Part III, Chapter XLII, 11

The first is this: “Civil power is subject to spiritual power. Therefore whoever holds supreme spiritual power has the right to command temporal princes and dispose of their temporal possessions for spiritual ends.” As for this distinction between temporal and spiritual power, let us consider what it can intelligibly mean to say that temporal, or civil, power is subject to spiritual power. These words can have only two meanings. When we say one power is subject to another, we mean either that the holder of the first is subject to the holder of the second, or that the first power serves the second as a means serves an end. We cannot understand one power as exercising power over another power, or having a right to command it. Subjection, command, right, and power are properties of persons, not of powers. One power may be subordinate to another as the saddler’s craft is to the rider’s craft. Even if civil government is ordained as a means to bring us to spiritual happiness, it does not follow that, when a king holds civil power and the Pope spiritual power, the king must obey the Pope any more than every saddler must obey every rider. As the subordination of one craft does not entail the subjection of its practitioner, so the subordination of one kind of government does not entail the subjection of its governor. Thus, when he says civil power is subject to spiritual power, he means that the civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign. His argument then stands as follows: “The civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign; therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes.” The conclusion is identical to the premise he needed to prove. To prove it, he first offers this reason: “Kings and Popes, clergy and laity, make up only one Common-wealth, that is, only one Church; in every body the members depend on one another; spiritual things do not depend on temporal things; therefore temporal things depend on spiritual things and are subject to them.” This argument contains two gross errors. One is the claim that all Christian kings, Popes, clergy, and other Christians make up one Common-wealth. Clearly France is one Common-wealth, Spain another, Venice a third, and so forth. They consist of Christians and are therefore distinct bodies of Christians, that is, distinct Churches. Their respective Sovereigns represent them, making them capable, like a natural person, of commanding and obeying, acting and suffering. No general or universal Church can do these things until it has a representative, and it has none on earth. If it had one, all Christendom would undoubtedly be a single Common-wealth whose Sovereign, that representative, ruled in both spiritual and temporal affairs. To make himself such a representative, the Pope lacks three things our Savior has not given him: the powers to command, to judge, and to punish, except by excommunication—turning away from those who refuse to learn from him. Even were the Pope Christ’s sole vicar, he could not exercise Christ’s government until our Savior’s second coming; and then the judges of the world will not be the Pope but St. Peter himself and the other Apostles.

The other error in this first argument is his claim that the members of every Common-wealth depend on one another as the members of a natural body do. They do indeed hold together, but depend only on the Sovereign, who is the soul of the Common-wealth. When that soul fails, the Common-wealth dissolves into civil war, with no person even holding fast to another because they lack a common dependence on a recognized Sovereign. So too the members of a natural body dissolve into earth when they lack a soul to hold them together. The analogy therefore gives no grounds for inferring that the laity depend on the clergy, or temporal officers on spiritual officers, but rather that both depend on the civil Sovereign. He should indeed direct his civil commands toward the salvation of souls, but is subject to none but God himself. We can thus see the elaborate fallacy of this first argument, designed to deceive those who do not distinguish between the subordination of actions as means to an end and the subjection of persons to one another in administering those means. For every end, the means are determined by nature or supernaturally by God himself; but the power to compel men to use those means has been entrusted in every nation to the civil Sovereign under the Law of Nature, which forbids men to break their pledged faith.

His second argument is this: “Every Common-wealth, being supposed perfect and sufficient in itself, may command another Common-wealth not subject to it and force it to change the administration of its government, even deposing its prince and installing another, if it cannot otherwise defend itself against the injuries he intends to do it. How much more may a spiritual Common-wealth command a temporal one to change the administration of its government, and depose princes and install others, when it cannot otherwise defend the spiritual good.”

It is quite true, as I have sufficiently demonstrated already, that a Common-wealth may lawfully do everything described here in defense against injury. And if it were also true that there now existed in this world a spiritual Common-wealth distinct from a civil one, its prince could, in response to injury or to a lack of assurance against future injury, seek redress and security through war—in short, by deposing, killing, subduing, or any other hostile act. But by the same reasoning it would be no less lawful for a civil Sovereign, in the face of like injuries suffered or feared, to wage war against the spiritual Sovereign. I believe this is more than Cardinal Bellarmine intended to infer from his own proposition.

