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Church and State in Christian History Author(s): David Knowles Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 4, Church and Politics (Oct., 1967), pp. 3-15 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/259819 Accessed: 28-09-2016 11:58 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Church and State in

Christian History David Knowles

The dialogue, which has often become a controversy and a conflict,

between church and state constitutes one of the great themes th run throughout European history. It is closely allied to, and is indeed often confused with those other recurring dialogues between liberty and authority, between the individual and the group, an between law and conscience. In the actual flux of events several

these debates may coincide. The possibility of conflict betwee

liberty and authority, between individual duty and the law, is as it were built into the fabric of human relations. It is the predicament

of Antigone, where the decree of the ruler conflicts with the claim

of personal love and human piety; the predicament of Thomas

More when a spiritual truth as he saw it conflicts with the will of king and the decision of parliament. But the dialogue of church and

state is less elemental than these others, and a discussion of t problems that are included under an index-entry as 'church an state' can become very confused unless the terms of the discussi are clearly understood. The area of the church and state battleground is closely limite Strictly speaking, we need the presence of two bodies of organiz

human beings; on the one hand the 'polity' or totality of a race or a

region organized to achieve a prosperous existence as a soci

civilized group, and on the other hand the 'church' or totality of religious body organized to direct and protect its members in their progress to a spiritual end. This, however, is not the only possib situation. As we shall see, it is possible, and indeed usual for bo church and state to include the same or nearly the same group people; it is also possible for an organized state to confront an imperfectly organized religious group, and for an organized church

to face a politically unorganized multitude. In these two la

situations the church-state contest exists only in a rudimentar 3

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

state. It is in the two other cases, when the church is within a state, or when church and state are coextensive

confrontation becomes acute.

Although the relationship, or opposition, of church an possible in any human society, and has certainly occurr

Christendom, we shall be concerned here only with the cou

Europe and the near East, and the United States of Ame

with the fortunes of the Christian church as it has existed life of Christ.

For almost three centuries after the public life of C

followers, while remaining a remarkably cohesive and unite lacked a complete 'overhead' organization. At first scattered

united only by their community of faith, they soon attain

individuality under elders and bishops. From the beginn

of belief and spirit was taken for granted, but unity of org

and the conception of the concerted policy and action was not fully attained for three centuries. There was

very powerful and articulated state in existence, the Roman

which occupied almost all the known world as it ap

Roman citizens. What was the attitude of Christians to this levi-

athan ? Their Master had allowed men to call him lord and king, but had declared emphatically that his kingdom was not of this

world.1 In a lapidary phrase of apparent clarity but in fact susceptible of varied interpretations 2 he had, to the ordinary hearer

of his words as recorded by the evangelist, made a distinction between the 'things of Caesar' and the 'things of God', and, in the context, allowed to the civil, de facto ruler the right to support in return for his protection, though the words also, and in-

deed primarily, asserted the unlimited claim of the supreme dominion of God. Christ also, both here and in his words

to Pilate,3 implied that human authority derived its validity from God. That his nearest followers so understood his

words is clear from the pronouncements of both Peter4 1 John xviii 36. My kingdom is not of this world.

2 Matthew xxii 2I. Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Cae and to God the things that are God's. 3 John xix I . Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it

given to thee from above. 4 I Peter ii 13. Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's whether it be to the king as supreme or to governors as sent by him. Ibid Fear God. Honour the king.

4

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

Paul,5 which to those who realize that Nero was the p

beneficiary of their exhortation to respect the governmen sometimes seemed surprising. The apostles were in fact en

a great principle, not discussing a problem of casuistry, and s as Christians were a small body submerged in a vast empire no

principle would have been viable. For almost three hundre

the Christian church was in the position- perhaps a happy pos of having, as a body, no political relationship to the state. Ind

Christians might come into conflict with officers of the s reason of their beliefs, or even of their refusal to allow to the

the head of the state the respect due to God alone, but the ch an organized body with a corporate policy had no political exis

