differences between the society imagined by
Plato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, these
differences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raise
Platonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptions
which were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posterior
to the days of Plato. These conceptions--which were cherished by Stoic
thinkers; which penetrated into Roman Law; and which from Roman Law
flowed into the teaching and theory of the early fathers of the
Church--are mainly two. One is the conception of human equality; the
other, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of all
the human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city of
God in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no less
present to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They are
conceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Church
even more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato had
halted at the stage of a civic society, the _respublica Christiana_ of
the Middle Ages rose to the height of a single _humana civilitas_. While
Plato had divided the men of his Republic into classes of gold and
silver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of the
divine Idea for a single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery
of the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and,
if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in one
around the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, and
find tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Church
herself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life,
there was 'neither bond nor free'.

The prevalence of Realism, which marks mediaeval metaphysics down to the
end of the thirteenth century, is another Platonic inheritance, and
another impulse to unity. The Universal _is_, and is a veritable thing,
in which the Particular shares, and acquires its substance by its degree
of sharing. The One transcends the Many; the unity of mankind is greater
than the differences between men; and the university of mortal men, as
Ockham writes, is one community. If there be thus one community, and one
only, some negative results follow, which have their importance. In the
first place, we can hardly say that the Middle Ages have any conception
of the State. The notion of the State involves plurali