Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords: On the Origins of Western Political Theology (180–398) by Lester L. Field, Jr. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 157 Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords: On the Origins ofWestern Political Theology (180-398). By LFSTERL. FIELD, JR. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1998. Pp. 542. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-01304-7. Perhaps the best way to introduce this book on early Christian political theology would be to cite a passage from Aidan Nichols's recent book, Christendom Awake! (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), in which he remarks: I have said so far that the embodiment of the shared aims of a Christendom society cannot be separated from the need to enact the fundamental norms of such asociety in the civil law, for the re-creation of Christendom as State. Whereas in traditionally republican polities, a supreme court might be regarded as the appropriate institution for testing proposed legislation against the public criterion of the JudaeoChristian revelation, Iwish toconcentrate in conclusion on the possible role of a revived (national and also international) monarchical institution in this regard. (83-84) The plausibility of Nichols's "revived monarchical institution" cannot be understoodwithoutsome reference to that long history ofpolitics and theology in the West wherein politics, while being politics, still did not exempt itself from the sources of revelation and its effect on the public order. Professor Field's erudite study of late-second-to-fourth-century efforts to understand the relation between the emperor and the God of revelation provides some of the historic background of the relation between political structures and theological principles. This learned book contains 264 pages of text, with almost the same amount of space devoted to endnotes, bibliography, and index. The book is divided into three general parts: "The Church of the Martyrs" (180-312), "The 'ConstantinianRevolution'" (312-74), and "TheAge ofAmbrose" (374-98). The first part is divided into three chapters that discuss, in order, "Liberty," "Ecclesiastical Dominion," and "Imperial Dominion and the Two Swords: Images and Reflections." The second part contains six chapters: "Freedom of Religion," "The Emergence of a Christian Empire," "Donatism: The Church in Africa or Heretical Conventicle?" "After Nicea: Western Reactions to Arianism," "Lucifer of Cagliari and the Luciferians," and "Hilary of Poitiers." The third part has four chapters: "Freedom by Birth, Faith, and Priestly Right," "How Was an Empire Christian," "The Christian Empire," and "The Papacy: Ancient Denouement or Medieval Prelude?" This content outline alone gives some indication of the scope of this fine study. The book begins and ends as a study of liberty in its many nuances. Field is aware that Christianity introduced itself into the world not under the rubric of 158 BOOK REVIEWS necessity or coercion but of liberty. "Ancient Christians regarded liberty as humanity's greatest gift and highest goal," Field writes in his introduction. This view survived antiquity. Yet it survived differently in the East, where Christians continued to express themselves in Greek, and in the West, where after the second century they increasingly or generally expressed themselves in Latin. Hence the designation "Eastern" and "Western"came to indicate considerably more and less than a location in the Roman empire. From a historical and theological standpoint, these regional labels graduallysignaled two distinctself-understandings. (xiii) No doubt, Field notes, with some irony, liberty is not considered to be antithetical to revelation, but is precisely a "gift" and a "goal." It is something we do not yet possess; it is not something acquired solely by our own powers. He does not think that, at bottom, there is a difference of principle between Eastern and Western Christianity on this point, however different their external political manifestation may be. Liberty, no doubt, needs to be ordered for it to be what it is. The classical enemy to liberty, as Aristotle had already implied in his definition of democracy, was liberty itself, that is, a form of liberty that had no end or purpose. This is the liberty that is identified with license, doing whatever one wants, whatever it is one wants, a principle that has reappeared as near, if not at, the heart of "modern" political philosophy since Machiavelli. Freedom rather was to be a result of the virtues, not of their lack. Will depended on intelligence to specify its end and...