[Sidenote: Writings of Hippocrates.]

Of the works attributed to Hippocrates, many are doubtless the production of his family, his descendants, or his pupils. The inducements to literary forgery in the times of the Ptolemies, who paid very high prices for books of reputation, have been the cause of much difficulty among critics in determining such questions of authorship. The works indisputably written by Hippocrates display an extent of knowledge answering to the authority of his name; his vivid descriptions have never been excelled, if indeed they have ever been equalled. The Hippocratic face of the dying is still retained in our medical treatises in the original terms, without any improvement.

[Sidenote: His opinions.]

In his medical doctrine, Hippocrates starts with the postulate that the body is composed of the four elements. From these are formed the four cardinal humours. He thinks that the humours are liable to undergo change; that health consists in their right constitution and proper adjustment as to quantity; disease, in their impurities and inequalities; that the disordered humours undergo spontaneous changes or coction, a process requiring time, and hence the explanation of critical days and critical discharges. The primitive disturbance of the humours he attributed to a great variety of causes, chiefly to the influence of physical circumstances, such as heat, cold, air, water. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not impute all the afflictions of man to the anger of the gods. Along with those influences of an external kind, he studied the special peculiarities of the human system, how it is modified by climate and manner of life, exhibiting different predispositions at different seasons of the year. He believed that the innate heat of the body varies with the period of life, being greatest in infancy and least in old age, and that hence morbific agents affect us with greater or less facility at different times. For this reason it is that the physician should attend very closely to the condition of those in whom he is interested as respects their diet and exercise, for thereby he is able not only to regulate their general susceptibility, but also to exert a control over the course of their diseases.

Referring diseases in general to the condition or distribution of the humours, for he regards inflammation as the passing of blood into parts not previously containing it, he considers that so long as those liquids occupy the system in an unnatural or adulterated state, disease continues; but as they ferment or undergo coction, various characteristic symptoms appear, and, when their elaboration is completed, they are discharged by perspiration or other secretions, by alvine dejections, etc. But where such a general relief of the system is not accomplished, the peccant humours may be localized in some particular organ or special portion, and erysipelatous inflammation, mortification, or other such manifestations ensue. It is in aiding this elimination from the system that the physician may signally manifest his skill. His power is displayed much more at this epoch than by the control he can exert over the process of coction. Now may he invoke the virtues of the hellebores, the white and the black, now may he use elaterium. The critical days which answer to the periods of the process of coction are to be watched with anxiety, and the correspondence of the state of the patient with the expected condition which he ought to show at those epochs ascertained. Hence the physician may be able to predict the probable course of the disease during the remainder of its career, and gather true notions as to the practice it would be best for him to pursue to aid Nature in her operations.

[Sidenote: The character of his practice.]

It thus appears that the practice of medicine in the hands of Hippocrates had reference rather to the course or career of disease than to its special nature. Nothing more than this masterly conception is wanted to impress us with his surprizing scientific power. He watches the manner in which the humours are undergoing their fermenting coction, the phenomena displayed in the critical days, the aspect and nature of the critical discharges. He does not attempt to check the process going on, but simply to assist the natural operation.

When we consider the period at which Hippocrates lived, B.C. 400, and the circumstances under which he had studied medicine, we cannot fail to admire the very great advance he made. His merit is conspicuous in rejecting the superstitious tendency of his times by teaching his disciples to impute a proper agency to physical causes. He altogether discarded the imaginary influences then in vogue. For the gods he substituted, with singular felicity, Impersonal Nature. It was the interest of those who were connected with the temples of Aesculapius to refer all the diseases of men to supernatural agency; their doctrine being that every affliction should be attributed to the anger of some offended god, and restoration to health most certainly procured by conciliating his power. So far, then, as such interests were concerned, any contradiction of those doctrines, any substitution of the material for the supernatural, must needs have met with reprehension. Yet such opposition seems in no respect to have weighed with this great physician, who developed his theory and pursued his practice without giving himself any concern in that respect. He bequeathed an example to all who succeeded him in his noble profession, and taught them not to hesitate in encountering the prejudices and passions of the present for the sake of the truth, and to trust for their reward in the just appreciation of a future age.

[Sidenote: His doctrine is truly scientific.]

With such remarks we may assert that the medical philosophy of Hippocrates is worthy of our highest admiration, since it exhibits the scientific conditions of deduction and induction. The theory itself is compact and clear; its lineaments are completely Grecian. It presents, to one who will contemplate it with due allowance for its times, the characteristic quick-sightedness, penetration, and power of the Greek mind, fully vindicating for its author the title which has been conferred upon him by his European successors—the Father of Medicine—and perhaps inducing us to excuse the enthusiastic assertion of Galen, that we ought to reverence the words of Hippocrates as the voice of God.

[Sidenote: The school of Cnidos.]

[Sidenote: Is destroyed by Constantine.]

[Sidenote: Classes of physicians.]

The Hippocratic school of Cos found a rival in the school of Cnidos, which offered not only a different view of the nature of disease, but also taught a different principle for its cure. The Cnidians paid more particular attention to the special symptoms in individual cases, and pursued a less active treatment, declining, whenever they could, a resort to drastic purgatives, venesection, or other energetic means. As might be expected, the professional activity of these schools called into existence many able men, and produced many excellent works: thus Philiston wrote on the regimen for persons in health; Diocles on hygiene and gymnastics; Praxagoras on the pulse, showing that it is a measure of the force of disease. The Asclepion of Cnidos continued until the time of Constantine, when it was destroyed along with many other pagan establishments. The union between the priesthood and the profession was gradually becoming less and less close; and, as the latter thus separated itself, divisions or departments arose in it, both as regards subjects, such as pharmacy, surgery, etc., and also as respects the position of its cultivators, some pursuing it as a liberal science, and some as a mere industrial occupation. In those times, as in our own, many who were not favoured with the gifts of fortune were constrained to fall into the latter ranks. Thus Aristotle, than whom few have ever exerted a greater intellectual influence upon humanity, after spending his patrimony in liberal pursuits, kept an apothecary's shop at Athens. Aristotle the druggist, behind his counter, selling medicines to chance customers, is Aristotle the great writer, whose dictum was final with the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. As a general thing, however, the medical professors were drawn from the philosophical class. Outside of these divisions, and though in all ages continually repudiated by the profession, yet continually hovering round it, was a host of impostors and quacks, as there will always be so long as there are weak-minded and shallow men to be deluded, and vain and silly women to believe.

[Sidenote: Egyptian medicine. The Museum.]

[Sidenote: Philadelphus founds medicine on anatomy.]

[Sidenote: He authorizes dissection and human vivisection.]

[Sidenote: Physicians of the Alexandrian school.]

When the Alexandrian Museum was originated by Ptolemy Philadelphus, its studies were arranged in four faculties—literature, mathematics, astronomy, medicine. These divisions are, however, to be understood comprehensively: thus, under the faculty of medicine were included such subjects as natural history. The physicians who received the first appointments were Cleombrotus, Herophilus, and Erasistratus; among the subordinate professors was Philo-Stephanus, who had charge of natural history, and was directed to write a book on Fishes. The elevated ideas of the founder cannot be better illustrated than by the manner in which he organized his medical school. It was upon the sure basis of anatomy. Herophilus and his colleagues were authorized to resort to the dissection of the dead, and to ascertain, by that only trustworthy method, the true structure of the human body. The strong hand of Ptolemy resolutely carried out his design, though in a country where popular sentiment was strongly opposed to such practices. To touch a corpse in Egypt was an abomination. Nor was it only this great man's intention to ascertain the human structure; he also took measures to discover the mode in which its functions are carried forward, the manner in which it works. To this end he authorized his anatomists to make vivisections both of animals, and also of criminals who had been condemned to death, herein finding for himself that royal road in physiology which Euclid once told him, at a dinner in the Museum, did not exist in geometry, and defending the act from moral criticism by the plea that, as the culprits had already forfeited their lives to the law, it was no injury to make them serviceable to the interests of humanity. Herophilus had been educated at Cos; his pathological views were those known as humouralism; his treatment active, after the manner of Hippocrates, upon whose works he wrote commentaries. His original investigations were numerous; they were embodied, with his peculiar views, in treatises on the practice of medicine; on obstetrics; on the eye; on the pulse, which he properly referred to contractions of the heart. He was aware of the existence of the lacteals, and their anatomical relation to the mesenteric glands. Erasistratus, his colleague, was a pupil of Theophrastus and Chrysippus: he, too, cultivated anatomy. He described the structure of the heart, its connexions with the arteries and veins, but fell into the mistake that the former vessels were for the conveyance of air, the latter for that of blood. He knew that there are two kinds of nerves, those of motion and those of sensation. He referred all fevers to inflammatory states, and in his practice differed from the received methods of Hippocrates by observing a less active treatment.

[Sidenote: Improvements in surgery and pharmacy.]

By these physicians the study of medicine in Alexandria was laid upon the solid foundation of anatomy. Besides them there were many other instructors in specialties; and, indeed, the temple of Serapis was used for a hospital, the sick being received into it, and persons studying medicine admitted for the purpose of familiarizing themselves with the appearance of disease, precisely as in similar institutions at the present time. Of course, under such circumstances, the departments of surgery and pharmacy received many improvements, and produced many able men. Among these improvements may be mentioned new operations, for lithotomy, instruments for crushing calculi, for reducing dislocations, etc. The active commerce of Egypt afforded abundant opportunity for extending the materia medica by the introduction of a great many herbs and drugs.

