ENGLISH DOOR

THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

CHAPTER IV.

THE FALL OF PAGANISM, AND WHETHER ITS FALL WAS ENTIRE.

We have seen by what an inexorable necessity Paganism led the aristocracy of Rome to degradation, her people to barbarism, and her empire to destruction. If regenerated humanity was to subsist, the old order must perish, and it is our object now to consider the manner of its fall, and whether its extinction was complete. Paganism did not succumb, as has often been supposed, to the laws of the Emperors, nor did Constantine, when, in A.D. 312, he gave liberty to the Christians, desire them to turn the sword upon their foes of the old religion. A later edict, which seems entirely modern in its principle, promised to the heathens the same tolerance as was afforded to the faithful. ‘‘For,” as it said, ‘it is one thing to engage in mental conflicts in order to conquer heaven, another to employ force to coerce conviction.” Notwithstanding the instigation of the Arians, who were interested in laying violent hands upon the conscience, and certain edicts of Constantius against superstition, Paganism continued in possession of its liberties and privileges until the end of the fourth century, when the menacing attitude of its professors, and their eager rallying round any usurper, elicited a sterner legislation. Two laws of Theodosius, and four of Honorius, effected the closing of the temples, by suppressing their revenues and forbidding their sacrifices. These seemed crushing blows to idolatry, but St. Augustine attests that in Africa the idols remained standing, and that their worshippers were powerful enough to burn a church and slaughter sixty Christians. In spite of the imperial edicts, there was no case known of pagans being condemned and punished by death for the sake of religion; and the Imperial line was about to end, but polytheism was destined to survive it, as if to prove that ideas are not to be slain by the sword, and that even false doctrine is more durable than the powers of earth.

        Paganism, then, perished by the two weapons of controversy and charity. The controversy on both sides was loud and free, and was prolonged in the East until a decree of Justinian closed the schools of Athens; whilst in the West Ammianus, Claudian, and Rutilius calumniated with impunity the new religion, and its saints and monks. The old cult was entrenched behind the consent of antiquity, and struggled to retain its hold over the mind by every art which was calculated to touch it, by the subtlety of philosophic interpretation, the majesty of its ritual, the charm of its mythology, whilst it enlisted every human interest and passion against the Gospel. Then, as ever, it reproached Christianity with hatred of the human race, in other words, its contempt of the world, with an avoidance of the public pleasures, and the incompatibility of its laws with the maxims and manners which had built up the greatness of Rome. By it calamity had befallen the Empire whose frontiers id been delivered to the barbarians by the outraged gods, and heaven kept back its very rain on account of the Christians. Pluvia desit causa Christiani.

The Christian apologist answered with inimitable equity and vigour, refusing in the first place to condemn entirely the old civilization, acknowledging a modicum of truth in the doctrines of the philosophers, of good in the Roman legislation, and, as we shall see hereafter, reserving the literature whilst they rejected the fables : antiquity with a thorough discernment,—thus doing honour to the human mind, and teaching it to recognize the divine ray within it. Having thus rubbed off the polish of Paganism, they presented it to the eyes of the people, naked and bloodstained, in the full horror of its impure and murderous observances; instead of the losses which are so pleasing to our modern delicacy, instead of explaining away the crime of idolatry by acknowledging it as a necessary error, the apologists kindled conscience against a hateful worship by showing in it the work of the devil and the reflexion of hell. This system of argument, at once full of charity towards human reason, but without pity for Paganism, was presented in its entirety in the writings of St. Augustine.

