History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

  A few strong churchmen and laymen made efforts to resist this tendency. As far back as the fourth century, Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa, accepted the truth as developed by pagan physicians, and aided them in strengthening it. In the seventh century, a Lombard code embodied a similar effort. In the eighth century, one of Charlemagne's capitularies seems to have had a like purpose. In the ninth century, that great churchman and statesman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, superior to his time in this as in so many other things, tried to make right reason prevail in this field; and, near the beginning of the tenth century, Regino, Abbot of Prum, in the diocese of Treves, insisted on treating possession as disease. But all in vain; the current streaming most directly from sundry texts in the Christian sacred books, and swollen by theology, had become overwhelming.[347]

  [347] For a very thorough and interesting statement on the general subject, see Kirchhoff, Beziehungen des Damonen- und Hexenwesens zur deutschen Irrenpflege in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie, Berlin, 1888, Bd. xliv, Heft 25. For Roman Catholic authority, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, article Energumens. For a brief and eloquent summary, see Krefft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, as above; and for a clear view of the transition from pagan mildness in the care of the insane to severity and cruelty under the Christian Church, see Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind, London, 1879, p. 523. See also Buchmann, Die undfreie und die freie Kirche, Bresleau, 1873, p. 251. For other citations, see Kirchoff, as above, pp. 334-346. For Bishop Nemesius, see Trelat, p. 48. For an account of Agobard's general position in regard to this and allied superstitions, see Reginald Lane Poole's Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884.

  The first great tributary poured into this stream, as we approach the bloom of the Middle Ages, appears to have come from the brain of Michael Psellus. Mingling scriptural texts, Platonic philosophy, and theological statements by great doctors of the Church, with wild utterances obtained from lunatics, he gave forth, about the beginning of the twelfth century, a treatise on The Work of Demons. Sacred science was vastly enriched thereby in various ways; but two of his conclusions, the results of his most profound thought, enforced by theologians and popularized by preachers, soon took special hold upon the thinking portion of the people at large. The first of these, which he easily based upon Scripture and St. Basil, was that, since all demons suffer by material fire and brimstone, they must have material bodies; the second was that, since all demons are by nature cold, they gladly seek a genial warmth by entering the bodies of men and beasts.[348]

  [348] See Baas and Werner, cited by Kirchhoff,as above; also Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 68, and note, New York, 1884. As to Basil's belief in the corporeality of devils, see his Commentary on Isaiah, cap. i.

  Fed by this stream of thought, and developed in the warm atmosphere of medieval devotion, the idea of demoniacal possession as the main source of lunacy grew and blossomed and bore fruit in noxious luxuriance.

  There had, indeed, come into the Middle Ages an inheritance of scientific thought. The ideas of Hippocrates, Celius Aurelianus, Galen, and their followers, were from time to time revived; the Arabian physicians, the School of Salerno, such writers as Salicetus and Guy de Chauliac, and even some of the religious orders, did something to keep scientific doctrines alive; but the tide of theological thought was too strong; it became dangerous even to seem to name possible limits to diabolical power. To deny Satan was atheism; and perhaps nothing did so much to fasten the epithet "atheist" upon the medical profession as the suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge diabolical interference in mental disease. Following in the lines of the earlier fathers, St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, all the great doctors in the medieval Church, some of them in spite of occasional misgivings, upheld the idea that insanity is largely or mainly demoniacal possession, basing their belief steadily on the sacred Scriptures; and this belief was followed up in every quarter by more and more constant citation of the text "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." No other text of Scripture--save perhaps one--has caused the shedding of so much innocent blood.

  As we look over the history of the Middle Ages, we do, indeed, see another growth from which one might hope much; for there were two great streams of influence in the Church, and never were two powers more unlike each other.

  On one side was the spirit of Christianity, as it proceeded from the heart and mind of its blessed Founder, immensely powerful in aiding the evolution of religious thought and effort, and especially of provision for the relief of suffering by religious asylums and tender care. Nothing better expresses this than the touching words inscribed upon a great medieval hospital, "Christo in pauperibus suis." But on the other side was the theological theory--proceeding, as we have seen, from the survival of ancient superstitions, and sustained by constant reference to the texts in our sacred books--that many, and probably most, of the insane were possessed by the devil or in league with him, and that the cruel treatment of lunatics was simply punishment of the devil and his minions. By this current of thought was gradually developed one of the greatest masses of superstitious cruelty that has ever afflicted humanity. At the same time the stream of Christian endeavour, so far as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries, indeed, gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the south of France, by certain Franciscans in northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church was stimulated by the Mohammedans. Certain monks, who had much to do with them in redeeming Christian slaves, found in the fifteenth century what John Howard found in the eighteenth, that the Arabs and Turks made a large and merciful provision for lunatics, such as was not seen in Christian lands; and this example led to better establishments in Spain and Italy.

  All honour to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but, as a rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with those for other diseases, and they usually degenerated into "mad-houses," where devils were cast out mainly by cruelty.[349]

  [349] For a very full and learned, if somewhat one-sided, account of the earlier effects of this stream of charitable thought, see Tollemer, Des Origines de la Charite Catholique, Paris, 1858. It is instructive to note that, while this book is very full in regard to the action of the Church on slavery and on provision for the widows and orphans, the sick, infirm, captives, and lepers, there is hardly a trace of any care for the insane. This same want is incidentally shown by a typical example in Kriegk, Aerzte, Heilanstalten und Geisteskranke im mittelalterlichen Frankfurt, Frankfurt a. M., 1863, pp. 16, 17; also Kirschhof, pp. 396, 397. On the general subject, see Semelaigne, as above, p. 214; also Calmeil, vol. i, pp. 116, 117. For the effect of Muslem example in Spain and Italy, see Krafft-Ebing, as above, p. 45, note.

