Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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John E. Toews

Comparison of Schleiermacher and Chateaubriand highlights two issues

that became prominent in the subsequent history of theorising about rela-

tions between church and state – the relationship between immanent and

transcendent meaning, and the question of expressive and disciplinary

power. Did church society simply give articulate form to the religious

experience already present in the social relations of religious subjects? Or

did it impose a transcendent shaping power on the formlessness of individual

striving? Was the church an institutionalised expression of the substantiality

of organic community implicit in natural and social life, or a disciplinary

construction of order within a fallen world?

In the polemical, anti-revolutionary works of the

emigr

e Savoyard noble

Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), these tensions took on an exemplary inten-

sity that gave priority to the imposed discipline of institutionalised states

and churches within the historical development of religious society and

differentiated cultural communities. Maistre’s interpretation of the inﬁnite

striving of the romantic subject was framed by traditional Christian views

of unbounded hubris and sinful rebellion against divine order. ‘Inﬁnite in

his desires’ and inevitably discontented with any ﬁnite object or particular

identity, man was a ‘born despot’ insatiable in his lust for power (Maistre

1971,p.118). All claims that individuals could regulate and socialise this

striving through their own intellect and moral powers were illusory and

merely exaggerated the original fault. At the same time Maistre claimed

that such hopes for rational self-regulation corrupted an original, natural,

instinctual wisdom, grounded in recognition of the radically self-destructive

tendencies inherent in the drive for self-sufﬁciency. Prior to its corruption

by the released powers of egoistic self-interest this instinctual communal

knowledge recognised that striving for radical autonomy needed to be con-

trolled by submission to the absolute power of the group, and that rational

calculation would ultimately have to submit to blind faith in the provi-

dential divine will. This communal wisdom was sedimented in historically

produced traditions and languages, and especially in the institutions of state

and church. In one sense Maistre seemed to present a conception of state

and church as the expressive articulations of the ‘directing spirit’ (Maistre

1971,p.212) working in an immanent fashion in national political cultures.

He was different from writers like Schleiermacher and Chateaubriand pri-

marily in his vision of this immanent evolution as a coercive disciplinary

process marked by the violent punishment of rebellious subjectivity and

ruled by the rituals of sacriﬁce: ‘The whole earth, continually steeped in

blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must

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be sacriﬁced without end, without restraint, without respite until the con-

summation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death’ (Maistre

1971,p.253).

This shift in interpretative emphasis produced a qualitative shift in the

relations between state and national community, and between religious

society and ecclesiastical governance. Because the incorrigible striving for

autonomy could only be controlled through total submission to absolute

power, the sovereignty of the ruler became the actual, efﬁcacious cement

of the communality of the nation. It was through common recognition of

the need for unrestricted power in the political sovereign that individu-

als afﬁrmed the pr iority of the national community over their individual

claims. Consciousness of community was inherently tied to the recogni-

tion that identity was enforced through the arbitrary, unrestricted will of

an authority outside the individuals in the group: a ‘transcendent’ power

actualised their immanent unity. The state thus took ultimate priority over

national community. Submission to the necessity of absolute rule, rather

than mutual recognition among individual subjects, articulated the structure

of the social organism. Similarly, collective recognition that ﬁnite strivings

for radical autonomy would only lead to self-destruction could not emerge

‘naturally’ as the expression of religious experience, but only as blind faith in

an absolute, transcendent authority that ultimately subdued the unconscious

drives for power and self-sufﬁciency. The disciplinary and doctrinal author-

ity of the transnational institutionalised church and its autocratic head, the

pope, created the substance of religious society out of the strangers of a

fallen world.

In Maistre’s political philosophy states and churches were not creations of

human will but historical products of supra-per sonal, ultimately unknowable

events and processes. As such they remained historically particular: ‘ever y

possible form of government has shown itself in the world, and everyone is

legitimate once it has been established’ (Maistre 1971,p.142). At the same

time this historical relativism was tempered by a belief that certain gener-

ally acknowledged and ‘eternal’ laws structured the diversity of historical

forms. All states and churches were marked by the inherent necessity of

individual submission to the governance of an absolute power transcending

the individual will. In most of his works Maistre imagined state and church

as analogous in structure and uniﬁed and commingled with each other in

the formation and development of national cultures: ‘There should be a

state religion, just as there is a state political system, or rather, religion and

political dogmas mingled together form a general or national mind sufﬁciently

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John E. Toews

strong enough to repress the aberration of individual reason which is of

its nature the mortal enemy of any association’ (Maistre 1971,p.108). At

the same time belief in the ‘eternal’ rules of all such associations, the total

submission of the individual to a transcendent, mysteriously operating will

was enforced and not just ‘expressed’ in a single Catholic Church ruled

with absolute, ‘infallible’ power by a pope who could rightfully claim the

authority to override the claims of individual states if the leader s of those

states rebelled against the eternal laws of divine order. ‘Religious truths’,

he insisted, ‘are only general truths manifested and made divine within the

religious sphere: so that it is impossible to attack one without attacking the

law of the world.’ As the absolute executor and judge of divine law, Maistre’s

papacy was the ‘great Demiurgus of universal civilisation’, the actual legis-

lating, constitutive subject of human culture (Maistre 1971,pp.131, 143).