[Sidenote: Decline of Alexandrian medicine.]

The medical school of Alexandria, which was thus originally based upon dissection, in the course of time lost much of its scientific spirit. But the influence of the first teachers may be traced through many subsequent ages. Thus Galen divides the profession in his time into Herophilians and Erasistratians. Various sects had arisen in the course of events, as the Dogmatists, who asserted that diseases can only be treated correctly by the aid of a knowledge of the structure and functions, the action of drugs, and the changes induced in the affected parts; they insisted, therefore, upon the necessity of anatomy, physiology, therapeutics, and pathology. They claimed a descent from Hippocrates. Their antagonists, the Empirics, ridiculed such knowledge as fanciful or unattainable, and relied on experience alone. These subdivisions were not limited to sects; they may also be observed under the form of schools. Even Erasistratus himself, toward the close of his life, through some dispute or misunderstanding, appears to have left the Museum and established a school at Smyrna. The study of the various branches of medicine was also pursued by others out of the immediate ranks of the profession. Mithridates, king of Pontus, thus devoted himself to the examination of poisons and the discovery of antidotes.

What a fall from this scientific medicine to the miracle-cure which soon displaced it! What a descent from Hippocrates and the great Alexandrian physicians to the shrines of saints and the monks!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Jewish physicians.]

To the foregoing sketch of the state of Greek medicine in its day of glory, I must add an examination of the same science among the Jews subsequently to the second century; it is necessary for the proper understanding of the origin of Saracen learning.

[Sidenote: Their emancipation from the supernatural.]

In philosophy the Jews had been gradually emancipating themselves from the influence of ancient traditions; their advance in this direction is shown by the active manner in which they aided in the development of Neo-platonism. After the destruction of Jerusalem all Syria and Mesopotamia were full of Jewish schools; but the great philosophers, as well as the great merchants of the nation, were residents of Alexandria. Persecution and dispersion, if they served no other good purpose, weakened the grasp of the ecclesiastic. Perhaps, too, repeated disappointments in an expected coming of a national temporal Messiah had brought those who were now advanced in intellectual progress to a just appreciation of ancient traditions. In this mental emancipation their physicians took the lead. For long, while their pursuits were yet in infancy, a bitter animosity had been manifested toward them by the Levites, whose manner of healing was by prayer, expiatory sacrifice, and miracle; or, if they descended to less supernatural means, by an application of such remedies as are popular with the vulgar everywhere. Thus, to a person bitten by a mad dog, they would give the diaphragm of a dog to eat. As examples of a class of men soon to take no obscure share in directing human progress may be mentioned Hannina, A.D. 205, often spoken of by his successors as the earliest of Jewish physicians; Samuel, equally distinguished as an astronomer, accoucheur, and oculist, the inventor of a collyrium which bore his name; Rab, an anatomist, who wrote a treatise on the structure of the body of man as ascertained by dissections, thereby attaining such celebrity that the people, after his death, used the earth of his grave as a medicine; Abba Oumna, whose study of insanity plainly shows that he gave a material interpretation to the national doctrine of possession by devils, and replaced that strange delusion by the scientific explanation of corporeal derangement. This honourable physician made it a rule never to take a fee from the poor, and never to make any difference in his assiduous attention between them and the rich. These men may be taken as a type of their successors to the seventh century, when the Oriental schools were broken up in consequence of the Arab military movements. In the Talmudic literature there are all the indications of a transitional state, so far as medicine is concerned; the supernatural seems to be passing into the physical, the ecclesiastical is mixed up with the exact: thus a rabbi may cure disease by the ecclesiastical operation of laying on of hands; but of febrile disturbances, an exact, though erroneous explanation is given, and paralysis of the hind legs of an animal is correctly referred to the pressure of a tumour on the spinal cord. Some of its aphorisms are not devoid of amusing significance: "Any disease, provided the bowels remain open; any kind of pain, provided the heart remain unaffected; any kind of uneasiness, provided the head be not attacked; all manner of evils, except it be a bad woman."

[Sidenote: The Arabs affiliate with them.]

[Sidenote: Rise of Jewish physicians to influence.]

[Sidenote: They found medical colleges,]

[Sidenote: and promote science and literature.]

At first, after the fall of the Alexandrian school, it was all that the Jewish physicians could do to preserve the learning that had descended to them. But when the tumult of Arabic conquest was over, we find them becoming the advisers of crowned heads, and exerting, by reason of their advantageous position, their liberal education, their enlarged views, a most important influence on the intellectual progress of humanity. Maser Djaivah, physician to the Khalif Moawiyah, was distinguished at once as a poet, a critic, a philosopher; Haroun, a physician of Alexandria, whose Pandects, a treatise unfortunately now lost, are said to have contained the first elaborate description of the small-pox and method of its treatment. Isaac Ben Emran wrote an original treatise on poisons and their symptoms, and others followed his example. The Khalif Al Raschid, who maintained political relations with Charlemagne by means of Jewish envoys, set that monarch an example by which indeed he was not slow to profit, in actively patronising the medical college at Djondesabour, and founding a university at Bagdad. He prohibited any person from practising medicine until after a satisfactory examination before one of those faculties. In the East the theological theory of disease and of its cure was fast passing away. Of the school at Bagdad, Joshua ben Nun is said to have been the most celebrated professor, the school itself actively promoting the translation of Greek works into Arabic—not alone works of a professional, but also those of a general kind. In this manner the writings of Plato and Aristotle were secured; indeed, it is said that almost every day camels laden with volumes were entering the gates of Bagdad. To add to the supply, the Emperor Michael III. was compelled by treaty to furnish Greek books. The result of this intellectual movement could be no other than a diffusion of light. Schools arose in Bassora, Ispahan, Samarcand, Fez, Morocco, Sicily, Cordova, Seville, Granada.

[Sidenote: Intermingling of magic and sorcery.]

[Sidenote: Dedication of portions of matter and time to the supernatural.]

[Sidenote: Origin of the week.]

Through the Nestorians and the Jews the Arabs thus became acquainted with the medical science of Greece and Alexandria; but to this was added other knowledge of a more sinister kind, derived from Persia, or perhaps remotely from Chaldee sources, the Nestorians having important Church establishments in Mesopotamia, and the Jews having been long familiar with that country; indeed, from thence their ancestors originally came. More than once its ideas had modified their national religion. This extraneous knowledge was of an astrological or magical nature, carried into practice by incantations, amulets, charms, and talismans. Its fundamental principle was that the planetary bodies exercise an influence over terrestrial things. As seven planets and seven metals were at that time known—the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, being the planets of astrology—a due allotment was made. Gold was held sacred to the sun, silver to the moon, iron to Mars, etc. Even the portions of time were in like manner dedicated; the seven days of the week were respectively given to the seven planets of astrology. The names imposed on those days, and the order in which they occur, are obviously connected with the Ptolemaic hypothesis of astronomy, each of the planets having an hour assigned to it in its order of occurrence, and the planet ruling first the hour of each day giving its name to that day. Thus arranged, the week is a remarkable instance of the longevity of an institution adapted to the wants of man. It has survived through many changes of empire, has forced itself on the ecclesiastical system of Europe, which, unable to change its idolatrous aspect, has encouraged the vulgar error that it owes its authenticity to the Holy Scriptures, an error too plainly betrayed by the pagan names that the days bear, and also by their order of occurrence.

These notions of dedicating portions of matter or of time to the supernatural were derived from the doctrine of a universal spirit or soul of the world, extensively believed in throughout the East. It underlies, as we have seen in Chapter III., all Oriental theology, and is at once a very antique and not unphilosophical conception. Of this soul the spirit of man was by many supposed to be a particle like a spark given off from a flame. All other things, animate or inanimate, brutes, plants, stones, nay, even natural forms, rivers, mountains, cascades, grottoes, have each an indwelling and animating spirit.

[Sidenote: Alexandrian necromancy.]

Amulets and charms, therefore, did not derive their powers from the material substance of which they consisted, but from this indwelling spirit. In the case of man, his immaterial principle was believed to correspond to his personal bodily form. Of the two great sects into which the Jewish nation had been divided, the Pharisees accepted the Assyrian doctrine; but the Sadducees, who denied the existence of any such spirit, boasted that theirs was the old Mosaic faith, and denounced their antagonists as having been contaminated at the time of the Babylonian captivity, before which catastrophe, according to them, these doctrines were unheard of in Jerusalem. In Alexandria, among the leading men there were many adherents to these opinions. Thus Plotinus wrote a book on the association of daemons with men, and his disciple Porphyry proved practically the possibility of such an alliance; for, repairing to the temple of Isis along with Plotinus and a certain Egyptian priest, the latter, to prove his supernatural power, offered to raise up the spirit of Plotinus himself in a visible form. A magical circle was drawn on the ground, surrounded with the customary astrological signs, the invocation commenced, the spirit appeared, and Plotinus stood face to face with his own soul. In this successful experiment it is needless to inquire how much the necromancer depended upon optical contrivances, and how much upon an alarmed imagination. But if thus the spirit of a living man could be called up, how much more likely the souls of the dead.

[Sidenote: These ideas originate in Pantheism.]

In reality, these wild doctrines were connected with Pantheism, which was secretly believed in everywhere; for, though, in a coarse mode of expression, a distinction seemed thus to be made between matter and spirit, or body and soul, it was held by the initiated that matter itself is a mere shadow of the spirit, and the body a delusive semblance of the soul.

