Before passing on to the other great divisions of the jurisdictional power we must linger a while longer over the study of the canonical power. If the declaratory power is the higher, the canonical power, which brings it into immediate touch with temporal things, is the more deeply affected by their complexity and contingence. The documents of the ecclesiastical magisterium that rule its exercise have, in every age, to reckon with the contemporary state of cultural development. The field of its influence is therefore variable; sometimes, as in the early Christian era, it seems to keep itself well within its legitimate frontiers, and at others, as in the Middle Ages, it appears to overstep them. We must first define its essential exigencies, and determine the nature of its relations with political power and political society. That, however, will not suffice. We shall still have to discuss, endless as the task may seem to be, the legitimacy of many measures taken by the medieval Popes in the name of their powers, measures that find mention in the canonical collections and were then turned to account in the theological Summae: transference of the Imperial dignity, deposition of apostate princes, suppression of heresy, organization of Crusades. If we maintain that these measures were justified, there seems to be a danger that those who thus work to save the full authority of the canonical power entertain the secret hope that one day all its medieval applications will be revived. And if, on the contrary, we disavow these measures, and consider them to have been usurpations on the part of the spiritual power, it seems as if we shall have to agree that in thus falling in with the methods of the kingdoms of this world the Church lost sight of her transcendence, yielded to the third temptation rejected by Our Lord, allowed her sanctity to be eclipsed during long centuries and, by ambition, weakness or ignorance, betrayed the mission that Christ had entrusted to her. Neither the theologian who simply asserts the divine character of the canonical power, nor the historian content to plead extenuating circumstances for an attitude he admits to be regrettable, will ever resolve these grave questions. Let us make an attempt to resolve them on their own merits. We shall in the first place recall (1) the analogical character of the canonical jurisdiction. I shall indicate (2) the essential claims of the Church in her relations with the State. Then (3) we shall set out to describe the normal role of the Church in a secular Christendom. And finally (4) we shall discuss more at length the role of the Church in medieval Christendom.

Since the Church has no other end than eternal life and union with the divine Persons, we have refused to distinguish in her first, a specific element by reason of which she is supernatural and possesses the powers of order and magisterium, and then a generic element by reason of which she is social and visible, possessing like other societies the power of legislating, judging and punishing. The Church is, at once and through and through, both supernatural and visible: first by reason of the power of order and the declaratory power, next by reason of her canonical power which contains the legislative, judicial, and coercive powers within itself. Her resemblance to political societies is analogical only, not univocal. Hence the resemblance of her canonical power to the political power is also only analogical; and that of her legislative, judiciary and coercive powers to the legislative, judiciary, and coercive powers of the State, is merely analogical likewise.

It follows, as I have already pointed out, that the canonical power can propose even speculative and doctrinal statements to the faithful, who will then be bound to give them an intellectual assent; that if it more especially governs exterior acts, it can nevertheless prescribe the interior acts of faith and religion that should lie behind them; and that the maxim De internis non judicat praetor is not to be applied to the canonical domain simply as it stands.[446]

It further results that the means of coercion open to the Church to bring her rebellious children back into the ways of obedience and love will not be identical with those used by the temporal society. Since the Church is a society which is not of this world, a spiritual society, ecclesiastical penalties will be always spiritual by reason of their end. But since the Church is a society which is in this world, a visible society, she can touch delinquents in their visible, temporal and material goods; but, even then, such penalties, remaining spiritual in aim, will be distinct from those inflicted by civil society. They will have another measure; they will be lighter and will not, for example, go as far as the shedding of blood and the death penalty.

The same remarks apply to the means of extending and defending the Church. The sole means of conquest proper to the Church as such, is the preaching (and living) of the Gospel; neither constraint nor war is allowable here. The sole means of defence proper to the Church as such, and arising from her nature as the visible Kingdom of God among men, remain spiritual in measure and aim, even when temporal in themselves. They do not consist in opposing blade to blade, bloody constraint to bloody constraint: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep among wolves" (Matt. x. 16); so that if the Church still exists in the world, if the sheep still live in the midst of wolves, the thing is clearly a miracle.[447] The only bloodshedding for which the Church, as such, takes the full and immediate responsibility is that of the martyr. "Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus, and held him. And behold one of them that were with Jesus, stretching forth his hand, drew out his sword; and striking the servant of the High Priest, cut off his ear. Then Jesus saith to him: Put up again thy sword into its place; for all that take the sword shall perish by the sword" (Matt. xxvi. 50-52). And we are clearly warned that what applies to Jesus Himself applies to all His Kingdom: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now"—since they have not done so it is clear that—"my kingdom is not from hence." (John xviii. 36).

Yet Popes have issued decrees for setting holy wars on foot, and for compelling princes to hunt down heresy, and I believe that they did so legitimately. But what I propose to dispute is that they did so in virtue only of their canonical power, and of essential and permanent exigencies of the Kingdom of God.

A further remark. When we speak of the means adopted by the legislative, judiciary and coercive powers of the Church, we speak first, of course, of those means which she wields herself, without having recourse to any intermediary. But we include further certain activities exerted through the medium of the secular arm; not all such activities indiscriminately, but those only for which the ecclesiastical power can and ought to bear the full responsibility, those whose immediate end is the spiritual not the temporal-Christian, Christianity and not Christendom, activities regulated by the laws of the Church and not by the laws of the State. The secular power is then functioning as a pure instrument of the canonical power. Its activity, ordinarily civil, becomes spiritual hic et nunc, exceptionally, on special occasion; it submerges itself in the activity of the canonical power, changes its character, becomes lighter and more moderate. On that account, the secular arm has to renounce the use of the sword. St. Augustine does not refuse its services to deal with the Donatists, but he "would not hear of capital punishment; he trembled lest the blood of the enemies of the Church should flow back upon her and dishonour her."[448] The Church is the party responsible for these activities, not the secular power: they are here regarded as pertaining to her "direct power". I shall reserve the term "indirect power" for another use.[449]

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The claims of the Church with respect to the State concern on the one hand the life of the Church herself, and on the other her influence on the State. The Church has first of all the right and the duty to take root, live and develop in the bosom of political societies. She has moreover the right and the duty to exert a sanctifying influence on the life of political societies. Both kinds of claim are put forward by Leo XIII in the Encyclical Sapientiae Christianae (10th January 1890): "The Church cannot be indifferent as to the particular laws which shall rule cities, since it happens only too often that instead of keeping to the political sphere these laws transgress their due limits and encroach on ecclesiastical rights. Now God has entrusted the Church with the duty, first of opposing political measures harmful to religion; and secondly, of bringing all her zeal to bear to ensure that the laws and institutions of peoples should be penetrated with the spirit of the Gospel. "Let us consider, briefly, each of these claims.

However great their diversity the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world meet on the same territories, not to say in the same men, and claim them for their respective ends. How are we to conceive this partition—first within the man himself, and then among his worldly and temporal goods?

The law of all created natures, be they physical particles or living germs, is to tend towards their act, their end, their perfection, their good. This good is a distant likeness of the divine good; and so, in tending to their own perfection they are also tending blindly—and of course with numberless failures—to God. Now if this is so, then man, who is not exempt from the general law, ought likewise to be constantly moving towards his end and his good, that is towards God, in a truly human way, in which the failures will take on the nature of sins.[450] In moving in this properly human manner towards the fulfilment and fullness of his nature, man will find himself bound to enter into relations with other persons and to live a communal life; first of all in the basic community of the family, which is ordained for the handing on of life, and is itself involved in civil communities, wider, more perfect, more "divine "ordered to the unfolding and flowering of human life [451]—communities whose influence will penetrate the family community and lift it gradually above itself. The supreme civil community alone will have full moral personality, will be perfect; not in the sense that it can isolate itself from all others and tend to some impossible autarchy, but in the sense that it can treat with the others as an equal with equals. At each step of this progressive introduction to community life man is moving towards God.

And yet the human person is too noble a thing to be wholly received into and absorbed by a community. It is but a part of himself that moves towards God by way of the family, and another part by the various civil communities; and there remains an element in him that can move towards God only directly, that concerns no one but God and himself. That is why St. Thomas distinguishes three parts in moral philosophy: first the "monastic", which rules the activity of man in his singleness; then the "economic, "which rules the activity of the domestic community; and then "politics" which rules the activity of the civil community.[452] He writes elsewhere that the good of man as man, which consists in the knowledge of truth and the regulation of the lower appetites, is distinct from the good of man as citizen, which consists in social intercourse; that the virtue that makes a good man is distinct from the virtue that makes a good citizen.[453] Thus the community has its rights over the man, and its place on the road by which he moves towards God (and there we have the part given over to Caesar, although for God's sake); yet it must never become totalitarian, never wholly absorb the man, in whom is an irreducible greatness, mysterious and referable immediately to God, on which the civil community has no right to lay hands (and there we have God's exclusive part): and it is inasmuch as it protects the mystery of the independence of the human person that private property too becomes inviolable. "The man," says St. Thomas, "is not ordained to the political community according to all that he is or has. . . . But all that man is, all that he does, all that he has, ought to be referred to God."[454] Without even quitting the plane of philosophy it thus becomes evident that the civil community is of itself unfitted to rule the entire being of the men it brings together; it rules only their life as citizens and the inner reserves of their nature lie beyond its grasp. It is precisely in virtue of this part of themselves, the part that remains inaccessible to the civil community and by which they are capable of God by grace, [455] that men are called to enter into a higher community.

The same men, composed of soul and body, whom the State, on account of their natural capacities, claims for civil life, are claimed by the Church, on account of a more inward obediential capacity, for the life of the heavenly city, the life "of this Jerusalem, whose Prince is God, whose citizens are the angels and all the saints whether reigning in glory in their fatherland or still pilgrims on earth, according to the word of the Apostle [Eph. ii. 19]: "You are fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God."[456] It is a supernatural city which Christ has begun to gather up around Himself and incorporate into His own Body, a visible extension of His being, of which He remains today the Head though He is ascended into Heaven and cannot corporeally touch our miseries (save under the eucharistic veils). He now continues by way of the sacramental power (made visible by the sacraments that confer it) [457] to endow it with the life of grace and the infused virtues: "for, that man should be a member of this City his nature does not suffice, it needs to be elevated by God's grace; and it is clear that the virtues that are in man inasmuch as he is a member of that City, cannot be acquired by his natural powers. Wherefore they are not caused in us by our own acts but infused into us by the divine gift."[458] And He continues by the jurisdictional power (also made visible by reason of the designation that confers it) to dispense the truth that nourishes its contemplation and directs its action. Of the two forms of the jurisdictional power it is the second, the canonical, that most often comes in contact with the political power. It takes the necessary regular disciplinary measures concerning matters of a spiritual nature (whether wholly so, and these are the most numerous, or only partially so—"mixed" matters, such as the effects of marriage, education, etc.); and it takes accidental disciplinary measures concerning matters essentially civil but becoming spiritual hic et nunc, as touching the altar. The Church intervenes here to defend spiritual goods in the strict measure demanded by this defence; she herself takes the concrete initiative of the materially political (but formally spiritual) act; and her intervention may be effected by "civic Catholic action"—this is properly Catholic action and not political action, since its object is to defend, for the sake of the spiritual, values that are proper to the city of God, though involved in the temporal order.[459] Thus the same men are drawn into the orbit of two great visible communities, of two societies, each being perfect and supreme in its sphere, whose specific ends, jurisdictional powers, and formal bonds, are profoundly distinct. The Pope alone could be an exception; but if, with a view to safe-guarding the free exercise of his spiritual power, he voluntarily assumes the charge of a political principality, as in fact he did for a long period, the line of partition between the spiritual and the temporal will run through his own heart.

