Naturally enough the monastic spirit has been often
treated as an absolute antithesis to the lay statesmanship which it so bitterly
opposed. But in fact they sprang from the same root of a discontent, which was
wholly reasonable, with the anarchical conditions of the early Middle Ages. The
religious reformer, stunned and bewildered by the wrong-doing of men and the
manifest inequity of fortune, argued that a world so irredeemably bad must be
regarded as an ordeal for the faith of the believer. Man was afflicted in this
life that he might realise the supreme value of the life to come. He was
surrounded by evil that he might learn to hate it. He was placed in society
that he might school himself to control the immoral and non-moral instincts
which society calls into play.
The political reformers, at least in their more disinterested
moods, were animated by the same belief in an all-wise Providence, but drew
different deductions from it. The God who created man as a social being could
not have intended that society should remain perpetually unjust. He must have
intended that it should approximate, however imperfectly, to the idea of
justice which He has revealed. The State is a divine institution, and therefore
man must do his best to reform the State. The lay ruler, as the representative
of justice, is God's steward and even in a sense His priest. Frederic II, whom
his contemporaries denounced as an apostate and blasphemer, only expressed in a
particularly daring form the tradition of medieval royalty when he styled
himself, or allowed his flatterers to style him, the Corner-Stone of the
Church, the Vicar of God, the New Messiah.
