Book Review: Before Church and State

Jones, Andrew Willard. Before Church and State: A Study of the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Acaemic, 2017. $39.95

In Andrew Willard Jones’s book Before Church and State: A Study of the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, Jones seeks to create space for a new analysis of the political order of the Catholic middle ages by dismantling certain eisegetical interpretations of it. What Jones offers in this book is not a new set of facts which he has uncovered, but rather a narrative that seeks to understand the middle ages on its own terms, as a “complete act,” without importing later, modern concepts. 

Before Church and State is divided into four parts. Part One “The Business of Peace and the Faith,” works to prove that modern concepts of competition between the religious and the secular, between church and state, are inadequate for understanding the middle ages on their own terms. Beginning with Lateran III in 1179 and tracing the notion of the “Business” up to and through the reign of St. Louis IX, Jones demonstrates that the pursuit of social peace was not conceived of as a “secular” goal, nor was the preservation of the Faith conceived of as a merely “religious” goal. Rather, St. Louis’s kingdom was thought of as a “sacramental” reality. As Jones puts it, “the spiritual power was a power precisely insomuch as it operated in the secular world, and the secular power was a power precisely insomuch as it worked toward a spiritual end” (145).  In other words, medieval mind didn’t divide the world into “secular” and “religious” spheres in the way that the modern mind tends to. Everything had to do with both. 

Part Two, “Counsel and Aid,” focuses on sovereignty in 13th century France. Jones makes the claim that sovereignty and the state as we conceive of them in the modern world, didn’t exist in St. Louis’s kingdom. The kingdom of France under St. Louis was instead founded upon the idea that peace is the “natural state” of humankind rather than violence as later thinkers such as Hobbes would claim. Jones does the difficult work of proving, through a rigorous analysis of the records of St. Louis’s parlement, that the power to uphold the peace was not monopolized by anyone, not even the king. In such a stateless society, much like in a cheesy children’s cartoon, the only way to have effective large-scale action was through the power of friendship - the networks of consilium et auxilium. Interestingly, the idea that medieval Catholic society was stateless and built around friendship aligns with Dorothy Day’s interpretation of Catholic Social Teaching as being somewhat aligned with the traditional anarchist position that the state is an inherently violent institution.

The question of Papal authority in the middle ages is critical to discussions about the relationship between temporal and spiritual power and it forms the focus of Part three, “The Fullness of Papal Power.” The core of  Jones’s argument about Papal power is that it was “not all-encompassing, to be sure, but always present - the necessary spiritual complement to the secular power of the king” (313). This argument dovetails with the argument presented in Part one, the “secular” and “religious” aspects of life were not seen as being divorced but part of an integrated whole. The authority of the pope and his legates wasn’t in conflict with the authority of the king but rather they were working in tandem on behalf of the “business of peace and the faith.” Together, especially when discussing Louis IX and Clement IV, the king and the pope formed a single network of consilium et auxilium. It’s in this section of the book that the previous two threads come together and the way in which the principles previously outlined by Jones operated can be clearly seen. 

Part four is by far the shortest section. In it, Jones attempts to connect the sacramental framework of 13th century France with the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. This, Jones believes, can serve as an alternative theoretical understanding to the common modern understanding of the medieval era. The political order of St. Louis’s kingdom, of which Thomas Aquinas was part, makes sense in light of Thomas’s understanding of law and grace. The purpose of human law to Aquinas is to instantiate the natural and divine law in particular human circumstances. The “two swords” of the spiritual and temporal powers sought to do this in tandem, by standing as a bulwark against the violence of sin and calling sinners back to repentance, thus restoring the primordial peace. 

Dr. Jone’s vision of the middle ages has potentially radical implications for Catholic political theory, a fact that he is well aware of. If the kingdom of the only sainted monarch of France was a stateless society, a society built around networks of counsel and aid rather than around the fear of violence, and a society that saw the secular and the sacred as an integrated whole, then isn’t it likely that we should desire to emulate at least some of those aspects? As the present political order grows old, it will be necessary for Catholics to continue building new communities where the liturgical life can be lived in its fullness and from where we can continue to evangelize the world. Those communities will need a clear vision of what form they should take beyond the present liberal framework and Before Church and State does the hard work of showing how that worked in history in the sacramental kingdom of St. Louis IX.