How do these great communities confront each other within the soul of a man? Are they contraries, and is it the law of each to devour the other and assimilate it? There are some who are so persuaded. Those of them who recognize the divine greatness of the Church, would endow her with a mission to absorb the State.[460] Others, much more numerous, want the State to swallow up the Church: it is to this that totalitarianism, whether it flatters or persecutes the Church, whether it be pagan, or atheist, communist, racist or statist, tends of its nature. A third reaction, anarchist this time, would consist in proclaiming the radical illegitimacy of every social hierarchy, divine or human, and in involving the human person in an unbridled revolt.[461] All these solutions do violence to the human being and hurry him on to catastrophe. It is enough to respect the depth of the mystery in man to understand that he has to move towards God in two different ways. By reason of his natural powers, actualized by his acquired virtues, he will move towards his connatural ends, and will therefore enter into civil communities. By reason of the obediential potency of his spirit, actualized by grace and the infused virtues, he will acquire wings on which he may rise to the city of the angels, of Christ, and of the divine Persons. He will walk and fly at one and the same time; and in this there will be no incompatibility. Indeed, he will walk the more surely on the earth when his love draws him towards heaven, and be the better citizen when fully Christian; it will be the mission of the Church to Christianize civil life. The earthly city and the heavenly city, the State and the Church, divide man's inward life between them. The law of an essential duality, from which he will only escape by death, divides his being in this world. The division is grievous, no doubt, but in itself salutary. It does not aim at vainly tearing man apart and producing sterile and unending conflicts. It is meant to bring the various powers of his soul by different routes to the same God. It was always present, but it only came to light on the day when the Saviour uttered, as it were in passing, the famous words: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Matt. xxii. 21): words which sanctioned the just rights of Caesar while creating the rights of the Church, and which were to overturn the age-long totalitarianism of the pagan world. St. Augustine drew attention to it forcibly.[462] It is a homicidal folly and an offence to the Gospel to want to change the distinction between Church and State into opposition. The conflicts that have arisen between them in the course of history are accidental, not of the true essence of either.

Church and State meet on the same territories. How define the dominium of each?

Man's dominion over external things—a feeble reflection of the divine dominion over the being and the activity of all creation—is the power, flowing from his intelligence and his will, of using them for his own ends, as if they had been made for him.[463]

It can take two forms. First there is the dominion inherent in the human person, the use of external things which each individual person has the right to make for his own ends. There we have personal property, the dominium humile. Then there is the dominion of the civil power, the use of external things which the civil power has the right to make for the common good. There we have the high dominion, the dominium altum. It is not meant to supplant personal property but to make it more secure, more fruitful, better distributed and better regulated. And if the State may itself become proprietor of certain domains and non-movables, of certain industries and public services, this is only the more efficiently to favour the autonomy and personal property of its subjects.

What dominion does the Church claim over these external things? Exactly that which is needful for the complete fulfilment of her spiritual mission.

First of all, to safeguard the free exercise of his sovereign spiritual jurisdiction, the Pope will have the canonical right—subject of course to all the claims of justice—to a civil principate, whereby he will possess, to the exclusion of all other political power, the dominium altum over a portion of territory, to be administered by him as by any other temporal prince. It is clear that this principate, standing alongside other temporal principates to guarantee the independence of the pontifical power, will not of its nature tend to supplant these others; any more than the movable or immovable property of the State will tend of its nature to supplant other personal properties.

Save only for this temporal principate, which does not enter into her structure but is annexed to it from without, the Church as such cannot without usurpation claim dominium altum over any territory. It is not her business, but that of political governments, to look to the security, regulation and development of personal property. In this sense she ought to refuse, as Jesus did, the kingdoms of this world and their glory. A territory, a kingdom, may be added to her from without, but she remains intrinsically and of her very nature a non-territorial society, a society without a fatherland. She must neither retreat into some determinate region as into an entrenched camp, nor extend the frontiers of the pontifical state to those of her mission to all mankind. Even in the Middle Ages that was never her ideal; [464] and if the canonical power then penetrated deeply into political life, this was not, as we shall see, in virtue of any essential and permanent claim of the Church, but of a particular conception of Christian political order. This conception was legitimate, I hold, for the epoch in question, but is not bound up with the life of the Church.

If the Church is essentially non-territorial she must needs have her being in the territories of others. In this sense she will dwell on the earth as a stranger. Like the God who lies hid in the Host, she too, a supernatural person of whom the world is not worthy, will ask only of States, in order that she may live with them, this dominium humile, this right of personal property, which they cannot abolish without injustice. But this right will then be doubly inviolable: first, as personal property, so that they cannot despoil her of it without tyranny, without overturning the equity they exist to defend; and again as religious property, so that they cannot take it away without sacrilege and outrage on religion.[465] Thus the Church, though she is greater than the states, is yet subject to them in one respect. She is bound to obey their just laws. The theologians have recognized this, [466] and Cajetan gives it precise point in a celebrated text.[467] She will be more or less at their mercy, and they will find it easy to despoil her, to rob her of the means of subsistence, to stifle her; it has in fact been her fate to be constantly dispossessed and as often rehabilitated. But clearly, they cannot behave in this way without calling in question the rights on which they themselves are based. Here again, these conflicts between Church and State remain accidental; only by a violation of the nature of things could they be made essential.

In coming to divinize the inmost depths of a man, to make him a citizen of heaven, a member of Christ, a living temple for the divine Persons, grace and the infused virtues make their influence felt throughout the whole range of his temporal activity, and speed his progress towards his political and properly human ends. The plane of spiritual activity remains clearly distinct from the plane of temporal activity, even when this is directed and penetrated by the spirit of the Gospel. To the first plane belongs the work of the infused virtues and the things of the interior life looking directly to God. To the second belong the work of the acquired virtues and the things of the cultural life, notably those of political life which are directly Caesar's concern, but for God's sake. "Let every soul be subject to higher powers. For there is no power but from God. . . Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. . . Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake,": so writes St. Paul (Rom. xiii. 1-5), who here gives us the full meaning of the Reddite Caesari. The planes of the spiritual and of the temporal are in themselves different, but they cannot be separated. "One is subordinate to the other; the temporal as such needs to be vivified by the spiritual; the common good of civilization demands of itself to be referred to the common good of life eternal, which is God Himself. On the one plane as on the other, my work will only be well done if I have, in regard to the object in view, the necessary competence and the needed instruments: but even when I act as a citizen of another city than the Church of Christ, the Christian life and truth should permeate my activity from within, should be the living soul and direction of all the material, whether of knowledge or means of realisation, that I bring into play; and this whatever be the object of my work, whether it is, as in planting a vine or building a house, one which belongs in itself to a technique independent of the Christian faith, or, as in things of the social and political sphere, one where, however large the part played by technical elements, the ethical order predominates, and hence one that intrinsically depends on the higher principles assigned by Christian faith and the Christian wisdom that comes from above."[468]

We need not fear to push the debate too far. The general question of the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual, of the profane to the sacred, is evidently wider than the more particular question of the jurisdictional relations of Church and State. It is the whole field of temporal life that is due to fall under the attraction of the whole field of spiritual life. But, as we have just seen, the activities of the temporal life can be disposed into two groups.

In the first we shall put all those activities which, in themselves, do not directly involve ethical and contemplative values: gardening, cooking, building canals and aeroplanes, studying algebra and the sciences—in the sense in which science is opposed to wisdom [469]—and so forth. It is not by reason of their content but solely on account of their existence in a human subject redeemed by the blood of the cross and bound to direct all his acts to eternal life, that these temporal activities are touched by the breath of the spirit.[470]

In the second group we shall put activities which, over and above all technical and scientific values, bring into play of themselves the highest of human values, the values of ethics and wisdom. Such are social, political and philosophical activities. It is not simply on account of their existence in a subject wayfaring towards eternity, but also by reason of their very content, of their specific object, that these activities should receive influence and regulation from the spiritual order. And what will be the effect of this influence and regulation? First, it will tend to heal, to rectify the deviations that are bound to occur in human temporal activity, since it comes from creatures fallible in their own nature and wounded by their revolt against grace, so that they pursue the good and the true with diminished powers, even when this good and true are, in themselves, proportioned to their nature, connatural.[471] Innumerable errors, philosophical, moral, economic, political, cultural—concerning the place of the human person in the universe, how he is to attain his last end, his multiple social relations, the use to be made of worldly goods—are brought to light and corrected by the healing function of revealed truth and divine grace. That is not all. The influence of the spiritual not only rectifies the defects of natural activities; it permeates them through and through and gives them tone, infuses them with new sap, and this without in any way removing them from their own plane and their proper laws; even in their own specific sphere—that of philosophical research, economic and political organization, artistic invention—it operates to sublimate them, [472] to give them a new splendour which is the proper effect of Christianity; so that we can indeed have a Christian philosophy, a Christian economics and politics, a Christian art, and, more generally, a Christian culture—Christian, that is, in its inner inspiration, and in the way in which it faces the problems of life in time. In thus impregnating with its influence the activities which flow from the acquired virtues and which are specified by ends that are immediately cultural, Christianity communicates its own impetus, so that they march with a surer, quicker, lighter step towards their own cultural ends; one can say of them what the Vulgate says of those who hope in the Lord: "they shall take wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint" (Isa. xl. 31).

Should we attribute these spiritual influences which orientate temporal things to a last end, rectify and invigorate them, to the temporal or to the spiritual order, to the Kingdom of God, or to the world of culture?

Formally considered they belong to the Kingdom of God. They affect the world of culture, the philosophic, economic, social, political and artistic life of a people, but they do so as an analogical cause which remains transcendent to its effects. The ray of grace and truth which falls on a culture and operates to heal its wounds and sublimate it, belongs indeed to the Kingdom of God. It is as it were an overflow from that Kingdom, tending to rectify and inspire the stuff and environment of a world in which other influences also—those of man, those of the devil—play their part. So that a culture, a civilization, even Christian, can be said to belong to the Kingdom of God not properly but only in a certain respect, only to the extent to which it receives the rectifications and illuminations we have mentioned.

So then, while the spiritual influences affecting a culture belong formally, and in themselves, to the Kingdom of God, the cultural work itself on which these influences fall is, properly speaking, exterior to the Kingdom.[473] It belongs to the temporal sphere. It derives immediately from human energies and resources, from acquired virtues and habits, which may be aided and vivified by the spiritual but function here as temporal agents and for temporal ends.

