Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages (Part I)

A Preliminary: Voegelin’s “Political Ideas”

In the introduction to the History of Political Ideas, Voegelin writes, “the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give to his life a semblance of meaning.” As such, the political idea is representative of “a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without” (CW 19:225). This, in turn, informs Voegelin’s dis­cussion of the functional component of the political idea. “The political idea is only to a limited extent descriptive of any reality; its primary func­tion is not a cognitive but a formative one. The political idea is not an instrument of description of a political unit but an instrument of its cre­ation” (CW 19:227-28).

As a practical matter, this explanation is important to an understand­ing of the sense in which Voegelin examines political ideas as they oc­cur in history; for in its character and in an evocation of meaning, the idea itself may never reach its fruition in an institutional form. Since the idea itself is pure, the realization of the idea may not be fully realizable in the historical existence of human beings in reality. At this point in Voegelin’s development there may, in fact, be something of the Platonist within him.

The use of the term idea may, in itself, be misleading when it comes to a reading of Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas. Generally speaking, when Voegelin uses the term political idea he is not referring to an “idea” per se, or an idea in the singular. Rather, Voegelin is usually describing matrices of ideas that serve as the basis upon which the Idea is constructed. This approach is indicated by Voegelin’s structural analysis of the basis of political ideas. The structure of the Idea is determined by “three sets of ideas: the ideas concerning the constitution of the cosmos as whole; the ideas concerning the internal order; the ideas concerning the status of the cosmion in the simultaneous world and in history” (CW 19:226).

Paul’s evocation of the Christian community had fulfilled the re­quirements for the evocation of a little world of meaning.  [In a previous chapter] we  noted Voegelin’s argument regarding the “greatness of Paul” in the apostle’s ability to create a constitution for the community of the faith­ful that fully took into account both the realities of human beings and human nature and the realities of the world in which Christianity emerged. In his evocation of the Christian community through a series of com­promises with the world, Paul had created a complex of ideas that would lead to the expansion of Christianity throughout the known world. With that said, the dream of Paul, in the sense of an overarching community that would extend beyond the boundaries of nations and peoples, failed to materialize in history, but it was transformed into something else: the notion of the sacrum imperium. This idea of “imperial Christianity,” al­though never fully realized in history, would become the defining char­acteristic of the Middle Ages and set the stage for the disorder of the modern period.

The Church Embodies the Pauline Compromises

The problem with any political idea is that it is dependent upon the historical circumstance in which it happens to be formulated. As such, political ideas are largely contingent upon the moment in time and place in which they emerge. Furthermore, political ideas are also entirely de­pendent upon the institutionalization of the idea if they are to be trans­lated into concrete human action toward the creation of order or disorder. It is important to remember Voegelin’s warning regarding the existence of destructive forces, both “within and without” the political cosmion. An idea can only be effective in history to the degree that it is realized through some form of institutional representation.

In the Christian experience, the representation of the Pauline idea came to be embodied in the institutional church. This was implied both in the idea of the differing spiritual gifts granted to individual human beings in their equality before God and in the necessary requirement that the expansion of the community of the faithful and the realization of impe­rial Christianity required a corresponding organization by which to un­dertake the program. Voegelin argues:

“The church has become the great civilizing influence in the Western world because it was able to compromise the strict teachings of the Sermon on the Mount with the weakness of human nature, with the existence of governmental power, and with the historical con­tent of pre-Christian civilization. The compromise with the weak­ness of man expressed itself in the inclusion of everybody into the mystical body of Christ through the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; the foundation for membership is laid through the sacramental reception, not through any guarantee that the per­son is, indeed, a member of the invisible church. The actual status of the soul in salvation or damnation is known to God alone; it can­not be judged by the brethren in the community.”

“The acceptance of governmental power as part of the “world” and willed by God is the second great compromise. It enabled the church to outlast the difficulties of the early centuries and reached its climax in the in­tegration of the royal function into the order of the charismata in the ninth century.”

“The third compromise, equally inaugurated by Saint Paul, was the compromise with history through the recogni­tion that God revealed himself to the pagans through the law of na­ture and to the Hebrews through the Old Law before he revealed himself to the world at large through the Logos that had become flesh. As a consequence of this third compromise it was possible for the early patres to absorb the Stoic natural law into Christian doctrine, and by virtue of this absorption to create for Christianity a system of ethics that was applicable to relations between men who live in the world.” (CW 22:140-41)

Voegelin notes, however, that the importance of these compromises is mitigated by the realization that “they could not have unfolded their full effectiveness unless they had been accompanied by the creation of the sacramental organization” (CW 22:141). In other words, for the com­promises to lead to the creation of some form of political order, some corresponding representative institution was required.

