The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn toward Existence 0813219566, 9780813219561

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Medieval Political Order to 1150
2. The Emergence of the Individual
3. Constitutionality and Existence in Medieval England
4. Crisis and Closure 1: The Isolation of the Sovereign Individual
5. Crisis and Closure 2: The Submergence of Existence
6. Continental Problems in Political Order
7. The Medieval Papacy and the Overreach of Authority
8. Toward the Future
Concluding Remarks: The Contemporary West and Islam
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Differentiation of Authority

The Differentiation of Authority The Medieval Turn toward Existence

James Greenaway

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, DC

For Wendy

Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenaway, James. The differentiation of authority : the medieval turn toward existence / James Greenaway. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1956-1 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. Power (Social sciences)— History—To 1500.  2. Authority—History—To 1500. I. Title. JC330.G72 2012 303.3΄6—dc23    2011033132

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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1

1. The Medieval Political Order to 1150

19

2. The Emergence of the Individual

51

3. Constitutionality and Existence in Medieval England

83

4. Crisis and Closure 1: The Isolation of the Sovereign Individual

117

5. Crisis and Closure 2: The Submergence of Existence

146

6. Continental Problems in Political Order

179

7. The Medieval Papacy and the Overreach of Authority

204

8. Toward the Future

235

Concluding Remarks: The Contemporary West and Islam

269

Bibliography Index

295 303

Acknowledgments

Books mean different things to different people. For me, the manuscript in its final appearance as a book is not unlike the lifetime of a beloved pet: messy, frustrating, but eminently worth it in the end, it also functions as something of a chronicle of one’s own life. And much has happened since its inception as a discussion with Brendan Purcell of University College Dublin. His suggestion to go back to the Middle Ages and “poke around” for loose strands of meaning in the formation of Western society has proven to be one of the most fruitful pokings around that I have ever done. His brilliant advice, gentle criticism, and, most of all, his razor wit have underpinned the entire project from the beginning. I would also like to thank Gerard Casey, also of University College Dublin, for helping me to just get writing in the first place and for pushing me to the finish line. I met Jim Kruggel, acquisitions editor for the the Catholic University of America Press, at a conference and was immediately impressed. He has been extremely professional, helpful, and kind at each of the various stages of production. Later on, the manuscript received careful reading from the reviewers selected by the press: Barry Cooper and Bjorn Thommassen. I appreciate their being so generous with their time and their comments. In addition, Philip G. Holthaus has provided skillful copyediting of the manuscript. Final revisions and indexing were subject to

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Acknowldegments

some vital intervention from Ana Olivares and Matthew Magliacane of St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas. I want to thank the University of Missouri Press for their permission to reprint many extracts from Eric Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas. Reprinted from The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volumes 19–22, History of Political Ideas, Volumes 1–4, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1997–1998 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. All of my family contributed in their own ways over the years and I am deeply indebted to each one. Finally, and going back to that “bookas-chronicle” business, I want to thank Wendy, whom I married along the way and who has been a source of daily encouragement and revitalization. It is to her that I dedicate the book.

The Differentiation of Authority

I ntroduction

There are things we take for granted. There is an ocean seething with meaning just under the skin, always moving us. We raise our sails on it, sink our tiller into it, and upon it we navigate for better or worse. In the routine of daily living, there is much that we assume to be palpably obvious, and we wonder at the struggles of generations past to arrive at what is unambiguous. The medieval world, on those occasions when it surfaces into discourse, is usually spoken of in a pejorative manner, associated with the most fantastic prejudices, fears, superstitions, harshness, expectations, hardships, and so forth. In contrast to them, we are impeccably “modern,” our modernity in this sense resting on our “nonmedievalism.” We imagine that our contemporary sensibilities effectively immunize us from lapsing into the fallacies of old. In this, we are probably correct. Yet our sensibilities rest upon that ocean of meaning that is still seething. We are in motion. We may indeed hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, but as Brian Tierney has pointed out, there is nothing self-evident about “unalienable” rights for most human beings throughout history, nor is there an “antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” as UNESCO declared in 1949, in the wake of an unprecedented assault on such rights.1 1. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 1–2.

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Tierney took it upon himself to trace the concept of natural rights to its historical emergence in the medieval period. Similarly, Harold Berman began his seminal Law and Revolution by highlighting the importance of the same period—specifically after 1150—for the origins of modern Western legal systems. There is, then, something about that medieval period that is of significance to the development of our society today. It is a “something” that has an enduring importance because it was a movement that is still moving through us today. Our contemporary efforts to achieve a more just order are in substantial continuity with that same struggle for order in the Middle Ages. Technological advances and higher standards in greater accord with the dignity of the person are among the characteristics that distinguish the modern from the medieval, but there is more than an organic link between our societies and theirs. The medieval world outgrew itself, its coordinates having to shift in line with the turbulence that moved individuals and society. I propose to look at this turbulence, this unsettling flux that stirs, steers, and agitates because the modern West has been shaped by it in a way that no other people have. Specifically, I want to look at how this turbulence upset the medieval cosmion and drove it beyond its own boundaries. David Walsh has written that “[d]emocracy does not exist within institutions and places, but within the hearts and minds of the human beings who occupy them.”2 In this case, to say that the medieval world came to an end is to say that the hearts and minds of concrete persons changed. Note the emphasis in this: things change not because there is a change of policy or personnel at the upper institutional tier of political reality, but because there is a change of mind at the lower level of individuals in community. The gradual end of the medieval world was an incremental change that occurred in individual persons first. Furthermore, it was a change whose legitimacy was grounded in nothing else than in the movement of existence itself. This provides an answer of sorts to the question, By what authority was such a fundamental change effected? The papacy and kingship, as the two pillars of medieval auctoritas, did not determine the change, but participated in it. The end of medieval order proceeded, 2. David Walsh, “The Unattainability of What We Live Within: Liberal Democracy,” in Die fragile Demokratie—The Fragility of Democracy, ed. Anton Rauscher (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2007), 133–56.

introduction 3 paradoxically, by its own authority and launched society into a new terra incognita. It was not a change with revolutionary results in the sense of effacing previous centers of power or potestas; but it was no less radical for all that. Institutions of spiritual and political authorities were not replaced with something new, but with a reconfiguration of their relations as part of an emerging new order. The death of the medieval world was slow and difficult and was witnessed by those same medieval people. Their witnessing however was not a passive bystanding, but an active participation in the movement that was occurring in their very existence as persons. The explosion of activity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward was urban, commercial, literary, scientific, philosophical, and so on but was conducted not by the authority of the church or the various principalities and realms—although, not without their tolerance—but by the authority of persons themselves. It was a humanism that represented a turn toward existence. It was a turn that was authoritative in its own right, depending upon no spiritual or political validation, and it was a turn that was self-establishing in that its assertion was not one that could be rescinded. In the context of an investigation into medieval order, this turn toward existence is a turn toward the authority embedded in the existence of individuals. This period under the spotlight here is the era of the emergence of the individual and the increase of activity in the world amounted to an assertion of the individual’s authority. Traditionally, the meaning of society was historically grounded in the Two Swords formula of Pope Gelasius I: that is, that the world is ruled by the priestly sword and by the royal sword. This dualism of authority—the giving to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Mt 22: 21, Mk 12: 17, Lk 20: 25)—framed the order into which this third authority began to increasingly assert itself. It is for this reason that the authoritative existence of persons is here referred to as “existential authority.” Authority is closely related to the power of acting. Existential authority is a deliberately chosen term that keeps in view the central problem of authority in the medieval world. There are presumably many ways to discuss the increased emphasis on the individual at this time, but the use of “existential authority” aims to locate the assertion of individual authority within the historical and pragmatic horizon of the

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royal and ecclesial authorities. While allowing for an existential authority in the context of a discussion on Gelasius’s two ordines of priest and king, it is not meant that existence presents an alternative codification of law, natural or otherwise; nor is the existence of the individual the enactment of such. Human existence is the existence of the human person, not as a tabula rasa, but already constituted by a movement toward meaning. Meaning means change in that meaning can never be final. Every attempt to symbolize the ultimate end or telos of existence is not so much negated in itself, but never claims the final allegiance of all. In this sense, the symbolization of ultimate meaning is not necessarily meaningful to every person and eventually loses traction in a society. This forms part of the crisis of the medieval world in which the Gelasian arrangement was being increasingly challenged by the assertion of existential authority. In other words, the medieval crisis was a crisis of meaning, and the overcoming of the crisis was not a comprehensive resolution in the provision of a complete meaning for the world, but the partial settlement that liberal constitutionalism represents in the balancing of a triad of authorities against each other: the political, the spiritual, and the existential. The turn toward existence in the medieval context is evident in the rise of organized activity after Berman’s “axis-time” of 1050–1150, before which activity was at a minimum. The assertion of a legitimate claim over a portion of the world accords with the concept of dominium or proprietary ownership, and begs the question: By what authority is dominium claimed? This in turn led to a recognition of a legitimacy rooted in nothing else but the individual by virtue of his or her very existence. It is no accident that the rapid growth of coordinated worldly activity such as the chartering of towns and the development of law occurred at the same time that the notion of embedded natural rights surfaced. This book is deeply indebted to the work of Eric Voegelin for two major reasons. The first is that his early writings on the political development of the Middle Ages in volumes 2 and 3 of his posthumously published History of Political Ideas circumscribes the content treated here—with a few exceptions. His commentary is frequently referred to. However, in acknowledging gratitude it should be noted that this book is not intended as a commentary on Voegelin’s commentary. Voegelin’s medieval vol-

introduction 5 umes are the boundary to an otherwise limitless field of content, but in both his early and later work, he has largely missed the central importance of existential authority in persons as a real authority in the world. The second reason is the importance of his later thought on history. The preface to the first volume in his magnum opus, Order and History, begins with the words, “The order of history emerges from the history of order. Every society is burdened with the task, under its concrete conditions, of creating an order that will endow the fact of its existence with meaning in terms of ends divine and human.”3 From this, Voegelin went on to develop his thought on the “process of being” in which there are “leaps” from the compactness of existence to a more differentiated mode of existence. The cosmological intimacy of the divine, the human, and the natural, which determined an experience and symbolization of consubstantiality among the “partners in being,” recedes as the insight into being advances and, through reason and revelation, the transcendental horizon of being becomes discernible. Of course, all of this process of differentiation happens “in history” which is problematic for the meaning of history. History cannot be simply the history of this or that society, or even a singular line of time receding into the past of the speculator’s present; nor is history reducible to an esoteric code that offers secrets into its pattern. Voegelin suggests that there are, in a way, two histories: “(I) the history internal to [a concrete society’s] existence and (II) the history in which it comes into and goes out of existence.”4 Voegelin has therefore provided categories that the discussion herein gladly makes use of. The medieval crisis was about meaning, in which the overarching order of Christendom and its evocation of a sacrum imperium became increasingly inadequate as the symbolization of Christian existence in the world. The finality of the Gelasian arrangement was overtaken by the process of differentiation. However, the end of Christendom was not the failure of Christianity. In an important yet subtle way, it was the demonstration of its success. The separation of authorities by Jesus, the political from the spiritual, was of profound importance and to be 3. Voegelin, Order and History, Volume 1: Israel and Revelation, 19. (Part of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vols. 14–18 specifically. Hereafter the reference for the various volumes of Order and History will be Order and History 1, 2, etc.) 4. Voegelin, Order and History 4, 173.

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found nowhere else. In the separation of one from the other, Jesus established the autonomous dignity of each, but it was not an autonomy that bore no reference to the other. The political and the spiritual were differentiated from each other, but not isolated, as they were linked together by the differentiation of a third sphere of autonomy, the existential. Christian revelation involved the temporal and transcendental dignity of the individual, and unambiguously asserted the priority of the person over the whole world. For the purposes of this discussion, Christian revelation differentiated three species of authority—the political, the spiritual, and the existential—all of which are constituted with autonomy. However, as each authority is the result of the same differentiation, none escape bearing an obligation to the others. Put more simply, political auctoritas cannot disregard the dignity of human existence firstly, nor secondly, censure the spiritual claims of the church without delegitimating itself by destroying the foundations of its own authority. Nor can the church infer from its spiritual authority coercive potestas by subordinating the realm of the existential and the political to itself. When institutional spiritual authority attempts to absolutize its claims over the temporal, it negates its own raison d’être by erasing the basis of virtue in personal and political liberty. Human existence is existence in the mode of humanity. The movement of being is elusive but is occasionally touched by individuals. Out of the depths of being, the existence of man is imbued with meaningful direction that cannot be captured. Differentiation is a process that is still moving. Revelation is not an event in the past but a mysterious movement of being that is still unfolding through the participation of man in individual, sociopolitical, and historical existence. The existential authority of concrete persons mediates this process of differentiation into the temporal-mundane. In the light of this grand dignity of humanity that participates in both the temporal and the transcendental simultaneously, the risk of self-corruption is heightened. Augustine’s category of libidinous self-love or amor sui finds channels for its own indulgence in rejecting the spiritual authority subsisting in the church; by absolutizing its own authority, the cohesion of society is breached in that instance. The corruption of existential authority, like the corruption of political and spiritual authorities, involves the fragmentation of the triad and rep-

introduction 7 resents an attitude of closure to reality. The opposition between openness and closure to reality is a theme in any discussion of order and turns on the assertion of personal authority as derived from an integration or an absolutization of self. As Voegelin reminds us, “tension between openness toward reality and contraction of the self is a human problem at all times.”5 Voegelin’s personal resistance to the ideological hubris of the modern era draws on symbols that point to the human potential for existential deformation that include libido dominandi, morbus animi, scotosis, etc.6 In the lowering of the existential horizon, the “things” of reality, “including man and society, come to an end in time without coming to their End out-of-time. The truth of reality is not questioned; it is resisted.”7 It is apparent then that any equilibrium achieved among the differentiated authorities stands in perennial peril of disintegration through the corruption of one or the other of the pillars in the triad. Society is an intricate but meaningful whole, “a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization”8 The individuals who authoritatively generate meaning do so in conjunction with other individuals, and in relation with the public institutional authorities in the environment. Social existence is carried by a consensus of what matters, specific to that society. Such community-forming consensus is a “likemindedness” or homonoia that binds individuals into a greater whole. Jeffrey Herndon comments that this concord is not merely an intellectual agreement among a few individuals within a given polity about what ought to be done, or who gets what, where, and when, but rather it consists of a shared understanding among the populace about what it means to be a human being and what the ends of the given society or community ought to be.9 5. Ibid., 330. 6. See Voegelin, Order and History 5, 54–62 et passim. See also Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 12: Published Essays 1966–1985, 119–20, 273–74. (Hereafter the reference for the various volumes of the Collected Works will be Collected Works 1, 2, etc.) Here he draws on Henri Bergson’s categories of the open and closed selves in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion to elucidate the problem of existential corruption. 7. Voegelin, Order and History 5, 49. 8. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 109 (in volume 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin). 9. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 20.

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Like-mindedness is an integrating sociopolitical force that emerges from a common understanding of what human existence is. John Courtney Murray refers to the “constitutional consensus whereby the people acquires its identity as a people and the society is endowed with its vital form, its entelechy, its sense of purpose as a collectivity organized for action in history.”10 Furthermore, “this consensus is come to by the people; they become a people by coming to it.”11 Frederick D. Wilhelmsen and Willmoore Kendall, writing about the “tacit agreement [within a polity] on the meaning of the good life, and, therefore, on the meaning of man within the total economy of existence,” use the term “political orthodoxy.”12 R. Bruce Douglass renders it as “civil theology” and maintains that it is the entirety of beliefs “through which the members of a political society relate their political experience to the ultimate conditions of human existence.”13 Civil theology, then, is a pragmatic, if implicit, agreement among members of a community on the meaning of human existence that has spiritual as well as political dimensions. Directly due to these dimensions, civil theology is the field in which the equilibrium among the triad is differentiated, lived, and symbolized. Theologia civilis was the term that Augustine adapted from an earlier Roman thinker, Marcus Varro, to handle the problem of symbolic truth in society. Varro analyzed the different types of symbolism in the pre-Christian Roman world and listed three main categories, namely, the mythical, the physical, and the political.14 In his Civitas Dei, Augustine comments: What are we to think of his [Varro’s] division of theology, or the systematic treatment of the divine, into three kinds, of which the first is called mythical, the second physical, and the third political? . . . His explanation runs as 10. Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections of the American Proposition, 9; quoted in Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 22. 11. Ibid. 12. Wilhelmsen and Kendall, “Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy,” in Wilhelmsen, Christianity and Political Philosophy, 35; quoted in Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 21 13. Douglass, “Civil Religion and Western Christianity,” in Thought 55 (June 1980): 169; quoted in Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 23. 14. We know of Varro mostly through secondary sources, such as St. Augustine. For a detailed discussion of “civil religion” in Varro, see Ernest Fortin, “St. Augustine,” History of Political Thought, 191–94.

introduction 9 follows: “What they call ‘mythical’ is what is especially in use among the poets; ‘physical’ theology is used by the philosophers; and ‘political’ by ordinary citizens.”15

Augustine clearly thought that Varro’s tripartite division was illuminating as he adopted it for his own considerations, reworking its content to incorporate revelation. Augustine’s rendition was comprised of supernatural theology, natural theology (or Varro’s physical theology), and civil theology. It is this civil theology that is of interest here. Augustine subsumed two of Varro’s species of theology into his civil theology: the mythical of the poets and the political as relating to the official cults of Rome and the cities.16 In other words, Augustine’s civil theology is composed of two levels of symbolization: the mythic symbolization of existence and the symbolization of institutional authorities. If Augustine’s notion of a civil theology is substantially correct, there are two tiers of political meaning of which the lower tier is the spontaneous generation of like-mindedness from the existence of persons in community, and the upper tier is the authority of political rulership to use its potestas for the purposes of coercively guarding what is determined as a good by the social whole. What we can take from Augustine’s consideration of civil theology is that it moves on two related planes. In the course of the present discussion, civil theology will indicate the body of truths that form a society in the sense of an implicit consensus shared by its members. Civil theology is therefore a human social field in which authoritative political, spiritual, and existential meaning converge, replete with rival and complementary symbols; and the degree of consensus among individuals concerning the convergence in a civil theology gives rise to a corresponding degree of like-mindedness, understood as an integrating force. The existence of concrete members of society, of course, is always meaningful and the existential authority they embody renews the symbolization of society. That is, symbolization that bears on notions of justice, identity, cultural fashions, and the like and ultimately on the meaning of existence never stays the same because what it symbolizes is effectively “un-symbolizable” in any comprehensive, final sense. 15. Augustine, The City of God, book VI, 5 (ed. David Knowles). 16. See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 153.

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The un-symbolizable is the movement of reality beyond its own structure. This sentence is more than an apparently unedifying paradox. It is a linguistic attempt to articulate what escapes articulation and leaves us with nothing but tortuous language. In the case of civil theology, symbolization chases the glimpses that being affords. The double tier of political reality, then, is inherently tense with the symbols of institutional authority and the lower tier of individual and communities not often in step. Put another way, institutional authority functions in tension with the shifting meaning of existential authority. Voegelin describes the two planes of late medieval civil theology: [We distinguish] between two planes of Western civilization, an upper plane and a lower plane. The upper plane we shall characterize in a preliminary fashion as the plane of the public institutions; the lower plane as that of the [spiritual and political] movements that are in permanent revolt against the established institutions. Since the beginning of the eleventh century, the spiritual and intellectual history of Western civilization has been enacted on both of these planes; moreover, a good deal of this history is the story of the interaction between public institutions and the movements of revolt.17

Harold Berman opines that, in the cases of revolution in the West, there was a failure of institutional authorities to adequately respond to the shift in existential meaning. Had they made the necessary fundamental changes in line with the shift of meaning, the existing order which they coordinated may have had some chance of avoiding destruction.18 All of this talk about gradual change suggests the vitality of the process of differentiation in Western society in continuous animation from its medieval format to the present and beyond. The starting point of the discussion is a survey of the main events in the development of authority in the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Gregorian renovatio. The Carolingian-Christian aspiration for a sacrum imperium amounted to a civil theology in which the meaning of social existence was evoked. The sacrum imperium symbolized the hope for an order of the world that nonetheless transcended the world and seemed to 17. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume Four: Renaissance and Reformation, 131–32. (Part of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vols. 19–26 specifically. Hereafter the reference to the various volumes in History of Political Ideas will be History of Political Ideas 1, 2, etc.) 18. Berman, Law and Revolution, 21.

introduction 11 form a whole in which the parts of medieval society found their place. It was the sheer completeness of this civil theology that haunted the later attempts to find an adequate formulation of order when the sacrum imperium was overtaken by more assertive existential forces and became increasingly redundant. The turn toward existence was never so stark as in the invasion period after the Carolingian world collapsed. The rise of feudal relations in the vacuum of a violent decentralization of authority was the only adequate response to the conditions of the times, representing the thin line between order and chaos. The renaissance of Latin Christendom involved a major upheaval in the reconfiguration of the church’s relations with the mundus which culminated in both an unprecedented assertion of papal authority and the reorganization of world in line with the rise of principalities and kingdoms outside the Holy Roman Empire. Of course, the shifting meaning of a society in motion was not confined to the ecclesial and political spheres. It was sufficiently caught by the more sensitive intellects of the age who intuited the shift as a turn toward the existence of persons. The reprioritizing of political goods and the foundations of a rights-based legal system placed the dignity embedded in the individual Christian under the spotlight. In most cases, the reprioritization was subtle, as Brian Tierney points out in his analysis of the emergence of natural rights in the comments and glosses of canon lawyers. However, the consequences were potentially radical as the political and legal thought of Thomas Aquinas and the existential witness of Saint Francis of Assisi demonstrate. The reprioritization of the individual implies the rearrangement of political goods and their recalibration to a higher standard in line with the dignity of man. “The emergence of the individual” is a phrase that intends not so much the emergence of existential authority as its new assertiveness. The fortunate conditions of the Norman Conquest of England were not merely geographical (although physical distance from the unfolding crisis of meaning on the Continent did insulate English civil theology to some degree), but primarily historical in the sense of regenerating an old society with provisions made for the assertion of existential authority alongside political governance and the spiritual authority of the church. From the beginning, Norman England provided channels of expression

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at the national level for existential authority, integrating society with a constitutionalism that drew together the disparate authorities of society into a national-political whole. The strength of English kingship, vis à vis the baronage, allowed royal authority to command participation in a parliament, which met with a growing national sentiment or likemindedness. The result was to set in motion a process in which sections of English society gradually articulated themselves for political action at the national level. The constitutionalism of England is traced through considering the significance of Magna Carta, the earlier thought of John of Salisbury and the later thought of Sir John Fortescue, especially in the latter’s contrast of the English realm with the French. Not that the development of Western order has been entirely smooth. Corruption of any of the authorities in the differentiated triad remains a persistent danger. Corruption of existential authority in the medieval period manifested itself in two discernible ways: the elevation and isolation of the individual, and the submergence of the individual beneath the massiveness of a collective substance. Voegelin pinpoints the spiritual nature of existential corruption: The bond [of Christian faith] is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.19

In the degenerative attitude of closure, the attractiveness of an alternative in gnostic patterns of thought provides a remedy to the uncertainty of faith in the sense of Hebrews 11:1. In the denouement of the sacrum imperium, a crisis of meaning ensued in which Christendom found itself being overtaken by newly assertive forces outside its supposed exhaustiveness. The new forces were not necessarily gnostic forces, but the attractiveness of certain patterns of gnostic thought influenced many significant thinkers in the maelstrom. The revival of Donatism in the sense of an invisible spiritual elitism surfaces in the hubris of Cardinal 19. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 187–88.

introduction 13 Humbert’s dialectic against simony, while centuries later John Wycliffe responded to the unseemliness of the late medieval papacy as a spiritual authority by invoking a higher spiritual authority embedded in the Christian who exists in a state of grace. According to Wycliffe, these are predestined to membership in the invisible church. The elevation of the individual amounts to the subordination of the other authorities in the triad and the rejection of the historicism of society. This rejection of historicism receives a twist in the apocalyptic thinking of Joachim of Fiore, who understands himself to be the authoritative decoder of the sacred Scripture and the prophet of history’s final age. Existential corruption usually involves fragmenting the equilibrium that has differentiated historically. The reception of Aristotle presented a challenge to the West, not so much an intellectual challenge as a spiritual challenge. The Aristotle of the Islamic philosophers was assumed to be the perfection of man, and his writings bore a higher authority, written as they were with a higher insight into being. The most prominent Islamic channel through which the writings of “the Philosopher” came was Averroës, and the complex of ideas he transmitted included, among others, a notion of a collective soul, based on his reading of Aristotle’s De anima. In the twilight of the Gelasian-medieval world, such a notion gained much traction. Siger of Brabant helped to popularize Averroism, while its effects can be found in the writings of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Having a residue of Averroist sentiments did not render a thinker a gnostic, but it certainly amounted to a corruption in existential authority. The lines of meaning that were opened up due to the Averroist influence have remained doggedly persistent, lines in which the dignity of man is sunk beneath the supposition of a higher dignity. Existential corruption is not the end of the matter either. The unfolding crisis of meaning impacted keenly on the institutional authorities of the political and the spiritual. The Gelasian arrangement was no longer valid in a world churning with new forces. The political authorities struggled to keep the assertion of existential authority in its myriad manifestations under control. In its most extreme, existential authority generated movements of revolt that swept across the cities and towns of Europe, including England, and even the peasant classes were caught

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up in the crisis, becoming politically relevant for the first time in the West. The response of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and Norman king of Sicily, to the crisis of meaning indicates the trend toward absolute rule by claiming absolute authority. Similarly, the surge in potestas, gradually acquired by the Capetian kings in France, corresponded to the increasing absolutization of royal authority. This was in spite of the growth of a national sentiment on a par with England, but the failure to integrate existential authority into the national realm by not endowing society with a channel for political expression engendered a volatile civil theology which ultimately erupted into violent revolution. Political absolutization in the city-states and principalities of the empire and its fringes frustrated the growth of a national people who nonetheless exercised their genius for creating wealth and sparked the Renaissance through a spirit of engagement with the world. However, factionalism, feuding, and bloodshed dominated the meaning of social existence and prevented any trend toward constitutionalism from embedding itself in their humanist civil theology. The response of the church to the crisis of the period was less an exercise of its spiritual competence than a grab for worldly power. The medieval church set itself to resist any curtailment of its prestige, sinking itself as an institution into the sand. The eleventh century reinvigoration of the papal office by Gregory involved the merging of the pope’s auctoritas with a potestas to act in the world. Thus were kings and emperors deposed and others crowned, armies raised and taxes levied. The swelling of the institutional church to the status of an international power broker par excellence under the papal claim to a plenitude of power gradually occurred with its advocates and critics along the way. In this regard, Giles of Rome and John of Paris wrestled in their writings with the jurisdictional boundaries of papal authority as well as the notion of authority in general. The definition of medieval papal power was provided by Boniface VIII in his bull Unam Sanctam, in which both spiritual and temporal swords are in the hands of the pontiff, with the temporal sword used by the prince on the command (ad nutum) of the church. There was nothing different in this from previous claims to a papal plenitude of power, but when combined with the context in which a previous bull, Clericis Laicos, was issued to forbid French and English

introduction 15 clergy from paying taxes, the Unam Sanctam signified to many that papal absolutism presented an impediment to political authority and to the growth of nations in general. The nadir was reached when Boniface was arrested in his palace in Anagni by a French lawyer and the aura of medieval papal authority finally dissipated. Jurisdictional strife between the church and the nations was by now an ancient struggle, the only new factor in the situation being the scandalous jurisdictionalism that arose within the church herself. The Great Schism in which there were two popes were elected, and then three, represented a major crisis that rocked the entire Christian world. The attempt to resolve the mess took the form of conciliarism which eventually exhausted itself with more jurisdictional squabbling between different groupings and the eventual victory of the papal-monarchical structure of church government over the councils. The upheaval in the medieval church over the meaning of its spiritual authority has little to recommend it. However, the agonizing death of the Gelasian-medieval world involved a painful renovation of every fiber in the structure of the church, from each living concrete Christian individual to the fourteen hundred years of its institutional history. The differentiating process of being was leaving none of the church’s stones unturned and, over time, enhanced her realization of the very mystery she embodies. It is important to remember that the process of differentiation unfolded across each of the authorities in the triad, and the upheaval that it caused embraced the totality of medieval order. That the upheaval was devastating to the medieval church is testament to the spiritual substance that penetrated the life of the church in spite of the preoccupation with shoring up jurisdiction. The implications of the medieval crisis are hard to assess, and they certainly escape enumeration. In addition, there are many significant lights that burned in the fog of the times and whose work still resonates today. However, William of Ockham and Nicholas of Cusa, separated in time by a century, form a complementarity in their dynamic turn toward existence. Ockham—the Nominalist—was too much of a Nominalist to restrict his speculation with Nominalism. His method of disregarding universals allowed him to tear the world to shreds in search of its composite parts; and in the course of his search he began to lean heavily on a notion of a relative natural law or natural equity as an authori-

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tative quality embedded in existence itself. The embodiment of this authority in persons and in the civil theology of nations as the operation of “evident reason” became important enough to outweigh any other form of authority. Indeed, for Ockham, both the spiritual and the political find their meaning in safeguarding the autonomy of the individual in which spiritual and political virtue can grow. Nicholas of Cusa provided the antidote to the dismantlement of the world in Ockham’s works. He was an extraordinary polymath whose contributions to astronomy and physics fit with his philosophic-theological vision of being as a dynamic whole. His theory of concordance augmented the rational character of man’s existential authority as a participation in the movement of being. The whole of being is moved as a flow from the infinite concordance among the Trinity. The concord among individuals and in society mirrors the inner life of the Trinity and each Christian is thereby gathered into its movement. Cusa saw that each zone of authority had its place in the whole and was moved by the same flow. In addition, he was sensitive enough to realize that such concordance is a movement that exceeds the human capacity to harness it, but whose attraction lifts the rational intellect beyond itself into a mystical superrationality that is formed by a glimpse of the whole. In all of this wandering through the medieval world there is discernible the meandering thread of differentiation that has left its marks, forever indelible. The priority of existence over any attempt at its symbolization is a recognition that it is existence that determines the symbols. The concrete existence of the individual becomes the instance of this priority. Furthermore, existential priority establishes the role of spiritual and political authorities as they tend to the existential welfare of the individual and communities in their straddling of the temporalmundane dimension and the depths of transcendence. Indeed, the individual has become a priority in the recognition that only the individual forms a center of infinite meaning in which there is no strict division between temporal-mundane and transcendence, but rather a personal space in which each becomes a dimension of the other. That is, only in the individual person can the temporal become imbued with transcendence, and the transcendental become incarnate. The medieval turn toward existence was therefore a turn toward the individual for the sake of

introduction 17 its originating evocation: the sacrum imperium was repackaged in the differentiated acknowledgment that the whole for which they aspired is already the single human being. There is always a danger of anachronism in stating historical similarities between different eras, crediting earlier societies for achievements that do not occur until later. However, it does not follow that theoretically addressing such similarities, as I suggest below, between medieval and modern on a philosophical level inevitably constitutes an anachronistic fallacy. There are qualitative similarities between thinkers of both periods who engage with problems of order because there are qualitative similarities in the problems of order as they have emerged in the West. The historical differentiation of authority is, I suggest, one dynamic factor in the development of Western order, just as it is one possible way of interpreting that development. In general, medieval political thought has not been adequately treated. For example, a cursory glance at most political philosophy textbooks or course programs demonstrates that the fifteen hundred years from antiquity to Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Locke, with an occasional nod toward Augustine and Aquinas, is simply “leap-frogged” or ignored—as though nothing of significance happened. It is in the hope of addressing this gaping hole that this book was written.

1 The M edieva l Politica l Order to 11 50

Legal historian Harold Berman points to an “axis-time” in the development of Western medieval order. He has postulated that “there was a radical discontinuity between the Europe of the period before the years 1050–1150 and the Europe of the period after [these] years.”1 Norman Cantor, in another context, agrees, stating that this period was dominated by an attempt at world revolution which influenced many aspects of social change. “It seems, in retrospect, that it was almost necessary for a revolutionary onslaught to shake the order of the early Middle Ages to its foundations, so that the new political, economic, and intellectual forces could be given the opportunity to develop in the face of the old institutions and ideas.”2 In order to grasp the significance of the 1050–1150 period for the development of Western political order, the Middle Ages to 1050 will be treated in the first part of the chapter. We will be able then, in the second part, to appreciate what constituted the “revolutionary onslaught” that unfolded in the axis-time. 1. Berman, Law and Revolution, 4. 2. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 244.

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The Middle Ages to 1050 Political Development The urge to sanctify the political was rejected by the early Christian community but became a characteristic of medieval society and was at the root of many problems that were distinctively medieval. Before focusing on specific controversies pertaining to church and empire, something more fundamental is needed: before there are institutions that convey the meaning of a community’s existence, there is the community. With this in mind, it is apposite to describe the lower-tier development of identity and community substance among the peoples of the early medieval West before proceeding to the upper-tier institutional development.

Lower Tier: Monasticism and Authority The conversion of the pagan communities to the north and west of the old imperial zone to communities bonded by a Christian community substance took many forms.3 The common outcome of conversions was not just the generation of Christian piety among formerly pagan individuals, but the transformation of multifarious tribal peoples into membership within a universal spiritual community. What this transformation means politically is the renovation of the Germanic peoples’s civil theology. More than any other institution, the driver of major civilizational renovation in early medieval Europe was the monastery. The geographical area that was to become the Latin West was a vast wilderness left largely vacant by the movement of the tribes. It was in this wilderness or indeed in the kingdoms of those surviving tribes that men and women established monastic foundations. The monastery can be regarded as the vehicle of civilization par excellence in that its presence in these regions represented a new spirit, operating according to a different, if not somewhat exotic, rule or authority. Of course, while these foundations stood for the eternal order of the pax Christi, there was also the prestige of Roman imperial greatness that attached to the monastery that drew attention. 3. See Richard Fletcher, Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 21 In earlier imperial times, the monastic ethos had already proved supremely attractive as an ordering force. The transformation of the whole person in asceticism and the absolute renunciation of pleasure, comfort, company, and human society symbolized an unworldly spiritual authority in the service of the Kingdom of God. Monks became living icons of the Christian personality and were regarded by contemporaries as “watchmen or guardians who ‘kept the walls’ of the Christian City and repelled the attacks of its spiritual enemies.”4 Within and beyond the boundaries of the civilized empire, it was the monks who took the place of the martyrs in the public imagination as models of perseverance in troubled times. The monastery itself was an autonomous Christian polis, functioning as a center of Christian community substance in the midst of a rural hinterland among pagan peoples. In effect, it meant that the establishment and function of a monastic community had to be adaptable to the cultural and natural environment. The inner spiritual freedom of the monastery depended upon an external economic and political liberty to operate as a self-contained Christian polis. Political authority in the West was weak or, in places nonexistent, and did not impinge upon the freedom of the monastery to establish itself in a region. By way of contrast, the rule of temporal authority in the Byzantine East was strong and the monasteries there were obliged to conform to the monastic legislation of Justinian, which stifled the independence of the monastic spirit. Caesaropapism, or the exercise of imperial authority involving the exercise of supreme ecclesiastical authority, was characteristic of the relations between empire and church in the Byzantine zone. The Byzantine emperors arrogated authority over ecclesiastical matters to themselves, although they conceded the title pontifex maximus, which was the acknowledged title of the bishop of Rome. Augustine, himself a monk and a bishop, championed the combination of monastic and sacerdotal activity that became one of the marks of Western monasticism. His conception of the monastic life was inspired by the common life of the Church, the community of the mystical body. St. Basil in the East also argued that the corpus mysticum showed that life in community is superi4. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 45.

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or in principle to solitary asceticism. Owing to the legislation of Justinian, the Western form of monasticism never quite broke the tradition of the solitary ascetic hermit in the East and the regulation of monastic life in the West remained internal to the monastic tradition. After the sack of Monte Cassino in 581 by the Lombards, Pope Gregory the Great gave the Benedictines an apostolic mission to bring the word of God to the barbarians in the West. Being a monk himself, he understood the effectiveness of monasticism among the pagans. Importantly, he was also prepared to guard it as an institution of the church against the local authority of the episcopate. This was a crucial intervention that in some ways mirrored the much later royal intervention in AngloNorman England that opened a direct channel between the Crown and subjects, thereby circumventing the stifling of liberties by the baronial class. Papal authority guaranteed the economic and political freedom of monasticism from local control and preserved the conception of the monastery as an institution composed of spiritually free men and women engaged in a constant and authoritative encounter with the divine. In the north and west of Europe, the monks were creating a new Christian culture by grafting the symbols of more differentiated truth onto preexisting pagan tribal culture. The process took the form of changing the meaning of preexisting symbols of pagan cosmic-divine truth. In principle, we can adopt a twofold approach to the analysis of symbols: first, we can describe the exterior characteristics, such as coronation rites or the representation of justice, and so on; second, we can examine the internal content of truth that such symbols embody. Generally, symbols of authority are spontaneously generated within a civil theology by the meaning a society has of itself. Symbols of authority therefore are always culturally embedded. By leaving the exterior form of preexistent symbols alone, missionary monks could influence change in the content of truth in the direction of Christian revelation. In regions that used to be provinces of the empire, such as Britain, Christianity had already arrived through earlier missionary work, but with the disintegration of Roman society Roman order had collapsed. In this situation, it was the monastic institution which reasserted the church’s spiritual authority. In a letter to an abbot named Mellitus, Pope Gregory writes:

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 23 Tell [Bishop Augustine of Canterbury] that I have long been considering with myself about the case of the Angli; to wit, that the temples of idols in that nation should not be destroyed, but that the idols themselves that are in them should be. Let blessed water be prepared, and sprinkled in these temples, and altars constructed, and relics deposited, since, if these same temples are well built, it is needful that they should be transferred from the worship of idols to the service of the true God; that, when the people themselves see that these temples are not destroyed, they may put away error from their heart, and, knowing and adoring the true God, may have recourse with the more familiarity to the places they have been accustomed to.5

Pope Gregory is quite explicit about the specific method to be used: the hollowing out of compact or less-differentiated meaning from the symbols of spiritual authority and their replacement by the content of Christianity. Christopher Dawson also describes the process of conversion appropriate to fifth- and sixth-century Ireland: A medieval tradition states that St. Patrick demanded from his converts a tithe of the population and the land of Ireland for the religious life. And, although this is no more than a legend, there is no doubt that early Irish monasticism was a great mass movement led by the sons and daughters of the ruling families who founded the monasteries and were followed by their fellow tribesmen and dependants. Although the monastic community, which was a society of peace, represents the opposite pole of thought and action to the tribal community, which was a society of warriors, there was a certain parallelism between them. On the one side we have the chieftain and company of warriors who are bound to follow him to the death; on the other, we have the abbot and his community which is sworn to obedience to eternal life. On the one hand there is the ethos of honour and fidelity and the cult of the hero; on the other, the ethos of sacrifice and sanctity and the cult of the saint and the martyr. Again, on the one side, there is the oral tradition of heroic poetry and, on the other, the literary tradition of the Sacred Scriptures and the legends of the saints.6

Due to the unassuming, but radical, presence of monastic life in a region, the civil theology of the peoples of early medieval Europe shifted subtly but comprehensively. The shift in the meaning of political existence was subtle in that the symbols of authority in a society remained—such 5. Gregory the Great, in Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great, trans. J. Barmby, in Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 13 (New York: 1895), 84–85. Available online at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/greg1a.html. 6. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 50.

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as a king, laws, and rituals—but the meaning of symbols were now beginning to reflect a Christian attitude toward the transcendence and the ground of authority. It was also comprehensive in that, once the shift toward a greater differentiation of authority was made, a return to a more compact cosmological, or pagan, existence became impossible. The monastery provided an oasis of peace, security, liberty, and hope in an age where the conditions for survival were far from certain.

Upper Tier: From Byzantium to the Franks In the sixth to eighth centuries, the Christian differentiation of authority into an institutional political head and an institutional spiritual head was well established. In the old imperial regions around the Mediterranean, the range of temporal rulers typically included the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople and the manifold of Germanic kings, while spiritual leadership was provided by the pope, the secular bishops, and abbots primarily. The major institutional shift at this time occurred gradually between papal authority and the authority of Constantinople. An institutional divergence is perhaps best understood as reflecting the civilizational divergence between the Greek East and the Latin West, concentrated in the visible heads. In other words, the crisis in the Western empire was the first major crisis of authority, manifested in the actions of the representative heads. The overstepping of jurisdictional competence by both emperor and pope had begun to create tensions. The breakdown of relations through the centuries between the papacy and the Byzantine emperor had become more pronounced: the violent coercion by Justinian of Pope Vigilius to give assent to the Monophysite heresy; the assertion of superiority by the papal office over the other churches including the patriarchate of Constantinople; the de facto end to imperial power in the West in spite of Justinian’s attempts to reestablish the authority of his office beyond the Byzantine cultural zone of influence; the ever-present threat of Lombard aggression and the consequent provision of temporal authority by the papacy in the city of Rome and beyond. From this we can deduce that the existential needs of the newly emerging civilization in the West were not met by an Eastern empire centered in Constantinople. Crucially, the Byzantine form of imperial existence—symbolized most effectively by the practice of

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 25 Caesaropapism, or the jurisdictional claim over the Eastern churches by the emperor—did not adequately represent the meaning of Latin existence. This first crisis in the West was a crisis in its civil theology over the problem of authority and its proper remit. Caesaropapism in the geographically distant Constantinople was made possible through a powerful imperial head; in the Latin West where Byzantine political power could not be asserted, there existed a vacuum that could only be filled by the prestige that the Roman papacy carried.7 The vacuum of imperial political authority left Pope Gregory the Great with no option but to administer the city of Rome and its surroundings. The independence of spiritual from political authority was central in the development of the papacy, and by extension for the development of civil theology in the Latin West. Its curtailment by a temporal ruler overstepping his temporal remit would inevitably lead to friction. In 494, by way of admonishing the Caesaropapal function of Byzantine emperors, Pope Gelasius I had set forth in a letter to the Emperor Anastasius the necessity of separating powers into temporal and priestly. This became known as the Gelasian doctrine of the Two Swords. In the letter, Gelasius also maintained that the sacerdotal office has superiority over the regal office: Two there are, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power. Of these the responsibility of the priests is more weighty in so far as they will answer for the kings of men themselves at the divine judgement. You know, most clement son, that, although you take precedence over all mankind in dignity, nevertheless you piously bow the neck to those who have charge of divine affairs and seek from them the means of your salvation.8

This formulation of the separation of powers by Gelasius restates at a normative and political level the differentiation articulated by Jesus. For this reason, his letter carried a weight that not even a Byzantine emperor could ignore. With this letter, the distinctive shape of Western Christendom was announced: the nominal separation of powers acknowledged but not practiced in the East was expanded into a radical statement of 7. “Papal-caesarism” is Voegelin’s term that he coins when treating the Donation of Constantine; see Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 60. 8. From Pope Gelasius’s letter to Emperor Anastasius, in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe: A Short Sourcebook (hereafter, Medieval Europe), 40.

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the independence and superiority of the papal magisterium. What this meant in theory over the centuries was the cogovernance of the Christian mundus by the imperial head taking charge of temporal goods such as security and coercion to justice, and by the papal head of spiritual matters. In practice, this neat separation of competence and authority proved impossible to maintain. For one, issues surrounding justice, for example, were not clearly delineated into the competences of either the emperor or the pope: What is the substance of justice and right? Who is the subject of justice? What is the final end of justice? Is justice a political or a spiritual concern, or is it frustratingly both? First, as Harold Berman has shown, law was embedded within the rituals and customs of a society which meant a further practical confusion over how to even interpret and administer justice. Second, the maintenance of a separation of two powers from each other with the motif of superiority attaching to one was inevitably a source of trouble as the history of the era demonstrates. A third and more subtle problem that only became noticeable much later was that the emphasis on two authorities for the governance of a Christian people meant that a third form of authority—the existential, as asserted by individuals and groups—was muted. The crisis of authority in West was not about the imperial structure of political existence, but about the Byzantine form of empire. From the perspective of the papacy which by now represented the Latin West, an empire most adequately served the temporal dimension of a universal power structure or ecumene whose spiritual meaning the church could carry. A Christian empire—as opposed to a patchwork of competing kingdoms—would better express a universal Christian people as a spiritual community in the world, culturally diverse but bonded together within a common civil theology. An empire could also provide the coercive power or security of the church’s action in the world. As Lactantius had commented, so long as Rome survived, the end was not to be feared. It was the sentiment of a universal Roman ecumene that long endured in the West and animated the will to establish a Holy Roman Empire as the Christian successor to the past.9 The problems with Constantinople that arose between the sixth and eighth centuries therefore were not considered as deriving from an imperial arrangement but with the precise9. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 1, 223.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 27 ly Byzantine form of that arrangement. The inadequacy of the eastern Byzantine Empire in representing the meaning of Latin Christian existence as well as the failure to forcefully secure that existence set in train a process that led to a new royal association with the Carolingians. However, the tension between spiritual and temporal institutions was merely repackaged for a new set of political and historical circumstances rather than solved. The specific crisis over Byzantine authority may been resolved in transferring imperial authority to the Franks, but the general problems of authority and jurisdiction remained and would have further civilizational implications. The Gelasian combination of auctoritas and potestas with the motif of papal superiority inevitably led to interminable clashes between the “Two Swords,” no matter the provenance of the imperial sword. The transfer of the problem of supererogation from its Byzantine form of imperial intervention in ecclesial affairs was followed at times by royal domination and intervention by Carolingian and Ottonian houses and at times by papal claims to lordship over the domain of the properly political. To uphold the dignity of Latin Christianity, the papacy required a new temporal arrangement in which the church’s function as the institutional representative of transcendental truth and spiritual authority could be guaranteed. Across the Alps lay the kingdom of the Franks, a Christian kingdom since the conversion of Clovis in 496, possessing the military power to protect the church of Saint Peter. Pope Gregory III wrote to Charles Martel in 739 requesting protection for the church. Martel applied some diplomatic pressure on the Lombards. The importance of this event is that it set in process a buildup of relations in which mutual help could be granted. In 751, Pope Zachary responded to the request for intervention in temporal affairs to depose the ancient and revered royal dynasty of the Merovingians by applying the sacred counterweight of his office which alone could transplant royal authority to the Carolingians. The contemporary account given in the annals of the abbey of Lorsch comments on the events: “Pope Zacharias . . . in the exercise of his apostolic authority, replied to [the ambassadors of the Carolingians] that it seemed to him better and more expedient that the man who held power in the kingdom should be called king and be king, rather than he who falsely bore the name. Therefore the aforesaid pope com-

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manded the king and people of the Franks that Pepin, who was exercising royal power, should be called king, and should be established on the throne.”10 With the coronation of the Carolingian Pepin the Short in 751, a realignment of medieval order was effected in the field of power politics that had been fermenting for centuries. In the philosophic-spiritual field of civil theology, the new Carolingian order of power seemed to carry the meaning of the Gelasian evocation of Two Swords more adequately and congenially than Byzantium. Pope Stephen II anointed Pepin and conferred on him the title patricius Romanorum (754), recognizing his role in the newly contrived relationship that he secure the existential needs of Rome. This is significant for at least two reasons. First, the “needs of Rome” were not coterminous with the earlier historic meanings that such a phrase connotes. By the eighth century, Rome symbolized the new situation of a papal authority that was able to project a potestas into the temporal field, recognized and confirmed by Pepin in his Donation to the Holy See of the Italian peninsula from Parma to Apulia. Second, the meaning inherent in patricius was problematic: on the one hand, it pointed to the preservation and continuity of an imperial structure from the Byzantine arrangement into the past of classical Roman antiquity; on the other hand, as Voegelin has pointed out, the pope “under imperial law, had no legal right to confer the title of patricius Romanorum (or even that of patricius), nor could the Frankish king make ‘donations’ of imperial provinces to anybody.”11 If Pepin could secure Rome from the belligerence of the Lombards and the Byzantines, then the meaning of his action was refracted through the patricius Romanorum symbol, ensuring the perpetuation of empire with its dignity located in the church of Rome. The term patricius Romanorum was therefore an entirely new symbol that indicated the integration of a specifically Latin civilization with its representative center in the Holy See. The only step that remained in dismantling the formal Byzantine link and transferring imperial dignity was to crown a new emperor for the new empire. The coronation of Charlemagne (768–814) on Christmas Day, 800, was the perfect expression of the translatio imperii and it capped the political trajectory of generations. The transfer of imperi10. From “The Coronation of Pepin the Short, 751” in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 68. 11. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 57–58.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 29 al dignity to the Franks was no mere legal ruse; for contemporaries, it meant nothing less than the work of God and the first realization of a sacrum imperium. There are two reasons why it is important not to lose the sense of the intense spiritual understanding that drove the translatio: first, from the perspective of Charlemagne, the translatio was no mere political transfer, but a transfer of spiritual authority to his royal persona; second, the politicospiritual transfer infused the imperial office with its charismatic function of “deputy of Christ.” Therefore, it becomes clear that a major source of the enduring problem with appropriate authority and its jurisdiction is that a properly political sphere, divested of a spiritual function under Christian revelation, had not yet sufficiently emerged from the pagan background of Germanic kingship. Similarly, the spiritual authority centered in the papacy had not yet properly defined its relations with the temporal world. The infringements of each upon the sphere of the other are probably one of the most characteristic historical marks of the medieval era.

Shift in Civil Theology to Medieval Categories of the Person While these competing claims will be examined in more detail below, the translatio imperii is an important moment in the Western differentiation of the philosophical and political problem of authority. Institutional authority in church and empire was a concrete reality and the Gelasian formulation certainly envisaged the assertion of these authorities in the cogovernance of the Christian mundus. However, the noninstitutional authority of persons was not yet recognized as a licit or important source of authority in the upper tier of institutions, nor in the lower tier of individuals and associations. However, what we do begin to see in the political language that immediately followed the translatio imperii is a shift from classical categories of the res publica Romana to the Germanic-Christian vocabulary of persons, such as the royal person and the priestly person.12 The significance of the shift lies in the recognition that auctoritas is not merely a function of an institutional potestas, 12. Evidence for this shift can be seen in documents that emerge from the Synods of Worms and Paris, and in the capitularies of Louis the Pious. See Voegelin’s commentary on this point in History of Political Ideas 2, 63.

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but resides in persons. The opening toward the terminology of persons suggests that a differentiation in the meaning of authority has occurred, and that this differentiation is best articulated by employing the symbol of the person. Although the authority in the “persons” is reserved exclusively for holders of specific offices at this stage, the presence of a universal signifier like “person” for a practitioner of licit authority lends itself to further differentiation that will eventually include existence itself. For the ninth century, however, the persona sacerdotalis and the persona regalis are understood to hold their respective authority from the divine person of Christ, the priest-king who is the source of all authority. We will now see the evidence of this shift toward persons in the literature of the era.

Germanic Kingship and the Problem of Overreaching Authorities Germanic kingship from antiquity was such that royal authority was invested with a spiritual function relating to the existence of the tribe or nation. The king represented the existence of the nation in a twofold manner: he was the representative of national existence to the overarching divine order of the gods; and so he functioned as a symbol of identity, also representing the nation to itself. A way to restate this is: Without a king, the nation lacked existence. The function of a king was not merely the coercion of justice and the guarantee of licit power, but the security of national existence within the totality of being. His actions were luminous for the meaning of national existence as it bore upon both the political and the spiritual spheres. One could even go so far as to say that the kingship that emerged among the pagan Germanic gentes was a compact fusion of authority that was simultaneously political and spiritual, but also existential in a surrogate sense. The existence of the individual was dwarfed by the emphasis on collective national or tribal existence, which implied that the meaning of individual existence was sought within the national collective. The priority of national existence over individual existence in the compactness of the pagan soul effectively granted dominion or lordship over the meaning of personal existence to the royal head. In other words, the monopoly of authority that was invested in Germanic kingship dominated existence to such an extent that there could be little

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 31 or no meaning to existence outside the nation. Contemporary accounts of kings and peoples between the fifth and eighth centuries are replete with references to kingship and existence. Alfred Dove states that the connection between the concepts of rex and gens “is so strict that renunciation of kingship on the part of tribes is considered equivalent to the loss of independent existence and the decline of national identity.”13 Furthermore, as the differentiation of authority was unknown, this compactness was not problematic for pagan society; it could only become a problem when the Christian differentiation of authority was formally accepted by the baptism of the royal person. The type of problem it actually became was therefore one that extended into the political, the spiritual, and the existential spheres of human reality. The differentiation of authority was not, nor can ever be, a tidy process which is, for example, a merely political concern or a spiritual affair. Rather, the process of differentiation is one that works itself out through the existential minutiae of the day-to-day life of individuals and communities. Existence is authoritative, meaning that authority is embedded in existence itself and thus has a claim on the various dimensions of human life, whether they be political, spiritual, ethical, philosophical, commercial, artistic, and so forth. In the case of the early medieval conversion of kings—and therefore nations—to Christianity, the separation of Caesar’s things from God’s was formally recognized, but the praxis of the separation involved the upheaval of an entire civil theology and implicated the meaning of existence itself. The Christianization of the pagan nations was therefore not an event that can be circumscribed by a date, but occurred in the interiority of concrete persons who incarnated a civil theology. Upheavals of such depth and magnitude move with a time factor and inevitably the medieval gentes in the West struggled to put the square pegs of Germanic kingship and tribal nationhood into the round hole of differentiated order. The conflation of zones of authority is amply demonstrated by Charlemagne’s capitulary of 802: 3. Everyone on his own behalf should strive to maintain himself in God’s holy service, in accordance with God’s command and his own pledge, to the 13. Quoted by Voegelin in History of Political Ideas 2, 48. Voegelin presents a short survey of the link between kingship and existence here.

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best of his ability and intelligence, since our lord the emperor himself is unable to provide the necessary care and discipline to all men individually. 5. That no one should presume to commit fraud or theft or any other criminal act against God’s holy churches or against widows or orphans or pilgrims; for the lord emperor himself, after God and his saints, has been appointed their protector and defender.14

The conflation of moral norms with legal directives and religious obligations in the capitulary suggests that the meaning of Charlemagne’s political authority was far from strictly political in the modern sense. Harold Berman demonstrated this when he wrote that long before Charlemagne consented to be crowned emperor by the pope in 800, his devoted servant Alcuin had referred to him as ruler of the imperium christianum. Furthermore, “Charlemagne himself in 794 had called a ‘universal’ church council at Frankfurt at which he promulgated important changes in theological doctrine and ecclesiastical law.”15 Charlemagne’s imperial authority claimed priority over what may be termed political, spiritual, and existential because these zones had not differentiated sufficiently. Their apparent fusion into an expanded sphere over which the emperor could exercise licit power probably reflected the understanding of rulership by most Germanic peoples. However, this compactness met with resistance from the papacy who had driven the translatio imperii from the compactness of Caesaropapal power in Constantinople and now found itself helpless as the leadership of the Latin West gradually shifted north of the Alps to the Frankish kings. Therefore, the great medieval struggle between papacy and kings was not in the first instance about potestas but about auctoritas and its proper sphere. The struggle became a power play when papal auctoritas later combined with potestas in order to wrest from the emperors once again the independence of ecclesial authority. Although the church had long developed as a temporal power—as evidenced by the Donation of Constantine16 and other donations—and 14. From Charlemagne, “General Capitulary for the Missi, Spring, 802,” in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 76. 15. Berman, Law and Revolution, 91. 16. The Donation of Constantine is a forged document that dates from roughly 750. It was presented to Pepin in 754, implying a clarification of the relationship between the Gelasian Swords and the justification of papal auctoritas over royal potestas. See Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 176–77.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 33 although kings and emperors had often relied on the support of popes and had acknowledged ecclesial superiority in matters of faith, the momentum of leadership in medieval Christendom from the late eighth century lay with the royal head and not the sacerdotal head. Berman reminds us that Frankish emperors, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries German emperors as well as French and English kings—plus Spanish, Norse, Danish, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and other rulers—governed bishops even in matters of religious doctrine, just as the Byzantine emperors had done. “The justification was that emperors and kings were consecrated, sacral rulers, ‘deputies of Christ.’”17 The early Christian perspective on political power had been forgotten. While Augustine, and before him Paul, thought the political sufficient in its own sphere and in no need of being “Christianized,” the medieval mind regarded political power as something to be not only consecrated, but often to surpass in dignity the authority that the church exercised. However, this was far from universally accepted and it is no surprise that it was the monasteries that led the movement once again toward ecclesial independence and renewal. The impulse within early medieval civil theology was not to reconstitute political power as Christian, but to evoke a sacrum imperium whose transcendental Christian substance would embrace all authority at once and while the world endured. Walsh writes that “it is this wholeness of ethos, rather than power, that accounts for the peculiar tolerance of resistance and diversity within the medieval commonwealth.”18 The development of Christendom with its charismatic kingship was not so much a rejection of the early Christian experience of the political, but a manifestation of the integrating aspiration for a universal, holy empire. It was a civil theology that expressed an experience of the wholeness of being and the essential participation and dignity of man in that overarching order. If the sacrum imperium was to be a manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth, then the political could not avoid being gathered into the sanctification.

17. Berman, Law and Revolution, 92. 18. Ibid., 7.

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The Medieval Political Order to 1150 Authority in the Post-Carolingian Era and the Reforming Spirit

The unstable conditions beginning in the generation after Charlemagne meant that the realization of a sacrum imperium was hopelessly compromised by overriding existential concerns. This was the time in which Viking incursions from the north and west began in earnest, while the Slavic and Magyar raids came from the east. The ever-present threat from the south was presented by the burgeoning of Islamic civilization. The chronicler of St. Vedast expressed the trauma of the later ninth century: The Northmen cease not to slay and carry into captivity the Christian people, to destroy the churches and to burn the towns. Everywhere there is nothing but dead bodies—clergy and laymen, nobles and common people, women and children. There is no road or place where the ground is not covered with corpses. We live in distress and anguish before this spectacle of the destruction of the Christian people.19

The Latin West “was a beleaguered citadel which only survived because its greatest enemy, Islam, had reached the end of its lines of communication, and its lesser enemies (the Slavs, the Hungarians, and the Vikings) were organized only for raids and for plunder.”20 A new alignment in power politics became necessary because of a dire lack of security and the outright ineffectiveness of the Carolingian kings. Under the pressure of pragmatism, power devolved to more local centers of authority. The empire was divided, real power had passed into the hands of the aristocracy, and the Carolingian kings were less and less able either to maintain control over government and law within their realm or to withstand the incursion of savage invaders.21 In the generations after Charlemagne, the central institutions of Carolingian authority were practically ignored with a decentralized web of feudal organization resulting. Oakeshott describes feudalism as a “sort of order” that could become a “political order.” He writes that 19. Quoted in Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Civilisation, 87. 20. Southern, Western Society, 27. 21. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 193–94. He notes, “The Carolingian line did not end in Germany until 911, and in France the Carolingians held on until 987, but from the last quarter of the ninth century the Carolingian king was a nonentity.”

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 35 the reciprocity of obligations and duties results in “a legal relationship of mutual benefit, based upon the ownership of land, between a ‘lord’ (dominus, seigneur) and his ‘vassals.’ Both are ‘free’ men; and there is a compact between them made under oath. . . . This arrangement may take place at any level of society.”22 That feudalism could arise at all pointed to the collapse of central authority, which was by now a theocratic mixture of imperial and papal powers. The shift in power from the central government of the king to the barons and dukes signaled a collapse in the social structure but not a collapse of civilizational substance. The spread of customs such as fealty and homage, already embedded in the culture, took on the starker meaning of survival.23 As Henri DanielRops described the situation, “One world was dead, another was seeking to be born: was not all the discord and suffering a sign of impending parturition?”24 The organization of society along feudal lines suggests the retreat of authority from the hegemony of the political over the ecclesial and the sphere of the existential to all that the culture of the time had remaining to it: the bonds between individuals, bonds that were expressed both hierarchically through the strata of medieval society and laterally among individuals. Feudalism therefore occupies an important place within the narrative of authority in the West: when political authority and power fail to deliver such goods as order and justice and thereby become irrelevant to the existential necessities of life, those necessities rely upon the authority embedded in the existence of individuals themselves. The social conditions in which feudalism emerged severely challenged the concept of Germanic kingship and with it the notion of national existence. Therefore, what also begins to come into focus within the narrative of authority is a distinction between forms of political authority, specifically dominium and royal auctoritas. The notion of dominium was recognized from classical times as pertaining to a family 22. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 280. For a discussion of the inadequacy of the term “feudalism” and a description of some the characteristics of feudal structures, see Luscombe, “Formation: c. 750–c. 1150,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–1450 (hereafter, The Cambridge History of Medieval Thought), 159–63. 23. For a discussion of the nature of feudal oaths, see McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West, 180–83. 24. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Dark Ages, 529.

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or household. Oakeshott notes that, “It referred to a specific potestas of the head of a household, namely his potestas as the owner of property and slaves. In respect of his property and slaves, but not in respect of his wife, children or clientes, the paterfamilias was dominus (‘lord’) and exercised dominium.”25 Kingly potestas differed from mere dominium or lordship in that royal potestas rested upon a right to rule. Kingship therefore was inherently constituted by legitimate authority or auctoritas. It was held that the only self-evidently legitimate ruler was God and as a result only God could confer potestas: Omnis potestas est a Deo. Lordly dominium was the authority out of which came kingly authority. However, kingly authority was not the same authority as that of lordship. While the king certainly had dominium as lord over his own demesne, his authority as king was not lordly: “A medieval king, then, came to be recognised to have two different kinds of ‘authority’ over two different kinds of subjects. The ‘authority’ of ‘lordship’ over his own demesne and his tenants, and the ‘authority’ of a ‘king’ over his kingdom and his subjects.”26 Under the conditions in which feudal decentralization emerged, royal auctoritas was effectively eclipsed by lordly dominium. In the bonds between individuals, civilizational substance was still intact. The effort to survive was a cooperative effort, delimited on a clearly defined principle of reciprocity. Its expression lay in the preexisting cultural forms of interpersonal loyalty and the custom of oath taking. In the face of severe external existential threat, such customs provided the only social supports available for carrying the civil theology of Western Europe. The authority to represent the existence of the nation no longer was carried in any meaningful way by the king or emperor, but devolved to the only stratum left: the subjects themselves. The emphasis upon naked potestas rather than royal auctoritas led to the panEuropean situation of reliance upon the strong arm of the local baron. However useful baronial might could be for the purposes of survival, baronial power was not of a sort that could unite a society or bring about a national people, or gentes.27 The potestas of the king—with its author25. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 235. 26. Ibid., 459. 27. See chapter six below for a consideration of principalities and city-states and their failure to bring about a people.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 37 ity to represent the community of subjects and ability to form a national unit—was now elided and effectively replaced by dominium exercised by the nobles and other holders of land. The existential authority of a people was carried now by individuals in bonds of fellowship or fealty with others. In the vacuum of royal potestas, the raising of these customs among individuals to the level of organization symbolized the continuous development of civil theology, and emphatically not a breach in the order of civilization. The collapse of central authority certainly gave rise to radical actions, but with anarchy there arose a self-reliance that carried the order of a people within the individuals and communities themselves, shorn of an upper-tier institutionalization. In this case, anarchy means the actions of some landowners who recognized no power above them, but self-reliance means the assertion of an existential authority to secure oneself and one’s own against the caprices of the times.28 For all practical purposes, feudalism was an effective response to grave existential danger that had the effect of underscoring the importance of existential authority in individual persons and their associations. Existential authority, then, was an authority that could extend to the sphere of political goods such as national survival—even when there was no political realization of a national people—but was primarily driving the human orientation toward meaning and justice on a personal and interpersonal level. If existential authority was rooted in the individual and therefore overlapped the sociopolitical and the spiritual, then the heightening of existential authority could provide the coherence of society in extreme circumstances where institutional authorities of empire and church were weak. It was in this situation that the vast network of interpersonal and interclass loyalties could cohere, and with it, the hierarchy of society from the peasant through the aristocracy to God. On a philosophical level, the feudal arrangement continued to symbolize the coherence of being in spite of the centrifugal tendencies of the time. The mutual relations between God, man, and the world remained intact, grounding the continuing development of a Western 28. For a discussion of the church’s role under the frequently violent circumstances on the ground and its assumption of temporal authority to organize public safety in the Peace of God proclamation, see Van Caenegem, “Government, Law and Society,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 177ff.

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civil theology. The prevailing tension underlying existence through the period of invasion was marked by fear and restlessness, but when the frequency of attacks occasionally subsided, the upper plane of institutional power in the papacy and the emperor slowly rekindled. From the trauma of the preceding generations, the intact civilizational substance was renewed, born of the feudal experience of dependence upon existential authority. By the tenth century a relative peace had been established and the overriding struggle for survival subsided. The generations of trauma had given the people of Western Europe the opportunity to realize the wholeness of the sacrum imperium in a post-Carolingian form: that is, without submerging each Gelasian authority in the sphere of the other. The post-Carolingian and postinvasion period is marked by the beginnings of spiritual reform. Voegelin notes that this was a time caught up in a “great spiritual wave.”29 Human existence—experienced spiritually and extending into the political field of action—had gained an added intensity following the experience of destruction and decay. This “spiritual wave” denotes the emergence of the third authority—the existential—into the Gelasian world of double institutional authority which simultaneously participated in both. The differentiation and assertion of existential authority precipitated not just the renewal of the West, but led to a major crisis that slowly destroyed the medieval cosmion.

Monasticism and the Renewal of Authority The institution already most adequately arranged for the realization of a Christian evocation and spiritual reform was the monastery. The ideal for which monastic existence strived involved the establishment of a perfect Christian community. The engagement of the regular, or monastic, clergy in the contemplation of and struggle for the divine took place, to varying degrees, outside the existing social structures of the world, while the secular clergy of diocesan priests and bishops were deeply immersed in those structures. Unsurprisingly, the intensity of focus could come from the monasteries whose origin and raison d’être was to exist in the desert, figuratively speaking, in order that each monk 29. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 68.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 39 or nun could better “incline the ear of the heart and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father.”30 The contrast between the existential and political conditions of the world and the ideal at which monasticism was directed was stark. Encroachments by the temporal world on the monastic ideal, such as lay investiture, the practice of simony, and clerical marriage were specifically regarded as injurious to the monastic ideal. Generally, the ethos of the monastic life and it foundation in spiritual freedom were restricted to the extent that clerics were absorbed by the affairs of the mundus. Discipline, including poverty and celibacy, was the cornerstone of the monastic struggle to keep the world beyond the enclosure. If the monastery could detach itself from a destabilizing engagement with the world, it could win for itself the opportunity to refocus on its authentic mission to participate in the transfiguring movement of reality toward the divine. By this refocusing, monasticism could become the vehicle for spiritual renewal, paralleling its earlier role in spreading the substance of the Christian faith. In 909, the prelates of the church in Rheims identified the inadequacies of ecclesiastical authority: The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined and burned, the land is reduced to a solitude. As the first men lived without law or constraint, abandoned to their passions, so now every man does what pleases him, despising the laws of God and man the ordinances of the Church. . . . In those [monasteries] that remain there is no longer any observance of the rule. They no longer have legitimate superiors, owing to the abuse of submitting to secular domination. . . . God’s flock perishes through our charge. It has come about by our negligence, our ignorance and that of our brethren.31

The abbey of Cluny was founded in southern France in 910. The purpose of the foundation was to raise the quality of the spiritual component in the lives of the regular clergy. At this time, the practices of simony (buying and selling of church offices and property), lay investiture (the authority assumed by temporal lords to invest bishops with the insignia of their episcopal office), and nicolaism (clerical marriage) were common. They functioned as three of the most significant external signs of the entanglement of the church in the temporal affairs of the 30. St. Benedict, “Prologue,” The Rule of St. Benedict. 31. Quoted in Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 121.

