2022-04-12 《西方哲学史》引言3

Christianity popularized an important opinion, already implicit in the teaching of the Stoics,--I mean, the opinion that a man's duty to God is more imperative than his duty to the State.

This opinion--that "we ought to obey God rather than Man," as Socrates and the Apostles said--survived the conversion of Constantine, because the early Christian emperors were Arians or inclined to Arianism. When the emperors became orthodox, it fell into abeyance. In the Byzantine Empire it remained latent, as also in the subsequent Russian Empire, which derived its Christianity from Constantinople.  But in the West, where the Catholic emperors were almost immediately replaced (except, in parts of Gaul) by heretical barbarian conquerors, the superiority of religious to political allegiance survived, and to some extent still survives.

their conceptions of law and government would have been more intelligible to Marcus Aurelius than they were to contemporary monarchs.

Its second great period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, was dominated by the Catholic Church, except for a few great rebels, such as the Emperor Frederick II (1195-1250). This period was brought to an end by the confusions that culminated in the Reformation (Protestant Reformation, 1517-1648).

At first, outside Italy and southern France, his control over bishops and abbots was very slight, but from the time of Gregory VII (late eleventh century) it became real and effective.

In Italy, moreover, culture spread to the laity some centuries sooner than it did north of the Alps. Frederick II（1194-1250）, who tried to found a new religion, represents the extreme of anti-papal culture; Thomas Aquinas（1225-1274）, who was born in the kingdom of Naples where Frederick II was supreme, remains to this day the classic exponent of papal philosophy. Dante（1265-1321）, some fifty years later, achieved a synthesis, and gave the only balanced exposition of the complete medieval world of ideas.

After Dante, both for political and for intellectual reasons, the medieval philosophical synthesis broke down. It had, while it lasted, a quality of tidiness and miniature completeness; whatever the system took account of was placed with precision with relation to the other contents of its very finite cosmos. But the Great Schism, the conciliar movement, and the Renaissance papacy led up to the Refformation, which destroyed the unity of Christendom and the scholastic theory of government that centered round the Pope.

In the theory of politics, as in everything except art, there was a collapse of order. The Middle Ages, though turbulent in practice, were dominated in thought by a passion for legality and by a very precise theory of political power. All power is ultimately from God; He has delegated power to the Pope in sacred things and to the Emperor in secular matters. But Pope and Emperor alike lost their importance during the fifteenth century. The Pope became merely one of the Italian princes, engaged in the incredibly complicated and unscrupulous game of Italian power politics.
The new national monarchies in France, Spain, and England had, in their own territories, a power with which neither Pope nor Emperor could interfere. The national State, largely owing to gunpowder, acquired an influence over men's thoughts and feelings which it had not had before, and which progressively destroyed what remained of the Roman belief in the unity of civilization.

From the sixteenth century onward, the history of European thought is dominated by the Reformation. The Reformation was a complex many-sided movement, and owed its success to a variety of causes. In the main, it was a revolt of the northern nations against the renewed dominion of Rome. Religion was the force that had subdued the North, but religion in Italy had decayed: the papacy remained as an institution, and extracted a huge tribute from Germany and England, but these nations, which were still pious, could feel no reverence for the Borgias and Medicis, who professed to save souls from purgatory in return for cash which they squandered on luxury and immorality. National motives, economic motives, and moral motives all combined to strengthen the revolt against Rome. Moreover the Princes soon perceived that, if the Church in their territories became merely national, they would be able to dominate it, and would thus become much more powerful at home than they had been while sharing dominion with the Pope. For all these reasons, Luther's theological innovations were welcomed by rulers and peoples alike throughout the greater part of northern Europe.

The result, in thought as in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation from spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily towards a personal isolation inimical to social sanity.