Medieval Essays (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

Church and State in the Middle Ages

v Church and State in the Middle Ages I t is impossible to understand the history of the medieval Church, and its relations with the State and to social life in general, if we treat it in the analogy of modern conditions. The Church was not only a far more universal and far-reaching society than the medieval State, it possessed many of the functions that we regard as essentially political. As F. W. Maitland used to insist, it is diYcult to find any definition of a State which would not include the medieval Church, while the State under feudal conditions often lacked prerogatives and functions without which we can hardly conceive a State existing. In the modern world the Church is regarded as essentially a voluntary society of limited membership and limited functions, while the State is the fundamental fact that dominates every aspect of social life and leaves little room for any independent activity. The chief problem for us is how to safeguard that minimum of social autonomy without which neither the spiritual society of the Church nor natural social organisms like the family can fulfil their functions. In the early Middle Ages, however, the State had neither the physical power nor the moral prestige to make such universal claims. It was suYciently occupied with the problems of bare existence. It occupied a precarious position between the universal society of the Church, which possessed a monopoly of the higher culture, and the lesser territorial units which possessed so large a measure of local autonomy as to leave few political prerogatives in the hands of the nominal sovereign. Accordingly, in the Middle Ages the ultimate social reality was not the national kingdom, but the common unity of the Christian people of which the State itself was but the temporal organ and the king the divinely appointed guardian and defender . 67 Thus to the medieval mind the distinction was not between Church and State as two perfect and independent societies, but rather between the two diVerent authorities and hierarchies which respectively administered the spiritual and temporal aVairs of this one society, as Stephen of Tournai puts it in a well-known passage: “In the same city and under the same king, there are two peoples and two ways of life, two authorities and two jurisdictions. The city is the Church—the king is Christ. The two peoples are the two orders in the Church—the clergy and laity. The two ways of life are the spiritual and the bodily. The two authorities are the priesthood and the kingship. The two jurisdictions are the divine and human laws.”1 Of course, Church and State retained their formal distinction. Indeed from one point of view there was a far greater sociological diVerence between the two societies than there is today, since they inherited distinct cultural traditions and historical backgrounds. The Church looked back to the civilized past and preserved the tradition of Latin culture and of the Roman order, while the medieval State was the heir of the barbarian conquerors and represented the social traditions and institutions of the Germanic peoples—Franks, Saxons, Lombards and Visigoths. Thus medieval society has a twofold aspect. On the one hand, there was the ideal unity of Christendom which united all the baptized as a single people and family against pagan barbarians of the North and the civilized Moslem world to the South, and on the other there was the centrifugal tendency of national and local particularism which divided Western Europe into a confused mass of warring principalities . It is, however, important to remember that these two aspects of medieval society are not to be identified simply with the ecclesiastical and political categories in the narrower sense. The medieval king was not merely the representative of the old barbarian national monarchies; he was also an oYcer in the Christian society, who stood in a peculiarly 68 Church and State in the Middle Ages 1. Cf. Carlyle, History of Political Theory, ii, 198 and iv, 166. This passage is quoted by M. Maritain in Primauté du Spirituel in such a way as to suggest that the city is humanity and that the two peoples are the Church and State, but this is not what Stephen of Tournai says. close relationship to the Church and was consecrated by religious rites. However much the reforming canonists might insist on the essential distinction between the...