8 - The New Science of Politics

Summary

The cosmological revolution which the absorption of Aristotle wrought in the 13 th century, displayed its greatest effects in the sphere of governmental science. What secular governments, writers, jurists, polemicists, had been groping for, especially in the period since the Investiture Contest, was now presented by Aristotle in the form of a natural unit that had grown entirely in accordance with the laws of nature, wholly independent of divine intervention and grace or theological or other speculative reflexions. Asistotle's concept of the State as ‘a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life’ seems innocuous enough, but nevertheless introduced new dimensions into thought concerning society and its government. It led to the abandonment of the hitherto predominant wholeness point of view. By introducing the concept of the State as a viable notion, the complementary concept of the citizen also made its debut. In a more accurate sense, both concepts were not so much introduced as reborn and raised to major proportions within the new orientation. Both the State and the citizen were to prove concepts detrimental to the structure of medieval Christian society and government.

For what the Aristotelian revolution effected in the thirteenth century was a rebirth of the very creature that had been hibernating for many a century, that is, natural man or the man of flesh who, as St Paul had taught, was successfully washed away by baptismal water which infused divine grace into the recipient and turned him into ‘a new creature’. The effect was that man as a Christian was incorporated into the Church and had to follow the rules laid down for its members.