The temporal should subordinate itself, as I have said, to the spiritual, not to abdicate, not to renounce its own nature, not to allow itself to be absorbed; but, on the contrary, to save its true temporal nature, so that, thanks to the purifying and elevating influence of the spiritual, it may tend of itself to its own better temporal development; as the flora and fauna of a country feel the benefit of a favourable climate without in any way being withdrawn from the laws of vegetative and sensitive life. From the standpoint of efficient causality we might say that spiritual energy acts on the temporal, as a principal cause of higher rank acts on lower principal causes; it penetrates and elevates them. From the standpoint of final causality we might say that the temporal is ordered to the spiritual as an intermediate end might be, which, while having its own native dignity, is nevertheless referred to a higher and ampler end. This, for example, in animals the vegetative functions (respiration, nutrition, reproduction) are modified and elevated by contact with sensitive life—their primary value lies in themselves, but they are besides referred to sense experience, which is something of a higher order. The subordination of the lower efficient cause to the higher, of the intermediate or infravalent end to the higher and supravalent, being essential and intrinsic, we can speak of an essential and intrinsic subordination of the temporal to the spiritual. Thus subordination is of such a nature that the sources of temporal activity in no way lose their character as principal causes (lower), so as to be changed into mere instruments of the spiritual; and that the ends of temporal activity in no way lose their character as ends (intermediate, infravalent), so as to become mere means to the spiritual. The distinction, subtle perhaps, but capital, between a lower principal cause and a mere instrument, and the corresponding distinction between an intermediate end and a pure means, should never here be lost sight of; the lower principal cause acts by virtue of its form, of its nature, the motion it receives being only the condition of its activity; whereas the pure instrument does not act of itself at all, the motion it receives being the total cause of its activity. Similarly, the intermediate end is, absolutely speaking, an end, something desirable for its own sake; it is only in a certain sense that it is a means, something desirable for the sake of something else; whereas the pure means is desirable solely for the sake of something else.[474]

In certain circumstances, of course, temporal activities can be treated as strict instruments of the spiritual; the acquired habits and virtues can function, with spiritual good in view, as pure instruments of the infused habits and virtues, and cultural values can be regarded as pure means to the spiritual. But when that happens the temporal is shorn of its own laws and ends, becomes itself spiritual so as to be incorporated in the spiritual, converted into the spiritual, absorbed into the spiritual; natural resources, acquired virtues and dispositions, things in themselves temporal or cultural—such as churches, religious houses, benefices, treasures of art, the languages needed for worship or for preaching, the liturgical chant—all these, on account of the direct use of them made by the Church and the immediate purposes to which they are referred, at once become spiritual.

Thus we admit that the acquired virtues and dispositions, psychological resources, and temporal values in general, can be elevated by the spiritual in two typically different ways. First—while they are still functioning as principal second causes, according to their own laws and within their own sphere, but under the rectifying and illumining influence of the spiritual order and of the Gospel virtues. We shall then have a Christian philosophy, a Christian economy, a Christian sociology, a Christian politics, a Christian art, in short, a culture that is Christian but distinct from the Church and from the Kingdom of God: Christian culture then being the domain of human and temporal life restored and inspired by the Gospel, and the Church being the Kingdom of life divine and eternal. Second, temporal activities and values can function as pure instruments of the spiritual: they will then have been taken up out of their own plane to be reintegrated and reabsorbed into the Kingdom of God.

Spiritual influences acting on the temporal for the good of the temporal, to orientate, inspire and sublimate it, are subject to two phases which ought to be carefully distinguished.

In the first place, such influences operate by way of men, clerics or laymen (the latter being bearers of Catholic action, one of whose ends is to Christianize the temporal human order) who work in the name of the Church and engage her responsibility; they are acting in their capacity as Christians, as such, as members of Christ and citizens of the Kingdom of God, to safeguard certain primordial and permanent temporal values, the radiant centres of cultural life. The presence of these values appears to be morally necessary to the normal exercise of the spiritual life itself, in the general run of men. Thus, in the doctrinal order, the Church takes up on its own account the defence of certain fundamental truths concerning the nature, life and destiny of man, concerning social justice, the civic conscience, the rights and duties of political society, the origin of authority, the unity of the human race and the solidarity of all men. These truths are in substance temporal—they are spiritual only for the radiance they receive from Christianity, for the Christian light [475] that confirms and illuminates them; and they represent a frame of reference, the touchstone, if you will, by whose aid we may appreciate and judge the broad tendencies of the world of philosophy, art, and the moral, social and political sciences. Thus again, but now in the practical order, the Church takes up on her own account the defence of certain virtues indispensable in the work of civilisation, virtues such as humanity, friendship, loyalty, fidelity, justice, clemency, generosity; more generally and more profoundly, she strives to foster an attitude of soul, a spirit, in which all cultural problems should be taken up, an attitude, a spirit, which flows from and finds its highest instance in divine charity, and is capable of marvellously purifying and elevating the civilizing virtues. Here then is the first way, the first phase, we have to deal with: the spiritual ray that lights up the temporal here remains pure, undivided, unalloyed.[476]

Taken at this first stage, the influence of the spiritual is capable of preparing the Christianization of a culture; it may favour a Christian style in politics, economics, philosophy and art, impregnating these with Christian principles and a Christian spirit. But it is essentially incapable of setting a society on foot, of giving existence to a cultural whole and bringing it to a successful issue. The construction of a temporal society, the building up of a civilization, demands activities and means that are properly human. But the men who set about these temporal tasks, if Christian, if regenerated by grace, will work as Christians, with a Christian conscience and without even provisionally setting God and Christ aside.[477] Then appears the second stage, the second phase of the penetration of the spiritual into the temporal. It is brought about by Christians dedicated to the maintenance and progress of culture, living in the midst of the complexities of technical life, who therefore cannot pretend to engage the authority of the Church; for this transcends all the divergencies, oppositions, and legitimate conflicts between civilizations. The spiritual radiance that here falls on the temporal is the more divided and refracted the more it penetrates the temporal shadows; it demands to be associated with a multiplicity of ephemeral manifestations of cultural life so as to be embodied in them and by them; with the various types of political regime, the various efforts at economic amelioration, the various branches of work and technique, the various styles of art, the various vocations of peoples and races. Its destiny is to be broken up so as to enter into partnership with every honest attempt at cultural improvement, even when these attempts are in opposition to each other.[478]

Here then are the essential exigencies of the Church anxious to accomplish her double task, namely to safeguard her own existence, and to Christianize civil life, to defend the spiritual and to enlighten and inspire the temporal.

These exigencies, thus defined, will not of themselves suffice to account for the form taken in the Middle Ages by the intervention of the ecclesiastical authority in political matters. It aimed at fashioning a determinate type of Christendom, a "sacral, "or "consecrational" Christendom. This form of intervention, which is not bound up with the essence of the Church, was justified in its main lines by conditions which we look upon today as having passed away for ever.

If we reduce the problem of the relations of the Church with the State and, more generally, with human culture, to its essential elements and permanent features, it seems that we have to recognize two facts, both incontestable, but in union a seeming paradox.

First, the Church is so profoundly differentiated from the State, and her divine ends so completely transcend all merely cultural ends, that the law ruling their relations can be but a law of distinction; of themselves Church and State are not in competition and should not conflict.[479] And further, from the fact that all human activities without exception, each in its own way, should help to bring about our return to God, the Last End of the whole universe, it is clear that the activities whose proximate end lies in terrestrial and temporal goods, have to be ordered, rectified, enlightened and sustained by the activities whose immediate end lies in heavenly and eternal goods; so that the spiritual, far from smothering the temporal and impeding its development, will alone be capable of bringing it to its full completeness; not indeed giving it existence, "instituere ut sit", [480] but giving it a purified and sublimated Christian existence, "instituere ut sit perfecte et christiane. "There we have a received doctrine already found in Augustine [481] and in the Apologists of the preceding centuries; the Popes of our own day have not ceased to recall it. It opens the Encyclical Immortale Dei on the Christian constitution of states: "The Catholic Church, that imperishable handiwork of our all-merciful God, has for her immediate and natural purpose the saving of souls and securing of our happiness in heaven. Yet in regard to things temporal she is the source of benefits as manifold and great as if the chief end of her existence were to ensure the prosperity of our earthly life. "It is found again in the Encyclical Ubi Arcano, of the 23rd December 1922, in which Pius XI writes that the Church "far from diminishing the power of temporal societies, each legitimate in its place, happily perfects it as grace perfects nature", and that "if, in virtue of her divine mission, she looks only to spiritual and imperishable goods, yet by reason of the harmonious interconnection of all things, her action contributes even to the earthly happiness of each man and of human society as effectively as if she had been established expressly to promote it. "In the measure in which it departs from Christianity the movement of history gets out of control, the higher cultural values take second place, might gains upon right, the spirit of hatred supplants the spirit of concord; respect for the human person, the rights of other classes, of other peoples, of other races are despised; the sanctity of treaties and of agreements is trampled under foot.[482]

But if the law of the relations of the Church with the State, of the spiritual life with the cultural life, is a law of concord, we are bound to note and admit that in point of fact such concord is a very rare achievement, an equilibrium attainable only with effort, a prize to be won in daily battle. Hostile forces, veiled or open, work unceasingly against it. They are at work, not indeed in the Church as such, since she is holy and unstained, but in those of her children who easily yield to the solicitations of nature, become victims of error, passion, and sin; they are still more busily at work in social or political movements, in cultural tendencies, in the very heart of those states that take their stand on the cult of riches, the pride of life, and all the other ideologies that thrust aside and despise the holiness of the Gospel. The revelation of St. Paul on the divine origin of the political power, and its fundamental harmony with Christianity, is completed by the terrible revelation of St. John on the diabolical use of the political power as exploited by the Dragon against the Church, [483] and on the mortal warfare that goes on till the end of the world between the Woman and the Beast.

It is not the diabolic powers alone, nor the forces of concupiscence alone, that seek to set the Church against the world, grace against nature; there is something else, more subtle. Even to angelic natures, exempt from all passion and disorder, divine grace could seem to come as something alien, so that they could be startled and taken aback when it was proffered and sin made possible for them.[484] It is not surprising therefore that the Church, which is the kingdom of grace, should feel in some sense an exile among human societies: that she should disconcert them by the splendour of her revelation, and frighten them as soon as she tries to spread her wings. "The neighbourhood of Eternity is dangerous for the perishable, and that of the Universal for the particular."[485] There is a reason for this mystery: the law of duality and accord, which rules the relations of Church and State, of the spiritual kingdom and the cultural world, is valid only while the Church is in time, still a kingdom in chrysalis, a crucified kingdom, and the law of her activity is but a law of sanctification. When she has passed the frontiers of eternity to enter, as St. Augustine says, the higher City, "the age in which all principality and power shall vanish", when she has become a kingdom fulfilled, a kingdom of glory, when the law of her activity has changed into a law of transfiguration, then there will be no more distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, because there will no longer be our time, nor our historical movement, nor our culture and cultural progress; the law of duality will be dissipated in the splendour of the heavenly City, and the final kingdom, fully delivered, will absorb into itself the new heaven and the new earth, and all that is other than hell.

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Under the influence of the kingdom of grace, that is to say, in a Christian climate, we can envisage the flowering of two general types of political regime.[486]

Those of the first type—which are not to be dreamed of save in a region populated exclusively or mainly by Christians, indeed by visible members of the Church of Christ—seek to form a political unity of Christians alone, or visible members of the Church alone; granting civic rights to no others.

