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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

John E. Toews

In the theories of Coleridge and Hegel, metaphysics and historical meta-

narrative often seemed to be at the service of a comprehensive justiﬁcation of

the ofﬁcial or established relation between state, national culture and church

within their own cultural communities. The Anglican Church and Evangel-

ical State Church of Prussia revealed their intrinsic meaning in the theories

of the self-styled intellectual spokesperson of the truth of the totality. Despite

the obvious differences between Britain and Prussia regarding the relations

of intellectuals to state and nation, and of state and nation to each other,

Coleridge and Hegel shared an unmistakably Protestant perspective. Lamen-

nais and Saint-Simon represented contrasting views from within the French

and Roman Catholic traditions. Both articulated their fear of, and opposi-

tion to, the imagined (and remembered) anarchical social consequences of

the liberation of self-interested individuals during the revolutionary period

with a polemical demand for the restoration or construction of a hierarchi-

cal order of spiritual and temporal authority. Both were convinced that the

restoration of spiritual order, general submission to the universal validity of

certain unquestioned truths about human existence, took precedence over

changes in the temporal order, and that only a reinvigorated, uniﬁed spiri-

tual power could create a stable moral order among the anchorless, atomised

individuals of a post-revolutionary society. Neither Lamennais nor Saint-

Simon could imagine the creation of a moral order or ethical community

in terms of the diverse incommensurabilities of national cultural ‘ideas’,

but identiﬁed ethical order with the dominance of a universal, institutional

church (on the model of the Roman Catholic papal church) over the lim-

ited sphere of politics and the particularist communities of national cultures.

Both simpliﬁed the complex reciprocities and dialectical relations present

in Hegel and Coleridge into a dichotomous relation between a universal

ethical community based on spiritual identiﬁcation through submission to

absolute truth and the particular claims of self-interest regulated by external

force.

Lamennais set the agenda for Restoration debates in France on church–

state relations with his multivolume Essay on Indifference in Religious Matters

(1817–23). Against the notion, certainly insinuated in Chateaubriand, that

the reinvigoration of religious life was a matter of feeling and imagination

rather than consensual submission to correct doctrine, Lamennais’ apologia

for Catholic Christianity was based on the claim that the Christian church

possessed absolute infallible authority in matters of doctrine, and therefore

constituted the only hope for social harmony. ‘Re-establish authority!’ he

proclaimed in the preface to the Essay:

624

Church and state

Order will be entirely reborn; truth will again be set on an unshakable base. The anarchy

of opinion will cease; man will listen to man, minds united by One and the same faith

will dispose themselves around their centre, which is God, and will draw life again from

the source of light and life. (Lamennais 1817–23, i,p.49)

Only correct belief could provide the certainty required for the ethical dis-

cipline of egoistic interests and the formation of communal identiﬁcations.

The feelings or reasonings of the individual subject could never attain such

certainty on the basis of evidence; it could only be provided by the power

of testimony that spoke with absolute authority. Such authority had two

forms in Lamennais’ analysis. It was implicitly present in the general rea-

son or common sense (sensus communis) embodied in popular traditions and

inherited familial wisdom in all human cultures. In this sense it constituted

all of those truths that were simply accepted a priori because human existence

was impossible without them. This general reason was thus not a creation or

discovery of individuals but the consequence of a primal encounter with the

divine will, a product of universal revelation. Common sense emerged from

recognition of human ﬁnitude and of the dependence of the individual on

the whole of which he or she was a part. In response to historical deviations

from this revealed general reason, through individual or collective rebellion,

the Church of Christ emerged both to re-enforce common sense with a

public doctrine that had infallible authority, and to provide the sacraments

of grace that would make it possible for fallen individuals to order their

wills in conformity with the truths of authoritative belief. For Lamennais,

therefore, the infallible authority of Christian doctrine derived from its role

as the fulﬁlment and inheritor of the immanent truth of human history.

