J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis<\/a><\/div>\nThe economic base of this social pyramid consisted of the dependent peasants and manorial craftsmen on whose work the warriors lived. We thus seem to behold what at first sight looks like a structural unit in the sense that the phrase Social Pyramid is indeed meant to convey. But this picture is quite unrealistic. Societies, with the possible exception of primitive tribes and full-fledged socialism, are never structural units, and half the problems they present arise from the fact that they are not. The society of feudal times cannot be described in terms of knights and peasants any more than the society of capitalist times can be described in terms of capitalists and proletarians. Roman industry, commerce, and finance had not been destroyed everywhere. Even where they had been destroyed or where they had never existed, they\u2014and consequently classes of bourgeois character\u2014had developed or developed again before St. Thomas\u2019 day. In many places these classes had outgrown the framework of the feudal organization and, helped by the fact that a well-fortified town was normally impregnable to the knights\u2019 arts of warfare, they had successfully challenged the rule of the feudal lords\u2014 the most conspicuous instance being the victorious resistance of the towns of Lombardy. As a historical reality, therefore, feudalism means the symbiosis of two essentially different and largely, though not wholly, antagonistic social systems.<\/p>\n
But there was another factor of non-feudal origin and character that the warrior class failed to absorb or to conquer, for us the most important of all, the Roman Catholic Church. We cannot enter into a discussion of the extremely intricate relations of the medieval Church with the feudal powers. The one essential point to grasp is that the Church was not simply an organ of feudal society but an organism distinct from feudal society that always remained a power in its own right. However closely allied with, or dependent upon, feudal kings and lords it may at times have been, however near it may have come to defeat and to being harnessed into the service of the warrior class, it never resigned its own authority and never became the instrument of that or any other class.<\/p>\n
Since the Church was always able not only to assert itself but also to wage successful war upon the feudal powers, this fact should be too obvious to require explicit statement, were it not that historiography, inspired by a popular version of Marxian sociology, may easily create the impression\u2014to put it in the crudest possible way\u2014that medieval thought was merely the ideology of a landholding warrior class, verbalized by its chaplains. This impression would be wrong not only from the standpoint of those who refuse to accept the Marxian sociology of ideas, but also from the standpoint of Marx himself, even if we chose to interpret the Catholic system of thought as an ideology, it would still remain the ideology of the clergy and never merge with that of the warrior class. It is important to keep this in mind because of the practically complete monopoly of learning that the Catholic Church enjoyed until the Renaissance. This monopoly was due primarily to the spiritual authority of the Church. But it was greatly reinforced by the conditions of those ages in which there was neither room nor security for professional scholars except within a convent. In consequence, almost all \u2018intellectuals\u2019 of those times were either monks or friars. Let us briefly consider some implications of this.<\/p>\n
All those monks and friars spoke the same unclassical Latin; they heard the same Mass wherever they went; they were formed by an education that was the same in all countries; they professed the same system of fundamental beliefs; and they all acknowledged the supreme authority of the Pope, which was essentially international: their country was Christendom, their state was the Church. But this is not all. Their internationalizing influence was strengthened by the fact that feudal society itself was international. Not only the Pope\u2019s but also the Emperor\u2019s authority was international in principle and, to some varying degree, in fact. The old Roman Empire and that of Charlemagne were no mere reminiscences. People were familiar with the idea of a temporal as well as of a spiritual superstate. National divisions did not mean to them what they came to mean during the sixteenth century; nothing in the whole range of Dante\u2019s political ideas is so striking as is the complete absence of the nationalist angle. The result was the emergence of an essentially international civilization and an international republic of scholars that was no phrase but a living reality. St. Thomas was an Italian and John Duns Scotus was a Scotsman, but both taught in Paris and Cologne without encountering any of the difficulties that they would have encountered in the age of airplanes.<\/p>\n
In fact as well as in principle, practically everybody who wished to do so was allowed to enter a monastic order and also to join the ranks of the secular clergy. But advancement within the Church was open to everybody in principle only, since the claims of members of warrior-class families in fact absorbed the greater part of bishopries and abbotcies. But the man without connection was never entirely excluded from the higher dignities, not even from the highest; and, what is much more important for us, he was not debarred from becoming an idea-shaping and policy-shaping \u2018keyman.\u2019 The regular clergy (the monks) and the friars supplied, as it were, the general staff of the Church. And in the monasteries men of all classes met on equal terms. natural lawly, the intellectual atmosphere was often charged with social and political radicalism, though this was, of course, much more the case at some times than at others and much more with the friars than with the regular monks. In the literature that we are going to survey we get this radicalism in a highly rarefied form but we do get it.<\/p>\n
