On the other side, the church boldly asserted the right and duty of the divine to control the world,—the religious symbol of the modern proposition that conscience should dominate political and business affairs. "No institution is apart from the authority of the church," wrote Ægidius Colonna. "No one can legitimately possess field or vine except under its authority or by it. Heretics are not owners, but unjustly occupy." Canossa symbolized the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, and there is a sublime audacity, moral as well as political, in the famous Bull of Boniface VIII., "We declare that every human creature is subject to the Roman pontiff."
The church as a corporate society expressed also the community of its members. It was indeed no mere collection of individual believers. As a divine institution, the "body of Christ on earth," it gave to its members rather than received from them. It invested them with new worth, instead of getting its own worth from them. Nevertheless, it was not an absolute authority; it represented the union of all in a common fellowship, a common destiny, and a common cause against the powers of evil.
The massive cathedrals which remain as the monuments of the ages of faith, are fitting symbols of these aspects of mediæval life. They dominate their cities architecturally, as the church dominated the life of the ages which built them. They inspired within the worshipper, on the one hand, a sense of finiteness in the presence of the sublime; on the other, an elevation of soul as he became conscious of union with a power and presence not his own. They awed the worshiping assembly and united it in a common service.
§ 2. MAIN LINES OF MODERN DEVELOPMENT
We have seen that the mediæval life had two sets of standards and values: one set by the tribal codes and the instinct of a warlike people; the other set by a church which required renunciation while it asserted control. Changes may be traced in both ideals. The group morality becomes refined and broadened. The church standards are affected in four ways: (a) The goods of the secular life, art, family, power, wealth, claim a place in the system of values. (b) Human authority asserts itself, at first in sovereign states with monarchs, then in the growth of civil liberty and political democracy. (c) Instead of faith, reason asserts itself as the agency for discovering the laws of nature and of life. (d) As the result of the greater dignity and worth of the individual which is worked out in all these lines, social virtue tends to lay less value on charity and more on social justice.
It must not be supposed that the movements to be outlined have resulted in the displacement or loss of the positive values in the religious ideal. The morality of to-day does not ignore spiritual values; it aims rather to use them to give fuller meaning to all experience. It does not abandon law in seeking freedom, or ignore duty because it is discovered by reason. Above all, it is seeking to bring about in more intimate fashion that supremacy of the moral order in all human relations for which the church was theoretically contending. And in recent times we are appreciating more thoroughly that the individual cannot attain a full moral life by himself. Only as he is a member of a moral society can he find scope and support for full development of will. In concrete phrase, it is just as necessary to improve the general social environment in which men, women, and children are to live, in order to make better individuals, as it is to improve the individuals in order to get a better society. This was a truth which the religious conception of salvation through the church taught in other terms.
To follow the development of the modern moral consciousness, we shall rely not so much on the formal writings of moral philosophers as on other sources. What men value most, and what they recognize as right, is shown in what they work for and fight for and in how they spend their leisure. This is reflected more immediately in their laws, their art and literature, their religion, and their educational institutions, although it finds ultimate expression in moral theories. The more concrete aspects are suggested in this chapter, the theories in Chapter XII.
§ 3. THE OLD AND NEW IN THE BEGINNINGS OF INDIVIDUALISM
An interesting blending of the class ideal of the warrior and "gentleman" with the religious ideals of devotion to some spiritual service, and of protection to the weak, is afforded by chivalry. The knights show their faith by their deeds of heroism, not by renunciation. But they fight for the Holy Sepulcher, or for the weak and oppressed. Their investiture is almost as solemn as that of a priest. Honor and love appear as motives side by side with the quest of the Holy Grail. Chevalier Bayard is the gallant fighter for country, but he is also the passionate admirer of justice, the knight sans peur et sans reproche. Moreover, the literature which embodies the ideal exhibits not only feats of arms and religious symbolism. Parsifal is not a mere abstraction; he has life and character. "And who will deny," writes Francke,[87] "that in this character Wolfram has put before us, within the forms of chivalrous life, an immortal symbol of struggling, sinning, despairing, but finally redeemed, humanity?"
If chivalry represented in some degree a moralizing of the warrior class, the mendicant orders represented an effort to bring religion into secular life. The followers of St. Dominic and St. Francis were indeed ascetic, but instead of maintaining the separate life of the cloister they aimed to awaken a personal experience among the whole people. Further, the Dominicans adopted the methods and conceptions of Greek philosophy to support the doctrines of the church, instead of relying solely on faith. The Franciscans on their part devoted an ecstatic type of piety to deeds of charity and beneficence. They aimed to overcome the world rather than to withdraw from it. A bolder appeal to the individual, still within the sphere of religion, was made when Wyclif asserted the right of every instructed man to search the Bible for himself, and a strong demand for social justice found expression in Wyclif's teaching as well as in the vision of Piers Plowman.