civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the
nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these
centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the
administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no
clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than
this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life
of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously
by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss
the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles
the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial
chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here
to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized
administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the
foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to
illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive
reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle
Ages.
* * * * *
It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this
we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle
Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider
the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle
Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr.
Rashdall's great work on _The Universities of Europe in the Middle
Ages_, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the
history and character of the intellectual movement which the
Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and
discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which
are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the
intellectual movements of the twelfth century.
The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of
the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine,
but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the
desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy
centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had
little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little
decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century
the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization,
and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a
moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the
Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and
bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy
and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German
emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and
England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end
of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being
done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge
reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable
passion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this
spontaneous passion which produced the universities.
The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest
universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just
this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did
not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that
they were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew men from every
quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could
give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to
become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found
that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of
students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and
protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to
these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed
as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that
they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were
recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.
In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these
days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in
their eagerness to learn, were of every class and condition, rich and
poor, noble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable
quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the
citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but
neither poverty nor riches could destroy their noble thirst for
knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and
disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when
they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads
broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north
with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities
were not local or national institutions, but were made up of a
cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to
each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use
of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a
pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable
language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and
drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens,
but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge,
by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.
But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that
one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our
literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages
men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of
other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the
universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main
under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the
Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior
Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not
normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had
spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore
with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the
Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature,
philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was
expected to know whatever there was to know.
And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of
the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature
which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators
were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the
ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in
Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in
thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of
antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John
of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance
scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable
acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained
through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature
of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write
two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This
type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I
said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the
thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a
philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and
philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general
quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic
was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other
Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the
thirteenth century.
It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not,
to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can
observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear
away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages
was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his _Sic et Non_ is
the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.
It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense
the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise
any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the
decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do
not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of
the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard
developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some
general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the
authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the
authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement,
criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it.
The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic
is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method
that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are
constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his _Decretum_, the first
great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat
unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of
the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian
people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic
treatises, like the _Suma Theologica_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, were
constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the
method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a
submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.
I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and
living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those
days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.
* * * * *
We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of
mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin
by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning,
which is of the first importance.
The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient
world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the
Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and
also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval
scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The
relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite
different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the
Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain
continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to
little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or
method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work.
For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional
and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the
art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but
was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some
intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art,
but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.
Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and
independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments,
characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that
it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of
view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that
of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and
fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we
know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth
and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a
long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as
for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and
perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain
aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is
the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms
to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development
full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early
form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either
the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.
There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry
was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of
every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of
the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and
gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the _Romance of the Rose_.
It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world--the
sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never
been expressed in more moving terms than in the _Tristan and Iseult_ of
Thomas or Beroul--but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard
poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the
Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to
trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse
farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the
ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of
scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become
substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in
Jean Bodel's _Jeu de St. Nicholas_, in Adam de la Halle's _Jeu de la
Feuillee_ and _Robin et Marion_, and in dramas like the _Empress of
Rome_ or the _Otho_. Whatever criticism we might want to make on
mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and
of one mood.
It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the
other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind
ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by
inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely
imitative.
It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting,
and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa
Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St.
Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to
remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but
living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of
Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which
culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and
Westminster Abbey.
It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the
nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk
about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of
mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which
grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a
passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that
they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure
lost this.
* * * * *
The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off
from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent
world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and
the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order.
The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English
policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that
delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the
great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere
mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only
system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should
express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole
community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod
omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be
approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have
thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living
political civilization.
And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of
spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.
It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new
bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With
all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing
apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other
stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and
above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of
the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life
and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages
they taught men love as well as obedience.
Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world
was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in
men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of
men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were
slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has
rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but
these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself
in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the
almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that
did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the
fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism,
they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way.
Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the
mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will
know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts
which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in
which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great
architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only
overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.
A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the
human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in
a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days
compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world
was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we
have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and
the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library).
Lord Bryce, _History of Roman Empire_.
Rashdall, _Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages_.
R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_.
W. P. Ker, _Epic and Romance_.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Cf. Cicero, _De Legibus_, i. 10-12; and Seneca, _De Beneficiis_,
iii. 18.
[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.
[25] Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory_, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.
[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iv. 1.
[27] Cf. Bracton, _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus_, i. 8, 5.
[28] Cf. Manegold, _Ad Gebehardum_, c. XXX.
[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.
[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's _Policraticus_,
introduction.
[31] Cf. Gratian, _Decretum_, D. iv. c. 3.
V
PROGRESS IN RELIGION
BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUeGEL
The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all
well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of
Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the
ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is
plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that
we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and
forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really
traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly
religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is
occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great,
abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all
experienced and sincere, they will also admit--as possibly the most
baffling of facts--that the human individuals, families, races, are
relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly,
sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but
completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and
interests of human life--Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again,
Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely
assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite
distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and
practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human
life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations
are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly
some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws
and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion,
will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious
perception as may still remain in this particular soul.
I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental
questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I
will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the
Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may
concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main
results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to
elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in
past and present Religion which concern the question of religious
'Progressiveness'.
I
I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only
forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then
fashionable philosophy.
First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our
Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree;
and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences
between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human
being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my
rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to
these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not
simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into
abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within
the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete
character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So
Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]
And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the
reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and
sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry
Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary
data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized
knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere
particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of
articulation.'[33]