Before Church and State
Andrew Willard Jones, Feb. 2020,
Thomistic Institute Chapter, Harvard Graduate Students.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jos9xj0m8mY
This is an exciting time for Catholic political thought. There is whole lot going on as I’m sure a lot of you are aware and part of this is because the post war dream of a catholic friendly liberalism has lost a lot of its credibility and because a lot of the old loyalties that held the two major political coalitions of the c20th together have largely dissolved. Most obviously with the communists gone conservatives are finally looking at what libertarians believe and repudiate it. Which I at least find invigorating.
So, as Catholics we find ourselves in a situation where we can get to revisit and honestly read our tradition’s social thought, without manipulating it to fit into prior, essential partisan, agendas and this is also exciting.
Now one of the direction that this new vitality is going is being called post-liberalism. Which at its simplest seems to be just a suspicion that the assumptions that underwrite liberalism, most directly, that society is made up autonomous subjective utility maximising individuals, and that the proper role of politics is to facilitate this maximisation as much as possible, that these assumptions are under suspicion.
Within post-liberalism however there is emerging a wide range of modes of political thought for example the National Conservatives are attempting to reestablish the nation state as the primary unit of social cohesion, you have a revived christian left-wing that is seriously and thoughtfull capitalism with moral decay and then of course there are various forms of integralism most of which advance the notion of some sort of confessional state, or at least the idea that the state needs to be oriented toward the supernatural end of man.
Now it seems to me that one thing that these various post-liberalism have in common is a tendency to accept the structures of contemporary politics. There tends to be an implicit machine model in play where the structures are a neutral mechanism and the outcomes produced by its operation are determined by the inputs put into the machine. So the problem with the current order for example, is that it is directed to a false end say wealth, and what we need to do is redirect it toward the proper and true end and make the appropriate modifications. What I want to do today is challenge this tendency by pointing out something that most of us already really know, which is that the extrinsic structures of society are integral to the anthropological assumptions that underwrite the ends being pursued. This means that rather than a machine processing different inputs we should think of society as a piece of architecture. Where form and function are two aspects of the same thing.
A true post-liberalism then won’t be a modification of the liberal structure but a new one entirely. By looking at societies that were pre-liberal and were therefore structured in a non-liberal way we might get some insight into what such an architecture might look like.
So I’m going to start by giving a description of liberalism and its dynamics and then I’ll shift gears and talk about St Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval order and then bring them back together in the end.
The most fundamental concept in modern politics is clearly “the state”. But why is the state a state and not a club or company or gang or church? What is the state? By state we ought to mean at least what turn of c20th thinkers such as Max Weber meant: a state is an entity holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain geographical area. The state is the entity that decides when and how force is to be used, there is no beyond it among men and so ultimately conflicts terminate with its decision followed by its action. States are sovereign. Such sovereignty is conceptually ubiquitous. Manifested most clearly in law it extends everywhere and everyone acts within it as a legal persona, each of these personae has a particular battery of rights and obligations and its actions are always capable of being described through these rights and obligations. When I walk down the pavement as a citizen I have a right to leave my house and use this particular piece of property in just this manner, the sovereign can look at me and make sense of me within its categorical framework through its language through its registry of things and persona. My actions are capable of being accounted for within the preexisting schema and so judged and if necessary restrained. Within this registry of the state every person is a legal persona of some sort and each and every thing is a piece of legally defined property of some sort. This is the foundation of its sovereignty.
Following John Milbank I would assert that such sovereignty emerges as a component of the modern assumption of a primordial violence.
Within this understanding humans are engaged in interminable conflict with each other and with nature itself. The force of the state does not eliminate this fundamental war of all-against-all but rather, in a manner of speaking, decisively wins it. And so subdues the wills of the many under the will of the one. And the familiar Hobbesian form, the state’s violence is so overawing and so predictable that the individual determines that it serves his self-interest better to make contracts with his fellow men, than to engage with them and so the state in combat. And in this manner competition comes to replace open warfare.
Conceptually this works, because the contract is a device that incorporates the adversarial interacitons of individuals into the structure of the state. As a legal construction the contract becomes a part of the ubiquity of the sovereign state that enforces it and the contractual relationship becomes, in effect, an extension of the state apparatus.
Through a contract the state is invited into a human interaction, and the actions of the contracting parties become imbued with its legitimate force. Hobbes understood this when he posited the Sovereign as coming into being not through a contract, as he is often supposed to have done, but rather that contracts come into being only once a sovereign has emerged from the primordial conflict. Only one man’s victory over other men makes the defeated men capable of making a binding deal. And their social contract is with each other and not with the victor. The contractual relationship becomes possible only because the prior hegemonic relationship is solidly established.
We need not be here dogmatic Hobbesians in order to capture the essential point, that the making of contracts brings relationships within the sovereign registry of personae and property and so structures those relationships accordingly.
With the forging of a contract the wills of the contracting parties and the will of the enforcing state become one. It follows that if all peaceful person-to-person relationships are contractual they are all instances of the state’s subtle and often complicated sovereign will. This is Hobbes’ point.
Understanding this helps us to see the illusory nature of the public private divide within liberalism. Through contracts the parties’ private arrangement becomes effectively legislated and therefore grounds for coercive state action, it becomes a political relationship.