The Seeds of Reform and Revolution

Problems arise when the organizational realization of the idea moves through history and faces the pressure of existence in the field of social and institutional forces upon it. In the instance of Christian civilization, the church as an institution was an immanent existential embodiment of a spiritual event. Voegelin observes that in the context of the Christian West, the “public institutions of imperial Christianity (church and em­pire) have, from their beginning, absorbed the problems of the spiritual soul and its destiny into their pattern” (CW 22:133). The difference be­tween “reform” and “revolution” is thus a reflection of the effectiveness with which the institutional structures are able to absorb those problems or eliminate them.

The experience of Christianity into the Middle Ages had demonstrated that under the surface of the existing institutional order were political, so­cial, and spiritual movements that came into play in the creation of Christian order. For this reason, Voegelin argues, we can distinguish “between two planes of Western civilization, an upper plane and a lower plane.” The upper plane consists of “the public institutions; the lower plane as that of the movements that are in permanent revolt against the established institu­tions.” Christian political order was problematic largely because of the in­herent tension between the institutional order and the distinctly “Christian idea of the person in immediacy to God” (CW 22:131-33). This tension was both lessened and, paradoxically, increased by the apparent inclusion of an objective standard by which to measure the suc­cess or failure of public institutions in representing the very real demands of the spiritual existence of human beings in society. The social standard created by the sermons of Jesus of Nazareth proved to be the source of order and of disorder.

Voegelin argues, “The spiritualism of Christianity, and in particular the spiritualism of the Sermon on the Mount, is a stan­dard that can be invoked against the institution that is supposed to rep­resent it; if the spiritual order of Christianity is grossly violated through the conduct of the ruling groups, the appeal can go to standards that are, on principle, accepted by the ruling groups themselves” (CW 22:134). On the other hand, the dictates of the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain created an impossible standard for institutions to achieve in reality. As a result, there were always elements on the fringe that stood in opposition to the institutional order.

The contingent nature of the idea remained a major problem that, in the course of centuries, would result in the crisis of the Great Reformation. The “general nature of the problem that caused the great religious dis­ruption” of the Great Reformation is characterized by Voegelin as:

“the crisis of the accumulated, but intellectually undigested, histor­ical content of Christianity. The Spirit is absolute; but the symbol­ization of its experience and its institutionalization in the life of human community is historical. In the course of history, symbol­izations that express the essence of Christianity adequately at one time may become inadequate in a new age; the essence of Christianity is a matter of permanent readjustment of its historical expres­sion . . . . The flash of eternity that is the church is a flash into his­tory; the doctrinal expressions of the flash–which at the beginnings of the church may have seemed as eternal as the flash itself–reveal their relativity in the light of history that flows on through the ages.” (CW 22:223)

The revolution that was the Great Reformation is thus a reflection of the inability of the church itself to adjust to the changing political, social, and religious environment in which it found itself.

The Church in the World and Demands for Reform

Voegelin’s discussion of the problem of Christian order as it expresses itself in the evocation of the sacrum imperium of the Middle Ages. “The political ideas of the Middle Ages are oriented toward the focal evocation of the sacrum imperium, of the holy empire, just as Hellenic theory was oriented toward the polis and Christian-Roman the­ory toward the kingdom of Heaven and the Roman empire”(CW 20:29). However, while the sacrum imperium may be understood as an “ideal type,” it was, as with most idealized conceptions of what might be, never fully realized in history. As Voegelin observes, “the entelechy of the process failed to reach its stage of perfection; the universal empire as a power organiza­tion and the universal spiritual community tended toward each other and finally met, but they did not amalgamate” (CW 20:66).

The very fact that it is not an “ideal type” points to the problem with the realization of the idea in history. Furthermore, it also illustrates the interplay between the calls for reform from the bottom of the social struc­ture and the increasing inability of the institutional order to reflect the reality experienced by the people within the society. Finally, it is in the rise and fall of the idea of the sacrum imperium that the compromises with the world that Saint Paul made in his initial contact with the world and the conception of the constitution of the Christian community come undone in the interplay of institutional order and social forces.

