Decentralism and Statism in the Experience of Christendom

[Perun]

ahhh.....the myth of Medieval totalitarianism



http://www.townhall.com/phillysoc/mcarthy.htm

Decentralism and Statism in the Experience of Christendom

by John P. McCarthy


Let us begin by defining our terms. Decentralism and statism are self-explanatory. The former means confining political power to as local a base as possible. The later means granting to the political authority ascendancy over all aspects of human life. Decentralization works to inhibit statism, since even where a local regime might have totalitarian aspirations, its limited territory and size would inhibit its pretensions.

Christendom refers to a specific territory, Europe, especially Western Europe, during a specific historical period, from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation, when there was a common religious creed, despite ethnic, linguistic and geographic differences. Then an individual’s concept of membership was to Christendom more than to a nation or state.

Many good Liberals, especially in the nineteenth century, characterized Christendom as a theocracy, the epitome of centralization and statism, especially because of the suggestion that political authority emanated from the Pope. However, while there was that theocratic proclivity in Western Christendom, it was more the exception than the rule. In fact, the historical record of Christendom, and the heritage of Christendom that continues, probably more in the United States than Europe itself, should indicate that Christendom was a major supporter of decentralization and opponent of statism.

The very theological premises of Christianity militate against statism and favor decentralization. This is despite and, indeed, because Christianity is a universalist religion. Most pre-Christian religions were religions of a specific people or state. The Christian mandate was to convert the world. That could be seen, and no doubt was by some, as a directive for conquest and global uniformity. But, as the Founder succinctly put it, His Kingdom was not of this world. The Christians were not to construct a terrestrial utopia, but to preach a message with relevance to the next world. In addition, Christ said to “Leave to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s.” That meant there were limits to Caesar’s authority. Caesar, that is, the State, was neither the source of authority nor the determiner of right and wrong. Those two themes, that Christianity did not provide a specific political agenda as to how societies should be organized, and that the State was not the repository of values, would be enduring characteristics of Christendom, despite occasional lapses into that peculiar form of centralized statism-- theocracy.

The central message of Christianity, the Incarnation, that is, God becoming man and bearing all the physical, psychological and mental features of mankind, including a brutal death, meant that the Christian message was not entirely otherworldly, but was a realistic formula for the world as it was. Its disciples were not etherial and/or passive beings acquiesing in predestined and circular determinism. God had entered the world and grace was available to transform the world, not according to an ideology, but according to principle and a way of life.

Christianity’s early experience was one of martyrdom, martyrdom occasioned by the refusal of Christians to worship the civic Gods of the Roman Empire. The Roman authorities regarded their refusal to share the civic religion, more than their specific Christian beliefs, as subvervise. All that changed when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, to the chagrin of “conservative” Romans who saw that as the begining of the end. The eighteenth century historian, Gibbons, would reconstruct their lament in his argument that the Christian virtues of resignation and meekness, the message of the “Beatitudes,” were contradictory to what made the Empire.

But St. Augustine would confront those who saw Christianity as politically unconstructive with his monumental “City of God,” which reaffirmed the extraterrestrial vision of Christianity and freed it from linkage to any specific worldly political entity. However, when the Empire did collapse in Western Europe, the Church, which had drawn organizational and administrative competence from the Empire, inevitably was called upon to fill the institutional void.

The Church’s response in dealing with post-Imperial Western Europe was to assert values other than those of the political authority, but not to impose a societal blueprint. British historian and cultural anthropologist Christopher Dawson has demonstrated how it sought to transform existing institutions, customs, and heritages with a Christian perspective, or allow actual grace to work its way in the existing raw material of human society.