Because real difference between persons is understood as the source of conflict and so also economic friction, liberalism seeks to map on to all human interactions the sovereign matrix of abstract personae properties rights and contracts, thus eliminating real personal difference in the self-referential registry. To register all relationship as contractual agreements between personae with fungible rights is to eliminate qualitative relationships in favour of quantitative transactions, collapsing the wills of persons, into the single will of the now corporate sovereign.
And so the primordial warfare is replaced with the structured haggling, and lawsuits that occur within the sovereign’s idiom. The subject’s translation of their relations into this language is that submission of their will’s to the sovereign’s that peace requires. As long as they move in his will the relentless conflict is peaceful by definition. This totalised public rationality is the liberal State’s path to a type of freedom and peace.
But this path is severely compromised. Indeed the sovereign state is not nearly as strong as the above description may suggest. For example the state cannot comprehend, nor even see, a conversation my wife and I had in our living room last night. If it were to look, if we were to bring lawsuits against each other for example, all it would be able to see and so narrate, is a study about contractually bound rights bearing citizens, engaged in legally allowed or forbidden activity, but that is simply not what happened. These concepts never occurred to my wife and I, and to read them back onto the events of that evening is simply to lie. To opportunistically to re-write history in the language of liberalism in order to use the coercive apparatus of the state against each other.
All such real personal, rather than abstract and enregistered relationships, constitute an ever present mitigation of the state’s sovereignty. For example I have some sort of real relationship with the local shopkeeper, I have no such relationships in the stock market. Because our relationship is, in at least some measure, qualitative and prior to registry of personae and property, it is possible that I might come to blows with the shopkeeper, or conspire with him against another, or allow my loyalty to him and his shop to distort the price mechanism and so harm economic efficiency. It is inconceivable that I should act so with the stock market.
When the state looks at an interaction with the shopkeeper it can see only parts of what really happened, and so its sovereignty is not fully realised. What it controls is not what is really there. When it looks at a transaction on the other hand, it sees exactly what happened in its totality because the transaction was contained within the categories and procedures of the state’s registry.
The first type of encounter is in some measure unpredictable and inefficient, and so the liberal drive to make more and more of society operate merely in the registry and within the state’s proper supervision. This drive is clearly in our everyday lives. Not long ago I went with my boy’s outdoor club on a field trip to a local museum. It was an official outing of the organisation, and so even though I was driving my own children there was a pile of paperwork that had to filled out, permission slips, medical forms, car insurance verification and so on. As I drove my own children in my own vehicle to a public museum which I could have visited on any given day, I was no longer simply their father living in the private realm of familial relationships, rather we had been enregistered. I was now a sense a deputy of the liberal regime and our day trip was an action that occurred in the state with all its pieces duly accounted for.
The state could now make sense of our roles and what we were up to and so we were now prepared to defend our actions in court. This is a particularly absurd example no doubt, but the dynamic it reveals is increasingly common. Even if often unnoticed. Real qualitative relationships are steadily pushed aside or at least overlaid by enregistered quantitative relationships. Within the assumptions of primordial conflict that underwrites liberalism this move is seen as a positive development. This is so because sovereignty is understood as an always contested constant.
From the conclusion of the first human to human encounter, the first encounter marked by fear and self-interest and so an immediate and mutual preemptive war, a sovereign emerges, he is the victor and he has sway over the conquered even if it be but one person. The victors of these original encounters then turn immediately on each other and so ever larger sovereignties emerge. The state is merely the up-to-this-point the most successful combatant in a certain region. Externally it remains engaged in the primordial war with similar sized sovereignties but more importantly internally its hegemony is everywhere and always being threatened by the lingering or emergent partial sovereignties of smaller conquerors with smaller domains. Powers that would unseat it or carve out little kingdoms of their own. The war never really ends and sovereignty, power, is its prize as Foucault writes:
“Isn’t power a sort of generalised war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and State? Peace would then would be a form of war and the state a means of waging it.”
Such a conclusion is unavoidable if we accept the now humdrum assumption that as Pierre Bourdieu concluded ‘the gratuitous act is impossible’. If a gift is impossible if all giving is really a concealed of taking then Hobbes’ logic of sovereignty is it seems unavoidable. To the extent that men are not in fact warring to that very extent they are necessarily living under a sovereign of some form. But each such sovereign is being constantly put to the test. Constantly either growing in strength or else being displaced by another.
We see this in modern liberalism in its tendency to understand any realm not regulated by the state as an area regulated by the domination of lesser powers. This statement might seem rash but a little reflection bears it out. For Ludwig von Mises, if humans are not engaged in contractual relations they are necessarily engaged in hegemonic relations. They are the only two options, and contractual relations occur only under the hegemony of a sovereign, sovereignty is therefore constant even if the state is not the only sovereign on the field. According to the exact same logic left-liberals and post-modernists understand the fields of inter-personal relationships, of families, of church, of language itself, as battlefields on which would-be despots manoeuvre within the space left by the bigger sovereignty’s lack of completeness. What such postmodernism has revealed is that which Hobbes has already shown us: power is not merely the work of positive political structures but penetrates into every aspect of human interaction. According to this view people are engaged in a constant and often obscured struggle over the control of power structures that subsist as much in culture, art, sex, entertainment or philosophy as they do in politics. None of this a challenge to the concept of sovereignty, it is rather its foundation.
