Volume 3, Chapter 2

'THE AVIGNON CAPTIVITY', 1314-1362

Section 1: CRISIS IN THE WORLD OF THOUGHT

Section 2: THE TROUBLED TIMES OF JOHN XXII

Section 3: THE AVIGNON REGIME

CRISIS IN THE WORLD OF THOUGHT

i. The Problem of Church and State

WITH the death of Philip the Fair, in the autumn of 1314, the assault of the French monarchy on the papal claims came to a sudden end. The regime of co-operation between the two powers was resumed, if not in all the friendliness of former days, at any rate with an equal practical effectiveness; the peace, such as it was, would not be broken until the very eve of the Reformation, two hundred years later. "Such as it was", for not only had the issue between Boniface VIII and Philip not been decided, despite the surrenders of Clement V -- so that it remained a possible source of further disaster through all those two centuries -- but there was a permanent memorial of the controversy in the literature circulated by both parties during the fatal years. The issue was practical, it was important, it was urgent -- and it has never ceased to be so. "The pope's imperative intervention in French affairs was not anything merely arbitrary and suddenly thought up, that can be explained by the pope's ambition, or excused by the king's tyranny. It was bound up with a body of teaching, with the supremacy of the spiritual power as the Middle Ages had known and practised it, a supremacy in which the Church still saw a lawful and necessary function of the mission she held from God." [477]

Both king and pope realised fully that the fight was no mere clash of personal temperaments. That the temperamental weaknesses -- and worse -- of the contending potentates had their influence on the course of the struggle is evidently true, but these were not its most important elements; they can, by comparison, be disregarded in a study of the fight and its consequences, as we can disregard the slander and invective of the controversialists. But the controversialists dealt also with other things than slanders: on both sides, theories were set out and defended, and the best writing of this sort was carefully preserved, armament for future like conflicts, and -- this is true of the anti-papal works at least -- carefully translated into French, so that others besides the priest and the legist could see how right it was for the king to challenge the pope. [478] As this literature remained and grew, in the course of two hundred years, to become a formidable menace to Catholic unity, something more must be said of it and of how the "grand differand" between Boniface and Philip continued to poison Catholic life for generations after them. [479]

With this in mind we may go on to note the attitude of the writers on the papal side as an affirmative answer to the question "Did Our Lord mean the Pope to be the Lord of the World?" This answer meant, in practice, that the Church's mission towards the state included "not only the consecration of kings, but also the verification of their title, and the control of their administration. . . the right and power to judge and correct their conduct [i.e. as rulers], to invalidate their acts and, in extreme cases, to pronounce their deposition." [480]

Kings, of course, did their best to escape the exercise of such powers and, as they grew more literate, they began to raise doubts whether they were indeed lawful powers. So Frederick II, in 1245, had denounced his excommunication as "a misuse of priestly authority"; and he had gone on to declare to the princes of Europe that "nowhere do we read that by any law, divine or human, has power been given to the pope to punish kings by depriving them of their kingdoms, or to pass judgment on princes." Such a situation would be ridiculous, said Frederick, "the claim that he who as emperor is loosed from all laws is yet himself subject to law." [481]

The emperor here is evidently setting up the law of ancient Rome against what the pope claims of him as a disciple of Christ; but his contention is also a reminder of another factor of the struggle that must be ever before the mind of those who perhaps stand amazed at the immensity of the papal claim. This is the fact that nowhere, in these centuries, is it a question of conflict between the papal claims and some royal scheme of a balanced distribution of royal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. From the moment when these fights first began in the time of St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) was always between two claims to be absolute. These popes who, reforming the Church, slowly drew Christendom back from the depths, found their greatest obstacle in the actually existing, all-embracing, imperial and royal absolutism which had all but merged the Church in the state. If the pope was not to be all, [482] then the king would be all; the pope must be all, or the Church would be nothing. The alternative before Christendom was the supremacy of the Church over the state, or else Caesar, to all intents and purposes, the pope. The popes, with remarkable faith -- and courage -- did not shrink from choosing; they dutifully climbed the heights and thence proceeded to judge the world.

Did our Lord mean the pope to be the Lord of the World in this sense? Canonists, by the time of Boniface VIII, had been saying so for a long time, and saying it in such a way that they seemed to claim still more. Hostiensis [483] for example who died in 1271, one of the greatest of all the eyes of his contemporaries, declared that it is the pope who is the true source of all the state's authority; and that the state, indeed, in all its actions, is really deputising for the pope; the emperor is no more than the pope's vicar for temporal affairs. For there can only be one Lord of the World, namely Christ, Our Lord; and the pope alone is Christ's vicar, Who "committed all things to Peter", giving him not a key, but the keys; "two keys" says the cardinal, by which are signified the two fields of papal supremacy, to wit, the spiritual and the temporal. And this strong doctrine is no more than a reflection of what an equally eminent master in the law had proclaimed to all Christendom when, having become pope, he was engaged in a life and death struggle against the absolutist schemes of Frederick II. This was Innocent IV (1243-1254) [484] and against the emperor's claim to incorporate the Church into the State, this canonist pope set up his own, "We exercise the general authority in this world of Him who is the King of Kings, who has granted to the prince of the apostles and to us a plenitude of power to bind as well as to loose upon earth, not only all persons, but all things whatsoever." We have seen Frederick's scornful comment on this language. But the emperor's rejoinder was as barren, apparently, as his military genius or political power. The pope, in this particular conflict, was victorious and his high conception of papal duties and powers seemed more firmly established than ever.

When, fifty years later, the papacy, in the person of Boniface VIII, next called up for judgment a powerful ruler, the spirit and tone of the intervention was, if possible, more "Innocentian" than Innocent IV himself ! but this time the royal rejoinder was far indeed from fruitless. And Christendom saw the popes suddenly compelled to lower their tone: the contrast between the actions (and the language) of Boniface VIII and Clement V, less than ten years later, was something to marvel at. Phaethon, it would seem, had fallen from his car. And, whatever the rights of the question, the rebel responsible for the catastrophe had not only gone unpunished, but had been lauded by the victim for his good intentions. Here, surely, was mischief indeed, grave scandal in the most literal sense. The crisis had produced a stumbling block for Catholics over which many would continue to trip until the Catholic state disappeared from the political world.

For Philip the Fair's challenge, whether the popes really possessed such authority, was now set before the mind of Catholic Europe so forcibly and so clearly, that the debate about it never really ceased thereafter. In the two hundred years and more during which that authority had been claimed, exercised and generally acknowledged, it had come to be one of the fundamentals of the Christian political system, of the Christian-religion-inspired civilisation of Western Europe. Revolt here was revolt indeed, and when, from such a revolt, the Church failed to emerge victorious and able to punish the rebel, its prestige suffered a defeat that was irreparable. Never again does the Church dominate the conflict from above; henceforth the popes too, are in the arena, and if the high papal tone persists (as naturally it does, for the popes do not immediately understand that the former things have passed away) it serves as an additional aggravation to the world. Gradually the popes came to abandon this position so long defended by the great medieval canonists, this theory which had been the Church's defence against the all-invading state; and it may be well if, to avoid confusion, and the better to understand the tragedy which accompanied the slow changeover, we remind ourselves what was really -- in the mind of the popes -- the nature of the power they had claimed, and the kind of arguments by which they had defended it. " It was in its source an authority that was spiritual, and it made no claim, therefore, to absorb the authority of the state; but it was a power that extended to the furthest boundaries of the moral order, and which, as an inevitable consequence of this, included the right to survey the conduct of rulers and to call them to account for their behaviour as such, to correct them, to pass sentence on them if they were at fault, and even to depose those who prove recalcitrant." [485] The popes never claim that they may administer France or Spain as though it were their own Italian Papal State. But they do claim authority to correct the rulers of these lands for sins committed in ruling, as they correct all other delinquencies in the flock placed under their charge; and they claim the right to correct rulers in a particular way, by excommunicating them and declaring them to have forfeited the right to rule. Boniface VIII's bull Unam Sanctam is nothing more than an official statement of this theory and claim.

What of the standing of this papal claim to punish kings by deposition? Whether it be true or not it " has never, in any way, been proposed as a doctrine of the Church; but, nevertheless, it certainly won the assent of many popes, and, in an especially grave moment of history, it coloured the traditional background of the papal claims, namely in the solemn document that expresses the distinctive views of Boniface VIII." [486] Perhaps it is here, in the association of a theory peculiar to a particular age with a definition of general Catholic duty, that we must look for the source of the most serious part of the ensuing and mischievous misunderstanding. What was really defeated may indeed have been no more than a "personal system", that is to say, a theory and policy really " personal " to a succession of popes, but hitherto everywhere taken for granted. But this "personal system" had now been defeated and defied at a moment when it was set out in the closest association with a solemn definition of essential Catholic duty. If the one was defied the other could not but appear compromised. Henceforth the first was always on the defensive and acceptance of the second might suffer accordingly.

The debate between the canonists and legists had, then, revealed the whole deep chasm that separated these antagonistic views of public life. It had also produced that third theory from which the ultimate true solution was one day to be developed, and had thereby thrown into high relief the deficiencies in the canonists' argumentation and the exaggerations in the claims they made. These exaggerations produced, naturally enough, an exaggerated reaction that carried the canonists' lay opponents to a denial of papal prerogatives and rights (in spiritual matters).that were beyond all question. It is, for example, from this time that the appeals from the pope to a General Council first begin to appear with anything like frequency, a new tendency that grows steadily through the next sixty years, and which the opportune disaster of the Schism [487] then so fosters that, at the Council of Constance, an effort is actually made to give this abuse force of law. [488] Again, the canonists have quoted Scripture in support of their assertions, but Scripture understood metaphorically. For example, two actual swords had once been brought to Our Lord by the Apostles for his defence: [489] the canonists had read the act allegorically, and used that allegory to justify a theory. Now, a critical attack was made on this method of using Scripture -- an attack which could be supported by the new, clear, strong teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, that arguments about doctrine can only be based on the literal sense of the sacred text. [490] Once this mentality developed, a whole host of arguments, classic with the canonists for two centuries and more, would simply disappear overnight. [491] And much else would disappear too -- the prestige of the theological scholar, for example, with that new educated lay world which is the peculiar distinction of this fourteenth century, the age where the greatest figures among orthodox scholars are Dante and Petrarch, and where no cleric writing theology attains to eminence and yet manages to keep entirely orthodox.

The latest historian to study the conflict of ideas that underlay the crisis, analyses the works of some seventeen polemists. [492] There are, first of all, the antagonists who set out and defend the rival theories: on the papal side two Augustinian friars, Giles of Rome [493] and James of Viterbo [494] ; on the king's side the authors of the treatises called A Dialogue between a Cleric and a Knight and Rex Pacificus. Next there is a group of nine writers whose aim is to find some middle way in which to reconcile the rival jurisdictions. Working from the papal side towards this are the Dominican John of Paris and the authors of the gloss on the bull Unam Sanctam, and the treatise called Quaestio in Utramque Partem: on the other side are six writers the best known of whom is Dante? whose De Monarchia here comes under consideration. Finally, there are considered four "practical" schemes. It is hardly possible in a work of this kind to attempt anything more than to list all these, and to refer those interested to the long analysis of them (180 pages) in Riviere's authoritative work. But something must be said of John of Paris -- as a critic of the papal apologists -- for it was with his theory that the future lay; nor can Dante be merely mentioned.

