The Fracture of Symphonia- From Saxon–Norman Synthesis to the Papal Imperium and the Modern War of Authorities

I. Prologue — The Lost Harmony

Core Argument:

The pre-modern Christian world understood creation as an ordered totality — a cosmos, not a chaos. In this vision, Church and State were not competitors for power but partners in order: two distinct ministries serving the one divine Logos. The early Church Fathers articulated a model of governance as a synergistic harmony between altar and throne, each within its proper sphere but cooperating for the salvation of mankind:

• Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century), extolling Emperor Constantine’s reign, saw the Christian emperor as an icon of divine rule. In his Oration in Praise of Constantine, Eusebius declares that Christ, the Word of God, has entrusted a “transcript of the Divine sovereignty” to the emperor, who “in imitation of God himself, directs the administration of this world’s affairs” . The empire was thus an image of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, with the emperor as God’s vicegerent.
  
• St. Ambrose of Milan (4th century) insisted that the imperial office and the Church must work in concord, yet with the spiritual authority superior in divine matters. “The emperor is within the Church, not above the Church,” Ambrose famously taught , meaning that even the Christian emperor submits his soul to the Church’s care. Ambrose’s confrontation with Emperor Theodosius – whom he barred from communion after a massacre until the emperor did penance – set the paradigm that secular rulers must govern morally, under spiritual accountability.
  
• St. John Chrysostom (4th–5th century), as Patriarch of Constantinople, likewise envisioned a “commonwealth” of church and empire. In his writings, Chrysostom contrasted the heavenly power of the priesthood with the earthly power of kings, yet praised Christian emperors who used their office to defend truth and nurture the Church. He gave sanctuary to victims of imperial injustice and reminded the powerful that nothing is stronger than the Church; even kings lay aside their crowns before the altar . For Chrysostom, the priestly and royal offices were complementary gifts of God for the order of society.
  

In the Byzantine East, this vision flowered into the doctrine of symphonia (Greek: συμφωνία, “harmony”). Under Emperor St. Justinian the Great (6th century), the principle was codified in imperial law. Justinian’s Novella 6 proclaims that “the priesthood and the Empire are the two greatest gifts which God, in His infinite clemency, has bestowed upon mortals; the former ministers to divine matters, the latter presides over human affairs, and both, proceeding from the same principle, adorn the life of mankind” . The law continues: “If the priesthood is everywhere free from blame, and the Empire full of confidence in God and administered equitably, general good will result for mankind” . This is not a “separation of powers” in the modern sense, but a concord of powers. Church and State are like two choirs singing in harmony under one conductor – Christ the Logos.

Justinian’s ideal of symphonia presupposed that each power remains distinct yet cooperative: the clergy focused on “divine things” and prayer for all, the emperor focused on just governance of earthly affairs . The emperor took seriously his duty to uphold orthodoxy and justice, while the bishops took seriously their duty to counsel and, if needed, rebuke rulers for the good of their souls. Both “proceed from the same principle” – God’s providence – and work in concert for the well-being of the world . The emperor’s legitimacy was sacramental: he received his crown in church, blessed by the high priest, symbolizing that his authority flowed from Christ. The priest’s authority was incarnational: in dispensing sacraments and teaching truth, he wielded not his own power but the power of Christ’s presence. In this cosmic order, there was no rivalry of principle between throne and altar, because Truth was one.

Epistemological Backdrop:

Underlying this classical Christian polity was an analogical worldview. Reality was seen as a hierarchy of being, each level reflecting the one above. Earthly institutions were images (icons) of heavenly realities. Authority was understood not as a mere human convention or a contest of wills, but as a participation in divine order. As St. Paul taught, “there is no authority except from God” (Romans 13:1) – a statement the Fathers took seriously. Government, when just, partook of God’s own justice; the Church, when holy, manifested God’s own holiness.

This analogical epistemology meant that kingship itself was modeled on the kingship of God. When a Christian ruler was anointed with holy oil at coronation – following the biblical tradition of David and Solomon – it signified the Holy Spirit’s empowerment for a ministry of justice. The chronicles describe medieval coronations in explicitly liturgical terms. At the coronation of an English king, for example, the Archbishop would crown the monarch while intoning Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon king , linking the moment to Scripture and divine sanction. The king swore an oath before God to uphold the Church and rule righteously, and the people swore loyalty, invoking God as witness . Breaking such oaths was not just a political crime but a sin that imperiled one’s soul . In short, political authority was covenantal and sacred.

Thus, in the pre-modern understanding, legitimacy was rooted in ontology (the order of being) rather than mere will or consent. A king was legitimate not because he seized power or because a majority favored him, but because he was part of a divinely ordained continuum of order – provided he ruled justly under God. Likewise, the Church’s authority derived from its fidelity to the apostolic faith and the grace of Christ, not from popular appeal. Truth was not created by the human mind; it was received from God and reflected in the structures of society. As Eusebius rhapsodized, the whole universe – from the angelic hosts to the motions of sun and moon – is an ordered procession praising the one Sovereign . The Christian emperor, kneeling in prayer, acknowledged that his sword served that higher harmony .

In such a worldview, Church and State were two organs of a single social organism, animated by the divine Spirit. The welfare of the polis (city or realm) depended on the cooperation of its spiritual and temporal leaders in pursuing the common good under God’s law. St. Augustine had described a well-ordered commonwealth as one whose people “love God and love one another” in proper measure (cf. City of God, XIX). The Eastern Fathers even compared a Christian kingdom to a liturgy: the emperor and clergy perform distinct roles in the grand worship of God through just governance and piety . This is why Eastern liturgical practice to this day prays for civil authorities at every Divine Liturgy (“Remember, O Lord, our civil authorities…”), just as it prays for bishops – each has a God-given ministry.

The tragedy of Western civilization begins when this sacred harmony fractures. When the unity of symphonia gave way to a dualism of competing “church” and “state,” the result was not true freedom, but a war between absolutes. The cooperation of altar and throne degenerated into a competition for control. With that shift, metaphysics collapsed into mere politics – the vertical axis (transcendent truth) was eclipsed by the horizontal (power struggle). No longer seeing themselves as two parts of one body, Church and State in the West began to behave like rival corporations, each bargaining for privilege. The high ideal of a Christ-centered society was slowly displaced by legalistic wrangling – essentially a contractual view of society rather than a covenantal one.

This fracture did not happen overnight; it was the result of centuries of historical crises and choices. But the core pattern is: once cooperation yields to competition, the entire ontological framework is lost. Authority ceases to be seen as participatory (a sharing in God’s order) and becomes merely possessive – a tug of war over who “owns” power. In the absence of a shared higher Truth, what remained was a naked struggle of jurisdiction and will. The sad result was that even as medieval churchmen and kings fought each other in the name of God, the true harmony of heaven and earth – that “forgotten music” of a cosmos in tune with its Creator – faded from the Western imagination. The stage was set for the rise of modernity, in which power would increasingly be its own justification and competing authorities would fragment the once-unified worldview.

Before we trace that dissolution, however, we must understand the last flourishing of symphonia in the Christian West: an island of harmony that briefly existed in early medieval England, where an ancient Saxon ethos fused with Norman order. From there, we will follow the cracks as they widen: the loss of a Western emperor and the Papacy’s overreach, the struggle of popes and emperors for supremacy, the shattering of Christendom in Reformation, the Enlightenment’s transvaluation of authority, and finally the flat and fractured world of today. Throughout, we will seek an epistemological genealogy – uncovering how ideas of truth, authority, and society evolved – and a theological architecture – discerning how theological assumptions underpin cultural and political developments. We proceed now to that Saxon–Norman world, a case study in what might have been, and what was lost.

II. The Saxon–Norman Fusion: Root and Right, Strength and Order

Historical Argument:

Before the papal-imperial power struggles tore Latin Christendom apart, England under her early kings provides a vivid example of natural symphonia in the West. Especially in the era spanning the late Anglo-Saxon period and the generations after the Norman Conquest (roughly 9th through 12th centuries), we see an integration of two cultural streams into a relatively unified Christian commonwealth. This was the fusion of Saxon liberty and piety with Norman hierarchy and discipline – a synthesis that produced a high medieval English polity remarkably cohesive in its sense of legitimacy.

• Saxon Heritage (Root and Right): The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) society was deeply rooted in local custom, kinship, and a sense of the sacredness of place and community. Their law was largely unwritten and customary – discovered rather than arbitrarily decreed. The Anglo-Saxons believed that law (ǣ) was part of the moral fabric of the world, ultimately rooted in divine justice. Early law-codes, like those of King Alfred the Great, began with the Ten Commandments and excerpts from biblical law, explicitly grounding English law in God’s law . King Alfred (late 9th century) described his role not as an innovator but as a compiler of the best laws of his predecessors, done “with the counsel of his witan (wise council)” . This reflects a humility before a higher law. The king was seen as chief guardian of justice, but he governed with the advice of nobles and clergy (the Witanagemot, or Witan). The Witan, an assembly of “counsellors of the nation,” had no rigid constitutional power as modern parliaments do, but its moral weight was great. Laws were often issued in the form, “This is the ordinance that King ___, with the counsel of his witan, ordained, for the good of the people and the praise of God…” . In other words, governance was consensual and communal, not autocratic. The king wore a crown, but he also took an oath at coronation to uphold the Church and rule justly – a sacred vow witnessed by the people and made to God. An Anglo-Saxon coronation rite (formulated by St. Dunstan in the 10th century for King Edgar) charged the monarch “to keep peace, forbid unjust deeds, and uphold justice and mercy, so that God may confirm your throne”. The people, for their part, swore to obey the king in all just commands. This two-way oath, or covenant, imparted a covenantal character to kingship.
  

Furthermore, Saxon political culture cherished the concept of “folk-right” – the idea that there were ancient rights and laws that even the king must respect. Freedom (frēodōm) in this context did not mean individual license to do anything, but the guarantee of justice and due process for every free person according to the law of the land. It was a communal liberty, rooted in one’s status and membership in a family, a guild, a shire. The local “moots” (folk-courts) of hundred and shire, where free men gathered periodically to adjudicate disputes, were an expression of this participatory order . A false oath in such a court was not merely perjury but a grave offense against God that endangered one’s soul . Thus, truth-telling, fidelity, and lawful behavior were intertwined with religious duty. The Saxon ethos was sacramental in its own way: it saw the hand of God in the ‘moral soil’ of England, in the duties to kin and lord, in the seasonal rhythms of agrarian life blessed by the Church’s liturgical calendar.

An illustration of Saxon symphonia is King Alfred the Great (reigned 871–899). Alfred is often called “England’s Darling” and was eventually regarded as a saint in some calendars. He defended Christian England against pagan Viking invasions, and after securing peace, he turned vigorously to rebuilding the realm. Alfred’s law code famously begins with the Ten Commandments and excerpts from Exodus, then the injunction of Christ “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, and only then merges into the laws of English kings . In his introduction, Alfred explains that he gathered laws from Moses, from Christ, and from the venerable earlier kings of England, seeking to “judge all causes by the light of the Word of God”. He explicitly subordinated the king’s law to God’s law. Alfred also took a deep personal interest in the spiritual and intellectual life of his people: he lamented in a famous preface how learning had decayed in England and set about translating Latin works (like Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care) into Old English for the education of the clergy. This act was both cultural and spiritual leadership, revealing Alfred’s view of kingship as a pastoral office for the good of his people’s souls. Indeed, in a letter to Bishop Wulfstan, Alfred wrote that a king must have inside him the “books most necessary for all men to know” and that without wisdom, power will do more harm than good. Such was the symphonic ideal: the king as protector and educator of the nation under God, working hand in hand with his bishops. Little wonder that later English legend would remember Alfred not only as a warrior, but as a just lawgiver and a saintly ruler who cared for the poor and established monasteries.