Whomever happens to have the power in a particular realm happens to be the sovereign there. The project of liberalism then is to press the victory of the liberal state and the particular idiom of sovereign order that it speaks, across these battlefields. The Commons must be enclosed; the hold of the church broken; standard education provided; commercialisation extended; family structures or gender roles eliminated. In short the registry of rights bearing persona and their property must be extended into these realms through its ever extending complexification. This is what liberalism calls progress. This progress is the steady elimination of power structures from which rival notions of justice can be sustained and so conflicts emerge.
Liberalism’s conquest however cannot be merely external. That is not how power works. As the most sophisticated liberals understand people must be educated into liberty, they must be enlightened. The family for example truly only loses its rightful hegemony when people begin to actually see it as an association of personae, and not as something integral to their very person-hood and so something capable of common goods. They must begin to actually see the world through liberal lenses, they must begin to live in the state’s registry.
The dynamic of this education is one of descent, wherein the presupposition of ‘man as fundamentally at war with his fellow man’ becomes progressively fulfilled. The anticipated conflict shapes the actual relations between men and direction of its realisation. Take greed for example, the presupposition that men are greedy leads to the creation of an apparatus that provides a peaceful and profitable path to greedy behaviour which, in turn, leads people into the vice of greed which demonstrates the need for the juridical apparatus and the desirability of its penetration into the world of real relations. Because men are greedy my son’s outdoor club must protect itself from lawsuits through the extension of the apparatus that facilitates people’s greed and this in turn reinforces the notion that such lawsuits are somehow legitimate. A father’s grasping lawsuit against the club becomes literally nothing personal. He becomes merely a plaintiff suing an insurance company over a contract violation.
This is how the actual sovereignty of the state is extended to more closely aligned with its self-asserted sovereignty. The universal yet fictious registry of all people and all things becomes real not so much through the positive extension of the juridical State, but more fundamentally through the private conforming of the real to it. This is how real Power works. Take our homes, the state can see them only as property, any meaning that connects us as persons to a certain place is necessarily invisible to it. As we increasingly treat our homes as mere property however, the state becomes penetrate more deeply into the reality of things. As we become more liberal more of our real lives fall under the states’ gaze and so its sovereignty is extended. This is how the liberal panopticon is formed.
The distinction that matters in understanding the power of the State is not therefore that between the so-called public sector and the so-called private sector. The distinction that matters fundamentally is between those aspects of our real lives that fall within the registry merely and those which do not; which aspects of our lives have been conformed to the will of the sovereign and which have not. What is more we can see theorists have located sovereignty in the wrong place. Sovereignty is not so much an attribute of the sovereign entity that stands over and against its subjects, sovereignty is in the citizen’s soul. To ask what the sovereign can do, to ask what power it has, must be to ask what kinds of person the subjects have become, to what extent have they become incorporated into the sovereign. This is Hobbes’ corporate sovereign. Understanding this is to understand that all sovereignty is necessarily popular sovereignty.
Liberalism becomes more real, as through vice, human nature comes to approximate what liberal theory always supposed it to be and so the law comes to structure through its penetration of the real, the very soul. At its hypothetical terminus the registry would be reality itself. Persons would be their personae, places and things would be merely property, and physical violence would become impossible within the constant conflict and relentless sameness of the now actually ubiquitous sovereign will. And in such a way the accuracy of Hobbes’ diagnosis and the reality of his cure would come fully into being simultaneously at the end of a single integral process of a history. Total sovereignty and total conflict are inseperable. At the limit man is totally violent and totally subdued by an even greater violence, like in a prison.
In opposition to such liberalism Christianity asserts an anthropology of peace that is rooted in real difference. A father and a son for example live together in real differentiation, this differentiation is the foundation of their peace. Rather than based on contracts the parent-child relationship remains largely based on things like duties, self-sacrifice, obedience, gifts and ultimately love, all things that rely upon a fundamental inequality, a real qualitative difference between persons. It is in this difference that they form a family at peace, a truly common good, a good that can only be had when it’s had together. The parent-child relationship retains an ever diminishing, but seemingly irrepressible presence within late-liberalism because ultimately liberalism cannot find a way to fully enregister children - to finally either denounce parenthood as oppression and liberate humanity from its sway, or else make children simply property. This resilient parent-child relationship demonstrates the incompleteness of the liberal project. The family relationship remains at least for a time and at least in some parts somehow outside or beyond the liberal order. It demonstrates the reality of human relations incapable of quantification and registration, making manifest in our everyday lives the gap between the registry and the real. Which makes it a threat to liberalism and so the object of its aggression.
In juxtaposition, to the contractual norm in liberalism, familial type relationships which are an anomaly within liberalism were the foundational norm for pre-liberal Christian society. Indeed we should not have too much trouble imagining such relationships extending beyond the immediate family in ever bigger circles involving more and more the people with whom an individual interacts, even to the point of encompassing an entire society. Entering into this imaginary world is to enter into the world of the pre-liberal Middle Ages. Lets look at Aquinas’ description.
