Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver

Thomas Pink

Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver

1. Thomas Hobbes against canon law

A central preoccupation of Hobbes in Leviathan was the historical Catholic claim that, just as much as any State, the Church has the au-thority and jurisdiction to make obligatory law, and to enforce that law by threat of punishment. The Church not only has the right to teach, but to coerce.1 The canon law of the Church is as genuine a form of enforce-able, obligation-imposing positive law as is the civil law of the State.

Hobbes denied that the Church can licitly coerce as well as teach. Only the State had the right to legislate and punish. Properly under-stood, canonical regulation was only ever obligatory law if voluntarily legislated and enforced as part of their own civil law by the rulers of states, the only true possessors of coercive authority:

From the same mistaking of the present Church for the Kingdom of God, came in the distinction between the Civill and the Canon Laws: The Civil Law being the Acts of Soveraigns in their own Dominions, and the Canon Law be-ing the acts of the Pope in the same Dominions. Which Canons, though they were but Canons, that is, Rules Propounded, and but voluntarily received by Christian Princes, till the translation of the Empire to Charlemain; yet after-

1 Coercion in the Catholic tradition involves the issuance of directives backed by the threat of punishment – the punishment being designed to motivate compliance from those who would otherwise have been unwilling to do as directed. For this view of coercion see Thomas aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q95, a. 1, resp. See also Leo XIII: «For, law is the guide of man’s actions; it turns him toward good by its rewards, and deters him from evil by its punishments», Libertas §7.

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wards, as the power of the Pope increased, became Rules Commanded, and the Emperours themselves (to avoyd greater mischiefes, which the people blinded might be led into) were forced to let them pass for Laws2.

At the heart of the canonical system, as understood by the Church, is the sacrament of baptism. Baptism, which all Christians share, con-veys divine grace and gives membership of the Church. In the canonical system, understood as a system of obligatory law, in conveying Church membership, baptism also subjects the baptized to ecclesiastical juris-diction, and brings with it obligations specifically to the Church, which the Church can then legally enforce. In particular, baptism brings with it an obligation to faith – to belief in the revelation to which the Church bears witness – which is enforced through the canon law forbidding her-esy and apostasy3. As Hobbes observed, the Church of his time might even enforce this obligation to Catholic faith on Protestants, who are validly baptized, and so subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and who in this respect differ from Jews and Moslems, who are exempt4. And so Hobbes complained:

From hence it is, that in all Dominions where the Popes Ecclesiasticall power is entirely received, Jewes, Turkes, and Gentiles, are in the Roman Church tolerated in their Religion, as farre forth, as in the exercise and profes-sion thereof they offend not against the civill power: whereas in a Christian, though a stranger, not to be of the Roman religion, is Capitall; because the Pope pretendeth that all Christians are his Subjects. For otherwise it were as much against the law of Nations to persecute a Christian stranger, for profess-ing the Religion of his owne country, as an Infidell; or rather more, inasmuch as they that are not against Christ, are with him5.

2 Th. hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, ed. by Noel Malcolm, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2012, c. 44, Of Spirituall Darknesse from Misinterpretation of Scripture, p. 964.

3 The 1983 Code of Canon Law still retains this traditional conception of the Church as a coercive authority with jurisdiction over all christifideles or baptized, and with the authority to impose temporal as well as spiritual penalties for crimes such as heresy and apostasy. See canons 1311, 1312 and 751.

4 For examples of such enforcement in early modern Italy, see Ch. blaCk, The Italian Inquisition, Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, p. 91 and p. 132.

5 Th. hobbes, Leviathan, cit., c. 44, Of Spirituall Darknesse from Misinterpretation of Scripture, vol. 3, pp. 964-966

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Enforcement of the canon law on heresy, as of canon law on other matters, historically involved not just the Church, but also the Christian State. But this involvement of the State was understood by the Church of Hobbes’s time not as the State’s voluntary cooperation under its own authority, but as fulfilling an obligation on the State to enforce the Church’s authority. Christian rulers were bound by their own baptism not only to meet canonical obligations themselves, but to help enforce them on their baptized subjects6.

Thus the Church’s canonical regulation not only claimed the force of binding and enforceable law, but came to colonise the civil law of the State, treating the baptized rulers of Christian states as, in religious matters, the agents of the Church, coercing their subjects on her behalf.

Hobbes’s rejection of the canonical system was in part an assertion of the authority of the State against the Church. Hobbes would not tol-erate any rival bearer of the coercive authority that Leviathan reserves to the State alone, no more in the field of religion than elsewhere. A particular target was the political theology of Robert Bellarmine, which Hobbes repeatedly and critically addressed through the last two books of Leviathan, in “Of The Christian Commonwealth” and “Of the King-dom of Darkness”.

But there was a deeper conflict, fundamental to the whole argument of Leviathan, about the very nature of coercive authority. For the model of coercive authority that Hobbes was attacking as much involved a distinctive conception of State authority as of Church authority. Suarez and Bellarmine saw the direction given to its subjects by any sovereign authority, be it State or Church, as combining two things. It both threat-ens force, and communicates belief. The imposition of obligations, and their enforcement by threat of punishment, is inescapably a form of instruction. Legitimate and well-crafted punitive law not only does not repress or bypass our reason, but in addressing our reason also enhanc-es it, conveying true belief and understanding. This view of coercive authority as educative was of course well suited to the Church’s own conception of her central purpose as an authority – to teach and com-municate the faith. But it also drew from a conception of the State as

6 The assertion of the Church’s authority to use the Christian State as her bracchium saecu-lare or secular arm was still to be found in canon 2198 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law.

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a coercive teacher that long preceded Christianity and that we find in Aristotle.

Whereas for Hobbes the communication of belief and coercive di-rection must be quite separate. In so far as it is directing action by co-ercive pressure, the State cannot also be functioning as a teacher; the State cannot be using coercive pressure to inform people and change what they believe. While as teacher the Church cannot also function as coercer; in addressing belief, the Church is merely a source of spiritual counsel, not of coercive command. The communication of belief was separated by Hobbes from direction enforced by punishments, and the coercive role of the State changed from that of educator into that of coordinator of human action.

In Leviathan Hobbes was not simply engaging in a turf war, on the State’s behalf, against the claims of a potential ecclesial rival. He was doing something more far-reaching. Hobbes was embarking on an im-portant revolution in thinking about the very nature of coercion, and about the role of the State itself.

2. Law and liberty

Fundamental to Hobbes’s attack on the canonical system is a dispute about the nature of law and about the basis of law in our human nature and capacities. A central question is the relation between law and hu-man freedom or liberty. So we must begin by examining the theory of law we find in late scholasticism, and especially in Bellarmine and Su-arez – giving particular attention to Suarez, who of the two writers was by far the more systematic and searching thinker.

For scholastic ethical theory, law is closely bound up with one very special and distinctive human capacity – human freedom understood as a power or capacity to determine outcomes. We naturally think of our-selves as having a power to determine for ourselves how we decide and act. This power of self-determination, which philosophers call freedom or free will, is multi-way, making alternatives by way of decision and action available to us. It is up to me whether I walk away, or remain where I am – and also up to me which of these actions I decide to per-


form. I have control over which actions I perform, and, beforehand, over which actions I decide to perform.

Law, for Suarez, is an especially directive form taken by reason, one that recognizes and guides our capacity for freedom, and in two contrasting ways. First, law affords us rights, and in particular a right to liberty, a right that limits just coercion. At the same time law imposes obligations – obligation being termed by Suarez a vis directiva or di-rective force – that bind us to exercise freedom in ways that are good rather than bad; and such obligations may, under certain conditions, be justly and coercively enforced. In both cases, in giving us a right to liberty that blocks our coercion, and in imposing obligations on us that may permit our coercion, law is giving normative recognition to our possession of freedom as a power. This means, as we shall see, that in scholastic ethical theory freedom or free will possesses a dual norma-tive significance. Like the law that gives it recognition, our free will is both a normative block to coercion, and a normative enabler of it.

How is our free will taken to base a right to liberty? The answer is simple. Freedom is a power to determine for ourselves what we do. And the right to liberty is understood by Suarez as the right to exercise this power – as the right to determine for ourselves what we do. The power bases the right because the right concerns the power. How, without the power, could we possess the right to exercise it?

