TYRANNY AND TYRANNICIDE. - Tyrant (τύραννος) and tyranny are relative terms, of which the second indicates a form of regime and the first the person who establishes it or draws his political action from it. Their meaning has not always been identical.
I. MEANING OF THE TERMS
Among the earliest 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 was therefore restricted, in a prevailing way, to highlighting the illegitimate origin of the power and the lack of any title of legality, disregarding the manner in which the usurper exercised political power. Even though he administered public affairs, attending to the well-being of the citizens, he always remained a tyrant. Thus in Greek antiquity there were tyrants who showed themselves to be good despots, such as Pisistratus at Athens and Polycrates at Samos, and others who have left in history a sad reputation for their cruelty, such as Dionysius of Syracuse.
Soon, however, the term was extended, without express reference to the legal or non-legal origin of the power, to indicate the person who exercises it solely with a view to his own personal advantage, according to the definition left by Aristotle (Eth. Nic., VIII, 10), and whose political action degenerates into despotism through the use of violence, the means of oppression and the system of privileges.
Plato (Rep., IX) describes the tyrant as a man full of himself, who becomes furious and incapable of love. Tyranny thus comes conceptually to coincide with that form of regime in which the will of the sovereign, legitimate or illegitimate it matters little, is the law and the absolute criterion of government, that is, with despotism and autocracy. This conception, resting upon a moral evaluation of political action, remains unchanged in the following centuries. In the Middle Ages the two aspects of tyranny noted above are expressed by the distinction between the tyrannus tituli or usurpationis, which partly reflects the primitive Greek sense of the term, and the tyrannus regiminis, which refers to the second. The distinction already appears clearly outlined in St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 105, a. 1 ad 2) and after him dominates the question of the lawfulness or otherwise of resistance to the tyrant, to which a different solution is given according to the two concrete cases that it theoretically represents. The presence of tyranny in fact posed, for political science as well as for morals, a small nucleus of problems not easy to resolve, among which are that of resistance to the despotism of the monarch and that of the killing of the tyrant, or tyrannicide. For the first, 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 of popular institutions, the killing of the tyrant was held to be an enterprise worthy of high praise and its executor raised to the heaven of heroes. Xenophon is a witness to this custom (Hieron., 4) and Plato (Rep., X) condemns tyranny in such burning words that one can easily deduce from his manner of expression an approval of tyrannicide. Aristotle (Polit., IV, 1; VIII) proves no less harsh, although he does not expressly declare himself an advocate of its lawfulness. The same attitude prevailed 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, and Quintilian sees in tyrannicide a demonstration of courage and of religion (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, there prevailed the exhortations to obedience toward public authority, contained in germ in the Gospel (Mt. 20, 25; 22, 21) and more explicitly expressed by St. Paul (Rom., 1, 3, 2) and by St. Peter, who in his first letter (I Pt., 2, 13, 18) counsels submission even toward wicked princes, etiam discolis. The question of tyrannicide resurfaces in the 12th century with John of Salisbury (Polycraticus, III, 15; PL. 199, 572), who seems to have been the first to raise it again, though not systematically, by maintaining the lawfulness of killing the tyrant even on the part of private citizens, basing this on the rights of the community and on its power to enforce them against whoever unjustly violates them. Between him and John the Little (cf. the condemned propositions, in Hefele-Leclercq, VII, p. 293, n. 3), who in the 15th century maintains the same thesis, stands St. Thomas, who had the merit of formulating the problem more exactly and of proposing a more moderate solution, although he did not deal with it in a systematic way (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 lawfully be killed on private initiative; nevertheless, if there exists no higher authority to which to appeal, 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 St. Thomas, it seems that a private individual may receive the mandate to carry out the sentence. Regarding the tyrant by usurpation (tyrannus usurpationis), he seems to admit the faculty of killing him, since he possesses no legitimate title to government and can be considered an enemy of the people, thanks to the principle that makes lawful the use of force against force, to the point of causing the death of the unjust aggressor. In either case the tyrant is an unjust aggressor against the community, against whom the latter may react for its own defense in a collective manner, as a society as such, whence the exclusion of tyrannicide on private initiative.
From these general lines John the Little departed, who after the assassination of Duke Louis of Orléans (23 Nov. 1407) defended the killing and upheld the thesis of John of Salisbury, 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 16th century
Among the great masters of the 16th century, Bellarmine, Suárez, Molina, Lessius, the doctrine returns to the positions of St. Thomas, enriching itself with some new determination. Its principal exponent is Suárez, who, maintaining the now established distinction between the tyrant usurpationis and the tyrant regiminis, resolves the twofold case in different ways, keeping to the Thomistic line. Regarding the first, availing himself of the principle of the lawfulness of active resistance against an unjust aggressor, he maintains that both the people and every private citizen has the faculty of killing him, since society exercises against him the right of legitimate defense, nor in fighting him does it violate any sovereign right. However, recourse to such a killing is lawful only when the common good necessarily requires it, nor does any other way exist. Regarding tyrannicide for abuse of power he makes two suppositions. If the tyrant threatens the life of a private citizen, he may be repelled by force, like any unjust private aggressor, and may even be killed, always preserving moderation in defense and excepting the case in which grave evils for the public good may be feared from his death. The private citizen cannot, however, set himself up on his own initiative as avenger of the rights of society, cutting short the abuse of power by killing the tyrant, since he has no faculty whatsoever to judge the legitimate possessor of sovereign power. The State, however, can declare war on him, because in this case society is superior to the king, having conferred power on him on 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 collectivity. He nevertheless hints at a supposition in which private action would seem lawful. This would occur when the king became an actual aggressor against the community, working for its ruin and killing a multitude of citizens. A limit case certainly, and yet not entirely hypothetical, in which every citizen threatened by the despot's caprice could 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).
The thought of Mariana (v.), which has passed into history as that of the forerunner of regicide, does not depart greatly from the theoretical lines described above. Excepting certain rather bold expressions and the faculty recognized in the private individual to make himself the interpreter of public opinion, by taking the initiative in killing the tyrant, he moves along the current of tradition, which goes back to St. Thomas. Only particular historical contingencies have conferred on him a celebrity that goes beyond the merit of his work, which is more literary than scientific. More harsh, on the other hand, in maintaining the lawfulness of tyrannicide were the Protestants Melanchthon, Zwingli and Calvin.
4. From the 17th century to our own days
The subsequent Catholic speculation, particularly under the impression of the new revolutionary theories, of which an echo is had in proposition 63 condemned by the Syllabus: "It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate monarchs, and to rebel against them" (Denz-U, 1763), it has shown itself to be somewhat more rigid. St. Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori (Homo apostolicus, VIII, II, 13) did not hesitate to define as false and pernicious the opinion of Suárez and of the moralists and theologians of the 16th century, refuting the democratic principle on which they had relied. Equally contrary was Taparelli (Saggio teoretico di diritto nat., II, Rome 1928, p. 16 ff.), while other moralists, even if not royalists like Bossuet (Politique, VI, a. 2, prop. 6), have manifested a certain ambiguity of attitude. It can nevertheless be affirmed that the more modern ones, more sensitive to the voices of the times, agreeing in the emphasis given to the human person and to his rights, have increasingly approached the opinion already expressed by the ancients. As for the present, two points can be regarded as settled: 1) the private individual has no faculty whatsoever to raise a murderous hand against the legitimate sovereign who has transformed himself into a tyrant; 2) the people, understood as a single political body, has the right to defend itself 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, has the faculty to resist actively, if no other way presents itself to shake off the yoke of tyranny. Of this principle Pius XI recognized the positive value on the occasion of the oppressive regime established in Mexico against Catholics.
Bibliography12 works
Antonio Messineo