Medieval Origins of the European State System: The Catholic Church as Midwife

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Møller
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
State System ◽  
Nous Pouvons ◽  
Multistate System ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
The Church

Abstract The received view in international relations (IR) is that the European multistate system was created when the medieval religious order broke down in the centuries following the Reformation. This view, which sees the medieval Catholic Church as a factor that hindered the advent of the multistate system, ignores a key insight of medieval historians, namely that the deeper historical precondition for the European multistate system was that the Church challenged the notions of empire and hegemony after the eleventh-century conflict of church and state. By mining this body of historiography, this paper shows how the end of the fusion of lay and religious authority in general and the Church's persistent interest in avoiding that one secular polity outmatched the others in particular contributed to the development of the European multistate system. These insights not only question dominant historiographic assumptions of IR, but may also be said to challenge the epistemological approaches of much of this scholarship. Resumen El criterio aceptado en Relaciones Internacionales (RI) es que el sistema multiestatal europeo se creó tras el colapso del orden religioso medieval en los siglos posteriores a la Reforma. Este criterio, que considera a la Iglesia católica como un factor que dificultó el advenimiento del sistema multiestatal, ignora un conocimiento clave de los historiadores medievales, específicamente, que la condición previa histórica más profunda del sistema multiestatal europeo fue que la Iglesia desafió las nociones de imperio y hegemonía después del conflicto entre la iglesia y el estado en el siglos XI. Al indagar exhaustivamente este cuerpo de historiografía, este informe demuestra cómo el fin de la fusión entre autoridad laica y religiosa en general y el interés persistente de la Iglesia por evitar que una forma de gobierno secular supere a las otras en particular contribuyeron al desarrollo del sistema multiestatal europeo. Estas conclusiones no solo cuestionan las conjeturas historiográficas dominantes de RI, sino que puede decirse que también desafían los abordajes epistemiológicos de gran parte de esta erudición. Extrait Le point de vue généralement accepté dans les relations internationales est que le système multiétatique européen s'est constitué lorsque l'ordre religieux médiéval s'est effondré dans les siècles qui ont suivi la Réforme. Ce point de vue, qui voit l’Église catholique médiévale comme un facteur ayant empêché l'avènement du système multiétatique, omet une perspective clé des historiens médiévaux, c'est-à-dire que l'une des conditions historiques préalables plus profondes à l’établissement du système multiétatique européen a été le fait que l’Église avait remis en question les notions d'empire et d'hégémonie après le conflit entre Église et État du 11e siècle. En exploitant ce corpus historiographique, cet article montre comment la fin de la fusion des autorités laïques et religieuses en général, et l'intérêt persistant de l’Église à éviter qu'un régime laïque ne dépasse les autres en particulier, ont contribué au développement du système multiétatique européen. Ces perspectives remettent non seulement en question les hypothèses historiographiques dominantes, mais nous pouvons considérer qu'elles remettent également en question les approches épistémologiques d'une grande partie des recherches dans ce domaine.

scholarly journals Bringing the Church Back In: Ecclesiastical Influences on the Rise of Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (02) ◽  
pp. 213-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Møller
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Multistate System ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
European Development ◽  
Bureaucratic Institutions ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Church

AbstractRecently, political scientists and economists have redoubled their attempts to understand the “Rise of Europe.” However, the role of the Catholic Church has been curiously ignored in most of this new research. The medieval West was shot through with Catholic values and institutions, and only by factoring in the Church can we understand the peculiar European development from the high Middle Ages onward. More particularly, the 11th century “crisis of church and state” set in train a series of developments that were crucial for the Rise of Europe. The Church was the main locale in which the development of representation, consent, and early bureaucratic institutions took place, and it contributed to creating, integrating, and maintaining the European multistate system. This note demonstrates that current scholarship has failed to factor in ecclesiastical influences and it shows how these gaps can be filled by a more careful reading of prior historical scholarship.

scholarly journals The Ecclesiastical Roots of Representation and Consent

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1075-1084 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Møller
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Latin West ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
The Church ◽  
Shed Light

Recent attempts to explain the development of medieval representative institutions have neglected a long-standing insight of medieval and legal historians: Political representation and rule by consent were first developed within the Catholic Church following the eleventh-century Gregorian Reforms and the subsequent “crisis of church and state”. These practices then migrated to secular polities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This was facilitated by the towering position of the Church in medieval society in general and the ubiquitous “areas of interaction” between religious and lay spheres in particular. I document these processes by analyzing the initial adoption of proctorial representation and consent at political assemblies, first, within the Church, then in lay polities. These findings corroborate recent insights about the importance of religious institutions and diffusion in processes of regime change, and they shed light on the puzzling fact that representation and consent—the core principles of modern democracy—only arose and spread in the Latin west.

