Political Theory

Marsilius of Padua, and others

His great achievement was to lay out a coherent basis for the secular state. While Marsilio can in no sense be called un-Christian, the State for him needs no pope and no church in order to exist. As you might expect, he drew on Aristotle for this argument.

The State, the civitas, is a community that aims at a common life. It is therefore the community itself that lays down the rules by which it is governed; only the people can legislate. The prince derives his power to rule directly from the people, and the prince is both the executor and the servant of the Law. Marsilius is no democrat here. The State is to be ruled by a hereditary prince and the laws are made not by the whole people but by the better class, whose natural role is to legislate. But Marsilius is careful to insist that ultimate power belongs to the entire citizenry, for it is this that justifies rebellion when the State is ruled by an evil prince.

Notice there is no special role in all this for the priests. They are indeed merely citizens, like all other citizens. Marsilius in fact went even further. Just as the State is the whole body of the people, so the Church is the whole body of the faithful. This leads him to conclude, for example, that a priest cannot excommunicate -- only the congretation itself can do that. Priests only have spiritual powers and can employ them only through spiritual means. As soon as they enter into temporal affairs, they are merely citizens. This applies as much to the pope as to a rural vicar.

Marsilius went even further in regard to papal power. He argued that Peter had no special authority over the other apostles, that he was never Bishop of Rome, and that there is no evidence that the popes have inherited any sort of primacy. What governs the Church is not the Pope but the Church itself, as manifested in a general council. And even this body can be called only by civil authority.

These theories were dynamite. They were roundly condemned by the Church, but the numerous references to Defensor Pacis show that it had a continuing influence.

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