ABSTRACT
Law, sovereignty, society as rational and moral community: these are three of the historical and linguistic paradigms within which the nation-as-idea was embodied and which became, as such, the object of intense philosophical, political, and historical scrutiny in the period 1770-1850. In this sense they are areas of discourse and of'performative acts' which represent 'incarnations' of the dynamic ideal reality of nationhood. The relationship between Church and State offers a fourth. In the co-agency of nation and word (where 'word' is taken as the nexus of language, thought, and divine revelation), this relationship evolved differently according to the particular history, the cultural, political and social prejudices (in the Gadamerian sense175) of each nation. The Church/State dynamic is determined, for example, by the denominational nature of a national church, or by the particular philosophical and theological traditions which have shaped it. However, for all the hermeneutical hurdles which these differences raise, the common theme emerges that Church/State relationships were crucial in the development of national identity and self-consciousness in this period. It has been argued that 'the struggles of the State against the clergy form the great epochs in the genesis of modern nations', and that 'in some cases we may even say that religion is the nation, and the nation is what it is in virtue of its religion' (Barker, 1927, 121).176