But there is no spiritual Common-wealth in this world. Such a Common-wealth is the Kingdom of Christ, which Christ himself says is not of this world, but will exist in the next, at the resurrection. Then those who lived justly and believed him to be the Christ, though they died with natural bodies, will rise with spiritual bodies; then our Savior will judge the world, conquer his adversaries, and establish a spiritual Common-wealth. Meanwhile, since no one on earth has a spiritual body, there can be no spiritual Common-wealth among men still in the flesh, unless we call preachers commissioned to teach and prepare men for entry into Christ’s Kingdom at the resurrection a Common-wealth. I have proved they are not one.

The third argument is this: “It is unlawful for Christians to tolerate an infidel or heretical king if he endeavors to draw them into his heresy or unbelief. But it belongs to the Pope to judge whether a king is drawing his subjects into heresy. Therefore the Pope has the right to decide whether a prince should or should not be deposed.”

I answer that both assertions are false. Christians—or people of any religion—who refuse to tolerate their king, whatever law he makes, even in matters of religion, break their pledged faith in violation of divine law, both natural and positive. Nor has any subject a judge of heresy other than his own civil Sovereign. For “heresy is nothing but a private opinion obstinately maintained against the opinion that the public person, that is, the representative of the Common-wealth, has commanded to be taught.” Thus an opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy, nor can the Sovereign princes who authorize it be heretics. Heretics are only private persons who stubbornly defend a doctrine prohibited by their lawful Sovereigns.

To prove that Christians need not tolerate infidel or heretical kings, he cites Deut. 17, where God forbids the Jews, when they set a king over themselves, to choose a foreigner. From this he infers that it is unlawful for a Christian to choose a non-Christian king. It is true that a Christian—one who has already bound himself to receive our Savior as his king when he comes—tempts God greatly by choosing for his king in this world someone he knows will seek, by terror and persuasion alike, to make him break his faith. But, Bellarmine says, there is the same danger in choosing a non-Christian king as in failing to depose him once chosen. I answer that the question concerns not the danger of failing to depose him, but the justice of deposing him. Choosing him may in some cases be unjust; deposing him once chosen is never just. It always breaks faith and thus violates the Law of Nature, God’s eternal law. Nor do we read that any such doctrine was thought Christian in the Apostles’ time, or under the Roman emperors until the Popes acquired civil sovereignty over Rome. Bellarmine replies that the early Christians did not depose Nero, Diocletian, Julian, or Valens, an Arian, only because they lacked temporal force. Perhaps so. But did our Savior, who could have summoned twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels to his aid, lack force to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, who without finding fault in him unjustly handed him over to the Jews to be crucified? Or if the Apostles lacked temporal force to depose Nero, did they have to teach newly converted Christians in their letters, as they did, to obey the powers established over them, Nero among them at that time, and to obey not merely for fear of their wrath but for conscience’s sake? Shall we say that for lack of strength they not only obeyed but taught what they did not mean? Christians must therefore tolerate their heathen princes, or princes authorizing the teaching of an error—for I cannot call anyone whose doctrine is the public doctrine a heretic—not for lack of strength but for conscience’s sake. In further support of the Pope’s temporal power, Bellarmine cites St. Paul (1 Cor. 6), claiming that he appointed judges under the heathen princes of the time who had not been ordained by those princes. This is untrue. St. Paul merely advises them to have some of their brethren resolve their disputes as arbitrators rather than go to law against one another before heathen judges. This wholesome and charitable precept is fit for practice even in the best Christian Common-wealths. As for the danger to religion that may arise when subjects tolerate a heathen or mistaken prince, a subject is not competent to judge it; or if he is, the Pope’s temporal subjects may likewise judge the Pope’s doctrine. For every Christian prince, as I have proved already, is no less the supreme pastor of his own subjects than the Pope is of his.

The fourth argument is drawn from the baptism of kings. To become Christians, they submit their scepters to Christ and promise to preserve and defend the Christian faith. This is true: Christian kings are no more than Christ’s subjects. Yet they can still be the Pope’s equals, for they are the supreme pastors of their own subjects, and the Pope himself is no more than king and pastor, even in Rome.

