MTS-02: Smith on Field

Discussed on October 3, 2012, with Warren Smith as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.

Source: Lester Field, Liberty, Dominion, & the Two Swords (Notre Dame, 1998)

Discussion Prompt

The concept of constitutional boundaries spoken of in the Lester Fields reading this round stuck in my mind as I proceeded through the text. The term only appears two or three times, but the concept itself seemed thematic. After all, dominion and the distinction between the Spiritual and the Temporal sword is one determined by boundaries that both the Church and the world find to be constitutive.

Earlier in Christian history, there was a sharp divide between the sword itself that the state was ordained to use and its true nature. This polarity occurs twice in Fields; the first is included in the statement "Christian judgment of the sword pertained to its use, not its nature." (46) By this, I take it to mean that the Church took issue not with the fact that the state wielded the sword, but how and for what purpose. It seems that the sword itself was an evil instrument wielded only to restrain like evil. This logic allowed the 'Apostle Paul to hate the sword and still commend martyrs' killed thereby. (ibid, paraphrase)

The second occurrence is a few pages later, another seeming contradiction; "soldiers sinned by virtue of the very sword [God] had ordained for them." (48) Here again, a critical divide, a constitutional boundary, provides the necessary context. Up to this time, Christians were still prohibited from being soldiers – "for no Christian or catechumen could become a soldier." (47, emphasis in original) In each occurrence, the explicit assumption in place was that the Church and the world existed in two very different states of being. The text does not make incredibly clear whether that state of being was defined chronologically or teleologically.

If the imperial sword is evil used against evil despite those who wield it, the spiritual sword is of God and used for the purpose of protecting his Church. God wielded the spiritual sword against heretics and blasphemers who would (even inadvertently) lead flocks astray. "The Lord's holy sword" (51) protected from within, in the form of heretics, and from without, in the form of persecutors. Clergy were instruments of God's incision; ultimately it was Christ who operated, "to cut apostates off from the Church." (52)

This sword of the Spirit was described in one of two ways; scripturally, the spiritual sword is God's word in Christ Jesus, but traditionally, the "spiritual arms of salvation" was the equated with the Eucharist. (53) Therefore, it was priests who were God's "peaceful soldiers" (50) and "Christ's army" (54) who were the line of defense against the spiritual evils of heresy and apostasy, not the imperial soldiers who wield an ordained sword evilly to restrain evil.

Of the two swords, the sword of God is in every way prior to the worldly sword. Things get complicated when God and the world seem to be working in tandem. Even in that case, however, in a nation that assumes its own Christianity, "an emperor in the Church is not above the church." (211) The supposedly "Christian" world, its tools, and its agents are all subordinate to God. Even heretical emperors were in the position "of being outside the church but subject to its discipline." (154) Herein lies the issue at the heart of my overall thesis.

Ambrose plays prominently in the later chapters selected from Fields. Frustratingly, it is hard to pin down whether or not Ambrose held consistently to a single political theology throughout his bishopric or not. During his early service, with Martin, he excommunicated the Spanish bishops advocating for Priscillian's execution. For example, in concord with the theology extrapolated above, he condemned the zealous Bishops from Spain, "not the state's right to inflict [capital punishment]." (201) Far from endorsing Caesar's sword, he simply recognizes constitutional boundaries making each distinct in purpose and execution.

However, Ambrose eventually "predicated a sword's materiality upon its ethical and spiritual use" (209) and thereby "spiritualized the imperial sword." (210) The blurring of the lines between the sword of God and the sword of Caesar troubles the proper distinction earlier proposed.

Questions

The Emperor Maximus' suggestion to Martin regarding Priscillian that "heretics rightly condemned customarily pertain to public judgments rather than the pursuits of priests" (201) is poignant and credible. However, does this betray the nature of excommunication as an invitation to return to the fold? Or, more importantly perhaps, does this eschatology suggest the ekklesia is somehow below or within imperial jurisdiction?

A correlation is made between martyrs and soldiers in Prudentius' concept of sueta virtus. (209) How does this play into my project and how can it be applied to the lived theological statements of soldier saints like Martin?

