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Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX
Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX explores the “problem of Church and State” in thirteenth century France by taking a detailed look at the lives of two men, Gui Foucois (Pope Clement IV) and Louis IX and the institutions they helped build. It argues that the “problem” of Church and State did not exist in the thirteenth century. The spiritual and temporal powers existed, to be sure, but these were not parallel structures attempting to govern the same social space in a contest over sovereignty. Rather, the spiritual and the temporal powers were wrapped up together in a differentiated and sacramental world, and both included the other as aspects of their very identity. “Government” happened through networks of consilium et auxilium that cut across lay/clerical lines. These networks necessarily included both spiritual and temporal powers. During the reign of Louis IX the king’s network expanded to encompass the majority of the social space. This network had integral to it both the papal “fullness of power” and the royal “fullness of power” without any contradiction. The book reconstructs how such government actually happened and not simply the arguments that intellectuals had about how it ought to happen. This reconstruction is, furthermore, presented as a response to how modern historians and scholars of politics often suppose government to have happened. The book is, therefore, directly aimed at engaging and challenging the consensus of contemporary scholarship. What is more, it brings contemporary thought concerning the definition of “religion,” “secular,” and “politics” into the study of the Middle Ages, something that is long overdue. Up to this point, scholars interested in challenging modern conceptions of “religion” have, when treating the Middle Ages, had to rely largely on historical scholarship written from within the conventional paradigm. This book aims to provide these scholars with a methodologically and technically rigorous alternative. If the book’s thesis is widely accepted, it will call for the reconsideration of the accepted narrative of medieval Church and State.
510 pages, Hardcover
Published May 12, 2017
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December 22, 2018
Like Diogenes searching for an honest man, I spend my days searching for a useful political program. Necessarily rejecting all Left philosophies as anti-human and anti-reality, I go searching through the thickets on the Right, where of late various new approaches have arisen, to accompany various old ones that are getting fresh attention. They do not get much older than the one espoused in this book, Catholic integralism—versions of the idea, in essence, that church and state should be cooperative joint actors in pursuit of a flourishing society, rather than separate spheres of action. There is a lot to be said for this approach, but as always, its modern proponents spend too much time talking about the past, and too little on how elements of this approach could be used to build the future.
"Before Church and State" is a very detailed examination of the relationship of church and state in the kingdom of Saint Louis IX (r. 1226–1270). The focus is not so much on the king, although he appears often in the vehicle of his commands and in his correspondence, but on one of his servants, Gui Foucois. Not that Foucois was any ordinary servant—after serving the king in sundry high positions, he became a bishop, then Pope Clement IV (r. 1265–1268). It is through the service of Foucois to his society that Jones frames his story, especially in his service as enquêteur, basically an itinerant judge tasked with administering justice on the local level.
While this presents as a history book, and a very academic one at that, containing lengthy footnotes in untranslated Latin, and the word “integralism” appears nowhere, it has a clear purpose, and that is to praise integralism and demonstrate that it is a workable system. Rather than argue merely that the secular and religious powers can cooperate, or did cooperate in thirteenth-century France, Jones makes a broader claim, which he states precisely. “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 emerged from under it. I mean they 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.”
Jones therefore rejects most of the definitional categories in which we think. This is a bold step; it flies the face of all modern assumptions, across the political spectrum. Carl Schmitt would not agree that sovereignty is a modern creation; Karl Marx would not either. And separation of church and state is a critical part of the Enlightenment project of atomized liberty and emancipation from unchosen bonds. According to Jones, the aim of Louis’s kingdom was not for the king to exercise power for himself, or for the Church to do so. Rather, the goal was simply peace, defined broadly. All those who held any kind of power had that same goal, which Jones, following contemporary usage, terms “the business of the peace and the faith.” The “business” involved two major powers: the crown and the Roman Church, and their functionaries, like Gui Foucois, were intertwined and interested in the same goals, not competing. They were, that is, conducting the same enterprise.
Peace was the telos of society; it led to the telos of man, salvation. Legal positivism this was not. Temporal power “could be said to be legitimate only to the extent that it was ordered toward a goal that it shared with the spiritual power: salvation through faith and love—orthodoxy. And so, every action of the temporal power had an intrinsic spiritual dimension, and likewise every action of the spiritual power had an intrinsic temporal dimension.” The difference between temporal and spiritual power did not mean conflict; rather, as with the Trinity, or the human and divine natures of Christ, the ideal was unity, a partnership in which there was no distinction between “secular” and “spiritual.”
Certainly, there were many conflicts among both the great and the small. But rather than Hobbes’s war of all against all, “conflicts were waged within a sacramental context, within a conceptual universe where the temporal and the spiritual were intrinsically bound up together.” The king, for example, viewed himself not as a mere temporal lord with certain powers and certain duties but, like Charlemagne, as a Davidic king, bound before God, and answerable at His throne, to seek true peace, administer true justice, deliver souls to God, protect the weak, and strengthen Christendom. The Pope had a similarly expansive, and overlapping, view of his powers and duties, but that did not necessarily mean conflict. Rather, it meant that king and Pope, and more importantly their functionaries, worked together to achieve society’s goals. When we overlay modern concepts of sovereignty on this concept, we fail to understand how men of this era viewed themselves, as well as how they acted. (Not that it was all men—Jones refers several times to, for example, women owning fortresses, and therefore being part of the “business.”)
