3. The Culmination of the Middle Ages.
What was
now in the process of formation was a Christian culture
based on the universal acceptance of the faith and
typified in the twelfth
century by the rise of scholas-
ticism,
the great cathedral building, and the gradual
transition to what we call
universities. Behind it lay
the revival of Western economic life in the
eleventh
century; the growth of towns; the emergence of some-
thing like city-states in Italy; the
development of
Mediterranean trade by some of these as Moslem
power in
that sea declined; the success of the First
Crusade; the wider view of the
world; the contacts
with Arabian civilization; and the recovery of impor-
tant areas of ancient
thought—all these, together with
the fact that both men and
society had come to the
stage of general intellectual awakening, or had
found
the kind of exhilaration which lights the spark. Starting
from
the discovery of Aristotelian logic—and greatly
relishing
this—while lacking the concrete knowledge
of the world and
nature which Aristotle had possessed,
men ran to a great amount of
deductive reasoning from
little material; and, as the more scientific work
of
Aristotle emerged, they accepted virtually his whole
system of
nature, which became to them an inherited
“authority,” almost like the Bible—an authority
all the
firmer because it was in schools that medieval thought
developed. The great achievement was the degree to
which the natural
science and the philosophy of Aris-
totle were combined with the Christian faith, to pro-
duce a “scholasticism”
which was bound to have a
character of its own, if only because the
philosophy
(always remembering theology in the background)
tended to
concentrate on such problems as the exist-
ence of God, the immortality of the soul, the question
of free will.
The pontificate of the statesmanlike Innocent III
(1198-1216) sees the
“religious society” of Western
Europe in all its
majesty, and it is this that sets the
stage in the thirteenth century for
the development
of scholasticism to its culmination in Saint Thomas
Aquinas, the renewed cathedral building, and the
spread of
universities—the climax of that Christian
culture which, a
century after Innocent, was to pro-
duce a
Giotto and a Dante. Innocent more than once
chose an emperor, and he forced
Philip Augustus of
France to recognize as a queen the first wife whom
he had tried to divorce. He had the kings of Aragon,
England, Portugal,
Castile, Denmark, and Sicily as his
vassals. He launched two crusades
against the infidel,
as well as a third against the heretics in the south
of
France. He also dominated the whole European diplo-
matic situation. His Lateran Council of 1215 was at-
tended by over 1200 bishops, abbots, and
priors (in-
cluding representatives from
Armenia and the Latin
churches that the crusaders had established in
Syria
and the Balkans) as well as many other people from
European
countries—proctors from the Emperor at
Constantinople, for
example, and from the kings of
France, England, Hungary, and Poland. In
other words,
it was “like a representative Parliament of
all
Christendom.” It was entirely the pope's council and
it
passed judgment between rival candidates for the
empire, and between King
John of England and his
barons. It also allotted the major part of the
county
of Toulouse, besides taking measures for the reform
of the
Church, and planning a new crusade.
The activities of the papal curia and its agents were
now undergoing a great
expansion. The multiplicity
of the appeals to Rome and the constant
despatch of
delegates from Rome to all parts of Europe secured
the
authority of the canon law throughout the system,
and kept the papacy in
touch with all regions. The
increasing organization and the increasing
circulation
of money assisted the development of papal finances
and
enabled Innocent to draw on the great wealth of
the Church.
This mundane success had its darker side, and, in-
deed, for some time the protests against the worldliness
of
ecclesiastics had been rising—protests that took
shape as
heresies. In the case of the Cathari, who had
brought Manichaeism from the
East and had captured
much of society in the south of France, as well as
spreading into neighboring regions, the class of austere
perfecti were a reproach to the Church, while the
ordinary credentes were allowed excessive license,
and
the whole movement could be regarded as a threat
to society
itself. The menace was so formidable that
the idea of the crusade was now
directed to the conflict
against the heretic as well as against the
infidel. A cruel
suppression took place and the Inquisition was gradu-
ally developed to cope with the
aftermath.
In the case of Peter Waldo and his followers who
from about 1170 took to
poverty and began to draw
doctrine straight from the New Testament, the
sup-
pression of the unauthorized
preaching drove a band
who had erred only through their enthusiasm,
into
revolutionary ways and actual heresy. When Saint
Francis
dedicated himself to poverty in 1208, Innocent
III took care not to repeat
the error, though Francis
and his followers had found their own way of
imitating
the apostolic life and they, too, had preached without
license. They were harnessed to the Church, and the
organization of the
movement was gradually taken out
of Saint Francis' hands. The monastic
system, based
on poverty, chastity, and obedience, was adapted to
the
purpose of men who went out into the world to
preach; and so the friars
found their way into the
medieval landscape.
Similarly, Saint Dominic in 1215 received permission
to establish an order
which should meet heresy with
argument and learning, and the members of
this order
were particularly trained for a preaching and teaching
role. These new orders of wandering friars, who served
under the direct
command of the pope and constituted
his special sort of army, quickly
became important and
numerous. They brought religion home to the
people
and acquired a popularity that sometimes weakened
the position
of the parish priest. They recruited bril-
liant men, some of the Dominicans leading in the
development of
scholasticism; and they came to ac-
quire an
important place in universities. The Francis-
cans soon carried their missionary work into northern
Europe and
North Africa. Before long they were in
China.
This was a period when religion was so imposing
in the way in which it was
handed down and presented
to people—and was so powerful in its
forms of current
expression—that, in spite of some strange
deviations,
it hardly occurred to the great mass of human beings
(even
to the rebels and the powerful intellects) that
there was the alternative
of disbelief. A religion that
has soaked itself into the minds of men, and
almost
become second nature to them, can work like a chemi-
cal in society, inspiring original thought, giving
wing
to the imagination and inciting the believer to strange
adventures, curious experiments in living. In the Mid-
dle Ages a certain marriage of Christianity and the
world—Christianity with the whole mundane order—
produced a supra-national religious society that was
itself an amazing
structure and can now be envisaged
as a work of art. If we have in mind all
the external
apparatus of the religion as it existed at that
time—its
symbolism and its ceremonial, its biblical
personalities
and famous saints, its associations with a peculiar pat-
tern of the cosmos, even its view of the hand
of God
in history—we can entertain the hazardous idea of a
“Christian civilization,” which, culminating in the
thirteenth century, affected the landscape of town and
country, governed
the calendar of the year, touched
the home, the craft guilds, the
universities, and even
put a stamp of its own on the most idle
superstitions.
This civilization carried its own ideas about the
nature
of personality and about the right posture to be
adopted by
human beings under the sun. It provided
the conditions for the development
of piety and the
inner life—for the deepening of religious
thought and
religious experience—and for the expression of all
this
in cathedrals, in painting, and in poetry.
Even the papacy, which can seem so unattractive
to us as it asserts its
claims against powerful monarchs,
stood in many ways as a beneficent
influence, insisting
on certain standards, raising the quality of the
clergy,
checking forms of tyranny, providing antecedents for
modern
international law, and directing governments
to objects that transcended
the ambitions of secular
rulers.
