[13] T. W. Rolleston, _Parallel Paths_.
[14] _Phys._ ii. 8, 198 16-34.
[15] Pp. 28-9.
[16] _Phys._ ii, c. I.
[17] _De Part. An._, Bk. i, c. 5.
[18] _Phys._ ii. I, _init._
[19] _De Anima_, _init._
[20] _Meteor_, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's _Aristotle_, vol. i, _fin._
[21] _Polit._ 1253 a; _Eth._ 1162 a.
[22] _Gen. An._ ii. 3. 737.
IV
PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A. J. CARLYLE
There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among
some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle
Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries
were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern
time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and
little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the
modern world.
The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other
time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of
Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most
important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of
the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that
much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and
there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest
conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly
those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in
the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most
characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.
Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed
and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to
be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance;
and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the
conceptions of the Romantic revival.
There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The
Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary
movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization
which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter
years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably
a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth
century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon
what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge;
they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth
century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous
results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its
most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions
of new aspects of truth.
The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the
schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward
the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they
had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those
who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval
civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt
for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for
them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they
turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically
to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous
ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy
phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England
and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which
unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.
It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for
the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had
in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was
very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past,
and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of
the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art--the
half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and
Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All
Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets,
battlements, crypts, and dungeons--and all in ruins. Indeed, the
Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of
the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make
any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our
minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the
Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and
content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic
movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous,
that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love
to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.
What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study
the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were
really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to
us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some
qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost,
but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very
much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the
figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the
mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a
romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his
lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he
was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of
military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin
form (_miles_), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and
distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in
absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In
virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself
for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which
he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly
wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small
landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He
was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs,
than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant,
often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his
neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged
absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was
a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact
person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for
adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must
dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer
and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand
that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the
times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but
on the whole the character of human life was not very different.
What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world?
Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our
barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort
disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and
disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains
were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember,
however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some
internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.
Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material
and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began
rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects
continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we
must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages
were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire,
and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages
knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine
and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus
learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were
educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively
humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful
intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the
general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned
they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual
culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of
the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently
apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that
world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the
outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different
from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the
Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very
felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there
was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later
stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world.
However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently,
the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of
elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of
characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the
Barbarian races themselves.
With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and
the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and
movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its
elements, and their development, especially during the period from the
end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it
reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the
ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large
subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly
with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call
religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society,
with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth,
and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.
* * * * *
I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic superstition that
the Middle Ages were specifically religious, and yet it is quite true
that the first aspect of mediaeval life which compels our attention is
exactly the development of the sense of the significance of the
spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of the men of
the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense their achievement; but not
as contradicting the characteristic developments of the Hellenic
civilization, but rather as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a
singular superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in spiritual
insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's lecture, as serving
to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake
when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more
acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and
Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of
God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.
The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not
wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development
and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and
individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the
post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and
poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its
conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it
gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well
be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the
self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says
that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet
these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension
which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered
that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear
in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once
and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the
'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different
and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were
capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the
children of God and capable of communion with Him.
It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a
new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which
justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the
tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at
times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into
the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which
would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the
State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first
fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great
authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws
its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and
independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of
the other within its proper sphere.
It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval
Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there
was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand
outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind
all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.
It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom
of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and
in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious
organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this
they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual
spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they
never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense
authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem
as though there were no place left for the freedom of the individual
judgement and conscience. And yet that was not the case. The theory of
excommunication that is set out in the canonical literature of the
Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and imperfectly
understood. It was the greatest and most masterful of the Popes,
Innocent III, who laid down in memorable phrases which are embodied in
the great collection of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman
is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it would be a mortal
sin to do or to leave undone some action, he must follow his own
conscience even against the command of the authorities of the Church,
and must submit patiently to Church censures and even excommunication;
for it may well happen that the Church may condemn him whom God
approves, or approve him whom God condemns.[24] This is no isolated or
exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is constantly laid down
in the canonical literature.[25] It is, I think, profoundly true to say
that when men at last revolted against what seemed to them the
exaggerated claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way
towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only asserting and
carrying out its one most vital principle, the principle of the
independence or autonomy of the spiritual life; the modern world is only
fulfilling the Middle Ages.
I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western
civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps
the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because
it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on
to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the
Middle Ages, with which we must deal.
* * * * *
And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that
there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political
order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the
political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.
We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political
authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we
translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is
that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State
exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse
this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was
suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St.
Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost
forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of
some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish
perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings',
is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of
the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more
normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the
Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its
aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it
is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with
the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute
sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric
or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as
of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have,
indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are
in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty
of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may
have made, they were, with rare exceptions, clear that there was no
legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for
justice.
It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political
principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is
the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is
over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of
Thomas a Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the
tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law,
while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a
memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part
of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has
two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still
current among more ignorant persons--I have even heard some theologians
fall into the mistake--that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority
as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such
a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite
true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to
oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men
of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but
because they were only slowly working out the organization through which
these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was
the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the
embodiment of justice.
It is again out of this principle that there arose another great
conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is
really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests
upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the
people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based
upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of
the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of
the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or
elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service,
but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler
who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval
political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even
crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the
king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired
to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work
the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince
refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be
deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in
even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and
violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there
were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay
him.[29]
These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the
principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his
faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the
Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St.
Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman
jurists of Bologna, like Azo.
These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of
political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages,
and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the
control of the common affairs of the community by means of the
representation of the community. For it should be more clearly
understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation
of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men--to whom even yet
the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct--it was these
men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized
government has been built up.