Types of Bank Guarantee

Church and State in Christian History
Author(s): David Knowles

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 4, Church and Politics (Oct., 1967),
pp. 3-15
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/259819
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Church and State in
Christian History
David Knowles
The dialogue, which has often become a controversy and a conflict,

between church and state constitutes one of the great themes th
run throughout European history. It is closely allied to, and is
indeed often confused with those other recurring dialogues between
liberty and authority, between the individual and the group, an
between law and conscience. In the actual flux of events several
these debates may coincide. The possibility of conflict betwee
liberty and authority, between individual duty and the law, is as it
were built into the fabric of human relations. It is the predicament
of Antigone, where the decree of the ruler conflicts with the claim
of personal love and human piety; the predicament of Thomas
More when a spiritual truth as he saw it conflicts with the will of
king and the decision of parliament. But the dialogue of church and
state is less elemental than these others, and a discussion of t
problems that are included under an index-entry as 'church an
state' can become very confused unless the terms of the discussi
are clearly understood.
The area of the church and state battleground is closely limite
Strictly speaking, we need the presence of two bodies of organiz
human beings; on the one hand the 'polity' or totality of a race or a
region organized to achieve a prosperous existence as a soci
civilized group, and on the other hand the 'church' or totality of
religious body organized to direct and protect its members in their
progress to a spiritual end. This, however, is not the only possib
situation. As we shall see, it is possible, and indeed usual for bo
church and state to include the same or nearly the same group
people; it is also possible for an organized state to confront an
imperfectly organized religious group, and for an organized church
to face a politically unorganized multitude. In these two la
situations the church-state contest exists only in a rudimentar
3
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
state. It is in the two other cases, when the church is

within a state, or when church and state are coextensive
confrontation becomes acute.
Although the relationship, or opposition, of church an
possible in any human society, and has certainly occurr
Christendom, we shall be concerned here only with the cou
Europe and the near East, and the United States of Ame
with the fortunes of the Christian church as it has existed
life of Christ.
For almost three centuries after the public life of C
followers, while remaining a remarkably cohesive and unite
lacked a complete 'overhead' organization. At first scattered
united only by their community of faith, they soon attain
individuality under elders and bishops. From the beginn
of belief and spirit was taken for granted, but unity of org
and the conception of the concerted policy and action
was not fully attained for three centuries. There was
very powerful and articulated state in existence, the Roman
which occupied almost all the known world as it ap
Roman citizens. What was the attitude of Christians to this levi-
athan ? Their Master had allowed men to call him lord and king,
but had declared emphatically that his kingdom was not of this
world.1 In a lapidary phrase of apparent clarity but in fact
susceptible of varied interpretations 2 he had, to the ordinary hearer
of his words as recorded by the evangelist, made a distinction
between the 'things of Caesar' and the 'things of God', and, in
the context, allowed to the civil, de facto ruler the right to sup-
port in return for his protection, though the words also, and in-
deed primarily, asserted the unlimited claim of the supreme
dominion of God. Christ also, both here and in his words
to Pilate,3 implied that human authority derived its validity
from God. That his nearest followers so understood his
words is clear from the pronouncements of both Peter4
1 John xviii 36. My kingdom is not of this world.

2 Matthew xxii 2I. Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Cae
and to God the things that are God's.
3 John xix I . Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it
given to thee from above.
4 I Peter ii 13. Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's
whether it be to the king as supreme or to governors as sent by him. Ibid
Fear God. Honour the king.
CHURCH AND STATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY
Paul,5 which to those who realize that Nero was the p

beneficiary of their exhortation to respect the governmen
sometimes seemed surprising. The apostles were in fact en
a great principle, not discussing a problem of casuistry, and s
as Christians were a small body submerged in a vast empire no
principle would have been viable. For almost three hundre
the Christian church was in the position- perhaps a happy pos
of having, as a body, no political relationship to the state. Ind
Christians might come into conflict with officers of the s
reason of their beliefs, or even of their refusal to allow to the
the head of the state the respect due to God alone, but the ch
an organized body with a corporate policy had no political exis
With the conversion of Constantine there took place the