Relation to other texts in this series

In the back of my mind was Yoder's claim from his Christian Witness to the State that "the Christian church knows why the state exists… better than the state itself." Yoder and Fields' read of history thus seem complimentary;

"the heathens thereby became the inadvertent instruments of [God's] justice" (Fields, 47)

"the bearers of political authority are in spite of themselves agents of the divine economy, being used whether in rebellion or submission as agents of God's purpose," (Yoder, 12)

It would be interesting to leverage Yoder's proposed middle axiom to the political theology represented by Fields as belonging to the early church. Is his concept compatible with Fields' "constitutional boundaries"? Hauerwas suggests Yoder backed away from the use of such language, and Fields similarly uses his phrase very sparingly. What is the reason for this reluctance?

Discussion

Discussion transcript

Warren Smith: What?

Logan: The reflections.

Smith: Oh, okay.

Logan: Unless you wanted to read them now.

Smith: Let's see — let me ask this. Did you have a list of questions you wanted to talk about first?

Logan: Not as much as last time. I put some on the back, and I'm also going to try to relate it to other readings in the series. I focused on some of the material on Martin. I don't have a hard-and-fast set of questions.

Smith: In that case, let's just go through and read it, and I'll stop you, and we can talk more about the questions at the end.

Logan: Okay, sounds good.

Smith: All right.

Logan: I tried to just regurgitate what I think the text was saying — I left out a lot.

Smith: Summarize what the text was saying.

Logan: Yeah. One of the things that kept coming back to me was Field's term — I think he uses it twice — "constitutional boundaries." With Hauerwas, I read Yoder's Christian Witness to the State, and he used the term "middle axioms" to describe the gray area — they're probably not the exact same thing, now that I think about it. Middle axioms for Yoder are the gray area between over-pragmatic precision and the church's eschatological expectations — somewhere between church and state there must be some kind of middle ground, though that may not be a fair way to put it. Dr. Hauerwas said Yoder actually backed away from that term. Field uses the same phrase, but only twice. One of the things I was trying to get at was how Field defines the state of being for the sword of God versus the sword of the state. They're obviously distinct, but in what way — teleologically, or merely chronologically? Even Ambrose seems to shift, from standing with Martin and saying there's a hard distinction — Priscillian should be tried by ecclesial courts — to eventually saying that a sword's materiality is predicated on its ethical and spiritual use. Field's words: Ambrose "spiritualized the imperial sword." So there's this distinction running through the text, but the permeability of the boundary wasn't clear to me, and I don't think it was clear to the church either. I was trying to figure out whether there was a shift, or whether it was something evolving over time.

Smith: What's the difference between saying there's a shift and saying it's evolving over time?

Logan: For me, a shift implies a singular occurrence — you go up and up until you hit a cliff, and then something's different.

Smith: A punctiliar moment.

Logan: Right. The metaphor's not about up and down, just that there's something different. I don't know much church history, but it seems like Priscillian's execution represents a shift rather than something gradual.

Smith: Yes, that's interesting — it's tied up with language, because when I think of a shift, I think of a change, but I usually think of a shift as something less radical. Though I guess we do talk about a "paradigm shift," which implies something more radical.

Logan: Right. I think the accusation people level at someone like Yoder is that it sounds like it just happened overnight — Field even uses the phrase "Constantinian revolution," not "Constantinian shift." Some of this is interplaying nicely with my church history readings — Homoousios and how some of that plays out. It's obvious it started earlier — reading Tertullian and Origen — so it wasn't merely Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, and it wasn't merely Priscillian, and yet those two events seem to mark some kind of limit. Before Constantine there was something; in between those two events people are still trying to work it out; by the time we get to Priscillian, it's like it's all out the window. I wrote about Augustine in my margins on this.