What the canonists held about the relation of the pope to Catholic princes, considered as princes, has already been described. In the controversies of 1296-1303 the two great theologians, Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo, Augustinian friars both, strove to give these theories a still greater prestige. The temporal ruler, they held, was strictly subjected to the spiritual ruler; the pope, because the vicar of Christ, was the source of all law and of all earthly power and authority; the governmental action of pnnces was subject to the pope's control; and these themes were, for Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo [495] , part and parcel of the Catholic faith. It is the first merit of John of Paris that, in the very hour when this inconveniently favourable apologetic was born, he provided the needed theological criticism.

The work in which the Dominican thus corrects the Augustinian -- Kingly Power and Papal Power [496] -- was written apparently in 1302, just before the publication of the Unam Sanctam. Its author is not a partisan, but well aware of the controversy -- as a lecturer in the University of Paris could not but be aware of it; but he explicitly detaches himself from the rival schools of thought, and sets himself to the search for a via media. With all due submission he makes his own analysis and he sets out his ideas as a hypothesis.

In his view there is not -- as the Waldenses continue to say -- any inconsistency between the true Idea of the Church of Christ and a concern with power in temporal matters. Nor -- as the theologians he criticises assert -- is the Church's power in temporal matters a consequence of its spiritual authority. It does not follow that because the Church possesses authority over men in spiritual matters that it also possesses authority over them in temporal matters -- an authority which it allows the state to exercise as its vicar. Wherever the Church does in fact enjoy authority in temporal matters, this is the outcome of some grant made by the State "out of devotion". The two entities Church and State -- though unequal in dignity -- are co-ordinate in the exercise of authority. Both originate in the divine plan. The State derives its authority from God no less really than does the Church. The spiritual power is indeed the superior of the two, but it is not superior in everything. The pope, though truly Vicar of Christ by Christ's appointment, is not in fact heir to the totality of Our Lord's universal royalty over men and kings. In its own order the State is, under God, sovereign.

Has the spiritual power, then, no authority to regulate the temporal? It has indeed; for the purpose of the spiritual power is a higher thing than the purpose of the temporal, and the lower purpose is subordinate to, and for the sake of, the higher. But -- and here again lies the really great importance of John of Paris - - the Dominican insists that the pope is to exercise this control by instructing the conscience of the prince, and, if the prince fails, by administering correction that is spiritual. The pope instructs the prince, he says, de fide and not de regimine; [497] the only instrument of the Church's empire over the prince is its charisma to instruct the Christian mind in things of faith and morals, and its moral authority over the Christian conscience. [498]

The presence of the great name of Dante among the parties to this discussion, is a useful reminder that the quarrel's importance was by no means merely French. [499] Again, while Dante is a layman, he is a layman who is not a legist; and, like John of Paris, he has no official locus standi in the quarrel. He is moreover a layman who, in refuting the papal thesis as the canonists propound it, makes use of their own chosen method of argument, and uses this to deny the validity of their use of Scripture. All this is extremely interesting; we have here one of the first appearances of the private lay citizen in the public life of the Church. And he appears as not only a most orthodox believer, an undoubted "good Catholic", but as the author of a theologico-political treatise directed against currently accepted ecclesiastical theories, and written to promote the revolution that will save the Church's soul.

Nevertheless Dante is to be classed with John of Paris; for he, too, is looking for the via media. This has not, indeed, always been clear to the readers of his treatise De Monarchia. [500] The general theme of that well-known book is that a universal monarchy is essential if civilisation is to survive and humanity to make lasting progress. Dante's arguments in proof of this build up a conception of monarchy so high that only when a saint was the monarch would the system really work: or so we might think as we read. But for Dante that ideal monarchy was actually in existence. It was the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and all that was needed for the millennium to arrive was to convince the world of the duty of all princes to accept the emperor's superiority. The greatest hindrance was nationalism, and for nationalism -- "the nations that so furiously rage together, the peoples that imagine a vain thing" [501] -- Dante has strong, religiously- phrased condemnation. How shall the universal monarch accord with the universal pope? In the first place, he is politically independent of the pope; and Dante, attacking, not indeed the papacy, but the canonists who have devised the theory of the papacy's supreme political authority, systematically reviews -- and denies -- all the " spiritual" proofs these are wont to adduce: proofs from the sun and moon, the two swords, Saul's deposition by Samuel, Our Lord's promise to St. Peter, all this is rejected as beside the point.

So far there is nothing to distinguish Dante's thought from that of other contemporary writers -- not even the almost religious tone of his language about the empire is personal to him. It is in the closing chapter of the third book that he makes his own contribution, and that very briefly. If the empire is independent of the Church -- and since it existed before the Church this must be so -- and if the Church's power is wholly spiritual, then the emperor's authority derives immediately from God. The electors merely indicate the man who shall lawfully wield this power. But the emperor yet remains in some way subject to the pope "since mortal happiness is in some way established with a view to immortal happiness." [502] What is this way? and what, in hard detail, does this relation involve, for both pope and emperor? Dante does not tell us. But he says that the emperor receives from the pope "that light of grace by which he may rule more virtuously"; and he lays it down that the emperor shall act towards the pope "as a first-born towards his father, so that radiating the light of the father's grace, he may the more virtuously shine in all that world over which he has been set by Him Who alone is governor of all things spiritual and temporal."

This, it may be thought, is little enough and disappointing in its generality. Yet it is a statement of principle. Dante conceives the State as politically independent of the Church, and yet the temporal power as subordinate to the spiritual; and he conceives it as possible that these two realities -- independent, and yet the one subordinate to the other -- can so co-exist. And it is on this note that the treatise ends.

This, it is true, is not the aspect of Dante's political thought that has chiefly attracted attention. What has been chiefly regarded is his idealistic exaltation of the empire and his protest against the medieval claim that the popes enjoyed, as popes, a primacy in political matters; and his championship of the State's independence of such ecclesiastical tutelage. In his own time also it was this which made the great impression and Dante's De Monarchia suffered the reception which received opinion inevitably gives to the pioneer! When, after his death, during the war between the popes and the schismatic emperor Lewis of Bavaria, these themes again became practical politics, there was even for a moment the danger that Dante's bones would be digged up and burnt as those of a heretic! [503]

It cannot but be reckoned as a great misfortune -- even if perhaps an inevitable misfortune, given that human nature influences scholars too -- that, despite these artificers of the via media between the contending absolutisms, it was the extreme theories of the canonists, given theological form by the genius of Giles of Rome, which continued to shape the mind of the papal champions; and that these theories maintained their hold all through the next most difficult centuries, through the time of the Schism and the Conciliar controversies, and the Reformation, until the great spirit of St. Robert Bellarmine restated and determined the issue. The great Jesuit doctor recognised John of Paris as a distant ancestor of his own thought; and a modern, somewhat disgusted, commentator -- a very great scholar indeed -- has presented Dante as being not much better than Bellarmine. It is always a loss to base a good case on poor argument -- and that was the loss which champions of the papacy, often enough, suffered in those centuries. It was an additional loss that, by their proscription of the theorists of the middle way, the writings of this school passed into the armoury of the enemy, and the obiter dicta of John of Paris (for example) became the foundation of more than one useful plaidoyer for Gallicanism. [504]

ii. The Problem of Faith and Reason

One of the most serious consequences of the duel between Pope Boniface and the French king was, then, something quite unpredictable; namely, that a considerable body of Catholic thought was now permanently roused, not indeed, as yet, against any Catholic doctrine about the papacy, but against a principle of administration which, for generations, had been almost as sacred as doctrine, a principle with which the prestige of the papacy was most intimately linked. Here, for the future, there was a great division in Catholic thought. And, unfortunately, it was not the only division. Already, only fifty years after the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, Christendom was beginning to suffer from the failure of its thinkers to rally to his thought, and most of all from their failure to accept its supreme practical achievement, the harmony he discerned between the spheres of knowledge naturally known and of that which we know supernaturally, the true character of the relations between reason and faith. The story of philosophy among Catholics in these fifty years is, in that respect, one of steady deterioration. Already, by the time John XXII canonised St. Thomas (1323), the work was well begun that was to sterilise the movement which was the glory of the previous century, to dislocate the teaching in the theological schools (not the faith of the theologians indeed, as yet, but their scientific exposition of it), to destroy the theologians' confidence in philosophy and the pious man's confidence in the theologians, and to leave the ordinary man, in the end, "'fed up' with the whole business" [505] of speculative theology.

What is the end of a society that ceases to have any use for thought, or any confidence that thought can produce certitude? Pessimism surely and despair, a flight to the material in compensation, or else to a wrong -- because unintelligent -- cultivation of the mystical life of devotion, to superstition thereby and to worse. For to this must devotion come once it disinterests itself from that explanation of revealed truth which true theology is, and once the mystic is tainted with the fatal error that considers theology as mere scholarship, the professional occupation of the theologian, whereas it is an essential condition of healthy Catholic life; and for the mystic, especially, is it important that theology should flourish and good theologians abound, for in the guidance which objective theology supplies lies the mystic's sole certainty of escaping self- illusion.

All of these calamities were to develop in time. Not all of them came at once, nor within a few years. But it is now that the seeds of much lasting disaster are sown, through the new philosophical theories of leading Catholic thinkers. The two greatest names associated with this movement away from the positions of St. Thomas Aquinas are John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, Franciscans both of them, and teachers of theology at Oxford.

Before we consider how they came to build up their new critical theories of knowledge, let us note, what we cannot too much insist upon, namely, that the problem which all these thinkers were trying to solve, about the nature of faith and of reason, and about the relations between the two, is one of the permanent practical anxieties of mankind. Upon all men, sooner or later, the hard experiences of life force the issue. Are the relations between faith and reason such that a reasonable man can continue to have faith without suppressing, or ignoring, the activities of his reason? Here is the difficulty from the side of the philosopher. Is theology -- the body of knowledge whose first principles are truths known by God's revelation -- really a science? i.e. is it a matter fit for, and capable of, scientific treatment? Is it really a field for the exercise of the reason? Or is not philosophy (where the reason has the field to itself), the exercise of the natural reason, a thing to be feared by theology, the sphere of the natural reason being so separated from the sphere of revealed truths that the introduction of reason into this last cannot but be as harmful as it is, scientifically, illegitimate? Here is the dilemma from the side of the theologian.

St. Thomas had so understood faith and reason that he was able to explain how, of their own nature, they are harmonious; they are means of knowledge independent, indeed, the one of the other, but not antagonistic; they are productive of distinct spheres of knowledge, but spheres which are yet in contact, so that man's intelligence can thereby be satisfied that to believe is reasonable, and be satisfied also that faith is not a mere vicious circle in the mind.

This teaching of St. Thomas left man's mind at peace with itself. Man was delivered from doubts about his power to know with certitude natural reality external to himself; he was certain that he could know with certainty, by the use of his reasoning intelligence, not only facts but also general truths of the natural order. Beyond this sphere of the natural truths lay that other sphere of truths, about God as man's final destiny, unattainable by the merely finite, reasonable intelligence. Many of these other truths had been made known to man -- revealed -- by God, and these truths man also could know with certainty, through his belief in the divine veracity and his knowledge that God had revealed them. Between these two ways of knowing -- by reasoning out the truth from truths already known, and by acceptance of the word of God revealing truths -- there was no conflict; nor was there any conflict between what was known in the one sphere and in the other; there could not, from the nature of things, be any such conflict. And the two spheres were connected and interrelated, so that man's reasoning intelligence could make with the sphere of faith that contact without which man could never be satisfied, and at rest, about the reality of belief, in that intellectual part of his soul whose activity is the very foundation of all his life and happiness. The means of this contact, the delicate all-important nexus, the medium of the thinker's hold on the fact of that higher sphere's existence, was reason's power to arrive, by its own natural operations, at the sure knowledge that there is a God Who is the cause of all else that exists, and at an equally sure knowledge about several of the divine attributes.

