PARTISAN REVIEW
tinguish heresy from orthodox beliefs
if
they were left without help.
They got excited only when the Pope had recourse to the secular
arm. Then they pillaged and burned everything, but only because
they had confidence in the Pope and because they never turned up their
noses at a chance to pillage.
It
is true that the ideology was ultimately
intended for them, for them and the people, but it was communicated
to them orally by preachings, and the Church very early made use
of a simpler language than writing, the image. The sculpture of the
cloisters and the cathedrals, the stained-glass windows, the paintings,
and the mosaics speak of God and the Holy Story. The clerk wrote
his chronicles, his philosophical works, his commentaries, and his
poems on the margin of this vast illustrating enterprise of the faith.
He intended them for his peers; they were controlled by his su–
periors. He did not have to be concerned with the effects which
his works would produce upon the masses, since he was assured in
advance that they would have no knowledge of them. Nor did he
want to introduce remorse into the conscience of a feudal plunderer
or caitiff; violence was unlettered. Thus, for him it was not a question
of reflecting to the temporal its own image, nor of taking sides, nor
of disengaging the spiritual from historical experience by a continuous
effort. Quite the contrary; as the writer was of the Church, as the
Church was an immense spiritual college which proved its dignity by
its resistance to change, as history and the temporal were one and
spirituality was radically distinct from the temporal, as the
aim
of
the clerkship was to maintain this distinction, that is, to maintain
itself as a specialized body in the face of the century, as, in addition,
the economy was so divided up and the means of communication
were so few and slow that events which occurred in one province
had no effect upon the neighboring province, and as a monastery
could enjoy its individual peace, like the hero of
The Acharnians,
while its country was at war, the writer's mission was to prove his
autonomy by delivering himself to the exclusive contemplation of
the Eternal. He affirmed incessantly the Eternal's existence and dem–
onstrated it by the very fact that his only care was to regard it. In
this sense, he realized in effect the ideal of Julien Benda, but one can
see under what conditions: spirituality and literature had to be
alienated, a particular ideology had to triumph, a feudal pluralism
had to make the isolation of the clerks possible, virtually the whole
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