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II. THE MIDDLE AGES
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Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
II. THE MIDDLE AGES
1. The Church and the Barbarian Invaders.
Be-
tween the fifth and the tenth centuries, the
downfall
of the Roman Empire in the West, the eruption of
barbarian
hordes from Asia, the establishment of
Teutonic monarchies and the long
period of wars and
migrations threw the map of the European continent
into the melting pot, until it finally emerged with a
general pattern that
is still recognizable today. From
the seventh century, the rise of Islam
and the expansion
of the Arabian Empire produced a drastic and perma-
nent division in that Mediterranean world
which had
been the seat of the Greco-Roman civilization and had
formed
the original Christendom. In the eastern half
of the ancient Roman Empire,
the imperial system
maintained itself at Byzantium, and, though it lost
to
Islam most of its territory bordering on the eastern as
well as all
the southern Mediterranean, it retained its
cultural continuity (and
preserved Christianity in
Constantinople) for a further period of something
like
a thousand years.
In a sense it is now the history of Europe that really
opens, and this
Europe is to emerge as the new form
of “Christendom”
though it is only very slowly that
the northern part of it becomes
Christianized. The
centuries of upheaval produced a grave decline of
culture even in the south, and much of what had been
subtle and profound in
classical thought—much even
of the scholarship and
science—was to disappear for
a long period. Henceforward, there
is a separate history
of the West and we trace the rise of a Western civili-
ety itself has returned in many respects to primitive
forms. Compared with the Byzantine world, and even
later with the rapidly developing culture of Islam, the
West appears as a backward region for a long time,
its backwardness illustrated by the appalling collapse
of its city-life, at a time when Constantinople, and later
Bagdad, were of tremendous prestige and size. For
special reasons this Western civilization at its formative
period, when everything was still malleable, found
itself under the presiding influence of a Christianity
that had acquired greater power over mundane affairs
than ever before.
Some of the Teutonic invaders had become Chris-
tianized before their eruption into the Roman world,
but they
had been converted by Arians and had re-
ceived
the faith in a heretical form. This would seem
to have created difficulties
with the populations they
subjected, for no Arian dynasty survived, though,
in
the case of Spain, the Visigoths maintained themselves
by going
over to Catholicism. The Frankish invaders
of Gaul may have owed some of
their success to the
fact that their dynasty was converted only after
their
migration into the Roman Empire, so that from the
very first,
they adhered to the Catholicism of their
Gallo-Roman subjects. For
centuries the reigning
dynasties were to have an exceptional part to play
in
the shaping of the map, the history and the culture
of Europe, and
it was they who brought their peoples
over to Christianity in those more
primitive conditions
under which it was inevitable that religion should
be
regarded as the affair of the group.
If Christianity had won its way in the Roman Empire
through individual
conversion, it owed its spread over
Europe sometimes to mass-conversion,
i.e., to the de-
crees, perhaps the example,
sometimes the pressures
and persecuting policies, of those who held the
govern-
ment. It was to be extended
further in the north of
Europe in subsequent centuries by movements
from
both the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, so that,
when the
thirteenth century opened, only a small
wedge of paganism remained, near
the point where
the southern coast of the Baltic turns north.
Lithuania
resisted longest of all, balanced for a considerable
period
between the influence of Rome and the influ-
ence of Byzantium. From the western side the advance
was sometimes
made through military conquest and
colonization policies, particularly in
the east of what
the modern historian knows as Germany. Here the
warfare between Christian and pagan might be of a
brutal kind, down to the
time when, in the thirteenth
century, Prussia was
“converted” by the Teutonic
Knights.
A considerable part of Europe was Christianized,
therefore, by methods not unlike the ones by means
of which a
similar area was brought over to commu-
nism
in the twentieth century. As in the case of
communism—though
with greater effect in those ear-
lier stages in
the history of society—the Christian
control of education, the
procedures of indoctrination,
and the withholding of knowledge about
possible al-
ternative systems (or the
treatment of all alternatives
as merely disreputable) ensured the
maintenance of the
authoritarian creed in subsequent centuries,
without
the need to continue perpetually the forcible methods
that had
been required for its installation. Granted the
conditions of the time, one
could say, however, that
those countries which became Christian were fortu-
nate. The existing alternatives would
hardly have been
more happy for them. Indeed, it was their conversion
that brought them into the orbit of civilization.