Such a theory as this, about faith and reason and their interrelation, is an evident aid for philosopher and theologian alike. It is even a necessity, if philosophy is not to degenerate into scepticism or if theology is not to become a mere psittacism. It guarantees the integrity of both the sciences and the right of each to use the methodology natural to it. The philosopher is saved from the temptation to infidelity, and the theologian from reliance on rhetoric and emotion. Now it was the unfortunate effect of the great thinkers who followed St. Thomas that their theories of knowledge destroyed the all-important nexus between the spheres of reason and faith, when they denied the power of reason really to prove the existence of God.

John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were, both of them, Franciscan friars; they were Englishmen, and they taught theology, the one after the other, in the university of Oxford. We are now assisting at the very early appearance of what has been a recurring phenomenon of history -- the confection in England of revolutionary doctrines fated to pass across the Channel and to be productive, in the different mental climate of the Continent, of really significant upheavals. The University of Oxford had, from the beginning, very marked particular characteristics. While Paris was, and continued to be, the first home of pure speculation, the philosophers at Oxford, from the beginning, were particularly attracted to the study of the physical universe. To one of the earliest of these Oxford teachers, Robert Grosstete. we owe a whole corpus of thought related to the theory of light. With another, Adam Marsh, it is mathematics that colour his speculation. And the pupil of these two doctors was the still greater physicist Roger Bacon. [506]

Roger Bacon, too, was a Franciscan, and, like all the thinkers of his time, he was first of all a theologian. It is theology which is the mistress-science, but philosophy is needed if theology is to be explained. Bacon -- like his great contemporary, and superior, St. Bonaventure, Minister-General of the Franciscan order -- holds that a divine illumination of the mind is the beginning of all knowledge. He explains how all knowledge, of natural things as well as of what is sacred, has descended to us through the ages from a first divine revelation. The Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers played similar roles in the divine plan. The philosophers were the successors of the prophets, they were themselves prophets. Nay, Roger Bacon is a prophet too, and conducts himself as such, whence doubtless not a little of the sufferings he had to endure from his brethren. He is a fierce critic of all his contemporaries of the university world, and no less fiercely he contests the prestige allowed the teachings of the great men of the past. Aristotle, unexamined, is a superstition; the only way to certain progress in knowledge is to return to the actual sources, and to make experiments. [507] Knowledge of the ancient languages then -- no one should rely on translations -- of mathematics [508] and physics, and the capacity and habit of experiments; these are the first things necessary in the formation of the true philosopher. There is no natural certainty to equal the certainty produced by experiment; indeed, by all internal and spiritual experiment we may come to the highest flights of the mystical life. The use of experimental method will reveal in time all the secrets of the world's natural forces. The Church ought to foster such researches. Their fruits will be invaluable to the Crusaders, for example, and also in the approaching struggle with Antichrist that is at hand: for this hard-headed critic of the superstition of Aristotle-worship was, in many things, a fiercely faithful believer in the fantasies of Abbot Joachim.

By the time Duns Scotus came to Oxford as a student [509] his confrere, Roger Bacon, was nearing the end of his very long life. The university was still filled with the disputes caused by the Franciscan criticism that the differences which characterised St. Thomas's philosophy were not orthodox. [510] The Dominican criticism of that philosophy, of which also Oxford had seen a great deal, had been ended, in 1287, by the instruction of the General Chapter of the order that the brethren were to follow St. Thomas's teaching. But with the saint's chief Franciscan opponent, the passionate John Peckham, still Archbishop of Canterbury, his teaching was hardly likely to be favourably regarded at the English university.

John Duns Scotus, indeed, was well acquainted with it, and in two ways he shows himself a kind of product of the Thomist revolution. For Scotus is an Aristotelian, breaking away and taking the schools of his order with him, from the Augustinian theories dear to St. Bonaventure; and he is so preoccupied with St. Thomas that his own major work is a kind of critical commentary on the saint's achievement.

It is an erroneous and very superficial view that sees in Scotus a conscious revolutionary, a turbulent Franciscan set on to vindicate the intellectual superiority of his order against the Dominican rivals. Duns Scotus has all the calm and the modesty and the detachment of the theologian who daily lives the great truths of which he treats. Always it is to the judgment of the Church that he submits his proferred solutions; the spirit in which he presents his teaching could not be more Catholic, more traditional. But it is not with the great Franciscan as a theologian that we are now concerned, but with his philosophical teaching, more particularly with his theories of knowledge and what follows from them.

More than any other of the scholastics Scotus is preoccupied with the problems of logic. It is not surprising that so studying logic in the scientific and mathematical-minded university of Oxford, and in the order that was the especial home of these studies, Scotus was most exigent in his idea of what is needed to make a proof that is really conclusive. We can argue to the existence of things either from their causes, or from their effects. The first kind of proof is the better, St. Thomas would say -- when we can get it; the second kind, though inferior, is yet conclusive and so useful. But for Scotus, only the first kind is really a proof.

And so there disappears a whole celebrated series of proofs from reason of the existence of God: and with them go the rational proofs of the providence of God, and of the immortality of the human soul. The human reason cannot, by its own powers -- it is now said -- arrive at certitude here. These are truths indeed, but truths only to be known by faith. Theology is their true home, the learning which deals with truths rationally unprovable. So, then, there disappears that middle ground where philosophy and theology meet, the all-important nexus between natural and supernatural know] edge; and there disappears with it the notion that philosophy and theology have it in common to give to man speculative knowledge: for theology is now rather a source of practical direction for life than a science. Philosophy and theology are no longer in contact. The day will come when they are conceived as necessarily opposed. [511]

Duns Scotus also moves away from St. Thomas, and again by what at first sight may seem only a nuance of method, in that his philosophy makes its first contact with God not in answering the question, Whether God exists? but this, Whether there exists a Being who is infinite? The truth of God's infinity is, in fact, central for Scotus: it is for him God's "essential" attribute. [512] And in association with this characteristic approach there is to be noted the place the Franciscan gives to the divine will. It is here, so he teaches, and not in the divine intelligence, that the cause of things being what they are is to be sought. A thing is good because God has willed it as it is. Had God willed it to be otherwise, then it would equally have been good. Law is right in so far as law is acceptable to God. From the point of view of St. Thomas, this is a topsy-turvy way of regarding the matter: and in its ultimate logical consequences it is, of course, far more serious than that. Those consequences will in the next two hundred years be worked out to the full.

Scotus, it may be thought, had a different kind of mind from that of the great Dominican. His tendency to develop his thought through an analysis of ideas already known, and to rely on such analysis as the only way, are in great contrast to the versatility of St. Thomas. But in this chapter we are merely considering the Franciscan doctor as the first in time of the thinkers whose critique of the philosophico-theological synthesis of St. Thomas did so much to prevent the general acceptance in the Catholic schools of that metaphysical teaching which later generations of Catholics have seen as a conditio sine qua non of sound theology. [513] To know Scotus in this role alone is, of course, to know him barely at all. His theological teaching was to form the piety of his order for centuries, under the active patronage of many popes, and especially was it to be the inspiration of the three great saints who revived the order in the dark days that followed the Schism, St. Bernadine of Siena, St. John Capistran and St. James of the March. The teaching of Duns Scotus on the Incarnation, and the spirituality which flowers everywhere in it, are one of the permanent treasures of Catholic thought. Most famously of all, Scotus is the first great doctor to set out, as we know it to-day, the mystery of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception and in one office for the feast Duns Scotus is described as another St. Cyril, raised up to defend this doctrine as St. Cyril was raised up to defend that of the divine maternity.

John Duns Scotus was a holy man, venerated as a saint. and perhaps one day to be officially recognised as such. Canonisation is a distinction that no one has, so far, proposed for William of Ockham. Of Ockham's early life we really know very little. He was younger by a generation than Scotus, [514] born somewhere about 1285. [515] He joined the Franciscan order and he studied theology at Oxford, where, however, he never proceeded to a higher degree than the lectorate, i.e. the apprentice stage where the graduate taught under the doctor's supervision It was at Oxford that Ockham's career as a teacher began. He never, it would seem, taught at Paris, and he was still busy with his lectures at Oxford on the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard (the classic occupation at this stage of the theologian's career) when, in 1324, on the eve of his doctorate he was summoned to the papal court to defend the orthodoxy of his views. He had, in fact, been denounced to the pope as a heretic by the chancellor of the university, John Luttrell,

Ockham's many writings are all extant, and the most of them have been in print since the end of the fifteenth century. [516] And, since 1922, we possess the report of the Avignon Commission appointed by the pope to enquire into his orthodoxy. [517] Ockham's influence was undoubtedly as mischievous as it was extensive. It is the mind of Ockham which, more than all else, is to dominate the university world from now on to the very eve of the Reformation, but it would be rash, [518] in the present state of our knowledge, to attempt to trace the pedigree of his ideas. But Ockham was certainly anti-Scotist, in full reaction, that is to say, against the super-subtlety and multitude of the new distinctions which mark that system.

Perhaps the readiest way to make clear the nature of the harm Ockham did, is to review the Avignon report, and to note [519] how Ockham's misunderstanding of the nature and limitations of the science in which he excelled -- logic -- led him to deny the possibility of metaphysics, to divorce completely the world of natural reasoning from that of supernatural knowledge, and to colour even theology with the baneful theory that all our knowledge that is not of singular observable facts is but a knowledge of names and terms. In a curious subtle way the reality of theological truth is thus dissolved, while the appearances (and the terminology) remain the same. Ockham's nominalist theory about the nature of our intellectual knowledge is far more radical than that of Abelard; for him "general ideas cannot correspond to anything in reality," [520] a philosophical position which is not consistent with the Faith. And he revealed himself as a philosophical revolutionary of the first degree in the new classification of knowledge which he proposed. There is a kind of knowledge which is self-evident, intuitive knowledge Ockham calls it; this alone is certain knowledge, and this alone enables us to say whether things exist or not. This alone can be the foundation of scientific knowledge. All other knowledge -- of images, of memories, of ideas -- abstractive knowledge, he names it, is not really knowledge at all. [521] It is not the business of this book to demonstrate where Ockham's mistake lay -- this is not a treatise of philosophy. But if Ockham were right, our knowledge would be no more than a mere system of useful mental conventions with no objective justification. We should, necessarily, from the nature of things, be complete sceptics about everything except our own physical sensations.

Given such a conception of knowledge, there can hardly be any common ground between reason and faith; and the two spheres are indeed, for Ockham, entirely out of contact. So little can what goes on in the one be related to the activity within the other, that faith may even assure us of the existence of what reason tells us is impossibly absurd. This separation of faith and reason was the greatest mischief of all. [522]

Ockham, like Scotus, is fascinated by the truths of God's omnipotence and of the divine infinity. For him, too, it is the will which in God is all important. And he is thence led into developments that far surpass the novelties of Duns Scotus. Even the divine command to love God could, thinks Ockham, equally well have been the command to hate Him; and God could, if He chose, damn the innocent and save the guilty. The whole of our knowledge could be an illusion, God causing us systematically to see and feel as existent things which actually do not exist, and this without any reflection on the divine veracity, or trustworthiness: our sole certitude that God does not so act lies, not in any belief that God is Truth itself but in this that miracles are not part of the ordinary machinery of the divine ruling of creation. One day, what these subtly argued theses posit as possibilities will, without any of Ockham's delicate argumentation, be crudely stated as the fact, and God be hailed as an arbitrary tyrant who must therefore, paradoxically, be merciful to man his victim. From Ockham to Luther is indeed a long road, and the Franciscan's thought doubtless suffers many losses as it makes the journey along it. But it is a road whose trace is unmistakable, and the beginning of that road needs to be noticed. From one point of view Luther has a claim to be regarded as the last in the long line of Catholic theologians of the scholastic decadence. It is not an unimportant point of view.