[In an earlier chapter] we discussed the Tyconian problem. The speculations of Tyconius prefigured events within the realm of the sacrum imperium and beyond. The Donatist controversy was contained because it took place on the fringes of the empire. But the role of the institutional church as the representative of transcendent order and the conduit by which one entered into the community of the faithful would remain a constant target for those who did not believe that the church was, in fact, truly representative of the spiritual order of the kingdom of God. For the fu­ture, the Tyconian problem would reemerge in the middle of Europe, and the conflagration could not be simply brushed aside to the margins of community existence. The Great Reformation may properly be understood, from the Voegelinian perspective, as the end of a process that has two primary components.

The first is the social pressure from the bottom in the form of the reformist impulse, but this only becomes problematic to the de­gree that the institutions are unable to absorb the demands for reform into themselves or successfully demonstrate that the proposed “reforms” are either unnecessary or unwise. The demands themselves are the re­sult of a narrowing of the ontological perspectives that defined the exis­tence of human beings in history. In other words, the reality in which the reformers worked became increasingly restricted, a situation which in turn limited the range of options available to the institutional order.

The other component comprises the institutional order itself, the order of the church specifically, which must bear some of the burden of re­sponsibility in history. The problem with the institutionalization of the spirit is ultimately that it must be representative of the spirit. From the beginning of the experience of the institutional church, however, the field of reality in which it operated began to contract as well into the intra­mundane reality of the world of statecraft. In fact, it could be argued that the modern state was born out of the experience of the church well be­fore the modern territorial state as we understand it emerged.

The Construction of the Imperium

Voegelin argues that the Carolingian empire was the result of a grad­ual historic evolution that took some 300 years to occur.¹ At the Council of Chalcedon of 451, the Roman church condemned the Monophysite Christology and appealed to Emperor Zeno (d. 491) to enforce the Orthodox doctrine as expressed by Leo I (d. 461). The emperor’s response was to propose a compromise that drove the final wedge between Constantinople and Rome. The result of this split was the development of the Gelasian doctrine of the two swords by which temporal and spir­itual powers were to be separated between two authorities, with the em­peror having primacy in temporal matters and the church having primacy in matters of springing from the spiritual.

This, as Voegelin points out, was “incompatible with the practice of Byzantine emperors if not with their theory” (CW 20:53). The solution could not be found in a rap­prochement. Instead, relations between Constantinople and Rome stag­nated in an uneasy alliance, as the church in Rome remained enamored of the idea of the Roman Empire, to which the Byzantine emperor was ostensibly heir. The situation had been exacerbated when the power of the Eastern Empire was threatened by pressure brought on by the barbarian invasions and the near-complete breakdown of the empire’s administrative appara­tus.

As a result, the church was thrown back on its own resources; more important, Rome became dependent upon the papal organization and the church for its sustenance. This allowed Gregory I (d. 604) not only to claim papal supremacy over the other churches of the empire and the patriarch in Constantinople, but also to fulfill the functions of a temporal ruler in the West. The final straw consisted of the loss of Byzantine political and military control as a result of the Lombard invasions. The pope “had to look for temporal support elsewhere unless he wanted to become a court bishop in the Lombard kingdom, a position that would have been even less appealing than imperial interference in spiritual matters” (CW 20:55).

In the long, slow decline of the alliance between Rome and Constan­tinople, we can see the power of an idea. Voegelin argues that it “is sur­prising for how long the papacy held the emperor in profound awe, in spite of the humiliations to which a number of popes were exposed.” But while the “interference in spiritual matters led to temporary severances of the communion,” it did not lead to “a formal breach.” Instead, the formal breach only occurred when Constantinople was no longer able to fulfill its temporal functions sufficiently to support the episcopate in Rome (CW 20:54-55). The break itself was delayed because hovering in the back­ground was the idea of the universal empire–the idea of Rome.

Voegelin argues, “The idea of Rome lay heavily over the historical process, and it required the accumulated force of centuries of events to crystallize the new evocation” (CW 20:66). The epochal consciousness ex­pressed by Melito of Sardis, and quoted by Voegelin, indicates the per­ception that the fate of Christianity and the fate of the empire are inextricably linked. Melito writes to the emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Our philosophy first grew up among the barbarians, but its full flower came among your nation in the great reign of your ancestor Augustus, and became an omen of good to your empire, for from that time the power of the Romans be­came great and splendid. You are now his happy successor, and shall be so along with your son, if you protect the philosophy which grew up with the empire and began with Augustus.”² Only when the empire proves it­self to be inadequate to the maintenance of civil and political order is that linkage broken.

