Systematic Theology – The State

Morality and the State

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 30

Dictation Name: 30 Morality and the State

Year: 1970’s

Our subject now, to turn to our second subject of the evening, is Morality and the State.

Now, we have previously considered Marsilius, or Marsiglio, of Padua. His dates were approximately 1290-1243, when he died. Marsilius was a great enemy of the church whose ideas to this day have profoundly influenced the church. Before we review what he had to say about the state, let us remind ourselves Marsilius was the one who said the church should only be concerned with spiritual matters, and leave everything else to the state. It should never comment or deal with things material, or political, or economic.

Marsilius said first that the state is grounded in reason, not in revelation, and so the state was transferred from the jurisdiction of God to man, and the state is to be ruled by philosopher kings who are the voice of reason.

Second, Marsilius said the state is the supreme coercive force, and it must regulate all of society. There is nothing outside its jurisdiction.

Third, the state is the voice and the will of the people, of man, and therefore, the state has nothing to do with God. It is purely a human and a humanistic institution. The church at best is its satellite if not its enemy, because the church does not base itself on reason, but on something which is supposedly, according to Marsilius and his followers, irrational.

Louis IV of Bavaria who became the emperor, and was a persecutor of the church, made Marsilius an archbishop, and so Marsilius, an enemy of Christ, became a ruler in the church.

According to Marsilius, the church was to be limited to ritual, to mystical experiences, and emotional expression. Pious gush. The church today, by and large, has as its patron saint, Marsilius, even though they don’t acknowledge him, because today, the church Protestant and Catholic belongs to the world of Marsilius, not the world of scripture.

One brilliant English scholar of the beginning of the century, Bucel{?}, had this to say about Marsilius, “Marsilius, who with Ididius{?}, follows Aristotle in tracing politics up from the family or household desires to rehabilitate the state as the home of ethical life in the ancient spirit of classical times. He seem also to follow him in dividing the six functions, three productive, three protective, husbandry, crafts, and banking for the physical life, the duties of judge, soldier, and priest for both natural and spiritual life. The priesthood is just another department of the state set up and controlled by the people. His purpose, to demolish grounds for clerical interference and politics, was one which could not have occurred to Aristotle in whose time there was no such counterpoise to secular absolutism or rather the divine king.”

Do you get Rousseau’s point? It says, first of all, as we saw last time, what Marsilius did was to separate morality from religion. He said you don’t get morality from religion, you get it from politics, as Aristotle said, and second, he said everything, therefore, is under the jurisdiction of the state, because the state governs the moral life of man, and the church has no business in interfering into the moral realm. This is why we’re having problems today when the state speaks out on abortion. What right has the church, some say, to interfere? That’s within the jurisdiction of the state, and there is a move now to take away the tax exemption of the Catholic Church, and then of course, of other churches, because of a stand against abortion. After all, that’s a moral question and the state is the arbiter of morality in terms of this tradition.

As a matter of fact, in Nebraska, one of the things I testified was their character education manual, which makes precisely this point. It separated emphatically morality from religion, from Christianity, and made it an aspect of the life of the state and the teaching of the state, and what they felt was that there should be the same kind of character education in the Christian schools as in the public schools. In other words, this is antinomianism, and this is why antinomianism can flourish under statism, because it’s irrelevant, and they have nothing to worry about where it is concerned.

Naturally, as Marsilius’s thinking spread, so too did the centralization of power in the state, and so too did the Inquisition. I dealt last time with the Inquisition, and I’m returning to it to call attention to some further facts. The Inquisition, at first, had to fight the bishops. Why/ Because the bishops opposed the Inquisition and defended the heretics, and they said, “They must not be forced to believe,” but the state wanted the Inquisition, and the state ultimately got the papacy on its side and the Dominican order, monks, to act as inquisitors. The whole point was to undercut the power of the bishops. Why? Because the bishops had been almost semi-feudal lords with tremendous powers in their diocese, and the kings and the emperor did not want the bishops to be strong, and so the inquisitors were used to undermine the bishops.

The papacy was brought into line on this by being told it will make you stronger as against the bishops, and so the papacy cooperated and helped undercut the power of the bishops. Then what happened? The next step was taken in the Spanish Inquisition, which was entirely a state thing. The Spanish Inquisition said no one could appeal against the Inquisition to the pope, so the pope was first used to undermine the bishops, and then the pope himself was undermined. The pope had been brought in on it because what the Inquisition was doing was to not only condemn the heretic, but then confiscate his property, and who go it? The state. It made it very, very profitable to condemn heretics, did it not? And of course, when they promise the papacy that the church would get a portion, minor portion, and that got them on their side, although they would up the losers, and it is interesting that the Inquisition was often given its greatest stimulus by rulers who themselves were unbelievers. In fact, Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen Emperor, was emphatically an unbeliever. He may have been a secret Muslim, but it was he who was able to convince the Vatican to go along with the Inquisition. It was he who required death for all heretics and the confiscation of all their properties, who found it very profitable to do so. So, we can see that the Inquisition served the purposes of the state, but to return to Marsilius.

