The idea that an Italian (or German) pope might have authority to dictate United States policy stabs terror into the heart of any modern American—Protestant or Catholic. The Church’s authority is limited in extent to eternal matters; our political business is our own. To confuse the two realms would summon up the collective bad memories of the Inquisition, Jesuitical oppression, papal tyranny, and a host of other medieval nightmares out of which our Protestant forefathers had awakened us. In the American imagination, freedom is a newly-acquired modern privilege which “the people” must never cede back to the oppressive Church authorities.

The struggle to escape from Church authority has had many champions over the course of two millennia. However, the one medieval who often gets credit for breaching the gates of wanton Church tyranny is Marsilius of Padua, a 14th century doctor-turned-political philosopher. It was during Marsilius’ time that Christendom began to find its foundations cracking. Thanks in large part to Marsilius’ own work, the political hierarchy of Christendom, which had sustained medievalism for a millennium, was decried as oppressive to a newly-defined class of power-brokers, nebulously called “the people.” The shattering of the medieval hierarchy would have a dramatic effect on the proponents of the Reformation two centuries later.

The World To Which Marsilius Was Born

The common conception about medieval politics (before Marsilius) is that a Platonic hierarchy dominated Europe. The narrative told by such medieval political scholars as Ephraim Emerton and Walter Ullmann is that the thousand year reign of Christendom imposed a deceptively fragile unity on Europe—both theologically and politically. All pursuits of truth and authority assumed that there was one undivided truth that could be attained either by illumination (Augustine), reason (Anselm), or mystic faith (Pseudo-Dionysius). The paradigm was essentially Platonic: an assent by means of reason or belief from material knowledge to higher knowledge. This philosophical hierarchy was mirrored politically in a relatively straight-forward hierarchy which ran down from God to the Pope to the King to the People. This hierarchy posits that all Christian kings owed their allegiance to the Church, with the Roman pope at its head. A consequence of this simple hierarchy is that political theory, as such, does not really exist before the 13th century, for any questions of political authority were more a matter of theology, not political science.[2]

In this scheme, the authority of the Pope was far more than an abstraction. The bishop of Rome claimed more than spiritual power—he claimed to have a seat reserved for him at the table of European politics. According to the eighth-century document “The Donation of Constantine” (later proven to be a forgery), the Emperor Constantine had given his ecclesiastical counterpart, Pope Sylvester, his own Roman palace and the entire Western region of the Roman Empire. The rationale behind this incredibly generous gift[3] was that Constantine was moving his empire to the eastern seat of Constantinople, and wanted to leave his Western lands in the capable and pious hands of the Church. On the basis of this supposed donation, the Pope now claimed to have temporal power as well as spiritual power over the former lands of the Roman Empire. Why else would Charlemagne have sought the blessing of the Pope in 800 A.D. to be crowned “Holy Roman Emperor,” unless he—in fact—needed the Pope to validate his rule?

Of course, such a claim would not go undisputed in any age, medieval or modern. Indeed, only a few generations after Charlemagne, Frankish and Germanic rulers began chafing at the pope’s authority. A common point of contention in the struggle to keep ecclesiastical power under control was investiture—the royal practice of filling church offices with hand-picked men. This would naturally have the effect of keeping ecclesiastical positions of power friendly to the king. Pope Gregory VII harangued the German king, Henry IV, over just this practice:

Your Highness should beware lest any defect of will toward the Apostolic See be found in your words or in your messages and should pay due reverence not to us but to Almighty God, in all matters touching the welfare of the Christian faith and the status of the Church.[4]

Innocent III, a few generations later, furthered Gregory’s warning, arguing that the pope is “lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one.” [5] If the pope really does wield both the highest form of spiritual and temporal power, this claim—while a tad bombastic—doesn’t appear all that illogical. [6]

The apologist Giles of Rome made a more rhetorically-effective argument for papal supremacy in his work Unam Sanctam:

All temporal things are placed under the dominion and power of the church….The power of the supreme pontiff governs souls. Souls ought rightly to govern bodies…. But temporal things serve our bodies. It follows then that the priestly power which governs souls also rules over bodies and temporal things. [7]

The Platonic appeal is straightforward and reasonable. In a previous century, his logic would have been viewed as unassailable. But, as Walter Ullmann stresses in his analysis of medieval thought, Aristotle was now making a strong play for the affections of the medieval world.