In the Byzantine East, Roman Emperors, continuing
a regime that had
developed from the time of Con-
stantine,
were able to exercise in some respects (though
perhaps less than was once
thought) a species of
“caesaropapism.” But in the
West the Roman Emperor
had disappeared, while the bishop of Rome
maintained
his spiritual ascendancy amongst Christian believers
and
acquired during the invasions even a certain lead-
ership in some secular matters. Pope Gregory the Great
(590-614)
was fervent in his religious duties, extending
his influence over western
countries, directing the con-
version of
England, and asserting the spiritual su-
premacy of Rome as the see of Saint Peter. But in
default of anybody
else, at a time when Byzantine
authority in Italy had become inert, he was
compelled
to negotiate with the Lombard invaders of Italy and
to
administer Rome as a governor, inaugurating the
temporal power of the
papacy. It almost seemed as
though the Church in the centuries before the
barbar-
ian invasions had unwittingly been
developing an or-
ganization exactly
calculated to survive, and to pre-
serve the
faith, through just such a period of cataclysm
as had now occurred.
In a world where civilization had suffered such a
recession, Christianity
itself shared in the “barbariza-
tion,” coming closer sometimes to those pagan super-
stitions that governed primitive
minds. Neither the
spiritual life nor examples of saintliness were impossi-
ble, but the intellect was ready to
accept magic and
legend even more easily than before; and, since
ancient
thought itself was now imperfectly known and imper-
fectly understood, something of
superstition was run
into the interstices, and there was produced an
outlook
which entangled the material with the spiritual, mak-
ing religion more earthy, in a way, and nature
herself
a field for the miraculous.
On the other hand, whatever may be said about the
verted, there was a sense in which the spread of
Christianity was the kind of conquest that justifies itself
retrospectively. The most impressive part of the story
is the tremendous internal missionary work which the
Church conducted in the succeeding centuries in the
countries into which it spread—work calculated to
bring religion home to the individual, and to make it
gradually more genuine and profound, even if it had
been shallow and unreliable at first. It was not merely
a case of eliminating all the superstitions that could
not be harnessed to Christianity or preventing lapses
into paganism, but also teaching the belief that had
been handed down, influencing manners and morals,
and deepening sincerity, deepening the appreciation
of the faith. Part of the curious charm of Bede's Eccle-
siastical History (including those papal letters which
provide guidance for the conversion of England and
prescribe special consideration for those who need
careful weaning from paganism) lies in an amazing
gentleness that stands out (early in the eighth century)
against a background of violence; in it also is found
a combination of high ideas at the spiritual level with
crude notions about the universe, a simple love of
amiable miracles. The great support of the Church in
the Middle Ages was to be the sheer fidelity of the
mass of the people to their beliefs, and whether the
faith were superstitious or not, its genuineness was in
the last resort the real weapon that popes were to have
against kings.
During its earliest centuries, the Church had devel-
oped in a highly civilized world, and its theological
teaching
had come to require a considerable degree
of sophistication. The literature
to which it was at-
tached, and its own
insistence on the continuity of its
doctrinal tradition, gave it a vested
interest in the
preservation of the Greco-Roman culture. It could not
prevent a serious relapse even within its own ranks;
but in a sense it had
from the first been particularly
organizing itself for the preservation of
a creedal system;
and this—indeed the maintenance of the whole
tradi-
tion—called for a staff
of trained ecclesiastics. These
latter, precisely because of the education
that was so
essential for them, were to become indispensable also
in
the work of secular government. The attachment
to the Scriptures made the
Christian Church the enemy
of illiteracy at a crucial stage in the
development of
peoples; and the need to have translations for mission-
ary purposes secured that it might
even be the chief
agency in the development of a literary language.
The whole situation, in fact, imposed upon church-
men the tasks of educating the “barbarians” and
they
became the principal instrument by which the culture
of the
ancient classical world was transmitted to the
Teutonic peoples who had acquired the predominance
in Europe.
In the most violent days the monasteries
stood like fortresses, preserving
the tradition of learn-
ing—preserving, sometimes without knowing it, the
manuscripts of classical works that went out of circu-
lation for centuries. And for centuries it was church-
men—people with minds
primarily shaped by their
religious beliefs and religious
training—who took the
lead in the gradual recovery and deepening
apprecia-
tion of the thought and
learning of antiquity. The
ancient materials were now envisaged in a
framework
of Christian ideas. It was as though, in Western Europe,
a
civilization was being constructed from old materials
but to a new
architectural design. There emerged in
the Arabian Empire a parallel
culture, closely con-
nected with that of
ancient Greece, but under the
presidency of the Islamic faith. These two
imposing
examples of a culture which developed in a religious
setting
almost under the eye of the historian, offer
promising material for a
resort to the comparative
method.