But the source of this truth was ultimately transcendent, the divine reve-

lation of God. Ethical order among human beings was synonymous with

submission to divine truth. The ofﬁcial spokesperson for this authority on

earth, synthesising, correcting and interpreting the corrupted and obscured

intuitions of common consciousness, was God’s deputy – the pope.

In On Religion Considered in its Relations with the Political and Civil Order

(1825–6) Lamennais drew out the contemporary institutional consequences

of the premises established in the Essay. Because of the tendencies among

current states and political leaders, even those who claimed to support the

church, to subordinate ecclesiastical authority to their own limited goals

of external order and obedience to temporal authority, Lamennais moved

towards a ‘liberal’ position in which the independence of the church from

8 Translation from Reardon 1985,p.181.

625

John E. Toews

political authority was judged as a precondition for the creation of a society

in which the church could exert its proper spiritual authority over the

temporal realm. The church would never be able to reform itself in order

to play the role of spiritual authority in the creation of an ethical order

unless it freed itself from the interference of temporal interests in its internal

affairs. By 1829 Lamennais was insisting on the need for the church to

claim the civil liberties – freedom of conscience, press and association –

that would allow it to restore its autonomy against temporal interference

under the reinvigorated authority of papal leadership. The alliance with

aristocratic privilege and monarchical power had cost the church its inner

soul and thus ultimately its authority over the mass of individuals in society.

Ultramontanism, the superiority of the institutionalised spiritual power (the

papacy) over temporal authority in the control of church organisation and

internal affairs, was claimed as the only position from which a restoration of

European culture as a moral order could be realised. In his inﬂuential journal

L’Avenir (1830–1), Lamennais presented himself as the prophetic leader of a

religious ‘enlightenment’ that ‘will one day bring not only the French but

all Europe into Catholic Unity, which eventually and by successive advances

will draw to itself the rest of the human race and will constitute it, through

an identical faith, into an identical spiritual society’.

During the period 1829–32, a precarious balance between transcen-

dent and immanent theories of religious authority marked the position of

Lamennais and his followers. On the one hand, the Menaissians seemed to

be concerned primarily with a transformation of the international Catholic

Church into a puriﬁed spiritual church. Even their liberal politics and pop-

ulist propaganda were meant to mobilise mass support and public opinion

under the authority of papal power and established church doctrine. Their

aims were focused on the submission of the individual to the absolute truth

of divine revelation, a submission that rejected any interference of tempo-

ral interests in the relation between the subject and divine authority. At

the same time Lamennais continued to insist that this spiritual church was

implicitly present in the common consciousness of all cultural collectivities

or ‘peoples’, and the preaching and journalism of his follower s addressed this

popular audience directly, suggesting the possibility of a spiritual, universal

Catholicism outside of the existing church hierarchy. Public opinion would

not only be mobilised but also taught to speak the truth that it already

possessed in implicit form. The populist dimension in Menaissianism was

9 L’Avenir, 27 January 1831, cited in Reardon 1975,p.93.

626

Church and state

also evident in its strong support of the Polish nationalist rebels and exiles

during their years of rebellion against tsarist domination (Parvi 1992).

After the revolutions of 1830 Lamennais’ apocalyptic sense of the present

moment as a turning point in human history, which would inaugurate the

full realisation of European Christendom as a spiritual community under the

international leadership of the papacy, reached a new intensity. However,

when he was rebuffed by the ecclesiastical agency that he had heralded as

the infallible spokesperson of truth and the leader of a spiritual reformation

of European society, the unity of the two dimensions of his theory began

to fall apart. In 1832 and 1834 the papacy rejected ﬁrst the alliance with

liberalism and then the theory of general reason embedded in the tradition

of human culture and carried by the implicit consciousness of the ‘people’.

