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Christopher Dawson: Religion And The Rise Of Western Culture

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CONTENTS

I. Introduction: The Significance of the

Western Development 11

II. The Religious Origins of Western Culture:

The Church and the Barbarians 26

III. The Monks of the West and the Formation

of the Western Tradition 44

IV. The Barbarians and the Christian Kingdom 67

V. The Second Dark Age and the Conversion

of the North 84

VI. The Byzantine Tradition and the Con-version of Eastern Europe 101

VII. The Reform of the Church in the Eleventh

Century and the Medieval Papacy 120

fill. The Feudal World: Chivalry and the

Courtly Culture 140

IX. The Medieval City: Commune and Gild 161

X. The Medieval City: School and University 181

XI. The Religious Crisis of Medieval Culture:

The Thirteenth Century 199

XII. Conclusion: Medieval Religion and Popular

Culture 218

Appendix: Notes on Famous Medieval Art 225

Index 231

Chapter I

Introduction: The Significanceof the Western Development

In my previous series of lectures I abstained as far as pos-sible from dealing with the history of Christian culture, notbecause this lies outside the scope of the Gifford Lectures,but because it is the culture to which we all in some sensebelong, and therefore it is impossible for us to study it inthe same way as the cultures of the remote past which wecan see only through the opaque medium of archaeologyor the cultures of the non-European world which we haveto understand from the outside and from a distance. Thisinvolves a difference in the quality of our knowledge whichmay almost be compared to the difference between the as-tronomer's knowledge of another planet and the geogra-pher’s knowledge of the earth on which we live. There isnot only a far greater mass of material available for thestudy of Western culture than for that of any other; butour knowledge is also more intimate and internal. Westernculture has been the atmosphere we breathe and the lifewe live: it is our own way of life and the way of life ofour ancestors; and therefore we know it not merely by docu-ments and monuments, but from our personal experience.

Hence any study of religion which ignores and leaves onone side the accumulated experience of the Christian pastand looks exclusively to the remote and partially incompre-hensible evidence derived from the study of alien religioustraditions or even to our own abstract notions of the natureof religion and the conditions of rdigious knowledge isbound to be not merely incomplete but insubstantial andunreal. And this is most of all the case when we are consid-

ering, as in these lectures, the problem of Religion and Cul-ture-the intricate and far-reaching network of relationsthat unite the social way of life with the spiritual beliefsand values, which are accepted by society as the ultimatelaws of life and the ultimate standards of individual andsocial behaviour; for these relations can only be studied inthe concrete, in their total historical reality. The greatworld religions are, as it were, great rivers of sacred tradi-tion which flow down through the ages and through chang-ing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize.But as a rule we cannot trace them to their source, whichis lost in unexplored tracks of the remote past. It is rareindeed to find a culture in which the whole course of thisreligious development can be traced from beginning to endin the full light of history. But the history of Christendomis an outstanding exception to this tendency. We know thehistorical environment in which Christianity first arose: wepossess the letters of the founders of the Churches to thefirst Christian communities in Europe, and we can tracein detail the successive stages by which the new religionpenetrated the West

Thenceforward, at least during the last sixteen centuries,the mass of material available for study is so huge that itexceeds the capacity of the individual mind to grasp it.

Consequently the study of Western religion and West-ern culture is difficult from the opposite reason to thatwhich renders the study of prehistoric and ancient orientalreligions difficult: because we know too much rather thantoo little—because the vast field of study has had to bedivided among a number of different- sciences, each ofwhich is further subdivided into specialized branches ofstudy which in turn become autonomous fields of study.

But while this process of specialization has increased ourknowledge of almost every aspect of history, it has had anunfortunate influence on the study with which we are con-cerned, since it has tended to separate and divide the de-ments that we have to unite and bring together. On theone side, the scientific historian has concentrated his re-searches on the criticism of sources and documents; on theother, the student of Christianity has devoted himself to

the history of dogma and ecclesiastical institutions, withthe result that we have a number of highly developed sepa-rate studies—political history, constitutional history, andeconomic history, on the one side, and ecclesiastical his-tory, the history of dogma, and liturgiology on the other.But the vital subject of the creative interaction of religionand culture in the life of Western society has been left outand almost forgotten, since from its nature it has no placein the organized scheme of specialized disciplines. It hasbeen left to the amateur and to the man of letters. It isonly thanks to some exceptional foundation like that of theGifford Lectures that it is possible to find an opportunityto bring it into relation with academic studies.

But meanwhile, outside the academic world, new socialforces have been at work which have used history, or aparticular version of history, for social ends, as a means tochange men’s lives and actions. And the rise of these newpolitical ideologies and ideological theories of history hasshown that the development of scientific specialism has inno way lessened man’s need for an historical faith, an in-terpretation of contemporary culture in terms of socialprocesses and spiritual ends, whether these ends are definedin religious or secular formulae. This conflict of ideologies,the Marxian doctrine of historical materialism and the at-tempt of the new totalitarian states to create historicalmyths as a psychological basis of social unity, have all madeus realize that history does not consist in the laborious ac-cumulation of facts, but has a direct bearing on the fateof modem society. To vote in an election or a plebisciteto-day has ceased in many European countries to be apurely political action. It has become an affirmation offaith in a particular social philosophy and a theory of his-tory; a decision between two or three mutually exclusiveforms of civilization. I do not say this is a good thing; onthe contrary, it means that history and social philosophyare being distorted and debased by political propagandaand party feeling. Nevertheless much the same thing hap-pened in the past in the sphere of religion, and yet theseages of religious controversy were also ages of high religiousachievement.

This transportation of the ultimate problems of historyand culture from the study to the market-place and thehustings is not the result of any trahison des clercs, but isthe inevitable result of the awakening of public opinionto their significance and relevance. And it is of vital im-portance that the gap between the popular political inter-ests in these questions and the scientific and philosophicstudy of them should not be too wide. The increasingspecialization of modem higher studies creates a real dan-ger in this respect, so that a situation may conceivably arisein which the specialist exists solely to provide expert adviceto the politician and the journalist, and no one is left tocriticize the official ideology which is imposed on the com-munity not so much by deliberate propaganda as by thebureaucratic control of education, information and pub-licity.

It would be a strange fatality if the great revolution bywhich Western man has subdued nature to his purposesshould end in the loss of his own spiritual freedom, butthis might well happen if an increasing technical controlof the state over the life and thought of its members shouldcoincide with a qualitative decline in the standards of ourculture. An ideology in the modem sense of the word isvery different from a faith, although it is intended to ful-fil the same sociological functions. It is the work of man,an instrument by which the conscious political will at-tempts to mould the social tradition to its purpose. Butfaith looks beyond the world of man and his works; it in-troduces man to a higher and more universal range ofreality than the finite and temporal world to which thestate and the economic order belong. And thereby it in-troduces into human life an dement of spiritual freedomwhich may have a creative and transforming influence onman’s social culture and historical destiny as well as on hisinner personal experience. If therefore we study a cultureas a whole, we shall find there is an intimate rdation be-tween its religious faith and its social achievement. Evena religion which is explicitly other-worldly and appears todeny all the values and standards of human society may,nevertheless, exert a dynamic influence on culture and pro-

vide the driving forces in movements of social change.“Religion is the key of history,” said Lord Acton, andto-day, when we realize the tremendous influence of theunconscious on human behaviour and the power of re-ligion to bind and loose these hidden forces, Acton’s say-ing has acquired a wider meaning than he realized.

It is true that this factor does not seem to play a largepart in the history of modem civilization. The greatchanges that have transformed the conditions of humanlife in every continent and have gone a long way towardsthe creation of a single world society seem at first sight tobe the result of purely secular and economic causes. Yetnone of these causes seems adequate to explain the magni-tude of the European achievement.

How did it come about that a small group of peoples inWestern Europe should in a relatively short space of timeacquire the power to transform the world and to emanci-pate themselves from man’s age-long dependence on theforces of nature? In the past this miraculous achievementwas explained as the manifestation of a universal Law ofProgress which governed the universe and led mankind byinevitable stages from apehood to perfection. To-day suchtheories are no longer acceptable, since we have come tosee how much they depend on an irrational optimismwhich was part of the phenomenon they attempted to ex-plain. Instead we now tend to ask ourselves what were thefactors in European culture which explain the peculiarachievement of Western man? or to use the brutal and ex-pressive American phrase, “What makes him tick?” Butwhen we reach this point we shall find the religious factordoes have a very important bearing upon the question.

For as I wrote eighteen years ago: “Why is it that Europealone among the civilizations of the world has been con-tinually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritualunrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging lawof social tradition which rules the oriental cultures? It isbecause its religious ideal has not been die worship of time-less and changeless perfection but a spirit that strives toincorporate itself in humanity and to change the world.In the West the spiritual power has not been immobilized

in a sacred social order like the Confucian state in Chinaand the Indian caste system. It has acquired social freedomand autonomy and consequently its activity has not beenconfined to the religious sphere but has had far-reachingeffects on every aspect of social and intellectual life.

"These secondary results are not necessarily of religiousor moral value from the Christian point of view—but thefact remains that they are secondary to and dependent onthe existence of a spiritual force without which they eitherwould not have been or would have been utterly different.

"This is true of the humanist culture in spite of thesecularism and naturalism which seem so characteristic ofit. The more one studies the origins of humanism, themore one is brought to recognize the existence of an ele-ment which is not only spiritual but definitely Christian.

"It may be objected that this is only one and not themost important aspect of the Humanist movement. Buteven the purdy naturalistic achievements of the Renais-sance were dependent on its Christian antecedents. Hu-manism was, it is true, a return to nature, a rediscovery ofman and the natural world. But the author of the discovery,the active principle in the change was not the natural man;it was Christian man—the human type that had been pro-duced by ten centuries of spiritual disdpline and inten-sive cultivation of the inner life. The great men of theRenaissance were spiritual men even when they were mostdeeply immersed in the temporal order. It was from theaccumulated resources of their Christian past that they ac-quired the energy to conquer the material world and tocreate the new spiritual culture.”1

Now what I said here about the origins of the Humanistculture seems to me to be equally true of the age of theEnlightenment and the nineteenth century, when Westernculture conquered and transformed the world. It is easyenough to present the history of this European expansionas a process of imperialistic aggression and economic ex-ploitation. But aggression and exploitation are nothing newin world history, and if they suffice to explain the European

1 From Christianity and the New Age, pp. 94-96 (1931).

achievement; it might have been realized hundreds orthousands of years earlier by any of the world empires thathave successively held the stage of history.

The peculiar achievement of Western culture in modemtimes is due to a new element which was not present in theolder type of imperialism.

For, side by side with the natural aggressiveness and thelust for power and wealth which are so evident in Euro-pean history, there were also new spiritual forces drivingWestern man towards a new destiny. The activity of theWestern mind, which manifested itself alike in scientificand technical invention as well as in geographical discovery,was not the natural inheritance of a particular biologicaltype; it was the result of a long process of education whichgradually changed the orientation of human thought andenlarged the possibilities of social action. In this processthe vital factor was not the aggressive power of conquerorsand capitalists, but the widening of the capacity of humanintelligence and the development of new types of creativegenius and ability.

The other great world cultures realized their own syn-thesis between religion and life and then maintained theirsacred order unchanged for centuries and millennia. ButWestern civilization has been the great ferment of changein the world, because the changing of the world became anintegral part of its cultural ideal. Centuries before theachievements of modem science and technology Westernman had conceived the idea of a magna instauratio of thesciences which would open new ways for human under-standing and change the fortunes of the human race.

Nor was this the unique vision of a solitary genius. Wecan see to-day that Francis Bacon was much nearer to theMiddle Ages in his thought than Macaulay and his genera-tion believed; indeed in some respects his thought is nearerto that of his namesake Roger Bacon than to that of Gali-leo. For it was Roger Bacon who first conceived the idea ofa total synthesis of scientific and philosophic knowledgewhich would enlarge the bounds of human life and giveChristian civilization power to unite the world.

But with Roger Bacon we find ourselves back in the full

stream of medieval culture—a culture which was as com-pletely dominated by religious beliefs and embodied inreligious institutions as any of the great religious cultures ofthe Eastern world. And ibis medieval culture was thematrix in which the Western type was formed and theultimate source of the new forces that have moved andtransformed the world. The older school of "enlightened"rationalist historians dismissed the thousand years of me-dieval history as an age of intellectual darkness and socialstagnation—an aimless wandering in the wilderness be-tween tiie old world of classical culture and the PromisedLand of modem Enlightenment and Liberty. But thanksto the disinterested work of the historians of the last cen-tury and a half, we have now come to understand thatthese centuries were ages of intense social and spiritualactivity and often of violent conflict and revolutionarychange. From Cassiodorus and Bede to Erasmus and Co-pernicus the tradition of thought was never completely in-terrupted; so that we can follow the sequence of culturewithout a break from the fall of the Roman Empire in theWest to the age of the Renaissance.

No doubt it is easy to see how the Humanist or rational-ist notion of the Dark Ages arose. From the economic pointof view the early Middle Ages were indeed a period ofretrogression and stagnation; there were long periods inwhich commercial activity was at a standstill and city lifehad almost disappeared.

From the political point of view there were times inwhich the state was reduced almost to vanishing point andthe classical tradition of citizenship and public law seemedto be extinguished. Even from the intellectual point of viewthe scientific achievements of the ancient world were for-gotten for centuries and the standard of literary culturewas often rudimentary. Yet in spite of all this, Westernculture preserved a spiritual energy which was independentof political power or economic prosperity. Even in the dark-est periods of the Middle Ages this dynamic principle con-tinued to operate. For what distinguishes Western culturefrom the other world civilizations is its missionary char-acter—its transmission horn one people to another in a con-

tinuous series of spiritual movements. Christianity firstentered Western Europe as a missionary movement whichoriginated in the Hellenistic cities of the Levant, and forcenturies the men from the East—Paul, Irenaeus, Athana-sius, Cassian, Theodore of Tarsus, and the Greek andSyrian Popes of the eighth century—played a leading partin laying the foundations of Western Christianity. In theage which followed the fall of the Empire, this process oftransmission was continued, by the Christians of the West-ern provinces towards the barbarian peoples, as we see inSt. Patrick's mission to Ireland, St. Amand's evangelizationof Belgium and above all in the epoch-making work ofGregory the Great for the conversion of England.

Up to this point the spread of Christian culture in theWest followed the normal course of expansion from Eastto West—from the old centres of higher culture towardsthe younger and less civilized peoples and lands. But fromthe sixth century this process is reversed by a new move-ment of missionary activity passing from the West to East,from the new Christian peoples of Ireland and England tothe Continent—a movement which was not confined to theconversion of Dutch and German pagans, but which alsoled to the reform of the Frankish Church and the revivalof education and classical learning. This marks a new de-parture in the history of civilization, since it involved adualism between cultural leadership and political powerwhich distinguishes Western culture from that of theByzantine world where the political centre continued to bethe centre of culture, as it was also for the most part in theolder oriental societies.

This independence of cultural leadership and politicalpower was one of the main factors that produced the free-dom and the dynamic activity of Western culture. ForEuropean history is the history of a series of renaissances—of spiritual and intellectual revivals which arose independ-ently, usually under religious influences, and were trans-mitted by a spontaneous process of free communication.In the earlier Middle Ages the chief organ of this processof transmission was the monastic order and its motive forcewas the quest for individual perfection or salvation. It was

this motive which led Columba to Scotland and Columbanto Burgundy and Boniface to Germany, and in each case thespiritual initiative of the individual became embodied ina corporate institution which in its turn became the centreof a new movement of transmission, like the movementfrom Iona to Lindisfame and the creation of a new Chris-tian culture in Northumbria, the reform of Gallic monas-ticism which proceeded from Columban’s foundation atLuxeuil, and the influence of the Anglo-Saxon foundationof Fulda on Christian culture in Germany.

We find a similar process at work in later periods of theMiddle Ages, e.g. in the influence of the monastic reform-ers of Burgundy and Lorraine Qn the reform of the Churchin the tenth and eleventh centuries, or in the work of theItalians in Normandy, where a succession of monasticleaders from Northern Italy—William of Volpiano, John ofFecamp, Lanfianc of Bee and Anselm of Canterbury-raised Normandy from a semi-barbaric condition to a posi-tion of intellectual leadership in North-Western Europe.But during the later centuries of the Middle Ages the vitalmovement of culture was by no means confined to monasticlife. It was represented in every field of social and intel-lectual activity, from the economic activity of communeand gild up to the abstract level of science and meta-physics. Everywhere we find the same rapid and spontane-ous transmission of influences from one end of WesternEurope to the other; everywhere we see the co-operation ofmen and movements of diverse national origins whichtended towards the creation of a common but highlyvariegated pattern of culture throughout Western Chris-tendom. Nor did this cease with the medieval period, forthe Renaissance itself was a typical example of this freeprocess of communication and creation which passed fromone country to another, uniting men of different race andlanguage in common cultural aims and a fellowship ofideas.

It may be objected that all this is in no way peculiar toWestern culture, but is of the very nature of the process ofcultural development and change everywhere and always.But though every culture produces elements of change and

many of them have experienced religious or intellectualmovements which have been generated and transmittedby the free spiritual activity of individuals, there has beennone in which the movement of change has so transfusedthe whole life of the culture that the two have becomeidentified. The ancient oriental cultures were all based onthe conception of a sacred order which ruled every aspect ofman's life and which must be preserved and handed onunchanged and complete, if society is to survive. The civili-zation of China is the most typical and successful of thesecultures, and though China has owed much to the intru-sion of independent spiritual movements, notably to thatof Buddhist monasticism, it has always regarded suchmovements as foreign to the sacred order of Chinese life,whether they were condemned wholeheartedly as mortalenemies of the Confucian tradition, or tolerated half-heartedly as spiritual luxuries which could be added likean exotic ornament to the body of native tradition.

It is only in Western Europe that the whole pattern ofthe culture is to be found in a continuous succession andalternation of free spiritual movements; so that every cen-tury of Western history shows a change in the balance ofcultural elements, and the appearance of some new spirit-ual force which creates new ideas and institutions andproduces a further movement of social change.

Only once in the history of Western Europe do we see anattempt to create a unitary, all-embracing, sacred order,comparable to that of the Byzantine culture or to thoseof the oriental world. This was the Carolingian Empirewhich was conceived as the society of the whole Chris-tian people under the control of a theocratic monarchy,and which attempted to regulate every detail of life andthought down to the method of ecclesiastical chant andthe rules of the monastic order by legislative decrees andgovernmental inspection. But this was a brief and unsuc-cessful episode which stands out in sharp contrast to thegeneral course of Western development, and, even so, itscultural achievement was largely dependent on the contri-bution of independent elements coming from outside the

Empire, like Alcuin from England, John Scotus from Ire-land and Theodulf from Spain.

Apart from this single exceptional case, there has neverbeen any unitary organization of Western culture apartfrom that of the Christian Church, which provided an ef-fective principle of social unity. And even in the MiddleAges the religious unity imposed by the Church never con-stituted a true theocracy of the oriental type, since it in-volved a dualism between the spiritual and the temporalpowers, which produced an internal tension in Westernsociety and was a fertile source of criticism and change.Nevertheless throughout the whole history of Western Eu-rope down to the last century the absence of unitary or-ganization and of a single uniform source of culture did notdestroy the spiritual continuity of the Western tradition.Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture therewas a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense ofspiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divi-sions and social schisms that marked its history. It is oftendifficult to trace the connection between this spirit of faithand the new movements of change which often seem torepresent a radical denial of any common spiritual basis.Nevertheless, when we study these movements closely weshall usually find that such a connection does really exist.

In fact, nowhere is the dynamism of Western religionmore strikingly manifested than in the indirect and uncon-scious influence it has exercised on the social and intellec-tual movements which were avowedly secular. It is easy tofind examples of this in the history of the modem revolu-tionaiy and reformist movements, but by far the most im-portant and the most interesting is to be found in the his-tory of the rise of the modem scientific movement whichhas had such immeasurable importance in the history ofthe modem world.

But I do not propose to deal with this subject in mypresent lectures; only a man like Pierre Duhem, who wasat once a scientist, an historian and a philosopher, is capa-ble of undertaking such a task, and even he did not live tocomplete the task he had set himself. What I wish to do isto study the earlier phases of the Western development

and to see how far the formation of the Western Europeculture complex was conditioned by religious factors.

At this stage of European history the relations betweenreligion and culture are to be seen in their simplest form.No historian denies that the coming of Christianity to thepeoples of the West had a profound effect on their culture;nevertheless this great spiritual revolution left the materialconditions of Western life unchanged. There remained animmense gulf between the semi-barbarian society of Mero-vingian Gaul and Anglo-Saxon Britain and the maturereligious culture of the Christian Empire—between themind of a man like St. Augustine or Boethius and that ofthe warrior chiefs like Clovis or Chilperic who controlledthe destinies of the West. The rise of the new WesternEuropean culture is dominated by this sharp dualism be-tween two cultures, two social traditions and two spiritualworlds—the war society of the barbarian kingdom with itscult of heroism and aggression and the peace society of theChristian Church with its ideals of asceticism and renuncia-tion and its high theological culture. Nor is its importanceconfined to the Dark Ages from a.d. 500-1000; it remainscharacteristic in some degree of medieval culture as a wholeand its effects are still traceable in the later history of West-ern Europe. Indeed I believe that it is to be regarded asthe principal source of that dynamic element which is ofsuch decisive significance for Western culture.

But it is important to realize that this dualism was notsimply a crude dualism of opposition and conflict. At a rela-tively early period it was sublimated on the higher level ofculture and became an internal principle of polarity andtension. Thus already in the first century of NorthumbrianChristianity the tradition of Latin patristic culture foundits worthiest representative in the barbarous North in theperson of the Venerable Bede, and it is no less significantthat the last work of the last Roman philosopher—the DeConsolatione Philosophiae of Boethius—should have beenfirst translated into the vernacular by a warrior king in theinterval of his heroic struggles with the Danes for thepreservation of Western Christendom.

This creative process of cultural assimilation which finds

24 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

conscious expression in the literary tradition was also atwork in the dqrfh of the individual conscience and in thegrowth of new social institutions. We see it in the lives ofthe saints, in the laws of the kings, in the letters of mis-sionaries and scholars, and in the songs of poets. No doubtall the evidence we possess sheds but a fitful and uncertainlight on the vital realities of the social process. Yet evenso our knowledge of the origins of Western culture is farmore authentic and detailed than anything we possess inthe case of the other great cultures of the ancient or theoriental world.

But there are other respects in which we are betterequipped to understand the birth process of Western cul-ture than our predecessors. The historians and philosopherswhose minds were formed by the liberal enlightenment ofthe eighteenth century could feel little interest and nospiritual sympathy with ages in which the darkness of bar-barism seemed only to be deepened by religious super-stition and monastic asceticism; while in the nineteenthcentury the nationalist tendencies that were nowherestronger than in the field of history reacted towards an un-critical idealization of Teutonic and Slavonic barbarians andcaused the unity of Western culture to be ignored ordepreciated.

But our generation has been forced to realize how fragileand unsubstantial are the barriers that separate civilizationfrom the forces of destruction. We have learnt that barba-rism is not a picturesque myth or a half-forgotten memoryof a long-passed stage of history, but an ugly underlyingreality which may erupt with shattering force whenever themoral authority of a civilization loses its control.

For us, therefore, the history of the Dark Ages and thefirst beginnings of a new culture in the West fourteen hun-dred years ago have acquired, or ought to acquire, a newsignificance. We can understand better than Gibbon thedesperate struggle of the later Empire to maintain its higherstandards of urban culture and civilized order under theweight of a top-heavy bureaucracy against the constantpressure of war and invasion, and we can realize in a more

INTRODUCTION

intimate way than the nineteenth-century historians whatwere the feelings of the Roman provincials when the dikesat last broke and the tide of barbarism spread ever morewidely over the land.

Above all, we are in a better position to appreciate thevital function of religion both as a principle of continuityand conservation and as the source of new spiritual life.In that age religion was the only power that remained un-affected by the collapse of civilization, by the loss of faithin social institutions and cultural traditions and by the lossof hope in life. Wherever genuine religion exists it mustalways possess this quality, since it is of the essence of re-ligion to bring man into relation with transcendent andeternal realities. Therefore it is natural that the Dark Agesof history—the hour of human failure and impotence-should also be the hour when the power of eternity is mani-fested. Inevitably these ages of the death and birth of cul-tures are furthest withdrawn from the light of history. Butwhere, as in the case of the origins of our own culture, weare able in some degree to penetrate the darkness, it ispossible to see something of the creative process at work inthe depths of the social consciousness; and however incom-plete this knowledge may be, it is of very high value for thestudent of religion and the student of culture.

Chapter II

The Religious Origins ofWestern Culture: The Churchand the Barbarians

The beginnings of Western culture are to be found in thenew spiritual community which arose from the ruins of theRoman Empire owing to the conversion of the Northernbarbarians to the Christian faith. The Christian Churchinherited the traditions of the Empire. It came to the bar-barians as the bearer of a higher civilization, endowed withthe prestige of Roman law and the authority of the Romanname. The breakdown of the political organization of theRoman Empire had left a great void which no barbarianking or general could fill, and this void was filled by theChurch as the teacher and law-giver of the new peoples.The Latin Fathers—Ambrose, Augustine, Leo and Gregory—were in a real sense the fathers of Western culture, sinceit was only in so far as the different peoples of the Westwere incorporated in the spiritual community of Christen-dom that they acquired a common culture. It is this, aboveall, that distinguishes the Western development from thatof the other world civilizations. The great cultures of theancient East, like China and India, were autochthonousgrowths which represent a continuous process of develop-ment in which religion and culture grew together from thesame sociological roots and the same natural environment.But in the West it was not so. Primitive Europe outsidethe Mediterranean lands preserved no common centre andno unified tradition of spiritual culture. The people of the

North possessed no written literature, no cities, no stonearchitecture. They were, in short, “barbarians”; and it wasonly by Christianity and the elements of a higher culturetransmitted to them by the Church that Western Europeacquired unity and form.

This missionary aspect of Western culture, of which Ihave already spoken in the Introduction, is older thanChristianity, since it goes back to the remote past beyondthe beginnings of recorded history. Even the Romans in themidst of their ruthless conquest of empire were not un-conscious of it, and when the greatest of Latin poets sethimself to create a national epic, he chose for his hero notthe typical heroic warrior but a kind of pilgrim father, thepious long-suffering Aeneas who was charged with theprovidential mission to found a new city and bring the godsto Latium:

genus unde LatinumAlbanique patres atque dta moenia Rotnae.

Now the Virgilian myth became the Christian reality.When St. Paul, in obedience to the warning of a dream,set sail from Troy in a.d. 49 and came to Philippi in Mace-donia he did more to change the course of history than thegreat battle that had decided the fate of the Roman Em-pire on the same spot nearly a century earlier, for hebrought to Europe the seed of a new life which was ulti-mately destined to create a new world. All this took placeunderneath the surface of history, so that it was unrecog-nized by the leaders of contemporary culture, like Galliothe brother of Seneca, who actually saw it taking place be-neath their eyes. But it is impossible to read the contem-porary account of these journeys and the letters that St.Paul wrote to the first Christian communities of Europeand Asia Minor without realizing that a new principle hadbeen introduced into the static civilization of the Romanworld that contained infinite possibilities of change. As themob at Salonika protested: these men have turned theworld upside down, proclaiming another king than Caesar—Jesus. And so indeed they did, and this act of creativerevolution marks the beginning of a new era in world his-

tory, and, above all, in the history of the West. Up to thispoint Europe had been divided between the Roman worldand the outer world of barbarians. Now the Roman worldwas itself divided between the servants of Caesar and theservants of Christ. In the course of centuries this latter di-vision was finally overcome by the conversion of the Empire,so that Roman and Christian became almost synonymousterms. But by that time the power of the Empire in theWest was broken. Rome was no longer the capital ofCaesar, it had become the Apostolic See. To St. Leo andhis contemporaries the Roman Empire was an instrumentin the hands of providence to bring the nations together toreceive the Gospel of Christ. St. Peter and St. Paul hadtaken the place of Romulus and Remus as the founders ofthe second Rome, the Urbs sacerdotdis et regalis, whichwas the centre of the Christian world:

En omne sub regnum Remimortale concessit genusidem loquuntur dissoniritus, idipsum sentiunt.

Hoc destinatum, quo magisjus Christiani nominis,quodcunque terrarum jacet,uno inligaret vinculo.1

Thus the conversion of the Roman Empire, the processby which the state of Augustus and Nero became the stateof Constantine and Theodosius, has a vital relation to therise of the new culture. This has never been adequatelyrecognized by the historians, owing to the curious divorcebetween ancient and modem history which has caused thestudy of the transitional age of the third and fourth cen-turies to be so neglected in English education, which inthis respect was still influenced by the ideals and prejudicesof the Italian humanists. And these prejudices, in turn, re-

1 Prudentius, Peristephanon, II, 429; cp. Leonis M., sermo 82.Translation; “Lo, the whole race or man has been bowed to theKingdom of Remus, different rites say the same and think thesame. So it is destined that the Christian law should bind all theearth in one bond.”

fleeted the cultural disunity of the age in question. Thehigher culture of the ancient world continued to shut itseyes to the existence of the new faith, even after Chris-tianity had become the official religion of the Empire. Andthis obstinate conservatism was strongest in the West,where it was strengthened by the traditions of Romanpatriotism and the resentment of the senatorial aristocracyagainst the new capital on the Bosphorus with its eunuchconsul and its Greek senators. To these defenders of a lostcause, like Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, Claudian andRutilius Namatianus, Christianity was an alien interloperwhich undermined the moral resistance of the state at thetime when the barbarians were attacking it from without.It was against these opinions that St. Augustine and Orosiuswrote in the fifth century, so that it was not until after thefall of Rome that the dualism between the old culture andthe new religion was finally overcome.

In the East, however, conditions were very different, andfor centuries to come the Eastern Empire was to remain thecentre of the development of Christian thought and culture.

The new religion had had its origins in the semi-orientalunderworld of the great Hellenistic cities, bringing new lifeand hope to classes and individuals spiritually estrangedfrom the soulless materialistic culture of the Roman world-state. By degrees it permeated the whole society, until inthe fourth century it became the official religion of theEmpire and inspired the new type of Byzantine culturewhich had its centre in the New Rome founded by the firstChristian Emperor at Constantinople. This culture wasAsiatic Greek in origin. For we must remember that at thetime of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West the maincentres of Christian culture and the majority of theChristian population were still non-European. The mothertongue of the Church was Greek and its theological devel-opment was mainly due to Asiatic Greek councils and Asi-atic Greek theologians, at a time when in the Latin Westpaganism was still strong, and the ruling classes, and, farmore, the rural population, were still largely non-Christianin culture and tradition.

It is interesting to speculate on what might have been

the result if the Western development had followed theEastern pattern—if a kind of Latin Byzantine culture hadarisen in the fifth and sixth centuries with its capital atRome or Milan or Treves, as might well have happened,if external forces had not intervened. In fact, however, theimperial system in the West had broken down under thepressure of the barbarian invasion, before the new religionhad had time to permeate the culture and social life of theWestern provinces.

Only in Africa were conditions comparable to those inthe Eastern provinces, and Africa was not destined to re-main a part of Western Christendom for very long. Therewere indeed a few Western European cities, such as Romeand Lyons, which had an important share in the first move-ment of Christian expansion, but even at Rome the paganresistance was more stubborn and long continued than inthe East. In the predominantly rural areas of Central andWestern Europe the social elements which contributedmost to the rapid diffusion of Christianity were non-exist-ent, and these regions remained pagan in culture, if not inname, down to the last days of the Western Empire andbeyond.

Thus, unlike Christian Byzantium, Christian Rome rep-resents only a brief interlude between paganism and bar-barism. There were only eighteen years between Theo-dosius' closing of the temples and the first sack of theEternal City by the barbarians. The great age of the West-ern Fathers from Ambrose to Augustine was crammed intoa single generation, and St. Augustine died with the Van-dals at the gate.

There were, of course, very wide differences in the con-ditions that prevailed in the different provinces and thedifferent strata of society. An aristocrat like Sidonius Apol-linaris, who lived under the relatively tolerant rule of theVisigothic kings, could continue to lead the life of a cul-tured and wealthy landowner while his contemporaries ofthe same class in less favoured regions were being slaugh-tered or reduced to beggary. Roughly speaking, we may saythat all along the Northern frontiers of the Empire fromYork to Belgrade the structure of civilized life had collapsed,

the cities and villas had been destroyed and society relapsedinto a state of pagan barbarism. But in the South, round theshores of the Mediterranean, there was as yet no break inthe continuity of culture, and the barbarian conquerorswere a small alien element, which existed as a parasiticgrowth upon a Latin-speaking population that vastly out-numbered them and continued to live its own life with itsown laws and institutions.

Nevertheless the development of Western Christianitydid not always correspond with this pattern. In the Mediter-ranean lands the conquerors were Arians, who sometimes,as in Africa, subjected the Church to intense persecution;while in the North, though the conquerors were fitr morebarbarous in culture and pagan in religion, they were moreaccessible to the missionary action of the Church, whichwas also the representative of the higher culture.

Hence the barbarian kingdoms of the South were short-lived and had little influence on the future of Western cul-ture, except negatively in so far as they prepared the wayfor the Moslem conquest of Africa and Spain in the eighthcentury. It was the baptism of Clovis in 496 and that ofEthelbert of Kent in 597 that mark the real beginnings ofa new age in Western Europe.

Thus it was in those parts of the West where the mate-rial destruction of the barbarian invasions had been great-est that the new development took place. The spiritualresources of the Church had not been seriously impaired bythe fall of the Empire. Indeed in certain respects they werestrengthened, since the Church now united the social tradi-tions of Roman culture with its own spiritual traditions andthus fulfilled a double function in a society which neededsocial as well as religious leadership. The new barbariankingdoms had taken over the military and political func-tions of the Empire—they held the sword, they levied thetaxes, they administered justice—of a sort—but everythingelse belonged to the Church—moral authority, learning andculture, the prestige of the Roman name and the care ofthe people. A man’s real citizenship was not to be foundin his subjection to the barbarian state, but in his member-ship of the Christian Church, and it was to the bishop

rather than to the king that he looked as the leader ofChristian society.

But all the time a process of assimilation was going onwhich tended to create a new social unity. As the barbarianswere converted to Christianity, they also acquired elementsof the higher culture, while on the other hand the Christiansociety was gradually losing touch with the traditions ofRoman culture and was itself becoming positively barba-rized. We find a good illustration of this double process inthe picture which St. Gregory of Tours gives us of the con-ditions in the kingdom of the Franks during the secondhalf of the sixth century. He was himself a man of aristo-cratic Gallic lineage, a descendant of Roman officials and amember of a dynasty of bishops. But the society in whichhe lived and which he describes is already profoundly bar-barous and his own writings show little sign of classicalculture, as he himself admits in the prefaces to his Historyand to his hagiographical works. But he was a true Romanin his unflinching realism, his loyalty to the past and hissense of social responsibility which he maintained in a so-ciety equally oblivious of the Roman order and the Chris-tian spirit. He still represents the Roman-Christian ideal ofthe bishop as Defensor Civitatis and the ultimate guardianand champion of the civic tradition in its new Christianform—the tradition which had been so nobly maintainedin the age of the invasions by St Germanus of Auxerre,St. Avitus of Vienna, St Anianus of Orleans and St. Si-donius Apollinaris (431/2-487).

But in the age of Gregory of Tours the barbarism whichhad destroyed the Empire had also invaded the Church.The Merovingian kings had not ceased to be barbarians bybecoming Christians. Indeed, in proportion as they becamedetached from the tribal background of the old Germanickingship they seemed to become more ferocious, moretreacherous and more corrupt. And it was on these savagesthat the Church was increasingly dependent, since with thebreakdown of the old Roman organization the king inevita-bly intervened more and more in the appointment of bish-ops and in the government of the Church. And conse-quently the outward decline in the condition of culture was

accompanied by a deterioration of moral standards whichalso affected the bishops and the monasteries.

The world which Gregory of Tours describes is a worldof violence and corruption in which rulers set an exampleof injustice and contempt for the law, and even the bar-baric virtues of loyalty and military honour were no longerpreserved. In such a world religion was able to maintainits power only by the awe inspired by its supernatural pres-tige and the spiritual violence it opposed to the physicalviolence of barbarism. The fear of the wrath of God andthe vengeance of the saints was the only power capable ofintimidating the lawless ruffians who were so commonamong the new ruling class in the semi-barbarous Frankishstate.

In the Dark Ages the saints were not merely patternsof moral perfection, whose prayers were invoked by theChurch. They were supernatural powers who inhabitedtheir sanctuaries and continued to watch over the welfareof their land and their people. Such were St. Julian ofBrioude, St. Caesarius of Arles, St. Germanus of Auxerre—such, above all, was St. Martin, whose shrine at Tourswas a fountain of grace and miraculous healing, to whichthe sick resorted from all parts of Gaul; an asylum whereall the oppressed—the fugitive slave, the escaped criminaland even those on whom the vengeance of the king hadfallen—could find refuge and supernatural protection. It isdifficult to exaggerate the importance of the cult of thesaints in the period that followed the fall of the Empire inthe West, for its influence was felt equally at both ends ofthe social scale—among the leaders of culture like Gregoryof Tours and St. Gregory the Great and among the com-mon people, especially the peasants who, as “pagani”, hadhitherto been unaffected by the new religion of the cities.In many cases the local pagan cult was displaced only bythe deliberate substitution of the cult of a local saint, aswe see in Gregory of Tours’ description of how the Bishopof Javols put an end to the annual pagan festival of thepeasants at Lake Helanus by building a church to St. Hilaryof Poitiers on the spot to which they could bring the offer-

ings which had foimerly been thrown into the waters ofthe sacred lake.

Thus the early centuries of the Middle Ages saw therise of a new Christian mythology—the legends of the saints—to which Gregory of Tours himself contributed, so muchby his hagiographical writings—the two books on the Mira-cles of St. Martin, the Life of the Fathers, the book of theMiracles of St. Julian of Brioude and the books of theGlory of the Blessed Martyrs and the Glory of the Con-fessors. This literature and the cult to which it correspondsrepresent the other side of the dark picture of contempo-rary society which he presents in his History of the Franks.On the one side we see a world of violence and injusticewhich is sinking to destruction by its own weight. But onthe other side there is the world of divine power and mys-tery in which the harsh necessities of daily experience nolonger dominate man’s life—where nothing is impossibleand every human suffering and misfortune may find aremedy.

It is very difficult for the modem mind to enter thisworld of popular Christian imagination which finds expres-sion in the early medieval legends of the saints, since it isfarther removed from us than the mysticism of the lateMiddle Ages, or the metaphysical religion of the age of theFathers. Yet it is genuinely Christian in spirit, though it isthe Christianity of a society striving against the all-pervad-ing influence of a barbaric environment. In this twilightworld it was inevitable that the Christian ascetic and saintshould acquire some of the features of the pagan shamanand demigod: that his prestige should depend upon hispower as a wonder-worker and that men should seek hisdecision, in the same way as they had formerly resorted tothe shrine of a pagan oracle.

Nevertheless it was only in this world of Christian my-thology—in the cult of the saints and their relics and theirmiracles—that the vital transfusion of the Christian faithand ethics with the barbaric tradition of the new peoplesof the West could be achieved. It was obviously impossiblefor peoples without any tradition of philosophy or writtenliterature to assimilate directly the subtle and profound

theological metaphysics of a St. Augustine or the greatteachers of the Byzantine world. The barbarians could un-derstand and accept the spirit of the new religion onlywhen it was manifested to them visibly in the lives andacts of men who seemed endowed with supernatural quali-ties. The conversion of Western Europe was achieved notso much by the teaching of a new doctrine as by the mani-festation of a new power, which invaded and subdued thebarbarians of the West, as it had already subdued thecivilized lands of the Mediterranean. And as the martyrshad been the heroes and witnesses of the conquest of theEmpire, so it was the hermits and the monks who werethe confessors and apostles of the faith among the bar-barians.

Here the relation between religion and culture is notthat of assimilation and permeation, but rather one of con-tradiction and contrast. The lives of the saints and asceticsimpressed the mind of the barbarians because they werethe manifestation of a way of life and a scale of valuesentirely opposed to all they had hitherto known and ac-cepted. But the contrast was not between the higher civili-zation of the Christian Roman world and the barbarism ofthe pagans, but a contrast between two spiritual worlds ortwo planes of reality. For behind the ethical contrast be-tween the life of the saint and the barbarism of societythere lies the eschatological dualism of the present worldand the world to come which was the background of themedieval Christian view of life.

The Western Church did not come to the barbarianswith a civilizing mission or any conscious hopes of socialprogress, but with a tremendous message of divine judg-ment and divine salvation. Humanity was bom under acurse, enslaved by the dark powers of cosmic evil and sink-ing ever deeper under the burden of its own guilt. Onlyby the way of the Cross and by the grace of the crucifiedRedeemer was it possible for men to extricate themselvesfrom the massa damnata of unregenerate humanity andescape from the wreckage of a doomed world.

This stem doctrine came with peculiar force to the de-

dining civilization of the post-Roman world—a world inwhich war and famine and slavery and torture were theunavoidable facts of daily experience, where the weak couldhardly survive, and the strong died young in battle.

No doubt it is easy for us to see the other side of thepicture. Indeed, modem nationalism has tended to idealizethe native cultures of the Western barbarians, and to seethe Germans, the Celts, the Slavs and the rest as youngpeoples full of creative powers who were bringing new lifeto an exhausted and decadent civilization. But though thisview found its ultimate justification in the course of history,it was not possible for the men who actually had to dealwith the barbarians to recognize it. To the Christian worldduring the Dark Ages the forces of barbarism were inevita-bly seen in their negative aspects—as a formless power ofwar and destruction which brought ruin to the cities andslavery to the peoples. This is the view which finds expres-sion so often in the Christian liturgy, which prays that Godmay come to the aid of the Christian people and subdue thebarbarian peoples who put their trust in their own savagery.Nor were the barbarian princes who were nominally Chris-tian much better, as we see from St. Gildas’ strictures onthe tyrants of Britain, St. Patrick’s letter to Coroticus orGregory of Tours’ picture of Merovingian society.

We see from the letters and homilies of St. Gregory theGreat that the Christian conscience was by no means in-different to the social injustice and physical suffering of thetime—the prisoners “tied by the neck like dogs and led awayto slavery”, the mutilated peasants, the depopulated andstarving cities. But these things were past the aid of manto cure. "What is there,” asks St. Gregory, "to please usin this world? Everywhere we see sorrow and lamentation.The cities and towns are destroyed, the fields are laid wasteand the land returns to solitude. No peasant is left to tillthe fields, there are few inhabitants left in the cities, andyet even these scanty remnants of humanity are still sub-ject to ceaseless sufferings. . . . Some are led away captive,others are mutilated and still more slain before our eyes.What is there then to please us in this world? If we still

love such a world as this, it is plain that we love not pleas-ure but misery.”2

These things, St. Columban wrote a few years later inhis letter to Pope Boniface, were signs of the end. Theworld was visibly falling to pieces and the Shepherd ofShepherds was about to come for the last time. And there-fore it was natural that Christians should turn their eyesto the other world—to the Eternal City, of which they werealready citizens by adoption and which was steadily extend-ing its frontiers against the transitory and fading visibleworld.

But though the religion of that age was intensely other-worldly, its other-worldliness had a very different characterfrom much that we have come to associate with the wordin its modem pietist form. It was collective rather thanindividualist, objective rather than subjective, realist ratherthan idealist. Although the world to come lay outside his-tory and beyond time, it was the fixed limit towards whichtime and history were carrying the world. The ocean ofeternity surrounded the sinking island of human existenceon every side. In the past, the world of men had been con-fident and secure. As the waters of the sea retreated, theyhad pushed the limit of culture further and further underthe protection of the dikes they had built. But now thewaters were advancing, the dikes were down and soon therewould be no more land. Only the Church remained as anark of refuge, and it was a better investment to spend one’stime and money on the building of an ark than to waste itin vain attempts to mend the broken dikes or reclaim themined fields and saltings.

This is a crude picture of the other-worldly attitude ofearly Christendom. But the reality was no less crude. St.Gregory the Great represents the highest surviving tradi-tions of Roman society and stands head and shouldersabove the average level of Lombard or Merovingian cul-ture. He had applied the strong practical intelligence andstatesmanship of ancient Rome to the service of the Churchand at the same time he was a great Christian teacher in

2 S. Greg. Mag., Homil. in Ezech. II, Epistle vi, 22.

the spirit of St. Ambrose and St. Leo. Yet when he recordsin his Dialogues the lives and deeds of the holy men whowere his immediate predecessors he introduces us into awonderland of supernatural marvels which equal or surpassanything to be found in the legends of the martyrs or thelives of the Fathers of the Desert.

To that age the saints and ascetics were living and visiblewitnesses to the power of the world to come. And theywere not the only witnesses. Even more important was thecorporate experience of and communion with the eternalworld which the Church already possessed in the SacredMysteries. I pointed out last year how the religion culturesof the ancient world found their centre in the ritual orderof prayer and sacrifice around which the whole life of thecommunity revolved. In the rdigion cultures of the Byzan-tine and medieval world the Christian liturgy held a similarposition. The centuries which followed the fall of the Em-pire in the West, in spite of the impoverishment of theirmaterial culture, were from the liturgical point of view agreat creative age, and it is remarkable that this is no lesstrue of the semi-barbaric West than of the stable and com-paratively prosperous Byzantine world. All these ages pos-sessed of poetry, music and art found expression in theliturgy—an expression which no later age has been able tosurpass.

Nothing indeed could be more striking than the contrastbetween the secular and the liturgical poetry of this age. InByzantium we have, on the one side, the dying echoes ofthe classical Hellenic tradition in the last poets of the Pala-tine Anthology, while, on the other, there is the greatest ofthe liturgical poets, Romanus the Melodist, who endowedthe new spirit of the new Christian culture with a newmusic and a new rhythm.

But in the West the contrast is even more striking sinceit can be seen not in two distinct schools of poetry but inthe work of the same writer. Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530-601) seems at first sight the typical representative of adecadent culture, a literary parasite who makes his livingby composing laborious compliments and panegyrics to flat-ter his barbarian patrons. But the moment he is touched

by the liturgical spirit his tired rhetoric is miraculouslytransformed into the mighty music of the Vextlla Regis andthe Range lingua gloriosi.

It is impossible to insist too strongly on the importanceof this transformation of literary style and aesthetic feeling,for nothing gives us a clearer insight into the nature of thespiritual changes that were producing a new type of culture.It began long before the fall of the Empire, since its originsgo back to the New Testament and the first beginnings ofGentile Christianity. But it was not until the fifth centurythat its influence was strongly felt on the higher levels ofRoman culture. And it is remarkable that it was the mostRoman in temperament of all the fathers, St. Ambrose ofMilan, who took the first and most decisive step towardsthe creation of a new liturgical poetry. We possess a mostvivid account of the impression that it produced on a con-temporary in the Confessions of St. Augustine^ in which hedescribes his wonder and delight at the new spiritual worldthat was opened to him by St. Ambrose at Milan at thedawn of his conversion:

The days were not long enough as I meditated, andfound wonderful delight in meditating, upon the depth ofYour design for the salvation of the human race. I wept atthe beauty of Your hymns and canticles, and was power-fully moved at the sweet sound of Your Church’s singing.These sounds flowed into my ears, and the truth streamedinto my heart; so that my feeling of devotion overflowed,and the tears ran from my eyes, and I was happy in them.