A new flood of scholars wanted to reveal the glories of Aristotle to a Platonically-stifled Middle Age. The forced unity of Plato was gradually giving way to the more organic and diverse natural world of Aristotle. Ullmann argues that the new system made a sharp distinction between the natural man and the spiritual man (like Paul in 1 Corinthians).

Aristotle himself had shattered the (Platonic) wholeness standpoint by stating that man and citizen corresponded to two different categories of thought: the good citizen need not be a good man, and vice-versa. [8]

The great Dante Alighieri himself fashioned his own political theories after this Aristotelian influence, arguing for the same kind of natural/supernatural distinction in politics that Thomas Aquinas argued for in revelation. Returning again to Ullmann:

The step taken by Dante was to make his universal State a product of nature and thereby to make it (and the Church) an item of the whole cosmos. The supreme agens in the world is still God, but He operates partly through the medium of revelation and grace in supra-natural sphere. [9]

For Dante, the State and Church were respective institutions of power, both legitimate under God. The State was no longer under the Church. Using an analogy Copernicus would later muddy up, Dante compared the State and Church to the moon and sun, respectively. The moon might benefit from the sun’s light, but is not in its orbit. Likewise, the Church serves to illuminate the State morally and spiritually (like a counselor), but in no way rules over it.

Before the entrance of Marsilius, those promoting new ideas of political hierarchy (e.g. Dante, Aquinas, and John of Paris), while promoting the independence of the State, never denied that its authority came directly from God. They merely removed the intermediary of the Pope. [10] The next logical step was left to the man from Padua.

Marsilius of Padua

The figure of Marsilius has only grown with time. Very few details of his life are known. And it seems fairly certain that his ideas carried far more weight centuries after his death than during his brief rise to political stardom. His rise to prominence was facilitated by Ludwig IV of Bavaria, the Holy Roman Emperor. Ludwig had been maintaining the long-held German tradition of dissing the Roman pope, dabbling in excommunicable defiance, and trying to find a way to solidify his power in the German states. There were apparently two separate times at which Ludwig found Marsilius of Padua to be a helpful propagandist in his fight against Pope John XXII. The first instance was at the beginning of his reign as emperor, when the pope refused to recognize his election to the position and eventually excommunicated him in 1324. It is not known whether Marsilius took up the pen to defend the Empire against the Church of his own volition, or whether Ludwig commissioned him. But however it happened, in June of 1324 Marsilius published his most famous work, Defender of the Peace. Almost twenty years later, Marsilius would again take up the defense of Ludwig when the Emperor wanted to annul his son’s marriage in order to make a more politically advantageous match. The only problem to this was that the pope was in no way disposed to do favors for Ludwig. The pen of Marsilius was therefore again most helpful to Ludwig in defending his right to annul the marriage without papal consent. For his troubles, Marsilius was excommunicated by the pope and Ludwig gratefully gave him the archbishopric of Milan. [11]

The content of Marsilius’ work has been analyzed constantly since the 14th century, by many scholars of varying levels of genius. To avoid adding myself to this list, only a brief summary of Marsilius’ main points will follow. Three individual assertions stand out in respect to our present thesis:

1) Marsilius takes Aquinas to his logical dead end—namely, that the natural and supernatural world are completely distinct spheres of authority and revelation.
2) In doing so, Marsilius effectively frees the State from the direct and indirect [12] sway of the Church.
3) In place of the Church, Marsilius creates the idea of the human legislature, that is, the idea that all authority is derived from a body politic (both in the State and the Church). In practice, since the human legislature is essentially a civic body, the civil realm has supremacy over the Church.