In a striking popular work, Words of a Believer (1834) Lamennais took on

himself the role of prophet and leader with a direct appeal to the masses

to rise to their own responsibility, to end privilege and injustice and to

establish a divine kingdom of brotherly love. Lamennais rebuffed the estab-

lished Catholic hierarchy by clearly placing his hopes in the people as the

agent of divine truth and presenting himself as the people’s spokesperson. A

new populist Catholicism, a people’s church separate from both states and

organised churches, became Lamennais’ imagined historical agent for the

transformation of Europe into an ethical community. If the papacy would

not speak for and lead this movement, a new clerisy would have to be

created, and Lamennais seemed quite ready to assume leadership of such

a new cadre of spiritual reformers. Lamennais still imagined the ethical

order as grounded in submission to divine, transcendent authority, but this

authority now articulated its will in the voice of the people. Within a few

years the transcendent element in Lamennais’ religious prophecy had almost

disappeared. In his Book of the People (1837), virtually all of the authority for

the creation of an ethical world came from ‘below’, from the innate genius

of national peoples and their immanent historical experience. Moreover, as

Lamennais moved towards the authority of the unconscious will of the peo-

ple as the foundation of spiritual community and a new church, the theory

of a national church, and of people’s churches organised in a federation of

national movements, also emerged more prominently. With breathtaking

rapidity Lamennais had shifted his role from a servant of transcendent truth

and papal authority to a spokesperson for popular national consciousness.

As a prophet of the immanent ethos of national development, Lamennais’

intellectual itinerary culminated in intellectual proximity to the site where

that of his compatriot, Henr i de Saint-Simon, had begun. Since the turn

627

John E. Toews

of the century Saint-Simon’s various historical projects had focused on the

construction of a new ‘organic’ ethical order in European Christendom.

From the time of his ﬁrst published manifestos calling for a new European

order in the ﬁrst decade of the century, however, Saint-Simon had imagined

the new truth that would organise European society and ground its ethical

principles as a scientiﬁc creation, a body of veriﬁed scientiﬁc laws produced

by a clerisy of scientists who would exert their ‘spiritual’ control over society

in a secular and post-Christian ‘church’. As rational knowledge displaced

faith in authority as the organising principle of the social organism, secular

scientists inherited the mantle of the church as carriers of the ‘spiritual

power’ (Saint-Simon 1964,pp.1–20).

Disappointed by the response of the scientists to his calls for an interna-

tional scientiﬁc clerisy, Saint-Simon had moved towards presenting himself

as the prophet of a ‘New Christianity’ by the end of his life in 1825. The

authority of the spiritual power over temporal rulership in society and the

priority of the unity of the social organism over the pursuit of individual

self-interest could not be sustained by rational knowledge alone. The new

meanings that would motivate ethical identiﬁcation and produce the new

organic order were now ascribed to a renewed revelation of the univer-

sal truth of Christianity as a religion of brotherly love. Like Lamennais,

Saint-Simon saw his role as the chosen leader of a divine mission and called

upon his readers to ‘Hearken to the voice of God that speaks through me’

(Saint-Simon 1964,p.116). Saint-Simon’s vision of the new moral order

was grounded in a revealed, absolute and infallible truth, and it found its

fulﬁlment in a universal earthly society produced through complete identi-

ﬁcation of all individuals with this truth and its representatives. The ‘church’

reappeared as an intellectual clerisy, not legitimated by tradition or tied to

the established institutionalised churches, but taking its authority from the

implicit unspoken will of the people. From the standpoint of the absolute

claims of this future church society the temporal order of states could only

be a fetter on the historical incarnation of spiritual community. The spiritual

church swallowed up national churches and political states in its triumphant

construction of an integral, ‘organic’ order on the foundations of a loving

practice that ﬂowed from the revelation of true doctrine.

