When we try to picture to ourselves the intellectual and moral state
of Europe in the Middle Ages, some fixed and almost stereotyped ideas
immediately suggest themselves. We think of the nations immersed in a
gross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction of
arts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated;
allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumble
into dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror of
coming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, or
yielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgar
appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period
weakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable.
Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle
disputation upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theological
fanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of the
reason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrate
under the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern men in masses,
aggregations, classes, guilds--everywhere the genus and the species of
humanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons.
Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascent
nationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation,
combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts and
aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving a
false air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducing
the interpretation of texts to an exercise of idle ingenuity, and the
study of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insane
system of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's fall
and of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit of
cynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in the
harsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, and
God's eternal jailer in the next world. Nature is regarded with
suspicion and aversion; the flesh, with shame and loathing, broken by
spasmodic outbursts of lawless self-indulgence. For human life there
is one formula:--
"Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror."
The contempt of the world is the chief theme of edification. A charnel
filled with festering corpses, snakes, and worms points the preacher's
moral. Before the eyes of all, in terror-stricken vision or in
nightmares of uneasy conscience, leap the inextinguishable flames of
hell. Salvation, meanwhile, is being sought through amulets, relics,
pilgrimages to holy places, fetishes of divers sorts and different
degrees of potency. The faculties of the heart and head, defrauded of
wholesome sustenance, have recourse to delirious debauches of the
fancy, dreams of magic, compacts with the evil one, insanities of
desire, ineptitudes of discipline. Sexual passion, ignoring the true
place of woman in society, treats her on the one hand like a servile
instrument, on the other exalts her to sainthood or execrates her as
the chief impediment to holiness. Common sense, sanity of judgment,
acceptance of things as they are, resolution to ameliorate the evils
and to utilise the goods of life, seem everywhere deficient. Men are
obstinate in misconception of their proper aims, wasting their
energies upon shadows instead of holding fast by realities, waiting
for a future whereof they know nothing, in lieu of mastering and
economising the present. The largest and most serious undertakings of
united Europe in this period--the Crusades--are based upon a radical
mistake. "Why seek ye the living among the dead? Behold, He is not
here, but risen!" With these words ringing in their ears, the nations
flock to Palestine and pour their blood forth for an empty sepulchre.
The one Emperor who attains the object of Christendom by rational
means is excommunicated for his success. Frederick II. returns from
the Holy Land a ruined man because he made a compact useful to his
Christian subjects with the Chief of Islam.