Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/20

2 unknown to the Latin world there was a wider sphere for the exercise of ingenuity, for something approaching originality, than there could be when an authoritative text-book lay ready to hand. In the following essay our attention will be mainly directed to these traces of independence, not so much in the domain of formal philosophy as in those regions where philosophy touches religion, where reason meets superstition, and where theology links itself with political theory. In the later period we shall limit ourselves exclusively to this last subject, to the attempts made to frame a political philosophy, and in particular to reconcile the notion of the state with the existence and the claims of an universal church, or to modify those claims by reference to the necessary exigencies of civil government.

The field therefore of our investigation is that of theology, but it does not follow on this account that its produce must also be theological. Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought: the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The overmastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy: politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. But when this characteristic is recognised, it is found to supply not only the explanation of the distance which seems to separate the middle ages from modern times, but also a means of bridging over the interval. Men thought theologically and expressed themselves theologically, but when we penetrate this formal expression we discover their speculations, their aims, their hopes, to be at bottom not very different from our own; we discover a variety beneath the monotonous surface of their thoughts, and at the same time an unity, ill-defined perhaps, but still an unity, pervading the history of European society. There was indeed never a