Resistencia al Poder: Zeferino González on Aquinas’s View on Insurgence

This paper discusses Zeferino González’s commentary on whether Thomistic teachings support insurgence. In particular, the study revisits one chapter of the Estudios sobre la filosofía de Santo Tomás (1864). Here, González critiques a court official of Castille, Francisco Gutiérrez de la Huerta, who, in his Dictamen del Fiscal (1845), attributes the doctrine of regicide and tyrannicide to St. Thomas Aquinas. Suspecting this ascription to Aquinas and the Dominicans as “bad faith,” González goes back to Huerta’s cited passages from Aquinas’s “De regno” in the work De Regimine Principum, the Summa Theologiae, and the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Furthermore, the discussion is given context by citing relevant discourses in the University of Santo Tomas and the Philippines during the time the Estudios was published, such as the discussion in the 1864 article “A la Nacion,” which has since been attributed to González’s student, Fr. Jose Burgos.