Marsilius’s state is the modern state; coercion without any religious restraint. The state itself becoming its own church and decreeing its own morality and saying, “We are the judge of morality,” and isn’t that what the Supreme Court has done over and over again in the abortion case, and in other cases? We now have a decision which may go to the Supreme Court which says sodomy is perfectly alright. Well, the state is now the moral arbiter. It can tell you what is right and wrong, and don’t you dare disagree. The state is the voice of reason and the source of morality, and reason increasingly was identified with reasons of state. If the state wants to do something, because the state is the source of morality, then it is ipso facto moral, and man became a creature of the state. Not a creature of God, but a creature of the state, and you had statist predestination.

To give you an example and quote someone who is more honest here than others, but whose thinking was very similar to that of Lester Ward, one of the great American sociologists whose influence has helped make this country. Lester Ward’s close friend was an Austrian/Polish sociologist, Ludwig Gumplowicz, who died in 1959, and Gumplowicz said, “It is not man himself who thinks, but his social community. The source of his thoughts is in the social medium in which he lives, the social atmosphere which he breathes, and he cannot think ought else than what the influences of his social environment concentrating upon his brain, necessitate.” Very interesting, is it not? That’s your modern environmentalism and behaviorism.

He also said, “My doctrine is that justice is the interest of the stronger.” And who is the stronger? It’s the state. Now, you can say Gumplowicz and Ward were positivists, but what about the idealists? Well, let’s hear what T.H. Green, one of the great idealists of England had to say. Green said, “A right against society as such, a right to act without reference to the needs or good of society is an impossibility since every right depends on some social relation, and a right against any group of associated men depends upon association on some footing of equality with them, or with some other men. If we regard the state as the sustainer and harmonizer of social relations, the individual can have no right against the state. Its law must be to him of absolute authority. No exercise of power, however abstractly desirable, for the promotion of human good it might be, can be claimed as a right unless there is some common consciousness of utility shared by the person making the claim, and those on whom it is made. It is not a question whether or no it ought to be claimed as a right. It simply cannot be claimed except on this condition.” In other words, there is no right or wrong apart from the state, and it can vary in terms of what the state decrees.

A good example of that is abortion. When we go back through history into ancient times, we find that sometimes the state wanted troops, wanted more soldiers. Abortion is against the law, it’s immoral. Then, when there were too many children to suit them, abortion must be practiced. It’s an old fact of history. In other words, morality is determined by the state. I have a good in my library written by someone who got out of the Soviet Union, in which, on his arrest, he said, “But all I was doing in my writings which you are condemning, is to state the party line,” and the KGB man looked at him with contempt, and he said, “It was the party line last year, it is not the party line this year,” and it is what the state says now that is right and any deviation from that is wrong and immoral. Now, that’s example what these men were saying.

Or, to quote another man, someone I had to read when I was a student at Berkeley in the thirties. Bernard Bosanquet, an English philosopher who died in 1923, who said he could not see the state being limited by any moral idea because the state itself is morality, an idea, of course, which is Hegelian. He wrote, “The nation state is the widest organization which has the common experience necessary to found a common life. This is why it is recognized as absolute in power over the individual, and as his representative and champion in the affairs of the world outside. It is obvious that there can be but one such absolute power in relation to any one person, and his discharge from one allegiance can only be affected by his acceptance of another. The nation state as an ethical idea is then a faith or a purpose, we might say a mission, were not the word too narrow and too aggressive. The modern nation is a history and a religion rather than a clear-cut idea.” In other words, the state is not only the source of reality, but it is a religion.

This is what we are facing today in the courts. These bureaucrats who come and testify against us are horrified by the idea that these Christians actually believe that something in a book called The Bible says what’s right and wrong rather than the State of California, or of Nebraska, or Montana, or Alabama. They are righteously upset, and their fervor is really something to see. For them, the state is religion. It is the source of morality. [19:10

But if you take the idealist position of men like Bosanquet and Green and you identify the state with morality and religion, then there can be no moral judgment of the state, because it is God walking on earth, and everything it does is ipso facto right, or if you take the positivist’s view that there is no such thing as morality, and the state is the life of man and man dare not question the state, it amounts to the same thing. If there is no morality how can you criticize the state as absolute power? It leads to the kind of thinking that one man gave voice to when he said, “The clergy and the military exist to serve the nation,” or as one Mexican positivist philosopher said, “The rights of society are more important than the rights of man.” This is our predicament today. This is the thinking that I encounter over and over again as I testify before state committees, or before courts, state and federal, across the country. This is the premise of their operation. They regard what we believe, our Christian faith, as the voice of the past, and they find it incomprehensible and meaningless. But it is they who are meaningless, and it is they who shall, in the days ahead, face the judgment of God.

We will take our break now, and meet after ten or fifteen minutes for our third session and the question and answer period.

End of tape