Our Fathers Have Told Us Part 8

44. Only, therefore, in days when the Cross was received with courage, the Scripture searched with honesty, and the Pastor heard in faith, can the pure word of G.o.d, and the bright sword of the Spirit, be recognised in the heart and hand of Christianity. The effect of Biblical poetry and legend on its intellect, must be traced farther, through decadent ages, and in unfenced fields;--producing 'Paradise Lost' for us, no less than the 'Divina Commedia';--Goethe's 'Faust,'

and Byron's 'Cain,' no less than the 'Imitatio Christi.'

45. Much more, must the scholar, who would comprehend in any degree approaching to completeness, the influence of the Bible on mankind, be able to read the interpretations of it which rose into the great arts of Europe at their culmination. In every province of Christendom, according to the degree of art-power it possessed, a series of ill.u.s.trations of the Bible were produced as time went on; beginning with vignetted ill.u.s.trations of ma.n.u.script, advancing into life-size sculpture, and concluding in perfect power of realistic painting. These teachings and preachings of the Church, by means of art, are not only a most important part of the general Apostolic Acts of Christianity; but their study is a necessary part of Biblical scholars.h.i.+p, so that no man can in any large sense understand the Bible itself until he has learned also to read these national commentaries upon it, and been made aware of their collective weight. The Protestant reader, who most imagines himself independent in his thought, and private in his study, of Scripture, is nevertheless usually at the mercy of the nearest preacher who has a pleasant voice and ingenious fancy; receiving from him thankfully, and often reverently, whatever interpretation of texts the agreeable voice or ready wit may recommend: while, in the meantime, he remains entirely ignorant of, and if left to his own will, invariably destroys as injurious, the deeply meditated interpretations of Scripture which, in their matter, have been sanctioned by the consent of all the Christian Church for a thousand years; and in their treatment, have been exalted by the trained skill and inspired imagination of the n.o.blest souls ever enclosed in mortal clay.

46. There are few of the fathers of the Christian Church whose commentaries on the Bible, or personal theories of its gospel, have not been, to the constant exultation of the enemies of the Church, fretted and disgraced by angers of controversy, or weakened and distracted by irreconcilable heresy. On the contrary, the scriptural teaching, through their art, of such men as Orcagna, Giotto, Angelico, Luca della Robbia, and Luini, is, literally, free from all earthly taint of momentary pa.s.sion; its patience, meekness, and quietness are incapable of error through either fear or anger; they are able, without offence, to say all that they wish; they are bound by tradition into a brotherhood which represents unperverted doctrines by unchanging scenes; and they are compelled by the nature of their work to a deliberation and order of method which result in the purest state and frankest use of all intellectual power.

47. I may at once, and without need of returning to this question, ill.u.s.trate the difference in dignity and safety between the mental actions of literature and art, by referring to a pa.s.sage, otherwise beautifully ill.u.s.trative of St. Jerome's sweetness and simplicity of character, though quoted, in the place where we find it, with no such favouring intention,--namely, in the pretty letter of Queen Sophie Charlotte, (father's mother of Frederick the Great,) to the Jesuit Vota, given in part by Carlyle in his first volume, ch. iv.

"'How can St. Jerome, for example, be a key to Scripture?' she insinuates; citing from Jerome this remarkable avowal of his method of composing books;--especially of his method in that book, _Commentary on the Galatians_, where he accuses both Peter and Paul of simulation, and even of hypocrisy. The great St. Augustine has been charging him with this sad fact, (says her Majesty, who gives chapter and verse,) and Jerome answers, 'I followed the commentaries of Origen, of'--five or six different persons, who turned out mostly to be heretics before Jerome had quite done with them, in coming years, 'And to confess the honest truth to you,' continues Jerome, 'I read all that, and after having crammed my head with a great many things, I sent for my amanuensis, and dictated to him, now my own thoughts, now those of others, without much recollecting the order, nor sometimes the words, nor even the sense'! In another place, (in the book itself further on[38]) he says, 'I do not myself write; I have an amanuensis, and I dictate to him what comes into my mouth. If I wish to reflect a little, or to say the thing better, or a better thing, he knits his brows, and the whole look of him tells me sufficiently that he cannot endure to wait.' Here is a sacred old gentleman whom it is not safe to depend upon for interpreting the Scriptures,--thinks her Majesty, but does not say so,--leaving Father Vota to his reflections." Alas, no, Queen Sophie, neither old St. Jerome's, nor any other human lips nor mind, may be depended upon in that function; but only the Eternal Sophia, the Power of G.o.d and the Wisdom of G.o.d: yet this you may see of your old interpreter, that he is wholly open, innocent, and true, and that, through such a person, whether forgetful of his author, or hurried by his scribe, it is more than probable you may hear what Heaven knows to be best for you; and extremely improbable you should take the least harm,--while by a careful and cunning master in the literary art, reticent of his doubts, and dexterous in his sayings, any number of prejudices or errors might be proposed to you acceptably, or even fastened in you fatally, though all the while you were not the least required to confide in his inspiration.

