Chapter 7

The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from Augustine to Abélard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous _villas_ disappeared; towns vanished or shriveled up; libraries were burned or rotted away from neglect; schools were closed, to be reopened later here and there, after Charlemagne's educational edict, in an especially enterprising monastery or by some exceptional bishop who did not spend his whole time in fighting.

From about the year 1100 conditions began to be more and more favorable to the revival of intellectual ambition, a recovery of forgotten knowledge, and a gradual accumulation of new information and inventions unknown to the Greeks, or indeed to any previous civilization. The main presuppositions of this third period of the later Middle Ages go back, however, to the Roman Empire. They had been formulated by the Church Fathers, transmitted through the Dark Age, and were now elaborated by the professors in the newly established universities under the influence of Aristotle's recovered works and built up into a majestic intellectual structure known as Scholasticism. On these mediaeval university professors--the schoolmen--Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well stand to-day. "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time [they], did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."

Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages. Very gradually only did peculiarly free and audacious individual thinkers escape from this or that mediaeval belief, until in our own day some few have come to reject practically all the presuppositions on which the Scholastic system was reared. But the great mass of Christian believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, still professedly or implicitly adhere to the assumptions of the Middle Ages, at least in all matters in which religious or moral sanctions are concerned. It is true that outside the Catholic clergy the term "mediaeval" is often used in a sense of disparagement, but that should not blind us to the fact that mediaeval presumptions, whether for better or worse, are still common. A few of the most fundamental of these presuppositions especially germane to our theme may be pointed out here.

11. OUR MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE

The Greeks and Romans had various theories of the origin of things, all vague and admittedly conjectural. But the Christians, relying upon the inspired account in the Bible, built their theories on information which they believed vouchsafed to them by God himself. Their whole conception of human history was based upon a far more fundamental and thorough supernaturalism than we find among the Greeks and Romans. The pagan philosophers reckoned with the gods, to be sure, but they never assumed that man's earthly life should turn entirely on what was to happen after death. This was in theory the sole preoccupation of the mediaeval Christian. Life here below was but a brief, if decisive, preliminary to the real life to come.

The mediaeval Christian was essentially more polytheistic than his pagan predecessors, for he pictured hierarchies of good and evil spirits who were ever aiding him to reach heaven or seducing him into the paths of sin and error. Miracles were of common occurrence and might be attributed either to God or the devil; the direct intervention of both good and evil spirits played a conspicuous part in the explanation of daily acts and motives.[20]

As a distinguished church historian has said, the God of the Middle Ages was a God of arbitrariness--the more arbitrary the more Godlike. By frequent interferences with the regular course of events he made his existence clear, reassured his children of his continued solicitude, and frustrated the plots of the Evil One. Not until the eighteenth century did any considerable number of thinkers revolt against this conception of the Deity and come to worship a God of orderliness who abode by his own laws.

The mediaeval thinkers all accepted without question what Santayana has strikingly described as the "Christian Epic". This included the general historical conceptions of how man came about, and how, in view of his origin and his past, he should conduct his life. The universe had come into being in less than a week, and man had originally been created in a state of perfection along with all other things--sun, moon, and stars, plants and animals. After a time the first human pair had yielded to temptation, transgressed God's commands, and been driven from the lovely garden in which he had placed them. So sin came into the world, and the offspring of the guilty pair were thereby contaminated and defiled from the womb.

In time the wickedness became such on the newly created earth that God resolved to blot out mankind, excepting only Noah's family, which was spared to repeople the earth after the Flood, but the unity of language that man had formerly possessed was lost. At the appointed time, preceded by many prophetic visions among the chosen people, God sent his Son to live the life of men on earth and become their Saviour by submitting to death. Thereafter, with the spread of the gospel, the struggle between the kingdom of God and that of the devil became the supreme conflict of history. It was to culminate in the Last Judgment, when the final separation of good and evil should take place and the blessed should ascend into the heavens to dwell with God forever, while the wicked sank to hell to writhe in endless torment.

