From Two Swords to Three: The Medieval Differentiation of Authority

The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence. James Greenaway. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012.

James Greenaway’s book The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence is a tour de force study of the process of differentiation of order during the Middle Ages, which resulted in the birth of modern Western civilization. Greenaway endeavors to show how, amidst the historical struggles and developments in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages on, the Christian differentiation underwent a change in the relationship between the threefold sources of order or authority: spiritual, temporal and existential (or personal). This threefold division was gradually differentiated and worked out in human consciousness by the revelation of a fully transcendent God that could reveal His inner nature, and welcome man back into communion with Him, only by means of the Incarnation.

The working out of this differentiation, however, proceeded by gradual steps. Greenaway is interested in how one of these steps, the Gelasian project of a sacrum imperium ordered by the interplay of “Two Swords”(the ecclesiastical and the royal), was slowly undermined and overtaken by the development of the consciousness of the authority of personal existence. This third form of authority was as much as result of the Christian differentiation as the other two, but its constitution in history through proper symbols and practices had to wait for social and theoretical developments born from the Gelasian arrangement itself.

The book’s scope is enormous and bold in terms of the time span it covers and the different aspects of historical development it analyses. Yet Greenaway is capable, by means of a competent review and presentation of major historians and theorists of the time, to produce a coherent and satisfying picture of the historical process as a whole. The book is organized in eight chapters, with a general introduction and concluding remarks that compare the Western interplay between the triad of authorities and the Islamic outlook.

The first two chapters offer an historical analysis of the antecedents of the “turn toward existence.” Chapter One looks at the context in which the Gelasian doctrine of the “Two Swords” was formulated. Chapter Two points to the historical markers of the rise of existential individual authority at the end of the early Middle Ages, with St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas respectively as practical and a theoretical witnesses of the movement.

The third chapter analyses the development of the peculiar English historical experience of the organization of the people in a constitutional system, made concrete by the Magna Carta. The English constitutional experience, made possible by the relative strength of the Norman king who could represent the whole of the political people, thus allowing England to erupt into a society organized for action in history, is presented as a felicitous example of the rise of individual authority in a stable relationship with the political and religious institutions.

The next two chapters treat the problematic of “Crisis and Closure” in the context of the rise of the authority of individual existence, analyzing problems and pathologies of the recently differentiated individual experience of authority, be it through the individual’s isolation from the historical process and its institutional limits (John Wycliffe, Anonymous of York and Joachim de Fiore); by means of Averroist inspired narratives that attempted to solve the tension by subsuming the individual into a collective consciousness (Siger of Brabant, Dante and Marsilius of Padua); and in gnostic deformations of spiritual experience. Greenaway sees in these imbalances symptoms of the historical exhaustion of the Gelasian medieval balance between two authorities, and in the excesses committed signs that the institutional and existential configurations of the sacrum imperium were no longer enough to accommodate the search of meaning in individual existence.

The sixth and seventh chapters deal, in their turn, with absolutist institutional responses to the rise of individual existential authority, in continental politics (Frederick II, the French king, and the Italian principalities) and in the papacy. The bottom line in both chapters is that these political and religious institutions were not able to cope with the challenges posed by the social consequences of individual authority, mainly because the Gelasian arrangement and its project of a sacrum imperium prevented them from finding alternative ways to accommodate the new social forces and movements without a breakdown of the system.

Greenaway ably shows how, in contrast with England, in France the main social actors were never organized into a national polity that could be the base of a stable constitutionalism. And the papacy’s reaction to the breakdown of the imperium into national realms and the consequent multiplication of political-religious conflicts about jurisdiction and authority was transformed into a political project to justify the expansion and concentration of papal temporal power, or met a reaction (in the shape of the Conciliarist movement) that could not overcome the same institutional and jurisdictional themes. In these chapters, Greenaway lays out more clearly his thesis that the rise of existential authority within the Gelasian historical process based on the “Two Swords”, as a product of the Christian differentiation of the personal internal sphere of existence, led to the development of social symbols and forces that challenged the very Gelasian environment in which they originated and led to its breakdown towards the Western modern configuration.

The eighth and final chapter highlights the political thought of William of Ockham as a crystallized proposal of “the existential authority of the individual as a legitimate pillar of society with the political and the spiritual” (p. 236), and the mystical writings of Nicholas of Cusa as a remedy to the loss of the “substantive cohesion of society” caused by Ockham’s Nominalist tendencies.

All in all, Greenaway provides a comprehensive and well-balanced view of the philosophical, political, and social movement that produced, throughout the Middle Ages, the configuration of political, religious, and personal forces or authorities within which we still have to contend in political and philosophical disputes to the day. He competently demonstrates that the modern West is both in a relationship of continuity and rupture with the medieval period, and that the rupture is a product itself of the medieval logic of the Gelasian “Two Swords”, itself a product of Christian differentiation. As Greenaway puts it, “the truth of Christian society” went beyond the “pendulum of arguments for and against the superiority of one of other of the Gelasian swords” (p. 226), and the separation of a place for the existential individual authority, or dignity, was the task to which liberal thinkers in the early modern period set themselves in earnest.

