North & South at Roccasecca
Even when those closest to us are imprisoned by the ideas of secular power, let us remember that friendship is the substance of happiness and that true national unity comes from truth.
Philip J. Harold is Professor of Politics and Dean of the Constantin College of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas, and the author of Against Values: How to Talk About the Good in a Postliberal Era. Portions of this talk were given at the ruins of the castle of the Counts of Aquino in Roccasecca to students in the University of Dallas’s Rome Program in the summer of 2022.
America is in crisis. In part this is because we face a decision on the nature of our political order. Simply put: Are we a republic or an empire? Since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the United States has tried to be both a republic and a global hegemon, with an empire of nine hundred military bases abroad, domination of the world’s seas and skies, and the funding of endless wars across the globe.
The peace dividend at the end of the Cold War never materialized, our euphemistically-named defense spending found a new justification in the War on Terror, and now the bill for American empire is coming due. Congress and President Biden recently gave Ukraine $61 billion in aid in its war against Russia, even though we are currently adding $1 trillion worth to our national debt every one hundred days. Domestic support for aid to Ukraine and Israel — who got $26 billion as well — is falling, and the possibility of a de-dollarized world is emerging.
This time next year, the federal government will spend more financing the national debt than any other single item in its budget. Despite manifest abuses, Congress also recently reauthorized the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), ensuring that security state’s surveillance powers will continue to be trained on domestic political enemies. This too befits a society that exists for the sake of war, rather than the opposite.
America as a “dangerous nation,” as Robert Kagan put it, is only one aspect of our political tradition, however. We are attached to local control and checks on power. This runs deep in our political tradition. As Woodrow Wilson noted, the leaders of the American Revolution were “more interested in providing checks to government than in supplying it with energy and securing to it the necessary certainty and consistency of action.”
With power in the states divided between a multitude of elected officials responsible only to the voters and the courts, and not a superior officer, they are laws unto themselves rather than finding their place within a greater hierarchy. What Wilson wrote in 1908 of an attachment to the Whig tradition remains true today. For example, Texas voters for the first time are going to the polls to vote for property appraisal district board members, a portion of which have just been made elective.
We seem to face a choice between a republic and an empire, between being the “champion and vindicator” of our own freedom, and going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” in the words of John Quincy Adams.
This is a false dichotomy though. Focusing exclusively on our own freedom produces in the end its apparent opposite, the striving for imperial domination. To think of freedom apart from our relationships with others does not exempt us from the need for basic security — and putting other people in the box of one’s own desire inevitably receives exogenous shocks, which push us inexorably towards requiring conformity of others. Libertarian freedom ends in imperialism and totalitarianism.
Our choice must be made in the light of the good. What is good in the political realm is strong relationships with others, where citizens find their happiness in being together. Happiness is a common good. The label “happy” is most properly said of a polis and only derivatively applied to an individual.
We must set our sights on something more than our own freedom. How we relate to each other is what matters the most. We ought not try to fix our relationships with the aim of getting something else; rather, our relationship with others is the aim. Friendship is the substance of the common good. This applies to corporate bodies as well, up to and including the state. As the great philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand beautifully puts it, “nations are created for each other’s sake.” The idea of a state possessing sovereignty, having ultimate power in its own domain, while true, is not sufficient alone.
In facing the current crisis, it is helpful to return to the pre-modern era, to a different understanding of the political sphere than that of sovereign states at war with each other. In what follows we shall first consider the era of St. Thomas Aquinas, and then conclude with a reflection on a passage of his that concerns spiritual and secular power.
The High Middle Ages was an era of prosperity. The climate had warmed, agriculture was fruitful, and generally people were fed and healthy. Large cities and a merchant class emerged. Internal warfare was dramatically reduced (war at this time was more a matter of crusades against external enemies), and legal and institutional structures for governing were developed. Universities were founded and the beginning of modern scientific thought emerged. The struggles of a previous age were bearing fruit, namely the great revolution in law and politics made by Pope Gregory VII: the Hildebrand Reform, or the Gregorian Reform, of 1075-1122.
Thomas was as far removed from it as we are today from the Civil War or Italians are from the unification of Italy; it was therefore the settled political achievement of an earlier era. The Gregorian Reform was not some kind of gradual process, but a societal revolution that completely upended the socio-political order. The previous model for authority was Caesaropapist — where the king or emperor ruled the church. Priests could marry, which brought them within the clan and feudal structure.
Clergy were also dispersed locally and had few links to central church authorities. Kings and lords appointed them. Additionally, these secular leaders had religious functions. They were sacral figures. They had a thaumaturgic authority: a magical or miraculous element to their rule. They could make men holy by their anointing them. They had healing powers. The emperor was the supreme spiritual leader of all Europe.
