The Church’s central role in Magna Carta has been airbrushed out of history
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| One of four surviving 1215 Magna Cartas, in Salisbury Cathedral (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
The freedoms contained in the 1215 document
originate 'with the Christian Church and Christian theology'
This Monday coming marks the
800th anniversary of Magna Carta, a peace treaty between a comically cowardly
drunken king and his leading barons. It mainly focused on financial disputes
but it nonetheless came to become ‘the Bible of the English Constitution’,
in William Pitt the Elder put it.
Although there is some understandable
scepticism about the way that Magna Carta was romanticized by 17th century
opponents of the Stuart monarchs, and the motives of the barons were almost
entirely selfish, its four surviving clauses (sometimes counted as 3, as 39 and
40 were merged into one in the definitive 1297 reissue) still hold enormous
weight, legally, culturally and emotionally.
But though Clause 39 – “No free man is to be
arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other
way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the
lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” – is well-known to
educated people, it is less commonly recalled that Clause 1 states “that the
English Church is to be free, and to have its full rights and its liberties
intact”.
More importantly, the Christian origins and
influence of the Great Charter are mostly ignored, a point raised in
a new
Theos report by Thomas Andrew, The Church and the Charter: Christianity and
the Forgotten Roots of Magna Carta.
In particular Andrew addresses the unsung hero
of Magna Carta, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, who played a huge
part in drawing up the treaty and implementing it.
Langton was a strange and unusual choice for
the role; he was the former tutor to Pope Alexander III, and was a rather otherworldly
scholar who wrote page upon page of totally impenetrable commentary on the
Bible. However, there was a theme in his later writing, much of which seemed to
focus on the bad kings of the Old Testament who broke God’s law and who
therefore had terrible things done to them. Biblical kings, he wrote, had a
book of laws written down by the priests; today’s kings though ignore the
advice of priests and rule without restraint. The archbishop gave lectures in
which he attacked these modern rulers who tax not out of necessity but greed
and vanity, and where he said kingship was a punishment to mankind. To a king
as paranoid as John it would have been clear what he was getting at. Langton
also attacked “princes who flee from lengthy sermons”, which would certainly
apply to King John, who was so openly bored by church he once sent three notes
to a bishop presiding over Mass to hurry up so he could have lunch. (On another
occasion, reminscent of Edmund Blackadder, John took out a gold coin at
collection time, fiddled with it, and then ostentatiously put it back in
his purse.)
Archbishop Langton was perhaps intellectually
the most important figure behind Magna Carta, and although he may have not have
written it (no one knows exactly who, although it was certainly a
collaboration), according to one chronicler he played a big part in suggesting
the idea by raising the subject of Henry I’s 1100 coronation charter, a series
of promises made by the Norman king which influenced the men of 1215.
More significant, though, as Andrew
states, was the Christian intellectual tradition that led to the lasting ideas
within Magna Carta, which is ignored today:
“A more nuanced position recognises that the
ideas contained within the Magna Carta are part of a developing intellectual tradition.
They did not emerge ex nihilo, but arose as an expression of pre-existing
thought, given shape and substance in the political demands of the moment. And
a key aspect of that intellectual tradition is the contribution of the
Christian Church and Christian theology.
“No account of the Magna Carta can be
complete without reference to the Church. Indeed, given the prominence placed
on the principle of ecclesiastical liberty within the text, no account of the
Magna Carta should even begin without acknowledging the Church’s role in its
formation. And yet popular thinking seems all too willing to ignore it
altogether. While academic scholarship has produced some notable studies into
the theological background of the Archbishop of Canterbury, material aimed at
the general public has largely failed to recognise the contribution of
Christian theology or the Church in the formation of the Magna Carta. When the
British Library ran a series of events exploring the 800 year-old roots of
‘Britain’s struggle for freedom and contribution of the Church was all but
ignored. And as the professor of political science Cary Nederman points out,
while commentators will often pay lip service to the principles of ecclesial
liberty enshrined in the first clause of the Magna Carta, this is generally
done with the attitude of someone fulfilling a formal requirement, before they
can move on to the meatier parts of the text.”
To miss the role played by the Church is to
“miss a crucial part of the Magna Carta’s story”, he argues. “This is
particularly true of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was instrumental not
only in negotiating the Charter of 1215, but also in the important reissue of
1225 under Henry III, which confirmed the Magna Carta’s place in history.
Perhaps more important than this, however, is that a failure to acknowledge the
Christian theological context within which the Magna Carta arose is to miss out
on an understanding of some of the most important roots of our political and
intellectual heritage.”
The booklet also contains a foreword by Larry
Siedentop, the author of Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western
Liberalism, which is an essential study of how individualism and freedom
have their roots in St Paul. I would say that everyone should be forced to read
this book, but I suppose that would go against the whole point of it.
As Siedentrop points out: “The understanding
of justice itself began to be more closely associated with the assumption of
moral equality. For a strong case can be made that the earliest form of natural
rights theory was the work of canon lawyers from the 12th to the 14th century –
lawyers who transformed the idea of natural law inherited from the ancient
world, by giving it a far more individualist cast. In their hands, ‘aristocratic’
liberty, liberty understood as personal and corporate privileges, began to give
way to a more ‘democratic’ conception of liberty.
“Today there is a widespread embarrassment
about confronting the role of the Christian church in the formation of the Western
world. The Western debt to ancient Greece and Rome is far more likely to be
emphasized than its debt to Christian moral thought.”
Of course this is not an isolated incident;
the eradication of the Church’s influence on Magna Carta is part of a
wider cultural amnesia in which the Christian origins of so many ideas we now
assume to be universal have been forgotten. In that sense Christianity has
rather been a victim of its own success.
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