Over the last three decades, Marsilius of Padua has generated more scholarly interest than any other medieval political thinker. There have been a profusion of monographs in Italian, German, and English; Annabel Brett’s exemplary annotated English translation of Defensor pacis; and now this third substantial collection of papers.
That interest is unusual in uniting North American and European scholars. There is, however, no consensus, other than on Marsilius’s enduring importance. The cover illustration for this collection, a copy of the 1522 Basel edition of Defensor pacis now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, together with chunks of the cannon ball which damaged it during the British bombardment of the city in 1807, symbolises the book’s contentious career. Indeed, it might be suggested that the book is more akin to the cannon ball than to the battered copy. This remarkable afterlife is the third of the three themes to which a section is devoted in the collection. The other two are concerned, respectively, with Marsilius’s sources and with exploring his connections with his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Altogether there are fifteen papers and a substantial introductory survey (by the author of a paper on collective prudence). It will be impossible to do justice to all these contributions in a brief review, so I shall pick out some which appear particularly striking.
To take the final theme first, the most arresting paper in this section, by Frank Godthardt, is concerned with the responses of German intellectuals during the Third Reich. A great deal has been written in Germany about the enthusiastic attempts by some medieval historians in the 1930s and 40s to draw conclusions from their research congenial to the regime. Marsilius turns out to be a rich, hitherto neglected, example. Godthardt has previously investigated with more thoroughness than anyone else Marsilius’s own life. He shows himself to be similarly sensitive to shifting context here.
He begins by pointing out that “possibly most” scholars now agree that Marsilius “is a proponent or forerunner of republicanism, popular sovereignty, or even democracy,” but that in Germany during the Third Reich he tended to be interpreted very differently (385). Godthardt concentrates on three historians, the most enduring of whom has been Richard Scholz, the editor of Defensor pacis (1933), who published several pieces on the subject in the late 30s and early 40s (he died in 1946). Scholz is shown to argue that the Holy Roman Empire was not “the ideal nor even the main subject” of Defensor pacis; rather it presented “possibly the earliest account of the generic nature of Marsilius’s theory” (393). He eventually came to depict theFührer as pars principans, the autocratic embodiment of the legislator which is the universitas civium. Marsilius’s vagueness about precisely how the fidelis legislator humanus delegates power renders his analysis potentially very adaptable, in all sorts of ways.
It is Godthardt himself who draws attention to the curious presentist parallels with another interpretation based on a generic reading of Marsilius, the one he suggests is adopted by “possibly most” contemporary scholars. Cary J. Nederman has been in the vanguard. His paper in this same section pushes that interpretation further than ever: he argues that Marsilius “subscribed to the intellectual foundation” on which modern rational choice theory is reportedly built, namely 1) “rational choice,” 2) “the free-rider problem,” and 3) “rent-seeking” (363-8). Nederman concedes that “of course” Marsilius does not name these modern social scientific concepts. Nevertheless, he contends, “the conception of personal advantage” intrinsic to them is also intrinsic to Marsilius’s “central preoccupation in the Defensor pacis,” namely peace, which Marsilius allegedly identified “with advantage in an individual and collective sense.” It will be for readers of Defensor pacis to judge what all this might have to do with the text. Nederman makes an emphatic but unexplained point of using the American political philosopher Alan Gewirth’s 1951 translation “in preference to that of Annabel Brett,” which is a far more accurate rendering of the Latin (363, n.13).
A paper by Gregorio Piaia, a distinguished Marsilian scholar, rounds off this section. It is concerned with the use made of Marsilius by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. Piaia argues that Eco’s move to writing fiction, in which an unambiguously progressive Marsilius is given an important role, is a response to developments in Italian politics in the 1970s and 80s.
Returning to the first theme to be addressed in the collection, Marsilius’s sources, Roberto Lambertini offers a careful consideration of Marsilius’s use of Aristotle’s Politics, which reveals him to have an exceptionally detailed knowledge of the work and identifies the particular version of the Latin translation he was probably using. Marco Toste delves deeper into this issue. He attempts to show which contemporary commentaries Marsilius drew on in Dictio I. Indeed, he suggests that in some passages of Defensor pacis, Peter of Auvergne’s commentary on the Politics may be more important than the Politics itself. In other places Marsilius is shown to be in debate with Peter and other thirteenth-century commentators. In doing so, Toste draws on works which exist only in manuscript. References to modern editions of Aristotle will no longer suffice. Alessandro Mulieri tackles the hitherto neglected topic of collective prudence, central to the notion of the fidelis legislator humanus. It is a concept for which Marsilius is indebted to another commentator, Peter of Albano, more than to Aristotle. Mulieri’s suggestion that it is “trans-generational” or “trans-historical” is repeatedly asserted; but how Marsilius might have conceived of this working is explored only by analogy with the accumulation of knowledge in astronomy, the arts, and music. He fails to pay attention to Marsilius’s analysis of historical change.
