In the previous posting we mentioned that Walter Bagehot,
whose economic theories were a strong influence on John Maynard Keynes (whose
own theories have pretty much wrecked the global economy), wrote favorably of
the political theories of the totalitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes is probably remembered as a proponent of a
discredited political theory called the “divine right of kings.” This is the theory that God somehow directly
vests the State in the person of the ruler with the right to rule. This makes disobedience to the State the same
as disobedience to God, making the State (in Hobbes’s terminology and creative
spelling) a “Mortall God.”
Divine right theory is the basis for the modern Totalitarian
State. All good comes from the State,
and there is no recourse against its judgments or actions; anything coming from
the State or done by the State is by definition “good.”
Hobbes did not, however, invent divine right, nor did he
manage to stir up the controversies in the way as did an earlier proponent, Sir
Robert Filmer, chief theologian of James VI/I Stuart of Scotland/England. (It wasn’t the “United Kingdom” until later,
making numbering without offending someone or being confusing difficult.)
It was Filmer’s work, not Hobbes’s, that called forth the
work in political science of John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Both Locke and Sidney were strong influences
on America’s Founding Fathers, although authorities are divided as to which was
the greater influence. The strongest
influence on Locke and Sidney, however, was a Vatican curial official from an
obscure mountain town in Italy, Montepulciano, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine.
According to Bellarmine, building on the work of Aquinas and
other Scholastic philosophers, God does not grant a special power of rule to
anyone. Rather, rights are inherent in
each person by nature. People make a
revocable grant of power to government, which legitimately governs only with
their consent. This so irritated Filmer
that he opened his posthumous work Patriarcha,
or, The Natural Power of Kings, with a blast at all those democratic “Papists”:
“1. SINCE the time that school divinity began to flourish there
hath been a common opinion maintained, as well by divines as by divers other
learned men, which affirms:
“ ‘Mankind is naturally endowed and born with freedom from all
subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please, and
that the power which any one man hath over others was at first bestowed
according to the discretion of the multitude.’
“This tenet was first hatched in the schools, and hath been
fostered by all succeeding Papists for good divinity.”
Bellarmine’s learning was so wide and deep and his output so
scholarly that some of his opponents claimed that “Bellarmine” was actually a
pseudonym for a group of scholars working day and night against the political
and religious philosophies of the Reformation.
Today’s opposition, fully aware that all this work came from a rather
diminutive and frail individual, take another tack. They assert that Bellarmine, who intervened
in the first trial of Galileo (there were two) on Galileo’s side, getting him
off with a warning, was actually instrumental in Galileo’s condemnation at his
second trial . . . years after Bellarmine’s death. . . .
In any event, by the 18th century, it appeared as
if Locke, Sidney, and others had put period to divine right as a viable
political theory. The conflict between
Catholic and Protestant also became less acrimonious. This made Bellarmine’s work seem to be an
interesting relict of a less-enlightened age, something of interest, perhaps,
to scholars, but no one else.