The founding text of medieval political thought was Augustine of Hippo’s On the City of God Against the Pagans, written to refute the charge that abandoning the old gods in favor of Christianity was responsible for the sack of Rome in 410. According to Augustine, no human being dominated any other in the state of innocence described in Genesis. The pervasive fact of such domination in later times is due to Adam’s original sin ofrebellion against the rightful dominance of God. On this account all politics is unnatural, for the essence of earthly empires, kingdoms, cities, and even families is the control of some by others. Relationships of dominance and subjection are a punishment but also a partial remedy for loving self more than God, since uncontrolled self-will would produce a world even worse than the one in which we find ourselves. Politics is a matter of damage control. Genuine happiness, including freedom from our own drive for domination, can come only by God’s grace, through faith in Christ.
From this position, two approaches to political action were taken, both involving the church. The more familiar one, sometimes referred to as political Augustinism, was to promote the power and authority of the church, provider of the means of grace. The other approach was to minimize the church’s involvement in secular politics, relying on its ministry to individuals for whatever amelioration of civic life might be possible. Bernard of Clairvaux exemplifies both approaches and the tension between them by endorsing the principle that earthly powers should act at the pope’s nod (nutum), while entreating the pope to avoid immersion in secular business.
Other approaches to politics, with less or in some cases no discernible emphasis on human corruption, were taken mainly in the later Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas argued for the naturalness of politics and the possibility of nonexploitative forms of authority aimed at a genuine, albeit not ultimate, this-worldly happiness. Marsilius of Padua saw natural human desire for a ‘‘sufficient’’ life as the proper motive of political association and regarded contemporary papal exercise of power as an unwholesome disturbance of natural processes. For Marsilius, blessedness in the next life was indeed to be had only by following Christian teaching, but it was crucial that the clergy have no coercive power to enforce their teaching.
World History
