England and France - 1272-1291
The record has been, until now, primarily a record of custody. Who held what, where, for how long, and how they passed it on. The keepers have been extraordinary in their ordinariness - cloth merchants and wool merchants and Toledo notaries and German widows and Czech students, people who held something carefully because they had been asked to hold it and because holding it was the right thing to do.
This chapter is different. It is about the argument.
The chain has always carried two things: the materials themselves, and the understanding of what the materials mean. Custody alone is not sufficient - the materials can be perfectly preserved and perfectly useless if no one can articulate what they describe, what they argue, what the world looks like if they are taken seriously. The custody keeps the evidence. The argument makes the case.
I have found, in the Alton library, a document that is neither a custody record nor a formal instrument of transmission. It is the beginning of a treatise - forty-seven pages in a thirteenth-century hand, incomplete, breaking off mid-argument, apparently never finished. The notation system marks it as belonging to the chain. The content makes clear why.
The treatise is an argument for the ordering. Not a description of it, not a history of it - an argument. It takes the philosophical vocabulary of the high medieval period and uses it to demonstrate, with the precision of a trained scholastic, that the sacred and secular ordering of human society is not convention but nature, not imposed but discovered, not a story the powerful tell but a structure the real contains.
It was written in the generation before everything came apart. It was written by someone who saw what was coming and tried to make the case before it arrived.
He did not finish it. The argument he made has never been made in public. It has been sitting in the chain's custody for seven hundred years, waiting for someone who could carry it forward into a language the present age can hear.
What follows is drawn from a manuscript in the Alton library, catalogued by Teodor Maren as: partial treatise, Latin, late thirteenth century, provenance uncertain, notation confirmed. I have translated the most significant sections. The translator's choices are my own and I take responsibility for them.
The author's name, as best I can determine from internal evidence, was Thomas. He was English. He had studied in Paris. He returned to England in 1272 and spent the remaining years of his life in a small Augustinian house in a town whose name I have not been able to identify from his references. He died, I believe, sometime before 1295.
He is not Thomas Aquinas. He is a different Thomas, a smaller Thomas, a Thomas nobody has heard of. He wrote forty-seven pages that nobody read and which have been in the chain's custody for seven centuries.
He deserves to be named.
— T.M., 1961
The treatise begins without preamble, in the manner of a man who has been thinking about something for a long time and has finally sat down to write it out:
There are those who say that the ordering of sacred and secular authority in human society is a matter of agreement - that men have found it useful to arrange themselves thus, and that the arrangement persists because it serves the purposes of the powerful. I will not argue against the observation that the powerful have corrupted the ordering for their own purposes. They have. The corruption is real and its consequences are severe and I am writing in part because of them.
But corruption is not invention. A thing that has been corrupted was real before it was corrupted. The question is not whether the powerful have used the ordering for their own ends - they have, they always will - but whether the ordering exists prior to and independent of their use of it. Whether it is discovered or constructed. Whether it reflects something true about the nature of human beings and their relationship to God and to each other, or whether it is simply the most convenient story available to those who hold power in a given generation.
I intend to show that it is discovered.
Thomas's method is scholastic in the high medieval tradition - he proceeds by proposition and demonstration, each step grounded in the previous, the argument building with the specific patience of someone who has been trained to build arguments that hold. He is not a brilliant stylist. He is a careful one, which is different and in some ways better, because the argument does not depend on the reader being dazzled but on the reader following.
He begins with the nature of order as such - the metaphysical claim that order is prior to human agreement, that it is found in the structure of things before it is recognized in the structure of society. He draws on Aristotle and Aquinas and several others I have not been able to identify from his references, building a foundation that takes eleven pages and which the reader, if following carefully, finds has established something solid by the end of it.
He moves from the nature of order to the nature of the sacred - the claim that the sacred is not a human category imposed on a secular world but a dimension of reality that the secular world is embedded in, whether or not any given human being acknowledges it. He is careful here in a way I admire: he does not ask the reader to believe in God to follow the argument. He asks the reader to consider what the world looks like if the sacred is real, and to assess whether that description is more or less adequate to human experience than the alternative.
This is a significant move. He is making the argument in a register that does not require prior faith. He is doing what a historian of ideas does - taking a framework seriously enough to follow it, assessing it from inside, asking what it explains and what it leaves unexplained.
The argument for the ordering itself occupies the treatise's middle section, which is the longest and the most technically demanding. Thomas's central claim is that the sacred and secular orderings of human society are not two things that happen to coexist but one thing seen from two angles - that the sacred ordering of the Church and the secular ordering of empire and kingdom and household are aspects of a single structure that human beings have partially discovered and partially corrupted and partially forgotten but which remains discoverable because it is grounded in the nature of things rather than in the preferences of the powerful.
The argument is not complete. It breaks off at page forty-seven, mid-sentence, in a way that suggests not a deliberate ending but an interruption - illness, perhaps, or death, or simply the running-out of time that comes to everyone.
The sentence he does not finish begins: and therefore the question for those who will come after is not whether the ordering can be recovered, for it cannot be lost entirely as long as the nature of things remains what it is, but whether -
He does not finish it.
I have been sitting with the unfinished sentence for three years since I found the treatise in the Alton library in 1958. I have tried to complete it in my mind - to write, as Thomas might have written, the second half of the sentence that he did not live to write.
I have not been able to do it to my satisfaction.
I think the sentence requires someone who is not me. Someone who has Thomas's training - the philosophical vocabulary, the scholastic method, the ability to make the argument in the language of an age - but who is living in the present age rather than the thirteenth century, who can take Thomas's argument and carry it forward into the vocabulary the present requires.
The history of ideas as a discipline did not exist in Thomas's time. It exists now. It is precisely the tool the argument needs - someone trained to show how ideas move through time, how they are received and transformed and eventually produce the world they describe, someone who can demonstrate not just that the ordering was real but that its dismantling was a specific intellectual event with specific causes and specific consequences that can be traced and documented and argued about in terms the present age can follow.
Thomas began the argument. He did not finish it. The materials in the chain's custody provide the evidence. The argument has been waiting for seven hundred years for someone trained to make it.
The verso of the formal instrument, written in 1291 - the same year Thomas died, I believe, though I cannot confirm this - addresses this person directly. I have always understood the address as referring to the historian. I think now that it refers to a specific kind of historian: one who has spent fifteen years studying how ideas move through time and who has, in the course of that study, found himself in possession of the most significant case study available.
I do not know who that person is.
I trust the chain knows.
— T.M., 1961