Warrior kings of the Celtic and Germanic tribes were gradually--very gradually--made to look upon themselves, at least in theory, as repositories of justice rather than being simply warlords. Their acceptance of consecration at their coronation imposed a sense of obligation, a sense of duty, as Burke put it, not shared by shameless democracies. Local pre-Christian shrines for naturalistic dieties were “baptized” and made into holy wells, and centers for popular devotion to Christian saints. The influence of Christianity guaranteed that the servile system of feudalism, with its element of contract, even if permanent and inheritable, would work toward ultimate liberty rather than regress into slavery. The ability to excommunicate kings and emperors was an important restraint on absolute political power.

The Courts of Canon Law, that is, those courts that enforced church law, whether it be about internal church organizational questions, or doctrinal and moral matters, including marital--and, inescapably, probate-- issues, played an important role in the Middle Ages. Admittedly the concept of a church court having coercive power would appear outrageous in a pluralist society, especially the concept of its jurisdiction being determined by the clerical status of plaintiff or accused rather than just the matter at issue. This practice gave to clerics an immunity from other tribunals somewhat comparable to that claimed by contemporary academics and artists, who accept public largese but not supervision by the state.

But the medieval Courts of Canon Law must also be viewed in a more positive light. They had emerged from the tradition of the written and proclaimed Roman Law, and were light years more advanced in procedural matters than the folk or even royal courts that had determined guilt or innocence by ordeal, battle, or by the social weight of referees for plaintif and accused. Furthermore, the Canon Law Courts worked as a restraint on the growing claims by kings to have a monopoly on justice, especially the fruits of justice, that is, the fines that were paid. Thomas a Beckett, slain on the orders of Henry II, was a martyr for the independence of the clerical courts from royal intrusion. Three and a half centuries later, Thomas More would be a martyr for the principle of the autonomy of the Church in proclaiming its moral teaching against the aspirations of Henry VIII to overrule its decision on his marital status.

Unfortunately, by the thirteenth century, the Papacy made theoretical assertions that it was the source of determining the political legitimacy of kings and emperors. However, so vain an aspiration was an indication of hubris, as in the next century the Popes found themselves the virtual hostages of the French Kings. There then followed the scandal of the Great Western Schism, which at one point saw three rival claimants to the Papacy. Ever since the Papacy’s coercive political power has been continually restricted, first being limited to the shrinking Papal States and, today being confined to the few score of acres making up the Vatican. But the moral authority seems to have magnified in inverse proportion to the decline in political power, both within the Church and universally.

The Wars of Religion that followed the Reformation were a scandal to believers. The most tragic consequence of the Reformation was the shattering of the unity of Christendom and the subordination of churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to absolute states, all monarchies. Henry VIII and Louis XIV were virtually identical except for the later professioning a nominal link to the Church while insisting on absolute control over hierarchical appointments. The ultimate consequence of royal absolutism was the replacement of the kings as the source of authority by the nation state with its earthly religion of nationalism.

Significantly, the Papacy opposed Louis XIV’s expansionism and directed prayers of thanksgiving on hearing of the defeat of Louis’ satellite, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne. The Irish Protestant victors unfortunately were unappreciative and imposed the Penal Laws on the Catholics of the island. A fragile alliance of the Papacy and Whiggism (Whiggism of Burke’s kind) began with the opposition to the French Revolution, which had abandoned all restraint on the assertion of authority by the political process. The French Revolution’s logical successor, Napoleon, whom some Whigs sought to appease, was ultimately brought down by the forces of older Europe, including the Church.

Tension persisted throughout the nineteenth century between the Church and Liberalism because of the Church’s identification with the forces of reaction who sought to restore or preserve the pre-revolutionary order and who were inhospitable to the irrepressible industrial revolution and capitalism. At the time few perceived that the medieval heritage of restraint on political authority, of decentralization and balance of power, was being best continued in two essentially Protestant areas of the world, Britain and the United States. Ironically the political-social institutions that today can boast of distinct roots with medieval times, that is, with Christendom, are the Papacy, the federal union of the United States, and the British Monarchy and Parliament.

