GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

23O ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE GREEKS
in the political sphere, the State, too, has authority. What,
then, is the relation of God's authority to the State's?
St Thomas's answer is that the State's authority must, in
the last resort, be regarded as the delegated authority
of God. In the first place, God invests with his authority
the people as a whole. It is in the people that, as later
writers would have put it, sovereignty resides. The people
then delegate this authority to whatever form of representa-
tive circumstances suggest as being the most suitable,
either to a monarch, or to a talented few, or .even St.
.Thomas does not exclude the possibility to representatives
of the people as a whole, chosen by the people as
a whole. But whether the resultant government is a
monarchy, an aristocracy or a democracy, its authority
derives from God via the people.
But now arises another difficulty. Man, as we have
seen, is not only a natural, but a supernatural being and
he functions upon the supernatural plane even while
he is still on earth. Over man's supernatural nature God's
authority .extends, and in this sphere no less than in
the temporal sphere, God's authority is vested in earthly
representatives. Whereas, however, in the temporal sphere
God's authority is distributed among the people who are
many, in the spiritual sphere He has a single representative,
namely, the Pope. The Pope, in fact, is the intermediary
between God and mankind. Thus two authorities, the
political and the papal, each deriving its authority
from God, confront each other. How are their respective
claims to be adjusted? St. Thomas solves the difficulty by
saying that in all cases of dispute the last word rests with
die Pope. The Pope, in other words, is pre-eminent ova*
any earthly ruler. This solution was not, however, one
that the political authorities were always prepared to
accept, for though in theory the opposition was between
man's natural and his supernatural natures, it expressed
itself in practice in a struggle between two all-too-human
authorities* As Darrcll Figgis puts it in his Churches in the
Modern Stale,
" When " (in mediaeval times) "conflict is spoken