Ullmann, Middle Ages Individuals
'All individuality is absent', 'complete absorption in society'
The Source:
Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, John Hopkins Press 1966
[Walter Ullman taught several Social Science Files subscribers at Cambridge.]
Lecture I: The Abstract Thesis
Theme of Subject and Society
There are probably few topics in modern social and political thought which arouse greater interest than the status, function, and power of the individual within the State, within the organized body of citizens. Although it would be too optimistic to say that the problem has been satisfactorily solved everywhere, there is, nonetheless, at least within the Western orbit, a fairly general agreement on the autonomous, independent status of the individual within society. I think I am right in saying that since the eighteenth century it has become a more or less universally accepted point of view that man as an individual has certain inalienable rights which no power of government can take away and with which no government may with impunity interfere; and further, that as a matter of fact no less than as a matter of doctrine, the individual's participation in government-provided that certain requirements of a formal nature are fulfilled-is his undoubted right; that, in other words, the abstract notion of the State is in reality nothing else but the concrete aggregate of the individual citizens. …
… Man's present status is taken so much for granted that it is difficult to realize that it was not always so, that the emergence of the individual within society as its full, autonomous, and constituent member was the result of weary and protracted conflicts which in some respects have not everywhere reached their end. …
… [It] cannot surely be denied that the European Middle Ages constitute the period in which the basic doctrines affecting the relations between the individual, society, and its government were formulated and applied to an extent which is certainly remarkable. …
… [The theme which] has not been accorded the attention which is surely its due [is] the feudal complexion of society and the concomitant view of the individual within feudal society. It seems to me impossible to exaggerate the fructifying significance of the feudal theme, precisely in respect of my topic, for within its precincts we do not move in the higher regions of speculative doctrine, dogma, and authority, but keep our gaze firmly fixed on the concrete, mundane, and earthly activities of contemporary, that is, medieval society. …
[MH: I will return later to Ullmann’s Lecture II, The Practical Thesis (Feudalism)]
… We must set out from the incontrovertible fact that for the greater part of the Middle Ages ideas relating to the public sphere were shaped partly by Roman concepts and notions and partly by Christian doctrines. The concepts of Roman parentage which are directly relevant are those concerned with the structure of society as a corporation. This corporational element seems to me a crucial and vital feature of medieval society and has particular relevance to my topic, for in combination with the ecclesiological strain of thought it led without great effort to the thesis that the Christian was a member of the all-embracing, comprehensive corporation, the Church. …
… The individual became absorbed in and by the corporation itself, by the Church, which itself, however, was governed on the monarchic principle, according to which original power was located in one supreme authority, from which all power in the public sphere was derived-a system which, for want of a better name, I call the descending or theocratic theme of government and law. …
… Most, if not all, of the basic principles relative to the individual as a subject to higher authority are contained in the Bible, notably in the Pauline letters. If one realizes—as every medievalist ought to, but so few in fact do—what an unparalleled influence the Bible as the repository of divine wisdom exercised in the Middle Ages, one will have no difficulty in appreciating that it was taken not merely as a model, but above all as a ready-made philosophy relative to matters of public government. The all-pervasive Christian theme made the Bible a pattern—a whole philosophy was so conveniently assembled within two covers. …
… When, therefore, in the late sixth century Gregory the Great [Pope Gregory I] stated that the verdict of the superior—no matter whether just or unjust—had to be obeyed by the inferior subject, he expressed in unmistakable language (which was to be repeated a hundred times throughout the subsequent period) the essential point of the inferior's duty of obedience to the law of the superior.
It was these conceptions of the inferior status of the individual and the superior status of ruling authority which explains not only the prevailing medieval view on the inequality of men … but also the development of the concept of majoritas and its corollary of obedientia. Superiority of public rank necessarily yielded the demand for obedience on the part of the inferior subject. To my mind it is, therefore, highly significant that in the fully matured medieval canon law there is a section which bears the very title of De majoritate et obedientia. It was in this section of the canon law that the basic legal rules relative to the superior or major authority and the inferior subject were stated, and it was also here that the concept of obedience emerged as an operational concept correlative to major (i.e. superior) authority. Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of this fundamental medieval topic than the postulate for obedience on the part of the subject to the command or law of a superior, although the subject, precisely because he was an inferior, had no share in the making of the command or law, obedience to which was based upon his faith as a Christian. By replacing consent, faith served as the basic ingredient of the law.