During centuries of tumult and upheaval, however,
the framework of medieval
culture (like the pattern
on the map of Europe itself) was slow in taking
shape.
There was a period in the eighth century when
England and
Ireland seemed to be the last refuge of
civilization, and missionaries
particularly from Nor-
thumbria (often in
the tradition of Bede) carried the
light back to the continent, converting
parts of
Germany that had never been Christianized, and con-
tributing to the emergence of the
“Carolingian Renais-
sance” at the end of the century. At this latter date,
a
long alliance between the papacy and the prede-
cessors of Charlemagne had resulted in the re-creation
of an
“empire”—one in which Charlemagne was able
to exercise a sort of “caesaropapism,” controlling
the
Church even in essential matters and expecting from
it spiritual
support—as though the function of the laity
was to fight the
battles while the function of the clergy
was simply to assist the warfare
with their prayers.
A “Carolingian Renaissance,”
which did not itself open
out into a long-term cultural development,
established,
through the emperor's edicts, the enduring principle
that
monasteries and cathedrals should accept the re-
sponsibility for education.
Then further waves of invasion in Europe—and even
in
Britain—in the ninth and tenth centuries brought
a renewed
period of turbulence; and in the tenth cen-
tury
the papacy, having no longer an emperor to pro-
tect it, came to “the saddest period in its
history” when
it met something worse than
“caesaropapism,” becom-
ing the victim and the plaything of the local Roman
aristocracy. The
danger from violence of this immedi-
ate sort
was doubled by the spread of the doctrine that
even the land that was devoted to religious use. David
Knowles (in a paper, “Some Trends of Scholarship,
1868-1968, in the Field of Medieval History”) has
described how
The ownership and control of all churches, not excluding
monastic and
canonical foundations, passed gradually into
the hands of individuals
who, whether laymen or ecclesi-
astics, were lords of the land. Thus from the eighth century
onwards there was gradually established in western Europe
the regime of
the private or proprietary church, of which
the lord enjoyed many of
the fruits and to which he ap-
pointed a
priest (or abbot or bishop) of his choice, and which
he could give,
sell or divide like any other real property.
When the system was linked
at the summit to the extreme
claims [of] the emperors to appoint
bishops and even popes,
there existed in perfect form the
“church in the hands of
laymen.”
2. The Establishment of the Medieval Order.
The
real recovery of Europe from what can justifiably be
regarded as “Dark Ages” dates from the latter half of
the tenth century, when the Germans halted the
Magyars, nomadic hordes from
Asia, who had carried
their raids across the length and breadth of the
conti-
nent. Henceforward the west of
Europe was guarded
against the worst of its dangers by the
consolidation
of Germany and the establishment of the Magyars in
a
sedentary Christian state in Hungary, as well as the
development also of
Christian monarchies in Poland,
Bohemia, and Scandinavia. The establishment
of a
“Roman Empire” under Otto I in 962 opened at
last
a period of comparative stability, and there emerged
something
like the shape of the Western Europe we
know—a Europe which by
1053 had lost a great deal
of its connection with the Orthodox Church.
Trade and
industrial production increased again, and the Medi-
terranean, which in 972
“like the Baltic, was a hostile
sea,” saw important
developments which brought
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to the front. The period
be-
tween 1050 and 1150 was to prove one of
the most
creative epochs in European history, and its great
achievement was that it established the real bases of
the medieval system.
In this period intellectual influ-
ences from
the more highly developed Islamic world
provided an important stimulus; but
it was only one
factor in the case. The intellectual leadership had
passed to the northern part of France and to Lorraine.
The promotion of the
study of logic (which goes back
to Gerbert in Rheims, A.D. 972, and was
based at first
on the writings of Boethius) became “the most
impor-
tant feature in the advancement of
learning in northern
Europe.”
But from the time of Otto I the Church had become
still more the prey of the
laity and a low-water mark
was reached when the Emperor Henry III (1039-56)
deposed three
popes and installed his own nominees.
