Equalization in the Body and the Body Politic : From Galen to Marsilius of Padua

Abstract

Considering Marsilius of Padua’s education, it is not surprising that in his political writings he draws on the ancient topos linking the functioning of the political body to that of the animal body, judging the good function of both in terms of the ideal of « health ». He spent his student years studying Galenic medicine at the University of Padua at a time when Padua was one of the pre-eminent centers of medical education in Latin Christendom. In the second and third decade of the fourteenth century, while he was engaged as a teaching master in the Faculty of Arts at Paris, preparing his great political treatise, Defensor pacis (1324), he is referred to as magistrum Marsilium physicum paduanum. Scattered references indicate that he remained a medical practitioner throughout his teaching years at Paris, continuing to practice even while in exile at the court of Louis the Bavarian (c. 1325-1342). The question remains : are the connections we find in Marsilius’ writings between the animal body and the body politic merely rhetorical, or was Marsilius’ vision of the workings of the civitas profoundly influenced by his training in Galenic medicine ? Are there real and meaningful parallels between Galen’s model for the ordering of the body’s « proportionate parts » – i.e. the bodily organs – and Marsilius’ modeling of the place, function, and ordering of the « proportionate parts » of the civitas – i.e. its citizens and the associations they form ? I will argue that these parallels are both real and profound, and, further, that both the discourse of Galenic medicine and the discourse of Marsiglian politics consistently identify the practice of bodily ordering with a dynamic process of continuous proportional equalization. I hope to show that Marsilius’ possession and application of Galen’s medical model of equalization is the key to his imagination, in Book 1 of the Defensor Pacis, that citizens unequal in means and unequal in their contribution to the whole can nevertheless find order and equalization within the systematic workings of the civic body.