THE FRANCISCAN’S POSITION AND THE MARSILIUS’ CONTRIBUTION ON POVERTY DEBATES

With the appearance of the Mendicants Order — namely, Franciscan and Dominicans — at the beginning the thirteenth century several questions about Christian poverty arose, initially about the ideal of Christian life, and later, in the fourteenth century, questions associated with dominion and coercive power. The present study aims to show the contribution of Marsilius of Padua on ecclesiastic poverty debates, exposed in his Defensor Pacis (1324). We intend to show that the radical Marsilius’ position about poverty is in concordance with his political and ecclesiastic project, in which the clerics, as a social group, had to submit to the command of the civil law, while at the same time they had to live in absolute poverty, because this would be the right way for Christ’s followers to live. His position is usually associated with Franciscan thought, thus it is important to know which of the points can be associated with the minor friars. For this, we will divide the text into two parts: in the first, we show how the poverty question becomes a theoretical problem, and some features we can call the “Franciscan poverty theory”. In the second part, we intend to present Marsilius’ thesis about the ecclesiastic poverty and how this fits into his ecclesiastic-political project. At the end, two aspects must be highlighted: first, Marsilius defended the ideal of apostolic life as absolute poverty, allowing the priesthood only the use of goods; second, Marsilius is emphatic in his position that the clerics do not have any dominium or coercive power in the worldly plan; and this is not only a political question, but also fits in his ecclesiastic theory described in the second part of Defender of peace.