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world. If the renewal of the clergy were to be effected in any meaningful way, there was need of an institutional restructuring, which, in the case of Cluny, was nothing short of revolutionary. While the rule of Cluny was based on a renewal of the Benedictine Rule, with an emphasis on its strict observance, its originality was the foundation of other monasteries that depended upon the mother house. Rather than a loose congregation of individual houses, Cluny established itself as an order. Under the leadership of the abbot, its monastic foundations maintained filial relations with its parent. Furthermore, the order was directly under the authority of the pope and therefore exempt from local lords, episcopal and temporal. As Voegelin notes, Cluny with its centralizing Cluniac structure and its strict observance of the rule was “precisely the type of organization that could serve as a pattern for the organizational independence of the church herself from secular power.”32 Two points suggest themselves about the importance of the Cluniac innovation to the reforming spirit of the time: The order’s form of government gave a precedent to the wider ecclesiastical and temporal authorities of an organization that could effectively exercise sovereignty and whose centralized, integrated structure stood in sharp relief to the web of feudal society, thereby achieving an institutional liberty from the power of the lords. Cluny was also the first translocal corporation33 and “its exemption from local jurisdiction . . . made the existence of a strong papacy desirable that could offer protection against the encroachments of temporal and local episcopal powers.”34 In the absence of a strong papacy, the Cluniacs had to rely on the strength of the imperial and royal power, such as it was, to “emancipate [the church] from the corrupting influences of baronial and local politics and economics”;35 while the emperors enjoyed the support given by the abbey. With the strength of such support, which was steeped in the reforming spirit of the time, the emperor was eventually able to wrest from the nobles of Rome the power to appoint the pope. The gradual reassertion of imperial power over the 32. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 69. 33. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 506; quoted by Berman in Law and Revolution, 91. 34. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 69. 35. Berman, Law and Revolution, 91.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 41 aristocracy began in Germany with Otto I the Great. By 1046, Henry III could reclaim “his right of nominating the pope and compelled the Romans to take an oath renouncing their right of election. The renunciation of popular election removed the most dangerous institutional barrier to spiritual independence.”36 However, as Berman notes, the basic aim of the Cluniac reform faced an insuperable obstacle: The clergy were so thoroughly enmeshed in the political and economic structure at all levels that they could not be extracted from it. Under the aegis of the great reforming emperors of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the monastic orders could be cleansed and the papacy could be strengthened, but the church as a whole could not be radically reformed because it was not independent. Simony and nicolaism remained burning issues.37

Fundamental renewal of the church required a strong papal center to curtail the centrifugal practices and tendencies that restricted the primary spiritual component of religious life. In principle, reform of the church as whole was shown to be possible by the institutional structures of Cluny which were set in place as a means to achieve greater freedom from temporal intervention and intramundane engagement.

The Middle Ages from 1050 to 1150 Libertas Ecclesiae The Investiture Controversy has been variously referred to as the Hildebrandine Reform or the Gregorian Reform, after the monk Hildebrand, who was leader of the papal party in the period after 1050 and who ruled as Pope Gregory VII from 1073 to 1085. The terminology of reform and struggle underplay the dramatic upheaval of the time that found its institutional expression in the resurgence of both the imperial office and more especially in the assertion of papal authority. As Berman has stressed, “another term used to denote the same era, namely, the Investiture Struggle, is not so much an understatement as an oblique statement.”38 That the specific struggle was centered on the problem of lay investiture conceals not only the wider implications for medieval so36. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 82. 37. Berman, Law and Revolution, 91. 38. Ibid., 87.

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cial structures, but the “spiritual wave” that had been shifting the emphasis of civil theology toward renewal for generations. By the time “freedom of the church” had become the slogan of reform, the spiritual wave of existential authority had been burgeoning for over a century. Libertas ecclesia was a symbol compressing a widespread dissatisfaction with the exercise of authority, both ecclesiastical and royal. The dissonance between the Carolingian-type theocratic rule that persisted in a repackaged form with the Ottonians after the invasion period and the Gelasian ideal of two separate but coordinate powers was compounded by the subtly increasing assertion of existential authority that participated in both temporal and spiritual spheres. The upheaval in the aftermath of the invasions, the feudal self-organization of society, and the general unrest that was characteristic of the time had at its experiential core the tension between the harsh conditions of existence as they were and the intimations of order that more adequately reflected the coherence of existence. The Investiture Struggle from the late eleventh century can be understood as a somewhat inevitable “release of energy and creativity analogous to a process of nuclear fission.”39 By the time Leo IX (1049–1054) took up the struggle to reform the church, the tension had already become acute and the momentum for reform had snowballed: the actions of the papal party, the struggle to emancipate the mission of the ecclesia from the mundus, constituted nothing short of a revolution. In fact, the employment of the term “revolution” is apposite in this case as many commentators of the era have suggested. The roughly one-hundred-year period from 1050 to 1150 marks an axis-time of sorts for Western society: before which the practical fusion of institutional authorities was the norm and the assertion of existential authority was still dull; and after which the resetting of relations between church and the now multiple royal heads led to a separation of the ways, while the exercise of existential authority had become one of the most dominant characteristics of Western society. 40 39. Brown, Society and the Supernatural, 134; quoted in Berman, Law and Revolution, 88. 40. See Berman, Law and Revolution, 19ff. Berman lists the typical characteristics of a revolution by which he can identify six major Western revolutions. See also Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 244ff. Cantor states explicitly that the “period from 1050 to 1130 was dominated by an attempt at world revolution that influenced in highly effective ways the other aspects of social change.”

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 43 The spiritual wave had spilled out of the monasteries and, propelled by the existential self-reliance of feudal society, had burgeoned into revolutionary sentiment by the 1050s. While the element of institutional reform was the most visible aspect of the Investiture Struggle, the assertion of existential authority on the lower plane of society for over a century is what made it possible. Therefore, the reconfiguration of institutional relations and jurisdictions at the upper plane of institutional authority must be seen as an outcome carried by the upsurge in existential sentiment, or Voegelin’s “spiritual wave.” In this context, it is worth mentioning the Pataria movement of Milan. The Pataria was a popular uprising of sentiment against the simoniac clergy that began in 1056. The name “Pataria” refers to the rag market at Milan and the peasant stratum of the city population that inhabited the quarter. The Liber qui inscribitur ad amicum of Bonizo of Sutri (1086) identified “the simoniac interests with those of the feudal lords who during the period of migration anarchy had gained a position that now they were reluctant to relinquish; and he sees in the Pataria a democratic movement, under the leadership of high-minded noblemen, that aims at popular control of the higher clergy in the interest of spiritual reform.”41 The assertion of existential authority among the Pataria involved an acute spiritual and political awareness. If the lower plane of sentiment among the members of Milanese society were socially representative of other population centers throughout Christendom, then the papacy could channel the cultural momentum into institutional upheaval with the expectation of a large degree of sociopolitical support.

The Authorities of Gregory VII and Henry IV Hildebrand had been the most dynamic force during the papacies of Nicholas II (1058–1061) and Alexander II (1061–1073), as the renewal of the papal office began to gain momentum. By the time he became Pope Gregory VII, he had a very sharp intellectual grasp of the inadequacies affecting the church’s relation to the world and a fierce conviction to establish papal power as the means of redressing it. K. J. Leyser wrote about Gregory that “[e]ven if it could be shown that all his ideas 41. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 84–85.

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were found in older traditions and already widespread in the reformmovement before his pontificate, there would remain the frightening severity and heroic persistence with which he pressed them, regardless of the consequences to himself or to others. He had, to say the least, the temper of a revolutionary.”42 One of his first acts as pope was to encourage Christian men and woman to avoid receiving sacraments from priests practicing nicolaism. Furthermore, in 1075, twenty-seven points concerning papal authority were compiled by the papal court at his instigation. Known as the Dictatus Papae, they were not made public at the time but they function as the private manifesto of the revolution about to unfold in time.43 Gregory’s demand for the subordination of the temporal to the papal was taken as an attack by Henry, who refers to the long tradition of the anointed, sacred office of king as the representative of Christ. He expresses the inner dignity of his office as head of a holy empire in continuation from Rome and Constantinople: Henry, king not by usurpation, but by the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, not pope, but false monk. . . . You have mistaken our humility for fear, and have dared to make an attack upon the royal and imperial authority which we have received from God. You have even threatened to take it away, as if we had received it from you, and as if the empire and kingdom were in your disposal and not in the disposal of God. . . . You have attacked me, who, unworthy as I am, have yet been anointed by God to rule among the anointed of God, and who, according to the teaching of the fathers, can be judged by no one save God alone, and be deposed for no crime except infidelity. 44

The sacrum imperium ideal persisted as a vibrant, attractive evocation for Henry, under whose rule the empire was developing as the earthly counterpart to the Heavenly Kingdom. From the vision of the victorious Christ the king came the dignity of the imperial office. Henry testifies 42. Leyser “The Polemics of the Papal Revolution,” in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, 53. Peter Cardinal Damian, who was an associate of Hildebrand’s since the 1050s, referred to him as “my holy Satan. . . . Thy will has ever been a command to me—evil but lawful. Would that I had always served God and Saint Peter as faithfully as I have served thee”; quoted in Berman, Law and Revolution, 94, from Orville Prescott, Lords of Italy: Portraits from the Middle Ages, 43. 43. See Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 153–54. All twenty-seven propositions concern the superiority of papal authority over royal and other ecclesiastical authority. 44. Ibid., 155–56.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 45 to the emperor’s superiority in being “judged by no one save God alone.” Christian emperors had symbolized themselves as the “deputy of Christ” and therefore claimed the legal and spiritual authority to appoint bishops with the words “Accipe ecclesiam!” investing them with the insignia of their office. Gregory, however, claimed “princes shall kiss the foot of the pope alone,” and that the pope had the power to depose emperors, but that “he [the pope] can be judged by no one.”45 Reform of the church’s involvement in the world in line with Christian experience demanded the separation of the temporal and the spiritual swords. Gregory’s was the attempt to curtail royal authority in all matters ecclesiastical, thereby changing de facto the exercise of power by the emperor. The drastic limitation of temporal authority as such radiated through the hierarchy of feudal associations, including the exercise of authority by lords, both temporal and spiritual. When the papacy arrogated to itself alone the authority inherent in the symbol “deputy (or vicar) of Christ,” the entire social and historical web of relations was shaken. However, Gregory’s conception of the relationship of the Gelasian Two Swords was that the temporal power be subordinate to the church in strictly spiritual matters and, to a lesser extent, to be indirectly guided in secular matters by the church. “Gregory VII and his supporters never doubted that secular government . . . represented divine authority, that the power of the secular ruler was established by God, and that secular law flowed ultimately from reason and conscience and must be obeyed.”46 Nevertheless, from Gregory’s Dictatus Papae, there can be traced the understanding of papal power as a plenitude of ecclesiastical power, “an absolute imperium, derived from God alone, responsible only to God; boundless, exceptionless, complete and imprescriptible—a potestas perfecta.”47 Oakeshott has suggested that at least from the time of Gregory VII, this papal auctoritas over kings began to be interpreted and used as if it were potestas—that is to say, a right to rule, to command, and to punish. . . . Gregory VII deposed the Emperor Henry IV; Innocent IV deposed Sancho II of Portugal and appointed a regent in his 45. Ibid., 153–54, propositions 9, 12, and 19, respectively. 46. Berman, Law and Revolution, 111. 47. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 274.

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place; and King John of England was excommunicated and his subjects absolved from their allegiance.48

Gregory’s thought was primarily directed at the freedom, and renewal, of the church; but the severity of his polemics led to yet another form of the perennial medieval problem: that of claiming the privilege to act in a sphere that does not lend itself to such privileges. Gregory sought to establish the independence and liberty of the church from the supererogatory assertions of the emperor, but his revolutionary temperament in principle carried the Gelasian ideal beyond itself. He laid the foundations for the later absolute papacy where nothing but the political subordination of the whole world before the papal throne would suffice. The ecclesial potestas of the papacy became a political potestas in the claim to universal auctoritas.49

The Endurance of the Sacrum Imperium The revolution from the beginning had clarity of purpose and an intellectual drive that rose directly from the personality of Gregory. Its nature was also radical enough to foment sufficient agitation generally in society and to provoke Henry in particular; the military aspect of the revolution broke out with the forces loyal to the emperor taking on forces allied to the papacy. The principal events and personalities of the revolution need not detain us here.50 The civil theology of the time, of which the sacrum imperium was the greatest evocation, shaped the form of intellectual debate surrounding the upheaval. Voegelin has surveyed Alois Dempf’s catalogue of the arguments on behalf of the emperor and the papacy respectively which all move within the Gelasian-medieval horizon.51 Antagonism against one authority by the other did not deprecate the necessity of the other authority. In the enduring sacrum imperium that expressed the wholeness of Christian order, both imperial and papal offices recognized that the dignity of their own authority relied on the dignity of the other. Voegelin cites various arguments on both sides that demonstrate this: the as48. Ibid., 275–76. 49. See chapter seven below. 50. See Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 265–76, for an excellent account. 51. See footnote 8 in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 86–88.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 47 sertion of the sanctity of the feudal oath against priestly dissension; the pragmatic, historical, and sacral legitimacy of imperial intervention in the affairs of the church; the sacramental and ethical character of the corpus mysticum that proves the unity of church and empire and which also prohibits Gregory’s destructive papal action; the admonishment of the two powers to avoid a break in the imperial form of political existence that has proven so successful for the growth of Christianity and had lasted in continuity from the Greeks to the Franks; the identification of a fundamental breach of political order in Henry’s deposition of the pope in the Synod of Worms (1076) which now must be restored through an imperial representative assembly.52 The arguments advanced by partisans of the emperor and the pope share the concern to preserve the spiritual meaning of Western existence. The meaning of medieval existence—as Christian existence under the Gelasian arrangement of the Two Swords—involved simultaneous participation in both the spiritual and the temporal spheres of being which sustained medieval civil theology right through the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As a civil theology, Christendom was still carried in the lives and societies of concrete people. Its Gelasian structure still had currency because it still symbolized the meaning of the Latin West. In short, there was no viable alternative to the sacrum imperium in the revolutionary latter half of the eleventh century. The Gelasian arrangement was still the only show in town and the suggestion of vanquishing or destroying either the papal or the imperial authority amounted to the self-extinction of a civilization. If an alternative could not be imagined, due to the embeddedness of Christendom’s Gelasian structure as a civil theology in actual societies, so too were the roots of the reforming zeal embedded in real people. These individuals and communities comprised the newly assertive factor in the situation. It was the rising authority of existence itself that would ultimately result in the self-surpassing of the medieval soul. 52. Respectively, these are the arguments of Wenrich of Trier in Epistula ad Hildebrandum (c. 1081), Wido of Osnabruck in Liber de controversies inter Hildebrandum et Henricum imperatorem (c. 1084), Liber de unitate ecclesiae conservanda, attributed to Walram of Naumburg (from the 1090s), the anonymous Tractatus de investiture episcoporum (1109), and Gebhardt of Salzburg in Epistula ad Herimannum Metensem (1084); quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 86–88, n. 8.

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The Medieval Political Order to 1150 The Institutional Outcome

The rise of the papacy occasioned the rise of the church from the weight of imperial authority. It is important to remember that the church’s traditions were deeply sunk in the substance of society and a revolution centered in the church was necessarily a revolution that spilled out across Christendom. Berman writes that calling total societal transformation the “Papal Revolution” does not limit its scope to such issues as the struggle for papal control over the church and for the freedom of the church, under the papacy, from secular domination, but, on the contrary, includes within its scope all the interrelated changes that took place at that time. The new papal office of the church, as Joseph R. Strayer has said, “almost demanded the invention of the concept of the State.”53 Divesting from itself the domination of the secular power, the church established sovereignty and the infrastructure it needed to operate effectively and internationally as an institutional carrier of divine authority. That a public, spiritual authority could be extended in so systematic a manner paved the way for the extension of a public, secular authority in the form of the modern state. In the aftermath of revolutionary fervor, the church had gained for itself the character of a “modern Western state.” Berman outlines the parallels: The church . . . executed its laws through an administrative hierarchy, through which the pope ruled as a modern sovereign rules through his or her representatives. Further, the church interpreted its laws, and applied them, through a judicial hierarchy culminating in the papal curia in Rome. Thus the church exercised the legislative, executive and judicial powers of a modern state. In addition, it adhered to a rational system of jurisprudence, the canon law. It imposed taxes on its subjects in the form of tithes and other levies. Through baptismal and death certificates it kept what was in effect a kind of civil register. Baptism conferred a kind of citizenship. . . . One could be deprived of citizenship . . . by excommunication. Occasionally, the church even raised armies.54

In general, the ascendancy of the spiritual Sword as an international power raised the bar for the temporal Sword. Prior to the mid-eleventh 53. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, 22; quoted by Berman, Law and Revolution, 22–23. 54. Berman, Law and Revolution, 113–14.

The Medieval Political Order to 1150 49 century, the unity of Christendom was predicated on a universality that was spiritual but also territorial. In other words, the sacrum imperium was an evocation of a territorial realization of Christendom. By the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, this territorial or political realization of Christendom had begun to wane, leaving the spiritual unity of the West intact. The pragmatic situation reveals this: the fringe realms outside the factual Germanic empire, such as France, England, Norman Sicily, and so forth had become integrated into the spiritual unity of Christendom without being absorbed by the empire. The civilizational unity of the West transcended the imperial zone. Dawson notes that, by now, medieval Christendom was not dependent on the existence of the empire as had Carolingian or Byzantine society. In fact, in the postGregorian era, Christendom had “a superpolitical or international character and possessed its own independent centre of authority in the reformed Papacy.”55 With regard to the specific struggle surrounding the Investiture Controversy, the resolution took some generations to come and even then it was partial. The institutional revolution had run its course and the will of Gregory’s successors began to fade. In the Concordat of Worms (1122) between Calixtus II and Henry V, the emperor abandoned the institution of lay investiture, but maintained the requirement that bishops and abbots pay him homage in his domains before their investment with the symbols of their offices. The Concordat was partial in that “the papacy granted to the German king the right to exercise a veto over the appointment of German ecclesiastics and, by implication, to maintain the decisive voice in their selection.”56 However, it functioned as a resolution to the problem of imperial claims upon the jurisdiction of the church. The papal argument against an imperial “deputy of Christ” had won. The partial resolution demonstrates the enduring difficulty that a “Christian” political authority presents. The notion of a non-Christian, or secular, political authority had not yet emerged within medieval civil theology and the abandonment of lay investiture still came at a price that recognized the Gelasian duality of medieval Christian authority. The papal revolution had forged a renewal within its own ranks and 55. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 142. 56. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 273.

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had engineered a reconstituting of relations with royal authority with initially mixed results. As Cantor says, “the half-century of the investiture controversy had brought about vast changes.”57 The visible changes could be seen in the institutional arrangements, but the invisible change was a philosophic-spiritual one in the ongoing differentiation of authority below the upper plane of institutions. The clearance of an “existential space” between the separating temporal and transcendent authorities was filled with the freely expressive spirit of the individual. The “release of energy” that had erupted into a revolution was also an increasingly assertive existential energy that powered a greater involvement with the world: the rise of universities or schools and engagement with literature and philosophy; the penetration of the structures of the world by the development of natural science; the increase in contact with civilizational forces beyond the matrix of Western experience; the rise of representative assemblies; the explosion of social phenomena such as urban life and mercantile interaction and the burgeoning of legal codes to impose a framework of order on such unprecedented activity. This is not an exhaustive list, but points to a general differentiation of social activity that was not grounded in the Gelasian duality of authority, but in its overcoming and which unfolded according to the assertion of human existence in the world. The postGregorian era therefore marks the accelerated disintegration of the Gelasian arrangement, allows for a pronounced assertion of existential authority, and witnesses the simultaneous beginning of the slow and tortuous death of the medieval cosmion and the birth of the modern West. 57. Ibid., 274.

2 The Em ergence of the Indi v idua l

The emphasis on existence had reached an influential point by the twelfth century. Moreover, this new emphasis was not a merely legal, political, or philosophical movement, but affected every aspect of medieval civilization. To demonstrate some of this universality, this chapter concerns itself with the development of law and its glosses that reflects the shift toward the existence of the person as constituting a field of rights. Second, we will consider the life of Saint Francis as embodying the dignity of the existential, whose theoretical significance is measured—at least implicitly—in the political and legal thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The Semantic Shift in the Language of Rights The revival of Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a crucial development that met the needs for a rapidly expanding sphere of worldly action and interaction. Voegelin describes it as “the most important single event in the process in which the new forces, individual and collective, generated an order of inner-worldly action as well 51

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as a method of inner-worldly legal reasoning.”1 The period from 1150 onward saw the chartering of cities across the Latin West, the exponential increase of commerce, the concentration of power in rising bureaucracies, as well as the jurisdictional claims of popes and emperors. One consequence of the pragmatic expression of such inner-worldly activity was the process by which law became self-aware, became disembedded from local custom, and the corpus of law began to grow in response to needs.2 The foundation of the law school in Bologna marks the rise of legal science in which important legal concepts such as the meaning of ius, or right, could become topical. In Lombardy, lawyers practiced Lombard law which of course had grown organically with political society, but by 1100 their preference for Roman law, meaning the body of Justinian’s legislation, led to an innovation whereby the text of Roman law became glossed with interpretations. In the next century and a half, there developed a dynamic body of law built upon a foundation of Roman law, and in time the glosses themselves became more important for the practice of law than the foundation text.3 In the environment of a greater emphasis on inner-worldly activity, there emerged an atmosphere of legalism that influenced the clerical sphere too. A teacher of canon law in Bologna, a monk named Gratian, began to systematize the various collections of canon law that had been written before his time, none of which was recognized as a standard text. He applied a method in his treatment of the materials to try to draw out the content of the law in a coherent manner, producing a treatise that was comprehensive and as free of contradiction as possible and mirroring, according to Voegelin, the glossatorial treatment of Roman law. “The Decretum Gratianum, as it was called, achieved, as soon as it appeared, a quasi-official status as the source of canon law and as the standard text for its teaching.”4 It is in the 1. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 160. 2. See Berman, Law and Revolution, especially his introduction. 3. The authority of Roman law was held in higher esteem than Lombard or other codes of law due to the myth of sacredness attached to it. Roman law was widely regarded as the absolute law of mankind in ways that mirror Muslim attitudes toward Shari‘a. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, chapter 10, “The Law,” for a discussion on the “canonization” of Roman law. 4. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 173.

The Emergence of the Individual 53 glosses rather than the foundational texts and the later commentaries that we begin to discern the assertion of the existential as a zone of subjectivity constituted by right; or as a commentator on Ockham’s contribution to the development of rights language calls it, a “zone of human autonomy” where, because nothing is forbidden, all is licit and the practice of liberty is unrestrained.5 Brian Tierney points out that in the twelfth century, society was “saturated” with a clamor for rights. He mentions the rights of popes asserted against the rights of emperors and vice versa, the rights of bishops and barons asserted in defense against the king, the rights of cathedral canons vis à vis the local bishops, the rights of peasants founding new villages in the wilderness claimed in return for the provision of food and labor to their lords. “Medieval people first struggled for survival, then they struggled for rights.”6 As early as the canonistic jurisprudence of the late twelfth century there is a semantic shift occurring in the meaning of ius. Brian Tierney writes that what occurs in the glosses of this time is “a new understanding of the old term ius naturale as meaning a kind of subjective power or ability inhering in individuals.”7 In his study, he works backward from Ockham to demonstrate how Ockham, who is normally credited with the inception of subjective rights, was able to build upon at least a century of jurisprudence that had already shifted toward the subjective. Tierney cites the Franciscan Bonaventure who transplanted religious concepts to legal theory with ius used in a subjective sense.8 He shows how earlier, non-Franciscan, secular theologians such as Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines were already working with a notion of subjective rights well before Ockham. In one interesting example, Tierney outlines how the shift toward subjectivity begins to emerge in the thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: “On account of this, that each one is bound by the law of nature to sustain his life, which cannot be done without ex5. George De Lagarde’s term for the subjective natural rights conceptions in the work of William of Ockham; quoted in Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 44–45. On William of Ockham, see chapter eight below. 6. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 54–55. 7. Ibid., 8. 8. In particular, Tierney refers to Bonaventure’s development of four forms of common ownership associated with four categories of rights; see ibid., 36.

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terior goods, therefore also by the law of nature (iure naturae) each has dominion and a certain right (ius) in the common exterior goods of this world which right also cannot be renounced.”9 Here, Tierney mentions, “the meaning of the word ius shifted from objective natural law to subjective natural right in the course of a single sentence.”10 He points to a notion of subjective rights emerging from the glosses on Gratian’s Decretum. He writes that the subjective understanding of ius that [Jean] Gerson [chancellor of the university of Paris, 1363–1429] took as the starting point of his rights theory, “a faculty or power in accordance with right reason,” associated with free choice and synderesis, was no novelty of late medieval theology; it had already found ample expression in the glosses on the Decretum two centuries earlier.11

He writes that there were contradictions in the Decretum, in spite of Gratian’s concern, that the glossators sought to resolve and which Gratian apparently was not aware of. Tierney mentions the controversy over the different meanings of ius naturale, some of which had been listed and discussed by various commentators before Huguccio assigned explanations to each one in his Summa on the Decretum (c. 1190). In fact, Huguccio wrote in his Summa on the Decretum: “Note that not all the examples of ius naturale given here refer to the same meaning of ius naturale; therefore a prudent reader will carefully discern which example refers to which meaning. But lest the mind of some idiot be confused we shall carefully assign each one.”12 Tierney notes that while Gratian used ius to refer to systems of objective law like military law, customary law, civil law, and so on, the canonist commentators already used ius to refer to natural, subjective right. In discussing modern rights language, a right demarcates a field in which the agent is free to act as he chooses, “to assert a claim or not to assert it. The canonists were making the same point—for them ius naturale could mean ‘to reclaim one’s own or not to reclaim it.’”13 In particular, Tierney shows how, in the 1180s, English glossators were already working with a notion of subjective right that was essentially the same as De Lagarde’s “zone of human autonomy.” He quotes from the authors of two glosses, both of whom wrote, 9. Ibid., 38. 11. Ibid., 64 13. Ibid., 68.

10. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 60–61.

The Emergence of the Individual 55 “Ius naturale . . . licit and approved, neither commanded nor forbidden by the Lord or by any statute.”14 For the twelfth-century glossators, ius carried a meaning that went beyond merely legal claims. It was an assertion of a sphere of power inhering in the individual person that could be exercised or not and according to an authority derived from within the person alone. Between Gratian’s time and the second half of the twelfth century, an important semantic shift seems to have occurred that recognized that ius did not merely have objectivity, but was already embedded in the existence of man. It is this embeddedness that Tierney calls subjectivity. For example, he writes: “Thus, where Gratian discussed customary law as a form of ius, the Ordinary Gloss commented that a custom was not established by repeated usage unless there was actually an intention to establish it, and then added, casually introducing the subjective meaning of ius, that this was true even when a person acted by virtue of his right (iure suo).”15 The modern duality of objectivity/subjectivity is maintained in his analysis, and it need not detain us here except to say that the glossators and commentators were not metaphysically hampered by the epistemological limitations that the moderns imposed upon themselves. In fact, they found that it was the very existence of concrete persons that was already furnished with a quality that, in the intellectual and political context of rights claims, could assume a legal status. The existence of man was constituted by an authority whose validity could not be ignored and, in the jousting for legal entitlements, this authority was considered important enough to be asserted. By about 1300, the enumeration of natural rights reflected their existential roots: the rights to property, rights to consent to government, rights of self-defense, rights of infidels, marriage rights, procedural rights. Tierney notes that “[f]rom the thirteenth century onward, Roman and canon lawyers argued that the basic rules of legal procedure guaranteeing a fair trial were based on the natural right of self-defense, not merely on human enactments.”16 The semantic shift that had occurred in the language through Berman’s axis-time was more properly an existential shift that was moving the entire civilizational frame of the medieval West away from the 14. Ibid., 67. 16. Ibid., 70.

15. Ibid., 61.

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Gelasian world of the Two Swords toward an amorphous and restless future, whose political and religious authorities would have to contend with the assertiveness of existence itself.

The Existential Authority of Saint Francis (c. 1182–1226) Saint Francis was the great symbolic figure of thirteenth-century spiritualism. His life embodied the new forces quickening in late medieval society, most notably in the accent on piety as an expression of individual Christian dignity in its immediacy under God. What Francis symbolizes in a discussion of civil theology is the assertiveness of the existential authority exercised by a Christian individual as the epitome of what was genuinely new about the post-Gelasian world. There had been an outburst of piety that had built up significantly as a movement in society by the early thirteenth century. This piety had assumed many forms, some of which took on heretical, criminal, and hedonistic aspects, while others remained within the orbit of Christian mysticism. Saint Francis became the exemplar of the Christian mystic and of the new existential forces in general. Like a beacon, he attracted to his way of life countless individuals and groups who were moved by the piety of the times. Arguably, his iconic status was gained in the recognition of a powerfully assertive piety, which may sound almost oxymoronic, but if the life of Francis could exemplify fellowship, humility, and poverty, it did so with a fierce, unbending will. He was a man of no social rank who moved outside the feudal bonds of his day; he was a religious outside the church’s institutional hierarchy who nonetheless remained orthodox and obedient to the papal magisterium; he blended devout submissiveness with the force of an unbreakable spirit. A life lived in such a manner was sure to draw attention, and indeed he caught the spirit of the time so comprehensively that his open letters, addressed to all Christians, carried an authority thought by many to be equivalent to a pope or emperor. Saint Francis effectively established the legitimacy of existential authority as the third center of authority characteristic of an embryonic Western civilization.

The Emergence of the Individual 57 The Dignity of Christian Humility The idea of life in conformance with the humanity of Christ captures the contemporary piety of Francis’s time. The will to confound the world and the elements of the world that are found in man himself is a primary theme in Salutation of the Virtues.17 Francis advises simplicity, humility, and poverty as the internal and external forms of virtuous attack on the vices of the world that can stem from, inter alia, property and inheritance, political power, and an intellectual civilization. With an almost cold-blooded defiance of the vices, Francis establishes the concreteness of a personal witness to Christ’s humanity and suffering as the foundation of a personal authority and the power to act. His defiance is expressed as a witness of humility and suffering that naturally gravitates to the portion of the world that is most powerless and most apt to suffer: the sick, the dying, the poor, the broken-hearted, as well as the silent suffering of the natural world.18 The Christianity of Francis was aimed at the world while never losing sight of the Kingdom of Heaven. By way of example, The Canticle of Brother Sun captures the magnificent range of spirituality in his soul as it extends across the “lowest stratum of creation. . . . He took the humble by the hand and led them to their dignity, not in an otherworldly realm of God, but in a realm of God that is of this world. And he gave nature its Christian soul and with it the dignity that made it the object of observation.”19 The greatness of Francis and his saintliness lay in the emphasis he put on the humility of creatureliness and the glorification of God that sheer existence manifests. What Francis brought into focus for Christianity was a different perspective on the majesty of creation: the community of being—God, man, and the natural world—is joyfully proclaimed in the smallness and the meekness of the most fragile of beings:

17. Francis of Assisi, “The Salutation of the Virtues,” in Armstrong and Brady, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, 151ff. 18. Emmanuel Levinas writes about the intangible quality of authority carried in a human face: “The relation to the face is immediately ethical. The face is that which cannot be killed; or at least, that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’” See Levinas, Etica e infinito, 101. 19. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 141.

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The Emergence of the Individual 1. Most High, all-powerful, good Lord, Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessing. . . . 3. Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, Who is the day and through whom You give us light. . . . 5. Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars. . . . 9. Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs. . . . 12. Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death.20

The spirituality of Francis is evident not in the vastness of the created order, but in the intimacy of his belonging within the goodness of creation that bears the thumbprint of God. The addressing of natural phenomena and elements as brother or sister suggests a familial bond that is a bond of existence and it is this emphasis on the dignity of being that animates Francis and catches the spirit of the time. Theoretically, the life of Francis ranged across the horizon of created being while simultaneously reaching into the heart of the humandivine mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, death, and Resurrection. Francis elevates the existential authority of the individual Christian to act in the world for the sake of the suffering, but it is the suffering Christ who commissions the individual to do so. The resolve of Franciscan humility to confound worldly wisdom represents the inextinguishable luminosity of existence which Christian revelation differentiates. From a practical perspective, the humility of Saint Francis was crucial in that he was unwavering in his submission to the spiritual authority of the church. In this way, existential piety never spilled over into social revolution by succumbing to a superbia of existence at a time when a spirit of revolt was so prevalent. In the decay of the Gelasian meaning of Western society, revolt was upon the lips of many from the underclasses of countryside and town to the rising force of the intellectuals. Dissatisfaction at the feudal infrastructure of society, long after the invasion period had passed, was acute and the church was not spared this frustration. The Franciscan charism could channel these frustrations by in20. Saint Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” in Armstrong and Brady, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, 38–39.

The Emergence of the Individual 59 corporating them into an ecclesial movement. However, the term ecclesia itself had been undergoing a change in meaning for some time. The original meaning of church was that of a community of Christians that included within it the hierarchical structures of temporal and spiritual powers, but by the end of the twelfth century the dissociation of communities, sacerdotal from lay, had begun with the meaning of church becoming associated with that of the sacerdotal in distinction from the lay.21 The incorporation of the Franciscan Tertiary Order can be viewed in this regard as a countercultural movement that partially bridged the gulf in meaning that was emerging between the sacerdotal and the lay in the corpus mysticum by establishing the spiritual legitimacy of the layman’s existential authority. The civilizational danger of a libidinous assertion of existential authority within Christendom was ameliorated by the Franciscan solution of harnessing the centrifugal tendencies of the layman’s piety with a sentiment of submissiveness to the established sacerdotal structure of the church. The Heraclitean warning about those who retreat into a “private wisdom” that departs from the common substance of truth, or homonoia,22 had become all the more apt as gnosticism claimed the allegiance of many and had become a new and potent factor in late medieval civil theology.

Existential Authority as a Third Civilizational Authority The conformance of Francis to the suffering Christ was the supreme symbol of piety for the times, but it rode upon, and exemplified, the disturbance of the civilizational equilibrium that marked the Gelasianmedieval arrangement. While the piety of the layman could be established indeed, the eschatological determination of Francis to confound the evil of the vices raised the significance of the individual in the very struggle against evil in and beyond the world. In the Salutation of the Virtues, that struggle becomes a noble act born of virtue:

21. See Saint Francis, “Testament,” in Armstrong and Brady, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, 153–56. 22. Fragment B2. See Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 24.

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The Emergence of the Individual Holy Wisdom destroys  Satan and all his subtlety. Pure holy Simplicity destroys   all the wisdom of this world   and all the wisdom of the body. Holy Poverty destroys the desire of riches   and avarice   and the cares of this world. . . . Holy Charity destroys   every temptation of the devil and of the flesh   and every carnal fear. Holy Obedience destroys   every wish of the body of the flesh   and binds its mortified body    to obedience of the Spirit    and to obedience to one’s brother.23

The participation of the individual in the virtuous struggle against evil grounds the field of battle to the body and soul of man, even while it may be still be fought in celestial spheres beyond the world. This may articulate an old truth of Christianity and the role of the Christian in building up the Kingdom of God, but it receives a renewed emphasis in an age of unprecedented activity by individuals. The charge of Manichaeism against Francis is tentatively brought by Voegelin. He writes: It is impossible to understand the Franciscan attitude if the ethical categories of virtues and vices are supposed to refer to the character of the individual person alone. In the context of the Praise [The Salutation of the Virtues], virtues and vices are forces emanating from the supreme powers of good and evil, from God and Satan, and taking possession of men. The struggle of virtues against vices becomes a collective undertaking; the virtues of the one group have the function of “confounding” the vices of the other. There is a distinct touch of Manichean immanentism in this conception of the struggle between good and evil, though it does not reach the rigidity of a formula.24

However, this charge of gnosticism is rejected as it appears that Voegelin has misread the point of the poem. On a philosophical level, good and evil transcend man indeed and yet become an all-too-human strug23. Francis of Assisi, “The Salutation of the Virtues,” in Armstrong and Brady, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, 152. 24. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 136.

The Emergence of the Individual 61 gle, played out in virtue and vice. The participation of human existence in the whole of being in its range from transcendence to the temporalmundane meant that, for Francis, every person was existentially obliged to put his or her shoulder to the plough and struggle daily against the vice that would destroy goodness. Rather than the unworldliness of a Hesiodian battle between titanic forces of order and disorder, Francis tends toward highlighting the struggle in the ordinariness of life. In the end, one is hard-pressed to find in the Salutation a covert gnostic rather than a prayer in the manner of the Book of Wisdom. Indeed, he humanizes the conflict after the image of the suffering Christ.25 It is here that Francis again touches on and validates the new direction of civil theology: conformance to the humanity of the suffering Christ is potentially at odds with the image of Christ the victorious messiah-king who is emblematic of the sacrum imperium. The Christ of Saint Francis is no longer the Christ of Gelasian-medieval Christendom. On a political level, there is an obvious disparity between the priestly-royal head of Heaven and Earth and the suffering servant; it is a disparity that is felt in the shift in civil theology to convey the luminosity of the individual and of existential authority in general. The priestly-royal function of Christ is not restricted to the symbolism of imperial and papal offices, but now has a dominium in the individual. By the time of Francis, the Gelasian structure of imperial existence had become an anachronism in that the evocation of a sacrum imperium had declined to insignificance in a world filled with new existential forces. In his preference for the Christ of the poor, Francis embodies a new phase of Western society even while the imperial phase lingered in the background. Francis opened up a way of life for many by transforming the image of Christ and, in effect, conforming that image to his own exaltation of the humble, poor, suffering, and creaturely. In this way, the philosophical problem of differentiating authority found expression in Francis. In the Gelasian world that was already beginning to fade into the past by the late twelfth century, existential authority had had no representative voice. To be that representative was the role that Francis played and 25. See Walsh’s “Editor’s Introduction,” to Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 19ff, for a discussion of what Voegelin did not recognize in the transmission of order from the medieval to the modern world.

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which, in a Christian environment, took upon itself Christian symbols, the most fitting of which was that of the suffering humanity of Christ. That evocation was a potent spiritual force that raised the dignity of individual existence to that of Christ’s redemptive suffering. If Francis was attractive in the denouement of the sacrum imperium civil theology, it was because the life he led and the life about which he preached resonated with the experienced dignity of personal existence. If the premium placed on the individual is indicative of modern civilization in the West, then it found one of its first representatives in Saint Francis. The assertion of a third center of authority side by side with the two great orders of spiritual and temporal authority was the great achievement in the philosophical search for order at the time. The unswerving conformance of Francis to the humanity of Christ established the existential authority of the individual as a legitimate force in Western society, while simultaneously emphasizing existence as a spiritual reality. His was a concrete witness to the dignity of existence and to the equilibrium that is possible among the three forms of civilizational authority. The life of Saint Francis, and his reception of the stigmata, made such an impact on the medieval mind that the “poverello,” as he was affectionately known, was canonized two years after his death by Pope Gregory IX. What was left in his wake was the need for a theoretical consideration of the significance of that existential authority that he seemed to embody so perfectly.

The Individual in the Political Work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) The political and legal thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas provides a medieval glimpse of a postmedieval future. In this glimpse alone, he established certain minimum standards to which any politics or law subsequently became answerable. The solidity of his philosophic-spiritual foundation and its rational coherence allowed him to propose a vision of what both politics and law could be, but which could not be realized practically for centuries. In the political and legal work of Aquinas, and that of a host of contemporary glossators and commentators preceding him, we see a much greater concern for the rational and spiritual na-

The Emergence of the Individual 63 ture of persons than had appeared before in the medieval period. Natural reason by now had the quality of enlightenment by faith, and faith was coupled with the authority of reason—thus Anselm’s credo ut intelligam and Aquinas’s cognitio fidei. Existential authority, in the context of Aquinas’s work and the Scholasticism of his predecessors, emerges from a philosophic-spiritual tension in the person toward the transcendentdivine ground of existence. Moreover, such authority is asserted in the temporal-mundane sphere of existence in the world. It is with this understanding of a newly assertive third authority in the midst of established political and spiritual authorities that we turn to what is truly remarkable in the thought of Aquinas. Although this section provides merely a snapshot of an extraordinary mind dwelling on the ordinary fields of politics and law, it is hoped that what emerges is more than a survey. Aquinas’s great contribution was his recognition of the inexhaustible importance of guarding the existence of the individual—albeit the Christian individual only. Once he had articulated a new and higher existential standard, there was no authentic turning back. Aquinas had effectively and definitively raised the bar in the political and legal treatment of persons.

The Place of Politics Aristotle suggested that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science. However, as man is not the highest being, a science of human action is not the highest science: “For it would be absurd for someone to think that political science or prudence is the most excellent science; for the best thing in the universe is not a human being [and the most excellent science must be of the best things].”26 In attempting to describe the relation between political truth and the truth of being, or more generally the relation of politics to being, he had in mind that man ranks as only one participant in a larger community of being that includes the divine and the cosmos. Nonetheless, if man has his proper place in the hierarchy of being, then the practical science of politics has its proper place too. Aquinas picks up the same theme when he writes that 26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1141a20–22.

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[I]t is not fitting that we think that some politics or prudence be the highest science, that is, the highest among the sciences. This could not be the case unless man were the best of those things that are in the world. Of the sciences, one is better and more honourable than another from the fact that it is a science about better and more noble things. . . . It is however false that man is the best of those things that are in the world: therefore neither politics nor prudence, which are about human things, are the best of the sciences.27

The question about what constitutes the highest thing, or the highest subject matter, is not one that can be resolved by politics. When politics assumes an extrapolitical authority, such as that of a regulator of religion or even a substitute for metaphysics, pragmatic political decisions are invested with a weight that flattens existential concern with truth and being; and often what follows is a disregard for the individual and concrete subjects of existential concerns. Schall comments that in denying the existence or relevance of transcendental reality, one is tempted to “elevate politics, already a high science in its own practical realm, into simply the highest science.” The sciences that emerge from the experience and theoria of existence become subordinate to the practical science of politics, “so that there is no criterion of reality able to resist the judgment of the politician. What is becomes a political decision.”28 To understand what lies within the sphere of politics, one must be already cognizant of the range to which political existence and political authority extend within the totality of human being. An adequate philosophical anthropology yields an understanding of the full amplitude of human existence, a range that stretches from participation in transcendental reality to the temporal-mundane. An adequate philosophical anthropology therefore allows us to differentiate the political from what is not political because it is also concerned with what exceeds the political. Aquinas can write about the importance of political things because he also deals with those things that are not political. Even if he is not explicitly writing an anthropology, his philosophical foundations are solid enough to articulate the metaphysics of human existence. As Schall notes, Christian revelation “acknowledged that there were spheres of 27. Thomas Aquinas, In Decem Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum Expositio, L. VI, 1. vi, no. 1186, 325–26; quoted by Schall, “The Uniqueness of the Political Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” Perspectives on Political Science 26, no. 2 (1997): 88. 28. Schall, “The Uniqueness of the Political Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” 88.

The Emergence of the Individual 65 reality and human activity that were not political, without the need to deny that what was political was proper and had its own place.”29 For the Christian thinker, such as Aquinas, the sphere of transcendence had opened in Christian revelation. Within this revelation the problems of perfection and final end, with which Aristotle had to wrestle in a nonrevelatory environment, had differentiated and found their proper place in a sphere beyond the political. The corollary was that the properly temporal, such as the political, was divested of its ancient burden of achieving final perfection.

Aquinas’s Concern for Just Order The contemporary political background to Aquinas’s thought included the migrations and conquests of the Normans in England and Sicily. Also the work of Western political expansion included the invasion of the eastern Mediterranean by the crusaders, and of the Teutonic orders into the Slavic and Baltic regions of eastern and northern Europe in the time before the Turkish advance. It was against the background of this dizzying array of new political foundations that Aquinas’s work appeared. Voegelin notes that his treatise De regimine principum was dedicated to the king of Cyprus, which was significant in that it demonstrated the badly corroding condition of the sacrum imperium as a comprehensive Western civil theology by the thirteenth century. “That the treatise was not dedicated to the emperor or a Western king shows . . . how far away the new theory was from either the imperial problems of the Investiture Struggle or the political problems of the nation state.”30 The thirteenth century arguably represents an intermediate stage of Western development from medieval to modern which involved the increasing assertiveness of individual existential authority and the array of new existential problems that affected the traditional institutional political and spiritual authorities. The new assertiveness was moving outside the meaning of the sacrum imperium, and practically speaking the more emphatic the existential assertiveness grew in Western society, the less relevant the traditional Gelasian civil theology of Christendom 29. Schall, Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy, 106. 30. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 216.

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became. The bifurcation of the temporal from the transcendent—that is, of reason from faith and of politics from the attempt to establish a Christian mundus—were all characteristic of the shifts in civil theology. Aquinas’s work can be understood as an attempt to harness and harmonize the bifurcation through his comprehensive vision of who man is, what politics is for, and the divine telos that draws both. Aquinas shares concerns for the just governance of Christian people which in many ways are parallel to the concerns of the American Founding Fathers around the issue of tyranny. If the governance of a Christian people could include the participation of all, certain limitations or checks on the ruling power would be necessary to prevent the possibility of tyranny. Aquinas highlights the importance of institutions for the purpose of regulating just governance. Although the section on limited monarchy in De regimine principum was left unfinished, it occurs within a discussion of how to prevent tyranny. A constitutional government must be protected from tyranny, and the proper method for dealing with a threat of tyranny is its prevention through a limitation of royal power. The problem of tyranny is raised twice in the Summa theologiae: The first time it appears in a brief enumeration of the Aristotelian forms of government (I-II.95.4), concluding with the statement that the regimen conmixtum is the best form of government. . . . The second occasion arises in the discussion of Israelite institutions (I-II.105.1). This article is of particular interest because it shows the almost incredible insouciance of Thomas when it comes to strict systematic construction. Monarchy is considered, as in De regimine principum, the best form of government because it is the analogue of divine governance of the world. On the other hand, it is not the best form of government because empirically men are weak and the danger of tyranny necessitates preventive institutions.31

For Aquinas, the issue of the best kind of government remained secondary to the primary issue of outlining a political order in which the bond of affection between Christians freely arises and unites communities in their universal orientation to eternal beatitude. In this way community, as a spontaneous human phenomenon, has an origin and an 31. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 221–22. See also Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages, for a discussion of medieval mixed constitutional theory as the best form of government.

The Emergence of the Individual 67 end that participates in both temporal and transcendental spheres simultaneously. The task of political authority, then, is mostly a negative one in that it must exist in order to prevent the destruction of the social order. However, political authority for Aquinas is also positive in that it serves to foster the life of virtue among the people. The social order is itself a good in that it reflects the existence of Christian individuals in community as simultaneously temporally and transcendentally participating creatures. The preference for a form of government or institution depends upon how well it functions to prevent tyranny and foster virtue. For example, while Aquinas thinks that monarchy is the best form of government, he leaves a question mark hanging over what form of monarchy is preferable, due to the possibility of abuse by weak men. Monarchy could also become tyrannous and therefore the worst form of government. A similar question mark hangs over the form of general suffrage as tyranny could come from the bottom up, in which case it should be jettisoned. In the Summa, Aquinas notes the characteristics of tyranny from the bottom, such as vote buying or the election of men with poor characters. In the De regimine principum, he mentions the plundering of the rich.32 Aquinas is clearly noncommittal about the best form of government, even if the commixed government with the participation of all seems to deserve his favor, as the possibility of tyranny remains while men are weak. The constant in his political thought is the need for an adequate order in which the life of virtue is possible. In this way, Aquinas can even allow for the temporary tolerance of a tyrant if his removal involves the worsening of public order in revolutionary fervor. “If, however, a tyranny is not excessive, it is more advantageous to tolerate a degree of tyranny for the time being than to take action against the tyrant and so incur many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself.”33 The premium Aquinas places on existential order, as a political and spiritual force, is indicative of the new direction inherent in the civil theology of his day. 32. See Voegelin’s discussion of “tyranny from the bottom” in STI, II, 97, 1 and De regimine principum I, 1, in History of Political Ideas 2, 222ff. 33. Aquinas, De regimine principum, bk. 1, ch. 7, 3. In James M. Blythe, On the Government of Rulers, 74.

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The Emergence of the Individual Political Projection of Human Dignity

Aquinas’s focus on the Christianity of the individual resulted in a prescient vision of what politics could include. In sum, a commixed polity, including general suffrage, would be the only appropriate method of governing a population of mature Christians (leaving aside the question of whether there could ever exist a population of Christians who were mature). If everyone is to be subject to a government, everyone should have a share in that government. Voegelin comments that the polity “should have for its magistrates the king, the heads of the nobility, and representatives of the people elected by general suffrage. It is a constitutional project that in principle would be realized by the English constitution in the second half of the nineteenth century.”34 Assuming the possibility of spiritual maturity among the population, some form of constitutional government should be representative of the broad sweep of Christian man within the polity and should take its “constitutionality” from the very existence of the community of Christian individuals. Voegelin writes that “if the ideas of constitutional government and general suffrage were to be applied to a community . . . not only the Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would be integrated into the political system but also the proletariat.”35 Aquinas never treated the concrete case or considered the practical implications of his theory, other than to draw out the consequences of the existence of a free Christian people and what their free existence means. “We do not know, however, what the policy of Thomas would have been in the concrete situation of even an Italian town; and how his principles would have operated in complex territorial units like England . . . or in France . . . is beyond imagination.”36 However, this is the point: Thomas was not concerned with developing a policy based on his political principles. His contribution was a vision of what political authority in a Christian environment should involve; and the anthropology at work in his vision is similar to the anthropology that animated the phrase made famous by Lincoln’s “gov34. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 222. 35. Ibid., 221. 36. Ibid.

The Emergence of the Individual 69 ernment of the people, by the people, for the people.”37 The anthropology that informs the vision of political reality of both Aquinas and later classical-liberal thinkers emerges from the heightened experience of existence that Christian revelation has differentiated: that is, the opening of transcendental reality, the de-divinization of the political, and the possibility of human participation in both. Aquinas was no “policy wonk,” nor was he trying to revolutionize political reality. He was projecting the consequences of a politically organized community whose existence drew its meaning from Christianity. The existence of the free Christian individual straddles the spheres of both the temporal and the transcendental, and it is in this sense that, while institutional political authority remains concerned with the mundus, it is itself infused with an existential force that is at the core of individual existence. The existential authority of the individual person unites the two spheres of being. As Schall puts it, political philosophy seeks wisdom that is concerned to know where human actions fit into the whole scope of reality.38 Aquinas’s vision of the Christian man in political society is a projection of a philosophic-Christian anthropology. The Christianity of man’s existence requires that the political authority that bears on social existence or his political orbit carry certain minimum standards, values, expectations, etc. This is suggestive of a civilizational consensus in the late medieval world and embryonic West about what man is and formed the direction of a new, post-Gelasian civil theology. This consensus is embodied in the personal existence of individuals and points beyond itself to the transcendent ground and telos of that anthropology. Aquinas’s political thought therefore implicitly suggests that it is the existential authority of Christian persons that grounds the legitimacy of political authority, and does so in a depth that transcends the merely immanent conditions of temporal-mundane reality.

37. Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863. The American experiment with democratic self-rule depends upon the stock of common wisdom among the citizenry in the same manner as Aquinas’s vision depends upon the spiritual maturity of the people. 38. “Thus political philosophy completes philosophy itself. . . . It concerns what is proper to man in this world”; Schall, Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy, 112.

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The Emergence of the Individual The Existential Embeddedness of Law

Let us turn our attention now to Aquinas’s legal thought. As opposed to his interspersed and fragmented political writings, he presents a coherent legal theory. An appropriate place to begin is with his definition of what law is: “Law is nought else than an ordinance of reason for the common good made by the authority who has care of the community and promulgated.”39 This definition contains four principles: law as ratio, the essence or purpose of civil society’s enactments, the authority underlying the enactment, and those to whom the law is addressed. The implication is that political disorder will arise from a violation of one or other of those principles. In any reading of Aquinas, it is important to locate where discussion of a subject occurs within the full amplitude of the work. In contrast to his thought on the politics of governance, Aquinas’s thought on law has a firm place in his Summa that allows us to see its boundaries, or where the extension of the authority of law ultimately must give way to something extralegal. Its occurrence is located in the Prima secundae that deals with the actions of man, that is, after the treatment of God and creation and before the treatment of redemption. In the Prima secundae, man’s final end in beatitude is considered first,40 followed by the means by which he can arrive at his end. The means are actions that are subdivided into specifically human, voluntary actions41 and the passions that man shares with the animals.42 Aquinas’s relentless sorting and clarification establish a metaphysical anchoring of human existence in general, involving the intrinsic, ontological relatedness of man to the transcendent-divine God and the spatiotemporal, natural world. Aquinas continues his exploration of human reality by considering the principles of human action, subdividing these into the internal and the external. The internal are the powers and habits that move men to action, while the external principle is God who moves men to the ultimate good of beatitude.43 It is here that a discussion of law is located: 39. Saint Thomas: Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST), I, II, 90, 4c; 40. STI, II, 1–5. 41. STI, II, 6–21. 42. STI, II, 22–48. 43. STI, II, 48–89.

The Emergence of the Individual 71 God moves man through instruction by law or through grace.44 In his own commentary on Aquinas, Voegelin notes: “Hence the theory of law is the theory of the instruction given by God to man in order to motivate his acts toward the ultimate goal of beatitude. . . . The world, including man, is the creation of God; it bears the impress of the divine intellect; the meaning of created existence is the movement back toward God.”45 It follows, then, that law, while belonging to the life of man in community, derives its being from the transcendent sphere of the divine. Law reaches across the categories of natural reason, yet it has roots that draw their justice from the supernatural while always tending back toward the supernatural. Law is a phenomenon that is more than human as it reaches beyond itself into the transcendent-divine. Even so, Aquinas treats it as a human phenomenon and there arises an inherent tension between law’s divine provenance and man’s creative abilities to make law in partnership with God. Law, in this sense, becomes a metaphor for the human condition: man and law participate rationally in transcendental reality simultaneously with the temporal. Law in Aquinas—that is, the provenance and extension of law—is a transnatural phenomenon that mirrors the existential authority of the human person. Aquinas states that “the ruling idea of things which exists in God as the effective sovereign of them all has the nature of law.”46 In other words, law is something in the structure of being that issues from God and returns to God. In its issuance there are four kinds of law that Aquinas discerns which illustrate its divine provenance and rational quality. The lex aeterna is the first topic of law. “Hence the eternal law is nothing else than the plan of the divine wisdom considered as directing all the acts and motions [of creatures].”47 It is the ratio of creation itself in the intellect of God. It is uncreated and, from a human perspective, is the rule moving man in his orientation toward his final end. Man’s specific createdness takes its rational nature from the divine lex aeterna. Copleston writes, For although man cannot read off, as it were, the eternal law in God’s mind, he can discern the fundamental tendencies and needs of his nature, and by reflecting on them he can come to a knowledge of the natural moral law. . . . And 44. STI, II, 90–108; STI, II, 109–14. 45. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 223. 46. STI, II, 91, I

47. STI, II, 93, 1

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since this law is a participation in or reflection of the eternal law in so far as the latter concerns human beings and their free acts, man is not left in ignorance of the eternal law which is the ultimate rule of all conduct. “The natural law is nothing else but a participation of the eternal law in a rational creature.”48

Therefore, the dictate of reason living in man is called the lex naturalis. The lex naturalis, born of the lex aeterna, is refracted through human imperfection. Aquinas is building an ontology for the natural law understood as an authoritative force embedded in human existence, a law that may be experienced only in its general principles but is sufficient to orient concrete persons in justice and friendship. For example, “the primary precept of the law is that good should be done and pursued and evil avoided; and on this are founded all the other precepts of the law of nature.”49 The lex humana is the cocreation of law by man himself for the pragmatic circumstances of existence. However, it bears only on the temporality of existence. As human life is not exhausted by temporality, lex humana cannot be exhaustive. The goal of existence, eternal beatitude, draws man from transcendental reality and therefore is revealed by the lex divina in the Old and New Testaments. For Aquinas, any theory of law must be open to each of these four types of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine. The overall context of Aquinas’s discussion of law is that of partnership between man and God. Law in this sense becomes a metaphor for the being and essence of human existence and a theory of law explicates something important about human relations in the world and with transcendental reality. Aquinas’s theory of law, if “not just any opining about human existence,” must be erected upon a well-grounded anthropological conception of man.50 Christian persons are legitimately subject to law in this most profound sense. If the lex aeterna symbolizes the divine thumbprint upon being in general, lex naturalis symbolizes man’s orientation to the eternal divine ground of being. Man is not just subject to law, but is constituted by law. The free Christian person is illuminated by existence itself, which is not for Aquinas a phenomenon of 48. Copleston, Aquinas, 221; quote from STI, II, 91, 2. 49. Ibid., 222; quote from STI, II, 94, 2. 50. See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 138–39 for comments on opinion versus theoria.

The Emergence of the Individual 73 “thrownness” or material animation within a spiritually or morally neutral space. Existence emerges from the necessity of the lex aeterna. However, this has a corollary with regard to the lex humana. Man is constituted by law in virtue of his existential orientation to the divine ground, but the authority that humanly created law carries must be subject to the authority embedded in human existence. One might say that law in its positive meaning exists for man and not man for the law. Aquinas’s theory of law therefore presupposes a theory of man for whose meaningful existence positive law ought to be adequate, but is sometimes not. The adequacy of positive law as an institution in an environment of Christian people is determined by the degree to which that law symbolizes and reflects the meaningful existence of those Christian persons in community and the justice that marks the right relations among persons: The proper characteristic of justice, as compared with the other moral virtues, is to govern a man in his dealings towards others. It implies a certain balance of equality, as its very name shows, for in common speech things are said to be adjusted when they match evenly. Equality is relative to another. With justice, in addition to this, that which is correct is constituted by a relation to another, for a work of ours is said to be just when it meets another on the level, as with the payment of a fair wage for a service rendered.51

This rightness—or ius—in relations is the object of justice and can be traced in natural law: being the object of an existentially grounded law, ius is not an autonomous quality called natural right with no further reference to anything beyond the individual or corporate will, but is ultimately the illumination of the lex aeterna that is called the natural law. Voegelin proposes that Aquinas’s ontological foundation of a theory of law is probably the only tenable position for a philosophy of law. Without a transcendental grounding, he outlines these nihilistic alternatives: the validity of any positive order that can compel submission and/or the erection of intermundane elements such as instincts, desires, survival of the fittest, or the like into absolutes.52 With regard to the purpose of law, Aquinas himself notes that Isidore had already stated in his Etymologies that “laws were made that in fear thereof human audacity might be held in check, that innocence 51. STII, II, 57, 1c 52. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 226–27.

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might be safeguarded in the midst of wickedness, and that the dread of punishment might prevent the wicked from doing harm.” Agreeing with him, he adds that Some are bumptious, headlong in vice, not amenable to advice, and these have to be held back from evil by fear and force, so that they at least stop doing mischief and leave others in peace. Becoming so habituated they may come to do of their own accord what earlier they did from fear, and grow virtuous. This schooling through the pressure exerted through the fear of punishment is the discipline of human law. Consequently we see the need for men’s virtue and peace that law should be established; as Aristotle says, man, when perfected by virtue, is the best of all animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst. For he can use the weapons of reason, which other animals do not possess, to get rid of lusts and brutalities.53

Built into Aquinas’s discussion of the necessity of law is the recognition of human innocence and goodness as well as the human propensity for evil. The discussion is conducted using the language of virtue, understood as the excellence of the soul, and vice, which gives an indication of the limits to which law can extend. The problem of disorder is not one that can be resolved through the promulgation and enforcement of laws, rather, its management becomes the task of law. Again, Aquinas begins his theory with the concrete historical reality of human life; his anthropology is taking cognizance of the soul as a center of tension between contrary forces. Consequently his legal theory works as an extrapolation from the soul to the social field of community, not unlike Plato’s overall vision of society as man-writ-large (macroanthropos).54 The anthropology at the heart of Aquinas’s political and legal theory is anchored in a metaphysics that can handle the problem of good and evil at a level that transcends the temporal field of politics and law. If law is another element in man’s return to God, then it is always more than a body of rules made by legislative organs and enforced by government sanction.55 Aquinas seems to be suggesting that positive law knows that it is limited to the sociopolitical sphere of community. 53. STI, II, 95, 1c. 54. See Plato, The Republic 368d–e: Society is a man written in larger letters. Elsewhere, he writes that a corrupt society operates like a great sophist (492b) in contrast to the good polis, which is a reflection of the philosopher’s soul. 55. STI, II, 91, 3.

The Emergence of the Individual 75 While it can acknowledge that order and disorder are tensions that originate outside the sphere in which it can extend its authority, positive law is in substance the expression of uncreated eternal law. In other words, positive law has a jurisdictional remit that extends to the social field, but its content is derived from that which transcends the sociopolitical. Law in general—and not just positive law—is equal to the task of managing the concrete human reality of justice in community because, for Aquinas, the object of law—ius—is built into the structure of being which means that law has a metaphysical span from the temporal into the transcendent. Law, for Aquinas, always means more than positive law, unless he is explicitly dealing with positive law. Here the species known as positive law finds its limits that occur within the genus of law; and the genus of law takes its configuration from the uncreated and necessary being of the eternal law.

The Radical Nature of Aquinas’s Theory of Law In book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory of common property ownership, suggesting that evils arise from the wickedness in men rather than from the unequal distribution of goods. The root of evil is not property, but the desire of man. The political community will not be united through property relationships that hold everything in common, but through education in virtue.56 Aquinas picks up this line of thought when he writes: Someone makes the accusation that the evils which now happen in cities, such as deceptions men make about contracts, or judgments about false testimony, or that the poor envy the rich, these are due to the fact that all this happens because possessions are not held in common. But if anyone rightly thinks about this, none of these things happens because possessions are not held in common but because of the evil in men.57

The concept of original sin was not available to Aristotle, but both he and Aquinas put the root cause of social evils in the desires of the indi56. If a person owns nothing privately, he has no chance to set a good example of liberality (charity) regarding property. With an eye on the fundamental importance of virtue for the human psyche, Aristotle rejects utopianism of this sort that includes the communities of women and children. See his remarks in Politics 1263b15–1264a2; also 1267b1–9. 57. Aquinas, In octo libros politicorum Aristotelis expositio, II, 4; quoted in Schall, Reason, Revelation and the Foundations of Political Philosophy, 113.

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vidual, rather than on structures in the cultural and political environment, such as private property. Evil, the privation of good, affects the quality of man’s conscience and conduct in the world. Disorder will occur when the object of law, the existentially authoritative ius, is violated so justice establishes or seeks the rectification of ius in a state of affairs. Positive law, then, is concerned with political relationships that can be broken by the evil desires in individuals. Aquinas’s political theory focuses on political relationships—relationships that are subject to the forces of justice and injustice. It is here that Aquinas’s thought becomes radical for his time and visionary of a later time. He discerned two fundamental political relationships: first, that pertaining to the governance of subjects by a prince; and second, the private, civil relations among the subjects themselves. With regard to the first political relationship, the enforcement of the legal order manifests the governmental authority of the prince; but in the second set of relationships, the authority of the individual over his own rightful possessions is tantamount, forming the basis for political relationships among subjects in a community. Aquinas saw that private property means that subjects can “have commerce with one another by exerting their specific proprietary authority, expressing itself in buying, selling, donating, etc.”58 Drawing on STI, II, 105, 2, Voegelin notes that the theory may sound trite today, but for its time it was revolutionary because it swept aside the feudal structure of property rights and made the society of property owners and their business relations the center of legal theory.59 The authority exercised by the Christian property-owner over his property is one of dominium or lordship,60 and this form of authority is the basis of a radically new legal theory. The exercise of dominium rests on an anthropology that acknowledges the needs of man in the temporal world, but more than this: the exercise of proprietary ownership is fundamentally is for the life of virtue. The existence of man as a temporally located, spiritual creature means that dominium is a political good whose goodness necessarily reaches beyond the political. In Aquinas’s 58. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 229. 59. Ibid. 60. For a discussion on the difference between a lordly exercise of dominium and a royal exercise of potestas, see Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought.

The Emergence of the Individual 77 legal theory, dominium is the just exercise of authority over property by individuals whose justice arises from its being temporally and spiritually beneficial for existence. What the thought of Aquinas represents is the presence of an authority that is not new, but is newly assertive; and to a degree that it only now comes on the radar of political thought. Of course, Aquinas does not explicitly name it, but the authority exercised by each individual Christian over that which is his is acknowledged as a necessary good rather than a contingent good. Its “revolutionary” character expresses the presence and assertion of existential authority by individual Christians, and does so in the twilight of the Gelasian dualism of the two established authorities of priestly and royal swords. Furthermore, the two fundamental relationships in society—between the ruler and the people and between the people themselves— receive treatment from Aquinas that is itself nothing less than “revolutionary.” On the side of the ruler-people relation, we have seen that Aquinas had tentatively projected the theory of constitutional monarchy as an adequate form of governance among a community of free Christian people, thus aligning political power with the existential authority exercised by individual Christian persons; and on the side of law, the dominium of the property society replaces widespread feudal arrangements. Political governance and law are theoretically readjusted to a higher level of existential liberty, according to the increasingly assertive authority of individuals and groups in society. Aquinas’s contribution to political and legal thought is that he could establish the foundations of political and legal order on what transcends the political and legal. The contours of both politics and law are retraced by Aquinas, revealing themselves under his powerful focus as transnatural phenomena: their transnatural character emerged from the possibility that lies within both politics and law to point beyond themselves. As man is temporal but in being human he lives beyond his temporality, so too must politics and law participate in the transcendence of existence. In this way, Aquinas can show that it is the inalienable authority that the existence of man carries which grounds politics and law, thereby setting a limit to their jurisdiction. If the political is bound by what transcends it, the legal is completed only by love, both of which limitations are set by the authoritative character of existence.

