The Pastoral Power of the Christian Prince in Pedro de Ribadeneyra's Tratado de la Religión

This study examines Pedro de Ribadeneyra's (1526–1611) conception of state‐building as articulated in his Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el Príncipe Cristiano (1595). Written as a direct response to both Niccolò Machiavelli and Cornelius Tacitus – two authors Ribadeneyra explicitly condemned – the treatise rejects Machiavelli's advice to princes and criticizes Tacitus's portrait of Emperor Tiberius. Employing casuistry, Ribadeneyra moralized the political debate by drawing a sharp distinction between a religiously inspired reason of state and one less influenced by religious concerns. In his framework, the former characterizes the government of a Christian prince, while the latter defines the Machiavellian ruler whom Ribadeneyra identified in Tacitus's Tiberius. For Ribadeneyra, the most effective representation of the Christian prince is that of the good shepherd – a model that anticipates what Foucault would later call ‘pastoral power’ and that Ribadeneyra presents as the sole legitimate form of governance. The article ultimately argues that Ribadeneyra's pastoral model redefines reason of state as a spiritual duty of care, placing his work within a broader Catholic tradition of ‘reason of church’ that resisted the early modern separation of religion and politics. By tracing this pastoral model from its early modern uses, the article provides a framework for future studies of pastoral rule in political thought.