“Two loves,” St. Augustine says in De Civitate Dei, “have made two cities, love of self unto contempt of God the Earthly City, love of God unto contempt of self the Heavenly City,” the City of God. These “cities”—civitates—are, of course, not states, but societies; St. Augustine himself tells us that the term civitas is an equivalent of the term society. They are societies, however, of a special kind. The Ciyitds Dei is a “mystical” society of all the elect, past, present and future. The Civitas Terrena, the Earthly City, is identical neither with the earthly state nor with any particular earthly state such as the Roman Empire, nor with any merely human society, it too is a “mystical” society, that of the impious, the damned.

The social thought of the Middle Ages, which undertook to comprehend and scientifically to formulate the nature and foundation of all human society, proceeded from the principle of a single and uniform but articulate whole. The idea of an organic conception of all human society in its entirety was as familiar to the mediaeval mind as the notion of an atomistic or mechanistic constrution of human associations was alien to that mind. Aside from issuing into a distinct and definite theory of “public law,” the mediaeval efforts to understand mankind in its entirety and to treat every form of human society as an organic unity were the starting points of a novel philosophy of law and state which brought about a new and glorious development of legal, social, and political ideas. This development was fully in line with the professed aim of the mediaeval spirit, namely the spiritual and moral education of die western world. It had for its core the doctrine of the Church, and for its goal the elaboration of an integrated outlook on all of human life. In die fields of legal, social, and political speculation this development was greatly enhanced by the collaboration of theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Here, as elsewhere, die mediaeval mind displayed and, on the whole, preserved that high degree of unity of thought and purpose which had its roots not only in that commonly shared conception of a single harmonious universe governed by one infinitely wise God, but also in the conviction that all first premises of right thought or right action were divinely revealed truths rather than discoveries made by human reason alone.

Nicholas Berdyaev, the noted religious philosopher and sociologist, wrote a book more than a decade ago entitled, in the French, The New Middle Ages. In this work he naturally did not imply that history is repeating itself. Nor did he imply diat, by reason of a cyclical recurrence of identical periods in history, following our age of enlightenment, there would dawn a new age of predominantly religious authority concurrently with which State authority would almost disappear—a new age wherein philosophy and science would exercise a far greater general influence upon life than they do today. History, indeed, does not repeat itself. If it did, its story would be a poor carmen universitatis, a poor drama of world progress, unworthy of the Lord of history and of human freedom.

To write about Central Europe and do justice to all the problems that face us there, and to the nations that provoked them, is well nigh impossible. That part of Europe, in its national and political makeup, resembles a crazy quilt which does not, at first glance, present any common thread to unravel the general design of its historical and political evolution. The nations occupying the vast regions from the North Sea to the Adriatic and the Black Seas are so numerous and, on the surface, so heterogeneous, that it appears impossible to find any common ground on which all could meet and forget their national, religious, and political differences. Who will work the miracle of discovering a common interest among the Germans, the Slavs, the Magyars, and the Rumanians? Strictly speaking, Central Europe only includes the Germans from the Rhine to die Oder, the Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovenes, and the Croats. But any study of dieir history reveals that their story is inseparable from the history of Eastern and Soudieastern Europe. For a true understanding of Central Europe Poland and the Balkans must also be considered.

The Junkers, as popularly conceived today, are considered to have been die evil genius of the German people, prompting their authoritarianism, their statism and their militarism. The popular conception is faulty when it uses die term “Junker” to include all German or even all Prussian nobles and fails to recognize diat Junkers come only from the historic eastern provinces of Prussia. It comes nearer to die trudi in its political judgment. For there is no doubt that die Junkers, who were able to defend dieir reactionary principles of absolute monarchy through their traditional and substantial political influence at Court, in die army, in the civil administration and dirough party politics, were a prime politcal cause of Prussia's failure to reform its government along liberal and popular lines before 1918.