John of Salisbury
St. Augustine was so deeply concerned with the theological defense of Christianity against paganism and heresy that he did not elaborate a political theory clearly defining the boundaries between political and ecclesiastical power. But toward the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius defined the relation between the two authorities (or the two swords):
- Ecclesiastical authority dealt in spiritual and religious affairs; while
- Political authority dealt in the care and administration of temporal matters.
Gelasius did not raise, or answer, the question of who is to decide whether a specific issue is predominantly religious or political. In his dualistic conception of authority he assumed the Church and State would cooperate in practical tasks rather than engage in bitter jurisdictional disputes.
The first great conflict between Church and Empire occurred in the latter part of the 11th century, when in 1076, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV deposed of Pope Gregory VII. Shortly thereafter, the Pope not only deposed the Emperor but also excommunicated him and relieved his subjects from their oath of allegiance. From that time until the end of the 13th century, the conflict between ecclesiastical and secular power dominated theory as well as practice of politics.
John of Salisbury’s the Statesman’s Book is the most incisive presentation of the papalist viewpoint. He is considered to be the most typical of medieval writers before the spread of Aristotelianism in the 18th century. (John of Salisbury was a friend of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury who also became Adrian IV, the only English pope.) He championed the supremacy of the ecclesiastical over the temporal.
Question: Is the state, even the democratic state, to have complete and absolute authority, or must there be some competing principles of allegiance that will make it difficult, or impossible, for the state to be an all-consuming Leviathan? The church can no longer, as in the Middle Ages, play the part of the sole competing source of loyalty and authority, but thus far no other institution or idea is in sight that can be relied on to do the job.
Historical Backdrop: The experience of fascist and communist totalitarianism in the 20th century shows that a community which lacks ideas and institutions that can challenge the state may eventually be devoured by omnipotent depotism.
St. Augustine
The recorded history of the west knows of no similar catastrophe than the destruction of the Roman Empire by the Gothic, Vandal and Hun warriors, when a way of life was so thoroughly destroyed that men forgot what their ancestors had known for centuries, and had to start all over again groping toward a new existence. It was a long and painful experience, and the process of gradual recovery from a near mortal illness, the medieval period, fills the ten centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the revival of ancient thought and learning in the fifteenth.
When Rome was ravaged in 400 A.D., a wave of shock and horror spread through the world. The pagans ascribed the catastrophe to the betrayal of the old Roman deities under which Rome had risen to the position of the dominant world power. The Christians, too, were perplexed: it was hard to understand how Rome could be so shamed just after Christianity had become the religion of the state. If Rome was not strong enough to safeguard its own existence against heathen tribes, how could it be the source of wordly power that the church needed in spreading Christianity?
Enter St. Augustine from whose works emerge the strongest reaffirmation of Christian idealism. In the City of God (De Civitate Dei, 413 A.D.), Augustine posits two chief ideas:
- The first concerns the pagan challenge to Christianity – where he demonstrated the hollowness and inconsistencies of paganism, materialism and worldly success;
- The second, his more constructive task, concerns the vision of the heavenly city as contrasted with the earthly city (civitas terrona)
Augustine was more concerned with the ways of life rather than the organization of life.
“If man is to become worthy of entry into the eternal kingdom of heaven, the City of God, there must be some agency on earth that leads to the right direction.” Yet no where does Augustine clearly define the Church. As a result, his arguments were later used by adherents of papalist doctrines as well as those who affirmed the sovereignty of mundane rulers of the church.
Peace is conceived in terms of Justice:
“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies.”
Jews and Early Greeks
Rome conquered Judea in 70 A.D. but the Jews were unwilling to admit political or military defeat. There was no room in the Temple of Jerusalem for the statue of the Roman Emperor and his worship as a deity.
In the first five centuries of the Christian era, the rabbis in Palestine and Babylonia developed the Mishnah and the Gemara known together as the Talmud. The Mishnah (“Repetition”) was the first written collection of laws after the Bible. The Gemara (“Completion”) is a series of commentaries, discussions and interpretations of the Mishnah.