St Thomas writes:
“The exterior principle that inclines us toward evil is the devil, on the other hand the exterior principle that moves us to the good is God, who both instructs us with law and assists us with Grace. Law is an exterior principle of human action”
This is of crucial importance because such exterior principles are in a sense secondary in human actions. Interior principles, that is, habit virtues and vices are primary. St Thomas’ entire legal theory rests on this distinction and on the manner in which law interacts with habit, on the movement of the exterior to the interior. Laws are, as St Thomas said, propositions of practical reason ordered toward action and Thomas tells us that in practical matters man is a part of a community intrinsically, and it is the happiness of this community that is the ultimate end of action - which Thomas calls the common good. Therefore every true law is directed toward this common good, social happiness. Because of this laws must be shared within a community with the implication that we reason in practical matters as members of a community. Our practical reason takes place embedded in a community, or we might say following MacIntrye, a tradition.
Answering the question: “what am I to do”? involves intrinsically the reason of the community, its ordering of means towards the common end. This is ultimately what Thomas means when he tells us that human law is the determination of the natural law, and that such determination or specification is necessary for moral action.
Table manners offer a simple example. As children we are taught to chew with our mouths closed, why? Because to chew with our mouths closed is to show respect our parents to honour our fathers and mothers the natural moral law follow to its relative determination in this particular society through the human law of chewing with our mouths closed. What would the law mean without such specification? how would one go about honouring one’s parents if we didn’t share with our parents a matrix of positive actions that made such abstract commands concrete? In practice in fact we normally abstract the general law from the particular laws. This means that good human laws exposes us to true natural moral law whereas unjust laws expose us to distorted natural law.
A related consequence of the social nature of law has to do with the formation of habits. Law creates habits. The purpose of all law is to make men good. Human laws aims at instructing men who are not yet perfect and guiding them into the wisdom and prudence that will enable them fulfill the highest levels of the natural moral law through simply being themselves. Prudent people create good law, good human law, and is the mechanism through which the less prudent can participate in their prudence, and in doing so can have both their desires disposed towards the object of the virtues and their intellects shaped to recognise the truly good. In other words to become prudent themselves. As they grow into prudence and all the particular virtues it brings with it, they become freed from the law, not because they can break but because it has been internalised into a second nature, it has become who they are. It becomes second nature for the child to not only eat with his mouth closed externally, but to do so as an aspect for what it means to be a respectful son or daugher internally. Their prudence allows them to be in a word, polite, or in a more general sense just.
This prudence though is culturally bound the prudent man of one society is not the same as a prudent man of another, he has been shaped by his society’s law he has become a good citizen of his particular city as Thomas following Aristotle would say. We become the mature people we are through such shaping, indeed as we move through life most of our action is habitual. This is a fact that modern phenomenology has helped us see dramatically but already present in Thomas. We are initiated into a linguistic community through an education that is first external but which is steadily internalised to constitute simultaneously, the subjects that we are, and the world of objects that we encounter. The exterior world appears to us through our habits, and law is the mechanism through which habits are transferred from one person to another. The way in which people come to inhabit the same world.
Thomas concurs with Aristotle that it is our ability to speak that most clearly demonstrates that we are social by nature because it is through language that we can share what is just and unjust what is right and what is wrong as well as what is useful and what is harmful. Developing the habit of our language and internalising our laws, most generally understood, are the same development. In a proper society law leads to virtue and to be a good citizen means to be a good man and in turn a good legislator. Virtuous citizens move together toward their common good as friends, sharing the habits that govern their everyday life, while their prudence externalised as instruciton or law, steadily creates new good citizens and governs the problem of novelties or the initiation of new projects. This is peace simply, in which Thomas tells us the whole multitude is the primary legislator.
This reading of Thomas is buttressed when we consider his treatment of law after The Fall. Thomas tells us that after sin the natural law was increasingly blotted out from our hearts because of our vicious customs and habits, because of our false human laws. Collectively we sunk ever lower in a downward spiral as our vice produced corrupt law which formed people into ever deeper vice. This was a process that took time and that was social. As our wills became deformed so too did our intellects. Reason itself lay in tatters as the natural moral law was increasingly replaced by what Thomas calls the law of the stimulate to sin, with concupiscence, with sensuality and an animal like pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Indeed “the law of nature was destroyed by the law of concupiscence”.
The most general precepts of the human natural law to love God and to love our neighbour became increasingly distorted into idolatry and injustice. This was the state of nature, the Age of the natural law, as Thomas and the bulk of the tradition simply calls it. In this situation law even proper law takes on a coercive character. In charity a boy who obeys his father because he loves him and wants to becomes the man his father wants him to be, and the father instructs the child only toward the common good. Once sin enters however, the boy rather avoid the discomfort of consciously chewing with his mouth closed. Lacking a proper love for his father he would rather seek the pleasure of smacking away, and so the father’s law must carry penalties in order to be effective. Fear of punishment becomes the first step towards the internalisation of law towards virtue and wisdom and therefore towards freedom from the law.
