Bonaventure: Conscience and Synderesis. Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshaw translation. In McGrade, Kilcullen, and Kempshaw, eds.: The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts.  Volume II: Ethics and Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

 

The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure flourished in the middle of the thirteenth century, eventually serving as Minister General of the Franciscan order and Cardinal of Albano, having first come to prominence in Paris as a lecturer on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Conscience and Synderesis is a commentary on Lombard’s book.

Following the structure of that book, Bonaventure divides his commentary into two articles, the first on conscience and the second on synderesis. He calls conscience “a certain directive rule of the will,” whereas synderesis “is called the spark of conscience.” Synderesis thus seems to be something like what Aristotle calls the “efficient” or originative cause of conscience, its archē. 

He intends to answer three questions about conscience: Is it in the cognitive part of the soul or the affective part? In its origin does it exist by nature or is it acquired? And in its effects “does every conscience obligate?” Or can one rightly refuse to obey it?

There are five arguments for conscience as existing in the cognitive part of the soul. First, Ecclesiastes 7:22 describes conscience as something that knows; in that passage, the prophet observes that a wise man knows that even righteous men have sinned by cursing others. Second, Damascene calls conscience “the law of our understanding,” and Scripture “directly respects the understanding,” presumably in the sense that divine Revelation tells the truth to human souls. The third argument is etymological: the word for knowing, scientia, is built into conscientia. Conscius means awareness of something in a sciens or knower, a person who has experienced a cognition. Fourth, conscience could be right or wrong. Since making a mistake “relates to a habit or act of understanding”—a passion in itself cannot make a mistake, although of course it can be misdirected by a part of the soul that is mistaken—it “seems that conscience resides in a cognitive power.” Finally, cognition acts in certain ways. It reads, judges, directs, witnesses, and argues. These are all rational acts, not (for example) sense perceptions or appetites. “But all these acts are attributed to conscience, for conscience is a book in which we read, conscience judges inwardly, conscience witnesses, conscience argues, and conscience rule and directs.”

There are five arguments for conscience as existing in the affective part of the soul. A passion cognizes nothing; a habit is ingrained, unchanging once established, hence unlike knowledge, which changes readily and substantially. But if conscience is cognitive, and “the cognitive power is concerned with everything,” both action and contemplation, conscience would “extend not only to moral matters but also to things taught in the various disciplines, which is obviously false.” Second, understanding is to the true what affect is to the good. Conscience has to do with the good; it is a matter of agapic love, of caritas. Third, “the law of the flesh fights against the law of the mind”; both are “motive powers,” not cognitive. Conscience has to do with motive, with fighting the good fight, and hence ranges itself “on the side of the affective.” Fourth, conscience can cause remorse, “a certain grief and passion.” Finally, “the pleasant and the painful reside in an affective power; for example, “the damned will be in great pain from the gnawing worm of conscience.” 

Bonaventure resolves the question by classifying conscience as a form of cognition, not as cognition simply, in the broadest sense. He begins by remarking that just as the term “understanding” can be understood in three ways—as the power to understand, as a habit, and as a principle that is understood—so “conscience” can be taken “as the thing of which one is aware” (“the law of our understanding,” as an earlier theologian put it), as a habit (“that by which we are aware”), and as “the power to be aware” (a “natural law written in our consciences”). Bonaventure chooses the definition of conscience as a habit, that by which we are aware; this is what the term is “more commonly taken” to mean. By this definition conscience must be “a habit of the cognitive power,” since awareness is a cognitive capacity, not an affect. [1]

However, there are two ways of knowing. There is “speculative” or theoretical knowledge: knowledge of natural laws, for example. And there is practical knowledge, which aims at right action. Aristotle draws this distinction, saying that theoretical and practical understanding are equally matters of cognition, but they have different aims. Theoretical knowledge is knowledge ‘for its own sake,’ aiming only at the satisfaction of the human desire to know. Practical knowledge is knowledge of ‘what to do’; it “dictates and inclines to movement.” An example of theoretical knowledge is ‘Every whole is greater than its part’; an example of practical knowledge is ‘God should be honored.’ The habit of knowledge simply is called scientia; the habit of practical knowledge is called conscientia. Conscience “does not perfect the speculative power in itself but as it is joined in a certain way to affection and activity.”

Therefore, in reply to the five arguments claiming that conscience is not cognitive, Bonaventure says that insofar as conscience is a power it is a power “applied to knowing about conduct or morals.” As a habit, it can be either natural or acquired, and as such it can go right or wrong, either purifying or defiling the soul. Insofar as it is good it “dictates and inclines to good and draws back and flees from evil.” That doesn’t make it “affective,” only that “it has a certain concomitance with will and affection.” And while it is unquestionably true that the law of the flesh is opposed to the law of the mind, the law of the flesh “presupposes a disordered representation of carnal things in fantasy and cognition”; it has a cognitive element, albeit a mistaken one. The remorse we feel after violating conscientious knowledge is of course affective, but that feeling is not itself conscience. Similarly, the painful and pleasurable feelings we experience in response to our thoughts and actions may well be conscientious but are not conscience itself. The conscience testifies and judges, the feelings of remorse or rejoicing follow from those cognitive perceptions.

It might be suggested that the question of conscience as Bonaventure addresses it points the way to a distinction between Christian Aristotelianism and classical philosophy generally. The classical philosophers understand the soul as a natural entity with a firmly established and well-articulated set of characteristics. In the relatively simple description offered by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, the soul has three parts: logos or reason, thumos or spiritedness, and the epithumia or appetites. In Christianity, the human soul proves more malleable. The first human being was made in the image of God, but the image has little of the Original’s firmness. Eve is readily beguiled by the Serpent; as far as the reader can tell, Adam simply goes along with her offer of the forbidden fruit of moral knowledge. Even the chosen nation, Israel, wavers repeatedly between obedience and disobedience to God’s commands. And in the New Testament, the soul appears as a battleground on which much more powerful forces, divine and demonic, struggle for rule. This may explain why in Christian thought, including that of Bonaventura, Socratic thumos is replaced by the will. Spiritedness has a firm object: it loves honor. (In Augustine, closer to Platonism than many Christians, this takes the evil forms of pride and love of domination.) In Christianity, however, the will tends to waver, even before its corruption in the Garden of Eden. Will is ‘free’; it can incline one way or another, depending upon which external spiritual forces seize control of it. Bonaventure’s treatment of conscience as a natural habit as it were borrows some of the solidity of Aristotelian ‘naturalism’ for Christian purposes.

Bonaventure moves next to the question of whether conscience is an innate or an acquired habit. There are six arguments for its innateness. In Romans 2:14-15 the Apostle Paul remarks that gentiles without the divine law are nonetheless “a law unto themselves because they show that the work of the law is written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them.” Scripture itself testifies that “conscience bespeaks a habit naturally inscribed in the human heart.” Augustine concurs; human beings have “a natural judicatory” within them, a standard of conduct. Another Father of the Church, Isidore, teaches that “natural right is that which nature has taught animals,” and if animals have so been taught, “much more has it taught human beings, who excel all animals.” Further, “the cognition of natural right is nothing other than conscience.” Moreover, “we have a natural instinct to seek blessedness and honor” from our parents; since we could not be this way “without some prior cognition,” and conscience is a kind of moral cognition, conscience must be innate. As a consequence of these first four arguments, Bonaventure remarks that since human beings cognize natural law, that cognition must occur “either by acquisition or by nature. If the former, it is similar to “the political virtues.” If by nature, “the cognition of natural law is nothing other than conscience. Finally, “natural right binds the will naturally.” But to be bounded, the will needs to know what it is that it is to do; “understanding precedes affect.” Conscience is the cognition of natural right or law.

Against the claim that conscience is innate, opponents make six arguments of their own. In On the Soul, Aristotle compares “the soul at birth” to a blank tablet with nothing inscribed on it. (By this reading, Aristotle anticipates Locke.) If so, the soul can have “no innate cognition.” Augustine adds a Platonic argument: Yes, the soul has knowledge in it at birth but “burdened by the weight of the body, it forgets the things it used to know.” However, Augustine cites this argument in his Retractions. “He would not retract this unless he held it to be false,” and indeed Augustine did convert from Platonism to Christianity, necessitating exactly this kind of retraction. The opponents’ third argument is more elaborate. To know something complex, we first need to know the simple elements that compose it, the “incomplex.” For example, we can’t know a principle “unless we have cognition of its terms.” So far, this accords with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. But—and here again, the opponents come across as proto-Lockean—we know the “incomplexes” only through the senses; no one understands color without sight, and to lose a sense is “necessarily [to] lose knowledge.” Therefore, “all cognition of complexes” too “is necessarily acquired and taken from sense.” Conscience being “a cognition of a complex”—of what Locke calls a complex idea—namely, natural right—conscience must be an acquired habit, not an innate, natural one. Similarly, if conscience aims at practice, at conduct not theory, and “things pertaining to conduct are as difficult or more difficult to know than those pertaining to simple contemplation,” conscience must be an acquired habit, a thing gained from experience not simple sense perception. Sense perceptions, moreover, are infallibly correct, although we may misinterpret them. Since conscience can err, it must be an acquired not a natural habit. Finally, “natural habits are present in everyone and at all times, because those things are natural which are the same for all and which go with a nature inseparably. But consciences are not the same in all,” nor are they present in the same person at all times. The opponents give the example of a person entering a religious order who develops “a conscience that forbids acting against the counsels [of perfection], a conscience one did not have before.” Therefore, conscience is acquired, not natural.