It was only a little while before that the church of Milanhad begun to practise this kind of consolation and exulta-tion, to the great joy of the brethren singing together withheart and voice. For it was only about a year since Justina,the mother of the boy emperor Valentinian, was persecut-ing Your servant Ambrose in the interests of her ownheresy: for she had been seduced by the Arians. The de-voted people had stayed night and day in the church, readyto die with their bishop. And my mother, Your handmaid,bearing a great part of the trouble and vigil, had lived inprayer. I also, though still not warmed by the fire of Your

Spirit, was stirred to excitement by the disturbed andwrought-up state of the city.

It was at this time that the practice was instituted ofsinging hymns and psalms after the manner of the Easternchurches, to keep the people from being altogether wornout with anxiety and want of sleep. The custom has beenretained from that day to this, and has been imitated bymany, indeed in almost all congregations throughout theworld.*

This new liturgical poetry of the West differs from thatof the East in its sobriety and simplicity which are never-theless not without their own beauty. It was created by aman, trained in classical traditions, who was careful not totransgress the rules of classical prosody. But since he sub-ordinated his art to the new requirements of the liturgyand wrote for the Church and the people, he producedsomething entirely new which has lived on for seventeenhundred years in the hymnaries of Western Christendomand the liturgy of the Western Church.

In this he succeeded better than Prudentius, a greaterpoet, but one who was too individual to subordinate hisgenius to the needs of the congregation. On the other hand,St. Ambrose’s great disciple St. Augustine went further (inhis rhythmic "psalm against the Donatists”) and aban-doned the whole tradition of classical poetry in a direct ap-peal to the popular audience—volens etiam causam Dona-tistorum ad ipsius humillimi vulgi et omnino imperitorumatque idiotarum notitiam pervenire.*

This curious work bears a close resemblance to the newreligious poetry which had arisen in Syria and found itsgreatest representation in St. Ephrem, “the Harp of theHoly Spirit”.

It is constructed in regular strophes of twelve verses ofsixteen syllables. Each strophe begins with a successive let-ter of the alphabet and ends with a recurrent refrain, andeach verse of the strophe ends in the same vowel. All these

8 Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, vi-vii. F. J. Sheed’s trans-lation.

* Translation: Wishing to bring the affair of the Donatists tothe knowledge of the lowest class, the ignorant and illiterate.

features are characteristic of the new Syriac religious poetry,so that everything points to the oriental origin of the newstyle. Nevertheless, in spite of the great influence of St.Augustine, his experiment in the new style of rhythmicverse found no immediate imitators. It was not intendedfor liturgical use, but for popular propaganda, and the litur-gical poets continued to follow the tradition of St. Am-brose. It is only in the furthest West in the new CelticChurches that the use of rhythmical and, above all, rimedpoetry was fully developed in the service of the liturgy aswell as for private prayer.

Meanwhile throughout the West the liturgy was becom-ing more and more the centre of Christian culture. Al-though Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola do not comparewith St. Ambrose as liturgical poets, they reflect the growingimportance of the liturgy in the intellectual and spiritual lifeof the time. Even Sidonius Apollinaris, who seems at firstsight a typical representative of the old secular culture, de-voted his talents to the composition of liturgies and theimprovisation of prayers, as Gregory of Tours relates (H.F.II, xxii).

Whatever else might be lost, and however dark might bethe prospects of Western society, the sacred order of theliturgy remained intact and, in it, the whole Christianworld, Roman, Byzantine and barbarian, found an innerprinciple of unity. Moreover the liturgy was not only thebond of Christian unity. It was also the means by whichthe mind of the gentiles and the barbarians was attunedto a new view of life and a new concept of history. It dis-played in a visible, almost dramatic form what had hap-pened and was to happen to the human race-the sacredhistory of man’s creation and redemption and the provi-dential dispensation that governed the course of history,the great theme which is so majestically unfolded in theprophecies and prayers of the Paschal liturgy. For while theliturgy had the same key significance in the culture of an-cient Christendom which it had possessed in the archaiccultures, its spiritual content was entirely different. As wehave seen,6 the archaic ritual order was conceived as the

B Cf. Religion and Culture, ch. vii.

42 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

pattern of the cosmic order, and consequently its typicalmysteries were the mysteries of nature itself representedand manifested in the dramatic action of a sacred myth.Such were the mysteries of Eleusis, such were the still olderand more venerable mysteries of Sumerian and Egyptianreligion, like the myth of Tammuz and Ninanna or Isis andOsiris—all of which centre in the mystery of the life of theearth and the cycle of the agricultural year. The Christianmystery, on the other hand, was essentially the mystery ofeternal life. It was not concerned with the life of nature orwith culture as a part of the order of nature, but with theredemption and regeneration of humanity by the Incarna-tion of the Divine Word.

But since the Incarnation and the whole redemptiveprocess were historically situated, the Christian mysterywas also an historical mystery—the revelation of the divinepurpose manifested on earth and in time, as the fulfilmentof the ages. Thus instead of the nature myth which was thekey to the ritual order of the archaic civilization, the Chris-tian mystery is based on a sacred history, and liturgy devel-ops into an historical cycle in which the whole story ofhuman creation and redemption is progressively unfolded.And at the same time an element of historical and socialcontinuity was provided by the commemoration of thefeasts of the saints, by which every age and every peopleand indeed every city found its liturgical representative andpatron.

It is almost impossible to convey to the modem mindthe realism and objectivity with which the Christians ofthose ages viewed this liturgical participation in the mys-teries of salvation. The commemoration and mystical re-presentation of the sacred history was at the same time theinitiation and rebirth of the creature into an eternal exist-ence. On this plane the old order had already passed awayand the eternal world invaded and transfused the world oftime, so that creation was brought back to its spiritualsource and mankind was united with the angelic hier-archies in a common spiritual action. The theological andmetaphysical aspects of this conception of the liturgy wereworked out most fully during this period in the Byzantine

THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS 43

Church by writers like the Pseudo-Dionysius and SaintMaximus the Confessor. But there was no real divergencebetween East and West in this matter, since in the sixthand seventh centuries all the different liturgical traditionsshared the same liturgical spirit and theoria which was thecommon inheritance of Eastern and Western Christendom.

Thus in the West, after the fall of the Empire, theChurch possessed in the liturgy a rich tradition of Chris-tian culture as an order of worship, a structure of thoughtand a principle of life. And in spite of the general declinein culture this tradition continued to develop spontane-ously and to bear fruit in different forms according to thecomplicated evolution of the different Western Rites.There were the rich and colourful liturgies of VisigothicSpain and Merovingian Gaul. There was the NorthernItalian tradition, represented by the Ambrosian Rite. Andfinally there was the ancient and conservative Roman tra-dition, which from the time of St. Gregory the Great cameto exercise a far-reaching normative influence on all theWestern Churches.

The preservation and development of this liturgical tradi-tion was one of the main preoccupations of the Church inthe dark age that followed the barbarian conquest, sinceit was in this way that the vitality and continuity of theinner life of Christendom which was the seed of the neworder were preserved. But this demanded a concentrationof religious and intellectual energy which could not befound in the dying culture of the ancient city and in thetradition of the schools as represented by men of letters likeVenantius Fortunatus or Ennodius.

The problem was solved by the rise of a new institutionwhich became the guardian of the liturgical tradition andthe social organ of a new Christian culture. As the darknessdeepened over Western Europe it was in the monasteriesrather than in the cities that the tradition of Latin cultureand the patterns of Christian life were preserved. Themonks were the apostles of the West and the founders ofmedieval culture.

Chapter III

The Monks of the West and theFormation of the WesternTradition

Any study o! the origins o! medieval culture must inevita-bly give an important place to the history of Western mo-nasticism, since the monastery was the most typical culturalinstitution throughout the whole period that extends fromthe decline of classical civilization to the rise of the Euro-pean universities in the twelfth century—upwards of sevenhundred years. And it is even more important for the sub-ject with which I am particularly concerned—the relationof religion and culture, for it was through monasticism thatreligion exercised a direct formative influence on the wholecultural development of these centuries.

No doubt, as I said in Religion and Culture, there havebeen other cultures—Tibet, Burma and Ceylon, for exam-ple—in which a non-Christian monasticism played a some-what similar role. But these were secondary or marginalcultures which have had little influence on the course ofworld history. The situation in China is more comparable,since there we have an example of a great world culturewhich was influenced by the coming of Buddhist monasti-cism at the very period when Western and Byzantine cul-ture were being moulded by Christian monasticism. But,in China, the old tradition of Confucian learning remainedintact and the Buddhist monks never took the place of theConfucian scholars. In the West, on the other hand, theeducational institutions of the Roman Empire were sweptaway by the barbarian invasion or declined and died with

the declining city culture of the Latin world. It was onlyby the Church and, particularly, by the monks that thetradition of classical culture and the writings of classical au-thors, “the Latin classics", were preserved. And already inthe sixth century we have an outstanding example in thecase of Cassiodorus (496-575) of the way in which the oldtradition of learning found a refuge in the monastery, andthe monastic schools and libraries and scriptoria becamethe chief organs of higher intellectual culture in WesternEurope.

Nevertheless, this was not the primary task of monasti-cism. In fact, nothing could be further removed from theoriginal spirit of the institution. It was bom in the Africandesert as a protest against the whole tradition of the classi-cal culture of the Greek and the Roman world. It stood forthe absolute renunciation of everything the ancient worldhad prized—not only pleasure and wealth and honour, butfamily life and citizenship and society. Its founders andmodels were the terrible ascetics of Nitria and the Thebaidwho passed their lives in ceaseless prayer and fasting and inan almost physical struggle with the powers of darkness.

After the peace of the Church when the supreme testof martyrdom was no longer demanded, the ascetics hadcome in the eyes of the Christian world to hold the positionthe martyrs had formerly occupied as the living witnesses ofthe faith and the reality of the supernatural world. Theywere men who "had tasted the powers of the World tocome" and, as we see in the Lausiac History and the otherdocuments of primitive monasticism, they were regarded asthe watchmen or guardians who "kept the walls” of theChristian City and repelled the attacks of its spiritualenemies. The fame and influence of the new movementreached their height at the very moment when Rome, theearthly city, was falling a victim to the barbarians. It was inthat generation that leaders of Roman society, like Paulaand Melania, and leaders of Western Christian thoughtlike Jerome and Rufinus and Cassian made their pilgrim-ages to the Egyptian and Syrian deserts and initiated aliterary propaganda in favour of the new movement which

had enormous success throughout the Latin West and theByzantine East.

The writings of John Cassian—the Institutes and the Col-lations—are particularly important, since they sum up thewhole spirit and practice of Egyptian monasticism in a formacceptable to Western Latin culture and became the au-thoritative standard of monastic spirituality for all the sub-sequent generations of Western monasticism from St.Benedict and Caesarius of Arles to the Brethren of theCommon Life and the early Jesuits.

And, at the same time, men like St. Martin and St.Honoratus and Cassian himself were introducing the mo-nastic way of life in the Western provinces. The movementspread with amazing rapidity, since it reached Spain andBritain at the same time as Gaul, and extended into Ire-land from the moment of its conversion to Christianity bySt. Patrick.

In its main features this early Western monasticism wasindistinguishable from that of the East and its most im-portant centre, which was situated on the Riviera at Lerinsand Marseilles and in the islands of the Ligurian Sea, wasa stronghold of oriental influences. But, from the begin-ning, we can trace signs of another influence which wasdestined to socialize the ideal of the monastic life, andtransform it into a great cultural institution. There wasmuch in oriental monasticism that was repugnant to thedisciplined and practical ethos of the Roman tradition, andSt. Augustine's work on monasticism—de Opere Mona-chorum—is outspoken in its condemnation of the hypocrisyof the long-haired false ascetics and the wandering monkswho lived in idleness and exploited popular superstition.Yet St. Augustine was himself a monk as well as a bishop,and one of the creators of the Western monastic tradition.For it was he more than anyone else who was responsiblefor that combination of the monastic life with the priest-hood which ultimately became one of the distinctive fea-tures of Western monasticism.1

1 Fr. Herding has written, "The union of the monastic idealwith sacerdotal activity is the deliberate personal creation of St.Augustine, a creation which still remains alive and fruitful"

The Augustinian conception of monasticism, as de-scribed, for example, in his Sermons (e.g. 355 and 356) isinspired by the ideal of the common life of the primitiveChurch rather than by the intense asceticism of the monksof the desert. And the same is true to a great extent ofthe ideal of St. Basil, which became the classical standardof Byzantine monasticism in Europe and Asia Minor. ForSt. Basil the social nature of man and the Christian doctrineof the common life of the Mystical Body prove that thelife of a community is necessary to perfection and there-fore superior in principle to the solitary asceticism of thehermit.

The monastic community was a self-contained societywhich was completely Christian in so far as it existed onlyfor spiritual ends and was regulated down to the mostminute detail by a rule of life which took the place ofsocial custom and secular law. Thus it was a free society,independent of external control and based on voluntarymembership. In the East this independence was less com-plete owing to the monastic legislation of Justinian, whichacquired canonical authority. And it was partly for this rea-son that, in spite of St. Basil, the extreme individualism ofthe solitary ascetics of the desert continued to enjoy such ahigh prestige and that the great centres of the ascetic tradi-tion in Egypt and in North-West Mesopotamia (especiallyin the region of Tur Abdin) became the leaders of the re-sistance to the Imperial Church and were consequently lostto Orthodoxy.

In the West, however, the state was too weak and toobarbarous to attempt to control the monasteries. Here thegreat legislators of monasticism were not Justinian, but St.Benedict and St. Gregory the Great. The Rule of St. Bene-dict marks the final assimilation of the monastic institutionby the Roman spirit and the tradition of the WesternChurch. Its conception of the monastic life is essentiallysocial and co-operative—as a discipline of the common life;

(Zeitschiiit fur Chiistliche TheoJogie, 1930, p. 359) -

But we must remember that the idea of an episcopal monasterygoes back to St. Eusebius at Vercelli, c. 360.

“the school of the service of the Lord”. It differs from theolder rules in its strongly practical character, its regulationof the details of common life and common work and itsconcern with the monastic economy. The Rule lays downthat “the monastery should be so arranged that all neces-sary things such as water-mill, gardens, and workshopsshould be within the enclosure”. In fact the BenedictineAbbey was a self-contained economic organism, like thevilla of a Roman landowner, save that the monks werethemselves the workers and the old classical contrast be-tween servile work and free leisure no longer obtained. Theprimary task of the monk, however, was still the perform-ance of the divine liturgy of prayer and psalmody which isminutely regulated by St. Benedict. This is the work ofGod—Opus Dei—with which nothing must interfere andwhich is the true end and justification of the monastic life.

Thus, in an age of insecurity and disorder and barbarism,the Benedictine Rule embodied .an ideal of spiritual orderand disciplined moral activity which made the monasteryan oasis of peace in the world of war. It is true that theforces of barbarism were often too strong for it. MonteCassino itself was destroyed by the Lombards about 581,and the monks were forced to take refuge in Rome. Butsuch catastrophes did not weaken the spirit of the Rule;on the contrary, they brought the Benedictines into closerrelation with Rome, and with St. Gregory, through whomSt. Benedict and his Rule acquired their worldwide fameand their new apostolic mission to the barbarians in the farWest. For it was at Rome that the Benedictine traditionbecame combined with the Augustinian tradition of aclerical monasticism and with the liturgical traditions ofthe Roman monasteries which were responsible for the per-formance of the liturgical offices and the music of the greatbasilicas.

Thus in the age of St. Gregory, and largely owing to hispersonal influence, the foundations were laid for a synthesisof the various elements of Western monasticism accordingto the spirit of the Benedictine rule under the guidance andcontrol of the Papacy. St. Gregory had himself been amonk, and he did more than any of his predecessors to

promote and protect the cause of monasticism, even againstthe authority of the episcopate, when circumstances ren-dered this necessary. Above all, he realized clearly that themonastic institution had become an essential organ of theChurch, and the chief hope for the future of Christianculture. It is remarkable that St. Gregory, who was cer-tainly not lacking in a sense of social responsibility, de-liberately dissuaded his friends from entering the publicservice on the ground that the world was nearing its endand that it was better to seek the peace of the cloister inwhich a man becomes already a partaker in eternity, thanto become involved in the temporal anxieties and ambi-tions that are inseparable from the service of the state.2

But while in the Mediterranean the monks were retreat-ing from the dying culture of the ancient world, in theNorth monasticism was becoming the creator of a newChristian culture and a school of the Christian life for thenew peoples of the West.

It was among the Celtic peoples that this aspect of mo-nasticism was first developed. We know, indeed, practicallynothing of monastic origins in Britain, apart from thefoundation by St. Ninian of the monastery of Candida Casain Galloway in 397, which became a centre of Christianinfluence first among the Piets and later in Ireland. But inthe fourth and fifth centuries the famous Pelagius was amonk from Britain, while his chief disciple Caelestius was,apparently, of Irish origin. Moreover Faustus of Riez, thegreatest and most learned of the early abbots of Lerins,was himself a Briton, and there is little doubt that it wasfrom Lerins that the main tradition of Celtic monasticismand liturgy was derived.

With the collapse of civic life in Britain and the disap-pearance of the old Roman sees, the monks became theleading element in the Church, while in Ireland the monas-tic element was predominant from the first, and was thecharacteristic feature of the new Irish Christian culture. IfSt. Patrick himself was not a monk, he was under strongmonastic influence and had a direct contact with the great

2 Cf. especially S. Greg. Mag., Epist. vii, 26.

centre of Gallic monasticism at Lerins. He himself whenhe was an old man tells in his Confession how he longedto return to Gaul to “visit the brethren and to behold thefaces of the Saints of the Lord”. And there is no doubtthat monasticism in Ireland is as old as the time of St.Patrick, since he writes of "the countless sons of the Scotsand the daughters of chieftains, who had become monksand virgins of Christ”.

In Ireland the Roman tradition of city life and the cityepiscopate were non-existent, and so it was natural that theIrish Church should have found its natural centres in themonasteries which rapidly became very numerous and verypopulous. A medieval tradition states that St. Patrick de-manded from his converts a tithe of the population andthe land of Ireland for the religious life. And, althoughthis is no more than a legend, there is no doubt that earlyIrish monasticism was a great mass movement led by thesons and daughters of the ruling families who founded themonasteries and were followed by their fellow tribesmenand dependants. Although the monastic community, whichwas a society of peace, represents the opposite pole ofthought and action to the tribal community, which was asociety of warriors, there was a certain parallelism betweenthem. On the one side we have the chieftain and his com-pany of warriors who are bound to follow him to the death;on the other, we have the abbot and his community whichis sworn to obedience to eternal life. On the one hand thereis the ethos of honour and fidelity and the cult of the hero;on the other, the ethos of sacrifice and sanctity and thecult of the saint and the martyr. Again, on die one side,there is the oral tradition of heroic poetry and, on the other,the literary tradition of the Sacred Scriptures and thelegends of the saints.

This correspondence between the patterns of pagan andmonastic culture made it possible for men to pass from theone to the other by a profound change in their beliefs andtheir system of moral values without losing vital contactwith their old social tradition, which was sublimated andtransformed, but not destroyed or lost. Thus, family andregional loyalties came to centre in the hereditary monas-

tery and the hereditary saints of the clan or kingdom, andthe abbot became a spiritual chieftain whose dignity wasusually transmitted to a member of the founder’s kin.3

All this helps to explain the appeal the monastic institu-tion made to the barbarian society, and especially to itsruling elements, and why so many men and women of royalblood entered the cloister and took a leading part in theconversion of their kinsfolk. Men of this kind, like St. Illtydand St. Cadoc and St. David in Wales, St. Columba andSt. Enda and St. Finnian of Clonard in Ireland, and SS.Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop, Willebrord and Boniface,Aldhelm and Bede in England, played a decisive part in thecreation of the new Christian culture which first arose inthese islands and gradually influenced the whole of WesternEurope by its monastic foundations and its missionary andeducational activity.

In this new environment monasticism inevitably tendedto assume a role of cultural leadership foreign to the originalspirit of the institution. The monks had to instruct theirconverts not only in Christian doctrine but in the Latintongue, which was the sacred language of scripture andliturgy. They had to teach reading and writing and thosearts and sciences which were necessary for the maintenanceof the Church and the liturgy, such as calligraphy, painting,music and, above all, chronology and the knowledge of thecalendar which had a similar importance for the liturgicalculture of the early Middle Ages to that which they hadpossessed in the archaic ritual cultures.

Thus there arose an autonomous Christian culturecentring in the monasteries and permeating the Churchand the life of the people by educational and religious in-fluence. It was no longer a question of the conquering bar-barians being affected by the religion and culture of theconquered, as with the Franks and Goths; it was a newcreation produced by the grafting of Latin Christian tradi-tions on the native barbarian stock, so that it became in-

8 Cf. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Cen-tury (1946), pp. 27-29, for similar conditions in Northumbria,especially the custom of queens becoming abbesses of royal con-vents after the death of their consorts.

temally assimilated by the new peoples. And it foundoriginal intellectual expression in the new vernacular litera-tures which make their first appearance in Ireland andEngland. Here the old oral heroic tradition achieved formand expression as in the songs of Beowulf and Widsith,while the new Christian poetry makes use of the traditionalheroic imagery, as we see, for example, in poems like TheDream of the Rood or Andreas.

But the strength of the new Western monastic move-ment was due not only to its appeal to the kings and thenobles of the barbarian kingdom, it was also a power withthe peasants which brought Christian culture to the heartof the rural society. For the monastery was an institutionwhich was separable from the urban order of the LaterEmpire and capable of becoming the spiritual and economiccentre of a purely rural society. By its sanctification of workand poverty it revolutionized both the order of social valueswhich had dominated the slave-owning society of the Em-pire and that which was expressed in the aristocratic war-rior ethos of the barbarian conquerors, so that the peasant,who for so long had been the forgotten bearer of the wholesocial structure, found his way of life recognized andhonoured by the highest spiritual authority of the age. EvenSt. Gregory, who himself represented the traditions of theSenatorial aristocracy and the great Roman landowners,gives in his Dialogues a most sympathetic picture of thepeasant life of contemporary Italian monasticism, as in hisdescription of Abbot Equitius who used to travel through-out the country teaching and preaching and who, whensummoned to give an account of his mission, presentedhimself before the Pope’s messengers in peasant dress andhobnail shoes carrying the scythe with which he had beenmowing the hay.4

These Italian monks were often themselves peasants bybirth like St. Honoratus, who founded the great monasteryat Fondi with its two hundred monks, although he was ofservile origin. In Northern Europe social conditions weredifferent, since, as I have said, the leaders of Celtic andSaxon monasticism were drawn from the ruling class of

4 S. Greg. Dialog. I, iv.

barbarian society. But there was no less insistence on sim-plicity of life and the value of manual labour. To the mod-em mind the most striking feature of Celtic monasticismis its extreme asceticism, which is nearer to the Egyptianthan the Benedictine pattern of life. Nevertheless, agricul-ture was far from being neglected. Indeed, nothing couldbe simpler and more functional than St. Molua's statementof the economic basis of the monastic life. “My dearestBrethren,” he said, “till the earth well and work hard, sothat you may have a sufficiency of food and drink andclothing. For, where there is sufficiency among the servantsof God, then there will be stability, and when there isstability in service, then there will be the religious life. Andthe end of religious life is life eternal!”6

It was the disciplined and tireless labour of the monkswhich turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe andbrought back into cultivation the lands which had beendeserted and depopulated in the age of the'invasions. AsNewman writes in a well-known passage on the Mission ofSt. Benedict: “St. Benedict found the world, physical andsocial, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the waynot of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to doit, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rarespecific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently,gradually, that often till the work was done, it was notknown to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visita-tion, correction or conversion. The new work which hehelped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silentmen were observed about the country, or discovered in theforest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men,not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyesand keeping their attention on the stretch, while they pain-fully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they hadsaved. There was no one who contended or cried out, ordrew attention to what was going on, but by degrees thewoody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a

6 Plumner, Vitae Sanctorum Hibemiae, II, 223 (1910). St.Molua or Laisren was the founder of Clonfertmulloe or Kyle inthe sixth century.

farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learningand a city.”6

All this is no less true of Celtic monasticism than of theBenedictines. In some respects it was even more true, sinceit was the Irish monks who contributed most to create thetradition of monastic learning and educational activity dur-ing the dark period which followed the decline of theByzantine Empire after the death of Justinian (565). Thecauses of this new development in the far West are com-plex. The most important of them, as I have already men-tioned, was undoubtedly the exotic character of the newChristian culture in Ireland. Latin was the sacred languageof the liturgy and the Scriptures, which every monk had toacquire, and which could be acquired only by books and thecareful study of texts and grammar. But this new learninghad to compete in Ireland with a very ancient and elaboratesystem of vernacular culture and education, which had beenhanded down for centuries by the sacred order of seers andpoets (filid) who held a very important place in Irishsociety. The representatives of the new culture could onlytriumph by meeting their rivals on their own ground, asmen of learning and masters of the word of power, andtherefore it was natural and inevitable that Irish monasti-cism should acquire many of the features of the old learnedclass and that the monasteries should become not onlyabodes of prayer and asceticism but also schools and centresof learning.

Thus the Latin culture of Gallic monasticism trans-planted to Wales and Ireland soon gave birth to a newliterary tradition. It is often difficult to distinguish betweenthe continental and insular elements in the new culture,since there is a certain affinity between the baroque eccen-tricities of later Gallic rhetoricians, like Virgilius Maro ofToulouse, and the fantastic verbosity of the “Hisperic”Latinity, which was so much admired in the British andIrish monasteries. At first sight, the laborious conceits ofthese monkish schoolmasters contrast very unfavourablywith the "lucidity and discretion” of St. Benedict, or even

6 Newman, Historical Studies, II.

with the honest bad Latin of Gregory of Tours. But it was asign of the exuberance of a youthful culture rather than thepedantry of decadence, and it even produced works of realpower and imagination, like the remarkable poem “AltusProsator”, which is ascribed to St. Columba. Since this hasa reasonably good claim to be the oldest existing monumentof Scottish literary culture, it is astonishing that it is notmore famous. For, in spite of its barbaric Latin, it is awork of genius, which strikes a new note in European litera-ture. The poet is inspired by the apocalyptic vision of theapproaching end of all things which, as I said in the lastchapter, is characteristic of the age; and the passages whichdeal directly with this theme use all the new resources ofrhythm and assonance and alliteration and repetition to in-tensify the sense of urgency and doom in an extraordinarilyimpressive way:

Regis regum rectissimi prope est dies domini,dies irae et vindictae tenebrarum et nebulae,diesque mirabilium tonitruorum fortium,dies quoque angustiae meroris ac tristitae,in quo cessabit mulierum amor ac desiderium,hominumque contentio mundi huius et cupido.7

This poem helps one to understand the austere and un-compromising spirit of Celtic monasticism. The leaders ofthat movement, like St. Columban and St. Columba him-self, conceived their mission in the spirit of the prophets ofthe Old Testament, who were set over the nations and thekingdoms to pluck up and break down, and to build and toplant. For the principle of spiritual authority in CelticChristianity was found in the numinous character of thesaint rather than in the jurisdiction of an ecclesiasticalhierarchy. A great saint and wonder worker like St. Co-lumba attracted disciples and created a centre of spiritual

7 The Irish Liber Hymnorum, ed. Bernard and Atkinson(1891), Vol. I, 66. Translation: “The day of the Lord, the all justKing of Kings is at hand, a day of wrath and vengeance and thecloud of darkness, of marvellous strong thunder, of bitter grief andwoe, on which love and the desire of women shall cease and thestrife of men and the lust of this world."

power which radiated through his monastic foundations,which retained their loyalty to him after his death. Theseformed the familia or paroechia of the saint, and to a greatextent took the place of the territorial diocese of the Latinand Byzantine world.

Thus, in Ireland, it was the abbot and not the bishopwho was the real source of authority, and the latter was of-ten a subordinate member of the monastic community whopossessed the power of ordination, but no territorial juris-diction or hierarchical authority. These great monasticfamiliae with their thousands of monks and dependants,their far-flung settlements and their complete independ-ence of any external authority, have more resemblance tothe later medieval religious orders than to the older type ofBenedictine monastery, and, as we see from the attractiveVersiculi Familie Benchtiir, they already possessed a strongsense of corporate loyalty and devotion to the rule of theirfounder.

Bencuir bom regulaRecta atque divim,

Stricta, sancta, sedulaSumma, justa et mira.

Navis nunqmm turbataQuamvis fluctibus tonsa,

Nuptiis quoque parataregi domino sponsa.

t t • • •

Certe civitas firma,fortis atque munita,

Gloriosa ac digm,

Supra montem posita*

This change in the social basis of Christian culture showsitself in many different ways, some of which were destined

8 The Antiphonary of Bangor, ed. F. E. Warren, II, 28. Trans-lation: “the rule of Bangor is good, righteous, divine, severe, holy,zealous, just and wondrous.

“A ship that is never troubled though tossed by the waves:a bride adorned for the marriage of her lord and king.

'Truly it is a stronghold, secure and well defended—the city seton a hill, glorious and comely.”

to leave a permanent mark on the life and discipline of thewhole Western Church. Perhaps the most remarkable in-stance of this was the change in the system of moral disci-pline which substituted the practice of private penanceand confession for the ancient canonical tradition of pub-lic penitence, which had been characteristic of the LatinChurch. The old system rested on the principle that publicsins demanded public satisfaction to the Church, whichinvolved a temporary suspension of the privileges of mem-bership of the Christian community, followed by the pub-lic reconciliation of the penitent by the bishop. In theCeltic Churches, on the other hand, the practice of pen-ance followed the pattern of the monastic discipline whereany infraction of the Rule or the moral law was expiated byan appropriate penance determined by the authority of theabbot or the confessor. Thus there arose the elaboratecodes of penalties known as the Penitentials, in which theprecise penance for every possible sin is minutely pre-scribed. These penitentials have a remarkable analogy tothe barbaric legal codes which lay down an exact tariff ofpayments and punishments for the different classes of menand the different crimes, just as the old system of canonicaldiscipline has an analogy to the civic traditions of the classi-cal Roman world. It is, therefore, not surprising that theCeltic penitentials found ready acceptance in communitieswhich followed barbarian law, both in Anglo-Saxon Britainand on the Continent. And the famous penitentials attrib-uted to Theodore of Canterbury and Egbert of York rep-resent the adoption of the Celtic system and its adaptationto the general situation of the Western Church in the newlyconverted countries of the North.

But the greatest service of the Irish monks to WesternChristendom was the new movement of missionary expan-sion which did so much to spread Christianity and restorethe monastic life throughout Western Europe in the sev-enth and eighth centuries. The driving force in this move-ment was primarily the ascetic ideal of pilgrimage—pere-grinandi pro Christo—which peopled the islands of thenorthern seas, as far as the Faroes, and even to Iceland,with monks and hermits. But those who were led eastward

to Britain and the Continent combined this motive with aspirit of active missionary enterprise. In this way the monas-tery of St. Columba at Iona became the centre from whichthe evangelization of Scotland and Northern Britain pro-ceeded, while the journey of St. Columban to the Conti-nent became the starting point of a movement of monasticreform which extended from Annegray and Luxeuil inBurgundy to Lake Constance and finally to Bobbio nearPiacenza in Italy. St. Columban was perhaps the most dy-namic personality the Celtic Church produced, and it wasthrough him and his disciples that Irish monasticism firstbecame a force in continental culture. He brought new lifeto the decadent monasticism of the later Merovingian age,and almost all the great monastic founders and mission-aries of the seventh century, with the exception of St.Amand, were his disciples, or the heirs of his tradition andhis Rule; such were St. Gall ( -640), St. Wandrille( -668), St. Ouen (610-684), St. Philibert (608-684),St. Fara ( -657), St. Omer (c. 670), St. Bertin (c. 709),St. Valery ( -622), St. Romaric ( -653), men andwomen whose names are still written across the map ofEurope, like the German princes of the eighteenth centuryand the Russian commissars of our own time.

The resultant monasticism was not, however, of a purelyCeltic type. The Rule of St. Columban was too severe tobecome the normal standard of religious life in continentalEurope. It was gradually tempered by the influence of theRule of St. Benedict, so that the use of both Rules as co-ordinate authorities became characteristic of the Hiberno-Gallican monasticism of the seventh century. It was in thisway that the Benedictine Rule first became widely knownand followed in Gaul, since it provided the ideal via mediabetween the superhuman asceticism of Celtic monasticismand the chaotic multiplication of independent rules and ob-servances that prevailed in Merovingian Gaul.

But it was in Anglo-Saxon England during the same pe-riod that the meeting of these two monastic traditionsproduced the deepest and most lasting influence on West-ern culture. Here, as in Ireland, a new Christian culture

was planted in barbarian soil by the work of the monasticmissionaries and the monastic schools. But it was not, as inIreland, the direct product of the native society, nor was ita case, as in Gaul, of scattered Celtic and Benedictine in-fluences that mingled with the existing traditions of an old-established Christian society. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons was due to the direct initiative of St. Gregory theGreat, who sent St. Augustine and his companions fromthe centre of Latin Christendom and of Benedictine mo-nasticism to the Jutish kingdom of Kent (596-97), while,on the other hand, Northumbria was converted mainlyby the Celtic monks from Iona, who founded the islandmonastery of Lindisfame in 634. Thus both elements wererepresented in a pure undiluted form, so that a collisionbetween them was unavoidable.

The battle was fought out in Northumbria where theRoman tradition found enthusiastic support among a groupof young Northumbrians led by St. Wilfrid (634-709) andSt. Benedict Biscop (628-90), while the Celtic traditionwas supported by Lindisfame and the Northumbriancourt. St. Wilfrid was a man of boundless energy and im-perious will, whose long life was passed in a series of con-flicts and exiles. But though he succeeded in his main ob-ject of inducing the Northumbrians to accept the disciplineand authority of Rome and abandon the cause of Iona andthe Celtic observance, he failed in his further attempt toreorganize the Northumbrian dioceses on strict canonicalprinciples. This was first accomplished from Canterbury bythe second Roman mission in 668, led by Theodore ofTarsus, a refugee from the eastern territories of the Byzan-tine Empire, which had been recently occupied by theMoslems. In the course of his long episcopate (669-90)Theodore entirely reorganized the Anglo-Saxon Church,establishing the canonical Western system of territorialdioceses, annual synods and episcopal jurisdiction withoutany serious conflict with the existing bishops and monas-teries of the Celtic tradition. He was, moreover, a man ofhigh culture, and, assisted by Hadrian, an Italian abbot ofAfrican origin, he made Canterbury a centre of learningwhich rivalled the great monastic schools of Ireland. We

possess a contemporary witness to the prestige of the newschool in the letter written by St. Aldhelm—himself trainedin both traditions—to Eahfrid, a monk who had just re-turned from six years’ study in Ireland.9

But, at the same time, another centre of the higher cul-ture was being established in Northumbria, which was evenmore important than the school at Canterbury. This wasthe creation of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop, who estab-lished their monasteries at Ripon and Hexham and Wear-mouth and Jarrow, as colonies of Latin culture among theNorthern barbarians and fortresses of Roman order againstCeltic particularism. Benedict Biscop, above all, devotedhimself to the development of religious art and learning.He had served his novitiate at Lerins, the ancient capital ofWestern monasticism, and on his repeated journeys toRome and Gaul he brought back to England a wealth ofmanuscripts, paintings, relics and vestments, as well asmasons and glaziers and singers for the adornment andservice of the Church. Finally, in 678, he brought with himfrom Rome the arch-chanter of St. Peter’s, and the abbotof one of the Basilican monasteries at Rome who acted asPapal legate at the Council of Heathiield in 680, and whospent two or three years instructing the monks of North-umbria in the music of the Roman chant and the annualorder of the Roman liturgy.10

The rise of this centre of intensive Latin monastic cul-ture in Northumbria was the more important because itwas in direct contact with Lindisfarne, the chief centre ofCeltic monastic culture in Britain, so that the two tradi-tions influenced and stimulated one another. Hence it wasin Northumbria that Anglo-Saxon culture, and perhaps thewhole culture of Western monasticism in the Dark Ages,achieved their climax at the beginning of the eighth cen-

9 Perhaps identifiable with Eadfrid, abbot of Lindisfarne, 698-721, to whom the Lindisfarne Gospels are ascribed.

10 The chapter which Bede devotes to this mission of AbbotJohn shows the immense importance that the liturgical chantpossessed in the monastic culture. Here again early medievalChristendom follows the pattern of the archaic ritual cultures andthe doctrine of sacred music which is expressed in the ChineseBook of Rites and in Plato’s Laws.

tury. The immense literary and patristic learning of theVenerable Bede testifies to the strength of the Latin ele-ment, while the art of the Anglian stone crosses showsSyrian or East Mediterranean influences. On the otherhand the calligraphy of the Lindisfarne Gospels and theevolution of the Insular Script represent a blending ofCeltic and Latin influences; while the vernacular literature,which made its first appearance and reached its highestachievement during this period, shows how the new literaryculture was able to assimilate and preserve the epic tradi-tions of the old heroic poetry of the Teutonic barbarians.

This rich and many-sided Northumbrian culture came toan untimely end, like the parallel monastic culture of earlyChristian Ireland, owing to the Viking invasions of theninth century. But before it perished it had succeeded inimplanting the seeds of a great revival of religious life andChristian culture on the Continent. This was the work,above all, of two Anglo-Saxon monks: St. Boniface ofCrediton, the Apostle of Germany (675-753), and Alcuinof York, the adviser of Charlemagne (730-804), the spirit-ual fathers of Carolingian culture. When Boniface em-barked on his mission, religion and culture in the Frankishkingdom were at a low ebb, and the victorious tide of Mos-lem invasion was sweeping over the Christian lands of theWestern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. By 720 theSaracens had penetrated as far as Narbonne; and in thefollowing years all the old centres of monastic culture inSouthern Gaul, such as Lerins, were sacked, and evenLuxeuil, the centre of the tradition of St. Columban inBurgundy, fell a victim to Arab raiders. At the same timeCharles Martel, the leader who checked the Moslem ad-vance at Poitiers in 732, was hardly less of a danger to theChurch, owing to his wholesale exploitation and expropria-tion of bishoprics and monasteries to provide benefices orfiefs for his warriors.

But the creation by St. Boniface and his Anglo-Saxoncompanions of a new province of Christian culture on thenorthern flank of Christendom had an importance that farexceeded its material results. At first sight it might seem

that the conversion of a few tribes of German barbarians—Hessians, Saxons and Frisians-was a very small gain in com-parison with the loss to Christendom of the old civilizedterritories of North Africa and Spain, whose Churches hadhitherto played the leading part in the development ofChristian life and thought in the West. Nevertheless, thework of St. Boniface did more than any other factor tolay the foundations of medieval Christendom. His missionto Germany was not an isolated spiritual adventure like theachievements of his Celtic predecessors; it was part of a far-sighted programme of construction and reform plannedwith all the method and statesmanship of the Roman tra-dition. It involved a triple alliance between the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, the Papacy, and the family of CharlesMartel, the de facto rulers of the Frankish kingdom, outof which the Carolingian Empire and the Carolingian cul-ture ultimately emerged. St. Boniface's direct personal re-lation with Rome as apostolic legate for Germany enabledhim to overcome the centrifugal tendencies of the Celtictradition which was still strong on the Continent, and toprevent any interference with his work by the local Gallicanepiscopate. At the same time his extension of Christianculture in Germany secured the support of the sons ofCharles Martel—Pepin and Carloman—and he made use ofit to carry through a far-reaching programme of ecclesias-tical reform for the Frankish Church itself in a series ofcouncils held between 740 and 747.

This alliance between the reforming party and the newmonarchy was sealed by the solemn religious consecrationof Pepin as king of the Franks by St. Boniface himself atSoissons in 752, a ceremony which was repeated by PopeStephen II at St. Denis in 754, as though to accentuate theimportance of the act, which indeed marks a new era inWestern history. Yet none of this could have been accom-plished without the help of the Anglo-Saxon monks andmissionaries. For St. Boniface’s work depended on hismonastic foundations, above all on Fulda (744), whichwere the centres of Christian culture and missionary actionin the newly converted territories. It was in these Anglo-Saxon colonies that the new type of Christian culture, which

had been developed in Northumbria in the seventh cen-tury, was adapted and transmitted to the Germanic peoplesof the Continent, and a new generation was trained whichprovided the personnel for the re-education and spiritualleadership of the Frankish Church. New foundations fol-lowed one another rapidly during the next fifty or hundredyears: St. Gall in Switzerland (c. 750), Hersfeld, foundedby St. Boniface's successor St. Lull in 769, Benedictbeuemand Tegernsee in Bavaria (740 and 757), Kremsmiinsterin Austria (777), Lorsch in Hesse (764), New Corvey inSaxony (822), were all of them, like Fulda, sources of mis-sionary activity and centres of intellectual culture and ma-terial civilization, not only for Germany, but also for theneighbouring lands to the north and east. We can get anidea of the immense scale of these monastic foundationsfrom the well-known plan of an abbey produced at St. Gallabout 820. It is no longer the simple religious communityenvisaged by the old monastic rules, but a vast complexof buildings, churches, workshops, store-houses, offices,schools and alms-houses, housing a whole population of de-pendants, workers and servants like the temple cities ofantiquity. The monastery had, in fact, taken the place ofthe moribund city, and was to remain the centre of me-dieval culture until the rise of the new type of city com-mune in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that thewhole Carolingian culture should have a monastic charac-ter. Indeed it was the Carolingian age which finally estab-lished the Benedictine Rule as the universal standard of thereligious life in the West. The great monasteries were thecultural centres of the Carolingian Empire, and it was bytheir alliance with the monastic culture that Charles andhis son, Louis the Pious, were able to carry out their ambi-tious plans for ecclesiastical and liturgical reform whichcontributed so much to the spiritual and formal unificationof Western Christendom. Although the political structureof the Empire endured for less than a century, its work ofcultural and religious unification remained the permanentfoundation of all the later medieval developments. The ex-

tent to which the Carolingian age defined the terms of me-dieval culture is to be seen very clearly in the case of theliturgy, since the liturgical reform imposed by Charles theGreat led to the introduction of a common rite throughoutWestern Europe. For the Roman rite, as known to the Mid-dle Ages, was, in fact, the officially authorized rite of theCarolingian Empire and represents the fusion of Romanand Gallican elements resulting from the revision of theliturgical books earned out by Alcuin and his fellowworkers.

Here, as in so many other ways, the monastic culture ofthe Carolingian Empire followed the pattern laid down bythe short-lived flowering of Christian culture in North-umbria between 650 and 750, of which Boniface andAlcuin were the heirs and transmitters. But on the Con-tinent the revival of culture found in Charles the Greata patron who had the vision to appreciate its possibilitiesand the power to realize them. Not only did he gather at hiscourt the most learned men of his time from every part ofWestern Europe, from Italy and Spain to Britain and Ire-land, but he carried out a systematic programme for thereform of clerical education. Few rulers have possessed aclearer sense of the importance of education and a greaterconcern for the diffusion of letters than is shown in thelegislation and correspondence of Charles the Great. Fi-nally, in the school of the palace directed by Alcuin, thelast great representative of the Northumbrian culture, andin his immediate court circle, he established a centre ofhigher study, where for the first time in the Middle Agesscholars and nobles, laymen and ecclesiastics met on thecommon ground of humane letters and rational discussion.

In all this there was a deliberate purpose to create or re-store a Latin Christian culture which should be the com-mon spiritual possession of the new Western Christianempire. No doubt the new learning was elementary andlacking in originality. Its main achievements were educa-tional rather than literary or philosophical, and consisted oftext-books like the De Institutions Clericorum of RabanusMaurus (776-856); dictionaries and commentaries likethe Liber Glossarum and the Glossa ordinaris; the reform

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of the script, and the reform of the liturgy for which Alcuinhimself was largely responsible, and most of all the collec-tion and copying of manuscripts. But in comparison withthe debased culture of seventh-century Gaul, traditional-ism itself was a progressive force, for it secured the survivalof the classical inheritance of Western culture. The wordsof Alcuin's teacher, Aelbert of York—that it would be dis-graceful to allow the knowledge which had been discoveredby the wise men of old to perish in our generation—show asense of responsibility to the past which is the mark ofgenuine humanism rather than of a blind adherence totraditionalism. The spirit of Christian humanism finds ex-pression in Alcuin’s own letters to Charles tire Great: "Ifyour intentions are carried out,” he writes, “it may be thata new Athens will arise in France, and an Athens fairer thanof old, for our Athens, ennobled by the teaching of Christ,will surpass the wisdom of the Academy. The old Athenshad only the teachings of Plato to instruct it, yet even so itflourished by the seven liberal arts. But our Athens will beenriched by the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit and will,therefore, surpass all the dignity of earthly wisdom.”11

It may seem to us pathetic, or even absurd, that a monk-ish schoolmaster like Alcuin, and an illiterate barbarian likeCharlemagne, should dream of building a new Athens in aworld which possessed only the rudiments of civilizationand was about to be overwhelmed by a fresh tide of bar-barism. Nevertheless, their ideal of a Christian culturewhich would restore and preserve the inheritance of an-cient civilization and classical literature was never lost andultimately found its progressive realization in the develop-ment of Western culture.

In this sense the achievement of the Carolingian age wasa true renaissance and the starting point of Western cultureas a conscious unity. The pupils of Alcuin, Rabanus Mau-rus, Einhard, Angilbert of St. Riquier, Adalard of Corbie,and Amalarius of Metz, handed on the tradition to theirpupils in turn, to Servatus Lupus and Walafrid Strabo, thedisciples of Rabanus Maums at Fulda, and to Heiric of

11 Ep. 170.

Auxerre, the pupil of Servatus Lupus at Ferri&res. In thisway the Carolingian revival was carried on by the greatCarolingian abbeys, each of which preserved the traditionestablished by the Palace School of Charlemagne and Al-cuin’s later teaching at Tours. And after the fall of theEmpire it was the great monasteries, especially those ofSouthern Germany, St. Gall, Reichenau and Tegemsee,that were the only remaining islands of intellectual lifeamidst the returning flood of barbarism which once againthreatened to submerge Western Christendom. For, thoughmonasticism seems at first sight ill-adapted to withstandthe material destructiveness of an age of lawlessness andwar, it was an institution which possessed extraordinary re-cuperative power. Ninety-nine out of a hundred monaster-ies could be burnt and the monks killed or driven out, andyet the whole tradition could be reconstituted from the onesurvivor, and the desolate sites could be repeopled by freshsupplies of monks who would take up again the brokentradition, following the same rule, singing the same liturgy,reading the same books and thinking the same thoughts astheir predecessors. In this way monasticism and the mo-nastic culture came back to England and Normandy in theage of St. Dunstan from Fleury and Ghent after more thana century of utter destruction; with the result that a cen-tury later the Norman and English monasteries were againamong the leaders of Western culture.