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
International Exhibitions ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opera Houses ◽  
The Church

This book is the first comprehensive study that reevaluates music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century. As the divide between Church and State widened on the political stage, more and more composers began writing religious—even liturgical—music for performance in decidedly secular venues, including popular cabaret theaters, prestigious opera houses, and international exhibitions: a trend that coincided with Pope Leo XIII’s Ralliement politics that encouraged conservative Catholics to “rally” with the Republican government. But the idea of a musical Ralliement has largely gone unquestioned by historians and musicologists alike who have long accepted a somewhat simplistic epistemological position that emphasizes a sharp division between the Church and the “secular” Republic during this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, critical reception studies, and musical analysis, this book reveals how composers and critics from often opposing ideological factions undermined the secular/sacred binary. From the opera house and niche puppet theaters to Parisian parish churches and Montmartre’s famed cabarets, composers and critics from opposing ideological factions used music in their effort to craft a brand of Frenchness that was built on the dual foundations of secular Republicanism and the heritage of the French Catholic Church.

Roman Catholicism and Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 436-457
Author(s):  
Petr Kratochvíl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Church ◽  
Hostile Attitude ◽  
The Catholic Church

This chapter explores the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and Europe over many centuries. It argues that the Catholic Church and Europe played a mutually constitutive role in the early Middle Ages and one would not be conceivable without the other. However, the Church gradually disassociated itself from Europe and vice versa. Since the Reformation, but even more strongly in the last two centuries, the Church’s attitude to Europe has become markedly more ambivalent, due to the rise of the European state, the hostile attitude of the Church to modern European social and political thought, Europe’s ongoing secularization, and the increasingly global nature of the Catholic Church. While the tension between the Church and Europe persists, the process of European unification marked a watershed in the Church’s relationship to Europe, given that integration is a key area in which the Church strongly supports the political developments of the continent.

Lauener, Michael, Schutz der Kirche und Stabilität des Staates durch Absenz von religiöser ,Seichtigkeit': die religionspolitischen Anschauungen von Jeremias Gotthelf und Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel aus dem Geist der Versöhnung

2019 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 280-349
Author(s):  
Michael Lauener
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Protection of the church and state stability through the absence of religious 'shallowness': views on religion-policy of Jeremias Gotthelf and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel out of a spirit of reconciliation. The article re-examines a thesis of Paul Baumgartner published in 1945: "Jeremias Gotthelf's, 'Zeitgeist and Bernergeist', A Study on Introduction and Interpretation", that if the Swiss writer and keen Hegel-opponent Jeremias Gotthelf had read any book of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, some of this would have received his recognition. Both Gotthelf and Hegel see the Reformation to be the cause of the emergence of a strong state. For Gotthelf, this marks the beginning of a process of strengthening the state at the expense of the church. Hegel, on the other hand, considers the modern state to be the reality of freedom, produced by the Christian 'religion of freedom' (Rph, §270 Z., p. 430). In contrast to Gotthelf, for whom only Christ can reconcile the state and religion, Hegel praises the French Revolution as "reconciliation of the divine with the world". For Gotthelf, the French Revolution was only a poor imitation of the process of spiritual and political liberation initiated by the Reformation, through which Christ reduced people to their original liberty. Nevertheless, both Gotthelf and Hegel want to protect the state and the church from falling apart, they reject organizational unity of state – religion – church in the sense of a theocracy, and demand the protection of church communities.

