time: the refreshing river 



clearly formulated in our time by Julien Benda, in his book, La 

 Trahison des Clercs} The betrayal of our generation by the clerks, 

 that is to say, by the scientists and scholars which it has produced, 

 he conceives to consist in the fact that whereas the mediaeval clerk 

 was wholly devoted to the working out of the implications of a 

 transcendent truth, the modem clerk has no similar task, and therefore 

 engages without hesitation in the political struggles of the time. 

 "Our century," says Benda, "will be called the century of the intel- 

 lectual organisation of political hatreds. That will be one of its great 

 claims to fam.e in the history of human ethics." But does not Benda 

 misread the attitude of the mediaeval clerk .^ Preoccupied by trans- 

 cendent truths he might certainly be, but he was also very much 

 concerned about economic relationships, and, by virtue of that fact 

 alone, he was politically minded in the modem sense of the words. 

 For modem politics bear no relation to the politics of the mediaeval 

 world. A 13th-century theologian might well leave on one side the 

 quarrels of petty princes about territorial jurisdiction or feudal honours, 

 but he, on his own assumptions, could not, and did not, leave on 

 one side the detailed economics of the commerce and finance of the 

 time. Benda fails to realise that in our days there is no longer any 

 distinction between politics and economics. What are the ferocious 

 modern nationalisms which he describes with such force but devices 

 engineered and operated by economic interests which do not 

 wish co-operation and friendship between the comm.on peoples 

 of the world? What is jingo imperialist patriotism but an instru- 

 ment designed to drown the call to union of the Communist 

 Manifestoi^ 



The mediaeval scene was supremely characterised by its subordina- 

 tion of other interests to religion. We may call it a period of religious 

 genius, when all poetry, literature, learning, and music was co-opted 

 into the service of this primary preoccupation of men. And since 

 this was the case, no human interests could be regarded as outside 

 the sphere of theology, least of all the interests of the market-place, 

 where every economic transaction was a possible opportunity for the 

 snares of the devil, or, alternatively, could, by right arrangement, be 

 turned into an exercise of spiritual profit. The life of man on earth 



^ Benda, J., La Trahison des Clercs (Grasset, Paris, 1927), The word clerk meant 

 originally any man who could read, an attainment chiefly confined in the Middle Ages 

 to ecclesiastics major and minor, cf. the Book of Common Prayer: "the priest and 

 clerks." 



46 



