by Andrew Willard Jones

Read October – November 2020.

A summary I gave to a friend:

Speaking of the Middle Ages, I read a book recently I think you’d enjoy if you haven’t read it already, called Before Church and State by an Andrew Willard Jones. It’s a kind of history of the reign of St. Louis IX of France, but he’s making arguments about how our modern categories, like Church and State, cause us to misunderstand the Middle Ages. They didn’t think in these terms and neither do they give us an accurate picture of what happened. We look back and we have this Hobbesian view that the primordial state of things is perpetual conflict, so we have to read St. Louis as wanting to build the absolutist State. But Christians in the Middle Ages understood the primordial state of reality to be the peace of Paradise. The project of both King and Pope was to strive to restore that peace, to build the Augustinian City of God, to make the kingdom a sacramental anticipation of the New Jerusalem. So I found it really interesting. It talks about how the Albigensian Crusade and the English Barons' Wars fit into this picture; it has a lot of surprisingly interesting examples of Medieval law and how it functioned, how the Four Senses of Scripture inspired people in this time, and even a chapter about de-modernizing St. Thomas Aquinas.

Introduction - Church and State?

• Study of France during the life of St. Louis IX (1214–1270), also following the career of Gui Foucois or Pope Clement IV (~1200–1268)
• Argument: France at that time was not a place where the sacred and secular vied for mastery, but a world in which the two were completely dependent on each other.
• To us moderns the secular is fundamental and religion is accidental, religion is just one aspect or category that functions in a secular world.
  • Farming, elections, courts, wars, all things that could be done without religion, therefore these are all secular.
• Argument, middle ages neither secular nor religious because for the medievals these were two sides of the same coin (a society that pursued holiness or orthodoxy, building the City of God)
  • The “secular” was integral to a social reality that was thoroughly “supernatural” in character.
  • Justice is a title of Christ, the king is the vicar of Justice, secular justice is a participation in building the City of God
  • The king’s legitimacy was by virtue of his membership in Christ’s Body and the office he held within it
  • A sacramental world in which material and spiritual were always inseparable in every activity
  • The spiritual sword of excommunication was wielded against mortal sinners and the temporal sword was wielded against the violent
• Phrase from Henri de Lubac, “a complete act”, a world that makes sense on its own terms, a world unto itself
  • Our secular world is a complete act, France of St. Louis IX was a very different complete act, and even the violent and heretical world of the Albigensians was its own complete act
• Another modern assumption is that sovereignty exists, and this colours modern views of the middle ages, popes and kings are always fighting over sovereignty
  • Sovereignty is the “absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth”
  • The sovereign is the entity that wields force legitimately, independent of all others
  • History is the Hobbesian state of nature, the constant struggle over who gets to wield sovereignty, because it cannot be shared
  • The power of the State is violence, to which everyone submits
  • Liberalism developed out of this thought, where property rights are natural and human interactions are at root contracts that we make, compromises in the face of violence and scarcity; the State enforces contracts and property rights by violence
  • Peace is only possible by violence great enough to suppress all other conflicts
  • The secular democratic state is the telos and paragon of sovereignty
• In Christianity by contrast peace is the primordial condition; violence is sin, corruption, not a thing at all, an absence
  • This is key in St. Augustine
  • “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.”
  • Only Christianity makes love real , not just electric nerve impulses, not just the selfish gene trying to reproduce
• Many references to John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory in this introduction, oh dear… I may have to read some day…
• Gui Foucois was born around 1200 at Saint-Gilles (near Nîmes, originally founded as an Abbey by St. Giles, major stop for pilgrims on the way to Compostela)
  • grew up during Albigensian Crusade
  • Gui’s father Pierre died at Grande Chartreuse
  • A layman for most of his life, he served the king and his brother Alphonse, Count of Toulouse, was a key figure in the reforms and construction of the legal universe whereby the South could be made orthodox
  • His wife (who had provided him with 2 daughters) died in 1257, and thereafter he took Holy Orders
  • Within a year he was elected bishop of Le Puy; he served in the king’s Parlement
  • 1264 elected Pope Clement IV
  • His life cuts across so many lines of division typically drawn by moderns thinking about the “problem of Church and State”

