1. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 318. At one point in a critical study of art and aesthetic judgment, which necessarily is as much about the meaning of words as about the interpretation of meaning, George Boas raised the same difficulty: “We talk glibly about “society’ as if we knew what is was and as if that knowledge convinced us that it was all of a piece. But society in modern times, and probably wherever one had an urban civilization, has been a collection of more or less harmonious groups, groups which have been organized for religious, economic, political, and even aesthetic aims.” Further on in the discussion he made clear: “A social group in its origin is a number of people trying to achieve a given purpose,” The Heaven of Invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1962), pp. 48 and 223. So, once again, to understand social movement and change we must concentrate our attention, so far as it is possible to do so, on each of the persons involved. J. Huizinga, in an essay on the idea of history, offered a warning: “As I have said, language inevitably entails such metaphysical expressions. The danger lies in the fact that a metaphor can, as it were, become the basis for further construction and that the slightly humanized figure of speech thus can turn into a phantom, allowing a mythological conception to steal into the place of a scientific one … An abstract concept like ‘capitalism’ is seen as a diabolical being full of cruelty and cunning. ‘Revolution’ may be seen first as an idea, but it soon becomes an almost living being,” The Varieties of History, Fritz Stern, ed. (New York: Meridian, 1956), p. 294.
2. Gregory the Great, Exposition on the Song of Songs, c. 12. Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis, CTB, #95, pp. 400–401. Stephen of Tournai, Preface to the Summa, in Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity, Robert Somerville and Bruce C. Basington, eds. (New Haven: Yale, 1998), p. 195. Bernard of Clairvaux, in search of a more subtle meaning, declared: “Ecclesia nomine non una anima sed multorum unitas vel potius unanimitas designator,” Song of Songs, 61:2.
3. See also Gary Macy, “Was There a “Church’ in the Middle Ages?” Unity and Diversity in the Church, Studies in Church History 32 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 107–116;
4. and Glenn Olsen, “The Idea of the ‘ecclesia primitiva’ in the Writings of the Twelfth-Century Canonists,” Traditio 25 (1969): 61–86.
5. “Abstractions are useful as a sort of shorthand but they derive real meaning entirely from the context in which they are preached.” Gilbert Murray, with reference to John Buchan’s impatience with philosophical concepts, in the preface to John Buchan. The Clearing House (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946), p. viii.