Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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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 this way. But the master himself would make very clear, most emphatically during the peasants’ revolt, that the ungodliness of rulers is no warrant for rebellion.
Luther would, in his later years, reluctantly accept – at the strong and repeated urging of German princes – a right of resistance that went beyond his earlier convictions; but the issue then was whether the princes had a right, even a duty, to form a league to resist the emperor, which Luther had earlier opposed. Some supporters even appealed to Roman civil law in support of the right to resist force with force and to disobey unjust judges. There were those who argued, invoking ‘private law’, that an unjust ruler might forfeit his public authority and effectively become a private person subject to resistance on the grounds of self-defence. Even Luther himself with great hesitation accepted the ‘private law’ doctrine; but, while some did indeed interpret the doctrine as implying a more radical right of individual resistance, for Luther the narrowly circumscribed issue was the right of lesser authorities like German princes actively to resist the higher authority of the emperor.4 The argument developed by rebellious princes to justify resistance to the imperial power was intended, from beginning to end, to be formulated in such a way as to ensure that resistance was not conceived as a general right residing in the people. It was meant, from the start, to be a constitutional argument about the rights of princes and other officials to resist the higher authority of the Empire, especially in matters of religion, and even to repel the emperor with military force. Even if the emperor had become a private person by governing unjustly, his punishment remained a public duty, performed by proper authorities, and not a private right.
Other Christian theologians had devised theories of obedience to secular authority, but Luther faced specific problems that no other theologian had effectively confronted. Unlike, for instance, Marsilius of Padua, who attacked the papacy on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire and its allies in Italian civic communes, in particular the Ghibelline nobility, Luther was asserting the authority of secular rulers, sometimes kings but in particular local princes, who were in conflict with both pope and emperor. To establish that Christians owed obedience to German princes, it was not enough to declare that the Church had no jurisdiction, public or private. This might suffice to shift the balance of authority in worldly affairs from Church to secular government, but princes whose authority was in no way derived from divine associations – such as even the Holy Roman Emperor enjoyed – would seem to have a tenuous claim on the strict obedience of Christian believers. Augustine had gone a long way in establishing the principle that secular and even pagan rulers could command the obedience of Christians; but there remained some loopholes, which were closed by Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith.
Augustine had certainly argued that temporal government is providentially ordained by God to deal with a fallen humanity. Since the purpose of government was simply to maintain peace, order and a fair degree of comfort among sinful human beings who could expect no justice in this world, even pagans could fulfil this modest purpose and could command obedience on the same grounds as did a Christian ruler. The principle of obedience was underwritten by his doctrine of predestination, which seemed to leave little, if any, scope to human effort in achieving salvation. At the same time, as we have seen, Augustine’s view of salvation appeared, in the eyes of some interpreters, to leave room for human effort in cooperating with the grace of God, while his attitude to heresy and his support for its brutal suppression by the state might be understood to imply that Christians did, after all, stand in a different relation to secular authority than did heretics or non-believers. Some might even be inclined to interpret the distinction between the sinful mass of humanity and the elect, rooted in the doctrine of predestination, to mean that secular government was necessary to control the many but that the few might somehow be exempt.
Luther decisively closed all the doors left ajar by Augustine. The Reformation would, to be sure, produce sects, in particular the Anabaptists, who believed that true Christians were subject only to the Word of God and not to the temporal sword. But Luther’s theology is emphatically on the side of obedience to secular government and the need for Christians to submit to it. Whatever he may have believed about predestination or the division between damned and elect, his doctrine of justification by faith effectively rendered them irrelevant to the question of obedience to secular authority, while at the same time giving secular government an unambiguous claim to divine ordination.
Luther accepted the Augustinian opposition between the realm of God and the earthly realm, or the devil’s; but that antithesis was trumped by another distinction, between temporal and spiritual realms, with their corresponding modes of authority, both of which are divine. The antithesis of divine and diabolic ‘kingdoms’ remained important; but it figured in the argument on divinely ordained temporal and spiritual realms only in the sense that it reflected the dual nature of humanity, the simultaneous unity of sin and justification that characterizes Christians, whose human sinfulness requires the temporal sword.
The distinction between temporal and spiritual realms, or between the kinds of order to which they are respectively subject, does not, then, correspond to the antithesis of God’s realm and the devil’s, because, as