The Josias Podcast, Episode IX: Before Church and State

… ایک ج futur " wardrobe havoc ins lonely mardak ress [Music] Welcome to the Gisaias Podcast. This is part of Etnault, Vodistan, in Austria, Jor, and Elliot were both preventive from being here today, but modern wage slavery. But I am joined by Alan Finister, Professor Alan Finister has been here. Before hello, Alan, how are you? He seems to be doing fine. And we have a very special guest today, the author of the brilliant monograph Before Church in the State, Professor Andrew Willard Jones. Hello, Andrew, how are you? Excellent. Andrew is in Ohio and Alan is joining us from Colorado. So the music that I began with today is the transition between the fourth and the fifth movements of Beethoven's sixth symphony. And the sixth symphony is, of course, programmatic music. And the fourth movement is the storm. And then the fifth movement is the sun coming out after the storm. And I chose it because there's this wonderful piece that you get with the sun coming out. And the music expresses, I think, a great desire for peace, which in a way is the theme of your book, Andrew, before church and state. But in Beethoven, it seems like you have, there's all this conflict. You always have the battle between light and dark. And then here in this transition, you see very beautifully the piece sort of emerging out of the conflict, whereas it seems like you want to argue that the Christian view of peace is as being more primary than conflict. Yeah, I think that that's right. That peace is primordial. It's the violence that is the eruption into it. Isn't it the disruption? The sin is not, I mean, it doesn't have proper being, right? It's a tear, a disordering of the peace. It doesn't exist in its own right. And that the peace then is the thing that is the given. And this is something that I explore in the book quite a bit, is that the conflicts that occur among men are, I think, can be read as rival versions of peace. They're all pursuing peace in their own twisted ways. And it's not, they're not conflicts over rival visions of violence far from it. Right? So, so peace is this the primordial condition that doesn't require, I don't know, it's, it's experienced rather than needing to be explained perhaps. And it seems like in modern political thought going all the way back to Hobbes, but you see this in different ways in various modern political writers. The presumption is rather that the primordial condition is violence or chaos or something. And political order is something that has to be imposed by force. That's right. I mean, like you brought, you brought up Hobbes and he's of course the person who we immediately go to because he's the clearest on this and the most consistent. And I think that's appropriate. I mean, for Hobbes, of course, it's a metaphysics, it's a material, it's metaphysics, where the cosmos itself is a place of conflict. And so man, man engage is from the beginning in a war against each other and what the emergence of political authority is not, which is I think it often misconstruing of Hobbes, some sort of a contract horizontally between men that then constitute a sovereignty or something like that. And so I think what Hobbes is actually saying is that in the warfare eventually someone comes out on top and it doesn't really matter what scale you're looking at. If you're looking at the family or the tribe or the state that there's because of the excessive warfare, it's necessary that somebody starts gaining power over the others and that it's precisely that victory in the war that makes contract possible. And so the contract is only possible once you have a third party to enforce it, Hobbes tells us. And so it's not a, and that's a real misconstruel, I think, of the social contract and people in modern political thought is they want it to be a contract between the governed and the governing. And so what Hobbes proposes it, it's rather a contract between the contracts emerged between the governed because of the reality of the violence, the overriding violence that is above them of the sovereign. And so, yeah, so that's a political theory that is rooted fundamentally in an understanding of conflict as the root human interaction. In fact, anything that's not conflict is dissembling is tactics strategy, right? It's not real. What does it you think is the prehistory of that concept of Hobbes? I mean, where do you think it comes from before him? Because it is a distinctively modern idea, isn't it? And it doesn't seem to be one of the ideas up for discussion in the ancient world. I think that lineage or genealogy is long and complicated, but I think I definitely think we don't have to go very far to get to a certain Protestant notion of sin and the way in which salvation works. That virtue is real virtue is sort of an impossibility that the total depravity is the condition of man. And that even in our being saved, that doesn't really change. So, there's definitely a step there in the reformation, but you can go further back, of course, and start telling the story of nominalism in the 14th century, I think, to find the roots of this. And it's not just sort of abstract exercise of theory, I mean, Hobbes and Locker, they're living through, if you look at just their biographies, what they're experiencing, the Wars of Religion and Civil War in England. I think there's some perhaps justification, or at least not justification, what was the right way of saying it. We can understand perhaps why they would adopt such a pessimistic view. And then, as Ian Crusade, is a pretty violent episode as well. So, presumably there had to be an additional factor in order to explain why. I guess my answer fundamentally would be that they're just wrong, that they're falling, that this is a temptation of man. If you make reality fundamentally violent, and fundamentally about violence, there's nothing that lays beyond our power. I mean, it's just a continuation of the fall of bringing everyone together. everything beneath us so that we can control it and dominate it. I mean, I don't know that I mean, I can produce a bunch of historical contacts and try to thicken it up. And so we can understand what happens better. But ultimately, this is the temptation of humanity. Yeah. So maybe let's look then at how the fact that we that we are living in a world that's been in many ways formed by Hobbes and Locke and their successors and so on. How does that hamper us when we try to understand medieval society? Well, because because we view our reading of society as common sense and rather obvious, right? So we go back and assume for the most part that because we don't view ours as our vision as historically contingent, we view it as the way it must have been then as well, because it's the way it is everywhere, all these is just reality. And so we read the source material with that in mind is we're sorting the source material into these categories of modern sociology and politics. And so we get a reading of the Middle Ages that has this conflict at root and which forces us to then see a just of dissembling a propaganda campaigns of massive scales, right? Which is what you get that the entire essentially the entirety of the Christian, medieval tradition is one giant power strategy, right? That's essentially the read of what the church is up to in the Middle Ages in modern historiography. And so you have, you go back and read and you see, you can see, of course, okay, they don't have states in a modern form. They don't have theories of sovereignty or legitimacy, but that it from a modern perspective, that doesn't mean that those things aren't there. What you actually want to read then is that what we're seeing in the Middle Ages is there coming to being in the stent and being of being clarified, right? Sovereignty is there whether we like it or not, but we just hadn't quite recognized it yet. And so we came to understand it as history progresses till we get, of course, to a sort of culmination of history in the Declaration of Independence, right? So at least in America, that's the way it's right. So that means that religion or Christianity, because we deny the existence of grace ultimately, at least the social efficacy of grace, the social significance of it, that