The Protestant Solution
Party, Sect, and Machiavelli’s Transpolitical Problem
If you were a Protestant in the seventeenth century, there was at least one Machiavelli book that you really liked. The reception of old Nick is remarkably stable insofar as it has, for five centuries, always been mixed. As today, some early modern Protestants found The Prince penetrating and the Discourses on Livy useful.
Thomas Jackson (1579-1640), the president of Corpus Christi, Oxford, cites “Machiavel” dozens of times and interacts at length with several of Machiavelli’s texts in his Treatise of the divine essence and attributes, though he qualifies that the man “deserves no favour himself.” (As I’ve written before, Machiavelli was always accused of atheism, just not in the way we assume today.) Jackson complained that Machiavelli, who was never so much false as imperfect, was not straightforward in what he meant by “fates” or “fortune.” Indeed, it could be that the Florentine did “acknowledgeth no general providence at all.” At the same time, Jackson’s nascent Arminianism made him uncomfortable with the rigidity of Machiavelli’s doctrine of providence.
It was nevertheless obvious to Jackson that the “attributes which he gives to Fate or Fortune, cannot belong to any power in heaven or earth, save onely to the onely wise invisible GOD.” Reading Machiavelli is actually a doxological exercise.
“Whatsoever effect these observations wrought in Machiavel; the perusall of them will lift up the Christian Readers heart to sing with Daniel: Blessed bee the name of God for ever and ever, for wisedome and might are his. Hee changeth the times and seasons, he giveth wisdome unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding.”
Others, as today, found Machiavelli impious and unworthy of such engagement. But, again, most everyone liked the Florentine Histories mainly because the book, albeit addressed to a Giulio de’Medici (Clement VII), outlined (if understandably subtly) how Rome had snatched power from the princes of Christendom. More than that, the Histories showed how the papacy operated.
Curiously, as many a reader has noticed, Machiavelli’s history of his city does not begin with any real discussion of Florence at all. It starts with the familiar story of Rome. Overthrown by barbarians, the empire descended into chaos, and in the midst of this chaos, the Christian faith replaced the old gods. Machiavelli considers Christianity a fundamentally populist religion, but over time, the popes, who had initially gained reputation through piety and asceticism, rose to power.
Before the Lombards, and certainly before Charlemagne, pontiffs were subject in secular matters to secular authorities. With Theodoric, king of Ravenna, this began to change as the western patriarchs sought champions to free them from both Eastern and Lombardian control. In Machiavelli’s estimation, the ceaseless wars of the peninsula were largely instigated by papal summons from one lord or another, or even from foreign powers, for help. The account of Charlemagne’s intervention is somewhat wooden in the Histories, but the result is correctly identified. Rome had found a defender and, more importantly, an imperial alternative to the East.
The rest is history, history told and retold throughout the late medieval and early modern periods. It is found in Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, William of Ockham, Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, John Calvin, and seemingly every notable Protestant thereafter. Incrementally and shrewdly, the papacy amassed power to bind and loose all things on earth, including kingdoms and kingships. Though always with a degree of separation—indirectly—popes exercised temporal power through jurisdiction over spiritual causes. Suarez went to great lengths to nuance this power but in the end all his distinctions lack difference. Emperors and kings were subjugated through papal censures and decrees as the quintessential example of the Investiture controversy of 1076 illustrates.
When Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, continued to appoint (“invest”) bishops according to custom but over and against the objections Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand), it was more than spiritual censure that came his way. For a king or emperor, excommunication was not just excommunication. Gregory had already asserted exclusive right to depose secular rulers, and he released all Henry’s subjects from their oaths and fealty. As Protestants would later complain, Rome’s censures were never merely spiritual. Everyone knew that the excommunication of kings diminished the reputation and rule of the same, invited insurrection, and encouraged jealous nobles to seize power. (This is part of why Richard Baxter later advised against it.) Whether popes could actually depose kings or not was no small matter. Spiritual censures could be used as de facto depositions. No papal army necessary.
As Henry’s rule began to crumble, he famously journeyed to Canossa, where the pope was wintering, to grovel. After three days of standing barefoot in a blizzard outside the castle walls, Henry was restored. Even with the excommunication lifted, however, German nobles had already ignited revolt and demanded revocation of the hereditary succession of the Salian dynasty. The next German king and Roman emperor would be elected. Pope Gregory blessed the arrangement, ostensibly for the sake of peace. When Henry rejected the proposal, he was swiftly excommunicated again. A council of German bishops elected an antipope, Clement III, as Henry made war in northern Italy.
Eventually, Henry would conquer Rome itself and, with the support of newly friendly cardinals, install Clement as pope. Gregory then allied himself with the Normans and pushed Henry back. A new pope, Victor III, was elected, who died rather quickly, which led to the ten-year reign of Urban II, who launched the First Crusade. The investiture controversy between Rome and Germany would rage on until around 1122 (Concordat of Worms).
