Merton doesn’t describe what that particular configuration (of the ‘integrated’ artist) would’ve looked like, and I won’t attempt to describe it myself, based on what I imagine it to have been, because I’d feel then obliged to defend what I’d said with evidence and argument and so forth, the idea of which, in this case, wearies me, though I will say that if Merton was correct, and that (very generally) ‘the artist’ in the West was integrated with society during the Middle Ages, the reason for that integration arose from the fact that society-at-large and the artist shared something like an evangelical purpose, even if that purpose was not always genuinely held, but in some instances was a posture rather than a conviction, or could be found in a person or institution that in other ways was corrupt.