[3] Vita Vasonis, cap. xxv and xxvi, Migne, P.L., vol. cxlii, col. 752, 753; cf. supra, p. 51.
But, continued St. Augustine, retracting his first theory,—and nearly all the Middle Ages agreed with him,—"these severe penalties are lawful and good when they serve to convert heretics by inspiring them with a salutary fear." The end here justifies the means.
Such reasoning was calculated to lead men to great extremes, and was responsible for the cruel teaching of the theologians of the school, who were more logically consistent than the Bishop of Hippo. They endeavored to terrorize heretics by the specter of the stake. St. Augustine, bold as he was, shrank from such barbarity. But if, on his own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle itself, false?
If we consider merely the immediate results obtained by the use of brute force, we may indeed admit that it benefited the Church by bringing back some of her erring children. But at the same time these cruel measures turned away from Catholicism in the course of ages many sensitive souls, who failed to recognize Christ's Church in a society which practiced such cruelty in union with the State. According, therefore, to St. Augustine's own argument, his theory has been proved false by its fatal consequences.
We must, therefore, return to the first theory of St. Augustine, and be content to win heretics back to the true faith by purely moral constraint. The penalties, decreed or consented to by the Church, ought to be medicinal in character, viz., pilgrimages, flogging, wearing the crosses, and the like. Imprisonment may even be included in the list, for temporary imprisonment has a well-defined expiatory character. In fact that is why in the beginning the monasteries made it a punishment for heresy. If, later on, the Church frequently inflicted the penalty of life imprisonment, she did so because by a legal fiction she attributed to it a purely penitential character. Any one of these punishments, therefore, may be considered lawful, provided it is not arbitrarily inflicted. This theory does not permit the Church to abandon impenitent heretics to the secular arm. It grants her only the right of excommunication, according to the penitential discipline and the primitive canon law of the days of Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Lactantius, and Hilary.
. . . . . . . .
But is this return to antiquity conformable to the spirit of the Church? Can it be reconciled in particular with one of the condemned propositions of the Syllabus: Ecclesia vis inferendæ potestatem non habet?[1] The Church has no right to use force.
[1] Proposit, xxiv.
Without discussing this proposition at length, let us first state that authorities are not agreed on its precise meaning. Every Catholic will admit that the Church has a coercive power, in both the external and the internal forum. But the question under dispute—and this the Syllabus does not touch—is whether the coercive power comprises merely spiritual penalties, or temporal and corporal penalties as well. The editor of the Syllabus did not decide this question he merely referred us to the letter Ad Apostolicæ Sedis of August 22, 1851. But this letter is not at all explicit; it merely condemns those who pretend "to deprive the Church of the external jurisdiction and coercive power which was given her to win back sinners to the ways of righteousness." We would like to find more light on this question elsewhere. But the theologians who at the Vatican Council prepared canons 10 and 12 of the schema De Ecclesia on this very point of doctrine did not remove the ambiguity. They explicitly affirmed that the Church had the right to exercise over her erring children "constraint by an external judgment and salutary penalties," but they said nothing about the nature of these penalties. Was not such silence significant? It authorized, one may safely say, the opinion of those who limited the coercive power of the Church to merely moral constraint. Cardinal Soglia, in a work approved by Gregory XVI and Pius IX, declared that this opinion was "more in harmony with the gentleness of the Church."[1] It also has in its favor Popes Nicholas I[2] and Celestine III,[3] who claimed for the Church of which they were the head the right to use only the spiritual sword. Without enumerating all the modern authors who hold this view, we will quote a work which has just appeared with the imprimatur of Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4]
[1] Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastici, 5 ed., Paris, vol. i, pp. 169, 170.