the moment of the Reformation was something very different. It was a demand, an appetite, proceeding from the whole community, a worship of civil authority. It was deification of the state and of law. It was the adoration of the executive. This governs me, therefore I will worship it and do all it tells me. Such is the formula for the strange passion which has now and then seized great bodies of human beings intoxicated by splendor and by the vivifying effects of command. Like all manias, for it is a mania. This exaggerated passion is hardly comprehended once it is passed. Like all manias, while it is present, it overrides every other emotion. Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered such a mania. The free cities manifested that disease quite as much as the great monarchial states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the papal sovereign was then magnificent beyond all past parallel. In Geneva, Calvin was a god. In Spain, Charles and Philip governed two worlds without question. In England, the Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. Man might and did rebel against a particular government, but it was only to set up something equally absolute in its place. Not the form, but the fact of government was adored. I will not waste the reader's time in any discussion upon the causes of that astonishing political fever. It must suffice to say that for the moment it hypnotized the whole world. It would have been incomprehensible to the Middle Ages. It was incomprehensible to the 19th century. It wholly occupied the 16th, if we understand it. We largely understand what made the success of the reformation possible. Well then, the increasing disconsent of the masses against the decaying forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing irritation against the temporal government and the organization of the Church, came to a head just at that moment when civil government was worshipped as an awful and almost divine thing. According to such an atmosphere was launched the last, the strongest of the overt protests against the old social scheme, and in particular against the existing power of the papacy, especially upon its economic side. The name most prominently associated with a crisis is that of Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by birth, and speech, and one of those exuberant, sensual, rather inconsequential characters which so easily attract hearty friendships and which can never pretend to organization or command, though certainly to creative power. What he precisely meant or would do, no man could tell, least of all, himself. He was out for protest, and he floated on the crest of the general wave of change that he ever intended, nay, that he could ever have imagined the disruption of the European unity is impossible. Luther, a voice, no leader, was but one of many, had he never lived, the great bursting wave would have crashed onward much the same. One scholar after another, and these of every blood and from every part of Europe, joined in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic training to the newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride of life, of the logician to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl swept men of every type into the disruption. One thing only united them. They were all inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great names, which in the ultimate challenge refused to destroy and held to preserve, the greatest is that of Erasmus. Great names which even appear in the role of that of the Catholic martyrs, the Blessed Thomas Moore, is the greatest of these. Must here be counted with the names of men like the narrow Kelvin on the one hand, the large Reveille up on the other. Not one ardent mind in the first half of the 16th century, but was swept into the stream. All this would and must have been quieted in the process of time. The mass of Christendom would have settled back into unity, the populace would have felt instinctively the risk they ran of spoilation by the rich and powerful if the popular institutions of Christendom broke down. The masses would have all swung round to solidifying society after an upheaval. It is their function. We should have attained repose and Europe, united again, would have gone forward as she did after the rocking of four hundred years before, but for that other factor of which I have spoken. The passion which this eager creative moment felt for the absolute and civil government, that craving for the something godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne, or a national hymn. This it was which caught up and in the persons of particular men used the highest of the tide. Certain princes in the Germanys who had all of the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning of authority, befriended here one heirsark and there another. The very fact that the Pope of Rome stood for one of these absolute governments put other absolute governments against him. The wind of the business rose, it became a quarrel of sovereigns, and the sovereigns decided, and powerful usurping nobles or leaders decided the future of the herd. Two further characters appeared side by side in the earthquake that was breaking up Europe. The first was this. The tendency to fall away from European unity seemed more and more marked in those outer places which lay beyond the original limits of the old Roman Empire, and notably in the northern Netherlands and in northern Germany, where men easily submitted to the control of wealthy merchants and of hereditary landlords. The second was this, a profound distrust of the new movement, a reaction against it, a feeling that moral anarchy was too profitable to the rich and the coup-pidness, began at first in a dull, later in an angry way, to stir the masses of the populace throughout all Christendom. The stronger the old Latin sense of human equality was, the more the populace felt this, the more they instinctively conceived of the Reformation as something that would rob them of some