Here’s the link to it on Wipf and Stock’s website.

It will also be available through the Westminster Theological Seminary bookstore in about a week. It’s currently listed as “coming soon” on their site.

And it’ll be up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online outlets in around 5 weeks or so.

Davis rightly points out that Calvin’s Eucharistic theology is conditioned by the dialectical tension of absence and presence. There are two seemingly antithetical points which Calvin was most concerned to uphold: 1. “[I]t is absolutely essential for the ascension to be understood as the removal of Christ’s body from earth to heaven so that it is corporeally absent from believers. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” And 2. “[I]t is absolutely essential that believers have access to the body of Christ in heaven so that it is present corporeally to them. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” (130)

We see both points being affirmed throughout Calvin’s writings. The clearest affirmation of the first point may be found in the Consensus Tigurinus (which Davis, following Paul Rorem, rightly sees as a compromise on Calvin’s part which demonstrates the limit to which he would allow himself to be taken in conciliatory efforts with Bullinger and the Reformed in Zurich, rather than a full disclosure of his own position). Calvin viewed spatial location as essential to a human body. And since Christ must ever remain truly human for us and for our salvation, he must remain a locally circumscribed human. (132)

Nevertheless, point 2 is just as important for Calvin. For salvation to be a reality for us, we must have access to Christ himself. Even though Christ has ascended, we must possess him in reality. While Calvin clearly affirmed that Christ is located in heaven, and even states in his comment on Acts 1.11 that this has to do with spatial distance, he also makes some comments which imply that this talk of “spatial distance” is but an accommodated or metaphorical way of speaking (133-134)

While, for Calvin, the account of the ascension condemns any effort to seek for a corporeal presence of Christ in local proximity to ourselves, nevertheless, he often stated that the right hand of God to which Christ ascended is not a particular place but a metaphorical description of the authority given to Christ (as in, for instance, his comment on Ephesians 1.20). There is a most intriguing passage to this effect in Calvin’s comment on Ephesians 4.10, where he suggests that the language of spatial distance is indeed a form of accommodated speach:

When Christ is said to be in heaven, we must not take it that he dwells among the spheres and numbers the stars. Heaven denotes a place higher than all the spheres, which was appointed to the Son of God after his resurrection. Not that it is strictly a place outside of the world, but we cannot speak of the Kingdom of God except in our own way.

Davis comments on this passage:

What I take this passage to mean is that talk of place, in relation to heaven or the kingdom of God, was figurative for Calvin. We speak, Calvin seems to be saying, of heaven up above and separated from us by space, not because that is the way it is, but because that is the only language we have to understand how the world is separated from heaven. (135)

Davis’ conclusion in this regard is worth quoting at length:

How, then, does this finally help with the dilemma of Calvin’s insistence that Christians partake of the true body of Christ for salvation while at the same time maintaining that that body is absent in space? How did the notion of a Christian’s spirit being lifted to heaven to feast on Christ there make sense to Calvin? For, if one is going to insist that humanity, to remain truly human… must retain its limitations, it makes no more sense that a human spirit can ascend to heaven than that a human body can be ubiquitous if–and this is the big if–the notion of space on both ends, the space between heaven and earth, is thought of as a literal space with a straight line being the shortest distance between point A and point B.

But there is at least reason to entertain the hypothesis that Calvin did not mean space literally; he said, as we read above, that the talk of such space is actually an accommodated way of speaking. As such, this accommodated language is the only language Calvin thought could be profitably used; it is a type of language that reflects human ways of speaking and knowing rather than one that corresponds perfectly to divine reality…

Here, then, is my hypothesis regarding Calvin’s language on ascension: Separation from Christ is not a function of distance; rather, distance is a metaphor for separation. In other words, separation from Christ is not a function of physical removal, but it is the language of physical removal that best conveys to the human mind the reality of separation. To put it yet another way, the notion of distance was Calvin’s way of speaking about the radical divide that separates the heavenly from the earthly, the divine from the human. (136)

According to Davis, this way of understanding Calvin’s frequent talk about spatial distance opens a way to see yet more convergence between Luther and Calvin on the question of Eucharistic presence:

If this can be shown to be a viable reading of Calvin’s thought, it means, I think, that Calvin and Luther were somewhat closer on the point of the mechanics of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist than has previously been thought. Though it has been pointed out how, in some ways, their thought might have had points of contact, it has mostly been assumed that Calvin stood closer to Zwingli than to Luther on the issue of the ascended body. My suggestion is that it is possible to see Calvin as crossing hemispheres, and even on this matter being, as he always claimed, much more of a disciple of Luther than has been recognized. (137)

Right or Wrong? I’m not quite sure at this point. At the very least, it’s certainly an attractive hypothesis, and I think it opens some intriguing possibilities.

This is far from the truth, and if the preceding parts of this series have not yet demonstrated this, this part and the ones that follow should do so. In this part of the series, we will look at one of the most pivotal series of events that shaped Christian political discourse in the “High” Middle Ages, and which, in terms of the monistic doctrine of the papacy which emerged from it, substantially prepared the ground for the Reformation’s attempt to recover a more healthy “two kingdoms” viewpoint.

The road to the establishment of this Papal Monarchy over Medieval Christendom was a long one and cannot be traced merely by analyzing the historical development of the abstract theology of the papacy. Many concrete historical events contributed to the consolidation of ecclesiastical and social power in “the Eternal City.” One of the most important shaping events for the papacy’s self-consciousness was the Investiture Contest of the eleventh century. Though there had been earlier precedents for papal superiority, it would be in the eleventh century and its immediate aftermath that the office of the Roman Bishop would succeed in achieving the political position of being the “head” of Christendom. (Though subsequent centuries would see intensive debates over what exactly that meant.)

The eleventh century saw a flurry of papal activity, including such monumental events as the formal, disastrous split in 1054 between the Western and Eastern branches of the Church, the creation of a novel initiatory system (the college of cardinals) by Pope Nicholas II in 1059,[1] and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 (sanctioned by Pope Alexander II),[2] and the calling of the First Crusade by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095.[3]

Through much of this tumult, that is, from about 1049 to 1085, the firm guidance of a man of extraordinary ability and iron will can be detected, a man sometimes called Hildebrand but whom we know better by his later title, Pope Gregory VII. From obscure beginnings, Hildebrand would, over the course of a quarter century, rise to a position of which his forebears like Leo the Great and Nicholas I had only dreamed. He was the mover and shaper of five successive holders of the papal throne, and would eventually hold the throne himself for twelve years (1073-1085). Rightly has one Protestant historian said that “Gregory was, in his own time, and has been since, the subject both of the highest praise of the severest censure.”[4] Indeed, in his own era Gregory VII was subject to just this dichotomy of evaluation. While he called himself “The Blessed Peter on earth”,[5] his loyal supporter Peter Damian called him “my holy Satan,” referring to his apparent “Luciferian” pride of place, an accusation which Gregory always struggled against. Another of his followers, while an opponent, Archbishop Liemar of Bremen, called him “the dangerous man” (periculosus homo).[6] Against the charge that he sought “to ‘sieze’ the papal throne ‘for the sake of earthly glory (pro gloria mundi…arripere),”[7] Gregory stated of himself “nay, rather would I have chosen to end my life as a pilgrim than to sieze upon thy place for earthly glory and by devices of this world.”[8] Clearly this was an extraordinary man to have evoked such extraordinary evaluations in his own day.

The ascent of a man such as Gregory could not have come at a more opportune time. Amidst the political tumult between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, popes and anti-popes, and popes and Eastern patriarchs, there was a growing sense of urgency among pious Christian leaders that the Church had become infected with worldliness and moral corruption. The ninth century had witnessed the collapse of Charlemagne’s Empire[9] and catastrophic invasions of Muslims, Vikings, and Magyars and plundering barbarians.[10] These events had forced the Western world into an emergency survival mode of government that we call “feudalism.” In this age, communication and travel were severely restricted and nearly all functions of what we would consider the responsibility of a public, central government were instead discharged by a plethora of local lords whose power was tied to generational possession of land and the fealty of those living on it. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that ecclesiastical institutions would come to be strongly influenced, and sometimes even dominated, by these lay lords.[11]

From the fifth century on, Christian political thinking had been delimited by the theoretical framework of Gelasian dualism, which held that the Christian society (societas Christiana) was composed of two powers, spiritual and temporal, each of which was independent of the other’s jurisdiction but at the same time required to work together for the peace and prosperity of society. Thanks to the fact that in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Church stepped in to fill the power vacuum, this principle had proved difficult to consistently practice. But the difficulties came to be especially acute under the conditions of feudalism. As one scholar has summarized the trouble: “Kings, on the basis of their material power and spiritual responsibilities, and bishops, by virtue of their spiritual authority and temporal wealth and duties, each claimed supremacy over the other in worldly affairs and correspondingly the right to intervene in the proper administrative functions of the other.”[12] Another puts it this way:

How can the Church of Christ, the mediatrix of God’s grace on earth, acknowledge herself to be a mere institution of the secular state? How can she own herself subject to the government of temporal princes? And, as the other side of the same coin, there arises the question: How can Christian emperors – lords of the civilised world, as they still perceived themselves – be expected to regard themselves as in some sense ‘subjects’ of the Church?[13]

Although during the Carolingian era, three distinct positions on the relationship of spiritual and temporal powers had existed (papal monism, royal monism, and dualist conciliarism), by the time of the Investiture Contest only two basic positions remained. Christians had to choose between the position of “the pontifical king” (royal monism), or the position of the “kingly pontiff” (papal monism). The former position saw kings annointed by the priestly power for the purpose of being able to share in the “ministry” of priests (such as guarding the faith and promoting its well-being in their territories), but not in the “dignity” of priests (such as purely sacramental operations). The latter position insisted that the temporal power was subject to the spiritual power, which originated, and thus finally controlled, all other powers. Interestingly, for all their overt contradictions of each other, both of these positions had the same root: a transformation of the dualistic notion of two powers in one society into the notion of one power in two modes. Especially throughout the tenth century, which is often called by historians “The Century of Iron,” this fundamental confusion and the exactly contrary schemes of authority it produced increasingly produced social disorder in both spiritual and temporal spheres.

