The Pursuit of Glory, page 60
The art of the Bach cantata is an exposition of the foundations and principles of the Christian faith, and none more searching or more inexorable, deeper or more precise, has ever been. The temporal life and the eternal, works and faith, mortality and death, sin and repentance, suffering and salvation–all the emotions and inspirations of the Christian soul exalted this, the greatest of preachers since Luther, not to theological abstractions but to a passionate presentation by symbolic means of an incomparably vivid musical imagination.
The kind of culture exemplified by Weltenburg, the Toledo Transparente and Nun kommt, der Heiden Heiland could be illustrated from every different creative genre from every part of Europe, both Catholic and Protestant. From literature good examples would be John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) or Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (published posthumously in 1670) with its pithy rebuttal of Cartesian rationalism: ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’ From painting it would be difficult to exceed the ceiling fresco of San Ignazio in Rome–The Glory of St Ignatius Loyola and the Missionary Work of the Jesuit Order (1688–94)–painted by Andrea Pozzo SJ. From the particularly rich range of sculpture, the pulpit created by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen in 1695–9 for the Jesuit church at Louvain, but now in the Church of St Michael and St Gudula at Brussels, so perfectly incorporates baroque religiosity as to justify an extended discussion. It might well be contrasted with the androgynous angels of Ignaz Günther (1725–75) which adorn a number of south German churches.
In music, it would be tempting to compare Bach’s cantata with a work by his exact contemporary and fellow Saxon Handel, the most obvious candidate being Messiah, not least because the aria ‘He was despised and rejected of men’ is every bit as dramatic and passionate as ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock’. But there are plenty of candidates from the Catholic world–one of the numerous oratorios or cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) or his son Domenico (1685–1757), for example. Such comparative investigations could be pursued, if not ad infinitum, then at least until many large volumes had been filled. Here it must suffice to have used a few representative examples to establish a point of reference from which development can be measured.
WITCHES AND WITCH-HUNTING
What all these cultural manifestations have in common is a belief in the omnipotence and omnipresence of God. As the baroque artists tried to show, the world below and the world above formed a unity, suffused by the supernatural. The Christian God who directed both was no remote first cause or cosmic clock-maker, but a hands-on deity who liked to make his presence felt. This was a belief that could inspire great art, but could also lead to violent outbreaks of intolerance. None was more terrible for those on the receiving end than the periodic eruptions of witch-hunting. By 1648 the prosecution of witches had largely come to an end in Spain, the Dutch Republic, England, Geneva and France. There was a further wave in Germany during 1660s and plenty more short but sharp bursts of activity until after the middle of the eighteenth century. In Scotland the last major outbreak was 1661–2. In Poland, Bohemia and Hungary witch-hunting did not reach a peak until after 1700. The last officially sanctioned execution took place in the Swiss canton of Glarus in 1782. During the previous three centuries perhaps as many as 40,000 Europeans had been executed by the authorities, and untold more had perished at the hands of lynch-mobs.
Long after witchcraft had been downgraded from a capital crime to fraud, popular belief in its reality persisted with the occasional deadly consequence. In 1751 a mob at Tring in Hertfordshire, reported to have numbered ten thousand, watched while an elderly couple, John and Ruth Osborne, were ‘ducked’ in a pond to establish whether or not they had bewitched a neighbour. Although Ruth at once provided proof of her innocence by sinking like a stone, she was subjected to the ordeal three times and drowned. Her husband survived, to help provide the evidence that led to the trial and execution of the mob’s ringleader. The last victim of popular belief in witchcraft appears to have been Bridget Cleary of Ballyvadlea, County Tipperary, beaten and burned to death in 1895 by her husband, other family members and neighbours who believed that she was a fairy changeling magically installed in the place of the real Bridget.
Belief in witchcraft was not confined to the credulous illiterate. Bishop Bossuet (1627–1704), as educated and erudite a man as there was in Europe, could write ‘I hold that witches could form an army equal to that of Xerxes, which was at least 180,000 men’, adding ‘I should like them all to be put into one single body so that they could be burned all together in a single flame!’ As the author of The Art of Governing, Drawn from the Words of Holy Scripture, Bossuet was well placed to appreciate how forthright his God had been on the subject of witchcraft and witches, Exodus 22:18 commanding: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Unlike many modern moral theologians, who first think of an attractive precept and then search for a biblical text to support it, most men and women of all classes believed that what they read in the Bible was literally the Word of God. That was why John Wesley (1703–91) stated that ‘giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible’. As his contemporary, the jurist Sir William Blackstone (1723–80) pointed out: ‘to deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once to contradict the revealed word of God’.