The existence of a new evocation for the empire required the destruction of the old one. Christopher Dawson describes the change in terms that Voegelin would undoubtedly understand:

“For centuries a civilization will follow the same path, worshiping the same gods, cherishing the same ideals, acknowledging the same moral and intellectual standards. And then all at once a change will come, the springs of the old life run dry, and men suddenly awaken to a new world, in which the ruling principles of the former age seem to lose their validity and to become inapplicable or meaningless. This is what occurred in the time of the Roman Empire, when the ancient world, which had lived for centuries on the inherited capi­tal of the Hellenistic culture, seemed suddenly to come to the end of its resources and to realize its need of something entirely new.”

“For four hundred years the civilized world had been reading the same books, admiring the same works of art, and cultivating the same types of social and personal expression. Then came the change of the third and fourth centuries, A.D., when the forms of the Hellenistic culture lost their vitality and men turned to a new art, a new thought and a new way of life–from philosophy to theology, from the Greek statue to the Byzantine mosaic, from the gymnasium to the monastery.”³

Of course, the new evocation took centuries to fully materialize until it was realized and institutionalized with the coronation of Charlemagne (d. 814) in 800—and even then it would never reach the status of com­pleteness.

The Frankish Monarchy

Of course, the new evocation took centuries to fully materialize until it was realized and institutionalized with the coronation of Charlemagne (d. 814) in 800–and even then it would never reach the status of com­pleteness. With the understanding that God was the partner in the destiny of the church, the “slow ripening” of the “situation that was consummated in the coronation of Charlemagne” was understood by Voegelin “in the symbolism of the time” as:

“decisions of God. For the contemporaries of the coronation, the transfer of the empire was neither an act of the pope, nor an act of the Frankish king, nor an act of the people of Rome, but an act of God. Divine providence had shown its intentions through the course that it let history take, and the acts of man could do nothing but accept the divine decision” (CW 20:52).

It was within the scope of the new evocation that the entity properly understood as “Europe” came to be. Christopher Dawson observes, “It was only in so far as the different peoples of the West were incorporated in the spiritual community of Christendom that they acquired a common cul­ture. It is this, above all, that distinguishes the Western development from that of the other great world civilizations.”⁴

Voegelin notes the irony of the situation: “the papacy and the Frankish monarchy had developed in directions that, on the surface at least, seemed to contradict the Gelasian declaration on separation of powers” (CW 20:59-60). In the case of the Frankish monarchy, even prior to the coronation of Charlemagne it had “evolved . . . in a theocratic direction insofar as the church organization was integrated into the administrative hierarchy of the monarchy and the king presided over church assemblies with far-reaching interference in matters of discipline.” Voegelin is care­ful to note that:

“it would be rash to assume that the theocratic tendencies in the Western empire duplicated the caesaropapism of the Byzantine empire. While the static relationship is similar, the dynamics are completely differ­ent. In the East, the imperial administration represented the old civ­ilizational forces and the Christian Church had to integrate herself into an established system of superior civilizational quality; in the West the church represented the superior civilizational forces, and the temporal power had to grow into political and historical stature by means of ecclesiastical aid.”

“The institutional ascendancy of the temporal power in the Frankish kingdom was balanced, therefore, in practice by the dependence of the Carolingian administration on the church organization and church personnel for the governmental and civilizational penetration of the realm, particularly those sections where the Germanic population was strong in numbers. The com­pulsory Sunday service with the influence exerted from the pulpit was the main instrument of transmitting temporal power for weld­ing the people into a unit by transmitting the intentions of the cen­tral administration to the last village.” (CW 20:60-62)

Dawson echoes Voegelin’s observation: “The government of the whole Empire was largely ecclesiastical, for the bishop shared equally with the count in the local administration of the 300 counties into which the Empire was divided, while the central government was mainly in the hands of the chancery and of the royal chapel.” The church was thus an essential representative of political, as well as spiritual, order.⁵ Furthermore, in the cooperation of the imperial administration and the clerical adminis­tration, the development of permanent political and legal institutions was made possible.⁶

The Church Becomes a Territorial State

By the time of the Carolingian empire, the church not only had evolved into a spiritual power but had taken on the trappings of a territorial state. Voegelin notes that the “papacy had grown, already before Gregory I  (Gregory the Great), into a huge domainal administration; since Gregory it had acquired the characteristics of a temporal principality . . . ; the spiritual head of Christianity had become in addition a temporal monarch” (CW 20:60). This evolution of the institutional representative of Christianity into a tem­poral kingdom would become an increasing source of tension and future problems.