[Footnote 38: 'Commentary on the Galatians,' Chap. iii.]

48. For indeed, the only confidence, and the only safety which in such matters we can either hold or hope, are in our own desire to be rightly guided, and willingness to follow in simplicity the guidance granted.

But all our conceptions and reasonings on the subject of inspiration have been disordered by our habit, first of distinguis.h.i.+ng falsely--or at least needlessly--between inspiration of words and of acts; and secondly by our attribution of inspired strength or wisdom to some persons or some writers only, instead of to the whole body of believers, in so far as they are partakers of the Grace of Christ, the Love of G.o.d, and the Fellows.h.i.+p of the Holy Ghost. In the degree in which every Christian receives, or refuses, the several gifts expressed by that general benediction, he enters or is cast out from the inheritance of the saints,--in the exact degree in which he denies the Christ, angers the Father, and grieves the Holy Spirit, he becomes uninspired or unholy,--and in the measure in which he trusts Christ, obeys the Father, and consents with the Spirit, he becomes inspired in feeling, act, word, and reception of word, according to the capacities of his nature. He is not gifted with higher ability, nor called into new offices, but enabled to use his granted natural powers, in their appointed place, to the best purpose. A child is inspired as a child, and a maiden as a maiden; the weak, even in their weakness, and the wise, only in their hour.

That is the simply determinable _theory_ of the inspiration of all true members of the Church; its truth can only be known by proving it in trial: but I believe there is no record of any man's having tried and declared it vain.[39]

[Footnote 39: Compare the closing paragraph in p. 45 of 'The Shrine of the Slaves.' Strangely, as I revise _this_ page for press, a slip is sent me from 'The Christian' newspaper, in which the comment of the orthodox evangelical editor may be hereafter representative to us of the heresy of his sect; in its last audacity, actually _opposing_ the power of the Spirit to the work of Christ. (I only wish I had been at Matlock, and heard the kind physician's sermon.)

"An interesting and somewhat unusual sight was seen in Derbys.h.i.+re on Sat.u.r.day last--two old fas.h.i.+oned Friends, dressed in the original garb of the Quakers, preaching on the roadside to a large and attentive audience in Matlock. One of them, who is a doctor in good practice in the county, by name Dr. Charles A. Fox, made a powerful and effective appeal to his audience to see to it that each one was living in obedience to the light of the Holy Spirit within. Christ _within_ was the hope of glory, and it was as He was followed in the ministry of the Spirit that we were saved by Him, who became thus to each the author and finisher of faith. He cautioned his hearers against building their house on the sand by believing in the free and easy Gospel so commonly preached to the wayside hearers, as if we were saved by 'believing' this or that. Nothing short of the work of the Holy Ghost in the soul of each one could save us, and to preach anything short of this was simply to delude the simple and unwary in the most terrible form.

"[It would be unfair to criticise an address from so brief an abstract, but we must express our conviction that the obedience of Christ unto death, the death of the Cross, _rather_ than the work of the Spirit in us, is the good tidings for sinful men.--Ed.]"

In juxtaposition with this editorial piece of modern British press theology, I will simply place the 4th, 6th, and 13th verses of Romans viii., italicising the expressions which are of deepest import, and always neglected. "That the _righteousness of the_ LAW might be fulfilled _in us_, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.... For to be carnally _minded_, is death, but to be spiritually _minded_, is life, and peace.... For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if _ye through the Spirit_ do mortify the _deeds_ of the body, ye shall live."