Dismissing the Platonic argument that both Augustine and Aristotle have refuted, Bonaventure isolates “three opinions among the learned about the origin of cognitive habits,” all of which hold that they are both natural and acquired. These opinions “differ, however, in assigning the ways in which these habits are innate and acquired.”

The first formulation distinguishes the “active understanding” or “active intellect” from the “possible understanding” or “possible intellect.” It is the possible understanding that begins as a blank slate, then receives sense impressions, with no assistance from the active understanding. Bonaventure rejects this. If the active understanding has cognitive habits, why would it not “communicate them to the possible understanding without help from the senses”?

The second formulation holds that cognitive habits are innate insofar as the mind perceives universals, acquired insofar as it perceives particulars. A variation of this formulation holds that cognitive habits are innate with regard to principles, “acquired with regard to cognition of conclusions.” This, however, also diverges from Aristotle and Augustine. They both deny the Platonic claim that the mind contains principles innately. On the contrary, “cognition of principles is acquired by way of sense, memory, and experience” (Aristotle) or by means of “a certain unique incorporeal light,” analogous to the way “the fleshly eye sees things in front of it in physical light” thanks to its natural power (Augustine). 

Bonaventure endorses the third opinion. For cognition to occur, two things must happen: “the presence of something cognizable and a light by which we make judgement about it.” Thus cognitive habits are innate “by reason of an inwardly given light of the soul,” acquired because the thing cognized has a species or form to be perceived by that inner light. Bonaventure calls this natural light “a natural judicatory.” We “acquire” the external species by means of the senses: How else would I perceive the distinction between a whole and a part if I never saw or heard or tasted or touched a whole thing and one or more of its parts? “On the other hand, that light or natural judicatory directs the soul itself in making judgments both about things that can be cognized and things that can be done.”

Bonaventure adds another distinction. Some cognizable things are “very clearly evident, such as axioms and first principles,” while others are not so clearly evident, such as the conclusion of a geometric proof based on the axioms. The same goes for cognition aimed at practice, for “things that can be done.” It is easy to perceive “Do not do to another what you do not want done to you,” but that cannot tell me what to do if I’m thinking of asking for elective surgery. The innate light of cognition is necessary but not sufficient to reach a scientific conclusion; the same goes for moral conclusions, things “which we are bound to do” that we know not by consulting moral principles but “only through additional instruction.” Hence conscience, which has to do with morality, with choices about actions, is “an innate habit” in one way, “an acquired habit” in another. The “natural light” of conscience “suffices for knowing that parents should be honored and neighbors should not be harmed,” but the species “parent” or “neighbor” doesn’t exist in me prior to sense impressions I acquire from the outside world. The innate, non-sensory cognitions (awareness of God) and the innate, non-sensory “affects” or feelings (love, fear) are what Bonaventure calls “essences.” The awareness of God and of self, love, and fear do not come to us from any acquired cognition through the “outer senses.” This is why Aristotle says that “nothing has been written in the soul”—as Locke claims—not “because there is now awareness in the soul, but because there is no picture or abstracted likeness in it.” Or, as Augustine argues, “God has implanted a natural judicatory in us,” the truth, which “is naturally impressed in the human heart.”

The third question Bonaventure addresses with respect to conscience is “Must we do everything that conscience dictates as necessary for salvation?” Advocates quote Romans 14:23, “Whatever is not of faith is sin,” drawing the conclusion that since whatever is not of faith is against conscience, “we must do everything that comes from a dictate of conscience.” They also say that laws are obligatory, binding; since “conscience if the law of our understanding,” we must obey it. They also argue that “we must do what a judge commands”; “conscience is our judge”; ergo, we must obey it. Finally, that if I do something I believe to be a mortal sin it is indeed a mortal sin because I show “contempt for God” in so acting. “If we cannot not believe what conscience dictates,” we “sin mortally if we act against it.”

Those who deny that we must do everything conscience dictates to receive salvation contend that “conscience sometimes dictates doing something that is against God.” It must then be that our conscience is mistaken, not God, and we should disobey our conscience. Further, “conscience cannot obligate to anything to which God cannot obligate, since conscience is below God.” Acting against God’s law is the true sin, not acting against conscience; “conscience does no in virtue of itself bind anything.” Nor can conscience absolve us from any obligation impressed upon us by God or indeed by any other superior authority.

Bonaventure thinks that some distinctions are in order. 

1. To what does conscience bind?
2. Does it bind to everything it dictates?
3. Is a human being “caught in perplexity when conscience dictates one thing and divine law dictates the contrary”?
4. To which we owe our obligation, when conscience and “the command of a superior” conflict with one another?

It depends. Sometimes conscience dictates “what is according to God’s law, sometimes what is aside from God’s law, sometimes what is against God’s law.” This doesn’t apply to counsels or persuasions, only commands—laws being one form of command. Conscience of course does bind when we act according to divine law. If conscience tells us to do something that has no relevance to God’s law, we may do it so long as conscience tells us to do it; Bonaventure gives the example of a conscientious urge to pick up a straw. If conscience tells us to act in violation of God’s law, however, conscience is wrong and God is right. In such instances, conscience actually “puts a human being outside the state of salvation” so long as the urge lasts. If we don’t “set conscience aside” we “sin mortally.” The dilemma is that in acting against conscience we involve ourselves in showing contempt for God, “as long as we believe, with conscience so dictating to us, that what we are doing is displeasing to God, although it may be pleasing to God” in fact. This is the point Paul the Apostle makes in Romans 14 in saying that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. 

Why? Because “God attends not only to what we do but to the spirit in which we do it.” If we act against the divine law while our conscience mistakenly tells us we are acting in obedience to it, we act “not in a good but in a bad spirit and because of this” we sin mortally. We should therefore obey the commands of our superiors, as Paul himself tells us to do, respecting the commands of emperors, not only in fear of punishment but in fear of sinning. Conscience “truly is a law but not the supreme law.” At the same time, “whenever we believe we are sinning mortally, we are sinning mortally.” It is only when we knowingly sin against divine law, including the divine law that commands us to obey human superiors, that we sin mortally. “Conscience is like a herald or messenger of God, and it does not command what it says from itself, but it commands, as it were, from God, like a herald proclaiming the edict of a king”; conscience “binds in things that can—in some way—be done well.” In those circumstances in which we “do not know how to judge maters, in that we do not know God’s law, we ought to consult those who are wiser, or, if human counsel is lacking, turn to God in prayer.”

Bonaventure next turns to synderesis, “the spark of conscience.” Should it be classified as cognitive or affective? Can it be extinguished by sin? Can it become depraved through sin?

Four arguments support the claim that synderesis should be classified as affective—a feeling, not a form of knowledge. The Church’s Gloss on Ezekiel 1:10 calls synderesis “the spirit that intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words”—as a profound feeling, not as logos. For his part, Ambrose describes men and women as beings who “naturally will the good” even as they are “subject to sin.” Will is affective, not cognitive; it motivates but it does not know. Since conscience aims at knowing, the spark of conscience, the thing that impels it to action, must be synderesis, not conscience itself. Human sinfulness or corruption stems from sensory motives—finding the apple pleasing to the eye and apparently tasty. This “rational motive part,” the thing that inspires conscience, can be “nothing except synderesis.” Finally, “just as understanding needs light for judging, so affect needs a certain heat and spiritual weight for loving rightly,” a “natural judicatory in the cognitive part of the soul.” This is conscience. In the same way, there needs “a weight in the affective part of the soul directing and inclining good.” That is synderesis.

Four arguments contradict the claim that synderesis should be classified as affective. Jerome maintains that the prophet Malachi’s adjuration to “guard your spirit” and remain faithful to your wife cannot arise from “the animal part” of the soul, which might advise one rather differently, but from the rational part, which Jerome calls synderesis. The Gloss on Luke 10:30 holds that a man’s “sense of reason” cannot be stripped from him even if he is inflicted with a severe beating; since “the sense of reason resides in reason,” and the sense of reason is synderesis, synderesis must be rational. Indeed, if synderesis is the spark of conscience, and conscience is cognitive, why would synderesis not belong to cognition instead of the affective? Finally, synderesis must be a habit by process of elimination. If it were affective, a thing “on the motive side” of the soul, it would be “either a power or a passion or a habit.” It isn’t a passion, since it is not sinful. It isn’t a habit, because a good habit is a virtue, a bad habit a vice, and synderesis is neither a virtue nor a vice. Nor is it a power, because “the power of will is related equally to any object of appetite whatever, including such objects as food and drink. Synderesis is the spark of conscience, not of hunger or thirst. What else can it be, then, but an element of cognition?

More generally, Bonaventure asks, what exactly is synderesis? How is it related to natural law and conscience? How is it related to the three “powers of the soul” identified by Plato’s Socrates: the rational, the “irascible” or thumotic, and the “concupiscible” or appetitive? Is synderesis a fourth part of the soul, “outside and over” these three powers, an eagle soaring above them all? Or is synderesis a part of one of the three powers or ‘parts’ of the soul already identified by the philosopher?

One plausible but inadequate account holds that synderesis is part of the rational part of the soul, the “higher portion,” which turns the soul toward God and is therefore always right, in contrast with the lower portion of the rational part, which turns the soul toward earthly things, toward practice, and is called conscience. Synderesis directs us to the divine law, conscience to the natural law. The problem is that, as already established, reason may err, even to the point of committing a mortal sin. Further, as Jesus commands, we must love not only God but our neighbor, who resides in this world and not yet in Heaven. 