Contributing to the difficulties would be the incorporation of the tem­poral ruler into the corpus mysticum. We have noted that Paul made cer­tain compromises with the world in his creation of the constitution of the Christian community. Among those was the derivation of the gifts of the spirit and the use of the analogy of the body as the representative of the community in the world.

By the time of the Carolingian founda­tion, the temporal ruler has been incorporated into the body of Christ. Voegelin writes:

“The Pauline doctrine of the charismata, of the gifts of grace differentiating the functions of the members of the corpus mysticum, has been enlarged beyond the early Christian community idea. The body of Christ has absorbed the ruling office into the field of the dynamis of Christ. This office had been distinguished as the exousia by Saint Paul and been excluded from the corpus mysticum; the ruler has become charismatic” (CW 20:63).

This development is problematic to some de­gree as well. With the differentiation of power defined in terms of spir­itual and temporal as expressed in the Gelasian doctrine and with the inclusion of the temporal ruler as a member of the corpus mysticum, the lines of authority were sometimes confused and confusing to both the church as the recognized spiritual authority and the emperor as the con­stituted temporal ruler of the community.

The lines of authority, temporal and spiritual, which had never really been clear to begin with, became even more complex and interrelated. There was, in the notion of the sacrum imperium, from its foundation with Charlemagne to its destruction following Frederick II, a great de­gree of what Louis Halphen has termed “systematic confusion” regard­ing the balance between the spiritual and temporal powers within the empire on the part of the temporal authorities.⁷ This, in turn, presents something of a problem for the relationship of the church to the tem­poral authority, since the church itself has become a territorial power with interests of its own that may or may not be congruent with the in­terests of the temporal authority upon which it relies and with which it at the same time competes.

But it would be a mistake to transpose the modern understanding of the division between church and state to the medieval sphere. Dawson maintains that in the Middle Ages, the “conception of Christian society was essentially a unitary one. State and church were not independent or­ganisms but different orders or functions in a single society of which the Pope was the head. Yet at the same time this did not mean that the two orders were confused or identified with one another. The prince had his proper function in Christian society and his own rights within the sphere of its exercise.”⁸ Voegelin repeatedly stresses this point with regard to the evocation of the sacrum imperium. Nevertheless, the potential existed for conflict between the two orders of power within the Holy Empire, and this potential would become increasingly apparent with the subsequent development of the church into the first “Renaissance monarchy.”

Monasteries as Repositories of Reform: The Question of Community

Of significant importance in the creation of the new Christian com­munity, the new Christian “people,” was the monastery. Voegelin main­tains, “The institutions gained their function as the uniformly civilizing factor of the countryside with the introduction of the Rule of Saint Benedict in the ninth century.” In the adoption of the Rule of Saint Benedict (c. 530), the monasteries transferred “the Hellenic ideal of the self-sufficient community from the polis to a select Christian community.”

However, unlike in the Hellenic case, the select Christian community had a function outside of itself. Whereas “the Platonic polis was a self-sufficient politico-religious unit . . . the Benedictine polis had its mean­ing in the larger Christian community as a form of life supplemented by, and supplementing the functions of, the secular clergy and the temporal power.” As such, the monastery becomes “the symbol of the changes that occurred in the transition from ancient Mediterranean civilization to Western Civilization: from the polis to the territorial empire (and later the territorial state), from urban civilization to agricultural feudal civi­lization, . . . from pagan myth to the spirit of Christ” (CW 20:64).

