The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coastline from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic structure rose were far removed from those of later generations, it flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Summae of the Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of development. The economic teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic parts of the system—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.
There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.”
Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper predominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.10 It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all” and that “in this world God must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them—the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred.
To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes
