Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought (review)

Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought. By Francis Oakley. [Studies in the History of Christian Thought, Volume XCII.] (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1999. Pp. x, 359. $108.00.)

Francis Oakley writes with both learning and commitment. He refuses, moreover, to be confined within tightly-drawn boundaries of chronology or methodology. This collection encompasses reflections on both the spiritual and temporal powers, and it crosses the artificial boundary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Nor is the reference to eternity in the title a mere rhetorical flourish. The authors Oakley reads, Catholics and Protestants alike, were engaged with such issues as the absolute and ordained powers of God.

Instead of simply republishing old articles, Oakley has framed eight of his contributions, one in an older but fuller version, between two specially-written chapters. The first offers the author's reflections on the state of scholarship concerned with the history of political ideas. Oakley does not hesitate to break lances with Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and others in defense of Arthur O. Lovejoy and Brian Tierney. Nor does he hesitate to dissent from certain predominant assumptions of recent decades. In particular, the author refuses to abandon the idea of "influence," despite its having fallen into disfavor in certain circles. Oakley, in all cases, addresses issues by returning to the sources, refusing to let them be far from our minds when theoretical issues are being debated.

In the context of these recent controversies, the second chapter, an older piece on Walter Ullmann, seems dated. That once-great name has lost much of its luster, and ideas of ascending or descending power receive little mention now. Oakley, however, applies there the same test of fidelity to the sources he applies to more recent writers. In the same way, Oakley's brief for Tierney's Foundations of the Conciliar Theory is based firmly on reading in the works of theologians, canonists, and publicists. Oakley's commitment to larger issues leads him to comment here, as he has elsewhere, on nineteenth-century efforts to tidy up the past, glossing over inconvenient complexities and continuities within a larger tradition of institutional thought.

Three chapters are devoted to these questions of continuity and context. Here Skinner, not Ullmann, is the chief target of criticism. Larger patterns are described that cross our neat chronological boundaries, and the influence of one thinker on another is described as possible to document, once adequate caution is employed. Perhaps the most compelling of these chapters is that documenting the relationship of the doctors of the Sorbonne to the confrontation between Venice and the papacy in 1606-1607. Here we are confronted with an argument grounded not just on Jean Gerson, that pre-eminent figure in theological conciliarism, but on Edmond Richer, whose influential edition of Gerson was contemporaneous with this conflict.

The following chapters return to one of Oakley's long-term interests, the distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God. He finds this concept employed not just by Roman Catholic thinkers and Jacobean divines but by Protestant writers on the Continent. All can be shown to have made use of this distinction, as they balanced biblical and philosophical concepts of divinity. These concepts are identified as of importance for European political discourse from the Middle Ages to the time of Locke. What this reviewer misses, however, in the discussion of English thought is any awareness of the massive contribution of Paolo Prodi to the study of the Jacobean controversy over oaths, Il sacramento del potere (1992).

This collection concludes on a less satisfactory note with an excursus on the thought of Michael Oakeshott. This is more an appendix to the first chapter than an independent composition, and it is hard to follow without referring back to that chapter. It might...