Entre o elogio e a censura: o lugar da religião no pensamento de Nicolau Maquiavel

Abstract

This work analyzes the place that the religion occupies in the thought politician of Nicholas Machiavelli (1469 - 1527). It raises the perspective of analysis around the religion as one of the basic subjects of its workmanship and essential to the understanding of the censure that direct to the bar of the Roman Church. The relevance of the religion if shows in the foundation and conservation of the politician State. It is a force capable to make to converge in the State the well public, the social order and the freedom of its people. This function of the religion is recognized since a perspective pair. First, it is instrumentum regni: the dynast uses it as force that canalizes the religious feeling (timori de dio) of the people in favor of the obedience of the civil ?commandment". Second, the own people identify the religious commandment with the civil commandment, intermediated for an internalized civic and moral education: the people are persuaded of that the civil obedience is a value and a well itself. Machiavelli recognizes in the religion this normative function, essential to the establishment of the order and security of the State. The religion is simultaneous to the same conditions of the civil life, because it is a balance center between the conflict relations in the State. Of the attrition between forces that, for one face they are aggregates, therefore they recognize the power and its good use as form to accommodate the internal conflicts and to guarantee the freedom, and on the other hand they are disjoint, because it's originated of a movement that it searchs, it desires, it wants and ambitions blindly to everything, becomes necessary a balance point. It is to leave of this tense relation between the members of a politics community that the religion is analyzed by Machiavelli. The Speeches, The Prince, Of the Art of the War, History of Florence, are the main texts of this study, even so it is enriched by lesser workmanships and the important aid of studious of its thought. Between the commendation and the censorship in relation to the religion, are those that create the conditions for its manifestation in the State and those that contribute for its destruction.