Following on from what has been said, it remains to show the productive cause of that which exercises the function of prince, viz. the cause through which the authority of principate, which is instituted by election, is given to a person or persons. For it is by this authority that a prince is made such in actuality, and not by his knowledge of the laws, prudence, or moral virtue, even if these are the qualities of the perfect prince. For it is a fact that many may have these qualities, who nonetheless, because they lack this authority, are yet not princes (unless perhaps in proximate potential).

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Returning to the question, then, let us say (in accordance with the truth and with the opinion of Aristotle, Politics III chapter 6) that the efficient power to institute or to elect a principate belongs to the legislator or the universal body of the citizens, just as we said in chapter 12 of this discourse that the passing of laws belongs to this same body; and any correction of the principate – or even its deposition if that is necessary for the common advantage – likewise belongs to it. For this is one of those greater matters in the polity that in chapter 13 of this discourse, section 4, we concluded belong to the universal multitude of the citizens (from what Aristotle says in Politics III chapter 6). For ‘the multitude is dominant in greater things’, as was said in that place. The manner of assembling for the said institution or election may vary perhaps according to the various regions. But the truth is that whatever the ways in which they may differ, this can be seen in every case: that an election or institution of this kind always comes about by the authority of the legislator, which (as we have said over and over again) is the universal body of the citizens or its prevailing part.

This treatise will be called The Defender of the Peace, because it discusses and explains the particular causes by which civil peace or tranquillity is preserved and exists, and also those through which its opposite, strife, arises, is prevented and is removed. For by it the authority, cause and harmony of divine and human laws and of coercive principate of any kind – which are the rules of human actions – can be known: and it is in the appropriate and unhindered measurement of these actions that the peace or tranquillity of the city consists.

Furthermore, both prince and subject, the primary elements of any civil order, can understand by this treatise what they must do in order to preserve the peace and their own liberty. For the first citizen or part of a civil regime, sc. the princely – be it one man or several – will understand from the human and divine truths written down in this book that they alone have the authority to command the subject multitude, collectively or individually, and to constrain any individual, if it is expedient to do so, according to the laws that have been laid down. They will also understand that they can do nothing more than this, particularly anything involving difficulty, without the consent of the subject multitude or the legislator; and that the multitude or legislator should not be provoked by injustice, because the force and authority of principate consists in the express will of this same multitude. The subject multitude and each of its individuals can, for its part, learn from this book what kind of man or men it should institute to exercise the function of prince. It will also learn that it is obliged to obey only the commands of the princely part as being coercive for and in the status of this present world, although these commands must nonetheless be in accordance with the laws that have been laid down, in the case of those matters that the laws determine; and in the case of those they do not, these commands should be in accordance with what was said in chapters 14 and 17 of the first discourse.

This being our understanding, someone will object to what we have said that if bishops or priests who minister the gospel, and who also wish to observe the status of perfection, cannot keep anything to supply their future need except on condition that they have the will and the firm purpose to give it to any poor man or men whom they first meet and who are most in need, together with the other conditions that we detailed before in our description of supreme poverty; then how will they be able to concentrate on both preaching the word of God and procuring their daily living, as seems necessary if it is not licit for them to keep anything for themselves for the future? For it seems difficult or impossible for these to be done at the same time. Hence in Acts 6: ‘It is not reasonable that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables,’ the apostles imply that these two cannot be done at the same time. Therefore it is licit for the perfect to keep temporal things to supply their future need. The same thing can be shown further from another place; for on John 14, on the passage: ‘because he had the bags, in which they kept the offerings etc.’ the gloss says, ‘In this the church is given the pattern of keeping necessities.’ Since, therefore, it is the perfect, and especially priests or bishops, who are understood by the term ‘church’ in this passage, it appears that they can licitly keep necessities for themselves against the future. Again on that passage of Matthew 7: ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow,’ the gloss says: ‘But no one should be scandalised if he sees one of the just procuring these necessities for himself and his own, and let him not form the judgement that he is taking thought for the morrow; since in order to give an example of so doing, he who issued this command, and to whom angels ministered, had bags from which he could furnish necessities for use.’

As I embark upon something so difficult, then, I am quite assured that there is nothing in the way that could have a claim to truth. But nevertheless I see three entrenched enemies of that very truth readying their weapons against this work. One is persecution from the violent power of the Roman bishops and their accomplices. For they will strive with all their forces to destroy both it and those heralds of the truth who spread it abroad, as the direct adversaries of their purpose of unjustly seizing and keeping possession of temporal goods, as well as of their burning desire for principate. To recall them from all this with words of truth will be a difficult business, however evident those words may be. But may merciful God in his grace deign to recall them nonetheless: may he curb their violent might, and may all his faithful, both princes and subjects, curb it likewise; for it is everyone's peace that is menaced by these men.