From this time onwards -- from the middle of the fourteenth century -- it is Ockham's system that dominates the minds of Catholic thinkers. And this, strangely enough, despite the discovery of all its latent mischievousness by the officials first appointed to judge it, and despite the still more evident fact of Ockham's open rebellion against the pope, and the subversive literature of propaganda in which he justified this to all Europe.

The Avignon Commissioners noted in Ockham's philosophy the opinions which might lead to errors in theology -- especially his theory that the object of our knowledge is not reality but an idea of reality only -- with special reprobation and alarm. They condemned his agnostic notion that we cannot know anything more of God than the concept which we form of God: this they declared was manifest heresy. His special dialectical method they found to be " subversive of philosophy and of theology alike." They had faults to find with his criticism -- as he applied it to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity -- of the current philosophical teaching about relation. And, finally, they signaled for condemnation a number of theological errors that were to have a great fortune in the future, for they were to appear prominently in the theological foundations of the new Protestant religion. For example, Ockham's notion that, after justification, sin and grace can coexist in the soul; his theory that the merit which a soul has in God's sight is really wholly due to God's acceptance of man's actions as meritorious, and in no way to any worth possessed by the act itself; moral guilt, again, for him, is not so much a reality that inheres to the soul, as a blameworthiness that cries out for punishment; [523] and although Ockham does not deny the defined teaching that Our Lord is present in the Blessed Sacrament by transubstantiation, he declares that "consubstantiation" -- the theory that the bread and the wine remain after the consecration - - would be a more suitable theory.

Why, it may be asked, did there not follow upon this report a strong, and even violent, condemnation of the English friar? Perhaps his sudden flight to the schismatic emperor, and the new crisis that followed upon this, first delayed that condemnation; and then, later, the need for it was obscured by the resounding excommunication of Ockham for other heresies. Certainly the pope, John XXII, had no doubts about the quality of Ockham's Oxford work when he described him in a letter to the King of Bohemia (July 27, 1330) as "a heresiarch who publicly taught many heresies, and had composed writings full of errors and heresies." On the other hand, Ockham does not always set out his ideas as proven true, but often puts them forward as suggestions and hypotheses. And he had, of course, a master mind, and the competence that goes with such, in his special gift of dialectic. No doubt, in the long four years he debated with the commissioners, he put up a good defence. Even so, whatever be the reason for it, the escape of this system in 1326 from the needed condemnation is something that still surprises the historian. Certainly the alleged tyranny of the clerical system over the mind of the medieval thinker seems at the moment to have been functioning badly. [524]

But Ockham's philosophical novelties did not by any means go entirely uncondemned. If the papacy had other aspects of his career to occupy its energies, the university of Paris, the capital of theological studies, was immediately active against these. Ockhamism was gaining a hold on the younger masters and a decree of November 25, 1339, forbade the use of his books and the teaching of his theses in the faculty of arts. The next year saw a still stronger condemnation of that teaching, as definitely erroneous, and a ban on the use of the new dialectic in argumentation in the schools. Then, in 1346, came the papal condemnation of Nicholas of Autrecourt [525] for teaching which is distinctly Ockhamist, and the university's condemnation of two others of the sect, Richard of Lincoln in 1346 and John of Mirecourt, a Cistercian, in 1347. But, in the end, it was Ockhamism that prevailed at Paris. More and more the great names are, all of them, his disciples, Buridan, Marsiglio of Inghen, Peter d'Ailly and John Gerson. By the end of the fourteenth century Paris is, indeed, the chief stronghold of what is now called the via moderna, of its logic, its metaphysics and its theology.

It may be asked why the antiqui proved so powerless against the novelties? -- the followers of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. So far the answer to this natural question is not fully known. One part of it, perhaps, is that the two schools were, increasingly, more interested in fighting about their mutual differences than in continuing to study reality. They contracted something of that fatal preoccupation with mental processes for their own sake which is the characteristic vice of the fourteenth century, and began to "philosophise about philosophies." [526] Had they, in truer imitation of their first begetters, given their attention to the new problems of the new age, dealing less with St. Thomas and Duns Scotus as antagonists, and more with what had been the cause of their activities as thinkers, they would have discovered, amongst other things, that they had more in common than they supposed. [527] Had they realised how, very often indeed, St. Thomas and Duns Scotus complement and complete each other, the easy victory of the followers of Ockham would scarcely have been possible.

But while Thomists and Scotists were thus locked in a chronic state of sterile warfare, it was the new Nominalism that took up the new problems raised by the new developments in the knowledge of nature. These new truths could not, of course, cure the radical ills of the nominalist philosophy; but in the association of those who discovered these truths with the adherents of a philosophy more and more at odds with Catholic theology, we may already see signs of the great characteristic of later ages, the assumed necessary antagonism between religion and science. St. Thomas had indicated the true starting point for the harmonious development of natural knowledge and theology; and with this he had exemplified the spirit in which the philosopher and the theologian should work. Neither was to be regarded as the lucky possessor of an armoury of solutions and recipes for all possible problems that the future might throw up; but as a thinker, ready to investigate everything, with a first hope always of assimilating novelties, that derived from a passionate conviction of the unity of all truth. Once that true starting point was lost, and that spirit fled, there was no future for thought.

And this is what had happened round about the middle of the fourteenth century. Henceforth there was stagnation in orthodox circles, and elsewhere a steadily increasing disruption in the life of the spirit. Once the Catholic mind had ceased to think, the faith of the multitude, deprived of its natural protection, would be a prey for every vagary of idea or sentiment. [528]

THE TROUBLED TIMES OF JOHN XXII

i. The Friars Minor

Twelve days after the death of Clement V, the twenty-three cardinals met to choose the new pope in the palace of the bishop at Carpentras, [529] the temporary seat of the curia (May 1, 1314). To elect the pope sixteen votes were needed, according to the law of Alexander III, [530] but the college was so divided that no party commanded this needed two-thirds of the whole: there was a Gascon party -- the friends, relatives and fellow-countrymen of the late pope -- ten in all; there was a "Provencal" party of six, that included two Normans; and there were seven Italians, by no means united but continuing in France the hereditary feuds of unhappy Italian memory. For twelve weeks these groups steadily maintained a deadlock, Italians and "Provencaux" supporting an admirable candidate, Cardinal Guillaume de Mandagout, the Gascons resolved to have none but a Gascon. Presently there were quarrels, riots next, and then, July 24, armed bands of free soldiers, under the command of the late pope's nephew, raided the town, massacring what Italians they found, clerics and bankers, and pillaging the goods of the Italian cardinals. A blockade of the conclave seemed likely, and the Italian cardinals, with the troops clamouring for their lives, fled from the city. For the Gascon party this was their chance to remove to Avignon, and thence to declare themselves the conclave and to announce that whoever they elected would be the lawful pope. But a timely manifesto from the Italians checked this manoeuvre; and then, for nearly two years, the two groups, refusing to meet, gave themselves to endless and sterile negotiations.

It was the future Philip V of France who, in the end, induced them to come together, at Lyons in March 1316. He had sworn not to use any violence against them, and to leave them free to enter into conclave when they chose. But when, in June, his brother the King of France (Louis X) died, and Philip left Lyons for Paris, his lieutenants disregarded the sworn engagement, and forced the cardinals into conclave, telling them that locked up they should remain until they found a pope (June 28, 1316). For six weeks there was again a deadlock, until three Italians joined with some of the "Provencaux" and the whole Gascon party to elect the Cardinal-Bishop of Porto, Jacques Duese (August 7). He took the name John XXII.

The choice was singular, for Jacques Duese, a man of conspicuous administrative ability, and long episcopal experience, of exceptional legal talent, and sternly upright character, was a frail old man of seventy-two. He was, however, destined to last out another eighteen years of vigorous life, after escaping in the first months of his pontificate an attempt to get rid of him by arsenic and witchcraft, in which two bishops and one of the Gascon cardinals had a share. Whenever the constitutional history of the Church comes to be written, John XXII will be one of its greatest figures, for he is one of the chief architects of that centralised administrative and legal system through which, for centuries now, the popes have exercised their divinely instituted primacy. But " incomparable administrator " as he was, John XXII was no less a vigorous ruler, dealing as strongly as subtly with the host of problems that awaited him; and he was, above all else, a most militant defender of the traditional rights of the papacy. With this election the initiative in the affairs of Christendom passed once more to the pope, and to one of the strongest of all his long line. The first problem to which he set his hand was how to bring peace to the much troubled order of the Friars Minor.

It has been told [531] how as the companions of St. Francis grew, within a few years, to be numbered by the thousand, the simple informal "rule" that had served for the saint and his score of friends inevitably proved to be insufficient. If a movement that now extended half across Europe was to survive, and with it the special approach to the service of God that was the personal gift of St. Francis of Assisi, the ideal would need a carefully-devised protective code of legislation; and it has been told how the imposition of the new rule in 1223 left many sore hearts among those whose Franciscan life went back to the first early days. Such tragedies as these, when idealism has to face the cold air of reality and either develop a protective covering or die, are not infrequent in human history. Only an infinity of charity can, when they occur, save the ordinary idealist from ruin.

But with the Franciscans there was one change especially which, from the moment it was made, caused very much dissatisfaction indeed among this little group of "primitives," for it seemed to them to affect the most characteristic of the new order's virtues, poverty. Religious poverty -- the renouncement of ownership, of the right to own property and the right to acquire it henceforward -- had been part and parcel of the monastic life from the beginning. From those first days in the deserts of Egypt, the religious who owned -- or who wanted to own -- anything had been regarded as highly unfaithful to the life to which he had consecrated himself. But when this first fashion, of solitary religious life in deserts, had given place to that of a common life lived in monasteries, although the individual monk -- whatever his rank -- continued to be a monk through religious poverty as well as through religious obedience, some proprietor there had to be for the monastic buildings, the lands which the monks worked, the woods, the farms and the like. That proprietor was the abbey or the order.

It was the desire of St. Francis -- and the special characteristic of his religious ideal -- that not even the community of his brotherhood should own. The order as an order should profess, and practise, religious poverty. This was an ideal easily realised while the order was no more than a few groups of friars, making their way through the Umbrian countrysides that were their native home, preaching their simple exhortation to penance, begging the elements of sustenance at the first door to which they came, sleeping under hedges and in barns; beggar-men who were apostles, apostles who cheerfully lived the life of beggars. But as the numbers grew, the mission of the brotherhood expanded. Soon it had before it a much more complex work than this simple apostolate. And as a code of rules was called for, and courses of study, so too were stable centres where the brethren would live. There had to be buildings, no matter how simple, and land on which they were built. Who was to own all this?

