Robert Bellarmine and the Seeds of Constitutionalism

The great saint, Jesuit cardinal, and doctor of the Church Robert Bellarmine died on this date in 1621. This gives me another opportunity to commend the work of the terrifically talented Stefania Tutino, including her book on Bellarmine's political theory, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), and her edited collection of primary sources from Liberty Fund. Here's a bit from Stefania's conclusion to the chapter on Bellarmine and the "potestas indirecta":

Bellarmine followed the neo-Thomist doctrine of differentiating sharply between the natural power of the sovereign and the supernatural power of the pope, and indeed he grounded his view of the pope's empire of souls precisely on the unique, incommensurable, and supreme character of the pope's spiritual authority over both the Church and the Christian temporal commonwealths. This move, however, did not remove the seed of constitutionalism when it came to secular government, or, better, it weakened the authority of the sovereign with respect to the authority of the pope while at the same time granting to the temporal authority an autonomous space with respect to the authority of the Christian Church....

What this paradox highlights, I argue, is just how relevant Bellarmine's theory was in the political discourse of early modern Europe, precisely because it was engineered to safeguard and preserve the pope's spiritual primacy against both the Protestants and the authority of early modern monarchies. The significance of this issue transcends the question of the constitutionalist elements embedded in Bellarmine's and other neo-Thomists' doctrine: in a sense, in fact, precisely because Bellarmine's potestas indirecta was meant to oppose the supernatural and supernational empire of souls of the pope to the national and "natural" jurisdiction of the king, it became a fundamental springboard to rethink the secular arguments and foundations of constitutionalism and absolutism. 209-10.