The Unity of Civilization

unity, as we have seen, was essentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we may almost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church, however univers

ergy from all secular power. The one aim is a means to the other: the pope cannot be universal primate, unless the clergy he controls are free from secular control; and the clergy cannot be free from secular control, unless the universal primacy of the papacy effects their liberation. Gregorianism wins a great if not a thorough triumph. It establishes the theory, and in a very large measure the practice, of ecclesiastical unity. The days of the Landeskirche are numbered: the days of the Church Universal under the universal primacy of Rome are begun. But when the universality of the Church has once been established in poin

nt a theocracy, and the bull of Boniface VIII, by which he claimed that every human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff, was its necessary outcome. But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was never greatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end that mattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformity with divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembers the plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaeval Church. The seven sacraments had become the core of her organization. Central among the seven stood the sacrament of the Mass, in which bread and wine were transubstantiated into the divine body and blood of our Lord. By that sacrament men could touch God; and b

shment-speaking first of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace; then of the world of the commons, and

and directing it to her own ends. So arose chivalry, which, like most of the institutions of the Middle Ages, was the invention of the Church. Chivalry was the consecration of the fighting instinct to the defence of the widow, the fatherless, and the oppressed; and by the beginning of the eleventh century liturgies already contain the form of religious service by which neophytes were initiated into knighthood. This early and religious form of chivalry (there was a later and lay form, invented by troubadour and trouvère, which was chiefly concerned with the rules for the loves of knights and ladies) culminated in the Crusades. In the Crusades we touch perhaps the most typical expression of the mediaeval spirit. Here we may see the clergy moulding into conformi

r jurisdiction, to control both by the ambit of his power.'[18] Such ampler jurisdiction, which might indeed be claimed for the emperor, but which he had never the power to exercise, was both claimed and exercised by the papacy. The papacy, which sought to enforce the Christian canon of conduct in every reach of life and every sphere of activity, would never admit that disputes between sovereign princes lay outside the rule of that canon. Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim to arbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any such admission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct all Christian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, to coerce them by ecclesiastical censure. A

ogous to the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way of testing rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courts of law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged to the clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, it follows, first, that it is a legal procedure which needs a high

oductive of any new value-it necessarily follows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use of borrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and all acquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done. This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law: In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum. Once more, therefore, and once more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Church seeking to enforce the unity of the Christian principle and to reduce the Many to the One. In the same way, and from the same motive, that private war was to be banished from the feudal class in the country, competition-the private war of commerce-was to be eliminated from the trading classes in the towns. Nor was the attack on competition, any more than the attack on war, so much of a forlorn hope as it m

dal classes. Towns became trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits of lay life. A mediaeval town-with its trade and commerce regulated, however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council acting as trust

hed from sacerdotium by mediaeval writers; but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle, and for the same object-ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Here, as elsewhere, the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church mou

knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects; and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed to the Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitude of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. The logic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the most comfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelation committed to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours the methods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine of t

the product of great personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction. Men saw the world sub specie unitatis; and its kaleidoscopic variety was insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of their vision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmament declared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willing servant of Christianity; and bestiaria moralizata were written to show how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type, of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types

ges and all their works; and we may prefer a single Opus of Roger Bacon to the whole of the Summa of St. Thomas. But it is necessary to judge an age which was destitute of natural science by some other criterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that the Middle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored the Particular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkers knew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those of Plato, they were no