I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do

we owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the

compass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and

lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too much

to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of

civilization and through that in large measure its very existence. The

truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying

that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the

barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves

and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not

without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them

men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had

framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first

defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it.

Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely

to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly

and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned

the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its

development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and

efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and

collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and

heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions,

the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical

life. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing to

us the ideals and the results of the one and the other. We may

so far define their contribution as consisting in the thought of

Civilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought only

but a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but an

ideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life.

We have also to recognize another most powerful influence of which they

were the vehicles--closely related to the other. The Greeks first

articulately conceived and deliberately pursued the ideal of Freedom. It

was, I say, closely related to the other, for they meant by it not

merely freedom from physical or political constraint but also inward

freedom from prejudice and passion, and they held that knowledge and

freedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula and

re-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilization

regarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledge

or Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theory

and practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in its

advance liberates the other for a further effort. The several faculties

of the human spirit work harmoniously together in mutual respect and

reciprocal alliance. Hence arises another distinctive feature of the

Greek ideal, namely, that of wholeness or all-round completeness; there

is in it no one-sided insistence on this or that element in human

nature, no tendency to ascetic mutilation, no fear or jealousy of what

is merely human, tainted by its animal origin or its secular

associations.

But we must not exaggerate. This ideal was imperfectly defined, still

more imperfectly executed or realized. It would be absurd to suppose

that it was held by all Greeks; it was indeed advocated by and for a

minority only. Those who now find in it the impulse and guide of Greek

history might be hard put to it if they were obliged to produce evidence

of their faith, and they would be forced to confess that there was much

to be said against their interpretation. There is to be acknowledged

first the apparent want of internal unity in the Greek world, split up

as it was into small and mutually hostile civic groups; and secondly,

the loose coherence of each of these groups within itself (for each, we

might almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is a

commonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so that

barbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-present

evil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designed

for all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for a

privileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilized

Greece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination,

not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal of

practical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowly conceived

was not _in principle_ confined to a 'chosen people', or to one strain

of blood. It supplied a programme extensible to all who could show their

title to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the

special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this

common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he

was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found

himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the

world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to

school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to better

his instructions.

This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since that

mankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in its

dream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menace

of outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thought

and life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and new

fruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ran

in its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness and

hopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgotten

debt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit which

now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each

new generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeats

its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate

care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization,

by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for

us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything

that may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?'

Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem,

we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Classical Antiquity,

and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experience

as a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will be

re-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the task

before us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe a

habitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructing

it we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way of

escape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what we

would do for and in our successors.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the

deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair

creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie

behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art

the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and

the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive

figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of

dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty

bright.' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and

humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not

abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are gods

and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at

home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and

unman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create

what is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing

and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all

language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument

that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams.

The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of

Europe like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal,

'a joy for ever'.

In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so

humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the

breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it did

not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its

triumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech created

thought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not only

supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. They first took the

measure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of man

to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world they

lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also

reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it

and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable

not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature

knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over

which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more

habitable home. In it and availing himself of its offered aid he built

his households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations.

But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic and

social or political, for his life had other issues and promised other

fruit. The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sake

and in itself as the knower of its world.

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science or

the Sciences. In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but the

faintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost at

once to flower and fruit. First and foremost we have to think of

Mathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics and

Astronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps not

wholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and

Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case of

the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile

in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too

much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but

what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous than

what they accomplished in Art. The idea of Science was there, disengaged

from the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea of

free and therefore all the more potent Science. The whole physical--and

much more than the physical--environment of human life was proclaimed

permeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or at

any rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes.

But yet a third advance was made. The Greek mind became conscious of

itself as the knower and therefore the lord and master of its world.

Turning inward upon itself it discovered itself as the centre of its

universe and set itself to explore this new inner realm of being. In the

consciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength.

Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. In

so doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thus

became its servant and not its master--at the same time finally

liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passion

and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and

disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without

reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and

self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it

revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment

wider and more real--more stable and permanent--than the physical

cosmos, finding in the one and the other something more enduring,

substantial, and precious than shows itself either to Science or the

economic and political prudence, yet which alone gives meaning and worth

to the one and the other. Thus for the first time arose before the mind

of man the conception of a life not sunk in nature and practice, but

superior to them and the end or meaning of their existence--a life of

intense activity, of unfailing interest, of inexhaustible and eternal

value.

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowly

conceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of a

spectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cut

off from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, a

life into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or be

transported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourable

circumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not

confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It

was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was

reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute

student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness.

And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with it

the imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, to

enlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the great

business and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is,

the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world.

These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought into

the very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, the

idea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing and

still more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and end

of civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally. It may be

thought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough

of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a

certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the

fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice

and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with

practical illustrations or models for our imitation. Yet again we must

not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as

dreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of

Greek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadied

down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of

grave and energetic manhood.

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a

pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and

leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also

decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of

Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards

barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of

civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive,

but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave

men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always

children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to

learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So

much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look

upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In

this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of

art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced

works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they

created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the

sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But

their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which

pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and

engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear

witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile

advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately

put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into

express theory from their applications.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European

civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too

easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to

concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome,

ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other

the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures

and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most

characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those

achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter

is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of

_Imperial_ Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most

informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an

apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was

here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not

unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a

world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of

that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare,

and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military

power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and

so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her

empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it

haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic

disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe

looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace.

It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who

pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more

practically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized world

was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single

government and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supreme

sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable

condition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization was

equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was

covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the

Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through

system and order--that was the secret of the Roman success. But two

other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the

idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it

was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and

exactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a

legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties,

determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the

sovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so much

by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world's

stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation

throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all,

issuing from and enforced by a single central power.

The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too high

and difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it was

applied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of its

apparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men's

minds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by the

Carolingians or of the attempt at the restitution or copy of it in the

spiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in the

ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in

which it still--in thought--controls us when without essential

alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and

still look for the secret of _its_ peace and strength in an organization

of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a

sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding

and receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinct

that the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restoration

of a similar system in its application to international relations.

Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that its

realization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judge

that it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements of

importance in view of our present problem and perplexity.

It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from the

history both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a time

and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its

permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the

civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again

because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived

internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what

still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized

world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman

Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I

trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse the

causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be

out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who

administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to

the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the

enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of

that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they

did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I

do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as

by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or

semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the

range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now

suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to

say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they

erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the

way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the

ideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea of

nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a

single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon

a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered

upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs

of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere

tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of

Europe based upon it collapsed.

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the

nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it,

and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to

the reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empire

or of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope of

salvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system of

law in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream--the

administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not

that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be

transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations and

our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere

than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide

to the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far too

much water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit which

gave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret of

its vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work of

reconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System and

Order, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learn

the love of Freedom and Truth.

The Greeks have given us the idea of a life worth living which

civilization renders possible, but does not directly produce. This life

in its essential features they rightly conceived, but its content they

failed to articulate, and whether because of that or not, they failed to

realize its indispensable conditions, material, economic, political, &c.

The Romans did more effectively realize this, but they lost sight of the

ends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure of

which they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that at

no time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under the

Roman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time were

civilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty,

mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in Life.

Life was without savour, and they turned away from it in weariness and

disgust and despair, seeking and finding in Philosophy--the fruits of

reflection upon life--nothing better than consolation for the wounds and

disillusions of life. Thus those who gave their lives to Rome lost

heart, and retreating into themselves found nothing there but solitude

and emptiness. Civilization was but the husk of a life that had fled.

Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bony

skeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits and

stiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilization

as a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered and

systematic thought and action within which the higher forces now

recognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work.

Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forces

can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did

in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating

and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies

must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to

learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such

concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain

dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedom

and Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known how

to grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without which

it cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals we

must turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious and

sober task of creating a political and legal structure on which the

eternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work of

extending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity.

