CHAPTER XIII

THE MIDDLE AGES

All the end of the Sixth Book of Mr. Wells’s History is taken up with his judgment on what must properly be called the Middle Ages in Europe—that is, the period which begins with the great awakening of the West in the eleventh century and ends with the strains and difficulties of the fifteenth, to conclude in the crash of the Reformation. It is the period midway between that great stage of Christendom called the Dark Ages which ends about the year 1000 and the split of Christendom which comes after 1500. It covers nearly twenty pages.

It would not be just to criticize the writer for this comparatively small allotment to what is, in the best judgment of cultivated European men, the greatest achievement of our race. Mr. Wells would answer that the Middle Ages were _not_ the greatest period of our race, _nor_ our race the chief portion of mankind. He has a right to his own theory of History: to treat the climax of united Christendom as but one episode (and not a superior episode) in the little we know of human effort and achievement. He is wrong, but he has a right to be wrong: unless, indeed, one affirms that no historian may adopt the anti-Catholic view. The scale, I say, is, in my judgment, warped. I think that an impartial observer (could such an one be conceived), looking at the world from far off, himself without religion, and judging things strictly by their temporal effect, would still say that it was in Europe men did the very most they ever could do, and that the time they did the most they ever could do was the 500 years between the year 1000 and the year 1500.

To ask Mr. Wells to see things in that completely detached fashion would be to ask too much; for he does not seriously pretend to look at the story of mankind thus detachedly, but rather to interpret it in terms of Evangelical English Protestantism, gutted of such supernatural doctrine as it once possessed. I will therefore deal with this chief section of the human story as briefly as Mr. Wells himself deals with it, although it certainly deserves a much larger place. For, after all, Mr. Wells’s whole quarrel is with the Catholic Church; and this was the moment when the Catholic Church was producing its chief fruits after the long and desperate siege of the Dark Ages. I think, in decency to such an opponent, Mr. Wells ought to have made the section more important. But, on the other hand, I remember that the opponent is an opponent; and if one regards the Catholic Church as the bane of mankind (which is Mr. Wells’s hereditary attitude), one would naturally hesitate to emphasize the centuries of its most _united_ active effect upon our blood.

Three things have impressed Mr. Wells mainly in what he has been told by his Oxford coaches on this tremendous episode in the human story.

_Firstly_, the spontaneity, energy, and united purpose of the Crusades.

_Secondly_, the apparent futility of the medieval Papacy in handling its fine opportunity for creating an international (and a merely human) state.

_Thirdly_, the decline and breakdown of Christendom, inevitably ending in the shipwreck called the Reformation.

In the first of these points, he is right—though very restricted in vision. In the second, he is historically quite wrong: the Middle Ages were not a period in which a particular insufficient and later somewhat tyrannical institution called “The Papacy” was trying to achieve, or ought to have tried to achieve, a merely temporal unity, careless of Catholic doctrine. In the third, he is still more wrong historically. The Reformation was not an inevitable climax led up to by greater and greater weakness in Christendom and not to be avoided. It might have been avoided; and all that it did was very nearly undone again by the recovery of European sanity after the first delirium of a minority had passed. The destructive work of the Reformation would have been repaired altogether but for the shortsightedness (from a European point of view) of Richelieu in backing up the defeated Protestant Principalities of Germany against the Empire; due to his considering nothing but the advantages of the French Royal house and forgetting Christendom.

Mr. Wells is genuinely impressed by the first Crusade. He uses in connection with it the novel German idiom “will to” crusade, and that is the highest compliment he can pay it. He is impressed by these great masses of men going eastward. He calls it a spectacle such as “had never before been seen in the whole history of the world.” He does not, indeed, appreciate that the thing was a vast French movement (for he would not like any great movement to be French); he prefers to think of it as Norman, under the old Victorian superstition that the Normans, being vigorous, could not be really French at all. But he admires it, because it was popular, because it was spontaneous, and, above all, because it was big. He sees in just perspective the gradual “officializing” of the Crusades, and he appreciates the fact that the violent Moslem feeling of the later twelfth century was a reaction corresponding to the Christian enthusiasm of eighty years before. He puts the episode of Saladin well. But what I think he does not appreciate is the way in which medieval civilization continued to hold the crusading idea. He says in so many words that (by the third Crusade) the “magic and wonder had gone out of these movements” and that “the common people had found them out.” He ought to have been told by those who coached him that, though changing conditions had made united popular support more and more difficult, yet, right on into the fifteenth century, the Holy Sepulchre was the ideal goal. Even in England (a country which had little to do with the Crusades), you have Henry IV dreaming of it all his life, and you have Henry V, 230 years after the time when Mr. Wells thinks the ideal had been lost, complaining, as he died, that he had not retaken the holy places.