Part I - The Business of the Peace and the Faith

Chapter 1 - Enemies of the Faith and of the Peace

• The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1255) was commonly referred to by contemporaries as the negotium fidei et pacis
• Set in motion May 1207 (Gui Foucois was a boy), Pope Innocent III confirmed the excommunication of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, citing crimes that were mostly on the peace side of the business (rather than the faith)
• To Innocent III, Raymond was a failure as a Christian prince, he was both immoral and criminal, was against both the Church and the Law
• Innocent III applied canons from Lateran III against Raymond, which lumped together mercenaries (ruptarii, marauders) and heretics, urged Christians to take up arms against them; Lateran III and Innocent III both saw mercenaries and heretics in the same light
• To the orthodox, a heretic was like a perverted monk or priest (distortion of the spiritual) and their defenders were like perverted knights (or anti-knights , distortion of the secular), and both of these were bound up together
• To the orthodox, the South was a society of heretics of extreme austerity and pacifism, and laymen of extreme violence
• In the heresy of the South, matter was the realm of the evil principle, could not be redeemed; how could there be Incarnation or Sacraments if matter is evil?
• Mark Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (2008), attempted to describe the South of this period anthropologically
  • An attempt to describe their world without using the categories of the contemporary orthodox
  • Worth noting that he uses very modern categories, it similarly is probably not the way the Southerners saw themselves either!
  • In the Southern understanding, “Christ ‘saved the world by showing how He mollified His humanity,’ and so all sacramental or corporal elements of ‘orthodox’ religion made no sense.”
  • Some of it is very anthropology jargon-y: “Pegg writes about ‘methods for organizing time and space’ or ‘modest variations and improvisations of quotidian courtliness’ in describing the way of life in the troubled regions.”
• Innocent III opened Lateran IV with a sermon on Luke 22:15, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer”, and compared this to King Josias who restored the temple and celebrated a great Passover with the people
  • Passover is physically the liberation of Jerusalem, the Crusade,
  • Tropologically, the reform of the Church,
  • Anagogically, salvation itself.
  • The temporal sword (Crusade) was integral to society, just as the Old Testament was to the New
  • Both the spiritual sword and the temporal sword were necessary for the defeat of evil-doers, both praiseworthy
  • Luke 22:38, “Ecce duo gladii hic”, symbolized the two swords
  • Denying the goodness of the Old Testament and denying the goodness of the temporal sword were two dimensions of the same, dualist error

Chapter 2 - Enemies of the King and the Church

• Innocent III in an exhortation to take up arms to King Philip II of France that the two swords were united in the Church of Christ, who is both priest and king according to the order of Melchisedec
• The war ended in 1229, Count Raymond VII surrendered; that year the war’s spiritual and temporal consequences were codified in three ways:
  • A royal ordinance, Cupientes
  • The Peace of Paris was signed by Raymond VII and Louis IX (then aged 14); Raymond would thenceforth help the king with both the peace and faith side of the business
  • The Council of Toulouse followed the previous two, but went into much greater detail, looked to uproot the petty violence of the old social order and replace it with the peace of a Catholic one
    • If someone believed something was owed to him he was to seek it through judges, who would determine who had ius
• The South had been a world where vassals had little obligation to their lords, lords fought wars with mercenaries, towns were fortified, and violence reigned
• The “heretics” of the South were the holy men of a deeply unholy society, the pacifist counterparts of the violent lords and anti-knights
• The Catholic order that would replace it was a sacramental society, secular power modelled on the holy kingship of David; the material and spiritual were compatible, not a paradox like they were for the heretics
• Hence, enemies of the peace were enemies of the faith, “a man who rebelled against the king and a man who adored a Cathar perfectus would ultimately be subject to the same sanction”.

Chapter 3 - For the Extirpation of Heretical Depravity and for the Conservation of the Peace

• A large body of law was growing in order to carry out the business, “a single legal universe” from both spiritual and secular sources, but with neither power “sovereign” (imposing it from outside or above)
• The law simply flowed from the practice of orthodoxy

Chapter 4 - From the Duty of Royal Power

• Louis IX went on crusade from 1248–1254 (sometimes called the Seventh Crusade)
• Louis’ Grande ordonnance of 1254 was one of his first acts on return, reformative, aimed to weed out corruption from royal officials, pursue justice
• Some articles of the Grande ordonnance dealt with Jews, they were to be expelled when they practiced usury, blasphemy or fortune-telling; otherwise they were to be protected (not dealing with Jews per se but manifest sinners)
• The interdependency of spiritual and secular powers in prosecuting the business was very real:
  • E.g. the seneschal of Carcassone complained to the king about local prelates
  • The prelates had complained against him, truthfully, that he had not sworn to uphold the royal statute Cupientes
  • He protested that the prelates themselves were corrupt, not behaving according to the statue either, merely using it for their own gain, e.g. by excommunicating people they didn’t like and refusing to absolve them unless they complied with their demands
  • If the seneschal were to seize the goods of the unjustly excommunicate as Cupientes demanded, he would sin; if he didn’t seize, having sworn, he would commit perjury
  • Impossible for both the spiritual and temporal powers to fulfill their duties unless the other side cooperated