According to “another way of speaking, we should understand motivation insofar as guided by reason to consist of two aspects, the way of nature and the way of deliberation—speculation or theory and practice; similarly, “just as free judgment consists of reason and will as they move deliberatively, conscience and synderesis relate to reason and will insofar as they move naturally. Synderesis, conscience and the natural law “always incline to good, “but free judgment “sometimes inclines to good, sometimes to evil. Synderesis is the power; conscience is the habit; natural law inheres in objects. Since conscience is cognitive, either there must be something that directs us to action other than conscience or synderesis, or that synderesis is that thing which so directs us. 

Which is it? “There is a third way of speaking”: the understanding “has a light which is a natural judicatory for it, directing the understanding in what is to be known”; affect also has “a certain natural weight directing it in what is to be sought.” The things to be sought are either morally honorable or advantageous. Similarly, cognizable things may be objects of contemplation or those relating to morals. Conscience is the name for the judicatory power that has such a habit, such a way; synderesis is the name for a power “susceptible to habituation rather than a habit.” “Power as thus habituated” urges us toward the morally good, and therefore belongs to the affective side of the soul. When we appeal to God with sighs too deep for words,” we exercise just this affective habit toward the good. Synderesis is the spark of conscience in the sense that “conscience alone,” being cognitive, “can neither move nor sting nor urge except by means of synderesis, which, as it were, urges and ignites.” “Just as reason cannot move except by means of will, so neither can conscience move except by means of synderesis.” Synderesis isn’t “a power of will in general but only will insofar as it moves naturally.”

What, then, is the relation of synderesis to natural law, as distinguished from deliberation, the realm of virtues and vices? Natural law relates to both synderesis and conscience. “We are instructed by natural law and are rightly ordered by it”—that is, the three parts of the soul attain their right order by conforming to nature, to what a human being really is. Natural law is a habit or way including both understanding and affect, conscience and synderesis. “In another sense natural law is called a collection of the precepts of natural right, and in this sense it names the object of synderesis and conscience,” with conscience dictating and synderesis inclining us either to seeking or to refusing. This latter sense Bonaventure considers the more proper meaning of natural law. Synderesis is then “an affective power insofar as it is by nature easily turned to good and tends to good,” whereas conscience is “a habit of practical understanding.” “Natural law, finally, is the object of both.” Synderesis is the word for “the affective power as its motion is natural and right,” indeed flying like an eagle “over the others,” the other parts or powers of the soul, “not mingling with them when they err but correcting them.”

But can synderesis be extinguished by sin? The Gloss on Psalm 14:1 states that some men are “devoid of every rational power.” And if you argue, as Bonaventure does, that synderesis isn’t a rational power, there is the Gloss on Psalm 56:2-3, saying that “foolish arrogance is like a numbness, when someone trusting himself neither fears nor is cautious”—a symptom of “spiritual sickness” occurring when synderesis has been extinguished. Too, “heretics endure death for the sake of their errors without any remorse of conscience,” another sign that synderesis “seems to be entirely extinct in them.” Finally, since sin can be “totally extinguished, as is clear with regard to the Blessed Virgin,” so too “synderesis can be extinguished by a multitude of sins.”

The contrary view hold that the spark of conscience wasn’t extinguished even in Cain, “a great sinner.” Augustine also testifies that there is no shamefulness “so vicious that it makes one lose all sense of what is morally honorable.” Synderesis “is naturally inherent in us,” unalienable; vice “does not destroy the last vestiges of nature.” Finally, even the damned suffer “remorse of conscience,” which can only be ignited by synderesis; indeed, “this remorse is especially intense in them,” one of the worst torments they suffer.

Bonaventure answers that synderesis can be impeded temporarily but not extinguished because “it is something natural” to us. The “vain and fictive joy” of heretics, who “believe that they are dying for the piety of faith when they are dying for the impiety of error; “the wantonness of pleasure” whereby “a human being is sometimes so absorbed by a carnal act that there is no place for remorse” or for reason, either; “the hardness of obstinacy,” seen in those “who are so far confirmed in evil that they can never be inclined to good”: all these conditions of the soul finally earn the rebuke of conscience, sparked by synderesis—a rebuke “especially vigorous in the damned,” for whom it comes too late. The damned retain their human nature, and with it synderesis, now acting in them “as punishment.” Although “synderesis can be impeded in its act yet never universally extinguished, permanently and with respect to every act.” Adam’s fall did not extinguish his humanity, or ours.

But, if not extinguished, can synderesis become depraved through sin? Evidently so, some say, inasmuch as there are “shameless sinners” in whom synderesis has been “overthrown.” The Gloss on Jeremiah 2:16 explains, “A malignant spirit reaches all the way from the lower members to the top of the head when the sickness of defiance corrupts the mind’s chaste height,” which is “synderesis itself.” Since conscience can err, so synderesis must be deviant at such times. Sin can rule the soul at the same time as synderesis remains within it; therefore, synderesis can become depraved through sin.

Those who deny that synderesis can become depraved through sin recall the Biblical comparison of synderesis to an eagle, which soars above the other three parts of the soul, correcting them when they err. Even when I do what I do not want to do (Romans 7:16), synderesis is what tells me I do wrong. “The act of synderesis always reacts against fault, even in the worst sinners,” and so cannot be said to have been depraved, though they are. And finally, we know that even the worst sinners sometimes repent. While there is life there is hope. “But the rightness that adheres most tightly is rightness by way of nature, and this is synderesis”; “therefore, it does not seem that it can become depraved through fault.”

Bonaventure is especially concerned with answering the claim that sin corrupts the highest part of the human mind. The argument claims that “the higher portion of reason has two ways of moving: either as it is turned toward God and is ruled and directed by eternal laws, and, in this way, sin does not exist in it; or insofar as it is turned toward lower powers, and in this way it takes from them occasion for deviation and can become depraved by sin.” He replies that “synderesis of itself always urges to good and reacts against sin.” Sin is a deliberate act of the will, not an act of the will “as it exists by nature or moves naturally.” What happens when we sin is rather like what happens when a good ruler is overthrown by rebels. He is still good, but the rebels overpower him. “For a lord’s presiding depends on two things, namely, the rectitude of the one presiding and the submissiveness of the one serving.” Synderesis “of itself is always right, yet because reason and will frequently hinder it (reason through the blindness of error and will by the obstinacy of impiety) synderesis is said to be overthrown, in that its effect and its presiding over the other deliberative powers is repelled and broken through their resistance.” For its part, conscience “is always right when it stays on the level of the universal and moves in a single direction,” but when it “descends to particulars and makes comparisons it can become erroneous, because here it mingles with the acts of deliberative reason.” Bonaventure gives as his example the adherence of Jews to the laws commanding circumcision and the avoidance of certain foods. They are right in believing “that God should be obeyed,” a prompting of the “natural judicatory” of conscience. They are mistaken, he claims, in those particulars, which are particular applications of that prompting. In this as in all conscientious mistakes, “it is not synderesis” that is “turned aside, although conscience errs.” Another way of putting this is that synderesis is a natural power, naturally habituated. “Nature, taken by itself, always moves rightly.” But conscience is not only a natural but also an acquired habit, and acquired habits “can be either right or deviant in character,” right or erroneous. Free judgment is under synderesis, not the other way around. 

 

Note

1. In this, Bonaventure follows Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094a, where the philosopher writes that “awareness” of the highest good must “have great weight in one’s life,” that is, in our choices and practices.

John of Paris: On Royal and Papal Power. J. A. Watt translation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002.

 

Christianity posed a problem to the world—quite intendedly so, as its Founder insisted. He testified to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God, a new regime (though arguably the oldest) challenging all existing regimes, beginning with the Roman Empire. At the same time, the citizens (or perhaps subjects) of this new regime were commanded to obey the regimes of this world, which did not wield the sword in vain. Given the new regime’s stern means of enforcing its own way of life—eternal damnation—it too wielded a mighty sword, however. And its purposes might easily conflict with the purposes of all other regimes, which worshipped gods the new regime despised as demons. That the two swords might clash was seen, horribly, in the Founder’s crucifixion. That they would continue to clash was guaranteed when the new regime’s ecclesia or assembly acquired substantial property controlled by the assembly’s monarch, reigning in Rome.

Jean Quidort “of Paris” considered this religio-political dilemma in the early 1300s. In his excellent introduction, J. A. Watt recounts the controversy which had arisen between King Philip IV of France (“Philip the Fair”) and Pope Boniface VIII. For nearly a century, the Roman Catholic Church had denied the right of secular power to tax church property without the pope’s permission. The penalty for so doing was excommunication; if prolonged until death, excommunication meant damnation, according to Catholic doctrine. Philip was the latest French king to chafe under this proscription, needing revenues for his war against Edward I of England, who had also taxed church property and outlawed clergy who protested. Philip enraged Boniface when he arrested the “loudmouthed” and seditious bishop of Pamiers in October of 1301 on charges of treason against France, to which the royal chancellor soon added charges of simony, heresy, and blasphemy. “The issue at stake was sovereignty,” a word deriving from the Latin superanus, meaning “any elevated place” whether physically, morally, or politically on high. “Who was then ‘souverain es choses temporeix‘ in France?” 

