THE MONK AND THE WOMAN.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 5, 1 February 1884, Page 14

THE MONK AND THE WOMAN.

It will be generally acknowledged as a true statement that there is no time when political danger is so imminent as during the period of great national change. This proposition, which is so trite and well-known in reference to the individual State or people, is even more correCl in regard to the peril which arises to the welfare of the whole community of nations which border the particular State in which the change is occurring. Never perhaps was this so well marked as at the time when the disintegration of the great Roman Empire had become an accomplished facsl. On no particular date can the historian lay his finger and say, This was the end!”—that Colossus of nations was so immense, that blows here and fraeftures there, which would have shattered any frame of less vast proportions, only told gradually and slowly towards its sure decay. But when Rome had parted into its Eastern and Western divisions, when the heart of the Empire ceased to throb forth its strong centralising pulsations of command and order into the far-away limbs and fingers of its colonies and once-subjedt nations, out of that paralysis of the extremities, out of that senility of law and decrepit military rule, arose the greatest danger to which civilisation as ever exposed—the danger of universal anarchy. The irruption of the barbarous nations threw the world of culture back for centuries ; although even this had its good side in giving to the peoples of Western Europe that “ iron of the blood ” which the northern savages had kept and nurtured, while the luxury born of conquest, of the use of slaves, and of the large estates, had sapped the constitutions and drained the courage of their southern neighbours. The eagles ol Rome were screaming no more for war; they had flown back for the last time over Alps and Appennines, and the strong voice of the Legionary echoed no more from the banks of the Tigris to the shores of the Isles of Tin. In the place of the old military rule arose among the abandoned nations a fierce turbulent spirit, a love of bloodshed, a scorn of authority not supported by power, which threatened to crush out every softer impulse and every gentler virtue of humanity. During the time which saw the Ostrogoth and the Visigoth, the Saxon Heptarchy, the Lombards, the Merovingians, and the Norse Vikings, each king and kinglet, chief and noble was as a God to his followers, so long as he led them where blood was to be shed and booty secured. Men seemed to be losing all human feeling in the blood-thirst of the wolf, when amongst them passed small bands of earnest messengers who preached the dodlrine of universal brotherhood, the gospel of mercy and forgiveness, and under their courageous teachings the spedtral form of anarchy drew back, the threatened chaos of society took a form a shape which grew day ■ by day into more perfect symmetry and more practical organisation, an organisation which has survived the passage of ten centuries, and is visible working among us in our own day. The men who wrought this unity taught that the Pontiff was the Vicar of God, his foot was on the neck of kings, his was the power to bind and loose in heaven and earth and hell. No less claim would have availed ; under threats of the terrors of darkness for the unbelievers, and promises of sure reward eternally for obedience, the discordant particles of seething humanity settled and crystalised around the chair of the High Priest at Rome. Scattered into every village, gathered together in every town were the emissaries of the Christian Pontifex- Maximus ; where the Convent rose, where the monks tilled the lands of the Monastery were centres of law and order, nuclei of industry and good conduct. It may be urged that there is nothing inherent in Christianity as Christianity to have made it such an unifying and organising power, that any strong religious spirit, such as Mahometanism’ would have done as much; and such objection is to some extent just. The hand of the Caliph stretched out from Mecca could make its grip shut as hard at Jerusalem or Bassorah as in the temple of the Caaba, and could reach as far as the touch of the successor of Peter ; but in considering historical fads we must deal with what was, not with what ‘ might have been,’ and it was Christianity which stood in the western breach between

savagedom and the possibility of government. For which let us be glad, and thankful for the beauty of its youth.

The servants of the Church were not only examples of discipline and morality, but possessed another power for good in their celibacy; it is impossible to rate too highly the effect of such celibacy cit ' that particular time. he world had seen many priesthoods, had seen the sway of the priests of Babylon and Egypt, of Judaea, Greece, and Rome become stronger and more intolerant each year their nation existed, the people more and more crushed beneath sacerdotal influence until the sword of the invader shore the Gordian knot of trouble and servitude. A little study will show how the arrogance of priestly caste, increasing from father to son and propagated by family traditions, grows into a shape beside which regal pride sinks into insignificance., But in the Christian Establishment was an order of priests recruited from all classes; into the ranks of that priesthood the sons of the meanest could gain admittance ; within that order was safety from the famine and sword which sometimes swept the land ; there was a constant succession of “ new blood ” ; a strength resulting from the blending of many diverse races, and the absence of that intolerable family pride of priesthood which is the inheritance of a sacerdotal caste. We can hardly imagine the disastrous effeCt on men which would have resulted had there been a Christian Hierarchy mingling at once the blood of kings and hereditary priests in the veins of certain noble families.