The Bishop of Hippo had become the light of the Universal Church; Asia and Gaul pressed him with questions; the Manichaeans, Donatists, and Pelagians left him no repose. But it was the pagan controversy which absorbed his life, overflowed into his letters, and inspired his greatest works. In a.d. 412, Africa was governed by Volusian, a man of noble birth, and attached to the old religion, who was drawn towards the Church by the genius of Augustine, but brought back to his superstitions by the idolatrous examples all around him. One day, as he was whiling away his leisure in conversation with some men of letters, had touched on many points of philosophy, and deplored the contradictions of the sects, the discussion turned upon Christianity. Volusian set forth his objections, and at the close of the usual cavils against Holy Writ and the mysteries, showed the real cause of his repugnance by accusing the new religion of preaching pardon of injuries which was irreconcilable with the dignity of a warlike state, and so hastening the decline of Rome, of which the calamities produced by the rule for a century of Christian princes was sufficient evidence. A disciple of Augustine, who had taken part in this discussion, related it to his master, and implored him to answer it. He complied, and without neglecting the theological objections, mainly directed his attack to the political questions. Beginning by expressing surprise that the mildness of Christianity should give scandal to men accustomed to praise clemency with the sages of old, he denied that the faith had suppressed justice in insisting upon charity. Christ had not forbidden war, but had only desired it to be just in its cause, and merciful in its process; if the state had possessed such warriors, magistrates, or taxpayers as the Church required, the Republic would have been intact. If the Empire had been carried off by a wave of decay, yet St. Augustine could point to a period long anterior to the Christian era, and show how in the time of Jugurtha the public morals were entirely corrupted, and how Rome might have been sold if a purchaser could have been found; and then in horror at the profligacy which was sapping the core of humanity when the new faith appeared, the Bishop of Hippo exclaimed, “Thanks to the Lord our God, who has sent us against so great evils an un­exampled help, for whither were we not carried, what souls would not the horrible wave of human perversity have carried off, had not the Cross been planted above us, that we might seize and hold fast to that sacred wood. For in that disorder of manners, detestable as they were, that ruin of the old discipline, it was time that an authority should come from on high to announce to us voluntary poverty, continence, benevolence, justice, and other strong and shining virtues; it was necessary not only that we might honourably order this present life and assure a place in this earthly city, but to lead us to eternal salvation, to the all-holy Republic, to that endless nation of which we are all denizens by the title of faith, hope, and charity. Thus, as we are living as travellers on earth, we should learn to tolerate, if not strong enough to correct, those who wish to establish the Republic on a basis of unpunished vice, when the ancient Romans had founded and aggrandized it by their virtues. If they had not that true piety towards the True God which would have conducted them to the eternal city, they kept at least a certain native righteous­ness which sufficed to form the city of earth, to extend and to preserve it. God wished to manifest in that glorious and opulent Empire what civil virtues could effect, even when divorced from true religion, that with the addition of the latter men might become members of a better city, which had truth for its sovereign, charity for its law, eternity for its duration.”

Noble words, and yet Augustine did not aim at perfection of eloquence, according to the standard of the rhetoricians, but at convincing Volusian, whose yielding convictions only waited for the last assault. It was this hope that impelled him from the first blow of controversy to the depths of the subject, and brought forth the first idea of his “City of God.” This was in 412, and the twenty-two books of that work, commenced the following year, interrupted and continued by snatches during fourteen years, were not concluded until 426. St. Augustine did but develope therein the doctrine of the above letter, which he did not exceed in eloquence; and it is thus that immortal books are born, not from the proud dream of the lover of vainglory, nor from leisure nor solitude, but of the travail of a soul which has been flung into the struggles of its age, has sought for truth and found inspiration. We shall have occasion soon to study and analyze the “City of God,” and note the commencement of a science unknown to the ancients—the philosophy of history, but we may pause for a moment now before the greatest work undertaken for the refutation of Paganism. Its plan gave the author an occasion of attacking and destroying in succession the mythological theology of the poets, the political theology of statesmen, the natural theology of the philosophers of old time; and whilst he dissipated the last scruples of the scientific, he left no pretext for repugnance on the part of men of letters. That religion which they charged with a reaction towards ignorance and barbarism gave ample evidence of rivalling by its beauty the good things of profane antiquity; for what was the elegance of Symmachus in comparison with the thunders of the apologists for Christianity?

Yet the new faith would not have changed the world had it appealed only to men of learning and science. This had been the crying fault of philosophy. Plato had written on the door of his school, “Let none but geometers enter here,” and Porphyry, seven hundred years later, confessed that he knew of none among so many sects which could teach a way of salvation for every soul. But Christianity had found a universal path of safety : the teaching of the poor was its special novelty, and persecutors long reproached her with recruiting in the workshops or in the cottages of weavers or of fullers. At the beginning of the fifth century, the working-classes in the towns, who occupied, according to a poet, the upper floors of the houses, were almost entirely devoted to the new religion. But idolatry was still mistress of the rural districts: votive garlands still adorned the sacred trees; the traveller came across open temples in which the sacrificial embers were burning, or statues with portable altars at their feet, or encountered some haggard peasant with a tattered mantle over his shoulders and a sword in his hands, professing to be a votary of the great goddess Diana, and to reveal futurity by her aid. Yet the Church believed that these rude men, who toiled and suffered and led that pastoral life from which the Saviour had drawn His parables, were not far from the kingdom of God, so she collected labourers and shepherds into her temples, and did not disdain arguing before them as St. Paul before the Areopagus.

