7 - Governmental Doctrines in Literary Sources

Summary

A large, though extremely variegated fund of source material relative to governmental doctrines and the law is to be found in the vast number of writings which partake of a number of different branches of learning, if present-day categories were to be employed. One of the common features of this huge output from the fifth century onwards was the christocentric theme. Christocentric cosmology, all-embracing as it was and affecting every segment of public life, accounted for the exposition of many governmental themes which a later age would have assigned to ‘political theory’ proper, but which by virtue of the very nature of the Christian theme itself were as yet quite undifferentiated and dealt with in theological tracts, in epistolary communications, in devotional sermons, in dogmatic treatises, in encyclopaedic dictionaries, in liturgical arrangements and in instructional monographs—in short, any conceivable literary genre served as a platform from which to propagate the one or the other governmental item. The very nature of this variegated source material makes it imperative to limit the topic to typical examples in chronological sequence, if the subject is to be kept within manageable terms.

Since society was to be shaped by Christian ideas capable of being moulded into the law, the concept of justice evidently stood in the foreground either explicitly or implicitly. A whole cluster of ancillary ideas surrounded this concept especially when its biblical substance was merged with its Roman counterpart. In one way or another the relevant literature concerned itself with an analysis of justice within the Christian framework. This was the core of all the varied intellectual efforts which tried to apply Christian principles to public government.