The difference in political hierarchy (if you can still call Marsilius’ system a hierarchy) can be illustrated like this:

Ullmann pares down the essence of Marsilius’ Defender of the Peace to this one action: “with one stroke [Marsilius] achieved a tidy dichotomy of the natural and supernatural. In matters of the human State only natural things counted….The idea of hierarchy has vanished.” [13] As moderns, we would readily identify Marsilius’ system with populism. And, certainly, there is an element of truth in this association. However, Marsilius’ system has deeper philosophical roots. Scholars commonly associate Marsilius’ political ideas with those of his contemporary, William of Ockham. The association is implied from the voluntarism of each—Ockham in his philosophy, and Marsilius in his political theory. For both, there is no real or unified law behind the appearance of reality. For Ockham’s philosophy, voluntarism means that God does not have to create things according to preset rules. There is no Platonic form of truth, beauty, or goodness. Things are as they are. Marsilius’ political voluntarism argues that will, and not abstract reason, is the essence of law. [14] In other words, law is what you make it. Law must be spoken of in the lower-case; there is no Greater Law up in the sky to which all earthly forms should be conformed. Rather, “law is made, not given, and it is made by the community of citizens.” [15]

These ideas of Marsilius were a clear break from the thought of Aquinas, although both were clearly influenced by Aristotle. Alexander D’entreves argues that while Aquinas distinguished between the realms of faith and reason, or theology and politics, Marsilius “draws a clear-cut and impassable line of demarcation.” [16] What does reason have to do with faith, or God with politics?

This is not to say that Marsilius was consciously trying to make his political theories atheistic. In a very interesting passage of Defender of the Peace, Marsilius makes a biblical defense of his position. Calling John Chrysostom to his defense, he argues that if Christ wanted His new world to be ruled by priests with coercive powers, He would have structured it after the Mosaic law, with all its earthly blessings and punishments. And, Marsilius goes on, if priests did have coercive power to enforce the law it would hurt those on whom they exercised it: “since the person who observed [these laws] under coercion would be helped not at all toward eternal salvation.” [17]The priest should help his flock toward eternal salvation and not confuse them by meddling in earthly affairs. Rather, in earthly affairs the Church must bow to the State.

In the end, however, it is not Marsilius’ biblical arguments that are remembered. Rather, modern writers look back to Marsilius as the Great Emancipator of political science from “the fetters of ecclesiastical thought.” [18]

The Ghost of Marsilius

In his own generation, Marsilius’ theories served to encourage the German emperors to independence, although no total break occurred. But scholars have often remarked at how regularly the English and German Protestant reformers use Marsilius for their cause two centuries after his death. The value of Marsilius to the English reformer, in particular, is clear. Ludwig’s divorce problem in the 14th century was a near-perfect mirror of the English King Henry VIII’s domestic troubles in the 16th. Henry VIII, of course, needed an heir, and a new wife to facilitate this. However, just like Ludwig, he found the pope painfully insensitive to his dynastic needs.

At this time, Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, recalled Marsilius’ old arguments in Defender of the Peace. If a king needs to enact a divorce (or any civil policy) for the benefit of the country, he should go ahead and do it. The pope has no temporal authority to deny this. The English monarchs had a long history of resistance to the Pope and to ecclesiastical authority. Centuries before, the issue of contention had been investiture (i.e. whether the king could appoint men to church offices). It was this debate waged between Henry IV and Thomas Becket that led inadvertently to the latter’s death.

Perhaps it was the geographic distance between London and Rome that gave the English kings their independent spirit, or perhaps it was some deeper cultural or theological undercurrent. But whatever the reason, Marsilius’ writings found a ready audience in Reformation England. [19] Thomas Cromwell specifically commissioned an English translation of Defender of the Peace which was influential over several subsequent generations. Even Marsilius’ more extreme forms of voluntarism were embraced. The English—excepting Sir Thomas More [20]—were completely comfortable with the idea that laws have no transcendent value; they are merely enforceable. A work by Sir Thomas Smith, written in 1565, even acknowledged that perhaps Plato’s adversary in his Republic, Thrasymachus, had gotten it right after all: the highest standard of justice in a commonwealth is the will and convenience of the ruling party. [21] It was on similar grounds that many of the English theorists objected to John Knox’s more idealistic reforms north of the border. [22]

The German Protestant tradition owes almost as much to Marsilius as the English Reformation does. Scholars have remarked on the similarities between Luther and Marsilius’ political thought; both make great distinction between the secular and sacred realms, and both see natural and special revelation having singular authority over the political and the ecclesiastical worlds, respectively. However, that said, it must be granted that Luther did not go nearly so far as Marsilius in granting the State de facto supremacy over the Church. While Marsilius granted the State the right to appoint bishops and moderate ecclesiastical power, [23] Luther wanted to keep the Church and State in completely different worlds. This is his famous two-kingdoms theory which informs Lutheran thought to the present day. As he writes:

There are two kingdoms, one the kingdom of God, the other the kingdom of the world….God’s kingdom is a kingdom of grace and mercy…but the kingdom of the world is a kingdom of wrath and severity….Now he who would confuse these two kingdoms—as our false fanatics do—would put wrath into God’s kingdom and mercy into the world’s kingdom; and that is the same as putting the devil in heaven and God in hell. [24]

Here Luther clearly limits the State to a purely punitive role. The State is not a part of a cosmic hierarchy (as in the view of the Platonic medievals); it is side-lined to clean-up duties. The State plays no grand role in redemptive history; it only futilely tries to restrain evil-doers. On the other hand, the State has no warrant to meddle in the affairs of the Church (as Marsilius would have preferred). If the Church agrees to play by itself in its own corner, the State should abide by the rules and not mess up the Church’s little play-world.

Unfortunately for Lutheranism, the German state never really wanted to play by the rules, and the Lutheran countries (e.g. the German states and Sweden) were characterized by a state-sanctioned church. Independence turned out to be too costly a luxury when the State could provide sanctuary from hostile Catholic adversaries. Whether it was a failure of Luther’s successors to maintain his two-kingdoms theory, or a some inherent flaw in the theory itself, it’s hard to escape the observation that Luther’s defensive theory of two distinct kingdoms didn’t sail for long in the turbulent seas of post-Reformation Europe. [25]

In his classic work, Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr comments that at many points Luther’s idea of the two-kingdoms sways perilously close to dualism—very much like the late medieval distinction between the temporal (the civil) and the eternal (the ecclesiastical). Luther relates the temporal world “to sin in such a degree as to move creation and fall into very close proximity, and in that connection to do less than justice to the creative work of God.” [26] Certainly, the way that Luther equates the civil kingdom with the dominion of Satan would imply there’s not much use in sanctifying it.

The Watershed

In review, it looks suspiciously like both the medieval Platonists and the Marsilians suffer from the same disease—dualism. The Marsilian system and its Lutheran spin-off actually seem to glory in the dualism between faith and reason, and natural and supernatural revelation. There are two rulebooks for the two realms, and if you try to apply the rules of one to the other, it makes as little sense as trying to execute a squeeze bunt in the game of football. You can’t mix rulebooks. You can’t put the Devil in heaven or God in hell.

On the other side of the divide, the Platonic system of the late medieval papacy has an even more prodigious pedigree of dualism which extends all the way back to Augustine’s unfortunate flirtation with Plotinus. In this vein, Giles of Rome, the papal apologist, made just as clear of a distinction between the temporal and the eternal as did Marsilius. The difference was that, as a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, Giles arranged his hierarchy with the eternal taking precedence over the temporal. In his methodology, you reason from the abstract to the particular. The Aristotelian Marsilius, of course, takes the exact opposite position. [27]

The real question is therefore whether the sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal is really healthy. By raising this question, I am of course at least hinting that my own opinion is that it is not. It would seem that the early medievals, at their best, saw no need to dichotomize the natural and the supernatural worlds. The idea of preferring one to the other would have appeared a foreign concept to a churchman like Patrick who scared away the snakes, defied the heathen festivals, and prayed, chanted, cursed, and prophesied his way through Ireland. Nor would Boniface have been much convinced of the temporal/eternal distinction while hewing down Thor’s Oak. Heaven and earth seemed not so much like opposing magnetic poles when Constantine’s army witnessed the sign of the cross in the sky before the battle at Milvian Bridge. Augustine himself, when he was out from under Plotinus’ influence, saw that Creation itself was the story of redemption, and not the Devil’s playground. The City of God had been planted on earth with the seed of Abel and spoke greater things with each passing age.