In order to cover such a large amount of historical material, Greenaway must support his text on other analysts who have done the heavy lifting of synthesis of the first order materials. His book is, above all, dependent on the work and analyses of Eric Voegelin, as he avers in his Introduction. Voegelin is, indeed, almost always the starting point of Greenaway’s analyses of the thinkers he brings into the discussion, and he usually follows the former’s take, with a few disagreements and corrections.

Greenaway’s work proceeds, then, as a concatenation of the different authors concerning the interplay of authorities in their times, or a refinement of the analysis started by Voegelin. In his attempt at synthesis, a closer interpretive work with the authors’ texts is left out of the book’s scope. At times, Greenaway’s own position seems to be identical with Voegelin’s, giving certain parts of the work a character of a commentary on Voegelin’s thought, something the author announces in the Introduction he is trying to avoid. Nevertheless, Greenaway is acutely attuned to the rise and expansion of individual or personal spaces of authority, legitimacy and, as he suggests in the analysis of William of Ockham’s natural equity, dignity. In this sense Greenaway builds upon Voegelin’s work in a singular and profitable direction.

Although Greenaway is very convincing in his various identifications of that kind of authority throughout the book, one question could be raised regarding his characterization of individual authority as existential, in a sometimes stark contrast with the other two kinds he finds differentiated in Christendom, spiritual (or transcendental) and temporal (or political) authority. The starkness of the opposition leads the reader at times to the impression that the realm of individual authority fights an uphill battle against the two institutionally established other types, which each fight for its own conquered territory against the authority of existence, and each other’s. The process of differentiation and establishment of the authority of existence, throughout historical processes and in different thinkers’ theoretical constructions, seems to be opposed by ossified structures which overemphasize the pragmatic dimension of existence, spirit against power.

However, it should be kept in mind that the two types of authority that make up the Gelasian symbolism of the two swords are intrinsically built, from the start, by the influence of the existential movement or tension differentiated by Christianity. In other words, the Gelasian differentiation, based on the discourse of Christ on the things of God and those of Cesar, is itself a product of the discovery of the existential tension within each human being, an internal sacred place where conversion takes place.

Perhaps it would be better to stick to the terminology of “person” instead of that of “existence”, or even “individual existence”, for what the book shows with detail and care is the rise and development of the meaning of the person as the locus where the tension of existence takes place, and for which political and religious structures ultimately exist, as “the existential or spiritual principle that animates both [spiritual and temporal powers]” (p. 226). That is, as Greenaway knows and explicitly affirms, a potential revealed in Christ’s incarnation as God made man, but one that would go through a long historical process to be fleshed out and transformed into an authoritative symbol.

With that focus, it would be possible to judge more clearly to what extent the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas actually represents and fleshes out the possibilities of the authority of the personal sphere. Greenaway states that Aquinas emphasized “the importance of human (Christian) dignity inhering in the personhood of each individual, above the institutional structures of that environment.” (p. 80) But it is really not clear to what extent Aquinas used the terminology of personality in relation to politics and institutions, and Greenaway does not produce textual evidence for such a strong statement. In one instance where Greenaway quotes the Summa Theologiae on “the dignity of the individual person” (p. 79), the context will show that the discussion is not really geared toward the understanding of human persons, but mainly of the Holy Trinity’s doctrine of the three persons in one God.

Similarly, to say that Aquinas places a “premium… on existential order, as a political and spiritual force” as “indicative of the new direction inherent in the civil theology of his day” (p. 67) may be the result of reading too much of what Greenaway is looking for in Aquinas’ realistic preoccupation (following his philosophical model, Aristotle) with stability as opposed to searching and implementing the very best regime. While there is no doubt that Aquinas writes on politics and law from within the differentiated order of Christianity, which allows him to classify the kinds of law according to the sphere in which they apply. But Aquinas still remains committed to some Aristotelian categories (such as the relationship between individuals and society as analogous to parts and the whole), so that to see a special anthropology or a personalist emphasis might be a little anachronistic.

The “existential embeddedness of law”, then, does not have to reflect “the existential authority of the human person” as such (p. 71), but the results of the Christian differentiation for political and religious institutions as well. A clearer separation between the differentiation of existence under a fully transcendent Creator who assumes human existence in order to communicate His Grace, and the dignity of personal or individual existence as such (which was worked out throughout the centuries after the revelation of Christ), might help towards a better appraisal of what the specific contribution of the slowly developing “personalism” consisted in.

All this does not detract from the quality and the perspicacity of Greenaway’s analysis of the main political and theoretical developments of the time under observation. It is particularly illuminating and provocative when it shows a historical thread of the differentiation of the authority of existence, such as the meaning of the figure of Saint Francis, the movement of Conciliarism, and the new kind of Christian theologians symbolized by Ockham, for example.

One other interesting feature, for political theorists in general, stems from the analysis’s rich contextualization of the major staples of medieval political thought, such as those found in source books or Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas, among the historical interplay between religious and political institutions. As such, it reveals these authors’ and ideas’ deeper meaning as witnesses, actors, and elements of the historical processes in which medieval consciousness of politics and religion developed, and by extension, Western modern consciousness as well. In this regard Greenaway’s book is in perfect continuity with Voegelin’s concern with turning the investigation of political ideas and thinkers into a coherent and deep investigation of the underlying spiritual currents that orient human action and human order.

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