IV.II. The Crusades

The Church gained the victory in the struggle referred to in the previous chapter; and in this way secured as decided a supremacy in Germany, as she did in the other states of Europe by a calmer process. She made herself mistress of all the relations of life, and of science and art; and she was the permanent repository of spiritual treasures. Yet notwithstanding this full and complete development of ecclesiastical life, we find a deficiency and consequent craving manifesting itself in Christendom, and which drove it out of itself. To understand this want, we must revert to the nature of the Christian religion itself, and particularly to that aspect of it by which it has a footing in the Present in the consciousness of its votaries.

The objective doctrines of Christianity had been already so firmly settled by the Councils of the Church, that neither the mediaeval nor any other philosophy could develop them further, except in the way of exalting them intellectually, so that they might be satisfactory as presenting the form of Thought. And one essential point in this doctrine was the recognition of the Divine Nature as not in any sense an other-world existence [ein Jenseits], but as in unity with Human Nature in the Present and Actual. But this Presence is at the same time exclusively Spiritual Presence. Christ as a particular human personality has left the world; his temporal existence is only a past one — i.e., it exists only in mental conception. And since the Divine existence on earth is essentially of a spiritual character, it cannot appear in the form of a Dalai-Lama. The Pope, however high his position as Head of Christendom and Vicar of Christ, calls himself only the Servant of .Servants. How then did the Church realize Christ as a definite and present existence? The principal form of this realization was, as remarked above, the Holy Supper, in the form it presented as the Mass: in this the Life, Suffering, and Death of the actual Christ were verily present, as an eternal and daily repeated sacrifice. Christ appears as a definite and present existence in a sensuous form as the Host, consecrated by the Priest; so far all is satisfactory: that is to say, it is the Church, the Spirit of Christ, that attains in this ordinance direct and full assurance. But the most prominent feature in this sacrament is, that the process by which Deity is manifested, is conditioned by the limitations of particularity— that the Host, this Thing, is set up to be adored as God. The Church then might have been able to content itself with this sensuous presence of Deity; but when it is once granted that God exists in external phenomenal presence, this external manifestation immediately becomes infinitely varied; for the need of this presence is infinite. Thus innumerable instances will occur in the experience of the Church, in which Christ has appeared to one and another, in various places; and still more frequently his divine Mother, who as standing nearer to humanity, is a second mediator between the Mediator and man (the miracle-working images of the Virgin are in their way Hosts, since they supply a benign and gracious presence of God). In all places, therefore, there will occur manifestations of the Heavenly, in specially gracious appearances, the stigmata of Christ’s Passion, etc.; and the Divine will be realized in miracles as detached and isolated phenomena. In the period in question the Church presents the aspect of a world of miracle; to the community of devout and pious persons natural existence has utterly lost its stability and certainty: rather, absolute certainty has turned against it, and the Divine is not conceived of by Christendom under conditions of univer-THE GERMAN WORLD 391 sality as the law and nature of Spirit, but reveals itself in isolated and detached phenomena, in which the rational form of existence is utterly perverted.

In this complete development of the Church, we may find a deficiency: but what can be felt as a want by it? What compels it, in this state of perfect satisfaction and enjoyment, to wish for something else within the limits of its own principles— without apostatizing from itself? Those miraculous images, places, and times, are only isolated points, momentary appearances — are not an embodiment of Deity, not of the highest and absolute kind. The Host, the supreme manifestation, is to be found indeed in innumerable churches; Christ is therein transubstantiated to a present and particular existence: but this itself is of a vague and general character; it is not his actual and very presence as particularized in Space. That presence has passed away, as regards time; but as spatial and as concrete in space it has a mundane permanence in this particular spot, this particular village, etc. It is then this mundane existence [in Palestine] which Christendom desiderates, which it is resolved on attaining. Pilgrims in crowds had indeed been able to enjoy it; but the approach to the hallowed localities is in the hands of the Infidels, and it is a reproach to Christendom that the Holy Places and the Sepulchre of Christ in particular are not in possession of the Church. In this feeling Christendom was united; consequently the Crusades were undertaken, whose object was not the furtherance of any special interests on the part of the several states that engaged in them, but simply and solely the conquest of the Holy Land.