The homilies of St. Maximus of Turin form the chief example of this popular controversy. The inhabitants of the rugged valleys of Piedmont defended step by step the superstitions of their forefathers, and the bishop provoked the dispute by making his first onslaught on the fatalism which attracted the souls of the indo­lent, by discharging them from all moral responsibility.

 “If everything is fixed by destiny, why, O pagans, do you sacrifice to your idols? To what purpose those prayers, that incense, those victims, and those gifts which you lavish in your temples? That the gods may not injure us, is the answer. How can those beings who are unable to help themselves, who must be guarded by watch-dogs that robbers may not carry them off, who cannot protect themselves against spiders, rats, or worms, injure you? But, they reply, we adore the sun, the stars, and the elements. They worship fire, then, which can be quenched by a drop of water or fed by a stick of wood; they worship the thunder, as if it was not as obedient to God as the rains, the winds, and the clouds; they adore the starry sphere which the Creator has made with so marvellous an art for an ornament of beauty to the world. Lastly, the pagans reply, the gods whom we serve inhabit the heaven.”

The preacher followed them into this last refuge and scourged with his satire the crimes of these divinities—Saturn devouring his children, Jupiter married to his sister, the adulteries of Mars, then he continued:—

“Is it on account of her beauty that you give Venus alone among the goddesses an abode in a planet? What do you make up there of that shameless woman among a crowd of men? What do you say of the host of children you pagans have given to Jupiter? and if once they were born of the gods, why do we not see the same thing now? or is it that Jupiter has grown old, and Juno past childbearing?”

We cannot wonder that this system of preaching did not shrink from bold images, familiar expressions, or from sarcasm, if it was necessary to subdue a coarse-minded audience. Christianity stooped thus to the language of the vulgar to instruct and reawaken thought in minds held incapable of reasoning, to break the bonds of superstition, and release the souls of men from the terrors which peopled nature with malevolent deities, and from the pleasures by which men repaid themselves for the horror caused by their gods. Whereas eloquence subdued the more intelligent, the grosser minds were earned away by example ; the waters of baptism fell upon their brow to sanctify its sweats, and these poor people returned calmed and purified to their ploughs and their flocks, dreading no longer an encounter with Satyrs or Dryads in the depth of the forests. Yet the earth had not lost its enchantment, for at every step they could recognize the footprint of the Creator, and they laboured upon its soil as in the vineyard of the Heavenly Father. Bacchic orgies no longer profaned the manners of which Virgil had sung as pure and peaceful; Christianity had given to the men of the fields the happiness which to the poet of the “Georgics” had been only a dream. They could realize their happiness now, and love the poverty which the Gospel had blessed; self-respect was present in every hovel; and as at length the Supreme Cause of all things, the truth of which philosophers had been ignorant, had been manifested to the ignorant, they could afford to spurn their superstitious fears, inexorable fate, and the din of greedy Acheron.

The conquest of conscience, commenced by controversy, was consummated by charity. It was not a charity of that peaceful nature which knew no enemy, and dreamed only of delivering the captive, building schools and hospitals, and covering the old Roman world with its peculiar institutions, as a wounded body is swathed in bandages, but charity, as it were, in arms, attacking Paganism with the novel weapons of gentleness, forgiveness, and devotion. We must enter the recesses of those Roman families which were still divided between the old and the new belief, and see how their Christian members were skilled in laying siege to a pagan soul with tender violence, counting no time lost if it was led at last to the altar of Christ. St. Jerome shows us this very spectacle in bringing us into the house of Albinus, who was a patrician and pontiff of the old religion. His daughter, Laeta, was a Chris­tian, and had borne to a Christian husband the young Paula, whose education occupied Jerome in his desert retreat. The latter wrote to Laeta, “Who would have believed that the grand-daughter of the pontiff Albinus would, from a vow made at a martyr’s tomb, have brought her grandfather to listen smilingly as she stam­mered a hymn to Christ, and that the old man should one day cherish on his knees a virgin of the Lord?” Then he added, in touching consolation to Laeta :—

“A holy and faithful house sanctifies the one infidel who remains firm in his principles. The man who is surrounded by a troop of Christian children and grand­children, must be already a candidate for the faith. Laeta, my most holy sister in Jesus Christ, let me say this, that you may not despair of your father’s salvation.”