But this now coercive law could lead to true virtue only if it was in fact a specification of right reason, if it was made and enforced by an actually prudent legislator. As humanity descended after The Fall such prudence became harder to come by. Rather, people were initiated into more or less unjust regimes and becoming a just citizen was more like becoming a good thief and less like becoming a good man. Indeed as Thomas says “Through the wickedness of tyrants subjects fall away from the perfection of virtue”.
Here we find ourselves perhaps back to our discussion of liberalism and especially of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes of course imagines man as totally depraved as completely dominated by the law of the stimulate to sin by the law of sensuality. There is nothing left of Aquinas’ natural perception of, nor desire for, the truly good. Aquinas can be seen to posit a Hobbesian picture of sorts as a limit concept but for him humanity could never actually attain such fallenness. For Aquinas man’s nature retains its fundamental orientations and the most basic principles of the natural law can never be entirely effaced. This is why humans no matter how fallen are still capable of sin. Man becomes beast-like perhaps, but he cannot actually become a beast as Hobbes explicitly presents him. For Aquinas the love of God and the love of neighbour becomes obscured and so the love of self comes to dominate. For Hobbesian liberals, the love of self is all there every was. This then is the decisive difference between the two approaches: is violence a disorded peace? or is peace a mere tactic of violence? Are all wars fought for peace? or is peace a continuation of war? Do we have an ontology of violence or one of peace? These is what Milbank has called the two transcendental codes through which history can be made sense of.
As we’ve seen, for Hobbes the inevitable consequence of man’s condition is the construction of sovereign states through the submission of mens’ wills to the will of the stronger, who become ultimately the man-made God, the Leviathan. Such submission is Aquinas’ very definition of slavery and Hobbes agrees, for him sovereignty is nothing more than slavery. Aquinas and Hobbes seem to further agree in the sense that for Aquinas The Fall does in fact lead to such slavery. The descent into vice which is slavery to sin is simultaneously a fall into slavery to other men, and even more ominously, to the demons who dominate them through their idols, their man-made gods. This is a consequence of the function of human law. Indeed for St Thomas man under the natural law man finds himself in an ironic and tragic situation. The laws that a vicious societywould need in order to move themselves into virtue become increasingly beyond their ability to create, precisely to the extent that they need them more. The worse they get, the more they need more and proper human law, and yet at the same rate the more they become incapable of making it, and less inclined to do so. To the contrary they tend to fashion false law, accelerating their decline through the extension of tyranny. Because of this by the time of Abraham, Thomas tells us, men had fallen into idolatry and into the most shameful vices. This decline culminates of course in slavery under Egypt’s god-king a rather good example of Hobbes’ Leviathan. St Thomas and Thomas Hobbes seem to find agreement.
And yet the two ontologies and the states of nature they propose, while making sense of the same data are in fact fundamentally opposed. For St Thomas our slavery is a deprivation and is ultimately parasitical on our real fundamentally good relationships. For Hobbes and his post-modern heirs such real relations are dissolved into the fundamental conflict. Hobbes and Foucault are not wrong therefore, because they see relations of power penetrating every aspect of our linguistic and social selves, St Thomas sees this. They are wrong to see these laws, and the habits they engender, as always and essentially exploitive, as necessarily competitive with other economies of power. And their late liberal followers to see every constellation of power at whatever scale as essentially battling for some type of sovereignty. All fathers seek power, perhaps, but not all fathers seek to become Pharaoh to lord it over their sons as a god. Man is depraved leading to slavery, St Thomas agrees, but he is not totally depraved.
This distinction makes all the difference, for Hobbes the regime of the Mosaic Law is simply more sovereignty simply more external domination albeit with God as king. For St Thomas however the Old Law was the first step in the restoraiton of man to liberty. Thomas tells us that the totality of the natural law the entire life in accordance with reason and so with virtue was contained within the precepts of the Old Law. The precepts of the Old Law “prohibited all the sins that are contrary to reason”. In order for this to happen the Law had to be instantiated in a human law appropriated for that particular people and that particular time and place. And so Aquinas explains, God gave Israel through its human leaders a highly specified determination of the natural law in the Mosaic Law. However the Old Law was inadequate it remained a law of fear a law focused on outward actions induced through the threat of punishment. It was a necessary stage, like the boy who first obeys out of fear, but it could not of itself induce men to true virtue, the end of law. This requires love which is the work only of Grace, the content of the second phase of the divine law, the New Law.
The New Law is first and foremost the very Grace of the Holy Spirit through which the law itself can be fulfilled. Again Thomas tells us law instructs and grace assists. So the New Law the perfect law is ultimately no law at all but Grace. It is the fulfilment of the law, the end of the law. But as the old law left nothing behind when it took all of the natural law into itself, so the new law leaves nothing behind. The entire movement of the Age of Nature, through the Age of Law, through the Age of Grace is contained within it.
This means that the Old Law was perfected in the new law with the externalised precepts becoming in the interiorised law of charity in the same manner in which a boy is perfected in becoming a man with all that he was, without remainder, growing up into manhood.