means that language of theology, that means the actions of the sacraments, the liturgical life of the church has necessarily political propaganda purposes. And that's the way it's been largely read. And so even even people who are sympathetic in some ways to the church are often still fall into this narrative and just kind of wish the church had won, that in the conflict between the supposed incessant conflict between the church and the monarchies, and then both of their attempts to build states, it would have been better for everyone if the church had built the state, right? That's what even though sympathetic to the church sometimes seemed to be arguing. I found one thing I found problematic at the beginning of reading your book, which I massively enjoyed, was I thought you were a bit harsh to medieval historians as a group. Not a medieval historian myself, but I've spent many hours in pubs with medieval historians over the course of my life. And it seemed to me that I was reminded of R.W. Southern's statement in the Western society and the church in the Middle Ages, the volume two of the Penguin history of the Christian church, which is a pretty standard introductory text by an eminent historian to that period. And he waxes lyrical at length about the fact that the Middle Ages is defined by the identification of the church with the whole of organized society. And that this distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods in history and he says in its widest limits it's a feature of European history from constant, untimed to bold tear. And he says that the church wasn't a society, it was the society, the human Sochiata's perfecta. So I mean, he's, so I mean, I recognize that the people who aren't being reflective about it, including some historians, can fall into this imposition of modern categories onto the Middle Ages. But I'm not sure it's as all pervading as you, as you suggest. That's probably a worthy criticism. And I would acknowledge in my own personality perhaps a certain combativeness that leads me to perhaps hyperbole sometimes, but even within, even taking that into account, to recognize you have to go beyond recognizing the pervasiveness of the church or of Christianity. So simply recognizing, say that Christianity is the framework through which people view the world or recognizing that all of social reality is permeated or touches somehow the life of the church, the church is there. That can be done from entirely, in a way that's completely consistent with the basic political, sociological assumptions of modernity. So in the same sort of ways you might do it with an anthropology, with a tribe somewhere in an island someplace, and you can describe their world and try to provide a thick description of it. But you're still, I think that if we look at those, most of those histories in detail, we'll see that they're not, they're still viewing those things as the ideology, basically, that animates the political structure or the frame of reference that they have. And these sorts of can be very sophisticated and very accurate in that regard, in that way. But unless you see that Christianity, the criticism goes beyond that, that Christianity is not simply one framework through which one might view the world, but is different categorically and provides the possibility for a different type of society. I'm afraid you're missing it, that you're still falling, the ones are still falling, historians are still falling into the modern mistake. And so, yes, I mean, and I would hate to come across as not respecting what the historians, I mean, my work is of course completely dependent upon theirs. But there's still, I think it's still hard to find a work that isn't making the mistake at some fundamental level, especially if you're talking about politics. So, but if nothing is right that the Middle Ages is defined by the identification of the church with the whole of organized society, and obviously that stretches, and if he's right that stretches over a really long period of time, getting more and more intense at the centre of that period. What historians usually call the high Middle Ages, so something like from either the Gregorian Reform Movement or the first crusade until the end of the 13th century. What another thing that interested me is why you chose the end of that period of the most intense identification. Did you see as to exemplify these themes which contrast with modern misunderstandings of the Middle Ages? I mean, did you think of Louis IX's reign as the apogee of that of the church as society, or do you choose it because it's at the end or were you looking at it anyway and you thought, yeah, you thought this would be a good way of showing off because you're showing off this distinction or lack of it because I do think I do think that you have, like you said, a building of Christian civilization that mounts through that high medieval period through the 12th century. And I, inculminating in the 13th, in probably latter in four and 1215 and then moving into the establishment of the mendicin orders and the spread of the mendicin orders. And then the councils of the 13th, I mean, there's a lot going on, of course, ultimately the work of Thomas and Louis is just right in the heart of all that. So it's not how research projects begin and end up, you're studying what you are studying and seeing what's there, right? So I ended up in Louis IX and saw, it found that the church was in the 18th century. what I saw there, but I wanted to say that I studied Louis IX because I believed that period was the culmination of something. And I don't know that I still. It culmination perhaps, yes. I mean, I would say there's a clarity of vision in that mid-13th century that gets complicated pretty quickly after that. I mean, one sort of arrival wave seeing what's going on there is instead of seeing it as the culmination of the building of a Christian civilization, as you said many see what's going on there instead is sort of the beginnings of the realities of modern society that aren't yet. It's not yet fully distinguished themselves, so the beginnings of states and institutions like that. And so people will talk about the reception of Aristotle in the 13th century as being sort of a key step here. You get the idea of a Sochiitas Perfecta, a complete society that's influenced by the reception of Aristotle and that begins to move away from a medieval society and have sort of the beginnings of a modern state. And then they would see Louis IX as being sort of an early centralizer who's sort of one of the progenitors of modern nation states. He's sort of beginning to centralize royal power, which will be further centralized then by his successors. Philip the Fair will then on account of that come into conflict with Boniface the 8th and all the rest of it. So how would you respond to that view of Louis IX as being sort of. Yeah. Sure. It's important to distinguish what I'm saying. Okay, so the state, the modern state has a history. It has a genealogy. It comes from someplace, right? And we can write that. We could write that history and trace its components and its thinking and what the pieces of it are back and further as far as you want to go. And that's the way history works all the way back to the beginning and write the history of the state. And if you did that, of course you would end up putting an important place on the 13th century for all the reasons you just listed. And that's not a challenge. In fact, I feel like that works in my favor because what I'm arguing, what I want to argue, is not that you had this Christian civilization and then there came from outside some invader called modernity, right? Some spaceship lands and the moderns get out and overthrow Christianity and create modernity. What I want to say is that modernity is a Christian heresy. And so we. It comes out of Christendom. It doesn't come from anywhere else. There was no colonizers that came and brought it. And so we. What Louis builds and what he's engaged in building can quickly become the line between Orthodoxy and heresy, as we all know. I mean, you can quickly take that which is Orthodox and exaggerate it, twist it, apply it in inappropriate ways and find yourself in the worst of heresies. And