In Saxon England, freedom was fundamentally relational. A man was “free” (as opposed to a thrall or serf), but his freedom was exercised in the context of belonging – to a family, to a lord, to a shire, and ultimately to Christendom. The mutual oath of lord and man exemplified this. The Old English oath of fealty required a vassal to swear “by the Lord before whom this relic is holy, that I will be faithful and true to N., and love all that he loves and shun all that he shuns, according to God’s law and the world’s principles”, promising never to harm his lord by word or deed . Importantly, it added “on condition that he keep me as I am willing to deserve,” implying the lord’s obligation to justly protect the vassal . Here is covenant rather than coercion: loyalty given and protection guaranteed, both under God. To break such an oath was not just a crime but a sacrilege. This intense covenantal bond, often sealed on relics of saints, made the lord-vassal relationship a microcosm of Church–State symphonia – each lord a little king, each vassal a responsible free man, all bound by sacred promise. The ideal was that no one was above the law: even King Alfred reportedly had his own son’s hands burned when the prince was accused of a misdeed, to show that justice spared no one. And when King Edward the Confessor (11th century) was revered for his holy life, it was said that the land had peace – as if the personal sanctity of the ruler brought divine favor on the realm, a very Orthodox idea.

• Norman Heritage (Strength and Order): The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought a different emphasis that would fuse with the Saxon. The Normans (descendants of Vikings who settled in Normandy and adopted French language and Frankish feudal customs) introduced a more centralized feudal hierarchy and a martial, disciplined ethos. William the Conqueror and his Norman knights saw fealty and feudal obligation not in terms of folkish custom but as a strict chain of command ultimately rooted in the duke/king’s authority. They had a genius for organization and hierarchy. Castles were built across England to enforce royal authority; every inch of land was catalogued in the Domesday Book (1086) for purposes of just taxation and feudal dues. William and his successors insisted on their feudal rights but also took seriously their responsibilities to protect their vassals and enforce justice. The Norman contribution can be seen as the architectonic principle – they built structures (literally and institutionally) that could channel the energies of the realm in an orderly way.
  

Crucially, the Normans brought continental feudalism, which, while often portrayed as mere oppression, had an ideal of its own: hierarchical love. In theory, feudal society was like a great pyramid of personal loyalties, all ascending to the king, and above the king, God. The motto of Norman knighthood was “Honour through service.” The Norman knight was bound by a code of chivalry that idealized loyalty, courage, and piety. Chronicles of the First Crusade, for instance, speak of Norman nobles hearing Mass before battle and charging into the fray crying “Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”). While there were many brutal Normans, the ideal held that obedience was ennobling, not degrading. To obey one’s lord unto death was an honor, because it meant one was faithful – and faithfulness was a godly virtue. In this mindset, order was the expression of love under authority. Just as a monk obeyed his abbot out of love for Christ, a knight obeyed his liege out of fealty sanctified by an oath. The Norman kings, such as William and his son Henry I, often enforced harsh justice (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lamented some Norman exactions), but they also rooted out corruption, built strong courts, and tried to ensure one law for all. Henry I’s Coronation Charter (1100) is a remarkable document where the king voluntarily promises to abolish unfair taxes and respect the Church’s freedom – essentially binding himself by law, a concept that would flower later in Magna Carta. This reflects the Norman (and Frankish) tradition that a true king is the keeper of justice who must uphold le droit (the law) as an objective reality above even himself.

In church matters, the Normans also imposed stricter order. William I replaced almost the entire Anglo-Saxon episcopate with Norman bishops (such as the learned Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury) . These new prelates imposed reforms: enforcing clerical celibacy (which had been lax in England) , re-organizing dioceses, and elevating ecclesiastical discipline. William, working with Lanfranc, separated Church courts from secular courts to professionalize church discipline – though he also maintained control over those church courts’ decisions in cases involving laymen . Bishops became part of the feudal hierarchy: they were given great estates and in return owed military service (knights) to the king . While this could be seen as entangling churchmen in worldly concerns, it also meant the clergy were integrated into the kingdom’s governance. The bishop was simultaneously a lord of the realm and a shepherd of souls – an image of symphonia within one person. Norman rulers insisted on their rights over the Church in England: William decreed that no papal bulls or legates could enter his realm without his leave, and no church synod could enact decrees without royal assent . And when Pope Gregory VII (the great reformer) demanded that William do fealty (swear allegiance) to the Pope for the kingdom of England, William flatly rejected any such submission . One of William’s letters to Gregory VII survives, in which he states: “I have never promised, nor will I promise, to pay fealty to the Roman Pontiff,” though he expresses reverence for the Pope as successor of St. Peter. William acknowledged the spiritual primacy of Rome but denied papal claims to temporal lordship in England . This set a precedent: England would maintain an independent crown, not a vassal of the papacy. Yet at the same time, William and the Normans were devout sons of the Church in matters of faith – he had invaded with papal blessing, after all . Thus the Norman stance was a kind of balanced symphonia: robust royal authority over the church’s temporalities, combined with support for ecclesiastical reform and piety.

The fusion of Saxon and Norman qualities occurred over the generations following 1066. Consider the reign of Henry II (1154–1189) – a great-grandson of William with Anglo-Saxon blood through his grandmother Matilda. Henry II brought to maturity the common law of England (a legacy of Saxon local law and Norman royal law), sending itinerant justices to spread the King’s law uniformly. He famously clashed with Archbishop Thomas Becket over the limits of royal authority in Church affairs. The clash (which led to Becket’s martyrdom) is often seen as emblematic of church-state conflict, but note: Henry’s vision was not to diminish the Church’s spiritual authority; it was to curb abuses and ensure one justice system. Becket, for his part, defended the clergy’s independence. The irony is that both operated from within a framework where everyone still assumed Church and State should cooperate under God, but disagreed over jurisdictions. In the end, even after Becket’s death, Henry II did penance at Becket’s tomb and largely reconciled with the Church, accepting that serious crimes by clergy would see them defrocked by the Church before royal punishment – a compromise of jurisdictions. This shows that the ideal of symphonia was straining but not yet broken: they sought a working harmony, however tense.

By the 13th and 14th centuries, England reaped the fruit of the Saxon-Norman synthesis in a unique political culture. Magna Carta (1215), negotiated between King John and his barons (with Archbishop Stephen Langton mediating), begins by affirming that “the English Church shall be free, and have its rights undiminished”. It simultaneously asserts the ancient liberties of the nobility and realm. The document is essentially a covenant restoring old harmony: the king is reminded he is under law (as per Norman feudal principle and Saxon custom), and the barons and Church secure their rights while affirming the king’s legitimacy. The very idea of holding a king accountable to his coronation oath was only conceivable in a society that had not lost the concept of higher law and mutual obligation – a legacy of the early harmony.

Epistemological Note:

This Saxon–Norman synthesis rested on what we can call a sacramental worldview in social relations. Earthly institutions were seen as capable of mediating divine order. The coronation of a king was a sacramentale (not a sacrament strictly, but a holy rite); the anointing with chrism was believed to confer grace for ruling. The hierarchical arrangement of society – from peasants to lords to king – was interpreted analogically: “as above, so below.” Just as God is Father and we are His children, so the king is father to his people and they his children in care (an image King Alfred used). Just as Christ is King and servant, so the Christian king must rule and serve. Monastic writers described ideal kings as “another David”, combining secular might with spiritual devotion. Even the feudal bond was likened to the bond between Christ and His disciples or Christ and the Church (an echo of Ephesians 5:23, which compares marital hierarchy to Christ and Church). We can say that feudalism at its best functioned as iconography – a living image of spiritual truth. The lord’s protection symbolized God’s providence; the vassal’s loyalty symbolized the believer’s faith; the mutual pledge symbolized the covenant between God and man. This was, of course, an ideal and often breached in practice, but it remained a guiding metaphor.

Because of this analogical imagination, early English writers did not view the community as an arbitrary construct, but as an organism with soul and body. The king was often called the “head” and the people the “members,” echoing St. Paul’s description of the Church as the Body of Christ. When all classes performed their duties in charity and justice, it was seen as a harmonious body politic, healthy and blessed. A break in the harmony – a tyrant on the throne, or rebellious barons, or a corrupt clergy – was like a sickness in the body. The remedy was repentance and restoration of right order, not the creation of a new order from scratch.

The last truly Orthodox (in the sense of undivided Church) English king was Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), whom even Normans revered as a saint. He died just before the Conquest, and William the Conqueror respected Edward’s memory. Edward’s sanctity and reputation for healing miracles (he’s credited with the royal touch for scrofula) reinforced the notion of a sacral kingship. It’s poignant that the Anglo-Saxon chronicle lamented after the Conquest that “Jesus, alas, was asleep” while foreigners overran the land – a metaphor that the divinely ordained order was in peril. Yet the Normans, once settled, took up the mantle of English kingship and eventually became more “English” in adopting these ideals.

By the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189–1199), we see a king who was the epitome of chivalry – devout, fearless, if sometimes reckless – and whose legend helped shape the ideal of the Christian knight. Richard spent most of his reign on Crusade or in captivity, but his charisma and courage made him a symbol of the noble king who fights for Christendom. Edward I (1272–1307), though later than our focus, consciously tried to emulate King Arthur and King Solomon, crafting himself as a just lawgiver and crusader-king – again showing the persistence of the ideal. And in the 14th century, Edward III (1327–1377) and his son Edward, the Black Prince embodied a late chivalric flowering: they were brave, courtly, patrons of the Church (the Black Prince requested to be buried with the cryptic motto “Houmout” – high spirit – and “Ich dien” – I serve). The Black Prince in particular was celebrated for his mercy and honor in warfare. At the Battle of Poitiers (1356), after capturing the French King, he treated him with reverence and refused to eat until the king was served – a gesture of humility that contemporaries saw as Christian knighthood incarnate. These cultural icons – Alfred, Richard, Edward III, the Black Prince – were later romanticized, but significantly they all were seen as defenders of the faith and exemplars of the bond between godly rulership and the common good.

By viewing these figures through a Western Rite Orthodox lens, we can appreciate that pre-Schism Western Christianity shared fundamentally the same worldview as Eastern Orthodoxy regarding society. The English Church before 1054 was in full communion with Orthodoxy, and even after, for a time, it maintained some distinctives (e.g. Sarum rite liturgy, certain saints) that tied it to its older Orthodox heritage. The Saxon-Norman synthesis, therefore, can be seen as Western Orthodox England meets hierarchical Norman structures. It was as if the organic, communal Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons (with its roots in the early Church and Celtic monasticism) merged with the disciplined, systematizing energy of the Latin Normans. The result was a high medieval English society that, at its best, balanced liberty and order, conscience and obedience, local custom and universal truth.

However, this high culture had its vulnerabilities. The very strength of a harmonious Christian order could be exploited or gradually eroded by excessive claims – especially from without. In England, a “hard end” culturally may be marked around the time of the English Civil War (17th century), when the descendants of these ideals, the Cavaliers (royalist Anglicans who cherished hierarchy, monarchy, and altar), were defeated by the Roundheads (Puritan egalitarians). The Cavaliers – with their motto “For Church and King” – represented the last remnant of the old symphonic ideal (albeit in a Protestant context by then). They wore the plumes and spoke of honor and divine right, heir to Edward III’s chivalry, but by then much had decayed. After Edward III’s time (14th century), the cultural unity frayed: the Church was beset by corruption and schism (Avignon papacy, etc.), the crown by overmighty barons and dynastic wars (Wars of the Roses). The Black Death and other crises shook the social fabric. Yet even late, one hears echoes: Shakespeare (a late flowering of this sensibility in the 16th century) has Hamlet recall that the king is “the ordinance and the law” and the “chosen of God”, and Henry V presented as a quasi-sacral figure who marries mercy and justice. These echoes would largely dissipate as Reformation and Enlightenment ideas took hold.

We now turn to the first great fracture in the Western harmony: the loss of a Western Emperor and the rise of Papal monarchy. For while in England a balance was (imperfectly) struck, on the continent the equilibrium between spiritual and temporal authority began to tip dramatically. When the Western Roman Empire fell, the Pope in Rome gradually assumed an unprecedented role – stepping into a power vacuum that would have momentous consequences. The story continues with that development, the “Missing Emperor” and how the Papacy tried to wear two crowns, thus upsetting the old order and setting in motion the long conflict of church and state in the West.