In the event, Boniface was seized by the king’s agent, Guillaume de Nogaret; the pope was tried by the French parlement and died six weeks later. That didn’t stop the judicial proceeding, which continued until March 1310, with the predictable outcome: the pope was judged guilty, the king’s right to tax church lands affirmed. Yet while force majeure combined with a legal judgment settled the question in practice in that time and place, it scarcely addressed its theoretical dimension. A Dominican who had written a defense of Thomas Aquinas, John of Paris defended the king’s stance with arguments from both natural law and Scripture. 

As a Christian Aristotelian might well do, John begins by exercising the virtue of moderation, situating himself between two extreme doctrines. The Waldensians, he writes, deny that popes have any power in temporal affairs or any legal right to temporal wealth, charging that “when the church accepted Constantine’s donation” of Rome and its environs for its capital on earth “it became Roman and no longer the true church of God.” The Herodians make the opposite claim, that Christ’s kingship “was of the human kind” and, as a consequence, “the pope, in so far as he stands in Christ’s place on earth has a power over the properties of princes and barons as well as cognizance and jurisdiction of them” owing to the pope’s receipt of “primary authority, derived directly from God.” By contrast, “the prince” “has his power mediately from the pope.” According to Herodias, “other prelates and princes,” in contrast to the pope, “are not lords but guardians, agents, stewards.” 

John demurs. “Truth lies midway” between these claims. While “it is not wrong for prelates to have lordship and jurisdiction in temporalities,” this power “is not theirs because of what they are or because they are vicars of Christ and successors of the Apostles”; rather, they have power over worldly things “in virtue of of the concession and permission of rulers if they are so endowed through the piety of rulers,” like Constantine, “or receive them from some other source.”

John defines royal government in Aristotelian terms, as “the government of a perfect or self-sufficient community by one man for the sake of the common good.” [1] As a community, it differs from animal herds, which govern themselves by “natural instinct” and from human beings “who live a solitary life,” governing themselves “by reason.” Aristotle had distinguished political life from that of animals and of gods; as a Christian, John cannot use the example of ‘gods,’ and so changes it to solitary rational beings, who might be human or the one God. Self-sufficiency differentiates the political community from sub-political communities, especially families, which Aristotle regards as incapable of living a fully human life on their own. The common good differentiates the royal regime from the bad regimes—tyranny first of all, but also oligarch and democracy—and “by one man” distinguishes that regime from the good regimes consisting of a few or many rulers—aristocracy and “polycratia,” John’s term for Aristotle’s politeia or ‘mixed’ regime. Government so defined “has its roots in the natural law and the law of nations,” which consist both of human needs and of human reason. 

As Aristotle teaches, “man is a social or political and social animal,” and men outside the political community” do “not live as men according to what is proper to their nature,” remaining stunted, somewhat bestial. Political communities evince a certain ruling order or regime, which may or not conduce to the fulfillment of human nature. Of those that do, the good regimes, John prefers royal government. “Government of a community is more effective when conducted by one man according to virtue, than when exercised by many or few virtuous men,” for four reasons. First, “virtue is more united and therefore the stronger in one ruler than when divided among many”; second, “there can be no community where unity and concord is missing,” and “the single ruler better upholds that unity of the community,” so long as he is virtuous; third, “a single ruler has a sharper eye for the common good than many rulers can have even if they are ruling according to virtue” because he can more readily consider the community as a whole, standing farther apart from particular interests than the few or the many; finally, “in the law of nature all government is reduced to overall unity just as in any body composed of a mixture of parts there is one element which is master over the others,” as the soul rules the “heterogeneous human body.” 

Where, then, does the priesthood come from? Unlike Aristotle, Christians insist that “man is not merely ordered to such good as nature can bestow on him, which is to live virtuously, but that he is also ultimately ordered to a supernatural end, which is life eternal.” Given the superiority of the royal regime, “it follows that there must be some one person who will have the direction of all to this end.” Were it “possible to achieve this end simply through human nature,” the king would rightly take this function, but since a human being “cannot secure eternal life through purely human virtue” the ruler in question can only be God—that is, “Jesus Christ, who in making men sons of God has brought them towards eternal life.” Christ was not only a wise king (as attested in the Book of Jeremiah 23:5) but a priest. Priests offer sacrifices to divinity, reconciling men with divinity; that is their function. Unique among priests, Christ “offered himself as a sacrifice” for the purpose of removing “the universal obstacle,” sin, between men and God. “For this [Christ] is [the] true priest.” Christ as embodied in human form died on the Cross and subsequently awakened from death, returning to His Father in Heaven. He left behind His ecclesia, His church; this assembly of human beings needed “to establish certain remedies through which this general benefit” of human salvation from sin “might be applied in some way.” “These remedies are the sacraments of the Church,” which are physical embodiments of Christ’s “spiritual power,” embodiments “placed on the same plane as their principal agent, the incarnate Word, to whom they owe their spiritual power.” Absence the physical presence of Christ on earth, “it was necessary for him to institute ministers who would administer these sacraments to men,” conferrers of “sacred things” because “they are leaders in the sacred order” who “teach sacred truths” as “intermediaries between God and man” in action and word or argument. “The priesthood is the spiritual power, given by Christ to the ministers of his church, of administering the sacraments to the faithful.” As in the political communities, so in the regime of God there should be “one supreme head,” who is “the Roman pope, successor of Peter,” responsible for maintaining the unity of God’s assembly when “diversity of opinion” threatens to “divide the Church, whose unity demands unity of belief.” 

“Therefore it is by God’s decision that there is a subordination of church ministers to one head. But it does not follow that the ordinary faithful are commanded by divine law to be subject in temporalities to any single supreme monarch.” The world is too diverse for that. Climates, languages, and conditions vary around the world; “in order to live well together” the nations need to “choose the sort of rulers appropriate for the sort of community in question.” Royal government or kingship may be the best of the best regimes, but that regime may not be best for a particular community; as Aristotle teaches, circumstances count when you get down to cases. Further, “one man alone cannot rule the world in temporal affairs as can one alone in spiritual affairs,” as the sanction of “spiritual power” is verbal, a matter of the Word of God, whereas “secular power…cannot so easily extend its sword so far, since it is wielded by hand.” In keeping with the physicality of temporal communities, worldly regimes consist of property owners; “each is master of his own property as acquired through his own industry,” unlike ecclesiastical property, which “was given to the community as a whole.” Finally, “all the faithful are united in the one universal faith, without which there is no salvation,” but that doesn’t mean that “all the faithful should be united in one political community,” as “what is virtuous”—as distinguished from what is salvific—in “one community is not virtuous in another, as is true also for individuals, of whom the Philosopher speaks in Ethics Book II, that one thing may be too little for one man and too much for another.” Not only the philosopher Aristotle but the Christian Augustine holds “that a society is better and more peacefully ruled when the authority of each realm was confined within its own frontiers,” that “the cause of the Roman empire was its ambition to dominate and the injurious provocation of others,” leading to its cataclysmic fall.

Although the papal monarchy is superior in dignity to that of any secular monarch—salvation being even more important than the happiness virtue enables and, as Aristotle himself argues, “what is concerned with the final end is more complete and more worthy and gives direction to what is concerned with an inferior end”—it “does not follow” that “the priestly is a more dignified function than the royal” in “every respect.” “The power of neither of these derives from the other but rather both from some superior power.” That superior power isn’t hard to find in the Bible. “Both take their origin immediately from one supreme power, namely God,” and “hence the inferior is not subject to the superior in all things but only in those matters in which the supreme power has subordinated the inferior to the superior.” No one would claim that because a teacher of letter or of morals “guides a household to a nobler end, knowledge of truth, than its doctor,” the guide to bodily health, that “the physician should be subject to the teacher in the preparation of his medicines.” The rulers of Rome have consented to the authority of the priests, but this local “custom” need not, should not, be universalized to all cities, all political communities. Rather, the Roman dispensation symbolized “the greater excellence of the priesthood of the future,” when the greatest and truest Priest will return to rule a new Heaven and a new earth. A similar anticipation may be seen in France. “Because in the future it was to be in France that the religion of the Christian priesthood was to flourish best, divine providence ensured that among the Gauls the pagan priests called druids gave definition to Gallic life,” just as the Roman papacy now anticipates the rule of the supreme Priest.

Because Constantine donated Rome to the Catholic Church, it belongs to the Church as a whole, not to any one person. The bishop of Rome has the right to ordain its use; he wouldn’t be entitled (for example) to sell it. He is the “steward” of Church properties, not their “lord.” What is more, just as a monastic community may “depose its abbot” so the Church “might do the same to its bishop, if it has been established that he has squandered the property of the monastery or church and that he has broken faith in taking for his private gain what was for the common good.” “Even less” is the pope lord of lay property; “nor is he its steward, unless perhaps in some extreme need of the church,” such as “pagan invasion or some such disaster”— one “so great and obvious” that he “could demand tithes and fixed contributions from individual members of the faithful, though these should be according to their means”—or “the common spiritual good”—such as the need to pay for additional assistant priests in a growing parish when revenues have not risen commensurate with the increase of spiritual services to the parishioners. The penalty for non-compliance is “ecclesiastical censure,” not jail time or some other bodily or material punishment. This is because lay property isn’t granted to the community as a whole, “but is acquired by individual people through their own skill, labor and diligence, and individuals, as individuals, have right and power over it and valid lordship,” entitled thereby to “order his own and dispose, administer, hold or alienate it as he wishes, so long as he causes no injury to anyone else, since he is lord.” 