I think if I were to write a history of the state, that's the direction I would want to go from. The state is. The modern state is a perversion of the Christian understanding of law and of order. Not some new creation. No, I often think. I've told myself this story about less that violence precedes society as the origin of this heresy, which I agree entirely with what you just said about modernity arising as a Christian heresy, but that it was the denial of nature itself, as you suggested before, in the 14th century, of the real existence of the nature of things, which renders this concept which precedes Christianity, you can see it in Cicero and Aristotle, that political legitimacy descends from nature. That peace and the social order of man is something which is natural to man, which seems to be the metaphysical basis for the idea that peace and not violence comes first. One thing that gives me pause in this blame the non-unless narrative for why it all goes wrong in the period after Lou the Ninth is the huge intensification of the level of violence apparently required to preserve orthodoxy in Christian society from the end of the 12th century onwards. And I'm trying to trace where that comes from, because although the legal apparatus for capital punishment for heresy is more or less in place in Roman law, even arguably from the 5th century, that still earn incredibly rare occurrence up until the late 12th century, and then suddenly we have this explosion in the allergians in Crusade and very significant levels of violence used to contain heresy for the remaining centuries of the Middle Ages. And as wondering if that's somehow connected to what's causing modernity to arise and if so, what we're causing? I think that one thing we have to do when we're going to discuss this sort of stuff is not try to hold constants. So things constant. So for ex-inhistory, everything is moving. So when you say, when we say in the earlier Middle Ages, say, there doesn't seem to be the force exerted to maintain orthodoxy against heresy, which is true, you get the first real sources for the significant concern about heresy and the persecution of heresy are not really until precisely the period of the first crusade and all this stuff getting started. But that doesn't, the question is, the question you ask is, okay, is everything else being held constant but that? Or is rather what we're seeing is the construction of a Christian civilization where what is being sought after in society? So the conversion of peoples, what does it mean to convert to Christianity? Is that being held constant? Or is society becoming more ambitious in that the faithful can convert to a Christianity that maybe in an earlier period they would have been inclined to think as reserved to the monks? And so the sort of discipline that exists within monasteries becomes something that is analogously approximated in the rule of society as a whole. And so it's maybe, yes, there's more social discipline, probably, I think that, I mean, sometimes you've got to not make the mistake of just us having more sources, right? But there's definitely, I think that's right, but it's because the pursuit of the perfection that's being envisioned is greater than was once the case. And being achieved. I mean, if you read something like Augustine Thompson's work on cities of God, the Italian communes in the 12th and 13th century, you can see precisely this. If you view, if you see the picture he paints of these cities of laity that are, that are lived by the very rhythm of the liturgy that are Christian to their very core, that it's their entire self identity is positioned that way and that the piety and life of faith of the normal lay person is of such an elevated degree that it's almost hard for us modern to believe it. Well, then it makes sense that heresy becomes something that they're more concerned about than they would have been, right? Perhaps, does that make sense? I mean, that heresy rises as an importance as a component of an increased rigor of orthodoxy, an ambition perhaps or optimism even of what's possible. Yeah, I think that is quite plausible. I, the one, when I was trying to think in my deal, historian who I felt was really guilty of, the charges you lay at the beginning of the book. And I won't say who he is, but I, but I was, the one thing that sprang to mind was a book about Italian city states, which I've been reading and it had gone through a number of additions and there was a, there was a, and the earlier additions I understand from the footnotes of the additional reading had depicted the release. religious life of the Italian city states very much in terms of conflicts of jurisdiction between bishops and and lay institutions and and the rise of various aberrant forms of Christianity and heresy and then there was there was a grudging admission which belonged only to this edition that Augustine Thompson's book had rather undermined this approach to the Italian city states and he says that at the beginning of his book he says you know everybody writes about heretics this and and and war with the bishop on this subject or that what about everybody else he says you know what was everybody else doing and then he plunges into his exhaustive study of the exuberant piety and liturgical life of these well you know once we think about it it's sort of common sense isn't it that if popular piety of popular faithfulness is increasing in intensity that error would be as well I mean that we want to use consider it's like we are obviously that's I mean that's really interesting point there's a similar point is made by Charles Taylor in his book on on secularization but he makes it not about the 13th century but about the the era of the Reformation yes and the formation of kind of a disciplinary society where Calvin and Geneva tries to sort of impose the discipline of the monastery and the whole city and so on and he sees that as Taylor sees that as kind of being finally counterproductive because the he thinks it would have been better to stay with kind of a two-track Christianity as he calls the earlier model where you have some people who are you know following councils of perfection and but then you there's patients with sort of the people who are on a slower track but there's some historian that will go so far as to argue that that Christianity following the same sort of line of reasoning is that is that Christianity really no one's really Christian until the Reformation because you just define Christianity as what emerges in the Reformation one one author who I think really does you completely fit the the erroneous way of looking at things that you've described as Francis Fukuyama in his book on the origins of political order and he's sort of he gives a threefold history of the world basically tracing first the origins of the state and then the rule of law and then accountable government and the his account of the rise to the state really follows exactly the pattern that you talk about but maybe we can talk a little bit more about why why you say that in in the kingdom of fluid the night there's no sovereign in the modern sense so I mean because the typical modern view which Fukuyama expresses very well is that it's necessary for social order that you have a boss who doesn't have a boss you know you need to have someone a final a final authority to whom you can appeal in conflict who will be able to settle the dispute and if you have multiple ones then there still has to be one you know as Karl Schmidt says the sovereign is he who decides on the exception so if there's some conflict between the multiple authorities the one who gets to decide what the exception is that's the real sovereign but on your account that's that's not what you have in in the kingdom of fluid the night you have various jurisdictions which overlap in various ways and in some areas one person has this sort of the final court of appeal and in other questions someone else is but there's no unitary authority to which you can point and say this is this is the sovereign this is the one who in this territory the buck stops at his desk yeah these are these are the sorts of questions that these are hard because I think I think we're we're often bucking up against