It seems as if we--the heirs of their experience--bound to face a more

appalling problem, are bankrupt, even of hopes, having lost both the

ideal of a life worth living on this earth and that of some large and

complex organization rendering this life possible. But this is not so,

for the forces which in Antiquity created and for long maintained a

civilization at first desirable and then strong, are not spent. Still

they make the Greco-Roman civilization which is ours a thing worth

living and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concord

deeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by the

present noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care--and not

we only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent or

malevolent--for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peace

and order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we still

have minds to devise and wills to execute whatever is necessary to its

progress. Still we are willing to learn of history and resolved to

better its instruction, to know ourselves and our world and adjust our

ideas and our acts to the situation in which we find ourselves. The

civilized world has not lost heart or hope; and will not, so long as the

dreams of its immortal youth and the plans of its immortal manhood are

not lost to its memory or passed beyond its retrospective reflection.

_Note_. The doctrine that all History is contemporary History has

been best set forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose

works several expressions have here been borrowed, with a

profound acknowledgement of indebtedness to him.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Hegel, _Philosophy of History_, Parts II and III (to be read not as

philosophy, but as history guided and enlightened by philosophy).

Translation in Bohn's Library.

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press.

Adamson, _The Development of Greek Philosophy_. W. Blackwood. (For a

brief but pregnant account consult Webb's _History of Philosophy._ Home

University Library.)

Butcher's _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_ ('What we owe to Greece').

Macmillan.

Murray's _Rise of the Greek Epic_. Clarendon Press.

Warde Fowler's _Rome_. Home University Library.

Bryce's _Holy Roman Empire_. Macmillan.

IV

UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES[15]

Ergo humanum genus bene se habet et optime, quando secundum quod

potest Deo adsimilatur. Sed genus humanum maxime Deo adsimilatur

quando maxime est unum; vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est.

Propter quod scriptum est: 'Audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus

est'. DANTE, _De Monarchia_, i. viii.

I

He who shuts his eyes to-day to make a mental picture of the world sees

a globe in which the mass of Asia, the bulk of Africa, and the length of

America vastly outweigh in the balance the straggling and sea-sown

continent of Europe. He sees all manner of races, white and yellow,

brown and black, toiling, like infinitesimal specks, in every manner of

way over many thousands of miles; and he knows that an infinite variety

of creeds and civilizations, of practices and beliefs--some immemorially

old, some crudely new; some starkly savage, and some softly

humane--diversify the hearts of a thousand million living beings. But if

we would enter the Middle Ages, in that height and glory of their

achievement which extended from the middle of the eleventh to the end of

the thirteenth century, we must contract our view abruptly. The known

world of the twelfth century is a very much smaller world than ours, and

it is a world of a vastly greater unity. It is a Mediterranean world;

and 'Rome, the head of the world, rules the reins of the round globe'.

From Rome the view may travel to the Sahara in the south; in the east to

the Euphrates, the Dniester, and the Vistula; in the north to the Sound

and the Cattegat (though some, indeed, may have heard of Iceland), and

in the west to the farther shores of Ireland and of Spain. Outside these

bounds there is something, at any rate to the east, but it is something

shadowy and wavering, full of myth and fable. Inside these bounds there

is the clear light of a Christian Church, and the definite outline of a

single society, of which all are baptized members, and by which all are

knit together in a single fellowship.

Economically the world was as different from our own as it was

geographically. Money, if not unknown, was for the most part unused. It

had drifted eastwards, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, to

purchase silks and spices; and it had never returned. From the days of

Diocletian, society had been thrown back on an economy in kind. Taxes

took the form either of payments of personal service or of quotas of

produce: rents were paid either in labour or in food. The presence of

money means a richly articulated society, infinitely differentiated by

division of labour, and infinitely connected by a consequent nexus of

exchange. The society of the Middle Ages was not richly articulated.

There were merchants and artisans in the towns; but the great bulk of

the population lived in country villages, and gained subsistence

directly from the soil. Each village was practically self-sufficing; at

the most it imported commodities like iron and salt; for the rest, it

drew on itself and its own resources. This produced at once a great

uniformity and a great isolation. There was a great uniformity, because

most men lived the same grey, quiet life of agriculture. The peasantry

of Europe, in these days when most men were peasants, lived in the same

way, under the same custom of the manor, from Berwick to Carcassonne,

and from Carcassonne to Magdeburg. But there was also a great isolation.

Men were tied to their manors; and the men of King's Ripton could even

talk of the 'nation' of their village. If they were not tied by

conditions of status and the legal rights of their lord, they were still

tied, none the less, by the want of any alternative life. There were

towns indeed; but towns were themselves very largely agricultural--the

homes of _summa rusticitas_--and what industry and commerce they

practised was the perquisite and prerogative of local guilds. Custom was

king of all things, and custom had assorted men in compartments in which

they generally stayed. The kaleidoscopic coming and going of a society

based on monetary exchanges--its speedy riches and speedy bankruptcies,

its embarrassment of alternative careers all open to talents--these were

unthought and undreamed of. The same uniformity and the same isolation

marked also, if in a less degree, the knightly class which followed the

profession of arms. A common feudal system, if we can call that a system

which was essentially unsystematic, reigned over the whole of Western

Europe, and, when Western Europe went crusading into Syria, established

itself in Syria. Historians have tried to establish distinctions between

the feudalism of one country and that of another--between the feudalism

of England, for instance, and that of France. It is generally held

nowadays that they have failed to establish the distinction. A fief in

England was uniform with a fief in France, as a manor in one country was

uniform with manors in other countries, and a town in one country with

towns in others. 'One cannot establish a line of demarcation between

German and French towns,' says a famous Belgian historian, 'just as one

cannot distinguish between French and German feudalism.'[16] The

historian of the economic and institutional life of the Middle Ages

will err unless he proceeds on the assumption of its general uniformity.

But the uniformity of the fief, like that of the manor and the town, was

compatible with much isolation. Each fief was a centre of local life and

a home of local custom. The members of the feudal class lived, for the

most part, local and isolated lives. Fighting, indeed, would bring them

together; but when the 'season' was over, and the forty days of service

were done, life ran back to its old ruts in the manor-hall, and if some

of the summer was spent in company, much of the winter was spent in

isolation. On a society of this order--stable, customary, uniform, with

its thousands of isolated centres--the Church descended with a

quickening inspiration and a permeating unity. Most of us find a large

play for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or the

struggles of politics. The life of the mind was opened to the Middle

Ages by the hands of the Church. We may almost say that there was an

exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were

not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But it

is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is

curiously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance,

and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash of

different national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world,

sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns,

each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linked

together by unity of culture and unity of faith. It had a single mind,

and many pockets. We have a single pocket, and many minds. That is why

the wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into the

Middle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the golden

age of international finance.

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable,

for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very

inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless

to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy a

craving of the mind. An uncritical mediaevalism is the child of

ignorance of the Middle Ages. Sick of vaunting national cultures, we may

recur to an age in which they had not yet been born--the age of a single

and international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that the

strength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness. They were on a low

stage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were on

a low stage of economic development that they found it so easy to

believe in the unity of civilization. Unity of a sort is easy when there

are few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higher

thing, when it is a synthesis of many different elements. The Middle

Ages had not attained a national economy: their economy was at the best

municipal, and for the most part only parochial. A national economy has

a higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, because

it means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost,

and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activities

and more intricate connexions. A national economy could only develop

along with--perhaps we may say it could only develop through--a national

system of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, and

with some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary condition

of economic progress. With the coming of the national State the facile

internationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economics

and politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit,

hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and national

religions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were duly

born. But a national economy, a national State, a national Church were

all things unknown to the Middle Ages. Its economy was a village

economy: its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by a

universal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with a

universal Church the only possible culture was necessarily

international); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixt

and between--sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew to

himself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose in

Israel; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international.

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the

point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the

same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There

was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle

Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of

Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family.

Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as

there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there

must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But here

again isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps only

two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle

Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there was

Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the

Church, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language in

Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of

Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the

only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle

Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of

the thirteenth century, Romance was still one _idioma_--even if it were

_trifarium_, according as its 'yes' was _oïl_, or _oc_, or _sì_.[17] Of

the three branches of this _idioma_, that of _oïl_, or Northern France,

was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it to

London: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: the

Crusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled most

of the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts;

it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture.

It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francis

himself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined.

The linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was thus Latin, either in

its classical or in its vulgar form. There were of course other

languages, and some of these had no small vogue. Just before the period

of which we are treating--the period which extends from 1050 to

1300--Icelandic had a wide scope. It might have been heard not only in

Scandinavia and the Northern Isles, but in a great part of the British

Islands, in Normandy, in Russia--along the river-road that ran to

Constantinople--and in Constantinople itself. But the fact remains that

the linguistic basis of mediaeval thought and literature was a Latin

basis. The Romance University of Paris was the capital of learning: the

Romance tongue of Northern France was the tongue of society. And as the

linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was Romance, so, too, was

mediaeval civilization itself. The genius of Latin Christianity was the

source of its inspiration: the spirit of the Romance peoples was the

breath of its being. The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided the

scheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religious

consecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet the

irruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and the

emperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock. It was perhaps

at this point that the unity of the mediaeval scheme betrayed a fatal

flaw. It would be futile to urge that the dualism which showed itself in

the struggles of papacy and empire had primarily, or even to any

considerable extent, a racial basis. Those struggles are struggles of

principles rather than of races; they are contentions between a secular

and a clerical view of life, rather than between the genius of Rome and

the genius of Germany. Hildebrand stood for a free Church--a Church free

from secular power because it was controlled by the papacy. Henry IV

stood for the right of the secular power to use the clergy for purposes

of secular government, and to control the episcopacy as one of the

organs of secular administration. But the fact remains that a scheme

which rested on a Teutonic emperor and a Roman pontiff was already a

thing internally discordant, before these other and deeper dissensions

appeared to increase the discord.

Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had to

depend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity,

with a single centre of coherence. There was a low stage of economic

development, which on the one hand meant a general uniformity of life,

in fief and manor and town, and on the other hand meant a local

isolation, that needed, and in the unity of the Church found, some

method of unification. With many varieties of dialect, there was yet a

general identity of language, which made possible the development, and

fostered the dissemination, of a single and identical culture.

Nationalism, whether as an economic development, or as a way of life and

a mode of the human spirit, was as yet practically unknown. Races might

disagree; classes might quarrel; kings might fight; there was hardly

ever a national conflict in the proper sense of the word. The mediaeval

lines of division, it is often said, were horizontal rather than

vertical. There were different estates rather than different states. The

feudal class was homogeneous throughout Western Europe: the clerical

class was a single corporation through all the extent of Latin

Christianity; and the peasantry and the townsfolk of England were very

little different from the peasantry and the townsfolk of France. We have

to think of a general European system of estates rather than of any

balance of rival powers.

II

The unity which rested on these bases begins to appear, as a reality and

not only an idea, about the middle of the eleventh century, and lasts

till the end of the thirteenth. That unity, as we have seen, was

essentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we may

almost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church,

however universal in theory, had hardly been universal in fact. The

period of the Frankish, the Saxon, and the early Salian emperors had

been a period of what German writers call the _Landeskirche_. The power

of the Bishop of Rome had not yet been fully established; and the great

churches of Reims and Mainz and Milan were practically independent

centres. Independent of the papacy, they were not independent of the lay

rulers within whose dominions they lay. On the contrary, their members

were deeply engaged in lay activities; they were landlords, feudatories,

and officials in their various countries. In the face of these facts,

the Gregorian movement of the eleventh century pursues two closely

interconnected objects. It aims at asserting the universal primacy of

the papacy; it aims at vindicating the freedom of the clergy from all

secular power. The one aim is a means to the other: the pope cannot be

universal primate, unless the clergy he controls are free from secular

control; and the clergy cannot be free from secular control, unless the

universal primacy of the papacy effects their liberation. Gregorianism

wins a great if not a thorough triumph. It establishes the theory, and

in a very large measure the practice, of ecclesiastical unity. The days

of the _Landeskirche_ are numbered: the days of the Church Universal

under the universal primacy of Rome are begun. But when the universality

of the Church has once been established in point of extension, it begins

to be also asserted in point of intensity. Once ubiquitous, the papacy

seeks to be omnicompetent. Depositary of the truth, and only depositary

of the truth, by divine revelation, the Church, under the guidance of

the papacy, seeks to realize the truth in every reach of life, and to

control, in the light of Christian principle, every play of human

activity. Learning and education, trade and commerce, war and peace, are

all to be drawn into her orbit. By the application of Christian

principle a great synthesis of human life is to be achieved, and the

_lex Christi_ is to be made a _lex animata in terris_.

This was the greatest ambition that has ever been cherished. It meant

nothing less than the establishment of a _civitas Dei_ on earth. And

this kingdom of God was to be very different from that of which St.

Augustine had written. His city of God was neither the actual Church nor

the actual State, nor a fusion of both. It was a spiritual society of

the predestined faithful, and, as such, thoroughly distinct from the

State and secular society. The city of God which the great mediaeval

popes were seeking to establish was a city of this world, if not of this

world only. It was a fusion of the actual Church, reformed by papal

direction and governed by papal control, with actual lay society,

similarly reformed and similarly governed. Logically this meant a

theocracy, and the bull of Boniface VIII, by which he claimed that every

human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff, was its necessary

outcome. But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was never

greatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end that

mattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformity

with divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembers

the plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaeval

Church. The seven sacraments had become the core of her organization.

Central among the seven stood the sacrament of the Mass, in which bread

and wine were transubstantiated into the divine body and blood of our

Lord. By that sacrament men could touch God; and by its mediation the

believer met the supreme object of his belief. Only the priest could

celebrate the great mystery; and only those who were fit could be

admitted by him to participation. The sacrament of penance, which became

the antechamber, as it were, to the Mass, enabled the priest to

determine the terms of admission. Outside the sacraments stood the

Church courts, exercising a large measure of ethical and religious

discipline over all Christians; and in reserve, most terrible of all

weapons, were the powers of excommunication and interdict, which could

shut men and cities from the rites of the Church and the presence of the

Lord. Who shall say, remembering these things, that the aims of the

mediaeval Church were visionary or impracticable?

For a time, and in some measure, they were actually accomplished. Let us

look at each estate in turn, and measure the accomplishment--speaking

first of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace;

then of the world of the commons, and the Church's control of trade and

commerce; and last of the clerical world and the Church's control of

learning and education.

The control of war and peace was a steady aim of the Church from the

beginning of the eleventh century. The evil of feudalism was its

propensity to private war. To cure that evil the Church invented the

Truce of God. The Truce was a diocesan matter. The 'form' of Truce was

enacted in a diocesan assembly, and the people of the diocese formed a

_communitas pacis_ for its enforcement. There was no attempt to put an

absolute stop to private war; the Truce was only directed to a

limitation of the times and seasons in which feuds could be waged, and a

definition of the persons who were to be exempted from their menace. But

from seeking to limit the fighting instinct of a feudal society, the

Church soon rose to the idea of enlisting that instinct under her own

banner and directing it to her own ends. So arose chivalry, which, like

most of the institutions of the Middle Ages, was the invention of the

Church. Chivalry was the consecration of the fighting instinct to the

defence of the widow, the fatherless, and the oppressed; and by the

beginning of the eleventh century liturgies already contain the form of

religious service by which neophytes were initiated into knighthood.

This early and religious form of chivalry (there was a later and lay

form, invented by troubadour and trouvère, which was chiefly concerned

with the rules for the loves of knights and ladies) culminated in the

Crusades. In the Crusades we touch perhaps the most typical expression

of the mediaeval spirit. Here we may see the clergy moulding into

conformity with Christian principle the apparently unpromising and

intractable stuff of feudal pugnacity: here we may see the papacy

asserting its primacy of a united Europe by gathering Christian men

together for the common purpose of carrying the flag of their faith to

the grave of their Redeemer. Here the permeating influence of Christian

revelation may be seen attempting to permeate even foreign policy (for

what are the Crusades but the foreign policy of a Christian commonwealth

controlled and directed by the papacy?); and here again even the

instinct for colonial expansion, so often the root of desperate wars,

was brought into line with the unity of all nations in Christ, and made

to serve the cause of Him 'in whom alone is to be found the true nature

of the One'.

There is another aspect of the clerical control of peace and war in the

interest of Christian unity which must not be forgotten. The papacy

sought to become an international tribunal. The need for such a tribunal

was as much a mediaeval as it is a modern commonplace. Dante, who sought

to vindicate for the emperor, rather than for the pope, the position and

power of an international judge, has started the argument in famous

words. 'Between any two princes, of whom the one is in no way subject to

the other, disputes may arise, either by their own fault, or by that of

their subjects. Judgement must therefore be given between them. And

since neither can have cognizance of the other, because neither is

subject to the other, there must be a third of ampler jurisdiction, to

control both by the ambit of his power.'[18] Such ampler jurisdiction,

which might indeed be claimed for the emperor, but which he had never

the power to exercise, was both claimed and exercised by the papacy. The

papacy, which sought to enforce the Christian canon of conduct in every

reach of life and every sphere of activity, would never admit that

disputes between sovereign princes lay outside the rule of that canon.

Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim to

arbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any such

admission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct all

Christian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, to

coerce them by ecclesiastical censure. And if any shall say, that kings

must be treated in one way, and other men in another, we appeal in

answer to the law of God, wherein it is written, "Ye shall judge the

great as the small, and there shall be no acceptance of persons among

you." But if it is ours to proceed against criminal sin, we are

especially bound so to do when we find a sin against peace.'[19] Here,

in these words of Innocent, the clerical claim to control of peace and

war touches its highest point. In the name of a Christian principle,

permeating all things, and reducing all things to unity, the dread

arbitrament of war is itself to be submitted to a higher and finer

arbitration. The claim was too high to be sustained or translated into

effect. It is not too high to be admired.

Nor was it altogether remote from the actual life of the day. Even to

the laity of the Middle Ages, war was not a mere conflict of powers, in

which the strongest power must necessarily prevail. It was a conflict of

rights before a watching God of battles, in which the greatest right

could be trusted to emerge victorious. War between States was analogous

to the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way of

testing rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courts

of law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged to

the clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, it

follows, first, that it is a legal procedure which needs a high court

for its interpretation (and what court could be more competent than the

papal curia?), and, next, that it is a matter which in its nature

touches the clergy. Such ideas were a natural basis for the Church's

attempt to control the issues of war and peace; and if we remember these

ideas, we shall acquit the Church of any impracticable quixotism.

The attempt to control trade and commerce was no less lofty and no less

arduous. It is perhaps still easier to stop war than to stop

competition; and yet the Church made the attempt. The Christian law of

love was set against the economic law of demand and supply. It was

canonical doctrine that the buyer should take no more, and the seller

offer no less, than the just price of a commodity--a price which would

in practice depend on the cost of production. The rule for prices was

also the rule for wages: the just wage was the natural complement of the

just price. The prohibition of usury and of the taking of interest was

another factor in the same circle of ideas. If prices and wages are both

to be returns for work done, and returns of an exact equivalence, then,

on the assumptions which the canonists made--that the usurer does no

work, and that his loan is unproductive of any new value--it necessarily

follows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use of

borrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and all

acquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done.

This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law:

_In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum_. Once more, therefore, and

once more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Church

seeking to enforce the unity of the Christian principle and to reduce

the Many to the One. In the same way, and from the same motive, that

private war was to be banished from the feudal class in the country,

competition--the private war of commerce--was to be eliminated from the

trading classes in the towns. Nor was the attack on competition, any

more than the attack on war, so much of a forlorn hope as it may seem to

a modern age. Even to-day, custom is still a force which checks the

operation of competition, and custom covered a far greater area in the

Middle Ages than it does to-day. The rent of land, whether paid in

labour or in kind, was a customary rent; and in every mediaeval

community the landed class was the majority. It was an easy transition

from fixed and customary rents to the fixing of just prices for

commodities and services. Lay sentiment supported clerical principle.

Guilds compelled their members to sell commodities at a level price, and

in a spirit of collectivism endeavoured to prevent the making of corners

and the practice of undercutting. Governments refused to recognize the

'laws' of demand and supply, and sought, by Statutes of Labourers, to

force masters to give, and workman to receive, no more and no less than

a 'just' and proper wage.

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Church

sought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homes

in the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of the

friars--Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite--enabled the

Church to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reaching

than that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns became

trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders

of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to

attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits

of lay life. A mediaeval town--with its trade and commerce regulated,

however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council

acting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached as

Tertiaries to those orders--might be regarded as something of a type of

Christian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of these

conditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelian

philosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the town

the closest approach to the ethics of Christianity.

The control of learning and education by the Church is the most peculiar

and essential aspect of her activity. The control of war and peace was a

matter of guiding the estate of the baronage; the control of trade and

commerce was a way of directing the estate of the commons; but the

control of learning and education was nothing more nor less than the

Church's guidance of herself and her direction of her own estate.

_Studium_ may be distinguished from _sacerdotium_ by mediaeval writers;

but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the

curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All

knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of

knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle,

and for the same object--_ad maiorem Dei gloriam_. Here, as elsewhere,

the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded and

informed a matter which was not, in its nature, easily receptive of a

clerical impression. The whole accumulated store of the lay learning of

the ages--geometry, astronomy, and natural science; grammar and

rhetoric; logic and metaphysics--this was the matter to be moulded and

the stuff to be permeated; and on this stuff St. Thomas wrought the

greatest miracle of genuine alchemy which is anywhere to be found in the

annals of learning.

The learning which the Church had to transform was essentially the

learning of the Hellenic world. Created by the centuries of nimble and

inventive thought which lie between the time of Thales and that of

Hipparchus, this learning had been systematized into a _corpus

scientiae_ during that age of Greek scholasticism which generally goes

by the name of Hellenistic. In its systematized Hellenistic form, it had

been received by the Roman world, and had become the culture of the

Roman Empire. By writers ranging from Ptolemy to Boethius the body of

all known knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects;

and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed to

the Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitude

of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. The

logic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the most

comfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelation

committed to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours the

methods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine of

the Mass. In the hands of Abelard, in the _Sic et Non_, they served to

suggest the need of criticism of the text of Christian tradition. If

unity was to be preserved, a bridge must be built between the secular

science of the Greeks and the religious faith of the Church. In the

thirteenth century that bridge was built. Aristotle was reconciled with

St. Augustine; the _Organon_, the _Ethics_, and the _Politics_ were

incorporated in the body of Christian culture; and the mediaeval

instinct for unification celebrated its greatest and perhaps its most

arduous triumph.

The thirteenth century thus witnessed a unity of civilization alike as a

structure of life and as a content of the human mind. On the one hand,

there rose a single governing scheme of society, which culminated in the

universal primacy of Rome and the Roman pontiff. On the other hand, set

in this scheme, and contained in this structure, there was a single

stuff of thought, directed to the manifestation of the eternal glory of

God. The framework we may chiefly ascribe to Gregory VII; the content to

St. Thomas Aquinas. But the whole resultant unity is less the product of

great personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction.

Men saw the world _sub specie unitatis_; and its kaleidoscopic variety

was insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of their

vision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmament

declared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willing

servant of Christianity; and _bestiaria moralizata_ were written to

show how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type,

of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegories

to this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was an

allegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world of

creation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well as

the beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenly

meanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might be

transmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hugh

of St. Victor dominated men's thought, making all things (like the Mass

itself, if in a less degree) into _signa rei sacrae_.

The unity of knowledge was thus purchased at a price. Things must cease

to be studied in themselves, and must be allegorized into types, in

order that they might be reduced to a unity. Perhaps the purchase of

unity on terms such as these is a bad bargain; and it is at any rate

obvious that in such an atmosphere scientific thought will not flourish,

or man learn to adjust himself readily to the laws of his environment.

From the standpoint of natural science we may readily condemn the Middle

Ages and all their works; and we may prefer a single _Opus_ of Roger

Bacon to the whole of the _Summa_ of St. Thomas. But it is necessary to

judge an age which was destitute of natural science by some other

criterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that the

Middle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored the

Particular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkers

knew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those of

Plato, they were none the less far better Platonists than they were

Aristotelians. If they had been better Aristotelians, they would have

been better biologists; but as they were good Platonists, they had a

conception of the purpose and system of human life in society, which

perhaps excuses all, and more than all, the defects of their biology.

Any survey, however brief, of the political theory of the Middle Ages

will show at once its Platonic character and its incessant impulse

towards the achievement of unity.

