Part 7
“Is it the Whitsuntide service?” I asked a priest at last in the Greek I heard on all sides.
“Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to the Virgin?”
“What insults?” I murmured.
“Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill with our Seven Sleepers! This blasphemous Patriarch of Constantinople denies our Lady the title _Theotokos_, would argue that she is not Mother of God, but that the Christ born through her was only the human part of Him, not the Eternal Logos.” His voice trembled, his beady eyes flamed with passion. “And he dares come defend his thesis here—in Ephesus, where the Holy Virgin lies buried! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn up twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he stamped out that minx Hypatia.”
“Is Cyril here too, then?”
“Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached! ‘Hail, Mary, Mother of God, spotless dove! Hail, Mary, perpetual lamp at which was kindled the Sun of Justice! Hail, Mary! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and sing; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star; thanks to Thee the college of Apostles was established. . . .’” His voice died away in reminiscent ecstasy.
“Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate?”
“Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing—he pretexts that all the bishops are not arrived, and he induced the Emperor’s commissioner to protest against the sitting. But as thou seest, the Council is going on—hath been going on from early morn—there are two hundred bishops.”
“There are only a hundred and fifty,” put in a voice. “It is scandalous.”
“Ay,” assented another voice. “Where is the Patriarch of Antioch?”
The priest turned on the Nestorians. “It is beasts like you with whom Paul fought here,” he said.
“Beast thyself,” retorted a physician in a long robe, “to suggest that God could be contained in the womb.” It was the beginning of a scuffle that grew to a bloody battle between the Nestorian minority and the orthodox. Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group of Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it again, leaving a trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle. The survivors made for the harbour, hoping doubtless for safety in the multitude of boats and ships.
And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the Council-chamber, till at last as the long summer day closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder was heard from within—“Anathema! Anathema!” And the cry passed to the crowd—“Anathema! Anathema!”—till the whole firmament seemed to crash and rock with it and men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in air. And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the word came that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches leapt as by magic into flame, and men escorted the Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and singing, and lo! round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires.
And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian _bottegas_ with immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out through the centuries portraits of the Madonna and Child, to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a symbol of the true faith: delectable, innumerable, filling the whole earth with their glory.
* * * * *
The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there came from parted lips, “_Ave Maria purissima_” or “_Viva nuestra Señora_,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “_Sin peccado concebida_.”
Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the _Fiesta_. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the Bull—_Regis Pacifici_—which after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfection.
“Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely Señora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more glorious than her past.”
But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop.
“_Ave Maria purissima!_”
“_Sin peccado concebida!_”
* * * * *
I am still in Spain, watching Señor Bartholomé Estéban Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently under the guidance of Señor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull _Ineffabilis_, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the “Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a Procession to her shrine.
And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.
* * * * *
The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio?
In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria!_”
And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy Mother, was the _civitas Virginis_, and that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias; and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the Virgin did her duty as suzerain——
But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment.
“Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror.
“Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”
“We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled. “No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.
“They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found another!”
And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!_”
* * * * *
The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets recommenced—“_Debellatrix Incredulorum_,” “_Janua Coeli_,” “_Turris Davidica_,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender marble Pietà of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!_” And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing, vitalising.
And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis: in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for “maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!
And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters, to the _Vergine Bella e di sol vestita_—the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the _Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio_ of Dante, and the images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude; who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara.
But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY
From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the _Sidereus Nuncius_ of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out of the centre of the stage. The moon—no longer _teres atque rotunda_—lost her beautiful spheric smoothness, her very light was a loan—unrepaid. Great _Sol_, himself, the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the obscure coryphæus of some choric dance veering towards and around some ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium. The ninefold vault engirdling Dante’s universe was shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was replaced by a maze of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways that were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer insects or a whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human brain reeled in this simoom of stars, and to complete its confusion, the philosophers hastened to assure it that with the universe no longer geocentric, man could no longer flatter himself to be its central interest.
“So many nobler bodies to create, Greater, so manifold, to this one use,”
appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. _Homo_ could not be the Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam,
“Whether heaven moves or earth Imports not.”
The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost” testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our universe can displace _Terra_ from the centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the _spit_ revolves and not the fire.
And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of the universe.
But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt
“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”
The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from every _ultima Thule_ of the universe are unequal. ’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the universe’s crowning race.
For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man, pray to what other end all this planetary pother? If man is but a by-product of the cosmic laboratory, what is the staple? Till this question is answered, we may safely continue anthropocentric.
Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds! Nay, ’tis our grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty that stands corrected. We did not dream that our facture required such colossal machinery, that to engender us a billion billion planets must be in experimental effervescence. A fig upon their size! Do we rank Milton inferior to the megatherium? Can a man take thought by adding a cubit to his stature? The ant is wiser than the alligator, and the sprawling saurians of the primal slime may have their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that have never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen herself to the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were no better: she would still be—in the infinite wash of Space—a pebble, even as a pebble is a stellar system in miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing in it is large enough to be important—if quantity is the criterion of importance. To be in one spot of Space is as dignified or undignified as to be in another. Why, I wonder, has position in Time escaped this invidious criticism. As well assert that nothing important can happen or nothing that happens can be important, because everything must happen at a mere point of Time, which is not even Time’s _central_ point. It was a truer sense of values that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their foundation at Time’s central point, up to which or back to which all the ages lead. The year One begins with Christ’s birth, with Mohammed’s Hegira. In the same spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the old cartographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre. Position in Time or Space is not the measure of importance, but importance is the measure of position in Time or Space. Where the highest life is being lived, there is the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is lived elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we in Space, but are we on the central lines of cosmic evolution? That is the question.
Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever _Terra_ stands. Not the mythical theology of sacred books, but the scientific theology of sacred facts. The expansion of the universe from a mapped parish to a half-uncharted wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion—a Deity is more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden—but it did shake the Church, so recklessly committed to a disprovable cosmogony. And the Church burnt books and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, clinging to an earth surrounded by menial planets, as it had clung to the flat plane of “Christian Topography.”
But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen? Were they mere venomous obscurantists? Nay, they were patriots fighting for their father-world, for the cosmos of their ancestors, _pro aris et focis_. They saw their little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up and lost in its measureless magnificence. And so in a frenzy of chauvinism they gagged Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league with Reason, emperor of the stars.
But despite the Church’s defeat, our little globe still maintains a sturdy independence. And until you bring me evidence of a superior genus, I shall continue to regard our good red earth as the centre of creation, and man as the focus of inter-celestial planetary forces.