Those of the second type would try to weld into a political unity all the inhabitants of a region, granting citizenship to all no matter what their religion, but directing them to temporal and political ends which Christianity would regard as legitimate and would not disavow.

In the first case, Christian values permeate the whole political order; the notion of Christianity, of visible membership of the Church, enters into the very definition of the citizen. That is the Christian consecrational conception of the temporal regime. In the second case, Christian values affect the political order from without, to sustain, enlighten and sublimate it; the notion of Christianity, of visible membership of the Church, remains outside the definition of the citizen; it designates only a perfect way of being a citizen, distinguishing a spiritual family of citizens. That is the Christian secular conception of the temporal regime.

We may use the word "Christendom" in a limited and recent sense, [487] not directly of the Church nor yet of her successive stages of development and internal organization, but directly of a certain temporal regime of peoples who welcome her, a certain cultural complex which she maintains and inspires, a Christian civilization, a Christian world.[488] In this sense there are two possible realizations—not univocal, but proportional and analogical—of the idea of Christendom, two specifically distinct types of Christendom: the consecrational and the secular.

1. The legitimacy, indeed the necessity, of a secular Christian temporal organization, of a Christendom of the secular type, stands clear when we consider the position of a political power which, while fully resolved to build a Christian political order, finds itself obliged to unite on the plane of civic life, citizens of a single region but varying religious belief. The principle is incontestable that, since faith is something interior, no one is to be constrained to it.[489] The political power we have in mind cannot allow the consciences of any of its subjects to be forced, and cannot but take cognisance of the multiplicity of the spiritual families to which they belong; it will practise "civil tolerance". Its whole function, its whole effort, will be to unite these people as citizens and on the temporal plane, following political rules of Christian inspiration, both as regards means and ends.[490]

There will be no question of falling into "dogmatic tolerance", which regards all forms of belief or unbelief as equally acceptable, or of seeking some doctrinal minimum common to all the citizens, believing or unbelieving; the sole problem will be how to go to work practically for the realization of a common temporal regime. Undoubtedly the Christian political effort "comprehended in the fullness and perfection of the truths which it implies, takes in all Christianity; yes, the whole of Christian ethics and dogmatics: it is only through the mystery of the redeeming Incarnation that a Christian sees the proper dignity of human personality, and what it costs. The idea which he has of it stretches out indefinitely, and only attains the absolute fullness of its significance in Christ. "But by the very fact that it is "secular and not sacred, this common task does not in the least demand in its beginnings a profession of faith in the whole of Christianity from each man. On the contrary, it includes in its characteristic features a pluralism which makes possible the convivium of Christians and non-Christians in one temporal city. Hence, if by the very fact that it is a Christian work it supposes by hypothesis that those who take the initiative will be Christians, with a full and total comprehension of the end to be attained, yet it calls to work all men of goodwill, all those whom a grasp more or less partial and defective—very defective it may be—of the truths which the Gospel makes known in their plenitude, disposes to give their practical help (which may not be the least devoted or the least generous) in the achievement of their common task. It is here that the text has its fullest force and application: he that is not against you is for you" (Mark ix. 39).[491] It would be to misapply it to behave "usually without admitting it to oneself, as if the political city could not be usefully served except by Catholics."[492]

How, from a Catholic standpoint, can a fraternal accord and partnership on the spiritual plane, between believers of different denominations, be brought about? How could such a partnership be made to result normally in co-operation on the plane of temporal and secular life? These delicate questions were treated by Maritain in a conference at the fourth World Congress of Faiths.[493] On the religious and spiritual plane, the basis of this partnership "is not in the order of intellect and ideas, but of that of the heart and of love: it lies in friendship, natural friendship, but first and before all in mutual dilection in God and for God. . . Love is not given to essences, or to qualities, nor yet to ideas, but to persons, and what we are concerned with here is the mystery of persons and the divine presence within them. The partnership in question is not a partnership of beliefs, but a partnership of men who believe. . . In the fraternal dialogue envisaged there is a sort of forgiveness, of remission, not bearing on ideas—they deserve none if they are false—but on the state of those who go along with us. Every believer knows that all men will be judged, himself along with the others; and that neither he nor the other is God, and able to judge the other. And what either is in the eyes of God neither knows. Here the Gospel's Nolite judicare applies in all its force. "Of this friendship of charity" it will be false to say that it is supra-dogmatic and that it lives in spite of the dogmas of the faith; such a way of speaking is inadmissible for all to whom God's word is as absolute as His unity and His transcendence. "But it is supra-subjective in this sense, that it brings recognition that the other man exists not as mere accident of the empirical world, but exists in the sight of God and has a right to exist. Love and charity, while still holding to the faith, help us to recognize all the truth and dignity, all the divine and human values, in beliefs that are other than our own; it makes us respect them, it urges us unceasingly to seek in them all that bears the stamp of man's original greatness and God's loving-kindness and generosity." That amounts to saying that "it inevitably involves a kind of tearing apart of a heart fixed on the truth it loves, and fixed also on the neighbour who ignores or misappreciates this truth." That is all we can do on the religious plane. From the Catholic standpoint there can be no other rapprochement than that of charity. We cannot "enter any sort of communion less intangible, more determinate, more visible, expressed in some common intellectual symbol or sacred form. But, on the plane of temporal and secular life, this rapprochement ought to be expressed in common activities, should be signified in some more or less strict co-operation having concrete and determinate objects in view—whether there is question of the common good of the political society to which each of us respectively belongs, or of the common good of the whole of our temporal civilization. A common activity supposes common principles. What community of doctrine in men whose religious convictions are different, will be capable of holding them together in positive co-operation for the good of civilization?"

For answer let us recall (1) that men are fundamentally united as having a common nature; (2) that the immediate end to be practically achieved is in the natural order. That granted, we can go on to say that "the unity of the earthly task and the temporal end pursued necessarily suppose a certain community of principles and of doctrine, but not necessarily—however desirable, however evidently better and more effective it may be in itself—a strict and pure and simple doctrinal identity: it suffices that the principles and doctrines should have a unity of likeness or proportion, let us say in the technical sense of the word, of analogy, regard being had to the practical end in question, which, although referable to a higher end, is of itself in the natural order, and is doubtless conceived by each party in the light of the principles proper to each, but in its existential reality is extraposed to these conceptions. "We know of course when we speak in this way that a complete doctrine, founded on Catholic teaching, can alone bring an entirely true solution of the problems of civilization." Thus the law of fraternal love, "which either party understands with different theological and metaphysical connotations, and which for Christians striving to fulfil a radical—but terribly contradicted—tendency of our nature is the second commandment like unto the first", implies at least the practical and implicit recognition of high spiritual values, such as the existence of God, the sanctity of truth, the value and necessity of goodwill, the dignity of the person, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, no matter what theoretical doctrines may be explicitly professed on these points. In this way, men with different religious convictions can collaborate not only, as is evident, "in establishing a technique, in putting out a fire, in helping the hungry and sick, in stopping an aggression. But it is possible—if the analogical likeness between their principles of action just mentioned really exists—that they should co-operate at least and above all in procuring the primary goods of earthly existence, in activities that bear on the good of the temporal city and civilization and the moral values invested in them. ""They will work together for the good of the human city not under cover of any mere equivocation, but in the community of the analogy between principles, movements and practical proceedings implied by the common recognition of the law of love, and corresponding to the primary inclinations of human nature. And why should I conceal the fact that for me, a Christian, according to whose faith one only Name has been given to men whereby they can be saved, that even in the temporal order this community of analogy supposes a first analogue which is purely and simply true? and that implicitly it is to Christ, known to some, unknown to others, that there tends in the end, under more or less pure, more or less perfect forms, all authentic love that works in this world for the reconciliation of men and for the common good of their earthly life?"

It goes without saying that under a secular as under a consecrational regime the earthly city, as such, has its duties to God, that it ought to show itself deeply religious and Christian, that it should effectively collaborate with the Church.[494] But to fulfil these duties it will neither have to constrain men to some sort of confessional conformity, nor to set up any interconfessional cult. Its Christianity will be shown in the elevation of its temporal ends, the purity of its chosen political means, its public acknowledgement of those Christian values on which all the sanctity of the temporal order depends, and the unfailing respect in which it holds the rights of the Church. It is even conceivable, in a secular regime, that the canonical power might have recourse to the secular arm; not, of course, under its medieval form and as touching all the citizens, but those only who belong to the Church.[495]

2. There is a second and more general justification, based on the nature of things, for the existence of a Christian temporal order of the secular type. If the spiritual and temporal spheres are essentially distinct, and if the second is, in itself, subordinate to the first, it is easy to foresee that in the organization of their relations two great successive periods, two historical epochs, will be distinguishable.

The first of these will begin at the moment when the supremacy of the spiritual order is publicly recognized. Then, on account of the extraordinary power of attraction inherent in spiritual values, they will inevitably begin to envelop, enwrap, and embrace all values of the temporal order, so that these latter will seem in a way to be based on them, or, more exactly, withdrawn behind them, hidden in them, renouncing all ambition for the time being to assert their difference and emphasise their originality.

The second legitimate period—(leaving on one side the question, whether in practice it can follow the first without dislocations and dangers)—will begin at the moment when temporal values, though still fully recognized as essentially and intrinsically subordinate to spiritual, begin to be seen with a clearer consciousness of their own specific nature and role; as such they will be distinguished from spiritual realities, not in the least to be withdrawn from their influence, but, on the contrary, to achieve a dependence that is to be more conscious of itself, and more conformable to the respective natures of either. For the Church too will profit by this differentiation. It will allow her to appear all the more clearly to the world as the Body of Christ, as the Kingdom not of this world, but capable nevertheless of illuminating all the kingdoms of this world with the light of heaven.

To the first epoch corresponds the organization of a Christendom of the consecrational type. To the second corresponds the organization of a Christendom of the secular type. And if the differentiation of which I have spoken represents a normal historical process, a genuine progress, it will be recognized by the understanding and wisdom of the Church as a good and desirable solution of the question of her relations with temporal powers. "Even supposing that religious divisions should one day come to an end, this more perfect differentiation of the temporal order would remain as a gain achieved—the distinction between dogmatic tolerance, which regards liberty to err as itself a good, and civil tolerance, which insists that the commonwealth should respect the rights of conscience, will remain stamped in the substance of the city."[496]

After the Edict of Constantine the Graeco-Roman world was moving towards a Christendom of the consecrational type. To the reason for this just given we may now add other explanations of the historical order.

Ancient society, as Fustel de Coulanges has convincingly shown, rested on a confusion of the divine and the social, of the religious and the political.[497] Christianity—and in this is its miracle—was powerfully to revive the religious spirit, but by making a profound distinction between the religious and the political, the things of God and those of Caesar. However, this new and unexpected distinction could not at once manifest all its consequences to the Christians who took over from the ancient world; and since it was consistent with two forms of political organization, it was natural that the majority should first have looked to the consecrational form, more nearly allied to the old regime, and have given it the preference.