[Sidenote: The black art.]

In the eighth century, many natural facts of a surprising and unaccountable description, well calculated to make a profound impression upon those who witnessed them, had accumulated. They were such as are now familiar to chemists. Vessels tightly closed were burst open when tormented in the fire, apparently by some invisible agency; intangible vapours condensed into solids; from colourless liquids gaudy precipitates were suddenly called into existence; flames were disengaged without any adequate cause; explosions took place spontaneously. So much that was unexpected and unaccountable justified the title of "the occult science," "the black art." From being isolated marvels unconnected with one another, these facts had been united. The Chaldee notions of a soul of the world, and of indwelling spirits, had furnished a thread on which all these pearls, for such they proved to be, might be strung.

[Sidenote: The Arabians fall into these delusions,]

With avidity—for there is ever a charm in the supernatural—did the Arabs receive from their Nestorian and Jewish medical instructors these mystical interpretations along with true knowledge. And far from resting satisfied with what their masters had thus delivered, they proceeded forthwith to improve and extend it for themselves. They submitted all kinds of substances to all kinds of operations, greatly improving the experimental process they had been taught. By exposing various bodies to the fire, they found it possible to extract from them more refined portions, which seemed to concentrate in themselves the qualities pertaining in a more diffuse way to the substances from which they had been drawn. These, since they were often invisible at their first disengagement, yet capable of bursting open the strongest vessels, and sometimes of disappearing in explosions and flames, they concluded must be the indwelling spirit or soul of the body, from which the fire had driven them forth. It was the Chaldee doctrine realized. Thus they obtained the spirit of wine, the spirit of salt, the spirit of nitre. We still retain in commerce these designations, though their significance is lost. When first introduced they had a strictly literal meaning. Alchemy, with its essences, quintessences, and spirits, was Pantheism materialized. God was seen to be in everything, in the abstract as well as the concrete, in numbers as well as realities.

[Sidenote: and the Christians also.]

Anticipating what will have hereafter to be considered in detail, I may here remark that it was not the Mohammedan alone who delivered himself up to these mystic delusions; Christendom was prepared for them also. In its opinion, the earth, the air, the sea, were full of invisible forms. With more faith than even by paganism itself was the supernatural power of the images of the gods accepted, only it was imputed to the influence of devils. The lunatic was troubled by a like possession. If a spring discharged its waters with a periodical gushing of carbonic acid gas, it was agitated by an angel; if an unfortunate descended into a pit and was suffocated by the mephitic air, it was by some daemon who was secreted; if the miner's torch produced an explosion, it was owing to the wrath of some malignant spirit guarding a treasure, and whose solitude had been disturbed. There was no end to the stories, duly authenticated by the best human testimony, of the occasional appearance of such spirits under visible forms; there was no grotto or cool thicket in which angels and genii had not been seen, no cavern without its daemons. Though the names were not yet given, it was well understood that the air had its sylphs, the earth its gnomes, the fire its salamanders, the water its undines; to the day belonged its apparitions, to the night its fairies. The foul air of stagnant places assumed the visible form of daemons of abominable aspect; the explosive gases of mines took on the shape of pale-faced, malicious dwarfs, with leathery ears hanging down to their shoulders, and garments of grey cloth. Philosophical conceptions can never be disentangled from social ideas; the thoughts of man will always gather a tincture from the intellectual medium in which he lives.

In Christendom, however, the chief application of these doctrines was to the relics of martyrs and saints. As with the amulets and talismans of Mesopotamia, these were regarded as possessing supernatural powers. They were a sure safeguard against evil spirits, and an unfailing relief in sickness.

[Sidenote: Transmutation of metals—Alchemy.]

[Sidenote: Philosopher's stone.]

A singular force was given to these mystic ideas by the peculiar direction they happened to take. As there are veins of water in the earth, and apertures through which the air can gain access, an analogy was inferred between its structure and that of an animal, leading to an inference of a similarity of functions. From this came the theory of the development of metals in its womb under the influence of the planets, the pregnant earth spontaneously producing gold and silver from baser things after a definite number of lunations. Already, however, in the doctrine of the transmutation of metals, it was perceived that to Nature the lapse of time is nothing—to man it is everything. To Nature, when she is transmuting a worthless into a better metal, what signify a thousand years? To man, half a century embraces the period of his intellectual activity. The aim of the cultivator of the sacred art should be to shorten the natural term; and, since we observe the influence of heat in hastening the ripening of fruits, may we not reasonably expect that duly regulated degrees of fire will answer the purpose? by an exposure of base material in the furnace for a proper season, may we not anticipate the wished for event? The Emperor Caligula, who had formerly tried to make gold from orpiment by the force of fire, was only one of a thousand adepts pursuing a similar scheme. Some trusted to the addition of a material substance in aiding the fire to purge away the dross of the base body submitted to it. From this arose the doctrine of the powder of projection and the philosopher's stone.

[Sidenote: Transmutation and transubstantiation.]

This doctrine of the possibility of transmuting things into forms essentially different steadily made its way, leading, in the material direction, to alchemy, the art of making gold and silver out of baser metals, and in theology to transubstantiation. Transmutation and transubstantiation were twin sisters, destined for a world-wide celebrity; one became allied to the science of Mecca, the other to the theology of Rome.

[Sidenote: The elixir of life.]

[Sidenote: Potable gold.]

[Sidenote: Chemical waters.]

While thus the Arabs joined in the pursuit of alchemy, their medical tendencies led them simultaneously to cultivate another ancient delusion, the discovery of a universal panacea or elixir which could cure all diseases and prolong life for ever. Mystical experimenters for centuries had been ransacking all nature, from the yellow flowers which are sacred to the sun, and gold his emblem and representative on earth, down to the vilest excrements of the human body. As to gold, there had been gathered round that metal many fictitious excellences in addition to its real values; it was believed that in some preparation of it would be found the elixir vitae. This is the explanation of the unwearied attempts at making potable gold, for it was universally thought that if that metal could be obtained in a dissolved state, it would constitute the long-sought panacea. Nor did it seem impossible so to increase the power of water, as to impart to it new virtues, and thereby enable it to accomplish the desired solution. Were there not natural waters of very different properties? were there not some that could fortify the memory, others destroy it; some re-enforce the spirits, some impart dulness, and some, which were highly prized, that could secure a return of love? It had been long known that both natural and artificial waters can permanently affect the health, and that instruments may be made to ascertain their qualities. Zosimus, the Panopolitan, had described in former times the operation of distillation, by which water may be purified; the Arabs called the apparatus for conducting that experiment an alembic. His treatise on the virtues and composition of waters was conveyed under the form of a dream, in which there flit before us fantastically white-haired priests sacrificing before the altar; cauldrons of boiling water, in which there are walking about men a span long; brazen-clad warriors in silence reading leaden books, and sphinxes with wings. In such incomprehensible fictions knowledge was purposely, and ignorance conveniently concealed.

[Sidenote: The Arabs originate scientific chemistry.]

The practical Arabs had not long been engaged in these fascinating but wild pursuits, when results of very great importance began to appear. In a scientific point of view, the discovery of the strong acids laid the true foundation of chemistry; in a political point of view, the invention of gunpowder revolutionized the world.

[Sidenote: Gunpowder and fireworks.]

There were several explosive mixtures. Automatic fire was made from equal parts of sulphur, saltpetre, and sulphide of antimony, finely pulverized and mixed into a paste, with equal parts of juice of the black sycamore and liquid asphaltum, a little quick-lime being added. It was directed to keep the material from the rays of the sun, which would set it on fire.

[Sidenote: Incombustible men.]

Of liquid or Greek fire we have not a precise description, since the knowledge of it was kept at Constantinople as a state secret. There is reason, however, to believe that it contained sulphur and nitrate of potash mixed with naphtha. Of gunpowder, Marcus Graecus, whose date is probably to be referred to the close of the eighth century, gives the composition explicitly. He directs us to pulverize in a marble mortar one pound of sulphur, two of charcoal, and six of saltpetre. If some of this powder be tightly rammed in a long narrow tube closed at one end, and then set on fire, the tube will fly through the air: this is clearly the rocket. He says that thunder may be imitated by folding some of the powder in a cover and tying it up tightly: this is the cracker. It thus appears that fireworks preceded fire-arms. To the same author we are indebted for prescriptions for making the skin incombustible, so that we may handle fire without being burnt. These, doubtless, were received as explanations of the legends of the times, which related how miracle-workers had washed their hands in melted copper, and sat at their ease in flaming straw.

[Sidenote: Arabian chemists.]

Among the Saracen names that might be mentioned as cultivators of alchemy, we may recall El-Rasi, Ebid Durr, Djafar or Geber, Toghrage, who wrote an alchemical poem, and Dschildegi, one of whose works bears the significant title of "The Lantern." The definition of alchemy by some of these authors is very striking: the science of the balance, the science of weight, the science of combustion.

[Sidenote: Djafar discovers nitric acid and aqua regia,]

[Sidenote: and that oxidation increases weight.]

[Sidenote: He solves the problem of potable gold.]

