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Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2013

Miguel Vatter
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Abstract

Machiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter of The Prince Machiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake in The Prince, especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavelli appeals to providence merely in order to fool the Church and the Medici. This article argues that it is not necessary to appeal to such exoteric readings of the 26th chapter of The Prince if one envisages the possibility that Machiavelli may have drawn upon an alternative, non-Christian conception of divine providence coming from medieval Arabic and Jewish sources that is more compatible with his desire to return to Roman republican principles than is the Christian conception of divine providence.

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Research Article
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The Review of Politics , Volume 75 , Special Issue 4: Machiavelli's Prince , Fall 2013, pp. 605 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2013 

Given the Luciferine reputation of his political ideas, it was not long before readers of Machiavelli began to ask themselves what were his own religious beliefs.Footnote 1 Was he a radical epicurean, an atheist or a libertine; or was he a tormented Christian, all too aware, like Augustine, that the harsh realities of politics correspond to the fallen nature of human beings?Footnote 2 Recent historiography has moved Machiavelli's concern with religion back into the heart of his political thought, restating the central political significance of the question of God in his theory.Footnote 3 Traditionally, this conjunction of God and politics in Machiavelli has been explained in terms of an instrumental conception of religion, associated with the idea of a civil religion.Footnote 4 But does this hypothesis exhaust the role of religion in Machiavelli's political thought? Could Machiavelli also be employing a noninstrumental understanding of religion that explains why some parts of his political theory make sense only in light of certain theological premises? In this case, one has left behind the hypothesis of civil religion and moved on to ask about Machiavelli's “political theology.”Footnote 5

The relatively new claim that Machiavelli is not merely recovering an ancient conception of religion as an instrument of political rule, but is putting forth a political theology of his own has been forcefully made by Maurizio Viroli in Machiavelli's God. According to Viroli, Machiavelli was neither an atheist nor a pagan. “Machiavelli's God is the God of Florentine republican Christianity.”Footnote 6 He adhered to the political theology of what Viroli calls “republican Christianity,” whose first principle is “that a true Christian is a good citizen who serves the common good and liberty in order to implement the divine plan on earth. God participates in human history, … created men in his own image and wishes them to become like him with their virtue, working to make the earthly city comparable to the heavenly city.”Footnote 7 Viroli argues that thinkers as diverse as Thomas of Aquinas and Ficino, Savonarola and Leonardo Bruni, Giles of Rome and Matteo Palmieri advocate one and the same “republican Christianity.” For reasons which I outline below, I doubt that Machiavelli drew inspiration for his experiments with political theology from this “tradition.” However, Viroli does raise the interesting question of what conception of “divine glory” and “divine nature” Machiavelli could have held that would serve as a foundation of his novel way of understanding love of country and republicanism.

I shall not engage the old question of Machiavelli's personal morality or the significance of his Exhortation to Penitence. It is clear that for him the real dimensions of the problem of religion in politics only emerge once the belief in a divinity is posed directly in relation to the most “ferocious” and pitiless aspects of politics as illustrated by Roman historians and by the Hebrew Bible.Footnote 8 In order properly to pose the question “Who is Machiavelli's God?” one would have to find a conception of God whose “divine nature” is such that human “imitation” of this nature would give rise to ferocious political actions, and, furthermore, such an “imitation” would make a “saint” out of whoever obeys these “extraordinary commands” (Discourses 3.22).Footnote 9 In order to find such a God in Machiavelli's writings it is better to reconsider his other, less pious “exhortation to seize Italy, and to set her free from the barbarians” which closes The Prince.Footnote 10

My hypothesis is that the God one finds therein is not to be found in the “republican Christianity” reconstructed by Viroli, but rather in the Arabic and Jewish politicophilosophical reflections on prophets and revealed religion which Viroli omits. It is not within the respublica Christiana, characterized by the running “quarrel between two different sets of people—the lay officials and the clerical, the bishops and the justices, the pope and the kings—over control of one and the same society,”Footnote 11 that Machiavelli could find inspiration for his own dreams of a national state that would stand independent from the Roman Catholic Church. Much more promising was the fertile terrain of medieval Arabic and Jewish political thought concerned with the question of what kind of Church-less “republic” God wishes to establish through his philosophers-prophets-kings.Footnote 12

In this article I propose an indirect demonstration of this hypothesis: instead of showing that Machiavelli was influenced by these alternative, non-Christian ways of understanding the role of God in political affairs, I will assume that he was familiar with some medieval Arabic and Jewish thought, about which he could have learned from a variety of sources available to him, and show how that assumption enables me to solve two puzzles which have haunted Machiavellian scholarship. The first concerns his appeal to divine providence in order to prop the ambitions of the “new prince” in the last chapter of The Prince. This reference seems to sound a discordant note with the “irreligious” theses advanced in the rest of the book, and has led commentators since Croce and Gramsci to think that Machiavelli either added this part as a purely rhetorical afterthought, or he committed a “sacrifice of the intellect” and took an irrational “leap of faith” in order to jump over the shadow of his own pessimism.Footnote 13 The second puzzle is posed by Machiavelli's repeatedly claiming that if one wishes to create or maintain “a republic in corrupt cities,” then “it would be necessary to turn it more toward a kingly state than toward a popular one” (Discourses 1.18), despite his adoption, throughout most of his writings, of a staunchly pro–popular government stance.Footnote 14 I suggest that it is possible to give a republican reading of Machiavelli's late appeals to divine providence and “monarchic” turn, if one reads them in their appropriate, non-Christian theologicopolitical context.