Chapter 5 - Desiring that the King not gain some Advantage from this Violence

• The task of Gui Foucois (and other inquisitors) from roughly 1254–1262 was to right wrongs committed by royal officials, and hold them to the high standard demanded of Davidic lordship
• Change in the status of the land could not be justified, unless it was precipitated by some crime
• Thus, peace was the status quo, in opposition to modern thinking; distinctions between lex, ius, and usus fade away when peace reigns
• Royal power was not absolutism, not an outside ordering principle, not the source of all legitimacy, rather it was force to counter the force of the unjust
• References Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, on medieval law: “To say what someone ought to do is at one and the same time to say what course of action will in these circumstances as a matter of fact lead toward a man’s true end and to say what the law, ordained by God and comprehended by reasons, enjoins.”
• Medieval justice contrasted with “legal positivism” whose validity is self-referential, rather it is directed towards an immediate telos, maintenance of peace, pointing to an ultimate telos, salvation
• Temporal power only legitimate when ordered to the goal that it shares with the spiritual power, orthodoxy, salvation through faith and love

Chapter 6 - Gird thy Sword upon thy Thigh, O Thou most Powerful (Ps. 44)

• For Catholics, “the world” is not simply the physical, it is the realm of sin, the City of Man; the “kingdom of God” is not only the spiritual, not just heaven, but the realm of grace; the City of God and the City of Man are everywhere and always intermingled; compare this with modern Christians!
• Moderns scandalized by e.g. papal temporal power, due to our lack of sacramental imagination!
• Sainte-Chapelle windows (constructed 1246 – 1248), the king is depicted as heir to the kings of Israel
• Coronation Rite from the Ordo of 1250, included for the first time such things as the “holy ampulla”, the oath to expel heretics, the knighting of the king with boots and spurs, the participation of the peers of the kingdom, which would all be standard till the Revolution
• Coronation was a “complete act”!
• In the world/realm of sin, the king wields the sword not merely to achieve worldly peace, submission of sinners to the Law; rather, it it to prepare sinners for Christ, convert the kingdom of the Law into the kingdom of grace ruled by Christ himself
  • The king’s mission is to transform the City of Man into the City of God
  • The king unites the Old and New, Law and its fulfillment in grace, David and Christ, who wields and abolishes the sword
• The king is a point of contact between the temporal and spiritual
  • Knighted by laymen and anointed by archbishop
  • The king is crowned by the archbishop, he too participates in their apostolic ministry; the bishop is the pastor of the interior of souls, the king of the exterior
  • Clergy are closest to altar but the king is next closest, between people and clergy
  • The king reaches back into history and the Old Law and up into grace and the sacraments
• In such a sacramental society the aim is to perfect and fulfill but not abolish the historical, material, the Old Law; is it possible in a republic, a democracy to be such a society when there is no kingly matter to perfect?
• The king’s duty is to bring about a temporal peace in emulation of God’s eternal peace, reduce the distinction between ecclesia and saeculum
  • As he did this, the proscriptive Law would fade away because it was only effective against the realm of sin
  • In the realm of grace the Law is interiorized in charity
• In a society of sacramental orthodoxy, all legitimate use of force becomes a kind of holy war and all crime or rebellion becomes heresy
  • Tempting to us to see as a theocracy, intolerant authoritarianism
  • Not in fact however, no sovereignty here, since peace not violence is the governing principle
  • Vincent de Beauvais to St. Louis: “Any prince legally rules those under him, no in so far as they are human, but in so far as they have become brutish.”
  • Swords only ordered to peace, so princes have no power over their swords when the people are at peace, priests cannot refuse the sacraments except to mortal sinners
  • Objective of both swords is to render themselves obsolete

Part II - Counsel and Aid

• Sovereignty is arbitrary power
  • Sovereignty’s monopoly on violence is only possible through modern technology
  • The sovereign determines when its order is violated; there is no limit on its field of action, since it could suspend such a limit in the name of peace and order
  • Conflict is the fabric of society, and sovereignty is the ultimate prize of conflict
  • Postmodernism does not do away with sovereignty, merely strips it of its legitimacy, of its “divine” or “natural” mythology, cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory
• In St. Louis’ kingdom, peace was the product of difference and inequality; when people were somehow “the same” that is when violence erupted
  • Difference makes Charity (duty, gift, love) possible, and thus Peace is possible
  • Liberalism imagines us as all the same, the medieval mind imagined us as all different and relational
  • Differentiation main way in which medieval and modern law differed
  • Liberal society thoroughly undifferentiated, we must come up with concepts like “self-ownership”: why can a person do as he pleases? Because he is the owner of himself. The difference between personhood and property must be flattened, ownership and property precede humanity
  • The Persons of the Trinity thoroughly differentiated, Each defined by His relationship with Each Other
  • Family in modern society remains an island of differentiation in a sea of sameness: peace possible in a family, not conflict mitigated by contracts and violence
  • Father-son relationship based on differentiation, duties, self-sacrifice, obedience, gifts and ultimately love
• We can thus imagine wider groups beyond the family whose relationship, whose peace is based on differentiation
  • Not imagining a society without conflict, e.g. fathers and sons argue all the time, it, it is imagining a society where such conflicts do not fit
  • Cf. Hostiensis’ complementarity of lay, secular and religious
• Gui Foucois came into the king’s service in 1254
• In the mid-1250s, St. Louis established his Parlement as a permanent institution
  • it was the king’s court or curia
  • Met several times a year to hear cases and make rulings
  • Heard cases about everything from pasturing pigs to making war
• Gui’s wife died in 1257, he took Holy Orders, was elevated to the See of Le Puy, became one of Louis’ counselors in Parlement
• 1259, Gui transferred to Archbishopric of Narbonne
• 1261, elevated to cardinalate
• 1264, papal legate to France, directed to help Louis bring peace to England
• 1268, elected Pope Clement IV

