THE MIDDLE AGES
All the end of the Sixth Book of Mr. Wells’s History is taken up with
his judgment on what must properly be called the Middle Ages in
Europe—that is, the period which begins with the great awakening of the
West in the eleventh century and ends with the strains and difficulties
of the fifteenth, to conclude in the crash of the Reformation. It is the
period midway between that great stage of Christendom called the Dark
Ages which ends about the year 1000 and the split of Christendom which
comes after 1500. It covers nearly twenty pages.
It would not be just to criticize the writer for this comparatively
small allotment to what is, in the best judgment of cultivated European
men, the greatest achievement of our race. Mr. Wells would answer that
the Middle Ages were _not_ the greatest period of our race, _nor_ our
race the chief portion of mankind. He has a right to his own theory of
History: to treat the climax of united Christendom as but one episode
(and not a superior episode) in the little we know of human effort and
achievement. He is wrong, but he has a right to be wrong: unless,
indeed, one affirms that no historian may adopt the anti-Catholic view.
The scale, I say, is, in my judgment, warped. I think that an impartial
observer (could such an one be conceived), looking at the world from far
off, himself without religion, and judging things strictly by their
temporal effect, would still say that it was in Europe men did the very
most they ever could do, and that the time they did the most they ever
could do was the 500 years between the year 1000 and the year 1500.
To ask Mr. Wells to see things in that completely detached fashion would
be to ask too much; for he does not seriously pretend to look at the
story of mankind thus detachedly, but rather to interpret it in terms of
Evangelical English Protestantism, gutted of such supernatural doctrine
as it once possessed. I will therefore deal with this chief section of
the human story as briefly as Mr. Wells himself deals with it, although
it certainly deserves a much larger place. For, after all, Mr. Wells’s
whole quarrel is with the Catholic Church; and this was the moment when
the Catholic Church was producing its chief fruits after the long and
desperate siege of the Dark Ages. I think, in decency to such an
opponent, Mr. Wells ought to have made the section more important. But,
on the other hand, I remember that the opponent is an opponent; and if
one regards the Catholic Church as the bane of mankind (which is Mr.
Wells’s hereditary attitude), one would naturally hesitate to emphasize
the centuries of its most _united_ active effect upon our blood.
Three things have impressed Mr. Wells mainly in what he has been told by
his Oxford coaches on this tremendous episode in the human story.
_Firstly_, the spontaneity, energy, and united purpose of the Crusades.
_Secondly_, the apparent futility of the medieval Papacy in handling its
fine opportunity for creating an international (and a merely human)
state.
_Thirdly_, the decline and breakdown of Christendom, inevitably ending
in the shipwreck called the Reformation.
In the first of these points, he is right—though very restricted in
vision. In the second, he is historically quite wrong: the Middle Ages
were not a period in which a particular insufficient and later somewhat
tyrannical institution called “The Papacy” was trying to achieve, or
ought to have tried to achieve, a merely temporal unity, careless of
Catholic doctrine. In the third, he is still more wrong historically.
The Reformation was not an inevitable climax led up to by greater and
greater weakness in Christendom and not to be avoided. It might have
been avoided; and all that it did was very nearly undone again by the
recovery of European sanity after the first delirium of a minority had
passed. The destructive work of the Reformation would have been repaired
altogether but for the shortsightedness (from a European point of view)
of Richelieu in backing up the defeated Protestant Principalities of
Germany against the Empire; due to his considering nothing but the
advantages of the French Royal house and forgetting Christendom.
Mr. Wells is genuinely impressed by the first Crusade. He uses in
connection with it the novel German idiom “will to” crusade, and that is
the highest compliment he can pay it. He is impressed by these great
masses of men going eastward. He calls it a spectacle such as “had never
before been seen in the whole history of the world.” He does not,
indeed, appreciate that the thing was a vast French movement (for he
would not like any great movement to be French); he prefers to think of
it as Norman, under the old Victorian superstition that the Normans,
being vigorous, could not be really French at all. But he admires it,
because it was popular, because it was spontaneous, and, above all,
because it was big. He sees in just perspective the gradual
“officializing” of the Crusades, and he appreciates the fact that the
violent Moslem feeling of the later twelfth century was a reaction
corresponding to the Christian enthusiasm of eighty years before. He
puts the episode of Saladin well. But what I think he does not
appreciate is the way in which medieval civilization continued to hold
the crusading idea. He says in so many words that (by the third Crusade)
the “magic and wonder had gone out of these movements” and that “the
common people had found them out.” He ought to have been told by those
who coached him that, though changing conditions had made united popular
support more and more difficult, yet, right on into the fifteenth
century, the Holy Sepulchre was the ideal goal. Even in England (a
country which had little to do with the Crusades), you have Henry IV
dreaming of it all his life, and you have Henry V, 230 years after the
time when Mr. Wells thinks the ideal had been lost, complaining, as he
died, that he had not retaken the holy places.
