Sinclair B. Ferguson and Derek W.H. Thomas: Ichthus: Jesus Christ, God’s Son, the Saviour. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2018.

 

According to the New Testament, God requires us to know Christ, if we desire salvation. Very well, then, who is He? The authors provide a clear account of the identity of Jesus based upon the principal events of His life as presented in the Gospels.

At birth, Jesus was God incarnate—a status vehemently disputed by Jerusalem rabbis when He laid claim to it in their presence, some thirty years later. The rabbis demanded His execution, the penalty for blasphemy under Jewish law. Because they lived under Roman law, they could not themselves execute that penalty but instead prevailed upon the Roman governor to have Him crucified. Jesus’ death thus in a sense followed from His birth, but in a way unlike any other human being. No one had accused him of any illegal or sinful act prior to His alleged blasphemy; there was no evidence to suggest that He had been subject to ‘original sin,’ or the curse entailed by it, until the allegation of blasphemy that led to his execution.

To explain the Incarnation, the authors begin by citing the famous opening lines of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word….” In this case, perhaps unique in the ancient world, ‘word’ or logos refers to a Person, not an idea or a faculty of the soul, and not simply an utterance. Whereas Matthew begins his account of Jesus with an account of Abraham and Luke begins with John the Baptist’s parents, “John begins with eternity,” to “the very first words of the Hebrew Bible.”  “John is helping us understand creation. That creative speech of God described in Genesis chapter 1 was not simply a sound” but “a person”; “the entire created order has a personal, not an impersonal foundation.” What is more, the Word was with God; as the Son of God, Jesus was with His Father, capable of looking upon His Father and living, unlike any other human being. And the Word was God; that is, “He is uncreated,” a being “on the side of God, not on the side of creation,” with “the authority to bring us into the family of God.” At the same time, He is incarnate, ‘approachable’ or ‘viewable’ by human beings, unlike His Father. “If we know Christ the Logos then we know the one who has been from eternity, always is, and ever will be, face to face with the heavenly Father.” “This for John is the wonder of the incarnation. The one who was able to live ‘face to face’ with God in that holy atmosphere, and to gaze into the eyes of his Father, has assumed our flesh and come to live ‘face to face’ with us in our fallen world, in obedience to his Father.” Without the Incarnation, without the assumption of physical, human being by God, there could be no “substitute and sacrifice for human sinners.” “The Son of God became what he was not in order that we might become what we were not.” He came “as one person who functioned appropriately according to each of his two natures”—functioning “as the creating and sustaining Word” in His divine character to redeem creatures powerless to redeem themselves, yet experiencing weariness, thirst and hunger, calm and joy and sadness, amazement and sorrow, finally death on the Cross, in His human nature. “In the incarnation of the word, God himself was sovereignly at work to bring salvation” to human beings. 

In so doing, not only His death but His life was a continual sacrifice. Human beings “have never truly and fully tasted or sensed how sinful sin is because it is so normal to us. Jesus, by contrast, saw how abnormal, distorting, ugly, and deeply rebellious it really.” God embodied must feel the difference between holiness and unholiness more than any other being. At the same time, by bringing the divine light of the Word to earth, among mere humans, God illuminates their intellectual and moral darkness, a darkness otherwise terminated only in the final darkness of death.

After His birth, His incarnation, the next major event in Jesus’ life is His baptism. Born of Mary’s sister, John the Baptist lived to denounce the Pharisees and Sadducees as a brood of vipers, in need of baptism as a sign of their repentance. More, “He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry,” a Person who will baptize you not with water but “with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” But before He does that, and to John’s astonishment (the full truth had not been revealed to the prophet), Jesus comes to be baptized by John. Why would the Son of God, infinitely superior to John, with no sins to repent, come to John for baptism?

“John was the first prophet to appear in Jerusalem or in its environs for four centuries,” the last of the type of prophets seen in the Old Testament. He attracted huge crowds who gathered to listen to his words. “A massive spiritual awakening seemed to be underway,” along the lines of similar ‘revivals’ which had occurred in the history of the Israelite nation. John’s baptism, “a baptism of confession of sin and repentance,” recalls the baptisms ordained for the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism. “Unclean by definition,” Gentiles “needed to be washed.” At the same time, John’s baptisms occurred at the River Jordan, where Israel had entered the Promised Land, where Elijah was last seen before ascending to Heaven. If John is the new Elijah, then he “the appearance and the message of the divinely appointed herald of the end of the age.” Ages end when God visits His righteous anger upon them, sending flood waters over the world or drowning the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. 