This cooperation between powers meant that heresy was functionally the same as rebellion; a man could be excommunicated for rebellion and rebellion shaded into heresy, as shown by contemporary use of complex terms (analyzed exhaustively by Jones) such as faiditi, a marauder with heretical overtones, who disturbed the peace and harmony that was the goal of society. Nor was civil justice a monopoly of the king, something he handed down to others to exercise on his behalf. For example, the king could order that dueling not be used as a form of trial in those situations and areas where he customarily dictated the procedures of justice; he had no such power beyond that, so trial by combat continued in many areas. This was a lived form of subsidiarity. Ecclesiastical law was much more than that dictated by the Pope; non-ecclesiastical law much more than that dictated by the king. And law bore relatively little resemblance to modern statute law: it was one body of law with both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical sources, with the same end goal, of societal peace.
Jarringly to us, though the norm in pre-modern Europe, was that the source of most law was custom (except for canon law, applied only within the Church itself). The vast majority of legal disputes put before the enquêteurs, or their ecclesiastical counterparts (with whom they overlapped and into whom they shaded), revolved around determinations of custom. “A ‘new’ custom was basically synonymous with a ‘bad’ custom, both of them subjecting victims to an arbitrary will and so reducing them to servitude.” There was no set of parallel legal systems; there was a single legal universe, and its goal was peace through law, embodied in custom.
It is worth noting that everything Jones describes falls generally under the heading “rule of law,” as opposed to arbitrary power. Although, as Francis Fukuyama has discussed, the rule of law is a purely Western concept, found nowhere in China or the Muslim world, you not infrequently hear uneducated people suggesting that the Enlightenment is the origin of the rule of law. Steven Pinker is particularly bad for this, but you hear variations on the claim very often. In fact, the law as explicated in Louis’s kingdom fully met A. V. Dicey’s famous nineteenth-century definition of the rule of law, as rephrased by the pseudonymous blogger Lexington Green: “Restated, Dicey says the Rule of Law consists of: (1) disallowing arbitrary power, restricting the use of power to what is permitted by law, (2) treating all persons to the exact same law, in the same courts, without regard to their status, and (3) treating the officers of the government to exactly the same law as everybody else.” Despite the remoteness from us of the kingdom of Louis IX, it was very like us in this way, or like we were until recently, which is perhaps the most important characteristic of a non-tyrannical government.
So the book consists of a mass of data in service of Jones’s basic proposition, almost all from primary sources. I can’t tell you whether this is accurate history; as Jones freely admits, it contradicts the more standard narrative, which views Louis IX as conflicting with the Church in a struggle for dominance. My purpose here is mostly to evaluate what this view of life says for our future. A major fault line on the Right, recently developed, is whether the modern order is redeemable at all. I have talked earlier of the “civil institutionalists” as one group of modern conservatives dissatisfied with the modern world and wishing to make a change. Among those interested in Reaction, such as me, I place them as a sub-group of what I call Augustans, who take a dim view of democracy, as well as atomized liberty, and focus on power and its uses to remake society, in a way that will be mostly determined ad hoc within certain broad guidelines. The “civil institutionalists” also reject the Enlightenment but focus on the specific desired characteristics of a revived society, not the uses of power to achieve a remaking. (It will not be surprising that I am an Augustan, and am peddling my own coalescing political program, tentatively named Foundationalism.) Their focus on societal specifics, rather than power, makes integralists a brand of civil institutionalist.
Integralism is often thought of as the formal combination of church and state. That seems a bit odd for Christians—whatever happened to “give unto Caesar”? Plus, that does not distinguish it from caesaropapism, the domination of the church by the state. It would be more precise, I think, to say that integralism rejects the liberalism of the Enlightenment, and wishes to return to an idealized pre-Enlightenment form in which the Roman Church plays a critical role and has real power. (Despite occasional efforts, like those of John Calvin, to form a Protestant integralist state, the idea has usually had little pull for Protestants, for reasons that are fairly obvious if you read Brad Gregory’s "The Unintended Reformation.") I am all for rejecting the Enlightenment, and as I have discussed elsewhere, it is certainly true that little or nothing of the material success of the modern world has anything to do with the Enlightenment, and that as a political project it is in its dying gasps. Whether some form of integralism is the cure I am much less sure about, starting with my core objection to too much reactionary thought—that what we should be looking for is a new thing informed by the old, not the old thing itself.
There are a really two types of integralists. Despite the attention they get, I suspect you could fit all their supporters today into a provincial hotel’s third-biggest banquet room. Their only prominent mouthpiece is the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule (of whom more below). One group, the majority (though that is like being the world’s tallest midget) holds to the idea, promulgated by Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century most precisely, that there should be separate spiritual and temporal spheres, with the former having the final word in areas of overlap. This form of integralism seems closely aligned with Roman Catholic thinkers. Jones’s history offers very little support for this vision, despite Vermeule’s praise for this book. The second group hews to Jones’s vision—blurring the boundaries between church and state, and remolding how we view their work, as joint, rather than oppositional. This seems to be generally the theory, and often the practice, of the Orthodox Church (though it too often shades uncomfortably into caesaropapism).
