In the first of these points, he is right—though very restricted in vision. In the second, he is historically quite wrong: the Middle Ages were not a period in which a particular insufficient and later somewhat tyrannical institution called “The Papacy” was trying to achieve, or ought to have tried to achieve, a merely temporal unity, careless of Catholic doctrine. In the third, he is still more wrong historically. The Reformation was not an inevitable climax led up to by greater and greater weakness in Christendom and not to be avoided. It might have been avoided; and all that it did was very nearly undone again by the recovery of European sanity after the first delirium of a minority had passed. The destructive work of the Reformation would have been repaired altogether but for the shortsightedness (from a European point of view) of Richelieu in backing up the defeated Protestant Principalities of Germany against the Empire; due to his considering nothing but the advantages of the French Royal house and forgetting Christendom.
Mr. Wells is genuinely impressed by the first Crusade. He uses in connection with it the novel German idiom “will to” crusade, and that is the highest compliment he can pay it. He is impressed by these great masses of men going eastward. He calls it a spectacle such as “had never before been seen in the whole history of the world.” He does not, indeed, appreciate that the thing was a vast French movement (for he would not like any great movement to be French); he prefers to think of it as Norman, under the old Victorian superstition that the Normans, being vigorous, could not be really French at all. But he admires it, because it was popular, because it was spontaneous, and, above all, because it was big. He sees in just perspective the gradual “officializing” of the Crusades, and he appreciates the fact that the violent Moslem feeling of the later twelfth century was a reaction corresponding to the Christian enthusiasm of eighty years before. He puts the episode of Saladin well. But what I think he does not appreciate is the way in which medieval civilization continued to hold the crusading idea. He says in so many words that (by the third Crusade) the “magic and wonder had gone out of these movements” and that “the common people had found them out.” He ought to have been told by those who coached him that, though changing conditions had made united popular support more and more difficult, yet, right on into the fifteenth century, the Holy Sepulchre was the ideal goal. Even in England (a country which had little to do with the Crusades), you have Henry IV dreaming of it all his life, and you have Henry V, 230 years after the time when Mr. Wells thinks the ideal had been lost, complaining, as he died, that he had not retaken the holy places.
However, he does appreciate and feels the Crusades, especially the first one.
What he does not understand is the medieval Church, its necessary unity; and that the Papacy was the condition and guardian of that unity. There he is altogether wrong. He is out of perspective, and misses the elements of the affair.
Here, again, I must make myself clear by yet another of what I fear my readers may call ceaseless repetitions of an obvious principle. Unfortunately it is not a principle obvious to Mr. Wells, or to the readers for whom he writes, and it must be repeated again and again, for it is almost certain to be misunderstood.
The principle is this. We are not primarily concerned in an historian with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval historical period. He seems to think of it as something dominated by the old “Giant Pope” of his traditional Bunyan. He shows some admiration for the idea of the Papacy uniting Christendom because that subserves his Comtist ideal of humanity-worship. But what he doesn’t understand at all is that the real point of issue was not the Papacy—which is the central organ of the universal Church—but the conception of the universal Church itself: and of a Church not only universal, but visible and corporate.
To read these pages one would think such an idea of visible, corporate unity had never existed—and yet it is the whole historical point and meaning of the Catholic Church: then, now and for ever. He seems to think that the Papacy was a particular institution doing something on its own, artificial, like the League of Nations, and through defects in organization failing to pull it off. But the Papacy was nothing of the sort. It was original in the foundations of the Church. It remains dominant in the Church to-day. It is the exemplification of unity, and, to put it shortly, of the prime historical truth that the Catholic Church is not a theory, but a thing.
For instance, he gives at great length the quarrel between the Popes and Frederic the Second. He does not appreciate the elementary point, that if Frederic the Second had won the Church would have broken up. It was a life-and-death duel in which religion was at stake; and though naturally a modern heir of Little Bethel sympathizes with Frederic merely because he finds Frederic in opposition to “Giant Pope,” yet the historian should take a larger view. He may dislike our Christian civilization, and wish it were destroyed. He may rejoice to think how nearly the successes of Frederic came to destroying it; he may praise Frederic for “irrigating us” with anti-Christian ideas—notably Moslem—and regret that our civilization won; but to represent it as a mere struggle between two sovereigns, Pope and Emperor, is not history at all. It is like making the struggle between revolutionary France and aristocratic England a struggle between the tyrant George III against virtuous Republicans; or the monster Robespierre against the Three Jolly Englishmen of the song.
All through this dealing with the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Mr. Wells continues to show that intense local Protestant feeling, in which he was trained, and misses the wide historical view altogether. He does not recover it by his phrases—which are numerous—upon the grandeur of an international ideal.
Popes have no international ideal, because the Catholic Church has no international ideal. There might be no such things as nations (any more than there were under the Roman Empire): perhaps in the near future there will again be no such things as nations. But there would still be a Catholic Church, and there would still be a Papacy.