The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of Andrew Willard Jones’s , Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Emmaus Academic, 2017).
In the Church there are two powers, the spiritual and the temporal. —Vincent of Beauvais (1260)
This book is a study of France during the life of St. Louis IX (1214–1270). In it, I hope to overcome the limitations of modern political and religious categories and, in doing so, to reframe our discussion of government in the Middle Ages, especially with regard to the spiritual and temporal powers. I argue that thirteenth-century France was not a world of the secular and the religious vying for position and power, but a world in which the material and the spiritual were totally dependent on each other and penetrated one another at every level. This was a world not of the religious and the secular, but of the New Testament and the Old, of virtue and vice, of grace and law, of peace and violence. This world offered a coherent vision of the whole in which mankind moved through grace from the lesser to the greater, from the fallen to the redeemed. Its integral vision included all of social reality and its vision was far removed from our own.
Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played. Within this secular vision, religion as a sociological category is often considered inessential to the concept of society itself. In this view, religious societies are, in a sense, accidentally religious: their religion can fade away. Secular societies, for their part, do not seem have a religion proper to themselves at all, even if some individuals within them are religious.
To us moderns, the secular is fundamental. Even when religion is considered a universal sociological category, we almost always first translate it into something secular, such as its function: it synthesizes diverse perspectives and experiences, it knits people together, it makes the world coherent, it assuages the fear of death, it provides legitimacy for power, it constructs social roles, and so on. In this way, we are perhaps willing to accept that every society has a religion, but only if we first reduce religion to yet another aspect of the fundamental secular, to yet another ideology or worldview. In such an approach, “religion” is a category that functions within the secular.
Through this framework, we recognize that the societies of the Middle Ages were religious. But we do so because we recognize in the Middle Ages characteristics that we, from the vantage point of the fundamental secular, now call religious. When we say that the Middle Ages were religious, we mean something similar, I think, to when we say that a particular person is religious. He goes to church, he prays, he talks about God, and so on. Religion is important in his life. It might even be the most important thing in his life, having influence in everything that he does. But it could go away; he could abandon his religion and become secular and he would still be him. And this is so because the secular is always actually there: it is the “there” where religion functions. In this way, even the most religious person does a great deal that we coherently call secular. He goes to work; he votes; he mows his lawn. We view the Middle Ages in a similar manner, and activities of our secular world that we recognize in the behavior of the religious people of the Middle Ages we deem to have always really been secular, even if they mentioned God when they did them. The people of the Middle Ages could have cultivated the land, they could have elected kings, they could have administered justice, and they could have fought wars without God because farming, elections, courts, and wars are constants and so ultimately secular. On the other hand, things that we recognize in the past and now think of as being religious and so optional to our secular society we deem to have always belonged to the “religious” sphere—the Scripture, liturgy, prayer, sacraments, the clergy.
The current book is a challenge to this conception of the Middle Ages and to the categories that underpin it. In it, I hope to add my voice to the growing chorus of scholars from diverse disciplines who are challenging notions of the “religious” and the “secular” wherever they appear. I contend that the Middle Ages were neither religious nor secular because the religious and the secular are two features of a single construction: the modern, Western social architecture of “Church” and “State,” “private” and “public,” “individual” and “market,” and so on. The societies of the Middle Ages had a different architecture based on different assumptions and different concepts, ultimately on a different vision of the cosmos.