So far, simple enough. My plan upon reading this book was to review what integralists had to offer, through this book and other writings, and then analyze integralism as part of my overall project. The problem is that effort, other than reading this book, took all of two hours, because what I summarize above appears to be the whole of integralism. It has no depth. It is a parlor game, a thought experiment. Not only is there no plan on how to get from here to there, there is no analysis of what “there” will be, except for “the Pope will be in charge.” I guess that’s a plan, but it doesn’t offer much to chew on, now does it? It is no surprise that no integralist has written any book on integralism as a modern program, and their thoughts appear confined to tweets and occasional short articles on websites, where the articles are more about Catholic theology as it relates to politics (of which Aquinas, for example, had much to say) than about integralism.
Where that leaves us is criticizing, or endorsing, a very not-defined integralist vision. My first objection is that the integralists see no role for secular achievement as important for a flourishing society. To them, statecraft is soulcraft, and that is all. Not even Saint Louis would have endorsed that idea, much less Charlemagne. They saw the soul, of their subjects as much as themselves, as the ultimate reason for their works, but that did not mean a monarch should ignore, or had no obligation to perform, works unrelated to the soul. With them, my belief is that human flourishing requires both a virtuous society and some degree of focus on external acts of heroic daring and accomplishment. Jones does not discuss it, but Louis IX twice went on Crusade, when that was a great and dangerous work, and died on his second journey. True, the Crusades were a form of religious pilgrimage, but with a strong secular heroic component. Louis was also the greatest European patron of the arts of his age; again, many of those arts had religious themes, but they had other dimensions as well. And many a less devout, yet still strongly Christian, monarch, from Henry the Navigator to Charles V, struck the balance differently, yet kept both soulcraft and dynamic heroism.
My second objection is that deep down, or not so deep down, all the integralists totally reject pluralism, especially of the religious variety. That is, they believe that religious pluralism sows the seeds for the end-condition of the liberal project, what we see today, the fragmenting of society under liquid modernity into a catastrophic pursuit of voluntarism, forced equality, autonomic individualism, societal fracturing, gross consumerism and the “goods culture,” and general denial of reality, all enforced with ever greater strictness by the ever more powerful state, leading to either a centrifugal flying apart or a totalitarian regime. All true, and true at least in part that religious pluralism is closely tied to this, though as cause or effect is unclear. But it seems to me the answer isn’t to mandate one religion as the established religion and to give its hierarchs power over society as a whole, though certainly pretending all religions are equally valid and equally preferable likely erodes virtue over time. Rather, the answer is probably to have a strong, Augustan-style state, which will seek the common good and a realistic degree of virtue and flourishing. And that state, very much a non-liberal state, will directly and deliberately encourage and enforce standards of virtue, but not on a confessional basis—even if most of those standards will be derived from Christianity. At the same time, freedom of religious exercise for all will be allowed to the extent not actually in contradiction with those standards. Thus, any non-pernicious religion would be permitted. Certainly Christianity would be officially preferred—there would be no pretense of religious neutrality, and personal advancement in the state and society would be assisted if non-Christians converted (a very successful long-term technique used by Islam). Polytheism would be accepted and no accepted religion would be directly discouraged. Naturally, wholly pernicious belief systems, such as Satanism, would be suppressed by the state. We can call this “pluralism lite,” and again, it’s closely related to the standard Muslim practice (though there considerably more restriction on the practice of other religions was the norm, and zero tolerance offered for non-monotheistic religions). Such a prescription is far more likely to lead to a dynamic, flourishing, and conflict-free society than would eliminating religious pluralism.
I have other objections. In the first conception of integralism, papal supremacy, it is evident that integralists have not spent any time analyzing Pope Francis or the corrupt sink of heresiarchs that is the current Roman clergy, and therefore glibly assume that the supremacy of the Roman Church will fix the problems of modernity. I have some sympathy; until Pope Francis showed up, I tended to think of the Roman Church as the last, best hope of the West. No more of that for me. And to the second conception, joint action, the disadvantage of this relative to the first conception is that it seems inherently unstable. Yes, in its ideal form it achieves the goal of human flourishing. But human nature being human nature, how often would that ideal form be achieved, if two hierarchical power centers were actually expected to cooperate? Certainly Charlemagne, often held up as the European ideal of the Davidic king, spent a great deal of his time contending with various popes and interfering in papal politics outside the Frankish lands. But my first line objections are the two above—that integralists’ vision of their desired state is crimped and defective, not that it is erroneous and impractical as applied, which is probably also true.
[Review completes as first comment.]
