Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

CHAPTER ONE: ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE STATE
§ 1 The Multiplicity of Interpretations
l. Theocracy
The Origin and Meaning of the State according to the Theocratic Interpretation. The majestic
power of the state has led again and again, as history teaches, to seeing something divine in
the state. Here two forms of theocratic thought about the state can be distinguished:
a) Ruler worship saw in the king as the representative of the state the bodily appearance of
God on earth. After the Syrian King Antiochus had himself glorified as ‘savior’ (soter) and
‘manifestation of God’ (epiphanes) two centuries before Christ, state and emperor worship
became widespread in the ancient world. In the Asia Minor city of Priene, an inscription from
the ninth century A.D. was found in which it says that the Emperor Augustus has proclaimed
the ‘gospel’ and brought ‘salvation’ to man. Since the death of Augustus, the deceased Roman
emperors were declared divine by decree of the senate. Domitian, Aurelian, and Diocletian
had themselves called ‘lord and god’ (dominus et deus) even in their own lifetimes. According
to the concepts of Incan state worship, the emperor of the Incan Empire too was not only
the supreme political and military leader, but also the sun god who had become man and appeared
on earth. His death meant a return home „to the house of his father, the sun.“
b) Whereas ruler worship fetched God from Heaven, as it were, and had him assume visible
form in the person of the king, a second direction, which is usually called theocracy in a narrower
sense, took governmental authority away from the state and bore it up to Heaven, as it
were, which had as its consequence that only priests as the representatives of God were allowed
to exercise governmental authority. Thus, for example, the Zealot party at the time of
Christ rejected all independent political and governmental power. God alone exercised political
and theocratic rule in Israel through the temple priesthood of Jerusalem. Whoever paid the
phoros, the tax coin, to the Romans was tolerating mortal rulers next to God and thus betraying
the God of Israel. A similar ideology was held by some jurists and theologians in the
Middle Ages. Thus, for example, Aegidius Romanus († l3l6) taught that „after the passion of
Christ, there can no longer be any true state in which Christ does not reign as founder and
ruler.“ 1 Ultimately, all political power rests in the hands of the pope, who, of course, allows
the affairs of government to be exercised by laymen, since otherwise the laymen would feel
„completely discriminated against.“ In the works of Thomas Aquinas and the other leading
theologians of the Middle Ages one will search in vain for such views. In the sixteenth century,
Francisco de Vitoria poured derision upon the adherents of the theocratic theory: this is
all sophistry (omnino est sophisticum); it was not God who gave the pope alleged rule of the
world, but the Curial jurists, although the latter were „quite poor in property and mind.“ 2
2. The Ideology of Power.
In the modern era, the theocratic theory has been supplanted by power ideology as an interpretation
of the state which sets out from the principle that the right of the stronger is the ‘oldest
of all laws’.
a) In terms of the history of ideas, it was the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli (l469-l527) who
exercised the most lasting influence. Behind his theory there stands a fundamentally pessimistic
image of man: „In general, one can say that people are ungrateful, inconstant, and hypocritical,
filled with fear of danger and greed for gain.“ Only a powerful prince is able to force
self-seeking people to order. The prince must therefore exercise his power unscrupulously
1 Aegidius Romanus, De ecclesiastica potestate (Weimar, 1929), 73.
2 Relectio prior de potestate Ecclesiae, ed. Getino (Madrid, 1934), II:66