The character of ‘medieval political thought’ is problematic. Its very existence, as an identifiable entity or subject, may be questioned, and has been denied. Yet such doubts and denials seem less than plausible in the light of the sustained and fruitful scholarly investigation and exposition that the subject – though not always under this title – has received for the best part of a century. Some aspects of that historiography will be considered in a moment. First, however, something needs to be said more directly about the nature of the subject itself. It is no doubt true that if certain definitions of ‘political thought’ are accepted it will be hard to find such thought in the period surveyed in this book. For most medieval thinkers the analysis, whether conceptual or institutional, of ‘politics’ in its original Greek sense was neither relevant nor possible. Even after the so-called ‘Aristotelian revolution’ of the thirteenth century this is still substantially true. Concepts and terminology derived from Aristotle's Politics then indeed became common intellectual currency; and yet there is no medieval work challenging even distant comparison with that massive treatise. The influence of Platonic or neo-Platonic ideas was no doubt more continuous, though the light it shed was refracted; but there is no medieval text of the character, let alone the calibre, of Plato's Republic. Ideas, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, rooted in the life of the polis or city-state had at best a limited application in most medieval societies.

For all the tribulations and transformations experienced by the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries, the territorial configuration of its western half in 400 was not significantly different from that of 200 years before. Just a lifetime later imperial power was extinct in the west, which lay parcelled out among an assortment of kings and other warlords, predominantly Germans. Ex uno plura. The political map was to be redrawn time and again in the years ahead as new barbarian powers asserted themselves, as the empire strove to re-impose its control, as Islam expanded its dominion. Not one of the Germanic kingdoms of 750 had arisen at the direct expense of the fifth-century empire: the Anglo-Saxons had descended in force upon an already abandoned Britain; the origins of the huge regnum Francorum lay with Clovis (c. 481–511); the Lombards had entered Italy only in 568. But, as all this demonstrates, the west had continued to know political fragmentation. Indeed, it has known it ever since. If the unitary ideal, among the most potent of Rome's legion legacies, has never been far from the forefront of the western European consciousness, it is the political plurality bequeathed by the fifth-century collapse which in practice has always prevailed.

To multiplicity of polities corresponded diversity of ethos and inner form. That Germanism, Romanitas and Christianity worked as shaping influences upon all the barbarian kingdoms may be granted. But the generalisation conceals a host of variables. The Germans were no undifferentiated mass, and the nature of their contribution varied from kingdom to kingdom.

The early Christians understood the Church to which they adhered to consist of a community called out to serve God as his people and focused on Jesus of Nazareth as model for the disciples' filial relation to God. At first entirely Jewish both in composition and in conception, the community was transformed by St Paul into a body of universal extension. In the apostle's conviction God, through Jesus the Messiah and his society, had at last disclosed his eternal plan: that is, to call men and women of all races and conditions in faith and obedience to a Master who acted out and embodied the redeeming love of God for his fallen creation. The huge success of the Gentile mission, led by this Jew of the Dispersion with Roman citizenship, changed the Church from being an ethnic minority group which could hope for easy toleration within an empire generally ready to allow tribal religion, even when it diverged from the official religion of the government. Romans believed that empire had been bestowed not only by their own gods, but also by the gods of the conquered peoples; the latter deities could therefore be taken over. The Jews, whose Maccabaean resistance to assimilation made them respected but little loved in Greco-Roman society, were unmolested in their cultic practices which ‘though very peculiar, were at least ancestral’ (Celsus). But alarm was generated by the Christians dividing families and recruiting from all races and classes: mixing slaves and free; treating ‘brothers and sisters’ within the community as equal (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11); above all refusing to accord divine honour to the emperor or to swear by his genius.