The ultramontane tendencies inherent in Maistre’s search to stabilise ethi-

cal norms and ontological meaning in terrestrial representatives of absolute

transcendent authority gained momentum throughout the nineteenth cen-

tury, and were increasingly appropriated by the papacy itself. By the second

half of the century they had become strong enough to fuel major con-

ﬂicts both within the various Catholic churches in continental Europe and

between these churches and the various movements striving to achieve

communities of national identiﬁcation. When the papacy asserted its radical

claim to supreme authority in matters of norms and meaning at the Vat-

ican Council of 1870, and presented inf allible papal authority as the only

remaining bulwark against the hubris of modern subjectivity and historical

relativism, Maistre’s framework for understanding state and church emerged

from obscurity to trump the apologias for ecclesiastical revival in romantic

thinkers like Schleiermacher and Chateaubriand.

2 Systematisation: church and state in the totality of

history and culture

During the ‘Restoration’ period between the external reconstruction of

European states at the Congress of Vienna and the reinvigoration of the

political and cultural movements for reform and revolution during the

1830s, Coleridge (1772–1834) and Hegel ( 1770–1831) constructed ambi-

tious, complex theoretical syntheses which both transformed romantic

visions of personal, communal and ontological identity into systematic

structures of differentiated totality, and posited these systems as the true

meaning of the cultural world brought into being by the revolutionary

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age. Their claims for theoretical closure and historical reconciliation were

tenuous, problematic and contested, but they set the agenda for most dis-

cussions of church–state relations in their own national languages during

the decades between their deaths and the Revolution of 1848.InFrance,

the equally ambitious but more polemical, historically unreconciled and

prophetic writings of F

elicit

e de Lamennais (1782–1854) and Comte Henri

de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) dominated discussion and set a rather different

agenda for the cultural critics and activists of succeeding generations.

Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the

Idea of Each (1830) marked a culminating, though cryptic synthesis of the

metaphysical and historical theory of culture that had been in the making

since his participation in the historical hopes, visions and disappointments

of the romantic movement at the turn of the century. The starting point of

Coleridge’s analysis was the romantic reformulation of the Kantian distinc-

tion between idea and concept. The elements of his analysis – ‘church’ and

‘state’ – were not considered as generalising and descriptive terms abstracted

from historical particulars, but constitutive agencies, potencies deﬁned by

their ‘ultimate aim’. They embodied themselves, or made themselves man-

ifest, within historical particulars in a dynamic process of actualisation. The

determination of such ‘Ideas’ and their process of self-actualisation and self-

revelation occurred within a totality of reciprocal relations. ‘Church’ and

‘state’ deﬁned their identities in relation to each other, as dynamic elements

of a cultural totality (itself an ‘Idea’), as opposing dimensions of a ﬁeld of

forces constituted by their polarised difference, analogous to a magnetic

ﬁeld. In this theoretical framework, the difference between church and

state was assumed to be constitutive of human culture. Collapse of one into

the other, reduction of one to the other, would destroy the ‘ﬁeld’ of rela-

tions that their difference produced. Moreover, as ‘Ideas’, church and state

were understood as spiritual or ‘psychic’ powers that operated in individuals

through processes of identiﬁcation (either unconsciously as action possessed

by the Idea, or self-consciously as transparent possession of the Idea), rather

than ‘objects’, or empirically delimited institutions external to individuals.

Church and state became ‘real’ in historical individuals through processes

that ‘cultivated’ subjective identiﬁcations. Finally, as Ideas, church and state

were marked by a constant tension between potentiality and actuality and

between the agency of subjective energy and the objective forms of cultural

institutions. The ultimate aim deﬁning the cultural meaning of the institu-

tion was in a constant process of self-deﬁnition; at any particular historical

moment the empirical institution was in a critical relationship with its own

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essence. Every organised form of subjective energy was a manifestation open

to further transformation.