ill-understood, but profound spiritual guarantee against slavery, exploitation, and oppression. There began a sort of popular grumbling against the reformers, who were now already systematic. Their rich patrons fell under the same suspicion. By the time the movement had reached ahead and by the time the central power of the church had been openly defied by the German princes, this protest took as in France and England and the Valley of the Rhone, the ancient seats of culture, a noise like the undertone of the sea before bad weather. In the outer Germanies it was not a defensive Christendom at all, but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere the populace stirred. A general observer cognizant of what was to come would have been certain at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose intelligently, the movement against the church and the civilization would come to nothing. The revolt elsewhere in half-barbaric Europe would come to no more than the lopping off of outer and insignificant things. The Baltic plain, sundry units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and the Pyrenees, which had suffered from lack of instruction and could easily be recovered. These would be affected. The outer parts which had never been within the pale of the Roman Empire might go, but the soul and intelligence of Europe would be kept sound, its general body would reunite, and Christendom would once more reappear whole and triumphant. It would have reconquered these outer parts at its leisure and Poland was a sure bastion. We should, within a century, have been ourselves once more Christian men. So it would have been, but for one master tragedy which changed the whole scheme of the four great remaining units of western civilization, Iberia, Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical moment, broke down by a tragic accident and lost continuity. It was hardly intended. It was a consequence of error much more than an act of will, but it had full effect. The breakdown of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the chief event of all. It made the reformation permanent. It confirmed a final division in Europe. By a curious accident, one province, extraneous to the Empire, Ireland, heroically preserved what the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies and Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of Britain and cut off by that loss from a direct succor, Ireland preserved the tradition of civilization. It must be my next business to describe the way in which Britain failed in the struggle, and at the hands of the King, and a little group of ever-richest men, such as the Howards among the Gentry, and the Cecils among the adventurers, changed for the worse the history of Europe. The end of Section 32, the end of Chapter 8, Section 33, Europe and the faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Grow Up and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach. Section 33, Chapter 9, The Defection of Britain. One thing stands out in the fate of modern Europe, the profound cleavage due to the reformation. One thing made that wound, it was almost mortal, so deep and lasting, the failure of one ancient province of civilization, and one only, to keep the faith. This province whereof I write, Britain. The capital event, the critical moment in the great struggle of the faith against the reformation, was the defection of Britain. It is a point which the modern historian, who is still normally anti-Catholic, does not and cannot make. Yet the defection of Britain from the faith of Europe 300 years ago is certainly the most important historical event in the last thousand years. Between the saving of Europe from the barbarians and these our own times. It is perhaps the most important historical event since the triumph of the Catholic Church under Constantine. Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they would be seen by an impartial observer from some great distance in time or in space or in mental attitude. Let me put them as they would appear to one quite indifferent to and remote from the antagonists. To such an observer the history of Europe would be that of the great Roman Empire passing through the transformation I have described. Its mind first more and more restless, then more and more tending to certain conclusion, and that conclusion, the Catholic Church. To summarize what has gone before, the Catholic Church becomes by the fifth century, the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical of the Eastern Sism, which is of its nature perpetually subject to assault from within because it deals with matters not open to positive proof, from without because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites who are not of our civilization, are naturally its enemies. The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and the unity of this soul were preserved from generation to generation, declined in its body during the Dark Ages, say up to and rather beyond the year 1000. It became coarsened and less in its material powers. It lost its central organization, the Imperial Court, which was replaced first by provincial military leaders or kings, then later by a mass of local lordships jumbled into more or less national groups. In building, in writing, in cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculpture, the Roman Empire of the West, which is our selves, forgot all but the fundamentals of its arts, but it expanded so far as its area is concerned. A whole belt of barbaric Germany received the Roman influence, baptism, and the mass. With the creed that came to these outer parts, reading and writing, building in brick and stone, all the material essentials of our civilization. And what is characteristic of that culture? The power of thinking more clearly. It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian reached longer to 10 degrees east, and the Scandinavian peninsula. But a thousand years after our Lord, it has reached even these. And there remains between the unbroken tradition of