When Enlightenment philosophes quipped that they would not rest until the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest, they expressed more than just an incandescent rage against the governmental and ecclesiastical structures of the ancien régime. They voiced the idea of a secular politics disentangled from the influence of the Church, which had begun in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the great Contract theorists, such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Lock, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
As Francis Oakley argues in his three-volume work on the development of medieval political thought, this tells only a part of the story in the trajectory of Western political theory. While the shift from the religious to the secular in political theory dates from the late sixteenth century, Oakley challenges the prevailing consensus that the Middle Ages represented an aberration in the history of Western political theory. Instead of seeing the “ebb and flow of ideas” (x) as a secular–religious–secular one, we must see it as a religious–religious–secular process.
Oakley has successfully undertaken an ambitious task. The second volume continues the thesis laid out in the first volume, Empty Bottles of Gentilism, that the supposed secular ruling institutions of Greece and Rome were heavily imbued with the sacred. Foucault broached this idea in his 1979 Tanner Lecture by noting that in ancient societies considered their kings as pastors or shepherds of their people and that Christianity would co-opt this idea.
Having demonstrated the sacral nature of pre-Christian ideas of rulership, Oakley undertakes to demonstrate how these ideas were then reshaped during the Middle Ages. Beginning around the middle of the eleventh century there is a change in the relationship between the regnum of the nascent European monarchies and the sacerdotium of the monarchial papacy. Oakley cited the relationship between the emperor Henry III and his creature Pope Leo IX as the culmination of the religious character of kingship and its accepted control over ecclesiastical offices. However, this relationship changed in 1076 as the reformist pope, Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV came to open conflict during the Investiture Controversy. The question over the investiture of bishops was a side issue to larger developments of the eleventh century. While the idea of priest—kings and emperor—pontiffs had been, at least, in theory regarded as the proper order of European political society, it was due to the energies unleashed during the Cluniac reform movement that began to upset this balance.
For the proponents of papal monarchy, especially for Gregory VII and Innocent III, what was at stake was more than the appointment of bishops, but rather who had claim to be the rightful custodians of “universal leadership in [a] unitary Christian society” (9). One of the unintended consequences of this aggressive campaign of papal authority over the secular powers was that it began the process by which kingship was deanchored from its theological moorings. The end result was in less than 200 years after the ascendency of the papacy, Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam, largely a reiteration of boilerplate claims of papal authority, would serve as the catalyst for Philip IV of France to send his troops to arrest the pope who would die days after this humiliation.
However for Oakley, even as the papacy and European monarchies began their long divergence they both were still marked by a continuity to past theories of sacral kingship popular in Greco-Roman societies; the Capetians and Hapsburgs did not need a Bossuet to tell them they were gods on earth or were the beneficiaries of divine sanction. Only now monarchs were free to claim other sources for the authority independent from the papacy which had made good on that claim since the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. This continuity also appeared in an unlikely institution, that of the papacy itself as popes from Gregory VII onward began to look more like priest—kings than the successors of Peter. This is central to Oakley's main argument that the Middle Ages were not an aberration in the history of political theory, but rather the heir to a rich history of religiously informed political theory which elevated the ruler and legitimized his rule.
In this volume, Oakley has written a well researched and documented reassessment of the development of Western political thought. His lucid prose allows the reader to grasp the complexities and richness of medieval political theory. Oakley is to be commended for such a contribution to the historiography and I am certainly looking forward to the publication of the third volume.
