The Medieval Era
Cont'd

This is not the hasty verdict of an enthusiast spurred into a panegyric of adulation, though at first sight it may appear to be the case.

I but record the sober truth. I write plainly so that the reader may understand that I am a whole-hearted lover of Francis Bacon. I know him as “Our Francis”; and to know him in so intimate a fashion is to love him.

I want every reader of this book to know and to love him too. I would that you should love him understandingly and passionately as did his friends Ben Jonson, Sir Tobie Matthew, Sir Thomas Meautys.

Indeed, in his own day this fact is recorded by a contemporary, Aubrey, who states that “all who were great and good loved and honoured him.”

I am going to tell you why they loved and honoured him….these great and good men. They loved him because they knew his real life, his secret works, his personal character. In a word, because they understood him, the peculiar circumstances of his life and the complexity of his nature.

King James VI., of Scotland and I., of England
(1566–1625)

When I have told my tale I shall be surprised if you do not feel inclined to do reverence to this intellectual Colossus who strides down the ages among us. If you do not reverence him for his honesty of character, his inflexible pursuit of Truth and Beauty, I shall have failed in my task.

To understand so complex a personality one must know the story from the beginning...even before he was born on the present stage of life and action. To begin the story of his life, as is the fashion of so many biographers, when he was about twenty-five or thirty-five years of age, either in 1584, his entry to Parliament, or 1597 when his first publication, ten short Essays, was printed under his own name - is necessarily fatal to the understanding of the complete man.

It limits the presentation to a portion only of his life. If the most important fragment - the real Key to his Personality - is ignored, the student, no matter how earnest and honest he may be, sets out on a wrong trail, becoming increasingly bewildered and baffled as he faces the enigmas surrounding Francis Bacon. The man he would capture has escaped the biographer's pen. He has failed to find the secret springs of a life because he has neglected to hunt for hidden beginnings.

What we want to know first of all about Francis Bacon are the formative influences of childhood, his environment and education; for these are the factors which mirror themselves in every growing babe, and play so powerful a part in the mental and spiritual equipment of the adult.

In Francis Bacon’s case – since he is a world figure – we even want to know his antecedents, his father, his mother, the state of England and its relation to Europe; in short, the Feudal Era which gave rise to the Age to which he was born.

Let me then rough in the historical background before delineating Francis Bacon’s personality.

In 1561 England was slowly awakening from the death-like trance into which she had fallen, in common with the rest of Europe, through the spells of the Holy Catholic Church. For upwards of a thousand years this Church had reigned supreme over an entire Continent. The Pope was the Dictator not only of the religious life of the nations but he also controlled all intellectual activity. Men and women had no right to think outside the narrow bonds of an enervating theology.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine was “converted” in A.D. 324, it marked the emergence of Christianity as the specially favoured cult of the Empire.

His conversion set the seal of success on his protracted desperate struggle with Licinius his rival. In deference to priestly prejudice, “he closed the Schools, dispersed the Libraries, and allowed Science to be branded as magic.”

Thereafter, the Church dug the grave of Greek speculation and Roman philosophy, it fostered Art merely as a handmaid to minister to theological creeds: it banished the ancient philosophic forms of culture, science and poetry: and the drama of the mysteries was Anathema Maranatha. All search for Truth from the third century onwards ended in a pre-ordained cul-de-sac – Orthodox dogma.

Theology led men away from the great thinkers of Greece and Rome and from the Ethical Rituals of the Mysteries that had once displayed their Secret Dramas in Sacred Temples on the banks of the Nile.

It trampled on the Pagan Schools of Thought and grouped their teachings into the dust with cries of “heresy.” It scoffed at secular learning. Under the leadership of the priest, civilization plunged blindly forward into the abyss of the Medieval Era.

In the Middle Ages are to be seen a series of lurid pictures in which the Lights of Knowledge go out one by one…from the time of the quarrelling Council of Nicaea (325), through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Persecution of Heretics, to the Elizabethan Era (1561).

During the whole of this time, there was no unfettered intellectual life. The middle of the thirteenth century touched the lowest ebb of European thought. If the Church was ever, in any sense, a patron of Learning, it was a Learning that was in bonds.

There were barren disputations, in Universities and Monasteries alike, that revolved round metaphysical subjects utterly valueless to the disputants or use to mankind, such as “Could God, being omnipotent, make two parallel lines meet? Could he possibly make ten devils dance on the point of a needle at one and the same time?” For centuries real learning was lost amid arid wastes of subtle dialectics.

The social life of the common people was for ages wretched in the extreme…The majority lived in mere hovels. The prejudice of “caste” was as pronounced as it is in India today.

