Systematic Theology – The State

Marsilius of Padua and Spiritual Religion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 26

Dictation Name: 26 Marsilius of Padua and Spiritual Religion

Year: 1970’s

O Lord our God, we give thanks unto thee that by thy grace and mercy, thou hast raised up men in our day who are ready to stand for Christian freedom, to go to court of to jail, and to declare that Jesus Christ is Lord and he must be obeyed, that not man but God is Lord, and to be obeyed. Bless them, we beseech thee O Lord, who are under fire. Give us a spirit of prayer as we think of them day by day, and bless us now as we study the things of thy kingdom. In Jesus name. Amen.

We have been dealing with the conflict of church and state in our day, and studying the theology of the state. We will have three subjects this evening, as usual, and the first will be Marsilius of Padua and Spiritual Religion. Marsilius is also known by his Italian name, Marsiglio. Marsilius is the Latinized form of it. His dates are approximately 1290-1343 in the Middle Ages. He was an Italian scholar. He was a professor of philosophy and then rector of the University of Paris, and he is best known for his very famous book, published in 1322, The Defender of the Peace. It was an attack on the temporal power of the church. While it was nominally directed against the papacy, it was really the church as a whole that was under attack in Marsilius’s book. He was attacked for it in his day by the papacy, but he triumphed then and eventually. The whole system of concordats that developed in Roman Catholic Europe and after the Reformation rest on a Marsilian background. In fact, we may almost call Marsilius one of the evil fathers of Protestantism because of the tremendous influence he has had in Protestant circles outside of Calvinism, but in the last century, Marsilius’s influence has triumphed within the Reformed community and the Reformed churches.

In fact, very early with the Reformation, all too many people were ready to turn to Marsilius on the very ridiculous assumption that because Marsilius had been against the papacy, that made him a good man, but they were very wrong. Henry VIII, by the way, relied heavily on Marsilius. In fact, the very first translation into English of his Defender of the Peace was for Henry VIII.

Marsilius emphasized the spiritual role of the church. This has a very appealing ring, and it did in his day, and he said the church is getting too worldly, too much involved in politics and other things, and the church needs to confine itself to spiritual matters, and so Marsilius isolated the church and the Christian faith from any relevance to the material world, from any relevance to politics, to economics, to the arts and the sciences, and confined it to the soul of man. As a result, the only future left for Christianity then was pietism, spiritual devotions, no relevance to the problems of everyday life. Marsilius was the great father of this kind of thinking, and he was, although not openly, very much anti-Christian as well as anti-church. Thus, what Marsilius did was to deny the sovereignty of Jesus Christ over the world.

Now, since Marsilius’s day, a great myth has arisen of which the basic pattern goes back at least to Marsilius. This myth is that the medieval papacy ruled the world ruthlessly, that it exercised tremendous temporal power, and that it made kings and rulers bow down to it. This is what you read in many a history book, but it is a myth. Our history books are written by humanists and by secularists, by people who are anti-Christian, and so they pervert the history with regard to the medieval church, with regard to Calvin, and with regard to every true Christian profession that is being made in our day.

Now, according to the history books, the great affirmation of papal power and the high point of papal power was Boniface VIII and his bull, Unam Sanctam, in 1302. That and his subsequent bull, Clericis Laicos are regarded as the height of papal insolence and power. What was Boniface VIII saying? This man who supposedly, as the high point of papal claims and arrogance in the Middle Ages, is portrayed in the history books as the great evil pope. He was saying to the French monarch and the English monarch, it is illegal to tax the clergy to fight your wars. Both Philip IV of France and the King of England were trying to collect money to tax the clergy to finance their war. It was an indirect way of financing the church properties.

Moreover, what he was saying in Unam Sanctam was that the church is under Christ, and under Christ has a duty to declare to the world what Christ requires of it, and therefore, must speak to civil authorities. It must speak to rulers and declare unto them what their duty is under God. Now, we may differ and certainly do from Boniface VIII as to what Christ’s claims are, because we have a different theological perspective, but we cannot differ with him on his assertion that all peoples, every realm of life, is under Christ. It cannot say it is separate from the kingdom of God.

What happened to Boniface, this man who is portrayed in the history books as so great a tyrant. Why, Philip IV had him arrested, threw him in prison, treated him most brutally, and then released him and the old man, sick and humiliated by the treatment he received, was dead in less than a month. So much for the high point of papal power, and so much for the truth of history books. Boniface had simply asserted the freedom of the church. He had done so in medieval terms, but the powers of his day found it intolerable.

Well, now back to Marsilius of Padua. What was Marsilius’s thesis? What was it that he was asserting? First, he said that all jurisdiction over the material world, over the material creation, over politics, economics, the state, the arts, the sciences was grounded not in revelation, not in the Bible, but in reason, and so he transferred the whole world from the governance of God to the governance of philosophy, to the governance of philosopher kings a la Plato, and said in effect to the church, “You have nothing to do with the world. Go into your closet and pray, and indulge in your private devotions, but don’t say anything about what’s going on in the streets, or what people are doing. That’s no business of yours.”