What this episode demonstrated to all of Europe was that kings, even emperors, were weak. By censuring rulers, the papacy could subvert and even overthrow kingdoms. In Boniface VIII and Innocent III, papal power reached its zenith. By the early sixteenth century, Leo X was already in a demonstrably weaker position than his predecessors, even as he reasserted the dogma of Unam Sanctum.
What Machiavelli understood, perhaps better than anyone else, is how and why all this was politically possible for the papacy, and it explains his criticism of the “Christian sect” of his day.
If you’ve read The Prince or the Discourses, you know that Machiavelli repeatedly returns to the question of whether and how to use mercenaries (“foreign arms”). Related is his treatment of the unarmed prophet. Savonarola is his example. The would-be reformer of Florence failed because he was dependent solely on the strength and endurance of belief. He had no means to force his followers to believe (or behave) once their confidence or enthusiasm had waned. This is a problem if you are trying to take over, secure, and rule a city. Typically, you need guns.
There are exceptions that prove the rule, however. Moses established new modes and orders, but he had an army. Christ, on the other hand, had no army. Propaganda (lit. propagation) is the weapon of the unarmed prophet. By this, he means he can acquire foreign arms and conquer and rule indirectly. Through Constantine and Theodosius, Christianity acquired arms not native to it.
Now, if you know your Leo Strauss, then you know that Machiavelli himself is the unarmed prophet; he is also the prince (and not the prince). In any case, there is a problem with the way the indirect rule of Roman Christianity operated. The means as such is not the problem for Machiavelli, clearly. He endeavored to do the same.
The papacy perfected the mode and method of the unarmed prophet. By spiritual power, it was able to deal worldly wounds. Through censures, popes wielded arms if “at a distance” or indirectly. As Harvey Mansfield described it, “He [the pope] must work on princes through their peoples; he does not confront them as the prince of his own people.” The Crusades are the most obvious examples of papal use of foreign arms. More regular was the dictation of papal policy to Christian kingdoms. If you played Medieval Total War, you understand how this works. An advisable strategy is to send a priest to the cities of adversaries prior to invasion to stir up discontent through proselytizing. If you’re lucky, the cities will descend into chaos and rebellion and may even overthrow the government before your armies arrive.
Another illustrative example of this is the case of the Cathars in Occitania in the early thirteenth century. When Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse—himself not a Cathar—refused to obey papal demands that Cathars be cleansed from the region, he was excommunicated, his land interdicted, and his subjects released from obedience. Toulouse was then invaded and conquered by another, though Raymond, following exile in England, was able to regain much of his territory. Even in 1998, John Paul II denied the request of the mayor of Toulouse to lift Raymond VI’s excommunication. The power of spiritual sanction and indirect rule remains.
Again, indirect rule by foreign arms is, in itself, not the problem. The problem is found in the effect of the particular case. Machiavelli blames the papacy in multiple places for destabilizing Italy. It was endemic to the papal mode of rule, combined with papal status as otherworldly. “These alone have states, and do not defend them; they have subjects, and do not govern them; and the states, though undefended, are not taken from them; the subjects, though ungoverned, do not care, and they neither think of becoming estranged from such princes nor can they.”
The problem for Christendom is not indirect rule as such; it is the universality, the transpolitical claims of the papacy, for which indirect rule is employed. In this sense, Roman Christianity made politics impossible. Machiavelli is well known for his proto-Nietzschean critique of the weakness of Christianity, albeit the former’s critique is perhaps more misunderstood than the latter’s. But here we identify the more pressing issue.
Political societies, states, are predicated on the common good. But the common good must be particularized and concrete. It cannot remain universal and ethereal. In other words, the basic requirement for any state is a distinction between natives and foreigners. Competition between states assumes this, but so too does the good of any state require it. Bluntly, the common good of one political society is often maintained at the expense of another political society. Even if competition is not the case or the root cause, princes must know who their people are, who they are to care for and benefit. Citizenship, you might say, is the fundamental question of political society. Where the distinction between natives and foreigners is eroded, political life is impossible.
The universality of the Roman Church, not merely in doctrine but in fact, “does not observe this distinction,” summarizes Mansfield, “but the effectual truth of its internationalism is subservience to foreigners.” This is both figuratively and literally. The papacy’s spiritual power was foreign to secular rulers, but it also employed the arms of other competing kingdoms against one another. The deposition of princes was an invitation to neighbors to invade; internal crusades were of a similar nature. Under this universal, global management, the distinction between peoples was eroded, if not culturally then politically. Every nation in Christendom became a colony of Rome. Christian princes knew that, at bottom, his people and land were not his own but the pope’s.
The populism of Christianity, the rise of a temporal papacy notwithstanding, facilitated this, according to Machiavelli. The people, the aristocracies, were the foreign arms weaponized against Christian princes in their own territories. Said princes could not resist the otherworldly nature of papal power because of the insulation of indirect rule. Popes, though they lived as princes, were not princes, so they did not approach princes in kind.
