Alcune osservazioni intorno al Defensor pacis di Marsilio da Padova

Marsilian thought on power and the state, on the legitimacy of government and on the role of priesthood within civil society covers a wide theoretical spectrum even if it derives from a contingent situation. It focuses on the analysis of the exercise of political power and, in a context that is strongly characterised by the weight of a Patristic and Biblical tradition, it attempts to distinguish between the civil dimension of the “freedom” of the state (understood as the organisation of men and not of believers) and the dimension of an eventual other-worldly spiritual salvation. His theoretical and political struggle does not derive from an antiecclesiastical bias; on the contrary it is a consequence of Marsilio’s vision of man’s naturalness and his aims in his worldly life. Marsilio can in this way claim the sincere individual adhesion to the rules of each individual’s beliefs, and establish the validity of law, freed of all divine and eternal plan, on premises of a jurisdictional nature. The retrieval of the Ciceronian theme of language, as foundation of the human capacity to associate, allows him, moreover, to overcome the impasse between Aristotelian anthropological naturalism and Agostinian pessimism