The Influence of Romans XIII on Christian Political Thought II. Augustine to Hincmar

Abstract

I a preceding article, the place held by St. Paul's precepts on civic obedience in the Thirteenth Chapter of his Epistle to the Romans was studied in the earliest writings of the Church before the time of St. Augustine. It was shown that St. Paul was understood to have taken up and complemented the revolutionary teaching of the Saviour which formally announced the separate and distinct spheres of the temporal and spiritual rule of mankind. God and Caesar both have their respective claims on man's conscience. St. Paul gives the reason: Caesar's power also comes from God; or rather, it is God's power exercised by man for man's good. Caesar is the minister of God. We also saw, however, that this simple and clear teaching does not entirely settle and clarify man's relations with his secular government. Lacking the Aristotelian doctrine that man by his nature is a political animal as well as a social animal, some of the early Fathers failed to make a distinction between the power, which is from God, and the office itself, which is of human right. All of them derived political rule from the fact of sin, just as they did those other social institutions, private property and slavery. To them that seemed the clear implication of St. Paul's teaching in Romans 13. If men had not sinned, there would have been no political rule, for this rule was conceived as merely coercive government, a thing which would have been an idle usurpation in the state of equality which accompanied the state of innocence. Thus, lacking a justification in natural law for political rule, they escaped anarchy by seeking it solely in the decree of God following man's fall. St. Paul's teaching was thus narrowly circumscribed