III. The Missing Emperor: The Western Vacuum and the Rise of Papal Caesarism

Historical Genealogy:

One of the most fateful ruptures in Christian history was the collapse of effective imperial authority in the Latin West. In A.D. 476, the last Roman Emperor of the West (Romulus Augustulus) was deposed. While the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire continued as a Christian Roman authority in Constantinople, the West fragmented into barbarian kingdoms. This left the bishop of Rome (the Pope) as one of the few intact institutions straddling the wreckage of antiquity and the new medieval order. With no Western emperor to partner or restrain him, the papacy gradually accrued not just spiritual leadership, but temporal responsibilities and ambitions.

In the early Middle Ages (5th–8th centuries), the Popes often acted as de facto civic rulers in central Italy. Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), for example, in the face of chaos, organized Rome’s defense, fed the populace, negotiated with invading Lombards – essentially doing what a just Roman emperor might have done, but there was none. The Popes also inherited a moral clout: they were seen as the successors of St. Peter, the foremost apostle, and custodians of orthodoxy. Over time, a crucial shift occurred: the idea that the Pope, in the absence of an emperor, held a kind of plenary authority in Christendom. In Eastern terms, one could say the “symphonic” partner went missing, and the remaining partner (the papacy) tried to play a solo symphony.

By the 8th century, this tendency accelerated. The Byzantine emperors, weakened and far away, lost control of Rome and much of Italy (especially during the Lombard invasions and conflicts over Iconoclasm). Feeling abandoned, the Popes turned north to the Frankish kings for protection. In 754, Pope Stephen II even traveled across the Alps to anoint Pepin the Short (father of Charlemagne) as King of the Franks, effectively transferring legitimacy from the old Merovingian line to Pepin – a bold act that implied the Pope could make and unmake kings. In return, Pepin and later Charlemagne defended the papacy and granted land (the Donation of Pepin), laying foundations for the Papal States.

It was in this milieu that an infamous forgery arose: the Donation of Constantine. Composed likely in the mid-8th century (between 750 and 800) , this document purported to be a decree of Emperor Constantine the Great (4th century) transferring authority over the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I as a reward for Sylvester having healed and baptized Constantine. According to the Donation, Constantine bestowed on the Pope “supremacy over the sees of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem and all the world’s churches,” along with control of the imperial palace in Rome and “all the regions of the Western Empire” . In essence, it made the Pope a secular ruler over the West and asserted that all other patriarchs and even the Eastern Emperor were subordinate in ecclesial matters. It even conveyed that the Pope had the right to appoint secular rulers in the West . Though forged (its Latin language and content clearly betrayed an 8th-century origin ), the Donation was eagerly used by later medieval popes to bolster their claims. By the 11th century, Pope Leo IX and Pope Gregory VII were citing it as if it were genuine authority .

Even if the Donation of Constantine had been genuine, from an Orthodox perspective it would have been theologically illicit. No emperor, however great, can donate spiritual authority to a bishop – the very notion is an ontological confusion. The authority of the apostles and their successors comes from Christ and the Holy Spirit, not from imperial grant. As St. Peter would say, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The Church is theanthropic (God-human) in constitution: Christ is its true head, and the Holy Spirit its guide. For an emperor to pretend to hand over the “government of the West” to the Pope would imply the Church’s jurisdiction is a piece of real estate or political office that Caesar can assign. It was, in effect, an attempt to politicize the spiritual. Sadly, the very success of the forgery’s acceptance shows that by the High Middle Ages, many in the West were thinking in those terms: the spiritual hierarchy could be mapped onto worldly dominion.

Thus, the Western vacuum of empire led the papacy to inflate its role – initially out of necessity, later out of hubris. The Popes became, in their own self-conception, the successors not only of Peter but of Constantine. This “Papal Caesarism” marks a dramatic departure from earlier symphonia. Instead of two ministries in harmony, one office now sought to embody both. Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand, r. 1073–1085) would epitomize this by essentially claiming in his Dictatus Papae that the Pope held the fullness of power in earth and heaven. We will examine Gregory in the next section; suffice here to note the trajectory: from guardians of orthodoxy and servants of liturgy, the medieval Popes gradually reimagined themselves as monarchs in their own right, wielding both swords (spiritual and temporal). The medieval ideal of a universal Christian society under two powers (regal and sacerdotal) was replaced by the papal theorists with a vision of one single hierarchy with the Pope at its summit – the Pope as both High Priest and, effectively, Emperor over all Christian peoples.

This was an epistemological rupture as much as a political one. When the Pope asserts the right to depose kings and give kingdoms, the very ontology of authority is changed. Authority is no longer seen as something that flows from God through multiple channels (priesthood and kingship each blessed by God), but rather something that can be centralized and manipulated by human decree. It implies that the Pope, a man, can re-order reality by his command – a hint of voluntarism that will only grow in Western thought. If an emperor can grant spiritual jurisdiction and a pope can bestow or remove temporal crowns, then the structure of Christendom becomes a chessboard at the disposal of clever players, rather than a sacred order given by God. In short, being itself (the order of who is in charge of what) becomes subject to will rather than given by nature or God. This is the seed of what will become, centuries later, a secular idea that authority is just a social contract or a power arrangement, not a divinely rooted service.

The culmination of Papal Caesarism was the pretense that the Pope was above all earthly authorities with no accountability. By 1075, Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae boldly claimed, “The Pope may depose emperors,” and “He may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men” (i.e. to excommunicated princes) . These were revolutionary assertions: a Pope releasing an entire people from obedience to their lawful king was unheard-of in the first millennium. Yet it now became a tool of papal policy. The Pope was, in effect, asserting a form of temporal suzerainty over all Christendom – a claim to an imperium of his own. Indeed, one papal theorist, Aegidius Romanus (Giles of Rome, 13th century), later wrote “the Pope has by divine right the plenitude of power in temporalities as well, at least indirectly, since everything is ordered to the spiritual end.” By such logic, symphonia was utterly fractured: the Pope absorbed the imperial role and relegated kings to mere deputies who could be judged and fired by the Pontiff.

Historically, this papal aggrandizement set the stage for chronic conflict. The absence of a “sympathetic Emperor” in the West (like a Theodosius or Marcian who obeyed the Church) meant that the Church’s leader felt compelled to play emperor himself to fill the power vacuum. But as soon as a new Western emperor-like figure did emerge (in the person of Charlemagne and later the Holy Roman Emperors), a titanic struggle ensued: for there could be only one sun in the sky, and now both Pope and Emperor claimed to be that sun around which the other must orbit. The doctrine of symphonia – two lights, sun and moon, in harmony – was abandoned by the Papacy in favor of the doctrine of plenitudo potestatis (“fullness of power”) residing in the Pope alone. The Byzantine East viewed this development with alarm and sadness, one of the factors leading to increased estrangement and ultimately the Great Schism (1054 and after). The Eastern Church never accepted the Donation of Constantine or the radical claims of Gregory VII; they held to the older view that the Emperor was still a valid authority in the Christian commonwealth (even after 476, the Eastern Emperor was prayed for as basileus in Western churches for a time). But by crowning Charlemagne in 800 (about which next), the Pope made a statement: the papacy can make an emperor – implying the papacy is above empire. In Orthodox understanding, this was a profound ecclesiological error: the Church does not need to rule the world; it needs to guide consciences and sanctify lives. Caesar is not a pope, but a pope must not be Caesar either.

One illustrative episode: in 864, Pope Nicholas I (a strong pope) wrote to King Lothair II of Lotharingia, asserting that the pope, as “prince of the apostles,” had authority to judge all men, including kings, and that kings derive their dignity from the papal see’s recognition. He even used the forged Donation to lecture the Byzantine emperor. Nicholas excommunicated the powerful patriarch Photios of Constantinople (leading to the Photian schism), in part for reasons of asserting Roman supremacy. We see already the papacy behaving as a super-monarch.

By the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) carried this to its logical conclusion: he treated the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV as a rebellious vassal to be disciplined. Gregory excommunicated Henry and declared him deposed, telling the German nobility they were no longer bound to obey him. This astonishing action – a pope firing an emperor – had no real precedent. It was justified by Gregory under a theory of moral supremacy: only the Pope could judge a Christian ruler, since the Pope is the Vicar of Christ. The result was chaos: civil war in Germany and Italy, and the spectacle of Emperor Henry IV standing as a penitent in the snow at Canossa in 1077, begging the Pope’s forgiveness. The “world turned upside down,” some said – an emperor supplicating a pope as a penitent. To papal supporters, it was a great moral victory, putting the fear of God (or of the Church) into secular power. But to many others, it was deeply unsettling: had the Pope now become a temporal overlord?

From an Orthodox perspective, Gregory VII’s actions marked a departure from the canons of the early Church. No longer was the Pope content to be the spiritual father advising Christian monarchs; he now claimed the right to unmake monarchs. The power of the keys (binding and loosing sins) was transmuted into a power to bind and loose allegiance of subjects. This conflation of spiritual and temporal sword in one hand is what we term “Papal Caesarism.” The Pope became, in effect, the missing Western Emperor. Indeed, later Popes like Innocent III would explicitly style themselves as holding both swords (quoting Luke 22:38, “here are two swords,” which medieval exegetes took to mean spiritual and temporal power – both given to Peter). Innocent III in 1198 used the allegory of sun and moon: “Just as the moon receives its light from the sun… so the royal power derives the splendor of its dignity from the pontifical authority” . In other words, the Pope is the sun, the king but a lesser orb reflecting papal light. This is the polar opposite of Justinian’s symphonia, where emperor and priesthood were distinct yet cooperating. Innocent went so far as to say the Pope could “examine” and judge kings and even declared, in 1213, King John of England deposed (John submitted and even surrendered England as a fief to the Pope to get his crown back, an astonishing event). By 1302, Pope Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam proclaimed, “It is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” This was the zenith of Papal monarchy: the Pope on top of the world, quite literally in his view.

The ancient principle articulated by Ambrose – “the emperor is within the Church, not above it” – had morphed into something unintended: the Pope is above the emperor in all things. The idea of two powers in harmony gave way to one power with total supremacy.

Thus, the ontology of Christian society cracked: what had been two halves of a whole became two wholes in collision. The Pope, claiming to embody the entire res publica Christiana in his person, left no truly independent role for a Christian emperor or king except as his vassal. And inevitably, the kings and emperors who had some pride and sense of divine mandate of their own would not accept this indefinitely. The stage was set for the great struggle for supremacy between Papacy and Empire that would dominate the High Middle Ages. That struggle – often called the Investiture Controversy and the conflicts around it – is the dramatic next act. It will show how the Papal claim to plenitudo potestatis (fullness of power) and the Imperial claim to autonomy led to a dialectical fight that ironically produced two absolutisms, paving the way for the later secular absolutist state.

But before moving on, let us mark the deep cultural loss: when Pope and Emperor became rivals rather than partners, Christendom lost its unified vision. No longer was there a single orchestral performance of society; instead, two conductors argued and the musicians took sides. As cooperation gave way to competition, Christian peoples were increasingly politicized – forced to choose allegiance between spiritual and temporal authorities. This not only bred war and intrigue, it also subtly changed the way people thought about truth and power. People began to ask: Who ultimately governs? – a question alien to the earlier harmony where God governed through both. The seeds of skepticism were planted: if Pope and Emperor thunder anathemas at each other, ordinary souls wonder, where is the voice of God? This cynicism will later flower into secularism.

For now, we proceed to the medieval battleground: the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy locked in mortal combat for the soul of the West – a conflict that would erupt in excommunications, civil wars, antipopes, even a crusade against a Christian emperor. In this contest, we will see the ideas of absolutism begin to take shape on both sides, as each protagonist claims total authority. The very titling of the Pope as “Vicar of Christ” and the Emperor as “Christ’s secular image” led to a kind of collision of vicars. The grand ideal of symphonia was the casualty.