3 Practice: the intellectual movements of the mid-nineteenth century

By 1830 the prophetic visions of both Lamennais and Saint-Simon had

begun to take on the historical role of party programmes for groups of

628

Church and state

disciples. As the ‘schools’ of adherents grew and faced the challenges pre-

sented by political and social change, the tensions and oppositions within

their intellectual positions became manifest in school divisions. Such partisan

fragmentation was also the fate of the theoretical legacies of Coleridge and

Hegel. In the middle decades of the century intellectual coteries, move-

ments and ‘parties’ intent on bringing into historical actuality aspects of

the theoretical positions inherited from the synthetic thinkers of the 1820s

dominated the discourse on relations between church and state. Despite an

enormous diversity of positions both within and across national cultures,

some general similarities in these movements, crossing national lines, can

be constructed.

The 1830sand1840s witnessed, ﬁrst of all, a signiﬁcant growth in the

inﬂuence and public presence of the movement for inner reform (puriﬁca-

tion, spiritualisation, uniﬁcation) within the established, dominant confes-

sional churches. This movement, led by academics, churchmen and intellec-

tual publicists of the younger generation (born around 1800) was committed

to the general aim of transforming existing churches into authentic exem-

plars of an ideal ‘spiritual’ church. In such a church the direct authority

of transcendent truth would provide the organising centre for an associa-

tion of believers free from the interference of state bureaucrats and secular

politicians. The historical and cultural implications of the general move-

ment to emancipate the church from state interference and inner political

corruption were not always clear and produced divisions among the church

reformers. The projected cultural mission of a ‘free’ church was to transform

the atomised individuals of post-revolutionary civil society into an ethical

organism. In order to accomplish this task the church needed not only

‘freedom’ to control its internal affairs in the making of appointments and

the establishment of authoritative doctrine, but also the freedom to engage

in its moralising mission through educational, publicistic and philanthropic

institutions. Moreover, this moralising mission entailed direct confrontation

with the state for control of the norms of the domestic sphere – especially

relating to sexuality, marriage and child-rearing – as well the control of

educational and charitable, social-welfare institutions. The movement to

free the church from the state thus rapidly became, implicitly and often

explicitly, a political movement with the aim of constructing a ‘Christian

State’. In the second half of the century battles were fought over the control

of higher education, over the creation or rehabilitation of religious orders to

fulﬁl the role of social and educational agencies, and over divorce and mar-

riage laws. As democratic institutions and parties evolved after the 1860s,

629

John E. Toews

divergent views of the relationship between church and state and about the

appropriate role of church society in shaping the ethos of a national culture

became a familiar element in the conﬂicts among conservative, liberal and

socialist movements and their political organisations.

In France, the movement for inner church reform instigated by the

early work of Lamennais and expressed in the brief outburst of liberal

Catholicism in L’Avenir illustrated the various elements of this pattern of

development. Lamennais’ most distinguished, active and inﬂuential disciples

during the year s of L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire (1802–61) and Count Charles

de Montalembert (1810–70), did not follow their mentor in his break with

the papacy. They retained their commitment to an inner, ‘loyal’ reform of

the Catholic hierarchy. This did not necessarily imply a complete rejection

of the liberal and populist elements of Lamennais’ view of church reform

but it did involve the reinterpretation of these elements within a framework

that rejected any immanent (cultural or natural) foundation for the spiritual

truths according to which a Christian society was to be reconstructed.

The truth did not come from the people but was brought to them as a

transforming transcendent answer to the dilemmas of their fallen existence.

Lacordaire gave a new urgency to the development of forms of worship,

preaching and propaganda that would speak to the needs of the people

for salvation; Montalembert appealed to the public to support religious

control of educational institutions; while Frederic Ozanam (1813–53)tried

to meet the sufferings of the victims of the post-revolutionary society with

the recreation of ecclesiastical charitable orders. These practices presented

a vision of the church informed by authoritarian populism and directed

to meet the spiritual and physical needs of individuals victimised by liberal

political and economic policies. By the 1840s this vision had been carried

into the public discourse of political debate not only by parliamentarians

like Montalembert, but also by ecclesiastical ofﬁcials like the Abb

elix

Dupanloup (1802–78) and the polemical journalist Louis Veuillot (1813–

83). It found philosophical expression in the work of Louis Bautain (1796–

1867) who attacked the ‘pantheism’ implicit in the hypothesis of a sensus

communis that found its perfected ﬁnal form in Christian truth, and asserted

the transcendent ‘otherness’ of religious truth as the only viable foundation

for a Christian moral order.