The Church and the ordo clericorum

Images of the Church

The period 750–1150 produced no treatise de ecclesia, nor did it witness ecclesiological speculation of the type familiar in the later Middle Ages. The intellectuals of these four centuries possessed not so much a ‘concept of the Church’ (Kirchenbegriff) as an ‘image of the Church’ (Kirchenbild) – or rather, multiple images, drawn from Holy Scripture. Trained, as most learned men of this period were, in the contemplative approach of the lectio divina, they knew that the whole Bible speaks of Christ and his Church ‘in spiritual similitudes … as through a glass darkly’. Reading the sacred page allegorice, the student would find as much ecclesiological as christological material. ‘The Church … is called by many names in Scripture, such as the kingdom of heaven, the woman, the bride, the wife, the dove, the beloved, the vine, the sheep, the sheepfold, the city, the tower, the pillar, the firmament, the house, the temple, the body of Christ, the net, the supper and others which the reader can perhaps find.’ The anonymous twelfth-century encyclopaedia of biblical typology, Allegoriae in universam sacram Scripturam, identifies eighty allegories of holy Church in the Old and New Testaments. Some of these allegoriae are more than metaphors: they are fully developed ecclesiological ideas of great power and complexity. In four of these allegories in particular – ‘the body of Christ’, ‘the ship’, ‘the bride’ and ‘the mother’ – the ecclesiology of the period 750–1150 can be traced. Corpus Christi.

The world of the Christian fathers from Ambrose to Isidore of Seville had come to differ profoundly from the world of the early Apologists, of Origen and Tertullian. The transformations which produced these differences came in two great waves: the first, sweeping across the whole of the Roman world, is the crisis of the third century from which Roman society was to emerge into a new stability in the fourth, a stability won through extensive re-organisation and accompanied by far-reaching changes not only in the administrative and social structure of the Empire, but also in its traditional culture and religion. These changes, though their incidence differed from region to region, affected the Empire everywhere. The second wave rolled mainly over the Western provinces: the Germanic invaders who settled within imperial frontiers came to create their own, eventually independent, kingdoms on what had been Roman soil. Both waves radically altered the social and political structures of Western Europe, and also the cultural conditions in which reflection on those structures could take place.

The later Roman Empire

The reforms of the emperors at the end of the third century, continued by Constantine in the fourth, secured the Empire from anarchy, from military, economic and social collapse. The means employed, emergency measures which gradually turned into a system, created a novel kind of political reality: a centralised, bureaucratic state very different from the Empire as it had been in the time of the Antonine or even the Severan dynasty.

The conciliar movement of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was an attempt to modify and limit papal control over the Church by means of general councils. It was sparked off by the disputed papal election of 1378, when, following the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, French cardinals rejected the election of the Italian Urban VI, on canonical grounds, and elected Clement VII as anti-pope. The movement was also a response to growng centralisation of church administration and justice, to perceived abuses of power by the (in fact rather weak) papacy in exile at Avignon (1305–77) and to the widespread desire for church reform. There was, further, a latent contradiction in church tradition between the doctrinal authority of councils and the jurisdictional primacy of Rome. The movement was led mostly by Frenchmen and Germans; it evoked little response in Italy. Conciliarism was a moderate programme in comparison with the aspirations of men like Marsilius, Wyclif or Hus, who wanted national or state churches, and who saw whole aspects of Catholic tradition, especially papal authority, as fundamentally opposed to scripture or to reason. But it also reflected a shift in religious sentiment from universality to nationality, and a sense that religious matters could legitimately be debated, at least by all educated clergy. In the event, the pope–council conflict affected considerably the structure of medieval Christendom. What emerged as the practical alternative to papal centralisation was devolution of power to secular rulers and nation-states.

Philosophers: metaphysics, ethics and political theory

European political philosophy had its first home in Greece, in a society made up of numerous small city-states, each with its own laws, customs and constitution. The term ‘politics’ in fact derives from ‘polis’ the Greek noun for ‘city-state’. The sheer variety of constitutions known in Greece – Aristotle and his school were to produce monographs on no less than 158 of them – meant that it was hardly possible there, as it may well have been in Egypt or Mesopotamia, to assume that there is only one way in which to run a society. Varied as the Greek states were, and subject to further variation by reform or revolution, they fell into three main classes – monarchy or rule by one man, described approvingly as ‘kingship’ or disapprovingly as ‘tyranny’; oligarchy or rule by a few, politely called ‘aristocracy’ or rule by the best; and democracy or rule by the entire adult male citizen body, known to later detractors as ‘ochlocracy’ or mob-rule. Their respective merits were hotly discussed from the time of Herodotus (3.80–2) onwards, even if some states, notably Sparta, a totalitarian society much admired for its discipline, stability and prowess in war, fell into none of these categories.