Smith: That's good — I think there's a process of trying to figure something out, which then gets solidified once you reach a particular point, or at least some negative judgment rules something else out. There's a certain development — I hesitate to call it linear, because that implies something progressive — but there's a process of figuring out what's meant, such that by the end there's something dialectical going on: whatever was in the thesis is different by the synthesis. So yes, I think that's a reasonable way to think about what's going on — they're working out this new relationship. Constantine brings a revolution; things are really different, and yet some of the same issues were afloat before him. But once you have an emperor extending patronage to Christianity, it becomes a different context than one where the state is thoroughly pagan and Christians can't be part of it without committing idolatry. So your way of thinking about causality is important there, and you're doing it.

Logan: I'm glad I delayed reading Sulpicius until the third piece, because I'm really interested in how Martin fits into this developing understanding of the church's relationship to the world. One of my concrete questions: Yoder says "the Christian Church knows why the state exists better than the state itself," and Field suggests something similar — "the heathens thereby became the inadvertent instruments of God's justice," which isn't too different from Yoder's "the bearers of political authority are, in spite of themselves, agents of the divine economy, being used, whether in rebellion or submission, as agents of God's purpose." I'm curious about your thoughts on that eschatology — I feel like I've been assuming it, but not critically.

Smith: Take the first quotation — I think Yoderians and non-Yoderians alike would agree with it, in positive or negative terms: the church understands the state's relationship to God, and therefore its purpose in the divine economy, in a way that Christians without a notion of the divine economy don't. And therefore the state is either an instrument of God, or the embodiment of "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," or the result of the Fall — the dynamics of the Fall embodied. I think all of those are true, and it's because we have the categories that we're able to think about it that way. Now — "the heathens thereby became the inadvertent instrument of God's justice" — remind me which heathens he's talking about and how they became the instrument. I left my copy at home.

Logan: Page 47. [reads] "Although the pagans freely rejected salvation, they nonetheless feared the vicious consequences of their choices. As remedy for sin, and for the concerned souls, God therefore granted them the sword collectively, so that individuals could not use it with impunity. Since the heathens thereby became the inadvertent instruments of his justice, the grant prejudiced neither his eternal omnipotence nor their vicious freedom. The sword of violence functioned as the sword of justice, the avenger of violence."

Smith: My sense is that the link you're making holds — the heathen don't realize it; they think they're operating either as instruments of the pagan gods, or for nothing other than the glory of Rome. What the Christians know is that while their freedom is vicious, and not unto salvation, it's nevertheless something God uses to accomplish God's purpose. That's very different from, say, the restoration of Israel — when the Persian king... Cyrus... restores the Israelites, he does it because he believes he's received a vision, that it's God's will that they be sent back to Jerusalem. That's a pagan with a sense of divine vocation. These pagans, by contrast, are exercising power without realizing their authority comes from God. Which raises the question of natural law — do the pagans have an idea of justice that, while imperfect because it isn't founded on the gospel, the fulfillment of the justice of Torah, the justice inscribed in nature, is nevertheless not simply Thrasymachus's "justice is the advantage of the stronger"? Take someone like Marcus Aurelius — he has an idea of natural law, of the logos, that to live according to nature is to live according to reason. He doesn't realize that life according to nature, and the justice he derives from the logos, is more fully realized in the gospel. He sees himself submitting to the same justice Christians submit to, except Christians know it more fully. Another way to put this is that it gets at the question of the "anonymous Christian" — does someone who pursues natural law, which ultimately comes from Christ, unintentionally become a follower of Christ?

Logan: I think Hauerwas would say yes, particularly if they're engaging in the liturgy.

Smith: If they're engaged in the liturgy — well, I think he'd say the liturgy already names the one you'd be following, so there wouldn't be the same sense of anonymity. There's an interesting lecture he gave at Baylor on natural law — his critique of Jean Porter's use of natural law theory. He argues Porter doesn't understand Barth on this: she says Christian ethics shouldn't simply be a filling-out of natural law, so there's continuity between natural law and Christian ethics. He'd say we don't have full knowledge of natural law — that the only right understanding of it comes from what's revealed in Christ. So the gospel isn't simply going to line up with natural law; it's going to be different from what the world thinks it's doing when it talks about justice. I think the essay's called something like "The End Is Like the Beginning." You might ask him for it — it's a good essay.