our civilization in the West, and the systematic but Christian civilization of the Greek Church, nothing but a belt of paganism from the corner of the Baltic southward, which belt is lessened year after year by the armed efforts and the rational dominance of Latin culture. Our Christian and Roman culture proceeds continuously eastward, mastering the uncouth. After this general picture of a civilization, dominating and mastering in its material decline, a vastly greater area than it had known in the height of its material excellence, this sort of expansion in the dark, the impartial observer whom we have supposed, would remark a sort of dawn. That dawn came with the 11th century, 1000 to 1100. The Norman race, the sudden invigoration of the papacy, the new victories in Spain, at last the first crusade, mark a turn in the tide of material decline, and that tide works very rapidly towards a new and intense civilization, which we call that of the Middle Ages, that high renewal which gives Europe a second and most marvelous life, which is a late reflowering of Rome, but of Rome revivified with the virtue and the humor of the faith. The second thing that the observer would note in so general a picture, would be the peculiar exception formed within it by the group of large islands lying to the north and west of the continent. Of these the larger, Britain, had been a true Roman province, but very early in the process, in the middle and the end of the 5th century, it had on the first assault of the barbarians been cut off for more than the lifetime of a man. Its gate had been held by the barbarian, then it was re-christianized almost as thoroughly as though even its eastern part had never lost the authority of civilization. The mission of St. Augustine recaptured Britain, but Britain is remarkable in the history of civilization for the fact that alone of civilized lands it needed to be recaptured at all. The western island of the two, the smaller island, Ireland, presented another exception. It was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German barbarians of the continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gaelic armies forced it totally to accept baptism. It was not savage like the Germanies. It was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass of shifting tribes. It was a nation. But in a most exceptional fashion, though already possessed and perhaps because so possessed of a high pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the lifetime of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit of the creed. The civilization of the Roman West was accepted by Ireland not as a command or as an influence, but as a discovery. Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the north and west of the continent remain in the observer's mind, and he will note when the shock of what is called the Reformation comes, new phenomena attaching to those islands, cognate to their early history. Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present in the pages that follow. What we call the Reformation was essentially the reaction of the barbaric, the ill-tutored, and the isolated places external to the old and deep-rooted Roman civilization against the influences of that civilization. The Reformation was not racial, even if there were such a physical thing as a teutonic race, and there is nothing of the kind. The Reformation shows no coincidence with that race. The Reformation is simply the turning back of that tide of Roman culture which for five hundred years had steadily set forward and had progressively dominated the insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the confused by the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by the conquered against a moral and intellectual superiority which offended them. The Slavs of Bohemia joined in that sincere protest of the lately and insufficiently civilized, quite as strongly as and even earlier than the vague peoples of the sandy heaths along the Baltic. The Scandinavian, physically quite different from these tribes of the Baltic plain, comes into the game. Wretched villages in the Mark Brandenburg, as Slavonic in type, as the villages of Bohemia, revolt as naturally against exalted and difficult mystery as do the isolated villages of the Swedish valleys or the isolated rustics of the Sivans or the Alps. The revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore enjoying the sincere motive which accompanies such risings, but deprived of unity and of organizing power. There has never been a fixed Protestant creed. The common factor has been and is reaction against the traditions of Europe. Now the point to seize is this. Inimical as such a revolt was to the souls or to speak upon the mere historical plain to civilization, bad as it was that the tide of culture should have begun to ebb from the far regions which it had once so beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is the reaction against the unity, the discipline, and the clear thought of Europe, would never have counted largely in human affairs had it been confined to the external fringe of the civilized world. That fringe would probably have been reconquered. The inherent force attaching to reality and to the stronger mind should have led to its recovery. The northern Germanies were as a fact reconquered when Richelieu stepped in and saved them from their southern superiors, but perhaps it would not have been reconquered. Perhaps it would have lapsed quite soon into its original paganism. At any rate, European culture would have continued undivided and strong without these outer regions. Unfortunately, a far worse thing happened. Europe was rent and has remained divided. The disaster was accomplished through forces I will now describe. The end of Section 33. Section 34, Europe and the Faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hiller Bellach. Section 34, Chapter 9, continued. Though the revolt was external to the foundations of Europe, to the ancient provinces of the empire, yet an external consequence