Marcilius of Padua & Spiritual Religion

Marsilius emphasized the spiritual role of the church.  This has a very appealing ring, and it did in his day, and he said the church is getting too worldly, too much involved in politics and other things, and the church needs to confine itself to spiritual matters, and so Marsilius isolated the church and the Christian faith from any relevance to the material world, from any relevance to politics, to economics, to the arts and the sciences, and confined it to the soul of man.  As a result, the only future left for Christianity then was pietism, spiritual devotions, no relevance to the problems of everyday life.  Marsilius was the great father of this kind of thinking, and he was, although not openly, very much anti-Christian as well as anti-church.  Thus, what Marsilius did was to deny the sovereignty of Jesus Christ over the world.