In terms of timing, there seems to have been something of a west–east gradient. Neither Catholic Ireland (despite the later fate of Bridget Cleary) nor Calvinist Holland were much affected in the seventeenth century, nor was Spain after a last outbreak of witch hunts in Navarre in 1610. In England, where between 300 and 500 had perished since the middle of the sixteenth century, the last witch was executed in 1684, a timetable replicated in France, where the royal government intervened in 1682 to reclassify sorcery as deception, although a priest, Louis Debaraz was executed at Lyon in 1745. In Sweden there was a last terrible outbreak in 1668–9 at Mohra in Dalecarlia, when several children accused women of taking them to the Witches’ Sabbath, leading to around seventy deaths, although the very last execution does not appear to have taken place until 1779.
It was in the south-eastern principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, in Franconia and Bavaria, that witch-crazes kept recurring until deep into the eighteenth century. In the late 1670s, for example, around 140 beggars and indigent children perished in the Archbishopric of Salzburg as a result of the ‘Zauberer-Jackl’ (Little Sorcerer Jack) trials. Unusually, most of the victims–70 per cent–were young males, mostly members of vagrant bands of children allegedly led by Little Jack, although he himself was never apprehended. Eighty years later, the new Bavarian Criminal Code of 1751 was still decreeing burning alive at the stake as the stake as the penalty for those found guilty of concluding a pact with the Devil, of having sexual intercourse with him or even just worshipping him, and beheading for those who invoked diabolic assistance to do harm to third parties, their property or their animals. Although it is often stated that the last execution in Germany occurred in 1749 at Würzburg, in reality there was a further flurry in Bavaria in the 1750s. Pending further discoveries, the final victim is thought to be Maria Anna Schwägelin, beheaded at the Prince-Abbey of Kempten on 11 April 1775 for confessing to a pact with the Devil. The abbot who signed the death warrant, Honorius Baron Roth von Schreckenstein, added the injunction ‘Fiat iustitia!’ (Let justice be done). In the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia, it was the late seventeenth century that saw the worst of the persecutions, but further east, in Hungary and Transylvania, it was not until the very end of the seventeenth century that they began in earnest. In Hungary 209 accused of witchcraft stood trial between 1690 and 1710, of whom 85 were executed; during the next forty years 809 were tried and 213 executed.
In Hungary, as in other parts of Europe, the persecution of witches did not end because belief in witchcraft or magic ceased, but because the government intervened. Travelling through Hungary in 1729, Johann Georg Keysler passed through a village called Nesmel, between Neuendorf and Komárom where just a few days earlier three women and a man had been burnt at the stake for alleged diabolism, having first confessed to all kinds of absurdities under the most brutal torture. He explained the frequency of persecution there by reference to the Protestantism of the inhabitants. That also explained the horrors at Szeged, where the previous year the local judge, his wife and thirty-four others had been burnt. When Keysler expressed disapproval to the Catholic who was recounting the events, he was told in reply that the judge must have been guilty, because although a tall and corpulent man, he only weighed three-and-a-half ounces. Not unreasonably, Keysler then asked how the judge had been weighed and whether it had been done in public, but soon realized that this was a subject better not pursued. He observed:
It seems it is the opinion of many ignorant persons, that they who will not blindly swallow all such stories, must themselves be concerned in such diabolical practices: others conclude that he who does not believe the stories of witches and apparitions, is not convinced of the existence of God or the devil, Heaven or hell.
In the case of Hungary it was the Empress Maria Theresa who in 1756 ordered that in future all cases should be referred to the central court of appeal for confirmation before sentence could be carried out. The result was a sharp reduction in the number of trials, which came to a complete stop in 1777. By that time, it could be said that the age of witch trials was well and truly over (although they were to resume with a vengeance under a different aegis in the twentieth century). In 1648 witches were being burnt all over Europe; by 1815 anyone attempting to prosecute a ‘witch’ would find him-or herself in the dock.
THE CULTURE OF REASON
Many have been the explanations offered for this great change, itself symptomatic of an ever more fundamental change. The reasons for both the tenacity of beliefs in witchcraft and their eventual relaxation were revealed by John Wesley in the passage from which the earlier quotation was taken:
It is true, likewise, that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread throughout the nation, in direct opposition not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not), that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible; and they know, on the other hand, that if but one account of the intercourse of men with separate spirits be admitted, their whole castle in the air (Deism, Atheism, Materialism) falls to the ground. I know no reason, therefore, why we should suffer even this weapon to be wrested out of our hands. Indeed there are numerous arguments besides, which abundantly confute their vain imaginations. But we need not be hooted out of one; neither reason nor religion require this.
