§1
On this matter I treated partly in Book II, and partly it must be treated here. There I urged concord; here I treat the true and solid quieting of seditions born from discord, matters which I also urged concerning the peace of Germany. Hatred and aversion from one’s neighbor are contrary to charity; from them arise other plagues and shameful acts, namely discord, contention, war, quarrel, sedition, and schism, which altogether remove peace from the midst and, when they have invaded a city, demonstrate by their own malice the goodness of peace. What is most excellent in our doctrine? Peace; I shall add, also what is most useful. Conversely, what is most disgraceful and destructive? The separation of wills. Gregory Nazianzen, on the moderation to be observed in disputations.
All those things come from the same source, namely hatred: discord is a conflict of wills, contention a conflict of words, and the rest are conflicts of things.
§2
Discord is an altogether grave vice, for it is the disagreement of one’s will from the will of one’s neighbor concerning a divine good or the neighbor’s good which we are bound to will and desire for him. It is an act of hatred, and indeed the primary act, when someone maliciously opposes, so far as lies in him—by his will, if he cannot by deed—that which his neighbor embraces with the best will and which he is bound to will, or even to bestow and procure, for him. Therefore the Apostle, Galatians 5:20, enumerates dissensions among the manifest works of the flesh which exclude men from the kingdom of heaven.
For whoever is found in discord is disowned by the Father, disinherited by the Son, and likewise made alien from the Holy Spirit. For he who has despised the good of the law that was given rejects the gift offered; he who has refused to observe the testament will not be able to attain the Lord’s inheritance; and he who has wished to be discordant with a Christian cannot possess concord with Christ. For it is the crime of contumacy to despise what is commanded, to refuse what is prescribed, and to turn away from what has been enjoined. What do you have in common with discord, Christian? Why do you love mutual hostilities, something which could not please the author of peace? Why do you practice enmities which even the man who first invented them could not escape?
§3
But if reason should be silent, nature itself commends concord to us most greatly and accuses dissensions. For nothing is so discordant by vice as this race—the human race—or so social by nature. Nor could human nature speak more fittingly for guarding against the vice of discord, lest it arise, or for healing it when it had arisen, than by recalling that parent whom God willed to create as one man from whom a multitude would be propagated, so that by this admonition a concordant unity might be preserved even among many.
From a mind steeped and seething in hatreds, contention is a certain foam of boiling discord and a pestilential breath, when the man who is discordant disputes with his neighbor in order to assail the truth. Against the truth, I say; for a contest undertaken on behalf of the truth, if accompanied by modesty and a zeal for instruction, is not only praiseworthy but very often necessary, either lest justice be oppressed or lest religion be abandoned without defense.
No vice is more common today, none held in greater praise and value among our adversaries. For what are the innumerable defamatory pamphlets? What the pictures? What the other things, except contention and an assault upon truth? What else do they do than lose even the name of Christianity by disputing about religion? For who among them speaks peaceably with the divine Scriptures without contention, not striving to conquer another with empty and childish animosity? In whose heart does peace conquer? But enough has been said concerning the contentions of heretics in the book On the Union of the Evangelicals and the other, On Syncretism.
When discord and contention grow strong, they produce wars, quarrels, seditions, and schisms. When the conflict is between princes and states, it is war; when between private persons, a quarrel; between citizens, sedition; in the Church, a schism, which almost always ends in heresy. Would that all these things needed to be explained in discourse. Would that there were such felicity in our times that we learned from books that they were evils rather than felt them in the deed itself.
§4
The first care of a prince, or nearly so, is to protect sacred things and augment religion—not, however, so that he is the judge of controversies, but the patron of acknowledged and approved truth. For he ought not to possess the same power in the temple as in the praetorium, nor to dominate the faith of his subjects, but to persecute perfidy. Those who so form their prince that he is neither himself devoted to a definite religion nor undertakes the care of those of others place some Epicurean or Diagorean over the state. In the first place, they will never obtain what they propose to themselves, namely, that the people will love or accept an atheistic man. Thereafter this license which the prince permits will altogether disturb the peace of which we treat. For the prince’s Politicism will render uncertain everything—sacred ceremonies and whatever ought to have been most certain.
Indeed, we deservedly judge pitiable those peoples whom the commands of their lords have drawn three or four times into various sects within the lifetime of one man, while the populace embraces the prince’s errors partly voluntarily and partly through inducement and threats. For those whom the authority of princes alone moves or their power impels are necessarily without religion. Yet much worse is the condition of those whom a tyrant who despises the gods oppresses by the precepts of Machiavelli. A heretical prince harasses his subjects because of his error; a Machiavellian because of calculations of gain or loss. Avarice and ambition govern these; superstition governs those. No one can be secure in his religion when it depends upon so many chances; yet there is more mutability in a Machiavellian principate.
