Eric Gregory offers this wise counsel: “Words do not work the same way in normative theorizing as they do in historical inquiry. It is enough that ‘Donatist,’ ‘Pelagian,’ and “Manichean’ exist as live options in moral, political, and religious discourse - . . . . Continue Reading »
Figgis again: “when all reservations have been made, there can be little doubt that it is right to treat the growth of political ideas, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a branch of ecclesiastical history. With a few exceptions religion or the interests of some religious body . . . . Continue Reading »
Figgis has his Catholic prejudices, but he’s on to something in this summary of the political ecclesiology of Wyclif, forerunner of teh Reformation: “Scholastic in form, Wyclif’s writings are modern in spirit. His de Officio regis is the absolute assertion of the Divine Right of . . . . Continue Reading »
Marx looked forward to the withering of the state. He was centuries late. Figgis says it already happened in the middle ages: “As Professor Maitland pointed out, under feudalism there is no public law; all rights are private, including those of the king. It is this absence of a theory of the . . . . Continue Reading »
JN Figgis ( Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius ) writes, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, but the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church. The latter took over . . . . Continue Reading »
Dumont argues that the Gelasian “two powers” theory is often misread. The theory is not a simple hierarchy, the state subordinated to the church, but a ” hierarchical complementarity .” Priests are indeed superior to kings, but they are “subordinate to the king in . . . . Continue Reading »
Like many scholars, Louis Dumont ( Essays on Individualism ) traces the development of modern conceptions of social order, individualism, and politics to Ockham: Ockham denied that general terms have any reality: “Ockham goes so far in his polemics against the Pope as to deny that there is . . . . Continue Reading »
“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks . . . . Continue Reading »
And in the “What the hell?” category: Eduardo Galeano writes in Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent : “In the middle of the nineteenth century the filibusterer William Walker, operating on behalf of bankers Morgan and Garrison, invaded Central . . . . Continue Reading »
Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a seminal book in the theological development of Emmanuel Katongole. As he recounts it in his recent The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa (Eedmans Ekklesia) , . . . . Continue Reading »
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