by Garrett Robinson
“Heureux l’Empire / Qui suit ses lois!”[1] So goes one of the lines from one of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s lyrical tragedies exulting, in an only slightly indirect manner, the power of Louis XIV and his state. A later work echoes the same sentiment: “Chantons, chantons, la douceur de ses lois / Chantons, chantons, ses gloreiux exploits!”[2] Louis XIV would, at least in his youth, himself mount the stage in works that illustrated through music and dance his role as the fount of all power and authority. At the same time, he busied himself expanding and defining the boundaries of his kingdom, quashing rebellion, and enforcing a common dialect of French throughout his kingdom.[3] With the Church displaced after the Reformation, and any rival communities to monarchical power deprived of their authority, such tragedies and ballets served as a new liturgy that made clear the omnipotence of the monarch and his state.
The preceding essay attempted a summary of ways in which monarchs subsumed the jurisdiction of rival communities; this essay will have more to do with the changes in thought that those sixteenth century monarchs brought about, and which not only made the modern, liberal state possible but also created the framework of thought by which the state assumed its own continued existence as the sole legitimate aim of politics. Both the idea of the “nation” and “religion” date from this time of the sixteenth century, and a serious historical analysis of the origins of both liberalism and the state demand that one examine how the thought of this period changed the vocabulary regarding politics in a way that affects states to the present day.
Before the time of the Reformation, “religion” referred to a virtue practiced by fulfilling one’s liturgical duties, and only later became a set of propositions held by an individual.[4] Monarchs began to support churches not out of an understanding that they were submitting to a particular moral tradition, but that conforming to a particular church could bring certain benefits abroad as well as provide another means to control of the populace. The move away from “religion” as a virtue and towards “religion” as some selected, chosen belief system played a key role here. “Religion,” as a belief or “system of doctrines” came to replace “religion” as actual practice during the period immediately preceding the Reformation with thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino and which culminated in the Reformation itself.[5]
When “religion” was redefined as the personal chosen beliefs of individuals, monarchs acquired a new tool with which to exercise unfettered control over their subjects. The state could, and did, take upon itself the defining of appropriate “religious” functions in order to manage the populace. The monarchs of England and Sweden are fairly obvious examples in setting up national churches, but the Catholic Church in France, Spain, and Hungary served as equally “national” churches that served the monarch first.[6] Only once their subjects were entirely subjected, materially and spiritually, to their sovereign, did the monarchical state risk religious liberalization. As William Cavanaugh points out, “it is important to see that once Christians are made to chant ‘We have no king but Caesar,’ it is really a matter of indifference to the sovereign whether there be one religion or many.”[7] As early modern kings displaced the transcendent common goods of “religion,” they filled the loyalty formerly owed to those goods with newly redefined concepts of the fatherland and the nation.
“Nation” and “patria” or fatherland (e.g., patrie in French ) suffered their own redefinitions during this period, helping to elevate the continued survival of that place once held by the pursuit of the common good. Throughout the Middle Ages, one’s patria was one’s region or province: a rather local place that one could love, indeed arbitrarily, as the place of one’s youth and upbringing. Early modern monarchs applied this term in a new way to mean the entirety of their realm.[8] As pride in one’s place of upbringing and the traditions and local communities of that place could make that person more reluctant to serve a distant monarch or more likely to revolt against him, such provincial loyalties had to go.
Much odder was the change in the meaning of “nation,” which, prior to the early modern period, had no attachment to the boundaries of a particular kingdom. In the Middle Ages, the term natio referred to vague and amusingly clumsy groupings of peoples.[9] The early modern reinterpretations of the meaning of “nation” resurrected the term to refer not to a nebulous sort of ethnic grouping but to the ever more clearly defined boundaries of the state. This change in definition also encouraged monarchs to extinguish minority languages of their realm in order that all those of the nation might speak the same language: l’Académie Française is here the most obvious example. It should strike one as odd how these kings used new ideas to call subjects from across their realm in order that they, despite sharing neither language nor culture but merely the arbitrary and invented appellation of “French,” “Spanish,” or “English,” might die on distant frontiers solely for the exaltation of their “nation.”
