Ian Campbell is Reader in Early Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published, with Floris Verhaart, a collection of Calvinist writings on war: Protestant Politics beyond Calvin: Reformed Theologians on War in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Routledge, 2022). He recently edited a cluster of articles on early modern war for the Journal of the History of Ideas (Volume 83, Number 4, October 2022), and another cluster of articles on sacralisation in early modern Europe is forthcoming in History of European Ideas. This incorporates an English translation of an important article by the late Italian scholar, Paolo Prodi, on confessionalisation and sacralisation, available as an early online publication here.
What did Franciscan scholastics teach about warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Historians know a lot about Dominican and Jesuit writing on warfare. The Dominican friars of the School of Salamanca like Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto are especially famous, and their work has been woven into the early history of international law. Nevertheless, Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern world. They were vital to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. They were often the most militant preachers in Paris during the French Wars of Religion. They served in large numbers as chaplains to the Spanish armies in the Low Countries during the long war against the Dutch. They were deeply engaged in the re-Catholicisation of lands conquered by imperial forces in Germany. And Franciscans occupied many chairs in theology across Catholic Europe, composing hundreds of theological commentaries, and theological and philosophical handbooks. What did they have to say about war and politics? Did they adopt the same doctrines as their Dominican and Jesuit contemporaries, or did they constitute a distinctive tradition?
During the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Franciscans – both the Observant and Conventual branches – pivoted towards the theology of John Duns Scotus. Scotus was a brilliant Scottish friar who taught and wrote in Oxford, Paris and Cologne between the 1290s and his death in 1308. Under pressure from rival theological traditions within the Church from the late sixteenth century, the Franciscan leadership eventually decided to discourage the teaching of Franciscan masters like Alexander of Hales or William of Ockham and concentrated their efforts in theological education on Scotus. The literature that resulted has been neglected by twentieth-century historians who have been preoccupied by Thomas Aquinas and the Dominican and Jesuit theologians who adapted his teaching to early modernity. This neglect is partly owed to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879 which commanded that Aquinas should be regarded as pre-eminent among Catholic theologians. Aeterni Patris has cast a very long shadow. Talented early twentieth-century Neo-Thomist historians like Alfred Vanderpol sought to demonstrate that there was one Catholic just war tradition, and that it moved on a clear line from St Augustine through Aquinas to the School of Salamanca. Other medieval theological traditions, including Scotism, were ignored. And Vanderpol’s book of 1919, La doctrine scolastique du droit de guerre, is still innocently cited by modern historians of European writing on warfare who do not realise that the book belongs to a partisan historiographical and theological project.
Scotus’s theology, in so far as it touched on politics, was certainly different to that of Aquinas. Scotus offered systems of natural law and human virtue, a theory of the origins of human society, and a description of the relationship between the prince and the sacred. In all of these aspects of his theology, Scotus preferred not to use the natural ends or purposes that were so important a part of the social and political thought of Aquinas. Aquinas believed that there were natural purposes impressed in humanity by God that inclined humanity to self preservation, family life, and participation in the state, and he developed his doctrine of natural law from these inclinations. Scotus was not interested in any talk of natural purposes. His natural law was a law more or less congruent with human reason or God’s commands. Overall, Scotus’s natural law tended to be less important as a standard than in Thomist accounts of human life. This was sharply obvious in Scotus’s treatment of the relationship between the secular prince and the Jews. For Scotus, the prince’s job was to reconcile clashing rights. Should the prince baptise Jewish children (and the children of other unbelievers) without their parents’ consent? Scotus thought that he or she should, on the basis that while the Jewish parent did have a right in their child, God’s right was greater, and so the prince must defend God’s right. This became a vital place for early modern Scotist theologians to reflect on the relationship between the secular prince, the sacred, and force.
The early modern Franciscan scholastics offer a perspective on warfare alternative to the one familiar to us from the School of Salamanca. The School of Salamanca, and especially its later Jesuit members like Francisco Suárez, tended to discourage the use of force in conversion. By contrast, the Franciscans who followed Scotus were much more likely to recommend the use of civil or military force to advance the faith. The Scotist theologian and servant of the Emperor Charles V, Alfonso de Castro, made use of Scotist arguments to defend the emperor’s war against the Protestant princes of Germany in the 1540s. Another Scotist, Juan Focher, probably made use of these arguments when advising the viceroy of New Spain in the 1560s and 1570s. His defence of the use of force in conversion that was printed at Seville in 1574 was certainly a Scotist one. And John Punch offered a completely developed Scotist theory of war in his extensive publications of the 1650s and 1670s. Castro, Focher, and Punch were the most prominent Franciscan theorists of war as such, but they worked in a much wider community of Scotist theologians who were sympathetic to their fundamental assumptions. Prominent seventeenth-century Scotists educated in Rome like Filippo Fabri, Angleo Volpi, Bartolomeo Mastri, Anthony Hickey, and Lorenzo Brancati da Lauria all carefully defended Scotus’s doctrine of forced baptism. Scotus also had admirers outside of the Franciscan order. John Mair, a secular priest teaching at Paris, Glasgow, and St Andrews in the early sixteenth century, followed Scotus on forced baptism and insisted that difference of religion alone might justify a war fought by Christian princes on non-Christians.
I will shortly publish, with my colleague Dr Todd Rester, a collection of Latin texts and English translations by these Scotist theologians on warfare. This work was done as part of ‘War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe’, a research project funded by the European Research Council between 2016 and 2021. We include Scotus writing on forced baptism (with the seventeenth-century commentary by Hickey), John Mair on war in the Holy Land and New World, Alfonso de Castro on war against the Schmalkaldic League, Juan Focher on war in New Spain, and John Punch on war against the Protestants in Britain and Ireland. Provisionally titled Franciscans and Scotists on War: John Duns Scotus’s Theology, Anti-Judaism, and Holy War in Early Modernity, I hope this book will be of practical use to scholars directly concerned with the just war tradition and the Franciscans as well as to historians interested in the wider relationship between state power and sacred power in European early modernity.
Ecclesiastical History Society 