It is true that there was a limit to this power of recupera-tion. Irish and Scottish monasticism never fully recoveredfrom the effects of the Viking invasion, and the breach inthe continuity of Anglo-Saxon monastic tradition was hardlyless serious. However resistant monasticism might be toexternal disaster and insecurity, it was, nevertheless, ulti-mately dependent on the existence of Christian society andits temporal institutions. Therefore in order to understandthe relations between religion and culture in Western Eu-rope, it is also necessary to study the evolution of the greatexternal organ of Christian Society, the institution of king-ship, and its relation to the Church and to Christendomas an inclusive political religious unity.

Chapter IV

The Barbarians and the ChristianKingdom

The evolution of monarchical institutions and the idea ofkingship during the Dark Ages from 400 to 1000 providesone of the most instructive examples in history of the com-plex process by which different social and religious elementsbecome interwoven in the formation of a culture. For thefully developed Christian monarchy of the Middle Ages,which possessed such a remarkable uniformity of typethroughout the European world, represents the ultimate fu-sion of a whole series of traditions that had their originin remote ages and possessed extremely different culturalbackgrounds.

When the barbarian tribes broke into the Roman Em-pire in the fifth century, they came into a world which wasin the midst of a process of social and religious change. Theclassical Mediterranean tradition of citizenship and civicmagistracy was already overshadowed by the oriental con-ception of divine monarchy, and the Roman Imperator wasbeing transformed into a Byzantine Basileus secluded inthe eunuch-guarded recesses of the Sacred Palace. But thistradition of oriental theocracy was not altogether in har-mony with the spirit of the new religion, which was also oforiental origin but which still retained the memory of cen-turies of persecution and passive resistance to the imperialpower.

As we have already seen, the Christian tradition was es-sentially dualistic, accepting a fundamental opposition be-tween the Church and the world: the kingdom of God andthe kingdom of Caesar. And, though this opposition was

weakened in the East by the gradual incorporation of theOrthodox Church in the monarchical order of the Byzan-tine Empire, in the West it was being reinterpreted andreinforced by the Augustinian philosophy of history. ForSt. Augustine's City of God, one of the books which didmost to form the mind of Western Christendom, sees allhistory as a struggle between two dynamic spiritual prin-ciples manifested through the ages in the never-endingconflict between two societies—the City of God, and Baby-lon, the City of Confusion, which remain eternally divided,although in the present world they mix and interpenetrateone another in every form of human society.1

Yet in spite of this underlying religious dualism, theChristians of the Latin world, with the exception of Salvian,show a loyalty to the Roman Empire which lasted down tothe time of St. Gregory the Great and beyond. But it wasloyalty to a tradition and to a civilization—to the idea of thepax Romana and the Romana fides—rather than to the per-son and the authority of the Emperor which had becomeshadowy and remote. In practice the Roman bishops andnobles, like Sidonius Apollinaris and Cassiodorus and St.Isidore, found no difficulty in accepting the de facto au-thority of the barbarian kings as "powers ordained by God”,very much in the same way as the oriental Christians likeSt._John of Damascus accepted the sovereignty of thekhalifs, and the East Syrian bishops acknowledged the au-thority of the kings of Persia. Indeed, the Christian view ofthe world actually favoured a realistic attitude in politics,owing to its spiritual dualism which treated all temporalconditions and institutions as transitory and provisional.The Christian people was the Second Israel dwelling inexile and captivity, and Christians could accept the op-pression and arbitrary rule of the barbarians as the He-brew prophets had accepted the rule of the Gentiles whowere the unconscious instruments of the divine purpose inhistory.

But to the barbarians themselves kingship had a verydifferent significance. It was their one vital social institu-tion, and it possessed a psychological appeal to all that was

1 De Civitate Dei, I, c. 35.

deepest in their cultural and moral tradition. The barbarianking was neither a despot like the oriental monarch nor amagistrate like the Roman Emperor; he was a war leaderwho enjoyed the prestige and mana of divine ancestry andheroic tradition. The barbarian peoples were, in fact, noless king-conscious than the Homeric Achaeans, and,though they never produced a Homer, they possessed thesame type of heroic epic traditions which they preservedfor centuries and which formed a link between latermedieval culture and the age of the barbarian invasions, justas the Greek epic linked the classical world with the ageof the Trojan War and the fall of the Mycenean Culture.So, too, the relation between the barbarian kingship andthe sacred monarchy of the Roman Byzantine Basileus isparallel to that between the Achaean warrior kings and theEgyptian Pharaoh, or the great king of the Hittites. Butwhereas the details of this relation are lost in the mists ofmyth and legend, we are able to follow the history ofmedieval kingship in detail on both sides of its pedigree.

For the new barbarian kingdoms had a double origin. Onthe one side they inherited the tradition of some heroicgod-descended royal race like the Amals, the Balts, theAsdings, or the Merovingians; while, on the other, theywere allies and deputies of the Roman Empire, and in-herited the political and administrative traditions of ahighly organized state. This dual character appears moststrikingly in the case of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth. Theod-oric was an Amal, the heir of the heroic traditions of therace of Eormanric, and himself the hero of the medievalepic of Dietrich of Berne. Yet, at the same time, he was aman of Roman education, a patron of Roman art and litera-ture, and a ruler who carried on the Roman tradition oflaw and government. Procopius, who was no friend of theGoths, wrote of him that “his manner of ruling over hissubjects was worthy of a great Emperor; for he maintainedjustice, made good laws, protected his country from invasionand gave proof of extraordinary prudence and valour”.2 Bar-barian rulers of this type recognized clearly enough thattheir native tradition of warrior kingship was not enough.

2 Procopius, de Bello Gothico, I, x.

As King Athaulf the Visigoth declared. Gothic barbarismcould not submit to the reign of law, but without the lawsthere could be no state. Therefore he had abandoned hisblind hatred of everything Roman and had made up hismind to use the Gothic power in the service of civilizationfor the honour and exaltation of the name of Rome.8

Nevertheless, it was just those peoples like the Goths,who went furthest to accept the high civilization of Rome,that failed to survive. The kingdoms of the Ostrogoths andthe Vandals in Italy and Africa were destroyed by Justinianand that of the Visigoths in Spain, in spite of its muchlonger history, was swept away by Musa ibn Nusair andhis general Tariq in 711-13. It is, therefore, to NorthernEurope—to the Merovingian kingdom between the Rhineand the Seine, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain andthe Scandinavian kingdoms of the remote Baltic world—that we must look for the origins of the traditions of bar-barian kingship inherited by the kingdoms of the West andfinally incorporated into the order of medieval Christen-dom. It is in these lands that we can best discern theoriginal features of the institutions that underlie the his-toric forms of kingship. In this country, above all, theearliest Anglo-Saxon literature has preserved the heroictradition of the warrior kings of the migration period, andat a much later date the old Norse poetry and sagas carriedthe same tradition on into the world of medieval culture.Both these traditions show a remarkable agreement in theirindependent versions of the Northern tradition. The Scan-dinavian literature which is derived from the kinglessaristocratic society of medieval Iceland is no less concernedwith the heroic ideal of kingship than the Anglo-Saxonepics, which are, presumably, the work of court poets de-pendent on some royal or princely patron.4

In comparison with the new barbarian kingdoms that had

8 Orosius, vii, 48, i.

4 It is true, however, that from the beginning Icelandic poetsand saga makers took service with the kings of Norway and Den-mark, so that Icelandic literature was also influenced directly byroyal patrons and the tradition of court poetry.

arisen with a civilized Roman basis, the ancient barbariankingship of the North was a social and religious, rather thana political institution. The king was not primarily a governorand a law-giver, but the head and the symbolic representa-tive of his people.

It is very difficult for us to enter into the spirit of the oldGermanic polity, as represented by the earliest laws likethose of Kent, especially as these laws were mainly in-tended as a Christian revision or modernization of an exist-ing body of law and tradition which is unknown to us. Wehave the impression of a complex stratified or hierarchicalsociety which was, however, quite different from the feudalor class hierarchies with which we are familiar.

As Professor Jolliffe has shown so well in his Constitu-tional History of Medieval England,5 this archaic type oftribal kingdom derived its stability not from the power andauthority of the ruler but from its own specific gravity andfrom the complex network of kinship and inherited statuswhich held the people together in a community the struc-ture of which was consecrated by religion and sacred tradi-tion. And the king was the natural centre in which all thesetraditions and loyalties were concentrated. He was the em-bodiment of the life of the nation and the life of the land.He was the representative of the people to the gods ashigh priest, who presided at the sacrifices, and he repre-sented the gods to the people by virtue of his divine an-cestry and the sacred prestige of his blood and his office.

But it is hardly necessary to say that the people or "folk”of which we speak is not a nation in the modern sense of theword. Kings and kingdoms were as plentiful in the paganNorth as in the Homeric world or in ancient Canaan. TheRunic verses of the Rok Stone in Sweden speaks of "twentykings of four names, sons of four brothers who for fourwinters dwelt in Seeland"; and even in historic times, atthe beginning of the eleventh century, the Norwegian prov-ince of Uppland was subdivided among five different king-doms. The rise of the greater kingdoms, above all that of

5 J. E. A. Jolliffe, Constitutional History of Medieval England(1937), pp. 44-47. Cf. also his earlier work, Pie-teudal England:The Jutes (1933).

the Franks, was a consequence of the period of the barbar-ian invasions and the conquest of alien peoples; but in pro-portion as these new kingdoms increased in size, they losttheir “national” bond with the people and their link withthe primitive tradition of racial kingship. These elementssurvived most fully in the Scandinavian North, which hadbeen least affected by alien influence. In Sweden, especially,the monarchy preserved its archaic religious character downto the twelfth century; and the institution of kingship re-mained inseparably connected with the great sanctuary ofYngvi Frey at Old Upsala, of whom the king was at oncethe high priest and the human counterpart. It is from theSwedish tradition that we derive through Norwegian andIcelandic sources the fullest evidence concerning the priestking, whose chief function was to offer sacrifice on behalf ofthe people for good harvests and victory in battle and whowas himself liable to be sacrificed if his offerings provedunacceptable to the gods.

The historical circumstances of Anglo-Saxon Englandplaced it midway between the two developments. Its king-doms were the creation of successful warrior leaders, all ofwhom ultimately claimed divine descent, although few werethe direct representatives of a known continental dynasty,save for the royal house of Mercia, which was descendedfrom Offa of Angle, one of the heroes of the old epic tra-ditions and a ruler of the continental Angles. But, unlikethe other barbarian states which had established them-selves on Roman soil, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had nottaken over the Roman traditions of centralized politicalauthority. They remained socially and spiritually akin tothe barbarian kingdoms of the North. Even at a later datetheir literature shows how deeply their traditions wererooted in the Northern world—the lands of the Danes andthe Geats and the Frisians. The great ship burial of anEast Anglian king of the early seventh century which wasdiscovered at Sutton Hoo on the River Deben in Suffolk in1939 gives us a remarkable sidelight on this world and onthe great warrior kings, "Sackers of Cities” and "Treasurersof Heroes” of whom we read in Beowulf* and Widsith.

*Cf. the ship burial of King Scyld in Beowulf, 34-35.

The coming of Christianity to this Homeric world inevi-tably produced a social as well as a religious revolution.King Raedwald attempted to reconcile the old and the newworlds by maintaining the sacrifices in the same templewhich he dedicated to Christian worship, but such com-promises are rare. From the time of St. Augustine the royalfamilies were the primary targets of missionary activities,and the royal courts were the centres from which the con-version of England was achieved. However small was thepolitical power of the king, he was the keystone of the socialstructure, and his conversion to Christianity was the sym-bol and pledge of the conversion of his people. Thus,though the kingship lost its old divine prerogatives andmuch of its traditional magical associations with good har-vests and victory in war by becoming merged in the widerunity of Christendom, it gained new prestige by its closeassociation with the Church, from which it gradually ac-quired a new form of sacredness. The cult of St. Oswaldthe Martyr, the second Christian king of Northumbria, andof many lesser figures in the reigning houses, like St. Oswinand St. Hilda, St. Sigebert of East Anglia, St. Sebbi of Es-sex, St. Ethelburga, St. Sexburga and St. Edith, providedAnglo-Saxon royalty with a Christian substitute for thedivine ancestry of pagan tradition.

Yet, at the same time, it may be doubted whether thesegains were not outweighed by the loss of the heroic ethos ofpagan kingship. The royal saints of Anglo-Saxon Englandwere, for the most part, men who were defeated in battleby the pagans, like St. Oswald and St. Edwin, or men whoresigned their crowns to become monks, like St. Sebbi, ofwhom it was said he ought to have been a bishop ratherthan a king. It was hard for warlike barbarians to acceptthe Christian ethic of renunciation and forgiveness in theirrulers who had been the living embodiment of their prideof blood, as we see from St. Bede's story of King Sigebert ofEssex who was killed “because he was wont to spare hisenemies and forgive them the wrongs they had done assoon as they asked him”. Moreover, even Bede himself wasconscious of the dangers arising from the weakening of theties of personal loyalty and of the military virtues which

accompanied the rise of the new Christian culture, as heshows in the last sentences of his history and in the epistleto Archbishop Egbert of York where he criticizes theabuse of monastic endowments as a threat to the militarysecurity of Northumbria.

A similar weakening of royalty and of the social ordertook place in all the barbarian kingdoms of the West as aresult of the transition from pagan to Christian culture. Wesee a striking example of it in the Visigothic kingdom ofSpain, in many respects the most advanced and powerfulof all these kingdoms. Ever since the Visigoths ceased to beArians and accepted Catholicism as the state religion (in589), the relations between state and Church had been soclose that they formed practically a single organism, gov-erned by the king and the great councils held at Toledo,which were legislative assemblies as well as ecclesiasticalsynods. But although the Church was so closely associatedwith the monarchy and used all its resources to support theroyal power and anathematize sedition and rebellion, it waspowerless to prevent what a contemporary calls the “de-testable Spanish custom of killing their kings’'. The historyof Visigothic Spain after the extinction of the ancient royaldynasty in 531 is a long series of rebellions, assassinationsand palace revolutions. It may be that the new religioussanctions were not strong enough to compensate for theloss of the instinctive pagan loyalty to the ancient god-descended royal line of the Balts, which had come to anend in 531. In any case, although the alliance of the Churchand the monarchy produced a characteristically Spanishfusion of religion and politics, and a remarkable code ofecclesiastical and civil legislation, it failed to overcome theindiscipline and social disunity which proved fatal to theexistence of Christian Spain.

No doubt the same elements of weakness existed in theFrankish kingdom, which, in the well-known words ofFustel de Coulanges, was "a regime of despotism tem-pered by assassination”. Indeed, the history of the Merovin-gian dynasty presents a darker picture of lawlessness, crimeand sheer incapacity than that of any of the barbarian

kingdoms. Yet, in spite of this, the Franks remained loyalfor centuries to the family of Clovis if not to its individualrepresentatives for the sake of the hereditary sacred pres-tige of the royal blood, and this conservatism allowed theFrankish state to maintain its continuity during the forma-tive period in which the conquerors and the conquered be-came fused into a new social unity. The process of assimila-tion was favoured by two important factors. In the firstplace there was no religious barrier between the Franks andtheir Gallo-Roman subjects, since the Franks were notArians like the Goths and Vandals and Lombards, but hadbecome Catholic in the reign of Clovis (496); and, sec-ondly, they were not, like the Goths, isolated in the midstof an alien population, but still remained in contact withthe other German peoples, so that they extended theirdominions during the sixth century eastward to Thuringiaand Bavaria, as well as southward to Burgundy and Aqui-taine.

The result of this was that the kingdom of the Franksbecame the centre towards which all the living forces ofWestern culture converged: the meeting place of Latin andGerman elements, and of Mediterranean and Atlantic in-fluences. In “France”, as it may now be called, Irish andAnglo-Saxon monks met those from Italy and Spain, andSyrian traders met the Frisian merchants who traded withEngland and the Baltic. The Frankish monarchy was theonly institution which provided a principle of organizationfor this development, but it was incapable of assuming therole of cultural leadership until its whole character andspiritual purpose had been drastically transformed.

Hence the internal revolution which substituted thefamily of Charles Martel and Pepin for the old royal housemeant far more than a mere change of dynasties. It was thebirth of a new ideal of kingship and a new conception ofthe nature of the Frankish state. The tradition of loyaltyto the Merovingians, decadent and impotent though theywere, was too strong to be set aside by purely politicalmethods, and it was only after gaining the approval of PopeZachary that Pepin ventured to supersede the old dynastyand accept the royal crown by a solemn act of religious con-

secration which was performed by St. Boniface at Soissonsin 751.

This was the first introduction among the Franks of thereligious ceremony by which the king was crowned andanointed by the Church, and the importance of the newrite was accentuated by its repetition three years later bythe hands of the Pope himself when he visited Pepin toseek his aid against the Lombards. Henceforward it was tobe a characteristic feature of Western kingship, so that thechrism or oil of consecration was held to confer a newsacred character on the person of the ruler.7 There hasbeen much discussion by historians with regard to theorigins of the ceremony. It was already in use in the seventhcentury in Visigothic Spain, where, as I have said, the king-ship was exceptionally dependent on the support of theChurch, and it is probable that it was practised even earlieramong the Celtic peoples, whence it was no doubt trans-mitted to the Anglo-Saxons. But there can be no questionthat its ultimate origin is to be found in the Old Testamentwhere it embodies the theocratic principle and the depend-ence of the secular power on the spiritual power of theprophet, as we see in the case of Samuel anointing Davidin place of Saul, and in the even more dramatic story ofEliseus’ mission to anoint Jehu as king to destroy the houseof Ahab. In both of these cases the prophet as the repre-sentative of God intervenes to change the course of historyby transferring the kingship to a new line, and we can hardlydoubt that these precedents were in the minds of the Popeand St. Boniface and the advisers of King Pepin when thenew rite was introduced.

Thus from the beginning the new monarchy was asso-ciated with the Church and was regarded as the divinely ap-pointed organ of Christendom. No doubt Charles Marteland his son Pepin, ule petit poingeur," were tough and ruth-less soldiers who did not “carry the sword in vain”, and theformer in particular used the wealth of the Church and thelands of the monasteries to provide fiefs or “benefices” for

7 Cf. the words of the German tenth-century rite: "The graceof God has this day changed thee into another man and hasmade thee by the rite of unction partaker in His divinity.”

his warriors. But this secularization of Church property tookplace at the very moment when St. Bede was criticizingthe excessive multiplication of monastic foundations as asource of the military weakness of Northumbria, and it ispossible that Charles Martel's ruthless cutting out of deadwood was not altogether a misfortune for the FrankishChurch.

In any case, there is no doubt that the Carolingian houseas a whole was traditionally friendly to the party of ec-clesiastical reform. St. Boniface, the noblest representativeof that party, admitted that without the support of CharlesMartel his missionary work would have been impossible.But it was under Charles's sons, Pepin and Carloman, thatthe Carolingians became most fully identified with the re-forming movement and gave their support to St. Bonifacenot only in his missionary activity but in his reform of theFrankish Church, carried out in the series of great councilsthat accompanied the formal inauguration of the Carotin-gian monarchy in 751.

In this work the primary agent was the apostle of Ger-many himself, who, for all his unworldliness, possessed aremarkable talent for construction and organization, and hefound an invaluable ally in Carloman, the most religiousof all the Carolingians, who was responsible for summoningthe first council of the Frankish Church to assemble afteran interval of eighty years, thus putting an end to the ec-clesiastical anarchy which had characterized the later Mero-vingian period.

Nevertheless, St. Boniface's programme of reform wasnot fully realized. He had hoped to use his power as Legateof the Holy See to restore the complete hierarchical orderof bishops and metropolitans and, finally, of archbishops,who were to be invested by the Pope with the pallium asa mark of their delegated authority. But the resistance ofthe profoundly secularized episcopate, and the traditionalauthority of the secular power, rendered such a sweepingreform impossible. The patron of St. Boniface, Carloman,the ruler of Germany and North-West France, resigned hispower in 747 and became a monk, first at Mount Soracteand afterwards at Monte Cassino. Pepin, who now united

the whole Frankish realm and set about the conquest ofAquitaine, was not a man to accept any diminution of hisauthority, although he was ready to use his power in anenlightened way and to forward the work of reform. There-fore, instead of bringing the Frankish Church under theimmediate jurisdiction of Rome, the reformers were obligedto seek an alternative solution in a close association betweenthe Frankish monarchy and the Papacy.

St. Boniface accepted this solution in so far as he pre-sided at the ceremony which consecrated the new mon-archy, but he ceased to take any further share in the affairsof the Frankish Church. He withdrew to the monastery hehad founded at Fulda to be the centre of missionary ac-tivity in central Germany, and soon afterwards returned toFrisia, which had been the starting point of his missionaryactivities, to offer his life as the crown of his apostolate(754). One of his last acts was to write to St. Fulrad ofSt. Denis, King Pepin's confidential adviser, on behalf of hismissionaries and monks, “almost all strangers; some of thempriests stationed in many places to minister to the Churchand the people; some monks placed in our cells to teachchildren their letters; and some old men who have longlived and laboured with me. I am anxious about all these,that after my death they may have your counsel and theroyal protection, and that they may not be scattered likesheep without a shepherd and that the peoples who dwellon the pagan marches may not lose the law of Christ”.8

In fact his disciple, St. Lull, who succeeded him as Arch-bishop of Mainz, was out of touch with the men who con-trolled the destinies of the Frankish kingdom. Some yearslater he complained to an English archbishop (Ethelbert ofYork) that “the Church is daily oppressed and harassedbecause new princes follow new ways and make new lawsaccording to their desires”—quia modemi principes novosmores novosque leges secundum sua desideria condunt.9And thus, in spite of the influence of St. Boniface and theAnglo-Saxon missionaries on the reforming policy of theCarolingians, they were not responsible for the vital deci-

8 S. Bonifatu et Julli, Ep. 93, ed. Dummler M.G.H.

9 Ibid., Ep. 125.

sions which transformed the character of the Frankishmonarchy. They were due to the initiative of the Papacyand to the Frankish advisers of Pepin and his successor,Charles the Great, such as St. Fulrad of St. Denis, St.Chrodegang of Metz, and Wilichair of Sens. The appeals ofPopes Stephen II and Paul I to King Pepin and that ofHadrian I to Charlemagne created a new political bondbetween the Papacy and the Frankish monarchy and ulti-mately led to the destruction of the Lombard kingdom, theabolition of the Byzantine sovereignty over Rome andRavenna and the recognition of the king of the Franks asthe patron and protector of the Holy See. In return, thePope accepted the control of the Carolingian monarchyover the property and personnel of the Church, and theway was prepared for the establishment of the new WesternEmpire, which gave constitutional form and ritual conse-cration to the new relation between the Papacy and theFrankish kingdom.

For the new Empire was an essentially theocratic institu-tion. "It expressed both the new conception of Christen-dom as the ultimate social unity, and the sacred characterof the ruler as the divinely appointed leader of the Chris-tian people. The traditional expressions that convey thesacred or numinous nature of the imperial power—sacrumimperium, sancta majestas, divus Augustus, and the like,which had been preserved in the Byzantine Empire-acquired a new significance in the West, for, as we see fromAlcuin’s correspondence,10 the conception of the theocraticmission of the Frankish monarchy preceded Charles’s as-sumption of the imperial tide and was psychologically itscause rather than its consequence. In fact the fusion of thetemporal and spiritual powers was far more complete inthe Carolingian state than it had been in the Christianbarbarian kingdoms, or even in the Byzantine Empire. Thelegislation of Charles the Great, which was of such im-portance for the development of Western culture, is thesupreme expression of this theocratic conception of au-

10 Cf. especially Ep. 174, in which Alcuin writes of the threesupreme powers of the world: the Roman Papacy, the RomanEmpire and the Frankish kingdom.

thority. It is the legislation of a unitary Church-state andcovers every aspect of the common life of the Christianpeople from economics and police to liturgy and highereducation and preaching. In the same way the administra-tion of the Carolingian state was equally unitary, since thebishop, no less than the count, was appointed and con-trolled by the emperor and acted with the count as jointrepresentative of the imperial authority. So, too, the missi,the imperial delegates who carried out periodical tours ofinspection through the provinces, were always composed oflay and ecclesiastical members in equal numbers—usually acount and a bishop or abbot. For the immense expansionof the Carolingian state in consequence of the conquest ofSaxony and Hungary and the Spanish March and the an-nexation of Italy, Bavaria and Frisia had rendered religionthe only real bond of union between the different peoplesand languages of the Empire, and it was not as the princesof the Franks, but as the rulers and leaders of the wholeChristian people^ that Charles and his successor, Louis thePious, governed their dominions.

No doubt Charles himself, like his father and grand-father, was a mighty warrior before the Lord, and it washis sword rather than his religious prerogative which hadcreated the new Empire. Nevertheless he was inspired toan even greater extent than his predecessors by the idealsof the monks and scholars whom he had gathered at hiscourt and from whom his counsellors and ministers andofficials were recruited.

I have already written in the previous chapter of thisaspect of Charles the Great’s work—his promotion of educa-tion and literature, and his far-reaching plans for ecclesiasti-cal and liturgical reform, which did so much to increase thecultural unity of Western Europe. But apart from thesecultural results, the Carolingian legislation in itself marksthe emergence of the new social consciousness of WesternChristendom. Hitherto the legislation of the Western king-doms had been of the nature of a Christian appendix tothe old barbarian tribal codes. Now, for the first time, acomplete break was made with the past, and Christendomenacted its own laws, which covered the whole field of social

activity in Church and state, and referred all things to thesingle standard of the Christian ethos. This was inspiredneither by Germanic nor Roman precedent. The Carolin-gian emperors gave the law to the whole Christian peoplein the spirit of the kings and judges of the Old Testament,declaring the law of God to the people of God. In theletter which Cathaulf addressed to Charles at the beginningof his reign, the writer speaks of the king as the earthlyrepresentative of God, and he counsels Charles to use theBook of Divine Law as his manual of government, accord-ing to the precept of Deuteronomy xvii. 18-20, which com-mands the king to make a copy of the law from the booksof the priests, to keep it always with him and to read itconstantly so that he may learn to fear the Lord and keepHis laws, lest his heart be lifted up in pride above hisbrethren and he turn aside to the right hand or to the left.

So, too, Alcuin writes again and again of Charles as thesecond David, the chosen leader of the people of God, whonot only guards the frontiers of Christendom against thepagan barbarian, but also guides and protects the Churchherself and guards the Catholic faith against heresy andtheological error. It would be a mistake to regard these ut-terances either as mere courtly flattery, or as a proof thatthe Church had become entirely subordinated to politicalinterests and the supremacy of the state. What they showis rather a unitary conception of the Christian communityin which the distinction of Church and state, which is soobvious to modem lawyers and political theorists, had be-come blurred and unimportant. This is shown very clearlyin the passage with which Jonas of Orleans begins histreatise on the royal office—De Institutione Regia—in thereign of Louis the Pious. “All the faithful must know,” hewrites, "that the universal Church is the body of Christ whois its Head, and in it there are two figures which stand outsupreme—the priest and the king”—in ea duae principaliterexistant eximie personae, sacerdotalis videlicet et regalis.But, above all, it is in the coronation rite itself that the newCarolingian Christian kingship achieved its classical expres-sion, which was transmitted from the Carolingian liturgy,on the one hand, to the West Frankish realm and the Anglo-

82 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

Saxon kingdom, and on the other to East Frankish king-doms and to the medieval empire.

It is unnecessary for me to say much about this, be-cause we still possess this rite without substantial changein our own coronation service, and the evolution of theEnglish coronation rite takes us back with hardly any seri-ous gaps to its Carolingian origins. This is one of the mostremarkable examples in history of the continuity of theWestern development, since here it is not a question of un-conscious influence or of the vestigial survival of ancienttradition in popular custom, but of a solemn public actwhich holds a central place in the political order of a greatmodem state. And all the elaborate ritual and symbolismwhich make up the ceremony have their origin in the an-cient conception of the king as a sacred representativefigure, the head of the Christian society, standing betweenGod and the people, bound by reciprocal bonds of loyaltyand fidelity to one and the other, since the royal charisma,the grace conferred by unction, was manifested and justifiedonly in so far as the king was the servant of God, theguardian of justice and the protector of the rights of hispeople. For if the people are bound to obey the king, theking himself is no less bound to keep his oath, which makeshim a minister of God, as well as a sovereign.

Thus there is a kind of theocratic constitutionalism im-plicit in the coronation rite which was gradually worked outin the evolution of the medieval state. For both the priestand the king were members and ministers of the sameChristian society; both alike were consecrated by God fortheir office, the one to teach and offer sacrifice, the otherto rule and judge. Throughout the Middle Ages there was acontinuous tension which often rose to a conflict betweenthese two authorities. But both of them were regarded asfunctionaries of the same society, and no one questionedthat each of them possessed a sacred character, althoughthere were wide differences of opinion with regard to theirmutual relations and the determination of their respectivefunctions and prerogatives. Even during the Carolingianperiod the position which was secured by the exceptionalachievement of Charles the Great was rapidly undermined

THE BARBARIANS AND THE CHRISTIAN KINGDOM 83

and disintegrated by the weakness of his successor, so thatthe sense of unity of Christian society, which was the sourceof Charles the Great’s unique authority, was equally re-sponsible for the formal judgment and deposition of Louisthe Pious in 834 by the bishops as the ultimate representa-tives of divine authority. For the divine right of theanointed king was counterbalanced throughout the greaterpart of the Middle Ages by its conditional and revocablecharacter; and this was not a mere concession to theologicaltheory; it was enforced by the very real authority of theChurch. Here again the influence of the Old Testamenttradition of theocracy was paramount, so that the medievalmonarchy, and most of all the medieval empire, possesseda theocratic character in a different sense from that which isto be seen in the Byzantine Empire, or in the absolutemonarchies of Europe after the Renaissance and the Ref-ormation. Nevertheless even in these later periods it is notdifficult to find examples of the older view of the limitedand essentially dependent nature of divine right. Through-out these periods, both in Catholic and Protestant Europe,there was a large body of opinion which acknowledged theDivine right of kings without admitting that this involvedthe principle of Passive Obedience, so that there is an his-toric connection between the modem idea of constitutionalmonarchy and the medieval tradition of kingship.

Chapter V

The Second Dark Age and theConversion of the North

The Carolingian Empire was an attempt to realize a vastprogramme of social and cultural reconstruction with slen-der material forces and no technical equipment. The re-markable thing is not that it was a material and politicalfailure, but that the ideal of unity and the tradition ofChristian culture which inspired it were able to survive solong in the adverse conditions of the ninth century.

For from the moment that its founder died, the Empirewas involved in a mounting tide of difficulties and disastersagainst which emperors and bishops maintained an heroicbut ineffectual struggle. It was not merely that the disap-pearance of the dominant personality of Charlemagne al-lowed the fundamental contradiction between the barbaricFrankish tradition of patrimonial tribal monarchy and thespecifically Carolingian ideal of a unitary Christian Church-state to become explicit. The crisis was due still more to thefact that for the next century and a half Western Christen-dom was exposed to a new storm of barbarian invasion evenmore destructive than those of the fifth century. For notonly was the Carolingian Empire far weaker and smallerthan the Roman world, it was open to attack simultaneouslyfrom every side: from the Scandinavian pirates of theNorth, from Saracen raiders in the Western Mediterraneanand finally by a new horde from the eastern steppes—theMagyars—whose raids extended from the Lower Danubeover the whole of Central Europe and Northern Italy. Thusby the tenth century Western Christendom had becomesurrounded by a rising flood of barbarism and the leader-

ship of Western culture had passed to Islamic Spain whichwas then at the height of its prosperity under the inde-pendent Khalifate of Cordova.

The threat to Christian civilization was rendered moreserious by the fact that the monasteries which had hithertobeen the centres of Western culture were particularly ex-posed to barbarian attacks. Long before the CarolingianEmpire was seriously threatened, the great monastic cen-tres of Northumbrian and Celtic culture had been de-stroyed—Lindisfarne in 793, Jarrow in 794 and Iona in 802and 806. Thenceforward the shrines and monasteries of Ire-land were devastated year by year until by 830 a powerfulScandinavian kingdom was established in Eastern Irelandwhich became the base for further raids on Western Britainand the Atlantic coasts of France and Spain. Thus themovement of destruction followed the same path as theIrish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, who had contributedso much to the formation of the Carolingian culture; andas the new monastic foundations had been the character-istic feature of the earlier movement, so now the destruc-tion of the monasteries was no less characteristic of thenew outburst of barbarism.

The monastic culture of Ireland and Northumbria neverrecovered from this assault, and even in the CarolingianEmpire it caused a setback to the monastic movementwhich had far-reaching effects on religion and culture.

But the main threat to Western Christendom came notfrom this sporadic raiding but from the massive threat ofan organizetMnvasion from Denmark by way of Frisia andSouth-East England. This danger had been staved off forhalf a century by the co-ordinated action of Carolingiandiplomacy and missionary activity. Indeed it was duringthe reign of Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious, thatChristianity first penetrated into Scandinavia through thework of St. Anskar, the first archbishop of the new see ofHamburg, formed in 831. It was only after the fall of Louisthe Pious, and still more after the outbreak of civil warbetween his sons, that the attacks upon the Carolingiankingdoms became serious. In 845 the Danish king sailed upthe Weser and destroyed Hamburg, the northern outpost

of Christian civilization; in the same year Paris was sackedand Charles the Bald paid a heavy ransom to the Danes,while at the same time in the Mediterranean Rome wasattacked by the Saracens, who plundered the tombs of theApostles, the sacred centre of Western Christendom.

But these disasters were only the prelude to the mainattack on the West, which began about 850 and continuedwithout intermission for the next fifty years. During theseyears it was no longer a question of isolated pirate raids,but of skilfully planned invasion by highly organized pro-fessional armies bent on conquest and settlement. Yearafter year they established their winter quarters in strategicpositions on the coast of the Atlantic and the EnglishChannel from which they launched their annual campaignson Frisia, Eastern England or Western France. From 855to 862 they were established on the Loire and the LowerSeine. In 865 the main attack on England began, whichled to the rapid conquest and settlement of Northumbriaand Mercia and to the long struggle with Wessex from871-78, in which the stubborn and heroic resistance of KingAlfred ultimately decided the issue. But this was followedin 879 by an even more formidable onslaught on all theWestern Carolingian lands from the Elbe to the Garonne.On Candlemas Day 880 the whole northern army of theGerman kingdom, led by Bruno the Duke of Saxony, twobishops and twelve counts, was destroyed by the Danes ina great battle in the snow and ice at Ebersdorf on the Lune-berg Heath. The two young kings of Germany and WestFrancia did pin temporary successes at Saucourt andThim6on, but both of them died almost immediatelyafterwards, and Charles the Fat, who temporarily reunitedall the Carolingian kingdoms, proved completely incapableof dealing with the situation. The great army which hadcome from England established itsdf in the very heart ofthe Carolingian Empire and proceeded to devastate me-thodically the lands between the Rhine and the Seine,burning Cologne and Treves and Metz, and sacking theimperial palace and the tomb of Charlemagne at Aachen.In 882 the army was at Cond6 on the Scheldt, in 883 it

was at Amiens, while in 885-86 it was concentrating itsefforts on the siege of Paris, where the forces of Christen-dom made a last desperate stand.

It is of these dark years that the chronicler of St. Vedastwrites, “The Northmen cease not to slay and carry intocaptivity the Christian people, to destroy the churches andto burn the towns. Everywhere there is nothing but deadbodies—clergy and laymen, nobles and common people,women and children. There is no road or place where theground is not covered with corpses. We live in distress andanguish before this spectacle of the destruction of theChristian people.”1

These years witnessed the final collapse of the Carolin-gian Empire. The failure of the last attempt to rally theunited forces of the West round the surviving representa-tive of the house of Charlemagne was followed by a newalignment of power round the local leaders of national re-sistance—Eudes, the Count of Paris, in France, Amulf inGermany, Rudolf in Burgundy, and Guy of Spoleto inItaly. These new kings derived their authority from theirmilitary leadership and their power to protect their coun-try from the inroads of the barbarians. Nor were they alto-gether unsuccessful, for the victory of Eudes at Montfauconin 888, and the still more important success of Amulf in891 when he stormed the camp of the main Viking armyat Louvain, marked the turn of the tide. The Vikings oncemore diverged their efforts against King Alfred in the greatinvasion of 892-96, which is so fully described in theAnglo-Saxon chronicle, from which Wessex finally emergedbattered but undefeated. Much suffering was still in storefor the West, and the worst of the Magyar invasions wasstill to come. But the climax of the storm had passed andthe survival of Christendom was secured.

I have dealt in some detail with the events of these years,because they were of such decisive importance in the historyof the West. There has never been a war which so directlythreatened the existence of Western Christendom as awhole; indeed the Christian resistance has more right to

1 Annal. Vedast. ann. 884.

the name of a crusade than the Crusades themselves.2 Itsubjected the inchoate order of Western Christendom to aterrible test which burnt away anything that was weak andsuperfluous and left only the hardest and most resistantelements which were inured to insecurity and violence.Thus these years saw the complete destruction of the mo-nastic culture of Northumbria and East Anglia which hadproduced such rich fruits in the previous century. Theymarked the end of the great age of Celtic Christian cul-ture, which survived only in a weakened and impoverishedcondition. They destroyed the Carolingian Empire itselfand ended the intellectual revival when it was just reach-ing its creative period in the lifetime of John Scotus andServatus Lupus.

Above all, this age destroyed the hope of a pacific devel-opment of culture which had inspired the leaders of theChurch and the missionary movement and reasserted thewarlike character of Western society which it had inheritedfrom its barbarian past. Henceforward the warrior ethos,the practice of private war and the blood feud were asprevalent in Christian society as among its pagan neigh-bours. The reign of law which Charlemagne and the ec-clesiastical statesmen of the Carolingian Empire had at-tempted to impose was forgotten, and the personal relationof fidelity between lord and vassal became the only basisof social organization.

But in so far as these changes lessened the distance be-tween the Christians and the barbarians, they made iteasier for the latter to become assimilated by Christian so-ciety. The Viking conquerors on Christian soil in England,Normandy and Ireland often became Christian from themoment of their settlement, thus forming an intermediatezone between Christendom and the pagan world throughwhich Christian influence gradually penetrated back to thehomelands of the conquerors and prepared the way for theconversion of Scandinavia.

England and Ireland were the chief centres of this proc-ess of cultural and religious interpenetration during the

2 The whole army that fell at Ebersdorf in 880 was canonizedcollectively by the German Church as the Martyrs of Ebersdorf.

tenth century and it was also in England that the first ofthe new national kingdoms arose as an organized centre ofresistance against the heathen invader. No Christian landhad suffered more severely than England from the disasterof the ninth century; nowhere were the centres of the oldmonastic culture so completely destroyed. Yet King Alfred,unlike his contemporaries on the Continent, such as Eudesin France, Arnulf in Germany and Boso in Provence, wasnot content to organize a successful military resistance.Alone among the rulers of his time, he realized the vitalimportance of the spiritual issue and devoted no less energyto the recovery of the tradition of Christian culture thanto the defence of national existence.

It is impossible to be in any doubt about King Alfred’ssense of the urgency of the problem, since he himselfsummed up the whole situation in the preface to his trans-lation of St. Gregory’s treatise on Pastoral Care which isone of the most remarkable documents of medieval cultureand the earliest monument of English prose.

He describes in moving words how the tradition of thegolden age of Christian culture had been lost until onlythe name of Christendom was left. “The name alone weloved that we were Christians, and very few of the virtues.”

When I remember all this then I remember also how Isaw before it was all ravaged and burned, how the churchesstood around dl England, filled with treasures and booksand a great company of God’s servants, and how little theyfdt the profit of books for they could not understand thembecause they were not written in our tongue. As if theysaid our elders who held these places before us loved wis-dom and through it they got wedth and left it to us. Herewe may see their traces but we cannot follow after them,and for that have lost both the wealth and the wisdom be-cause we were not willing to bend our minds to the pursuitof learning.

The remedy for this state of things Alfred found in thedevelopment of the vernacular culture.

For it seems well to me that we dso change into the

tongue that we all know the books that are most needfulto be known by all men; and we will bring it about as wevery well may, if we have peace, that all the youth of freemen of England, those that have the opportunity to givethemselves to it, should be bound to learning, while theycan be bound to no other usefulness, until the time whenthey all know how to read English writing. Let them fur-ther learn the Latin tongue who desire to learn it and torise to a higher state.9

It was with this aim that King Alfred, with the help ofArchbishop St. Plegmund, Asser the Welshman, St. Grim-bald the Fleming and John the monk of Corvey in Saxony,began his library of translations which he carried on duringthe last twelve years of his reign in the midst of the "var-ious and manifold troubles of the Kingdom”. And all hisachievements as a warrior king (like Amulf and Eudes andhis ancestors) are perhaps less heroic than the determina-tion with which he set himself in his later years to acquirelearning in order to restore to his people the lost traditionof Christian culture.

It is interesting to compare the work of Alfred with thatof Charlemagne. He was attempting to do for Englandwhat Charlemagne had attempted to do for WesternChristendom as a whole. He was working in far more un-favourable circumstances with insufficient resources andinadequate intellectual help. Nevertheless his modest planfor the diffusion of a vernacular Christian culture was per-haps more suited to the real needs of the age than thetheocratic universalism of the Carolingian Empire.

The Empire was not strong enough to withstand the dis-integrating effects of the barbarian attacks, but its traditionwas still powerful enough to prevent the new kingdomsfrom basing themselves on the foundation of autonomousnational traditions of culture. In the West the fall of theEmpire was followed by the dissolution of the authority ofthe state itself. It was not the national kingdom but thelocal centres of military control—the county and feudalprincipality—which became the vital political realities. The

8 Preface to Cura Pastoralis, translated by M. Williams.

new kingdoms of Burgundy, Italy, Provence and Lorrainepossessed only a shadowy and fitful existence, and thoughthe kingdom of France or Western Francia retained some-thing of its ancient prestige, the actual position of theking in the tenth century was no more than that of honorarypresident of a committee of feudal magnates who weretheir own masters and ruled as kings in their own princi-palities.

In the East, however, the political development followeda different course. Christian Germany was so largely a Caro-lingian creation, and the German Church had been soclosely associated with the Empire in the work of govern-ment and in the extension of Christian culture to the Elbeand the Danubian lands that the Carolingian tradition sur-vived the fall of the Empire and determined the wholecharacter of the subsequent development. The centrifugaltendency which showed itself in the rise of the five greatduchies—Saxony, Bavaria, Thuringia, Franconia and Swabia—was checked by the loyalty of the episcopate to the mon-archical principle which was solemnly reasserted as a prin-ciple of Christian faith by the great synod of Hohenaltheimin 916.

This alliance of Church and king became the comerstone of the new political order established by Otto theGreat (936-73)—an order which was consummated byOtto’s coronation at Rome in 963 and the restoration ofthe Western Empire. The new Empire was thoroughlyCarolingian in tradition and ideals. Indeed, Otto I wenteven further than Charlemagne in his reliance on theChurch in the practical administration of the Empire, sothat the bishops acquired the functions of the Carolingiancourt and became the main instruments of government.This conversion of the episcopate into a territorial and po-litical power was to some extent common to all the landsthat had formed part of the Carolingian Empire-to Franceand Italy as well as to Germany and Lorraine. It did notexist in Anglo-Saxon society, nor in the newly convertedbarbarian kingdoms of Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary.But nowhere did the process go so far, or have such seriouspolitical and religious consequences, as in the lands of the

Empire in Germany and Lorraine, where it was destinedto condition the relations of Church and state for six hun-dred years. Even the Reformation did not exhaust the con-sequences of this anomalous situation, and the Germanepiscopate remained inextricably entangled with the politi-cal order until the ecclesiastical principalities were finallyliquidated in the age of Napoleon.

If the Germanic Empire had possessed the universalcharacter of its Carolingian prototype as the political ex-pression of the respublica Christiana, the situation mightnot have been so irremediable. But since, in spite of itstheoretical claims, it was never conterminous with WesternChristendom, and possessed its own national aims and in-terests, there was an inherent contradiction between thespiritual office and the political functions of the new typeof count-bishop who was the central figure in the adminis-tration of the Empire. The leading minds in the Carolin-gian Church, like Rabanus Maurus, had always been con-scious of the danger, and even in the tenth century St.Radbod of Utrecht was faithful to the tradition of St.Willebrord and St. Boniface and refused to accept secularoffice as inconsistent with the spiritual functions of theepiscopate.

But in the age of Otto I this attitude was no longertenable. The great leader of the Church in Germany, St.Bruno, the brother of the Emperor, accumulated every kindof ecclesiastical and secular dignity. He was Archbishop ofCologne, Abbot of Lorsch and Corvey, Arch-Chancellor ofthe Empire, Duke of Lorraine and, finally, Regent of theEmpire during the absence of Otto in Italy.4 Yet at thesame time he was a great patron of learning, a student ofGreek and a leader in the new movement of educationaland cultural revival which accompanied the restoration ofthe Empire. It was, in fact, when the influence of theseecclesiastical statesmen was at its highest, during' the mi-nority of Otto III and under his brief reign, that the newEmpire came nearest to realizing the Carolingian ideals ofChristian universalism. No doubt this was partly due to the

4 It is significant that it was in 1870 that his cultus was firstconfirmed by the Holy See.

personality of the young Emperor himself, who was halfByzantine in blood and was intensely alive to the appealof Roman tradition and Byzantine religion. But no lessimportant was the formative influence of the remarkablegroup of ecclesiastics who were his teachers and advisers,St. Bernward of Hildesheim, St. Heribert of Cologne, St.Notker of Li£ge and, above all, Gerbert of Aurillac, PopeSylvester II, the most universal intelligence of his age.

Thus the close of the tenth century witnessed a briefspasmodic attempt to transform the Germanic nationalkingdom of the Saxon emperors into the universal and in-ternational empire of Christian Rome. Otto III made it hisaim to revive the international prestige of Rome, free thecity from the control of the local aristocratic factions andestablish the closest possible unity with the Papacy. Hisfavourite residence was at Rome in the “palace-monastery”on the Aventine, close to St. Alessio, and he took as hisprogramme of government “the restoration of the republicand the renovation of the Roman Empire”—Restitutiorepublicae et Renovatio Imperii Romanorum.

And though his brief reign ended in failure and disap-pointment, it nevertheless had a greater influence on thefuture development of Western Christendom than manyreigns that were more famous and more materially success-ful. In the first place, by the nomination of the first North-ern European Popes—Gregory V and Sylvester II—it fore-shadowed the internationalization of the Papacy which wasto characterize the great age of the medieval Church. Andin the second place, by the abandonment of the Saxonpolicy of German imperialist expansion which had identi-fied the conversion of the pagans with their submission tothe German Empire and the German Church, it led to theformation of the new Christian kingdoms of Eastern Eu-rope.

Yet the age which saw the conversion of Hungary andPoland and Russia was also a time of triumph for Northernpaganism. Again for the last time the Viking fleets werelaunched against the West, and a new age of barbarianconquest began. The causes of the new movement are ob-scured by the complicated struggle for power which divided

the three Northern kingdoms against one another. But it isprobable that the consolidation of German power by Otto Iwas felt as a threat to Northern independence, and the de-feat of Otto II in Italy was the signal for the Danes, likethe Wends east of the Elbe, to renounce Christianity andto invade the territory of Christendom.