Medieval government provides an opportunity for us to see the lines of this architecture. Medieval kings did many things, including enforce justice and wage war. We are inclined to think of justice and war as essential and so secular. Kings are, therefore, the State, and are more often than not seen as fundamentally secular in nature, even if animated by sincere “religious” ideology because such ideology could transition away from its “religiousness” without doing violence to the State’s fundamental nature. This reading is re-enforced by the terminology we find in the medieval sources, within which the kings and lords are often referred to as the “secular power.” They were the “secular arm” who enforced the “secular law” with the “secular sword.” This modern view is not completely wrong: kingship is without doubt an ancestor to the modern State—one branch of the State’s genealogy does lead here. The problem, however, is that in the Middle Ages the “secular” was integral to a conception of social reality that was thoroughly “supernatural” in character. “Justice” was a name for Christ, and the king was his vicar. The king’s “secular” justice was a direct participation in the construction of the City of God, and his legitimacy came only through his sacramental incorporation into the Body of Christ and the office that he held within it. He wielded the secular, temporal sword that had been bestowed on the Christian people by Christ himself. The temporal sword belonged to God. The “religious” was not accidental to this world, and the kings were not the State. It was a sacramental world in which the material and the spiritual were everywhere and always present together. The spiritual power was the power of the priests to dispense the grace that sustained this society in charity and they wielded the spiritual sword of excommunication against the mortal sinner. The temporal power was the power of the laymen to organize the world of things and events, and they wielded the temporal sword against the violent. Both powers and their swords were the power of the Church through which it worked out its salvation in time. It was an integral understanding. “Secular” simply meant “in time” or “in the world,” and the Church militant operated directly in the world. Indeed, the primary dispensers of sacramental grace were the “secular” clergy and the only “religious” people were the monks and nuns. This world made sense on its own terms. It was what Henri de Lubac would have called a “complete act.”[1] If we insist on reading our understanding of the secular and of the religious back into this world, what we see is that the government of both kings and priests were thoroughly secular—of course, they were also both thoroughly religious. Our modern categories do not hold.
One of the central arguments of this book is that we should abandon the use of “religion” and “secular” “Church” and “State” understood in their modern senses in our attempts to understand the Middle Ages, in this case the thirteenth century. This is not because the terms have no meaning—in our world they have a great deal of meaning. Rather, it is because one cannot get too far along in building a thick description of the thirteenth century before concluding that everything was religious or, if one is inclined to come at it from the other direction, before concluding that everything was secular. Both conclusions are correct because the thirteenth century is the common ancestor in the genealogies of both the religious and the secular. It is out of this medieval world that our conceptions of the secular and the religious slowly emerged over centuries of history—and they emerged together: the religious is a part of the secular.
It is as mistaken to read the secular and the religious back into the medieval world as it would be to describe a grandfather as a conglomeration of his grandchildren’s traits. He is not a piece of this child and a piece of that child. He is a “complete act” in and of himself, and the children descend from him; before they were born, they did not exist “in him,” a piece here and a piece there. Rather, it is only after their birth that we can look back at the grandfather and see whence they came. It is only after the children exist that the grandfather can be somehow “divided up.” This glance back can tell us a lot about the grandchildren—it is a legitimate genealogical exercise—but it adds little to our knowledge of the grandfather. He does not need the grandchildren in order to be the “complete act” that he is. The “religious” and the “secular” are the offspring of modern history. The Middle Ages are their shared grandfather. In order to understand him, we must set the grandchildren aside because they did not yet exist.
The process through which they came into being is appropriately called secularization, but it is a very difficult process to describe without putting the cart before the horse. Peter Berger has written, “By secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”[2] The problem, however, is that institutions and symbols are recognizable as religious only from the vantage point of the secular. This means secularization might be just as legitimately understood as being the process by which sectors of society and culture were construed as religious institutions and symbols. In other words, secularization is the process through which the “religious” as we conceive of it was created. Along these lines, Brent Nongbri has accurately remarked that we call religious “anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity,”[3] and when Charles Taylor states that the British were more religious in 1900 than ever before, we might consider him to be, in a sense, defining the term “religious.”[4] It is no coincidence that it is precisely at this time and in this place—late nineteenth-century, Western Europe—that we can also most clearly define the “secular” (Darwin, Marxism, the factory, Otto von Bismarck, the Third Republic, etc.). It seems that historians such as Jean Delumeau, who have maintained that the people of the Middle Ages were not really Christian at all, are working within a tautology:[5] from within the categories of modern thought, the Middle Ages could not really be Christian because Christianity can only exist in a secular society. As a “religion,” Christianity is a modern, dare I say “secular,” phenomenon.
