CESARISM (CAESAROPAPISM). – This is a tendency whereby, in the reciprocal relations between Church and State, the latter is assigned or acknowledged an interference or preponderance that does not accord with the genuine teachings of legitimate ecclesiastical tradition on the matter. This tendency assumes different practical forms according to the periods in which it appears, at times reaching the point of a genuine exercise of jurisdiction by the State over the Church in certain matters, and particularly in those that, more or less properly, are called mixed. Relations between the two supreme powers have always been delicate, either because the material assistance furnished by the State to the Church provoked a demand for corresponding concessions, or because new questions arose which, as times and the requirements of public life changed, called for special clarification of their relations.
These problems are as old as Christianity; but as long as the Roman Empire regarded it as religio illicita because it was dangerous, its relations with it could only take the form of open hostility or suspicious toleration; Constantine’s conversion changed them into open favor. This favor immediately led the sovereign to regard it as an honor, indeed a duty, to provide the Church with stable means of subsistence, assistance, and defense against external and internal enemies; but it also brought with it interference in the affairs of the Church, in order to regulate them, whenever this was deemed necessary, according to his own judgment, even to the point of entering into doctrinal controversies whenever these appeared likely to cause disturbances. This did not mean that imperial authority set itself up as the direct judge in such controversies; it did, however, sometimes seek to obtain from the bishops the decisions it preferred. This disposition or tendency certainly derived from the Roman tradition of the pontifex maximus, a dignity that was an attribute of imperial power; but also from the fact that too many bishops, by frequenting the imperial court and residing there for long periods, were inclined to solicit its favors and, in order to obtain them, to exaggerate its powers; while others hastened there under the pretext of seeking compensation, as a final court of appeal, against alleged injustices on the part of legitimate ecclesiastical authority. When Constantinople became the seat of the Empire in the East, it assumed the title of New Rome; and this wholly Christian New Rome relegated the ancient one to the background, especially when the latter found itself in an entirely barbarian environment. The traditional concept of the primatial authority of St. Peter, continuing in his successors, was replaced by that of the bishop of this second Rome, the sole continuer of the Empire; in other words, a religious concept was replaced by a political-national concept, and it is precisely this that has informed, down to the present day, relations in the East between the State and the individual dissident churches, insofar as these had formed part of the ancient imperial Church.
Meanwhile, in the West, the feudal regime of the medieval states created entirely different relations; it made the individual Churches elements of the State as such. The Roman Church, however, remained outside this arrangement, although it too came to constitute a State of which it was sovereign; but, together with the Western Empire, it formed a system of relations that, although not always peaceful, assured it a spiritual independence that was never disavowed.
It was only in the full Renaissance, with the emergence of new ecclesiastical theories and finally with the denial of the concept of a visible Church militant on earth, precisely at the moment when the aspirations of the new nationalities were being affirmed, that the Protestant Churches were constituted, intimately bound to the authority of the State and lacking independent vitality. The Anglican Church, which wished still to preserve a hierarchy and the appearance of a Church, does not differ essentially in this respect from the other Protestant Churches, insofar as its existence and teachings are legally subject to the arbitrary will of political authority.
Cesarism in its specific form arose instead in the Catholic states of the West, although never in the radical form of Byzantine Caesarism, in the seventeenth century, with the chief purpose of limiting the authority of the Roman Pontiff within individual states and replacing it with sovereign authority, until the system reached its most acute form in Febronianism (v.) Josephinism (v.). It showed particular hostility to the doctrine of the indirect power of the Church in temporal matters; it sought to make relations between bishops and the Holy See as general and infrequent as possible, to limit the right of exemption of religious orders, to impose placet and exequatur upon ecclesiastical letters and measures, to subject to its own will the foundation and existence of religious institutes, the acquisition and alienation of their property, the acceptance of appeals tamquam ab abum from the judgments of the Pope and the bishops, and even to establish new boundaries for dioceses and parishes; it also claimed the right to legislate on matrimonial impediments.
The pretext for all this was the need to remedy the deficiencies of ecclesiastical authority, to safeguard sovereign dignity, and to protect itself against the excesses of the Church and against privileges considered harmful to the national good. Clearly, one cannot speak of Cesarism in states that recognize no legitimate spiritual authority: in them, religion is entirely at the disposal of politics, which uses it for its own advantage.