Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought (review)

The Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) is remembered as the most prominent Catholic monarchomach and a leading historiographer of late sixteenth-century Spain. In his De Rege et Regis institutione libre III et Phillippum III Hispaniæ Regem Catholicum (1599), Mariana at the same time advocated absolute monarchy and the overthrowing of tyrants. Mariana thus occupies an odd place in the history of political philosophy, for his ideas contradicted the prevailing absolutist ideology of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic Church. Harald Braun's analysis of De rege seeks to explain this historical anomaly, not simply by presenting Mariana's thought in its contemporary political context, but by following the roots of Mariana's arguments in medieval conciliar thought, as well as in humanist political philosophy.

Braun meticulously shows how Mariana crafted his arguments out of the classical and medieval traditions of civil and canon law. Indeed, as scandalous as Mariana's ideas came to be, they were deeply rooted in the canons of the Church and Thomist philosophy, and in the fear that rogue nobility would seize power from a legitimate king. This explains why Philip III welcomed the tyrannicidal De rege as an advice book that represented his own virtue as a ruler.

What makes Braun's study valuable and new is that he convincingly presents Mariana as a meeting point between medievalist conciliar thought and the historicist, humanist philosophies of prudence. Indeed, Mariana, a good Spanish Augustinian and Tacitist, was imbued with the pessimism rooted in the downfallen state of mankind. Like Justus Lipsius and other political thinkers who lived in the age of religious war, Mariana had little faith in politics and was convinced, in good Tacitean (and, indeed, Machiavellian) form, that the state was ever threatened by strife and faction. Thus Mariana advocated a virtuous and prudent civic prince according to the model laid out by Justus Lipsius in his Politica (1589). And like Lipsius, Mariana saw absolute monarchy as a force against faction and war, but one that could only exist with a philosophy of civic prudence and the common good. Yet in contrast to Lipsius and traditional absolutists, he insists that without constitutional law and humanist virtue, kings become tyrants, and tyrants should be overthrown.

In the end, Braun shows that Mariana's synthetic discourse was neither rationalist nor secular. It was based on the defense of the particular administrative role played by the Spanish secular clergy. Tracing a Catholic genealogy of political liberty and constitutional sovereignty, Braun reveals that Mariana's idea of the monarch as a legal governor grew from a defense of the rights and liberties of the Church, and in this way can be seen as being related to, though not exactly the same as, Gallicanism: that shaky entente between protonationalist clergy and secular monarchy. Braun's important work illustrates ever more clearly that historians of political liberty cannot claim that ideas such as constitutionalism, popular sovereignty, and the modern state were purely secularist. Indeed, they grew from long ecclesiastical and legal traditions that intertwined religious and secular power in both Catholic and Protestant countries. If there were a secularizing tendency, some of its thickest roots grew from theology and canon law, which Marsilius of Padua and others had shown could be used to defend secular royal power.

The question therefore remains: why did Mariana use the unorthodox batch of classical, ecclesiastical, and humanist elements that he did to come up with his idea of Catholic limited absolutism? Braun leaves us intrigued. A full intellectual biography of Mariana seems the next logical step after this book. An examination of Mariana's education, existing correspondence, library catalogue, historical and antiquarian practices, and the writings of those close to him might reveal even more clearly his motivations. Braun's study is the first step in this new excavation of Mariana, and he opens the way for those who want to understand...