MARIANA, JUAN DE

Spanish theologian and historian; b. Talavera, Spain, April 2, 1536; d. Toledo, Feb. 16, 1624. He entered the Jesuits in 1554; studied philology, theology, and history at alcalÁ; taught theology in Rome (1561), Sicily (1564), and Paris (1569); and preached in Italy, France, and Flanders. In 1574 he returned to Toledo and devoted himself to writing. His history of Spain, first published in Latin in Toledo in 1592, was augmented, revised, and translated into Spanish by him in later editions. It is somewhat uncritical. His Re rege et regis institutione (Toledo 1599), written at the request of Philip II and dedicated to Philip III, did not attract much attention until the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610. In the work Mariana held that power was conferred on monarchs and sanctioned by the people, who in the last analysis, as he saw it, had the right of tyrannicide. Kings, therefore, should be educated so that this extreme may be avoided. Henry's assassin, however, had never heard of Mariana. There was an outcry in France against Mariana and the Jesuits, and the Jesuit general threatened any approval of tyrannicide with severe penalties. In his De monetae mutatione, one of the Tractatus VII theologici et historici (Cologne 1609), Mariana attacked monetary debasement and openly accused Spanish fiscal officials of fraud. He was imprisoned in a Franciscan monastery for a year, where he is supposed to have composed a discourse on the ills of the Jesuits. Some scholars hold that this work is not entirely his; others hold that he had completed it in MS by 1605 and that it was confiscated by the government when he was imprisoned in 1610. It was published in Bordeaux in 1625, the year after Mariana's death, and was frequently used as a weapon against the Jesuits. Mariana was one of a group of Spanish Jesuits who, by splitting from the rest of the society in its early years, would almost have destroyed the society. He composed the Scholia in Vetus et Novum Testamentum (Madrid 1613). A monument was erected to him in Talavera in 1888.

Bibliography: a. astrain, Historia de la compañia de Jesús, 7 v. (Madrid 1902–25) v.3–4. j. laures, The Political Economy of Juan de Mariana (New York 1928). l. koch, Jesuiten-Lexikon 1163–65. c. testore, Enciclopedia cattolica 8:146–147. a. mercati and a. pelzer, Dizionario ecclesiastico (Turin 1954-58) 2:849. d. mansilla, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 2 7:48–49.

[m. b. martin]