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Article Excerpt
In the history of medieval political thought no virtue has been more pivotal than prudence. After Thomas Aquinas the defenders of monarchy in France increasingly made prudence the princely virtue par excellence by making it the basis of justice, the exercise of the common good, and the moral requisite of decision making. In this process no work has been more telling than the monumental De regimine principum (1275-80) (1) of Giles of Rome (1243-1316), a work which enjoyed widespread dissemination for the next four centuries. In a general way we can say that the main reason for its popularity at princely courts was the vast powers it ascribed to the king, especially in lawmaking and the administration of justice. Modern scholars have been fascinated by this process of distribution, even if today the reasons for its utilization are not always clear. (2) Recent studies have emphasized how selective Giles was in using the works of Aristotle and even Aquinas. (3) It has been suggested that Giles added a moral content to the intellectual virtue of prudence in order to give the king's distributive justice greater force. (4) Although Aquinas gave more political content to Aristotle's prudence, Giles went further by making this virtue the foundation of all princely behavior. It is the virtue of prudence, according to this line of reasoning, that legitimizes all the practical measures which follow in detail in his Mirror of Princes, such as the managing of the royal household. (5)
While this insight in Giles' treatment of political prudence is a breakthrough for further research, it leaves two questions unanswered:
1) Why did Giles link prudence to communicative justice?
2)Why did Giles abandon, according to the usual interpretation, this exalted idea of the prudent king in his later De ecclesiastica potestate (1301-02), (6) which made the king subservient to the pope? The answer is, it is argued here, that he did not make the king a mere servant of the supreme pontiff. The apparent contradiction between the role of the king in both these treatises is resolved once it is realized that Giles tied the king to the defense of his subjects' property rights. The misunderstandings of both these tracts arise from the assumption that they were largely occasion pieces, commissioned for specific purposes, and, like many scholastic tracts, divorced from the realities of the day.
Giles entered the Order of the Augustinian Hermits in 1258, at the height of the mendicant-secular clergy conflicts in Paris (1252-59). While there is no evidence the young Giles was directly involved in the controversy, he certainly would have been interested in the exchange. His new-founded Order was dependent on the papacy for its existence and its privileges. The property question concerned the Augustinian Hermits, who were closer to the Dominicans--who held property in common but not as individuals--than the Franciscans (who possessed neither). Giles would have been sympathetic to the arguments of Thomas Aquinas, who defended the right of prelates to own property, which was compatible with their pastoral duties. Aquinas, unlike Bonaventure, shifts the discussion away from poverty and toward charity, as the central virtue for all religious and prelacy. (7) Later, in writing the De regimine, Giles came to realize that he needed a foundational virtue which was different from both poverty and charity. He focused on justice, not charity, as the principle of the princely right to hold property. By extension, the laity, in general, hold the same right as a function of their obligation to dispense justice fairly. If it seems strange that Giles in 1275-80, when he was writing his Mirror, would emphasize what appears almost self-evident--that laymen may own property--it should be noted that the mendicant-secular clergy controversy had not yet subsided by that time. Indeed, the second phase of the dispute (1268-71) intensified it by reaching out to wider issues, to the very notion of perfection in the various states in the church. Technically Giles did not have to respond to the issue of perfection as an attribute of holding property, since the debate was mainly about religious and prelates. But Giles seems to have believed that he had to affirm that laymen could be virtuous and hold property, while yet avoiding the question of Christ and his apostles as possessors of property. (Giles could not appeal to scripture in a Mirror which is centered on Aristotle.) Once again, Giles turns to (natural) justice as the prince's point of reference for holding property.
It might be added that just after Giles became a student at Paris in c. 1268, the Olivi-poor use controversy and the problem of Franciscan poverty was about to erupt, not to mention the ongoing attack on certain friars as proponents of Joachite prophecies. Morever, the condemnation of some Thomist ideas in 1277 would probably have made Giles hesitant to appear too close to Aquinas' opinions about charity as the mainstay of episcopal property. (8) Giles' decision to defend the prince's right to property on the basis of Aristotelian natural law permitted him to sidestep the scriptural and canonical bases of clerical property. Although he never discusses the mendicants' claim to possess goods in common, it would be intriguing to know how much of the De regimine was written (or revised) after the papal bull Exiit qui seminat of 1279 (upholding Franciscan absolute poverty) had reached Paris. One wonders if Giles' extended attack on property in common as practiced by the ancient Spartans was a judicious way of distancing himself from Franciscan evangelical poverty; that is, Giles' attack was in part intended to avoid any accusation that he was attacking the papal bull. If so, this would be all the more reason to avoid all references to church property in the De regimine. Any clerical reader during 1275-80 would have noticed the move away from Thomist charity and toward justice and prudence. To make his case, Giles decided to not treat the question of ecclesiastical property and the right of secular princes to intervene in such property.
Thus the issues of poverty and property were very much vibrant in the 1270s. These controversies may have influenced Giles' view of the princes' relation to property, in particular the virtue of prudence. In the very beginning of his Mirror where he establishes prudence as the predominant virtue for rulers, he defines a tyrant as one who confiscates the temporal goods of others in order to get rich. (9) Such action is wrong because the tyrant's motive is greed, and because the laity's possessions are guaranteed by the good customs and laws of the realm. (10) In the context of the treatise as well as the policies of the royal court in the 1270s, these exhortations might have disposed the young prince Philip to think immediately of royal emergency taxation of the clergy and the increase of indirect taxes on the laity, especially the townsmen. (11) It should...
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