1 Introduction
One of John Witte’s distinctive contributions to the study of law and religion, among many others, is fixing attention on the role of rights and religion in the history of resistance and revolution in the Western tradition. To some degree, his views run against the stream. Scholars like Leo Strauss have, as Witte says, famously asserted that before the Enlightenment, the word “right” was used exclusively in an objective sense to mean “rightly ordered” as part of a hierarchical system of social and political status and duty. Only when “secular thinkers,” such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, came along did the idea of “subjective rights,” understood as individual or personal entitlements representing a radical challenge to hierarchical order, gain acceptance.1 Other scholars, Witte points out, have long believed that “early modern Calvinist theories of resistance provided important counterweights to the political absolutism of Jean Bodin, James I, and their followers,” but they have “usually overdrawn the distinction between Calvinist and other Protestant traditions of resistance, and have ignored the theories of fundamental rights and social contract developed by early modern Calvinist writers.”2
Against such accounts, Witte calls attention to a “Protestant logic of revolution” that “was built in part on the familiar legal doctrine of legitimate self-defense,”3 and that existed well in advance of the Enlightenment and outside of Calvinism, even if many Calvinists were among its most enthusiastic advocates. It is that logic, he claims, that has “driven French, Dutch, Scottish, and English revolutionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to throw off their tyrannical oppressors in protection of their fundamental rights. It was in
Defense of oneself and of third parties against attack, using proportionate and even deadly force and violence when necessary, was an ancient legal teaching. When a person is unjustly attacked by another, the victim has the right to defend himself or herself—to resist, either passively by running away, or actively by staying to fight with proportionate force. Other parties, particularly relatives, guardians, or caretakers of the victim, also have the right to intervene to help the victim—again, passively by assisting escape, or actively by repelling the assailant with force. Early modern Calvinists argued by analogy that magistrates who exceed their authority forfeit their political office and become simply like any other private persons. If magistrates and their agents use force to implement excessive authority, their victims may rise up in passive or active resistance, using mortal force when necessary. The right to communal revolt was thus, in part, the individual right of self-defense writ large.7
Without elaborating, Witte links the biblical idea of covenant to the right of self-defense. Early modern Calvinists, he says, believed that political society, adopting what amounts to a contract theory of government, results from a solemn agreement among God, rulers, and people on the model of the ancient Israelite covenant. God agrees to protect and bless rulers and a people so long as they obey the laws of God and nature. Rulers, for their part, agree to obey the laws and defend “the people’s essential rights, particularly those rooted in
2 The Logic of Self-Defense
Witte’s reference to a “Protestant logic of revolution … built in part on the familiar legal doctrine of legitimate self-defense” is worth considering in some detail. The words suggest a common set of ideas having a certain rational structure and some features and implications that underlie the animating beliefs and activities of a substantial number of important revolutionary movements in Europe and America from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
To begin with, we must underscore, as Witte does, that this set of ideas was neither a Calvinist nor a broadly Protestant invention, even if deployed in a distinctive way by Protestants. The right of self-defense has found acceptance as a moral and legal standard across numerous non-Protestant and non-Western religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions from ancient times on.9 This discovery has led one scholar to the following conclusion: These traditions all “have in common that they generally consider the person acting in self-defense to be morally and legally justified [and] none of these traditions considers the right of self-defense to be a boundless license to violence. Instead, concepts such as imminence of attack, necessity, … proportionality of defense, and [right] intent are invoked across very different traditions to circumscribe the parameters of legitimate defense.”10
Several things are presupposed: “Right of self-defense” means that persons, simply as such, and individually or collectively, are morally and legally entitled to use reasonable or defensive force to protect themselves or others against arbitrary force; “reasonable or defensive force” means employing the least amount of force, administered without malice, that is necessary and proportional to resist an imminent arbitrary attack; “arbitrary force” means (at a
Beginning in the twelfth century, canon lawyers and Roman Catholic thinkers adapted and expanded on these characteristics as a basis for the use that Calvinist revolutionaries would put them to later on. Most important, the Catholic thinkers anchored the right of self-defense in a broad theory of subjective natural rights. Though the idea of subjective rights was clearly present in Roman law, it was not closely linked to the notion of natural law as it was by the canonists12 and, after them, by William of Ockham and members of the conciliar movement.13 A belief in subjective natural rights posited in all persons a sphere of personal liberty, “a zone of human autonomy,” generated by an inward “power” or “faculty” possessed by every individual and taken to be guided by reason14 that inspired a new exhilarating sense of personal and corporate empowerment.
