Annotatio CLXXVI
”To thee only have I sinned.” — Psalm 50:6
Cassiodorus, in the commentaries on the Psalms, upon this verse has these things:1 “If anyone of the people has erred, he sins both against God and against the king; but when the king offends, he is guilty to God alone, because he has no man who may judge his deeds. Rightly, therefore, does the king say that he has sinned to God only: because [God] was the only one who could sift what [the king] had committed.” John of Torquemada, cardinal-presbyter, in book 1 On Ecclesiastical Power, chapter 91, places this passage among the arguments of those who prefer the Caesarean power to the Pontifical. The heretics of our times — who strive to vindicate the first grade of ecclesiastical dignity to the secular magistrate — cite this very passage, and annex to it another sentence out of the third commentary of Jerome on Jeremiah, where, in the explanation of chapter 13, it is thus read: “Not only the ignoble common crowd and the vile populace, but [also] the Kings of the Churches, who sit upon the throne — the priests themselves too, the second grade in ecclesiastical honor — are filled up with the variety of sins.”
The words of these authors must be referred to the kingdom and the priesthood of the Jews and of the Gentiles: among whom, since all the sacerdotal worship was instituted for the obtaining of the earthly and temporal goods of the present life — the care of which looks to the king — justly were the priests and pontiffs both of the Jews and of the Gentiles made subject to Kings and Emperors. But in the Evangelical law — in which Christ, the assisting Pontiff of the good things to come, instituted a priesthood far more excellent, in that it confers on us spiritual and heavenly goods, over which the royal power has no right2 — it is fair that kings be made subject to the rule of the pontiffs, and obey the word of the priests. Yet it is to be observed here that Philo the Jew, in the book On Fugitives [De profugis], and in the third book On the Life of Moses, admonishes that, although the high priest of the Jews was inferior to the king, nevertheless, for so long as he was discharging his ministry — entering the temple, clothed with the sacerdotal vestment, bearing on his head the tiara [cidaris] in place of the royal diadem, and the golden plate marked with the name of God — he was superior to the king himself. Nay more, in the book On the Legation to Gaius [Caligula] he testifies that the Maccabean princes, his own ancestors, by the best right preferred the Priesthood in every respect to the kingdom, saying thus: “I, who had both ancestors [that were] kings, and, of these, several who were also high Pontiffs — they valued that [priestly] dignity more than the royal: judging that, by how much God stands before man, by so much the pontificate is more excellent than the kingdom; for to the care of the one [the priesthood] pertain divine things, to that of the other [the kingship], human.” You have [something] on this matter in St. Thomas, book 1 On the Governance of Princes [De regimine principum], chapter 14; likewise you shall read more of these things below, in the book which next follows this [one], in the seventy-second Annotation.