terminology questions right so we can define a word like sovereignty in such a way that we can apply it anywhere and that may be a really useful thing to do for comparative political theory or there might be reasons to want to come up with an idea and notion of sovereignty and I think someone like Schmidt is doing this but there's that's not what I'm arguing against is is a notion of sovereignty that I think is a more everyday notion or the notion that underpins our actual political our conception of ourselves politically so I think that when we when we think of our own politics we think we think that the state is an umbrella under which everything falls right and so we may have liberties and freedoms and and rights but they all fall within this umbrella of sovereign power and this umbrella this power may it may acknowledge our rights it may protect them it may carve out little spaces for us to operate but we still have we still carry with us in modern politics this notion I don't think is any different for libertarians as much as it is for socialists okay so in modern politics they they basically conceive of the state as that sort of as that sort of an entity and that and that it's a legislator right so it's not simply a judge it makes the laws that govern the way we behave now if that so when I say and that's a vape area I suppose Max Weber and and you know it's like it's like the question is when can we when can we use the word sovereign or the word state without qualification right when we don't just talk about futile states or limited states or confessional states or one can just say the word state and it feels to me that that's like Bismarck's Germany okay so which is vapor right okay so that period late 19th century central Europe and and okay so that's what I'm contending exists neither in thought nor practice and not which which may maybe feel somewhat mundane unless you consider that unless you consider that that that is an ex that conception of sovereignty or the state is what's underpinning the interpretation of the Middle Ages normally because they're going back and seeing people striving after the creation of that right right and fighting against each other over who's going to gain that control okay so what I'm trying to argue is that that is not there in either in either thought or practice what you have instead is is definitely a conception of justice a conception that things crime exists and has to be suppressed and I there has to be trials and sentences passed and all of that but there's no notion that that descends from a legislator who you know some sort of absoluteist notion of of of descending order of of delegated authority or something like that rather it emerges from the bottom up would be a better way of saying it so in a certain time and place there's a certain person who has certain responsibilities that we would think of as being political and those are rooted his legitimacy which is another tricky word right it emerges from his peaceful fitting his fitting peacefully into that time and place and his serving of his function there so if we wanted to take some of these more expansive notions of sovereignty that some people propose we could say he's the sovereign there right if we wanted to I mean you could you could use a definition of sovereignty that will allow you to map sovereignty onto this on I know I just don't find that I find that to be I find that to not be useful a useful exercise because it creates confusion because we we have multiple meanings of the word sovereign and I would rather just stick to the meaning that I think has become dominant it seems like the modern liberal response would be that to prevent sort of corruption of political life you need to have impersonal institutions I mean you you mentioned Weber Weber is sort of the the best theorist of the impersonal and you know the advantages of impersonal bureaucracy if if we have you know and you have these these beautiful 19th century depictions of justice as a blindfolded lady right meaning she's not corrupted by personal considerations she doesn't know any of these people that she's judging she's this impersonal bureaucracy and that means that she she'll be fair right because she her own interests aren't implicated in it so it's better to have kind of this central state authority with this impersonal bureaucracy that can come in and use objective measures to judge you know who's in the right in a in a particular dispute rather than having some local authority who knows the people who are involved and who can be swayed by passion and by his relation to them. You know, this person is his nephew's servant or whatever, and the other person is his, you know, the, some enemy of his is servant, and so he's going to, of course, you know, be partial and give the judgment to the servant of his friend rather than of his enemy. How would you respond to that sort of objection? Yeah, that's a praise of the impersonal. Right. So I would start by saying the objection of corruption or the potential bias is so clearly the case. I mean, some clearly they're concerned at the time. So if you just glance through the legislation of the period is the corruption and partiality of the people who hold power is what they're obsessed about. Right. So, so your concern or our concern as moderns was theirs. Okay. So, so we can see it there. I mean, this is what the onkuturs and these these investigators that I write about are precisely what they're what their purpose is is to go investigate local authorities and see if they're behaving that way. So there is that and that's just the nature of of power, I think, regardless of the particular construction of it. But okay, so here's the here's the the major distinction. The liberal argument would be okay, given that that's the case with humanity, then an apparatus of impersonal institutions at universal institutions is the best way to deal with that condition of humanity. Okay. Right. My argument would be let's try to articulate I'll try to this is a hard one. In order to construct that impersonal rational bureaucratic apparatus, what you actually have to do is map onto the world of real people who are in real relations a stealth referential system of of persona legal persona who have certain rights and responsibilities and properties that exist with certain legally defined terms and you know entity a certain legal entity which is types of property. And you have to map that upon all of society so that everything everything can be kind of registered in this universal universal registry. Okay. And then when you face a problem, you go and you look at the persons or the and the properties and all you see in looking at those are those the previously mapped on in registered persona or properties. Right. And the real people and their real relations are okay, are invisible to the state. It must be. They must be. Right. So that what I think that's an act of evasion. Okay. So what you're you're actually that when two persons who know each other actually know each other to neighbors say and they have a real relationship with each other and they coexist in a certain way and then they get into a conflict and they retreat into the abstract bureaucratic registry of all things and people to fight a lawsuit against each other that that's actually a fixed, fixed, efficient strategy of power that they're deploying against each other. Okay. So their real relationship is actually as Frank and Joe the neighbors. Okay. So and the state doesn't see that. The state has no idea who they are and doesn't care. Can't know who they are. No means of knowing who they are. I think that works against your argument in some ways because the oncitor that you mentioned, talk about a great deal in the book and and Palomol that Louis IX creates seem like that. And as you say you suggested just now that they arose out of a concern about the corruptibility of judicial processes and but they are they are both entities which are on a national or super national level entering into the particular in order to avoid this kind of corruption. But if you go across the channel it seems to me speaking not as an illegal historian but from my yeah from my dipping my toe in here and there. That's another show. The