Whereas in Roman law the idea of subjective rights was “rarely, if ever,” “used to describe the right of a citizen against the state,”15 that usage began to blossom with the advent of new thinking in the twelfth century. For the canonists, “all persons,” according to natural law, “held a right to defend themselves from attack or depredation. If they had no such right, [they] would have been subject to indiscriminate violence or worse.… This way of thinking about rights stood behind the widely recognized power to resist a tyrannical
Ockham and the conciliarists, such as Jean Gerson, Jacques Almain, Nicholas of Cusa, and others, supported and developed these positions. Ockham believed the right of self-defense against arbitrary attack, and the claim of the poor in extremis to the “superfluities of the rich” in the name of survival, to be two “inalienable natural rights” that stood as everlasting limitations on the power of rulers,19 and other conciliarists expanded on the rights to security and survival.20 Gerson declared the right of self-defense to be imprescriptible, and went on to apply it explicitly to a social body, the church. “Since it would be licit for one single person to repel force with force in case of violence attempted by a true pope against life or chastity … why in a similar case should it not be so permitted to the whole church?”21
Furthermore, basing their arguments on the right of self-defense, conciliarists made an important contribution to political theory. They held a view about the origins of political society later shared by John Locke: all persons, according to the law of nature, are assumed to be entitled to defend themselves, forcibly, if necessary, against threats to safety and survival. The problem was that they inclined to use force arbitrarily, not defensively. They wantonly attacked others in the service of their own interests or exercised force maliciously and excessively in protecting themselves, resulting in an endemically violent and chaotic state of affairs. To deliver themselves from this “fallen” condition, they banded together and agreed to entrust to a ruler the primary responsibility of administering force in accord with defensive standards, thereby guaranteeing their rights to safety and survival better than they could do if left to themselves.
Far more more decisively than their predecessors, [the conciliarists] insist[ed] that political authority is not merely derived from but inheres in the body of the people.… [The] people only delegate and never alienate
their ultimate power to their rulers, and [therefore] the status of a ruler can never be that of an absolute sovereign, but only that of a minister or official of the commonwealth.22
It is in this way that conciliarists made “deeply influential contributions to the evolution of a radical and constitutionalist view of the sovereign State.”23 The fundamental objective of the state is to protect by means of representative government and the constitutional regulation of sovereign power the basic rights of all to security and survival against the ever-present threat of arbitrary abuse.
Nevertheless, there remains a deep “ambiguity inherent in the whole Conciliar position.” On one hand, there is a “representative ideology,” a “populist side,” to their thinking, which holds that authority in both church and state “derives solely from the common agreement and consent of subjects,”24 and respects subjective rights by permitting the individual exercise of self-defense against arbitrary attacks on the part of a pope or other ruler,25 and by encouraging popular participation in political life in order to protect rights to security and survival. On the other hand, it was hard for most conciliarists to shed altogether the hierarchical principle. Although the traditional system of the three estates—clergy, nobles, and people—was ideally sensitive to the needs of the people, there was a strong tendency to assert that final authority for reigning in or deposing a ruler, not to mention determining other political and legal matters, lay not chiefly with the people, but with the two upper estates, the clergy and nobles. That was so, as John Mair put it, in order that “no element of passion shall intrude.”26 The implication was that the “lower orders” cannot be trusted, after all, to control themselves and act according to the conditions of defensive force if threatened with arbitrary force, just as they cannot in general be trusted to function politically in ways that best protect their other rights. We may call this reaction political paternalism, which comes to this: All persons are free to exercise their natural rights so long as they are directed by their political superiors to know how best to do that.
In line with such thinking, conciliarists proposed to limit the authority of both church and state by carefully distinguishing their respective jurisdictions and functions according to constitutionally determined “laws and statutes,” as Gerson put it.28 The two societies are each self-sufficient in their own right. Church officials have no authority or aptitude for interfering in worldly matters, including the administration of physical force, suggesting very different responsibilities for the two institutions.29 Whereas the state, concerned with “outward matters”—the material security and survival of human beings—may exercise its authority by employing “outward weapons”—physical force and coercion—the church, concerned with “inward” spiritual beliefs and the practices that manifest them, may exercise its authority by employing only “spiritual weapons”—nonviolent forms of persuasion and discipline.
Such reflections might have opened the door to ideas of freedom of religious belief and practice, especially against the background of medieval Catholic thought on the subject. Though not a proponent of natural rights, Thomas Aquinas, for example, hinted at such a position in defending a right to uncoerced belief. In the nature of human reasoning, he argued, “unwilling belief is an impossibility. The only valid act of faith is that which proceeds from a free, interior choice.” Accordingly, it is thoroughly improper, he concluded, to compel people outside the church, such as Jews, Muslims, and pagans, to join.30 To
On the other hand, conciliarists like Gerson may have written eloquently about “evangelical liberty,” but they “could not conceive of anything like a modern right to religious freedom.”32 The three objectives of the conciliar movement, made clear in the Council of Constance (1414–1418), were to end papal schism, reform the church, and defend the faith, especially against the heresies of John Wyclif and Jan Hus. The third ambition led to the public execution of Hus in 1415, leaving no doubt about conciliar commitments to enforcing orthodoxy to the fullest extent of the law. Such a reaction may be described as religious paternalism, which amounts to this: All persons have a right by nature to follow conscience, so long as they are directed by their religious superiors to discover what conscience truly teaches.