This general account of man, his origin and fate, embraced in the Christian Epic, was notable for its precision, its divine authenticity, and the obstacles which its authority consequently presented to any revision in the light of increasing knowledge. The fundamental truths in regard to man were assumed to be established once and for all. The Greek thinkers had had little in the way of authority on which to build, and no inconsiderable number of them frankly confessed that they did not believe that such a thing could exist for the thoroughly sophisticated intelligence. But mediaeval philosophy and science _were grounded wholly in authority_. The mediaeval schoolmen turned aside from the hard path of skepticism, long searchings and investigation of actual phenomena, and confidently believed that they could find truth by the easy way of revelation and the elaboration of unquestioned dogmas.

This reliance on authority is a fundamental primitive trait. We have inherited it not only from our mediaeval forefathers, but, like them and through them, from long generations of prehistoric men. We all have a natural tendency to rely upon established beliefs and fixed institutions. This is an expression of our spontaneous confidence in everything that comes to us in an unquestioned form. As children we are subject to authority and cannot escape the control of existing opinion. We unconsciously absorb our ideas and views from the group in which we happen to live. What we see about us, what we are told, and what we read has to be received at its face value so long as there are no conflicts to arouse skepticism.

We are tremendously suggestible. Our mechanism is much better adapted to credulity than to questioning. All of us believe nearly all the time. Few doubt, and only now and then. The past exercises an almost irresistible fascination over us. As children we learn to look up to the old, and when we grow up we do not permit our poignant realization of elderly incapacity among our contemporaries to rouse suspicions of Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, or Aristotle. Their sayings come to us unquestioned; their remoteness makes inquiry into their competence impossible. We readily assume that they had sources of information and wisdom superior to the prophets of our own day.

During the Middle Ages reverence for authority, and for that particular form of authority which we may call the tyranny of the past, was dominant, but probably not more so than it had been in other societies and ages--in ancient Egypt, in China and India. Of the great sources of mediaeval authority, the Bible and the Church Fathers, the Roman and Church law, and the encyclopaedic writings of Aristotle, none continues nowadays to hold us in its old grip. Even the Bible, although nominally unquestioned among Roman Catholics and all the more orthodox Protestant sects, is rarely appealed to, as of old, in parliamentary debate or in discussions of social and economic questions. It is still a religious authority, but it no longer forms the basis of secular decisions.

The findings of modern science have shaken the hold of the sources of mediaeval authority, but they have done little as yet to loosen our inveterate habit of relying on the more insidious authority of current practice and belief. We still assume that received dogmas represent the secure conclusions of mankind, and that current institutions represent the approved results of much experiment in the past, which it would be worse than futile to repeat. One solemn remembrancer will cite as a warning the discreditable experience of the Greek cities in democracy; another, how the decline of "morality" and the disintegration of the family heralded the fall of Rome; another, the constant menace of mob rule as exemplified in the Reign of Terror. But to the student of history these alleged illustrations have little bearing on present conditions. He is struck, moreover, with the ease with which ancient misapprehensions are transmitted from generation to generation and with the difficulty of launching a newer and clearer and truer idea of anything. Bacon warns us that the multitude, "or the wisest for the multitude's sake", is in reality "ready to give passage rather to that which is popular and superficial than to that which is substantial and profound; for the truth is that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid".

It is very painful to most minds to admit that the past does not furnish us with reliable, permanent standards of conduct and of public policy. We resent the imputation that things are not going, on the whole, pretty well, and find excuses for turning our backs on disconcerting and puzzling facts. We are full of respectable fears and a general timidity in the face of conditions which we vaguely feel are escaping control in spite of our best efforts to prevent any thoroughgoing readjustment. We instinctively try to show that Mr. Keynes must surely be wrong about the Treaty of Versailles; that Mr. Gibbs must be perversely exaggerating the horrors of modern war; that Mr. Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr. Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised sympathy for Bolshevism.

Yet, even if we could assume that traditional opinion is a fairly clear and reliable reflection of hard-earned experience, surely it should have less weight in our day and generation than in the past. For changes have overtaken mankind which have fundamentally altered the conditions in which we live, and which are revolutionizing the relations between individuals and classes and nations. Moreover, we must remember that knowledge has widened and deepened, so that, could any of us really catch up with the information of our own time, he would have little temptation to indulge the mediaeval habit of appealing to the authority of the past.

