Deus Per Naturam, Deus Per Gratiam: A Note on Mediaeval Political Theology

Dr. George H. Williams' recent study on The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D., published as an extra number of this Review, may be taken as an excuse for delving once more into the highly suggestive pamphlets of this anti-Gregorian royalist. In a paragraph headed Christus per naturam , Christus per gratiam Dr. Williams, able and stimulating, discusses the Christology — perhaps we should say: political Christology — of that courageous mediaeval publicist, thereby commendably calling attention to a hitherto somewhat neglected topic: the bearing of Christology on the relationship between Church and State. It is, however, not the christological aspect of the natura-gratia problem which will be dealt with in the following pages, but the historical and doxographic sides of it. Dr. Williams, it is true, has indicated the immediate, or possibly immediate, sources of his author's political theories, but it would have exceeded by far the proper tasks of his analysis to trace every theorem back to its origins. Although the building up of an unbroken catena philologica is not intended here either, it may yet prove not quite useless to spread out in the present paper some material, casually collected and perforce incomplete, which might elucidate the adaptation to Christian thought of an axiom of Hellenistic political theory.