Jumping forward to the Reformation again, the opening book of John Calvin’s Institutes illustrates just how inextricable the eternal and temporal actually are. When asked whether the knowledge of God or the knowledge of self comes first, Calvin—in essence—answers, Yes. Both the knowledge of the eternal and the material are so irreparably linked to each other that in knowing one in truth, you know the other. It’s impossible to pin down a precedence. This concept seems to be the missing element in Luther, in Marsilius, and in the Scholastics. This is why dualistic political philosophies careen between Erastianism (State-over-Church) and a tyrannical papacy. Both extremes assume that either the eternal or the temporal has preeminence over the other. Neither has a moment to wonder whether it is just possible that the eternal is the temporal and the temporal is the eternal. Dualism forgets that heaven came to earth and the infinite was joined to the finite.

So, in the end, dualism drives a deep wedge between worlds (temporal and eternal) and spheres (civil and churchly). It creates its own monsters, some Platonic and some Marsilian—the latter illustrated by John F. Kennedy’s address to the Southern Baptists. Certainly it is the Marsilian monster which is nourished and coddled by the American myth. No pope, priest, or pastor will ever have temporal power over our president. We have constructed a wall of separation to make sure of it. Like Kennedy, we would be horrified to hear that wall had been breached by some meddling churchman.

Meanwhile, the Church is the institution which has been hobbled temporally. Frightened by the ghost of Innocent III and the Donation of Constantine, we’ve effectively performed an ecclesiastical castration. And until time somehow reverses this, we can thank Marsilius, among others, for providing the snip, snip which gave the Church the voice of a choir boy.

* * *

Footnotes

1 The only previous time a Catholic had threatened to become president, in 1928, the liberal Christian publication, The Christian Century, proclaimed that it could not “look with unconcern upon the seating of a representative of an alien culture, of a medieval, Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy and of a foreign potentate in the great office of the President of the United States."
2 Ullmann notes that the idea of a distinct political science is not compatible with “the medieval Christian theme of wholeness.” Walter Ullmann, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), 12.
3 Even more generous, given that the ability to take tax-deductions was still a good sixteen centuries in the future.
4 As quoted in Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 142.
5 Ibid., 143. Innocent was making a judicial, not a moral claim—often the point of objection.
6 Ibid., 147.
7 Ullmann, Law and Politics, 270.
8 Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961), 259
9 Ibid., 268.
10 The contradictory nature of this episode (granting an archbishopric to an excommunicant) goes to illustrate the State’s rebellion against the old ecclesiastical hierarchy.
11 Thereby going a step farther than Dante.
12 Ullmann, Law and Politics, 283.
13 Alexander D’entreves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1939), 86-87.
14 Ullmann, Principles of Government, 270. Cf. Defender of the Peace, i.12.7-8. Ullmann also defines the basis of law as a preceptum coactivum: “the enforceable character of a rule makes it law,” ibid. 269. Such ideas have given many scholar the clever idea to connect Marsilius to the bastard son of political science, Machiavelli.
15 D’entreves, 48.
16 Defender of the Peace, ii.9.2.
17 Ullmann, Principles of Government, 258.
18 Harry S. Stout, “Marsilius of Padua and the Henrician Reformation,” Church History, Vol. 43, No. 3. (Sept. 1974), 308-318.
19 Sir Thomas More, famously martyred under Henry VIII, wrote in his Utopia that the ideal state would have every citizen bound to the belief that there is an “ultimate standard of right and wrong, beyond what the state may at any moment command,” cf. D’entreves, 99.
20 Cf. D’entreves, 102.
21 English constitutionalist John Aylmer has an interesting passage in objection to John Knox’s book on the biblical argument against the rule of women: “I must say this to them all in general, that the Scripture meddleth with no civil policy further than to teach obedience . And therefore whatsoever is brought out of the Scripture concerning any kind of [rule of women] … who hath made me betwixt you a judge? As though he should say, my office is not to determine matters of policy, of succession, of inheritance, for that belongeth to the civil magistrates,” as quoted in D’entreves, 103-104.
22 Defender of the Peace, ii.22.11.
23 As quoted in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 172.
24 The Peace of Augsburg and the Treaty of Westphalia—primarily Lutheran documents—made state-determined churches the norm.
25 Niebuhr, 188.
26 As an interesting aside, Ullmann comments that the rise of the Aristotelian inductive method gave birth to all sorts of modern marvels, e.g. biology, more varied architecture, and landscape paintings (which Ullmann argues didn’t exist in the medieval world till Aristotle became popular). Cf. Ullmann, Principles of Government, 300ff.