He ended by adding advice to encouragement, and entered into and directed the last attack of the domestic plot, to which the old man’s obstinacy was destined to yield.

“Let your little child, whenever she sees her grand­father, throw herself on his breast, hang on his neck, and sing him the Alleluia in spite of himself.”

To such pious manoeuvres, repeated doubtless in every patrician house, that proud and opiniated spirit of the old Romans, which had formed the last rampart of Paganism, surely though slowly succumbed.

But kindness and consideration were naturally easy when the conversion of a parent was the aim, and a greater merit lay in preaching truth to enemies and conquering fanatical crowds by generosity. When St. Augustine took possession of his see at Hippo, the imperial laws put sword and fire at his disposal against the pagans, but he at once forbade violence, and was even unwilling that they should be forced to break the idols raised upon their lands.

“ Let us begin rather,” he said, “ by destroying the false gods in their hearts.” Once the Christians of the little town of Suffecta, forgetful of his instructions, destroyed a statue of Hercules. The pagan populace, in a fury, took up arms, and rushing upon the faithful, killed sixty of them. St. Augustine might have obtained the execution of the homicides, not only by setting the edicts of Theodosius in motion, but under the whole system of Roman law against murder and violence in arms; but he wrote to the pagans of Suffecta, reproaching them, indeed, with the shedding of innocent blood, and threatening them with the Divine justice, but refrained from summoning them before the tribunals of earth.

“If you say that the Hercules was your property, be at peace, we will restore it; stone is not wanting to us; we have metal, many kinds of marble, and workmen in abundance. Not a moment shall be lost in carving out your god, in moulding and gilding it. We will also be very careful to paint him red, that he may be able to hear your prayers; but if we give you back your Hercules, restore to us the number of souls of which you have robbed us.”

Language so full of sense, so hardy, and yet so tender, was calculated to touch men’s hearts; for human nature loves that which excels it, and the doctrine of pardon towards enemies ended in gaining the world which it had at first astonished.

As the imperial edicts had no power to demolish the idols, still less could they close the arenas. Constan­tine, by a constitution of a.d. 325, promulgated in the first fervour of his conversion, had, indeed, forbidden those games of bloodshed; but the passions of the populace, stronger than law, had not only protected their pleasures, but insisted on making the princes accomplices in them, so that the victories of Theodosius still provided gladiators for the amphitheatres of Rome, Vainly did the eloquence of the Fathers ring against these bloody amusements; vainly did the poet Prudentius, in pathetic verse, press Honorius to command that death should cease to be a sport, and murder a public pleasure. But charity accomplished what no earthly power had dared commence. An Eastern monk, named Telemachus, one of those useless men, those enemies to society, as they were called, took up his staff one day and journeyed to Rome, to put down the gladiatorial combats. On the 1st of January of the year a.d. 404, the Roman people, piled tier upon tier on the benches of the Coliseum, were celebrating the sixth consulate of Honorius. The arena had already been reddened with the blood of several pairs of gladiators, when suddenly, in the thick of an assault of arms which held every eye fixed, and kept every mind in breathless suspense, a monk appeared, rushed forward with outstretched arms, and forced the swords asunder. At the sight, the astonished audience rose as one man, roaring in question as to what madman it could be who dared to interrupt the most sacred plea­sures of the sovereign people. Then curses, threats, and finally stones, rained from every circle. Telemachus fell dead, and the combatants he had striven to part finished their bout. This blood was needed to seal the abolition of the games of blood, for the martyrdom of the monk forced the irresolution of Honorius, and an edict of the same year, which seems to have extorted obedience, suppressed the gladiatorial shows, and with them idolatry lost its chief support. The Coliseum remains to this day, and the mighty breach in its side symbolizes the assault of Christianity upon Roman society, which it entered only by dismantling it. Today we must bless the ruin which it made, as on entering the old amphitheatre we discern therein only the signs of peace, plants growing, birds building their nests, children playing innocently at the foot of the wooden cross which rises in the midst as the avenger of humanity which was outraged, the redemptress of humanity which fell.