IV. The Holy Roman Empire and the Struggle for Supremacy

The Dialectic of Power:

On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish King Charlemagne as “Augustus” (Emperor) of the Romans in St. Peter’s Basilica. This moment was fraught with symbolism: after over three centuries without a Western Emperor, a new Roman Empire (later called the Holy Roman Empire) was being born. Yet unlike the old symphonia of Constantine and Sylvester, this renaissance had a built-in ambiguity. Who was truly in charge of Christendom now? Charlemagne himself viewed his imperial office as God-given, a revival of Christian empire. He took responsibility for reforming the Church, correcting liturgy (even imposing the Filioque in the Creed, controversially), and calling synods. He promulgated laws (capitularies) touching both civil and ecclesiastical matters. He corresponded with the Eastern Emperor as an equal. In effect, Charlemagne acted as a new Constantine in the West – protector of the Church, patron of Christendom’s cultural flowering (the Carolingian Renaissance). His court scholars even proposed that just as there were once two halves of the Roman Empire (East and West), now there were two Emperors – one in the East (Byzantine) and one in the West (Frankish) – each supreme in their realm. Of course, the Byzantines angrily rejected that claim, calling Charlemagne an upstart. The Pope, for his part, gained a powerful secular ally and perhaps believed he gained a subordinate. But Charlemagne was no puppet; he understood empire in the traditional way: the emperor is the highest temporal authority, anointed by God. He even styled himself “governing the Roman Church in love”, suggesting a paternal role over the papacy.

Thus, from the outset, the Holy Roman Empire was a simulacrum of Rome – an empire without metaphysical unity. There were now two “emperors” in Christendom (Byzantine and Frankish), and also the Pope with supra-national claims. The unity of the Christian people under one Roman Emperor – a theological principle strongly held in the East – was broken. The Latin West transferred its loyalty to Charlemagne and his successors, but the question lingered: Did the imperial crown derive its legitimacy from papal coronation? Leo III had physically placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head. Later chroniclers say Charlemagne was taken by surprise and even a bit displeased by the Pope’s act – perhaps because it could imply the crown was given by the Pope. Carolingian ideology preferred to say the Pope merely recognized what God had already bestowed (Charlemagne was called Emperor in letters earlier that year). But the precedent was set: imperial coronation by the Pope became standard. This gave the papacy a powerful card: emperors needed the Pope’s sanction, or at least it strongly bolstered their legitimacy. On the other hand, the Pope now depended on the Emperor’s military sword and political protection. Leo III had been driven out of Rome by rivals and it was Charlemagne who restored him. The mutual dependence of Pope and Emperor became a double-edged sword. Each needed the other, yet each also resented that dependence and sought to assert superiority.

Fast forward to the 11th century and the conflict explodes in the Investiture Controversy (so named for the dispute over investiture, the appointing of bishops and abbots, symbolized by staff and ring). By this time, the Holy Roman Emperors were German kings, descendants (in title if not blood) of Charlemagne, ruling a realm in Germany and northern Italy. The Papacy had also reformed itself in the Gregorian Reform movement (named after Gregory VII). Two towering personalities embody the clash: Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. Both were zealous, strong-willed, and convinced of their divine right.

Gregory VII, in his Dictatus Papae (1075), laid out propositions that read like a manifesto of papal absolutism: that the Pope alone can depose or reinstate bishops, that “he alone may use the imperial insignia,” that “all princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone,” and crucially that “it may be permitted to him to depose emperors” . He declared the Roman Church has never erred and never will (claiming infallibility) , and that the Pope is judged by no one . He even asserted the Pope can release subjects from allegiance to excommunicated rulers . This was plenitudo potestatis nakedly stated: the Pope held all authority in trust from God and could dispose of secular power as righteousness required. Gregory saw the widespread corruption (simony, immoral clergy, etc.) and believed only a powerful papacy independent of secular control could purify the Church. In his mind, moral right made might – the Pope, being concerned with souls, could judge kings who endangered souls.

Emperor Henry IV (young, headstrong) believed in his own God-given sovereignty. He was “King by the grace of God” (Dei gratia Rex) and felt responsible for his realm’s welfare, including the proper functioning of the Church in his lands. German kings had long appointed bishops (lay investiture) because bishops were also imperial princes with lands and political roles. Henry IV, dealing with rebellious Saxon lords, needed loyal churchmen in office. He refused to accept Gregory’s papal encroachment on what he saw as royal privileges. The flashpoint was Gregory forbidding lay investiture, and Henry insisting on investing his chosen candidate as bishop of Milan. Gregory admonished Henry, and Henry in turn convened a synod of German bishops that declared Gregory deposed. In a famous letter of 1076, Henry addressed Gregory not as Pope but as “Hildebrand” and thundered: “Henry, king not by usurpation but by God’s holy ordination, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk… You have me do obeisance to you – who yourself are in revolt against legitimate authority. … You dared to threaten to depose me – as if kingship and empire came from you and not from God! … I, Henry, by the grace of God King, do say unto you: come down, come down and be damned throughout the ages!” . The bold words of Henry’s letter (likely ghostwritten by scholars at his court) encapsulated the imperial ideology: the king received his crown from God directly, not from the Pope; the Pope was overstepping and in fact endangering the order of the Church by his pride. Henry even cited St. Peter’s command, “Fear God, honor the king,” against Gregory , and noted that even the Fathers left the judgement of evil emperors like Julian the Apostate to God . Henry cast Gregory as Lucifer, trying to usurp God’s throne (strong language indeed).

The result was a dramatic collision. Gregory, unmoved by Henry’s rhetoric, excommunicated Henry IV and declared him deposed, absolving Henry’s subjects from their oaths of fealty . This released a firestorm: the German princes, some hostile to Henry, used the papal sentence as an excuse to rebel and demand Henry reconcile with Gregory or be replaced. This led to the famous scene at Canossa (1077): Henry crossed the Alps in winter and presented himself at the castle of Canossa where the Pope was staying. There, Henry reportedly stood outside in the snow, barefoot and clad in a penitent’s hairshirt, for three days, begging forgiveness. Gregory, forced by the pleas of others (and perhaps enjoying the humiliation a bit), absolved Henry after extracting professions of obedience. It was a psychological victory for the papacy: the mightiest prince in Christendom bowing in submission to the pontiff. One monk exulted that Pope Gregory “bound the king in punishment and loosed him in pardon, being Christ’s Vicar who hath plenitude of power”. The concept of the Pope as the feudal overlord of Christian kings gained currency.

Yet the victory was short-lived. The underlying conflict did not go away; in fact, it intensified. Henry IV regained strength, installed an antipope, and eventually drove Gregory VII into exile (Gregory died in 1085 saying, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, thus I die in exile”). The Investiture Controversy continued for decades, with periodic civil wars and shifting advantages. It was only settled (temporarily) in 1122 by the Concordat of Worms, a compromise where the emperor renounced lay investiture with ring and staff (symbol of spiritual authority) but retained the right to invest bishops with a scepter (symbol of temporal authority) and have some input in their election. The principle was that bishops owed spiritual authority to the Church but political allegiance to the emperor. This patched up the immediate crisis, but the larger question of supremacy remained unresolved.

Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the struggle took new forms. The Papacy, having established a bureaucracy and legal apparatus (the papal curia and canon law), grew even more assertive. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Emperors (especially the Hohenstaufen dynasty like Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II) dreamed of a revival of Roman imperial glory, which inevitably meant clashing with the Popes. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) reached the apogee of papal power: he intervened in the succession of the Holy Roman Empire, placed kingdoms like England and Aragon under interdict to bend their kings, and presided over a Christendom where nearly every monarch deferred to some papal authority. Innocent III described himself as the Vicar of Christ in a broad sense and stated “We are set by God over kings and kingdoms”. He was involved in choosing the German king in 1201 and made King John of England his vassal. Under Innocent, the Papal Monarchy was at its zenith – he even convened the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), a massive legislative council for Christendom, underscoring that the Pope was effectively lawgiver for the universal Church.

On the other side, Emperor Frederick II (r. 1220–1250), a brilliant if impious ruler, fought with multiple Popes. He was excommunicated several times yet pressed on with his policies. Frederick saw himself as an enlightened absolute monarch, and the Popes (Gregory IX, Innocent IV) portrayed him as an Antichrist. In 1245, Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons formally deposed Frederick II, declaring him deposed for heresy and blasphemy. Of course, Frederick did not step down; he quipped that the Pope had no authority to judge a Roman Emperor. But it showed how routine the notion of papal deposition of emperors had become since Gregory VII’s time – once unthinkable, now almost expected in clashes.

This prolonged duel of Pope and Emperor produced a dialectical mirroring: each side began to adopt the other’s methods and attitudes to the extent that by the late Middle Ages one sees two absolutisms emerging. On one hand, the Papacy, claiming infallibility and direct power from God, became quasi-secular – raising armies, conducting diplomacy, levying taxes (like Crusade tithes), and wielding the interdict (shutting down sacraments in a realm) as a weapon of mass coercion. The Pope was sometimes called “Dominus Mundi” (Lord of the World) by canonists. On the other hand, secular rulers began to sacralize their kingship in new ways – apart from the papal blessing. They developed theories of Divine Right of Kings (particularly in later France and England) that said kings were accountable only to God, not to any Pope or even, eventually, not to the Church’s moral authority. After Emperor Frederick II’s death, the Empire itself weakened and fragmented (leading to the rise of independent kingdoms), but the idea of sovereign monarchs who inherited authority directly from God took deeper root.

In a sense, the medieval symphony became a duel of soloists. Both the Papacy and the emerging Nation-States/monarchs claimed plenitudo potestatis in their sphere. The Papacy declared total spiritual supremacy (with some temporal oversight), while kings began to assert total temporal sovereignty (with control over the national church). The harmony was replaced by a dialectic: thesis (papal totalism) versus antithesis (secular totalism). Tragically, both sides, by claiming total power, lost sight of the older idea of shared, limited power oriented to a higher law.

One telling intellectual development: in the 14th century, Marsilius of Padua wrote Defensor Pacis (1324), taking the emperor’s side philosophically. Marsilius argued that all authority, including Church authority, ultimately derives from the people (early hint of nominalism and voluntarism). He denied the Pope had any coercive power and said the Church was subject to the state in temporal matters. Likewise in England, William of Ockham became a polemicist against the Pope, developing ideas that the Church is the community of the faithful and that the Pope can err – ideas sowing seeds of conciliarism and skepticism about centralized authority. Ironically, the extreme claims of the papacy provoked extreme reactions that laid groundwork for later Protestant and secular theories reducing or eliminating papal authority.

Meanwhile, the Papacy itself suffered a fragmentation in the Great Western Schism (1378–1417), where two (later three) rival popes each claimed to be the true pope, supported by different kings. This scandal – effectively a war of popes – disillusioned many. It was partly resolved by the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which asserted a temporary supremacy of an ecumenical council over the pope (the theory of conciliarism) to end the schism. Though conciliarism later waned, the principle that a council could judge a pope was admitted at least once. But overall, by the eve of the Reformation, the medieval experiment had shown both extremes: the Papacy as a theocratic monarch, and secular rulers defying or manipulating the Church to their advantage.

Philosophical Implications:

This centuries-long contest fundamentally reshaped Western epistemology. The question “Where does authority come from?” became a matter of debate and contention, whereas earlier it was assumed to come from God through a harmonious chain. Now, some said it came through the Pope (vicarly, to kings), others said directly to kings (with the Pope limited to spiritual teaching). The unity of truth got split: “two swords” became two separate hierarchies, each claiming divine sanction, but often in contradiction. The common folk and local nobility learned they could play off one against the other. Loyalty got divided, and with it, the sense of a unified worldview.

We also see in this era the rise of legalism and power politics: both Papal canon law and royal civil law systems expanded, sometimes at the expense of moral principle. For example, the Pope might annul a ruler’s marriage or incite rebellion in the name of spiritual penalties; the king might outlaw appeals to Rome and seize church properties if the Pope displeased him. Faith in the old order eroded. Already in the 14th century, the poet Dante Alighieri (an ardent Catholic) wrote of the papacy’s temporal greed: “You have made a sewer of blood and filth out of the temple of the highest;” and Dante put Pope Boniface VIII in the circles of Hell for simony. The institution meant to be the spiritual guide was perceived by many as just another power player. Conversely, many genuinely holy churchmen were appalled at kings’ brutality and self-aggrandizement. There was a lot of mutual moral indictment: each side claiming the other had deviated from God’s path.