To one of these chemists, Djafar, our attention may for a moment be drawn. He lived toward the end of the eighth century, and is honoured by Rhazes, Avicenna, and Kalid, the great Arabic physicians, as their master. His name is memorable in chemistry, since it marks an epoch in that science of equal importance to that of Priestley and Lavoisier. He is the first to describe nitric acid and aqua regia. Before him no stronger acid was known than concentrated vinegar. We cannot conceive of chemistry as not possessing acids. Roger Bacon speaks of him as the magister magistrorum. He has perfectly just notions of the nature of spirits or gases, as we call them; thus he says, "O son of the doctrine, when spirits fix themselves in bodies, they lose their form; in their nature they are no longer what they were. When you compel them to be disengaged again, this is what happens: either the spirit alone escapes with the air, and the body remains fixed in the alembic, or the spirit and body escape together at the same time." His doctrine respecting the nature of the metals, though erroneous, was not without a scientific value. A metal he considers to be a compound of sulphur, mercury, and arsenic, and hence he infers that transmutation is possible by varying the proportion of those ingredients. He knows that a metal, when calcined, increases in weight, a discovery of the greatest importance, as eventually brought to bear in the destruction of the doctrine of Phlogiston of Stahl, and which has been imputed to Europeans of a much later time. He describes the operations of distillation, sublimation, filtration, various chemical apparatus, water-baths, sand-baths, cupels of bone-earth, of the use of which he gives a singularly clear description. A chemist reads with interest Djafar's antique method of obtaining nitric acid by distilling in a retort Cyprus vitriol, alum, and saltpetre. He sets forth its corrosive power, and shows how it may be made to dissolve even gold itself, by adding a portion of sal ammoniac. Djafar may thus be considered as having solved the grand alchemical problem of obtaining gold in a potable state. Of course, many trials must have been made on the influence of this solution on the animal system, respecting which such extravagant anticipations had been entertained. The disappointment that ensued was doubtless the reason that the records of these trials have not descended to us.

[Sidenote: Rhazes discovers sulphuric acid.]

[Sidenote: Bechil discovers phosphorus.]

With Djafar may be mentioned Rhazes, born A.D. 860, physician-in-chief to the great hospital at Bagdad. To him is due the first description of the preparation and properties of sulphuric acid. He obtained it, as the Nordhausen variety is still made, by the distillation of dried green vitriol. To him are also due the first indications of the preparation of absolute alcohol, by distilling spirit of wine from quick-lime. As a curious discovery made by the Saracens may be mentioned the experiment of Achild Bechil, who, by distilling together the extract of urine, clay, lime, and powdered charcoal, obtained an artificial carbuncle, which shone in the dark "like a good moon." This was phosphorus.

[Sidenote: Geological views of Avicenna.]

[Sidenote: His works indicate the attainment of the times.]

And now there arose among Arabian physicians a correctness of thought and breadth of view altogether surprising. It might almost be supposed that the following lines were written by one of our own contemporaries; they are, however, extracted from a chapter of Avicenna on the origin of mountains. This author was born in the tenth century. "Mountains may be due to two different causes. Either they are effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard. The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the other intact. Most of the eminences of the earth have had this latter origin. It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size. But that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic and other animals on many mountains." Avicenna also explains the nature of petrifying or incrusting waters, and mentions aerolites, out of one of which a sword-blade was made, but he adds that the metal was too brittle to be of any use. A mere catalogue of some of the works of Avicenna will indicate the condition of Arabian attainment. 1. On the Utility and Advantage of Science; 2. Of Health and Remedies; 3. Canons of Physic; 4. On Astronomical Observations; 5. Mathematical Theorems; 6. On the Arabic Language and its Properties; 7. On the Origin of the Soul and Resurrection of the Body; 8. Demonstration of Collateral Lines on the Sphere; 9. An Abridgment of Euclid; 10. On Finity and Infinity; 11. On Physics and Metaphysics; 12. An Encyclopaedia of Human Knowledge, in 20 vols., etc., etc. The perusal of such a catalogue is sufficient to excite profound attention when we remember the contemporaneous state of Europe.

[Sidenote: Effect of the search for the elixir on practical medicine.]

The pursuit of the elixir made a well-marked impression upon Arab experimental science, confirming it in its medical application. At the foundation of this application lay the principle that it is possible to relieve the diseases of the human body by purely material means. As the science advanced it gradually shook off its fetichisms, the spiritual receding into insignificance, the material coming into bolder relief. Not, however, without great difficulty was a way forced for the great doctrine that the influence of substances on the constitution of man is altogether of a material kind, and not at all due to any indwelling or animating spirit; that it is of no kind of use to practise incantations over drugs, or to repeat prayers over the mortar in which medicines are being compounded, since the effect will be the same, whether this has been done or not; that there is no kind of efficacy in amulets, no virtue in charms; and that, though saint-relics may serve to excite the imagination of the ignorant, they are altogether beneath the attention of the philosopher.

[Sidenote: Medical conflict between Europe and Africa.]

It was this last sentiment which brought Europe and Africa into intellectual collision. The Saracen and Hebrew physicians had become thoroughly materialized. Throughout Christendom the practice of medicine was altogether supernatural. It was in the hands of ecclesiastics; and saint relics, shrines, and miracle-cures were a source of boundless profit. On a subsequent page I shall have to describe the circumstances of the conflict that ensued between material philosophy on one side, and supernatural jugglery on the other; to show how the Arab system gained the victory, and how, out of that victory, the industrial life of Europe arose. The Byzantine policy inaugurated in Constantinople and Alexandria was, happily for the world, in the end overthrown. To that future page I must postpone the great achievements of the Arabians in the fulness of their Age of Reason. When Europe was hardly more enlightened than Caffraria is now, the Saracens were cultivating and even creating science. Their triumphs in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, proved to be more glorious, more durable, and therefore more important than their military actions had been.



CHAPTER XIV.

THE AGE OF FAITH IN THE WEST—(Continued).

IMAGE-WORSHIP AND THE MONKS.

Origin of IMAGE-WORSHIP.—Inutility of Images discovered in Asia and Africa during the Saracen Wars.—Rise of Iconoclasm.

The Emperors prohibit Image-worship.—The Monks, aided by court Females, sustain it.—Victory of the latter.

Image-worship in the West sustained by the Popes.—Quarrel between the Emperor and the Pope.—The Pope, aided by the Monks, revolts and allies himself with the Franks.

THE MONKS.—History of the Rise and Development of Monasticism.—Hermits and Coenobites.—Spread of Monasticism from Egypt over Europe.—Monk Miracles and Legends.—Humanization of the monastic Establishments.—They materialize Religion, and impress their Ideas on Europe.

[Sidenote: Influence of the Arabians.]

The Arabian influence, allying itself to philosophy, was henceforth productive of other than military results. To the loss of Africa and Asia was now added a disturbance impressed on Europe itself, ending in the decomposition of Christianity into two forms, Greek and Latin, and in three great political events—the emancipation of the popes from the emperors of Constantinople, the usurpation of power by a new dynasty in France, the reconstruction of the Roman empire in the West.

The dispute respecting the worship of images led to those great events. The acts of the Mohammedan khalifs and of the iconoclastic or image-breaking emperors occasioned that dispute.

[Sidenote: Worship of relics and images.]

[Sidenote: Its rapid spread in Christendom.]

Nothing could be more deplorable than the condition of southern Europe when it first felt the intellectual influence of the Arabians. Its old Roman and Greek populations had altogether disappeared; the races of half-breeds and mongrels substituted for them were immersed in fetichism. An observance of certain ceremonials constituted a religious life. A chip of the true cross, some iron filings from the chain of St. Peter, a tooth or bone of a martyr, were held in adoration; the world was full of the stupendous miracles which these relics had performed. But especially were painted or graven images of holy personages supposed to be endowed with such powers. They had become objects of actual worship. The facility with which the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, had given an aristocratic fashion to this idolatry, showed that the old pagan ideas had never really died out, and that the degenerated populations received with approval the religious conceptions of their great predecessors. The early Christian fathers believed that painting and sculpture were forbidden by the Scriptures, and that they were therefore wicked arts; and, though the second Council of Nicea asserted that the use of images had always been adopted by the Church, there are abundant facts to prove that the actual worship of them was not indulged in until the fourth century, when, on the occasion of its occurrence in Spain, it was condemned by the Council of Illiberis. During the fifth century the practice of introducing images into churches increased, and in the sixth it had become prevalent. The common people, who had never been able to comprehend doctrinal mysteries, found their religious wants satisfied in turning to these effigies. With singular obtuseness, they believed that the saint is present in his image, though hundreds of the same kind were in existence, each having an equal and exclusive right to the spiritual presence. The doctrine of invocation of departed saints, which assumed prominence in the fifth century, was greatly strengthened by these graphic forms. Pagan idolatry had reappeared.

[Sidenote: Simple fetiches replaced by images.]

[Sidenote: Bleeding and winking images.]

At first the simple cross was used as a substitute for the amulets and charms of remoter times; it constituted a fetich able to expel evil spirits, even Satan himself. This Being, who had become singularly debased from what he was in the noble Oriental fictions, was an imbecile and malicious though not a malignant spirit, affrighted not only at pieces of wood framed in the shape of a cross, but at the form of it made by the finger in the air. A subordinate daemon was supposed to possess every individual at his birth, but he was cast out by baptism. When, in the course of time, the cross became a crucifix, offering a representation of the dying Redeemer, it might be supposed to have gathered increased virtue; and soon, in addition to that adorable form, were introduced images of the Virgin, the apostles, saints, and martyrs. The ancient times seemed to have come again, when these pictures were approached with genuflexions, luminaries, and incense. The doctrine of the more intelligent was that these were aids to devotion, and that, among people to whom the art of reading was unknown, they served the useful purpose of recalling sacred events in a kind of hieroglyphic manner. But among the vulgar, and monks, and women, they were believed to be endowed with supernatural power. Of some, the wounds could bleed; of others, the eyes could wink; of others, the limbs could be raised. In ancient times, the statues of Minerva could brandish spears, and those of Venus could weep.

