The Unity of Western Civilization Part 6

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 acc.u.mulated 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 cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.ses of gold and silver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of the divine Idea for a single cla.s.s, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery of the Ma.s.s and the glory of the fruition of G.o.d 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, a.s.sembled 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 Sa.s.soferrato, _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 members.h.i.+ps 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 churchmans.h.i.+p and to citizens.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d. 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 Troltsch, 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociations 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 members.h.i.+p 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 Const.i.tutions 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 _etatisme_ 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 cla.s.sical 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 friends.h.i.+p one with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scope of public things. And when they have attained this friends.h.i.+p, 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, _Ill.u.s.trations 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. Troltsch, _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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sertion of a law supreme and binding on all men, eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment.

And now turn to this pa.s.sage 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]