III

To mediaeval thought, as to Plato, the unity of society is an organic

unity, in the sense that each member of society is an organ of the whole

to which he belongs, and discharges a function at once peculiar to

himself and necessary to the full life of the whole. Monasticism, so

often misrepresented, attains its true meaning in the light of this

conception. The monk is a necessary organ of Christian society,

discharging his function of prayer and devotion for the benefit not of

himself solely, or primarily, but rather of every member of that

society. He prays for the sins of the whole world, and by his prayer he

contributes to the realization of the end of the world, which is the

attainment of salvation. In the same way the conception of a treasury of

merits, afterwards perverted in the system of indulgences, belongs to an

organic theory and practice of society. The merits which Christ and the

saints have accumulated are a fund for the use of the whole of Christian

society, a fund on which any member can draw for his own salvation, just

because each is fitly joined and knit together with all the rest in a

single body for the attainment of a single purpose. But we need not take

isolated instances of the Platonism of mediaeval thought. The whole

basic conception of a system of estates, which recurs everywhere in

mediaeval life, is a Platonic conception. The estates of clergy,

baronage, and commons are the Platonic classes of guardians,

auxiliaries, and farmers. The Platonic creed of [Greek: to auton

prattein] ('Do thine own duty') is the Christian creed of 'doing my

duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me'. The

Middle Ages are full of a spontaneous Platonism, and inspired by an

_anima naturaliter Platonica_. The control which the mediaeval clergy

exercised over Christian society in the light of divine revelation

repeats the control which the guardians of Plato were to exercise over

civic society in the light of the Idea of the Good. The communism of the

mediaeval monastery is reminiscent of the communism of the Platonic

barracks. And if there are differences between the society imagined by

Plato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, these

differences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raise

Platonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptions

which were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posterior

to the days of Plato. These conceptions--which were cherished by Stoic

thinkers; which penetrated into Roman Law; and which from Roman Law

flowed into the teaching and theory of the early fathers of the

Church--are mainly two. One is the conception of human equality; the

other, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of all

the human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city of

God in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no less

present to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They are

conceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Church

even more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato had

halted at the stage of a civic society, the _respublica Christiana_ of

the Middle Ages rose to the height of a single _humana civilitas_. While

Plato had divided the men of his Republic into classes of gold and

silver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of the

divine Idea for a single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery

of the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and,

if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in one

around the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, and

find tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Church

herself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life,

there was 'neither bond nor free'.

The prevalence of Realism, which marks mediaeval metaphysics down to the

end of the thirteenth century, is another Platonic inheritance, and

another impulse to unity. The Universal _is_, and is a veritable thing,

in which the Particular shares, and acquires its substance by its degree

of sharing. The One transcends the Many; the unity of mankind is greater

than the differences between men; and the university of mortal men, as

Ockham writes, is one community. If there be thus one community, and one

only, some negative results follow, which have their importance. In the

first place, we can hardly say that the Middle Ages have any conception

of the State. The notion of the State involves plurality; but plurality

is _ex hypothesi_ not to be found. The notion of the State further

involves sovereignty, in the sense of final and complete control of its

members by each of a number of societies. But this, again, is _ex

hypothesi_ not to be found. There is one final control, and one only, in

the mediaeval system--the control of Christian principle, exerted in the

last resort, and exerted everywhere, without respect of persons, by the

ruling vicar of Christ. But if plurality and sovereignty thus disappear

from our political philosophy, we need a new orientation of all our

theory. We must forget to speak of nations. We must forget, as probably

many of us would be very glad to forget, the claims of national

cultures, each pretending to be a complete satisfaction and fulfilment

of the national mind; and we must remember, with Dante, that culture

(which he called 'civility') is the common possession of Christian

humanity. We must even forget, to some extent, the existence of

different national laws. It is true that mediaeval theory admitted the

fact of customary law, which varied from place to place. But this

customary law was hardly national: it varied not only from country to

country, but also from fief to fief, and even from manor to manor. It

was too multiform to be national, and too infinitely various to square

with political boundaries. Nor was customary law, in mediaeval theory,

anything of the nature of an ultimate command. Transcending all customs,

and supreme over all enactments, rose the sovereign majesty of natural

law, which is one and indivisible, and runs through all creation. 'All

custom,' writes Gratian, the great canonist, 'and all written law, that

are adverse to natural law, are to be counted null and void.' Here, in

this conception of a natural law upholding all creation, we may find

once more a Stoic legacy to the Christian Church. 'Men ought not to live

in separate cities, distinguished one from another by different systems

of justice'--so Zeno the Stoic had taught--'but there should be one way

and order of life, like that of a single flock feeding on a common

pasture.' Zeno, like St. Paul, came from Cilicia.[20] Like St. Paul, he

taught the doctrine of the one society, in which there was neither Jew

nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian. We shall not do wrong to

recognize in his teaching, and in that of his school, one of the

greatest influences, outside the supreme and controlling influence of

the Christian principle itself, which made for the dominance of the idea

of unity in mediaeval thought.

Before we proceed to draw another negative conclusion from the principle

of the one community, we must enter a brief caveat in regard to the

conclusion which has just been drawn. We cannot altogether take away the

State from the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen and the sweep of a

paradox. There were states in mediaeval Europe, and there were kings who

claimed and exercised _imperium_. These things caused the theorists, and

particularly the Roman lawyers, no little trouble. It was difficult to

reconcile the unity of the _imperium_ with the multiplicity of kings.

Some had recourse to the theory of delegation, and this seems to be the

theory of the _De Monarchia_ of Dante. But there was one contemporary of

Dante who said a wise thing, prophetic of the future. _Rex est in regno

suo_, wrote Bartolus of Sassoferrato, _imperator regni sui_. In that

sentence we may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages. When kings become

'entire emperors of their realms' (the phrase was used in England by

Richard II, and the imperial style was affected by Henry VIII), unity

soon prepares to fly out of the window. But she never entirely took

flight until the Reformation shattered the fabric of the Church, and

made kings into popes as well as emperors in their dominions.

We may now turn to draw another conclusion from the mediaeval principle

of unity. To-day the world recognizes, and has recognized for nearly

four centuries, not only a distinction between States, but also a

distinction between two societies in each State--the secular and the

religious. These two societies may have different laws (for instance, in

the matter of marriage), and conflicts of duties and of jurisdictions

may easily arise in consequence. The State may permit what the Church

forbids; and in that case the citizen who is also a churchman must

necessarily revolt against one or other of the societies to which he

belongs. The conflict between the two societies and the different

obligations which they impose was a conflict unknown to the Middle Ages.

Kings might indeed be excommunicated, and in that event their subjects

would be compelled to decide whether they should disobey excommunicated

king or excommunicating pope. But that was only a conflict between two

different allegiances to two different authorities; it was not a

conflict between two different memberships of two different societies.

The conflict between the two societies--Church and State--was one which

could hardly arise in the Middle Ages, because there was only a single

society, an undivided Christian commonwealth, which was at one and the

same time both Church and State. Because there was only one society,

baptism counted as admission both to churchmanship and to citizenship,

which were one thing, and one only, in the Christian commonwealth; and

for the same reason excommunication, which shut the offender from all

religious life, excluded him equally and by the same act from every

civil right. The excommunicated person could not enter either the Church

or the law court; could not receive either the eucharist or a legacy;

could not own either a cure of souls or an acre of soil. Civil right and

religious status implied one another; and not only was _extra ecclesiam

nulla salus_ a true saying, but _extra ecclesiam nullum ius_ would also

be very near the truth. Here again is a reason for saying that the State

as such can hardly be traced in the Middle Ages. The State is an

organization of secular life. Even if it goes beyond its elementary

purpose of security for person and property, and devotes itself to

spiritual purposes, it is concerned with the development of the spirit

in its mortal existence, and confined to the expansion of the mind in

the bounds of a mortal society. The Middle Ages thought more of

salvation than of security, and more of the eternal society of all the

faithful, united together in Christ their Head, than of any passing

society of this world only. They could recognize kings, who bore the

sword for the sake of security, and did justice in virtue of their

anointing. But kings were not, to their thinking, the heads of secular

societies. They were agents of the one divine commonwealth--defenders

of the Faith, who wielded the secular sword for the furtherance of the

purposes of God. Thus there was one society, if there were two orders of

ministering agents; and thus, though _regnum_ and _sacerdotium_ might be

distinguished, the State and the Church could not be divided. Stephen of

Tournai, a canonist of the twelfth century, recognizes the two powers;

but he only knows one society, under one king. That society is the

Church: that king is Christ.