[Sidenote: Idolatry never extinguished in Greece and Italy.]

In truth, the populations of the Greek and Latin countries were no more than nominally converted and superficially Christianized. The old traditions and practices had never been forgotten. A tendency to idolatry seemed to be the necessary incident of the climate. Not without reason have the apologists of the clergy affirmed that image-worship was insisted on by the people, and that the Church had to admit ideas that she had never been able to eradicate. After seven hundred years of apostolic labour, it was found that the populace of Greece and Italy were apparently in their old state, and that actually nothing at all had been accomplished; the new-comers had passed into the track of their predecessors. It is often said that the restoration of image-worship was owing to the extinction of civilization by the Northern barbarians. But this is not true. In the blood of the German nations the taint of idolatry is but small. In their own countries they gave it little encouragement, and, indeed, hastened quickly to its total rejection. The sin lay not with them, but with the Mediterranean people.

[Sidenote: Influence of the barbarians.]

Nor are those barbarians to be held accountable for the so-called extinction of civilization in Italy. The true Roman race had prematurely died; it came to an untimely end in consequence of its dissolute, its violent life. Its civilization would have spontaneously died with it had no barbarian been present; and, if these intruders produced a baneful effect at first, they compensated for it in the end. As, when fresh coal is added to a fire that is burning low, a still further diminution will ensue, perhaps there may be a risk of entirely putting it out; but in due season, if all goes well, the new material will join in the contagious blaze. The savages of Europe, thrown into the decaying foci of Greek and Roman light, did perhaps for a time reduce the general heat; but, by degrees, it spread throughout their mass, and the bright flame of modern civilization was the result. Let those who lament the intrusion of these men into the classical countries, reflect upon the result which must otherwise have ensued—the last spark would soon have died out, and nothing but ashes have remained.

[Sidenote: Origin of Iconoclasm.]

Three causes gave rise to Iconoclasm, or the revolt against image-worship: 1st, the remonstrances and derision of the Mohammedans; 2nd, the good sense of a great sovereign, Leo the Isaurian, who had risen by his merit from obscurity, and had become the founder of a new dynasty at Constantinople; 3rd, the detected inability of these miracle-working idols and fetiches to protect their worshippers or themselves against an unbelieving enemy. Moreover, an impression was gradually making its way among the more intelligent classes that religion ought to free itself from such superstitions. So important were the consequences of Leo's actions, that some have been disposed to assign to his reign the first attempt at making policy depend on theology; and to this period, as I have elsewhere remarked, they therefore refer the commencement of the Byzantine empire. Through one hundred and twenty years, six emperors devoted themselves to this reformation. But it was premature. They were overpowered by the populace and the monks, by the bishops of Rome, and by a superstitious and wicked woman.

[Sidenote: Inutility of miraculous images discovered in the Arab invasions.]

[Sidenote: Destruction and sale of idols by the Arabs.]

It had been a favourite argument against the pagans how little their gods could do for them when the hour of calamity came, when their statues and images were insulted and destroyed, and hence how vain was such worship, how imbecile such gods. When Africa and Asia, full of relics and crosses, pictures and images, fell before the Mohammedans, those conquerors retaliated the same logic with no little effect. There was hardly one of the fallen towns that had not some idol for its protector. Remembering the stern objurgations of the prophet against this deadly sin, prohibited at once by the commandment of God and repudiated by the reason of man, the Saracen khalifs had ordered all the Syrian images to be destroyed. Amid the derision of the Arab soldiery and the tears of the terror-stricken worshippers, these orders were remorselessly carried into effect, except in some cases where the temptation of an enormous ransom induced the avengers of the unity of God to swerve from their duty. Thus the piece of linen cloth on which it was feigned that our Saviour had impressed his countenance, and which was the palladium of Edessa, was carried off by the victors at the capture of that town, and subsequently sold to Constantinople at the profitable price of twelve thousand pounds of silver. This picture, and also some other celebrated ones, it was said, possessed the property of multiplying themselves by contact with other surfaces, as in modern times we multiply photographs. Such were the celebrated images "made without hands."

[Sidenote: The Emperor prohibits image-worship.]

[Sidenote: The monks sustain it.]

It was currently asserted that the immediate origin of Iconoclasm was due to the Khalif Yezed, who had completed the destruction of the Syrian images, and to two Jews, who stimulated Leo the Isaurian to his task. However that may be, Leo published an edict, A.D. 726, prohibiting the worship of images. This was followed by another directing their destruction, and the whitewashing of the walls of churches ornamented with them. Hereupon the clergy and the monks rebelled; the emperor was denounced as a Mohammedan and a Jew. He ordered that a statue of the Saviour in that part of the city called Chalcopratia should be removed, and a riot was the consequence. One of his officers mounted a ladder and struck the idol with an axe upon its face; it was an incident like that enacted centuries before in the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. The sacred image, which had often arrested the course of Nature and worked many miracles, was now found to be unable to protect or to avenge its own honour. A rabble of women interfered in its behalf; they threw down the ladder and killed the officer; nor was the riot ended until the troops were called in and a great massacre perpetrated. The monks spread the sedition in all parts of the empire; they even attempted to proclaim a new emperor. Leo was everywhere denounced as a Mohammedan infidel, an enemy of the Mother of God; but with inflexible resolution he persisted in his determination as long as he lived.

[Sidenote: They accuse the emperor of atheism.]

His son and successor, Constantine, pursued the same iconoclastic policy. From the circumstance of his accidentally defiling the font at which he was being baptized, he had received the suggestive name of Copronymus. His subsequent career was asserted by the monks to have been foreshadowed by his sacrilegious beginnings. It was publicly asserted that he was an atheist. In truth, his biography, in many respects, proves that the higher classes in Constantinople were largely infected with infidelity. The patriarch deposed upon oath that Copronymus had made the most irreligious confessions to him, as that our Saviour, far from being the Son of God, was, in his opinion, a mere man, born of his mother in the common way. The truth of these accusations was perhaps, in a measure, sustained by the revenge that the emperor took on the patriarch for his indiscreet revelations. He seized him, put out his eyes, caused him to be led through the city mounted on an ass, with his face to the tail, and then, as if to show his unutterable contempt for all religion, with an exquisite malice, appointed him to his office again.

[Sidenote: Council of Constantinople prohibits image-worship.]

If such was the religious condition of the emperor, the higher clergy were but little better. A council was summoned by Constantine, A.D. 754, at Constantinople, which was attended by 388 bishops. It asserted for itself the position of the seventh general council. It unanimously decreed that all visible symbols of Christ, except in the Eucharist, are blasphemous or heretical; that image-worship is a corruption of Christianity and a renewed form of paganism; it directed all statues and paintings to be removed from the churches and destroyed, it degraded every ecclesiastic and excommunicated every layman who should be concerned in setting them up again. It concluded its labours with prayers for the emperor who had extirpated idolatry and given peace to the Church.

[Sidenote: Uproar among the monks.]

[Sidenote: The emperor retaliates.]

But this decision was by no means quietly received. The monks rose in an uproar; some raised a clamour in their caves, some from the tops of their pillars; one, in the church of St. Mammas, insulted the emperor to his face, denouncing him as a second apostate Julian. Nor could he deliver himself from them by the scourging, strangling, and drowning of individuals. In his wrath, Copronymus, plainly discerning that it was the monks on one side and the government on the other, determined to strike at the root of the evil, and to destroy monasticism itself. He drove the holy men out of their cells and cloisters; made the consecrated virgins marry; gave up the buildings for civil uses; burnt pictures, idols, and all kinds of relics; degraded the patriarch from his office, scourged him, shaved off his eyebrows, set him for public derision in the circus in a sleeveless shirt, and then beheaded him. Already he had consecrated a eunuch in his stead. Doubtless these atrocities strengthened the bishops of Rome in their resolve to seek a protector from such a master among the barbarian kings of the West.

[Sidenote: Re-establishment of image-worship by Irene the murderess.]

Constantine Copronymus was succeeded by his son, Leo the Chazar, who, during a short reign of five years, continued the iconoclastic policy. On his death his wife Irene seized the government, ostensibly in behalf of her son. This woman, pre-eminently wicked and superstitious beyond her times, undertook the restoration of images. She caused the patriarch to retire from his dignity, appointed one of her creatures, Tarasius, in his stead, and summoned another council. In this second Council of Nicea that of Constantinople was denounced as a synod of fools and atheists, the worship of images was pronounced agreeable to Scripture and reason, and in conformity to the usages and traditions of the Church.

Irene, saluted as the second Helena, and set forth by the monks as an exemplar of piety, thus accomplished the restoration of image-worship. In a few years this ambitious woman, refusing to surrender his rightful dignity to her son, caused him to be seized, and, in the porphyry chamber in which she had borne him, put out his eyes. Constantinople, long familiar with horrible crimes, was appalled at such an unnatural deed.

[Sidenote: Resumption of Iconoclasm by the succeeding emperors.]