In everyday English we can use the same terms both to assert our possession of freedom as a power and to assert freedom as a right. I might say: «It’s up to me what I do» simply to report that I actually do possess control over what I do. But I could also use the phrase to assert not the power but the right – as a right not to be coerced. If you attempt to direct me to do something, and back this direction up with threats, I might protest: «Don’t you tell me what to do; it is up to me what I do». In the scholastic tradition we find the same shifting application of terms to assert both the power and the right. Dominium can mean freedom or libertas as a power; or it can used, as in dominium libertatis, to mean the right to exercise the power:

If, however, we are speaking of the natural law of dominion, it is then true that liberty is a matter of natural law, in a positive, not merely a negative sense, since nature itself confers upon man the true dominion of his liberty (dominium

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libertatis). For liberty rather than slavery is of natural right, for this reason, namely, that nature has made men free in a positive sense (so to speak) with an intrinsic right to liberty, whereas it has not made them slaves in this positive sense, strictly speaking7.

The right to liberty does not rule all coercion out as illegitimate. But it does establish that no individual naturally has the right coercively to direct another. Coercion, if legitimate, requires special justification. In particular it requires some form of public authority with jurisdiction. That jurisdiction must extend to the kind of activity that the authority is seeking punitively to direct; and the individual being directed must fall under that jurisdiction.

But once this condition on public authority is met, our power of free-dom ceases normatively to block our coercion, and comes normatively to enable it. For freedom, as a power over alternatives, needs the direc-tion, away from bad alternatives and towards the good, which legal obligations provide. And freedom also makes us truly, morally respon-sible for what we do, so that if we disregard obligations and breach them, we can be fairly punished for the breach. Freedom is the basis of desert of punishment.

This dual significance of free will, as a basis of right and of obliga-tion, and so as a block to coercion and an enabler of it, goes far back in the canonical tradition, and is embedded in the traditional theology of baptism and of baptism’s juridical significance. A much cited canonical text, important both for the Council of Trent and for the Second Vatican Council, is the fourth Council of Toledo’s ruling on coercion in relation to baptism – the basis of the Church’s own coercive jurisdiction.8 No

7 F. suárez, De Legibus ac Legislatore Deo, II, c. 14, §16, in Id., Opera Omnia, ed. Charles Berton, Louis Vives, Paris 1856, vol. 5, p. 141 (my emphases).

8 The fourth council of Toledo was a provincial council held in 633 in Visigothic Spain. Its teaching on coercion in relation to baptism was fundamental to the theological discussion at Trent that led to the condemnation of Erasmus, as discussed below. The council of Toledo was also cited at Vatican II in Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration on religious liberty, along with other canoni-cal material, in footnote 8 to the declaration’s exposition of the Church’s traditional respect for liberty of belief – the canonical passages cited making it plain that the traditional liberty strictly applied to the belief of the unbaptized. My The interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: a reply to Martin Rhonheimer, in «Nova et Vetera» (English edition), 11, 1 (2013), pp. 77-121 discusses the implications of this use of canonical material for the interpretation of the declaration.


one may rightly be coerced into baptism or into the act of faith – for faith involves free will. But once someone is validly baptized (even if through illicit pressure), their free will ceases to protect them from coercion. In the baptized the act of faith can licitly be coerced – and should be, in those unwilling to meet the obligation to faith that baptism brings with it:

This holy synod teaches however concerning the Jews that no one then is to be forced to believe (nemini deinceps vim ad credendum inferre). God has mer-cy as he pleases, and hardens hearts as he pleases. People are not to be saved against their will, but willingly, that the demands of justice be respected. For as man perished in obedience to the serpent by his own will (propria arbitrii voluntate) so too through the call of divine grace each person is saved through the conversion of his own mind in faith. Thus people are to be persuaded to convert by free will (libera arbitrii facultate), not compelled by force. As for those who have already been compelled into Christianity (as was done in the times of the most pious ruler Sisebut) since they are already linked to the holy sacraments and have received the grace of baptism, and been anointed with chrism, and have publicly partaken of the body of the Lord, it is required that they be compelled to hold the faith that they received by force or necessity, lest the name of the Lord be blasphemed and the faith that they received be held vile and contemptible9.

By the time of Suarez, Toledo IV was integrated into a developed theory of right and obligation. The free will of the unbaptized gave them a right not to be coerced by the Church into the faith, and that was because the unbaptized lay outside ecclesial jurisdiction. But once baptism put people within the Church’s jurisdiction, that same free will then underpinned an obligation to faith that the Church could legiti-mately enforce. Enforcement would be fair given the obligation to the Church that baptism brought with it, and given people’s genuine moral responsibility for what they freely believed or failed to. Breach of the obligation to faith, in heresy or apostasy, when culpable, could be pun-ished as a canonical offence.

But in truth the baptized are under an obligation both to God and the

9 Toledo IV, canon 56, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 voll., ed. E. Friedberg, Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig 1881, vol. 1, pp. 161-162.

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Church by reason of baptism, and therefore can specifically be compelled by the Church to remain in the faith or to return to it10.

For the scholastic tradition, then, law and freedom are intimately related. In affording a right to liberty, and then in licensing limitation of that liberty through punitively enforced obligations, law is combining two modes by which the human power of free will or freedom is given normative recognition.

Hobbes was deeply opposed to this view of law because he denied the very possibility of freedom as a power. There could be no such thing as a human power of self-determination because the very formulation of it was viciously regressive: «And if a man determine himself, the question will still remain what determined him to determine himself in that manner»11.

The right to liberty and obligation could no longer be united within one and the same law as two ways of recognizing the power of self-de-termination, since there could be no such power. The right and obliga-tion now fell apart for Hobbes as phenomena that were simply opposed – law now being identified by Hobbes exclusively with obligation, and the right to liberty surviving just as the space left to us by obligation-imposing law:

For though they that speak of this subject, use to confound Jus, and Lex, Right and Law; yet they ought to be distinguished; because RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas LAW determineth, and bindeth to one of them; so that Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation and Liberty; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent12.

The function of law, for Hobbes, would now be just to limit liberty; and liberty would come to no more than what is left open to us by the obligations of the law. This generated a fundamental problem within

10 F. suárez, De Fide, disp. 20, sec. 3, §17, in id., Opera Omnia, cit., vol. 12, pp. 514-515.11 Th. hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, clearly stated

between Dr Bramhall Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, EDITORE? London 1656, p. 26.

12 Th. hobbes, Leviathan, cit., c. 14, «Of the first and second Naturall Lawes, and of contracts», in vol. 2, p. 198.


Hobbes’s theory of coercive authority and the State. What was left to limit the attempts of an earthly sovereign to coerce us? Certainly not any right to liberty on our part, based on our power of self-determina-tion or free will, that the State might be under an obligation to respect; and this left Hobbes with a considerable problem where the coercion of belief was concerned – a problem to which we shall return.

3. Church and State

We have considered the general nature of law and coercive author-ity. We must now turn to Suarez and Bellarmine’s view of the various specific kinds of law and authority, and of the distinction between two coercive authorities in particular – Church and State.

State authority is regarded as that form of authority that is natural to humanity. The authority of the State is based on natural law – that form of law that applies to humans in general, just through their human nature. And State authority serves those ends, natural justice and natural happiness, that are proper to human nature, and that are the concern of any human community.

But there is also a supernatural end available to us gratuitously through Christ, and communicated to us by revelation rather than natu-ral reason. This involves the revealed law of the New Covenant – a law that does not come with human nature, but is the special product of divine legislation, communicated to us by Christ, and which takes the form of a divine positive law. This revealed divine law establishes an-other kind of authority, that of the Church, which stands to the law of the New Covenant as State authority stands to natural law. State authority is based on natural law; so civil law, the positive law of the State, both enforces that natural law and extends and specifies its application. Cor-respondingly, therefore, since the Church’s right to legislate and punish rests on the revealed law of the New Covenant, canon law, the positive legislation of the Church, serves the same function in relation to that revealed law. Canon law both enforces the law of the New Covenant and extends and specifies its application. Though each system of posi-tive law serves different ends, each is a form of humanly created law

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governing human communities that must support and maintain them-selves through earthly or temporal means. The tension in early modern Catholic theories of civil and canon law is fundamentally between what Church and State have in common – parallel structures of humanly leg-islated positive law governing shared human populations – and what distinguishes them: the different bases of each law, in a revealed law that is divine and in a law that is rationally given and natural; and the fundamentally different ends served by the two authorities, spiritual in the Church’s case and temporal in the case of the State.