radical change that has ever occurred in Christendom. N
did the emperor become a Christian, and impose resp
Christian persons, beliefs, and institutions, but he became a C
ian emperor. In other words, he regarded his office as giv
the powers vis-a-vis the church that he had hitherto exer
the quasi-charismatic manner that was an adaptation of a
Roman conventions and Persian kinghood. Translated into
ian language, and fortified by the Christian conceptio
authority as derived from God, this made of the emperor a ch
instrument and representative of God, whose task it was
peace to the church and bring all men to the service of Go
the momentous transference was made, and the church be
state church with the head of the state as its protector. As
then stood there was no central, unifying person or machi
act as the representative or spokesman or agent of the church
emperor could therefore take charge of the church, s
councils, publish their decisions, found new sees and elect
archs. He was not the 'supreme head' of the church, but he
both theory and practice, outside and in a sense above the
its God-given Protector.
The emperor Constantine (who in fact was baptized only
very end of his life), so far from being content with a po
toleration and laissez faire, translated into terms of Christian
logy the God-given position that acquaintance with Persi
5 Romans xiii I. Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for th
power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.
appropriated for the Roman emperor. It was a sacra

priestly office. Dante, in a famous stanza, deplored the (apo
donation by Constantine of the rule of the West to the
might with more reason have deplored the first beginni
involvement of church and state that was to be the cause of so
much turmoil in the history of Europe.
The action of Constantine, besides giving immediate relief to
the church, helped to polarize the tendencies that already existed
towards organization and centralization. Freedom of travel and
solemn debate in council, together with the realization of the effects
of overhead control by the emperor, tended to stiffen and unite
the clergy of the empire, and the subsequent claims of the emperor
to a divine commission to rule the church provoked the bishops of
Rome to a clearer and firmer assertion of the primacy of the
spiritual power and the supremacy of the successor of the prince of
the apostles and his inheritance of the promises made by Christ to
Peter. Thus now for the first time the problem of church and state
was being posed.
This problem, however, did not reach an acute phase for almost
two centuries. The fourth century, in which the Christian empire
was established with only the brief interlude of Julian the Apostate,
was also the golden age of the Fathers of the church. The great
Greek fathers, from Origen to John Chrysostom, had remarkably
little to say on the theory of imperial control. Indeed, the first and
for long the only important utterance on the relationship of the
church to secular power was that of Augustine. His City of God,
the work of fourteen years (413-426), intensely personal and
'western' like all Augustine's work, reflected no actual crisis or
controversy of church and state, but was inspired by the catastrophe
in world history of the first sack of Rome by invaders from without
the empire (4Io). The work originated in the peculiar Augustinian
thought-world in which theology, philosophy, Scripture and, in
this case, world history, were enlisted to illuminate the path to
salvation of the individual Christian, seen as a member of the body
of the predestined. It had no relevance whatsoever to the existing
situation in the eastern empire. Augustine, an African with a pro-
vincial's knowledge of Roman history, a self-taught theologian
with a rhetorician's admiration for Neoplatonic philosophy, was
writing of the war between good and evil which he saw within him-
self and others and projected into world history. He can have had
6
few readers at the time and no influence upon the out

own age. The City of God, nevertheless, like other works
such as Plato's Republic, had an immense influence in the
centuries later, and was to influence all Christian politi
throughout the middle ages. In its characteristic A
'existentialism' it has proved a despair, if not a delusio
mentators ancient and modern, and the medieval interp
the City of God as the Christian commonwealth of monar
and people lay behind almost every attempt to the
Christian government in the West between Charlema
Louis.
Meanwhile, on the level of political events, the claims of succes-
sive emperors to control ecclesiastical affairs were countered by
arguments that received classic expression from Pope Gelasius I.
Writing to the emperor Anastasius in 494 he declared that there
were two forces that ruled the world, the sacred sovereignty of the
priesthood and the executive power of the prince. Both were God-
given, and while the priestly authority was greater, inasmuch as it
guided even the emperor's soul as that of a son of the church, yet
the priesthood obeyed the emperor in matters of public, secular
interest. This utterance, important in so many ways, is of particular
interest in two respects. In the first place, the pope placed the
emperor firmly within the church as one of its sons. As a Christian,
he is within and beneath the spiritual authority in spiritual matters.
But, secondly, the emperor receives his authority from God, indeed,
and not from the priesthood or pope. He serves and directs the
temporal affairs of Christendom in his own right, though his sphere
is less exalted than that of spiritual authority. This fine balance, to
which the papacy has returned in essence in the modern world,
stands between the extremes of the Divine Right of kings and the
concept of political authority as rising solely from the consent and
association of human beings.
Less than fifty years after the declaration of Gelasius the great
emperor Justinian had his say. Empire and priesthood are indeed
both divinely instituted, but the emperor as shepherd and ruler of
the Christian society has as his principal care the purity of life and
doctrine of the priesthood. Among Byzantinists of today the term
caesaropapism is in disfavour, and it is true that, again and again in
different periods and circumstances, the bishops of Byzantium,
7
with or without the support of the patriarch, successfully