Did they have any choice in the matter? The Emperors themselves, in the attempt to reconstruct the Empire on the basis of the living forces of Christianity, were the first to consider the Christians as the sole true citizens of the Empire, and so to prepare the advent of a Christendom of the consecrational type. That at least seems to be suggested by Fr. Konstantin Hohenlohe: "The great social reform that was to culminate in the abolition of slavery and the remodeling of the Roman family was only made possible by discouraging the non-Catholics, for Catholics alone were prepared for these profound reforms, they alone had learned to respect the slaves and to lead a healthy family life. . . It was more especially for political reasons that Constantine and his successors insisted with such a heavy hand on maintaining unity of faith in the Roman Empire. It emerges, both from one of Constantine's letters, and from his speech to the Council of Nicaea, that he turned to the Christians because, above all else, he found a social sense amongst them and a spirit of sacrifice hitherto unexampled. In the face of endemic military revolutions, the Church seemed to him to be the sole institution in which any belief in authority and any moral stability remained. Christianity appeared to him and his successors to be the only bond of unity that could prevent the dissolution of the Empire. If they served the unity of the Church, it was because this unity alone could serve their political designs. And that is why every attempt against this unity seemed, at the same time, to be an attempt against the State."[498]

The secular form of Christendom which in the abstract might have been the earliest in date, or even the only one to be realized in the concrete, in point of fact came after the consecrational form. The passage from one form to the other could hardly have been effected without a crisis. The end of a Christendom, if it is neither the end of the Church nor the end of the world, will certainly appear as the end of a world, and the birth of another. The crisis was in fact terrible. Instead of evolving normally towards a secular Christendom, medieval Christendom was ravaged by the wars of religion, by the disastrous error of theological liberalism, by the establishment of a regime of separation between the Church and the State, and lastly by the ideologies of Communism and Racism. It seems that a secular Christendom, however extensive and precious its inheritance from the past, is destined to grow in the midst of ruins. The evil is immeasurable. But thanks to the divine omnipotence it may well, and all unwittingly, lend itself to the ultimate development of the Church. Thus the errors of theological liberalism and of the separation of Church and State, spread now over all the earth, seem today to be preparing the great pre-Christian civilizations of the East, and even certain peoples of the Near East, to reject the confusion of the religious and political orders and to recognize the doctrine of the distinction of the spiritual and temporal spheres.[499]

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To the pagan religion, which in the ancient world was immersed in the social order and identified with the State, there succeeded the Christian. In the measure of its triumph it brought into being an order in which spiritual things, not separated but definitively distinguished from the temporal, were to permeate them with the influence of the Gospel and organize them into a Christendom. The first of these historical Christendoms was of a type not yet concerned to draw out all the consequences of the differentiation of spiritual and temporal: first because such a task was premature, and next because, in view of the prompt religious unification of the peoples of the West and the diminution of conflicting beliefs within the confines of a single culture, it did not seem to be pressing. In this first type, which I have called consecrational, what notions would be formed of Christendom and of Christian civilization? How shall we characterize the medieval city, considered (1) in itself and in its intrinsic nature, and (2) with respect to the authority that ruled it? More precisely, how shall we (3) define the coercive power in general, and how explain the Church's responsibility for the infliction of the death penalty in the days of the Inquisition, and for (4) the wars in the days of the Crusades?

In this study of medieval Christendom it is not my purpose to write its history. Writing primarily as a theologian, I wish to establish two things—(1) the legitimacy and logical structure of this type of Christendom; and (2) its contingent and transitory character: for medieval Christendom with all its inevitable imperfections was not the only possible form of Christendom. It will then be my task to determine the powers that devolved upon the Church precisely on account of this historic type of Christendom; and finally to bring out the transcendence of the canonical power, its inalienable spirituality, and its distinction from the inferior powers that have sometimes accompanied it: which last is the chief purpose of the study as a whole.

We do not need to grasp the nature of medieval society, but only the nature of the Church, to understand what heresy is in itself and at all times. But without grasping the nature of medieval society we should never understand the very special character which heresy took on at this epoch; nor why its social consequences differed profoundly from those of other forms of infidelity, those of the heathen, of the Jew, or the Moslem; nor the nature and forms of its repression in the Middle Ages.

It would be incorrect to describe medieval times as those of a confusion between the spiritual and the temporal. Since Our Lord's decisive utterance about God's things and Caesar's, the two powers, even when united in a single subject, have remained for Christians formally distinct. But their interrelations were characterized in medieval society by the fact that the spiritual order did not confine itself to acting on the temporal as a regulator of political, social and cultural values. It tended besides, in virtue of an historically explicable process, to associate a part of itself with the temporal, to weld that part to the temporal, to become thus united with the temporal, a component element in the structure of society. The idea of "Christian" tended to enter into the definition of "citizen", and the idea of Christianity into the definition of society, not simply as an extrinsic cause and source of inspiration, but as an intrinsic cause and an integrant part. One had in fact to be Christian, a visible member of the Church, in order to be a citizen; society, in virtue of its constitutional principle, was made up of Christians only. Those who did not visibly belong to the Church were from the first dismissed society: the heathen over the frontiers, the Jews into ghettos. Those who, having first been Christians, afterwards broke with the Church, as heretics or schismatics, constituted a much greater danger—they shook the very bases of the new society and appeared as enemies of the public safety.

The medieval society was therefore a composite whole, an amalgam of the spiritual and temporal, in no wise demanded by the nature of things. What is required by the nature of things is the distinction of the spiritual and the temporal, and the subordination of the latter to the former, not their fusion as component parts of society; and another type of Christian society is always conceivable. But owing to various historical contingencies the medieval fusion was the best, perhaps even the only practicable, solution. In the measure in which the peoples of the West were converted to Christianity, they more and more expressly brought the qualification of "Christian "into the definition of citizen, the idea of Christianity into the definition of the society. They had clearly realised that "the divine law that comes of grace does not do away with human law that comes of natural reason", and that," in itself, the distinction between faithful and unbelievers does not do away with the dominion and authority of unbelievers over the faithful".[500] But since the attempt was made in the concrete to establish a society constitutionally containing none but Christians, it was not enough to be a man to enter it; one had besides to be a Christian. According to a distinction suggested by James of Viterbo, in such a city the natural rights of man as man stood for the material and initial value; and a man's quality as a Christian, as a visible member of the Church, became the formal and perfective value.

A second characteristic of the medieval policy, which stems from that just described, and from the involvement of the spiritual in the temporal I have just mentioned, is that the dominant dynamic ideal was then that of force at the service of right, while today the ideal tends to be in the non-totalitarian states at least—that of the conquest of freedom and the realization of human dignity.[501]

I have mentioned the very different position which the Middle Ages reserved for simple unbelievers (pagans, Saracens, Jews) on the one hand, and for heretics on the other.

What, in Christian eyes, was the juridical condition of the Gentiles? What did St. Augustine think about it? What were the views of St. Thomas and his followers? What was the attitude of the Church?

The main lines of traditional thought in this matter are easy to make out. The texts that express it, far from refusing pagans all legal status, went so far even as to allow them (though outside the consecrational order) to exercise authority over Christians.

That is the burden of the distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God, made in the Gospel and explained by the Apostle when he recommends the Christians of Rome to obey the constituted authorities, pagan though they were: "Let every soul be subject to higher powers. For there is no power but from God; and those that are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God" (Rom. xiii. 1-2).

St. Augustine in his turn was often to recall that established authority, even in the hands of pagans, should be regarded as legitimate. He does so for example in his penetrating exposition of the Apostle's words written to undeceive Christians who, on account of their initiation into spiritual liberty, considered themselves free of all obligations towards the temporal city.[502] He does so again in his commentary on Psalm cxxiv where he describes the situation of the Christians under the Emperor Julian: "The faithful soldiers served a faithless Emperor. Was it a question of worshipping idols, of offering them incense? They preferred God to the Emperor. Was it a question of mustering for battle, of marching on the enemy? They obeyed at once. They distinguished their eternal Master from their temporal master, and nevertheless for their eternal Master's sake they obeyed their temporal."[503] And even in the De Civitate Dei, after refusing unbelievers any knowledge of the true republic born of true justice," of which Christ is the Founder and Guardian", he goes on to define the terrestrial republic, people, and city by the pursuit of peace. The peace it pursues, not being the peace of Christ, can hardly be final, but it is not reprehensible either; indeed it is necessary to the City of God during its journey through mortality, and the City of God will not hesitate to obey the laws which guarantee it.[504] It is in these same texts that St. Augustine passes sentence on the pagan world and declares that, not having known true justice," without which great kingdoms are merely great robberies", [505] it could not have known any true city. These severe views (which might be compared with St. John's maledictions against the Beasts of the Apocalypse, symbols of the powers of iniquity) helped in the Middle Ages to give birth to what H. X. Arquilliere calls "political Augustinianism": he characterises this as a "tendency to absorb natural law into supernatural righteousness, the law of the State into that of the Church "and considers it, with reason, as "a simplified and impoverished form of the great Doctor's thought, a remote and unforeseen consequence of certain pages of his works, a posthumous derivative of his teaching, in which he would certainly not have recognized his personal thought in its integrity."[506] However, if the teaching of Augustine was too narrowly interpreted by his successors, the truth he brought to light is clear. It is not a denial to the pagans of all legality, peace and true citizenship: it is the assertion that the temporal city cannot be perfect—that is to say based on true justice and true peace—save in dependence on Christianity. How deny, he asks, that the peace so much longed for by the earthly city is a good? And the earthly city itself is a still better good, by reason of the human race it harbours. But when this peace and good begin to be taken as the sole or supreme ones, then indeed catastrophe is on the way.[507] In other words, the common good of temporal life demands of its own nature to be ordered to the common good of eternal life: and there we have another aspect of the traditional doctrine.

Following St. Augustine, the high Middle Ages did not refuse to accord a legal status to pagans.[508]

Later, this doctrine was not lost sight of. The most authoritative theologians defended it. "The divine law, which is the law of grace," wrote St. Thomas, "does not do away with human law which is the law of natural reason", so that, in itself, the fact that princes are infidels does not prevent them from continuing to reign legitimately even over those of their subjects who may be converted to Christianity.[509] St. Thomas explains a little further on, in virtue of the same principle, that the prince who falls into infidelity or apostasy does not, simply on that account, lose his power over his subjects, who remain bound to obey him: "Unbelief, in itself, is not inconsistent with dominion, since dominion is a device of the law of nations which is a human law; whereas the distinction between believers and unbelievers arises from the divine law, which does not annul human law."[510] A precision, demanded by the passage of time, is introduced here: it is of itself that the infidelity of princes leaves their power over the faithful intact; but the Church reserves the right to take away this power by sentence in certain circumstances—which will be those obtaining in a consecrational regime.

