CHAPTER IV.

THE TEMPORAL SUPREMACY OF THE POPE.*

THE subject of the Pope's temporal supremacy,—or, more generally, of the right of the church, and of the Pope as ruling and representing it, to interfere authoritatively in the regulation of civil and secular affairs, has been for above 'seven hundred years discussed and debated within the Church of Rome itself, and it has been one main occasion of internal divisions and contentions among its adherents. It has led to a great deal of interesting discussion as to the origin, grounds, and objects of civil and ecclesiastical power, and the functions and relations of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The Roman Catholic Church of France long reckoned it one of its chief glories, that it had always strenuously opposed the Pope's temporal supremacy, and maintained the independence of the civil power; and many of its most illustrious men-such as Richer, Launoy, De Marca, Natalis Alexander, Bossuet, Fleury, and Dupin-have exerted their great talents and learning in defending views upon this subject which were sound and scriptural, but very distasteful to the Court of Rome. The defence of the Pope's temporal jurisdiction and supremacy by the immediate adherents of the Papal Court,commonly called by the French, Ultramontanists, and the position made to it by the divines of the Gallican Church, and by Protestants, form a very important and interesting department of the great controversy between the empire and the priesthood-the state and the church-the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities; and a survey of it affords abundant materials for confirming the great truth of the distinctness and mutual independence of the

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* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW, No. | le Droit Public du Moyen Age relativexxiii., Nov. 1849. Art. vi.-Pouvoir ment à la déposition des Souverains. du Pape au Moyen Age, ou Recherches Par M.***, Directeur au Séminaire Historiques sur l'origine de la Souve- de Saint-Sulpice (L'Abbé Gosselin). raineté Temporelle du Saint-Siège, et sur Paris, 1845.

civil and ecclesiastical powers, and of the unlawfulness of the one claiming any jurisdiction or right of authoritative control over the other.

The Popes had succeeded in getting themselves generally acknowledged as the vicars of Christ and the monarchs of the church, and had established themselves as temporal sovereigns in the imperial city, before they ventured to claim a general right of authoritative interference in temporal matters, and before they presumed to depose kings, and to absolve their subjects from their oaths of allegiance. Gregory VII., in the latter part of the eleventh century, was the first Pope who claimed and exercised the power of deposing a sovereign, and absolving his subjects from their oaths and obligations, and this has procured for him a very unenviable notoriety. Ever since that time, the generality of the immediate adherents of the Popes have defended this power as justly and lawfully belonging to the head of the church. Not one of his successors in the Papal chair has ever disclaimed this power, while not a few of them have both claimed and exercised it. Innocent III., Innocent IV., Boniface VIII., Clement VII., Paul III., Pius V., Sixtus V., and Gregory XIV., have pronounced sentences of deposition upon Emperors of Germany and Kings of England and France, and have pretended to absolve their subjects from their oaths of allegiance, and to impose it upon them as a Christian duty to carry the Pope's sentence of deposition against their sovereign into practical effect. These proceedings of the Popes have been defended by many of the most eminent Roman Catholic theologians, but they have been vigorously assailed by others, especially by the defenders of what are called the Gallican Liberties; and they have been much dwelt upon by Protestant writers, as affording interesting indications of the character and policy of the Church of Rome, and valuable materials for the exposure of some of the claims which she puts forth.

Notwithstanding the lengthened discussion that has taken place in regard to some of the topics involved in the investigation of this subject, there is no great difficulty in tracing the leading outlines of the history of this claim to temporal supremacy, and of the grounds on which it is based.

There can be no doubt, that the primitive doctrine of the church, in regard to the proper relation of the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities, was that which Scripture so clearly

sanctions, namely, that the state and the church are, in their constitution, and by God's appointment, distinct and independent societies, each supreme in its own province, and neither having any jurisdiction or authoritative control over the other. Very unequivocal assertions of this great truth, so flatly inconsistent both with the doctrine of the Erastians and with that of the Church of Rome in its palmiest days, have been produced from the Popes of the fifth and sixth centuries-from Gelasius, Symmachus, and Gregory the Great. Similar statements have been produced from Popes even in the eighth and ninth centuries, after they were established as temporal princes, and were generally acknowledged as the heads of the church. These statements are produced and commented upon by the defenders of the Gallican liberties; and they afford ample warrant for the title which Simon Lowth, one of the nonjuring clergy of the Church of England, gave to a curious work which he published in 1716—“The independent power of the church, not Romish, but primitive, and Catholic." It is true, that long before the Popes ceased to disclaim jurisdiction in temporal things, there had been a large intermixture or confusion of the secular and the spiritual. Long before the civil establishment of Christianity by Constantine, the bishops had been accustomed to decide many of the civil questions that arose among Christians in the capacity of arbiters, and their right to decide some questions of this sort was sanctioned and ratified by the first Christian emperors. As they came, in the course of time, to be possessed of large property, this, combined with their influence over the minds of the people, gave them political power-a right to interfere, and a capacity of interfering with effect, in the management of national affairs; and all this they were careful to improve for increasing their authority. Bishops of Rome had, in their own sphere, their full share of the influence in temporal matters which was derived from these sources, and which, when tried by a mere worldly standard, irrespective of scriptural principles, might be reckoned legitimate; and when they had once succeeded in getting themselves acknowledged as the rulers of the church, as supreme judges in all ecclesiastical matters, they had no great difficulty in persuading men that they had some right of interfering, in the last resort, in all those temporal matters, in the management of which their subjects the bishops had a share.