We live in this modern world and most of us do not believe that our concept of the secular is a historically contingent construction. Rather, we tend to believe our world to be based on the way things really are (the secular, too, has become a “complete act”): we understand “secular” and “religious” to be essential categories. And so, with these categories in hand, we go off to study the government of other cultures, other times and places, sorting whatever we find appropriately. In doing so, when we consider government, we construct sociological theories and historical narratives that necessarily terminate with the secular State and that posit the secular State as something that is really always there, even if nascent, not yet developed, or obscured. The discipline of political history has been practiced largely within this meta-narrative of secularization, and while the works of individual scholars are, of course, often nuanced and sensitive to potential category mistakes, it is nevertheless the case that a generalized, medieval chapter in this narrative has emerged as a synthesis of the research of the past two hundred years. This is the narrative one often finds in textbooks or in summaries of the medieval period. It is a narrative that one finds normally accepted by non-specialists without qualification.
Within this familiar story, the papacy battled the monarchs over who would have what Walter Ullmann called “monarchic functions,”[6] over whether the imperium or sacerdotium was sovereign. This was a protracted struggle, from the Investiture Controversy in the eleventh century to the Avignon papacy in the fourteenth. As Geoffrey Barraclough wrote, “It is possible to draw a straight line from what [Gregory VII] set out, but failed, to do, to the exalted claims of Innocent III and Boniface VIII.”[7] Over the course of this struggle, as the popes attempted to extend their power they were forced to spend the papacy’s moral capital engaging in dirty political power struggles, as well as stretch the ideology of papal monarchy into a theory of world-wide theocracy. As the papacy drifted from its properly religious and spiritual role, as it struggled to gain control of the “secular” sphere of politics, it debased the power of ecclesiastical censure and of crusade, turning them into cynical tools of statecraft; it centralized its administration, undermining the power of the episcopate, and became corrupt and legalistic. In the process, it lost the moral authority and prestige it once held. This conflict ended in an ignoble defeat of the papacy at the hands of Philip IV, from which it was a short journey to French domination of the Avignon papacy, schism, and ultimately the Reformation.[8] As J. A. Watt states, “We may perhaps allow ourselves to see in the contrast between Innocent III in the authoritative splendor of Lateran IV and the bitter humiliation of Boniface VIII the measure of the decline of the papacy in the thirteenth century: a decline the popes at Avignon did little to halt.”[9] The papacy’s decline is to be contrasted with the rise of the monarchies, who, over the course of their struggles with the Church, achieved independence and real sovereignty. As the story goes, the renewed study of Roman law provided the State with the legal concepts needed to justify itself without religion. Theologically, Aquinas finally dispensed with Augustine’s notion that the State was the consequence of sin and asserted, based on Aristotle, that the State was natural to mankind. Embracing this theoretical and legal self-sufficiency and having bested the Church, the monarchs set about building their States.
Within this narrative, the kings are certainly religious. But, it is a modern understanding of religion. It is religion as political ideology and personal piety. Because of this, “religion” remains an accident to the king’s essence as the State. Ideologies can change and personal piety fade away without the essence of the State being undermined. Within the narrative, the anointed kings of the High Middle Ages were the State, and when their ideology shifted to that of absolutism in the Early Modern Period, they remained the State, and when, ultimately, the monarchies gave way to Modern secular legislatures and secular dictators, these remained the State. The State is the constant because the Modern State is really where we started.
Nevertheless, one must be careful in criticizing this narrative too harshly because the secular State most certainly does have its own history, and I suspect that a good telling of it would include many parts of the genealogy that I just laid out. That is not the problem. The problem with the accepted narrative is that within it history itself tends to become nothing but the genealogy of the secular State. In the accepted narrative, we start with the grandchildren. And so, many histories purporting to be about the Middle Ages are actually about the nineteenth century. Similar to the secularity of the State, within this narrative the Church’s religiousness is conceived of as essential. The Church engaged in secular affairs throughout the narrative, to be sure, but its political activities were accidental to its essence, and when they faded away or were suppressed, when religion finally became the private, spiritual, reflective thing that it really, properly always was, the Church remained the Church and religion remained religion. The project of modern historians of the Middle Ages has often, therefore, been to show how this proper sorting happened, how we finally got to the secular State and the religious Church, and so we get the narrative of the “problem of Church and State.”
