Part 41

On humility, the following maxims are recorded among his sayings: “No man can attain to the knowledge of God but by humility. The way to mount high is to descend; for all dangers and all great falls which ever happened in the world, were caused by pride, as is evident in the angel in heaven, in Adam in Paradise, in the Pharisee mentioned in the gospel; and all spiritual advantages arose from humility, as we see in the Blessed Virgin, the good thief, &c. Would to God some great weight laid upon us obliged us always to hold down our heads.” When a certain brother asked him; “How can we fly this cursed pride?” he answered; “If we consider the benefits of God, we must humble ourselves, and bow down our heads. And if we consider our sins, we must likewise humble ourselves, and bow down our heads. Wo to him who seeks honor from his own confusion and sin. The degrees of humility in a man are, that he know that whatever is of his own growth is opposite to his good. A branch of this humility is, that he give to others what is theirs, and never appropriate to himself what belongs to another; that is, that he ascribe to God all his good and all advantages which he enjoys; and acknowledge that all his evil is of his own growth. Blessed is he who accounts himself as mean and base before men as he is before God. Blessed is he who walks faithfully in obedience to another. He who desires to enjoy inward peace, must look upon every man as his superior, and as better and greater before God. Blessed is he who knows how to keep and conceal the favors of God. Humility knows not how to speak, and patience dares not speak, for fear of losing the crown of suffering by complaints, in a firm conviction that a person is always treated above his deserts. Humility dispels all evil, is an enemy to all sin, and makes a man nothing in his own eyes. By humility a man finds grace before God, and peace with men. God bestows the treasures of his grace on the humble, not on the proud. A man ought always to fear from pride, lest it cast him down headlong. Always fear and watch over yourself. A man who deserves death, and who is in prison, how comes it that he does not always tremble? A man is of himself poverty and indigence; rich only by the divine gifts; these then he must love, and despise himself. What is greater than for a man to be sensible what he owes to God, and to cover himself with confusion, self-reproach, and self-reprehension for his own evils? I wish we could have studied this lesson from the beginning of the world to the end. How much do we stand indebted to him who desires to deliver us from all evil, and to confer upon us all good.” Against vain-glory he used to say;--“If a person was sunk in extreme poverty, covered all over with wounds, half-clad in tattered rags, and without shoes; and men should come to him, and saluting him with honor say: ‘All admire you, my lord; you are wonderfully rich, handsome, and beautiful; and your clothes are splendid and handsome;’ must not he have lost his senses, who should be pleased with such a compliment, or think himself such, knowing that he is the very reverse?”

The servant of God was remarkable for his meekness and charity, and he used to say, “We can appropriate to ourselves our neighbor’s good, and make it also our own; for the more a person rejoices at his neighbor’s good, the more does he share in it. If therefore you desire to share in the advantages of all others, rejoice more for them all; and grieve for every one’s misfortunes. This is the path of salvation, to rejoice in every advantage and to grieve for every misfortune of your neighbor; to see and acknowledge your evils and miseries, and to believe only good of others; to honor others, and despise yourself. We pray, fast, and labor; yet lose all this if we do not bear injuries with charity and patience. If we take so much pains to attain to virtue, why do not we learn to do what is so easy? you must bear the burdens of all, because you have no just reason of complaint against any one, seeing you deserve to be chastised and treated ill by all creatures. You desire to escape reproaches and condemnation in the next world, yet would be honored in this. You refuse to labor or bear anything here, yet desire to enjoy rest hereafter. Strive more earnestly to vanquish your passions, and bear tribulations and humiliations. It is necessary to overcome yourself, whatever you do. It avails your soul little to draw others to God unless you die to yourself.”

On prayer, which this servant of God made his constant occupation and delight, he used to say,--“Prayer is the beginning and the consummation of all good. Every sinner must pray that God may make him know his miseries and sins, and the divine benefits. He who knows not how to pray, knows not God. All who are to be saved, if they have attained the use of reason, must set themselves to pray. Though a woman were ever so bashful and simple, if she saw her only son taken from her by the king’s orders for some crime, she would tear her breasts, and implore his mercy. Her love and her son’s extreme danger and miseries would make her never want words to entreat him.”

The fruits and graces of perfect prayer he summed up as follows: 1. “By it a man is enlightened in his understanding. 2. He is strengthened in faith and in the love of all good. 3. He learns to know and feel his own miseries. 4. He is penetrated with holy fear, is humble and contemptible in his own eyes. 5. His heart is pierced with compunction. 6. Sweet tears flow in abundance. 7. His heart is cleansed. 8. His conscience purged. 9. He learns obedience. 10. Attains to the perfect spirit of that virtue. 11. To spiritual science. 12. To spiritual understanding. 13. Invincible fortitude. 14. Patience. 15. Spiritual wisdom. 16. The knowledge of God, who manifests himself to those who adore him in spirit and truth. Hence love is kindled in the soul, she runs in the odor of his sweet perfumes, is drowned in the torrent of his sweetness, enjoys perfect interior peace, and is brought to immortal glory.”