Coleridge’s analysis of the relations between church and state as dynamic

potencies or incarnate, self-actualising Ideas, operated on two major lev-

els. His ﬁrst and most obvious concern in On the Constitution was the way

in which the state as the legal and political institution of governance (the

state in a limited and ‘narrow’ sense) and the church as the institution for

communal identiﬁcation were deﬁned in relationship to each other in the

constitution of the historical organism of a national culture or ‘realm’ (the

‘state’ in a broader, more general sense). In this context, the Idea or ‘ultimate

aim’ of the state was the preservation of a dynamic equilibrium between

the interests of permanence and progression in so far as they were objec-

tiﬁed in differentiated, opposing forms of private property ownership or

‘propriety’ (landed property on the one hand and the ‘movable and per-

sonal’ property of mercantile, manufacturing, distributive and professional

classes, on the other) organised into the legal vessels of ‘estates’ and rep-

resented in the political institutions of the legislative body or parliament.

Within this sphere, the executive ofﬁce, or kingship, the ‘beam of the con-

stitutional scales’, constituted the disinterested, or general interest of balance

and equilibrium (Coleridge 1976,pp.29–30).

The opposing power to the state within the ‘realm’ of a national cul-

ture was the church, deﬁned here as a worldly, national estate or ‘order’

whose idea or aim was the educational one of ‘educing’ an incorporation

of national identity within the minds and consciences of its citizens. A pro-

fessional/functional class (the clerisy) constituted the national church as an

estate of the realm devoted to the preservation and development of historical

traditions embodying the progression of the national Idea which connected

isolated individuals to their common essence. The clerisy was also ideally

organised into legislative bodies (Houses of Convocation) and headed by

the executive ofﬁce of kingship, since the person of the king symbolically

represented the nation as a uniﬁed subject of will and judgement. The

clerisy was sustained materially by a national reserve or endowment which

Coleridge called the ‘nationality’.

In some ways the national church, because it constituted identity rather

than difference in the polar tensions of the culture, had priority over the

7 Coleridge expounds on the meaning of his use of the word ‘idea’ in the ﬁrst chapter of his essay. See

Coleridge 1976,pp.11–22. The concept of polarity and its magnetic analogy is discussed throughout

the text, but see especially pp. 24, 31, 86 n.95.

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‘state’. Yet Coleridge insisted that the actual sovereign within the realm

was the national Idea, implicitly presented in the unconscious will of the

people and manifest in the king. The national church was an ‘immanent’

institution, an estate of cultural functionaries called from within the world.

It consisted of both the groups of scholars and thinkers who constantly

worked through and clariﬁed the national cultural heritage and the mass of

educators and ediﬁers who carried the national idea into every town and

village. The cultivating function of ‘educing’ the implicit wisdom of the

national idea within the individual subject or person was distinguished from

the ‘civilisational’ task of ‘instruction’ which gave individuals the means

to pursue their personal interests within civil society in an efﬁcient, ratio-

nal and law-abiding manner. In England the earthly vessel of this function

was historically manifest according to Coleridge in the institutions of the

established Anglican Church. But Coleridge did not perceive the national

church as necessarily confessional. Criteria for membership were criteria of

national allegiance, in both political and cultural affairs, although this did

clearly exclude those Catholics who saw their loyalty to a foreign state (the

papacy) or to moral injunctions (like celibacy) that prevented full partici-

pation in national life, as taking priority over their national identiﬁcations

(Coleridge 1976,p.81).

At the same time it was clear that in an ‘immanent’ sense the national

church was aptly named a ‘church’ because its primary aim was con-

nected to the actualisation of the ‘divine’ idea within the mind and con-

science of the national population. Thus ‘theology’, at least in the applied

sense of the study of the manifest presence of the ‘Idea’ in national lit-

erature, philosophy and historical institutions, remained at the centre of

national education and the clerisy’s function (Coleridge 1976,pp.46–9).

But this function as Coleridge deﬁned it was a condition of all cultures,

not the contingent quality of special cultures, and present in primitive cul-

tural realms like those of the ancient Celts, as well as in Greece, Rome,

ancient Israel and Egypt; it was not the distinguishing mark of a Christian

culture.

The reciprocal relations of state and church within the organic totality

of national cultures was framed by Coleridge within a wider context of

church–state relations that encompassed the immanent and transcendent

dimensions in which national cultures themselves functioned as the ‘state’

pole in a differentiated identity of the whole. The Idea of the ‘Christian

Church’ was not a part of the ‘essential Being’ of the national churches,

but ‘the sustaining, correcting and befriending Opposite’ of the world of

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organised, historically immanent national cultures (Coleridge 1976,pp.55–

6, 114–15). The ‘Idea’ of this ‘spiritual’ church was to actualise the intelligent

will as a participant in the ultimate ends of divine will, to pursue redemp-

tion from earthly ﬁnitude and identiﬁcation with transcendent divinity.