By the end of the nineteenth century more thoughtful observers were begining to perceive that revolutionary liberalism carried to its full would bring on the absolute state. For example, the utilitarians had argued that the free market best met the happiness of the greatest number of people, but their intellectual descendants, the Fabian Socialists, argued that the masses had to be guided by the state to realize what was happiness. One of their apostles, Graham Wallas, called his formula of social organization The Great Society. In other words, Liberalism no longer sought liberty, but instead a perfect society, the very thing the Church, in its wisdom and understanding of human nature, knew could not be achieved in this world.

The era in which the New Liberalism, that is, statist liberalism, emerged, the later part of the nineteenth century, has been best chronicled by that master historian, Carlton Hayes, in his classic work, A Generation of Materialism. Liberty, never mind religion, was subordinated to the pursuit of progress and development guided by the infallible certainty of science. The forces that seemed destined for triumph were those characterized by modernity, industrialism, and political centralization, as was evidenced in the wars of the 1860’s and 1870’s. Prussia and Sardinia had triumphed in the achievement of German and Italian political unification and the victory of the North in the Civil War had forever foreclosed the option of withdrawal from the American Union. The door was open for state-capitalism with all the instruments of protectionism, imperialism, and expansionism in the name of modernization.

This was the era and those were the abuses which provoked Hilaire Belloc, with his English radical and French Jacobin roots, to begin to fear and forecast the Servile State. He was joined in his apprehensions by the democratic radical and Little Englander, G. K. Chesterton, who asked What’s Wrong with the World in succinctly describing the ascendancy of philosophical and socio-psychological determinism at the expense of belief in liberty or values.

That perceptive sociologist, Robert Nisbet, acutely analyzed the phenomena that accompanied modernization: the disruption of traditional and local communities and the urbanization of western society. As a consequence there has appeared mass man, molded not by tradition and prescription, but by universal education and the mass circulation press, able to exercise the franchise, and ready to follow such enthusiams as nationalism, racism, and socialism.

The twentieth century has been the tale of the latter horrors being carried to the fullest extreme in the “modern” regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. The defeat of Nazism and the collapse of the Soviet Union should not blind us into the confidence that we are at the comfortable “End of History.” There continues the totalitarian potential in the Third World. The unification of the European Community is scarcely the civilizational unity that Christendom implied, but rather an administrative and economic union in which authority appears increasing distant from the populace, never mind not being seen as subordinate to any higher, other-worldly source. Fortunately the sentiment is strong in America, especially among those who consider themselves Christians, that the state is not the repository of human value. Enough of us still insist that the role of the state must remain limited to protection and justice, and not to the making of a perfect society designed by politically correct social engineers.

[Perun]

Here's the latest post from my blog:

Myth of Medieval Totalitarianism



Here's a very interesting piece by John P. McCarthy titled Decentralism and Statism in the Experience of Christendom. In short McCarthy goes to great length explaining the governing political philosophy of Medieval Christendom and how it compares to its modern political institutions; particularly on the question of statism(i.e. centralized governmental control) as opposed to decentralism.

Contrary to the popular myth expressed nowadays, Medieval Christendom tended to favor the latter, while modern liberal and secularist governments have tended towards the former. As he explains:

Many good Liberals, especially in the nineteenth century, characterized Christendom as a theocracy, the epitome of centralization and statism, especially because of the suggestion that political authority emanated from the Pope. However, while there was that theocratic proclivity in Western Christendom, it was more the exception than the rule. In fact, the historical record of Christendom, and the heritage of Christendom that continues, probably more in the United States than Europe itself, should indicate that Christendom was a major supporter of decentralization and opponent of statism.

McCarthy goes onto to explain that Christian theology itself seems to "militate against statism and favor decentralization." Largely this was because of the doctrine of Original Sin(which implies that man is too flawed to have absolute power) along with his Christ's command of "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but to God the things that are God's". This implied that Caesar was not the sole authority in the world, but that the commands of God had to be obeyed as well. More on this later.

