Читать книгу The World's Debt to the Catholic Church - James J. Walsh - Страница 4

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The subject of this book is, in brief, the contribution of the Catholic Church to civilization. Civilization is the process by which men come to be more interested in their minds than in their bodies. In order to go on living we have to be reasonably interested in our bodies. It is very easy to be more interested in them than is necessary or even good for them. There is a constant tendency gripping us to be occupied more with our bodies than with our minds, that is to devote ourselves to the seeking of the satisfaction of the body either present or prospective rather than the satisfaction which comes with the cultivation of the mind. Every man must care properly for his body, because otherwise his mind will not function as it should and he will inevitably be diverted from the intellectual and the spiritual life by the insistent claims of a neglected body.

Every attention to our physical being beyond what is necessary to keep it in good condition just takes away that much time which might be spent in developing the mind and making life mean more. We all want to have life and have it more abundantly. That was what Christ said He came to bring to men. The Christian Church has been the supreme bearer of good tidings in this regard, the evangelist of the higher, better, nobler life.

We all realize that the formula for life that is worthiest of man as a rational being is "Plain living and high thinking." By plain living we mean taking such simple food, securing such proper exercise and obtaining the amount of sleep necessary to keep the body in health while working so as to make a suitable living, taking such recreation as will prove appropriate diversion and leave all the rest of the time for occupation of the mind with thoughts that lift us above the sordid round of life. Men do not readily follow such a program however. The body has many temptations for indulgences of one kind or another that are being constantly put forward. Cultivating the mind is not of itself an easy nor always a satisfying occupation. The medieval philosopher said that "Knowledge makes a bloody entrance," and while this may not be literally true and some knowledge comes with comparative ease, there is no doubt at all that the intellectual life for the great majority of people requires such self-control and self-discipline, as well as quite definite persistence of character, as cannot be expected of the great majority of men unless their emotions are deeply stirred or their hearts are deeply touched and they have therefore other than selfish motives.

Nature has so constituted the body that it is not only easy but even pleasant and often very alluring to occupy one's self with the satisfaction of its desires. This condition of human life was necessitated by the fact that the individual had to be very definitely committed to self-preservation even under the most trying circumstances and inclined to self-propagation in order to secure the continuance of the race. In the scheme of things as they are in this little world of ours the conditions of human life are so arranged that it is, as it were, assumed that the mind will through its power of reasoning be quite capable of and deeply intent on taking proper care of itself and its development while the body needs instincts and natural tendencies of many kinds to secure its healthy persistence. Our intellectual curiosity is a very strong impelling motive, and yet it has nothing like the influence over us nor the power to get us to do things which is bound up so forcibly and almost compellingly with the various physical tendencies which we have inherited with our bodies and which constantly manifest themselves.

Unfortunately, while the mind ought to be thoroughly capable of organizing life so as to secure proper development and cultivation and thus enable its possessor to live a life that will be more abundant in the things of the spirit, it too needs allurements to secure its proper co-operation in making life fuller. The great source of these allurements is the sense of beauty which all genuinely intellectual people possess. This sense of beauty gives a satisfaction that is higher and more amply complete than any of the pleasures of the body. All men have some of it. It is not necessarily associated with education and even the child possesses some hints of it. Very well informed people who think themselves educated and who perhaps have received some academic stamp that would seem to indicate the possession of mental development may have very little of it. The savage may have a rather keen sense of it. He may even try to express it in some extravagant fashion, and so we have such expressions as "barbaric splendor", which indicate a striving after beauty that is carried to excess because it is not according to the canons of good taste. Any man who has a sense of beauty to a marked degree and the power to express it is an artist, and the artist and the poet are the highest products of our civilization such as it is. [Note 1]