This church was a visible community engaged in public tasks of redemptive

transformation within the world, but it could have no earthly organisation,

hierarchy or visible head. It constituted the spiritual pole of the relationship

between the divine and the world, between the absolute creative subject

and its objectiﬁcation in nature and history. Coleridge deﬁned the rela-

tionship between the spiritual and the national churches as contingent,

because the religious encounter with the inﬁnite occurred as an act of free-

dom. The national culture could be directed by convictions ﬂowing from

a direct encounter with the divine and thus constructed from the perspec-

tive of eternal values, but it could also form itself as an articulation of its

essential inner ‘Idea’ without this transcendent connection. The spiritual

church was universal or ‘catholic’ but found its earthly existence not in

a Catholic organisation (this false idolatry of the spiritual as a material,

earthly organisation was represented by the papal ‘anti-church’), but scat-

tered throughout existing congregations of different confessions and among

certain members of the national clerisy. Coleridge thus opposed in principle

all utopian notions of an organised City of God on earth and maintained

the distinction or differentiated polarity between transcendent and imma-

nent in his general philosophy of culture. Relations to the divine Idea as

an immanent potency, as the incarnate spirit unifying the elements of a

national culture, were not simply equated with relations to the transcen-

dent source of that Idea. The tension in Coleridge between a deﬁnition

of the church as the ‘immanent’ cultural institution through which the

national identity was articulated and infused into the population and the

church as the institution that mediated between the transcendent and

the immanent in a ‘contingent’ manner dependent on the acts and choices

of individual subjects, remained a critical issue in nineteenth-century think-

ing about the ultimate authority for validating ethical norms and cultural

meanings.

The theory of the relations between church and state that evolved

in Hegel’s philosophy of culture after 1800 was grounded in an idealist

philosophical discourse that Hegel shared with Coleridge. But Coleridge

remained closer to the language of Schelling’s absolute idealism (with its

emphasis on historically immanent ideas as potencies of an ultimately

transcendent, pre-conceptual Absolute Being) than Hegel, who deﬁned

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himself within the German Restoration debates as the primary opponent

of Schelling’s residual supernaturalism. Hegel’s positions revealed some sig-

niﬁcant dimensions of Coleridge’s distinctions but the particular spin he gave

to these distinctions produced a theory with markedly different cultural and

historical implications. Like Coleridge, Hegel began from a standpoint that

assumed the priority of absolute unity and posited difference as differen-

tiation within a totality in which every element was deﬁned through its

relation to other elements in a system of differences. The individuality that

structured the differences of persons and nations emerged from a primal

creative ground and moved with internal necessity towards some form of

self-conscious reintegration. Hegel’s dialectic of development was different

from Coleridge’s co-inhering polarities because of the much more promi-

nent role it gave to the processes of historical transformation and to the

‘sublation’ (aufhebung) of differences within these processes. For Hegel, at

least most of the time, it appeared that the Absolute did ﬁnd its own fulﬁl-

ment (made itself actual and manifest) in history and human consciousness,

and thus could attain the public transparency of a philosophical science of

totality.

In the Hegelian system, the ‘state’ constituted the fulﬁlment of the ethical

life of the cultural nation. ‘The state’, he insisted, ‘is the actuality of the ethi-

cal idea’ (Hegel 1967b, p. 115). Coleridge’s occasional use of the word ‘state’

(in the broader sense) as the term for the national cultural organism had a

more literal political meaning in Hegel. It was in the complex legal, admin-

istrative, legislative and executive institutions of the political constitution

that the process of subjective identiﬁcation in which the individual subject

recognised its freedom through identiﬁcation with the publicly articulated

collective will of the community reached its ﬁnal form. ‘Self-consciousness’,

he claimed, found ‘its essence and the end and product of its activity, its

substantive freedom’ in the state (Hegel 1967b, p. 115). The political realm

was not just the site for a rational balancing of interests articulated through

functional classes or estates, but was expanded to encompass the realm of

ethical identiﬁcation that Coleridge had assigned to the national church.

All forms of community based on feeling, historical traditions and identiﬁ-

cation with symbolic ‘representations’ found their fulﬁlment in the publicly

articulated order of a state of laws in which the subject could recognise its

participation in the ‘idea’ in a transparently rational, self-conscious f ash-

ion. The inevitable pluralism of religious confessions, confessional churches

and religiously deﬁned cultural communities (grounded in the particu-

larity of their representational speech and the ‘subjective’ forms of their

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John E. Toews

identiﬁcation) provided the instigation for a historical movement to the

‘higher’ universality of the state as an ethical community.