Although Christ as God had lordship over all men and their property, Christ “as man did not have it.” And even if He did, he didn’t “pass it on to Peter.” Christ is king in three senses: He is king of all creation; He is king of men because “what he did in the flesh leads us to membership of a kingdom, not indeed of this world” but of “the kingdom of heaven”; and He is head of “all the faithful,” who, “in so far as they are his members, one with Christ the head through faith and charity, are kings and priests” in their own, lesser, right. But Christ “as man” is not king. As man, He was poor, His kingdom not of this world, and he exercised “no authority or judicial power over temporalities,” giving instead simply an “example of virtue.” Therefore, no Christian priest “may claim to be Christ’s vicar” respecting temporalities. When He drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, when He sent his disciples to fetch an ass and a colt, when He exorcised demons by forcing them into pigs who hurled themselves into the sea—all violations of property rights if performed by a man—He exercised “authority as God,” not as man. Those who argue that a Christian convert subjects himself to the pope in property matters “in the same way as men are subject to their kings” unwittingly imply “that Christ had changed his kingdom into an earthly one.” It is rather that Christ rules by faith, governing “the hearts of men and not their property.”

Even if Christ did claim or exercise jurisdiction over lay property as a man, he didn’t “hand it on to Peter.” It is true that Christ functioned as head of the Church “according to his human nature, not only according to his divinity.” But in anticipation of His death and resurrection, He gave His spiritual authority to Peter, leaving His corporal authority to Caesar, who already had “received it directly from God.” He didn’t even confer all spiritual authority to Peter, giving him the power to forgive sins but not to “dismiss” them, to wipe them off an individual’s moral balance sheet altogether. Only He made the supreme priestly sacrifice by His work on the Cross.

The division between spiritual and temporal authority comports with the way God has ordered creation. “The more a thing has perfect being, the more its being is distinct.” John means that, for example, when God created animals, and in particular man, “male and female he created them”; hermaphroditism is “an error of nature,” an imperfection whereby the organs of generativity are confused, indistinct. Or, in the poorly ordered household as described by Aristotle, “one person is occupied by many tasks.” There is no adequate division of labor. God has so ordered His Church that it attends only to its proper task; “it is inappropriate that one person alone should be entrusted with such diverse duties as the priestly function and the royal lordship.” In the words of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to the priesthood, “Your jurisdiction is over sin not possessions.” thus “the pope has neither the power of both swords nor any jurisdiction in temporal affairs unless it has been granted to him out of piety by a secular ruler,” such as the Emperor Constantine. “To say,” as some do, “that royal power came first directly from God and afterwards from the pope is quite ludicrous” because royal office “comes indisputably from God” and God gave Peter no “power of conferring the royal office.” 

John devotes the remainder of his book to listing 42 arguments advanced “by those who maintain the contrary position” to the one he has taken and then, Thomas-like, responding to them. He groups the argument in seven clusters of six arguments each. The first cluster consists primarily of Scripturally-based arguments, the most telling of which derives from Matthew 16:19, which states, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” The second cluster consists of citations from the Canon Law, as when the pope is empowered to depose an emperor or to hear appeals from a secular judge. The arguments in the third cluster attempt to establish that the superiority of spiritual over temporal matters means that spiritual authority encompasses temporal authority: “Who can do the greater thing can do the lesser,” and “since therefore the pope can command in spiritual matters, so he can in temporal matters.” Fourth-cluster arguments purport to find in spiritual things the causes of temporal things, “deduc[ing] from this argument that it is the pope who gives to the prince the laws according to which they exercise or should exercise their jurisdiction, nor can a secular prince receive law from any other source without its being papally approved.” The arguments in the fifth cluster center on justice, that “without true justice a republic cannot be ruled and that there cannot be true justice in a republic when Christ is not its ruler”; therefore, it is reasoned, the temporal sword may be wielded justly “by the hand of the soldier, but at the priest’s signal and the emperor’s command.” The arguments in the sixth cluster relate temporal and spiritual “as means to end,” saying that since the pope wields spiritual power the king’s temporal power must serve the pope’s purposes. The seventh cluster consists of ‘real world’ arguments. Since “the pope must be self-sufficient as regards both types of religious life, active and contemplative,” and since “he cannot be self-sufficient for the active life unless he has direct and meaningful power over temporalities,” and moreover because “the clergy are more vigorous in reasoning and intellect than the laity,” clergymen generally and the pope above all must take the lead over kings. 

John begins his reply with some “general ideas.” Aristotle observes that “nature does not fall short in what is essential; when it gives a power, it gives it only with all aids sufficient to the proper exercise of that power in the manner appropriate for its operation.” God “is more perfect than nature”: in giving “spiritual power to priests, he gives them those means necessary for its proper execution.” There are five such means: sanctification and consecration of the sacraments (the means of action); correct instruction and knowledge of the sacraments through doctrine (a means of the mind); “coercion of those who despise the sacraments” through “fear of legal punishment” (a means of enforcement); “due differentiation and orderly arrangement of those who administer the sacraments” (the means of ordination); and provision of what is necessary for supporting the lives of the ministers so ordained (a means of funding). Christ Himself also granted six powers to the Apostles and “therefore” to the ministers of the Church, powers whereby these means can be enacted: the power of consecration (“Do this in remembrance of me”); the power of administering the sacraments (the power of the keys to the Kingdom, especially the forgiveness of sins); the authority of the apostolate seen in preaching; the judicial power “to coerce in the external forum by which sins are corrected through fear of punishment,” namely, anathema; the power of establishing ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the power to receive the materials means of whatever may be needed to “maintain a suitable standard of living” for the clergy. The Apostles received “these six” powers from Christ and “no others” except the power to work miracles which bishops and priests today no longer have, “for the confirmation of our faith is so manifest as no longer to need confirmation by miracles.” 

In his thirteenth, central chapter John draws the conclusion from the previous chapter, announcing in his title, “Prelates of the Church have neither lordship nor jurisdiction in temporal affairs by virtue of the powers granted to them nor on their account are princes subject to them in temporal affairs.” The first three powers (consecration, forgiveness, and preaching) are obviously spiritual. “The nub of the difficulty lies in the fourth power,” the judicial power. John proposes two “keys” to understanding what Christ means by this power of coercion. His disciples ask Him what they should do if one brother in Christ sins against another. Jesus tells them to confirm the charge with witnesses and to admonish him. “If he refuses to listen to you, tell it to the Church. And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector”—that is, an outsider. The consequence of this judgment will “bind,” will be authoritative, in earth and in heaven. The penalty on earth is exile from the Church; Christ makes no mention of any other punishment. Further, “sin can be committed in temporal matters in two ways”: by error respecting doctrine, obviously a matter for an “ecclesiastical judge” only; and by “aiming to secure another’s property for oneself or making threats to do so,” a matter for a civil judge under the civil laws. Property laws exist to “ensure that property is put to those proper human uses which would be neglected if everyone held everything in common”; indeed, “if things were held unreservedly in common, it would not be easy to keep the peace among men.” As Augustine teaches, by “natural law there is equal freedom and common possession for everyone in everything,” but once sin was introduced into the world only property law was left to prevent men from ruining one another. That property law was initially introduced by God (“Thou shalt not steal”) but the Roman emperors also upheld it. Ecclesiastical law, by contrast, pertains to the thing all Christians do hold in common, namely, the Holy Spirit. As Bernard of Clairvaux advised Pope Eugenius, “Your power is not in possessions but in hearts.” As John puts it, “both the pope and emperor have universal jurisdiction, though the one has spiritual jurisdiction and the other temporal.” The pope may therefore excommunicate a sinner, including an emperor but that is the limit of his authority; he may request the “barons and peers of the kingdom” to correct the offender, but no more. Similarly, if a pope himself becomes “delinquent in spiritual matters,” the cardinals should first warn him; if they can’t remove him “on their own,” they may request that the emperor do so. “This is the way two swords are bound to lend help to each other in that common charity which united the members of the Church.” 

Chapters 14 through 20 are given over to refutations of the forty-two arguments for papal supremacy in temporal affairs stated in Chapter 11. The first cluster of six arguments, based on Scripture, tend toward what John calls “mystical exposition of the text”—symbolical readings, such as an interpretation of a passage describing the moon as reflecting the light of the sun as representations of the emperor and the pope, respectively. No such reading can “be accepted unless a proof is found from some other passage of Scripture, because mystical exegesis does not proceed by proof.” In this instance, without any more textual explanation, “moon” and “sun” might be said to represent any pair of persons or of things, a procedure limited only by the ingenuity of the reader. And even granting the symbolic reading, it doesn’t prove what it’s said to prove, inasmuch as “the moon has a virtue proper to itself, given to it by God, which it does not receive from the sun, by which it can cause” sublunary effects other than those caused by the sun. 

The second cluster of arguments, drawn from Canon Law, supposedly entitling a pope to depose an emperor, derive from “de facto situations, being concerned with what has in fact been done, rather than with what ought to have been done.” To put it in our terms, they derive from precedent. But precedent has no validity if it contradicts the letter of ‘constitutional’ law. Compared to laws set down in the Bible, Canon Law resembles mere statutory law. Further, the supposed precedents contradict one another, as “there are many arguments concerned with past practice which can be used to demonstrate the contrary of this alleged papal power.”