Then, the second thesis of Marsilius was that the state is a coercive power whose function is to regulate and control strife. So that supreme power is the mark of the state. Now, obviously, this conflicts with the idea of the state as reason. His first thesis is the state is reason incarnate. The second, that it is coercive power. What Marsilius was doing was to reach for every theory out of paganism that would undercut the Christian position.

His third thesis was that the state is a volunteerist, republican form, and it represents the will of the people. Now, there is a conflict between his three thesis. All three have flourished since Marsilius’s day, and the state has reason, the philosopher kings are sovereign. In the statist coercion, the strongest are sovereign. In the republican view, the people are sovereign. Anything for Marsilius except the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. That he would not tolerate.

Now, one of his associates, John of Paris, carried this a step further, and what John of Paris did was implicit in all that Marsilius said, but John of Paris said that nature and morality are autonomous and separate from grace and religion, that morality has no foundation in religion, the religion has nothing to do with morality, that all the religion has to do with is private devotions and communications with God. In fact, he said, “The acquired moral virtues can be perfect without theological virtues, nor are they perfected by them except by an accidental perfection.” To be perfect you don’t need Christ. To be absolutely and totally virtuous, he said, you don’t need Christ, and if you don’t need him, why should the state need him? If you believe in God, go into your close and indulge in your private devotions, but don’t think that has anything to do with the world at large. Even further, he said, “Even without Christ as ruler, there is the true and perfect justice which is required for the state, since the state is ordered to living in accordance with acquired moral virtue to which it is accidental that it be perfect by any further virtues.” In other words, it is not essential that it have any further virtues from Christianity. What John of Paris and Marsilius did was to make Christ and the church alike irrelevant to the good society and to virtue.

Marsilius was an heir of Greek philosophy. He was also a type of a kind of a professor we are very familiar with today whose utopias on paper have little relation to historical reality. One contemporary scholar, Gureth{?}, has said, “Marsilius’s conception of political power is monistic, unilinear, and ultimately unlimited.” He is the spiritual father of Hobbs and of Rousseau, of totalitarianism. It is he who fathered the separation of Christianity from the state and from politics. Marsilius believed, by the way, in a hereditary morality. If you attained moral perfection and two or three generations had it, it was in effect for him, a hereditary thing then. There was a hereditary line established of natural virtue, of reason which was equivalent to virtue, and now this should concern us very much. Marsilius was the father of modern antinomianism, the father of most of the people who run around in the churches saying they are under grace, not under the law. That was Marsilius’s thesis, and it was a beautiful one. It dissolved Christ as the law-giver and as the king over society, and it established the state as the source of law. He had, you see, to eliminate God’s law in order to free the state, and he said the church must deal with the spiritual realm, which meant nothing when he got through with it.

But he said, among other things, “But there were also certain other commands in the Mosaic law which were to be observed for the status of the future world, like those relating to sacrifices or hostages, or offerings for the redemption of sins, especially hidden ones, which are committed through eminent acts, and no one was compelled by pain or punishment of the present one, to observe these commands.

Analogous to these commands are all the councils and commands of the new law, for Christ neither wanted nor commanded that anyone be compelled to observe them in this world. Although he does give a general command that human laws be observed, but under pain or punishment to be afflicted in the other world upon transgressors. Hence, the transgressor of human law, most usually sins against divine law, although not conversely.” Can you imagine that? All that Christ came to do for Marsilius was to tell people, “You’ve got to obey the state. Obey Caesar. You don’t have to obey the Old Testament.” He came to free men from the law and to deliver them to the state.

Now, this is where the modern church has gotten its doctrine, out of this ungodly man. What Marsilius said was this, to summarize his argument. If the church forbids abortion, that doesn’t have a binding power, but when the state forbids it, then it’s a very serious offense, because it is then a sin against the state, the sovereign power, and that’s what Jesus Christ hates. Any violation of the laws of the state. Do you recognize Jesus as Marsilius presents him? Do you recognize this as the Jesus of a lot of churches?

Marsilius also gave a humanistic meaning to ownership, or lordship, dominion, and he separated it from God, and gave it a material and societal meaning. This kind of doctrine was very much revived in this country after the Puritans had very much opposed it, at the time of the War of Independence and after, and when Washington, in his Farewell Address, spoke out against the idea that there could be morality without a religious faith, and warned against that opinion, what he was warning against was the influence of Marsilius. Now, it was not that he knew Marsilius, but it was that philosophy that had risen again as the result of the French Revolution, and was again being adopted and beginning to come into this country.

Of course, we have now seen the separation of morality from religion, and we have seen the church separated from all relevance to the world, and we see the results of that all around us, the irrelevance of the church and its continuing failure. Only when we renounce the doctrines of Marsilius of Padua and his influence throughout the history of the church can we again be a strong and a free church.

I mentioned that Calvinism and some segments of the Catholic church alone stood out against Marsilius’s thinking, when in the last century Calvinism has surrendered to it also, and retreated into pietism.

End of tape