Saint Robert Bellarmine and Constitution Day

In the life of a Christian, trusting in God, there are no coincidences. I don't think it's a coincidence that today is the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America  in 1787 (and thus, Constitution Day) and the feast day of Saint Robert Bellarmine, the great scholar and Cardinal, patron saint of Catechists. Bellarmine entered Eternal Life on September 17, 1621. As Franciscan Media describes his life:

When Robert Bellarmine was ordained in 1570, the study of Church history and the fathers of the Church was in a sad state of neglect. A promising scholar from his youth in Tuscany, he devoted his energy to these two subjects, as well as to Scripture, in order to systematize Church doctrine against the attacks of the Protestant Reformers. He was the first Jesuit to become a professor at Louvain.

His most famous work is his three-volume Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith. Particularly noteworthy are the sections on the temporal power of the pope and the role of the laity. Bellarmine incurred the anger of monarchists in England and France by showing the divine-right-of-kings theory untenable. He developed the theory of the indirect power of the pope in temporal affairs; although he was defending the pope against the Scottish philosopher Barclay, he also incurred the ire of Pope Sixtus V.

Bellarmine was made a cardinal by Pope Clement VIII on the grounds that “he had not his equal for learning.” While he occupied apartments in the Vatican, Bellarmine relaxed none of his former austerities. He limited his household expenses to what was barely essential, eating only the food available to the poor. He was known to have ransomed a soldier who had deserted from the army and he used the hangings of his rooms to clothe poor people, remarking, “The walls won’t catch cold.”

Among many activities, Bellarmine became theologian to Pope Clement VIII, preparing two catechisms which have had great influence in the Church.

I've posted on Bellarmine's political writings before and as I as post this I'm still reading a discussion of his contributions to the theory of the pope's indirect power in temporal affairs by John Courtney Murray, SJ, published in 1948 in Theological Studies 9 (December), pages 491–535. 

Although Karl Maurer is commenting in this article on Thomas Jefferson's knowledge of Bellarmine's denial of the divine right of kings by reading a book contesting with the Cardinal, it is still appropriate to cite on Constitution Day, since that document providing for the structure of governance in the United States of America was developed to protect liberty and freedom, properly understood and provide for an ordered but not repressive federalist government, with its power derived from the people. 

As the article notes, we know that Jefferson read Robert Filmer's defense of the divine right of kings, Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended Against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, By Arguments, Theological, Rational, Historical and Legall because he wrote comments in the margins of his copy of the book, now in the Library of Congress:

In Patriarcha, Filmer quotes Bellarmine directly as follows: "Secular or Civil authority (saith he) 'is instituted by men; it is in the people unless they bestow it on a Prince. This Power is immediately in the Multitude, as in the subject of it; for this Power is in the Divine Law, but the Divine Law hath given this power to no particular man. If the Positive Law be taken away, there is left no Reason amongst the Multitude (who are Equal) one rather than another should bear the Rule over the Rest. Power is given to the multitude to one man, or to more, by the same Law of Nature; for the Commonwealth cannot exercise this Power, therefore it is bound to bestow it upon some One man or some Few. It depends upon the Consent of the multitude to ordain over themselves a King or other Magistrates, and if there be a lawful cause, the multitude may change the Kingdom into an Aristocracy or Democracy' (St. Robert Bellarmine, Book 3 De Laicis, Chapter 4). Thus far Bellarmine; in which passages are comprised the strength of all that I have read or heard produced for the Natural Liberty of the Subject." (Patriarcha, page 5.)

Imagine what Jefferson must have been thinking as he read the opening paragraphs of Patriarcha, a direct assault on the Roman Catholic scholarship of Bellarmine:

"Since the time that school divinity (i.e. Catholic Universities) began to flourish, there hath been a common opinion maintained as well by the divines as by the divers of learned men which affirms: 'Mankind is naturally endowed and born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please, and that the power which any one man hath over others was at the first by human right bestowed according to the discretion of the multitude.' This tenet was first hatched in the (Medieval Roman Catholic Universities), and hath been fostered by all succeeding papists for good divinity. The divines also of the reformed churches have entertained it, and the common people everywhere tenderly embrace it as being most plausible to flesh and blood, for that it prodigally distributes a portion of liberty to the meanest of the multitude, who magnify liberty as if the height of human felicity were only to be found in it — never remembering that the desire of liberty was the cause of the fall of Adam."

There is no doubt that Jefferson, after reading Filmer, must have been struck by Bellarmine's definition of individual freedom and popular sovereignty. . . .

Please read the rest there.

Happy Constitution Day!

Saint Robert Bellarmine, pray for us!

Book Review: Martz on More

I purchased this book used; it had previously been a community college library book and the library had rebound the paperback as a hardback, trimming the front and back covers off and affixing them to the hardback binding. I really appreciated that rebinding because the original proportions of the paperback (127 x 179 mm or 5" x 7.05") would have made it rather awkward to read--and it was still strange with long columns of type.