If the Bible is the great and imperishable achievement of the Jewish community in Israel, the Talmud is the enduring monument of the Jewish community in exile. The Bible, the prophets and the Talmud (as the third pillar) ensured the survival of the Jewish people as a spiritual and cultural community. Theirs was a nation without the material attribute of a national territory and without the political attribute of national sovereignty.
The main difference between Greek and Jewish thought is that in the Greek view, man created God; in the Jewish view, God created man.
The Jewish concept therefore challenges man to rise to the closest possible communion with God by living a life of justice. By contrast, the Greek creation of the gods by men brings the gods down to the level of man, depriving him of any standard of perfection toward which mankind can – and must – strive.
Jewish idea is to “act justly” whereas the Greek idea is to “think clearly.”
Stoicism
Stoicism appeals to the individual as an individual rather than as a member of the community; in this characteristic lies its strength and weakness. The moral appeal to the individual is not, as in the closely-knit city-state of Plato and Aristotle, to idolize and worship the laws and moral or one’s community but to live in accordance with nature.
Epictecus:
“To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign for want of education; to accuse oneself shows one’s education has begun; to accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.” - Epictecus summing up the Stoic process of mental health.
“What disturbs men’s minds is not events but their judgment on events.” If man can preserve the inner freedom that he possesses as a rational being, no external evil or threat of evil, not even death, can be potent enough to break his freedom, his self, his quality as a rational being. External things, then, are not good or evil in themselves; they are merely “materials for the will, dealing with which it will find its own good or evil.”
“The tyrant has power over individuals only to the extent that they fear him, that is, to the extent that they treasure their accidental possessions of property and health, their life, more than their inner freedom, their reason, over which no one else can have authority… It is control of other men’s minds rather than their bodies that gives the tyrant his parasitical power.”
“No man can rob us of our free will.” (also by Marcus Aurelius)
“To influence men’s judgment and reason, the rulers ought to busy themselves less with external things. They should concern themselves more with their rational values if they want to understand those of others. The stoic is thus willing to give way to the King or Tyrant in matters of external force, because there the ruler is superior; “where, on the other hand, I am the better man, it is for you to give way to me, for I have made this my concern and you have not.”
“It is not arguments that are wanting nowadays… but the man who will apply his arguments and bear witness to them by action.”
Epicurus:
“The impious man is not he who denies the gods of many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many.” Epicurus believed in immortal gods but claimed that they do not trouble themselves with the affairs of the world.
“Pains of the soul are worse than those of the body: for the flesh is only troubled for the moment, but the soul for the past, present and future.”
Stoic thought in the 17th century is expressed by Baruch Spizonza in saying, with regard to tyrants, “obedience makes the king.”
Cicero and Rome
Historical Background:
Rome, unable to solve the growing social and imperil problems in the framework of the traditional institutions of the Republic, incessantly moved toward monarchical government. Cicero thought primarily of political and administrative remedies for the decay of the ancient Republican spirit and he had little understanding of the profound economic issues and damages that the rise of a propertyless proletariat in Rome had produced. Instead of looking into the future and accepting as permanent the new social and economic forces in Roman life, he looked back into the a past in which these forces had not existed.
Cicero fervently believed in moderation, concord and constitutionalism; such a political faith flourishes best in a time of social stability. When this stability has become undermined by intolerable rifts in society, constitutionalism as a purely political faith offers no solution, unless supplemented by basic social and economic reforms.
“Romans, by defending their allies, have gained dominion over the whole world.”
“There is no human being of any race who, if he finds a guide, cannot attain to virtue.”
One of the characteristic assumptions of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is the implicit faith that once general principles of government are laid down, the process of government can be safely entrusted to the rulers. {Philosophy, not law, is the queen of both Plato and Aristotle’s masterpieces.}
“The state is a community of law (iuris societas).”
“Although we cannot agree to equalize man’s wealth, and the equality of innate ability is impossible, the legal rights at least of those who are citizens of the same commonwealth ought to be equal.”
