The differentiation of authority: the medieval turn toward existence

Concluding Remarks: The Contemporary West and Islam

269 Concluding Remarks The Contemporary West and Islam How did it come about that a small group of peoples in Western Europe should in a relatively short space of time acquire the power to transform the world and to emancipate themselves from man’s age-long dependence on the forces of nature? ... Why is it that Europe alone among the civilizations of the world has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social tradition which rules oriental cultures? ... In the West spiritual power ... has acquired social freedom and autonomy and consequently its activity has not been confined to the religious sphere but has had far-reaching effects on every aspect of social and intellectual life.1 Christopher Dawson highlights the “unrest” of Western society as its most significant and enduring characteristic. In these concluding remarks , the West—medieval and modern—is considered as the field sustained and given direction by the differentiation of authority into into its three forms: political, spiritual, and existential. Some remarks on the enduring character of the West from the medieval into the modern period are in order to demonstrate that the differentiation is not complete, nor is it a process particular to the medieval period, but that the difficulty of maintaining an equilibrium among the three authorities forms 1. Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 15–16. 270 Concluding Remarks an important continuity between our day and our medieval past. In addition , the uniqueness of Western society as constituted by this differentiation contrasts with non-Western societies. As the differentiation of authority erupted in Christian revelation, the absence of Christianity in historical societies seems to militate against the process of differentiation . As the comments on Islam below show, spiritual, political, and existential centers are certainly present in non-Western societies but their assertions only became authoritative within a higher schema, and not only on their own terms. In Islam, the relation of the triad demonstrates a compactness rather than a differentiation, a fusion rather than a separation , and a dominance of a higher authority rather than the autonomy of each of the three. These remarks are entirely general, but are intended to present the achievement of Western differentiated order in relief against a non-Western order for the purposes of appreciating better what has occurred. Remarks on the Endogenous Character of Western Society The Continuity of Western Society in the Rebalancing of Authorities To the extent that we associate the medieval with the Gelasian formula , we can state that the medieval world was slowly killed by the emergence of existential authority in its midst which gradually uprooted the Gelasian arrangement from its moorings. In this sense we understand ourselves as nonmedieval. We live in a world of technological, medical, and scientific achievement that surpasses the standards of the Middle Ages. However, to the extent that the medieval struggle for an adequate spiritual and political order to replace the Gelasian order was one that was driven by the assertion of the authority and dignity that inheres in the individual and his free incorporations, we are in substantial continuity with that time. This neither makes us medieval, nor makes them modern. The enduring Western project to secure a more adequate arrangement for human dignity is determined by standards evoked in dealing with the existential authority of individuals. To be sure, an arrangement that prioritizes existence is a vague notion, and it does not Concluding Remarks 271 lend itself to any final understanding, which would amount to the closure of history. Nor does such an arrangement have an aim in the sense of a mission to achieve a final end. However subtle it may seem, Western society contains an inner quality of purposiveness in the sense of a selfunfolding direction, and furthermore, such a direction has a pragmatic history which is, by definition, rather concrete. Liberal constitutionalism is the modern Western arrangement that seeks to achieve an equilibrium among the triad of authorities that allows for the temporal and spiritual welfare of persons and their communities. There exists a modern body of literature that recognizes the continuity of this struggle as central to Western existence. Alexis de Tocqueville , writing in the aftermath of both the American and the French Revolutions, discerned the link between the spiritual and the political through the agency of the individual soul. “Despotism can govern...