Nothing thus far would have been controversial for early mod-ern Catholics. Few Catholics then denied, as Hobbes denied, that the Church was indeed a coercive authority, with a general right to legis-late canonically and to enforce her laws with punishments. Suarez and Bellarmine were both of course aware that there was a very general question about how any form of human legal direction, be it by Church or State, can play a role in taking us to a supernatural end. How can hu-man legal direction and correction play a role in salvation, when salva-tion is a gift of divine grace? But there was a ready Catholic answer to this general question, and one with which most of their co-religionists would have been comfortable. The answer is that here as elsewhere in the economy of salvation, grace itself uses human agency as its instru-ment, especially through works of charity – in this case moving humans to assist other humans by correcting them. As Suarez put it:

It is replied that men cannot by their own power direct others to the super-natural end, but they can do this with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, from whom they obtain the authority; and although the efficacy and the growth is always given by God, through his grace, yet men too can plant and water and thus direct people through laws toward the supernatural end; and by the same reason they can through spiritual or other congruent penalties restrain peo-ple from sins in relation to eternal salvation, which is prevented by sin. And though human coercion cannot just by itself change the internal will, where sin properly is to be found, nonetheless this coercion is necessary; both be-cause discomfort (vexatio) tends to produce understanding, and also because once the opportunity or ease of performing the external action is removed, the will abandons the internal affection much more easily; and finally because external observance is necessary to the good of the Church, and to avoiding scandals and dissensions and the like. Therefore the shepherds of the Church use authority that is both directive and coercive, and effect through their laws


not only internal justice, but also what is externally virtuous, fitting and well established13.

Later we shall see this same issue also being addressed by Bellarm-ine, in very similar terms, with special regard to the coercion of the act of faith.

There were however other questions about which there was no con-sensus in early modern Catholicism. These concerned the relations between Church and State and, in particular, their respective coercive competences.

The first question concerned the very authority to coerce religiously. Was the right and authority to direct religious belief and practice ex-clusive to the Church? Was all legislation and punishment in matters of religion based, at least ultimately, on the authority of the Church, or did the State have a legislative authority of its own in matters of religion too?

Then a second question had to do specifically with the temporal or earthly sphere. The State clearly possesses authority in the temporal sphere. States legislate regarding temporal or earthly goods, and threat-en forms of punishment that are temporal, involving the punitive re-moval of earthly goods such as property, liberty and even life. But does the Church also have a right to legislate regarding temporal goods and to threaten temporal punishments? And what, given the spiritual and heavenly nature of her mission, might be the basis of this temporal au-thority, and what is its relation to the temporal authority of the State?

These two questions address the relation in human law between the spiritual and the temporal, but from opposite directions. The first ques-tion is about whether religion can be the business of a coercive author-ity, the State, whose concerns might immediately appear earthly and temporal rather than heavenly or spiritual. Can the earthly concern itself with heavenly ends? The second question is about how far a primarily spiritual authority that serves spiritual ends can use earthly means. How far can the heavenly make use of the earthly?

There was no consensus in early modern Catholicism about the these issues of Church and State, and Bellarmine’s and Suarez’s writings

13 F. suárez, De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 1 §11, p. 330.

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were often composed in public controversy with other Catholics, such as the Franco-Scottish Gallican William Barclay. Suarez’s and Bellarm-ine’s views did have the backing of Paul V, so that they came to provide the body of what, by the early seventeenth century, amounted to, for the papacy, an official theology of Church and State. But this theology was vigorously opposed elsewhere in the Catholic world, and notably by the Sorbonne and the Paris Parlement. And even in Rome the vic-tory of Jesuit political theology was recent. Bellarmine’s own defence of the Church’s temporal authority as only indirect – as limited to what was necessary for spiritual ends – had been insufficiently extensive for a previous pope, Sixtus V. Following the hierocratic tradition of Ae-gidius Romanus and Augustinus Triumphus, Sixtus still believed that the Church had a direct temporal sovereignty over the earth, and died in 1590 while planning to put Bellarmine’s political theology on the Index14.

Beyond these matters of public controversy lay a more refined and subtle question, also involving Church and State, which was a particu-lar interest for Suarez. This was a question about the kind of direction given by humanly legislated positive law. Does canon law, the positive law of the Church, direct action in a fundamentally different way from civil law, the positive law of the State? In the case of civil law, positive law seems to direct only action that is forensically public and external. But how far is this really true; and if true, is it a truth about the function-ing of human positive law in general, or simply about civil law? Does canon law, as the law of a spiritual authority, differ from civil law in directing internal or forensically private actions too? We shall see this question becoming pressing in relation to the canon law on heresy – the positive law of the Church that directs belief, which seems to be an internal mental State.

Where the authority of the State was concerned, the Roman theolo-gians were united against the Gallicans on one important point regard-ing religion. The Roman view insisted that the State lacks any authority of its own to legislate for matters of revealed or supernatural religion. This was because the authority of the State is based on natural law, so

14 See s. TuTino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010, pp. 67-70.


that its jurisdiction extends only to the good of a human community as governed by natural law – so as involving goods natural to humanity, such as natural happiness and natural justice. Revealed religion offers us a supernatural end that goes beyond anything of which humans are naturally capable. Though the State is under the same natural law ob-ligation as individuals to believe and publicly acknowledge any divine revelation of that end if and when it is communicated, no such revela-tion is itself part of natural law; and so no more than individuals does the State have any authority of its own to legislate for religion in su-pernatural form or to enforce that legislation by threats of punishment:

Punishment of crimes only belongs to civil magistrates in so far as those crimes are contrary to political ends, public peace and human justice; but co-ercion with respect to those deeds which are opposed to religion and to the salvation of the soul, is essentially a function of spiritual power [the power of the Church], so that the authority to make use of temporal penalties for the purposes of such correction must have been allotted in particular to this spiri-tual power15.

So for example the State had no authority of its own to prohibit or restrict religions just because they were false, at least provided those false religions were consistent with natural law – as monotheisms such as Judaism and Islam both were:

The reason is that these [non-Christian] rites are not intrinsically bad in terms of natural law; so the temporal power of a ruler does not extend in itself to forbidding them16.

But natural law is not wholly neutral on the question of religion. For human reasoning from created things allows us to come to know of God’s existence as our creator, and to know that we bear his image, and that we bear it through our possession of freedom as a power and through our related capacity for reason. This means that we are under a natural law obligation to practise at least natural religion – a rational

15 F. suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores, III, c. 23 §19 in id., Opera Omnia, cit., vol. 24, pp. 320-321.

16 id., De Fide, cit., disp. 18, sec. 4, §10, p. 451.

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monotheism the function of which is not to bring us to any supernatural end, but, besides honouring God himself, to further the good both of individuals and also of the human community. It is vital to the good of any human community, and so too of the State, that God’s existence be recognized publicly, and that he be loved and given due worship.

This would suggest that the State does have some authority of its own in matters of religion: the State must at least have the right to direct and enforce natural religion in the form of rational monotheism. But even here matters were not clear-cut. On this issue Suarez equivocated, between a static view, that still allows the State this authority over natu-ral religion at least, and a dynamic view, that from the coming of Christ reserves all authority in religion generally to the Church.