The West once more sallied forth in hostile array against the East. As in the expedition of the Greeks against Troy, so here, the invading hosts were entirely composed of independent feudal lords and knights; though they were not united under a real individuality, as were the Greeks under Agamemnon or Alexander. Christendom, on the contrary, was engaged in an undertaking whose object was the securing of the definite and present existence [of Deity] — the real culmination of Individuality. This object impelled the West against the East, and this is the essential interest of the Crusades.

The first and immediate commencement of the Crusades was made in the West itself. Many thousands of Jews were massacred, and their property seized; and after this terrible prelude Christendom began its march. The monk, Peter the Hermit of Amiens, led the way with an immense troop of rabble. This host passed in the greatest disorder through Hungary, and robbed and plundered as they went; but their numbers dwindled away, and only a few reached Constantinople. For rational considerations were out of the question; the mass of them believed that God would be their immediate guide and protector. The most striking proof that enthusiasm almost robbed the nations of Europe of their senses, is supplied by the fact that at a later time troops of children ran away from their parents, and went to Marseilles, there to take ship for the Holy Land. Few reached it; the rest were sold by the merchants to the Saracens as slaves.

At last, with much trouble and immense loss, more regular armies attained the desired object; they beheld themselves in possession of all the Holy Places of note — Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Golgotha, and even the Holy Sepulchre. In the whole expedition — in all the acts of the Christians — appeared that enormous contrast (a feature characteristic of the age) — the transition on the part of the Crusading host from the greatest excesses and outrages to the profoundest contrition and humiliation. Still dripping with the blood of the slaughtered inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Christians fell down on their faces at the tomb of the Redeemer, and directed their fervent suppli-cations to him.

Thus did Christendom come into the possession of its highest good. Jerusalem was made a kingdom, and the entire feudal system was introduced there — a constitution which, in presence of the Saracens, was certainly the worst that could be adopted. Another crusade in the year 1204 resulted in the conquest of Constantinople and the establishment of a Latin Empire there. Christendom, therefore, had appeased its religious craving; it could now veritably walk unobstructed in the footsteps of the Saviour. Whole shiploads of earth were brought from the Holy Land to Europe. Of Christ himself no corporeal relics could be obtained, for he was arisen: the Sacred Handkerchief, the Cross, and lastly the Sepulchre, were the most venerated memorials. But in the Grave is found the real point of retro-version; it is in the grave that all the vanity of the Sensuous perishes. At the Holy Sepulchre the vanity of [the cherished] opinion passes away [the fancies by which the substance of truth has been obscured disappear]; there all is seriousness. In the negation of that definite and present embodiment — i.e. of the Sensuous — it is that the turning-point in question is found, and those words have an application: “Thou wouldst not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.” Christendom was not to find its ultimatum of truth in the grave. At this sepulchre the Christian world received a second time the response given to the disciples when they sought the body of the Lord there: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.” You must not look for the principle of your religion in the Sensuous, in the grave among the dead, but in the living Spirit in yourselves. We have seen how the vast idea of the union of the Finite with the Infinite was perverted to such a degree as that men looked for a definite embodiment of the Infinite in a mere isolated outward object [the Host]. Christendom found the empty Sepulchre, but not the union of the Secular and the Eternal; and so it lost the Holy Land. It was practically undeceived; and the result which it brought back with it was of a negative kind: viz., that the definite embodiment which it was seeking, was to be looked for in Subjective Consciousness alone, and in no external object; that the definite form in question, presenting the union of the Secular with the Eternal, is the Spiritual self-cognizant independence of the individual. Thus the world attains the conviction that man must look within himself for that definite embodiment of being which is of a divine nature: subjectivity thereby receives absolute authorization, and claims to determine for itself the relation [of all that exists] to the Divine. This then was the absolute result of the Crusades, and from them we may date the commencement of self-reliance and spontaneous activity. The West bade an eternal farewell to the East at the Holy Sepulchre, and gained a comprehension of its own principle of subjective infinite Freedom. Christendom never appeared again on the scene of history as one body.