A deep dilemma lies at the heart of the logic of self-defense as it was worked out in the late Middle Ages by people like the canonists, Ockham, and the conciliarists, and that dilemma has to do with the whole idea of subjective natural rights. Ordinary persons, in the face of arbitrary force, are free by nature to take the law into their own hands, but, in doing so, are liable to go too far and use force arbitrarily themselves. Because they cannot be trusted, the only solution is for them to agree to submit to a governing authority designed to restrain force and to protect ordinary persons’ rights to security and survival. The dilemma is how far the governing representatives ought to go in trusting ordinary people to know the best way to protect their rights. The dilemma, as we mentioned, has both political and religious dimensions.
Though, as we said, Calvinist leaders were by no means the only ones to invoke the logic of self-defense in the cause of revolution, they were important exemplars. Their efforts to encourage and support the use of force to end the rule of one government and start a new one—our definition of revolution—in France, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, and America in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries were profoundly consequential.
Lutherans undoubtedly made an important contribution. Martin Luther himself, along with Philip Melanchthon, introduced key arguments in favor of resistance to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and the popes of the time who encouraged imperial efforts to impose a Catholic order throughout premodern Europe. There were occasional appeals to natural law and reason as the basis for resistance and to canon and civil law provisions for limiting the emperor’s authority to work his will, and toward the end of Luther’s life he became an impassioned advocate of forcible resistance in the name of defending and maintaining what he regarded as the true religion.33
But with one exception, Lutherans did not dwell extensively on the role of natural rights to security and survival or to constitutional reform in favor of wider popular participation in government. That exception was expressed eloquently in the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, where, in response to the oppressive demands of the emperor, the leaders of that small Lutheran city in Saxony formally protested. They complained against forcibly “eradicating true doctrine and worship” and endangering “life and limb,” “wife and child,” and the “local liberties of the people.” They called upon lesser magistrates and citizens “to stand up to such superiors” and “protect themselves and their people,” exercising “their rights to defend themselves” under the “universal” and “natural” “law of legitimate self-defense.”34
It was the Calvinists, starting with John Calvin himself,35 who drew inspiration more elaborately than most Lutherans from the conciliar tradition, thereby applying and developing the logic of self-defense to a greater extent than Lutherans did. This conclusion is not surprising since, as an adolescent,
God has equipped rulers with the full authority that the rights of each individual to person and property not be denied, for these rights are goods bestowed by God. The authorities protect these rights through laws, which therefore must be made firm and durable, and all trace of arbitrariness avoided.… The subjective rights of freedom have no strong security if they are not supported by the authorities and legislation.38
Although he would change his views later, Calvin, in his 1540 Commentary on Romans, published when he was thirty-one, states that, according to Paul, the rights to be enforced by the governing authorities are restricted to the Second Table of the Decalogue, to “that part of the law which refers to human society.” Paul “makes no mention here … of [enforcing] the worship of God,” but addresses only political affairs. “Since magistrates are the guardians of peace and equity, all who desire that every individual should preserve his rights and … live free from injury must defend to the utmost of their power the order of the magistrates.”39
Elsewhere, Calvin indicates that equity is a crucial part of the natural law that “God has engraved upon human minds,” and that “equity alone must be
Calvin is serious here about the jurisdiction of law and government extending only to the security and survival of citizens and not to belief and worship. “The whole of [Paul’s] discussion [in Romans 13] concerns the civil government. Those, therefore, who bear rule over human consciences attempt to establish their blasphemous tyranny from this passage in vain.”45 When these comments are combined with other statements—also later revoked—favoring religious freedom for “all peaceable believers, including Catholics, Jews, and Muslims” that were included in the 1536 edition of Calvin’s Institutes, it is plausible to conclude that the idea of a conceptual gap between belief and compulsion present in Thomas’s thought and incipient in the conciliar tradition and after had some effect on the young Calvin.
His commitment to justifying rights on grounds of natural reason is also evident in comments like this: “We observe in all human minds universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order.… While people dispute among themselves about individual sections of the law, they agree on the general
To be sure, Calvin altered or, better, complicated these views as the result of his deep involvement in the public administration of sixteenth-century Geneva over roughly twenty years. In the face of the growing challenges inside and outside Geneva, represented most acutely by the attacks of Michael Servetus on the doctrine of the Trinity in 1553, Calvin came to believe there was need to extend the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate beyond Second Table social offenses to matters of religious belief and worship, prescribed in the First Table. He now called for the civil enforcement of “the outward worship of God” and “sound doctrine of piety and the position of the Church,”47 claiming that “no government can be happily established unless piety is the first concern,” and “that those laws are preposterous which neglect God’s right and provide only for human life.”48 To establish religion by bringing both Tables of the Decalogue under the control of the state was obviously to limit the rights of citizens not only religiously but also politically and economically. It meant overshadowing appeals to natural reason common to all citizens as the basis for law and policy with parochial appeals to Christian scripture and Reformed theology. In short, it meant that Calvin moved strongly in the direction of religious paternalism.