Under conditions such as these--with the plurality of States

unrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and with

distinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced--we may

truly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention

_honoris causa_, Professor Tröltsch, that 'there was no feeling for the

State; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; no

omnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; no

abstract basis of association in formal and legal rules--or at any rate,

so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for the

Church, and in no wise for the State'.[21] So far as social life was

consciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of the

clergy, and the scheme was that of the Church. The interdependencies and

associations of lay life--kingdoms and fiefs and manors--were only

personal groupings, based on personal sentiments of loyalty and

unconscious elements of custom. A mixture of uniformity and isolation,

as we have seen, was the characteristic of these groupings: they were at

once very like one another, throughout the extent of Western Europe, and

(except for their connexion in a common membership of the Church

Universal) very much separated from one another. But with one at any

rate of these groupings--the kingdom, which in its day was to become the

modern State--the future lay; and we shall perhaps end our inquiry most

fitly by a brief review of the lines of its future development.

IV

The development of the kingdom into the State was largely the work of

the lawyers. The law is a tenacious profession, and in England at any

rate its members have exercised a large influence on politics from the

twelfth to the twentieth century--from the days of Glanville, the

justiciar of Henry II, to the days of Mr. Asquith, the prime minister of

George V. It is perhaps in England that we may first see the germs of

the modern State emerging to light under the fostering care of the royal

judges. Henry II is something of a sovereign: his judges formulate a

series of commands, largely in the shape of writs, which became the

common law of the land; and in the Constitutions of Clarendon we may

already see the distinction between Church and State beginning to be

attempted. With a sovereign, a law, and a secular policy all present, we

may begin to suspect the presence of a State. In France also a similar

development, if somewhat later than the English, occurs at a

comparatively early date. By the end of the thirteenth century the

legists of Philippe le Bel have created something of _étatisme_ in their

master's dominions. The king's court begins to rule the land; and proud

of its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, the

great prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every human

creature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface at

Anagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of the

mediaeval papacy. Everywhere, indeed, the tide seemed on the turn at the

close of the thirteenth century. The Crusades ended with the fall of

Acre in 1291. The suppression of the great international order of the

Templars twenty years later marked a new leap of the encroaching waves.

The new era of the modern national State might seem already to have

begun.

But tides move slowly and by gradual inches. It needed two centuries

more before the conditions in which the modern State could flourish had

been fully and finally established. Economic conditions had to change--a

process always gradual and slow; and a national economy based on money

had to replace the old local economy based on kind. Languages had to be

formed, and local dialects had to be transformed into national and

literary forms, before national States could find the means of

utterance. The revival of learning had to challenge the old clerical

structure of knowledge, and to set free the progress of secular science,

before the minds of men could be readily receptive of new forms of

social structure and new modes of human activity. But by 1500 the work

of preparation had been largely accomplished. The progress of discovery

had enlarged the world immeasurably. The addition of America to the map

had spiritual effects which it is difficult to estimate in any proper

terms. If the old world of the Mediterranean regions could be thought

into a unity, it was more difficult to reduce to the One the new world

which swam into men's ken. Still more burdened with fate for the future

generations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on a

national basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell. Meanwhile,

men had begun to think and to write in national languages. Already by

the reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which was

spoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literary

language in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation. Still

earlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than a

century after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germany a common

speech and a common Bible. It was little wonder that in such times the

old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into

fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there

developed--at any rate in England and in Germany--a national Church. The

unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone.

_Cuius regio eius religio_. To each region its religion; and to each

nation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begun

as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan

representative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years

after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and

Lope de Vega in Spain.

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind.

It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain: England was seeking to

maintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a world

with which we are familiar--a world of national languages, national

religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State

behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity.

But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend the

bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz,

fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; and

a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the

French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenth

century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet

serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it

could play the part of an international university, and provide a common

centre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity of

the Middle Ages was gone--gone past recall. Between those days and the

new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much was

lost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to the

currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. It

would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which

should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the

new world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the old

world was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will say

in his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evil

spirits--nationalism and commercialism. One thing is perhaps certain. We

cannot, as far as human sight can discern, ever hope to reconstruct

unity on the old basis of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages.

Yet need is upon us still--need urgent and importunate--to find some

unity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Some

have hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought that

international finance and commerce would build the foundations of an

international polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of war

has shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply no

further unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science,

and may trust that the collaboration of the nations in the building of

the common house of knowledge will lead to co-operation in the building

of a greater mansion for the common society of civilized mankind. But

nationalism can pervert even knowledge to its own ends, turning

anthropology to politics, and chemistry to war. There remains a last

hope--the hope of a common ethical unity, which, as moral convictions

slowly settle into law, may gradually grow concrete in a common public

law of the world. Even this hope can only be modest, but it is perhaps

the wisest and the surest of all our hopes. _Idem scire_ is a good

thing; but men of all nations may know the same thing, and yet remain

strangers one to another. _Idem velle idem nolle in re publica, ea demum

firma amicitia est_. The nations will at last attain firm friendship

one with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scope

of public things. And when they have attained this friendship, then on a

far higher level of economic development and with an improvement by each

nation of its talent which is almost entirely new--they will have found

again, if in a different medium, something of the unity of mediaeval

civilization.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W.J. Ashley, _An Introduction to English Economic History_, vol. i, pt.

2, ch. 3; vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans.

Lord Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_. Macmillan.

A.J. and R.W. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory in the West_. W.

Blackwood.

H.W.C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library). Williams &

Norgate.

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and

'Empire'.

J.N. Figgis, _Churches in the Modern State_, Appendix I. Longmans.

Bede Jarrett; _Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages_. T.C. and E.C.

Jack.

E. Jenks, _Law and Politics in the Middle Ages_. Murray.

F.W. Maitland, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_, translated from

Gierke's _Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht_. Maitland. Cambridge

University Press.

R.L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_. Williams & Norgate.

H. Rashdall, _Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_. Clarendon

Press.

A.L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle Ages_. Clarendon Press.

H.O. Taylor, _The Mediaeval Mind_. Macmillan.

E. Tröltsch, _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen_ (II. Kapitel).

P. Vinogradoff, _Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe_. Harper.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: I should like to dedicate this essay to my friend and old

pupil, the Rev. Bede Jarrett, O.P., to whom I owe much, and to whose

book on _Mediaeval Socialism_ I should like to refer my readers.]

[Footnote 16: Pirenne, _Revue Historique_, liii. p. 82.]

[Footnote 17: _De Vulgari Eloquio_, 1. viii.]

[Footnote 18: _De Monarchia_, 1. x.]

[Footnote 19: Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory in the West_, ii.

219-22.]

[Footnote 20: Cf. E.R. Bevan, _Stoics and Sceptics_.]

[Footnote 21: _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen_, p. 242.]

V

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

You know the story of Sophocles' _Antigone_: how, when two brothers

disputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out and

brought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle.

Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no one

shall give burial to the traitor who has borne arms against his native

land. The obligation to give or allow decent burial, even to an enemy,

was one which the Greeks held peculiarly sacred. Yet obedience to the

orders of lawful authority is an obligation binding on every citizen. No

one dares to disregard the king's order save the dead man's sister. She

is caught in the act and brought before the king. 'And thou,' he says,

'didst indeed dare to transgress this law?' 'Yes,' answers Antigone,

'for it was not Zeus that published me that edict; not such are the laws

set among men by the Justice who dwells with the Gods below; nor deemed

I that thy decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the

unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of

to-day or yesterday but from all time, and no man knows when they were

first put forth.'[22]

There you have the assertion of a law supreme and binding on all men,

eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment.

And now turn to this passage from the traveller and historian Herodotus,

an almost exact contemporary of Sophocles. He has been telling how

Cambyses, king of the Persians, has been wantonly insulting the

religion and customs of the Egyptians. 'The man must have been mad,' he

says:

'For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the

best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon

consideration would choose those of his own country: so far do

men go in thinking their own laws the best. Therefore it is not

likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things.

And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by

many proofs, and above all by this story. For when Darius was

king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked

them, 'How much money would you take to eat your fathers when

they die?' And they answered that they would not do this at any

price. After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called

the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the

presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was

said, 'How much money would you take to burn with fire your

fathers when they die?' And they cried with a great voice that he

should speak no such blasphemy. Thus it is that men think, and I

hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law

was king over all.'[23]

There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarch

commanding here this, there that.

This capricious arbitrary aspect of law was a thing which much impressed

the Greeks. They contrasted the varying, artificial arrangements made by

mankind with the constancy and simplicity of nature. We speak of nature

and convention; they contrasted things that are by nature with things

that are by law. It was a contrast that bore fruit later on.