The total content of the natural law was therefore perfected within the new law and so Thomas follows the bulk of the mediaeval tradition in seeing the natural law ultimately as fully within the divine law. As Gratian’s Decretum states simply “Natural law is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel”
The love of God and the love of one’s neighbour as oneself, the first general precept of the natural law, are of course Christ’s summation of the content of the divine law. From within this line of thought then, after sin, the grace and instruction that is required to fully know and live the natural law is available only as the New Law. Through Grace and the teaching of the Gospel men become better capable of the prudence necessary to craft law, to craft the language and culture necessary to lift each other in mutual love to their common good. This is why the New Law contains so few specific precepts. Through Grace men were restored as legislators. Virtuous men could discern what was just and what was opportune for the common good and act accordingly. As important, however, was that the same Grace flowing into the community enabled its members to participate in this prudence. The mandates of the rulers became law and not mere commands only as the people came to share in virtue as they became sons rather than slaves.
Through the New Law it became again possible to achieve at least the beginnings of true peace, peace with oneself peace with one’s neighbour and peace with God. These prudent legislators of the New Law were of two types Thomas tells us spiritual and temporal. In peace the spiritual power was the conduit through which grace and the teaching of the Gospel flowed into society. The temporal power provided organisation and direction to the Grace filled community as it satisfied the necessities of life. In true peace the specified law of charity would be interiorised and so even the threat of the sword would be out of place. In the ideal of true peace both the spiritual and temporal powers were essential but neither the spiritual nor the temporal sword would function.
But this ideal was never fully met of course, rather in a sense the entire course of Salvation History was present within the New Law. It carried within the mechanism we might say to lift people from the age of nature, unbelievers and those in mortal sin through the age of law the period of obedience through fear, to that of Grace where we find true virtue. The spiritual and temporal powers operated side by side up and down this ladder of ascent. Against the violence of sin the temporal power was that authority that used force and the spiritual power was that authority that preached penance and offered mercy and so a return to grace through the sacraments. The temporal power sought to build a society of virtue through law but the spiritual power was necessary for the achievement of this object because, as we have seen, true virtue is not possible without both Law and Grace. The temporal and the spiritual were therefore united in a single endeavour that was rooted in the narrative of Salvation History.
Their endeavour was to reestablish societies of peace. Such societies were communities of friends bound in familial type relations who moved together deeper in their love of God and each other within shared worlds of habits, of discourses of right and wrong, just and unjust within their differentiated specifications of the Gospel we might say.
In Thomas’ world such a condition was known simply as “the peace”.
Within such communities the construction of virtue was first a project of these discourses, of participatory prudence. Wherein the more advanced guided the less advanced into the peace. It was second in the case of sin, a matter for fraternal correction, correction that presupposed these discourses and friendships. And it was only in the third place in the case of sustained disruptive sin, a matter of positive law carrying coercive sanctions. This endeavour was intrinsically as spiritual as it was temporal, made possible only through the coordination of Law and Grace, of the Old and the New as we might say, which cannot be seperated into sealed off compartments or organised into some sort of juridical constitution of relative powers or checks and balances. The Old and the New are one divine law and the temporal and spiritual powers formed one government that was decidedly not a State, and that moved communities from the imperfect to the perfect, to true peace which was the most perfect common good.
What this all means is that in the mediaeval conception the perfected church can be understood as not political. However this can so not because politics operates outside of it in a parallel self sufficient realm but rather because to the extent that a community is converted, politics is fulfilled in the law of charity, thereby ceasing to be politics in the modern sense at all. The perfect church is not political only because it is the fulfilment of politics, because politics is brought up into it and perfected beyond itself.
This is precisely the move that both Hobbes and Locke adamantly refuse. For them the kingdom of God is not anticipated on earth for them grace is not efficacious here and now but holds out only a promise for the next life. For these founding fathers of liberalism the new law is not a new law and not a lived law at all. It is a sort of anti-law a sort of a promise the ultimate undoing law. For pre-liberal Christians on the other hand Grace is fulfilment of all law a fulfilment that begins in time but achieves completion only in glory. This is the difference and anthropology of peace makes.
When St Thomas looked out upon C13th society he saw something profoundly different from the liberal vision. In his world peace was constituted by radically differentiated persons, in real non- combative relations, in friendships. Society was ordered and realised, rather than abstract justice among persons and rather than legal personae. This order was based on the real charitable relation, for example, between husband and wife and not as in the liberal order on their registration in a universal matrix of quantitative sameness. As we have seen such real relations between persons exists within liberalism as anomalies to the extent liberalism is not fully realised. In Thomas’ world however such relations were the content of proper order itself it was they that constituted the peace and it was this real peace that the coercive apparatus of society was charged to maintain and to extend.
Conflict ripped the social fabric here or there but not everywhere. The sword was accordingly deployed justly on in response to real sustained conflict. Those who wielded the sword did so therefore not through a universal registry of all people and all things no such registry existed. Rather the temporal power approached and engaged a society constituted by actual personal relationships, these relationships bound the scope of the sword. Coercion’s field of action was necessarily limited to the actual conflict at hand it had not prior standing claim to action across thew whole social field. In fact most of the social field constituted by habitual discourses and practices of differentiated relationships remained invisible to it. Because the peace between persons was real the temporal power literally couldn’t know what that peace was and what the law was until it was called in to defend it. In this way the sword was not ubiquitous not omniscient and certainly not omnipotent. Neither in theory nor in practice - it wasn’t sovereign. The temporal power wasn’t a mediaeval state merely aimed at different conceptions of the common good, it was not a state at all. Take for example a case from St Louis IX’s reign.
