VIII.

A new age arose, with which the old conceptions did not harmonise. The Church had attained to political world-dominion; she had either actually overcome, or was on the point of overcoming, the Empire and the old State order. The aims and results of the mighty efforts put forth by the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had now been made manifest; but now a movement began 92among the laity and in the nations to emancipate themselves from the tutelage of the hierarchy. In social movements, in religious sectarianism, in pious unions which failed to find satisfaction in official piety, in the endeavours of nations and princes to order their own concerns independently, was heralded the approach of a new era. For a whole century the secular Church succeeded in holding back the tide; and in doing so she was aided by a fresh phenomenon in monasticism which is marked by the foundation of the mendicant Orders.

The figure of the tenderest and most loveable of all monks, the quaint saint of Assisi, stands out brilliantly in the history of the Middle Ages. Here, however, we are not asking what was his character, but what were his aims in devoting himself to the service of God and of his brethren. In the first place he desired to renew the life of the Apostles by imitating the poverty of their life and their preaching of the Gospel. This 93preaching was to arouse penitence in Christendom and to make Christendom effectively that which she already was through her possession of the Holy Sacraments. A society of brethren was to be formed which, like the Apostles, should possess nothing but penitence, faith, and love, and which should own no other aim than to serve others and to win souls. St Francis never clearly defined how far this society was to extend itself. He was no politician, and never intruded on the domain of government. But what could converts, made by the preaching of the poor brethren, have become, but themselves brethren, serving itinerant preachers, in their turn? For them St Francis himself laid down fixed and settled rules. Neither individuals nor even the society, united as it was for a truly Christ-like life, was to possess property of any kind. “Go sell all that thou hast.” Life in God, suffering along with His Son, love for His creatures, human and other, service even to the sacrifice of one’s own life, the 94riches of the soul, which possesses nothing but the Saviour—such was the Gospel of St Francis. If any man ever realised in his life what he preached, St Francis was that man. And—what is the characteristic mark of this Western movement—intense as this asceticism was, heartfelt as this religion was, it did not drive its disciples into solitude or the desert, but the reverse. Christendom, nay, the whole world, was to be won for this new and yet old Christianity of repentance, renunciation, and love. A Christian world—this conception, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, had a quite other content than in the sixth and eleventh; not only because the geographical horizon had extended itself for the West, but to a higher degree because the poor and the ordinary man were now to be reckoned as part of that world. Western monasticism, down to the end of the twelfth century, had been essentially an aristocratic institution; the privileges of the monasteries were in most cases conditioned 95by the descent of their inmates. The monastic schools were as a rule open only to the nobility. To the coarse and common people the monastery remained as inaccessible as the castle. There were no popular Orders and few popular monks. St Francis did not break down the walls of the noble monasteries but raised alongside them huts for poor and rich. He thus restored the Gospel to the people, who had hitherto possessed only the priest and the Sacrament. But the saint of Assisi was the most submissive son of the Church and of the Pope in history. His labours were devoted to the service of the Church. Thus he was the first to give to monasticism—for a monasticism his brotherhood became, little as he meant it—special tasks for Christianity as a whole, but in the bosom of the Church: for care for the Church is care for salvation. Clugny and its monks had exclusively devoted themselves to the reform of the spiritualty. St Francis would know no distinctions. We may say without 96exaggeration that he wished not to found a new order of monks but to revolutionise the world—to make the world a fair garden, colonised by men who follow Christ, who need nothing, in whose hearts is God. It was love that enlarged his horizon: his fancy neither grew rankly luxuriant, nor did it become barren through his stern asceticism: his determination to serve Church and Christianity remained to the end strong and powerful, though he was constrained with pain to see how the Church corrected and narrowed his creation. Hundreds of thousands flocked to him. But what were thousands when it was a question of millions? The emergence of the so-called Tertiary Brethren by the side of the strict monastic order is on one side, of course, an indication that this Gospel does not penetrate into human society without compromise, but on the other a shining example of the far-reaching influence of the Franciscan preaching. The Tertiaries kept up their secular callings, their marriages 97and their possessions; but they adapted themselves as far as possible to the monastic life, held themselves aloof from public affairs, and devoted themselves, as far as they could, to asceticism and works of piety. This institution, which formed itself without any recognised founder, is a striking proof of the universal character of the Franciscan movement. Sects had led the way; but the brotherhood remained true to the Church. Nay, the interest of the laity in the life and in the sacraments of the Church was awakened by them; through them the idea grew slowly effective that a layman, sincerely obedient to the Church and inwardly pious, has a right to share in the highest good which the Church can communicate. The conception of a double morality differing in value, could on this basis be transformed into another more tolerable conception of a morality differing only in kind. An active Christian life may be of equal value with the contemplative; the latter is only a more direct path to salvation.