That on this ideological basis there resulted a hierarchical ordering of all members of society cannot cause much surprise … One aspect of this hierarchical thesis was the inequality of the members of society. One should never forget that the principle of equality is of fairly recent date; in other words, that the members of society had, by virtue of being members of society, equality of standing within the public field was not a doctrine that was known to the high Middle Ages. Here operated inequality before the law.
The inequality of the members of society showed itself most manifestly in the unequal treatment before the law, for a superior was treated differently from an inferior. Once again Gregory the Great gave the lead when he stated that those in a commanding position were to be treated differently from those who were subjects. This statement came to be a major principle: no inferior could legitimately bring any accusations against a superior. In other words, subjects were not entitled to invoke the help of a law court against a superior. From the mid-ninth century this point of view became universally accepted and had specific reference within the ecclesiastical sphere and also general reference within the royal field. … [Thus] the layman was not only precluded from partaking in matters of ecclesiastical government but also from charging a cleric with any crime, because he was a mere subject. …
… Considering that politological thought was so markedly clerical in the earlier and high Middle Ages, one will not be surprised to learn that within the public sphere, the layman as such had none of the rights with which even the most insignificant member of a modern society is credited. He had, for example, no right of resistance to superior authority.
Behind all declarations stood the concept of the office, which made possible the distinction between the superior and the inferior, since the office itself was capable of fairly precise measurements. The very nature of hierarchy presupposes a gradation of ranks or offices, according to easily recognizable criteria. It is this feature which imparts practicability to the descending theme of government and explains why those members of society who had no office not only stood at the very bottom of the social ladder but also were without public rights.
The individual's standing within society was based upon his office or his official function: the greater it was, the more scope it had, the weightier it was, the more rights the individual had. As a mere subject the individual was no more than a recipient of orders, of commands, of the law, and as a layman, in particular, he was merely a passive spectator who was to obey: his role was that of a learner.
For illustrative purposes permit me to adduce some source material from the high Middle Ages … The books of instructions for the chancery personnel in the public chanceries contained quite detailed regulations concerning the very points which I have just tried to make. They laid down that a persona minor was he who had no public office, such as a merchant, a simple citizen, an artisan, or a person of similar standing. Certain members of society were not even permitted to write or to receive letters to which the ordinary formal requirements were applicable … These chancery books allow the discerning student unimpeded ingress into the workshop of the governments themselves and deserve, along with similar source material, greater attention than they have hitherto received.
It would be quite misleading and erroneous to think that my foregoing considerations apply only to the ecclesiological set of ideas, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, it was no different in the royal field proper, where it was very much the same premise by which the individual was absorbed in the body corporate of the kingdom. If anything, the individual was far less in a position to assert any autonomous rights, because the possibility of a distinction between private and public, which was to some extent operative in the ecclesiastical field, was for the greater part of the Middle Ages not drawn in the royal sphere. Here the very concept of subject, of the subditus, of the Untertan, was in actual fact far more, and more directly, an operational instrument. Often enough do we read in the royal field that the populus was commissus [commited] to the king—that the people or the kingdom was entrusted to the king's government … This was not a mere formula nor a device of some high-sounding chancery practice, but a statement with profound contents.
That the kingdom or the people were entrusted or committed to the king's government meant, firstly, that the king’s power itself was not derived from the people or the kingdom or any individuals, but from divinity. The title of the king as "King by the grace of God" expressed the idea that his powers were the result of the working of God's good will or of God's grace … that the kingdom or the people or the totality of the individuals had nothing to do with the powers which the king possessed. The king received his powers as a concession from divinity … and what he had received through the grace of God in the shape of public power, he could concede to his subjects. The individuals as subjects had no rights in the public field. Whatever they had, they had as a matter of royal grace, of royal concession. One will understand now, I hope, why the king's grace was so vitally important for the subjects, for without it they had no standing in public: this is the vital contrast of the king's grace and his disgrace, the latter of which the subject incurred if for the one or the other reason he had jeopardized the king's good will and caused his benevolentia to turn into malevolentia. …
… The Munt [of the king] placed people on the same level as a minor under age and meant the supreme protection, the over-all superior and controlling knowledge of the king of when and how and where and why the subjects needed his protection.
One can best understand the meaning of the Munt if one compares it to the guardianship of a child: it is the kind of protection which a father affords to a child, or a guardian to his ward, or in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England the husband to his wife. The kingdom or the people in the trust of the king were treated—and explicitly so—as if they had been minors who needed the protecting and guiding hand of the king. …
… An immediate, practical as well as theoretical consequence of this ideology was the king's duty to care for his subjects, a duty which was in fact embodied in the concept of the Munt. This duty was always made a strong point in all doctrinal expositions on kingship …
… Considering the strongly pronounced superior-inferior relationship between king and subject, it is interesting to see the consequence of criminal conduct against the king: it was nothing but high treason, and the very term and concept of high treason is a vivid reminder of the underlying ideology. …
… Considering the strongly pronounced superior-inferior relationship between king and subject, it is interesting to see the consequence of criminal conduct against the king: it was nothing but high treason, and the very term and concept of high treason is a vivid reminder of the underlying ideology. …
… One could hardly expect that these ideological premises would facilitate constitutional progress. If the subjects were mere recipients of the law given them, and if the law was, as was often enough said and written and stated, a gift of God, a donum Dei, made known through the mouth of the king, how could progress be made in a constitutional respect and the subject released from the fetters into which this doctrine had put him? …
… In particular, what characterized all forms of the descending theme of government and law in the Middle Ages was that the ancient requirement of the consent of the citizen was replaced by the faith of the subjects, for it was the faith in the substance of Christianity which gave birth to the theocratic institutions themselves. Moreover, the king within the descending theme of government did not belong to the kingdom; the pope did not belong, in his function as pope, to the Church—each stood outside and above the entity entrusted to him. …
… [The] construction chosen in the Middle Ages was that obedience was simply the outward sign of faith and that the ruler demanded from his subjects nothing that was not already contained in the unquestioned and unrestricted faith of the subjects. Since faith was all-embracing, compliance with the law given by the superior followed as a matter of course. The whole complex theme of obedientia facit imperantem resolves itself in the Middle Ages into a cooperating acceptance by the inferior subject of the superior's decrees and laws, because the subject has faith in the superior's institution. …
… The absorption of the individual by the community or by society accounts for a number of features with which every medievalist is familiar. There is no need here to refer to collective punishments, such as the interdict of a locality or the amercements of towns, villages, or hundreds, and so on : the basic view seems to have been the corporate character of the group, and it made not the slightest difference how many innocent suffered from these impositions. …
… Throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages decisions made by corporate bodies were not arrived at by the operation of the numerical or quantitative majority principle, but by a qualitative majority … which did not take into account the exact numbers voting on either side, but the greater weight of those voters who had a higher authority, partly by virtue of their office and partly by virtue of greater knowledge, learning, experience, or the consideration which they derived from their rank. In other words, it was not the individual casting his vote who counted; it was the value which he had to the corporate body; it was his position and function which were reflected in the weight attributed to his vote and which counted.
Only when all the voters had the same office, hence the same standing, was the qualitative majority replaced by the quantitative-numerical principle, as could be witnessed in the procedure adopted for papal elections (1179), when a two-thirds majority was required : because no distinction between the voting cardinals could be drawn, counting by heads only remained.
[Here discusses an exception in the medieval English jury system — omitted.]
[The] the medieval thesis of the corporational structure of society [was] rooted … in Roman conceptions. Students of medieval history are familiar with the trite postulate Utilitas publica prefertur utilitati privatae [Public utility is preferred to private utility] … The significance of this principle in the medieval period is that what mattered was the public weal, the public welfare, the public well-being, in brief, the good of society itself, even at the expense of the individual well being if necessary.
If we were to try to pursue the matter a little further, we would understand on the one hand why the law played so crucial a role in the Middle Ages, for law, in order to be law, is at all times addressed to the generality, and on the other hand the very real concern of medieval governments for safeguarding the interests of society, that is, the public good, which was considered to be the supremum bonum [supreme good]. From this consideration arose the demand for suppressing publicly all individual opinion contrary to the assumptions upon which society allegedly was built.
The most readily available instance in this respect is the inquisitorial procedure which was based upon the consideration that the cementing bond of the corporate body, that is, the faith, must be safeguarded under all circumstances.
Society was one whole and was indivisible, and within it the individual was no more than a part: but what mattered was the well-being of society and not the well-being of the individual parts constituting it.
The individual was so infinitesimally small a part that his interests could easily be sacrificed at the altar of the public good, at the altar of society itself, because nothing was more dangerous to society than the corrosion and undermining of the very element which held it together, that is, the faith. …
… In close proximity to this topic stood the relationship between the individual's property and the Ruler's right to dispose of it. It should be borne in mind that, within the framework of the descending theme of government, ultimately property was considered an issue of divine grace, which view precluded the emergence of a thesis according to which the individual as owner had an autonomous right to his property. …
.. The Munt of the Ruler was the operational instrument in this [general faith-based] scheme, which is only another way of saying that what mattered was the well-being of society. The disregard of the interests of the individual was not a disregard of his rights—which in any case he did not autonomously have within this framework—but a sign of his complete absorption in society. …
… Here another observation can be made concerning the mutual relations between society and the individual. Society was pictured as a large organism in which each member had been allotted a special function which he pursued for the common good. Two characteristic facets of medieval life are intimately linked with this consideration.