[Sidenote: Their Saracenic tastes.]

During the succeeding reigns to that of Leo the Armenian, matters remained without change; but that emperor resumed the policy of Leo the Isaurian. By an edict he prohibited image-worship, and banished the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had admonished him that the apostles had made images of the Saviour and the Virgin, and that there was at Rome a picture of the Transfiguration, painted by order of St. Peter. After the murder of Leo, his successor, Michael the Stammerer, showed no encouragement to either party. It was affirmed that he was given to profane jesting, was incredulous as to the resurrection of the dead, disbelieved the existence of the devil, was indifferent whether images were worshipped or not, and recommended the patriarch to bury the decrees of Constantinople and Nicea equally in oblivion. His successor and son, however, observed no such impartiality. To Saracenic tastes, shown by his building a palace like that of the khalif; to a devotion for poetry, exemplified by branding some of his own stanzas on his image-worshipping enemies; to the composition of music and its singing by himself as an amateur in the choir; to mechanical knowledge, displayed by hydraulic contrivances, musical instruments, organs, automatic singing-birds sitting in golden trees, he added an abomination of monks and a determined iconoclasm. Instead of merely whitewashing the walls of the churches, he adorned them with pictures of beasts and birds. Iconoclasm had now become a struggle between the emperors and the monks.

[Sidenote: Final restoration of image-worship by the Empress Theodora.]

Again, on the death of Theophilus, image-worship triumphed, and triumphed in the same manner as before. His widow, Theodora, alarmed by the monks for the safety of the soul of her husband, purchased absolution for him at the price of the restoration of images.

Such was the issue of Iconoclasm in the East. The monks proved stronger than the emperors, and, after a struggle of 120 years, the images were finally restored. In the West far more important consequences followed.

[Sidenote: Image-worship in the West.]

[Sidenote: It is sustained by the pope,]

To image-worship Italy was devoutly attached. When the first edict of Leo was made known by the exarch, it produced a rebellion, of which Pope Gregory II. took advantage to suspend the tribute paid by Italy. In letters that he wrote to the emperor he defended the popular delusion, declaring that the first Christians had caused pictures to be made of our Lord, of his brother James, of Stephen, and all the martyrs, and had sent them throughout the world; the reason that God the Father had not been painted was that his countenance was not known. These letters display a most audacious presumption of the ignorance of the emperor respecting common Scripture incidents, and, as some have remarked, suggest a doubt of the pope's familiarity with the sacred volume. He points out the difference between the statues of antiquity, which are only the representations of phantoms, and the images of the Church, which have approved themselves, by numberless miracles, to be the genuine forms of the Saviour, his mother, and his saints. Referring to the statue of St. Peter, which the emperor had ordered to be broken to pieces, he declares that the Western nations regard that apostle as a god upon earth, and ominously threatens the vengeance of the pious barbarians if it should be destroyed. In this defence of images Gregory found an active coadjutor in a Syrian, John of Damascus, who had witnessed the rage of the khalifs against the images of his own country, and whose hand, having been cut off by those tyrants, had been miraculously rejoined to his body by an idol of the Virgin to which he prayed.

[Sidenote: and by the Lombard king.]

But Gregory was not alone in his policy, nor John of Damascus in his controversies. The King of the Lombards, Luitprand, also perceived the advantage of putting himself forth as the protector of images, and of appealing to the Italians, for their sake, to expel the Greeks from the country. The pope acted on the principle that heresy in a sovereign justifies withdrawal of allegiance, the Lombard that it excuses the seizure of possessions. Luitprand accordingly ventured on the capture of Ravenna. An immense booty, the accumulation of the emperors, the Gothic kings, and the exarchs, which was taken at the storming of the town, at once rewarded his piety, stimulated him to new enterprises of a like nature, and drew upon him the attention of his enemy the emperor, whom he had plundered, and of his confederate the pope, whom he had overreached.

[Sidenote: Position of affairs at this time.]

[Sidenote: The Saracens dominate in the Mediterranean.]

[Sidenote: Causes of the alliance of the popes and the Franks.]

This was the position of affairs. If the Lombards, who were Arians, and therefore heretics, should succeed in extending their sway all over Italy, the influence and prosperity of the papacy must come to an end; their action on the question of the images was altogether of an ephemeral and delusive kind, for all the northern nations preferred a simple worship like that of primitive times, and had never shown any attachment to the adoration of graven forms. If, on the other hand, the pope should continue his allegiance to Constantinople, he must be liable to the atrocious persecutions so often and so recently inflicted on the patriarchs of that city by their tyrannical master; and the breaking of that connexion in reality involved no surrender of any solid advantages, for the emperor was too weak to give protection from the Lombards. Already had been experienced a portentous difficulty in sending relief from Constantinople, on account of the naval superiority of the Saracens in the Mediterranean. For the taxes paid to the sovereign no real equivalent was received; but Rome, in ignominy, was obliged to submit, like an obscure provincial town, to the mandates of the Eastern court. Moreover, in her eyes, the emperor, by reason of his iconoclasm, was a heretic. But if alliance with the Lombards and allegiance to the Greeks were equally inexpedient, a third course was possible. A mayor of the palace of the Frankish kings had successfully led his armies against the Arabs from Spain, and had gained the great victory of Tours. If the Franks, under the influence of their climate or the genius of their race, had thus far shown no encouragement to images, in all other respects they were orthodox, for they had been converted by Catholic missionaries; their kings, it was true, were mere phantoms, but Charles Martel had proved himself a great soldier; he was, therefore, an ambitious man. There was Scripture authority for raising a subordinate to sovereign power; the prophets of Israel had thus, of old, with oil anointed kings. And if the sword of France was gently removed from the kingly hand that was too weak to hold it, and given to the hero who had already shown that he could smite terribly with it—if this were done by the authority of the pope, acting as the representative of God, how great the gain to the papacy! A thousand years might not be enough to separate the monarchy of France from the theocracy of Italy.

[Sidenote: Revolt of the pope from the emperor.]

[Sidenote: Alliance of the pope and the Franks.]

The resistance which had sprung up to the imperial edict for the destruction of images determined the course of events. The pope rebelled, and attempts were made by the emperor to seize or assassinate him. A fear that the pontiff might be carried to Constantinople, and the preparations making to destroy the images in the churches, united all Italy. A council was held at Rome, which anathematized the Iconoclasts. In retaliation, the Sicilian and other estates of the Church were confiscated. Gregory III., who in the meantime succeeded to the papacy, continued the policy of his predecessor. The emperor was defied. A fleet, fitted out by him in support of the exarch, was lost in a storm. With this termination of the influence of Constantinople in Italy came the imminent danger that the pope must acknowledge the supremacy of the Lombards. In his distress Gregory turned to Charles Martel. He sent him the keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and implored his assistance. The die was cast. Papal Rome revolted from her sovereign, and became indissolubly bound to the barbarian kingdoms. To France a new dynasty was given, to the pope temporal power, and to the west of Europe a fictitious Roman empire.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The monks.]

The monks had thus overcome the image-breaking emperors, a result which proves them to have already become a formidable power in the state. It is necessary, for a proper understanding of the great events with which henceforth they were connected, to describe their origin and history.

[Sidenote: Their first position]

In the iconoclastic quarrel they are to be regarded as the representatives of the common people in contradistinction to the clergy; often, indeed, the representatives of the populace, infected with all its instincts of superstition and fanaticism. They are the upholders of miracle-cures, invocation of saints, worship of images, clamorous asserters of a unity of faith in the Church—a unity which they never practised, but which offered a convenient pretext for a bitter persecution of heresy and paganism, though they were more than half pagan themselves.

[Sidenote: and subsequent improvement.]

It was their destiny to impress on the practical life of Europe that mixture of Christianity and heathenism engendered by political events in Italy and Greece. Yet, while they thus co-operated in great affairs, they themselves exhibited, in the most signal manner, the force of that law of continuous variation of opinion and habits to which all enduring communities of men must submit. Born of superstition, obscene in their early life, they end in luxury, refinement, learning. Theirs is a history to which we may profitably attend.

[Sidenote: The first hermits.]

[Sidenote: Their self-denial.]

From very early times there had been in India zealots who, actuated by a desire of removing themselves from the temptations of society and preparing for another life, retired into solitary places. Such also were the Essenes among the Jews, and the Therapeutae in Egypt. Pliny speaks of the blameless life of the former when he says, "They are the companions of palms;" nor does he hide his astonishment at an immortal society in which no one is ever born. Their example was not lost upon more devout Christians, particularly after the influence of Magianism began to be felt. Though it is sometimes said that the first of these hermits were Anthony and Paulus, they doubtless are to be regarded as only having rendered themselves more illustrious by their superior sanctity among a crowd of worthies who had preceded them or were their contemporaries. As early as the second and third centuries the practice of retirement had commenced among Christians; soon afterwards it had become common. The date of Hilarion is about A.D. 328, of Basil A.D. 360. Regarding prayer as the only occupation in which man may profitably engage, they gave no more attention to the body than the wants of nature absolutely demanded. A little dried fruit or bread for food, and water for drink, were sufficient for its support; occasionally a particle of salt might be added, but the use of warm water was looked upon as betraying a tendency to luxury. The incentives to many of their rules of life might excite a smile, if it were right to smile at the acts of earnest men. Some, like the innocent Essenes, who would do nothing whatever on the Sabbath, observed the day before as a fast, rigorously abstaining from food and drink, that nature might not force them into sin on the morrow. For some, it was not enough, by the passive means of abstinence, to refrain from fault or reduce the body to subjection, though starvation is the antidote for desire; the more active, and, perhaps, more effectual operation of periodical flagellations and bodily torture were added. Ingenuity was taxed to find new means of personal infliction. A hermit who never permitted himself to sleep more than an hour without being awakened endured torments not inferior to those of the modern fakir, who crosses his arms on the top of his head and keeps them there for years, until they are wasted to the bone, or suspends himself to a pole by means of a hook inserted in the flesh of his back.

