TYRANNY and TYRANNICIDE. – Tyrant (τύραννος) and tyranny are relative terms, the latter denoting a form of government and the former the person who establishes it or draws inspiration for his political action from II. Their meaning has not always been identical.
I. MEANING OF THE TERMS
Among the ancient Greeks, anyone who had usurped supreme power in the city against the will of the people was called a tyrant. The meaning of the term thus came predominantly to emphasize the illegitimate origin of power and the absence of any title of legality, regardless of the manner in which the usurper exercised political power. Even if he administered public affairs while seeking the welfare of the citizens, he always remained a tyrant. Thus, in Greek antiquity, there were tyrants who proved to be good despots, such as Pisistrato in Athens and Policrate in Samos, and others who left a sad reputation in history for their cruelty, such as Dionisio of Syracuse.Soon, however, without explicit reference to the legal or illegal origin of power, the term came to indicate the person who exercises it solely for his own personal advantage, according to the definition handed down by Aristotle (Eth. Nic., VIII, 10), and whose political action degenerates into despotism through the use of violence, means of oppression, and a system of privileges.
Platone (Rep., IX) describes the tyrant as a man full of himself, who becomes furious and incapable of love. Tyranny thus came conceptually to coincide with that form of regime in which the will of the sovereign—whether legitimate or illegitimate matters little—is the absolute law and criterion of government, that is, with despotism and autocracy. This conception, based on a moral evaluation of political action, remained unchanged in the following centuries. In the Middle Ages, the two aspects of tyranny noted above were expressed through the distinction between the tyrannus tituli or usurpationis, which partly reflects the original Greek meaning of the term, and the tyrannus regiminis, which refers to the second. The distinction is already clearly delineated in s. Tommaso (Sum. Theol., 1°-2°, q. 105, a. 1 ad 2) and thereafter governs the question of whether or not resistance to the tyrant is licit; this question receives a different solution according to the two concrete cases that it represents in theory. The presence of tyranny in fact posed, both for political science and for morality, a small group of problems that were not easy to resolve, among them the question of resistance to the despotism of the monarch and that of the killing of the tyrant, or tyrannicide. For the former V. RIVOLUZIONE.
II. JUDGMENT ON TYRANNICIDE
Opinions on tyrannicide have often been shaped by the political conditions of the time.1. In the Greco-Roman world
Among the Greeks, lovers of liberty and popular institutions, the killing of the tyrant was regarded as an undertaking worthy of the highest praise, and its perpetrator was raised to the firmament of heroes. Xenophon bears witness to this custom (Hieron., 4), and Plato (Rep., X) condemns tyranny in such vehement terms that his manner of expression can easily be taken to imply approval of tyrannicide. Aristotle is no less severe (Polit., IV, 1; VIII), although he does not expressly advocate its lawfulness. The same attitude is found among the Romans: Cicero (Ad. Att., XIV, 6; De officiis, III, 4) praises Brutus and Cassius for the killing of Caesar and glorifies them as heroes, while Quintilian sees in tyrannicide a demonstration of courage and religious devotion (De inst. orat., XII, §§ 1, 36).2. From the beginning of the Christian era to the Middle Ages
In the Christian teaching of the first centuries and among the Fathers, exhortations to obedience toward public authority prevailed; these were contained in germ in the Gospel (Mt. 20, 25; 22, 21) and expressed more explicitly by s. Paul (Rom., 1, 3, 2) and by s. Peter, who in his first letter (I Pt., 2, 13, 18) counsels submission even to wicked rulers, etiam discolis. The question of tyrannicide resurfaced in the twelfth century with John of Salisbury (Polycraticus, III, 15; PL. 199, 572), who seems to have been the first to raise it again, although not systematically, by maintaining the lawfulness of killing the tyrant even by private citizens, grounding it in the rights of the community and in its power to assert those rights against anyone who unjustly violates them. Between him and John the Little (cf. The condemned propositions, in Hefele-Leclercq, VII, p. 293, n. 3), who in the fifteenth century upheld the same thesis, stands s. Thomas, who had the merit of formulating the problem more precisely and proposing a more moderate solution, although he did not deal with it systematically (De regimine principum, I, 6; Sent., II, dist. XLIV, q. 2, a. 2).According to him, the tyrant by abuse of government (tyrannus regiminis) cannot be lawfully killed on private initiative; nevertheless, if there is no higher authority to which appeal may be made, the entire nation, represented by its best citizens, may rise up against him and decree the death penalty, if this is deemed necessary for the common good. In this case, according to the thought of s. Thomas, it seems that a private individual may receive the mandate to carry out the sentence. As regards the tyrant by usurpation (tyrannus usurpationis), he seems to admit the right to kill him, since he possesses no legitimate title to rule and may be regarded as an enemy of the people, by virtue of the principle that makes the use of force against force lawful, even to the point of causing the death of the unjust aggressor. In both cases the tyrant is an unjust aggressor against the community, against whom it may react in collective self-defence, as a society in itself; hence the exclusion of tyrannicide on private initiative.