To make war on the papacy, in these conditions, was to make war on Christendom itself, even your own people. The brilliance of papal universality was that it was governed with foreign arms and, simultaneously, removed the native arms of any princely opponent. What emerged was transnational, ideological party politics—the Guelfs and Ghibellines—rather than domestic, territorial politics. To Machiavelli, this precluded any chance to pursue the real common good of real people in real time and space. That is, the political dynamics of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were such that no real domestic regime was possible because the distinction between domestic (native) and foreign affairs had, in effect, been obliterated. Even princes themselves could no longer see it. Relations between countries were largely conditioned by their relation to Rome rather than solely by the distinction between native and foreigner. All honors were spiritual rather than material, or rather, all material honors—the things necessary for princes to be princes—were channeled through spiritual honors. Aside from this, the fact that an “ecclesiastical principality” was in the mix—a state that is not a state—confused everything, especially in Italy.
Mansfield mistakenly sees this problem as endemic to Christianity as such and, therefore, incapable of solution even by a Protestant “rearrangement of the sacerdotal hierarchy.” This mistakes what Protestantism proposed and achieved. The problem with Roman Christianity was not an invisible universality but a visible one—the insistence on temporal, institutional correspondence to spiritual, eternal unity.
This informed the hierarchical confusion of worldly institutions. The spiritual is, indeed, universal and of higher dignity than the temporal. But it does not therefore follow that the visible, temporal, ecclesiastical institution is higher in earthly authority than the secular institution. In other words, the invisible hierarchy does not yield a visible one. Protestantism is the restoration of proper visible order.
Nevertheless, if Mansfield doesn’t quite imply these points, he cedes that Protestantism rearranged the hierarchy. Princes, no longer subjugated to popes or prelates, were restored to their proper purview over the religious policy of their jurisdiction. In secular things, clergy were subject to secular authority; exemptions were removed. Rearranging the chairs on the deck would matter little—some but not enough—if the second maneuver had been absent, viz., the development of national churches. That is, the boundaries and jurisdiction of both worldly institutions, church and state, would coincide and, ultimately, sit under one worldly head. Invisible and visible cannot correspond, but visible and visible must.
Indeed, as Richard Baxter (not a Machiavelli respecter) explained, while princes had been confined strictly to their dominions, the Roman church had laid claim to the “whole world,” insisting that one world needed one spiritual sovereign. This was always impossible in fact and theory, said Baxter. There should be myriad churches corresponding to myriad states.
The Two Kingdoms doctrine corresponds to the invisible and visible. In the temporal, visible realm in which the institutional church exists, there is only one kingdom, not two, and these are distributed across as many real-world kingdoms as the earth contains. In each, the prince or king is head of the clergy just as he is head of his other subjects, and head of the church just as he is head of other institutions.
Baxter, like other Protestants, thought of Moses more as prince than priest or prophet. And it was Moses, more than Aaron, who “was more the mediator between God, as legislator, and the People.” None of this is to confuse roles or distribution of labor. A prince is not a priest, nor is he a physician, but a prince does oversee these other professions. So on and so forth. I have covered all this several times before. Needless to say, lay investiture was no longer a problem in post-Reformation England, and Roman censures were nullified. Cuius regio, eius religio policy changed everything.
Our point here is that the introduction of national limitation to ecclesiastical institutions and the elevation of princes to purview over religious policy answers the Machiavellian problem of transpolitical universalism. As Baxter said, there should be no distinction between a Christian kingdom and a national church; the membership is the same. In this way, church and state claims coincide, neither extends beyond the other, and neither is universal.
Here, under Protestantism, the distinction between native and foreigner is no longer muddied by the church. Indeed, the church reinforces the distinction by a more natural earthly manifestation. Here, expression of Christianity corresponds to the boundaries of human nature, of political existence. The universal claims of Christianity are particularized and politicized. And in the Protestant vision, there is no longer dual sovereignty competing in every realm; there is no longer a special populist appeal available to foreign powers; there is no longer the threat of external indirect rule. You could argue, of course, that though the transpolitical universality of the papacy was neutralized, at least in Protestant states, the problem of ideological parties (rather than domestic) remained. If there was now a Protestant and a Catholic interest competing in Europe, then politics, or at least diplomacy, remained ideological rather than truly domestic. Mansfield would insist too that the problem of indirect rule, which Machiavelli pioneered for modernity, was reincarnated as western democracies.
Granting all this arguendo, we still must recognize that the manifestation of the transpolitical universality in Machiavelli’s day was solved by Protestantism. If the distinction between native and foreigner has reemerged, it is not because of Protestantism qua Protestantism. But now we have led ourselves into what is, perhaps, a vicious cycle. If the modern West, England and America in particular, has been formed by Protestantism, and if the native-foreigner distinction has again been eroded, and domestic politics rendered impossible (again) by transnational, transpolitical ideological universality, then perhaps only Protestantism is to blame. It may be bastardized Protestantism, a Protestantism injected with foreign pathogens, a Protestantism duped by the propaganda of unarmed prophets, but it is, politically speaking, Protestantism, nonetheless. And yet, it is only Protestantism that has a track record—indeed, its genesis—of solving this problem.
Image: Henry at Canossa, John Foxe (1583). Wikimedia Commons.