Chapter 7 - The Lord King Orders that the Plain Truth be Found

• Parlement’s job was to adjudicate rival “peaces”, find out which party in a conflict was the peaceful one, determine what constituted the original peace before the conflict, restore that peace and see that it is respected
• The right to use force was diffused throughout society, heavily context-bound, to notion that private use of force was in and of itself violent or always illegitimate
• The king was not the master of the peaceful order, but its servant
• The power of coercion of criminals was called simply “justice”, “high justice” or “justice of blood” was the right to judge capital crimes, e.g. murder, rape, treason, etc.
• The crown did not have a monopoly on justice, neither did it delegate justice
  • Rather a variety of different entities in different locations held different shares of justice
  • Some cases in parlement over who held justice in a certain location, but actually this chapter focusses on these only to cater to modern prejudices
  • Always lots of open space: it might be determined because of a conflict that someone held justice over a certain crime in a certain place, but what about other crimes?
  • Parlement did not assign justice, when necessary it “discovered” it
  • Funny example about the nude thieves, starting p. 181
• Historians have tried to find in the records of Parlement that justice was delegated top-down, but it was quite possible for the king to act criminally in punishing criminals where he did not possess justice
• Crown and Parlement only intervened when there was some disagreement about who held justice, what was the original peace
  • Assumption was that you only had to find out the truth of the particulars of a certain place, what it had been like before the conflict, and the answer to what things should be like would be clear
• Our society abhors private violence because it challenges our “peace”:
  • State has a monopoly on violence, non-State violence is taboo
• Methods and arguments used in Parlement concerning cases about who held justice substantially similar to those used for who held the right to fell trees in a particular wood, pasture pigs in a particular field in June, and who in August, who had the right to charge a toll for crossing a particular bridge
• For the medievals scarcity only existed when two parties wanted to possess something that couldn’t be possessed by both
  • Modern idea is that everyone always wants more of everything at the expense of everyone else, hence every interaction is defined by scarcity, axiomatic in economics
• Author contends that medieval conception of rights not different from modern
  • King’s rights also not different from anyone else’s, perhaps just more of them
  • Both cases rights emerge only where there is conflict, right held by one person against another
  • Difference lies in the conflicts that rights assuage
  • Modernity believes in universal conflict and so requires universal human rights
  • For medievals conflict was the exception, and so rights were very particular
• Parlement uninterested in law in the modern sense
  • Instead looked at “possession” and “use”
  • use through time demonstrated the reality of possession, who had it and for how long most important questions to determining what was the peace
  • Peace could be seen as the summation of the uses of society
  • Possession was a responsibility as much as a right, someone with the right to levy a bridge toll could be expected to maintain the bridge as well
• Time, place and circumstance crucial to medieval law, but not to modern, which pretends to universality
  • ‘We feel there is something “medieval” and out of place, perhaps even unjust, but at least exceptional, about such things as common-law marriage, squatters’ rights, or statutes of limitation.’
• Change, passage of time, flux of human relationships and material things were the conditions within which medieval justice operated
  • How long? Most crucial question
  • Modern law static, unaffected by time, statutes are timeless
• Historians say that medieval society and law was based on custom, but not accurate
  • Custom = habit = the default way of resolving certain conflicts, developed in areas of frequent conflict
  • The pre-existing peace, the differentiated practice, demonstrable use could displace a custom
  • The right to put aside a custom was called a “liberty”
  • The king and his parlement also judged according to divine law and wisdom (outside of rights, uses, etc.)
  • But usually divine law not specific so still relied on use, possession, etc.
• Medieval law particular, not arbitrary
  • Particular practices upheld by judgments because they were just and peaceful
  • Not because they fit into a self-justifying constellation of written laws (like ours)
• St. Louis was not against private violence (neither duels nor larger conflicts)
  • Acts of force great and small came under the same kind of justice as other things
  • They could be peaceful or violent, depending on circumstances

