Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, "Celestial Hierarchy"

The democratic Christian is often willing to accept that monarchy would be preferable if a just man were king, but he hesitates because he fears that a kingdom would be in danger of becoming a tyranny if the monarch stopped being a just man. What he fails to see is that "monarchy" simply so called is a term whose meaning is almost equivocal; the similarity between a kingdom and a tyranny is almost superficial. What greated distance could there be between justice and the greatest depth of detesable injustice? Plato's insight bears repeating: it is democracies, not kingdoms, that become tyrannies. The reason is clear: it is not formal political structures and offices but the constitutions of men that make the city. If you give an oligarchic society a democratic constitution it will still be an oligarchy (and is that not what we've seen so much in our modern world?); the offices and branches of government will bend to the kimd of men that are in them. The state least likely to become a tyranny, then, is that farthest which is farthest from tyranny and injustice not so much in the number and structure of political offices but farthest in the moral constitution of the spirits of its citizens: a kingdom properly so-called, one ruled by philosophy and wisdom and virtue because its statesmen have these qualities. A tyrant is a man who is addicted to his lawless appetites, who is darkened in mind; he chases phenomena and not realities; there is neither wisdom or love in his heart. Such a man is the very opposite of a true king, as far from him as a man is from a monster; he is, however, close to the democratic man: whether we mean by that the democracy of the Greeks, the rule of the lawless mass, or the democracy of today, a liberal-capitalistic organization far more akin to what the ancients would have called oligarchy, what remains is that the ultimate love of these societies is bodily good and nothing better The oligarchial man is not different, though there is a certain pseudo-temperance to his character, because he seeks not wasteful bodily pleasure but bodily comfort and security - today he might call it say peace abroad and domestic security, low unemployment and inflation; it almost sounds temperate, but his sin is not desiring these things but in desiring nothing more than them - the sin of the rich man in Christ's parable, who put his trust in a full silo. The liberal-capitalist state is not distressed at a lack of virtue, as long as it has bread and peace. The oligarchial and the democratic man, then, share thus common sin with the tyrannical man; their primary sin, to care for the gains of the body first and forget the soul. There is little distance between them in this; all of them seek corporeal goods as their end, in varying degrees if lawlessness. They are all alike in this, and near each other and thus far away from the royal man, who sets his mind on the things that are above, and even the timocratic man, who delights in honor and acts of heroism. The distance between lawlessness and virtue, between darkness and philosophy - that is the distance betweeb the king and the tyrant. The democrat is far nearer the tyrant; no surprise, then, that we see democracies turn easily into tyrannies. And how foolish then is the thought that we should avoid monarchy and choose democracy to prevent tyranny!

Canticum Canticorum

St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, “Crisis of Liberalism”