Freedom's Progress?: A History of Political Thought,
by Gerard Casey
I have skipped ahead to Casey’s
review of the European Middle Ages. His first chapter regarding this
period is entitled “Christianity,” as seems appropriate if one is discussing
freedom’s progress in the Middle Ages.
For its first three hundred
years, Christianity was a non-establishment religion. Christians
learned to live beyond the action of the state, without state protection, and
even had to struggle against the state:
These three centuries
established an abyss between the domain of government and the domain of
religion….
When Constantine turned to
Christianity, much of his reason was for the support that this religion could
bring to the Imperial State. Initially, Caesaro-Papism (with the
head of state also head of the Church) held sway. This arrangement
continued in the East until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
In the post-Roman West, the
story was somewhat different.
In the wake of the Rome’s
demise, barbarian kingdoms emerged – Visigoths, Franks, Lombards. As
tribes accepted Christianity, for a time Caesaro-Papism
continued. However from the eleventh century onward, this would all
change.
Tom Palmer regards Gregory
VII’s issuance of Dictatus Papae in 1075, in which the
independence of the Church was announced, as “the first of the most significant
moments of the past thousand years.”
The power of the Church
gradually increased in the subsequent years, such that papal power came to know
no national bounds in wielding imperial authority. While
ecclesiastical independence was a welcome event, it seems to have consumed
itself in power, coming “to a shuddering halt with the onset of the
Reformation.”
Setting aside the religious and
theological issues, this result allowed for a return of local Caesaro-Papism,
primarily in the areas under the sway of Lutheranism and Calvinism, but also in
many Catholic regions as well. This result also gave birth to what
we now know as the modern state:
The modern state, in the form
in which we have come to know it – the sole sovereign power in a defined
territory, exercising a monopoly on (allegedly) legitimate violence, with the
power to commandeer the resources, including the persons, of its citizens – had
come into existence.
There was no “state,” as we
know it, until the Reformation. Again, set aside the theology; this
is something worth understanding for those concerned about liberty…it seems to
me. Of course, the Church was not faultless in bringing on this
result, as noted by Casey.
In any case, Casey is getting
too far ahead in the story. While Christianity had no immediate
impact on the political environment, it did establish fundamental building
blocks for what would become subsequent political thought. Casey
offers three important factors:
…first, the idea that there
are two centres of human allegiance; second, the development of the gold
and silver rules, together the rule of reciprocity, as the basis of
human conduct; and third (and for my purposes in this history, most
importantly) the value of the individual as a creature made in the
image and likeness of God, whose ultimate goal is to know, love, and serve
God in this life and be happy with Him in the next.
Casey examines each of these in
turn – as will I shortly. However a few interesting points are
raised: to the first, competing and decentralized governance authorities; to
the second, the silver rule is insufficient; to the third…this one is
interesting.
If the purpose of “individual”
is to “know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with Him in the
next” (as opposed to “anything peaceful”), is it appropriate to carry forward
the concept of “individual” absent this purpose? The individual
minus God equals…what, exactly, to a political theory based on the
individual? Curious.
In any case, let’s examine each
of these three in turn:
Two Centres of Human Allegiance
There was the spiritual and the
temporal, each having a claim but neither able to make a claim to the exclusion
of the other.
…Christianity…involves a
realization that there is no political solution to the problems of human
existence…Without the separation of political authority from transcendental
authority, there is no limit to what the political is and what it is meant to
achieve.
It was in the spaces in between
these two authorities where the political freedoms of the West found room to
grow. It is easy to point to the destruction during the time of the
Middle Ages – the wars, the intrigue, the corruption. To solely
focus here without acknowledging the creative release due to this tension
between two competing authorities is to do a disservice to the understanding of
where and how liberty grows.
The Rule of Reciprocity
The silver rule and the golden
rule. The silver: do not do unto others as you would not have them
do to you: “This is the rule of justice.” The golden: do unto others
as you would have them do unto you: “this is the law of love.”
The Bolognese monk Gratian, in
his Decretum, otherwise known as the Concord of Discordant
Canons, assimilates both versions of the rule of reciprocity and describes
this assimilation as natural law.
Gratian composed this work in
the mid-twelfth century, divided in three parts and addressing dozens of points
of law. Before considering further this combination of silver and
gold, perhaps some background on this
work:
Gratian tried to harmonize
apparently contradictory canons with each other, by discussing different interpretations
and deciding on a solution.
