Mutual Causality in Wyclif’s Political Thought: His Doctrine of Dominion

While facing the topic of civil lordship in his political writings, Wyclif starts from the premise that authority and subordination, dominium and servitus, are to be conceived as reciprocal. The root of this idea is Biblical and is developed by Wyclif in the framework of Aristotle’s logic of relations. All Christians are reciprocally one another’s lords and servants, and – on closer inspection – each one is both lord and servant of himself, as the relation between soul and body is concerned. This allows Wyclif for a broad account of the relation of dominium, founded on grace, in terms of mutual control by the subjects involved, also leading to the almost paradoxical tenet that servants might exercise their duty to obey their secular lord even by resisting or rebelling to him, or by expropriating the endowed prelates, as spiritual lords, of their wealth. The issue is of topical interest, as the human lordship is shaped on – and thus legitimated by – the archetypical relation of dominium borne by God with creatures; and the paper shows how the preliminary assumption of a mutual relation between dominium and servitus influences Wyclif’s featuring of the diverse kinds of human dominion, more or less close to the eternal divine pattern, paying particular attention to the key rôle mutual mastery and slavery plays in Wyclif’s doctrine of dominium evangelicum.