functions are performed by the jury and in the manual jury in terms of being a witness to custom and which seems to express more the idea of treating these these two individuals as Frank and Joe and not as two abstractions. And another thing that occurred to me in that context is the fact that the English common law system because you talk in the book about the fact that because peace pre-exist when hard law appears to deal with one of these conflicts at the concrete particular level that's a patch a patch of hard law on the pre-existing peace which doesn't need to be there in the form of hard law and that that seems to you precisely how the common law system works that for matters which pertain to contract and and and relations and easements and property rights and and natural justice you don't need hard law because you you just have natural reason and and what really is happening on the ground and precedent. So there's so there were no hard laws about these things there's just a huge backlog of previous decisions based on concrete instances whereas it seems that France is precisely developing in the opposite direction with these kind of these kind of decisions being made by a quasi national institution in Paris with with these archaea going in and entering in rather than drawing from the knowledge of the local custom like the Menorial jury does. So I think we're an agreement and I think that that's that there's maybe a miss a miss reading of what's happening in France because of what happens in France later. So when when when they when when when Louis apparatus in whatever form enters into a conflict what they are after is the particulars of the conflict in that in that time and place and all of the the traditional customary components of that. So they have no this and this is the great distinction between that and liberalism is that is it they they don't they can't even see the peace until there's a rupture. I mean what I mean is like that the form that it's taken the way these people are living together as real people is not something that's even visible to the governmental apparatus until there's a conflict and then it enters into it and tries to determine what was the peace prior to the conflict and then and then tries to to do what it can to reestablish that peace and so that's where law rights these sorts of things make appearances and and you can see this you can see this fat in a fascinating way when you can see that's something like a right a right is is is in the face of a conflict between two persons one of the ways it might be solved is by essentially the granting of a right to one of them against the other and that right though is literally forgotten once peace is restored between them. So you can have a right two people could one could have a right at one point and that right only persists for as long as the conflict festers right and and it dissolves and and this is the way in which they go back and well how long has it been since that right was was was used how long has it been since there was any opposition to behaving in certain way or that way and if it's long enough then whatever than that is no longer the peace the peace has evolved has lived to change into something else and so things like law things like rights things like contracts these things are always fleeting temporary and I and that I think that's as much the case in in France and what you're describing in England is just is is is a different form of the same I think the same conception of how government behaves what government is I mean like yeah so at one point you talk about about how the as you did today you talk about how there is a narrative genealogy of the state but but but that's not the only story and it's not the main story and you're trying to tell the main story at the time in the 13th century rather than rather than looking at the the early story of the emergence of the state and and this divergence does begin to occur between between the two sides of the channel and and I'm wondering I'm wondering do you do part of the traditional story of the emergence of the state is is the is the rediscovery of the digest in Italy in the in the 11th century and and and the incorporation of of of late Roman law into the structure of European states and I'm wondering whether whether you because you don't really comment on on because you don't want to talk about that genealogy you want to to talk about the real story in the 13th century. I wonder if you think that part of that unilogical story is sound because I mean there's often an aphorism you hear in England anyway I don't know elsewhere in common law countries that under the common law you have liberties that is you have there is society already exists and you're free to do those things which you have customarily done and only in Sephora that's then restricted by positive law whereas in civilian law jurisdictions people have rights that is a list of things they're allowed to do by the government and they should ask permission for anything else but they feel like doing and do you do you think that comes from the the slow tide of incoming tide of room and law or do you think there's some other reason for this later divergent which wasn't there in St. Louis time I think this is outside my field of expertise so I'll speak as just as just as my self here I think that it's certainly the it has to be the case that the study of Roman law and not just of Roman law but of classical civilization I think in the I would I would be tempted to push it a little later and to see yes it's beginning in the in a serious way in the 14th century but perhaps as late as is into the humanist of the Renaissance where it becomes elevated studied made sort of normative for political thinking you know and that's not in any way isolated from movements in theology that complement it and you know so I think it's a very it's a very complicated but definitely the case what you're saying is true I think that that the Roman law provides the material not simply provides the rational legal tools to talk about a state but helps helps prompt it right I would I would want to push back a little bit on your point Alan because what in a previous episode with Pedro is Cardo we talked about the Roman the the idea of right in Roman law at Pedro argued I thought very convincingly that what right means for the Roman tourists even especially the early ones but even the later Roman tourists is the object of the virtue of justice so the the thing that is due to someone else in justice and it seems to me that is that's consistent with the idea of liberty is under common law or or rights in the in the way that the parliament in Louis the ninth kingdom talks about them and it's different from the idea of rights as you know these permissions from the government that you get in early modern thinking yeah I don't want to accuse a classical Roman law of that charge it does seem to me that it's that this this absolutely ties in and that and perhaps in some ways the emergence of this idea of the state is entangled with what Justinian does to Roman law right in order to justify Byzantine autocracy in the context of a very differentiated legal system inherited from the republic and the early empire so so I'm not trying to claim that the problem enters in through through the classical model of Roman law I suspect part of the problem is that is that this what this wonderful hitchhikers guide to the Dark Ages version of Roman law produced by just norm is discovered and it's interrogably convenient and it sweeps all before it but in some ways it's it's a less authentic expression of the Roman law than the messier the messier earlier version which you would need in enormous library in order to in order to apply which they just don't have because all those books are gone okay so before we before we were run out of time I want to go move now to the question of the relation of spiritual and temporal authority the title of your book is before church and state and the thesis is that you don't have two institutions the church and the state vying for power but you have various kinds of authorities working together towards a common end you have Louis IX wielding the temporal sword and then you've got there's the