Crusades of another kind, bearing somewhat the character of wars with a view to mere secular conquest, but which involved a religious interest also, were the contests waged by Spain against the Saracens in the peninsula itself. The Christians had been shut up in a corner by the Arabs; but they gained upon their adversaries in strength, because the Saracens in Spain and Africa were engaged in war in various directions, and were divided among themselves. The Spaniards, united with Frank knights, undertook frequent expeditions against the Saracens; and in this collision of the Christians with the chivalry of the East — with its freedom and perfect independence of soul — the former became also partakers in this freedom. Spain gives us the fairest picture of the knighthood of the Middle Ages, and its hero is the Cid. Several Crusades, the records of which excite our unmixed loathing and detestation, were undertaken against the South of France also. There an aesthetic culture had developed itself: the Troubadours had introduced a freedom of manners similar to that which prevailed under the Hohenstaufen Emperors in Germany; but with this difference, that the former had in it something affected, while the latter was of a more genuine kind. But as in Upper Italy, so also in the South of France fanatical ideas of purity had been introduced; a Crusade was therefore preached against that country by Papal authority. St. Dominic entered it with a vast host of invaders, who, in the most barbarous manner, pillaged and murdered the innocent and the guilty indiscriminately, and utterly laid waste the fair region which they inhabited.

Through the Crusades the Church reached the completion of its authority: it had achieved the perversion of religion and of the divine Spirit; it had distorted the principle of Christian Freedom to a wrongful and immoral slavery of men’s souls; and in so doing, far from abolishing lawless caprice and violence and supplanting them by a virtuous rule of its own, it had even enlisted them in the service of ecclesiastical authority. In the Crusades the Pope stood at the head of the secular power: the Emperor appeared only in a subordinate position, like the other princes, and was obliged to commit both the initiative and the executive to the Pope, as the manifest generalissimo of the expedition. We have already seen the noble house of Hohenstaufen presenting the aspect of chivalrous, dignified and cultivated opponents of the Papal power, when Spirit [the moral and intellectual element in Christendom] had given up the contest. We have seen how they were ultimately obliged to yield to the Church; which, elastic enough to sustain any attack, bore down all opposition and would not move a step towards conciliation. The fall of the Church was not to be effected by open violence; it was from within — by the power of Spirit and by an influence that wrought its way upwards— that ruin threatened it. Respect for the Papacy could not but be weakened by the very fact that the lofty aim of the Crusades — the satisfaction expected from the enjoyment of the sensuous Presence — was not attained. As little did the Popes succeed in keeping possession of the Holy Land. Zeal for the holy cause was exhausted among the princes of Europe. Grieved to the heart by the defeat of the Christians, the Popes again and again urged them to advance to the rescue; but lamentations and entreaties were vain, and they could effect nothing. Spirit, disappointed with regard to its craving for the highest form of the sensuous presence of Deity, fell back upon itself. A rupture, the first of its kind and profound as it was novel, took place. From this time forward we witness religious and intellectual movements in which Spirit — transcending the repulsive and irrational existence by which it is surrounded — either finds its sphere of exercise within itself, and draws upon its own resources for satisfaction, or throws its energies into an actual world of general and morally justified aims, which are therefore aims consonant with Freedom. The efforts thus originated are now to be described: they were the means by which Spirit was to be prepared to comprehend the grand purpose of its Freedom in a form of greater purity and moral elevation.