It was, however, England rather than the Continent thatwas the chief victim of the new Viking attack. The restoredChristian kingdom of the house of Alfred, which had at-tained its zenith under King Edgar (959-75), had nowfallen on evil times, and under the pressure of invasion itcollapsed in blood and ruin. For twenty-five years Englandwas plundered from end to end and drained of immensesums of money, relics of which are still found in gravesand hoards and in runic inscriptions from one end ofScandinavia to the other. Finally, in 1016, Canute, the sonof the leader of the pagan reaction, was recognized as kingof England, thus becoming the founder of an Anglo-Scandinavian empire.

But the victory of Canute was not a victory for paganism.As soon as he was in power he dismissed the Viking armyand ruled England "under the laws of King Edgar" accord-ing to the traditions of Christian kingship. He became agreat benefactor of the Church, building the tombs andadorning the sepulchres of the saints, like St. Alphege,whom his father had slain. Like Ine and Ethulwulf, hemade a pilgrimage to Rome to visit the tombs of theApostles and assist with the princes of Christendom at thecoronation of the Emperor in 1027. He introduced Englishbishops and monks into Denmark and Norway and itseemed for a time as though Canterbury might replaceHamburg as the ecclesiastical capital of the North.

Thus the incorporation of Scandinavia into WesternChristendom was due, not as in Central Europe to thepower and prestige of the Western Empire, but to the con-quest of Christian England by the barbarians who broughtback Christianity to the North with the other spoils of in-vasion.

Hence the conversion of the Northern peoples did notmean the victory of an alien culture and the loss of na-

tional independence, as happened to the continental Sax-ons or the Slavs of Eastern Germany. The pagan North en-tered the society of Western Christendom at the very timewhen its social vitality was greatest and its culture mostcreative. It was the work of the greatest of their own rulers,kings like St. Vladimir in Russia, Canute the Mighty inDenmark and Olaf Trygvason and Olaf the Saint in Nor-way.

It was, in fact, only through the authority of a new uni-versal religion that the national monarchy acquired theprestige necessary to overcome the conservatism of the oldpeasant culture and the independence of the old tribalkingdoms—“fylker” or folks.

In this way the victory of Christianity coincided with theattainment of national unity and was the culmination ofthe process of expansion and cultural interchange whichhad accompanied the Viking movement. The mixed cultureof the Christian Viking states across the seas reacted on theculture of the Scandinavian homelands and led to thebreaking down of local particularism alike in religion andpolitics. Indeed it seemed for a time as though the whole ofthe Nordic culture area from the British Isles to the Balticwould be united in a northern Christian empire under thesovereignty of the Danish king. Ruling from his court atWinchester, surrounded by English ecclesiastics, Scandi-navian mercenaries and Icelandic poets, Canute broughtthe Northern lands for the first time into real contact withthe international life of Western Christendom. The Northhad never before known a king so rich and so powerful. AsToraren the Icelander wrote:

Canute rules the land

As Christ, the shepherd of Greece, doth the heavens!

Nevertheless this empire of the North, like the contem-porary Slavonic empire of Boleslav the Great in Poland(992-1025), was a fragile and transitory power, and thefigure of Canute made little permanent impression on theNorthern mind. It was not Canute, but his defeated rivaland victim, Olaf the Saint, who became the type and repre-sentative of the new ideal of Christian kingship in the

Northern lands. For Canute, in spite of his Christian lawsand his lavish generosity to the Church, made no appeal tothe higher elements in the Nordic traditions. He was a suc-cessful warrior and statesman, but he was never a hero, forhe owed his victories to his overwhelming power and toan unscrupulous use of his great financial resources. OlafHaroldson, on the other hand, was an authentic representa-tive of the Northern heroic tradition, like his predecessorOlaf Trygvason (995-1000). He completed the latter’swork of Christianizing Norway, breaking the stubborn re-sistance of the pagan chiefs and countryfolk with fire andsword, and died like the other Olaf in an heroic battleagainst hopeless odds.

But the battle of Stiklestad (1050) differs from that ofSvoldr (1000) in that it was a civil war against the king’sfaithless subjects who had been bought by Canute’s Eng-lish money. Thus it was an historical realization of thedominant motive of the old epic poetry—the tragedy ofloyal heroism defeated by treachery and gold. As Olaf’sfriend the poet Sighvat wrote:

There go the prince's foes,

Bringing their open purses,

Many bid dearly in metalFor the head of our king.

Every man knows that he who sellsHis own good lord for gold'Will end in black hellAnd of such is he worthy.*

But in the case of Olaf this ancient tradition of Nordicheroism was united with a new spirit of religious faith. AsOlaf's retainers kept their faith with their lord, so Olafhimself kept faith with the Lord of Heaven. And thus thenew religion became the object of a deeper loyalty than thereligion of the old gods had ever evoked.

The year after the battle, the body of St. Olaf was takento Nidaros (Trondheim) and the defeated king became thepatron and protector of the Christian North, and the fame

6 Heimskiingla, p. 403, ed. E. Monsen (Cambridge 1932).

of his virtues and miracles spread throughout the Northwith extraordinary rapidity.

Even his former enemies acknowledged his power andaccepted him as the patron and guardian of the Norwegianmonarchy, as we see in the fine poem called 'The Song ofthe Sea Calm” which Canute's court poet Toraren wroteonly a few years later. Although the poem is dedicated toKing Swein, the Danish usurper, its real hero is the deadking who still rules the land from his shrine at Nidaros.

There he liesWhole and pureThe high praised king

There the bellsMay ring aloudOf themselves,

Above the shrineFor every dayThe folk to hearThe clanging bellsAbove the king.

Hardly had HaroldsonGot a homeIn the heavenly realmEre he becameA mighty man of peace.

A host of men

Where the holy king doth lieKneel for help,

Blind and dumbSeek the king,

And home they goTheir sickness healed.

Pray thou to OlafThe man of GodThat he grant theeHis holy spirit.

With God himself

He seeks

Success and peace

For dll men .«

Thus the popular canonization of St. Olaf in 1031 isimportant not only as one of the first and most spontaneousinstances of the way in which the new peoples consecratedtheir nationality by adopting a royal saint as their nationalpatron, but still more because it marks the final reconcilia'tion between the Nordic and the Christian traditions. St.Olaf quickly took the place of Thor as the patron of thefarmers, their champion against trolls and witches, and theideal type of the Northern warrior. The national code oflaw became known as the laws of St. Olaf, and the kings ofNorway were regarded as the heirs and representatives ofSt. Olaf, almost in the same way as the kings of Swedenin the heathen time had been the successors and represent*atives of the God Frey.

The wholehearted acceptance of Christianity in Norwayand Denmark gradually transformed the spirit of Scandi-navian culture.

Adam of Bremen, who is a contemporary witness andwas well informed of Northern affairs through his friend-ship with King Sweyn Estrithson of Denmark, has de-scribed the change in a remarkable passage. After speakingof their former piracy, he goes on:

But after their acceptance of Christianity, they have be-come imbued with better principles and have now learnedto love peace and truth and to be content with their pov-erty; even to distribute what they have stored up and notas aforetime to gather up what was scattered. ... Of allmen they are the most temperate both in food and in theirhabits, loving above all things thrift and modesty. Yet sogreat is their veneration for priests and churches, that thereis scarcely a Christian to be found who does not make anoffering on every occasion that he hears Muss. ... In manyplaces of Norway and Sweden, the keepers of the flocksare men of noble rank, who after the manner of the pa-

6 Heimskiingk, p. 469, trans. E. Monsen and A. H. Smith.

THE CONVERSION OF THE NORTH 99

triarchs live by the work of their hands. But all who dwellin Norway are most Christian with the exception of thosewho dwell far off beside the Arctic Seas.1 *

He speaks in the same way of the habits of the Icelanderswho are forced to live in material poverty owing to theseverity of their climate:

Blessed is the people, say I, of whose poverty no one isenvious, and most blessed in this—that they have now allput on Christianity. There is much that is remarkable intheir manners, above all Charity, whence it comes that allthings are common among them not only for the nativepopulation but also for the stranger. They treat their bishopas it were a king, for the whole people pay regard to hiswill, and whatever he ordains from God, from the scrip-tures and from the customs of other nations, they hold aslaw.6

However much Adam has idealized Scandinavian Chris-tendom there is no doubt that a reaction was making itselffelt against the violence and cruelty of the Viking age, andunder the rule of kings like Olaf Kyrre—“the Peace King”—of Norway, 1066-93, who was also called “the Farmer”,the new ideals of Christian kingship obtained general ac-ceptance. The opening sentences of the Laws of St. Olaf,though they date in their present form from a much laterperiod, seem to reflect the spirit of this period:

This is the beginning of our law that we should bow tothe East and pray the Holy Christ for peace and good years,that our land may be well peopled and that we may befaithful to our king; may he be our friend and we his, andmay God be the friend of us dl.

The new Christian culture which spread over the Northin the eleventh and twelfth centuries was largely derivedfrom England whence came the majority of the early mis-sionary bishops and the first monastic communities, andon the other hand the annexation of the Norse earldoms

1 Adam of Bremen, Descriptio Jnsularum Aquilonis, 30 and 31.

8 Ibid., 35.

in Caithness and the Western Islands by Magnus, the suc-cessor of Olaf Kyrre, brought Norway into immediate re-lations with Scotland and Gaelic culture. Had it not beenfor the Norman conquest of England and Ireland, theBritish Isles and Scandinavia and Iceland might well havecome to share a common culture and to form a distinctprovince of Western Christendom. But even the Normanconquest did not entirely break the connection. In someways it strengthened it, as we see in the career of Turgot,who took refuge in Norway from the Normans and was theteacher of Olaf Kyrre, and afterwards became prior of Dur-ham, archbishop of St. Andrews and the guide and biog-rapher of St. Margaret of Scotland.

With the fall of Anglo-Saxon culture, the Scandinavianworld became the great representative of vernacular culturein Northern Europe. And it was, above all, in Iceland thatthe scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took upthe tradition of King Alfred and founded the great schoolof vernacular historiography and archaeology to which weowe so much of our knowledge of the past. We are apt toregard medieval culture as intolerant of everything that layoutside the tradition of Latin Christendom. But we mustnot forget that the Northern Sagas are as much the creationof medieval Christendom as the chansons de geste and thatit is to the priests and the schools of Christian Iceland thatwe are indebted for the preservation of the rich traditionof Northern mythology and poetry and saga.

Chapter VI

The Byzantine Tradition and theConversion of Eastern Europe

The conversion of the Scandinavian peoples was an eventof peculiar importance for the West since it was these peo-ples who during the Viking age had constituted the mostserious and immediate threat to the existence of WesternChristendom. But it was not an isolated event, for it wasduring the same period that the peoples of Eastern Europeentered the society of Christian peoples, and formed asecond European Christendom which extended from theBaltic to the Black Sea and from the Elbe to the Don andthe Upper Volga. The formation of this second Christen-dom was organically related to the conversion of Scandina-via in so far as its expansion followed the lines of the Vikingtrade routes to the East, and found one of its most im-portant centres of diffusion in the new Russian states whichwere organized and controlled by Scandinavian adventures.Further west, on the Danube and the Elbe and the Morava,the Eastern expansion of Christendom goes back to anearlier period and had its origins in the efforts of Charlesthe Great and his successors to extend the frontiers of theirempire and Christendom in Central Europe.

But these efforts met only with partial success, and itwas not until the tenth and eleventh centuries that Chris-tian culture finally took root in Eastern Europe—in Bohemiaand Hungary and Poland, as well as in Scandinavia andRussia.

At first sight this is a surprising fact, since the ByzantineEmpire maintained its cultural and religious leadershipthroughout this whole period and its capital at Constanti-

102 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

nople was in an admirable position to be the headquartersof a movement of missionary expansion across the Danubeand the Black Sea. Already in the fourth century the Gothsin South Russia had been converted and their bishop hadbeen present at the Council of Nicaea, while in the BalkansSt. Nicetas of Remesiana had carried on a successful aposto-late among the pagan peoples on the Danube. But afterthe death of Justinian the Eastern Empire underwent aprofound transformation. It turned its back upon Europeand became an oriental state, which was increasingly ab-sorbed in the struggle for existence, first with the PersianEmpire and after 640 with the Moslem Khalifate whichhad conquered Syria and Egypt. The Illyrian provinceswhich had been the backbone of the Empire from beforethe reign of Diocletian to that of Justinian—from the thirdto the sixth centuries—were devastated by the barbariansand occupied by Slavonic tribes, and when the Empire re-established its position in the eighth century it owed itsrecovery to the Isaurian emperors who were Asiatic in originand based their power on Asia Minor rather than on theEuropean provinces.

Under these conditions it is not surprising that Byzan-tine cultural and religious influence expanded eastwards toArmenia and Georgia rather than northwards into EasternEurope.

The only outstanding exception to this tendency is to befound in the strange career of Justinian II (685-95 a°d705-11), who resembled Ivan the Terrible in his ruthlesscruelty, his mental ins lability and his sudden outbursts ofdemonic energy.

Justinian II spent ten years in exile in the Crimea, wherehe married the sister of the Khagan of the Khazars, andhe allied himself with the Bulgarians in order to recoverhis throne, rewarding the Bulgarian ruler with the purplemantle and the title of Caesar. Yet in his age and underthe great Isaurian emperors who succeeded him there wasno Byzantine missionary activity in Eastern Europe, com-parable to that of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon monks in theWest during the same period. This was no doubt mainlydue to the tremendous gulf which separated the urban cul-

ture of the Byzantine Empire from the successive wavesof barbarian peoples who came pouring in from the outerwilderness. In the West no such gap existed, since theChristian barbarian kingdoms which had arisen on the ruinsof the Western Empire provided a natural transition be-tween the Latin culture of the Western Mediterranean andthe pagan culture of the Northern barbarians. But the his-tory of Eastern Europe has always been dominated by thegeographical fact that it has no natural eastern frontier. Thegreat Eurasian steppe stretches inimitably from the Dan-ube to the Altai mountains, and southward by the oases tothe Great Wall of China and the Manchurian forests. Thiswas the highway of the nations which opened the heart ofEastern Europe to the warrior peoples of Central Asia, andit was never closed until Munnich and Marshal Keithstormed the Lines of Perekop in 1737.

The whole of this vast area forms a unity far closer thanthat of the West, since the peoples of the steppes have beenin contact with one another from time immemorial andany change in their relations might set the whole area inmotion from the frontiers of China to those of the By-zantine and Carolingian Empires. For while the high-est civilizations of the far East and the far West havealways ignored one another’s existence and lacked themeans of communication and co-operation, the barbariansof the steppes have been equally aware of the existence ofboth worlds and have shown themselves able to organizevast military combinations which they directed impartiallyagainst East and West. Consequently the relation of theByzantine Empire to its barbarian neighbours was not thatof a unified civilization dealing with divided barbaroustribes. It was a relation of empire with empire. For thoughthe peoples of the steppes were in many respects morebarbarous than the pagan Germans and Slavs, they were,from a military or military-political point of view, highlyorganized, and formed part of a wider whole which reachedfar beyond the range of Byzantine statesmanship. Thisorganized imperial type of Eurasian barbarism already ex-isted in the fifth century when the Huns who had beendriven westward from the heart of Central Asia established

104 RELIGION and the rise of western culture

themselves in Hungary, whence they invaded the easternand the western provinces impartially. But Attila and theHuns were but the first of a long series of nomad con-querors on the Danube, Kotrigurs, Avars, Bulgars and Mag-yars—not to mention the Khazars and the Patzinaks andthe Cumans—all of whom successively occupied the steppesfrom the Volga to the Danube. The ephemeral characterof these nomad empires only increased their destructive-ness, since the moment that a people became sufficientlycivilized to receive the seeds of Christian culture, it wasreplaced by a new horde from the outer steppes, and thewhole process had to begin again. It was not until the lastof the great conquering tribes—the Mongols—united thewhole Eurasian world in an organized imperial state in thethirteenth century that the situation was stablized but thisgreatest of the nomad empires found its centre of gravityin Eastern Asia, far beyond the reach of Byzantine culturaland rdigious influence.

Thus the Byzantine Empire throughout its entire historyof a thousand years was confronted on its northern Euro-pean frontier by a series of Asiatic barbarian empires,which constituted a continual threat to the Balkan prov-inces and the capital itself. This extension of Asia west-ward into the heart of Central Europe separated EasternChristendom from the native peoples of Eastern or North-Eastern Europe-from the Slavonic peasant peoples wholived north of the steppes and the still more remoteFinnish tribes who occupied the vast forest region thatstretched from the eastern Baltic to the Urals and onwardsinto Siberia. For Western and Northern Europe this barrierdid not exist, since the Germans came into immediate con-tact with the northern Slavs by way of the Elbe and withthe southern Slavs by way of the Danube, while the Scan-dinavian peoples from time immemorial had followed thechain of rivers and lakes south-eastward from the Baltic tothe Volga and the Dnieper. Hence it is not surprising thatthe first challenge to the peoples of the steppes came fromthe West rather than from the Byzantine Empire. It wasCharlemagne and his son Pepin, the king of Italy, whodestroyed the centre of the Avar kingdom in Hungary and

reopened the Danubian lands to Christian missionary ac-tivity. The new spirit which animated this first expansionof Western Christendom finds expression in the hymn oftriumph composed by some anonymous Carolingian poeton the final subjugation of the Avars in 796.

Omnes gentes qui fecisti, tu Christe, dei suboles,terras, fontes, rivos, monies et formasti hominem,Avarosque convertisti ultimis temporibus.

Misit deus Petrum sanctum, principem apostolum.

In auxilium Pippini magni regis filiumUt viam ejus comitaret et Francorum aciem.

Nos fideles christiani deo agamus gratiam,

qui regnum regis confirma vit super regnum Uniae,

et victoriam donavit de paganis gentibus.1

These rough forcible tetrameters have little in commonwith the laborious elegiacs of the contemporary courtscholars. They are even more remote from the spirit ofByzantine culture—their ideal is that of the Crusades andthe chansons de geste—gesta Dei per Francos.

We are, however, relatively well informed about the ec-clesiastical aspect of this expansion of Western Christen-dom to the Avar kingdom, thanks to the letters of Alcuinand the council held by Paulinus of Aquileia in KingPepin's camp during this very campaign.8 The fall of theAvar Empire, which had for centuries overshadowed thelife of Eastern Europe, produced an enormous impres-sion on the Slavonic peoples, the memory of which still sur-vives in the early medieval Russian chronicles. Not only

1 Poet. Latin. Aevi Carolini, I, 116 (M.G.H.). Translation:"Thou, O Christ, son of God, who hast made all peoples, whohast formed lands, fountains, streams, mountains and man, inthese last days Thou hast converted the Avars. God has sent St.Peter, chief of apostles, to the aid of Pepin, son of the great king,to go with him on his way and with the army of the Franks. Letus faithful Christians give thanks to God, who has confirmed theKing's rule over the Kingdom of Hungary and has given himvictory over the pagans.”

2Cf. Alcuin's letters, 99, 107, 110-13 an<* Concilia AeviCarolini, I, no. 20, pp. 172-76 (M.G.H.).

did it open the Danubian and West Balkan lands to Caro-lingian influences, it also gave the Slavonic peoples furthernorth a breathing space during which they were able toassert their political independence. In this way there arosein the ninth century the Great Moravian state which wasthe first Slav kingdom to become Christian and to play apart in European history. For the Byzantine Empire thedevelopment was less favourable, since the fall of the Avarsdestroyed the balance of power which Byzantine diplomacyalways attempted to maintain on its northern frontiers, andleft the Bulgars for almost a century without a rival powerto distract their attention from the Byzantine frontiers.The result was that the Bulgars, under their Khagans, Krumand Omurtag, established themselves firmly in the Balkansfrom Belgrade and Ochrida to the Dobrudja and inflicteda terrible defeat on the Byzantines in 811, when the Em-peror Nicephorus and his whole army were destroyed.

For the next two centuries Bulgaria constituted a mostserious threat to the Byzantine Empire, but its establish-ment in the civilized lands of the Eastern Balkans pro-duced a profound change in its own state and culture. TheBulgars ceased to be a horde of Turco-Finnish nomads fromthe stqppes like the Avars or the Huns and became a peopleof Slavonic language and Christian Byzantine culture. In-deed it was in ninth- and tenth-century Bulgaria that thefoundations were laid of the Slavonic literature and culturewhich were subsequently transmitted to the Russians andthe Serbs, and thus became the main source of the cul-tural tradition of the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe,outside Greece.

This development, however, was by no means a peace-ful or harmonious one, for the political methods of Byzan-tine imperialism contradicted its cultural and religious aimsand hindered the rise of independent Christian states onthe borders of the Empire. It had always been the policyof Byzantium to make trouble for the barbarians on theirown frontiers by calling in more remote barbarian peoplesto attack them in their rear, calling in Avars against Hunsand Turks against Avars. The fact that the Bulgars had

become Christians did not prevent the Byzantines fromusing the same technique against them and bringing infresh barbarian hordes from the steppes. The result wasthat the spread of Christianity in Eastern Europe becameinvolved in the complicated web of power politics. The fearof Byzantine imperialism made the Bulgars look towardsthe West, while the fear of German Carolingian imperial-ism turned the eyes of the Moravians towards Byzantium.

It was against this confusing political background thatthe religious activity of Pope Nicholas I, the PatriarchPhotius and the apostles of the Slavs, SS. Cyril and Metho-dius, must be viewed. St. Cyril, who was originally knownas Constantine the Philosopher, was a learned monk ofThessalonica and was first sent by the Emperor and thePatriarch Photius to the Khazars in South Russia on a mis-sion that was probably political as well as religious. On hisreturn to Constantinople in 862-63 he met the envoyswhom Ratislav, the prince of Moravia, had sent to establishfriendly relations with the Eastern Empire, in order tocounter-balance the combined pressure of the Carolingiankingdom and the German Church. Now at the same timethat Constantine and his brother Methodius began theirwork for the Moravian Church, in response to the requestof Ratislav, Boris the Khagan of Bulgaria was making simi-lar advances to Rome in order to safeguard his independ-ence against the Byzantines. We still possess the long anddetailed reply of Pope Nicholas I to the questionnaire ofthe Bulgarians on all kinds of moral, ritual and social prob-lems. It is a document which ranks with St. Gregory's letterto St. Augustine of Canterbury as a primary authority forthe attitude adopted by the Papacy in its dealings with thebarbarians, and, like the latter, it is a monument of states-manship and pastoral wisdom. It shows how the conversionof the barbarians inevitably involved changes in their socialculture and how necessary it was to distinguish betweenthe essentials of the Christian way of life and the accidentsof Byzantine or Latin culture, which the missionaries wereapt to regard as a necessary part of Christianity.8 And the

8 For example, it seems from this document that the questionof wearing trousers preoccupied the minds of Byzantine mission-

same problem arose in Moravia, where the Carolingianbishops attacked Cyril and Methodius for their use of thevernacular for liturgical purposes.

If the policy of Nicholas I and his successors Hadrianand John VIII had been victorious, a new Slavonic provinceof Christendom might have arisen in the Balkan and Danu-bian lands, which would have been independent of thestate Churches of the Byzantine and Carolingian Empires.But the decline of the Papacy after the assassination ofJohn VIII and the unscrupulous power-politics of the twoempires rendered this impossible. The work of Cyril andMethodius was undone by the Carolingian bishops, whilethe action of the Byzantines in calling the pagan Magyars totheir aid against the Bulgars destroyed the nascent Chris-tian culture of both Moravia and the Danubian lands. Forthe coming of the Magyars into Hungary, together with theoccupation of their former home west of the Don by thePetcheneg Turks,4 once more restored the barrier of thepeoples of the steppes between the Byzantine Empire andCentral and Eastern Europe. Indeed the new barbarian at-tack went further than its predecessors. The Magyars notonly destroyed the Moravian Kingdom, they also destroyedthe Austrian March of the Carolingian Empire and carriedtheir raids into the very heart of Western Europe.

Nevertheless the work of the missionaries was not alto-gether lost, for when Svatopluk and the pro-German partyin Moravia drove out the disciples of Cyril and Methodius,ten years or so before the coming of the Magyars, theyfound a refuge in Bulgaria where the Cyrillian ideal of avernacular Slavonic Christianity coincided with the aim ofBoris and his successors to create an autonomous BulgarianChurch. It was here that St. Clement at Ochrida and St.

aries in the ninth century no less than of English and Americanmissionaries in the nineteenth. But whereas these modem mis-sionaries encouraged the wearing of trousers as a part of Christiancivilization, the Byzantines banned them as a pagan and barbarouscustom.

4 Known to the Byzantines as “Patzinaks”. It is confusing thatByzantine writers habitually speak of the Magyars, who wereFinno-Ugrians, as “Turks”, while the Petchenegs, who were reallya Turkish people, are described as “Scythians .

Naum at Preslav carried on the work of Cyril and Metho-dius for the creation of a Christian Slavonic script andliturgy and literature. Under the great Tsar Symeon (893-927), who established an independent Bulgarian patriarch-ate, the new vernacular culture reached a precocious ma-turity, comparable to that of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria twocenturies earlier. It was, however, of even greater impor-tance, since Old Slavonic, the language of the new Chris-tian culture, was to become the sacred liturgical language ofEastern Europe, and, above all, of Russia.

But this sudden development of Christian culture inBulgaria was even more short-lived than that of ChristianNorthumbria. The ambitious attempt of Symeon the Greatto establish a Bulgarian empire and a Bulgarian patriarchateinevitably led to conflict with Byzantium, and the Byzan-tines followed their traditional policy of bringing downMagyars, Petchenegs and Russians upon them from theouter lands. The second half of the tenth century and theearly part of the eleventh saw the end of Bulgarian inde-pendence and the Hellenization of the Bulgarian Church.

No doubt the conquest of Bulgaria, which reunited theold Balkan provinces to the Empire, was an externaltriumph for Byzantine imperialism, but, like the annexa-tion of the independent Christian kingdom of Armeniawhich took place at the same period, it was disastrous tothe cause of Eastern Christendom. For the destruction ofnational independence and the identification of the Ortho-dox Church with Byzantine domination produced a moodof spiritual revolt among the subject peoples which ledthem not only to oppose the dominant alien civilization butto turn away from the Christian view of life towards thefundamental world-refusal of oriental dualism.

Already in the eighth and ninth centuries similar condi-tions on the eastern frontiers of the Empire had producedthe militant sect of the Paulicians in Armenia and AsiaMinor, and in the tenth century a Bulgarian priest, Bogomilor Theophilus, founded a similar but independent sect inEurope which was destined to make the name of Bulgar asynonym for heretic throughout the medieval West. Like

their predecessors, the Bogomils taught that the materialcreation was essentially evil and that salvation was to befound in the total rejection of all the works of the flesh,including marriage; war and all external activity. In thislast point they differed from the Paulicians, who were anexceptionally warlike and active sect.5

The Bogomils, on the other hand, were pacifist, quietistand anti-political. They avoided open conflict and practisedconcealment, so that they were able to carry on a subter-ranean propaganda among the peasant population of theBalkans. Moreover, their ideas infiltrated into orthodoxSlavonic literature through their influence on Bulgarianvernacular literature, which was the source of the numer-ous apocalypses and apocryphal legends which were so pop-ular in Russia in medieval and even in modem times. Theexistence of this heretical underworld is of great importancein the history of medieval culture alike in the East andthe West, although the wholesale destruction of hereticalliterature has deprived us of literary evidence. Neverthelessthere is little doubt that the whole movement, not only inthe Balkans, but in the rest of Europe, had its origin andcentre of diffusion in Bulgaria in die tenth and eleventhcenturies.

Meanwhile the fall of the Bulgarian state had openedthe way for the rise of a new power beyond the Danube.To the East the Khazar Empire still dominated the landsbetween the Black Sea and the Volga, and owed its im-portance to its control of the trade routes between the NearEast and Europe. These routes from the Lower Volga tothe Lower Don and from the Baltic eastward to the Upperand Middle Volga had been important channels of com-munication between North and South from time immemo-rial. For Russia is not only open to Asia by way of thesteppes, it is also open to North and South and East byway of its rivers; and as the steppes have been the highway

5 Their relations to the latter may be compared with that of theQuakers to the Anabaptists in the seventeenth century, or withthat of the Bohemian Brethren to the Taborites in the fifteenthcentury.

of war, the rivers have been the highway of trade and cul-ture. It is true that in the Middle Ages the trader and thewarrior were often indistinguishable, and this was especiallytrue of the Vikings who in the East no less than the Westdevoted themselves impartially to piracy and trade, andcolonization and conquest. Traders and adventurers fromScandinavia seem to have been active in the East long be-fore the expansion of the Vikings in the West began, andArabic historians give a vivid picture of the way of life ofthese predatory adventurers.

The Rus, writes Ibn Rusta, make raids upon Saqlaba(the Slavs), sailing in ships in order to go out to them, andthey take them prisoner and carry them off to Khazar andBulkar (on the Volga) and trade with them there. . . .

When a child is born to any man among them he takesa drawn sword to the new-born child and places it betweenhis hands and says to him, “I shall bequeath to thee nowealth, and thou shalt have nought except what thou dostgain for thyself by this sword of thine.”

They have no landed property nor villages nor cultivatedland; their only occupation is trading in sable and greysquirrel and other furs, and in these they trade and take asthe price gold and silver and secure it in their belts.9

This account, which dates from the beginning of thetenth century, no doubt refers to the Rus of the Northwho came from the Baltic by way of Lake Ilmen or LakeLadoga by the Upper Volga to the great Moslem emporiumof Bolghar, the capital of the Northern Bulgars, near Kazan.But they were also active on the southern route to the Seaof Azov, and the first Russian raid on Constantinople tookplace as early as 860. The essential unity of the Rus andthe Western Vikings is shown by the interesting story inthe Annals of St. Bertin of the Russian envoys to Constan-tinople in 838, who tried to return to their own countryby way of the West in the company of the Byzantineembassy to Louis the Pious and who admitted that theywere Swedes by birth.

8 Translated by C. A. Macartney, The Magyars in the NinthCentury, pp. 2x3 ff. (1930).

In fact, the history of the establishment of the Kievanstate and its attacks on the Khazars and the ByzantineEmpire affords a remarkable parallel to that of the estab-lishment of the Western Viking states at Dublin and Yorkand in Normandy and their attacks on Wessex and theCarolingian Empire, nor is it impossible that the slackeningof the Viking attacks on the West in the tenth century wasdue in part to their energies, having been diverted to thenew sphere of adventure that had been opened in theSouth-East. For the establishment of the Rus at Kiev inthe second half of the ninth century and their develop-ment of the Dnieper as the main trade route between theBaltic and the Black Sea took place at a time when thepressure of the steppe peoples on South Russia had re-laxed, and when the Magyars were moving westward intoHungary.

From Kiev the Viking merchant princes were able toorganize and exploit the Slav peoples of the Ukraine andpush back the Khazars from the Black Sea. Under theirearly rulers, Oleg (Helgi), Igor and Svyatoslav, the foraysand conquests of the Rus equalled and surpassed those ofthe Western Vikings in the ninth century. They were di-rected not only against the Byzantine Empire, but againstthe Bulgarians of the north and the south, the Khazars andthe Moslems of Azerbaijan, and on at least two occasionsin 913-14 and 943-44 expeditions were carried out on avery large scale across the Caspian Sea.7

If these ventures had been more successful, it is possiblethat the course of Russian development might have beendeflected to the East and that Russia might have becomea part of the Islamic world. Fortunately for Europe andthe Byzantine Empire the triumphant career of Svyatoslav,the greatest of the early Kievan rulers, ended in disaster(963-72). In the course of a few years he had destroyedthe Khazar Empire and conquered the Bulgarians of theVolga and the Bulgarians of the Danube. He even resolvedto transfer his capital from Kiev to Pereyaslavets (LittlePreslav) in Bulgaria, thus uniting Russia and Bulgaria in a

7 Cf. N. K. Chadwick, The Beginnings of Russian History; andG. Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, 33-35.

new empire which would control all the inland trade routesfrom the Danube to the Volga. After four years of war hewas defeated by the energetic resistance of the new Em-peror John Zimisces, and in the following year he was killedby the Patzinaks on his way back to Kiev at the falls of theDnieper—the series of rapids and portages which was theweak point of the Kievan trade route through the steppes.

It was Vladimir, the son of Svyatoslav, who took the his-toric decision which decided the future of Russia in 988.According to tradition it was not taken until he had madeenquiries from the Moslems, the Jews, the Latins and theGreeks, and the decisive factor was the splendour of theByzantine liturgy as the Russian envoys saw it at St. Sofia.But no doubt the Byzantine connection and the prestigeof the Byzantine Empire were the decisive factors.

After the conversion of Vladimir there was a rapid ex-pansion of Christian Byzantine culture in Russia. Here, asin eighth-century Northumbria and ninth-century Bulgaria,we see how rapidly the conversion of a pagan people maybe followed by the sudden blossoming of a seemingly ma-ture Christian culture. Already under the rule of Yaroslavthe Wise, the son of St. Vladimir (1036-54), Kiev becameone of the greatest cities of Eastern Europe, as Adam ofBremen describes it “the rival of Constantinople and mostrenowned glory of ‘Greece' It was a city of churches andmonasteries, and the cathedral of St. Sofia with its Byzan-tine mosaics and frescoes, which date from the days ofYaroslav, remains with St. Mark's at Venice a witness ofthe high achievement of Eastern Christendom at the primeof its medieval development. The influence of this newSlavonic Byzantine culture extended far to the north-eastto Riazan, Rostov and Vladimir, as well as northwards tothe Gulf of Finland and Lake Ilmen where Novgorod theGreat retained its importance as the gateway to the Baltic,as Kiev was the gate to the Black Sea and the south.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries this eastern wayto Byzantium was still a familiar way to Scandinaviantravellers. Novgorod or Holmgard as they called it was itselfalmost a part of the Scandinavian world and the courts ofthe Russian princes were the natural refuge of Northern

princes in exile—of Olaf Trygvason and St. Olaf, of HaroldHadrada and of the family of his rival, the other Harold,the last Saxon King of England. Icelandic tradition recordsthat it was in Russia—“in St John's Church, on a hillabove the Dniqjer'that the first man to bring Christianityto Iceland, Thorwald Codranson, found rest after his longjourneying,8 and many an unknown Northerner, like theman whose runic gravestone was found at Berezan Islandat the mouth of the Dnieper, followed the same path, asmercenaries, traders or pilgrims.

Thus the conversion of Russia opened a new channel bywhich Christian culture could penetrate the pagan North,so that the whole continent seemed about to become aChristian orbis terrarum. For Eastern Europe was now themeeting place of two independent currents of Christianculture; and while Byzantine influences were spreadingnorthwards by way of the Black Sea and the Russianriverways, Western Christendom was expanding eastwardsthrough Central Europe, and new Christian states werearising in the valleys of the Elbe, the Vistula and theDanube.

For the same age which saw the revival of the ByzantineEmpire and the expansion of the Byzantine Church alsosaw the revival of the tradition of Carolingian imperialismby the new Germanic Empire of Otto I and his successorsand a fresh expansion of Western Christendom towards theEast. As in the age of Charles the Great, it was the WesternEmpire and not Byzantium which delivered Christendomfrom the ravages of the pagan power which the Magyars,like the Avars, had established in the heart of Europe. Onceagain the life of the Eastern March revived. Abbeys andbishoprics were restored and colonists from Western Ger-many repeopled the deserted lands of Eastern Austria. Theattitude of the emperors and prelates of the Western Em-pire towards the Slavs both on the Danube and the Elbewas, however, the same as that of the Byzantine Empiretowards the Slavs of the Balkans. They took for grantedthat the spread of Christianity meant the expansion of the

8 Cristne Saga, ix, 1, in Origines Islandicae, I, 403-4.

Empire and that the conversion of the Slavs involved theirsubjection to German bishops and German counts andmargraves. Ambitious prelates like Pilgrim of Passau at-tempted to extend their jurisdiction over the conqueredterritories and did not hesitate to buttress their claims bythe wholesale forgery of documents and charters.®

This ruthless exploitation of conquered and convertedSlavs by Germanic imperialism provoked a reaction inNorthern Europe as Byzantine imperialism had done inBulgaria, but here it found expression, not in the under-ground resistance of heretical movements like the Bogomils,but in an open return to paganism. The defeat of Otto IIby the Saracens in Italy in 982 was followed by a generalrising of the pagan Slavs which swept over the EasternMarches and pushed the frontier of Christendom backfrom the Oder to the Elbe.

Fortunately this external disaster to the expansion ofWestern Christendom was followed by a radical transfor-mation of policy which altered the whole history of Centraland Eastern Europe. This change was primarily due to thepassing of the leadership in the conversion of the new peo-ples from the Empire and the imperial clergy to the rulersof those peoples themselves, but it was rendered possibleby Otto Ill’s wider conception of the Empire as a societyof Christian peoples, which made him welcome the forma-tion of new Christian kingdoms and the creation of newChurches in direct dependence on Rome rather than onthe German hierarchy. Otto III was, moreover, closely at-tached to the most remarkable representative of the newSlav Christianity, St. Adalbert or Voytech, the first Czechbishop of Prague who had taken refuge at Sant' Alessio onthe Aventine when he had been driven from Bohemia bythe pagan reaction of 983, and who subsequently carried onan apostolate in Hungary and Poland and Prussia, wherehe finally died as a martyr in 997.

St. Adalbert exercised an immense influence on the de-velopment of Christendom in Eastern Europe. His monas-tic foundation at Brzevnov near Prague, where he estab-

9 E.g. Pilgrim of Passau’s attempt to establish his claims to amythical province of Lorch with seven suffragan sees in 973.

lished a colony of Benedictines from Rome, became thefountainhead of monastic influence for the neighbouringcountries. It was the mother house of Meseritz, the firstBenedictine foundation in Poland, which was established byAdalbert himself, and of the great Hungarian abbeys ofPannonhalma and Pecsvarad which were founded by hisdisciple St. Astrik or Anastasius. And in death he was evenmore powerful than in life. Boleslav, the warrior king ofPoland, obtained his body from the heathen Prussians andenshrined it in the church of Gnesen. The Emperor Ottohimself, St. Adalbert's friend, hastened across Europe toworship at his shrine^ and it was in honour of the martyrthat he established the new hierarchy which freed Polandfrom its dependence on the German Church and made itan independent member of Christendom.

In the same way, Otto III and Pope Sylvester created thenew Christian kingdom and hierarchy of Hungary. Herealso the influence of St. Adalbert was evident. For it was hewho had baptized St. Stephen, and it was his disciple, themonk St. Astrik, who became the first head of the newhierarchy. Thus it was from the new Rome of Otto IIIand Sylvester II that St. Stephen received the Holy Crown,the sacred symbol of Hungarian royalty, which marks thetransformation of the Magyar robber state into the ", Apos-tolic Kingdom" that was to be the eastern bulwark ofChristendom.

The little treatise known as the Instruction of St. Ste-phen10 to his son St. Emeric (1007-31) professes to ex-press the ideals of the founder, and, whatever may be itsdate, it is certainly true to the spirit of Otto III and hisecclesiastical advisers, above all in the striking passage (Ch.VI) which attributes the greatness of the Roman Empireto its freedom from national prejudices and counsels theprince to welcome strangers and foreigners who bring morelanguages and customs into the kingdom: "for weak andfragile is a kingdom with one language and custom"—namunitis linguae, uniusque moris regnum imbecitte et fragilum

10 Libellus de Institutione Moium ac Dectetum S. Stepheni,ed. Scxiptoies Regum Hungaricarum, Vol. II, 611-27 (Budapest1938).

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—a sentiment which seems strangely enlightened in com-parison with the nationalism and xenophobia of modemEurope and which was equally in conflict with the tradi-tions of a barbaric tribal society like that of the earlyMagyars.

In fact the conversion of Hungary even more than thatof Poland opened the way to Christian culture in EasternEurope, since the Middle Danube has always been the chiefgateway between East and West. It was immediately usedas an opportunity for further missionary activity by anotherof Otto Ill's familiar friends, St. Bruno of Querfurt (c.970-1009), the disciple of St. Romuald and the biographerof St. Adalbert. He attempted to make Hungary the start-ing point of a mission to the East—to the nomads of theRussian steppe and to the pagan kinsmen of the Magyarson the Volga, a mission which brought him into friendlyrelations with the new Christian state of St Vladimir atKiev.

Thus by the beginning of the eleventh century a newsociety of Christian peoples was arising in Eastern Europefrom Scandinavia to the Crimea and from the Danube tothe Upper Volga. This new Christendom was still an is-land in a sea of paganism and barbarism between the Turk-ish nomads of the steppes and the Finnish tribes of thevast northern forests. Even on the Baltic and in East Ger-many, in Lithuania and Prussia, and as far west as Mecklen-burg, there remained a hard core of pagan resistance, whichwas not to be overcome for centuries, since it owed itsstrength to the national resistance of the Baltic peoplesagainst German colonial expansion and exploitation; andwhere this factor was absent, as in Hungary and Russia,the progress of evangelization was relatively rapid. The peo-ples of this new Christian society were in geographical andcultural contact with one another and their ruling familieswere closely related. Nor was the division between the Latinand Byzantine provinces of Christendom as yet so sharplydefined as to destroy the sense of religious and culturalcommunity. Traces of the work of Cyril and Methodiusstill lingered in the West, in Croatia and perhaps in Bo-

Il8 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

hernia, where the abbey of Sarzarva maintained the East-ern Rite in the eleventh century, while in Russia, so longas the traditional relations with Scandinavia were still pre-served, the close personal bond of the Russian princes withthe North tended to keep Russia in an intermediate posi-tion between East and West.

Even in the twelfth century Helmold, the German priest,who had considerable knowledge of Eastern Europe, doesnot clearly distinguish the frontiers of the two Christen-doms. “All these peoples, except the Prussians,” he wrote,"claim to be Christians. But I have never discovered whowere the teachers from whom they received their faith, savethat in all their observances they seem to follow the Greeksrather than the Latins. For it is easy to travel by sea fromRussia to Greece.”11

The course of history, however, gradually increased thedivergence between the Russian development and that ofthe Western Slav and Scandinavian peoples. The adventof a new horde of nomads—the Cumans—interfered withthe great trade route from the Baltic to the Black Seain the twelfth century, and finally in the thirteenth centurythe last and most tremendous eruption of the peoples ofthe steppes created a vast Eurasian empire which tore Rus-sia violently away from the rest of Europe and practicallyended its intercourse with the other Eastern Europeanpeoples.

Thus the Mongol conquest produced a cataclysmic in-terruption in the development of Eastern Christendomwhich divides the earlier from the later Middle Ages. Dur-ing the earlier period—in the eleventh and twelfth cen-turies—the Christian peoples of Eastern Europe occupiedan intermediate position between the Latin West and theByzantine East; and though they were divided by their re-ligious and cultural sympathies, the division was not an ex-clusive one. A Western ruler like Bela III of Hungary mightlook towards Byzantium while a Russian like Iziaslav I ofKiev might look towards Rome, while the relations betweenthe ruling families were as close as they were in the eight-

11 Helmoldi Chronica SJavorum, XXI, II (M.G.H.).

THE BYZANTINE TRADITION 119

eenth and nineteenth centuries. During this earlier periodthe Christian culture of Eastern Europe was most advancedin Kievan Russia, owing to the high development of theRussian towns and their autonomous economic and po-litical life, while the culture of Poland and Hungary wasrelatively backward.

In the later Middle Ages all this was changed. Hungary,Bohemia and Poland became closely integrated in the com-mon life of Western Christendom and developed flourish-ing national cultures. While the Russian princes had be-come the vassals and taxgatherers of the Mongol Khans,Hungary and Poland shared in the political order of theWestern kingdoms and developed advanced forms of aris-tocratic parliamentarism and constitutional liberties. More-over, the union of Poland with the Lithuanian state led toan immense Eastern expansion of Polish and Latin-Chris-tian culture, so that it came to include all the WesternRussian principalities, which were not under the Mongolyoke, apart from Novgorod, including Kiev itself. EvenNovgorod, the great and ancient city-state which retainedits independence throughout the Middle Ages, was hardpressed in the thirteenth century by the militant expan-sion of the German crusading orders on the Baltic. Thisconflict, which acquired the character of a religious war,was responsible for the growing anti-Latin and anti-West-ern tendency in Russian national tradition.

But the same process was also taking place in the Southat the centre of the Byzantine world. Here, too, the militantspirit of the crusading movement, allied with the economicimperialism of the Italian city-states, aroused a spirit ofintense religious and patriotic resistance in the Byzantineworld. Thus the foundation of the Latin Empire of Con-stantinople which seemed to mark the climax of the vic-torious advance of Western Christendom was a fatal blowto the cause of Christian unity and the cultural unity ofEastern Europe. It was the Ottoman sultans, not the Lat-ins or the Russians or the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans,who entered into the inheritance of Justinian and the By-zantine emperors.

Chapter VII

The Reform of the Church in theEleventh Century and theMedieval Papacy

The breakdown of the Carolingian Empire and the disin-tegration of the authority of the state under the combinedinfluence of barbarian invasion and feudal anarchy led to asimilar crisis in the life of the Church. It was not merelythat the monasteries and churches were sacked by Vikingsand Saracens and Magyars, and that bishops and abbotsdied in battle with the heathen. Even more serious wasthe internal disintegration due to the exploitation and secu-larization of the Church by the leaders of the new feudalsociety. Abbeys and bishoprics were treated in the sameway as lay fiefs. They were appropriated by violence; theywere bought and sold or used as rewards for successfulmilitary adventures.

The despair of the representatives of the Carolingiantradition may be seen in the dark picture of the state of theChurch which was drawn up by the prelates of the provinceof Rheims at Troste in 909.

The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined andburned, the land is reduced to a solitude. As the first menlived without law or constraint, abandoned to their pas-sions, so now every man does what pleases him, despisingthe laws of God and man and the ordinances of theChurch. The powerful oppress the weak, the land is full ofviolence against the poor and the plunder of the goods ofthe Church. Men devour one another like the fishes in the

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sea. In the case of the monasteries some have been de-stroyed by the heathen, others have been deprived of theirproperty and reduced to nothing. In those that remainthere is no longer any observance of the rule. They nolonger have legitimate superiors, owing to the abuse of sub-mitting to secular domination. We see in the monasterieslay abbots with their wives and their children, their soldiersand their dogs.

Nor does the council spare the bishops themselves:

God's flock perishes through our charge. It has comeabout by our negligence, our ignorance and that of ourbrethren, that there is in the Church an innumerable multi-tude of both sexes and every condition who reach old agewithout instruction, so that they are ignorant even of thewords of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.1

When the leaders of any society realize the gravity of thesituation and admit their own responsibility like this thesituation is never desperate, and in feet at the very timewhen the bishops of the Belgic province were composingthis jeremiad the first steps of reform were being taken inneighbouring provinces. Once again, as in the fifth andsixth centuries, Christianity showed its independence of ex-ternal conditions and its power to create new organs ofspiritual regeneration. A new movement arose from themidst of the feudal society to meet the new danger of thefeudal secularization of {he Church.

This movement was at first purely monastic and ascetic.It took the form of a flight from the world and public lifeto the desert and the cloister, a repetition in different cir-cumstances of the first great movement of Western mo-nasticism which I described in earlier chapters.

