Chapter 14 THE DOGMA OF INDEPENDENCE Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

 

Chapter 14 THE DOGMA OF INDEPENDENCE Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

 

Chapter 14 THE DOGMA OF INDEPENDENCE

THE JESUITratio studiorum imbued western culture with a purely Catholic political theory. This theory, as articulated by Deist philosophes and politicians, ultimately became the rhetorical mainspring of the American Revolution. It so impacted the world that its formulator and original apologist, a Jesuit priest named Robert Bellarmine, was created a Saint in 1930.

Prior to Henry VIII’s break with the Roman papacy in the mid1530s and subsequent creation of the Church of England, kings regarded themselves, within their respective realms, as the anointed vicars of God for secular purposes only. After Henry’s schism, Protestant kings assumed God’s anointment
covered religious purposes as well. They became infallible popes of their own national churches. Following the biblical teaching that the ruler is “God’s minister to thee for good,” Protestant kings claimed to rule by Divine Right, holding absolute sway over their subjects. In the maxim of Divine Right’s greatest champion and James I’s private theologian, Sir Robert Filmer, “The King can do no wrong.”

Divine Right’s staunchest opponent was Robert Bellarmine, private theologian to the pope, Clement VIII (1592-1605), who made him Cardinal Bellarmine in 1599. Cardinal Bellarmine appealed to the self-interest of the common man, something the Divine Right system failed to do. He invented liberation theology. Drawing on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Bellarmine maintained that God anointed no kings but instead gave sovereignty directly and naturally to the people. The people were free to confer their sovereignty upon whomever or whatever they chose. Should the people’s chosen sovereign prove himself (or itself) unworthy, the people had the right to depose him (or it) and start anew with any form of government they deemed necessary, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or republic.
Understandably, the Protestant monarchs loathed Cardinal Bellarmine. A Collegio Anti-Bellarminianum was established at Heidelberg to train Lutherans in how to cope with Bellarmine’s democratic egalitarianism. When Queen Elizabeth ordered that Bellarmine be lectured against at Cambridge, the lecturer, while reading the Cardinal to refute him, converted to Roman Catholicism. Theodore Beza, who succeeded John Calvin as head of the Protestant church at Geneva, is said to have declared of Bellarmine’s magnum opus, Christian Controversy, “This book has ruined us!”
Of the process of “making the enemy move as one wishes,” Sun-tzu wrote: “The great science is to make him desire everything you wish him to do & to provide him with all the means to help you in this, without his realizing it.” Thus, liberation theology reached the American revolutionaries through the voice and energies of its principal adversary, Sir Robert Filmer. Sir Robert spent the first four pages of Patriarcha (1680), his illustrious defense of Divine Right monarchy, refuting Cardinal Bellarmine. But his refutation contains so much material from Bellarmine’s works that Patriarcha amounts to nothing less than a concise introduction of Bellarminian theory.
The two most conspicuous reviewers of Patriarcha were Algernon Sidney, Puritanism’s greatest political philosopher, and John Locke, the voice of Enlightenment in England and America. Algernon Sidney’s name means little to modern Americans, but in his day, and for generations after, it was synonymous with individual liberty. Babies and country estates were called “Sidney” in his honor, even though he was beheaded in 1683 for plotting the death of King Charles II. Sidney’s philosophical admirers loved his open hostility to Roman Catholicism. They ignored his intrigues with the Jesuits of Louis XIV, and his long visits to Rome. Discourses concerning Government, his most celebrated work, was known respectfully as “the noble book.” After its republication in 1763, along with an account of his preposterous trial (no indictment, no assistance of counsel, perjured testimony, tainted evidence, packed jury), it could be found in the library of every affluent home in America.
Sidney began Discourses with the following sentence: “Having lately seen a book entitled Patriarcha written by Sir Robert Filmer concerning the universal and undistinguished right of all kings, I thought a time of leisure might well be employed in examining his doctrine and the questions arising from it: which seem to concern all mankind.” Whereupon, quoting Filmer’s quotations from Bellarmine, Sidney goes on to attack Filmer and in the process defends Bellarmine. How wondrously Sun-tzuan that a trusted Protestant thinker would indoctrinate a nation of fellow-Catholic-bashers with the teachings of a Jesuit Cardinal!
John Locke held such influence over revolutionary intellectuals that historians have labeled him “America’s Philosopher.” He, too, endorsed Bellarmine by attacking Filmer. On the title page of his Two Treatises on Government (1690), Locke advertises that he will refute Patriarcha with reasoning wherein “the false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown.” He then expounds Cardinal Bellarmine in his own words, words that will become the rationale of the American Revolution: “Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his consent….”
The personal library of the main author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, contained a copy of Patriarcha, and also a handsome folio of four hundred ninety-seven pages of the discourses of Algernon Sidney. “If Jefferson read but the opening pages of Sidney’s and Filmer’s books,” Bellarminian scholar John Clement Rager wrote in 1926,
he had the principles of democracy as propounded by Bellarmine, in a nutshell. It is more than likely, however, that the curiosity of Jefferson … prompted [him] to look more deeply into the original writings of this Catholic Schoolman.
[He] had not far to go. In the library of Princeton University there was a copy of Cardinal Bellarmine’s works. James Madison, a member of the committee which framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights, was a graduate of Princeton. Probably he read Bellarmine, for at this period of his life he read everything he could lay his hands on and was deeply versed in religious controversy.
It might be remarked that several members of the committee which drew up the [Virginia] Declaration of Rights had been educated in England, where the writings of Bellarmine were not unpopular even among those who were most inimical to his faith.
The operative philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is easily traceable to Bellarminian liberation theology:

Cardinal Bellarmine	Declaration of Independence
“Political power emanates from God. Government was introduced by divine law, but the divine law has given this power to no particular man.”	“The people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
“Society must have power to protect and preserve itself.”	“To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
“The people themselves, immediately and directly, hold the political power.”	“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
“All men are born naturally free and equal.”	“All men are created equal.”
“For legitimate reason the people can change the government to an aristocracy or a democracy or vice versa.”	“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new goverment.”

Interestingly, Patriarcha (1680) was not published until twenty- eight years after its author Sir Robert Filmer’s death. It arrived in an era of dwindling hopes for Divine Right, the concept having been thoroughly discredited when King Charles I was beheaded in 1625.
Could it be that Patriarcha was edited or ghost-written by Jesuits at the command of Superior General John Paul Oliva (1661—1681)? The purpose would have been to induce the enemies of Roman Catholicism to follow Bellarmine by having Bellarminian liberation attacked by a loser, Filmer, the disgraced champion of a lost Protestant cause. The idea is not far-fetched when one considers actual outcome. For Patriarcha did in fact produce the theory of revolution that impelled the colonists to create a nation subservient to the black papacy.
But for liberation theology to translate into the violence necessary to divide the English-speaking world, England had to commit acts of tyranny. How this was accomplished, despite a dazed and confused and rather innocuous young king, is the subject of our next chapter.