VI

THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH


Modern life has travelled so far beyond medieval Christianity that it is
only with an effort we retrace our steps to the intellectual position of
a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, or the _Imitatio Christi_. Apart from
the difficulties of an unfamiliar terminology, we have become estranged
from ideas which then were commonplaces; beliefs once held to be
self-evident and cardinal now hover on the outer verge of speculative
thought, as bare possibilities, as unproved and unprovable guesses at
truth. Our own creeds, it may be, rest upon no sounder bottom of logical
demonstration. But they have been framed to answer doubts, and to
account for facts, which medieval theories ignored; and in framing them
we have been constrained partly to revise, partly to destroy, the
medieval conceptions of God and the Universe, of man and the moral law.

This is not the place for a critique of medieval religion. But, unless
we bear in mind some essential features of the Catholic system of
thought, we miss the key to that ecclesiastical statesmanship which
dominates the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The programme of the
great Popes, from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, must appear a tissue of
absurdities, of preposterous ambitions and indefensible actions, unless
it is studied in relation to a theology as far remote from primitive
Christianity as from the cults and philosophies of classical antiquity.