THE LOST SOUL OF THE BODY POLITIC A Dissertation by JESSE ALLEN CHUPP Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2012 Major Subject: Political Science THE LOST SOUL OF THE BODY POLITIC A Dissertation by JESSE ALLEN CHUPP Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Cary J. Nederman Committee Members, Robert Harmel Judith Baer Leah DeVun Head of Department, James Rogers May 2012 Major Subject: Political Science iii ABSTRACT The Lost Soul of the Body Politic. (May 2012) Jesse Allen Chupp, B.S., Indiana Wesleyan University; M.A., Ball State University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Cary J. Nederman The modern nation-state is the product of a gradual process in which the religiously concerned medieval political and ecclesiastical synthesis became more secular and centralized. Mirroring this external institutional development, the theoretical conception of the state changed from one of a natural organic unity of diverse corporate members, often described metaphorically as a Body Politic, to a consent-based compact among atomized individuals. This change can be traced in the Body Politic metaphor of four authors: John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan, Johannes Althusius, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In this project, I argue that the Body Politic metaphor, particularly the inclusion or exclusion of a soul of the Body Politic, is uniquely appropriate for capturing the complexity of political life in general across differing levels of aggregation and for elucidating the political and religious commitments of the authors who employ it, as they critique their own contemporary political and religious institutions and describe their ideal societies. In the conclusion, I suggest that the loss of a strongly organic conception of the state has denied modern society and political theory a well established means for recognizing and integrating corporate entities and for explaining the existence of the modern nation-state in any kind of transcendental moral context, thus the lost soul of the Body Politic. iv This work is dedicated to my Family, whose love, patience, and sacrifices made it possible. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair, Cary Nederman, for the manifold ways in which he provided this project with inspiration and guidance, and my committee members, past and present, Ed Portis, Robert Harmel, Judith Baer, and Leah DeVun, for their patience and thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also to the Department of Political Science office staff, especially Carl Richard, Carrie Kilpatrick, Lou Ellen Herr, and Dianne Adams, whose many helps were invaluable to this project and other situations over the years. Thanks also go to my many colleagues and friends among the cohort of graduate students in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University and in other departments as well. Their professional and personal contributions to my graduate experience and this work are too numerous to list individually. However, special thanks are due to Phillip Gray for his mentoring me as a novice political theorist and to Robert Puckett, David Rossbach, Nathan Ilderton, and Tyler Johnson for putting up with the good and the bad from me for so many years. Thanks to my parents, Greg and Ruth Chupp, for their love, help, and direction, and to my in-laws, Jim and Geri Elsberry, for their many considerate gestures of support. Many thanks are due as to all my siblings, my wife’s siblings, and their families, especially Robert and Jennifer Puckett, for their help and support during the time that vi this work was completed. Finally, thanks to my wife, Sarah, for her love and patience with me and this project, and to our children, James, Jack, and Caroline, for making my life so full of love and meaning. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT......................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION..................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………….. vii 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................ 1 2. THE BODY POLITIC OF JOHN OF SALISBURY......................................... 30 3. THE BODY POLITIC OF CHRISTINE DE PIZAN........................................ 61 4. THE BODY POLITIC OF JOHANNES ALTHUSIUS..................................... 102 5. THE BODY POLITIC OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU.............................. 138 6. CONCLUSION................................................................................................... 170 REFERENCES........................................................................................................ 177 VITA........................................................................................................................ 186 1 1. INTRODUCTION The modern nation-state, the current dominant expression of the Body Politic, is the heir to the following development regarding the theory and motivation of political and religious institutions: the ancient Greeks and Romans ordered society towards political justice and virtue, and political religion and its officers were concerned primarily with inculcating civil allegiance; this social arrangement occurred first in the Body Politic of cities and then, later, in empires. Christian civilization, especially in Western Europe, retained some of the political institutions of the classical period but added an otherworldly teleology of the soul as the ultimate concern of human life and created a synthetic religious-political construct commonly called the Two Swords in which priests exercised a much more prominent position than they did in the classical institutional order. In this period, the Body Politic was thought to repose in local political sovereignties but also, even if only mystically, in the entire Christian community under the spiritual administration of the Chief Christian Pastor, the Pope. The Reformation nation-states, the precursors of the modern structure of the Body Politic, retained the Christian religious motivations of the medieval theory but collapsed the religious- political authority into the hands of national sovereigns, thus returning religious officials to a position of political subservience. These political sovereigns, after an initial phase of religious vigor and conflict, became so manifestly disinterested in the otherworldly ____________ This dissertation follows the style of the American Political Science Review. 2 element of Christian religion that the political theory of the modern nation-state came to repose its philosophical legitimacy upon the consent of the governed as political citizens only, instead of as Christians in political agreement, and sometimes conflict, while in pilgrimage to the next life. The secular modern nation-state, the modern Body Politic that abrogates any explicit positive religious commitments or concern for the destiny of souls, is the product of this historical and theoretical development. Thus, two of the main components of the original project of Western Civilization, concern for the soul and the public acknowledgment and promotion of human goods that transcend politics, have been lost to the life of the modern Body Politic. The entirety of this political, cultural, and religious story is impossible to describe in the course of a dissertation, but the germ of this development can be seen in the medieval Catholic Christian political theories of the Body Politic of John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan, the Reformed Protestant Christian political theory of Johannes Althusius, and the early modern secular political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Specifically, I will argue: that John's medieval Body Politic metaphor represented the organic, and sometimes ambiguous, relationship of the political and religious realms that took seriously the Christian understanding of the soul’s origin and destiny; that Christine's removal of the soul, the clergy in John's designation, from the Body Politic metaphor and her French nationalism subtly weakened the medieval political and religious synthesis, even though her work displays a large degree of Catholic devotional piety and even an endorsement, though tepid, of the sacramental necessity of priests; 3 that the Reformed Christian political theory of Althusius, which can be understood as an analogue to the Body Politic metaphor, though stripped of its unifying principle, is Christian in name but not by necessity since its focus is ultimately secular as implied by his subjection of the ministers of religion to the civil power, his complete abrogation, as a Calvinist Protestant, of the hagiographic elements in John and Christine, and his severe diminishing of the sacramental life; and that Rousseau’s General Will theory, another conceptual device related to the Body Politic, is an attempt to recover the moral consensus that the organic medieval synthesis fostered minus any specific religious commitment other than a nod to the ability of religion to foster civic loyalty in the classical sense. Concern for the salvation of souls, so explicit in John's theory, is absent from Rousseau's. Before