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THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

bribery and treason, all the weapons of party conflict in use at the time. It sacrifices articles of belief to worldly advantages, and allies itself with heretics and unbelievers against orthodox powers. The Papacy as an idea has a history of its own, but this bears no relation to the position of the popes in the sixth and seventh centuries as Byzantine viceroys of Syrian and Greek provenance; or to their later evolution into powerful landowners, with crowds of subject peasants; or to the Patrimonium Petri of the early Gothic — a sort of duchy in the possession of great families of the Campagna (Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipani), which alternately set up the popes, until finally the general Western feudalism prevailed here also, and the Holy See came to be an object of investiture within the families of the Roman baronage, so that each new pope, like a German or a French king, had to confirm the rights of his vassals. In 1032 the Counts of Tusculum nominated a twelve-year-old boy as pope. In those days eight hundred castle-towers stood up in the city area of Rome amongst and upon the Classical ruins. In 1045 three popes entrenched themselves in the Vatican, the Lateran, and Santa Maria Maggiore respectively, and were defended by their noble supporters.

Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it, and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution accomplished itself in kinds of life, and it also, therefore, is part of the history of the estates. The city-life as such emerges — through the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul, and becoming conscious that the life within is something different from the life outside — and at once the spell of personal freedom begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that from the tenth century B.C (and "contemporaneously" in other Cultures) drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of freedom. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract) origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been snapped. And consequently the freedom-idea ever contains a negative; it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man from something. Of this freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual, social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under the name of Freedom leads back to an origin in this one prime fact of detachment from the land.