Chapter II: Roman Renaissance (4)

§ XCVII. Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various tenets which before had been little more than floating errors in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism, it became necessary to fasten down with a band of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid, and less rational, to the whole body of Romanist Divinity. Multitudes of minds which in other ages might have brought honor and strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable when they were formally defined and defended; that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude, were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that, above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God's word accessible to every man, left all sins against its light incapable of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible, the judgment was pronounced upon her, which made her the scorn and the prey of her own children, and cast her down from the throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low, that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation was mocked in the temples of Christianity. Judea had seen her God laid in the manger of the beasts of burden; it was for Christendom to stable the beasts of burden by the altar of her God.

§ XCVIII. Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself. That opposition was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing, and incautious. It could indeed hardly be otherwise. Fresh bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching. Forced by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting, rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily. Sect branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege. Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their guides to be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood and contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the rejection of the highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind: while the learned infidel, standing aloof, drew his own conclusions, both from the rancor of the antagonists, and from their errors; believed each in all that he alleged against the other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he watched the winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of England drink the blood of King Charles.

§ XCIX. Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent of the renewal of the study of Pagan writers. But that renewal found the faith of Christendom already weakened and divided; and therefore it was itself productive of an effect tenfold greater than could have been apprehended from it at another time. It acted first, as before noticed, in leading the attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was discovered that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt, and the primal object of every scholar became now to purify his style. To this study of words, that of forms being added, both as of matters of the first importance, half the intellect of the age was at once absorbed in the base sciences of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly unworthy of the serious labor of men, and necessarily rendering those employed upon them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion. Of the debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once reading a grammarian's notes on a great poet: logic is unnecessary for men who can reason; and about as useful to those who cannot, as a machine for forcing one foot in due succession before the other would be to a man who could not walk: while the study of rhetoric is exclusively one for men who desire to deceive or be deceived; he who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue, or, if he fear it, it is because the base rhetoric of dishonesty keeps the truth from being heard.

§ C. The study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men took of the Bible. Christ's teaching was discovered not to be rhetorical, St. Paul's preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical. The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism; and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief stumbling-blocks to its religion.

§ CI. But it was not the grammarian and logician alone who was thus retarded or perverted; in them there had been small loss. The men who could truly appreciate the higher excellences of the classics were carried away by a current of enthusiasm which withdrew them from every other study. Christianity was still professed as a matter of form, but neither the Bible nor the writings of the Fathers had time left for their perusal, still less heart left for their acceptance. The human mind is not capable of more than a certain amount of admiration or reverence, and that which was given to Horace was withdrawn from David. Religion is, of all subjects, that which will least endure a second place in the heart or thoughts, and a languid and occasional study of it was sure to lead to error or infidelity. On the other hand, what was heartily admired and unceasingly contemplated was soon brought nigh to being believed; and the systems of Pagan mythology began gradually to assume the places in the human mind from which the unwatched Christianity was wasting. Men did not indeed openly sacrifice to Jupiter, or build silver shrines for Diana, but the ideas of Paganism nevertheless became thoroughly vital and present with them at all times; and it did not matter in the least, as far as respected the power of true religion, whether the Pagan image was believed in or not, so long as it entirely occupied the thoughts. The scholar of the sixteenth century, if he saw the lightning shining from the east unto the west, thought forthwith of Jupiter, not of the coming of the Son of Man; if he saw the moon walking in brightness, he thought of Diana, not of the throne which was to be established for ever as a faithful witness in heaven; and though his heart was but secretly enticed, yet thus he denied the God that is above.[25]

And, indeed, this double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused effective and practical belief altogether. It would have been better to have worshipped Diana and Jupiter at once, than to have gone on through the whole of life naming one God, imagining another, and dreading none. Better, a thousandfold, to have been "a Pagan suckled in some creed outworn," than to have stood by the great sea of Eternity and seen no God walking on its waves, no heavenly world on its horizon.

§ CII. This fatal result of an enthusiasm for classical literature was hastened and heightened by the misdirection of the powers of art. The imagination of the age was actively set to realize these objects of Pagan belief; and all the most exalted faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed in the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of Fiction. The invention which had formerly been both sanctified and strengthened by laboring under the command of settled intention, and on the ground of assured belief, had now the reins laid upon its neck by passion, and all ground of fact cut from beneath its feet; and the imagination which formerly had helped men to apprehend the truth, now tempted them to believe a falsehood. The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter's field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.