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The Emergence of the Individual Friendship as the Final Cause of Justice

The transcending nature of man, the telos of man in the divine, the supernatural perfection of man: each of these are symbols that emphasize the notion of man as tending beyond the temporality of the mundane. In discussing man and the point at which the political and the legal reach their limits, we see how the externality of each shades off and where virtue ultimately takes over. This is the immediate jurisdiction of existential authority. Law is what Aquinas calls an external principle of action, and is to be distinguished from internal principles—whether those principles be of reasoning or of action, principles like intellect, will, passions, and habits. External principles of action refer primarily to rules or norms of action, but the root problem of disorder is the human propensity to evil, that is, an internal principle of action. Justice regulates the external relations between individuals and between the ruler and the ruled, but human reality is neither bound nor determined by externality. Aquinas can show that prudence, for example, is more important than justice. The seeking of “rightness” in the community is guided by prudence: “Now the rôle of prudence . . . is to charge our conduct with right reason.”61 It is prudence, not justice, that tells us what to do, or how to do it, after considering all the circumstances and particulars of a case. In the end though, it is friendship as a form of love that is more important than justice for Aquinas, even in the political life of the city. James V. Schall writes that [u]nlike justice—which looks to the abstract relationship between persons in terms of what is due or not due, not to the persons themselves—friendship and charity look primarily to the person who is the object of our friendship or love. . . . Aquinas’s world is filled with something always more than itself, with a kind of abundance more like a gift than like something due in justice. The problem of the world is not that it reveals a kind of niggardly justice or subsistence but that it reveals an unlimited superabundance.62

Schall’s point is that Aquinas sees the whole discussion of justice in need of something more than itself. So too with politics. Ius is the con61. STII, II, 47, 4c 62. Schall, “The Uniqueness of the Political Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” 86.

The Emergence of the Individual 79 tent of the law because it is the content of existence, but its positive legislation and coercion can only be directed at the field of external relations between people. The relation between the ruler and the ruled, between individuals and the institutions of society, should be determined by a basic constitutional law. Human reality is touched but not penetrated by political and legal relations. “Aquinas does not think that human reality can ever be fully assumed under the virtue of justice, which does not direct itself to persons but to relationships.”63 If the virtue of justice is a habitual orientation to the existentially embedded ius, then ius finds its end in amicitia. Aquinas writes of the dignity of the individual person “because subsistence in a rational nature is of high dignity, therefore every individual of the rational nature is called a ‘person.’”64 The medieval increase of emphasis laid upon personhood—for example, in the authorities of the priestly and the royal persons—symbolized more than the dignity of an office: the mysterious inexhaustibility of human existence that underlies the external relations assumed under law was caught by the word persona. It is this quality of a personal authority or dignity that institutions of the political and legal order, as well as the ecclesiastical order, must recognize, regard, and embody in order to remain existentially meaningful. Aquinas sees the content of justice as always tending toward amicitia, as an interpersonal bond which in turn leads beyond itself to charity. Justice is adequate for the regulation of political community but, like political community, justice is radiant with a content that simultaneously transcends yet grounds it. Justice, like political community, is necessarily surpassed by friendship. Amicitia alone is directed to individuals under the authority of personal existence. Friendship or love cannot be the objects of regulation, and remain unregulated. Justice has its proper place, as does politics, but it does not hold the highest place in human reality. The most that we should expect from the political is that it remains cognizant of its own limitations and open to that which at once exceeds it, yet in which it finds its own content. Justice is assumed, augmented, and completed by friendship, but not replaced. Political ties among citizens remain important, but their own 63. Ibid. 64. STI, 29, 3.

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importance and happiness are directed to making the happiness of the virtuous life possible for every person. In this way, what both the political and legal orders assume is their own transcendence: the possibility of friendship, the development of relations from the externality of political relations to the internal depth of personhood. Voegelin identifies the central importance of Aquinas for a philosophical history of Western politics and goes so far as to say that, in amicitia, Aquinas has articulated the purpose of Western Christian existence: There is no parallel in Hellenic civilization to the passage in 1 John 4: “Who does not love, does not know God; for God is love. . . . We love him because he first loved us.” The development of these experiences of Johannine Christianity (which, it is my impression, were closest to St. Thomas) into the doctrine of fides caritate formata, and the amplification of this doctrinal nucleus into a grandiose, systematic philosophy of man and society, are the medieval climax of the interpenetration of Christianity with the body of a historical civilization. Here perhaps we touch the historical raison d’être of the West, and certainly we touch the empirical standard by which the further course of Western intellectual history must be measured.65

The Epochal Importance of Aquinas’s Political and Legal Thought Aquinas’s exploration of the content of the political and legal environment and his ranking in importance of human (Christian) dignity inhering in the personhood of each individual, above the institutional structures of that environment, effectively raised the bar in any consideration of how persons ought to be treated in an environment with a civil theology founded on Christianity. By weighing the dignity of Christian persons, Aquinas considered the existential authority of individuals as primary in political and legal thought. If the political and the legal are to have genuine merit, they must recognize that they are grounded in the meaningful existence of persons; that it is persons and their communities that form political values and spontaneously generate a civil theology which it is the role of the political and legal order to embody and protect. In the growing twilight of the Gelasian weltanschauung, that still held its grip in the thirteenth century, Aquinas’s thought captured 65. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 4, 251.

The Emergence of the Individual 81 the civilizational shift that was slowly destroying the medieval cosmion. Aquinas’s greatness lies in his penetration of the political and his vision of what a politics could be was centuries ahead of his time. His work is prophetic in that his theoretical treatment provided a corrective to the absolutist tendencies of the traditional institutional authorities that would begin within the next century. In the same way, his work can already diagnose what is wrong with political forces eight hundred years later as they sloughed off into ideological attempts to establish a metaphysics. Schall writes: “The understanding of political things, in a sense, limits them to what they are and can do. To understand politics properly we need to know what politics is not—what it cannot do. What it cannot do is become a metaphysics. It cannot itself become a way of deciding on its own powers.”66 Nor is Christianity a manifesto for the establishment of a Christian politics as attempted in the Middle Ages, but involves a realization that there is no political solution to the problems of human existence. The best that politics can do is to guarantee an environment in which the problems of good and evil are managed justly. It may seem insignificant today, but the burden carried by societies in which there is no separation of the things of Caesar and things of God is the charging of political action with salvific effect. Copleston writes that “it is obvious that Aquinas could not regard the State as having been absorbed by the Church or as possessing no positive function of its own. The State existed before the Church and, as a natural institution, it co-exists with the Church, exercising its own function.”67 Without the separation of political authority from transcendental authority, there is no limit to what the political is and what it is meant to achieve. In this way, Aquinas corrects the philosophic-spiritual problem of the medieval era which involved the conviction that, in a Christian mundus, a Christian political authority is possible. Aquinas was able to restate an old truth about Christianity about which Saint Augustine was clear: that there is no need to sanctify the political. What was different about Aquinas’s restatement was its Scholastic coherence in the midst of a new civilizational climate that had begun to prioritize the individual. In the denouement of the sacrum 66. Schall, “The Uniqueness of the Political Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” 90. 67. Copleston, Aquinas, 238.

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imperium, which clearly did not exhaust the political energies of Western Christendom, he could work with an anthropology, sure of its metaphysical foundations, that demonstrated the temporal and transcendental dimensions of existence. With these he could show that existential authority may overlap the political but that such authority also overlaps with transcendental reality in the depths of man’s participatory soul. Ultimately, it is Aquinas’s conviction that faith and reason cannot be in conflict that gives his work its significance and importance. As both faith and reason have the same provenance in uncreated divine being, human being is opened toward meaning in the conjunction of faith and reason. What has become possible in the wake of Aquinas’s work is to see his powerful articulation of human existence—as rational and participatory in divine being—as setting the bar higher by which political and legal actions are measured. The enduring relevance of Aquinas’s thought is reflected in his ability to dialogue with voices in contemporary issues of political philosophy: what politics and law ought to aim at, the mediation of intangible realities like the dignity of human existence by concrete positive law, and the meaning of a political act as an expression of truth already constituting political communities.

3 Constitutiona lit y a nd Ex istence in M edieval Engla nd

The Characteristics of Constitutionalism The existence of a parliament is arguably the most obvious indicator of a constitutional government, or perhaps provides a cover of constitutionality for tyranny. Either way, parliamentarism is a technical device for government that suggests a well-integrated and functioning political society. Michael Oakeshott gives an account of the earliest and most simple forms of parliament in the cortes of the Iberian peninsula in the twelfth century before surveying the development of French and English parliaments. He writes that “although ‘parliaments’ of various sorts appeared everywhere in medieval Europe, none except the English parliament managed to establish itself as a permanent partner with the king in government.” The English form of parliamentary government, then, became atypical in the context of rising absolutism in Europe. The reason he gives for this “is perhaps that it was a single, all-purpose assembly; and that it was not an assembly of the estates of the realm.” However, Oakeshott’s statement that England was not an “assembly of 83

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the estates of the realm” is not entirely accurate. English society was indeed articulated into estates or communes within the realm and each was represented in the parliament. Oakeshott was referring to the permanent nature of the English parliament over the temporary and somewhat intermittent national “assembly” in France. The French EstatesGeneral was a “congress of ambassadors,” an assembly representing the great, still semi-independent, provinces of France whose meetings were rare and which did not become a normal instrument of government. Oakeshott writes that while “law and legislation became the business of the king and the parlements [regional courts of law throughout France] . . . politics and finance became the business of the estates [composed of nobles, ecclesiastics, and townsmen]—a separation of functions which had momentous consequences.”1 In England, the parliamentary assembly of the estates became an established partnership in government with the king and did not separate governmental functions. However, this explanation alone does not explain the atypicality of English parliamentarism and postpones the question of why English constitutional arrangements developed into a permanent form of government. Voegelin suggests that, in general, an understanding of constitutionalism is not properly attained by focusing on “aspects of constitutional technique—such as representation, elections, written constitutions, and bills of rights.” He notes: No satisfactory general definition of constitutionalism is possible for the obvious reason that the differences between the historical types of government covered by this symbol are too profound. If we define as constitutional a government that operates within the framework of a written constitution and is limited by a bill of rights, England has no constitutional government. . . . If we define constitutional government more liberally as a government that observes a rule of law and has the consent of the governed, practically every de facto government that is not too much riddled by arbitrary and corrupt practices and that governs in such a manner that the cries of suppressed minorities or majorities do not permanently testify to the absence of consent, appreciable sections of society would fall under the concept.2

1. See Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 307–17. 2. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 141–42.

Medieval England 85 The enumeration of the various signs of constitutionalism does not penetrate to the underlying substance of a civil theology as a body of truths whose living out in persons constitute social existence. The word constitution itself comes from two words: com- and statuere meaning “to set together.”3 The setting together of political society comes across as something of a technicality in need of elaboration, but it does convey the sense of a partnership. The definition of constitutionality may be problematic but a description of constitutional characteristics through the institutional means of parliament is possible and necessary. Oakeshott writes that these characteristics include the following: 1. That every man has rights and among these rights is the right to be protected by law against the infringement of rights. . . . 2. That every man has a vested and legitimate interest in the present condition of his rights, which should not be changed without his consent. . . . 3. That what was a man’s “own” may not be taken away from him or curtailed without his consent. . . . 4. That there are some persons who have a right to oppose misgovernment, not by rebellion, but by calling the attention of a ruler to his errors and by notifying him that he will not get the necessary support if he rules in neglect of the rights of his subjects. 5. Lastly, the practice of calling parliament entailed, in the end, the practice of “representation.”4

Constitutionalism then is a very apt word-symbol that embodies notions of consent, legal rights, dominium or proprietary lordship, representation, and circumscription of power that do not sit in abstraction beside each other but each implying the other in a working partnership. Constitutionalism symbolizes the authority carried by the existence of free men in a realm, in governing partnership with the head of the realm. It is the recognition of the grounding of political authority by the head in the body politic. In other words, that which constitutes the body—the members—is also what partly legitimates the ruling authority. More precisely, it is the existential authority of individual subjects (albeit articulated into communes or estates) that constitutes the members of the living body politic and provides a human soil in which to 3. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, 1980. 4. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 318–19.

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ground rulership. The attempt at achieving an equilibrium between political, ecclesial, and existential authorities is the singular mark of English constitutionalism that could later develop on the world stage into a Western liberal constitutional tradition.5 Constitutionalism, in spite of its various shades of meanings, denotes a sociopolitical cohesion. What is at stake is the institutional realization of a society’s civil theology that had by now come to stress the luminosity of the individual. In the case of England, the realization of the truths constituting society could be partly determined by the subjects themselves through parliamentary representatives in partnership with the Crown.6 The reciprocity between the English monarch’s potestas to articulate the realm into a political people through communes and the homonoia (or political friendship) in English society that provided the national substance to be articulated by the king will be explored below. The underlying assumptions of what constitutes the truth of early English society will be explored in the treatment of Magna Carta, while the thought of fifteenth century Fortescue will give a firsthand account of what the medieval English body politic is. The first part explores the notion of a body politic or commonwealth through the work of John of Salisbury. In his work, which presents an early meditation on the limitation of ruling political power and the authority of the individual, the direction of the English realm that was already unfolding is discernible.

The Policraticus of John of Salisbury (1159) The Organoc Analogy and Legitimacy In the Policraticus, the only treatise written about politics before the reception of Aristotle, John describes the articulated political community as an analogy of an organism or body, drawing on a letter by Plutarch to the emperor Trajan.7 The commonwealth is 5. See Walsh’s comments on the connection between the medieval synthesis of faith and reason and the growth of constitutionalism into modernity, in his “Editor’s Introduction,” to Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 17–24. 6. For Oakeshott’s assessment between what is involved in the distinction between the Crown and the king—or jurisdictio and gubernaculum—see Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 319–21. 7. Voegelin refers to The Instruction of Trajan as a spurious source; see History of Political Ideas 2, 121.

Medieval England 87 a sort of body which is animated by the grant of divine reward and which is driven by the command of the highest equity and is ruled by a sort of rational management. By all means, that which institutes and moulds the practice of religion in us and which transmits the worship of God . . . acquires the position of the soul in the body. . . . The position of the head . . . is occupied, however, by a ruler subject only to God and to those who act in His place on earth, in as much as in the human body the head is stimulated and ruled by the soul.8

John proceeds to discuss the analogous heart of the commonwealth, the ears and eyes, the hands and feet, and so on. The use of a bodily analogy is close to Paul’s corpus mysticum Christi with the important distinction that “the Christian mystical body is not the body of a community, but the community is the body of Christ. In the Policraticus, on the other hand, the community is seen, indeed, as a body, standing round and firm on the earth, as a unit, within this world.”9 The political community is a community organized for action in the world. John does not mention the sacrum imperium in his consideration of the commonwealth, but neither does he identify it with England or any kingdom on the fringe of the empire. The geographical boundaries of his commonwealth are not drawn, suggesting that he was not writing about any concrete realm but about a range of political possibilities which he may have traced from the perspective of the Christian dignity of individual subjects. In his theory, we have a commonwealth of the post–Investiture Controversy era, understood as a field of inner-worldly political action. The Gregorian reconfiguration of relations between regnum and sacerdotium, no matter how partial, allowed John in 1159 to assume the pragmatic separation of the spiritual from the political and vice versa. However, the separation of spiritual from political-temporal did not, by any logical necessity, intend the loss of one sphere by the other. John’s conception of commonwealth paints a picture of a worldly unit of action embodying a metaphorical soul, which in effect amounts to a body politic intrinsically open to a higher transcendental reality through the analogy with the concrete person with his participatory existence in the world yet extend8. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, 38–39. 9. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 121. See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz on the transfer of meaning from the “old idea” of the corpus mysticum to the body corporate of the realm in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 7ff.

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ing beyond it. In principle, John’s analogy mirrors Plato’s conception of society as “man-writ-large” with the qualification that John’s analogy assumes the Christian revelation of transcendence that he builds into the life of the commonwealth and the Christian differentiation of authority that frames specifically political authority. The issue of the legitimacy of royal rulership is a topic raised in John’s theory of commonwealth. Voegelin writes, “the papal attempt, in the preceding century, at creating a fringe of principalities dependent on the pope had implied the assumption that no prince would dare to hold his power directly ‘de Dieu et son épée,’ as Jean Bodin was to formulate it, but would seek a shelter of legitimacy under the spiritual authority of the sacrum imperium.”10 By the 1150s, the sacrum imperium civil theology is still dominant, as is evident in John’s analogy of the ruler as head and the church as soul. However, it is also the time in which we can discern an implicit shift from the sacrum imperium conception of a conferred political legitimacy by papal sanction to a legitimacy grounded in the existence of the individual members in a political society. John’s theory is significant in many respects, one of which is that it represents the subtle transition to a post-Gelasian consciousness. The Gelasian infrastructure of the Two Swords remains intact and finds expression in his work while he dwells upon the existential legitimacy that he finds already inhering in a commonwealth. Temporal-political rulership is still presented by John as tied to papal sanction but the legitimacy that he detects in the commonwealth is existential authority which also has a claim on royal rulership. In the Policraticus, the king is answerable to (1) transcendentaldivine authority which overshadows him and delegates authority to him, while he is also answerable to (2) the existential authority of the members who comprise the substance of the commonwealth.11 (1) was an established but still enlarging conception of rulership, but (2) indicates the new shift in civil theology. With regard to (1), the ruler should 10. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 122. 11. See Kantorowicz’s masterful treatment of the political fiction of the king’s two bodies—politic and natural—the subject of The King’s Two Bodies. Also see Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, 116–28, 147–48, for his analysis of a ruler’s function of existential and transcendental representation.

Medieval England 89 not merely allow the application of ecclesiastical law by the church to a jurisdiction that was ruled temporally by him, but acknowledge that the authority of his rulership was outranked by the authority of the spiritual. With regard to (2), the ruler ought to allow his rulership to be guided by law, the substance of which is provided by superior divine truths in Scripture, Christian doctrine, and Roman law. From both (1) and (2), John’s conception of kingship is such that the action of the ruler is effectively bound by the substance of Christian truth. His rulership is circumscribed by an undifferentiated concept of law, as yet largely uncodified and embedded in the folk laws of the time. Voegelin describes the compactness of the situation thus: The law [in general in the twelfth century] is a fixed body of rules consisting of the biblical codes and of the Roman law ranking equal with the divine law. The law stretches like a sky over all men, and the king is under it, equal with the rest of mankind. The law is not yet differentiated into the higher law and the positive law, for the prerequisite of such differentiation is the existence of representative agencies who hold the monopoly of transforming the higher principles into positive law for the community.12

Tyrannicide and Existential Authority It follows then that, in the rejection of his subordinate status with regard to the divine substance of the law, the ruler becomes a tyrant: The ruler is one who rules by laws. Furthermore, the law is a gift of God, the likeness of equity, the norm of justice, the image of the divine will, the custodian of security, the unity and confirmation of a people, the standard of duties, the excluder and exterminator of vices, and the punishment of violence and all injuries. It is attacked either by violence or by deceit. . . . In whatever manner this happens, the grace of God is plainly being assailed and God is in a certain fashion being challenged to a battle. The ruler fights for the laws and liberty of the people; the tyrant supposes that nothing is done unless the laws are cancelled and the people are brought into servitude.13

In the rejection of law, the tyrant renders his rulership illegitimate. Sabine and Thorson comment that 12. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 123. 13. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, 53–54.

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the law in John’s conception forms an omnipresent tie running through all human relationships including that between the ruler and the ruled. Consequently it is binding mutually on king and subject. So true is this that the distinction between a true king and a tyrant was of major importance for John. His book had the doubtful honor of presenting the first explicit defense of tyrannicide in medieval political literature. “He who usurps the sword is worthy to die by the sword.”14

The tyrant foreshadows the absolute monarchs of later Europe in whom John detects a demonic element: “The ruler is a sort of image of divinity and the tyrant is an image of the strength of the Adversary and the depravity of Lucifer, for indeed he is imitated who desired to establish his throne to the north and to be like the Most High, yet with His goodness removed.”15 By the 1150s, the arguments surrounding the Investiture Controversy about the superiority of the sacerdotium over the regnum had largely vanished. John was speculating under a different evocation and his theory is reflective of the new conditions of a transitional environment that amounted to the rise of the individual. He is formulating something new for his time by attempting to establish the limits of political action, primarily the action of rulership within this new environment. By submission to a higher rank of truth, the political evocation of John is constructed with inherent limits to rulership. These limits were visible in the Christian sign of an overarching transcendent reality provided by the church firstly, and secondly in the new emphasis on law. In terms of curbing the overreach of political action, both could act as a countermeasure and censure to abuses of Christian dignity. The decline of the sacrum imperium was not so much a disintegration of Christendom as a shift in medieval civil theology that recognized that the order of Christianity was primarily an authoritative personal encounter with transcendental reality and mediated by the sacraments, but only secondarily the substance of a sociopolitical order. As Voegelin says, the Policraticus “is important because it reveals the individual as the source of the new intramundane sentiments.”16 The recognition 14. Sabine and Thorson, A History of Political Theory, 235. 15. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, 54. 16. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 123.

Medieval England 91 that individual persons were the fundamental units of a commonwealth was at the core of the shift, and that the institutional centers of power drew their importance from and for the sake of those individuals. John’s theory of political power in the commonwealth assumes both existential and transcendental legitimacy inasmuch as the actions of a ruler are bounded by the authority of God and his church as well as by the law. It is the theoretical prototype of limited constitutional government. In the Policraticus, legitimate rulership approaches what we might refer to as a government of laws, not of men. John’s advocacy of the extreme of tyrannicide suggests that the limitation of government is of the highest importance: “That by the authority of the divine book it is lawful and glorious to kill public tyrants, so long as the murderer is not obligated to the tyrant by fealty nor otherwise lets justice or honour slip.”17 Assuming the serious mindedness of John, the hubris of tyrannicide becoming topical in his work is radiant with meaning for the new evocation: it demonstrates that the midtwelfth century is an unprecedented time for the development of existential authority. In this case, the tyrannicidal act is focused on the authority of the individual conscience which John has identified as the sole judge of a ruler’s goodness or evil. John’s theory of tyrannicide is untenable as a theory of politics if each governmental act is to be met by violence judged as legitimate by an individual. If tyrannicide were to become the norm, the representative function of the ruler would be transferred in practice to the individual, reducing the practical wisdom of politics to a farce. The danger of corroding the public order by executing the ruler, of decapitating the body politic, is not broached by John; and later considerations of tyrannicide generally leaned toward toleration of tyranny for the sake of maintaining public order, as we have seen with Aquinas.18 Russell Kirk provides a modern example of the raw importance of order in his story of an encounter with a Russian scholar who explained why order must precede other political goods such as justice and freedom: 17. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, chap. 20. 18. See chapter two above.

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At any moment, one’s apartment might be invaded by a casual criminal or fanatic, murdering for the sake of a loaf of bread. In this anarchy, justice and freedom were only words. “Then I learned that before we can know justice and freedom, we must have order,” my friend said. “Much though I hated the Communists, I saw then that even the grim order of Communism is better than no order at all. Many might survive under Communism; no one could survive in general disorder.”19

However, in the absence of institutional curbs on the medieval abuse of power, John suggests that only individual resistance can be exercised, even to the extreme of tyrannicide. As Voegelin characterizes it, there was no counterweight on the other levels of the governmental structure in John’s time. “The tyrant cannot well be expected to exterminate himself by using his own sword, and non-Christian instances are not ready to hand to fulfill the task, [therefore] somebody who is a Christian has to do it. For John of Salisbury the individual has to be executor because no representative organ of community resistance yet exists.”20 While the representation of political order by the individual in the theory is clearly faulty and the burden of executing a despotic ruler unreasonable, the importance of having some form of limitation on the exercise of power is the insight that John expresses.

The Differentiation of Authority in the Politicraticus The term “tyrant” throws light on a specifically Western understanding of kingship. Tyranny is largely synonymous with despotism, which derives from the Greek despotes. Oakeshott notes that for Aristotle and his contemporaries, despotes meant a man whose “authority” to rule was based on his ownership of what he ruled—territory and subjects alike. . . . And, in giving advice to Alexander, Aristotle recommends him to behave like a hegemon (that is, a “leader” of free men) to the conquered Greeks, but to behave like a despotes to the conquered barbarians, because this was their notion of political authority.21

Transferring the context to John’s day, the tyrant was a despotes who exercised a right to rule based upon ownership or dominium over what he 19. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 6–7. 20. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 123–24. 21. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 458.

Medieval England 93 ruled. However, a ruler can only be a tyrant if the concept of rulership has differentiated sufficiently to allow a form of rulership to emerge that is not based on dominium, like Aristotle’s hegemon. Oakeshott goes on to state that in the early medieval period, the most significant relation was that between a man and the land which he owned and the people who lived on that land and cultivated it. . . . [These people] were all his people, the suitors at his court. They owed him services and he owed them protection. In short, he had “authority” over them, not merely power, and his “authority” was recognized to derive from his ownership [dominium or “lordship”].22

The difference between lordly authority and kingly authority has already been mentioned in chapter one above, but it is worth asking the following question in this context: If the authority of a king was not that of a lord—that is, not an overlordship that rests upon an expanded form of dominium—what was it? Kingly authority was derived from God, but as authority differentiated historically in the West it was increasingly thought to also derive from the consent of his subjects. “Subjects” were ruled as “freemen” and “not bound to their rulers by tenancies of land and services arising out of those tenancies.”23 Specifically royal auctoritas and potestas was not that of dominium. It is this that John catches in his Policraticus at just the time when the assertion of personal existential authority was rising against a network of what may be termed dominiumrelations, understood as the stifling of political life and laws at the social level of the barons. John’s tyrant claims absolute authority, and therefore power, over the individual Christians in his realm. These individuals are no longer his “subjects” when the king has debased his dignity and become no more than a supreme overlord, and once freemen have been forcibly reduced to the tyrant’s dominium. John’s theory of tyrannicide is an emphatic statement limiting political potestas for the sake of the dignity of the Christian individual and community when royal auctoritas has disintegrated into dominium. What is interesting is that the notion of dominium as lordly ownership was increasingly at the center of postfeudal social developments, but was beginning to devolve down the social levels. What marks the 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid.

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postfeudal arrangement is exercise of dominium by the rising commercial classes. This is to say that lordship was no longer concentrated exclusively at the baronial level. The explosion of activity in the highmedieval West included the burgeoning of commercial and entrepreneurial activity understood as the economic generation and expansion of dominium by individuals with a mercantile bent. The assertion of existential authority involved dominium in the sense of asserting a right to private property. Indeed, from John’s Policraticus emerges the understanding of dominium as the exercise of an individual’s authority embedded in the dignity of his existence as a Christian. In his work, there is a growing necessity to establish an individual’s right to live in an order of peace, safety, and liberty, untouched by the interference of a despotic overlordship. The crystallization of personal rights, individual zones of autonomy, and the expansion of personal dominium were all ways of emphasizing the assertion of existential authority as a new force on the Western stage, simultaneously public and private as well as temporalpolitical and spiritual due to its embeddedness in existence itself. That John could conceive of and express a commonwealth that debarred dominium from royal rulership for the sake of individuals, the church, and kingly dignity indicates that there were lines of meaning within twelfth-century civil theology significant for the future development of Western civilization. By emphasizing the authority of the individual to the point of tyrannicide, John seemed to be suggesting that participation in a commonwealth amounts to a claim of ownership or dominium on the part of individual subjects. The word “claim” is tentatively used because the great arguments over property rights were still almost two centuries away. However, stating the claim to ownership does not suggest an anachronism, but highlights the underlying experiences of entitlement that were stirring. If John’s theory can be rightly characterized as a protoconstitutionalism, then it can be similarly identified as an early clarion call for a theory of rights-based law.

The Anglo-Normans and Magna Carta (1215) The central plank of English development is the strength of the royal power. In general, the problems that initially emanated from the

Medieval England 95 abuse of royal power by Kings John and Henry III led to solutions by the upper-class barons or tenants-in-chief that gradually involved the entire realm. It is these solutions that are significant in our investigation as they involve the deliberate attempt to balance the three centers of authority: the temporal-political, the transcendental-spiritual, and the individual-existential.

The Uniqueness of Anglo-Norman Kingship The feudal order that first emerged in northern France and in time spread over most of Europe was the political order out of which English kingship developed. We have seen how kingship itself was something in excess of lordship. In France, royal authority was an authority that the lords placed over themselves in recognition of the Dei gratia title of what became a Capetian monarchy. French kingship was absolute from the beginning in the sense of being held to be divinely ordained. Similarly, the king in England was recognized as king Dei gratia, but his divinely sanctioned absoluteness was, from the beginning, conditioned by the particular circumstances of the Conquest. There are some general historical and geographical factors that marked the shape that the English development took. These include the situation of the Norman Conquest (1066) that weakened the power of the feudal lords and concentrated royal power. The consequent royal authority carried such potestas as to unify the various local customs into a common law, and to draw the various communities of England into a larger national whole which was the realm. In other words, the strength of Norman kingship was able to forge a deepening of national consciousness or identity. The insularity of England preserved it from the entanglements of imperial ambitions and the problems of control over papal claims that dominated the French and German temporal authorities.24 Oakeshott supplements this view by pointing to William the Conqueror’s policy of initially combining the absoluteness of his newly won kingship with an absolute lordship or dominium of England: At the conquest all the ancient seats of “lordship” were abolished, and William asserted his “lordship” over the whole land. This territory was then par24. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 130.

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celed out as “fiefs” to “lords” who thereby became the tenants-in-chief of the king, owning him services. . . . No tenant-in-chief enjoyed the right of justicia (the right to hold an independent court) [as was the case in France, les parlements] in his “fief.” Justice was the concern of the king throughout his realm. And by the Oath of Salisbury a direct relationship was established between the king and, not only his tenants-in-chief, but all his subjects. The Norman kings of England were among the first to have “subjects” who were not themselves “lords.” They are the kings of “England.”25

The kings in France were not, by Oakeshott’s definition, the kings of France. The opening of a channel of justice between the Crown and the individual members of the realm expanded a sphere of liberty that could be enjoyed by all subjects. By concentrating justice in the Crown, William effectively granted a legal guarantee of freedom to each subject in the realm. Oakeshott explains the implications: “Now, all of this was something like a carefully planned ‘feudal’ monarchy. It gave the king the strongest possible hold over his tenants-in-chief, but it admitted that the king owed duties to his subjects to the performance of which they had the right to hold him.”26 At first, William claimed dominium over all of conquered England by virtue not only of his evident potestas but also of his auctoritas as king which had been given a papal sanction.27 What was truly extraordinary about William’s “carefully planned feudal monarchy” was his renouncing of dominium of the entire land, having forcibly implemented his systems of rights and duties. By doing so, he now positioned himself as a “king” rather than a mere overlord, arrogating to himself the function of justice. By this act alone, the English office of king could become established as strong and absolute yet fair and impartial to each of his subjects equally. The development of England as a national and political realm was therefore dominated by a kingship that could carefully balance many potentially centrifugal forces. Voegelin lists three important integrating factors that dominated the development of England: 25. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 281–82. 26. Ibid. 27. “The probability of William’s success was enhanced by the moral support that he received from Rome. At the urging of Cardinal Hildebrand, the supreme pontiff had sent the duke a papal banner, which he carried with him to England”; see Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 279.

Medieval England 97 There is no doubt that kingship and feudal loyalty are the strongest integrating factors up to the fourteenth century. We have to rank second the religious reinforcement lent to the royal function through papal support beginning with the conquest. . . . The national sentiment, finally, ranks third in chronological order but, in perspective, surpasses the other two in importance.28

It is primarily the national sentiment of being English, in a dynamic combination with both the strength of royal power and the Christian ceiling overarching royal authority, which gave rise to the constitutional arrangements that have lasted through the centuries.

National Sentiment and Like-mindedness Abuse of the strength of royal power came in the form of royal interference with the private lives and feudal liberties of the lords or barons. Royal encroachments reached a critical point in the reign of King John in the early thirteenth century. The gradual increase of abuses had combined with the demand for payments in lieu of military service from property holders (scutage) for an unpopular war against the French and finally provoked a combined act of resistance from the barons that resulted in the Magna Carta. Baronial resistance to the abuse of royal power was not merely the exercise of the right to hold the king to his duties, but were also symptomatic of a growing national sentiment. For example, in reserving their interests to England the barons could afford a pragmatic, if not phlegmatic, attitude to the loss Normandy to the French: “What seems most striking about the loss [of Normandy to the French] is the ease with which the Norman baronage in England adjusted itself to it by a division of interests between the English and Norman branches of the families affected.”29 The baronial sense of royalpolitical injustice by successive kings could have led to an overhaul of English political society and its structures through violent revolution, but the revolt of the barons was tempered instead by a concern for the realm’s national cohesion and a regard for its good through its king. The moderation of their revolt was matched by a corresponding temperance on the part of the king for the good of the realm. It is this overarching concern for the good of England that becomes interesting in our pursuit 28. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 131. 29. Ibid., 132.

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of existential authority. Aristotle’s symbol for the cohesive substance of a body politic is homonoia or political friendship, an enlargement of Heraclitus’s meditation on the community-creating power of the logos, common to all (homologia).30 It is a like-mindedness among members of a political society about the truths of a society, that is, the civil theology of the society. Inasmuch as this concern for civil theology is one that is lived by the concrete individuals who comprise the society—and only later, if at all, theorized about—national sentiment emerges authoritatively from existence. It is a national and political identity that expresses the belonging of man in the world while orientating social acts toward a transcendental good. It is an existential frame of reference that imbues individuals and their associations with meaning and an existential dignity. In this case, the national sentiment among the barons and the English king is an early expression of like-mindedness, but is significant for the reason that it captures the territorial range to which the civil theology extended: that is, England. It symbolizes the occurrence of political events on the level of the national English realm. In general, the nature of the political friendship and identity involved in the common experience of like-mindedness is characteristic of an increasingly articulate and ever-widening society. The increase in national sentiment suggests the rising significance of existential authority in England. The assertion of the barons’ lordly authority of dominium against royal encroachment is indicative of the general philosophical situation: the rise of existential dominium against the overreaching claims of jurisdiction by institutional powers. As we see in the later English cases of John Wycliffe and in documents such as Piers Plowman, the rise of the existential could also challenge the spiritual authority of the institutional church.31 At the very least, the existential authority in individuals was a force in Norman-English society from an early point. The experience of national sentiment among the politically significant stratum of the time—the baronage—was always more than an 30. Voegelin analyzes homonoia and discusses it as an agreement among individuals in a society that is rooted in the experience of the nous, in Order and History 2, 231, and in Order and History 3, 321ff. 31. See chapter four below for a discussion of Wycliffe and the spiritual authority of existence.

Medieval England 99 expression of indignant frustration in the context of national identity. National sentiment, taken by itself, was not the exclusive privilege of a particular society or stratum of society but an open sentiment in which all could participate. The English baronage unwittingly gave the national sentiment a political significance for the entire English realm. As the only stratum of English society articulated for political action in 1215, their actions had both a national and a political impact, effectively opening a line of meaning in English civil theology that was to lay the foundations for the social cohesion and political integration of the entire realm: national identity was now tagged with a political consciousness. Belonging to the English realm meant participating in the English realm. The strength of English kingship coupled with the inherently representative actions of the barons began to generate a process of articulation of the national realm of communes into a national and political people. In the specific case of the Magna Carta document, the national sentiment of the barons was explicitly a national-political sentiment, while the grudging consent of King John was still prompted by a concern for the good of the entire kingdom. While “national sentiment” is a new assertive force in medieval civil theology, a “national-political” sentiment is the new assertive force unique to England. We shall see how national sentiment in France could lead a lawyer like Pierre Dubois to propose French hegemony over Christendom, suggesting the strength of a national French sentiment and the existence of a national French people.32 What constituted the important difference in England was the existence of a national and a political people. In England, the rising national identity, initially among the baronagium but gradually extending further out to other sectors of society, met with the strength of royal power in a unique way that led directly to the formation of a national-political “people” and the articulation of the various estates, communes, and strata of society for political activity at the national level. This was not replicated in any other realm at the time but was distinctively an outcome of the convergence of two factors under the conditions of the Norman conquest: the potestas of the English king to draw 32. See chapter six for an account of Pierre Dubois and the increasing tendency to view political problems as being in need of legal solutions.

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the disparate elements of the realm into a national and political whole; and the strength of a national like-mindedness as the political expression of Norman-English civil theology among the king’s subjects.

The Balance of Authorities in Magna Carta Magna Carta is the document whose greatness must be measured against the civilizational crisis of authority in the high medieval period in which the assertion of existential authority was becoming politically significant. However, the grievances of the barons were more than political. Their baronial entitlements were being overridden by a powerful king who seemed indifferent to his own acts of injustice. The recourse to the pope was therefore a moral and legal one, as well as political and religious. The result, which was the Magna Carta, had to be similarly moral and legal to properly address the grievances, as well as being a political document that addressed the royal representative of the whole realm in the context of an overarching divine authority. The lingering prestige of the papal office and its moral authority in matters of justice was accentuated in the English case by the events of 1213. “John had resigned England into the hands of the pope and received it back in fief. . . . The political situation was apparently so critical in 1213 that the prestige of the papal overlordship was indispensable in the relations with France as well as in order to avoid an internal revolt.”33 When the barons approached the pope for support of a charter, they were in search of the ultimate binding authority in order to sanction the validity of their own dominium or lordly authority and actions. The medieval dignity of papal authority is expressed clearly in these actions. As yet, the authority of the pope was relatively uncontested as the highest authority in the enduring Gelasian configuration of Christendom. The papal fiefdom of England was not so much a political event as an entirely medieval event whose meaning continued to express the temporal and transcendent unity of the Gelasian-Christian world. The resulting Magna Carta symbolized the baronial authority of dominium seeking accommodation and balance with the traditional Gelasian centers of regnum and sacerdotium. However, as mentioned above, the devolution of 33. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 132.

Medieval England 101 dominium into the stratum of individuals at this time, under the expansion of economic and legal activity and much else, ensured that the solution sought by the barons was a representative solution for all whose dominium could be threatened in principle by despotic acts. The authority of individuals over their own property is the exercise of a dominium or ownership as a right embedded in the existence of the human person. The baronial plea for papal mediation indicates not just the failure of an individual king (in his Body Natural) to the duties of his own crown (in his Body Politic), but also the assertion of the right to dominium that would come to serve the dignity of all the individual subjects of the realm. As ecclesiastical facilitator of the charter and representative of the medieval papacy’s concern with the English problem, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton was instrumental in not just delivering the document, but probably also in determining its contents. Magna Carta did not envision a remake of society, given the prudence and restraint of all participants in the struggle, but aimed at a much humbler settlement that involved the provision for the prosperity and good of the entire realm. The good of the realm in this case involves preserving royal initiative and the good of his royal soul, maintaining the life and liberty of the church, as well as the good of the entire kingdom. Allowances therefore were to be made for the achievement of these goods under the counsel of Langton and others. The function of the barons was service on a committee overseeing the implementation of the compromises. Voegelin comments that “the archbishop appears as the guardian of the true interests of the realm by his double function as advisor to the barons and to the king.”34 The three major players in the English drama represent the struggle for equilibrium among the triangle of uniquely Western authorities: the royal, the ecclesiastical and, in principle, the existential through the barons’ concern with preserving rightful dominium. They are all accorded a voice in the maintenance of the realm. What emerges most distinctly in the attempt at balancing the claims of England’s rival and complementary authorities is the consciousness of a common political or34. Ibid., 133.

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der binding on all; of a national-political sentiment finding expression in the concerns of all. The recourse to a charter indicates firstly the desire to broker a solution for the good of the existing realm and secondly the robust nature of political friendship in general when national likemindedness has pervaded the different levels and participants of the struggle. The overarching good of the English realm is the dominant determinant that was directed by the king “in his resoluteness in taking decisive steps, when such steps served the interest of the realm, as for example the resignation of England to the pope, and by the barons who in spite of their amply justified discontent had enough political acumen not to break off, as a group, the relations with the king and to accept the leadership offered by Langton.”35

The Strength of English Kingship “The modern constitutional system did not evolve on the plane of institutions but through the superimposition of ideas on institutions that had grown in an entirely different field of sentiments and ideas.”36 Voegelin is here referring to the primary experiences of homonoia that is at once national and political, and which occurs by varying degrees in the soul of each member of a society. The development of community relies on the preexisting constitutive experiences of that homonoia among the individuals and groups. English constitutionalism, with its array of liberties and representative mechanisms on an institutional level, is a development on the level of public institutions which occurred secondarily to the primary and prepolitical self-articulation of society. It is this prior articulation into a form that then could assume, demand, and avail of political enfranchisement, such as the safeguarding of liberties and representation, which is the more significant development. What is striking in the history of England is the extent to which strong kingship could foster the preexisting political friendship within communities to the point where those communities could become articulate for political action at the national level. The liberties granted by the English king were modest in comparison 35. Ibid., 134. 36. Ibid., 135.

Medieval England 103 with France and attendance at parliament was an obligation, not a right.37 What was unusual about England in the thirteenth century was the extension of the obligation to participate in a government of the realm to ever wider strata of society through the transformation of society into communes and estates. The transformation of the barons as individual tenants-in-chief into a commune with a distinct legal personality and capable of single political action was followed by the attendance of burgesses representing shires, boroughs, guilds, and other communes at the national assembly. Voegelin repeatedly makes the point that focusing on the upper tier of public institutions misses the most significant development, which is precisely this transformation of lower-tier social units into representable communes. “The communes were society in form for action, while the representation of shires and boroughs by delegates was an inevitable technique that developed as soon as the substance to be represented was experienced as such.”38 It is this community substance that is crucial. It is in the individuals of a community that a community substance occurs and as such is the assertion of the meaning of their own existence. In the case of England, it is existential meaning in the mode of national identity that opens itself to political action at the national level. This points, firstly, to the mutual desire of both king and communes to cooperate for the good of the realm, as well as for their own reasons. Secondly, the desire among the king’s subjects to be represented at the higher national level suggests the existence of a social substance capable of political articulation. This is another way of saying that the existential authority of individuals belonging to communes ready for political action sought legitimate channels of expression at the national level. The process of a political society becoming articulate from the level of the nobility and higher clergy, down to lower strata that were socially significant was certainly a process that was fostered from the top of the political ladder, that is, by the king. However, the symbiosis between the royal authority and the various representatives of existential authority in society seeking political expression is demonstrated in this observation by Voegelin: 37. For an outline of what baronial rights were conceded by the king in Magna Carta, see Hollister et al., eds., Medieval Europe, 166–72. 38. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 137.

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Of the dynamics of the lower society that must have suggested the initiative from the top as a promising action we know very little. But from various symptoms, such as the commercial provisions of the Magna Carta, we can draw the conclusion that, by the thirteenth century, economic development must have resulted in the rise of a society of knights and merchants of sufficient wealth to make their taxability in comparison with the feudal revenue a major item in the finances of the realm, and of sufficient consciousness of their own importance to make their consultation advisable.39

This consciousness of importance in the context of the national realm, and the provision of a channel for participation in the government of the realm under royal pressure, led to the structuring of England as a constitutional monarchy after the prior articulation of the people into a national-political people.

Success of Parliamentary Structure Although the politically significant classes of barons, knights, merchants, and so on were articulating themselves into a form for action under royal pressure to do so—the peasantry as yet remained politically unarticulated and therefore without a representative voice—their amalgamation into an actual unit, capable of national action, was still uncertain. For example, under the influence of the papal bull Clericis Laicos of 1296, the lower clergy abstained from participation in the general parliament and assembled in a separate convocation up to the seventeenth century.40 There was also a tendency among the merchants to deal directly with the king regarding grants and entitlements rather than through parliamentary means due to the legal situation following the Conquest. The possibility of separate houses of assembly for each commune and the consequent turning away of each commune from the other was real, but was avoided in the end. One could surmise that, under the direction of the king and ultimately through the national willingness of the communes, a general parliament of king and communes was the most adequate form of assembly to carry the weight of national sentiment with its several strands of temporal, ecclesiastical, and existential authorities. The parliamentary provision of channels for political expression and 39. Ibid.; emphasis added. 40. Ibid., 139.

Medieval England 105 the diffusion of political unrest was encouraged by the shape that parliament took. The bicameral division into Lords and Commons by itself could have led to the pursuit of separate interests by upper and lower estates to the detriment of the realm, but this was also avoided by attendance of the nobility in both houses according to their division into the peerage and the gentry. In the lower House of Commons, the amalgamation of the gentry and the merchant class—the haute bourgeoisie— led to the generation of an English middle class that provided a ballast against the revolutionary tendencies that were engendered by severe class distinctions evident on the Continent. The comparison of England with France with regard to the creation of a middle class and its effect of dissipating the sentiments of disorder among the poor and unenfranchized as well as the promotion of a society governed beneath the umbrella of law is a compelling justification of Aristotle’s theory of the middle class. The integration of the bourgeoisie into an aristocratic style of politics created by the feudal nobility effectively insulated England against destructive forces among its politically significant classes firstly; and secondly during later centuries, could dissipate enough revolutionary fervor among the proletarian class by the promotion of political articulation.41 The assertion of existential authority at a national level was provided for through the parliamentary structure. In theory, the extension of the franchise to the peasantry or proletariat was possible as soon as their own substance as a community was experienced and their transformation into a politically articulate commune occurred.

Integration of the Realm England’s pragmatic success as a prosperous and stable realm was due in large part to its high degree of constitutionality. The articulation of communities into a form for political action on a national level, for the good of the entire realm, depended in the first place on those com41. The extension of the franchise to the proletariat occurred centuries later when the lowest classes finally found their substance as a group with the industrialization of England. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 142: “With the close of the ancien régime in 1832 the broad masses were gradually absorbed into the system through the technical device of the franchise for the Commons.”

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munities being capable of participation in the national body politic. In England, this national body politic was the king in his corporate person. That is, the English king was a persona mixta who had two capacities: He has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation . . . and he is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has sole Government of them.42

It was therefore the king and no other who could draw the communities into the life of his realm. However, mechanisms of participation are of limited value if there is no prior substance to avail of them. There is therefore an issue of education and well-being that becomes important. The education and enrichment of the subjects of the realm empowers the subjects of a realm to pursue their interests and welfare in liberty which in turn enables the constitutionality of the realm. On a practical level, the expansion of a middle class is in the interests of the realm for the reason of their greater taxability over those available under feudal arrangements. However, on a more philosophical level, Aristotle argues that a city ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. . . . And this is the class of citizens which is most secure in a state, for they do not, like the poor, covet other men’s goods; nor do others covet theirs, as the poor covet the goods of the rich; and as they neither plot against others, nor are themselves plotted against, they pass through life safely.43

Applying the principle of the mean to the polis, and agreeing that the middle course is best, it follows that the middle amount of possessions is also best. For Aristotle, such a middle degree of possessions is amenable to reason, fostering a life of virtue by the creation of an environment that is materially sufficient to the life of happiness. The rise of a middle class was in the interest of the English king, in that they could provide a counterweight both to the threat posed by the wealth and power of the 42. Quoted by Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies, 13. 43. Aristotle, Politics (IV. 11), 1295a25–32, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2057.

Medieval England 107 barons and to the tendencies of the poor to plunder. In short, the generation of a middle class in the realm could become the unofficial domestic policy of the English king which would deliver a more law-abiding national culture, taxable prosperity, and social stability. The policy of reducing illiteracy and poverty for the general good of the realm would anchor English society in obedience to law; and, on an individual level, promote the dignity of the Christian person that could become the subject of legally guaranteed rights on the one hand while bearing civic responsibility within the realm. In essence, the royal policy of advancing a literate middle class encouraged attitudes that could be described as constitutional. That reciprocal rights and responsibilities between king and communes could be established institutionally, with mechanisms and symbols of representation, indicates that constitutionality had penetrated to the individual members of the realm to the extent that they were members of a politically articulated commune. Royal authority in England symbolized more than the dignity of a king. It was also the symbol of a thoroughgoing process of articulation in society that fostered a constitutional attitude in the creation of communes. It was the king who could guarantee a subject’s rights and enforce a subject’s political obligations; it was the king who could symbolize the universality of law and justice throughout the realm. It was similarly the royal representative function that could hold up the entire body politic and induce the requisite attitudes appropriate to an English political identity (that could later become citizenship) among its component parts. In short, it was the function of Western kingship to facilitate the expression of existential authority of the individual members of the body politic at a national political level by providing a channel for their participation in the “commonwealth.” The political integration of the realm was heavily dependent upon the penetration of constitutionality among the various communes and levels of English society. It was the royal prerogative to drive constitutionality in the realm. Pressure was applied from the top downward to expand like-mindedness at the lower tier among the individuals to the point of eventually embracing the entire realm. King Edward I could issue a writ of summons to the bishops in 1295 and state “that what touch-

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es all, should be approved by all.”44 The king had in view the totality of the realm, its good and the participation of all in the commonwealth of the realm. That is, the king is the guarantor of the realm’s constitutionality. It was the uniqueness of English kingship to drive the process of constitutionality through the entire realm in a manner that would integrate the component parts and form a national-political people. In general, where this process of constitutionality was missing, there appeared other forms of governance that were inherently unstable, relying upon the often violent caprices of the ruling classes. In the absence of a king, such as within the old imperial zone, political development took the shape of city-states and principalities. We shall discuss this and the situation of French kingship below, but what both of these continental alternatives to the English accommodation showed was a failure to achieve adequate constitutionality at a national level.

Constitutionality in the Work of Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) Sir John Fortescue was an English jurist who served for a time as chief justice on the King’s Bench. His knowledge of and admiration for the English form of governance drove him to contrast it with the French system, and to explain his preference for England. Oakeshott reminds us that “since dominium was the normal way of thinking about ‘authority’ it is not surprising that ‘kingly’ authority was often thought of as if it were the ‘authority’ of ‘lordship.’”45 Fortescue indeed refers to a kingdom as a dominion, but his concern is with the outcome of specifically royal authority.

Dominium politicum et regale If a political process, dressed with constitutional accoutrements and driven from the upper tier of rulership downward through the strata of society, does not meet a social substance of like-mindedness in the low44. Summons to the Archbishop for a Great Council, in Stubbs, Select Charters, 485; quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 150. 45. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 458.

Medieval England 109 er tier of individuals and groups, there can be no assurance that an articulation into communes for national action will occur.46 On this lower tier of concrete communities, there are always factors at play in the civil theology of the society that can act against articulation for political action at a national level: prepolitical factors at a tribal level, for example, whose civil theology, expressed in customs and rituals, furnishes existential meaning sufficient for the lives of its members, invalidating any need for national arrangements; or religious factors that demur from the concept of a national state such as elements and traditions within some Islamic civil theologies.47 In each case, the differentiation of authority has not occurred. A major consequence of this is an understanding of the political, the religious and the existential—as well as the relations of each of these forms of authority with the others—that not only differs from the Western understanding, but in its more extreme sentiments can bear an animus against differentiation in Western civilization. Such animus arises not so much from repugnance at the mechanisms of liberal democracies at work, but at the meaning of what is political and what is not political that these mechanisms rest upon for their operation. In other words, Western constitutionalism presents more than a political challenge to non-Western societies. If we remember that Western constitutionalism is already embodied by its “constituting” individuals before it is expressed in political structures, then a more differentiated understanding of what is political is at work, which also includes an understanding of what is not political: that is, the religious and the existential. Imposition of visible constitutional structures such as representation, electoral boundaries, voting procedures, and the like on a community may appear supremely constitutional, but these structures do not necessarily equate with constitutional government of a constitutionalizing people. What royal political action from the top downward in England did was to foster or encourage a desire for articulation that was already in motion and an enlargement of the preexisting national sentiment within the realm. That is, for royal action to gain traction, it 46. “There is no guarantee whatsoever that the introduction of a constitution in a country will produce constitutional government; it may just as well produce a revolutionary shambles”; Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 145. 47. See my concluding remarks below.

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had to meet with a like-mindedness of a common existence in the realm and an existential concern for the common good. The function of a king who drives the articulation and literacy of a realm touches only on one level of the growth of a political people. In an important sense, the differentiation of authority must have already occurred in individuals and among communities in order for the growth of a national people to occur. In order for the king to drive the integration of the realm, there had to be a national substance capable of being driven. In this context of differentiation having occurred, Voegelin highlights the uniqueness of specifically Western kingship: The growth of the “realm,” which ultimately results in the growth of the “people,” is somehow taken for granted, though it is precisely the process that should arouse curiosity. . . . The Hellenic civilization did not achieve any large territorial power structure at all, while the Roman empire had a large expanse but neither a realm, nor a people, nor representative institutions— setting aside the late Roman provincial development. . . . This comparison with the ancient world brings into clearer relief the decisive function of Western kingship with its feudal organization of large territories as the integrating forces of the realm and of the peoples that grow in its shelter and under its pressure.48

Sir John Fortescue, in his The Governance of England (c. 1470), has grasped the significance of a national-political articulation that occurs among the various strata of society under the umbrella of royal authority. He has provided an analysis that throws light on the underlying problem in his comparison of two different kinds of realm, synonymous with that of the fifteenth-century realms of France and England. In his political theory, the results are symbolized in the contrast of the terms dominium regale and the dominium politicum et regale, which signify differences of political phases of development or forms of government: the dominium regale is designated as a more primitive form in that such governance is concerned with law to the extent that the law pleases the king. If the governance is good, it may convey the good of divinely sanctioned natural law. However, in the end the dominium regale is still the rule expressing the king’s will: “[The two kinds of kingdom] differ in that the first king may rule his people by such laws as he makes himself, and 48. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 154.

Medieval England 111 therefore he may set taxes and other impositions on them as he himself wishes, with their assent.”49 The dominium politicum et regale is a later appearance whose development depends upon mankind having become more civilized: The second king [in the dominium politicum et regale] may not rule his people by laws other than those they assent to, and therefore he may set no impositions upon them without their own assent . . . for one kingdom began of and by the might of the prince, and the other began by the desire and institution of the people of the prince.50

What marks the more primitive status of the dominium regale is the absence of the authority of the people in the governance of the polity, whether by the lack of articulation or by royal denial of their participation. There may exist a national sentiment as was certainly evident across the Continent, but without the participation of the people the realm remains unpolitical or “uncivilized.” The existential authority of the people, in balance with the royal-temporal and the ecclesialspiritual authorities is the desired configuration of a civilized body politic. Fortescue was like his contemporary Wycliffe, as we shall see, in that he was able to embody and harness the forces of the time. However, he could go further than Wycliffe in that he could theoretically penetrate the uniqueness of England’s political substance and formulate the difference between early modern England and the Gelasian-Christian past without feeling the need to destroy England’s heritage from that past. Fortescue’s Governance of England focuses on the importance of a governance of laws and highlights the provision for existential authority in the governance of the realm, the attempt at equilibrium among the three authorities, and a penetrating constitutionality from the bottomup and from the top-down of the social strata that characterized the political physiognomy of England.

Eruption and Proruption Like John of Salisbury, Fortescue employs the organic analogy of the body politic as a device to demonstrate the parts, the whole, and the 49. Fortescue, The Governance of England, in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 211. 50. Ibid.

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integration of the parts into the whole. He criticizes Augustine who, in chapter 23 of his City of God said that “a people is a body of men united by consent of law and by community of interest.” But such a people does not deserve to be called a body while it is acephalous, that is, without a head. Because, just as in natural bodies, what is left over after decapitation is not a body, but is what we call a trunk, so in bodies politic a community without a head is not by any means a body.51

The people who are willing to be united and make a body politic called a realm must have a head to govern the body. “So a people wishing to erect itself into a kingdom or any other body politic must always set up one man for the government of all that body, who, by analogy with the kingdom, is, from regendo, usually a king.”52 The language of Fortescue is striking: in it he demonstrates the shift toward the authority vested in the people that “erects” a kingdom or body politic. Also striking is his use of the symbol “people.” It is indicative of the constitutionality of England at this stage of political development that recognizes the people as the carriers of authority and centers of existential meaning from which civil theology erupts. In fact, Fortescue uses the language of eruption to go “deeper into the obscure processes by which a political substance is formed and becomes articulate.”53 Voegelin comments on the phrase ex populo erumpit regnum: “The people erupt into a realm . . . as the articulate body surges out of its embryonic state. In the case of a people hitherto entirely inarticulate Fortescue speaks of eruption; in the case of a realm tantum regale that experiences the transition to a political state, he speaks of proruption.”54 The organic analogy is extended beyond John of Salisbury by pointing to the mysterious process of a political evocation. John of Salisbury left the articulation of the body politic unexplained, but Fortescue meant to deal with the problem of national-political development. On the lower tier of the people, the self-articulation of the various communes in society into a national-political people emerges from the will 51. Fortescue, On the Merits of the Laws of England, chap. 13, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 520. 52. Ibid. 53. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 157. 54. Ibid., 157–58.

Medieval England 113 or intention of the people (intencio populi) which is (extending the organic analogy) “the source of life, having in it the blood, namely, political forethought for the interest of the people, that it transmits to the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is maintained and quickened.”55 The intencio populi is the assertion of the mysterious evocation of a people by their own authority and expressing a civil theology of that society. Clearly the intencio populi refers to the “people” as an existentially authoritative principle that is also dynamic in that it expresses its authority through the process of eruption.56 It is this force that emerges from the soul of concrete human beings in concrete communities that Fortescue describes as the nourishing bloodstream of a body politic. Like John of Salisbury, his political theory seems to resonate with Plato’s theory of society as man-writ-large. The body politic does not originate in a legal contract, nor does it occur by nature, but arises from an authority embedded in human existence. The erupting or, more specifically in the case of England, the prorupting, body becomes a “realm,” the dominium politicum et regale that is a constitutional realm. This realm is the political reality with ultimate transcendental meaning that balances the dignity of the royal office with the dignity of the people’s existence in each of the communes. The dominium politicum et regale embraces the commons and the lords (both ecclesiastical and lay) and recognizes their willed integration into a national unit as constituting the political body, who is the English king in his immutable corporate person.

The Good of the Realm Is a Mutual Good among the Estates The properly articulated and constitutional realm manifesting the integration of the various estates into the one national unit must also be a realm that holds its national good from the good of each component estate. It is this national and composite good for which the king acts in a dominium politicum et regale. The royal provision of appropriate parliamentary channels for the articulated estates allows the peo55. Fortescue, On the Merits of the Laws of England, chap. 13, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 520. 56. See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 120–23.

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ple, as we have seen, to give or withhold their assent to the levying of taxes or changing of the laws. In France, the estates are not asked for their assent. “Assent” carries the meaning of a willingness on the part of the estates to participate in the higher national unit for the good of the realm. However, the language of assent once again indicates the extent to which the constitutional spirit of England had penetrated the realm by the fifteenth century. In principle, the estates or communes as political actors carried an authority delegated by their individual members. The “assent” needed by the king was the authority of individuals articulated collectively. The levying of taxes, the defense of the realm, and so on were therefore not simply royal actions, but national political actions conducted by the constitutional parliament. Fortescue’s language of “assent,” “intencio populi,” “eruption” and the like are terms that emerge from meditation on the meaning of constitutionality. The good of the realm is not an abstract good, but more concretely the good of each estate for the sake of the whole. The main topic of Fortescue’s Governance of England is the “estate of the king” which, as the head of the body politic, must be maintained in its majestic dignity and protected from any diminution. It is an obligation upon the other estates to preserve the majesty of the king which is always the self-preservation of the good of the realm. For Fortescue, the main cause of the diminution of the royal majesty is the rise of more wealthy and powerful rivals. The king must therefore be maintained as the wealthiest lord of the realm in order to quell any proud rebelliousness among his subjects. In fact, the wealth and well-being of the king is public priority for the sake of political stability. If the good of the entire realm is dependent upon the good of the royal estate, then the corollary is equally true: the good of the royal estate is dependent upon the good of all estates in the realm. As mentioned above, the enrichment of the commons is obviously good for the individual common people, but also crucial for the prosperity of the realm as they can bring more to the royal exchequer that sustains the well-being of the king and realm. Fortescue constantly makes reference to the island nature of England and its openness to attack from the sea. If the commons can equip themselves with bows and arrows, then the defense of the realm is more easily and effectively achieved.

Medieval England 115 To the extent that constitutionalism has begun to penetrate the English realm as an attitude or as a self-understanding, it is England’s achievement. Constitutionalism, being more than a set of mechanisms, should be understood as a civil theology that enshrines the dignity of man and compels the integration of his existential authority into the governance of the realm. Perhaps the greatest symbolism of Fortescue’s notion of the mutuality of goods among the estates is his transfer of the papal designation of servus servorum Dei to the king. If the king is the first servant of the realm then the servant is worth his keep. In general, the transfer of religious symbolism such as servus servorum Dei to the post-Gelasian realm on the fringes of an increasingly irrelevant empire demonstrates the strength of national sentiment at the time and attitudes toward both political existence and the particularization of Christendom into national units. In the specific discussion of England, the meaning of the king as first servant of the realm emerges with a seamless logic from Fortescue’s constitutional attitude. In his discussion of the proruption of a political people, he employs the symbol of mystical body for the realm. Voegelin comments that the transfer of the Christian symbol of corpus mysticum is indicative of the final decline of the Gelasian-medieval Christendom under the closure of the national realms. The general situation was such that the national realms had taken on a meaning whose civil theologies had made the imperial evocation redundant. It is this premium upon a national civil theology that Fortescue formulates. Voegelin discerns that the dismantling of the imperial evocation under the pressure of the national civil theologies extended beyond the political: In the transfer of the corpus mysticum to the realm we can sense the evolution toward a type of political society that will succeed not only to the empire but also to the church. To be sure, these implications were not envisaged by Fortescue even vaguely; but the transfer, nevertheless, pointed toward a representative who will represent society with regard to the whole range of human existence, including its spiritual dimension.57

Voegelin’s comments prove Fortescue’s insight into English civil theology. However, the value of Fortescue’s thought is not only his insight57. Ibid., 43.

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ful reflection upon why England is political and not merely royal, but his absorption and recognition of the realm’s constitutionalism as a civil theology. Fortescue witnesses to a constitutionalism that had long taken root in England and which sought to balance the triangle of political, ecclesiastical, and existential authorities. On one level, English constitutionalism is a political development but, as Fortescue shows, the civil theology out of which it comes is expressed as the intencio populi, an existential assertion that grounds the political and mediates transcendental reality into the living civilizational bedrock.

4 Cr isis a nd Closur e 1 The Isolation of the Sovereign Individual

Eric Voegelin has argued that the evocation of a sacrum imperium had the “effect of weakening the sentiment of distinction between the world and the realm of what is not of this world.” He suggests that the eschatological expectation of the temporal world sinking into oblivion, prevalent in the early Christian experience, had receded rapidly in the medieval period because “the sentiment that the structure of the world was part of the Christian realm was growing; the world had entered the realm of God.”1 Christian civil theology was so evocatively successful that even political authority was now conceived to belong to the charismata of the corpus mysticum. That the whole world could now be gathered up into the “realm of God” laid the groundwork for the gnostic derailment. If transcendental reality could be imaginatively transfigured into a structure of immanent reality, then being could be possessed in a variety of ways, including perhaps epistemologically by possession of esoteric knowledge or politically through fully fledged militancy. In either case, the gnostic intent is to immanentize transcendental reality. The 1. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 108–9.

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problem is one that Voegelin calls metastasis, which he describes as “a vision of the world that will change its nature without ceasing to be the world in which we live . . . [a term] signifying a change in the constitution of being.” He adds: “The constitution of being is what it is, and cannot be affected by human fancies. Hence, the metastatic denial of the order of mundane existence is neither a true proposition in philosophy, nor a program of action that could be executed.”2 Metastatic sentiments are at the forefront of Voegelin’s mind when he mentions the growing medieval assumption that the “world had entered the realm of God” because he emphasizes: “The statement may seem sweeping, but it cannot be sweeping enough, for we find heretical sects going to the pantheistic extreme of justifying personal indulgence in passion, lust, and crime as manifestations of the divine will.”3 In an attempt to penetrate to the experiential root of metastatic expectation, Voegelin asks a relevant question about what the thinkers achieved by their metastatic transfiguration. He answers that “they achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their place in it, which otherwise they would not have had.”4 Certainty about man’s place in being substitutes for both anxiety and the tension of “unknowing” in the act of faith. Voegelin continues: “When the world is de-divinized [by Christianity], communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith.”5 However, this is not to accuse every innovation as a gnosticism and it is important to note that gnosticism as such is not our focus in these chapters. Gnosticism is a generic term for a pattern of thought that has accompanied not just Christianity from the beginning, but also the process of differentiation that Christian revelation set in motion. Obviously there have been a myriad varieties of gnosticism that have appeared 2. Voegelin, Order and History 1, 506. 3. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 109. 4. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 187. 5. Ibid.

The Sovereign Individual 119 as distinguishable sects or doctrines, such as Donatists, Nestorians, Arians, or the later Cathars, Florensians, and so forth; however, gnosticism is less obvious as a pattern of thought influencing individuals and groups, their attitudes, assumptions, and programs of action. If gnosticism is a corruption of Christian revelation, then it is also a corruption of Christianity as a personal and community-building substance. The authorities differentiated by Christianity—the spiritual-transcendental, the political-temporal, and the existential—may be subject to corruption by gnostic patterns of thought. If the influence of gnosticism presents a rival narrative of meaning to that of Christianity, then it does so by subtly changing the meaning of individual, sociopolitical, and historical existence as they have emerged in Christianity. This subtlety is belied by the comprehensiveness of the change of meaning: on the one hand, symbols attached to the “partners in being”—God, man, and the world— such as prayer, ritual, language, appear similar, but the similarity is exploded by the reimagination of the meaning of God, man, and the world into something other than what they are. However, tagging every spiritual, political, and existential corruption with the title “gnostic” is not helpful and sometimes misses the point. Gnosticism is one form of corruption among others, all of which, I suggest, have a common root in the possessiveness of existence, the libido dominandi.6 Possessive lust necessitates a rejection of what cannot be possessed. The way out of the unfortunate predicament is to reimagine the nonpossessable into something that lends itself to possession. Since reality itself cannot be possessed by the libidinous agent, but rather possesses the agent, the agent indulges his lust by closing himself against the very reality he seeks to possess and remaking it imaginatively in his own image. This is metastasis and indeed it constitutes a gnostic corruption which will discussed below under the form of apocalypticism. However, the closure to the whole of being that makes this corruption possible can also be a closure against those parts of being that present obstacles to the agent’s project. In this case, we will explore the closure 6. “Behind the passions there is at work the lust of existence from the depth. . . . In Christian psychology, this [boundless] lust of existence has become the superbia vitae, or libido dominandi, which serves the theologians as the definition of original sin.” See Voegelin, Anamnesis, 106.

