Charged he hath this day
His men of might
In his own sight
All young children to slay....
Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection, as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations as Coverdale’s lovingkindness and tender mercy, Tindale’s long-suffering, mercifulness, peacemaker, and beautiful (for it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version.
In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification. For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still, through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it. But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of understanding history.
If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated, there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the sense of its independent being and activity, of bottomless depths and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling or with hope and joy—with delight and mirth, or with agony, anguish, despair, repentance—and on the other hand that feeling of its being an inner world, which has since developed so fully that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.
In this connection it is particularly interesting to note the appearance of conscience in the thirteenth century. In classical times the Latin ‘conscientia’ seems to have meant something more like ‘consciousness’ or ‘knowledge’; it was generally qualified by some other word (‘virtutum, vitiorum’—‘consciousness of virtues, of vices,’ ...), and its termination, similar to that of science, intelligence, ... suggests that it was conceived of by the Romans more as a general, abstract quality, which one would partake of, but not actually possess—just as one has knowledge or happiness, but not “a knowledge” or “a happiness”. Used in ecclesiastical Latin and later in English, conscience seems to have grown more and more real, until at last it became that semi-personified and perfectly private mentor whom we are inclined to mean to-day when we speak of “my conscience” or “his conscience”.
The movement towards “individualism”, like many other phenomena of modern civilization, has long ago shifted its centre of gravity outside the walls of the Church. Once it was felt as the peculiar glory of the Christian religion. In the Dark Ages heresies which attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction. This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain uniformity of pattern. Thus, while the influence of Christianity had ensured to all men—not merely to a small slave-owning class—a modicum of personal liberty, it deprived them in the same breath of that dearest of all possessions, freedom of thought. The grim meaning gradually acquired by the Latin word Inquisition, meaning an ‘inquiry’, still signifies to us the ruthless pains that were now taken, for the first time in the world’s history, to pry into and endeavour to control that private thinking life of men which had suddenly acquired such a vast importance in their eyes. The still grimmer auto-da-fé began life as a Spanish phrase meaning simply an ‘act of faith’.