Religious Violence, Martyrdom, and Martin Luther

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Whitford
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The State ◽  
State Control ◽  
Final Model ◽  
Positive Goal ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

Violence was first experienced in the church as martyrdom. Under the Roman Empire, Christians were subjected to state-sponsored penalties ranging from fines to corporal punishment to execution. A number of prominent early theologians and apologists fell victim, including Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Origen, Cyprian, Perpetua, and Felicity. With the end of persecution under Constantine and then its eventual designation as the empire’s official religion, Christianity’s relationship to violence changed significantly. While some theologians had attempted to grapple with the question of whether Christians could join the Roman armies, the new relationship between church and state required new theological consideration. Accordingly, new questions arose: For example, could or should the state enforce right belief? Over time, three general approaches to violence emerged. The first is a coercive model. In this model, the state (and then later, the church in places) used its punitive powers to enforce Christian orthodoxy and fight against its enemies, both within its own borders and externally. St. Augustine provided part of the justification for coercion in his “Letter 93: To Valentius,” in which he argued that not all persecution is evil. If persecution is aimed at bringing one to right belief and practice, it has a positive goal. Many heresy trials and later executions were supported by “Letter 93.” Later thinkers expanded the model of internal persecution against heretics to external attacks on those deemed threatening to Christianity from outside the church or outside the empire. The Crusades were largely justified on such bases. The second is a pacifist model. Though perhaps the dominant model in the first two centuries of the church, it was quickly eclipsed by the other two perspectives. Early theologians such as Tertullian and Cyprian argued that because Christ forbade Peter to use the sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christians were forbidden from using violence to achieve any ends, “but how will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away” (Tertullian, On Idolatry, Chapter 19, “On Military Service.”) In the medieval period, the pacifist model was adopted by some monastic traditions (e.g., the Spiritualist Franciscans), but more commonly by what were then considered heretical movements, including the Cathars, Albigensians, Waldensians, and Czech Brethren. The final model is often called the “Just War” perspective. The origin for this theory can be found in St. Ambrose’s response to a massacre of innocent people. He argued that while a Christian should never use violence for his or her own benefit, there were times when a Christian, out of love for neighbor, had to use violence to protect the weak or innocent. To stand by and watch the powerful attack or kill the innocent when one can do something to prevent it is nearly as great a sin as being one of the attackers. As with the coercive model, Augustine provided much of the framework for this view of violence. Augustine allowed that there were some righteous wars, fought at the command of God as punishment for iniquity. That view remained less influential and is more closely connected to the coercive model. Far more influential was his view that there were wars that were necessary for the protection of the homeland and the innocent. In this sense, he outlined two major principles that guided later thinking. First, a war must have a right (or just) cause (ius ad bellum), and one must fight the war itself justly (ius in bello). Just causes included defending the homeland, coming to the aid of an ally, punishing wicked rulers, or retaking that which was unlawfully stolen. Beyond the simple cause, it also had to be rightly intentioned—it could not be fought for vainglory’s sake, nor to take new lands. It had to have some method of state control, since states go to war, not individual people. When conducting the war, one also had responsibilities. One had to be proportional, have achievable ends, and fight discriminately (that is, between combatants, not combatants against civilian populations). Finally, and most importantly, war had to be a last resort after all other measures failed, and it had to be aimed at producing a benefit for those one sought to defend. In the medieval era, Thomas Aquinas added significant precision to Augustine’s framework. All three models continued into the Reformation era. The advent of formally competing visions of Christianity following Luther’s excommunication by the pope and his ban by the emperor in 1521 at the Diet of Worms added new dimensions to these models. Martin Luther had occasion to comment upon all three.

Two Autobiographical Narratives of Conversion: Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
George Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Church

Ever since the Reformation, and increasingly since the example set by Newman, the Church of England has had to contend with the lure of Rome; in every generation there have been clergymen who converted to the Roman Catholic Church, a group either statistically insignificant or a momentous sign of the future, depending on one’s viewpoint. From the nineteenth century Newman and Manning stand out. From the first two decades of the twentieth century among the figures best remembered are Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) and Ronald Arbuthnot Knox (1888–1957). They are remembered, not because they were more saintly or more scholarly than others, but because they were both writers and therefore are responsible for their own memorials. What is more, they both followed Newman in publishing an account of the circumstances of their conversion. This is a genre which continues to hold interest. The two works demonstrate, among other things, the continuing influence of Newman’s writings about the identity of the Church.