On the static view there is a constant and still valid division of au-thority in religion, with supernatural religion being the exclusive busi-ness of the Church, while natural religion remains a proper object of State authority. Thus in his work on the supernatural virtues, Suarez talked of all rulers, non-Christian rulers included, retaining the right to prohibit irrational polytheism, as contrary to natural law, and to enforce monotheism:

The confirmation of our argument is that the purpose of [State] power is to maintain the State in peace and justice, which cannot be done unless the State is also induced to live virtuously; but men cannot live according to moral and natural virtue, without true religion and the worship of the one God; therefore, natural power and the jurisdiction of a human State are extended to include this purpose… even a pagan – that is, a non-Christian – king, if he has a knowledge of the true God, may coerce his own subjects into believing that truth (cogere subditos ad idem credendum), either by their own reasoning if they are educa-ted, or by putting human faith in more learned men, if they are ignorant; and consequently, he may compel those same subjects to cease from the worship of idols and from similar superstitions contrary to natural reason. The proof of this inference is that there resides in such a king all power which, according to natural reason, is suitable for a human State17.

However elsewhere, in his discussion of canon law in book four of De Legibus, Suarez took the dynamic view. The State’s authority under

17 Ivi, disp. 18, sec. 4 §§7-8, pp. 450-451.


natural law did once extend to natural religion. But now the coming of Christ has reoriented religion as such, at least within the Christian world, to the supernatural. And this removes religion in general from the competence of the State, and places it exclusively under the author-ity of the Church:

For the matter of civil law is more principally and mainly what pertains to human justice: whereas the main concern of canon law is what pertains to divi-ne justice and religion, for almost everything else is ordered to this, as evident from what we have said. As regards this area, civil authority is more limited now within the Church, than it was before the Christian religion; for once the care of religion was oriented towards to the virtue and happiness of the com-monwealth, as we noted above from St Thomas; but now religion itself, and spiritual salvation and spiritual happiness are the priority, and the rest for their sake; and therefore once the care of religion either belonged to the authority of the ruler, or was joined with that authority in one and the same person, or was subordinated to the authority of the ruler: now however the care of religion is specially given to the shepherds of the Church18.

We find this dynamic view later endorsed by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, where religion in general, just as concerned with divine worship and the sacred, is placed within the jurisdiction of Church rather than State:

The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers (potestates), the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over di-vine, the other over human, things [...] While one of the two powers has for its immediate and chief object care of the goods of this mortal life, the other provides for goods that are heavenly and everlasting. Whatever, therefore, in things human is in any way of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls or to the worship of God, is wholly subject to the power and judgment of the Church (id est omne in potestate arbitrioque Ecclesiae)19.

18 F. suárez, De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 11, §10, p. 372.19 leo Xiii, Immortale Dei §13-§14. For a later, and very important endorsement of the

dynamic view, see Jacques Maritain: «Here we are confronted with the basic distinction, stated by Christ himself, between the things that are God’s and the things which are Caesar’s. From the advent of Christianity on, religion has been taken out of the hands of the State; the terrestrial and national frameworks in which the spiritual was confined have been shattered; its universal-ity together with its freedom have been manifested in full bloom», J. mariTain, Man and the

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What establishes that the Church exists as a coercive authority? Ob-viously, it cannot be natural law. It must instead be revelation that es-tablishes the coercive nature of the Church – the same revelation that communicates the New Covenant law that bases the Church’s author-ity. So Suarez and Bellarmine rest their view of the Church’s right to coerce on a series of arguments from revelation. We find arguments from scripture and then from tradition, including from specific conciliar and canonical decrees and decisions. The emphasis lay not so much on the Church’s very nature as a coercive authority, which was not really controversial in the early modern Catholic world, but on something else that was much more disputed – the Church’s possession of a jurisdic-tion that though it served a supernatural end, could include the temporal sphere, including temporal punishments, where necessary to attaining that supernatural end.

The argument from scripture took a variety of forms. The principal argument was from specific words of Christ understood as directly es-tablishing the coercive nature of the authority of St Peter and of the later popes as his successors. The fundamental text, and one that was seen as implying coercion directly, was St John’s gospel, chapter 21, in which Christ commissions St Peter to be a shepherd, with the faithful as his sheep – sheep who have gone or are liable to go astray, and need to be rescued by the divine shepherd Christ and his earthly vicars. Linked to that vision of a shepherd and his flock is the fundamental unity of the flock – a unity that implies, in religious matters, a subordination of a Christian State to the Church.

In a still profoundly agricultural world early modern theologians did not easily forget, as we now do forget, the intensely coercive na-ture of the shepherd’s role. To protect and regulate their flock shep-herds do regularly apply or threaten highly temporal forms of force. The coercive nature of shepherding is typified by the shepherd’s staff or crook, which is written of as a disciplinary virga or rod. The image in the catacombs of Christ the shepherd clasping a wandering sheep about his shoulders portrays a sheep that has been physically picked up and is being forcibly held. Baptized wanderers are compelled by

State, Catholic University of America Press, Washington 1998, p. 152.


the shepherd to remain faithful to their baptism – to their membership of the flock.

At the heart of the New Testament is a pastoral metaphor drawn from non-rational nature, of the shepherd and the sheep, that concerns our predicament as fallen rational beings. Since this metaphor has coercive implications to which early modern Catholicism was very sensitive, the idea of the shepherd was readily interpreted as licensing the use by pope and bishops of temporal force for spiritual ends. In the case of humans, the sheep are actually rational, though waywardly so. So the force li-censed is not brute, but involves law and legal coercion. The shepherd must be able to direct the sheep by legislation – by the imposition of legal obligation:

and then [Christ] added [to St Peter]: Feed my sheep (John 21) whe-re by the word feed is meant the authority to govern and to make laws20.

Force therefore takes the form of threats of legal punishment – to protect the sheep from predators from without, to maintain order with-in, and to ensure that the flock is adequately maintained:

When Peter was told «Feed my sheep» (John last chapter), he was given every authority that is necessary for a shepherd to protect his sheep. To the shepherd a threefold authority is necessary: one concerns wolves, so that he may keep them away in any way he can; the second concerns the rams, so that if they ever hit the flock with their horns he may be able to confine them; the third concerns the rest of the sheep, so that he may provide each one of them with the proper forage. And therefore the Supreme Pontiff has this threefold authority21.

So coercion addresses us as rational and as bearing the image of God – but as fallen too, so needing to be subjected to temporal penal-ties, including corporeal ones, just as sheep are. The sheep include the baptized temporal rulers of Christian states, who even as rulers still count as no more than sheep within the community of the Church, and

20 F. suárez, De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 3, §1, p. 334.21 roberT bellarmine, Tractatus de Potestate Summi Pontificis in Rebus Temporalibus,

adversus Gulielmum Barclay, c. 25, in On Temporal and Spiritual Authority: Robert Bellarm-ine, ed. by S. Turtino, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis 2012, p. 318.

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so who are subject to the Church even in their role as rulers and not just as private individuals. Baptism brings obligations to the Church that are specifically political and not just private:

In fact, since kings through baptism have subjected themselves to the spi-ritual authority of the Pontiff, they are considered to have subjected also their kingdoms and their political authority to the same spiritual authority; that is, they wanted to be directed and corrected by the Pontiff if they have strayed in any way from the path to salvation in temporal matters22.

Why does the status of being a sheep involve the political as well as the private person of the ruler? The fundamental argument is from the unity of the flock, and so of the Christian community as a whole. This unity means that in matters of religion, while it is true that people retain their temporal rights, no part of that community’s temporal or earthly nature is exempt from ecclesial direction for spiritual ends. So, for example, individual Christians continue to have a right to private property; but they can nevertheless be obligated by their baptism to make a portion of their goods available at the Church’s direction when needed for the Church’s mission:

I reply that private men who are admitted into the Church do not forfeit their goods and other temporal rights, and yet they can be obliged by the Church to support their parish priests and, as the Apostle says, let those who sow spiritual things reap carnal things (1 Corinthians 9:11), and they were hardly bound to do these things before accepting the faith23.

Similarly, therefore, baptized rulers of Christian states retain their political authority and sovereignty in temporal matters – but can like-wise be obliged through baptism to lend their temporal power to sup-port the authority and mission of the Church:

By the same token, temporal princes who join Christ’s household lose nei-ther their power nor their jurisdiction but subject themselves to him whom Christ has put in charge of his household, to be ruled and led by him in the path that leads to life24.

