Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    statues and paintings of all the centuries, the stately ceremonial, the white-robed priest and the incense, the grave honourable well¬ born men and women, thronging the sanctuary? Why leave these people, whose mere conformity with the ancient ritual, however superficial or careless, grouped them round the daily sacrifice into a picture more impressive than any on the walls of the temple itself? for, though modern writers may claim that the Roman Mass-ritual is “art at full tide”, yet Pagan worship, under that Southern sun, must have been even more picturesque. How could he leave all this, to go and worship, after the fashion of the Christians of those early days, in a little room bare of statues or pictures, bare even of all the rudest ornaments, where his own tailor’s or shoemaker’s son might be the celebrant of the new¬ fangled uncouth mysteries ? Could he not accept all that was best of the new, without making so cruel a breach with the old ? But Augustine tells us how the working of Victorinus’s own thoughts gradually drove him out of all these excuses; how justly he feared to be denied in heaven by a Christ whom he had shrunk from confessing on earth. We read how he left his colleagues, his friends, his equals—left them to go on in their stately way which to them seemed the only part in life’s pageant that could possibly be played by scholars and gentlemen—and, himself, made the most public possible profession of faith in the Christian conventicle. He accepted meekly what Clough’s fastidious Oxford scholar calls “the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people”, and suffered the crowd of cobblers and weavers to hail him as a brother in triumphant chorus—Victorinus! Victorinus!—while he made his public profession of faith and bowed his head to the baptizing priest. Against this new spirit the Pagan reactionaries fought in vain. With all its faults, this Christian enthusiasm roused men from a past which, however dignified at its best, had often been scarcely more than a state of respectable stagnation. The economic historian Rostovzef, who will not be suspected of bias in this direction, writes most emphatically here:3 “The watchwords of the State were oppression, coercion, and persecution; the maxims of the Church were love, compassion, and consolation. The Church, and she alone among the different religious communities, offered not only spiritual comfort but also practical assistance amidst the miseries of present life, while the State oppressed and persecuted the comforters.”
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