There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of Christian history, these divisions would have seemed all but impossible.
Today’s feast of King St. Louis IX of France (August 25) offers us an opportunity to recover a gem of medieval wisdom, which is the prospect that political authority can be truly ordered toward Christ. King St. Louis IX, who ruled France from 1226 to 1270, is regarded by many as the greatest medieval king and the only true saint-king of France. His reign is an enduring model of Christian kingship, so much so that the subsequent generations of French monarchs were all expected to emulate him.
In his reign, one finds a sophisticated and saintly understanding that his kingship belonged to Christ.
In his kingdom, there was no secular state lurking beneath religious trappings, waiting to be separated from them. The kingdom itself was ordered around the sacraments, and the faith’s vision of man, justice, authority, family, worship, and the common good. The categories of “religious”
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