The “Providential Logic” in Chapter 26 of The Prince

Any serious interpretation of chapter 26 must begin from Mario Martelli's 1982 essay “La logica provvidenzialistica e il capitolo 26 del Principe,” in which he argues that in the last chapter of The Prince Machiavelli breaks with his preceding naturalism as much as with his preceding republicanism.Footnote 15 According to Martelli, Machiavelli breaks with his naturalism because the “providential logic” of the Exhortation of chapter 26 can no longer be understood within a Polybian logic of natural cycles of political forms (Discourses 1.2) or a naturalistic conception of historical necessity. In chapter 26 Machiavelli no longer speaks about politics from the plane of the natural history of mankind, but rather from the plane of its sacred history, more particularly, from what appears to be a politicotheological understanding of sacred history: “Beyond this, see here the extraordinary things, without precedent, conducted by God: the sea has opened; a cloud has shown you the way, the stone has poured forth water; here the manna has rained down” (Prince 26, 121). Likewise, Martelli argues, in chapter 26 Machiavelli also breaks with his previous republican convictions, because he finally comes to see that only a civil prince who is willing to abandon his civic status as citizen, in order to take on an absolute status, can hope to accomplish the new mission with God's favor or grace, namely, the unification of Italy under an absolute ruler who will put an end to the church's and the pope's secular power as it had existed for centuries in Italy.

The figure of Savonarola plays a particularly important role in Martelli's interpretation. The idea that it would require an absolute rather than a civil prince to unify Italy and put an end to the worldly power of the Catholic Church had already been prefigured in Savonarola's preaching. He had argued that Florence (not Rome!) was the new Jerusalem, the kingdom of God on earth, having as its head a “Christ King” (Cristo re), and that Savonarola was his prophet. Martelli claims that Machiavelli was actually an admirer of Savonarola's politicotheological project, and that by placing Savonarola in the company of Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus in chapter 6 of The Prince he was praising the Dominican friar, not making him the object of condescending irony.Footnote 16

I agree with Martelli's suggestion that chapter 6 on armed prophets and chapter 26 on divine providence should be read together, and that these chapters lend an eschatological orientation to Machiavelli's political thought which has been obfuscated by those interpreters who, on the basis of the devastating critiques he directs against Roman Catholicism and its political form (Discourses 1.12 and 2.2), too quickly leap to the conclusion that for Machiavelli God could only play a mystificatory role in politics. On the other hand, I disagree with Martelli's understanding of the providential logic because his interpretation reflects a prevailing prejudice according to which Machiavelli must have been referring to a Christian idea of providence. I think that the opposition Machiavelli draws in chapter 6 between the “armed prophet”—represented by Moses—and the “unarmed prophet”—represented by Savonarola—is clearly based on a distinction between the Jewish and the Christian conceptions of divine providence. If so, Machiavelli's treatment of providence in chapter 26 of The Prince should also be read in light of a Jewish rather than a Christian political theology.Footnote 17

A fundamental conduit for these ideas would have been the reception of Moses Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed in the culture of the Italian Renaissance, as well as the work of Yohannan Alemanno and Isaac Abravanel. In the Guide, Maimonides explains the double nature of God, who is composed of an essence that remains unknowable to human beings, and of an existence that consists in thirteen divine attributes of his glory. These attributes are all ethicopolitical in character. They are therefore object of human imitation and they ground the possibility that the ethicopolitical actions of human beings may fashion them into a likeness of God, and thus make them “saintly.”Footnote 18 Maimonides distinguishes between the pagan conception of religious-political laws (nomoi) and the Jewish conception of divinely revealed law (shari'a).Footnote 19 His awareness of a distinction between civil religion and political theology speaks in favor of seeing the same distinction also at play in Machiavelli's text. Seen from the politicotheological perspective, Maimonides argues that in Moses's prophecy God reveals himself as having divine attributes which are at the same time ethicopolitical attributes. This would mean that the only legitimate science or knowledge of God, that is, the only legitimate theology, would take the form of political science. With Maimonides, then, one has an example of a political theology (in distinction to a civil religion) which does not set the authority of the priesthood (of the church) above the authority of the people and their representatives as happens in the respublica Christiana. On this reading, Maimonides makes it possible to unify politics and theology in a way that is entirely different from the unification proposed by Catholic theological and political thought since Augustine, while avoiding the crude Latin Averroist idea of religion as a noble fraud.

What is the difference between Jewish and Christian ideas of divine providence? As Agamben has recently argued, the Christian conception of divine providence is characterized by its “economical” logic tied to the idea of divine “dispensations” or “mysteries.”Footnote 20 Christian providence depends on postulating a divine order in which history has a place that is neither the beginning nor the end of the divine calendar of human redemption. Because God has, from all times (nunc stans), established the calendar of salvation (at whose center stands the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ), it follows that nothing can be done to accelerate the return of the Messiah. From a Christian standpoint, the Messiah will not return in history, but only when history itself is at an end. On the basis of this divine oikonomia or dispensatio, the Roman Catholic Church is the only legitimate representative of God on earth, precisely because it is that power which symbolizes or stands for the nonarrival of the eschaton in history.

Karl Löwith has shown that with Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century Cistercian monk, the dispensational conception of Christian providence begins its process of “secularization” in order to end up as the idea that there exists a divine order in history rather than a divine order of history. In the former account, God's existence is seen in history, whereas in the latter account, history is characterized by the absence of God and this absence indicates that history itself will eventually come to an end.Footnote 21 By unfolding the dispensations of the Trinity into three ages (the age of the Father, of the Son, and—after 1260 according to Joachim's prophecy—the age of the Holy Spirit), Joachim of Fiore introduces the idea that God realizes his plan in and through history, and this belief eventually reconnects with a Promethean vein of modernity as the age of human self-assertion, which leads to the idea of progress as the secular history of human self-redemption.Footnote 22

The important point for my argument is that in this Christian, economical conception of providence, the prophet can only be unarmed. In a strict, pre-Joachine Christian conception of history, there are no more prophets after Christ's resurrection because God's plan simply is not to be known through a reading of history. After Joachim of Fiore's claim that history may reveal God's plan, prophets again become possible. But these new prophets must remain “unarmed” because it is history itself that will bring salvation “behind the backs” of political actors: the unarmed prophet is merely an interpreter of history; he is not a maker of history; he cannot accelerate the coming of the Messiah.