John the Little departed from these general lines. After the assassination of Duke Louis d’Orléans (23 Nov. 1407), he defended the killing and upheld the thesis of John of Salisbury, which was condemned in general terms, without striking at its defender, by the Council of Constance in 1415 (Mansi, XXVII, 765).
3. Among the great masters of the sixteenth century. – Among the great masters of the sixteenth century—Bellarmino, Suárez, Molina, Lessio—the doctrine returned to the positions of s. Thomas, acquiring several new specifications. Its principal exponent was Suárez, who, while retaining the now-established distinction between the tyrant usurpationis and the tyrant regiminis, resolves the two cases differently, remaining along Thomistic lines. With regard to the former, appealing to the principle that active resistance against an unjust aggressor is lawful, he maintains that both the people and every private citizen have the right to kill him, since society exercises against him the right of legitimate self-defence, and in combating him violates no sovereign right. Such killing, however, may be resorted to only when the common good necessarily requires it and no other course exists. As regards tyrannicide for abuse of power, he makes two suppositions. If the tyrant attacks the life of a private citizen, he may be repelled by force, like any unjust private aggressor, and may even be killed, provided that moderation is always observed in the defence and excepting the case in which serious harm to the public good may be feared from his death. A private citizen may not, however, on his own initiative set himself up as the vindicator of society’s rights, bringing the abuse of power to an end by killing the tyrant, since he has no authority to judge the legitimate possessor of sovereign power. The State, however, may declare war against him, because in this case society is superior to the king, having conferred power upon him on the condition that he govern politically, not tyrannically. But action against a public person as such must be exercised by a public person, that is, by the collective body. He nevertheless mentions a supposition in which private action would seem lawful. This would occur when the king became an actual aggressor against the community, working toward its ruin and killing a multitude of citizens. This is certainly an extreme case, yet not entirely hypothetical, in which every citizen threatened by the despot’s caprice might provide for his own safety (De virtutibus, disp. XIII, sect. VIII, concl. 4; Defensio fidei, VI, 7; in Opera omnia, ed. Vivès, De Virtutibus, XII, p. 759; XXIV, pp. 677-78).
MARIANO, (v.), who passed into history as the precursor of regicide, does not depart greatly from the theoretical lines described above. Apart from certain rather daring expressions and the authority granted to the private individual to interpret public opinion by taking the initiative in killing the tyrant, he moves along the current of the tradition that goes back to s. Thomas. Only particular historical circumstances conferred upon him a fame that exceeds the merit of his work, which was more literary than scientific. The Protestants Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin, on the other hand, were much more uncompromising in maintaining the lawfulness of tyrannicide.
4. From the seventeenth century to the present day. – Subsequent Catholic speculation, particularly under the influence of the new revolutionary theories, of which an echo is found in the...
in proposition 63 condemned by the Syllabus: “It is licit to deny obedience to legitimate monarchs and to rise up against them” (Denz-U, 1763), it has proved somewhat more rigid. St. Alfonso Maria dei Liguori (Homo apostolicus, VIII, II, 13) did not hesitate to define the opinion of Suárez and of the moralists and theologians of the sixteenth century as false and pernicious, refuting the democratic principle on which they had relied. Taparelli was likewise opposed (Saggio teoretico di diritto nat., II, Rome 1928, pp. 16 ff.), whereas other moralists, even if not royalists like Bossuet (Politique, VI, a. 2, prop. 6), displayed a certain ambiguity in their attitude. It may nevertheless be affirmed that the more recent writers, more sensitive to the voices of their time and in agreement in emphasizing the human person and his rights, have increasingly drawn closer to the opinion already expressed by the ancients. With regard to the present, two points may be regarded as established: 1) a private individual has no right to raise a murderous hand against the legitimate sovereign who has turned tyrant; 2) the people, understood as a political body in its unity, have the right to defend themselves against a despotic government and, in extreme cases, when oppression has reached a particular degree of intensity and individual rights and personal security are at stake, have the faculty of actively resisting, if no other means of shaking off the yoke of tyranny presents itself. Pius XI recognized the positive value of this principle on the occasion of the oppressive regime established in Mexico against Catholics.