Liberalism is "in origin primarily a refusal of ecclesial power." So write John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (Politics of Virtue, 31).

In refusing ecclesial power, early modern political theorists renounced the arrangement of Latin Christendom. The "first polity knowing no bounds and truly based upon the rule of law (thereby combining both universality and right in the sense of object ius) was non other than the Latin Catholic Church" (30). After Gregory VII, the church "was reconceived in terms of the sway of Canon law, rooted in the charitable precepts of the gospel and the theology of the creeds and Church Fathers" (30; they cite the world of Harold Berman).

In the medieval world, the church was a "transpolitical" polity, a community "oriented beyond time to eternity and devoted to more rigorous ideals that the community at large." Political communities were "answerable to the spiritual," and the church's "higher standard" was concretized and exemplified by saints and orders. Christianity's transcendence of the state wasn't merely theoretical. It was woven into political practice.

Milbank and Pabst note that the church's transpolitical function had some antecedents in the role of mystics or Plato's philosopher-kings: "Certain parallels exist in ancient China, and the elevation of the guru beyond kingship in India, but still more with the Buddhist Sangha" (30). Christianity and Islam "democratised" this transcendent community and made it more or less coextensive with the political community as a whole, though in Christianity the transpolitical was distinguished more sharply from the political.

What happens in modern politics when this transpolitical community's role is rejected? Two possibilities, the authors suggest: Either the reality of universal law is still assumed but it "floats free of any concrete communal instantiation"; or, it's said that the transpolitical ideal coincides with the state (31).

In England, the post-ecclesial order takes a couple of forms: absolute sovereignty or the primacy of natural law, understood as absolute formal rights (31). Continental post-ecclesial orders tend to identify the polity with the transpolitical community (31).

As a result, liberalism is "aporetically caught between absolute exaltation of the individual and absolute exaltation of the state," though, the authors admit, these end up being virtually the same. What's missing is an ecclesial power that can check the power of the state or guide the actions of the individual: "Neither individual presumption nor state overweening can now be so effectively chastened as by the constraining and normative presence of an inner psychic community" (31).