Part of the genius of the system of government invented by the Medieval West was the incorporation of Fides as the organizing principle of the whole of society. In the period between Pseudo-Dionysius’s Hierarchia and the breakdown of feudalism during the 14th Century, the concept of Fides (faith, fidelity) served as the contextual framework through which Latin Christians interpreted their social, political, and religious relationships. This notion is the common thread that ties together the Warband Society of Tacitus’s Germania, the Christianized Franks and Anglo-Saxons of the early Medieval period, Franco-Norman Classical Feudalism, and to a lesser extent the “bastard” feudalism of the High Middle Ages, which still gave lip service to Faith. Furthermore, it is the essential social bond which links the Two Cities and permits the Christian to move freely between them in a way which is less possible in a society where the religious and secular authorities are mutually hostile.

Any attempt to conceive of a stable social system must address the notion of Fides as well as its fundamental antagonism toward modern will-based systems of government by consent.

The notion of Contract serves as an inferior substitute for Faith, as it implies the inherent untrustworthiness of one’s partner and therefore makes Aristotelian political friendship impossible, thus leaving no other option in modern politics but a Schmittian state of eternal warfare within the state. Modern liberals attempted to weld the idea of “social solidarity” onto consent-based systems to resolve this problem, but the solution is fatally flawed, as epitomized in Edward Ross’s article “Social Control” in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 5 (1896).

Let me begin by addressing the meaning of the concept of Fides. Fides must be understood as Faith in the broadest sense of the word: not just religious belief, but also faithfulness, holding faith with others, acting in good faith, keeping faith. The ideal of the medieval fighting man was “Semper Fidelis,” an ideal to which only a handful of modern institutions still remain faithful. One of the major insights of Voegelinian scholarship, especially those outside of the dominant, liberal, EVS school of Voegelinian interpretation, is that the fundamental experience of politics for man is not liberty, but obligation to others. For the first few decades of our lives, we are fundamentally unfree in the liberal sense, being subjected to the authority of nearly every person around us, yet those who exercise authority over us do so in a way which is for our benefit. In all but the marginal cases, we experience power with restraint, authority without abuse, and most importantly for this topic, benefit without cost.

For a non-sociopathic individual, this incurs obligation, regardless of whether or not we gave explicit consent to be born, reared, educated, and protected. Please refer to Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon to see the absurdity of the consent-based attitude towards children and obligation.

This is where Fides fits in; as a consequence of our experience of obligation arising from receiving benefit without cost, we incur a moral duty to ascribe good faith in the future where good faith has been shown in the past, and in return to act in good faith towards others. Thus, we perpetuate a positive spiral of cooperation and mutual good which is sustained solely by our moral choice to participate in a eudaimonious or “friendly” relationship. “Honor thy Father and Mother” is more than a command of Scripture; it is also a command of our very natures to recognize and feel obligation toward our kith and kin. The virtue of Medieval society was the ability to metastasize this to the whole of society, wherein all social bonds, including the political, are treated as personal bonds of friendship between an interrelated web of persons. The so-called “pathological altruism” of European societies can be traced back to this notion of society as a collection of friends, which was anything but pathological in its original context.

There are two more things to place into this context before we move on to the critique of modernity. First, the political bonds of Western-style medieval societies grew out of the folkish warband, which explicitly rested in these ties. The Anglo-Saxon rincman, the warrior who served and in exchange received a ring from the dryhten as a symbol of his oath and trust, is a person whose essential relationship is based on this notion of faith, namely that he hold faith with his hlaford (loaf-giver, lord) and his lord hold faith with him.

The relationship between lord and man was intensely personal and deeply felt, as we see in the historical accounts of men piling up their bodies in an attempt to rescue the corpse of their fallen leader. The notion that one’s oath and reputation is so important that dozens of men should willingly and gladly die to prevent the dead body of their beloved lord from being dishonored by the enemy is almost foreign to the degenerate modern mind. Where Scripture says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” (John 15:13) few moderns outside of men who have seen actual combat actually understand the significance of this kind of social bond.

This exchange of oaths and the expectation that everyone would hold faith with those oaths sustained all feudal political relationships. The very word felony refers to the act of breaking one’s oaths to society. Those who cannot be trusted, for the medieval thinker, must be relegated to the lowest, most menial rank in society, and many legal codes of the period attest to this principle.

Secondly, for the medieval thinker, faith is a unitary concept spanning the religious and social spheres. To be faithless in secular affairs is to be faithless in religious ones. Prior to St. Thomas’s Dual Order, which paved the way for secularism by artificially dividing virtue and ethics, wickedness is not seen to be “domain-specific.” If a man cannot be trusted by his fellows because he routinely breaks faith with them, there is no reason to expect that he can keep faith with God any better. One can neither be a good Christian but bad citizen, nor a bad Christian but good citizen. One’s character is one’s character, which spans the Two Cities, as the medieval mind understood the unitary nature of personality. St. Thomas’s absurd argument regarding the ability to separate these ideas bears the modern fruit of “leave your faith outside the ballot box” and “leave your [right-wing] politics outside the door of the Church.”

The first breach in Fides comes from the bastardization of this kind of loyalty and faith between fighting men from the monetization of the feudal oath. The rise of scutage and the use of fines for acts which previously led to disseisin took a personal relationship between lord and vassal and transformed it into an economic relationship between a landholding oligarchy and a depersonalized Crown. The fundamental character of the relationship between individuals has changed from one of personal trust and personal service to one of economic exchange.  Cooperative relationships have become adversarial. War is introduced into the realm, not as the exception to the rule but as the character of the regime. This is not to claim that medieval politics were perfect or without disgraceful actions. In many ways, the anarchy is comparable to the Wars of the Roses, as both involved bribery, betrayal, and the worst elements of human nature on display. The former, however, did not legitimize the evils of civil war with the justification of raison d’etat, as the Tudor tyrants would do.

To conclude, the very notion of the social contract arises out of a situation where individuals cannot be trusted to abide by their word. It assumes a society that is essentially faithless, in which friendship is impossible. The medieval system, resting on the assumption of faith and the harsh censure of public faithlessness, permitted a system in which explicitly legal bonds were unnecessary because the positive feedback of Fides assured outcomes superior to the letter of the law. The modern system of contractual consent over faithful friendship ensures that obligation is only met at the minimum possible level. It creates incentive to defect in prisoner dilemmas, especially if a clever lawyer can find an “out” in the contract. It leads to a perverse motivation to absolve oneself of obligation by twisting and abusing the terms of the agreements publicly made.  It legitimizes a system of institutionalized abuse.

The modern mind’s incapacity to practice faith is epitomized in Ross’s article, “Social Control.”  Since under the modern understanding, no person can ever be trusted, it must be concluded that friendship in the Aristotelian sense is impossible. Each of us being no more than fundamentally equal and disembodied wills which inevitably come into conflict over objects of desire, the choice to have personal relationships and friendships with some but not others must be delusional and irrational. Ross argues that what we call friendship is merely prejudice in favor of some individuals rather than others, and thus is a barrier to the creation of the modern liberal utopia under the social control of experts who alone are capable of harmonizing the discordance of unrestrained Will through social science. Only by rejecting friendship as a form of prejudice and instead embracing universal fraternity, can the fundamentally untrustworthy world become trustworthy.  Ross calls for a perfect equality of sentiment between all individuals, so that in a society where everyone is equally a stranger, he can imagine a common bond in their strange-ness which permits trust.

In complete emotional isolation from one another, Ross expects to find the “fertile and generous emotion” which C. S. Lewis attributes to “men with chests.”

Ecce, absurditas horum temporum.