Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought

The idea that man is by nature a social and political creature enjoyed a long and rich career during the Latin Middle Ages.1 Indeed, it is perhaps not too implausible to say that the naturalness of human association was one of the few doctrines to which virtually all medieval political thinkers would subscribe, in one or another version. A primary reason for this widespread agreement was an analogous near-unanimity on the part of the philosophical and theological sources available to the Middle Ages. At one time it was supposed that social and political naturalism was strictly an inheritance from the transmission of Aristotle to the West in the thirteenth century.2 Despite occasional relapses,3 however, this view has been discredited on the grounds that most of the influential classical and Christian authorities accessible throughout the whole of the Middle Ages articulated essentially the same concept.4 Cicero, Seneca, the Latin poets, St. Augustine, Lactantius-these figures (and others besides) all reinforced the notion that man was meant by nature to live in community with his fellows. Thus the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics by the West merely confirmed the naturalism that had almost universally permeated medieval political, philosophical, legal, and theological treatises. The predominance of naturalistic conceptions of human association in political thought from at least the twelfth century onwards was more a function