With the conversion of Constantine there took place the radical change that has ever occurred in Christendom. N

did the emperor become a Christian, and impose resp

Christian persons, beliefs, and institutions, but he became a C

ian emperor. In other words, he regarded his office as giv the powers vis-a-vis the church that he had hitherto exer the quasi-charismatic manner that was an adaptation of a Roman conventions and Persian kinghood. Translated into

ian language, and fortified by the Christian conceptio

authority as derived from God, this made of the emperor a ch

instrument and representative of God, whose task it was peace to the church and bring all men to the service of Go the momentous transference was made, and the church be state church with the head of the state as its protector. As then stood there was no central, unifying person or machi

act as the representative or spokesman or agent of the church

emperor could therefore take charge of the church, s

councils, publish their decisions, found new sees and elect archs. He was not the 'supreme head' of the church, but he both theory and practice, outside and in a sense above the its God-given Protector. The emperor Constantine (who in fact was baptized only very end of his life), so far from being content with a po

toleration and laissez faire, translated into terms of Christian

logy the God-given position that acquaintance with Persi

5 Romans xiii I. Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for th power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.

5

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

appropriated for the Roman emperor. It was a sacra

priestly office. Dante, in a famous stanza, deplored the (apo

donation by Constantine of the rule of the West to the might with more reason have deplored the first beginni

involvement of church and state that was to be the cause of so much turmoil in the history of Europe.

The action of Constantine, besides giving immediate relief to the church, helped to polarize the tendencies that already existed towards organization and centralization. Freedom of travel and solemn debate in council, together with the realization of the effects

of overhead control by the emperor, tended to stiffen and unite the clergy of the empire, and the subsequent claims of the emperor

to a divine commission to rule the church provoked the bishops of Rome to a clearer and firmer assertion of the primacy of the spiritual power and the supremacy of the successor of the prince of

the apostles and his inheritance of the promises made by Christ to Peter. Thus now for the first time the problem of church and state

was being posed. This problem, however, did not reach an acute phase for almost two centuries. The fourth century, in which the Christian empire was established with only the brief interlude of Julian the Apostate,

was also the golden age of the Fathers of the church. The great Greek fathers, from Origen to John Chrysostom, had remarkably little to say on the theory of imperial control. Indeed, the first and

for long the only important utterance on the relationship of the church to secular power was that of Augustine. His City of God,

the work of fourteen years (413-426), intensely personal and 'western' like all Augustine's work, reflected no actual crisis or controversy of church and state, but was inspired by the catastrophe in world history of the first sack of Rome by invaders from without

the empire (4Io). The work originated in the peculiar Augustinian thought-world in which theology, philosophy, Scripture and, in this case, world history, were enlisted to illuminate the path to salvation of the individual Christian, seen as a member of the body

of the predestined. It had no relevance whatsoever to the existing situation in the eastern empire. Augustine, an African with a provincial's knowledge of Roman history, a self-taught theologian with a rhetorician's admiration for Neoplatonic philosophy, was writing of the war between good and evil which he saw within him-

self and others and projected into world history. He can have had 6

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

few readers at the time and no influence upon the out own age. The City of God, nevertheless, like other works such as Plato's Republic, had an immense influence in the

centuries later, and was to influence all Christian politi

throughout the middle ages. In its characteristic A

'existentialism' it has proved a despair, if not a delusio mentators ancient and modern, and the medieval interp

the City of God as the Christian commonwealth of monar

and people lay behind almost every attempt to the Christian government in the West between Charlema

Louis.

Meanwhile, on the level of political events, the claims of successive emperors to control ecclesiastical affairs were countered by arguments that received classic expression from Pope Gelasius I. Writing to the emperor Anastasius in 494 he declared that there were two forces that ruled the world, the sacred sovereignty of the

priesthood and the executive power of the prince. Both were Godgiven, and while the priestly authority was greater, inasmuch as it

guided even the emperor's soul as that of a son of the church, yet the priesthood obeyed the emperor in matters of public, secular interest. This utterance, important in so many ways, is of particular

interest in two respects. In the first place, the pope placed the emperor firmly within the church as one of its sons. As a Christian, he is within and beneath the spiritual authority in spiritual matters. But, secondly, the emperor receives his authority from God, indeed,

and not from the priesthood or pope. He serves and directs the temporal affairs of Christendom in his own right, though his sphere is less exalted than that of spiritual authority. This fine balance, to

which the papacy has returned in essence in the modern world, stands between the extremes of the Divine Right of kings and the concept of political authority as rising solely from the consent and

association of human beings.