It would be well for Christendom if the Baptismal service explained what it professes to abjure.]

49. Beyond this theory of general inspiration, there is that of special call and command, with actual dictation of the deeds to be done or words to be said. I will enter at present into no examination of the evidences of such separating influence; it is not claimed by the Fathers of the Church, either for themselves, or even for the entire body of the Sacred writers, but only ascribed to certain pa.s.sages dictated at certain times for special needs: and there is no possibility of attaching the idea of infallible truth to any form of human language in which even these exceptional pa.s.sages have been delivered to us. But this is demonstrably true of the entire volume of them as we have it, and read,--each of us as it may be rendered in his native tongue; that, however mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve, it contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and state of life, which so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or pain.

50. Indeed, the Psalter alone, which practically was the service book of the Church for many ages, contains merely in the first half of it the sum of personal and social wisdom. The 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th, have in them the law and the prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is antic.i.p.ated in the 104th.

51. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group of historic and didactic literature has a range comparable with it.

There are--

I. The stories of the Fall and of the Flood, the grandest human traditions founded on a true horror of sin.

II. The story of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races.

III. The story of Moses, with the results of that tradition in the moral law of all the civilized world.

IV. The story of the Kings--virtually that of all Kinghood, in David, and of all Philosophy, in Solomon: culminating in the Psalms and Proverbs, with the still more close and practical wisdom of Ecclesiasticus and the Son of Sirach.

V. The story of the Prophets--virtually that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence.

VI. The story of Christ.

VII. The moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its fulfilment.

Think, if you can match that table of contents in any other--I do not say 'book' but 'literature.' Think, so far as it is possible for any of us--either adversary or defender of the faith--to extricate his intelligence from the habit and the a.s.sociation of moral sentiment based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained unravaged, and every teacher's truest words had been written down?

52. I am no despiser of profane literature. So far from it that I believe no interpretations of Greek religion have ever been so affectionate, none of Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the symbols of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of G.o.d, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many pa.s.sages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply grave to me. How far my mind has been paralysed by the faults and sorrow of life,--how far short its knowledge may be of what I might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my own pleasure or self-proclaiming, I have been guarded, as men who so write always will be, from errors dangerous to others; and the fragmentary expressions of feeling or statements of doctrine, which from time to time I have been able to give, will be found now by an attentive reader to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of Sacred literature,--both cla.s.sic and Christian, which will enable him without injustice to sympathize in the faiths of candid and generous souls, of every age and every clime.

53. That there _is_ a Sacred cla.s.sic literature, running parallel with that of the Hebrews, and coalescing in the symbolic legends of mediaeval Christendom, is shown in the most tender and impressive way by the independent, yet similar, influence of Virgil upon Dante, and upon Bishop Gawaine Douglas. At earlier dates, the teaching of every master trained in the Eastern schools was necessarily grafted on the wisdom of the Greek mythology; and thus the story of the Nemean Lion, with the aid of Athena in its conquest, is the real root-stock of the legend of St. Jerome's companion, conquered by the healing gentleness of the Spirit of Life.

54. I call it a legend only. Whether Heracles ever slew, or St. Jerome ever cherished, the wild or wounded creature, is of no moment to us in learning what the Greeks meant by their vase-outlines of the great contest, or the Christian painters by their fond insistence on the constancy of the Lion-friend. Former tradition, in the story of Samson,--of the disobedient prophet,--of David's first inspired victory, and finally of the miracle wrought in the defence of the most favoured and most faithful of the greater Prophets, runs always parallel in symbolism with the Dorian fable: but the legend of St. Jerome takes up the prophecy of the Millennium, and foretells, with the c.u.maean Sibyl, and with Isaiah, a day when the Fear of Man shall be laid in benediction, not enmity, on inferior beings,--when they shall not hurt nor destroy in all the holy Mountain, and the Peace of the Earth shall be as far removed from its present sorrow, as the present gloriously animate universe from the nascent desert, whose deeps were the place of dragons, and its mountains, domes of fire.

Of that day knoweth no man; but the Kingdom of G.o.d is already come to those who have tamed in their own hearts what was rampant of the lower nature, and have learned to cherish what is lovely and human, in the wandering children of the clouds and fields.

AVALLON, _28th August_, 1882.

CHAPTER IV.

