History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom
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[333] As to the fearful effects of the papal bull Summis Desiderantes in south Germany, as to the Protestant severities in north Germany, as to the immense number of women and children put to death for witchcraft in Germany generally for spreading storms and pestilence, and as to the monstrous doctrine of "excepted cases," see the standard authorities on witchcraft, especially Wachter, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Strafrechts, Soldan, Horst, Hauber, and Langin; also Burr, as above. In another series of chapters on The Warfare of Humanity with Theology, I hope to go more fully into the subject. For the magic spreading of the plague at Milan, see Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi and La Colonna Infame; and for the origin of the charges, with all the details of the trail, see the Precesso Originale degli Untori, Milan, 1839, passim, but especially the large folding plate at the end, exhibiting the tortures. For the after-history of the Column of Infamy, and for the placing of Beccaria's book on the Index, see Cantu, Vita di Beccaria. For the magic spreading of the plague in general, see Littre, pp. 492 and following.
As the seventeenth century went on, ingenuity in all parts of Europe seemed devoted to new developments of fetichism. A very curious monument of this evolution in Italy exists in the Royal Gallery of Paintings at Naples, where may be seen several pictures representing the measures taken to save the city from the plague during the seventeenth century, but especially from the plague of 1656. One enormous canvas gives a curious example of the theological doctrine of intercession between man and his Maker, spun out to its logical length. In the background is the plague-stricken city: in the foreground the people are praying to the city authorities to avert the plague; the city authorities are praying to the Carthusian monks; the monks are praying to St. Martin, St. Bruno, and St. Januarius; these three saints in their turn are praying to the Virgin; the Virgin prays to Christ; and Christ prays to the Almighty. Still another picture represents the people, led by the priests, executing with horrible tortures the Jews, heretics, and witches who were supposed to cause the pestilence of 1656, while in the heavens the Virgin and St. Januarius are interceding with Christ to sheathe his sword and stop the plague.
In such an atmosphere of thought it is no wonder that the death statistics were appalling. We hear of districts in which not more than one in ten escaped, and some were entirely depopulated.
Such appeals to fetich against pestilence have continued in Naples down to our own time, the great saving power being the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. In 1856 the present writer saw this miracle performed in the gorgeous chapel of the saint forming part of the Cathedral of Naples. The chapel was filled with devout worshippers of every class, from the officials in court dress, representing the Bourbon king, down to the lowest lazzaroni. The reliquary of silver-gilt, shaped like a large human head, and supposed to contain the skull of the saint, was first placed upon the altar; next, two vials containing a dark substance said to be his blood, having been taken from the wall, were also placed upon the altar near the head. As the priests said masses, they turned the vials from time to time, and the liquefaction being somewhat delayed, the great crowd of people burst out into more and more impassioned expostulation and petitions to the saint. Just in front of the altar were the lazzaroni who claimed to be descendants of the saint's family, and these were especially importunate: at such times they beg, they scold, they even threaten; they have been known to abuse the saint roundly, and to tell him that, if he did not care to show his favour to the city by liquefying his blood, St. Cosmo and St. Damian were just as good saints as he, and would no doubt be very glad to have the city devote itself to them. At last, on the occasion above referred to, the priest, turning the vials suddenly, announced that the saint had performed the miracle, and instantly priests, people, choir, and organ burst forth into a great Te Deum; bells rang, and cannon roared; a procession was formed, and the shrine containing the saint's relics was carried through the streets, the people prostrating themselves on both sides of the way and throwing showers of rose leaves upon the shrine and upon the path before it. The contents of these precious vials are an interesting relic indeed, for they represent to us vividly that period when men who were willing to go to the stake for their religious opinions thought it not wrong to save the souls of their fellowmen by pious mendacity and consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this miracle is very simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those mixtures fusing at low temperature, which, while kept in its place within the cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being brought out into the hot, crowded chapel, and fondled by the warm hands of the priests, gradually softens and becomes liquid. It was curious to note, at the time above mentioned, that even the high functionaries representing the king looked at the miracle with awe: they evidently found "joy in believing," and one of them assured the present writer that the only thing which could cause it was the direct exercise of miraculous power.
It may be reassuring to persons contemplating a visit to that beautiful capital in these days, that, while this miracle still goes on, it is no longer the only thing relied upon to preserve the public health. An unbelieving generation, especially taught by the recent horrors of the cholera, has thought it wise to supplement the power of St. Januarius by the "Risanamento," begun mainly in 1885 and still going on. The drainage of the city has thus been greatly improved, the old wells closed, and pure water introduced from the mountains. Moreover, at the last outburst of cholera a few years since, a noble deed was done which by its moral effect exercised a widespread healing power. Upon hearing of this terrific outbreak of pestilence, King Humbert, though under the ban of the Church, broke from all the entreaties of his friends and family, went directly into the plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets, public places, and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the sick and dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the pestilence. To the credit of the Church it should also be said that the Cardinal Archbishop San Felice joined him in this.
Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king seems to have surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for it gave confidence and courage which very soon showed their effects in diminishing the number of deaths. It would certainly appear that in this matter the king was more directly under Divine inspiration and guidance than was the Pope; for the fact that King Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his life, while Leo XIII remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed the Italian people in favour of the new regime and against the old as nothing else could have done.