These complications affected Calvin’s theory of the church and state and, eventually, his thoughts on revolution. Building on the conciliarists, he was a dedicated constitutionalist in his political thinking, believing that “every commonwealth rests upon laws and agreements,” preferably written,49 that are regarded as fundamental to the protection of the “freedom of the people,” a favorite phrase, defined by the “original natural rights of freedom” that individual members all share. He also agreed that polyarchic, representative governments “compounded of aristocracy and democracy”50 are better than monarchies. Monarchs rarely live up to what is just and right or “know how much is enough,” showing that human “fault and failing causes it to be safer and more bearable for a number to exercise government.” The pluralization and separation of power introduces “certain remedies against tyranny,” as
Again building on conciliar thinking, Calvin applied these same ideas to the church. There is a similar emphasis on polyarchic, representative church order, involving the pluralization and separation of power and popular participation. There is also, in theory at least, the same stark differentiation of authority and jurisdiction between church and state as the conciliarists affirmed on paper. “The church,” said Calvin, “does not have the right of the sword to punish or compel, not the authority to force; not imprisonment, nor the other punishments which the magistrate commonly inflicts.… The church does not assume what is proper to the magistrate; nor can the magistrate execute what is carried out by the church.”54 The problem was that when it came to putting things into practice, Calvin, like the conciliarists, reneged on theory and seriously blurred the lines between the institutions by putting the state to work in the service of the church—by arranging, that is, for the state to enforce the First as well as the Second Table of the Decalogue.
As Calvin’s ideas on church and state spread across much of Europe, and eventually to the New World, some of his followers, who propounded those ideas, predictably encountered ardent, often violently aggressive opposition from the established political and religious authorities. How and on what grounds should Calvinists defend themselves against the “tyranny” they encountered? Was their primary concern the defense of common natural rights to security and survival of “all the people,” grounded in “the light of reason,” and including the freedom to believe and worship as conscience dictated? Or was their paramount concern, instead, to defend the right to establish true religion in place of false religion, and thereby to give special protection to the rights of fellow Calvinists over everybody else? Was their task, in short, to seek to enforce only the Second Table by itself, or the First and Second Tables together? What is more, Calvinists faced a second question concerning what kind of government they should be defending. In order best to protect the people and their rights,
Calvin provided some guidance in addressing these questions, but much of it was quite ambiguous, confirming his reputation as “a master of equivocation.”55 His followers would frequently exploit the ambiguities and take positions different from the master. Calvin accepted the personal right of self-defense as legally permissible, though he suggested that it was unbecoming for Christians to exercise it. Commenting on Jesus’s rebuke to Peter to put his sword away as described in Matthew 26:52, he says, “if any man resist a robber, he will not be liable to public punishment, because the laws arm him against one who is the common enemy of mankind.” But still, he emphasizes that the strict conditions of defensive force are difficult to comply with. “Excessive wrath must be laid aside, and hatred, and desire of revenge, and all irregular sallies of passion, that nothing tempestuous may mingle with the defense. As this is a rare occurrence, … Christ properly reminds his people of the general rule, that they should entirely abstain from using the sword.”56
Calvin’s attitude toward collective self-defense is somewhat less hesitant, though there is similar worry about the potential excesses of any use of defensive force. It is both “natural equity” and the “nature of the office” that entitle magistrates to “restrain the misdeeds of private individuals” and “to defend by war” “dominions entrusted to their safekeeping” “anytime they are under attack.” At the same time, they must avoid “giving vent to their passions,” or
When it came to revolutionary action, Calvin’s hesitancy involved more than just his sensitivity to the conditions of defensive force. In numerous places, he cautioned against popular rebellion of any kind, reminding readers of Paul’s admonition, in Romans 13:1–2, that everyone be subject to governing authorities. That is so although citizens be “cruelly tormented by a savage prince” or “greedily despoiled by one who is avaricious or wanton,” or even “vexed for piety’s sake by one who is impious and sacrilegious,”58 because “a wicked ruler is the Lord’s scourge to punish the sins of the people,” and it is therefore “our fault that this excellent blessing of God is turned into a curse.”59 In that spirit, he had “opposed rioting, unregulated iconoclasm and individual resistance, all of which he associated with social disorder.”60
However, such thinking was, especially toward the end of Calvin’s life, in severe tension with countervailing thoughts that were accentuated by the plight of his followers in neighboring France at the hands of the hostile Catholic monarchy there. Calvin had long held that lesser magistrates “appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings,” such as ephors for Spartan kings, tribunes for Roman consuls, or, “as things now are,” the three estates for the French monarchy, might use force in defense of “the freedom of the people.”61 With the mounting abuses heaped upon his Huguenot followers, he spoke with a new intensity, renouncing in no uncertain terms any reluctance he may have had previously about the right of lesser magistrates to take up arms against “the fierce licentiousness of kings.”62
He was still, for the most part, a political paternalist, usually opposing any action initiated outside established constitutional authority. However, he began entertaining new, quite rebellious thoughts in the early 1560s. On one occasion, he supported the assassination by a private citizen of a French
As we would expect, Calvin showed special concern for Second Table violations and the natural rights grounds on which the violations stand condemned. In particularly graphic language, he called attention to what some “dictatorships and unjust authorities” do: they “drain the common people of their money, and afterward lavish it on insane largesse,” as well as “exercise sheer robbery, plundering houses, raping virgins and matrons, and slaughtering the innocent.” Such atrocities, he declared, arouse an “inborn feeling [always present] in human minds to hate and curse tyranny as much as to love and venerate lawful kings.”64
Again, as we would expect, he also addresses First Table violations, hinting, along the lines of his radicalized thinking of the 1550s and early 1560s, at open rebellion. If evil rulers “command anything against [God], let it go unesteemed.” Christians, he continues, “ought not be concerned about all that dignity which magistrates possess; for no harm is done when it is humbled before that singular and truly supreme power of God.” Like Daniel, Christians ought to refuse obedience to rulers who issue “impious edicts,” since by uttering such commands, a ruler has “exceeded his limits” and “abrogated his power.” Indeed, further reflecting on Daniel in his commentary, published in 1561, Calvin proclaims that rather than obey magistrates who rebel against God, “we ought, rather, utterly to defy them,” or, literally, “to spit on their heads.”65 Such claims rest undoubtedly on scriptural grounds, though it remains unclear from these sentiments how far Calvin means for disobedience to go. If force is to be used, is it simply to defend the right to follow conscience, or is it to vanquish false religion and impose the true faith? As Calvinism spread, these would be serious issues.
