Before Church and State:
A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX
by andrew willard jones
emmaus academic, 510 pages, $39.95
I
f there is a specter haunting the imaginations of Christians in the public square today, perhaps it is the specter of the premodern integration of church and state. As the postwar liberal consensus erodes, a wider range of approaches to Christian engagement in political and social life becomes imaginable. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has observed that some young Christians, disillusioned with liberal politics, are drawn to “a revived Catholic integralism.” For such young integralists, Before Church and State, a book by Andrew Willard Jones, has been the hot beach read of the summer, and—unusually for an academic monograph—a rich source of memes on Twitter. (Millennials will be millennials.) For those drawn toward integralism, Jones’s scholarship is positively exciting.
Jones, a historian at Franciscan University in Steubenville, never uses the word “integralism,” but the word nonetheless captures the society that he describes in thirteenth-century France. Aided by a philosophical and theological sophistication that is unusual for his profession, Jones challenges our most basic assumptions as moderns. He does, however, speak of “an integral vision which included all of social reality.” In this integral vision, “church” and “state” did not exist as separate institutions; rather, spiritual and temporal authority cooperated together within a single social whole for the establishment of an earthly peace, ordered to eternal salvation. Nor was there an “economy,” in the modern sense of a relatively autonomous system based on private property and contract. Rather, the use of material goods was thoroughly integrated into the peace. “State,” “church,” and “economy” were not merely underdeveloped, waiting to be discovered. They did not exist, and would have to be invented. The vision of social peace gave way to an idea of social life as a violent, primordial struggle for power, and of sovereignty as limiting that violence by monopolizing it.