RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Caperolani
Capital Punishment
brated him as savior of Europe. He died soon after, exhausted by hardships. Although revered in his lifetime as a saint, he was not canonized until 1690. Prominent contemporaries, among them the subsequent pope Pius II., expressed some doubts as to his miracles and had no favorable opinion of him because of his bragging self-glorification ond choleric irritability. E. Lempp.
Bibliography: The early Vitas and some of John's letters are in ASB, Oct., x. 269-552, with which cf. L. Wadding, Annates Minorum, vols, iv.-vi., Leyden, 1648, orix.-xiii., Rome, 1734 (an excellent source). The most comprehensive biography is by A. Hermann, Capistranus triumphans, Cologne, 1700; the first scientific lif 3 is by G. Voigt, in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, x. (1863) 19-96; cf. idem, Enea Silvio di' Piccolomini, vol. ii., Berlin, 1860; the latest life is by E. Jacob, Johannes von Capistrano, Breslau, 1903. A considerable list of literature is given in Potthast, Wegweiser, pp. 1396-97.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.
I. The Historical Development of Capital Punishment. In Primitive Society (§ 1). In Roman Law (§ 2). Attitude of the Church (§3). II. Place of Religious Ideas in the Question. III. Capital Punishment in Modern Times.
I. The Historical Development of Capital Punishment: It must be borne in mind that the killing of a person guilty of grievous crime does not, in primitive society, belong to the class of deliberate ordinances enacted by the commui. In nity. It is rather a form of the im-
Primitive pulse of revenge, which the primitive Society, institutions of all the older civilized nations first tolerate, and then regulate and uphold or limit (see Blood-Revenge). In primitive conditions revenge has a twofold operation. It is directed in some cases against offenses which affect the individual or the family (such as theft, adultery, and the murder of a freeman); in these cases the injured family proceeds against the offender or his family, and the community takes part only in the interests of public peace, by establishing a penalty on payment of which the offender is to be safe from revenge. Quite a different form of procedure is that against crimes which offend the consciousness of the whole community (sacrilege, unnatural vices, treason in war, etc.). Here the vengeance of the community is provoked, and it acts first by formal delivery of the offender to the will of the members or outlawry, then later by actual execution, in connection with which sacred ceremonies analogous to those of sacrifice are often found. As organized government grows stronger, it takes an official interest in crimes which were originally in the private sphere, withdraws them from individual vengeance, and subjects them to capital punishment. Religion has its influence here; the interference of government in such cases is usually brought about by the conception that the crime, apart from the injury to the immediate victims, defiles the community and must be punished in order to retain peace with the deity. This can be clearly shown in the Greek law of the post- Homeric age, less clearly but still probably in ancient Roman law; and the same course was followed in Hebrew history. In the primitive law (cf. Ex. *xi. 12 sqq.) the murderer is exposed to the pursuit of the avenger of blood, and the elders of the com-
munity cooperate only to the extent of driving the fugitive from an asylum and delivering him to the avenger. In the case of the other crimes mentioned in Ex. xxi. the punishment of death is either private vengeance, or at most a sort of tribal vengeance or lynch law. As late as the period of Deut. xix. the blood-vengeance is mentioned; but by the side of it appears the idea that the whole community is affected with blood-guiltiness by a deliberate murder, and must be purified by the death of the offender. The same law began, when priestly influence increasingly dominated all departments of life, to be applied to other offenders (blasphemers, traitors, adulterers, etc.). The formal abandonment to the avenger was replaced by stoning, in which all the men of the community took part.
In so far as the religious influence remained a permanent factor in the penal code, the Jewish State stands alone among the Mediterranean communities. In the others, especially 2. In the Greek and Roman, punishment Roman became exclusively a matter of secu- Law. lar enactment. In the Roman the principle is continuously applied from the fifth century that the death penalty (whether by decapitation, burning, or throwing down a precipice) is due to all grave crimes (including murder, arson, perjury, treason, etc.); but in practise this was mitigated by the frequent substitution of the " interdiction of fire and water," i.e., banishment from the community, especially after the introduction of the provocatio ad populum, an appeal to the whole body of the people against the decision of consuls and other magistrates empowered to> pronounce sentence of outlawry. In the last two* centuries of the republic capital punishment was seldom applied, to members of the upper classes at least. But it was never abolished, and when the reorganization of the Roman system took place under imperial legislation it was again more frequently employed, even against Roman citizens. Thus at the beginning of the Christian era it was an accepted institution throughout the Roman Empire, though with variations in usage due to local law.
The teaching of Christ made no substantial alteration in these conditions. Of his own recorded sayings, the only one directly bearing on the subject is Matt. xxvi. 52, which (like Gen. ix. 5) refers rather to the eternal working out of the divine justice in the abstract. But Paul speaks expressly in Rom. xiii. 1 sqq. of the legal death-penalty — although here it is merely designated as reconcilable with the divine law, not required or imposed as a duty upon the State. Accordingly Christian teaching made no change in the Roman law, and, when the Christians became dominant, after having been for two centuries frequent victims to its provisions, they still allowed it to take free course. In fact, it was applied with increasing frequency even to Roman citizens of the higher classes, and from the time of Constantine to a large number of minor offenses.
Although the Church was more firmly and fully organized when it came into contact with the institutions of the new Germanic kingdoms, and assumed the right of extensive interference with their penal
Capital Punishment Capito