No argument in the third cluster, which consists of arguments maintaining that spiritual power encompasses temporal power, withstands the test of logic. For example, it is true that a pope may denounce an emperor for sin, but “denunciation does not give the pope jurisdiction.” “If it did, all civil jurisdiction would be utterly obliterated,” contra the clear teaching of Christ. And true, the pope’s power is greater than the emperor’s power, but that doesn’t mean that it extends to control over the emperor’s sphere of authority. “The orders or genus are different: if my father can generate a man, it does not follow that he can generate a dog nor that if a priest can absolve from sin, he can absolve from a money debt.” The power to generate a man is more impressive than the power to generate a dog, but its superiority in that regard does not entail the lesser power. In the fourth cluster’s attempts to find spiritual causes for temporal things, John finds another ‘category mistake.’ “In a well-ordered household it is not he who teaches letters and morals, a spiritual function who appoints the physician; both are appointed by the head of the household”; similarly, “the whole world is a single community under God as its supreme power who appoints both pope and prince.” “In so far as a king is concerned to be a faithful Christian,” the pope “directs him in faith but not in government.” And if the prince proves a tyrant? God works in mysterious ways for the spiritual benefit of His people: “tyranny of princes can exist for punishment of sinners,” or a means of “prov[ing] the endurance of subjects, or to force them to take refuge with God who alone can change the hearts of kings for the better.” These tests have their limits, however, as one must not “fall into the error of Herod who thought fearfully that Christ would destroy the earthly kingdom.”

Against fifth-cluster arguments justifying the superiority of papal power over temporal power, John replies that “moral virtues can be complete without theological virtues.” This leads John to reject ‘papist’ reading of Luke 22:38 on the “two swords.” “There is nothing here except a certain allegorical reading from which no convincing argument can be drawn.” As with the symbolic interpretations put forward in the first cluster of arguments, “allegory is insufficient to prove any proposition unless some clear authority can be produced from another source to substantiate it.” In this passage, John suggests, the two swords refer not to the royal and papal powers but to the Old and New Testaments, or perhaps “to the sword of the Word and the sword of impending persecution.” And even if it be granted that the conventional reading of the “two swords” is correct, the text doesn’t say that “they are to be Peter’s or any other Apostle’s, for Peter did not touch one of them, namely the secular sword, since it was not his.” And Christ told him to put even the spiritual sword into the scabbard, “for certainly an ecclesiastical judge ought not to use his spiritual sword precipitately for fear it might be despised, but only after much consideration and in circumstances of great necessity”—a cautionary monition to any pope, and to popes inclined to emulate Boniface, in particular.

The sixth cluster of arguments, consisting of claims that secular power serve only as means to spiritual ends, John follows Aristotle’s treatment of the relation between the moral and theoretical virtues, rather than (for example) Augustine’s more Platonic integration of human motivation under the rubric of love, whereby he denies the morality of any but those virtues founded on caritas. “The Lord appointed a king for the Jewish people at the same time as the priesthood or even before.” And even this king ruled in a mixed regime, not in a true, purely royal, regime, and the mixed regime’s aristocracy “rule[d] according to virtue” without the guidance of priests. Here, John shifts his earlier argument in favor of monarchy, recalling Aristotle’s teaching in Book III of the Politics, that monarchy “joined with aristocracy and democracy…is better than the pure form, because, in a mixed regime, all have some share in government,” and “through this sharing, the peace of the community is preserved” because “everybody loves a government of this type and watches over it.” John goes so far as to commend this regime to the Church itself. “It would certainly be the best constitution for the Church if, under one pope, many were chosen by and form each province, so that all would participate in some way in the government of the Church.” Further, a pure monarchy “easily degenerates into tyranny” because “perfect virtue is to be found in few.” God eventually shifted Israel’s regime to a pure monarchy at the request of the Israelites, but only “as if in displeasure…because they were rejecting a regime more beneficial to them.” Surely the papacy should not be organized in a manner appropriate to the Israelites in their condition of moral decline.

To the arguments in the seventh cluster, the ones based on a sort of hard-nosed realism, John reverses the reality. It is the prince who must, realistically, be “permitted to withstand the abuse of the spiritual sword as best he may, even by the use of the material sword, especially when abuse of the spiritual sword conduces to the mischief of the community whose care rests on the king”—as when a pope claims revenues needed to pay for defensive wars against foreign powers, whether pagan or Christian. “Otherwise, [the prince] would be ‘bearing the sword in vain.'” John defines “spiritual” as something whose “relationship to the divine spirit is through causality or concomitance”; for example, “the sacraments of the Church are spiritual as is their administration, because they contain grace and cause it.” Popes are entitled to tithe Catholic Christians for such a purpose; “it is by virtue of spiritual function that right to tithe is held.” As to the claim that clergy excel the laity in “intellectual power,” “if this is so, they ought not therefore dominate in everything but only in the higher and the better, namely, in spiritual matters.”

In his final five chapters, John turns first to a consideration of the donation of Constantine and to what it entitles popes to do. “Some people” claim that “by reason of this gift, the pope is emperor and lord of the world and that he can appoint kings”—for example, the king of France—and “get rid of them like an emperor.” To this, John replies that Constantine donated one province of his empire to the Church, and it was Italy, not France. What is more, “the donation was displeasing to God,” according to no less an authority than St. Jerome. Civil and doctrinal disorder followed in its wake. As far as France is concerned, although the Gauls submitted had to the Roman yoke, the Franks never did, in keeping with the meaning of their name, ‘fierce.’ And is the Roman Empire, even in its current iteration as the Holy Roman Empire, a sacrosanct thing? Even if the pope does rightly rule it, will it last? Hardly so, as “it seems to be quite expressly stated in Scripture that the Roman empire should fail just like any other.” And popes themselves are not entitled to perpetual rule. A pope can resign or be pushed out for good cause: If he proves “totally unsuitable or useless, or if some impeding condition such as insanity occurs later, he ought to seek release from the people or from the college of cardinals, which in this case stands in place of the whole clergy and people.” Were this not so, “what was instituted in charity would be warring against charity, should he continue to rule injuriously, causing evil and confusion in the church and imperiling his own soul.” God bestows the papacy, but “through human cooperation.” It is “in a certain degree way natural” that “some men have jurisdiction over others,” but that jurisdiction is both conferred and “may be taken away” by the consent of the governed. A pope’s priesthood is permanent, but his ‘popehood’ is not. He took an oath of office when he was elevated to the papacy; if he violates that oath he may rightly be removed. 

Some fearful souls worry that a book like this should not exist, making as it does “judgment about these issues concerning the pope.” To this John replies in proto-Kantian fashion, ‘Dare to know’: “I believe it not blameworthy to speak the truth”; in fact, “ignorance is dangerous,” not truth.

 

 

 

Note

1. He later refines this definition, writing that a regime is royal “only when whoever rules it does so according to laws he has himself made,” in distinction not only from tyranny but from what would later be called a ‘constitutional monarchy,” where the monarch “rules not according to his own will but according to laws which the citizens and others have made”—what Aristotle calls a ‘mixed regime’ or what John calls “a civil or political constitution, not a monarchical one.”

 

The Book of Ruth

It makes sense that the Book of Ruth follows the Book of Judges. As Aristotle understands, families, not individuals, form the foundation of political communities. Unlike individuals, mated pairs generate the next generation of humans; pregnant females and newborn children need care; therefore, if human individuals were truly isolated from one another, the human race would disappear. Families eventually form tribes and tribes then may form political communities, although not necessarily. To this day, there are Afghanistans—places where tribes count more than country, where a ‘nation-state’ cannot hold together without the powerful bond of tyranny. Just as families and tribes may coalesce into political communities for the sake of self-defense and prosperity, so political communities may dissolve back into tribes or even families, often with civil war resulting. In the Book of Judges, readers see Israelites withdrawing into their households, into family life. 

More, Ruth’s descendant, David, will found a new regime in Israel, the monarchy mentioned as it were longingly at the end of the Book of Judges. More still, Ruth is an ancestor of Jesus, who will found still another monarchic regime, one far more extensive than David’s.

It therefore also makes sense that a major theme of the Book of Ruth is chesed—loyalty, that is to say attachment. In a factionalized, civil-warring society attachments need to be reestablished. Although families are the elementary human forms of attachment, the attachment of God and Man predates it. Without the right establishment of both of these attachments, both of these loyalties, the political community cannot survive, much less flourish. 

“Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled that there was a famine in the land” (1:1). The regime of judges combined what we would call ‘executive’ with judicial powers. These rulers had failed; each person did what was right in his own eyes—dissolving political society not merely into tribes or even families but individuals—a derangement indeed. “A certain man of Bethlehem-judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons” (1:2). Famine may arise from drought or some other natural cause, but it may also result from misrule. Famine compels families to migrate, disrupting the lives of those lands to which they migrate. Moab is hill-country; Elimilech (which means “my God is King”), Naomi (meaning lovely, delightful, pleasant), their sons Mahlon (sickly), and Chilion (failing) are Ephrathites, that is, from Ephrath, the old name for Jerusalem, not far from Jerusalem. Soon after their arrival, Naomi was widowed, left with two sons, who married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. Although marrying a non-Israelite was not forbidden, neither was it propitious. True to their names, Mahlon and Chilion died ten years later, leaving Naomi without protection from the men in her family. Separated from Israel because a famine threatened the family from starvation, Naomi’s husband and sons were separated from her by death. 