For men are generally more tenacious of superstition and heresies; but when they relate the religion of their people to their own advantages and dignity, then, if the condition or calculation of utility changes, a change of religion must follow also. For if a politician commands a Lutheran populace and himself agrees with his subjects not by faith but for the sake of his advantage, because it is expedient that a prince of Lutherans appear to be a Lutheran, everyone understands that, when the calculation of utility changes, he will change not his faith, which he does not possess, but his simulation of faith, which is moved by utility alone. Bring to such a man the hope of greater dignity and power: suddenly he will become not only a Calvinist and an atheist, but even a Turk.
Under such a prince there can be peace neither of the state nor of the Church, for no one can trust a man who refers everything to his own utility. When it is expedient for him, he will put on every form of religion; indeed, he will rage even against the associates of his own religion. Nor are peoples subject only to the danger of variety and inconstancy when true utility has twisted the prince in another direction, but also when a false appearance of it has been presented. Irreligious princes have therefore always held a kingdom to the greatest public evil and have overthrown themselves, God making foolish the wisdom of this world. Deservedly so: their subjects’ souls are a source of gain to them, and God an object of mockery.
Such men are perfidious and abominable even in human society, for:
ἀκύρων γινομένων τῶν συνθηκῶν ἀναιρεῖται ἡ πρὸς ἀλλήλους χρεία τῶν ἀνθρώπων.
When covenants are rendered void, mutual intercourse among men is removed. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I, chapter 15. But those men remove all these things when they deny that there is a divine power, namely:
Οἷσιν οὔτε βωμὸς οὔτε πίστις, οὐδ᾽ ὅρκος μένει·
For whom neither altar, faith, nor oath remains firm. Aristophanes, Acharnians. They neglect everything right and honorable provided that they obtain power. They will never lack a cause for abjuring an old simulation and feigning a new one; it will not be difficult to seek hiding places in perjury once they have learned to impose the appearance of justice and honesty upon their own desires and frauds.
A prince must therefore be religious, hold a true understanding concerning God, offer true worship to God, and instruct and confirm the people entrusted to him not only by protecting them with arms, ordering them by justice, and cherishing them by clemency, but also by religion, which is the supreme good of the human breast.
For why should princes not worship God when they know that a kingdom was given to them by God and can be taken away by him when he wills? For by God:
Things founded proceed, Each in its own order; and by the Prince of things the courses Remain fixed.
§5
The same God is arbiter of great empires and huts; with as easy a nod he overturns marble palaces as humble cottages. Strong and weak things hang from the same thread, destined to fall if he who weighs mountains in a balance relaxes his hand. Hence kingdoms generally fall by an unexpected and unforeseen outcome, because they spurn the providence of the divine power. The creator of things willed that great things depend upon the smallest, lest anyone, elated by his own greatness, neglect small things—much less him from whom both great and small things come. Princes must therefore worship him through whom they reign and live.
Your dominion, therefore, O princes, rests upon the counsel of God alone, not upon human arts; neither caution nor anxious fear accomplishes the matter.
Many came to their fate While they feared the fates.
The very fear of coming evil Sent many into the greatest dangers.
God himself warns princes: “But now the Lord says: Far be this from me; but whoever glorifies me, I shall glorify him; but those who despise me will be ignoble.” 1 Kings 2:30. How noble was David by worshiping God; how ignoble Jeroboam? We therefore see that all things turn out prosperously for those who worship God and adversely for those who spurn him; for even calamities themselves are converted to good for the pious, while their prosperity is for the impious a cause of miseries.
For they are raised on high So that they may fall with a heavier fall.
§6
It is not only necessary for a prince to be religious and to induce his citizens by example and edicts to worship the divine power, but also fitting to government and altogether royal.
Δεῖ γὰρ τὸ ἄριστον ὑπὸ τῷ ἀρίστῳ τιμᾶσθαι, κὴ τὸ ἁγεμονεῦον ὑπὸ τῷ ἁγεμονεομένῳ.
The best—that is, the divine power—must be honored by what is best and most excellent among created things, while he who governs must be honored by those who are governed. But kings and princes are the best part of the world, through whom, even if they are evil, very many evils are nevertheless impeded, and who protect the society and safety of the human race. They are nearest to God; for this reason they are also called gods, and deservedly gods if through them the divine Majesty is vindicated.