[147] Vita B. Ægidii apud Papebroke, t. 3, Aprilis ad diem 23, p. 236.

[148] Conc. t. 11, p. 237.

[149] The emperor Michael dying in 1283, his son Andronicus renewed the schism, and restored the deposed patriarch Joseph.

[150] Possevin. Apparatus sacer, t. 1, p. 245.

[151] Gerson calls St. Bonaventure both a cherub and a seraph, because his writings both enlighten and inflame. His order makes his doctrine the standard of their schools, according to a decree of pope Pius V. To the works of St. Bonaventure these divines add the double comments of Scotius on Aristotle and the Master of the Sentences.

Peter Lombard, a native of Novara in Lombardy, was recommended by St. Bernard (ep. 366) to Gilduin, first abbot of the regular canons of St. Victor’s at Paris, performed there his studies, professed that order, and was one of those who, by an order of abbot Suger, king Louis VII. and pope Eugenius III. in 1147, were sent from St. Victor’s to St. Genevieve’s in place of the secular canons. Eudes or Odo, one of this number, was chosen first regular abbot of St. Genevieve’s, on whose eminent virtues see the pious F. Gourdan, in his MS. history of the eminent men of St. Victor’s, in 7 vols. folio, t. 2, p. 281. Peter Lombard taught theology at St. Genevieve’s, till in 1159 he was made bishop of Paris. Gourdan, ib. t. 2, p. 79 and 80. He died, bishop of that city, in 1164. He compiled a body of divinity, collected from the writings of the fathers, into four books, called Of the Sentences, from which he was surnamed The Master of the Sentences. This work he is said by some to have copied chiefly from the writings of Blandinus his master, and others. (See James Thomasius De Plagio literario, from sect. 493 to 502.) Though it be not exempt from inaccuracies, the method appeared so well adapted to the purposes of the schoolmen that they followed the same and for their lectures gave comments on these four books of the Sentences. Among these, St. Thomas Aquinas stands foremost. The divines of the Franciscan Order take for their guides St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus. This latter was born in Northumberland, and entered young into the Order of St. Francis at Newcastle. He performed his studies, and afterward taught divinity at Oxford, where he wrote his Commentaries on the Master of the Sentences, which were thence called his Oxonian Commentaries. He was called to Paris about the year 1304, and in 1307 was appointed by his Order, Regent of their theological schools in that University, where he published his Reportata in Sententias, called his Paris Commentaries, which are called by Dr. Cave a rough or unfinished abstract of his Oxford Commentaries. For the subtilty and quickness of his understanding, and his penetrating genius, he was regarded as a prodigy. Being sent by his Order to Cologne in 1308, he was received by the whole city in procession, but died on the 8th of November the same year, of an apoplexy, being forty-three, or as others say, only thirty-four years old. The fable of his being buried alive is clearly confuted by Luke Wading, the learned Irish Franciscan, who published his work, with notes, in twelve tomes, printed at Lyons in 1636. Natalis Alexander, a most impartial inquirer into this dispute, and others, have also demonstrated that story to have been a most groundless fiction. Wading, Colgan, &c., say that Duns Scotus was an Irishman, and born at Down in Ulster. John Major, Dempster, and Trithemius say he was a Scotchman, born at Duns, eight miles from England. But Leland, Wharton, Cave, and Tanner, prove that he was an Englishman and a native of Dunstone, by contraction Duns, a village in Northumberland, in the parish of Emildun, then belonging to Merton-hall in Oxford, of which hall he was afterward a member. This is attested in the end of several manuscript copies of his Comments on the Sentences, written soon after the time when he lived, and still shown at Oxford in the colleges of Baliol and Merton. That he was a Scotchman or an Irishman, no author seems to have asserted before the sixteenth century, as Mr. Wharton observes. (See Cave, t. 2, Append. p. 4. Wood, Athen. Oxon. Sir James Ware de Script. Hibern. c. 10, p. 64. Tanner de Script. Brit. V. Duns. Wading, in the life of Scotus, prefixed to his works.)

