Christendom's Own Social Thinkers
While Ibn Khaldun was founding the sociology of Islam, Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, Marsilius of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa were engaged in similar studies in Christendom, though without the same scientific order. Dubois, by launching broad intellectual attacks on the papal system and singing the praises of Philip IV of France, did what William of Ockham and Marsilius did in the service of Louis of Bavaria. In The Plea of the People of France to the King against Pope Boniface (1308) and the treatise On the Recovery of the Holy Land (1305), this passionate jurist advised that the popes should at once cast away their worldly powers and possessions; that the rulers of Europe should prevent the execution of papal decrees within their dominions; and that the French Church should abandon the Church of Rome and submit to the power and law of the state. Beyond this, Dubois held that all of Europe should unite under the king of France as emperor, with Constantinople as capital, as a bulwark against Islam. An international court should be set up to settle disputes among nations, and any Christian country that made war on another should suffer economic sanctions. Women should enjoy all the educational privileges and political rights of men.
Few seemed to pay much attention to these proposals, but they entered the currents of thought that loosened the foundations of the papal system. Two centuries after Dubois, Henry VIII, who had certainly never heard his name, followed his proposals and Wycliffe's in the field of religion, and at the start of the nineteenth century Napoleon briefly united Europe under French rule and made the pope the captive of the state. Dubois belonged to the new class of jurists who wished to take the clergy's place in governing, and he won his struggle; we live today at the height of his victory.
Oresme on Money
Oresme, who had stirred revolution in other fields of knowledge, wrote about 1355 one of the clearest, plainest and most forceful works of economic literature, On the Origin, Nature, Law and Alterations of Money. In his view the money of a country belongs to the community, not the king; its use is general and must not be monopolized by the king; the ruler or government should regulate and ease the issue of money but must not make profit from coining it, and must keep the metal content of the coinage pure and unadulterated. A king who cheats in coining is a thief. Moreover, bad money drives good money out of circulation (as "Gresham's law" would state two centuries later): people will hide or export good money, and debased coins will come back to the dishonest government itself through taxes and the like. Oresme's ideas were not mere ideals. He taught them as tutor to the son of John II of France, and when his pupil, Charles V, came to the throne, after one forced debasement of the coinage he took the teacher's advice and rebuilt the finances of war-ruined France on a sound and honorable foundation.
Marsilius of Padua
Marsilius of Padua had a livelier and more passionate nature than Oresme: an implacable individualist, proud of his reason and his courage, he made his political philosophy inseparable from his stormy life. The son of a notary of Padua, he studied medicine at the university; it is possible that his sharp anti-clerical ideas came from a climate of skepticism created at Padua by Averroist philosophy, the same skepticism Petrarch met in the same generation and tried to reject and condemn. From there Marsilius went to Paris and was for a year rector of its university. In 1324, with some help from John of Jandun, he wrote the most important and influential political treatise of the Middle Ages, Defensor Pacis (The Defender of the Peace). Knowing that the Church would reject and excommunicate their book, the authors fled to Nuremberg and put themselves under the protection of Emperor Louis of Bavaria, who was then at odds with the pope.
They could not expect so combative and quarrelsome a man as Pope John XXII to bear their militant defense of peace calmly and patiently. The book argued that the quarrel between Church and state had disturbed the peace of Europe, and that Europe would be ordered and best preserved only when the Church, with all its members and property, was subject to the same king or emperor who commanded all other persons and property. In its view the acquisition of wealth was a gross mistake the Church had made from the beginning, since nothing in Scripture permits it.
The Church as the Whole Community
Like William of Ockham, the authors of the Defender of the Peace apply the word Church to the whole Christian community. As under Roman law the Roman people were the true rulers of their land and delegated their authority only through trusteeship and representation to councils, the senate or emperors, so the Christian community should delegate its authority, by giving proxy, to its representatives, the clergy, who must answer to the people who gave them that proxy. In Marsilius's view the popes' claim to have derived their supremacy from the apostle Peter is a historical error: Peter had no more power than the other apostles, and the bishops of Rome in the first three centuries had no primacy over the bishops of other capitals. The first general councils of the Church were presided over by the emperor or his representatives, not the popes. A general council whose members were freely chosen by the people of the Christian community should interpret Scripture and the writings of the Fathers, define Catholic doctrine, and choose the cardinals, who would elect the pope. The whole clerical community, popes included, should be subject in all civil and worldly matters to civil rights and laws. The state should hold the power to appoint clergy, increase or reduce their numbers, establish churches and priests, remove unworthy priests, supervise school endowments and church revenues, and relieve the poor from the Church's surplus income.