Most of the section on sources is therefore largely concerned with Aristotle, specifically thePolitics and recent commentators on it, though Gert-Jan van de Voorde makes some interesting observations on Augustine. But there are, of course, many other sources, as initially catalogued by C. W. Previté-Orton as long ago as 1927.
The third category of papers (the second theme focused on within this collection) is concerned with comparing and contrasting Marsilius with his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Ferdinand Deanini elaborates a striking parallel between civic excellence and apostolic poverty: the austerity of the perfecti reminds citizens that civic duty requires the sacrifice of individual good for that of the city (a point which could not easily be reconciled with Nederman’s about rational choice theory). Charles Briggs, drawing on a number of works which have never been printed, compares Marsilius with an impressive array of Dominican theorists (in most detail Guido Vernani da Rimini and Luca Mannelli) providing an unprecedentedly rich, specifically North Italian context. Jacob Langeloh addresses Marsilius’s understanding of history, setting it in an early fourteenth-century context by comparison with John of Paris and Dante. History was a subject of fundamental importance to all three thinkers. In particular, Langeloh is concerned with the extent to which Marsilius considers history a contingent process—defined by him “as the possibility for things to go this way or that” (254)—and to what extent a providentially ordained one, directed towards a determined end (“finality”). As far as he is concerned, it seems that these are alternatives: what is contingent is by definition not providentially ordained. In my view, such a position misunderstands the conventional Augustinian acceptance that the exercise of free will is the normal channel for the operation of providence.
The most substantial part of this paper is a sometimes flattering attack on a recent monograph on the subject of Marsilius’s conception of history. That monograph was written by the current reviewer. This review is not an appropriate place to respond in detail to Langeloh’s criticisms. But given the centrality of Langeloh’s refutation of my case to his, it is impossible to consider his interesting paper without saying something.
I did indeed, as he states, argue that Marsilius considered that the current conflict between John XXII and Louis of Bavaria appeared to presage the imminent apocalyptic consummation of human history. Such a view would hardly be surprising in a thinker so deeply influenced by the Spiritual Franciscans (an aspect of Marsilius’s thought which might have received more attention from Langeloh and other contributors to this collection). But I did not suggest that he predicted the precise timing or actual circumstances in which the apotheosis of human history would come to pass, and I emphasised that this important point in his thinking remained implicit. The fundamental often is. Marsilius never comes out and prophesies the Apocalypse. I did not say that “Louis inherits the duty to initiate the apocalypse.” I did not argue that Marsilius linked “the development of the secular state to salvation history.” Indeed, in my opinion, one of Marsilius’s fundamental point is that from the conversion of Constantine, embodied in his catastrophic Donation, the manner in which the Roman state and the church were progressively elided was compromised from the very start. It is the way in which the Roman state ceased to be secular which creates the destructive conflict ripping Christendom apart in Marsilius’s day. Langeloh claims that what Marsilius says about Christ’s redemptive role “is merely an explanatory piece of information.” I think Marsilius sees it as central to the providentially ordained historical process which began with the Fall and will end with the Last Judgment. It was highly unusual, because it involves direct divine intervention, rather than providence working through human exercise of free will, which is the way in which providence normally operates. For a medieval Christian, everything is providentially ordained. Nothing can be “unintended” (Langeloh’s word, summarising his view of much of what happens in “contingent” history). That must include John XXII’s consummation of a millennium of papal history with his attempted long-term usurpation of the role of Roman emperor. Readers can make up their own minds whose view is the more plausible. I am grateful to Langeloh for his courtesy, and for the seriousness with which he has considered my book.
This particular disagreement reveals the intellectual passion which Marsilius continues to rouse. The same is true of this collection as a whole. By leaving obvious gaps, it encourages us to go on address them. I have already mentioned Spiritual Franciscans. In terms of the Defensor pacis’s afterlife, its role in the Reformation also cries out for detailed treatment.