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to history as a structure of human reality in favor of an intellectual organization of the world as solution to problems. This is not necessarily gnosticism as generally understood, but does exhibit gnostic tendencies as a pattern of thought in the mode of closure. In any case, the most significant point for our discussion here is that closure to being means the negation of the triad of authorities. The entire triad is threatened when a corruption sets into one of its pillars. The importance of identifying gnostic strands should not be underestimated given the mischief that has been predicated on such strands, mischief that has had murderous results on a vast scale through the centuries. However, the identification of gnostic tendencies in a specific case is not the indictment of a thinker who is thereby accused of being complicit in the crimes of later centuries, but the identification of that corruption that subtly alters the meaning of existence, thus depriving the thinker of genuine existential authority. Our task, then, is to identify how such derailments became possible in the historical context of the medieval mind. Depending on the specific thinker or agent, one or more authorities in the triad may be elevated above the rest and absolutized, and the others subordinated. Political and religious corruption in the form of absolutism will be the subjects of further chapters, but the corruption of existential authority will be analyzed in this chapter and the next: respectively, existential absolutism as a mode of being in closure to reality and the consequent subordination of the political and religious authorities; and the closure to being made manifest in the submergence of human existence under the weight of a higher dignity belonging to an imagined structure in being.

The Tyconian Problem The fourth century Donatist Tyconius held that only one of the elect would enter Heaven. Only a spiritual elite among men belonged to the true corpus mysticum while others belonged to a civitas diaboli. Briefly, Voegelin outlines the nature of the Tyconian problem: The Donatist Church was the true church, according to the Tyconian theory, while the main church, which admitted the fallen brethren, stood outside the true church just as did the pagans. Tyconius went even further and admitted

The Sovereign Individual 121 that within the true church there were imperfect members who did not actually participate in the spiritual corpus mysticum of the saints. Within the visible true church, there was, therefore, an invisible spiritual church of the perfect Christians. . . . The invisible church was the true civitas Dei, while the false brethren, the separati of the main church and the pagans, belonged to another unit, the civitas diaboli, the city of the devil.7

The Tyconian problem that faced Christian symbolism in the early centuries began to reappear with the new existential assertiveness in the eleventh century. Rather than a doctrine like Donatism itself, the Tyconian problem relates to gnostic tendencies of elitism based on the belief in the superior spiritual substance that inheres in an individual.

Cardinal Humbert (d. 1054) Two dominant figures who “book-end” the period under consideration and who succumbed to gnostic tendencies of the Tyconian type were Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida in the eleventh century and John Wycliffe of England in the fourteenth. Cardinal Humbert was one of the early intellectual leaders of the eleventh-century church reform movement whose knowledge of Greek fitted him for the role of papal ambassador to Constantinople. Two notable events marked his career: one was that he ended his legation to Constantinople in 1054 by excommunicating the patriarch, thereby making the centuries-old schismatic trend official; the other was his papal election decree of 1059 that placed the election of the pope in the hands of the cardinals and excluded interference from the emperor and the Roman aristocracy.8 Regarding Wycliffe, in the De Ecclesia and De Contrarietate Duorum Dominorum, Voegelin finds Tyconian doctrines such as universitas electorum and the Antichrist, respectively. A discussion of Wycliffe shall follow an assessment of Humbert.

Simony and the Corpus Diaboli The treatise Libri tres adversus simoniacos (“Three Books against Simoniacs”) was a response to the unsatisfactory situation pertaining to 7. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 1, 213. 8. See Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 254; and I. S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Thought, 265 et passim. For Voegelin’s discussion of Wycliffe, see History of Political Ideas 3, 188–89.

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the practice of laymen buying and selling church goods, known as simony. Jeffrey Burton Russell summarizes Humbert’s position, which was “that the root of evil was lay influence in the Church and that there could be no effective reform unless this were wholly rooted out.”9 The eradication of simony was felt to be necessary for a genuine libertas ecclesiae. The treatise appeared in the decades leading up to the Investiture Controversy and embodies all the vigor that would eventually result in the overhaul of papal and imperial authority regarding the church. Joseph Canning identifies the element of superiority in Humbert’s work: “The king or emperor for him was as a layman no sacral ruler. Clergy were superior to laymen. ‘Just as the soul excels the body and commands it, so too the priestly dignity excels the royal or, we may say, the heavenly dignity the earthly.’”10 This element of superiority in itself was nothing outside the familiar medieval struggle to assert the preeminence of either the royal or the priestly authority over the other. Nonetheless, in the heat of the struggle to reform, the familiarity of Humbert’s assertion of superiority gives way to accusations that fall outside the frame of the traditional argument: abuse of the church—even church property—by an inferior authority amounts to heresy; and heresy involves the diabolic. The buying and selling of the church’s goods by laymen rises to the level of heresy for Humbert as it implies that the Holy Spirit who gives life to the church can be coerced “at the beck of slavish and commercial hands,” compromising the integrity of the true church, part of which includes material goods. Simony as heresy seems to take on the characteristics of a Tyconian-type corpus diaboli. Humbert’s invective is indicative of an intellectual hubris, rigorously pursuing its own logic. With the conception of all-encompassing heresy at work in the custom of simony, Humbert stretches his hubris in the direction of ministerial worthiness. Voegelin identifies the Tyconian element: Humbert [denies] . . . the assumption that the administration of the sacrament will mediate the charisma irrespective of ministerial worthiness. Here we meet with a precise formula for the opposition between sacramental ob9. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Medieval Christianity, 122. 10. Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450, 86.

The Sovereign Individual 123 jectivity as the principle of a mystical body mixed of good and bad (which for that very reason can become the human corpus of a Christian civilization), and the radical postulate of spiritual freedom that of necessity has to distinguish between a pure body of Christ and a mystical counterbody of the devil.11

Spiritual purity in individuals and in the church is the true substance of the mystical body. The intemperance of Humbert’s dialectic brings him to a neo-Donatist position for the eleventh-century world of the sacrum imperium. One must bear in mind that the specific controversy over validity of the sacraments—their intrinsic and objective validity against their dependence on the worthiness of the minister for validity—was an old one that St. Augustine had battled against and was settled by the church’s condemnation of Donatism. What is more, Humbert’s contemporary reformer Peter Cardinal Damian had written his own treatise, Liber gratissimus, arguing that the objectivity of the sacrament lay in the substance of the sacrament which was beyond the personal qualities of the minister. It is unlikely that Humbert was unaware of this, yet he was nonetheless prepared to engage in an intellectual reconfiguration of sacramental validity. Humbert had a justified grievance against simoniac clergy, their supporters, and the political and ecclesiastical structures from which support becomes possible, but the intellectual force of his argument against simony had a severity that demonstrated a peculiar closure to, or an unwillingness to acknowledge, the historical understanding of a mystical body composed of good and bad. For simony to be heretical, it became necessary to jettison the historicism of civil theology that bound together the parts of the medieval world into a civilizational whole and instead to imaginatively posit the ontological division of two communities: one comprised of the heavenly elite and the other of the destructively demonic. Humbert demonstrated a peculiar closure to being and its historical structure through which the process of differentiation unfolds. His logic seemed animated by a violence which ironically pushed his own conclusions into heresy of the Donatist sort, as Voegelin notices: “We are not surprised therefore, to find in the second book, which deals with the structure of history, that the Tyconian problem breaks through with full force. The spiritu11. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 92.

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ally free church is the body of Christ; the simoniacally infected body is the corpus diaboli.”12

Intellectualism and Existential Authority The gnostic temptation to conceptually reconfigure the world by applying an intellectual framework is evident in Humbert’s work. The civil theology of the sacrum imperium held within it the wholeness of being and the correlative coherence of the partners in being: man, God, and the world. It was an imperium that maintained its coherence in spite of the human propensity to weakness and sin. Under the forceful dialectic of Humbert, the wholeness of being is torn apart. Simoniac practice is one element of evil that must be overcome in an act of reform within the corpus mysticum. The gnostic component, following Voegelin’s assessment, amounts to a line of thought that in principle is not far removed from an invisible, Tyconian church of saints which has not only immanentized the transcendental notion of heavenly transfiguration but also engages in acts of cosmic warfare against the demonic. Humbert indicates an intellectualism that was becoming increasingly characteristic of his day. By “intellectualism” is meant a corruption of existential authority, specifically a closure to the historical structure of order. Humbert’s preference for his own intellectual solutions abstracted from the historical development of civil theology and constructed a suprahistorical context for the reform instead: namely, the opposition between the invisible true church with its pure and valid sacraments and the demonic body of the false church, immersed in impurity. By an act of intellectualism, Humbert subordinates the historical dimensions of the simoniac problem to the suprahistorical, and with it the historicity of order as it differentiated via ecclesial, political, and existential authorities. The rejection of historicity in favor of intellectual solutions to problems is effectively the rejection of the Christian foundation of medieval civilization. His treatise against simoniac practices therefore contains components, latent or kinetic, that became a distinguishing mark of the gnostic corruption of existential authority and which ran counter to the civi12. Ibid., 93.

The Sovereign Individual 125 lizing tack of Christianity that could hold saints and sinners together within a sacred imperium. In Humbert, the simoniacs who infect the true church with impurity constitute a false church. This amounts to a corrosion of the historical understanding of the church and its traditions, the rejection of the historicity of human existence, and displays a dangerous hubris acting as the animating spirit. These bear the marks of a gnostic pattern of thought, but this does not impugn Humbert as a gnostic. He was a fiery revolutionary whose personality foreshadowed that of Gregory VII and gnostic strands of meaning suited the trajectory of his critique. As church historian Friedrich Kempf points out, a complete revolution was needed to work out problems like simony and to finally deal with them. “The forms of the life of the early mediaeval religious and political world had become questionable, so that from various sides the duty was imposed on the Church of exploring more exactly her proper activity in the world by virtue of the Sacraments and of their ministers.”13 There were many facets of medieval life that had not yet been worked out; if simony was one, then a theory of the church and ecclesial authority was another, and yet another was the danger posed by the temptation of gnostic patterns of thought that still stood in need of diagnosis as such.

Wycliffe (1324–1384) The pre-Reformation direction of English civil theology is signposted clearly in the work of John Wycliffe. Church historian Karl August Fink offers this statement about Wycliffe’s writings: Moved by the deplorable situation of ecclesiastical administration and by the insecurity consequent upon the outbreak of the Western Schism, he now came forward as [an aggressive] reformer. . . . [He] did not rest content with a criticism of external and superficial things, such as the veneration of relics and saints, auricular confession, purgatory, indulgences, and monasticism, but, proceeding from the lex Dei in Scripture, attacked the theological bases of the mediaeval Church and hence was regarded as one the worst enemies of the hierarchy.14 13. Friedrich Kempf, “Beginning of Reform: German Popes,” in Jedin, History of the Church, 3:355. 14. Karl August Fink, “Wyclif and Hus,” in Beck et al., History of the Church, 4: 444, 446.

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His work contained within it developments that were permeated by the philosophic and political circumstances of the time and reached conclusions that point to the inevitability of the later Reformation. The work of Wycliffe is marked by a spiritual sensitivity to the problems of the time, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an intellectualism that elevates the spiritual authority of the individual in a “state of grace” over the papal magisterium, simultaneously rendering the authority carried by sacred tradition redundant. The state of grace was probably Wycliffe’s most important heuristic tool that he could use to effectively measure the validity of royal authority, papal authority, or the authority of any Christian action. The standards of individual Christian existence in a state of grace become the unassailable touchstone of his work. Wycliffe captures the zeitgeist in that he embodied many of the historical forces that were oscillating in English civil theology particularly and more broadly through the Western civilizational zone. Voegelin notes that Wycliffe’s greatness lies not so much in the profundity of his thought, but in its amplitude. He could capture the most dynamic currents in English society, experienced most intensely among the lower strata of peasants, and raise them to “to the level of the distinguished scholar, the Oxford man, and the man of politics associated with the court.”15 In Wycliffe, there is a degree of existential sensitivity and balance that is strong enough to respond to the forces of the time, but not enough to draw him to either eschatological revolt or mystical withdrawal. His employment of state of grace is the perfect symbol for the degree of eschatology and mysticism in his work, and for the restraint that does not allow him to abandon his realism. It also perfectly symbolizes the degree of eschatology, mysticism, and prudential restraint prevalent in English civil theology at the time. Wycliffe’s theories of civil dominion (or political authority) and of the church’s spiritual authority bear this out.

De Domino Civili and the State of Grace God is lord of the world and all creatures are thereby his servants.16 Lordship and service therefore define the roles of the divine-human re15. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 170. 16. Much of Wycliffe’s thought was preformed by others. In the case of his thought on dominium or ownership, the preformation came through the Franciscan problem of poverty

The Sovereign Individual 127 lationship. He frames the argument in feudal terms, but with the important difference that God does not rule by intermediate vassals. “By this formula Wycliffe attacks on principle the mediating institution of the church and makes every layman a priest holding from God on equal terms of service with every other man.”17 Leaving aside his specific arguments regarding the church, what makes man’s holding or dominion from God possible is his existence in a state of grace and not in a state of mortal sin. “Dominion is then conferred by God in return for the service due to him; he who incurs mortal sin defrauds his lord-in-chief of the service and forfeits his tenure.”18 This is Wycliffe’s elevation of the authority embedded in individual Christian existence and his important condition of being in a state of grace. The endowment of man by God means that dominion is shared by all who are in a state of grace. Wycliffe suggests that this natural dominion, which veers toward a theory of natural communism, must also be qualified by the institution of civil dominion due to the empirical fact of the evil perpetrated by those not in a state of grace. Therefore, he concludes, the institution of political authority is sanctioned by God as a redress against ungodliness and must not be broken. One of Wycliffe’s inconsistencies is evident here in that, while upholding the sanctity of the civil order, he seems to leave its legitimacy hanging somewhat. For example, a leader by common consent cannot be the legitimate leader unless he is accepted by the grace of God; and his acceptance by the grace of God is dependent upon the state of grace of the electing community.19 “Popular election may be the civil rule for electing a magistrate, but under natural law the electing community may be infected in the majority by crime and hence may err in the election (I.29, p. 209).”20 The suspicion of Tyconianism hangs over Wycliffe’s theory of a state of grace as the legitimating authority. The electors may comprise something of a political corpus diaboli, thus invalidating the and especially the treatise De Pauperie Salvatoris by the archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitzralph, who argued that dominion over the world is illicit unless man is purged of Adam’s sin and exists in a state of grace. See ibid., 185. 17. Ibid., 185–86. 18. Ibid., 186. 19. Wycliffe, De Civilo Domino I.18; quoted in Voegelin, ibid, 185–88. 20. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 187.

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leadership to which their candidate has been elected. The question that is left in suspense is whether Wycliffe was formulating a Gelasian-style, Christian political authority or not. Even if he were, however, he undermines his own theory. As Voegelin points out, so far from establishing the sanctity of the civil institutions, Wycliffe undermines them ontologically: the civil order may be the concrete order of the world, but the order of the world is not quite concrete: Wycliffe is in suspense. He cannot accept the civil order unreservedly under a principle of relative natural law, and he cannot condemn it clearly under a principle of absolute natural law. We can feel the eschatological tension, but the revolutionary hope of a Third Realm cannot crystallize into a doctrine. . . . We may speak of a suspended eschatology. Wycliffe’s spiritual sensitiveness is strong enough to let historical reality become shadowy in comparison with the spiritual reality of the divine order; but it is not strong enough to find the way either into personal mysticism or into the prophecy of the realm to come. His spiritual order is neither quite the order of the life hereafter nor quite the obligatory order for this life.21

Voegelin’s comment on Wycliffe’s “suspended eschatology” deserves attention. Wycliffe’s “suspense” reflects a prudence found in much of England’s political development and linked to the enlargement of likemindedness to the realm through national sentiment. The coherence of England as a national society is well established by Wycliffe’s time. Evidence of the prudential virtue that looks to the common good is his willingness to submit to the rule of a reprobate leader who is sanctioned by God. In Wycliffe’s thought, the equilibrium between the temporal and the personal can be maintained even in the case of a king whose rule is corrupt for partly the same reason as Aquinas.

The State of Grace and the Church The inconsistency in Wycliffe’s establishment of autonomy in both the civil order of society and the spiritual order of the individual arises from the deeper inconsistency inherent in his theory of a state of grace. If he can theoretically balance the powers in the case of a criminal king, no such accommodation is realistic in the case of the church. The standard of existence in a state of grace for the ecclesial hierarchy are obvi21. Ibid.

The Sovereign Individual 129 ously much stricter than for political governors. In his De Ecclesia, written in 1376 just after the Great Schism had broken out, the problematic of the state of grace receives further treatment: The Church Militant is now defined as the body of the elect (universitas electorum). The historical church has for its members the reprobate as well as the elect; hence it cannot be the necessarily invisible Militant Church. Christ is the head not of the visible sacramental but only of the invisible Church (De Ecclesia III, p. 58). The “foreknown” on the other hand, form a body with the devil at its head (V, p. 102).22

Extending the influence of the Franciscan Spirituals, Wycliffe claimed that “the possessors of church property were in a state of sin, and so long as they remained therein, they were deprived of their legitimate jurisdiction.”23 De Ecclesia elevates the significance of the state of grace as opposed to the state of sin, and indicates a radicalizing of his thought: The radicalism of the position explodes the structure of the sacramental church; it is more Tyconian than Augustinian in its sectarian implications. The doctrine borders even on Manichean dualism, as can be seen from Wycliffe’s work on the Antichrist, which bears the title De Contrarietate Duorum Dominorum.24

The great civilizational solution to the problem of lay investiture and simoniac bishops and priests, which initiated the Gregorian papal revolution, was achieved on principle centuries earlier by Peter Damien in his Liber gratissimus (1052). In emphasizing the objectivity of the sacramental charisma as issuing from God, he could remove the worthiness of the sacramental minister as a standard of validity. The substance of the charisma remained unaffected by personal unworthiness. The radicalism of Wycliffe picks up on Humbert’s thought and reverses the charismatic objectivity that formed an intrinsic precondition for the function of the church as the unifying spiritual organization of the West. Instead he emphasizes the existential authority of the individual in a state of grace as being a superior spiritual authority to that of the church. Eberhardt describes the results of Wycliffe’s work: 22. Ibid., 188. 23. Newman C. Eberhardt, A Summary of Catholic Thought, 770. 24. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 188.

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Since a superior’s state of conscience is essentially invisible, Wycliffe had practically proclaimed the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its authority indistinguishable and denied the visibility of the Church. After denying as well the divine institution of the papacy and the episcopacy, Wycliffe found it simple to conclude that the judgment of the Church was not necessary in matters of faith, so that individual conviction of faith and private interpretation of Scripture constituted adequate theological criteria.25

Voegelin’s description of Wycliffe’s work is more nuanced than Eberhardt’s. He insists that one of the characteristics of Wycliffe is the radicalizing tempo of his thought that nevertheless rarely becomes radical enough to eviscerate the historicity of society and its institutions. He notes that Wycliffe does not invalidate completely the structure of the sacramental church, but hangs its validity on the state of grace of the pope. The papal state of grace becomes the criterion of his worthiness for the office and the model for the worthiness of the entire episcopal structure. However, Voegelin’s nuances are of dubious value on this occasion. If Wycliffe could maintain an equilibrium between political authority and individual Christian authority by arguing for toleration of a corrupt rule, he effectively obliterates any residual equilibrium between the ecclesiastical and the existential authorities. The charisma of the papal office, and the understanding of its commissioning from Christ, is rejected. Wycliffe maintains the sacramental structure of the church and the Petrine office of the pope but subordinates them to the absolute worthiness of the individual’s state of grace which is ultimately the only valid spiritual criterion. If the pope is in a state of grace, perhaps he can claim to be the head of the Invisible Church Militant, and it follows that the reprobate pope who does not conform to the life and teaching of Christ is not among the elect. However, the distinction between the invisible church of the elect and the visible church of saints and sinners is a Tyconian one that absolutizes the existential and effectively dismisses the historical church by an act of intellectualism. Peter Damien’s counsel for the purity of sacramental charismata regardless of personal worthiness prevented the fracturing of the church in the eleventh century and its rendering into one of several sects. Wycliffe’s emphasis on existential authority alone not only fractures the 25. Eberhardt, A Summary of Catholic Thought, 770–71.

The Sovereign Individual 131 unity of the corpus mysticum by invalidating the ecclesiastical power, but steers him into further spiritual-existential difficulties of predestinarianism. While one is admonished to strive for membership in the Invisible Church through the state of grace, the elect are already saved and the damned already damned. He insists that “God’s immutable decision [precedes] in time the existence of man” but still “admonishes the Christian to live in the hope of salvation and to believe himself a member of the invisible church.”26 The difficulties are evident in his later works on royal and papal powers. In De Officio Regis, he takes a familiar position, insisting that the king represents the divine nature of Christ and the pope his human nature. His theory of the King’s Two Bodies—the natural and the political— indicates that the transfer of the universal corpus mysticum to the English national realm is complete. He draws no specific conclusions, other than declaring the king’s function as vicar of Christ, but always highlights the state of grace. Voegelin notes that “all Wycliffe’s recognition of institutions is permanently to be qualified by his rule that in matters spiritual the last pauper has to be obeyed rather than a pope or an emperor, if the pauper is the better man.”27 A further radicalization of his theory appears after 1378 in his De Potestate Papae where, under the pressure of historical circumstances, he explicitly states that there are two spiritual and two political powers: The first spiritual power is the clerical power to dispense the sacraments; the second, the practice of spiritual deeds of mercy, is shared by all Christians alike. The first political power is the power of the rulers; the second is the general power of the community. All power is from God, and the criterion by which the rightful possession of power is to be known is the righteousness of the incumbent. . . . Who falls into mortal sin, thereby loses his power.28

Recognizing that the relation between the existential authority of individuals in community, or political friendship, and the political authority of the king is less problematic, and that the reprobate ruler must still be obeyed, Wycliffe’s turns his attention to the papacy. Fink characterizes Wycliffe “as an extreme Augustinian.” He writes that “if the papal 26. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 189. 27. Ibid., 191. 28. Ibid.

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bulls compared him to Ockham and Marsilius of Padua, this probably referred less to his philosophy than to the practical danger he implied for the structure of the late mediaeval Church.”29 Although Christ will not abandon his church and the Petrine succession continues, Wycliffe insists that the legitimate individual successor is not necessarily identified with the summepiscopate of Rome. The link between the papacy and Rome is a “human institution, due to the imperial power of Rome and the Donation of Constantine [De Potestate Papae IX].”30 The Tyconian problem arises again, in this case of reprobate electors in the college of cardinals who, by their personal corruption, invalidate the legitimacy of their choice for pope. Wycliffe leaves himself little choice but to turn to magic and superstition: the selection for pope must be left to God directly in the drawing of lots. The “spiritualized papacy” is Voegelin’s term for the modernism of the position that Wycliffe reaches, which is that the papacy must be excised from any temporal, legal jurisdiction in the world. A conclusion to be drawn from Wycliffe’s thought is that the tension that exists directly between temporal-political authority and spiritual-ecclesial authority be extinguished. There is a metastasis of sorts in play here whereby the political and the spiritual become mutually exclusive. The inevitable areas of jurisdictional overlap that the royal and priestly authorities struggled over for centuries are simply ignored. Meanwhile, the reduction of the papacy implies the dismantling of the universal church administration and with it the charism of universal spiritual authority. The worthy pope now embodies the Spirituals’s ideal of poverty and a radical otherworldliness. The de-papalizing of the pope is arrived at conclusively when he states that Christendom would fare better under the headship of Christ himself, as Voegelin describes: The De Christo et suo Adversario Antichristo lists the contrasts between Christ and his vicar in such a manner that the pope appears as the Antichrist. And Wycliffe finds even some good in the Schism itself because Christ by it has graciously split the head of the Antichrist so that the two parts now fight each other.31 29. Fink, “Wyclif and Hus,” in Beck et al., History of the Church 4, 446. 30. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 191. 31. Ibid., 192.

The Sovereign Individual 133 The hubris of existential absolutism signals not just that the soil of Reformation had been prepared, but that it lent itself to Manichean extremes in the same manner that the Tyconianism of Humbert drifted into dangerous civilizational territory.

Apocalypticism By the mid-twelfth century, civil theology had begun to shift to include a new emphasis on the individual and his spiritual and temporal range of action. That range of action was as diverse as the range of individuals themselves and therefore included sentiments and acts on a scale from the orthodox to the outright heretical. As mentioned, the flourishing of the arts, commerce, education, innovation, and so on mark this period. This was a time of new focus on the historical present as a meaningfully new age. Christopher Dawson writes: [The] sense of imminent crisis, of the pressing need for moral reform and spiritual renovation, runs through all the religious thought of the twelfth century. That century which seems to us the Golden Age of medieval Catholicism— the age of St. Anselm and St. Bernard, the age of the Crusades and the Cathedrals, of the new religious Orders and the new schools—appeared to contemporaries dark with the threat of coming doom. . . . The preoccupation with apocalyptic ideas is characteristic of the mind of the twelfth century. . . . These tendencies were by no means a proof of religious or cultural decline. On the contrary, they show how deeply men’s minds had been stirred by the religious awakening and their awareness of the imminence of a new age.32

Dawson is correct when he says that apocalyptic tendencies were not a proof of decline in religion or culture. He locates the apocalyptic with the flourishing of human forces in other areas of late medieval enterprise, suggesting thereby a common root derived from a renewed focus on existence in the world. If existential authority was expressed in the meaningful activity of life in the world, then the meaning of that world was similarly existential in the sense that true meaning must be embodied and lived. Civil theology, as the common body of largely unspoken truths that imbues society with meaning, is a product of social existence that radiates meaning not just in the world, but of the world. Apoca32. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 204–5.

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lyptic sentiments in twelfth-century experience represent a significant avenue in the differentiation of authority in that they display an expectation of a metastatic transfiguration of reality; and because of that apocalypticism signifies a particular form of closure to existence that often tends toward the extreme of outright dogmatic heresy. In Voegelin’s language, if the eschatological sentiment in early Christianity was to “de-divinize” the historically present age, the later gnostic tendency was to “re-divinize” the present.33 What is intended by apocalypticism is the imagined reconstitution of being by the fusion of the transcendentdivine with the temporal-mundane world, all underwritten by an esoteric but corrupt claim of existential authority.

The Anonymous of York (c. 1100) In the last decade of the eleventh century and in the first decade of the twelfth, an anonymous writer in the new Norman kingdom of England produced a series of tracts in support of the superiority of the temporal sword over the priestly sword. Their occasion was the English investiture controversy with its inevitable polarization of supporters of the church from supporters of the king. While Humbert would have supported the church in all matters, the Anonymous of York sides with the king. The basis for enhancing royal dignity is that the royal function of Christ is superior to the priestly redeeming function. We thus have to recognize [in the king] a twin person, one descended from nature, the other through grace. . . One through which, by the condition of nature, he conformed with other men: another through which, by the eminence of [his] deification and by the power of the sacrament [of consecration], he excelled all others. Concerning one personality, he was, by nature, an individual man: concerning his other personality, he was, by grace, a Christus, that is, a God-man.34

As a result, the royal function is superior to the sacerdotal because “Christ as king is equal to God, while as priest he is his inferior. The king reflects . . . the divine nature of Christ, the priest his human nature.”35 Ernst H. Kantorowicz explains that the similarity between Christ the 33. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 175. 34. Norman Anonymous, quoted by Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 46. 35. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 98.

The Sovereign Individual 135 King and his visible kingly vicar in the world is so great that there is only one essential difference: “Christ was king and Christus by his very nature, whereas his deputy on earth was king and christus by grace only.”36 Like Humbert, this argument belongs within the mainstream of arguments within the reform period as a whole, and despite the differences of alliance, they both actively engage in an intellectualism which imaginatively absorbs transcendental reality into the temporal in order to inflate the meaning of one area of reality beyond the historically mediated meaning. The apocalyptic tendency of the Anonymous becomes evident in his treatment of the structure of history as a course proceeding from the paradigm of history in the mind and will of God. For the Anonymous, the world is imbued with spirit because the present is properly constituted as an age which has become the true realm of God. From this it follows that anyone who is a believer is already ruling the world with Christ the king. The believer is already so full of divine spirit that there is no need for the sacramental mediation of the church, which effectively makes the sacerdotal office redundant—at least in the Christian West. That is, the realm of God and the realm of the world have amalgamated so comprehensively that the existence of the believer now carries sufficient spiritual authority that the church’s role as magisterium and sacramental mediator is rendered superfluous. The Anonymous can inflate the royal office because the royal function is divine by grace and therefore superior. The transfiguration of man has already occurred for the Anonymous in the time of the tracts, and furthermore, the Tyconian problem of a corpus diaboli is extended in large part to the church, which is accused of usurping the true spirit of Christianity and leaving in its place the Roman church. As part of a free-flowing interpretation of the content of history, the Anonymous suggests that the Roman church with its bishop as the highest among bishops, for reasons of imperial prestige alone, arrogated authority to itself as a response to the early threat of schisms in order to maintain unity. Once the emergency situation had passed, the Roman sacerdotium did not relinquish its con36. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 47. He highlights that this account of the divine nature of the royal office parallels the later understanding by the Tudor lawyers, and became the basis of late medieval and early modern English kingship.

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trol and as a result had corrupted Christian belief. Voegelin notes that “we can see the line that is running from the York Tracts to Hobbes’s Leviathan with its interpretation of the church as the realm of darkness that obstructs the function of true Christian kingship. The idea of an English national church, free from ‘foreign’ interference, raises its head tentatively.”37 The final age of transfiguration implied by the writings of the Anonymous had now arrived, with its consequences for the meaning of human existence, the transcendence of the divine, and the structure of the world. The dualism of reality between a realm of light, concentrated in the imaginative symbol “true kingship,” and a realm of darkness, was matched with the symbolic employment of a tripartite division of history. Echoing Paul’s threefold interpretation of the Law from pagan law, through the Mosaic Law, to the Law of the Spirit, the Anonymous extends the symbolism: The first age is that of the Old Testament with its prefiguration of general priesthood and kingship; the second is that of the New Testament with the true and general priesthood of the believers and the true priesthood and kingship of Christ; and the third is the age of true kingship and the reign of Christ the king with his believers. “The Scriptures promise everywhere to the faithful the kingdom (regnum) of Heaven, and nowhere the priestdom (sacerdotium).”38 Aside from the nontraditional and ahistorical interpretation of Scripture, this statement by the Anonymous demonstrates that for him the royal principle far exceeds the now redundant priesthood because the world, which is synonymous with Christendom, is full of the divine spirit; and the priesthood of everyman marks the new age, presided over by the king, who is “God and Christ by Grace.” The apocalyptic sentiments are indicative of a new age in which the existence of man has become spiritually superior to the spiritual substance of the church due to the metastatic transfiguration of the immanent world. The meaning of existence— temporal and transcendental—has changed in the apocalyptic lens through which the Anonymous looks. 37. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 100. 38. Quoted from Tractatus Eboracenses, ed. Böhmer, 667, in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 99.

The Sovereign Individual 137 Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) The Readability of History Much of the initial reforming sentiment and action spilled out of the monasteries, as we have seen with Cluny, which was followed by the rise of various orders such as the Cistercians. With a growing focus on the historical present, the structure of the new saeculum became increasingly topical. The experience of a new age was probably most acute in the monasteries which had been the institutional innovators of existential developments among the peoples of Europe for centuries. The idea and action of the monastery was a visible witness to its own spiritual core. However, the monastic was not invulnerable to existential corruption. By the time of Joachim of Fiore, the prehistory of apocalyptic thinking had included speculation on the meaning of history as we have just seen with the esoteric paradigms of Anonymous of York at the turn of the twelfth century. It is in this context of an evolutionary process of thought that Joachim of Fiore appeared as a culmination.39 Voegelin gives this summary of his thought: The principal idea of Joachim can be briefly formulated thus: the history of the world is articulated by the successive appearances of three realms, the realm of the Father reaching from Adam to Christ, the realm of the Son reaching from Christ to 1200, and the Third Realm of the Spirit reaching from 1200 to the Day of Judgment.40

What is remarkable is the consistent use of the Trinity as a tripartite division of history. Using a Trinitarian rubric to interpret historical existence was a method employed by various thinkers from antiquity. As Herndon notes: In the Gospel of Matthew, the generations to Christ were reckoned in three groups, each encompassing fourteen generations (1:1–17). The logic of the identities of the Holy Trinity lent itself to divisions of three. Thus, Irenaeus was the first patristic leader to divide history into three ages and natural phenomena into three types. In the Manichean heresy, the struggle between the 39. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 127–28. See also Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 204. Dawson gives a fine list of twelfth-century thinkers that indicates the unfolding of speculation on history as a line of thought and locates Joachim of Fiore at the end as the culmination of this line. 40. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 126.

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opposing forces of light and darkness passed through three stages. Even Saint Augustine had appropriated the use of the number three for the divisions of human affairs and the human qualities necessary for their study.41

Voegelin notes that the method of symbolism is the spiritalis intellegentia, the spiritual understanding of the world content by subsuming it under sacred principles such as the Trinity, the hexaemeron, the generation groups of Hebrew history, etc. . . . The movement of symbolic thought has to originate in the realm of sentiments determining the purpose to which the symbolic method is to be put.42

For most Christians in medieval Europe, the Trinitarian scheme of history was taken for granted as the only valid hermeneutic framework, but “the mystical revelation of Joachim would give the symbol a resonance that would move through history.”43 With the appearance of the thought of Joachim, the corruption of existence in the West found its most enduring and intoxicating symbolism. The corruption in Joachim’s thought was clearly a gnosticism, and his followers constituted a gnostic sect. History is conceived as proceeding on an intelligible course that, with the possession of interpretive knowledge or gnosis regarding historical structure, can be read and its direction understood. Joachim was the first of many gnostic prophets who stood at the end of a line of time equipped with the knowledge to interpret the meaning of history. For Joachim, each of the three ages or realms has a similar internal structure: The completed course of the first realm furnishes the pattern by which we can understand the structure of the second realm that is nearing its completion. We are able to determine exactly the point at which we have arrived at the present, because we know the law governing the whole course, and we can even make predictions concerning future events.44

Regarding the structure of each age, there is a preparatory period lasting twenty-one generations, an initial period (initiatio) lasting twenty-one generations and a period of fruition (fructificatio) also lasting twenty-one generations. However, the last period of an age functions as the prepa41. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 88. 42. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 126–27. 43. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 88. 44. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 129.

The Sovereign Individual 139 ratory period of the next, so that each age lasts forty-two generations.45 Joachim calculates that the second age of Christ will end in 1260, but that his own day of 1200 is the beginning of the two precursor generations of the new age, analogous with Zachariah and John the Baptist—each generation lasting about thirty years. This beginning time of precursor generations has its own internal structure too that gives the new age a trinity of leaders: two precursor leaders from each of the two precursor generations and an ultimate leader for the new age. “The Third Realm, following Joachim, will open, therefore, with two precursors to be followed in the third generation by a new leader, a dux e Babylone, who will become the founder of the Realm of the Spirit.”46 Voegelin remarks on the “restraint” of Joachim and other millennial thinkers who speculated within the dominant civilizational arc of Christendom and who faced themselves with the problem of the symbolic leadership of the new saeculum. After all, if Christ was the dux of the Christian age, who would be the new Christ for the third age? The new leader would necessarily have to replace Christ within the logic of a Third Realm. That is, the Third Realm would have to open with the appearance of a new Messiah.

The Destabilization of Symbols The gnostic corruption of symbols exerts its influence through the apparent similarity of sentiment to Christian experience, but has the attraction of greater certitude than the existential tension of Christian faith. The mystery of historical existence is replaced in Joachim’s case by the readability of history. If history as an epistemic code replaces mystery, then existence itself is reimagined as a secret playbook of sorts. The “partners in being”—God, man, the world—are the agents of historical existence and necessarily undergo a transformation in their meaning. The abandonment of traditional meaning of those symbols that had originally emerged in Christian revelation and existential openness to being within the civilizational zone of Christendom did not have to lead to the development of a new set of symbols for a new set of meanings. Rather, “God,” “man,” “the world,” and related symbols are retained 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 130.

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as symbols but suffer a corruption of their meaning. The meaning of “God,” for example, blends into the divine transfiguring force according to a predetermined schedule, while “the world,” now transfigured, is no longer the world of space-time but has undergone something of an ontological change which includes the human substance of “man,” now perfected as a god-man. The gnostic tendency to destabilize symbols is evident from the treatment of Christ as the leader of a dying saeculum. The reinvention of one partner in being—here, the divine partner—destabilizes the other partners in being by necessity as each partner holds its meaning in tension toward the others. With the reimagination of Christ, the reworking of the structure of the world, and through the immanentization of the process of history, Joachim’s logic impels a rearticulation of man from his classic-Christian meaning of imago Dei, updated to a more fitting model for the new age. Voegelin remarks on Joachim’s need for a more perfect version of man that suits the new saeculum of the Spirit, describing it as both revealing and disappointing: “It is revealing because it supplies us with a classical instance of . . . [an] idea born out of a [monastic] community experience and it is disappointing because the choice of the experience is so narrow that the evocation could not become effective on a broader historical scale.”47 Let us examine these two characteristics. The community experience was the Cistercian monastic community that served as the ideal model for the new man and his religious and moral autonomy. From this, a set of political ideas must have taken shape. The social effect of a Cistercian abbey included spiritual reform and liberation from feudal bonds due to the sheer size of its economic enterprises. Voegelin hypothesizes that “Cistercianism must have had a function for the lower stratum of feudal society comparable to that of the Calvinism for the rising bourgeoisie and of Marxism for the worker of the nineteen century.”48 In this way, the model of life that it represented could have counterposed the freedom and autonomy of monasticism to a world suffering from a crisis of meaning. “On the level of Bernardian spiritualism it presented a counterworld of solidarity, simplicity, poverty, and working discipline, embodying evangelical spirit more truly than the secular 47. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 133. 48. Ibid.

The Sovereign Individual 141 clergy and the feudal church.”49 Joachim founded the Florensians as the embodiment of the new perfection which the Rule of St Benedict and the reforming zeal of Cistercian monasticism could not match, founded as it was in the Christian understanding of existence. If the First Realm is characterized by the predominance of the Law and the life of the layman, the Second by grace and the active-contemplative life of the priest, the Third Realm with its metastatic infusion of Spirit will see the perfection of man through the contemplative life of the monk. His method of ­spiritalis intelligentia, following the course of Old and New Testaments, the ages of the Father and the Son, will be succeeded by the New Order and the elements of contemplation, liberty, and spirit. As Voegelin writes, the four Gospels of the age of the Son will be superseded by the evangelium aeternum as announced by Rev. 14:6. It will not be a written Gospel but the spirit in its actuality transforming the members of the order into members of the Realm . . . without the mediation by sacramental channels of grace. The church will cease to exist in the Third Realm because the charismatic gifts, necessary for the perfect life, will reach man without the priestly administration of the sacraments.50

The disappointment of which Voegelin has spoken in relation to the man of the new saeculum stems from the implication that human perfection is now the order of the day. There is no need for the mediating function of the church as man has now transformed into an autonomous and free being at the level of spirit due to the metastatic infusion of the Holy Spirit. While materially man remains man, his specific form has become divine. Joachim’s magical imagination projects a brotherhood of god-men to replace the lesser form of men evident at the end of the Second Realm. The dignity of Second Realm man is to be replaced by the superior dignity of the Third Realm. Language like this raises the specter of the ideological devastation that was to follow centuries later, but for the moment, Voegelin highlights the limitations of Joachim’s work: The Third Realm is made up of a religious elite. The civilizational compromise that gives Christianity effectiveness in the world is lost; the new realm has no room for the weaknesses of man, nor for the variety of his natural gifts. The human wealth of the corpus mysticum idea is lost in the aristocratic 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 134.

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egalitarianism of spiritually mature persons. The evocation of Joachim could result in a sect, but not in the organization of a people.51

The freethinking Joachim was symptomatic of his day: the bifurcation of reason from faith, the rejection of tradition, and the malleability of symbols derived from Christian revelation. All of this occurred within the civilizational context of the sacrum imperium that still endured, but was fast becoming an anachronism as a civil theology. With the corruption of Christian symbols, the Christian meaning of human existence was corrupted too. To the extent that apocalypticism gained traction as a line of meaning within civil theology, confusion about the meaning of Christendom increased. Under examination, the confusion is the by-product of an evocative complex of problems, all of which were erupting out of the traditional order and uncovering an exciting, but unchartered, territory. The most dominant included the inadequacy of the sacrum imperium as a civil theology to meet the existential need for meaning, even while the traditional Gelasian order persisted in institutional authorities, the assertion of existential authority that antagonized the traditional sacrum imperium by generating new truths in civil theology; and the gnostic degradation of Christian symbols. The potent mixture constituted a crisis in medieval civil theology as Christendom reached a saturation point and began to spill over into a new age driven by the dangerous and uncontainable assertion of existence.

The Persistence of Apocalypticism At the time of Joachim and into the thirteenth century, the advent of the new Messiah was restrained somewhat by the arc of Christian meaning that stretched over Western civilization. Voegelin notes that the appearance of Saint Francis seemed to validate the apocalyptic vision of Joachim. There was an apparent symbiosis between the two in the minds of contemporaries: not only could Francis be the dux who would appear to lead the world into Joachim’s new age of the Spirit, but “the prophecies of Joachim had furnished the symbolic pattern”52 for the recognition of Francis as the herald of a new epoch. However, if Saint Francis 51. Ibid. 52. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 135.

The Sovereign Individual 143 could be thought of as the new Messiah by apocalyptic thinkers, it was only because his imitation of Christ was so complete. Apocalypse therefore met resistance in the Christian wholeness of being that still endured in civil theology. The interpretive method of spiritalis intelligentia furnished Joachim with a framework to read history, enabled by compromising transcendental reality by an imaginative epistemic act and by redefining being through the prism of magic. Voegelin notes that “[t]he meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.”53 Of course, the structure of being in its transcendental, spatiotemporal, and human dimensions remains the same no matter what course metastatic redefinition takes. In the later phases of the Western form of apocalypse, the flowering of the gnostic sentiment developed from an immanentization of the transcendental to a rejection of the transcendental. In the closed existence of the alienated speculator . . . the thinker must now, in Nietzsche’s phrase, extend grace to himself. He must develop a “divided self,” with one self acting the role of “man” who suffers the human condition and the other self acting the role of “God” who brings salvation from it. . . . The man who performs the feat combines in his person the two natures of God and man in the sense of the Definition of Chalcedon; he is the new Godman, the new Messiah.54

The experience of apocalypticism had two influential effects: the first was the breakdown of meaning in traditional symbols as they had emerged historically, such as the reinvention of God, man, and the world and the elaboration of other symbols, such as a third age, a dux, a prophet, and so on to capture the metastasis. The result was an ambivalence of meaning in civil theology that hovered between an outmoded Christendom and an ecstatic expectation of a future dispensation. The second effect was the intoxication of a future just about to be realized. The creation of a new age of the perfect was therefore dependent on the generation of a divinized immanent reality that occluded the transcendent ground of being by its absorption into the third age. The reappear53. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 185–86. 54. Voegelin, Order and History 4, 320–21.

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ance of the third age symbolism through history underlines the potency of apocalyptic sentiment and the menace that its practitioners represent. The National Socialist Dritte Reich that would last one thousand years is most obvious, but the notion of Russia as the Third Rome is also redolent with apocalypse. In a letter from Filofei of Pskov to Ivan the Great, the end of history comes into sight: The church of the first Rome fell because of the godless heresy of Apollinaris. The gates of the second Rome at Constantinople were smashed by the Ishmaelites. Today the holy apostolic church of the third Rome in thy Empire shines in the glory of Christian faith throughout the world. Know you, O pious Tsar, that all empires of the orthodox Christians have converged into thine own. You are the sole autocrat of the universe, the only tsar of all Christians. . . . According to the prophetic books all Christian empires have an end and will converge into one empire, that of our gossudar, that is, into the Empire of Russia. Two Romes have fallen, but the third will last, and there will not be a fourth one.55

Apocalyptic sentiments contain within them the disintegration of the human-divine relationship and, in its place, temporal-mundane structures: the immanentization of the transcendent and the divinization of man and/or the world. The possessiveness of existence, or libido dominandi, increasingly began to provide an anti-Christian corpus of symbolization with which to confront procivilizational symbolism such as law and governance that emerge from the Christian differentiation of authority. The degraded symbols catch the rising absoluteness of man’s possession of existence which amount to a closure against differentiation and the process in being from which it unfolds. On the other hand, existential openness to the transcendent ground of being is played out in the fragility of its various modes of faith, hope, and love. It is a fragility that shapes a philosophic-spiritual attitude and expresses the unknowability of the whole of being by the part. However, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, existence in mystery met with existence in possessive knowledge under the form of gnosis. The spectacle of pro- and anti-Christian symbols converging in the civilizational environment of 55. Quoted by Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, 181. For a thorough analysis of the problem in the German case, see also Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 7).

The Sovereign Individual 145 late medieval Europe reflects the increasing range of human experience in the broadening of society and personal ranges of action. However, the convergence also presages the dangerous extremes to which the corruption of existence could go, particularly as apocalyptic sentiment came to acquire potestas. For example, in a passionate criticism of Marx, Voegelin writes, “In the imaginary reality of the [apocalyptic] ideologists, this killing of men in revolutionary action is supposed to produce the much desired transfigurative, or metastatic, change of the nature of man as an event in ‘history.’ . . . Revolutionary killing will induce a Blutrausch, a ‘blood-intoxication’; and from this Blutrausch ‘man’ will emerge as ‘superman’ into the ‘realm of freedom.’”56 For the medieval mind, though, totalitarian devastation still lay several centuries into the future. For our purposes, it suffices to say that the autonomous and sovereign individual—in the modes of both openness and closure toward existence—had become a permanent feature of Western civilization in the late medieval period. However, it should be noted that, despite apocalypticism’s withering effect on the cogency and coherence of existential, political, and spiritual authorities, the civilizational heritage under attack has proven to be capable of being provoked and sharpened in response. 56. Voegelin, Order and History 4, 319.

5 Cr isis a nd Closur e 2 The Submergence of Existence

If the absolutizing of existential authority and the consequent corruption of the triad of authorities was the theme of the last chapter, then this chapter looks at the inverse of the individual sovereignty through the work of Siger of Brabant, Dante, and Marsilius of Padua. What emerges is, of course, another form of closure to reality with another degradation of symbols of the partners in being—man, God, and the world—that, to different degrees, falls outside the historicism of Christianity, but this time subordinates man—that is, existential authority—beneath a superior principle of authority. The popular name given to this form of closure is Averroism, after the Muslim philosopher Averroës. It should be said that caution is advised in this regard: closure and openness symbolize differentiation that occurs in Christian revelation. The unfolding of the Muslim mind represents a different, sui generis, set of problems. When we use the term “Averroism,” we are specifically referring to the transfer of a pattern of thought from a non-Christian environment to a civil theology that has been formed by Christianity. The term relates to that area of Averroës’s thought that locates the 146

The Submergence of Existence 147 intellect in the eternal human species. For Averroës, the “intellect is one in all [human beings].”1 The eternal, nondegradable substance that the single person individuates is the specific strand of Averroist thought that is referred to here. “Averroism” can refer to other doctrines that Averroës and the Latin Averroists held, including the denial of immortality and the duality of truth in its two forms of reason and revealed religion, but our focus in this chapter is on the collectivist dimension. Therefore, while acknowledging the other shades of Averroism, it is to be stated that “Averroism” is the most suitable hermeneutic term for the characteristic submergence of human existence beneath the weight of a greater collective reality. It will be applied here to relate this element of submergence to the tendency of significant medieval thinkers to overlook the significance of the individual and speculate about a higher collective, ultimately squashing the dignity of existence. The choice of thinkers whose writings demonstrate the Averroist component is not free of controversy. John B. Morrall rejects the notion that either Dante or Marsilius were Averroists. He states that “all attempts to reconstruct a so-called political Averroism from the works of Dante or any other medieval thinker have been quite unreal.” He goes on to say that Averroës himself never wrote a “personal system of political philosophy,” commenting mainly on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For Morrall, there was no “Averroist scheme of thought. To try to find . . . influences of such a hypothetical scheme in the statements of Dante or Marsiglio seems a rather futile speculative exercise.”2 The response given here is to acknowledge the controversy over who was and was not an “Averroist.” However, as noted in the beginning of chapter four, lines of meaning or patterns of thought are what are of importance here, not systems, schemes, doctrines, or schools. Morrall is correct in stating that neither Dante nor Marsilius are “Averroists,” but there are certainly Averroist lines of thought present in their work which are examined here.

1. Averroës, “Long Commentary on the De Anima,” in Hyman and Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 331ff. 2. John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 100.

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The Reception of Aristotle and Islamic Influences The introduction of Aristotle’s work from Islam into the civilizational orbit of the West was the occasion for another pattern of thought to challenge the Christian basis of civil theology. The Philosopher’s writings and the commentaries that accompanied them contained many propositions that were incompatible with those of Christian dogma. In the intellectual climate of the times, a rival narrative presented a stimulating alternative to Christian symbols, while at the same time it was suppressed as heretical. These contrary responses were evidenced in the University of Paris’s teaching the Commentaries of Averroës and in the 219 propositions of heresy condemned by Bishop Tempier (1277), respectively. A third response to the Aristotelian corpus was represented by Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in which the recognition that this rival narrative was useful and was not going to go away necessitated a serious attempt at assimilation. Albert and Thomas were motivated by their confidence that Christianity was already constituted by the fullness of truth and consequently had nothing to fear from Aristotle. It was their belief that Christianity contained within it the tools to synthesize everything in Aristotle that was truthful and expose all that was false. The variety of responses to Aristotle indicates the vitality of the intellectual climate of the time and says something about the elasticity of civil theology itself which permitted those opposing forces to occur. In the aftermath of the Gregorian revolution and its institutional upheaval, the church was no longer the sole agent of civil theology but gradually became one authoritative force within Christendom among others: quite apart from the multiplicity of kingdoms and principalities that had arisen, this was the age of universities, commerce and communes, and sects. The response to Aristotle in the thirteenth century was variegated, tumultuous, and indicative of the shift in civil theology away from an evocative sacrum imperium.3 3. See also H. Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade, 325ff. For a longer discussion of the impact of Aristotle on the intellectual life of the medieval West, see Hans Wolter, “The Flowering of Scholasticism and of the Western Universities,” in Beck et al., History of the Church, 4: 246ff. Also see David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 139ff.

The Submergence of Existence 149 The Islamic Background Due to the Arabic transmission of Aristotle, it is well to look firstly at the Islamic background to the reception of Aristotle. Peter von Sivers notes the attitude of Islamic thinkers toward Aristotle: “For some Muslims, notably Averroës (d. 1198), Aristotle was the perfection of humanity and the founder of a religion of the intellect equal, if not superior, to what is viewed as the common man’s religion of images contained in the Koran.”4 In the orbit of early Islam, Voegelin writes, “philosophy had become . . . a form of life for an intellectual elite. . . . ‘Philosophizing’ [became] a style of existence.”5 The falāsifa were the scholars “who based their studies on the body of Greek philosophy that went in Islamic civilization mainly under the name of Aristotle.”6 However, “we have to understand the Aristotelianism of the Islamic falāsifa with some qualification.” The Islamic scholars focused on the twelfth book of Metaphysics and the third book of De Anima as transmitted by the Commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias without much attention being paid to other areas of his work. In fact, areas of Aristotle’s work that challenged the mysticism of the faylasūf were overlooked and substituted with Neoplatonism.7 Voegelin sums up the Aristotelian corpus for the falāsifa: The keystone of the canon was the so-called Theology of Aristotle, an abridged paraphrase of the last three books of the Enneads of Plotinus. Neoplatonic mysticism and the Commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias to the De Anima formed the dynamic center of Islamic philosophy. . . . They made possible the evolution of the idea of the Active Intellect as an emanation from God arousing to activity the passive intellect of man. The aim of human life is in this system the achievement of the complete union, the ittisāl, of the human intellect with the Active Intellect. Behind the dry technical formula of the oneness of the Active Intellect in all human beings lies a mystical experience and a welldeveloped religious attitude giving their meaning to the theoretical issues.8 4. Von Sivers, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 13. 5. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 181. 6. Ibid., 183. 7. One area that was largely omitted by the Islamic philosophers was the political. This may well have to do with the religious meaning that Islam attaches to the political. See my concluding remarks on Islam below. The falāsifa were motivated by a desire to go the spiritual heart of the religious. 8. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 184.

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The inevitable consequence of understanding Aristotle in such a way as to attribute to him the “glory of Plato’s Republic and . . . the theology and mysticism of Plotinus”9 was to mythologize him. Averroës sums up this Aristotle: “I believe that this man has been the rule of nature, and the prototype that nature created in order to make visible the limit of human perfection in this world.”10 For our purposes, the appearance of this mythical Aristotle in the West through the meditations of the falāsifa is the important point, as Voegelin states: It was not primarily the content of [Aristotle’s] work that created the disturbance; the Aristotelian results could be assimilated as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas demonstrated. The danger was the mythical Aristotle as a new spiritual authority of equal rank with the Christian revelation and tradition.11

In this case, the invocation of the mythical Aristotle as the final authority on matters philosophical led to an inevitable clash with the traditional spiritual authority of the church. Hans Wolter describes the link between the mythical Aristotle and Western thought: Toward the middle of the [thirteenth] century Averroes had supplanted Avicenna in the scholarly world as the commentator of Aristotle. The turning of the philosophers to him developed at Paris into a vigorous movement. . . . Its leader was Siger of Brabant, one of the most important interpreters of Aristotle of that time, independent in judgment and of constructive intellectual powers.12

We will follow Voegelin’s account of Siger of Brabant for the following purpose: to ascertain his transformation of the meaning of man, God, and the historicism of the world, and the consequences of such a shift within the context of a crisis of meaning in civil theology.

9. Ibid., 185. 10. Ernest Renan, Averroës, 54ff., and Pierre Felix Mandonnet, Siger, 153ff; quoted by Voegelin in History of Political Ideas 2, 185. 11. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 185. 12. Hans Wolter, “The Flowering of Scholasticism and of the Western Universities,” in Beck et al., History of the Church, 4: 256–57.

The Submergence of Existence 151 Siger of Brabant (c. 1235–1285) God and Man In Siger there is a “confusion of sentiment” in the confrontation of his Averroism and Christianity. “Siger gives preference to the truth of faith even if it conflicts with the results of philosophy.”13 For example: “This, we say, is the opinion of the Philosopher concerning the union of the intellective soul with the body; but if the opinion of the holy Catholic faith is contrary to the opinion of the Philosopher we wish to prefer it in this instance as in others.”14 Reason now belongs to “the Philosopher” and conspicuously not to the orbit of Christian faith. The rational incoherence of faith and the inconsistency of reason with revelation lead to a contradiction that Siger maintains is futile to try to reconcile. As Burton Russell puts it, “We must accept both truths, each in its compartment, and not try to synthesize them.”15 Nonetheless, if he does not attempt a synthesis of faith and reason, he does attempt an integration of sorts when he insists on a preference for the truths of faith. However, while Siger prefers the authority of faith over reason, there do not seem to be any discernible grounds for preferring faith over reason all of the time or some of the time, or indeed for preferring reason over faith. The explicit bifurcation of faith and reason from each other in Siger indicates a civilizational schism: the umbrella of Christian symbols was still in place, but the rational faculty of human intellect operated as a cognitive instrument within its own autonomous sphere. The compartmentalization of reason effectively implied a correlative compartmentalization of faith, the major consequence of which is to shut the individual off from the process of differentiation in being. It amounted to a corruption of existential authority, the authority by which—ironically—the compartmentalization and shutting down was asserted. If the substance of faith has no ratio and reason has no orientation, then Siger’s type of philosopher ends up arguing potentially perilous positions that Voegelin characterizes: 13. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 188–89. 14. Siger de Brabant, Quaestiones de anima intellectiva, in Mandonnet, Siger, 156ff ; quoted by Voegelin in History of Political Ideas 2, 189. 15. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Medieval Christianity, 179.

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The situation reaches the critical point in the discussion of the immortality of the soul, which Siger denies on rational grounds: if any philosopher should argue to the contrary, the answer would be that just as man can understand things that animals cannot there are “prophetic men” who have knowledge of things that the “common reason” of man cannot reach but has to accept on the testimony of prophets.16

Prophecy stands in opposition to common reason which common people must simply accept without asking for proper justification. In the place of the corpus mysticum, with its charismata of gifts spread over the whole of humanity, there is now a process of elevation of a prophetic elite and the relegation of those with nothing more than common reason to a lesser order of humanity. There is a creeping existential menace in the loss of Christianity that is evident in the intimations of misanthropic sentiment. Voegelin catalogues the impact of the loss of Christianity as a spiritual authority and transcendental experience: The denial of the creation of the world in time, the denial of the individual imperishable soul, the denial of a life beyond, the denial of otherworldly reward or punishment for action in this world, the denial of a summum bonum other than the felicity that can be reached within the range of earthly existence are principal negations establishing the world as an immanent structure without relation to a transcendent reality in the Christian sense.17

Ultimately Siger’s thought constitutes a rejection of the dignity of human existence. The illumination of the individual by transcendental reality which forms each person is negated through the rejection of Christianity that has differentiated transcendence. In contrast to a thinker like Aquinas, who can say in his Summa contra gentiles that “the order of things in Truth is the order of things in Being,” Siger’s bifurcation of faith and reason points to a breakdown in the experience of wholeness in being. When God’s nature can be penetrated and grasped by self-appointed “prophets” who operate from their own private assumptions, one is reminded of Heraclitus’s sleepwalkers: “Therefore one must follow (the universal Law, namely) that which is common (to all). 16. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 189. 17. Ibid., 190. Each of the above denials are not explicitly set out in a systematic manner by Siger, but are characteristic of the new “philosophical” attitude. Voegelin points to the list of 219 propositions condemned by Bishop Tempier in 1277 as elucidating the problem. For a complete list of the propositions, see Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 335–54.

The Submergence of Existence 153 But although the Law is universal, the majority live as if they had understanding peculiar to themselves ” (B2) and “those who are awake have a world one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their private worlds” (B89).18 The problem centers on the immanentization of the transcendent God who now reveals truth to the private prophetic souls of the new philosophers. It follow that the souls of the common people are bereft of God in the sense of not participating in divine transcendence. Siger does not state it explicitly, but the implication is that the common people do not participate in the Godhead because they are not ontologically capable. The prophetic soul of the philosopher, on the other hand, seems to constitute no less than a higher being, deflating the common man as a lower form of life. The assertion of a libido dominandi removes the philosopher to a private world, closed to the common substance of the Heraclitean logos. From the inverted world of the new philosopher’s private perspective, judgment upon the common people is formed and pronounced. The absurd situation is characterized by a fracturing of human existence in immediacy under God and the historical development of civilization. In short, there is no history, only the eternal division between the prophetic philosopher and the idiota.

The Collective Intellect The situation of an eternal divide between the higher and lower humans requires an explication of the eternal substance in which the divide is located. Voegelin outlines the Averroism of Siger’s answer: The intramundane conception of man requires an idea of mankind that is at variance with the Christian transcendental conception. The idea of mankind as the mystical body of Christ is replaced by the idea of the human species as a collective unit existing through the process of generation from eternity. No individual soul, furthermore, gives form to the body, but the Intellect uno in numero, one in number, operates on the human beings.19

The biological and intellectual collective of human existence represents the ultimate metaphysical dissipation of man: the individual becomes an individuation of an eternal substratum. The denigration of the common man is due to his unknowing participation in the collec18. Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 24, 28. 19. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 191–92.

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tive intellect. Voegelin notes that this hierarchical notion of humanity arises from “an inclination to treat the non-philosophical man as an inferior type and even to compare him to animals, an attitude that seems to crop up as soon as the Christian insight into equal spiritual dignity of all men is abandoned.”20 The collective intellect constitutes the soul of mankind, a universal sentiment that gained expression in the rather arcane orbit of medieval Latin Averroism. However, with the particularization of the West into a multitude of realms and principalities, this universalism of the collective underwent its own particularization. Man, modified now into an element within a deeper collective—whether universal or particular—is now ready to be flattened by the absolutist movements in politics in later centuries, not to mention consumed by the modern ideological juggernauts in the guise of mass movements that claim the elitism of embodying the collective soul. The corruption of existential authority has resulted in the absurd situation of a power grab by an elite who seek to dominate, control, or deny existence. The notion of an anima intellectiva has been influential for later thinkers due to two aspects of mankind’s constitution by it: In the first place, the quality of oneness in the collective, that substitutes for the openness of transcendental reality, delimits mankind as an enclosed unit. In the second place, the natural process of human generation is an eternal process by which the eternal unit, mankind, participates in the deeper collective reality. If we focus on the first aspect—the oneness of the human unit—the oneness of mankind’s political organization suggests itself and the evocation of a world empire becomes a logical solution. The world empire that corresponds to the universality of the collective intellect was realized in Dante’s evocation of a world monarchy. If we focus on the greater dignity of the collective, the transmission of the species becomes at most a qualified good, with the advocacy of war, population control, and the occasional culling seeming necessary at times.21 The series of polities which come and go, in peace and war, but which are based on the same collective substance for their political legitimacy through time is the evocation of Marsilius of Padua. “The Defensor Pacis [of Marsilius] has to be ranked, therefore, with the Monarchia of Dante; 20. Ibid., 192. 21. Ibid, History of Political Ideas 3, 99–100.

The Submergence of Existence 155 the two treatises together represent the potentialities of the Averroism in politics.”22 Voegelin’s analysis of Averroist collectivism provides the rubric under which to discuss important elements in the writings of both Dante and Marsilius, with the advisory that the potentialities of Averroism have a longer reach than mere politics.

Dante (1265–1321) Cantor summarizes the enduring significance of Dante: Dante Alighieri . . . was in many ways a transitional figure. Dante has often been depicted as the poet who put the Summa Theologica in verse, as a fervent disciple of Thomas Aquinas. There are plausible grounds for this view; undoubtedly Dante was heavily influenced by Thomistic doctrine. But he was also sympathetic to some of the views of the Averroists, and in his approach to political thought there is a new note of radical voluntarism that strongly contradicts Thomistic political doctrine. . . . He was reaching out to new intellectual horizons that were not yet clearly perceptible. He oscillated between the extremes of traditional medieval doctrine and audacious radicalism, signifying the dilemma of the new generation of late medieval thinkers.23

That Dante was a pivotal character whose writings reflect the inner turbulence of high medieval civil theology somehow downplays his literary genius, but his contribution to letters and to the development of humanism is a consequence of a finely tuned, pious, and prodigiously welleducated mind, sensitive to a future that lay just beyond the agonies of the present.

Existential Authority in Dante The Gelasian arrangement became anachronistic as soon as the assertion of the existential authority of the Christian individual began to disrupt the sacrum imperium paradigm. We have seen how, in the experience of spiritual authority, the persona sacerdotalis no longer dominated the sphere of spirit and the individual Christian was becoming more assertive in the expression of his or her own spiritual experience which may or may not have been orthodox. The specific problem for the late 22. Ibid., 100. 23. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 546.

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medieval period was not so much that there was no institutional channel for personal existential authority, but that it was an authority that moved below the civilizational radar: the individual barely registered as a source of authority and yet the burgeoning influence of existential authority ultimately proved to be overwhelming to the point of crisis. The Gelasian-medieval conception of order had no institutional infrastructure for handling the individual, other than opening itself to the process of differentiation that was resulting in civilizational overhaul, whose philosophical basis was a reconfiguration of relations among political, spiritual, and existential authorities. In short, a new equilibrium was being sought among the confusion and apparent loss of meaning. The eruption of personal existential authority was the crack in the Gelasian arrangement that contained orthodox forces as well as the potential for corruptions of the heretical, gnostic, antiestablishmentarian, or misanthropic varieties, and so on. To add to the confusion, some of these potentialities could be realized at once and to different degrees in the thought of various thinkers. The political thought of Dante displays just such a variety and combination of potentialities, each of which emerged from the authority of his own existence. The assertive force of his existential experience, amid the tensions and turmoils of the northern Italian communes of his milieu, erupted via a relatively new medium. Voegelin explains: For the public utterances of a private individual Dante had to develop literary forms and symbols of authority suitable to the new function. In the earlier phase of his political writing he adopted as his literary medium the letter, which had been evolved by Frederick II and used by Saint Francis. The open letter, as a political manifesto, becomes the instrument of expression for the individual that has no institutional public but rather appeals to “public opinion.”24

In addition to open letters, Dante wrote the Monarchia as a more conventional political treatise, elaborating “systematically the doctrine of the Letters.”25 Of course, Dante’s most famous work was his Divine Comedy in which “he achieves the great innovation of a political poem in the lingua volgare, addressing himself by this medium to the Italian24. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 72. 25. Ibid., 73.

The Submergence of Existence 157 speaking people at large.”26 The greatness of his innovation was that, in writing from the experience of his own existential authority outside institutionally sanctioned authority, he could appeal to the individual existential authority of persons in general.

Existential Loneliness Voegelin establishes the intellectual character of Dante: he was “a new type of political thinker . . . who had no status in a social group that would give representative authority to his word and form the audience for what he had to say.”27 That is, he wrote on behalf of neither the ecclesial nor the temporal authorities, but representatively on behalf of existence itself. In fact, Dante may be seen as writing by “the authority of the majestas genii”28 to whosoever might read his words. Voegelin refers to Dante as a “spiritual realist,” meaning by that term the attitude of the political thinker of the fourteenth century and after, who has to detach himself intellectually, and sometimes also practically, from the surrounding political institutions because he cannot attribute to them representative function for the life of the spirit that he experiences as real within himself.29

The civil theology of the sacrum imperium no longer provided an adequate meaning for sociopolitical existence by the time of Dante, rendering the two institutional pillars of the sacrum imperium inadequate by themselves. The concentration of authority in the emperor and the pope within the one order was no longer representative of medieval existence. Politically, the empire had been succeeded in influence by the rising kingdoms; spiritually, the outbreak of sentiments ranging from the orthodox to the host of heterodoxies was already shaping new lifestyles in cities and in rural regions. The traditional order of a society that found its meaning as a society of Christian men and women in the realm of God was becoming marked by signs of decay. All over Europe, the end of the medieval evocation was experienced as a tangible sense of a lack of meaning. There were “signs of decomposition, in some countries earlier and in others later, in some more catastrophically and in other less so.”30 26. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 68.

27. Ibid., 66. 29. Ibid., 71.

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For example, the disorder in France after the battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), the Jacquerie (1358) and the equivalent English case of the Peasant Revolt (1381) were symptomatic of a breakdown in society. There were similar sociopolitical catastrophes in Spain, Aragon, Portugal, Germany, and Russia at the time.The breakdown of society’s cohesive bonds of like-mindedness points to an underlying breach in order on a massive scale. As the Gelasian order had waned over two centuries, the upheaval in civil theology gradually attained to crisis proportions that was equivalent in many ways to the problem that had exercised political thinkers from Homer through the classical Greek period of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides and into the Christian era with Augustine. Voegelin writes that in the general case, “the most impressive phenomenon, as always in the decline of an order, must have been the acts of wanton indulgence . . . which break the right order . . . so frequently and so deeply that a society is no longer capable of self-defense.”31 Dante’s response to the disorder in his environment was the exploration of the order that endured in his own soul. That existential order eventually found political symbolization in the form of world monarchy. His Monarchia outlines the constitutional form of the Christian world at peace, but Voegelin advises that Dante should not be dismissed as “a belated imperialist.”32 Rather, he reminds us that the preferred symbolism used by any thinker is a “secondary phenomenon requiring in every instance an investigation of the ulterior structure of sentiments that determine the [symbolism].”33 Dante’s conception of an Earthly Paradise is an assertive act of resistance from his soul, motivated by the political misery of his time. “He does not want to bring back an earlier dispensation of forces, but looks rather to a new dispensation though in the imperial form.”34 This is less a medieval conception than a distinctively early modern formulation that exhibits symbols associated with gnostic patterns of thought. Eternal peace should supersede the disorder: His monarchy has the eschatological touch of the Third Realm of Joachim of Fiore; it is related to later ideas concerning the organization of a peace31. See Voegelin’s comments on the classical instances of breakdown in Order and History 2, 108ff. 32. Ibid., 71. 33. Ibid., 70. 34. Ibid., 71.