But this only highlights the significance of Jesus. It does not explain why He would want to be baptized by a mere mortal, however divinely inspired. John quite reasonably asks, “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?” Jesus replies, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” What righteousness does the Son of God, of all Persons, need to fulfill? 

The authors suggest that Jesus invokes Isaiah 53, where the prophet’s songs “describe and interpret the life and suffering of a figure simply described [by God] as ‘My servant.'” “By his knowledge,” the prophet sings, “shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” If Jesus “came to be that Servant, to identify himself with us in our sin, and to become the one who would bear the iniquities of his people,” then Jesus thinks of John’s baptism as preliminary to taking on the sins of the humanity whose nature He has assumed. Since baptism is not only a cleansing ritual but a naming ritual, this baptism ‘names’ Jesus “among sinners,” counts Him in the census of covenant-breakers. The authors quote John Calvin: Jesus “willed in full measure to appear before the judgment seat of God his Father in the name and in the person of all sinners, being then ready to be condemned, inasmuch as he bore our burden.” Therefore, Jesus’ baptism is “an act of substitution.” “The Egyptians received the curse; but God’s people got the blessing. So it will be when our Lord’s symbolic baptism becomes a reality. The curse he bears is ours; the blessing we receive is his.” Jesus’ death “draws both the guilt and sting of sin,” while His resurrection is the act “through which we are raised into a new life altogether.”

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism, he is anointed by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The dove recalls the dove Noah released from the ark. The dove returned carrying an olive branch, proving that life on land had revived, signifying “that the judgment of God [on humanity] had passed and that a ‘new creation’ had begun.” The Holy Spirit is said to “hover” over the waters, perhaps an allusion to God’s hovering over the waters of chaos during the creation week. “Now, through Jesus’ identification with covenant-breakers, God is going to bring about not only the redemption and regeneration of individuals but something far grander even than that—a new creation altogether.” The Holy Spirit “has come to help” the Son, a human as well as divine Being, who has entered a new and far more dangerous time in His “life and ministry,” the “prolonged war” with Satan “for which he had been in preparation these past thirty years. “Until the end, even in his death,” Jesus “will be upheld by the Spirit.” While it is true that, qua divinity, Jesus would need no assistance whatever in displaying His power. But to do so would not accomplish this mission. “He would no longer be the second man, the last Adam,” “our representative,” the one who suffers for humanity’s sins in place of humanity. He would ‘only’ be God on earth, performing wonders.  

Where is the Father? Right here, at least in His voice, which confirms, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” God the Father may utter these words “to confirm to the human mind of Jesus his identity as the second person of the Trinity.” The human mind needs such confirmation, as it will wonder, “how can this man be himself God?” In submitting to baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus obeys the Law of His Father and submits “to the Father’s plan” as the sacrificial substitute who “tak[es] the place of Adam and his posterity.” This means that we are not only pardoned for our sins, but that Jesus’ righteousness counts in our favor. Baptism is an act of justice, of righteousness, which clears the way for divine grace, which is far beyond justice. Among the Israelites, men sacrificed something they might have eaten, something that might have sustained their flesh, for the spiritual purpose of ‘getting right,’ realigning their souls, with God. Jesus will sacrifice His own human-all-too-human flesh, flesh never made to sin by His own divine character but baptized as if it had been. Baptism in obedience to the Father’s Law signifies His readiness to sacrifice that flesh in substitution for the sin-directed flesh of human persons.

Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness evidently parallels the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, Noah’s forty days and forty nights in the ark. The authors remark that Luke’s version of the Temptation differs from Matthew’s; Luke begins Jesus’ genealogy with Adam instead of Abraham. By calling attention to Jesus’ human ‘lineage,’ Luke wants his readers to notice that Jesus is the Second Man, the Last Adam. (Nietzsche satirizes this when presenting his own ‘Last Man,’ whom he regards as the culmination of Christian egalitarianism.) Luke sets “our Lord’s ministry within the cosmic context to which it belongs.” Having “entered the bloodline of Adam,” Jesus “is being led on to the front line to do battle against Satan,” but “this time—as Mark points out—not in a garden where the animals were named by and obedient to Adam, and where food and beauty abounded,” but “in a wilderness where there was neither food nor water, and where wild animals roamed.” Against Adam’s condemnation, defeat, and bondage in sin as a consequence of his disobedience, Jesus sets obedience, freedom, victory, and salvation. “This temptation narrative tells us that what Adam failed to do, Jesus has come to do. The image of God that was marred through Adam is now being repaired through Christ.” By entering Satan’s desolate territory, Jesus makes war against him, seizing his hostages, the sons of Adam. The temptation story calls attention to Jesus’ acts, not His ‘being.’ His incarnate Being enables Him to launch a counterattack on Satan, and win.