Naomi then heard “that the LORD had visited His people” on the land He promised them, “giving them bread” (1:6). She returns to her people, likely expecting better security for herself. More, she is loyal to her people, to God, and to His regime in the Promised Land. She tells her daughters-in-law, “Go, return each to [your] mother’s house: the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead, and with me. The LORD grant you that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” (1:8-9). Invoking her authority as a mother, now the head of the household, she mingles her command with a blessing. The word translated as “kindly” is chesed, the same word for loyalty. Loyalty is indeed a form of kindness, a loving attachment and often a just one. It is the lifeblood of union, whether in a family, a tribe, or a political community. True loyalty intends the good of the other person. Naomi regards God as Lord, as Ruler, and evidently has taught her daughters-in-law about him; perhaps as a result of this teaching, the relationships in her household have been Godlike—kind, loyal, unselfish, ‘agapic’ as the New Testament Greek will say. To “find rest” was what Naomi, her husband, and her sons had wanted—homes, as one says in English. They are much more likely to find husbands in Moab than in Israel. With no men remaining in her own family, Naomi blesses them in parting with them; she would dissolve her family completely, but with chesed, mindful of the good of the two younger women. 

But the women don’t want to leave her. They prefer this family, however broken, to their own Moabite people. This bespeaks the attraction of God’s regime; foreigners prefer it to their own, having experienced its animating principle, chesed, a loyalty based not upon bloodlines but upon the spiritual union of human beings with and under God. That is, the love of God can overcome the love of one’s own, as indeed Jesus will command when he tells His disciples that he brings not peace but a sword, a sword that may sunder ordinary family bonds, the natural sentiments of households.

Naomi tells the women to think again. “Why will you go with me? Are there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands?” (1:11). What is more, there will never be any more sons for her, “for I am too old to have a husband,” and even if I could find one you would need to wait a long time before they were of marriageable age! (1:12). “No, my daughters, for it grieves me much for your sakes that the hand of the LORD is gone out against me” (1:13). She thinks that God must be angry with her, possibly (as some commentators speculate) because she didn’t return to Israel as soon as her husband died. Whatever the reason, she is neither selfish nor sentimental but reasonable, considering the good of the women; Matthew Henry supposes that she tested them to discover if they truly accepted the rule of God. If so, Ruth passed the test: “They lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her” (1:14). Orpah will now obey Naomi’s advisory, “going back unto her people and unto her gods” (1:15). But Ruth will not go, saying, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me” (1:16-17). In response to the chesed  of Naomi, Ruth reciprocates with equal or even greater chesed, “steadfastly minded to go with her” (1:18).  She will change the regime under which she had been raised, loving her own but counting her mother-in-law and the God under whose laws Naomi counts as her mother her own, now. “There will I be buried”; in the ancient world, this is the most crucial of commitments, as the land of one’s own father, one’s own god, was regarded as sacred ground. She calls the God of Israel “Lord,” not only “God,’ the One she would be ruled by. For her part, Naomi now sees all of this in Ruth. The steadfastly-minded person is the one capable of kind loyalty, animated by the spirit of the regime of Israel. She cannot again marry a son of Naomi, but she might marry an Israelite and begin a new family, under God. (1)

Upon returning to Bethlehem, Naomi finds that her people remember her, although they are not sure if it really is her. The twenty years since she left have been long and hard. “And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me” (1:20). I am no longer ‘Pleasant’ or “Lovely’; I am Mara, ‘bitter.’ Here it’s not God’s kind lordship but his power that she recalls; God is sadday, almighty, a word one commentator recalls as especially common in the Book of Job. Naomi is the female equivalent of Job. “I went out full,” with a husband and two sons, “and the LORD has brought me home again empty: why then do you call me Naomi, seeing the LORD has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me” (1:21). As Ruth may or may not know, God is also called sadday when He is founding or re-founding His regime, as for example when he appears to Abraham, commanding him to “walk before Me and be perfect” (Genesis 28:3), and when he changed the name of Jacob to ‘Israel.’ Any political founding requires unanswerable might on the part of the founder. Loving kindness is not enough. Jesus Himself, who founds a regime upon loving kindness, upon self-sacrificing concern for the good of His subjects, depends upon His Father’s might to resurrect Him. Without that might, he would be merely another ‘idealist’—as an acquaintance of mine once put it, “a nice reform rabbi, better than most.”

And she has returned with a daughter-in-law who is no Israelite in the eyes of the Israelites but “Ruth the Moabitess” (I:22). What will Ruth do here? How can she find acceptance in her new regime, however loyal she may be to it, and to Naomi? 

As it happens, “Naomi had a kinsman of her husband, a mighty man of wealth” named Boaz (2:1). Deferring to her mother-in-law, Ruth asks permission to go to the field and to gather grain left behind by the harvesters. As seen in Leviticus 19:9, the law of God ordained that a farmer shall not scour his field for these leftovers, leaving them instead for the poor, especially for poverty-stricken widows. The law of God, itself an act of God’s graciousness, commands graciousness from the landowner. Laws derive from the regime, from the rulers; the ‘rule of law’ is always the rule of rules devised by rulers. Knowing the law of God, Ruth expects to “find grace” under “the sight” of the owner, who is obliged to obey that law (2:2). She does not yet know she will be in Moab’s field.

Naomi grants permission. “It so happened” that Ruth arrived at “a part of the field belonging to Boaz” (2:3). By law, Boaz must permit her to glean grain there, but he might obey God’s law ‘to the letter’ while making it hard for her to glean much. The author of the Book of Ruth asks his readers to imagine the scene: “Behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem,” greeting his workers with the traditional phrase, “The LORD be with you,” which they return (2:4). That is, owner and workers, fellow members of God’s regime, treat each other with mutual respect; at the same time, Boaz is the owner of the land, the ruler of the property, no ‘absentee landlord’; he has come to oversee the harvest, the way in which his workers work his land. Noticing the young foreigner, he asks not who she is but who ‘owns’ her, rules her. His foreman answers that she is the Moabite woman who returned to Israel with Naomi, his kinswoman.

Just as she had asked Naomi permission to go to the field, Ruth had asked the foreman for permission to glean “among the sheaves”; that is, in addition to exercising her lawful right to glean in the field, after the workers had passed, she asks permission to work with them (2:7). The foreman graciously granted this request, and since then she has only paused for a short rest in a temporary shelter near the field; she works diligently for herself and her mother-in-law.

Recognizing her as a kinswoman by marriage, Boaz reaffirms his foreman’s grace; “abide here among my young women” (2:8). Furthermore, I command that my young man not touch you, either while you work in the field or when you go to quench your thirst at the vessels “which the young men have drawn” (2:9). Young men pose a potential danger to young women (and often to themselves), but under my rule they are to obey God’s law and you shall be safe. At this, Ruth bows in gratitude, asking “Why have I found grace in you eyes, that you should acknowledge me, seeing I am a foreigner?” (2:10). Is she slightly suspicious of Boaz? Or simply astonished? Boaz assures her that “it has been showed to me, all that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, and how you have left your father and your mother, and the land of your birth, and are come into the people you did not know before” (2:11). As a wise ruler, Boaz has taken care to learn why the foreigner has come to his land, and what her character is, particularly her exhibition of chesed. This suggests that his question, “Whose young woman is this?” was asked only to identify her with certainty, or perhaps to conceal his knowledge from his subordinates. However this may be, he reassures her with a blessing: “The LORD recompense your work, and a full reward be given you of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings you are come to trust” (2:12). 

That is, Boaz knows Ruth has trusted God by putting herself under His regime, Israel; as a man under the rule of that God, Boaz’s rule of his field imitates God’s rule of His people. Boaz follows the law and adds to it with grace, in imitation of the Ruler who ordained that law. Ruth can trust the young men under his rule because he has commanded them to leave her alone, despite her youth, poverty, and foreignness—any one of which might tempt them to exploit her. She can also trust his rule over them, and over her, because he trusts her trust in his Ruler. Boaz is an Israelite who does not set up his own ‘household religion,’ as do the factitious heads of families seen in the Book of Judges.  

For her part, Ruth acknowledges that his “friendly” speech, the speech of one who has accepted her as a member of his family and his country, makes her the equivalent of his other young women (2:13). At this, Boaz invites her to dine with his family, after her day’s work, commanding the young men to allow her to glean among the sheaves without reproach. And more: “let fall also some of the handfuls for her,” not rebuking her when she gathers these, too (2:16). Thanks to God’s gracious law, and Boaz’s gracious supplementation of it, Ruth gathers “about an ephah of barley”—four gallons, more than enough to feed herself and Naomi (2:17). What will she do with the excess?

She brings it all back to Naomi, who blesses Boaz first of all because he did not “take knowledge of thee,” take sexual advantage of her, as Boaz had prohibited his young men to do (2:19). His command to the young men to leave her untouched was no claim to keep her for his own illicit use. And she rightly states her gratitude not only respecting Boaz’s conduct but asks God’s blessing upon him, “who has not left off his kindness to the living”—Ruth, Naomi—but “to the dead”—their husbands, his kinsmen (2:20). Like the Father of fathers, Boaz is a protector. Emphasizing again her foreign origin, the author reports that Ruth added that Boaz had commanded his young men to protect her. Naomi pronounces this good, happy to have her return and continue her gleaning. Having seen that Ruth has gleaned more than might be expected under God’s law, she explains this by saying that Boaz after all is a kinsman of hers, and now of Ruth’s. The problem of Israelite factionalism described in the Book of Judges sees its solution in the rule of Boaz, who unites his young women and men with his kinswoman, Naomi (who had been regarded with some diffidence upon her return) and, crucially, with Ruth, a foreigner who has proved herself a loyal citizen of the regime God intends to be the light unto the nations. That is, in ruling his own family and lands, Boaz thinks, speaks, and acts according to the animating principles of the regime of Israel, not according to some rules he made up for that family and those lands.