One important complication was the appearance, within the very lifetime of St. Francis, of Brother Elias, a friar with a genius for making the order "a going concern" and a "real success"; here was the practical man, who knew how to gather in the money, and how to spend it, and who rose indeed to the highest place in the order. His sad spiritual end strengthened the hands of the party called "the Spirituals" -- who wished for the impossible restoration of the order's first days. The Spirituals had much to say of the inevitable effect of deserting the first rule, and, no doubt truly, they could point to many friars, in these later days of elaborate organisation, who reminded men of nothing so little as St. Francis. But the zeal of the Spirituals did not stop here. They could see no good at all in any way but their own way, and they bitterly denounced, along with such friars who really were disgracefully unfaithful, the great mass of the order, the brethren who had settled down to live according to the popes' official interpretation of the mind of St. Francis. It is sad, but not surprising, to record that the poverty of these militant Spirituals was often only surpassed by their lack of charity in judging their fellows, and by their determined insubordination towards those very superiors to whom, for the love of God, they had vowed away their wills in religious obedience.

The first great organiser, charged by the popes with finding a way out of this chaos, and so preserving the great ideal, was the seventh Minister-General, John of Fidanza, whom we know as St. Bonaventure (1221-1274). He served the order, humbly and patiently, as its head for seventeen years (1257-1274) and for his success in devising a way of life, faithful to the ideal of St. Francis, accessible to the man of average good will, and suited to the extended mission of the order, he has merited to be called its second founder. [532] The solution which his long experience devised is set out -- often in St. Bonaventure's own words -- in the decretal bull published five years after the saint's death by Nicholas III. [533]

The problem how an order was to continue to exist that had no right to own, and of how religious pledged to so rigorous a view of poverty were to be faithful to it, and yet be able to accept from the faithful all that was needed to keep the community alive, the decretal solved by the device that the Holy See became the owner of whatever was given to the Friars Minor. In all their use of whatever was given for their use, the Franciscans were not their own masters; they were dependent on the good will of the Holy See. Nor need this have been the mere legal fiction which it has, very superficially, been made to seem. A truly conscientious man uses in a very different spirit and way the things that are his own and those which he has borrowed. The friars were still forbidden even to handle what St. Francis -- the wealthy merchant's son -- held in peculiar abhorrence, money. Not even through a third person, was any friar to use money for his own profit. But he was not bound to refuse, of what was given him, all beyond what sufficed for his own immediate personal necessity. It was lawful, for example, for the monastery to lay in a store of food. But always, and in all things, the friar was supposed, and commanded, to make such a use of this power of using as would accord with the high ideal of St. Francis. Martin IV, in 1283, added a practical detail to this system by appointing an official (called syndic) to act for the Holy See as a protector of the temporalities in every town where there was a Franciscan house.

These were the years when the war of the Sicilian Vespers was bringing upon the Holy See the succession of disasters already described, and it has been noted how a revival of Joachimite fantasies now developed and how, as in an earlier generation, the Franciscan Spirituals were again prominent in that revival. [534] The system set up by the decretal of Nicholas III was, in Italy and in southern France, rudely shaken before it could well settle. Next came the advent of the hermit pope, Celestine V, in whom the Spirituals saw, not only a holy man who had led their own kind of life for sixty years and more, but the papa angelicus foretold by Joachim, as they were the new religious order which the prophet had seen. One of the few personal actions of this hermit pope's short pontificate was the permission granted to the Italian Spirituals to form themselves into a new order, on the model of Celestine's own institution, a kind of Benedictine foundation, and with the Celestinian rule. This solution Boniface VIII had revoked. Moreover, Celestine's scheme had left untouched the problem of the Spirituals outside the mountain lands of central Italy. And the stormy reigns of Boniface VIII and Clement V went by to the accompaniment of violent anti-papal agitation from this turbulent Franciscan minority.

The division in the order was by this time (1311) one of the papacy's chronic troubles, a perpetual menace to the general peace, and, given the vast expansion of the order, a potential threat to the general unity of the Church. [535] And side by side with this fresh trouble within the order, there was a steadily developing trouble from without, the complaints -- true or false - - from every part of Christendom about the friars' abuse of their privilege of exemption from the authority of the local bishop and the parochial system. Hence Clement V, once the meeting of the General Council of Vienne was decided, appointed a commission to review the whole Franciscan problem. Its findings could be studied at the council and a lasting decision then be taken.

But that decision -- given in Clement's bull Exivi de Paradiso [536] -- was so even and so nuanced that both Spirituals and Conventuals -- so their opponents were coming to be called (the common party, the party of the conventus) claimed a victory. The trouble was thus barely appeased and when, after Clement's death two years later, the Holy See remained vacant for two and a quarter years, it had ample time to break out in all its old fury. In more than one city of Tuscany and Provence feeling ran so high that the Spirituals, throwing off their obedience, drove out the Conventuals after riots and fighting. To add to the trouble the Minister-General now died, and by the time the long vacancy of the Holy See was ended these provinces of the order were in a state of anarchy. To reduce that anarchy was one of the first of the tasks to which the new pope, John XXII, set his hand.

The new pope was a professional legist, a trained and experienced administrator. His sense of order, his well-earned name as a strong and capable administrator, his acute legal mind can have left no one doubting how he would solve the problem. But long before John XXII had finished with the troubles of the Friars Minor, even his tenacity and native toughness must have felt the strain. In a bull [537] of 1317 he excommunicated and summoned to an unconditional surrender, the rebellious Spirituals from Tuscany who had now made Sicily their headquarters, and he gave characteristically strong support to the new Minister-General, Michael of Cesena, [538] who offered the same terms to the insubordinate friars of Provence. After a hearing in his own presence, where both parties were represented, the pope ordered the Spirituals, under pain of excommunication, to abandon their claim to wear a different kind of habit, and to accept it as good Franciscan doctrine that it was lawful for the convent to take the normal measures to secure that there was food enough for the brethren.

But the sequel had its tragic side. All but twenty-five of the Spirituals gave in; these twenty-five were handed to the Inquisition. They were not only disobedient in a grave matter, defying even excommunication, but, it was ruled, heretics also, for they had expressly declared that the ground on which they refused obedience was that the pope had no authority to alter the rule of the order. Of the commission of theologians responsible for this example of "constructive heresy," the Minister-General was one. The "heretics" were condemned to the stake, and four of them who held out to the end were actually burnt at Marseilles (May 1318). Thereupon an uneasy peace settled upon the friaries of Provence.

Four years later the affairs of the Friars Minor again troubled the pope. It was not now the small band of Spirituals whom he had to bring to heel, but the whole order; and this in a matter of such importance that, by the time the dispute was over, John XXII had made the order into a different kind of thing.

In the bull [539] which marked the final defeat of the Spirituals the pope had warned them that great as is the virtue of poverty, it is not the greatest of virtues. The new dispute turned precisely on this point, namely the theoretical or doctrinal point of the exact value of religious poverty as the Friars Minor conceived this. A Franciscan had been denounced to the Inquisition in Provence for stating in a sermon that, like the Franciscans, Our Lord and the Apostles had neither owned anything as individuals nor as a body. Among the judges was another Franciscan, and he declared that so far from this being heresy, it was the Church's own teaching. This was towards the end of 1321, and within a few months the dispute was occupying the whole attention of the papal court. From the beginning the Franciscans made much of the fact that in the decretal which was the Magna Carta of the order's ideals, Exiit qui Seminat, [540] Nicholas III had not only declared that the friars in giving up all things were showing themselves true followers of Our Lord, but had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, any further reopening of this question. John XXII now suspended this prohibition, and soon a tremendous theological tourney was in full swing.

The Franciscans argued for the consecration as Catholic doctrine of the theory that their own way of life was exactly that of Our Lord and the Apostles; that Our Lord was, as one of them actually said, a Franciscan in all but the habit. The other orders, resentful of the suggestion that the Franciscan way was a more perfect following of Our Lord than any other, joined with the secular clergy to oppose them. The air was filled with the extravagances of the rival parties, and all the charges ever made against the Friars Minor were now vindictively renewed. Then, while the question was still sub iudice, the General Chapter of the order, meeting at Perugia, declared, in a public manifesto, that it had been for many years part of the Catholic faith that Our Lord had lived in the utter poverty of St. Francis, and they appealed to the pope to support them and to renew the law, and the prohibition, of his predecessor Nicholas III.

The rash public action of the General Chapter raised a second question that went beyond the simple question of fact (i.e. whether Our Lord had indeed lived in this way), the question namely whether it had ever been declared that all Catholics must believe this as a part of their faith.

The pope proceeded, in orderly fashion, to answer both questions, in two decisions given 8 December, 1322, [541] and 12 November, 1323. [542]

The first decision does not touch the question of doctrine at all. It is a practical ruling as to how the ideal of poverty must be carried out by the Friars Minor, and it is an argued reply to the contentions of their agent at Avignon, Bonagratia of Bergamo. This friar, a highly-skilled theologian and lawyer, had examined the question, What is ownership? from all points of view, seeking to show that no matter what theory of it one adopted, the Franciscan contention was right. The pope followed him point by point in careful refutation; [543] and, developing the point he had made against the Spirituals six years earlier, he laid it down that religious poverty does not of itself constitute perfection, using here that teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, on charity as the essence of perfection, which had preserved the other great medieval order from disputes of this sort. The pope noted -- a good fighting jab that Bonagratia had not looked for -- the singular fact that the Franciscan order, so anxious to bear this distinction of a peculiarly absolute poverty, was, as a matter of fact, more anxious to acquire property than any of the other orders. The plan of Nicholas III, that made the friars users only and the Holy See the owner, had worked out badly. It was to be abolished and henceforth the Franciscan order would be, as an order, on a footing similar to the others. [544] All the subtle argumentation by which Bonagratia had endeavoured to show that the friars did not only not own even the food they put to their lips - - an ownership which would have sufficed to disprove the absoluteness of poverty they claimed -- but could so use (and thereby destroy) it without having that right to destroy which is a mark of ownership, the equally argumentative pope routed with ease. Henceforth the Franciscans must be content to be poor, [545] in the same way that the other orders were poor, however much they might continue to make poverty their speciality.

The chiefs of the order did not take this decree calmly. Bonagratia replied to the pope with a violence and contempt that earned him imprisonment. He no doubt saw that the revolution now commanded in the practical way Franciscan poverty was lived, foreshadowed a judgment no less drastic on the doctrinal question.

This matter seems to have been most carefully considered during the ensuing months, and all parties were heard. Then came the decision, [546] 12 November, 1323. To declare that Our Lord and the Apostles were not owners (i.e. had not a right to use the things they used, a right to sell them, to give them away, to use them in order to acquire other things) is heresy.

The order, before this solemn and serious adverse judgment, was silent and submissive; but a few months later the condemned ideals found an unlooked-for champion in the emperor, Lewis of Bavaria. He had, for a long time now, been openly at war with the pope, and recently -- 23 March, 1321 had been excommunicated. And he found it a useful thing, in the new defiance that was his reply to the pope, to cry out to all Europe that John XXII was a heretic, whose wickedness spared not Christ nor His mother nor the saints. Seven popes, said the emperor, have approved the rule of St. Francis, and Christ by the stigmata of the saint has sealed it with His own seal. And now this enemy of God, and so forth.

But still the order as a whole did not move against the pope: it remained obedient and loyal. The pope, however, replying to the emperor, undertook [547] to reconcile his direction for the Franciscan way of life with that of Nicholas III, and thence sprang a new controversy, for here the pope was dealing with something less privileged than dogmas and heresies. At the General Chapter of 1325 [548] Michael of Cesena had to remind the brethren not to speak disrespectfully of the pope. And then Michael himself fell.

