This is the first volume of a projected three that will, together, set the record straight on medieval political thought and demonstrate its relevance to the long tradition of Western political theorizing. Oakley's central argument is simple and elegant. Its demonstration is sophisticated and challenging. That is, although gracefully written and tightly argued, the book must be read carefully and the book challenges the conventional wisdom.
Oakley's allusive title comes from Hobbes who struck out against everything ancient and primitive that, in his acidulous view, the Roman Church had foisted on people for centuries. For Oakley, Christianity—Roman to be sure, but that is not the central point in this volume—poured new wine into those old bottles. In later volumes in the series, those bottles will be broken.
The core of Oakley's arguments turns around what he takes to be a misunderstanding, perhaps even a deliberate one: democratic Athens and republican Rome are usually taken as the starting points for a proper understanding of modern Western political thought. On the contrary, Oakley argues, these were brief episodes. Kingship is the political common sense of the entire world for millennia. Moreover, kingship is, albeit in differing ways over time, sacred. The idea that modern politics leave religion aside to encompass only what is “truly” political distorts and impoverishes both politics and the way we discuss the subject.
Under the archaic mode of rulership, people conceived of nature as alive; they saw no barrier between nature, society, and man. Rulers might be divine or special agents of the divine. In the Hellenistic world, these kinds of ideas were developed and disseminated. Rulers were called shepherd, savior, benefactor, mediator, god manifest, or god incarnate. Greeks and Romans tended to break rulership into its constituent parts, but they retained the religious dimensions. With the Roman imperial regime, leadership was again divinized. The spread of the imperial cult shows that there was no sharp demarcation between the political and the religious. The eruption of biblical religion into Constantine's world destabilized the sacral monarchy he had inherited.
The Hebrews introduced new ideas. For them there could be no consubstantiality between the deity and the created order. The world was disenchanted. Yet Yahweh gave his people a king at a certain point and thereafter there were fierce controversies over kingship, which inflected discussions at the time of Christ. The “Kingdom of God” appears more than 140 times in the New Testament: Was it present or future? What was it? The desacralizing process was complicated by some of Jesus' own teachings and by the Pauline conviction that the earthly order possessed certain legitimacy because it was of divine institution (so Romans 13:1–7). Philo Judaeus and the early Alexandrian fathers introduced Hellenistic terminology in their reflections of God, and on Christ. By the time when Eusebius assigned a providential role to the Roman Empire there had emerged a kind of synthesis of both thought and language.
Eusebian ideas formed the common sense of his and the following era, but one should not set them off too sharply against an Augustinian world order. In some of the most sensitive pages of his book, Oakley differentiates between the early and the mature Augustine, and among various strands in Augustine's thought. Medieval writers took their prompt from Augustine's writings against the Donatists. For Augustine, the state was a necessary evil whose coercive force could be useful in imposing unity. Augustine's writings against the Pelagians were also influential in so far as they argued for certain cooperation with the workings of divine grace. In addition to showing how Augustine's thought developed, Oakley also demonstrates how Augustine was read by later generations. In spite of himself, then, Augustine was understood to have re-spiritualized politics, to have absorbed the natural order into the supernatural, and to have interpreted rulership as a divinely ordained ministry.
The early medieval centuries experienced an artful blending of Germanic and Celtic traditions—to which Oakley devotes a supremely sensible discussion, the transformation of the church into a thickly articulated institutional structure, and the biblical and patristic heritages. Gradually church and state became coterminous in something like Eusebian terms. In the empire (after 800 but especially under the Ottonians) the installation of an emperor was seen as a sacramental act and the ruler was assimilated to the clergy. By 1100, in writings such as those of the Norman Anonymous, the ruler became a Christocentric figure, the leader of a baptized community in which there were really no lay people. The king became a “national Melchizedek” in the felicitous formulation of George Williams.
Apart from one skeptical strain in the thought of the mature Augustine, early medieval political thought displays a complex Christian accommodation with the archaic mode of royal sacrality. Those centuries show “the extraordinary tenacity of the dominion that archaic notions of royal sacrality clearly exercised over the late antique and early medieval imagination” (174). Two factors, however, worked to weaken the progressive and optimistic Eusebian tradition: the nobility and the crystallization of the clerical order. Mutual and reciprocal bonds shaped polities that were by no means popular but that were not divine either. Feudalism, treated with sensitivity and commonsense, plays a key role in Oakley's discussion. Several sets of texts—Pseudo-Dionysius, the Symmachan Forgeries, the Donation of Constantine, and Pseudo-Isidore—along with the ecclesiological formulations of Nicholas I contributed to a new sense of the clergy's place in the world and set the stage for the Gregorian era. One eagerly awaits the treatment of that period in volume 2.