First, there was the stratification of medieval society into its estates. The significance of this stratification within the present context is that it was precisely the hallmark of a member of a particular estate that he could not move out of his own estate and that whatever status he enjoyed, he was rigidly controlled by the norms applicable to his estate.
These norms concerned his very standing within society, concerned any privileges he might have had, including the right of inheritance, of marriage; in short, the norms of a particular estate contributed to the petrification of society and the ossification of the individual's status within it. That the freemen and the unfree were treated fundamentally differently, especially in regard to the Wergeld, and that there were basic procedural differences between them need only be mentioned for one to realize how closely linked the individual was with his estate.
[Brittanica: wergild, Old English: “man payment”, in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party..]
… The essential point of [the] organological thesis [society like human body with ‘head’ directing the parts] is that although the body public was one and indivisible, in which all its members had to play their role, it nevertheless needed authoritative guidance by the head and, thus, the law "given from above”. The closely integrated structure of society called forth the monarchic principle, the underlying idea being that the members of society were not fit enough to guide society, which was entrusted to the Ruler's government. The primary concern was the good of society, of the whole body of subjects, and not of the individuals. In a roundabout way we return to the utilitas publica, which is to be preferred to the utilitas privata.
An adequate assessment of the medieval point of view must stress a feature which runs right through governmental actions, writings, speeches, sermons, tracts, pictorial representations, in fact any product of the creative mind. This is [an objective] feature which is perhaps difficult for us to grasp today, but which seems to me essential if one wishes to penetrate the medieval texture. …
… Precisely because the individual in the Middle Ages was submerged in society, there is very little danger of these personal, subjective methods of assessment asserting them selves. It is assuredly not without coincidence that we know so very little of the personal traits of most of the men who directed the path of medieval society. …
… What mattered was not the individual, was not the man, but, as I have already implied, the office which that individual occupied. The office itself is capable of precise measurement, capable of a purely objective assessment: it can be measured by its own contents.
It was the office which absorbed the individual, but the office and the power it contained were not of human origin or making, but of allegedly divine provenance. Once again, we move within a human, non-individualistic precincts. Sculpture and portraiture in the high Middle Ages reveal the same features … in medieval manuscripts … the men depicted there are not real men at all, but merely types.
All individuality is absent. …
…Basically, the medieval viewpoint concerning the standing of the individual in society was the result of the combination of two fundamental themes, to both of which I have tried to give due emphasis: the overriding importance of law in the Middle Ages and the organological conception of society, which latter was nothing less than the Pauline clothing for the Roman corporation thesis.
Although the properly medieval doctrine did not and could not give us a thesis of the autonomous standing of the individual in society, it nonetheless bequeathed to the modern world a principle which is not, even today, fully implemented in a number of societies, specifically, the rule of law.
… [We] have pretty clear proof of how strongly entrenched was the idea of law as the regulating and animating force of society, even at that early time. It was an idea that in varying keys was repeated over and over throughout the Middle Ages, down to the seventeenth century …
… One might be inclined to say that the medieval emphasis on the collectivist phenomenon of the law successfully prevented the emergence of a thesis concerning such rights which the individual had had apart from the law and before the law was given.
The theme of the law as the soul of the body (public and politic) was, in other words, explicable by the overriding importance attached to society and by the negligible role which the individual played in it. Differently expressed, the collectivist trend of thought gave rise, at least embryonically, to the incipient thesis of the idea of the rule of law, a standpoint upon which all shades of opinion in the Middle Ages were agreed.
The law was the invisible Ruler of society, made concrete by the visible Ruler, who disposed of both scientia and potestas, who, in a word, knew what justice and the interests of the society in his charge demanded. …
… Because the soul was said to be immortal, public bodies, which were what they were through the law, could also not die and were credited, therefore, with sempiternity. In a roundabout way we return to the collectivist standpoint—all the individual bodies may and will die, but what cannot die is the idea of law, the idea of right order, which holds the public and corporate body together and which, therefore, possessed sempiternity. I believe it was Alexis de Tocqueville who, in reference to the law, once said that “governments may perish, but society cannot die”. …
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