The pope had summoned him to Avignon. There were rumours (August 28, 1327) [549] that he had come to an understanding with the emperor, and that he was to be the expected imperial anti-pope. Michael arrived at Avignon in December of that year, and spent some months making certain changes in the administrative staff of the order at the pope's command. Then, on April 9, 1328, there was a tremendous scene in open consistory when the pope's anger at the Minister-General's dissimulation broke all bounds and overwhelmed him, John blaming him for the declaration at Perugia in 1323 that had been the source of so much trouble. Michael did not deny his responsibility and now, so he tells us, resisted Peter to his face. He was placed under open arrest, and a few weeks later, with Friar Bonagratia, he escaped from Avignon. Outside the city a guard was waiting, sent by the emperor for their protection, and at Aigues Mortes there was a ship to take them to Lewis at Pisa.

At Avignon Michael had found one of his subjects who was also in difficulties with the pope. This was Ockham, so far indifferent to these public questions that were rending his order. But Michael now showed him how John XXII was a heretic, contradicting the "faith" as Nicholas III had taught it. And when the General fled to Pisa, William of Ockham accompanied him. It is at this moment that the Englishman passes into the history of European politics, and its literature; and the Franciscan problem ceases to be a major problem troubling the harmony of Catholic life. A few faithful followers went out with Michael into the wilderness, as the remnants of the Spirituals had already done, to form yet another element in that underworld of religious rebels which everywhere seethed below the surface of medieval life, devoted, narrow, fanatical, apocalyptic, and ineffective as all tiny groups must be which are wholly cut off from the life of their time.

ii. The Last War with the Empire, 1314-1356

At the moment when the Franciscan chiefs, and their English brother with them, threw in their lot with Lewis of Bavaria, the emperor's fortunes in his war with Pope John XXII were mounting to their highest point.

It was now nearly four years since Lewis had first defied the pope; in all that time -- the same years that saw John XXII's troubles with the order of the Friars Minor -- the war had never slackened. From the emperor's point of view it was a war of independence; to the pope it was a crusade. The question that divided them was the old, old question yet once again, what rights had the pope, as pope, over the empire. Although the protagonists did not know it, this was to be the last of these great conflicts. Lewis was indeed to end broken and defeated, like many an emperor before him, but the cause he defended was, this time, to win through, and in less than ten years from his death be tacitly given droit de cite by the papacy.

The wisdom of John XXII's successor -- Innocent VI -- tacitly granting that right when he ignored a new "provocation" by the successor of Lewis in 1356, no doubt neutralised much of the mischief to religion which such struggles as these inevitably caused. But, like that earlier fight, between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, this contest too had its literary side; and the two chief writers who supported Lewis, Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham, were not only publicists but, as political thinkers, adversaries of far greater weight, and more permanently dangerous, than any the popes had yet had to face. Against them the popes might publish condemnations and sentences of excommunication, but, on the Catholic side, there was no thinker equal to them. Their anti-papal, anti-clerical, anti-religious writings survived the condemnations, to be studied more and more, in university circles, slowly infecting Catholic life everywhere, to become indeed the first great literary source and reasoned justification of that "laicism" which the modern popes never cease to denounce as the deadliest foe of religion. In these centuries between St. Thomas and Luther there is no more powerful agent of disintegration than the work of Marsiglio and Ockham.

To understand something of the German situation as the newly- elected John XXII faced it, [550] the history of papal-imperial relations during the previous eight years must be recalled, the results of the election as emperor, in 1308, of the Count of Luxembourg, Henry VII.

His short reign (1308-1313) was almost wholly taken up with an active military intervention in the complicated politics of Italy. The then pope -- Clement V -- suspicious of imperial schemes that would give new life to the anti-papal party in every Italian state and city, sought an ally in his vassal the King of Naples -- Robert the Wise. Henry strove to form a league against Naples, incurred excommunication by the attack he made, and then, as he marched south from Siena, he was suddenly carried off by fever (August 24, 1313).

Clement V understood to the full the opportunity that had now fallen to him. The late emperor had ignored his formal commands about Naples, and had disregarded the conditions set by the pope for his coronation at Rome. The pope now announced that, during the vacancy, the Holy See would administer the empire. He explained that the oaths sworn by Henry VII (at his coronation) were real oaths of fidelity to a suzerain, [551] and acting as suzerain he quashed [552] the sentence of deposition passed by Henry (April 26, 1313) on Robert of Naples. The terms of this papal declaration are all one might expect from a pope so versed in the traditions of the canon law: it is "In virtue of the undoubted supremacy which the Holy See enjoys over the empire, of the right which the head of the Church possesses to administer the empire when there is no emperor, and by that plenitude of jurisdiction which the successor of St. Peter has received from Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords" that he annuls the emperor's sentence.

Clement V soon followed the emperor out of this world (April 20, 1314) and it was not until six months after the pope's death, and while the Holy See was still vacant, that the German princes met to elect Henry VII's successor. They made a double election: five of them voting for Lewis, the Duke of Bavaria, and two for Frederick of Habsburg (October 19, 1314). Each was acknowledged as emperor by his own partisans and both were crowned, and on the same day, though in different cities. As the cardinals continued to keep the Holy See vacant for the best part of another two years, the situation in Germany had time to harden. By the time John XXII was elected (August 7, 1316), a miniature civil war was in progress, and the Italian princes (the papal or Guelf part of them) were suggesting that here was the pope's opportunity to end the noxious institution which the empire continued to prove itself, to Italy, to France, and to the Church.

But John XXII refused to be drawn into this plan. He was inclined to a policy that would protect the independence of religion by balancing the forces of the contending princes; the central point of the policy was the idea that there should be no prince in Italy so powerful that he dominated the whole peninsula. So of the rivals in Germany he supported neither, calling on both to submit their claims to a peaceful arbitration. Then, in 1317, he announced that he considered the empire as vacant; and acting as its administrator, he appointed Robert of Naples imperial vicar in Italy.

For the next five years there was no change in the situation, until, at the battle of Muhldorf (September 28, 1322), Lewis overwhelmed his rival, and took him prisoner. Then the pope, after an interval of some months, in which Lewis asked for recognition, stated his terms, in the spirit of Clement V's intervention in 1313. Lewis refused to ask the empire as a gift from the pope and thereupon the new war began.

It may be asked how far this new war was necessary, a war -- as it proved -- singularly disastrous for religion. Had John XXII not been the fiery-tempered old man he was; had he shown the awareness of, say, Innocent VI, that a new world had come into being since the fall of the Hohenstaufen, a world in which the empire was so little more than a shadow dignity that it was folly to fight a war about one's rights over it, and still more mischievous to link up the cause of religion with those rights; had the pope been something younger than a man of eighty, could this catastrophe not have been averted? John XXII's temperament cannot, it is true, be discharged of much heavy responsibility for many of the troubles of his reign and their long-lasting consequences.

But, it must also be considered, Lewis of Bavaria was, at this moment, and had been for a considerable time, a most helpful ally to those Ghibelline foes in Italy with whom, for the last five years, the pope had been at war; a war intended to make Italy really safe for the papacy by destroying the Ghibelline power wherever found. [553] The pope, in the spring before Muhldorf was fought, had called in, against the anti-papal party in Italy, the aid of Lewis's rival. Now that Lewis was victorious in Germany there was every reason to believe he would pass into Italy as the Ghibelline leader. That he brushed aside the condition by which the pope designed to protect the papal interests against him, confirmed this suspicion. In April 1323 Lewis's envoys in Italy demanded the withdrawal of the papal armies from before Milan; in May they won over to Lewis, Mantua and Verona, at the very hour these were making their submission to the pope. In July Lewis sent a force to assist the Ghibellines of Milan, a small force it is true, but sufficient to relieve the city. The whole situation in northern Italy, lately so favourable to the pope, was in six months, and by the emperor's action, wholly reversed.

These are the very months, it will be remembered, in which the pope has remodelled the order of Friars Minor; [554] he is about to destroy a cherished Franciscan opinion about the peculiar relation of their order to Our Lord; [555] and Lewis, in the Declaration of Sachsenhausen (May 22, 1324), will denounce the pope as a heretic for these actions, and take the order under his protection in the hope that throughout Germany, and especially throughout Italy, he will now be possessed of a whole army of enthusiastic propagandists.

On October 8 of that same year, 1323, then, the pope warned Lewis to cease to act as emperor within three months, or excommunication would follow. Lewis, playing for time, secured a delay of another two months; but finally the blow fell (March 23, 1324); just eighteen months after the victory of Muhldorf had made him master, in name, of the German world.

The next event in the war belongs to the history of political science; it was the appearance on June 24, 1324, of Marsiglio of Padua's great book The Defender of Peace. [556] The empire, it was here argued, was something wholly independent of the Holy See; the prerogatives invoked by a succession of popes were mere usurpation. There was much other revolutionary doctrine in the work, as will be seen, and presently its authors [557] fled from what awaited them in Paris to the court of the emperor.

Lewis, on July 11, was once more excommunicated and deprived now of all right ever to be elected emperor. Against him the Habsburg party in Germany now combined with the King of France (Charles IV, 1322-1328) to elect, with the favourable support of the pope, a more suitable kind of emperor. But Lewis countered this by freeing his old rival Frederick of Austria, also a Habsburg, and coming to an arrangement by which Frederick should rule in Germany while Lewis would remain emperor and be master of Italy. And now Lewis, with the aid of Marsiglio's advice, began to prepare for the Italian expedition.

The great affair opened with a kind of congress at Trent (January- March 1327), where the purpose of the expedition was announced, a war for religion against "the priest John" who is a heretic; it was a procedure very reminiscent of Philip the Fair's national assemblies against Boniface VIII. [558] In March Lewis marched out of Trent. He was crowned King of Lombardy at Milan (March 31) and then slowly made his way from one city of northern Italy to another. The misfortunes of Henry VII, and the military mistakes that had caused them, were carefully avoided. By October Lewis had gained Pisa and in the first week of the new year (January 7, 1328) he was at Rome and in possession of St. Peter's, where enthusiastic services of thanksgiving marked this first fruits of triumph.

And now began a series of highly-spectacular happenings. The emperor, reconciled by their apparent usefulness to the most revolutionary of all Marsiglio's political theories, and as though he had never opposed to the papal claims his own theory that he was emperor by God's direct institution, now consented to appear before the world as the elect of the populus romanus. On January 11, 1328, at a great assembly, "the People" voted him the imperial crown; and, moreover, chose four proctors to invest him with it. Six days later Lewis was anointed as emperor, with the usual ritual, by two bishops, and then crowned by one of the proctors: this proctor was no less a personage than Sciarra Colonna, the assailant of Boniface VIII at Anagni a quarter of a century before.

John XXII had not, of course, looked on idly at the invasion of Italy. While the crown of Lombardy was still a fresh joy to Lewis the pope declared him deprived of his hereditary states, [559] and about the time that Lewis entered Pisa the pope condemned him as a heretic for his patronage of the Franciscan Spirituals and also of Marsiglio. [560] In that same bull the Defensor Pacis was also condemned. Then, in January 1328, the month of Lewis's new "election" as emperor, the pope had declared the war against him to be a crusade, and had ordered it to be preached everywhere as such; and in Germany, brushing aside the Habsburg claim because the party would not submit it to his judgment, the pope, acting as the vacant empire's overlord, had summoned the electors to a new election. They obeyed, and met: but were not able to come to any agreement.