INTERPRETATIONS.

1. It is the admitted privilege of a custode who loves his cathedral to depreciate, in its comparison, all the other cathedrals of his country that resemble, and all the edifices on the globe that differ from it. But I love too many cathedrals--though I have never had the happiness of becoming the custode of even one--to permit myself the easy and faithful exercise of the privilege in question; and I must vindicate my candour, and my judgment, in the outset, by confessing that the cathedral of AMIENS has nothing to boast of in the way of towers,--that its central fleche is merely the pretty caprice of a village carpenter,--that the total structure is in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury--nothing of the might of Durham;--no Daedalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet le Duc--

"The Parthenon of Gothic Architecture."[40]

2. Of Gothic, mind you; Gothic clear of Roman tradition, and of Arabian taint; Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpa.s.sable, and unaccusable;--its proper principles of structure being once understood and admitted.

[Footnote 40: Of French Architecture, accurately, in the place quoted, "Dictionary of Architecture," vol. i. p. 71; but in the article "Cathedrale," it is called (vol. ii. p. 330) "l'eglise _ogivale_ par excellence."]

No well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as s.p.a.cious as he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsion of human labour.

He did not wish to exhaust in the pride of a single city the energies of a generation, or the resources of a kingdom; he built for Amiens with the strength and the exchequer of Amiens; with chalk from the cliffs of the Somme,[41] and under the orders of two successive bishops, one of whom directed the foundations of the edifice, and the other gave thanks in it for its completion. His object, as a designer, in common with all the sacred builders of his time in the North, was to admit as much light into the building as was consistent with the comfort of it; to make its structure intelligibly admirable, but not curious or confusing; and to enrich and enforce the understood structure with ornament sufficient for its beauty, yet yielding to no wanton enthusiasm in expenditure, nor insolent in giddy or selfish ostentation of skill; and finally, to make the external sculpture of its walls and gates at once an alphabet and epitome of the religion, by the knowledge and inspiration of which an acceptable wors.h.i.+p might be rendered, within those gates, to the Lord whose Fear was in His Holy Temple, and whose seat was in Heaven.

[Footnote 41: It was a universal principle with the French builders of the great ages to use the stones of their quarries as they lay in the bed; if the beds were thick, the stones were used of their full thickness--if thin, of their necessary thinness, adjusting them with beautiful care to directions of thrust and weight. The natural blocks were never sawn, only squared into fitting, the whole native strength and crystallization of the stone being thus kept unflawed--"_ne dedoublant jamais_ une pierre. Cette methode est excellente, elle conserve a la pierre toute sa force naturelle,--tous ses moyens de resistance." See M. Viollet le Duc, Article "Construction"

(Materiaux), vol. iv. p. 129. He adds the very notable fact that, _to this day, in seventy departments of France, the use of the stone-saw is unknown_.]

3. It is not easy for the citizen of the modern aggregate of bad building, and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town,--of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery,--not easy, I say, for the citizen of any such mean city to understand the feeling of a burgher of the Christian ages to his cathedral. For him, the quite simply and frankly-believed text, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and industrious persons gathered in His name--"They shall be my people and I will be their G.o.d";--deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as he was a Jew among Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to any--even the poorest--group of disciples, as one of their nation; and that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a compatriot to them as if He had been born of a Picard maiden.

4. It is to be remembered, however--and this is a theological point on which depended much of the structural development of the northern basilicas--that the part of the building in which the Divine presence was believed to be constant, as in the Jewish Holy of Holies, was only the enclosed choir; in front of which the aisles and transepts might become the King's Hall of Justice, as in the presence-chamber of Christ; and whose high altar was guarded always from the surrounding eastern aisles by a screen of the most finished workmans.h.i.+p; while from those surrounding aisles branched off a series of radiating chapels or cells, each dedicated to some separate saint. This conception of the company of Christ with His saints, (the eastern chapel of all being the Virgin's,) was at the root of the entire disposition of the apse with its supporting and dividing b.u.t.tresses and piers; and the architectural form can never be well delighted in, unless in some sympathy with the spiritual imagination out of which it rose. We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols and types: in old Christian architecture, every part is _literal_: the cathedral _is_ for its builders the House of G.o.d;--it is surrounded, like an earthly king's, with minor lodgings for the servants; and the glorious carvings of the exterior walls and interior wood of the choir, which an English rector would almost instinctively think of as done for the glorification of the canons, was indeed the Amienois carpenter's way of making his Master-carpenter comfortable,[42]--nor less of showing his own native and insuperable virtue of carpenter, before G.o.d and man.