Under the Feudal system, the world was made for the benefit of the classes…the men “of gentle birth by letters patent.” The laboring masses were, regarded as serfs by Church and State. They knew nothing of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

To the Priest, the Wisdom of the Ancients was a stumbling-block; and to the unlettered Lords of Feudalism, foolishness. The accumulated knowledge of the ancient world – history, politics, science, philosophy, ethics – was lost for over a thousand years and almost destroyed. We have to thank the Moors for the preservation of certain definite branches of knowledge.

It is difficult for the average reader to realize that there were actually great civilizations prior to Christianity, profound thinkers, skillful artists, learned scholars, and that in pre-Christian times are to be found systems of thought, much more complex than simple genesis – germs, of science, art, moral and political philosophy, speculative thought, religion, and so on.

There were even clear ideas on the three great problems on which men ponder today more than ever – God, Man, Destiny. Zeno and Plato believe in God as an energizing power (Spirit) at the centre of life and motion, omnipotent, omniscient, all wise; that he was “our Father” in a personal sense whose ever-watchful providence extended to everyone; that man was an immortal spirit; this world a training ground for higher life; and that God had given everyone an angel or guardian to guide and protect him, character being the most important asset he possessed.

“God deals by us as a good Father deals by his children; He tries us, He hardens us, He fits us for Himself. I know that nothing comes to pass but what God appoints,” wrote Seneca (3 B.C. – A.D.65). Epictetus, about A.D. 94, wrote similarly, “Dare to look up to God and Say: Deal with me henceforth as Thou wilt; I am of one mind with Thee; I am Thine; I reject nothing that seems good to Thee; lead me whithersoever Thou wilt. To have God for our Maker and Father and Guardian shall this not avail to deliver us from grief and fear? For when you have shut the doors and made darkness in the house, remember ye are not alone. For God is there and your Guardian is there. He hath placed at every man’s side a Guardian, charged to watch over him, a Genius that cannot sleep nor be deceived.”

Whence came this note of certainty in these magnificent utterances of these ancient Teachers?

The fact is that the Ancient Wisdom - quite apart from Learning and Culture - was based in its moral aspects from a first-hand knowledge of Psychic Phenomena (The Oracle of Delphi, the Vestal Virgins, the Sibylline Books all provide evidence of intercourse with the Spirit World) and an Ethical interpretation of Nature which found its Summum Bonum in the Drama of the Mysteries. But these various Schools - Stoicism, Epicureanism - were suppressed, and their mysterious and mystical symbolism all but perished.

Plato and Virgil were lost to the world, though they might be known privately by a few individual monks in the privacy of their cloistered cells.

It should never be lost sight of, as I have already said, that up to the time of Henry VIII (1531-47), the Roman Church held undisputed sway over the bodies, minds and souls of men. Anyone who dared to withstand Authority was broken on the wheel.

The zenith of the Middle Ages was the thirteenth century when Europe had one religion and one culture, when grievances were many and life was cruelly hard for the masses in ever country.

Indeed, the conditions under which men and women were living at this time were so intolerable that they were openly beginning to chafe under their pains and their poverties. It was out of these widespread evils, that touched every phase of national life, that there was born a new temper...the spirit of reaction took the place of passive obedience.

Intellectuals were sick of the ignorance of the clergy and their condemnation of secular learning and formed secret societies for the advancement of knowledge.

The masses were at last awakened to the fact that from the official church there was flowing a stream of poison which was utterly at variance with morality or real religion.

There was absolution for every crime - on payment of a fixed tariff: poisoning eleven ducats; incest thirty-six livres; perjury seven livres; murder was even less: one ducate, four livres, eight centimes.

In Torquemada's administration 10,220 persons were burned alive, 97,321 being punished with confiscation of property. In 1572, eleven years after Francis Bacon's birth, there was the butchery of St. Bartholomew's Eve. In 1568 the Holy Office condemend every man, woman and child in the Netherlands to the scaffold. Francis Bacon was then seven years of age.

The monks destroyed books in a wholesale fashion. Pope Gregory destroyed the priceless library of the Palatine Apollo. Poesy was held to be the inspiration of the Devil. The Jesuits converted the flourishing kingdom of Bohemia into a desert. Francis I., signed Letters Patent for the suppression of printing. Copernicus (1473-1543) waited thirty years before daring to announce publicly that the Sun was the Centre of the Universe. He escaped the deadly clutches of the Inquisition by dying. Bruno was burnt for espousing the heresy of Copernicus. Galileo was martyred in 1612. Descartes (1596-1650) was horribly persecuted in Holland and narrowly escaped being burnt.

Such being the fate of the intellectual giants we can guess the lot of the smaller men. The nonentities fell like leaves in a storm, a storm of violence that never ceased but swept remorselessly on through decade after decade. (See New Light on the Renaissance, by Harold Bayley p.211).

