THE ‘MEDIATE’ DERIVATION OF PRINCIPATUS

The account we have been considering explained and legitimated political authority as such. But it did not explain how any specific regime, government, dynasty, or prince can acquire legitimate authority. It was axiomatic to the Society and its enemies that legitimate authority ultimately comes from God. The issue between them was how it descends from this transcendent source to mundane office-holders, and whether, and if so how, the limits which legitimate political authority must respect might be enforced.

It was common polemical practice among its enemies to impute to the Society three doctrines which, they claimed, undermined secular authority: the ‘mediate’ derivation of political authority via ‘the people’, tyrannicide, and the potestas indirecta of the papacy. The first of these bore on the legitimation of specific regimes, the second and third (which will be considered in subsequent chapters) on possible ways of enforcing limits on regimes and rulers that exceeded their authority, or had none to begin with. In the fevered imagination of some anti-Jesuits, these doctrines formed part of a deep Jesuit strategy of furthering the cause of papal hegemony, Spanish policy, or (in even more conspiratorial vein) the Jesuit project of world domination, or any combination of these objectives.