From the Church's point of view, the
main problem
to be solved was the question of the independence of
the
spiritual authority; for the existing system led to
many abuses and
obstructed any attempt to bring the
clergy under discipline. A monastic
reform which
started in Cluny in 910, though it did not attack this
problem, established centers of piety over a very wide
area. Another such
movement in Lorraine can be seen
from 1046 making a specific call for the
absolute inde-
pendence of the spiritual
authority. The demand for
change arose in the provinces therefore, and it
was
a band of people connected with the Lorraine move-
ment who brought this latter program to Rome and
became influential in that city. They supported their
cause by a study of
the canon law, and if on the one
hand they made use of what we know as the
“False
Decretals” (produced two centuries earlier in
the
province of Tours) they also found more imposing
evidence,
including documents from the time of
Gregory the Great.
Perhaps their labors would have been ineffectual if
the Emperor Henry III,
though nominating popes, had
not appointed some worthy people to the Holy
See.
Their efforts at a time when the next emperor, Henry
IV, was a
minor, led in 1059 to a crucial decree which
excluded the
laity—whether the emperor or the Roman
aristocracy—from any part in the appointment of a
pope and
prescribed an independent election by cardi-
nals. A great development of ecclesiastical litigation
and an
increasing number of appeals to Rome may
have represented another way in
which action from
the provinces helped to elevate and transform the
papal office. The Lorraine reformers had been equally
anxious—indeed, it would seem to have been their
initial
anxiety—that local ecclesiastical authorities
should be
liberated from subservience to a powerful
laity. During the pontificate of
Gregory VII (1073-85)
the zeal of the pope for the reform of the Church
at
large, and particularly the Church in Germany—the
determination to get rid of such evils as simony—led
to that
conflict between papacy and empire which was
to form one of the great
themes of medieval history.
In any case, the essential system of the Middle
Ages
now took shape.
At first it was a controversy as to whether the mon-
arch should choose his own bishops and invest them
with the
insignia of the spiritual office. And here the
Church was faced with
problems that arose out of the
character of its new entanglement with the
world.
Bishops in Germany had vast temporal possessions and
might be
the heads of considerable principalities. An
emperor could not be
indifferent to the appointment
“Investiture Contest” was in fact open to compromise,
and one pope, in what seems like a fit of absent-
mindedness, accepted the interesting idea of turning
the bishops into purely spiritual officers—a thing which
had no chance of being tolerated by the German epis-
copate. The pope possessed weapons—he could use
discontented magnates, or incite foreign powers, or
foment public opinion, against an emperor. Before
long, pope and emperor were presuming to depose one
another.
There can be little doubt that the assertion of the
independence of the
spiritual authority, and the result-
ing
conflict between “spiritual” and
“temporal,” were
amongst the factors that were to
give to Western his-
tory its remarkable dynamic
quality. The controversy
directed the thought of men to the question of
the
origin and basis of government, whether secular or
ecclesiastical,
and produced a literature that has little
parallel in the history of
Byzantine Christianity. At
times it led to a confrontation between the
theory or
the assumptions of the canon law and the principles
that lay
behind Roman Law. The fervor for political
theory in Europe in the
centuries from the time of
the Renaissance may owe something (just as
medieval
thought itself owed something) to the influence of the
ancient world. But many of the modern ideas rise more
directly out of the
politico-ecclesiastical controversies
of the Middle Ages. This point became
a great feature
in the historical thinking of Lord Acton, who summed
up the matter by saying that Saint Thomas Aquinas
had been “the
first Whig.”
In the age of the Reformation many of the medieval
patterns of thought are
still visible, whether in the
theory of the divine right of kings, or the
notion of
a contract between king and people, or the idea of
constitutional limitations on monarchical authority, or
the controversy
over tyrannicide. At a later period still,
it is possible to trace the
actual secularization of what
had once been politico-religious ideas.
Without what
under various forms was an epic conflict between the
secular authority and the spiritual, a Western Europe
under a predominant
religious faith might have
hardened into something like the Byzantine or
oriental
systems.
Gregory VII and the restored papacy stood for the
idea of a Christian
Commonwealth—not a “state” but
a
“religious society” existing for the glory and the
service of God. The whole was to be managed by a
secular arm and a
spiritual arm, and these were sup-
posed to
cooperate with one another. Often the two
did cooperate, the Church not
only offering its prayers
and its spiritual services—not merely
giving a vague
support to the whole order of things—but allying with
the monarch because, for example, it had an interest
in
preserving the larger territorial unit from disruption.