These linguistic and societal changes indicate a new understanding of the ends of political society. Participation of members of a community in the shared moral tradition of that community, formerly the primary realm of political life, faded as the monarchical state usurped, or at least began the process of usurping, the authority of rival communities. The state deemed institutions such as guilds or parish groups as impermissible barriers to an efficient, united, centralized, and war-ready state. The Catholic Church, to take the most obvious example, had its own sovereign to whom loyalty was apparently impermissible. The state instead proposed its own ends: its own survival as a distinct entity with its subjects receiving in turn security and freedom brought about by the demise of other societal organizations.
Hobbes made this clear in denying the existence of any sort of spiritual commonwealth or jurisdiction at all: the sovereign per Hobbes is the only valid object of one’s loyalty; attempts by a “religious” group to hold the sovereign accountable were not only inconvenient, but, according to Hobbes, “the greatest crimes that are incident upon human nature.”[10] Locke’s own Letter on Toleration hardly departs from this, as, despite niceties regarding liberty of conscience, Locke denied any possibility of tolerating members of those religions who subject themselves to a jurisdiction that is not the sovereign. He meant, of course, Catholics,[11] but he tacks on “Mahometans” as well.[12]
Where once the common good understood in a Christian sense focusing on the salvation of souls formed the final end of politics, the monarchical states of early modernity suggested instead the great promise of security: so long as a subject performed their duties to the state, they would be free to go about whatever actions they wished. The condition of submitting to the state in this manner, however, was that the state, monarchical or in its later democratic or technocratic varieties, would alone decide what activities or beliefs or memberships would remove one from the protection of the state.[13]
Where the existence of many different political communities prevented any single one from gaining absolute power in pre-modern politics, the total triumph of the monarchical state within its realm led to total control over every aspect of life including, in the end, what deserves to be considered “political life” at all. How can the state be trusted to act as a tool to convey the content of faith to the populace, then, when the state has, from its beginning, not only sought the expulsion of devout communities from political life, but has in fact tended to erect in their place a cult with which to glorify its own continued existence as the sole legitimate end of politics? Any project that seeks to use the power of the modern state to bring about a particular religious program fails to take into account the fact that the state has always considered itself a rival to and the regulator of “religious” groups.
As part of the project of criticizing the sovereign state, certain questions regarding the legitimacy of the modern use of the term “nation” should also take into account the primacy of natural communities, in particular local ones, over the artificial, commanding nation state of today. This is not meant to promote an entirely “localist” paradigm: despite a “less-cozy feeling” that larger associations may bring us, Susannah Black is not wrong in noting that “the experience of the common good here is (or should be) the experience of living in a just and well-ordered society, one in which judges are not corrupt and laws reflect natural law.”[14] The preceding narrative, however, in both this article and the three preceding ones, should cast some doubt on the ability of the modern state to be in any sense an entity ordered to natural law, as it can only ever command and never really “reason,” that is, it can never really orient itself according to the precepts of natural law. Instead, natural communities of both local and non-local sorts should play a role in creating law as communities that actually do – or should – reason together.[15] A true postliberal political theory will only come out of a politics that recognizes the problems in regarding the state as the primary political entity and seeks in turn to breathe new life into other, more natural communities and organizations.
[1] “Happy the Empire that follows his laws.”
[2] “Sing, sing, of his of the sweetness of his laws; sing, sing of his glorious exploits.”
[3] For an understanding of Louis XIV’s role in triumphing over other political organizations, especially the parlements of the provinces, see J. Russell Major, “Louis XIV,” in From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1994), 335-366.