The practice that came to be known as “investiture” was a natural outgrowth of the overall feudal ethos. As Tierney writes:

…A petty lord regarded the village church and its lands as a part of his estates, the priest as an estate servant like one of his stewards, to be appointed at will. A greater noble, greedy for the vast lands of some local abbey, would set himself up as its “protector” and assume the right to appoint its abbot. The complex of estates belonging to the abbey then became just one more fief rendering services to the lord and subject to his rule. Some richly endowed bishoprics went the same way. They were seized by brigand nobles, let out as fiefs to illiterate warriors, bestowed as dowries on favored daughters, or passed on to younger sons…Few of the men who acquired ecclesiastical positions in this way cared anything for the spiritual duties of their offices. Nor were they likely to feel bound by the old ascetic disciplines of the Western church that prescribed a life of celibacy for the priests. It became commonplace for priests and abbots to be married or to keep women without being married, and when such men had sons they sought to pass on to them their ecclesiastical offices and episcopal estates. This practice tended to destroy the whole conception of priesthood as a sacred vocation to such a degree that, in the eyes of later reformers, clerical marriage came to be regarded as a most offensive symbol of the general subordination of spiritual office to material ends that characterized this age.[14]

In this environment, what could be more natural than for the feudal lord and his vassal (even if a priest or bishop) to conduct the usual feudal-homage ceremony, invoking all the usual reciprocal obligations and penalties that attached to such a personal (i.e., non-bureaucratic) relationship? The problem was that the natural tenor of minds living in this time could not make the tidy conceptual separations we today can between “secular” and “sacred” jurisdictions, or between “Church” and “State.” To them, “all the lands, rights, jurisdictions, and duties of a bishopric formed one, indissoluble juridical entity.”[15] Thus it was that feudal lords would often consecrate the bishops in their lands, bestowing the tokens of spiritual leadership, the ring and the staff, upon the bishops with the majestic incantation “Receive the Church!” (“Accipe ecclesiam!”).

Horrified reactions to this “lay investiture” from reforming theologians took the form of increasingly violent polemics against the sin of “simony.” This was the sin traditionally associated with Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-24, who tried to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit. Since secular rulers, then as now susceptible to monetary payments for their favors, it required no needle-in-haystack searches to discover men in the eleventh century who had become bishops by paying money. Although such men often alleged that they had paid the money only for the royal land grant and not for the bishopric, the reformers refused to back down. The general inability to conceptually separate the two spheres of activity caused the reforming parties in the Church to put the most militant spin on their quest, making out that the sin of simony was inherently committed by the mere involvement of a secular prince in sacred affairs.

The dispute grew in the latter part of the tenth century, but began to come to a head during the pontificate of Leo IX (r. 1049-1054). After decades of turmoil in the papal court driven by the political machinations of powerful Roman families and German Emperors, who often advanced competing claimants to the papal throne, the Emperor-elect Henry III, a pious Christian sympathetic to the reforming ideals, put Leo forth. Perhaps aware of the irony of standing for reform of lay investiture while himself being invested by a layman, Leo traveled to Rome dressed as a pilgrim and did not take the position until his election was confirmed by the people and clergy of Rome, just as long custom dictated. Unwilling to appear as the mere creature of the Emperor, Leo nevertheless owed to the Emperor his ascent to the papacy.

During Leo’s tenure, the positions on investiture that would be taken for the next several generations hardened. Two of Leo’s cardinals, Peter Damian and Humbert of Silva Candida, contended over the best way to reform the relationship between laymen and clergy. Humbert took the hardline position that any ecclesiastical office obtained by the favor of a lay ruler was simony, and that simony was so serious a sin that it rendered the priest so ordained, his sacramental functions, and all others he himself ordained, illegitimate. That this position would have created mass havoc in the Church by calling into question the ordinations of half the priests in Europe did not seem to cause Humbert any conceptual or practical difficulties.[16] Humbert believed that ecclesiastical power was related to secular power as the soul is related to the body—both need each other, but the soul is “obviously” superior and is to be accorded the greater dignity.[17]

For those who would follow this line of reasoning, both popes and their defenders, the paradox of drawing and practicing societally-disruptive conclusions in the name of defending society would go unnoticed. Peter Damian, on the other hand, took a more pastoral position, insisting that just because a man was a bad bishop (by reason of having obtained the office sinfully) did not mean he was no bishop at all. While as fiercely opposed to clerical simony as Humbert, Damian nevertheless saw no need to disrupt the entire societal order instead of working within it to correct abuses. But by the close of the 1050’s, Humbert’s position had prevailed in the reforming party at Rome.[18]

As the reforming parties gained influence, they were able to portray the situation throughout Europe as being one of widespread ecclesiastical corruption and decline. Along with the increase in materialistic bishop-magnates, monasteries, long the mainstay of Christian piety and learning, continually became lax in their discipline. The situation was ripe for reform, and the forces to carry such out were even in the tenth century beginning to marshal themselves for the astounding coup of the eleventh.

Of major importance to the activities of Gregory VII in this regard was the Cluniac monastic movement. Its contributions to the terms of the eleventh century debate were several. First was the principle of the absolute independence of the spiritual power from the temporal power. Second was the resolution of the spiritual power into the final jurisdictional focal point of the Bishop of Rome. Third was a perfectionistic moral outlook that stressed complete withdrawal from “the world” – or failing that, a sort of highly idealized life characterized by being “in the world, but not of it.”[19] The rapid spread of Cluniac houses across Europe (by the beginning of the twelfth century there were over three hundred monasteries associated with it) prepared the way for the revolution that the papacy would soon spearhead as its program of fighting the “evil” of lay investiture. Pope Gregory VII would make the Cluniac vision of a world transformed into a giant monastery his own, and would wage a war to convince the whole Church that that vision was the one inherited from the Church Fathers and which had to be recovered at all costs lest the Church and all of society fall into utterly irreparable ruin.

The Investiture Contest proper is usually considered to have begun in 1075 with the outbreak of controversy between Gregory VII and the Salian Emperor Henry IV. Among the important documents issued in the early stages of the conflict was the Dictatus papae, the authorship of which is usually attributed to Gregory VII, but sometimes to later writers. One of the Contest’s most well-known incidents is the humiliation of the emperor at Canossa in January of 1077, in which the pope forced the emperor to stand barefoot in the snow for three days waiting for the pope to decide to lift the excommunication he had imposed on Henry for his “rebellion” against Rome. The excommunication of the emperor posed a serious problem, for Gregory did not merely claim that Henry was outside the Church. More expansively and disastrously, he claimed that Henry’s political subjects throughout German domains no longer owed the Emperor temporal loyalty because he was a “heretic.”[20] This was interpreted by opponents of Henry as the Church sanctioning them to rise up against their lord in bloody civil wars.

Throughout the Investiture Contest, polemicists on both sides bitterly railed at their opponents for being “heretics” and “outlaws” and all manner of other sinful things. Armies sent out by the pope and the emperor clashed, killing thousands in the name of contradictory reforming programs. Each claimed ample Scriptural and patristic support, and declared that a victory by the other side would be the very death of Christendom and the Gospel. Papal propaganda made out that the emperor’s side wanted to subjugate the Church to the secular sphere and destroy Christian liberty. Imperial propaganda made out that the papal side cared nothing for basic social order and was content to start civil wars and destroy the very fabric of society for the sake of the pope’s personal glory.

From 1081 to 1084, Henry had Rome itself under siege, determined to root Gregory out and install his own recently elected pope, Clement III, on the papal throne. The pope was only saved by the arrival of Robert Guiscard and his savage Normans, who normally inhabiting the southern parts of Italy, were induced by Gregory to come north and drive off the emperor. Ironically, by the time the Normans arrived Henry had already achieved his nominal objective and had withdrawn from the city. The Normans, consequently, decided to sack Rome and take Gregory back with them to the south. Perhaps foreshadowing the later humiliation of another pope with delusions of grandeur, Gregory VII died in captivity on May 25, 1085, complaining that “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”

Subsequent popes, Urban II, Paschal II, and Calixtus II, would continue the struggle over investiture, and by degrees the papacy would achieve victory. It was no small victory for papal power, in fact, that Urban II mobilized all of Western Christendom for the First Crusade in 1095, in large part with promises of spiritual benefits for using temporal power in the service of the Church. Henry IV lived on until 1108, when he died in the midst of a conflict with his son and heir, Henry V. The latter Henry also fought the papacy’s investiture position, but in the end participated in the Concordat of Worms in 1122, which formally ended the Investiture Contest and set the stage for the development of the Papal Monarchy and the next several centuries of conflicts between kings and popes.