The fifth argument comes from our Savior’s words, “Feed my sheep.” These, he says, bestowed all powers necessary to a pastor: the power to drive away wolves, meaning heretics; the power to confine rams that have gone mad or butt the other sheep with their horns, meaning wicked kings even if Christian; and the power to provide the flock with suitable food. From this he infers that Christ gave St. Peter all three powers. I answer that the last is no more than the power, or rather the command, to teach. For the first, driving away wolves or heretics, the passage he cites is Matth. 7.15: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” But heretics are not false prophets, or prophets at all. Even if the wolves meant there were heretics, the Apostles were commanded not to kill them or, if they were kings, to depose them, but to beware of, flee, and avoid them. Moreover, this counsel to beware of false prophets was given neither to St. Peter nor to any of the Apostles, but to the multitude of Jews who followed Christ up the mountain, most of whom had not yet been converted. If it conferred a power to drive out kings, that power was conferred not merely on private individuals but on people who were not even Christians. As for separating and confining fierce rams, by which Bellarmine means Christian kings who refuse to submit to the Roman pastor, our Savior himself refused to assume that power in this world, and advised leaving the wheat and weeds to grow together until the day of judgment. Much less did he give it to St. Peter, and St. Peter cannot pass it on to the Popes. St. Peter and all other pastors are told to regard Christians who disobey the Church—that is, the Christian Sovereign—as heathens and tax collectors. Since no one claims authority for the Pope over heathen princes, no one should claim it over those who must be regarded as heathens.

Yet from the power to teach alone Bellarmine also infers the Pope’s coercive power over kings. A pastor, he says, must give his flock suitable food; therefore the Pope may, and must, compel kings to do their duty. It follows that the Pope, as pastor of Christian men, is king of kings. Christian kings should indeed either confess this or else themselves assume the supreme pastoral charge, each in his own dominion.

His sixth and last argument is drawn from examples. I answer, first, that examples prove nothing; second, that the examples he cites do not even establish a likelihood of right. Jehoiada’s killing of Athaliah (2 Kings 11) was either done by the authority of King Joash, or it was a horrible crime by the high priest, who since the election of King Saul had been merely a subject. St. Ambrose’s excommunication of the Emperor Theodosius, if he really did it, was a capital crime. As for the Popes Gregory 1, Gregory 2, Zachary, and Leo 3, their judgments are void because they judged their own cause; their acts in accordance with this doctrine, especially Zachary’s, are among the greatest crimes human nature can commit. So much for ecclesiastical power. I would have been briefer and refrained from examining these arguments of Bellarmine’s had they been offered by him as a private man, rather than as the champion of the papacy against all other Christian princes and states.

CHAPTER XLIII. OF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR A MAN’S RECEPTION INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

His first argument is this: “Civil power is subject to spiritual power. Therefore whoever holds supreme spiritual power has a right to command temporal princes and to dispose of their temporal affairs for spiritual ends.” Let us consider what it could mean to say that temporal, or civil, power is subject to spiritual power. There are only two ways to make sense of it. Either the person holding one power is subject to the person holding the other, or one power serves as a means to the end pursued by the other. We cannot mean that a power itself has power over another power, or that one power has rights over another or can command it. Subjection, command, right, and power belong to persons, not to powers. One activity can serve another, as a saddler’s craft serves the rider’s skill. Suppose we grant that civil government is a means to spiritual happiness. It does not follow that a king holding civil power must obey the Pope, who holds spiritual power, any more than every saddler must obey every rider. An activity’s place below another does not make its practitioner subject to the other practitioner. Nor does government’s service to a higher goal make its governor subject to another governor. So when Bellarmine says civil power is subject to spiritual power, he means the civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign. His argument becomes: “The civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign; therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes.” His conclusion simply repeats the premise he needed to prove. He first tries to prove it this way: “Kings and Popes, clergy and laypeople, make up just one Commonwealth, that is, one Church. In every body the parts depend on each other. Spiritual things do not depend on temporal things. Therefore temporal things depend on spiritual things and are subject to them.” This argument contains two serious errors. First, all Christian kings, Popes, clergy, and other Christians do not form one Commonwealth. France is one Commonwealth, Spain another, Venice a third, and so on. Each contains Christians, so they are separate bodies of Christians, or separate Churches. Their respective Sovereigns represent them. That makes each body able to command and obey, act and be acted upon, like an individual person. No general or universal Church can do this without a representative, and it has none on earth. If it did, all Christendom would be one Commonwealth, and that representative would be its Sovereign in both spiritual and temporal affairs. To be that representative, the Pope would need three things our Savior has not given him: authority to command, judge, and punish. He has no power to do more than excommunicate those who refuse to learn from him—that is, to leave their company. Even if the Pope were Christ’s only deputy, he could not exercise Christ’s government before our Savior’s second coming. And when Christ comes, St. Peter himself, together with the other Apostles, will judge the world, not the Pope.