For while the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the territorialChurch in general were so much a part of contemporarysociety that they were almost at the mercy of the predomi-nant social forces, the monastic institution represented theprinciple of an autonomous Christian order which provedto be the seed of a new life for the whole Church. It is

Mansi Concilia, Vol. XVIII.

true that the old Carolingian monasteries had been ex-ploited and secularized in the same way as the bishoprics,but every monastery was an independent organism, andthus each new foundation provided the opportunity for afresh start and a return to the observance of the Benedic-tine Rule which remained the consecrated norm of monas-tic life.

Hence it was in the new monasteries founded by feudalprinces or converted nobles, like Cluny in Burgundy (910),Brogne and Gorze in Lorraine and Camaldoli in Tuscany(1009), that the foundations were laid of the new move-ment of spiritual reform that was to transform the medie-val Church.

No doubt the monk was concerned primarily with thesalvation of his own soul rather than with any programmeof ecclesiastical reform. But as we have seen,2 Western mo-nasticism always possessed a strong consciousness of itssocial responsibility and its missionary functions. If on theone hand it was based on the tradition of the Fathers of theDesert, it was inspired still more by the ideals of St. Augus-tine and St. Gregory. The Augustinian theology and phi-losophy of history with their intense realization of theburden of inherited evil under which the human race la-boured and their conception of divine grace as a continuallyrenewed source of supernatural energy which transformshuman nature and changes the course of history—all thishad become part of the spiritual patrimony of the WesternChurch and, above all, of Western monasticism, and Chris-tendom had only to return to this tradition to recover itsdynamic energy.

Thus although the efforts of the reformers of the tenthcentury were primarily devoted to the cause of monasticreform, they involved far wider issues. These men were notmere self-centred ascetics, but prophets of righteousnesswho defended the weak and the oppressed and spoke boldlyagainst evil in high places. We see this, above all, in thewritings of St. Odo, the second Abbot of Cluny (927-942),who was one of the greatest of the early leaders in the re-

2 Cf. Ch. II, p. 26 ff.

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forming movement. His chief work, the Collationes, isbased on the Augustinian conception of the Two Cities orrather of the two races, the children of Abel and the chil-dren of Cain whose warfare must endure to the end oftime. But while St. Augustine conceives this oppositionprimarily as a conflict between the Christian Church andthe heathen world, St. Odo is concerned, above all, withthe forces of evil that flourish within the Church.

Nothing could be darker than the picture St. Odo drawsof the state of the Church, the decay of monasticism andthe immorality and materialism of the clergy. Yet he is farfrom confining his criticism, as one might perhaps have ex-pected, to strictly ecclesiastical abuses. The most strikingfeature of his teaching is its bold and almost revolutionarycriticism of social injustice. The great evil of the age in hiseyes is the oppression of the poor and he denounces themisdeeds of the ruling classes of his time in the spirit andthe words of the Hebrew prophets: "Woe to you that arewealthy in Sion: you great men, heads of the people that goin with state into the house of Israel.” The robber nobleswho plunder the poor and their accomplices, the worldlyprelates who fail to protect their people from injustice, arethe true seed of Cain, the persecutors of God.

How then are these robbers Christians, or what do theydeserve who slay their brothers for whom they are com-manded to lay down their lives?

You have only to study the books of antiquity to see thatthe most powerful are always the worst. Worldly nobility isdue not to nature but to pride and ambition. If we judgedby realities we should give honour not to the rich for thefine clothes they wear but to the poor who are the makersof such things—mm sudoribus pauperum praeparatur undepotentiores saginantur.8

But St. Odo realizes that this reign of injustice has itsroots deep in human nature and cannot be abolished byreliance on external means—on “the arm of the flesh”. From

8 Collationes, III, 26-30: "for the banquets of the powerful arecooked in the sweat of the poor.”

the days of Abel, the first of the just, down to the last ofthe elect, suffering and defeat have been the portion of Hiechildren of God. The only remedy is to be found in thatspiritual force by which the humility of God conquers thepride of the evil one. Hence the spiritual reformer cannotexpect to have the majority on his side. He must be pre-pared to stand alone like Ezekiel and Jeremy. He must takeas his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals atHippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lom-bards at the gates. For the true helpers of the world arethe poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the crosson their foreheads, who refuse to be overcome by the tri-umph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvationof God.

To the modem this may appear an unpractical conclu-sion. Nevertheless it undoubtedly gave spiritual force to themovement of reform which the Carolingian Church hadlooked for in vain from councils and kings. However goodwere the intentions of the latter, they sddom had the powerto give effect to their resolutions. The monastic reform, onthe other hand, was an autonomous movement which de-rived its power from its internal spiritual resources. It wasassisted rather than hindered by the decentralization andlocal particularism of feudal society, for these conditionsmade it possible for a founder to establish his new religiousfoundation without the interference of king or bishop. Theclassical example of this is Cluny itself, which was foundedby Count William of Auvergne in 910 as the property ofthe apostles in immediate dependence on the Holy See,formally excluding any intervention whatsoever by king,bishop or court-a privilege which became the pattern andideal for the other reformed monasteries. Thus from thebeginning a kind of alliance was established between thePapacy and the monastic reformers, an alliance which wasalready confirmed by St. Odo’s relations with Alberic, theRoman prince, and Leo VII in the first half of the tenthcentury.

Morever the loose and shapeless organization of thefeudal state made it possible for the reformed congrega-

tions to extend their influence by patronage and recom-mendation in the same way as a great feudal estate, so thata reformer like St. Abbo of Fleury could even say in jestthat he was more powerful than the king of the Frankssince his abbey possessed dependencies in lands where theking had no authority.4

But though the influence of Cluny extended fromSouthern Italy to Eastern England it was by no means theonly centre of reform. A similar movement was arisingabout the same time in the Low Countries where St. Ge-rard of Brogne (d. 959) was the reformer of the chiefmonasteries of Flanders, St. Peter and St. Bavo at Ghent,St. Omer, St. Bertin and St. Ghislain, and somewhat latera group of clerks from Metz established an equally impor-tant centre at Gorze in Lorraine under St. John of Van-di&res. In Italy the tradition of the monks of the desertand the oriental anchorites was revived by the action ofascetics like St. Nilus, the Byzantine monk, who foundedthe great Basilian monastery of Grottaferrata south ofRome, St. Romuald, the founder of Camaldoli, and St.John Gualbert, the founder of Vallombrosa.

These various movements often crossed and blendedtheir influence with one another. Thus the reform of theAnglo-Saxon monasteries in the age of St. Dunstan was con-nected with the Flemish movement through St. Peter’s atGhent and with the Cluniac movement through the greatmonastery of Fleury, which had itself become a secondarycentre of reform. In the same way St. William of Volpiano(962-1031), the Abbot of St. Benigne at Dijon, introducedthe Cluniac reform into Normandy, while Richard of St.Vannes of Verdun brought the independent movement ofreform in Lorraine into contact with that of Cluny, and hisdisciple, St. Poppo (978-1048), the Abbot of Stavelot andthe friend and counsellor of the Emperors Henry II andConrad II, became the reformer of the monasteries ofWestern Germany.

Thus all over Western Europe new centres of monasticreform were arising like islands of peace and spiritual order

4 Vita Abbonis, Migne, CXXXIX, 41.

in the sea of feudal anarchy. Monasticism had ceased to bea helpless spectator of the moral disorder of Christendom,and had become an independent power in Western society.In men such as St Odo and St. Romuald and St. Williamof Volpiano the lawless feudal nobles, who cared nothingfor morality or law, recognized the presence of somethingstronger than brute force—a numinous supernatural powerthey dared not ignore. St. Peter Damian records thatRanier, the Marquis of Tuscany, used to say that no em-peror could put such fear into him as the mere glance ofSt. Romuald, and even after his death the saint was stillregarded as the protector of the poor and the avenger of theoppressed.6

As we have already seen in the earlier history of the DarkAges,6 the saint was not just a good man who was dead; hewas a living power, who took an active interest and share inhuman affairs, strong to protect his own, and terrible inanger. Every great abbey and pilgrimage church was thehome of such a power, where he held his court and re-ceived the petitions of his clients; and the legal rights ofimmunity and asylum that such holy places enjoyed werebut the external recognition which society yielded to suchan authority.

In the same way it was the saint who was lord and masterof all the lands and serfs of the abbey, and the abbot wasbut his servant and steward, so that it is not surprising tofind free men voluntarily giving up their liberty to become"the saint's men": for such homines sanctorum or sainteurs,as they were called, possessed a higher status than the or-dinary serf, and a more powerful protector than the ordi-nary freeman.

By the beginning of the eleventh century the movementof monastic reform had attained maturity and began to af-fect every aspect of Western culture. The great abbots whowere the leaders of the movement, like St. Odilo of Cluny

6E.g. St. Peter Damian's story of the peasant woman whosuccessfully invoked the aid of St. Romuald against the noble whohad stolen her cow (Vit. S. Rom., c. 104).

(994-1019), St. Abbo of Fleury (988-1004), St. Poppo ofStavelot (977-1048), and St. William of Volpiano (990-1031), were the dominant figures of the age and exercisedimmense influence on contemporary rulers. Never had themovement for the foundation and restoration of monas-teries been more active than, for instance, in Normandy,where the foundations of this age, like Fecamp and Beeand St. Evroult, became the centres of a great revival ofChristian culture.

Nevertheless the reformers had as yet no idea of anyfundamental change in the relations between the spiritualand temporal power. They still accepted the traditionalCarolingian conception of the divine right of kings and theduty of the prince to intervene in religious and ecclesiasticalaffairs. In so far as they were concerned with the state ofthe Church outside the monastery, it was to the royal powerrather than to the bishops or the Papacy that they lookedfor support. We see this clearly in the writings of the lead-ing canonists of the time, like St. Abbo of Fleury andBishop Burchard of Worms. The work of the former isaddressed expressly to the French king, Hugh Capet, andhis successor Robert the Pious, whose power he regards asa sacred ministerial office for the rule and reform of theChurch; while the latter in his great Decretum representsthe tradition of the bishops of the Empire and accepts theauthority of the Emperor in the government of the Churchwithout any consciousness of the contradiction betweenthis state of affairs and the traditional principles of CanonLaw on which his work is based.7

However inconsistent this attitude might be, it corre-sponded with the facts of the situation. For the movementfor the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline and canonicalorder during the early part of the eleventh century de-pended entirely on the sympathy and co-operation of theroyal power. It was the Emperor rather than the Pope whotook the initiative in the work of reform, and it was underthe auspices of emperors like Henry II and kings of Francelike Robert the Pious that the first reforming councils and

7 For Burchard’s position see especially Hauck, Kirchenge-schichte Deutschlands, III, 442.

synods were held in Germany, Italy and France (e.g. atPavia in 1022 and at Bourges in 1031).

But the exercise of the royal supremacy in religious mat-ters was not conceived in any hostile spirit towards Rome.The relations between the Empire and the Papacy hadnever been more friendly and intimate than they were inthe time of Otto III and Sylvester II in 999, and of HenryII and Benedict VIII (1012-24).

So long, however, as the Papacy was under the control ofthe Roman nobility, its interests were limited by the feudsof local factions; and so far from taking the lead in themovement of reform, it was in dire need of reform itself.Throughout the tenth century the secularism and corrup-tion of the rival cliques which exploited the Papacy were aflagrant denial of die ideals of the reforming movement,and the reaction of the Northern episcopate found mostviolent expression in the synods of St. Basle and Chelles in991 and 99$. The fret that the spokesman of this anti-Roman opposition, Gerbert, himself became Pope Sylves-ter II four years later provided an unexpected denouementof the conflict; but after a generation, the worst scandalsof the tenth century were revived by John XIX and Bene-dict IX. Finally the deposition of Benedict IX and the elec-tion of two rival candidates led to the decisive interventionof the Emperor Henry III, who at the Council of Sutri in1046 set aside all three Popes and imposed a Germanbishop, Suiger of Bamberg, as his own nominee.

Henry III was an austere and devout man, a friend ofsaints and reformers, who took his theocratic responsibili-ties towards the Church very seriously. Consequently it isnot surprising that his drastic action at Rome met withgeneral approval from the reforming party, apart from oneor two exceptions like Bishop Wazo of Lilge. Even St. PeterDamian, the leader of the Italian reformers, accepts hiscontrol of the Papacy as a manifestation of divine Provi-dence, and he compares his reforming action to that ofChrist driving the money-changers from the temple!8

The action of Henry III had a far-reaching effect on the

8 Liber Gratissimus ad fin.

course of the reforming movement. At first sight it mightseem that it would reduce the Papacy to complete depend-ence on the imperial power, for the three Popes whom henominated in rapid succession—Clement II in 1046 andDamasus II and St. Leo IX in 1048—were loyal prelates ofthe Empire from Germany and Lorraine, who had no Ital-ian connections and were consequently forced to rely on thematerial support of the Emperor. Nevertheless, the merefact that the Papacy was taken out of the control of theRoman nobles and their factions and brought into intimaterelations with Northern and Central Europe had an im-mediate effect on its international influence.

Still more important was the feet that the coming of LeoIX created an alliance between the Papacy and the move-ment of religious reform, which had its centre in Lorraineand Burgundy. As Bishop of Toul, Leo had been fortwenty-two years one of the leading figures in the Churchof Lorraine at a time when it was the scene of the reform-ing activity of abbots like St. Richard of Verdun, St. Poppoof Stavelot and St. Odilo of Cluny, and of bishops likeWazo of Li£ge—all of whom died about the time when hebecame Pope. And the men whom he brought to Romeas his chosen helpers were all drawn from the same milieu—Humbert, the Abbot of Moyenmoutier, Hugh the White,Abbot of Remiremont, and Frederick, the Archdeacon ofLi6ge, who was brother of Duke Godfrey of Lorraine andwas later to become Abbot of Monte Cassino and PopeStephen IX.

The introduction of this foreign dement into the Curiahad a revolutionary effect on the Papacy, which became thehierarchical centre and organ of leadership for the reform-ing movement. The reform of the Church was no longerthe aim of scattered groups of ascetics and idealists, it be-came the official policy of the Roman Church.

In his brief pontificate of less than five years St. Leodevoted himself to the work of reform with superhumanenergy, crossing the Alps again and again to hold reformingcouncils in Germany and France as well as in Italy, andestablish direct personal control over the Churches of West-ern Christendom. At the same time he took an important

part in the political affairs of Christendom. He had to dealwith the difficult problem of the Normans, who were estab-lishing themselves in Southern Italy with no less ruthless-ness and violence than that of the Danes in England. Heattempted to meet this danger by direct military action,supported by both the German and the Byzantine Empires.But his well-planned political strategy met with militarydisaster. He was defeated and captured by the Normans,and at the same time his plan for union between WesternChristendom and the Byzantine Empire was resisted bythe ecclesiastical intransigence of the Byzantine patriarchMichael Cerularius. He did not survive these disasters, andtwo years later, in 1056, the Emperor Henry III died pre-maturely, leaving his five-year-old son to succeed him underthe regency of his widow.

This event was fatal to the old order and put an end tothe co-operation between the Empire and the Papacy onwhich the policy of the reformers had hitherto been based.During the minority of Henry IV, the party of reform as-serted the independence of the Papacy, disregarded theconcordat of Sutri and began to elect their own candidatesto the Papacy in independence of the Empire. They alliedthemselves with the anti-imperial party in Italy, representedby Duke Godfrey of Lorraine and Tuscany whose brotherFrederick of Lorraine became Pope Stephen IX in 1057.Finally they brought about the alliance between the Papacyand the Normans in Southern Italy, a reversal of allianceswhich had enormous consequences, since it was an opendefiance, not only of the German Empire, but of the Byzan-tine Empire also, and did more than anything else to makethe breach with the Eastern Church irremediable.

The moving spirit behind these events seems to havebeen Humbert of Mqyenmoutier, Cardinal Bishop of SilvaCandida, who was the dominant figure alike in the reform-ing movement and in the negotiations with Constantinopleand the Normans during these critical years (1049-61).The ideas which inspired his activity are to be seen in histreatise Against the Simonists (c. 1058), which is at oncethe earliest, the ablest, and the most extreme statement

of the programme of the reformers. To Humbert, simonywas not merely a sin; it was the supreme heresy, since itdenied the spiritual character of the Church and subordi-nated the gifts of the Spirit to money and worldly power.But since the Holy Ghost cannot be bought or sold, it fol-lowed, so he argued, that the Simonists had no share inHis gifts. Their sacraments were null and void, and theirchurch was the church of Anti-Christ. To meet these evilshe called for a return to the old canonical principles of freeelection and the emancipation of the Church from the con-trol of the secular power and from the custom of lay in-vestiture. Since the spiritual power is as superior to that ofthe king as heaven is superior to earth, the Church shouldguide and rule the state as the soul rules the body; so onlywas it possible to ensure the reign of justice and the peaceand union of the Christian people.

It is clear that these views are irreconcilable, not onlywith the current practice of eleventh-century Feudalism,but with the whole tradition of the imperial state Churchwhich had inextricably confused spiritual and secular func-tions, and had regarded emperors and kings as the divinelyappointed leaders of Christian society. It was a reversionto the uncompromising dualism and anti-secularism of theearly Church.

The revolutionary consequences of these theories werenot clear to the older generation of reformers, who wereHumbert's contemporaries, like St. Leo IX and the greatleader of the monastic reform in Italy, St. Peter Damian,who remained faithful to the ideal of the union of the twopowers which had been temporarily realized in the time ofHenry III. But after the death of Cardinal Humbert andPope Nicholas II in 1061 the leadership of the movementpassed to younger men who were prepared to carry the ideasof Humbert to their logical conclusion at whatever cost.Foremost among them was the archdeacon of the RomanChurch, the Tuscan Hildebrand, who had held an impor-tant position at Rome since 1059 and was elected Pope in1073 as Gregory VII.

Although the importance of his influence on the historyof medieval Christendom has always been fully recognized,

his personality and his work have been the subject of themost diverse judgments. On the one hand, he has beenregarded as the prime author and inspirer of the whole re-forming movement, and on the other as an ambitious ec-clesiastical politician of the type of Boniface VIII. But it isnow generally recognized that both these views are equallyerroneous. He was not an original thinker, for it was notHildebrand but Humbert of Moyenmoutier who was thetheorist and ideologist of the reforming movement. But onthe other hand he was no mere ecclesiastical power politi-cian, but a man of intense spiritual convictions with a deepsense of his prophetic mission.

His view of the Church and the world was characterizedby the same Augustinian dualism that we have seen in thecase of St. Odo of Cluny, but this was the common tradi-tion of the Church of his age, and there is much less traceof direct Augustinian influence in his writings than is to befound in the work of Cardinal Humbert. It is in the Bibleand, above all, in the Prophets that the real source of Greg-ory VIPs inspiration is to be found; and the primary scrip-tural doctrines of divine judgment, the divine law of justiceand the prophetic mission provide the recurrent theme ofall his thought and teaching. His sense of the urgency ofhis mission and the terrible predicament of the Christianworld finds its most striking expression in the last appealhe addressed to the Christian people from his exile inSalerno before his death.

To me also, though unworthy and a sinner, that word ofthe Prophet has come, “Go up into the mountain and cryaloud: spare not”, and so whether I will or no, setting asideall fear and dll affection, I cry, I cry and I cry again. TheChristian religion, the true faith taught to our fathers bythe Son of God, has fallen so low that it is an object ofscorn, not only to the EvU One, but even to the Jews, theSaracens and the pagans. These have laws that profit themnot to salvation and yet they are faithful to them. But we,blinded by the love of the world, have forsaken the TrueLaw.

Every day we see men who go to death in thousands for

their lords or their fellows, but those who fear God, few asthey are, think only of their own souls and forget theirbrethren.

Since the day when the Church has placed me on theapostolic throne, my whole desire and the end of all mystriving has been that the Holy Church, the Bride of God,our mistress and our mother, should recover her honour andremain free and chaste and Catholic.9

There is nothing political in this ideal of reformation.But the uncompromising simplicity with which it wasformulated made it a revolutionary force in a world inwhich the Church had become a part of the social order,and ecclesiastical and political relations had become inex-tricably entangled. Above all, the old Byzantine and Caro-lingian ideal of the sacred monarchy was an obstacle to anyradical programme of reform, since it consecrated the statusquo and surrounded vested interests with the halo of sacredtradition. Hence Gregory VII's uncompromising determi-nation to free the Church from its feudal dependence onthe secular power meant the abandonment of the old By-zantine and Carolingian conception of the divine right ofkings and the passive obedience of their Christian subjects.But since the reformers no less than the conservatives con-tinued to accept the unitary character of Christian society,the denial of the imperial theocracy involved the assertionof the supremacy of the spiritual power in the social lifeof Christendom, so that it was inevitable that the Popeshould take the place which the Emperor had hitherto oc-cupied as the supreme leader and judge of the Christianpeople.

This change, revolutionary as it was, was in harmonywith the changing conditions of the new age. The Empirewas no longer able to fulfil even formally the universal func-tions which the Empire of Charlemagne had represented.It had become an archaic survival from the point of view ofWestern Europe as a whole, where the new feudal stateshad become the leaders of culture. Yet the sense of the

* Monuments Gregoriana, Ep. coll. 46, pp. 572-74.

unity of Christendom was stronger than ever and de-manded some new institutional expression, and the re-formed Papacy provided such an expression more effec-tively than any political institution could have done, sinceit transcended national and territorial rivalries and pos-sessed in the hierarchy and the Canon Law the necessaryinstruments for its realization. It was, moreover, far moreflexible than the Empire, since it could create special formsof relation, not only with local churches and monasteries,but also with the territorial powers, in addition to its uni-versal authority. Thus Gregory VII encouraged the rulersof the more remote Christian territories, such as Spain,Denmark, Hungary and Croatia, to accept the protectionof the Holy See and become vassals of St. Peter. Andthough this did not imply any direct political control, itemphasized the new position of the Papacy as the centreof international society.

The new formulation of the theocratic idea was assimi-lated without great difficulty by the feudal society of theWest, where the limitations of kingship were a matter ofcommon experience. But it was a very different matter inthe Empire where the Carolingian tradition was so strongand where the Church and the bishops were the mainstayof the imperial system. Here there was a conflict of idealsas well as of social forces, and for generations Christendomwas tom asunder by the conflict. For the first time in thehistory of the West an attempt was made to enlist publicopinion on either side, and a war of treaties and pamphletswas carried on, in which the most fundamental questionsconcerning the relation of Church and state and theright of resistance to unjust authority were discussedexhaustively.

This marks a new departure in the history of Westernculture, for it meant that men had begun to reason aboutthe principles on which Christian society was based, and touse the appeal to these principles as a means of changingthe existing order. When Gregory VII wrote, “The Lordsays ‘I am the Truth and the Life', he did not say T amcustom' but T am Truth'" (non dixit Ego sum consuetudo,

sed Veritas), he was invoking a new kind of Divine Rightwhich was ultimately to prove stronger than the divineright of kings.

At first the controversy started from common presup-positions and common theological principles. Both sidesaccepted the Augustinian theology of grace and justice, theCelasian doctrine of the concordance of the temporal andspiritual powers and the Carolingian conception of Chris-tendom as a theocratic unity. Above all, St. Augustine’s Cityof God, with its tremendous vision of the Two Loves andthe Two Cities whose opposition and conflict explain thecourse of history, formed the background of the whole con-troversy and was appealed to explicitly and repeatedly byboth parties in support of their interpretation of thestruggle.

By the Reformers the claim of the Emperor to dominatethe Church is seen as another assault on the liberty of theCity of God by the children of Babylon and the generationof Cain. To the Imperialists, on the other hand, the Re-formers are the enemies of peace who destroy the unity ofthe one Body by separating the priesthood from the king-ship, putting the weapons of carnal warfare in the hands ofthe Church.

Thus the question of the right of resistance became oneof the main issues of the controversy. The adherents of theEmpire—like the monk of Hersfeld who wrote the anony-mous work De Unitate Ecclesiae Conservanda—condemnedthe right of resistance on grounds of Christian pacifism.

Peace, says the Lord, I leave to you, My peace I giveunto you. Wherefore, whenever the sons of the Church arecompelled to make war, they do this not by the teachingof Christ and the tradition of the Church, but from neces-sity, and by a certain contagion of Babylon, the earthlycity, through which the sons of Jerusalem journey duringtheir earthly life.10

What a mystery of inquity is now being worked by thosewho call themselves monks and, confounding the Church

10 Op. cit., I, ad fin.

and the state in their perverse doctrine, oppose and setthemselves up against the royal power and the Holy See11

so that

for seventeen years and more, everywhere in the RomanEmpire there are wars and seditions, the burning ofchurches and monasteries; bishop is set against bishop,clergy against clergy, people against people, and fatheragainst son, and brother against brother.12

But in the eyes of the reformer this passive conservatismwas irreconcilable with the liberty of the Church and therestoration of the true order of Christian society. Since theChurch was one, the Christian prince and the Emperorhimself held his office within the Church, subject to thelaw of the Church and under the authority of its spiritualrulers. The temporal authority was therefore in a sense theauthority of the Church in temporal affairs, exercisedthrough its temporal ministers. And if these ministers wentwrong it was the duty of the Church and of the Christianpeople to call them to order and, if necessary, to dismissthem in favour of a more suitable candidate. Stated in itsextreme form, as in the Letter to Gebhard by Manegoldof Lautenbach, this involves the substitution of an almostdemocratic theory of social contract for the traditional prin-ciple of the divine right of kings, as well as a drastic justifi-cation of the employment of force against schismatics andheretics, according to the words of the prophet "Cursed behe who doeth the work of the Lord negligently and cursedbe he that keepeth back his sword from blood.” That thiswas not a matter of abstract theory is shown by the historyof tiie Saxon revolt, as recorded by Lambert of Hersfeldand Bruno of Magdeburg, both of whom stress the condi-tional character of the allegiance of the Saxons to theEmperor and the right and duty of defending their nationalliberties and those of the Church.

But in spite of this predominantly theological atmos-phere, there were already some writers who were prepared

11 Op.

cit, II, c. 42.

to defend the cause of the Empire on its own ground invirtue of its own temporal prerogative. The most remarka-ble of these writers is Benzo, Bishop of Alba, a scholar anda humanist, who anticipates Dante in his enthusiasm forthe Roman tradition and for the restoration of the universalauthority of the Empire. Henry IV is the rightful successorof the great emperors of the past and of the heroes of an-cient Rome, who has been sent by heaven to bring backthe glory of the Empire to Italy, and through Italy to theworld. This restored Empire was to be independent alikeof the Church and of feudalism. It was to be an absolutemonarchy based on the ancient Roman order and universallaw and a restored system of general taxation. Thus in spiteof its Utopian character the thought of Benzo of Albaseems to foreshadow the approaching renaissance of the po-litical conception of the state.

In the eleventh century, however, in so far as a politicalstate existed it was to be found, not in the archaic tradi-tions of the sacred Empire, but in the new monarchy ofthe Normans who were the especial object of Benzo's ha-tred and denunciation. And so, too, it was not the Empirebut the reformed Papacy which was the real heir of theRoman tradition of universalism and international order.For the Church was not only a much more universal andcomprehensive society than the medieval state; it exercisedmany of the functions which we regard as essentially politi-cal. As F. W. Maitland used to insist, it is impossible toframe any acceptable definition of the state which wouldnot include the medieval Church. It was a sovereign powerwhich imposed its own laws and enforced them in its owncourts by its own judges and lawyers. It possessed an elabo-rate.system of appellate jurisdiction, an organized bureauc-racy and an efficient system of centralized control carriedout by permanent officials and supervised by the visits andreports of the legates who played such a prominent part inthe international life of Christendom.

All this was the direct outcome of the reforming move-ment, for the emancipation of the Papacy from its depend-ence on the Empire and the separation of the spiritualauthority of the bishop from his secular obligations as a

138 RELIGION AND THE RISE OP WESTERN CULTURE

member of the feudal hierarchy made it necessary to re-construct the whole order of ecclesiastical administrationand jurisdiction as an organized unity.

But the creation of this great machine of ecclesiasticalgovernment was not the original aim of the movement ofreform, which as we have seen was inspired by the un-worldly, spiritual ideals of men like St. Peter Damian. Thereformers themselves were well aware that the growth ofecclesiastical power and wealth involved a danger of secu-larization from within which was as deadly though moreinsiduous than the external evils against which they fought.It is true that there were some supporters of the reformingmovement who had something of Benzo of Alba’s sympathyfor the ancient Roman tradition, and who regarded the vic-tory of the Papacy as a triumph of Latin civilization andorder over the forces of Germanic and feudal barbarism.Thus the fine ode which the Archbishop of Salerno, Alfano,addressed to Hildebrand when he was still archdeacon, callson the Papacy to break with spiritual weapons the rudeforces of barbarism which opposed the Roman power andcompares Hildebrand himself to the heroes of the past—to Marius and Caesar and the Scipios:

His et archiapostolifervido gladio Petrifiange robur et impetusittius, vetus ut iugumusque sentiat ultimum.

Quanta vis anathematis!

Quidquid et Marius prius,quodque Julius egerantmaxima nece militum,voce tu modica fads.

Roma quid SdpionibusCaeterisque QuiritibusDebuit magis quam tibi,

Cujus est studiis suaeNacta jura potentiae?1*

18Migne, P. L., Tom. CXLVII, 1262. Translation: “Howgreat the power of thy anathema! All that Marius and Julius

REFORM IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY 139

But there is no sign of this in Hildebrand's own thoughtand utterances. He was inspired far more by the scripturalideal of a prophet of justice and judgment set over the na-tions and over the kingdoms, “to root up and to pull down,to build and to plant”. It was the same spirit which in-spired St. Bernard in the following century, and so manyother Christian leaders. And it was because this propheticspirit inspired the work of the reforming movement in theeleventh and twelfth centuries that it acquired the spiritualenergy and the moral prestige that enabled it to animateand transform medieval culture during that decisive periodof its development.

accomplished with vast slaughter of soldiers, you can do withvoice unraised.

“Break the strength of their onrush by the sword of Peter, thechief apostle, that they may feel the ancient yoke to the end.

“What more did Rome owe to the Scipios and her citizensbesides than to thee, by whose efforts she has gained the rightsof her power."

Chapter VIII

The Feudal World: Chivalry andthe Courtly Culture

In the eleventh century the movement of reform of whichI wrote in the last chapter was no longer limited to themonastic life, but had become the inspiration of a widermovement of spiritual change which transformed the orderof the Western Church and the spirit of Western culture.In this way there arose the new unity of medieval Chris-tendom which was no longer dependent on the existence ofthe Empire as in Carolingian or Byzantine society, but hada superpolitical or international character and possessed itsown independent centre of authority in the reformedPapacy. It is true that the Carolingian tradition survivedwith little essential change in the Holy Roman Empire un-der the Saxon and Salian emperors, but it no longer em-braced the whole of Western culture. The most active andvital centres of new life were to be found elsewhere in thedisorderly feudal society of the West Frankish realm, wherethe Carolingian tradition was almost extinct and the royalpower itself had sunk to the lowest possible level.

Here the real unit of political life was not the kingdombut the new feudal states which had been built out of theruins of Hie Carolingian state by rebellious vassals or suc-cessful military adventurers or even, in the case of Nor-mandy, by the settlement of barbarian invaders from thedistant North. These feudal states had been created by warand for war. Their whole structure and ethos were military,and the only force which kept society together was theprimary bond of fidelity which united the warrior and hischief, as it had done in the days of the barbarian invasions.

141

Thus the rise of feudalism seems to mark a return tobarbarism, in which the fundamental institutions of civi-lized society have practically disappeared and the world wasruled by “the good old law, the simple plan. That he shouldtake who has the power, and he should keep who can”.

But though feudalism was a reversion to barbarism, italso contained its own remedy. The very ferocity and bar-barism of the early feudal princes made them ill men toquarrel with. It was one thing to flout the authority of theweak and distant Carolingian monarch, but it was a verydifferent matter to revolt against men like Fulk Nerra ofAnjou, or Baldwin of Flanders, or William the Bastard ofNormandy. Such men were hard and cruel masters, butgood “justiciars”, who were able to protect their own landsfrom war and plunder and were determined to enforce re-spect for their authority on their unruly vassals.

And in feet no sooner were the feudal principalitiesfirmly established than population began to increase, theroads were once more open to traders, and towns andmarkets revived. Each of these feudal states—above all Nor-mandy, Flanders, Anjou, Blois, Champagne and Burgundy—became the focus of an intense social activity; and theirvery multiplicity and limited character as compared withthe unwieldy bulk and universal claims of the Carolingianand German Empires favoured the progress of Westerncivilization. A state of the size of Normandy or Flanderswas large enough to form a self-sufficient social organism,while not too large to be controlled and defended by asingle head. Thus the petty states of France and the LowCountries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries played asimilar part in early medieval culture to that of the Greekcity-states in antiquity, or to that of the Italian principali-ties in the Renaissance. The revival of religious, intellectualand artistic life was connected, not so much with the Em-pire or even the monarchies, as with these feudal states.Even the ferocious Fulk Nerra of Anjou, who seems at firstsight no more than a bloodthirsty barbarian, was a greatfounder of monasteries and rebuilder of churches, whilehis contemporary, William the Great of Poitou (993-1030), was the friend of Fulbert of Chartres and a cul-

tured and magnificent prince, who delighted in reading andcopied manuscripts for his library with his own hand. Aboveall, it is significant that the movement of monastic reformfound its earliest patrons, not in the great Saxon emperors,but among the feudal princes of the tenth century. Clunywas founded by William of Auvergne, the Duke of Aqui-taine, the reform of Gerard of Brogne owed its extensionin the Low Countries to Amoul the Old, whose predeces-sor Baldwin II had grown rich on the plunder of Churchlands and who had distinguished himself even in that law-less age by the murder of Fulk, the Archbishop of Rheims.Later in the early eleventh century it was Richard II ofNormandy who brought St. William of Volpiano fromDijon and made Fecamp the great centre of monastic re-form in the north-west.

Thus the anarchy of the feudal "system” was compen-sated by the vitality and the recuperative power of the newtype of society. From the beginning of the eleventh cen-tury onwards Western feudal society showed an extraordi-nary power of expansion which carried French chivalry andits institutions from one end of Europe to the other—fromthe British Isles to Portugal and Sicily and further still toSyria and the borders of the Arabian desert.

It is an expansion comparable to that of the Northmenin the preceding period, who had established their settle-ments and kingdoms from Dublin to Kiev. Indeed, the twomovements are in some measure continuous, since it wasthe Christian Northmen of Normandy who were every-where the spearhead of the new movement. But while theVikings were rapidly absorbed by the countries in whichthey settled, and adopted the religion and institutions ofthe conquered peoples, the new feudal society was strongenough to preserve its spiritual identity and even to exert acreative influence in the field of culture. This is due to thefact that the feudal society of Northern France hadachieved a new fusion or synthesis between the Christianand the barbarian elements in medieval culture. Hithertothese elements had coexisted in Western culture side byside with one another, but they did not form an organicunity. They remained two separate worlds—on the one side,

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the peace society of the Church, which found its centrein the monastic life and culture; on the other, the warriorsociety of the Western barbarians, which remained paganat heart in spite of the external and partial acceptance ofChristianity.

The Carolingian Empire seemed for a moment to repre-sent the triumph of the Christian element and the uni-fication of Western culture on Christian principles. But itwas soon evident that the imposing theocracy of the Chris-tian Empire was a pretentious sham, and that although theemperors who were most deeply imbued with the Carolin-gian ideals—like Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald andCharles the Simple—might set forth in their capitulariesthe principles of Christian government and detailed plansof moral and liturgical reform, they were incapable of de-fending their lands against the pagans or making their sub-jects obey them. The rule of law and the political authorityof the state had disappeared, and the only remainingprinciple of social cohesion was the direct personal bond ofloyalty and mutual aid between the warrior and his chief,and that of service and protection between the serf and hislord. There is an obvious resemblance between the feudalsociety and the traditional relation of the barbarian warleader to his comitatus or “hyr

Nothing could be further from the Christian ethos, yetalthough the feudal noble was the lineal descendant of thebarbarian warrior he was, at the same time, a Christianknight, who possessed a certain loyalty to the wider societyof Christendom, and a certain fidelity to the Church.

This dualism in the spirit of feudal society finds a strikingillustration in a famous incident in English history. OnAugust nth, 991, a Viking fleet landed near Maldon inthe estuary of Blackwater and met the men of Essex, ledby their ealdorman Byrhtnoth, who was defeated and slainafter a brave resistance. The event is recorded in two al-most contemporary sources: the Latin Vita Oswaldi, com-

posed by a monk of Ramsey, and the Anglo-Saxon Lay ofMddott, which has sometimes been called the greatestbattle poem in the English language. In any case it is aclassical expression of the heroic aristocratic ethos whichis seen in Beowulf and the Fight at Finnesburg and in theoldest Scandinavian poetry. The death of the hero and thespeeches of his followers who are determined to die withtheir lord belong so completely to this tradition that theyreproduce precisdy the situation, the emotional reactionsand the poetic formulas of the old Northern pagan heroicpoetry. But, in the other source, the monastic chroniclerrepresents Byrhtnoth as a Christian champion of his coun-try against the pagans, whose hands are strengthened byhis piety and good works. And both these versions are es-sentially correct, since Byrhtnoth was not only a great war-rior, but a devout Christian, like his nephew Aethdwine,"the friend of God", and he was venerated for centuriesby the monks of Ely as one of their great benefactors.

Here we see die two component elements of the newfeudal culture coexisting in their pure state, without min-gling or confusion. But in the territories of the formerCarolingian Empire, above all in Northern France, whichwas the focus of the new society, a process of fusion wasalready iat advanced and was giving birth to new institu-tions, new ideas and a new literary tradition. Here the riseof the feudal culture represents the translation into specifi-cally Christian forms of the spirit of the old Northernwarrior tradition, so that the dualism of culture which hadbeen characteristic of Western Europe during the last fouror five centuries was at last transcended.

This creative activity of the new feudal culture finds itsappropriate literary expression in the new feudal epic—thechanson de geste-which makes its appearance in NorthernFrance in this period. This is perhaps the only-certainlythe most outstanding—example of a genuine heroic poetryarising in historic times and dealing with historic personsand events. It is true that the existing chansons date mainlyfrom the twelfth century, while the subject-matter is de-rived from the tradition and legends of the Carolingianage. But it is essentially the poetry of the feudal society

THE FEUDAL WORLD

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which arose out of the ruins of the Carolingian Empire,and it reflects the social conditions of that age in the sameway as the Northern heroic poetry reflects the social tradi-tions of the age of the barbarian invasions.

Thus their world is already an archaic one, and is inmany respects more akin to the post-Carolingian world thanto the world of the twelfth century to which the existingpoems belong. In all of them, for example, the bond of kinis emphasized as it was in the old tribal society. WhenGanelon is tried for his treason, for instance, thirty of hiskinsmen are found as his sureties or oath helpers, and whentheir champion is defeated in ordeal of battle all thirty arehanged—an example of the principle of the solidarity ofthe family which exceeds anything to be found in the bar-barian codes of law. In the same way we find the old bar-barian law of the blood feud and the right of the kin tothe payment of blood money in full vigour. Even so late achanson as Garin of Lorraine gives a vivid picture of theconsequences that might follow even an unintentional actof homicide: the messengers riding from one end of Franceto the other summoning uncles and cousins and vassalsto avenge their kinsman or their lord, and the ineffectualefforts of the innocent slayer to make composition by thepayment of an enormous wergeld. Again, in Raoul ofCambrai, the interest centres in the tragic conflict betweenthe bond of kin and the bond of feudal allegiance whichleads Bernier the vassal to slay Raoul, his lord. Where, in allthis, it may be asked, is the new Christian spirit to befound? For the chansons de geste are barbarous in the sameway as the feudal society was itself—more barbarous in somerespects than the courtly spirit of the old Germanic epic.But while the old heroic poetry was confined within itsown inherited tradition and knew no loyalty beyond theties of blood and personal allegiance, the new literatureimplicitly recognized the existence of a higher law and awider spiritual loyalty.

The dominant motive of the chansons de geste—at leastthe earliest and most famous cycle—is not personal revengeor family feud, but the war of the Christians against theinfidel—gesta Dei per Francos. The Carolingian wars

against the Saracens of Spain hold the same central placein the feudal epic tradition as the war of Troy in that ofancient Greece. And it was here rather than in any na-tional opposition of French to Germans, or Normans toEnglishmen that the new patriotism of feudal Europearose. This patriotic sentiment has a religious rather than apolitical character, since it is not related to any existingstate; but to the wider society of Christendom as a whole,and thereby it introduces a new spiritual element into thebarbarian ethos of the warrior culture. The warlike deeds ofthe champions are not an end in themselves, they are per-formed in the service of Christendom, et la loi Deu es-saucier et monter. The knight who dies in battle for thefaith is not only a hero, but a martyr, as Archbishop Turpinexplains to Roland and his companions at Roncesvalles.“Lord Barons,” he says, “Charles has left us here. For ourking we ought indeed to die. Give your aid to uphold Chris-tendom. You will have battle, you may be sure, for withyour eyes you see the Saracens. Confess your sins and askGod's mercy. I will absolve you for your souls' health. And,if you die, you will be holy martyrs. You will have a seat inhigh paradise.”1 So, too, when Vivien is defeated at thebattle of Archamps, he repents that he has prayed to ourLady to preserve his own life, when God Himself did notdo so, but suffered death oh the cross for us to save us fromour mortal enemies, and he prays instead that he may keephis faith till death without fear.2

1 Seignurs baruns, Carles nus laissat ci.

Pur nostre rei devum nos ben murir.

Chrestientet aidez a sustenir.

BataiUe avrez, vos en estes tuz fiz,

Kar a vos oilz veez les Smazins.

Clamez vos eulpes, si preiez Deu meicit.

Asoldzai vos pur voz anmes guarir.

Se vos muiez, esterez seinz maztizs.

Seiges avrez el greignor pareis.

Chanson de Roland, 1127-35.

Que mun cors quidai de la mozt garir,Quant Dampnedeu meismes nel fist,Que pur nus mozt en sainte czoiz soSzi,

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In the same way the feudal relation itself, the bond be-tween the knight and his lord, was moralized by the intro-duction of religious motives. One of the greatest of the re-forming bishops of the early eleventh century, Fulbertof Chartres, explains in his letter to William the Great ofPoitou how the feudal relation constitutes a complex ofreciprocal moral rights and duties centring in the sacramen-turn fidelitatis, and since the relation was in principle a freepersonal contract it inevitably depended more upon moralsanctions than would be the case in an ordinary politicalrelation. And so the ancient barbarian motive of personalloyalty to the war leader was reinforced by higher religiousmotives, so that the knight finally becomes a consecratedperson, pledged not only to be faithful to his lord, but to bethe defender of the Church, the widow and the orphan,as the ceremony ad benedicendum novum militem in themedieval pontificals describes.

In this way the knight was detached from his barbarianand pagan background and integrated into the social struc-ture of Christian culture, so that he was regarded as oneof the three indispensable organs of society, like the priestand the peasant, each of whom, as Gerald of Cambrai says,needs the services of the other as members of one body.And though this may have had little immediate effect onthe actual behaviour of .the feudal warrior, it provided aspiritual archetype which ultimately had a transforming ef-fect on the standards and ideas of medieval society.

At the same time, the period which saw the rise of theinstitution of knighthood also witnessed an organized at-tempt to limit or suppress the evils of private war andfeudal lawlessness by the institution of the Peace of Godand the Truce of God. This movement seems to haveoriginated with the bishops of Central and Southern

Pur nus raindre de noz moitels enemis.

Respit de mort, Siie, nei dei jo roverCar a Tei meisme nel voikis pardoner.

Tramettez mei, Sire, Williame a 1 curb nes,

V Loowis qui France ad a garder.

Par lui veintrum la bataille champel.

Changun de Williame, 816-26.

France, who first pronounced an anathema against theplunderers of the Church and those who robbed the peas-ants of their cattle at the Synod of Charroux in 987, butthe Abbey of Cluny was associated with the movementfrom the beginning, and its great abbot, St. Odilo, togetherwith the Lorraine reformer, Richard of St. Vannes, helpedto extend the movement to Northern and Eastern France.Everywhere the bishops took the lead in the establishmentof such leagues of the peace, the members of which sworeto protect the lives and property of non-combatants, aboveall of the clergy and the peasants.

Radulf Glaber has described the enthusiasm with whichthe people thronged to these assemblies crying, “Peace,Peace," and the noble verses which Fulbert of Chartrescomposed on the subject show the spirit which animatedthe movement:

O band of the poor, he writes, give thanks to God Al-mighty who, strong to renew, no less than to create, hasbrought back to the right way an age that was abandonedto evil. He has succoured thy long travail, O heavy laden,by granting thee the renewal of peace and quiet. Now, thenobles that had long discarded the restraints of law, setthemselves manfully to do the right. The thought of thegallows makes the robber hold his hand and the unarmedwayfarer sings aloud in the presence of the highwayman.The straggling vines are pruned once more and the wasteland is tilled. The spear is made into a pruning hook andthe sword into a plowshare: peace enriches the lowly andimpoverishes the proud. Hail, Holy Father, and grant salva-tion to all who love the quiet of peace. But as for thosewho love war, break them with the power of thy right hand,delivering the sons of the evil one to belli8

This poem is no doubt connected with the efforts of KingRobert the Pious (996-1031) to extend' the peace move-ment. He not only supported it in his own realm, but madea serious attempt to extend it to Christendom as a whole,

8 Analecta hymnalogica, L, p. 288. Raby, Christian LatinPoetry, 261-62.

in concert with the Emperor St. Henry II, who was also agreat supporter of the movement for religious reform.

But this attempt to suppress the evil of private war bydirect action on the part of the bishops and the faithful ismore significant as a symptom of the birth of a new spiritthan as an effective method of social reform. The warriorelement in feudal society was too powerful to be suppressedby sworn leagues of the peace: unless the latter becametransformed into a militant revolutionary movement, as wasindeed the case with the great league of the Capuchonn^sin Auvergne in the twelfth century.

Far more successful was the attempt of the Church tofind a new outlet for the warlike energies of feudal societyby turning them against the external enemies of Christen-dom. For the proclamation of the Crusade for the recon-quest of Jerusalem by Urban II at the council of Clermontin 1093 produced a wave of religious enthusiasm which wasnone the less real because it also appealed to the naturalinstincts of the unregenerate feudal warrior. According toFoucher of Chartres, the Pope associated his appeal withthe ideas of the peace movement and the Truce of God,and called on the peace-breakers and men who lived bythe sword to win pardon for their sins by becoming soldiersof Christ and shedding their blood in the service of Chris-tendom.

For the first time feudal society had found a purposewhich transcended local particularism and united WesternChristendom in a common enterprise under the leadershipof the Church. In many ways it was a unique movement,owing to the combination of a spontaneous popular move-ment with a number of organized military expeditions in-spired by political aims. To an outside observer like AnnaComnena, who has described the Crusade so vividly fromthe standpoint of a civilized Byzantine princess, it seemedlike a new wave of barbarian invasion.