When in chapter 6 of The Prince Machiavelli refers to Savonarola as an “unarmed prophet” he is identifying the essential contradiction in post-Joachine Christian providential logic, namely, the contradiction between believing that God's plan will be realized in history, and at the same time believing that human beings cannot make their own history. This tension is found in Savonarola's preaching when he acts as a prophet who proclaims for Florence the goal of becoming a biblical “nation of saints,” with Christ as its “captain,”Footnote 23 and yet remains faithful to Thomas Aquinas and is incapable of grasping tyrannical power in order to realize this goal, because he stands under the Christian prohibition on accelerating the coming of the Messiah.

In his Trattato sul governo di Firenze Savonarola argues for a republican form of government, rather than a monarchic one, entirely on the basis of politicotheological reasoning. Like Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola believes that monarchy is the best form of government, but that it is not always and under all conditions realizable.Footnote 24 In a people “which is inclined to discord … the prince would find it necessary to become a tyrant should he wish to secure and stabilize himself”; and tyranny is the worst form of government, something to be avoided at all costs.Footnote 25 Thus Savonarola concludes that in the case of Florence the best regime is the civil one, and not a monarchy. But Savonarola's reasoning falls prey to the temptation of establishing the true form of government, that is, monarchy, in Florence under the form of a theocracy (following Josephus's understanding of the Mosaic constitution as a theocracy), since Messiah or Christ means “the anointed one,” the “king.” The problem is that a Florentine theocracy would mean that the Kingdom of God has already been realized on earth, and that would mean history is at an end. Had Savonarola accelerated the end of history, he would have unmasked himself as the Antichrist, thus putting himself on the stake even before his enemies placed him there.Footnote 26

When in chapter 6 of The Prince Machiavelli opposes the figure of an “armed prophet,” who is favored by God only with the right “occasion” to display his absolute virtù or absolute power to shape a state out of nothing, to Savonarola, he is breaking with Christian economical providence. Instead he joins together a Jewish understanding of divine providence (an understanding for which, ironically, Savonarola's preaching had amply prepared the terrain) with a neo-Roman vocabulary of virtus as locked in struggle against fortuna, which Machiavelli had himself rediscovered from his frequentation of Roman historiography.Footnote 27

From this thesis, there follow two important corollaries. First, Machiavelli's conception of history does not fall under Löwith's and Voegelin's thesis of secularization of Christian Heilsgeschichte, and, indeed, any attempt to read Machiavelli within the paradigm of “secularization” is doomed to fail.Footnote 28 But, and this is equally important, Machiavelli's undoubted sympathy for certain aspects of the cosmology of ancient paganism and its belief in the “eternity of the world” and the “natural cycles” of history, as shown by his evident borrowings from Lucretius, cannot be simply set in abstract opposition to a politicotheological understanding of history and divine providence coming from an Arabic and Jewish understanding of their relation.Footnote 29 Alfarabi, Averroes, and Maimonides tried to harmonize the Aristotelian scientific demonstration of the eternity of the world with the prophetic revelation of a God that transcended the world: I see no reason why Machiavelli should be denied this attempt, especially if it is needed for his political science. It is by holding together both horns of the dilemma through a recovery of the Jewish doctrine of providence that Machiavelli's Prince achieves a new way of understanding the relation between order and history which breaks both with Augustine's “linear” idea of providence (premised on the belief that Jesus is the Messiah) and with the old “circles” of pagan thinking about history.

Military Order and Divine Providence: From Moses to Cicero and Augustine and Back

According to the Jewish conception of providence, God is present in history as the military leader of his Chosen People, leading them in their wars against other nations to regain their “promised land”—which is a land on earth and not in a supernatural beyond.Footnote 30 Both Savonarola and Machiavelli have this kind of a God in mind, rather than the God of Christendom who is present in history only in his church and who enjoins “idleness” and passivity in the face of injustice (Discourses 2.2). Savonarola asks us to

consider the order of the universe which provides a leader for every genus … the army is not well ordered without a captain. … Likewise the city is not ordered if it is not reduced to the highest magistrate. You, Florence, have Christ as its King, who God wanted to show to be King and to rule from the beginning of his birth … and that is why he wanted that Christ be born in an age when all the world was under the rule of a prince, Octavius, so as to show the whole world that it had to obey Christ.Footnote 31

In this complex passage, Savonarola mixes together an understanding of Christ as the Messiah in the Hebrew sense of the term, and the Jewish idea of God as the commander of his people constituted as an army, with the politicotheological arguments used by Eusebius to justify Constantine's Christian empire. Only recently, thanks to the debates of the 1920s and 1930s over the meaning of Christian political theology between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, has the incompatibility between these different ideas of the Messiah become evident.Footnote 32 One of the first scholars to make use of these insights in order to reinterpret the Mosaic constitution was Martin Buber, who applied it in his reconstruction of archaic Jewish conceptions of divine kingship.