We may marvel that, before so much love and so much light, the world did not yield at once, to the entire discomfiture of Paganism. But one portion of the latter survived in spite of Christianity, and as if to keep it strung to an eternal resistance, while another remained in the very bosom of the Church which showed her wisdom in respecting the legitimate wants of man and the innocent pleasures of the nations. For Paganism has two constituent parts, the one being an absolutely false religious idea, the other the true idea of the necessary relation of man with the invisible world, and the consequent methods of fixing that relation under sensible forms in temples, festivals, and symbols. Religious thought cannot be confined to the solitary domain of contemplation, but proceeds thence to grasp space by the temples which it causes to be reared, time by the days which it keeps holy, and nature in her entirety, by selecting as emblems such things as fire, perfume, and flowers, her brightest and purest products. These truths ought not to perish, and the policy of the Church had to solve the difficulty of crushing idolatry without stifling beauty of worship. The zeal of the Fathers was displayed on every page of their writings, and they have been charged with pushing it to the point of Vandalism in demanding the destruction of the temples. But St. Augustine took a most effec­tual step towards obviating that passion for iconoclasm which seizes whole nations at some moment of intense public emotion, and forbade Christians to turn articles which had been devoted to the service of the false deities to their personal use. He desired that the stone, wood, and precious metals should be purified in the service of the state, or in honour of the true God, and his maxims saved many a building in Italy, Sicily, and Gaul which remains to us instinct with the genius of antiquity. The Pantheon of Agrippa became the Basilica of All the Martyrs, 'and in Rome alone eight pagan sanctuaries stand in our day under the invocation of a saint as protector of their ancient walls. The Temple of Mars at Florence, and that of Hercules at Milan, were converted into Baptisteries. Sicily defended for long her ancient altars; but when the Council of Ephesus had given to the veneration of the Mother of God a new and brilliant lustre, the Sicilians surrendered, and the soft touch of the Virgin opened more temples than the iron hand of the Caesars. The Mausoleum of the tyrant Phalaris was made sacred to our Lady of Mercy, and the temple of Venus, on Mount Eryx, formerly served by a college of harlots, became the Church of St. Mary of the Snows.

And if the people hankered after those lofty porticoes beneath which their fathers had prayed, still more difficult was it to rob them of those festivals which had lightened the severity of their labour, and broken in upon the monotony of their life. So Christianity hallowed in place of suppressing them, and from the end of the fourth century solemnities in honour of the martyrs took the place of those of the false gods. The bishops encouraged an admixture of sober joy with the gravity of these pilgrimages, permitted fraternal love- feasts on their celebration, and transported thus into the Church the fairs which had tempted the multitude to the worship of Bacchus and Jupiter. Yet the perseverance of the clergy failed to displace the days which custom had consecrated, and the cycle of the Christian year was forced to conform in many particulars to the pagan calendar. Thus, according to the authority of Bede, the procession of Candlemas consigned the Lupercalia to oblivion, and the Ambarvalia only, yielded to the rustic pomps of the Rogations. As the peasants of Enna, in Sicily, could not detach themselves from the joyful festivals they always held after harvest in honour of Ceres, the Feast of the Visitation was retarded on their account, and they offered on the altar of Christ the ripe wheat-ears with which they had garlanded their idols.

In fact, if Christianity prohibited the adoration of Nature, she never cursed or condemned that which constituted the visible beauty of the universe. It beheld, not only in the heathen religion, but in the public ritual, a symbolism which employed creatures as the signs of a sacred language between God and man. The seven-branched candlestick had lighted the tabernacle of Moses, the gums of Arabia had burnt on the altar, and year by year the Hebrew people had gathered palm-branches and foliage for the Feast of Tabernacles. The rites which were so common to every worship were to pass into the new religion. The poet Prudentius was already inviting Christian virgins to the tomb of St. Eulalia, and bidding them bring baskets of flowers in honour of the youthful martyr; and at the same period was the custom introduced of burning tapers before the places where the saints reposed. The priest Vigilantius cavilled at this practice, and taxed it with idolatry; but St. Jerome replied, and his clever genius embraced at once the whole scope of the question.