of that revolt arose within the ancient provinces. It may be briefly told, the wealthy took advantage, within the heart of civilization itself, of this external revolt against order. For it is always to the advantage of the wealthy to deny general conceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular philosophy, and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of the human will, organized throughout the whole community. It is always in the nature of a great wealth to be insanely tempted, though it should know from active experience how little wealth can give, to push on to more and more domination over the bodies of men, and it can do so best by attacking fixed social restraints. The landed squires then, and the great merchants, powerfully supported by the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt that, within the reformation, their opportunity had come. The largest fortune-holders, the nobles, the merchants of the ports, and local capitals, even in Gaul, that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human life, licked their lips. Everywhere in northern Italy, in southern Germany upon the Rhine, wherever wealth had congested in a few hands, the chance of breaking with the old morals was the most powerful appeal to the wealthy, and therefore throughout Europe, even in its most ancient seats of civilization, the outer barbarian had allies. These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe from within, had no excuse. Theirs was not any dumb, instinctive revolt like that of the outer Germanies, the outer Slavs, nor the neglected mountain valleys, against order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences that clear thought brings. They were in no way subject to enthusiasm for the vaguer emotions roused by the gospel, or for the more turgid excitements derivable from Scripture, and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. They were on the make. The rich in Montpelier and Nimes, a knot of them in Rome itself, many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance, supported the strong, inflamed critics of clerical misliving, and even winked solemnly at the lunatic inspirations of obscure men and women filled with visions. They did all these things as though their objective was religious change, but their true object was money. One group and one alone of the European nations was too recently filled with combat against vile non-Christian things to accept any parley with this anti-Christian turmoil. That unit was the Iberian Peninsula. It is worthy of remark, especially on the part of those who realize that the sword fits the hand of the Church, and that Catholicism is never more alive than when it is in arms. I say this worthy remark by these, that Spain and Portugal, through the very greatness of an experience still recent when the Reformation broke, lost the chance of combat. There came indeed from Spain, but from the Basque nation there, that weapon of steel, the Society of Jesus, which Saint Ignatius formed, and which surgical and military saved the faith, and therefore Europe. But the Iberian Peninsula, rejecting as one whole and with contempt and with abhorrency, and rejecting rightly any consideration of revolt, even among its rich men, thereby lost its opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain would be the stronger today had it fallen to her task, as it did to the general populace of Gaul, to come to hand grips with the Reformation at home, to test it, to know it, to dominate it, to bend the muscles upon it, and to reemerge triumphant from the struggle. I say then that there was present in the field against the Catholic Church a powerful ally for the Reformers, and that ally was the body of immoral rich, who hoped to profit by a general break in the popular organization of society. The atheism and the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality, the scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance, answered. Over the heads of the Catholic populace the call of barbarism. The iconoclasts of greed joined hands with the iconoclasts of blindness and rage and with the iconoclasts of academic pride. Nevertheless even with such allies barbarianism would have failed the Reformation with today be but an historical episode without fruit. Europe would still be Christendom had not there been added the decisive factor of all which was the separation of Britain. Now how did Britain go and why was the loss of Britain of such capital importance? The loss of Britain was of such capital importance because Britain alone of those who departed was Roman and therefore capable of endurance and increase. And why did Britain fail that great ordeal? It is a question hard to answer. The province of Britain was not a very great one in area or in numbers when the Reformation broke out. It was indeed very wealthy for its size as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth does not account for the fundamental importance of the loss of Britain to the faith in the 16th century. The real point was that one and only one of the old Roman provinces with their tradition of civilization, letters persuasive power, multiple soul and one and only one went over to the barbaric enemy and gave that enemy its aid. That one was Britain and the consequences of its defection was the perpetuation and extension of an increasingly evil division within the structure of the West. To say that Britain lost hold of tradition in the 16th century because Britain is Teutonic is to talk nonsense. It is to explain a real problem by inventing unreal words. Britain is not Teutonic nor does the word Teutonic itself mean anything definite. To say that Britain revolted because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than in any ancient province of Europe is to know nothing of history. The seeds of revolt were in her then as they were in every other community as they must be in every individual who may find any form of discipline of burden which she is tempted in a moment of disorder to lay down. But