According to Buber, the figure of the armed prophet (Moses) and the figure of the army commander were originally the same. This is a particularly crucial point because it allows me to point out with precision the second place where I depart from Martelli's reading of chapter 26. Martelli argues that Machiavelli's excursus in chapter 26 on the need for the prince to organize a popular militia that can withstand the Spanish and Swiss infantry must have been written earlier than the rest of the chapter because it expresses a “republican” state of mind in which Machiavelli is still only concerned with stabilizing a city's regime against foreign invaders, but does not yet have in mind the divine, redemptive mission to liberate and unify Italy which he voices in the rest of chapter 26.Footnote 33 Martelli's audacious interpretation is plausible only if one assumes that Machiavelli is referring to a Christian understanding of divine providence. Only on such an understanding would it make sense to oppose the order of the ecclesia militans intended to maintain the mystery of the economy of divine providence to the organization of a people's army strong enough to repel any monarchy or empire. By separating the parts dedicated to the divinely anointed prince from the parts dedicated to a republican militia in chapter 26, Martelli assumes that God's grace is so powerful that it could relieve the divinely anointed king and his messianic task from the burden of organizing and leading into war a people's army in order to accomplish his revolutionary goals. But Machiavelli's text does not warrant such a reading of divine grace: “God does not want to do all things, so as not to take away our free will or any part of that glory that belongs to us” (Prince 26, 121). Indeed, Martelli's assumption disregards the fact that all discourses on divine providence—including the early Christian one—rely on the analogy between a people and an army with a leader. As Peterson explains in his treatise on political theology, this analogy originally derives from the image through which Aristotle's (and neo-Aristotelian) theology illustrates the proper relation between God and the cosmos. Divine providence, understood politicotheologically, is a discourse which contains a theory of how people ought to go to war. The question is to see which variant of this theory Machiavelli appropriates and which he rejects.

In Augustine's early treatise on divine providence, entitled On Order, one reads:

What else do friends strive for, but to be one? … A people is a city for whom dissension is a danger. What else is to dissent [dissentire] but not to think alike [non unum sentire]? An army is made of many soldiers. And is not any multitude so much the less easily defeated in proportion as it is the more closely united [coit]? In fact, the joining [coito] is itself called a cuneus [troops in wedge formation], a co-union, as it were [quasi couneus]. And what about every kind of love? Does it not wish to become one with what it is loving?Footnote 34

Augustine is reinterpreting the Aristotelian image of God leading the world as a military commander leads his troops in light of the original, archaic Roman conception of the populus as a military grouping of individuals. Just as in a well-ordered army, dissent is excluded in order to group a multitude into the formation of a cuneus, a military wedge-formation or united front which breaks open the opposing hordes, so should the Christian assembly of the people or ecclesia be grouped without dissent if it is going to become an ecclesia militans, ready to fight off sin and unbelief.

As Augustine reiterates later, in the City of God: “a people is a community of a rational multitude which is associated by a communal concord of the things it loves.”Footnote 35 By claiming that love (charity), not law, unifies a people Augustine modifies Cicero's definition of the populus given in De re publica 1.39 as a function of a iuris consensus, an agreement between people with respect to the law.Footnote 36 This modification is necessary in order to bring Cicero and Roman republicanism in line with Christianity. Viroli identifies charity and love of country in his reconstruction of “republican Christianity” on the basis of this Augustinian conception of the well-ordered people. But, as is well known, Augustine's theory of love is characterized precisely by the order of the objects that are to be loved: first, one is to love God; second, the neighbor and the world.Footnote 37 If one inverts this order, and loves more the world than God (or “one's country more than one's soul” as Machiavelli says),Footnote 38 then on Christian grounds justice becomes impossible and thus also the republic, the true civil life. Thus, it is misleading for Viroli to interpret the late medieval discourse on the compatibility of Christian charity and love of country (understood as pursuit of the common good or justice)Footnote 39 as if this were a subversion of Augustine's opposition between the City of God and the city of man. These pages of Augustine on divine providence are the first moment of so-called republican Christianity, but such a synthesis is achieved at the cost of eliminating the very idea that conflict between social orders can bring about true equality under law.Footnote 40 Machiavelli can be turned into a representative of this “tradition” of political Augustinianism only if one disregards entirely his account of the productivity of social conflict for the attainment of equal law and freedom.

One of the fundamental theses of The Prince is that, given the permanent dissension between people and nobles he posits in chapter 9, a civil prince should always side with the former, and proceed to arm them so as not to have to rely on mercenary armies, as he discusses in chapters 12 and 13. When Machiavelli speaks in Discourses on Livy 1.18 about the need for an “absolute” commander who has to comport himself in a manner that is “nearly regal” (quasi regio), he does not mean to advocate the establishment of a kingdom and the abandonment of the civil principality, as Martelli believes. Instead, Machiavelli is referring to the “nearly regal” quality of Moses's theocratic regime according to which Moses cannot become king because God is already in command of an armed people and, for the same reason, Moses cannot permit any monarch to have absolute power over his people. The conjunction of theocracy and popular government in the Hebrew Republic prior to the period of the kings was already prefigured by Savonarola: “Your regime, Florence, is similar to that of the Judges of the Israelites. … And I also want to say that this regime and government of the Hebrews, although it was democratic [populare], because the people held power and the judge did not command but counseled, it could also be called a kingly government [governo regale]—because it depended on the mouth of one, that is, of God, because God was he who ruled over them, because the mouth of the judge and of the prophet was counseled by God as to what they had to do.”Footnote 41 There is no tension or contradiction in chapter 26 between Machiavelli's “old” republican view of a people's army and his supposed “new” turn towards monarchy: the figure of the armed prophet, just like the figure of the absolute “civil” prince, is in fact completely consistent with a militant “Hebraizing” republicanism.

The Messianic Moment in Machiavelli's Republicanism

The Mosaic theocratic regime changed once God's Chosen People decided to give itself a king like other nations which had their human kings, as recounted in 1 Samuel 8. In so doing, Mosaic theodemocracy comes to an end.Footnote 42 Machiavelli registers this constitutional change in the tension between chapter 6 and chapter 26, between the “armed prophet” and the “new prince,” who invents “new laws and the new orders” (Prince 26, 121). This tension arises because Machiavelli does not believe that another Moses is possible in his age. Human kings already exist and have led their invading armies into Italy. Furthermore, unlike the “enslaved and oppressed” Hebrews that Moses rescued from Egypt, the Italian people is no longer purely passive matter on which a form can simply be imposed by the will of their leader (chapter 6), because “here there is great virtue in the limbs, provided she does not lack leaders” (Prince 26, 121).