§ CIII. But this was not all. The habit of using the greatest gifts of imagination upon fictitious subjects, of course destroyed the honor and value of the same imagination used in the cause of truth. Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion Virgins and Angels were disembodied and disbelieved. The images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average value in the spectator's mind; and incidents from the Iliad and from the Exodus to come within the same degrees of credibility. And, farther, while the powers of the imagination were becoming daily more and more languid, because unsupported by faith, the manual skill and science of the artist were continually on the increase. When these had reached a certain point, they began to be the principal things considered in the picture, and its story or scene to be thought of only as a theme for their manifestation. Observe the difference. In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting. The distinction is enormous, the difference incalculable as irreconcilable. And thus, the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of color and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy,--inconceivable, unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it,--which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.

Now all this evil, observe, would have been merely the necessary and natural operation of an enthusiasm for the classics, and of a delight in the mere science of the artist, on the most virtuous mind. But this operation took place upon minds enervated by luxury, and which were tempted, at the very same period, to forgetfulness or denial of all religious principle by their own basest instincts. The faith which had been undermined by the genius of Pagans, was overthrown by the crimes of Christians; and the ruin which was begun by scholarship, was completed by sensuality. The characters of the heathen divinities were as suitable to the manners of the time as their forms were agreeable to its taste; and Paganism again became, in effect, the religion of Europe. That is to say, the civilized world is at this moment, collectively, just as Pagan as it was in the second century; a small body of believers being now, as they were then, representative of the Church of Christ in the midst of the faithless: but there is just this difference, and this very fatal one, between the second and nineteenth centuries, that the Pagans are nominally and fashionably Christians, and that there is every conceivable variety and shade of belief between the two; so that not only is it most difficult theoretically to mark the point where hesitating trust and failing practice change into definite infidelity, but it has become a point of politeness not to inquire too deeply into our neighbor's religious opinions; and, so that no one be offended by violent breach of external forms, to waive any close examination into the tenets of faith. The fact is, we distrust each other and ourselves so much, that we dare not press this matter; we know that if, on any occasion of general intercourse, we turn to our next neighbor, and put to him some searching or testing question, we shall, in nine cases out of ten, discover him to be only a Christian in his own way, and as far as he thinks proper, and that he doubts of many things which we ourselves do not believe strongly enough to hear doubted without danger. What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity; and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice. And under this shelter of charity, humility, and faintheartedness, the world, unquestioned by others or by itself, mingles with and overwhelms the small body of Christians, legislates for them, moralizes for them, reasons for them; and, though itself of course greatly and beneficently influenced by the association, and held much in check by its pretence to Christianity, yet undermines, in nearly the same degree, the sincerity and practical power of Christianity itself, until at last, in the very institutions of which the administration may be considered as the principal test of the genuineness of national religion, those devoted to education, the Pagan system is completely triumphant; and the entire body of the so-called Christian world has established a system of instruction for its youth, wherein neither the history of Christ's Church, nor the language of God's law, is considered a study of the smallest importance; wherein, of all subjects of human inquiry, his own religion is the one in which a youth's ignorance is most easily forgiven;[26] and in which it is held a light matter that he should be daily guilty of lying, or debauchery, or of blasphemy, so only that he write Latin verses accurately, and with speed.

I believe that in few years more we shall wake from all these errors in astonishment, as from evil dreams; having been preserved, in the midst of their madness, by those hidden roots of active and earnest Christianity which God's grace has bound in the English nation with iron and brass. But in the Venetian, those roots themselves had withered; and, from the palace of their ancient religion, their pride cast them forth hopelessly to the pasture of the brute. From pride to infidelity, from infidelity to the unscrupulous and insatiable pursuit of pleasure, and from this to irremediable degradation, the transitions were swift, like the falling of a star. The great palaces of the haughtiest nobles of Venice were stayed, before they had risen far above their foundations, by the blast of a penal poverty; and the wild grass, on the unfinished fragments of their mighty shafts, waves at the tide-mark where the power of the godless people first heard the "Hitherto shalt thou come." And the regeneration in which they had so vainly trusted,--the new birth and clear dawning, as they thought it, of all art, all knowledge, and all hope,--became to them as that dawn which Ezekiel saw on the hills of Israel: "Behold the day; behold, it is come. The rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded, violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, nor of their multitude; let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Or, more briefly, science has to do with facts, art with
phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to
facts; and to art facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena. I
use the word "art" here with reference to the fine arts only, for
the lower arts of mechanical production I should reserve the word
"manufacture."

[9] Tintoret.

[10] St. Bernard.

[11] Society always has a destructive influence upon an artist:
first by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, by its
chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its
vain occupation of his time and thoughts. Of course a painter of men
must be _among_ men; but it ought to be as a watcher, not as a
companion.