The Reformation did little to aid Free Thought. The English Puritans made great bonfires of everything Popish, destroying Art and glorying in their depredations. Luther called Copernicus, "this fool who wishes to reverse the entire system of astronomy." Puritans and Romanists alike were united in their persecution of philosophy and their hatred of secular knowledge for the common people.

The revolt against Authority actually began with Dante (1261-1321) - hitherto supposed poet of theological Catholicism - was secretly one of the first intellectual rebels against the Holy Church. His works were directed against the evils of tyranny and were written to hearten the little band of Continental thinkers who were struggling to disseminate liberal ideas. The evils of the times could not be opposed openly. It could only be done by covert ways and means.

The attempt to prevent printing having failed, the Church resorted to the expedient of muzzling. Clerical Inquisitors were appointed in Madrid, Rome, Naples, Lisbon and elsewhere. Licence to publish was refuted to all except those who were certified. Free England was equally affected. The dangers of authorship were great and the rewards of literature remote.

In Dante's day no branch of intellectual effort lay open in which to exercise independent judgment. Every line he wrote in his own language was subject to supervision and censure. He lived under a reign of terror. The use of torture was definitely ordered by the Bull of Innocent IV (1252) and became universal.

In every monarchy, every school and university, a ceaseless silent espionage was set on foot. Every action of the student's life was reported to the Inquisitor...

Ever since Italy had been darkened by the shadow of the Inquisition, men had begun to devise means to communicate with each other, and with their public in a style which should be intelligible to themselves without giving offence to Rome, open revolt was impossible. They matched their wits againt their persecutors and were able to say pretty nearly what they liked by a System of disguised writing.

This use of double writing in serious literature was the only method of free expresssion open to men of letters...to write in such a manner that the Authorities might assume their doctirne to be orthodox while the public for whom it was designed might readily perceive its real drift. Except by resort to this old and time-honoured device the spirit of independent thought would have perished altogether...

The modern has nothing but distaste for crptic modes of writing...yet Dante lent his genius to this end...like his master Virgil he chose to practise the subtlety of the double entendre...Dante and his contemporaries had a hidden multitude eager for each work they produced. (Passing of Beatrice, by Gertrude Leigh. (Intro., p.10)).

It was Dante with his secret disciples, and his equally secret public, that set the trend of the intellectual and moral revival that ultimately took possession of men's hearts and minds openly.

He helped to impregnate the Spirit of the Age with new ideas...secretly; and by a succession of hands - loving disciples - the Torch of Hidden Wisdom was handed down from Virgil, one of the Masters of the Ancient Mysteries, through Dante to the Elizabethan Era...to the oustanding genius of that age, Francis Bacon.

We shall see how the circumstances of his life, and the Spirit of the Age, caused this intellectual giant to dissemble like his predecessor Dante. He adopted all Dante's methods of Secret Writing (double entendres, word-play with words and phrases) and carried the methods to the farthest limits in a variety of ways - by numbers, anagrams, printing errors, special type-setting, hieroglyphics, allegorical pictures, emblematic head and tail pieces, watermarks, etc. - in order to help humanity to escape from the mental and pysical heraldom of a thousand years. He was a secret ethical teacher working along lines of action, open and concealed.

The movemnt which gradually worked up from the time of Dante (1265-1321) culminated in the Renaissance or the Rebirth of Europe, and consisted, really, in an open Revival of learning which may be said to have begun with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and ended with the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603: but the ground had been slowly prepared from some two hundred years, for all Europe had gradually become honeycombed with secret surgings for higher things.

The movement was actually an open revolt against the barrenness of Medievalism and a return to the rich humanity of Greece and Rome, with all the free activities which invested the calssical age. It sought "to escape from a life of fetters, from ecclesiastical tradition and intellectual tyranny into freedom."

These efforts led directly to the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, which had been fought inch by inch by the Holy See during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages. It came to an end with Luther's attack on the sale of Indulgences by the Pope in 1517.

Vergil Polydore
(d.1555)

In Engalnd the Reformation came in with the schism of England from Rome under Henry VIII. The immediate cause of the break was the quarrel between Henry and the Pope, who had refuesed to sanction the King's divorce from Catherine. The King broke with Rome, set up an English Church with himself at the head, made his own Articles of Religion, appointed his own clergy, seized the monasteries, and married Anne Boleyn in the teeth of all clerical opposition. But the King's divorce was the mere occasion of what must sooner or later have been the only solution of England's relation with the Holy See, which claimed authority to impose its will on Kings and Parliaments.

The breach with Rome could not therefore be healed even by the reaction under Queen Mary, Henry's Catholic daughter, who suceeded him. Yet the old system of Romanism had so strong a hold on the English people that when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, the nation was about equally divided between the adherents to the Roman faith and two distinct parties which had renounced the Papacy but who could not work in common...the Church of England which sought to maintain the continuity of religious tradition in the country, and the Puritan Party which drew its inspiration form Calvinism.

