Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT. 109
This procedure and its results were recognised as among
the glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an
exorcism directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which
svas so effective that five devils gave up possession of a suf-
[erer and signed their names, each for himself and his sub-
Drdinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be
nolested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in
1583, gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast
Dut twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils.
The ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of
ii later period, abound in boasts of such " mighty works."*
fl Such was the result of a thousand years of theological
r-easoning, by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data
Dartly given in Scripture and partly inherited from pagansm,
regarding Satan and his work among men.
Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against
'
science falsely so called," the world had come a long way
ndeed from the soothing treatment of the possessed by him
ivho bore among the noblest of his titles that of " The Great
The result was natural : the treatment of the
Physician."
nsane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer, the
orturer, and the executioner.
To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unortunate
development. In spite of the earlier and more
dndly tendency in the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as
ijarly as 314 A. D., commanded the expulsion of possessed
' oersons from the Church the ; Visigothic Christians whipped
hem ;
and Charlemagne, in spite of some good enactments,
mprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered
ninds might have been restored to health by gentleness and
kill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medi-
:ines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics
they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became
* In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have quoted ex-
ansively from the original treatises, of which a very large collection is in my posession
; but in this chapter I have mainly availed myself of the copious transla-
;ons given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in TAe Nineteenth Century
3r October, 1888, entitled Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and
pread of exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i,
P- 379-385.