The Submergence of Existence 159 ful order even by his vocabulary: the state of temporal felicity he wishes to bring about is symbolized . . . by the mythical conception of the Earthly Paradise, the symbol that was still employed by Lenin to designate the Communist Realm (Mon. 3.16).35

The medieval empire was sprung from the need to find and articulate a civil theology that could account for the political existence of Christian men and women and the orientation of that political existence to the transcendent-divine Beyond. Dante’s Earthly Paradise represents the assertion of a soul that chooses the tangibility of immanent Heavenliness over the tension of Christian revelation in the midst of a sinful world as a better guarantor of order, justice, and peace. In a world so evidently rotten, the temptation to articulate a future that could not decompose reared its head in the imagining of the Earthly Paradise.

Averroism in the Monarchia The reorganization of the world with the express purpose of establishing eternal peace and banishing the conditions for evil and suffering is a form of thinking that, in spite of noble intentions, requires a metastasis that imaginatively forgets that the world is as it is, rotten or not. Dante picks up the Averroist thread of metastatic corruption when he considers the most perfect form of society in De Monarchia, book 1. He begins by asking about the “purpose of human society as a whole” in order to determine the courses of action necessary for achieving that final purpose: Now since our present subject is political, indeed is the source and starting point of just forms of government, and everything in the political sphere comes under human control, it is clear that the present subject is not directed primarily towards theoretical understanding but towards action. And since in actions it is the final objective which sets in motion and causes everything—for that is what first moves a person who acts—it follows that the whole basis of the means for attaining an end is derived from the end itself. For there will be one way of cutting wood to build a house, and another to build a ship. Therefore whatever constitutes the purpose of the whole of human society . . . will here be the first principle. . . . We must therefore now see what is the purpose of human society as a whole.36 35. Ibid., 72. 36. Dante, De Monarchia, book 1.2–3, in Prue Shaw, Dante: Monarchy, 5.

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Voegelin notes that for the first time, the idea of the perfect society becomes thematic. If “the framework of political society has the purpose of serving as the field of operations for fully developed human faculties,” then the most adequate or perfect form of political society becomes the most desirable.37 In addition, Dante outlines what human quality determines the adequacy and the precise form of political arrangement that he believes culminates necessarily in a world monarchy. The unique nature of a human being is to exist as a creature who apprehends by means of the potential intellect [virtus intellectiva]: this mode of existence belongs to no other creature . . . other than human beings. . . . And since that potentiality cannot be actualized all at once in any one individual or in any one of the particular social groupings . . . there must needs be a vast number of individual people in the human race, through whom the whole of this potentiality can be actualized. And Averroës is in agreement with this opinion in his commentary on the De anima.38

Etienne Gilson takes umbrage at the accusation that Dante was an Averroist, but he allows that Averroism was certainly an influence on Dante’s thought regarding the potential intellect. He takes issue with the association of Averroism and Dante for much the same reason as Morrall. However, after refuting the idea that Dante shares Averroës’s denial of the immortality of the soul, after refuting the idea that Dante shares the Averroism of Siger and Boethius of Dacia that sees a duality of reason and religion, and after refuting the idea that Dante shares Averroës’s subordination of religion to philosophy, he acknowledges that Dante was certainly influenced by Averroës’s thought on the universal collective intellect.39 In order to make his case, he first cites the fourteenthcentury commentator on Dante’s work, the Dominican Guido Vernani, who was probably the first to notice Averroist tendencies and who says of the provenance of Dante’s potential intellect: “If one speaks in this way, it manifestly follows that there is but a single intellect in all mankind; now to say and to think this is the gravest error, and its author and inventor is that Averroes whom he cites.”40 Gilson’s position on the matter, in the context of a refutation of the charge of Averroism in Dante, states: 37. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 75. 38. Dante, De Monarchia, book 1.3, in Prue Shaw, Dante: Monarchy, 7. 39. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 125ff. 40. Vernani, quoted by Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 168–69.

The Submergence of Existence 161 In order then, to construct his own doctrine, Dante has transposed the thesis of Averroes by taking the human race, in other words the individuals existing at all times on earth regarded collectively, as an equivalent of the single possible intellect of Averroes. If he here refers us to Averroes, the reason is that in fact he finds his starting-point in Averroism, but this does not mean that he has adopted it.41

Gilson stresses that Dante writes in the guise of a “reformer” and not a metaphysician; and what is more, he writes of a universal human community in order to establish the conditions for universal peace. Gilson then seems to slide into an Averroism of his own. He writes: Most certainly he [Dante] owes to him [Averroës] the idea, which is, moreover, a splendid one, of a unity of the human race in which the whole of humanity would at all times realize its special aim, namely to possess the entire intellectual knowledge which it is capable of assimilating. But we need not go back from this idea to what it implies in Averroes; rather must we look from it towards what it betokens in Dante: a community that man must create that he may secure a peace which does not yet exist, with a view to attaining an object which humanity has not yet secured, because before it can be secured it must first exist.42

There are shades of Thomas More’s Utopia in Gilson’s conception of Dante’s world peace: that is, that the world is not what it is. World peace, as an immanent possibility, negates the human reality of superbia vitae. The collectivism out of which comes Dante’s potential intellect seems in the end to have ensnared Gilson. Gilson is correct in stating that Dante was no Averroist, but he has shown that the temptation to opt for Averroist symbols with a potential for gnostic mischief was strong. For Dante, the universality of the potential intellect becomes the determining factor in human politics. Individuals and social groupings are substantially subordinate to the actualization of the potential human intellect. The nature of man is posited in the collective and not in any individual. “To the universality of the intellect, the universitas hominum organized under the world monarch has to correspond.”43 If Dante is correct in his assumption that the essence of humanity is to be found in the virtus intellectiva, then he is also effectively correct in his designation of world monarchy as the most adequate form of government. How41. Gilson, ibid., 169. 43. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 75.

42. Ibid.

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ever, the pooling of humanity in a static universal structure of collective consciousness cannot be acceptable. The static conception of humanity equates to an ahistorical conception of being. It is a form of intellectualism that disregards the historical structure of being. The elimination or subordination of historicity has the effect of reducing man to a mere function of a mechanism. The argument for a world monarchy demonstrates that the willful forgetting of history amounts to quashing the amplitude of humanity across the range of individual, sociopolitical, and historical existence. The unity of mankind is not static; it is an open field in which the possibilities of the human mind unfold historically and manifest themselves in the sequence of civilizations and of nations. . . . With this insight into the historicity of the mind the idea falls that a static “organization” can be the political answer to the idea of man. The drama of human history cannot be caught in a governmental power organization, imperial or otherwise, and cannot be submitted to the rules of a trial in court. The defect of Dante’s theory is its intellectualism.44

The defect of intellectualism that espouses static structures—political, anthropological, philosophical, or otherwise—is the underlying assumption that a collective, universal substance exists which is, on the one hand, the most foundational metaphysics of man and which, on the other hand, can be then pooled in a structure symbolizing being. The collective in Dante’s case is symbolized by the universal potential intellect. The existential problem that Dante’s Averroist tendencies prevented him from grasping was that the construction of an Averroist world monarchy in which a reductive understanding of man operates does not solve the crisis of personal and social disorder, but in fact qualitatively worsens it. That is, if the understanding predominates that man is merely a function of a greater substance, then those who might claim to harness, interpret, and control the collective, suprahuman substance assume absolute authority. Dante’s sensitivity to the existential pathology of his environment precluded any ambition to garner godlike powers for himself or a favored elite, but his solution lent itself to such a possibility in principle.45 44. Ibid., 76–77. 45. See ibid, 77, for Voegelin’s comments on the continuity of intellectualism as a problem in Western society.

The Submergence of Existence 163 Purgatorio The corruptions symbolized by world monarchy in the Monarchia are compounded by the abundance of Joachitic or apocalyptic symbols in his third part of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio, and particularly parts 29 and 32–33. In his treatment and description of a newly restored empire, Dante introduces a dux or leader to inaugurate the new era. For verily I see, and hence narrate it, The stars already near to bring the time, From every hindrance safe, and every bar, Within which a Five-hundred, Ten, and Five One sent from God, shall slay the thievish woman And that same giant who is sinning with her.46

The leader is the “Five-hundred, Ten, and Five” which, in Roman numerals, makes up DVX. Unlike Joachim, the dux is not a spiritual figure, but temporal: the spiritual figure will appear in the Inferno as the Veltro. ’Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be; Of that low Italy shall he be the saviour, On whose account the maid Camilla died, Euryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds; Through every city shall he hunt her down, Until he shall have driven her back to Hell, There from whence envy first did let her loose.47

The appearance of temporal and spiritual savior figures belongs to the future and their era is one ordained by God. The present misery of the empire in Dante’s own time belongs to a preceding period in a process that he seems to regard as unfolding according to an eternal law. Voegelin detects the element of fatalism in Dante’s apocalyptic vision: His fatalism approaches rather the submission to a course of history under an eternal law that was characteristic of Siger de Brabant and the Averroists. . . . The situation and the sentiments of Dante are in some respects similar to 46. Dante, Purgatory, 33.33–38; accesssed from http://www.online-literature.com/dante/ purgatorio/33. 47. Dante, Inferno, 1.100–106; http://www.online-literature.com/dante/inferno/1/. See also Voegelin’s footnote about the inclination of some authorities to identify the Dux and the Veltro, ibid., 80.

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those of Saint Augustine. Again the empire has failed and there is no hope of restoration in the immediate future; there is a time waiting ahead comparable to the saeculum senescens. The individual can do nothing but withdraw into the attitude of religious contemplation. . . . The saeculum will come to an end by divine intervention, with the important difference, however, from the Augustinian conception that the end will not be the advent of the heavenly realm but a new imperial dispensation in the history of Christian mankind. We are faced for the first time in the Divina Commedia with the sentiment of hopeless hope that some deus ex machina will abolish the centrifugal and destructive tendencies of the intramundane forces and at the same time establish a perfect intramundane Christian realm.48

According to the trajectory of his thought in the Monarchia and the Purgatorio, the political theory of Dante balloons into a massive civilizational reconstruction project of the Christian world by God himself. It would appear that an element underscoring Dante’s “hopeless hope” is that he experiences mankind as crooked beyond redemption. We are put in mind of Hesiod’s warning in the Works and Days that we are approaching a stage where man’s own foulness has become terminal: Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis [gods of shame and indignation], with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods: and bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.49

In the Christian dispensation, the forsaking of man by the divine is not possible but Dante’s experience of human depravity is so pronounced that he theoretically abandons the human soul. The flirtation with Averroist collectivism has overtaken the classic-Christian notion of the soul as a center of order, and in its stead is nothing but an epicenter of grave disorder. With this abandonment, the process of recovery as a movement in the soul is similarly overlooked: the subtlety of a periagogē (turning-around) in the Platonic sense has become meaningless to the degree where the only hope is the oxymoronic “hopelessness” of divine intervention. In Dante’s abandonment of man there is 48. Ibid., 81–82. 49. Hesiod, Works and Days, 198–201; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, at http://www .sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/works.htm.

The Submergence of Existence 165 the suggestion of a struggle at the level of faith: the loss of the imago Dei effectively means an abandonment of the revealed God of Christian experience. Xenophanes once expressed his revulsion at the “unseemly” depiction of the divine symbolized by the epic poets as gods with shapes.50 Dante’s gnostic lines of thought have overcome the subtlety of faith and cling to an immanentized Christian God with the shape of an interventionist demiurge. The plane on which Dante’s political thought moves is a grand, macroscopic perspective that perceives the civilization of the West in its qualitative rottenness and its quantitative geographic breadth. The perspective belongs better to prophecy than to political philosophy for the very reason that Dante does not engage with the problems of man in his individual existence. His encounter with Averroism is focused on the larger political collectivities of empires and world monarchies and does not grapple with the dynamics of civil theology as it occurs spontaneously among individuals-in-community. There is no anthropological theory of man, but rather a tendency toward gnosticism that pulls the spiritual into the sphere of the temporal-mundane, consequently swallowing the individual, society, and history. The absurdity referred to above in which the Averroist thinker denies the authority of individual existence by the corruption of his own existential authority resonates within the despair of Dante. His “hopeless hope,” as Voegelin has it, carries the motif of absurdity in reaching out to a metastatic future world that does not exist in order to gain spiritual consolation in the present. Ellis Sandoz, in commenting on one of Voegelin’s early essays, notes Kant’s dismay at the fulfillment of human perfection as a perfection pertaining only to man generically and at some point in the future, but lying beyond the reach of any individual man: Man’s “double nature” [rational and sensible] evolves through time toward perfection; and this perfection of virtue and happiness is the goal of human striving throughout history. The individual life is too short to attain such perfection, for it necessarily presupposed an endless progress within an endless existence: only man generically can fulfill these conditions, and then only through the direction of his reason can he attain the perfection which is 50. See fragments B14, B16, and B23 especially, in Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers.

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the plan of his being. Kant’s astonishment lies in the recognition that earlier generations could never do more than prepare the way for the final harmony of the future; they are no more than the manure of the future harmony as Dostoevsky later said.51

The Averroism that haunted Dante is an infectious strain of thought that has surfaced repeatedly in the West, most militantly in the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Kant’s revulsion for a generic human substance that renders the individual human being into “manure” for some unrealizable future dispensation is well founded, manifesting as it did the existential despair of Dante.

Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275–c. 1342) By the early fourteenth century, the Averroist influence was one of many forces in the increasingly disorganized field of civil theology, a disorganization that sprang from the tension between the new emphasis on liberty and the hardening of Gelasian institutions of authority that absolutized their rule. In the field of pragmatic politics, the sacrum imperium was dead as an evocative or effective civil theology. The contours of political reality had changed too much from the conditions that had originally engendered a sacred empire: the fringe kingdom of the French had extended its hegemony over southern and eastern Europe, as well as parts of north Africa; the papacy had moved out of the imperial zone to Avignon; in addition to this, the empire itself had become more selfconsciously German.52 The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius appeared in this pragmatic context, and was an attempt to resolve the social ills associated with the church’s supererogatory claim of jurisdiction over the political. The Defensor Pacis was written one generation after the De ecclesiastica potestate of Giles of Rome in which Giles argues for the domination of all authority, spiritual and temporal, by the papal head as the absolute representative of God’s power. The apparent loss of spiritual substance in the work of a papal apologist and its replacement with a calculus of 51. Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, 56–57. 52. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 83: “The papal refusal to recognize Louis IV as emperor aroused the national sentiment of the German princes, with the result that by a series of acts the constitutional position of the emperor was made independent of the pope.”

The Submergence of Existence 167 power was matched by Marsilius in his secular analysis of political society. Leo Strauss maintains that “[o]ne ought . . . not even to expect to find a complete presentation of political philosophy in the Defender. The work comes to sight as a kind of appendix to that part of Aristotle’s Politics which may be said to deal with the diseases of civil society.”53 As the papal claim to a plenitude of power was a particular evil that the Philosopher was not in a position to treat, Marsilius means to fill the vacuum. He “sought both to demonstrate that the papacy’s claim to plenitude of power was the source of strife, and to destroy the theoretical basis of that claim. The papacy and the clergy in general, he considered, should not pursue temporal power but should follow a purely spiritual life free of possessions and jurisdiction.”54 The evil is treated mainly over two discourses: the first seeks to establish a political theory on the basis of philosophy (i.e., Aristotelian philosophy with Averroës as an authority); the second is a theological interpretation of Scripture whose aim is to undermine the papal claim to potestas plenitudo.55 Our interest lies with the first discourse. Voegelin states that “the title of the treatise indicates its primary interest: the establishment of peace and tranquility in the community through the subordination of the disturbing sacerdotal power under the monopolistic secular power as the ultimate guarantor of political and legal order (III.3: De titulo huius libri).”56

Governance and the Collective Marsilius was deeply uninterested “in the spiritual forces that lived in [the religious movements and general piety of the time]; in the Defensor Pacis there is no trace of the idea of the spiritually free, mature Christians forming the substance of the polity as in the theory of Thomas Aquinas.”57 Strauss makes a comment about the movements or forces that helps to clarify Voegelin’s statement: the “sect” for Marsilius is a philosophical concept that is understood as “a society constituted by a belief in a peculiar divine law or by a peculiar religion; that concept em53. Strauss, “Marsilius,” History of Political Philosophy, 277. 54. Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 154. 55. We may mention that this dual approach mirrored a typically Averroist attitude to the duality of truth. See Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 154–55. 56. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 87. 57. Ibid., 91.

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braces equally all allegedly and all truly divine laws, for the truth of the true religion escapes philosophy as philosophy. This religiously neutral concept of the sect is an essential part of Marsilian political science.”58 In other words, Marsilius acknowledges the fundamental importance of an integrating body of truths, or a civil theology, for understanding the substance of political friendship or community, but he does not engage with that substance; rather, he puts that substance or content into parentheses. What he offers instead is a factual description of political existence that includes the strata of the late medieval society of his day. An example of Marsilius’s attitude to the substance of a civil theology is provided by his willingness to entertain the Aristotelian and Averroist notion of eternal generation.59 That it contradicts the historicity of existence in Christian civilization is irrelevant to him, yet he regards it as the duty of the ruler to uphold the Christian faith for the sake of peace. A Christian civil theology is undoubtedly to be defended in Marsilius’s thought for the sake of peace, but is not politically relevant in any meaningful sense beyond that.60 The problem is that the removal of historical meaning from the political and the preference for “religiously neutral concepts” indicates a controversial assumption: that discussion of political phenomena can proceed without either implicit or explicit value judgments. As we will see, Marsilius fails in his parenthesis of sects and discusses political existence as a sectarian with an Averroist subnarrative. His political theory locates governmental authority in the intramundane unit of society itself. That is, the fundamental political authority is not the government itself but is the legislator or “human legislator”; that is, the whole body of citizens. Sovereignty rests in the whole. On the one hand, Marsilius’s location of the source of political authority in the whole body of the commonwealth is certainly close to a modern secular conception—excised is the temporal authority of the church.61 How­ 58. Strauss, “Marsilius,” History of Political Philosophy, 278. 59. See Defensor Pacis, I, 17, 10, and II, 28, 15, in Annabel Brett, Marsilius of Padua. 60. See Strauss’s own discussion of law in the Defensor, including divine law, as necessarily to be connected to coercive power in History of Political Philosophy, 289–94. 61. Voegelin makes the comment that many moderns have seen in Marsilius a fellow modern, ahead of his time who anticipated the “more advanced and enlightened” ideas of modernity, such as popular sovereignty. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 85.

The Submergence of Existence 169 ever, as a result of his approach in bracketing political substance, the theory seeks not merely the separation of church and state, but ends up in a radical isolation of the political from its own civil theology. The consequence is that what Marsilius calls the political is such a shriveled rendering of what is genuinely political that it barely deserves the name: the political is so autonomous that there is no existence in political existence, abstracted as it is from its foundation in the civil theology of society. His derivation of political authority is an act of intellectualism that disregards the historicity of society. Instead he speaks of human existence as a predicate of a collective and underlying Nature: For nature never fails in necessities, and even takes care of what is more noble, such as is (among corruptible things) the human race. And since it is from this race, once it has been perfected through the various arts or disciplines, that the city must be constituted as from its material, together with the distinct parts within it that are necessary to attain the sufficient life. . . ; therefore she herself initiated this differentiation in human generation, producing some who have in their native dispositions a suitability and tendency towards agriculture, others towards soldiering, others towards other kinds of crafts and disciplines—but always different people to different pursuits.62

Marsilius continues by mentioning other natural endowments that lead to “offices” within the city, such as governing prudence, operative, and speculative inclinations. Voegelin notes that the “unit of man is broken up into a gamut of natural endowments, with the result that Marsilius has no personalistic anthropology, Christian or otherwise, but a typically Averroist collectivist philosophy of natural man.”63 This is a view that seems to be supported by J. P. Canning who writes that Marsilius “adopted an ‘Averroist’ and thus purely naturalistic approach in . . . the Defender of the Peace.”64 The material causes of the offices or services of the city are the men who have followed their natural inclinations. Marsilius’s reference to the Philosopher, Aristotle, is typical for 62. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, I, 7, 10, in Brett, Marsilius of Padua, 37–38. 63. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 94. 64. Canning, “Introduction: Politics, Institutions and Ideas,”in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 361. According to Canning, the dominant view of many medieval thinkers at this time was that political life be considered, in line with Aristotle, a dimension of natural reason; which in the case of Aquinas has been shown to point beyond itself as the merely natural, thereby attaining something of a transnatural quality. The designation of natural therefore carries some important nuance. See chapter two above.

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his day but he “has no idea of man comparable to the Aristotelian.”65 Where Aristotle in his Politics was concerned with the problem of happiness (eudaimonia) and excellence as perfections of man, and could analyze the problems and purpose of political existence under such a conception, Marsilius is only marginally interested in an anthropology. His focus lies elsewhere. The establishment of order, secular and monopolistic, without regard for other factors that emerge from the underlying existential matrix of truths constituting the polity, such as justice and liberty, provides the tenor of Marsilius’s treatise. Like Hobbes, the focus of his political theory is directed at the power element of uppertier institutional reality in a political society without treating the lowertier movements of symbolization and existence in society. The Averroist tendency is to treat the collective of human society through the coercive power of governmental institutions, leaving his treatise as a top-heavy edifice that barely notices the underlying human substance of individuals in community.

The Legislator Marsilius begins his investigation of the conditions leading to political tranquility with an “organic analogy” with a healthy animal. In step with Aristotle in the first and fifth books of the Politics, he expresses the analogy as the equation “tranquility : regnum = health : animal”:66 The city is like a kind of animate or animal nature. For an animal which is in a good condition in respect of its nature is composed of certain proportionate parts arranged in respect of each other, all communicating their actions between themselves and towards the whole; likewise too the city which is in a good condition and established in accordance with reason is made up of certain such parts. A city and it parts would therefore seem to be in the same relation to tranquillity as an animal and its parts is to health.67

65. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 95. 66. Two hundred years before the Defensor Pacis, the Policraticus of John of Salisbury also employed the device of an organic analogy. In John’s time, the fragmentation of Christendom into a plurality of political units that he called commonwealths had not yet come to be, but by the time of Marsilius the fragmentation was a stark reality. 67. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, Discourse I, chapter 2, part 3, in Brett, Marsilius of Padua, 12.

The Submergence of Existence 171 Once Marsilius has established the polity as a center of power in a plurality of political power centers, he must now show the provenance or source of governmental legitimacy. In other words, he must ground political authority in a legitimating source. For Aquinas, the political aimed at the temporal conditions for allowing the free Christian to practice a life whose goal is beatitude. In this way, legitimate political authority was grounded in the existence of individuals in community. Marsilius, on the other hand, is in search of a legitimating ground for political authority that has no reference to the existential. The organic analogy breaks down as a device for describing the source of authority, “for the ruler is one of its members and cannot derive his authority from the other members of the functioning unity, whom, on the contrary he has to regulate.”68 In the end, Marsilius locates the source of governmental authority beyond the individual, articulated members of the commonwealth, in the whole of the society. But what quality does the “whole” of society have that transmits sovereign authority? As mentioned, the whole for Marsilius does not include the truths of society taken to mean the human substance of a society’s historicity. The dynamics of the soul are expressly rejected. The whole is a nebulous force known as the legislator that is the source of the ruler’s authority. On the surface of it, nothing appears too disordered. Marsilius is among the first political thinkers to address the apparent constituent power of the people as the power that authorizes and legitimates public action: We may affirm in accordance with the truth and counsel of Aristotle’s Politics . . . that the “legislator” or primary and proper efficient cause of the law is the people or corporate body of citizens [universitas civium], or the more dominant part of them, by means of their election or volition expressed through words in a general assembly of citizens regarding the commanding or prescribing of things to be done or omitted in regard to the civil acts of human beings under threat of temporal penalty or punishment.69

In order to ascertain the grip of Averroism on the formation of Marsilius’s thought, we must discern what is meant by legislator and what is not. “The term cannot be rendered in English simply by ‘legislator’ 68. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 89. 69. Marsilius, Defensor Pacis, Discourse I, chapter 12, part 3, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, 184–85.

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because our modern legislative function is under the fundamental law,” writes Voegelin. However, Marsilius’s legislator is a translation of the Aristotelian nomothetes, which “on the contrary, is the intramundane agent authorizing the constitutional order under which the ruler executes his functions, including rule making.”70 Voegelin emphasizes that the evaluation of this definition of the legislator depends on the meaning given to the valentior pars, usually translated as “more dominant part” as above. He disregards “more dominant part” and other translations which are “literally correct but convey no meaning unless elaborated upon.”71 Instead, relying on the thought of Max Weber, he uses “socially relevant part” that brings out the meaning “all members of the community who cannot be neglected politically without causing revolutionary instability of the social order.”72 The “socially relevant part” is also more apt as it corresponds better with the intentions of Aristotle.Voegelin’s own translation of this important section of the Defensor Pacis then is read: When I say “the socially relevant part” [valentior pars] I mean relevant by the quantity as well as the quality of the persons in the community for which the law is given; whether the aforementioned universitas civium [corporate body of citizens, the whole] or its socially relevant part makes itself the law, or entrusts its making to one or more persons who, of course, are not and cannot be the legislator himself but act only for a definite purpose, at a definite time and in accordance with the authority conferred on them by the original legislator.73

Types of persons in the society constitute the socially relevant part by their numbers or because of their qualities. For example, the poor are relevant to the preservation of order or peace in society due to their sheer numbers, while the socially relevant qualities include the educated, the propertied rich, and those personalities with influential characters. Voegelin continues: For Marsilius the dividing line between quantity and quality seems to run between a lower class of peasants, artisans, and merchants and an upper class of priests, military men, and lawyers (I.5); in the context of I.13 the men of 70. Ibid. 71. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 90. See, for example, Jeannine Quillet’s translation as “the weightier part” in “Community, Counsel and Representation,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 558–61. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 89.

The Submergence of Existence 173 quality are distinguished as the educated, prudent, and legal experts from the mass of the uneducated.74

The legislator is seen to be composed by the general stratification of medieval society and therefore to represent the whole of any particular society. There are two things to say about the legislator that are relevant for the understanding of the shift in civil theology from medieval to modern. The first is that Marsilius’s theory, by invoking the whole of society and involving the various strata by quality and quantity, lends itself well to the development of constitutional, democratic government. The location of sovereignty in the civium universitas is an achievement that reflects a shift in civil theology away from the sacrum imperium concentration of authority in papal and imperial heads. In this sense, Marsilius represents a line of thought that belongs to the borderline between medieval and modern Western sentiments. As Voegelin says, “It would not have been at all impossible for political theory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to take the turn toward a construction of popular, democratic government.”75 Marsilius’s attraction for modern political theorists is his consideration of constitutionality upon which legitimate government is based. However, a modicum of probing proves that Marsilius also provides a sting in the tail. Strauss points out that the human legislator may delegate his legislative power to one or to several men. Marsilius thus allows the sovereignty of the people to remain entirely dormant. In the same breath in which he proclaims the transcendent virtue of everyone’s actually participating in legislation, he dismisses that participation as irrelevant. One must go further and say that he retracts the very principle of popular sovereignty.76

According to Strauss, Marsilius’s outline of political authority trumps any other form of authority. As the main threat to civic peace comes from the church hierarchy, political authority has the power to legitimately “succeed in subordinating the Christian priests to the Christian laity, the Christian aristocracy to the Christian populus or demos.”77 74. Ibid., 90. 75. Ibid., 91. 76. Strauss, “Marsilius,” History of Political Philosophy, 283. 77. Ibid., 280.

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Marsilius has placed sovereign authority to do so in the universitas. However, while this may subordinate and nullify the threat to civil peace that ecclesiastics represent, it does no more than identify the collective of society as sovereign. In refusing to consider the content of a Christian civil theology under the discussion of political reality in the first discourse, he does not give reasons for the sovereignty and the legitimate supremacy of political authority. The second thing to be said in regard to the legislator addresses the fact that it did not take the turn toward a construction of popular government. Bearing in mind that Marsilius’s primary concern is the establishment of an enduring order of peace rather than an anthropology that treats the existential substance of community, he focuses his treatise on the upper level of public institutions. Granted, he acknowledges the intrinsic importance of including the whole of society or its valentior pars for the garnering of an inclusive political peace in which all participate, but his conception of the legislator remains no more than a conception. The legislator is a stratified, but static, picture of what constitutes society. Marsilius views sociopolitical existence through a collectivist lens and sees a well-defined unit corresponding well to the Italian town environment of his day, but is blind to those existential forces that provide the cohesion of like-mindedness. The legislator reflects the collective dimension of society and its constitutive strata; it is a device for articulating the visible surface of a community without penetrating to the invisible core that Aristotle called politike philia, or political friendship, and which Augustine had identified as the common agreement about things that are loved.78 Without taking account of the truths of society that comprise a civil theology and in not allowing the historicity of society, Marsilius ignores existential openness or the living substance of embodied truths in persons whose community radiates meaning into the polity. The role of the legislator looks like it highlights the dignity of persons by recognizing their quality and quantity, but in the end Marsilius is too strongly influenced by the Averroist pattern of thought. The Defensor Pacis is presented as a universal, catch-all theory for any political community regardless of its geographical extent and the historical sub78. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1167b3–4, and Augustine, City of God, 19:24.

The Submergence of Existence 175 stance of community. His emphasis always lies upon the singular collective; for example: “Rome along with Sicily and other communities are numerically one kingdom or empire for no other reason except that each and every one of their subjects is ordered through volition towards a numerically singular supreme ruling body.”79 Due to the loss of historicity, the city or kingdom does not grow through, and is not held together by, the free association and consensus of its members. Rather, the invisible community substance of likemindedness is replaced by the visible ordering force of the ruler. The stability of the polity depends on the ruler’s monopoly of coercive power. The sovereignty of the legislator, the universitas or valentior pars, would appear to be compromised by its utter dependence on government. The legislator may provide the causae formales, the fundamental law, which institutes the ruler, but it is the ruler’s function to corral the rest of the city or kingdom into the order that will best conserve the polity. Order is a mechanical construct for Marsilius, lacking the transnatural character that has emerged in the analysis of Aquinas’s political theory and the fullness of a historical structure.

The Menace within Averroism Averroist collectivism is an inherently dangerous form of gnostic corruption, as the Defensor Pacis proceeds to demonstrate. Marsilius considers whether or not there should be an arrangement approximating to a world monarchy like in Dante’s conception, “a numerically singular supreme ruling body over everyone,” as opposed to a plurality of such, and favors plurality. Here it becomes clear that Marsilius’s Averroist tendencies diverge from those of Dante in that he does not identify the collective as a human substance. His reasoning begins and ends with the collective conception of man and society as a function of a quasidivine collective substance, sometimes identified as Nature. Lest there be an “overabundance of human propagation,” Nature—the “heavenly cause”—has diversified men by distance, customs, and habits. Each group of men is then organized into their own polity, “for it would probably seem to some people that nature has moderated the propagation of 79. Marsilius, Defensor Pacis, Discourse I, chapter 17, part 11, in Nederman and Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory: A Reader, 192.

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human beings and other animals by means of war and epidemics in order that there may be adequate resources for their raising.”80 With regard to war, a plurality of polities promotes discord and rivalries that end in death and destruction. Voegelin wryly notes, “As the effects of war and disease might be diminished by world peace, attempts at political organization should not go beyond the plurality of natural polities.”81 Culling the human population, whether by epidemic or war, is one of Nature’s ways of conserving resources. Nature ensures that mankind’s welfare be realized by prioritizing her own assets over the individual polities. Mankind shall be occasionally culled for the sake of mankind. The particular collectives—polities, commonwealths—are all functions of the primary collective. In Marsilius, the corruption of existence has found its archetypal political symbolism and the result must be nihilism, a sentiment that was to grow in influence in later Western civilization. One stark example of Averroist nihilism’s enduring quality comes from Adolf Hitler’s misappropriation of Heraclitus’s fragment, “War is the father of all things.” Hitler says: “The entire universe seems to be ruled by just this one idea, that an eternal selection takes place in which the stronger in the end maintains life and the right to live, and the weaker falls. One will say that nature is therefore cruel and merciless, but the other will grasp that nature is thus only obeying an iron law of logic.”82 Christianity has not disappeared in Marsilius’s thought. In fact, his treatment of the sacerdotium takes up most of the Defensor Pacis, but through his Averroist prism, he departs from the contents of Christian revelation which are embodied in the Christian individuals whose civil theology is ignored as irrelevant. In particular, the Christian meaning of both God and man are irrelevant to the thrust of the treatise. With regard to the contents of Christian faith, the title of his sixth chapter in Discourse One demonstrates a typically Averroist attitude: “On the final cause of a certain part of the city, sc. the priestly; handed down 80. This and above references from Marsilius, Defensor Pacis, I.17.10. 81. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 96. 82. Quoted by Voegelin, in Hitler and the Germans, 141. Here Voegelin discusses the link between Hitler, Social Darwinism, and Darwin’s preference for the use of categories taken from early English liberalism such as the “Survival of the Fittest.” The fragment from Heraclitus is B53; see Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 28.

The Submergence of Existence 177 and revealed directly by God, but which cannot attain conviction by human reasoning.” The rationality of Christianity is thereby eclipsed by the assumption that truth whose provenance is directly from God cannot be discussed. In fact, as we have seen, this faith-reason schism was becoming increasingly dominant; as the aspiration for a sacrum imperium civil theology dwindled, the unity of God’s realm with the world was dissipating and with it went the earlier philosophical sentiment of Anselm, “Credo ut Intelligam.” Revelation simply must be accepted, but its lack of rationality compromises its relevance for the temporalpolitical sphere. For Marsilius, Christian truth belongs to the beyond of the world and the meaning of human life in this world is a topic for the philosopher alone with Aristotle as the guide. In the same chapter six, he characterizes religion as a “holy terror” which functions to keep the conduct of the mass of people in check by the expectation of punishment in the next world. Christianity “is interpreted as an otherworldly religion that must not be institutionalized in the form of a church having a potestas coactiva over its members. To Christ himself are denied the functions of a king and a judge except in the saeculum aeternum.” If Christ and his truth are reserved for the beyond, then not only has the church no coercive power or jurisdiction in this world, but the entire church hierarchy, including bishops and the pope, is to be dismantled. Everything is subordinate to the legislator, and the legislator is a function of the primary collective. It is the legislator that “ordinates the life of man toward his mundane happiness.”83 It is then the function of the legislator to realize, not the body of existential truths in civil theology, but the truth of an Averroist collective. The legislator represents not so much the truth of society but an immanentized form of transcendental reality. With the positing of Christian truths in the beyond and a collective eternal substance determining the temporal-mundane, the authority of existence is corrupted. The existential authority of individual persons is flattened into irrelevance by the massiveness of the collective, and the dignity of human participation in transcendental reality is imagined into oblivion. Man is reduced to a function of collective in a way that antici83. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 98. For the main outlines of the church’s subordination to the legislator and the ruler, see Defensor Pacis, II.4–7. On the pre-Reformation position of Marsilius regarding the doctrine of sola scriptura, see II.19.

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pates later speculation and ideology.84 The influence of the falāsifa is very present in Marsilius, particularly the attitude of Avempace toward orthodox religion as a means to keep the masses in check.85 Losing the openness of existence results in the loss of rationality, not because the masses—with their religion—are incapable of reason, but because the Averroist speculator has cut himself adrift from being by attempting to exist outside the differentiating movement of being, revealed by Christianity. Averroist man lives in a state of existential deformation, both individually and sociopolitically. Christianity, on the other hand, articulates the notion of human existence ordered by, and attuned to, transcendent-divine reality while losing nothing of participation in the mundane world of space and time. Rather, Christian revelation enhances life therein by the differentiation of authority. There is no possibility in the context of the Defensor Pacis for a politics based on the dignity and the rights of man. Marsilius’s treatise represents a line of meaning in the late medieval period in which the improvement in the personal existence of man is held up as meritorious, yet is undermined by the temptation to engage in metastatic speculation. The implication of this is the development of political thought that operates outside and above the community of persons bonded in the invisibility of politike philia. The existence of persons is duly submerged beneath the gargantuan weight and superior dignity of the collective. The occurrence of Averroist tendencies in Marsilius, Dante, Siger, and others suggests that the crisis of meaning was more profound than any one thinker of the period could capture. The upheaval affected civil theology because it was a disturbance that emerged from the individual search for a meaningful order of existence that could not be found in the Gelasian articulation of Christendom. Averroism and the other corruptions are evidence that the medieval world under the Gelasian infrastructure had begun to crumble, inevitably shaking the entire edifice of medieval civilization and eventually settling into a new but uneasy reconfiguration of authorities that we generically refer to as modernity. 84. See, for example, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, who emphasizes our fundamental reality as genetic. As animals, we exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines. 85. Avempace stridently advances the claim in his The Hermit’s Guide that revealed religion is a lower form of wisdom, suitable for the masses. See De Lacy O’Leary, Arabic Thought and Its Place in History, 245–46.

6 Continenta l Problems in Political Or der

Existential authority was the new civilizational factor with which both political and spiritual institutional authorities had to grapple. The problem for the church was the rise of heretical new pieties outside the traditional orthodoxy which will be examined in the next chapter. However, the problem that the political authorities had to face was the management of individual personal assertions which presented a potential threat to the like-mindedness of society and the legitimacy of political power in general. We have seen how the English realm drew the variety of movements and estates into a process of political articulation for the sake of the common good. Perhaps due to the older imperial and royal traditions on the Continent—or more precisely, an older civil theology steeped in the Gelasian doctrine and the expectation of a sacrum imperium—driving a constitutional process of articulation was not a realistic possibility. Put simply, in the new climate of existential assertiveness, political authority could respond in one of two ways: either by the channeling of existential authority in constitutionalism or by subordinating it beneath the weight of absolute power. In this chapter, various political responses such as authority in the 179

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empire, the kingdoms, and the principalities will be examined, principally to highlight the central political problem: their failure to realize the polity as a “political people.” This problem is, of course, more than merely political. It is a problem that is indicative of a shifting civil theology that was replete with the meaningful action of individuals and their free associations, meaningful action based on an existential authority that had not been recognized as a legitimate force in the polity. In large part, the response of royal authority was to claim absolute jurisdiction over the sphere of the existential. The crisis in civil theology was very pronounced in the upper tier of public institutions. Failing to adequately symbolize a civil theology that was shifting toward the authoritative assertion of human existence in the lower tier of persons and groups, the exercise of potestas was concentrated on expanding authority beyond the political. As in earlier times, medieval political authority sought to overlap its zone of control with a sphere that did not belong within its competence. The difference in the later Middle Ages is that these nonpolitical spheres were not necessarily ecclesiastical, but primarily existential. There were often bloody results. Berman states that upheavals on a revolutionary level are inevitably outcomes when public institutions of authority lose their existential grounding. They “proved incapable of responding, in time to the changes that were taking place in society. . . . [If] the inevitable had been anticipated and necessary fundamental changes had been made within the pre-existing legal order . . . then the revolution would presumably have been avoided. To change in time is the key to the vitality of any legal system that confronts irresistible pressure for change.”1 That medieval civilization was in a state of grave upheaval is evident from the growing absolutism of political institutions.

Frederick II and the Constitutions of Melfi (1231) Frederick II was Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily. Cantor paints this picture of him: Frederick was a strange man, the “wonder of the world,” who seemed to stand outside the moral order of his day. . . . [He was] a great soldier, a patron of the 1. Berman, Law and Revolution, 21.



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arts and sciences, the author of a formidable treatise on falconry. But he was a megalomaniac who considered himself beyond the ethical standards of Latin Christianity. It is appropriate that Frederick was idolized by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. . . . Frederick II was a sort of intellectual Fascist, a man of learning and fastidious tastes, but a brute and a bully nevertheless.2

A man of formidable character who had his hands on the levers of power, Frederick was a thorn in the side of his enemies, but received the adulation of many more. He is important for our purposes in that his actions, which dominated a large part of the thirteenth century, carried a meaning that illuminates the growing crisis of his time.

The Disappearance of the Individual The historical instance of Frederick II provides a counterweight to the existential shift in medieval civilization. Frederick’s Constitutions of Melfi (1231) contain sentiments and symbolism that suggest a lingering aspiration for a sacrum imperium with its imperial and papal heads, but which is running short of the substance of Christianity. In particular, there is no acknowledgment of what Aquinas was to call “free Christian men.” Frederick’s perspective appears retrogressive in comparison to the new theory of commonwealth as exemplified by John of Salisbury and compared to developments in the Norman kingdom of England. Almost a century after John of Salisbury’s exaltation of individual authority as a legitimate constitutional force, Frederick’s notion of politics precludes any recognition of the authority of individuals. In article 4 of the Constitutions, discussion of the king’s laws, decisions, offices, and wisdom of appointments is expressly prohibited for the reason that criticism of the royal office is tantamount to sacrilege, the punishment of which is a function of the king. However, John of Salisbury’s perspective on the matter highlighted the gross abuse of individual Christian liberty that he named explicitly as tyranny and not kingship. Nonetheless, Frederick’s tyranny is enigmatic to the modern mind. At the institutional level, his actions appear distinctly modern: the province of Sicily becomes the subject of modern acts of lawmaking, transforming it into something resembling a secular state. He was a puzzling character who pro2. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 458–59.

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voked many of his contemporaries, including the pope, to condemn him as a heretic or even an Antichrist. Paradoxically, others regarded Frederick as a champion of the faith to the point of regarding him as a messiahking. As Voegelin states the problems surrounding the conflicting images of Frederick: The style of dominus mundi, used by his courtiers, oscillates between the meanings of the imperial master of the orbis terrarum and of the satanic Lord of this World. The luciferic fascination of the emperor still makes it difficult to gain an unbiased, reliable picture of his person and of his ideas. . . . The greatness of the emperor lies neither in the strength of a clear and firm character nor in the merits of a policy nor in the consistency of carrying it out; it lies, rather, in the strength and vastness of a soul that was equal to the tensions of the age.3

Arguably, Voegelin has overstated his case. If Frederick’s soul was equal to the tensions of the age, then the existential forces that were driving the new post-Gelasian age should find some voice in his life and character. In fact, they do in that Frederick himself embodied a force of existence that thumbed its nose at rival authority, especially the pope. However, he allows no voice or expression of existential authority in his Sicilian subjects. The sentiments expressed in the Prooemium to his Constitutions reflect the denouement of the sacrum imperium civil theology of his day but do not provide for the assertion of that existential authority which was leading to its eclipse. Instead, and in contrast to Aquinas, Frederick’s theory of anthropology at the root of his Constitutions is deeply flawed. So crucial is this flawed anthropology that any estimation of Frederick’s contribution to political thought must be measured against two important anthropological and consequently political criteria: (1) his consideration of the human dignity and existential authority of his subjects as individuals and as a people, and (2) how he answered the pressing question of political legitimacy in the twilight of the sacrum imperium.

Frederick II and Authority Frederick advances in his Constitutions a commentary on man after the Fall that addresses both (1) and (2). He selects elements of the Genesis account to produce an alternative narrative of who man is (1) and 3. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 149–50.



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why he must be ruled (2). In summary, God has punished man’s transgression in Eden with the loss of immortality. Being now mortal, man’s death would have threatened the meaning of creation so God made mortal man fertile. This had two implications that concern the two criteria. On the one hand, man’s inclination to transgress became an inheritance for all generations; on the other, this inclination made man quarrelsome and therefore God placed rulers over the mass of men in order to preserve order. In his narrative, Frederick glosses over the redemptive significance of the death and Resurrection of Christ. Voegelin makes the following comments: Furthermore, we notice the introduction of Aristotelian conceptions. The world as created by God has an entelechy; when the telos, man, disappears, the rest of the world loses its “form” (deformatur). The substitution of the community of mortal man for immortal man re-forms the hierarchical structure of the world; the creation reaches its climax in the ruler who has to preserve the order of the people. The ordering function of ruler arises out of the necessitas rerum, the necessity of the world.4

The Place of Existential Authority of Persons in Relation to Frederick’s Function as Ruler and Lawmaker Set in Frederick’s account are assumptions about the nature of man, the nature of God, and the nature of the human-divine relationship, all of which render Scripture a legalistic but useful device. In differentiating the compactness of being, Christianity revealed the inexhaustible depth of human existence as a participant in transcendental reality. Philosophically, Aquinas’s treatment of political existence never loses sight of man’s luminosity as a spiritual being, transcending the sphere of the political and uncovering its limitations while simultaneously raising the field of political action to new heights of human dignity. By way of contrast, the moral and spiritual problem of Genesis is surplus to the requirements of Frederick’s political theory of rulership. Man is reduced to an unredeemed troublemaker who exists in a state of all against all, reminiscent of the later Hobbesian theory. There is very little tolerance for the assertion of existential authority in such a conception. Voegelin makes a suggestion that the Prooemium contains an element “that 4. Ibid., 153.

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for brevity’s sake we shall call the Averroist.”5 Averroism, as discussed above, is a term given to a series of conceptions about being that gained much traction in the medieval West after the reception of Aristotle, one of which is the element that posits the collective immortality of mankind in place of individual immortality. The mystical body of Christian mankind represents the spiritual unity of mankind, emphasizing that it is a unity of persons whose individual dignity subsists in the single human being. “The collectivist idea . . . absorbs the human personality into the spirit of the group. Man is the individuation of a generic intellect, and death means depersonalization through dissolution into the worldmind.”6 Although Averroism does not normally appear on the radar until the writings of Siger of Brabant a generation or two later, the collectivist element was clearly present as a line of thought in the earlier half of the thirteenth century. Collective immortality is a species of gnosticism. The notion of a collective immortality of man provides a gnostic alternative to the individual immortality of Christianity, and consequently to the obligations owed to the existential dignity of each person. Gnosticism accompanied Christianity since the beginnings of nominally Christian communities, claiming to provide epistemological certainty as a substitute for the tenuousness of faith. Put another way, gnosticism in any of its multiplicity of forms exists meaningfully only as a foil for Christianity and poses as a body of esoteric knowledge in Christian clothing, for example, language and rituals. In Frederick’s case, he maintains the traditional Christian symbolization which is in substantial contrast with the theory he is expounding. In his Constitutions he writes: Thus we, whom God has elevated beyond any hope man might have cherished to the pinnacle of the Roman empire and to the singular honour of all other kingdoms at the right hand of divine power, desire to render to God a two fold payment for the talents given to us, out of reverence for Jesus Christ, from whom we have received all we have.7

5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 154. 7. Frederick II, Prooemium, quoted in Pennington, “Law, Legislative Authority and Theories of Government, 1150–1300,” in Burns, Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 441.



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What is most notable is the use of Christian language for an nonChristian narrative of absolute power. In this case, the elements that would lend themselves to the development of Latin Averroism appear in Frederick’s collective immortality of mankind. In the denigration of personal existence to brutishness and to the individuation of a higher dignity in the collective substance, there seems no theoretical possibility of individual authority exercising an influence in the kingdom of Sicily. Berman notes that Frederick was able to complete “the process of centralization and bureaucratization of state authority” by the expansion of royal law over an impersonal mass.8 The individual units of the impersonal mass are, of course, lawless and troublesome men. An essential part then of necessity in the necessitas rerum is the ruler who must impose order by his divinely ordained authority. In the century and a half from the accession of King Roger II in 1112 to the death of his grandson Frederick in 1250, the people of Sicily and southern Italy had become accustomed to being subject to rulers that Berman has characterized as “the most powerful, the wealthiest, and culturally the most sophisticated of the secular rulers in Western Europe. Their success in these respects was due in considerable part to the genius of their governmental and legal institutions.” However, the genius of Sicily’s institutional infrastructure rested on the fact that it was, “to be sure, an autocratic genius: the king remained above the law, not only in practice but even in theory.”9 Frederick’s narrative of the Fall symbolizes an attitude toward mankind that has more in common with the attitude of intellectualism represented by Siger de Brabant and the tradition of the falāsifa with the important qualification that it was an attitude joined to royal potestas. For him, there was a lower (religious) order that is sufficient for keeping the mass of people in line, but above this was a higher order to which only an elite few can attain, foremost among whom was Frederick himself. The stability of the kingdom of Sicily may in part be due to the strength of the centralized and absolutist governmental and legal institutions, but it could also be partly due to the domination and resultant docility of the Sicilian subjects as a people. The existential authority of individual persons was neither recognized nor allowed. 8. Berman, Law and Revolution, 424. 9. Ibid.

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Frederick’s Foundation of Political Legitimacy That Frederick would set out to justify his royal authority with a narrative of human sinfulness suggests that the legitimacy he claimed for the particular nature of his kingship was dubious. Frederick was crowned emperor by pope Innocent III who had conferred on him the imperial crown upon the condition that he would abdicate his kingdom of Sicily when he gained the full recognition of the German princes. This recognition was achieved in 1218, when Otto IV, who had been Innocent’s original candidate for the German throne, finally died. But Frederick had no intention of giving up Naples and Sicily, which were the real strongholds of his power.10

The Sicilian throne was Frederick’s inheritance by succession while the legitimacy of his imperial function was conferred by the pope. Over the years, the actions of Frederick became increasingly offensive to the papacy. In the first place, as newly crowned emperor, he had agreed to forfeit his Sicilian kingdom, which it appears he never had any intention of doing. Second, he clashed repeatedly with the papal authority to the point of engaging in acts of warfare against papal agents and supporters, was excommunicated, and in “1245 Pope Innocent IV formally declared him to be ‘rejected by God,’ deposed from imperial authority, and outlawed.”11 Here arises a question on the meaning of political legitimacy: Can the legitimacy of rulership be violated by illegitimate acts? The answer to this was positive according to the papacy, which was the legitimating authority and which reserved the right to withdraw the legitimacy of his imperial majesty. From a legal perspective, Frederick did render his authority illegitimate if the foundation of his authority, the papacy, declared it so, on the understanding that if the papal authority had to power to confer imperial dignity on him, it had the power to remove it too. The sacral dignity of the office was subject to excommunication.12 Frederick, on the other hand, held that his status as king and emperor was untouchable in that it was attained through legitimate 10. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 458. 11. Berman, Law and Revolution, 428. 12. See J. A. Watt’s commentary in “Spiritual and Temporal Powers,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 382–87, for a general discussion of the relation of the powers within the Gelasian Two Swords framework.



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means. It is plausible that Frederick’s attitude as set forth in the Constitutions was itself constituted by the Sicilian attitude of the royal head acting above the law. After all, Frederick had been raised in Sicily as an orphan by various princes. The legalities of the empire seem not have bothered Frederick. Yet there was a need to base his rulership on some legitimate foundation and in the Prooemium he underscores the necessity of his own style of rulership in the necessitas rerum. Frederick was eager to base his authority as leader on something that he considered deeper and more profound than the papal conferral of legal status. It is this that is indicative of the shift in medieval society: the assertion that papal authority was not the final authority, that an existential necessity of things ultimately surpassed it. This is the existential source that Frederick claims legitimates his own style of absolutist monarchy in Sicily and which needed no recognition by a pope. That there are Averroist shades of meaning in Frederick’s thought is borne out by the assertion of a higher dignity in being. Although there is a narrative of the Fall, it is an alternative narrative that draws its meaning as a play on the original narrative in Scripture. Voegelin stresses that the Prooemium advances a non-Christian, “naturalistic theory of government, deriving the function of rulership from the structure of intramundane human reality.”13 In fact, it is probably closer to the truth to suggest that Frederick’s theory of government derives its legitimacy from the existential assertion of his own libido dominandi. The kingdom of Sicily became an extension of Frederick’s personality and his rule was so absolute that he assumed an extrapolitical authority and power to dominate the civil theology of Sicilian society. The meaning that Frederick invested his rulership with was so supreme that it obscured the boundaries of the political, the spiritual, and the existential.

Frederick II as Mirror of Gelasian Disintegration The necessitas rerum has connotations that are toxic for the Gelasianmedieval order. It would appear that if Frederick became anathema to the legalities of papal legitimating power, then that power of the papacy to legitimate had become dubious and increasingly irrelevant to Freder13. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 153.

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ick. The instance of his contempt for papal authority indicates that the foundation of rulership in the necessity of being itself was considered by him to be a superior foundation of legitimacy, at least in the world outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. Combined with the driving force of his megalomania, one may suggest that Frederick’s clash with the papacy was symbolic of the birthpangs of the modern West and by corollary, the slow death of Gelasian-medieval order. Jeffrey Herndon notes that the idea of the sacrum imperium does not die with Frederick, but the personality and institutions that have any hope of achieving the realization of the idea are swept from the stage of history. Instead of the grandeur of a communal empire bound together by the spirit of Christ, a system of competing powers would be rationalized and justified by new, emerging ideas.14

The appearance of Frederick’s necessitas rerum in the context of a self-legitimating tale of fallen humanity suggests that the sacrum imperium as a civil theology had begun to lose its radiance, and with it the institutional expressions of the one Christian order had begun to lose their universal relevance. Frederick’s attitude indicates that the medieval evocation of empire had dwindled and that for him, the more significant political drama lay outside the empire in the rival centers of political gravity such as France and the Norman kingdoms. His particular shift away from papal legitimating authority was not a dishonest statement of the papacy’s dwindling authority in the new environment of existential authority, but rather the honest recognition by Frederick that the type of legitimacy he required in order to dominate as well as rule was not the type of legitimacy that the papacy could extend. The second noteworthy point about Frederick is the inherent gnosticism forming his dominance. He was crowned a Christian emperor by Innocent III, but the sacrum imperium was the less significant of his two realms. It was in Sicily that he could claim absolute authority to dominate civil theology, but the empire was to be shared with the pope. In any event, the imperial zone was geographically too broad, historically too rooted in tradition, and culturally too diverse for any emperor to rule effectively. Frederick’s style of rulership was imbued with a gnostic fasci14. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, 95.



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nation for the possession of the absolute and it was only in the kingdom of Sicily that he could assert his messiah-like reputation to transcend the political. In using Sicily as the extension of his will, he could dominate the civil theology of the Sicilian kingdom, eclipsing the assertion of existential authority among his subjects and obscuring the Christian differentiation of the boundaries of the political. We have seen that the dynamic factor in this process was his conception of mankind as an immortal collective—and an unruly rabble in need of order, at that—substituting for the dignity of a community of individuals.

French Kingship Political Legitimacy in the Extraimperial Realms The rise of existential authority in the latter half of the twelfth century and through the thirteenth is also the time of great civilizational upheaval as well as a time of anxiety and crisis. The meaning of society was moving beyond the Gelasian-medieval evocation as the exercise of existential authority in the world opened up new vistas and new possibilities that had never been envisioned before. The acute problem in the political sphere was one of legitimacy, or the just grounding of a ruler’s authority. According to Oakeshott, medieval society believed that for a man to have authority over others, for him to have a right to rule, was something he must have acquired.

No man could be thought of as having a natural right to rule over other men; or, to put it another way, a right to rule could not derive from any natural quality that the ruler, as a man, might have—his superior strength; his superior intelligence or virtue.15 The right to rule, the authority behind political power, was uniformly held to be ordained only by God. In medieval society it was the pope who, as representative of the transcendent-divine God, could confer that legitimacy. Such legitimacy reflects the understanding that medieval society had of itself: a society spiritually articulated for existence in the 15. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 267. He goes on to say that, with regard to hereditary succession, “royal families” were certainly recognized, but the right to rule derived not from a bloodline but from a higher legitimating authority, who was God.

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transcendent-divine beyond. The civilizational upheaval was a gradual shift in civil theology toward a more articulated existence in the spatiotemporal present. The “eruption” of a people, as Fortescue called it, as a political people presented something new: in addition to divine ordination, kingship was to be properly grounded in the civil theology embodied by the people for royal authority to claim the fullness of legitimacy. Rightful kingship was characterized by two legitimating factors: rightful ordination and rightful grounding in the truth of society. This was the differentiation of authority as it manifested itself in the development of England after the Conquest. French civil theology, in contrast, was much older than the eleventh century and was deeply immersed in the Gelasian-medieval evocation of order. By the thirteenth century, France had become the dominant realm among the kingdoms on the fringe of the empire and its dominance demonstrates in clearer relief the increasing importance of these kingdoms within that older medieval ethos. The legitimizing of political authority in the fringe powers required a reconsideration of traditional Gelasian symbols of rulership which had been concentrated on the dignity of the imperial office and for the realization of the sacrum imperium as a universal Christian empire. “A transfer of the system of symbols, and of the universe of arguments connected with it, to the relation between the pope and a particular kingdom in Christianity must lead to complications.”16 Voegelin sums up the new field of problems that presented themselves in the case of the extraimperial political powers: The theory of royal-temporal power will have to deal . . . with the three main questions of (1) the relation of royal power to papal power, (2) the relation of royal power to imperial power, and (3) the relation of the church within the kingdom to the central church organization, the Gallican and Anglican questions.17

The problem to be addressed here encompasses this enumeration by Voegelin: the nature of a “Christian” kingship. Within medieval Christendom, temporal rulership was in need of a particular type of legitimacy owing to its sacral character. Christian political authority belonged with the charismata of the corpus mysticum and, this being the case, the 16. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 54. 17. Ibid.



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papacy was the only institution with sufficient representative authority of transcendental reality to bestow appropriate legitimacy. The papal function of conferring legitimacy to political rulership had been established for as long as the notion of a “Christian” political authority had been evoked (even despite clashes over the superiority of papal or imperial offices). The new problem was that that sacral character was now conceived to be transferable to the national realms. French monarchy is so important because of the scale of France’s political hegemony over the late medieval world. The clarification of political legitimacy beyond the imperial is the general problem that is bound up with the particular configuration of the French case. However, from the differentiation of authority in the historical situation another problem arises: the new assertion of existential authority in the enduring Gelasian field of authorities. In the aftermath of the Gregorian revolution, the political situation was characterized by the following realities: the strengthening of the papacy and the presence of the church as an actor in pragmatic fields of power; the rise of the fringe kingdoms and a plurality of Christian political authorities; and the assertion of specifically existential authority in the explosion of commerce, exploration, natural sciences, arts, political agitation, gnostic sects, and other such developments. The result was the new situation of multiple sacral kingships, not all of whom easily accepted the auctoritas claimed by the pope to legitimate rulership. As the postGregorian age moved on, some kingdoms began to look past papal authority as the supreme spiritual and legitimating authority and to seek alternative sources of legitimacy. We have mentioned England on the one hand and we have seen how Frederick II sought legitimacy for his own style of absolute kingship in his libidinous conception of natural necessity arising from fallen human existence rather than the spiritual office of the papacy. Such was the radical nature of the shift, at a political level, that it took a character of the magnitude of Frederick II to boldly witness to what was, in hindsight, the birth of a Western civilization of nations and the death of the old Gelasian-medieval universitas. The legitimating of political authority in the thirteenth century was still tied to papal authority: that is, royal rule without papal sanction lacked legitimacy, due not only to what papal authority meant in the world, but

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also due to the meaning of Christian kingship as divinely ordained. The sacrum imperium may have been entering into its twilight under the force of existential assertiveness in the world, but it held its grip through the lingering meanings that both kingship and papacy evoked. In this cosmion of order, France was an exception.

Early Development of France It was the policy of Gregory VII to extend recognition of the temporal authority of satellite kingdoms of the fringe under the spiritual hegemony of the papacy. In the French case of the early thirteenth century, Voegelin writes: The first indication that a French claim to power independent of the imperial existed is contained in the decretal Per Venerabilem of Innocent III (1202), which declares that the king of France does not recognize a superior in temporal matters. At the same time a canonist, Alanus, forwarded the general principle that every king has in his realm the same rights as the emperor in the empire; he refers to the origin of the rule in the international law of the time insofar as the division of the realms . . . introduced by ius gentium, is approved by the pope.18

Voegelin’s statement relates to the papal recognition of French regal authority, but the historical truth is that French kingship itself had already undergone centuries of development as a sacral office quite independently of the papacy. Oakeshott writes that, after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, France “was a land in which the great dukes and counts ruled in their dukedoms and counties. Their rule was ‘lordship’ [dominium]—that is, the right to rule based upon the ownership of land.”19 When Hugh Capet was elected king of the West Franks in 987 by his fellow lords, his kingship was not a dominium over them. Capet’s kingship was, instead, an authority over the lords, “as an organizer of defence against common enemies. He was a ‘king’ of ‘lords,’ not of France.”20 However, kingly office in France had descended from the Christian convert, Clovis, in the fifth century. Oakeshott outlines the peculiarity of French kingship: 18. Ibid., 55. 19. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 227. 20. Ibid.



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It was understood that his [Capet’s] royal potestas had not been given him by his electors, nor did it derive from his royal blood; it was something he had acquired in the anointing ceremony of his coronation. The oil of anointment had, according to repute, been brought by a dove from heaven for Clovis’s coronation, and it was preserved from generation to generation, over centuries. He was king Dei gratia. The king in France made no promises at his coronation, he acknowledged no duties to his people—he could scarcely be said to have subjects—but only to God. He was rex sacerdos; the bishop’s words at the coronation were: “through this crown you become a sharer in our ministry.”21

If lordship was dominium, kingly potestas was ordained by a heavenly auctoritas.22 From the beginning, kingship in France was absolute monarchy according to Oakeshott’s definition: absolute monarchy “did not mean that French kings had extraordinarily great power; quite the reverse, they had very little. It signified only that their potestas was derived, not from their subjects, but directly from God, and was bestowed on them in an ecclesiastical ceremony.”23 The political situation in France was fraught from the beginning by the absoluteness of its kingship; royal absoluteness had no need of cogovernance with its subjects. Indeed, by the midthirteenth century, roughly contemporaneously with Frederick, the absoluteness of French kingship was evident in the adulation that the saintly Louis IX received from the papacy even while he announced that his kingship was held from God only and from himself. The development of a national French monarchy over the centuries, from an impotent auctoritas set over the potestas of the lords, gradually resulted in the aggrandizement of the Capetian house and a powerful royal office on the fringe of the empire that combined potestas with a sacred character, quite independently of the emperor but with enjoying the favor of the pope. In effect, the absolute auctoritas of the French king’s heavenly commission was joined to absolute potestas over the French realm.

21. Ibid., 278. 22. French kingship, even more so than English kingship, was associated with thaumaturgic powers to heal various diseases, in particular scrofula. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 57–59. 23. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 279.

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Projection of French Power The massiveness of France’s reach across the world in the generations from Louis IX onward was thought to be of divine providence; the service of God was continually enacted by the further increase of political power abroad and the consolidation of all the resources of the Christian world in the hands of the French. The situation of French dominance is neatly summed up by historian Norman Cantor: With the resources of the wealthiest state in Europe, the loyalty of the French clergy, a French stronghold in Sicily, and with a French party in the college of cardinals itself, the Capetian ruler had the power to dominate the papacy more thoroughly than any king since the middle of the eleventh century. But in 1270 the papacy was not concerned about its potential vulnerability. On the contrary, it led the universal acclaim for a king [Louis IX] who seemed the perfect Christian monarch.24

The divine sanctioning of French kingship and its contrast with the emperor is nicely caught by Voegelin: “France was symbolized by a saint at the time when the empire was headed by the anti-Christian figure of Frederick II.”25 The sense of holy purpose in French hegemony over the world found its perfect expression in the removal of the papacy to Avignon. Voegelin writes, “the formal transfer of the papacy to Avignon in 1305 may be understood as a formal completion of the close relations between the French popes of the thirteenth century and the French princes.”26 The position of France as the leader of the mundus in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was secured. Its domination of the political and ecclesiastical powers of the Latin West, its influential expansion into the east and toward north Africa occurred predominantly during the imperial interregnum but suggests that the evocation of a universal Christian imperium still lingered with enough force in French civil theology to compel a “Christian” imperialism. The temporal expansion of French hegemony was most pronounced 24. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 464. 25. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 59. 26. Ibid., 61.



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in the campaigns of Charles of Anjou, who was the brother of King Louis IX. He acquired a de facto imperial position through the expansion of French influence in the West and into the near Orient. The projection of French power across Europe and beyond have to be seen in the context of the situation of the interregnum and the mounting crisis in civil theology as the sacrum imperium decayed. French civil theology was particularly open to the notion of a Christian empire in spite of the crisis, given the strength of French power and the conception of French kingship as a sacred office. The French solution was to occupy the mundus on behalf of Christendom, driven by a realistic recognition of their own power to do so. However, while France could act on behalf of the whole of Christendom, there was also the animating force of national pride at play. Consequently, there is a interesting overlap of old and new in French civil theology: on the one hand, there was the new factor of a rising national sentiment; while on the other hand, it is significant that France would engage in imperial functions during the interregnum. This demonstrates the meaning that the French attached to their existence as a realm.27 The actions of French royal potestas draw their meaning from the Gelasian-medieval orbit of symbols in which French civil theology was formed, while conveying much that was new about the existential like-mindedness of national identity. Where the civil theology of England had been recast by the Conquest, French power demonstrated a totality of meaning that combined its roots in the original Gelasian evocation of the Christian world order, appended with the post-Gelasian assertion of national sentiment.

Pierre Dubois The French lawyer Pierre Dubois represents this amalgam of meaning. In his De recuperatione terre sancte, written in 1306, he propounds the reconquest of the Holy Land as symbolic of the expansion of the Christian West by the king of France in lieu of the emperor. As Voegelin puts it, the extension of French power under Dubois’s conception means that from now on the “church will be supported by the state, the pope will be a French pensioner,” not to mention that the charismatic office of the 27. Charles of Anjou put his nephew Philipp III forward as a candidate for emperor in 1273.