Logan: One more thing, briefly — Field mentions that Paul can command martyrs and yet condemn the sword. I don't want to get too deep into it, since I'm reading on martyrs with Stanley next, but: what is God's will in killing his own? How is that not patently unjust?

Smith: Good question. Here's the answer — though I'm jumping ahead, giving you a preview of when we talk about the cross. It's not that God wills... well, ultimately you have to trace it back to Christ, the archetypal martyr — or Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first martyr. Anselm answers a related question: did the Father will Christ's death? It sounds as if the Father, in willing the Son's death, is being unjust. What Anselm says — and I find it persuasive — is that the Father didn't will the death of the Son per se; what the Father willed was the Son's obedience and truthfulness. Why was Jesus put to death? He claimed to be the Son of God and was charged with blasphemy. How could he have avoided the crucifixion? Easily — they didn't have a case against him. All he had to do was keep quiet, or deny it. But because the Father required him to be honest and truthful about who he was, and faithful to his identity as Messiah and Son of God, he had to say yes. So what the Father wills is not the death, but the faithfulness — the death is the consequence of that faithfulness. Which fits nicely with Paul's language of Christ as the new Adam: the fall of the first Adam was disobedience, a lack of fidelity; the triumph of the new Adam is that he's perfectly obedient to God. By extension, it's not that God wills the death of the martyr, but that he wills the martyr's faithfulness. Now — if God wills the use of the sword, what does that say about the martyr? I think the answer is: God wills the use of the sword to punish the unjust. The vicious freedom of the pagan government is what makes it use the sword unjustly, against the righteous — but in punishing the righteous, God's righteousness is declared, and the government reveals its own injustice.

Logan: So this will get into Martin as well — where does that leave the faithful servant who isn't martyred?

Smith: The faithful servant who isn't martyred is nonetheless performing a witness. It's just not a witness unto death.

Logan: Okay — that's the difference between white martyrdom and red martyrdom.

Smith: Yes, exactly.

Logan: So am I not alone in lamenting that we call "martyrdom" the actual event of death, rather than one's whole life of faith?

Smith: No, I think that's right. Even in Tertullian's time, by the Decian persecution, simply being imprisoned was sufficient to qualify someone as a martyr. Here's the way to think of it: what is a martyr but a witness? So the whole of the Christian life is bearing witness. The person who bears witness through obedience in simple things is, in a sense, better off than the person who bears witness in the extreme but whose actions aren't actually God's will — trying to prove the truth of Christianity by handing themselves over to be martyred. Sorry if I've said this before — have I given you my essay on martyrdom?

Logan: I don't think so.

Smith: Let me see if I have a copy — it touches on this point.

Logan: I don't want to hammer it too hard, but it's something that'll be on my mind when I read with Stanley next. We're about halfway through — I did want to get to the bare historicity of some of this. So — there's this intriguing challenge from Emperor Maximus to Martin. Priscillian is propagating heresy, he's found out and condemned in some fashion, and the text suggests he's excommunicated — I hadn't known that. I thought only Martin and Ambrose were involved, but I don't know exactly how the papacy worked at that stage.

Smith: Excommunication — the papacy in this period is seen as authoritative, first among equals, with a degree of primacy. Ambrose acknowledges that, and yet deviates from it — there's a case involving the practice of foot-washing as part of baptism, where Ambrose says he's being more faithful to Peter than the heir of Peter is. So theoretically the Bishop of Rome has a great deal of authority, but Ambrose is more concerned with faithfulness to Peter than to the Bishop of Rome. Which means individual bishops could excommunicate without it needing confirmation from the Bishop of Rome.