"Before Church and State" is a very detailed examination of the relationship of church and state in the kingdom of Saint Louis IX (r. 1226–1270). The focus is not so much on the king, although he appears often in the vehicle of his commands and in his correspondence, but on one of his servants, Gui Foucois. Not that Foucois was any ordinary servant—after serving the king in sundry high positions, he became a bishop, then Pope Clement IV (r. 1265–1268). It is through the service of Foucois to his society that Jones frames his story, especially in his service as enquêteur, basically an itinerant judge tasked with administering justice on the local level.
While this presents as a history book, and a very academic one at that, containing lengthy footnotes in untranslated Latin, and the word “integralism” appears nowhere, it has a clear purpose, and that is to praise integralism and demonstrate that it is a workable system. Rather than argue merely that the secular and religious powers can cooperate, or did cooperate in thirteenth-century France, Jones makes a broader claim, which he states precisely. “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 emerged from under it. I mean they 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.”
Jones therefore rejects most of the definitional categories in which we think. This is a bold step; it flies the face of all modern assumptions, across the political spectrum. Carl Schmitt would not agree that sovereignty is a modern creation; Karl Marx would not either. And separation of church and state is a critical part of the Enlightenment project of atomized liberty and emancipation from unchosen bonds. According to Jones, the aim of Louis’s kingdom was not for the king to exercise power for himself, or for the Church to do so. Rather, the goal was simply peace, defined broadly. All those who held any kind of power had that same goal, which Jones, following contemporary usage, terms “the business of the peace and the faith.” The “business” involved two major powers: the crown and the Roman Church, and their functionaries, like Gui Foucois, were intertwined and interested in the same goals, not competing. They were, that is, conducting the same enterprise.
Peace was the telos of society; it led to the telos of man, salvation. Legal positivism this was not. Temporal power “could be said to be legitimate only to the extent that it was ordered toward a goal that it shared with the spiritual power: salvation through faith and love—orthodoxy. And so, every action of the temporal power had an intrinsic spiritual dimension, and likewise every action of the spiritual power had an intrinsic temporal dimension.” The difference between temporal and spiritual power did not mean conflict; rather, as with the Trinity, or the human and divine natures of Christ, the ideal was unity, a partnership in which there was no distinction between “secular” and “spiritual.”
Certainly, there were many conflicts among both the great and the small. But rather than Hobbes’s war of all against all, “conflicts were waged within a sacramental context, within a conceptual universe where the temporal and the spiritual were intrinsically bound up together.” The king, for example, viewed himself not as a mere temporal lord with certain powers and certain duties but, like Charlemagne, as a Davidic king, bound before God, and answerable at His throne, to seek true peace, administer true justice, deliver souls to God, protect the weak, and strengthen Christendom. The Pope had a similarly expansive, and overlapping, view of his powers and duties, but that did not necessarily mean conflict. Rather, it meant that king and Pope, and more importantly their functionaries, worked together to achieve society’s goals. When we overlay modern concepts of sovereignty on this concept, we fail to understand how men of this era viewed themselves, as well as how they acted. (Not that it was all men—Jones refers several times to, for example, women owning fortresses, and therefore being part of the “business.”)
This cooperation between powers meant that heresy was functionally the same as rebellion; a man could be excommunicated for rebellion and rebellion shaded into heresy, as shown by contemporary use of complex terms (analyzed exhaustively by Jones) such as faiditi, a marauder with heretical overtones, who disturbed the peace and harmony that was the goal of society. Nor was civil justice a monopoly of the king, something he handed down to others to exercise on his behalf. For example, the king could order that dueling not be used as a form of trial in those situations and areas where he customarily dictated the procedures of justice; he had no such power beyond that, so trial by combat continued in many areas. This was a lived form of subsidiarity. Ecclesiastical law was much more than that dictated by the Pope; non-ecclesiastical law much more than that dictated by the king. And law bore relatively little resemblance to modern statute law: it was one body of law with both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical sources, with the same end goal, of societal peace.
Jarringly to us, though the norm in pre-modern Europe, was that the source of most law was custom (except for canon law, applied only within the Church itself). The vast majority of legal disputes put before the enquêteurs, or their ecclesiastical counterparts (with whom they overlapped and into whom they shaded), revolved around determinations of custom. “A ‘new’ custom was basically synonymous with a ‘bad’ custom, both of them subjecting victims to an arbitrary will and so reducing them to servitude.” There was no set of parallel legal systems; there was a single legal universe, and its goal was peace through law, embodied in custom.
It is worth noting that everything Jones describes falls generally under the heading “rule of law,” as opposed to arbitrary power. Although, as Francis Fukuyama has discussed, the rule of law is a purely Western concept, found nowhere in China or the Muslim world, you not infrequently hear uneducated people suggesting that the Enlightenment is the origin of the rule of law. Steven Pinker is particularly bad for this, but you hear variations on the claim very often. In fact, the law as explicated in Louis’s kingdom fully met A. V. Dicey’s famous nineteenth-century definition of the rule of law, as rephrased by the pseudonymous blogger Lexington Green: “Restated, Dicey says the Rule of Law consists of: (1) disallowing arbitrary power, restricting the use of power to what is permitted by law, (2) treating all persons to the exact same law, in the same courts, without regard to their status, and (3) treating the officers of the government to exactly the same law as everybody else.” Despite the remoteness from us of the kingdom of Louis IX, it was very like us in this way, or like we were until recently, which is perhaps the most important characteristic of a non-tyrannical government.