“You call these Christians idolaters. I deny it not, for all who believe on Christ have come from idolatry; but because we rendered this worship once to idols, must it be forbidden now to offer it to the true God? All the churches of the East burn candles at the moment of the reading of the Gospel, not truly to dissi­pate the darkness, for at that hour the sun is shining with all its brightness, but as a sign of joy, in memory of those lamps which the wise virgins kept burning in honour of the Eternal Light, of which it is written, “Thy word, O Lord, shall be a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my paths.”

St. Jerome summed up on this point the whole policy of the Church, whereby she achieved the conversion of the Roman world, as well as the civilization of the barbarians. Two centuries later, when the Anglo-Saxons poured in crowds to baptism, and demanded permission to burn their idols, Pope Gregory the Great moderated this zeal, and wrote to his missioners, directing them to destroy the images but to preserve the temples, and consecrate them, that the people, having acknowledged the true God, might the more readily come to worship Him in places to which they had become accustomed. He also advised them to replace the old pagan orgies by orderly banquets, in the hope that if they allowed the people some sensible gratifications, they might rise more easily to spiritual consolations. The enemies of the Roman Church have triumphed over these pass­ages, in which they have only seen the abomination brought into the sacred place; but we must rather admire the utterances of a religion which has penetrated into the depths of humanity, and knowing what con­flicts with passion she must of necessity demand from it, shrinks from imposing needless burdens. This course has shown that true knowledge and love of human nature whereby alone it can be won.

But there was that other principle in Paganism with which the Church could not treat, which she had to attack without respite, and which on its own side offered a resistance as imperishable as the passions in which it was rooted. At first, the old religion had hoped to preserve itself intact, and spring over the period of the invasions like Aeneas traversing burning Troy with the gods he had saved. Pagans counted with joy a multitude of sympathizers amongst those Goths, Franks, and Lombards who had covered the face of the Western Empire. Roman polytheism, faithful to its maxims, held out the hand to the polytheism of the barbarians, and as the Jupiter of the Capitol had admitted the strange divinities of Asia to share his throne, he could hardly reject Woden and Thor, who were compared to Mercury and Vulcan. They were, it was said, the same heavenly powers honoured under different names, and the twin cults were bound to sustain one another against the jealous God of the Christians. Thus the wave of invasion seemed to leave a sediment which revived the genius of Paganism, and in the midst of the sixth century, when Rome had passed fifty years under Gothic domination, the idolatrous party boldly attempted to reopen the Temple of Janus and restore the Palladium. So, at the opening of the seventh century, St. Gregory the Great awakened the solicitude of the Bishops of Terracina, Corsica, and Sardinia towards the pagans in their respective dioceses. About the same time, the efforts of St. Romanus and St. Eloi barely achieved the conversion of Neustria, and in the next century Austrasia was so much troubled by the corruption of the clergy and the violence of the nobles, that multitudes aban­doned the Gospel and restored their idols. In truth, the two systems of Paganism were mingled, and the struggle sustained by the Church for three centuries against the deities of Rome was but an apprenticeship to the longer conflict she was destined to wage against the idols of the Germans. In that case, also, she con­quered by a charity whose only term was martyrdom, and by a controversial method which carried its considera­tion for rude minds to the last degree. The Church treated these barbarians with the same respect as the people of Italy or of Greece, and the entire polemical system of the old apologists reappeared in the homilies of the missioners who evangelized Frisia and Thuringia. The Bishop Daniel, in expounding the proper method of discussion with the pagans of the North, renewed the arguments of St. Maximus of Turin. “You must ask them,” he said, “if their gods breed still, and if not, why they had ceased to do so.”