Civilization, then, is the process by which man's sense of beauty is aroused and trained and satisfied. What the Catholic Church has done for civilization has been the stimulating of the sense of beauty and the affording of opportunities for its expression with the preservation of the results of this, so that they may continue to be a joy to mankind and a further stimulus to the development of the sense of beauty. In thus diverting man from over attention to his body to definite cultivation of his mind and the recognition of the beauties of the world around him and the creation of beautiful things, the Christian Church has accomplished more than any other agency and has indeed been the one institution which all down the centuries has constantly and consistently lifted man up to what is highest and best in him. While its main purpose was to prepare men for happiness in another world than this, it thus afforded the greatest possible help to making the life of every individual happier in this world just in proportion to the faculties that he possessed. Without art man would be little better than the savage. By art we mean the expression of man's thoughts in a beautiful enduring way that will enable him to enjoy himself and permit others to enjoy what would otherwise be but fleeting emotions within himself.

Men who have a strong sense of beauty need no special stimulation but make opportunities for themselves to express their thoughts in some enduring fashion. The cave man, the earliest man that we know anything about, used the flat surfaces of his cave home to paint pictures of animals. This was thousands of years ago, and it would probably be expected that his art would be extremely crude and altogether primitive. Primitive it is, but like the primitives in art generally, vigorous and vivid. It lacks all the modern technique of art that has come as the result of practice, but it is as finely artistic as anything could well be. Modern art critics have not hesitated to say that there is no animal painter alive today who can make such vivid, vigorous pictures of animals as the cave man did. He painted them at rest and in action, both in quiet and vehement action, and above all he painted them with every muscle tense just preparing for action though not as yet moving, thus accomplishing one of the most difficult feats an artist can perform. He painted in oil colors after having drawn his lines with a piece of flint and often filled them with carbon from the by-products of his fires, so that they are eminently enduring and have lasted down to our time; otherwise we would not have believed the possibility of the cave man ever having produced such veritable triumphs of art.

The feeling of anthropologists now is that the cave man made these pictures as a sort of religious exercise. A man who could see so clearly and then reproduce his vision for others so exactly, who could invent oil painting because he wanted to reproduce the animals exactly in the colors that he saw, was evidently in no sense of the word a being lower in the scale than we are ourselves. Indeed, one can scarcely help but have the feeling that if the legend of the seven sleepers were to come true and some of the cave men's children who had been shut in behind a fall of rock in the long ago were to be awakened and sent to school in our time, these children of the artist inventor of oil painting would rather be ahead than behind our children in school work.

This man could manifestly think clearly, and he seems to have thought, that if he could make a very lifelike picture of an animal, he was its superior and should be its master, and that there was a being that somehow beholding this relationship between him and the animal through the evidence of the picture, would give him the victory over it in hunting. The cave man buried his dead, perfectly sure that they were still alive, though their bodies were already beginning to decay, so that it is easy to understand the religious elements that entered into his life and his belief in a world of spirits and a Supreme Spirit who ruled the destinies of things. After all we have never found a tribe of savages, no matter how low in the scale of mentality, who did not have such religious ideas. They represent our intellectual instincts.

All forms of religion since the cave man's time have had this tendency to art expression very definitely present in them. The arts have come into existence very largely in association with religious services. Is it any wonder that the churches became treasure houses of masterpieces of painting? Music and song were born in men's hearts when their aspirations to serve the Deity in some way properly came home to them. It has been the custom among certain classes of scholars to say that sex was the beginning of art and even to suggest that religion itself was very largely confounded with sex feelings. As more and more investigation and research have been made, however, this has been seen to be a very partial view due to certain extravagant sex interests of the last generation or two and certain reactions against religion which led men easily to accept anything that would in any way discredit its manifestations. The first great poems that have been preserved for us, the Book of the Dead in Egypt, the Upanishads and the Rig-Vidas, Homer's Iliad among the Greeks, have very large religious elements in them. Indeed, it has often been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks and had more to do with keeping the old Olympian mythology alive and an influence in men's minds than any other single factor. The great dramatic poems of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides were written in honor of Dionysos, the Greek god of inspiration, and were composed for use in religious celebrations with plots founded on the stories of the gods and their interventions in human affairs.

