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Tracing the Social Construction of the Law on the Separation of Church and State from Western History to Philippine History

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Tracing the Social Construction of the Law on the Separation of Church and State from Western History to Philippine History Tracing the Social Construction of the Law on the Separation of Church and State from Western History to Philippine History Emmanuel C. Batoon University of Santo Tomas Graduate School Abstract Historical-legal studies have been conducted to find the formal legal true meaning (Coquia 17; Pangalangan 1; Jimenez 786; Candelaria et al. 842; Bagares 1; Hilbay 24; Festin and Villasis 77) of the law on the separation of Church and State. This paper looks beyond these formalist and idealist interpretations of the law, and views the law as a social-political reality that is historically constructed by social actors, like Church ministers, Heads of States and academics. Thus, this paper traces the social construction of the law on the separation of Church and State from Western history to Philippine history. Keywords law on the separation of church and state, social construction, western history, Philippine history BATOON: TRACING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION UNITAS 65 Social Constructions of Church and State Relations in Western History Ancient History In Western ancient history, the social construction of the relation of Church and State has been divided into those who advocated Caesaropapism or those who held the primacy of the emperor over the Pope and Papocaesarism or those who held the primacy of the Pope over the emperor. Those who advo- cated Papocaesarism believed that the power of the two keys was given to Peter by Jesus to bind and loose heaven and earth (Coronel 23). This idea was reinforced by St. Ambrose of Milan who was known to have said that, “the emperor is within the Church and not over the Church” (23). But the conceptual elaboration of the Church and State relation was started by St. Augustine of Hippo. In the City of God, St. Augustine talked about two cities or two societies: What we see, then, is that two societies have issued from two kinds of love. Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in the love of God that is ready to trample on self. In a word, this latter relies in the Lord, whereas the former boasts that it can get along by itself. The city of man seeks the praise of men, whereas the height of glory for the other is to hear God in the witness of conscience (ch. 14: 410). If we consider Plotinus’ influence on St. Augustine’s philosophical-theo- logical thinking, St. Augustine’s stature as a Father and bishop of the Catholic Church whose concern was the formulation of a framework for the building of the Catholic Church, and the historical conditions in which he wrote his text, we can arrive at an understanding of what the two cities concretely embodied. St. Augustine was not a Platonist but a Neo-Platonist who subscribed to the dialectical logic of Plotinus (Plotinus 36) and to the dialectical concep- tion of the relation of the “One, to the Mind, and to the Soul” (369). Through this dialectical thinking, St. Augustine was able to explain the “Doctrine of the Trinity” where there was first the Father, then the Son proceeded from BATOON: TRACING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION UNITAS 66 the Father, and finally, the synthesis or love between the Father and the Son led to the birth of the Holy Spirit. If we further apply St. Augustine’s dialec- tical thinking on the Trinity to the historical conditions of his time, we can say that the first historical moment was the existence of the pagan Roman Empire, the second historical moment with the arrival of the Christian cult as a new religious movement, and finally the third historical moment was the synthesis of the pagan Roman Empire and Christianity as a new religious movement that led to the formation of Christendom, a Holy Roman Empire, informed by the love of God. Medieval History What St. Augustine provided was a theoretical framework that conditioned the possibility of conceiving the Church and State union, the concrete construction of the explicit union of the Church and the State as two societies comprising Christendom, however, was done by “Pope Gelasius I, who was an African, like St. Augustine, that ruled as a Pope of the Catholic Church, from March 1, 492 to November 21, 496” (Korn 272). Karaan narrates the context upon which Pope Gelasius I constructed the union of Church and State: During his reign, the Church in the East enjoyed the official protection of the Byzantine Empire. There was direct control of the Imperial power over the affairs of the Church. This phenomenon is denominated as Caesaropapism. However, in the West, this was not the case. The Western Roman Empire fell into the hands of the invading Barbarians. As a consequence, the Roman Pontiff was freed from the influence of the Roman Emperor. The Papal authority started to reassert itself over civil powers (86). From the given context, Pope Gelasius I delineated the thesis on the Two Powers. The construction occurred when he wrote to Byzantine Emperor Flavius Anastasius I in 494 A.D. the following: There are indeed, most august emperor, two powers by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the Popes and the royal power. Of this the priestly power is much more important, because it has to render account for the kings of men themselves [at the Last Judgment]. For you BATOON: TRACING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION UNITAS 67 know, our very clement son, that although you have the chief dignity over the human race, yet you must submit yourself faithfully to those who have charge of Divine things, and look to them for the means of your salvation (Ehler and Morral 10-11). Unlike St. Augustine who used the concept of love to conceptually describe the union of the Two Cities of Church and State, Pope Gelasius I used the idea of Two Powers to identify the concrete distinction of powers between the Church and State. The first power was the spiritual power which the Catholic Church wielded; the other power was the temporal power which the State exercised. The temporal power took care of the bodily needs of man, while the spiritual power provided for the spiritual requirements of man. Since the Church took care of the spiritual needs of man, which was the basis of his salvation, the Pope surmised that the Church had primacy over the State, but also added that though the Two Powers were distinct from each other, they were not separate from each other, because they served the same man (Bloom et al. 65; Clark 11-12; Menache 57). If Pope Gelasius I was a bishop of the Catholic Church who constructed the idea of Two Powers to show the union of Church and State relation to pastor or govern the members of Christendom, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, an abbot of the Benedictine Religious Order, which was a ‘sect-like’ organi- zation within the Catholic Church (Finke and Wittberg 154), founded for the purpose of revitalizing the Church by way of their special apostolate or charism, also provided a new expression to the Gelasian Two Powers doctrine (Coronel 23). From his perspective as a ‘religious,’ “he compared the temporal power and spiritual power to the two swords which the apostles offered to Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and declared that the Church possessed both swords but exercised temporal power only indirectly through the agency of the emperor and king” (Coronel 23). St. Bernard’s concept of the Two Swords that qualified Pope Gelasius I concept of the Two Powers was modified and made academic or universally rationalized by St. Thomas Aquinas. BATOON: TRACING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION UNITAS 68 St. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s conception of politics as starting point in constructing the relation of Church and State. Aristotle defined politics as follows: Observation shows us, first that any polis (or state) is a specific form of association, and, secondly that all association are instituted for the purpose attaining some good—for all men do all their acts with a view of achieving something which is, in their view, a good. We may therefore hold [on the basis of what we actually observe] that all associations aim at some good and we may also hold that the particular association which is the most sovereign of all, and includes all the rest, will pursue this aim most, and will thus be directed to the most sovereign of all goods. This most sovereign and inclu- sive association is the polis, as is called, or the political association (1). As Aristotle did, Aquinas believed that the establishment of a State was part of the nature of man, for man to be directed to his natural end. In Aquinas’ work, On Kingship to the King of Cyprus, he said: . it is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group. If, then, it is natural for man to live in the society of many, it is necessary that there exist among men some means by which the group may be governed (4-5). St. Thomas consequently identified how a group of men ought to be governed: …since the beatitude of heaven is the end of that virtuous life which we live at present, it pertains to the king’s office to promote the good life of the multitude in such a way as to make it suitable for the attainment of heavenly happiness, that is to say, he should command those things which lead to the happiness of Heaven and, as far as possible, forbid the contrary (64).
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