It was the prudent policy of Elizabeth which saved the country from internecine strife (as in France and Germany) and made England a Proestant power; for an infallible Church they substituted the Bible as the unerring expression of God's relation to man; the interpretation of the Bible they left to the individual conscience. (See the Reformation and the Renaissance in Chambers' Encylopaedia).

It is out of this slowly-shifting historical background with its enervating mental and moral influence, its terrifying bigotry of Protestant and Catholic alike, its corrupt and wisked methods, the clash of bitter political and religious forces, the low ideals of humanity, the appalling ignorance in which the masses of the natios were steeped, the torture of heretics and the wholesale murder by the Church of entire communitites like Albigenses, that there stepped on to the Stage of Europe one of the Men of Destiny by whom God chooses to work out His great plans of human advancement...a man fated to play so great a part in the mental activities of the world's civilazations, that his all-round influence on the progress of humanity during the last three hundred years is greater than that of any one man who preceded him or is like to succeed him.

Francis Bacon is already known as the Father of Experimental Science. He taught Man how to experiment for the good of humanity. The world has yet to learn that, apart from his known labours, his life was largely devoted to concealed duties, the laying of secret bases for eternity, educational and ethical.

The unrest that had long rocked medieval Europe - flinging its ideals into the melting-pot to reshape them into a new modern world - had at last stirred England into activity. She was the last civilized country to feel the breath of the new spirit. The masses were restless. Their risings had been the signal for various repressive Acts of Parliament (1350, 1425, etc.), until, with their ancient craft guilds swept away, the working man, with Elizabeth's celebrated Act of Apprentices, was virtually a labour conscript under the heel of the justices. His wages were fixed by them and the sheriff. He could not leave his home nor seek for work in any parish without a permit from the justices. For two or more "to congregate" in order to ventilate a grievance, to seek for more money or better working conditions, was a crime against the State, and act of rebellion, and the offenders were to be regarded as felons and treated accordingly.

The Merchant Guilds, which were capitalistic, had triumphed over the Craft Guilds of workmen. The labourer was left without a weapon with which to fight for a decent existence until the rise of the Trade Unions in the nineteenth century. The highways of Europe - like England - were full of landless and homeless men. "It was small consolation to an English peasant in the latter years of Elizabeth, whose cottage had been pulled down that a sheep farm might be extended, workless and wageless, to be assured that he lived in a wondeorus age of discovery and glory! What did he care?" (Sidney Dark).

The darkest hour of the Medieval Age on the Continent is to be found in the years preceding the reign of Elizabeth. Ignorance, superstition, rotten wickedness infected all the Continental nations in all grades of society. If the common people were illiterate, the so-called "Gentry" were equally bookless. The peasant was virtually a serf wretchedly housed in a hovel.

The Royal Courts were filled with Machiavellian statemen corrupt in spirit and shrunken in soul. They were hotbeds of licentiousness and debauchery where demi-mondaines flaunted their charms, naked and unashamed, to noble roues whose lives were spent in intrigues, at the gaming tables and in vicious squandermania.

Machiavelli

The Church was at full blast destroying heretics with torture, fire and sword, selling indulgences for crime and vice to all who had money to pay for such priestly "pardons." The upper classes had their heels on the necks of the people who were sullenly silent, waiting for a chance to rise against their oppressors, fiercely debating under their breaths, as an outlet for their repressed energies, the respective theologies of Catholicism and Protestantism. And scattered throughout the continent were little knots if Intellectuals, and spiritually-minded men, who were secretly striving to bring about a new order of society, to free the masses from the tyrannies of Church and State, and to inculcate the idea of "Education " and "Freedom of Thought" as the true pathway to progress.

At the time of the death of "Bloody Queen Mary" the stagnation of centuries was slowly giving way to movement. The intellectual yeast kneaded into the mass of humanity by Dante and his disciples had begun to take effect. There was a bubbling and rising in men's minds. The old order was changing, giving place to a new.

It was these influences, this new spirit of the age, which were injected into our Island Home in the sixteenth century. Though shut off from the main drift of continental affairs, she partook of all its good and evil qualities.

This is the background against which we must see the England of Elizabeth - the young woman of twenty-five who ascended the throne in 1558 when the fortunes of the nation had sunk to their lowest ebb through bloodshed and misgovernment - if we would understand the complexities of Elizabethan life and thought. It was an Era of transition beset with dangers and difficulties.

This is an historical survey of fact as I see the era, and must not be taken as an attack on any Church. The spirit of persecution was equally rampant in both the Protestant and the Catholic Church--Alfred Dodd.