Modern Society

Secularized or Christianized?
Two stages in the process of secularization:
- legitimate declericalization
- radical anthropocentrism

The Christian Humanism of Francisco de Victoria and the Secularization of

Medieval Theocracy

 Francisco de Vitoria (Victoria), OP

 1483-1546
 a Spanish Renaissance philosopher, theologian and jurist
 Founder of the School of Salamanca
 Theory of just war and international law

The Historical Context

 the Discovery of the Americas (Oct. 12, 1492)

- the Jesuit reduction

- the pontifical donation of America to Spain

- “El Requerimiento”

[The colonization of the Americas (and even the Philippines) was justified based
on the temporal authority of the Pope and on Aristotle’s theory of slavery.]

Influences to Victoria
-Thomistic Philosophy
-Nominalism
-Renaissance Humanism

His Political Theory

-De Potestate Civili
-Man is civil and social by nature and on this basis he demonstrates that the
origin of the city and republic is not an invention of man nor an artificial fact but
a reality that derives from man’s nature.
  In politics, for society to attain its end, there is need for authority.
= political authority must also be natural
. causes of political authority
1. Final cause: common good
2. Efficient cause: God
3. Material Cause: the community
4. Formal Cause: equated with the definition of political power

 “all authority proceeds from God.”

 “consensus communis”
 “theory of Translatio Imperii”
 This is an alternative to the two main political theories about political
authority in the Modern Period:

1. Divine Right Theory

Social Contract (Hobbes and Locke
 Distinction between the Church and political community
1. Different ends
2. Different laws
Just like in Aristotle, he sees that the end of political society is actually the
condition for attaining man’s supernatural end.

Vitoria’s Criticism of the Power of Spain over the Americas

 A. Against arguments that denied American Indians to have private
property and public authority
 B. Against the titles of popes and kings giving them right over the
Americas
 - emperor of the world
 - temporal power of the Pope
 - Title of Religion
Aquinas’ Principles: Bases of Victoria
1. Ea enim quae sunt naturalia homini, neque subtrahuntur, neque dantur
homini per peccatum.
2. Ius divinum, quod est ex gratia, non tollit ius humanum, quod est ex naturali.

His concept of “Totus Orbis”

1. the Aristotelian notion of the “zoon politikon”
2. universal community
3. Everyone has the same rights and dignity by virtue of belonging to the society
of “totus orbis”.
4. The causes of international community
Totus Orbis
 - the right to defend oneself
 - “anthropophagy”
 - international intervention
Just War
 Is it licit for Christians to go to war?
 What are the causes of a just war and the ethics/morality of war?
 Old Testament
 Augustine
 “The only legitimate war is that of self-defence.”
Some factors/conditions that cannot justify a war:
- Religion
- Desire for territorial expansion
- the existence of a single universal empire
- Personal glory or desire for prestige of the kings (private interest)

Thomas Hobbes’
Political Theory
Anthropology:
- FEAR of violent death
- DEFENSE/CONSERVATION of one’s life
Central political thought:
- conservation of peace in society through social order
Man is not social by nature.”
= homo homini lupus
“the need to reach an accord or compromise”
“Good and evil are established by laws made by the ruler.”

‘Political artificialism’ and the social contract

 the relationship between the new nation-state (the Tudors), and the
individual citizen.
 medieval society: each man has a relatively fixed place in society
 Modernity: the rise of individualism and social mobility, which
accompanied the rise of commerce and capitalism.
His question: what could take its place to avoid anarchy?
 Hobbes’ insight was that societies are not natural entities, but artificial
wholes.
 ‘Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to
secure a man at all’.
 social contract : ‘I authorise and give up my right of governing myself, to
this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up
thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner’.
1. Artificialism: Societies exist because individuals act in accordance with
rules that can be rejected, broken or altered.
 2. The SWORD = Need for social control: Matters must be arranged so that
it will never be in anyone’s interest to break covenants, which cannot exist
where there is no common power to enforce them.
3. Thus, a social contract must be presumed in which it is as if every man
should say to every other man…

 The state of nature: Homo homini lupus.

 The two fundamental passions: ambition (cupiditas naturalis) and fear (cf
ratio naturalis).
1. perpetual war: The natural state of nature is for man to be in a state of
war.
2. Hobbes ‘rights’ of nature are derivative from the two fundamental
passions, ambition and fear, particularly fear of violent death.
 The natural rights of man can be summed up as:
 The right to ‘to do what he would, and against whom he thought fit, and
to possess, use and enjoy all that he would, or could, get.
 The right to ‘protect his life and members’ and ‘to use all the means, and
do all the actions, without which he cannot preserve himself’.