Here too we hear the loud and imposing sound of the rise of the national state. Kings, who with the support of the new middle classes had subdued lords and districts, now felt strong enough to deny the Church's claim to stand above civil power. Lay rulers took advantage of the corruption and decline of the Church's intellectual and international authority and resolved to bring all vital affairs of their subjects, religion and Church included, under their own control and mastery. This was the essential point of a quarrel settled in the Reformation, and the victory of the state over the Church was one of the signs of the end of the Middle Ages. (In 1535 Henry VIII, at the height of his revolt against the Church, ordered the Defender of the Peace translated and printed at state expense.) Marsilius, like Ockham and Luther, after proposing that the power of the people replace the power of the Church, was forced, for the sake of preserving society and his own safety, to substitute the power of the state for the power of the people; but he did not raise kings to the level of all-powerful giants. Beyond the victory of the state he looked ahead to a day when the people could actually take up the work of governing, which all legal theories had long held to be their right.
Marsilius on Popular Government
In reforming the Church and clergy, Marsilius favored democracy: every Christian community should choose its representatives to the general council of the Church; every church district should choose its own priests, supervise their work, and, if necessary, depose them; no member of a district could be expelled or excommunicated without the consent of the rest. Marsilius proposed the same principles, with carefully hesitant changes, for civil government. In his words, according to truth and Aristotle's opinion, the legislator, the first and effective cause of law, must be the people, that is, all the citizens or their weightier part, expressing in the general assembly of citizens, by their own will, their wish and vote. By "weightier part" he meant both the number and the quality of persons in the community for which the law is made. All the citizens or their weightier part either make law directly or leave the task to a few, but these few are not and cannot be lawgivers in the strict sense; they act only in the cases and for the time authorized by the true legislator. A citizen is one who takes part in civil society and, according to rank, has the right of voting and judging. By this definition children, slaves, foreigners and women are distinguished from citizens. The best law arises only from the deliberate will of the whole community; the majority is better able than any of its parts to detect the faults of a proposed law, since the whole community is worth more and is stronger than any part.
For its own time (1324) this is a remarkable and fitting statement, and the living conditions of the age make its careful qualifications seem justified. Even Marsilius did not favor equal voting rights for all adults in a Europe where scarcely one in ten could read, communication was hard, and class differences were set in the mortar of time. In fact he opposed complete democracy, in which only the number of persons would decide law and policy, and, to heal this "decay and corruption of a republic," preferred that people have political power proportioned to their worth to society, though he did not say how or by whom this worth could be recognized. He left room for monarchy but added that a ruler chosen by election should be preferred by far to those who reach power by inheritance. The king's duty is to be the community's agent and servant, and if he behaves badly, the community may rightly depose him.
These thoughts had a medieval and even ancient root. Roman jurists and scholastic philosophers had constantly placed the reins of government in the hands of the people, in theory. The papacy itself was a kind of elective monarchy. The pope called himself "servant of the servants of God," and Thomas Aquinas agreed with John of Salisbury about the people's right to overthrow arrogant, lawbreaking kings. But in Christendom these ideas were seldom developed into a clear, explicit rule for elective government. Here, in this man of the fourteenth century, the idea of the Protestant Reformation and the idea of the French Revolution were found together.
Fate of a Man Ahead of His Time
Marsilius was so far ahead of his time that he could not fail to be troublesome. He rose very fast with Louis of Bavaria and declined just as fast with his fall. When Louis made his peace with the popes, he was asked to dismiss Marsilius as a heretic. We do not know the outcome. Apparently Marsilius died in 1343, rejected by the Church he had fought and cast off by the state he had worked to raise.
The Lawyers and the Rise of the State
The successes won in his age would have been impossible if the rising class of jurists had not given the state power and authority equal to that of the Church. On the ruins of feudal and local law, beside canon law and often against it, the jurists raised the structure of the state's "positive law," and year by year this royal or civil law extended its sway over every area of people's lives. The law schools of Montpellier, Orléans and Paris produced bold and shrewd jurists who, against the claims of the popes, built out of Roman law for their masters the theory of the divine right and absolute power of kings. These ideas were strongest in France and eventually developed into the thought of "I am the state" and the "Sun King." They also spread in Spain and cleared the road for the absolute monarchy of Ferdinand, Charles V and Philip II; and even in England, where government rested on two houses of Parliament, Wycliffe spoke of the king's unlimited authority and of the divine origin of kingship. The Lords and Commons opposed this view, and Sir John Fortescue stressed that the king of England had no right to make and issue law without Parliament's consent, and that English judges, by the oath they had sworn, were bound to judge of the king as befits him; yet under Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, England too knelt before despotic rulers.
Between the two opposed beliefs, the absolute power of popes and the absolute power of kings, some idealist thinkers clung to the idea of "natural" or divine law. They held that divine justice had planted its seed in human conscience and had spoken in the four Gospels, and that it stood above human laws. Neither state nor Church paid attention, but the idea survived behind the scenes, sometimes shining, sometimes forgotten, and lived on dimly until in the eighteenth century it emerged in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and played a small part in the revolution that overthrew both absolute powers (Church and monarchy) that had ruled humanity.