But Charlemagne was now about to appear, to assure to Christianity dominion, but not repose. Vanquished Paganism was transformed, and instead of a worship became a superstition. Yet, under the new form, it retained its essential faculty of leading men astray through their fears and their lusts. The converted races agreed to hold that their former gods were so many daemons, but upon the condition of reverencing and invoking them, and attaching an occult virtue to their images. Thus the Florentines had dedicated the Temple of Mars to St. John; but a certain awe still attached to the image of the fallen god. In the year 1215, a murder committed upon the spot brought the Guelphs and Ghibellines to blows, upon which Villani, an able historian, but one apt to be carried away by the opinions prevalent in his time, concluded “that the enemy of the human race had retained a certain power in his ancient idol, since at its feet the crime had been committed which had brought upon Florence so many evils.” These malevolent phantoms were but slowly dissipated, for imaginations could not shake themselves free of a spell which had bound them for so many ages. The ancient gods still kept their place in imprecations and oaths, and to this day the Italians swear by Bacchus. Pagan associations were as firmly and still more dangerously perpetuated in the sensual festivals, with their orgies and obscene songs, which the canons of the councils held in Italy, France, and Spain did not cease to condemn. The pilgrims from the North were astonished, on visiting Rome, at seeing the calends of January celebrated by bands of musicians and dancers, who paraded the town with sacrilegious songs and exclamations which savoured of idolatry. When the Italian cities were hastening, in their newly acquired liberty, to form themselves in the image of Rome, they established consuls and wished for public games. Horse and foot races were celebrated, and the lustful memories of old time came to mingle with these recreations, and races of courtesans were given in imitation of the festivals of Flora. If the Italy of the Middle Age did not actually revive the gladiatorial conflicts, she did not renounce bloody spectacles. At Ravenna, at Orvieto, and at Sienna, custom had fixed certain days upon which two bands of their citizens took up arms and slaughtered each other for the amusement of the mob. Petrarch, in 1346, grew indignant at beholding a renewal at Naples of the butcheries of the Coliseum. He relates how, one day, he was drawn by some friends to a spot not far from the city, where he found the court, the nobility, and the multitude ranged in circles assisting at the warlike sports. Noble youths were being slaughtered there under the eyes of their fathers, their glory consisting in the coolness with which they received the death-blow; and one of them rolled in a pool of blood at the very feet of the poet. Petrarch, horror-stricken, struck spurs into his horse and fled, vowing to quit before three days were past a land which was stained with Christian blood.

If pagan instincts thus lurked in the bosom of Catholic society, we may expect to see them burst forth as soon as Paganism reappeared openly in the heresy of the Albigenses. From Bulgaria to Catalonia, from the mouths of the Rhine to the pharos of Messina, millions of men arose, fought, and died for a doctrine, the essence of which lay in replacing the austerity of Catholic dogma by a new mythology, in recognizing two eternal principles of Good and Evil, and dethroning the sole God of the Christians. This popular heathenism surprises us in an epoch wherein the Church seemed absolute over the conscience; but, more strange still, it possessed a learned element, as if the human reason, once set free by the new faith, had fallen back into its old slavery, whilst in every age men of learning, ingenuity, and perseverance conspired to renew the traditions of the school of Alexandria, and restore error by philosophy and the occult sciences.

Up to the seventh century we can trace the pagan doctrines in the Gallo-Roman schools, which even contained men who were professedly heathen; and the writers of that epoch were still combating the false learning of those who boasted of extending the discoveries of their predecessors, but were in reality attached to their errors. But these dying sparks were to be extinguished in the obscurity of the barbarous era. It was in the midst of the Carolingian Revival that a theologian of depth, who had studied in the monastic schools of Ireland, John Scotus Erigena, began to profess, with force and brilliancy of exposition, a philosophy which was thoroughly imbued with the Alexandrian opinions. He tempered its excesses, indeed, by contradictions which saved his own orthodoxy, but failed to satisfy the logic of his disciples—a logic which three hundred years later impelled Amaury de Bene and David de Dinand to teach publicly the pantheistic tenets of the unity of substance, the identity of spirit and matter, and of God and nature. The Church perceived the greatness of the danger, and the new sect succumbed to the condemnations of her doctors and her councils; but these pantheistic principles, yet alive, lay hidden amongst the disciples of Averrhoes, to appear again with a more menacing attitude in the persons of Giordano Bruno and of Spinoza.