22 Ivi, c. 16, p. 266.23 Ivi, c. 3, §7, p. 169.24 Ivi, pp. 169-170.


Suarez emphasizes that this subjection has to be political because the flock of the baptised must be one:

The principle foundation of this truth is declared both through reason and testimony: for it is taken from the unity of the Church of Christ sufficien-tly communicated through the Gospel, and declared by Paul, 1 Corinthians, 12, saying: We are all baptized into the one body... therefore Christ the Lord founded the Church as one spiritual kingdom, in which there would be one king, and one spiritual ruler; therefore it is necessary that the temporal power be subject to the spiritual, as the body is to the soul25.

To communicate the unity of the Christian community we find Su-arez using in this passage a further and venerable image, in this case relating Church and State – the image of soul-body union. The Chris-tian Church, understood in the widest sense as the community of the faithful, unites the two forms of authority, the spiritual authority of the Church with the temporal authority of the State, as the soul is united with the body to form a single human person. And in spiritual mat-ters that are higher, the community as a whole must be directed by the higher, spiritual authority – just as in the higher matters that concern the soul the body must act at the direction of the soul.26 So all Christians with whatever temporal belongs to them, including their political com-munities, must be subordinate to the shepherds in spiritual matters, and give their shepherds temporal support where this is required to serve the supernatural end. The pastoral and soul-body union models come together in the following passage of Bellarmine:

And spiritual and temporal authority do not converge in the Church as two commonwealths converge in a federation, but as the spirit and the flesh con-verge in one man, as Gregory of Nazianzen taught clearly in his oration Ad populum timore perculsum. And it is certain that the spirit must rule over the

25 F. suárez, De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 9, §3, p. 366.26 The model of soul-body union as an ideal of Church relations has patristic roots: Suarez

and Bellarmine both appealed to Gregory Nazianzen. The model continued to have a long his-tory, still being magisterially taught by Leo XIII in 1885: «The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things...There must, accordingly, exist between these two powers a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man», Immortale Dei §§13-14.

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flesh, not the other way around, and in the Church of Christ Pontiffs and kings are not like the chief rams in the sheepfold but rather like the shepherds and the sheep, and whether the shepherds should rule over the sheep or the sheep over the shepherds is not something that can be called into doubt27.

So the State can be involved in religious coercion – not under its own authority but as a community of the baptized ruled by the baptized. Baptized rulers can, by virtue of their baptism, be called upon in the exercise of their political office to act as the Church’s agents in enforc-ing her authority, just as the body can be directed by the soul to act on the soul’s authority. The State becomes in spiritual matters the Church’s secular arm.

These two pictures, of the bishop as shepherd and State rulers as sheep, and of the State as united with the Church in a soul-body union to act as the Church’s agent in spiritual matters, are frequently asserted together. And each picture is seen as implying the same conclusion: that the Church must have the right and authority to apply, if necessary with State assistance, coercion in temporal form, for spiritual ends.

Scripture was used to establish not only that coercive authority ex-tending to the use of temporal means had been given to the Apostles, but that this authority to coerce had actually been exercised by them. One important passage appealed to in this connexion is from Acts, where, appealing to the authority of Augustine28, Ambrose and Gregory the Great, Suarez interprets the deaths of Ananias and Saphira as a pun-

27 R. bellarmine, Tractatus de potestate Summi Pontificis, cit., c. 13, p. 247.28 Suarez refers to Augustine’s anti-Donatist Contra epistolam Parmeniani (the reference

to apostolic punishment of Ananias and Saphira is in book 3.3). Augustine explicitly refers in relation to the suppression of Donatism to a coercive power specifically of the Church over the baptized. See for example epistle 185 de correctione Donatistarum, especially 185.11 where Augustine speaks of a just and corrective prosecution of the wicked by the Church and 185.23 «Cur ergo non cogeret Ecclesia perditos filios ut redirent, si perditi filii coegerunt alios ut pe-rirent». For an argument that Augustine conceived of the Church as the true coercive authority in relation to the baptized, and saw the Roman State’s involvement in such coercion as no more than a fulfillment by baptized Christians of their duty to support the coercive authority of the Church, see r.a. markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1970. According to Markus, in his dealings with impe-rial officials and in his writings in defence of religious coercion Augustine considered Christian rulers and officials primarily as baptized members of the Church; their role as State officers was secondary to that: ivi, p. 148.


ishment inflicted on them by St Peter – a just penalty imposed by the apostolic possessor of a coercive jurisdiction over the baptized:

And finally, lest this power [to use temporal means of coercion] be com-pletely hidden at the beginning of the Church, since the Apostles could not then exercise it in the ordinary way because of the numbers and strength of the unbelievers, some miraculous signs were given of this power: such a sign was made through Peter in Acts 5, when at his command Ananias and Saphira died, about which Ambrose says (sermon 19), «While he punishes one, he corrects others, for he wanted punishment to touch one and fear to touch the others»29.

Other passages are cited by Suarez to establish the apostolic punitive authority not only of St Peter but also of St Paul, as in 1 Corinthians 5 where St Paul decrees that for the good of his salvation a member of the Church at Corinth guilty of incest be «handed over to Satan for the de-struction of the flesh» (that is, as Suarez understands St Paul’s decree, subjected to a temporal punishment).

Because the issue was a matter of revelation, concerning the law

29 F. suárez, De Fide, cit., disp. 20, sec. 3, §21, p. 517. Suarez repeats the interpretation in F. suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae, III, c. 23, §§12-13, in id., Opera Omnia, cit., vol. 24, p. 318 appealing not only to Gregory, but also to the authority of Bede. Suarez there concludes: «Ac-cording, then, to this Patristic interpretation of the said text, we find that ecclesiastical correction and punishment consist not in spiritual censure alone, but also, on occasion, in corporeal afflic-tions, so that the pastors of the Church may resort to temporal punishment for the sake of spiritual welfare». Notice that Suarez’s view of St Peter’s role in the deaths of Ananias and Saphira was not universal in the Catholic tradition. It had been challenged long before his time, not because of the interpretation’s involvement of ecclesial authority in the infliction of a temporal penalty – canoni-cal temporal penalties were not themselves a problem – but because of the specific infliction of the penalty of death. How could death be inflicted on the authority of and at the hand of a bishop, a minister of the New Testament? Aquinas, driven by concern on this point, in Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 4, resp, had mentioned the interpretation later assumed by Suarez, only to deny it, and claim that it was God rather than Peter who inflicted the penalty. It is immensely significant that despite the fame and immense weight of Aquinas as an authority in the counter-reformation Jesuit order, and despite the far from obscure location of Aquinas’s discussion of this passage, Suarez no longer regards Aquinas’s view as even worth mention. Priority is now given to an interpretation, claims to the patristic antiquity of which Suarez repeats and emphasizes, that locates firmly in scrip-ture itself the right of ecclesial authority to enforce obligations on the baptized through not just any temporal penalty, but specifically through death; the only possible earthly bearer of any ultimate authority to enforce baptismal obligations by death being the only true bearer of jurisdiction over the baptized – the Church, not the State.

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of the New Covenant, appeal was made not only to scripture but to past conciliar and canonical authority. The disciplinary decrees of Trent were of great importance, in that these openly called for temporal pun-ishments to enforce canonical regulation, requiring where necessary the assistance of the State in their imposition. As Bellarmine noted:

Also, they [Christians] can, as a punishment for different sins, not only be obliged by their confessors in the internal forum to atone for their sins by giving alms, but also be fined by the bishops in the external forum with pecu-niary sanctions and also be put in prison, as is clear from the Council of Trent, session 25, chapter 330.

Trent clearly supported not only the Church’s right to impose tem-poral penalties, but also an obligation on the Christian State to enforce the Church’s authority. The Council of Trent’s canons on the reform of marriage called on ecclesiastical judges to request the assistance of the State in the enforcement of penalties for adultery and concubi-nage, penalties that extended if necessary to expulsion from the place of residence31. Trent also called in the help of the secular arm to enforce Church law on monastic enclosure, declaring the excommunication of any secular magistrates unwilling to assist32. And the Council solemnly admonished rulers in their capacity as baptized Catholics to enforce Church authority33.

