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CF 3333 Clash of Cultures

The Corporatism of the Middle Ages

Thomas’s conception of social and political life falls directly into his larger plan of nature as a whole, and the most important passages in which he treated the subject were a part of his great systematic work on philosophy and theology. Like all nature society is a system in which the lower serves the higher and the higher directs and guides the lower. Following Aristotle, Thomas described society as a mutual exchange of services for the sake of a good life to which many callings contribute, the farmer and the artisan by supplying material goods, the priest by prayer and religious observance, and each class by doing its own proper work. The common good requires that such a system shall have a ruling part, just as the soul rules the body or any higher nature rules the lower. Thomas compares the founding and ruling of states, the planning of cities, the building of castles, the establishment of markets, and the fostering of education to the providence whereby God creates and rules the world.

Hence rulership is an office or a trust for the whole community. Like his lowest subject, the ruler is justified in all that he does solely because he contributes to the common good. His power, because it is derived from God for the happy ordering of human life, is a ministry of service owed to the community of which he is the head. He cannot rightfully exercise power or take property by taxation beyond what is needed. The moral purpose of government is therefore paramount.

George Sabine, A History of Political Thought, 1961, p. 249

The royal coronation ceremony itself goes back, as has been seen, to Carolingian times; the coronation oaths early accept a wide responsibility. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Aethelred the Redeless in the tenth century took the following oath, though he failed to live up to it:

In the name of the Holy Trinity, three things do I promise to the Christian people my subjects: first, that God’s Church and all the Christian people of my realm hold true peace; secondly, that I forbid all rapine and injustice to all men under all conditions; thirdly, that I promise and enjoin justice and mercy in all judgements, that the just and merciful God of his everlasting mercy may forgive us all.

"The oath of Aethelred," says Maitland, "may be taken as the model of the oaths worn by king after king in the days after the Conquest…the oath of Henry I seems to have been precisely that of Athelred."

Later oaths are more elaborate; all assume a sacred trust. The king is to maintain justice and do right. By the fourteenth century Edward II of England promises to "hold and keep the laws and righteous customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen, and to defend and strengthen them to the honour of God."

John Bowle, Western Political Thought, 1961, p. 182

While the Universal Church was concerned with the individual soul, the medieval community was based on classes and ranks, within a limited and local order, feudal or municipal. The unattached individual during the Middle Ages was one condemned either to excommunication or to exile: close to death. To exist one had to belong to an association – a household, manor, monastery, or guild. There was no security except through group protection and no freedom that did not recognize the constant obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the identifiable style of one’s class and one’s corporation.

Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961, p. 269