But how can a radical\u2014hence also critical\u2014attitude of mind be imputed to a social group whose members were bound to obey the dictates of a supreme and absolute authority? This apparent paradox is easily resolved. The lives and the faith of the monks and friars were indeed subject to authority that was, in theory at least, absolute and spoke immutable truth. But beyond the sphere of discipline and fundamental religious belief\u2014 beyond the matters that were de fide\u2014that authority did not undertake to direct their thought, nor did it prescribe results. In particular, it had not, in general, any motive for doing so in the department of political and economic thought, that is to say, for compelling the clerical intellectuals to expound and defend or to represent as immutable any given temporal order of things. The Church was judge of all things human; conflict with temporal authority was an ever-present possibility and very often the actual fact; the monastic orders were important instruments of Papal authority: these were no reasons for preventing them from looking upon temporal institutions as historically mutable works of man. I am far from wishing to belittle the importance of Christian ideals and precepts per se. But we need not invoke them in order to realize that monastic subordination to authority in matters of faith and discipline was compatible with extensive freedom of opinion in all other matters. We must go even further. Not only did the monks\u2019 sociological location\u2014outside, as it were, of the class structure\u2014make for an attitude of detached criticism of many things; there also was a power behind them that was in a position to protect that freedom. So far as treatment of political and economic problems is concerned, the clerical intellectual of that age was not more but less exposed to interference from political authority and from \u2018pressure groups\u2019 than was the laical intellectual of later ages.<\/p>\n
The indictment that unquestioning acceptance of ecclesiastic authority invalidated the reasoning of those monastic scholars from a scientific standpoint is thus seen to be without foundation. We have, however, still to consider a particular form of it. The analytic nature of their reasoning has often been denied on the ground that their arguments can have been only arguments from authority: subject to the authority of the Pope as they were, they had no other method left of establishing or refuting a proposition than to adduce for or against it literary authorities recognized by that supreme authority.<\/p>\n
But this is not so. The point can be cleared up by a reference to St. Thomas. He taught indeed that authority was of decisive importance in matters involving Revelation\u2014 namely, the authority of those to whom the revelations had been made\u2014but he also taught that in everything else (and this includes, of course, the whole field of economics) any argument from authority was \u2018extremely weak.\u2019 Of course, the scholastics all quoted copiously, but so do we. They deferred to authority\u2014where they agreed with it\u2014more than we do because they emphasized cooperative rather than individual opinion and attached great importance to continuity of doctrine. But this is all.<\/p>\n
With the monopoly of learning went the monopoly of \u2018higher\u2019 teaching. In the schools that were founded from the seventh century on, by temporal and spiritual lords, it was clerics who taught the tatters of Graeco-Roman science as well as theology and philosophical doctrines of their own\u2014great teachers like Abelard attracted students and caused, occasionally, a lot of trouble for the controlling authorities. In some cases from these schools, in others independently, the self-governing \u2018universities\u2019 developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries\u2014incorporated associations of either teachers, as in Paris, or students, as in Bologna, who before long grouped themselves into theological, philosophical, legal, and medical \u2018faculties.\u2019 At first, princes and bishops had no more to do with them than what was implied in the granting of corporative privileges and in religious supervision. Accordingly, the universities enjoyed a large measure of freedom and independence; they gave more scope to the individual teacher than do the mechanized universities of today; they were a meeting ground of all classes of society; and they were essentially international. But from the fourteenth century on, government foundations became increasingly frequent. Governments also acquired control of previously independent institutions. Eventually, this changed everything. Government influence not only made for the assertion of purely utilitarian aims but also for restriction of freedom, particularly, of course, in matters of political doctrine. But, precisely because of the power that stood behind the clerical teachers, the universities held their own fairly well until the religious split in the sixteenth century.<\/p>\n
The opportunities offered by the universities natural lawly reinforced the old tendency of scholars to become teachers. And since the public was then as prone as it is now to overemphasize the teaching at the expense of the production of what is being taught, medieval men of science were and are usually referred to as Schoolmen or Scholastics (doctores scholastici). In order to disabuse himself of prevailing preconceptions, the reader had better see in these scholastic doctors simply college or university professors. St. Thomas, then, was a professor. His Summa Theologica was, as he informs us in the preface, conceived as a textbook for beginners (incipientes).<\/p>\n
J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Thomas\u2019 life extended over the crest of feudal civilization. This term suggests the idea of a particular type of warrior society, namely, of a society dominated by a warrior stratum that was organized, on the principle of vassalage, in a hierarchy of fief-endowed lords and knights. From the standpoint of this hierarchy of warriors, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,6707],"tags":[7897,275,7896],"class_list":["post-4882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-feudalism","tag-scholasticism","tag-schumpeter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}