A second old enemy of almost any truth is no less readying its weapons against this work, viz. the habit of listening to and believing things that are false: I mean falsehoods that have long been sown and taken root in the souls of many simple Christian faithful by certain priests or bishops and their adherents. For in various of their speeches and writings these priests have implicated both divine and human judgements about human acts in multiple convolutions that are extremely laborious to unfold. And from this tissue of opinions they have inferred, although without any justification, certain interpretations by means of which they have introduced their unjust despotism upon the Christian faithful. For these in their simplicity believe, from various bits of misreasoning on the part of these priests – along with a threat of eternal damnation – that they are bound by divine ordinance to obey these spoken and written sophistries (in which the conclusion frequently fails to follow from the premises).

Now that we have determined these matters, we want to follow on by showing that it is expedient and extremely useful to establish one single bishop and one single church or college of priests as head or principal of the rest. First, however, we must distinguish the modes and senses in which one single church or bishop can be understood to be head of all the others, so that we can separate the mode or sense that is appropriate from those that are inappropriate or inexpedient. Now a single bishop or church can be understood to be head of all the others in one way, viz. in the sense that all the churches and individual persons of the world are obliged to believe the meaning of Holy Scripture in accordance with their definition and determination in cases where doubts arise (especially concerning what must be believed and observed of necessity of salvation); and are obliged to observe church ritual or divine worship in accordance with what they ordain. In this sense, no single bishop or church of any province, as such, and no college of priests is head of the others by an establishment of divine law, nor (according to the example of the early church) is it expedient that such a head should exist; and similarly not by any ordinance or decree of the faithful human legislator either. For if this were so, then along with all the other resulting inconveniences all princes, communities and peoples would of necessity of salvation be obliged to believe, in accordance with the definition or determination of Boniface VIII, that they were subject to the Roman pope in coercive jurisdiction; and again, according to the decrees of some individual, so-called Roman pope, that it is not Christ's counsel to reject or renounce, both in common and as proper to oneself, the possession or dominion of temporal goods or the power of licitly contending for such things or of claiming them before a coercive judge.

To sum up, let us draw together what we have conveyed concerning the power or authority of the priestly keys given by Christ to the apostles, and say that in the sinner who truly repents, i.e. grieves for a sin committed, God alone effects certain things even with no preceding ministration on the part of a priest, viz. the illumination of the mind, the purging of the fault or stain of sin, and the remission of eternal damnation. But there are other things that God effects in the same sinner not by himself alone, but through the ministration of a priest, such as to show who, in the view of the church, is held to be loosed or bound from his sins in this world and is to be bound or loosed in another, i.e. those whose sins God has retained or forgiven. Again there is another thing that God effects in respect of a sinner through the ministration of a priest, sc. the commutation of the penalty of purgatory, which is owed by the sinner for the status of the world to come, into some satisfaction which is temporal or of this world. For he relaxes it in whole or in part according to the kinds of satisfaction that have been enjoined and the condition of the penitent, all of which should take place through the priest with the key of power according to discernment. So, too, the insolent are excluded by the priest from the communion of the sacraments, and those recovering their right mind are readmitted to it, as we said towards the end of the previous chapter.

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And this was the opinion of the Master in Book 4, distinction 18, chapter 8, when he said: ‘Regarding these ways of binding and loosing, in what sense is it true’, that: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed also in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound also in heaven.”

The rest of this discourse is given over to explaining and resolving, in an appropriate manner, the authorities of Scripture or the canon and the elements of human reasoning that were introduced in chapter 3 of this discourse and the preceding, and which seemed to contradict our conclusions. Before we go on, however, it is as well to remember what we said in chapter 19 of this discourse, in accordance both with the view of Saint Augustine and with infallible reasoning founded on Scripture: viz. that we are not bound, of necessity of salvation, to have faith in, believe for certain, or confess as true, any speech or writing except those which are called ‘canonic’: i.e. those that are contained in the Bible, those that necessarily follow from them, and those interpretations of Holy Scripture (where the sense is doubtful) that have been made by a general council of catholic faithful. This is especially so for those clauses where error would lead to eternal damnation, such as the articles of the Christian faith, together with those interpretations of them that have been made in general councils convened, held and brought to a close in accordance with reason. And therefore where the authorities of the sacred canon or Holy Scripture do not need mystical exposition, we shall in all cases follow their clear and literal sense; where they do, I shall follow the more probable opinion of the saints. If the saints have put forward any views on their own authority, going beyond Scripture, I shall accept those that are in agreement with Scripture or the canon and reject those that disagree; but always on the authority of Scripture, upon which I shall always rely. Because they too sometimes differ amongst each other in their opinions on Scripture and going beyond Scripture, as for example Jerome and Augustine on that passage of Galatians 2: ‘But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed;’ and again Ambrose and Jerome on the question of Joseph's virginity.

