To determine what is the fact we must define our terms. Monarchy and republic are terms often vaguely and loosely used. All governments that have at their head a king or Emperor are usually called, by even respectable writers, monarchies, and those that have not are usually called republics, whether democratic like ancient Athens, aristocratic like Venice prior to her suppression by General Bonaparte, or representative like the United States. But this distinction is not philosophical or exact. All governments, properly speaking, in which the sovereignty is held to rest in the people or political community, and the king or emperor holds from the community and represents the the majority of the state, are Republican, as was Imperial Rome or is Imperial France; all governments, on the other in which the sovereignty vests not in the political community, but in the individual and is held as a personal right, or as a private estate, are in principal monarchical. This is, in reality, the radical distinction between republicanism and monarchy, and between civilization and barbarism, and it is so the terms should be understood.
The key to modern history is the struggle between these two political systems, or between Roman civilization and German barbarism, and subsequently to Charlemagne, were especially between feudalism and Roman imperialism. In this struggle the sympathies and influences of church have been on the side against barbarism and feudalism, and in favor of the Roman system, and therefore on the side of republicanism, Rome, theoretically and in name, [{629}] remained a republic under the emperor from Augustus to Augustulus. However arbitrary or despotic some of the Caesars may have been and certainly were in practice, in principle they were elective, and held their power from the political community. The army had always the faculty of bestowing the military title of Imperator or emperor, and all the powers aggregated to it, as the tribunitial, the pontifical, the consular, etc., were expressly conferred on Augustus by the senate and people of Rome. The sovereignty vested in the political community never in the person of the emperor. The emperor represented the state, but never was himself the state. In principle Roman imperialism was republican, not in the strict or absolute sense monarchical at all.
The barbarian system brought from the forests of Germany was in its principle wholly different. Under it power was a personal right, and not, as under Roman imperialism, a trust from the community. With the barbarians there were tribes, nations, confederations, but no commonwealth, no republic, no civil community, no political people, no state. Republic, res publica, Scipio says, in the Republica of Cicero, cited by St. Augustine in his De Civitate Dei, means res populi; and he adds, that by people is to be understood not every association of the multitude, but a legal association for the common weal. "Non esse omnem coetum multitudinis, sed coetum juris condensu et utilitatis communione sociatum." [Footnote 175] In this sense there was no people, no res populi, or affairs of the people, under the barbarian system, nor even under the feudal system to which, with some Roman ideas it gave birth after Charlemagne. Absolute monarchy, which alone is properly monarchy, according to Bishop England, did not exist among the barbarians in its full development; but it existed in germ, for its germ is in the barbarian chieftainship, in the fact that with the barbarians power is personal, not political, a right or privilege, not a trust, and every feudal noble developed is an absolute monarch.
[Footnote 175: Apud St. Augustine, tom. vii. 75. B.]
These two systems after the conquest occupied the same soil. What remained of the old Roman population continued, except in politics, to be governed by the Roman law, lex Romanorum, and the barbarians by the lex barbarorum, or their own laws and usages. But as much as they despised the conquered race, the barbarians borrowed and assimilated many Roman ideas. The ministers of the barbarian kings or chiefs were for a long time either Romans or men trained in the Roman schools, for the barbarians had no schools of their own, and the old schools of the empire were at no time wholly broken up, and continued their old course of studies with greater or less success till superseded by modern universities. The story told us of finding a copy of the Civil or Roman Law at Amalfi, in the eleventh century, a fable in the sense commonly received, indicates that the distinction between barbarian and Roman in that century was beginning to be effaced, and that the Roman Law, as digested or codified by the lawyers of Justinian, was beginning to become the common law in the West as it long had been in the East, and still is in all the western nations formed within the limits of the old Roman empire, unless England be an exception. There was commenced, even before the downfall of Rome, a process of assimilation of Roman ideas and manners by the barbarians, which went on with greater force and rapidity in proportion as the barbarians were brought into the communion of the church. This process is still going on, and has gone furthest in France and our own country.
The barbarian chiefs sought to unite in themselves all the powers that had been aggregated to the Roman emperor, and to hold them not from the political community, but in their own personal right, which, had they [{630}] succeeded, would have made them monarchs in the fall and absolute sense of the term. Charlemagne tried to revive and re-establish Roman imperialism, but his attempt was premature; the populations of the empire were in his time not sufficiently Romanized to enable him to succeed. He failed, and his failure resulted in the establishment of feudalism—the chief elements of which were brought from Germany. The Roman element, through the influence of the church and the old population of the empire, had from the close of the fifth century to the opening of the ninth acquired great strength, but not enough to become predominant. The Germanic or barbarian elements, re-enforced as they were by the barbarians outside of both the church and the empire, were too strong for it, and the empire of Charlemagne was hardly formed before it fell to pieces. But barbarism did not remain alone in feudalism, and Roman principles, to some extent, were incorporated into feudal Europe, and the Roman law was applied, wherever it could be, to the tenure of power, its rights and obligations; to the regulation, forfeiture, and transmission of fiefs, and to the administration of justice between man and man, as we apply the Common Law in our own country. But the constitution of the feudal society was essentially anti-Roman and at war with the principles of the Civil or Roman Law. Hence commenced a struggle between the feudal law and the civil—feudalism seeking to retain its social organization based on distinctions of class, privileges, and corporations; and the civil law, based on the principle of the equality of all men by the natural law, seeking to eliminate the feudal elements from society, and to restore the Roman constitution, which makes power a trust derived from the community, instead of a personal right or privilege held independently of the community.