Notes

[1] The cardinals had existed before, but until that point they had been simply the leading clergy in and around the city of Rome, often functioning as advisors to the Popes. What may be called “the college of cardinals,” the entity which even today actually elects the Pope, was, at its inception in 1059, part of a broader reforming solution to secular interference with the Papacy. Interestingly, Brian Tierney calls it “a radical innovation that changed the whole institutional structure of the Roman church.” The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300 [University of Toronto Press, 1999], pg. 27.

[2] For the role of the papacy in this decisive event of England’s history, see William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, Vol. 1 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], pp. 445-450. That the papacy had reason to support the invasion of England is made clear by David Douglas’ remark that William the Conqueror could claim responsibility for the ongoing ecclesiastical revival in his own province of Rouen, and thus enable himself “to appear as the armed agent of ecclesiastical reform against a prince [Harold Godwinson of England] who through his association with Stigand [a corrupt bishop supporting Harold’s claim to the English throne] had identified himself with conditions which were being denounced by the reforming party in the Church.”, William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact Upon England (Berkeley and Los Angels: University of California Press, 1992), pg. 187.

[3] A succinct summary of the decrees issued at Clermont, as well as the stirring address of Pope Urban calling the First Crusade can be found in the Gesta Regum Anglorum, pp. 595-607.

[4] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 5 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996], pp. 66-67.

[5] Joseph McCabe, Crises in the History of the Papacy [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916], pg. 150.

[6] Ian Stuart Robinson, “Periculosus Homo”: Pope Gregory VII and Episcopal Authority,” in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 9 [1978].

[7] Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest [New York: Manchester University Press, 1978], pg. 35.

[8] Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, pp. 60-61.

[9] That the successors of Charles the Great bore such surnames as “the Bald,” “the Fat,” “the Stammerer,” “the Simple,” “the Lazy,” and “the Child,” is eloquent testimony to the decline of this period.

[10] For outstanding summaries of these invasions and their impact upon Western Christendom, see Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity, Including That Of The Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V, Vol. 3 [London: John Murray, 1883], pp. 260-266, and John Marsden, The Fury of the Northmen [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993], pp. 30-56. The latter source reproduces a number of contemporary accounts which cannot fail to impress the Modern reader with the apocalyptic horror experienced by the Christians of that period, who uniformly believed God was visiting his Church with destruction on account of her sins.

[11] Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, pp. 24-25; Christopher Dawson, “The Feudal Society and the Christian Epic”, in Medieval Essays [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954], pp. 185-192.

[12] Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, trans., Theodor E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison [New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962], pg. 3. The comment is by Morrison.

[13] R.W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Government in Five Medieval Thinkers [Edwin Mellen Press, 2003], pg. 79.

[14] Crisis of Church and State, pp. 24-25.

[15] Ibid, pp. 34-35.

[16] Tierney’s judgment of Humbert is that he was “coldly intellectual, a man more concerned with justice than with charity, more swayed by abstract argument than by practical considerations of human need” who could “never resist pressing an argument to its logical conclusion and if the process led to results that were subversive of the whole existing order of society, to ideas whose implementation might throw the whole world into chaos, he would rather risk the chaos than reconsider the argument.” Crisis of Church and State, pg. 33. Also see pp. 34-35 for notes on Humbert’s blind spots in terms of how his principles would subvert the existing feudal order.

[17] See the extracts from Humbert’s Three Books Against the Simoniacs, in ibid., pp. 41-42.

[18] Though the cardinal died in 1061 his ideas—most importantly his strict, one-sided ideas regarding the supremacy of the papal office over that of royal offices – lived on and would by Gregory VII be given a defining, norming force that would reverberate through the next five hundred years of authority controversies in the Church.

[19] Such Cluniac works as Abbot Odo’s Life of St.Gerald of Aurillac powerfully portrayed the possibility of the ordinary layman achieving the profound holiness of the Saints while yet remaining within the world. See Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F.X. Noble and Thomas Head, second printing [University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000], pp. 293-362.

[20] One here sees the resemblance in arguments about temporal power to Cardinal Humbert’s position that objective authority in the Church is fundamentally connected to subjective orthodoxy.

However, Charlemagne seems to have had quite a different concept of the Roman primacy than did the popes themselves. Charlemagne’s royal seal was inscribed with the words “the renewal of the Roman Empire” (Renovatio romani imperii), but he thought that his “Roman Empire” (imperium Romanum) was territorially limited to Europe and that it was legally and actually the Christian Empire, not the Roman Empire, which he believed was in the East, ruled from Byzantium. Further, he conceived of his role as protector of the Church in terms of being responsible for the good order of the Church-Empire of Europe, which included both temporal and spiritual aspects.[2] This being the case, Charlemagne had no sympathy with Leo III’s view that being crowned by the hands of the pope effected a transfer of universal rulership from episcopal pretenders in the East to the lawful papal authority in the West protected by its “Roman noble” (patricius Romanorum), Charlemagne. Charlemagne seems to have been preserving the Gelasian two powers distinction in his view that the Christian Empire was “ideologically and religiously nurtured by the Church of Rome but monarchically governed by him.”[3]

Even so, there were inconsistencies in both theory and practice. For in Charlemagne’s Christian Roman Empire, the King was the visible symbol of the unified society. Charles himself was the governor and “spouse” of the Church-Empire (gubernator ecclesiae, sponsus ecclesiae),[4] and was often addressed as “King and Priest” (Rex et Sacerdos). His great scholar Alcuin of York called him the one whom “the dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ has made rector of the Christian people”, the one on whom rests “the whole salvation of the church of Christ.”[5] In this light, Charlemagne’s theories about his relationship to the Church set down a pattern which later temporal rulers would try to emulate in their battles with bishops of Rome who were claiming the opposite, namely, that the pope was the Rex et Sacerdos.

Before moving on with this topic, we must first look briefly at the topic of feudalism, because that mode of government characterized the Middle Ages and profoundly impacted Christian understandings of the relationship of the spiritual and temporal powers.

The Roman Empire in the West, as a coherent, functional political entity, had collapsed by the end of the 5th century. Though much of the apparatus of government still existed, the exercise of the apparatus by a centralized bureaucracy to which all local spheres gave homage did not. Many things which we ourselves take for granted, such as food, shelter, clothing, protection from violence by other people, and so forth, were very difficult to secure. Long range transportation was unsafe, and long-range communication was unreliable. Life for ordinary people consisted of being thankful to God if a merely subsistence living could be eked out of the soil by means of grossly inferior agricultural tools and techniques. Waves of barbarian invasions (the Vikings, the Magyars, and the Danes), which began in the late eighth century and continued until the middle of the eleventh, degraded the stability of temporal government and culture even further.

The lack of centralized, strong governments severely hampered effective resistance to these depredations. Society became a very localized phenomenon, held together largely by oral agreements between “lords” (men who because of their superior material means could protect others) and “vassals” (those who would receive protection from the lords in exchange for personal loyalty to the lord and his interests). Bound together by an increasingly intricate – and sometimes contradictory – web of these feudal obligations, Christians faced a long, dark night of cultural and spiritual decline.

Fundamental to the system was land ownership, for only those who owned land could have the resources and the stability needed to set themselves up as lords and to take vassals into their service. The Church, having become a rather substantial land owner centuries earlier when Constantine and his imperial heirs had made Christianity the official religion of the Empire and lavished immense wealth of possessions upon her, could not remain outside of the feudal system. Rather, she became deeply entrenched in it, to the point where all across Europe men could be found who were at one and the same time spiritual and temporal lords. The reader will no doubt see that one obvious result of this was that officers of the Church were, simply by nature of the society that they lived in, forced to hold both temporal and spiritual swords. Gelasius’ dualism looked good on paper, but it was not paper that held the feudal world of the Carolingians together.

Because the Carolingian era is the last major historical stopping point prior to the ascension of the papacy to what some have called “the papal world monarchy” of the late eleventh to the early fourteenth century, we will focus the remainder of this post on developments within the Western Church during this era.

In terms of power within the Church herself, it is interesting that many Carolingian bishops followed an interpretation of Matthew 16:18-19 (the purported biblical foundation of papalist rule) which had been stated by the Venerable Bede, an interpretation which held that every member of the priestly order (sacerdotalis ordo), not just the Bishop of Rome, was a “vicar of Christ” (vicarius Christi). The significance of this lies in the brief survey of feudalism just given. In the feudal world of the Carolingians, where the same men could be simultaneously bishops of the Church and local temporal lords, the fact that many bishops thought that there was no single, absolute monarchical leader who fused within himself both spiritual and temporal powers is surely significant.

On the other hand, trouble was brewing in the temporal power. Monism, or the reduction of power to a single locus, was not just a temptation for bishops. Kings such as Charles the Bald leaned toward interpreting the relationship of the two powers in a harmonic manner: the two powers were necessary to carry out God’s will in this life, and if, to that purpose, the king was God’s vicar on earth, then the bishop was correspondingly God’s vicar in the Church.[6] Yet, their thought was also animated by the older precedent of royal monism, in which, as with Charlemagne himself, the king was seen as both King and Priest, and thus, as much more than merely the protector of the Church. Advocates of papal monism referred to themselves as “vicars of the Son of God,” and thus, as the absolute power in the Church-world.[7] Advocates of royal monism, on ther other hand, referred to themselves as ruling both “the church and the Empire” and as being “the rector[s] of all Christian religion in so far as it pertains to men.”[8]

The mutual exclusivity of these two monisms contributed much to the breakdown of Gelasian dualism in the Carolingian age. The Frankish kings were fighting an emerging papal absolutism in a very turbulent cultural setting, and they, like the papalists, tended to be dualistic in theory but monistic in practice. What the Carolingian theologians and kings needed was an “intermediary” between the two powers, a “neutral” power that could decisively determine where the boundaries of each of the other two began and ended and help to smooth out the numerous confusions of jurisdiction that existed as the Empire fell apart under both internal and external pressures. Lacking such a “third way,” the debates between the episcopalists and the royalists tended to be dominated by extremes.[9]

Let us look at two microcosms of the battles going on in both spiritual and temporal powers during this period. The first is the political context of the production of the documents that we now know as the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore, and the second is the controversy between Hincmar Archbishop of Rheims (806-882) and Pope Nicholas I (820-867).