For the whole of the West, she writes, and all the bar-barian tribes which dwell between the further side of theAtlantic and the pillars of Heracles, had all migrated into

Asia through the intervening parts of Europe and were mak-ing the journey with dl their household. . . .For theseFrankish soldiers were accompanied by an unarmed hostmore numerous than the stars or the sand, carrying palmsand crosses on their shoulders—women and children too.And the sight of them was like many rivers streaming fromall sides and they were dl advancing on us through Daciagenerdly with aU their hosts.*

But no disorderly wave of popular excitement can ex-plain the success of the First Crusade. In any age it wouldhave been an achievement of the first magnitude to marchan army overland from France through Asia Minor toAntioch and Jerusalem, to defeat the Turkish and the Egyp-tian forces and to establish a chain of Christian states alongthe Syrian coast, and inland as far as Edessa on theEuphrates. It marks a turning point in the history of theWest: ending the long centuries of weakness and isolationand cultural inferiority and bringing the new peoples ofWestern Christendom back to the old centres of EasternMediterranean culture.

This achievement was rendered possible only by the over-mastering unifying power of religious passion. And if it wasthe religion of the chansons de geste rather than that of themonastic reform, the crusading movement helped to estab-lish a bond of sympathy and common interest betweenthem. For it was the great Cluniac Pope, Urban II, wholaunched the first Crusade at a critical moment in thehistory of the struggle between the Papacy and the Empire,when the Emperor and the kings of France and Englandwere all under sentence of excommunication and when,therefore, Christendom could not look to them for leader-ship. And in the second generation of the Crusades it wasthe greatest of all the monastic reformers, St. Bernard, whotook the leading part in preaching the Crusade and whoalso gave his powerful counsel and support to the newMilitary Order of the Temple in which the religious idealsof Christian Knighthood found their fullest expression.

The great Military Orders, like the Crusades themselves,

* Anna Comnena, Alexiad, XV, trans. E. A. S. Dawes.

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were a bridge between lay and ecclesiastical society. Whilefeudalism had tended to secularize the Church by as-similating the benefice of the bishop or abbot to the fiefof the baron, the Crusades and the Military Orders intro-duced the religious principles of vows and voluntary obe-dience into the institution of chivalry. The Crusader wasdetached by his vow from all his feudal and territorialobligations and became the soldier of the Church andof Christendom. And in order to obviate the danger ofanarchy resulting from this emancipation from feudal obli-gations, the institution of the Military Orders provided anew principle of authority and organization based uponstrictly religious conceptions similar to those of the mo-nastic order. The new social status created by these institu-tions was a strictly international one which belonged toChristendom as a whole and not to the Empire or thekingdoms. Accordingly the rise and fall of the great Mili-tary Orders, particularly the Templars, is an index of theprogress and the decline of the unitary tendencies inmedieval Christendom.

So long as the Crusades continued, the unity of Christen-dom found expression in a dynamic militant activity whichsatisfied the aggressive instincts of Western man, while atthe same time sublimating them in terms of religious ideal-ism. Thus the Crusades expressed all that was highest andlowest in medieval society—the aggressive acquisitiveness ofa Bohemond or a Charles of Anjou and the heroic self-abnegation of a Godfrey of Bouillon and a St. Louis.

This ambivalence was equally characteristic of the institu-tion of chivalry itself, which long outlasted the crusadingmovement and left a permanent imprint on Europeansociety and culture. Each of the great world civilizationshas been faced with the problem of reconciling the aggres-sive ethos of the warrior with the moral ideals of a uni-versal religion. But in none of them has the tension beenso vital and intense as in medieval Christendom and no-where have the results been more important for the his-tory of culture. It was no longer, as in the age of the bar-barian invasions, a tension between two societies and twosocial elements, between the warlike ethos of the pagan

152 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

conquerors and the Christian culture of a more highlycivilized conquered population. On the contrary, in feudalsociety the tension was within the same society and evenwithin the same class. We see, for example, in OrdericusVitalis’s Ecclesiastical History how the same stratum ofpopulation, and even the same families, produced asceticsand warriors, leaders of the monastic reform and robberbarons, so that individual character rather than social tradi-tion was the decisive factor.

Thus the tension between the two ideals and the twoways of life now becomes an internal psychological one,which sometimes manifested itself by the individual con-version of the knight into the monk, but which more oftentook the form of some compromise between the two ideals,such as the vow of Crusade, membership of the MilitaryOrders, or the attempt to transform knighthood into thesecular arm of the Church and the spiritual power. Thegradual leavening of the heroic ethos by the influence ofthe Church finds its literary expression in the chansons degeste, which represent the authentic spirit of feudal society,in contrast to the romantic poetry of the troubadours andthe courtly epic which seem to belong to an entirely dif-ferent world.

For the age of the Crusades also saw the development ofa new secular ideal of chivalry which seems the directantithesis of St. Bernard's ideal of Christian Knighthoodand the disciplined austerity of the Military Orders, whileat the same time it was equally remote from the barbaricheroism of Northern feudalism. This new ideal is the crea-tion of the South. It arose from the contact between thefeudal society of Languedoc and the higher civilization ofthe Western Mediterranean, which was still the centre ofWestern Islamic culture. It found expression in a new wayof life and a new literature-the lyrical poetry of the trouba-dours—which was to have an immense influence, not onlyon Western literature, but also on Western standards of be-haviour.

The distinctive features of this new movement were thecult of courtesy and the cult of love. It was concerned,

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above all, with the refinement of life—with creating a newpattern of social behaviour which centred in the ideal ofromantic love, and it was reinforced by an elaborate codeof manners which appears sophisticated and subtle even bymodern standards, and must have stood out in abrupt andstartling contrast to the brutality and violence that stillcharacterized feudal society.

Thus the new movement has all the marks of an exoticgrowth. It has no roots in the earlier medieval culture ofthe West. It is neither Christian, nor Latin, nor Germanic.It appears abruptly in South-Western France about thetime of the First Crusade without any preparation or previ-ous development. Yet it must have had a pre-history, as isshown by its literary expression which is as exotic andoriginal as the social ideals that it embodies. For theearliest-known lyrics of the early troubadours possess all themarks of a style and a literary tradition that had alreadyreached maturity.6

I have argued elsewhere6 that the origins of the new styleare to be found in the rich and brilliant society of Mos-lem Spain, with which the Dukes of Aquitaine had beenbrought into contact through their annexation of the half-Spanish Duchy of Gascony after 1030, and by their crusadeagainst the Moors of Saragossa which led to the conquestof Barbastro in 1064.

It is impossible to discuss here the arguments for andagainst the influence of Western Islamic culture on Prov-engal literature and the new courtly ideal. I can only referto the more general aspects of the process of culture-con-tact which took place during this period. It is unquestion-able that in spite of the mutual intolerance of the twocultures the young peoples of the West were sometimesreceptive towards the higher and more sophisticated cul-ture of the older civilization, as we see in the case of thetransmission of Arabic philosophy and science during the

6 Cf. Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, Nos. VI, VII and X ofJeanroy’s edition in the Chssiques Franjais du Moyen Age(1927).

0 “The Origins of the Romantic Tradition”, Mediaeval Religion,pp. 121-54 (1935)-

154 RELIGION and the rise of western culture

twelfth century through the activities of the school of trans-lators at Toledo and elsewhere. And if this was the case inclerical society which was most on its guard against the in-filtration of alien doctrines, it is likely that lay society waseven more ready to accept the influence of the higher cul-ture in matters not directly related to religion or politics.

The civilization of the Southern Mediterranean whichhad reached its highest development in the age of theFatimid Khalifate and the Khalifate of Cordova in thetenth and eleventh centuries inevitably produced a deepimpression on the men of the North, who knew only theharsh and comfortless life of the feudal stronghold. And inthe age of Crusades, when the Mediterranean was oncemore open to Western shipping, and the Italian maritimerepublics were growing rich by trade with Islamic lands,there was no lack of intercourse between the two worlds.

There is a charming passage in the Chronicle of FraSalimbene in which he describes his one and only glimpseof this kind of life in one of the rich orientalized houses ofthe great merchant city of Pisa.

Going begging for bread with our baskets we happenedon a cortile which we entered. And there was a leafy vinespread out overhead. Its verdure was delightful to beholdand it was a pleasure to rest beneath its shade. There wereleopards and many strange beasts from across the seas onwhich we gazed, for it is a pleasure to see what is new andstrange. And there were youths and maidens in the flowerof their youth, richly dressed and of charming counte-nances.

And they held in their hands violins, viols, zithers andother instruments of music from which they made melody,accompanying the music with appropriate gestures. No onethere moved, no one spoke, all listened in silence. And thesong was so new and so delightful, both on account of thewords and the variety of voices and the manner of singingthat it filled the heart with joyousness. No one spoke to us.We said nothing to them. And the music of the voices andthe instruments never ceased all the time we stayed there,and we remained there a long time and knew not how to go

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away. I know not (God knows) whence came such a visionof so much delight, for never before had I seen anything likeit, nor has it been granted me since ever to see it again.7

It may be objected that this scene took place in ChristianItaly, not in Moslem Spain. But this illustrates my pointregarding the penetration of the southern Islamic formsof culture into medieval Christendom. We see the sameprocess taking place in Salimbene’s age on a much widerscale at the court of the Emperor Frederick in Sicily andApulia, and in the previous century the last Norman kingsof Sicily went even further towards the adoption of theoutward forms of the court life of the Islamic world, andshowed themselves generous patrons of Moslem scholarsand men of letters. There is, moreover, some fragmentaryevidence that in the eleventh century this southern culturewas already asserting its charm on its conquerors, for IbnBassam, the Portuguese Moslem historian,8 has preserveda vivid picture of one of the leaders of the Aquitaine cru-sade of 1064, seated on a divan in oriental dress while helistened enthralled to a Moorish lady singing to him inArabic.

For it was through music and poetry and the vision of anew and delightful way of life that the influence of thehigher culture of the Southern Mediterranean penetratedfeudal society. The courtly culture and the Provencal poetrywere the carriers of this exotic spirit. They were not merelyforeign to the older traditions of feudal chivalry, they werehostile to its spiritual ideals. As against the other-worldli-ness and asceticism which dominated Christian thoughtand inspired St. Bernard’s crusading ideal, their spirit wasfrankly worldly and hedonistic. Love and honour, wealthand liberality, beauty and joy—these were the true ends oflife in comparison with which the joys of heaven and thepains of hell were pale and shadowy.

Thus the courtly culture was a kind of anti-crusade, a

7 Chronica Fratris Salimbene de Adam, ed. Holder-Egger,

SS., XXXII.

8 He is quoting from the lost work of Ibn Hayyan, the greatSpanish historian, who was a contemporary of the events de-scribed.

propagandist movement for the development of a newsecular aristocratic culture, which travelled in the oppositedirection from the Crusades but along the same roads—from the Mediterranean to Northern France and Italy, andultimately to Germany and England and Wales. And it ispossible to follow the path of this diffusion in detail, at leastin one of its most important channels. For the heiress ofAquitaine, the granddaughter of the first troubadour,Eleanor of Poitou, became successively Queen of Franceand Queen of England, and her daughters were Marie ofChampagne and Alix of Blois and Mathilda of Saxony, andunder their patronage all these five courts became in turncentres of diffusion for the courtly culture and literature inNorthern Europe.

This development is a remarkable example of a purelycultural movement in the narrower sense of the word, amovement that has neither grown out of the soil nor beeninspired by religious aims, but which belongs entirely to theintermediate region of conscious art and conscious socialbehaviour. Anomalous as such movements are in relationto the development of the great world cultures, they are notwithout their importance, as we see in certain aspects ofHellenistic and Renaissance culture. But the case of thecourtly culture of medieval Europe is peculiarly strikingowing to the fact that it coincided with the creative move-ment of medieval religion and traversed it. And the resultwas a conflict and tension in the heart of Western culturebetween two divergent conceptions of chivalry and two con-flicting standards of behaviour.

This conflict was complicated by the fact that it overlaidthe older conflict between the ideal of the barbaric warriorand that of the Christian knight to which I have alreadyreferred. Thus when the courtly culture reached the Northin the second half of the twelfth century, these conflictsfound expression in the new romantic literature which aroseat the Angevin court and in the courts of Northern Franceand Flanders and the western and southern German lands.The Arthurian legend which had been created as a kind ofnational myth of the Anglo-Norman-Angevin dynasty af-forded free scope to the imagination of the new school of

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poetry and became the centre of a vast development ofcourtly epic and romance. But here even from the begin-ning, we see a poet like Chretien de Troyes accepting theexotic ideals of the new courtly poetry, in deference to hispatroness, Mary of Champagne. "Matter and style,” hesays, “are given and furnished by the countess. The poet issimply trying to carry out her concern and intention.”

Finally in the great prose cycle of Lancelot and the Questof the Grail, in the thirteenth century, the tension betweenthe courtly ideal and the Christian tradition is quite con-scious and explicit and becomes a central theme of thewhole cycle, as is shown in the dramatic contrast betweenLancelot and Galahad; Camelot and Corbenic; the worldlychivalry with its cult of courtesy and its antinomian idealsof romantic love, and the heavenly chivalry that is sym-bolized by the quest and the vision of the Holy Grail. Buthere already there is an attempt at synthesis and reconcilia-tion. Galahad is the son of Lancelot, and the latter joins,though without success, in the spiritual quest. And theirdivergent ideals are held together by the same code ofcourtesy and the common institutions of the “high order ofchivalry”. It is easy to find other examples of this effort ofreconciliation. Hugh de Berz6, the repentant trouv£re whomade his recantation in La Bible au Seigneur de Berzd,could at the same time defend the ideals of courtesy."Laughter and song, jousting and adventuring and holdingcourt, such was the custom. Yet these aforetime did not forthat forfeit paradise, for he who is angry and gloomy andmelancholy may well lose paradise, and he who is full of joyand gaiety can well gain it, so long as he keeps himself fromsin.”9

Nevertheless the conflict of the two ideals found atragic expression when the brilliant society which had givenbirth to the courtly culture went down in blood and ruinbefore the Crusaders from the North, led by the Abbot ofCiteaux and Simon de Montfort. And the conflict of cul-ture is reflected in the contrast between the characters ofthe leaders, on the one side the weak and irresolute CountRaymond of Toulouse and the dissolute King Peter of

9 La Bible au Seigneur de Berz6, 127.

Aragon, both of whom were poets and great patrons ofculture; and on the other side that thirteenth-century Iron-side, the devout and merciless Simon de Montfort. Thecourtly culture of the South showed its essential frailtywhen it was brought to the hard test of war and found nounity of purpose and no worthy leadership. There was per-haps one exception, the young Raymond Roger of Beziers,who was the first victim of the crusade, and whose fate iscommemorated in the noble lament of an anonymoustroubadour.

They have slain him. Never has there been such a crimeand folly so displeasing to God, as the act of these rene-gade dogs of the race of Pilate who killed him. As for him,he was like Jesus who died to redeem us. Has he notcrossed by the same bridge to save his people?

Rich in lineage, rich in pride, rich in valour, rich in coun-sel, rich in prowess; there was never a man to be com-pared to you. In you we have lost the fountain of ;oy.10

But it is characteristic of the dualism of the ideals ofchivalry that when the poet is brought up against a reallytragic situation, he abandons the sophisticated style and thehedonistic ethos of the Provencal tradition and returns tothe imagery and the ideals of Christian chivalry, and writesmore like a crusader than a troubadour.

In fact from the beginning of the thirteenth century theexotic and the Christian elements in the tradition ofchivalry interpenetrate one another in an inextricable con-fusion. Some of the clearest expressions of the pagan hedon-ism of courtly culture are to be found in the literature ofthe North, as in that exquisite little masterpiece, Aucassinand Nicolette, which seems to belong to Picardy or Hai-nault, though it shows clear marks of oriental influence.And on the other hand we find in Italy a really profoundand fruitful assimilation of the ideals of the courtly cultureby the spiritual life of medieval Christendom. We see thisabove all in the case of St. Francis, who owed more to thevernacular culture of the troubadours than to the Latin

10 Trans. Jeanroy, Po6sie Lyrique des Troubadours, II, 213.

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culture of the Schools and the old monastic orders. In factthe life of St. Francis shows a conscious, but entirely spon-taneous and unliterary transposition of the ideal of courtesyto the higher plane of the Christian life, thus freeing itfrom its conventional aristocratic limitations and endowingit with a transcendent cosmic significance.

He went honourably upon the stones, writes the thir-teenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varazze,11 for thelove of Him that so called stone. He gathered the smallworms out of the ways, because they should not be troddenby the feet of them that passed by. He commanded inwinter to give honey unto bees that they should not perishfor hunger. He called all beasts his Brethren. He was re-plenished of marvellous joy for the love of his Creator.He beheld the sun, the moon and the stars and summonedthem to the love of their Maker.12

I shall be speaking further on the influence of St. Francison medieval religion. Here I will only point out the decisiveimportance of his life in the desecularization and spirituali-zation of the courtly culture. For he is the real creator ofthat vital union of the two traditions which had so great aninfluence on the development of both medieval spiritualityand medieval vernacular literature.

But we must not overestimate the importance of thisspiritual transformation, for it never entirely overcame thesecular hedonism of the courtly culture within its ownsocial environment. This secular element survived both thedecline of Provencal culture and the rise of Franciscanspirituality. It was still the dominant element in the laterchivalry, so well and sympathetically described by Froissart,which, when we consider the horrors of the Black Deathand the Hundred Years’ War, seems like a brilliant veneerthat conceals the corruption of a dying society.

The secularization of chivalry was increased both by theloss of the crusading ideal and by the increasing wealth

II The Golden Legend, by M. B. James de Voragine, translatedby Chaucer.

12 The Golden Legend, Caxton’s translation, Kelmscott ed.,p. 897.

and luxury of Western court life, as we see it for exampleat the Burgundian court at the end of the Middle Ages: sothat the figure of the medieval knight changes almost in-sensibly into that of the Renaissance courtier. Yet even so,the higher spiritual ideals of chivalry were never completelydiscredited or lost. They were passed on through the laterMiddle Ages from Joinville's Life of St. Louis to the Life ofthe Good Knight Bayard by the Loyal Servitor, and fromChaucer to Sir Philip Sidney. It is possible that the ele-ment of dualism and tension which was inherent in thetradition of chivalry and courtesy from the beginning gaveit a power of adaptation and survival which the more com-pletely integrated institutions of medieval Christendom didnot possess. However that may be, it is certain that the idealof Christian chivalry has always retained its attraction forthe Western mind and its influence on Western ethicalstandards in spite of the criticisms of moralists like Aschamand the tragic irony of the greatest minds of the Renais-sance: Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Chapter IX

The Medieval City: Communeand Gild

The development of the feudal society and the institu-tions related to it, notably the institution of chivalry, repre-sents only one aspect of the revival of Western culture inthe Middle Ages. No less important was the rebirth of thecity which transformed the economic and social life ofWestern Europe. During the Dark Ages, and especially inthe Carolingian and post-Carolingian age, Western Europehad become an almost entirely agrarian society, in whichthe life of the city played a smaller part than perhaps inany society that has reached a similar stage of civilization.But from the twelfth century onwards the medieval worldwas once more a world of cities in which the life of thecity and the civic spirit were hardly less intense than in theclassical age of Greece and Rome. Nor was the medievalcity a repetition of anything that had gone before. It wasa new creation, unlike the cities of antiquity or those ofmodem times and differing also, though in a lesser degree,from the types of city which were to be found in the Eastat the same period.

This new type of European city had a considerable in-fluence on the religious development of Western Europeduring these formative centuries. The late Ernst Troeltsch,following Max Weber, went so far as to maintain that itwas the medieval city which first provided the favourableconditions for a thorough-going Christianization of sociallife such as had existed neither in the city culture of theancient world, which was based upon slavery, nor in the

feudal agrarian society which had been built up so largelyby the strong at the expense of the weak.

It was, he writes, only when the city which arose out ofthe disintegration and surplus of feudal landownership hadunited its varied population, drawn from all sorts of dif-ferent social origins, that a ground was prepared on whichthe higher qualities of medieval society could be purifiedfrom the crudity and violence of feudalism. The very con-dition of existence of the city as an essentially economicassociation is peace, the freedom and the common interestof all the citizens, together with freedom to work and thebasing of property on personal effort and industry.

In dll these respects the city corresponded to a great ex-tent with the demands of Christian ethics. As a non-military peaceful community of work, using the militaryelement only for its defence and still devoid of capitalisticurban features, the medieval city was a pattern of Christiansociety as we find it in Thomist theory. From the politicaland economic point of view the period of civic culture whichbegins in the eleventh century may be regarded as a prepa-ration and foundation of the modern world. But for thehistorian of ethics and the religious life it also appears, withits cathedrals and its intensive church life, its religious con-fraternities and gilds, its care for the spiritual and materialwelfare of its inhabitants and its educational and charitableinstitutions, as the highest point of the development of themedieval spirit.1

It is easy to show the reverse side of this development—the intensity of class conflict and the ferocity of the in-ternecine strife which fill the chronicles of the Italian andFlemish cities. Nevertheless, there are several factors in thedevelopment of the medieval city which bear out Troel-tsch’s favourable verdict.

For in the first place the city, like the monastery, was anoasis of security and peace in a world of insecurity and war.It was a place of refuge where the unwarlike could gather

1E. Troeltsch, Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen undGruppen, pp. 250-51.

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under the protection of the Church. The early cities ofCarolingian times owed their existence to the Church. Theywere the residence of the bishops and the centre of adminis-tration of the diocese, and also contained a number ofmonasteries in addition to the chapter and the episcopalschool. Apart from the ecclesiastics and their dependants,and the garrison of knights and men-at-arms charged bythe bishop or the count with the duty of defending thewalls, there was practically no independent class of towns-people. The Carolingian city was not an economic centre,apart from its market which provided the necessities of lifefor its inhabitants. It was in fact a sort of temple city, suchas we find existing in prehistoric times in Mesopotamia orlater in Asia Minor.

The distinctive element in later medieval city life—themerchant class—did not make its appearance until the tenthor eleventh century, and even then its importance wasmainly confined to certain favoured regions, above all, theshores of the Western Mediterranean, the plain of Lom-bardy, and the valleys of the Scheldt, the Meuse and theRhine, and in Eastern Europe to the two great trade routeswhich linked the Baltic with the Caspian and the Black Seaby way of the Volga, the Dnieper and the Don.

In Western Europe this new development was generallybased on the principle of voluntary association under re-ligious protection—a principle peculiarly suited to the needsof new classes that had no place in the established terri-torial hierarchy of the feudal state. These associations had adouble character. On the one hand, they originated in thefellowship of the highway where men must travel in com-pany for mutual protection, as organized caravans of pil-grims or merchants; and, on the other, in the voluntaryreligious association—the confraternity, charity or gild whichunited for charitable or social purposes under the patronageof some popular saint.

It was to associations of these kinds that the develop-ment of medieval city life in North-Western Europe wasprimarily due. Such groups of merchants were to be foundin Flanders, as early as the tenth century, settled underthe walls of a feudal fortress or an ecclesiastical town, and

as the commercial movement grew, they spread throughoutNorth-Western and Central Europe. By degrees the freeand voluntary merchant association began to deal in an un-official way with all the needs of the new communities. Inthis way it produced spontaneously the organs of a newmunicipal government which was utterly unlike anythingthat the classical city-state or the territorial feudal statehad known, since it was by origin the limited functionalorgan of a single unprivileged class. The self-constitutedgroup of merchants under their elected head met togetherto take counsel for their common interests and raisedvoluntary funds for their common needs. As they increasedin wealth and numbers, they tended to become a completeself-sufficient organization which could carry on an inde-pendent existence apart from the regular organs of thefeudal state. And as the power of the merchants grew andthey became more accustomed to common action, theyfinally aspired to take over the political, juridical and mili-tary functions that had formerly belonged exclusively to thebishop, the count or die representatives of the feudal state.

In this way there arose the commune, which was one ofthe greatest social creations of the Middle Ages. The com-mune was an association in which all the inhabitants of atown, and not the merchants alone, bound themselves byoath to keep the common peace, to defend the commonliberties and to obey the common officers. In principle, ithad much in common with the sworn “leagues of the peace”of which I spoke in the last chapter, although it had a widerscope and a more permanent character. Its members de-scribed themselves as “the men of the peace”, the “swornbrethren", partners in a common “friendship”, bound everyman to help his brother in the common need.

But although the commune had a definitely revolution-ary aspect as an assertion of popular independence againstthe episcopal authority, it was far from being anticlericalin the vulgar sense of the word. On the contrary, both inItaly and in Northern France and Germany it was closelyrelated to the movement of ecclesiastical reform and it wasoften under the leadership of popular preachers of Hilde-

brandine ideals that the towns rose in armed revolt againsttheir bishops.

The most striking example of this is the insurrection ofthe Pataria in Milan, which played such an important partin the reform movement in 1065 under the leadership ofErlennbald, the first of the new tribunes, who ruled thecity “like a Pope and like a king, by the sword and by gold,by sworn leagues and covenants”, as a hostile chroniclerwrites. It was here in Lombardy that the communal move-ment attained its greatest development, so that finally in1176 the forces of the Lombard League were strong enoughto meet the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa himself anddefeat him in pitched battle at Legnano. Here the com-munal movement was inspired by the same intense reli-gious enthusiasm that characterized the Crusades. The menof Milan went out to fight for the liberties of their city andthe rights of Holy Church around the Carroccio—the greatox wain on which the Mass of battle was said and whichbore the standard of St. Ambrose, the palladium of thecity.

In fact the alliance of the league of Lombard cities withthe Papacy against the Empire marks the emergence of anew power in medieval society, and henceforward thecities take a leading part in the public life of the West.

It is true that conditions in Italy were different fromthose in Northern Europe, which I have been describinghitherto. For in the Mediterranean world the Roman andByzantine traditions of city life survived to a far greaterdegree than in the North, and there was never the sametendency to class segregation and the development of thetown as the organ of specialized economic classes that wefind in Northern Europe.

In Italy the leading citizens of the town were the lessernobles of the surrounding country, and the class conflictpreceded and was intermixed with the feuds and rivalriesof the nobles, which corresponded to the private wars ofnorthern feudalism. Moreover, the fact that the Churchin Italy was essentially a city institution, which carried onthe tradition, and usually preserved the frontiers, of theRoman civitas made the bond between city and country

much closer than in Northern Europe and strengthenedthe sense of civic unity and patriotism.2

Hence in the course of the early Middle Ages Italy be-came a land of city-states which is comparable only toancient Greece in the richness and diversity of its civic life.From the great maritime republics such as Venice and Pisaand Genoa, which were wealthier and more powerful thanmany a medieval kingdom, down to the little hill cities ofUmbria and the Marches which controlled only a fewsquare miles of fertile territory, we find every type of com-munity, agreeing only in the intensity of their local patriot-ism. In all of them the coexistence of nobles and plebeiansin a common polity produced a social life unlike anythingto be found in Northern Europe. No doubt class feelingwas strong, as it had been in ancient Greece, but the con-flict was not one between the urban bourgeoisie and therustic nobility as in the North, but between the differentclasses which shared the common life of the city.

At first the commune was governed by consuls who werechosen in the full assembly or arrengo of the citizens. Butas the political power of the cities developed, the consulsbecame dependent on the council of the leading citizens,who were nobles. On the other hand the growth of tradeand industry increased the importance of the merchantsand craftsmen, and they also demanded a share in the citygovernment. In the thirteenth century the people, organ-ized in their gilds, and combined in wider associations likethe Credenza of San Ambrogio at Milan, the Society ofSan Faustino at Brescia or the Society of San Bassiano atLodi, attempted to wrest the control from the nobles.Finally, above all in Tuscany, the nobles became an ostra-cized class, who were either excluded from office, or drivenfrom the city altogether, so that the political exiles and thedisenfranchised became an important element in Italiancity politics.

2 The symbol of this intimate relation between Church andcity is to be seen in the common baptistery which is such astriking feature of the Italian cities, especially m Tuscany, and wesee in Dante how both the civic patriotism and the religiousdevotion of the poet were concentrated on this as the sacredheart of Florence (Pazadiso, XXV, 1-11).

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This jealousy of any class or individual which claimed anexceptional position was characteristic of Italian communallife and led to the elaboration of a series of constitutionaldevices for the supervision and control of the magistrates.This was the inevitable consequence of the direct partici-pation of every citizen in the work of government, which,as in ancient Greece, involved the rotation of office andshort periods of tenure as well as the supremely demo-cratic system of election by lot instead of by vote.

The political development of the great maritime citiesfollowed a different course, owing to the fact that thenobles themselves were engaged in commerce, so that eventhe Doge of Venice, who was the equal of kings and inter-married with Byzantine and German princesses, had ashare like other Venetians in trading ventures. These citieshad been the leaders in the economic revival of the Mediter-ranean, and possessed a cosmopolitan outlook unknownelsewhere in Western Europe. Venice, above all, had re-mained immune from barbarian conquest and controlthroughout the Dark Ages, and in the eleventh century wasstill largely Byzantine in culture and social life. The devel-opment of the Western cities, on the other hand, washampered by the predominance of the Moslem powers inthe Western Mediterranean, and the rise of the economicprosperity of Pisa and Genoa depended on trade with Spainand North Africa rather than on the Byzantine world. Atthe beginning of the twelfth century Donizo of Canossawrites of Pisa as a semi-oriental town.

Qui pergit Pisas videt illic monstra marina,

Haec urbs Paganis, Turchis, Libycis, quoque Parthis

Sordida, Chaldcei sua lustrant littora tetri.

Yet these cities were none the less in the van of theChristian advance against Islam, and their peoples wereanimated by a strong crusading spirit which finds expres-sion in the Latin verses of the Pisan poets of the eleventhand twelfth centuries. From a literary point of view thesepoems are far inferior to the crusading epic of Northernfeudalism—the chanson de geste—but on the other hand

they are very close to the events that they relate and reflectthe essentially civic character of the crusading movement inItaly. Already, a generation before the First Crusade, theItalian cities had burst open the doors which had so longshut off Western Europe from the civilized Mediterraneanworld, and the foundation of the great Duomo at Fisa in1063, which was built with the spoils of the Saracens afterthe conquest of Palermo, is a witness to the combinationof civic pride, commercial enterprise and crusading idealismwhich characterized the maritime republics.

The effects of the reopening of the Mediterranean onWestern trade and shipping were by no means confinedto the Italian maritime cities; the cities of Provence andCatalonia, above all Marseilles and Barcelona, shared in theexpansion. When Benjamin of Tudela visited Montpellierin 1160 he found it thronged with Christian and Moslemmerchants from all parts—from Algarve, Lombardy, theEmpire, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, France, Spain and Eng-land, and he adds that people of all tongues meet here,chiefly in consequence of the traffic of the Genoese andthe Pisans.

In this way Mediterranean influences penetrated inland,from Venice into Lombardy and across the passes into Ger-many, from Pisa into Tuscany, from Genoa across the MontCenis and from the Riviera up the valley of the Rhone toBurgundy and Champagne. Here the merchants from theMediterranean met those from the other great centre ofWestern economic activity—the towns of Flanders; and thegreat fairs of Champagne developed during the twelfthcentury into an international commercial centre and aclearing house for financial transactions between men ofdifferent nationalities.

As this stream of commerce grew wider and deeper, itgradually transformed the economic way of life in West-ern Europe. New industries sprang up, new towns werefounded and the old episcopal cities revived and acquiredcommunal institutions. From the town the new life reachedthe countryside and in some cases even led to the forma-tion of rural communes by groups of villages, as in the well-known example of the commune of Laonnais where seven-

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teen villages acquired a charter of communal liberties fromLouis VII in 1177. But even apart from these exceptionalcases the revival of town life brought liberty to the peasant,either directly by migration to the growing cities, or in-directly by favouring the commutation of labour for moneypayments and increasing the possibilities of enfranchise-ment.

It was in this atmosphere of economic renaissance, theexpansion of commercial life, and increasing opportunitiesof personal freedom, that the great flowering of the reli-gious culture of medieval Christendom took place; a flower-ing which finds its artistic expression in the new Gothicstyle of architecture and sculpture which had its origin inNorthern France in the twelfth century and spread fromone end of Western Europe to the other during the nexthundred and fifty years.

No doubt Viollet le Due went too far when he definedGothic architecture as the architecture of the communes—a lay art inspired by the new spirit of popular liberty—since the monks also, above all those of the Cistercian order,had an important share in its early development. Never-theless, there is a close relation between the two move-ments, since the new art originated in the regions of North-ern France in which the communal movement was strong-est, and the great cathedrals which were the supremeachievements of the new style were the centres of the civiclife of the new cities, like the city temple in antiquity.

Moreover the new style spread and became diversifiedwith the expansion of town life, until by the later MiddleAges it had transformed the appearance of every city inNorthern and Western Europe and inspired the new civicarchitecture of the Low Countries and the Hanseatic townsof the Baltic.

For the new city produced a new people and a new art,and although both were conditioned by economic forcesand depended materially on the revival of commercial andindustrial activity, they were also inspired by new spiritualforces which to a considerable extent preceded the eco-nomic revival. Thus the ways of pilgrimage are older than

the trade routes. St. Gilles was a centre of pilgrims beforeits famous fair developed and before Marseilles and Mont-pellier became centres of merchants. It was the pilgrimageto St. Michael of Monte Gargano that brought the Nor-mans to Southern Italy before the Italian merchants crossedthe Alps, and it was the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and notthe Levant trade of Pisa and Genoa, that inspired thecrusading movement.

Finally, and above all, it was the religious confraternityor “charity"—the free association of individuals under thepatronage of a saint for mutual aid, spiritual and material—which was the seed of the great flowering of communal lifein the merchant and craft gilds which were the most strikingfeature of medieval urban society. The life of the medievalgild was a microcosm of that of the commune, and its in-tense solidarity made its membership more important inthe life of the individual than that of the city itself, sinceit was primarily through the gild that the ordinary manexercised and realized his citizenship. The constitution ofthe craft gilds was essentially the same throughout WesternEurope; and in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies it came to play the leading part in the life ofeveiy medieval town, from great cities like Florence andParis and Ghent down to little towns with only a few hun-dred inhabitants.

There was, however, a great difference between the partplayed by the gilds in the life of the free cities of Italyand Flanders and Germany and the more modest functionsthat they performed in countries like England and theFrance of the later Middle Ages which possessed a strongroyal government. The position in Italy was unique, inas-much as the nobles-at least the lesser nobles-from the firsttook a leading part in the common life of the city, and thegilds to which they belonged—such as the bankers, the mer-chants and the lawyers—inevitably possessed a much greatersocial prestige and political influence than the gilds of thecraftsmen and shopkeepers. Hence it was in Italy that thegilds first succeeded in dominating and practically absorb-ing the government of the commune and concentrated its

authority in the hands of their own representatives—thePriors of the Greater and Lesser Arts.

It is, however, in Northern Europe, in the cities ofFlanders, that we find the most remarkable developmentof the craft gilds as a political force. Here in the fourteenthcentury the gilds of the less privileged workers, above all,the weavers who were the largest element in the popula-tion, rose against the merchant aristocracy and set up a kindof medieval dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the ruleof the gilds of the clothiers the three great cities of Flanders—Ghent, Bruges and Ypres—reached their highest point ofdevelopment and for a short time played an important partin European politics. But this was a unique achievement,due to the exceptional condition of the Flemish industrialcities which possessed a great international market. In morenormal cases the craft gilds were subject to the control ofthe civic authorities and formed a hierarchy of corporationsthrough which the economic and social life of the town wasregulated in the most minute detail. In this way the medie-val city succeeded in reconciling the interests of the con-sumer with the corporate freedom and responsibility of theproducer. As the late Henri Pirenne wrote: “The medievalurban economy is worthy of the Gothic architecture withwhich it is contemporary. It created in every detail, andone might say ex nihilo, a system of social legislation morecomplete than that of any other period of history, includingour own.”8

It was this integration of corporate organization, eco-nomic function and civic freedom which makes the medie-val city, as Troeltsch remarks, the most complete embodi-ment of the social ideals of the Middle Ages, as we see themin their most highly developed form in the writings of St.Thomas and his contemporaries. Medieval political phi-losophy was dominated by the ideal of unity. Mankind wasone great society, and above all the regenerated human race,that portion of mankind which was incorporated in theChurch was united by its membership of Christ, its Head,by its allegiance to the divine law and by its dedication to

8 H. Pirenne, Les Villes du Moyen Age, p. 182.

172 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

one transcendent end. This unity formed a complex hier-archical organism, a body with many members, each hav-ing a vital function to fulfil, each with its own office andministry for the service of the whole.

This doctrine of society involves the principle of hier-archical subordination at every stage, but unlike the Aris-totelian theoiy it does not involve total subordination or theinstitution of slavery. For every individual member of thewhole is an end in himself, and his particular officium orministerium is not merely a compulsory social task but away of the service of God through which he shares in thecommon life of the whole body. No doubt in practice aman's place in the social hierarchy may be determined byheredity or social competition, but in principle the theoryfavours the conception of vocation and the internal auton-omy of each particular organ.

Now, as we have seen, there was already a tendency inthe feudal order to recognize the organic nature of societyand the reciprocity of rights and duties in the social hier-archy. But the feudal system rested in the last resort on afoundation of serfdom and on the power and privilege thatwere won and maintained by the sword, so that the feudalstate could never entirely escape from the condition ofanarchy and disunity out of which it had arisen. The medie-val city, on the other hand, was essentially a unity—a visibleand tangible unity, sharply defined by the circle of its wallsand towers and centred in the cathedral, the visible embodi-ment of the faith and spiritual purpose of the community.And within the city, the autonomous corporate organiza-tion of the different economic activities in the economicand social life of the community, by means of the gildsystem, corresponds perfectly with the doctrine of the or-ganic differentiation and mutual interdependence of themembers of the Christian society. Thus the medieval citywas a community of communities in which the same prin-ciples of corporate rights and chartered liberties appliedequally to the whole and to the parts. For the medievalidea of liberty, which finds its highest expression in the lifeof the free cities, was not the right of the individual tofollow his own will, but the privilege of sharing in a highly

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organized form of corporate life which possessed its ownconstitution and rights of self-government. In many casesthis constitution was hierarchical and authoritarian, but asevery corporation had its own rights in the life of the city,so every individual had his place and his rights in the lifeof the gild.

These rights were not purely economic or even political,for one of the most remarkable features of medieval gildlife was the way in which it combined secular and religiousactivities in the same social complex. The gild chantry, theprovision of prayers and masses for deceased brethren, andthe performance of pageants and mystery plays on the greatfeasts were no less functions of the gild than the commonbanquet, the regulation of work and wages, the giving ofassistance to fellow gild-men in sickness or misfortune andthe right to participate in the government of the city. Forit was in the life of the Church and in the extension of theliturgy into common life by art and pageantry that the com-munity-life of the medieval city found its fullest expression,so that the material poverty of the individual man was com-pensated by a wider development of communal activity andartistic and symbolic expression than anything that themore materially wealthy societies of modem Europe haveknown.

In this, the medieval city was more completely a com-monwealth—a full communion and communication of so-cial goods—than any society that has ever existed with theexception of the Greek polis, and it was superior even tothe latter, inasmuch as it was not the society of a leisuredclass supported by a foundation of servile labour. Erasmus,who saw at Strasburg one of the last examples of the fullgild constitution of the Middle Ages that still survived inthe age of the Renaissance, was conscious of this when hewrote,

Videbam monarchiam absque tyrannide, aristocratiamsine factionibus, democratiam sine tumultu, opes absqueluxu . . . Utinam in hujusmodi rempublicam, divine Plato,tibi contigisset inciderel4

4 “I saw monarchy without tyranny, aristocracy without fac-

174 religion and the rise of western culture

It is true that the full development of the gild system inthe polity of a free city was an exceptional achievement,which, like Greek democracy, was only realized in excep-tionally favourable circumstances and for a brief period, asin Flemish towns in the fourteenth century, at Siena underthe government of the Riformatori (1371-85), and atFlorence under Michele di Lando and the Ciompi (1378-82). In France and England the rise of the nationalmonarchy deprived the cities of their political independ-ence and ultimately of their internal autonomy. Never-thdess, even here, they made an essential contributionto the life of the medieval state. By taking their placein the feudal hierarchy, side by side with the barons andthe clergy, they brought a new representative principle intopolitical life. First in Southern Italy and Spain, later inEngland and France, and finally throughout Western Eu-rope from Sweden to Portugal, the "good towns” becameone of the great estates, “universities” or "brazos” of therealm, and were summoned to send their proctors or rep-resentatives to give counsel and aid to the king and obtain"the common assent of the realm”.

It is in this system of representative estates that themedieval conception of society as a community of com-munities finds its most complete expression. The kingdomas a whole is a umvmitos—the commune of the realm-andit is made up of a number of different universitates inwhich each order or organ of society is conceived as acorporate whole.

No doubt this idea was so deeply rooted in medievalthought that it had already found expression in feudal so-ciety before the rise of the new system. Indeed the primaryestates of the realm were the clergy and the barons—thelords spiritual and temporal—and the towns only attaineda place in the council at a later period as “the ThirdEstate”. But it was not until the coming of the towns, whichcould only take part in political life through their electedrepresentatives or proctors, that the representative principle

tions, democracy without tumult, wealth without luxury . . .Would that it had been your lot, divine Plato, to come upon sucha republic."

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became an essential part of the estates system, and it wasthis principle which gave the medieval assemblies of estatestheir new character and their constitutional importance.From this point the medieval state ceases to be a feudalhierarchy based on the principle of land tenure, and be-comes a true political community in which nobles and com-mons co-operated for common social ends. The institutionof constitutional representative government which has be-come the characteristic political form of modem Westernculture has its roots in this medieval development, and evenduring the Middle Ages it had already acquired full, thoughpremature, expression in exceptional cases, such as theCortes of Aragon and Catalonia where the estates pos-sessed complete control of legislation, as well as the rightof supervising the administration of their grants by a perma-nent committee of the estates, known as the DiputacionGeneral.

Thus the medieval ideas of the organic nature of society,of corporate rights and duties and the mutual co-operationof the different specialized social functions in the life of thewhole underlie the development not only of the corporateinstitutions of the medieval city but also the representativeconstitutional organization of the later medieval kingdom.And at every stage of this development these ideas find acorresponding expression in the thought and institutions ofthe Church. Thus the feudal hierarchy of early medievalsociety corresponds with the integration of the monasticcommunities into great hierarchical orders like the Cluniacand the Cistercian. The development of the communes ardfree cities is associated with the rise of the universities andwith a new type of religious Order—the Friars—which is nolonger based on endowments and the ownership of landbut is organized to fulfil a particular sr :ial function; andthe later development of the system of estates finds its ec-clesiastical counterpart in the Conciliar movement whichdeveloped the principle of representation on a still widerbasis than that of the medieval state, and attempted tocreate constitutional representative organs for the entirebody of Christendom.

Clearly these are not two independent developments.

The life of medieval society was one, and its religious andsecular institutions only represent different functions of thesame organism, as medieval thinkers from John of Salisburyto Nicholas of Cusa continually insist. There is, however, astriking contrast between this unitary and universalist tend-ency in medieval thought and culture, and the sharpdualism of Church and World characteristic of the olderChristian attitude to secular culture, which, as we haveseen, stOl dominated Christian thought during the DarkAges. The change was due not merely to the changed re-lations of the Church to a society which was Christian byprofession and regarded its religious faith as inseparablefrom its citizenship. It was also due to the revolutionarychange of thought by which medieval philosophy had as-similated the Aristotelian ethical and sociological principlesand integrated them into the structure of Christianthought, so that the Law of Nature—the moral law re-vealed by the light of reason—was confirmed and developedby the spiritual law revealed by faith. This does not ofcourse abolish the fundamental Christian distinction be-tween nature and grace, reason and faith, the World andthe Church, but it puts the emphasis on the concordanceand harmonization of the two orders rather than on theiropposition and conflict. The divine law which is of gracedoes not abolish the human law which is based on naturalreason. It is a law of liberty which sets man free from thelimitations and servitudes of the temporal order and opensa wider spiritual horizon to Christian civilization. This con-ception of the progressive incorporation of all the differentlevels of existence and value in a divine order provides anappropriate theological ideology for the complex corpora-tive development of medieval society in which every reli-gious and social function finds its autonomous organic ex-pression, from the trade gild which serves the materialneeds of the city up to the monastic community whichexists only for prayer and contemplation—each with its ownlaw and its own institutions, but all sharing alike in thecommon life and faith of one all-inclusive spiritual whole.

Nor was it only the philosophers who were conscious of

the continuity of nature and grace and the capacity of everysocial institution to be informed by a higher spiritual pur-pose. What could be more Thomist than the words inwhich the Yarmouth chronicler speaks of his gild merchant.

If, he says, the bond of love and friendship is laudableamong mere rational men, then how much more is thatwhich is between Christians, who are tied by the strongestbond of faith and religion; but above all by those Chris*tians who form one fraternity bound and linked togetherby a solemn oath.6

In every aspect of the later medieval culture we find thisconception of a hierarchy of goods and values and a cor-responding hierarchy of estates and vocations which bindthe whole range of human relations together in an orderedspiritual structure that reaches from earth to heaven. Nev-ertheless the completeness and symmetry of the Thomistsynthesis should not blind us to the fact that it rests on avery delicate balance of opposing forces and different tradi-tions which can only be maintained by a strict adherenceto ah order of ethical and metaphysical requirements thatrests in the last resort upon an act of faith. There is all thedifference in the world between the Pauline doctrine ofthe mystical organism of the Divine Body in which everypart achieves it own spiritual perfection and subserves theends of the whole and the Aristotelian idea of society as anatural organism, sufficient to itself, in which the differentclasses exist solely for the sake of the whole, and where theruler and lawgiver imprint form on the inert matter of thesocial body, so that the lower classes, which are concernedwith the mechanical arts or with unskilled labour, have apurely instrumental character.

Now, as St. Thomas has shown, it is quite possible toincorporate the organic materialism of Aristotelian politicsinto the organic mysticism of the Christian view of society,but only on condition that the state itself is recognized asan organ of the spiritual community and not as the sover-eign end of human life. That is to say, that social theory

8 Cross, The Gild Merchant, II, 278.

and social practice must deal with the part in terms of thewhole and not as a final end.

And this means that the lesser corporate bodies—cities,gilds, universities and estates—are not merely instrumentsor organs of the state, but possess a further relation andresponsibility to the wider spiritual society of which theyalso form part. As the gild has a loyalty to the king as wellas to the city, $0 it has a loyalty to Christendom as a whole,as well as to the kingdom or principality to which its citybelongs.

Now this principle was recognized generally in medievalsociety in its great period, and it was this that gives medie-val civilization its peculiar character. But it was difficult toreconcile this conception of a graduated series of com-munities, each with its own principle of quasi-political au-thority, with the Aristotelian theory of a single communitywhich was autarkic and autonomous, and possessed ex-clusive sovereignty over its members. It was possible tomaintain the universalism of medieval thought only bytransferring the attributes of the Aristotelian state to somewider whole. If this whole was the Church, as AegidiusRomanus and Alvarius Pelagius maintained, it resulted ina theory of Papal monarchy or theocracy which threatenedthe independence of the temporal power even in its ownsphere. If it was the Empire, as Dante believed, then itis the Empire and not the Church which becomes the di-vinely appointed organ through which human civilizationattains its ultimate end. This end Dante defines in Aris-totelian or rather Averroistic terms as the continuous ac-tualization of the potential intellect, i.e. the realization ofall the potentialities of the human mind. And the Emperoris the formal principle of human unity and moves the willsand actions of men by a single law, in the same way asGod, the First Mover, imparts a single law of uniform mo-tion to the heavens.