Chapter 8 - The Spiritual and the Temporal

• P. 232, Parlement heard case of a Guillaume vs. chapter of Orleans
  • chapter selling candles
  • Guillaume claimed royal charter granted him exclusive rights
  • Chapter claimed papal authority to do so, and this evidence was not excluded from case
  • Justice was above the law, justice is the foundation for the law, justice is not defined by the law
• St. Louis in his judgements sometimes appears to be imposing penances!
• Large conflict described between Bertrand, provost of the church of Toulouse, and Raymond, bishop of Toulouse, around 1262, 1263
  • Both pope and king were involved trying to determine who was at fault
  • “Excommunications flowed into armed conflict without seam and it was violence in the street that had first involved the secular power.”
  • Conflict between two parties composed of both two groups composed of both clerics an laymen
  • Who was Church and who was State?
• When it came to law, even papal decrees could be overridden by peaceful practice
  • The pope’s laws were like those of any other prince
  • The two swords both descended from God, both were for the construction and defence of the City of God
• ‘It was the spiritual that made the kingdom Christian and it was the temporal that made it a kingdom. It is not that they cooperated in some sort of “Gelasian” division of spheres—you have your space and I have mine. Rather, they formed a unity that was, simply, the Church.”

Chapter 9 - Counsel and Aid

• St. Louis’ society was decentralized not just technologically but conceptually
• Every actor and action had its own legitimacy, participated in an overarching legitimacy that was the justice of God, whose result was peace
• The king could not control all the resources of the kingdom, but what if he could get those who did control them to join him in some initiative?
  • What if he could bind them by loyalty? Or even friendship?
• Power was wielded through networks of loyalty, cooperation, favour, and friendship
• Networks included bishops as much as lords, friars, burgher, canons, knights, everyone
• Historians describe consilium et auxilium in a very narrow feudal sense = what a vassal owed his lord
  • In fact it did not even primarily exist within such feudal, unequal relationships
  • Even in the narrow feudal context, the vassal swears to behave towards his lord as a faithful member of his kin, as a true friend
  • Friendship itself however is not defined by oaths, exists prior to oaths
  • A lord unfaithful to his vassals was a still wicked man, since it was like he had betrayed a kinsman or friend, without any perjury or oath involved
• St. Thomas Aquinas defined divination as the attempt to use the consilium et auxilium of a demon
• Giving counsel and aid was the use of one’s resources, rights, uses, etc. in the service of another
  • such a relationship could be mutual when people united with a common goal
  • Would be praise or blameworthy together
• A king’s consilium very powerful, the most powerful consilium of an individual?
• Christianity demanded that all owed counsel and aid to their neighbour
• The Christian ideal is a universal but differentiated network of counsel and aid, שָׁלוֹם
• Law and right important but not primary, where peace succeeded they too would fade
• Networks of counsel and aid had “orthodoxies” to them, common moral understandings
  • Divine justice underwrote one’s legitimacy in society
  • To knowingly act unjustly was to surrender legitimacy
  • To give counsel and aid to crusaders was to share in their indulgence, to do so to Saracens was to incur excommunication
• Moderns believe difference leads to conflict and subordination
  • Trinitarian understanding however is that difference does not necessitate conflict
  • Different people coexist through friendship, mutual giving, trust
  • Sharing a vision of divine justice is the origin of counsel and aid
• The Toulouse Bertrand-Raymond conflict was not about whether bishops or the king are really in charge, whether Church or State was supreme
  • Conflict was about rival conceptions of justice, each side believed the other to have acted unjustly
  • When bishops and kings agreed on the content of justice, they treated each other as friends, they gave each other counsel and aid
  • The conflict would then fade away, with no one subordinated
• If conflict persisted, charges of sin would necessarily change to charges of heresy, since two irreconcilable orthodoxies were at friction, violence even war justified
• Albigensian crusade the ultimate example of this
  • Oaths sworn by capitulating southern nobles in 1214 focussed on not giving consilium, auxilium and favorem to marauders and heretics, starting to give them to the Roman Church and her allies
  • Louis XIII entered the fight in 1226 only after having taken consilium with his barons and so directing them and their resources to the war
  • At the war’s end in 1229, the Peace of Paris wanted to dissolve the opposing network and integrate Raymond VII into that Louis IX and the Roman Church
• Guy Foucois and the Jews, pgs. 269 and 272, reference Robert Chazan, “Archbishop Guy Fulcodi of Narbonne and his Jews”, Revue des etudes juives, 132 (173): 589