an emperor's attempt to impose a doctrine or a line of co
True it is also that the emperor, in theory at least, undertook
no more than declare the doctrine which he and all orthodox
Christians held. But it is equally true that emperors, by edict and
action, declared and exercised their God-given power of supreme
government. They did not claim powers of infallible definition of
doctrine, or of supremacy over the priesthood, for such claims
would have had no meaning in the Byzantine context of their day,
but they undoubtedly exercised powers that trespassed upon
spiritual authority in a way more direct than those claimed by
Charlemagne or Louis xiv.
To a modern historian, one of the strangest features of both
eastern and western ecclesiastical thinking is the perseverance with
which both emperors and popes in East and West continued for
almost a millennium to speak and theorize as if the church was
conterminous with the world and, stranger still, that both eastern
emperor and western pope should for centuries ignore the existence
of the other's sphere of authority, and speak as if each ruled over
the whole of the church-world. Nevertheless, that was in fact the
notional framework of all political thought between the age of
Constantine and the fall of Constantinople; perhaps we may find a
parallel in the identification by 'western' writers in recent cen-
turies of 'European' civilization with civilization itself.
From the seventh century onwards papal authority in the East
and imperial authority in the West became gradually vestigial, and
for our review the East may henceforth be disregarded. In the West
the void of a supreme temporal ruler, on the levels of both politics
and thought, was filled in due time by the birth of the western
empire under Charlemagne, but by 800 papal political thought
had developed since the days of Gelasius. The papacy, having
shaken off the emperor's control and having acquired temporal
sovereignty, had also clarified its spiritual supremacy. Escaping
from the empire it had escaped also from the Gelasian doctrine of
the two powers. Established by accident as a temporal ruler in a
West devoid of any political centre of unity, the pope had no rival,
and the legend of the donation of the western half of the empire to
the pope by Constantine strengthened the conviction of the papacy
that it was paramount not only over the souls of Christendom, but
over their political life also. Monarchs therefore had only a
8
ministerial power under the papacy, and when the em

'renewed' in the West by the coronation of Charlema
the emperor was a papal appointee with the task of def
Roman church against all enemies. Charlemagne, howev
see matters in this light. Brought up to a Frankish-Ger
ception of kingly power and indoctrinated by the theolog
court inspired by Augustine's City of God, and borrowing
high imperial practice of the East, he saw himself as t
ordained governor of Christendom, charged with the duty
vising the religious life of his empire, including its do
disciplinary well-being. Thus Charlemagne at the heig
power acted in many ways as Justinian, save that he
advice from experts on theology, and allowed a final r
the pope as the ultimate authority for doctrine and di
Charlemagne's conception of imperial power did not s

first few years of his son's rule and was never repeated in
Europe fell apart into regions with monarchs of their own
claim to universal rule on the part of a German empe
matter of words, not of reality. On the other hand, the a
papal supremacy in all religious matters became more
emphatic. Nevertheless, the secular rulers in every co
obtained so close a control over ecclesiastical lands and off
the western church in general had never grown from a co
local or regional churches into a single closely-knit b
papal headship. Thus the celebrated conflict of empire
was not in origin precisely a struggle of church and s
rather a movement for moral and disciplinary reform
manded as a sine qua non a far larger measure of episcopal
freedom and control. The direct enemy was the layman
church property and rights. But circumstances of every k
personal and historical, led to the contest becoming p
the one hand to the Roman curia inspired by a pope o
energy and confidence, and on the other hand to an em
was the elected king of Germany elevated to the imper
the papacy. In this confrontation the papacy was b
victorious in the realm of theory, since all in the weste
including kings and emperors, admitted the spiritual p
of the papal office, while the emperor, now without an
effective universal rule, had also to acknowledge that h
9
power came from the pope. The secular state was as yet i
ceivable, and no monarch in western Europe could con
world without a pope. The emperor's only answer was to a
a rival antipope.
In contrast to the loosening of the imperial realm, the papac
asserting its authority over the whole church, by enforcin
cipline and protecting the clerical status, had made,
western Christendom, the concept of 'church' all but equiv
that of 'clergy', thus replacing the older connotation of the
of God. Concurrently, the claims of the papacy to monar
supremacy as the representative, the vicar of Christ (tha
God) on earth, were carried to their extreme point by a suc
of eminent popes who were also expert jurists and thought
rather than theological categories. Faced with the oppositio
powerful emperor, a party of canonists and theologians pro
the doctrine that of the two powers, priesthood and empi
former was the superior and indeed so much the superior t
empire was subordinated to it. By a mixture of juristic exp
of spiritual power and an allegorical interpretation of a t
Scripture, it was argued that the pope had been entrusted with
two swords, temporal and spiritual, that he bestowed the
the former upon the secular ruler, but only so that he might
the ends of the pope to whom he owed his position as em
The doctrine of Gelasius upholding the two powers, great
less, was superseded by the monarchy of the spiritual power w
could use the temporal power as its minister.
This doctrine was translated into practice with increasing de
tion by Innocent III and his immediate successors, who re
the culminating position that all powers and persons wer
ordinated to the Vicar of Christ, from whom all other aut
derived what strength they might possess. The church h
become a body with all the qualities and claims of a state, a
unitary conception of power was strengthened by the axiom o
reigning Aristotelian thought that all agents could ultimat
reduced to a single supreme one, that is, in this context, the p
Yet in the hour of apparent victory, when Boniface vII
proclaiming the universal jurisdiction of the papacy, a frontal
was about to be delivered which began as an exhibition of
politics and developed as a compound of Aristotelian natu
nominalist thought, and historical criticism. In the realm of p
IO
Pierre de Flotte, an agent of the French king, Philip t