The False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore were a set of spurious documents that appeared in the second half of the ninth century purporting to demonstrate that papal jurisdiction over both spiritual and temporal spheres had been an original institution of Christ’s Church. In the days of Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, the Western Church had been faced with two forms of political subjugation – one to the Eastern Emperor and the other to the barbarian Lombards. In that context, someone had forged the Donation of Constantine, a document claiming that the Emperor Constantine had given temporal power over the whole Western Empire to the Bishop of Rome. The purpose of the forgery was to cement an alliance between the pope and the Franks, thus freeing the West from outside political and military domination.

Similarly, the ninth century Carolingian episcopate, faced with the depredations of feudal lords who were not churchmen, and also with civil war and the random incursions of the Vikings, suddenly found itself in possession of a collection of Decretals purportedly written by the venerable St. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636). These Decretals guaranteed the independence of the spiritual power from the temporal power by magnifying the authority of the Bishop of Rome as the final court of appeal. According to Pseudo-Isidore, the temporal power had no ability to judge the spiritual, for only God may do that.[10]

Though frauds, the False Decretals were motivated by the pious desire to save the one unified Christian society in a time of desperate emergency. Men respected authority and tradition, and there could be few things possessing more authority and tradition than sayings of the Church Fathers handed down by St. Isidore of Seville. In the context of the right of the Church to preserve itself from control by the temporal power, it is understandable, but woeful, to find a radical innovation arise on the basis of the False Decretals. This was the innovation that the terms “the Church” (ecclesia) and “the world” (mundus) were seen as synonymous. This in turn entailed that when at last the pope came to be seen as the head of the spiritual power, he would also be seen as the head of the temporal power. As I.S. Robinson writes:

…According to Pseudo-Clement I, the Lord commanded all the princes of the earth and all men to obey the bishops to submit to them and be their helpers, so that all alike might show themselves faithful ‘fellow-workers in God’s law’. The later Carolingian reformers, therefore, bequeathed a definition of the relations of the two powers radically different from that of the patristic age. It entailed a significant modification of the Gelasian formula. In the acta of the Council of Paris of 829, and increasingly in ecclesiastical records of the ninth century, the sentence of Gelasius is quoted in the form: ‘the church is principally divided into two excellent persons, the sacerdotal and the royal’—not [the world, but the Church]. No longer is the Church in the empire, as in patristic thought: the empire is in ecclesia. The two powers now appear as the separate functions of a single institution, ‘the rule of souls, which is the pontifical power, being greater than the imperial power, which is temporal’.[11]

The False Decretals had an immense impact on Christian political thought for centuries, and did not begin to be questioned until the 15th century, notably by the papalist Juan de Torquemada and the conciliarist Nicholas of Cusa. They were not widely recognized to be spurious until the Protestant scholar Blondel published his decisive expose of them in 1628. However, the power of their ideas for men living in the Carolingian age cannot be understated, and this leads us naturally into our second microcosm, the controversy between Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims and Pope Nicholas I.

Hincmar wrote in different places that the authority of rulers is granted by God and is not to be disobeyed,[12] yet also that the rulers are obligated by God to follow the law lest they show themselves no true kings at all.[13] Nicholas I, on the other hand, wrote that the Roman Church was literally the epitome of the whole Church, the “society of the faithful” (societas fidelium). He brazenly – and falsely – asserted that the whole Church had always held that papal decrees were sufficient to establish a matter, and put forth that all political power in the world resolved ultimately into the power of the Roman Bishop: “We, by God, have been established the leaders over the whole earth, that is, over the universal Church”, for “The world is, in fact, the Church.”[14]

Hincmar flatly denounced as legal frauds the False Decretals upon which Nicholas I was basing his power claims. The archbishop distinguished between “the justice of Peter” (aequitas Petri) and the “assent of the Church” (assensus ecclesiae). Papalists, following Leo the Great, used the former phrase to ground papal sovereignty in Christ’s commission to Peter in Matthew 16:18-20. But according to Hincmar, the justice of Peter was always subject to the assent of the Church because the Church was composed of all the bishops and laymen, not merely the pope and his lackeys. This nuance enabled the Archbishop to uphold Petrine authority in the Church while denying its alleged corollary, papal sovereignty over the Church.

In Hincmar’s theory, the authority of ecclesiastical canons derived from the assent of the universal Church (assensus universalis ecclesiae), and all judgments, even papal ones, issued out of conformity with that universal assent were to be considered illegitimate.[15] This theory had significant ramifications for the later development of conciliarism within the Church, but in the context of temporal political theory it also seriously limited the authority of the Bishop of Rome by subjecting him to the more fundamental authority of the Church herself. Entailed in this, of course, would be a restriction of papal claims to power over the Empire.

This survey has shown that the eighth and ninth centuries were a pivotal point for the development of the “two kingdoms” doctrine during the Middle Ages. In this short period of time we see all the elements of the later papalist and imperialist systems in nascent form, each striving in its own way for dominion over the other. In brief, the dualistic theory of Gelasius that two powers existed in one society was in various ways subtly transformed into the theory that only one power existed in two modes. The patristic and early Medieval sources that the Carolingians possessed (and also some of the ones which they themselves would produce) were not fully self-consistent, and so they led to the formulation of two competing concepts of the relationship of temporal and spiritual powers.

These two concepts would exist in a fundamental tension all the way up to the time of the Reformation. This fact is a strong argument against the idea often advanced by Roman Catholics that the Reformation produced political novelties based upon a desire to destroy legitimate divinely-instituted authority in the spiritual power. Rather, we may already begin to see hints of how the Reformation would try to restore a more balanced and healthy concept of the relationship of the two powers in the one Christian society than the papalists themselves held.

[2] Three major examples being his “General Admonition” of 789, his presiding role at the Council of Frankfurt in 794 (at which the iconophile position of the Seventh Ecumenical Council was condemned), and his superintendence over the “trial” of pope Leo III in 800. See A.J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, Vol. 1: The Second Century to the Ninth (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), pp. 263-266.

[3] Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1953), pg. 116.

[4] I.S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy”, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pg. 260.

[5] Cited in Geoffrey Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe: The Ninth and Tenth Centuries in European History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pg. 28.

[6] Karl Frederick Morrison, The Two Kingdoms: Ecclesiology in Carolingian Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), pg. 58.

[7] Ibid., pp. 57-58.

[8] Ibid., pg. 138.

[9] Ibid., pp. 66-67 and 136-137.

[10] “Episcopi a Deo sunt judicandi,” Pseudo-Pius, as cited by Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, second edition (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1962), pg. 182; also Pseudo-Evaristus: “Nor, therefore, can the bishops be blamed or accused by commoners or vulgar men.” My translation of: “Non est itaque a plebe vel vulgaribus hominibus arguendus vel accusandus episcopus.”

[11] I.S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy”, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c.1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pg. 298. The quote is from Pope Gregory IV’s Epp. 5: “maius esse regimen animarum, quod est pontificale, quam imperiale, quod est temporale.”

[12] De Fide Carlo Rege Servanda, 33 (PL 125: 979A-979C; De divortio Lotharii regis et Tetbergae reginae (PL 125: 619-772, esp. col. 758).

[13] As in his De regis persona, 6 (PL 125: 834-836), where he approvingly cites Augustine’s maxim from the City of God IV.4, “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves but little kingdoms?” This translation is from Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), pg. 66.

[14] My translation of “Nos divinitus…constituti principes super omnem terram, id est, super universam ecclesiam.” (Epistle 88, lines 32ff., cited by Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, pg. 195. Also: “Terra enim ecclesia est” (ibid., line 34).

[15] Morrison, The Two Kingdoms: Ecclesiology in Carolingian Political Thought, pp. 91-94.

Tertullian (160-220), who famously wondered what Jerusalem had to do with Athens, also made it plain that “Nothing is more foreign to us [the Christians] than the State.” [Apologeticus 38.3, as cited by Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pg. 10.] Origen (185-254) thought of the Empire as having brought “a milder spirit” without which the spread of the Gospel would have been much more difficult,[Contra Celsum, ii.30.] On the other hand, Cyprian (d. 258), wondered how something that “had originated as a refuge for robbers” could be in any sense eternal.[W.H.C. Frend, “Church and State: Perspective and Problems in the Patristic Era,” in Studia Patristica Vol. XVII, Part One, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), pg. 44.] Later, the apologist Arnobius (d. ca. 330) wrote that the Roman Empire was “a curse to humanity…born for the destruction of the human race.”[Frend, ibid., pg. 42.]

According to George Hunston Williams, the patristic age produced four different theories of the relationship of Church and State: [1] “What has the Emperor to do with the Church?” (the Donatist-monastic view), [2] “The Church is in the Empire” (the Arian subordinationist view), [3] “The Empire is in the Church” (the view of a tradition springing from St. Ambrose), and [4] “The Church and Empire are separate, but cooperative.” [Christology and Church-State Relations in the Fourth Century," in Church History Vol. 20, No. 3, Sept. 1951.]