The polarity between cultivation and instruction, between the national

clerisy and secular teachers of instrumental knowledge, was also, in the

Hegelian system, transformed into a dialectical movement within the realm

of ‘scientiﬁc’ knowledge. Such knowledge was sustained and propagated by

a class of intelligence, which found its appropriate place as an estate within

the state. Religious communities were free of state control as long as they

restricted themselves to the communicative interaction of private individuals

and the articulation of personal conviction and feeling. At the point where

they made claims on the public will and universal ‘objective’ truth they were

subordinated to the higher ethical sphere of the political community and

the objective knowledge of self-conscious ‘science’ (Hegel 1967b, p . 170).

Demands for the complete union of church and state, in Hegel’s view,

implied the imposition of private conviction on public reason, the fanatical,

ultimately destructive domination of the objective differentiated structures

of cultural life by the undisciplined subjective convictions of a particular

confessional group.

At the same time, however, Hegel’s system posited religious faith as a

subjective appropriation of an ‘absolute’ truth that transcended the ﬁnite

limits of rationally directed will in the terrestrial institutions of the state.

In religious experience, religious language and religious communities, the

human subject took as its object, as the ‘other’ of its subjectivity, not the

communal organism of the state but the absolute truth that actualised itself

in the ethical practices and institutions of historical states. ‘As intuition,

feeling, representative knowledge’, religious experience ‘is concentrated

upon God as the unrestricted principle and cause on which everything

hangs. It thus involves the demand that everything else shall be seen in

this light and depend on it for corroboration, justiﬁcation and veriﬁcation’

(Hegel 1967b, p. 166). However for Hegel the truth of man’s relation to the

Absolute was articulated in religion in a limited form, in the experience of

subjective feeling, in the language of representation, and in communities of

‘irrational’ identiﬁcation.

Religious apprehension and manifestation of absolute truth thus found

its fulﬁlment not in religion but in the rationally afﬁrmed, self-conscious,

fully transparent and objectively ‘public’ truths of philosophical or ‘scien-

tiﬁc’ knowledge. Hegel merged Coleridge’s universal spiritual church, the

Church of Christ that transcended the limitations of terrestrial national

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cultures and their constitutions, into public institutions of absolute knowl-

edge and into the ‘clerisy’ of academic philosophers, scholars and educators

who articulated and taught that knowledge. Moreover, this knowledge was

not free in relation to the state. Its content was the ethical substance of the

state; it was the state’s self-consciousness.

Hegel was quite ready to assert that religion was the ‘groundwork’ of the

state and that states could demand that all their citizens assume member-

ship in some form of religious community or church. Experience of the

Absolute grounding and permeating the life of the individual subject was

the basis for identiﬁcation with the collective will of the state. The rational

ethos of the universal political community articulated and objectiﬁed the

religious experience of irrational and symbolic identiﬁcation in public form,

just as knowledge of the Absolute in the systematic structures and rational

language of science raised the cognitive content of religious faith to a form

appropriate to its content. Moreover, within even the most highly devel-

oped ethical state, there would always be a need for religious communities

and religious language. The majority of the population would never attain

the self-transparency of systematic knowledge but would always appropri-

ate their knowledge of the Absolute through symbolic representation and

irrational identiﬁcation. Similarly, in the educational development of indi-

viduals the substance of ethical life was experientially absorbed through

feeling and appropriated in the representational forms of narrative and

myth before it could be intellectually appropriated. But this ‘autonomy’

of the religious sphere and ecclesiastical institutions, was a ‘relative’ auton-

omy restricted by the disciplined control and knowledge of the state and

its philosophical ‘clerisy’. Hegel and his disciples claimed to have ‘recon-

ciled’ state and church, religious faith and philosophical knowledge, but the

metaphysical and historical dynamics of the Hegelian dialectic implied an

ultimate domination of state and philosophical knowledge over the church

and religious faith: ‘In contrast with the church’s subjective conviction,

the state is that which knows’ (Hegel 1967b, p. 171). In the churches the

Absolute was still made manifest as a ‘transcendent’ reality, as ‘other’ to

the human subject. Hegel’s theor ies of church and state appeared to defy

such limitations and brought the transcendent within the sphere of human

culture. It relegated those institutions in which subjective self-consciousness

related to its own essence as an external transcendent reality to the status of

stages on the way to a full appropriation of the substance of the transcendent

within the immanent structures of history.

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