And a comment attributed to Tom
Woods:
The Decretum was
called "the first comprehensive and systematic legal treatise in the
history of the West, and perhaps in the history of mankind – if by
'comprehensive' is meant the attempt to embrace virtually the entire law of a
given polity, and if by 'systematic' is meant the express effort to that law as
a single body, in which all parts are viewed as interacting to form a whole.
Returning to Casey:
Whereas libertarianism springs
unproblematically from the silver rule, the golden rule could be problematic
for it.
Were the golden rule turned
into law, individuals would be required by law to do things for
others. Not libertarian. Yet, Gratian describes the
combination of the two as “natural law,” the foundation on which many
libertarians build the non-aggression principle.
Keeping in mind Gratian
developed this in the twelfth century, perhaps as Casey further develops this
history we might find that Gratian took the idea of natural law further than
originally conceived or understood.
The Individual Made in the
Image and Likeness of God
Dangerous territory, so I will
let Casey do the talking:
The individual human
being, a creature made in the image and likeness of God [imago dei], is
a being of supreme importance – not the tribe, not the city, not the
nation, not even the family.
The emergence of the individual
from these Christian roots was slow in coming:
…it wasn’t until around the
twelfth century that the individual began to stand out from his various social
groups – family, society, community, guild and city….
And a major impetus of this
emergence was increased commercial activity, not necessarily theological
discovery – commercial activity that made possible survival away from the
family and tribe, making the family and tribe less functionally important to
the individual.
Other no less important factors
that contributed to the emergence of individual were the residual insistence on
freedom from restraint deriving from Germanic tribal traditions and the germ of
a theory of natural rights emerging from the rediscovered and reabsorbed Roman
law.
Casey uses the term “natural
rights,” not “natural law.” This is in the twelfth century,
coincident to the time that Gratian combined the silver and – most problematic
for libertarian theory – golden rules and called these “natural
law.” I am way out of my depth here, but I can’t help but consider
that the golden rule, when considered as a foundation of natural law results in
natural rights.
Casey notes that this emergence
of the individual was not without a downside…
…as it coincided with the birth
of the modern powerful, centralized and jealous state, whose ambition was to
emasculate or eliminate all politically significant intermediate social groups
that might vie with it for the allegiance of a mass of potentially weak,
isolated individuals.
But it seems to me more than
just a downside, and not merely coincident. One of the key
questions: does the focus on and liberation of the individual lead to the
increase in the power of the state? In other words, are these correlated
and not merely coincident? Robert Nisbet would say yes.
Casey draws an interesting
conclusion, and one quite different from mine (and we will see if he
subsequently convinces me):
This ambition [to emasculate or
eliminate all politically significant intermediate social groups] was to be
realized in the twentieth century in the reversion to tribalism that we
witnessed in Fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism.
It seems to me that while
National Socialism and maybe Fascism can be described as tribal, I don’t
understand this description for Bolshevism. But more importantly:
the elimination of competing intermediate social groups was bound to lead to
the most horrendous forms of the state witnessed by man.
Tocqueville saw this coming as early as
1840; I have argued that its roots are to be found in the Renaissance and
Reformation, with the biggest push given by the Enlightenment. This
would correspond with Tocqueville’s assessment.
In other words, I don’t see
these “isms” caused by a “reversion to tribalism” but instead a result of
isolated individuals looking for a home – and finding a home in the only social
structure allowed by the state to exist: the state.
Remember the context of the
term “individual” in this history, as Casey earlier offered:
…the value of the individual as
a creature made in the image and likeness of God, whose
ultimate goal is to know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with
Him in the next.
It could be that the individual
minus God equals…“Fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism” (and perhaps
many other “isms” of political thought). In other words, maybe the
issue isn’t tribalism. After all, it was during the tribalism of the
Middle Ages that this idea of freedom was founded in the West.
Epilogue
From the endnotes:
Asks Leah Bradshaw: “Is it the
case that ‘the detachment of secular liberalism from its religious foundations
in Christianity threatens the future of the West?”
Mmmm…yes.
The contemporary West is
perhaps the first major world culture to undertake the experiment of
systematically dispensing with a religious foundation for its social and
political structures.
In your heart, you know how
this will turn out. There is one context in which the idea of
“individualism” works. Casey has offered it.