In his commentary on the Secunda Secundae (1511-1517), Cajetan, who is certainly thinking of the Indians of the New World, very strongly insists on the legitimacy of their political status, and on the injustice of making war on them simply because they are pagans: "There may be unbelievers who are not under the temporal jurisdiction of Christian princes, either in right or in fact. For example, the pagans who were never subjects of the Roman Empire, and those who inhabit lands where the Christian name is unknown. The governments of these peoples, albeit unbelieving, are legitimate, whether they be of the royal or democratic form. Their unbelief does not do away with their jurisdiction over their subjects, since the dominium arises from positive law, and infidelity is of the divine law which does not annul human law, as St. Thomas explains (II-II, q. 10, a. 10). No king, no emperor, not even the Roman Church, [511] has any right to make war on the pagans to take possession of their lands or to subject them temporally. No pretext for a just war is here discoverable, since Jesus Christ, the King of kings, to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth, did not send soldiers or armies to conquer the world, but holy preachers, like sheep among wolves. And so, even under the Old Law, though that was the time of armed conquest, I do not see that any war was declared against any people simply because they were infidels. It was declared against peoples who refused passage, or who had first attacked the people of Israel, or who detained what did not belong to them. We should therefore sin grievously if we undertook to spread the faith of Christ by such means. Not only should we not be legitimate masters of the peoples thus conquered, but we should be guilty of great robberies, and we should be bound to make restitution like all those who have unjustly occupied or conquered a country. We must send these peoples, not conquerors who oppress them, scandalise them, enslave them and make them twice the child of hell more than themselves (Matt. xxiii. 15), but holy preachers capable of converting them to God by their word and by their example."[512]

Taking his stand on the authority of St. Thomas and of Cajetan, Francis of Vittoria was to affirm in 1532, in his lectures at Salamanca, that infidelity, in itself, does away neither with public nor private dominion; that Saracens, Jews and other infidels are therefore true proprietors, just as much as Christians, and that to despoil them is simply to be guilty of theft and rapine; [513] that the Barbarians, that is the Indians of the New World, in spite of their infidelity and the many mortal sins they indulge in, are legitimate princes and legitimate proprietors, so that Christians can find no justification in this infidelity and sin for taking possession of their country and stealing their goods.[514] And this was also to be the doctrine of the man who deserved to be called the Father of the Indians, the Dominican, Las Casas. In a treatise published at Seville in January 1553, he protested with the greatest energy, and a typically Spanish violence, against the theoreticians in the pay of the Conquistadores, who pretended that since the Indians were unbelievers their goods and lands passed at once to the Christians: "Those who say that Christ, by coming into the world, has, ipso jure, deprived the infidels of all authority, independence, sovereignty and jurisdiction, are uttering absurdities, contrary to all reason, unworthy of the intelligence of a peasant, scandalous, infamous, unworthy of the name of Christian. They bear false witness against Jesus and dishonour Him. There is no greater obstacle to the preaching of the Gospel. If Christ came to fulfil all justice He could by no means rob men of their natural rights. With this impious and detestable opinion, they make the Church a liar, they are guilty of heresy and sacrilege, and those who maintain it ought to be burnt alive, since it is contrary to Scripture and the doctrine of the Church."[515]

It is therefore clear, according to the doctrine which may be called traditional, that unbelievers, if they were outside Christendom, were not on that account outside the law; and that their juridical status had to be respected by Christians.[516]

1. We need then say no more of pagan princes governing their pagan subjects. But a little further on we shall have to return to the case of the pagan prince whose subjects have become Christian, and still more especially to the case of the Christian prince who turns unbeliever. For, according to St. Thomas, although in such circumstances the prince does not, ipso facto, lose his power, the Church can nevertheless take it away from him by sentence.

It remains to say here that whatever may have been the civil condition of infidels living in Christendom—of pagans, Saracens, Jews and so on—it was never permissible to invade their natural rights.[517] And so St. Thomas, who here appeals to the custom of the Church, forbids the baptism of young children of Jews and other unbelievers without the consent of their parents.[518] This teaching of St. Thomas—rejected by Scotus, who maintains that a prince would act well in ordering the baptism of all his subjects' children, whether Jews or infidels [519]—continued to prevail in the Church. It was sanctioned notably by a Bull of Julius III, dated 8th June 1551, [520] and by Benedict XIV's letter Postremo Mensae of 28th February 1747.[521]

For the same reason, unbelievers, even when they are subjects of Christian princes, are not to be compelled to enter the Church. The Decretum of Gratian (Part I, dist. 45, ch. 3) transcribes a letter addressed to Paschasius, Bishop of Naples, in which Pope St. Gregory forbids the disturbance of Jewish worship: "If with a right intention you would lead non-Christians to the true faith, you must use persuasion and not violence. For minds that might easily be enlightened by your explanations will be estranged by your hostility. All who, under colour of snatching men from false cults, go about it differently, show that they seek their own will rather than God's."[522] In Chapter 5 the Decretum reports the 57th Canon of the fourth national Council of Toledo in 633, concerning the Jews. As for those who had already been compelled to become Christian in the reign of Sisebut, and had received the sacraments, they should remain Christian, and the question of the validity of these extorted conversions should not be reopened. But "for the future, no one is to be constrained to believe. For the Lord hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth (Rom. ix. 18). The Jews are not to be saved in spite of themselves, but freely, so that all justice be safeguarded. Conversions are to be made by consent, not constraint, by persuasion, not force."[523] Towards 1190, Clement III forbade "anyone to compel the Jews to receive Baptism against their will", and towards 1250 Innocent IV reminded the Archbishop of Arles of the same principles: "It is contrary to the Christian religion that any man, without willing it, and in spite of his absolute opposition, should be forced to become and remain a Christian."[524] Shortly afterwards, St. Thomas was writing in the Summa that "as for unbelievers who have never received the faith, such as the heathens and the Jews, they are by no means to be compelled to the faith in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will". When Christians wage war on unbelievers, "it is not for the purpose of forcing them to believe, because even if they were to conquer them and take them prisoners, they should still leave them free to believe if they will; but in order to prevent them from hindering the faith of Christ".[525] Finally, the Council of Trent declared that "the Church never passes judgment on anyone who has not yet come into her by the door of baptism."[526]

2. To sum up: the medieval Church, as such, regarded the natural rights of pagans as inviolable. She did not wish their children to be baptized against their will, nor that they themselves should be compelled to believe.

That applies in the first place to the unbelievers outside the Church who had a proper juridical status recognized by Christians. It cannot be denied that in the course of centuries writers appeared who hoped for the destruction of paganism by fire and sword, and made it a duty for princes to wage war on the pagans and compel them to believe; [527] but it is impossible to maintain that they express the authentic thought of the Church.

It applies also, naturally, to unbelieving ethnic groups, Slavs or Moors, allied with Christian princes, and, on that account, more or less incorporated into Christendom.

But it also applies even to unbelievers deprived of juridical status and reduced to bondage, for example, by a just war. If we grant that even these are not to be constrained to Baptism we shall be led to a solution of the pluralist type—the permission of more than one religion—especially if their numbers are considerable. There will be toleration for their rites and their manner of serving God. That, says St. Thomas, is the practice of the Church.[528] Undoubtedly there were theologians who, in such circumstances, would concede the right of Christian princes to impose the faith on unbelievers. But they did not express the true thought of the Church; and the later theological development, to which Benedict XIV is a witness, followed a different direction. They were careful for the most part to speak with reserve. Francis of Vittoria himself found it difficult to approve the measure by which, in 1502, the Moors of Spain were forced to choose between conversion and exile. Any political chief who forced a religion on his subjects would be stigmatized as a tyrant today by all theologians. And how could Christianity be forced on anyone without opening the door to sacrilege, and, notably, the worst of all, to sacrilege against the Eucharist?[529] It is indeed astonishing that this last consideration which, unfortunately, has nothing chimerical about it, [530] did not prevail in the minds of theologians of the calibre of Scotus and Vittoria.

Religious liberty, which had been taken from the Jews after 135 and restored to them by the Antonines, was in principle respected and guaranteed by the Christian Emperors. But it is clear that from the moment when the Empire was reconstructed on the basis of unity of faith, it could no longer welcome on an equal footing those Jews who, from the beginning, had shown themselves to be fierce adversaries of the Christians, and who intended to preserve their autonomy as a religious and ethnic group. Constantine saw them as people who had to be kept at arm's length. His successors, whose laws were incorporated in the Theodosian Code in the fifth century and in Justinian's in the seventh, while recognizing the Jewish religion as lawful, sought to favour the Christians and to keep them free from contamination by forbidding the Jews to build new synagogues, to marry Christian women, to convert Christians, to have Christian servants in their houses, and so on. It should be remarked that these laws were not in force for very long throughout the whole Empire, which was now beginning to crumble.[531]

The barbarian princes adapted the Roman legislation to their kingdoms with more or less strictness. At intervals, the severity of the laws was equalled or surpassed; thus Dagobert I in France (630) and Sisebut in Spain (612-613) ordered the Jews to receive Baptism under pain of exile. To the extent to which the principle of nationality asserted itself the Jewish dislike of fusion with the indigenous element drew stronger resentments on their heads. Their position in Spain during the century preceding the Arab invasion was very precarious.[532] Then were held those Councils of Toledo so remarkable for their dogmatic definitions on the Trinity and the Incarnation, but of which it has been said, in respect of their practical ordinances, that they were "less Councils than national assemblies of the Spanish monarchy, content to do no more, or little more, than register the decrees of their sovereigns". Gratian records several of their canons in the Decretum, and the severe spirit in which they were couched was to leave its mark on ecclesiastical legislation.[533] Charlemagne was rather less hard on the Jews. But from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth their situation grew worse. Although in certain cities they achieved remarkable prosperity, they were banished successively from England, from France, from a large part of Germany, and then, in 1492, from Spain, where since 1480 the Inquisition, founded by the Catholic kings, functioned chiefly against the Marranos; and finally, in 1496, from Portugal.[534] They emigrated to Italy, Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and later to Holland and England.

As long as they were not converted, the Jews, in medieval Christendom, by reason of their ethnico-religious autonomy, functioned as an alien body embedded in an organism.

From the standpoint of the Christian faith, their religion appeared as a kind of infidelity—less grave than heresy, since it was not a repudiation of the Christian faith.[535] That is the original meaning of the phrase "perfidia judaica".[536] Now the Church, as such, that is to say Christianity, the spiritual kingdom, can cheerfully tolerate sinful members within her, or again, a conflict of theological opinions, or the onerous conditions of a Concordat, and so on; but it is clear that she cannot tolerate infidelity in her own ranks, that her task is to fight it with all the spiritual weapons the Saviour has placed in her hands.

The Church, however, can readily agree that Christian princes, Christendom, the temporal kingdoms, should put a certain pluralism into practice in respect of other religious groups, and tolerate, for example, the exercise of infidel cults. Religious tolerance is then realized and takes effect on the plane of temporal life. Political rulers, the princes of the Christian states, or of the states of the Church, will accordingly admit the Jews to their territory under certain conditions, and will guarantee them the free exercise of their worship; they may act likewise with regard to other non-Christian peoples, Moslem populations for example, whom they may have subjugated in a just war.

