The Cloister and the Hearth Part 117

"Kissing of images, and the Pope's toe, is Eastern Paganism. The Egyptians had it of the a.s.syrians, the Greeks of the Egyptians, the Romans of the Greeks, and we of the Romans, whose Pontifex Maximus had his toe kissed under the Empire. The Druids kissed their High Priest's toe a thousand years B. C. The Mussulmans, who like you, profess to abhor Heathenism, kiss the stone of the Caaba: a Pagan practice.

"The Priests of Baal kissed their idols so.

"Tully tells us of a fair image of Hercules at Agrigentum, whose chin was worn by kissing. The lower parts of the statue we call Peter are Jupiter. The toe is sore worn, but not all by Christian mouths. The heathen vulgar laid their lips there first, for many a year, and ours have but followed them, as monkeys their masters. And that is why, down with the poor heathen! Pereant qui ante nos nostra fecerint.

"Our infant baptism is Persian, with the font, and the signing of the child's brow. Our throwing three handfuls of earth on the coffin, and saying dust to dust, is Egyptian.

"Our incense is Oriental, Roman, Pagan; and the early Fathers of the Church regarded it with superst.i.tious horror, and died for refusing to handle it. Our holy water is Pagan, and all its uses. See, here is a Pagan aspersorium. Could you tell it from one of ours? It stood in the same part of their temples, and was used in ordinary wors.h.i.+p as ours, and in extraordinary purifications. They called it Aqua l.u.s.tralis. Their vulgar, like ours, thought drops of it falling on the body would wash out sin; and their men of sense, like ours, smiled or sighed at such credulity. What saith Ovid of this folly, which hath outlived him?

'Ah nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina cdis Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua.'

Thou seest the heathen were not _all_ fools. No more are we. Not _all_."

Fra Colonna uttered all this with such volubility, that his hearers could not edge in a word of remonstrance; and not being interrupted in praising his favourites, he recovered his good humour, without any diminution of his volubility.

"We celebrate the miraculous Conception of the Virgin on the 2nd of February. The old Romans celebrated the miraculous Conception of Juno on the 2nd of February. Our feast of All Saints is on the 2nd of November.

The Festum Dei Mortis was on the 2nd of November. Our Candlemas is also an old Roman feast: neither the date nor the ceremony altered one t.i.ttle. The patrician ladies carried candles about the city that night as our signoras do now. At the gate of San Croce our courtezans keep a feast on the 20th August. Ask them why! The little noodles cannot tell you. On that very spot stood the Temple of Venus. Her building is gone; but her rite remains. Did we discover Purgatory? On the contrary, all we really know about it is from two treatises of Plato, the Gorgias and the Phaedo, and the sixth book of Virgil's aeneid."

"I take it from a holier source: St. Gregory": said Jerome, sternly.

"Like enough," replied Colonna, drily. "But St. Gregory was not so nice; he took it from Virgil. Some souls, saith Gregory, are purged by fire, others by water, others by air.

"Says Virgil:--

'Aliae panduntur inanes, Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto Infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.'

But peradventure, you think Pope Gregory I. lived before Virgil, and Virgil versified him.

"But the doctrine is Eastern, and as much older than Plato as Plato than Gregory. Our prayers for the dead came from Asia with aeneas. Ovid tells, that when he prayed for the soul of Anchises, the custom was strange in Italy.

'Hunc morem aenaeas, pietatis idoneus auctor Attulit in terras, juste Latine, tuas.'

The 'Biblicae Sortes,' which I have seen consulted on the altar, are a parody on the 'Sortes Virgilianae.' Our numerous altars in one church are heathen: the Jews, who are monotheists, have but one altar in a church.

