A disciple of this great master, the B. Egide Colonna, cardinal archbishop of Bourges, wrote in his book, De Regimine Principum: "Society cannot attain to the supreme end assigned it without a combination of three means—virtue, light, and exterior well-being. A prince should, then, in his kingdom first watch with wise solicitude over the culture of letters, in order to multiply the number of the learned and skilful.
[Footnote 135 (no reference; probably De Regimine Principum): Liv. iii. p. 2, c. viii.]
For where science flourishes, and the sources of study spring up, sooner or later instruction is disseminated among the crowd. So, to dissipate the shadows of ignorance which shamefully envelop the face of royalty, the king should encourage letters by a favorable attention. Still more, if he refuses the necessary encouragement, and does not wish his subjects instructed, he ceases to be a king—he becomes a tyrant."
To finish the picture of the ideas of this time, let us quote again these words of a sermon of the gentle and seraphic Bonaventura: "We find today great scandals in governments; for while an inexperienced pilot would not be placed on a ship to manage the rudder, we put at the head of nations those who ignore the art of governing them. When the right of succession places children on a throne, woe to empires!"
The doctrines of the thirteenth century on the formation of public power, on the duties of supreme authority, on the rights of people, on sedition, etc., are so rigorous that they appear bold, even in our time, when the defect is not precisely an excess of reserve and respect. Truth alone can free the human mind from every prejudice, develop character, and inspire a language at once so proud and so simple. What reflections it provokes when one has listened to the magnificent platitudes of so many men of our time, who believe they think freely because they are not Christians.
When Innocent IV., Celestin IV., St. Thomas, the B. Egide Colonna, and St. Bonaventura spoke thus, the Caesarism of the middle ages was decidedly vanquished for several centuries. This is one of the grandest facts of history since the incarnation of the Word.
The emperors of the house of Swabia, assuming with greater power and more science the despotic plans of the Saxon emperors, had the monstrous pretension to realize to the letter these texts of The Digest: "The will of the prince is law," (Ulp.;) "The prince is above all laws," (Paul.) By virtue of these texts the prince commanding would have been the absolute sovereign of the world, the proprietor of the Christian universe, and not only of the royalties of the earth, but also of private property. Interpreters taught without blushing the Caesarian theory of the dominium mundi. Le Recueil des Lois of Sicily, revised by Pierre de Vigne for Frederic II., and promulgated by this autocrat in the kingdom of Naples, is a model of this abominable legislation that progressists of our day sometimes dream of restoring.
The Roman Church alone resisted these false principles, these monstrous politics, and, thanks be to God, she triumphed.
The ruler of modern times has become what he was in the age of pretorian law, corrupted by the Caesarian jurors of the empire, of the middle ages, and particularly the Renaissance, that is to say, the people, who by a so-called "royal law" would have relinquished their rights into the hands of the Roman emperors. But if the sovereign people could not but be a majority purely numerical, arrogating in its turn the pretended laws of Caesar, the struggles of the middle age between the clergy and the empire would certainly be renewed.