In summary, the medieval struggle between Emperor and Pope ended in a stalemate of mutual ruin: the Papacy, though it survived and even later recovered some authority in the Catholic Reformation, lost the moral high ground in many eyes and eventually saw its universal claims shattered by the Protestant Reformation; the Holy Roman Empire decayed into an assortment of semi-autonomous states, its imperial dignity largely nominal by early modern times. But out of their clash, the modern notion of sovereign power emerged: a power that is total within its sphere and acknowledges no equal on earth. The Pope became the prototype of absolute spiritual authority (infallibility), defined dogmatically in 1870 but conceptually present in these medieval claims. The kings became the prototypes of absolute secular authority, culminating in figures like France’s Louis XIV who said “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”). Ironically, both sides in the medieval fight mirrored each other’s absolutist tendency. In the words of Lord Acton, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” whether in papal tiara or royal crown.

The harmonious hierarchy of the cosmos was forgotten in practice. The medievals still intellectually believed in an ordered universe under God, but their politics lived a contradiction. By late Middle Ages, one finds writers like William Langland in Piers Plowman lamenting that “the Church and Chivalry together no longer rule – instead, greed and cunning.” The stage was now set for the next upheaval: the Reformation, in which the pent-up forces of national and princely resistance to papal authority, combined with theological dissent, would explode, permanently fracturing the external unity of Western Christendom. In that fracturing, the very idea of a unified Truth would be challenged as never before.

Before proceeding, let us mark the close of the medieval period with a cultural reflection. The ideal of symphonia – though battered – had not entirely vanished from memory. Figures like St. Louis IX of France (a 13th-century saint-king) and St. Elizabeth of Hungary (a pious noblewoman) still showed the possibility of holiness in high office. The late medieval concept of the “Two Lights” (sun and moon) was twisted by Innocent III to subordinate kings, but some theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas carefully taught that the temporal power is legitimate in its own order, though directed to the spiritual good. Aquinas, writing after the worst of the Investiture fight, argued that king and priest have different ends – the king the bonum commune temporale (temporal common good), the priest the bonum spirituale. He said the priesthood is higher in dignity as spirit is to matter, but he did not call for direct rule by the priest in temporal matters. In this, Aquinas tried to salvage symphonia in scholastic terms: differentiating ends. However, his nuanced view would soon be hard to sustain in the storm of the Reformation, where more radical ideas took hold.

It is to that Reformation that we now turn. We shall see how the “War of Authorities” between Papal and Royal power in the Middle Ages inadvertently cleared the ground for modernity’s war on all authority. The Reformation will shatter the old unity, and out of its ashes, Enlightenment philosophy will proclaim new absolute authorities – reason, the individual will, the state, science – each in its turn making totalitarian demands. The pattern of rivalry we observed will repeat in new guises, until we reach our present “flat world” of fragmented truths and contested legitimacies. But first, the hammer blows of Luther and his contemporaries, which broke the medieval Church and transferred spiritual authority to multitudinous sects and, importantly, to the secular princes.

V. The Reformation: The Shattering of Unity

Political Reading:

The Protestant Reformation (16th century) is often remembered as a religious awakening or a triumph of individual conscience against corrupt authority. While it certainly had deep theological motivations, it can also be understood as the political and national revolt of the secular arm against the last vestiges of Papal imperium. In other words, the Reformation was as much (or more) the culmination of kings’ and princes’ long struggle to assert sovereignty as it was a grassroots reform of faith. The context: by the early 1500s, the Papacy had recovered from the medieval schisms and was a wealthy, bureaucratic power – but spiritually enervated and morally criticized (the Renaissance Popes were notoriously worldly). Many laity and clerics alike yearned for reform of abuses (indulgence trafficking, simony, etc.), but importantly so did many princes who chafed at the flow of money and obedience from their realms to Rome. When Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk in Saxony, ignited controversy in 1517 by denouncing indulgences, he unwittingly lit the fuse on a powder keg of political discontent.

The Church’s Overreach Produced Its Equal and Opposite Reaction: The Papacy’s late medieval overreach – its “Caesaropapist” tendencies in the West – provoked secular authorities to push back hard. The Reformation provided the ideological cover for that pushback. Luther’s central theological cry was justification by faith alone and Scripture alone as the authority for doctrine, which inherently challenged the mediating role of the Catholic priesthood and the magisterium. But it is crucial to note how quickly Luther’s cause was taken up by German princes and city magistrates who saw in it an opportunity to free themselves from papal (and imperial) entanglements.

Luther, in his 1520 treatise “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” explicitly appeals to the princes to carry out reforms that the Pope and bishops would not. He demolishes what he calls the “three walls” of the Romanists: 1) that secular authorities have no jurisdiction over the Church – Luther asserts that in a crisis, if the so-called spiritual authorities are corrupt, the secular princes must act as “emergency bishops” ; 2) that only the Pope can interpret Scripture – Luther says every Christian with Scripture has the right to judge truth, effectively democratizing authority; 3) that only the Pope can convene a council – Luther urges princes to do so if needed. By doing this, Luther transferred a huge amount of practical power to secular authorities in religious matters. Indeed, he only survived after 1521 (when he was declared heretic and outlaw by Emperor Charles V) because he was protected by Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony.

This dynamic – the rallying of princely support – shows the Reformation’s political engine. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 would formalize the principle cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”) , meaning the prince of each territory could choose Lutheranism or Catholicism and his subjects must follow that choice or emigrate. This was essentially the legal codification of what had already happened: religion became a department of state, determined by the ruler. The unity of Christendom under one Church shattered into territorial churches. The medieval concept that the Church had universal jurisdiction gave way to national churches (the Lutheran territorial churches in Germany, the Church of England, the Reformed Church in Scotland, etc.) each under the de facto supremacy of the local sovereign. For example, Henry VIII of England, in breaking with Rome (1534), had Parliament declare him “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England” . Henry’s Act of Supremacy explicitly united crown and altar under the monarch’s person, something earlier English kings like Alfred or Edward the Confessor would have considered sacrilegious. But by the 16th century, even devout kings like Henry (originally titled “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope for opposing Luther) were willing to seize spiritual leadership when it suited their dynastic or political aims (in Henry’s case, to obtain a marriage annulment and control church wealth).

Thus the Reformation decentralized authority in an unprecedented way. Instead of one Pope, there were now multiple “popes” (not in title, but in effect): each prince became the head of his own church (Lutheran princes, the King of England, etc.), or in freer cities, the city councils took that role. The unity of doctrine also fractured: Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others disagreed on significant points (the Eucharist, church governance, predestination, etc.), leading to the formation of different Protestant traditions. Each claimed Scripture as the highest authority, but since interpretation of Scripture varied, there was no final arbiter. Revelation became, in practice, a matter of opinion. Every man became in a sense his own interpreter – a principle of private judgment that was exhilarating but also destabilizing. Indeed, Luther’s insistence on the primacy of individual conscience bound only by Scripture was exemplified at the Diet of Worms (1521), where he refused to recant, saying: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” . This was a heroic stance for truth, but it also elevated subjective conviction (provided one believed it grounded in Scripture) above any external authority (Pope, council, even centuries of tradition). The sola scriptura principle ironically led to multiple competing interpretations of Scripture, and thus multiple “authorities” each claiming scriptural warrant.

The Reformation also destroyed sacramental ontology in society. The medieval worldview had seven sacraments and a host of sacramentals that permeated life – from baptism marking one’s entry not just into the Church but society, to the Eucharist as the center of communal worship, to marriage as indissoluble sacred bond, to anointing of kings as quasi-sacrament. Luther and most Reformers reduced sacraments to two (Baptism and Eucharist, and even these reinterpreted) and rejected the sacramental nature of ordination, confession, etc. The chain of being that linked cradle to grave in a sacred continuum was broken. No longer was the priesthood seen as a distinct ontological order with powers; Luther called it a mere function of preaching the Word, and he emphasized the “priesthood of all believers.” In practice, this democratization led not to a society of actual priests, but to a society where the mediating role of the Church diminished drastically. If every believer is a priest inwardly, then the special authority of clergy is downplayed. The visible Church became, in Reformation doctrine, often just an “assembly of the faithful” (for Calvin, the Church exists wherever the Word is rightly preached and sacraments duly administered – a functional definition). Gone was the idea of the Church as a mother who nurtures souls through sacraments or as the mystic extension of the Incarnation. Protestant nobles dissolved monasteries (Henry VIII and others seized monastic lands, ending the monastic intercessory presence in society). Convents closed, shrines were smashed, relics discarded. The very idea that material things (water, oil, icons, relics) could convey grace was considered superstition by Reformers. This was a profound desacralization of the material world – a step toward a flatter, more “immanent” frame of reality.

In governance, polity became contractual. The medieval notion of covenant under God was replaced slowly by notions of social contract among men. The Reformation, by removing a unifying Church authority, left a vacuum that secular political theory filled. For instance, in Calvinist areas, church governance became very decentralized (the consistory, a body of elders, ruled Geneva’s church with Calvin), and ideas of elective leadership in church perhaps influenced political thought toward viewing civil government also as something based on the consent of the governed (though that would fully bloom later). More immediately, Protestant kings justified increasing control: since they saw themselves as the guardians of true religion in their realm, any dissent (Catholic or radical Protestant) was often treated as sedition. Ironically, a movement that began with Luther’s personal stand in conscience led to cuius regio eius religio – the populace’s conscience dictated by the ruler’s choice. This state of affairs made religion a department of state policy. While this granted rulers stability (no competing allegiance to a foreign Pope), it also meant religion’s transcendent claim was subordinated to political needs.

The unity of Christendom dissolved into rival churches and states. By 1600, one could see Europe divided: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), Anglican, plus radical sects (Anabaptists, etc., though these were often persecuted by both sides). Each claimed to have the correct interpretation of Christianity and often were at war – literally (the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War 1618–1648, etc.). Thus, Christendom went from being “one flock under one shepherd” (as the ideal had been) to a patchwork of confessions each with their own shepherds. No single authority commanded universal allegiance, and Western Christianity lost its exterior unity and with it a great deal of cultural cohesion. The concept of Symphonia was utterly incompatible with this new reality: symphonia assumed one Church and one Christian empire/kingdom working in harmony. Now there were multiple churches and emerging nation-states often in conflict.

To illustrate the consequences: In a symphonic society, a sin could be a crime and a crime a sin in a unified moral order. In Protestant lands, the definition of sin and crime shifted as rulers saw fit (with advice of reformers). For instance, Geneva under Calvin imposed a strict theocratic morality by law (attendance at sermons mandated, dancing banned, etc.). In Anglican England, the king (later queen) determined the liturgy and creed (via Parliament) and dissenters were penalized. Meanwhile, in Catholic Counter-Reformation lands, the Inquisition might enforce orthodoxy with state cooperation. Thus everywhere, religion became more coercive in some ways because it was an arm of state policy – or in Calvin’s Geneva, the state was an arm of religious policy, but effectively merged. And across borders, the different confessions viewed each other not just as heretical, but often as politically suspect or treasonous (since allegiance to a different church implied allegiance to a foreign power or subversive principles). The result was a series of wars and persecutions that ravaged Europe for more than a century. By the mid-17th century, exhaustion with religious conflict contributed to a new mindset: maybe society should not be based on religious unity after all.

Thus, the Reformation inadvertently laid the groundwork for secularization. By shattering the religious unity and introducing endless doctrinal conflict, it made some thinkers yearn for a basis of peace outside religion. The polity became increasingly seen as a contract for security rather than an organism under God. Already, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, essentially established a new principle: the state as the supreme authority in its territory, not subject to supra-national religious interference. It also allowed a limited form of toleration for minority Christian sects in some cases – not out of love of pluralism, but fatigue of war. Westphalia is often cited as the origin of the modern secular state system.

