From his cell St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, reformed abuses in the Church, deposed an Anti-Pope, and denounced heretics. In his distrust of human reason, trying to free itself from some of the dogmatic assertions of early Christian thought, he represented the narrow outlook of his age: but in his love of God and through God of humanity he typifies the spiritual charm that like a thread of gold runs through all the dross of hardness and treachery in the mediaeval mind.
‘Do not grieve,’ he wrote to the parents of a novice ... ‘he goes to God but you do not lose him ... rather through him you gain many sons, for all of us who belong to Clairvaux have taken him to be a brother and you to be our parents.’
To St. Bernard self-renunciation meant self-realization, the laying down of a life to find it again purified and enriched; and this was the ideal of monasticism, often misunderstood and discredited by its weaker followers, like all ideals, but yet the glory of its saints.
XI
THE INVESTITURE QUESTION
We have said that in ‘the Oath of Strasbourg’[9] it was possible to distinguish the infant nations of France and Germany. This is true—yet Germany, though distinct from her neighbours, was to remain all through the Middle Ages rather an agglomeration of states than a nation as we understand the word to-day.
One reason for the absence of any common policy and ambitions was that Charlemagne, though he had conquered the Saxons and other Germanic tribes, had never succeeded in welding them into one people. Under his successors the different races easily slipped back into regarding themselves rather as Saxons, Franconians, or Bavarians than as Germans: indeed the Bohemians relapsed into heathendom and became once more altogether uncivilized.
This instinct for separation was aided by the feudal system, since rebel tenants-in-chiefs could count on provincial feeling to support them against the king their overlord. It is hardly surprising, then, if the struggle that broke out in Germany as elsewhere in Europe between rulers and their feudal baronage was decided there in favour of the baronage.
Perhaps if some strong king could have given his undivided attention to the problem he might have succeeded, like William I of England, in making himself real master of all Germany; but unfortunately the rulers of the German kingdom were never free from foreign wars. Just as the Norsemen had descended on the coasts of France, so Danes, Slavs, and Hungarians were a constant menace to the civilization of Germany; hordes of these barbarians breaking over the frontiers every year, and even pillaging districts as far west as the Rhine.