So in the news this week. There is a trade deal between the United States of America and the United Kingdom. There is a renewed accord between Russia and China on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. There is a new Pope in Rome. The cast of characters: Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, with a thousand loyal party men, a hundred cardinals and Lord Mandelson in attendance.
If we put this all into the longest possible historical context — short of Robin Fox’s suggestion that we are still Palaeolithic man and short of the Weinsteins’ suggestion that we need A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 20th century — then we have to refer back to the history than began with St Peter.
Everything that divides East and West comes down to three historical accidents. The first is that St Peter was martyred in Rome (c. AD 68), the capital of the Roman Empire. The second historical accident is that Constantine adopted Christianity for his cause at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312) and then adopted it for the empire when he became emperor. The third historical accident is that Constantine moved his capital to Byzantion in the East (330) and thus created the astonishing situation in which Rome was not the centre of Rome and, a few centuries later, that Rome the city was not even part of Rome the empire.
These historical accidents have vast salience in May 2025.
Why? For a very simple reason.
No Papacy, no states.
The world until, let’s say, Pope Gelasius (d. 496), was a world of empires, where an empire was, as I said recently, a cancerous entity: an entity that was fluid, in the sense that it had frontiers, not borders, and was solipsistic, in the sense that it recognised the right of no other ruling order to exist. It recognised other empires de facto but not de iure. If Sargon the Great could conquer you, he would. Ditto for Rameses, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Charlemagne, Genghis, Tamerlane, Suleyman, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin. Actually, those last three were in breach of strict order: which is why reactions to Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin were not simply that of fear but of moral contempt: since they breached our sense that such cancerous solipsistic activity was no longer cricket. The new cricket, since, say, 1600 had been a state cricket. Where the state was not the empire. Whereas the empire was solipsistic and expansionary, the state more or less knew its place: it could still engage in colonial activity, but only within strict limits, as established in the rising laws of peace and laws of war in Europe and, after the 19th century, the entire world. Now we live in a world of states.
Gelasius was a Pope. In 494 he wrote, from Rome, a letter to the Roman emperor in Constantinople, Anastasius, in which he said Duo sunt, “Two there are”, that is, two forms of power, one regalis potestas and the other auctoritas sacrata. His argument was that while the Emperor possessed royal power, he the Pope, possessed sacred authority. This was the origin of the doctrine of two swords, imperium and sacerdotium. This doctrine had an antecedent in the remarkable passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus entrusted to Peter the keys to the kingdom of earth and the kingdom of heaven, and in the gospel of Luke, where Jesus tells his disciples that “two swords” are “enough”. Go to the Vatican, even now, and look at the statue of St Peter: he holds two keys in his hands. Well, in 494 Gelasius recognised imperial power: but with the proviso that the two swords were originally possessed by the Pope, as the successor of Peter, and that one of the swords had been delegated by him to the Emperor.
Now, I should say at this point that all ancient empires, Roman or not, were both political and religious: indeed, they combined cult and command. They had power, and they had law, and they sanctified the union of both by referring to the gods, or to a singular God. This was a universal fact: but the oddity of our history is that it remained the model of the East. Inherited by Constantine, it was common to Persia and the Islamic empires of the Umayyads, Fatimids, Abbasids, Ottomans: it was adopted by the Russians when they styled themselves the Third Rome. It was taken for granted in China: even though the Chinese were dubious about religions, whether Buddhist, Christian and Islamic, as external principles, and instead made a religion out of their own political conformity.
The origin of the West, as distinct from the East, is found in Gelasius’s theorisation of the position the Popes found themselves in, after the three historical accidents I mentioned, and especially after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (c. AD 476). As everyone knows, the Popes struck out as independent figures, and when the Roman Empire in the East was ruled by a woman, the Popes declared this an impossibility, and delegated imperial power, which was their original position, to the King of Francia, Charlemagne, thus inaugurating the thing we came to call the Holy Roman Empire (800). (Not Holy, not Roma, and not an Empire, quipped Voltaire, because he could afford his wit, living, as he did, in a world of states.)
The Middle Ages in Europe is an age of much, including feudalism, but it was fundamentally the age of the conflict between Papacy and Empire. In this conflict, the Papacy claimed powers for itself, forced the Empire to claim powers for itself, and, in resisting the Empire, claimed powers for other European kingdoms, like France, Sicily, Naples and England that enabled those kingdoms, later, to claim independence not only from Empire but also from Papacy. This was the Reformation, or, the origin of Absolute Monarchy: anyhow, the series of events that led a hundred theorists to work on the theory of the state. The state being a new name for the sovereign entity that refused to recognise any other power higher than itself.
The difference between East and West is that West was formed by the distinction of imperium and sacerdotium and the consequent separation of church and state, whereas East remained in a world in which it was unthinkable to separate empire and sacred authority or to separate whatever were the equivalents of state and church power. The twist was the West came to dominate the East between, say, 1500 and 1900: forcing the East — Russia, China, India etc. — to at least acknowledge the significance of the European theory of the state. This theory remains the basic logic of all world government. In addition, Europe spread its ideas: of atheism, of emancipation, of enlightenment and of revolution, with great consequences, especially for Russia and China. Russia and China are complicated reactions to Europe, composed out of European shadow ideals, but imposed on a continuous conviction that church and state should not be separated. Thus the greatest difference in the world.
This is what lies behind everything that is going on. The President of America is a Western president of an order that insists on separation of church and state. The Prime Minister is an equivocal figure, who possesses state power in the only important medieval monarchy that survives. He looks to America as at least understanding the logic of the West. The Pope is the successor of St Peter and Gelasius, as well as all the dubious Popes of the Renaissance, and presides over an empire of ideas that survives to threaten the sovereignty of each and every Western state and some Eastern ones. The Presidents of Russia and China are rulers of restrained powers that, by tradition, resist Western ideas, whether imperial or sacerdotal and remain a threat to the Western order of states. Starmer is pleased by Trump. Trump says he is pleased to see an American Pope. Xi and Putin meanwhile shake hands. The Pope says he will proclaim the gospel. And whatever will be, will be. It is not just that these are all rival powers: they are powers of different orders, and exist with different histories and therefore different assumptions. The world has not yet ceased to be of great interest.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.