by Garrett Robinson

Editorial Note: The Regensburg Forum seeks to be an actual forum where one can find different perspectives and ways of approaching topics within the long Augustinian tradition or within the history of Western Christianity. Garrett Robinson’s series of essays will be based upon his reflections on topics in political theology and philosophy in light of the history of the Middle Ages. The Regensburg Forum has addressed these issues from a variety of perspectives already (here, here, here, here, etc.), though we haven’t had as much opportunity as we’d like to look at the practical realities of medieval political culture. It is clear that our debates about church and state in the modern world must grapple with the fact that the church had a different institutional character 1900, 1500, 1000, and 500 years ago. And, as Robinson will argue, it may not be accurate to describe any political institutions before 1500 or 1600 using the language of “the state.”

It should be useful to have these broad considerations in mind as you read this piece and Garret Robinson’s subsequent contributions. There are a number of ways of looking at the relationship of modern liberal politics and medieval thought and practices, which TRF hopes to pursue in the future. We encourage our readers to suggest lines of inquiry and even to make their own contributions on a wide range of topics.

During one of his interactions with Carl Schmitt, Josef Pieper asked the jurist why The Concept of the Political did not speak at all of the bonum commune. Schmitt replied, “Anyone who speaks of the bonum commune is intent on deception.”[1] While, as Pieper realized, this was not an answer at all, it betrays the typical cynicism toward ideas of the common good of one for whom the state is the only vision of political life. Most political thought today shares Schmitt’s dismissal of the fundamental nature of the pursuit of the common good in political life.

This is because modern state is not a community like a guild, a parish, or a city: all of them communities in which the members pursue common ends through a shared moral tradition. The state, on the other hand, only commands its citizens to conform to its policies. Thus, it can never participate in a tradition because participation in a tradition requires consent to the content of that tradition. Instead, the state can only imagine itself as the arbiter of what terms of various religions are licit to be practiced in the public sphere under its own terms. All other allegiances that might attempt to bind their members by a certain tradition come under the suspicion, and, eventually, the condemnation of the state.

Politics dedicated to the common good cannot find its basis in the modern state because a people cannot pursue the common good absent a coherent community within which individuals share a common moral tradition. When forming a critique of modern politics and its distance from eudaimonic politics, one should keep in mind when and by which institutions modern politics came about. In short, modern political ideas of the state or sovereignty should not be read into pre-modern societies; instead, those pre-modern ideas might inform contemporary ideas on how to work past the framework of liberal politics.

There are two points to make here: first, that in pre-modern politics communities tended to act as wholes regarding moral decisions as they recognized the importance of a shared moral tradition. Second, the state, as the form of liberal politics par excellence, has never sought any idea of the common good, but only its own continued survival through absolving any allegiance to “subordinate” communities through which individuals might traditionally and normally seek common goods.

Members of pre-modern political communities understood a shared and mutually enforced moral tradition to be at the core of decisions regarding politics and law. Politics, for them, included keeping other members of the community accountable to accepted standards of their shared tradition. This meant that one had to interact regularly with the other members of one’s community and also necessitated that that community must, at least compared to modern conceptions, be rather small.

Sharing a moral tradition also encouraged communities to change that tradition as a group, and not as individuals. Thus, when Bede tells us the story of the Aethelberht’s conversion, we read how the same king compelled no-one’s conversion.[2] When Edwin of Kent converted, he did so “with all the nobles of his race and a vast number of the common people”[3]; the act of mass conversion, it would seem, was another act of a community acting as a whole in order to remain members of a single tradition and not a change ordered by the king. When Clovis converted after his own Constantinian vision, he asked St. Rémi that he might tell his people of his conversion beforehand to soften the blow of his abandoning his people’s faith, only to find at the meeting arranged for this purpose that “God in his power had preceded him, and before he could say a word all those present shouted in unison: ‘We will give up worshipping our mortal gods, pious King, and we are prepared to follow the immortal God about whom Remigius [Rémi] preaches.’”[4] None of these kings forced conversions; they in fact avoided forcing their people to abandon their ancient tradition. But not only was the Truth of the Gospel enough to convince their subjects to convert along with them, but a recognition of the need for a continued understanding of justice and common ends moved them to recognize the same faith as their king.

Force — and not consent to and participation within a tradition — is at the foundation of modern, state-based politics. When European monarchs sought to centralize their authority in the sixteenth century onwards, they attacked the communities and institutions that up to that point had regulated or governed themselves, including monasteries and guilds on a more local level and the nobility and the clergy on a more general level. Instead, nascent states reduced members of those communities to a collection of individuals who, themselves unbound from a common moral and legal tradition, became free to set their own moral parameters as their own miniature sovereigns made in the image of the sovereign state. This sixteenth century transformation both created the framework of the modern state and planted the seeds of liberalism. Because the state is so fundamentally tied with the destruction of rival communities seeking their goods, one should question any attempt that proposes the use of the state as a tool to reorient politics to certain common goods.            

The second piece in this series will outline the structure of medieval politics in order to illustrate the political reality prior to the modern age. A third will outline the development of those kingdoms into early modern states, and a fourth with explore the ways that those states changed the definition of terms to ensure their dominance as the only legitimate form of political community.

Garrett Robinson is a former teacher who recently graduated with his J.D. He writes from Michigan.

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[1] Josef Pieper, No One Could have Known, 175.

[2] Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the British People Bk. 1 Ch. XXVI.

[3] Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the British People Bk 2 Ch. XIV.

[4] Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks Bk. 2 Ch. XXXI.