To all this papal activity Lewis replied by allowing Marsiglio to persecute those who, in Rome, dared to stand by the pope. But as the weeks went by, shows still more bizarre were prepared. Three times within a month, "the People" were summoned to exercise, in full assembly, their sovereign rights. On April 14 they solemnly presented John XXII for the emperor's judgment, accusing the pope of heresy; four days later, at another assembly, Lewis, crowned and bearing the imperial insignia, delivered sentence on the pope for his "heretical" declaration about the nature of Our Lord's poverty, and for the treason of his attack on the emperor; the sentence was, of course, deposition. Then on May 12, Ascension Day, a new pope was presented for "the People's" approval. He was, of course, a Friar Minor, Brother Peter of Corvara. The assembly approved him with acclamations, three times in all, and Lewis thereupon invested him with the fisherman's ring. On Whit Sunday following Peter was consecrated and crowned in St. Peter's as Nicholas V. [561] There is about all this that note of naive comedy which never, somehow, fails to be absent from solemn anti- clerical incursions into the realms of liturgy and ecclesiastical ceremonial.

It was just six days after Peter's coronation that the Minister- General of the Friars Minor made his escape from Avignon, bringing out with him, for the emperor's service, that still greater power -- as yet unsuspected -- William of Ockham.

At this very moment of triumph, however, Lewis of Bavaria's good fortune left him, never to return. He was to live for another nineteen years, in all that time to claim to be emperor, and to attempt to enforce his claims by what arms he could gather, and by diplomacy with a succession of popes. But never again was he to achieve a victory of any kind, and only the failure of his many enemies to combine saved him, as he drifted helplessly through these years. Only three months after the grandiose installation of "Nicholas V" the emperor was forced out of Rome; his army shrank to little more than a bodyguard; every city in Italy closed its gates against him; by the close of 1329 Lewis was once more in Germany.

The anti-pope, of course, fared no better than his master. Never had he exercised any power except in those rare districts of Italy where Lewis could command obedience, and nine months after his coronation "Nicholas V" issued his last bull (March 4, 1329). He had left Rome with the emperor, hissed and booed by the most treacherous populace of all the Middle Ages, and thereafter, for some time, he had followed in the imperial suite. But to Lewis he was not worth the trouble of transporting into Germany and, left behind, he disappeared from sight, until John XXII's agents discovered him. A public confession of his follies might be serviceable to the papal cause, and a generous pardon was offered to induce him to submit. So, clad in his friar's habit, with a halter round his neck, Brother Peter at last made his ceremonial submission to the pope (Avignon, July 25, 1330), to disappear thereafter from history. [562]

For the short remnant of John XXII's long reign, it was the policy of Lewis to seek reconciliation. But John was inflexible in his demand for an unconditional surrender: whatever happened Lewis was never to be acknowledged as emperor, a new election should choose in his stead someone more suitable. In 1333 [563] all the parties came to a complicated agreement, one part of which was the emperor's resignation. But this plan, so it seemed to the King of Naples, would make France too powerful in Italy, and he combined with the schismatic Franciscans at the Bavarian court to persuade Lewis to withdraw his assent. [564]

Five months later John XXII died. [565] From the new pope, Benedict XII -- a theologian where John had been a canonist, a man of peace where John had been a fighter, conciliatory and not intransigent -- Lewis had, seeming] y, much to hope. The seven and a half years of Benedict's short reign were filled with negotiations between the two. Benedict never repelled the emperor, he was not over-exacting; Lewis continued to be his weak and vacillating self. But the negotiations never came to anything. Always the King of France, unwilling to see pope and emperor reconciled, managed to influence the pope and to delay the settlement that ever seemed so near. Benedict XII knew well what the French were at, though he seems not to have known how to defeat their diplomatic finesse: he had none of the political gifts. Edward III of England was, in these years, preparing to open the long Hundred Years' War with France, and looking for allies on the Continent. Benedict foresaw what would happen. " The Germans," he said, " will understand, in the end, where the real cause of all these delays lies, and they will make common cause with the English." Which, of course, came to pass; [566] and with the beginning of the war all communication between Lewis and Avignon ceased.

But in the next few years two things happened in Germany that foreshadowed the new age, which, all unsuspected as yet, was surely approaching. All these wars between pope and emperor, that had gone on with so little interruption for now nearly two centuries, had necessarily had a most brutal effect upon the daily religious life of the unhappy peoples of Germany. Sooner or later, in all these wars, the emperor was excommunicated, and thereupon all who sided with him would share the terrible sentence which deprived a man of all right to receive sacraments and which cut him off from the divine life that enlivens the members of the mystical body of Christ. And, as often as not, there would follow upon this excommunication the sentence of interdict, local or general, which closed all the churches, often for years at a time., depriving the whole people of the mass and indeed of all sacraments but those for the newly born and the dying. [567]

Would the generality of mankind, understanding the policy behind the interdict, co-operate with the pope by accepting it in a spirit of religious humility, and, associating themselves with it penitentially, offer up these grave spiritual inconveniences in a kind of reparation, embracing the very interdict as an opportunity to deepen their own private spiritual life? Such expectations could only be nourished by those whose optimism could see in the average man and woman a soul obviously called to serve God in the high perfection of some strict religious order. The enforcement of the interdict meant in practice -- not necessarily, of course, but as things usually are -- a grave falling off in the liveliness of faith and in morality: while to disobey it entailed, of course, sacrilege each time the forbidden religious rite was performed.

And to add to the chaos there was, very frequently indeed, what amounted to a kind of schism, the activity of the two factions, pro-pope and pro-emperor, which everywhere divided sees and parishes, monasteries and religious orders. While the scholar was hesitating (in another matter) between Thomas and Scotus and Ockham, the ordinary man -- if he really cared about religion -- was wondering which of the rival clergy he knew was telling the truth, or knew what the truth was.

Here, in part, are some of the causes of that decline in religion which the contemporary preachers and mystics describe so luridly, and against which councils are forever legislating, and which has its reflection in the tales and poems of the new vernacular literatures, where -- very significantly -- it is not so much matter for reprobation, or shocked surprise, as it is unconsciously supplied as part of the natural background of the story's action.

Germany, by the year 1338, had suffered nearly fifteen years of spiritual chaos, and the prelates and princes now besought Lewis to be reconciled with the pope, and petitioned the pope in the same sense. To this appeal the pope appears not to have made any reply; and in the July of that year, the prince-electors, meeting at Rense, made a joint declaration on oath that they would defend the rights and freedom of the imperial dignity, which they declared was not the creation of the pope but derived directly from God; the man whom they elected was, they asserted, emperor by the very fact; no papal confirmation or approval was in any way necessary for the lawfulness of his acts. They declared, moreover, that John XXII's various sentences of excommunication passed on Lewis were unjust, and they threatened the pope to his face that they would provide remedies of their own should the Holy See not withdraw these sentences.

Was it the genius of Marsiglio of Padua that shaped such declarations? He certainly had a share in the next innovation, a very foolish intervention by the emperor in the discipline of the sacraments. For Lewis, in 1342, of his own imperial authority, declared null (on the ground of the man's impotence) the marriage between John of Bohemia and Margaret, the heiress of the Tyrol. He wanted Margaret (and the Tyrol) for his own son, another Lewis, and since these two were doubly related within the forbidden degrees, the emperor now issued dispensations from the impediment of consanguinity. And Marsiglio wrote a treatise to justify him.

When the austere, but somewhat unpractical, Benedict XII died (April 25, 1342) the cardinals chose [568] in his place the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, Pierre Roger, as near an approach to Aristotle's magnificent man as the order of St. Benedict has ever known. Clement VI -- so he chose to be called -- was a personage far too experienced in public life to waste any time over the debris of the emperor's hopes and chances. Lewis was bidden, somewhat in the manner of John XXII, to cease to style himself emperor; and his position in Germany, where his incompetence was now regarded as the main hindrance to peace, was by this time so desperate that he made a very humble submission to the pope and offered to abdicate (September 18, 1343).

The pope's first inclination was to accept this surrender. But once again, while he debated, other influences prevailed, the combination of the emperor's many foes in France, in Italy and in Germany. Clement stiffened the terms of submission -- only to find that he had now roused all Germany against him. [569] But it was not in favour of Lewis that the German princes moved, for a few days later they decided on the man whom they would like to see in his place, Charles of Moravia, the son and heir of the blind King of Bohemia who had been Lewis's great enemy in Germany. [570] Lewis had all but ruined Germany, they thought, and "No more Bavarians" was their answer when he ventured to plead for his own line.

And now, at last, the pope shook himself free of his political tutors. The French king preferred to see Lewis acknowledged rather than Charles elected. But Clement VI, this time, ignored the French. He again declared Lewis no emperor (April 13, 1346), and called upon the prince electors to fill the vacancy. This they did, two months later, electing Charles: three of his five electors were prelates, the pope supported him, and so Charles IV has come down as "the priests' emperor." The gibe was no more than a last flicker from the party of Lewis. He died of apoplexy (October 11, 1347), and when his successor died soon after (June 14, 1349) Charles IV's troubles from the house of Wittelsbach were at an end.

" The priests' emperor " had succeeded in great measure because of the pope's powerful aid; and the pope had first used every care to make sure that Charles was really his man. The emperor-to-be, French by his upbringing and Clement's one-time pupil, had appeared at Avignon and had sworn cheerfully to accept all manner of restrictions on his authority. Once securely elected he did not even trouble to ask the pope's confirmation. He did not, indeed, break his promise not to enter Italy until the pope had confirmed the election. But so long as he would not ask such confirmation, Clement would not give the desired permission for his coronation at Rome. The peace was never broken, but the deadlock endured as long as Clement VI reigned.

Charles found the next pope -- Innocent VI [571] easier: leave was given for the expedition into Italy and Charles was crowned, by the papal legate, in St. Peter's, on April 5, 1355. And now, secure of his position, and certain that there would be no resistance from the pope, he published on January 13, 1356, the famous "Golden Bull" which regulated anew the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. In this it is declared that the election of the emperor is a matter for the prince-electors alone, and that during vacancies the Elector of Saxony is to act as imperial vicar for the north and the Count Palatine for the south. Of all the great papal claims, so resoundingly set forth (and exercised) for centuries, and were, so recently, the occasion of a twenty years' war, there is not a single word. They are not denied, but simply ignored, treated as though they had never been.

Here truly is a sign that a new age has begun; and this, not only in the definitive secularisation of the imperial dignity by the unilateral act of the emperor, but, even more, in the tacit acceptance of this act by the pope. For Innocent VI, who had known, for months beforehand, what was in preparation, remained silent. He could not approve, but he did not condemn. True enough, there was in the bull substantial compensation for the papacy. The empire as such is, henceforth, to mean Germany only. The fatal ambition to realise imperial rights through an actual domination of Italy was thereby cut out forever from the imagination of the German imperial mind. When next a Holy Roman Emperor plays any part in Italian affairs it is because he happens to be, at the same time, the hereditary King of Naples. [572] But that claims so great were allowed by the papacy to fall so silently [573] -- this was surely a great event, and it marks a real turning point in history.

iii. Marsiglio of Padua

The surrender of Innocent VI to the fait accompli of the Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV is still more striking when it is set beside the contemporary theories of Marsiglio of Padua, as to the proper place of the Church in the Christian State, set out in the Defensor Pacis; [574] theories which, as yet, were mainly important by reason of Marsiglio's position among the counsellors of Lewis of Bavaria. Lewis had indeed been badly beaten where "the priests' emperor" was now, in 1356, victorious; but it was, none the less, the patronage and protection of Lewis that had preserved Marsiglio, and his book, despite the massy condemnation of John XXII. The Defensor Pacis, so preserved, was now to take on a new lease of life; its doctrines to become yearly more "actual," and more and more infect the world of Catholic thought, and to influence the political advisers of Catholic princes until the book became, in fact, what its author intended it to be, " one of the strongest implements of war ever imagined against the social action of the Church." [575]

For in Christendom, as Marsiglio proposed to reorganise it, the pope was not merely fettered in his function, as the legists would have fettered him: he was not to function at all. It is the peculiar and lasting mischief of Marsiglio that he creates, for the controversy, an entirely new politico-religious atmosphere, where the problem of Church and State is treated in all its generality. No longer is it any particular right or claim of the Church which is called in question; what is now attacked is the very idea of the Church as an institution. And the layman's desire to throw off the cleric's control of social life is now itself made the basis of a kind of religious teaching.