[Sidenote: Profound contemplation of God.]

[Sidenote: Aerial martyrs. Holy birds.]

Among the Oriental sects there are some who believe that the Supreme Being is perpetually occupied in the contemplation of himself, and that the nearer man can approach to a state of total inaction the more will he resemble God. For many years the Indian sage never raises his eyes from his navel; absorbed in the profound contemplation of it, his perennial reverie is unbroken by any outward suggestions, the admiring by-standers administering, as chance offers, the little food and water that his wants require. Under the influence of such ideas, in the fifth century, St. Simeon Stylites, who in his youth had often been saved from suicide, by ascending a column he had built, sixty feet in height, and only one foot square at the top, departed as far as he could from earthly affairs, and approached more closely to heaven. On this elevated retreat, to which he was fastened by a chain, he endured, if we may believe the incredible story, for thirty years the summer's sun and the winter's frost. Afar off the passer-by was edified by seeing the motionless figure of the holy man with outstretched arms like a cross, projected against the sky, in his favourite attitude of prayer, or expressing his thankfulness for the many mercies of which he supposed himself to be the recipient by rapidly striking his forehead against his knees. Historians relate that a curious spectator counted twelve hundred and forty-four of these motions, and then abstained through fatigue from any farther tally, though the unwearied exhibition was still going on. This "most holy aerial martyr," as Evagrius calls him, attained at last his reward, and Mount Telenissa witnessed a vast procession of devout admirers accompanying to the grave his mortal remains.

[Sidenote: The monks insist on celibacy.]

More commonly, however, the hermit declined the conspicuous notoriety of these "holy birds," as they were called by the profane, and, retiring to some cave in the desert, despised the comforts of life, and gave himself up to penance and prayer. Among men who had thus altogether exalted themselves above the wants of the flesh, there was no toleration for its lusts. The sinfulness of the marriage relation, and the pre-eminent value of chastity, followed from their principles. If it was objected to such practices that by their universal adoption the human species would soon be extinguished, and no man would remain to offer praises to God, these zealots, remembering the temptations from which they had escaped, with truth replied that there would always be sinners enough in the world to avoid that disaster, and that out of their evil works good would be brought. St. Jerome offers us the pregnant reflection that, though it may be marriage that fills the earth, it is virginity that replenishes heaven.

[Sidenote: Grazing hermits.]

If they were not recorded by many truthful authors, the extravagances of some of these enthusiasts would pass belief. Men and women ran naked upon all fours, associating themselves with the beasts of the field. In the spring season, when the grass is tender, the grazing hermits of Mesopotamia went forth to the plains, sharing with the cattle their filth, and their food. Of some, notwithstanding a weight of evidence, the stupendous biography must tax their admirers' credulity. It is affirmed that St. Ammon had never seen his own body uncovered; that an angel carried him on his back over a river which he was obliged to cross; that at his death he ascended to heaven through the skies, St. Anthony being an eye-witness of the event—St. Anthony, who was guided to the hermit Paulus by a centaur; that Didymus never spoke to a human being for ninety years.

[Sidenote: Insane hermits.]

From the Jewish anchorites, who of old sought a retreat beneath the shade of the palms of Engaddi, who beguiled their weary hours in the chanting of psalms by the bitter waters of the Dead Sea; from the philosophic Hindu, who sought for happiness in bodily inaction and mental exercise, to these Christian solitaries, the stages of delusion are numerous and successive. It would not be difficult to present examples of each step in the career of debasement. To one who is acquainted with the working and accidents of the human brain, it will not be surprizing that an asylum for hermits who had become hopelessly insane was instituted at Jerusalem.

[Sidenote: Causes of hallucinations.]

The biographies of these recluses, for ages a source of consolation to the faithful in their temptations, are not to be regarded as mere works of fiction, though they abound in supernatural occurrences, and are the forerunners of the daemonology of the Middle Ages. The whole world was a scene of daemoniac adventures, of miracles and wonders. So far from being mere impostures, they relate nothing more than may be witnessed at any time under similar conditions. In the brain of man, impressions of whatever he has seen or heard, of whatever has been made manifest to him by his other senses, nay, even the vestiges of his former thoughts, are stored up. These traces are most vivid at first, but, by degrees, they decline in force, though they probably never completely die out. During our waking hours, while we are perpetually receiving new impressions from things that surround us, such vestiges are overpowered, and cannot attract the attention of the mind. But in the period of sleep, when external influences cease, they present themselves to our regard, and the mind submitting to the delusion, groups them into the fantastic forms of dreams. By the use of opium and other drugs which can blunt our sensibility to passing events, these phantasms may be made to emerge. They also offer themselves in the delirium of fevers and in the hour of death.

[Sidenote: Supernatural appearances.]

It is immaterial in what manner or by what agency our susceptibility to the impressions of surrounding objects is benumbed, whether by drugs, or sleep, or disease, as soon as their force is no greater than that of forms already registered in the brain, those forms will emerge before us, and dreams or apparitions are the result. So liable is the mind to practise deception on itself, that with the utmost difficulty it is aware of the delusion. No man can submit to long-continued and rigorous fasting without becoming the subject of these hallucinations; and the more he enfeebles his organs of sense, the more vivid is the exhibition, the more profound the deception. An ominous sentence may perhaps be incessantly whispered in his ear; to his fixed and fascinated eye some grotesque or abominable object may perpetually present itself. To the hermit, in the solitude of his cell, there doubtless often did appear, by the uncertain light of his lamp, obscene shadows of diabolical import; doubtless there was many an agony with fiends, many a struggle with monsters, satyrs, and imps, many an earnest, solemn, and manful controversy with Satan himself, who sometimes came as an aged man, sometimes with a countenance of horrible intelligence, and sometimes as a female fearfully beautiful. St. Jerome, who, with the utmost difficulty, had succeeded in extinguishing all carnal desires, ingenuously confesses how sorely he was tried by this last device of the enemy, how nearly the ancient flames were rekindled. As to the reality of these apparitions, why should a hermit be led to suspect that they arose from the natural working of his own brain? Men never dream that they are dreaming. To him they were terrible realities; to us they should be the proofs of insanity, not of imposture.

[Sidenote: Delusions created by the mind.]

If, in the prison discipline of modern times, it has been found that solitary confinement is a punishment too dreadful for the most hardened convict to bear, and that, if persisted in, it is liable to lead to insanity, how much more quickly must that unfortunate condition have been induced when the trials of religious distress and the physical enfeeblement arising from rigorous fastings and incessant watchings were added? To the dreadful ennui which precedes that state, one of the ancient monks pathetically alludes when he relates how often he went forth and returned to his cell, and gazed on the sun as if he hastened too slowly to his setting. And yet such fearful solitude is of but brief duration. Even though we flee to the desert we cannot be long alone. Cut off from social converse, the mind of man engenders companions for itself—companions like the gloom from which they have emerged. It was thus that to St. Anthony appeared the Spirit of Fornication, under the form of a lascivious negro boy; it was thus that multitudes of daemons of horrible aspect cruelly beat him nearly to death, the brave old man defying them to the last, and telling them that he did not wish to be spared one of their blows; it was thus that in the night, with hideous laughter, they burst into his cell, under the form of lions, serpents, scorpions, asps, lizards, panthers, and wolves, each attacking him in own way; thus that when, in his dire extremity, he lifted his eyes for help, the roof disappeared, and amid beams of light the Saviour looked down; thus it was with the enchanted silver dish that Satan gave him, which, being touched, vanished in smoke; thus with the gigantic bats and centaurs, and the two lions that helped him to scratch a grave for Paul.

[Sidenote: Important religious results of cerebral sight.]

[Sidenote: A future world.]

[Sidenote: Immortality of the soul.]

