Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

therefore he that hath the supreme power spiritual hath right to
command temporal princes, and dispose of their temporals in order to
the spiritual." As for the distinction of temporal and spiritual,
let us consider in what sense it may be said intelligibly that the
temporal or civil power is subject to the spiritual. There be but
two ways that those words can be made sense. For when we say one power
is subject to another power, the meaning either is that he which
hath the one is subject to him that hath the other; or that the one
power is to the other as the means to the end. For we cannot
understand that one power hath power over another power; or that one
power can have right or command over another: for subjection, command,
right, and power are accidents, not of powers, but of persons. One
power may be subordinate to another, as the art of a saddler to the
art of a rider. If then it be granted that the civil government be
ordained as a means to bring us to a spiritual felicity, yet it does
not follow that if a king have the civil power, and the Pope the
spiritual, that therefore the king is bound to obey the Pope, more
than every saddler is bound to obey every rider. Therefore as from
subordination of an art cannot be inferred the subjection of the
professor; so from the subordination of a government cannot be
inferred the subjection of the governor. When therefore he saith the
civil power is subject to the spiritual, his meaning is that the civil
sovereign is subject to the spiritual sovereign. And the argument
stands thus: the civil sovereign is subject to the spiritual;
therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes, (where
the conclusion is the same with the antecedent he should have proved).
But to prove it, he allegeth first, this reason, "Kings and popes,
clergy and laity, make but one Commonwealth; that is to say, but one
Church: and in all bodies the members depend one upon another: but
things spiritual depend not of things temporal: therefore temporal
depend on spiritual, and therefore are subject to them." In which
argumentation there be two gross errors: one is that all Christian
kings, popes, clergy, and all other Christian men make but one
Commonwealth: for it is evident that France is one Commonwealth, Spain
another, and Venice a third, etc. And these consist of Christians, and
therefore also are several bodies of Christians; that is to say,
several churches: and their several sovereigns represent them, whereby
they are capable of commanding and obeying, of doing and suffering, as
a natural man; which no general or universal Church is, till it have a
representant, which it hath not on earth: for if it had, there is no
doubt but that all Christendom were one Commonwealth, whose
sovereign were that representant, both in things spiritual and
temporal: and the Pope, to make himself this representant, wanteth
three things that our Saviour hath not given him, to command, and to
judge, and to punish, otherwise than, by excommunication, to run
from those that will not learn of him: for though the Pope were
Christ's only vicar, yet he cannot exercise his government till our
Saviour's second coming: and then also it is not the Pope, but St.
Peter himself, with the other Apostles, that are to be judges of the
world.
The other error in this his first argument is that he says the
members of every Commonwealth, as of a natural body, depend one of
another. It is true they cohere together, but they depend only on
the sovereign, which is the soul of the Commonwealth; which failing,
the Commonwealth is dissolved into a civil war, no one man so much
as cohering to another, for want of a common dependence on a known
sovereign; just as the members of the natural body dissolve into earth