Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought

Harald E. Braun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754639626
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317110255
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) is one of the most misunderstood authors in the history of political thought. His treatise De rege et regis institutione libri tres (1599) is dedicated to Philip III of Spain. It was to present the principles of statecraft by which the young king was to abide. Yet soon after its publication, Catholic and Calvinist politiques in France started branding Mariana a regicide. De rege was said to empower the private individual to kill a legitimate king. Its 'pernicious doctrines' were blamed for the murder of Henry IV in 1610, and it was burned at the order of the parlement of Paris. Modern historians have tended to build on this interpretation and consider De rege a stepping stone towards modern pluralist and democratic thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. The notion of Mariana as an uncompromising theorist of resistance is in fact based on the distorted reading of a few select sentences from the first book of the treatise. This study offers a radical departure from the old view of Mariana as an early modern constitutionalist thinker and advocate of regicide. Thorough analysis of the text as a whole reveals him to be a shrewd and creative operator of political language as well as a champion of the church and bishops of Castile. The argument as a whole is informed by a Catholic-Augustinian view of human nature. Mariana's bleak, at times downright cynical view of man imparts focus and coherence to a text that challenges well established terminological boundaries and political discourses. In the first instance, his deeply pessimistic appraisal of human virtue justifies his disregard of positive law. He is thus able to mould diverse elements extracted from Roman and canon law, scholastic theology and humanist literature into a deliberately equivocal discourse of reason of state. Finally, this secular interpretation of the world of politics is cleverly yoked to a thoroughly clerical agenda of reform. In fact, reason of state is made to propagate an episcopal monarchy. De rege is exceptional in that it strings together a curious scholastic theory of the origins of society, a conservative ideology of absolute monarchy and a breathtakingly radical vision of theocratic renewal of Spanish government and society. Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Political Thought elucidates the differentiated nature of political debate in Habsburg Spain. It confirms the complexity of Spanish political life in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Complementing recent work on Catholic political thought, the European reception of Machiavelli, and Spanish Habsburg government, this study offers a more complete and holistic picture of early modern Spanish political culture.

CHAPTER ONE
Human Nature, the Origins of Civil Society, and the Power of Princes

Mariana begins his treatise on the education of the prince with a detailed discourse on the nature of man and the origins of civil society and government.¹ Examining how human nature relates to the transition from pre-civil to civil society is not the ordinary point of departure for the author of an early modern mirror-of-princes. Desiderius Erasmus, for instance, launches straight into the early education of the prince, then moves on to tangible topics like the preservation of peace or the imposition of taxes.² Treatises concerned with the ‘art’ of government as such commonly ignore the issue. Giovanni Botero, Pedro de Ribadeneira or the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius immediately set out to provide a doctrine of statecraft just as practicable, though morally less offensive than the one found in Machiavelli’s Il Principe.³ Mariana clearly intends to do his readers a similar service. Yet he enters the debate on the scope and limit of Christian statecraft from a very different angle. He is perhaps the only Jesuit author to root the transfer from pre-civil to civil society in a ‘state of nature’ after the Fall and before the conception of civil society.⁴

At first glance, Mariana’s account reads like a humanist melange of diverse motifs, lines and passages. Tenets from a wide variety of medieval and classical texts are woven into a flow of elegant and difficult Latin. Cicero’s De inventione, Virgil’s Georgica, Machiavelli’s Discorsi, as well as the works of Seneca and Saint Thomas Aquinas feature prominently. Mariana risks confusing readers who expect to enter a discourse on practical matters pertaining to the education of the prince and the conduct of government. Yet the complex, occasionally jumbled texture of his introductory chapters provides the foundation for much of what is to follow. The themes and contradictions that emerge from his intricate narrative go a long way to explain how and why he arrived at some of his surprising conclusions.