4. The coercion of belief: the Council of Trent

Trent was involved, not only in asserting the Church’s general right to use temporal means of coercion, and to call on the State to assist her, but in a dogmatic affirmation of the right to coerce, in particular, the act

30 R. bellarmine, Tractatus de potestate Summi Pontificis, cit., c. 3 §7 p. 169.31 See Council of Trent, Session 24, Canones super Reformatione circa Matrimonium, c.

8, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by N. Tanner and G. Alberigo, Georgetown University Press, Washington 1990, vol. 2, p. 759.

32 See Council of Trent, Session 25, Decretum de Regularibus et Monialibus, c. 5 in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, cit., pp. 777-778.

33 See Council of Trent, Session 25, Decretum de Reformatione Generali, c. 20 in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, cit., p. 795.


of faith in the baptized. The obligation to faith was a central baptismal obligation, without which the Christian life was clearly impossible; and this obligation in particular could be enforced.

The trigger for Trent’s definition was provided by Erasmus. In the preface to his Paraphrases on Matthew34, Erasmus had proposed that those baptized as children be asked on growing up publicly to reaffirm their baptismal promises; and that they not be subjected to any punitive coercion back into fidelity save exclusion from the sacraments if they were unwilling to provide the reaffirmation. This Erasmian challenge to the use of temporal penalties to coerce the baptized into fidelity had already been criticized well before Trent by Spanish theologians meet-ing at Valladolid in 1527 to review Erasmus’s works, and had been con-demned thereafter by the University of Paris. At Valladolid, whatever else the individual theologians varyingly thought about the public reaf-firmation of baptismal promises, all were hostile to Erasmus’s proposed rejection of any coercive enforcement of fidelity on the unwilling – one theologian expressing the view that a threat of death for the unwilling would be a suitable sanction35.

At Trent in January 1547 Erasmus’s proposal was included in a series of condemnable propositions regarding baptism – the errores

34 erasmus oF roTTerdam, In Evangelium Matthei Paraphrasis, Basel 1522. 35 For more on the universally hostile reception already given at Valladolid to Erasmus’s

rejection of a punitive coercion of the recalcitrant baptized back into faith – a hostility shown even by those theologians otherwise well disposed towards Erasmus – see l.a. homza, Eras-mus as hero, or heretic? Spanish humanism and the Valladolid assembly of 1527, in «Renais-sance Quarterly», 50 (1997), pp. 78-118. Notice that in his In Acta Apostolorum Paraphrasis, Antwerp 1524, in discussing Acts chapter 5, Erasmus rather unsurprisingly also targets and very deliberately opposes any interpretation of the deaths of Ananias and Saphira as the imposi-tion of a temporal penalty by St Peter, based on ecclesial authority over the baptized. St Peter’s role, according to Erasmus, is entirely prophetic, and the punishment is directly imposed, on divine authority alone, by God: «Peter did not however inflict any punishment, but simply a bitter and health-giving rebuke. He (Ananias) in truth neither broke down in tears nor expressed any penitence, and was struck down by divine vengeance». And again, in relation to Saphira: «although Peter, than whom no one was milder, did not inflict punishment here». Notice that, unlike Aquinas, Erasmus does not dwell on possible juridical issues specific to the death penal-ty arising from St Peter’s clerical State. Erasmus appealed instead to St Peter’s alleged personal disposition, and a connected ideal of Christian life and conduct as entirely non-coercive in its relation to others. We have, it seems, a far more fundamental challenge to Suarez’s conception of St Peter’s role. As a Christian St Peter’s character must exemplify a certain pacific ideal, and so he must deal with his flock non-coercively.

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haereticorum circa sacramentum baptismi. There was no dissension re-garding the erroneous nature of Erasmus’s view. The discussions made reference both to the custom of the Church, which was to impose the faith on the baptized, and to Toledo IV36. In March in its decree on baptism Trent then cited Erasmus’s proposal in canon 14, and imposed an anathema upon it. And as at Valladolid, the condemnation was not of the simple proposal that people be asked to reaffirm their baptismal commitment; but of Erasmus’s linkage of this proposal to a disavowal of any real coercion of the baptized – his suggestion that those unwill-ing to make the requested affirmation should be left uncoerced to their own decision:

If anyone says that when they grow up [cum adoleverint], those baptized as little children should be asked whether they wish to affirm what their godpa-rents promised in their name when they were baptized; and that, when they reply that they have no such wish, they should be left to their own decision and not, in the meantime, be coerced by any penalty into the Christian life [suo esse arbitrio relinquendos nec alia interim poena ad christianam vitam cogendos], except that they be barred from the reception of the eucharist and the other sacraments, until they have a change of heart: let him be anathema37.

This decree was clearly understood at the time as a de fide endorse-ment of coercion of the act of faith in the baptized – as we see from Francisco de Toledo, the first Jesuit to be made a Cardinal, and prefect of studies at the new Roman College:

Fifth conclusion. Those baptized as infants before the use of reason are certainly to be compelled when they reach the age of reason to retain the faith, even on penalty of death. This is against Erasmus, who in a certain preface to a version of the New Testament says it would be more advisable if these infants once they reached the age of reason were questioned about the faith; and if they

36 Of the theologians who specifically addressed Erasmus’s proposal, all condemned it as damnandus, or as falsus, or as haereticus. There is no record of any opposition to the condem-nation of Erasmus or of any questioning of the basing appeal to Toledo IV: see Concilium Tri-dentinum Diariorum, Actorum, Epistularum, Tractatuum, ed. Societas Goerresiana, in volume 5, ed. by S. Ehses, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1911, pp. 838-995; and h. Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1957, vol. 2, pp. 316-332.

37 Council of Trent Session VII, Decree on baptism, canon 14, 3 March 1547, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, cit., p. 686.


did not wish to remain in it, were left free, being deprived only of participation in the sacraments. But this view is heresy, and the conclusion is Catholic. First, this heresy is condemned in the Council of Trent session VII, canon 14. And furthermore because just as by divine law baptism can be conferred on infants, so obligations can be imposed on them by the same God, even before the age of reason; for God can demand of humans whatever is pleasing to him38.

Theologians thereafter consistently viewed this decree as defining the legitimacy of the use of coercion to enforce baptismal obligations, including the central baptismal obligation to faith. Thus in the eight-eenth century Billuart asserted it to be clear Church teaching that the faith of heretics and apostates, but not of the unbaptized, may rightly be coerced39. His approach was entirely conventional. Besides Aquinas’s well-known and frequently cited teaching to that effect in the Summa Theologiae 2a2ae question 10, article 8, Billuart cited the canon law on heresy, specifically including Toledo IV on the coercive retention in the faith of the baptized. Then for dogmatic teaching by a general council, Billuart appealed to canon 14 of Trent’s decree on baptism. We find prominent and officially approved manualists taking the same line until the Second World War. Thus Perrone in 1845, Hurter in 1908, Ottaviani in 1935, and Merkelbach in 1938 all agree that Trent defines the legiti-macy of the coercive enforcement of baptismal obligations, including the central obligation to faith40. As Merkelbach observes:

Baptized infidels can be compelled by spiritual and temporal penalties to return to the faith and to the Church, since by baptism they were made subject to the Church (Council of Trent, session 7, canon 14)41.

38 FranCisCo de Toledo, In Summam Theologiae Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Enar-ratio, vol. 2, q. 10, art. 8, An infideles sint ad fidem impellendi, Rome 1869, p. 110.

39 See C.R. billuarT Summa Sancti Thomae, Everardum Kints, Liege 1746-1751, in the Tractatus de fide, diss. V, art. II, Utrum infideles cogendi ad fidem?

40 See G. Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae quas in Collegio Romano SJ habebat, Pi-rotta e socii, Milano 1845, vol. 7, Tractatus de baptismo, pp. 103-111; H. hurTer Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium, Wagner, Innsbruck 1908, vol. 3, tract. IX, §§315-316, pp. 281-282; A. oTTaviani, Institutiones Iuris Publici Ecclesiastici, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, Città del Va-ticano 1935, vol. 1, §170; B.H. merkelbaCh, Summa Theologiae Moralis, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1938, vol. 1, §740 .

41 B.H. merkelbaCh, Summa Theologiae Moralis, cit., I, §740.

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The coercion of the act of faith has often been seen as raising special problems. But the perceived nature of these problems has taken very different forms.