Epistemologically, truth was no longer one accessible hierarchy, but a cacophony needing management. If Revelation becomes effectively privatized (each person reading the Bible and deciding), then what is public truth? The early Reformers did not intend to create religious liberty in a modern sense – Luther was vehement against Zwingli, Calvin against Anabaptists, etc. – but the pluralism their movement spawned made enforceable uniformity more and more untenable. People began to conceive of religion as a matter of private conviction, not public consensus. This is a key shift: the medieval asked “What is true, and how do we enforce God’s truth?” – the emerging modern asked “What is to be done with so many conflicting consciences?” The answer that gradually formed was: relegate religion to the private sphere, and establish a basis for public order that does not depend on theological agreement. That answer is the Enlightenment idea of a neutral, secular public square – something we’ll discuss in the next section.

In sum, the Reformation broke not only the institutional unity of Western Christendom but also its epistemic unity. It unleashed the individual conscience and interpretation as never before. While it sought to return to the pure authority of Scripture, in practice it led to competing scripturalisms and a reliance on secular authority to decide between them. As the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky observed, Protestantism, by trying to spiritualize and simplify Christianity to just faith and Word, inadvertently handed over large swathes of life to the secular realm – making possible a world where faith is a private matter and the public realm runs on non-religious principles.

From a Western Rite Orthodox viewpoint, one can lament that the Western Church, instead of healing its internal abuses in continuity with tradition, was rent asunder, and in the ensuing chaos many baby truths were thrown out with the dirty bathwater. The sacramental worldview, the ascetic-monastic witness, the sense of mystery and hierarchy – these were greatly diminished in Protestant lands. The Eastern Church watched these events from afar (often under its own Ottoman yoke then) and saw it as a further tragedy following the papal schism: first Old Rome deviated into pride of power, then Western Christendom imploded under revolt against that pride. Each stage was a move away from the wholeness (catholicity) of the apostolic tradition.

Now, after the Reformation’s dust settled by mid-17th century, an intellectual movement took shape building on the newfound secular authority and pluralism: the Enlightenment. If the Reformation transferred power to princes and fragmented truth into many confessions, the Enlightenment would question the very basis of truth and sovereignty in a more radical way – introducing open skepticism, human reason as judge of all, and new totalizing ideologies (like the Leviathan-state or the utopian revolution). This is the next phase of the war of authorities: the battlefield moves from Pope vs King to Reason vs Revelation, People vs Throne, Science vs Church – in short, the dialectic of domination enters a new arena. Let us proceed to how Enlightenment thought inherits and transforms the logic of absolute sovereignty first modeled by Popes and Kings, and drives it to even more revolutionary conclusions.

VI. Enlightenment and the Dialectic of Domination

Philosophical Genealogy:

By the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe had wearied of religious strife. The failures of both Papal and royal absolutism to bring peace or unity paved the way for a new mindset: perhaps human reason and autonomy could solve what tradition and faith had not. The Enlightenment was a broad intellectual movement (roughly 1680–1800) emphasizing reason, empirical science, progress, and skepticism of authority. Crucially, it inherited the logic of total sovereignty from the previous era but transferred it to new hosts.

• Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), writing after the English Civil War’s chaos, set forth in Leviathan (1651) a theory of political authority divorced from divine hierarchy. Hobbes saw humans in a state of nature as equally vulnerable and thus fearful, leading to a “war of every man against every man” unless there is an overwhelming power to keep order  . Hobbes concluded that individuals rationally contract together to surrender all their private will to a sovereign who will ensure peace. This sovereign (whether monarch or assembly) becomes a “Mortal God” – Hobbes literally uses that phrase: “that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, that mortal god to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defense.” . Here, Hobbes is secularizing the idea of the absolute ruler: under God (in a deist or distant sense) the State is effectively divine on earth in its authority. The Leviathan (the commonwealth) is created by human artifice but endowed with such total power by the covenant that it can shape the will of all citizens by fear of its might . Hobbes’ sovereign is beyond moral judgment of subjects – he argued the sovereign cannot be unjust to his subjects since they authorized all his actions . This chilling absolutism was justified by Hobbes as necessary to avoid the horror of anarchy (he famously described life without sovereignty as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” ). Note how Hobbes echoes the papal claims inadvertently: as Gregory VII thought the Pope’s decrees cannot be judged by anyone and Innocent III saw the state as deriving light from the papacy, Hobbes simply removes the Pope and gives that infallibility to the State. In Hobbes’s view, the State’s commands define justice – even religion must be dictated by the state to avoid division. In effect, Hobbes privatized God and absolutized government. The Leviathan is owed total obedience “under the immortal God”  – meaning you obey the State as you would God, except where God directly contradicts (and Hobbes’s “God” doesn’t speak much). This is the blueprint for modern totalitarianism: a human-made sovereign demanding unconditional loyalty. Hobbes replaced the medieval two-swords doctrine with one sword, held by the Commonwealth.
  
• Locke: John Locke (1632–1704) took a somewhat different approach, aiming to justify constitutional government and religious toleration. Yet Locke also essentially privatized faith and placed sovereignty ultimately in the people (though exercised via government). In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke argues that the care of souls is not the magistrate’s business; true religion consists in inward persuasion which cannot be compelled by force  . He defines a church as “a free and voluntary society” of men gathered for worship . This was a revolutionary definition: no one is born into a church; one joins by choice . Thus the bond of religion is a private association, not a public identity. This undercuts the old idea of corpus Christianorum (body of Christendom) to which all members of society belong by baptism. Locke’s view severs inherited communal religious obligations – faith becomes like membership in a club you pick. Locke explicitly says each person must be satisfied in his own mind of doctrine , otherwise it’s just hypocrisy. And he asserts the magistrate’s power extends only to “civil interests” (life, liberty, health, property) and “hath nothing to do with the world to come” . This is a clear declaration of the secular state: the government’s job is only to protect earthly welfare, not souls . Spiritual salvation is an individual pursuit in the domain of the church (voluntary society). This two-realm theory essentially echoes the Lutheran “two kingdoms” but in a rationalist rather than theological framework. The effect was to relocate authentic religion to the private sphere of conscience, leaving the public square to rational consensus on secular ends. Locke even suggests that no one can be compelled to support a church they don’t believe in, foreshadowing separation of church and state. While Locke advocated tolerance for differing Protestant sects (not necessarily for Catholics or atheists, interestingly, in his context), the genie was out: soon Enlightenment thinkers expanded toleration to all faiths as a principle. Religion was becoming seen as personal opinion or preference, whereas science and reason would govern public truth.
  

Locke’s political theory (in Two Treatises of Government, 1689) still nods to God-given natural rights and a moral order, but in practice the social contract rests on human consent: people make a government to secure their rights, and if it fails, they can alter or abolish it. Sovereignty thus ultimately resides in “the people” – a concept that will radicalize further in Rousseau and the French Revolution. The important part for our narrative: legitimacy and authenticity of authority were being recast in terms of service to individual rights and consent, rather than participation in divine order. This is a huge epistemological shift. Truth and right are determined less by alignment with an objective cosmic hierarchy and more by subjective human criteria (consent, utility, etc.). This will open the door to dialectical and utilitarian thinking about truth.

• Hegel: Skipping ahead to the 19th century but as part of the Enlightenment’s legacy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) can be seen as the thinker who theologized history itself. Distressed by the French Revolution’s excesses yet inspired by its scope, Hegel took the concept of conflict as the engine of progress to a metaphysical level – the famous dialectic. According to Hegel, the unfolding of Absolute Spirit (which is his somewhat impersonal notion of God) occurs through historical dialectic: every idea (thesis) breeds its opposite (antithesis), and their clash produces a higher synthesis, and so on, progressively. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the State becomes the incarnation of moral Idea. He wrote, “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth… one must worship the State as a terrestrial divinity.”  . He saw the Prussian state of his day as the culmination of history’s dialectic to that point, the rational organization of freedom. In Hegel’s view, individuals find their true freedom only in submission to the laws and institutions of the rational State  . The State has a quasi-divine status: “All the worth which the human being possesses, he possesses only through the State.” . This is essentially a secular transposition of the medieval claim “outside the Church no salvation” into “outside the State no true value.” It is a return of symphonia’s ideal in a perverse form: not the harmony of Church and State under God, but the merging of Church into State under the Absolute Spirit’s march. Hegel asserted that world-historical individuals (like Napoleon, whom he famously admired as “the world-soul on horseback”) might need to “trample many an innocent flower” for the advancement of Spirit  – essentially moral norms are subsumed to the higher rationality of History. This chilling idea seeded future totalitarian justification: the individual is nothing; the collective Spirit (the Volk, the Revolution, etc.) is everything. Hegel’s dialectic sacralized conflict: struggle and overcoming are how the divine manifests. Thus conflict was no longer a regrettable breakdown of order (as in classical thought) but the very mechanism of progress and being.
  

To tie with our theme: Hegel is the culmination of the idea that truth emerges from power struggle – albeit an intellectualized one. Medieval Pope and Emperor fought and each claimed to have divine sanction; Hegel says that fight (and all historical fights) are how the divine grows self-aware. He in effect justified domination: “World history stands above morality”, he implies . And the duty of the individual is to align with the State/History: “If the State claims life, the individual must surrender it.” , “One must worship the State.” . This is a direct quote from Hegel’s writings or second-hand accounts of them . In a sense, Hegel gave the philosophical benediction to the modern authoritarian state as god on earth. It’s an eerie echo of Hobbes’ mortal god, but with a mystical-historical twist.

• Marx: Karl Marx (1818–1883) took Hegel’s dialectic and “stood it on its head” (or rather, put it on a materialist footing). Marx argued that the driving force of history is economic class struggle – material conditions, not Spirit. In the famous opening of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels declare: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition”  . Marx effectively replaced the church-vs-state or people-vs-king dramas with bourgeoisie vs proletariat as the central conflict. He predicted that this dialectical conflict would inevitably result in the overthrow of capitalism and the birth of a classless, stateless communist society – essentially a secular eschaton (end-times utopia). In doing so, Marx turned many Judeo-Christian concepts into materialist form: paradise (communist utopia), the elect (proletariat), the oppressor (bourgeois “Pharaohs”), the prophets (socialist intellectuals). But God is absent; history is an impersonal process driven by economic forces. Marxism sees everything else – religion, morality, culture – as “superstructure” shaped by the mode of production. Thus, ultimate authority in explaining society lies in economics. Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people”, a drug to keep the masses complacent. He wanted to abolish religion and the old order entirely, calling for “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”. The Church–State rivalry, in Marx’s view, was just one manifestation of deeper class conflict (for instance, he’d interpret the medieval papacy vs empire as clergy vs nobility caste struggle, perhaps). He confidently proclaimed the Communist Party as the voice of the future, heralding a new world without oppression.
  

In Marx, the dialectic of domination becomes explicitly revolutionary annihilation: each stage’s ruling class is violently overthrown by a new revolutionary class – slave-owners by feudal lords, feudal lords by bourgeoisie (capitalists), and now capitalists by proletariat . Conflict isn’t just a way to truth; it is the only way. And the end of history (communism) is a state of absolute equality with no private property or religion – effectively a flattening of all hierarchy. In practice, Marxism, when implemented in the 20th century (USSR, etc.), became one-party dictatorships with state atheism, brutally suppressing both Church and independent state structures in favor of a fused Party-State that micromanaged life. This is ironically like a parody of symphonia: only one organ exists – the Party – which is the secular “church” and government combined, and it demands total allegiance. Those regimes exemplified the culmination of the quest for total sovereignty: the Party leaders held plenitudo potestatis in a way even medieval popes or kings could not imagine, extending into controlling thoughts, arts, economy, family life, and eliminating dissent by mass terror. They were explicitly anti-transcendent – the utopia was purely of this world.

Epistemology of Flattening:

As these Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideas triumphed, the analogical, vertical worldview was progressively flattened. Instead of a rich hierarchy of being, Western thought embraced either a mechanical materialism (the universe as atoms and void, no inherent purpose) or a subjective idealism (truth as a construct of human thought or will). In either case, the old idea that lower realities reflect higher divine realities was lost. The cosmos was no longer seen as an icon but as a machine or a battlefield of forces.

Truth became not something given from above, but something that emerges from below or within, often through conflict:

• For Hegel, truth emerges historically through the clash of ideas.
  
