Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought

by Harald E. Braun

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.

214 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Roland Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over 400 years ago, a Jesuit theologian named Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) tried explaining what makes a good ruler to the twenty-year old Philip III, who ascended the Spanish throne that year. His book De rege et regis institutione (On the King and the Royal Institution) was so unsuccessful that people thought that he was advocating killing the king. Mariana was writing at an unfortunate time because French jurists such as Hubert Languet and François Hotman were reinterpreting the Bible and Roman law to justify overthrowing tyrants in the name of religious freedom. When Mariana wrote about the French king Henry III (1574-1589) that he exhibited the “character and talents of the tyrant, hated equally by Heaven and men,” and that the king’s own crimes led to his assassination, his opponents assumed that this meant Mariana believed that anyone had the right to kill a king they thought was a tyrant. Not only was this bad news for Mariana, it cast a shadow over the Jesuit order as a whole, which was looking less and less trustworthy from the king’s perspective. But according to Harald Braun’s close study of De rege, whatever Mariana was, he was not a regicide. Braun takes us into a world where Christians, not secular nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists, believed that they alone had the right to run the country as they saw fit.

Read my full review here: https://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/06/...