"The Life of Greece", by Will Durant

It was in this period-from the Norman Conquest to Edward II-that the law and government of England took the forms which they maintained till the nineteenth century. Through the superimposition of the Norman feudal upon Anglo-Saxon local law, English law for the first time became national-no longer the law of Essex or Mercia or the Danelaw, but "the law and customs of the realm"; we can hardly realize now what a legal revolution was implied when Ranulf de Glanville (d. 1190) used this phrase.

In 1295 ..summoned the "Model Parliament," the first complete Parliament in English history. "What touches all," his writ of summons read, "should be approved by all, and ... common dangers should be met by measures agreed upon in common."

By 1295 the principle was accepted that no statute passed by parliament could be abrogated except by Parliament; and in 1297 it was further agreed that no taxes were to be levied without Parliament's consent. Such were the modest beginning from which grew the most democratic government in history."

We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys an adequate picture of any age. During these conflicts of peoples and emperors, Guelfs and Ghibellines, Blacks and Whites, Italy was sustained by a hard-working peasantry...

Italy was divided into city-states. The same sort of problems also occurred in Germany at the time, as they had previously in classical Greece.

Looking back over the panorama of Latin Christianity, we are impressed, above all, by the relative unanimity of religious faith among diverse peoples, and the overspreading hierarchy and power of he Roman Church, giving to Western Europe-non-Slavic, non-Byzantine Europe-a unity of mind and morals such as it has never known again. Nowhere else in history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many men for so long a time. The authority of the Roman Republic and Empire over its immense realm endured from Pompey to Alaric, 480 years; that of the Mongol Empire or the British Empire, some 200 years; but the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne (814) to the death of Boniface VII (1303)-489 years. Her organization and administration do not appear to have been as competent as that of the Roman Empire, nor was her personnel as capable or cultured as the men who governed the provinces and cities for the Caesars; but the Church inherited a barbarous bedlam, and had to find a laborious way back to order and education. Even so her clergy were the best instructed men of the age, and it was they that provided the only education available in Western Europe during their time.....

Despite the chicanery usually accompanying collective human power, it was good that above the states and kings of Europe there should be an authority that could call them to account and moderate their strife.

Man in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy-to seek food eagerly and gorge himself zealously-because, when food came, he could not be sure when it would come again. He had to be sexually sensitive, often promiscuous, because a high death rate compelled a high birth rate; every woman had to be made a mother whenever possible, and the function of the male was to be always in heat. He had to be pugnacious, ever ready to fight for food or mate. Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.

But when man found that the best means of survival, for individual as well as species, was social organization, he expanded the hunting pack into a system of social order in which the instincts once so useful in the hunting stage had to be checked at every turn to make society possible. Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.

In the task of moderating human violence, promiscuity, and greed, certain instincts, chiefly social, took the lead, and provided a biological basis for civilization. Parental love, in beast and man, created the natural social order of the family, with its educative discipline and mutual aid. Parental authority, half a pain of love and half a joy of tyranny, transmitted a life-saving code of social conduct to the individualistic child. The organized force welded by chieftain, baron, city, or state circumscribed and largely circumvented the unorganized force of individuals. Love of approval bent the ego to the will of the group. Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race. Law frightened instinct with the specter of punishment. Conscience tamed youth with the detritus of an endless stream of prohibitions.

The Church believed that these natural or secular sources of morality could not suffice to control the impulses that preserve life in the jungle but destroy order in a society. Those impulses are too strong to be deterred by any human authority that cannot be everywhere at once with awesome police. A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin if it is to be obeyed; it must carry a divine sanction and prestige that will be respected by the soul in the absence of any force, and in the most secret moments and coverts of life. Even parental authority, so vital to moral and social order, breaks down in the contest with primitive instincts unless it is buttressed by religious belief inculcated in the child. To serve and save a society, a religion must oppose to insistent instinct no disputable man-made directives, but the undebatable, categorical imperatives of God Himself. And those divine commandments (so sinful or savage is man) must be supported not only by praise and honor bestowed for obeying them, nor only by disgrace and penalties imposed for violating them, but also by the hope of heaven for unrequited virtue, and the fear of hell for unpunished sin. The commandments must come not from Moses but from God.

It’s interesting, because one could say that Christianity was organizing society along a moral center