Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the most faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the conception of creation, and never gets above that of generation and formation.Things are produced by the Divine Being impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.Aristotle teaches substantially the same doctrine.Things eternally exist as matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, from materia informis to materia formata.Even the Christian Platonists and Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation;they assert it, indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of revelation, not as a fact of science; and hence it is that their theology and their philosophy never thoroughly harmonize, or at least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God.They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural laws.If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god.They saw no divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws.
Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes themselves.Hence they could not assert the divine origin of government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its institution.Their writings may be studied with advantage on the constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs, but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its authority.
The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a religious duty.Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind it.Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state.No man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally important duty of taking care of themselves.But by asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the state.For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church with most disastrous consequences.While the Roman Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence.
But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor, and owed him no civil allegiance.He became civilly independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it.To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual independence.