However, he does appreciate and feels the Crusades, especially the first one.

What he does not understand is the medieval Church, its necessary unity; and that the Papacy was the condition and guardian of that unity. There he is altogether wrong. He is out of perspective, and misses the elements of the affair.

Here, again, I must make myself clear by yet another of what I fear my readers may call ceaseless repetitions of an obvious principle. Unfortunately it is not a principle obvious to Mr. Wells, or to the readers for whom he writes, and it must be repeated again and again, for it is almost certain to be misunderstood.

The principle is this. We are not primarily concerned in an historian with his philosophy but with his history. No doubt bad philosophy must always make bad history. And there is no true history, in the absolute sense of the word “true,” which is written upon the basis of, or to prove, a false philosophy. But in ordinary language, when we say “bad history,” we do not mean “bad philosophy”; we mean a statement of facts in false proportion: a bad outline. And it is most emphatically a bad outline which those who coached Mr. Wells have given him of the medieval historical period. He seems to think of it as something dominated by the old “Giant Pope” of his traditional Bunyan. He shows some admiration for the idea of the Papacy uniting Christendom because that subserves his Comtist ideal of humanity-worship. But what he doesn’t understand at all is that the real point of issue was not the Papacy—which is the central organ of the universal Church—but the conception of the universal Church itself: and of a Church not only universal, but visible and corporate.

To read these pages one would think such an idea of visible, corporate unity had never existed—and yet it is the whole historical point and meaning of the Catholic Church: then, now and for ever. He seems to think that the Papacy was a particular institution doing something on its own, artificial, like the League of Nations, and through defects in organization failing to pull it off. But the Papacy was nothing of the sort. It was original in the foundations of the Church. It remains dominant in the Church to-day. It is the exemplification of unity, and, to put it shortly, of the prime historical truth that the Catholic Church is not a theory, but a thing.

For instance, he gives at great length the quarrel between the Popes and Frederic the Second. He does not appreciate the elementary point, that if Frederic the Second had won the Church would have broken up. It was a life-and-death duel in which religion was at stake; and though naturally a modern heir of Little Bethel sympathizes with Frederic merely because he finds Frederic in opposition to “Giant Pope,” yet the historian should take a larger view. He may dislike our Christian civilization, and wish it were destroyed. He may rejoice to think how nearly the successes of Frederic came to destroying it; he may praise Frederic for “irrigating us” with anti-Christian ideas—notably Moslem—and regret that our civilization won; but to represent it as a mere struggle between two sovereigns, Pope and Emperor, is not history at all. It is like making the struggle between revolutionary France and aristocratic England a struggle between the tyrant George III against virtuous Republicans; or the monster Robespierre against the Three Jolly Englishmen of the song.

All through this dealing with the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Mr. Wells continues to show that intense local Protestant feeling, in which he was trained, and misses the wide historical view altogether. He does not recover it by his phrases—which are numerous—upon the grandeur of an international ideal.

Popes have no international ideal, because the Catholic Church has no international ideal. There might be no such things as nations (any more than there were under the Roman Empire): perhaps in the near future there will again be no such things as nations. But there would still be a Catholic Church, and there would still be a Papacy.

This provincial attitude towards the Papal position appears in all manner of phrases scattered up and down this part of Mr. Wells’s work, as, for instance, that “men of faith and wisdom believe in growth and their fellow-men; but Priests, even such Priests as Gregory VII, believe in the false ‘efficiency’ of an imposed discipline.” Here is a phrase which might have been written by a man in his sleep as to the first part, and which is composed of mere chapel doctrine as to the second—“believing in growth and one’s fellow-men” means nothing; nothing whatsoever. It is gas. And, on the other hand, it is not a special sort of lurking animal called “Priests,” who believe in the efficiency of an imposed discipline, it is everyone who ever organized Man for any end whatsoever; from coming down in time for breakfast to the salvation of the human race.

I wonder that a man of Mr. Wells’s desire for intellectual distinction should lend himself to such things.

But the worst historical blunder in all this is the repetition, at this time of day, that the simple faith of the Dark Ages gradually broke down through the increasing knowledge and intellectual activity of the Middle Ages until at last it came to the complete disruption of the Reformation.