Possibly the most interesting point made in this piece is that one key social institution prevented the state from assuming absolute power during the Medieval period, and that institution was none other than the church. For example, the ability of the pope to excommunicate monarchs "was an important restraint on absolute political power."

However over time, especially beginning in the late Medieval period, monarchs were able to concentrate more and more power into their own hands. The Great Schism and other unfortunate incidents that served to weaken the geo-political power of the Papacy only helped this process along. By the time of the Renaissancence and the Wars of Religion, the existence of absolute monarchies became the norm throughout Europe.

Then came the supposed "Age of Enlightenment" in the 18th century, where intellectuals proposed new theories about man and of the state. The thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that man, through use of reason, could perfect himself. This of course ran contrary to the Christian concept of original sin, but the Enlightenment rejected Christian morality as nothing more than outdated rubbish. Having believed that man could become perfect, logically one could also argue about the ability to the create the perfect state. And that's just what the Enlightenment thinkers sought to lay out. Basically the job of the state was to create a more enlightened and perfect world. However, in order to accomplish that goal, a more efficient and centralized form of government would be needed. Many European monarchs adopted this viewpoint under the premise of "elightened despotism".

The ideals of the Enlightenment eventually lead to the French Revolution of 1789, and consequently the further centralization of governmental power. Yet the idea of the state being a vehicle for transforming society into a more perfect ideal did not die, in fact it was further articulated throughout the 19th century and came to full practice within the 20th century with unspeakable horrors.

So rather than totalitarianism being a product of Christendom, it is rather a product of centuries of turning away from Christian teachings. Ironically when Medieval people spoke about the separation of church and state, they largely meant it so that the church wouldn't be corrupted by the state. The church, again, was seen as a divinely inspired institution that held society together and whose moral power kept the state in check. In contrast, when we now speak about this concept it's reversed; somehow the state is in danger of being corrupted by the church. However, it can clearly been seen which force has caused more destruction when left unchecked by moral forces.

Yet the notion that Christianity provided the framework for totalitarianism has gained new emphasis within a intellectual movement known as the European New Right, also known by its French name Nouvelle Droite. Long story short, this a group of intellectuals who believe in revitalizing European civilization and providing the intellectual case for legitimizingtng ethnic identities. Certainly nothing wrong with that. However, this movement is Neo-pagan in orientation, and wishes to blame Christianity for much of the mess of the modern world.

Thomas Sunic is a key thinker within this movement who shares this view. In his article Marx, Moses and the Pagans in the Secular City, he lays his case that "the roots of tyranny do not lie in Athens or Sparta, but are traceable, instead, to Jerusalem" and the Bible. He certainly agrees with the assessment of Oswald Spengler that "Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism", because of its emphasis on social justice and so on. If it weren't for 2000 years of Christianity, Liberalism and Communism would not have been possible, or so their argument goes.

McCarthy completely dismisses this argument, stating that "Christians were not to construct a terrestrial utopia". This is because Christ himself stated that his kingdom was not of this world. Jim Kalb also offers his thoughts on this issue, arguing that rather than being the direct result of Christianity, liberalism and communism were more or less gross perversions of Christian doctrine. BTW, here's a link to another interesting discussion about the European New Right's mistaken views on Christianity by Jim Kalb and others.

Anyways, the lesson here is the example of Medieval Christendom provided the example of limited government in its true sense (not the so-called conservative fraud of "small government"), while secularism has done nothing but given government more power than it needs. This is why Catholic Social Doctrine has always upheld decentralization, aka subsidiarity, as an all important element.

So the next you meet a liberal who screams about the seperation of church and state on the grounds that religion will set up a tyrannical theocracy(like in the Middle Ages or "Dark Ages" as they're more commonly referred to derogatorily), you can counter them with the facts!

posted by Perun | 2:56 PM