Marsiglio of Padua (called also Mainardini, and Menandrinus), an ardent sympathiser with the Emperor Ludwig, and a distinct progenitor of Wyclif in his ideas of political government. Mr. R. L. Poole has clearly summarised the arguments of Marsiglio in his Wycliffe and Movements for Reform, a volume which must be consulted by any reader who wishes to trace in detail the descent of ideas, and especially of political ideas, through Marsiglio and Ockham to Wyclif.[1] Marsiglio worked out his conception of the harmony which should exist between the civil and the spiritual dominion in his Defensor Pacis, produced whilst he was living at Paris in 1324, which was probably a few years after the date of Wyclif's birth, This work, with the Dialogus and De Ecclesiastica et Politica Potestate of Ockham, was widely read by his contemporaries and successors; and the literature to which these works belong did much to create or reconstruct the model on which our actual theories of Church and State have been formed.
No doubt for the original ideas we should have to go back at least as far as the political philosophers of Greece and Rome, to whom Marsiglio must have been more or less directly indebted for them. Prescience and divination alone could scarcely have enabled a Schoolman to evolve from surrounding chaos the main political principles of the eighteenth century; but, whether this could have been or not, the more salient of these principles had been stated
- ↑ See also John Wiclif and his English Precursors, by Prof. G. V. Lechler; Lorimer's translation.