This all changed with Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) and his propaganda campaign for “freedom of the church.” The church and not kings would choose priests, monks, and bishops. The Roman Cardinals would elect the pope. All Christians were to boycott priests who had a concubine or a wife, so priests had to choose between their families and their vocation. Emperors, kings, and lords no longer held thaumaturgic authority. They were not chosen directly by God to rule, answerable to God alone.
Rather, the pope was the supreme spiritual leader of all Europe, and the pope could depose kings and emperors. Gregory VII did just that to Emperor Henry IV, excommunicating and deposing him when Henry refused to acknowledge Gregory’s dictates. Henry journeyed as a humble penitent in January 1077 and had to wait three days in the snow to present himself to the pope and ask for pardon.
This was the legacy that was bequeathed from an earlier age to the thirteenth century. While popes struggled against emperors, the pope was not the king of Christendom. He did not rule with a sword. He taught what was right and true; he was a universal judge of what was sin. He could declare a monarch to be in mortal sin and in rebellion against God, excommunicating him, and thus wield enormous authority. The papacy was not a military force in its own right, but was wedded to the power of the Christian princes. Society had a decentralized structure.
Today we assume that rulers are not the heads of churches. However, this only emerged after the Gregorian Reform and the separation and freeing of the Church from the political rulers.
This society was localized, even as it was becoming more united. The pope was in a sense the most powerful man in Europe, yet at no point did he consolidate that power into an empire. Unity was to be found in faith, charity, justice, and truth. During two hundred years of crusading, the Pope called together immense armies, and they came together freely and fought together without an empire and without establishing one.
There was everything necessary for an empire — agriculture, literacy, a shared set of beliefs, advanced military technology, institutions spanning the whole civilization — yet an empire was not created. Christendom was an anti-empire. The highest office of the unity — the pope — was the least powerful in the sense of military might. The pope was the judge of the universal, of virtue and sin, and not a legislator of the particular, not a king of armies and of economies. The papacy and the power of the kings were fundamentally not in competition with each other.
St. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1224 in beautiful Roccasecca, near the county of Aquino. It is from this county that St. Thomas gets his surname, since one branch of the family had control over this county until 1137. His father Landolfo had nine children with his mother Theodora, four boys and five girls. Thomas was the youngest boy.
There were important political consequences to the location. Roccasecca is midway between Rome and Naples. Latium, the region of the Pope, was to the north, and Campania, belonging to the Kingdom of Sicily (the “Regno”) and the Emperor Frederick II, was to the south. Roccasecca lay on the border of these two regions, situated at the limits of the authority of the pope and the emperor. Both wanted control over the monastery of Monte Cassino, for example, which today is thirty minutes southeast by car. The castle where Thomas was born was originally built as part of the outer defenses of Monte Cassino 230 years prior.
Thomas’s family lived on the border between the authority of the emperor and the pope, and shifted their allegiance. St. Thomas was actually a second cousin to Emperor Frederick II through his mother, and Thomas’s father Landolfo initially supported him in 1210, becoming in 1220 the royal justiciar (an arbiter representing the king) in the large area between this castle and Naples. But Landolfo’s oldest son Aimo and second oldest son Rinaldo switched sides to the pope, and the emperor ended up putting Rinaldo to death.
Since Thomas was the youngest son, he was destined for the Church. He went to the monastery when he was 6 years old, learning to read and write there. He had to leave at age 14 or 15. Frederick II had captured Monte Cassino in early 1239 and expelled nearly all the monks. Thomas continued his studies at Emperor Frederick II’s new university in Naples, the first to be founded independently of papal authority. There he became acquainted with the Dominicans and probably with Aristotle’s natural philosophy. He decided five years later to become a Dominican.
This was not in the family’s plan for him, to be a beggar monk — he was supposed to become abbot of Monte Cassino, and thereby contribute to the family’s power. His mom tried to talk him out of it to no avail. She wrote to her sons, who were fighting for Emperor Frederick II. They captured him and brought him to the family’s castle in Roccasecca. The kidnappers included a very powerful counselor to the emperor, so Frederick II had probably personally agreed to the kidnapping. Thomas was only able to leave in the summer of 1245, having spent two years imprisoned by his family. He left with his mother’s tacit acceptance, by escaping from his window with a rope, like St. Paul in Damascus, or so the story goes.
After he was released, Thomas went to Paris for a couple of years, and then to Cologne to study with Albert the Great between 1248 and 1251. Frederick II was the son of Henry VI, the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor, and Cologne was politically the most anti-Hohenstaufen city in Europe. In his writings Aquinas supported the papal monarchy.
Ultimately Frederick II hounded Aquinas’ family, and they had to flee. There is evidence that Thomas was able to get the pope to raise church funds on their behalf. Therefore, looking north and south from Roccasecca, there are two different visions of political and social order.