But the Pagans had many, being polytheists. In the temple of Paphian Venus were a hundred of them. 'Centum que Sabaeo thure calent arae.' Our altars and our hundred lights around St. Peter's tomb are Pagan. 'Centum aras posuit vigilemque sacraverat ignem.' We invent nothing, not even numerically. Our very Devil is the G.o.d Pan: horns and hoofs and all; but blackened. For we cannot draw; we can but daub the figures of Antiquity with a little sorry paint or soot. Our Moses hath stolen the horns of Ammon; our Wolfgang the hook of Saturn; and Ja.n.u.s bore the keys of heaven before St. Peter. All our really old Italian bronzes of the Virgin and Child are Venuses and Cupids. So is the wooden statue, that stands hard by this house, of Pope Joan and the child she is said to have brought forth there in the middle of a procession. Idiots! are new-born children thirteen years old? And that boy is not a day younger. Cupid! Cupid! Cupid! And since you accuse me of credulity, know that to my mind that Papess is full as mythological, born of froth, and every way unreal, as the G.o.ddess who pa.s.ses for her in the next street, or as the saints you call St. Baccho and St. Quirina: or St. Oracte, which is a dunce-like corruption of Mount Soracte, or St. Amphibolus, an English saint, which is a dunce-like corruption of the cloak worn by their St. Alban, or as the Spanish saint, St. Viar, which words on his tombstone, written thus: 'S. Viar,' prove him no saint, but a good old nameless heathen, and 'praefectus Viarum,' or overseer of roads (would he were back to earth, and paganizing of our Christian roads!), or as our St. Veronica of Benasco, which Veronica is a dunce-like corruption of the 'Vera icon,' which this saint brought into the church. I wish it may not be as unreal as the donor, or as the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne, who were but a couple."

Clement interrupted him to inquire what he meant. "I have spoken with those who have seen their bones."

"What of eleven thousand virgins all collected in one place and at one time? Do but bethink thee, Clement. Not one of the great Eastern cities of antiquity could collect eleven thousand Pagan virgins at one time, far less a puny Western city. Eleven thousand _Christian virgins_ in a little, wee Paynim city!

'Quod cunque ostendis mihi sic incredulus odi.'

The simple sooth is this. The martyrs were two: the Breton princess herself, falsely called British, and her maid Onesimilla, which is a Greek name, Onesima, diminished. This some fool did misp.r.o.nounce undecim mille, eleven thousand: loose tongue found credulous ears, and so one fool made many; eleven thousand of _them_, an you will. And you charge me with credulity, Jerome? and bid me read the lives of the saints.

Well, I have read them: and many a dear old Pagan acquaintance I found there. The best fictions in the book are Oriental, and are known to have been current in Persia and Arabia eight hundred years and more before the dates the Church a.s.signs to them as facts. As for the true Western figments, they lack the Oriental plausibility. Think you I am credulous enough to believe that St. Ida joined a decapitated head to its body?

that Cuthbert's carca.s.s directed his bearers where to go, and where to stop; that a city was eaten up of rats to punish one Hatto for comparing the poor to mice; that angels have a little horn in their foreheads, and that this was seen and recorded at the time by St.

Veronica of Benasco, who never existed, and hath left us this information and a miraculous handkercher? For my part, I think the holiest woman the world ere saw must have an existence ere she can have a handkercher, or an eye to take unicorns for angels. Think you I believe that a brace of lions turned s.e.xtons and helped Anthony bury Paul of Thebes? that Patrick, a Scotch saint, stuck a goat's beard on all the descendants of one that offended him? that certain thieves, having stolen the convent ram, and denying it, St. Pol de Leon bade the ram bear witness, and straight the mutton bleated in the thief's belly?

Would you have me give up the skilful figments of antiquity for such old wives' fables as these? The ancients lied about animals, too: but then they lied logically; we unreasonably. Do but compare Ephis and his lion, or, better still, Androcles and his lion, with Anthony and his two lions. Both the pagan lions do what lions never did; but at least they act in character. A lion with a bone in his throat, or a thorn in his foot, could not do better than be civil to a man. But Anthony's lions are a.s.ses in a lion's skin. What leonine motive could they have in turning s.e.xtons? A lion's business is to make corpses, not inter them."

He added with a sigh, "Our lies are as inferior to the lies of the ancients as our statues, and for the same reason; we do not study nature as they did. We are imitatores, servum pecus. Believe you 'the lives of the saints;' that Paul the Theban was the first hermit, and Anthony the first Caen.o.bite? Why, Pythagoras was an Eremite, and under ground for seven years: and his daughter was an abbess. Monks and hermits were in the East long before Moses, and neither old Greece nor Rome was ever without them. As for St. Francis and his s...o...b..a.l.l.s, he did but mimic Diogenes, who, naked, embraced statues on which snow had fallen. The folly without the poetry. Ape of an ape--for Diogenes was but a mimic therein of the Brahmins and Indian gymnosophists. Natheless, the children of this Francis bid fair to pelt us out of the church with their s...o...b..a.l.l.s. Tell me now, Clement, what habit is lovelier than the vestments of our priests? Well, we owe them all to Numa Pompilius, except the girdle and the stole, which are judaical. As for the amice and the albe, they retain the very names they bore in Numa's day. The 'pelt' worn by the canons comes from primeval Paganism. 'Tis a relic of those rude times when the sacrificing priest wore the skins of the beasts with the fur outward. Strip off thy black gown, Jerome, thy girdle and cowl, for they come to us all three from the Pagan ladies.