Within the Catholic tradition, the issue was not traditionally the very possibility or legitimacy of coercing belief – that possibility and le-gitimacy was taken as evident in the early modern period. The problem within the Catholic tradition had more to do with the implications of the canonical regulation of belief for the theory of human positive law. Some canonists saw the coercion of belief as helping to establish that though just as much a form of humanly legislated positive law as the civil law of the State, canon law operated in a fundamentally different way from civil law, addressing internal acts in a way that civil law did not.

But outside the Catholic Church the issue did indeed involve, from the early modern period on, the legitimacy and even the very possibility of coercing belief. And one thinker greatly responsible for this radical reframing of the issue was Thomas Hobbes.

5. The coercion of belief: the Catholic problem

We shall first address the Catholic problem – the problem to do with the nature of humanly legislated positive law. Such law is the law of a human community, and so a form of law that deals with what is forensi-cally public or external. This link between positive law and the external arises in two ways. First the law attends to the good of a community, not of an individual person – and so is concerned with what is external and public to the whole community, and not what might be private to specific individuals. But secondly the law has to be enforced by the community or its officials. So the actions that law governs must be fo-rensically public. Human courts and their officials must be able to tell whether the law has been broken or obeyed. So it is natural to think that human positive law addresses external actions such as theft or murder, or clear attempts at such, but not, at least directly, private and internal mental acts of merely deciding to steal or murder. Such a view of posi-tive law seems plausible for ordinary forms of civil law – the laws im-


posed by states under their own authority. But what of canon law – the positive law imposed and enforced under the authority of the Church?

Some thought that the positive law of the Church had to work dif-ferently, just because it did govern mental states such as belief. Suarez cites the view, of Pighius and others, that because of the spiritual nature of the Church, canon law, though a form of positive humanly legislated law, is fundamentally unlike civil law in that canon law does directly address internal acts, such as belief considered as a purely internal men-tal State:

For granted that we defined above concerning human law in general that it cannot address internal acts, there is a special difficulty for that view in the case of canon law, which we have left for this place. For there is a gene-ral reason for doubting the view, in that ecclesial authority is spiritual, and is principally directed at the internal good of souls, and has a more elevated principle, namely God himself supernaturally conferring that authority, and therefore on either account this authority appears immediately concerned with internal acts42.

But Suarez did not accept that civil and canon law worked in differ-ent ways. Suarez admitted that canon law might indeed have addressed internal acts directly, had Christ given the Church the required author-ity – which, Suarez conceded, Christ certainly had had the power to do. But there was, in Suarez’s view, no evidence that Christ had actually granted the Church such an authority; in particular, the practice and legal tradition of the Church gave no support to Pighius’s hypothesis that Christ had done so43.

In Suarez’s view, canon law actually worked exactly as did civil law. Just like civil law, canon law and its enforcement was directly con-cerned with the external good of a human community, and so addressed external acts. But just as civil law did too, canon law addressed the character of those external acts as they affected the community’s good. And external acts could affect the good of a community through being expressive of internal acts – internal acts that then formed the public moral character of the external acts that expressed them, so that positive

42 F. suárez De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 12, §1, p. 374.43 Ivi, §7, p. 375.

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law could address those internal acts as well. In such cases, when so constitutive of the moral character of the external acts, internal acts too could be subject to the direction of human positive law. The only differ-ence between the communities of Church and State lay not in the modus operandi of positive law, but in the fact that the spiritual nature of the Church made the relation of external to internal acts more crucial to the good of the ecclesial community. In performing a public sacramental act, what a priest intended might be crucial to the character of that act within the life of the ecclesial community, for example; which is why canon law might make very specific reference to what the priest did or did not intend in its classification and regulation of sacramental acts44.

Suarez insisted that belief was not a concern of any human positive law, canonical or civil, considered just as an internal mental State.45 But belief was not a purely internal State. For beliefs were apt to be asserted. And when asserted, their assertion could matter to the good of a community, not just as an act of speech, but as the expression of what was clearly the assertor’s genuine belief. Doubt or disbelief in fundamental religious or ethical truths could, when expressed, deeply harm a community. For this reason, such doubt or disbelief could, when expressed, be of concern to the public authority governing community, and be subject to criminal penalties.

Laws directive of belief were not peculiar to canon law. They could be part of civil law too, and in Suarez’s view when serving to apply the natural law could be based on purely political authority. We have already seen one central case. Natural law-based State authority might not be competent to direct or enforce any particular supernatural belief. But it could, at least in principle, enforce natural religion – belief in rational monotheism:

Even a pagan – that is, a non-Christian – king, if he has a knowledge of the true God, may coerce his own subjects into believing that truth […] The proof of this inference is that there resides in such a king all power which, according to natural reason, is suitable for a human State46.

44 See F. suárez, De Legibus, cit., IV, c. 12 and 13, pp. 374-387.45 On this point see F. suárez De Fide, cit., disp. 21, sec. 2, §4, p. 535.46 Ivi, disp. 18, sec. 4, §8.


Of course the general issue of the appropriateness of coercing acts that are the gift of grace arose for the act of faith in particular. How could faith, which was a gift of God, be produced by legal coercion? But the case of faith introduced no new or peculiar difficulty. The same general solution was applied: divine grace uses human action as its in-strument. Just as grace can use human preaching to communicate the faith in the first place, so too grace can use human correction to enforce the obligation to faith in the baptized:

The twelfth argument. Faith is a gift of God, and so no one can be compel-led to faith. I reply, just as faith is a gift of God, so too it is an act of free will, and moreover so too chastity and the other virtues are gifts of God, and yet adulterers, murderers and thieves are punished and compelled to live chastely and justly. Wisdom too is a gift of God, and yet it is written in Proverbs 29 that the rod and reproof bring wisdom. Finally faith is a gift of God, but God bestows this gift by various means, one of which is reproof47.

Moreover this use of coercion no more destroyed free will in the case of faith than it destroyed it in the acts of other virtues. Compul-sion – by which was meant the threat of punishment – did not remove human free will in relation to the act of faith, any more than did crimi-nal penalties generally. Threatening people with punishment left them still with the option to risk the penalties and to disbelieve, as penalties on theft leave burglars still strictly free to risk the penalties and em-bark on theft. The threat of punishment served simply to encourage free will’s right use:

And further we say free is to be understood in two ways, meaning either free from the natural necessity (necessitate naturali) which is to be found in a naturally acting cause, or free from moral necessity (necessitate morali), that is from some obligation to act. The first kind of necessity is inconsistent with the act of faith...but in truth penal coercion [the threat of punishment] does not impose this kind of necessity, as is self-evident, and so is not inconsistent with the freedom required by faith; on the contrary, it aids that act, by leading the person to believe freely; and though at the beginning such coercion may appear in some way to diminish the indifference involved in freedom, nonetheless it

47 R. bellarmine, Quinta Controversia Generalis: De Membris Ecclesiae Militantis, III, De Laicis, c. 22, Ingolstadt 1599, pp. 522-523.

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leaves the act still strictly free, and it is less bad to believe through such coer-cion than not to believe at all48.

6. The coercion of belief: Thomas Hobbes

In the early seventeenth century the advocates of the legal coercion of belief were also principal defenders of the individual right to liberty. As we have seen, from the fourth council of Toledo the canonical tra-dition, further developed by Suarez’s time to incorporate a theory of individual rights, did not only teach that State and Church alike had the authority to coercively direct belief. It also taught strict limits to that au-thority – limits placed by the human right to liberty together with the re-stricted nature of the relevant political and ecclesial jurisdictions. Thus the State altogether lacked the authority coercively to impose revealed truth; while the Church did possess that authority, but only in relation to the baptized. And fundamental to the right to liberty was free will.

Thomas Hobbes, by contrast, denied free will. He denied the very existence of a power of self-determination, or of a right to liberty under-stood as the right to exercise that power. Indeed Hobbes had no theory of individual rights that could limit the authority of a State and obligate the State to respect them. The right of a subject to liberty extended only so far as the law of the State permitted. The possible implications of this were obvious and troubling. What if a State ruler were to decree that all his subjects were to adopt some dubious form of religion? What could block his Christian subjects from being bound – legally obligated – by such a decree? In the minds of Hobbes’s immediate readership of Prot-estant Christians the entire credibility of his political theory was put in doubt. The unlimited authority of the Hobbesean State appeared now to threaten the very salvation of the Christian believer.