Less than fifty years after the declaration of Gelasius the great emperor Justinian had his say. Empire and priesthood are indeed both divinely instituted, but the emperor as shepherd and ruler of the Christian society has as his principal care the purity of life and

doctrine of the priesthood. Among Byzantinists of today the term caesaropapism is in disfavour, and it is true that, again and again in different periods and circumstances, the bishops of Byzantium, 7

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

with or without the support of the patriarch, successfully an emperor's attempt to impose a doctrine or a line of co True it is also that the emperor, in theory at least, undertook no more than declare the doctrine which he and all orthodox

Christians held. But it is equally true that emperors, by edict and action, declared and exercised their God-given power of supreme government. They did not claim powers of infallible definition of doctrine, or of supremacy over the priesthood, for such claims would have had no meaning in the Byzantine context of their day,

but they undoubtedly exercised powers that trespassed upon spiritual authority in a way more direct than those claimed by Charlemagne or Louis xiv. To a modern historian, one of the strangest features of both eastern and western ecclesiastical thinking is the perseverance with

which both emperors and popes in East and West continued for almost a millennium to speak and theorize as if the church was conterminous with the world and, stranger still, that both eastern emperor and western pope should for centuries ignore the existence

of the other's sphere of authority, and speak as if each ruled over the whole of the church-world. Nevertheless, that was in fact the notional framework of all political thought between the age of Constantine and the fall of Constantinople; perhaps we may find a parallel in the identification by 'western' writers in recent centuries of 'European' civilization with civilization itself. From the seventh century onwards papal authority in the East and imperial authority in the West became gradually vestigial, and for our review the East may henceforth be disregarded. In the West the void of a supreme temporal ruler, on the levels of both politics

and thought, was filled in due time by the birth of the western empire under Charlemagne, but by 800 papal political thought

had developed since the days of Gelasius. The papacy, having

shaken off the emperor's control and having acquired temporal sovereignty, had also clarified its spiritual supremacy. Escaping from the empire it had escaped also from the Gelasian doctrine of the two powers. Established by accident as a temporal ruler in a West devoid of any political centre of unity, the pope had no rival, and the legend of the donation of the western half of the empire to the pope by Constantine strengthened the conviction of the papacy that it was paramount not only over the souls of Christendom, but

over their political life also. Monarchs therefore had only a 8

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

ministerial power under the papacy, and when the em 'renewed' in the West by the coronation of Charlema the emperor was a papal appointee with the task of def Roman church against all enemies. Charlemagne, howev see matters in this light. Brought up to a Frankish-Ger

ception of kingly power and indoctrinated by the theolog court inspired by Augustine's City of God, and borrowing

high imperial practice of the East, he saw himself as t

ordained governor of Christendom, charged with the duty

vising the religious life of his empire, including its do disciplinary well-being. Thus Charlemagne at the heig power acted in many ways as Justinian, save that he advice from experts on theology, and allowed a final r the pope as the ultimate authority for doctrine and di

Charlemagne's conception of imperial power did not s

first few years of his son's rule and was never repeated in Europe fell apart into regions with monarchs of their own

claim to universal rule on the part of a German empe

matter of words, not of reality. On the other hand, the a

papal supremacy in all religious matters became more emphatic. Nevertheless, the secular rulers in every co

obtained so close a control over ecclesiastical lands and off

the western church in general had never grown from a co

local or regional churches into a single closely-knit b papal headship. Thus the celebrated conflict of empire was not in origin precisely a struggle of church and s rather a movement for moral and disciplinary reform

manded as a sine qua non a far larger measure of episcopal

freedom and control. The direct enemy was the layman

church property and rights. But circumstances of every k

personal and historical, led to the contest becoming p the one hand to the Roman curia inspired by a pope o energy and confidence, and on the other hand to an em was the elected king of Germany elevated to the imper the papacy. In this confrontation the papacy was b victorious in the realm of theory, since all in the weste including kings and emperors, admitted the spiritual p of the papal office, while the emperor, now without an effective universal rule, had also to acknowledge that h 9

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

power came from the pope. The secular state was as yet i

ceivable, and no monarch in western Europe could con

world without a pope. The emperor's only answer was to a a rival antipope.