The ecclesiastics
might introduce the monarchy to
ideas of law, notions of property, the use
of written
deeds—techniques of an older civilization which
they
were in a position to remember, and perhaps to need
for
themselves. Monarchs in turn defended and
endowed the Church; and at a
desperate moment an
emperor had helped to produce that reformed papacy
which was to harass his successors. When the two
clashed, it was almost in
the logic of the medieval
system that the conflict should be long and that
the
spiritual arm should ultimately prevail, but only to its
own
detriment. Already, for Gregory VII, the pope
represented Christ, the real
governor of the world, and
it was for him to guide the destiny of the
“religious
society,” directing and coordinating its
larger purposes.
The most signal illustration of this in the latter
half
of the eleventh century was the way in which Gregory
VII and his
successor took up the idea of a Crusade
assuming that Rome should have the
role of inspirer
and director. At a time when monarchs were in revolt
against the Holy See, and Germany in particular with-
held its support, it was the pope, not the emperor, who
launched
the First Crusade (1096-99) and showed
himself the leader of Western
Europe.
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-
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-
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.
4. The Beginning of Decline.
However, in this
whole medieval order of things Christianity was
gravely entangled with the systems of the world, its
bishops, for example,
being great landholders and
feudal lords. Even if men in general had been
more
otherworldly, the conditions in the terrestrial sphere
itself
were bound to suffer changes as time went on.
Because even the
ecclesiastics (by the very character
of the situation) were not
sufficiently otherworldly, the
Church itself came under the operation of
some of the
laws which govern other religions—govern human
systems generally. In a sense it became the victim of
the remarkable
success that it had achieved in the
preceding period. To the upholders of
the existing
order of things, the changes that were brought about
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were
bound to appear as a
decline; and in certain respects
the medieval synthesis can be seen to be
breaking
down. But the story of religion—even the story of
the
state as essentially a “religious”
society—had by no
means come to its end. The downfall of the old
order
is difficult to disentangle from the interesting move-
ments that were reassembling the materials
and bring-
ing about the creation of a new one.
In some respects
the medieval period moved into what we call modern
times on its
own momentum, as a result of impulses
within itself. Amid much confusion,
we see deeper lines
of continuous development, as though the logic of
events were working itself out.
It was in the realm of thought—indeed, it was at
the heart of
scholasticism itself—that the most fateful
changes occurred. And
these changes were calculated
to affect the actual character of religion,
not merely
the relations between Christianity and the world. Saint
Thomas Aquinas, by his reexposition of Aristotelianism,
had provided
believers with a philosophy which ex-
plained
the cosmos and was crowned by a theology;
but the result had been to make
philosophy an autono-
mous affiar. Even while
he was at work there were
men who were more down-to-earth, more prepared
just
to hold their Aristotelianism neat; and perhaps a cer-
tain worldly-mindedness made them a danger not only
to an ecclesiastical system but also to religion itself.
Others who were
not worldly-minded or unbelieving
tended to argue their way behind the
tradition of
classical philosophy itself, and to question its
basis—to
doubt even the possibility of metaphysics. It
meant
denying the ability of the human mind to reach the
kind of
truths that were associated with “natural reli-
gion,” or to reason in any way about God.
Under the influence of William of Ockham a great
section of the academic
world went over to a system
which, without denying the revelation, cut away
the
forms of rationalization hitherto current, making reli-
gion a matter of pure fideistic acceptance. Even the
difference between right and wrong was removed from
the domain of
reason—it came to be held that a thing
was good because an
arbitrary God had decreed it so.
If scholasticism itself had emerged too
directly out of
a passion for logic, and had lost something by its devel-
opments in an abstract realm, too
remote from life and
from general culture, the fourteenth-century develop-
ments increased the gulf and helped
to make the whole
system curiously arid. Even the content of religious
thought came to be altered, for reflection was now
concentrated on the
absolute power of a God who was
beyond man's reason, and who, from a state
of uncon-
ditioned freedom, settled all
things by sheer arbitrary
decree. The will of God, the power of God,
became
the great theme, and the result was by no means the
same as
when the emphasis is placed on the thesis:
“God is
love.” Even in the discussion of human beings,
attention was
fixed on the role of man's will and that
of God's grace in the work of
salvation.
These preoccupations help to explain some of the
peculiar emphases and
developments in the sixteenth-
century
Reformation. In any case, the separation be-
tween faith and reason was bound to create difficulty—
unreal, God himself more remote—a situation which
could encourage secularism and religious indifference.
Perhaps more dramatic at the time, however, were
the changes in the
relationship between the Church
and the world, and even the appearance of a
tremen-
dous controversy concerning the
nature of the Church
itself.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the
papacy both presumed too much
on the success that
it had achieved, and discovered what it had lost
by
the discomfiture of its chief rival, the empire in
Germany.