[12] I intended in this place to have introduced some special
consideration of the science of anatomy, which I believe to have
been in great part the cause of the decline of modern art; but I
have been anticipated by a writer better able to treat the subject.
I have only glanced at his book; and there is something in the
spirit of it which I do not like, and some parts of it are assuredly
wrong; but, respecting anatomy, it seems to me to settle the
question indisputably, more especially as being written by a master
of the science. I quote two passages, and must refer the reader to
the sequel.

"_The scientific men of forty centuries_ have failed to describe so
accurately, so beautifully, so artistically, as Homer did, the
organic elements constituting the emblems of youth and beauty, and
the waste and decay which these sustain by time and age. All these
Homer understood better, and has described more truthfully than the
scientific men of forty centuries....

"Before I approach this question, permit me to make a few remarks on
the pre-historic period of Greece; that era which seems to have
produced nearly all the great men.

"On looking attentively at the statues within my observation, I
cannot find the slightest foundation for the assertion that their
sculptors must have dissected the human frame and been well
acquainted with the human anatomy. They, like Homer, had discovered
Nature's secret, and bestowed their whole attention on the exterior.
The exterior they read profoundly, and studied deeply--the _living
exterior_ and the _dead_. Above all, they avoided displaying the
dead and dissected interior, through the exterior. They had
discovered that the interior presents hideous shapes, but not forms.
Men during the philosophic era of Greece saw all this, each reading
the antique to the best of his abilities. The man of genius
rediscovered the canon of the ancient masters, and wrought on its
principles. The greater number, as now, unequal to this step, merely
imitated and copied those who preceded them."--_Great Artists and
Great Anatomists_. By R. Knox, M.D. London, Van Voorst, 1852.

Respecting the value of literary knowledge in general as regards
art, the reader will also do well to meditate on the following
sentences from Hallam's "Literature of Europe;" remembering at the
same time what I have above said, that "the root of all great art in
Europe is struck in the thirteenth century," and that the great time
is from 1250 to 1350:

"In Germany the tenth century, Leibnitz declares, was a golden age
of learning compared with the thirteenth."

"The writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible
ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of common grammatical rules."

The fourteenth century was "not superior to the thirteenth in
learning.... We may justly praise Richard of Bury for his zeal in
collecting books. But his erudition appears crude, his style
indifferent, and his thoughts superficial."

I doubt the superficialness of the _thoughts_: at all events, this
is not a character of the time, though it may be of the writer; for
this would affect art more even than literature.

[13] Churton's "Early English Church." London, 1840.

[14] "Quibus nulla macula inest quæ non cernatur. Ita viri nobilitate
præditi eam vitam peragant cui nulla nota possit inviri." The first
sentence is literally, "in which there is no spot that may not be
seen." But I imagine the writer meant it as I have put it in the
text, else his comparison does not hold.

[15] Observe, however, that the magnitude spoken of here and in the
following passages, is the finished and polished magnitude sought
for the sake of pomp: not the rough magnitude sought for the sake of
sublimity: respecting which see the "Seven Lamps," chap. iii. § 5,
6, and 8.

[16] Can Grande died in 1329: we can hardly allow more than five
years for the erection of his tomb.

[17] Vol. I. Chap. I.

[18] Sansovino, lib. xiii.

[19] Tentori, vi. 142, i. 157.

[20] "Jacobus Pisaurius Paphi Episcopus qui Turcos bello, se ipsum
pace vincebat, ex nobili inter Venetas, ad nobiliorem inter Angelos
familiam delatus, nobilissimam in illa die Coronam justo Judice
reddente, hic situs expectat Vixit annos Platonicos. Obijt MDXLVII.
IX. Kal. Aprilis."

[21] Isaiah xlvii. 7, 10, 11, 15.

[22] Compare "Seven Lamps," chap. vii. § 3.

[23] See the farther remarks on Inspiration, in the fourth chapter.

[24] That is to say, orders separated by such distinctions as the old
Greek ones: considered with reference to the bearing power of the
capital, all orders may be referred to two, as long ago stated; just
as trees may be referred to the two great classes, monocotyledonous
and dicotyledonous.

[25] Job xxi: 26-28; Psalm lxxxix. 37.

[26] I shall not forget the impression made upon me at Oxford, when,
going up for my degree, and mentioning to one of the authorities
that I had not had time enough to read the Epistles properly, I was
told, that "the Epistles were separate sciences, and I need not
trouble myself about them."

The reader will find some farther notes on this subject in Appendix
7, "Modern Education."