Rulers could be tyrants, misusing their power to create disorder. Academic tradition distinguished tyrants into rulers with legitimate titles who behaved tyrannically (tyrannus ab exercitu) and usurpers (tyrannus absque titulo). The hard line often adopted for preaching and catechetical purposes was that both sorts were divine punishment for sins, and the remedies were humility and suffering. Strictly, however, an usurper was not a ruler at all, but an aggressor who in principle might be resisted by anyone, according to the natural right ofself-defence. However, Jesuit moral thought was consequentialist, and it was therefore relevant that most legitimate regimes had begun in usurpation or conquest, and that some sort of rule was better than none. With legitimate rulers behaving tyrannically, there was a ‘‘presumption in favour ofauthor-ity’’: such a ruler is still a ruler, and private individuals have no authority to judge or to punish their superiors. However, especially given contractualist assumptions, tyranny arguably causes the reversion of authority back to the commonwealth (or ‘‘the people’’) from which it originates. The people collectively is the ruler’s superior and may therefore judge and punish him. An efficient tyrant would obviously prevent the meeting of bodies representing the commonwealth to eliminate such a possibility. In that event, anyone killing a usurper was arguably carrying out the presumptive sentence of the commonwealth. The anarchic potential of this doctrine was evident, especially given the assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV of France. A further orthodox argument, though there was no recent successful instance of its implementation, was that popes had the authority to judge and to depose rulers, and had in the past done so (paradigmatically Zacharias’ supposed deposition of Childeric); that excommunicated rulers were eo ipso deprived of their office; and that unless the popes had declared otherwise, anyone might carry out their sentence. However, Bellarmine, Suarez and Becanus, in the context of Oath of Allegiance Controversy with James I/VI pointed out that excommunication does not entail deposition, and deposition is not the same as a death sentence, least of all one to be executed by private individuals. As such, however, tyrannicide was a traditional scholastic doctrine. It was very equivocally endorsed by Juan de Mariana, with no mention of any papal role, and as a warning to princes rather than as something he advocated, in a treatise of 1599 written for the future Philip III, which aroused no controversy in Spain, but was condemned by the Paris parlement and the Sorbonne. Mariana’s Jesuit defenders further attenuated it. Nevertheless, the doctrine was imputed to the whole Society by its enemies.
The Papal Potestas indirecta
The papal power to depose secular rulers was an extreme extrapolation of a doctrine that as such was regarded as simple orthodoxy by the Society’s leading theologians (though many Catholics resisted it), the so-called ‘‘indirect authority’’ of the papacy in temporal matters (potestas indirecta in temporalibus). This meant the papacy’s right to intervene, with coercive means if necessary, in secular government when the salvation of souls required it. The doctrine brought into peculiarly sharp focus the intractable difficulties of the idea of a polity of Christians, subject not only to their secular rulers but also to a non-territorial, hierarchical church. The range of possible resolutions to this perplexity was familiar from the medieval ‘‘two swords,’’ sacerdotium/imperium controversies. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) that ended the wars in the Holy Roman Empire between the emperor and the Protestants had (without using the expression) made cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the rulers determines the religion of the subject) the rule for the whole of the Holy Roman Empire. The Tridentine church, and the Jesuits as its spearhead, rejected this settlement and the territorial-ization and denominalization of Christianity it implied.
World History