Having said so much in unmixed praise, let us turn to another side of the question, and see how the light faded and the fine gold became changed. If the unity and celibacy of the Church had many and good effects upon the history of men, they had many cruel and unwritten effects upon the position of women. The dodtrines of human depravity, the fall of man, and the vileness of all natural instindts made the celibate who would rise to bodily holiness look upon woman as his personal enemy. His teachers brought with them from the East a contempt for the physically weaker sex not wholly undeserved by those Eastern women. If the effect of the use of slaves was degradation for the male slave and effeminacy for his owner, still worse was the result for the female slave and her master. Not only did slavery spread its social cancer, but the massing of thefreedmen in cities (where they had been driven by the slave competition in agriculture on the large estates) had its vile consequences. Any man who wished not to be utterly crushed down became a follower of some great noble, and paid in sycophancy for that noble’s protection ; if the freedman could scarcely call his life his own, the freedman’s wife and daughters were at the beck and call of the great lord in a way which made morality impossible. The mixture with the northern barbarians gave not only strength and courage to the men, but a renewed faith in and higher ideal of womanhood, for the sanctity of marriage and the chastity of their women were articles of belief in the Norse and Teutonic tribes. As we read the Eddas, the Niebelungen Lied, and the other old poems and stories which are our legacy from those stormy days, we see indeed that the Northern women had fingers rather too apt to close round the haft of the axe and the hilt of the knife, but then they did not spare themselves, their love of bloodshed or sufferance of it had nothing of the cruel selfishness which made the delicate Roman ladies in the Flavian amphitheatre turn down their dainty thumbs as the death signal for others. The Scandinavian woman was the house-mother, in her own home-domain, man’s equal ; looked upon with almost religious respeeff, because in her veins ran the blood of the ‘ fighting man,’ and the wife and the mother of the Northern warrior were the wife and the mother of heroes. But the monks, trained in the later Roman contempt for women and the pietist horror of the sex, changed all that. In the quiet working room of the Convent, in rainy days of winter, on drowsy afternoons of summer, when the Brothers ere at their missal-painting, or labouring in their tidy garden, when the low murmur of the convex turned upon the theme of Women, what

pungent satire, what bitter words, were poured forth upon that sex which to the celibate and the ascetic represented “ the world, the flesh, and the devil.” And if the holy and sincerely pious men, of whom there were many in the early Church, could revile women as their stumbling block and chief temptation, still more would the hypocrite who wished to disguise his sensuality put on a double portion of outward contempt for females, and make his teaching lower them in the eyes of laymen. He would affeCledly preach what Saint Chr}'sostom preached in earnest, that woman was ‘ a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, and a painted ill.’ They raved and slandered and reviled in a manner laughable exceedingly were not the consequences so terribly cruel and degrading. A favourite theme for the modern orthodox to descant upon, is what the Church has done for the purity and elevation of women, as though there w r ere no virtuous women in the older days. ‘ Were there no bards before the fall of Troy ?’ The elevation of mind which would allow mediaeval women to look on at vile Biblical dramas (the Monkish Mystery, or Miracle plays) where Adam and Eve were brought on the stage in a state of innocence, &c., was not so greatly above that of their pure Saxon and Norse ancestresses, and there is no more comparison between them than between the chaste Lucretias and Virginias of Ancient Rome, and the profligate daughters of nobles who swam naked round Nero’s barge in public procession. Countless centuries before, in the dim hazy days of the East, had grown up the worship of the female power in the Universe, that great sense of the infinite Motherhood of Nature which appeals to all generations of men. The subject of the Dual Deity in the Everlasting is too gigantic to be more than touched on here, and the temptation must be forborne which prompts us to glance toward Isis and Hera, Ceres and the Venus Genitrix, with the mystical allegories wdiich sanctified them, _ and the mysteries which polluted their later worship. The worship of the Virgin, which was the form taken by the mediaeval mind in its communion with the Great Mother, has had too much claimed for it when it is asserted that it helped vastly to improve the condition of women. The mind which had been resting in religious ecstacy upon the spiritual bosom of the Madonna, the eyes which had been raised in halfdelirious adoration toward the “ rosa mystica,” felt little but contempt when lowered to the level of earthly women, who, not having been honored supernatural visitors from Olympus or the New Jerusalem, could not enter the holy land of maternity through the gates of pain without leaving behind them the chaplet of virginity. The monk, too, in preaching the vanity of earthly happiness and the utter insignificance of the search for it, weakened the sanCtity of the regard for home and home duties. His hatred of the body not only encouraged dirtiness,but ruined the love of physical beauty which had been almost a religion among the Greeks, and gave us ideals from which Art is still suffering; so in sanitary matters and a hundred others, the old foolish, prudish contempt of the body appears and fights against any rational reform.

