by Vinicius

For Christians, the contemporary West has many tendencies that are objectionable and cannot be ignored. Society is secular; it does not recognise God, His Church or revelation. It does not even recognise natural law, based on divinely-made unchanging human nature, as the template for society.

The result is not only the array of positions associated with “woke” culture, but also the injustice and social chaos resulting from free-market absolutism and the ongoing technocrat revolution. Mankind is groaning under these threats, often reacting and lashing out.

On the Western political scene today, however, a position firmly based upon universal unchanging principles is absent. This is perhaps the worst calamity because it prevents any solution. Without this template in mind, changing society for the better is unlikely, as G. K. Chesterton wrote: “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling ….  There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden”. ¹

Papal social teaching from the nineteenth century laid down principles for the establishment of sound societies: social recognition of the Kingship of Christ; recognition of men as persons, of their ensouled nature and otherworldly end to which society was ultimately answerable; subsidiarity within society, rather than the absolute modern state; the submission of society and the market to natural law. When the Popes began to insist upon this social teaching, these principles were no longer being observed or were on their way out.

Today, no Western society embodies them. A look at the last hegemonic Western Christian civilisation that did so is needed, in order to better envisage what the Church has in mind. This article centres on several facets distinguishing the Christian West from contemporary society.

Modernity as we know it is dominated by the ideas and philosophies of the Enlightenment (which arose in the late seventeenth century, becoming hegemonic in the eighteenth century). This mindset is secular, regarding the world as man’s ultimate destiny.

There were two main streams in the Enlightenment: “rationalist” (typified by Voltaire), viewing religion as a dangerous fiction; and romantic (whose first important exponent was Edmund Burke), viewing religion as a “useful” but uncertain expression of civil society, a useful fiction in practice. Either way, society became the criterion for its beliefs, or lack of them. Evolving social convention became superior to natural or divine law and made possible the unrecognisable societies that exist today. 

The Pinnacle of the Christian West

The Enlightenment was preceded by the hegemony of the Christian West in its last form, a society epitomised by the Council of Trent. It was a hegemony that went back in different forms to the late Roman Empire. But this society, far from being the last vestiges of the Middle Ages, pioneered modern global society.

A glance at a map of the world in A.D. 1600 shows every Westernised territory outside Europe as ruled by Phillip III of Castile (Phillip II of Portugal and Aragon); the first “globalism” was Catholic. This was accompanied by economic and scientific expansion (the world eventually adopted Pope Gregory XIII’s 1582 reform of the calendar, for example), striking advances in government administration, and a military revolution that guaranteed Christian Western hegemony.

The Church, unique as a spiritual, divinely-founded society, was ordered to the otherworldly ends of mankind; civil societies were ordered to the common good on earth but understood their purpose as ultimately subject to mankind’s spiritual ends, which only the Church could attain. Because they listened to and assisted the Church on such matters, there was a thousand-year-old alliance of the Church and civil societies.  

The West had one faith from Emperor Theodosius the Great (AD 379-395) until the Reformation. Even its liturgical prayer tended to become more and more unified as the Roman rite of Mass spread from Rome itself to embrace the West, and then the entire world influenced by the West by A.D. 1600. The Roman rite’s orthodoxy ensured freedom from the eccentricities that often crept in out in the “peripheries”. This unity of faith and worship was the bedrock of civil society’s stability and continuity as well. 

The Christian West was the first civilisation to recognise all men as persons, ensouled individuals whose final end was otherworldly. This gave men rights and duties under natural and divine law that societies had to protect. It was a radical break with the pagan past, for which society’s end was purely secular, and its religions entirely concerned with worldly ends.

The pagan world’s divinisation of civil society only became possible again with the Enlightenment and the modern state, which once again made societies absolute. The Enlightenment’s absolutism (whether of monarchical or parliamentary kind) asserted society’s superiority over natural and divine law (societies appropriated the right to recognise whatever religion they chose, or none at all, for example). This model has now “progressed” to the point where society asserts its right to recognise “changes” in human nature (with the proliferation of “genders” etc.). 

The Christian West’s free and complex society

Religiously unified, the old West had an amazingly diverse civil society. The modern state we are accustomed to is uniform and omnipresent in each country. This state deals directly with individual. The state seemingly does everything (armies of bureaucrats run taxation, education, health, police, local government etc.) yet it is usually very hard to know exactly who governs and who can be held responsible.

In the Christian West, government (usually monarchical) was minimal in its functions and footprint, but was empowered to perform those functions, especially defence and the safeguarding of religious and moral unity. Political power was personally embodied in the monarch (or a small group). The monarch ruled, but was not absolute.

Saint Thomas Aquinas saw the best political system as having a mixed constitution, “partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy… as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people… rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers”. ²

The most important limit to the monarch’s authority was that it was conditioned upon conformity with natural and divine law: “if the prince… commands what is unjust, his subjects are not bound to obey him”.³ Indeed, Aquinas endorsed the overthrowing of tyrants who seriously contravened natural law, and this scholastic teaching was continued by Saint Robert Bellarmine. This justification for legitimate resistance (the “strict rule” Chesterton referred to, above) has been largely outlawed since the Enlightenment, both in absolute monarchies and parliamentary absolutism, both of which refuse to make civil society answerable to anything but itself, in practice. 

While monarchs did sometimes become tyrants (with mixed success) in the Christian West, they were unable to acquire absolute control over society in the way the modern state can, because they did not really govern in the modern sense at all.

The Christian West was a dense network of self-governing, overlapping territories and jurisdictions. A kingdom contained a large number of autonomous territories organised as lordships of various kinds. Such lords could also be vassals in other kingdoms where they possessed territories. Religious military orders spread over many countries, where they enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. The same applied to monastic orders, which administered lands populated by many millions of farmers. 