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emperor is reduced to that of a “German king who will have to receive a compensation in the form of hereditary kingship.”28 The logic of such “imperialistic exuberance”29 led Dubois to the view that the reorganization of the world under the overlordship of the French king was desirable and necessary; its practicality was of secondary importance. In the shadow of the decaying empire, currently without an emperor, the universality of the Western civilizational zone is still the animating sentiment for Dubois, but that universality is predominantly about the imperial scale of French power rather than spirit. Dubois envisages the universalized establishment of French political power and the subordination of other regional or national polities in a league under French hegemony. The league was to be constructed to establish permanent peace among kings, princes, and cities for the sake of the reconquest of the Holy Land. The king of France would chair an international council of temporal and spiritual princes and would nominate a supreme court to mediate conflicts. Appeals may be brought to the pope, but with the pope under the sway of the French king, the primacy of France in the world was secured. The outbreak of the Hundred Years War with England ended the possibility of France’s world leadership, but as Voegelin comments, “By his clear-sighted constructivism, unhampered by sentiments of tradition, ruthless in the pursuit of a policy, he is representative of the new type of royal lawyers like Nogaret and Flotte.”30 David Walsh comments that Dubois’s conception of a league of nations was “part of a scheme for realizing an age of universal peace. The modern and utopian dimensions of this work are not dismissed by Voegelin as purely fanciful, for he recognizes their source in the lingering medieval aspiration for an order to replace the sacrum imperium.”31 Voegelin writes that the construction of an international constitution is the easiest thing in the world and has no bearing on the feasibility of the project. More important than the content of the construction is the fact that at the time there existed 28. Ibid., 62. 29. Ibid., 61. 30. Ibid., 61–62. See also note 15 on p. 62 for comment on Pierre Flotte, one of the royal apologists in Philipp’s dispute with Boniface III. He rejected papal claims with the retort: “Your power is verbal, ours however is real.” For Voegelin’s comments on Guillaume de Nogaret, see 38. 31. Walsh, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 10, n. 8.



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already intellectual, progressive lawyers for whom the Christian imperial idea had so completely lost its evocative force that a reconstruction of Europe out of the forces of the particularized nations under a hegemon seemed advisable. The idea of the hegemonic league of nations and the intellectual creed that the unity of Western mankind can be produced synthetically by lawyers have remained ever since an important strain in the political ideas of the West.32

The crisis in civil theology was not merely political and did not lend itself to a legal solution. Dubois did not recognize the existential root of the crisis that affected the spiritual as well as the political dimensions of society. His work represents a line of meaning in French civil theology as well as a curious stage in European development in the early fourteenth century: the univeralism of the imperial evocation is still strong, while the spiritual substance of a sacrum imperium has been replaced by the meaning of French power, projected on the international stage. The historical growth of medieval Europe as a people bound together by a living body of truths and constituting meaning in the world is almost irrelevant for him, except that it has a certain usefulness: it has provided a civilizational zone to be organized by his intellectual methods. This intellectualism in the guise of legalism that aims to restructure the entire Christian mundus bears a resemblance to the metastatic thinking that was increasingly influential in his time. The failure to understand, or even to recognize, the cohesion of the West as a human embodiment of truths is evident in Dubois, paralleling the trajectory that the work of Marsilius of Padua took.

Internal Development of French Society What is striking about the French situation is its contrast with the development of England. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English royal power had been traditionally stronger than the royal power within France, which was constantly presented with the problem of the strength of the nobility.33 The Capetian kings could not assert their authority with the degree of ease that the Angevin kings could, with the 32. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 64. Dubois is an early proponent of European political integration, cited by twentieth-century advocates for European union. For example, see comments by Secretary General of the European Parliamentary Union Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Europe Pulling Together,” The Rotarian, 74, no. 6 (June 1949): 9. 33. See Cantor’s narrative of the rise of the Capetian royal power, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 409–15.

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conspicuous result that French royal power was not strong enough to encourage the self-articulation of society nor to provide national-political channels for the cogovernance of the realm. The strength of French royal power gradually increased from the end of the twelfth century. This was a critical period when the newly assertive existential authority was reaching politically significant proportions. Due to the process of constitutionality that had begun in England, the medieval crisis in civil theology was less acute than in other regions of Christendom. The integration of the new existential forces—articulated into communes, guilds, and cities, representing the concerns—at a national level did not occur in France to a significant degree. Fortescue, who was a contemporary observer, compared the situation of the French “commons” before and after the Hundred Years War: Neither Saint Louis, once king there, nor any of his progenitors ever set taxes or other impositions upon the people of that land without the assent of the Three Estates, which when they are assembled, are like the parliament of England. And many of his successors kept this order until recently, when Englishmen made such war in France that the Three Estates dared not come together. . . . [And then the French king] took it upon himself to set taxes and other impositions upon the commons without the assent of the Three Estates; yet he would not and has not set such charges upon the nobles for fear of rebellion.34

Fortescue’s description of France alludes to the Estates Genereaux, first called in 1303, but generally paints a picture of a society solidly fragmented among the three estates. The lack of political integration on a national level and the resultant polarization of the estates from each other eventually led to the violent “eruption” of 1789. Voegelin notes that when the French monarchy reached its phase of absolutism [of power], beginning after the Hundred Years War, no articulate society could counterbalance the newly concentrated royal power and save the feudal liberties through the dangerous period so they might burgeon as the liberties of the nation. When the third estate finally became articulate the process had to the take the form of a social revolution.35 34. From “Sir John Fortescue on the English and French Monarchies,” quoted in Hollister et al, Medieval Europe, 211–12. As a suitable riposte to Fortescue, see the account of the convocation of the three estates in Tours in 1483 by late fifteenth-century French historian Philippe de Commynes, also in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 218–20. 35. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 141.



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The attendance of representatives at national assemblies was common to both England and France, but the legal basis of that attendance was not the same and, indeed, pointed to the different tendencies in the two realms with regard to the articulation of society. Regional assemblies of French villes began to be called in order to grant auxilium during the thirteenth century; in attending, the towns fulfilled a feudal obligation because due to their enfranchisement they had status as feudal arrière-vassaux. In England, the privileges of the towns were never so complete as to constitute free towns with feudal rights; there was no development in England paralleling the rise of feudal communes in France.36

The baronial liberties set out in Magna Carta (1215) were themselves grants from the king and, in comparison with France, were not expansive. The concentration of temporal power at the baronial level in France tended to stagnate political development at a national level. The articulation of English society was forged by the strength of the royal authority, bypassing the potential for baronial stagnation, and opening up a direct link to the Crown. In this way, the English erupted into a political people long before the French, and could provide a legitimate resistance to the tendencies of early modern English kings to absolutize their potestas in a way that was unimaginable in France of the same period. No national-political articulation could be achieved under the strictly feudal arrangements in France. The Gelasian relation between powers was prolonged in that there was little recognition given to, and no permanent status acquired by, the forces of existential authority in society. In this situation, France lagged behind England in framing a political arrangement that secured a basic social stability among its component parts and members. The concentration of power in the dominium of the French nobles was followed by the concentration of power in the French king; but it was already too late. The fragmentation of French society into separate, unintegrated estates had already occurred. France emerged from the high medieval period as a national realm inflexible to the integration of the new existential forces at a national-political level. In other words, France remained a national realm without becoming a political people. The new existential forces that were asserting them36. Ibid., 136. London was the exception in that it had acquired a separate legal personality that gave it feudal status as a commune equal with the tenants-in-chief.

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selves could not be given any political status within the French governmental arrangement as long as royal potestas was devoted to preserving a Gelasian-medieval meaning to its auctoritas. To paraphrase Berman, the legal and political order of France did not respond adequately to changes in society, generating a fractious civil theology that counteracted the social cohesion of like-mindedness across the estates and propelling the realm toward revolution.

Particularism Inside the empire and on its fringes, political development took the form of principalities and city-states, as well as leagues among them. This is what Voegelin calls particularism. As Cantor relates, in 843 the three sons of Louis the Pious decided on the partition of the empire in the Treaty of Verdun. “There were to be three Carolingian realms: the western, the eastern, and an anomalous middle kingdom . . . [that] almost immediately collapsed, leaving a maze of petty principalities from Flanders to Lombardy.”37 It is this maze that geographically and politically made up the particularist zone, all of which developed either under the shadow of the empire or the French realm, or indeed both. Voegelin comments on the uniqueness of the city-states: With the towns emerged a political organization based on commerce and industry and on the intensified intellectual and spiritual life of densely settled communities. . . . The town . . . obviously was more than just another form of government; it was rather a new mode of life determining a type of political man who differed radically from the ruling as well as from the subject types of the feudal order—that is, from the noble, the ecclesiastic, and the peasant. The town was, furthermore, not a mere addition to the feudal world, but rather the representative of a new phase of Western civilization.38

That new phase was the outcome of existential authority being exercised in society. Some manifestations of existential authority in the towns ranged from the administration of civic institutions to the rise of education, science, and the arts, from the piety of religious practice to the indulgence of luxury, and from the development of law to the exponential 37. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 193. 38. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 218–19.



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increase of commerce. However, for all their success in providing a postfeudal field of rationality and existential authority, Western city-states contained an inherent design flaw: their failure to articulate as a people on a national-political scale. The failure of the imperial zone to develop as national units and as national peoples was affected by one or both of two major factors: the establishment of feudal principalities occurred within the Gelasian pattern of papal-imperial coordination of the world. This meant that political development carried the burden of the imperial evocation and it would be several centuries before the civil theology in each of the particularist units shifted sufficiently to recognize national integration as meaningful. Even when the sentiment for nationalpolitical unity arose, the pragmatic interests of the ruling elites often militated against it. Second, the inevitable concentration of power at a local, nonnational level led to a wielding of power that was akin to a lordly or proprietary dominium rather than a ruling auctoritas, accompanied by an inevitable factionalism. With regard to the first factor—the lingering weight of the imperial idea—the writings of Dante and of Cola di Rienzo exemplify a tendency toward the universal. As Voegelin notes, “We . . . have to acknowledge that in the imperial zone the transfer of the corpus mysticum idea to the national bodies did not function quite smoothly.”39 We have seen Dante’s desire for a universal empire, while di Rienzo captured the rising Italian national sentiment by advocating a spiritual renovation of sacra Italia, a temporal and spiritual realm with Rome resuming its place at the head of the Christian world.40 As in the national realms, sentiments of like-mindedness such as political identity and friendship were potent elements animating the truth of civic life in the particularist zone, even on a scale comparable to the national (for example, in Italy). However, the realization of those sentiments met with opposition due to the second factor: concentration of power in lordly or oligarchic hands. More pragmatically, the concentration of power at the level of the prince 39. Ibid., 238. 40. As both a political and spiritual reformer, Rienzo achieved a coup d’etat of Rome on the Feast of Pentecost, 1347. His letters to the various Italian cities indicate that there is a mixture of sentiment between the national and the imperial. See Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 235–37.

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or a ruling oligarchy meant the concentration of political action at the level of princely or party interests. The experience of universal spiritual community across Christendom could be suffocated by factional strife in the immediate environment due to the absence of a higher representative of power. Voegelin, commenting on the Italian cities, observes that the division of the upper class into nobility and bourgeoisie is the principle cause of the violent factional life. . . . Two civilizational styles, the feudal and the capitalistic, were in constant friction; and both groups tried to assure their political ascendancy with the aid of the lower classes. . . . The towns had no integrating institutions comparable to the king as the representative of the realm, and the factional associations proved incapable of producing a representative executive who could have balanced the particular interests of the factions.41

The need for a higher, integrating auctoritas exercising political potestas represents a problem that was as much spiritual as it was political. In general, the sacrum imperium was no longer an adequate civil theology that exhausted the possibilities of social existence; the spiritual substance of the universal corpus mysticum was being absorbed into the political units that existed due to the existentially authoritative assertion of national like-mindedness. In the case of the national realms, the expansion of like-mindedness that constituted national sentiment was also spiritually meaningful. The transfer of the imperial evocation to a national corpus mysticum was not a political transfer only, but was being driven by the truth of national civil theologies that had arisen, had a spiritual meaning too. This is evident in the development of national kingship in the extraimperial realms. The result was twofold: first, the formation of a national people internally who, second, still participated in the universality of Christendom. The achievement of royal rule was to integrate the units of the realm into a national people, and in the case of England, to forge a national-political people. Voegelin notes the insufficiency of the particularist arrangement on a purely political level: “The commune alone, without the integrating services of a king, does not have sufficient coherence to bind the factional interests into a workable political unit once the economic stratification of a commercial and industrial society is fully developed.”42 The political and spiritual insuf41. Ibid., 230–31.

42. Ibid., 231.



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ficiency of the particularist zone is evident in the failure of these units to generate a national “people” or a national corpus mysticum that could meet the existential needs of individuals and groups. The absence of a national people was felt keenly by thinkers in the particularist zone, such as Cola di Rienzo who, through Joachitic symbols, advocated the unification of Italy by way of realizing the dream of a sacra Italia as “the new corpus mysticum.”43 Without the integrating agency of royal rule, the national sentiments (such as they were) in the particularist zones remained unrealized for centuries and the existential authority of individual persons was eventually swallowed in the inexorable rise of absolutism in the towns. While the signoria provided a welcome relief from the factionalism of town life, the absolutism of their rule destroyed the communal freedom enjoyed by the burghers. Cantor underlines the stifling and near collapse of civic liberties in the towns: “One of the fundamental facts of thirteenth-century civilization was the failure of the industrial and commercial classes to make use of their economic and intellectual importance to achieve a measure of political leadership in society. By 1300 even the Italian communes were losing their political freedom.”44 The entrenchment of aristocratic or baronial dominium and the resultant asphyxiation of liberty and political articulation were unfortunate outcomes of the particularist zone that sour the apparent magnificence of bourgeois architecture, literary achievement, and financial genius. 43. Ibid., 237. 44. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 472.

7 The M edieva l Papacy a nd the Ov er r each of Author it y

After considering the development of political authority in the crisis of meaning in medieval society, the church—as the institutional carrier of transcendental substance and the eminent spiritual authority of the medieval West—must now be considered. The spiritual authority of the church will be discussed in the context of the differentiation of authority. Consequently, much of the church’s doctrine and life that properly belong to other fields of enquiry, such as theology, will be placed in parentheses as much as this is possible. Relevant contexts for this narrative include claims of the medieval church to potestas over the mundus, its relation to the political authorities of the time, and the question of authority within its own ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The fragmentation of the medieval world after the twelfth century was a rapid process of unraveling that had seismic effects on the primary medieval institutions. The actions of the emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI had expanded and consolidated the imperial zone against the Normans without and the disloyal lords within. The rise of the political fringe restricted the significance of the empire as a power unit and was symptomatic of the dying aspiration for a temporal-spiritual Chris204

The Medieval Papacy 205 tian order, the civil theology that had sustained the meaning of medieval society for centuries and had formed a civilization in the West. The differentiation of authority was proceeding relentlessly, and while Pope Gelasius could develop a formula for universal governance in the coordination of the two ordines of rex et sacerdotes, the assertion of existential authority had no obvious place within the Gelasian pattern. The problem of individual existence and authority had not yet begun to appear in Gelasius’s time, but by the end of the twelfth century, the church was increasingly faced with problems about authority in the world—both political and existential—which it had not had to deal with practically before. The new and potent factor at work in the civil theology was the existential, which was affecting attitudes and expectations among Christians with regard to both spiritual and political authorities. The Gelasian emphasis therefore was placed on the authorities arising from the transcendental-spiritual sphere and the temporal-political sphere— and their coordination—rather than on the individual Christian who participates in both spheres. The inadequacy of the Two Swords as the final, comprehensive arrangement for Christendom was borne out by the rise of existential authority and the crisis of restlessness and anxiety it inaugurated. In addition to the problem of an unseen, but acutely present, third authority in the individual existence of Christian persons, the jurisdictional boundaries of the transcendental and temporal institutions had never been finally worked out and were never clear. The claims of jurisdiction made by both church and empire were for areas of human life that are not definitively just temporal or spiritual, but rather overlapping, such as the nature of Christian kingship, or even the institution of marriage and the morality of the Christian subjects. We have seen how, for example, Charlemagne legislated morality for his subjects regarding orphans and widows. Overlapping aspects of existence that extend into spiritual and temporal concerns largely involve the assertion of existential authority. Before the end of the twelfth century, existence-as-authority was not recognized and the overlapping zones became the subjects of intense rivalries between the Two Swords. The meaning of kingship, the meaning of social institutions, and the ground of ethical action all derive within civil theology which itself is not exclusively a spiritual or political preserve,

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but a living body of truth that emerges spontaneously from the social existence of concrete persons who participate at once in the transcendental and temporal dimensions of reality. The fragmentation of the medieval world occurred due to the shifts in civil theology, particularly those concerning the understanding of what constitutes the dignity of the Christian person and the consequent authority carried by individual Christian persons. This newly assertive understanding was to reconfigure the sets of relations among ecclesial, political, and personal authorities with profound civilizational consequences. The pragmatic events of the late twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries involved the papacy in working out its degree of influence on temporal reality, within the context of its responsibility to the revealed truths of supernatural theology. The Latin civilization of the Christian West had been spiritually formed by the church, and on occasion, led politically by the papacy. The Donation of Constantine, the Crusades, the assumption of legal authority to crown and depose emperors and kings, the treatment of heretical groups, and so on were all actions predicated on a possessive relation or dominium which the church adopted regarding medieval society, rather than a familial one. Before the consolidation of the fringe kingdoms and rise of existential authority, the church was “the predominant civilizing factor in the evolution of Western society. . . . Christianity in fact could function as a civil theology.”1 In this sense, the civilizational unity of Christendom did belong to the church in that it was precisely an achievement of the church. As long as the sacrum imperium remained evocative, the church could claim a political-temporal function, as had the emperors a transcendental function. When the political unity of Christendom was broken by the rising dominance of the fringe, the fear was that the spiritual unity of the West would follow suit and disintegrate. As we have seen, this transfer of the corpus mysticum to the national units was more than a political phenomenon, involving the entirety of meaning in civil theology: existential, spiritual, as well as political. One solution that presented itself was the assertion of absolute papal authority. The drift into absolutism became characteristic of the church’s re1. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 220.

The Medieval Papacy 207 lation to the fragmenting world: to the several political authorities that had arisen within and beyond the imperial zone, and to the existence of heretical groups that threatened the Christian unity of Western society in a different way. At times during this crisis of meaning, the church’s relationship to the world changed from that of a mother to her children to something resembling proprietary lordship. The inadequacy of this response symbolized the beginning of the tortuous process of gradually letting the Gelasian-medieval arrangement die, and with it, the civil theology represented by the sacrum imperium which, by the end of the thirteenth century, was fast becoming redundant. Arguably, the wars of religion in post-Reformation Europe can be seen as the final deaththroes of the Gelasian-medieval conception in which representatives of spiritual power—the papacy, the Protestant sects—assert a claim on the control of the public order. In the long unraveling of this Gelasianmedieval world, the clash of jurisdictions between the church and the rising nations was symptomatic of the crisis that overarched and implicated both institutional authorities. In Voegelin’s analysis, the instance of Unam Sanctam and Boniface VIII provide the first dogmatic witness to this, while the second phase [of this clash] is marked by the transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1305 and the Great Schism from 1378 to 1417. The third phase is characterized by the Conciliar movement with the three main aims of restoring unity to the church, of reforming the church in the direction of a limited monarchy, and of solving the problem of the new heresies.2

We will follow Voegelin’s list of phases.

Absolute Papacy Oakeshott describes the institution of power in the papacy as involving potestas of two sorts: potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis. The potestas ordinis belonged to a consecrated bishop, and thus the pope enjoyed it already, before his election. To it belonged the sacramental powers of a priest. . . . The potestas jurisdictionis, on the other hand, was peculiar to the office of pope. It was the “right” in virtue of which all ecclesiastics were sub2. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 41.

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ject to his rule. This was understood to derive directly from the commission of Christ to St. Peter to found and govern the church, as recorded in the New Testament.3

In addition to potestas, or a right to rule, papal auctoritas signified an “activity of guardianship rather than ‘rule,’ a right to advise, and to teach, and to admonish.”4 Papal authority, then, extended to the custodianship of Christian doctrine as its sole authoritative interpreter. The pope had the authority to guard and to augment and to interpret Christian belief. . . . But the pope was not only recognized to have auctoritas over Christian doctrine; he claimed, and he often successfully exercised, auctoritas over the kings and emperors of Christendom. . . . The ground of this auctoritas was the pope’s position as guardian of the Christian church; and it was often used to instruct kings and emperors in their duties as Christian rulers and protectors of the church.5

While the potestas of the pope extended to the spiritual sphere of the Christian community of believers, his auctoritas could also extend to the temporal-political sphere in the supervision of royal and imperial affairs. The Gregorian renovatio involved the fusion of papal auctoritas with potestas, meaning the claim to exercise authority for the purposes of ruling, commanding, and punishing in the temporal-political sphere.6

Unam Sanctam (1302) The good that politics aims at is not, in the end, political but serves the transcendental end of man. Politics, in this sense, transcends itself or gives itself to what is higher. This is arguably the most important emphasis in the political philosophy of Aquinas. It follows that the papal office is understood as the supreme office of authority in that it carries a transcendental authority. However, it does not follow that papal supremacy is a political supremacy. Unam Sanctam was a bull of Boniface VIII that asserted the political hegemony of the pope and shored up the function of the church as a political agent, a function that had begun to ebb away “when centers of lay culture formed at the courts and in the cities, when competent lay personnel increased in royal administra3. Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 272. 4. Ibid., 274. 5. Ibid., 274–75. 6. See ibid., 275.

The Medieval Papacy 209 tions and city governments.”7 Boniface VIII appears less as successor to Peter than as the head of a powerful bureaucratic organization in conflict with royal potestas. We are taught by the words of the Gospel that in this church and in her power there are two swords, a spiritual one and a temporal one. For when the apostles said “Here are two swords” (Luke 22: 38), meaning in the church since it was the apostles who spoke, the Lord did not reply that it was too many but enough. Certainly anyone who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has not paid heed to the words of the Lord when he said, “Put up thy sword into its sheath” (Matthew 26: 52). Both then are in the power of the church, the material sword and the spiritual. But the one is exercised for the church, the other by the church, the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, though at the will and suffrance [sic] of the priest. One sword ought to be under the other and the temporal authority subject to the spiritual power. . . . For, the truth bearing witness, the spiritual power has to institute the earthly power and to judge it if it has not been good.8

The problem with reducing the Gelasian-medieval order of the Two Swords to an edict in which “we declare, state, define and pronounce”9 possession of absolute authority, is that the spiritual function of the papal office is elided into the temporal fight for jurisdiction. The aura of sanctity surrounding the Gelasian-medieval papacy disappears in Unam Sanctam and is replaced with an all-too-human quest for political power. Daniel-Rops writes that “although there was nothing new about this bull, either in its form or content . . . [it] was bound to be looked upon as an instrument of papal imperialism.” He also states that “it defined, for the first time and in dogmatic terms, the teaching which had been generally accepted from the days of St Bernard to those of St Thomas Aquinas.”10 Cantor writes that, even a century before Boniface VIII, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) believed that “everything in the world is the province of the pope,” that St. Peter had been commissioned by Christ “to govern not only the univer7. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 221. 8. Boniface VIII, “Unam Sanctam,” in Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 161–62. See also Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300, 188ff. 9. Boniface VIII, “Unam Sanctam,” ibid. 10. H. Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade, 570–71.

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sal Church but all the secular world.” Innocent was fond of alluding to hierocratic theory, in which the spiritual sword was superior to the earthly sword, in which the subordination of monarchy to the priesthood was likened to the moon’s dependency on the sun.11

An already fraught political situation was not helped by the actions of Boniface. According to Daniel-Rops, “chroniclers tell us that on several occasions Boniface appeared in public wearing the imperial insignia and with two swords borne before him, while heralds cried: ‘I am Caesar! I am the Emperor!’”12 It is no surprise then that the bull represented to the kings of Christendom a declaration of a papal will-to-power in the historical context of an already scandalous situation in which Boniface and the king of France, Philip the Fair, were engaged in a hostile standoff over taxation of the clergy and a charge of treason against a French bishop.13 The dramatic outcome was known as the “Day of Anagni.” The pope finally resorted to the last weapon in his artillery—excommunication and deposition of the king of France—and while at his family palace at Anagni to prepare the bull against Philip, Nogaret was dispatched to capture him and bring him back to France to stand trial. “The lilies of France were carried alongside the banner of St Peter, as if to show that France was fighting for the Church. . . . Nogaret’s plan, however, was frustrated. While the troops were removing the spoils from Anagni, a faithful cardinal managed to rouse the populace; the Frenchmen took to their heels followed by loud cries of ‘Long live the Pope! Death to the foreigners!’”14 Although the pope was freed by the people of Anagni and aristocratic relatives, the loss of mystique and inscrutability from the entire affair symbolized the severe deterioration in the evocative idea of a sacrum imperium. Voegelin analyzes the theoretical prehistory of the hierocratic assertions of the bull. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Franciscan Ber11. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 417–18. See also Sabine and Thorson’s commentary on Innocent III’s bull Venerabilem (1202) in A History of Political Theory, 256. 12. H. Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade, 570–71. 13. According to Cantor, slanderous accusations and name calling were characteristic of the enmity between Boniface and the French. The pope allegedly had claimed that he would rather be a dog than a Frenchman, while the French—under lawyer Nogaret—implied that Boniface therefore was a heretic as he did not believe in the human soul in the sense of being an essence or substantial form. See Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 495. 14. Ibid., 574.

The Medieval Papacy 211 trand of Bayonne had developed a hierarchical theory of power in support of the greater dignity of the spiritual authority in the pope. Based on the pseudo-Dionysian treatises on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, the ecclesiastical structure is an analogue of the hierarchy of angels, with “an ‘influence of virtue’ . . . streaming from the top of the hierarchy . . . to the inferior orders and persons, while the hierarchy as a whole is culminating in God, the supreme hierarch, from whom the divine light substance descends to the first person of the hierarchy proper. In the church the pope is the hierarcha homo . . . from whom the powers descend, and are distributed to the members of the ecclesia.”15 The closed spiritual pyramid is a theory of papal power that “the construction of Unam Sanctam does no more than expand . . . beyond the ecclesiastical order into a general theory of power including the temporal.”16 Certainly, Oakeshott holds that the first move toward papal absolutism was made by Gregory VII’s combination of papal auctoritas with an imperial potestas: “Now, at least from the time of Gregory VII, this papal auctoritas over kings began to be interpreted as if it were potestas—that is to say, a right to rule, to command, and to punish.”17 The traditional understanding of ecclesia as a community bound together in the corpus mysticum had secured the penetration of society by Christianity and the ultimate success of Christianity as the dominant civilizing agent. The hierarchy of a power substance is akin to a latterday ideology that sought to replace the messiness of Christian history with the neatness of a papal power theory. This was the outline of Gerard of Abbeville’s criticism of Bertrand. The constitution of Christ’s community in grace and fellowship, by mutual love in the sense of Saint Paul and the charismata given directly by God, are eclipsed by the theory.18 According to Voegelin, the flow of power from the top through the closed pyramid of the church is remarkable similar to the gnostic immanentization of transcendental reality. Rather than the theory of papal authority as a commissioning of Peter by Christ to be the visible head of the corpus mysticum and to exercise a pastoral authority to “feed my 15. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 200–203. 16. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 46. 17. Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, 275. 18. An example of the constituting force of caritas is described by St. Paul in 1 Cor. 13.

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lambs”, there is a raw declaration of divine power, concentrated at the top of the hierarchy. In comparison to Siger of Brabant’s “naturalistic construction of the intramundane society, Bertrand provides a supranaturalistic construction of a no-less intramundane society.”19 In the analysis of Boniface VIII specifically, Voegelin maintains the charge of gnosticism. He writes that, in the Unam Sanctam, we find the argument: Hence when a temporal power deviates, it will be judged by the spiritual power; and when a minor spiritual power deviates it can be judged only by God, not man. For this the Apostle is witness when he says: “the spiritual man judges all things; but he himself is not judged by anybody” (1 Cor. 2:15).20

Voegelin argues that in the context of 1 Corinthians, the “spiritual man” is the Christian who has received the spirit of God. He asserts that Paul’s intention was to show that the Christian who knows the mind of God cannot be judged by those who do not know the mind of God. (In his own language, “the pneumatikos cannot be judged by the mere psychikos.”)21 However, Boniface arrogates the spirituality of the Christian man to the clerical hierarchy, and to the office of the papacy especially. Voegelin quotes John of Paris who noticed the deception involved in the transfer of spirituality: the “homo spiritualis of Saint Paul does not derive his spirituality from the potestas spiritualis that is proper to the ecclesiastical judge.”22 Noting the sectarian element of the distinction between the lower spiritual rank of lay Christians and the church’s hierarchy, Voegelin shows that Boniface’s understanding of the spiritual man (that is not far from a Tyconian sentiment of elitism) is combined with an imperial will to power: The bull, indeed, transfers the spiritual ranks, as we should find them in a Gnostic sect, to the whole body of Christianity. . . . The whole sphere of established institutions (church, empire, national kingdoms) is reinterpreted as the hierarchical articulation of an imperium of the Spirit. Incredible as it may seem, Boniface VIII has made the attempt of transforming the spiritual and temporal orders of medieval Christianity into a Gnostic empire.23

19. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 201–2. 20. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 4, 206. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 206–7. 23. Ibid., 207.

The Medieval Papacy 213 Incredible it certainly does seem and it is entirely plausible that Voegelin has overstepped the mark in this instance, even to the point of committing the same fallacy of intellectualism that he accuses several gnostics of; namely, blatant disregard for the historical circumstances which Boniface faced and out of which came the bull. Daniel-Rops is surely closer to the truth when he maintains that “we may blame Boniface VIII for his intransigence and his blunders, but the truth is more grave. His mistake lay in wishing to remain a medieval pope like Innocent III at a time when a new conception of the world was emerging under the impulse of young, ambitious states.”24 There seems to have been a corruption of worldliness at play in the heightened tensions that underpins the papal will-to-power, rather than genuine spiritual substance in which religious authority ought to be immersed. However, this does not add up to gnosticism and while many patterns of thought at the time bore a similarity to gnostic immanentization, it does not follow that brute assertions of authority and power are anything other than alltoo-human instances of pride. Indeed, issued as a response to the time, Unam Sanctam displays a sense of desperation as the temporal world began to assert the legitimacy of its own authorities in separation from papal sanction. The undue claims for jurisdiction and superiority at the nadir of French-papal relations signified that the pope had not yet come to terms with the end of the Gelasian medieval order.

Giles of Rome: De ecclesiastica potestatae (c. 1301) The argument for the absolute papacy may have had an intellectual background in the likes of Bertrand of Bayonne, but it seems that Giles of Rome had a decisive influence on the bull. Before becoming papal counselor, he acted as tutor to the young Philip the Fair at the request of the French king, Philip III, after completing his studies at the University of Paris. It was at this time that he wrote his first treatise that developed a theory of power, albeit temporal power. Later he wrote De ecclesiastica potestatae, which appeared in the months before Unam Sanctam was issued. The contents do not concern us here other than to mention that Giles introduces a theory of power that corresponds very closely to 24. Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade, 575.

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Bertrand’s closed theory of pyramidal power substance and which posits at the top the powerful in contrast to the powerless at the bottom. Voegelin remarks, “human dignity in the image of omnipotent divinity is given to the rulers only. It does not become clear whether the subjects share in this dignity; the creation of man in the image of God becomes dangerously close to being a privilege of those who hold power.”25 As a papal theorist, Giles sets out to establish the nature of specifically papal power. In various chapters of this short work we have tried to state more clearly how earthly power, because it rules over temporal matters, is rightly and properly subject to the spiritual power, so that from this we may be able to infer that the spiritual power rules not only over the temporal power but also over temporal matters, inasmuch as the ecclesiastical authority is shown to have dominion over both temporal matters and their rulers.26

The resemblance to Unam Sanctam, while unsurprising, is striking: The plenitude of both spiritual and material powers belongs, of course, to the pope but their exercise differs in that the spiritual sword is at the immediate use of the church and the material sword is used by the secular princes at the command of the church. All secular laws “are invalid if they are in conflict with ecclesiastical law. These technical rules make Christian mankind a closed governmental system with respect to legislation, administration, and the use of the instruments of coercion.”27 Similarly, power is concentrated in the papal apex and Giles can state with this logic, “What the pope does may be said to be done by the church.”28 The church, in Giles’s theory, is elided by the office of the pope, and in the elision the church as a living community in spirit has evaporated. The church has been transformed into a hierarchical governmental organization. As Voegelin comments, Giles’s papal absolutism parallels the defining statement of royal absolutism that was still centuries away, L’état c’est moi!29 25. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 51. 26. Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, Book II, ch. 6., in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 392–93. 27. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 51. 28. Giles of Rome, De ecclesia potestatae, II, 12; quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 52. 29. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 52.

The Medieval Papacy 215 Only papal authority can grant legitimacy to the temporal authorities, which, in contrast to the cooperation and coordination in the Gelasian evocation, are now entirely subordinate. Hugh of St. Victor’s claim that the royal must be instituted by the sacerdotal finds a more radical expression in Giles’s assertion that no princely power is legitimately royal or just unless its legitimacy has been granted by the church, that is, the pope: The strictness of ecclesiastical power requires that it possess all things by ruling over them, but, in order to be freer to attend to spiritual things, that it have no earthly possessions in the sense that it would concern itself with them. Rather it commits the concern of these temporal things to laymen.30

Giles’s statement of papal power emanates from the heart of the medieval problem which is the notion of a Christian political authority. If temporal-royal rule could only find meaning as a sacred office, then legitimate kingship was intimately bound up with the sacramental authority of the papacy. It cannot be surprising that, in the predictable clashes, there developed a series of increasingly absolute theories of power. In fact, given the hemorrhaging of the sacrum imperium civil theology at this time, the line from Hugh of St. Victor through Bertrand and Giles to Unam Sanctam was perhaps inevitable. What is, in another sense, surprising, though, is the recasting of the papal office as that of an imperial overlord, whose dominium claims a legalistic jurisdiction over church, empire, world, and existence itself. It is a remolding that confounds the genuinely Christian foundation of medieval civil theology and the differentiation of authority into distinct but overlapping spheres set in motion from the beginning. This differentiation gave rise to cries for liberty on behalf of the church out of which came the Gregorian revolution and resulted in the explosion of human forces and activities in the post-Gregorian era, all of which were predicated on the existential exercise of liberty and the assertion of individual and communal authority. The absolutist line of Giles’s papal theory and the Unam Sanctam threatens this existential sphere, and by extension the shift of meaning in medieval society, by claiming jurisdiction 30. Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, Book II, ch. 6, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 393.

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over the world. If the political and the existential are to be subordinated to the now “superordinated” religious authority, then both the political and the existential lose their sphere of meaning and specific dignity. Rather than coordination, the practical science of living—the pursuit of existential goods such as virtue, happiness, liberty; the exercise of political goods such as justice, peace, order—is subordinated to the theocratic pattern set by the absolute papacy. For example, only Christians obedient to a Christian ruler who in turn is obedient to the magisterium can own property. Pagans have no property rights while the excommunicated have forfeited any they may have had. For Giles, the right to property cannot be called a natural right and the holding of property by inheritance or first occupation has no intrinsic justice. As Voegelin points out, the owners of property must also be baptized Christians in communion with the church. Through the Fall men have lost their all their rights; such rights as they have, they receive through their status in the sacramental order of the church, which has total dominion over all things. The whole sphere of natural law is abolished, and the legal status of men is made dependent on their obedient integration into the absolute governmental machine headed by the pope. The outlines of a totalitarian organization become recognizable.31

The legalism of Frederick II’s Constitutions of Melfi, combined with a justificatory narrative of the Fall, finds its counterpart in the De ecclesiastic potestatae. Giles’s theory is misanthropic in the same way as Frederick’s, and Voegelin’s diagnosis of totalitarianism is substantially correct. The characterization of power in the De ecclesiastica potestate is remarkably similar to the popular slogan of Italian fascists under Mussolini: “everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.”32 Giles had already written a prior treatise on princely power (De regimine principum, 1285) in which the subordination of temporal power to the spiritual is effectively ignored and hereditary monarchy is presented as the best form of government. Indeed, his argument for hereditary monarchy carries the same attitude to the masses that is also discernible in Frederick’s narrative of the Fall: when one considers 31. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 53. 32. Based on Mussolini’s totalitarian conception of the state. See Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, http://library.flawlesslogic.com/fascism.htm.

The Medieval Papacy 217 the concrete condition of men, hereditary succession is best.33 Furthermore, the concentration of unlimited power in the hands of a ruler is not considered a tyranny, as Aristotle thought, but as merely a monarchy where one person is sovereign and where there is orderly government. Giles seems to not necessarily prefer a regimen regale to its alternative, a regimen politicum where the laws are instituted by the subjects according to their own traditions and customs, but demonstrates a desire to theoretically underpin whichever order is represented by his employer; here, the increasingly absolute monarchy of Philip III of France, and there, the absolute papacy of Boniface VIII.34 The instance of Giles’s treatise manifests the drama of the medieval soul that had originally evoked and sustained the sacrum imperium but whose disintegration was one in which all the actors in the drama participated. The collapse of tension toward the transcendent-divine ground is manifest through a style of argumentation that is reminiscent of the sophists of ancient Greece.35 Voegelin contrasts Giles with Aquinas “who could establish the freedom and independence of the intellect because he was a great spiritualist. . . . In Giles [we have] the first modern political intellectual to use the intellect as a subservient instrument for the support of a dogmatic position.”36 The apologists for the absolute papacy or absolute monarchy in the late Middle Ages were the agents for a whitewashing of tradition whose development was rooted in the meaningful existence of society in favor of the aggrandizement of institutional power with which they are associated. The exercise of absolute authority meant both the effective subordination of a necessary public coauthority, as well as the silencing of rival sources of authority in individual existence by vanquishing the personal “zone of autonomy.” The exercise of absolute authority meant having a coercive strangle-hold on the public order and the domination 33. See Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum, Book III, pars 2, ch. 5, in John Trevisa, The Governance of Kings, 329–32. 34. See Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (hereafter, A History of Political Thought), 69–71. 35. See Voegelin, “The Sophists,” Order and History 2, 341–405. Here Voegelin argues that the sophists functioned as intellectuals-for-hire without regard for truth and the historicism of civil theology. 36. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 52.

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of its underlying civil theology, for the purpose of producing obedient conformance and minimizing dissent. On a philosophic-spiritual level, the dignity of human existence is decapitated by a temporal power structure, ecclesial or political, which reduces personhood to a material function within it. The gnostic environment is an existential vacuum, effectively granting a carte blanche to the dominant authority to act as chief metaphysician. Giles’s treatises on princely and papal power propel his respective overlords to the headship of the Western civilizational zone by the method of achieving an absolutism that can dominate civil theology.

John of Paris and the Limitation of Papal Power (c. 1302) Resistance to the papal claim to plentitudo potestatis forms one of the strands of the work of John of Paris. He wrote his Tractatus de potestate regis et papali in Philip’s kingdom of France in the early fourteenth century. It appears as an antidote to the sentiments of Giles in providing a robust challenge to the theory of absolute papal power and to absolute power in general. For example, where Giles asserted papal dominium over property and the authority to determine who may be entitled to property rights, John states forthrightly that the Pope is not an administrator in regard to them [the goods of laymen], save perhaps in the case of extreme necessity for the church; and even in this case he is not an administrator but the declarer of right. In order to explain this, we have to bear in mind that the external goods of laymen are not given to the community, as are the ecclesiastical goods; rather they are acquired by each person through art, labor, or proper industry, and individual persons as such have a right, a power, and a true dominion over them; and anyone may order, dispose, distribute, hold, or part with what belongs to him as he sees fit without injury to others, since he is the master. . . . Thus neither the ruler nor the Pope has dominion over such things or the right to administer them.37

Annabel Brett articulates the general shape of John’s argument: “[John distinguishes] . . . the nature of the community of the faithful from the nature of political communities. . . . Spiritual and temporal 37. John of Paris, On Kingly and Papal Power, ch. 8, “The Relation of the Supreme Pontiff to the Goods of Laymen,” in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 415.

The Medieval Papacy 219 are two very different communities, then, serving different ends, which John does not link in the way that Aquinas does.”38 John treats the temporal community as an autonomous community, free from any coercive papal power. While the headship of the church is derived from God alone and not from the corporate body of the church, John “will not allow that the body of the church has no power whatever if the pope abuses his authority. In such a situation, the pope can be deposed or removed from authority, ‘because that is in a certain way natural.’”39 There are two things to say about the natural authority of the church’s body. Firstly, the human substance of the church’s body is “natural” for John which then can be seen as legitimately asserting an existential authority of its own. Brett refers to Brian Tierney’s Foundations of Conciliar Theory by suggesting that John was drawing on Roman law and its theory of corporations, “in which the individuals in a group can be understood not simply as a disconnected aggregate but rather as ‘incorporated’ into one body.”40 The second thing to be said is based on the nature of existential authority: civil theology is spontaneously generated and sustained by the concrete lives of persons in community. Subsequently, it is the civil theology that invests the rulership of society with meaning and grounds authority in the truths that already bind society. The ruler is then a representative of the society’s civil theology. According to the theory of corporations that John seems to have been drawing upon, a difficulty presents itself: if one function of the ruler is to adequately represent the society over which he rules, does the papal claim to temporal authority also mean that the pope is the representative of society? If this is the case then it follows that the pope can be subject to Corporationist theories, such as that in the Conciliar Movement. For John, the papal head becomes answerable to an ecclesiastical body if he asserts a temporal auctoritas. This corporate body then would have a strong claim on the legitimacy of his rulership. John’s theory of the “natural” authority of the church’s body moves in the universe of meanings that were stirring in civil theology at the time. We can discern the 38. Annabel S. Brett, “Political Philosophy,” in McGrade, Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, 287. 39. Ibid., 288. 40. Ibid.

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emphasis he places on existential authority that mirrors political developments in his day. Also, one can sense Conciliarism coming on to the radar of possibilities if the papal assertion of absolutism with a jurisdiction over the temporal sphere were continued. Such absolutist supererogation was continued of course, and it follows that with the increased “temporality” of the papal office, the Corporationist response became highly plausible. If Conciliarism overturned the meaning of the papal office, it was because the prior papal claims of jurisdiction over the political and existential did too. John’s argument must be seen as a highly sensitive response to the plenitude of power claimed by the pope specifically, but within the context of arguing against absolutism in general that amounted to a self-inflicted blow to the dignity of either papal or royal offices. John’s argument formulates the separation of authorities, not by debasing one and elevating the other, but by exploring the particular competence of each. From this he can identify the where the jurisdictions of the ruler and the pope overlap and what form of intervention is appropriate to both in the case of a conflict in the jurisdiction of the other. However, Voegelin suggests that John goes too far: the theoretical attempt to minimize the church’s temporal influence effectively results in the removal of the spiritual power from the polity. In John, the Gelasian-medieval civil theology is dead. His argument has little to do with the Gelasian imperial problems. For the sentiment [underlying the argument] itself has become secular in the sense that it is bent toward an elimination of the spiritual power from the substance of the polity and no longer toward its limitation in a mixed spiritual-temporal community.41

Voegelin may have gone too far in his assessment of John. If John is seeking the minimizing of papal power over the political and existential, it does not follow that he demands the elimination of the spiritual power. In fact, Janet Coleman points out that for John, papal intervention is sometimes legitimate. However, the involvement appropriate to the papal authority is “incidental” involvement. That is, “when a ruler offends in temporal matters whose cognizance is not ecclesiastical, then the initiative in starting the correcting process is that of the barons and peers 41. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 56.

The Medieval Papacy 221 of the kingdom.”42 The pope’s function is incidental in that he may offer counsel. Even when the ruler has offended in matters like faith and marriage, the pope must restrict his actions to admonishment or excommunication; the removal of the ruler is again a matter for the barons. That is, intervention is appropriate so long as it is not the coercive action of political potestas, but action that belongs within the competence of spiritual auctoritas. He writes that the dignity of both offices, being separate from the other, is derived from God. It is God who grants them their specific competence which is not subject to the competence of the other, but always only to God: neither of these powers derives from the other; rather they both derive from some higher power. Hence secular power is greater than spiritual power in certain matters, namely, temporal matters; and with respect to this is not subject to it in anything, because it does not stem from it.43

John’s minimizing of the papal power from the French polity in particular was not the eradication of spiritual power by any means, but Coleman points out that it was significant that in chapter two of his tract John defines the priesthood as the spiritual powers given by Christ “to ministers” (note the plural); and in chapter ten, that the “multitude’s direction towards a higher end is in the care of Christ whose vicars and ministers are priests [again, note the plurals] rather than the pope.”44 The downsizing of papal power in the realm of the political testifies to a civil theology that had moved beyond domination by either papal or royal power while nevertheless asserting that priestly dignity is superior to the royal: Hence we say that priestly power is higher than kingly power and surpasses it in dignity, since we always find that what pertains to the ultimate end is better and more perfect, and directs that to which the lower end pertains. . . . If the priest is superior to the ruler in dignity and absolutely speaking, nevertheless it is not necessary that he be superior to him in all things.45 42. Coleman, “John of Paris,” in A History of Political Thought, 130. 43. John of Paris, On Kingly and Papal Power, ch. 5, “Which Is Prior According to Dignity, Kingship or the Priesthood?” in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 413–14. 44. Coleman, “John of Paris,” in A History of Political Thought, 131. 45. John of Paris, On Kingly and Papal Power, ch. 5, “Which Is Prior According to Dignity, Kingship or the Priesthood,” in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 413.

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The post-Gelasian evocation is clear in John’s thought. He highlights legitimate authority expressed corporately in the concrete persons of a society, and by doing so, places the existential on the same plane as the political and spiritual: The spiritual power has been depoliticized in his work; correspondingly, the political power has been despiritualized in the sense of exercising competence in religious matters; thirdly, dominium exercised by individual laymen over their goods is a legitimate zone of autonomy that ought not suffer intervention from other forms of authority except in case of necessity. John has carefully rebalanced the royal and sacerdotal authorities but with the inclusion of the existential. The differentiation in civil theology finds a voice in John even as the pragmatic events of his time were leading toward an increasing absolutism. His thought represents something of a diagnosis of the civilizational problem of disintegration while simultaneously presenting a solution.

Parochialism and Ecclesiastical Jurisdictionalism In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the rise of the national realms occurred under the influence of the various national sentiments. The increased emphasis on the domestic range of political community as against the larger range of European Christendom marks these centuries as the period of national closure. One obvious symptom of the closure is the military and economic struggles between England and France that signaled the end of a Western community in any politically meaningful way. “The kingship and the prime estates orient themselves increasingly toward the people within the territorial boundaries of the realm, as the foundation of their strength; and the people, as they become articulate, are oriented toward the structure of the realm in which they find their political form.”46 In the erosion of the sacrum imperium evocation as an adequate civil theology, identity became national and the rise of “parochialism” meant the fragmentation of the Christian world into a variety of polities. Furthermore, this impacted on the spiritual sphere as well as the sphere of politics due to the withering away of 46. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 163.

The Medieval Papacy 223 the sacrum imperium that had bound Christian communities together as the bearers of a common body of truths. “After the disaster of the Hohenstaufen [referring to Frederick II as the final straw in a line of belligerent rulers], the emperor had been practically eliminated in his function as the temporal lord of Christianity; and no substitute institution had evolved to take his place.”47 Due to the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism, the papacy’s function as spiritual lord of Christianity also came under threat. The common civil theology that had carried the meaning of papacy and empire as the ordines of the Christian world had ebbed so significantly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that both struggled to maintain their meaning as pragmatic events overtook them. The slow withering away of the sacrum imperium led to a crisis of meaning just under the surface of history: How was society to be understood now? What was the function of a universal church in a world shaped by the closing national units? Most radically, what was the fate of the individual to be, the bearer of the newly assertive authority, in the face of an absolutizing papacy and monarchy? The late Middle Ages is marked by confusion, uncertainty, and anguish that underline the spiritual nature of the crisis. The church, as representative of transcendental truth, was as much caught up in the upheaval as the temporal monarchs. The agonizing death of the Gelasian-medieval world and the simultaneous birth of the modern West encompassed every aspect of existence—individual, social, and historical—as the process of differentiation gradually gained critical mass.

Babylonian Capitivity and the Antagonism of Church and Nations The Babylonian Captivity refers to the residence of the popes in Avignon from 1305 to 1378, approximately the same length of time that the Jewish people lived in exile in Babylon. The influence of France was enormous at the time, but the immediate reason for the move was the unrest in Italy at the end of the thirteenth century, particularly the factionalism in Rome itself. The physical danger posed to the pope in his residence in Rome prompted Boniface’s successor to move to Perugia, 47. Ibid.

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while the next pope Clement V, a Frenchman, made the move to Avignon in the papal state of the Venaissin, which represented a short-term fix that had enormous political repercussions for the papacy’s reputation. Joseph Lynch comments: The reputation of the papacy for independence and fairness was hurt by the spectacle of a French pope, only a river’s width away from the kingdom of France, surrounded by a majority of French cardinals, living in a Frenchspeaking territory and often supporting the political and diplomatic aims of French kings. The political enemies of France, particularly England, were angered by what they saw as the papacy’s favouritism. The pious all over Christendom were also troubled by the popes’ abandonment of the traditional seat of St Peter in Rome.48

The policy of Gregory VII since the eleventh century was to favor the development of city-states in the papal territories over which, despite later claims, the popes had not asserted sovereignty. This had led to the situation at the end of the thirteenth century of the pope having no territorial foothold in Italy that could secure his personal safety. The response was to eventually reverse Gregory’s policy of abstaining from exercising temporal sovereignty and to actually assert temporal power which came about through the actions of Cardinal Albornoz in the latter half of the fourteenth century who made a return to Italy possible. The territorial gain for the papacy paralleled the political development of the nations and the parochialism of closure. What had been suggested in Unam Sanctam as far as the church’s temporal authority was concerned was now a pragmatic reality. The military activity of Cardinal Albornoz may have been a practical necessity for the papacy’s return to Italy, but the theocratic mixture of transcendental and temporal authority ominously asserted in Unam Sanctam had now come to pass. Woven into the territorial concerns therefore were issues like revenues, which had already given rise to the “Day of Anagni.” With the enormous resources that the church had at its disposal, bureaucratic rationalization and increased efficiency in the international collection of taxes ensued. As a result, the church became an organization in the world that could match, and often surpass, the powers of any of the national realms. The 48. See Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History, 323–24.

The Medieval Papacy 225 decline of Gelasian Christendom was therefore symbolized by the temporal rivalry between the church and the nations. Inevitably conflicts arose between the temporal suzerainty of the church and those states. Charles McIlwain sees the situation of the midfourteenth century as the final “untangling” in a long controversy of the “fundamental issue between Regnum and Sacerdotium from a mass of incidental questions, and the arguments of both sides . . . carried to their extreme logical conclusions.”49 He sees the jurisdictional struggles between the spiritual and the temporal authorities in the mid-fourteenth century as the culmination of a controversy that had raged since at least the papacy of Gregory VII, which had now come down to its bare bones. If God has entrusted the governance of the world to a single authority, responsible for the guidance and control of affairs, then the Commonwealth of Christians is in reality a Church and the head of the Church is the ultimate earthly seat of all authority and over all. If, on the other hand, God entrusted the guidance of the world to two separate and distinct authorities instead of to one, then one of these should be spiritual exclusively and the other must be supreme in all temporal matters. The defenders of secular government insisted that the divine government for the world is dualistic, the defenders of the sacerdotium held that it is monistic. . . . This great issue, in varying form but in essentials unchanging, has never been entirely absent from the political thought of the western world since the eleventh century at least.50

However, the controversy between the church and the temporal authorities was launched by the existential deficiencies of the Gelasian arrangement generally. The latent existential authority of Christian individuals began to assert itself more acutely after the invasions subsided towards the end of the tenth century. The problems in sacerdotiumregnum relations led to a radicalizing of the sectors within the church-ascommunity that was driven by the newly active, acquisitive, and anxious existential authority carried by Christian individuals. The Christian separation of powers that authorized the Gelasian dualism by which Christendom was to be governed was a differentiation that also 49. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (hereafter, The Growth of Political Thought in the West), 314. 50. Ibid.

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included the legitimizing of individual existence as authoritative. The pendulum of arguments for and against the superiority of one or other of the Gelasian Swords has to be seen as a product of the ultimate failure of the dualism to adequate capture the truth of Christian society. To the extent that the church and the nations faced off against each other for centuries after the fourteenth, the Gelasian-medieval conception of two powers lingered. To the extent that both the spiritual and temporal powers began to look toward the existential authority of their individual members, they could begin to retrace their own raison d’être, overcome the violence of the jurisdictional struggle, and thereby secure the existential or spiritual principle that animates both. As examples of the recovery of both spiritual and temporal authorities and a reorientation to the world founded on a recognition of the existential dignity of man, we have bold statements in much later documents such as Gaudium et Spes51 on the ecclesiastical side; and on the political side, the sentiments explicitly stated in the American Declaration of Independence. The agony of the medieval struggle between the church and the empire firstly and later the nations has to be understood as the continuing and difficult process of the differentiation of authority, propelled by the surfacing of the existential into the Gelasian formulation and cracking open the dualism that had locked church and state together in a state of mutual antagonism.

Schism and Antagonism within the Church By the fourteenth century, the Scholastic search for universals had been exhausted and had careered off into the philosophical mood of Nominalism. The dominance of Nominalism converged with an increased legalism that was primarily concerned with the proper jurisdiction in which authority could be asserted; and, conversely, in which another authority could not be asserted. In this atmosphere, a combative jurisdictional rivalry opened on two fronts: between the church and the 51. “Just as it is in the world’s interest to acknowledge the Church as an historical reality, and to recognize her good influence, so the Church herself knows how richly she has profited by the history and development of humanity.” Gaudium et Spes, 44. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-etspes_en.html.

The Medieval Papacy 227 nations, on the one hand, and on the other, within the structures of the church itself over the issue of papal authority. The Great Schism was an outcome of the jurisdictional obsession of the time which overtook the scandal of the Babylonian Captivity. In 1378, after Cardinal Albornoz’s securing of papal sovereignty over its Italian territories, some cardinals returned to Rome and elected another pope, even as the Avignon papacy continued. Christendom now faced the prospect of two popes which inevitably had much more than an ecclesiastical effect. Doubt, discord, and scandal resulted and filled Europe with confusion and hostility.52 Two popes, one French and one Italian, could attract the support of rival nations and lead to further division among the properly political sphere of the nations. Clement VII, the French pope in Avignon, enjoyed the support of France, Spain, Portugal, and Scotland, among others, while Urban VI had Italian, German, and English backing. Joseph Strayer writes that the concern for spiritual reform of the church became impossible under the circumstances: More than ever it was necessary to raise money by every possible means and to appoint prelates who were shrewd politicians and good businessmen rather than spiritual leaders. Conditions were worst in the unhappy dioceses of doubtful obedience where rival appointees fought for the possession of office, but even in the regions which were unquestionably loyal to Rome or Avignon, there was a decline in ecclesiastical discipline and morality.53

The preexisting antipapal writings of William of Ockham and Marsilius gained in influence under the weight of the scandal and the hostile atmosphere of competing jurisdictions. Both Ockham and Marsilius looked to the rising existential authority embedded in the living Christian communities to counter the nightmare: Ockham looked to the existential authority of individual Christians, while Marsilius emphasized the corporate authority of the community, the legislator. In England, Wycliffe insisted on the authority of Scripture, denounced the traditional authorities that seemed to contradict the Bible, and emphasized the authority of the individual Christian in a state of grace. Meanwhile 52. For more detail on the circumstances of the Great Schism, see Joseph Strayer, Middle Ages, 395–1500 (hereafter, Middle Ages), 426ff. 53. Strayer, Middle Ages, 429.

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John Hus in Bohemia was moved into action by the writings of Wycliffe. He emphasized the spiritual authority of the individual Christian conscience in the interpretation of Scripture and brought most of Bohemia with him. Strayer describes the situation of the church in 1400 as hopeless: “The Schism had lasted for twenty-two years and showed no signs of healing; England was full of heretics; Bohemia was almost ready to break away; and even the orthodox were denouncing the Church with unparalleled vigor.”54 The crisis had created a vacuum that was filled by an increasing reliance on shoring up and exercising temporal power. The emergence of the third authority, the existential, presented as much of a challenge to papal authority as it did to royal authority in that some individuals and groups had begun to arrogate spiritual authority to the existential, thereby placing the papacy into the position of redundancy or the Antichrist. Some assertions of existential authority were regarded by the papacy as either potentially heretical (e.g., the Franciscan Spirituals) or actually heretical (e.g., the Lollards and the Hussites). The solution to the breakdown of Christendom could not be found in the traditional authorities; neither the papacy nor emperor/kings could provide Christendom with its meaning any longer. The assertion of existential authority was, for the Gelasian mind-set, an opened Pandora’s Box. Yet, even through the political fragmentation into territorial units and the existential explosion of action, the experience of the spiritual unity of Christendom persisted. McIlwain notes that, “[the period from the late fourteenth into the fifteenth centuries] is the last time that these political problems were to be agitated in an intellectual world which still started with the assumption that Christendom is and must be one single regnum under the governance of God.”55 The one solution that had been mentioned by Ockham was a general council, and as Voegelin points out, “the existence two popes [commanding different national allegiances] required acts of recognition by the national clergies, [and] the national factor made it necessary to overcome the Schism by a supranational General Council.”56 In spite of good intentions for reform, this generat54. See ibid., 431. 55. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West, 346. 56. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 245–46.

The Medieval Papacy 229 ed further jurisdictional entrenchment with the church and further atrophy of the spirit.

Conciliarism The assertion of papal suzerainty over the spheres of the political and the existential was countered by innovations most characteristic of those very spheres. These innovations came under a constitutional process known as Conciliarism. The Corporationist theory has already been mentioned as being a potent factor in the thought of John of Paris, suggesting that, certainly by the early fifteenth century, the legal authority of corporate bodies was recognized and was commonplace in economic and political activities. The transfer of the legal personality of the corporate body to the corpus mysticum had already been completed by John a century earlier and the stage was set for a jurisdictional battle between papal and corporate authorities. However, the battle was to be fought not only on legal terms but also on the basis of rival understandings of where infallibility in the church lay: in the papacy or in the community. What is important to bear in mind is that, in Corporationist theory, it is the existence of a concrete body of persons that is authoritative. Their being Christian persons adds the factor of grace and constitution in the Holy Spirit to the theory. Papal authority then is pitted in a struggle for jurisdiction against a corporate expression of existential authority embedded in Christian community. Reform was one of two major themes of the councils, the other being heresy. The problem at hand was the assertion of absolute papal power and the task of reformers was to use the conciliar method to restrict that absolutism. However, both Conciliarism and the resultant national concordats suffered from the fundamental deficiency that they could only apply to the symptoms of the problem that, in the end, was larger than the institutional church. The papacy and the councils both devolved their action into jurisdictionalism and the clash between them became a show of point scoring. The issues of heresy and temporal dominium in the church stemmed from something much deeper than a series of conciliar or papal reforms could match. The gradual emergence of existential authority and its subtle corrosion of Gelasian civil theology left late medieval civilization in ruins. That the crisis was a process of differen-

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tiation that was transforming civilization was not readily perceived by the representatives of traditional authority. With regard to the church, the lapse into the jurisdictionalism of the Conciliar Movement and the concordats demonstrates that the disorder was not treated, but aggravated. The church’s status as a power player and a temporal-political broker side by side with the new national units testifies to the failure of both ecclesiastical and political authorities to diagnose and treat the common existential crisis as it radiated into the spiritual and political spheres. Church historian Fink explains that “[a]t the basis of the conciliar idea, which found at times stronger and at times weaker expression, according the political situation, lay the concept that the Pope is not the absolute master of the Church.”57 Strayer notes that, while the idea of a general council as a solution gained much support from theologians familiar with Ockham such as Gerson and d’Ailly, there remained the central problem over authority: “Who had the right to call a council, and who should preside over it in the absence of a universally recognized pope?”58 The main argument in favor of the superiority of corporate authority over papal authority is represented by the confident declaration by Conrad of Gelnhausen: “In case of imminent necessity, one has to have recourse to a council.” As the Schism is a case of imminent necessity, a council is to be called whose authority is derived from the infallibility of the church. “No weal [salus] can be on earth outside the Catholic Church, but it can be outside the college of the pope and his cardinals. Hence the council is superior to the pope, and it can assemble at the summons of the secular rulers, if the pope should fail to convoke it.”59 The claim of infallibility had become thematic since the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII and here Conrad—following Ockham and apparently with popular support—overturns the tradition of infallibility attaching to the papal magisterium.60 Fink writes that “in normal conditions [the pope] or the Ecclesia Romana in the narrower sense governs 57. Fink, “The Western Schism to the Council of Pisa,” in Beck et al., History of the Church 4, 424. 58. Strayer, Middle Ages, 431. 59. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 246–47. 60. Gregory VII had declared in number 22 of his dictates, “That the Roman church has never erred and will never err to all eternity, according to the testimony of the holy scriptures.” See Hollister et al., Medieval Europe, 154.

The Medieval Papacy 231 the visible Church. But in special cases—schism, heresy, “contra bonum commune ecclesiae”—the Universal Church comes to the fore. . . . According to this opinion, the power of the whole Church is greater, and she alone is infallible.”61 In the end, as the theoretical arguments became more radical, the cardinals grew more alarmed: an attack on papal authority was ultimately an attack on their own since, aside from the principle of apostolic succession, “practically all their power came from delegations of papal authority.”62 Still, both sets of cardinals abandoned the pope to whom they were loyal and called a council at Pisa in 1409. McIlwain explains the even more scandalous situation that emerged from the council: In 1409 a Council convoked at Pisa by the cardinals adopted the revolutionary remedy of deposing both popes and choosing another, who assumed the name of Alexander V, but as neither of the deposed popes would renounce his rights, there were now three popes, each claiming of right an exclusive jurisdiction over all Christendom for which he was answerable to God alone.63

The problem of rival popes proved intractable at Pisa which embarrassingly had now compounded the problem. The advocates of conciliar supremacy enlisted the support of the imperial authority against the papal. The famous decree of the next council at Constance (1414–1418), Haec Sancta, was promulgated in the absence of the pope: This synod, lawfully assembled in the Holy Ghost, forming a general council representing the Catholic Church Militant, has its power immediately from Christ, and all men, of every rank and dignity, even the pope, are bound to obey it in matters pertaining to the faith and the extirpation of the present schism and general reformation of the Church of God in head and members.64

The Schism was officially ended at Constance but the council was itself mired more deeply in jurisdictionalism: the decree, Frequens, was another example of jurisdictionalism that claimed to have more legality than papal authority.65 Frequens assumed the authority to call the 61. Fink, “The Western Schism to the Council of Pisa,” in Beck et al., History of the Church 4, 424. 62. Strayer, Middle Ages, 431. 63. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West, 347. 64. Quoted by Strayer, Middle Ages, 434. 65. See Fink, “The Council of Constance: Martin V,” in Beck et al., History of the Church 4, 448–73.

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council periodically, thereby establishing its authoritative supremacy and transferring it into a permanent institution that could complete the ongoing work of reform. Newman C. Eberhardt summed up the enthusiasm among Conciliarists for the decree: “By this means, supposedly, future popes would be kept in line, and hence Conciliarists clung tenaciously to Frequens, their consolation prize at Constance.”66 What is interesting is that, at this stage, the council organized itself into national blocs of the Italians, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Spanish that comprised prelates and representatives of secular power. The existential sentiment of national homonoia was instituted as a bulwark against the domination of any one nation. Added to the national blocs were the cardinals who constituted a further bloc. Inevitably, the factionalism of the arrangement led to difficulties as when the council began to interfere with matters recognized as belonging to papal jurisdiction in the summer of 1415. As Voegelin notes the provisions of the decree Frequens reveal a high degree of conscious constitutionalism that had evolved during the sessions of the Council of Constance. . . . From the evolution just outlined it becomes clear that the reforming zeal of the council was less absorbed by a reform of the spirit than by a jockeying for jurisdictional positions.67

Eventually, even the emperor Sigismund’s desire “for reform dwindled as the council continued, and toward the end he spent most of his time in securing his own rights.”68

Concordats An essential part of the conciliar approach as mentioned was the rising existential force of national sentiment. A consequence therefore was the notion of national churches and the issue of their independence. The reforms of Constance were presented in the form of national concordats which meant agreements between the papacy and the national churches under the control of the princes. The papacy could now adopt an autonomous legal personality with the right to enter into binding contracts with the various realms. The national concordats provided a method for 66. Newman C. Eberhardt, A Summary of Catholic History, 792. 67. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 248–50. 68. Strayer, Middle Ages, 436.

The Medieval Papacy 233 the papacy to negotiate terms with the national churches under the patronage of the temporal ruler. At Constance, the election of Martin V as pope ended the Schism and had brought the usefulness of the councils into doubt. “Martin was undeterred by criticism, for he had judged correctly that the council had exhausted its strength and that Europe would not tolerate a new civil war in the Church. He proceeded to defy the whole theory of conciliar supremacy.”69 The church’s religious unity was held together against the new emphasis on national units, but the prestige of the councils had begun to wither in the light of their failure to reform. Martin did not oppose the decree Frequens and further councils were called. The Council of Basel ended with a fiasco that Pope Eugene IV began by splitting the council of which Voegelin provides a summary: The pope, Eugene IV, however, was able to split the Council of Basel over the question of union with the Greek Church and the calling of his own council at Ferrara/Florence from 1438–1445. The rump council of Basel continued its sessions and elected a new pope, Felix V. That an institution that had been summoned originally for the abolition of the Schism caused a new schism was a severe blow for the prestige of . . . the conciliar idea in general.70

France alone refused to let go of conciliar principles and refused to make concessions to the pope through concordats. The Gallican church was now under the leadership of the national monarch through the independent enactment of an assembly of French clergy, known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438). The death of King Charles VII in 1461 allowed the papacy to enter into concordat-type negotiations with the Gallican church while the German settlement came in 1448 with the Concordat of Vienna.71 The debacle in Basel had convinced former influential Conciliarists like Nicholas of Cusa to support papal monarchy. The papacy could celebrate its victory, but it was surely a Pyrrhic victory at the level of a legal jurisdictionalism given that the disorder that had caused the unseemly spectacle over two centuries was left undiagnosed and untreated. The cost was to be the Reformation constituting the for69. Ibid., 437. 70. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 250–51. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Eberhardt, “Defeat of Conciliarism,” A Summary of Catholic History, 796ff. 71. See McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West, 353, and Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 255–56.

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mal split in the spiritual community of Western Christendom which had already occurred de facto by the time of Luther’s nailing of his ninety-five theses on the door in Wittemburg. It was widely believed in some areas in northern Europe that the existence of the Christian individual already carried within it sufficient spiritual authority that needed neither papal magisterium nor sacred tradition. The pre-Reformation sentiments were anchored in both the primacy of existential authority and in the response to the jurisdictionalism of the institutional church. In the past, the tension that bound both church and empire together was the source of a rich civil theology that gave rise to Christendom. In the new age of the late Middle Ages, those same authorities were increasingly finding themselves in a world where their respective authorities carried less and less weight. The civil theology that provided meaning for both had become an anachronism and the new civil theology was being forged by forces that were outside the control of both. The temptation to see in the debacle of the late medieval papacy a merely ecclesiastical problem, or in the growing absolutism of the national kings a merely political problem, is to be avoided. The upheaval of the time is a profoundly civilizational one that embraced the transcendentalecclesiastical and temporal-political spheres simultaneously. The problem affected the whole institutional infrastructure of Christendom. The church’s reaction almost tore itself apart as an ecclesia or spiritual community. The unseemly jockeying for power between two popes—and then three—firstly and then between the Conciliarists and the pope demonstrated an excessive concern with jurisdiction that manifested a confusion over the nature of spiritual authority in the church: the remit of auctoritas, its relation to potestas, the form of potestas that the church can legitimately exercise. In short, the self-understanding of the church as an ecclesial community and as an institution with a hierarchy was still unfolding, and the medieval struggle over jurisdiction represents a particularly ugly episode within a larger process of differentiation that involved the entire civilization. The good intentions of the advocates for reform in these centuries were burdened by their own inability to disengage themselves from jurisdictionalism and to diagnose the deeper, more profound realignment of forces within human existence.

