The Spirit vs the Letter: A Short History of the West
“I’m following the spirit of the law not the letter of the law.” This is a phrase you might use when making an excuse to dismiss rules you find inconvenient. However the tensions inherent in the spirit vs letter debate can be found at the heart of most of today’s political conflicts as well as many others throughout history. The current clash between conservatives and progressives can often be more accurately described as a spirit vs letter conflict. For example, US constitutional interpretation is often divided between originalists advocating strict adherence to the original intent of the text (usually conservatives) and living constitutionalists advocating a flexible interpretation that takes into account current circumstances and values (usually progressives).
The chart at the top of this post presents a brief history of the West using the prism of spirit vs letter. Much of the historical material in the chart was taken from Tom Holland’s excellent history of Christianity, Dominion. The spirit as I define the term is the authority of one’s own conscience. Its Greek formulation was “natural law” (a term that would take on an important meaning during the Enlightenment). The letter is the authority of the written word (meaning the authority of the Bible or Torah). In a broader sense it is the authority of tradition or as G. K. Chesterton said, “the democracy of the dead.” Its orientation is conservative. Between the spirit and the letter I’ve placed what I call the “authority of power.” By power I don’t necessarily mean only arbitrary or oppressive power. I mean the power that that tries to contain and mediate between the two extremes of spirit and letter, a centralized power that unites opposites and subdues rebellions.
Christ, Caesar, and the Authority of Power
My reading of the history of the West assumes that Jesus Christ was not a partisan of either spirit or letter, but rather a central mediator between the two. Tom Holland’s Dominion suggests that both Jesus Christ and Caesar Augustus were messianic figures that reformed and re-energized the central political establishment. They were redeemers not radicals. Caesar Augustus redeemed the Roman Republic from its self-destructive decline and created the Roman Empire. Augustus was called “the Son of God” by the poet Virgil and “the messiah” by others. There was a popular religious cult dedicated to his name. As for Jesus Christ, He ruled over “a kingdom not of this world.” As such, He had nothing subversive to say about Caesar’s authority over the kingdoms of this world. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” He said. This principle was repeated by the Apostle Paul who insisted that Caesar was in fact appointed by God to rule over Christians “for your good.” Christ would become the figure-head of the Holy Roman Empire after the Roman Empire collapsed. In an important sense the Holy Roman Empire is a continuation of the old Roman Empire, with Christ and Caesar as messianic partners in the history of the West.
Throughout the history of West people on both the spirit and letter sides of the debate have tried remove Christ from the central political hierarchy and turn Him into a partisan of either spirit or letter. It is true that in the gospel record Christ stands against the letter of the Jewish law. But within the broader culture of the Roman Empire Christ was a political moderate. It wouldn’t be until the Reformation that Christ would be taken down from the central hierarchy of Rome and co-opted by religious partisans.
Corinthians vs Galatians
My chart begins with the Apostle Paul who used the spirit vs letter formulation in epistles he wrote to two groups of Christian converts. The first group, the Corinthians, were cultural Greeks indulging in “Christian liberty” or rather libertinism. Their view was that Christ had done away with the Jewish law and therefore they were free to do whatever they wanted. The second group, the Galatians, were converts from a more god-fearing Jewish culture. They believed Christians must continue to obey the letter of the old Jewish law. Paul tried to create a bridge between the two groups. He claimed that even though Christ had done away with the old Jewish law that didn’t mean Christians could do whatever they wanted. Paul gave these Christians some new guidelines. These guidelines were not exactly “laws” and they were less onerous than the old Jewish law, but it was still “expedient” that they be obeyed. Effectively, Paul commanded these Christians to follow the new guidelines under his authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul’s claim to have Christ’s authority was essential for him to be able to bridge the two extremes and keep them together in one church. This archetypal arrangement would become a repeating pattern throughout the history of the Christianity as it struggled to contain perennial bouts of spiritual and textual radicalism.
The Early Christian Church
The early Christian church was a hodgepodge of diverse groups ranging from spiritual gnostics to letter-of-the-law Ebionites. Church fathers like St. Irenaus and St. Augustine used their writings to marginalize extremists and create a central orthodoxy. In 312 CE Constantine became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. His presence at the Council of Nicaea helped make it an enduring foundation on which to build the church.
As the church grew it took a more tolerant approach to letter and spirit extremists. Radicals were invited to form monastic communities. As long as these “spiritual athletes” refrained from criticizing the central leadership of the church they were free to be as extreme as they wanted to be. Saints emerged from this monastic tradition which provided spiritual inspiration to the laity and moral accountability to the clergy. Other monastics went off to convert the barbarians. As long as their missionary zeal was tempered by political pragmatism, things held together. Deals were cut with the baptized barbarian warlords and Charlemagne became the Emperor of a newly branded Holy Roman Empire.
The Holy Roman Empire
The new Holy Roman Empire was soon mired in corruption. During a 10th century period provocatively titled “The Rule of Harlots” there was widespread condemnation of the clergy from the monastic wing of the church. A radical named Gregory VII ascended to the papacy in 1073 and instituted broad reforms that came to be called Reformatio. These reforms were later codified into a legal system called canon law which included innovations like “equal justice for all.” The reforms made the church a more effective political force in Europe. Kings relied on the blessing of the Pope for their own legitimacy. Literate clerics and jurists from the church became essential to governments throughout Europe.