So the book consists of a mass of data in service of Jones’s basic proposition, almost all from primary sources. I can’t tell you whether this is accurate history; as Jones freely admits, it contradicts the more standard narrative, which views Louis IX as conflicting with the Church in a struggle for dominance. My purpose here is mostly to evaluate what this view of life says for our future. A major fault line on the Right, recently developed, is whether the modern order is redeemable at all. I have talked earlier of the “civil institutionalists” as one group of modern conservatives dissatisfied with the modern world and wishing to make a change. Among those interested in Reaction, such as me, I place them as a sub-group of what I call Augustans, who take a dim view of democracy, as well as atomized liberty, and focus on power and its uses to remake society, in a way that will be mostly determined ad hoc within certain broad guidelines. The “civil institutionalists” also reject the Enlightenment but focus on the specific desired characteristics of a revived society, not the uses of power to achieve a remaking. (It will not be surprising that I am an Augustan, and am peddling my own coalescing political program, tentatively named Foundationalism.) Their focus on societal specifics, rather than power, makes integralists a brand of civil institutionalist.
Integralism is often thought of as the formal combination of church and state. That seems a bit odd for Christians—whatever happened to “give unto Caesar”? Plus, that does not distinguish it from caesaropapism, the domination of the church by the state. It would be more precise, I think, to say that integralism rejects the liberalism of the Enlightenment, and wishes to return to an idealized pre-Enlightenment form in which the Roman Church plays a critical role and has real power. (Despite occasional efforts, like those of John Calvin, to form a Protestant integralist state, the idea has usually had little pull for Protestants, for reasons that are fairly obvious if you read Brad Gregory’s "The Unintended Reformation.") I am all for rejecting the Enlightenment, and as I have discussed elsewhere, it is certainly true that little or nothing of the material success of the modern world has anything to do with the Enlightenment, and that as a political project it is in its dying gasps. Whether some form of integralism is the cure I am much less sure about, starting with my core objection to too much reactionary thought—that what we should be looking for is a new thing informed by the old, not the old thing itself.
There are a really two types of integralists. Despite the attention they get, I suspect you could fit all their supporters today into a provincial hotel’s third-biggest banquet room. Their only prominent mouthpiece is the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule (of whom more below). One group, the majority (though that is like being the world’s tallest midget) holds to the idea, promulgated by Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century most precisely, that there should be separate spiritual and temporal spheres, with the former having the final word in areas of overlap. This form of integralism seems closely aligned with Roman Catholic thinkers. Jones’s history offers very little support for this vision, despite Vermeule’s praise for this book. The second group hews to Jones’s vision—blurring the boundaries between church and state, and remolding how we view their work, as joint, rather than oppositional. This seems to be generally the theory, and often the practice, of the Orthodox Church (though it too often shades uncomfortably into caesaropapism).
So far, simple enough. My plan upon reading this book was to review what integralists had to offer, through this book and other writings, and then analyze integralism as part of my overall project. The problem is that effort, other than reading this book, took all of two hours, because what I summarize above appears to be the whole of integralism. It has no depth. It is a parlor game, a thought experiment. Not only is there no plan on how to get from here to there, there is no analysis of what “there” will be, except for “the Pope will be in charge.” I guess that’s a plan, but it doesn’t offer much to chew on, now does it? It is no surprise that no integralist has written any book on integralism as a modern program, and their thoughts appear confined to tweets and occasional short articles on websites, where the articles are more about Catholic theology as it relates to politics (of which Aquinas, for example, had much to say) than about integralism.
Where that leaves us is criticizing, or endorsing, a very not-defined integralist vision. My first objection is that the integralists see no role for secular achievement as important for a flourishing society. To them, statecraft is soulcraft, and that is all. Not even Saint Louis would have endorsed that idea, much less Charlemagne. They saw the soul, of their subjects as much as themselves, as the ultimate reason for their works, but that did not mean a monarch should ignore, or had no obligation to perform, works unrelated to the soul. With them, my belief is that human flourishing requires both a virtuous society and some degree of focus on external acts of heroic daring and accomplishment. Jones does not discuss it, but Louis IX twice went on Crusade, when that was a great and dangerous work, and died on his second journey. True, the Crusades were a form of religious pilgrimage, but with a strong secular heroic component. Louis was also the greatest European patron of the arts of his age; again, many of those arts had religious themes, but they had other dimensions as well. And many a less devout, yet still strongly Christian, monarch, from Henry the Navigator to Charles V, struck the balance differently, yet kept both soulcraft and dynamic heroism.