Hobbes accordingly redefined what salvation required, and in a way neatly designed to remove potential conflict between the requirements of Christianity and the authority of the Hobbesean State. Salvation, in Hobbes’s view, required only inner belief that Jesus is the Christ, combined with conformity to the laws of nature and to whatever legal

48 F. suárez, De Fide, cit., disp. 20, sec. 3, §17, pp. 514-515.


obligations were imposed by earthly sovereigns.49 But what if the sov-ereign commanded that we not believe that Jesus is the Christ? No such command, Hobbes replied, could impose a legal obligation – but not because it violated a right to liberty.

Hobbes was not willing to entertain limitations on political author-ity based on obligations to respect the liberty of subjects and on related restrictions in the State’s competence. No area of human life, including religion, would be exempt from State authority, at least regarding ex-ternal action. Nor was Hobbes willing to make an issue of what forms of religion were actually true. Instead Hobbes introduced a new form of argument: that because the coercion of belief was somehow practically impossible, no directive on belief could ever impose an obligation.

Law could not impose obligations on belief, in Hobbes’s view, be-cause belief could not be produced through legal direction and coer-cion; and legal obligations presupposed some possibility, at least in principle, of their producing conformity. We have a repeated appeal by Hobbes to two features of belief that supposedly make belief im-possible legally to coerce. First Hobbes appeals to the supposed priva-cy of belief. The thought is simple. When faced by the sovereign and his inquisitors, we can always conceal what we truly believe, so that any law on belief is unenforceable on that account. Then, secondly, belief is non-voluntary: what we believe is not subject to our decision or will. Beliefs cannot be adopted or abandoned at will, just in order to comply with the law and avoid sanctions imposed on illegal belief. But that is the only way coercive law can work – as something that we can respond to voluntarily, on the basis of a decision to do so, just as a means to conforming to the law.

As for the inward thought, and beleef of men, which humane Governours can take no notice of, (for God onely knoweth the heart) they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, but of the unrevealed will, and of the power of God; and consequently fall not under obligation50.

49 See Th. hobbes, Leviathan, cit., c. 43, «Of what is Necessary for a Mans Reception into the Kingdome of Heaven».

50 Ivi, c. 40, «Of the Rights of the Kingdome of God», v. 3, p. 738.

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Legal coercion is only of those actions that can be performed or avoided simply as a means of fulfilling commands and of avoiding sanctions threatened for breach of commands.

But the Hobbesean view, with its emphasis on the issue of voluntari-ness, does not fairly address the theory of the legal regulation of belief we find in Suarez. For Suarez religious and ethical belief generally is not completely private. Such belief is to a significant degree a public phenomenon; it is of great significance in our social relations, and is very liable sooner or later to be expressed. That is one reason why what people believe can be of concern to a wider community. But more cru-cially, the non-voluntariness of belief is just not to the point. For where belief is concerned, the function of sanction-backed legal coercion is not to motivate people to form or hold beliefs voluntarily, simply on the basis of a will or motivation to avoid sanctions. Rather the function of the legal direction and the threatened sanctions that come with it is to direct the believer’s attention to a (supposedly) sound epistemic case, based on evidence or else on authoritative testimony, for the obligatory opinion – a case that the believer had hitherto been culpably ignoring – so that the required belief is then formed in response to that epistemic case. Consider again Suarez’s model of the use of State law to enforce natural religion, or belief in monotheism:

Even a pagan – that is, a non-Christian – king, if he has a knowledge of the true God, may coerce his own subjects into believing that truth, either by their own reasoning if they are educated, or by putting human faith in more learned men, if they are ignorant; and consequently, he may compel those same subjects to cease from the worship of idols and from similar superstitions contrary to natural reason51.

It is clear from this passage that Suarez is not presuming that be-lief can be formed just at will, irrespective of testimony or evidence. Belief is importantly non-voluntary because it is directed at its object as true, and so is dependent on truth-related testimony or evidence. State coercion serves simply to direct attention to that testimony or evidence: in the case of belief in God, to rational proofs of God’s

51 F. suárez, De Fide, cit., disp. 18, sec. 4, §8 (my emphases).


existence, or to the witness of experts to the existence and soundness of such proofs.

Behind this conception of State or positive law was a view of the educative function of law that was very old. We find it, for example, in book 10 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The State’s legislation, including its imposition of punitively enforced legal obligations, is certainly concerned with something that looms large in modern legal theory – mutually advantageous coordination at the point of the vol-untary. But State legislation is also concerned with education – with inducing change in the direction of ethically important truth at the level of citizens’ belief. The State is a coercive teacher. Sanction-backed le-gal obligations may serve to direct attention to justifications for belief – justifications for the truth of a socially and morally important claim, about God or about the nature and status of other humans; and in a case where these justifications, though dependent on truth, as relating to that truth also involve some good that binds us with the force of moral obli-gation, such as that we all believe this important truth on this ethically vital matter.

Hobbes was very influential in establishing as a cliché of English language political theory that belief cannot be successfully coerced. From Hobbes through Locke and down to our day, it has been endlessly repeated that the attempted coercion of belief is objectionable because it involves an oppressive use of the law that, though it may silence external speech, is bound to be ineffective as regards inner conviction. Thus Bernard Williams notes a «very important argument in favour of religious toleration» – namely that attempting to coerce belief is «es-sentially fruitless, because the forces of the State cannot reach a per-son’s centre of conviction»52.

But despite all these modern protests that the project of coercing belief is “essentially fruitless”, the coercive structures of early modern states could be very effective at changing what large numbers of people believed. Indeed, modern states do still appear to go to some length to influence belief, not just by various forms of positive recognition and endorsement, but also by the threat and application of sanctions. The

52 See B. Williams, Toleration, a political or moral question, in id., In the Beginning was the Deed, ed. by G. Hawthorn, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005, pp. 133-134.

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function of penal coercion in the criminal law is often to use the threat of a penalty to engage attention and help communicate a message that there are anyway prior grounds to believe – that the action threatened by punishment really would be seriously wrong.53 The punishment of crime is accompanied, in particular, by public witness given by judges and other representatives of the State for the prior and genuine wrong-ness of what is being punished – and it is this witness, and not an arbi-trary command, that the punishment is designed to ram home. Sentenc-ing is characteristically accompanied by moral criticism of the criminal – criticism that is revealed as seriously meant by the gravity of the punishment. Hence the failure to punish a crime with a penalty of any seriousness can convey the opposite message: namely that what was done was not, after all, so seriously wrong. Which is why in such cases of leniency the outrage of the victim and their friends may not betoken a desire for vengeance, but rather resentment at what they take to be a literal understatement of their rights.

The function of sanction-backed criminal law is in part to drive home an argument and change what people actually believe. No mat-ter how terrible and unwarranted the means adopted by the sixteenth century Church’s agents, their conception of the use of law to coerce the baptized into meeting their obligations was not so very different. The canonical punishments for heresy and the like threatened by the counter-reformation Church were no different in general function from the criminal punishments threatened by today’s liberal State: to com-municate testimony or witness to the truth given by representatives of the coercing authority – witness or testimony that should anyway be enough to support and warrant assent; and by impelling attention to the message and its grounds, to pressure those subject to the authority into believing it.

Whatever our final view of the morality of the coercion of belief, it is plain that Suarez and Bellarmine were at least right about what states and other coercive authorities actually do. For good or ill, the State is indeed and inevitably a coercive teacher. Hobbes’s argument to

53 For an influential defence of a communicative or expressive theory of the function of punishment in recent philosophy see J. FeinberG, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1970.


the contrary depended on a model of belief and what its legal coercion would involve that was crude and naïve. But Hobbes lacked a convinc-ing theory of the right to liberty; and so he simply could not afford to be more sophisticated. But we should not so easily deceive ourselves about how legal authorities, including the modern liberal State, actually work – well understood as this once was within the Catholic tradition.

Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver

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