But if the safety of the citizens and the tranquility of the state are also truly a care to him, as they ought to be and ought especially to be, a Christian prince cannot fail to apply himself to it. Yet without religion that tranquility not only cannot exist at all, but cannot even be desired. To such an extent is this so that even impious deniers judged that fierce and rude peoples must be restrained by fear of religion; for without religion and fear of the gods they did not think that their own rights would be safe. Reason will therefore teach what a pious king and nursing father of the Church must do.
§7
In addition, if religion is absent, the life of men is filled with foolishness, crime, and savagery; the truth of promises, the sanctity of oaths, and all fidelity in compacts and commerce are removed from the world. Lactantius, On Anger, chapter 8. This impiety and audacity at last rises against the very Mezentiuses and despisers of the divine power. For religion and fear of God alone guard the society of men with one another. Lactantius, On Anger, chapter 12.
The maxim of Maecenas to Augustus is golden, if it is transferred from superstition to true religion:
Τὸ μὲν θεῖον πάντῃ πάντως αὐτός τε σέβου κατὰ τὰ πάτρια, καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους τιμᾶν ἀνάγκαζε· τοὺς δὲ δὴ ξενίζοντάς τι περὶ αὐτὸ καὶ μίσει καὶ κόλαζε, μὴ μόνον τῶν θεῶν ἕνεκα, ὧν ὁ καταφρονήσας οὐδ᾽ ἄλλου ἄν τινος προτιμήσειεν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι καὶ καινά τινα δαιμόνια οἱ τοιοῦτοι ἀντεισφέροντες πολλοὺς ἀναπείθουσιν ἀλλοτριονομεῖν· κἀκ τούτου καὶ συνωμοσίαι καὶ συστάσεις, ἑταιρεῖαί τε γίγνονται, ἅπερ ἥκιστα μοναρχίᾳ συμφέρει.
Worship the divine power in every way and at every time according to the ancestral rites, and compel others to its worship; but hate and restrain those who introduce any innovation concerning it, not only for the sake of the gods—since he who despises them will hold nothing else in high regard—but because those who introduce certain new divinities impel many toward revolution. From this arise conspiracies, seditions, and secret assemblies, things assuredly least conducive to monarchy.
If a pleasure-loving and impious man pronounced these things about the true worship of the true God, he would give counsel both prudent and holy. For nothing in human affairs is more excellent than true religion; therefore it must be defended with the greatest care.
§8
How greatly atheists are hated, and always have been, not only by foreigners and neighbors but even by subjects and intimates who are participants in their tyranny, many ancient and recent events teach us. The entire family of Jeroboam was destroyed by King Baasha; all the lineage of Baasha by Zimri; the latter, despairing of kingdom and life, burned himself with his palace when the victor Omri approached, and Omri’s family was wholly cut off. Jehu too, although his posterity reigned to the fourth generation, was at last punished in Zechariah; Shallum was killed by Menahem, Pekahiah son of Menahem by Pekah, and the latter was killed by Hoshea, who was the last of the kings of Israel.
Behold all the kings not of the Persians or Scythians but of Israel divided from Judah: every one impious, every one either killed or punished by the destruction of his posterity. They possessed faithless prefects and subjects because they had all violated faith with God. These things are sufficient for a prince; if anyone wants more, let him consult those whose commentaries on this matter survive.
These matters deservedly ought to move a prince greatly, especially because heresy is a restless thing and its assistants, the preachers, are turbulent enemies of truth. Their superstition perpetually increases until it issues into every foul thing, so that it cannot bear even itself. Hence came those monsters of errors in former times, hence the Circumcellions savage against their own blood, hence the Libertines and Anabaptists of our time. But I have treated these sufficiently in the little book On the Increase of Heresies.
Nor do occupations poured out upon governing the state and administering justice excuse princes, since the head of legitimate government is the piety and morals of the citizens. If they apply their mind to these as though they were secondary matters, and importunately favor or conceal those teachers who prefer to please by some novelty rather than to edify by truth, as though these were not great injuries to the state, they entangle themselves in great calamities. Thus Constantine, a good prince, incautiously harmed the Empire and posterity; thus many in our time nourish serpents by which entire provinces, lethally poisoned, will soon fall. Did not Peucer alone, with two confessors of the Elector of Saxony, fill almost all Saxony with Calvinism without the prince’s knowledge? Did not Crellius alone recently drench almost that same Saxony with the blood of citizens and nobles?