recorded as saying to the pope: 'Your power is a matte
(verbalis), ours is one of facts and deeds (realis).' In th
ideas Aristotle, who had provided for St Thomas a ra
for theology to build upon, showed to others that the s
was a natural and necessary development of human so
that visible, forceful authority sprang from the need
beings and derived its sanction from them. Just as, on
ordinary human life, everyday experience was all, and
matter of belief only, so in the realm of practical politics
was alone real. The ruler of the state could punish in t
the pope or the bishop could only threaten what would
the next. The papal position was built upon a false cons
history; the church of the first century knew nothing
church, so far as it is known and seen by all, is an activ
on a level with other activities, and as such is a depar
state.
Ideas such as these propounded by Marsilius of Padua an

William of Ockham, were in the air in western Europe towards th
middle of the fourteenth century. On the one hand the papacy had
been led on by thought and by events to subsume all human activity
under the rule and guidance of the spiritual power. On the othe
side, the growth of national consciousness and of administrative
efficiency had given birth to a political competence wliich was
encouraged by Greek philosophy. Monarchs and their minister
saw dimly, without being able to express adequately, their right
and responsibilities on the political level, and were prepared to
challenge papal claims on that level and to recapture some of th
ground lost in previous centuries. They were aided by the new
historical or pseudo-historical appeal, made by Wyclif and Hus a
well as by Marsilius and Ockham, which was used to explode th
papal case by an exposition of the church's supposed primitive
simplicity. In practice rulers everywhere erected practical barrier
against ecclesiastical pretensions: in England the statutes agains
papal provisions and appeals to Rome; in France the refusal t
accept any papal powers of control claimed by the 'new' post
Gratian (c. 1140), canon law and decretals; the assertion of the
imperial electors to act without papal authority. It was a period o
momentous change, when the secular state was on the point of
being born. The contest was no longer one between priesthood an
II
empire for the liberty and spiritual pre-eminence of th

but between a church immersed in political action and t
of the nascent, secular, modern state which still acknow
supremacy of the papacy in spiritual matters.
The last century of the middle ages saw a crisis of authority

church and state. In the church the challenge to the extr
claim by the realism of the French monarchy had been foll
the new thought of Marsilius, and by the Great Schism
conciliar epoch. The papacy, indeed, had not explicitly r
but its fortunes for the next century prevented any adv
when the monarchical papal rule was restored the new p
the popes as actors in the power-politics of Italy and Eu
little scope for spiritual campaigns. On the other hand,
ruptcy of philosophy and scholastic theology in the fifteenth
added to other causes to give the rulers of the nations
France, and England - an authority which their predece
not enjoyed. They became absolute not only in fact, bu
theory. The king was regarded as the sole authority, t
sentative of God, to whom subjects owed a quasi-r
obedience. This was not a medieval conception, but a ch
age, born of the union in time of the new national state
'new way' in thought and feeling, which eliminated met
and natural religion. It was fed, as a quasi-religious
deformation of the Christian teaching that all authori
from God, and later, when the theory of the Divine R
established, by the model of the kingdom of Israel, bro
prominence by the Reformers of the second and third
tion.
With the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century the p
of church-state relationship became more complex. The
the lands that remained in communion with Rome, a pr
of the medieval situation of a Catholic monarch goi
extremes of independence as in Spain and in the Gallic
of Louis xiv and the Austria of Maria Theresa and J
There was the brief caesaropapism of Henry vIII in Eng
the longer phase of the Divine Right of kings. There w
continental Reformed churches, the regime of Calvin
and the attempts to reproduce it in the circles of export
ism. There was the ambivalent attitude of Luther towards the
12
godly prince and others, and the settlement of religion