Nicholas of Cusa: Scholar and Mystic
Nicholas of Cusa first fought the absolute power of the papal system and then submitted to it. In his varied life he showed the best face of Christianity to a Germany that had always looked at the Church with distrust. He was philosopher, administrator, theologian, jurist, mystic and scientist. Beneath his powerful personality he gathered the best qualities of the medieval builders, which he had made agree with his own spirit and life. He was born at Cusa near Trier (1401). At the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer he acquired both knowledge and piety and sincerity. In his one year at Heidelberg he was affected by the nominalism of William of Ockham; at Padua he gained from the thoroughly skeptical philosophy of Averroës; at Cologne he absorbed the religious tradition of the philosophy of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. All these elements blended in him to make him the most complete Christian of his age.
He never lost the mystical spirit he had received from Meister Eckhart. He wrote a classic treatise on mystical vision, On the Vision of God, and, in his philosophical defense of these visions (Apologia doctae ignorantiae), coined the famous phrase "learned ignorance." He rejected the rationalism of scholastic philosophy that wished to prove theology by reasoning; he thought human knowledge entirely relative and uncertain, with truth hidden in the nature of God. In general he denied astrology, but, overcome by the error of the age, he did some astronomical calculations; for example, he reckoned that the world would end in 1734. Amid a life full of Church business he knew the latest scientific ideas. He wanted more experiment and more exact measurement in science; he guessed at the times of fall of different bodies from different heights; he held that "the earth cannot be at rest but moves like the other stars." The stars, though they may seem fixed, move, no orbit is perfectly circular, and the earth is not the center of the universe, except in the sense that any point may be called the center of an infinite universe. These views were sometimes wise borrowings from predecessors and sometimes the result of his own brilliant insight.
The Council of Basel and Natural Law
In 1433 Nicholas went to Basel to present to the church council assembled there the claims of a friend to the archbishopric of Cologne. The claim was rejected, but he later used the occasion and presented to the council, then in dispute with the popes, a work that shone for a moment in philosophy. He called it The Catholic Concordance, and its general aim was to find ways and conditions for reconciling councils and popes. In a masterly allegory he compared Christendom to a living body and pictured the Church as an organic unity that can accomplish nothing successfully without the balanced cooperation of all its members. Instead of concluding, like the popes, that the members must be guided by the head, Nicholas said that only a general council could unite the interdependent parts of the Church. He repeated what Aquinas and Marsilius had said and, in imaginative phrases, anticipated what Rousseau and Jefferson later repeated. Every law rests on natural law, and a law contradicting it cannot be valid; since by the order of nature all men are free, the existence of every government depends solely on the consent of its subjects, and the binding force of every law arises from this tacit or open consent.
The people, to whom power and government belong, delegate their right to make or enforce law, by electing representatives, to a small group equipped with learning and experience; the legitimacy of this group derives from the consent of the subjects or the people themselves. When the Christian community likewise leaves its power, by choosing representatives, to the general council of the Church, this council, as agent of the people, represents religious authority. The pope cannot claim absolute power to make and issue religious laws on the basis of the imaginary Donation of Constantine, since that document is forged and pure legend. The pope has the right to convene the general council, but the council can depose him if it finds him unfit. These principles apply to princes as well. In all likelihood elective monarchy, in the present hopeless conditions, is the best form of government for humanity; but the king or ruler, like the pope, must convene a representative assembly from time to time and obey its commands.
Cardinal and Reformer
Nicholas's later life was a model for the first among priests. In 1448 he was raised to cardinal and became in person a reformer of Catholicism. On an energetic and ardent journey through the Netherlands and Germany he convened provincial synods, revived clerical discipline, reformed monasteries and convents, attacked the clergy's concubinage, raised the educational program for priests, and, at least for a time, raised the moral level of common people and clergy. Trithemius, the abbot-scholar, writes that Nicholas of Cusa appeared like an angel of light and peace in the darkness and confusion of Germany; he restored the unity of the Church, added to the authority of its supreme leader, and sowed the precious seed of a new life.
Besides his other titles and pursuits, Nicholas was also a humanist. He loved the works of the ancient classics and encouraged their study, and he meant to print a great series of Greek manuscripts he had himself brought from Constantinople. He had the patience and tolerance of a true scholar. In On the Peace of Faith, written in the very year Constantinople fell to the Turks, he called for peaceful understanding among the different religions and regarded the various creeds as rays of a single eternal truth. And at the dawn of new ideas, when the advance of free thought had made men giddy and arrogant, he wrote words just and noble. To know and think, and to see with the eye of reason the beauty of reality, is always a source of joy, and the older one grows the greater the pleasure it brings. As love is the soul of the soul, so the pursuit of knowledge and the discovery of truth is the soul of reason. In the turmoil of the times, daily troubles and anxieties, and the contradictions of life, we should lift our heads and look to the vault of heaven, and seek day by day a firmer grasp of the source of all good and beauty, of the capacity of our hearts and minds, of the intellectual fruits of humankind over the centuries, and of the wonders of nature around us; but we must always remember that true greatness lies in humility, and that learning and wisdom are useful only when they rule over our souls.
If there had been more men like Nicholas, there would have been no Luther.