Indeed, dramatic literature came into existence twice in the world's history, as a development out of religious ceremonials and celebrations. This happened once in Greece in the fifth century before Christ and then in modern Europe in the later Middle Ages, when the mystery and morality plays gradually evolved from the ceremonials in the Church. Rhyme was first used in lyric poetry in hymns written by the Irish not long after their conversion to Christianity in the fifth or early sixth century. The Oratorio from which developed the opera in Italy was at the beginning an extension and elaboration of the musical services of the Church. The opera came into being with sacred stories for plots.

Deep religious feeling has always exhibited a very definite tendency to express itself in poetry and supremely great poetry has nearly always had an element of profound religious inspiration in it. This is very well illustrated in the Old Testament and also in many places in the New Testament. Job is one of the greatest dramatic poems ever written. It has been said that there are five supremely great poems in the history of literature that have for themes the problem of evil in the world; that is, they are written round that great natural mystery as to why, though man wants so much to be happy, so much of unhappiness comes here below to most men and even to the best of men. These five poems, Job, Aeschylus' Prometheus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Calderon's El Magico Prodigioso and Goethe's Faust, are all of them deeply religious in temper even though they also express something of that skepticism which comes inevitably to the human mind in the face of the evil around us, particularly when it affects ourselves deeply. Of these five the first one written, Job, is usually said to be the greatest. The poetic ideas in it come from eighteen hundred years before Christ, though the literary form as we have it now was probably given to these ideas more than a thousand years later. The Psalms rise to lyric heights in the expression of the emotions of mankind that are unsurpassed. The Canticle of Canticles, as construed by the mystical poets and the saints who have been particularly favored, has proved a wonderful excursion in symbols of earthly love into what Coventry Patmore in our time so well called "The Unknown Eros."

The new dispensation has complemented the old in its influence upon poetry and the arts quite as much as it has fulfilled the law and the prophets. Christianity has taken the arts and given them inspiration for marvelous development and has stimulated men to the making of things beautiful that in the words of our ill-fated young English poet were to be "a joy forever." Without the inspiration afforded by Church architecture and the opportunity to build "Houses of the Lord," how little would be known of man's power to conceive and execute beautiful buildings that are of such size that it seems almost impossible that this puny creature man should have made them? These buildings are often so charming in their lines, so delightful in their decoration, that it is no wonder that they have always lifted men's minds up to higher interests, above the trivial things of life and the sordid cares of the body. It has been very well said that you cannot enter a Gothic church without having your eyes and your mind and your heart lifted up. Goethe, who was far from medievally minded and who had a distinct penchant for the old pagan mythology, in his Dichtung und Wahrheit tells the story of his first entry into the Strassburg Minster:--"I seemed suddenly to see a new revelation; perception of beauty in all its attractiveness was impressed on my soul." Goethe, as pointed out by De Wulf, from whose Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages the quotation is borrowed, "had been educated in the traditions of classicism, 'among the detractors of Gothic architecture,' as he phrases it himself." In spite of that, the great Gothic church was a revelation.

No wonder that they talk of the "dim religious light" of these Gothic churches. What Longfellow calls "the gloom of these long aisles" has in it more of "the light that never was on land or sea" than is to be found anywhere in all the world. They tempt to the mood in which man thinks deep thoughts and feels profoundly, as nowhere else, about the mystery of existence and something at least of the only satisfying solution of it. To be for any length of time in one of these Gothic churches, especially if alone, is to find the awakening of religious emotion that lifts one up to higher things. Longfellow, after spending so many years in translating Dante until surely, if anyone ever had done so, he had come to feel as the great poet himself had felt in the poem now acknowledged as the greatest that ever came from the mind of man, could find nothing more appropriate as a metaphor for the Divine Comedy than a Gothic cathedral. His three beautiful sonnets, very probably the most beautiful sonnets ever written in this country, are simply the poetic summing up of the religious effect of a great Gothic cathedral.

