Catholicism and Kingship

John Milbank writes about the catholic dimension of monarchy and its relevancy to us today.

Catholics in Britain and Ireland may sometimes feel rather indifferent or even hostile to monarchy: associated for them with Protestantism, the debarring of Catholics from public life and English oppression of the Celtic margins.

Yet the linkage of Catholicism with Republicanism in the case of Ireland is very much an accident of recent history. Further back in time, Irish tradition and literature was deeply linked to the Jacobite cause, and as in the case of Scottish Jacobitism, this was not a premature surrogate for nationalism, even if, in either case, a degree of federal independence was certainly sought. Nor was the cause at issue mainly about the right to exercise the Catholic faith, though that was certainly involved also.

For Catholics at that time were actually very few in number in Scotland, and the religious support for the Jacobite cause came overwhelmingly from Episcopalians, albeit ones of a decidedly High Church bent. This included the ‘Aberdeen Doctors’ who were so profoundly influenced by contemporary French Catholic mysticism.

If religion was central for the Jacobites, then it was the politico-religious matter of kingship. Scots, Irish and many English Tories were fighting for the sacrality of legitimate monarchic descent, for the supremacy of Church over State, and for the primary role of kingship within a mixed constitutional order. Yet they did not necessarily believe in the divine right of kings and by the time of the ’45 rebellion they had adopted radical commitments to triennial parliaments, freedom of the press and of religion.

This is only confusing if we insist upon thinking of the pre 1789 past in terms of anachronistic contrasts of left versus right. The Jacobites indeed refused whig individualism but were not adverse to the notion of political and economic contract, if this be understood more in terms of mutually beneficial covenant (and some Jacobites were Presbyterians). They certainly wished to defend a more traditional exuberance of expenditure at marriages,, baptisms, village festivals and the like, yet were by no means adverse to a greater development of commercial society. Their Gaelic poets articulated an erotic boldness that would have caused most lowlanders to blush even in the Eighteenth Century.

All the same, the Jacobite version of Enlightenment promoted in general a strong patriarchalism. Yet far from being outdated, this social attitude was actually on the rise, as JCD Clarke points out -- encouraged by pietist revival and new cults of sentiment. It was this very patriarchalism that eventually tended to encourage greater mercy of the law, kinder treatment of workers and the emancipation of slaves.

For these Tory radicals there was a certain link between kingship and notions of the primacy of personal care and interpersonal devotion, as we see reflected in so many otherwise boisterous Jacobite songs.

This is why kingship is not outdated and always inclined to return – as with today’s Caesar, the counter-oligarchic Trump! There is a profound parallel with the Papacy here. The Papacy and the British monarchy are two oddly surviving medieval institutions in Europe. Yet their very anachronism gives them the capacity to stand apart from the otherwise liberal fray, and to exercise a uniquely effective critique.

The new Pope, by taking the name Leo, has reminded us that it was the Papacy that first of all excoriated capitalism while also warning that a totally controlling state would prove tyrannic. Similarly, King Charles almost alone argued that modernist architecture was dehumanising, and that it could be possible to restore a traditional and ecological way of life while deploying differently advanced technology. As Prince he was once laughed at, as ageing and ailing King his ideas are now greeted as prophetic.

But do we need kings besides popes? Unlike some Irish and British Catholics, visiting French ones often confess an uneasy sense that the British preservation of the monarchy has sustained a Catholic dimension that they have lost.

For not only did Christianity first temper kingship with mercy and a greater respect for (now written) law, it also encouraged it as a crucial part of a Christological vision. Just because Christ is both God and Man, he is also in the New Testament both Priest and King, or King and Priest.

I put it both ways round since, for now, kingship reflects Christ’s manhood and while it is a sacred duty it is subordinate to the priestly encouragement of the enactment of the gospel. Yet at the eschaton it is Christ’s ruling power that prevails, as his mediating power is fulfilled. Likewise, the resurrection involves the whole ‘kingly’ human person, as St Paul indicates.

Just because, for the Christological vision, all is to be sacralised in the end and everything is somewhat sacred even now, kings are needed, besides priests, in order to reflect the fullness of a Christian order. They are not to be absolute rulers, but, as the Old Testament requires,, constitutional ones, legislating justly and themselves obeying the law. They are to co-exist with representative institutions conveying both the advice of the wise, and the desires of the populace.

All the same, the role of the monarch reminds us that ultimately human rule is personal; that someone must ultimately decide and that this person stands alone before her God, linking the destiny of her people with her own salvation.

Against the possible tyranny of the majority, or the biased factions of the oligarchic few, the monarch can insist on the objective common good, sustain the deep continuity of the past and look to its creative sustaining into the future We can see how King Charles has been able to do just this.

Of course, this ‘monarch’ may be a President and that is not illegitimate. And yet arguably the most successful constitutional democracies today are also constitutional monarchies: the most politically and economically stable countries, whether Christian or sometimes Islamic. That is because it is hereditary or elected monarchs who are best able to sustain the kind of balances that I have outlined.

As with the case of the Jacobites, often in the history of these islands a contention over kingship has been bound up with a contention over geographic rule. Not accidentally, medieval Scottish kings called their realm Alba, which simply means Britain (Albion) and boasted of links with Irish, besides Anglo-Saxon dynasties. All these ancient kings saw their kingship as both sacral and Christian, and construed their ruling in terms of a gracious gift-exchange of received tribute in return for the protection and harmonisation in justice of their subjects and neighbours.

This vision, like the vision of the Papacy, still has a Catholic future.

By John Milbank

John is a Professor of at Nottingham’s School of Humanities Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is most well known though as one of the founders of Radical Orthodoxy which seeks to bring modern life into the framework of theology. He is a theologian and poet and author of many books, articles and papers. You can find him X @johnmilbank3.