For the first three centuries, Christians gravitated toward the “Church is in the Empire” position. After Constantine’s legalization of Christianity, however, they began to gravitate towards the opposite position, “The Empire is in the Church.” The most striking example of this is, of course, the confrontation between Bishop Ambrose of Milan and the Emperor Theodosius in 390 A.D., in which the Bishop denied the Emperor access to the Eucharist because of his sins. [See Theodoret, History of the Church 5.17; Sozomen, History of the Church 7.25.316] This incident set a powerful precedent for papalist thinkers of later ages who would teach that the civil power derived its basic legitimacy from and was at all times fully accountable to the Bishop of Rome.

Long before the papalists arose, however, a principle which would allow for substantial resistance to their claims arose in Christian political thought. In the year of the Incarnate Word 494, almost seventy years after Augustine’s death, Gelasius, Bishop of Rome, laid down what many commentators believe to be the most fundamental political principle of the Middle Ages. In his Letter 12 (also called Famuli vestrae pietatis after the opening Latin words of the text) to the Eastern Emperor Anastasius, Gelasius posited that there was a single Christian society (societas Christiana) which had two distinct political focal points. These he called the “holy authority of bishops” (auctoritas sacrata pontificum) and the “royal power” (regalis potestas). Before discussing Gelasius’ views, let us look at some relevant portions of the text:[These are as cited by Dyson, Five Normative Theories, pp. 85-86.]

There are two orders, O August Emperor, by which this world is principally ruled: the consecrated authority of the pontiffs, and royal power [auctoritas sacrata pontificum, et regalis potestas]. But the burden laid upon the priests in this matter is the heavier, for it is they who are to render an account at the Divine judgment even for the kings of men. Know, O most clement Son, that although you take precedence over the human race in dignity, nonetheless you bend your neck in devout submission to those who preside over things Divine, and look to them for the means of your salvation. In partaking of the heavenly sacraments, when they are properly dispensed, you acknowledge that you ought to be subject to the order of religion rather than ruling it…For if the ministers of religion, acknowledging that your rule, insofar as it pertains to the keeping of public discipline, has been given to you by Divine disposition, obey your laws, lest they seem to obstruct the proper course of worldly affairs: with what good will, I pray, ought you to obey those who have been charged with the dispensation of the holy mysteries?

We should also consider some portions of the text as they were cited 600 years later by Gratian of Bologna in his own epochal work, the Concordium of Discordant Canons, better known as the Decretum. A handbook of excerpts of legal principles for use in Christian political theory, the Decretum was highly influential on Medieval political thought, not least in terms of its citations of Gelasius. After quoting the opening words “There are two, August Emperor,” the Decretum goes on to cite these passages: [This is my own translation of the Latin text found in Migne's Patrologia Latina, Volume 187, columns 458D-459B.]

§ 1. Among these things you know that you are to listen attentively to judgments from the priests, and not to those things which are rendered by your own will.

§ 2. Supported by many great customs and a good many authorities the Pontiffs have excommunicated both kings and emperors.

For instance, if a few specific examples of princes are required, [I offer these]. Pope Innocent excommunicated Emperor Arcadius because he had conspired to drive out St. John Chrysostom from his see. Also Ambrose, thought to be holy yet not the bishop of the Universal Church, did not seem to the other priests to be oppressive when he excommunicated Emperor Theodosius the Great for his faults and excluded him from the Church.

Ambrose indeed pointed out in his own writings that because gold is not of such great value if it is mixed with lead, how can the royal power be of higher dignity than the sacerdotal? He wrote this rule around the beginning of his pastorate: Brothers, honor the sublimity of the episcopate for nothing is able to be adequately compared with it. If the king is compared to the flashing of lightning and the prince to preeminence, they will be far inferior, just as if lead is compared to the glitter of gold. Obviously, since you see that the necks of kings and the princes of the nations should be submitted to the priests, and indeed the kings ought to pledge with their mouths that they will believe themselves to be established by the priests’ prayers.

Taken by itself, it is easy to see how Duo sunt could underlie the later Medieval program of the papalists to entirely subordinate the temporal power to the spiritual. Indeed, as Dyson points out, many Medieval thinkers working with this set of ideas tied them to four themes of Augustine’s work. These were: “the intrinsic or metaphysical superiority of the spiritual over the temporal; the association of political power with sin and with all that is ignoble or distasteful in human life; the idea of man’s dependence upon Divine grace bestowed through the Church; and the suggestion that earthly princes should place themselves and their resources at the Church’s disposal.” [Five Normative Theories, pg. 69.]

However, like Augustine himself, Gelasius had more to say on this subject and he was not entirely self-consistent. In the year of grace 496, in the midst of the Acacian schism between Rome and Constantinople, he wrote in his Tractate 4: [This is the translation of R.W. Dyson in Five Normative Theories, pg. 85.]

They [i.e., the civil authorities] fear [formidant] to intervene [in religious matters], knowing that these matters do not belong to the measure of their power, which has been granted to them [permissum est] to judge human things and not to rule things Divine. How, then, can they presume [praesumunt] to judge those by whom Divine things are administered? Before the coming of Christ…certain persons existed who were simultaneously priests and kings, as the sacred history shows in the case of Melchizedek; and the devil initiated this among his own peoples…so that the pagan emperors were also called pontifex maximus. But after the coming of the Truth [i.e., of Christ], Who was Himself both True King and true Pontiff, no subsequent emperor has taken the title of pontiff, and no pontiff has laid claim to royal dignity…For Christ, mindful of human frailty, has…separated both offices according to the different functions and dignity proper to each, wishing that His people should be preserved by a healthy humility, and not again ensnared by human pride; so that Christian emperors should now have need of the pontiffs for their eternal life, and the pontiffs should make use of [uterentur] the resources of the imperial government for the direction of temporal things: to the end that spiritual activity might be removed from carnal distractions, and that the soldier of the Lord might not be at all entangled in secular business; and that one who is entangled in secular business might not be seen to preside over things Divine. In this way He took care that each order should be humble…and that the profession of each might be suited to the special aptitudes of those who practise it.

From these two writings of Gelasius we can derive the following general scheme about the relationship of the two powers that made up the one Christian society. The two powers were both ordained by God for the purpose of governing the world, and although they are independent in their own spheres of activity, where their concerns may overlap they must cooperate with each other and avoid usurping each other’s roles. Further, the assumption of imperial Roman thought (taken up by the Eastern Christians in Constantinople) that the secular ruler has also a sacral character, that is, that the secular ruler is both a priest and a king, must be abjured by Christian rulers. Their role is confined to dealing with outward necessities and public order among the Christian people committed to their care. By the same token, though, ecclesiastical leaders are to have only a minimal presence in the operations of secular sphere.

It is surely of enormous significance that Gelasius ties this “two powers” distinction to orthodox catholic Christological teachings. Notice that in Tractate 4‘s rebuke of the Emperor (who resided in the East and by his intervention in the theological matters at stake in the Acacian Schism was acting as both king and priest), Gelasius says that it is the pagans who believe in a single ruler who is both king and priest, but that Christ overthrew that institution and separated the two powers, leaving only Himself as both King and Priest.

On the other hand, the language of Letter 12 is problematic. Gelasius describes the spiritual power with the word auctoritas (authority) and the temporal power with the word potestas (power). In classical Roman political thought, this distinction is extremely important. R.W. Dyson explains:

To the traditional Roman political sensibility, auctoritas is the highest kind of prestige which public life can confer. It is associated with seniority and with long and successful experience of public service. The individual who possesses auctoritas is able to achieve the good of the commonwealth and his own renown by initiating successful public policy…The major seat of auctoritas, its supreme institutionalisation, is the Roman Senate. The Senate’s authority comes from the collective wisdom which it embodies. its function is to deliberate on matters of public importance and to issue an authoritative decision, a consilium, for the magistrates to execute. The magistrates, on the other hand, have potestas, power, conferred upon them by the election of the people: power to carry the decisions of the Senate into effect; but they have no auctoritas of their own. They act, but they do not deliberate, and the counsel or policy upon which they act comes from elsewhere. [Five Normative Theories, pg. 89. Note that an interesting argument for the supreme authority of the Church being vested in a Council rather than the Pope here suggests itself from the different way that auctoritas played out in the Roman Republic as opposed to the Roman Empire.]

The distinction between auctoritas and potestas is what allows Gelasius to say in Letter 12 that “the necks of kings and the princes of the nations should be submitted to the priests, and indeed the kings ought to pledge with their mouths that they will believe themselves to be established by the priests’ prayers” – a position that will be repeated some 600 years later by Pope Gregory VII at the foundation of the sacral kingship (!) known as Papal Monarchy. The background assumption of this language is that the spiritual power is ontologically superior to the temporal, and therefore grants legitimacy to the temporal.

And yet, in Tractate 4 Gelasius also holds that the offices are distinct by the ordination of Christ Himself, and that it is un-Christian for a single man to be both king and priest. When this is combined with his remark in Letter 12 that “the ministers of religion, acknowledging that your rule, insofar as it pertains to the keeping of public discipline, has been given to you by Divine disposition, obey your laws, lest they seem to obstruct the proper course of worldly affairs…”, one can see how the “dualistic” position of Gelasius, built heavily upon that of Augustine in the City of God, left much room for creative interpretation. That is, the temporal power is to submit itself to the spiritual in terms of what is needed for salvation, but at the same time, the temporal power has its own “Divine disposition” with which the spiritual power is not to interfere. Questions such as “from where does the temporal power’s ‘divine disposition’ come – directly from Christ Himself or indirectly from His Church acting in His place on earth?” would lead to Gelasius’ views being developed in several different directions during the Middle Ages, and these developments will be the focus of subsequent posts in this series.