My second objection is that deep down, or not so deep down, all the integralists totally reject pluralism, especially of the religious variety. That is, they believe that religious pluralism sows the seeds for the end-condition of the liberal project, what we see today, the fragmenting of society under liquid modernity into a catastrophic pursuit of voluntarism, forced equality, autonomic individualism, societal fracturing, gross consumerism and the “goods culture,” and general denial of reality, all enforced with ever greater strictness by the ever more powerful state, leading to either a centrifugal flying apart or a totalitarian regime. All true, and true at least in part that religious pluralism is closely tied to this, though as cause or effect is unclear. But it seems to me the answer isn’t to mandate one religion as the established religion and to give its hierarchs power over society as a whole, though certainly pretending all religions are equally valid and equally preferable likely erodes virtue over time. Rather, the answer is probably to have a strong, Augustan-style state, which will seek the common good and a realistic degree of virtue and flourishing. And that state, very much a non-liberal state, will directly and deliberately encourage and enforce standards of virtue, but not on a confessional basis—even if most of those standards will be derived from Christianity. At the same time, freedom of religious exercise for all will be allowed to the extent not actually in contradiction with those standards. Thus, any non-pernicious religion would be permitted. Certainly Christianity would be officially preferred—there would be no pretense of religious neutrality, and personal advancement in the state and society would be assisted if non-Christians converted (a very successful long-term technique used by Islam). Polytheism would be accepted and no accepted religion would be directly discouraged. Naturally, wholly pernicious belief systems, such as Satanism, would be suppressed by the state. We can call this “pluralism lite,” and again, it’s closely related to the standard Muslim practice (though there considerably more restriction on the practice of other religions was the norm, and zero tolerance offered for non-monotheistic religions). Such a prescription is far more likely to lead to a dynamic, flourishing, and conflict-free society than would eliminating religious pluralism.
I have other objections. In the first conception of integralism, papal supremacy, it is evident that integralists have not spent any time analyzing Pope Francis or the corrupt sink of heresiarchs that is the current Roman clergy, and therefore glibly assume that the supremacy of the Roman Church will fix the problems of modernity. I have some sympathy; until Pope Francis showed up, I tended to think of the Roman Church as the last, best hope of the West. No more of that for me. And to the second conception, joint action, the disadvantage of this relative to the first conception is that it seems inherently unstable. Yes, in its ideal form it achieves the goal of human flourishing. But human nature being human nature, how often would that ideal form be achieved, if two hierarchical power centers were actually expected to cooperate? Certainly Charlemagne, often held up as the European ideal of the Davidic king, spent a great deal of his time contending with various popes and interfering in papal politics outside the Frankish lands. But my first line objections are the two above—that integralists’ vision of their desired state is crimped and defective, not that it is erroneous and impractical as applied, which is probably also true.
[Review completes as first comment.]
September 12, 2023
According to many post-liberal commentators, we live in a dictatorship of one kind or another. Some call it the Dictatorship of Relativism, others argue, following St. Thomas Aquinas and Cicero, that the tyranny comes from an entrenched class of elites pursuing their own self interest rather than the responsibilities of government. Dr. Jones, in this book, looks back even further to the High Middle Ages and explores what was a completely different conception of government than the Liberalism that we are all used to.
There are two aims to this book. The first is to debunk the Liberal idea that the Middle Ages can be framed as a contest between the Papacy and Monarchy. The second, and probably the more important for modern readers, is to show that Medieval Europe was not a theocracy.
Dr. Jones frames the bulk of the book around the career of Gui Fucuois, who began his work as an advisor and lawyer for Charles of Anjou, went to Paris to become an advisor to St. Louis IX, and then, upon the death of his wife, received Holy Orders and eventually became Pope Clement IV. His main purpose with this framing is to explore the social complexities of Christendom as it actually existed in 13th Century France. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this treatment is the understanding of law that is articulated. In essence, modern political theory is totalitarian in that it sees human beings as living in a constant state of restrained violence, while during Christendom Peace was understood as the default and violence was the result of sin. As long as peace was maintained, there was no need for any legal apparatus to intervene. It was only when a conflict arose that law had to be made specific, and even then the judges would default to the state of things before the conflict, thus our idea of "common law."
The book is a little tedious in places as it is an expanded and revised version of Dr. Jones' dissertation, but this mostly happens in the first three chapters and the bulk of the book is a fascinating read which forces us to confront our Liberal biases and look closer at how we have been conditioned by our own political realities.
There are two aims to this book. The first is to debunk the Liberal idea that the Middle Ages can be framed as a contest between the Papacy and Monarchy. The second, and probably the more important for modern readers, is to show that Medieval Europe was not a theocracy.
Dr. Jones frames the bulk of the book around the career of Gui Fucuois, who began his work as an advisor and lawyer for Charles of Anjou, went to Paris to become an advisor to St. Louis IX, and then, upon the death of his wife, received Holy Orders and eventually became Pope Clement IV. His main purpose with this framing is to explore the social complexities of Christendom as it actually existed in 13th Century France. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this treatment is the understanding of law that is articulated. In essence, modern political theory is totalitarian in that it sees human beings as living in a constant state of restrained violence, while during Christendom Peace was understood as the default and violence was the result of sin. As long as peace was maintained, there was no need for any legal apparatus to intervene. It was only when a conflict arose that law had to be made specific, and even then the judges would default to the state of things before the conflict, thus our idea of "common law."