The peasants of a certain village went every spring to a nearby wood to cut down dead trees for firewood. One year the local noble stopped them on their way home and forcibly took their laden carts. They protested saying “We have always taken firewood from this forest. “Indeed” responded the knight “but you have always taken one cart load this year you have two”. The king held an inquest and ruled that in the previous forty years sometimes the peasants had loaded one cart sometimes two, the knight was wrong and violated the peace through his actions and he was ordered to pay amends. A conflict here had shattered the peace and the conflict was not resolved by appeal to abstract rights or laws but to the particulars of time and place before the conflict had erupted between the real relationships between real persons, which is to say to the lived reality of the peace. In order for the temporal power to act the king had to first determine what the peace in this situation had actually been, he had to enter into a particular world over which he did not rule and previously could not even see and act as a judge. Whenever there was a situation in which peace had broken down, where scarcity lead to conflict, the temporal power sought to determine and reconstitute the peace and in this process rights made an appearance. But these rights only emerged once a conflict had in fact occurred. There was no universal registry of law and rights within which conflict and cooperation could function, rather all conflicts were eligible for an ad hoc rights solution.
These rights were temporary juridical or contractual solutions to real conflict. They created little finite and self-referential registries we might say. The firewood collecting peasants in the above example did not have a right to the wood until the conflict had actually occurred and been adjudicated. And the right they did win then had force only for as long as the conflict lingered in the real relations of the parties. Such rights were literally forgotten as peace was restored and these real relationships between particular persons as they or their children or grandchildren transitioned from being enemies to being once again friends. As they returned we might say to self governence in virtue the end of the juridical.
Rights necessarily faded away along with the conflict that called them into being. Such rights were formed and forgotten and formed again as generations moved through life in the space of the imperfect but real peace.
If conflict was a tear in the social fabric the temporal power was a tailor who sought to patch it. It is not that positive laws contracts and rights did not exist - they did. But they were these patches these compromises, they were disconnected and unlike within the liberal registry, if the whole universe of positive rights positive laws rights, obligations of personae were added up they would come nowhere close to covering the social field.
This is why they had markets but no “the market”, why they had courts but no “justice system”. What we are seeing is a world without even theoretical sovereignty because it is a world not premised on a ubiquitous violence. Rather this order, the peace, was Christian at its very core indeed the real peace was premised on the reality of grace and its real social efficacy.
This dynamic understanding is what ultimately underwrote the mediaeval understanding of the orders of society. Society was divided into three orders the laity the clergy and the religious.
These order constituted a true hierarchy, the laity worked in the world of men and things of time and change ordering it to a realisation of timeless perfection, of perfect peace. A perfection that was modelled and anticipated on earth in the life of the religious, but which was mediated to the laity only through the preaching example and sacraments of the secular clergy, the men who had a foot in a sense in both worlds.
If the domain of the religious was glory, that of the clergy was the New Testament and of the laity of the Old. This is not to say that the laity lived in the Old Testament far far from it, it is to say that to the extent that man remains subject to coercive law through fear, to that very extent the laity ruled through the temporal sword a rule explicitly forbidden to the clergy. And this lingering echo of the Old Testament the laity became the anointed kings of Israel and the clergy became once again the prophets and priests of the law. But of course this law was not integral it was shot through everywhere with its end with the realised New with Grace and its fruit charity. Here the clergy ruled in this non coercive realm of virtue, the truth poured from the clergy into the people that they might know justice, and grace poured through the sacraments that they might instantiate this justice in their order. This is how the spiritual was superior to the temporal not through some boring notion of sovereign or martial hierarchy where the will of the pope is commissioned to his temporal minions below like a proto-Louis XIV declaring himself law incarnate.
Rather, each of the orders reached down to those below and pulled them up, an action that was only possible through the aid of the order above. The temporal sword could only fulfil its function to chastise sinners with justice because its wielders had already been pulled above their station by the grace and preaching of the clergy, an elevation they could never have achieved on their own. And the whole social order, temporal as much as spiritual, was moving toward glory to the perfection of contemplation that would only occur in heaven but which was anticipated in the monastic life.
The monastic life was superior to the life of the secular clergy and to that of the laity because it was in a real sense the fulfilment of both. The monasteries were full of both ordained and non-laity clergy and laity living an integral life of the elevation of the temporal ever deeper into the spiritual. Work became worship and all of life became liturgy. In such a way the religious formed the model for the forces of power in society. The vision of their order lay at the beginning of the work of the laity and the clergy but it was also the end, contemplation was the fulfilment of human life itself and it was also the means. The prayers of the religious saturated every aspect every nook and cranny of society and efficacy of the monks’ penance dragged the sinful world forward or rather upwards. Monastic prayer and penance was integrated into politics, economics, family life parochial and diocesan structures. It was the mysterious blood coursing through the veins of Christendom similar to how for Hobbes money was the equally mysterious blood flowing through the body of the Sovereign.