4 The French Connection
Though Quentin Skinner in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought argues, misleadingly, that “there are virtually no elements in the [Calvinist theory of revolution that] are specifically Calvinist at all,” his account of the historical
Skinner correctly locates the growth of the Huguenot minority and the role of these men in the context of “the growth of absolutism” in sixteenth-century Europe. Absolutism provoked increasing resentment among the upper classes “that the apparatus of government” of the Valois monarchy “had become more centered around the court and person of the king,” leading to “the atrophying of the legal and representative elements in the constitution at that time”67 and the dismantling of “the feudal pyramid of legal rights and obligations.”68 In 1576, the eminent political theorist Jean Bodin abandoned his earlier reservations about untrammeled political sovereignty and answered the bourgeoning Huguenot threat by becoming “a virtually unyielding defender of absolutism, demanding the outlawing of all theories of resistance and the acceptance of a strong monarchy as the only means of restoring political unity and peace.”69
The August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered and thousands more exiled by royal troops and mobs of sympathizers, was a grisly manifestation of the violent hostility toward perceived threats that could result from an absolutist ideology. François Hotman, a humanist scholar and converted Calvinist, was the first to respond. He published his Francogallia in 1573, declaring that some rebellions “are just and even necessary,” particularly when “a people oppressed by a savage tyrant begs assistance from a lawful assembly of citizens.”70 But while he expanded on Calvin’s thoughts about the importance of lesser magistrates in leading revolutions, and about the excellence of polyarchic, representative government, he completely ignored the significance of natural rights, not to mention
What the Huguenots needed was a firmer, more convincing foundation for taking up arms against tyranny. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in 1564 and author of Right of Magistrates (1574), and Philippe Mornay, a soldier, diplomat, theologian, political adviser, and author of Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants, came to the rescue. While they gave considerable attention to scripture and doctrine and to the role of First Table considerations in the reasons and goals of revolution, they accentuated appeals, in Beza’s words, to the “general and universal rule of equity and rectitude” that is “based on maxims and common principles that have remained … despite the fall” into sin, and that “is so definite and firm that nothing clearly contrary and repugnant to it should be found proper and valid among humanity.”71 Among other things, Beza, as Witte points out, asserted rights to free speech and political petition. “Beza insisted that to criticize, petition, or sue a magistrate for political failings was not to be discourteous, let alone disobedient. The magistrate ‘suffers no injustice if he is constrained to do his duty.’”72 When a sovereign becomes a tyrant by lying to his people, “the people justly asserts its rights against him.”73
Like Locke a century later, the Huguenots [informed by Beza and Mornay, among others] assume that amongst the things we may be said to have the freedom and thus the right to dispose of within the bounds of the laws of nature are those properties … which are intrinsic to our personalities, and in particular our lives and liberties, … which everyone may be said to possess in a prepolitical state.76
In regard to the right of self-defense, Beza acknowledges the New Testament emphasis on nonviolence and recommends, as an initial response to tyranny, “prayers united with repentance,” since evil rulers are “most often an evil or scourge sent by God for the chastisement of nations.” But he goes on to “deny that it is illicit for peoples oppressed by notorious tyranny to make use of lawful remedies,”80 and proceeds to condone “legitimate self-defense against a tyrant,” though only according to the conditions of defensive force: “that the tyranny has become thoroughly obvious”; that “there is no recourse to arms until all other remedies have been tried”; and that “there is careful consideration not only of what is permitted but of what is expedient [proportional?], lest the cure be worse than the disease.”81
Mornay concurs. “In the first place, nature instructs us to defend our lives and also our liberty, without which life is hardly life at all.… To fight back is not only permitted, but enjoined, for it is nature herself that seems to fight here.”82 “What is more at war with nature than for a people to promise that it will put chains and fetters on itself, will put its throat beneath the knife, and will do violence to itself?” “Between the king and people there exists a mutual obligation which, whether civil or only natural, explicit or tacit, cannot be superseded by
Beza is clear, and Mornay agrees, that tyranny, at bottom, equals arbitrary rule: “Right is anything I like.”84 When it comes to spelling out the tyrannical acts, they are for the most part less explicit. Mornay concludes that “kings are neither owners nor usufructuaries of the royal patrimony,” and “are even less able to claim the private property of individuals as their own, or the public property owned by individual municipalities,”85 implying that violations of such statements would constitute acts of tyranny against the Second Table of the Decalogue. Beza says almost nothing about the Second Table, and they both allude more to First Table violations, raising the question of the role of force in regard to religious belief and practice.