• For Marx, truth (or the next social system) emerges through class warfare.
  
• For the liberal tradition (Locke, etc.), social truth emerges through negotiation of individual interests (a kind of continuous contract renegotiation).
  
• Even in science, the Enlightenment view shifted to seeing nature as chaotic matter governed by mathematical laws, but purpose was stripped away. Darwin’s theory (1859) of evolution by natural selection would later reinforce a vision of life shaped by struggle and survival rather than any divine plan – nature “red in tooth and claw” in Tennyson’s phrase. Some Social Darwinists even applied “survival of the fittest” to human society, justifying competition and eugenics.
  

Conflict was enthroned as the engine of progress. This is a diametric inversion of the Christian cosmic view wherein ultimately peace (shalom) is the goal and underlying principle (God created harmony out of chaos in Genesis; Christ is Prince of Peace). The modern dialecticians see progress through annihilation – each old form must be negated, often violently, for the new to emerge. This reached nihilistic expressions in thinkers like Nietzsche (1844–1900), who proclaimed “God is dead” and that henceforth truth is the will to power. Nietzsche admired conflict and viewed Christian virtues (meekness, charity) with contempt as slave morality. He exalted the coming Übermensch (overman) who creates values anew by sheer force of will. This is a direct (if extreme) product of the Enlightenment’s trajectory: once transcendence is killed (“God is dead” – meaning belief in any objective divine order is gone), power itself becomes the only measure.

So by the late 19th century, the West’s educated classes largely regarded religion as optional or a private matter (if not outright false), authority as emanating from human agreements or struggles, and hierarchy as suspect unless justified by utility or consent. The vertical dimension – a shared orientation to a higher good – was increasingly absent in political and intellectual discourse. Instead, ideologies battled: liberalism, nationalism, socialism, each a kind of secular faith claiming total authority over interpretation of history and human destiny. They would soon battle not only with words but with world wars and revolutions.

To summarize the epistemological shift: the analogical worldview saw the earthly realm as dependent on the heavenly (grace builds on nature; kingship models divine rule; truths of reason harmonize with revelation). The dialectical worldview sees earthly forces (like class interests or general will) as primary and self-justifying, with “truth” being the victor’s claim or the outcome of dynamic processes. Immanence replaces transcendence: meaning and authority are sought within the horizontal plane (in the state, the people, the historical process) rather than from above. This sets the stage for the 20th century: a flat world of contending absolute claims, none grounded in a higher order all acknowledge.

Before proceeding to our current flat world consequences, consider how the Enlightenment inheres the logic of Papal and royal absolutism but empties it of sacred content. The medieval Pope said, “I have all power from God to judge kings; none can judge me.” The Enlightenment tyrant or Jacobin says, “We, the People (or the Party or the Nation), have all power; God is irrelevant; nothing can judge our general will.” The continuity is the will to absolute sovereignty; the break is throwing off any divine accountability. Where the Pope at least notionally answered to God and the King to Christ, the new sovereign (be it a dictator or democratic majority) answers only to History or itself. This is why we call it the war of authorities culminating in modern totalitarian impulses: each new claimant to sovereignty (Reason, State, People, Class, Science) admits no peer and no superior.

We are now living in the wake of these upheavals – what some call postmodernity or late modernity – where the dust of deconstruction and conflict has seemingly settled into an indefinite fragmentation. Having traced how the vertical was lost and the horizontal absolutized, we will explore the consequences: a disenchanted, “flat” society full of rival claims and no symphony – rather a cacophony. Then, we will consider if there is a path to recover the “forgotten music” of a higher order without falling into the old traps of domination.

VII. The Consequence: A Flat World

Theological Anthropology:

Modernity’s hallmark is immanentization – all meaning is sought in the here-and-now, within the closed system of the material world or human society. Transcendence – the vertical reference to God or a higher order – is either denied or pushed so far into private subjectivity that it has no binding public power. As a result, all earthly institutions and ideologies that once justified themselves as serving a higher purpose now justify themselves by themselves. Every institution becomes, in a sense, self-referential and self-defensive, for there is no agreed external standard above them. In this flat landscape, each major sphere of life elevated itself into an absolute:

• The State no longer sees itself as limited by any law above itself (like divine law or natural law); it demands absolute obedience as a matter of civic duty and often ideological loyalty. The nation-state in the 20th century mobilized entire populations for total war, conscripted minds with propaganda, and asserted the right to plan or intervene in every aspect of life “for the common good” as defined by itself. This is visible in extreme form in totalitarian regimes (Nazi, Soviet, etc.) where the State (or Party) became an object of quasi-worship – huge rallies, leader cults, the younger generation indoctrinated to report even on their parents if disloyal. Even in softer democracies, the State grew leviathan in scale (bureaucracies, standing armies, surveillance) and often assumes a role of ultimate problem-solver, from cradle to grave, expecting the citizens’ primary allegiance and identity to be national (replacing religious community). Patriotism is a virtue – which is fine in measure – but in modern flatland it can become an ersatz religion (the nation as the highest good).
  
• The Church (speaking of Western churches broadly) in a secular environment often loses confidence in her transcendent mission and seeks relevance by mimicking the state or popular culture. Many churches rebranded themselves as social service agencies or activist NGOs, focusing on this-worldly agendas (political advocacy, community organizing) sometimes at the expense of the Gospel of salvation. This phenomenon is sometimes called “horizontalism” in theology – the Church reduced to ethics and activism, empty of mysticism or eschatology. Alternatively, some churches retreated entirely from the public sphere, essentially conceding that faith is just a private lifestyle. In either case, the Church often ceased to challenge the State’s pretensions or society’s ills prophetically; instead she either echoes secular talking points (left or right) or quietly exists on the margins. The result is institutional weakness and fragmentation: hundreds of denominations, little authority to bind consciences, and the secular powers barely acknowledging the Church except when useful. In many places, the church is treated as just another voluntary club.
  
• Science in a flat world transforms from a method of inquiry into a comprehensive ideology (scientism) demanding trust. Where once people said “I believe in God,” now they say “I believe in Science.” During crises (like a pandemic), you might hear slogans like “Follow the Science” – implying an almost infallible guidance from scientific experts. But pure science deals with empirical facts and theories, which always evolve; scientism elevates provisional findings into dogmas and often dismisses ethical, religious, or philosophical concerns as unscientific noise. This gives scientists and technocrats immense cultural authority – often stepping into roles of decision-making traditionally reserved for moral or spiritual judgment. For example, decisions about human life (conception, death, genetic engineering) are heavily influenced by what technicians can do rather than by any higher moral law, since the latter is contested. People accept invasive technologies or surrender privacy to surveillance systems in the name of scientific progress or security – effectively placing faith in the machine. There is a kind of priesthood of experts that has replaced the clergy in public trust (though ironically, trust in experts is also eroding when their guidance conflicts with political tribes – so even “Science” gets politicized, as seen in climate change debates or medical advisories).
  
• The Individual in late modernity is told to demand worship in the form of radical autonomy. The ultimate loyalty of the modern person is often to their own self-actualization. This is the fruit of centuries of emphasis on individual rights untempered by responsibilities to any transcendent order. The consumerist and therapeutic culture urges each person to “be true to yourself,” “follow your heart,” effectively making the Self a mini-sovereign. Traditional communal or hierarchical structures – family, community, authority, tradition – are cast as oppressors of individual freedom if they impose any limits. The only rule left is “consent” and subjective feeling. In a way, each individual becomes an absolute – hence a society of many little absolutes inevitably clashes. If my truth is self-created and your truth is self-created, and there’s no higher Truth to reconcile us, social life becomes a battleground of wills. We see this in identity politics: various groups, each centered on some aspect of individual or collective self-will (ethnicity, orientation, ideology), vie for recognition and power, often unwilling to submit to any common standard or dialogue, because that would be “oppression.” The atomized individual ironically often ends up lonely, anxious, and easily manipulated by state or market forces, having severed those relational bonds that gave meaningful support. The promise of godlike autonomy proves a terrible burden on the human psyche (we weren’t built to be our own gods), leading to widespread nihilism or the search for strongman leaders to take the burden of decision off our shoulders.
  

The result of all this is a society of rival absolutes and pervasive instability. Each sphere – State, Church (or ideologies that replace it), Science, Individual – claims total jurisdiction within its domain, and they frequently conflict. For instance, the State and Individual clash over the limits of freedom (e.g., mandates vs. choice); Science and Individual clash over truth (someone’s personal belief vs. expert consensus); Church (for those still devout) clashes with State (e.g., over marriage definitions, sanctity of life issues). With no shared vertical framework, these conflicts often become zero-sum power struggles rather than reasoned disagreements aiming at a higher truth.

Hierarchy without transcendence devolves into bureaucracy; freedom without teleology collapses into nihilism. This means that where we still have hierarchical structures (say, a corporation or a government or even academia), absent a noble guiding purpose, they tend to become soulless machines of procedure and control (bureaucracy) – concerned only with their own perpetuation and rules. People working in such structures often feel alienated, cogs in a vast apparatus, not inspired by any higher calling. On the other side, the valorization of freedom for its own sake – with no telos (end goal, like virtue or salvation) – leads many individuals to a sense of meaningless drift. Having cast off all duties except to self, the self eventually asks, “Is this all there is?” and either falls into hedonistic distraction or despair. The epidemic of depression, the rise of suicide, the attraction of young people to extremist ideologies (as a way to find purpose) – all these bespeak a deep nihilism gnawing at the vitals of the West. As Dostoevsky famously wrote, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” People often interpret that as meaning anything goes (license), but Dostoevsky’s point was also that when people truly believe nothing is forbidden (because no higher law), eventually nothing is valued – a pathology of the spirit sets in.

Cultural Genealogy:

The West now oscillates between anarchy and technocracy, both forms of despair masked as solutions. By anarchy, I mean the loosening of all normative bonds – a kind of social entropy. We see this in cultural relativism (no common culture, just a mosaic of subcultures), in moral libertinism (anything goes so long as “it doesn’t hurt someone” – and even what counts as harm is subjective), and in the breakdown of authority in families, schools, etc. People often celebrate this as liberation from oppressive norms. But the dark side is isolation, loss of shared meaning, and often an underlying chaos in lives (family breakdown, addiction, etc.). Observing this chaos, other forces push towards technocracy – rule by technical experts and algorithmic control. If people can’t govern themselves, maybe AI and Big Data can manage society better. There’s a quasi-religious faith in technological fixes for what are essentially moral-spiritual crises. We surrender more of our privacy and freedom to surveillance systems, thinking it will give security or efficiency. The state and corporate powers gather unprecedented data and power to “nudge” behavior (as some policymakers put it). Thus, one part of society clamors for absolute freedom (anarchy), and another yields to absolute control (technocracy). In truth, they feed into each other: the more social disorder from broken communities, the more excuse for intrusive governance to maintain semblance of order; conversely, the more a technocratic system micromanages life, the more people either rebel chaotically or become passive, hollow conformists who then erupt in irrational ways (because the soul seeks meaning or adrenaline).

Both extremes are forms of despair because neither acknowledges a higher meaning or hope:

• Anarchy as a worldview despairs that truth or goodness can be known, so it just lets each do their own thing till it falls apart.
  
• Technocracy despairs of wisdom among common folk, so it reduces people to datapoints to be manipulated for collective stability – a kind of hopeless view of human dignity.
  

One sees, in alternating phases, Western culture swinging: e.g., the wild 1920s individualism -> then the 1930s/40s rise of totalitarian regimes harnessing technology and mass organization -> after WWII, some balance -> the 1960s anti-authority explosion -> then by 2020s, a drift to either populist strongman politics or, in reaction, paternalistic nanny-states and tech-surveillance (even ironically used by those strongmen). These swings indicate a loss of the “vertical axis”. When people no longer look up to find common truth, they oscillate side to side in reaction to each other’s excesses.