In contrast to the loosening of the imperial realm, the papac

asserting its authority over the whole church, by enforcin

cipline and protecting the clerical status, had made,

western Christendom, the concept of 'church' all but equiv that of 'clergy', thus replacing the older connotation of the of God. Concurrently, the claims of the papacy to monar supremacy as the representative, the vicar of Christ (tha God) on earth, were carried to their extreme point by a suc of eminent popes who were also expert jurists and thought rather than theological categories. Faced with the oppositio powerful emperor, a party of canonists and theologians pro the doctrine that of the two powers, priesthood and empi former was the superior and indeed so much the superior t empire was subordinated to it. By a mixture of juristic exp of spiritual power and an allegorical interpretation of a t

Scripture, it was argued that the pope had been entrusted with

two swords, temporal and spiritual, that he bestowed the the former upon the secular ruler, but only so that he might

the ends of the pope to whom he owed his position as em The doctrine of Gelasius upholding the two powers, great

less, was superseded by the monarchy of the spiritual power w

could use the temporal power as its minister.

This doctrine was translated into practice with increasing de

tion by Innocent III and his immediate successors, who re the culminating position that all powers and persons wer ordinated to the Vicar of Christ, from whom all other aut derived what strength they might possess. The church h become a body with all the qualities and claims of a state, a

unitary conception of power was strengthened by the axiom o

reigning Aristotelian thought that all agents could ultimat

reduced to a single supreme one, that is, in this context, the p

Yet in the hour of apparent victory, when Boniface vII

proclaiming the universal jurisdiction of the papacy, a frontal

was about to be delivered which began as an exhibition of politics and developed as a compound of Aristotelian natu

nominalist thought, and historical criticism. In the realm of p IO

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

Pierre de Flotte, an agent of the French king, Philip t recorded as saying to the pope: 'Your power is a matte (verbalis), ours is one of facts and deeds (realis).' In th ideas Aristotle, who had provided for St Thomas a ra for theology to build upon, showed to others that the s was a natural and necessary development of human so that visible, forceful authority sprang from the need beings and derived its sanction from them. Just as, on ordinary human life, everyday experience was all, and

matter of belief only, so in the realm of practical politics

was alone real. The ruler of the state could punish in t the pope or the bishop could only threaten what would the next. The papal position was built upon a false cons history; the church of the first century knew nothing church, so far as it is known and seen by all, is an activ on a level with other activities, and as such is a depar state.

Ideas such as these propounded by Marsilius of Padua an

William of Ockham, were in the air in western Europe towards th middle of the fourteenth century. On the one hand the papacy had been led on by thought and by events to subsume all human activity under the rule and guidance of the spiritual power. On the othe side, the growth of national consciousness and of administrative efficiency had given birth to a political competence wliich was encouraged by Greek philosophy. Monarchs and their minister saw dimly, without being able to express adequately, their right and responsibilities on the political level, and were prepared to challenge papal claims on that level and to recapture some of th ground lost in previous centuries. They were aided by the new historical or pseudo-historical appeal, made by Wyclif and Hus a well as by Marsilius and Ockham, which was used to explode th papal case by an exposition of the church's supposed primitive simplicity. In practice rulers everywhere erected practical barrier against ecclesiastical pretensions: in England the statutes agains

papal provisions and appeals to Rome; in France the refusal t accept any papal powers of control claimed by the 'new' post Gratian (c. 1140), canon law and decretals; the assertion of the

imperial electors to act without papal authority. It was a period o momentous change, when the secular state was on the point of being born. The contest was no longer one between priesthood an II

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

empire for the liberty and spiritual pre-eminence of th but between a church immersed in political action and t of the nascent, secular, modern state which still acknow supremacy of the papacy in spiritual matters.

The last century of the middle ages saw a crisis of authority

church and state. In the church the challenge to the extr

claim by the realism of the French monarchy had been foll

the new thought of Marsilius, and by the Great Schism conciliar epoch. The papacy, indeed, had not explicitly r but its fortunes for the next century prevented any adv when the monarchical papal rule was restored the new p the popes as actors in the power-politics of Italy and Eu little scope for spiritual campaigns. On the other hand,

ruptcy of philosophy and scholastic theology in the fifteenth

added to other causes to give the rulers of the nations France, and England - an authority which their predece not enjoyed. They became absolute not only in fact, bu theory. The king was regarded as the sole authority, t

sentative of God, to whom subjects owed a quasi-r

obedience. This was not a medieval conception, but a ch age, born of the union in time of the new national state 'new way' in thought and feeling, which eliminated met and natural religion. It was fed, as a quasi-religious deformation of the Christian teaching that all authori from God, and later, when the theory of the Divine R established, by the model of the kingdom of Israel, bro prominence by the Reformers of the second and third

tion.