Beza is the more explicit. He is sensitive to the objection that because “religion is a matter of conscience,” it “may not be coerced” or “established by arms,” but he proceeds to reject outright the claim that resort to arms is “so opposed and repugnant to [religion] that [it] can have no place whatsoever in religious matters.”86 Reason and scripture, he claims, teach that the “true end of all rightly ordered government” is “the glory of God,” and since that “religion is planted by the Spirit of God along, through the Word,” “it is the duty of a prince who would convert his subjects from idolatry or superstition to true religion” to “provide and enforce good edicts against those who, from pure stubbornness, would resist the establishment of true religion.” It follows, he thinks, that princes who impose idolatry and false belief are guilty of “flagrant tyranny” that may be opposed in accord with the conditions of defensive force for the purpose, it appears, not of defending the principle of free conscience, but of replacing false with “true religion.”87
Though Mornay spends less time on the subject, he agrees, for the most part, with Beza. Like Beza, he believes that the people make an original covenant with God besides the covenant they make with their ruler. Accordingly, the first covenant promises that, along with supporting the people’s welfare, ruler and people will “maintain God’s glory,” no doubt defined as Beza would, and the assumption is that violations by ruler (or people) of the first covenant are as grievous as violations of the second, and equally worthy of a defensive use of
They both also tended toward political paternalism, giving lesser magistrates, and not the people at large or individual citizens, the exclusive right to initiate defensive force against tyrants, though both, interestingly, made an important exception. In the case of a tyrant who, as Beza says, “would seize dominion without title, or has already usurped it—whether [the tyrant] comes from without or arises from within,” private citizens should first appeal to lesser magistrates, but if those magistrates should fail to respond, “each private citizen should exert all his strength to defend the legitimate institutions of his country, and to resist an individual whose authority is not legitimate because he would usurp, or has usurped dominion in violation of the law.”91 Mornay says the same thing.92
However, in the case of a ruler “who has been avowed by his people, [he] may abuse his dominion, and still retain his authority over private subjects because the obligation to him was contracted by common consent and cannot be withdrawn and nullified at the pleasure of a private individual. Were it otherwise, infinite trouble would ensue, even worse than the tyranny itself, and a thousand tyrants would arise on the pretext of suppressing one.”93 Mornay agrees with Beza that the people, as a whole or as individual citizens, have no recourse whatsoever to take up arms against a “titled” ruler other than to appeal to the lesser magistrates. “The commonwealth is so little entrusted to private individuals that they, rather, are entrusted to the care of the notables
5 Conclusion
As John Witte understands, supported as he is by Brian Tierney, Quentin Skinner, and others, revolutionary thought in the West has historical roots much older than the Enlightenment, roots that are deeply embedded in Western Christian thought and practice. Of course, the elemental ideas are even older and of much wider acceptance, but it was Western European Christians—first the conciliarists and their predecessors in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, and then the Protestants, particularly the Calvinists, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries—in whom the ideas germinated and were developed and put into practice with great consequence.
The key inspiration was understanding the right of self-defense as the linchpin in a system of subjective natural rights. The idea that persons, individually and in groups, were by nature equally entitled to use force to protect themselves and others against imminent, unwarranted attacks, so long as they did it with due restraint and without malice, laid a radically novel foundation for government. Governments are necessary because uncontrolled self-enforcement is likely to lead to more, not less, unwarranted attacks. But governments are also under new management. Their primary obligation is now to protect the equal rights to life and livelihood of all persons within their care in accord with the conditions of defensive force, and to find ways in designing and administering the government to represent adequately the sovereignty of the people grounded in such an understanding. This obligation set a standard of paramount importance. So long as a government complied, it was legitimate and should be obeyed. When it did not, it lost its legitimacy and might be subject to revolutionary overthrow.