The Christian Epic did not have to rely for its perpetuation either on its intellectual plausibility or its traditional authority. During the Middle Ages there developed a vast and powerful religious State, the mediaeval Church, the real successor, as Hobbes pointed out, to the Roman Empire; and the Church with all its resources, including its control over "the secular arm" of kings and princes, was ready to defend the Christian beliefs against question and revision. To doubt the teachings of the Church was the supreme crime; it was treason against God himself, in comparison with which--to judge from mediaeval experts on heresy--murder was a minor offense.

We do not, however, inherit our present disposition to intolerance solely from the Middle Ages. As animals and children and savages, we are naively and unquestioningly intolerant. All divergence from the customary is suspicious and repugnant. It seems perverse, and readily suggests evil intentions. Indeed, so natural and spontaneous is intolerance that the question of freedom of speech and writing scarcely became a real issue before the seventeenth century. We have seen that some of the Greek thinkers were banished, or even executed, for their new ideas. The Roman officials, as well as the populace, pestered the early Christians, not so much for the substance of their views as because they were puritanical, refused the routine reverence to the gods, and prophesied the downfall of the State.

But with the firm establishment of Christianity edicts began to be issued by the Roman emperors making orthodox Christian belief the test of good citizenship. One who disagreed with the emperor and his religious advisers in regard to the relation of the three members of the Trinity was subject to prosecution. Heretical books were burned, the houses of heretics destroyed. So, organized mediaeval religious intolerance was, like so many other things, a heritage of the later Roman Empire, and was duly sanctioned in both the Theodosian and Justinian Codes. It was, however, with the Inquisition, beginning in the thirteenth century, that the intolerance of the Middle Ages reached its most perfect organization.

Heresy was looked upon as a contagious disease that must be checked at all costs. It did not matter that the heretic usually led a conspicuously blameless life, that he was arduous, did not swear, was emaciated with fasting and refused to participate in the vain recreations of his fellows. He was, indeed, overserious and took his religion too hard. This offensive parading as an angel of light was explained as the devil's camouflage. No one tried to find out what the heretic really thought or what were the merits of his divergent beliefs. Because he insisted on expressing his conception of God in slightly unfamiliar terms, the heretic was often branded as an atheist, just as to-day the Socialist is so often accused of being opposed to all government, when the real objection to him is that he believes in too much government. It was sufficient to classify a suspected heretic as an Albigensian, or Waldensian, or a member of some other heretical sect. There was no use in his trying to explain or justify; it was enough that he diverged.

There have been various explanations of mediaeval religious intolerance. Lecky, for example, thought that it was due to the theory of exclusive salvation; that, since there was only one way of getting to heaven, all should obviously be compelled to adopt it, for the saving of their souls from eternal torment. But one finds little solicitude for the damned in mediaeval writings. The public at large thought hell none too bad for one who revolted against God and Holy Church. No, the heretics were persecuted because heresy was, according to the notions of the time, a monstrous and unutterably wicked thing, and because their beliefs threatened the vested interests of that day.

We now realize more clearly than did Lecky that the Church was really a State in the Middle Ages, with its own laws and courts and prisons and regular taxation to which all were subject. It had all the interests and all the touchiness of a State, and more. The heretic was a traitor and a rebel. He thought that he could get along without the pope and bishops, and that he could well spare the ministrations of the orthodox priests and escape their exactions. He was the "anarchist", the "Red" of his time, who was undermining established authority, and, with the approval of all right-minded citizens, he was treated accordingly. For the mediaeval citizen no more conceived of a State in which the Church was not the dominating authority than we can conceive of a society in which the present political State may have been superseded by some other form of organization.

Yet the inconceivable has come to pass. Secular authority has superseded in nearly all matters the old ecclesiastical regime. What was the supreme issue of the Middle Ages--the distinction between the religious heretic and the orthodox--is the least of public questions now.

What, then, we may ask, has been the outcome of the old religious persecutions, of the trials, tortures, imprisonings, burnings, and massacres, culminating with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes? What did the Inquisition and the censorship, both so long unquestioned, accomplish? Did they succeed in defending the truth or "safeguarding" society? At any rate, conformity was not established. Nor did the Holy Roman Church maintain its monopoly, although it has survived, purified and freed from many an ancient abuse. In most countries of western Europe and in our own land one may now believe as he wishes, teach such religious views as appeal to him, and join with others who share his sympathies. "Atheism" is still a shocking charge in many ears, but the atheist is no longer an outlaw. _It has been demonstrated, in short, that religious dogma can be neglected in matters of public concern and reduced to a question of private taste and preference_.