Human Nature

Initially, Mariana’s account of human nature reads like a paraphrase of well known passages from the treatise De regimine principum jointly attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas and Bartholomew (Ptolemy) of Lucca.⁵ Man is the animal sociabile. Though humans and animals share the desire to live communally, the former did not receive the physical characteristics, strength and helpful instincts which help animals survive. Yet human beings are amply compensated for these deficiencies. God endowed them with the power of speech. Individuals able to communicate can decide to combine their skills and resources. Experience thus gathered and skills honed over the course of generations enable humanity to overcome many of the illnesses and dangers that would have cut short their ancestors’ lives. At this point, Mariana seems upbeat about the nature and capabilities of humankind. His observations echo the confident belief in the moral and intellectual qualities of man familiar from the work of early sixteenth-century humanists like Erasmus or his Spanish follower Juan Luis Vives.⁶

This buoyant voice quickly dies away. Despite their undoubted ability to pool skills and resources, Mariana says, men will always be in desperate ‘need of many things’, and will always remain painfully aware of ‘the frailty of the human body’.⁷ Those who believe that human success in the arts, medicine and war will improve their lot sadly deceive themselves. The things purporting to ‘distinguish, enlighten and adorn human life’ are nothing but the result of man’s vain struggle to escape death and alleviate the endless misery of this life. De rege is not the only instance where Mariana elaborates on the theme of human destitution. Not long after the publication of his treatise on the education of the prince, he drafted a little humanist treatise clearly fashioned on Seneca’s De morte et mortalitate, even borrowing its title from Nero’s tutor.⁸ The work only ever lifts the most pessimistic and disillusioning traits from Seneca’s writings, especially the many variations on the theme of life as permanent death and misery.⁹ Positive reflections on human life, like the Stoic appreciation of heroism as a virtue are completely ignored.¹⁰ Seneca is the source of many of the themes of Mariana’s tale of despair and deprivation, helping Mariana to sum up his sobering disquisition on human nature in De rege. Thus he provides the adage that man enters into life shedding tears, and never ceases to do so until the day he dies.¹¹ The reader is assured that there is very little reason to rejoice in life.

Mariana goes on to present a dark and powerful explanation for the origin of society. Paraphrasing Aquinas again, he is now keen to emphasize the Augustinian strand in the latter’s writing. It is worth quoting his words in full:

If man really had the strength and robustness to repulse dangers, and did not require the assistance of others, what sort of society would there be? Would men respect one another? Would there be any order to life? Would there be any mutual trust? Any love of humanity? (…) What could there be more monstrous and more savage than man unrestrained by law and the fear of judgement? Could any beast cause such carnage?¹²

Man’s baseness and malice are without bounds. Indeed, the mere thought of self-sufficient man is terrifying. Such a ‘cruel beast’ would focus all his energies on inflicting unspeakable misery on his fellow man. Mariana takes the opportunity to criticize the kind of ancient scepticism increasingly current among educated Spaniards.¹³ He disparages those who contend that ‘nature is a stepmother, not a mother of the human race, who has instructed dumb animals in all good things, but has cast man needy and feeble into the pursuit of this life (…)’.¹⁴ It is foolish to accuse God of putting man in permanent fear of his life. Such a line of reasoning ‘smacks of impiety’.¹⁵ Men have every reason to thank God for having created them utterly weak and dependent on their fellow men. It is their flawed nature which forced men to ‘live in one place, under the same laws and associated into a multitude’ in the first instance.¹⁶ It is their very frailty which encouraged men to discover Christian charity and friendship. Physical weakness and resultant mutual dependence are a supreme expression of divine grace. The notion that man ignorant of law, justice and virtue is like a beast pervades classical, medieval and early modern literatures.¹⁷ Yet even among authors united in their pessimistic stance on human nature, Mariana stands out for the way in which he links such pessimism with rational proof for God’s love of His creation.

The transition from pre-civil to civil society

The sombre treatment of human affairs continues. Mariana omits any reference to the Fall and the status of man before the Fall. Instead, he focuses on the condition of man immediately after the Fall. Though he never actually refers to ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, his account is clearly inspired by ancient stories of a ‘Golden Age’ and subsequent decline of the human condition.¹⁸ He uses pertinent themes and motifs from a range of classical authors in order to describe the situation of post-lapsarian man as one that is changed for the worse by the progress of ‘time and the wickedness of men’. In doing so, Mariana in fact historicizes the transition from pre-civil to civil society.