About the life of Marsiglio we know very little. One of the rare facts is that in 1312-1313 he was rector of the University of Paris. We do not know at what university his student days were passed, nor what he studied. He is, not impossibly, the Marsiglio de Maynandrino to whom John XXII, in 1316, provided a canonry at Padua; and the " Italian named Marcillo " of whom the same pope complained, three years later, that he had gone to the future Charles IV of France (1322-1328) as an envoy of the Italian Ghibellines. We meet him again, seemingly, as a witness to the profession of faith, made, at the demand of ecclesiastical authority, by the Averroist philosopher of Padua, Peter of Abano; and a set of verses by another fellow citizen, Albertino Mussato, describes Marsiglio as hesitating between a career in the law and medicine, and also as seduced from his medical studies by the lure of a military life in the service of two of the great condottieri of the day, Matteo Visconti and Can Grande della Scala.

Marsiglio was, very evidently, a man of parts, and in his great book the student will find, turn by turn, the influence of very varied tastes and accomplishments. He is the passionate Italian patriot; he is religiously anti-Catholic; but he is never the legist, never the philosopher. Aristotle is indeed his master, Aristotle idolised as the Averroist tradition did idolise him; [576] but Marsiglio's interest in the Philosopher was scientific, not philosophical. He was, very evidently, not of that elect company possessed of the metaphysical intuition of being and this, inevitably, vitiates his understanding of that part of Aristotle's work upon which he concentrated his vigorous militant mind, the social philosophy of the Politics. As the strongest part of the Defensor Pacis is its main section, that which deals with the nature and role of the Church, so the weakest is the political introduction where Aristotle's theories are discussed, and his formulae used, by a mind that is not metaphysical but positivist, not interested really in natures and causalities, and which therefore is prone to overlook the profound ideas that lie behind simple and seemingly obvious terminology. Marsiglio is not a philosopher, in the strict sense of the term. [577] Nor is he a jurist, although he is familiar (as an educated man might be who has frequented the company of jurists) with the legal aspect of the social questions that interest him. Nor is Marsiglio at all a theologian, and what religious ideas he has are akin to those of the Waldenses. Finally, there is every probability that Marsiglio knew, and had been in personal contact with, the group of French legists who, led by Nogaret, had waged the last stages of Philip the Fair's war on Boniface VIII; and he was an active Ghibelline. Considering all these elements in his formation one by one, it may be thought there could hardly be a better recipe from which to prepare the genius who was to devise the most mischievously anti- Christian work of the whole Middle Ages. [578]

Marsiglio's objective was nothing less than the social influence of the Catholic religion, exercised through popes and bishops and clerics generally upon the whole life of the time. This he proposed to destroy by explaining to the Catholic world what the State really is, and what is the true place of the true religion of Christ within the State rationally constructed. It is, then, necessary to say something about each part of his elaborate argument; and first, about his theory of the State and its powers.

Marsiglio's master, Aristotle, sees man as an animal which is social and political by its nature; and Aristotle's great commentator St. Thomas, understanding that problems about natures are metaphysical problems, and being himself no mean metaphysician, draws from Aristotle's principle a whole corpus of sociological teaching. But always St. Thomas relates his ideas to this first idea of what man's nature is. So, for example in discussing the great questions, What exactly are States? What kind of authority is it that they exercise? How does the citizen stand, relative to the State? What are the right and duties of each? it is to a truth about human nature that St. Thomas, each time, returns. It is by a theory built on a consideration of what natures are, that he answers such questions. How do there come to be States? Why, because it is the nature of men to live in a multitude, "and so there must be in men something by which the multitude is ruled": [579] and the saint speaks of the natural impulse [580] of men towards the State, which State came into being through human action originating in that urge of human nature.

The importance of seeking the beginnings of any understanding of human political action in such a fundamental as a nature, quite escapes the non-metaphysical Marsiglio. His thought remains on the surface; and he interprets the Aristotelian teaching in the light of a conjectured historical beginning, where the gathering of men in a community is due to circumstance alone, physical or economic. What ultimately, in his view, decides the new move to live in ordered groups is the fact that to form such a group is the choice of the majority. The State is, essentially, nothing more than this "collection" of individuals; and its only unity is that which comes from the imposition upon this multitude of a single will, to which all their individual wills now conform.

In the State -- as Marsiglio conceives it -- force is thus not merely an instrument by which the ideal of Social Justice overcomes whatever hinders its accomplishment, but it is an essential constituent of Law. Law is the imposition of the State's will upon the citizen; [581] where there is no force there is no legal obligation, and wherever, in that will, there is force, there is force of Law. Law that does not conform to the objective standard of justice, St. Thomas roundly says, is not Law at all; rather it is mere wickedness. [582] But Marsiglio explicitly contradicts this -- wickedness too is Law, if only it is commanded under legal penalties.

This same defect, that makes the goodness and badness of actions derive from something outside the act -- from laws, for example -- vitiates Marsiglio's theory of public authority. For the ruler's authority, in his view, originates in the expressed intention of these who make him the ruler. Whatever he does in accordance with that intention is good, whatever he does against it is bad; and the ruler so acting in accordance is the pattern for all his subjects' acts, their rule indeed and their measure.

Whence comes this designation of any particular individual to be ruler? Who is it that confers on him this extraordinary kind of power? Here we come to the best known feature of Marsiglio's theory, namely, his teaching about the sovereignty of the people. The source of all authority in the State is the will of the people. The proof of this, apparently, does not lie in any truth about the nature of man, but in the practical consideration that such "consultation" of the people must make for future harmony in the government of the State; and a wise ruler will also "prepare" the people, before he submits any matter to their judgment. Also, a most important consideration, it is the whole body of the people, assenting to the sanctions that accompany laws, which gives to laws that which really makes them

laws: it is the whole people that can alone impose what obliges universally. "Sanctions: in this consists the whole being of law, and the people alone has the power needed for the imposition of sanctions. In this is summed up the whole theory of Marsiglio." [583]

This is, of course, no more than a very general summary of an elaborate discussion that runs to far more pages than there are here lines. And the discussion may seem remote enough from Church history, whose business is to record the fortunes of the Gospel. But some familiarity with Marsiglio's leading notions is necessary in order to understand what is by no means remote, the character and scale, that is to say, of his attack on the traditional Catholic theory of the Church. For it is with the aim of producing an ecclesiastical revolution that Marsiglio has constructed his version of Aristotle's Politics.

The great source of all the evils that afflict the age, he says, is the hold which the clergy have secured on religious life. One main instrument of their power is the false notion of the Church which they have devised. For the Church, like any other " society, " is really no more than the aggregation of the individuals who compose it; it is "the ensemble of faithful believers who invoke the name of Christ." All such believers are equally "of the Church"; the distinctions which now obtain between, for example, clergy and laity are secondary, not essential, and produced by human authority merely. The Church, in the traditional sense, has no real existence, nor ever had any.

In Marsiglio's sense the Church has only one divinely instituted function, the administration of sacraments. The power to say mass, to forgive sins, to ordain priests is indeed of divine origin, and belongs only to priests themselves duly ordained. But with these essential liturgical functions clerical activity ceases. It is not for any clergy to decide who it is shall be ordained, nor in what part of the Church and in what capacity, and under what conditions the priest shall exercise his priesthood. Everywhere in the primitive history of the Church -- as Marsiglio reads it -- the determining factor at every stage of the evolution of Catholicism has been the action of the generality of the faithful. Here is still the true source of religious authority, the guarantee of fidelity to Christ's teaching. It is from this source that general councils derive what authority they possess, from here that the right to designate to particular offices derives, and also the right to inflict the supreme sanction of excommunication. In such a scheme there is obviously no place for episcopal authority, nor for the universal primacy of the pope. This last, particularly, is a flagrant usurpation

We never go far in studying such schemes before we are halted by inconsistencies, and by unresolved, and unresolvable, contradictions. For example, the question soon suggests itself whether these faithful, collected together in the Church, are an authority, a religious sovereign, distinct from themselves as the sovereign people of the State. Is this -- seemingly -- democratic Church independent of the -- seemingly -- democratic State? We would hardly expect it to be so; and indeed, by carefully thought out distinctions, Marsiglio shows how all the powers of ruling the Church which he denies to the clergy really belong to, and should lawfully be exercised by, the civil ruler. The Church is, indeed, no more than the religious aspect of civil society, the reflection of what that society feels, at any given moment, about religion.

Not only, then, may the civil ruler lawfully exercise all authority in the Church: to do so is, for him, a primary duty. For example, nothing is more fatal to the State, as Marsiglio conceives it, than the clear distinction between the legality of what it ordains and the intrinsic goodness (or badness) of these acts. It is therefore highly important, in practice, that there should never be any moral criticism of legislation. But, for centuries now, the Church of the popes has had the inconvenient habit of making such criticism; it is indeed one of the popes' chief activities. Laws have been denounced as tyranny because contrary to justice; rulers have been lectured, warned and punished for enacting laws declared to be unjust; subjects have been told that they need not, indeed must not, obey such laws. The State of the future must, then, see to it that no pope or bishop or other cleric is ever suffered to put into action a doctrine so treasonable, destructive indeed of the very basis of civil authority. The spheres of conscience and of obedience to civil authority are distinct, separate, and independent. Activities proper to the first must never be allowed to overflow into the second, or the most terrible confusion will follow and the peace and unity of the State be forever endangered.

" Unity within the State" -- here is an ideal very close to Marsiglio's heart. Therefore, within the State let there be one single authority, one single jurisdiction, no privileged bodies, no immunities. To introduce a second jurisdiction, to seek immunities for a particular section of the citizens (judicial immunities, legislative immunities, fiscal immunities) is treason to the State in the highest degree. The ruler must then, in simple duty to the peace of the State, destroy the privileges of the clergy. Also, in those matters where the divine law needs human agents for its execution, it is the State which must be that agent; for there cannot be two coercive jurisdictions operating over one and the same people. Only thus will the State become, what it needs to be, the real ruler of all its citizens. Law is, as it were, the atmosphere of a particular country -- all who live in that country must breathe the same air. Nothing, Marsiglio argues, with undisguised bitter passion, has been more noxious to the peace of states than that immunity of the clergy from the prince's jurisdiction which the popes have championed for so long; and in a kind of parody of the concluding phrases of Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam [584] he declares his own gospel, that for its own well-being the Church, all the faithful people of Christ, must be subjected to the civil ruler, his laws and his judges.

The needed subjection of the Church to the State will not, however, be achieved by such merely negative acts as the destruction of clerical privilege. A more continuous, positive, action upon the Church is needed, and this is in fact vital to the welfare of the State. Here Marsiglio -- like all his followers ever since, down to our very contemporaries -- flings consistency to the winds, and having first divorced morality from the business of ruling, he now proclaims that to foster morality is one of the State's gravest duties; the State, undoubtedly, has moral and even spiritual functions. The secularist patriarch enlarges on them with evident and conscious unction.

There is, for example, the State's duty to promote among its citizens the practice of virtue and of all the duties which God's revelation has made known to us, which last (we note) is not only necessary if man is