The Rise of the Modern State
The Papal Revolution gave birth to the modern Western state -- the first example of which, paradoxically, was the church itself.
As Maitland said a century ago, it is impossible to frame any acceptable definition of the state which would not include the medieval church.
By that he meant the church after Pope Gregory VII, since before his reign the church had been merged with the secular society and had lacked the concepts of sovereignty and of independent lawmaking power which are fundamental to modern statehood. After Gregory VII, however, the church took on most of the distinctive characteristics of the modern state. It claimed to be an independent, hierarchical, public authority. Its head, the pope, had the right to legislate, and in fact Pope Gregory's successors issued a steady stream of new laws, sometimes by their own authority, sometimes with the aid of church councils summoned by them. The church also executed its laws through an administrative hierarchy, through which the pope ruled as a modern sovereign rules through his or her representatives. Further, the church interpreted its laws, and applied them, through a judicial hierarchy culminating in the papal curia in Rome. Thus the church exercised the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers of a modern state. In adÂ-113- dition, it adhered to a rational system of jurisprudence, the canon law. It imposed taxes on its subjects in the form of tithes and other levies. Through baptismal and death certificates it kept what
was in effect a kind of civil register. Baptism conferred a kind of citizenship, which was further maintained by the requirement_________ formalized in 1215_________________________ that every Christian confess his or her
sins and take Holy Communion at least once a year at Easter. One could be deprived of citizenship, in effect, by excommunication.
Occasionally, the church even raised armies.Yet it is a paradox to call the church a modern state, since the principal feature by which the modern state is distinguished from the ancient state, as well as from the Germanic or Frankish state, is its secular character. The ancient state and the Germanic-Frankish state were religious states, in which the supreme political ruler was also responsible for maintaining the religious dogmas as well as the religious rites and was often himself considered to be a divine or semidivine figure. The elimination of the religious function and character of the supreme political authority was one of the principal objectives of the Papal Revolution. Thereafter, emperors and kings were considered -- by those who followed Roman Catholic doctrine -- to be laymen, and hence wholly without competence in spiritual matters. According to papal theory, only the clergy, headed by the pope, had competence in spiritual matters. Nevertheless, for several reasons this was not a "separation of church and state" in the modern sense.
First, the state in the full modern sense-that is, the secular state existing in a system of secular states -Âhad not yet come into being, although a few countries (especially the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and Norman England) were beginning to create modern political and legal institutions. Instead, there were various types of secular power, including feudal lordships and autonomous municipal governments as well as emerging national territorial states, and their interrelationships were strongly affected by the fact that all of their members, including their rulers, were also subject in many respects to an overarching ecclesiastical state.
Second, although emperor, kings, and other lay rulers were deprived of their ecclesiastical authority, they nevertheless continued to play a very important part -- through the dual system of investiture -- in the appointment of bishops, abbots, and other clerics and, indeed, in church politics generally.
And conversely, members of the clergy continued to play an important part in secular politics, serving as advisers to secular rulers and also often as high secular officials. The Chancellor of England, for example, who was second in importance to the King, was virtually always a high ecclesiastic -- often the Archbishop of Canterbury or of York-until the sixteenth century.Third, the church retained important secular powers. Bishops con- 114- tinued to be lords of their feudal vassals and serfs and to be managers of their estates. Beyond that, the papacy asserted its power to influence secular politics in all countries; indeed, the pope claimed the supremacy of the spiritual sword over the temporal, although he only claimed to exercise temporal supremacy indirectly, chiefly through secular rulers. 36_
Thus the statement that the church was the first modern Western state must be qualified. The Papal Revolution did lay the foundation for the subsequent emergence of the modern secular state by withdrawing from emperors and kings the spiritual competence which they had previously exercised. Moreover, when the secular state did emerge, it had a constitution similar to that of the papal churchÂminus, however, the church's spiritual function as a community of souls concerned with eternal life. The church had the paradoxical character of a church-state, a Kirchenstaat: it was a spiritual community which also exercised temporal functions and whose constitution was in the form of a modern state. The secular state, on the other hand, had the paradoxical character of a state without ecclesiastical functions, a secular polity, all of whose subjects also constituted a spiritual community living under a separate spiritual authority.
Thus the Papal Revolution left a legacy of tensions between secular and spiritual values within the church, within the state, and within a society that was neither wholly church nor wholly state. It also, however, left a legacy of governmental and legal institutions, both ecclesiastical and secular, for resolving the tensions and maintaining an equilibrium throughout the system.