From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, 100-1625

From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, 100-1625. Edited by Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. xx + 838 pp. $70.00 (cloth): $45.00 (paper).

The subtitle is misleading: this is far more than a "sourcebook." It is more basically an argument regarding the existence of a tradition of Christian "theopolitical" discourse extending, as the title has it, from the second-- century theologian Irenaeus (before him, in fact) until the seventeenthcentury jurist Grotius. This argument serves as the skeleton on which the book offers a "coherent overview of the development of Christian political thought" (p. xv), excerpting generously from over sixty theologians, political and legal thinkers, and ecclesial and secular authorities, all of whom contributed to the tradition in various ways.

The book charts the career of the tradition from the Roman Empire through its fall in the West, the rise of various barbarian successor states, the development of Byzantine imperial theology, the renaissance of the High Middle Ages, the struggle between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and the rise of nation states in the Renaissance and Reformation. The editors make no overt effort to identify a skeletal substructure to the "tradition," but nonetheless certain themes and recurrent motifs emerge in the texts. What they call an "aesthetics" of Christian government-a "drama of overcoming wrath with mercy" (p. 91)-is occasionally visible throughout, and one might say it is the political manifestation of the salvation economy at the core of the Christian kerygma.

This will be an indispensable text both for classroom use-and indisputably worth its price-and for Christian theologians and political thinkers, Christian or not. "Influence" is too modest a word for its proper effect: the work aims to reconstruct our minds, by revealing a vibrant, multivoiced and profound tradition of which our usual education gives us at best brief glimpses. The only analogies for the sort of impact it should have are the "rediscovery" of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the translation of the Bible into the European vernaculars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This work (in a less fundamental way, of course) should have the same sort of effect on contemporary discussions-energizing them with new arguments and providing them with historical depth that we never imagined were there.

There are some minor complaints, of course; there is a slight but noticeable frustration with Eastern Orthodox thought, about which the editors note, only a little unfairly, that, for all its Christological controversies, when it comes to politics, it assumed an essentially deistic cosmology (p. 181). The narrative evinces an overwhelmingly "intellectualist" character; very little attention is paid to historical changes in technology, economy, society, or political structure-or the rise of Islam, the fall of Constantinople, or Europe's exploration of the Americas-and how such changes might influence changes in political thought. At times one has the impression of a history only half told, a radically intellectualist history. More quibblingly, I wish that they might have begun the passages from Calvin on any page other than 666; given their appreciation of the Reform tradition, however, this is almost certainly the fault of some Arminian typesetter.

A work of this scope and ambition naturally raises many more questions than it answers; indeed, such is its point. But in reading this text I find myself sometimes frustrated as to what I am supposed to do with it. The editors clearly approve of this work, and wish us to carry it on; but it seems to me that for reasons both of the book's structure, and of the nature of our larger predicament itself, such appropriation may prove more difficult than the editors suggest.

Structurally, while many of the texts implicitly disagree with one another, the mode of presentation mutes the tradition-minded reader's apprehension of any arguments between them; and as argument is of the essence of tradition, this makes our "ownership" of the tradition difficult. When one compares it to the recent similar text by Michael Walter and his colleagues-- The Jewish Political Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)-- one notes the way in which the structure of the book itself, by being organized historically, leaves us unclear about how to go about appropriating it. It seems more a monument than a workbook (the editors' chosen descriptor, 11 sourcebook," seems on this point simply ambiguous to me). This has the advantage of presenting the texts in rather large chunks rather than the gobbets with which Walter et al. seek to satisfy us. But it does make much more difficult the practical task of appropriating this tradition. Such a complaint may not entail blame, but rather be a request for more; perhaps it could be complemented in a few years by a text similar to Lombard's Sentences, or even more provocatively, Abelard's Sic et Non.