The book is a little tedious in places as it is an expanded and revised version of Dr. Jones' dissertation, but this mostly happens in the first three chapters and the bulk of the book is a fascinating read which forces us to confront our Liberal biases and look closer at how we have been conditioned by our own political realities.
July 28, 2023
The loss of a star is for the writing style. It can be very redundant and take a while to get to it's point.
Other than that I think this book makes an undeniably compelling argument for the actual structure of the social order in the original Catholic Kingdom of Louis IX. It effectively dispels the biased slant modern academics have towards the middle ages. It essentially upends a common presumption of many current scholars: because religion is a fantasy that nobody believes except for selfish reasons, it is therefore used only as a form of oppression in power struggles within any society it exists in.
This book goes through the micro to the macro of King Louis IXs kingdom from the perspective of the people living through it. It does this specifically through letters between the people, sometimes formal, sometimes personal. It clearly shows that the spiritual power (the church, the pope) and the temporal power (the king, the lay people) lived together in a harmony based on a unified world view of the culture at the time.
I admit I went into this book with skepticism and sadly found that the people in Louis IX kingdom actually had more freedom than we do in America now. I was surprised at the LACK of power the king had and how much individuals had over themselves and over their own land.
The king was more like a sovereign leader over one area that was connected to other sovereign leaders. He was the top ruler in the land but his power was mostly limited to his realm.
The other fascinating thing was how there was not a monopoly on violence. The assumption was that peace was the norm. When it was broken the need arose for it to be kept, and whoever did the keeping was considered to have done a good thing.
Other than that I think this book makes an undeniably compelling argument for the actual structure of the social order in the original Catholic Kingdom of Louis IX. It effectively dispels the biased slant modern academics have towards the middle ages. It essentially upends a common presumption of many current scholars: because religion is a fantasy that nobody believes except for selfish reasons, it is therefore used only as a form of oppression in power struggles within any society it exists in.
This book goes through the micro to the macro of King Louis IXs kingdom from the perspective of the people living through it. It does this specifically through letters between the people, sometimes formal, sometimes personal. It clearly shows that the spiritual power (the church, the pope) and the temporal power (the king, the lay people) lived together in a harmony based on a unified world view of the culture at the time.
I admit I went into this book with skepticism and sadly found that the people in Louis IX kingdom actually had more freedom than we do in America now. I was surprised at the LACK of power the king had and how much individuals had over themselves and over their own land.
The king was more like a sovereign leader over one area that was connected to other sovereign leaders. He was the top ruler in the land but his power was mostly limited to his realm.
The other fascinating thing was how there was not a monopoly on violence. The assumption was that peace was the norm. When it was broken the need arose for it to be kept, and whoever did the keeping was considered to have done a good thing.
August 20, 2017
Great revisionism of the typical modern approach to understanding medieval politics.
April 12, 2022
An incredibly helpful historical analysis that allows Christians to imagine a society ordered by the Gospel. Sometimes more dense with historical scholarship than my brain can handle. However, it has the effect of grinding away notions that what we have today is the only option for how to conceive of politics, law, Church, and governance.
April 22, 2020
I greatly enjoyed this read. It is not for the lay reader of history though. This is a dense historical work for people who have studied a fair bit of medieval history. It isn’t dry necessarily, I think Jones does about the best one can in presenting this material, it’s just incredibly dense.
The focus of this book is on the Kingdom of France under the reign of Louis IX and the interactions of the secular and ecclesiastical power within the kingdom. The main argument is that the state and church as two separate powers didn’t exist during the middle ages they were combined together with both interfering and criss-crossing in authority with one another. So to argue that church and state existed as two separate entities is ahistorical. Jones defends his thesis well. He uses a variety of sources and I found myself convinced of his claims by the end of the book. At least as far as medieval France is concerned.
The only problem I have is whether we can paint the whole of the Middle Ages with this brush. Probably the weakest part is that he looks solely at France and doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about other states at the time. So maybe this is how church and state functioned in France but what of Castille, Scotland, Hungary or the Holy Roman Empire? I think that he is probably right generally, but I would have liked to see evidence that is distant from the boundaries of Gaul. Though to be fair this would be beyond the scope of his book, so perhaps his case should have been made more broadly.
The last thing I would like to tackle is how people have taken this work and made it into some political manifesto. While the author does hint at this it is hard for me to take this thought seriously beyond just wishful thinking as there are no solutions proposed as to how we would take the liberal age we find ourselves and return to a world where this is possible. As a Protestant though it has given me interest in thought of experiments of what it would look like for us.
For those who enjoy medieval history and want a revisionist take this is certainly worth picking up. I could very well see it becoming an important book in medievalist literature.
The focus of this book is on the Kingdom of France under the reign of Louis IX and the interactions of the secular and ecclesiastical power within the kingdom. The main argument is that the state and church as two separate powers didn’t exist during the middle ages they were combined together with both interfering and criss-crossing in authority with one another. So to argue that church and state existed as two separate entities is ahistorical. Jones defends his thesis well. He uses a variety of sources and I found myself convinced of his claims by the end of the book. At least as far as medieval France is concerned.