Histories of St. Louis’s rule have tended to be dependent on the narrative of the secular State and normally follow this pattern. In the thirteenth century, France gained territorial integrity. This newly expanded kingdom was increasingly governed by the central authority. The king worked to monopolize violence, bringing more and more “feudal” activities under his purview. To this end, Louis outlawed private war and the duel. The king’s power, we are told, was increasingly the ordering principle, maintaining the peace in the face of the so-called “private violence” of the knightly class, which was previously endemic. In order to effectively exercise his power, Louis rationalized his officials into a bureaucracy complete with salaries and offices. The royal officials of this administration operated under laws, or ordinances, decreed from the center. It was under Louis that these laws were brought together and rationalized in the pursuit of justice and peace. Louis, therefore, built Parlement. Parlement was the place where the conflicts of society were worked out through the new science of law, rather than through violence. Parlement was staffed with expert officials, lawyers, the famous “New Men,” who were the prototype of the middle class, a meritocracy of professionals. As Jacques Le Goff wrote, we are witnessing the “march toward absolutism,” which would all come together under Louis’s grandson Philip IV.[10] The French kings were building the sovereign State, and by the end of the thirteenth century this sovereignty extended to control of the Church.
In addition to the assumptions concerning the religious and the secular discussed above, I believe this reading is dependent on certain modern assumptions about how politics work; indeed, about what, in fact, they are. One of these assumptions is that sovereignty exists. Sovereignty is a difficult concept to define. But, the best place to start is probably with Jean Bodin: “Sovereignty is that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth.”[11] The sovereign is that entity that wields force without reference to any other human entity: all legitimate force is ultimately a delegation from the sovereign, and the sovereign has always and everywhere the right to intervene. Like the “religious” and the “secular” in the simplified narrative of Church and State, “sovereignty” is posited as an essential part of social life. Sovereignty exists, even if it is unclear who holds it or if the apparatus to effectively wield it has not yet been built, and the contest, the struggle of history is about who will both claim the prize of sovereignty and be able to defend that claim. In the “problem of Church and State,” sovereignty is what the popes and kings were really fighting over—a prize that by definition cannot be shared. However, it is my contention in this book that as with the “religious” and the “secular,” “sovereignty” did not exist in thirteenth century France, not because the organizational technologies had not yet been invented, but because the concept of sovereignty and the attempt to build sovereign States are the products of a distinctly modern set of assumptions and institutions that was not present.
I contend that ultimately the assumption that underpins the modern understanding of politics, the assumption that leads us to see sovereignty as always historically relevant, is the same assumption that underpins the doctrine of the “secular” (and so the existence of “religion”), and this assumption is the existence of a primordial violence. The idea was articulated most directly by Hobbes: humankind is in a state of constant warfare, everyone against everyone. The sovereign power of the State is a violence so profound and so predictable in its application that everyone submits. The other founding theorists of modern political thought essentially agreed. John Locke, for example, only avoids Hobbes’s natural war by positing property rights as natural. But such rights are always over and against another person. The liberalism that developed out of Hobbes and Locke conceives of human interactions as, at root, contractual actions and of contracts as a type of compromise in the face of conflict, in the face of scarcity. Because all human interactions are ultimately contractual and based on property rights and the State is that which enforces contracts and property rights, there is within liberalism itself the presupposition of the ubiquitous power of the sword—sovereignty.
I am convinced that this “ontological violence”[12] is the field from which the idea of sovereignty—and so of the State—has sprouted and is cultivated because, in the face of perpetual violence, peace is possible only through the imposition of a greater violence that can suppress all other conflicts.[13] Sovereignty allows for legitimate violence. Without it, in the modern world of ubiquitous violence, you can either accept a sort of political nihilism: the strongest rule and there is no right or wrong about it—this is the route taken by many post-modern theorists. Or, you can assert that all violence is immoral and that therefore all government is crime. This is an extreme position sometimes adopted by radicals of various stripes. Or, you can maintain that sovereignty is real and has existence prior to any particular, historical political situation. The sovereign is that power that can wield violence legitimately, that is somehow morally empowered with a monopoly on violence, and who rightly wields that monopoly unchallenged; all other violence is crime. Sovereignty allows us to sort the relentless violence into two types: the legitimate and the illegitimate.