As Foucault wants us to see the bodily discipline of the army penetrating ever deeper into the soul of modern liberal man we ought to see hear the peaceful and spiritual economy of the Monastery subtly penetrating and conforming the structure of Mediaeval society into its likeness. Here then is an entirely different form of the structures of social order which is inseperable from the fundamental truths that underwrite them - the truth that difference is the precondition of peace and that the peaceful relationship of father and son is the norm. As the great C13th canonist Hostiensis explained:
“There are three types of men, and through them The Trinity can be perceived, the laity are similar to the father through power, the secular clerics to the son through wisdom, and the religious to the Holy Spirit on account of benevolence and Grace. These three types namely the laity the secular clergy and the religious are a trinity but in the holy union of the church and in the catholic faith they are a unity. Likewise the persons of the Father and the Son and the Spirit are a trinity but in essence and divinity a unity.”
We can see from within this vision of peace how liberalism with its descent into vice and so the extension of coercive law is an inversion of this pre-liberal Christian orientation. It starts with an assumption of violence and works towards its fulfillment toward the totalising of vice the prerequisite of total coercive law. The mediaevals did the opposite, they began in a good world saturated with vice and moved through law toward virtue and so law’s fulfillment in charity. To the mediaevals progress was real, our nature itself was healed and elevated.
Now liberal modernity will of course have none of this charity talk because modernity’s ontology of violence denies the existence of Grace, or at least its efficacy in history. Ontological ascent or descent, true progress or regress, is simply not a concept of liberal thought. And so it refuses the dynamic hierarchical form of social order. Real actual changes in human relationships are denied in favour of the eternal registry of the liberal State, and progress is nothing other than the extension of the reach of this registry, the conquest of all lesser sovereignties. The liberal society progresses precisely to the extent that the regime’s sovereignty conquers all aspects of our real lives. Such a dynamic has no use for the spiritual power, for the preaching of the truth, nor for the flow of grace. In fact such things disrupt this society’s self-realisation. The extra-legal real relations of peace that emerge through faith and charity cannot be allowed to disrupt the advance of the registry of conflict. And so such spiritual, now called ‘religious’ things, are put into a box called ‘the church’ where they’re held captive and steadily starved out of existence.
What we are seeing here are two cities. The city of God which is the city of ascent and the city of Man which is the city of descent. The destination of the first city is eternal peace through charity and so it realises the movement of human law past itself to the eternal peace of heaven. This is the movement of increasing the scope of real charitable relations, of friendships and families in our lives at the expense of merely legal or adversarial ones. The destination of the other society is a sort of eternal law of total and ubiquitous force. This is a movement of increasing the reach of law at the expense of charitable relations, a movement that happens as we have seen as much in our souls as it does in the court houses.
To the first, the realm of law is the truly temporal realm, governed by the temporal power, a dynamic realm that moves past itself through the efficacy of the spiritual power and towards the image of perfection in the prayer and example of the monks. In the second city the spiritual power, grace, is denied, and the temporal power absolutised produces the stasis of total violence which it calls peace, which is the emergence of the all powerful Leviathan, the devil, as the mediaeval commentaries point out and which Hobbes fully knew.
From here perhaps we have gained a vantage point from which to glimpse a post-liberal future but without falling for the traps that liberal discourse sets for us, for example the temptation toward confessional states. We can see I think that we can take a staunchly anti-liberal position while simultaneously maintaining that a confessional state is nothing short of a monstrosity wherein Christianity becomes yet another rhetoric of power. But we can do so only by first seeing the world of law for what it is - an accepting the corporate ascent to God as the true drama of history. We can come to oppose a confessional state not because the political has its own proper realm untouched by grace, but for precisely the opposite reason because the progressive Christianisation of society is the progressive undoing of sovereignty itself. The difference that love makes is not a set of different policy positions it’s a different civilisation. This is what St Augustine is getting at when he tells us that the nature of a commonwealth can be ascertained by the object of its love.
In the 2nd century Justin Martyr wrote to the Emperor in defence of Christians. He asserted that Christians:
"..more than all other men are your helpers and allies in promoting peace because those criminals who endeavor to escape detection when they offend your laws, if they learned and were convinced that nothing can escape the knowledge of God, would by all means live decently."
But he pointedly suggests to the Emperor: “you seem to fear lest all men become so righteous and you no longer have anyone to punish” He finishes by chiding the Emperor “such is the concern of the public executioner but not of a good prince.
We see don’t we that the structure of our caesar’s power rests on sin. To undo sin is to undo caesar, our objective can not be to become caesar are objective is to create a world where he wakes up one day and finds that his empire doesn’t amount a whole lot. Regardless of short-term strategy then, the ultimate countering of liberalism is not a matter of modifying state or market it is a matter of changing our world. It is a matter of looking out at society and recognising that contracts are rare. Of seeing the countless friendships, families, shared passions and projects. Of seeing the types of relationships that underwrote the mediaeval order as being in fact the norm and then to develop these toward the common good of charity through the spiritual power. It is a matter of wrestling away from the sovereign more and more of our soul and so reducing its power by opening up worlds of peace and so structures of governance that it cannot even see. This is not the ‘leave liberalism alone’ or retreat into some from of quietism it is to actually undo liberalism.
Thank you.
