CHAP. VII. Mediaeval theories. to the idea, and strive through long ages to stem the irresistible time-current, fondly believing that they were breasting it even while it was sweeping them ever faster and faster away from the old order into a region of new thoughts, new feelings, new forms of life. Not till the days of the Renaissance and the Reformation was the illusion dispelled. The explanation is to be found in the beliefs which filled the human mind during these centuries. To describe those beliefs concisely and yet faithfully is difficult, for although some of their salient features remained substantially the same from the days of St. Augustine almost to the days of Erasmus, no single epoch in that long series of generations can be taken as shewing them in their full and typical completeness. The system of ideas which created and sustained the Holy Empire was in some of its aspects, or some of its parts, constantly growing, in other aspects and other parts constantly decaying, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, the relative prominence of its cardinal doctrines varying from age to age. But, just as the painter who sees the evershifting lights and shades play over the face of a wide landscape faster than his brush can place them on the canvas, in despair at representing their exact position at any single moment, contents himself with painting the effects that are broadest and most permanent, and at giving rather the impression which the scene makes on him than every detail of the scene itself, so here the best and indeed the only practicable course seems to be that of setting forth. in its most self-consistent form the body of ideas and beliefs on which the Empire rested, although this form may not be exactly that which they can be asserted to have worn in any one century, and although the illustrations adduced may have to be taken sometimes from earlier, sometimes from later writers. As the fundamental doc trines were in their essence the same during the whole CHAP. VII. of the Middle Ages, such a general description as is here attempted may, mutatis mutandis, serve true for the tenth as well as for the fourteenth century. Feu The Middle Ages were, as compared with the ages that preceded and the ages that followed, essentially unpolitical. Ideas as familiar to the commonwealths of antiquity as to ourselves, ideas of the common good as the object of the State, of the rights of the people, of the comparative merits of different forms of government, were to those generations, though such ideas often found an unconscious expression in practical expedients, in their speculative form little known, and to most men incomprehensible. dalism was the one great secular institution to which those times gave birth, and feudalism was a social and a legal system, only indirectly and by consequence a political one. Yet the human mind, so far from being idle, was in certain directions never more active; nor was it possible for it to remain without general conceptions regarding the relation of men to each other in this world. Such conceptions were neither made an expression of the actual present condition of things nor scientifically determined by an induction from the past; they were partly inherited from the imperial scheme of law and government that had preceded, partly evolved from the principles of that metaphysical theology which was ripening into scholasticism. Now the two great ideas which expiring antiquity bequeathed to the ages that followed were those of a WorldMonarchy and a World-Religion. Religion. Before that great movement towards assimilation which The Worldbegan with the Hellenization of the East and was completed by the Western and Northern as well as the East a Political thought, in the modern sense of the word, began to re-emerge under the influence of Aristotle in the later half of the thirteenth century. CHAP. VII. ern conquests of Rome, men, with little knowledge of each other, with no experience of wide political union," had held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them a matter purely local and national; and as there were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, gods of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of another country who worshipped other deities as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the East, frequently shew themselves in the early records of Greece and Italy: in Homer the hero who wanders over the unfruitful sea glories in sacking the cities of the stranger; the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner and an enemy: the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China, are only more vehement expressions of the belief which made Athenian philosophers look on a state of war between Greeks and barbarians as natural, and defend slavery on the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races that serve. The Roman dominion giving to many nations a common speech and law, smote this feeling on its political side; Christianity more effectually b Empires like the Persian did nothing to assimilate the subject races, who retained their own laws and customs, sometimes their own princes, and were bound only to serve in the armies and fill the treasury of the Great King. See I Kings xx. 23, with which compare 2 Kings xvii. 26. d Od. iii. 72: ἢ μαψιδίως ἀλάλησθε, οἷά τε ληϊστῆρες, ὑπεὶρ ἄλα, τοίτ ̓ ἀλόωνται ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, κακὸν ἀλλοδαποῖσι φέροντες; Cf. Od. ix. 39; Il. v. 214 åλλóтpios pús; and the Hymn to the Pythian e Plato, in the beginning of the Laws, represents it as natural between all states: πόλεμος φύσει ὑπάρχει πρὸς ἁπάσας τὰς πόλεις. Even Aristotle deems slavery to be based on a natural distinction, though before his time the orator Alcidamas had said, οὐδένα δοῦλον ἡ φύσις πεποίηκεν. banished it from the soul by substituting for the variety CHAP. VII. of local pantheons the belief in One God, before whom all men are equal.' World It is on religion that the inmost and deepest life of a Coincide nation rests. Because divinity was divided, humanity had with the been divided likewise; the doctrine of the unity of God Empire. now enforced the unity of man, who had been created in His image. The first lesson of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom suspicion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, designed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold polytheisms of the older world, exactly as the universal sway of the Caesars was contrasted with the innumerable kingdoms and city republics that had gone before it. The analogy of the two movements made them appear parts of one great world-movement towards unity: the coincidence of their boundaries, which had begun before Constantine, lasted long enough after him to associate them indissolubly together, and make the names of Roman and Christian convertible." and the Uni versal Men who were already disposed (for reasons set forth World-State above) to believe the Roman Empire to be eternal, came, under influences of far greater power, to believe the Church, Church. founded by the ever-living Son and guided by the everpresent Spirit of God, to be also eternal. Seeing the two institutions allied and conterminous, they took their alliance and interdependence to be equally eternal; and went See especially Acts xvii. 26; Gal. iii. 28; Eph. ii. 11 sqq., iv. 3-6; Col. iii. II. Romanos enim vocitant homines nostrae religionis,' says Gregory of Tours. In the early Middle Ages, 'Pwuaîo is occasionally used to mean Christians, as opposed to "EXλnves, heathens. h See p. 12, ante. CHAP. VII. Preservation of the unity of the Church. on for centuries believing in the necessary existence of the Roman Empire, because they believed in its necessary union with the Catholic Church. Oecumenical councils, where the whole spiritual body gathered itself from every part of the temporal realm under the presidency of the temporal head, presented the most visible and impressive examples of the connection of the World-Church and the World-State. The language of civil government was, throughout the West, that of the sacred writings and of worship; the greatest mind of his generation consoled the faithful for the fall of their earthly commonwealth Rome, by describing to them its successor and representative, the 'city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.'1 Of these two parallel unities, that of the political and that of the religious society, meeting in the higher unity of all Christians, which may be indifferently called Catholicism or Romanism (since in that day those words would have had the same meaning), that unity only which had been entrusted to the keeping of the Church survived the storms of the fifth century. Many reasons may be assigned for the firmness with which she clung to it. Seeing one institution after another falling to pieces around her, seeing how countries and cities were being severed from each other by the irruption of strange tribes and the increasing difficulty of communication, she strove to save religious fellowship by strengthening the ecclesiastical organization, i Augustine, in the De Civitate Dei. His influence, great through all the Middle Ages, was greater on no one than on Charles. Delectabatur et libris sancti Augustini, praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.' - Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 24. One can imagine the impression which such a chapter as that on the true happiness of a Christian Emperor (Book v, chap. 24) would make upon a pious and susceptible mind. It is hardly too much to say that the Holy Empire was built upon the foundation of the De Civitate Dei. |