 State of Original innocence = Man is naturally amoral!

 The ‘law of nature’ is sovereign = Man cannot renounce them!
 The mutual transferring of such rights is called a contract = the third law of
nature is ‘that men perform their contracts’.
1. NATURAL RIGHTS are not a right in the sense of a rule of law, tradition or
morals. Indeed man is naturally amoral (an ‘innocent’ like a baby or an animal
in this sense).
2. Rather, man cannot be obliged to renounce them because it is
psychologically impossible for him to do so. Man is, however, driven by fear of
death to circumscribe his first right, to ‘be content with so much liberty against
other men, as would allow other men against himself’.
The passage to the civil state: fear of the common enemy, death.
 Fear of death versus man’s self assertion (natural right)
 Fear of death and existence of society
 Security must be the sole reason for having a commonwealth.
 Men need to unite against a common enemy.
1. No motive in human nature, except the fear of death, is strong enough to
counteract the disruptive force of man's self-assertion.
2. Fear of death must, therefore, be the explanation of the existence of civil
society, insofar as there is a social order and not anarchy.
3. and it follows logically that a commonwealth must be devised that will
accomplish the end for which it exists: against death.
The contractual foundation of the state: transfer of all individual rights to the
Sovereign
  Complete safety of the people demands complete submission to an
absolute, undivided and perpetual sovereignty.
 Absolutism is its logical consequence!
Safety against things that will cause death!!!
Absolutism is the effect of government by consent, once the real interests of
individuals (the presupposition of the institution of the commonwealth) has been
clearly understood.

Leviathan
 The social contract unites the multitude into one people and marks the
generation of ‘that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently,
of that mortal God, to which we owe under the immortal God, or peace
and defence’.
 This distinguishes a ‘commonwealth’, or people, from a multitude.
 It is notable that for Hobbes either a monarchy or a republic would be
valid.
 - monarchist
 - Totalitarian
However, sovereignty should be absolute, and in this sense Hobbes is really a
monarchist. Even if a state is called a republic (or a democracy) effective
authority would still subsist in the few, or the one, and would be totalitarian.
ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY: the Sovereign is above the contract.
 Like Machiavelli’s Prince, the Sovereign is absolute.
 Common law vs. statute law
= Hobbes advocated the unambiguous supremacy of statute law.
It is entirely up to the Sovereign to decide which laws are necessary!
Common law vs. statute law
When Hobbes was writing, there was a clash between the principles of common
law (custom interpreted by judges) and statute law (rules laid down by a
determinate body or person).

The relationship between church and state

 Church: ‘a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the
person of one sovereign, at whose command they ought to assemble,
and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.’
 No supreme church!
 Papacy: “The ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof.”
There is, therefore, no supreme church to which all Christians owe allegiance,
for there is no supreme sovereign over all nations.
The Sovereign is subject only to the ‘natural laws’, of reason and the search for
peace.
 civil liberty: lay ‘only in those things, which are regulating their actions, the
Sovereign hath praetermitted’.
  Whether laws are necessary is entirely up to the sovereign.
 Fundamental liberty consists of the lack of proscription.
 This involves the right of the subject to preserve himself and resist
imprisonment.
 These are the only ‘natural laws’ to which the Sovereign is subject.
If the sovereign fails to do what he is there to do (namely to guarantee security),
through incapacity for example, the subject is released from his obligation. This
marks the limit of the subject’s ‘right to resist’.
Hobbes’ vision of man and the State is essentially mechanistic.
 If the Sovereign is in violation of the natural laws, there is the right of revolt
in extreme cases.
‘the mechanisation of the idea of the State brings to culmination the
mechanisation of the anthropological image of man’
1. If the sovereign fails to do what he is there to do (namely to guarantee
security), through incapacity for example, the subject is released from his
obligation. This marks the limit of the subject’s ‘right to resist’.
2. Hobbes’ vision of man and the State is essentially mechanistic.

 Man as Machine:
 He defines Liberty as the absence of impediments to action.
 He suggests that behaviour of man is not only explicable, but also
somehow unavoidable because men’s decisions and choices are simply
manifestations of internal pushes.
 Praise and blame, rewards and punishments, are merely additional
determinants of choice.
(What determines man’s actions is not man’s freedom but a certain determination from
within!!!)