Logan: Okay, that makes sense — I hadn't heard whether Priscillian had actually been excommunicated or denounced by council, or whether it was just Martin and a couple of others. Anyway — Maximus apparently says to Martin, "Heretics rightly condemned customarily pertain to public judgments rather than the pursuits of priests." Keeping in mind the eschatology we outlined earlier — is Maximus getting it wrong, suggesting that by excommunicating Priscillian, the church has put him outside the body of Christ and now under public authority? That seems to contradict the earlier eschatology. It also seems to contradict what you said before about excommunication ultimately being an invitation to return — so why would you execute Priscillian, at least as far as the church is concerned? I don't know if Maximus—

Smith: —is Christian? Here's the case: excommunication isn't the first step. It's — I've gone to you and said, "Logan, you're misguided here, give it up," and you refuse, and then you're excommunicated. And excommunication often entails the possibility of repentance — you can return to the fold. In Arius's case, excommunication was accompanied by exile, and later some bishops wanted to lift it. So it's the most drastic form of discipline, but it isn't final — you can be restored.

Logan: My concern is that the Spanish bishops seem to have taken the position that the ecclesial courts had failed, so they turned to the public authorities — and that must have had some popular backing, because they succeeded.

Smith: Yeah, that's a good question — when is an act—

[interruption — someone enters the room; brief exchange about meeting later in the day]

Smith: Golly, this is an interesting one. Have you talked to Maria Doerfler?

Logan: Not yet.

Smith: I think you should — she's doing so much with the issue of bishops and the Roman judiciary. I don't know if she's working on the Priscillianist controversy specifically, but she'd be a great person to talk to about this.

Logan: It seems like Martin remains at an impasse with the church—

Smith: Yeah.

Logan: —so whatever happens, he's executed. I'm assuming the excommunication was never lifted, since he never repented — and yet Priscillian's still eulogized personally as Bishop of Ávila [transcribed as "Martin's" — almost certainly an error; Priscillian, not Martin of Tours, held that see]. Maybe your suspicion will bear that out, but that stuck out to me.

Smith: I think it becomes a case where — well, not every bishop recognizes an excommunication imposed by another bishop, so I wonder if this is part of that.

Logan: Yeah. One of the other things that got me — on page 202, someone writes, "Priscillian, lest he be heard by our bishops, appealed to the prince, and it was permitted by our inconstancy." I think Field is saying Martin says this — it goes back to the issue of boundaries. There's a line about failing to uphold the canonical boundary: "For Martin, however, even bishops who had not crossed this canonical line had failed to defend it." Problems of jurisdiction and duty remained. In Priscillian's case, Ambrose was aghast that bishops had asked for the death penalty — he and Martin withdrew from communion with the bishops who'd improperly pursued Priscillian in a secular jurisdiction. But for Martin, even bishops who hadn't crossed the canonical line had failed to defend it. That's one of the things I want to think through — where does that canonical line exist, and what did Martin and Ambrose see in it?

Smith: What's meant by "the canonical line" — I assume there's a statute in common law that a bishop can only be tried by other bishops, not by civil authority.

Logan: Right. I think there was one other big thing I wanted to get to — with Ambrose. This was one of my questions: with Priscillian, Ambrose seems to defend whatever canonical line Martin identifies, but he goes on — at least in Field's words — to "spiritualize the imperial sword." Unless I'm misreading Field, that seems to mean the line becomes permeable and diffuse.

Smith: It's interesting — I'd like to see the actual text Ambrose bases this on. I read Field as saying Ambrose is claiming the state does have jurisdiction in spiritual matters — that it wields a kind of spiritual sword.

Logan: Is that improper for Ambrose, or is that fine?

Smith: I think it's fine. The question would be—

Logan: My thing is — isn't the spiritual sword only for the church to wield?

Smith: I guess the question is whether, in matters of religion, the state would be required to champion — or at least oppose any effort to make state power supportive of paganism, or anything non-Christian or anti-Christian.

Logan: So it would support the state using the sword for that purpose?

Smith: Right — such as in the Altar of Victory controversy.

Logan: Oh yeah, that's mentioned.

Smith: That's a case where Ambrose doesn't want a Christian emperor extending patronage to a pagan cult, because that would seem to recognize the cult's legitimacy. Likewise, he doesn't want money given to rebuild the synagogue at Callinicum, for the same reason.