Henceforward, it had to confront the rising
national monarchies without the
powerful assistance
which, ideally, should have come from the ancient
partnership between pope and emperor. In the bull
Unam Sanctam of 1302, Pope Boniface VIII
(1294-1303), relying on the assertions and on the victories
of his
predecessors, issued too high a challenge to
monarchs—claiming
too boldly the right to direct and
judge them even in the exercise of their
temporal
power. The resulting conflict, in which the French
government
accused him of appalling crimes and
demanded his trial before a general
council of the
Church, brought him to humiliation in 1303 at the
hands
of a body of desperadoes, and he died within
a few weeks after he had been
released.
In 1305, an archbishop of Bordeaux who was elected
as Pope Clement V proved
to be a creature of the
French king; and, besides creating many French
cardi-
nals, he took up his residence at
Avignon, which was
then just outside the frontiers of France. Owing
partly
to the political confusion of Italy, a return of the
papacy to
Rome proved impracticable for a long time.
Gregory XI went back there in
1377, but he died in
the following year and then the cardinals in Rome
elected a pope, but another was elected in Avignon.
Now, therefore, the
system reached its reductio ad
absurdum, two
successors of Saint Peter making con-
current
claims and exercising concurrent power. Noth-
ing could have been more injurious to the Church and
more damaging
to prestige than the existence for over
thirty years of the Great
Schism—some parts of Europe
attaching themselves to a pope in
Avignon, others to
a pope in Rome, with the further complication of
overlappings here and there, so that a diocese might
not be sure which of
two rival claimants was its duly
appointed bishop. There now arose the
question: What
means of rescue were open to a Church that seemed
to
have been struck at its very heart?
5. The Conciliar Movement.
It was natural that
there should be some tension in the Middle Ages
be-
tween the idea of the Church as the
entire community
of believers, collectively sustained and inspired by the
Holy Spirit, and the notion of a clerical hierarchy,
imposed
from above, and deriving a special authority
from outside the system, i.e.,
direct from Christ. It had
been noted that if Peter had received the power
of
“binding and loosing” (in Matthew 16:18-19)
this
particular prerogative had been extended after the
Resurrection
to all the Apostles (in John 20:22-23);
but though the effect of this was
to widen the basis
of authority in the Church, it did not in reality
override
the prevailing view that the bishop of Rome, as the
representative of Saint Peter, had the effective power
of government. The
term “Roman Church” was
ambiguous—it could
mean the local church of the city
of Rome but also it could signify the
entire congrega-
tion of the faithful. It
was the latter that was supposed
to be preserved against error, not in the
sense that
lapses here and there were impossible, but in the sense
that the Church in its entirety would never go astray—
there
would never be heresy in all its parts at a single
time.
Even this stress on the wide-ranging community of
believers, was not taken
to mean that the community
as such could carry on the work of government
without
the directing hand of the papacy; and those who glori-
fied General Councils of the Church
normally assumed
that the pope himself would actually summon these
bodies and lead them—that, indeed, his own authority
came to its
maximum when he worked through a
General Council. On the other hand, it was
possible
to consider that, though the church in Rome had played
a
distinguished part in the establishment and mainte-
nance of orthodoxy, the pope as a man might fall into
error; and
if he notoriously supported what had long
been regarded as heresy, his
authority would be ipso
facto at an end. It
came to be asserted that the same
would be true if he were publicly and
obviously guilty
of serious crime.
The possibility of such contingencies raised the
question of the part which
the College of Cardinals
or General Councils might have to play at the
moment
when the incapacity had to be declared. It has been
pointed out
that in canonist writers of about A.D. 1200
are to be found anticipations
of all the main assertions
of the Conciliar Movement. Yet this was the time
when
the papacy under Innocent III was making the highest
possible
claims and asserting that all other jurisdictions
in the Church were only a
derivation from Rome.
In the thirteenth century, however, the development
of the kind of canon law
which treated the Church
as a corporation tended to increase the possible
lever-
age of conciliar ideas. There now
appeared more of
the suggestion that a corporation is the source of
the
authority of its head, that all members of a corporation
should
take part in decisions which affect the whole
it lost its head, and could take the necessary measures
to rectify the default in the leadership. Such ideas were
able to develop at the very time when papal publicists,
for their part, were continuing the line of thought
which had brought the authority of Innocent III to
its height. Amongst writers hostile to the papacy the
idea arises not only that the cardinals could act on
behalf of the pope when he himself was defaulting in
some way, but also the idea that in serious matters
the pope should always act in consultation with the
cardinals—and moreover the idea that the cardinals
had the authority to summon a General Council.
