Yoder’s Middle Ages

Despite his characterization of the medieval system as “Constantinian,” Yoder recognizes that “the risk of caricature is great,” and he offers this balanced assessment:

“the church in the Middle Ages retained a more than vestigial consciousness of its distinctness from the world. The higher level of morality asked of the clergy, the international character of the hierarchy, the visibility of the hierarchy in opposition to the princes, the gradual moral education of barbarians into monogamy and legality, foreign missions, apocalypticism and mysticism – all of these preserved an awareness, however distorted and polluted, of the strangeness of God’s people in a rebellious world.”

Among other things, this suggests that the clergy’s efforts to distinguish itself from the laity, however pernicious, was perhaps motivated by an entirely legitimate desire to maintain what O’Donovan calls a vis-a-vis over against political powers.