Thus, the concept of the civil or new prince that Machiavelli constructs throughout The Prince needs to be understood in line with the figure of Moses, but as not identical to the “armed prophet”: the new prince is the prince of redemption, something Moses never pretended to be. Of this “redeemer” Machiavelli cannot “express with what love he would be received in all those provinces that have suffered from these foreign floods; with what thirst for revenge, with what obstinate faith, with what piety, with what tears. What gates would be closed to him? What peoples would deny him homage? What envy would oppose him?” (Prince 26, 122). Such a redemptive prince is no longer modeled after Moses (who did have to deal with the “envy” of his people) but appeals to another crucial figure of Jewish political theology, who is in a sense the counterpart of Moses. This is the figure of the Messiah, who represents a rejection of human sovereigns and a “return to beginnings,” namely, to the beginning of God's Kingdom on earth, the divine democracy or republic.Footnote 43 Jewish messianism had been thematized already by Maimonides in a realistic political sense, and through the Kabbalah it was beginning to spread throughout the Jewish communities outside of Spain and Portugal, and in that way also reached Florence through Pico's and Ficino's interest in the Kabbalah.Footnote 44 It is not implausible that Machiavelli would have heard of it and the crucial tension in the Kabbalah between the messianic order and the Mosaic order.Footnote 45 With the Jewish conception of the messianic age, it is possible to think a “return to beginnings” which coincides, in the messianic moment, with a (certain) “end” of linear history. Indeed, one of the main differences between the Jewish and the Christian conceptions of the Messiah is that in the Christian tradition the Messiah came only once on earth, and gave history its linear form, and will return only one time again, in order to end history. According to some views found in the Jewish tradition, however, the Messiah can return an infinite number of times; unlike the Christian tradition, it need not exclude the cosmology of the eternal return associated with pagan philosophy.Footnote 46

The messianic dimension of Machiavelli's discussion of divine providence, especially in chapter 26, has to do with the relation between divine grace, popular matter, and form of regime.Footnote 47 Machiavelli breaks with the model of the armed prophet in one crucial sense: for him it is no longer true that the Italian people is completely “enslaved” as the Hebrews were when Moses came to lead them out of Egypt. It is true that in chapter 26, rhetorically, he paints an Italy in chains. But in reality the Italian people were not a people with a slave mentality. After all, the Roman Republic had existed (and Florentine historians since Bruni had tried to resurrect its memory), there had been a strong history of free city-states, and the Florentine and Venetian Republics still existed; in short, there was that “memory” of past freedom that cannot be forgotten, as he says in chapter 5 of The Prince. As in his Discourses on Livy, the people are not a matter without form: they are a headless body (or multitude) whose vitality is seeking for a leader, a head.Footnote 48

The fundamental question is: what kind of a head (capo, capitano) is needed for a headless body that desires freedom? This head can no longer be a Moses because the people are not a lifeless material, passively waiting for a form to be imposed on it from outside. Rather, this captain must be a messianic figure, because according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah is the last king of a people who is free and self-organized into an army. The Machiavellian Messiah is this paradoxical figure of a leader who “heads” a headless body that desires not to be ruled. The messianic “end” of time in Machiavelli must take a temporal shape that is compatible with the eternity of the world, and at the same time it must be a temporal shape that permits a revolutionary break in the continuum of history. My hypothesis is that in Florentine political thought at the time of Machiavelli, this messianic problematic of the “end” of time takes the form of a “return to beginnings,” a return to the “first nature,” mentioned by Savonarola as much as by Ficino and Pico, but which only in Machiavelli comes to refer to a radical equality of all with all in a “state of nature” where human beings are “naked” (to use the expression of the Ciompi rebel), shorn of the acquired habits of inequality made possible by the division between rich and poor. Thus, in the end, there is after all a way in which a certain naturalism and a certain return to beginnings do match with Machiavelli's providential logic of chapter 26: not with divine providence as represented by the grace of Moses, but rather with divine providence as read from a messianic point of view.

If in Machiavelli the Jewish and the Roman understandings of politics are never entirely separate, then to the messianic function of the new prince there must also correspond an analogous antimonarchic and redemptive aspect in the history of Roman republican thought.Footnote 49 This aspect corresponds to the Roman expulsion of the kings at the hands of BrutusFootnote 50 together with the positive role assigned to the struggle between the plebs and patricians for Roman liberty.Footnote 51 Patricians or patres were the heads of clans; they had exclusive access to auctoritas and occupied all religious functions during the monarchy. In this sense, they were the ones who created the Roman “civil religion” and, according to Machiavelli, they used this religion for their own advantage in order to keep the plebs working for the army of the populus and for the senatorial class (Discourses on Livy 1.11–13).Footnote 52 Together with the so-called conscripti, who were part of the Senate but lacked the authority of the patres, and their clients, they formed the populus as it is originally understood, that is, as the army of the king. The populus exhibited what could be called a “class” structure, because it was composed of the classis which together formed the army, and which elected their commanders and approved the laws put forward by the Senate, through their centuriate assembly. The plebs were not part of these classes, that is, they were not constituted parts of the populus. Plebs were infra classem, and fell outside of the class division of Roman archaic society.Footnote 53

The fact that the plebs was not an organized class of Roman society provided the decisive condition of possibility for a remarkable event which Machiavelli designates as a “return to beginnings”: namely, when the plebs seceded from the civitas and began to organize themselves, they did so by founding a separate assembly which stood in opposition during the entire struggle of orders to the assembly of the army. Only in the third century BC, with the equiparation of plebiscites and laws, did the plebs become “integrated” into the Roman people. The important point here is that precisely this “separation” of powers (between plebeian and centuriate assemblies, tribunes and senators, the religions of Liber and Jupiter), conditioned by the fact that the plebs were not part of the army of the fathers, were not the populus, gave the plebeian opposition to the authority of the Fathers a political or constitutional form, rather than the form of civil war. The plebs could not have fought and won a civil war, because they lacked weapons and an army of their own: in the early phases of the Republic, the plebs were allowed to fight in the Roman army only in times of “national emergency,” and it was precisely during one of those crises that they seceded to the Aventine and went on a “general strike,” refusing to join the Fathers in the defense of Rome until these agreed to recognize their equality “under” law (which means: their equal capacity to make law).