Without the Roman Empire, would Christendom ever have been? The question goes beyond mere politics or church government. The imperial church granted us the creeds and unified the liturgy (with certain notable exceptions which themselves display socio-political lines). It gave us the legacy, the narrative, by which we now teach our children who they are. And this is both a blessing and a burden.

Peter Heather, in his The Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the way in which the Christian Church came to enjoy its role as a public institution. He notes, “After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the long-standing claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked” (123).

Rather than a clash, there is a coalescence.

Heather will go on to refute many of the claims of Edward Gibbon, those that assert Christianity had a violent effect upon the empire. This will also contradict the lesser known claims, though important to my ecclesiastical community, of R J Rushdoony in his The Foundations of Social Order. (It really is a terrible book. Perhaps one day I will take the time to refute some of its claims myself, but for now I will simply say that it could hardly be farther from the actual way history unfolded.)

Heather describes the instillation of Christianity as a social institution quite succinctly, and I will quote some of his best lines. Heather writes:

At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world…

This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God’s chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority within Christianity. As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were now intimately involved in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business of the new religion’s administration. To settle disputes, emperors called councils, giving bishops the right to use the privileged travel system, the cursus publicus, in order to attend. Even more impressively, emperors helped set the agendas to be discussed, their officials orchestrated the proceedings, and state machinery was used to enforce the decisions reached. More generally, they made religious law for the Church– Book 16 of the Theodosian Code is entirely concerned with such matters– and influenced appointments to top ecclesiastical positions.

The Christian Church hierarchy also came to mirror the Empire’s administrative and social structures. Episcopal dioceses reflected the boundaries of city territories (some even preserve them to this day, long after they have lost all other meaning). Further up the sale, the bishops of provincial capitals were turned into metropolitan archbishops, enjoying powers of intervention in the new, subordinate sees. Under Constantine’s Christian successors, the previously obscure Bishop of Constantinople was elevated into a Patriarch on a par with the Bishop of Rome– because Constantinople was the ‘new Rome.’ Very quickly, too, local Christian communities lost the power to elect their own bishops. From the 370s onwards, bishops were increasingly drawn from the landowning classes, and controlled episcopal successions by discussions among themselves. With the Church now so much a part of the state– bishops had even been given administrative roles within it, such as running small-claims courts– to become a Christian bishop was not to drop out of public life but to find a new avenue into it. If the Christianization of Roman society is a massively important topic, an equally important, and somewhat less studied one, is the Romanization of Christianity. The adoption of the new religion was no one-way street, but a process of mutual adaptation that reinforced the ideological claims of emperor and state.[1]

This imperial character of the early church can hardly be overstated. This is how we came to have the “ecumenical councils.” This is why some councils won out over others. This is how there could develop “Eastern” and “Western” branches of the Church, and this civil character of ecclesiastical organization is also how there could come to be “Byzantine” Christianity or “Frankish” Catholicism.

The early Christians were able to merge with the empire for a number of reasons.  They understood the civic order to have an abiding noahide validity.  Jesus had come, not just as a Jewish savior, but as a savior that extended salvation to the Gentiles and, in thus doing, he inherited the best of the Gentile legacy for the Church.  Texts such as Jeremiah 29:4-7 were also foundational for the early Christian social thought:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Two contemporary works which defend the role of Christians as Christians in the civic arena are Christopher Bryan’s Render to Caesar and Bruce Winter’s Seek the Welfare of the City.  Both of these are helpful refutations of the modified-Anabaptist position reflected in Yoder, Hauerwas, and even many supposedly Protestant theologians of our day.

Back in the old world, Augustine of Hippo states his case plainly on the matter:

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace.  It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced.[2]

Not only was a political synthesis with Rome allowable, for Augustine it was desirable.  It was a part of the larger Christian mandate to both pray for one’s leaders and to actively support the civic welfare, maintaining earthly peace.  The Emperor was also to protect and extend true worship, and so keeping on his good side was paramount.  With certain exceptions along the way, this became the patristic view of civic participation.

Late Antiquity scholar Peter Brown also notes the mutual interdependence of crown and miter. Just before the fall of the Western Empire, Symmachus extolled Rome’s ancient paganism as the source of its greatness, pointing to the newer religions, chiefly Christianity, as the reason for Rome’s more recent decline. Rather than simply deny the myth of eternal Rome, however, the early Christians tended to put their own spin on the legend. Brown writes:

The majority of lay Christians were content to stand Symmachus on his head. Rome, they replied, was of course a Holy City, and the Roman empire enjoyed special divine protection: but this was because the bodies of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, rested on the Vatican Hill. The ideology of the late fourth-century popes, and the cult of St. Peter in western Europe, owe much to conscious rivalry with pagan exponents of the myth of Rome. Symmachus paradoxically, was an unwitting architect of the medieval papacy.[3]

This pairing of Caesar and Christ worked for good and for ill. When Constantine, dressed as an angel, called the Council of Nicaea, it was to defend the deity of Jesus Christ. It was to form what we now recognize as catholic Christianity. Subsequent political competitions, however, would be less noble. Brown points to Chalcedon as one such low point:

Compared with these ancient Christian centres, Constantinople, only recently weaned from a military, Latin past, was a colourless newcomer. But to be a ‘Ruling City’ it had to lead the empire in doctrine also. The emperors hastily forced it to the fore. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the emperor Marcian took advantage of a trend in Greek opinion and of the support of Leo, the bishop of Rome, to humble the patriarch of Alexandria, and so to secure the position of Constantinople as the leading Christian city of the empire. The settlement arrived at in Chalcedon did violence to some of the deepest currents in Greek Christian thought of the time. The equilibrium of eastern Christianity was brutally upset. For the next two centuries, the emperors faced the uphill task of restoring the balance, sometimes by palliating, sometimes by by-passing ‘the accursed council’, without going back for a moment on the initiative which their ‘Ruling City’ had won at Chalcedon.[4]

Now, Chalcedon was certainly not “just” political. To say that would be to misunderstand both religion and politics in the antique world. And as it happens, the writers here at Basilica, along with our respective churches and ecclesiastical traditions, all receive Chalcedon as doctrine true to the word of God. Such does not undo the realities of Chalcedon’s context, though, nor can it deny the subsequent (nationalistic) schisms which the council produced.

Chalcedon would not be the last theological council to engage in imperial disputes. The second council of Nicaea is perhaps the most glaring, as it centered on the family feuds of the Emperor Irene. 2nd Nicaea rejected its immediate Byzantine predecessor in Constantinople (754) and was itself promptly rejected by Charlemagne’s Frankish church. Peter Brown again has an invaluable treatment of the iconoclastic controversy which can be found here.

None of this is meant to pull the rug out from Christendom. Actually, my larger intent is quite the opposite, as my previous posting should display. It is, however, essential that one have a clear understanding of the dialectic between the two swords, in all aspects. Mythology can only leave an inheritance of agnosticism.  And if we are to be, as Jeremiah, seeking the welfare of the city, even a city that has taken us captive, ought we not to expect certain challenges and apparent contradictions on the way?  Which is more important: participating, albeit at times “impurely,” or purely sitting it all out?

History has contemporary applications, it would seem. If Christianity sprouted only through its engrafting into the empire, how viable an option is it today to assume a total schism between church and states? What sort of gratitude is on display when “conservative” Christians despise civil rule? And what sort of socially minded Christians deny the very institution which gave the keys of the city to those who were held the keys of the kingdom?

[2] City of God 19.17

[3] The World of Late Antiquity. (W. W. Norton and Compnay: 1989), p 121-122

[4] ibid 144

Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various
spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual , narrative, and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in the basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.” The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

The postmodern devotion to abolishing “Western” (that is Greek) metaphysics would be illuminated by considering the economic conditions of its genesis. Just as our politico-economic discourse assumes the maximization of of earning and expenditure (even of borrowing) by groups and individuals alike, so our theoretical discourse is hostile to all forms of closure.

Earlier, he remarks that what makes the Greeks figure so largely in our memory is that they are enough like us to be easily enough intelligible, yet unlike us enough to exercise and challenge our minds. Because of this, there has been a whole history of hastily generalized “Greekdoms,” each of which have been made to play one role or another in European and American Christendom’s conversation about itself. In one recent episode of that history, Oswald Spengler famously emphasized the idea of limit as definitive of the Greeks, as opposed to the drive for the infinite and the dissolution of all boundaries supposedly characteristic of Western, “Faustian” communities.

Seaford is wiser by far than Spengler; Seaford, like the Greeks, is not dealing in essentializations. He is simply suggesting that the Greeks, through custom and circumstance and reasoning and choice, were disposed to limits, and that the modern West, from a similar combination of factors, is much less so. These aren’t necessary effects of any supposed cultural “nature” (which is a contradictio in adjecto), but are rather contingent effects of chosen policies. The Greek leaders contemplated and deliberated, as men are meant to do, and what they saw of God’s pattern for creation- what Lewis in The Abolition of Man called the “Tao”- they put into practice as best they could. They were often muddled and certainly made many mistakes, but they arrived at a sort of real wisdom. Seaford explicitly, and rightly, denies that the Greek culture of limit is wholly imitable by us. It is not imitable by us in many of its neutral particulars, and certainly not in any of its vicious particulars. But he does suggest it as an edifying model in certain respects. He calls the Hellenic legacy “one of a number of precious resources”, and so it is; we have many others, too, which might help us in our civic conversations about the nature of freedom, society, and the role of money and wealth.