According to this reasoning, therefore, there is also a judge who has coercive authority over transgressors in accordance with divine law, which we said was also a coercive standard of some human acts, both immanent and transitive. And this judge is one alone, sc. Christ, and no other. Hence James 4: ‘There is one lawgiver and judge, who is able to free and to destroy.’ But the coercive power of this judge is not exercised upon anyone in this world to mete out penalty or punishment or reward to those who transgress or observe the law laid down directly by him, which we have often called the evangelical law. For it was Christ's will, in his mercy, to allow the possibility of merit and of repenting of deeds committed against his law up until the very end of a man's life, as will be shown in what follows from the authorities of Holy Scripture.

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Now analogously with human law there is another judge in accordance with gospel scripture, who is a judge in the first signification: sc. the priest, who is a teacher in this world of the divine law and of the commands it contains of what is to be done or avoided in order to achieve eternal life and escape penalty, but who nevertheless has no coercive power in this world to constrain anyone to the observance of the things it commands. For it would be vain for him to coerce anyone to them, given that they would be of no profit to someone who had been coerced into observing them; we showed this plainly through Chrysostom (or rather through the Apostle) in chapter 5 of this discourse, section 6. And so we can appropriately liken this judge to a physician, who has been given the authority of teaching and commanding and making a prognosis or judgement about those things that are useful to be done or omitted in order to achieve bodily health and escape death or illness.

However, before we proceed to the demonstration of our propositions, we should take note of something extremely useful or indeed necessary for the certainty of everything we shall say in what follows. It is this: that we are not bound, of necessity of eternal salvation, irrevocably to believe or confess any writing other than those scriptures that are called ‘canonic’, or what necessarily follows from them, or – where the sense of Holy Scripture is doubtful – those interpretations or decisions that have been made through a general council of the catholic faithful; especially in those matters where an error would incur eternal damnation, such as are the articles of the Christian faith.

2

We assume as self-evident to all Christians that the Holy Scriptures should be firmly believed and confessed to be true; and because this cannot be proved otherwise than by their own authoritative pronouncements, I have omitted the passages for the sake of brevity. It is also apparent enough that we should give the same belief to interpretations of them made in the way we have said, since it seems that we must, in piety, hold that they have been revealed to us by the same holy spirit. We can show this from Scripture and an infallible argument based upon it. From Scripture, when the Truth says in Matthew 28, the final chapter: ‘and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ On this Rabanus Maurus has: ‘From this it can be understood that even unto the end of the world, there will not fail to be those who are worthy of God's immanent presence and dwelling;’ and we must in piety hold that the holy spirit always accompanies such people for the preservation of the faith. Hence Jerome: ‘Thus he promises that he will be with his disciples even unto the end of the world, and shows that they shall live for ever, and that he will never leave those who believe in him’.

It follows from what we have said that we should now show what kind of power, authority and judgement Christ may have wished to grant these same apostles and their successors, and what he did in fact grant them, on the strength of the words of Holy Scripture. Now among the words that seem to have a more express significance in this respect are those that Christ addressed to Peter, Matthew 16, when he said: ‘And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven;’ similarly, again, what the same Christ said to all the apostles in Matthew 18 and John 20: ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,’ and: ‘Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them’ etc. For it is from these words in particular that the opinion and title of ‘plenitude of power’, which the bishop of Rome ascribes to himself, takes its origin.

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In order to have a surer sense and awareness of these words, we need to recall certain things that we said in the last chapter of the first discourse, viz. that Christ, true God and true man, came into the world to bear witness to the truth, as he said himself in John 18: the truth, that is, of those things that are to be believed, done and rejected in order for the human race to attain eternal salvation. He both taught this truth in speech and showed it by example, and ultimately he handed it on in writing through the sayings of the evangelists and his apostles, so that in the absence of himself and his apostles we might still be guided by this Scripture in matters that are relevant to eternal salvation. And this was the office that he committed to the apostles his successors to carry out when he said to them in Matthew 28, the final chapter, in almost his very last words: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’

The remaining and final task of this discourse is to infer, from what has previously been determined, the causes of tranquillity and its opposite in a city or realm. For this was the principal question according to the purpose we set ourselves from the start. And first of all we shall indicate these causes in their common nature, presupposing from Aristotle (in book V of his Politics) the individual definitions of those that arise in the usual way. Following on from there we shall offer a specific discussion of that unusual cause of discord or intranquillity in civil regimes, which we said in the proem had long disturbed – and continues increasingly to harass and disturb – the realm of Italy.