to pretend that England and the lowlands of Scotland to pretend that the province of Britain in our general civilization was more ready for the change than the infected portions of southern Gaul or the humming towns of northern Italy or the intense life of Hanalt or Brabant is to show great ignorance of the European past. Well then how did Britain break away? I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next page or so. I believe it to be of capital value in explaining the general history of Europe and I know it to be hardly ever told if told at all told only in fragments. England went because of three things. First her squires had already become too powerful. In other words the economic power of a small class of wealthy men had grown on account of peculiar insular conditions greater than was healthy for the community. Secondly England was more than any other part of Western Europe save the Batavia in March. Footnote I mean Belgium that frontier of Roman influence upon the lower Rhine which so happily held out for the faith and just preserved it. A series of markets and of ports a place of very active cosmopolitan influence in which new opportunities for the corrupt new messages of the enthusiastic were frequent. In the third place that curious phenomena on which I dwelt in the last chapter the superstitious attachment of citizens to the civil power to awe of and devotion to the monarch was exaggerated in England as nowhere else. Now put these three things together especially the first and third for the second was both of minor importance and more superficial and you will appreciate why England fell. One small to wealthy class tainted with the atheism that always creeps into wealth long and securely enjoyed was beginning to possess too much of English land. It would take far too long to describe here what the process had been. It is true that the absolute monopoly of the soil the gripping and the strangling of the populace by landlords is a purely Protestant development. Nothing of that kind had happened or would have been conceived of as possible in pre-reformation England. But still something like a quarter of the land or a little less had already before the reformation got into the full possession of one small class which had also begun to enroach upon the judiciary in some measure to supplant the populace in local lawmaking and quite appreciably to supplant the king in central lawmaking. The end of section 34 section 35 Europe and the faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the faith by Hilaire Bellach. Section 35 chapter 9 continued. Let me not be misunderstood. The England of the 15th century the England of the generation just before the reformation was not an England of squires it was not an England of landlords it was still an England of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old burrows nearly always show a great number of freeholds. The process by which the later English aristocracy now a plutocracy had grown up was but in germ before the reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted but for the reformation it would not have matured. Sooner or later a popular revolt had the faith revived would have killed the growing usurpation of the wealthy. But the germ was there and the reformation coming just as it did both was helped by the rich and helped them. The slow acquisition of considerable power over the courts of law and over the soil of the country by an oligarchy imperfect though that acquisition was as yet already presented just after 1500 a predisposing condition to the disease. It may be urged that if the English people had fought the growing power of the squires more vigorously the squires would not have mastered them as they did during and on account of the religious revolution. Possibly and the enemies of the English people are quick to suggest that some native sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing down of the social balance in favor of the rich. But no one who can even pretend to know medieval England will say that the English consciously desired or willingly permitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful foreign wars, dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of national consciousness which consciousness had centered in the wealthier classes. All these combined to let the evil in without warning. And on the eve of the reformation a rich everichess class was already empowered to act in Britain. Ready to grasp as all the everichess classes were throughout the western world at the opportunity to revolt against the faith which has ever suspected constrained and reformed the tyranny of wealth. Now I enter this strange but at that time very real worship of government as fetish. This spirit did not really strengthen the government far from it. A superstition never strengthens its object nor even makes of the supposed power of that object a reality. But though it did not give real power to the long intention of the prince, it gave to the momentary word of the prince a fantastic power. In such a combination of circumstances, nascent oligarchy, but the prince worshiped, you get holding the position of prince Henry VIII, a thorough tutor that is a man weak almost to the point of irresponsibility where his passions were concerned. Violent from that fundamental weakness which in the absence of opposition ruins things as effectively as any strength. No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt against civilization than was the tutor family. Upon the contrary, Henry VII, his son and his two granddaughters, if anything, exceeded in their passion for the old order of the western world. But at the least sign of resistance, Mary, who burnt Elizabeth, who intrigued Henry, their father, who pillaged Henry, their grandfather, who robbed and saved, were won. To these characters slight resistance was a spur with strong manifold opposition. They were quite powerless to deal. Their minds did not grip, or their minds though acute were not large, but their passions shot. And one may