As always, the Greeks do have something to tell us; everybody does, really, but the Greeks are by Providence among our nearest historical neighbors and antecedents, and thus our Reformers took them as teachers in matters of cosmic and civic wisdom. Not their only or even primary teachers; but eminent teachers nonetheless.

Seaford’s own observation about certain fashions of our time should not go unremarked. He is very shrewd to see that the “postmodern” hostility to the tradition of Western metaphysics expresses the still very modern hostility to all forms of limit. Limits, where they are real, are from being; being, whose lineaments are traced by wisdom. Some would-be orthodox theologians seem to think that rejecting the Greeks and their ongoing legacy is a useful move in combatting what Seaford, at the end of his essay, calls “our hyper-monetized , atomized, and self-destructive culture of the unlimited”. They are only too happy to avail themselves of the postmodernist toolkit’s chisels and hammers of deconstruction in this undertaking. But by rejecting the wisdom of being, they are forced to posit categories of faith in their stead. The true wisdom of revelation, however, is not opposed to the wisdom of being which man can attain by reason; it presupposes it. Thus a faith-knowledge which rejects philosophy  is not truly a knowledge from revelation; it is simply “faith” in the modern sense- unaccountable, arbitrary personal preference, an idiosyncratic “value”, which is just as subjective and wilful as the worst aspects of modernity it claims to want to oppose. Francis Schaeffer was absolutely right to always insist, against certain kinds of modern theologizing, on “true truth”; and to insist on that is to find one’s self, consciously or not, as both disciple and fellow student of the Greeks.

Balmer takes some easy shots at Moore in his description of him and his campaign. One wishes that Balmer’s Coastal condescension were not so evident as it is; I, for one, don’t like to wince when I read things, but perhaps the priestly historian is working especially hard to insure that his readers won’t mistake him as somehow being the same sort of Christian as Judge Moore. The description of Moore seems meant to emphasize more than differences in theology proper. Balmer, for some reason, finds it necessary to tell us that Moore is a “former kickboxer”. The suggestion seems to be that Moore’s Christianity is aggressive and visceral, one might even say primitive- as opposed, I take it, to a more scholarly and cosmopolitan and unassuming style of belief, exemplified, I take it, by Balmer. More basically this implicit comparison seems to serve as a figure for the purported red/blue division of the United States; and Balmer seems to be taking pains to let us know where he lives. I’m not at all persuaded of the usefulness of the boxing criterion as an indicator of one’s intellectuality or politics. The Leftist academic sociologist Loic Wacquant, for example, took up boxing, and even wrote a book about it; and I’ve known a number of brainy and left-leaning boxers myself. The really primitive sport here is Balmer’s unkind jabbing at what Moore supposedly represents. Given his picture of Moore as an affable and naive, but nevertheless primitively severe magistrate, Judge Moore comes out looking like- I believe the comparison has been drawn before- that other Judge Roy of Western legend, the ridiculous but no less dangerous Hanging Judge Roy Bean.

I do not endorse Judge Moore’s rationale, as I understand it, for wishing to display the Ten Commandments; nor his political posturing. And if Balmer is right, Moore’s reading of the Constitution is certainly an example of an extremely naive originalism which would have bemused the Founders, and most serious Constitutional originalists now, who wouldn’t make anything like the kind of arguments Moore does, as Balmer relates it.

Balmer doesn’t let us in on the existence of wiser originalists, though; all we see is the flummoxed Judge Moore, unable to answer questions about modern media and the original provisions for free speech. Balmer is having his fun here mocking Moore’s version of care for origins and principles but Savigny, were he on the scene now, would doubtless want to say something too: Balmer, of course, doesn’t mention that school of jurisprudence. But once Moore has been identified as the only possible defender of a public Decalogue, and then depicted in a way reminiscent of that other Judge Roy, there’s nothing left for the reader to do but to want to get that Decalogue back in the storage room, or perhaps in the museum next to the stocks and Scarlet Letters and other instruments of bygone injustice.

But it might not be time yet to let Balmer win the argument. What if Moore’s rationale- which might indeed be so confused it doesn’t actually amount to one- isn’t the only one possible? What if the matter of the public Decalogue can’t simply be identified with Moore’s campaign?

The usual objection is that any public and official display of the Decalogue is tantamount to endorsement of the Christian religion, and thus violates what is held to be the Constitutional principle of separation of Church and State. That is too complicated a matter to deal with here; but I will suggest a way of looking at the Decalogue which might yet be helpful even with that larger question still unresolved.

One also hears confused objections based on mistaken identifications of the Decalogue with the entire Mosaic code, even though the Decalogue itself contains no prescriptions for penal sanctions, and in its Christian liturgical and political usage never has entailed the whole Mosaic code; and is recognized even by many irreligious commentators as expressing a very exalted ethical pattern corresponding at most points with the basic principles necessary for any society.

The critics are afraid that public honoring of the Decalogue means majoritarian exclusion, and repression of freedom in the name of the Law of God.

But the question isn’t, and cannot be, the role of the Decalogue as a pattern of positive law. The Founders were men of Protestant tradition, and Protestant tradition expressly denied that the Decalogue is a pattern of Christian positive law, except analogously, insofar as it expressed the basic truths of natural law. The real political significance of the Decalogue is not directly juridical, it is historical; but this need not mean obsolete.

The Decalogue is unquestionably part of American legal and political heritage; this is a purely historical judgment. The Ten Commandments are displayed prominently in the halls of our legal and political history, and there’s no changing that without undoing the past itself. This goes back to earliest times: the Decalogue figures largely in the laws of King Alfred, and Alfred’s laws are at the very origin of the English legal tradition which would eventually become our own.

But there are many things in our political and legal past we are happy to be rid of: if the displayed Decalogue is a sign of inevitably repressive authority, one could understand the critics’ concern. Before we go ahead and throw the wooden Decalogues in the museum next to the stocks and whipping posts, though, let’s look at what the Decalogue has meant .(1)

I have just said that it is inextricably part of our Constitutional history, and a central part. Whatever one’s religion or politics, if Magna Carta deserves recognition as a landmark of our legal tradition, then the Decalogue at least deserves a place along with the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. It is of signal and abiding historic importance for us.

Too, it is a venerable monument of translation and the multicultural origins of Christian civility. The evangelization of England was in many respects a work of translation. Hebrew and Greek and Latin and Celtic gifts had entered the stream of transmission, and the contributions of many smaller and more obscure communities too, to make up the bustling enterprise called Christendom, when preachers arrived to bear witness among the Saxon settlers of Britain. Christianity was from the beginning committed to the idea of oikumene and the idea of koinonia: its Greek was koine.

Thus this Christendom was, as Remi Brague calls it, an eccentric culture: it was used to having its center outside itself, which is to say that it constituted itself by an ever ongoing act of translation. The reception of the Decalogue by the early Saxon kings did not wholly displace Germanic tribal law, nor did it preclude a desire to receive and imitate Roman law; it was a symbolic polestar under which all that translation and revision and inspired innovation could happen. It served not only as a pattern guide of social order, but also as a sign of the unity of the legal and the ethical and the religious, and a sign too of the elsewhere-origins of legitimacy; the afar above, God; and the afar below, the ancient, holy lands: Israel primarily, but also too all the other places hallowed by martyrs and saints.

King Alfred’s reception of the Decalogue was a translation, and a revision too: not of the thing itself, but of its use. And in the place it held at the heart of the living English law through later centuries, it continued to signify translation: between here and there, public and private, ideal and practical, past and present. A nation of immigrants, such as ours is, might see its own image in the career of the living Decalogue as received and framed within the tradition of English law. The Decalogue is thus of abiding cultural significance for us.

Be all that as it may. Many would still ask, isn’t the Decalogue the sign and basis of a Puritan theocratic code, repressing freedom in the name of God? The Reformation did not entirely change the ancient idea of the role of the magistrate in religion, and of religion in the magistracy. And though we can only be grateful for the American settlement which places public religion primarily in the realm of society rather than State, it is not the case that this was entirely a departure from the earlier evangelical tradition. The Reformation view of the magistrate as guardian of both law-tables certainly had oppressive possibilities, and was sometimes actually oppressive in practice. But the basic Reformation distinction between Law and Gospel rendered the ancient positive law relative, and relatively expressive of a perfect and transcendent law of love to which it points back. All attempts to render the ancient laws absolute and use them coercively to create a holy polity were totally foreclosed by evangelical religion. The guarding of the first tablet did not mean direct command with regard to conscience; the magistrate only had power circa sacra, not in sacra, for purposes of public order. Even a separation of Church and State, established by law, is an act of political authority circa sacra, and thus could be seen an example of political custody of the two tables.

