What takes place in the modern era…is a reconfiguration of space that is much more profound than the creation of an expanded common space through the gathering up and coordination of formerly scattered elements into one. What happens is a shift from “complex space”—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a “simple space,” characterized by a duality of individual and state. There is an enfeebling of local common spaces by the power of the center and a simultaneous parochialization of the imagination of Christendom into that of the sovereign state. To say that the state “creates” society is not to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed before the state. Rather, the state “creates” society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.
This seems like an extremely important point—one that will take me quite some time to fully, if ever, assimilate into my thinking. Cavanaugh explains a little further on, “This creation of a unitary space requires the church’s absorption into the sovereign and the absorption of any other bodies that would threaten the unity of Leviathan.” This clarifies why he had said in the Introduction that, in order to “resist the colonization of the Christian imagination by a nation-state that wants to subordinate all other attachments to itself,” it will be necessary “to complexify political space.” Cavanaugh counsels that we need “to create forms of local and translocal community that disperse and resist the powers invested in the state and corporation,” ultimately expressed in “a kind of Christian micro politics that comes first and foremost from grass-roots groups of Christians.” I’m intrigued, to say the least, though I really have no idea what such proposals would look like in concrete terms.