The differentiation of authority: the medieval turn toward existence

Introduction

1 Introduction There are things we take for granted. There is an ocean seething with meaning just under the skin, always moving us. We raise our sails on it, sink our tiller into it, and upon it we navigate for better or worse. In the routine of daily living, there is much that we assume to be palpably obvious , and we wonder at the struggles of generations past to arrive at what is unambiguous. The medieval world, on those occasions when it surfaces into discourse, is usually spoken of in a pejorative manner, associated with the most fantastic prejudices, fears, superstitions, harshness, expectations, hardships, and so forth. In contrast to them, we are impeccably “modern,” our modernity in this sense resting on our “nonmedievalism .” We imagine that our contemporary sensibilities effectively immunize us from lapsing into the fallacies of old. In this, we are probably correct. Yet our sensibilities rest upon that ocean of meaning that is still seething. We are in motion. We may indeed hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, but as Brian Tierney has pointed out, there is nothing self-evident about “unalienable” rights for most human beings throughout history, nor is there an “antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” as UNESCO declared in 1949, in the wake of an unprecedented assault on such rights.1 1. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 1–2. 2 introduction Tierney took it upon himself to trace the concept of natural rights to its historical emergence in the medieval period. Similarly, Harold Berman began his seminal Law and Revolution by highlighting the importance of the same period—specifically after 1150—for the origins of modern Western legal systems. There is, then, something about that medieval period that is of significance to the development of our society today. It is a “something” that has an enduring importance because it was a movement that is still moving through us today. Our contemporary efforts to achieve a more just order are in substantial continuity with that same struggle for order in the Middle Ages. Technological advances and higher standards in greater accord with the dignity of the person are among the characteristics that distinguish the modern from the medieval , but there is more than an organic link between our societies and theirs. The medieval world outgrew itself, its coordinates having to shift in line with the turbulence that moved individuals and society. I propose to look at this turbulence, this unsettling flux that stirs, steers, and agitates because the modern West has been shaped by it in a way that no other people have. Specifically, I want to look at how this turbulence upset the medieval cosmion and drove it beyond its own boundaries. David Walsh has written that “[d]emocracy does not exist within institutions and places, but within the hearts and minds of the human beings who occupy them.”2 In this case, to say that the medieval world came to an end is to say that the hearts and minds of concrete persons changed. Note the emphasis in this: things change not because there is a change of policy or personnel at the upper institutional tier of political reality, but because there is a change of mind at the lower level of individuals in community. The gradual end of the medieval world was an incremental change that occurred in individual persons first. Furthermore, it was a change whose legitimacy was grounded in nothing else than in the movement of existence itself. This provides an answer of sorts to the question, By what authority was such a fundamental change effected? The papacy and kingship, as the two pillars of medieval auctoritas, did not determine the change, but participated in it. The end of medieval order proceeded, 2. David Walsh, “The Unattainability of What We Live Within: Liberal Democracy,” in Die fragile Demokratie—The Fragility of Democracy, ed. Anton Rauscher (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2007), 133–56. introduction 3 paradoxically, by its own authority and launched society into a new terra incognita. It was not a change with revolutionary results in the sense of effacing previous centers of power or potestas; but it was no less radical for all that. Institutions of spiritual and political authorities were not replaced with something new, but with a reconfiguration of their relations as part of...