Progress and History

by Unknown

There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the modern world.

The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.

Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance; and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the conceptions of the Romantic revival.

There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge; they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions of new aspects of truth.

The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.

It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past, and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art—the half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons—and all in ruins. Indeed, the Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous, that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.

What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost, but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin form (miles), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant, often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but on the whole the character of human life was not very different.

What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world? Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember, however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.

Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire, and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world. However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently, the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the Barbarian races themselves.

With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its elements, and their development, especially during the period from the end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society, with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth, and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.