Chapter 10 - In the Fullness of Royal Power

• The Second Barons’ War (1264–1267) in England, led by Simon de Montfort (6th Earl of Leicester and son of Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, one of the leaders of the Albigensian Crusade) against Henry III and his son (future Edward I “Longshanks”), is sometimes seen as a precursor to English parliamentary rule
• Historians often see the Mise of Amiens (1264, St. Louis’ decision as arbitrator in the English war) and any cooperation between king and Pope as opportunistic
  • But in light of actual relationship between king and pope and king and papal legate to England (Gui Foucois, the king’s old enquêteur), the were in true agreement about the English situation
• 1250s and 1260s complex
  • Precursor to the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302)
  • Manfred, King of Sicily, heir of tyrant Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II
  • Pope could not allow Manfred to hold Sicily, Manfred an anti-king, anti-David
  • Manfred wanted to rebuild father’s power in southern Italy at expense of Roman Church
  • Pope convinced that the future of crusades to the Holy Land and other large-scale plans depended on the resolution of the problem in Sicily
  • Louis agreed on the necessity of peace in Italy
  • Innocent IV looked to Henry III of England as champion against Manfred, and invested Henry’s second son, Edmund, with the kingdom of Sicily in 1253, with the expectation of an invasion
  • Various things delayed Henry, including hostilities with St. Louis, these needed to be resolved before he could invade Sicily
  • Pope insisted that as part of peace with France, St. Louis should also pledge 500 knights towards Sicilian expedition
  • Summer 1258, Simon de Montfort compelled Henry and Edward to agree to the Provisions of Oxford, forcing the king to rule in “consultation” with a council of barons not of his choosing
  • Barons relative power due to king’s debts from preparations for Sicily
  • 1259, Peace of Paris between Henry and Louis; Simon de Montfort represented Henry in Paris, but relationship between him and Henry continued to sour, stopped helping to procure the 500 French knights
  • 1261, pope absolved Henry of oath to uphold Provisions, charged Archbishop of Canterbury to force (threaten excommunication) barons to obey king
  • Henry and Simon asked Louis to intervene (both trusted Louis)
  • Christmas 1261, Urban IV named Gui Foucois cardinal
  • 1262, 1263, Louis’ relationship with Simon became strained: Henry and Louis were kings at peace and brothers-in-law (both married daughters of Ramon IV, Count of Provence)
  • November 1263, Gui Foucois made papal legate to England, to wield spiritual sword against rebels
  • December 1263, Henry and Simon made their cases to Louis
  • 1264, Mise of Amiens, open conflict breaks out in England, Henry and Edward captured by Simon, Guy prevented from crossing to England, placed barons’ land under interdict; death of Urban IV
  • 1265, Gui elected pope Clement IV, confirmed excommunication of Simon; Simon dies excommunicate at the hands of Prince Edward; Henry reclaims throne
• Kings understood Davidically, christologically, work for peace and justice on earth, in no way incompatible with the pope’s mission as vicar of Christ
• As in Albigensian crusade, rebellion and excommunication, heresy and violence became interchangeable in English situation, distinction between just war and holy war collapsed
• Mise concerned with undoing Provisions of Oxford, which it deemed to be an act of violence, supported Henry’s “fulness of royal power”
• This fullness of power not absolutism, confined by what is peaceful, what is just, what peace reigned before the Provisions, king has no power to commit violence
• Mise stipulates that Henry must pardon the barons and hold to rancour towards them
• Gui unable to accept Simon de Montford’s “peace” (with captive Henry), because making a ceremonial king out of Henry was against God and all justice
• Kings must be able to vary their counsellors with time and circumstances, have the liberty to choose with whose counsel and aid they rule, otherwise they could not maintain peace
• Louis apparently said he would rather be a ploughman than such a ceremonial king
• Rebels were attempting to introduce an earthly “constitution” preceding the king’s power
• Clement IV in 1267 letter to Greek emperor Michael Palaeologus, became basis for papal primacy agreed to by Greeks at Lyons II, repeated over and over until Vatican I

Part III - The Fullness of Papal Power

Chapter 11 - In the Image of a Proconsul

• De latere papal legates (from the side of the pope’s very body) were determined by Clement IV to not expire with the death of a pope as often assumed before
• Uses Jer 1:10 to describe their role: “Lo, I have set you this day over the nations, and over kingdoms, to root up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant”.
• Also uses image of imperial proconsuls, a position right below the Roman emperor, a permanent and indispensable feature of Roman governance
• combined biblical and legal justification, created something new: a spiritual, pastoral, and permanent apostolic governor of a province
• Medieval preaching not just instructive as modern tends to be, but prophetic; to preach was to be a mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit

Chapter 12 - With the Counsel and Assent of the King

• Spring 1263, since the situation was going poorly in England, negotiations began for Charles of Anjou, Louis’ brother, to take the throne of Sicily and defeat Manfred
• Charles’ investiture as King of Sicily in July 1265
• Charles would defeat and kill Manfred February 26, 1266 at the battle of Benevento
• Crusade taxes had become a permanent feature of life during this time, as there was always a crusade (Albigensians, Simon de Montfort, Manfred, Holy Land)
• This permanent crusade, full deployment of the spiritual and temporal swords, was the negotium, what defended the Catholic social order
• Both kings and pope were necessary and it cannot be said that one dominated the other, they were interdependent

Chapter 13 - Sede Vacante

• 29 November, 1268, Clement IV died, and longest papal vacancy in history began (34 months), doesn’t explain why??

