Before Church and State
Politics, Thomist and modern
Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State is a focused study of what he calls the “sacramental kingdom of St. Louis IX” (reigned 1226-1270). But his monograph poses a challenge to the typical way the story of Western political history is told. The normal story assumes “secular” and “religious” are essential, unchanging features of human life. In the Middle Ages, these two were confused, and Popes and Emperors battled over which had primacy. The Papacy overstepped its bounds and claimed secular political power. Modern history is a process of secularization, in which the Siamese twins of religious and secular get properly separated.
Throughout the process, “religion” and “the State” remain essentially what they always were: “Within the narrative, the anointed kings of the High Middle Ages were the State, and when their ideology shifted to that of absolutism in the Early Modern Period, they remained the State, and when, ultimately, the monarchies gave way to Modern secular legislatures and secular dictators, these remained the State.” Here’s one of Jones’s challenges: He thinks this idea of “the State” is an illusion. The only reason “the State” looks like a historical constant is because historians assume the modern State from the beginning (11).
In the standard narrative, religion is also a constant: Kings use religion as political ideology and practice religion as “personal piety” (10). Once again, the continuity is an illusion. It only looks like St. Louis and an American President are “religious” in the same way if we’re assuming a modern, privatized and apolitical and a-sacramental understanding of religion.
In Jones’s telling, “religious” and “secular” did not mean the same thing in the kingdom of Louis IX as they mean today. In both theory and practice, “the State” is a modern political construct that didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. For medievals, “sovereignty” belonged neither to church nor to the state but to Jesus Christ. Not even “church” meant the same thing in the Middle Ages as it means for us, as evidenced by this (very commonplace) statement of Vincent of Beauvais (1260): “In the Church there are two powers, the spiritual and the temporal” (quoted, 2). Note that spiritual and temporal powers both exist within the church, a society that encompasses priests and kings.
Here’s Jones’s stark statement of his thesis:
I argue that thirteenth-century France was built as a “most Christian kingdom” . . . I do not mean that the kingdom of France was a State with a Christian ideology. I mean it was Christian, fundamentally. There was no State lurking beneath the kingdom’s religious trappings. There was no State at all, but a Christian kingdom. In this kingdom, neither the “secular” nor the “religious” existed. Neither did “sovereignty.” I do not mean that the religious was everywhere and that the secular had not yet emerged from under it. I mean they did not exist at all. Also, I do not mean that the mechanisms and technologies necessary for the realization of sovereign power did not exist. Nor do I mean that the idea of sovereignty was inchoate, that its integrity was awaiting the development of intellectual systems capable of giving it expression. I mean that sovereignty did not exist at all. “Sovereignty,” the “secular,” and the “religious” have existence only in the specific historical circumstances through which we give them their definitions – that is, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (18).
When historians debate about medieval church-state relations, about secular and religious, they’re not talking about the Middle Ages. They’re talking about the nineteenth century (11).
So much for Jones’s overall thesis. I’m most interested in two topics he covers in the final chapter: the political theory of Thomas Aquinas, and the rise and significance of modern political theory.