Defensor Minor and De Translatione Imperii

Defensor Minor and De Translatione Imperii, translated Cary Nederman.  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1993).

From introduction to work:

“Because the Defensor Minor operates at a level of greater specificity than the Defensor Pacis,  it erases many of the ambiguities of the earlier work and affords further insight into the Nana fundamental intellectual and political commitments. His use of sources offers one example of an interpretive problem which the Defensor Minor helps to resolve. In discourse one of the Defensor Pacis, Marsilius relies heavily upon citations from Aristotle’s Politics, Ethics, and other works in order to authorize his theory of the temporal community and its rulership, while the anti-people arguments contained in the 2nd discourse are profoundly indebted to the terms in which the “spiritual” wing of the Franciscan order couched its dispute with Pope John XXII over the issue of clerical poverty.  Yet scholars have for many reasons suspected the sincerity or depth of Marsilius’s dedication to either Aristotelianism or the Spiritual Franciscan cause.

This suspicion is confirmed by the text of the Defensor Minor,  where the authorities cited are mainly biblical, with occasional reliance upon the Fathers (Chrysostom, Augustine, Ambrose) and more still rarely upon medieval sources (Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux). Marsilius’s  inattention to the Aristotelian and Spiritual Franciscan  teachings may be explained by his polemical purposes. Just as the Defensor Pacis  was designed to appeal to a cross section of European political units, so equally it sought to rally proponents of differing intellectual orientations to the anti-papl causes. Marsilius  cloaked the doctrines of the 1st discourse in Aristotelian garb in order to attract fellow school men by demonstrating that opposition to the papacy was an inescapable consequence of Aristotle’s teachings. He connected his thoughts to the arguments of the Spiritual Franciscans, who afforded  the most potent source of opposition to the papacy within the early 14th century church, in order to show how their views led inevitably to his own. In effect, the Defensor Pacis  set out  to colonize Aristotelian scholasticism and Spiritual Franciscanism  in the name of anti-papalism. In the Defensor Minor, however, Marsilius’s  audience has changed. The appeal to authoritative sources in the Defensor Pacis turns  out to be a further instance of the elastic quality of his thought.”

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