How Medieval Catholic Culture Formed Our Modern Republics, and Why Both Legacies Are Challenged Now

Global history reveals a common human quest for both security and meaning, one culminating in societies and states predicated on relationships of trust. For many centuries, and almost universally, that culmination centered on “sacral kingship.” For ages, we found our meaning and vested our security in God’s chosen leader—until we didn’t. Neither sacral kingship nor its demise was deeply understood in scholarship, much less in popular consciousness, until Francis Oakley’s The Emergence of Western Political Thought, which posited that it was the culture of Late Medieval Catholic society that doomed sacral kingship both politically and theologically. This rupture with immemorial patterns resulted in an entirely new political sensibility and practice, first in the West, and then globally. For that Catholic culture had, unwittingly, redefined for the world the two great issues of politics: “Whom can we trust?” and “How far can we trust them?” After 1650, the political senses of security and meaning shifted, slowly, irreversibly, and globally. Only now are we beginning to articulate an interdisciplinary understanding of this deep structural movement. And none too soon, for both the global political movement and its unique spiritual underpinning are gravely imperiled. So how shall we proceed?

Jerome Dwight Maryon is currently working on a three-volume study on turning Postmodern Politics into an upward cycle: political theory, statesmanship, and grassroots empowerment. His intellectual formation developed in five fields: Political science with honors interdisciplinary studies, French civil law, American common law, Catholic theology, and comprehensive Grand Strategy. Professionally, Jerome served in the U.S. Navy JAG Corps as Commissioner of the appellate court of the Navy-Marine Corps, the Vice-Chairman of all Lawyers in Uniform for the Federal Bar Association, the first JAG Historian, and the first President of the Washington Officers Mess; he ended by helping defend the integrity of the military justice system itself. After classified work abroad, Jerome team-taught courses ranging from Conflict Transformation to the Crisis of Confidence in the Catholic Church (book).