For an unspecified period of time after the Fall, Mariana says, men lived a life of Arcadian innocence. Paraphrasing a Ciceronian locus classicus, he describes these ‘first men’ as being completely ignorant of laws, civil authority and private ownership (dominium).¹⁹ Whatever earth yielded, they used in common. Peaceful hunters and gatherers roamed the woods and plains. This Arcadian interval yet to be disturbed by the consequences of the Fall is epitomized in elegant verse lifted from Virgil’s Georgica:

Even to mark the land with private bounds
Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
Herself, unbidden, yielded all the more fully.²⁰

Men and women co-habited, and started setting up families. These small familial groups soon formed larger units. They were now much more able to satisfy their many needs, and to protect themselves against wild animals.²¹ Sons and grandsons went on to set up house close to the seats of the patriarch of the family until a cluster of families came to constitute a new and distinct form of community, the ‘sib’ or ‘clan’ (pagus). At some point, many pagi joined together, thus establishing yet another community, the barbarian ‘tribe’ (gens or natio). Pagus, then, denoted an ethnically defined community that was distinguished from gens, natio or populus by its lesser degree of political consciousness and organization.²² The fact that Mariana prefers pagus to the more common humanist translation of the relevant Aristotelian term (vicus) is likely to be more than just a matter of stylistic variation. By using pagus rather than vicus, he stresses the pre-political, yet already ethnical rather than purely familial nature of the sib or clan as a stage in the development of the civilis societas.

Eventually, with further procreation and dispersion of families, more and more clans established themselves. Mariana admits that these primeval men, pure and innocent though they were, could not have existed without ‘some sort of government’. ‘Natural instinct and impulse’ (naturae instinctus et impulsus), he says, advised them to submit willingly and unconsciously to the counsel and guidance of their elders.²³ No one man was more powerful than his neighbour, and violence among men unheard of. The picture is one of nomadic clans emerging from the dawn of mythical time still utterly ignorant of avarice, violence and deceit.²⁴ Their life bore all the hallmarks of the ancients’ Golden Age.

In the following, Mariana infuses his account with his ever more prevalent theme of decline and corruption. Though he does not mention the Fall of Adam, he depicts a post-lapsarian mankind increasingly beset by vice. Developing his theme of a post-lapsarian state of nature, Mariana is increasingly out of tune with Thomist-Aristotelian conceptualizations of how society came into being. He does not, for instance, allow for a natural (in the Aristotelian sense) progression from this imagined state of nature to civil society. Civil society is not merely a complex and much more accomplished extension of family and clan. Civil society is the product of a period of transition characterised by the creeping progress of human corruption.

At some point after the Fall, powerful men became aware of their ability to terrorize and exploit their neighbours.²⁵ Organizing themselves into vagrant bands of robbers, they set out to deprive their fellow men of their lives and goods. These bands of murderers and thieves are the first associations to transgress and transcend the primeval pagus (the ‘instinctive’, still family-based community). Mariana calls them populus or societas. Yet to him they represent merely a preliminary stage of societal organization. These populi are nothing but rudimentarily organized mobs, held together by no more than the prospect of pillage and plunder. They existed without civic leaders as opposed to leaders of murderous gangs, and did not organize themselves on the basis of positive law. Yet they instigated the establishment of civil society. Under threat of being overwhelmed by ferocious potentiores, ‘some men’ came to recognize the need ‘to bind themselves with others in a mutual covenant of society (mutuum foedus societatis)’. Placing themselves under the authority of a rector, they formed the first civil societies. It was not the hostility of their natural environs that induced men to enter into a compact. Only a situation of escalating internecine strife forced them to abandon the primeval patriarchal community.

Mariana thus identifies a serious discontinuity between the formation of familia and pagu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction: Revisiting De rege
• 1 Human Nature, the Origins of Civil Society, and the Power of Princes
• 2 Power and the Law
• 3 ‘True Power’: Abandoning the Discourse on Sovereignty
• 4 Prudence, History and Providence
• 5 Guardians of the Realm
• Conclusion: De rege and the History of Early Modern Spanish Political Thought
• Bibliography
• Index