To the North there was the pope. During the last century-and-a-half before Aquinas, the papacy rose in importance to become the leader of Christendom. The institutional church as we know it was built, with dioceses, parishes, religious orders, and lay organizations all united through the sacraments and canon law. The papacy became the last court of appeal for all Western Europe. There was a unity to Christendom, then, that transcended language, custom, and political organization.
To the South there was the first modern state and the first absolute monarchy in Western Europe. The area was invaded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in an unplanned and disorganized fashion by the Normans, who came to Italy as mercenaries, then established little fiefdoms. These were united in 1130 by Roger II of Sicily, to form the Kingdom of Sicily.
There was no dramatic turning point, nothing like William the Conqueror in England in 1066. But there was the same result. The Normans were administrative geniuses, and they formed the first modern state and the first absolute monarchy in Europe. The king was above the law. He was the chief priest in the kingdom. Roger II combined enlightened tolerance with terrible cruelty, razing rebellious cities and slaughtering all men, women, and children in them. For over a century the rulers of southern Italy were rich and powerful. Frederick, called the “immutator mundi” (transformer of the world) and “stupor mundi” (wonder of the world), ruled from 1208 to 1250.
Frederick was in one way a throwback to the medieval era before Pope Gregory VII. He never denied the Christian faith, but he was just going through the motions of Catholic practice, and he lusted after power and complete control of his realm. A ruthless tyrant who dominated the church, Frederick was a true heir of the Norman kings of Sicily. His codification of the law of Sicily, the Liber Augustalis (Augustan Book), reflected the concept of absolute monarchy derived from pre-Christian Rome. It presents the king as an “executor of Divine Providence,” and says that princes are “judges of life and death for mankind” having the power to “decide … how each man should have fortune, estate, and status.”
Pope Gregory IX condemned this codification, laws which “have renounced salvation and conjured up immeasurable ill.” The Pope also warned Frederick when he moved to attack northern Italian cities — whose liberties had been guaranteed by the Church for over a half century — but Frederick ignored him, attacked, and conquered them. Gregory IX, who had been a good friend of St. Francis of Assisi, saw Frederick II as championing the sovereign powers of the pre-Christian emperors. Five years before Frederick’s death, Pope Innocent IV declared him deposed. After his death, Innocent IV invited the French king to come to Italy and eliminated his son Manfred. The Kingdom of Sicily was dismembered and never fully recovered. Frederick and his successors were defeated on the battlefield, and the papacy had met and overcome an intense challenge.
Can St. Thomas tell us anything about our current crisis? We conclude with a passage from the Commentaries on the Sentences. Here, Aquinas navigates between “hierocracy” or theocracy (where the church is the ruling power) and Caesaropapism (where the king or emperor is the head of the church). He writes:
Spiritual power and secular power are both derived from divine power. And thus secular power is under spiritual power to the extent that it has been placed under it by God, namely, in matters pertaining to the salvation of souls. And thus in these matters spiritual power is more to be obeyed than secular power. But in what pertains to the civil good, secular power is more to be obeyed than spiritual power, according to the passage: render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's (Matt 22:21). Unless, perhaps, spiritual power also has secular power joined to it, as in the case of the pope, who holds the peak of both powers, spiritual and secular. And this is by the arrangement of him who is priest and king forever in the order of Melchizedek, King of kings and Lord of lords, whose power will not be taken away and whose kingdom will not be destroyed forever and ever. Amen.
Both secular power and spiritual power come from divine power, and therefore share an inner unity and harmony. Spiritual power aims at the salvation of souls, namely bringing them to friendship with God; secular power aims at the civil good, namely civic friendship. Since service to and friendship with God involves service to and friendship with one’s neighbor, these two powers work in tandem in different ways towards the same goal. We can have loyalty to both institutions, and follow the lead of both, as they do not come in competition with each other.
In addition, there is a greater unity to them both. This comes out in the figure of the pope. On the occasions where the pope does have secular power, it is power in a different mode. Unlike a hierocracy or theocracy, the pope does not aim at an empire nor rule like an emperor, but rather says what is right and true, cooperates with secular powers, calls on Christians to do their duty to God and to their civil leaders, and works to promote friendship between peoples.
A real, higher, yet non-imperial unity — if this is possible, the idea of sovereignty is at best incomplete. Taken seriously, the concept of sovereignty corresponds with the idea of a state of war between states and denies a higher unity between them unless there is an agglomeration of one into the other through the formation of an empire.
In our current crisis we would do well to remember the possibility of a non-imperial unity-in-diversity. We ought to cherish our political tradition of localism and checks on power. Our loyalty to each other, our city, state, and nation are all in harmony. Loyalties coexist and are not in competition with each other. Our rulers are not absolute, nor do they have thaumaturgic authority (pace those insisting we “follow the science”). Even when those closest to us are imprisoned by the ideas of secular power, as St. Thomas was at Roccasecca, let us remember that friendship is the substance of happiness and that true national unity comes from truth.
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