The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny

by Orestes Augustus Brownson

Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God. They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural laws. If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god. They saw no divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws. Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes themselves. Hence they could not assert the divine origin of government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its institution. Their writings may be studied with advantage on the constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs, but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its authority.

The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a religious duty. Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind it. Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state. No man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally important duty of taking care of themselves. But by asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the state. For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.

After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two powers—the civil and the ecclesiastical—this doctrine of the divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church with most disastrous consequences. While the Roman Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor, and owed him no civil allegiance. He became civilly independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it. To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual independence.

This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the Pope's superior. If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the civil power is from God, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope be subject to the emperor in temporals. As at the time when the dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty itself. Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.

If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church, the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy. It would establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most hostile to social progress. Even the Jews could not, or would not, endure it, and prayed God to give them a king, that they might be like other nations.

In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and partly wrong. The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the supremacy of the moral order, or the law of God, without which governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being. The real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most approved theologians. The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, and holds immediately from God; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from God only mediately, through second causes, or the people. Yet, though derived from God only through the people, civil authority still holds from God, and derives its right from Him through another channel than the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and respect. This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she interprets and applies the law of God, both natural and revealed, she makes neither.

Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the representative of the civil society on the same level with the representative of the spiritual, or to emancipate the state from the law of God while they conceded the divine origin or right of government, they sought to effect its independence by asserting for it only a natural or purely human origin. For nearly two centuries the most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored to derive authority from man alone. They have not only separated the state from the church as an external corporation, but from God as its internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil authority, but what is called "the right of insurrection." Under their teaching the age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who conspire against it—the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction. The established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic, tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God, and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.

This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical principles. Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right but might. No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual or social progress. The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive. In civil society two things are necessary—stability and movement. The human is the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only successively actualized. But the element of stability can be found only in the divine, in God, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal. The doctrine that derives authority from God through the people, recognizes in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability and progress.

This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of things. It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real order. It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the Creator. Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act. That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology. God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being." All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as through that act they participate of his being. Through that act he is immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every creature. The creature deriving from his creative act can no more continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it. It is as bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that God created the universe, endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up, gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself. It cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself. It did not merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the creative act. Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no philosopher at all. Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather, Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended or discontinued, or not passing over from the creature and returning to God.

Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can continue to exist, act, or live only by participating through it of his divine being. There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in every creature, and therefore it is that God is worshipped in his works without idolatry. But he creates substantial existences capable of acting as second causes. Hence, in all living things there is in their life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great Christian theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real government. Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God. A government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in the air. It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God. What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason, without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real, living God himself. Hence government, like man himself, participates of the divine being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the same time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling authority with freedom, and stability with progress.