This is an incredible revolution. But we have many reasons for suspecting that in a much shorter time than that which has elapsed since the Inquisition was founded, the present attempt to eliminate by force those who contemplate a fundamental reordering of social and economic relations will seem quite as inexpedient and hopeless as the Inquisition's effort to defend the monopoly of the mediaeval Church.

We can learn much from the past in regard to wrong ways of dealing with new ideas. As yet we have only old-fashioned and highly expensive modes of meeting the inevitable changes which are bound to take place. Repression has now and then enjoyed some temporary success, it is true, but in the main it has failed lamentably and produced only suffering and confusion. Much will depend on whether our purpose is to keep things as they are or to bring about readjustments designed to correct abuses and injustice in the present order. Do we believe, in other words, that truth is finally established and that we have only to defend it, or that it is still in the making? Do we believe in what is commonly called progress, or do we think of that as belonging only to the past? Have we, on the whole, arrived, or are we only on the way, or mayhap just starting?

In the Middle Ages, even in the times of the Greeks and Romans, there was little or no conception of progress as the word is now used. There could doubtless be improvement in detail. Men could be wiser and better or more ignorant and perverse. But the assumption was that in general the social, economic, and religious order was fairly standardized.

This was especially true in the Middle Ages. During these centuries men's single objective was the assurance of heaven and escape from hell. Life was an angry river into which men were cast. Demons were on every hand to drag them down. The only aim could be, with God's help, to reach the celestial shore. There was no time to consider whether the river might be made less dangerous by concerted effort, through the deflection of its torrents and the removal of its sharpest rocks. No one thought that human efforts should be directed to making the lot of humanity progressively better by intelligent reforms in the light of advancing knowledge.

The world was a place to escape from on the best terms possible. In our own day this mediaeval idea of a static society yields only grudgingly, and the notion of inevitable vital change is as yet far from assimilated. We confess it with our lips, but resist it in our hearts. We have learned as yet to respect only one class of fundamental innovators, those dedicated to natural science and its applications. The social innovator is still generally suspect.

To the mediaeval theologian, man was by nature vile. We have seen that, according to the Christian Epic, he was assoiled from birth with the primeval sin of his first parents, and began to darken his score with fresh offenses of his own as soon as he became intelligent enough to do so. An elaborate mechanism was supplied by the Church for washing away the original pollution and securing forgiveness for later sins. Indeed, this was ostensibly its main business.

We may still well ask, Is man by nature bad? And accordingly as we answer the question we either frame appropriate means for frustrating his evil tendencies or, if we see some promise in him, work for his freedom and bid him take advantage of it to make himself and others happy. So far as I know, Charron, a friend of Montaigne, was one of the first to say a good word for man's animal nature, and a hundred years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology and anthropology man is neither good nor bad. There is no longer any "mystery of evil". But the mediaeval notion of _sin_--a term heavy with mysticism and deserving of careful scrutiny by every thoughtful person--still confuses us.

Of man's impulses, the one which played the greatest part in mediaeval thoughts of sin and in the monastic ordering of life was the sexual. The presuppositions of the Middle Ages in the matter of the relations of men and women have been carried over to our own day. As compared with many of the ideas which we have inherited from the past, they are of comparatively recent origin. The Greeks and Romans were, on the whole, primitive and uncritical in their view of sex. The philosophers do not seem to have speculated on sex, although there was evidently some talk in Athens of women's rights. The movement is satirized by Aristophanes, and later Plato showed a willingness in _The Republic_ to impeach the current notions of the family and women's position in general.

But there are few traces of our ideas of sexual "purity" in the classical writers. To the Stoic philosopher, and to other thoughtful elderly people, sexual indulgence was deemed a low order of pleasure and one best carefully controlled in the interests of peace of mind. But with the incoming of Christianity an essentially new attitude developed, which is still, consciously or unconsciously, that of most people to-day.