Pope at the time you'd climb at the fourth mostly yeah climb at the fourth wielding the spiritual sword and so on and they they're working together towards a common end and one of the things that I thought was was really really illuminating about your book is the way you you tie that to the senses of scripture and seeing how you have a connection between the the literal sense and then the spiritual sense there's a similar sort of dynamic relation between temporal authority and spiritual authority maybe you can you can say something about that sure I mean the the normal way then typical modern way of reading the senses of scripture is is as a sort of parallel glosses on the text so you have a certain text and you have the literal meaning of it then you have the allegorical meaning of it and then you have the topological the moral meaning and then you have the the anagogical meeting right and that they're kind of parallel meanings of this text and that I don't think that's totally wrong right but but what what I think more characterizes the dynamic of the of the 12th century to the 13th century is one of hierarchical dynamism so the the literal sense is your historical sense its meaning is the allegorical so it becomes really itself as it's understood allegorically and then the allegorical though is ultimately it's ultimately becomes it fully itself so the the Christ the Christ in the history becomes Christ in the reader in the topological when these internalized and then becomes in a sense then the history which is elevated by the allegorical is then internalized into the reader and the topological and so it's more perfect than it was when it was merely history and then all of this culminates in the movement to contemplation and the in the anagogical heaven when all the the senses are fulfilled in the ultimate so in a sense all the senses are ultimately the anagogical right okay so the there's a there's a parallel move here in in the power that the temporal and the spiritual power where the temporal power is there's an ascent to God that the society's being envisioned as a movement from from the state of fallen nature right so the state of sin the condition that we find ourselves in to redemption to salvation and it moves through these stages so you have the merely historical the world of things and in events which is a real world and it's tangible and you can touch it there's no denying its importance right and then and then it it gains its meaning though through faith and the allegorical and so how is the how is this world interpreted through scripture and that's also that's also the realm we might think of of the old law right the allegorical so the realm of positive law where there's a the the promulgation of of the natural law as a particular law is occurring in that sort of allegorical stage but the people who are living under it are they make their minds are maybe being illuminated by the truth and by the law but they're no longer they're not yet moving into the tropical the moral into charity right so faith moving to charity and so but that move is the move from the old to the new and it's the move that requires sanctifying grace the grace of the gospel the grace of Christ and so you have then the spiritual power which is the dispensing of grace and the preaching of the gospel in a way that isn't external but but is really understood as prophetic as the preaching of the Holy Spirit through the clergy and so you have again this dual intellectual the intellect and the will moving together from this preliminary allegorical into a moral a tropical sense and all of its culminating in contemplation or perfection ahead and so you have society as a whole the path the narrative a plot of salvation history which is exemplified or understood in the senses of scripture is is also then present in reality the social reality in which they're living yeah that makes a lot of sense that it seems like the the temporal power that continues to exist in the church distinct from spiritual power sort of in this between time between the ascension and the second coming so Pope Saint Julius the first in a letter that's constantly quoted throughout the Middle Ages by later popes he writing to the Byzantine emperor distinguishes the the authority of of Pontiffs and the power of the Royal Power and in in track date four he'll say that the reason why Christ distinguished these two was on a kind of pride, that it was given the state of humanity still wounded by sin and though in the process of redemption. It's good to have the spiritual sword and the temple sword as the leader come to be called wielded by different persons, have them cooperating towards the same end. And then after the second coming, of course, all of that as it will be handed over to Christ who has everything together. In a way that the two are cooperating in to prepare the second coming in a sense. Yeah, so that is very much an agreement with what I'm seeing. So the wielding, the spiritual and the temporal powers are of course ultimately derived from the priesthood and kingship of Christ himself and of humanity, right? I mean, the kingship and priesthood of Adam in the garden. And so there is a new Adam and the new Adam and the maybe Mokizadek in the middle there where you have the unity of the priesthood and the kingship as the primordial state, but there's a fittingness. There's a fittingness to the division of these into different powers, different orders of men. In the same way and really a very parallel to the fittingness of the division of the old and the New Testament. And that's so I actually think there's a direct parallel. I think the commentators of the Middle Ages see this where the two swords are as often exigeded as the old and New Testament as they are the second and spiritual power. And so I think that's the connection. There's a real fittingness. It's not a contingent thing that could have easily been otherwise. I mean, when we say fittingness, we mean something powerful by that, right? There is a lot of confusion of personnel. This is a strange thing about the Western Middle Ages. And you seem more comfortable with that in the book than I always feel about it. There's a confusion of clerics performing temporal functions and even more, more problematically, layman performing spiritual functions, which you don't find in the church at all prior to the barbarian migrations. And as far as I know, never occurs in Byzantium and isn't allowed in modern canon law. And also, it doesn't even seem to be room for it in Unam Sanktam. Boniface the 8th is very, and he's only summarizing the papal canonical tradition before him. Really, he's very clear that kings and soldiers excise the temporal sword and priest exercise a spiritual sword. And when our Lord Tolstant Peter in the garden of Gethsemane to put up thy sword into thy scabbard, he was telling him, "A. ultimately the temporal sword belongs to the spiritual power, but B, those who excise the spiritual sword are not permitted to exercise the temporal sword." And yet, there seems to be a lot of this swapping backwards and forwards of swords going on in medieval Europe. And you seem to more comfortable with that than the theory seems to support in when you are in your account of clemency, the false journey to the sea of St. Peter. It is the case, even in the period I'm talking about in everywhere, where I'm that I'm discussing that the priesthood, priests are not allowed to wield the sword. I mean, that is a, it's just simply not done or against the rules. And similarly, obviously, the laity cannot confect the sacraments. Right? And there's no, there is no confusion on that. In fact, they would go through them. That comes down to the inquisitor leaving the room while they torture the guy, really, doesn't it? I mean, in terms of the, of the not wielding the sword, I will never, I will not fall into the mistake of using that as some sort of apologetic for the church. I think I explicitly call that apologetic out as being nonsense, right? That, that, that, that, like I said, I think that that's the weird premise that are principal that the Hayman is more guilty than the judge, which seems strange to me. So, I mean, obviously, what, what, so that there is that that's meaningful