And the Reformation tradition is very alert to the negative reading of the Decalogue, as mostly a set of “shalt-nots”. The phrase “thou shalt not” has become almost a folk expression for the dictates of any repressive would-be authority, whatever would “bind with briars our joys and desires”. But far from being repressive, the negative form is liberatory:

The commandments, with the exception of two, the third and the fourth, are in the negative; they are prohibitions. Their negative character makes them unsuited as a foundation for a developed ethics…They are starting points for a further development of ethical demands, but the basic prohibitory character remains….Through their negative character the commandments actually take on a more comprehensive meaning. This brings out even more clearly their character as commandments which protect the common life of man and also their independence from particular historical forms of community life. (2)

The Reformation distinction between Law and Gospel, and the Protestant attention to the negative form of the commandments, forestalled the idea that the Decalogue was to be understood as a set of positive dictates requiring indefinite positive extension and application; in other words, it prevented it from serving as the principle of a code. That negative reading of the Decalogue accords well with Beza’s negative formulation, in his On the Duties of Magistrates and Their Subjects, of the duties of the magistrate as warden of both tablets: he must not forbid the good, nor command the evil. Beza was no libertine; but in that negative formulation, the principle of an open society is already germinally expressed.

The historic evangelical Christian use of the Decalogue as political monument was in large part as a sign of the conscious cancellation of clerocratic authoritarianism or of any simple identity between law and morality and revelation. But that is the opposite of what most critics of Decalogue display think it meant, and perhaps even the opposite of what most advocates of display think it meant. The Decalogue is thus, in a way many might find very surprising, of abiding political importance for us.

The Decalogue is inextricably part of the legal and political heritage of the United States. Whatever it means for us, it means for us in that context. By taking it out of context, both its critics and its supposed defenders argue over an illusion. Unfortunately, that argument over an illusion has real effects: it contributes to the ongoing erasure of the principles and origins of the American polity. Whatever might be the case with the difficult topic of the “separation of Church and State”, there is certainly no separation of nation and history enshrined in the Constitution, or anywhere else in American law.

The Decalogue is an eminent sign of translation, of continuity and difference, vision and revision, and thus of Christian cosmopolis. And a Christian cosmopolis of translation, service, and hospitality is politically inclusive of difference, so that it can refrain from making recognition of its architectonic principle a criterion of political fellowship, without denying or undoing that principle, taking as it were the form of a servant: we can thus say “(Christian) cosmopolis”, where the parenthesis indicates not a restriction, but rather a soul, a principle, a pivot.

The Decalogue in its historic and legal context is also a sign of freedom, since the negative reading of it distinctive to evangelical faith renders it an example and sign of relative expression of ideal and abiding principle, and forbids any absolute identification of specific positive law with eternal law; while at the same time disclosing it as a testament of covenant, the fact that history and community are made of personal relations.

From King Alfred the Great to the American Founders, the Decalogue has held a place of public honor in English-speaking polities. Perhaps, given the tenor of the current argument over its public display,and the wrongheadedness of the partisans of either side, it is best, at the moment, to wisely refrain from arguing for such a display. But one would expect better things from Christian historians, of all people, than cheap arguments against it.

(1) For an excellent treatment of the career of the Decalogue in the Christian world, see Paul Grimley Kuntz’s The Ten Commandments in History: Mosaic Paradigms for a Well-Ordered Society, Eerdmans, 2004. It is, unfortunately, a much smaller work than originally intended; Kuntz, a professor of philosophy at Emory, died before he could fully complete the work.

(2) Herbert Girgensohn, Teaching Luther’s Catechism, vol I, Muhlenberg Press, 1959; p. 21.

Behind all of this, as is the case with so much of Christian theology, is the epoch-making work of St. Augustine. Here the work of most importance is the City of God, written between 413 and 426 A.D. to answer the charge of educated pagans that the city of Rome, mistress of the whole world, had fallen to the barbarians because she had abandoned her ancient gods and embraced the novel God of the Christians.

In the City of God, Augustine divides God’s creation into “Two Cities,” the City of God and the City of Man. He defines and explains these two cities in several places throughout the work. Basically, the City of God is that entity made up of all the elect angels and elect men, while the City of Man is that entity made up of all the non-elect angels and non-elect men. The City of God is characterized by its love of God above all things which God has made, while the City of Man is characterized by its love of things which God has made above God Himself. At the same time, however, in terms of their membership both cities are mixed (permixta): the City of God gets her converts from the City of Man, and likewise, some members of the City of God on earth will turn out to have been non-elect men who in truth belonged to the City of Man.

The purpose of the work called the City of God for Augustine is to issue a radical critique of the Roman Empire, particularly of its claim to be the supreme embodiment of justice in this world. For classical authors, justice consisted of “giving to each man what is his own.” But on this definition, Augustine says, Rome was not a just society, for she did not give to the true God what is His own (City of God XIX.21). Rome at her best was not only not just, but fundamentally unjust. What the Romans called “justice” in their political order was merely a certain degree of social safety and stability.

So, says, Augustine of the classical political ideal of justice, “Justice being taken away, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers What are bands of robbers themselves but little kingdoms?” Here the oft-quoted story of Alexander the Great and the pirate, drawn from Book III of Cicero’s On the Republic, makes its appearance. Alexander caught a pirate, and tried to judge him for his crimes. But the pirate would have none of it: “When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor” (City of God IV.4).

Later, when Augustine develops his own idea of a “commonwealth” in distinction from the Roman idea, he made the lack of justice in the latter a major plank of his argument. Justice, he said, can only truly exist in a society ordered toward love of the true God:

…what justice can we suppose there to be in a man who does not serve God? For if the soul does not serve God it cannot by any means govern the body justly, nor can human reason govern the vices. And if there is no justice in such a man, then it is beyond doubt that there is no justice in a collection of men consisting of persons of this kind. (XIX.21)

The combination of Augustine’s idea that no true justice can be found in this world and his idea that politics in and of itself is the result of the Fall of man (City of God XV.1, 5 and XIX.15) proved tremendously influential on the first thousand years of Western Christendom. Man is not naturally political, but only political because of sin. And so, since all political orders are at their root based on sin and injustice, the issue which was of such great concern to classical pagan political theorists, namely, the issue of finding the best form of political order so as to achieve the best kind of society possible in this world, receded into the background of the Christian imagination.

Kingdoms would come and kingdoms would go, but no political order could be of more than an ephemeral concern to the Christian, who was, after all, just a pilgrim on his way out of this world and into the Heavenly World. Because God orders all government, even those of tyrants, and afflicts tyrants on people whose condition deserves it (City of God V.19, citing Prov. 8:15 and Job 34:30), the Christian must simply rest in the inscrutable providence of God regarding the shape and activities of the temporal political order under which he lives, and, if necessary, simply glory in suffering under unjust rulers for the sake of the Gospel.

This was not the whole story, however. It can be argued that Augustine was not entirely consistent with himself. For, contrary to the political pessimism he announced in City of God V.17 (“what difference does it make under what rule a man lives who is soon to die, provided only that those who rule him do not compel him to do what is impious and wicked?”), in V.19-26 he offers an intriguing defense of the legitimacy and justice of an explicitly Christian political order. Even that sort of political order would, on Augustine’s terms, be ultimately ephemeral, but he still gives it high praise in terms of its ability to incarnate justice in this world of pain and tears.

It is very important to understand that despite his very strong views on sin, the Fall, and predestination, Augustine absolutely rejects the idea that anything was created evil by God. At several places in the City of God, he issues extended critiques of this doctrine, and argues forcefully (1) that evil has no nature of its own but is a mere parasitic perversion of good, (2) that the will, when it turns away from God and honors things which God has created above God Himself, is the real source of evil, and (3) that love, whether ordered properly or not, is the chief motivating factor in all the activities of created beings. Although political orders generally speaking are for Augustine the result of a disordered love (what he calls the libido dominandi, or, “the lust for domination”), at the same time, he admits that it is possible to construct them on the basis of a properly ordered love.

This dual character of Augustine’s political thought set up the Middle Ages for the terrific battles between Christian kings and Christian bishops for political dominance of the one Christian society of which both were a part. Augustine’s basic idea of the Two Cities holds that both the City of God and the City of Man have both earthly and heavenly elements, and so neither is or can be fully coextensive with any particularly earthly political order.

Tracing these two cities in history is an extremely messy affair. Augustine devotes books XV-XVIII of the City of God to this task, but his conclusions are anything but certain. In XVIII.47, for instance, Augustine discusses the question whether there were any members of the City of God outside of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and he concludes from the example of Job that there were. Similarly, he stops tracing the history of the City of God with the incarnation of Christ (XVIII.46), and he is agnostic about the number of persecutions the Church will endure (XVIII.52-53) before Christ returns.

What it boils down to is that because of its permixta nature and because of the inscrutability of divine providence, Augustine does not think that the City of God can be easily traced in history after the definitive event of Christ. Some earthly kingdoms may partially overlap with it, and overlaps may be of varying degrees of quality, and yet even these may contain particular people who will ultimately be damned. Other kingdoms may belong entirely to the City of Man, yet may still contain particular people whom God will call out and make into members of the City of God. At any rate, the absolutely critical point is that no political order on this earth is, or can be, held to be coextensive with the City of God.

A final point of great importance is that the City of God is also not coextensive with the institutional Church. Augustine’s teaching on this point is scattered throughout the City of God, and unless one traces it carefully, it is easy to make the mistake (as some Medieval theologians did) of identifying the two. Books XVI, XVIII, and XX are especially relevant for this point, but we cannot go into the argument here.

To close this post, let it be reiterated that Augustine laid the firm foundation for the first 1,000 years of Christian political theology. Everyone who came after him read him, grappled with him, modified or clarified him, and tried to the uttermost of their strength to be consistent with this or that element of his very complex views. The story of how Christians used his monumental, yet critically ambiguous, theories in the City of God is one of the most fascinating that can be told from the history of the Church. We will continue looking at these themes as they played out in the Middle Ages proper in the next several posts.