That the movements nurturing and promoting this logic of self-defense—conciliarists and and their predecessors, Protestants and particularly Calvinists—were Christian movements was both motivating and perplexing. Motivating because these rights, naturally available to all human beings,
Different phases of the revolutionary tradition managed the tensions in different ways. The conciliarists developed an impressive theory of natural rights built up around the “greatest of rights”—the right of self-defense—and combined it with remarkably modern ideas about representative government and constitutionalism. That included the sharp separation of ecclesiastical and political authority, and might, in turn, have led to notions of the disestablishment of religion and freedom of conscience implicit in natural-rights reasoning. Nevertheless, they pulled back in horror from such implications, and eagerly enlisted the state in persecuting heretics like Jan Hus. Similarly, their ideas about representative government and popular sovereignty might have pushed them beyond the rather conventional confidence they placed in the estates system, but it did not.
John Calvin displayed the same kind of ambivalence toward natural rights and representative government. He gave much more attention to natural rights than he has been given credit for, including provision for an “inborn feeling in human minds to hate and curse tyranny,” which underlay his willingness to lend vigorous support to the Huguenot cause in France. Early on, he flirted with the implication of conciliar thinking, limiting the jurisdiction of the state to “outward matters,” and going so far as to favor a doctrine of freedom of conscience. He was a dedicated constitutionalist and, in theory, vigorously stood for the sovereignty of the people and representative government. On the other hand, he came to his belief in the right of rebellion late in life. He distinctly reversed himself on religious freedom and eventually took on the unmistakable image of a religious paternalist, and that development, in turn, strongly modified his commitment to popular sovereignty, since it awarded special consideration to the religiously orthodox.
There is something of the same ambivalence, again, in the Huguenot case on the part of Theodore Beza and Philippe Mornay. They are different in that they both develop the logic of self-defense more extensively than the conciliarists or Calvin, and spend more time on the role of natural rights in revolution and as the foundation of a well-ordered government. They both appear to give special preference to Christian control in government, though Mornay, at least, shows some hesitancy about enforcing religion to the same degree as Calvin and Beza. Both Mornay and Beza refer at length to the importance of popular
The rest of the story, to be told elsewhere, will apply the same analysis to key authors writing in defense of the Dutch Revolt, the Scottish Reformation, the Puritan Revolution, and the American Revolution.
John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20–21.
John Witte, Jr., Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Studies in Law and Religion, ed. Norman Doe and Gary S. Hauk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 288–89.
Ibid., 346.
Ibid., 346.
Ibid., 344ff.
Ibid.
Ibid., 344–45.
Ibid., 345.
Jan Arno Hessbruegge, Human Rights and Personal Self-Defense in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27–47.
Ibid., 30.
There is extensive philosophical discussion of the right of self-defense well-summarized in “Self-Defense,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-defense. The article emphasizes the difficulty of explaining the grounds and limits of the right, but succeeds only in showing that the difficulties pertain to how inadvertent attackers or innocent bystanders should be treated. The difficulties do not apply to clear examples of arbitrary attack (as defined above), such as a mortal attack, cited in the article, that is motivated by personal jealousy and only avertable by a lethal response. While the treatment especially of innocent bystanders must always be considered, the focus of this article is the exercise and justification of self-defense in response to what are claimed to be clear instances of arbitrary attack. See David Little, “The Right of Self-Defense and the Organic Unity of Human Rights,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021): 459–95.
Charles Donahue Jr., “Ius in Roman Law,” in Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78. See, also Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 58–77.
Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, chaps. 7 and 9.
Ibid., 99–100, 173–75, 198–200.
Donahue, “Ius in Roman Law,” 78.
R. H. Helmholz, “Human Rights in the Canon Law,” in Witte and Alexander, Christianity and Human Rights, 103.
Ibid.
Ibid., 101.
Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 75, 194, 183.
Ibid., chaps. 9 and 10.
Ibid., 233.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Reformation, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:119–20.
Ibid., 115.
John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York: Harper & Bros., 1962), 128–29.
Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 232–33.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, cited at 2:123. See also Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 128–29.
Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 76.
Cited in Matthew Spinka, John Hus and the Council of Constance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 19.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:114–23.
Eric D’Arcy, Conscience and Its Right to Freedom (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 153–56.
Though there is not much evidence that this important implication was drawn out by the conciliarists, it was clearly perceived later by Bartolomeo de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican missionary to Central America, in defending the natural rights of the local Indians against the depredations of the conquistadores. “The whole of Las Casas’ life’s work was inspired by the conviction that the Indians could be converted only by peaceful persuasion without any violence or coercion.” “Las Casas resembled Ockham in frequently appealing to canonistic texts in order to defend a doctrine of rights.” Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 272, 276.
Ibid., 214.
W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, “Luther and the Right of Resistance to the Emperor,” in Church, Society, and Politics, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 159–202.
Drawn from David Little, “Religion and the Justification of Rights,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 1 (2023), 148, citing John Witte, Jr., The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 87–88.
For Witte’s treatment of Calvin, see esp. The Reformation of Rights, 39–80, and Faith, Freedom, and Family, 139–54.
There is scholarly controversy over how exactly this influence occurred. As a young man, Calvin attended the College de Montagu in Paris, where John Mair, a Scottish conciliarist, was an influential teacher, but whether Calvin actually studied with him is unknown. Whatever the specific source of influence, the ideas of the movement were certainly in the air, and undoubtedly shaped Calvin’s thinking.
