Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ even that would not suffice to impose on Christians a strict obedience to secular government. The doctrine of justification by faith would achieve all these effects.

      Commentaries on Luther’s theology have tended to identify his greatest innovation as his challenge to the Church’s sacramental, sacerdotal powers. By the late Middle Ages, they say, a clear distinction had been established between the sacramental powers of the Church and its jurisdictional authority in the temporal domain, its coercive powers in the public realm (in foro exteriori et publice), its ‘plenitude of power’. Indeed, others before Luther, such as Marsilius of Padua, had challenged its temporal authority. But Luther took the extra step. No one had yet gone quite so far in questioning not just the Church’s temporal authority but even its powers over the souls of the faithful.

      Yet, if we follow the logic of Luther’s theological development, it is striking that it proceeds in the opposite direction. He begins by questioning the Church’s power to punish sins, to excommunicate or to confer benefices and indulgences, and then advances from there not simply to attack the temporal authority of the Church but to support secular governments and their claims to almost unconditional obedience. It is at this point that the doctrine of justification by faith becomes truly essential. That doctrine may have contributed even more to the defence of secular authority, and the necessity of obedience to it, than to the attack on the sacramental powers of the Church.

      The Lutheran creed of obedience looks back to St Augustine and St Paul, who had, at different moments in the history of the Roman Empire, enunciated doctrines of obedience to secular authority.1 In the first volume of this history, it was argued that the defining principle of Western Christianity was the rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains of law and obedience. The ‘universal’ Catholic Church was born when what had been a Jewish cult detached itself, in accordance with the doctrines of St Paul, from Judaism’s all-embracing religious law, which applied to both matters of faith and the mundane practices of everyday life. The distinction between Caesar and God, each with his own proper sphere of obedience, would perhaps more than anything else set Christianity, especially in its Western form, apart from the other monotheistic religions.2 It was this, above all, that permitted Christianity to become an imperial religion, which relinquished to Caesar the right to rule this world.

      Before the Constantinian conversion, St Paul had already invoked this principle to impose upon Christians a need to obey imperial authority. After Christianity had become the official religion of empire, St Augustine elaborated the principle of obedience to secular power into an even more uncompromising doctrine, which still included submission to pagan rulers. He accomplished this by transforming the old Christian dualism into a rather more complex dichotomy. Instead of a simple distinction between earthly and heavenly realms, or secular and spiritual authority, or even the sacred and the profane, Augustine proposed a dichotomy between the divine and earthly ‘cities’, which are antithetical but inextricably united in this world: the one representing the saintly, holy, elect, pious and just, the other representing the impure, impious, unjust and damned, which runs through every human society and every human institution, including holy institutions of the Church. Since all human beings and all human institutions are tainted by unholiness and sin, no truly just and rightful order is possible in this world; and they must all subject themselves, by divine ordination, to the earthly powers whose purpose is not to achieve some higher principle of holiness or justice on this earth but simply to maintain peace, order and a degree of physical comfort.

      For early Christian theologians under imperial rule, a doctrine of obedience to Caesar may have been a relatively simple matter. The issue became infinitely more complicated when empire gave way to the medieval fragmentation of temporal power, in which ecclesiastical authorities were major players. Now theologians had to confront not only a division of labour between Caesar and God, with their respective claims to obedience, but also between Empire and Church, or princes and popes, among a bewildering variety of other autonomous powers, from feudal lords to civic corporations. It is not surprising that much of Christian theology soon took the form of legalistic arguments on jurisdiction.

      No philosopher or theologian could ever have decisively resolved the boundary disputes between ecclesiastical jurisdiction and secular governments, especially between the papacy and rising feudal kingdoms, which increasingly plagued Western Christendom in the later Middle Ages; but medieval Christian theology was at least obliged to confront the question in a way that early Christianity was not. It may have been enough in the time of St Paul to elaborate the principle of rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains; and it may have been enough in St Augustine’s time to construct a theology of other-worldliness, like Christian Neoplatonism, which allowed obedience to Caesar to coexist with a devaluation of earthly existence and a philosophy of mystical release from the material world. But, in the age of Thomas Aquinas, theologians were compelled to contend with, and even to justify, the preoccupation of medieval Christians with the intricacies of worldly governance and conflicts among competing claims to temporal power.

      This was a time when rising kingdoms like France were contending with other temporal powers, such as the German princes of the Holy Roman Empire and above all with the papacy. Christian theologians confronted not only the contests between spiritual and secular domains but ecclesiastical powers that laid claim to temporal authority on the grounds of their privileged access to the spiritual domain. Aquinas himself never systematically spelled out in practical terms his views on the relation between spiritual and temporal powers; but, drawing on the rediscovered Aristotle, he did find a way of situating the secular sphere in the cosmic order, retaining for the Church its own rightful domain while securing the position of secular governments. Although he placed the secular political sphere in a descending hierarchy from the divine to the mundane, he ascribed to it a positive function in the greater scheme of things, not simply in the role of necessary evil, as it had been for Augustine. The spiritual realm still reigned supreme in the cosmic hierarchy, and the Church still had its privileged position in that sphere; but secular government, which was granted substantial autonomy, could, on Thomistic principles, be treated as the highest of Christian concerns in this world.

      Here, too, the cosmic order was defined in legalistic terms, as Thomas distinguished among various kinds of law, divine, eternal, natural and positive. Natural law was that aspect of divine regulation and the cosmic order accessible to human reason and hence available to secular governments no less than to ecclesiastical authorities. Political society was not directly instituted by God but by natural law as mediated through positive law. This doctrine went some distance in sustaining the authority of secular princes against ecclesiastical powers claiming temporal supremacy. While Aquinas himself remained aloof, his doctrines were soon deployed in favour, for instance, of Philip IV of France in his struggles with Pope Boniface VIII.3

      Lutheran theology disrupted this neat Thomistic structure. The hierarchy of the cosmic order was replaced by a particularly rigid separation of spiritual and temporal domains, which denied any temporal jurisdiction to the Church. As we have seen, Luther took this further than ever before by denying the jurisdiction of the Church in foro interno, no less than in foro externo, not only depriving it of authority in matters temporal but restricting even its formal sacramental functions, divesting the Church’s officers, the priesthood, of their role as humanity’s only and official channel to God. The powers of coercion belonged solely to secular government, to which Christians owed their obedience.

      In spiritual matters affecting the soul, Christians were, to be sure, obliged to follow their Christian conscience; and, if commanded to act in ungodly ways, they might be obliged to disobey. Yet this obligation did not constitute a right to resist or rebel. If Christians felt compelled in conscience to disobey, they were obliged simply to accept the punishment for disobedience. True Christian liberty belongs to the soul and is perfectly consistent with bodily imprisonment. The right of refusal was reserved to the individual Christian conscience and could not be translated into active, collective and organized resistance to secular authority. A radical reading of Luther might seem to suggest that civil authority could not reside in ungodly princes, and more radical resistance theories would interpret Lutheran doctrine in СКАЧАТЬ