 |
4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he could only see that the thing was there because something had put it there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there. Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so—if Mind is the orderer, it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that is best for it'.[8]
It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was good'. And there is no doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in contemplating their goodness.
5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow—he does not say exactly how—influencing the structure of things in this world. But he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history—and therefore history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.
This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:
'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the Republic, 'as he appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned, for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real nature.' (Republic, 611.)
Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with no effect on the rest of the universe (Sophist, 248, 249); it is a living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as glorious as possible (Tim. 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.
None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be significant for him. He does not turn aside,—as some souls, intoxicated with the Divine, have done,—from this world altogether.
Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there what the universe really is (Republic, Book vi, fin.; vii, init.). The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end of the Republic. Now the Republic is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime importance to man and helps him to advance.
Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save it from utter destruction (Polit. 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of spatial and temporal matter (Theaet. 176 A).
It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another, Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its true home lies.
And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the experience of History, implies something of permanent value running through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing thing:—'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another thing—but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true 'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions, more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal, and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous, but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more, we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them, any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks to us most plainly of the eternal realities.
This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art, and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of perfect types.
Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does. Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God, a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world, Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the world's desire.[12]
Now this idea of effort—or of something analogous to effort—constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears, with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while the adherents of the other—the school that I would call the school of hope—believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit, imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia.'[13]
Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good, comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book The Art of Creation. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a man express himself. Man, he says,
has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will again spring into life and expression.[15]
Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]
He would not have gone so far as to talk about the Will of a tree, but he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best, only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in the bakehouse too'.[17]
Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18] Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point of view of modern science.
And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other, unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however, they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities, say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]
As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy. The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas, do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]
In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the 'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.
Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to take.
He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.
But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower form may itself have been preceded by a higher.
Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles, alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall the sad passage in Plato's Laws (676) referring to the numberless nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the vegetable altogether.
Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles, we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and beautiful.
Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting perfection, and thus woman is man manque. On these lines of thought it is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers. This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests, cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.
But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature, finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State, that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good, and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.
For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we should always treat each man as an end in himself.
Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle, we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,—and all are more or less good,—tends to express some distinct aspect of a perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or in things, with reverence and rejoicing.
The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality, and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature, self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one comprehensive and glorious task.
This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank. Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and even with them they doubt of success.
Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable. Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough for his great task.
All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here', Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your children.'
In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization, simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'
And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the degeneration of the Persian Empire—once so magnificent and mighty.
This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it, for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them, as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered. Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta, and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.
The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end, however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had passed and their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after sympathy grew, hope returned.
For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic gave way to the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest, the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason now why the glorious life that Hellenism conceived for a few should not lie open to all men.
Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a united Europe.
That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women, make progress together in the common task.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
G. L. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life.
Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics.
Edited by Evelyn Abbott, Hellenica.
Bury, History of Greece.
Davies and Vaughan, Plato's Republic.
Welldon, Aristotle's Politics.
Peters, Aristotle's Ethics.
Bridges, The Spirit of Man.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] G. H. Perris, History of War and Peace, p. 54.
[7] 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. III.
[8] The Spirit of Man, 40; Phaedo, 96.
[9] The Spirit of Man, 16; Phaedo, 66.
[10] Natural Religion, part ii, c. 5.
[11] De An. ii. 4, 415, p. 35.
[12] The Spirit of Man, 39; Aristotle, Met. 10.
[13] T. W. Rolleston, Parallel Paths.
[14] Phys. ii. 8, 198 16-34.
[15] Pp. 28-9.
[16] Phys. ii, c. I.
[17] De Part. An., Bk. i, c. 5.
[18] Phys. ii. I, init.
[19] De Anima, init.
[20] Meteor, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's Aristotle, vol. i, fin.
[21] Polit. 1253 a; Eth. 1162 a.
[22] Gen. An. ii. 3. 737.
IV
PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A. J. CARLYLE
There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the modern world.
The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.
Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance; and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the conceptions of the Romantic revival.
There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge; they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions of new aspects of truth.
The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.
It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past, and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art—the half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons—and all in ruins. Indeed, the Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous, that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.
What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost, but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin form (miles), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant, often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but on the whole the character of human life was not very different.
What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world? Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember, however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.
Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire, and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world. However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently, the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the Barbarian races themselves.
With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its elements, and their development, especially during the period from the end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society, with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth, and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.
* * * * *
I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic superstition that the Middle Ages were specifically religious, and yet it is quite true that the first aspect of mediaeval life which compels our attention is exactly the development of the sense of the significance of the spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of the men of the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense their achievement; but not as contradicting the characteristic developments of the Hellenic civilization, but rather as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a singular superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in spiritual insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's lecture, as serving to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.
The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the 'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the children of God and capable of communion with Him.
