The Universal Christian Enterprise
The tradition of Naples is unanimously lived and expressed by the greatest writers of the kingdom, who are enemies of Luther, of Machiavelli, of Bodin, of Hobbes—in a word, of all the fathers of Europe. Against the first of these, Luther, it was a son of Gaeta, Tommaso de Vio, who opened the Catholic polemic, even though not the slightest tentacle of Lutheran heresy ever emerged in Naples, since the Waldensians had no other relation to Naples than that of a momentary stay: Juan de Valdés was from Cuenca, Bernardino Tommasini of Oca was Sienese, Pietro Carnesecchi and Pietro Martire Vermigli were Florentine, Marc’Antonio Flaminio was Venetian, Giulia Gonzaga was Lombard, and Isabel Briceno was Iberian. Nor did Machiavellianism ever gain a foothold in Naples, because the very Neapolitan school of Tacitean realism was by nature anti-Machiavellian. Among its ranks are names of the stature of Girolamo Franchetta, Fabio Frezza, Deodato Solerà, Gio. Donato Turboli, Muzio Floriati, Giambattista Vico, and many others—not to mention that one of the most formidable anti-Machiavellian polemicists known to us was born in Rocca d’Evandro, in the Terra di Lavoro: Ottavio Sammarco. Moreover, there were thinkers who did not even admit Tacitism (due to their extremely realist stance), such as Alberto Pecorelli or Giulio Cesare Capaccio, or the courageous polemicist Torquato Accetto, engaged in combatting Machiavelli from the trenches of Stoic philosophy. The absolutist mentality typical of Europe and unknown in the Spains, theorized by Jean Bodin in Les six livres de la République, was incompatible with the mentality of traditional Naples, because the latter upheld the subjection of the prince to the laws of the Kingdom, in the unanimous doctrine of Neapolitan jurisprudence, synthesized by the free subjects of Philip II in the much-forgotten yet sublime text of Giovanni Antonio Lanario, according to whom: “Potestas absoluta non potest dari in Republica politica, et bene ordinata” (“Absolute power cannot be granted in a political and well-ordered Republic”). This doctrine was developed by Alessandro Turamino in his vision of custom as an expression of the popular will; by Andrea Molfesio in his framework of legal limitations; by Domenico Tassone in his chart of institutional limitations; by Francesco Pavone in his conception of popular customs as superior to the laws of the prince; and by many others whom it is not necessary to list in order to clarify the concept of limited power characteristic of the Spains—which placed authentic Naples in a position of opposition to the Bodinian absolutism characteristic of Europe. The systematic body of Neapolitan parliamentary law developed by the Bishop of Capri, Raffaele Rastelli, in the time of Philip IV, would alone suffice to make clear the contrast between Neapolitan political law—free, with a Spanish imprint—and European political law.
* La monarchia tradizionale, Francisco Elías de Tejada, Capitolo Settimo, La Tradizione di Napoli, 4 L’impresa universale cristiana, 1963, P.153-154, Controcorrente Edizioni, 2001, P.142-144