In the case of the Jews, says St. Thomas, there is, it is true, a special reason for toleration.[537] For their worship prefigured the Christian faith; they bear witness, in spite of themselves, to its truth; their remnants are to be saved at the end of time. What lies at the bottom of the Jewish question is the mystery of Israel. The Saviour pointed to this mystery when He predicted "the hardening of the hearts of the Jews (Matt. xii, 41; xiii. 12; xxiii. 36), the conversion of the Gentiles in default of the Jews (Matt. xxii. 8; xxiv. 14), and the final conversion of the Jews (Matt. xxiii. 39)."[538] And for the Christians of the Gentile world St. Paul unveils the profound significance of these prophecies (Rom. ix-xi). He reminds them first that the Old Testament prophecies have not been falsified, since they are realized in the spiritual Israel, the Church: "Not as though the word of God hath miscarried, for all are not Israelites that are of Israel" (ix. 6). Then he considers the lot of carnal Israel, the Jewish people. Their rejection is full of mystery and their prerogatives remain astonishing: the offence of the Jews becomes the riches of the world: it hastens the conversion of the Gentiles, and that will one day provoke a salutary jealousy in the Jews. "I say then: have they so stumbled that they should fall? God forbid. But by their offence salvation is come to the Gentiles, [539] that they may be emulous of them. Now if the offence of them be the riches of the world, and the diminution of them the riches of the Gentiles: how much more the fullness of them?" (Rom. xi. 12). They are and always will be, in a way, a people consecrated to God, dedicated to God; and if the nations are in the Church as a wild olive grafted on a good tree, they too will one day be in her as on their own olive tree. "If the root be holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches be broken, and thou, being a wild olive, art engrafted in them, and art made partakers of the root and of the fatness of the olive tree: boast not against the branches. . . If thou wert grafted into the good olive tree, how much more shall they, that are the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?" (16-24). If they continue as a people in spite of their dispersion, it is that they may be one day re-integrated in the Church. "I would not have you ignorant, brethren, of this mystery. . . that blindness in part has happened in Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in. And so all Israel should be saved" (25-26). Then, as their rejection had provoked the reconciliation of the Gentiles, their re-integration will provoke a resurrection of the dead (15). It is therefore clear that they are still the people of God, somewhat as a rebellious son remains a son, and an apostate priest remains a priest, in virtue of an election which, for all their refusal of the Gospel, remains irrevocable: "As concerning the gospel indeed they are enemies for your sake; but as touching the election they are most dear for the sake of the fathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance" (28-29). The nature of the mystery that weighs upon Israel according to the flesh can be glimpsed: it is the mystery of a people chosen for the purpose of inaugurating the Church and refusing the grace of the Church, but whose lot remains bound up with that of the Church. It marks in reverse the theme traced through history by the Church in relief. This people, primarily no doubt in its books, but also in its flesh, is the bearer of prophecies.[540] There was therefore a special reason to tolerate it in medieval Christendom, but this tolerance had to be prudently hedged about. The Jews could exercise their religion, but proselytism was forbidden them, the publicity of their worship was reduced, [541] and the number of their synagogues limited.[542] And when, between 1238 and 1240, the blasphemies of the Talmud against Christ were discovered, the book was ordered to be burnt.[543]

These restrictions on their worship did not, as we have pointed out, touch the natural rights of the Jews. Their children could not be taken from them nor Baptism forced on them. The dilemma of conversion or exile, although it survived a long time in the practice of princes or of certain bishops, was condemned even by one of the national Councils of Toledo.[544] The general teaching of the Church is clear.[545]

But from the civic point of view, the rights of the Jews, like those of other unbelievers, were strictly limited. They were forbidden to exercise any public functions, a prohibition that applied also to Saracens; [546] for how could those who rejected the mystery of Christ be given the direction of a society composed of Christians alone?[547] If the feudal regime hardly allowed them to become great proprietors they could at any rate hold landed property and let it to agricultural workers, who, however, could neither eat nor lodge with them; [548] but neither they nor the Saracens could have Christian slaves in their houses, since their faith would be endangered.[549] A Jew could neither buy nor keep in service any of the baptized, nor any unbeliever asking for Baptism; if he had bought for re-sale any infidel seeking Baptism, he had to turn him over to Christians, subject to due compensation.[550] The Jews were obliged, like the Saracens, to wear clothes that differed from those of the Christians, so as to hinder marriages and other close relations with Christians.[551] They grouped themselves, quite spontaneously to start with, in the same quarter of the town around their synagogue; but later on, in the fifteenth century, and especially in Spain and the Pontifical States, they were forcibly confined to these ghettos.[552]

At the moment when it opted against its Messiah, [553] the messianic people mysteriously and irremediably left the ways marked out for it by Providence. Till the day of its reintegration in the Church dawns, Israel will be a disorientated and frustrated people, and the Jewish problem will find no solution.

Was the mystery of Israel to be stamped on the secular history of this people, and thus to influence also the temporal destinies of the Jews? The ancients thought so.[554] We may take them to task perhaps for looking at it a little too narrowly, for taking very accidental or even very dubious forms of "fulfilment" as the logical upshot of the prophecies. Thus the impossibility of incorporating the Jews in a constitutionally Christian society and the restrictions with which they had to be surrounded in a consecrational regime, seemed to be so many direct consequences of their primary deviation. And further, the state of servitude into which the Jews fell for various reasons after the Crusades [555] was thought to be justified, in so far as it had become a part of the public law, by their initial transgression. Thence it comes that texts of Innocent III and of St. Thomas on the servitude of the Jews [556] may bring together considerations of very unequal value, but following in strict sequence: the carnal Israel has preferred the religion of servitude to the religion of liberty (cf. Gal. iv. 21-30); [557] it has departed from the ways of providence till the day of its re-integration (Rom. xi); it cannot mingle with a consecrational Christendom; the public law at the end of the Middle Ages considers it as in bondage. The origins of this bondage are sometimes sought far back.[558] In reality it had no other foundation than the actual laws of the period.

The theologian is under no obligation to justify all the laws brought to bear on the Jews by provincial Councils or by the Popes, the latter, notably, as princes of the Pontifical States.[559] He is even less bound to take up the defence of all that was done in Christendom against the Jews. Medieval Christendom was an attempt at political organization under the sign of the Christian faith; it was very far from making perfect application of the principles of the Gospel on the plane of social and political life. We must realize however that the Papacy always aimed at keeping the Jewish problem clear of the political or religious passions that obscured it, and at bringing it back to its essentials. The measures the Popes adopted to regulate the activities of the Jews and to limit their influence, were dictated by the need to maintain the basic principle of the political constitution of the West. They belonged to the logic of a consecrational conception of the temporal order which, by definition, granted the quality of citizenship to Christians alone.[560] Doubtless they did not amount to the solution of the Jewish problem. They were but a solution, a political and provisional compromise. "The Middle Ages tried out a consecrational solution, in conformity with the typical structure of the contemporary civilisation. This solution, the solution of the ghetto, based on the fact of a divine chastisement hanging over Israel, and giving the Jews the status of foreigners in the Christian society, was of its nature hard, and in application often iniquitous and ferocious; it proceeded however from a lofty idea. . .; of the religious order, and nowise racial, it recognized the privilege of the soul, and the Jew, when baptized, entered as of right into the full convivium of the Christian society. This medieval solution has passed away to return no more, like the type of civilization from which it Sprang."[561]

Where this medieval solution is concerned, we must make a careful distinction between (1) a modus vivendi political by nature, which was, obviously, imperfect, but which, permitting as it did the peaceful living side by side of Jews and Christians, by the same token was a good, and which the Church could in consequence approve as valid in the temporal order; (2) the vexations and iniquities which the Jews suffered at the hands of the Christians, whether rulers or subjects, clerics or laymen, in the practical application of this modus vivendi, and which, in consequence, the Church as such has never accepted as her own responsibility.

The political emancipation of the Jews began in Holland in the seventeenth century, and then spread to England. "The young United States of America recognized the political equality of Jewish citizens. . . In 1791 the French Revolution granted the status of active citizens to the Jews, but on condition that they renounced all national particularism. The other states, except Russia, followed this example sooner or later. The Jew need not any longer be an object of contempt. The importance of the Jews in the world became considerable. But the Jewish problem remains. HOW could religious liberalism provide the solution? It ignored on the one hand the mystery of the Church on which hangs the notion of a truly human temporal order; and, on the other, it ignored the mystery of Israel, of the election that still rules the destinies of this people and will do so till the day of its conversion. Some notice will have to be taken of this two-fold datum if it is desired to fix the place of the Jews in the Christendom of the future."[562]

The condition of heretics in the old consecrational Christendom was quite other than that of the Jews and of simple unbelievers.

Instead of flourishing outside the Church like Judaism and paganism, heresy is an evil that infects her own subjects, those who belong to her fully and visibly; gaining on her like a cancer on its parent organism. The Church has then to fight in her own members against the seductions that carry them away. She can avail herself of canonical penalties to remind them of their former solemn promises and to save the rest of the faithful from apostasy. The common doctrine of the Church has always looked with very different eyes, first, from the speculative standpoint, on the infidelity of Jews and pagans as compared with that of heretics; and again, from the canonical standpoint, on those who have never been her members, as compared with those who at first were so and have fallen away.

These considerations are valid for all ages. But in the Middle Ages the position of heretics had a special significance. In a society which never pretended to contain any but Christians, any but visible members of the Church, heresy loomed up unexpectedly as something anarchic, something capable of destroying the whole political and social structure from within. It amounted to a crime against the public safety. And a crime it would have to remain until it became strong enough itself to form independent political organizations of its own and to defend them by arms—when we have the period of the "wars of religion"; finally new heretical States arose, also modelled on the consecrational ideal, and, like the medieval State, proscribing any new "heresies", that might arise within them.

Thus, as long as temporal society was ruled by this consecrational ideal, which, at the fall of the Roman Empire, saved the Western world—but which eventually ceased to be useful—heresy amounted to a political disorder with which it was impossible in principle to make terms, [563] whether it was professed inwardly in good faith or bad. Let us rather say that as long as the consecrational temporal order was legitimate, the political harmfulness of all heresy was evident to everybody, and that in this sense good faith could not be presumed.

When the consecrational temporal order broke down, it was the spirit of indifference, of unbelief, of hatred of Christianity, religious liberalism grown powerful on account of the scandalous divisions of the Reformation, which was to take up the tale and put its stamp on Western civilisation. And that is why the Church tried to save the old order of things for as long as possible. We may venture to think that she would have defended it less energetically—that she would have abandoned it spontaneously, even boldly—if she had found a more enlightened faith and a higher sanctity in more of her children, and if, in consequence, she had felt it possible to pass to a secular Christian order without any tragic break.

From a first regime in which she had remained external to the State, which had showed itself hostile and persecuting but later became more friendly, the Church passed gradually to a regime in which a portion of her being became entangled in the stuff of the State and there took on a growing importance.

Undoubtedly in herself the Church remains outside and transcends all states, whether we consider her primary essential function which is to form the Kingdom of God, or her secondary essential function which is to sanctify the social, political and cultural work of mankind. But historically, by reason of the Christian values included in the very definition of the medieval State, the Church came in a way to be mirrored in the State; which nevertheless remained essentially distinct from her and inadequate to her. Thus the State received a consecrational character.

The Church exerted a profound influence on the affairs of the State. She was involved, in a way, with the administration of the temporal, by the fact that the very texture of the "consecrational "temporal order comprised supernatural values, such, for instance, as the profession of the Catholic faith, which none but she could define or control. Not that she needed to encroach on the jurisdiction of the princes. But she was then doubly authorized to remind them of their duty to defend the common good of the State: first under her general and permanent title as guardian and illuminator of temporal values; and then under a special and temporary title, due to the supernatural element incorporated and incarnated in the structure of the consecrational State. It was never, to be sure, the business of the Church herself to defend the faith considered as representing political values, or herself to take up arms on behalf of the State and the spiritual interests embodied in it. But under a consecrational regime she could impose this duty on princes with very special insistence. There we have one of the reasons for the intimate compenetration of the spiritual and the temporal in medieval times.