However, he does appreciate and feels the Crusades, especially the first
one.
What he does not understand is the medieval Church, its necessary unity;
and that the Papacy was the condition and guardian of that unity. There
he is altogether wrong. He is out of perspective, and misses the
elements of the affair.
Here, again, I must make myself clear by yet another of what I fear my
readers may call ceaseless repetitions of an obvious principle.
Unfortunately it is not a principle obvious to Mr. Wells, or to the
readers for whom he writes, and it must be repeated again and again, for
it is almost certain to be misunderstood.
The principle is this. We are not primarily concerned in an historian
with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must
always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute
sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to
prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad
history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts
in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad
outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval
historical period. He seems to think of it as something dominated by the
old “Giant Pope” of his traditional Bunyan. He shows some admiration for
the idea of the Papacy uniting Christendom because that subserves his
Comtist ideal of humanity-worship. But what he doesn’t understand at all
is that the real point of issue was not the Papacy—which is the central
organ of the universal Church—but the conception of the universal Church
itself: and of a Church not only universal, but visible and corporate.
To read these pages one would think such an idea of visible, corporate
unity had never existed—and yet it is the whole historical point and
meaning of the Catholic Church: then, now and for ever. He seems to
think that the Papacy was a particular institution doing something on
its own, artificial, like the League of Nations, and through defects in
organization failing to pull it off. But the Papacy was nothing of the
sort. It was original in the foundations of the Church. It remains
dominant in the Church to-day. It is the exemplification of unity, and,
to put it shortly, of the prime historical truth that the Catholic
Church is not a theory, but a thing.
For instance, he gives at great length the quarrel between the Popes and
Frederic the Second. He does not appreciate the elementary point, that
if Frederic the Second had won the Church would have broken up. It was a
life-and-death duel in which religion was at stake; and though naturally
a modern heir of Little Bethel sympathizes with Frederic merely because
he finds Frederic in opposition to “Giant Pope,” yet the historian
should take a larger view. He may dislike our Christian civilization,
and wish it were destroyed. He may rejoice to think how nearly the
successes of Frederic came to destroying it; he may praise Frederic for
“irrigating us” with anti-Christian ideas—notably Moslem—and regret that
our civilization won; but to represent it as a mere struggle between two
sovereigns, Pope and Emperor, is not history at all. It is like making
the struggle between revolutionary France and aristocratic England a
struggle between the tyrant George III against virtuous Republicans; or
the monster Robespierre against the Three Jolly Englishmen of the song.
All through this dealing with the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Mr. Wells
continues to show that intense local Protestant feeling, in which he was
trained, and misses the wide historical view altogether. He does not
recover it by his phrases—which are numerous—upon the grandeur of an
international ideal.
Popes have no international ideal, because the Catholic Church has no
international ideal. There might be no such things as nations (any more
than there were under the Roman Empire): perhaps in the near future
there will again be no such things as nations. But there would still be
a Catholic Church, and there would still be a Papacy.
This provincial attitude towards the Papal position appears in all
manner of phrases scattered up and down this part of Mr. Wells’s work,
as, for instance, that “men of faith and wisdom believe in growth and
their fellow-men; but Priests, even such Priests as Gregory VII, believe
in the false ‘efficiency’ of an imposed discipline.” Here is a phrase
which might have been written by a man in his sleep as to the first
part, and which is composed of mere chapel doctrine as to the
second—“believing in growth and one’s fellow-men” means nothing; nothing
whatsoever. It is gas. And, on the other hand, it is not a special sort
of lurking animal called “Priests,” who believe in the efficiency of an
imposed discipline, it is everyone who ever organized Man for any end
whatsoever; from coming down in time for breakfast to the salvation of
the human race.
I wonder that a man of Mr. Wells’s desire for intellectual distinction
should lend himself to such things.
But the worst historical blunder in all this is the repetition, at this
time of day, that the simple faith of the Dark Ages gradually broke down
through the increasing knowledge and intellectual activity of the Middle
Ages until at last it came to the complete disruption of the
Reformation.
That sort of thing was already blown upon when Froude was writing a
lifetime ago. To-day it lingers in a local tradition, but it has quite
disappeared—and for ever—from intelligent discussion of that great
religious catastrophe, from which we are at last, perhaps, slowly
recovering.
