Ars Publica

A Prelude to a Preface to Walter Ullmann

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In the middle of the summer of 2016, I was plowing through books on Marsilius of Padua (ca. A.D. 1275–ca. 1342) and the figures and the history leading up to him. One professor I spoke with suggested that I look into the history of Roman law –rather than to principles found in Benedictine monasticism— to explain some of the cultural features that would make sense out of some of the positions characteristic of Marsilius.

So I started to tear through books on Roman law. I read through Stein, and acquired many of the primary sources found in the end-of-chapter bibliographies; I bought Harries, and picked up Jolowicz. I began carefully to read my way through several sections of Justinian’s Institutes. Stein I was reading together with Canning, King, and Black, among others; in Canning’s and King’s works, in some of the choicest footnoted section, I kept running across references to a work titled Law and Politics in the Middle Ages by Walter Ullmann. Ullmann taught several of the members of Monty Python, Nederman wrote, and several ideas of his (again, so I was told) are expressed in their movies, and in their radio and TV shows — so he must be fascinating and entertaining! Ergo, I picked up a copy of Ullmann’s Law and Politics, and started reading through it.  Continue reading →

Excerpt #10 — Augustine on (What We Would Call) The State

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We have earlier summarized what is perhaps the best book in English on Augustine’s politics (may this excerpt illuminate what is found there, and vice versa), began a summary of Book 19 of his City of God (part one here; pingbacks at the bottom for all other current and future parts), and offered an excerpt of Peter Brown writing about Augustine’s understanding of the Libido Dominandi; here I offer one excellent quote to summarize Augustine’s political vision. Continue reading →

Excerpt #9 — Gregory the Great on the Ends of Political Power

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In order to write responsibly the Fifth and final entry in the series “The Flags of the Dead and the Promise of the Future”, I have been forced to return to a number of books I have not read in some time (e.g., the political and religious works of the magnificent John Locke), and many that I have not read ever (e.g., The Institutes of Gaius).

Some of both of these are by the late Walter Ullmann (d.1983), who is treated at length by any responsible historian of the Medieval period. Ullmann is known most chiefly for his thesis that there are two competing sources of political power in the Middle Ages, one from God to the king (who then delegates what power and authority he wishes to officers who have no right to it, and from whom the king can –so Ullmann says– recall it at a moment’s notice), another from the People; this model is largely concerned with the efficient causes of political power, rather than their end, their teleology.

One of Ullmann’s many appreciative critics, Joseph Canning, notes that, when the teleology of monarchical power in the Middle Ages is properly attended to, the whole profile of medieval models of kingly power changes from Ullmann’s sketch of exclusive and absolute willful authority –with the people having no right of resistance– to something else. The Late Antique figure of Gregory the Great (or Gregory I), Pope of Rome (ca. A.D.540–604), who was massively influential on the culture of the Middle Ages, wrote an early text, the Moralia in Job (or “Morals on the Book of Job”), composed and delivered to a group of like-minded ascetics in an initial form in 578, while Gregory was a deacon, a papal legate to the court of the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and completed years later, after Gregory had already become the Roman Pope. It is almost obscenely large, and I know of only one person who has attempted to read all of it through from cover to cover; it is also rather unanimously regarded as his magnum opus, and one section of it contains, as Canning suggests, a picture of royal power that is at odds with Ullmann’s thesis, and shows the proper ends of worldly power in general, shows that it had a strong teleological thrust. 

I here offer the one section of Gregory’s Moralia cited by Canning as relevant to Ullmann’s thesis, together with parts of the section leading into it, and the section following it, with no massive amounts of commentary for now beyond a few notes at the end.

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The Flags of the Dead and the Promise of the Future, Part 2 of 5

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Continued from Part One.
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The Flags of the Dead and the Promise of the Future, Part 1 of 5

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Among other component parts, the Modern world is irreversibly marked by the heritage of the Enlightenment; this Enlightenment strain inclines people and cultures to a very fraught relationship with the accumulated goods of their own history. What is the relationship between these accumulated goods, goods that have roots, as well as a people’s having roots, and the kind of forward-looking freedom and rationality that our Enlightenment inheritance champions and promises? I love the Liberal project, and I love my several heritages, but the two, it must be admitted, live in a kind of tension. 

It could be argued that part of the reason why America is a bastion of the Liberal project is because it is not located geographically in a place where ancestral identities call from the earth to stifle it;  even without this, we are not always clear about how to engage with, or remember, events that we all share, such as September 11. 

It saddens me that there are symptoms of people flirting with abandoning the Liberal project. Consumerist formation leaves us unfit to the task of negotiating a common identity that is not pre-packaged by others, certainly. More than this, the seeming escalation of terrorism (the most violent imposition of ancestral identity) and the amplification of xenophobia (the fear-driven in-group trend by which people huddle with some ethnos or heritage for comfort instead of negotiate shared identity) hammer at many Liberal polities at the moment. Quite alarmingly, some major figures have said that democracy is merely a train that one takes until one arrives at one’s destination, at which point one exits. The reader should find such comments frightening. Ergo, this post seemed to be warranted, for what little it’s worth.

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