Now law, whose arbitrariness and variety so much impressed the Greeks

was the law not so much of this place or that, as of this or that

community and its members. This is a conception quite different from

that of the modern world. We may paraphrase 'English law' by saying the

law of England, because it is the law which will be applied (with, it

may be, some exceptions or modifications) by the English courts to all

persons, be they English or aliens, who come before them. But Athenian

law is not in this sense the law of Athens, nor, to begin with, is Roman

law the law of Rome. What we find is a law of Athenian or Roman

citizens. The stranger to the city is a stranger to its law. As a matter

of principle he is without rights by that law. His life is not protected

by the blood-feud which his family can pursue, or by the compensation

with which it may be bought off. His marriage with a citizen will be no

marriage, or at best a sort of half marriage. He can acquire no land

within the city's territory, and what goods he brings with him are

pretty much at the mercy of the first taker.

Such, at any rate, is the theory of the 'law of citizens'.

We need not, it is true, believe that it was logically formulated in

primitive times and ruthlessly applied. Some of its applications were

the result of positive legislation due to a growing consciousness of the

self-sufficiency of the city state and of the privileges of citizenship,

as when Athens passed a law excluding from citizenship the offspring of

citizens who had married foreign wives. But in its broad outlines the

principle is sufficiently borne out by the exceptions which were

necessary to make human intercourse possible. The stranger within your

gates is protected just because he is within your gates, and you throw

your protection about him, as is indeed your duty, for suppliants and

strangers come from Zeus. The foreigner, even at a distance, may have a

citizen as representative who can and will defend his rights. A stranger

may be allowed to take up a permanent residence in the city, and by the

mediation of a patron or guardian enjoy private rights not much inferior

to those of a citizen. His legal position will not be very different

from that of a woman citizen, who needs the like mediation. Cities may,

again, by treaty confer on each other's citizens reciprocal rights of

legal protection.

In the middle of the third century B.C., Rome, after its first

successful war against Carthage, took special measures to deal with the

problem of the alien litigant. The great and growing commerce which came

from all parts of the Mediterranean called for something more than a

mere admission to treaty privileges. A special officer was from

henceforth appointed to deal with the law-suits to which foreigners were

parties, and the judgement was given by a body (which we may compare

with our jury) which might include fellow-citizens of the foreign

suitor.

But here a difficulty arose: what law was to be applied to a transaction

between a Roman and a foreigner, or between two foreigners? The Roman

law, the law of citizens, had been codified two centuries earlier, and

its outline had been hardened by the practice of two centuries. The

forms for a transfer of property, for instance, were rigid and solemn;

the foreigner would hardly know them, and if he did, his alien hand

could not effectively do the prescribed acts nor his alien mouth speak

the almost sacred words. The answer was that behind the forms of the law

of this city or that, there was 'a law of the men of all nations'. The

common elements in the ordinary transactions of life, in whatever form

they were clothed, could be taken into account and given effect to.

Thus, side by side with the ownership according to the law of Roman

citizens, the solemn words of promise which only a Roman citizen could

utter, the marriage which only a Roman citizen could enter into, there

might be property, contract, marriage to which any one, citizen or

alien, might be a party.

This 'law of the men of all nations' (_ius gentium_) was of course not

an international law, it was a law administered by Roman officers, and

it was coloured by Roman conceptions, however much it may have drawn

from a comparison of foreign laws with which the Romans were brought

into contact. In turn it reacted upon the more narrow law of Roman

citizens (_ius civile_), broadening its conceptions and enabling it to

free itself from primitive formalism. It also made easier the task of

Roman governors who were called upon to administer the various laws of

the different countries which came to form the Roman empire.

The gradual extension of the citizenship (completed at the end of the

second century A.D.) to the whole of the inhabitants of the empire made

possible, at least in outward appearance, the application of a uniform

system of law throughout what was then the civilized world, though

beneath an apparent uniformity local traditions and customs survived to

the end, at any rate in the east. The 'civil law', as the Roman law in

its final form has been called down to the present day, consists of

elements of the narrowly Roman and the more universal law inextricably

interlaced.

This Roman solution of the problem of the foreign litigant is of much

more than merely practical importance. The Stoic philosophy which grew

up amid the decay of the old city life, whose adherents spoke of

themselves as citizens of the world, had fastened upon the old

antithesis of law (or convention) and nature, and formed the conception

of a law of nature, which should have a reasonable basis and a validity

superior to the arbitrariness of the city law. To this ideal conception

the Roman law of the men of all nations gave a body and a reality.

Stoicism became the 'established' philosophy of Rome, and Roman lawyers

well-nigh identified the '_ius gentium_' with the ideal law of nature,

describing it as that which natural reason has established among all

men. Yet for at least one of the great classical lawyers, whose words

have been enshrined in Justinian's legislation, the identification was

incomplete. By nature, it was said, all men are free, and mankind has

departed from what natural reason requires, in permitting slavery. Thus

the law of nature must be sought in something more universal than the

practice of mankind. More than fifteen hundred years later in an English

court an argument against the recognition of the rights of a slave-owner

was successfully founded on the law of nature.

Before the Roman law had been put (at Constantinople) into the final

shape in which it is preserved to us, the Roman empire in the west had

already been broken up by barbarian invasions. The invaders brought with

them their tribal laws and customs, rude, often cruel, narrow rather

than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not

understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they

had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon

the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on

in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things

that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects

short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they

drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time

each man, according to the community to which he belonged, had a

'personal' law. As late as A.D. 850 we hear that in France it might

happen that five men met together and each would have a different law.

Of course such a state of things means before very long that there must

be at any rate one set of common legal rules which must be applied

throughout a territory, namely rules to decide which kind of personal

law is to be used when there is a dispute between two persons whose

personal law is different.

Gradually the different populations within the same area coalesce, and

law from being personal becomes local. But the local area will not be

the same for all purposes. The law or custom which determines the rights

of the small, often unfree or half-free tenant, whether as between him

and his neighbour or as between him and his lord, may extend no further

than a very small area, such as in England we call a manor. The law by

which great men held their land from a king, though perhaps not uniform

throughout the kingdom, will cover a much larger area. The fact that a

great man may hold land in far distant places, it may be in different

kingdoms, and that men of this class have connexions with different

parts of Western Europe will lead to the formation of common notions of

feudal law, which make possible even the scientific study of a law of

feuds, though no complete uniformity was ever attained.

England was the first western country to attain political unity with a

territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the

determination of the English kings that in the more important matters

justice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either by

his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties,

secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively

little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong

enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. As early as the time

of Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would not

have the laws of England altered in favour of a rule--the legitimation

of bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents--which in one

form or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in the

neighbouring kingdom of Scotland.

In France political unity was reached only later and bit by bit, and

when it came the difference of law in the various provinces was too

firmly established to make uniformity possible until the time of the

Revolution. In Germany the shadowy unity of the Holy Roman Empire was

never enough to afford any effective central administration of justice.

National law in the strict sense was impossible under such conditions:

the most that can be expected is such a degree of unity as results from

common traditions inherited from more primitive times, and a community

of language and national feeling.

Amid local and national diversities of law there were at any rate two

unifying influences, the Roman and the Canon law. In some parts of

Europe, as in the South of France and Italy, the traditions of the Roman

law had never died out, and in a debased form, with much admixture of

the law of the invaders, it had come to form the basis of the local law.

In others it was the barbarian law which formed the groundwork. But just

as behind the new languages, whether in the main founded on Latin or on

Teutonic, Latin remained the medium of intercourse between the countries

of the West, and the instrument of thought and learning, so Roman law

remained a tradition which was ever ready to exert an influence. It is

not only in law courts that law is learnt and developed. Transactions

have to be drawn up in writing, and will largely be made in Latin, and

founded on precedents. The grants of land to and from ecclesiastical

bodies especially will be in a form which borrows much from Roman or

romanesque models; and they will form models for the transactions of

others. Even the formulation of native law in the early codes will be

carried out by men who know of no written law except the Roman. In the

twelfth century Roman law becomes a subject of University study

throughout Western Europe, in Italy, at Paris, even at Oxford, and forms

a part of that international learning which scholars carry from land to

land. Men trained in the Roman law rise to high positions in the public

service. As judges and administrators they will not forget what they

have learnt as students or taught as doctors. Yet it would be easy to

exaggerate its influence, great as it was. It was certainly more as a

form and method of legal thought than as an actual source of legal rules

that it made itself felt, for instance, in our own country, and the

strength and cohesion which it helped to give to our law enabled that

law later to resist its further advance.