In all this we find the insertion of what the modern
student would regard as
“constitutional” ideas into
canonist reflections on
Church government. The sup-
porters of the
Conciliar Movement at the beginning
of the fifteenth century could feel
that they were by
no means innovators—that, indeed, they were
follow-
ing principles with a long and
respectable ancestry,
principles essentially orthodox.
In any case, the Great Schism—the scandal of two
lines of
successive popes reigning contemporaneously
and dividing the
West—made it necessary to turn to
just that kind of thinking
which envisaged the Church's
power of self-rectification during a failure
in the su-
preme leadership. The Schism lasted
for nearly thirty
years, and, though almost all of the popes elected
during this period had sworn to resign if their depar-
ture would help the cause of unity, the promises
were
not kept. If either of the rival popes summoned a
General Council
it could only be a party affair and
the two colleges of cardinals failed in
their attempts
to persuade their respective popes to issue a joint
invitation to a Council. When in 1409 a Council was
called by cardinals at
Pisa, its legality was doubtful,
and though it pretended to depose the two
existing
holders of the papal office and secure the election of
a
third, the real effect of this was to make the situation
worse—there were now three claimants to the dignity
instead of
two. It is understandable if such an im-
passe
provoked much discontent with the general con-
dition of the Church, and stimulated a great deal of
thinking about
the position of both popes and General
Councils.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the
nation-states were now
becoming more important and
governments that had the choice of adhering to
one
pope rather than another acquired more power over
their national
churches. Their diplomacies (particularly
during the Hundred Years' War
between France and
England) affected their ecclesiastical loyalties
(the
English disliking a pope at Avignon, for example); and
when the
Emperor Sigismund combined with one of
the rival popes to summon the more imposing Council
of
Constance, it was through diplomacy conducted
with various national
governments that he secured a
broad basis for the assembly. This body
attacked the
papal problem in 1415, and began by deposing the
successor of the pope who had gained office as a result
of the Council of
Pisa—they struck at the very pope
who had joined Sigismund in
summoning the new
Council. The resignation of another claimant was
then
secured; and, though the pope at Avignon refused to
give way, the
diplomacy of Sigismund prevented his
having the support of reigning
monarchs.
The Great Schism was for practical purposes healed
and a new pope, Martin V
(1417-31), was appointed—a
man who, once in authority, opposed
the conciliarist
ideas then prevalent. The cry had gone up that a
General Council was superior to the pope and it was
decreed at Constance
that a Council should be sum-
moned at least
every ten years. There were some who
urged that even laymen should have a
place in such
a Council, which was being regarded as a repre-
sentative body. Another Council
which assembled at
Basel in 1431 refused to be dissolved at the
command
of another pope, and it brought absurdity to a higher
degree
than before, for it threatened a renewal of
schism by presuming to depose
the pope and to ap-
point another one. The
excesses of the radicals fright-
ened some of
the moderates into conservatism, how-
ever, and
in any case it was the pope rather than the
Council who had the power to
execute a policy ef-
fectively.
In 1439 a rival Council which the pope had sum-
moned to Ferrara decreed that a Council was not
superior to a pope;
and though a dwindling body went
on meeting at Basel, they came to terms in
1449,
abandoning their adhesion to the man whom they had
presumed to
appoint to the papal office. They had
humiliated a supreme pontiff and
compelled him to
treat with them after he had decreed their
dissolution;
but they brought the whole Conciliar movement to
a
miserable end.
6. The Transition to a New Order.
In the meantime
new forms of heresy had been arising, and they
gained
additional strength from the abuse that was being made
of such
things as indulgences, from the jealousy felt
toward ecclesiastical
property, and from national feel-
ing against
the intrusions of papal power into one
country and another. From about 1374
John Wycliffe
in England was preaching against the excessive wealth
of
the Church and claiming that the monarch should
decide how much of this
should be retained—a gospel
that brought him the patronage of a
powerful and
covetous nobility. He lost some of his humbler allies
when he attacked the problem of the eucharist, declar-
bread and wine retained their former substance. Em-
phasizing the absolute power of the will of God—a
form of emphasis which the influence of Saint
Augustine as well as contemporary movements in phi-
losophy encouraged—Wycliffe ran to predestinarian
views which were calculated to lessen the role of
church offices in the work of salvation. He encouraged
the reading of the Bible (and its translation into the
vernacular) because the Scriptures were of higher au-
thority than the traditions of the Church.