Logan: So in that reading, is Constantine being too permissive with his religious-liberty reforms? Though it seems like a position of privilege to say that, since the church benefited from it.

Smith: Here's the difference — it's the difference between allowing people to follow their conscience with respect to religion (you're not a Christian, and I don't compel you to act in an un-Christian manner, or to become a Christian against your conscience) and using state resources to actively support un-Christian worship. It's the difference between tolerating and patronizing. He expects the spiritual sword to be used to patronize — and to protect Christianity — but that's still compatible with a notion of toleration.

Logan: I'm still troubled by the necessary distinction, because that political theology makes it too easy to assume that when an emperor is Christian, the empire is Christian.

Smith: Right, right — and that goes back to the language of the head: what the head is determines what the body is. That's where Paul is getting it — the sense that if the paterfamilias becomes Christian, the whole household becomes Christian. Which raises the issue: you have a slave who becomes "Christian" because his master did — is he really a Christian? Does he know grace? Has he experienced conversion? That's the same issue in microcosm. Likewise, the emperor is spoken of as the head, so in a sense the empire becomes Christian. Though here's a key difference: Constantine isn't actually a Christian, just a supporter of Christianity — he's baptized late — whereas Constantius, and then Theodosius, actually make Christianity the empire's official religion. So there's a difference between an emperor's personal sympathies and the de jure status of Christianity as the state religion. But you're right that the emperor's religious affiliation becomes normative for the empire, even when there are tolerated minority groups.

Logan: My concern is whether becoming normative is good or bad for the church.

Smith: Yeah — that's absolutely the right question. I think there are ways in which it's clearly good — Constantine changes the law to prohibit the exposure of infants, so suddenly children have a legal status, a value in the eyes of the state, that they didn't have before. But at the same time, it means you become part of a Christian society even when that society isn't directly connected to the ecclesia.

Logan: The image that keeps coming back to me is the question of the — I guess, unconscious Christian. What happens when there's no need to account for one's own beliefs? What happens when you're not being persecuted — how do we know whether someone is a Christian or not? Or, in our own context — I was up until 2 a.m. last night talking with my roommate about whether she should vote, using the assumptions laid out in Yoder and Field — that yes, she should vote, it's not evil. But at the same time — if we're meant to be faithful unto death, what are the other forms of being faithful? How do I exercise my faith and obedience to God if I'm doing it through the emperor? How do I know, or how do other Christians know, that I'm not merely obeying the emperor and not actually obeying God — when the two get that close?

Smith: I think it becomes clear that your actions are primarily obedience to God at the moment of rupture — when Caesar says one thing and God says another, and you go with God. As opposed to: Caesar says don't kill, and I don't kill — which am I obeying? Here's a case where there doesn't have to be a conflict, but if the gospel is the fulfillment and perfection of the law — doing more than the law requires, going the extra mile — then, as Ambrose talks about: I don't kill you, and both God and Caesar say I shouldn't. But because God also says I should bless my enemy and pray for those who persecute me, it's by going above and beyond what Caesar requires that I show I'm living by a higher law, not simply the law of the state. That's how you'd recognize someone is motivated by the love of God rather than fear of the emperor. So there's the adversative instance, where God and Caesar give different commands and you follow God — and then there's supererogatory obedience, going above and beyond the state. The state doesn't require me to care for the poor; I've paid my taxes, that's enough.

Logan: This paradigm popped into my head — one way to put what I was asking: when being a martyr and being a citizen look so similar, where does the difference show? I wrote down, "never less than a citizen, always more."

Smith: Yes, that's good — I like that phrase. Never less than a citizen, but always more.

Logan: Yeah.

Smith: I'll steal that line sometime. Maybe I'll give you credit, maybe not.

Logan: I won't mind if you don't. I can't think of anything else concrete I had written down — I'm going to be really interested in getting into Sulpicius Severus's material, but in the meantime, I don't think I have anything else.

Smith: Okay — let me run to the photocopier and get you the article.

Logan: Okay, I'll start packing up.

Smith: Sure.