What is Satan’s strategy in response to Jesus? “Satan is not interested in tempting [Jesus’] deity, for he knows God cannot be tempted with sin”—what, indeed, would an all-powerful Being gain by contradicting Himself? “Rather he is focused on destroying the ministry that the Savior was sent to exercise.” Each of Satan’s temptations aims at getting Jesus to deny not His godhood but His manhood, the conduit (as it were) whereby He can take on the burden of humanity’s sins.

Satan first tempts Jesus by challenging Him to turn the stones that surround them into bread. Why is this a temptation? What is morally wrong with turning stones into bread? Nothing, in itself.  Satan implies that Jesus has the ‘right’ to do so, in order to end His hunger. But it isn’t “because of any need he has for himself as the Son of God that Jesus is in the wilderness. He is there as the Second Man. Where Adam became disobedient by taking and eating, Jesus means to be obedient by not taking and by not eating,” by acting as “Adam in reverse.” Jesus is God, so He can perform the miracle, but what has He to prove to Satan, who already knows who He is? He is in the desert to humiliate Himself before the Father and thereby to redeem mankind, not to react proudly to Satan’s provocation and thereby to confirm it. Hence His reply, the authors observe: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” He is “here for man and therefore…must live as man“—not to use His divine powers as a means of relieving his all-too-human bodily desires. Satan lied to Eve, telling her that she and Adam will not die but live as gods; Jesus chooses to live as a man and to die as one because there is no use lying to the One who is the incarnate Word. “Where Adam sought exaltation, Jesus embraced humiliation.“

It is worth adding that by saying “Man does not live by bread alone,” Jesus points to one of the distinctive characteristics of human nature. God does not live by bread, at all. Neither do angels. Animals live by bread, only. Only man lives by bread, but not by bread alone; man alone by his nature combines material with rational and spiritual qualities. Jesus combines those qualities, too, but in a different way, remaining divine while being human.  

Satan’s second temptation is ‘Worship me, and I will give you authority over all the kingdoms of this world,’ thereby offering Jesus the authority Adam had lost, without needing to endure crucifixion. Since Jesus can have authority over all the kingdoms of this world whenever He wants it by overthrowing Satan, impotent in the face of His power, the promise is empty. Satan’s offer amounts to an attempt to prevent Jesus from seizing Satan’s human subjects. Indeed, if the Son of God acceded to it, the Father might well punish Him for disobedience, as Adam was punished. Jesus would lose His authority over the world He created, and Satan might rule it a bit longer. But Jesus loves His Father and men, not Satan, and although He is harmless as a dove, he is even more prudent than a serpent, including the Serpent.

Satan finally challenges Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Again, the temptation or test consists of proving His deity. But Jesus “has not come to play in the world he has created, but in order to save it at great cost to himself.” Satan wants Jesus to tempt God, to do what Satan himself is doing, to perform an imitatio Satani. In refusing, Jesus “exposed the devil for what he really is behind his mask: the enemy of God, and at the same time the enemy of humanity.” In refusing, Jesus puts the lie to the liar. He will prove His divinity not in jumping off the temple, by falling, but by rising from the dead. He will prove His divinity on the Father’s terms, not Satan’s.

Before he does that, he must go not to the wilderness but to the mountaintop. Peter, John, and James accompany Him to the mountain to pray. There, Moses and Elijah appear before them, to be told by the Father that only Jesus is His Son, His Chosen One. Moses had brought the Law of God; Elijah had brought His prophecy. Jesus will fulfill both God’s Law and God’s prophecy. Jesus is transfigured, giving three of his disciples “a glimpse” of “the kingdom of glory to be ushered in by his return,” after His crucifixion and resurrection. “Peter said that they were ‘eyewitnesses of his majesty.'” John said that “Jesus was always ‘face to face with God,’ bathed from all eternity in his Father’s love,” “full of grace and truth.” Having seen Jesus as a man, they now see Him as the true Son of God, as divine. 