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature. The task of justice is therefore to discover the ‘nature of the things’ in a given situation rather than to impose upon it a preconceived solution, supplied either by revelatory insights or logical deductions.”
“Liberty has no dwelling place in any state except that in which the people’s power is the greatest, and surely nothing can be sweeter than liberty.”
Polybius
Polybius Histories:
“The secret of Roman political health lay in the principle of mixed constitutions.”
Causes of political change was observed by Lycurgus: Monarcy -> Tyranny -> Aristocracy -> Oligarchy -> Democracy -> Mob-Rule -> Monarcy.
Aristotle
Introduction:
- The state is a community.
- It is the highest of all communities.
Aristotle’s Politics lays the foundation for the organic concept of the state wherein the state is a natural community, an organism like all other organisms; the other view of the state is instrumentalist (older, produced by the Sophists) wherein the state is viewed as a piece of machinery.
“Man is by nature a political animal…”
“…only Gods and beasts can exist without the confines of a sheltering city.
Aristotle knows not of the conceptual distinction or contrast between individual and society nor can he visualize the later conflict between society (a sphere of unhindered spontaneous activity) and the state (a sphere of regulated and compelled behavior).
By studying all the then-known political systems, Aristotle laid down the foundations of an important banch of political science: comparative government and politics. The study of comparative political institutions is of interest to the political scientist as well as to the practicing statesman who must know the varieties of political experience if he is to be able to remedy the defects of existing constitutions.
Main classification of forms of state is the “view of serving the common interest” from those that only serve the private interest.
Constitutional government (polity) is a compromise between the two principles of freedom and wealth, the attempt to “unite the freedom of the poor and the wealth of the rice” without giving either principle exclusive dominance.
Defense of private property:
- Incentive and progress argument;
- Pleasure that private property gives;
- Liberality (consists on the use which is made of property);
- It has existed for such a long time.
Plato
Next to the Bible, the Republic has been the most influential book in western intellectual history, and Plato, therefore, the most influential philosopher in western civilization.
Rigid thought, control and censorship must protect humanity from its weaknesses. Even the lie is justified in protecting people’s minds against the unuseful truth.
“When people denounce injustice, it is because they are afraid of suffering wrong, not of doing it.”
“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
Plato favored mysticism more than rationalism: As long as the soul dwells in the body,it can never attain pure knowledge. The soul comes closest to knowledge by avoiding as much as possible all contact or association with the body. Plato considers the body a disease of the soul and believes that humans can attain final purification and deliverance only through death. All of these thoughts affected Christianity.
“Wars and revolution and battles are due simply and exclusively to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth, and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body for we are slaves in its service.”
Pre-Platonic Thinkers
Xenophanes:
“Man creates god in his own image.”
“The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning; but by long seeking men discover what is better.”
Protagoras:
“Concerning the Gods, I am unable to know whether they exist or not, nor form they have; many things prevent this knowledge: the obscurity of the problem and the brevity of man’s life.”
“Man is the measure of all things.”
The greatness of pre-Platonic humanism consisted in precisely accepting for the first time in history, the potentialities and limitation of human intelligence and creativity.
Pre-socratic thinkers saw the imperfection and fallibility of human judgment and knowledge. They therefore concluded that all men are in the same boat of doubt and uncertainty. “There is no aristocracy of those who know” (as Plato thought). Therefore, (and here philosophy merges with politics), if there is no absolute standard of what is right or wrong, the opinions of the majority are to decide.
The teaching of the Sophists shocked many because they emphasized what social reality is rather than what it should be. Accordingly, they were deemed the original progenitors of the Social Contract.
Pericles:
“… we employ wealth, not as a means of vanity or ostentation, but as an opportunity for service. To acknowledge poverty is no disgrace; the true disgrace is making no effort to overcome it.”
Socrates:
“The greatest threat to both the society and the individual is the suspension of critical thought.”
His imminent desire was to transcend the material temptations of life and to achive a life of true spirit on earth – to “practice immortality” in this life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
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