All this is much nearer to Averroes or Avicenna than tothe teaching of St. Thomas. But at the same time it isequally remote from the real spirit of Aristotle's politics,which was concerned with the study of the nature of theGreek city-state as it actually existed rather than with the

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vision of an ideal world-state. It is only when we come toMarsilius of Padua, less than a generation later, that wefind a theory of the state in which the medieval Christiantradition is entirely dominated and transformed by thespirit of Aristotelian naturalism, so as to leave no place forthe medieval conception of one universal Christian society.It is true that Marsilius still maintained the organic natureof society, but it was in the purely Aristotelian sense whichno longer possesses any link with the Pauline and theologi-cal tradition. The priesthood is no longer the principle ofspiritual unity, the soul of the social organism; it has be-come one among the many organs of the community, thepars sacerdotalis, subject to the ruling class, the pars princi-patis, and devoid of any transcendent authority. The prin-ciple of unity is to be found in the will of the humanlegislator which alone possesses coercive legal power. Nowthe human legislator, in Marsilius's view, is nothing elsebut the community itself, the communitas or universitascivium, which is the ultimate source of law6 and the con-stituent power behind the principatus, the ruling class thatis its organ or instrument. The same principle holds goodfor the Church which is the communitas fidelium, but sinceMarsilius assumes that his state is a Christian one, the twocommunities are the same, and there can be no division inthe ultimate source of authority in Church and state.

In all this Marsilius undoubtedly represents one aspectof the medieval civic development—the lay element in theItalian city-state as represented by the lawyers and officialsas against the friars and the churchmen; and his adaptationof Aristotelian political theory shows how easy it was for acitizen of the medieval Italian city-republic to return to thetradition of the Greek polis with its socio-political monismand autarky.

The older medieval political philosophy, from the Caro-lingian age to the twelfth century, was not really concernedwith the theory of the state at all but with the relations ofspiritual and temporal authority—of the two hierarchies that

6 Nos autem dicamus, secundam veritatem et consiliumAiistotelis, causam legis effectivam, primam et propriam essecivium universitatem (Defensor Pads, I, Ch. XII).

l8o RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

coexisted in the one body of Christendom. The state in theclassical and modem sense of the word first re-emerged inthe Italian city-state with its intensive political life, itsstrong civic consciousness and its complex and artificial con-stitutional systems. It is therefore no accident that thethinkers who revived the Aristotelian and classical doctrinesof the state and applied them to contemporary society werealmost without exception Italians, like St. Thomas Aquinas,Aegidius Colonna, MarsOius of Padua and Bartolus of Sas-soferrato. And so when these writers speak of civitas andrespublica, they are always thinking primarily of the city-state they knew; even though they enlarged their defini-tions so as to include larger political units like the medievalkingdom or the empire.

But in the case of Marsilius we are conscious of new cur-rents of social and religious thought which no longer belongto the pattern of medieval culture, but point forward to anew world. No doubt his conception of the universitascivium as the ultimate principle of social authority isgrounded on the political realities of the Italian city-state,in which it was always theoretically possible to appeal fromthe Podesta and the councils to the parliament or generalassembly summoned by the great bell of the commune, aswe see in the countless revolutions and changes of govern-ment in the Lombard and Tuscan cities. But when Marsil-ius goes on to apply the same principle to the Church andabandons the whole principle of hierarchical authority infavour of the communitas fidelium—the judgment of thegeneral body of the faithful, of which the clergy are theministers and employees—he seems nearer to sixteenth-century Zurich or seventeenth-century New England thanto the age and country of Dante and St. Catherine ofSiena.

Chapter X

The Medieval City: School andUniversity

The rise of the medieval city was accompanied by far-reaching changes in the intellectual life of Western societyand in the traditions of medieval education. And sincethose traditions were primarily religious these changes pro-duced corresponding changes in Western religion and in therelation between religion and culture.

As we have seen, the early Middle Ages, in the Carolin-gian age and the centuries that preceded and followed it,were marked by the preponderance of the monasteries, notonly in the spiritual discipline of the religious life but noless in the intellectual development of Christian culture.They have been called the Benedictine age of Westernculture, since from the rise of the new Christian cultureof Northumbria in the seventh century down to the revivalof city life and the rise of the communes in the twelfthcentury, the continuity of the higher culture was main-tained in Western Europe in the Benedictine abbeys whichwere the great sources of learning and literary production.

No doubt in theory the episcopal cities were also centresof learning, and it was the bishop rather than the monasterywho was directly responsible for carrying out the pro-gramme of Christian education as laid down in the capitu-laries of the Carolingian emperors. Moreover, the personalinfluence of the ruler often caused the Court and the Schoolof the Palace to be centres of intellectual activity and cul-tural leadership. But in both cases the actual achievementwas due to the monks, who were equally prominent in the

182 religion and the rise of western culture

episcopal cities and in the courts of Anglo-Saxon, Carolin-gian and German rulers. It is difficult to separate the tradi-tions of the school of York from that of Bede and BenedictBiscop, and the tradition of the school of the Carolingianpalace from that of Tours, and Corbie, and Fulda. Evenin the eleventh century, when the economic revival ofWestern Europe had already begun, Monte Cassino underthe abbacy of Desiderius (1058-87) was the most ad-vanced centre of culture in Italy; while north of theAlps the Abbey of Bee under Lanfranc and St. Anselm(

Nevertheless, by the eleventh century Bee and MonteCassino were exceptional, and the leadership in educationand learning was passing to the cathedral schools of North-ern France and Lorraine, such as Reims, Chartres, Laon,Toumai and Li£ge. This development had started in theprevious century at Lilge under Bishop Notker, and atReims under Gerbert of Aurillac, who was scholasticus ormaster of the school from 970 to 982. The tradition wascarried on by St. Fulbert at Chartres and by Adalbero atLaon, and extended in the course of the eleventh centuryto Toumai and Paris and Tours and Angers and Le Mans.But perhaps the most remarkable example of the eleventh-century cathedral school is to be found at Li6ge, where themonastic schools of the diocese produced a sort of rudi-mentary university to which scholars were attracted frommany parts of Europe, not only from France and Ger-many, but from Anglo-Saxon England and (in the case ofCosmas of Prague) from remote Bohemia. But the strugglebetween the Empire and the Papacy and the loyalty ofLi6ge to Henry IV destroyed the pre-eminence of this"Second Athens” at the very moment when the intellectualrevival was becoming pronounced.

Guibert of Nogent, who wrote in the beginning of thetwelfth century, describes in his autobiography how beforehis day and even in his youth there was such a lack of school-

masters that they could hardly be found save in the mostimportant cities, and even their knowledge was scanty and"hardly equal to that of the wandering clerks”—clerieulisvagantibus—oi “modem times”, when, as he writes else-where, letters were so flourishing and the number ofschools so great that they were accessible even to thepoorest.

For about this time, in the last decade of the eleventhcentury and the first two decades of the twelfth, there wasalready a remarkable revival of culture and literary activitywhich was not identified with any particular cathedralschool but was common to the Western provinces ofFrance—Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Normandy—andfound its patrons in the Anglo-Norman court of Henry Iand that of his sister, Adela of Blois. The leading figure inthis movement was Hildebert of Lavardin, teacher andBishop of Le Mans and afterwards Archbishop of Tours(1056-1133), perhaps the most accomplished Latinist ofall the Latin poets of the Middle Ages. Closely associatedwith him were Marbod of Angers (1035-1123), Chancellorand head of the school of Angers and afterwards Bishopof Rennes, and Baudri of Meung sur Loire (1046-1130),who studied at Angers and became Abbot of Bourgeuil(1089) and Archbishop of Dol in 1107, and more remotelyconnected were Reginald of Faye, south-west of Tours(c. 1040-1109), who became teacher at St. Augustine atCanterbury from 1097, and Raoul of La Tourte (c. 1063-mo), the Master of the monastic school of Fleury.

These men were not philosophers or theologians, butpoets and humanists who prided themselves on their knowl-edge of the classics and delighted in the society of scholarsand learned ladies with whom they exchanged letters andcopies of verses. Thus before the schools of Paris had be-come famous and before the new vernacular literature hadbeen developed at the feudal courts, there was already anecclesiastical courtly culture which foreshadowed the laterdevelopment of Western humanism and set a new ideal ofliterary education and social intercourse.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say. that this type of ec-

clesiastical humanism represents the central tradition ofhigher culture in the West. It looks back to the revival oflearning in the Carolingian period, which also had beenrepresented in the same region by Alcuin at Tours, Theo-dulf at Orleans and Lupus Servatus at Ferri£res; and for-ward to the early Italian humanism of Petrarch in thefourteenth century. Throughout the twelfth century it wasexceptionally flourishing in the Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Angevin kingdom and had an important centre in thehouseholds of Archbishop Theobald (1x39-64) and St.Thomas Becket (1164-70) at Canterbury, as well as at theroyal court.

Here the spirit of medieval humanism found its mostcomplete embodiment in John of Salisbury, the greatEnglish scholar, who after his studies at Paris and Chartresbecame the secretary of Archbishop Theobald and was laterthe companion of St. Thomas in his exile and at his death,Anally becoming Bishop of Chartres in 1176. His works givea more complete picture of the intellectual life of his timethan anything in medieval literature. For he was not only ahumanist and a student of the classics like Hildebert orMarbod, he was also fully initiated into the new dialecticaland philosophical studies of the schools as represented byhis teachers, who included Abelard and Gilbert de la Porreeas well as William de Conches and Richard l’Eveque. Hewas, moreover, one of the pioneers of the Aristotelianrevival and perhaps the Arst to realize the philosophicimportance of the "New Logic”, especially the Topics,which transformed the old scholastic art of disputation intoa theory of science and a science of thought.1

Yet at the same time he was fully alive to the dangersthat threatened the new university culture—not only thetendency towards a barren intellectualism—dudectica exsan-guis et sterilis—but still more the Philistine view of educa-tion as a utilitarian preparation for a successful professionalcareer. In these respects John is faithful to the tradition ofChartres which in the early part of the twelfth centuryunder the brothers Bernard and Thierry and their discipleWilliam of Conches had rivalled Paris as a centre of

1 Cf. Metalogicon, III, v: De utilitate Topicorum.

philosophy and surpassed it as a school of classical andhumane learning. Chartres was the last and greatest of thepre-university cathedral schools, and thanks to John ofSalisbury and the two educational treatises of Thierry andWilliam of Conches, the Heptateuchon and the Dragma-ticon, we have fuller information about the educationalmethods and ideals of the school of Chartres than wepossess for the great medieval universities in the followingcentury.

But when John of Salisbury wrote, the university move-ment was already far advanced. Paris and Bologna werethronged with crowds of students from every part of Chris-tendom, and the Bohemian life of the needy and turbulentscholars had already become a favourite subject for poetsand satirists. This new class was no longer contented withthe patient scholarship and strict discipline of the oldcathedral schools as represented by Chartres. It was an in-tellectual proletariat of needy and ambitious students, con-temptuous of the past, impatient of restraint, following thefashionable teacher and doctrine of the moment.

Already at the beginning of the twelfth century the fameof Abelard had made Paris one of the most popular centresof teaching in France, and by the middle of the centurythe multiplication of schools and the competition of rivalteachers had made it the intellectual capital of Christen-dom. During the twelfth century the schools of Parisgradually achieved their corporate organization, which cul-minated in the formation of the great universitas or corpo-ration of "masters” or licensed teachers under the controlof the Chancellor, and it became the archetype and stand-ard of most of the universities which were subsequentlyconstituted in Northern Europe.

But though Paris surpassed all other medieval universi-ties in its intellectual activity and in its corporate authorityas the intellectual organ of Christendom, it was equalledand perhaps surpassed both in seniority and in social pres-tige by the great Italian university which represents a dif-ferent tradition and a different type of organization. TheUniversity of Bologna held a similar position in Italy to

that which the University of Paris held in France. As thelatter university became the great international school oftheology and philosophy for the whole of Western Christen-dom, so Bologna from the beginning was the great interna-tional centre of legal studies. But while the University ofParis throughout the Middle Ages was essentially a clericalinstitution, Bologna was largely a lay university where thelawyers and officials, who played such a large part in thegovernment of the Italian cities, received their education.

No doubt the development of the study of the CanonLaw which was associated with the work of Gratian about1140 made Bologna an equally important centre of trainingfor the administrators and lawyers of the medieval Church.But it was as a school of Roman law that Bologna first be-came famous in the days of Imerius (c. 1090-1130), andit was the civilians, not the canonists who set the standardand determined the course of studies.

Already in the first half of the twelfth century the doctorof Civil Law enjoyed extraordinary prestige, as we see fromthe part taken by the Four Doctors of Bologna at the Dietof Roncaglia in 1158.2 Moreover, the students at Bolognaalso possessed a much higher position, due in part to theirmore mature age and higher social position, than theclerical students of Paris and Oxford. From a very earlydate they began to manage their own affairs and controltheir conditions of study, so that Bologna and the Italianuniversities which followed its tradition were essentiallystudent corporations that ultimately asserted their controlover their teachers whom they treated as their employeesrather than their masters.

This strange system which is so different from the hier-archical ecclesiastical order of the Northern universities isclosely related to the development of Italian communalinstitutions. The universities were in fact student com-munes based, like the city commune itself, on the moraland legal bond of the common oath. This relation has been

2 Rashdall writes that “no teachers perhaps in the whole historyof education had hitherto occupied quite so high a position inpublic estimation as the early doctors of Bologna”.

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admirably described by Dr. Rashdall in the following pas-sage from his classical book on the Medieval Universities.

The conception of citizenship prevalent in the Italian re-publics, he writes, was much nearer to the old Greek con-ception than that which prevails in modern states. Citizen-ship which is with us a mere accident of domicile wasin ancient Athens and medieval Bologna an hereditarypossession of priceless value. . . . Prolonged exile wastherefore a serious penalty to which a body of young menof good position, many of them old enough to be enteringon political life in their own cities, would naturally submitwith reluctance. The student universities represent an at-tempt on the part of such men to create for themselves anartificial citizenship in place of the natural citizenship whichthey had temporarily renounced in the pursuit of knowl-edge or advancement; and the great importance of astudium to the commercial welfare of the city in which itwas situated may explain the ultimate willingness of themunicipalities—though the concession was not made with-out a struggle—to recognize the student universities.8

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Bologna onthe revival of jurisprudence and the study of Roman law inWestern Europe. It was the great centre to which studentsof law resorted from all over Europe and from whichteachers like Vacarius in England and Azo and Placentinusin France went out to carry the seeds of the new learning.But it was in the life of the Italian city-states that thisinfluence was strongest. Almost every important city triedto attract teachers from Bologna and to possess a law schoolof its own, and the numerous universities which werefounded in Italy in the Middle Ages, with the exception ofFrederick II’s state creation at Naples, were all based onthe Bolognese model of a free student corporation anddevoted themselves, above all, to the study of law.

All this may seem remote from the history of the rela-tion of religion to Western culture. But the medieval revival

8 Rashdall, Medieval Universities, edited by Powicke andEmden, I, 164.

of Roman law was intimately related to the growth of thenew Canon Law which played such a great part in theintegration and organization of medieval Christendom.

The growth of the new Canon Law coincided with thereform of the Papacy and was an essential condition of thecentralization of authority and jurisdiction in the Pope andthe Roman Curia. But it was not until Gratian, a monk ofBologna, produced, about the year 1140, his great treatise,the Decretum, in which all the existing material wasclassified and arranged in the spirit of the new jurispru-dence, that the study of the subject was put on a scientificbasis. Henceforward Bologna became the great centre forthe teaching of Canon as well as of Civil Law. AlexanderIII, one of the greatest of the medieval pontiffs, was thepupil and commentator of Gratian. Innocent III was thepupil of Uguccio of Pisa, who taught at Bologna in thelatter part of the twelfth centuiy.

In feet throughout the central period of the Middle Agesfrom 1150 to 1350 it was the canonists and the Universityof Bologna rather than the theologians and the Universityof Paris who stood nearest to the Papacy and had the strong-est influence on the government and organization of theChurch. This was deplored by the conservatives like St.Bernard and Gerhoh of Reichersberg, and by idealists likeRoger Bacon and Dante. It was, however, to the Canoniststhat the actual organization of the medieval Church wasdue. The fact that this work was done by men trained inthe same school and the same traditions as the Civilianswho during the same period were organizing and rationaliz-ing the medieval state was of the first importance for thehistory of Western institutions. And it was in the life of theItalian cities that this process of interaction was most com-plete. The rulers and officials of the city-state and the ad-ministrators of the Church were drawn from the sameclasses, educated in the same universities and shared thesame intellectual background; so that there was a continualprocess of mutual criticism which stimulated the growth ofan educated public opinion, such as did not yet exist inNorthern Europe.

In Northern Europe the influence of Bologna and the

revival of legal studies made themselves felt from a veryearly period on the higher level of ecclesiastical and royalgovernment. It is true that Bologna was by no means theonly centre of legal studies. Apart from the Italian universi-ties, like Padua, which were immediately derived from it,it was the model for many other later foundations likeLerida, while in France Orleans and Toulouse possessedimportant schools of law. Nevertheless as Paris possessed aunique prestige as the centre of Christian philosophy andtheological studies, so Bologna—Bononia docta—was thelegal teacher of Europe from which, as Honorius III writesin his Bull of 1220, "went forth the leaders who rule theChristian people”; so that for centuries Paris and Bolognawere the opposite poles round which the world of medievalstudies revolved. While the great Italian philosophers, likeSt. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Matthew of Acquasparta andAegidius of Rome gravitated to Paris, clerics from NorthernEurope who looked forward to a public career in the Churchstudied at Bologna, where they constituted an independentcorporation—the Universitas Ultramontanorum. And theBologna degree—especially the double doctorate of Civiland Canon Laws—was generally regarded as the highestacademic honour in the world.

But in spite of the contrast in spirit and institutions be-tween Paris and Bologna, they both contributed equally tothe transformation of Western education and to the forma-tion of the professional intellectual classes which werehenceforth to dominate Western culture. In the past thespiritual unity of Christendom had been realized in a com-mon faith and a common moral or ascetic discipline whichwas the tradition of Western monasticism. It was only withthe rise of the universities that Western culture acquiredthat new intellectual and scientific discipline on which itslater achievements were dependent.

It is true that this aspect of medieval culture was forcenturies ignored or derided. The Humanists despised theSchoolmen for their bad Latin, and the scientists andphilosophers attacked them for their degenerate and "ver-

miculate” Aristotelian ism.4 It is only in recent times thatmen like A. N. Whitehead have recognized that modemscience itself could hardly have come into existence had notthe Western mind been prepared by centuries of intellec-tual discipline to accept the rationality of the universe andthe power of the human intelligence to investigate theorder of nature.

Clearly the fact that the educated classes of Europe forcenturies underwent a rigorous and elaborate training in theart of logical thinking must have left a mark on Europeanculture, as was recognized a century ago by Sir WilliamHamilton and J. S. Mill. But I believe we can go furtherthan this, and see in the medieval scholastic discipline oneof the main factors which have differentiated Europeancivilization from the great religion-cultures of the East, towhich the earlier medieval culture and that of the Byzan-tine Empire were so dosely akin. No doubt the Romantradition which survived in Western culture may have beenresponsible for die sodal activity and the constructivepolitical sense that were distinctive of the Western Churchsince the days of St. Gregory or even St. Leo the Great,but this Roman tradition with its sense of the value ofdiscipline and law and authority was essentially a con-servative force. It was not thence that Europe derived thecritical intelligence and the restless spirit of scientific en-quiry which have made Western civilization the heir andsuccessor of the Greeks. It is usual to date the coming ofthis new element from the Renaissance and die revival ofGreek studies in the fifteenth century, but the real turningpoint must be placed three centuries earlier in the age ofthe universities and the communes. Already at Paris in thedays of Abelard and John of Salisbury the passion fordialectic and the spirit of philosophic speculation had be-gun to transform the intellectual atmosphere of Christen-dom. And from that time forward the higher studies weredominated by the technique of logical discussion—thequaestio and the public disputation which so largely de-termined the form of medieval philosophy even in its

4 Cf. Francis Bacon’s famous passage in The Advancement ofLearning, I, iii, 3.

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greatest representatives. “Nothing,” says Robert of Sor-bonne, "is known perfectly which has not been masticatedby the teeth of disputation,” and the tendency to submitevery question, from the most obvious to the most abstruse,to this process of mastication not only encouraged readinessof wit and exactness of thought but above all developedthat spirit of criticism and methodic doubt to which West-ern culture and modem science have owed so much.

No doubt this passion for disputation and logical analy-sis also led to an immense waste of intellectual energyon barren controversies. At the beginning of the scholasticage John of Salisbury remarked that more energy had beenspent during the last fifty years on the controversy con-cerning universals than the Romans had spent in the con-quest of their empire. And at the end of the Middle Ages,the perverse subtilty of the Occamists and Terminists wentfar to justify the violence of the Humanist reaction. Never-theless between these two points there was a period ofgreat and fruitful intellectual achievement which was notconfined to logical and metaphysical studies, but extendedto every field of knowledge, including the natural sciences.

Hitherto I have been mainly concerned with the twogreat universities of Paris and Bologna which were the maincentres of theological and legal studies and the archetypesof the whole university movement. But there was also athird tradition, represented by the schools of Salerno andMontpellier and Toledo and the court of Palermo, whichwas of the greatest intellectual importance, though it hadlittle influence on the institutional development of themedieval university. For this was the channel by whichGreek and Arabic science reached the Western world, andfrom which the medieval culture of the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries derived its knowledge of Aristotle notmerely as a logician, but as a metaphysician, a physicistand a biologist.

We have seen how, during the Dark Ages, the WesternMediterranean had been separated from Christian Europeand had been the centre of a brilliant cultural developmentderived from the Islamic East. And it was here, rather than

192 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

in the crusading states of Syria and the Latin Empire ofConstantinople, that the East and West came into contactwith one another, and the vital process of cultural trans-mission and adaptation took place.

The process began in Southern Italy, where in the secondhalf of the eleventh century an African monk of MonteCassino, Constantine, initiated the work of translation, andthe school of Salerno became a meeting-place of Greek,Arabic and Jewish influences, at least in medical studies.But it was in Spain that the main work of translation tookplace, above all at Toledo, where the Archbishop, Raymondof Sauvetat (1126-51) established a school of translatorswhich continued its activity through the twelfth and thir-teenth centuries, so that Toledo for a time became equalto Paris and Bologna as a factor in medieval culture. Thescholars of Toledo not only translated into Latin the wholeAristotelian corpus in its Arabic form, they also producedversions of the principal works of the great Moslem andJewish philosophers and men of science: A1 Kindi, A1Farabi, A1 Battani, Avicenna, Ibn Gebirol and A1 Ghazali.Finally there were original thinkers, like Domingo Gonza-lez, the Archdeacon of Segovia, who first attempted to makea new synthesis between the philosophy of Avicenna (itselfa synthesis of the Aristotelian and Neo-platonic traditions),with the Augustinian tradition of Latin Christianity.

The most striking thing about this movement was itscosmopolitan character. Jews and Arabs and Greeks co-operated with Spaniards and Italians and Englishmen. Al-ready at the beginning of the twelfth century an Englishscholar, Adelard of Bath, who had been educated in thecathedral schools of Northern France, was travelling inSpain, Southern Italy and the Near East and translatingthe works of Euclid and the ninth-century mathematiciansand astronomers of Central Asia such as A1 Khwarizmi andAbu Ma'shar of Balkh. To Adelard and his successors—theItalians Plato of Tivoli and Gerard of Cremona, and theEnglishmen Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley and Al-fred of Sereshel—this was like the discovery of a new world,and they called on their compatriots to leave their elemen-tary studies and their barren arguments, and set them-

selves to school with the Arabs and the ancient Greeks whoalone possessed the genuine tradition of scientific andphilosophic knowledge.

One might well have supposed that the Mohammedanand pagan origins of the new learning would have pre-vented its acceptance by Western Christendom, but inspite of the opposition of conservatives and the suspicionsof the guardians of orthodoxy the new teaching made itsway with remarkable rapidity into the rising universities,so that by the middle of the thirteenth century the worksof Aristotle were being studied and commented and dis-cussed at Paris and Oxford and Toulouse and Cologne.

At Paris the main effort of the numerous summas andcommentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard wasdirected to the interpretation of theology in terms of Aristo-telian metaphysics and their mutual integration. At Ox-ford, on the other hand, under the influence of RobertGrosseteste and the Franciscan school, it was the scientificand mathematical aspects of the new learning that weremost studied and gave the school of Oxford its originalcharacter.

Finally, the Aristotelian tradition was represented in itspurest and most uncompromising form by the teaching ofthe Spanish Moslem Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-98),whose works were translated after 1217 by Michael Scot(d. 1232), the court astrologer of Frederick II, and foundenthusiastic disciples in Siger of Brabant and his followersin the University of Paris from 1270 to 1280, and at Bolo-gna and Padua in the fourteenth century.

The result of this great influx of new knowledge andnew ideas was to provide the universities and the interna-tional society of scholars and teachers who frequented themwith the materials from which to construct a new intel-lectual synthesis. The dialecticians were no longer com-pelled to masticate and remasticate the old scholasticcommonplaces. They had at last something solid to get theirteeth into. Arid for a hundred years there was, in conse-quence, such a development of philosophical studies as theworld had not seen since the great age of ancient Greece.The effect on general culture may be seen in a unique form

194 RELIGION and the rise of western culture

in the Dirina Commedia of Dante, the greatest literaryachievement of the Middle Ages, in which every aspect oflife and every facet of personal and historic experience isilluminated by a metaphysical vision of the universe as anintelligible unity. And behind the Divitia Commedia thereis the work of St. Thomas and St. Albert and a hundredlesser men, all of them devoted to the building up of agreat structure of thought in which every aspect of knowl-edge is co-ordinated and subordinated to the divine science—Theologia— the final transcendent end of every createdintelligence.

The great interest of this synthesis is not its logical com-pleteness, for that was to be found already in a rudimen-tary form in the traditional curriculum of the earliermedieval schools, but rather the way in which the mind ofWestern Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hel-lenic science and annexed the alien world of Moslemthought without losing its spiritual continuity or its specifi-cally religious values. No doubt all this was questioned bythe later critics of scholasticism, like Luther and his con-temporaries who maintained that medieval philosophy hadabandoned evangelical truth to follow Aristotle and the vaindeceits of human wisdom. But in order to maintain thisview they were compelled to push their condemnationfurther, and to condemn the whole tradition of WesternCatholicism right back to the age of the Fathers.

But if we look at the development of Western Christen-dom as a whole, it is clear that the intellectual synthesisof the thirteenth century was not a contradiction but thecrown and completion of centuries of continuous effort toachieve an integration of the religious doctrine of theChristian Church with the intellectual tradition of ancientculture. This aim was already set out in a rudimentary formby the encyclopaedists of the sixth and seventh centurieslike Cassiodorus and Boethius and Isidore of Seville, butit was not completely achieved until the thirteenth centurywith the recovery of the full inheritance of Greek philoso-phy and science, and with the creation of the new intel-lectual organs of Christendom—the university corporationsand the Orders of Friars.

195

The co-ordination of these two organs by the deliberatepolicy of the Papacy in the thirteenth century marked thefinal and decisive step in the intellectual organization ofChristendom. But it was not achieved without a severestruggle, for in spite of the revival of learning and the prog-ress of the schools during the twelfth century, the at-tempts of the Popes and the councils to provide for theeducation of the clergy by a canonical system of endowedteachers in every episcopal and archiepiscopal see had beengenerally ignored or neglected. It is even possible that theincreasing popularity of the new universities, especiallyBologna, had a detrimental effect on clerical education ascompared with the older type of cathedral school owing totheir concentration on legal studies at the expense oftheology. Consequently when St. Dominic founded hisOrder of preachers to combat the spread of heresy inSouthern France, Honorius III and his adviser. CardinalUgolino, saw the opportunity to create a new institutionwhich would carry out the programme of the Conciliarlegislation and provide the theological teachers which thesecular clergy had been unable to produce.

It was in the new universities, above all the University ofParis, that the new Order found its most fruitful field ofwork. For it was not only among the Albigensians ofLanguedoc that Christian orthodoxy was threatened bynew forms of heresy. At Paris itself the introduction ofArabic philosophy and Aristotelian science was accom-panied by the spread of pantheistic theories, and their con-demnation in 1210 and 1215 had been accompanied by theprohibition of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics. Yetthis prohibition could not be maintained indefinitely. EvenWilliam of Auvergne, the greatest representative of theolder tradition of philosophy in the first half of the thir-teenth century, who was bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1247,recognized the value of Aristotelian science and of theArabic and Jewish philosophies that were based upon itThe problem was to construct a philosophic synthesiswhich would unite the scientific truth contained in theteachings of the philosophers with the religious truth rep-

resented by the tradition of the Church and the teachingof the theologians.

The solution of this problem was the intellectual mis-sion of the new Order. As early as 1217 the first Domini-cans were sent to Paris and Bologna. In 1221 they were atOxford and in 1229 they were put in charge of the the-ological faculty of the new university that was establishedby the joint action of the Papacy and the King of Franceat Toulouse. Their example was soon followed by theFranciscans, in spite of their original diversity of aims; andfrom the middle of the thirteenth century all the leadingtheologians and philosophers with two or three exceptionsbelonged to one or other of the great mendicant Orders—Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure, Albert the Great andThomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Thomas of York, Rob-ert Kilwardby and John Peckham, Matthew of Acquaspartaand Duns Scotus. But the dominant position of the Friarsin the intellectual life of the medieval university was notattained without a struggle, and it required all the authorityand persistence of the Papacy to overcome the resistance ofthe University of Paris. It was a conflict between the proud-est and most independent corporation in Christendom andthe concentrated powers of the new religious Orders sup-ported by the Papacy. Both St. Thomas and St. Bonaven-ture were involved in the controversy and it threatened thevery existence of the University, since the latter at theheight of the struggle resorted to the desperate measure ofputting an end to its corporate existence by a solemn actof dissolution.

The passion aroused by the controversy may be seen notonly in the writings of the protagonists-e.g. in William ofSt. Amour's diatribe against the Friars, On the Perils ofthe Last Times, and St. Thomas's pamphlet Contra Im-pugnatores Cultns Dei—but also in the vernacular poetry ofRutebeuf and Jean de Meung, both of whom were violentpartisans of the University. And we see in the Romance ofthe Rose how a quarrel which originated in the conflictinginterests of two branches of the clergy—the regulars and theseculars—acquired a secularist and "anticlerical'' character

SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY 197

which foreshadows the future secularization of Westernculture.

On the other side, however, there is no trace of anyintention to lessen the prestige and authority of the Univer-sity as such. On the contrary the Bull of Alexander IV in1255 in support of the Friars—Quasi lignum vitae—showsvery clearly that it was the policy of the Papacy to recognizethe unique and sovereign position of the University of Parisin the intellectual life of Christendom. "The science of theschools of Paris," it declares, “is in the Church like theTree of Life in the terrestrial paradise, a shining lamp inthe temple of the soul. . . . It is at Paris that the humanrace, deformed by original sin and blinded by ignorance,recovers its power of vision and its beauty, by the knowl-edge of the true light shed forth by divine science.”

There can, in fact, be little doubt that the creation of theuniversities and the formation of the new religious Ordersalike formed part of the far-reaching design of the medievalPapacy for the intellectual organization of Christian civiliza-tion, which is one of the most remarkable examples of theplanning of culture on a large scale that history has everseen.

This ideal of the universal organization of human knowl-edge and human life by a spiritual principle was not con-fined to the international government of the Church; it isthe dominant spirit of thirteenth-century culture. It is tobe seen in rather a crude and naive form in the work ofencyclopaedists like Vincent of Beauvais and BartholomeusAnglicus. It inspired Roger Bacon's immense survey of allexisting and possible science, of which the Opus Majus,the Opus Minus and the Opus Tertium are the fragments.It finds an almost perfect literary expression in Dante’sepic, and it was embodied in visible form in the greatFrench cathedrals. But, above all, it found supreme expres-sion in the philosophic systems of the thirteenth century—those great “cathedrals of ideas”, as Professor Gilson hascalled them, in which all the acquisitions of Aristotelian andArabic science have been organically incorporated with theChristian tradition in an intelligible unity.

But though this intellectual achievement marks the

culmination of the medieval development, it did not be-come the foundation of a unitary religion-culture as wemight have expected. On the contrary, it inaugurated aperiod of intellectual criticism and cultural change whichis of the utmost importance for the history of Western cul-ture, but proved fatal to the synthesis of religion and cul-ture that seemed to have been achieved in the previouscenturies.

At first sight this is a surprising development, for West-ern civilization did not undergo any external catastrophesuch as the Mongol conquest which overwhelmed the mostflourishing centres of thirteenth-century Moslem culturein Central Asia. Nor was there any slackening of intellec-tual activity, and the university movement continued togrow. It was rather that the movement towards integrationand unity which had dominated Western Christendomsince the eleventh century had lost its impetus and nolonger found leaders capable of carrying it forward to newachievements.

The fourteenth century was an age of division and strife,the age of the Great Schism, which saw instead of theCrusades the invasion of Europe by the Turks and thedevastation of France by England.® And at the same timethe intdlectual resources of Western society which hadbeen so much strengthened by the extension of the uni-versity movement no longer assisted the integration ofChristian thought but were used negatively and criticallyto undo the work of the previous century and underminethe intellectual foundations on which the synthesis of thegreat thinkers of the previous age had been built. It is asthough the spiritual tide which had been steadily makingfor unity for three centuries had suddenly turned, so thateverywhere in every aspect of life the forces that made fordivision and dissolution were predominant.

5 Cf. Denifle’s remarkable work, La desolation des ^glises,monast&es et hdpitaux en France pendant la guerre de Cents Ans,2 vols., 1899.

Chapter XI

The Religious Crisis of MedievalCulture: The ThirteenthCentury

Throughout the period of which I have been speaking dur-ing the last three chapters, the spiritual life of Westernculture was dominated by the movement of religious reformwhich came to maturity in the second half of the eleventhcentury. The emancipation of the Church from imperialand feudal control and the assertion of the primacy of thespiritual power set free new spiritual forces and created thenew international society of medieval Christendom. Few,if any, of the historians of the Middle Ages have donejustice to the importance of the reforming movement asa continuous dynamic influence on medieval culture. Thosewho are most sympathetic to the medieval culture havebeen impressed by its religious unity and the harmonyof medieval Christendom, while its critics have alwaysstressed its traditionalism and its blind obedience to eccle-siastical authority. Neither party has paid sufficient atten-tion to the element of conflict which characterized thecreative centuries of the Middle Ages. For the great debatewhich began with the reforming movement of the eleventhcentury was not a temporary politic-ecclesiastical conflictthat was ended in 1122 by the Concordat of Worms; it wasinherited from generation to generation and passed fromone country to another through the whole course of medie-val history. And the creative centuries of medieval cultureowed their unity, not to the absence of strife, but to thefact that the party of reform, which was the dynamic ele-

ment in medieval culture, for a time attained a position ofcultural leadership through its alliance with the governingelement in the Church. When this alliance was broken atthe close of the thirteenth century, the spiritual unity andthe creative power of medieval culture gradually disap-peared.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, thereforming movement was a principle of unity rather thandivision. It united the most active elements in Christiansociety in a common programme round a common centreof unity. It broke down the barriers of feudal class privilegeand territorial particularism and gave new opportunitiesfor spiritual leadership and the free choice of individualvocations. It brought the monk out of his cloister, thebishop out of his diocese and the knight out of his fief andmade them all conscious of their place in the common lifeof Christendom and their participation in a common cause.

This widening of the horizon is to be seen first in thenew monastic movements which preceded the generalmovement of reform and contributed so much to it. Theage of reform was characterized by a new type of monas-ticism which was to become characteristic of WesternChristendom. In order to carry out the work of monasticreform it had proved necessary to sacrifice the traditionalautonomy of the individual monastery and organize a num-ber of reformed communities under the direction andjurisdiction of a mother house. The most famous exampleof this tendency was the Cluniac movement, which or-ganized a whole hierarchy of monastic communities underthe absolute control of the Abbot of Cluny. By the timeof St. Hugh (1049-1109) there were more than eight hun-dred monasteries affiliated to Cluny in France, Italy, Ger-many and Spain, so that the congregation had become agreat international power in the life of Christendom. Thisprocess of organization was carried still further in the newmonastic movements that arose at the beginning of thetwelfth century, above all by the Cistercians, as organizedby St. Stephen Harding early in the century, which was thefirst genuine religious Order in the later sense of the word.This first established the principle of corporate control by

an annual general chapter of the whole Order and a systemof mutual visitation and inspection. Thus the abbey was nolonger an end in itself; it was part of a larger whole, whichin turn was an organ of the universal society of Christen-dom.

This tendency towards the socialization of the monasticideal was at once a cause and an effect of the reformingmovement. The reformed Papacy was, as we have seen,largely a monastic creation, and it found its ablest and mostdisinterested helpers in the reformed monastic order. St.Peter Damian, Humbert of Moyenmoutier, St. Hugh ofCluny, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, Richard the abbot ofSt. Victor at Marseilles, and many more, were monks wholeft their cloisters to work for the reform of the Church.Urban II, the Pope who carried the reforming programmeto triumph, and who was also responsible for the launchingof the First Crusade, was a former prior of Cluny. And inthe twelfth century this tradition of monastic reform findsits supreme representative in St. Bernard, who was at oncethe embodiment of the ascetic ideals of Cistercian monasti-cism and the greatest public figure in the life of his time.In spite of his profound devotion to the monastic ideals ofcontemplation and penance, he was also a great man ofaction of the type of Gregory VII. His influence was feltat every point where the interests of Christendom were atstake, ending the Papal schism of 1130-38, restoring peacebetween Christian princes and launching the Second Cru-sade. Above all, he was the champion of the Gregorian idealof uncompromising spiritual reform, and applied the prin-ciples of the eleventh-century reformers to the changed cir-cumstances of a new age.

For, as we have seen, the victory of the Church creatednew problems and new temptations. In so far as the spirit-ual authority of the Papacy was embodied in a concretesystem of international government, it was forced to makeuse of temporal means, above all a system of revenue andfinance. And since there was as yet no system of eccle-siastical taxation, the medieval Papacy, like the medievalstate, was driven to use its rights of jurisdiction as a source

of revenue—a system which inevitably led to abuse and tothe exploitation of litigants and local churches by the Curiaand the Papal legates.

It was against these abuses that St. Bernard addressedthe severe criticism of the Papal administration of his greattreatise de Consideratione, which was addressed to hisdisciple the Cistercian Pope Eugenius III. He complainsthat the increase of litigation has turned the Curia into asecular law court.

The Palace resounds with the sound of laws, but they arethe laws of Justinian, not those of the Lord. Is not theenriching of ambition the object of the whole laboriouspractice of the laws and canons? Is not all Italy a yawninggulf of insatiable avarice and rapacity for the spoil it offers?So that the Church has become like a robber’s cave, fullof the plunder of travellers.1

Against these evils of the Curia and this tendency to-wards an ecclesiastical imperialism which made the Popethe successor of Constantine rather than Peter, St. Bernardsets up the reformer’s ideal of the prophetic and apostolicmission of a true Pope set over the nations to destroy, androot up, to build and to plant, “a mission that suggests theheavy labour of the peasant rather than the pomp of a ruler.For if you are to do the work of a prophet you need the hoerather than the sceptre”.2

In all this St. Bernard was far from wishing to diminishthe claims of the reformed Papacy to universal authority.In fact these claims have never been more passionately as-serted than in the tremendous passages which conclude thistreatise. His condemnation was directed entirely against thesecularizing tendencies which accompanied the growth ofecclesiastical power and centralization and had producedthe same confusion between spiritual authority and tem-poral power as had existed in the old Carolingian imperialstate Church against which the reformers had revolted. Forthe victory of the Papacy and the weakening of the powerof the Emperor or the prince over the clergy had not

1S. Bern., de Consideratione, II, vi.

2 Ibid.

fundamentally changed the nature of the medieval Churchin its feudal and territorial aspects. As the great ecclesiasti-cal magnates had formerly used the imperial or regal con-trol of the Church to increase their political power andwealth, so now they used the Church's freedom and itsclaim to independent jurisdiction in order to strengthentheir position still further. As an American historian haswritten:

Certainly not the state nor yet the church was the ulti-mate winner in the great controversy. The prince-bishopsand warlike abbots of Germany, with their worldly ways,their hard faces, their political interests, lords of churchlands that were actually huge ecclesiastical fiefs, and theGerman feudality were the red victors of the war.9

The perplexity and despair of the reformers in face ofthis tragic confusion is clearly expressed by Gerhoh ofReichersberg (1093-1169), one of the greatest representa-tives of the spiritual party in the German Church duringthe twelfth century. He remained faithful to the cause ofthe Papacy on the question of the Investitures, and, duringthe great struggle between the Emperor Frederick I andPope Alexander III, endured persecution and exile on be-half of his principles. But at the same time he censured theviews of the extreme papalist party which asserted the di-rect power of the Papacy over the Empire. In his last work,which he entitled The Fourth Watch of the Night, writtenin exile two years before his death, he is concerned, like St.Bernard, with the perils that threatened the Church fromthe avarice and ambition of her rulers. He saw the comingof the end, not in the external distress and persecution ofthe Church, but in its corruption from within by the "Jew-ish and pagan avarice that reigns in the very Kingdom ofChrist” and makes Rome a second Babylon. In despair helooks to the speedy coming of Christ as the only hope ofthe Church. Come then, Lord Jesus, he prays, come to Thyship, the Holy Church, which is labouring heavily in thisFourth Watch of the Night; come O Lord, rule in the midst

8 J. W. Thompson, Feudal Germany, p. 164.

204 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

of Thine enemies, the false priests who sell and rob inThine house and the princes who tyrannize in the name ofChrist. Come, Saviour Jesus, working salvation in the midstof the earth and the midst of the Church, making peacebetween the Kingdom and the PriesthoodA

This sense of imminent crisis, of the pressing need formoral reform and spiritual renovation, runs through all therdigious thought of the twelfth century. That centurywhich seems to us the Golden Age of medieval Catholicism—the age of St. Ansdm and St. Bernard, the age of theCrusades and the Cathedrals, of the new religious Ordersand the new schools-appeared to contemporaries darkwith the threat of the coming doom. Their attitude issummed up in tire opening lines of Bernard of Morlais’great rhythm, de contemptu mundi.

Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus,

Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter die supremus. . . ."

This preoccupation with apocalyptic ideas is character*istic of die mind of the twelfth century. It shows itself in acrude popular form in the vernacular German drama ofAntichrist (c. 1150) as well as in die learned World Historyof Otto of Freising and in the theological symbolism ofRupert of Deutz ( -113$), Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Ho-norius Augustodunensis (c. 1120) and Ansdm of Havel*berg ( -1158). Above all, it finds expression in the visionsand prophedes of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), oneof the most original minds of the twelfth century and thefirst of die great prophetesses of the Middle Ages-the twoSt. Mechtilds, St Angela, St Bridget and St Catherine ofSiena. And it reaches its final culmination in the CalabrianAbbot Joachim of Flora ( -1202), who announced thecoming of a new age, die age of the Spirit and the EternalGospel in which the Church will be renewed in the libertyof the spirit under the leadership of the new order of Spirit*ual Contemplatives.

4 De Quarta Vigilia Noctis, 21. Lib. de Lite, Tom. Ill, M.G.H.

® The world is very evil; the times are waxing late;

Be sober and keep vigil; the Judge is at the gate.

These tendencies were by no means a proof of religiousor cultural decline. On the contrary, they show how deeplymen's minds had been stirred by the religious awakeningand their awareness of the imminence of a new age. Norwere they confined to the educated minority—to the leadersof the reforming movement in the clergy and the monasticOrders: they had already begun to affect the new societythat was coming into existence in the medieval city. Asearly as 1058 the reforming movement had become identi-fied in Milan and the cities of Lombardy with the revoltof the popular faction against the bishops and the rulingnobles; and half a century later, in the Low Countries, theanti-Gregorian writer Sigebert of Gembloux complains ofthe revolutionary propaganda against the established orderin Church and State that was heard in the workshops andfactories, making the common people the judges of theclergy and denying the validity of the sacraments admin-istered by married or simoniac priests.®

This uncompromising denunciation of the worldlinessand corruption of the existing state of the Church by thereformers and still more the denial of the validity of theorders and the sacraments of the unreformed clergy by themore extreme representatives of the reforming movement,like Humbert of Moyenmoutier, recall the uncompromis-ing rigorism which characterized the old Western heresies,like Novatianism and Donatism. Thus it is not surprisingthat the reforming movement coincided with the reap-pearance of heresy and sectarian activity in the West, andthat there was even a certain confusion between the twomovements, as we see in the case of the priest of Scherewho was burnt at Cambrai, in 1077, as an heresiarch whostirred up the common people, although he was regardedby Gregory VII as an orthodox defender of the cause ofreform. In the same way the Patarine movement in North-ern Italy which began in close alliance with the reformedPapacy eventually became so contaminated with unortho-dox elements that the name of Patarines eventually becamethe colloquial Italian term for heretics.

6 Cf. esp. his letter to Archdeacon Henry in Marine andDurand, Thesaurus novus, I, 230.

We see how this transition from orthodoxy to heresytook place in the case of Arnold of Brescia, the disciple ofAbelard and the opponent of St. Bernard, who was one oftiie leading figures in Italian society in the first half of thetwelfth century. He first became involved in the conflictbetween the commune and the Bishop of Brescia—astruggle which began, as at Milan in the previous century,with an alliance of the commune and reformers against theimperialist bishop, but which was still carried on after theelection of a reforming bishop supported by Rome. InArnold’s view the real cause of the conflict was the temporalpower of the bishop and the wealth of the Church, andthe true solution was to be found in a return to the povertyof the primitive Church. In this he did not go much furtherthan many orthodox reformers, like Pope Paschal II him-self who had attempted to solve the conflict with the Em-pire in mi by a wholesale abandonment of the temporalauthority and privileges of the Church. But Arnold wentmuch further when he asserted that priests who held prop-erty or exercised temporal authority could not be saved;that everything temporal must be resigned to the princeand the laity, and the Church must return to a state ofevangelical poverty.

John of Salisbury, who gives a remarkably impartial ac-count of Arnold’s career, says that what he taught was inagreement with Christian ideals but quite irreconcilablewith life,7 and so long as he remained in exile in Franceand at Zurich, he seems to have been regarded as an un-worldly and impracticable idealist. But when he returnedto Italy and to Rome about 1147 he found himself oncemore in a revolutionary atmosphere highly favourable tothe propagation of his ideas. In 1143 the Roman com-mune had risen against the Pope and proclaimed therestoration of the Republic. It was an expression of thesame communal movement which had led the Lombardcities to revolt against episcopal control. But in Rome thebishop was the spiritual head of Christendom and the citywas the heir and embodiment of the immemorial tradition

7 Hist. Pont., 64.

of classical antiquity, so that the rise of the commune in-evitably involved a conflict with international forces: itsclaim to civic independence touched the interests of thePapacy at its vital centre, while its assumption of the vener-able title of “the Senate and People of Rome” was a chal-lenge to the Germanic Empire.

