The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition

By Yoram Hazony

Civil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law.

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After summoning additional examples, from Saul, David and Job, using the words of Saul’s son, Jonathan, to demand of the Emperor, “Why do you sin against innocent blood...?” Ambrose concludes: “I have not written this to put you to shame, but to induce you, by royal examples, to put this sin away from your kingdom.... You are a man, and temptation has come to you. Conquer it.”¹⁰³ And Theodosius, though holding out for a few months, eventually gave in and complied with Ambrose’s order to do penance.¹⁰⁴

By the end of the fifth century, the weakening grip of the Roman state had permitted the Church to come into its own, and what had been Ambrose’s assault on the monolith of state power had been institutionalized into a Church with independent constitutional standing. In keeping with Ambrose’s conception, both ecclesiastical assemblies and individual bishops of the Church gradually assumed the authority to watch over the rectitude of the state, making it their business to upbraid officials when either their public or personal conduct was deemed unworthy. And although the Christian Church, unlike the Hebrew prophets, did begin to wield political and material assets on a vast scale—thereby opening itself to the kind of abuses inherent in every accumulation of worldly power—it nevertheless succeeded in permanently implanting in the West the biblical idea of a spiritual leadership, independent of the political rulers of the state and constitutionally protected by tradition, whose mission is to be the organ of conscience within the body politic.

But it was not until 1075 that the full force of the contradiction between the Jewish and Roman teachings in Christianity exploded into the open, flinging the Church into full-scale revolt against the secular authority of the Holy Roman Empire (a Germanic “heir” to Rome which lingered on as the putative overlord of Europe until the seventeenth century) in its effort to reassert the independence of the religious right of dissent and disobedience. What is today known as the “Investiture Controversy” began as an attempt by the newly elected Pope Gregory VII to end the humiliating practice of state appointment of Church officials, which in many parts of Europe meant that a Churchman could expect his moral and political pronouncements to be reviewed by secular officials who often could determine the course of his career. While Gregory’s proscription of state influence in the investiture of bishops was originally intended as a purely religious act, its effects were highly political in nature. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV responded to this threat to his authority by moving to have Gregory deposed, and the pope responded by excommunicating the Emperor and decreeing that all oaths of fealty taken by his vassals were null and void—in effect insisting on the right of the Church to depose rulers and instigate national disobedience to their decrees—much as the prophet Elisha had deposed Jehoram.

As the confrontation between the Church and the government unfolded over the subsequent decades, the rancor gave way to the first philosophical tracts seeking to ground the actions of the two sides in the authoritative political documents of the Christian tradition. While the writings of the Apostles could only be used by the churchmen by urging readings straying far from the simple meaning of the texts, they found a wealth of material to support their position in the confrontations between prophets and kings in the Hebrew Bible. Thus Honorius of Augsburg’s Summa Gloria, written in the wake of the Investiture Controversy in 1123, argued that the right of the Church to oppose unjust actions of the state stems from the prophet Samuel’s creation of the kingdom of Saul, whose rule was not absolute, but limited by Samuel’s interpretation of divine justice even after Israel was ruled by an anointed king.¹⁰⁵ In 1159, watershed was reached with the assertion of an even more radical position by John of Salisbury, the first systematic medieval political writer of Christian Europe. John followed prophetic theology directly in reviving the argument that the right of temporal power to oblige and coerce is derived ultimately from spiritual authority, invoking the limitations imposed on Jewish rulers in the book of Deuteronomy, and arguing that “the law which is enjoined upon princes by the Great King who is terrible over all the earth and who takes away the breath of princesֹ. Surely this law is divine and cannot be broken with impunity.”¹⁰⁶ John concludes that while particular laws may have to be obeyed regardless of their content if they derive from a legitimate government, this legitimacy itself derives from the willingness of the ruler generally to govern justly and by law, being as the king “may not lawfully have any will of his own apart from that which the law ... enjoins, or the calculation of the common interest requires.”¹⁰⁷ One who does not govern in accordance with the dictates of justice, on the other hand, is nothing but a usurper of the power of the sword, a mere murderer, to be condemned as such by the spiritual authority, the Church: “He who usurps the sword,” he wrote, “is worthy to die by the sword.”

With this fateful step, John ushers in the modern age, insisting for the first time since the Jewish revolts against Rome on a moral right to disobedience and even rebellion in the face of unjust rule. It is little surprise that with such ideas abroad, it was not long before England, in 1215, experienced the great baronial revolt which at swordpoint foisted Magna Carta, and the first formal constraints on royal power in the West, on King John. And far from being a unique view, the essentials of John of Salisbury’s position were subsequently adopted by Aquinas¹⁰⁸ and other Christian thinkers, who opened the door for the first time to a politically activist Church bearing the right to urge the populace to resist unjust government—making it a genuine Western heir of the Jewish prophets, and the real forebear of all modern theories of disobedience before injustice.¹⁰⁹ As the decentralization of the feudal system began to give way to the more absolute nationalisms that are familiar from contemporary Europe, there can be no disputing that it was the relentless attacks of the Church which sought to protect society against the very real threat of resurgent, and unchecked, tyranny. Thus it was against such unblushing absolutists as Dante, Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes that Catholic writers such as Robert Bellarmine, Juan de Mariana and Francisco Suarez, building on John of Salisbury and Aquinas, began constructing the modern theories of popular sovereignty, and of the right of popular resistance to tyranny from which contemporary disobedience theories were ultimately to spring. In fact, so unequivocal was the incitement of the Church to disobedience in cases of state tyranny, that by the sixteenth century, polemicists defending the unchecked power of the king had fallen into the habit of accusing the pope of being an anarchist.¹¹⁰

But while the highest intellectual statements of the religious doctrine of popular sovereignty and the right of the people to resist were made by the Jesuits, the most effective purveyor of these ideas was Calvinist Protestantism. Despite an early flirtation with statism,¹¹¹ Protestant theories of disobedience quickly became indistinguishable from the theories being advanced by the Jesuits, with one difference: The Calvinist disobedience doctrines quickly succeeded in stirring formidable opposition to governments across Europe. In Scotland, the new legitimacy offered to disobedience to the existing state brought the ouster of the ruling authorities in 1560; in France, the demands of the Huguenots for religious toleration beginning in 1562 eventually led to armed rebellion and civil war; in Holland, beginning in 1566, Calvinism was a major force behind the protracted and ultimately successful revolt against Spain; and in England, Protestants were in the van of the rebellion against monarchical absolutism which led to the overthrow of King Charles I in 1648. And through it all ran the biblically inspired demand that the regime do justice. As the Estates-General in Holland declared in 1581, in determining to rid themselves of the Hapsburg monarchy: “All mankind know that a prince is appointed by God to cherish his subjects, even as a shepherd to guard his sheep. When, therefore, the prince does not fulfill his duty as protector; when he oppresses his subjects, destroys their ancient liberties, and treats them as slaves, he is to be considered, not a prince, but a tyrant. As such, the estates of the land may lawfully and reasonably depose him, and elect another in his room.”¹¹²

While it was the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which imparted to Christians for the first time the steely resolve to act in active defiance of the state and make a world of justice as had been demanded by the Hebrew prophets, the final chapter in the evolution of the Western disobedience theory belongs to the ideas of the first Protestant, Martin Luther. For it was Luther’s devotion to the liberty of the individual conscience which eliminated the need for resistance to be ordained by any church other than the unique church residing in the heart of every individual.

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