(cujus regio illius religio). In many countries, especially
the issue of toleration became of more practical impor
that of the relationship of church and state. Finally, th
constitution of the United States which, in its combi
political and civil liberty with an explicit declaration of
positive indifference to all religious beliefs and group
proved for almost two centuries the most successful
answer to the problem of church and state, and has, at
removes, been taken up into the declaration of religiou
the Second Vatican Council.
Indeed, from the French Revolution to the present day an entirely

new situation has developed. The 'state', whether liberal, demo-
cratic, socialist, fascist, or communist, has become increasingly
non-religious, if not positively anti-religious. For the first time
since the age of the conversion of Europe to Christianity, many of
the countries of the old and new worlds have ceased in large part
to provide a Christian climate or background in public life. At the
same time the impact of the state on the life and actions of the
citizen, whether the state be welfare, socialist, or communist, has
become more direct and pervasive. In the extreme case of the
totalitarian state, the interests and the convictions of the individual
have no sure place, and from the point of view of the government
he is expendable for the good of the commonwealth, present or
future. Such a state, so far from protecting or supporting the
church, or at least admitting a free church within its borders, looks
askance at all churches as bodies demanding private loyalties and
initiating group action against or at least apart from the state or
party in power, or as defending an outmoded way of life. Even in
the democratic states a humanistic, not to say a materialistic climate
challenges the religious and social standards and mores of tradi-
tional Christendom. While the churches no longer, save in a very
few countries, look to the state for privilege, patronage, or even
protection, it is clear that any institution claiming to stand by
transcendental, 'supernatural' truths and values is unable to admit
the right of either an individual in authority or the state to demand
actions contrary to religious convictions or to forbid the free
exercise of worship or the liberty of personal devotion to religious
ideals. As is only too well known, religious persecution, sometimes
I3
disguised under political reasons, is far from uncomm

twentieth century, but the clashes most frequently occ
marginal territory that must always exist between purely r
and purely secular interests. Education is a principal field o
for all agree upon its unique importance in moulding b
while in the modern world there is general agreement that
has at least a residual right and duty to provide educati
The naive 'liberal' belief of the nineteenth century, that an
tion can be purely neutral in religion and ethics, or that
be left free to choose a religion on attaining adolescence,
a conception of the rationality and docility and general
of opinion among human beings which experience h
endorsed, least of all our own in this age. Similarly, the dem
a purely materialistic or totalitarian state will alway
resistance from those with independent standards
Another field of dispute is the segregation or depression of
or political group. In many ways the conditions of the
world are similar to those of the Christian church in th
empire, and it is possible that the wheel will come full c
the Christian religion will form a body 'within' the state, b
sense co-extensive with it or an aspect or department of
years ago, Pope Leo xIII, in a programmatic letter,6 ass
claim of the church as a 'perfect' organism on a par with th
state; each had its sphere of dominance in human life,
its own rights within that sphere. It was a declaration i
terms of the position of Gelasius I. It is interesting to se
Roman Catholic Church of today, in the pronouncemen
Second Vatican Council, while not explicitly renouncing
look, lays greater stress on the church as a family of th
of God united throughout the world under bishops
rather than as a quasi-political organization.
But when all is said and done the conflict of church a
familiar in history and in universal experience, wil
endemic in the world of human beings. It is in the ultim
the conflict between the two cities of Augustine's tho
in our own century as in Augustine's there is and will r
unavoidable and yet lamentable confusion in practice be
visible and the invisible, between the church which is
places and in all respects the city of God, the congregation
6 The encyclical Immortale Dei of I November I885.
14
true children, and the state which must always to reli

have that ambivalent character as an agent and reflect
authority and yet at the same time as a potential en
City of God.
I5

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Church and State in Christian History

Author(s): David Knowles

The dialogue, which has often become a controversy and a conflict,

state. It is in the two other cases, when the church is

1 John xviii 36. My kingdom is not of this world.

Paul,5 which to those who realize that Nero was the p

With the conversion of Constantine there took place the

appropriated for the Roman emperor. It was a sacra

few readers at the time and no influence upon the out

with or without the support of the patriarch, successfully

ministerial power under the papacy, and when the em

Charlemagne's conception of imperial power did not s

Pierre de Flotte, an agent of the French king, Philip t

Ideas such as these propounded by Marsilius of Padua an

empire for the liberty and spiritual pre-eminence of th

The last century of the middle ages saw a crisis of authority

godly prince and others, and the settlement of religion

Indeed, from the French Revolution to the present day an entirely

disguised under political reasons, is far from uncomm

true children, and the state which must always to reli

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