The second error in his first argument is the claim that the members of a Commonwealth depend on each other as the parts of a living body do. They do hold together, but they depend only on the Sovereign, the soul of the Commonwealth. Without him the Commonwealth breaks apart in civil war. People no longer even hold together, because they have no common reliance on a known Sovereign. In the same way a living body’s parts return to earth when it loses the soul holding them together. This comparison gives no reason to think laypeople depend on clergy, or temporal officials on spiritual officials. Both depend on the civil Sovereign. He ought to direct his civil commands toward the salvation of souls, but he is subject to no one but God. This exposes the carefully constructed mistake in the first argument. It is designed to deceive people who confuse making actions serve an end with making one person subject to another in choosing the means. Nature, or God acting supernaturally, determines the means to every end. But in every nation, the power to make people use those means has been handed to the civil Sovereign under the Law of Nature, which forbids breaking one’s pledged word.

His second argument is: “Since every Commonwealth is assumed to be complete and self-sufficient, it may command another Commonwealth not subject to it, force it to change its government, and even depose its prince and replace him, if it cannot otherwise protect itself against the injuries that prince intends. Still more may a spiritual Commonwealth command a temporal one to change its government and depose and replace its princes if it cannot otherwise defend spiritual good.”

It is true that a Commonwealth may lawfully take all these steps to defend itself against injury, as I have already shown. If there were in the present world a spiritual Commonwealth separate from a civil one, its prince could also answer an injury, or guard against a future one, by making war. In short, he could depose, kill, subdue, or take any other hostile action. But by the same reasoning, a civil Sovereign could make war on the spiritual Sovereign when faced with the same injury or threat. I doubt Cardinal Bellarmine intended that consequence of his own claim.

But no spiritual Commonwealth exists in this world. It is the same as Christ’s Kingdom, which Christ himself says is not of this world. It will exist in the next world, at the resurrection. Those who have lived justly and believed that Jesus was the Christ will then rise with spiritual bodies, though they died with natural bodies. Then our Savior will judge the world, conquer his enemies, and establish a spiritual Commonwealth. Meanwhile no one on earth has a spiritual body, so there can be no spiritual Commonwealth among people still in the flesh. One could call preachers a Commonwealth, since they have a commission to teach and prepare people for admission to Christ’s Kingdom at the resurrection. But I have proved they are not one.

His third argument is: “Christians may not tolerate an unbelieving or heretical king if he tries to draw them into his unbelief or heresy. The Pope judges whether a king is leading his subjects into heresy. Therefore the Pope has the right to decide whether to depose that prince.”

My answer is that both claims are false. Christians, like people of any religion, break their pledge if they refuse to tolerate their king, whatever law he makes, even a law about religion. This violates divine law, both natural and revealed. No one judges heresy among subjects except their own civil Sovereign. Heresy is simply a private opinion stubbornly maintained against the opinion that the public person, the Commonwealth’s representative, has ordered to be taught. An opinion authorized for public teaching cannot therefore be heresy. Nor can the sovereign princes who authorize it be heretics. Only private people can be heretics, when they stubbornly defend a teaching forbidden by their lawful Sovereigns.