William Ockham, a native of Surrey, also a Grey Friar, a scholar of Duns Scotus at Paris, disagreeing from his master in opinions, raised hot disputes in the schools, and became the head or leader of the Nominals, a sect among the schoolmen who in philosophy explain things chiefly by the properties of terms; and maintain that words, not things, are the object of dialectic, in opposition to the others called Realists. Ockham was provincial of his Order in England in 1322, and according to Wood (Hist. et Ant. l. 2, p. 87) wrote a book On the Poverty of Christ, and other treatises against Pope John XXII., by whom he was excommunicated. He became a warm abettor of the schism of Louis of Bavaria, and his antipope, Peter Corbarius, and died at Munich in 1347. He is said also to have favored the heresy of the Fratricelli, introduced by certain Grey Friars in the marquisate of Ancona, who made all perfection to consist in a seeming poverty, rebelled against the Church, and railed at the pope and the other pastors. Flying into Germany, they were favored by Louis of Bavaria, and in return supported his schism. They at length rejected the sacraments as useless. Akin to these were the Beguards and Beguines, an heretical sect formed by several poor laymen and women, who, some by an ill-governed devotion and a love of a lazy life, others out of a spirit of libertinism, would needs imitate the poverty of the Friars Mendicants, without being tied to obedience, or living under superiors. They at length fell into many extravagant errors, and became a society of various notions and opinions, which had nothing common but the hatred they bore to the pope and other prelates, and the affectation of a voluntary poverty, under which they covered an infinite number of disorders and crimes. Such are the baneful fruits of self-conceit.

[152] St. Bonav. Specul. Novit. p. 2, c. 2.

[153] Tit. de Aleatoribus tam in Digesto quam in Codice.

[154] See St. Bonav. in 4, dis. 14. St. Raymund. St. Antonin. Comitolus, l. 3, 7, 9, p. 348, &c. Aristotle (l. 4, Ethic. c. 1.) places gamesters in the same class with highwaymen and plunderers. St. Bernardin of Sienna (Serm. 33, Domin. 5, Quadrag. t. 4), says they are worse then robbers, because more treacherous, and covering their rapine under seducing glosses.

[155] Job ii. 4.

[156] On the methods of varying every day these acts, see Polancus, De modo juvandi morientes; Joan. a S. Thoma. Card. Bona. &c.

[157] Apoc. xii. 12.

[158] Cicat. l. 2, c. 1, p. 446.

[159] This observation of St. Camillus has been since confirmed by many instances of persons who were found to have been buried alive, or to have recovered long after they had appeared to have been dead. Accounts of several such examples are found in many modern medical and philosophical memoirs of literature which have appeared during this century, especially in France and Germany; and experience evinces the case to have been frequent. Boerhaave (Not. in Instit. Medic.) and some other men whose names stand among the foremost in the list of philosophers, have demonstrated by many undoubted examples, that where the person is not dead, an entire cessation of breathing and of the circulation of the blood may happen for some time, by a total obstruction in the organical movements of the springs and fluids of the whole body, which obstruction may sometimes be afterwards removed, and the vital functions restored. Whence the soul is not to be presumed to leave the body in the act of dying, but at the moment in which some organ or part of the body _absolutely_ essential to life is _irreparably_ decayed or destroyed. Nor can any certain mark be given that a person is dead till some evident symptom of putrefaction commenced appears sensible.

Duran and some other eminent surgeons in France, in memorials addressed, some to the French king, others to the public, complain that two customs call for redress, first, that of burying multitudes in the churches, by which experience shows that the air is often extremely infected; the second is that of which we speak. To prevent the danger of this latter, these authors insist that no corpse should be allowed to be buried, or its face close covered, before some certain proof of putrefaction, for which they assign as usually one of the first marks, if the lower jaw being stirred does not restore itself, the spring of the muscles being lost by putrefaction. See Doctor Bruhier, Mémoire présenté au Roi, sur la Nécessité d’un Règlement Général au Sujet des Enterments et Embaumements, in 1745; also Dissertation sur l’Incertitude des Signes de la Mort, in 1749, 2 vols. in 12mo.; and Dr. Louis, Lettres sur la Certitude des Signes de la Mort, contre Bruhier, in 1752, in 12mo.

The Romans usually kept the bodies of the dead eight days, and practised a ceremony of often calling upon them by their names, of which certain traces remain in many places from the old ceremonial for the burial of kings and princes. Servabantur cadavera octo diebus, et calida abluebantur, et post ultimam conclamationem abluebantur. Servius in Virgilii Æneidon, l. 8, ver. 2, 8. The corpse was washed whilst warm, and again after the last call addressed to the deceased person, which was the close of the ceremony before the corpse was burnt or interred; and to be deprived of it was esteemed a great misfortune. Corpora nondum conclamata jacent, Lucan. l. 2, ver. 22. Jam defletus et conclamatus es. Apuleius, l. 1, Metam. et l. 11, ib. Desine, jam conclamatum est. Terent. Eunuch. 2, 3, ver. 56. St. Zeno of Verona, describing a wife who immoderately laments her deceased husband, says: Cadaver amplectitur conclamatum. St. Zeno, l. 1, Trac. 16, p. 126, nov. ed. Veron. This ceremony, trivial in itself, was of importance to ascertain publicly the death of the person.

