The Politicization of the "Nation" through Religious Claims since the Late Middle Ages. On the Profiling of a Political Unity of Action in the Field of Tension of Ecclesiastical Order Competitions and Institutional Differentiations

What role have ecclesiastical competitions for order played since the late Middle Ages in the development of those political units of action which were later to be called "nationes" and which then also called themselves such? What significance do theological discourses and religious claims to the concept of nation have for its politicization and affirmative-self-descriptive establishment, and what interactions with constitutional, legal and other cultural-historical aspects can be identified? How are these interactions and their preconditions ultimately reflected in the theological treatise literature in the historical run-up to the formation of the nation-state? The sub-project pursues these guiding questions against the background of the following observations:
          With the failure of the universal claims to power under Pope Boniface VIII through the violent intervention of secular power, the development of hierocratic-papalist theories of order by no means came to an end. On the contrary, the Augustinian hermit Augustine of Ancona, for example, presented a comprehensive bundling and methodically guided systematisation of papalist claims to validity in his "Summa de potestate ecclesiastica" in the mid-1320s, which was intended to religiously enhance the position of the Avignonese papacy against the emancipation efforts of competing secular authorities and thus strengthen it argumentatively. According to Augustine, the pope held a God-given fullness of power, which also made him lord over the secular rulers and their "regna" on earth. In doing so, Augustine was admittedly referring to older hierocratic-papalistic concepts of order: other members of his order such as Aegidius Romanus, Jacob of Viterbo or Alexander of S. Elpidio had, among other things, asserted the Pope's God-given power of jurisdiction over the secular rulers and, in doing so, referred to authorities such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas.
          Against these religiously legitimised claims to power and rule by the papacy, as Augustine of Ancona and others flanked them with arguments, the secular rulers in turn objected to theologians who interpreted the papacy of Avignon as an expression of religious-moral decay and developed church reform programmes against it, which, in defence against hierocratic-papalist assertions of validity, were based from a certain point on collegial-conciliarist church leadership models. These forces were also at work at and behind the great reform councils of the 15th century, at which the ecclesiastical leadership and order competitions between "papalism" and "conciliarism" were unleashed to great public effect. On both sides, there was a verifiable boom in the dissemination of the Summa of Augustine of Ancona, which influenced the formation of both positions, either critically or positively.
          The order competitions that shaped discourse at the councils of the late Middle Ages now ensured among representatives of conciliarist church models that the secular "regna" were referred to as "nationes" and called upon to intervene in responsibility for the well-being of the Church as a whole against the misguided claims to validity of the papacy. The units of action that were already forming through territorial consolidation of power and competing with the papacy in terms of power politics thus became the supporting pillars of the theoretical order of the church reform programmes of prominent theologians and dignitaries such as Pierre d'Ailly or Nicholas of Cusa, who thus promoted the (ecclesiastical) political emancipation of secular authorities from the hierocratic universalism of the popes through political attributions. Against the background of these religious claims, the political profiling of the talk of "nationes" then quickly established itself and gradually displaced other, more open interpretations of the concept in theological discourse.
          The complex context of events that is commonly referred to as the Reformation is ultimately also connected to the order competitions that increasingly developed in favour of the ruling-political "nationes", which, as part of more comprehensive order configurations, visibly merged with the polarity of the papal centre and decentralised forces from the 14th century onwards. The medieval politicization of the concept of nation, for example, is reflected in Martin Luther's widely effective treatise "An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation" (1520), which, for its part, took up the idea of the Council in favour of the fundamental reform of the Church and specifically addressed a certain political-legal association with "nation" in order to take it to task for saving the Church against papal claims to power. In the course of the early modern competition between the institutionally forming particular confessional church entities, the "nation" continued to be claimed as a political unit of action for the struggle over religious claims to truth and order, and thus in turn was religiously consolidated.
          On the basis of these observations, the project takes a look at theological thinkers as important actors for the politicization of the concept of nation and, using the example of the formation of religious order theory, examines theological discourses, institutional differentiation processes and church-political competitions as framework conditions and reinforcing factors of the political application of the speech of "natio"/"nation" since the late Middle Ages.