compare them when their passions of pride, of lust, of jealousy, of doting, of avarice, or of facile power were aroused to veheminent children. Never was there a ruling family less statesmen like. Never won less full of stuff and of creative power. Henry urged by an imperious young woman who had gained control of him, desired a divorce from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, grown old for him. The papal court temporized with him and opposed him. He was incapable of negotiation and still more incapable of foresight. His energy, which was of an Arabian sort, blasted through the void, because a void was there. None would then withstand the prince. Of course, it seemed to him no more than one of these recurrent quarrels with the mundane power of Rome, which all kings and saints among them had engaged in for many hundred years. All real powers thus conflict in all times. But had he known it, and he did not know it, though the moment was fatally an opportunity for playing that game. Henry never meant to break prominently with the unity of Christendom. A disruption of that unity was probably inconceivable to him. He meant to exercise pressure. All his acts from the decisive proclamation of September 19th, 1530 onwards, prove it. But the moment was the moment of a breaking point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, wondered into disaster without knowing what the fullness of the moment was. He was devout, especially to the blessed sacrament. He kept the faith for himself, and he tried hard to keep it for others. But having lost unity, he let in what he loathed. Not so long as he lived could those doctrines of the reformers triumph here. But he had compromised with their spirit, and at his death, a strong minority, perhaps a tenth of England, more of London, was already hostile to the creed. It was the same thing with the suppression of the monasteries. Henry meant no effect on religion by that loot. He nonetheless destroyed it. He intended to enrich the crown. He ruined it. In the matter of their financial endowment, an economic crisis produced by the unequal growth of economic powers had made the monastic foundation ripe for resettlement. Religious orders were here wealthy without reason. Poor in spirit and numbers, but rich in land. There impoverished without reason, rich in popularity and spiritual power, but poor in land. The dislocation, which all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic side through the mere efflux of time, inclined every government in Europe to a resettlement of religious endowment. But Henry did not resettle. He plundered and broke. He used the contemporary idolatry of executive power, just as much at Reading or in the Black Fires of London, where unthinking and immediate popular feeling was with him as a Glastonbury, where it was against him as in Yorkshire, where it was in arms, as in Galway, where it was against him as a Glastonbury, as in Yorkshire, where it was in arms, as in Galway, where there was no bearing with it at all. There was no largeness in him, nor any comprehension of complexity. And when, in this Jacobian unexampled way, he had simply got rid of that which he should have restored and transformed. Of what effect was that vast act of spoilation? It paralyzed the church. It ultimately brought down the monarchy. From a fourth to a third of the economic power over the means of production in England, which have invested top heavily in the religious foundations, here far too rich, there far too poor, Henry got by one enormous confiscation, yet he made no permanent addition to the wealth of the crown. On the contrary, he started its decline. The land passed by an instinctive multiple process, but very rapidly, to the already powerful class which had begun to dominate the villages. Then when it was too late, the tutors attempted to stem the tide, but the thing was done. Upon the indifference which is always common to a society long and profoundly Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or having conquered heresy ignorant at any rate of struggle for the faith, two ardent minorities converged. The small minority of confused enthusiasts who really did desire what they believed to be a restoration of primitive Christianity. The much larger minority of men now grown almost invincibly powerful in the economic sphere. The squires, 20 years after Henry's death, had come to possess through the ruin of religion, something like half the land of England. With the rapidity of a fungus growth, the new wealth spread over the desolation of the land. The enriched captured both the universities, all the courts of justice, most of the public schools. They won their great civil war against the crown. Within a century after Henry's folly, they had established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy and central government of England. The impoverished crown resisted in vain. They killed one embarrassed king, Charles I, and they set up his son, Charles II, as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their victory over the crown, they and the capitalists who have sprung from their avarice and their philosophy, and largely from their very loins, had been completely masters of England. The end of section 35. Section 36, Europe and the Faith. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Bellach. Section 36, Chapter 9, concluded. Here the reader may say what this large national movement to be interpreted as the work of such minorities, a few thousand squires and merchants begging a few more thousand enthusiasts, changed utterly the mass of England. Yes, to interpret it otherwise is to read history backwards. It is to think that England then was what England later became. There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any illusion to which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past in the light of the recent past, to think the process of one towards the other inevitable, to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable process independent of the human will, still suits the materialist pantheism of our time. There is an inherent tendency in all men to this fallacy of reading themselves into the past, and of thinking their own mood of consummation at what's excellent and necessary, and most men who write of these things imagine a vaguely Protestant Tudor England growing consciously Protestant in the England of the Stuart's. That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a combined effort of reading and of imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though you did not know what Wednesday was to be, and then to describe what Tuesday was. England did not lose the faith in 1550 to 1620 because she was Protestant then, rather she is Protestant now because she then lost the faith. Put yourself into the shoes of a 16th century Englishman in the midst of the Reformation and what do you perceive? A society holy Catholic in tradition lacks and careless in Catholic practice, irritated or enlivened here and there by a few furious preachers or by a few enthusiastic scholars at once devoted to and in terror of the civil government, intensely national in all the roots and traditions of its civilization, Roman impatient of the disproportion of society and in particular of economic disproportion in the religious aspect of society because the religious function by the very definition of Catholicism by its very creed should be the first to redress tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes first a mania for his king, next a violent economic revolution which in many parts can be made to seem an approach to justice, finally a national appeal of the strongest kind against the enroaching power of Spain. When the work was done by say 1620 the communication between England and those parts of the ancient west which were still furiously resisting the storm was cut. No spiritual force could move England after the armada and its effect save what might arise spontaneously in the many excited men who still believed, they continue to believe it for 50 years, that the whole Church of Christ had gone wrong for centuries, that its original could be restored and that personal revelations were granted them for their guidance. These visionaries were the reformers. To these souls still a thirst for spiritual guidance turned, they were a minority even at the end of the 16th century, the last years of Elizabeth, but they were a minority full of initiative and of action. With the turn of the century 1600 to 1620 the last men who could remember Catholic training were very old or dead. The new generation could turn to nothing but the new spirit. For authority it could find nothing definite but a printed book, a translation of the Hebrew scriptures. For teachers nothing but this minority, the reformers. That minority though remaining a minority leavened and at last controlled the whole nation. By the first third of the 17th century Britain was utterly cut off from the unity of Christendom and its new character was sealed. The Catholic faith was dead. The governing class remained largely indifferent as it still is to religion, yet it remained highly cultured. The populace drifted here into complete indifference, there into orgiistic forms of worship. The middle class went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbarism of the outer Germanes permeated it and transformed it. The closer reasoned, far more perverted and harder French heresy of Kelvin partly deflected the current and a whole new society was formed and launched. That was the English Reformation. Its effect upon Europe was to pendus. For though England was cut off, England was still England. You could not destroy in a Roman province the great traditions of municipality and letters. It was as though a phalanx of trained troops had crossed the frontier in some border war and turned against their former comrades. England lent and as from that day continuously lent the strength of a great civilized tradition to forces whose original initiative was directed against European civilization and its tradition. The loss of Britain was the one great wound in the body of the Western world. It is not yet healed. Yet all this, while that other island of the group drew the northwest of Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed civilization as were the outer Germanes, but had spontaneously accepted the faith, presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss of Britain which had been a Roman province, the faith, when the smoke of battle cleared off, could discover the astonishing loyalty of Ireland. And over against this exceptional province, Britain now lost to the faith, lay an equally exceptional and unique outer part which had never been a Roman province, yet which now remain true to the tradition of Roman men. It balanced the map like a counterweight. The efforts to destroy the faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty, any persecution in any part or time of the world. They have failed. As I cannot explain why they have failed, so I shall not attempt to explain how and why the faith in Ireland was saved when the faith in Britain went under. I do not believe it capable of an historic explanation. It seems to me a phenomena essentially miraculous in character, not generally attached as are all historical phenomena, to the general and divine purpose that governs our large political events, but directly and specially attached. It is of great significance how great man will be able to see many years hence when another definite battle is joined between the forces of the church and her opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect integrity and has kept serene without internal reactions and without their consequent disturbances the soul of Europe, which is the Catholic Church. I have now nothing left to set down, but the conclusion of this disaster, its spiritual result, an isolation of the soul, its political result, a consequence of the spiritual, the prodigious release of energy, the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.