Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace

by Marsilius of Padua, Annabel Brett

Overview

In his The Defender of the Peace, Marsilius of Padua offers a detailed analysis and explanation of human political communities, before going on to attack what he sees as the obstacles to peaceful human coexistence - principally the contemporary papacy. Annabel Brett's authoritative rendition of the Defensor Pacis is the first new translation in English for fifty years. Aimed at the student reader encountering this classic of medieval thought for the first time, this new edition is a scholarly and a pedagogic event of great importance to historians, political theorists, theologians and philosophers at all levels from second-year undergraduate upwards.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521783323
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/24/2005
Series:	Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Pages:	638
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.57(d)

About the Author

The editor and translator Annabel Brett is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. Her previous publications include Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997).

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
0521783321 - Marsilius of Padua - The Defender of the Peace - by Annabel Brett
Excerpt

Discourse I

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1

On the general bearing of the matters to be discussed; the reason for that bearing; and the division of the book

Every realm must desire tranquillity, under which peoples prosper and the profit of the nations is safeguarded. For she is the seemly mother of good arts. She it is who, multiplying the human race in unending succession, extends its resources and refines its manners. And if a man is perceived not to have sought her, he is marked for ignorant of such great concerns.¹

In the first of his letters, in the passage just set down, Cassiodorus gave expression to the advantages and fruits of the tranquillity or peace of civil regimes, in order that he might - by using these, as the best fruits, to explain the greatest of all human goods, viz. the sufficiency of this life, which none can achieve without peace and tranquillity - inspire the wills of men to be at peace with each other, and hence tranquillity. His pronouncement was in harmony with the view of the blessed Job, when he said in chapter 22: 'be at peace: thereby the best fruits shall come unto thee.'² It was because of this that Christ, the son of God, decreed that peace should be the sign and messenger of his birth, when he willed that the heavenly host should sing in one and the same pronouncement: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.'³ And for the same reason over and over again he wished peace upon his disciples. So John: 'came Jesus and stood in the midst of the disciples, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.'⁴ Warning these same disciples to preserve peace between themselves, he said in Mark: 'have peace one with another.'⁵ And he did not merely teach them to have it among themselves, but to wish it upon others - hence Matthew: 'And when ye come into an house, salute it, saying: Peace unto this house.'⁶ This, again, was the inheritance which he left to his disciples by testament, when the time of his passion and death had come, when he said in John 14: 'Peace I leave you, my peace I give unto you.'⁷ Following his example the apostles, as his true heirs and imitators, wished peace upon those to whom, in their letters, they addressed evangelical lessons and advice; knowing that the fruits of peace are the best; as we took from Job and explained further through Cassiodorus.

2

Contraries of themselves produce contraries:⁸ therefore from discord, the opposite of tranquillity, the worst fruits and disadvantages come upon a civil regime or realm - as is plain to see, and evident to all, from the realm of Italy. For as long as its inhabitants lived together peaceably, they sweetly plucked the fruits previously enumerated; prospering from and in these to the extent that they subjected to themselves the entire habitable world. But when discord and strife arose among them, their realm was troubled with toils and disadvantages of every kind, and was subjected to the sway of hated foreign nations. And in the same way it has once more been torn apart on all sides because of strife, almost to pieces, so that an easy entry now lies open to anyone with the will and power to occupy it. Not that there is anything to wonder at in such an outcome, since as Sallust testifies in his account of Jugurtha, by concord small things increase, while by discord the greatest collapse.⁹ Led astray through discord down the byway of error, its natives are deprived of the sufficient life, unceasingly enduring grave troubles instead of the sought-for peace, the harsh yokes of tyrannies instead of liberty. So they have at the last been made more unhappy than all others who live a civil life, so that their ancestral name, once the guarantor of glory and of safety to those who called upon it, is now thrown in their faces by other nations, to their ignominy.

3

Into this darkness, then, have these wretched people been plunged as a result of this discord or strife among themselves. Like sickness in an animal, it can be diagnosed as the indisposition of a civil regime. And even if the basic causes of this illness are several (many of them mutually associated), and almost all of them described by the best of philosophers in his civil science,¹⁰ with the potential to occur in their usual ways; still there nevertheless exists, over and above these, one singular and well-hidden cause, under which the Roman empire has laboured for a long time and labours still. This cause is highly contagious, and equally liable to spread to all other civil orders¹¹ and realms and has already, in its rapacity, tried to invade most of them. Neither Aristotle nor any other philosopher of his time or earlier could have recognised the origin and species of this cause. For it is, and was, a certain perverted opinion, which we shall unfold¹² in what follows; assumed by way of occasion from a miraculous effect produced by the supreme cause long after the time of Aristotle, beyond the possibilities of inferior nature and the usual action of causes in things.¹³ This opinion, surely sophistic, wearing the mask of the honourable and the beneficial, is utterly inimical to the human race and will in the end, if it is not checked, bring unendurable harm to every civil order and country.