We can, and commonly do, distinguish the Church, the spiritual and indefectible Kingdom, from Christendom, that is to say the temporal and perishable kingdoms, the societies which, being consecrational, themselves insisted on unity of faith, but as an element of their political unity.

However, since a consecrational Christendom comprised a spiritual element as one of its components, and was so penetrated by the Church that the latter descended in a way into the very heart of the State, there was a natural tendency to extend the name of the Church to cover Christendom itself. Taken in this large and improper sense the Church englobed Christendom.

It was on this account that, having quoted Gregory IX, who in 1229 saw in the University of Paris "the river that waters and fertilizes the whole paradise of the Church", and Jourdain, who considered it (along with the priesthood and the Empire) as the third of the institutions necessary to the Church, Etienne Gilson adds that "we observe at this period a strong tendency to identify. . . Christendom with the Church, as if the temporal and historical matter had already been wholly absorbed into the spirituality of its end. In reality, the University of Paris never was, and could not be, an institution of the Church, but was rather a French institution adopted by the Church to become an essential pivot of Christendom. We must be quite clear on this point, which is not without its importance even for the present state of the problem of Christendom."[564] We have seen St. Thomas writing that the Jews are bondsmen of the Church [565] (by reason of their temporal submission to the prince of the Pontifical State, or the other princes of Christendom); and again that the Church has tolerated the rites of unbelievers [566] (it was in Christendom, not in the Church that the rites were tolerated); and he says in a Quodlibet that the Church has armies and that the kings are her vassals [567] (which can evidently be valid only for Christendom and for the Pope as a prince of Christendom). When Pope Boniface VIII declared in the Bull Unam Sanctam that the Church "has both swords, that is the spiritual and the temporal, in her power", he affirms that the temporal power is in the bosom of the Church only because he too takes the word Church in the sense of Christendom.[568]

However, in the Middle Ages the word "Christendom" was usually taken in a sense rather different from that of the word "Church". It always connoted, whether directly or indirectly, proximately or remotely, the Church herself. But it directed attention rather on her lay elements, her relations with the world of culture, her temporal interests, her social activities and embodiments, the organized political whole she was trying to sanctify, and even on the peoples of the Byzantine Empire which the Middle Ages never gave up as finally lost to the unity of the Church.[569]

I shall try to define this consecrational Christendom, to grasp it in its essential type. But this essential type was never completely embodied in concrete fact along with all its implied consequences.

It was on its way to realization in medieval times. It showed itself first as a formative impulse directing and sustaining the movement of culture, like a seed fallen into the soil of history and there gradually unfolding its virtualities. As the Church came to fuller consciousness of her victory over the ancient world, the spiritual element she had deposited at the heart of the consecrational society gained ever more and more control and more clearly manifested its exigencies: thus, for example, the measures taken against heretics became more rigorous and even extended to the Western schismatics;[570] thus the excommunication of princes, by a consequence that does not seem to have been directly envisaged at first, began to involve their deposition.[571]

While the consecrational order was evolving in accordance with its own internal logic and was revealing its multiple implications with ever greater precision, it seems that faith too would have to keep pace with it and become ever more and more delicate and more profound: for although the consecrational order, being temporal, could tolerate many defects,[572] it nevertheless tended to establish a very high ideal of social life, and one that was deeply saturated with the data of revelation.[573] Unfortunately, instead of presenting the spectacle of an interior growth of the evangelical life, the end of the Middle Ages displays, in every branch of human activity, the advent of a spirit of independence finding ever more and more difficulty in accommodating itself to the rules of the faith and of the Christian life. The demands of the consecrational regime became more and more imperious, but the difficulty of maintaining and applying it increased from day to day. The Sovereign Pontiffs were constrained to a growing severity. From Gregory VII or from Innocent III, to Gregory IX, to Innocent IV, to Boniface VIII or to St. Pius V, their task seemed to become ever more overwhelming. We feel that the end of a world is in preparation and that consecrational Christendom, whose role had been so glorious, was beginning to crumble under its own weight.

St. Paul recommended the faithful to obey authorities that were pagan, but, in the Middle Ages, faith and communion with the Church became indispensable for the legitimacy of the princely authority.

St. Thomas relies on the authority of Gregory VII, who released the subjects of an excommunicated prince from their oaths of allegiance, to establish that an apostate prince cannot retain his power.[574] Why not? It was not because unbelief of necessity does away with dominion: for an unbelieving prince can rule legitimately over unbelievers, and, in certain cases, over believers. It was in virtue of particular historical circumstances which gave the Church the right to intervene in the organization of political society on account of the Christians who were its members. "Unbelief, in itself, is not inconsistent with dominion, since dominion is a device of the law of nations which is a human law; whereas the distinction between believers and unbelievers is of divine law, which does not annul human law. Nevertheless a man who sins by unbelief may be sentenced to the loss of his right of dominion, as also, sometimes, on account of other sins."

A little further back St. Thomas treats of dominion and unbelief in a broader way, not in connection with apostasy, but with the simple unbelief of a prince who had never belonged to the Church, and who therefore can never be subject to any canonical penalty.[575] The principles involved are the same. "Dominion and authority [dominium et praelatio] are institutions of human law, while the distinction between faithful and unbelievers arises from the divine law. Now the divine law, which is the law of grace, does not do away with human law, which is the law of natural reason. Wherefore the distinction between faithful and unbelievers, considered in itself, does not do away with dominion and authority of unbelievers over the faithful. Nevertheless this right of dominion or authority can be justly done away with by the sentence or ordination of the Church, which has the authority of God." And here is the reason: "since unbelievers in virtue of their unbelief deserve to forfeit their power over the faithful who are converted into children of God."

Thus therefore certain effects of the law of nations, such as the principle of legitimacy, can at times be set aside by sentence of the Church. On the consecrational hypothesis it is in fact clear that society cannot be left to an apostate prince nor entrusted to an unbelieving prince. The legitimate prince is a member of the Church, intra Ecclesiam.[576]

The texts of St. Thomas himself thus introduce us to two political regimes, both legitimate.

In the first, the prince is an unbeliever. His power, based on human law depending on natural reason, is entitled to respect by the Christian conscience. The Apostle Paul recognises the authority of a prince, such as Nero, and he speaks to the Philippians (see St. Thomas II-II, q. 10, a. 10, obj. 2) of saints in Caesar's household (iv. 22).

In the second regime, political unity demands religious unity. Hence no unbelieving prince can be legitimate. Also there will be no question of appealing to any unbelieving potentate without—that is to say to any not incorporated in the Catholic Church—to rule the Christian society.[577] Next, if we suppose an unbelieving prince whose subjects are beginning to pass to the true faith, this prince could be repudiated as soon as conversions became numerous enough [578] to warrant, without injustice or scandal, the foundation of a consecrational State. Finally, an apostate prince will be deposed. As we see, the duty of civic obedience to pagan Emperors like Nero, or "apostates" like Julian,[579] recognized under the first Christian regime, ceased to be justifiable under the second.

The conditions of legitimacy could thus undergo profound modifications when the constitution of political society was altered.

Why was the primitive principle of legitimacy judged to be insufficient in the Middle Ages, and under what immediate ideological influence was it transformed?

This change was certainly due to a large extent to the current of thought known as "political Augustinianism".[580] Numerous ecclesiastical writers, taking their cue from texts of St. Augustine on the impossibility of any true justice, any true peace, and consequently any true republic, before the coming of Christ, concluded—but against Augustine's own thought—that the ancient world, and, more generally, all unbelieving nations, could enjoy no incontestable political rights, and that the Church alone could introduce the principle of political legitimacy to the peoples she converted. There can be no question of denying the importance of this movement of ideas, which developed, as we have indicated, on the margins of the authentic theological tradition. But precisely on that account it fails to provide the fundamental explanation of the medieval political system; and I believe that the greater part of its success came from the fact that it was a very much simplified and very crude justification of a state of things which rested in reality on much more complex and much subtler considerations: a state of things which I have called the consecrational political regime.

Thus, the principle of political Augustinianism would explain, doubtless very clearly, that an apostate prince, by leaving the Church in which lies the source of all legitimate political order, would at once lose his rights of dominion. But the explanation would be a bad one, because, by starting from the same premises, we could conclude that the princes of unbelieving peoples were without rights and could be dispossessed simply in virtue of their unbelief. That, in fact, is how the opponents of Cajetan, Vittoria, and Las Casas reasoned at the moment of the conquest of the West Indies.

In the light of the principle of the consecrational State things take on a different aspect. There exists a human law, based on reason, which is not necessarily done away with when the divine law, based on grace, supervenes. Outside Christendom, this human law is the sole one. It ought to be held as sacred by Christian princes, and also by the faithful who live scattered among the nations, in conditions analogous with those of the Christians in the time of Nero or Julian the Apostate. But in societies whose political unity is based on unity of faith, where Christians are organizing themselves politically as Christians, when the regime is consecrational, a new element, of which the Church alone is judge, enters into the qualification of the citizen, and, a fortiori, that of the legitimate prince. It is evident that a man under excommunication cannot. retain the dominion. Human law, founded on reason, is not indeed renounced; it is partially neutralized by the law inscribed in the very constitution of the society and vanishes in the exact measure in which it opposes the superior exigencies of this fundamental law. Is not that, after all, the teaching of James of Viterbo? He poses the question: Was the temporal power instituted by the spiritual power? Or does it find its foundation in nature? "Between these two opposed paths we can find a middle and more reasonable one by saying that the temporal power results materially and initially [inchoative] from the natural inclination of men, and therefore from God Himself inasmuch as a work of nature is a work of God; but that it results formally and fully [perfective] from the spiritual power. . . That a man receives authority over men belongs to human law founded on nature. But that one of the faithful receives authority over the faithful, comes of divine law, issue of grace. For it is grace, not nature, that makes the faithful; and since the divine law is in the hands of the Vicar of Christ, it is to him that belongs the institution of faithful kings and of temporal power over the faithful as such. Also in the Church [here read Christendom] the temporal prince has power over men by human law and over the faithful by divine law. And if the faith fulfils [informat] nature, the spiritual power institutes the temporal by fulfilling it and fulfils it by instituting it."[581]

1. In seeking to justify the formula of Hugh of St. Victor, famous in the Middle Ages, according to which "the spiritual power has to institute the temporal that it may exist, and must judge it if it behaves ill",[582] James of Viterbo distinguishes, in the passage cited, two complements, two fulfillments, which the political authority can receive from the spiritual order: first that of faith, without which it would be neither wholly true nor complete; and then that of the approbation and ratification of the "sacring", the anointing.

Of the necessity of faith and visible membership of the Church enough has been said. Clearly, such will not suffice for a principle of legitimacy: in itself, it is simply a prerequisite. Accidentally, however, in virtue of circumstances, it could decide accession to the throne.

What now is the meaning of the sacring, the consecration, the