The only problem I have is whether we can paint the whole of the Middle Ages with this brush. Probably the weakest part is that he looks solely at France and doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about other states at the time. So maybe this is how church and state functioned in France but what of Castille, Scotland, Hungary or the Holy Roman Empire? I think that he is probably right generally, but I would have liked to see evidence that is distant from the boundaries of Gaul. Though to be fair this would be beyond the scope of his book, so perhaps his case should have been made more broadly.
The last thing I would like to tackle is how people have taken this work and made it into some political manifesto. While the author does hint at this it is hard for me to take this thought seriously beyond just wishful thinking as there are no solutions proposed as to how we would take the liberal age we find ourselves and return to a world where this is possible. As a Protestant though it has given me interest in thought of experiments of what it would look like for us.
For those who enjoy medieval history and want a revisionist take this is certainly worth picking up. I could very well see it becoming an important book in medievalist literature.
September 1, 2020
An extremely interesting look at how medieval Christians understood the social order and how it contrasts with our own idea of there being such things as a Church and State and our idea of primordial violence.
September 30, 2025
Genuinely an amazing and insightful book on the the conception of the medieval state (at least in practice in France under Louis IX). the two concepts of "negotium pacis et fidei" and "consilium et auxilium" being the glue that holds the world together. Jones argues quite convincingly that most historians looking at this period of time simply cannot conceive of the state of mind of the medieval person that worked inside these frameworks, and so they frequently fail to grasp the situation on the ground.
Which certainly makes me wonder how badly we understand other areas of history, in the way we unconsciously filter them through modern conceptions and categories.
The first two parts can be a little repetitive, and they are the meat of the book. But it's important for a reason. The case is being formed repeatedly for a reason. It all culminates very beautifully in the final third part.
"Peace was simple happiness, when all unrest was alleviated through the beatific vision, and through the New Law it was approached through Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith united the intellects of men with each other and with God. Hope united all men in the pursuit of God, and Charity (which ultimately included both Faith and Hope) united all human will and action and directed them through the love of God. The peace of society, if it was to be a true and not simply an exterior peace, was a unity wrought through these virtues, horizontally and vertically; it was friendship between men and between men and God. This means that true friendship in peace, both vertical and horizontal, was possible only through grace, especially that grace made available in the sacraments, because Faith, Hope, and Charity, along with all the minor virtues that worked in their service, were infused virtues. Charity was the perfection of the will in virtue, a perfection that carried with it the perfection of faith, transforming it from the lifeless faith proper to the Old into the living Faith of the New. It was perfect friendship with God."
"We can see within this reading that the construction of legal institutions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not a part of the process of “secularization,” the process of building the foundations foundations of the State at the expense of monastic and mystical faith, as it is often depicted in the mythology of modernity. Rather, it was the opposite: it was the effort to convert more and more of the world from violence to true peace, to produce in the law the bridge from fallen nature to redeemed nature. 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 motivated the whole dynamic through Hope)."
Reading this, one understands why modern scholars (who are invariably agnostics and atheists) can't comprehend the world they seek to analyse.
Which certainly makes me wonder how badly we understand other areas of history, in the way we unconsciously filter them through modern conceptions and categories.
The first two parts can be a little repetitive, and they are the meat of the book. But it's important for a reason. The case is being formed repeatedly for a reason. It all culminates very beautifully in the final third part.
"Peace was simple happiness, when all unrest was alleviated through the beatific vision, and through the New Law it was approached through Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith united the intellects of men with each other and with God. Hope united all men in the pursuit of God, and Charity (which ultimately included both Faith and Hope) united all human will and action and directed them through the love of God. The peace of society, if it was to be a true and not simply an exterior peace, was a unity wrought through these virtues, horizontally and vertically; it was friendship between men and between men and God. This means that true friendship in peace, both vertical and horizontal, was possible only through grace, especially that grace made available in the sacraments, because Faith, Hope, and Charity, along with all the minor virtues that worked in their service, were infused virtues. Charity was the perfection of the will in virtue, a perfection that carried with it the perfection of faith, transforming it from the lifeless faith proper to the Old into the living Faith of the New. It was perfect friendship with God."
"We can see within this reading that the construction of legal institutions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not a part of the process of “secularization,” the process of building the foundations foundations of the State at the expense of monastic and mystical faith, as it is often depicted in the mythology of modernity. Rather, it was the opposite: it was the effort to convert more and more of the world from violence to true peace, to produce in the law the bridge from fallen nature to redeemed nature. 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 motivated the whole dynamic through Hope)."
Reading this, one understands why modern scholars (who are invariably agnostics and atheists) can't comprehend the world they seek to analyse.
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April 3, 2020Frankly not as interesting as I was expecting. I didn’t think the author’s examples were convincing proof of his thesis. The best part of the book was towards the end when he goes into the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
February 16, 2022
A tough read, but definitely worth it if one is interested in St. Louis IX and the seemingly eternal battle between “Church and State”.
June 27, 2022
Incredibly informative, but very dense.
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