4

The fruits of peace and tranquillity, then, are the best, as we said, while those of its contrary, strife, are unendurable harm. For this reason we must desire peace, seek to acquire it when we do not have it, keep it once acquired, and fight off its opposite, strife, with every effort. Individuals who are brothers to each other, and all the more so collective bodies and communities, are moreover bound to help each other towards these goals, from feelings of heavenly charity as much as the bond or right of human society. This is Plato's advice, too, according to Cicero in the first book of On duties where he said: 'We are not born for ourselves alone: our country claims for itself one part of our birth, and our friends another.'¹⁴ To which Cicero aptly adds: 'Moreover, as the Stoics believe, while everything produced on earth is created for the use of mankind, men themselves are born for the sake of men. We ought in this to follow nature as our leader, to contribute to the common stock the things that benefit everyone in common.'¹⁵ And because it would be no small advantage, on the contrary a necessity, to unpick the sophism of the abovementioned singular cause of strife, which threatens no little harm to all communities, therefore anyone who has the will and the ability to perceive the common advantage is duty-bound to devote attentive care and painstaking labour to this end. For this much is plain, that there is no way this plague can be avoided, nor its baleful effect excised completely from realms or civil orders.

5

Neither should anyone neglect this charge through fear or apathy or in any other spirit of malice, II Timothy 1: 'For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love'¹⁶ - the power and love, I say, to make manifest the truth; hence the Apostle adds in the same place: 'Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord.'¹⁷ But this was the testimony of the truth, and it was to bear witness to this that Christ said he had come into the world, John 18: 'To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth,'¹⁸ sc. the truth that leads the human race to eternal salvation. After his example, therefore, any man whom the Giver of graces has more fully endowed with an understanding of these matters is to that extent more obliged to devote himself to the teaching of this truth, by which the abovementioned plague of civil regimes might be abolished from the human race and especially Christians: the truth, I say, which leads to the salvation of civil life and conduces not a little to eternal salvation as well. A man with this knowledge and ability sins gravely, as if by ingratitude, if he neglects this task; witness James in his Epistle General, chapter 4, where he said: 'To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.'¹⁹ For this common enemy of the human race will not be completely eradicated, nor the baleful fruits that it has so far produced wither, unless the evil of its cause or root is first exposed and convicted. Only by this route, and no other, can the coercive power of princes safely proceed finally to drive the dishonourable sponsors and obstinate defenders of this evil from the field.

6

And so, attentive and obedient to the advice of Christ, the saints and the philosophers given above, I, a son of Antenor,²⁰ acting from any understanding of these matters that may have been granted me by grace, and from a spirit too of confidence furnished me from above (as James attests in the first chapter of his Epistle General: 'Every good gift and every perfect gift, cometh down from above from the Father of lights');²¹ of reverence for the Giver, ardour to make known the truth, fervent love for brothers and country, pity and compassion for the oppressed; to recall the oppressors from the byway of error, and to spur on those who allow these things to happen when they should and can prevent them; and with an especial regard for you, most noble Ludwig,²² emperor of the Romans, as the minister of God²³ who will give this work the ending it hopes for from outside:²⁴ in whom as if by some special and ancient right of blood, and not less by your singularly heroic temperament and shining virtue, the desire to extirpate heresies, to support and safeguard the catholic truth and every other discipline of study, to excise vice and further the study of the virtues, to put an end to quarrels and to spread and nourish peace and tranquillity everywhere, is ingrained and confirmed; I have, after a period of painstaking and intense examination, committed to writing the sum of the thoughts that follow, judging that they may give some help to your watchful majesty in its care to provide against the said errors and other contingencies, and for every other public utility.

7

It is therefore my purpose, with the help of God, to expose only this singular cause of strife. For it would be superfluous to go over again the number and nature of those identified by Aristotle. But in respect of this one - which Aristotle could not perceive and neither has anyone else after him, who could have done, undertaken to define it - it is our will to lift the veil in such a way that it can hereafter be easily excluded from all realms and civil orders, and once excluded, virtuous princes and subjects can live in tranquillity more securely. And this was that object of desire put forward at the beginning of this work, necessary to all those who ought to enjoy civil felicity, which is it seems the best of all things that humans desire in this world and the final end of human acts.

8

I shall therefore divide my proposed undertaking into three discourses. In the first of these I shall demonstrate what I intend by sure methods discovered by human ingenuity, consisting of propositions that are self-evident to any mind not corrupted by nature, custom or perverse affection. In the second I shall corroborate what I shall take myself to have demonstrated with testimonies of the truth founded upon eternity, and also with authoritative passages of the saints, its interpreters, and other approved doctors of the Christian faith, so that this book should stand by itself, needing no extrinsic proof. On the same basis I shall attack the falsehoods opposed to my conclusions and uncover the sophisms of my adversaries, which stand in the way with their involutions. In the third discourse I shall draw a number of conclusions or lessons of the utmost utility, which all citizens - those in the position of prince as much as those who are subject - should heed, and which are evidently certain as a result of what has been previously determined. I shall divide each of these discourses into chapters, and each chapter again into sections, more or fewer according to the length of the chapter. The singular advantage of these divisions will be the ease of locating what readers need to find when they are referred from the later discourses and chapters to earlier ones. This will yield a second advantage, of making the volume shorter. For when it happens that in the later parts of the book we assume some truth (either for itself or for the sake of demonstrating something else) which has been adequately proved or established as certain in what has gone before, we shall, without further trifling with the proof, refer the reader back to the discourse, chapter and section where it was given, so that he²⁵ can easily find the certainty of what he is looking for.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Principal events in Marsilius's Life; Notes on the translation; Notes on references; Contents of The Defender of the Peace: Discourse I; Discourse II; Discourse III; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'The lucid an readable translation, along with the informative and often insightful annotations and a comprehensive bibliography, promises to produce a new generation of students who are fascinated by this remarkably idiosyncratic political text.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History

'Brett's version of the Defensor sufficiently improves on Gewirth's that it promises to become the standard English translation for the foreseeable future.' Political Studies Review

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