The theories of Arnold of Brescia, which had a purelyreligious origin, provided the revolutionary commune withan effective ideological justification for its struggle with thePapacy, and for about seven years the reformer threw him-self heart and soul into the struggle and became the apolo-gist for the republican cause. But his attempt to arrange analliance between the commune and the Emperor at theexpense of the Papacy proved a failure. The Roman re-sistance collapsed before the armed power of Frederick Bar-barossa. The German Emperor handed him over to theEnglish Pope Hadrian IV and he was executed as a hereticat the same time that Frederick was crowned Emperor.

Thus Arnold’s career is typical not only of the alliancebetween the new social forces and the rdigious idealism ofthe extreme reformer, but also of the attempt of theItalian intelligentsia to revive an association between thecivic patriotism of the Italian cities and the old traditionsof classical Rome.

The same tendency was to find expression in the laterItalian Ghibelline movement—in Dante and Cola di Rienzi,as well as in Petrarch—and in all of them we see the samedisproportion of spiritual aims and political means. Thiscontradiction between the romantic idealization of “thesacred city of Rome, the mistress of the world, the makerand mother of all the emperors” and the complete failureof the republican party to face political realities finds adramatic though comic expression in the interview betweenthe deputation of the Senate and the Emperor Frederickin 1155 described by Otto of Freising in which each partyconsidered itself as the only true heir of the tradition ofancient Rome.8 Nevertheless the civic patriotism of theItalian communes was a real force, as Frederick I experi-

8 Gesta Frederici, lib. II, cap. 29 and 30.

208 religion and the rise of western culture

enced when the northern chivalry was broken at Legnanoround the “carroccio” of St Ambrose by the forces of theLombard League.

And in the same way, in spite of the impracticable na-ture of Arnold of Brescia's programme, the revolutionaryidealism of the religious reformers was also a real forcewhich represented a serious challenge to the traditionalorder in the Church. During the second half of the twelfthcentury the Church in Northern Italy and Southern Francewas threatened by the rapid increase of heretical and sec-tarian movements, ranging from the oriental dualism ofthe Catharists, the Western representatives of the Bogo-mils,® through the Amoldists and Speronists and Lom-bards to the Poor Men of Lyons and the HumHiati whichwere in origin orthodox lay movements for radical religiousreform that came into conflict with the local authoritiesand gradually or partially lapsed into schism and heresy.These movements were particularly active among the newurban classes, as we see from the way in which the nameTextores—Weavers—acquired a sectarian significance. Butthey also appealed to the anticlerical elements among thenobility and the ruling class in the communes. For example,the heresy of Ugo Speroni, which has only recently becomeknown by the discovery of the treatise of Vacarius,10 thepioneer of legal studies in England, was the result of theprivate theories of a distinguished lawyer and consul ofPiacenza, while in Languedoc some of the greatest nobles inthe land, families like Esclamonde of Foix, the widow ofJourdain de 1'Isle Jourdain, were practising Catharists.

On the whole the Popes showed a for greater understand-ing of the importance of this challenge than the Hohen-staufen Emperors showed towards the revolutionary spiritof the communes. They recognized, almost from the begin-ning, that the sectarian movement involved two essentiallydissimilar elements, which demanded two different meth-ods of treatment. On the one hand, the Catharist or

®Cf. Ch. VI.

10 Published by P. Ilarino da Milano in 194; under the titleL'Eresia di Ugo Speroni.

Albigensian heresy was not a reformist movement or evenan unorthodox form of Christianity. It marked the reap-pearance of an ancient oriental religion as far or fartherremoved from Christianity than the religion of Islam. Con-sequently the Papacy used the same methods as it had em-ployed against the Moslems—the method of the Crusade,and of an appeal to Christian princes to use their power indefence of the faith; a method which was supplementedby a missionary campaign for the reconversion of the af-fected regions and finally by a code of repressive legisla-tion which gave birth to the Inquisition.

This marks a radical departure from the traditionaltheory, expressed in the sentence of St. Bernard, Fidessuadenda est non imponenda. It was largely due to theinfluence of the revived study of Roman law, since theassimilation of heresy to treason by Innocent III in 1199,although it was in accord with the practice of the medievalstate both in the East and the West, follows the precedentof the old civil legislation as represented by the CodexTheodosianus.11 On this matter Papacy and Empire wereat one, and the only question at issue was which powershould control the process of repression; and the final or-ganization of the Inquisition by Gregory IX in 1231 wasdetermined by the unwillingness of the Papacy to allowFrederick II a completely free hand in applying his drasticlegislation against heresy.

It is, in fact, difficult to separate the new attitude ofthe Church towards the suppression of heresy from thetendency of the Popes of the thirteenth century to assumea direct responsibility for the control of Christian societyas a whole: a tendency which was no doubt conditionedby the circumstances of the great struggle with the Hohen-staufen Emperors and the influence of Roman law, butwhich was ultimately the logical conclusion of the sameunitary theocratic conception of Christian society that had

11 The Manichaeans, in particular, had always been persecutedwith exceptional severity. Under the code of Justinian they wereliable to the death penalty, and this goes back before the con-version of the Empire to the time of Diocletian, who ordered theirleaders to be burnt and their followers to be beheaded.

given birth to the Sacred Empire itself. But in contrast tothis development of external and legal measures of repres-sion, we find another method directly inspired by thespiritual ideals of the reforming movement and whichsought to meet the demands of the dissident lay move-ments on their own ground. The Papacy recognized thatthe essential aims of these movements—above all the at-tempt to lead a life of poverty and evangelical perfectionoutside the monastic order—were orthodox in principle, andit attempted from the first to discriminate between thegroups which rejected the priesthood and the sacramentsof the Church and those which desired to fulfil their voca-tion within the hierarchical order.

Thus it was not until 1184 that a final breach occurredbetween the Waldensians and the Church, and as late as1179 they had received conditional approval from the greatcanonist Pope Alexander III. At the same time theHumiliati—a lay movement similar to the Waldensianswhich flourished among the artisans and populace of Milanand the Lombard communes—never entirely broke awayfrom the Church, but became divided into two branches,one of which received Papal approval and continued toflourish throughout the thirteenth century and later.

It is in rdation to these movements that we must viewthe rise of the Friars Minor. In its origins the Franciscanmovement has a considerable resemblance to the Walden-sians. It differed from them, above all, by the fact that itsfounder was one of the greatest religious geniuses in thehistory of Christendom, a man of the most intense origi-nality who had a profound influence on the spirit of West-ern Christianity and Western culture. But it also differedin that St. Francis was from the first entirely and whole-heartedly committed to the cause of Catholic unity so thatin consequence the Papacy found in his Order an idealorgan for the evangelization of the new classes and the newsociety which had grown up in the new cities outside thetraditional cadres of the territorial feudal Church. It is sig-nificant that the man who did more than any other tosecure the recognition of the new order and its intimate

relation with the Papacy was Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia,the future Pope Gregory IX, the organizer of the Inquisi-tion and the leader of the great conflict with Frederick II.Yet this indomitable representative of militant theocracywas the devoted admirer and personal friend of the saintwho went further than any Waldensian or Patarine in hispursuit of a purely evangelical way of life based on theliteral observance of the words of the Gospel. It is howevermisleading to speak, as I have done, of the primitive Fran-ciscan community as a religious Order. Nothing was furtherfrom the mind of St. Francis than the foundation of amonastic order of the traditional type, as we see in thepassage of his last Testament in which, after his profes-sion of faith and his loyalty to the Hierarchical Church, hereturns once more to the origin and purpose of his way oflife.

And after the Lord had given me some brothers, no-oneshowed me what to do, but the Most High Himself revealedto me that 1 must live according to the form of the HolyGospel: this I had written down in few and simple wordsand the Lord Pope confirmed it for me.

Those of us who were clerics said the office like otherclerics, and the laymen said the Paternosters. And veryhappily we stayed in poor and abandoned churches, andwe were ignorant and subject to all men. And I workedwith my hands and still wish to work; and it is my firmwill that all the other brethren should do some manuallabour which belongs to an honest way of life. And thosewho do not know how to work should learn; not out ofcupidity to receive the price of their labour, but in orderto give a good example and to banish idleness. And if weshould not be given reward for our labour, let us have re-course to the bounty of the Lord and beg our bread fromdoor to door.

The Lord has revealed to me that we should employ thisform of salutation: “The Lord give you Peace.”12

12 Opuscula S. P. Francisci, 76-82. English translation inKarrer, St. Francis of Assisi, 274-76 (1947), and in Cuthbert’sLife, 450-55.

212 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

For what St. Francis desired was not a new religious Or-der nor any form of ecclesiastical organization but the fol-lowing of Christ—a new life which would shake off theencumbrances of tradition and organization and propertyand learning and recover an immediate personal contactwith the divine source of eternal life, as revealed in theGospel. How was it possible to reconcile such an ideal withthe vast and complicated organization of ecclesiasticalpower represented by such a man as Gregory IX, and withthe ancient heritage of intellectual culture and social tradi-tion of which medieval Christendom was the bearer? Inone sense it was not possible. The primitive rule was notrealized. The Friars Minor became a religious Order, dif-ferent in form and spirit from the older Orders but no lessan integral part of the ecclesiastical organization, and theunlettered laymen of the primitive tradition became oneof the great student Orders which dominated the uni-versities and were renowned as philosophers and men oflearning.

Yet in spite of all this the spirit of St. Francis remained acreative force in the life of the time, and even literatureand art owed more to his inspiration than to any of hislearned and cultured contemporaries. In spite of thechanges in the character of the “Order” there always re-mained a remnant faithful to the spirit of their founderand the primitive observance, men like Brother Leo andBrother Giles who had been with the saint from the be-ginning and bore witness to what they had seen with theirown eyes. And it is to this group and their successors inTuscany and the March of Ancona that we owe the greaterpart of that remarkable body of tradition—both historicaland legendary—in which the image of St. Francis and thespirit of the primitive fraternity have been preserved. Buton the other side, the Franciscan movement influencedmedieval religion and culture no less through its officialecclesiastical organization as a new religious Order.

Here its development owes much to the example of theother great Order of Friars, the Dominicans, which aroseat the same period and was adopted by the Papacy as anew and powerful organ of the Church Militant. Nothing

could be more dissimilar than the character and aims ofthe two founders. St. Dominic had devoted his life to com-bating the heretical movement in Aragon and Languedoc,and he felt the need of a new organization more flexibleand more highly trained than the older religious Orders—one which could devote its whole energy to the strugglewith heresy by preaching and the intellectual training ofqualified teachers. In these respects his aims were similarto those of the founder of the Jesuits three hundred yearslater, and like the latter he was, above all, an organizerand a leader of men, whose aim it was to create a corporateinstrument for the service of the Church. This was also theaim which Cardinal Ugolino had in mind for the Francis-cans, and it is possible that he entertained the idea of afusion between the two movements when he brought thetwo founders together at Rome in 1218.18

Any scheme of this kind was of course impossible toreconcile with St. Francis's profoundest convictions, never-theless the influence of authority and the pressure of exter-nal circumstances did produce a certain assimilation be-tween the two Orders. The Dominicans accepted theFranciscan principle of corporate poverty and becameknown as Friars instead of Canons.14 And on the otherside the Franciscans adopted the Dominican ideal of ateaching Order and shared their intellectual activity andtheir participation in the life of the medieval universities.

Nevertheless, in spite of this, each Order retained itsown spiritual character. The Dominicans remained consist-ently devoted to their original ideal of a teaching Order—the Order of Preachers—while the Franciscans of both Ob-servances and traditions preserved their original mission aspreachers of the elementary and essential Christian truthsto the common people. Yet both Orders rivalled one an-other in their activities in the universities and in the life of

is Cf. Thomas of Celano, II, 150; Speculum Perfectionis, 43.J. R. H. Moorman, Sources for the Life of St. Francis, 20-21(1940).

14 St. Dominic was himself a Canon Regular, and the Domini-can Rule was based on that of St. Augustine and of the Pre-monstratensians, the "White Canons”.

214 RELIGION and the rise of western culture

the medieval city, as we see for example in the movementto bring peace to the warring factions in the Italian citiesin 1230 which was known as the Great Alleluia.

It was the Franciscans who first had the greatest influ-ence on vernacular literature, through their use of verseand minstrelsy in their popular apostolate—a practice whichhad been initiated by St. Francis himself in his great Can-ticle of Brother Sun, and which later in the thirteenth cen-tury found its most remarkable expression in the Laudi ofFra Jacopone of Todi, the poet of the Spiritual movement.But in the fourteenth century it was the Dominicans whoinspired the great movement of German mysticism whichcentred in the priories and nunneries of the Rhinelandand Switzerland and produced a galaxy of mystics andspiritual writers—Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Margaret andChristina Ebner and the sisters of Unterlinden and Tbssand Engeltal.

Again, both Orders shared in the new missionary move-ment which begins with St. Francis's mission to the Egyp-tian Sultan El Kamil in 1219, and reached its culminationwith the establishment of a Catholic Archbishopric atPekin or Cambaluc in 1305. Here, however, the Franciscancontribution was the most remarkable, both in respect ofpersonal originality, as with St. Francis himself or RamonLull, and the scale of their achievements. For the journeysof the Friars, no less than the voyages of Columbus andVasco da Gama, mark the awakening of a European worldconsciousness and the end of the geographical Dark Ages.

There are, it seems to me, few more impressive docu-ments in the history of medieval culture than the recordof the journey of John of Plan Carpino in 1246-47 and Wil-liam of Rubrouck in 1253-54 across the whole breadth ofCentral Asia to the court of the Great Khan in Inner Mon-golia. Here we see two unknown worlds confronting oneanother; unable to comprehend each other's language andrepresenting the opposite poles of human experience.

And Western Christendom could not have found abetter representative than this companion of St. Francis,John of Plan Carpino, who travelled in apostolic fashion-in hunger and cold and nakedness—across the empty places

of the world where, he said, the only signs of man were thebones of the dead and the ruins of dead towns, in order tobring to the successor of Ghenghis Khan the letters of thePope bidding him cease from the slaughter of the inoffen-sive peoples of Eastern Europe. The reply which John ofPlan Carpino brought back, in Persian and Turkish with aMongol seal, was discovered not long ago in the Vaticanarchives by M. Pelliot, and a very remarkable document itis.15

This is a good example of the way in which the Papacymade use of the Friars as its personal agents and emis-saries in the affairs of Christendom. Indeed from the timeof Gregory IX onwards the relation between the Papacyand the Friars became ever closer, until the two greatOrders came to form a disciplined corps d’ilite under thedirect command of the Papacy. An international body ofthis kind, detached from local territorial obligations andprivate interests, had always been a great need of the re-formed Papacy, and therefore the creation of the Mendi-cant Orders together with the foundation of the universitiesmarks the culmination of the movement towards interna-tional and superpolitical unity which was the ideal ofmedieval Christendom.

But unfortunately it came too late: the great age of thereforming movement was over, and the Popes who did mostto favour and make use of the Friars were not men of thetype of Gregory VII or St. Bernard but able lawyers andstatesmen like Gregory IX himself and Innocent IV andMartin IV who were preoccupied with the intense politicalconflict with the Hohenstaufen and the fatal entangle-ments of the Angevin alliance.

Hence it came about that the prophetic and evangelicalvocation of the early Friars became subordinated to thedemands of ecclesiastical power politics, and this produceda rift in the reforming movement from which medievalChristendom never recovered. The Papacy issued from theconflict with the Hohenstaufen victoriously, but with a

18 Pelliot, "Les Mongols et la Papaut£” in Revue de I’orientChretien, 1922-23.

216 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

serious loss of moral prestige. In the following century itnever regained the universal European position that In-nocent III had held. Above all, it lost the leadership ofthe movement of reform. Henceforward during the laterMiddle Ages the reformers were predominantly anti-Papalin spirit, as were the Spiritual Franciscans and Wycliffe, orsupporters of the secular power like William of Ockhamand Marsiglio of Padua.

This tragic crisis of the medieval spirit is reflected in thegreatest literary achievement of that age, the Divina Corn-media of Dante. Nowhere can we find a more perfect ex-pression of the power and the glory of the medieval cul-tural achievement which reached from Heaven to Hell andfound room for all the knowledge and wisdom and all thesuffering and aggressiveness of medieval humanity in its all-embracing vision of judgment. Yet at the same time it is amost drastic indictment of the medieval Church, and thegreat apocalyptic pageant of the concluding cantos ofthe Purgatorio expresses the revolutionary criticism of thespiritual Franciscans and the Joachimites rather than theorthodox conception of the Papal theocracy which wasthe ideal of Aegidius Romanus and St. Thomas himself.16

This crisis of the reforming movement and the declineof the unifying energy of medieval culture found outwardexpression in the two great external catastrophes of Dante'sgeneration—the end of the crusading states and the destruc-tion of the great crusading Order. The former was the in-evitable result of the way in which the crusading ideal hadbeen discredited and secularized by its use as a politicalweapon against Christian states like the Empire and thekingdom of Aragon. The destruction of the Templars byPhilip IV, linked as it was with the attack on the prestigeand independence of the Papacy by the simultaneousprocess against the memory of Pope Boniface VIII and therehabilitation of Philip IV by the Papacy, was far more

16 We find the same revolutionary criticism two generationslater in the very different vision of our English poet WilliamLangland. In spite of his bitter hostility towards the Friars hispoem is penetrated through and through by the ideas and idealsof the Franciscan Spirituals.

RELIGIOUS CRISIS OF MEDIEVAL CULTURE 217

serious, since it marked the complete victory of the tem-poral power of the new monarchy over the internationalelements in medieval society. The imposing structure ofmedieval Christendom which had been built up by theidealism of the reforming movement, the organizing powerof the Papacy, and the devotion of the religious Ordersproved powerless to withstand the determined attack of ahandful of unscrupulous officials like Guillaume de Nogaretand Pierre Flotte, who were the servants of the newmonarchy and understood how to exploit the new tech-niques of power in a ruthlessly totalitarian fashion.

That such a collapse could have occurred shows thatmedieval culture was undergoing a process of revolutionarychange. In fact the second half of the thirteenth century,which from many points of view seems to represent theculmination of medieval culture, also represents a turningpoint and a moment of crisis. For three centuries thedevelopment of Western Europe had been centripetal to-wards the unity of Christendom and the creation of anintellectual and spiritual synthesis. From the second half ofthe thirteenth century this movement is reversed and acentrifugal process begins which continues throughout thelater Middle Ages until it culminates in the religious divi-sion and social changes of the sixteenth century.

This change was not, however, entirely determined bythe internal forces of Western culture, for at the sameperiod a series of changes was taking place in Western Asiathat resulted in a general shifting in the axis of world cul-ture. It was in this age that the region between the Mediter-ranean and the Iranian plateau which had been the focusof world civilization for four thousand years lost its positionof cultural leadership and became stationary or decadent.Hitherto Europe had looked inward to Jerusalem andByzantium and “Babylon” (i.e. Cairo) as to the centres ofthe world, and Western man had been the pupil and theimitator of older, richer and more advanced civilizations.Now for the first time Europe is forced to follow untroddenways and to find new goals, and at the same time becomesconscious of its own powers, critical of accepted traditionsand ready for new ventures.

Chapter XII

Conclusion: Medieval Religionand Popular Culture

The age of Dante and Philip le Bel, which saw the trans-lation of the Papacy of Avignon and the failure of the for-lorn hope of the Emperor Henry VII to reassert the claimsof the Holy Roman Empire, marks the end of the medievaldevelopment. The later Middle Ages open a new chapter inWestern history. They are the time when Western mansets out with uncertain and hesitating steps on his greatadventure for the discovery of a new world: not merelythe discovery of new oceans and continents but the dis-covery of nature and of man himself as the crown and per-fection of nature.

Yet in doing so Western man was not consciously turn-ing his back on the spiritual ideals and the religious faithwhich had been the driving forces in medieval culture.When he started on his new journey his mind was stilldominated by medieval ideals and he was seeking newchannels for their realization.

We see this in many different departments of life. Forexample, die external expansion of Western culture by ex-ploration and discovery is directly related to the earliercrusading movement through the work of Prince Henry theNavigator, who planned his programme of discovery in theservice of his religious ideals. x

In the same way, as I said at the beginning, the originsof modem science in the later Middle Ages are found, notamong the Averroists of Padua, but with the disciples ofRoger Bacon and William of Ockham, who regarded reli-gious faith as the ultimate source of true knowledge.

But in the study of medieval culture it is necessary toremember that the higher levels of intellectual culture andpolitical thought, on which the historian's attention alwaystends to be concentrated, form a very small part of thetotal picture, and that the creative activity of religion ismost powerful where it is least recorded and most difficultto observe—in the minds of the masses and in the traditionsof the common people. And thus in the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, when the scholars were intent on therevival of learning and the statesmen were transforming theorder of Christendom into a new state system, the mind ofthe common people was still immersed in the religious at-mosphere of the medieval past.

We possess a precious and almost unique record of thispopular religious culture in the first great vernacularEnglish poem—William Langland's “Piers Plowman”. Forthough Langland was an educated and even a learned manhe represents the tradition and culture neither of the courtnor of the schools. He is a voice from the underworld ofthe common people, speaking their language, using theirimagery and sharing their ideals. And his poem seems toprove that the fundamental principles of the creative periodof medieval religion had been more completely assimilatedand incorporated by the new vernacular culture of the com-mon people than it had been by the higher and more liter-ary culture of the ruling elements in Church and state.

In the first place Langland represents the movement ofspiritual reform which had been the inspiration of medievalreligion for so long and which has now passed from themonastic orders and the Friars to the laity. In the secondplace, the reforming ideal is not conceived in terms of ec-clesiastical organization and government, but as a new wayof life as St. Francis had seen it, and there is the same in-sistence on the Franciscan ideal of poverty and compassionfor the poor, although the Friars no longer in his eyes ap-pear the true representatives of these ideals.

And in the apparel of a poor man and a pilgrim’s likenessMany times has God been met among poor people. . . .

And in a foal's frock once was he found

But it is far ago in St Francis time.1

And Langland is no less Franciscan in the way in which heattempts to bring the life of Christ and the high mysteriesof the faith into direct rdation with the homely realities ofcommon life. Indeed he goes even further on the sameroad, since his realism is no longer sublimated by the ro-mantic idealism of the courtly tradition but expresses theharsh realities of common life with a crude and scathingdirectness. Langland represents an older tradition than thatof the Troubadours. He does not belong to the new worldof courtly culture and oriental romance and Provencalsong, but to an older order which still maintained the na-tive traditions of culture and still clung to the antique al-literative measures of Anglo-Saxon heroic verse. He seemsat once more archaic and more modem than his great con-temporaries like Chaucer. His stem ascetic moralism hasnothing in common with the spirit of the Romance of theRose and the Decameron but looks forward to Bunyan andbackwards to the Poema Morale and the Anglo-Saxonhomilies.

Yet in spite of all this Langland’s work has incorporatedall the vital elements in the medieval religious tradition,which had been transmitted to the popular culture by thevernacular preaching of the Friars, and created from it avital unity of religion and culture which the more learnedand highly cultivated classes had failed to achieve.

We have seen how the fundamental dualism of Chris-tian thought had expressed itself during the earlier MiddleAges in the other-worldliness of the monastic ideal and inan unresolved conflict between the pagan traditions of thebarbarian warrior society and the Christian ideals of peaceand brotherly love. We have seen the great effort of thereforming movement to subdue the World to the Churchby the vindication of the primacy of the spiritual power, bycanonical reform and by the weapon of the Crusade. Andwe have seen how this heroic effort was weakened and

1B, xv, 202-23, 225-26.

broken at the close of the thirteenth century, so that in thelater Middle Ages the old social dualism reappeared in anew form in the conflict between the Church and the newsovereign state which was ultimately to destroy the unity ofWestern Christendom. Nor was this conflict in any waysolved by the Reformation, since it continued to operatemore intensely than ever within the divided Christendomin the new confessional Churches and in the new nationalsovereign states.

But in Langland’s vision we can see—if only for a mo-ment by a flash of poetic and prophetic inspiration—howthis dualism might have been surmounted and overcome.His view of life and his scale of values are no less other-worldly than those of the most ascetic representatives ofthe earlier medieval tradition. But they no longer find ex-pression in the flight to the desert or withdrawal to thecloister. For Langland the other-world is always immedi-ately present in every human relationship, and every man’sdaily life is organically bound up with the life of theChurch.

Thus every state of life in Christendom is a Christian lifein the full sense—an extension of the life of Christ on earth.And the supernatural order of grace is founded and rootedin the natural order and the common life of humanity.

Right as the Rose • that is red and sweetOut of a ragged root • and rough briarsSpringeth and spreadeth ♦ and spicers desire it,

So Do Best out of Do well • and Do better doth spring.2

True wedded folk • in this world are Do wellFor they must work and win • and the world sustain.For of this kind they come • that confessors be called,Kings and Knights, Keysets and churls,

Maidens and Martyrs • out of one man come.8

There is moreover no room for any social dualism or po-litical conflict between Church and state. For Langland re-mains faithful to the basic medieval conception of the One

Society whose members are differentiated by rank and au-thority, but are all alike children of one father and servantsof one master.

For we are all Christ's creatures • and of fiis coffers rich,And brethren as of one blood • as well beggars as earls,For on Calvary of Christ’s blood • Christendom gan spring,And blood brethren we became there • of one body won,As quasimodo geniti * and gentlemen each one.

No beggar or serving boy among us • save sin made himso.4 *

Langland’s poem is the last and in some respects themost uncompromising expression of the medieval ideal ofthe unity of religion and culture. He realized more clearlythan the poets and more intensely than the philosophersthat religion was not a particular way of life but the wayof all life, and that the divine love which is "the leader ofthe Lord's folk of heaven" is also the law of life upon earth.

For Heaven might not hold it: it was so heavy of himself,Till it had upon earth eaten his fill.

And when it had of this fold • flesh and blood taken,Was never leaf on a linden • lighter thereafter,

As light and as piercing • as the point of a needle,

That no armour may hold it • nor no high walls.6

Therefore these words • be written in the Gospel,

Ask and it shall be given you • for 1 give all things,

And that is the lock of love • that letteth out my grace,To comfort the careworn • cumbered with sin.0

This vision of Christendom as a labour of love is em-bodied in the great central figure of Piers Plowman whorepresents the threefold state of humanity. First he ap-pears as man, the child of nature, the peasant who sus-tains the world by his labour. Secondly he is the Son ofMan and the Son of God who saves the world by his blood,

4 B, xi, 192-97.

«B, i, 151-56.

6 E, i, 198-201.

MEDIEVAL RELIGION AND POPULAR CULTURE 223

Who comes in with a cross • before the common people.

Like in all limbs • to our Lord Jesus.

And thirdly he is the figure of the Church, the newspiritual humanity, anointed and enlightened by the HolyGhost to carry on the work of unity and salvation.

Hence the symbolism of the poem leads Langland neces-sarily to view human life according to the pattern of theearth as a work of spiritual tillage and harvest. In this he isreturning to the imagery of the Gospel and to the wordsof St. Paul, “We are fellow workers with God. You areGod's tillage. You are God’s building”; or, to use the wordsof the Vulgate which were so familiar to him, Dei agricul-tura estis.

In this image Langland finds an answer to the questionsthat were dividing the mind of medieval culture and de-stroying the unity of Christendom.

From the root of nature there springs the unexpectedand unpredictable flower of grace and the fruit of the spirit,which is eternal life. Christianity is the labour of love towhich every man is called according to his personal giftsand his social vocation, and the Church is the communityof love—the house of unity into which the harvest of hu-manity is brought.

And he called that House Unity • which is Holychurch in

English.7

Langland wrote at a time of deep distress and doubt, inthe midst of the Hundred Years' War, on the eve of theGreat Schism, when the great hopes of the reforming move-ment seemed to be lost. When, as he writes,

It seemeth now soothly • to the world’s sight,

That God’s Word worketh not • on learned or on lewd,But in such manner as Mark • meaneth in his Gospel,If the blind lead the blind • both shall fall into the ditch.9

Yet Langland's poem is itself a proof that all was notlost; that the labour of seven hundred years had not been

in vain. For if the barbarians of the West had learnt tothink such thoughts and speak such a language, it showsthat a new Christian culture had been bom which was notan alien ideal imposed externally, but was the common in-heritance of Western man.

What have we done with this inheritance? At least wehave had it. It has been part of our own flesh and bloodand the speech of our own tongue.

And the importance of these centuries of which I havebeen writing is not to be found in the external order theycreated or attempted to create, but in the internal changethey brought about in the soul of Western man—a changewhich can never be entirely undone except by the totalnegation or destruction of Western man himself.

If there is any troth in what I have been saying in thesetwo courses of lectures, such moments of vital fusion be-tween a living religion and a living culture are the creativeevents in history, in comparison with which all the externalachievements in the political and economic orders aretransitory and insignificant.

Appendix

Notes on Famous Medieval Art

Figure of Christ

From the Bewcastle Rood (c. 700) Warburg Institute.

The Anglian High Crosses are among the earliest andmost remarkable monuments of Western Christendom.Although they date from the first age of NorthumbrianChristianity, they show an astonishing mastery of designand execution, unlike anything to be found elsewhere inWestern Europe during this period. This new art owes itsorigin to the deliberate importation of Christian art andChristian craftsmen from the Mediterranean world by theleaders of the Anglian church, above all St. Wilfred andSt. Benedict Biscop in the second half of the seventh cen-tury. But while the ornament, especially the vine scroll,shows clear signs of Mediterranean (Syrian) influence, thestyle is not purely imitative, but represents an originalAnglian renaissance of classical Roman traditions. It is infact a true “Romanesque” art which anticipates the Con-tinental development by centuries. The Bewcastle cross hasa particularly close association with the great age of theNorthumbrian church, because it was erected in commemo-ration of King Alchfrith, the friend of St. Wilfred and thesupporter of the Roman party at the Synod of Whitby(664). It stands on the site of an old Roman fort high upon the Cumbrian moors beyond the Roman Wall. The fig-ure of Christ in Majesty resembles that on the earlier andeven finer Rood at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire. In bothcases the face is unbearded, but carries a moustache. The

Bewcastle inscription is entirely runic, whereas at Ruthwellthe corresponding figure has a Latin inscription—IHS XPSIUDEX AEQUITATIS. Bestiae et Dracones cognoveruntin Deserto Sdlvatorem Mundi. It seems that both of thesegreat crosses were set up as triumphant assertions of thepower of the Cross over the forces of outer barbarism.

Liturgy and Hierarchy

Ivory, Stadtbibliothek, Frankfort a. M. From Propylaen-

Weltgeschichte, Vol. III.

This is one of a pair of ivory diptychs which originallyformed the covers of a sacramentary. They are a fine ex-ample of the liturgical art of the Carolingian age, and showthe figure of an archbishop wearing the Pallium and sur-rounded by his attendant clergy. In the first panel, now inthe Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, the archbishop isholding a book open at the Introit for the First Sunday ofAdvent, while he raises his right hand in benediction. Thesecond panel, from the Stadtbibliothek at Frankfurt, whichis shown here, depicts the liturgical action itself. The arch-bishop is standing before the altar, and the open bookshows the beginning of the Canon of the Mass.

The Medieval Abbey

Durham Cathedral.

The Cathedral monastery at Durham is one of the mostwonderful monuments of medieval culture in Northern Eu-rope. For it is not only the finest and most complete ex-ample of Anglo-Norman architecture, it is also typical ofthe social development of the feudal monastery as a politi-cal and civic institution, a sacred city which ruled the landbetween Tweed and Tyne and protected the NorthernMarches against the Scots.

But behind this feudal development there lies the an-cient tradition of Northumbrian Christianity which madeDurham the holiest place in the north, for it was thesanctuary of St. Cuthbert and the legitimate heir of thesacred traditions of the Holy Isle of Lindisfame from whichthe monastic life first came to Northumbria. After the de-

struction of Lindisfame by the Danes, the body of St.Cuthbert began a long pilgrimage through the north, andwherever the body rested, the see of St. Cuthbert had itscentre. Finally, after a century at Chester le Street, it wasbrought at the end of the tenth century to Durham, stillcarried, according to tradition, by the descendants of theoriginal bearers of the body, “the men of St. Cuthbert”,who preserved a privileged position as tenants of the bish-ops. Finally, after the Norman conquest the monastic lifewas revived by three monks from Evesham—a Norman andtwo Anglo-Saxons—who had been inspired by their readingof Bede to restore the tradition of Northumbrian monas-ticism first at Jarrow, and finally, in 1083, at Durham itself.The monastery stands high on a rocky peninsula above theRiver Wear, defended on the north by the castle of thebishops which covered the neck of the peninsula. Thecloister and the monastic buildings lie south of thecathedral.

Medieval Kingship

Canute as Christian King. British Museum (Stowe MS.

944).

This drawing, from the Liber Vitae of Hyde Abbey(British Museum, Stowe 944), shows King Canute and hisqueen, Aelgivu (Emma), offering a gold cross to the altarof the abbey, while angels place a crown and a veil on theirheads and point upwards to the figure of Christ in Majesty.The drawing is a fine example of the Winchester school,c. 1020, the classical style of Christian Wessex, and it showsnot only how the Viking conqueror had acquired by hiscoronation the character of a Christian king, but also howthe revival of Christian culture; which had been begun byKing Alfred, proved strong enough to survive the politicalcatastrophe of the second Danish conquest and to trans-form the culture of its conquerors.

The court art of Danish England owed nothing to thestill vigorous tradition of Nordic paganism, it was the artof King Alfred's descendants; and King Alfred's foundationof Newminster (Hyde Abbey), in the same way, was the

special object of the Danish conqueror’s protection andbenefactions.

The Medieval Knight

Tomb of William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury (d. 1226)in Salisbury Cathedral.

The medieval idea of knighthood finds its classical ex-pression in the art of the thirteenth century, alike in archi-tectural sculpture, as in the famous equestrian figure ofBamber (probably representing St Stephen of Hungary),and still more typically in the tomb effigies which are sonumerous in this country. An example is the tomb tradi-tionally ascribed to William Longsword, the son of HenryII, and the father of William Longsword, the crusader whoaccompanied St. Louis to Egypt and died in the Battle ofMansourah, and whose cenotaph and effigy is also in Salis-bury Cathedral.

In contrast to these figures which express the classicalidea of Christian knighthood, the romantic or courtly con-ception of knighthood also finds expression in art, espe-cially in painting. Thus the famous Manasse codex of theGerman poets, which was produced at Zurich at the be-ginning of the fourteenth century, shows the knight eitheras a youthful, rather effeminate figure with long hair andflowing robes, or in full armour with the great tilting hel-met, mounted on a barded destrier. In the latter case,though the figure is supposed to represent a particular poetlike Hartman von Aue or Ulrich von Lichenstein, the faceand even the human figure have entirely disappeared. Manand horse have become transformed into a sort of heraldicmonster, a fantastic bird-headed hippogriff. And the factthat the same age has produced such completely differentrepresentations of the same institution is a striking exampleof the dualism that underlies the most brilliant develop-ment of medieval culture.

The Oriental Influence in Medieval CultureThe Death-bed of William II of Sicily. From the BerneManuscript of Peter of Eboli, de rebus Siculis carmen.Propylaen-Weltgeschichte, Vol. III.

NOTES ON FAMOUS MEDIEVAL ART 229

The brilliant culture of the Norman kingdom of Sicilywas steeped in Oriental and Byzantine influences, and thelife of the court resembled that of a Saracen ruler. Thisillustration shows the dying king attended by his Arab phy-sician and astrologer, with the mourners bewailing his deathin Oriental fashion.

Similar conditions existed at the Spanish courts, and theEscorial Manuscript of the Book of Games, by Alfonso theWise, depicts the king among his Moorish secretaries andmen of learning.

No aspect of medieval culture has been more neglectedthan this intensive process of cultural intercourse betweenEast and West which took place in the Western Mediter-ranean during the central period of the Middle Ages.

The German Prince Bishop Frederick I, Archbishop ofMagdeburg, 1142-52.

From his tomb in Magdeburg Cathedral. Propylaen-

Weltgeschichte, Vol. III.

The metropolitan see of Magdeburg was founded byOtto I in 968 as the centre of ecclesiastical jurisdictionfor all the lands beyond the Elbe, and throughout the Mid-dle Ages it was one of the chief bridgeheads of Germanexpansion towards the east. During the twelfth century thearchbishops collaborated with the Margraves of Branden-burg in the systematic colonization of the Eastern Marchesby settlers from the west. Archbishop Frederick was one ofthe leaders of the crusade against the Wends in 1147, whichon the whole had a disastrous effect on the conversion ofthe Slavs by increasing the antagonism between Christiansand pagans, and it was his successor Wichman who didmost to organize the colonization of the lands between theElbe and the Havel by Flemish and Dutch settlers.

Prince Henry the Navigator. 1394-1460.

Third son of King John of Portugal and Philippa of Lan-caster, Master of the Order of Christ. From the Paris

Manuscript of Azurara’s Conquest of Guinea, c. 1453.

Propylaen-Weltgeschichte, Vol. IV.

230 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE

Henry the Navigator is one of the typical figures of tireperiod of transition between the Middle Ages and modemtimes. He was the last of the crusaders and the first of theconquistadores. He devoted his whole life to the struggleagainst Islam in Africa, taking a prominent part in the con-quest of Ceuta in 1415, in the disastrous siege of Tangierin 1437, and the capture of Alcacer in 1458. This was en-tirely in the medieval traditibn, as it were a continuation ofSt Louis' last crusade against Tunis. Where Henry differsfrom his predecessors is in his development of geographicaldiscovery and colonization in the service of the crusadingideal. It was his aim to establish a new Christian dominionin West Africa so as to turn the flank of Islam, and possiblyestablish relations .with some Christian kingdom which wassupposed to exist beyond the frontiers of Islam. Year afteryear he sent his ships west and south along the Africancoast, until at last in 1445-46 they passed Cape Verde anddiscovered the world of tropical Africa. It was this discoverythat first broke down the limits of Western Christendom,so that even before the discovery of America the vast pos-sibilities of a new world were opened to medieval Europe,as we see in the letter of the humanist Politian to KingJohn II of Portugal in 1491. But at the same time thecrusading ideal became contaminated with the negro slavetrade and the quest for gold, both of which were inaugu-rated by Prince Henry. In spite of this, he remains a thor-oughly medieval personality: a crusading prince after thepattern of St. Louis, devout, chaste and ascetic; and it wasas the head of a military order—the Order of Christ—andunder the banner of the crusade that all his expeditionsand settlements were made.

Aachen, 86

Abbo, Abbot, 127

Abelard, 184,185,190, 206

Abu Ma'shar, 192

Acton, Lord, 15

Adalard of Corbie, Abbot, 65

Adalbero, 182

Adalbert, St., Bishop, 115, x 16,1x7

Adam of Bremen, 98-99,1x3Adela of Blois, 183Adelard of Bath, X92Aegidius Romanus (Colonna),X78, x8o

Aelbert of York, Bishop, 65Aethelwine, X44Africa, 30, 3x, 70Against the Simonists, 130, X31Ahab, 76

Albigenses, 157-158, 195, 209.

See also CatharistsAlbigensian Crusade, 157-158,209

A1 Battani, X92Alberic, Prince, X24Albert the Great, St., Bishop,194,*96

Alcuin, 21, 6x, 64, 65, 79, 8x,184

Aldhelm, St., Bishop, 51, 60Alexander III, Pope, 188, 203Alexander IV, Pope, 197Alexander of Hales, 190Alfano of Salerno, Archbishop,

Al^arabi9x92

Alfred the Great, King, 23, 86,87-90, 100

Alfred of Sereshel, 192A1 Ghazali, 192Alix of Blois, 156A1 Khwarizmi, 192A1 Kindi, 192Alleluia the Great, 214Alphege, St., Archbishop, 94“Altus Prosator,” poem, 55

Alvarius Pelagius, 178Amalarius of Metz, 65Amals, 69

Amand, St., Bishop, 19, 58Ambrose, St., Bishop, 26, 30,38,39-42

Ambrosian Rite, 43“Andreas," poem, 52Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 204Angevins, 156, 184Angilbert, St., Abbot, 63Anianus, St., Bishop, 32Anglo-Saxons, 23, 58-61, 70,72-74, 85-90,94,114,143-144, I82-I83, 220Anjoy, 141,183Anna Comnena, 149-150Anselm, St., Archbishop, 20,182, 201, 204.

Anselm of Havelburg, 204Anskar, St., Bishop, 85Antichrist, Drama of, 204Apocalypticism, 204Arians, 31,74, 75.Aristoteliamsm, 184, 189 sqq.Aristotelian Sociology, 176,177-180Armenia, 109

Arnold of Brescia, 206-208Amoldists, 208Amoul the Old, Count, 142Amulf, 87, 89,90Arthurian Cycle, 156-157Ascham, Roger, 160Asdings, 69Asser, 90

Astrik (Anastasius), St., Arch-bishop, 116

Athanasius, St, Archbishop, 19Athaulf, King, 70Attila, 104

Aucassin and Nicolette, 158Augustine, St., of Canterbury,Archbishop, 59,73,107Augustine, St., of Hippo,Bishop, 20, 23, 26, 30, 35,

232

39-41, 46-47, 68, 122-124,192

Augustus, 28Avars, 104-106

Averroes (lbn Rushd), 178,193Averroists, 193, 218Avicenna (lbn Sena), 178,192Avitus, St., Bishop, 32Azo, 187

Bacon, Francis, 17,190 n.Bacon, Roger, 17-18,188,196-107, 218

Baldwin II of Flanders, Count,141,142Balts, 69, 74Barbastro, Battle of, 153Bartholomew Anglicus, 197Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 180Basil, St, Bishop, 47Baudri of Meung sur Loire,Archbishop, 183Bayard Chevalier, Life of, 160Bee Abbey, 127,182Benchnir, Versiculi FamilieBenchuir, 56

Bede, Venerable St, 18,23,51,6on.,6i, 73-74,77,182Bela III, King, 118Benedict, St., 46,47-48,53-54;

Rule, 47-48, 58Benedict VIII, Pope, 128Benedict IX, Pope, 128Benedictbeuem Abbey, 63Benedict Biscop, St* Abbot50-60,182

Benedictines: see MonastidsmBenjamin of Tudela, 168Benzo of Alba, Bishop, 137Beowulf, Saga, 52,72,144Bernard, St., Abbot 139, 150,152,155,188,201-203,2°6»209,215

Bernard or Morlais, 204Bemward of Hildesheim, St,Bishop, 93

Bertin, St, Annals of, 111Bertin, St., Abbot 58

Bishops, Officials of the State,

Bolbio Abbey, ;8Boethius, St., 23,104Bogomil (Theophilus), 109Bogomils, 109-110,115, 208Bohemia, 115,117-119,182Bohemund, Prince, 151Boleslav the Great King, 95,116

Bolghar, 111

Bologna University, 185-189,

193.196

Bonaventure, St., Archbishop,

189.196

Boniface, St, Archbishop, 20,51,61-63,76-78,92Boniface VIII, Pope, 216Boris the Khagan, 107,108Bourges, Synod, 128Bridget of Sweden, 204Britain, 40

Brogne Abbey, 122,125Bruno of Cologne, St, Arch-bishop, 92Bruno, Duke, 86Bruno of Magdeburg, 136Bruno of Querfurt, St. (Boni-face), Bishop, 117Brzevnov Abbey, 115-116Bulgars, 102-104,106-110,112Burchard, Bishop, 127Buso, 89

Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman, 143-144

Byzantine Empire, 67,69,101-104,106-109,112-113,117-119,130

Cadoc, St, 51Caelestius, 49

Caesarius of Arles, St., Arch-bishop, 33, 46Camaldoli Abbey, 122,125Candida Casa, 49Canon Law, 127, 134, 137,186—189

Canterbury, 59-60,183,184Canute, King, 94-96

INDEX

Carloman, 62, 77Carolingian Empire, 21, 62-66,75,83,84-85,00-91,104-100,143,103,181-182,184,202

Cassian, John, St., 180,204Cassiodorus, 18,45,68,194Catherine of Siena, St, 180,204Catharism, 208-209. See alsoAlbigensesCathaulf, 81

Celtic Church: see Ireland,Wales, Monastidsm; use ofrhymed verse, 41Celts: see Ireland, Wales, Mo-nastidsm

Cerularius, Michael, 130Cervantes, 160

Chansons de Geste, 144-146,150,152

Charlemagne (Charles theGreat), 64-65, 79-81, 82-83,84,88,90-91,104Charles of Anjou, 151Charles the Bald, Emperor, 86,

Charles the Fat, Emperor, 86Charles Martel, 61-62, 75-77Charles the Simple, King, 143Charroux Synod, 148Chartres, School of, 182,184-185

Chaucer, 160, 220Chelles Synod, 138Chilperic, King, 237Chinese Culture, 21-22, 44,60 n.

Chivalry, 147, 158 sqq.

Chretien de Troyes, 157Christian Religion and Culture,unique knowledge of, 12, 24Chrodegang, St., Bishop, 79Ciompi, 174Cistercians, 200-201City, Mediaeval, Chapters IXand X, passim

Civil (Roman) Law, 186-189,200^-210Claudian, 29

233

Clement of Ochrida, St.,Bishop, 108

Clement II (Suiger),Pope, 128,

129

Clermont Council, 149Clovis, King, 23, 31, 75Cluny Abbey, 122-126, 129,142, 148, 150, 200-201Codex Theodosianus, 209Cola di Rienzi, 207Collationes of St. Odo, 123Columba, St., Abbot, 19, 51,55* 58

Columban, St., Abbot, 19, 20,

37* 55* 58* Ruk of, 58Columbus, 214Communes, 103 sqq.Concordant of Worms, 199Conrad II, Emperor, 125Constantine the Great, Em-peror, 28

Constantine (Cyril), St, 107Constantine, Monk, 192Constantinople, 111Copernicus, 18Corbie Abbey, 65,182Cordova Khalifate, 85,154Corvey New Abbey, 63, 90, 92Coronation, 62, 75-77, 01-82,116

Coronations of Pepin, 62, 75-

Coroticus, 36Cortes, TTie, 182Cosmas of Prague, 182Courtly Culture (and Love),152 sqq., 220

Credenza di San Ambrogio, 166Crusades, 149 sqq., 201 (thesecond), 201; Albigensian,157-158,209; Aquitaine, 155Cumans, 104

Cyril (Constantine), St.,Bishop, 107-109, 117Czechs: see Bohemia and Cos-mas of Prague

Damasus II, Priest, 129Danes, Denmark, 72, 84-87,

94-100. See also NoisemenDaniel of Motley, 192Dante, 137, 166 n., 178, 180,188,194,197, 207,216, 2x8David, King, 70David, St, Bishop, 51Decameron, 220Decretum, Burchard’s, 127Decretum, Gratian’s, 188De Consideratione, 202De Coatempta Munch, 204De Cura Pastorali, St. Gregory’s,89

De Institutione Clericorum, 64De Institutione Regia, 81De Opere Monachorum, StAugustine’s, 46De Quaita Viguia Noctis, 203De Unitate Eccleme Conserv-anda, 135-136Denifle, 198 n.

Desiderius, Abbot of MonteCassino, 182

Dialogues, St Gregory's, 38Diocletian, 209 n.

Dionysius, the Pseudo-Areopa-

Divina t^oznmedia, 194, 197,216

Dominic, St, 195,213Dominicans, 100-197,212-214.