Cathopolitics

Figgis notes that all the great questions of political theory from the late middle ages to Locke and beyond were first formulated with reference to the church: “Whatever we may think now, there is no doubt that such words as king, republic, aristocracy, and the maxims of the civil law, were then regarded as applicable to the concerns and constitution of the Church.” Comparison of Locke to Gerson shows “how great is the debt of the politicians to the ecclesiastics.”

One of they key contributions of the conciliarist debates was the universalization of political theory: “The arguments fro constitutional government were stripped of all elements of that provincialism, which might have clung to them for long, had they been concerned only with the internal arrangements of the national State. The theory of a mixed or limited monarchy was set forth in a way which enabled it to become classical.”

The shift with modern political theory, of course, is the abstraction of this universal theory of politics from any actual catholic political body. Modern political thought is left with the tension between universal ideal theories and the actual traditions and structures of particular nations. By what alchemy of abstraction does an argument for the supremacy of the Council over the Pope in the catholic church become a general argument for constitutionalism?