Witte, Reformation of Rights, 34–35.
Josef Bohatec, Calvins Lehre von Staat und Kirche (Aalan: Scientia, 1961), 94–95 (my translation).
John Calvin, Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and Thessalonians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 285–86.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battle, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 16, 1504.
Calvin, Commentary on Exodus 20:20, cited in David Little, “Economic Justice and Progressive Taxation,” in Reformed Faith and Economics, ed. Robert L. Stivers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 79.
Calvin, Commentary on Second Corinthians, 8:14, cited in Little, “Economic Justice,” 79.
Calvin, Commentary on Second Thessalonians, 3;12, cited in Little, “Economic Justice,” 79.
Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, 82:3, cited in Little, “Economic Justice,” 73.
Calvin, Epistles of Paul the Apostle on Romans, 13:5, 283.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 2, chap. 2, para. 13, 272. See also his discussion of “certain ideas of justice and rectitude … implanted by nature in the hearts of all persons,” in Calvin, Epistles of Paul the Apostle on Romans, 2:14–15, 47–49.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 2, 1487.
Ibid., bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 9, 1495.
Calvin’s Homilies on I Samuel, cited in Herbert D. Foster, “Political Theories of the Calvinists,” Collected Papers of Herbert D. Foster (Privately Printed, 1929), 82.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 8, 82.
Calvin’s Homilies on I Samuel, cited in Foster, “Political Theories of the Calvinists,” 82.
Calvin’s Commentary on Micah, 5.5.
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 20, para. 31, 1518.
Ibid., book 4, chap. 11, para. 3, 1215.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:192. Skinner’s elegant phrase is a much more accurate summary of Calvin’s thinking than his “unequivocal” suggestion that Calvin himself added nothing distinctive to Protestant revolutionary ideas and simply cribbed without remainder from “radical Conciliarist thought” and Lutherans (2:321, 323). See also Skinner, “The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution,” in After the Reformation, ed. Barbara Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980). It is true, as we have said, that Calvin borrowed from conciliarists and Lutherans, but he added a strong, if variable, concern for natural rights and constitutional, representative government, which his followers developed beyond his original suggestions. Skinner has correctly been criticized by Carlos Eire in War Against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 302–10, but Eire overemphasizes the religious reasons for Calvinist revolutionary behavior and ignores the reasons based on “natural equity,” natural reason, and constitutional considerations. Moreover, Skinner is himself not entirely consistent. At 2:214, he properly refers to the equivocal character of Calvin’s thought: “There are signs that Calvin begins to modify his doctrine of passive obedience at the end of the 1550s, and started to move towards the acceptance of the constitutional theory of resistance.”
Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew, 26:52.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, paras. 11 and 12, 1499–501.
Ibid., bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 29, 1516.
Calvin’s Commentary on Romans, 13:3, 282.
Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 321.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 31, para. 1519.
Ibid.
Gordon, Calvin, 327; see also 312 and the reference to W. Nijenhuis, “The Limits of Civil Disobedience in Calvin’s Last-Known Sermons,” Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), chap. 4, discussing Calvin’s Homilies on Samuel I and II.
Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 24, 1512.
Cited in Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 20, para. 1519n54.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:321.
Ibid., 2:255.
Ibid., 2:264.
Ibid., 2:284.
Julian H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 84.
Beza, Right of Magistrates, 124–25.
Witte, Faith, Freedom and Family, 303–04.
Ibid., 306–07.
Philippe Mornay, Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants, in Marshall, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century, 169.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:327.
Ibid., 2:329.
For a discussion of Beza, see Witte, “Rights, Resistance, and Revolution in the Western Tradition,” in Faith, Freedom, and Family, chap. 15, and more fully Witte, The Reformation of Rights, 81–142.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:331.
Ibid., 2:332–35.
Beza, Right of Magistrates, in Marshall, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century, 104–05.
Ibid., 130–31.
Mornay, Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants, in Marshall, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century, 187–88.
Ibid., 185.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 179.
Ibid., 133.
Ibid., 134–35.
Ibid.
Paul T. Fuhrmann, “Philip Mornay and the Huguenot Challenge,” in Calvinism and Political Order, ed. George L. Hunt (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 57; see ibid., 50 and 55 for evidence of a theocratic impulse in Mornay’s thought.
“Mornay fought Catholicism verbally, in writing, and on the battlefield, but there is no indication that he ever used his authority to keep people from exercising the Catholic religion.” Ibid., 63.
Beza, Right of Magistrates, in Marshall, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century, 107.
“The law of nature, the law of peoples, and civil law command us to take up arms against tyrants without title, nor is there any legal scruple to detain us.… Therefore, when this kind of tyranny occurs, anyone may act to drive it out, including private individuals.” Mornay, Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants, 188.
Beza, Right of Magistrates, 109.
Mornay, Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants, 195. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:331, for a confirmation of this conclusion in the thought of Beza and Mornay: “the right to hold the king to his promises can never by a property of the people as a whole,” but only to appointed officials.