That sort of thing was already blown upon when Froude was writing a lifetime ago. To-day it lingers in a local tradition, but it has quite disappeared—and for ever—from intelligent discussion of that great religious catastrophe, from which we are at last, perhaps, slowly recovering.

We all know, of course, what really happened. A civilization bursting into increasing vigour, the rise of nations and of vernacular literatures, an expansion of knowledge, all these tended, as does all growth, to disrupt unity. Something much worse than any good force (and learning is good), the catastrophe of the Black Death, shook society, yet unity was preserved. Even the great schism of the fourteenth century was healed.

The shipwreck called “the Reformation” came, as all shipwrecks come, by blundering. So little was it inevitable, that once it had taken place the warning was immediately taken to heart. The Church recovered itself, only failed by an error of French policy to recover all Europe, is still (if Mr. Wells will look about him) remarkably alive, and is increasing its hold upon the intelligence of Europe.

Why, that is the very commonplace of our time! Yet, in these pages Mr. Wells talks as though he were the contemporary of those worthy gentlemen who cheered for the victory of Garibaldi in Exeter Hall and thought the Faith would die with Pio Nono.

Thus he discovers with joy in certain ecclesiastics of the Dark Ages “the spirit of Jesus still alive in them” (p. 422). He is persuaded that Salerno (i.e. Physical Science) “cast a baleful light upon Rome” (p. 425). He will have it that the Church “had become dogmatic,” as though (Great Heavens!) it were not dogmatic in the Earliest Fathers. He will have it that “Jesus of Nazareth” and His preaching was “overlaid,” and, worst of all, he’s back at the old nonsense that “Priests”—that is the organization of the Church—think only about “their own power,” and not about the Divine, unique thing which it is their business to preserve.

What on earth does Mr. Wells think that the average Catholic from the beginning (say, in the second century) to the present day has accepted in the matter of the Hierarchy? Does he think that this vast body called the Catholic Church (vast in time, as in space, as in numbers) is a pack of dupes, run by a few supernaturally cunning rogues? That he should think us wrong and mistaken, subject to illusion in our doctrines, is fair matter for discussion; but the idea of our being fascinated by insincere conjurers is asinine.

That word is violent. I will repeat it. For it is exact. It is asinine to judge of the Hierarchy (Innocent III, Gregory the Great, Anselm, Langton, Ximenes, Bossuet, Leo XIII—I pick at random) that it is a conspiracy of charlatans, and of the laity (St. Monica, St. Louis, Lamoricière, O’Connell, Maritain, St. Francis, Pasteur) that they are gaping yokels who swallow any tale.

What is this, again (on p. 427), of Catholic “contempt for the intelligence and mental dignity of the common man”? If there is one conspicuous contrast between your elementary, half-educated, pseudo-scientific, “modern thought” and the Catholic Church, it is the contempt of the former for the common man, and the fact that the latter is based entirely upon the common man. The former—pseudo-science—is for ever trying to prevent the common man from getting a drink, marrying, having children, running his own house, living his own life, criticizing the mandarins of politics or of sham statistics; the latter—the Catholic Church—lives its whole life by consulting and realizing the common man. To attack the Catholic Church as being too subservient to the common man might be understandable; to attack it as contemptuous of the common man shows a complete ignorance of its character.

It is in the same spirit that we have (upon p. 429) the remark that the Catholic Church was, in the Middle Ages, “heading to its destruction.” It is not destroyed. Really, I do assure you, Mr. Wells, the Catholic Church is not yet destroyed. Will you not believe me? Must I give you proof? It is arduous collecting proofs of the obvious.

It is in the same spirit that he says of Wycliffe that he was a much abler man than St. Dominic.

Now I am sure Mr. Wells has never read a word of either. If he will read anything proceeding from St. Dominic and anything proceeding from Wycliffe, and put them side by side, I shall be content. He might as well say that Proust was a greater writer than Molière.

It is in the same spirit that he tells us Wycliffe translated the Bible into English “in order that people should judge between the Church and himself,” not knowing that a vernacular translation of the Bible existed in French, in German, in Bohemian, and even (probably, or certainly) in the newly-coalesced English tongue.

It is in the same spirit that he postulates “organized dogma” as in conflict with the “quickening intelligence and courage of mankind.” How can intelligence act upon any problem without resulting in organized dogma? How else did intelligence act on the problems of Astronomy? Is there no dogma to-day on the rotation of the earth? What on earth has “courage” to do with lack of dogma? Where is the courage in nourishing mere doubt in a woolly brain?