Communicatio Politica

William of Moerbeke provided the first Latin translation of Aristotle's Politics, and one of his chief tasks was to translate the term "koinonia politike", defining the concept which has come down to us in English as "civil society".

William was born between 1215 and 1235 in Moerbeke, in what is now Belgium (Beullens, 2005: 515)1 and "probably entered the Dominican convent at Louvain as a young man" (Dod, 1982: 63). Reported to be "a friend and collaborator of Thomas Aquinas" (p. 63), both of whom were Dominicans, he had become the confessor to the pope by 1271, and was consecrated as Archbishop of Corinth in 1278. Moerbeke "translated virtually all of the genuine works of Aristotle from Greek into Latin, either in the form of revisions of previous translations … or new renditions of texts that had never before been translated directly from the Greek" (Beullens, 2005: 515). Such was the case with Aristotle’s Politics, where he provided the first translation to the Latin West. His translations "became the standard texts of Aristotle up to and beyond the Renaissance" (Dod, 1982: 62-64; cf. Rubinstein, 1987: 42), and "laid the basis for the rich scholastic commentary tradition " (Beullens, 2005: 516).

Moerbeke might have used civitas or its derivative as a translation, but, Schmidt (1986: 305) argues, civitas had become quite ambiguous. It had both a legal connotation as a physical space and a philosophical connotation as a social space.

The legal connotation had its origin in Roman law, where civitas referred to a territory, and was constituted by order of a magistrate with the appointment of a ‘defender of the city’, a defensor civitatis. While this linguistic usage survived the long withdrawal of the Roman Empire, the medieval polity was centred on the parish, in a world where "the Church was the sole claimant to the title of defensor civitatis " (Schmidt, 1986: 305). St Augustine’s two cities – the City of God and the City of Man – had an earthly parallel: political space was at once a diocese or a parish as well as a city or village. As Schmidt suggests, "Aristotle’s category of koinonia politike was being inserted into a tradition which was poorly equipped to make a clear distinction between what was political and what was not" (p. 312).

What's more, St Augustine, in common with other early Christians, understood civitas as a social space, not as a territory. "Early Christians", Chadwick (1988: 11) contends, "understood the Church to which they adhered to consist of a community called out to serve God as his people". Figgis ([1921] 1963: 51) argued that St Augustine’s "primary distinction is always between two societies, the body of the reprobate and the communio sanctorum; not between Church and State". These societies are not two corporate bodies, though, but departures from, or abidance in, a life of sanctification. Figgis (1913: 199) indicates that "nobody in the Middle Ages denied that the king was God's minister, or that the bishops were great lords in the commonwealth. Pope and emperor, when they quarrelled, quarrelled like brothers, as members of the same society, the civitas Dei”.2 Or as Chadwick (1988: 13) notes, in a comment on St Paul: "The magistrate will get no one to heaven, but may yet do something to fence the broad road to the hell of anarchy which, as Thucydides first observed with disturbing eloquence, brings out the full human capacity for depravity". The two cities in the Augustinian tradition, then, were ideal-types, mixed together in practice, and would "only be distinguished eschatologically, that is at the last judgement" (Canning, 1996: 41).

Late medieval theology, however, departed from the Augustinian position. The recovery and translation of the texts of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers played a key role in this. While Boethius had translated some of the classical texts in logic during the sixth century, they remained little known. The major translation effort of Aristotle began in the twelfth century with a progressive translation of the entire corpus over a period of about 150 years – William of Moerbeke being the last of the great translators. Further, translations of Aristotle were often made from Arabic to Latin, and there was a reception of Muslim and Jewish Commentaries. Luscombe and Evans (1988: 334) note that “Latin translations of the writings of Maimonides, Avicenna and Averroes were to exert an incalculably wide and deep influence on the scholastics”. The translation effort and the wide reception of the Greek, Jewish, and Islamic works was only possible because of cultural developments within Europe – the emergence of the schools, the formation of new religious orders, the formation of medieval cities, and the growing trade and circulation of goods, ideas, and technical skills, contributing the most. This cultural development led to a scholastic flowering within Christian theology, the most important of which was the synthesis of Augustine and Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas.3 Antony Black (1992: 2-3) has a good summary of these developments:

The period 1250-1350 was especially innovative in philosophy. Mental life was not merely a repetitive rediscovery of past achievements; new problems of understanding and action were perceived and new conceptions sought. With Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham, ideas about God, human beings, social life and ethics developed anew and were perceived as improvements … The ultimate driving force was the tension and complementarity between the Judaeo-Christian and the Graeco-Roman. This was surely why ‘Europe’ developed along such different lines, intellectually and in the long run politically, from eastern Christendom and the world of Islam.

This was the world in which Moerbeke lived. He was a Dominican, and was particularly influenced by St Jerome’s translation of the Greek New Testament, where koinonia "plays an especially important role in the writings of St. Paul … Paul used the term in the joint sense of a fellowship between believers and their participation through the Eucharist, in the body and blood of Christ" (Schmidt, 1986: 300). Moerbeke, in the end, translated koinonia politike into the Latin communicatio politica – something which is referring to politics as 'a making common of'.

In the long nineteenth century following the disaster which was the French Revolution, Catholic social thought - or, better, what we now refer to as Catholic social thought - began building a new edifice around the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity, recovering and elaborating the Thomism of communicatio politica. It is this story - the story of the genesis, recovery, and development of communicatio politica, the engagements with Liberal, Marxist, and Reform thought during the last century, and the criticisms and setbacks from an aggressive social science - that we want to explore here. We intend to do so in a series of working papers, commentaries, historical studies, reviews, and incidentals which will examine deeper questions about the theory of civil society.
 
 
 

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End Notes
 
1.   Beullens (2005) indicates William’s birthplace might have been Morbecque, France, not Moerbeke, Belgium.
2.   In this, as in all things, medieval theologians were not unanimous. St Ambrose, one of the “Doctors” of the Church, for instance, held to the dualism of church and state (Chadwick, 1988: 19).
3.   See MacIntyre (1990).

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References
 
- Beullens, Pieter. (2005). “William of Moerbeke.” In Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, T. F. Glick, S. Livesey, and F. Wallis (eds.), pp. 515-516. London: Routledge.
- Black, Antony. (1992). Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Canning, Joseph P. (1996). “The Origins of Medieval Political Ideas, c.300-c.750.” In A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450. London: Routledge.
- Chadwick, Henry. (1988). “Christian Doctrine.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-1450, J. H. Burns (ed.), pp. 11-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dod, Bernard G. (1982). “Aristoteles Latinus.” In The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinbord (eds.), pp. 45-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Figgis, John Neville. (1913). “Respublica Christiana.” In Churches in the Modern State. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
- Figgis, John Neville. ([1921] 1963). The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’. Gloucester: Peter Smith.
- Luscombe, D. E. and G. R. Evans. (1988). “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance. ” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-1450, J. H. Burns (ed.), pp. 306-338. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rubinstein, Nicolai. (1987). “The History of the Word Politicus in Early-Modern Europe.” In The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe. A. Pagden (ed.), pp. 41-56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Schmidt, James. (1986). “A Raven with a Halo: The Translation of Aristotle’s Politics.” History of Political Thought: Vol. 7, No. 2, 295-319.
 
 
 

Working Papers & Research Notes