that they maintain that distinction. Right? I, that's not what, what grows together are the institutions. The institutional arrangement, and this comes from, I think, a convergence. So an attempt, the attempt to convert the world as a whole. And so you might think of it, and I try to, in the book, I think, think of it as sort of an extension of the walls of the monastery to include more and more of, of, of life, but not as monks, but as, you know, it's, you know, it's an analogy. So, that, as this extends the idea of the pursuit of perfection socially, the institutions that govern society are necessarily including both of these movements, the old and the new, the temporal and the spiritual, right, nature and grace. And, and so there's those institutions, they're not, the law that they're enforcing is one law, one, one, one law, the new law. And they, their, their functions are divvy now, and there's different orders of society, but it's not, it, it, need not be an institutional division. And it's not, for large, in large part. I mean, part of the reason why it cannot be an institutional is they don't have institutional division, is because they don't have the sort of self-referential, complete, absolute institutions that we have, right? That's part of the point of the book. Is that, these are, these are porous, open-ended institutions, and so they can interpenetrate each other at every level, and we're not talking about a theocracy in the modern sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before, before we started the podcast, Alan was poking funny at me because on a previous podcast, he, he said, I waxed a nostalgic about the jurisdiction, the habit of my monastery, highly concrets, had in the, in the middle ages, our Abbey had, had high justice in the lands that belonged to the Abbey, meaning it was the Abbey who signed the death warrants of convicted criminals. Right. And Alan was saying that, that's, that doesn't really fit with the theory. Really, you should have the, the habit, you know, concerned only with, with spiritual penalties and so on. And there should be some temporal ruler in that territory who has high justice. How would, how would you respond to that? Um, I don't know what should be maybe, maybe that's prudent. I know that the way the hierarchies, the way these things work would be that one who has holy orders can wield the temporal, but it doesn't work the other way. Right. Like, that's not in the theory. I mean, I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh, I mean, the theory doesn't say that it doesn't, it only, it can work one way, but not the other. I mean, I know that when, when we, when we hear about commended arbitrary abbots and 16 year old lay bishops and things, we, we winch. Rats more, when we hear about the abyss of highly concreutes, dealing with law and order in, in the Vinavalde. But, but some, but I, but in, in, when you read the theory, it seems to work, it seems to work both ways. And, and it seems the theory seems more plausibly incarnational in that you have two adjusters in Christ, you have two natures perfectly united without confusion or division. So, uh, so in before the, before the barbarian migrations meant that the only literate people left were bishops and monks in the west, you, you, you had the same kind of relationship and still in Byzantium while that was going on. You have the same kind of relationship between the spiritual power and the temporal power, perfect union without confusion or division, whereas there seems to be a kind of mingling involved in this sort of situation. Part of it was describing. Um, but I, but I would, I would be, I would be lazy asses, uh, concern that, that if someone has both temporal and spiritual power, they will either actually or at least be suspected of using one for the, using the wrong one for the sake of the other. Right. I mean, and do you think that maybe this is the, the prudence of the church, then over time is why they have been inclined us to create more, more strict divisions between these things. But what my, my point is not, my point is that there's no reason why a priest can't also be a king. In principle, oh, if he was sinless, like a lulled, I mean, in principle, a priest, you know, the king can be ordained to the priesthood. But it, and, and, and that. Um, so, so it's conceivable that those would fall on one man, like Adam, like the Lord, right? So it's that, that's, but maybe that's sort of aside the point, except that if we see that, um, the, the, I would be hesitant to draw the incarnation, the incarnational, um, human divine distinction to, [BLANK_AUDIO] too hard because we are talking everything we're talking about here as human. Right? I mean, human beings, the priesthood in the church militant moving through time in space is confecting material sacraments with buildings and men who are eating and are born and are, I mean, it's not, so the temporal permeates the spiritual at every level in the church. So I- The church isn't a human power as such, I mean, the church is a divine power. In the sense, I mean, at least in the sense that the word human power is used in Dinktartis Humane, for example. Well, yeah, I don't- I'm not going there. No, I mean it, what I mean is that it's a- the church militant on earth is made up of men. Yeah. Right? And of all the things that that implies. I mean, that it's temporal. It's not- there isn't a- there isn't just- there- in this transitory period of men through history, the spiritual and the temporal are intermingled, right? At every level. I would- Right. But I mean, this gets in a way to a question that a lot of tomas have raised about your book, which has to do with, you know, one of the main controversies in tomasism in the in the past century, the controversy over nature and grace. It's- yes, all these people are men. But one way of- of conceiving the- the relation between temporal and spiritual power is with respect to two common goods. You say, there is the common good of the divine nature in which we share through grace and to it- and we- we participate in that nature through the sacraments, which are the instrumental causes of grace in the human soul. And you say, okay, the- this- the spiritual power, the priest who wielded that authority, they are directly concerned with what is directly ordered to that common good, the common good of divine nature. But then you also have a- a human nature that's not destroyed by grace, it's elevated and perfected by grace. And there is a temporal common good, which is the natural happiness of the life of the virtues. And that is sort of- disposes you to the reception of grace, but it doesn't cause supernatural grace. And you- the way of conceiving it would be well the- the wielder of the temporal sword, he's directly concerned with what's ordered to that temporal common good of human nature. And he has to in a certain way subordinate that common good to the supernatural common good. So he has to order temporal peace, temporal happiness in such a way that it- it helps people to receive the supernatural good of participation in divine nature that comes through the sacraments. But his- his authority derives from the natural common good, whereas the authority of the priest derives from the supernatural common good. And those two are are related, but again, they're without confusion. And it seems like Alan's questions- you could understand them as saying, well, isn't this- this having one person exercise roles in both sort of lose that distinction of two goods? I wonder though. And then again, I hate to say this, but I always kind of have to is that- is that I am- I am a historian rather than- than a- that a real systematic theologian, right? So when I- when I work- when I start delving too big into this, it is a bit of an amateur endeavor. So I hope you're charitable. But the- the- the distinction- what I would be hesitant to do is to attempt to line up distinctions too rigidly. So here's what I mean. The Old Law- following Thomas here- the Old Law, we would say, okay, there's kings and there's priests, right? But- but Thomas says that both of them are specifying the natural law. One in so much- so the so the judicial precepts are specifying it with relation to man's love