In addition to its role in the foundation of the new evocation, the monas­teries also functioned as a regulative force upon the spiritual-temporal community of the church. We have noted that the line between reform and revolution is a thin one, and the monasteries were an important source of the impetus toward the first and the avoidance of the second. Voegelin notes that in the context of the sacrum imperium:

“reform was concerned in principle with a reassertion of the evan­gelical demands against the evils that had encroached on the life of the Christian community in the centuries after Charlemagne. The demands of poverty, celibacy, and Christian discipline were di­rected against the main evils of lay investiture, simony, and clerical marriage in particular, and they were directed in general against the engrossment of the representatives of Christian life, of the secular clergy, and of the monasteries, in the interests of the world. The re­form began where the contrast between the spiritual idea of Christianity and reality was felt most keenly, and where at the same time the resistance of vested interests could be overcome most eas­ily: in the monasteries.” (CW 20:68)

It is an irony of history that the reform movements themselves, while in­tended to supplement and revivify the connection between the spiritual existence of human beings as members of an overarching community in the Church, would also serve to undermine the existing foundations of the representative institutions of the Church itself.⁹

The Cluniac Reform

The Cluniac reform (910) consisted of the creation of an “order” as distinct from a “house.” In the Benedictine model, each monastery was an independent organization. The establishment of the Cluniac orders created a hierarchical system in which authority flowed downward from the abbot of the original house to all houses that composed the order. This provided a model for the Church as a whole, and, paradoxically, for the temporal authorities. As Voegelin notes:

“The strict observance of the rule and the centralizing constitution recommended the order to the papacy as the model of a hierarchi­cal spiritual organization with ultimate concentration of authority in the head of the church; it was precisely the type of organization that could serve as a pattern for the organizational independence of the Church herself from secular power. In a most unworldly cor­ner of the Christian community, in the midst of a diffuse field of re­gional feudal powers, the type of a well-integrated sovereign organization emerged that could be put to use in the organization of the Church as well as later of secular political authority.” (CW 20:69)

The Cistercians

Contrary to the Cluniac concern with its organization in the world and the relationship between the monastery and the world, the Anchorite reforms concerned the spiritual development of the individual person. But the Anchorite movement (c. 1000), with its emphasis upon the with­drawal from the world and contemplative life, had little influence be­yond itself. “Individual hermits . . . could exert an influence as models of extreme Christian unworldliness and thus become a regenerative force, but as soon as the anchoritic principles were transferred to a larger group a shading off into Benedictine cenobitism ensued” (CW, 20:70). The asceticism of the hermit is largely incompatible with life in society.

The importance of the Anchorite movement only emerges with the creation of the Cistercian orders (1098), which sought to combine “the organizational element of Cluny with the anchoritic element of asceti­cism on a new spiritual level” (CW 20:7.1). It is in the combination of the two that Voegelin sees the maximal differentiation of the spiritual consciousness. The Cistercian establishment took place largely as a re­form of the Cluniac system established some two hundred years previ­ously and as a result of the effective failure of the Anchorite movement:

“The achievements of Cluny were discipline, obedience, and or­ganization; the achievements of the anchorite foundations were poverty, asceticism, and the contemplative life in solitude. Two hundred years of success had brought to Cluny a wealth and external splendor that cast a shadow on the Christian spirituality that it was supposed to represent. The hermit movement, on the other hand, was inevitably asocial; the attempt at recapturing Christian primitive simplicity implied the withdrawal from effectiveness in Christian community life. “(CW 20:70-71)

It is in the amalgamation of the two approaches that a compromise is reached between the demands of Christian spirituality and the concern for community existence. Voegelin writes:

“Organizationally, the Charter of Charity provided for relative in­dependence of the monasteries . . . . The influence of the abbot of Citeaux was purely spiritual and could not extend to temporal ex­actions. The new foundations were, furthermore, not directly un­der Citeaux, but formed a hierarchy so that only the immediate foundations of Citeaux were under the spiritual supervision of the founding house, while the houses founded by the filial establish­ments were spiritually dependent on their own founding houses, etc.”

“This organizational feature reflected the basic principle of spir­itual father- and sonship. The element of spiritual fatherhood, of spiritual formation from man to man, defines the new level of Christianity . . . . The relationship resembles in some respects the Platonic eros, though in substance it is worlds apart from it: for the soul of the spiritual father does not create a new cosmion, but fa­ther and son are members of the pneumatic community in Christ.” (CW 20:71)

The construction of the pneumatic community of Christ is thus based on the spiritual equality of persons. As Voegelin reflects on the corre­spondence between Saint Bernard (d. 1153) and Eugenius III (d. 1151), the spiritual equality of the individual person is the focus. The pope’s power derives from his office, not from any quality of spiritual superi­ority. Bernard’s thesis, in Voegelin’s view, represents the spiritual matu­ration of the Christian West.