Moses and Elijah appeared on the mountaintop to speak with Jesus about “the exodus which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Moses knows that the exodus he had led from Egypt to the border of the Promised Land prefigured “a greater Exodus,” not from human tyranny but “from a deeper oppression under sin, Satan, and death.” In ascending from the dead, Jesus will lead His people to the holiest of promised ‘lands’—in Heaven, not on earth. By appearing to the Son, the prophets, and the apostles in the form of a cloud, the Father does something He has done before: during the first exodus, He had “manifested his presence” by the means of a cloud; he had done so when Moses met with God on Sinai; he had covered the tabernacle that way, and filled Solomon’s temple that way, also. “It is the Shekinah—the glory cloud of the presence of God coming down.” The men all fear it. The cloud “overshadows” them, as it had done to Mary “when he came to empower her at the conception of the Lord Jesus.” It may be that it will come at Calvary, too, when the sky darkens. “It is the physical expression of God’s presence in space and time inexorably fulfilling his purposes.” It is only after the Father has attracted their fearful attention that He speaks, telling them that Jesus and only Jesus is His Son. Jesus was born of a woman, but He is the Son of God. “If we are going to live” the Christian life and live it “well and to the glory of god, then Jesus alone must be the one who fills our horizon,” the authors conclude. Although “we have a thousand different needs,” “at the end of the day, there is only one need,” to “see the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to know” Him as the only one who truly offers salvation.

In their fifth, central chapter, the authors move to the garden at Gethsemane, where Jesus asks His Father not to send Him to the Cross but obeys when not relieved of that burden. His “spirit is willing,” but His “flesh is weak.” The ‘Man’ dimension of the Man-God can only shrink from the prospect of torture, scorn, and crucifixion. “This is the decisive moment,” the central event in Jesus’ life on earth—another decision in a garden, made in “the hour of the power of darkness,” in full realization of “what it would mean for him to be the Mediator between a Holy God and sinful humanity.” “Humanly speaking it is unhinging him”—the prospect of “enter[ing] into the unique horror of making atonement, of being someone who knew no sin but was made sin for others.” Moses had trembled at the presence of God. “But what he saw was God in covenant,” God self-restrained by His own guarantees. “What Jesus sees is the unmitigated wrath and anger of God unleashed against covenant-breakers,” with “no mercy,” fury descending on him as he “tak[es] the place and undergo[es] the curse due to ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God.'”

Not only as Man but also as God, Jesus must find crucifixion repellant. Having lived sinless, incarnate in a sinful world, was pain enough, “but to be reckoned sin—to ‘be made sin for us, who knew no sin’—surely his revulsion of that must have been total?” Yet “the will of the Son of God in his divine nature is exactly the same as the will of his Father,” there being “only one divine will.” Jesus’ decision is the supreme manifestation of self-sacrificing agapic love, the specifically Jewish and Christian form of love. When the Christian prays, “Thy will be done,” he aligns himself with the same will, but never so perfectly, and never at such a cost. 

For their discussion of Christ’s Passion on the Cross, the authors turn to the Gospel of Mark. “For as many as twenty hours the Lord Jesus was subjected to unmitigated, relentless and ruthless shame, climaxing in the final exposure of the cross.” This was more than physical torture. The Being most deserving of honor was shamed by a cohort of Roman centurions, sneering at His nakedness and His agony. Being nailed to a cross is to be exhibited, held up as an example of what happens when you violate the law. Unknown to His torturers, He was indeed being held up as an example, the supreme example of sacrifice on behalf of those torturers, among whom all human beings have numbered, insofar as they really do sin. “Ecce homo, indeed. Behold the man, now dehumanized by men, that we who have been unmanned in sin might become truly human again.” The most courageous guardians of Rome, the glory of their time and place, not only utterly despise the Being who is their only real guardian, but they mar him “beyond human semblance,” unwittingly doing exactly what needed to be done, namely, to destroy the one example of perfect human nature since Adam’s fall into sin, so that God and not ‘humanity’ may become the example, the guide, the guardian of human conduct. His nakedness recalls the nakedness of Adam before Adam’s sin, when ‘Man’ or Adam was truly man as God intended him to be. At the same time, His agonized question, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” is the last cry of the Last Man, the words of Man in his imperfection, loaded with sin. 