To prove that Christians must not tolerate unbelieving or heretical kings, he cites Deuteronomy 17. God there forbids the Jews to choose a foreigner when they appoint a king. Bellarmine concludes that Christians may not choose a non-Christian king. It is true that a Christian has already pledged to accept our Savior as king when he comes. Such a person would severely test God by choosing a king in this world whom he knows will try, through threats and persuasion, to make him break that pledge. But Bellarmine says the danger is the same whether Christians choose a non-Christian king or fail to depose him after choosing him. I reply that our question is not about the danger of failing to depose a king. It is about the justice of deposing him. Choosing him may sometimes be unjust. Once he has been chosen, deposing him is never just. It always breaks a pledge and therefore violates the Law of Nature, which is God’s eternal law. Nor do we read that such a doctrine was considered Christian in the Apostles’ time or under the Roman emperors, before the Popes acquired civil sovereignty over Rome. Bellarmine replies that early Christians did not depose Nero, Diocletian, Julian, or Valens the Arian only because they lacked military strength. Perhaps they did. But our Savior could have called for twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels. Did he lack the strength to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, who found no fault in him yet unjustly handed him over to the Jews for crucifixion? And even if the Apostles lacked the strength to depose Nero, why did they teach new Christians in their letters to obey the established authorities, including Nero at that time? Why teach them to obey not only for fear of punishment, but also for conscience’s sake? Are we to say they both obeyed and taught what they did not mean, merely because they lacked strength? Christians should tolerate their non-Christian princes for conscience’s sake, not for lack of strength. The same applies to princes who authorize the teaching of an error, though I cannot call someone a heretic when his teaching is the publicly authorized doctrine. Bellarmine also cites 1 Corinthians 6 in support of the Pope’s temporal power. He says St. Paul appointed judges under the non-Christian princes of the time without authorization from those princes. That is untrue. Paul merely advises Christians to choose fellow believers to settle their differences as arbitrators, rather than sue one another before non-Christian judges. This is sound, charitable advice that should be followed even in the best Christian Commonwealths. As for the danger to religion if subjects tolerate a non-Christian or mistaken prince, a subject is not qualified to judge it. If he is qualified, then the Pope’s temporal subjects are equally qualified to judge the Pope’s doctrine. As I showed earlier, every Christian prince is as much the supreme pastor of his own subjects as the Pope is of his.

The fourth argument comes from the baptism of kings. To become Christians, they submit their scepters to Christ and promise to uphold and defend the Christian faith. That is true: Christian kings are Christ’s subjects. But they can still be the Pope’s equals, since each is supreme pastor of his own subjects. Even in Rome itself the Pope is no more than king and pastor.

The fifth argument draws on our Savior’s words, “Feed my sheep.” Bellarmine says these gave every power a pastor needs: power to drive away wolves, such as heretics; to confine rams that are mad or use their horns to attack other sheep, such as bad kings, even Christian ones; and to give the flock suitable food. He concludes that Christ gave St. Peter all three powers. I reply that the last power amounts only to the power, or rather the command, to teach. For driving away wolves, meaning heretics, Bellarmine quotes Matthew 7.15: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” But heretics are not false prophets, or prophets of any kind. Even if the wolves here meant heretics, the Apostles were not commanded to kill them or depose them if they were kings. They were told to watch out for, flee, and avoid them. And Christ gave this advice not to St. Peter or any Apostle, but to the crowd of Jews following him up the mountain, most of whom had not yet converted. If it granted power to drive away kings, it granted that power not only to ordinary people but to people who were not even Christians. As for separating and confining aggressive rams, by whom he means Christian kings refusing to submit to Rome’s pastor, our Savior himself refused such power in this world. He advised letting wheat and weeds grow together until Judgment Day. Still less did he grant this power to St. Peter, and Peter could not pass it to the Popes. Peter and all other pastors are told to regard Christians who disobey the Church, meaning the Christian Sovereign, as nonbelievers and tax collectors. Since no one claims the Pope has authority over non-Christian princes, no one should claim he has authority over people who must be regarded as non-Christian.

But Bellarmine also draws a power to coerce kings from the mere power to teach. A pastor, he says, must give his flock suitable food. Therefore the Pope can and should force kings to do their duty. This would make the Pope, as pastor of Christians, king of kings. Every Christian king should either admit this or assume supreme pastoral responsibility in his own dominions.

His sixth and last argument consists of examples. My first answer is that examples prove nothing. Second, the examples he cites do not even make a right seem likely. Jehoiada’s killing of Athaliah in 2 Kings 11 was either authorized by King Joash, or it was a terrible crime by the high priest. Ever since Saul was chosen king, the high priest had been simply a subject. If St. Ambrose really excommunicated the emperor Theodosius, that was a capital crime. The judgments of Popes Gregory 1., Gregory 2., Zachary, and Leo 3. are invalid because they judged their own cases. The acts they performed in line with this doctrine, particularly Zachary’s, are among the worst crimes human beings can commit. This is all I will say about ecclesiastical power. I would have been briefer and left Bellarmine’s arguments unexamined if he had written as a private person, rather than as the champion of the Papacy against all other Christian princes and states.

Chapter XLIII. What Is Necessary for a Person to Enter the Kingdom of Heaven