[4] St. Thomas’ explanation of why religion is a virtue, and therefore an action as opposed to a belief is as follows:
As stated above “a virtue is that which makes its possessor good, and his act good likewise,” wherefore we must needs say that every good act belongs to a virtue. Now it is evident that to render anyone his due has the aspect of good, since by rendering a person his due, one becomes suitably proportioned to him, through being ordered to him in a becoming manner. But order comes under the aspect of good, just as mode and species, according to Augustine (De. Nat. Boni Iii). Since then it belongs to religion to pay due honor to someone, namely, to God, it is evident that religion is a virtue” (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 81, a. 2).
[5] For the change in the meaning of the word “religion,” see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71-72.
[6] In some of the countries, such as France and Hungary, one chose a denomination as part of choosing one’s faction. Thus, in both France and Hungary, the royal family remained Catholic while significant numbers of the nobility, who sought to protect themselves from expanding monarchical power, became Calvinists.
[7] William T. Cavanaugh, “’A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995): 407.
[8] For a summary of this process of redefinition, which extended from the Reformation to the Romantic era, see Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 117-136.
[9] For example, at the University of Paris, students were grouped into four nations: the French, the Picards, the Normans, and the English. The English nation “included everyone coming from the British Isles, whether he spoke English, Anglo-French, or one of the Celtic languages, but also had to accommodate Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and what not.” Huizinga, Men and Ideas, 155.
[10] This is part of Hobbes’ general theme of subjecting the ecclesiastical power entirely to the state:
“The fact of S. Ambrose in excommunicating Theodosius the emperor (if it were true he did so) was a capital crime. And for the Popes, Gregory I, Gregory II, Zachary, and Leo III, their judgments are void, as given in their own cause; and the acts done by them conformably to this doctrine are the greatest crimes (especially that of Zachary) that are incident to human nature.”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett,1994), Ch. XLII, paragraph 135.
[11] A recently discovered manuscript has made even more explicit Locke’s feelings regarding the toleration of Catholics:
“I doubt whether upon Protestant principles we can justifie punishing of Papists for their speculative opinions as Purgatory transubstantiation &c if they stopd there. But possibly noe reason nor religion obleiges us to tolerate those whose practicall principles necessarily lead them to the eager persecution of all opinions, & the utter destruction of all societys but their owne. soe that it is not the difference of their opinion in religion, or of their ceremonys in worship; but their dangerous & factious tenents in reference to the state (quoted in J.C. Walmsley and Felix Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript,” The Historical Journal (2019): 10).
This passage is notable in that it explicit that it is not the beliefs of Catholics that make them intolerable, but the imagined way toleration of them would be dangerous to the state. It is also amusing that Locke could not recognize that the state he venerated had successfully usurped societies and quashed offensive ceremonies as much if not more than the Catholic Church had.
[12] John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Kerry Rivers (Calgary, Nova Scotia: Broadview Press, 2013), 79-81.
[13] This is a particular theme of Giorgio Agamben’s:
“Far from being a prejuridical condition that is indifferent to the law of the city, the Hobbesian state of nature is the exception and the threshold that constitutes and dwells within it. It is not so much a war of all against all as, more precisely, a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else, and in which everyone is thus wargus, gerit caput lupinum. And this lupization of man and humanization of the wolf is at every moment possible in the dissolution civitatis inaugurated by the state of exception. This threshold alone, which is neither simple natural life no social life, but rather bare life or sacred life, is the always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty.”
Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 106.
[14] Susannah Black, “Front Porch and Empire: the Blessings, and Limits, of Limits,” Postliberal Thought, https://www.postliberalthought.com/blog//front-porch-and-empire.
[15] Andrew Willard Jones puts this rather nicely when he says, “[L]aws must be shared within a community with the implication that we reason as members of a community. Our practical reason takes place embedded in a community, or we might say, following MacIntyre, a tradition.” “The End of Sovereignty: An Essay in Christian Postliberalism,” Communio 45 (Fall-Winter 2018): 436.