A newly moulded piety, dominated by the surrender of the soul to Christ, spread forth from Assisi and made itself master of the Church. It was religious individuality and freedom that had been awakened; Christianity as the religion of poverty and love was to come by its own as opposed to the degeneracy in morality and politics.

The finest of mediæval hymns, the mightiest of mediæval sermons, belong to the Franciscan Order or to the nearly-related Dominicans. But to art and science also these Orders gave a new impulse. All the important schoolmen of the thirteenth century—a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Albertus Magnus—were mendicant monks. The noblest paintings of the old Italian school are inspired by the new spirit, the spirit of absorption in the sufferings of Christ, of a holy sorrow and a transcendental strength. A Dante, a Giotto, and again a Tauler, and a Berthold of Ratisbon—all these, in their feelings, thoughts, and creations, lived in the 99religious ideas of the mendicant Orders. But—what is more significant—these monks stooped to the populace and to individuals. They had an eye for their sorrows and an ear for their complaints. They lived with the people, they preached to the people in their own language, and they brought them a consolation they could understand. What the sacrament and the services had hitherto failed to give—a certainty of salvation—the mysticism of the Orders aimed at producing: but not outside of the Church means of grace. The eye must learn to see the Saviour; the soul must attain peace by sensuous perception of His presence. But the ‘theology,’ which here arose, proclaimed also the religious freedom and blessedness of souls lifted above the world and conscious of their God. If by this idea it did not actually begin the Evangelical Reformation, it made the path straight for it.

By the help of the mendicant Orders, of which she availed herself to the full, the 100Church was able in the thirteenth century to maintain herself at the height of her dominion. She won back the hearts of the faithful; but at the same time, through the activity of the monks, she ordered and brought to perfection her hold on the goods of the world, science, art, and law. It was then that the body of canon law was completed, which regulates all the relations of life from the standpoint of the Church’s world-dominion, and of an asceticism devoted to her service. This canon law is no longer recognised in civilised states, but its ideas still bear fruit. To a much higher degree are philosophy and theology, as well as social politics, still dependent on the mode of thought which in the thirteenth century, in the mendicant Orders, led to the masterly development of great scholastic systems. Through these Orders, again, the Church succeeded in overcoming the sectarian movements that had taken hold of the laity. It was the mendicants who with furious zeal conquered 101the heretical, but, alas! also free-spirited and evangelical, movements of the thirteenth century. Thus here also they made common cause with the world-ruling Church, the Church of politics and of the sword: nay, they became precisely the most favoured clerical servants of the Popes, who endowed them with the highest privileges, and permitted them everywhere to interfere with the regular administration of the Church and with the cure of souls. In the mendicant Orders, the Roman Pope found a tool wherewith to weld the national churches of the country more closely to his see, and to crush the independence of the Bishops. Thus they had the largest share in the Romanising of the Catholic Church in Europe, and also influenced in many ways the older foundations which sprang out of the Benedictine Rule. But they became secularised as speedily as any other Order before them. The connection with the secular Church proved once again fatal to monasticism. That connection had 102been from the first extraordinarily close—Francis had been compelled to yield as if to a decree of Fate—and the ruin was all the more rapid. What was meant to raise them above the world—their poverty—proved but an occasion of specific secularisation to those who no longer took poverty seriously. They saw themselves led to speculate on the coarseness, the superstition, and the sluggishness of the masses; and they became, like the masses, coarse, superstitious, and sluggish.

Yet the high ideal set before Christendom by St Francis could not disappear without shaking to their foundations the Church and the Order founded by him. When one party in the Order urged a modification of the strictness of the regulations imposing poverty, another, faithful to the Master, arose to defend them. When the Popes took up the cause of the former, the zealous party turned their criticism upon the Papacy and the secular Church. Complaints of the corruption of the Church had long been uttered by individual monks, 103but they had always died away again. The strife of the Church against the states and their claims had hitherto constantly enticed monasticism to recognise in the programme of the Church the beginning of the realisation of its own. But now arose the idea which had always lain dormant in monasticism and had again and again been suppressed. The tie with Church and Papacy was sundered: ancient apocalyptic ideas emerged; the Papal Church appeared as Babylon, as the Kingdom of Antichrist, who has falsified the true Christianity of renunciation and poverty. The whole history of the Church appeared suddenly in the light of a monstrous apostasy; and the Pope no longer as the successor of Peter but as the heir of Constantine. It was hopeless to attempt to move the Church to turn back. Nothing but a new revelation of the Spirit could avail to save her, and men accordingly looked for a future final Gospel of Christian perfection. With all the means in her power the Church 104suppressed this dangerous uprising. She pronounced the teachings of the Franciscans on the poverty of Christ and the Apostles to be heresy, and she demanded submission. A bitter struggle was the result. Christendom witnessed the new spectacle of the secular Church in arms against a doctrine of renunciation that had become aggressive. With the courage of men who had sacrificed all, the Spirituals preached to Pope and Bishop their doctrine of poverty, and sealed their testimony at the stake. At the end of the fourteenth century the secular Church came forth, victorious and unchanged, from her strife with poverty. Thus once again, at the end of the Middle Ages, the sleeping but ever reviving antagonism between the aims of the Church and the aims of monasticism had come to light in a terrible crisis. But monasticism was vanquished. The foundation of the mendicant Orders was its last great attempt in the Middle Ages to assert itself and its ideal in the Church as a 105whole while maintaining its connection with the history and constitution of that Church. But the development of the Franciscan Order was twofold. The one party, from the very first, resigned its original ideal, subjected itself completely to the Church, and became speedily secularised; the other sought to maintain its ideal, made that ideal stricter, set it up even against the Church, and exhausted itself, until it succumbed, in fantastic pursuits. This development will to some appear an unredeemed tragedy; but it will perhaps not seem an unmixed evil to those who recognise that individuals of the Order which strove to emancipate itself from the Church, sought deliverance at the hands of the State, and, in opposition to the claims of the Church, which they no longer or only partially admitted, began to defend the independence and ordinances of the State. It was the Franciscans who, in the fourteenth century, discovered a scientific foundation for the Hohenstaufen theory of politics. Western 106monasticism, as we learn from this astonishing volte-face, is unable to exist for any length of time without a close alliance with the forces of society. When the Church is not available, it seeks even the State. Yet this movement was but transitory. In the fifteenth century it deathly stillness reigns in the Order, which is now in entire subjection to the Church; attempts it reform were feeble, and resulted in no fresh life. In the age of the Renascence monasticism—with a few honourable exceptions—seemed to have condemned itself to inaction and uselessness. Yet the new culture, whose supporters, it is true, frequently spent their shafts of ridicule on the ignorant, slavish, and hypocritical monks, was not utterly hostile to ascetic ideals. Rather did the vision reappear of a wise and pious man, absorbed in the enjoyment of a quiet contemplation of heaven, without neglecting the world, in peaceful detachment from the noises of the day; who needs nothing because in spirit he possesses all. The attempt was even 107made to revive this ideal in the traditional forms of cloister-life; nor did it everywhere fail. But it was only given to isolated individuals to unite the rule of the convent with the study of Cicero or Plato, and to be sufficient for both. The scholar who was at the same time a man of the world, and who at his desk became enthusiastic for Stoical indifference or for Franciscan independence of externals, was anything but a monk; and the Church, in spite of all classical and edifying dissertations, remained as she was. The poor, as in the days before St Francis had shown them the way, sought to secure their salvation in pious and enthusiastic unions of every kind, which were, it is true, of occasional service to the Church, but nevertheless were to her a constant danger.