Having killed the vertical (to phrase it starkly), the West tries to compensate by building infinite horizontal systems of control. That means instead of depth (spiritual depth, moral depth) we create more breadth: more laws, more networks, more consumption, more information – hoping quantity can stand in for quality. We think if we connect everyone on the internet, that will produce understanding – but without a shared higher vision, it produces echo chambers and vitriol. We think if we accumulate enough wealth and comfort, that suffices – but hearts remain restless (the opioid epidemic, etc., testifies to spiritual void amid material plenty). We multiply entertainment and stimulation (24/7 media, social media) to distract from emptiness – resulting in short attention spans and inability to grapple with profound questions. It is a flatland in which the horizon stretches to infinity (endless options, endless knowledge at fingertips) but there is no heaven above. In literature, this ennui was captured by T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” (1922) – a world of fragments and dry lore where “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” but no life-giving water (transcendence) except maybe a distant thunder with no rain.

Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this “the immanent frame” – a self-sufficient human sphere closed to transcendence. Many accept this as the default reality. Yet, the paradox is, humans still long for meaning, righteousness, beauty beyond the material. In the flat world, these desires often mutate into secular idolatries: worship of nation, race, ideology, or even escapist spiritualisms (cultic beliefs, the occult, neo-paganism, etc.). So while formally the public world is flat, emotionally people are oscillating wildly seeking something to fill the “God-shaped hole” (to use Pascal’s phrase). This makes our times unstable: advanced technology and primal passions together – a dangerous mix, like giving a child a flamethrower while telling him there are no rules.

In this flat condition, legitimacy and authenticity are in crisis. Who or what can be trusted as real and good? The old answers (the Church, the learned, the elders, etc.) carry little weight for many. People suspect all authority of being a mask for power or profit. This is why conspiracy theories proliferate – lacking a vertical anchor of truth, any narrative might be true for some, and they’ll cling to it because the official narratives (from government or media) are not believed either, often for good reason due to past lies or incompetence. The war of authorities has devolved into a war on the very concept of authority. This is postmodernity: cynicism toward truth claims, belief that “truth” is just perspective or manipulation.

This erosion has gone so far that even reality of nature is contested. For instance, basic anthropological truths (like the reality of male and female) are challenged by some as arbitrary or fluid – a view impelled by radical individualism (I define myself) combined with technology (surgeries, etc., enabling that will). This was unimaginable in a world with a strong vertical sense (where one’s body was seen as a gift from God or nature). Now, body too is canvas for will-to-power or desire. But nature cannot be indefinitely mocked without consequence – physical and psychological harm often result.

We have painted a bleak picture, but an accurate one, of the current war of authorities: essentially, all against all – an anti-symphony, a cacophony. Or using the essay’s title metaphor: the Symphonia fractured, we live amid its shards, hearing not music but noise and occasional screams. Yet the very misery of this war may prompt a search for peace. The flat world is unbearable to souls who have tasted transcendence, and even those who haven’t consciously may feel an ache. As one poet put it, “the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats).

This sets the stage for our Conclusion – The Forgotten Music: how might we recover a sense of cosmic harmony (symphonia) again, not by turning back the clock simplistically, but by recalling the truths that were lost and forging a renewed understanding of authority as service and truth as objective and unifying? The answer will involve a return to ontology: to being, to acknowledging that reality (both spiritual and physical) has an inherent order not of our making, to which we must attune ourselves. In Christian terms, it means rediscovering Christ the Logos permeating creation – the vertical axis that connects heaven and earth, meaning and practice. Only by re-tuning ourselves to that divine key can the noise of modern life begin to resolve into music again.

Let us conclude with such reflections, pointing not to a utopia we can engineer (for the attempt to force symphony can lead back to tyranny), but to a humble re-aligning of our hearts and communities with the eternal Logos, such that gradually the rightful harmony might be restored – “on earth as it is in heaven.”

VIII. Conclusion — The Forgotten Music

The cure for our fractured world is not a naïve program of turning back to some bygone age, nor is it the imposition of a new totalizing ideology. Rather, it is a remembrance and reorientation – a metanoia (repentance in the Greek sense of a change of mind) toward the transcendent order that was always our true home. We have to recall the “forgotten music” – the harmony of heaven and earth – and learn to hear it anew and live it out in fresh circumstances. In doing so, we seek not to regress to the past but to reclaim the wisdom of the past (the ontology of participation, the covenantal view of authority) in a purified, deepened form that addresses present errors.

Symphonia cannot be legislated; it must be lived. One lesson of history is that merely legal or external arrangements of Church and State do not guarantee true harmony – the medieval symphonia broke when love and humility yielded to pride and ambition. Therefore, any restoration of harmony must begin within souls and communities, growing organically rather than being enforced top-down. It will come from men and women – laypeople, clergy, officials, families – who internalize both the priestly and royal virtues and practice them. In Orthodox thought, every Christian is called to be “king” and “priest” in a spiritual sense: king by ruling one’s passions and stewarding creation, priest by offering oneself and the world to God in thanksgiving. A society where individuals strive for that internal symphonia – “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) – will naturally engender healthier relations between institutions.

To recover symphonia is to rediscover ontology – the reality of things as God made them, and our place in that reality. It means recognizing that all power is ultimately stewardship, not possession. No authority we wield is truly our own; it is a trust from God for service. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). This is the corrective to the will-to-power: to see authority as a gift with accountability. A king or president or parent or pastor does not “own” his office; he holds it as a ministry (the word ministerium originally means service). Likewise, the gifts of intellect in scientists, or wealth in the economy, are endowments to be used for the common good under God’s watch. We must come to view power as relational, not autonomous. In concrete terms, this means renewing the idea of covenant – mutual, solemn commitment under higher law – in our social fabric: marriage covenants, community covenants, even the social contract concept re-infused with moral dimension (not just utility or fear). A covenant acknowledges relationship and responsibility in the sight of the transcendent. For example, a public official should see his role as a covenant with the people before God – as did old kings who took coronation oaths seriously, or as is inscribed on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all inhabitants thereof,” a biblical charge linking freedom with divine law.

The Church and State need not be fused – they must be tuned to one another under the Logos. The lesson of history is that merging them (Caesaropapism or Papocaesarism) corrupts both; yet isolating them entirely leaves a society schizophrenic. They are distinct but should not be discordant. Think of a duet: two voices singing different parts but one melody. What tunes them is not some human compromise alone, but the Logos (the Divine Word) – Christ, who is King of Kings and also eternal High Priest. When both churchmen and statesmen submit sincerely to Christ’s teachings – which include humility, justice, mercy – their actions naturally coordinate for good. It’s notable that in times of crisis, even secular leaders invoke prayer or moral law; there is an instinct that real answers lie beyond human cleverness. The more our leaders personally acknowledge a higher accountability, the more trustworthy their leadership. Thus rather than clamoring for a “Christian nation” by law, we should foster Christian virtues in citizens and leaders by persuasion and example, such that the laws and policies gradually reflect those virtues. In Western Rite Orthodoxy, we have the concept of “altar and throne” working together – not by legal decree but by shared faith. A modern application might be, for instance, local governments and churches partnering to help the poor, each respecting the other’s role – the church offering spiritual care and moral formation, the government ensuring material justice and order. Neither tries to do the other’s job, and neither excludes the other’s input. This cooperative model can scale if done wisely, but it starts small.

When the vertical axis returns, many of our oppositions between freedom and order, or between obedience and dignity, dissolve. Without the vertical, “freedom” is often defined as rebellion (throwing off all limits) because all limits seem arbitrary; but if God is above, then freedom is redefined as alignment with our true purpose (the eagle is free in the air, not in water – we are free in truth, not in error). Obedience similarly ceases to mean servility; it means attunement to reality. As Christ said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Paradoxically, a society that bows to God can afford to give individuals much freedom – because their freedom is oriented by conscience and virtue. In contrast, a godless society ends up either in chaos or in tyranny or oscillating between them, as we saw. Thus “freedom will no longer mean rebellion, and obedience will no longer mean slavery.” They will coincide in the joyful willing of the good. This was the case in moments of genuine harmony – say, a saintly king and a holy bishop cooperating actually enhanced the liberty of the people to thrive in good.

Then the forgotten music may once again be heard. In Christian imagination, all of creation is actually singing – the Psalms speak of trees clapping hands, hills singing, angels perpetually praising God. Sin introduced disharmony (the “music of men’s lives” became out of tune, to borrow from Shakespeare’s metaphor). The Incarnation and Redemption aim to restore the cosmic song – Christ is often depicted in Orthodox iconography as Pantocrator holding a gospel book surrounded by stars and winds, indicating his headship over the universe restoring order. When we realign with Christ (the Logos), we plug back into the cosmic symphony. In practical effect, this looks like communities where justice and mercy kiss (Psalm 85:10), where art, worship, and work integrate. Think of a church bell ringing out at eventide across a town – once that sound was common, reminding all of the presence of God amidst daily life. Hearing it, the farmer in the field paused to pray, the magistrate remembered his judgments must answer to a higher Judge, children learned beauty and reverence. We need to recover such integration. Not necessarily literal bells (though that wouldn’t hurt!), but ways that the divine is acknowledged regularly in public life – prayers at gatherings, religious feasts that everyone respects, charitable works done in Christ’s name openly and welcomed by authorities, etc.

None of this can be forced. It must come from authentic revival of faith and love at grass roots. As people experience the emptiness of flatland, they will seek transcendence. The Church – especially Orthodox tradition with its undiluted sacramental life and connection to the ancient Fathers – has to be ready to offer the living water. This is why sources, as our essay did, prioritize Scripture, the Fathers, Councils – those primary sources carry weight and spirit that can speak even now. Reacquainting society with those treasures (through education, dialogue) builds a common memory of what a harmonious world looked like. It might inspire, for example, a leader to emulate Marcus Aurelius or St. Louis or George Washington (who, though not Orthodox, embodied some classical virtues), rather than Machiavelli or Marx. Cultural icons matter – that’s why we mentioned Alfred, Richard, Edward III, the Black Prince, Cavaliers – not to idolize them, but to draw on whatever was noble in them as types of values needed. If we view them through a Western Rite Orthodox lens, we see not necessarily their denominational specifics but their virtues: Alfred’s piety and wisdom, Richard’s courage (hopefully baptized and tempered by mercy), Edward III’s chivalry and patronage of worship (he built beautiful chapels), the Cavaliers’ loyalty and honor (if only they had an Orthodox ethos to ground it). These qualities can be baptized and integrated into a living Orthodox culture in the West, giving Western converts and communities a sense that their heritage is not wholly alien to Orthodoxy but can be fulfilled in it.

Ultimately, the re-harmonizing of “heaven and earth” is God’s work – Christians believe Christ will come again to fully unite the two in the heavenly Jerusalem. But we are called to begin that harmonization now, in anticipation (this is the essence of the Church’s mission: to manifest the Kingdom already among us). When Christians live as “light of the world” (Matt 5:14), the forgotten music starts to be heard by others. It may start faintly – a chant here, a kind deed there that perplexes worldly logic – but it grows.

In conclusion, the fragmentation of symphonia from Saxon-Norman times through Papal imperium to modern secular chaos teaches a clear lesson: without the Logos, structures fall into strife; with the Logos, even diverse parts form a coherent whole. Our task is to humbly resubmit ourselves to that Logos, Jesus Christ, and to love our neighbors in truth. This will rebuild relational authority – fathers caring for families, pastors for flocks, leaders for citizens – not for gain but for God. Over time, that relational, covenantal, hierarchical order, infused by love, can heal the war of authorities. People will see that authentic authority is not about domination but about calling forth order and goodness – like a conductor bringing musicians in tune to make beauty.

We may never have a “magisterial Christendom” on earth before Christ returns; but we can have pockets of concord that leaven the whole. And if enough pockets connect, who knows? Perhaps by God’s mercy a true renewal of Christian culture in the West could emerge, neither medieval nor modern in the flawed senses, but a creative new symphony on ancient themes. In that symphony, heaven and earth sing together once more – the earthly polis reflecting the City of God. This is our hope and our striving. As the Psalmist says, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Psalm 85:10). When that happens, the forgotten music will no longer be forgotten; it will be the very atmosphere of our lives, to the glory of God.

In the words of the Apocalypse vision: “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). Amen.