In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the new Italian government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially Rome, which under the sway of the popes was scandalously filthy, are now among the cleanest cities in Europe. What the relics of St. Januarius, St. Anthony, and a multitude of local fetiches throughout Italy were for ages utterly unable to do, has been accomplished by the development of the simplest sanitary principles.
Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where theological considerations have been all-controlling for centuries. Down to the interference of Napoleon with that kingdom, all sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not impious. The most sober accounts of travellers in the Spanish Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in an American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has begun to work for good. The outbreaks of cholera in recent years have done some little to bring in better sanitary measures.[334]
[334] As to the recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague, and the pictures showing the intercession of Januarius and other saints, I have relied on my own notes made at various visits to Naples. For the general subject, see Peter, Etudes Napolitaines, especially chapters v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood by eye-witnesses, one an em
inent Catholic of the seventeenth century, and the other a distinguished Protestant of our own time, see Murray's Handbook for South Italy and Naples, description of the Cathedral of San Gennaro. For an interesting series of articles on the subject, see The Catholic World for September, October, and November, 1871. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of Spain, and the resistance of the people, down to a recent period, to the most ordinary regulations prompted by decency, see Bascome, History of the Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119, 120. See also the Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 446; also, for various citations, the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization in England.
II. Gradual Decay Of Theological Views Regarding Sanitation.
We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition, less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological control. In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in England, there were, from those charged with producing plague, few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one of the chroniclers tells us.
In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was mainly sought in special church services. The foremost English churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case when the various visitations reached their climax in the great plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the Sabbath." Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its destruction in forty days.
That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin. Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases of plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to disappear. The great fire had done a good work by sweeping off many causes and centres of infection, and there had come wider streets, better pavements, and improved water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague, other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged in the city, became much less frequent.
But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London, others developed by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there and elsewhere, and of these perhaps the most fearful was the jail fever. The prisons of that period were vile beyond belief. Men were confined in dungeons rarely if ever disinfected after the death of previous occupants, and on corridors connecting directly with the foulest sewers: there was no proper disinfection, ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large prisons for criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from these centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This was especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred men died within forty hours. Lord Bacon declared the jail fever "the most pernicious infection next to the plague." In 1730, at the Dorsetshire Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed by it. The High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A single Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost no less than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at Newgate, in the heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor, sundry aldermen, and many others, died of it.
It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing with this state of things were few, the theological spirit developed a new and special form of prayer for the sufferers and placed it in the Irish Prayer Book.
These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance through the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750 began the work of John Howard, who visited the prisons of England, made known their condition to the world, and never rested until they were greatly improved. Then he applied the same benevolent activity to prisons in other countries, in the far East, and in southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a victim to disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but the hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until this fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.[335]
[335] For Erasmus, see the letter cited in Bascome, History of Epidemic Pestilences, London, 1851. For the account of the condition of Queen Elizabeth's presence chamber, see the same, p. 206; see also the same for attempts at sanitation by Caius, Mead, Pringle, and others; also see Baas and various medical authorities. For the plague in London, see Green's History of the English People, chap. ix, sec. 2; and for a more detailed account, see Lingard, History of England, enlarged edition of 1849, vol. ix, pp. 107 et seq. For full scientific discussion of this and other plagues from a medical point of view, see Creighton, History of Epidemics in Great Britain, vol. ii, chap. i. For the London plague as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking, see A Divine Tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of God's judgements upon Sabbath Breakers and other like libertines, etc., by the worthy divine, Mr. Henry Burton, 1641. The book gives fifty-six accounts of Sabbath- breakers sorely punished, generally struck dead, in England, with places, names, and dates. For a general account of the condition of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the diminution of the plague by the rebuilding of some parts of the city after the great fire, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 592, 593. For the jail fever, see Lecky, vol. i, pp. 500-503.
The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of America; but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to Divine wrath or Satanic malice, there was one case in which it was claimed that such a visitation was due to the Divine mercy. The pestilence among the indians, before the arrival of the Plymouth Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period to the Divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the white population were attributed by the same authority to devils and witches. In Cotton Mather's Wonder of the Invisible World, published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this. The great Puritan divine tells us:
"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. They were destroye
d of the destroyer. That is, they had the Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous. Quivers full of Terrible Arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious Miasms into those Juices or Bowels of Men's Bodies, which will soon Enflame them with a Mortal Fire! Hence come such Plagues, as that Beesome of Destruction which within our memory swept away such a throng of people from one English City in one Visitation: and hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so many Disguised Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations."
Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases, and speaks of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of Infirmity" being "Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the Witches," of which he gives an instance. He also cites a case where a patient "was brought unto death's door and so remained until the witch was taken and carried away by the constable, when he began at once to recover and was soon well."[336]
[336] For the passages from Cotton Mather, see his book as cited, pp. 17, 18, also 134, 145. Johnson declares that "by this meanes Christ . . . not only made roome for His people to plant, but also tamed the hard and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians, insomuch that a halfe a handful of His people landing not long after in Plymouth Plantation, found little resistance." See The History of New England, by Edward Johnson, London, 1654. Reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Collection, second series, vol. i, p. 67.