[160] The empire of the West, which had been extinguished in Augustulus, was restored in the year 800, in the person of Charlemagne, king of France, who extended his conquests into part of Spain, almost all Italy, all Flanders and Germany, and part of Hungary. The imperial crown continued some time in the different branches of his family, sometimes in France, sometimes in Germany, and sometimes in both united under the same monarch. Louis IV. the eighth hereditary emperor of the Franks, was a weak prince, and died in the twentieth year of his age, in 912, without leaving any issue. These emperors, in imitation of the Lombards, had created several petty sovereigns in their states, who grew very powerful. These princes declared that by the death of Louis IV. the imperial dignity was devolved on the Germanic people; and excluding Charles the Simple, king of France, the next heir in blood of the Carlovingian race, elected Conrad I. duke of Franconi: and after him Henry I. surnamed the Fowler, duke of Saxony, who was succeeded by three Othos of the same family of Saxony. After St. Henry II. several emperors (the following Henries, and two Frederics in particular) were of the Franconian family. Rodolph I. of the house of Austria was chosen in 1273. There have been four dukes of Bavaria emperors, five of the house of Luxemburg, three of the old Bohemian royal house, &c. But in 1438, Albert II. duke of Austria and marquis of Moravia, was raised to that supreme dignity, which from that time has remained chiefly in that family. The ancient ducal house of Saxony was descended from Wittekind the Great, the last elected king of the Saxons, who afterwards sustained a long obstinate war against Pepin and Charlemagne, submitted to the latter, and being baptized by St. Lullus in 785, was created by Charlemagne, first duke of Saxony. St. Henry II. was the fifth Emperor of the Saxon race, descended from Wittekind the Great.

[161] On the authenticity of this diploma of Henry II. and also of those of Pepin, Charlemagne, and Otho I. see the Dissertation of the Abbé Cenni, entitled, Esame de Diploma d’Ottone è S. Arrigo, printed at Rome in 1754.

That the see of Rome was possessed of great riches, even during the rage of the first persecutions, is clear from the acts of universal charity performed by the popes, mentioned by St. Dionysius of Corinth, and after the persecutions by St. Basil and St. John Climacus. From the reign of Constantine the Great, many large possessions were bestowed on the popes for the service of the Church. Conni (Esame di Diploma di Ludovico Pio) shows in detail from St. Gregory the Great’s epistles, that the Roman see, in his time, enjoyed very large estates, with a very ample civil jurisdiction, and a power of punishing delinquents in them by deputy judges, in Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Campania, Ravenna, Sabina, Dalmatia, Illyricum, Sardinia, Corsica, Liguria, the Alpes Cottiæ, and a small estate in Gaul. Some of these estates comprised several bishoprics, as appears from St. Gregory, l. 7, ep. 39, Indict. ii.

The Alpes Cottiæ that belonged to the popes included Genoa and the sea-coast from that town to the Alps, the boundaries of Gaul, as Thomassin (l. 1, de Discipl. Eccl. c. 27, n. 17.) takes notice, and as Baronius (ad an. 712, p. 9.) proves from the testimony of Oldradus, bishop of Milan. And Paul the deacon writes, that the Lombards seized the Alpes Cottiæ, which were the estates of the Roman see. “Patrimonium Alpium Cottiarum quæ quondam ad jus pertinuerant apostolicæ sedis, sed a Longobardis multo tempore fuerant ablatæ.” (Paul. Diac. l. 6, c. 43.) Father Cajetan, in his Isagoge ad Historiam Siculam, points out at length the different estates which the Roman see formerly possessed in Sicily. The popes were charged with a great share of the care of the city and civil government of Rome. St. Gregory the Great mentions that it was part of their duty to provide that the city was supplied with corn, (l. 5, ep. 40, alias l. 4, ep. 31, ad Maurit.) and that he was obliged to watch against the stratagems of the enemies, and the treachery of the Roman generals and governors. (l. 5, ep. 42, alias l. 4, ep. 35.) And he appointed Constantius a tribune to be governor of Naples. (l. 2, ep. 11, alias ep. 7.) Anastasius the Librarian testifies that the popes Sisinnius and Gregory II. both repaired the walls of Rome and put the city in a posture of defence.