It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of the other within its proper sphere.
It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.
It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem as though there were no place left for the freedom of the individual judgement and conscience. And yet that was not the case. The theory of excommunication that is set out in the canonical literature of the Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and imperfectly understood. It was the greatest and most masterful of the Popes, Innocent III, who laid down in memorable phrases which are embodied in the great collection of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it would be a mortal sin to do or to leave undone some action, he must follow his own conscience even against the command of the authorities of the Church, and must submit patiently to Church censures and even excommunication; for it may well happen that the Church may condemn him whom God approves, or approve him whom God condemns.[24] This is no isolated or exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is constantly laid down in the canonical literature.[25] It is, I think, profoundly true to say that when men at last revolted against what seemed to them the exaggerated claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only asserting and carrying out its one most vital principle, the principle of the independence or autonomy of the spiritual life; the modern world is only fulfilling the Middle Ages.
I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the Middle Ages, with which we must deal.
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And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.
We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St. Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings', is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have, indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may have made, they were, with rare exceptions, clear that there was no legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for justice.
It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of Thomas a Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law, while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still current among more ignorant persons—I have even heard some theologians fall into the mistake—that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but because they were only slowly working out the organization through which these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the embodiment of justice.
It is again out of this principle that there arose another great conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service, but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay him.[29]
These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St. Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman jurists of Bologna, like Azo.
These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages, and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the control of the common affairs of the community by means of the representation of the community. For it should be more clearly understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men—to whom even yet the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct—it was these men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized government has been built up.
There is, however, yet another aspect of the development of political civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr. Rashdall's great work on The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought. Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the history and character of the intellectual movement which the Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the intellectual movements of the twelfth century.
The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine, but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization, and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable passion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this spontaneous passion which produced the universities.
The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that they were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew men from every quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.
In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in their eagerness to learn, were of every class and condition, rich and poor, noble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but neither poverty nor riches could destroy their noble thirst for knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities were not local or national institutions, but were made up of a cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge, by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.
But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature, philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was expected to know whatever there was to know.
And this means—what is strangely often forgotten—that the studies of the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature of antiquity that in works like the Policraticus he can hardly write two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the thirteenth century.
It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not, to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his Sic et Non is the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.
It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement, criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it. The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his Decretum, the first great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic treatises, like the Suma Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, were constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.
I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.
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We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning, which is of the first importance.
The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work. For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.
Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments, characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.
There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the Romance of the Rose. It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world—the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the Tristan and Iseult of Thomas or Beroul—but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in Jean Bodel's Jeu de St. Nicholas, in Adam de la Halle's Jeu de la Feuillee and Robin et Marion, and in dramas like the Empress of Rome or the Otho. Whatever criticism we might want to make on mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and of one mood.
It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely imitative.
It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting, and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St. Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and Westminster Abbey.
It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure lost this.
* * * * *
The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order. The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living political civilization.
And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.
It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages they taught men love as well as obedience.
Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way. Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.
A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library).
Lord Bryce, History of Roman Empire.
Rashdall, Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages.
R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought.
Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages.
W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Cf. Cicero, De Legibus, i. 10-12; and Seneca, De Beneficiis, iii. 18.
[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.
[25] Cf. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.
[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, iv. 1.
[27] Cf. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus, i. 8, 5.
[28] Cf. Manegold, Ad Gebehardum, c. XXX.
[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.
[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus, introduction.
[31] Cf. Gratian, Decretum, D. iv. c. 3.
V
PROGRESS IN RELIGION
BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUeGEL
The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great, abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit—as possibly the most baffling of facts—that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life—Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious perception as may still remain in this particular soul.
I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and present Religion which concern the question of religious 'Progressiveness'.
I
I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.
First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]
And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'[33]
Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought—constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]
Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two. But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration, in which our experiences, although always more or less successive, interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his Essai sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience, gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man. Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to be of importance for man's full awakening—even ethical and spiritual. Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests, indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true'—these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy, Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or Science, of a special but true kind.
Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature. The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work, Christoph Sigwart's Logik. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the real right', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,' as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is truly thinkable.'[39]
And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a doctrinaire position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in assuming that consciousness contains nothing but limits and conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]
II
Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.
1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary in clearness, importance, and richness of content.
The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah (say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to 1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of the laws of the Book of the Covenant (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and, again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long, deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses, as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my banner'—the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15); and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness—of the right and the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands—as when Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side' (Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5). Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any other god—certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here—the vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]
The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860 B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters.
The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).
And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble 'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the Pentateuch—the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)—appear to have been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally—the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix). There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity, when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the Assyrian by the way by which he came—all which actually happens as thus predicted (chap. xxxvii). |
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