Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

by William T. Cavanaugh

Why use the language of salvation when discussing the state? I don't believe that the state can be understood without theology. Carl Schmitt was right to say that all modern concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts if by "secularized" one means "covert." The story of the death of the sovereign God and his rebirth in the sovereign state is not a story of the progressive stripping of the sacred from some secular remainder. It is instead the transfer of care for the holy from church to state. We not only expect the state to provide technical solutions to market imbalances. In a deeper sense, we want the state to absorb the risk involved in living a mortal human life. We want the state to defer the consequences of our actions to some undefined future. In other words, we want the state to help us cheat death.

I am wary of some American bishops' recent forays into electoral politics, often implying support for Republican Party candidates based on mostly empty promises to support the bishops' legislative agenda. Not only are such gambits often counterproductive - the church's own recent scandals have left the bishops with little credibility among the population at large - but they tend to assume that the only solution to any given cultural problem is state enforcement. The church must be wary of nostalgia for Constantinianism. A Christian should feel politically homeless in the current context, and should not regard the dreary choice between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, as the sum total of our political witness.

I will argue that the above assumptions of fact are untenable in the face of the evidence. I will examine these three assumptions in order. First, unless one equivocates on the meaning of "state," the state is not natural, but a rather recent and artificial innovation in human political order. Second, the state gives rise to society, and not vice versa. Third, the state is not one limited part of society, but has in fact expanded and become fused with society.

The state emerged in Europe amidst the late Renaissance and Reformation. As Bruce Porter puts it, "The state as we know it is a relatively new invention, originating in Europe between 1450 and 1650."6 In this more precise sense, the state is a political form based on the distinctly modern concept of sovereignty, which maybe defined as "supreme authority within a territory." As formulated by Bodin, Hobbes, and other lesser figures of the early modern period, the state claims legitimate authority - as opposed to mere coercion - a supreme authority that no lesser authorities within a recognized set of geographical borders may legitimately oppose. Sovereignty is a departure from earlier forms of governance, in which people's political loyalties were based not necessarily on territoriality but on feudal ties, kinship, and religious or tribal affiliation.'

If a stranger committed a crime on someone else's land, it would be necessary to find out to whom he or she owed loyalty in order to know what law applied.

As is often the case in the history of language, large etymological shifts followed profound changes in social organization. New vocabulary was needed to describe a radically new situation. To treat the modern state as simply a variation in the history of societies is to ignore the fact that there were no such things as societies in the sense of clearly bounded and unitary systems of interaction until the birth of the modern state. As Anthony Giddens says, traditional social systems are composed not of one society but of many "societies"; the modern unitary society that originated in Europe is highly exceptional.'

In his On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Strayer narrates the gradual accretion of power to royal courts beginning in the twelfth century. The first permanent functionaries were estate managers hired to centralize, regularize, and keep account of the extraction of revenues from the lands and populations subject to the king." Next to develop were royal courts of law. Courts of law were originally simply royal courts, that is, the "great men" who surrounded the king and made up his household. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were increasingly called upon to settle disputes, frequently by knights and lesser landholders asking for protection against the wealthier nobles. The royal courts that developed were thus important to the king's struggle for power with the nobility. In general, the law became the principal tool of centralization and bureaucratization. By the fourteenth century, the governing apparatuses surrounding the king had "acquired their power largely by developing their judicial institutions and by protecting the property rights of the possessing classes" (p. 61). By the fourteenth century, war had made royal courts increasingly reliant on taxation, which in turn required inviting representatives of the propertied classes to give their consent in occasional nonvoting assemblies. Such assemblies generally succeeded in shifting the tax burden more heavily onto the unrepresented classes (pp. 58-68).

A king of France might send letters on the same day to the count of Flanders, who was definitely his vassal but a very independent and unruly one, to the count of Luxemburg, who was a prince of the Empire but who held a money-fief (a regular, annual pension) of the king of France, and to the king of Sicily, who was certainly ruler of a sovereign state but was also a prince of the French royal house. In such a situation one could hardly distinguish between internal and external affairs. (p. 83)

The agent of this change is war. Strayer says that the increased intensity of war in the fourteenth century and following was necessary to distinguish inside and outside, and he regards the process of state-building after Boo as inevitable (pp. 57-58). However, Charles Tilly argues against Strayer that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the rise of the state. In 130o, Tilly says, there were still five possible outcomes open: (I) the form of national state which actually emerged; (2) a political federation or empire controlled, if only loosely, from a single center; (3) a theocratic federation - a commonwealth - held together by the structure of the Catholic Church; (4) an intensive trading network without large-scale, central political organization; (5) the persistence of the "feudal" structure which prevailed in the thirteenth century.16 Tilly also faults Strayer for too little emphasis on the coercive aspects of state-building (p. 43). Tilly's larger contention is that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the rise of the state; it triumphed in Europe because of its superior ability to extract resources from the local population.

Building a state depended on the ability of state-making elites to make war, and the ability to make war in turn depended on the ability to extract resources from the population, which in turn depended on an effective state bureaucracy to secure those resources from a recalcitrant population. As Tilly puts it, "War made the state, and the state made war" (p. 42).

The element of popular resistance contradicts the modernizing narrative that sees in the growth of the state the progressive increase of political rights. In the crucial period of state formation, the state either absorbed rights previously resident in other bodies (guilds, manors, provinces, estates) or eliminated them altogether, as in the enclosure of common lands (Tilly, pp. 37-38). Close analyses of the history of taxation,18 policing,19 and food supply20 indicate that popular resistance to state-building was deep, broadly based, frequent, and violent. In England alone, the crown put down by force popular rebellions in 1489, 1497, 1536, 1547, 1549, and 1553, all responses to the centralizing efforts of the Tudors.

The conceptual leap that accompanies the advent of the state in the sixteenth century is the invention of sovereignty, a doctrine that asserts the incontestable right of the central power to make and enforce law for those people who fall within recognized territorial borders. Giddens contrasts borders with traditional frontiers, peripheral and poorly marked or poorly guarded regions in which the power of the center is diffuse. In premodern Europe, authority was often marked by personal loyalties owed in complexly layered communal contexts. In the state, by contrast, borders mark out a unitary space in which the individual is subject directly to the center, which has the right to enforce its will through a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence within those borders.31

What takes place in the modern era- not complete in some places until the late nineteenth a reconfiguration of space that is much more profound than the creation of an expanded common space through the gathering up and coordination of formerly scattered elements into one. What happens is a shift from "complex space" -varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority - to a "simple space," characterized by a duality of individual and state.33

There is an enfeebling of local common spaces by the power of the center and a simultaneous parochialization of the imagination of Christendom into that of the sovereign state. To say that the state "creates" society is not to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed before the state. Rather, the state "creates" society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.