The Canon law was the law of the Western Church, a truly international

society. It was formed largely on the model of the Roman law, and it

largely borrowed from it, though it is full of non-Roman elements. It

governed not merely what we should call purely ecclesiastical matters,

but dealt or attempted to deal with other things, such as marriage and

the disposition of the goods of the deceased. Our own law of marriage

and divorce, and of probate of wills, has a history which goes back to

the ecclesiastical law of the Middle Ages. Like the Roman law it

exercised an influence as a model and a repository of maxims, all the

greater because in every country it was a law in actual force within a

sphere of which the boundaries were constantly being disputed between

the lay and the church powers.

The beginnings of modern Europe with which we associate such things as

the revival of learning and the Reformation brought with them on the

Continent the event which is known as the reception of Roman law. The

traditions of the ancient world had been seen in mediaeval times through

mediaeval eyes, and had been moulded to mediaeval needs. The new age

insisted on going back direct to the classical tradition. It was the

actual Roman law of Justinian, not the Roman law as interpreted by

mediaeval commentators, that was to be studied and applied. The

break-up of the institutions of the Middle Ages, the growth of absolute

monarchical power, the centralization of government, all favoured the

tendency. Roman law contained doctrines eminently pleasing to an

absolute ruler, e.g. 'the decision of the monarch has the force of law'.

In Germany above all, where law was divided into countless local

customs, the movement had its fullest effect. Roman law comes to be the

law which is to be applied in the absence of positive enactment or

justifiable custom. The native law finds itself driven to plead for its

life, and is lucky if it can satisfy the conditions which are required

to enable it to continue as a recognized custom. In every country of the

West outside England, in greater or less degree, the Roman law comes in

as something which will at least fill up the gaps, and will purge or

remodel the native law. Even in Scotland texts of the Roman law may be

quoted as authorities. The strength of our own law, and the successful

resistance of our public institutions to monarchical power saved us

alone from a 'reception', in the continental sense, of Roman law. And

even our Blackstone will quote Roman law with respect where it tends to

confirm our own rules.

If this reception was a movement which brought about a greater unity in

the form and substance of the laws of Western Europe, there was another

factor at work which tended in the opposite direction. The claims of the

Empire to universal authority become more and more unreal: the claims of

the Pope are either rejected entirely, or the ecclesiastical sphere is

strictly delimited. The State becomes sovereign. For this purpose it

makes no difference whether it is a High Court of Parliament or an

absolute monarch which is the supreme authority: law comes to be thought

of as the command of a sovereign person or assembly. 'No law', we are

told, 'can be unjust', for law is the standard of justice, and there is

no other standard by which the justice of law can be measured. The fact

that there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmake

the law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law for

all the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with the

nation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law. Thus

Frederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France a

code which swept away the diversities of the provincial customs; yet it

served more than merely national purposes, for it found its way not only

into the countries conquered by him, where it survived his conquests,

but even into lands where he never held sway. Our French fellow-citizens

in Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law. It took

longer before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law. The very

strength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleon

stood for a time in the way of codification. The great German lawyer of

that time, Savigny, thought of national law as a half-unconscious

product of the national feeling of right. The Code of Napoleon had been

a revolutionary code, founded (imperfectly, no doubt) on the doctrines

of the rights of man; codification for Germany would mean the adoption

of something abstract, not specifically national. It was only a century

of extraordinary fruitful learned activity, bringing with it at the same

time a new and intense study of the Roman law, and a revival of the

knowledge and application of the native conceptions of law, that made

possible the German civil code which came into force fifteen years ago.

England has never seriously undertaken the work of codification, and its

law, uniform and national already in the Middle Ages, has become in the

modern world something far wider than a merely national law. The English

settlers in the new world brought their law with them. To-day English

law, modified no doubt by State and Federal legislation, is the Common

Law of the great republic of the United States. The colonies which still

remain within our Empire are territories of the English law, save where,

as in South Africa or Quebec, civilized settlers had already established

and retained their own law. Throughout these lands, it matters little

under which flag, an English lawyer finds the Courts speaking a language

which he understands.

Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization from

Western Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and lands

where in outward form at least the law is Roman. And yet we must not

make too much of this division. In the first place it cuts across

national boundaries. It unites us with the United States of America, it

separates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them with

continental Europe. In the second place law is, like language, a form of

thought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent a

unity of substance.

Among the forces which have made for unity something should be said of

the conception of a law of nature. The phrase has been out of fashion in

this country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress upon

the positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law which

they would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word. I am not

concerned here to discuss its philosophical validity. But it has never

been lost sight of. It is one of the inheritances of the Roman law

tradition. Alike in the Middle Ages, and since their close, it has been

the subject of speculation and an influence guiding the legislator, the

thinker, and the administrator of law. There is a whole literature upon

it on the Continent. It bulks pretty largely in Blackstone: you can see

its influence on the judges of the eighteenth century in this country;

the founders of the American Republic put a good deal of it into their

constitution, and American judges will still refer to it without shame.

What it really means is a standard by which the law here and now may be

judged, a standard founded on the needs of human nature. That the

standard becomes a different one, as the needs and possibilities of

humanity develop, has not prevented the seeking after such a standard.

It is perhaps only another way of putting the same thing to say that law

has developed and is developing constantly by reference to the pursuit

of ends more or less consciously arrived at by mankind. So far as these

ends are common, and I take it that in the main, amid national and

individual diversity and conflict they are common ends, law has been

formed for their attainment. On the whole what men have asked law to do

for them has been the same at any given stage in civilization. The

eighteenth century asked for liberty, property, and happiness. We are

putting a rather different meaning, or perhaps a different stress on the

words, not only here but throughout the civilized world, and the main

movements of legal change are in the same direction everywhere.

One word about the two kinds of law known as Public and Private

International law.

The fact that the laws of different countries are different gives rise

to problems whenever the Courts of one country have to deal with a set

of facts where some foreign element is involved, for instance a citizen

or an inhabitant of another country, or property which is in another

country, or a contract or transaction which took place abroad. Now we

have long got past the stage at which the Courts could simply disregard

the foreign element, could say this man is a foreigner, therefore he has

no rights; or this event took place abroad, and therefore we will treat

it as if it had never happened. On the other hand it will not do for

the Court to apply simply its own law. Grave injustice would be done,

for instance, if a transaction made on the faith of law which will give

a certain effect to it, were treated as made under another law which

will give it a different effect or no effect at all. For this reason the

Courts of every country have formed rules (sometimes called Private

International Law; sometimes, and as some hold, more properly, called

'Conflict of Laws') by which they determine how far, where a foreign

element is involved, the foreign law is to be carried out rather than

the law which the Court applies in ordinary cases. These rules are not

the same in every country, because differences of opinion are possible

as to what justice requires. But the very existence of such rules shows

that the Courts hold that the world of law is one, however much

diversified, and that no one territorial law can blindly go on its way

without taking account of its neighbours.

International law in the more proper sense of the word, that is Public

International Law, or the law which governs the relations between

States, is a very different thing. Something of the kind was not unknown

in the ancient world; the Greeks, for instance, had rules against the

poisoning of wells, the proper treatment of envoys, and the making and

keeping of treaties. But in its modern form it dates just from the time

when States were waking up to the consciousness of sovereignty, and when

the horrors of the wars which followed the Reformation showed that even

sovereign powers ought to conform to some rules of conduct. It has been

the work in its origin of writers and teachers of law, and has been

built up more recently by agreement between States. Unlike the law

between man and man, which modern states enforce by organized

compulsion, there is no standing organization whose business it is to

see that it is kept. It is not true to say that for this reason it is

not law at all, for in primitive times the recognized rules of private

law were enforced not by State sanction but by the action of

individuals, with the support of the opinions and at times the active

help of their neighbours and friends. But a law which is defied with

success and impunity is no law. The reality and strength of

International Law has lain in the fact that its breach brought at least

the risk of suffering, through the common disapprobation of civilized

nations; its preservation and maintenance for the future must lie in a

certainty of disaster, not greatly less than that which awaits the

transgressor of private law.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Jethro Brown, _The Austinian Theory of Law_. Murray.

Maine, _Ancient Law_. Murray.

Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_. Cambridge University

Press.

Vinogradoff, _Common Sense in Law_. Home University Library, Williams &

Norgate.