As Lamennais’ personal intellectual itinerary after 1834 suggests, it was

difﬁcult to sustain the viability of a universal ‘people’s church’, a church

that found its authority not in centralised hierarchy and submission to a

transcendent power, but in the common identity of an immanent ‘revelation’

630

Church and state

and communal ethic that pre-existed the differentiations of civil society. In

France this populist version of the universal church tended, as in Lamennais’

case, to lose its distinctively ecclesiastical identity and merge into religiously

framed conceptions of the nation as a moral community. It was quickly

swallowed up by more secular ideologies for national identity or ethical

socialism that perceived the ecclesiastical movements as rivals.

The authoritarian, neo-orthodox, activist, Catholic pietism of the Men-

naissian movement represented by Lacordaire and Montalembert and

mobilised at a popular level by battles with the anti-clericalism of liberal and

republican programmes for secular control of cultural institutions, especially

after 1870, had its counterparts among the younger generation of theolo-

gians, priests and lay intellectuals in Catholic regions throughout Europe,

most notably in western and southern Germany. In Prussia, and after 1871,

in the Bismarckian German Empire, the movement for Catholic renewal

struggled with the cultural hegemony exerted by a Protestant majority that

made claim to represent the national ethos. Resistance to attempts to sub-

ordinate the institutions of the church to the political instruments of this

hegemony led both to the creation of a powerful Catholic political party

(Zentrumspartei) and a ‘cultural war’ (Kulturkampf ) between the church and

the national state that lasted from 1871 to 1887.

Ultramontane sentiments

grew with the need to secure moral and institutional authority for resisting

the acts of the state. A liberal commitment to rights of free speech and

association was often combined with an anti-liberal, authoritarian vision of

an ideal Christian state and society.

The authoritarian, neo-orthodox movement for church reform and the

mobilisation of popular religiosity, however, also had signiﬁcant counter-

parts in the established Anglican and Evangelical churches of England and

northern Germany. In these areas of a nationally shaped Protestant culture,

however, the vitality of the merger of church reform with the idea of a

national church and a populist politics had greater sustaining power, pro-

ducing a more balanced tension among and within ecclesiastical reformers

between the authoritarian, liberal and populist conceptions of a Christian

church society and a Christian state.

In England, the Coleridgean legacy was divided among ecclesiastical

reformers between the transcendent orientation of the Oxford Movement

and the more loosely deﬁned ‘broad’ church reformers who retained a

10 For recent analysis of the Kulturkampf and its historical background see Ross 1998 and Smith 1995,

pp. 19–49.

631

John E. Toews

stronger sense of the immanent historical authority of a national church. The

major theoreticians and public spokespersons of the Oxford Movement –

John Henry Newman (1801–90), John Keble (1792–1866), John Pusey

(1800–82) and Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–36) – set out with the aim of

transforming the established Anglican Church into a true Church of Christ.

Their self-assigned task was to purify the church of its temporal corruptions,

to lead it back towards a strict submission to the authority of transcendent

spiritual truth and the institutional forms which would express that submis-

sion. The autonomy of the church, its emancipation from interest politics,

was as central to their sense of the church’s mission to create a Christian

society as it was to the Catholic followers of Lamennais.

