Principles of western civilisation

vir DHE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 257

all the tendencies of European history are hastening. To bring clearly before the mind the full outlines of the problem involved in the conflict between the temporal and the spiritual power in the Middle Ages, as the prolonged struggle between the Emperor and the Pope—which may be taken as representative of all minor and local phases of the conflict—becomes the life-centre of Western history in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it is necessary to carry the mind back over the conditions in which the problem begins to define itself, and through which it gradually rises towards its climax.

As we first catch sight, in the writings of the early Fathers of the new religion, of the influence of the concept that the welfare that had now come to be described as spiritual was of more importance than temporal interests, the effect on the mind of the individual is perceived to have been direct and unmistakable. There was inculcated through the influence of the new concept a contempt for wealth and power, and all that the world had to offer. The renunciation of the satisfaction of all the desires and passions, for which men had hitherto lived, was the ideal which was held before the mind; and the subjection of the body, the stamping on its passions, appetites, and very wants, grew accordingly into the mortifying rigors of hermits and anchorites, into the sufferings of almost inconceivably enduring pillar-saints, and at last, in the early centuries of our era, into all the aims and ideals of a world-embracing asceticism.

All this represented, however, but the subjective effect on the individual mind of the concept at the

s