Part IV - St. Thomas Aquinas and the “Most Christian Kingdom”

• Argued already that “the State” did not exist in the 13th century, in a similar what “the Church” did not; “neither the voluntary spiritual communion characteristic of Protestantism nor the positive and enclosed jurisdictional structure of 19th century Catholicism”.

Chapter 14 - The New Law and the Two Swords

• 20th century fights between theologians over Aquinas, strawmen created on both sides, Neo-Thomism not nearly so “rigid” as made to seem
• Text-book, “Whiggish” Thomas’ political thought: divine law was additional, a second storey on top of the natural law, which was already accessible to everyone
  • Divine law and grace could be removed, and the natural law would remain an unproblematic guide to life which virtuous people could follow
  • “Natural government” and social virtue are somehow immune from the effects of the Fall
  • Seems like Thomas the Pelagian (definitely St. Augustine would have had big problems with this!)
• Rather, St. Thomas Aquinas should be read as part of the “complete act” of the 13th century already sketched out above
• For St. Thomas, natural law is rational participation in the eternal law
  • “Natural law is the way God intends us, as human beings, to act concerning him, concerning ourselves, and concerning our fellow man.”
  • The eternal law is divine reason, humans have a rational nature that participates in divine reason
  • Therefore, right reasoning about what is to be done takes on the nature of a law
  • Human law is the practical application of the natural law, its further specification, natural law lived socially, applied to the common good in a place and time
  • Since humans are social and temporal in nature, even in the Garden of Eden there would have been human law
• In the garden, even without grace, by nature alone, man could love (diligere) God and neighbour, but was not capable of perfect virtue, loving God and neighbour in charity (caritas)
• But in man’s fallen state, he cannot even achieve all that his natural powers should be able to, sin prevents him from perceiving and acting on the natural law
  • Fallen man has replaced natural law with “the law of the stimulant [to sin]”, concupiscence, a second and deeply flawed nature, exaggerated all the more through actual sin and vice
  • Even the intellect is corrupted by original sin, we lack the natural knowledge we originally possessed
• Fallen human law is law only to the extent that the lawgiver acted virtuously despite his fallen human nature; he must try his best to discern the natural law and apply it
• St. Thomas in no sense believed that the natural law could be fulfilled by fallen man
• God instituted the Old Law, the first stage of divine law, in order to begin to correct this
  • The Old Law was focussed on man’s intellect
  • Old Law came at a time fitting for conquering men’s pride
  • Man is proud with respect to 2 things: knowledge and power
  • Abraham lived in a time when men relying on their own deficient reason had fallen into idolatry and other vices
  • The written Law was given after as a remedy for human ignorance
  • Romans 3:20, “The knowledge of sin comes through the Law.”
  • After instruction in the Old Law, man’s weakness was revealed when he was unable to fulfill it
  • Romans 8:3–4, “What the Law, weakened by the flesh, was powerless to do, this God has done by sending his own Son… so that the righteous decree of the law might be fulfilled in us.”
• The 10 Commandments re-promulgated a law that had been readily available to man’s reason before sin
• The totality of the natural law, life in accordance with reason and virtue, was contained in the Old Law
• God also revealed to Israel much human law, practical applications of the natural law in a time and place
• Israel under the Old Law was the closest man ever came to a natural regime: he had access to the natural law, and to its application, but not sanctifying grace
  • The Old Law restored knowledge of the natural law, but not the ability to fulfill it
  • “A man cannot observe all the precepts of the Law unless he fulfills the precept of Charity, which cannot be done without grace. And so, what Pelagius claimed is impossible.”
  • Whig-Thomism a kind of Pelagianism
• The Old Law was exterior and focussed on the intellect, the New Law was interior and focussed on the will
  • New Law presupposed a restored knowledge of the natural law
  • “This is the logic of salvation, the logic of the Bible itself: the literal sense of Scripture anticipated its meaning in the allegorical, but both the literal and the allegorical were ‘intellectual’ senses that were pointing toward their fulfillment in the interiorized tropological or moral sense, which concerned the will, leading it to the New Law of Charity, and so to the anagogical sense, which as perfect contemplation of God himself, was both the fulfillment of Scripture and its surpassing.”
  • Law is a transitory thing, reaching back into nature and forwards into grace
  • The New Law was the grace of the Holy Spirit, that restored to “natural” men the Charity (including Faith and Hope) that supernatural friendship with God and neighbour required
• The ideal Christian government:
  • Government of the interiorized New Law, where love of God and neighbour are united in a single law, which is the rational soul’s participation in the eternal law, which is perfected through grace