The members of the Oxford Movement were convinced that the goals

of cultivation and moralisation that Coleridge had assigned to the national

church could only be fulﬁlled if the national church became an expression

of the universal church, and asserted its disciplining control over socially

disintegrative, self-interested egoism on the basis of universal and super-

natural authority. Newman (before 1845) and Keble saw the Established

Church of England as one branch (along with the Greek and Latin) of

the universal Catholic Church (Newman 1967,p.72). The authority of its

ministry derived from apostolic succession, through the continuity of the

sacrament of ordination. The church presented itself as a representative of

transcendent authority over against the nation in a number of forms. In its

creeds it provided ‘objective’ spiritual truth that was not open to subjective,

individualising interpretation. The Protestant tendency to emphasise the

priesthood of all believers and the authority of scripture was subordinated to

the authority of the church. The process of moral ‘cultivation’ was redeﬁned

as submission, as self-sacriﬁce. Faith was not so much a subjective feeling of

encounter and identiﬁcation, as an act of surrender to a higher authority. In

its liturgical conceptions the church was to emphasise the vertical relation

to transcendent authority; the focus was on worship, prayer and ceremonies

of submission. In the sacraments the presence of God as the transcendent

Other was to be made symbolically manifest. The association among believ-

ers was mediated through their relations to the transcendent. All immanent

order was a product of this relationship to the transcendent divinity.

11 The positions of the Oxford Movement were presented in a series of ninety ‘Tracts for the Times’

published between 1833 and 1841. They have been excerpted in Chadwick 1960. The implicit

politics of the mission of internal church reform is analysed in an essay on John Keble in Prickett

1976,pp.91–119, and its implications for social policy in Rowlands 1989.Roe1966 represents at

least the beginnings of an attempt to place the Oxford Movement in a European context.

632

Church and state

The puritanical moralising zeal of the Oxford reformers, their often-

intolerant demands for absolute authority as the only therapy for self-doubt

and the collapse of spiritual discipline, indicated the extent to which they

based their strict neo-orthodoxy on very contemporary concerns about

the threatening disintegration of individual morality and social discipline.

Their demands for absolute authority arose as therapeutic demands from the

inner conﬂicts of the romantic subject. They were not so much defenders

of the status quo – which they perceived as rampant with corruption – as

fervent, pious, authoritarians. Despite disclaimers about any positive interest

in politics, however, their missionary zeal to bring about a new spiritual

discipline through submission to transcendent authority could not be sepa-

rated from the ‘immanent’ issues of social order and national identity. They

believed it was precisely the transformation of the national church into a

branch of the universal church of Christ that would resolve the problematic

disintegration of the nation as an ethical organism. The church was to free

itself from submission to politics, in order to present itself, in puriﬁed form,

as the ultimate arbiter of the political realm. Moreover, since the Oxford

reformers, unlike the Menaissians in France, were prepared to alienate the

‘nation’ in order to purify the church (for the ultimate good of the nation)

they found themselves drawn to a conservative politics, seeking protection

for the church’s autonomy (and monopoly of at least some of the means

of moralisation) through support of the politics of traditional privilege and

personal monarchical authority.

Although not ‘ofﬁcially’ a member of the Oxford Movement, the young

William Ewart Gladstone, in his ﬁrst published work, The State in its Rela-

tions with the Church (1838), tried to draw out some of the implications of its

ecclesiastical and theological positions for the task of transforming the nation

into an ethical community. For Gladstone, reform of the Established Church

provided an opportunity to create a new coalition of state and church for

the project of constructing the nation as a Christian moral order. In his view

political society and ecclesiastical society overlapped as two dimensions of

a single order. The state as well as the church was a site for moralisa-

tion and the transformation of self-interest into communal identiﬁcation.

The state had moral ends, which were provided with transcendent author-

ity by the church. The church was to serve ideally as the ‘conscience’ of

the state, the subjectively internalised paternal authority that cemented the

bonds of brotherhood that shaped the nation. The state thus had a legit-

imate interest in sustaining a uniﬁed church and a uniﬁed doctrine. But

this church was fundamentally a national church; the historical reality of

633