Is it any wonder that these marvelously beautiful structures tempted men to make every portion of them beautiful? As a result of this over-powering temptation the arts and crafts, the making of simple useful things beautiful, developed during the Gothic period as never before. Everything about the cathedral was made beautiful. The hinges on the doors, the locks, the keys, the latches, the woodwork, all were fashioned into lines of beauty, the books were illuminated until they became precious treasures, the vestments represented the most beautiful textiles and needlework ever made. The stained glass in the windows was such a triumph that it has been the despair of glass makers ever since. And the bells were so beautiful that they have made the standard for all after time. The very utensils of the altar, the cruets for the wine, the dish in which the priests' fingers were washed, the candlesticks and above all the candelabra, were all handsome in their way. The censers or thurifers, the incense boat, the lamp of the sanctuary, none of these were neglected, but like the altar railing and the pulpit and the chairs and benches were all beautifully designed and executed. The churches became veritable museums of things of beauty; and indeed, our modern museums are crowded with objects from the churches whenever these are no longer needed in the service of the church, or when, sad to say, for some lamentable reason, they have been removed from the church to which they belonged. Mr. Yeats, the Irish poet, once said, "There is no culture in the hearts of a people until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful." However that may be, one thing is perfectly sure, that the people of the Middle Ages, under the inspiration and the protection of the Church, made nothing for their churches that was not beautiful as well as useful.

Sculpture is one of the major developments of the arts and crafts which came to occupy a very prominent place in connection with the Gothic churches. The portals supplied an opportunity for sculptured figures that were eminently decorative and yet beautifully expressive of great religious truths as illustrated in the lives of the saints and the Lord Himself. There used to be the feeling that these figures followed the lines of the architecture so closely, acquiring a certain obvious stiffness and cramped air in the process, that they were not to be considered as artistic sculpture in any proper sense of the word. We have changed our minds on the subject in recent years, and now the sculptors of the Middle Ages are looked upon as having done supremely beautiful work and achieved, as almost never was done before, that supreme triumph of art, the purpose of fitting their ideas appropriately into their surroundings. François Millet, our greatest modern painter, once declared that the best definition of beauty that we have is "suitability to the conditions around." For a gnarled oak may be beautiful and a stiff and formal figure under certain circumstances is eminently decorative. No matter what the theory, sculpture has always been beautiful down the ages under the inspiration and in the service of the Church.

Painting has been even more beautiful under the same stimulus and incentive. How the history of painting would dwindle to nothingness without the religious paintings which make so large a part of its material! The churches were the museums; and as the people were required to go to church all the Sundays of the year, and between the holy days of obligation and their own devotion attended at least fifty days more, painting and sculpture and the arts and crafts had an audience of the whole people, such as our museums cannot command to anything like the same degree, and that aroused the sense of beauty and the artistic talents of all, even of those without formal opportunities for education. Church music sublimely beautiful and the great Latin hymns, poetry such as only Dante and Shakespeare might have written and no one has ever excelled, completed the round of the arts in the highest intellectual sense of that word and stirred deeply every possible taste for beauty and intellectual faculty that people might possess.

These great Christian Churches constituted a liberal education in themselves for all those brought in intimate contact with them; but, besides, they became centres of the intellectual as well as of the moral and spiritual life of the people. The earliest Christian schools were founded in connection with the churches and the first teachers were the priests and their clerical assistants. After a time the monastic schools came into existence, but the centre of interest in them, too, was the church of the monastery, and the religious orders prided themselves on the beauty of their churches, though also on the charm of the sites which they selected for their monasteries. Often these were bare enough and quite unpicturesque until the labor of the religious turned them into places of beauty and appropriate settings for the beautiful church, the chapter house, and other monastic buildings. When the first universities came into existence they were scarcely more than advanced cathedral schools with the chancellor of the cathedral as the rector of the university and with the cathedral property as the home at least of the administrative officials, and the cathedral chapter houses and even sometimes the cathedral itself or the open space in front of it as the place for the holding of university exercises. Most of the cathedrals had a group of canons whose ecclesiastical duties took but three or four hours a day and who were quite willing to devote the rest of their time to the education of all who had the talent and the desire for intellectual development.