[Footnote 42: The philosophic reader is quite welcome to 'detect' and 'expose' as many carnal motives as he pleases, besides the good ones,--compet.i.tion with neighbour Beauvais--comfort to sleepy heads--solace to fat sides, and the like. He will find at last that no quant.i.ty of compet.i.tion or comfort-seeking will do anything the like of this carving now;--still less his own philosophy, whatever its species: and that it was indeed the little mustard seed of faith in the heart, with a very notable quant.i.ty of honesty besides in the habit and disposition, that made all the rest grow together for good.]

5. Whatever you wish to see, or are forced to leave unseen, at Amiens, if the overwhelming responsibilities of your existence, and the inevitable necessities of precipitate locomotion in their fulfilment, have left you so much as one quarter of an hour, not out of breath--for the contemplation of the capital of Picardy, give it wholly to the cathedral choir. Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here--but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is late,--fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century--and has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of it; but wood-carving was the Picard's joy from his youth up, and, so far as I know, there is nothing else so beautiful cut out of the goodly trees of the world.

Sweet and young-grained wood it is: oak, _trained_ and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle--it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leaf.a.ge than any forest, and fuller of story than any book.[43]

[Footnote 43: Arnold Boulin, master-joiner (menuisier) at Amiens, solicited the enterprise, and obtained it in the first months of the year 1508. A contract was drawn and an agreement made with him for the construction of one hundred and twenty stalls with historical subjects, high backings, crownings, and pyramidal canopies. It was agreed that the princ.i.p.al executor should have seven sous of Tournay (a little less than the sou of France) a day, for himself and his apprentice, (threepence a day the two--say a s.h.i.+lling a week the master, and sixpence a week the man,) and for the superintendence of the whole work, twelve crowns a year, at the rate of twenty-four sous the crown; (_i.e._, twelve s.h.i.+llings a year). The salary of the simple workman was only to be three sous a day. For the sculptures and histories of the seats, the bargain was made separately with Antoine Avernier, image-cutter, residing at Amiens, at the rate of thirty-two sous (sixteen pence) the piece. Most of the wood came from Clermont en Beauvoisis, near Amiens; the finest, for the bas-reliefs, from Holland, by St. Valery and Abbeville. The Chapter appointed four of its own members to superintend the work: Jean Dumas, Jean Fabres, Pierre Vuaille, and Jean Lenglache, to whom my authors (canons both) attribute the choice of subjects, the placing of them, and the initiation of the workmen 'au sens veritable et plus eleve de la Bible ou des legendes, et portant quelque fois le simple savoir-faire de l'ouvrier jusqu'a la hauteur du genie du theologien.'

Without pretending to apportion the credit of savoir-faire and theology in the business, we have only to observe that the whole company, master, apprentices, workmen, image-cutter, and four canons, got well into traces, and set to work on the 3rd of July, 1508, in the great hall of the eveche, which was to be the workshop and studio during the whole time of the business. In the following year, another menuisier, Alexander Huet, was a.s.sociated with the body, to carry on the stalls on the right hand of the choir, while Arnold Boulin went on with those on the left. Arnold, leaving his new a.s.sociate in command for a time, went to Beauvais and St. Riquier, to see the woodwork there; and in July of 1511 both the masters went to Rouen together, 'pour etudier les chaires de la cathedrale.' The year before, also, two Franciscans, monks of Abbeville, 'expert and renowned in working in wood,' had been called by the Amiens chapter to give their opinion on things in progress, and had each twenty sous for his opinion, and travelling expenses.

In 1516, another and an important name appears on the accounts,--that of Jean Trupin, 'a simple workman at the wages of three sous a day,'

but doubtless a good and spirited carver, whose true portrait it is without doubt, and by his own hand, that forms the elbow-rest, of the 85th stall (right hand, nearest apse), beneath which is cut his name JHAN TRUPIN, and again under the 92nd stall, with the added wish, 'Jan Trupin, G.o.d take care of thee' (_Dieu te pourvoie_).