The upshot of this interpretation of Roman plebeian politics is that the plebs literally invented the separation of powers not as a way to unite the state, to integrate themselves into a people as parts of an organic whole, but in a struggle of resistance against the legal and religious domination exerted by the populus. The plebs constituted law starting from dissensus to the auctoritas of the Fathers embodied in the Roman civil religion. I have argued elsewhere at length that by instituting their own assembly in opposition to the Senate, by developing a new form of power (the power to veto all commands, imperium of government), and lastly by founding a counterreligion of their own (centered around the temple of Ceres dedicated to the cult of Dionysus) in opposition to the patrician temple of Jupiter, the Roman plebs, on Machiavelli's interpretation, made it possible to establish a republican constitution which stood over and beyond the claim to rule of any organized social group or person. None of this would have been possible had the plebs not broken the hegemony of civil religion through the kind of “messianic” conception of an acephalic political body I have described above. For Machiavelli, only this plebeian eschatology made it possible to conceive of the idea of a republican constitution as something that lies beyond the control of government and of those who fill its offices and authority; an idea of constitution that, far from fixing the power of some over others, is continuously dis-ordering the state and allows for its revolution, giving space to the struggles of the parts of society which aim at equality under law.

There is one last feature of Jewish messianism that is important to understand why chapter 26 takes the form of an exhortation. This is the question whether human beings can do things that “force” or “accelerate” the arrival of the Messiah. In The Star of Redemption Franz Rosenzweig calls this the problem of “tyrannizing” God. In contrast to more conservative orthodox positions, Rosenzweig defends the idea that human beings have a role to play in their divine redemption, and this role requires them to bring about a series of social and political revolutions. Thus, Rosenzweig opens the possibility that there exists a “right time,” a kairos, in which it is appropriate to “pray” for the arrival of the Messiah. Machiavelli's exhortation in chapter 26 seems to be just this kind of “prayer” pronounced at the “right time.” It is a prayer that will be fulfilled only on condition that the time is right, and the criterion of rightness is whether the new prince will have enough virtù to arm his own people. Machiavelli suggests that only by becoming commander of an armed and free people will the Medici prince have made himself in the image of God (as commander of his people) and be deserving of God's favor. Unless the Medici are willing to repent and purify themselves of their sins, of their previous associations with the nobility and the kings of this world, by “returning to beginnings” (which in Machiavelli recovers the Jewish concept of repentance, teshuvah) and embracing the side of the people, then they will not have lived up to the image of God, and as a consequence God will not grace them with the salvation of their state. With his typical sense of irony, Machiavelli closes the book he dedicates to a scion of the Medici family by advocating a messianic perspective which overturns Cosimo de’ Medici's saying that “one does not govern a state by praying nor by reciting ‘Our Father who art in Heaven,’” while at the same time creatively appropriating to his radical republican project Savonarola's own critique of Cosimo's “arte dello stato.”Footnote 54

Footnotes

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the international conference “Machiavelli: tempo e conflitto” held at the Università di Bologna, Italy, in November 2009. I wish to thank Stefano Visentin and Vittorio Morfino for their generous invitation as well as the participants for their helpful discussions. A special thanks to Vasileios Syros and Marco Geuna for reading and commenting on the drafts of this text. A shorter version of this paper is forthcoming in Italian under the title “Politica plebea e provvidenza in Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli: Tempo e conflitto, ed. Riccardo Caporali, Vittorio Morfino, and Stefano Visentin.

2 For Machiavelli's relation to Christianity and his personal religious beliefs, see Grazia, Sebastian de, Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) and Viroli, Maurizio, Il sorriso di Machiavelli: Storia di Machiavelli (Bari: Laterza, 1998).

3 For overviews of the current debate on Machiavelli and religion, see Cutinelli-Rendina, Emanuele, Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli (Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici, 1998); Colish, Marcia, “Republicanism, Religion and Machiavelli's Savonarolan Moment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 597–616.

4 For discussions of civil religion in Machiavelli, see Preus, Samuel J., “Machiavelli's Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and Object,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 2 (1979): 171–90; Sullivan, Vickie B., Machiavelli's Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty and Politics Reformed (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Rahe, Paul, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory Under the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Brown, Alison, “Philosophy and Religion in Machiavelli,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. Najemy, John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). As Brown observes in The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), “Machiavelli's attitude to religion presents two quite different faces, one valuing it as a form of political control, the other following Lucretius in describing religion anthropologically as the expression of deeply rooted beliefs and fears of ordinary people” (79).

5 For the distinction between civil religion and political theology, see my introduction to Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism, ed. Vatter, M. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

6 Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli's God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 61.

7 Footnote Ibid., 2.

8 These aspects are treated at length by Machiavelli in Discourses 1.11–15 as well as throughout book 3; see also the advice given in chapter 18 of The Prince.

9 Quotations from Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discourses on Livy, trans. Mansfield, Harvey and Tarcov, Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), unless otherwise noted.

10 In what follows I shall employ the following translation: Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, trans. Connell, William J. (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's, 2005), giving chapter and page number. For the original, I employ the edition of Giorgio Inglese, Machiavelli, Niccolò, Il Principe (Turin: Einaudi, 1995).