Borders were not absolute frontiers; they were highly porous. Countries were not ethnicities (that ideal would come to dominate after the French Revolution); while royal courts employed specific languages for official use, countries had a variety of languages and dialects. This diversity was nothing like the “globalised”, “multicultural” societies of the modern West, because the old cultural varieties were territorially established, giving them long-term viability.

In modern societies, arriving minorities are either absorbed into wider, amorphous entities, or cluster in antagonistic religious and cultural enclaves. The diversity of the old Christian West did not lead to ethnic conflict. Firstly, because all were unified around one faith, and secondly, because Enlightenment society’s self-worship (often expressed in exaggerated nationalism) did not yet exist. The Christian West’s nations were historical countries for which men were rightly prepared to die. But these were not tribal breeds, determined in Darwinian style.         

Subsidiarity; an “organic” society

In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, monarchs had called councils of peers and bishops to advise them. The first parliaments to represent the whole country by including commoners were the Cortes of the kingdom of León (1188).

Parliaments became general in the west during the thirteenth century. By early modernity, these representative institutions had achieved their highest development and collaboration with political rule which met them from above, so to speak. There were no political parties because society did not seek different “worldviews” or ideologies; it already had one; its Christian faith.

Political activity, answering to natural and divine law, was therefore concerned with how best to advance the society that actually existed.  There were many representative institutions, from village councils to city governments, regional and country-wide parliaments, guilds etc. Because country-wide parliaments guaranteed fixed numbers of seats to cities and towns, to the Church, to the nobility and to guilds, they all had a voice. Each of these social sectors was responsible for selecting its representatives, and vacancies were filled as needed. There were no “general elections” and no incessant political campaigning. The head of state might need grants of money or consent to legislative changes, depending on the system, but in all cases he exercised government or delegated it. 

Regions and localities were largely self-sufficient economically; trade was for things that could not be reasonably produced locally. Most people lived on the land, and most had stewardship of modest amounts of property which meant they were not destitute. Villages were also corporations which could allow access to use of common woods and pasturage. It was a system that discouraged the few from becoming extremely rich through buying out the less astute, but where almost everyone had access to some economic resources, preventing the absolute poverty and rootless “proletariat” that provoked the nineteenth and twentieth-century popes to call for society’s reform.

When Church lands were confiscated after the Enlightenment (and during the Reformation, in Protestant countries), or reorganised through the process known as enclosure in England, tens of millions of peasants lost all stake in property and access to common forests and pasture. This population became fodder for the industrial revolution. 

Education and care for the sick was, beyond the capabilities of families and the technical formation provided by guilds, primarily the province of the Church. This was because education was not regarded as creating employees to fill job descriptions, but a religious and cultural formation which ensured that clerics, administrators, jurists, military officers etc., would embody the principles of Christian civilisation. It was understood that “health care” was a vocation requiring a Christian spirit, not a job dependant on “market forces”. Hospitals were overwhelmingly administered by religious and provided services to the poor without charge.

The Christian West rises to the challenge.

At the beginning of modernity, the Christian West came under existential threat from outside (from Islam), from the Renaissance revival of pagan worldviews, and from the Protestant Reformation. These challenges were either defeated or put on the defensive until the Enlightenment. Early modernity was dominated by the Christian West, which achieved a summit of unity and doctrinal development with the Council of Trent. Indeed, the political teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas was better reflected in the Catholic government of this period than that of the thirteenth century. 

Where Islam had once encircled the medieval West, it was, in A.D. 1600, confronted at every point of expansion by Portuguese and Castilian superiority, whether in the Philippines, the Indian Ocean, Ethiopia or West Africa. The encirclement of Islam was a highly successful Catholic “geopolitical” strategy which lay behind the Castilian expansion west to the Americas, then to Asia, and the Portuguese expansion east. The battle of Lepanto and the third siege of Vienna ended the Islamic threat to Europe itself. The Renaissance, which was an existential threat to the Christian West, was overcome both in the battle of ideas, with the Council of Trent and a revival in scholasticism, and militarily through the defeat of the leading pro-Renaissance powers in the Italian wars of the early fifteenth century. 

This victory was made possible through the military revolution that took place in the Christian West and was put into effect by the Tercio system at the service of the Western Habsburgs who ruled from Madrid. The Tercios were the first standing army and the first pan-European army. It included divisions of Castilians, Portuguese, Neapolitans and Calabrians, Lombards, Flemish, Germans, Walloons, Burgundians, Swiss and Irish, and numbered over 150,000 in the early seventeenth century. It dominated battlefields for 150 years. The first to employ fire and movement tactics, it established the first military barracks, hospitals, pension systems, and the first academy, the Brussels Military Academy, which formed an international military elite. 

This military supremacy was not dependant on conscripting the whole of society in total war as the modern state has done. It was based upon voluntary service, and financed by grants of money conceded by a variety of assemblies and parliaments. In war, as in every facet of pre-Enlightenment society, government did not absorb society, which self-organised to a great degree.

Provided individuals and groups did not challenge Christian faith and natural law, they were untroubled by government, which was exercised using a minimal bureaucracy. The Christian West of early modernity, in its dynastic unity of many political realities ruled by related monarchs, or allied to them, did not consider itself an empire. Its constituent peoples did not war amongst themselves, but held to a worldview that did exclude other entities, like Islamic states, and the forerunners of the Enlightenment modern state. 

The Christian West as it exists today, though no longer hegemonic, would do well to examine the worldview and social structures of its early modern period. For this is a living civilisation that only needs social and political visibility again in order to be an alternative that many would choose.

by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher  focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.   

ENDNOTES

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ch. 7, The Eternal Revolution). ↩︎
2. Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 105, i. ↩︎
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, Q.104, 6. ↩︎