Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,
Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.
Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.
From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described—an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—is the same.15 Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occasions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploitation, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-comprehensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning given them is simple. The facts of class status and inequality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to us—enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.
As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is damnable.”16 As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere moneymaking was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essence of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily interpreted in terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasize that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.
That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true function was “to defend God’s law by power of the world.”17 Craftsmen—the burden of endless sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every other.”18
If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least
