The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c15.10

c15.10

But it is necessary to remember at the outset that in the whole range of Hindu political thought there is to be found no trace of theocracy,² as embodied in the social philosophy of Augustine's *De Civitate Dei* (The City of God) or of Aquinas' *De Regimine Principum* (Government of a Prince). For no period could the political ideas of the Hindus be treated as a branch of ecclesiastical history as Figgis considers it right in regard to European political speculation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.³ No *śâstra*-writer ever preached that some “high priest” or even the king is God’s viceroy on earth, or that the religious association, e. g., a *samgha* or temple-government, is a “self-sufficient” *svarâj*, independent of or coordinate with, nay, superior to, the secular organization of the *râṣṭra*. There is no touch of the conflicts between canon law and civil law¹ in the treatises on *nîti* and *dharma* or *smriti*, and the doctrine of *saptâmga* is absolutely undisturbed by the rivalry of the Byzantine conception (Justinian's) of the church as subservient to the state with the antithetic Gregorian doctrine of the supremacy of *sacerdotum* over *imperium*. But all the same, for purposes of historical perspective, it will be advisable in the present discussion to have an adequate orientation to the subject matter of Poole's *Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval thought* and Littlejohn's *Political Theory of the Schoolmen and Grotius*.