Selections from Three Works. Francisco Suárez
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position, that princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever.2
As intended, this oath served to divide the English Catholic community, being taken by George Blackwell, the archpriest in charge of its administration, and most of the prominent laity, but refused by the majority of the secular clergy and by the English Benedictines and Jesuits. Following on a series of works by Bellarmine, Suárez’s Defensio fidei was an exercise in controversial apologetics in reply to this oath that was commissioned by the Roman Curia through Decio Caraffa, the papal nuncio to Madrid. With papal approval the book gave a systematic account of state authority, of the subordination of temporal ends to spiritual, and of the Pope’s consequent indirect temporal authority over Christians. Given Suárez’s reputation, the significance of the work was not lost on James I’s government. Copies of each of the six books of the Defensio were supplied to London by Sir John Digby, James I’s ambassador to Madrid, as they were printed. The complete work was burned by the hangman at St. Paul’s Cross, subversive as it was of James I’s pretensions to derive his authority to rule immediately from God and to exercise that authority quite immune from any papal interference.
Suárez’s strong view of papal authority both over the church as a whole and indirectly over Christian rulers was always going to be unpalatable to French Gallicans, who denied any papal temporal authority and viewed the exercise of the pope’s spiritual authority as subject to the consent of the church. But there was a further matter that, after the assassination of two successive French kings, guaranteed the Defensio fidei a hostile reception in France. James’s oath raised the issue of tyrannicide; and so, with typical thoroughness, Suárez addressed this issue in the Defensio too, defending the legitimacy of tyrannicide under certain conditions.
[print edition page xvi]
The Council of Constance had issued a decree in 1415 condemning as heretical the following proposition:
Any tyrant can and ought to be killed, licitly and meritoriously, by any of his vassals or subjects, even by means of plots and blandishments or flattery, notwithstanding any oath taken, or treaty made with the tyrant, and without waiting for a sentence or a command from any judge.3
This condemnation was seen as binding on subsequent Catholic discussion of the permissibility of killing tyrants. But few Jesuits besides Juan Azor understood this decree to be a blanket condemnation of tyrannicide. Suárez insisted on a distinction between two sorts of tyrant that had been made by Aquinas.4 There are tyranni a regimine, or lawful tyrants, that is, princes with a legal title to rule, but who abuse their authority; and tyranni a titulo, or unlawful or usurping tyrants without even the right to rule. The latter may include previously lawful tyrants who have lost their title to rule through lawful deposition. In Suárez’s view, the difference between lawful and unlawful tyrants is that an unlawful tyrant is using violence on the state by his very retention of royal power, so that the state is by that very fact involved in defensive war against him. In contrast, a lawful tyrant has just title, but is abusive in his method of rule, which aims at his private advantage against the public good. In the latter case, it need not follow that the abuses amount to an actual attack on his community, though if an attack is being made then, again, the community is involved in a defensive war against its own prince. The Council of Constance was understood by Suárez to ban the indiscriminate killing of lawful tyrants, but to leave open the possibility of killing a usurping tyrant as part of a defensive war against him by the community. Even a lawful tyrant might similarly be killed if engaged in an outright attack on his own community.
The conditions set by Suárez for permissible tyrannicide were very circumscribed; but his discussion came only three years after the assassination
[print edition page xvii]
of Henri IV, and the apparently sympathetic treatment of the earlier murder of Henri III by his fellow Jesuit Mariana in De rege et regis institutione (1599) was also fresh in mind. In even discussing the topic the Defensio fidei contradicted earlier assurances given by the papal nuncio to France that it would not address the question of tyrannicide. As a result, Suárez’s work was initially condemned, with the writings of other Jesuits, by the Paris Parlement, though the French crown was brought to retract the condemnation of Suárez along with an earlier parliamentary condemnation of Bellarmine.
Suárez writes of individuals as possessing an original and natural liberty. But the distance between his thought and any subsequent contractarianism, let alone any form of liberalism, is considerable. The consent of the community may be a condition of political subordination. But this consent is, as we have noted, an alienation and, except under limited conditions, cannot be retracted. It involves no transfer of rights or powers from individuals to their rulers, but only from the community as a whole. Moreover, the community’s consent comes to no more than a shared custom of obedience under conditions that leave this custom to further the common good. And even this shared custom is not, as it would be for Hume, the ultimate source of political authority, but merely a condition under which God, the true ultimate source, grants that authority. It should also be noted that the metaphysical freedom of the individual’s will guarantees no special freedom in questions of religion. As De fide makes clear, coercion of belief may be perfectly legitimate. The limits on such coercion are almost wholly jurisdictional and do not arise directly from the moral status of the individual. The state has jurisdiction in its own right only in relation to the ends of natural law, which is why the state cannot coerce specifically Christian belief. But the state can perfectly well coerce religious belief and practice otherwise. The state can and should force individuals out of idolatrous or polytheistic religion and into the practice of the rational monotheism that natural law requires. The church, by contrast, does have jurisdiction in relation to spiritual and supernatural ends, though this spiritual jurisdiction is limited to the baptized. But within this jurisdictional boundary coercion is again fully permitted. With the assistance of Christian rulers, the church can certainly use force and
[print edition page xviii]
sanction on the previously baptized, in particular on heretics and apostates, to impose properly Catholic belief and practice.
We have seen that Suárez’s belief in a necessary dependence of all law on legislative origin and authority was controversial at the time, although the doctrine came to be increasingly widely shared among Catholic moralists thereafter.5 Much of the success of Suárez’s views lay in his considerable synthetic ability. His writings were informed by what seemed to many of his contemporaries an exemplary mastery not only of metaphysics and moral theology and psychology, but also, more than usual for his order, of canon and civil law and commentary thereon. This synthetic ability enabled Suárez to absorb and integrate much in the positions of opponents into his own work. In particular, those of his Catholic opponents who saw the natural law as unlegislated took its origin to lie not in the decrees of God, but in our own rational nature, and to be knowable simply through consideration of that nature. But Suárez too claimed to safeguard the link between natural law and rational human nature. Though in his view natural law was the product of divine legislation, Suárez sought to agree with his opponents that the natural law is not simply posited by authority but has a content determined by that rational nature which it governs and that the law can be known and obeyed just on the basis of understanding that nature. The reconciliation of rationalism regarding the content of the natural law with a voluntarist theory of its origin in the divine will was the central distinctive feature of Suárez’s De legibus.
Thomas Pink
[print edition page xix]
NOTE ON TRANSLATION (from the Carnegie edition)
The translation of these Selections from the works of Francisco Suárez has been made from the following editions:
De legibus ac Deo legislatore, first edition, Coimbra, 1612.
Defensio fidei catholicae et apostolicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errores cum responsione ad apologiam pro iuramento fidelitatis & praefationem monitoriam Serenissimi Iacobi Angliae Regis, first edition, Coimbra, 1613.
De triplici virtute theologica, fide, spe & charitate, first