On what grounds as Jesus been condemned to die? And why is it that those who condemn Him “recognize and acknowledge that he is in fact innocent”? The first charge is the charge of the rabbis, who accuse Him of blasphemy against God. The second charge is the charge of treason against Caesar in calling Himself a king. But “Jesus is not guilty of the religious court’s charge of blasphemy,” since the witnesses “cannot agree” on what they heard Him say. As for Caesar, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, finds “nothing worthy of death in this man.” He yields to the clamor of the rabbis, thereby himself committing treason against Caesar, committing the crime Jesus was tried on, before the judgment of Rome. “Why, then, when he is innocent is he crucified?” Because He took on the guilt of all human beings, suffered punishment for “the charges of which we are all guilty before the judgment seat of God.” All human beings stand guilty of blasphemy, having “made ourselves, rather than God, the center of our universe.” All human beings are traitors, too, having “rebelled against [God’s] authority over us.” “He is being crucified for us.”

Upon His death, the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The curtain had separated the holy of holies, “the one room that represented the presence of God” on earth, from the rest of the world, from the unholy. The curtain separated Creator from creation. Only the Jewish High Priest could enter that room, only once a year, carrying the annual sacrifice. But now that the supreme sacrifice had been made, “no other sacrifice will ever be needed.” The Father, “not in sorrow, but in the welcome of the gospel, tore the veil that hid him from us and barred sinners from entering his holy presence.”

From Jesus’ crucifixion, the authors move to John 20:1-23, the account of His resurrection. The tomb is empty. That discovery “set in motion a change to everything—absolutely everything.” Among the many messianic movements in the decades that followed, only one survived, its Messiah alone having survived death according to some 500 witnesses. The Sanhedrin had warned Pontius Pilate that Jesus’ disciples might steal the body and claim it was resurrected—the rabbis of the major Jewish sect, the Sadducees, did not believe resurrection possible—but many saw the living Christ.

The first of these was among the humblest. The former prostitute, Mary Magdalene, could not have given legally admissible evidence in the courts of that time, under that regime. This, the authors argue, makes the account more likely to be true, since a fictional account more probably would cite a man as the first witness. Indeed, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener, an unwitting allusion to Adam, the First Man. Her error is telling: “the Creator had become the Second Man, appointed to do the work which the first gardener, Adam, had so signally failed to do” by “replanting this fallen world and beginning a new creation that would eventually become a glorious garden.” She recognizes Him not by seeing but by hearing—rightly, since the sheep know their master by his voice (John 10:3). His first human body mutilated, He has remained in bodily human form. She reaches out to confirm His presence by touch, but Jesus tells her “not to hold on to him,” as “I have not yet ascended.” Resurrection is only the first part of Jesus’ exaltation; His “ascension to the right hand of his Father” would soon occur, and that is why Jesus must not suppose that he has “simply been resuscitated so that his former life can continue more or less as it was.” 

Jesus appears to His disciples, greeting and blessing them with “Shalom“—Peace be with you. “The word signified wholeness, well-being, complete healing, integration; peace with God, peace with themselves, peace with each other, peace with creation.” Isaiah had prophesied that the Suffering Servant would endure “the chastisement that brought us peace.” Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus will give his disciples the authority to forgive or not to forgive—sharing with them a portion of His lordship. Luke 24:50-53 relates Jesus’ blessing of His disciples and His ascent to Heaven; Acts 1:1-11 records the disciples’ receipt of the authority, as witnesses of His ascension, to tell the world of it. 

Jesus stayed with His disciples for six weeks after His resurrection. During that time, he taught them that he was not intending to restore the kingdom to Israel, as they had imagined, but that His destination was not Jerusalem but Heaven, where He “would be seated at the right hand of God” and “exercise all authority in heaven and earth, not merely over the Jewish people.” In so doing, He would never relinquish His embodiment. “The incarnation did not provide a merely temporary vehicle in which the Son of God was able to make a sacrifice for our sins” but His permanent body, in which He will reappear when the Last Day arrives. “He will come again in the same way he left—visibly, physically, bodily.” Bodily presence implies weight and force. “The ascension is about the kingship of Jesus,” His regime. Having “been in a prolonged and fierce battle” against Satan, God’s rival for rule, having “proved victorious,” He now “mount[s] his throne.” Such a visible triumph was familiar to Romans, as their victorious generals would return from the wars to a victory parade in the capital city. To prevent hubris, the triumphal procession would include a slave who accompanied the general in his chariot, repeating Homos es—you are a man and (by implication) not a god. “But this triumph,” Jesus’ triumph, “is different,” as this warrior really is God. His triumphal movement isn’t ‘horizontal,’ along the streets of Rome, but ‘vertical,’ an ascent to Heaven. Moreover, when Luke writes Christos kurios, Christ is Lord, he corrects the Romans’ practice of deifying their emperors. 

