Preface to the Fifth Edition

The favourable reception which the following Tract has met with makes me abundant amends for the abuse it has brought upon me. I should be ill employed were I to take much notice of this abuse: but there is one circumstance attending it which I cannot help just mentioning. The principles on which I have argued form the foundation of every state as far as it is free, and are the same with those taught by Mr. Locke and all the writers on civil liberty who have been hitherto most admired in this country. But I find with concern that our governors chuse to decline trying by them their present measures. For, in a pamphlet which has been circulated by government with great industry, these principles are pronounced to be ‘unnatural and wild, incompatible with practice, and the offspring of the distempered imagination of a man who is biassed by party, and who writes to deceive’. I must take this opportunity to add that I love quiet too well to think of entering into a controversy with any writers, particularly nameless ones. Conscious of good intentions and unconnected with any party, I have endeavoured to plead the cause of general liberty and justice. And happy in knowing this, I shall, in silence, commit myself to that candour of the public of which I have had so much experience.

Richard Price was born at Tyn-ton in the parish of Llangeinor near Bridgend in the county of Glamorgan on 23 February 1723. His father, Rice Price, was a Dissenting minister who had been an assistant to Samuel Jones, founder of the Academy at Brynllywarch. By all the accounts that have survived, Rice Price was a strict Calvinist who maintained an austere discipline in the home. Richard, however, rebelled against his father's theology at an early age, and though he upheld the puritan values inculcated by his parents, his religious beliefs became much more liberal and much more rationalist.

Price's father died on 28 June 1739 and his mother, Catherine, scarcely a year later. Richard then went up to London, where his uncle, Samuel Price, was an assistant minister to the famous hymnwriter Isaac Watts, at St Mary Axe in Bury Street. Once established in London, Price was entered at Coward's Academy in Tenter Alley, Moorfields, where he came under the instruction and the influence of John Eames, who had been a friend and a disciple of Isaac Newton. It was at this Academy that he was prepared for the ministry, which was to remain his vocation and his first concern throughout an extremely active career. It was at this Academy too that he received the training in mathematics that enabled him to make important contributions to the theory of probability, to actuarial science and to the growth and development of insurance.

Nicholas of Cusa, in Latin Nicolaus Cusanus, was born in 1401 at Kues on the banks of the Moselle river between Trier and Koblenz. His father was a moderately well-to-do boatman and vineyard owner who served on juries and lent money to the local nobility. There is no proof that Nicholas studied with the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer, Holland, as many of his earlier biographers assert, although he was influenced by the devotio moderna that they represented, and a scholarship, the Bursa Cusana, named after him, was established in the seventeenth century at Deventer. Following a year's stay at the University of Heidelberg in 1416, he pursued higher education in canon law at the University of Padua from 1417 until 1423. After receiving a doctorate in canon law (doctor decretorum) he returned to Germany and enrolled at the University of Cologne in early 1425. He seems to have studied philosophy and theology at Cologne and he practiced and probably also taught canon law. (In 1428 he turned down an offer of a professorship in canon law at the University of Louvain.) In 1427 and 1429–30, Cusanus travelled to Rome as the secretary of the Archbishop of Trier and established contacts with the Italian humanists who were interested in his reports of having discovered lost classical manuscripts in German monastic and cathedral libraries.

The two editors were able to work together on this book on the conducive neutral ground of Oxford and in the company of Peter Russell, to whom the book is gratefully dedicated in recognition of this and many other debts incurred by both of us over many years.

We share responsibility for the finished work, but the initial division of labour was as follows: the Introduction and choice of texts were Anthony Pagden's, who also compiled the table of ‘Principal events in Vitoria's life’ and ‘Bibliographical note’; the editing and translation of the texts were the work of Jeremy Lawrance, who also contributed the ‘Critical note on texts and translation’, the short critical introductions to each text, the footnote commentary, and the ‘Biographical notes’, glossary, list of references, and index at the end of the book. The text was subsequently revised by both editors. In particular, Anthony Pagden made numerous suggestions and corrections to the translation and notes.

Anthony Pagden would like to thank Quentin Skinner and Raymond Geuss for their comments on an earlier draft of the Introduction. He would also like to thank Ms Kate Eliot of Princeton University for allowing him to see an unpublished paper on Vitoria's conciliarism, to which his own observations on the subject are greatly indebted.