8 Towa r d the Futur e

The future of Western society beyond the medieval cosmion involved the integration of the existential into the orbit of authorities. With obvious exceptions—such as absolutism in early modern kingship and the horrors inflicted by modern ideologists who claimed to possess the collectivist spirit of the age/race/nation/class/liberation and so on—the postmedieval period continued the distinctly medieval project of finding a new equilibrium among the triad of authorities. The emphasis on the existential and the concern to find a new balance with the traditional pillars of authority marks the work of two significant thinkers of the time: William of Ockham (1285–1349) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). There are other influential contemporaries that could be discussed in this context, like St. Bonaventure or Jean Gerson, but the choice of Ockham and Cusa is due to a certain complementarity of their work. Like a good cop, bad cop routine, Ockham’s Nominalist approach was to tear the world into its component parts and examine them in abstraction from their place in the matrix of relations; Cusa, on the other hand, explored the harmony that held those parts together as a living society. What emerges from a theoretical treatment of both is the central importance of the individual as the bearer of the new Western order, 235

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whose existential authority is not isolated, but integrated into the historical field of civilization. The line that seemed to run through much of Ockham’s work was the theoretical weight that he gave to the liberty and dignity of man against the jurisdictional claims of the established authorities. In spite of his reputation, his Nominalism was not unqualified. Instead, like many thinkers of his day and after, he relied on a theory of (relative) natural law as a basis for his legal thought. It was in the elaboration of his legal thought that Ockham was able to find suitable categories with which to combat the overreach of the Gelasian Swords as they impacted on the individual zone of the existential. What Ockham definitively opened up was what de Lagarde called the “zone of human autonomy,” the enormous influence of which has prompted modern thinkers to see in Ockham the beginnings of subjective natural rights. The differentiation of existential authority was an outcome of Christian revelation, but it took the philosophical workmanship of Ockham to take the insights of the glossators and canonists and combine them with the anxiety of his own life as a Franciscan of the time, in order to finally establish the existential authority of the individual as a legitimate pillar of society with the political and the spiritual. Of course, Ockham’s gains involved a certain theoretical loss of the substantive cohesion of society in the relentlessness of his method of Nominalist abstraction, legalistic perspective, and religious fideism. Nicholas of Cusa’s mystical penetration of that substance provided a remedy for this approach. Cusa for his part could assume the work that Ockham and others had done a century before on the legalism of man’s autonomy while looking at the biggest of big pictures which is the being in which man finds his own existence. This metaphysical temperament complemented, as much as contrasted with, the work of Ockham. Nicholas’s treatment of the corpus mysticum under the conditions of his age allowed him to rearticulate the principles of Christian life in society while losing none of the substance of the faith (which was, after all, one of the primary concerns of Ockham). While many commentators highlight Cusa’s great mysticism, the component of humanism was also of vital importance in uncovering the trajectory that the differentiation of authority was taking. The humanist inflection also shows how attuned

Toward the Future 237 he was to the times. Cusa had the mystical and intellectual resources to harmonize the apparent disparities and conflicts of the world in a way that Thomas Aquinas could do two centuries earlier, by philosophically elaborating the meaning of his vision of God. With Cusa, the picture is painted again of a universe of powers—existential, temporal, and transcendental—that fit together in an approximate concordant harmony that flows from the absolute concordance of the triune God.

William of Ockham (c. 1288–c. 1348) Ockham’s work represents a formidable attempt to preserve the spiritual inheritance of imperial Christendom even as it began to fade. In other words, Ockham took upon himself the task of preserving the spirituality of Christian thought against the civilizational upheaval in Western civil theology as the sacrum imperium waned. As we have seen, the characteristic trend at the time was a dissociation of the church’s institutional spiritual authority from authority in general within the rising national realms; and within the church itself there was an increasing emphasis on shoring up jurisdictional authority. Voegelin notes: In the work of Giles of Rome we could observe the dissociation of power from the spirit, both precariously linked again through the evocation of a hierarchy with the substances of power and spirit concentrated in its head. In the vision of Dante the spirit has receded from the contemporary field of powers and passions, and their reunion becomes a hope for a distant future. In the Defensor Pacis the secular power structure has become a closed unit and Christianity is a creed for the people, while in the half-veiled background there appears an Averroist creed for the intellectual. The trend is clear . . . the forces of the world, having established themselves, now threaten to cut loose from Christian spirituality and to find a new balance in an intramundane order.1

The forces of the world are at the root of the upheaval in civil theology, stemming from the increased assertion of existential authority. Ockham considered the crisis of meaning a threat and was determined to defend the authority of Christian faith at all costs, even to the point of losing the Thomasic harmony with ratio. His writings display not just an absence of confidence in divine truth as the source of both faith and 1. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 105.

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reason and the guarantor of their ultimate harmony, but a bifurcation of faith from reason. Voegelin writes that “with the addition of free intellectual activity to the modes of expression of intramundane man in the forms of critical speculation, of critical empirical science, and later of critical history, a new system of ordinates was created that reduced the absoluteness of the [Christian] creed to a historically relative religion.”2 The model of rationality that had gained much traction in speculation was an Averroist dualism in which reason could work autonomously within its own sphere, untouched by the tenets or orientation of faith and without regard for final causes. For Ockham, such a force, untrammeled in its breadth, posed a potentially lethal threat to Christian dogmatic faith. The corruption of existential authority through the rise of gnostic patterns of thought had culminated in the undermining of harmony between faith and reason. If Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, could display a metaphysical confidence in the one substantial divine truth acting as the final cause of all reality, Ockham’s lack of confidence may suggest something about the general unease within the civil theology of his day in the fourteenth century. However, there was a delicious double irony at play in Ockham. In terms of method, he was not unlike Giles of Rome in wanting to fortify a claim of jurisdiction, albeit the jurisdiction of the Christian faith against the claims of instrumental reason as opposed to Giles’s absolute power. The first irony was that Ockham’s work of preservation, through the despiritualizing game of jurisdictionalism, played into the very process of spiritual disintegration that he strove to avoid. However, in spite of this, he still succeeded in preserving intact the Christian faith by unwittingly participating in the differentiation of authority and thus securing the authority of faith, if under a different guise, for the early modern dispensation.

Ockham’s Turn toward Existence Nominalism is probably the philosophical position most associated with Ockham. He denies the existence of universals and, by placing the epistemological weight on accidentals, aims at neutering the adventitious 2. Ibid., 110.

Toward the Future 239 nature of reason and securing the contents of faith from its wiles. However, the rejection of universals implies the rejection of necessity in being which ultimately results in a different conception of the transcendentdivine creator God. Voegelin begins his account of Ockham by commenting on his Nominalism: The order of the world is, for William, created by God, but it is not a revelation of the ratio aeterna; the world as it is owes its structure not to the divine substance but to an act of the divine will; the omnipotent God could have made it different if he had wanted to do so. The world does not have an essential structure, but realizes of the infinite possibilities the one that was God’s choice. . . . The order of nature does not have a structure of real universals; we cannot know, therefore, any substance in itself but can know it only by its accidentals. The causality in the order of nature is not denied, but, being dependent on the will of God, who may change it, it does not have the character of necessity. This conception of nature as a hypothetical order is the basis of Ockham’s Nominalistic theory of knowledge.3

The loss of universals and ontological necessity appears to leave Ockham with a voluntarist God to whose caprice all are subject. One may speculate that this was perhaps another outcome of the contact with Islam whose depiction of the divine is remarkably similar to the one that emerges from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism. By way of contrast, Ockham’s authoritarian God contrasts with the distinctly Christian God of Aquinas: in Aquinas’s thought, God is the source of all authority in which the entirety of creation is drawn to participate by the necessity of its very creation in the lex aeterna. Nevertheless, Ockham achieves his goal of theoretically preserving dogmatic truth about God and man from the reach of a relentlessly savage scientific critique. Kant is clearly the most famous successor to this strategy. As mentioned above, the first irony of the double is that Ockham plays into the spiritual breakdown of his day by divesting faith of its quality of rationality which instead becomes identified with the irrational and can be laid bare to the inevitable charge of absurdity. Ockham was probably aware of the difficulties his theory presented and he suggested a theory of fideism to counteract the validity of any such charges. Revelation is an initiative on the part of God and its miraculous nature cannot be investigated by 3. Ibid., 106.

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rational critique, but only accepted by the further miracle of faith that is worked in man by God. Faith is literally infused in man by God’s absolute power and its contents compel “the sacrifice of intellect. William gives the first construction of a strictly fideistic religious position, accepting the rationally impenetrable dogma by act of faith that is worked in man by a miracle of God.”4 Ockham’s Nominalistic-fideistic symbolism is his method of dealing with the problem presented by the crisis of meaning. David Walsh comments, “[Ockham’s] Nominalistic philosophical mode . . . announces the end of the medieval confidence in the unity of all things. Voegelin rightly measures the revolution taking place in Ockham’s writings when he identifies it as ‘a civilizational schism.’”5 However, there is more involved in the “civilizational schism” than the bifurcation of faith from reason and, as Walsh puts it, its modern equivalents in polarities such as public and private, church and state, and so on. This leads to the second of the ironies in Ockham’s double irony. The result of the Nominalist-fideist position is that Ockham essentially dichotomizes Christendom into two spheres that we now recognize as secular and ecclesiastical, respectively, and which reserve their own characteristics for their own spheres. “An intramundane civilizational process would now run parallel with the Christian civilizational process as organized in the church.”6 The severing of Christendom into parts is a political action that mirrors his philosophical attitude. Ockham is engaged in an extrapolation from theory into the pragmatic conditions of his day in which civil theology had already cracked open the unitary sacrum imperium. When Ockham asserted that men knew Christian faith only because God had willed it, and not because it was knowable through natural reason, he was asserting the primacy of will over reason in general. It is this concentration on the will that pushes Ockham’s thought into an entirely new field of thinking that surpasses the conventional categories of Nominalism and fideism. It is his theory of the will that trumps the importance of those categories in his political thought. Joseph Strayer writes that, from the perspective of Ockham’s more political thought, 4. Ibid., 107. 5. Walsh, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 8. 6. Ibid.

Toward the Future 241 it meant that action rather than reflection, success rather than abstract justice were the qualities which were going to be honored for the next two centuries. Ockham was also a strong Nominalist, that is, he denied that abstract ideas had any real existence and asserted that our only sure knowledge is of specific facts. According to this reasoning, the individual Christian is far more important than the artificial and unreal idea of Christendom.7

Nominalism and fideism are undoubtedly significant dimensions of Ockham’s work, but it is this focus on nonuniversalism and nonnecessity that allows Ockham to relativize that very Nominalism and fideism. In a theory of knowledge, Ockham is a Nominalist, in theology he advocates fideism predominantly, but in political thought it is the will that is primary; it is the existential basis of human will that constitutes Ockham’s contribution to understanding the differentiation of authority. His importance lies not only in the emphasis he gives to the divergence of the spiritual from the political spheres, but also on the assertion of the will as an existential authority. With Ockham, the existential sphere takes on the role of stabilizing the field of authorities. The medieval conflict over jurisdiction between the political and the sacerdotal is resolved—at least in outline—by Ockham’s insistence that royal and papal authority be exercised for the sake of the existential; that is, neither political nor religious authorities have a claim on the other, but their mutual coordination finds its purpose in the existential wellbeing of persons that extends temporally and into transcendental reality. It is the emphatic emergence of the existential sphere in Ockham’s more overtly political and legal works that ensures that a resonance among the three spheres is at least possible. Ockham moves toward this extraordinary insight into the process of differentiation by considering the authority of the mendicant theologian. Frequently antagonistic to the authorities of his day—especially to the pope due to his entanglement over the papal-Franciscan imbroglio over property—he identifies the authority by which he himself deliberates as a rightly trained theologian. He proposes this authority as a solution to the encroachment on faith by a wrongly ordained reason. “The authority he denied to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its head, 7. Strayer, Middle Ages, 424.

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he arrogated for the trained, intellectual theologian, that is, to the type produced in an exemplary manner by the mendicant orders.”8 The authority of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscan Spirituals, to determine what poverty meant in the imitation of Jesus, and the derivative right to use property without owning it, was pitted against the objections of Pope John XXII. If Ockham wanted to preserve faith from the intrusion of reason, then he also wanted to save the legitimate spiritual authority of mendicant theologians from an overriding papal claim that would diminish or condemn their practice of evangelical poverty.9 The doctrinal dispute over the poverty of Jesus ballooned into a major political incident with Ockham and his superior Michael of Cesena finding refuge from the pope in the court of his adversary, Emperor Louis IV. However, Ockham’s philosophical defense of the apostolic poverty of the Franciscans also became more significant than an intricate treatise about the distinction between the right to own and the right to use. By rightly ordained reason through a trained theologian, Ockham maintained a classical understanding of nous, even a shade of ratio in Aquinas’s sense. Giles of Rome had demanded a sacrificium intellectus in the form of a subordination of the intellect to the dogma of faith. Ockham’s subordination to faith is similar but is less explicit; he argues for the subordination of the intellect to God alone as opposed to the plenitude of papal power. Furthermore, this sacrifice of the intellect applied to all men, that is, to the pope as much as to any Franciscan or layman. Therefore, the exaltation of the theologian’s rationality, in subordination to God’s miraculous gift of faith, suggests that Ockham had an acute awareness of a third source of authority that was universal. The theologian as a Christian can rely on his existence in faith, and the rightly trained theologian can reason with a universally recognized authority. The theologian implicitly symbolizes a unity of reason and faith in existence that endured in the right-thinking individual rather than in the realization of a singular spiritual-political world order of Christendom. Ockham’s turn toward existence is a turn toward the rationality of existential openness to the mystery of being and its revelatory horizon of transcendence. Ockham could counterpose the rational authority of 8. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 113. 9. See Tierney, The Idea of Subjective Rights, 93ff.

Toward the Future 243 the theologian to the traditional papal and imperial/royal authorities. In the early fourteenth century, the civilizational course beyond the breakdown of the Gelasian articulation could not be discerned, but what his work represents is the will to preserve the integrity of the Christian faith and its correspondence with the rationality of existence. In grave spiritual and political matters, the one who has the authority to make the right decisions becomes crucial. “More important than the questions of what is heretical and who is a heretic is the question of who will decide who is a heretic.”10 For Ockham, “the ultimate decision rests with virtuous and expert theologians who cannot be moved from a recognized truth by any argument, even if an angel from Heaven tried to persuade them.”11 Ockham’s resolute confidence in the authority of rightly guided reason steered his legal and political thought.

Natural Law and Categories of Legal Theory Ockham developed theories of law and politics that were dependent upon his philosophical separation of spiritual and political authorities. The separation was driven by the assertion of existential authority which, as we shall see, he symbolized as ius gentium, customary law based on the spontaneously occurring natural law. Voegelin’s commentary on Ockham’s political thought includes a suggestion that the appearance of Nominalism in politics “gains its importance . . . as an interpretation of political reality when the substance of community is losing its force and, as a consequence, the relational aspects come to the fore.”12 If the substance of community was losing its force, it was because civil theology was becoming less coherent for the purpose of social existence. The crisis of meaning implied that there was no longer a consensus on an overarching schema for reality. Ockham’s emphasis therefore came to lie on the importance of the relational aspects of society and, given the rather strained relations that pertained, on the various competing jurisdictions in an increasingly fragmented world. Voegelin enumerates the relations that formed the environment in Ockham’s day:

10. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 116. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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The true Christian, propertyless, spiritual order is set off against the world at large; then the spiritual element in papal power is distinguished from the temporal; then the order of the church from the order of the secular politics at large; in the order of secular politics the imperial power from the national royal; and, finally, the order of rulership from the prepolitical [existential] order of the individual human beings.13

Ockham’s Nominalist perspective of investigating the elements within the whole bends his thought toward justice in the right relations among those elements; and it is the treatment of justice that belies his reputation as a strict Nominalist. There is in his thought a theory of conditional natural law that he does not extensively develop. The Stoics and Cicero, the early Church Fathers, Augustine and, closer to Ockham’s time, Gratian and Aquinas had developed theories of natural law that had become topical as such within the focus of their work. That Ockham could assume a rational, just order of natural law somehow embedded in existence itself, without having to treat it analytically, suggests not merely that his Nominalist temperament militated against a notion such as a universal substance of law but also that it did not become explicitly topical in the economy of his writings. It is an interesting situation and perhaps becomes explicable when we see that Ockham was not moved to develop an underlying theory, but instead took the facticity of human life by itself to consider its elements, one of which was obviously the order of justice that already has a claim on relations by virtue of their very existence; order that carries existence, or better, existence that carries order. Ockham’s mind was simply too sharp to circumscribe itself within the boundaries of what is permissible within Nominalism, but his Nominalist temperament directs him to the raw existence of things, persons, relations, and so on and he acts upon what he finds, which is, in this instance, a natural law. Voegelin’s discussion discerns the blending of two ideas that characterize his conception of natural law. The first is that relative natural law “governs the state of fallen man, in contrast with the absolute order of reason that governs the paradisiacal state [of innocence].”14 The second is that the “legal order is man-made and consists, at least predominantly, of human positive law as distinguished from natural law.”15 The 13. Ibid., 123 15. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 117.

Toward the Future 245 paradisiacal state is one marked by a common dominium over all things and, given the natural equity among all men, the absence of contesting claims. The dominium of this original natural equity belongs to the category of ius poli and has no need for private property rights as property is not contested. Indeed, the property order only emerges within the state of fallen man “for property was established on account of sin.”16 It belongs to “a stratum of law preceding in time and ranking higher in order than the civil law enacted by rulers.”17 Dominium in the legal property order precedes the political order as a necessary custom in accordance with right reason for the welfare of fallen man. By virtue of this, the private property order is known as a customary law or ius gentium, binding on all who exercise civil authority. The ius gentium is Ockham’s equivalent to civil theology in that he understands by it a spontaneously occurring body of customs in a social context, whose exercise constitutes the meaning of a community. However, as ius gentium acquires a legal personality, it belongs to the legal category of ius fori (or right in law court). It is a form of natural law from which, and for which, positive law is enacted. Ius gentium can only be broken by exceptional circumstances— such as an urgent provision for the necessities of life—which in that case is still governed by a higher law, a remnant of the original natural equity or ius poli. Voegelin writes in this regard, “he uses the term natural law . . . to cover the man-made law of the jus gentium; and he even goes so far as to extend the term to any human enactment that is not contrary to evident reason.”18 The fallen state of man is therefore set off against the original paradisiacal state, but is governed by the existential force of natural law that (1) has binding authority over every temporal ruler, and (2) is accessible to the “evident reason” of right-thinking individuals, the ideal type of which is the mendicant theologian. Furthermore, as Ockham states that divine law is “extended to comprehend all kinds of natural law,”19 the right-thinking man governs himself by natural law derived from the source of all authority in 16. William of Ockham, Dialogue III, II, 3, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 500. 17. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 118. 18. Ibid. 19. William of Ockham, Dialogue, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 501.

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God. Pressing the direction of Ockham’s thought somewhat, the rightthinking individual effectively mediates transcendental reality into the temporal-mundane world; a transcendence that is intrinsically rational or at least lends itself to rational mediation. Ockham’s vigorous emphasis on the rationality of natural equity and its universal binding authority resonates well with the classic definition of nous as an orienting force in being, and excavates a field of existential authority that extends from its center in the transcendental depths of the individual soul outward to the interpersonal web of relations and politico-historical matrix of meaning in civil theology.

Relations among the Triad of Authorities Natural Equity and Temporal Authority Arthur Stephen McGrade writes, regarding the Franciscan-papal property dispute, that “it remains the case, however, that neither in the Opus Nonaginta Dierum nor in any of his other works does Ockham attempt to construct a political theory on the basis of Franciscan poverty.”20 He goes on to say that in Ockham’s discussions of poverty, “there is no effort to exploit the topic for broader institutional applications, and no sustained attempt to place it in the context of a broader Christian social theory.”21 McGrade’s understanding of Ockham’s political theory is that it was not one of positing a strict division between the Franciscan ideal of poverty and the property order—a division that could be easily corrupted into a rivalry and eventually succumbing to the Tyconian problem—but one that outlined the role of just government in legally recognizing and coercively securing a life based on apostolic poverty. On the other hand, Voegelin takes the view that the relation between the property order of the world and the Franciscan order of poverty is the main problem: “The order of the world is fundamentally the order of unredeemed man based on force; the life of the true Christian will have to imitate the life of Christ, who did not assume a dominium over the world . . . but lived without property.”22 Voegelin’s analysis probably overemphasizes the radical and destructive nature of Ockham’s 20. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham, 15–16. 21. Ibid. 22. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 119.

Toward the Future 247 thought, but the bifurcation of Christendom into different spheres— spiritual, political, and existential—was an established trend in civil theology in the demise of the sacrum imperium. McGrade’s treatment is perhaps closer to the attitude of Ockham in that his work was extensive enough and subtle enough to find the tenuous link that held the various spheres of his day together. Under the nomenclature of ius gentium, Ockham articulates the existential substratum out of which the elements of late medieval Christendom differentiate and find their purpose. With regard to the best form of government, whether it be of the church or of a temporal realm, Ockham favors the rulership of the monarch who, like the king of Aristotle’s political thought, governs according to his prudence and is not bound by positive law, his rule perfectly circumscribed by natural law and guided by a concern only for the common weal. However, such a monarch cannot be found. The Dialogue III, I, 2 is concerned with the best form of government and the next best alternatives to the perfect king. Voegelin notes that “The second best form would be a monarchy limited by positive law, but it is possible that under certain conditions an aristocracy would be the best form of government. An alternative to a universal monarchy would be an aristocracy of national kings as the world government.”23 However, like in Aquinas, the shape that a government takes is secondary to the primary concern for the community of free Christian individuals, who by Ockham’s time had become increasingly vested with an awareness of natural and positive rights. Ockham states as much when he emphasizes the natural restriction on political-temporal power by the “common weal.” The political authority of the ruler is curtailed by the assertion of legal categories, particularly that of ius gentium as a residue of the original natural equity that precedes the political. The integration of existential authority in the English political and national realm evidently forms part of Ockham’s political perspective: political authority is grounded in the law that originates in the civil theology or ius gentium; the emperor derives his power indirectly from God, but directly from the consent of the people through their representative electors. “The emperor is not legibus solutus but has to respect the customary 23. Ibid., 121.

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institutions, which are not of his making.”24 The assertion of ius gentium as a customary law of the land supersedes the authority and de jure power of the emperor and national kings. The fact that Ockham conceives jus gentium to be superior to political authority suggests that the lingering Gelasian-medieval world was finally overcome. The subordination of political rule to a form of natural law is Ockham’s way of finding a new arrangement beyond the crisis of meaning and in line with the new forces of existence. Nor was the subordination as radical as it may on the surface appear. Ius gentium, as a form of natural law and a residue of the original natural equity of man’s prelapsarian existence, was a rational and universal justice that could reconfigure the relations among the authorities in human society without necessarily depleting any of them of their purpose. In this way, Ockham was repackaging the elements of Christendom for a post-Gelasian era.

Natural Equity and Papal Authority The de facto exercise of temporal potestas by the papacy was a feature of the political landscape in Ockham’s day. As mentioned, the dispute over the Franciscan ideal of poverty involved more than a mere doctrinal detail over the life of Christ; it involved the jurisdictional remit of the church which was by then equivalent to a transnational state with immense material resources at its disposal, eventually pitted against the resources of the empire. The assertion of papal plenitudo potestatis had met with plenty of theoretical and pragmatic opposition and now Ockham weighs in too. His Nominalist division of the world into its parts results in a variety of autonomous spheres such as the ecclesial and the myriad political units. For him, the power of the pope cannot have the character of a plenitudo potestatis, even in spiritual matters: “the pope does not possess a plenary power in spiritual matters, for he cannot prescribe to anyone those things that are works of supererogation—such as virginity, fasting on bread and water, entering a religious order, and so forth.”25 Note the component of individual authority on matters of personal spiritual discernment, evincing a sphere of autonomy over 24. Ibid., 122. 25. William of Ockham, Dialogue III, II, 2, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 496.

Toward the Future 249 which the pope does not possess power and cannot claim authority. In the same way, the sphere of the political has an autonomous character which means that the functions of the pope are properly restricted to “the preaching of the word of God and to his supreme judgeship over all the faithful in spiritual matters . . . tempered by the counsel of the wise and by divine and natural law.” Furthermore, any potestas that the pope exercises beyond the ecclesial “does not derive from Christ but has been acquired through human concession, voluntary submission, and explicit or tacit consent.”26 The government of the church receives roughly the same treatment that he gives to temporal governance, with the result that, in hindsight, Ockham becomes one of the first advocates of conciliarism. Like the idea of an aristocracy of national kings for a world government, he suggests the idea of an aristocratic church government by a group of national popes representing national churches; the Roman pontiff would retain supremacy in conformance with Peter’s supremacy among the apostles. Voegelin observes that the experience of a universal Christian mankind has become so weak that a universal monarchy and papacy no longer seem as necessary as they were for Dante. The national sentiment is strong enough to conceive of at least Western Christianity as a free association of nations under their temporal and spiritual leaders.27

According to Ewart Lewis, Ockham’s perspective of the papacy “was driven by the tragic conviction that John XXII was not only an aggressor against the secular power, but also, on the vital question of apostolic poverty, a traitor to the spiritual interests properly confided to his charge.” The pessimism of Ockham contrasts with the quiet confidence of John of Paris in the ability of Christendom to reform itself: John “could hope that problems could be solved through the clarification of sound tradition and a precise demarcation of secular and spiritual spheres.”28 Ockham sided with Michael of Cesena’s charges of heresy against John XXII’s bull Quia vir reprobus. The accusation of papal heresy therefore constitutes one of 26. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 120–21. Voegelin is referring here to the Dialogue III, I, and to the later work, De Imperatorum et Pontificum Potestatae. 27. Ibid., 121. 28. See Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas 2, 546.

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the central problems of Ockham’s thought. As McGrade puts it, “Ockham had not wanted to believe that a person holding the papal office would promulgate heresies as catholic truth. On reading John XXII’s constitutions, however, he concluded that just this had occurred.”29 Heresy within the church, and in the papal head specifically, presents the further problem of how to diagnose and resolve the heretical situation. Ockham’s solution has already been referred to above: the authority of the rightly trained theologian. The problem of heresy is one that can only be resolved by the theologians whose expertise alone can rightly handle the content of Christian doctrine, while canon lawyers are better suited to the “interpretation of decretals and canons and to judicial procedure.” Voegelin wryly, but correctly, observes that the question of whether a doctrine is orthodox or heretical has to be debated by the expert theologians who know the sources. With the transposition of the problem of orthodoxy to the plane of intellectual debate, it becomes impossible that any single authority within the church should be infallible.30

Thus the intrinsically connected problem of infallibility surfaces. The promise of Christ to be always with his church is applicable only to the entirety of the full Christian community, according to Ockham who devotes the entirety of Dialogue I, V to the issue. However, this is no corporation theory along the lines of John of Paris, unsurprisingly given Ockham’s Nominalist temperament. The corporate Christian community is not the carrier of infallibility. The fulfillment of the promise of Christ may occur, for example, only through children at times; in principle preventing the concentration of infallibility in any one part, namely, the pope, a general council, or indeed, the expert theologians. However, in the extreme case of a heretical pope, who should govern the church if infallibility is effectively abstracted from the situation as an authoritative principle? Sovereignty of church governance belongs to the entire Christian community and it is as legitimate experts within the community that Ockham’s theologians can exercise their authority. The entire Christian community will be called upon in the first place to exercise sovereign power, but are prevented by the practical impossibility of doing 29. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham, 16–17. 30. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 124.

Toward the Future 251 so on such a vast scale. Authority is then “devolved on a general council, in further sequence to the diocese in which the pope resides, and if the clergy fails, it devolves to the laymen.”31 The recourse to the spiritual authority in the existence of individual Christian laymen—as recipients of God’s miraculous deposition of faith and as participants in natural equity—is suggested as a last resort for Ockham; but the fact that this registers as a possibility for him is redolent of the place that the authority of the human person had assumed in the civil theology of the West in the fourteenth century. Takashi Shogimen puts Ockham’s concerns over papal and ecclesiastical power in an existential context: Modern scholarship has already highlighted that Ockham’s definition of both ecclesiastical and secular power is largely and primarily “negative”: he is concerned not so much with what ruling powers can do, as with what they cannot do. . . . Neither ecclesiastical nor temporal power can provide more than an environment in which men can freely live out their moral lives. In Ockham’s vision, individuals qua individuals are morally and spiritually autonomous. The impending problem that faces him, namely the papacy’s heretical claim to universal dominion, however, deprives Christians of opportunities to be virtuous.32

Ockham was not overly concerned about finding an institutional solution to abuses of temporal or ecclesiastical powers, but with the extrainstitutional authority of individual human beings to live unmolested by such abuses. Existential authority becomes topical in the work of William of Ockham for the first time through Ockham’s assertion of the spiritual authority appropriate to right-thinking Christian individuals who retain the dignity of their own autonomy against the claims of institutional spiritual authority in the church. It also finds expression through a consideration of natural equity and the individual, and the ius gentium of communities with their meaningful customs that precede and supersede the power of emperors and kings. This universal embeddedness of natural equity is a symbolic recognition of the existential authority of all human persons, the ordinary laymen and the theologian.33 31. Ibid., 125. 32. Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages, 234. 33. See Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 192, for a discussion of Ockham’s “absence”

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Michel Villey (writing in 1962) credits Ockham, and especially the critical degree of Nominalism in his work, with conceiving the modern idea of subjective rights. “L’idée du droit subjectif procéde elle aussi du nominalisme et si explicite avec Occam.”34 Villey’s argument that it was in Ockham’s thought that natural rights originated has enjoyed popular currency among historians since the 1960s. Villey goes so far as to claim that Ockham’s work constitutes a semantic revolution in the transformation of objective natural law and natural rights into subjective natural rights: “Révolution sémantique a elle seule riche de consequences. . . . Nous sommes ici-même au moment copernicien de l’histoire de la science du droit.”35 Mahoney writes: There is an obvious attraction in viewing the idea of subjective moral demands as a natural outcropping of the fourteenth-century worldview which stressed the unique significance of individuals as contrasted with universals, and which considered freedom the outstanding characteristic of human beings, a worldview of which Ockham was a leading and controversial exponent.36

As Tierney points out—probably influenced by Villey—Ockham’s writings became central to many natural rights commentators: George de Lagarde had made a similar point in discussing Ockham’s rights theories; he found in Ockham’s philosophy of natural law “a zone of human autonomy” where, because nothing was prohibited, all was licit, and where human freedom could be exercised without restraint. “Lá, ou elle ne defend rien, tout est licite.” This notion that ius naturale, “natural right” could define an area of human liberty as well as a body of restrictive law was of central importance in the emergence of modern rights language.37

However, Tierney takes Villey’s contention to task over locating the origins of natural rights language in Ockham. It is not a debate that need detain us here, save for the outlines. Tierney states that Ockham was of institutional machinery to mediate between ruler and ruled. Tierney overlooks the direction of Ockham’s political thought toward the natural equity of existence. Indeed, Ockham places more significance in the ius gentium as the symbolization of civil theology than on the tier of public institutions. 34. Quoted by Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 14. 35. Also quoted by Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 14. 36. Mahoney, The Challenge of Human Rights, 5ff. 37. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 44–45.

Toward the Future 253 an important figure in the development of natural rights theories . . . [but] his characteristic teachings were not derived from his Nominalist and voluntarist philosophy, but rather from a rationalist ethic applied to a body of juristic doctrine available to him in the canon law collections that he knew well and frequently cited.38

In fact, as early as the canonistic jurisprudence of the late twelfth century there is a semantic shift occurring, “a new understanding of the old term ius naturale as meaning a kind of subjective power or ability inhering in individuals.”39 As discussed above in chapter two, there are numerous examples of the inward turn of rights language among thinkers representing a broad swathe of the medieval mind, from Bonaventure, and Godfrey of Fontaines, to the twelfth-century glossators on Gratian’s decretals. Tierney has won the argument about origins through the strength of his own scholarship, but he goes on to make one point that is probably not correct and which is of importance in this context. With regard to the connection between philosophical thought and political theory, he states that there is no correlation between the two spheres of thought in the positions of many medieval thinkers. We can find Thomists and realists and nominalists at every point on the political spectrum. (For instance, Wyclif and Hus, like Ockham, upheld the rights of Christian subjects against the pope; but they were metaphysical realists in philosophy.) There is indeed no incongruity between Ockham’s philosophy and his political theory, but there is no necessary connection between them either.40

Ockham’s significance for us is that he—like Wycliffe, Fortescue, John of Paris, Giles of Rome, Dante, Marsilius of Padua, and others— was a thinker who could catch and articulate currents of meaning or patterns of thought within the crisis of civil theology, but without mastering or harmonizing them. Ockham did not have the synthesizing prowess of Thomas Aquinas who could harmonize the forces of his day within a well-articulated Christian whole. Instead, Ockham’s Nominalism precluded him from the Scholasticism of such a project and propelled him toward the existence of the forces. His work is therefore a crucial index of the differentiation of society and its underpinning authorities. For this reason, it is more correct to say that there is a correlation between Ock38. Ibid., 8. 40. Ibid., 32

39. Ibid.

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ham’s philosophy and his political thought. More precisely, his treatment of the natural equity of existence provides the link between the two, especially as it opens out into an investigation of natural rights. In the Dialogue III, 2 the master answers the probing questions of the pupil regarding natural law, indicating that its meaning is threefold: In one sense natural law is said to be that law which is in conformity with natural reason that in no case fails—as, for example, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” . . . In another sense, natural law is that law which is to be observed by those who go on natural equity alone, without any human custom or constitution, and which is natural because it is [not] contrary to the state of nature [before the Fall, such as an order of common property]. . . . In a third sense, natural law is said to be that which may be deduced by evident reason from the law of nations or from some human deed . . . and this can be called “conditional natural law” (jus naturale ex suppositione).41

The first mode refers to laws that are immutable. The second mode refers to laws that derive from the state of innocence but that are mutable. They are subject to change in the dispensation of fallen man from whose fallen-ness arises his need for the regulation of private property. The third mode of ius naturale refers to laws of evident reason that are observable in a living community. According to Brian Tierney, Ockham “does seem to introduce a new kind of natural law [in his third mode], unstable, changeable according to the will of the people involved. . . . Ockham’s argument was shifting here from natural law to natural rights.”42 Shogimen adds that while Ockham discusses the third mode of ius naturale in terms of natural right, its application to [discourses on papal power] clearly shows Ockham’s view of what constituted power. The will of those concerned [e.g., a community or nation] translates a right into a power. . . . Clearly a right that is willed to be exercised constitutes power that overrides the pope’s claim for that power. Here Ockham framed his appeal to natural right theory in his notion of power: the volition that follows the dictate of evident reason (namely natural right) constitutes power—non-institutional power that is cognitively legitimate.43

Ockham’s argument turns on the notion of a natural right emerging from a zone of natural law (a ius gentium) that precedes positive law. 41. William of Ockham, Dialogue III, II, 3, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, 500–501. 42. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 180. 43. Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages, 245–46.

Toward the Future 255 Those subject to institutional ecclesiastical or temporal authority nevertheless retain an existential authority that becomes a power when exercised. So long as it is “evidently reasonable,” existential authority has the legitimacy to counter the claims of rulers—political or ecclesial— when they overreach their competence and infringe upon the sphere of the individual. What de Lagarde described as Ockham’s “zone of human autonomy” is the existential jurisdiction of the individual Christian person in Ockham’s thought, the person who was vested with natural rights and a moral responsibility to exercise their liberty rationally and responsibly. What Ockham brings to the discussion of papal and imperial authority is the language of natural existential rights inhering in the individual person.44 In fact, the importance of Ockham’s language of natural rights lies in its recasting of political thought and action in the light of the existential. Shogimen highlights this when he writes that right reason morally requires service to the common good and, if an individual wills the dictate of right reason simply because it is the dictate of right reason, he becomes virtuous. But if he wills the dictate of right reason not because it is right, but because he is compelled to do so by, say, the pope, he cannot be virtuous. He should not be compelled even to do good. An individual can never be virtuous as long as he is coerced; freedom of the will is necessary in order to be virtuous.45

Human liberty is identified with spontaneous will: “libertas et spontaneitas videntur non posse distingui.”46 Papal potestas is redefined in the light of his theory of natural existential rights and extends only to those things that are not claimed by any Christian as rights or liberties. The abuse of papal plenitude of power, the papal claim to supererogatory authority, violates the rights and liberties granted by God and nature and deprives Christians of the possibility of being virtuous. According to McGrade, Ockham held that institutional power, both ecclesiastical and temporal, existed for the good of individual free men. With regard to the temporal power, there is a similar minimalizing of jurisdiction and function: “Instead of viewing law and government as the animat44. See Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 182. 45. Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages, 246–47. See especially Shogimen’s footnote on p. 247 for sources on Ockham’s ethics. 46. William of Ockham, I Sentences, X, 2, quoted in a discussion of the meaning of liberty in Ockham’s thought by Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages, 247ff.

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ing force in society, the source of all order and value, Ockham regarded them as purely instrumental. The political element in human affairs becomes for him a means to the social existence of free men, but not the basis of the community or its end.”47 Like Aquinas, Ockham maintains that government and positive law can only regulate the external aspects of political existence, but have no jurisdiction over the internal dimensions, which is the living community of individual persons whose very existence in like-mindedness engenders social meaning. Following the dictate of right reason for its own sake, the Christian individual acts virtuously, responsibly, and morally for the common good in conjunction with other Christians. The ruling institutions provide the means and occasionally the encouragement to do so. The picture that is building up in Ockham’s political thought is that of a threefold universe of powers, the most immediate and fundamental of which is that of the existential. Ockham is the first great champion of individual liberties, and as such, indicates the trajectory of the unfolding Western arrangement that prioritized the dignity of man among the triad of authorities. He did not seek solutions to ecclesiastical or temporal problems of legitimacy on an institutional level, but instead reaches down in order to grasp and elevate the existential authority of individuals. In doing so, he sought to establish sound foundations for that authority in natural equity, evident on the large scale in the ius gentium of the emerging nations. This allowed him to turn to the existential questions of liberty and moral responsibility that mark existential authority. The most that the ecclesiastical power and the temporal power can do is to enable the specific dignity of the existential by securing the zone of its remit. The natural equity in a virtuous life must be guarded by each person and every public institution against the denial of evident reason by persons and public institutions. Ockham saw his work as a defense against such abuses and encroachments. For him, it was the existential authority of each individual that sustains public life, not the ecclesiastical-spiritual or temporalpolitical authorities.

47. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham, 85.

Toward the Future 257 Ockham and the Disintegration of the Medieval World As John B. Morrall wrote in describing the mark of the Middle Ages: This fundamental dependence of society on a religious faith which it is assumed that all true citizens must share makes it legitimate to describe medieval society as a Christian Commonwealth. Conversely the disappearance in practice and finally also in theory of this dependence may be taken as marking the end of the medieval period of western European history.48

For Ockham, the disappearance of Christian faith was not so much the concern as the disintegration of social and political conditions for the Christian individual in its wake. Morrall’s observation is essentially correct in Ockham’s case in that he does not build his political theory on a religious faith on the first instance. What is striking in Ockham’s work is the remoteness of God, and the remoteness of a divine substance to draw all of Ockham’s individual relational parts into any harmony. God is, as mentioned above, a capriciously authoritarian figure. The miracle of Christian faith is not so much its content as its “givenness” by God. Beyond the voluntaristic act of depositing Christian faith in individuals, Ockham’s thought is overly concerned with the ultimate divine end, or any overarching grand narrative of being. Nonetheless, the subtlety of Ockham’s mind has not jettisoned Christianity, in the sense of Morrall’s “disappearance in theory and practice” but has concentrated it in the existence of the individual, allowing for its institutionalization secondarily. If we accept Morrall’s criterion for the end of the medieval period, then one might suggest that Ockham occupies a boundary position that is characteristically medieval in its categories, but postmedieval in its existential concerns. However, this is to overemphasize the acutely modernist framework of a division between the medieval and the modern. Ockham’s significance is that his work demonstrates more the continuity of civilization in the West rather than its discontinuity. Voegelin observed that much that we call modern is actually a product of the medieval mind, suggesting the roots of modern Western society extend deeply into the medieval era, whose anxieties and convictions about the meaning of existence are also ours. Ockham has taken these concerns and rearticulated them in the midst of the crisis. The results do not in48. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 11.

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volve the loss of society’s Christian moorings and the casting adrift of the West, but a profound reassessment of what individual Christian existence can legitimately ask, and expect, of institutional public authorities. We might see in his theory of natural equity the philosophical grounds for human dignity, just as we note that it forms the basis of a legal theory of natural rights. Walsh’s comments on Voegelin in his introduction to History of Political Ideas 3 could apply to Ockham, with allowance made for his historical situation: “What he did not sufficiently recognize, in my view, was that the order that was transmitted from the medieval to the modern world was a way of implicitly integrating the transcendent and the temporal, although without rendering their relationship philosophically articulate.”49 Ockham’s concentration on the dignity of the individual, his defense of existential authority in its spiritual depth and political liberty, and his preservation of royal and ecclesial spheres of authority symbolize how the integration of the transcendent and the temporal could still be achieved at the end of the Gelasian-medieval arrangement for the new Western evocation.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): Mystical Concordantia The perfect complement to the work of William of Ockham is the intensely mystical work of Nicholas of Cusa’s concordantia. Emerging from the Nominalist and jurisdictional world of the Conciliar Movement, Cusa was nonetheless able to touch theoretically the spiritual substance of Christianity that formed the mystical community of the church as the body of Christ. Voegelin describes the philosophical attitude of Cusa as that of a humanist and a mystic. As a humanist, he drew on the work of Plato and Aristotle as well as on Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, Dionysius Areopagita and Saint Thomas. As a mystic he had his roots in the theologia negativa; the use of the word concordantia for his title indicates his will to see the social cosmos as an analogue of the mystical concord of the three persons in the divinity; in his work, there is noticeable a strong influence of Meister Eckhart.50 49. Walsh, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 19. 50. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 257.

Toward the Future 259 The contrast with Ockham’s separation of the parts and his corresponding legalism is provided by Cusa’s consideration of what provides the integrating substance of the whole, that is, the Christian commonwealth understood as involving, actually and potentially, the whole of mankind. The complementarity of the two thinkers is their emphasis on the existential authority of individual human beings.

Concordance in the Mystical Body The Harmony of Existence The most fundamental category to understand in Cusa’s work is his concept of concordantia. Concordance is the principle by which the Catholic Church [ecclesia catholica] is in harmony as one and many—in one Lord and many subjects. Flowing from the one King of Peace with infinite concordance, a sweet spiritual harmony of agreement emanates in successive degrees to all its members who are subordinated and united to him. Thus one God is all things in all things. From the beginning we have been predestined for that marvelous harmonious peace belonging to the adopted sons of God through Jesus Christ who came down from heaven to bring all things to fulfillment.51

Concordantia is the spiritual substance of a mystical body that binds all members together into community. Concord arises among men to the extent that they allow the spiritual harmony to flow into them. Concordantia is therefore what makes possible any community, political or ecclesial. We can see in the notion of concordance a spiritualized approximation to Ockham’s natural equity which posits a substratum upon which—or better, a whole within which—a theory of human liberty and equality can be constructed. Cusa’s concordance theoretically stretches beyond Ockham’s natural equity which belonged to the human order of innocence firstly and, after the fall, to the order of evident reason. Concordantia is a mystical substance that proceeds from its absolute maximum in the concord of the Trinity: “And since it is evident that every living being has been created in harmony [concordantia], so also in the divine Essence where life and existence are one and completely equal there is a most infinite concordance because no opposition can be present where there is eternal life.”52 The Trinity is “the summa et infinita concordantia,” and gathers all human 51. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, I, 1, ed. Paul E. Sigmund, 5. 52. Ibid., 6.

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persons into an earthly analogue. It is in the light of the transcendent dimension of personal and community existence that Cusa’s thought on the mechanics of institutional procedures should be read. Public institutions exist for the realization of harmony in the individual and community; they provide political or spiritual authority as a means to achieve concordance. Here too, we find an echo of Ockham’s attitude to public institutional power. In a return to a preNominalistic, almost Thomist perspective of God as final cause, mankind seeks its end in the concordantissima unio, “eternal union with the spirit and flesh of Christ.”53 It is for this purpose that “God has ordained gradualis concordantia of the mystical body of the church.”54 Gradual concord, however, should not be considered gradual in the sense of a process that will inevitably reach a temporal-mundane end. Instead, Cusa has in mind a gradual approximation to the divine and absolute infinite, “an approximate harmony in which no particular position can legitimately be erected into an absolute.”55 The divine concordance is absolute in that it renders the temporal conflicts of differences into an infinite harmony of differences. The purpose of pointing out the mystical nature of temporal conflicts and the possibility of their overcoming in a concordance that approximates to the divine absolute is to show that the struggle for institutional jurisdiction could have no clear and final outcome of itself, but was acted out within a higher harmony. In effect, there will always be tensions and overlap between the spiritual and the temporal until the restlessness is assuaged by its gradual concordance with the divine absolute. The jurisdiction of what belongs under the authority of the church and what belongs under the authority of the secular power is a dialectical boundary problem that permits no clear answer by its own lights. When Cusa refocuses the lens from the jurisdictional struggle to the ultimate macroscopic level of Trinitarian concordance, the danger suggests itself of an Averroist collective substance in which the individual units of mankind are swallowed. On the contrary, Cusa employs the shift to demonstrate how Trinitarian concordance is the exemplar and 53. Ibid. 54. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 258. 55. Ibid., 259. Voegelin points out the equivalence with Hegel’s familiar symbol, Aufgehoben, for this rendering and overcoming of antithetical conflicts into a higher synthesis or infinite harmony.

Toward the Future 261 source of the harmony in which the dignity of existential authority is raised. Human existence is participatory for Cusa in that man’s corporeality is located in the temporal-mundane dimension of being even while it is simultaneously embraced by the transcendental reality of the Trinity. Earthly concordance bears a relation to heavenly concordance through the existential participation of man in both. For example, Cusa writes in his De coniecturis: Man is therefore God, but not absolutely, since he is a man. Hence he is a human god. Man is also the world, but he is not everything by contraction, since he is a man. Man is therefore a microcosm or, in truth, a human world. Thus, the region of humanity itself encloses God and the universal region in its human power.56

Human existence contains all things “humanly.” This mystical treatment becomes Cusa’s model for considering seemingly intractable problems. It is a theme that runs through many of his works.57 The struggles within the church regarding papal authority and the enduring tensions between the church and the various political authorities are symbolic of an imperfect harmony, and yet, for Cusa, there is a harmony that holds them together and frames the nature of the tensions. Voegelin notes that “cooperation and consent are the forms in which incessantly this approximate harmony has to be made effective.” He also underlines the confidence of Cusa in consent as an outworking of concordance: “This task is not hopeless, for by divine predestination the Spirit pervades society and furnishes the homogeneous substance that inclines the conflicting forces toward unity. ‘The Father is the fountain of life, Who accepts in the Son the blood vessel, through which the flux of the Spirit goes into all men.’”58 The language of consent is also the language of Cusa’s inward turn to find in man’s own existence the way out of the institutional tumult and a way into a better, more adequate arrangement.

56. Nicholas of Cusa, De Coniecturis, quoted by Pauline Moffitt Watts in Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth Century Vision of Man, 109. 57. See especially “Mens imago Dei” and “Sapienta clamat in plateis,” in Moffitt Watts, Nicolaus Cusanus, 87–116 and 117–52, respectively. 58. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 259.

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Rationality and Concordance Man’s membership in the mystical body is Cusa’s key to unlocking the problems of his day. Reality flows from the divine creator down to the lower levels of creation which, in comparison with the eternal light of God, are of differing degrees of opacity.59 This sense of a hierarchical flow of reality informs Cusa’s conception of the mystical body of the church which Voegelin describes: The body, or the ecclesia Christi, consists of the sacraments, the priesthood, and the faithful. The sacraments are the spirit, the priesthood is the soul, the faithful are the body. The three together are bound into the mystical body. The two ordines within the body, the priests and the faithful, are ordered hierarchically, from the papal and the imperial heads, through the ranks of the ecclesiastical and feudal hierarchies, down to the plain laici (III.I).60

However, Voegelin suggests that such a conception, as it stands, could have been articulated by any thinker since the ninth century. The fifteenth-century world of Cusa had moved into a postfeudal age of which he must take account. Not only the charismata as enumerated by St. Paul are included within the mystical body, but he stresses that every faithful individual’s membership has its place. The principle of caritas, or love, reaches out beyond the strict Pauline enumeration to potentially include the whole of humanity. In fact, Cusa puts great premium on the incorporation of the rational virtues and powers. “The whole natura rationabilis should adhere to Christ as its head.”61 Interestingly, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Cusa wrote his De pace fidei, a meditation on a heavenly council at which all the major religious groups are represented, including Hussites and Muslims. By the principle of una religio in varietate rituum, Cusa suggests the equivalence of all religions in being approximations to the one true faith, but in which Christianity is the most accurate. Muslims, Hussites, Jews acquire respect at the council for their common, but inferior, symbolization of the single faith. The church as the mystical body, spanning time and transcending 59. It seems as though the influence of Dionysius Areopagita on the work of Cusa became more pronounced at the time of his On Learned Ignorance in 1440. His thought became more distinctly mystical and he argued for the need to combine reason and a superrational speculation to understand divine reality. 60. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 260. 61. Ibid.

Toward the Future 263 the temporal, provides for the unfolding of all the potentialities of mankind, particularly the rational potentialities. “It becomes possible now to introduce as new ranks into the corpus mysticum the sapientes et heroes, that is the Platonic philosophers and guardians, as well as the Aristotelian political hierarchy of the free and the slaves (preface to bk. III).”62 Cusa exalts the human soul in its rational capacity by emphasizing that reason is shared by the saints and the heavenly hosts in adherence to Christ himself. He enhances the corpus mysticum by considering rationality more deeply as a universal modus operandi that extends across humanity in its breadth and into blessedness of heaven in its height.

Individual Authority in the Mystical Body Where Ockham found it necessary to pull the world asunder into its relational parts in order to examine the remit of the three authorities, Cusa concentrates on what unites them. However, his treatment of the humanism he locates within the mystical body does not stop there. In emphasizing the intellectual faculty, he prioritizes the authority of wellordained reason. The wise man, the rational-intellectual man, is the only truly free man. Liberty is thus a character of the human soul that is dependent upon its rational character. Therefore the authority that is carried and exercised by the sapientes is of a higher degree than the authority of the foolish. Although liberty and wisdom emerge together from membership in the mystical body, their seeming absence in a foolish individual does not affect that membership. Membership in the mystical body belongs to all the faithful and provides for the differences and ranges of all human characterological types. However, that said, Cusa wants to point out that whereas the wise man lives by the law that is imprinted on his soul, the foolish man is governed by his volitions. “Not nature makes a man a slave, but his foolishness [insipientia]; nor does manumissio make a man free, but discipline.”63 Liberty and slavery are not political categories that define membership in political communities as they were in the Hellenic experience. They are distinctly qualities of the human soul, engendered by the degree of rationality possessed and which qualify the authority carried by the existence of the single individual. 62. Ibid., 261. 63. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, III, 205ff.

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The degree of rationality possessed by the individual becomes the next problem for Cusa’s humanism. It would appear that the determinism of nature conflicts with the spiritual freedom of Christianity, if the degree of freedom is linked to the degree of rationality. If those who are not possessed of a significant degree of rationality by nature are to belong within the corpus mysticum and live with the dignity of their humanity intact, how is Cusa’s emphasis on the whole natura rationabilis to be reconciled with the irrational and the self-enslaving foolish individuals? The concordance of the wise and the foolish is brought about by the existence of trust as a character trait. “Thus,” writes Voegelin, “by a kind of natural instinct, the presidency of the sapientes and the subjection of the insipientes is brought into concord, and can exist under common laws, of which primarily the sapientes are the authors, guardians and executors.”64 Cusa’s own trust in Christ’s redemption of the natural order by grace provides the insight that natural differences between individuals can be overcome by a spiritual liberty. The “foolish” man exercises the authority of his existence by the act of trusting the wisdom of the more rational man. This is basis of the concord that is invoked by Cusa which he recognizes as necessary in a community. However, the natural instinct of trust is not an instinct of “obedience and submission to any ruler who happens to hold power, nor is it a gregarious instinct that compels men to join in community; it is rather a variant of reason.”65 The less rational man participates in the rational world by exercising the trust that already orientates him to the governance of reason. The sapientes is thus self-governing according to the discipline of reason—and to that extent, self-liberating—while the insipientes achieves his liberty by trusting in the social governance of reason that he does not possess personally. The personal authority of the individual then, whether sapientes or insipientes, always participates in rationality though the degree may vary.

Civil Theology in the Mystical Body The Catholic Concordance represents Cusa’s attitudes to the power of a general council to represent the church over the power of the pope. His consideration of authority in general proceeded from this atmosphere, 64. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 263. 65. Ibid.

Toward the Future 265 but it is not unreasonable to suggest that, while he switched alliances in 1437 to support papal monarchism over conciliarism (even to the extent of quoting from Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam), his mystical penetration of the problem of authority in general remained intact.66 After he wrote his most famous work On Learned Ignorance, Cusa became more emphatically a mystical philosopher rather than a canon lawyer, but did not give up his political and legal interests. Morimichi Watanabe, in his essay “Concord and Discord,” writes that even at this early stage of Cusa’s thought, we must recognize that his legal and political ideas, which appeared to be based on the egalitarian, seemingly “democratic” views of man and society, were not the only level of his thinking and that his full political and legal ideas are expressed more fully when the canonistic views are combined with or subordinated to a cosmological, hierarchical understanding of the universe, human communities and men. His cosmological views went beyond the realm of canonistic understanding of man, society and the church, a phenomenon which Erich Meuthen expressed as Übersteig (overflow) in one place and as “re-theologizing” in another. Brian Tierney has called this development “the gradual assimilation into canonistic theory of the ancient doctrine of the Church and the Mystical Body of Christ.”67

The sense of an Übersteig emanates from the work of Cusa, drawing what would be a rather dry discussion of administration upward toward the vision of what administration is for, and ultimately toward the vision of what sustains the direction of a world endowed with rationality. The self-governance of the wise man and the natural trustfulness of the foolish man represent the two poles of reason that are necessary for an approximate concord in society. More approximate concord places a premium on consent which is to be understood as a concurrence among persons and their corporate bodies. This concurrence occurs in the likemindedness of a civil theology and the consent that emerges is a living, concrete, and coherent embodiment of truth in action. Indeed, civil the66. For the transformation of Cusa from an advocate of the general council to an advocate of papal monarchy, see Joachim W. Stieber, “The ‘Hercules of the Eugenians’ at the Crossroads: Nicholas of Cusa’s Decision for the Pope and against the Council in 1436/1437,” in Christianson et al., Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom, vol, 45. See also Paul E. Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought; Donald F. Duclow, “Life and Works,” in Bellito et al., Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to Renaissance Man; and Kazuhiko Yamaki, Nicholas of Cusa: A Medieval Thinker for the Modern Age. 67. Morimichi Watanabe, “Concord and Discord,” in Yamaki, Nicholas of Cusa.

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ology is a concordance in society that is renewed at every moment in every individual or association and whose meaning reaches into the transcendental horizon of Trinitarian concordance. The existence of man radiates this infinite concordance into the temporal-mundane, thereby filling the finite with a limitlessness that reveals the deeper meaning of the individual. In order to achieve the concord with political and spiritual authorities, “trust,” as a living enactment of civil theology and its rational concordance, is essential. Voegelin writes: Without [trust, and concurrence within civil theology] representative government would be no more than a question of jurisdiction and power, and government by consent would degenerate into the tyranny of a majority that gives reign to its emotions and volitions. Trust and the rule of law, as formulated by Cusa, are the principles by virtue of which the idea of democratic government by leadership and consent makes sense.68

All institutional authority is treated respectfully as rational phenomena that aim at the existential good of all men, and to that extent, allow themselves to be guided by the Spirit and by Christ. “In order to be valid, positive laws have to be made in accordance with natural law.”69 Therefore, it is proper that the wise who are formed by reason be elevated to positions of legislative authority in order to achieve positive harmony with the underlying natural law. The sapientiores are the natural rulers of others by virtue of their reason alone. If the wise ruler can institutionalize the natural law to some degree, then the resulting positive law will guarantee the liberty of all to whom it applies, by codifying the mystical equality of all in the Body of Christ. Any deviation from this natural law invalidates the positive law and it follows then that rulership must originate in consent among the free and equal, and not by coercive force or hereditament: “For, since by nature men are equally strong and equally free, the true and ordered power of one, who is by nature not stronger than the others, can by constituted only by election and consent.”70 The occurrence of consent or concord among free and equal persons, who are also members of Christ’s mystical body, must be recognized as proceeding from the Holy Spirit who is the source of con68. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 263. 69. Ibid., 264. 70. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, II.14, quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 264.

Toward the Future 267 cordantia, even though such consent is mediated through political channels. The participation of such persons in the life of the Spirit confers on their concord the dignity of the divine. Cusa imbues the political with a sacred light, but it would be entirely incorrect to say that he is involved in resanctifying the political. Rather, the political is lit up with the light that shines from below in individuals through their generation of a civil theology that is composed of concordance. Like Ockham, Cusa’s sensitive intellect is attuned to the differentiation of authority and his mysticism operates in an equivalent manner to Ockham’s Nominalism: although the two thinkers move in opposite directions and under different philosophical moods, they both arrive at a repackaging of Western society through the balancing of political, spiritual, and existential authorities by considering the rational dignity of the individual.

The Mysticism of Cusa and Confidence for the Future While the momentum of the Conciliar Movement provided the energy for Cusa’s elaboration of authority, his mysticism combined with his humanism gave to his work the resources he needed to penetrate beyond the level of the Nominalism of his day in search of the substantive unity of Western civilization. Voegelin notes Renaissance sensibilities of the time and comments that the “energy of a renewed, revolutionary institution, the self-confidence of the sapiens, and a certain optimism with regard to the nature of man determine the atmosphere [of the councils].”71 Cusa’s mystical penetration to the heart of the Christian faith is reminiscent of Aeschylus’s diver in The Suppliants who must descend to the divine depths of his soul in order to wrest from it a just decision in a tragic situation. Cusa’s faith is not fideistic and he writes, “For faith implies in itself all that is intelligible, and the intellect is directed by faith, and faith is extended by the intellect. Where there is no sound faith, there is no true intellect.”72 This of course is another contrast with Ockham. The “civilizational schism” of a faith divorced from reason, albeit a real historical phenomenon, is surpassed by Cusa’s mys71. Ibid., 265. 72. Nicholas of Cusa, Docta Ignorantia, III, 11, quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 266.

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ticism and as such is shown to be not philosophically exhaustive. In fact, it is the mysticism of Cusa which centers on the role of existential authority that points the way forward for the civilizational unity of the West at the very time when the fractures of its Gelasian tensions had become terminal and had begun to dangerously threaten its cohesion. His thought represents the perennial possibility of regeneration within a society. Cusa’s mysticism is linked substantively to his humanism, which prompts him to place the authority of the human soul at the center of his political theory. He is an example of a new intellectual mystic who is moved by the vision of God. Voegelin describes the importance of Cusa in providing a way out of the sociopolitical upheaval involved in the loss of a civil theology: Cusa’s perspective of Christian history is neither the saeculum senescens of Saint Augustine nor a new dispensation like the Third Realms of Joachim of Fiore and of Dante, but the open horizon of a mankind ever growing in faith and intellectual penetration of the faith. . . . The nations emerging from the sacrum imperium did not become a plurality of brute power facts without grace: the mystical faith in the concordantia of mankind was still extended over them as the eternal arc, far outreaching the discord of the times.73

The concordantia infinita in the divine Trinity is the mystical experience at the heart of Christian faith which Cusa intellectually elaborates for the sake of a deeper understanding of human existence across its individual, sociopolitical, and historical range. Man travels in the world but, by the grace of the Spirit that pervades the mystical body, grows in faith and caritas toward the infinite concord that is God. Although he can never achieve absolute concord with God in this world, man can content himself with struggling for an approximate concord in all things. One can surmise that while Cusa could ennoble man by emphasizing his natura rationabilis, he could content himself with low expectations for what can be achieved politically. 73. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 3, 266.

Concluding R emarks The Contemporary West and Islam

How did it come about that a small group of peoples in Western Europe should in a relatively short space of time acquire the power to transform the world and to emancipate themselves from man’s age-long dependence on the forces of nature? . . . Why is it that Europe alone among the civilizations of the world has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social tradition which rules oriental cultures? . . . In the West spiritual power . . . has acquired social freedom and autonomy and consequently its activity has not been confined to the religious sphere but has had far-reaching effects on every aspect of social and intellectual life.1

Christopher Dawson highlights the “unrest” of Western society as its most significant and enduring characteristic. In these concluding remarks, the West—medieval and modern—is considered as the field sustained and given direction by the differentiation of authority into into its three forms: political, spiritual, and existential. Some remarks on the enduring character of the West from the medieval into the modern period are in order to demonstrate that the differentiation is not complete, nor is it a process particular to the medieval period, but that the difficulty of maintaining an equilibrium among the three authorities forms 1. Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 15–16.

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an important continuity between our day and our medieval past. In addition, the uniqueness of Western society as constituted by this differentiation contrasts with non-Western societies. As the differentiation of authority erupted in Christian revelation, the absence of Christianity in historical societies seems to militate against the process of differentiation. As the comments on Islam below show, spiritual, political, and existential centers are certainly present in non-Western societies but their assertions only became authoritative within a higher schema, and not only on their own terms. In Islam, the relation of the triad demonstrates a compactness rather than a differentiation, a fusion rather than a separation, and a dominance of a higher authority rather than the autonomy of each of the three. These remarks are entirely general, but are intended to present the achievement of Western differentiated order in relief against a non-Western order for the purposes of appreciating better what has occurred.

Remarks on the Endogenous Character of Western Society The Continuity of Western Society in the Rebalancing of Authorities To the extent that we associate the medieval with the Gelasian formula, we can state that the medieval world was slowly killed by the emergence of existential authority in its midst which gradually uprooted the Gelasian arrangement from its moorings. In this sense we understand ourselves as nonmedieval. We live in a world of technological, medical, and scientific achievement that surpasses the standards of the Middle Ages. However, to the extent that the medieval struggle for an adequate spiritual and political order to replace the Gelasian order was one that was driven by the assertion of the authority and dignity that inheres in the individual and his free incorporations, we are in substantial continuity with that time. This neither makes us medieval, nor makes them modern. The enduring Western project to secure a more adequate arrangement for human dignity is determined by standards evoked in dealing with the existential authority of individuals. To be sure, an arrangement that prioritizes existence is a vague notion, and it does not



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lend itself to any final understanding, which would amount to the closure of history. Nor does such an arrangement have an aim in the sense of a mission to achieve a final end. However subtle it may seem, Western society contains an inner quality of purposiveness in the sense of a selfunfolding direction, and furthermore, such a direction has a pragmatic history which is, by definition, rather concrete. Liberal constitutionalism is the modern Western arrangement that seeks to achieve an equilibrium among the triad of authorities that allows for the temporal and spiritual welfare of persons and their communities. There exists a modern body of literature that recognizes the continuity of this struggle as central to Western existence. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the aftermath of both the American and the French Revolutions, discerned the link between the spiritual and the political through the agency of the individual soul. “Despotism can govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”2 Without a spiritual foundation to underpin the practical science of politics, the dignity of man is lost. Commenting on Tocqueville’s conception of liberal democracies, M. R. R. Ossewaarde writes: “The progress of democracy itself is part of the noble heritage of the Christian civilization. According to Tocqueville, democracy is a natural right that has become actualized in history by providential governance.”3 Regarding the relations among the individual, religious traditions and temporal political forms in Western constitutional democracies today, Walsh writes: The [classical] liberal invocations of rights, summarizing the necessity of selfdetermination both individually and collectively, are reflective of the deepest reverence for human dignity. Natural or human rights constitute a recognition of the transcendent worth of each individual, which we are never justified in setting aside in the name of some particular social good.4

Furthermore, “to the extent that the liberal construction represents a secular derivation of the central Christian opening toward transcendent divinity, it is inextricably involved in the relationship with revelation.”5 2. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 318. This is clearly a continuation of a common theme from classical political thought through John of Salisbury in the twelfth century. 3. Ossewaarde, Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought, 146. 4. Walsh, “Are Freedom and Dignity Enough? A Reflection on Liberal Abbreviations,” in Kraynak and Tinder, In Defense of Human Dignity, 169. 5. Ibid., 174.

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When Walsh writes that the “transcendent worth of each individual” is the standard that liberal constitutional democracies use in their considerations of justice and right, he is suggesting the primacy of existential authority to sustain a political community by mediating a transcendental depth into civil theology in much the same way as suggested by Nicholas of Cusa. The obligation that civil theology, as Ockham’s ius gentium, places on public institutions to authoritatively administer its body of truths is a binding one that cannot be neglected without delegitimating the purpose of the institution. The centrality of the individual in modern liberal arrangements is the outcome of a long struggle within Western civilization for a more adequate existential articulation of that civilization. Political relationships are public relationships among strangers that have, as Aquinas discussed, justice as their guiding principle. This public and political form of relationship is citizenship. The “zone of autonomy” that marks the natural rights of each individual is secured by the organs of political authority and enhanced by the mediation of spiritual authority. While each individual is protected as an “autonomous zone,” and individuals can relate to each other as strangers, the citizenship relation provides for all civil associations that freely arise and for the possibility of an interpersonal opening toward friendship. In this way, distance-from and relatedness-to mark the liberal configuration of the existential-political relationship. The “setting at a distance” for the sake of a free association is the model of political relationships in liberal democracies that are replete with the dynamics of existential authority. Martin Buber has written on human existence that is simultaneously spiritual and political: The principle of human life is not simple but twofold, being built up in a twofold movement which is of such a kind that the one movement is the presupposition of the other. I propose to call the first movement “the primal setting at a distance” and the second “entering into relation.”. . . Man, as man, sets man at a distance and makes him independent; he lets the life of men like himself go on round about him, and so he, and he alone, is able to enter into relation . . . with those like himself.6

6. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, 60, 67.