Things have improved for the women; they are not yet secure. Ruth has found a protector for as long as the harvest lasts, but what then? Naomi wants a home for her, and for herself. Boaz is “of our kindred”; he has shown favor to you. After the grain has been harvested during the day, at night he winnows it on the threshing floor, where the animals crush it underneath their hooves and the night breeze blows the chaff away. After such work, he will be hungry and thirsty. “Wash thyself therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon thee, and get thee down to the floor: but make not thyself known unto the man, until he shall have done eating and drinking,” lies down, gets drowsy (3:3). Go in, uncover his feet and legs, then lie down next to them; “he will tell thee what thou shalt do” (3:4). Sober Matthew Henry takes this opportunity to say that this Israelite custom should not be taken as a precedent for our own times.

Ruth faithfully obeys. Harvest time brings celebration; she finds Boaz asleep on the threshing floor, next to the heap of grain, having “eaten and drunk” and made “his heart merry” (3:7). Uncovering his feet, she lies down next to them. At midnight he awakens in fear—perhaps from a bad dream, since his position next to the grain pile suggests a need to guard it. “Behold, a woman lay at his feet” (3:8)—a startling if not fearful occasion. “Who are you?” (3:9). Ruth answers quite fully: she gives her name, defines herself as his servant, and begs him to place his skirt over her, “for you are a near kinsman” (3:9). This is more than a request for protection; it is the customary way for a widow to ask a man to claim her as his wife, practiced by some Arabs to this day.

He now recognizes her. “Blessed be thou of the LORD, my daughter,” he replies (3:10)—acknowledging her as kin and as one now under the rule of the God of Israel. She deserves a blessing because “you have shown more kindness in the latter end”—that is, in her present conduct—than “at the beginning”—when she chose not to leave Naomi but to go gleaning the field for her. Why kindness? Because “you choose not young men, whether poor or rich”; you act loyally, with chesed, for the good of your family instead of seeking a young man for a husband (3:10). “Fear not: I will do to you all that you require: for all the city of my people know that you are a virtuous woman” (3:11). He knows she isn’t ‘throwing herself at him’ because the political community of Bethlehem knows her character, and marriage to her will not be a cause of dishonor.  

Showing himself a loyal follower of the law of Israel, he acknowledges their near kinship but says that “there is a nearer kinsman than I” (3:12) who must be considered; in the case of a childless widow, the nearest relation to her has the first right to marry her. Therefore, stay here tonight. In the morning, if your nearer kinsman will exercise his right, let him do it; if not, “I will do the part of a kinsman to you, as the LORD lives” (3:13). With this oath, this covenant, he ends the conversation as he begun, with a speech about God as Ruler, the one who set down the laws that form the right framework for conduct. Here Boaz shows why he is both a just and effective ruler. He acts with dispatch, but under the rule of God. The former helps to guarantee the latter; in wasting no time in fulfilling his oath to God he will make it less likely that he will fail to fulfill it. 

She lays at his feet until morning, leaving before dawn, lest she be taken for a prostitute by some observer. Equally solicitous of their reputation, Boaz commands, “Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor” (3:14). Before she leaves, he measures six units of barley, laying it into her garment; instead of impregnating her, she leaves her ‘pregnant’ with seed that she can bring back to her mother in obedience and honor. Upon her return, Naomi asks, “Who art thou, my daughter?” (3:16). Are you now Mrs. Boaz-to-be? She can reply, “These six measures of barley he gave me; for he said to me, Go not empty unto thy mother-in-law” (3:17). This confirms to Naomi not only Ruth’s honor but the honor of Boaz. “The man will not be at rest, until he has finished the thing this day” (3:18).

Indeed so. Boaz went to the city gate that morning—the place to wait for anyone he hopes to meet because the cities of Judah had no agora or town square; the gate was the hub of activity, whether for legal business or socializing. The nameless kinsman did come by, and Boaz hailed him, then called ten elders of the city to witness their conversation as an informal jury. Boaz has moved from a potentially hazardous private circumstance, at night, to a legitimate public one, in ‘broad daylight.’ He explains that that Naomi intends to sell a parcel of land once belonging to her late husband, our brother, Elimelech. It may be that she must sell the land because a widow could not inherit land in ancient Israel. If so, this would amount to a ‘distressed property’ sale, except for the legal bonds of kinship, although she would get it back during the ‘Year of Jubilee.’ “If you will redeem it,” he tells his kinsman, do so; if not, “then tell me, that I may know” (4:4). Then I will redeem it, with these men as my witnesses. There is, he now adds, a ‘rider’: “On the day you buy the land from the hand of Naomi, you must buy it also from Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the deceased, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance” (4:5). Property is a family right, not an individual right; property supports families; therefore, the widow of a childless kinsman must not only be recompensed for her property but she ought to be married, perpetuating the name of her deceased husband. Throughout antiquity, reputation understood as the ‘family name’ constitutes part of anyone’s most valuable property. 

The kinsman demurs. If he redeems the land and marries Ruth he will “mar my own inheritance” (4:6). Supporting Ruth would be an additional expense. The kinsman veers away from the spirit of the law, away from chesed, toward materialistic ‘individualism.’ To solemnize his intention, he takes off one sandal, the symbolic act of confirming a statement before witnesses, the deed that reinforces the word and the thought behind the word. Some commentators suggest that the show which has walked the land has been transferred by the act of taking it off, symbolizing the passing on of the right to walk that land, that property. Be this as it may, “And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people [at the gate], You are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s of the hand of Naomi. Moreover, Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren and from the gate of his place: You are witnesses this day.” (9-10). In this way, Moab has prevented factitious rumors that might arise about his relationship with the two women while integrating the Moabite woman into his family and into the civic life of the city, with the city elders as his witness to this public act. He has further reinforced civic unity by scrupulous observation of the Mosaic law. The civic union of Israel, and of this city, has held. With this legal transaction, made in public in the spirit of chesed, Moab builds up trust among the citizens united not only or even primarily by bloodlines but by God’s law. Matthew Henry suggests further that because “Boaz did this honor to the dead, as well as kindness to the living, God did him the honor to bring him into the genealogy” of Jesus, who is the Redeemer of all redeemers” and no respecter of persons, the One who offers to redeem both a prominent man like Boaz but also a poor, widowed, foreigner like Ruth. Other commentators explain the anonymity of the kinsman who refused to marry Ruth as a tacit criticism of his lack of chesed—his un-Jewish, and therefore un-Christlike turning away from a fundamental principle of the Israelite regime.

The people and the elders at the gate attested to their witness of this covenant, prayerfully recalling Rachel and Leah, “which who did build the house of Israel: and do thou worthily in Ephratah and be famous in Bethlehem” (4:11). Ephratah is the old name of Bethlehem, referring to its old regime, which was an aristocracy, the regime of excellence. Hence to do worthily in Ephratah is to do worthily in remembrance of the worthy. The other two blessings—building and fame, ‘surround’ worthiness—the one as its beginning, the other as its end or reward. Between them, Ruth and Leah were the ancestors of the whole nations, both elders and the people, aristocrats and democrats, old regime and new.

“And let thy house be like the house of Pharez, whom Tamar bore unto Judah, of the seed which the LORD shall give thee of this young woman” (4:12). In Genesis 38, Tamar brings the foreigner into Judah; the blessing here is that the new foreigner, Ruth, will become part of the Bethlehemite line, a section of the tribe of Judah. Like Pharez, the seed of Ruth will be prominent, a good ruler. 

As he will. Boaz takes Ruth as his wife, “the LORD gave her conception, and she bore a son” (4:13). Naomi shares in this blessing, as she now has a kinsman whose “name may be famous in Israel” (4:14). Her grandson “shall be unto you a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of your old age; for thy daughter in law, who loves you, and is better to you than seven sons, has born him” (4:15). God as Ruler rewards Naomi for her kindness to Ruth and her wisdom in thinking of this marriage and in telling Ruth how to make the marriage likely. She is restored and Israel is strengthened. The women in her neighborhood give the child a name, Obed (which means ‘servant’); his grandson will be the great king, David, servant of God as ruler of Israel. Christians will recall that David’s line comes down to the mother of Jesus. The women of the city assign this name, not the parents; naming a child is a civic duty, not a private one. Naming is the link between family and city.

Faction or even division caused by bad fortune threatens families, cities, and nations. Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz have countered it by adhering faithfully to the laws of God for His regime, Israel. Widowed and then deprived of her sons, her expected guardians, Naomi returns to Israel. Ruth comes with her, having joined the Israelite regime by vowing adherence to its laws. Ruth then attracts the attention of her future husband by her exhibition of diligence. Knowing of Boaz’s well-deserved merit and prominence, Naomi guides Ruth towards marriage, which Moab arranges by scrupulous adherence to those laws. The Book of Ruth shows the actions by which Israel can stay united on the foundation of the laws of God.

 

 

 

Note

1. Matthew Henry and many other Christian commentators find in the story of Ruth and Oprah and parallel to the New Testament story of the sisters Mary and Martha, the first who stays with Jesus to listen to His words, the other who prefers to bustle about in the household (Luke 10:38-42).