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It is certain, that no sooner were they established as temporal princes, and recognised as supreme rulers and ultimate judges in all spiritual matters, than they determined to bring the whole. world and all its affairs under their control, by dragging to their tribunals all temporal questions that had any connection, immediate or remote, with ecclesiastical subjects, and seeking to influence the disposal of crowns and kingdoms. They displayed in this all the selfish ambition, and all the unscrupulous manœuvring, which have always been the great characteristics of the Romish apostasy. So long, however, as the general principle of the distinctness and mutual independence of the civil and ecclesiastical powers was admitted, the Popes could not found their interferences in temporal matters upon a jus divinum, but were bound in consistency to admit that it was derived from, and, of course, regulated by, 'human laws, and the general concession or consent of men. But this state of matters did not satisfy their ambition. It did not afford a sufficiently elevated or secure foundation on which to rest their claims, and it furnished no sufficiently plausible pretence for their assuming the whole extent of power to which they aspired. Human laws, and the consent of parties, would scarcely enable them to grasp sceptres, and to dispose of crowns. And accordingly, we find that the first open attempt of the Popes to depose sovereigns, and to absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance, and the first explicit attempt to base their right of interference in temporal matters upon a jus divinum,-upon their divine right to rule the universal church as the successors of Peter and the vicars of Christ,—were contemporaneous.

These two things meet together in the pontificate of Gregory VII., the notorious Hildebrand, in the latter part of the eleventh century. Gregory and his successors founded the right which they claimed, to depose sovereigns, and to absolve their subjects from their oath of allegiance, upon their divine right to the power of the keys, the power of binding and loosing,-upon the supreme and universal dominion possessed by Jesus Christ, and conferred by Him upon Peter, and upon all his successors in the See of Rome. This view was defended by most of the theologians and canonists of the Church of Rome till after the Reformation, though there were always some eminent men, especially in France, who maintained the primitive scriptural doctrine that restricts the

power of ecclesiastical office-bearers to spiritual matters, and aserts the independence and supremacy of the civil magistrate in his own province. Scarcely any Romanist now-a-days, even beyond the Alps,-even among those who maintain the Pope's personal infallibility, and his superiority to a General Council in spiritual matters,-ventures to maintain his temporal supremacy, -his right to interfere authoritatively in civil and national affairs ; and the labours of those of them who discuss this topic at all, are now commonly directed to the object of palliating the assumptions of the Popes in former times, and concealing or explaining away the grounds on which they were defended. This is the great object of the second part of Gosselin's work, of which we propose to give some account.

Before doing so, however, it may be proper to state more fully how this subject was usually explained and discussed by Romish writers in former times; and with this view we shall refer chiefly to Cardinal Bellarmine, who is still justly regarded as the greatest of Romish controversialists, and without a knowledge of whose works no one can be regarded as fully master of all that can be said in defence of Popery. In the first volume of his great work, "Disputationes de Controversiis Christianæ fidei adversus hujus temporis Hæreticos," he treats very fully De Romano Pontifice, believing, as he says in his preface, the supremacy of the Pope to be the foundation of Christianity. He discusses this fundamental topic in five books, and the fifth he devotes to the temporal power of the Pope. He has also a separate treatise on the temporal power of the Pope, in reply to William Barclay, a learned Scotchman, who was Professor of Law in one of the French universities, and who had defended the views generally maintained upon this subject by the Gallican Church. This treatise of Bellarmine was condemned and suppressed by the Parliament of Paris, as injurious to the rights of sovereigns. The temporal supremacy of the Pope likewise occupies a prominent place in two very curious works which Bellarmine wrote in reply to King James VI., in the controversy occasioned by that monarch exacting an oath of allegiance of his Roman Catholic subjects after the Gunpowder

* There is a full collection of the testimonies of Romish writers against the temporal supremacy of the Pope, in a very learned work of Crakan

thorp's, entitled, "The Defence of Constantine, with a Treatise on the Pope's Temporal Monarchy," published in 1621.