Saint or Schemer? The 1527 Heresy Trial of Thomas Bilney Reconsidered

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Walker
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Ambiguous Figure ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Significant Figure ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

On 8 December 1527 two scholars, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, carried penitential faggots at St Paul's Cross as a token of abjuration of heresy. With this act both men formally cleansed their souls and brought about their reconciliation with the Church. Far from being the end of a story, however, this ceremony proved to be the beginning of a controversy which has survived until the present day. For Thomas Bilney subsequently renounced his abjuration and became a significant figure in the early Reformation in England, eventually dying at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1531. And yet, despite the importance attributed to him as a reformer, Bilney is now, as he was then, an ambiguous figure whose relationship with the Catholic Church and precise beliefs have never been conclusively determined. Many writers have claimed Bilney as a champion of their particular causes or have sought to identify his place in the wider movements of the Reformation. For the Protestant John Foxe he was a martyr, albeit a flawed one, for the reformed faith, who refused to the last to be intimidated into a second abjuration. For Sir Thomas More, in somewhat mischievous mood, he was a Catholic saint brought to realise the error of his ways at the stake and reconciled to the Church with almost his last breath.

Children, the Liturgy, and the Reformation: the Evidence of the Lichfield Cathedral Choristers

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 261-274
Author(s):  
T. N. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

The great interest generated by the theme of this year’s conference reflects the central importance of children in the history of the Christian Church, yet at the same time their omission from much of historical writing. For all but the recent past this is largely the result of the difficulties with the source material itself, and this is certainly true for historians of the Church during the medieval and Reformation periods. The main concern of the administrative records of the Catholic Church was with adults and, in particular, ordained men. It is to the schools that we must look for the most useful references to children and, more specifically, to the choir schools for evidence of the role of boys in the liturgy.

Church and State

1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-340
Author(s):  
Hans Rommen
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
State Problem ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Church

The problem of Church-State relations—if under Church is understood the Church universal in its Catholic form—may be answered without too much difficulty on a high abstract level. But on the contingent level of concrete historical development the problem becomes not only highly involved, but almost inexhaustible. For every growth in the Church's doctrine, (for example, the decrees of the Vatican Council and every deeper-going change in the other partner's constitutional forms or in its philosophical and ethical justification or a change in its aims to greater comprehensive competencies) poses a new problem. No wonder, therefore, that in our era of restlessness, of dynamic social changes, of conflicting ideologies fighting for the baffled minds of the masses, of wavering traditions decomposed by the acid of nihilist skepticism, the Church-State problem arises in a new intensity and urgency. The external signs are there for everyone to see: the fury of a Hitler against the “Black International,” the violent persecution of the Church in die satellite countries of the Russian orbit, and the complete subjugation of the Orthodox Church not to a “Christian” Czar but to die confessedly adieistic Politburo. In minor degree the problem is also bothering the people of the United States. A secularist outlook, indeed, may slur over the reality and intensity of the true problem. For the secularized outlook die Church in her essence—and even more so the churches and the sects—is not different in genere from odier numerous private organizations for die furtherance of more or less rational aims and longings in a constitutionally pluralist society. The secularist will, therefore, recognize only one pragmatic rule: tolerance unless the public order and the competency of the police power is directly concerned. Public order includes all too often for the secularist his reform ideas and his social ideals based on a relativist pragmatism in ethics and thus makes him highly sensitive to die criticism by a Church which bases ethics on revelation and on competencies which die secularist can only consider as unfounded and arrogant. Only if the Church remains in the private sphere of private individuals and stays in this “free” sphere where the secularist will tolerate any mass-idiosyncracies, only dius will he condescendingly tolerate the Church. His attitude may be explained to a degree by the fact of an exceedingly strong religious individualism and a subjective and emotional spiritualism, inimical to form and tradition (indigenous to this country and resulting in the easy dissolution of doctrinal unity into a multiplicity of sects). This spiritualist “formlessness” of religion, here, makes the emphasis on organically grown and established forms and on the objective institutions of religious life, so characteristic of the Catholic Church, a somewhat strange and suspicious thing. Yet there is no avoiding the nature and self-understanding of the Church, if the problem of Church and State should be approached. Otherwise the term “Church” would stand only for utterly private opinions by very private individuals in that sphere of irrational feeling and unscientific imagination which for the secularist agnostic is religion. And it is clear that upon such suppositions it would follow that the political authority has exclusive and plenary competency to judge about the compatibility of such a religion with the policy and the public order of the state. The consequence of such thinking is the abolition of the Church-State problem by the complete elimination of the Church.

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