Some years ago, the late Ewart Lewis observed that it was likely to be a long time before the “average professor of political theory will turn to his well-underlined copy of Nicholas of Cusa's De concordantia catholica with the same facility with which he turned to Aristotle's Politics.” This first complete translation of the Concordantia into English is an effort to make this major work of political and eccelesiological theory available to contemporary scholars. Before its publication the only English translation was a sometimes inaccurate excerpt containing the sections dealing with the theory of consent and Nicholas' proposals for a system of representative councils in the medieval empire. The lack of a definitive Latin text, the length of the work, and the considerable linguistic problems arising from Cusanus' awkward style and defective knowledge of Latin have long deterred scholars from undertaking the formidable task of translation.

The problem of establishing the Latin text has been resolved, thanks to the work of dedicated German scholars. In 1928, Professor Gerhard Kallen agreed to prepare a critical Latin edition under the auspices of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Books I and II were published in 1939 but the publication of Book III was delayed by World War II and it only appeared in 1959.

This extract from Vitoria's lectiones of 1534 – 5 on ST II-II. 10 ‘On unbelief in general’ shows the development of Vitoria's political ideas in connexion with the problem of evangelization in the two years leading up to the composition of the relections on the ‘barbarians’. His lectures on this quaestio make it clear that Vitoria was led to consider the topic as much by the problem of the moriscos and conversos (Moslem and Jewish converts in Spain) as by the American conquests. On the American Indians began as a re-reading of Article 12 ‘Whether it is lawful to baptize the children of non-Christians against the wishes of their parents’. The lectio translated here is on the more interesting Article 8. For convenience it has been divided into five sections (§§).

Reportata of the 1534–5 course survive in a number of MSS. As if to prove the connexion with the Indian question, the anonymous Madrid Biblioteca de Palacio MS from which the following extract is taken includes, between Vitoria's lectures on II-II. 10. 8 and 9 (fols. 65v–75v), a copy of a relection On the Caribbean Indians (De insulanis) by Father Domingo de las Cuevas, OP, Minor Professor of Thomist Theology in the university of Alcalá. In it, Cuevas quotes Vitoria's ideas on the ‘affair of the Indies’ as ammunition against a relection De Indis of another Alcalá professor, Father Domingo de Santa Cruz, OP.

These lectures On Law were delivered in the academic session of 1533–4 as part of Vitoria's day-to-day teaching of Aquinas' Summa, which he was then working through for the third time in his career (the full cycle took roughly seven years). It was to be the last time he would cover ST I-II; a fourth cycle, begun in 1539, had to be abandoned to substitutes by Christmas 1540 because of illness.

The extracts translated here consist of lectiones 121 – 9 and 136 – 7 (from the session's total of 154 lectures). The Spanish academic year began on the Monday after St Luke's Day, 15 October; these lectiones would thus have been delivered around Wliitsuntide of 1534, roughly at the beginning of our summer term. Officially, Vitoria should have been covering the university's set text for theology, Lombard's Sentences, but he preferred Aquinas. This was not the only liberty Vitoria took; the copyist of our MS notes that he omitted the ‘easy’ questions 25–49 altogether, ‘so as to get through the text by the end of term’ (‘ut possemus hoc anno finem imponere toti 1e 2e, fol. 29v). In the lectures translated below Vitoria omits some of Aquinas' articles, or dismisses them with a phrase.

The lectiones survive only in students' reportata. The ones translated here are taken from the anonymous Vatican MS Ottob. 1000.

The second relection on the power of the Church was delivered in early 1533. P's version is copied by the same hand as I On the Power of the Church (probably that of Fray Andrés de Burgos). Besides being more accurate than the printed texts, Andrés' copy preserves Vitoria's original division into six questions and twenty-seven propositiones.

RELECTION II ON THE POWER OF THE CHURCH OF THE VERY REVEREND MASTER FR. FRANCISCO DE VITORIA, DELIVERED IN SALAMANCA, A. D. 1533

In the other lecture which I gave on this topic last year, I dealt with part of the subject of ecclesiastical power; namely, by what law and when it was set up, the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical power, and the comparisons between the two. Consequently, on this occasion I shall discuss the subjects in whom this kind of power is vested, and other weightier theological questions concerning power.

[Question 1, Single article: Whether the power of the Church belongs to the Church as a whole]

§1 First of all, therefore, we may put the question whether the power of the Church per se is vested in the Church as a whole? That is to say, in the universal Church as distinct from its individual members, by analogy with the way in which civil power is immediately present in the whole commonwealth, as both theologians and philosophers correctly concede. It may seem that it is:

1. By the analogy with secular power, which is vested in the whole commonwealth though it is delegated to the magistracies and other powers within that commonwealth.