In this struggle the church has always sympathized with the Romanizing tendencies. It was under the patronage of the Pope that Charlemagne sought to revive Imperial Rome, and to re-establish in substance the Roman constitution of society; but his generous efforts ended only in the systematization and confirmation of feudalism. The Franconian and especially the Swabian in emperors attempted to renew the work of Charlemagne, but were opposed and defeated by the church, not because she had any sympathy with feudalism, but because these emperors undertook to unite with the civil and military powers held by the Roman emperors the pontifical power, which before the conversion of the empire they also held. This she could not tolerate, for by the Christian law the Imperial power and the pontifical are separated, and the temporal authority, as such, has no competency in spirituals. The Popes, in their long and severe struggles with the German emperors, or emperors of the holy Roman empire, as they styled themselves, did not struggle to preserve feudalism, but the independence of the church, threatened by the Imperial assumption of the pontifical authority held by the emperors of pagan Rome. This is the real meaning of those struggles which have been so strangely misapprehended, and so grossly misrepresented by the majority of historians, as Voigt and Leo, both Protestants, have conclusively shown. St. Gregory VII., who is the best representative of the church in that long war, did not struggle to establish a theocracy as so many foolishly repeat, nor to obtain for the church or clergy a single particle of civil power, but to maintain the spiritual independence of the church, or her independent and supreme authority over all her children in things spiritual, against the Emperor, who claimed, indirectly at least, supreme authority in spirituals as well as in temporal's. For the same reason Gregory IX. And Innocent IV. Opposed Frederic II., the last and greatest of the Hohenstaufen, the Ward in his childhood of Innocent III. [{631}] Frederic undertook to revise Roman imperialism against mediaeval feudalism, but unhappily he remembered that the pagan Emperor was Pontifex Maximus, as well as Imperator. Had he simply labored to substitute the Roman constitution of society for the feudal without seeking to subject the church to the empire, he might have been opposed by all those Catholics, whether lay or cleric, whose interests were identified with feudalism, but not by the church herself; at least nothing indicates that she would have opposed him, for her sympathies were not and have never been with the feudal constitution of society.
In the subsequent struggles between the two systems, the church, as far as I have discovered, has uniformly sympathized with kings and kaisers only so far as they simply asserted the republican principles of the Roman constitution against feudalism, and has uniformly opposed them, whenever they claimed or attempted to exercise pontifical authority, or to make the temporal supreme over the spiritual, that is to say, to subject conscience to the state. But in this she has been on the side of liberty in its largest and truest sense. Liberty, as commonly understood, or as it enters into the life, the thought, and conscience of modern Christian nations, is certainly of Greek and Roman, not barbarian origin, enlarged and purified by Christianity. The pagan republic united in the sovereign people both the pontifical and imperial powers as they were in the pagan emperors, and hence subjected the individual, both exteriorly and interiorly, to the state, and left him no rights which he could assert before the republic. The Christian republic adds to the liberty of the state, the liberty of the individual, and so far restricts the power of the state over individuals. This personal or individual freedom, unknown in the Graeco-Roman republic, Guizot and many others tell us was introduced by the German invaders of the Roman empire. They assign it a barbarian origin; but I am unable to agree with them, because I cannot find that the German barbarians ever had it. The barbarian, as the feudal, individual freedom was the freedom of the chief or noble, not the freedom of all men, or of all individuals irrespective of class or caste. This universal individual freedom, asserted and in a measure secured by the Christian republic, could not be a development of a barbarian idea, or come by way of logical deduction from the barbarian individual freedom, for it rests on a different basis, and is different in kind. The only ancient people with whom I can find any distinct traces of it are the Hebrew people. It is plainly asserted in the laws of Moses for the Jewish people. Christianity asserts it for all, both Jews and Gentiles, in that noble maxim. We must obey God rather than men. Every martyr to the Christian faith asserted it, in choosing rather to be put to death in the most frightful and excruciating forms than to yield up the freedom of conscience at the command of the civil authority, and the church shows that she approves it by preserving the relics of martyrs, and proposing them to the perpetual veneration of the faithful. The martyr witnesses alike to faith and the freedom of conscience.
To this individual freedom, as the right of manhood, the real enemy is the feudal society, which is founded on privilege; and where then should the church be found but on the side of those who asserted Graeco-Roman civilization as enlarged, purified, and invigorated by Christianity against the barbarian elements retained by the feudal society? It was her place as the friend of liberty and civilization. There can be no question that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the interests of humanity, liberty, religion, have been with the kings and people, as against the feudal nobility. It is owing to this fact, not to any partiality for monarchy, even in its representative sense, that the church has supported the monarchs in their struggle against feudal privileges and corporations.