It seems to me that almost all modern political thought, from theories of the divine right of kings to theories of representative republics, are ultimately about who is sovereign and how their monopoly on violence can be realized most effectively. Because this scenario operates at the level of an assumption, history is seen as the struggle over sovereignty: who is going to have it and how are they going to enforce it? The right answer ideologically, of course, is the secular, democratic State—which becomes the telos of history and the perfect manifestation of sovereignty. It is this idea that underpins ultimately the narrative of “the problem of Church and State” because it is this idea that cannot see a way to accommodate both papal and monarchical power within a single, coherent, and stable society.
Read from within this framework, in the Middle Ages, the Church seems to have made a bid for sovereignty. It attempted a religious State, a theocracy. This attempt put it necessarily in conflict with the secular monarchies. There simply cannot be both multiple sovereigns and peace, and so we get the notion of the Church and the State in the Middle Ages as rival, parallel institutions. As one theorist of secularization has written, “the popes were to rule over the Church, and the princes were to rule over the state, and each had its own property, personnel, and politico-legal apparatus.”[14] Like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sovereigns, sometimes the two institutions formed an alliance against some common enemy, while at other times they waged war against each other, but within the confines of modern political thought, the papacy and the kings could never ultimately be anything other than rivals. The development of the secular State and the religious Church is seen as the final resolution of this struggle over sovereignty, but not without the bloodletting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The story of sovereignty, the story of Church and State, and the story of the religious and the secular are, therefore, totally bound up together as interlacing plotlines in the same meta-narrative. This whole discourse is, I believe, ultimately ideological, an explication of the modern West’s legitimacy.[15]
Within this reading of the Middle Ages, relations between St. Louis IX and the papacy have been largely ignored. Joseph Strayer, in an article titled “The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century,” deals almost exclusively with Philip IV, mentioning St. Louis only once, stating that Louis was somehow resistant to the “nationalization” process.[16] The neglect of St. Louis is far exceeded, though, by the general neglect of the papacy during the second half of the thirteenth century. After the death of Frederick II in 1250 and the start of what is often called the “long interregnum” of the Empire, the history of the papacy seems to become relevant again only with the advent of its conflict with the Capetians under Boniface VIII and with the move to Avignon. Since the papacy is understood to have lost its battle with the French monarchy, and since papal power is essentially defined as its ability to dominate the antithetical power of the monarchy, it is simply assumed that the second half of the thirteenth century was a period of papal decline and monarchical ascent, even if not a period of open conflict.[17] In this emplotment the seemingly cooperative relations between the papacy and the Capetian monarchy in the thirteenth century are necessarily understood in terms of realpolitik: the papacy needed Capetian support against the Hohenstaufen and their heirs and the French crown found cooperation with the papacy to be sometimes in its interests.[18] As Elizabeth Hallam has written, “In general political dealings the king managed to remain on good terms with a papacy that could not deny his personal piety, but which he only supported when it suited his own ends: good order in the French Church, the upholding of his royal power and the recapture of the Holy Land from the infidel.”[19] However, because Church and State are opposed principles within this narrative, the rise of Capetian power ultimately necessitated a corresponding decline in papal power. James Powell is so convinced of the mutual exclusivity between the power of the papacy and that of crown that he argues that Louis IX’s enthusiasm for and organization of crusades, actions to which the papacy had been exhorting monarchs since the eleventh century, were evidence of the decline of the papacy, a decline that resulted in a Church that could be characterized as “desperate” by the end of the century.[20]
I do not aspire to diminish the work of the generations of scholars who have, to varying degrees, worked within the meta-narrative described above. Most have contributed greatly to our knowledge of the medieval monarchies and of the Church, and most nuance their own assertions in a manner that would reduce the purchase for aggressive criticism. Nevertheless, I do believe it to be the case that much work in this field has been handicapped by a matrix of categories and concepts that almost compels a certain narrative structure. The current book is an attempt to change the terms and categories through which we conceptualize and discuss the “problem of Church and State” in the Middle Ages and so to free scholarship to go in a new direction.
I argue that thirteenth-century France was built as a “most Christian kingdom,” a term that the papacy frequently used in reference to it. I do not mean that the kingdom of France was a State with a Christian ideology. I mean that it was Christian, fundamentally. There was no State lurking beneath the kingdom’s religious trappings. There was no State at all, but a Christian kingdom. In this kingdom, neither the “secular” nor the “religious” existed. Neither did “sovereignty.” I do not mean that the religious was everywhere and that the secular had not yet emerged from under it. I mean they did not exist at all. Also, I do not mean that the mechanisms and technologies necessary for the realization of sovereign power did not exist. Nor do I mean that the idea of sovereignty was inchoate, that its integrity was awaiting the development of intellectual systems capable of giving it expression. I mean that sovereignty did not exist at all. “Sovereignty,” the “secular,” and the “religious” have existence only in the specific historical circumstances through which we give them their definitions—that is, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If we approach the Middle Ages with these categories, then really we are writing histories of these modern centuries and not of the Middle Ages themselves. The “State” and the “secular,” like all concepts, certainly have histories, genealogies that reach back as far as one might like to go. The people of thirteenth-century France, however, were not trying to figure out how to build a “Sovereign State” and they were not trying to disentangle the “secular” from the “religious.” They had never heard of these things. Their world made sense, and it was a world that did not contain these concepts. This is the world that I am after.
We must abandon the assumptions of modern politics ultimately because France was a Christian kingdom and, within Christianity, peace is the primordial condition and violence is sin, an aberration, a corruption, and ultimately something that does not even have real being—it is an absence. This is a key theme of St. Augustine’s thought.[21] St. Thomas Aquinas treated peace as the final end of being itself.[22] One of the things we have to allow for in order to break free from the modern construct of the “problem of Church and State” is that charity could have real content as charity, that self-sacrifice is real and not just a tactic of conflict. We have to allow for the possibility that two people can have a relationship that is not predicated ultimately on competition for power, one over the other—in effect, we have to allow for the possibility of a non-dissembling peace. If we do so, we can understand the people of the thirteenth century on their own terms, within their “complete act,” because this is the language in which they speak. We can read the sources looking for their categories and concepts and we can entertain the possibility that their language is better at capturing who they were than is ours. It is this that I attempt to do.
[1] Henri de Lubac, S.J., Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), xix. “Something that existed long ago was, in its time, ‘a complete act,’ and it must be understood as such, in its totality.’
[2] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 107.
[3] Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2013) 18; With this in mind, we can see the circular nature of our sociological study of “religion.” For example, Berger writes that the Christian Church is very unusual among human institutions because it is an institution specifically concerned with religion rather than with the institutions of society themselves. The problem, I would contend, is that we derive our definition of religion from those things that the modern Christian Church is concerned with. This produces ethnocentrism in the study of comparative religions and presentism in the study of history (see The Sacred Canopy, 123). For a good example of this problem in action, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) 8–18. Charles Taylor defines religion as a way of thinking that posits the “place of fullness” beyond human life and the secular as a way that posits it “within” human life. This is the transcendent/immanent distinction. He writes, “The crucial distinction underlying the concept of secularity . . . [is:] what makes this group of people as they continue over time a common agent? Where this is something which transcends the realm of those common actions this agency engages in, the association is non-secular. Where the constituting factor is nothing other than such common action . . . we have secularity.” The problem, though, is that Christian salvation in the Middle Ages was not “beyond human life”; it was the fullness of human life: “On earth as it is in heaven.” The Church was the “place of fullness,” for it was the Body of Christ and it was both “within” and “beyond” human life. Does the Eucharist “transcend” the realm of common action that is the Mass or does the Eucharist “condescend” into history? Or conversely, does the Communist society’s commitment to self-sacrifice in the service of impersonal forces of history that ultimately results in heaven on earth not count as “transcending” its common action? If so, why not? It seems to me that we are again seeing concepts that do not lead us to understanding the nature of Christianity but are rather drawn from modern Christianity. Taylor’s definitions are workable for his history, but they are clearly rooted in the particular modern experience, a fact that he acknowledges; see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14–15, 194.
[4] Taylor, A Secular Age, 519.