Different societies, it was observed, tend to produce different kinds of people. Democratically ruled Athenians, for instance, had a different character from oligarchically ruled Corinthians. Such observations, abundantly reinforced by a growing familiarity with the customs of foreign peoples, brought home the importance of social factors, of ‘nomos’, a term which meant not only ‘law’ but ‘convention’.

The problem of the Christian Empire: ‘Imperium’ and ‘Sacerdotium’

Two traditions shaped the political thought of Western Christendom in the later fourth and the early fifth centuries, the age of St Ambrose and St Augustine. The first was the collection of ideas about human society which the Christian fathers of the fourth century inherited from the pre-Constantinian period. This included, of course, the hints on these subjects contained in the New Testament writings as well as ideas elaborated by Christians of the second and third centuries, in large part but not entirely in their reflection on the New Testament hints and their implications (see part I, chapter 1 above). The second set of ideas consisted of those engendered by the Christian response to the conversion of Constantine and to the progressive christianisation of the Roman Empire culminating, during the years which spanned the careers of Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo, in the official establishment of Christianity as the legally enforced religion of the Empire. Christians have always been apt to see the conversion of Constantine as a watershed between the age of a persecuted church and the age of a triumphant established Christianity. Whatever the appropriateness of such a view may be to the historical development (see Introduction to part III, above pp. 86–7), it does only partial justice to the political ideas rooted in the two different sets of circumstances, and to their overlap in the post-Constantine age.

Sources

In order to discuss medieval theories of government one must first locate them. There are very few medieval works whose avowed aim was the examination in conceptual terms of current governmental problems. Therefore the bulk of material has to be extracted from works that had another purpose. But this at once creates uncomfortable choices. The sources conventionally used by historians of political philosophy differ both from those on which constitutional historians habitually draw and from those appropriate for the investigation of medieval man's unspoken assumptions about government. Yet all three have some claim to reveal the ‘real’ political thought of the age. And past studies suggest that they do not blend easily.

Because it would be folly, in the space available, to attempt a complete approach to the subject, this discussion will be limited both geographically and conceptually to the examination of certain academic and official texts on government produced in England and France between 1150 and 1450. Concentration on England and France is justified by their strong cultural and political ties throughout the later middle ages, and by a large stock of common experience. Although by the end of the period their political systems were often contrasted, they nevertheless remained more like each other than either was like the Empire, Italy or Spain. The emergence of powerful vernacular traditions, the loosening of the link between Paris and Oxford universities, the growing sense of national identity, could not totally erase the past they had shared.

The Parmenidean challenge

Nature, for Aristotle, is an inner principle of change. If we are fully to understand what it is for man to have a nature, we must understand Aristotle's conception of change. This is no trivial matter. For in the intellectual climate in which Aristotle grew up it was not obvious that change was possible at all. As Aristotle said,

The reference is obviously to the pre-Socratic Parmenides, and his followers, who argued that change was impossible. For a change to occur, Parmenides argued, something would have to come into existence from a state of non-existence. But from nothing nothing could come to be. But nor can something come to be from something, for something already exists and thus cannot come to be.

Aristotle's Metaphysics begins:

Aristotle is attributing to us a desire, a force, which urges us on toward knowledge. Of course, for some this desire does not exercise great influence; but for some of us it plays an important role in our lives. Aristotle no doubt believed it was this desire that motivated him to do the research and thinking that led to his writing the Metaphysics, and he trusted in this desire to lead others to study it. It is this desire that is responsible for your reading and my writing this book.

How did Aristotle know that we have this desire? One does not know the content of a desire unless one knows what ultimately satisfies it. By its satisfaction we learn what the desire is a desire for. That is why Aristotle speaks of the delight we take in our senses. If the knowledge we pursued were merely a means to a further end, say, power over others or control of the environment, then our innate desire would not be a desire for knowledge.