Let thy hair grow like Absalom's, Jerome! for the tonsure is as Pagan as the Muses."

"Take care what thou sayest," said Jerome, sternly. "We know the very year in which the church did first ordain it."

"But not invent it, Jerome. The Brahmins wore it a few thousand years ere that. From them it came through the a.s.syrians to the priests of Isis in Egypt, and afterwards of Serapis at Athens. The late Pope (the saints be good to him) once told me the tonsure was forbidden by G.o.d to the Levites in the Pentateuch. If so, this was because of the Egyptian priests wearing it. I trust to his holiness. I am no biblical scholar.

The Latin of thy namesake Jerome is a barrier I cannot overleap. 'Dixit ad me Dominus Deus. Dixi ad Dominum Deum.' No, thank you, holy Jerome; I can stand a good deal, but I cannot stand thy Latin. Nay; give me the New Testament! 'Tis not the Greek of Xenophon; but 'tis Greek. And there be heathen sayings in it too. For St. Paul was not so spiteful against them as thou. When the heathen said a good thing that suited his matter, by Jupiter he just took it, and mixed it to all eternity with the inspired text."

"Come forth, Clement, come forth!" said Jerome, rising; "and thou, profane monk, know that but for the powerful house that upholds thee, thy accursed heresy should go no farther, for I would have thee burned at the stake." And he strode out white with indignation.

Colonna's reception of this threat did credit to him as an enthusiast.

He ran and hallowed joyfully after Jerome. "And _that_ is Pagan. Burning of men's bodies for the opinions of their souls is a purely Pagan custom--as Pagan as incense, holy water, a hundred altars in one church, the tonsure, the cardinal's, or flamen's hat, the word Pope, the----"

Here Jerome slammed the door.

But ere they could get clear of the house a jalosy was flung open, and the Paynim monk came out head and shoulders, and overhung the street, shouting--

"'Affecti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum Novae superst.i.tionis ac maleficae.'"

And having delivered this parting blow? he felt a great triumphant joy, and strode exultant to and fro; and not attending with his usual care to the fair way (for his room could only be threaded by little paths wriggling among the antiquities), tripped over the beak of an Egyptian stork, and rolled upon a regiment of Armenian G.o.ds, which he found tough in argument though small in stature.

"You will go no more to that heretical monk," said Jerome to Clement.

Clement sighed. "Shall we leave him and not try to correct him? Make allowance for heat of discourse! He was nettled. His words are worse than his acts. Oh! 'tis a pure and charitable soul."

"So are all arch-heretics. Satan does not tempt them like other men.

Rather he makes them more moral, to give their teaching weight. Fra Colonna cannot be corrected; his family is all-powerful in Rome. Pray we the saints he blasphemes to enlighten him. 'Twill not be the first time they have returned good for evil. Meantime thou art forbidden to consort with him. From this day go alone through the city! Confess and absolve sinners! exorcise demons! comfort the sick! terrify the impenitent!

preach wherever men are gathered and occasion serves! and hold no converse with the Fra Colonna!"

Clement bowed his head.

Then the prior, at Jerome's request, had the young friar watched. And one day the spy returned with the news that brother Clement had pa.s.sed by the Fra Colonna's lodging, and had stopped a little while in the street and then gone on, but with his hand to his eyes, and slowly.

This report Jerome took to the prior. The prior asked his opinion, and also Anselm's, who was then taking leave of him on his return to Juliers.

_Jerome._] "Humph! He obeyed, but with regret, ay, with childish repining."

_Anselm._] "He shed a natural tear at turning his back on a friend and a benefactor. But he obeyed."

Now Anselm was one of your gentle irresistibles. He had at times a mild ascendant even over Jerome.

"Worthy brother Anselm," said Jerome, "Clement is weak to the very bone.

He will disappoint thee. He will do nothing _great_, either for the Church or for our holy order. Yet he is an orator, and hath drunken of the spirit of St. Dominic. Fly him, then, with a string."

That same day it was announced to Clement that he was to go to England immediately with brother Jerome.

Clement folded his hands on his breast, and bowed his head in calm submission.

CHAPTER LXXV