11 Figgis, J. Neville, “Respublica Christiana,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser., no. 5 (1911): 63–88.

12 The crucial study of this theme is found in Abraham Melamed, The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

13 See Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), and Sasso, Gennaro, Machiavelli: Il pensiero politico, vol. 1 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), among many others.

14 For Machiavelli's “populist turn” see Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, chap. 1, and now McCormick, John, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

15 Martelli, Mario, “La logica provvidenzialistica e il capitolo 26 del Principe,” Interpres 4 (1982): 262–384.

16 Martelli, Mario, “Machiavelli e Savonarola: valutazione politica e valutazione religiosa,” in Tra Filologia e Storia: Otto Studi Machiavelliani, ed. Bausi, Francesco (Roma: Salerno Editori, 2009), 241–46, 277. For the opposite view, see Colish, “Machiavelli's Savonarolan Moment.”

17 In this article I cannot deal with the question of the possible “sources” that Machiavelli could have used in order to develop his interpretation of Jewish conceptions of divine providence. The reception of Jewish and Arabic political thought in Medicean and Savonarolan Florence remains an area of study that could receive more attention from Machiavelli scholars and specialists of Florentine political thought. For interesting indications I refer to the work of Moshe Idel, Fabrizio Lelli, and Brian Copenhaver among others.

18 On Maimonides and the doctrine of imitatio Dei, see the sober treatment in Melamed, Philosopher-King, 26–48. On the reception of Maimonides and Arabic medieval thought in the late medieval period and early Renaissance, see now Syros, Vasileios, Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

19 See the excellent discussion found in Stroumsa, Sarah, “Prophecy versus Civil Religion in Medieval Jewish Philosophy: The Cases of Judah Halevi and Maimonides,” in Tribute to Michael: Studies in Jewish and Muslim Thought Presented to Professor Michael Schwartz, ed. Abrahamov, Binyamin, Klein-Braslavy, Sara, and Sadan, Joseph (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2009), 79–102.

20 Agamben, Giorgio, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

21 Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

22 This metanarrative is the object of Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

23 Savonarola, Prediche italiane (27 December 1494), cited in Brown, “Savonarola,” 266.

24 Savonarola, Trattato sul governo di Firenze, ed. Schisto, Elisabetta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999), 1:1–2.

25 Savonarola, Trattato, 1:2.

26 On these motifs, and in particular on the reasons why Ficino thought Savonarola was the Antichrist, see now Romandini, Fabián J. Ludueña, Homo economicus: Marsilio Ficino, la teología y los misterios paganos (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2006).

27 As Nederman, C. J., “Amazing Grace: Fortune, God and Free Will in Machiavelli's Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 621, observes: “Machiavelli's writings—most especially that supposedly irreligious tract, the Prince—embrace the medieval theological doctrine that the human will is able to defeat external circumstance and to triumph over adversity when it accepts and cooperates with God's grace.”

28 This also makes problematic the interpretation of Machiavelli offered within the grand narratives found in Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Blackwell, 2006) and Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

29 On Machiavelli and Lucretius see the opposing interpretations found in Rahe, Paul, “In the Shadow of Lucretius: The Epicurean Foundations of Machiavelli's Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007): 30–55, and Lucchese, Filippo del, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza (London: Continuum, 2011); on Machiavelli and eternity of the world, see Sasso, Gennaro, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, 3 vols. (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1987). On Epicureanism as source of critique of Jewish religion, see Strauss, Leo, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

30 On Jewish providence see the fundamental work by Buber, Martin, “Koenigtum Gottes,” in Werke, vol. 2, Schriften zur Bibel (Munich: Koesel verlag, 1964), 489–649. One needs to consider with particular care the interpretation of God in Moses and Joshua as melekh, commander of the army: “JHWH is … He who accompanies His people (Ex. 33,16; Deut. 20,4; 31,6), He who leads His people (Ex. 13,21; Num. 14,14; Deut. 1,30–33), the commander, the melekh” (618). Joshua was a figure often invoked by Savonarola. The key to Buber's interpretation is the distinction he draws between melekh (“commander”) and “king”: this allows him to explain why the Mosaic constitution is a theocracy, and not a monarchy. This distinction may also shed light on the crucial tension between the halakhic obligation for God's Chosen People to have a “commander” and their later wish to have a “king” (like other nations): the two are clearly distinct, for the role of the commander can be taken up by more than one person, depending upon circumstances (as taught by the doctrine of the Three Crowns).

31 G. Savonarola, Salmi 11 October 1495, in Scelta di Prediche e Scritti di Fra Girolamo Savonarola: Con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita, ed. Villari, P. and Casanova, E. (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1898). Translation mine.

32 On Eusebius and the end of Christian “political theology” see Peterson, Erik, “Monotheism as a Political Problem,” in Theological Tractates, ed. Hollerich, M. J. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

33 The passage that begins: “If your illustrious house wishes to follow these excellent men who redeemed their provinces, it is necessary, before all other things, as the true foundation of every undertaking, that you provide yourself with your own arms” (Prince 26, 122).

34 Augustine, On Order, 2.18.48. I owe this citation to the excellent article by Heyking, John von, “A Headless Body Politic? Augustine's Understanding of a Populus and Its Representation,” History of Political Thought 20, no. 4 (1999): 562–64, with whose interpretation I agree for the most part.

35 Augustine, City of God, trans. Bettenson, Henry (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 19.24.

36 I have discussed the significance of this distinction between Augustine and Cicero with respect to contemporary republicanism and populism in “The Quarrel between Populism and Republicanism: Machiavelli and the Antinomies of Plebeian Politics,” Contemporary Political Theory 11, no. 3 (2012): 242–63. I have since become aware of the brilliant reading of De re publica 1.39 in medieval thought in Kempshall, M. S., “De re publica 1.39 in Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought,” in Cicero's Republic, ed. North, J. A. and Powell, J. G. F. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2001), 99–135, whose results, I believe, do not invalidate my own reading.

37 On the idea of ordo amoris in Augustine see Gregory, Eric, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Savonarola picks up this idea several times, for instance in Predica sopra Aggeo (in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, ed. Luigi Firpo [Rome: Belardetti, 1965]): “l'amore di Dio sempre tende alle cose superiori e l'amor propio alle inferiori” (III, 127); and in Predica sopra Aggeo XIII: “E chi ha l'amore suo retto e non distorto, amerà sempre più el ben commune ch'el proprio, come fa l'amore delle creature, insito da Dio in quelle, d'amare più la sua cause e l'universale che sè proprio. E se tun non fai questo, credi che l'amore tuo non è retto nè ordinato amore” (XIII, 233, emphasis mine). Savonarola has a clear notion of the ordo amoris: first the love for God, and only secondarily love for country: “rettificate, dico, l'amor vostro in Dio, che è sommo bene, e non distorcete l'amor vostro in cose vane. Fatelo, prima, per onore di Dio; secondo, per non guastare l'ordine, che vuole che amiate più Dio che voi e piu el ben commune ch'el proprio. … L'ordine bono della città ancora darà a voi questo: che sarete amati da ciascuno” (223).

38 Letter of 16 April 1527. See now the extensive discussion of this saying in Viroli's Machiavelli's God.

39 See the examples given in Viroli, Machiavelli's God, chap.1 passim.

40 For an overview of the debate on Machiavelli's theory of social conflict, see Geuna, Marco, “Machiavelli ed il ruolo dei conflitti nella vita politica,” in Conflitti, ed. Caruso, D. and Arienzo, A. (Naples: Libreria Dante e Descartes), 19–57, and Lucchese, Conflict.

41 Savonarola, Ruth e Micae, 18 May 1496, 106–8.

42 On the importance of this transitional moment for early modern political thought, see now Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

43 The “return to beginnings” is a formula that one finds in both Savonarola and Machiavelli and reflects the need to reform both religion and politics. For a detailed analysis of the “return to beginnings” see my Between Form and Event (Dordecht: Kluwer, 2000); on the use of the term in Savonarola, see Viroli, Machiavelli's God, 73–88. But Viroli claims that the “idea of renovatio that Machiavelli defends and sets forth as a religious and political ideal is the same as that found in the Christian tradition: it means return to the true form” (87). As I show in the previously cited book, this is not entirely correct.

44 Melamed, Abraham, “The Myth of Venice in Italian Renaissance Jewish Thought,” in Italia Judaica (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1983), 401–13, argues for a later conjunction of Machiavellism with messianism in Renaissance Jewish political thought: “Luzzatto interprets Jewish history according to Machiavellian lines. According to the organic theory of the state, the Jews, like any other people, follow an unavoidable historical cycle of birth, rise and decline. However, the decline could be the starting point for their renewal. So, Luzzatto gives the Messianic idea a Machiavellian meaning” (410). By the same token, for this Jewish messianic application of Machiavelli to work, it must have been clear to the Jewish readers of Machiavelli that his political thought was compatible with, and possibly contained, messianic strains.

45 On the opposition between Moses and the Messiah, see the studies on Jewish messianism in Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

46 On this point, I refer to Strauss, Leo, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Pines, Shlomo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). On the sense in which Jewish messianism thinks about the “end of history” see also Agamben, Giorgio, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

47 The nexus between divine grace, popular matter, and form of regime is central to Savonarola's Predica sopra Aggeo: “L'esemplo tu lo hai nel Salvatore [messia] nostro, el quale ha fondato el regno suo nella grazia; vedi quanto ei fu potente da principio … vinsono la potenzia del mondo colla debolezza, la ricchezza con la povertà, la sapienzia del mondo colla stultizia della croce. Or vedi che vale più la forza dello spirito e dell'esser spirituale che nessuna altra cosa. Vedi ancora e leggi tutte le istorie antiche, che gli uomini, quanti più erano in grazia, tanto più ottenevano e vincevano. Guardo Moisè, guarda Iosuè” (XIII, 217). Here Savonarola appeals to a decidedly messianic reading of Pauline motifs.

48 On the materialism and vitalism of Italian philosophical and political thought since Machiavelli, see now Esposito, Roberto, Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

49 Savonarola also gave his idea of messianic renovation an antimonarchical formulation. See Savonarola, Prediche sopra Aggeo: “Se tu vuoi renovarti, o città nuova, se tu vuoi esser nuova e se tu hai mutato nuovo stato, bisogna che tu muti nuovi modi e nuovo vivere, se tu vuoi durare, e se tu vuoi reggere e ti bisogna fare uno nuovo cantico e ricercarsi che tu abbi nuova forma. La prima cosa che tu debbia fare intra l'altre è questa: che tu facci legge, che nessuno più per l'avvenire possa farsi capo, altrimenti tu sarai fondata in su la rena” (VIII, 132, emphasis mine).

50 It is crucial to see that Savonarola also connected Moses to Brutus; see Brown, “Savonarola,” 273, 278, and Lynch, Christopher, “Machiavelli on Reading the Bible,” in Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought, ed. Oz-Salzberger, Fanic, Schochet, Gordon, and Jones, Meirav (Jerusalem: Shalom, 2008), 29–54.

51 What follows is based on parts of my article “The Quarrel between Populism and Republicanism.”

52 On these passages, see Najemy, John, “Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 659–81.

53 Momigliano, Arnoldo, “Prolegomena ad ogni futura metafisica sulla plebe reomana,” in Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 368–77, and “Osservazioni sulla distinzione fra patrizi e plebei,” in Roma Arcaica (Florence: Sansoni, 1989), 209–39.

54 See particularly Predica sopra Aggeo XIII, 215–19.

Ibid