To this class of movements belongs in the first place the establishment of monastic and chivalric orders, designed to carry out those rules of life which the Church had distinctly enjoined upon its members. That renunciation of property, riches, pleasures, and free will, which the Church had designated as the highest of spiritual attainments, was to be a reality — not a mere profession. The existing monastic and other institutions that had adopted this vow of renunciation, had been entirely sunk in the corruption of worldliness. But now Spirit sought to realize in the sphere of the principle of negativity — purely in itself — what the Church had demanded. The more immediate occasion of this movement was the rise of numerous heresies in the South of France and Italy, whose tendency was in the direction of enthusiasm; and the unbelief which was now gaining ground, but which the Church justly deemed not so dangerous as those heresies. To counteract these evils, new monastic orders were founded, the chief of which was that of the Franciscans, or Mendicant Friars, whose founder, St. Francis of Assisi — a man possessed by an enthusiasm and ecstatic passion that passed all bounds — spent his life in continually striving for the loftiest purity. He gave an impulse of the same kind to his order; the greatest fervor of devotion, the sacrifice of all pleasures in contravention of the prevailing worldliness of the Church, continual penances, the severest poverty (the Franciscans lived on daily alms) — were therefore peculiarly characteristic of it. Contemporaneously with it arose the Dominican order, founded by St. Dominic; its special business was preaching. The mendicant friars were diffused through Christendom to an incredible extent; they were, on the one hand, the standing apostolic army of the Pope, while, on the other hand, they strongly protested against his worldliness. The Franciscans were powerful allies of Louis of Bavaria in his resistance of the Papal assumptions, and they are said to have been the authors of the position, that a General Council was higher authority than the Pope; but subsequently they too sank down into a torpid and unintelligent condition. In the same way the ecclesiastical Orders of Knighthood contemplated the attainment of purity of Spirit. We have already called attention to the peculiar chivalric spirit which had been developed in Spain through the struggle with the Saracens: the same spirit was diffused as the result of the Crusades through the whole of Europe. The ferocity and savage valor that characterized the predatory life of the barbarians — pacified and brought to a settled state by possession, and restrained by the presence of equals — was elevated by religion and then kindled to a noble enthusiasm through contemplating the boundless magnanimity of Oriental prowess. For Christianity also contains the element of boundless abstraction and freedom; the Oriental chivalric spirit found therefore in Occidental hearts a response, which paved the way for their attaining a nobler virtue than they had previously known. Ecclesiastical orders of knighthood were instituted on a basis resembling that of the monastic fraternities. The same conventual vow of renunciation was imposed on their members — the giving up of all that was worldly. But at the same time they undertook the defence of the pilgrims: their first duty therefore was knightly bravery; ultimately, they were also pledged to the sustenance and care of the poor and the sick. The Orders of Knighthood were divided into three: that of St. John, that of the Temple, and the Teutonic Order. These associations are essentially distinguished from the self-seeking principle of feudalism. Their members sacrificed themselves with almost suicidal bravery for a common interest. Thus these Orders transcended the circle of their immediate environment, and formed a network of fraternal coalition over the whole of Europe. But their members sank down to the level of vulgar interests, and the Orders became in the sequel a provisional institute for the nobility generally, rather than anything else. The Order of the Temple was even accused of forming a religion of its own, and of having renounced Christ in the creed which, under the influence of the Oriental Spirit, it had adopted.

A second impulsion, having a similar origin, was that in the direction of Science. The development of Thought — the abstractly Universal — now had its commencement. Those fraternal associations themselves, having a common object, in whose service their members were enlisted, point to the fact that a general principle was beginning to be recognized, and which gradually became conscious of its power. Thought was first directed to Theology, which now became Philosophy under the name of Scholastic Divinity. For philosophy and theology have the Divine as their common object; and although the theology of the Church was a stereotyped dogma, the impulse now arose to justify this body of doctrine in the view of Thought. “When we have arrived at Faith,” says the celebrated scholastic, Anselm, “it is a piece of negligence to stop short of convincing ourselves, by the aid of Thought, of that to which we have given credence.” But thus conditioned Thought was not free, for its material was already posited ab extra; it was to the proof of this material that philosophy devoted its energies. But Thought suggested a variety of questions, the complete answer to which was not given directly in the symbols of the Church; and since the Church had not decided respecting them, they were legitimate subjects of controversy. Philosophy was indeed called an ancilla fidei, for it was in subjection to that material of the Church’s creed, which had been already definitely settled; but yet it was impossible for the opposition between Thought and Belief not to manifest itself. As Europe presented the spectacle of chivalric contests generally — passages of arms and tournaments — it was now the theatre for intellectual jousting also. It is incredible to what an extent the abstract forms of Thought were developed, and what dexterity was acquired in the use of them. This intellectual tourneying for the sake of exhibiting skill, and as a diversion (for it was not the doctrines themselves, but only the forms in which they were couched that made the subject of debate), was chiefly prosecuted and brought to perfection in France. France, in fact, began at that time to be regarded as the centre of Christendom: there the scheme of the first Crusades originated, and French armies carried it out: there the Popes took refuge in their struggles with the German emperors and with the Norman princes of Naples and Sicily, and there for a time they made a continuous sojourn. — We also observe in the period subsequent to the Crusades, commencements of Art — of Painting, viz.: even during their continuance a peculiar kind of poetry had made it appearance. Spirit, unable to satisfy its cravings, created for itself by imagination fairer forms and in a calmer and freer manner than the actual world could offer.