The greatest triumph of Christianity, however, was in leading and inspiring a certain number of men and women to make their lives a thing of beauty, a great poem, a work of highest art in the sublimest sense of that word. In that striking passage of the tenth chapter of St. Mark Christ meets the young man who ran up and knelt before Him and asked Him, "What shall I do that I may receive life everlasting?" Christ said to him, "Thou knowest the commandments." And the young man replied, "Master, all these things I have observed from my youth." Jesus looking on him, loved him and said to him: "One thing is wanting unto thee: go sell whatever thou hast, give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come follow me."

In Matthew's Gospel the phrase is, "If thou wouldst be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor and come and follow Me." Literally many many thousands of men and women have taken this injunction, and under the aegis of the Church have striven to be perfect even as Christ suggested to the young man that he should. Unfortunately, the young man himself to whom that injunction was given found it too hard a saying and "went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions." Many others down the centuries since, who have had great possessions either of money or of talents or of power, have found this saying too hard and have turned away even though the Lord had looked on them and loved them and suggested to their hearts that they should make what was highest and best out of their lives. They have made "the great refusal."

There has always been the open opportunity for men and women to lead this perfect life in Catholic Christianity, and the religious men and women, using religious in the sense of those who had re-obligated themselves to the highest aims for religious motives and services, have counted up in the many millions. Not all of them have been worthy representatives of the striving after the perfect life. They were human, and to err is human. The vast majority of them, however, have followed this injunction of Christ and not only found happiness for themselves but have also helped others to happiness through it. Many many thousands have deserved to have their names inscribed high on the scroll of humanity's greatest men and women and have had their lives written in many generations because of the appeal and the inspiration that their mode of living made for others even in the long subsequent time. Among them are St. Francis of Assisi, "the little poor man of God," as he loved to call himself, "the greatest Christian since Christ's time" as he has been called, of St. Teresa, perhaps the greatest of intellectual women, of whom more lives has been written than of any other except the Mother of the Lord, of St. Vincent de Paul, founder in modern charity, of St. Francis de Sales, "the gentleman saint," of St. Catherine of Sienna, the most influential woman of her time, and almost it might be said of all time, of St. Ignatius of Loyola, knight for Christ, of St. Benedict, whose life and rule probably brought more happiness to a greater number of individuals than that of any other mere man who has ever lived, of St. Scholastica his sister, who did as much for the women of many centuries as her brother did for the men, of St. Antony of Padua, beloved of mystical souls, of St. John of the Cross, the divine lover, of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, queen and mother, the apotheosis of charity, of St. Brigid of Ireland, whose name is in benediction, the "Mary of the Gaels," whom they honor so highly a millennium and a half after her death, of St. Hilda of Whitby, patroness of our first great English poet Caedmon, of St. Margaret of Scotland, wife and mother whose molding of the character of her son, St. David, meant so much for Scotland, of St. Louis of France, greatest of monarchs who ever ruled a people, one of the most beautiful of characters and yet with a family resemblance in every way to his cousin-german St. Ferdinand of Castile,--and so through a list that would make a volume in itself.

In a word, what the Catholic Church has done for men and women is to afford them an opportunity to express in their lives and in their sense of duty to themselves and to others, the sense of beauty they possessed in the arts and even in the crafts. Blessed is the man who has found his work is the supreme natural beatitude. This the Church has constantly and consistently fostered, making men blessed in the midst of a trying world as no other institution has ever done it. No wonder that it has been said that if there had been no Christian Church it would have been necessary to invent one for the sake of the benefits it brings to man in a worldly way. Man wants happiness more than anything else. The Church points how he can secure it by living a life worthy of his better nature.