The images that may thus emerge from the brain have been classed by physiologists among the phenomena of inverse vision, or cerebral sight. Elsewhere I have given a detailed investigation of their nature (Human Physiology, chap, xxi.), and, persuaded that they have played a far more important part in human affairs than is commonly supposed, have thus expressed myself: "Men in every part of the world, even among nations the most abject and barbarous, have an abiding faith not only in the existence of a spirit that animates us, but also in its immortality. Of these there are multitudes who have been shut out from all communion with civilized countries, who have never been enlightened by revelation, and who are mentally incapable of reasoning out for themselves arguments in support of those great truths. Under such circumstances, it is not very likely that the uncertainties of tradition, derived from remote ages, could be any guide to them, for traditions soon disappear except they be connected with the wants of daily life. Can there be, in a philosophical view, anything more interesting than the manner in which these defects have been provided for by implanting in the very organization of every man the means of constantly admonishing him of these facts—of recalling them with an unexpected vividness before even after they have become so faint as almost to die out? Let him be as debased and benighted a savage as he may, shut out from all communion with races whom Providence has placed in happier circumstances, he has still the same organization, and is liable to the same physiological incidents, as ourselves. Like us, he sees in his visions the fading forms of landscapes which are perhaps connected with some of his most grateful recollections, and what other conclusion can he possibly derive from these unreal pictures than that they are the foreshadowings of another land beyond that in which his lot is cast. Like us, he is revisited at intervals by the resemblances of those whom he has loved or hated while they were alive, nor can he ever be so brutalized as not to discern in such manifestations suggestions which to him are incontrovertible proofs of the existence and immortality of the soul. Even in the most refined social conditions we are never able to shake off the impressions of these occurrences, and are perpetually drawing from them the same conclusions that our uncivilized ancestors did. Our more elevated condition of life in no respect relieves us from the inevitable consequences of our own organization, any more than it relieves us from infirmities and disease. In these respects, all over the globe we are on an equality. Savage or civilized, we carry within us a mechanism intended to present to us mementoes of the most solemn facts with which we can be concerned, and the voice of history tells us that it has ever been true to its design. It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest. Such a mechanism is in keeping with the manner in which the course of nature is fulfilled, and bears in its very style the impress of invariability of action. It is no respecter of persons. It neither permits the haughtiest to be free from its monitions, nor leaves the humblest without the consolation of a knowledge of another life. Liable to no mischances, open to no opportunities of being tampered with by the designing or interested, requiring no extraneous human agency for its effect, but always present with each man wherever he may go, it marvellously extracts from vestiges of the impressions of the past overwhelming proofs of the reality of the future, and gathering its power from what would seem to be a most unlikely source, it insensibly leads us, no matter who or where we may be, to a profound belief in the immortal and imperishable, from phantoms that have scarcely made their appearance before they are ready to vanish away."

[Sidenote: Amelioration of monasticism.]

[Sidenote: Its final corruptions.]

From such beginnings the monastic system of Europe arose—that system which presents us with learning in the place of ferocious ignorance, with overflowing charity to mankind in the place of malignant hatred of society. The portly abbot on his easy going palfrey, his hawk upon his fist, scarce looks like the lineal descendant of the hermit starved into insanity. How wide the interval between the monk of the third and the monk of the thirteenth century—between the caverns of Thebais and majestic monasteries cherishing the relics of ancient learning, the hopes of modern philosophy—between the butler arranging his well-stocked larder, and the jug of cold water and crust of bread. A thousand years had turned starvation into luxury, and alas! if the spoilers of the Reformation are to be believed, had converted visions of loveliness into breathing and blushing realities, who exercised their charms with better effect than of old their phantom sisters had done.

[Sidenote: The modifications of eremitism.]

[Sidenote: Number of anchorites.]

The successive stages to this end may be briefly described. Around the cell of some eremite like Anthony, who fixed his retreat on Mount Colzim, a number of humble imitators gathered, emulous of his austerities and of his piety. A similar sentiment impels them to observe stated hours of prayer. Necessity for supporting the body indicates some pursuit of idle industry, the plaiting of mats or making of baskets. So strong is the instinctive tendency of man to association, that even communities of madmen may organize. Hilarion is said to have been the first who established a monastic community. He went into the desert when he was only fifteen years old. Eremitism thus gave birth to Coenobitism, and the evils of solitude were removed. Yet still there remained rigorous anchorites who renounced their associated brethren as these had renounced the world, and the monastery was surrounded by their circle of solitary cells—a Laura, it was called. In Egypt, the sandy deserts on each side of the rich valley of the river offered great facilities for such a mode of life: that of Nitria was full of monks, the climate being mild and the wants of man easily satisfied. It is said that there were at one time in that country of these religious recluses not fewer than seventy-six thousand males and twenty-seven thousand females. With countless other uncouth forms, under the hot sun of that climate they seemed to be spawned from the mud of the Nile. As soon as from some celebrated hermitage a monastery had formed, the associates submitted to the rules of brotherhood. Their meal, eaten in silence, consisted of bread and water, oil, and a little salt. The bundle of papyrus which had served the monk for a seat by day, while he made his baskets or mats, served him for a pillow by night. Twice he was roused from his sleep by the sound of a horn to offer up his prayers. The culture of superstition was compelled by inexorable rules. A discipline of penalties, confinement, fasting, whipping, and, at a later period even mutilation, was inflexibly administered.

[Sidenote: Spread of monasticism from Egypt.]

[Sidenote: Increase of the religious houses.]

From Egypt and Syria monachism spread like an epidemic. It was first introduced into Italy by Athanasius, assisted by some of the disciples of Anthony; but Jerome, whose abode was in Palestine, is celebrated for the multitude of converts he made to a life of retirement. Under his persuasion, many of the high-born ladies of Rome were led to the practice of monastic habits, as far as was possible, in secluded spots near that city, on the ruins of temples, and even in the Forum. Some were induced to retreat to the Holy Land, after bestowing their wealth for pious purposes. The silent monk insinuated himself into the privacy of families for the purpose of making proselytes by stealth. Soon there was not an unfrequented island in the Mediterranean, no desert shore, no gloomy valley, no forest, no glen, no volcanic crater, that did not witness exorbitant selfishness made the rule of life. There were multitudes of hermits on the desolate coasts of the Black Sea. They abounded from the freezing Tanais to the sultry Tabenne. In rigorous personal life and in supernatural power the West acknowledged no inferiority to the East; his admiring imitators challenged even the desert of Thebais to produce the equal of Martin of Tours. The solitary anchorite was soon supplanted by the coenobitic establishment, the monastery. It became a fashion among the rich to give all that they had to these institutions for the salvation of their own souls. There was now no need of basket-making or the weaving of mats. The brotherhoods increased rapidly. Whoever wanted to escape from the barbarian invaders, or to avoid the hardships of serving in the imperial army—whoever had become discontented with his worldly affairs, or saw in those dark times no inducements in a home and family of his own, found in the monastery a sure retreat. The number of these religious houses eventually became very great. They were usually placed on the most charming and advantageous sites, their solidity and splendour illustrating the necessity of erecting durable habitations for societies that were immortal. It often fell out that the Church laid claim to the services of some distinguished monk. It was significantly observed that the road to ecclesiastical elevation lay through the monastery porch, and often ambition contentedly wore for a season the cowl, that it might seize more surely the mitre.

[Sidenote: Difference of the Eastern and Western monk.]

[Sidenote: Legends of Western saints.]

Though the monastic system of the East included labour, it was greatly inferior to that of the West in that particular. The Oriental monk, at first making selfishness his rule of life, and his own salvation the grand object, though all the world else should perish, in his maturer period occupied his intellectual powers in refined disputations of theology. Too often he exhibited his physical strength in the furious riots he occasioned in the streets of the great cities. He was a fanatic and insubordinate. On the other hand, the Occidental monk showed far less disposition for engaging in the discussion of things above reason, and expended his strength in useful and honourable labour. Beneath his hand the wilderness became a garden. To a considerable extent this difference was due to physiological peculiarity, and yet it must not be concealed that the circumstances of life in the two cases were not without their effects. The old countries of the East, with their worn-out civilization and worn-out soil, offered no inducements comparable with the barbarous but young and fertile West, where to the ecclesiastic the most lovely and inviting lands were open. Both, however, coincided in this, that they regarded the affairs of life as presenting perpetual interpositions of a providential or rather supernatural kind—angels and devils being in continual conflict for the soul of every man, who might become the happy prize of the one or the miserable prey of the other. These spiritual powers were perpetually controlling the course of nature and giving rise to prodigies. The measure of holiness in a saint was the number of miracles he had worked. Thus, in the life of St. Benedict, it is related that when his nurse Cyrilla let fall a stone sieve, her distress was changed into rejoicing by the prayer of the holy child, at which the broken parts came together and were made whole; that once on receiving his food in a basket, let down to his otherwise inaccessible cell, the devil vainly tried to vex him by breaking the rope; that once Satan, assuming the form of a blackbird, nearly blinded him by the flapping of his wings; that once, too, the same tempter appeared as a beautiful Roman girl, to whose fascinations, in his youth, St. Benedict had been sensible, and from which he now hardly escaped by rolling himself among thorns. Once, when his austere rules and severity excited the resentment of the monastery over which he was abbot, the brethren—for monks have been known to do such things—attempted to poison him, but the cup burst asunder as soon as he took it into his hands. When the priest Florentius, being wickedly disposed, attempted to perpetrate a like crime by means of an adulterated loaf, a raven carried away the deadly bread from the hand of St. Benedict. Instructed by the devil, the same Florentius drove from his neighbourhood the holy man, by turning into the garden of his monastery seven naked girls; but scarcely had the saint taken to flight, when the chamber in which his persecutor lived fell in and buried him beneath its ruins, though the rest of the house was uninjured. Under the guidance of two visible angels, who walked before him, St. Benedict continued his journey to Monte Casino, where he erected a noble monastery; but even here miracles did not cease; for Satan bewitched the stones, so that it was impossible for the masons to move them until they were released by powerful prayers. A boy, who had stolen from the monastery to visit his parents was not only struck dead by God for his offence, but the consecrated ground threw forth his body when they attempted to bury it; nor could it be made to rest until consecrated bread was laid upon it. Two garrulous nuns, who had been excommunicated by St. Benedict for their perverse prating, chanced to be buried in the church. On the next administration of the sacrament, when the deacon commanded all those who did not communicate to depart, the corpses rose out of their graves and walked forth from the church.