Truth in Retreat

Extract

I do not mean that Truth shifts. I mean that as men stretch out their hands to grasp her, she seems to them to withdraw herself : even as the fairy glow on the distant hills recedes as we draw near. Men are bashful of the truth and are eluded because of the coyness of their grasp-Moreover the truth is expected to shift; and that position which is static is suspected of some falsity, since at some time or other truth must have shifted thence on her travels. Thus von Martin complains in his book, Sociology of the Renaissance.

‘The centre of gravity of mediaeval society was the land, was the soil. . . Mediaeval society was founded upon a static order of Estates, sanctioned by the Church. Everyone was assigned to his place by nature, i.e. by God himself, and any attempt to break away from it was a revolt against the divine order. Everyone was confined within strictly defined limits, which were imposed and enforced by the ruling Estates, the clergy. . . The King himself was bound to rule according to definite laws: he had to carry out his reciprocal obligations towards his vassals ; he had to treat the Church according to the principles of justitia.’

There is a certain notion of the Middle Ages which even the most ‘Protestant’ historian of our day has dismissed with contempt. It is based upon a purely imaginative estimate; it relies upon that selective principle which inevitably distinguishes the polemist from the historian. Above all, by its nervous distrust of the objective it must be classified as a subjectivism of the first order.