“Christ Willed Himself to Lack Authority”

One of the first rectors of the University of Paris, Marsilius of Padua, is commonly seen as the first theorist of secularity. This chapter demonstrates that Jesus’ Roman trial is of fundamental importance for Marsilius’ political thought. Indeed, it is claimed here that the conceptual architecture of Marsilius’ Defender of the Peace cannot be reconstructed without close attention to the Roman trial of Jesus. “Christ willed himself to lack authority in this world-age”, writes Marsilius, “in as much as he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’” This dominical saying is taken as a dramatic and irreversible renunciation, by the Son of God, of all secular jurisdiction. What is more, Augustine is Marsilius’ authority for this interpretation of Jesus’ saying. One probable line of transmission for Augustine’s interpretation of this saying is The Chain of Gold, a patristic commentary collated by Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, Aquinas may have a significant place in the history of secularity—not for anything that he wrote, but for something he edited.

The Genesis of the Idea and Value of Political Peace in Early Modern Political Philosophy

The main intention of this paper is to reconstruct the conceptual and historical‎ genesis of the idea and value of political peace from the point of view of ‎political philosophy at the intersection between late scholasticism and early modernity. The paper consists of three related parts. The first part highlights‎ methodological and contextual reasons why the idea of political peace has ‎been overshadowed throughout history by dominant discourses on war. The ‎second part deals with conceptual clarifications. The nature of war is distinguished ‎from other types of conflict and three interpretative approaches to‎ war are analyzed: political realism, fundamentalist-moralistic view of the holy‎ war, and the many theories of natural law that give rise to conceptions of just‎ war, but also the first abolitionist perspective or idea of ending all wars. Early‎ theoretical articulations of the notion of peace indicated modern-day emancipation‎ of politics from the tutelage of metaphysics and classical ethics, thus‎ separating the value of political peace from its original oneness with cosmic ‎and psychological peace. The third part of the paper highlights key moments ‎in the historical genesis of the value of political peace in the works of Aurelius ‎Augustine, Marsilius of Padua, and William of Ockham.‎

Scatter 2

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

Polykoiranie III (John of Salisbury, Aquinas, Dante, Marsilius of Padua)

Although John of Salisbury does not quote the Homer-Aristotle line Scatter 2 is following, his Policraticus does contain complex reflections on reading that resonate with a deconstructive approach. After the thirteenth-century Latin translations of Aristotle, the line reappears in influential but tendential accounts of the supposed superiority of monarchy in Aquinas and Dante, and in the more complex reflections of Marsilius of Padua.

MARSILIUS OF PADUA’S «OPUSCULA» IN CONTEXT OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE XIV CENTURY

Статья посвящена анализу «малых сочинений» («О перенесении империи» - «De translatione Imperii»; «Трактат о юрисдикции императора в брачных делах» - «Tractatus de iurisdictione imperatoris in causis matrimonialibus»; «Малый защитник» - «Defensor minor») Марсилия Падуанского (1275-1342), выдающегося философа, полемиста, ректора Парижского университета, сподвижника Людовика IV Баварского, критика папских доктрин «plenitudo potestatis» и «potestas clavium», автора знаменитого трактата «Защитник мира» («Defensor pacis»), и их месту в политической мысли, интеллектуальной культуре и полемической традиции первой половины XIV в. Автор выдвигает гипотезу о датировке трактата «О перенесении империи» и вероятном контексте его написания, а также выявляет связь между всеми работами Марсилия Падуанского. The article is devoted to analysis of the «opuscula» («On the Transfer of the Empire» - «De translatione Imperii»; «The Treatise on the Emperor’s Jurisdiction in Matrimonial Matters» - «Tractatus de iurisdictione imperatoris in causis matrimonialibus», «The Smaller Defendor» - «Defensor minor») of Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342), an outstanding philosopher, polemicist, rector of the University of Paris, Ludwif IV of Bavaria’s companion in arms, critic of pope’s doctrines «plenitudo potestatis» and «potestas clavium», author of the famous treatise «The Defender of the Peace» («Defensor pacis»), and its place in political thought, intellectual culture and polemical tradition of the first half of XIV century. The author puts forward a hypothesis, concerning dating of the «On the Transfer of the Empire» treatise and possible context of its writing, and also reveals connection between all Marsilius of Padua’s works.

Marsilius of Padua and Isaac Abravanel on Kingship: The Medieval Precedents of Republicanism Revisited

This article offers a comparative investigation of Marsilius of Padua’s and Isaac Abravanel’s ideas on kingship. It looks at how these thinkers transform the “canonical” sources of their respective traditions of political theorizing, i.e., Aristotle’s Politics and the Bible, to articulate the notion that ultimate authority rests with the citizens/people. It also examines how these two writers’ positions on kingship relate to the political realities that prevailed in late medieval Italy. Finally, it illuminates the medieval precedents of modern republicanism in the Christian and Jewish political traditions.

The Political Thinker as a Civil Physician: Some Thoughts on Marsilius of Padua and Machiavelli beyond Leo Strauss’ al-Fârâbî

While scholars have widely acknowledged a reliance on medical language in the political theories of Marsilius of Padua and Niccolò Machiavelli, they have rarely investigated the epistemological status of this appropriation. Questioning Leo Strauss’ claim that Jewish-Arabic Platonic ideas on the philosopher-king could have been a possible model for Marsilius and Machiavelli, this paper aims to show that the use of medical language by Marsilius of Padua and Machiavelli entails a form of political knowledge that is decidedly at odds with any kind of Platonic philosophical politics. This article makes the claim that, in their political theories, Marsilius and Machiavelli break with two key assumptions of Platonism: first, that philosophy as “absolute self-knowledge” is needed to rule; and, second, that philosophers must be lawgivers or legislators.