And whereas a false system of metaphysics was enticing many minds back to pagan antiquity, a greater number still were being drawn thither through those occult sciences which formed the living sore of the Middle Age. Christianity has been charged with breeding, in her favouring obscurity, astrology and magic, as well as the sanguinary legislation by which their excesses were repressed; but it is forgotten that the classic ages of the hidden sciences were the most brilliant periods of Paganism, that they flourished at Rome under Augustus, were elaborated at Alexandria, and could claim Jamblichus, Julian, and Maximus of Ephesus, the most illustrious of the Neoplatonists, amongst their neophytes. It was in vain that Origen, who had detected the secrets of the adepts, unveiled a portion of their artifices, by what illusions they caused the thunders to mutter, demons to appear, death’s heads to speak; for the vulgar believed in the mysteries which afforded the charm of fear. But the Caesars were troubled by that divining art which boasted of having announced their advent, but also foretold their fall, and we find the astrologers suffering banishment as mathematicians under Tiberius, persecuted for three centuries, and finally proscribed by constitutions of Diocletian and of Maximian. It was the legislation of the pagan emperors, carried on by Valentinian and Valens, and received into the codes of Athalaric, of Liutprand, and of Charlemagne, which founded the penal laws against sorcery which prevailed in the Middle Age; and thus did the torch of the ancient wisdom kindle the piles with which the Church has been reproached.

But penal fires could effect nothing against the fas­cinations of the forbidden fruit. In the thirteenth century, an age when Christian civilization was in its bloom, the doctrines reappeared which tended to deify the stars, by submitting human wills to their influence. Astrology had made its peace with the law, and placed itself beside the thrones of princes, or even in the chairs of the universities; armies refused to march unless preceded by observers who would mark the height of the stars, and rule the conjunction under which camps should be traced or battle given. The Emperor Frederick the Second was surrounded by astrologers, and the republics of Italy had theirs as well, so that the rival factions disputed for heaven in addition to earth. On the other hand, there was a renewal of the radical vice of Paganism, of the despair­ing struggle between man and nature, the attempt to conquer the latter, not by science or by art, but by superstitious operations and formulas; the adepts in magic renewed the idolatrous observances, not only in the secrecy of their laboratories, but in the numerous writings to which fear and curiosity afforded a circula­tion, in the shade of school or of cloister. Albert the Great recognized their influence, and in his summary of the processes by which those erring spirits boasted of predicting and governing the future, we may wonder at superstitions which the ancients themselves decried and repudiated; for instance, “Those abominable images which they call Babylonian, which appertain to the worship of Venus, and the figures of Belenus and of Hercules, whom they exorcise by the names of the fifty-four daemons attached to the service of the Moon : upon them they inscribe seven names in direct order to obtain a happy issue, and seven inversely to avert an unlucky event. In the first case, they incense them with aloes and balm; in the second, with resin and sandal-wood.

So much could error effect in the time of St. Louis and St. Thomas Aquinas, though theologians exhausted their arguments against the magicians and astrologers, and Dante fixed them in the lowest circle of his Hell. The occult sciences threw their spell over mankind, until they faded before the broad light of the sixteenth century. Yet Paganism did not expire with them, but continued to seethe like the lava of a volcano, terrifying the Christian world by chronic eruptions. No, Paganism could not be extinct in the hearts of men as long as a terror of God and the voluptuous influences of nature reigned therein together, nor could it be stifled in the schools as long as Pantheism held its own, and new sects rose to announce the apotheosis of humanity and the rehabilitation of the flesh. And the old error still ruled in Asia, in Africa, and in half of the islands of ocean, maintaining itself by threats and in arms, and now making martyrs at Tonquin and in China, as of old in Rome and Nicomedia: it still contends with the Church for six hundred millions of immortal souls.

A celebrated man, the object of our just regrets, but often liable to erroneous conclusions, has written, “How dogmas end.” But the study we have made may teach us that dogmas do not end. Humanity has only recognized two of them, though under diverse forms—that of the true God and that of the false deities. The latter was the masters of pagan hearts and the old society, the idea of the former went forth from among the Judaea hills to enlighten Europe first, and thence, little by little, the remainder of the world. The struggle between these two dogmas is the key of history, and affords to it all its grandeur and its interest; for what can be a prouder position or a more touching issue for the human race than to stand as prize in the combat between Error and Truth?

CHAPTER V.

ROMAN LAW.