Natural Law and the Origins of Political Secularism in Early Modern Europe

Natural Law and the Origins of Political Secularism in Early Modern Europe Nathaniel Mull Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Nathaniel Mull All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Natural Law and the Origins of Political Secularism in Early Modern Europe Nathaniel Mull This dissertation argues that a particular—and often overlooked—strand of natural law theory played an essential role in arguments for the secularization of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between the start of the Protestant Reformation (1517) and the English Restoration (1660), European conceptions of political and legal authority underwent a series of sweeping changes. Among the most drastic of these changes was the secularization of the idea of civil authority, which consisted of three developments. First, the legitimacy of civil sovereigns was no longer dependent on religious qualifications. Heretics and pagans could hold legitimate civil authority over Christian subjects. Second, civil authority came to be seen as the product of human agency rather than divine will alone. Kings were placed on their thrones by their subjects and were thus accountable to the communities they governed. Third, civil jurisdiction was limited to the pursuit and enforcement of temporal goods: civil peace, personal security, and the public virtues necessary for these ends. Civil sovereigns no longer had the right to determine citizens’ religious, spiritual, or supernatural obligations. My dissertation demonstrates that these three developments were made possible by the philosophical framework of natural law, which was deployed by both Catholic and Protestant political thinkers of this period. I trace the origins of this natural law secularism to the legal philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who first distinguished between two forms of legal obligation: natural law and divine law. Although both were given to human beings directly by God, natural law could be accessed and understood by all rational human beings while divine law required a special revelation through God’s chosen representatives. This distinction between the natural and the supernatural served as a core theoretical construct upon which early modern thinkers argued for the separation and co-autonomy of the civil and the ecclesiastical powers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholic natural law philosophers such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez defended the autonomy of civil power from the Church. The Jesuits, such as Suárez, Robert Bellarmine, and Luis de Molina, used this natural-supernatural framework to argue that civil governments were created by human agency, while church governments were the handiwork of God alone. Some Protestant thinkers were deeply influenced by this Catholic natural law theory and some, especially John Locke, took up the secularist defense of the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Locke’s contribution to political secularism was his reconciliation of the Lutheran notion of freedom of conscience with the autonomy of the civil sovereign. This was made possible by Locke’s Thomist understanding of the law of nature as the foundation of civil power. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Christian Theocracy in Medieval and Modern Europe 13 Chapter 2. The Natural Law Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas 64 Chapter 3. Thomist Dualism: Francisco de Vitoria on Secular and Ecclesiastical Powers 74 Chapter 4. Jesuit Natural Law: Divine Right and Secular Constitutionalism 99 Chapter 5. The Lutheran Dilemma: Liberty of Conscience and Secular Authority 136 Chapter 6. John Locke on Civil Sovereignty and Its Limits 164 Conclusion 193 Bibliography 199 i Acknowledgements In the process of researching and writing this dissertation, I have incurred many debts. I would first like to thank my adviser, Jean Cohen, who guided the entire process, from the initial idea to the final revisions. Her honest feedback, incisive questions, and constant encouragement were instrumental to the success of this project. David Johnston has served as a teacher, mentor, and reader throughout my seven years at Columbia. I benefited particularly from conversations with him about methods of reading and writing about the history of political thought. Nadia Urbinati has also been a source of inspiration and support throughout my graduate studies, and I have often made use of her encyclopedic knowledge of early modern political thought. I was also fortunate to have two generous outside readers—Andrew Murphy and Euan Cameron—who carefully read every part of the dissertation and offered many insightful comments and suggestions that I have attempted to incorporate into this final draft. Numerous other colleagues and friends at Columbia have generously offered to read drafts of chapters and to serve as sounding boards and critics for my dissertation. My project has benefited from the ideas and input of Turku Isiksel, Ira Katznelson, Tonya Putnam, Josh Simon, Robert Somerville, Ashraf Ahmed, Kate Jackson, Guido Parietti, Camila Vergara, Rob Goodman, Ben Mueser, Aaron Zubia, Alex de la Paz, David Ragazzoni, Luise Papcke, Bjorn Gomes, Michelle Chun, Jonathan Blake, Kevin Elliott, and many others. My coursework, research, and conference travel were generously funded by Columbia University’s Department of Political Science and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I have also benefited tremendously from the unfailing kindness and support of the department’s administrators, especially Kay Achar, Betty Howe, Michael Scott, and Holly Martis. Keinan Greene has been a dear friend and ii careful reader of my work for many years. His companionship and enthusiasm for my work has kept me going during the hardest days of graduate school. While presenting various parts of this dissertation at conferences, I have benefited from conversations with Alan Patten, Bryan Garsten, Joseph Canning, Annabel Brett, Michael Gillespie, Jennifer Pitts, Deborah Baumgold, Gil Anidjar, Daniel Alleman, Gabrielle Girgis, Alex Oprea, and Teresa Bejan. These conversations were made possible by generous invitations and financial support from the American Political Science Association, the Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory, the Sciences Po Political Theory Graduate Conference, the Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, the Graduate Philosophy Conference at The New School for Social Research, the Brown University Legal Studies Graduate Conference, and the Duke University Graduate Conference in Political Theory. As an undergraduate at Boston College, my interest in academic inquiry into politics, philosophy, and intellectual history was cultivated by several passionate and committed teachers, including David Botwinik, Elizabeth Chadwick, Susan Mattis, Hiroshi Nakazato, David Hollenbach, Seth Jacobs, and the late John Heineman. I would like to thank my parents, Donald and Tomoe Mull, who raised me to be curious, confident, and compassionate and who continued to support me in every way possible throughout graduate school. Finally, nothing I have accomplished in the last nine years would have been possible without the love and support of my wife, Julia Kang. She has sacrificed and suffered more than can ever be accounted for or repaid. It is to her that I humbly and gratefully dedicate this work. iii For Julia. iv Introduction This dissertation project is a historical and conceptual analysis of the relationship between two strands of early modern European political thought: Thomist natural law theory and political secularism. Although both topics have received extensive treatment by historians of political thought, relatively little has been written about the ways in which these two strands of thought intersect and influence each other. In this project, I seek to uncover the ways in which early modern arguments for the secularization of political power were constructed out of a set of ideas that originated in Aquinas’s philosophy of natural law. These arguments are part of a political debate spanning nearly two centuries, from the start of the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution. Over the course of this debate, new ideas emerged about the proper relationship between civil power and religion, often drawing on much older ideas from the Middle Ages. By the end of this period, some political thinkers were beginning to articulate a radically new vision of the civil commonwealth—one that modern readers would recognize as a fully secular state. The political secularism that I describe in this dissertation is primarily a political philosophy and only secondarily a set of institutions and practices. It is a way of thinking about politics that is grounded in temporal and corporeal reality, even though it is still ultimately endorsed by a divine creator. This secularism is a new way of justifying and criticizing political rule based solely on temporal ends such as self-preservation, protection of property, and political justice. Defined in this way, it may be seen as an ancestor of the idea of “public reason” later described by John Rawls.1 This secularist philosophy contains three interlocking ideas. First, civil 1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993), Lecture VI. 1 power arises out of natural necessity and therefore does not depend for its legitimacy on religious authorities. This means that the legitimacy of civil

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