With the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century the p

of church-state relationship became more complex. The the lands that remained in communion with Rome, a pr

of the medieval situation of a Catholic monarch goi

extremes of independence as in Spain and in the Gallic

of Louis xiv and the Austria of Maria Theresa and J

There was the brief caesaropapism of Henry vIII in Eng the longer phase of the Divine Right of kings. There w continental Reformed churches, the regime of Calvin and the attempts to reproduce it in the circles of export ism. There was the ambivalent attitude of Luther towards the 12

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

godly prince and others, and the settlement of religion (cujus regio illius religio). In many countries, especially the issue of toleration became of more practical impor that of the relationship of church and state. Finally, th constitution of the United States which, in its combi political and civil liberty with an explicit declaration of positive indifference to all religious beliefs and group proved for almost two centuries the most successful answer to the problem of church and state, and has, at removes, been taken up into the declaration of religiou

the Second Vatican Council.

Indeed, from the French Revolution to the present day an entirely

new situation has developed. The 'state', whether liberal, democratic, socialist, fascist, or communist, has become increasingly non-religious, if not positively anti-religious. For the first time since the age of the conversion of Europe to Christianity, many of the countries of the old and new worlds have ceased in large part to provide a Christian climate or background in public life. At the same time the impact of the state on the life and actions of the citizen, whether the state be welfare, socialist, or communist, has become more direct and pervasive. In the extreme case of the totalitarian state, the interests and the convictions of the individual

have no sure place, and from the point of view of the government he is expendable for the good of the commonwealth, present or future. Such a state, so far from protecting or supporting the church, or at least admitting a free church within its borders, looks askance at all churches as bodies demanding private loyalties and initiating group action against or at least apart from the state or party in power, or as defending an outmoded way of life. Even in the democratic states a humanistic, not to say a materialistic climate challenges the religious and social standards and mores of traditional Christendom. While the churches no longer, save in a very few countries, look to the state for privilege, patronage, or even protection, it is clear that any institution claiming to stand by transcendental, 'supernatural' truths and values is unable to admit the right of either an individual in authority or the state to demand actions contrary to religious convictions or to forbid the free exercise of worship or the liberty of personal devotion to religious ideals. As is only too well known, religious persecution, sometimes I3

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

disguised under political reasons, is far from uncomm twentieth century, but the clashes most frequently occ

marginal territory that must always exist between purely r and purely secular interests. Education is a principal field o

for all agree upon its unique importance in moulding b

while in the modern world there is general agreement that

has at least a residual right and duty to provide educati

The naive 'liberal' belief of the nineteenth century, that an

tion can be purely neutral in religion and ethics, or that be left free to choose a religion on attaining adolescence, a conception of the rationality and docility and general

of opinion among human beings which experience h

endorsed, least of all our own in this age. Similarly, the dem

a purely materialistic or totalitarian state will alway resistance from those with independent standards

Another field of dispute is the segregation or depression of

or political group. In many ways the conditions of the world are similar to those of the Christian church in th

empire, and it is possible that the wheel will come full c

the Christian religion will form a body 'within' the state, b

sense co-extensive with it or an aspect or department of years ago, Pope Leo xIII, in a programmatic letter,6 ass claim of the church as a 'perfect' organism on a par with th state; each had its sphere of dominance in human life, its own rights within that sphere. It was a declaration i terms of the position of Gelasius I. It is interesting to se Roman Catholic Church of today, in the pronouncemen Second Vatican Council, while not explicitly renouncing look, lays greater stress on the church as a family of th

of God united throughout the world under bishops

rather than as a quasi-political organization. But when all is said and done the conflict of church a

familiar in history and in universal experience, wil

endemic in the world of human beings. It is in the ultim the conflict between the two cities of Augustine's tho in our own century as in Augustine's there is and will r unavoidable and yet lamentable confusion in practice be visible and the invisible, between the church which is places and in all respects the city of God, the congregation 6 The encyclical Immortale Dei of I November I885. 14

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CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

true children, and the state which must always to reli have that ambivalent character as an agent and reflect authority and yet at the same time as a potential en City of God.

I5

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