Wesley would not abandon his belief in supernatural forces, because it was based on Scripture, endorsed by scholars down the ages, and confirmed by eye-witness accounts. Indeed, after writing this passage in his journal, he recorded at length the experiences of one of his followers, Elizabeth Hobson of Sunderland, who was repeatedly visited by dead relations. When asked whether he himself had ever seen a ghost, he replied that neither had he ever witnessed a murder, but ‘I have not only as strong, but stronger proofs of this [witchcraft], from eye and ear witnesses, than I have of murder, so I cannot rationally doubt of one any more than the other’. Again and again on his travels he encountered unfortunates, especially young women, who were clearly possessed by demons. When told by a doctor that one victim was suffering ‘what formerly they would have called being bewitched’, Wesley indignantly recorded that the only reason why such a diagnosis was no longer made was ‘because the infidels have hooted withcraft out of the world; and the complaisant Christians, in large numbers, have joined with them in the cry’.
In other words, Wesley believed in witchcraft for what seemed to him to be utterly compelling reasons but was uncomfortably aware that both non-believers and a large number of his fellow Christians did not agree with him. As an intelligent and well-educated man, he supplies a salutary warning to later ages not to scoff at discredited systems of belief. The great majority of Europeans living in the twenty-first century have as little understanding of the science that disproves witchcraft as their predecessors had of the science that proved the opposite. On the other hand, many seventeenth-century scientists now lauded for their contribution to the advancement of knowledge also entertained beliefs that would now be derided as superstition. The greatest scientist of that, or perhaps any, age, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), wrote two million words or more on theology and alchemy, took a keen interest in astrology and believed he could reconstruct the lost chronology of the ancient world from a study of the stars. He also spent a good deal of time trying to unravel the secrets of The Book of Revelation. His near-contemporary Robert Boyle (1627–91) challenged traditional chemistry in Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-physical doubts & paradoxes in 1661 but was also an alchemist and could never abandon his belief in miracles.
Yet it was scientists like these who undermined the foundations of witchcraft and all other forms of magic. Wesley believed that if only one case of diabolic intercourse could be proved, the whole sceptical case would fall to the ground. But equally, once one part of the traditional world-view was shown to be false, despite support down the ages from both classical and Christian authorities, then the whole edifice began to crumble. Of the many demolition agents, it is the heliocentric view of the universe that has the best credentials. Although expounded as early as the fourth century BC, it was Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium in 1543 that began its slow and fitful progress to acceptance. Along the way, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), his immediate successor as Imperial Mathematician to the Emperor Rudolf II, greatly improved astronomical instruments, revolutionized observational techniques, proved that there was no dichotomy between a perfect permanent heaven and a corrupt ever-changing earth, and established the laws of planetary motion. Indeed Kepler’s explanation of the last-named can lay claim to being the first natural law, for it was precise, universal and verifiable.
With just a little casuistry, the churches might easily have neutered this threat by adapting their cosmology, although such biblical episodes as Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks (Joshua 10: 12–13) would always have caused problems. In the event, they painted themselves into a corner by defending the indefensible long after heliocentrism had moved from hypothesis to fact. Although Protestants such as Luther and Melancthon joined in deriding the heliocentric view as folly perpetrated by attention-seeking neophiliacs, it was the Catholics who proved to be the most inflexible and who suffered accordingly. So famous was Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) that his interrogation, condemnation and abjuration in 1633 became a cause célèbre that branded the Church as a reactionary bulwark against intellectual innovation. The seven cardinals who made up the Inquisition’s tribunal stated unequivocally that:
The proposition that the sun is in the centre of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.
The proposition that the earth is not the centre of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.
The knowledge that the seventy-year-old Galileo had been shown the instruments of torture to encourage his recantation helped to deepen the divide between the religious establishment and natural science.
Beneath the frozen carapace of ecclesiastical authority, however, the relationship between individual Christians and natural science remained mutually supportive. All the great scientists of the seventeenth century were believers, indeed in most cases it was just their belief in the certainty of the next world that drove them to investigate the workings of the one they inhabited. However, what they found there made it difficult to embrace the kind of religion to be found at Weltenburg or to take seriously the notion of diabolic pacts or sexual orgies at the Witches’ Sabbath. For in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was a change in terrestrial physics to match the celestial revolution, as scientists grappled with the two central problems posed by the new cosmology: if the earth was not the centre of the universe, then why did objects fall towards its centre? and, if there were no crystalline spheres to hold them steady, why did the planets orbit in an orderly manner? In finding a solution, the most powerful tool was supplied by mathematics. From Copernicus to Newton, it was the ability of scientists to express their discoveries in the language of mathematics that provided the clarity, the universality and repeatability that provided the necessary authority. Indeed, it could be said that the greatest achievement of the seventeenth century was the discovery that motion could be measured mathematically.
