Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/247

Rh could be extracted from them by a violent adaptation of metaphor. It is no doubt usual, he says, among professors of theology to take a double sense in the words of Scripture, the literal or historical, and the mystical or spiritual: but for purposes of argument none but the former can be valid. He at once applies this axiom to demolish the favourite theory, at least as old as Gregory the Seventh, which found in the relation of the sun to the moon an apt and conclusive evidence of the subordination of the secular to the spiritual power, and suggested a variety of arithmetical puzzles as to the exact amount of their proportional magnitudes.

It was in fact in the purely critical work of controversy that the assailants of the hierarchy had almost uniformly the advantage: when they passed from criticism to the building up of a system of their own, their proposals are, in the view of a political philosopher, hardly less weak than those of their opponents. The French, as we have said, write with greater freedom than their imperial brethren; but in the latter too we find no lack of skill, no lack even of historical perception: and if their ablest recruits were drawn from the university of Paris, still the man who overtopped them all in the abstract splendour of his ideal was an independent Italian. Yet Dante's books De Monarchia, striking as they are, labour under the inevitable defect attaching to the attempt to exchange one impossible theory for another equally impossible. Supposing the human race to be entirely homogeneous, one might at once concede Dante's main proposition that the right and necessary form of government is that of one universal state by a sole universal ruler. But in truth he has no practical arguments to adduce in favour of this, only the general a priori principle of the virtue