  • Next best, not natural law simply, but government of the exteriorized law, just human judgment made possible through grace, no longer includes the particular precepts of the Old Law, but particular precepts made by virtuous lawgivers
  • Worst, government of fallen nature without grace, through the exteriorized rule of fear
• In other words:
  • Within the Church but without sacramental grace, the best peace possible was the externalized law of the Gospel
  • Outside the Church, the best possible was fallen nature’s imperfect understanding of the natural law and its application, and its obedience through virtue (virtuous Gentiles, difficult if not impossible)
• In 13th century France, both king and bishop specified divine law in their own way
  • This law was constructed in a sinful world in need of conversion
  • A world that still needed to be converted and brough to true peace
  • A world where when virtue is absent fleeting pleasures and the social peace of contracts and fear are the only peace possible
  • Their project was to bring people to the interior peace of the New Law
• The patristic and monastic tradition understood the two swords as the Old and New Testaments; this is compatible with the later understanding of the two swords as the temporal (exteriorized) and spiritual (interiorized) powers
  • The spiritual sword sought to scare the sinner back to the realm of grace before he fully left it
    • Excommunication was not wielded in the realm of sin, just at its brink, against those potentially still in unity (to infidels excommunication meant nothing)
  • The temporal sword could frighten or force the mortal sinner, living without grace, to accept at least a worldly peace
  • It required the sacraments to bring a sinner back to grace, and so law was required to determine when to administer them
  • Canon law grew up around penitential practice, confessionals
  • Inquisitors primarily confessors, their sentences penances
• “This was, of course, simply the dynamic of salvation itself: from fallen nature, to the Law, and through the Law to grace. It was the movement from the historical (nature) to the allegorical (Faith), on through the tropological (Charity) to the goal, the anagogical (which motivate the whole dynamic through Hope).”
• This seen in monastic practice:
  • Lectio to meditatio to oratio to contemplatio
  • Monasteries as microcosms of the New Law, where spiritual and temporal life are intermingled, every aspect of life was fully spiritual and temporal
  • Redeemed worlds in miniature
  • Can see the law of the medieval spiritual and temporal powers as emerging from monastic Rules
  • The attempt to turn Christendom into a monastic existence
  • Canons regular and mendicants attempted to bring the monastery into society and urban life
  • Reference to Augustine Thompson OP, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325
  • Married life as the oldest religious order
  • Salvation repetitive, iterative, even fractal
• Christ makes the New interior law achievable through the exterior, always as its fulfillment, not abolishment
  • This is seen especially in the flourishing of Eucharistic devotion and the Feast of Corpus Christi (which liturgy was composed by St. Thomas)
  • Grace comes to us exterior and sensible things
  • The perfect Church is not political merely because it fulfills politics, but because politics it brought into it and perfected beyond itself
  • John Milbank in Beyond Secular Order: “For law to be law as just law, it must point beyond itself.”
• The distinction that truly matters in the 13th century is not Church vs. State, but interiorized Law and exteriorized Law, virtue and vice, true peace and worldly peace (violence), servile fear and filial fear
• The realm of peace was the realm of Hope; Hope causes us to not settle for worldly peace and exteriorized law
  • Settling for exteriorized law is a kind of despair, failure to anticipate heaven on Earth
  • The way a king anticipates God’s kingship
  • Democracy is a kind of despair, it is the best we can imagine today
  • De regno 1.3. Aquinas thought that monarchy was the best form of government because it was least likely to fall into tyranny, even if its tyranny was worse than that of a polity, a consideration that becomes moot if we assume virtuous government to be impossible (De regno 1.5).
  • Hobbesian theory of primordial violence is part of the same historical movement of Protestantism that sees man as totally depraved
  • Lutheran doctrines of sola fide and two kingdoms (separate secular and spiritual kingdoms) part of this movement
  • Same with absolutist monarchs Catholic or otherwise
• The modern Church also tends to ignore or even deny the spiritual senses of Scripture, thus denying that history can ever be more than the realm of nature, that the Law can ever be fulfilled
  • Christianity has now accepted that it is something separate from the world, a lower, socially irrelevant realm of virtue
  • Only has its lower function of preaching, example of upright living, canon law little more than bylaws of religious clubs
  • Modern Christians abhor violence, support the taboo on private violence, yet support the State taking over more and more functions in society
  • Similar to gnosticism/albigensianism, where we have pacifist asceticism and violent lordship?
  • William T. Cavanaugh, The City: Beyond Secular Parodies
  • Thomas Aquinas points out Pontius Pilate’s error: kingship is nothing but force and truth is powerless in this world