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The political protection of individual liberty recognizes the creation of civic society in its spectrum across the arts and letters, commerce, education, and so on, and secures the exercise of a personal dominium or a private sphere of personal autonomy that is nevertheless free to enter into relation with another. The individual liberty of a citizen is a public political good that legally protects the personal and spiritual liberty of individuals. Citizenship, then, is the liberal concept that enshrines the assertion of existential authority, endows it with a legal personality, and defends it against the overreach of public authorities.7 Framed in this way, we can observe the continuity of the debate from the medieval period onward. John Rawls, for example, highlights the centrality of the natura rationabilis that we saw at the center of Cusa’s thought, while drawing on the notion of equality that Ockham deduced from his theory of natural equity. He writes in Political Liberalism that being reasonable is not an epistemological idea (though it has epistemological elements). Rather, it is part of a political ideal of democratic citizenship that includes the idea of public reason. The content of this ideal includes what free and equal citizens as reasonable can require of each other with respect to their reasonable comprehensive views.8

Buried at the core of the notion of citizenship is the universal sphere of reason, reminiscent of Heraclitus’s conception of the common logos: “When you have listened, not to me but to the Law (Logos), it is wise to agree that all things are one” (B50).9 The rational sphere is the sphere of citizenship that Rawls describes as marked by “public reason.” The autonomy of the citizen is not abridged by participation in society which he understands “as a system of fair cooperation.”10 Liberal constitutionalism can then be understood as an arrangement that approaches something of an accommodation among the three authorities and does so on rational terms.

7. For an excellent discussion of various citizenship theories, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 284–326. 8. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 62. 9. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 24, 28. See Voegelin’s commentary in Order and History 2, 229–38. 10. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 98.

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Concluding Remarks Modern Liberal Configuration as a Partial Resolution of the Problems of Differentiating Authorities

Rawls’s Thought as a Mirror of the Modern Turn toward Existence Rawls’s thought points to two features that should enhance the understanding of differentiating authority. Firstly, the differentiation of authority is a process that eludes all theoretical attempts to capture it. Its effects, however, can become discernible within political philosophy because a prudential science, such as political philosophy, is the study of truth in action. The deontological turn in Rawls’s thought about the priority of the right over the good proceeds only by presuming as settled the priority of the existential over political authority. The transcendent worth of the individual is not explicitly alluded to in Rawls’s thought, but it is intimated by the priority the individual receives. Commenting on Rawls, Walsh writes, Traditional foundations for human dignity in the ideas of creation or nature appear too uncertain, since they are more contestable than the rights they proposed to support. . . . Rawls concludes that the teleological approach is ineradicably subjective [in which we appeal to an ultimate end or reality that justifies all]. The deontological alternative he proposes is to bracket all talk of final ends and focus on the concrete convictions of justice and right that already inform our reflections. Such preanalytic convictions inevitably underpin our quest for the good anyway.11

Rawls reverses the relation between the right and the good, in which the final good was held to be prior by teleological doctrines, and insists that the priority of right gains its priority for no other reason than it just “is,” in the sense that existence seems to move “right-fully.” Being is less a state of how things are than a process that intimates the adverb “rightfully” for its description of how humans exist. It is a nonfoundationalism that Walsh traces in the writings of liberal theorists. For example, he notices that Ronald Dworkin’s insistence that the respectful treatment of individuals “is not derived from conventions or agreements. It is the irreducible condition for a liberal democratic order, itself incapable of demonstration.”12 When Richard Rorty insists that philosophy be 11. See Walsh’s commentary in The Growth of the Liberal Soul, 52–53. 12. Ibid., 53.



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subordinated to politics, he is not suggesting a fascism in which political authority is the final word. Walsh comments that “Few are as outrageous in acknowledging what has become commonplace, that the liberal order never really depended on the reasons adduced for it and cannot be endangered by the collapse of its rational surface. . . . Why should philosophical disagreements be allowed to jeopardize our common life together?”13 The existence of liberal democracies seems to be its own justification or “right” to be, and any purposiveness that steers liberal democracies is not a teleological good, but the movement of existence in its own right. Secondly, Rawls’s thought also demonstrates that the liberal solution to the problems of differentiating authority is intrinsically a partial solution. The post-cold war hubris in the liberal West may have generated sentiments of history having reached its final articulation, but this presumes that existence—and its process of differentiation—has been captured in the categories of political thought. If existence extends from transcendental reality through the temporal-mundane, then to assert that history can be captured in temporal-mundane categories is to assert an existential closure, suggesting that contemporary patterns of gnostic thought are alive and well.14 Nor should the process of differentiation be understood as a mechanical process, working its way through a unilinear conception of history, understood as some form of impersonal Averroist substance like Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of the Will. The endurance of liberal democracies after the fall of other forms of government is a testament to the stamina that the prioritization of existence provides in contrast to the quick burning fuse that exhausts itself in tyrannical and totalitarian articulations of political absolutization of power; and also to the impossibility of theocratic forms—a governance modeled on a final spiritual pattern—in the West after Gregory VII. The difficulties of existential authority in both its spiritual and political dimensions are demonstrated by current debates surrounding abortion and euthanasia. Such debates turn on the acceptance or dismissal of existential authority as the ultimate authority. Here, moral 13. Ibid. 14. Voegelin takes Hegel as a representative of the stop-history thinkers. For his theoretical treatment of Hegel’s essential gnosticism, see Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Published Essays, 1966–1985.

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arguments reach into the spiritual and the political domains, invoking the spiritual authority of transcendental reality and the coercion of temporal-legal power, while the core problem lingers in the domain of existential authority. The central problem today is both an old and new one: it is not concerned primarily with the problem of the nature of authority as such—existential authority is more than recognized in the premium placed on individual choice—but instead centers on the limits to the jurisdiction of the existential. In these ethical debates, the overarching question may legitimately be asked: Does existential authority reach legitimate boundaries before it corrupts itself? In any case, the partial solution to the problem of authority that liberalism presents today can be characterized in a twofold manner: in the first place, the political notion of citizenship affirms the priority of the existential over the political. Citizenship is built upon a foundation of reason which, being common and therefore public, relates individuals rationally and as strangers open to deeper relatedness with one another. In the second place, existential authority also has a spiritual dimension. The emergence of the existential in a historical process of differentiation is similarly a participation in transcendental reality that imbues history with a meaning that is not explicable on its own terms. The impossibility of predicting a final political articulation is necessarily related to the “unknowability” of a final differentiation of reality. Leaving out the irrationality of gnostic metastasis, there is no final shape to human existence that can be rationally predicted. End of history claims for liberalism are therefore rejected. The partiality of liberalism, as a contemporary and haltingly successful attempt to achieve an equilibrium among the triad of authorities, is therefore emphasized.

Tension in Constitutionalism between Teleology and Nonfoundationalism Liberal constitutionalism is always more than an idea or instrumentarium of governance; the single liberal democracy, as a constitutional arrangement, is always more than political and sustained by what is more than political. Every political society is a meaningful cosmion and spontaneously develops symbols that carry the meaning of that society’s existence. This body of truths is a set of teleological symbols that con-



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veys foundation myths, myths about the meaning of justice and other political goods, the spirit of nationality, and so forth. However, these symbols of civil theologies are subject to change with the changing individuals who are symbolizers over time. In other words, while the single liberal democracy—as a political society—is always imbued with social meaning, it is sustained not so much by its symbols but by its tacit emphasis on the symbolizers who embody the meaning by their existence. As Rawls said, right is prior to the good. In addition, an ultimate emphasis on the existence of symbolizers over the symbols of civil theology allows for the presence of a plurality of civil theologies within the one liberal democracy. Tolerance, multiculturalism, and the spectrum of symbolic positions on the nominal scale from progressive to conservative become possible only within liberal constitutionalism. As single liberal democratic states demarcate their geographical boundaries and the extent of their jurisdiction by means that resonate with the symbols of civil theology, and continue to express themselves teleologically in the sense of aiming at some final good, there arise tensions. Liberal constitutionalism in general has no foundation but its own existence in the individuals and communities that comprise it, but the spontaneous generation of civil theology give it a teleological adornment. As individual persons symbolize existence teleologically, it follows that liberal constitutionalism which emphasizes existence becomes replete with teleological goods—goods that nonetheless shift as we have seen with the medieval crisis and, as Rawls has suggested, are subjective. Liberal constitutionalism in general takes no stand on the teleology of man, only on his existence; and disentitles itself from asserting the superiority of any one set of symbols over another—except to the extent that it recognizes in a body of symbols an existential threat. In spite of this general selfdisentitlement, the particular liberal democratic states institutionalize the legitimating civil theology and, given the nature of the specific society, retain the superiority of some symbols over others. Thus the tensions arise not so much from rivalries among different civil theologies within a pluralist society, but from the nonfoundationalism of liberal constitutionalism in general and the symbolism of teleological goods in the specific state. However, the priority of existence over symbol allows for a partial

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resolution of the ancient jurisdictional struggle between the institutional political and spiritual authorities. The existence of man as meaningful is also symbolic and it follows that liberal constitutionalism, moved by existence, moves with a flotilla of symbols. In this movement of existence, it becomes an accommodation between the political and the spiritual authority of the church to the extent that spiritual authority is also concerned with the existence of man. As intimated in many medieval thinkers, the dualism of church-state struggles misses the most important factor in their respective spheres: their obligations to minister to the spiritual and sociopolitical dimensions of individuals and communities. When both institutional authorities prioritize existence, then the final goods of teleology find their appropriate expression. The rejection of existence as a priority has proven to be existentially dangerous as we have seen with the absolutization of both political and papal authorities. The differentiation of authority in the West has distinguished the separation of political, spiritual, and existential zones of autonomy, but as an outcome of the one differentiating process, each autonomous zone moves in the same direction as the others. What liberal constitutionalism does is to allow itself to be moved by the direction of existence and its differentiated zones. By being more than a political and symbolic arrangement, it can be a partial configuration of the triad of authorities that remains in process.

Western Comparison with Authority in Islam The choice of Islam instead of another non-Western society is pragmatic: the encounter between the West and Islam is a historical fact. In the exchange of intellectual ideas like the Arabic development of mathematics and the transmission of Aristotle’s works, or in the violent clashes that have continued to the present, the impact of Islam on the West has been enormous. The consideration of Islamic order proceeds by discussing firstly the understanding of Islamic authority in general for the purposes of further elaborating the meaning of individual existence, the status of the political, and the notion of history. The problem of differentiation will be considered therefore in an Islamic context.



Concluding Remarks 279 Authority in Islam

Islam is a complex of forces that comprises not merely a religion, but an identity and a civilization too. For most Muslims, the notion of private religion in a naked public square is inconceivable, because the authority of Allah is so complete that its codification in Shari`a presents an obligatory framework for all facets of human life. With its own Scriptures, orthodox language, laws, and a rulership that combined political with spiritual functions, the imperial caliphate did not assimilate into its conquered territories but transformed them. As a civilization, Islam extends membership only to those who profess Islam and, through bodies such as the Organization of Islam Congress (OIC), uphold the “Islamic rights” of man. If Islam is a complex that shades off into religion, identity, and civilization, then its organizing principle is the sovereignty of Allah. By extension, the authority of Allah is final and its application is of paramount importance. Shari‘a, as Islamic law, means “path to the water source,” denoting a direction to the fulfillment of life. It is a doctrine of duties toward Allah involving ritual, law, ethics, and good manners. Furthermore, every human action has a status in Islam: actions may be required or forbidden, recommended or reprehensible, or may be such that Shari‘a remains indifferent. Islamic law provides meaning to duties that “are, without exception, duties toward God, and are founded on the inscrutable will of God Himself. All duties that men can envisage being carried out are dealt with; we find treated therein all the duties of man in any circumstance whatsoever, and in their connections with anyone whatsoever.”15 In Sunni Islam, there are four schools of Shari‘a, and Shi‘a has one. What they have in common is their derivation from the Qu‘ran firstly and secondly the Sunna which contains the hadith literature or the traditions of the Prophet, which thus complements the Qu‘ran. In Sunni, there is ijma or the interpretive consensus of the scholars on the meaning of Scripture that occupies third place in the authoritative rank, with qiyas or reasoning by analogy sometimes occupying fourth place. In this hierarchy of authority, the revelation of Allah’s words in the 15. C. Hurgronje Snouck, Selected Works, 161.

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Qu‘ran is always supreme. Authority begins and ends with revelation, which means that its cataloguing through Shari‘a is infallible; there is a hadith in which Mohammad claimed that the Muslim community will never agree on an error. In the tenth century C.E., there emerged a consensus among the scholars that all the major problems of existence had been answered and only four schools of Shari‘a were recognized as orthodox. Joseph Schacht comments that after 900, the point had been reached when the scholars of all schools felt that all essential questions had been thoroughly discussed and finally settled, and a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one might be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all.16

The lawbooks of the four schools became the standard textbooks and any attempt to depart from them was denounced as innovation. Ijtihad (independent interpretation of Scripture) was abandoned in favour of taqlid (imitation) or submission to the canons of the four schools. Shari‘a has become fixed; and because it is infallible, it is not subject to change. The rights and freedoms set out in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights were thought to exceed those permitted under Shari‘a and, in 1981, there came the proclamation of the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. In this declaration, it is stated that, with regard to Shari‘a, divine revelation has been given “the legal and moral framework within which to establish and regulate human institutions and relationships” and that the “teachings of Islam represent the quintessence of Divine guidance in its final and perfect form.”17 Clearly, the concentration of final authority in Shari‘a trumps any assertion of authority that is not derived from the Qu‘ran, and any differentiation of authority in Islam must circumvent the fixity of Shari‘a. The doctrinal encrustation of authority in the form of Shari‘a determines that any consideration of authority in Islamic civilization must involve a consideration of Shari‘a too. As Mohamed Charfi explains, “There are 16. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 70–71 17. Preamble to Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, available online at http://www.alhewar.com/ISLAMDECL.html.



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only two possibilities: Muslim law may be considered either as a human, non-religious creation, or as a divine creation that is, by definition, just and immutable.”18 Orthodoxy holds that Shari‘a is divine and immutable, but this has led to a subdued confusion when some religiously sanctioned practices such as slavery and the subordination of women and non-Muslims do not always resonate with what is claimed to be just and immutable. Charfi continues: In the first case, [Shari‘a as a human creation] is a product of history and has to evolve like all other legal systems in the world—which means giving up not only slavery but corporal punishment and discrimination against women. In the second case, where Muslim law is supposed to stand the test of time and to be valid for all countries, it is not clear why its provisions concerning slavery should be abandoned.19

As Muslim societies have distanced themselves from the practices of the eleventh century and finds ways to overcome the harshness of Shari‘a, there is a possibility of a differentiation of authority occurring outside the supposedly exhaustive framework of Islam’s infallible law through the civil theology of those concrete Muslim societies.

Authority and the Political in Islam The major division within Islam between Sunni and Shi‘a, as well as the derivation of various traditions, is found in the events surrounding the succession to Muhammad. Wilferd Madelung writes that “there was no obvious and self-evident way to organize the community founded by the Prophet. All Muslims agreed that God had chosen Muhammad, but who would choose his successor?”20 The first leader or imam and deputy or caliph were chosen by Mohammad’s Companions from his own tribe, the Quraysh. During the reign of the third successor, Uthman, a dispute developed over the appropriate share of the spoils of war. Uthman was assassinated, and replaced by Mohammad’s cousin, Ali. The followers of Uthman and Ali fought the “battle of the camel” in 656 near Basra, which Ali won. It is to Ali that Shi‘ites remain faithful and look to as the perfect man after Mohammad. For them, Ali was the only legitimate 18. Charfi, Islam and Liberty, 40. 19. Ibid. 20. See Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad.

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caliph after Mohammad. Another battle, the battle of Siffin, took place the following year between the followers of Uthman and Ali, after which one of Uthman’s governors, Muawiya, obtained a truce with Ali through negotiation. It was this truce that led to the development of another tradition within Islam: the Khariji or “seceders.” Originally loyalists of Ali, they favored violent jihad against those deemed impure.21 For example, the agreement with Muawiya was rejected on the grounds that it is not for human beings to decide who would be caliph because the choice was for God alone to make. The Kharijites elected their own imam, and it was one of these who assassinated Ali. It should be clear then that, among the rich traditions of fourteen centuries of Islamic civilization, authority has not always been arrogated exclusively to the schools of Shari‘a. According to the scholar Abu Zahra, Islam has known three emphases: the political, the intellectual, and the orthodox.22 The emphasis on the political includes the early Kharijites and later jihadist movements that practice their own interpretation of Islam (ijtihad). There is also the intellectual emphasis, which was best represented by the Mu‘tazilites who were the adherents of suppressed schools of Shari‘a that prioritized reason over the claims of Qu‘ranic revelation. It was predominantly from the Mu‘tazilite line that the great flowering of Islamic civilization came which included philosophy, science and mathematics, engineering, medicine, and so forth. Their method was also largely that set out by Averroës: “We categorically state that, whenever there is a contradiction between the result of a proof (or of rational speculation) and the apparent meaning of a revealed text, the latter must be subject to interpretation.”23 Third is the dominant emphasis on the orthodoxy of the four schools and the imam or leader. Each emphasis has its representatives in the present day in the “Islamist” jihad movements, in the rationalism of many Muslim intellectuals, and the unbroken orthodoxy of Sunni and Shi‘a, respectively. Furthermore, other interrelated sources of authority have found expression in Islam, primarily in the early centuries: there were the Sufi mystics, who were accused of importing foreign elements into Islam and of 21. See Cooper, New Political Religions; or, An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, 80–81. 22. Abu Zahra, Al-mahadi al-islamiya, 5–6, in Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 33–34. 23. Averroës, Discours Decisif, 120, in Charfi, Islam and Liberty, 86.



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reserving special knowledge and power to a spiritual elite; Aristotelian thought provided a source of authority, but with the Mu‘tazilites was ultimately rejected because it placed human reason in a position of rivalry to God’s knowledge and of limiting God’s actions to the realm of rationality; local customs were similarly rejected with village wisemen accused of rivaling God’s authority in Shari‘a.24 The most fundamental contrast between Islam and the West, in this context, rests on the phenomenon of differentiation. In contrast to the open-ended process in the West, authority in Shari‘a remains both undifferentiated and encrusted in teleological symbolism. Authority is exercised in spiritual, political, and existential spheres, but each of the spheres is effectively fused with the others by the finality of Allah’s sovereignty. In Western terms, this means that there is no sphere of temporal-political authority that runs separately from spiritual authority, nor a zone of individual autonomy in Ockham’s sense. Any assertion of authority in Islam outside the orthodox codification of Islamic law is an assertion of apostasy and therefore illegitimate, but the triad of authorities can exist within Shari‘a. It recognizes that there are spiritual, political, and existential dimensions to human existence, but they do not exist apart from Shari‘a in any licit way and autonomy is therefore forbidden. The supremacy of Allah’s transcendental-divine authority holds the triad of authorities together, preventing any process of differentiation in Western terms. The authority of Allah and its dogmatization in Shari‘a can be characterized as supreme to the point of regarding the political and the existential as facets of itself. In the medieval West, any equivalent conception of spiritual authority was shown to be contrary to Christianity precisely because its claim to temporal power was recognized as an overreach in an already differentiated environment. The differentiation of authorities—that which belongs to God, that which belongs to Caesar, and the clearing of an existential space of that which belongs to the individual—emerged in Christian revelation with no parallel in Islam. Charfi claims that the fusion of state-religion is not intrinsic to Islam. He writes that “no distinction was established between Caesar and God. [However,] it was political 24. See Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 33ff.

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considerations plus the accidents of history that imposed the confusion between state and religion.”25 Be this as it may, the conception of supreme transcendental authority lies at the core of Islam. Transcendental sovereignty exercises power to bind spiritual, political, and existential agents to itself, in effect transcendentalizing the meaning of their actions. There are no spiritual, political, or existential authorities, powers, or acts in Islam in the sense that there are in the West; the fusion of the triad results from the authority of Allah to command ta‘a or obedience. Islamic authority is total. It is simultaneously a religious teleology in its various sects, a legal enactment of Scripture through its four schools of Shari‘a, a determinant of civil theology, and an apocalyptic solution to the problem of history. For all this applicability, the comprehensiveness of Islamic authority proceeds from its singular center of gravity in the enveloping authority of Allah. This has no parallel in the West, even at the height of papal absolutism when political authority was still political, but exercised by the prince on behalf of the pope. In Islam, the political has no certain status. According to Mohammad Kamali, the “nation state represents a super-imposition which has little claim to authenticity in the authoritative sources of Islam—Quran and Sunna.”26 The Qur‘an and Sunnah lend support to the creation of a political order and leadership for the sake of the Muslim community or umma. In other words, the political originates in the umma but not in Scripture and therefore political authority is always derivative. The main actor is always the Muslim community, not the state or its ruler. Kamali continues that the “individual must obey ulu al-amr, persons entrusted with leadership, but who are accountable to the community.” He writes that the whole conception of political organization and the state is service-orientated and humanitarian in the sense that the Muslim individual and community remain the principal actors in all its parts. The state as a corporate entity is never the primary actor, nor the repository of supreme political authority. The umma is the locus of political authority which is a form of executive sovereignty, merely delegated to the ruler based on the quranic doctrine of the vicegerency of man on earth. As ultimate authority belongs to God there can only be a unitary sys25. Charfi, Islam and Liberty, 126. 26. Kamali, The Dignity of Man: An Islamic Perspective, xiii.



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tem of law and government. Individual, community, and state are subject to the same law in which basic rights and duties are predetermined by Shari‘a. Accordingly, the political ruler or state has no authority to overrule or replace Shari‘a, or to violate any of its principles. In fact, there is no assumption in Islam that the interests of the individual and the state are in conflict, potentially or actually. Islam assumes a basic harmony between individual and state—realized through the implementation of Islamic law. The state’s main functions are ultimately to implement Shari‘a which involves the protection of the five essential interests of the individual: faith, life, property, intellect, and lineage through establishment of just political order.27 Majid Khadduri points out that volume 1 of Ibn Khaldun’s Al-Muqaddima is composed largely of a treatment of these functions of the political, without which society would be left in ruins in a war of all against all—a notion predating Hobbes by three centuries.28 Under the Prophet Mohammad, the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of Allah were united. Allah was the titular head of state but delegated authority to Mohammad as vicegerent. It follows that in the caliphial state, the caliph is always a political ruler whose Islamic rule is also religious. In administering and enforcing the divine law of Shari‘a, executive and legislative powers were separated: in theory, divine legislation had come to an end. In addition, the judicial function of the caliph was not to create new laws, but to interpret them with the orthodoxy of the schools and to enforce them. The caliph’s powers were derived from and limited by the divine law: only his appointment was made by the people. Nonetheless, the caliph was responsible to the people by virtue of his faithfulness in the enforcement of the divine law, demonstrating the deposit of Islamic sovereignty in the vicegerency of the umma by Allah and establishing the dubiousness of the political within Islam.29 Islam thus conceives transcendental-divine power and authority in general as exhausting all power and authority.30 Assertions of authority by non-Muslims—the scriptuaries of Christianity or Judaism, or apostates—lie outside the enveloping authority of Islam and therefore stand 27. Ibid., xiv. 28. Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, 5. 29. Ibid., 16ff. 30. For further commentary on the political problems of Islam, see Cooper, New Political Religions, 78ff.

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in an antagonistic relation. They are regarded as manifestations of jahiliyya or kufr, that is, ignorance—with the connotations of barbarism and cruelty—or opposition to Allah’s revelation, respectively. With the fusion of authorities in Islam, there is only one primary division in the world: the house that has submitted to Allah (dar al-Islam), synonymous with peace; and the house that has still to be brought under submission to Allah (dar al-harb), synonymous with struggle and war that, in its extremes, can be considered a cosmic or millenarian battle.31

The Remoteness of Allah from Man From the point of view of Christian theology and anthropology, the understanding of Allah also constitutes a major difference that is important for this discussion. Allah is certainly creator (Q39:47, Q95:4, Q40:64), and the Qu‘ran symbolizes man as animated by a spirit through a divine act: “I breathed into him [Adam] of My spirit” (Q38:72); and “We have bestowed dignity on the progeny of Adam . . . and conferred on them special favors, above a great part of Our creation” (Q7:70). However, there is no equivalent in Islam to the understanding of man as imago Dei. Islam does not go as far as Judaism and Christianity in the spiritual endowment of man as existing in the image and likeness of God. Due to an insistence on the radical unknowability of God, there can be no images or likenesses, and the sheer unworthiness of any attempt at portraying an image amounts to blasphemy. The Islamic understanding of God—Allah’s self-revelation—is that God is entirely remote. Whereas in the West the very closeness of human and divine was revealed in the Judaic experience of Sinai and in the filial relationship established by Jesus, Allah remains epistemologically impregnable except in the supremacy of his absolute authority. As has been argued throughout this book, the meaning of one of the partners in being—God, man, and the world—bears on the meaning of the others.32 If Islam is born from a divine revelation that differs from the Christian, then any dissimilarities in the meaning of God imply a corresponding difference in the meaning of what is a man and what is the world. 31. See Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, 25–40. 32. See the discussion of Joachim of Fiore, “The Destabilization of Symbols,” in chapter 4.



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Harold Berman has alluded to the West’s genius for adopting its own ancestors, which are largely the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the pneumatic civilization of Israel.33 In these cases, the meaning of individual, sociopolitical, and historical existence emerged in the revelatory differentiation of Judaism and Christianity, which symbolized the intimacy of the divine-human relationship. Similarly in the Greek experience, the search for the divine source of the Good yielded the civilizational discovery of the common logos that gathered the rational human soul and the divine together. This discovery led to the classical formulation of man as the zoon noun echon, the living being that possesses nous, thereby locating the meaning of human existence in the formative and personally intimate encounter with the divine. The problem suggested to the Western mind is that the remoteness of Allah implies the remoteness of Islamic man to himself. Put another way, the existential authority of man remains unknown to the Muslim mind, the remoteness of which clothes existential assertions outside the orthodox in the trappings of ignorance and perhaps apostate opposition. As Toshihiko Izutsu suggests, there are really only two types of human relationship with Allah: Muslim and kafir (those who refuse to come into the umma and express kufr or ingratitude rather than the shukr or thankfulness of the Muslim). Those who live in ignorance, the jahiliyya, constitute a third type outside the God-man relationship.34 The Muslim, the ungrateful rival, and the ignorant are the three human types set together in a necessary hostility: while the Qu‘ran advocates tolerance in some of its ayat or verses, such as the famous “No duress in matters of religion” (Q2:256), nonMuslims are subject to second-class status at best according to Shari‘a. For example, some restrictions on the nonMuslim (dhimmi) within Islamic lands include the payment of tribute in a fixed poll, jizya, and the land tax, kharaj; the wearing of distinctive clothing and the marking of houses as non-Muslim houses (built lower than Muslim houses). There are also prohibitions which include no riding horses or bearing arms; no scandalizing Muslims by performing worship openly or drinking wine; no building of new churches or syna33. See Berman, Law and Revolution, 3. 34. Izutsu, God and Man in the Koran, 84ff.

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gogues; a nonMuslim does not hold the same legal status as a Muslim and cannot act as a witness against a Muslim. For our purposes here, the assertion of individual existential authority remains an illegitimate assertion of the rival or the ignorant. Acknowledging that the existential needs of the individual Muslim are substantially met by Islam and therefore do not ordinarily become topical outside Shari‘a, nonetheless authority embedded in existence becomes opaque by the totality of the law. The problem of personal, existential meaning and the social meaning of civil theology are subsumed within the Shari‘a. Islam then contrasts with Western society in that it provides a comprehensive framework of meaning that binds human existence across its personal, political, and historical range to the inscrutable and sovereign will of Allah. The remoteness of Allah and of Islamic man to his own existential authority provides for the fixity of Shari‘a which offers a teleological substitute for the restlessness involved in the Western man’s capacity to “know thyself,” as exhorted by the ancient and adopted Delphic oracle and for the historical drama of an unfolding process of differentiation. The most obvious consequence of the fusion of authorities in Islam is the problem of political and existential relationships which has been partially solved in liberal constitutional democracies with the concept of citizenship. We saw how such a provision guarantees the private autonomy of existential authority within the matrix of public relationships. In Islam, there is no provision for political relationships as distinct from the umma. The umma is the primary relationship among Muslims that is closer to an order of religious brotherhood or fellowship than to the concept of citizenship. As Izutsu points out, it is integrally religious: “This is the concept of ‘community’ (ummah), or to be more exact, ummah muslimah which originally meant a ‘community (of people who have) surrendered (themselves to God).”35 Barry Cooper, in describing Muhammad’s victory after the hijra from Mecca to Medina in 622, describes the evocation of the umma in the epochal event as the transformation “from the potential of humanity living in submission to God to the actual establishment of an ecumenic Islamic world.”36 The umma expresses, not 35. Ibid., 78. In his footnote Izutsu quotes from Q2:122–28: “Our Lord, make us submissive to Thee, and of our seed a community submissive to Thee!” 36. Cooper, New Political Religions, 108.



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the consent of political citizens to the governance of laws, but the common subjection of both laws and individual to the will of Allah in the dar al-Islam.

The Historical Horizon of Islam The second aspect of the liberal solution to the problem of differentiating authority was the partial and inconclusive nature of its configuration. In contrast, authoritative actions of individuals and societies take their meaning from within the Islamic framework, which is total, singular, and universally applicable across the range of human existence—individual, sociopolitical, and historical. It is this historical horizon within Islam that provides apocalyptic reference points for authentic Islamic acts. The world is so recalcitrant and reluctant to hear the word of Allah and his prophets that he has decided to change the world himself through the vicegerency of his Muslim umma. Muhammad was the last messenger of God (Q33:40), and the last apostle to the world (Q7:157– 58). Moreover, his mission was to enact the struggle between truth and falsehood through force of arms Q21:18, 9:29. If nonbelievers refuse to abandon their ways, they will be dealt with appropriately until all the world submits (Q8:39–40). In Islam, the duty to fight unbelievers and idolators throughout all the world constitutes an inbuilt duty to succeed. Muhammad was “duty-bound to succeed” to show God’s favor, and his victories were God’s victories.37 The pragmatic triumphs of the Muslim armies were understood as the confirmation and triumph of paradigmatic Islamic history.38 When Bernard Lewis notes that in Islam “there is no Caesar but only God,” he is underscoring that the world has no status of itself, and that authentic Islamic action is essentially God’s action, which is the subordination of the world and the closure of human arrogance.39 This is the apocalyptic vision of metastatic transfiguration of the world, to be brought about by the umma. David Cook discusses the meaning of Islam’s early military successes: This fighting is closely connected to the apocalyptic aspirations of the early Muslims. . . . The apocalyptic foundation of Islam is clear from the Qu’ran, 37. Rahman, Islam, 16. 39. Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 6–7.

38. Cooper, New Political Religions, 80

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from the numerous predictions and prophecies in the early literature, from the doctrine of jihad, from the ecumenical spirit of the Believers, and from the rule of peace they sought to extend throughout the known world during the first century of their existence.40

When the Islamic duty to succeed fails, it is a demonstration of God’s punishment for choosing errant paths. (The archetypal failure was the sack of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongols in 1258 which killed the last Abbasid caliph.) Muslims must respond to the defeat by recovering the purity of the Prophet’s early Companions, the rightly guided first caliphs, and the venerable forefathers: al-salaf al-salihin. Included in the recovery is the restoration of the entire corpus of Scripture: Qu‘ran, Sunna, and Shari‘a and the apocalyptic horizon that embraces the purpose of the umma. This emphasis on original purity and the approaching apocalypse is known as salafism. Within this tradition, jihad as a struggle against rivals and the ignorant acquires a significance that motivated the early Kharijites. While jihad may not be a “pillar of Islam” like the shahadah or declaration of belief, prayer, pilgrimage, alms giving, and fasting, but it gains a practical importance equal to them. A thirteenth-century salafist, Ibn Taymiyya, asserted that Islam’s superiority over Christianity and Judaism was in its prescription of power, jihad, and wealth as conditions necessary for the existence of true religion.41 A modern Muslim scholar, Fazlur Rahman, underscores this when he comments on the spiritual worldliness of Mohammad and the first umma in contrast with Christianity: Was it not the time to go ahead? Who will say it was not? And yet it is exactly at this point that the Prophet has been most misunderstood, especially by Western critics. They say they fail to understand the Prophet at this juncture: how can a preacher become pugnacious? We must confess we fail to understand this failure, prejudice apart, except on the hypotheses that so addicted are these writers to pathetic tales of sorrow, failure, frustration and crucifixion that the very idea of success in the sphere seems to them abhorrent.42

40. Cook, “The Beginning of Islam as an Apocalyptic Movement,” in Hagarism, ch. 9; quoted by Cooper, New Political Religions, 114. 41. Laoust, Essai, 178; quoted in Cooper, New Political Religions, 97. 42. Rahman, Islam, 19.



Concluding Remarks 291

Power, piety including jihad, and wealth go together by necessity. This synthesis effects miracles and the transfiguration of the temporal-mundane. Ibn Taymiyya insisted that love and terror go together from the religious duty of commanding good and forbidding evil (the doctrine of hisbah). Largely ignored for nearly five hundred years, the salafism of Ibn Taymiyya was rediscovered in Mecca by Al-Wahhab who linked the waning of Islamic power to the corruption of Islam. He was rejected and found refuge with Ibn Saud where his salafism of purity, jihad, and apocalypse became the tradition of the Saudi kingdom. Cooper writes that while traditional Muslim scholars have downplayed the apocalyptic elements in Islam by avoiding the problem of metastasis, “more radical contemporary salafist and jihadist writers have tried to enhance the apocalyptic themes that undoubtedly can be found in the Koran and in other Muslim scripture.”43 The combination of the apocalyptic salafist sentiment with the tradition of jihad has inspired contemporary Islamic militants from Muhammad Qutb to Osama bin Laden. Cooper quotes Binder’s summary of the implications: When we consider once again that the absolute foundation of Islam, and of the freedom of the individual Muslim to act, is the hakimiyaa [sovereignty] of God, then the characteristic Islamic act becomes the defiance of jahili activity. Thus is the groundwork laid for acts of martyrdom which appear to be suicidal and/or hopeless acts of political terrorism.44

The nondifferentiation of authority in Islam means that all authority is subsumed within Allah’s supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority which is enacted by Shari‘a. In Sunni Islam, the absence of an authoritative clerical hierarchy or a magisterium in the Roman Catholic sense, combined with the prohibition of interpretation of sacred texts (ijtihad) has effectively created an entrenched orthodoxy centered on the four schools of Shari‘a. Whereas history is the field in which Sunni Muslims live out their duty to succeed, history has a different meaning for Shi‘a Muslims who do have a clergy. As the disinherited and oppressed minority within the Islamic world, Shi‘a is characterized by sacrifice and martyrdom, as typified by the imam, Ali. History is the enactment 43. Cooper, New Political Religions, 114. 44. Binder, Islamic Fundamentalism, 201; quoted in Cooper, New Political Religions, 124.

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of their struggle to restore Allah’s rule over the whole umma. Ali and the other main imams were divinely inspired and were therefore intermediaries between God and man; this constitutes heresy for Sunnis. Intercession is part of the divine plan for salvation and in the absence of the imams, a distinguished religious scholar or ayatollah can act as supreme guide and authority on Islamic law. He thus becomes the perfect embodiment of Islam as Shi‘a Muslims await the return of the last Imam. It is this enhanced apocalyptic sentiment that marks Shi‘a Islam. The expectation of the Hidden Imam’s return is the hope for a metastasis.45 The inability of Islam to diagnose apocalyptic corruption arises not just from apocalyptic elements in its Scriptures, but from the dominant aversion to any process of differentiation that could clarify the corruption through the emergence of existential authority. Cooper draws on Voegelin’s later philosophy of consciousness to diagnose the extremes of salafi-jihadism as a case of “pneumopathology”: What is “strange” about mass murder in search of a righteous peace is, precisely, the pneumopathological projection by terrorist consciousness. The peace that comes at the conclusion of the cosmic war is “the peace that passeth all understanding” translated from heaven to earth, which is again an imaginative operation in a projected second reality. To use Voegelin’s language, one might call this a metastatic peace, inasmuch as it requires a transformation of reality in order to be achieved.46

Islam seems to be constituted by too few resources to resist or counteract apocalyptic or millenarian sentiments that would aim at achieving a final end to history. The fusion of authorities in Islam, the fundamental unknown-ness of man in his rational nature to himself, and the consequent failure to adequately resist the attack on the historicity of existence go some way to preventing either spiritual, political, or rational resistance within Islam to its extreme cases of apocalyptic violence. To give one example of a pneumopathological case within the Islamic experience, the Al Qaeda Training Manual is replete with rejections of reason for the sake of a transfigurative violence: “The confrontation that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the di45. See Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy. 46. Cooper, New Political Religions, 58.



Concluding Remarks 293

alogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.”47 This discussion of authority in Islam is not intended for any other purpose than to provide a contrast with the differentiation of authority in the West and the precarious equilibrium of political, spiritual, and existential pillars that has been achieved. The nondifferentiation of Islamic civilization throws into relief the unique struggle for order that is germane to the West, but in the excavation of the existential, becomes universal. The priority of existence over symbol applies even to the symbolization of existence, implying that Western order—as liberal constitutionalism—is intrinsically open to the movement of existence and therefore unable to restrict itself to the historical societies in which the differentiation has occurred. The final symbolization of being in Islam should highlight the ambiguity and drama associated with the inconclusiveness of symbols in the West. As Walsh has commented, “A surface incoherence [of symbolization in the West] conceals an inward coherence that is no nowhere revealed except through existence itself.”48 The grand medieval struggle to wrest the deepest intimations of Christian order from the crisis of an inadequate symbolization of existence succeeded by maintaining an openness to the movement of existence. Societies inoculated against the effects of differentiation, as was shown here, seem to bear fewer existential anxieties and upheavals. The continuity of the medieval-modern Western project of establishing adequate order is one of renewal in which the equilibrium of the triad is achieved on a daily basis by each concrete individual and community. Western existence, as a plurality of liberal constitutional societies in historical motion, eludes the finality of its own symbolization, thus contrasting with the fatalism or completeness of non-Western existence. 47. Quoted by Jed Babbin, In the Words of Our Enemies, 60 48. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution, xi.

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INDEX

Absolutization: papal, 6, 207, 214–18, 284; political, 6, 7, 14, 185, 189, 191, 214, 235, 275 Abu Zahra, 282 Aeschylus, 267 Alanus, 192 Albert Magnus, 148 Albornoz, 224 Alexander V (pope), 231 Al-Muqaddima, 285 Ambrose, 258 Angevin kingship, 197 Anonymous of York, 134–37 Anselm, 63, 133, 177 Apocalypticism, 131, 133–37, 142–45, 163; in Islam, 284, 289–92; Joachim of Fiore, 19, 137–43; and metastasis, 119, 145 Aquinas, 11, 17, 62–82, 128, 148, 150, 169n64, 181, 244; and Aristotle, 63, 65, 74, 75, 148, 150; constitutionality, 66, 68, 77; and Dante, 155; and Frederick II, 182, 183; and friendship, 72, 78–80, 272; and Giles of Rome, 217; and John of Paris, 219; law, 70–77, 79; and Marsilius of Padua, 167, 171, 175; and Nicholas of Cusa, 237; place of politics, 63–65, 208; political relationships, 76–80, 272; property, 75–77; as prophetic, 81–82; and Siger, 152; tyranny, 66–67, 91; and William of Ockham, 238, 239, 244, 247, 253, 256 Aristotle, 158, 217, 247, 258, 278; and Aquinas, 63,

65, 74, 75, 148, 150; in Arabic imagination, 149–50; and Averroës, 13, 147, 149–50, 167; on despotes and hegemon, 92–93; and homonoia, 98; and Marsilius of Padua, 167, 169–72, 174, 177; medieval reception of, 13, 86, 148–50, 184; on middle class, 105–7 Augustine, 17, 123, 138, 158, 174n78, 244, 258; amor sui, 6; and civil theology, 8–9; on Marcus Varro, 8–9; and monasticism, 21; on the political, 81, 112; saeculum senescens, 164, 268 Augustine of Canterbury, 23 Avempace, 178 Averroës, 13, 146–50, 160–61, 167, 282 Averroism: in Dante, 147, 159–62, 165–66, 178; in Frederick II, 185–87; in Marsilius, 154–55, 171, 175–78; and Nicholas of Cusa, 260; in Siger, 13, 146, 151–55, 178, 184; and William of Ockham, 238. See also Existential corruption Avignon, 166, 194, 207, 227 Babylonian Captivity. See Church Balance among authorities. See Equilibrium Barons, 12, 22, 53; on continent, 199, 203; and dominium, 36, 92–94, 98, 100–101; in England, 93, 94, 95, 97–104, 107; and survival, 35–36 Basil, 21 Berman, Harold: on ancestry of West, 287; axis time, 4; and civil theology, 10, 180, 200;

303

304

index

Berman, Harold (cont.) embeddedness of law, 26, 52; on Frederick II, 185–86; papal revolution and the state, 41, 42, 48; on revolution, 10, 42n40, 48, 180 Bernard, 133, 140, 209 Bertrand of Bayonne, 210–15 Bin Laden, Osama, 291 Bodin, Jean, 88 Boethius of Dacia, 160 Bologna, 52 Bonaventure, 53, 235, 253 Boniface VIII (pope), 223; Day of Anagni, 196n30, 210; Gnosticism, 211–13; Unam Sanctam, 14–15, 207, 209–13, 265 Brett, Annabel, 168–170, 218, 219 Buber, Martin, 272 Byzantium, 24–29 Canning, J. P., 122, 167, 169 Cantor, Norman, 19, 32, 34, 42, 46, 49, 50, 96, 121, 155, 180, 181, 186, 194, 197, 200, 203, 209, 210 Capetian kingship, 14, 95, 193, 194, 197 Carolingian kingship, 10, 11, 27, 28, 34, 38, 42, 49, 192, 200 Catholic Concordance, The (Nicholas of Cusa), 259, 263, 264, 266 Charfi, Mohamed, 280–284 Charlemagne (emperor), 34; capitulary of 802, 31–32, 205; translatio imperii, 28–29 Charles VII (king), 233 Charles of Anjou, 195 Charles Martel (king), 27 Christendom, 43, 59, 61; and church, 100, 206, 208, 210, 231; as civilization, 49, 132, 136, 202, 210, 227, 234, 237, 240, 247, 249; as civil theology 5, 11, 12, 47, 65, 82, 90, 115, 139, 142–43, 148, 178, 198, 225, 228, 234, 241, 248; Fortescue, 115; fragmentation, 206, 222; French hegemony, 99, 195, 198; imperial territory, 33, 205, 208, 210 Church: and apocalypse, 135–36, 144–45; and authority, 6, 14, 27, 29, 33, 39, 58, 98, 126, 150, 168, 177, 205–34, 237, 251; Babylonian Captivity, 223–26, 227; and Charlemagne, 32; as community, 59, 214, 225; concordats, 232–34; corporationist theory, 219–20; differentiation in, 6, 15, 225–26, 234; eastern, 21, 24, 25; and empire, 26, 28, 37, 42, 47; Gallicanism, 190, 233; as governmental organization, 15, 40, 48, 59, 177, 211–12,

214, 247, 249–50; Great Schism, 226–29; infallibility, 132, 229–31, 250; invisible, 13, 120–21, 123–25, 129–31; jurisdictionalism 14–15, 166–67, 226–34, 234, 237, 248; parochialism, 222–23, 224; and the political, 45–46, 49, 81, 89, 91, 94, 101, 115, 134, 173, 195, 208, 210, 215, 218–22, 260–61, 278; reform, 40–42, 45–46, 121–22, 227; representative of transcendence, 15, 27, 90, 204, 223; and state of grace, 128–33; and world, 3, 11, 20, 34, 39, 43, 58, 207, 240. See also Christendom; Conciliarism; Corpus mysticum; Papacy Citizenship, 48, 107, 272, 273, 276, 288 Civil theology: and apocalyticism, 133, 142–43; Bruce Douglass, 8; as concordance, 264–68; differentiation, 8, 109, 189, 222, 281; in France, 190, 194, 195, 197, 200; and Frederick II, 182, 187, 188; and ius gentium, 245, 247, 251n33; John Courtney Murray, 8; like-mindedness, 8, 9, 98, 100, 174, 195, 200, 265; and Marcus Varro, 8–9: pluralism, 277; reception of Aristotle, 148; sacrum imperium, 10, 33, 46, 62, 65, 88, 90, 124, 142, 148, 157, 173, 206–7, 215, 222, 237, 247; two tiers of, 9–10, 29, 37; upheaval in, 31, 148, 158, 178, 180, 189–90, 223, 234, 237, 268. See also Constitutionalism; England; Islam; Marsilius Clement V (pope), 224, 227 Clement VII (pope), 227 Closure, 7, 12, 119–20, 134, 144–45, 146, 275; and intellectualism, 123–24 Clovis (king), 27, 192, 193 Cluny, 39 Coleman, Janet, 217, 220, 221 Collective intellect, 153, 154, 160 Commonwealth: Christian, 225, 257; in John of Salisbury, 86–88, 91, 94, 170; in Marsilius of Padua, 168, 170, 176 Conciliarism, 15, 220, 229, 233, 249, 265 Concordantia. See Nicholas of Cusa Concordat of Worms, 49 Concordats. See Church Conrad of Gelnhausen, 230 Constitutionalism: as civil theology, 86, 94, 109–10, 115–16, 277; democracy, 271, 276; in development in England, 12, 83–116; and equilibrium of authorities, 86, 111, 276, 293; Fortescue, 108–16; Marsilius of Padua, 5, 172–73; nonfoundationalism, 276–77; partial solution to problems of authority, 4, 276–78;

index 305 problems with definition, 84–85; and social well–being, 106, 114. See also Individual Cook, David, 289, 290 Cooper, Barry, 282, 285, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292 Copleston, F. C., 71, 81 Corporation theory. See John of Paris Corpus mysticum, 21, 47, 59, 87, 117, 141, 152, 190; within imperial zone, 201–3; Nicholas of Cusa, 236, 263–64; organic analogy, 115; and papacy, 206, 211, 229; Wycliffe, 131. See also Donatism D’Ailly, Pierre, 230 Damien, Peter Cardinal, 129, 130, Daniel-Rops, Henri, 35, 209, 210, 213 Dante, 13, 146–47, 154–66; on dux and veltro, 163; on Earthly Paradise, 158–59; on human nature, 161–62 Darwin, Charles, 176 Dawkins, Richard, 178 Dawson, Christopher, 21, 34, 269; apocalypticism, 133, 137; Christendom’s dependence on empire, 49; on devastation, 39; on national conversion, 23 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 226 De coniecturis (Nicholas of Cusa), 261, Defensor Pacis. See Marsilius of Padua De imperatorum et pontificum potestatae (William of Ockham), 249 Democracy. See Constitutionalism De pace fidei (Nicholas of Cusa), 262 Deputy of Christ, 29, 45, 49 Dialogue (William of Ockham), 245, 247–50, 254 Differentiation of authority, 10, 15–17, 156, 191, 204–5, 225–26, 234, 269–70, 278; apocalypticism, 133–34, 144–45, 291–92; from Christian revelation, 5–6, 24–25, 88, 118–19, 146, 236, 270, 283; constitutionalism, 108–13, 276–78; elusiveness of, 6, 274–76, 293; and Islam, 109, 270, 281–93; John Rawls, 274–75; the nations, 31, 38, 50; Nicholas of Cusa, 15–16, 236, 267–68; nonoccurrence, 109, 291, 293; papal power theory, 211, 213–18; William of Ockham, 15–16, 236, 238, 241, 247, 253–54 Dionysius Areopagita, 258, 262 Dominium: in papacy, 215, 229; in particularist zone, 200–203; as property order, 245–46; as zone of autonomy, 94, 222, 273. See also Existential authority Donation of Constantine, 25, 32, 132, 206

Donatism: Anonymous of York, 135; Tyconian problem in Humbert, 120–24; Wycliffe, 121, 127, 129, 130–32 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 166 Douglass, Bruce, 8 Dubois, Pierre, 99, 195–97 Dworkin, Ronald, 274 Eberhardt, Newman C., 129, 130, 232 Eckhart, Meister, 258 Edward I (king), 107 England: civil theology, 11, 85–86, 94, 98–100, 112–13, 115–16, 190, 195; kingship, 12, 89, 92, 95–99, 102–4, 108–10, 190, 202; liberties, 22, 89, 96–97, 102, 106, 199; medieval kingdom of, 83–116. See also Constitutionalism Equilibrium of authorities, 7, 8, 13, 86, 101, 111, 235; and liberal constitutionalism, 269, 276, 293 Estates-General, 84, 198 Eugene IV (pope), 233 Existence: and kingship, 30–31, 35–36; openness to, 7, 139, 144, 146, 174, 178, 242, 293 Existential authority: anxiety of, 38, 100, 142, 189, 205, 236; in Aquinas’s political and legal thought, 70–75; assertiveness, 3–4, 11, 13, 26, 37–38, 42, 43, 50, 53, 56, 62, 63, 65, 77, 93–94, 100, 105, 116, 142, 151, 155–56, 179–80, 182, 183, 189, 192, 199–200, 205–6, 228, 273, 288; and citizenship, 271–73, 276; and corporation theory, 219–20; and dominium, 4, 77, 93–94, 100, 273; embeddedness, 3–4, 15–16, 31, 35, 73, 79, 94, 227, 229, 288; and feudalism, 11, 34–38, 43; in Fortescue, 111–16; and Frederick II, 180–85; and Investiture Controversy, 42– 43; in Islam, 287–88; in John of Salisbury, 89–92; limits 276; and medieval towns, 4, 13, 200–203; and natural rights, 244, 252–56; and Nicholas of Cusa, 16, 236–37, 258–61, 272–73; threat from papal power theory, 204–7, 220, 228, 255; and Reformation, 234; and William of Ockham, 16, 227, 236–38, 251–58. See also Like-mindedness Existential corruption, 7n6, 12, 13, 119–20, 124, 238, 292; in Averroism, 154, 156, 159, 163, 165, 175, 176, 178; in Joachim, 138–42 Factionalism, 14, 201, 203, 223, 232 Faith: bifurcation from reason, 66, 151, 238, 240; Letter to the Hebrews, 12; and possessiveness, 144

306

index

Falāsifa, 149, 150, 178, 185 Felix V (pope), 233 Feudalism: as order, 34–35, 37; in particularist zone, 200–202; and property society, 76–77, 94; rise of, 11 Fideism. See William of Ockham Fink, Karl August, 125, 131, 230 Flotte, Pierre, 196 Fortescue, Sir John, 12, 86; comparison of England and France, 110–11, 114, 198; dominium politicum et regale, 108–11, 113; intencio populi, 113–14, 116; and John of Salisbury, 111, 112, 113; on kingly authority, 108, 114–15, 190; and the people, 110–16. See also Constitutionalism France: absolute monarchy, 95–96, 193, 217; dominance, 190, 194–95, 196; kingdom of, 189–200. See also Dubois; Fortescue Francis: and apocalypticism, 142; charge of Manicheism, 60; dignity of being, 57–58; priority of individual, 11, 56–62; suffering Christ, 59–62 Franciscans, 58–60; poverty, 126n16; property dispute, 241–42, 246, 248; Spirituals, 129, 228. See also Francis Frederick Barbarossa (king), 204 Frederick II (king), 14, 156, 180–89, 191, 194, 216, 223; character of, 181–82; Constitutions of Melfi, 180–81, 216; on human nature, 183–86, 191; as king of Sicily and emperor, 14, 180, 186, 188 Frequens, 231, 232, 233 Gaudium et Spes, 226 Gelasian arrangement, 3, 13, 25, 27–29, 45, 47, 50, 56, 59, 88, 155–56, 186n12, 205, 207, 225–26, 248, 258, 270; Boniface VIII, 209, 210; and existential authority, 38, 50, 61, 65, 77, 115, 142, 155–56, 179, 205, 225–26; in France, 188–91, 195, 199, 200; and John of Paris, 220–22; and Nicholas of Cusa, 268; in particularist zone, 200–201; William of Ockham, 236, 258 Gelasius I (pope), 3, 4, 205; Anastasias, 25 Genesis, Book of, 182, 183 Gerard d’Abbeville, 211 Gerson, Jean, 54, 230, 235 Giles of Rome, 14, 213–18, 237, 238, 242, 253; contrast with Aquinas, 217; De ecclesiastica potestatae, 166, 214, 215, 218; De regimine principum, 216, 217n33; and Frederick II, 216;

and property rights, 216, 218; and sophism, 217; tutor to Philip the Fair, 213 Gilson, Etienne, 160, 161 Gnosticism, 59, 60, 118–19, 120, 138, 165, 184, 188, 212, 213 Godfrey of Fontaines, 53, 253 Gratian, 52, 54, 55, 244, 253 Great Schism, 15, 129, 207, 223, 227 Gregory the Great (pope): administrator of Rome, 25; Benedictines, 22; letter to Mellitus, 22, 23 Gregory VII (pope), 14, 41, 43–49, 125, 192, 211, 224, 225, 230, 275; Dictatus Papae, 44–45, 230; on papal power, 14, 43–45, 21; and renovatio, 43–46 Haec Sancta, 231 Hegel, G. W. F, 260n55, 275n14 Henry III (king), 41, 95 Henry IV (emperor), 43, 45 Henry VI (emperor), 204 Henry of Ghent, 53, Heraclitus, 98, 152, 176, 273 Herndon, Jeffrey, 7, 8, 137, 138, 188 Hesiod, 61, 164 Historicism, 13, 123, 146, 150, 217n35; rejection in Dante, 162; rejection in Humbert, 124–25; rejection in Joachim, 142; rejection in Marsilius, 171; rejection in Wycliffe, 125, 130 Hitler, Adolf, 144, 176 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 136, 170, 183, 285 Homonoia. See Like-mindedness Hugh of Saint Victor, 215 Huguccio, 54 Humbert, Cardinal, 13,121–25, 129, 133–35 Hundred Years War, 196, 198 Hus, John, 125, 132, 228, 253 Hussites, 228, 262 Ijtihad. See Islam Imago dei, 140, 165, 261, 286 Immanentization, 117–18, 143–44, 153, 165, 177; and papal power, 212–13 Individual: and constitutionalism, 68, 85–86, 102, 107, 114, 276–78; medieval language of persons, 29–30; as symbolizer, 277 Innocent III (pope), 186, 188, 192, 209–10, 213 Intellectualism: in Anonymous, 135; in Dante, 162; in Dubois, 197; in Humbert, 124–25; in Marsilius, 169; in Siger, 153; in Wycliffe, 126, 130

index 307 Investiture Controversy, 41–42, 87, 122; papal revolution, 44n42, 48, 49 Islam: apostasy, 283, 287, 292; civil theology, 281, 284, 288; contrast to West, 270, 283, 288, 290, 293; differentiation, 270, 281, 283–84, 288, 291–93; governance, 285, 289; ijtihad, 282, 291; jihad, 282, 290–92; Khariji, 282, 290; man and Allah, 286–89; Mu‘tazilite, 282–83; salafism, 290–92; Shari‘a, 52n3, 279–90; sovereignty of Allah, 279, 283, 284, 285, 288, 291; succession to Mohammad, 281–82; Sunni and Shi‘a, 279, 281, 282, 291; voluntarism, 239. See also Apocalypse; Existential authority Ius fori, 245 Ius gentium, 192, 243, 245, 247, 248, 251, 254, 256 Ius poli, 245 Izutsu, Toshihiko, 287, 288

Legislator. See Marsilius of Padua Leo IX (pope), 42 Levinas, Emmanuel, 57n18 Lewis, Bernard, 286, 289 Lewis, Ewart, 249 Libido dominandi, 7, 119, 144, 153, 187 Like-mindedness, 7–8; Aristotle, 98; Augustine, 9; crisis, 158, 179; Cusa, 265; in England, 12, 97–100, 102, 107, 108, 110, 128; in France, 195, 200; Marsilius, 174–75; Ockham, 256; in particularist zone, 201, 202. See also Civil theology Lollards, 228 Louis IV (emperor), 166, 242 Louis IX (emperor, saint), 193–95 Luther, Martin, 234 Lynch, Joseph H., 224

Kamali, Mohammad, 284 Kant, Immanuel, 165, 166, 239 Kendall, Wilmoore, 8 Khadduri, Majid, 285 Kingship: authority of, 35–36, 96, 193; Germanic, 29, 30–33, 35. See also England; France Kirk, Russell, 91, 92

Magisterium. See Papacy Magna Carta,12, 86, 94, 97, 99–101, 103, 104, 199 Marsilius of Padua, 13, 24, 166–78; Averroism, 13, 146, 147, 154, 155; civil theology, 166, 168, 169, 173, 174, 176–77; constitutionalism, 172–73; Defensor Pacis, 154, 166, 172, 176, 178; and Dubois, 197; legislator, 168, 170–75, 177, 227 Martin V (pope), 231, 233 Marx, Karl, 140, 145 McGrade, Arthur S., 219, 246, 247, 250, 255, 256 McIlwain, Charles, 35, 225, 228, 231, 233 Metastasis, 118, 119, 276; and apocalypticism, 143–44; in Dante, 165; in Dubois, 197; gnosticism, 134; in Islam, 292; in Joachim of Fiore, 141, 143; in Marsilius of Padua, 178, 197; in Wycliffe, 132 Meuthen, Erich, 265 Michael of Cesena, 242, 249 Monasticism, 20–24; autonomy, 21, 140; Cistercians, 137, 140, 141; Joachim of Fiore, 140–41; renovation, 33, 38–41, 43 More, Thomas, 161 Morrall, John B., 147, 160, 257 Muslims. See Islam Mystical body. See Corpus mysticum

Lactantius, 26 Lagarde, Georges de, 53, 54, 236, 252, 255 Langton, Stephen (archbishop of Canterbury), 101, 102 Law: canonists, 48, 52, 53–54, 253; Roman 51, 52, 89, 219. See also Aquinas

Natural law: Aquinas, 72–73; Cusa, 266; Fortescue, 110; Giles, 216, in glossators, 54; Ockham, 15, 236, 243–51, 253–56; Tierney on, 252–53; Wycliffe, 127, 128 Necessitas rerum, 183, 185, 187, 188. See also Frederick II

Jacquerie, 157 Jews, 262 Joachim of Fiore, 13, 137–43, 158, 163, 265, 268, 286 John (king), 46, 97, 99 John XXII (pope), 242 John of Paris, 14, 212; corporation theory, 219–20, 229; relation of papal and political power, 218–22; Tractatus de potestate regis et papali, 218 John of Salisbury, 12, 86, 170n66, 181, 271n2; and Fortescue, 12, 111, 112, 113; tyrannicide, 89–92, 181. See also Commonwealth Jurisdictionalism. See Church Justinian (emperor), 21, 24; and Caesaropapism, 21; and Roman law, 52

308

index

Nicholas of Cusa: conciliarism, 233, 258, 265, 267; concordance, 16, 237, 258–68; corpus mysticum, 236, 263, 264; differentiation, 236, 267–68; equivalence of religions, 262; existential authority, 16, 235–36, 259, 261, 268, 272, 273; humanism, 236, 258, 263–64, 267–68; mysticism, 16, 236, 237, 267–68; and Ockham, 15–16, 235–37, 258–59, 260, 263, 267, 272, 273; wise and foolish, 263–67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143 Nogaret, Guillaume de, 196, 210 Nominalism, 226, 258, 267. See William of Ockham Normans: conquest of England, 11, 22, 65, 134; English kingship, 94–100, 197; realms, 14, 65, 134, 181, 204 Nous, 98, 242, 246, 287 Oakeshott, Michael: characteristics of constitutionalism, 85, 86; despotism, 92–93; feudalism, 34–35; French kingship, 96, 192, 193; lordly and kingly authorities, 35–36, 76, 108, 189; medieval papal authority, 45, 207– 8, 211; parliamentarism, 83–84; William the Conqueror, 95 On Learned Ignorance (Nicholas of Cusa), 262, 265 Opus Nonaginta Dierum (William of Ockham), 246 Ossewaarde, M. R. R., 271 Papacy: anti-Christ, 132, 182; conferral of political authority, 28, 186, 187, 191; and the east, 24–27; and existential authority, 41–43, 204–6; Frederick II, 186–88, 191, 223; infallibility, 229, 230–31, 250; limits of authority, 217, 218, 220, 248–51; magisterium, 26, 56, 126, 135, 230, 234, 291; and Magna Carta, 100–101; Marsilius, 166–69, 173, 227; move to Avignon, 166, 194, 207, 227; as overlordship, 100, 215, 218; papal power theory; 42–43, 191, 204–7, 228, 234, 255. See also Church; Conciliarism; John of Paris Papal power theory, 14, 45, 167, 210–11; and De ecclesiastica potestatae, 213–16; and William of Ockham, 242, 248, 255. See also John of Paris; Papacy Parliamentarism, 83–86; comparison of England and France, 84, 103, 114, 198; development in England, 104–5 Particularism, 200

Pataria movement, 43 Patricius Romanorum, 28 Paul, 87, 136, 211–12, 262; on the political, 33 Peasant Revolt, 157 Pepin the Short (king), 28, 32 Philip III (king), 213, 217 Philip the Fair (king), 210, 213 Piers Plowman, 98 Plato, 74, 75, 88, 113, 147, 149, 150, 158, 164, 258, 263, 292 Plenitudo potestatis. See Papal power theory Plutarch, 86 Political Liberalism (John Rawls), 273 Politike philia. See Like-mindedness Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 233 Property: and Aquinas, 75–77; and dominium, 36, 76, 77, 94, 101, 245; before the Fall, 254; Franciscan, 129, 241–42, 246; in papal power theory, 216, 218 Pseudo-Dionysian treatise on hierarchy, 211 Purposiveness, 271, 275 Quia vir reprobus (John XXII), 249 Qutb, Muhammad, 291 Rahman, Fazlur, 289, 290 Rawls, John, 273–75, 277 Reformation, 10, 125, 126, 133, 177, 207, 233, 234 Rienzo, Cola di, 201, 203 Roger (king), 185 Roman law, 55, 89, 219; revival, 51–52 Rorty, Richard, 274 Sabine, George H., 89, 90, 210 Sacra Italia. See Rienza Sacrum Imperium, 5, 87, 88, 123, 124, 148, 155, 173, 197, 268; and Christ the King, 44, 61; and church, 88, 206–7, 210, 222–23, 237, 247; denouement 12, 61–62, 65, 90, 142, 157, 182, 188, 192, 195, 196, 202, 207, 210, 215, 222–23, 233; endurance, 17, 46–47, 142, 181, 188; evocation, 10–11, 33, 49, 117, 190, 206, 217; and the Franks, 29–33; in post-Carolingian era, 34–38; process of sanctification, 33. See also Civil theology Sandoz, Ellis, 165, 166 Saud, Ibn, 291 Schacht, Joseph, 280 Schall, James V., 64, 65, 69, 75, 78, 81 Scholasticism, 63, 148, 150, 253 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 275

index 309 Shari‘a. See Islam Shogimen, Takashi, 251, 254, 255 Siger de Brabant, 13, 146, 150, 152–53, 178, 184, 185; and Bertrand of Bayonne, 212; and Dante, 160, 163; dualism, 151 Stoics, 244 Strauss, Leo, 167, 168, 173 Strayer, Joseph, 48, 227, 228, 230–32, 240, 241 Taymiyya, Ibn, 290, 291 Tempier (bishop), 148, 152 Thorson, Thomas L., 89, 90, 210 Tierney, Brian, 2–3, 209, 219, 265; on Ockham, 242, 251n33, 252, 254, 255n44; subjective rights, 11, 53–55 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 271 Translatio imperii, 28, 29, 32 Two Swords. See Gelasian arrangement Tyconian problem. See Donatism Tyconius, 120 Tyranny: in Aquinas, 66–67, 91; despotism, 92–94, 101, 271; and Frederick II, 181–82; John of Salisbury, 89–94; and papal power theory, 217 Unam Sanctam. See Boniface VIII UNESCO Declaration of Human Rights, 1 Urban VI (pope), 227 Varro, Marcus. See Augustine; Civil theology Vernani, Guido, 160 Villey, Michel, 252 Voegelin, Eric: Anonymous of York, 134, 136; Aquinas, 65, 66, 67n32, 68, 71, 73, 76, 80, 217; Boniface VIII, 212; civil theology, 10, 103, 115, 206, 208, 268; Conciliarism, 228, 230, 232, 233, 249; constitutionalism, 84, 104, 105, 109n46, 173; Cusa, 258, 260, 261, 262, 264, 266, 267, 268; Dante, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 165; Donatism, 120–21, 122, 123, 124, 129; Dubois, 195, 196, 197; England, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 104, 105; on existential corruption, 12, 119, 152, 154, 169; falāsifa, 149, 150; Fortescue, 112–13, 115; France, 192, 193n22, 194, 198; Francis, 57n19, 60, 142; Frederick II, 182, 183, 187; Giles, 214, 216, 217; Hegel, 260n55, 275n14; Hitler, 176; Humbert, 122,

123, 124; Joachim, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143; John of Paris, 220; John of Salisbury, 87, 90, 92; kingship, 31n13, 41, 88, 110, 190, 194, 222; law, 71, 73, 89; like-mindedness, 98n30, 102; Marsilius, 167, 168n61, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177; metastasis, 118, 134, 144, 145, 292; modernity, 61n25; monasticism, 40, 140; Ockham, 237, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250; openness, 7; papal-imperial tensions, 46, 47n52, 166, 194, 196, 207; papal power, 25n7, 28, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216; particularism, 200, 201, 202; property, 76, 246; public disorder, 158; reception of Aristotle, 149, 150; Roman law, 51–52; Rienzo, 201; sacrum imperium, 117, 196; spiritual wave, 38, 43; on theory, 72n50; Siger, 151, 152, 153, 154; Third Age, 144; work of, 4, 5; Wycliffe, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132 Wahhab, Al-, 291 Walsh, David, 33, 61n25, 86n5, 196, 240, 258; liberal democracy, 2, 271, 272, 274–75, 293 Watanabe, Morimichi, 265 Weber, Max, 172 Wilhelmsen, Frederick D, 8 William of Ockham: and Aquinas, 238, 239, 244, 247, 253, 256; conciliarism, 228, 230, 249; differentiation, 238, 241, 247, 25, 267, 283; divine voluntarism, 239, 257; fideism, 236, 239–41; Gelasian arrangement, 228, 236, 243, 248, 258; infallibility, 250; natural equity, 243–51, 254, 256, 258, 259, 273; natural rights, 53, 236, 251–55, 258; nominalism, 15, 235–36, 238–39, 240, 241, 243, 244, 248, 250, 252–53, 267; papacy, 227, 248–51; will, 240–41, 254–55; and Wycliffe, 132, 253. See also Cusa; Existential authority Wycliffe, John: 98, 111, 121 125–33, 228, 253; on the church, 128–33; civil dominion, 126–28; state of grace, 13, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 227. See also Donatism Xenophanes, 165 Zachary (pope), 27

The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn toward Existence was designed in Maiola and typeset by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan.