The thirteenth century thus witnessed a unity of civilization alike as a structure of life and as a content of the human mind. On the one hand, there rose a single governing scheme of society, which culminated in the universal primacy of Rome and the Roman pontiff. On the other hand, set in this scheme, and contained in this structure, there was a single stuff of thought, directed to the manifestation of the eternal glory of God. The framework we may chiefly ascribe to Gregory VII; the content to St. Thomas Aquinas. But the whole resultant unity is less the product of great personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction. Men saw the world sub specie unitatis; and its kaleidoscopic variety was insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of their vision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmament declared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willing servant of Christianity; and bestiaria moralizata were written to show how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type, of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegories to this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was an allegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world of creation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well as the beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenly meanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might be transmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hugh of St. Victor dominated men's thought, making all things (like the Mass itself, if in a less degree) into signa rei sacrae.
The unity of knowledge was thus purchased at a price. Things must cease to be studied in themselves, and must be allegorized into types, in order that they might be reduced to a unity. Perhaps the purchase of unity on terms such as these is a bad bargain; and it is at any rate obvious that in such an atmosphere scientific thought will not flourish, or man learn to adjust himself readily to the laws of his environment. From the standpoint of natural science we may readily condemn the Middle Ages and all their works; and we may prefer a single Opus of Roger Bacon to the whole of the Summa of St. Thomas. But it is necessary to judge an age which was destitute of natural science by some other criterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that the Middle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored the Particular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkers knew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those of Plato, they were none the less far better Platonists than they were Aristotelians. If they had been better Aristotelians, they would have been better biologists; but as they were good Platonists, they had a conception of the purpose and system of human life in society, which perhaps excuses all, and more than all, the defects of their biology. Any survey, however brief, of the political theory of the Middle Ages will show at once its Platonic character and its incessant impulse towards the achievement of unity.
III
To mediaeval thought, as to Plato, the unity of society is an organic unity, in the sense that each member of society is an organ of the whole to which he belongs, and discharges a function at once peculiar to himself and necessary to the full life of the whole. Monasticism, so often misrepresented, attains its true meaning in the light of this conception. The monk is a necessary organ of Christian society, discharging his function of prayer and devotion for the benefit not of himself solely, or primarily, but rather of every member of that society. He prays for the sins of the whole world, and by his prayer he contributes to the realization of the end of the world, which is the attainment of salvation. In the same way the conception of a treasury of merits, afterwards perverted in the system of indulgences, belongs to an organic theory and practice of society. The merits which Christ and the saints have accumulated are a fund for the use of the whole of Christian society, a fund on which any member can draw for his own salvation, just because each is fitly joined and knit together with all the rest in a single body for the attainment of a single purpose. But we need not take isolated instances of the Platonism of mediaeval thought. The whole basic conception of a system of estates, which recurs everywhere in mediaeval life, is a Platonic conception. The estates of clergy, baronage, and commons are the Platonic classes of guardians, auxiliaries, and farmers. The Platonic creed of [Greek: to auton prattein] ('Do thine own duty') is the Christian creed of 'doing my duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me'. The Middle Ages are full of a spontaneous Platonism, and inspired by an anima naturaliter Platonica. The control which the mediaeval clergy exercised over Christian society in the light of divine revelation repeats the control which the guardians of Plato were to exercise over civic society in the light of the Idea of the Good. The communism of the mediaeval monastery is reminiscent of the communism of the Platonic barracks. And if there are differences between the society imagined by Plato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, these differences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raise Platonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptions which were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posterior to the days of Plato. These conceptions—which were cherished by Stoic thinkers; which penetrated into Roman Law; and which from Roman Law flowed into the teaching and theory of the early fathers of the Church—are mainly two. One is the conception of human equality; the other, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of all the human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city of God in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no less present to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They are conceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Church even more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato had halted at the stage of a civic society, the respublica Christiana of the Middle Ages rose to the height of a single humana civilitas. While Plato had divided the men of his Republic into classes of gold and silver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of the divine Idea for a single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery of the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and, if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in one around the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, and find tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Church herself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life, there was 'neither bond nor free'.
The prevalence of Realism, which marks mediaeval metaphysics down to the end of the thirteenth century, is another Platonic inheritance, and another impulse to unity. The Universal is, and is a veritable thing, in which the Particular shares, and acquires its substance by its degree of sharing. The One transcends the Many; the unity of mankind is greater than the differences between men; and the university of mortal men, as Ockham writes, is one community. If there be thus one community, and one only, some negative results follow, which have their importance. In the first place, we can hardly say that the Middle Ages have any conception of the State. The notion of the State involves plurality; but plurality is ex hypothesi not to be found. The notion of the State further involves sovereignty, in the sense of final and complete control of its members by each of a number of societies. But this, again, is ex hypothesi not to be found. There is one final control, and one only, in the mediaeval system—the control of Christian principle, exerted in the last resort, and exerted everywhere, without respect of persons, by the ruling vicar of Christ. But if plurality and sovereignty thus disappear from our political philosophy, we need a new orientation of all our theory. We must forget to speak of nations. We must forget, as probably many of us would be very glad to forget, the claims of national cultures, each pretending to be a complete satisfaction and fulfilment of the national mind; and we must remember, with Dante, that culture (which he called 'civility') is the common possession of Christian humanity. We must even forget, to some extent, the existence of different national laws. It is true that mediaeval theory admitted the fact of customary law, which varied from place to place. But this customary law was hardly national: it varied not only from country to country, but also from fief to fief, and even from manor to manor. It was too multiform to be national, and too infinitely various to square with political boundaries. Nor was customary law, in mediaeval theory, anything of the nature of an ultimate command. Transcending all customs, and supreme over all enactments, rose the sovereign majesty of natural law, which is one and indivisible, and runs through all creation. 'All custom,' writes Gratian, the great canonist, 'and all written law, that are adverse to natural law, are to be counted null and void.' Here, in this conception of a natural law upholding all creation, we may find once more a Stoic legacy to the Christian Church. 'Men ought not to live in separate cities, distinguished one from another by different systems of justice'—so Zeno the Stoic had taught—'but there should be one way and order of life, like that of a single flock feeding on a common pasture.' Zeno, like St. Paul, came from Cilicia.[20] Like St. Paul, he taught the doctrine of the one society, in which there was neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian. We shall not do wrong to recognize in his teaching, and in that of his school, one of the greatest influences, outside the supreme and controlling influence of the Christian principle itself, which made for the dominance of the idea of unity in mediaeval thought.
Before we proceed to draw another negative conclusion from the principle of the one community, we must enter a brief caveat in regard to the conclusion which has just been drawn. We cannot altogether take away the State from the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen and the sweep of a paradox. There were states in mediaeval Europe, and there were kings who claimed and exercised imperium. These things caused the theorists, and particularly the Roman lawyers, no little trouble. It was difficult to reconcile the unity of the imperium with the multiplicity of kings. Some had recourse to the theory of delegation, and this seems to be the theory of the De Monarchia of Dante. But there was one contemporary of Dante who said a wise thing, prophetic of the future. Rex est in regno suo, wrote Bartolus of Sassoferrato, imperator regni sui. In that sentence we may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages. When kings become 'entire emperors of their realms' (the phrase was used in England by Richard II, and the imperial style was affected by Henry VIII), unity soon prepares to fly out of the window. But she never entirely took flight until the Reformation shattered the fabric of the Church, and made kings into popes as well as emperors in their dominions.
We may now turn to draw another conclusion from the mediaeval principle of unity. To-day the world recognizes, and has recognized for nearly four centuries, not only a distinction between States, but also a distinction between two societies in each State—the secular and the religious. These two societies may have different laws (for instance, in the matter of marriage), and conflicts of duties and of jurisdictions may easily arise in consequence. The State may permit what the Church forbids; and in that case the citizen who is also a churchman must necessarily revolt against one or other of the societies to which he belongs. The conflict between the two societies and the different obligations which they impose was a conflict unknown to the Middle Ages. Kings might indeed be excommunicated, and in that event their subjects would be compelled to decide whether they should disobey excommunicated king or excommunicating pope. But that was only a conflict between two different allegiances to two different authorities; it was not a conflict between two different memberships of two different societies. The conflict between the two societies—Church and State—was one which could hardly arise in the Middle Ages, because there was only a single society, an undivided Christian commonwealth, which was at one and the same time both Church and State. Because there was only one society, baptism counted as admission both to churchmanship and to citizenship, which were one thing, and one only, in the Christian commonwealth; and for the same reason excommunication, which shut the offender from all religious life, excluded him equally and by the same act from every civil right. The excommunicated person could not enter either the Church or the law court; could not receive either the eucharist or a legacy; could not own either a cure of souls or an acre of soil. Civil right and religious status implied one another; and not only was extra ecclesiam nulla salus a true saying, but extra ecclesiam nullum ius would also be very near the truth. Here again is a reason for saying that the State as such can hardly be traced in the Middle Ages. The State is an organization of secular life. Even if it goes beyond its elementary purpose of security for person and property, and devotes itself to spiritual purposes, it is concerned with the development of the spirit in its mortal existence, and confined to the expansion of the mind in the bounds of a mortal society. The Middle Ages thought more of salvation than of security, and more of the eternal society of all the faithful, united together in Christ their Head, than of any passing society of this world only. They could recognize kings, who bore the sword for the sake of security, and did justice in virtue of their anointing. But kings were not, to their thinking, the heads of secular societies. They were agents of the one divine commonwealth—defenders of the Faith, who wielded the secular sword for the furtherance of the purposes of God. Thus there was one society, if there were two orders of ministering agents; and thus, though regnum and sacerdotium might be distinguished, the State and the Church could not be divided. Stephen of Tournai, a canonist of the twelfth century, recognizes the two powers; but he only knows one society, under one king. That society is the Church: that king is Christ.
Under conditions such as these—with the plurality of States unrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and with distinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced—we may truly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention honoris causa, Professor Tröltsch, that 'there was no feeling for the State; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; no omnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; no abstract basis of association in formal and legal rules—or at any rate, so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for the Church, and in no wise for the State'.[21] So far as social life was consciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of the clergy, and the scheme was that of the Church. The interdependencies and associations of lay life—kingdoms and fiefs and manors—were only personal groupings, based on personal sentiments of loyalty and unconscious elements of custom. A mixture of uniformity and isolation, as we have seen, was the characteristic of these groupings: they were at once very like one another, throughout the extent of Western Europe, and (except for their connexion in a common membership of the Church Universal) very much separated from one another. But with one at any rate of these groupings—the kingdom, which in its day was to become the modern State—the future lay; and we shall perhaps end our inquiry most fitly by a brief review of the lines of its future development.
IV
The development of the kingdom into the State was largely the work of the lawyers. The law is a tenacious profession, and in England at any rate its members have exercised a large influence on politics from the twelfth to the twentieth century—from the days of Glanville, the justiciar of Henry II, to the days of Mr. Asquith, the prime minister of George V. It is perhaps in England that we may first see the germs of the modern State emerging to light under the fostering care of the royal judges. Henry II is something of a sovereign: his judges formulate a series of commands, largely in the shape of writs, which became the common law of the land; and in the Constitutions of Clarendon we may already see the distinction between Church and State beginning to be attempted. With a sovereign, a law, and a secular policy all present, we may begin to suspect the presence of a State. In France also a similar development, if somewhat later than the English, occurs at a comparatively early date. By the end of the thirteenth century the legists of Philippe le Bel have created something of étatisme in their master's dominions. The king's court begins to rule the land; and proud of its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, the great prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface at Anagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of the mediaeval papacy. Everywhere, indeed, the tide seemed on the turn at the close of the thirteenth century. The Crusades ended with the fall of Acre in 1291. The suppression of the great international order of the Templars twenty years later marked a new leap of the encroaching waves. The new era of the modern national State might seem already to have begun.