The reintroduction of Aristotle created a new rational spirit which was fused with Christian mysticism giving rise to modernitas, the Gothic age. It was a high point for the church. The conservative textual rigor of reformatio provided a solid foundation upon which the rational mysticism of modernitas could flourish. Reformatio also created a new elite now in danger of further revolutions. The church began sponsoring inquisitions against heretics. Thomas Aquinas helped to quell the anti-heretical hysteria by pointing out that light and truth could be present even in pagan and heretical works.
The church eventually succumbed to another long period of political corruption. During the 15th century’s Great Schism, the church had no less than three Popes, each one supported by different political factions around Europe. This inflamed opposition to the church from proto-protestants John Wycliff and Jan Huss. After a series of Hussite wars, moderate factions within the movement made peace with the church. But the groundwork had been laid for the reformation.
The Reformation and the Divine Right of Kings
In 1517 Martin Luther published his famous “95 theses,” a radical critique of the church. Copies of this critique spread like wildfire due to the newly invented printing press. Europe was soon divided between Catholics and Protestants and embroiled in religious wars. Luther and other reformers rejected ecclesiastical hierarchy and took their own authority directly from the text of the newly translated Bible, using their conscience to interpret it.
The vacuum of central religious authority was filled by freshly empowered empires and monarchies claiming “the divine right of kings.” Even in Catholic countries kings were amassing powers unfettered by any serious Catholic oversight. Author Rodney Stark notes that the Reformation only took hold in places where the Catholic church had a lot of political control, countries like Germany and England. The ruling classes in these areas saw an opportunity to expand their power by becoming Protestant and throwing off the political yoke of the Catholic church. Conversely, rulers in countries like France and Spain didn’t see the need for a reformation because the Catholic church’s political presence was already in decline. So both Catholics and Protestants found themselves in a new era of state power devoid of any ecclesiastical checks and balances. The Holy Roman Empire was effectively over. After the Reformation, the Catholic church had its own counter-reformation and became just another big church in a new Europe dominated by state power.
Four Revolutions
Not everyone was happy with the new power structure. Partisans of both the spirit and the letter thought society should be redrawn according to their own radical visions, not the whims of kings and electors. There were to be four major revolutions challenging the new world order.
The first of these revolutions, the English Civil War, overthrew the entire British political system (including beheading king Charles I) in favor of a theocracy based on Old Testament law. But the British hated the new theocracy and decided to bring Charles II back from exile in France, albeit with his kingly authorities somewhat reduced. His line ended in a Parliamentary coup called the Glorious Revolution which replaced the Stewart line with the Dutch king William of Orange, who was given even less power relative to Parliament. The power of the king was further depleted after William’s death when Parliament decided to bring in George I from Germany to rule Britain. The divine right of kings was over. With its three branches of government (king, parliament, and judiciary), its powerful navy, and wealthy merchant class, Britain was starting to looking like it might become an enduring successor to the Roman Empire in the West were it not for some clever statesmen across the Atlantic who had different ideas.
The American Revolution was not a revolution in the Communist or French sense of the term. It was more like “Britain 2.0.” Inspired by English innovations in the post-civil war period, the United States created a similar political system with three branches of government, democratic representation (a New England innovation), plenty of land to colonize, and new “rights” (inspired by the European Enlightenment). The war itself had been fought by angry colonists from the spirit and letter traditions (New England communitarians and Presbyterian individualists). But the war had been managed by centrist elites: country gentlemen from Virginia without utopian or religious delusions. This pragmatic government would grow to become the center of global rule, the true inheritor of the power of both the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
If the English Civil War was a revolution of the letter, the French Revolution was a revolution of the spirit. Birthed by utopian Enlightenment philosophers who had divorced themselves from any religious or textual authority, the French Revolution quickly spun out of control. Soon the French were appealing to the authority of emperors to restore their country. But even as France was overrun by successive imperial waves, the spirit of the revolution remained: “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” The idea that these rights should be universal percolated through Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually giving birth to today’s International Law.
New World Order
The world emerging from these four revolutions would grow to become our modern neoliberal world order. But not before facing challenges from Communists and Fascists. These ideologies arose due to the collapse of central religious authority. Religion itself is “totalitarian” in the sense that it provides a total cosmic narrative, but one that projects its dreams of perfection onto a “kingdom not of this world.” Thus religion provides and important immunization against utopianism by keeping utopia safely tucked away in heaven. With central religious authority gone, mankind’s dreams of perfection became the nightmares of reality. After two world wars, it’s unclear whether we’ve learned our lesson. Will the current neoliberal regime be strong enough to contain the perennial radicalism of spirit vs letter and channel it into renewal without being overthrown in revolution as the Catholic church did in the Gothic age? Time will tell. But the failure of the center to create a compelling religious narrative upon which to build its authority may lead to its downfall.