  The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to be the exorcism; but under the influence of inferences from Scripture farther and farther fetched, and of theological reasoning more and more subtle, it became something very different from the gentle procedure of earlier times, and some description of this great weapon at the time of its highest development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in hand.

  A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that, according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is pride. Pride led him to rebel; for pride he was cast down; therefore the first thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic, was to strike a fatal blow at his pride,--to disgust him.

  This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The treatises on the subject simply astound one by thei
r wealth of blasphemous and obscene epithets which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in casting out devils. The Treasury of Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.[350]

  [350] Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque Conjurationum terribilium, potentissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum practica probatissima: quibus spiritus maligni, Daemones Maleficiaque omnia de Corporibus humanis obsessis, tanquam Flagellis Fustibusque fugantur, expelluntur, . . . Cologne, 1626. Many of the books of the exorcists were put upon the various indexes of the Church, but this, the richest collection of all, and including nearly all those condemned, was not prohibited until 1709. Scarcely less startling manuals continued even later in use; and exorcisms adapted to every emergency may of course still be found in all the Benedictionals of the Church, even the latest. As an example, see the Manuale Benedictionum, published by the Bishop of Passau in 1849, or the Exorcismus in Satanam, etc., issued in 1890 by the present Pope, and now on sale at the shop of the Propoganda in Rome.

  Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate days ran as follows:

  "Thou lustful and stupid one,...thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,...thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,...thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish drunkard,...most greedy wolf,...most abominable whisperer,...thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!...I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,...dingy collier,...filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),...perfidious boar,...envious crocodile,... malodorous drudge,...wounded basilisk,...rust-coloured asp,... swollen toad,...entangled spider,...lousy swine-herd (porcarie pedicose),...lowest of the low,...cudgelled ass," etc.

  But, in addition to this attempt to disgust Satan's pride with blackguardism, there was another to scare him with tremendous words. For this purpose, thunderous names, from Hebrew and Greek, were imported, such as Acharon, Eheye, Schemhamphora, Tetragrammaton, Homoousion, Athanatos, Ischiros, Aecodes, and the like.[351]

  [351] See the Conjuratio on p. 300 of the Thesaurus, and the general directions given on pp. 251, 251.

  Efforts were also made to drive him out with filthy and rank-smelling drugs; and, among those which can be mentioned in a printed article, we may name asafoetida, sulphur, squills, etc., which were to be burned under his nose.

  Still further to plague him, pictures of the devil were to be spat upon, trampled under foot by people of low condition, and sprinkled with foul compounds.

  But these were merely preliminaries to the exorcism proper. In this the most profound theological thought and sacred science of the period culminated.

  Most of its forms were childish, but some rise to almost Miltonic grandeur. As an example of the latter, we may take the following:

  "By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be; and hath signified, sending by his angel,...I exorcise you, ye angels of untold perversity!

  "By the seven golden candlesticks,...and by one like unto the Son of man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks; by his voice, as the voice of many waters;...by his words, `I am living, who was dead; and behold, I live forever and ever; and I have the keys of death and of hell,' I say unto you, Depart, O angels that show the way to eternal perdition!"

  Besides these, were long litanies of billingsgate, cursing, and threatening. One of these "scourging" exorcisms runs partly as follows:

  "May Agyos strike thee, as he did Egypt, with frogs!...May all the devils that are thy foes rush forth upon thee, and drag thee down to hell!...May...Tetragrammaton...drive thee forth and stone thee, as Israel did to Achan!...May the Holy One trample on thee and hang thee up in an infernal fork, as was done to the five kings of the Amorites!...May God set a nail to your skull, and pound it in with a hammer, as Jael did unto Sisera!... May...Sother...break thy head and cut off thy hands, as was done to the cursed Dagon!...May God hang thee in a hellish yoke, as seven men were hanged by the sons of Saul!" And so on, through five pages of close-printed Latin curses.[352]

  [352] Thesaurus Exorcismorum, pp. 812-817.

  Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: "O obstinate, accursed, fly!...why do you stop and hold back, when you know that your strength is lost on Christ? For it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks; and, verily, the longer it takes you to go, the worse it will go with you. Begone, then: take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying worm, thou begetter of vipers!"[353]

  [353] Ibid., p. 859.

  This procedure and its results were recognised as among the glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective that five devils gave up possession of a sufferer and signed their names, each for himself and his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583, gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in boasts of such "mighty works."[354]

  [354] In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, entitled Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i, pp. 379-385.

  Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men.

  Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the noblest of his titles that of "The Great Physician." The result was natural: the treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer, the torturer, and the executioner.

  To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.

  One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving out the demons by torture.[355]

  [355] For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D. H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, 1882, p. 41.

  Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still exist. In the great cities of central Europe, "witch towers," where witches and demoniacs were tortured, and "fool towers," where the more gentle lunatics were imprisoned, may still be seen.

  In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of all representations still shows Satan and his imps sco
wling, jeering, grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan, and the vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres Cathedral we see a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long devil-scaring formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic, with a little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing from his mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in cathedrals and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and all served to impress upon the popular mind a horror of everything called diabolic, and a hatred of those charged with it. These sermons in stones preceded the printed book; they were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther's pictorial Bible.[356]

  [356] I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of Caricature and the Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen, 1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen, 1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur l'Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii.