Chapter IX Social Thought in the Middle Ages

The social thought of the Middle Ages was in part a reflection of the unsettled social conditions, and in part an outgrowth of the thought and life of the five centuries which intervened between the beginning of the Christian Era and the Fall of Rome. During these centuries the Church Fathers moved away from the pristine Christian teachings. While they accepted the underlying social nature of mankind and believed that government and social organization were necessary in order to curb evil tendencies, their teachings treated government as a divine institution and transformed rulers into super-powerful beings with divine rights. The autocratic rather than the democratic element in government received support.

The strong Roman bias for organization and administration was builded into the church—the result was the powerful Church of Rome with its hierarchal structure. After the Fall of Rome, the Roman proclivity for centralization of government lived on and produced within the Church a center of power that has been the marvel of church history.

The Church Fathers directed the attention of the people to the next world and to preparation therefor. Sacramental and sacrificial methods of salvation were elaborated. The importance of improving social conditions was ignored. In fact, the injustices in the current social order were considered as disciplinary measures for the soul in its preparation for the next world. The improvement of living conditions was considered to be wasted effort, if not indicative of heretical tendencies of mind.

By the third century, loyalty to creed had become a dominant note in Christianity. The poor constituted a decreasing influence in church life; wealth was exerting unChristian influences. The aristocratic elements in church organization began to transform the poor into a special class within the church. Poverty was not viewed preventively. By the time of the Fall of Rome the poor had become objects upon which to bestow alms as a means of expiating sin.

The greatest of the Latin Fathers was Saint Augustine (354–450). Among other works, he wrote a large set of twenty-two volumes under the title of The City of God. In this gigantic undertaking social thought was submerged beneath theological discussions. A part of the argument is devoted to an explanation of the Fall of Rome. The leading causal elements are described as economic factors, such as the rise of luxury; and religious unbelief, such as the worship of pagan gods. Augustine describes two cities, one of this world, materialistic and debasing; and one of the next world—the City of God, which through the will of God will finally triumph.

During the first half of the Middle Ages the dominant tendencies are Roman and Christian. The Roman power of organization gains increasing strength in its new form—the Church. The Christian influences were expressed in high ideals, new duties, and asceticism. The church acted as a soothing and quieting force in the centuries of unrest. It built elaborate monasteries and gathered together under its protecting wing large numbers of people, chiefly the poor. Under the supervision of the church, these religious believers lived in communal and sympathetic fashion. Along with these developments the church also manifested grave abuses. At the expense sometimes of the ignorant and the poor the church grew powerful.

Out of the period of social disorder which characterized the early Middle Ages there developed educational movements, such as that which Charlemagne sponsored, and the system of Feudalism, which gave to the Middle Ages its most distinctive set of characteristics. Feudalism made land the central institution of society. The ownership of land gave power; land constituted social and political power. Land was parcelled out upon the receipt of oaths of homage and fealty. Under this land system there were three classes of people: the nobles, the clergy, and the peasants. The nobles were the rulers and exercised military prerogatives. The clergy were either the privileged subjects of the nobles, or else through the institution which they represented they acquired land power. The peasants often despised the nobles, although they worked for and supported them.

As an outgrowth of feudal industry various forms of guilds or industrial organizations flourished from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. Sometimes the masters and workmen jointly belonged to guilds, as in the case of the merchant guilds. Sometimes the guilds became local monopolies. Always they possessed the aim of improving the conditions of the membership.

The religious wars, or Crusades, of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries inaugurated many changes. They gave the restless nobility major themes of attention and even removed many nobles through death in battle from the European arena. They created intellectual unrest. They enlarged the horizons of many individuals and gave rise to skepticism. They led to the Reformation.

Social thought in the Middle Ages received a considerable stimulus from Teutonic sources. The barbarous Teutons contributed ideas of freedom. They increased the emphasis upon the individual. They were rough, bold exponents of “personal liberty,” and disregarded mere churchly procedure, social traditions, and some of the finer ideals of life and character. On the other hand, chivalry and knighthood were perhaps of Teutonic origin.

The church utilized chivalry. It became the duty of the knight to defend the church and that which belonged to the church. Chivalry became a form of social discipline which ruled in the latter part of the Middle Ages. It softened manners and became the sponsor for virtue. It remained, however, a modified military structure with military traditions.

The rise of scholasticism took place in opposition to monasticism. In the ninth century the leading thinkers had not advanced beyond the conception of a natural social state, characterized by chaotic conditions, and organized by political machinery. By the twelfth century only the faintest glimmerings of a doctrine of popular sovereignty had begun to appear. The thought of the day was largely theological.

The church through its systems of monasteries had maintained centers where religious and intellectual traditions had been preserved. These centers were undoubtedly important factors in conserving much that was valuable in an age when ruthless disregard for civilized values prevailed.

Because of the abuses which sprang up in connection with the monasteries, certain positive reactions against the monasteries arose. St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) turned from the monastery to actual life. He inaugurated a method for the regeneration of society. He and his followers lived and spent themselves among the actual poor, subjecting themselves to the economic conditions of the poor. They helped the poor, not by giving alms as an expiation for sin and to secure self-salvation, but by the first-hand giving of their lives. St. Francis ignored the regular ecclesiastical conception of charity and gave it all the reality of a new and genuine social force. By renouncing the possession of property and living as the poor live, he obtained what he could secure in no other way—the poor man’s point of view. In this way, also, he secured an entrance into the poor man’s mind and heart that could not be had so well by any other method. By renouncing wealth and accepting literal poverty he reached the core of the problem of poverty. St. Francis was motivated by a desire to live a life of love. He spent not wealth but his life for the poor.

Scholasticism developed as a reaction against churchly asceticism. According to scholasticism the individual should look to reason rather than to church dogma for religious and spiritual guidance. Scholasticism repudiated church traditions as a guide for individual action; it turned to Aristotelian logic for its technique. Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274), the best known of the scholastic philosophers, pushed forward the Aristotelian premises as follows: Man is a social being: he unites with other individuals in a social organization in order to gain his own purposes. The individual looks to able rulers for wise political guidance; he accords the requisite power to these rulers. Aquinas thus recognized a tacit social compact, or contract, foreshadowing Rousseau.

In religion, scholasticism reduced religious mysticism to rational forms. It based religion on learning rather than on authority; it pursued the methods of reasoning rather than of contemplation.

Scholasticism furthered the advancement of learning; it aided and developed the life of the universities. It encouraged the growth of independent thinking, although its decline set in about the fourteenth century, before it had had a fair opportunity to inaugurate a movement which would lead to an inductive or a positivistic philosophy, or sociology.

Various other thought elements appeared in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. As early as the ninth century a maritime code, a military code, and a rural code were formulated in the Byzantine Empire in order to meet new social needs. Until the fall of Constantinople the Byzantine influence was a deterrent against the forces from the East. Byzantium preserved and gave a new impetus to Grecian literature, art, architecture, and law.

In Arabia the celebrated historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), made a detailed and surprisingly accurate description of the social life of the Arab tribes. With the evolution of the life of the individual, he compared the development of the successive stages in social life. This distinguished historian urged that history should consider not simply rulers, dynasties, and wars, but also racial factors, climatic forces, the laws of association, and the stages of associative life. He wished to make history scientific, even a social science. He formulated an evolutionary doctrine of social progress. He evolved a spiral theory of social evolution, beginning with the crudest primitive life and ending with the most civilized urban life.

In the latter part of the fourteenth century, England’s great popular poet, William Langland, wrote an allegorical poem entitled, Piers Ploughman. In this work the oppressed laboring and peasant classes cry aloud their longings for improved conditions. They are personified in Piers the Ploughman, who as a dignified laborer, plays for the first time the leading rôle in serious thought. He is the leader of a field of all types of people who are laboring together and longing for a better social order. Along with the agricultural laborers we see weavers and tailors, friars and minstrels, merchants and knights. Labor of every sort is dignified. All living laborers who work with their hands and minds, truly earning, living in love and according to the laws of social order and progress, will become the pure and perfected leaders of truth.

Langland depicted well the living and working conditions of the English laboring classes. Productive toil, he argued, will receive its crown of glory. But he did not indicate practical solutions. Langland was sure, however, that the service of labor to society is sacred. He pronounced patient poverty to be the prince of all virtues. He personified Jesus in the form of a working man. Langland’s fourteenth century social message was that the individual should renounce wealth, join the honest laboring poor, and follow Christ’s example of living a life of labor and love.IX-1

Social thought in the Middle Ages is fragmentary. While several centuries are included in the period, new social ideas are very few. The centuries of unrest and transition, the paucity of great leaders, the intellectual stagnation, and the prevalent illiteracy of the masses produced situations in which little social thinking of importance was stimulated. New thought of any type was almost negligible except as an isolated individual stood forth, such as Augustine, Charlemagne, Ibn Khaldun, Aquinas. A portion of the social thinking of the preceding age, however, was preserved, constituting a foundation for the renaissance of social thought that was coming.