History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [5]
The secular power, on the contrary, was in the hands of kings and barons of Teutonic descent, who endeavoured to preserve what they could of the institutions that they had brought out of the forests of Germany. Absolute power was alien to those institutions, and so was what appeared to these vigorous conquerors as a dull and spiritless legality. The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy, but all alike expected to be allowed occasional outbursts of passion in the form of war, murder, pillage, or rape. Monarchs might repent, for they were sincerely pious, and after all, repentance was itself a form of passion. But the Church could never produce in them the quiet regularity of good behaviour which a modern employer demands, and usually obtains, of his employees. What was the use of conquering the world if they could not drink and murder and love as the spirit moved them? And why should they, with their armies of proud knights, submit to the orders of bookish men, vowed to celibacy and destitute of armed force? In spite of ecclesiastical disapproval, they preserved the duel and trial by battle, and they developed tournaments and courtly love. Occasionally, in a fit of rage, they would even murder eminent churchmen.
All the armed force was on the side of the kings, and yet the Church was victorious. The Church won, partly because it had almost a monopoly of education, partly because the kings were perpetually at war with each other, but mainly because, with very few exceptions, rulers and people alike profoundly believed that the Church possessed the power of the keys. The Church could decide whether a king should spend eternity in heaven or in hell; the Church could absolve subjects from the duty of allegiance, and so stimulate rebellion. The Church, moreover, represented order in place of anarchy, and consequently won the support of the rising mercantile class. In Italy, especially, this last consideration was decisive.
The Teutonic attempt to preserve at least a partial independence of the Church expressed itself not only in politics, but also in art romance, chivalry, and war. It expressed itself very little in the intellectual world, because education was almost wholly confined to the clergy. The explicit philosophy of the Middle Ages is not an accurate mirror of the times, but only of what was thought by one party. Among ecclesiastics, however—especially among the Franciscan friars—a certain number, for various reasons, were at variance with the Pope. In Italy, moreover, culture spread to the laity some centuries sooner than it did north of the Alps. Frederick II, who tried to found a new religion, represents the extreme of anti-papal culture; Thomas Aquinas, who was born in the kingdom of Naples where Frederick II was supreme, remains to this day the classic exponent of papal philosophy. Dante, some fifty years later, achieved a synthesis, and gave the only balanced exposition of the complete medieval world of ideas.
After Dante, both for political and for intellectual reasons, the medieval philosophical synthesis broke down. It had, while it lasted, a quality of tidiness and miniature completeness; whatever the system took account of was placed with precision with relation to the other contents of its very finite cosmos. But the Great Schism, the conciliar movement, and the Renaissance papacy led up to the Reformation, which destroyed the unity of Christendom and the scholastic theory of government that centred round the Pope. In the Renaissance period new knowledge, both of antiquity and of the earth's surface, made men tired of systems, which were felt to be mental prisons. The Copernican astronomy assigned to the earth and to man a humbler position than they had enjoyed in the Ptolemaic theory. Pleasure in new facts took the place, among intelligent