Some analogies to the later Protestantism are appar-
ent in all this; but the first Lancastrian monarch of
England,
Henry IV (1399-1413), desired the Church's
recognition of his title to the
throne of England, and
his parliament carried a new statute, requiring
the
burning of heretics—a statute which was severely exe-
cuted during the reign of his son. The
“Lollard” fol-
lowers of
Wycliffe, some of whom had tended to revo-
lutionary ideas, could survive only as ineffectual secret
heretics.
Partly under the influence of the English movement,
John Hus led a similar
revolt against ecclesiastical evils
in Bohemia, and, though he avoided some
of Wycliffe's
doctrinal innovations, he was burned in 1415 by the
Council of Constance, which wished to show that at
least it did not
tolerate heresy. Some of Hus's associates
came nearer to the ideas of
Wycliffe, and there
emerged a popular radical movement which attacked
monasticism, the adoration of saints, purgatory, indul-
gences, etc., on the ground that these things were
not
authorized by the actual words of Scripture. And here,
as in
England, a powerful and richly endowed Church,
rife with obvious abuses,
was challenged by a danger-
ous picture of
Apostolic Christianity—the concept that
the clergy should be
poor men leading a simple life
as they guarded their flocks.
In 1419 the Czechs revolted and their religious
grievances, which gave the
conflict at times something
of an apocalyptic character, combined with a
tremen-
dous national hatred against the
Germans, who had
acquired a strong position at court, in the
university
of Prague, and in the industry of the towns. Successive
campaigns against the rebels came to disaster, and
though the extremists
were defeated in 1434, an agree-
ment had to
be made with the moderates which put
the Bohemian church in a special
position (e.g., in
regard to the reception by the laity of communion
in
both kinds). Bohemia remained, indeed, a region of
potential
revolt, potential heresy.
It might have been argued that the fifteenth century
had a special need for
the Christian religion at its best,
since deep forces in society were
producing a great
secularization of life—producing indeed a
society that
increased the mundane claims on human beings. The
growth of
industry and commerce, the development
of high finance, the increasing
importance of a bour-
geois class, and the
blossoming of virtual city-states in
Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands
provided a new
dynamic for the secular activities of men. The
resulting
erosion of the traditional feudal forms of society was
bound
to produce disorder in the period of transition,
and the Church had tied
itself unduly to the older order
of things—the very pattern of
its organization ceased
to correspond with the systems that were
developing
in the world. The exile of the papacy in Avignon, the
ensuing Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement had
increased the tendency
of separate regions to look after
their local religious affairs, and the
national govern-
ments were growing in
strength and importance, legis-
lating
against papal interference or making their own
terms with the popes.
The principle of nationality was itself receiving
recognition, even in the
organization of General
Councils and universities. The Renaissance in Italy
and
the more effective recovery of the thought of antiquity,
assisted
a secularization which, however, had also been
showing itself in the
development of vernacular litera-
ture and
its advance to high artistic status. And the
secularization showed itself
within the great develop-
ment of the visual
arts, especially in Italy—perhaps
also in the tendency of some
scholastic writers to move
over to science, to problems of celestial
mechanics, for
example.
But all this—and the palpable abuses in the Church
itself—did not mean that Christianity was coming to
its terminus
or that there had been a serious decline
of religious faith as such. The
very revolts against the
Church were born of religious
zeal—themselves signs
of a questing kind of religion that gets
behind the
conventions and seeks the original fountain of the faith.
The interesting eruptions of spontaneous life are not
antireligious but are
more like a groping for fresh
adventures in religion, longings for an
almost noninsti-
tutional kind of
piety, as though it were felt necessary
to cut through the artificialities
and go direct to the
essential things. Most significant of all are the
devo-
tional movements, that press for
contemplation and
austerity, or seek a mystical apprehension of
Christ.
And the Imitation of Christ which has been
the inspi-
ration of both Protestants and
Catholics—written in
the mid-fifteenth century, and more widely
published
and translated than anything in Christianity except the
Bible—contains hardly a reference to the Church in
spite of its
devotion to the Eucharist. An interesting
feature of the new age is the
involvement of the laity
in the new religious movements, and the
association
of these with municipal life.
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