But it was in its effeCl upon the belief in witchcraft that we see the cruellest result of monkish teaching. To consult authorities upon this subject makes the blood boil ■with indignation to find what fearful pain men inflicted, under supposed Biblical direction, upon members of their race, and nine-tenths of the victims were women. They were accused of having children by fiends (incubi), and women with beautiful hair were supposed to be peculiarly liable to attract demon lovers—this was supposed to be the meaning of St. Paul’s command to women to keep their heads covered ‘because of the angels. They were accused of frequenting witches-sabbaths where all sorts of vile orgies went on; of eating dead bodies as were-wolves ; and of every other idiotic trash which minds rotten with superstition could conceive. And the ascetic familiarity with bodily pain, nurtured by dwelling on horrible pictures and stories of the sufferings of the saints and martyrs, intensified by a gloomy faith lurid with the flames of purgatory and hell, made these judges and accusers use torture in the most heartless and unsparing manner. The poor

victim was often kept awake for days and nights by having a “ witch s bridle ” fastened on her mouth and secured by a padlock to the wall, so that the sufferer could neither sit nor lie down. Let us read : “ These instruments were so constructed that by means of a hoop which passed over the head, a piece of iron having four points or prongs was forcibly thrust into the mouth, two of these being directed towards the tongue, the others pointing out towards each cheek.” (Dalyell’s ‘ Darker Superstitions of Scotland.’) In this position she was watched by men set to keep her awake for days and nights in order to make her confess her guilt, the toituie of thirst being added. So thousands of the poor weak, worn-out creatures acknowledged anything they were required to confess, and were removed to the flaming faggots of deliverance. Llorente states that from his perusal of the documents of the Spanish Inquisition, he found that at least 31.000 persons were burnt by that institution alone. 50.000 perished in the Netherlands under Charles V. In Italy 1,000 persons were burnt in one year (Spina Dc Straus’). 7,000 persons were burnt at Treves (liners ‘ Traite des Superstitions’). Sprenger, who had unusual opportunities of judging, states that he believes that from the introduction of Christianity to the present day, nine million persons have suffered violent deaths on this account. Nor did the result of monkish fear of demons and monkish hatred of women end with the suppression of the monasteries ; a legacy of horror was left to the Reformers. The Puritans in England and America, the Presbyterians in Scotland murdered more women than even the Roman Catholics had done. Luther, the first Reformer, said, “ I would have no compassion on these witches, I would burn them all”; and John Wesley, the last Reformer, said (Journal 1768), “ the giving up witchcraft is in effeCt giving up the Bible. Let us turn away from this darkest record of human history, and glance at one more result of monkery. It AAas the degrading view taken of Love. It has been truly said that Love, as it is regarded to-day, is of modern growth ; that the exquisite and refined sentiment, which is the ideal of the intellectual world in opposition to brutal passion or coarse sensual indulgence, is a new product of our later civilisation. The notion of an affection which can survive all loss, grow without possession, and exist without hope of fruition, that “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all,” may be of modern date, but that it should be so is the result of the degradation of women by ascetic preaching from Eastern books. As the Church for ages persecuted intellect in men, and tortured thinkers- as heretics so they threw down the lofty womanly ideal of our Northern ancestors, and gave us centuries of grossness and sensuality. Every step towards freedom for women, every link of her chain which has dropt broken has been the work of that liberalising, widening tendency of thought which has been fought for inch by inch, year after year, against the monk and the monk’s successors. . Let me quote the noble words of noble George Eliot: “ What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions ? . They are theyea or the nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.” , T ™ . T Edav. Tregear. New Plymouth, Jan. 3rd, 1884.