for each other. And the ceremonial precepts for man's love for God, but both of these are- are the natural law being specified. And there's priests who- who sort of govern the ceremonial and there's kings that govern the judicial, but not- there's our hard lines between these things. And so you have- you have in the Old Law the functions of priests and king are these sort of anticipations of them. And we're not getting that hard- nature- grace division there, right? And- and I think that when you move into the new law, you want to be careful not that- when- at least when you read Thomas, he's not- nature and grace is underpinning the work. Of course, right? There's no doubt about that. But I'm not so sure that it's underpinning the way he's understanding law and the functioning of different offices within law. So the spiritual and the temple power is make appearances in Thomas's work directly only in reference to the specification of the natural or divine law in human law that there are two different types of human law givers. And- and it's in passing, right? That he does this. And so I- I think it's true that- that you have in- I think the division that if you want it- the- the division between a better division between the spiritual and the temporal would be to look at it as the old and the new, which- which includes a lot of the nature and grace discussion that we're talking about, but in a- in a let- but in a more muddied way, both nature and grace are present in the old. Both nature and grace are present in the new, right? And- and the spiritual and the temporal sort of run from top to bottom. They're present- they're present in the beginning, they're present in the end and they're- they're- they- they maybe change their functions or their relative positions to each other, but they're not. But they're always co-existing, right? But- Thomas- Thomas makes this argument in the day Regno. He starts off with talking about kingship in a- in a natural way. And then he's sort of- I know it's an unfinished work, but he- in Sevis, it's Sevis, he climaxes with this argument that truly the one who is to be called king is the one who can bring the multitude to their final end. Right. And because that final end surpasses nature in this world, therefore the- the only one who truly fully qualifies for the title of king is Christ himself. And then he says, thus in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom has been trusted not to earthly kings, but to priests. And most of all, to the chief priest, the successor of St Peter, the vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to him all the kings of the Christian people are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ himself. So he- he- he- we think that- that the relationship between the two orders is- is- and the- and the surpassing nature of the- of the end to which man is actually called in this sort of providencies, is- is crucial to the distinction between the clergy and the laity and between temporal rulers and spiritual rulers. And I was- when I was reading your book, I was- I was reminded of- an argument Christopher Dawson makes as to why Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800. He argues that Charlemagne was- was becoming- was- was trying to appropriate both swords. And the title being- was too dangerous. And then this tendency he had of having himself be called David was- was he speculates making clear the third very nervous, um, uh, that- that Western Christendom was going to be transformed into some sort of caliphate. And that he precisely wanted to give Charlemagne the title Roman emperor, because it had- for a very traditional reason for which the title was originally instituted, that it- in a certain sense it's a lower title than a title of king. And it kept the temporal and lay order properly- properly slotted in underneath the spiritual and clerical order rather than both ending up as chapter for the Western- Christian caliph. You know, the- the- what- what- what- uh- where am I going to go? The problem- one of the problems is- is trying to lock down the meanings of things. So if- if the papacy is- so I'm going to innocent the third late 12th century into the 13th century, that the papacy holds the fullness of kingship. But the fullness in the same way as it does the fullness of the priesthood. But the fullness of kingship is- is the redeemed new law kingship. not known. And which fulfills the kingship of the old law. It's fulfillment, but the kingship that enforces law that wields wars, that's the kingship of the old law. This is what Innocent Argus and so that when he's talking to kings, he is assigning them that role in the economy of salvation is that you are the kings, you know, of basically of the old law and that I hold the fullness of kingship, which is the reestablishment of the ministry of Mekizadek, Mekizadek, the reuniting of the priesthood in the kingship, but it's precisely because he has that fullness of kingship that he doesn't wield the sword because the sword is not the fullness of kingship, right? So there's, I want to articulate what I'm getting at. We have to allow for that sort of dynamic hierarchical fulfillment that you leave between the testaments and not try to make a constitution where there are kings and priests and they have relationships to each other that are stable. Like I don't, I think that's a misunderstanding of what the people in the Middle Ages, what they were getting at, right, when they talked about these things. Okay, we are, sadly we're running out of time, but I mean, we've gone, we've gone over our usual time of an hour anyways, but before we end, I did want to speak a little bit about what are sort of the consequences for us as Catholics living in 2018. And thinking about how the sort of modern world has progressed and this impersonal understanding of law and political community has ever more sort of destroyed the piece that you talk about, you know, you talk about atomization and individualism and so on. And in part, that is a consequence of the kind of Viberian bureaucracies of state and economy that we live under. So what do we do now? Yeah, one of the wonderful things about being historian is that we get to, we get a little cop out that we say, that sounds like someone else's problem. Right? What a just a cop out, of course. You know, you know, I've been thinking about this and I, one of the things that I've revealed, right, what I've come to understand is that things like knowing your neighbor, talking to them, like being friends with them, helping them is a political act. Because when you do that, you're forming a realm of human existence, a social space that the state knows nothing about, can't say anything about, doesn't see, isn't in control of. And more of that weakens the sovereignty of the state. So the sovereignty of the state is the actual sovereignty of the state, like the realized sovereignty of the state is extended to the extent that we come to approximate what modern sovereignty supposed as human nature to be. So the nastier we become, the more contractual we become, the more self interested we become, the more we view each other in the sort of way that modern political theory stipulates that human beings are, the more the modern politics become, actually becomes in reality, what it claims itself to be. And so undermining that, I mean, that might sound a little revolutionary, I don't know, but like, like knowing each other and solving our problems internally, I think St. Paul has something to say about this, and not running off, not running off to the state, right? Might be something to do. I was struck, also when reading your book, dug up this memory of a, when I was a child, I first asked my parents what the state was, and they gave me the very very indefinite one, but I was suspicious of this one. And you, we had a queen and we had a government that I didn't know why we needed this thing, one of the most of these acts of the frequency. That's excellent. Well, thank you so much, both of you, Alan and Angie, thank you for coming on. It was really wonderful to speak to you. I loved, absolutely loved your book, and we could keep on talking about it for hours. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]