On Temporal and Spiritual Authority. Robert Bellarmine

by separating good loyalist Catholics from traitors, but it also had implications in a much wider context. James’s attempt to shift the boundaries of sovereign authority was, in fact, a useful way to strengthen a Protestant king’s power over his Catholic subjects. Additionally it could be a handy weapon to strengthen the power of any king, including Catholic ones, against the influence of the pope. James understood the cross-confessional implications of his act, and in the second edition of his Triplici nodo triplex cuneus, a defense of his oath, he added a dedicatory epistle to all the sovereigns of Christendom, both Protestant and Catholic.¹⁷ The long and complex controversy over the Oath of Allegiance presented texts that defended or attacked the king from both English and European perspectives, but probably no text had as much impact in Europe as William Barclay’s De potestate Papae, published posthumously in 1609.

      Barclay was a well-known jurist who was born in Scotland in 1546 and lived there until 1571, when he moved to France and remained there until his death in 1608.¹⁸ Barclay’s most famous work is the treatise De regno et regali potestate, in which he polemicizes against George Buchanan’s theories of the right to resistance, especially rejecting the legitimacy of tyrannicide defended by the monarchomachs, a term Barclay coined.¹⁹ For this contribution Barclay was cited by John Locke as the main champion of the divine right of kings.²⁰

      Barclay’s De potestate Papae was dedicated to Pope Clement VIII, and Barclay insisted that his criticism came from within the Church. He attacked Bellarmine’s fundamental argument that political authority and ecclesiastical authority were at once separate and united in the Christian commonwealth. The separation that Bellarmine had introduced was not at all limited, Barclay suggested, nor had the historical advent of Christianity merged what used to be separate. Indeed, the separation between ecclesiastical and political authority had never been and could never be bridged by the pope’s authority because it was of divine law: “One needs to know that those two authorities by which the world is kept in order, that is, the ecclesiastical and the political, are iure divino separated and distinguished, so that even if both come from God, each is confined within its own boundaries, and the one cannot legitimately invade the other’s territory.”²¹ No one can dispense in matters of divine law, and not even the pope should presume to transgress boundaries set up by this law. While the primacy of the pope’s supreme spiritual authority was not questioned, such authority could not intervene in politics even for the sake of consciences and the attainment of eternal life, for which spiritual punishments and censures were more than enough.

      Bellarmine’s On the Temporal Power of the Pope. Against William Barclay (Rome, 1610) is important for many reasons. First, it elucidates the development of the cardinal’s thinking on papal authority in temporal matters and its complex implications. Faced with Barclay’s arguments, Bellarmine needed to defend the pope’s temporal authority, both direct and indirect, as the one true Catholic doctrine, showing that, despite some disagreement on how this authority played out, Catholic theorists were unanimous in defending its existence. At the same time, however, Bellarmine needed to defend and restate his own views on the indirect character of papal authority against both Barclay and the Catholic theologians who supported the pope’s direct authority in temporal matters. Bellarmine needed to do this without undermining the unity that he claimed the Catholic world presented in maintaining that the pope had some authority in the temporal sphere. For this reason, he also needed to clarify and, in certain cases, to modify and retract earlier statements that could open the way for Barclay’s antipapalism, as had happened a few years before with Sarpi. Thus, on the one hand Bellarmine retained his theoretical cornerstone regarding the relationship between political and ecclesiastical authority. As he wrote in chapter 7, “The spiritual or ecclesiastical commonwealth and the temporal or political commonwealth are both two and one: two parts, one total, just as the spirit and the flesh joined together at the same time constitute one man, indeed they are one man.” On the other hand, pushed by Barclay, Bellarmine was forced, for example, to restate his own opinion on the exemption of the clergy in a more clearly “papalist” sense.²²

      The treatise against Barclay is not only important for an understanding of the evolution of Bellarmine’s thinking and its implications for Catholic political theory and theology, but also for the considerations it contains on many theoretical and historical issues that are crucial to seventeenth-century debates over the relationship between the Christian Church and the Christian commonwealth. For example, if Bellarmine was right in stating that the Christian commonwealth merged political and ecclesiastical authority, albeit only partly, why did not Christ himself exercise any political influence? Why did the primitive Church tolerate so many persecutions by heretical emperors if it could depose them? Why would any prince want to become Christian, thus submitting himself to another authority? What was the relation between the pope’s spiritual authority and his role as sovereign of a temporal realm? Such questions arise from the core issues of early modern political thought: what is the origin of temporal government, and what is its relationship to spiritual authority? These issues cut across confessional boundaries and override the Catholic/Protestant dichotomy. In this respect, Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay was both the catalyst for and the expression of a series of dramatic events in the political history of Europe that involved precisely the process of theoretical definition and historical development of the early modern nation-states.

      Bellarmine’s On the Temporal Power of the Pope. Against William Barclay appeared soon after the publication of Barclay’s treatise, and it caused a great stir not only in Britain but also in the Catholic world, especially in France. The situation of the Catholic Church in France was already difficult owing to strong Gallican and antipapalist influences, but it deteriorated dramatically after King Henri IV of Navarre was murdered on May 14, 1610, by a French Catholic zealot, François Ravaillac. The assassination of the king, moreover, hardened the anti-Jesuit sentiments that were already prominent following the Society’s expulsion by Henri in 1594, and these sentiments had not softened after the order’s rehabilitation in 1603.²³ Thus Bellarmine’s book immediately became a paradigm of the dangers that the supporters of papal authority, especially the Jesuits, represented for the French monarchy in the wake of the assassination of Henri IV. That is why the book was subject to the unusual and potentially dangerous humiliation of being condemned by a sudden and unexpected arrêt (ruling) of the Parlement de Paris in the fall of 1610.²⁴

      On the Primary Duty of the Supreme Pontiff

      The division within the Catholic camp that Bellarmine’s theory provoked is indeed one of the clearest indicators of its relevance in early modern Europe. Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta did not simply reaffirm papal authority against the heretical denial of any such authority in spiritual or temporal matters. Rather, it did so in a manner that would allow the pope to retain his preeminence in a European context in which the Protestant churches as well as the increasingly strong European monarchies, both Protestant and Catholic, could jeopardize it. If the pope wanted to maintain supreme spiritual authority, he had to give up direct control over European subjects and concentrate on indirect direction of politics. While the first two texts in this edition clearly show the political and theoretical implications of Bellarmine’s theory, the third text deals with Bellarmine’s views on the dynamics of power within the Roman Curia. This is a memorandum, On the Primary Duty of the Supreme Pontiff, which Bellarmine gave to Pope Clement VIII in late September or early October 1600. It was never published but circulated widely in manuscript form.²⁵

      The memorandum concerned the need that Bellarmine saw for implementing a key aspect of Church governance that was decided at the Council of Trent, namely the enforcement of bishops’ residency in their dioceses. This was necessary, according to the cardinals at Trent, to ensure an effective chain of communication from Rome to the periphery of the Catholic world.²⁶ Bellarmine framed the issue of episcopal residency in the context of the relationship between the pope’s spiritual authority and the papacy’s political interests. Bellarmine began his memorandum by stating: “The Supreme Pastor has three roles [personae] in the Church of God: he is the pastor and rector of the universal Church, the bishop assigned to the city of Rome, and a temporal prince of an ecclesiastic dominion. But among all his duties the care for the