We all know, of course, what really happened. A civilization bursting
into increasing vigour, the rise of nations and of vernacular
literatures, an expansion of knowledge, all these tended, as does all
growth, to disrupt unity. Something much worse than any good force (and
learning is good), the catastrophe of the Black Death, shook society,
yet unity was preserved. Even the great schism of the fourteenth century
was healed.
The shipwreck called “the Reformation” came, as all shipwrecks come, by
blundering. So little was it inevitable, that once it had taken place
the warning was immediately taken to heart. The Church recovered itself,
only failed by an error of French policy to recover all Europe, is still
(if Mr. Wells will look about him) remarkably alive, and is increasing
its hold upon the intelligence of Europe.
Why, that is the very commonplace of our time! Yet, in these pages Mr.
Wells talks as though he were the contemporary of those worthy gentlemen
who cheered for the victory of Garibaldi in Exeter Hall and thought the
Faith would die with Pio Nono.
Thus he discovers with joy in certain ecclesiastics of the Dark Ages
“the spirit of Jesus still alive in them” (p. 422). He is persuaded that
Salerno (i.e. Physical Science) “cast a baleful light upon Rome” (p.
425). He will have it that the Church “had become dogmatic,” as though
(Great Heavens!) it were not dogmatic in the Earliest Fathers. He will
have it that “Jesus of Nazareth” and His preaching was “overlaid,” and,
worst of all, he’s back at the old nonsense that “Priests”—that is the
organization of the Church—think only about “their own power,” and not
about the Divine, unique thing which it is their business to preserve.
What on earth does Mr. Wells think that the average Catholic from the
beginning (say, in the second century) to the present day has accepted
in the matter of the Hierarchy? Does he think that this vast body called
the Catholic Church (vast in time, as in space, as in numbers) is a pack
of dupes, run by a few supernaturally cunning rogues? That he should
think us wrong and mistaken, subject to illusion in our doctrines, is
fair matter for discussion; but the idea of our being fascinated by
insincere conjurers is asinine.
That word is violent. I will repeat it. For it is exact. It is asinine
to judge of the Hierarchy (Innocent III, Gregory the Great, Anselm,
Langton, Ximenes, Bossuet, Leo XIII—I pick at random) that it is a
conspiracy of charlatans, and of the laity (St. Monica, St. Louis,
Lamoricière, O’Connell, Maritain, St. Francis, Pasteur) that they are
gaping yokels who swallow any tale.
What is this, again (on p. 427), of Catholic “contempt for the
intelligence and mental dignity of the common man”? If there is one
conspicuous contrast between your elementary, half-educated,
pseudo-scientific, “modern thought” and the Catholic Church, it is the
contempt of the former for the common man, and the fact that the latter
is based entirely upon the common man. The former—pseudo-science—is for
ever trying to prevent the common man from getting a drink, marrying,
having children, running his own house, living his own life, criticizing
the mandarins of politics or of sham statistics; the latter—the Catholic
Church—lives its whole life by consulting and realizing the common man.
To attack the Catholic Church as being too subservient to the common man
might be understandable; to attack it as contemptuous of the common man
shows a complete ignorance of its character.
It is in the same spirit that we have (upon p. 429) the remark that the
Catholic Church was, in the Middle Ages, “heading to its destruction.”
It is not destroyed. Really, I do assure you, Mr. Wells, the Catholic
Church is not yet destroyed. Will you not believe me? Must I give you
proof? It is arduous collecting proofs of the obvious.
It is in the same spirit that he says of Wycliffe that he was a much
abler man than St. Dominic.
Now I am sure Mr. Wells has never read a word of either. If he will read
anything proceeding from St. Dominic and anything proceeding from
Wycliffe, and put them side by side, I shall be content. He might as
well say that Proust was a greater writer than Molière.
It is in the same spirit that he tells us Wycliffe translated the Bible
into English “in order that people should judge between the Church and
himself,” not knowing that a vernacular translation of the Bible existed
in French, in German, in Bohemian, and even (probably, or certainly) in
the newly-coalesced English tongue.
It is in the same spirit that he postulates “organized dogma” as in
conflict with the “quickening intelligence and courage of mankind.” How
can intelligence act upon any problem without resulting in organized
dogma? How else did intelligence act on the problems of Astronomy? Is
there no dogma to-day on the rotation of the earth? What on earth has
“courage” to do with lack of dogma? Where is the courage in nourishing
mere doubt in a woolly brain?