[5] John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” The American Historical Review 19.3 (June, 1986), 521–22.
[6] Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen & Co., 1970), 451.
[7] Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 89. It is the premise of Brian Tierney’s popular collection of documents that “during the period from 1050 to 1300 there took place a series of conflicts between kings and popes which merged into one another in such a fashion that we may regard them all as changing aspects of one long, continuing crisis” (The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988]).
[8] See, for example, R. F. Bennett’s Introduction in Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
[9] J. A. Watt, “The Papacy,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5, 1198–1300, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164.
[10] Saint Louis, trans. Gareth Evan Gollard (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 235. For a extensive and nuanced articulation of this standard narrative applied to France and mutatis mutandis throughout Western Europe, see Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violenec in Medieval Europe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[11] Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 65.
[12] That modern social science is predicated on an “ontological violence” is the thesis of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
[13] For example, Pierre Manent has argued that the birth of the city in Greece was the politicization of the primordial warfare: “War gives way to political justice, which replaces it very advantageously. But it is important not to forget that justice is something that succeeds war.” In heroic societies war is everywhere, but the modern State produces peace by pushing war to the borders; see Manent, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 52–54. Robert N. Bellah recounts and endorses many anthropologists’ understanding of a primordial and ever-present conflict among the men of a tribe or troop for dominance as the root of social organization. Fearing an “upstart,” the men band together to keep any one of them from gaining too much power. Thus, violence is the root cause of the egalitarianism that we find in “small-scale” societies (Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 175–78).
[14] Philip S. Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700,” American Sociological Review 65.1 (2000): 157.
[15] For discussions of the ideological content of the very category “religion,” see William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993).
[16] The only mention of Louis reads: “Men like Saint Louis and Henry III, who believed sincerely in the old international ideals, could not follow a nationalistic policy” (Joseph Strayer, “The Laicization of French and English Society,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History, ed. John F. Benton and Thomas N. Bisson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 263).
[17] For example, Thomas Renna writes: “The power vacuum left in the aftermath of the imperial-papal conflicts was filled by a French monarch, Louis IX (1214–1270, canonized a saint in 1297). But St. Louis made no attempt to replace the universalism of Pope Innocent IV or Frederick II with his own brand of universalism. Instead, he sought to construct a particularist state, the kingdom of France. This state, a prototype of the later nation state, would serve to dismantle the Gregorian church. Ironically it was the papacy which created conditions favorable to the growth of the French national state. Indeed, nationalism, the nation might never have been realized without the drive by the holy see to forge a centralized church” (Church and State in Medieval Europe, 1050–1314 [Dubuque, IA: Kendal/Hunt Publishing, 1977], 142). He writes further: “But the Gregorian papacy and the Holy Roman Empire had gotten Europeans accustomed to thinking in universalist terms. Hence when these two monarchies depleted each other, Christians turned to the French king, the nearest thing to an ‘emperor’” (ibid., 157).
[18] See, for example, the manner in which Charles Wood accounts for Louis and the papacy’s agreements concerning the Provisions of Oxford while remaining within the traditional narrative: “Under the circumstances absolute proof is impossible, and yet the whole tendency of monarchical policy, at least since the reign of Philip Augustus, had been so contrary to any acceptance of papal sovereignty over matters of state that it becomes difficult to take at face value Louis’ seeming acceptance of it here. . . . When Louis IX found his views in accord with the Pope’s he seems to have felt no hesitation in acknowledging the pontiff’s superior position” (“Mise of Amiens and Saint Louis’ theory of kingship,” French Historical Studies 6.3 [Spring, 1970]: 304).
[19] Elizabeth M. Hallam and Judith Everard, Capetian France, 987–1328, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001), 308.
[20] James Powell, “Church and Crusade: Frederick II and Louis IX,” The Catholic Historical Review 93.2 (April, 2007): 252, 262.
[21] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 392.
[22] ST II-II, q. 29, a. 4.
[23] TNA [Thesaurus novus anecdotorum], 2:371.
[24] See HGL [Histoire generale de Languedoc], 8:428, 429, 434, 537; 7:123–24; and LTC [Layettes du Trésor des chartes], 1:950.