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To this end we must take up again the descriptions of tranquillity and its opposite already stated in chapter 2 of this discourse. For tranquillity was the good disposition of a city or realm, in which each of its parts is able to carry out the tasks appropriate to it according to reason and its institution. From this description the nature of tranquillity becomes clear. For when it says ‘good disposition’, this marks out its general intrinsic what-it-is. Whereas when it says that through it ‘each of the parts of the city is able to carry out the tasks appropriate to it’, this signifies its end, and this further enables us to understand its own particular what-it-is or differentia. Now since tranquillity is a kind of form or disposition of a city or realm, and is no more unitary than we argued a realm and city is (chapter 17 of this discourse, sections 11 and 12), it does not have a formal cause: for this is peculiar to composite entities. But we can grasp its active or productive cause from what was said in chapter 15 of this discourse and from the other things that necessarily accompany it in a city or realm.

As we embark on what we propose, therefore, we wish first to make plain what constitutes the tranquillity and the intranquillity of a realm or city; and of these, first tranquillity: for if this is not clear we cannot know what constitutes intranquillity. And since both of these seem to be dispositions of a city or realm (as we suppose from Cassiodorus) we shall without further delay make plain what needs to be clarified, i.e. what a realm or city is and what it is for, so that the description of tranquillity and its opposite will also become clearer.

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So, since we wish (following the order we have set down) to describe the tranquillity of a city or realm, we should be aware – so as to avoid any ambiguity that may arise from the multiplicity of terms – that this term ‘realm’ in one of its significations implies a plurality of cities or provinces contained under one regime. In this sense a realm does not differ from a city in terms of the form of polity, but rather in terms of size. On another understanding of the word, this term ‘realm’ signifies a particular type of polity or temperate regime, which Aristotle calls ‘temperate monarchy’. In this sense there can be a realm in a single city just as there can be in several – as was the case around the beginnings of civil communities, when in most cases there was one single king in each single city. The third signification of the term, and the most familiar, is a mixture of the first and the second. The fourth sense is something common to every type of temperate regime, whether in a single city or in several cities; Cassiodorus took it in this sense in the words we placed at the beginning of this book, and it is in this same sense that we too shall use the term in determining the answers to our questions.

Now with regard to what we said in chapter 15, and likewise in other chapters subsequently, someone might quite well raise doubts and show, first of all, that the dignity of a bishop is greater and different in type from that which belongs solely or simply speaking to a priest; and that a bishop's dignity does not exist purely as a result of the human institution that we called ‘separable’, but rather by divine ordination as well, which we earlier called ‘essential’. It seems that this can be convincingly established from Luke 10, where we find this passage: ‘After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face’. On this Bede writes: ‘Just as no one doubts that the twelve apostles prefigure the bishops, so likewise these seventy prefigured the priests of the second order of priests.’ The same thing can be shown from I Timothy 5, when the Apostle said: ‘Against a priest receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses.’ Therefore Timothy was superior in dignity to the other priests, but not by an election on the part of priests or the multitude of the faithful; therefore by divine ordination. Again, the same thing is apparent from the Letter of Pope Clement, headed ‘to James the brother of the Lord’. This seems also to have been the opinion of almost all bishops who are said to have succeeded Peter or Paul in the episcopal see of Rome, as is clear from the abovementioned Codex of Isidore.

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Secondly, it seems that it can be shown that Saint Peter was superior to the rest of the apostles by a power or authority that was given him directly by Christ and not by another man or men; and in consequence that his successors are superior to the successors of the others.

Of the conclusions to be drawn, we shall set down as the first:

1

That in order to gain eternal beatitude, it is necessary to believe only in the truth of divine or canonic Scripture, what follows from it with any kind of necessity, and the interpretation of it that has been made by a common council of the faithful, if this is put to an individual in due fashion. The certainty of this was given in and can be taken from chapter 19 of the second discourse, sections 2–5.

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That only a general council of the faithful or its prevailing multitude or part should determine the senses of divine law where there is doubt over the definition, especially those matters which are called the articles of the Christian faith, and anything else that must be believed of necessity of salvation; and that no other partial collective body or individual person, of whatever condition they may be, has the authority for the determination just mentioned. The certainty of this is given in chapter 20 of the second discourse, sections 4–13.

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That no one is commanded in evangelical scripture to be compelled to observe the commands of divine law by temporal penalty or punishment: chapter 9 of the second discourse, sections 3–10.

4

That for eternal salvation it is necessary to keep only the commands of the evangelical law or those that follow from them of necessity, and those things which it is appropriate to do or to omit according to right reason; and not all the commands of the old law: chapter 9 of the second discourse, section 10 to the end.

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That no mortal can give a dispensation from things that are commanded or prohibited by God or in the evangelical law; and that only a general council or the faithful human legislator can prohibit things that are permitted, binding people to fault or penalty for the status of this present world or of that to come, and no other partial college or individual person whatever their condition: chapter 12 of the first discourse; chapter 9 of the second, section 1, and 21 of the second, section 8.