Western Self-Assertion: The Mendicants and the Crusades

Concomitant with the internal reforms of the monastic movement that led to the development of the spiritual self-consciousness of Saint Bernard, the “second strain in the Western process was the defense against Islam” (CW 20:72). Voegelin sees three stages:

“in the concentration of the physical and spiritual substance that gives its peculiar dynamic expansiveness to our Western civilization. As a first stage we may count the migration events up to the eighth century, by which time the area of the West was set off, as a new ethnic and civilizational unit, against the ancient Mediterranean. A second stage was marked by the migratory disturbances of the ninth and tenth centuries, ending in the check of the Slavic and Magyar advances in the east and the stemming of the Islamic tide in the south. The third stage was reached with the Crusades proper, in which the external relations of the West evolved from the semi-consciousness of natural growth and defensive reaction into a fully conscious attitude of self-assertion and offensive action, paralleling the internal process in which the logic of ideas asserting itself against the infidels is followed by peaceful missionary activity.” (CW 20:72)

The rise of the military and mendicant orders is a part of, and reflective of, this growing imperial self-consciousness on the part of the West. Perhaps even more important was the planting of the spiritual seeds of destruction to the unity of the distinctly Western civilization that was in­advertently brought on by the establishment of the mendicant orders.

The Mendicants as Instruments of Mass Christianization

Voegelin notes that the “activist order of the military type was supple­mented a century later by a movement for the spiritualization and intellectualization of self-conscious expansiveness” (CW 20:77) Once the “point was reached where the absolutism of the Christian drive was bent, in prin­ciple, into a consciousness of its relativity through contact with a world of superior force that followed its own laws” (CW 20:79), the danger be­gan to grow that such movements might turn inward.

Voegelin argues that the mendicant orders became “the great instrument of orthodox mass Christianization, positively as well as in the negative form of the papal Inquisition,” and in carrying out this function they provided a tremen­dous service–in their time and ours–in maintaining the learning of the past and in adding to it as “their schools became . . . the great centers of intellectual, theological, and philosophical activity” (CW 20:78).

Voegelin observes the problems that accrue to the mendicant spirit, especially as it became manifest in the Franciscans (1209). First, there is the understanding that developed concerning Saint Francis (d. 1226) “as the symbol of a new Christian dispensation.” Second, the:

“movement of Saint Francis and his poverelli is distinguished, in its original form, by the personality of the saint, but it does not differ otherwise in essence from similar movements of the time . . . .  It is typical . . . of the popular religious movements spreading over the towns of Europe in the great heretical undercurrent that broke finally through into the institutional sphere of the sacrum imperium in the Great Reformation.”

The “second form” of the Franciscan Order, “the conventual with permanent houses, and the Dominican Order may best be characterized . . . . as successful attempts at integrating the activist spirit of popular sectarianism into ac­ceptable, nonheretical institutions” (CW 20:77-78). But the spirit of pop­ular sectarianism could not be contained in the absence of an ongoing process of institutional reform in the church hierarchy.

In order for the symbol of Saint Francis as the symbol of a new Christian dispensation to come to the fore, the meaning of history had to be revealed–or rather, changed–in a way that Saint Augustine, the original expositor of Christian history, could not have expected. J. G. A. Pocock defines the problem to be confronted in terms of Saint Augustine’s construction of history. The “separation of salvation and society, re­demption and history, soul and body, sundered but did not abolish the problem of the eschatological present . . . . Within the saeculum, there re­mained the problem of assigning meaning to the social and historical events experienced by individuals throughout the remembered past and henceforth to the end of time.”¹⁰

 

Notes

1. See Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, esp. chap. 11, “The Two Emperors of Christendom,” 445-76; LaTourette, The Thousand Years of Uncertainty: 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., vol. 2 of A History of the Expansion of Christianity; and Dawson, The Making of Europe, 214-33.

2. Eusebius, Ecclesiastica Historia 4.26.7, cited by Voegelin at CW 19:149.

3. Dawson, Christianity and the New Age, 1-2.

4. Dawson, Religionand the Rise of Western Culture, 23.

5. Dawson, The Making of Europe, 218.

6. See Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, 62-84.

7. Halphen, Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, 148.

8. Dawson, “Church and State in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Essays, 86.

9. See Dawson, Religionand the Rise of Western Culture, 243-64.

10. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 35.

 

This excerpt is from Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Order (University of Missouri Press, 2007). This is the first of two parts. Part two is available here.