As YaleBooks in the UK, Europe and Overseas notes, this book was published in 1972:

Recent writings about Thomas More have questioned his integrity and motivation and have challenged the long-held view of him as a humane, wise, and heroic "man for all seasons." This new book responds to these revisionist studies by closely and persuasively analyzing More's writings as well as Holbein's portraits of More and his family.

Louis L. Martz chaired the publication of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More from 1963 to 1997 and was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University; he retired from Yale in 1984 and died in 2001.

One of the "recent writings" Martz was responding to in 1992 was Richard C. Marius' 1983 biography of Thomas More, in which he judged More according to 20th century moral standards--an historicist approach (he did the same thing with Martin Luther in 1999)--positing that 20th century moral standards are superior to 16th because we've "progressed" and therefore "improved".

Marius also co-edited three works in the Yale Edition during Martz's tenure:Volume 6, Parts I & II: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies; Volume 7: Letter to Bugenhagen, Supplication of Souls, Letter Against Frith; Volume 8, Parts I-III: The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. So Martz was contending in print against a scholar he had hired to complete a 34-year project (and one he'd worked on past retirement from teaching). And since Marius was casting More as a violent and vituperative opponent of Tyndale and other reformers, there's the irony that Marius had edited those editions of More's controversial works against Tyndale and the other reformers under Martz's chairmanship.

Martz was also responding G.R. Elton's comments about More and the prosecution of heretics.

Chapter 1, "The Search for the Inner Man" deals with those matters pretty effectively. Martz notes that John Milton used similar rhetorical methods against his opponents and that Saint Augustine of Hippo attacked the Pelagians and the Manicheans in a similar way. Writing argumentative propaganda has its own rules and rhetorical style: "More and Milton and other devout humanists are using their command of good Latin and colloquial English as weapons against what they regard as deadly enemies of truth . . ." and they do what they must "to drive these evildoers out of the temple." (p. 21) Martz comments that it's not fair to say that Milton or St. Augustine or St. Thomas More displayed their true selves in their controversial works. And he notes from More's Apology that he was aware that sometimes he had gone too far--did Luther or Tyndale ever admit as much? (my question!)

Regarding the prosecution of heretics, Martz notes that Thomas Cromwell had heretics investigated and prosecuted too--and many more than More, comparing More's three out of six cases of religious heresy that led to burning at the stake in three years to Cromwell's 65 cases of religious treason that led to hanging, drawing, and quartering. As he concludes:

It is difficult therefore to argue that Thomas More's prosecution of those he suspected of heresy was any more severe than Thomas Cromwell's prosecution of those he suspected of treason. For both it was a grim matter of quelling what they, for different reasons, saw as sedition. Let us lay aside, then, this ancient and unfounded charge against More.

In some ways I think that Eamon Duffy--whose study of Saint John Henry Newman I so disagreed with--answers these issues better in the first part of Reformation Divided: "Thomas More and Heresy". Nonetheless, Martz presents good arguments to contradict Marius and Elton.

Inter alia, Martz offers an interpretation of the differences between the Holbein sketches and portraits of More: the official final version of the individual study and the family portrait in the sketch and in the Rowland Lockey version. In his comparison of the finished portrait in the Frick collection and the sketch featured on the the cover of the book he notes the Frick version shows control and resolution; the sketch openness and vulnerability. In the contrast between the Holbein sketch of the group portrait and the Lockey version, Martz notes the change of occasion: in Holbein's sketch the family is about to pray from the Breviary; in the Lockey version they are reading scholarly, humanist works (Seneca and Boethius).

The next three chapters, "The Order of the Heart", "The Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort", and "De Tristitia: Last Address to the World and to the Self" seem to search for the The Inner Man of Thomas More through his literary style and how he adapted it to the purpose of his work written either in Latin or in English. Martz identifies More's style as Augustinian, based upon the methods of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose City of God More discoursed upon when he was 23 years old in 1501. Martz emphasizes More's use of digression, repetition, and irony; his awareness of his audience and his search for truth for both himself and the audience. Martz comments, for example, that when engaging Tyndale on the subject of the doctrine of justification by faith (alone), More interrupts Tyndale's "relentless logic" (p. 37) with "an Augustinian manner" and in "an Augustinian view of life and religion--a view that sees, not a church of "elects" who cannot fall to damnation, however they may slip, but a church of fallen people, any one of whom has yet available the hope of redemption." (p. 38). A more realistic, humane, and common sense view of Christians in this life.

That certainly reveals More as presenting a thoroughly Catholic balance of how to think about God's justice and mercy and to maintain faith in forgiveness and absolution, hope in repentance and redemption. As Martz continues in these three chapters, he demonstrates how More found that same balance in the Dialogue of Comfort, his meditations on the Passion of Christ, in The Sadness of Christ, and during his time in the Tower of London. If that conviction was in Thomas More's heart, no wonder he could be so merry on Tower Hill when mounting the scaffold.