Before that, Jesus teaches the disciples something else, that the Holy Spirit will come to them, “another Helper,” one who will never depart from them, one that will descend to them not ascend from them. This outpouring of the Holy Spirit occurred on the holiday of Pentecost, when Diaspora Jews gathered from around the world in Jerusalem. Feeling that holy Presence, they heard Peter’s explanation, that this was “the guarantee that Jesus had now ascended into the presence of the Father and had asked for the Spirit to be sent to the church,” as He had promised the disciples. Peter spoke to them in Hebrew, in one language, as if the curse of the destruction of the Tower of Babel had been reversed and mankind could now listen to one voice. Only “the convicting and converting power of the Holy Spirit” could do such a thing. As a result, “Christ’s Spirit is present with us, indwelling us and carrying out his mission of making the things of Christ known to us, and distributing his gifts among us.” In fulfilling this promise to the disciples, Jesus strengthens Christians’ faith in the fulfillment of His still greater promise of return. 

“The second coming is about Christ himself.” In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses the worries of Church members who wonder what will happen to Christians who die before Christ’s return. Their initial hope that He would return quickly, during their lifetimes, had been falsified. (For one thing, Jesus had said that He wouldn’t return until the Gospel had been preached “in all the world,” giving all human beings a chance to hear and to respond to it.) Meanwhile, will the Christian dead “miss out on the blessing of the second coming”? 

Paul reassures them, pointing to the rule of Christ over His Church as a regime. “The gospel message is that the kingdom has already arrived in Jesus Christ, although it is not yet consummated (hence we continue to pray “Your kingdom come”). Christians are its citizens here and now. ‘The gospel of the kingdom’ is the only gospel there is.” As for the timing of His return to earth ‘in the flesh,’ He explicitly stated, “It is not for you to know” (Acts 1:7). Instead of wasting time in speculation, Christians should live “in the light of the possibility that Jesus could come back within our lifetime.” Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes; living as if He will return soon, in the confidence that our salvation doesn’t depend upon whether or not he does, will prove a good way to keep the Ruler of the Christian regime consciously present in our minds throughout our lives.

How will we know when He does return? For one thing, a trumpet will sound: in Jesus’ time, the trumpet was the herald of the arrival of the ruler; the trumpet called soldiers to battle; the trumpet proclaimed the Year of Jubilee, “when all debts and all bondage came to an end”; prophets had described the trumpet sound as the warning of “impending judgment.” “The ‘last trumpet’ functions in all these ways,” above all as a proclamation of “the beginning of an eternal jubilee, in which the Lord of glory will bring in the day of eternal joy.” 

Although a sound will herald Jesus’ arrival, He will be seen. The main terms associated with His return—epiphaneia, apokalupsis, parousia—all “suggest visibility.” More, He will see in addition to being seen, and “His gaze will cause a reflection of himself to become visible in his people.” The metamorphosis of their souls, already initiated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, invisibly, will become manifest in their bodies. They will “become like him.” 

Then what consolation has the dying Christian? “For the believer the process of dying may be a trial, a sore ideal, a difficult stage in the journey to the celestial city. But Christ has drawn the sting of death” by making it into “the gateway of life.” The metamorphosis of the living bodies of Christians will be paralleled even more miraculously by the resurrection of dead bodies—many of them now reduced to their elements. “No matter how disintegrated they may have become, he will regenerate these bodies marked by humiliation so that they will become like his body of glory.” What has disintegrated will then be integrated into the body of Christ as part of the politeuma of God’s regime.

Jesus Christ is the Second Man, having shared in the death inflicted upon Man for Man’s sin, and having suffered for Man’s sin, taking Man’s just punishment for him. Jesus Christ is also the Last Adam, having been resurrected, conquering death, and uniting His people with Him in His Kingdom then, now, and especially in the future, for eternity.

The authors title their book Ichthus, a reference to the familiar Christian symbol of the fish, which dates to the earliest years of the Church. This may have been a way for one Christian to signal his identity to another, during the many years of persecution under the Roman Empire, the rival regime at that time. According to a long tradition, the letters spell out an anagram meaning “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior.” In writing this clear statement of what that means, Ferguson and Thomas provide a straightforward account of the core principles of the Christian regime, of what the rule of God is for. 

 

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.”