Chapter 2: 'THE AVIGNON CAPTIVITY', 1314-1362

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 to save his soul, says Marsiglio, "but is also useful for the needs of this present life"; and so the state must appoint learned men to teach religion and to organise divine worship. There is nothing spiritual, he says, that does not somehow affect the welfare of the body politic. Therefore the State must control the spiritual. It ought, for example, to regulate the lives of the clergy, determining the standards of their conduct, their fasts, prayers, mortifications and so forth. It must decide the nice question whether they will not be better clergy if they do not possess property, but if, instead, surrendering all right to be owners, they throw themselves — for maintenance — on the generosity of the State, as God's agent, once they have committed all their care to Him: evangelical poverty imposed by the State on all the clergy will be yet another means of control. Finally it is the State's duty to take into its own hands the whole vast business of education, of forming, controlling, directing the literate class of the future, and of so shaping it that it will be yet another willing instrument of State policy.

The Defensor Pacis was completed on the feast of St. John the Baptist, 24 June, 1324. While its author was planning the new venture of setting up as a lecturer in theology, his book was denounced to the Church authorities. Marsiglio and his ally, the notorious Averroist, John of Jandun, saved themselves by flight (1326). They joined Lewis of Bavaria at Nuremberg and thenceforward their history is one with his; their influence upon his action alternating curiously with that of the emperor's other anti-papal allies, the Franciscans Michael of Cesena and Ockham. The first papal condemnation of the book, which does not, seemingly, name its author, is a bull of 1326 which has not survived. 585 The next year, April 3, 1327, a second bull, 586 addressed to Lewis, upbraids him for his patronage of these two "sons of perdition," but even yet the full text of the book does not seem to have reached the papal court. But by the date of the next bull, October 23 587 of the same year, the pope is more fully informed, through the bishops of Germany. In this bull five of the six propositions which the bishops sent on as resuming Marsiglio's leading ideas, are condemned after a most understanding criticism. The pope went directly to the heart of the subversive doctrine, and set in the broad light of day the mischievous principles that underlay the mass of subtle argumentation, satire and bitter, passionate rhetoric. The condemnation was, indeed, one of the most characteristic and masterly acts of John XXII's long, eventful reign.

The Defensor Pacis — appearing in the midst of a war between pope and emperor — naturally made a sensation. It was translated into French (1330) and into Italian (1363). In Germany especially it was a success. Nevertheless, it seems certain that there were but a few copies of the original in circulation before the time of the Schism (1378). It is not without interest to note that the so- called "democratic" theories of Marsiglio appear to have caused no comment at all. What, everywhere, roused attention was his application of them to the Church. How ruinous this was to traditional belief was immediately understood on all sides. Lewis of Bavaria himself cuts a somewhat comical figure, earnestly striving to dissociate himself from such scandalous ideas and explaining, in 1336, to Benedict XII that he has no head for these matters and has never really understood what Marsiglio had in mind.

But whatever the scandal caused by the Defensor Pacis to the mind of Catholic Europe, it remained unanswered, save for the papal condemnation. 588 Was it indifference, on the part of theologians, to a work which, in its new "positivist" approach to a theological problem, was an offence to current scholastic good form, and which, thereby, classed itself with all the rest of the new scientific knowledge of the fourteenth century? It is surely strange, and disconcerting, that Marsiglio's attack did not stimulate some Catholic to produce, not merely a controversial rejoinder, but a new constructive statement of traditional doctrine. Be that as it may, when the ideas of Marsiglio came alive again, in the last years of the fourteenth century, they met no contradiction from Catholic learning. His influence is evident now in France, in John Wvcliff, and in the heresies that from this time begin to dominate Bohemia. We find no less a person than Gerson recommending the book, and it undoubtedly played a part at the General Council of Constance. 589 It was more and more copied in the fifteenth century, more and more eagerly read, as the breakdown of Christendom drew nearer. The first printed edition appeared in 1517, the year of Luther's first appearance as an innovator, and the publication of an English translation, in 1535, was one of the earliest moves of Thomas Cromwell, then busy with the publicist strategy that accompanied the creation of the Church of England as we know it to-day. 590

iv. The End of John XXII

Marsiglio's adversary, John XXII, was harassed by trouble and crisis literally to the very end of his life. For his last hours, ere he passed from this world, at ninety years of age, were given to a theological controversy, and one which his own act had begun. In this controversy, about the state of souls in the interval between death and the General Judgment of mankind at the end of the world, the pope took a line that went against the general body of received opinion and tradition. The peculiar ideas which he championed were set forth in three sermons, preached at Avignon on All Saints' Day, 1331, on December 15 of the same year and on the following January 5. In these sermons John XXII declared that the souls of the just do not enjoy the intuitive vision of God (in which consists their eternal heavenly reward) until, after the last day, they are again united with their bodies; and also that neither the souls of the lost nor the devils are as yet in hell. but will only be there from after the last day.

These sermons of the aged pope astonished the theological world, at Avignon and elsewhere. The startling news of this papal innovation, in a matter belonging to the sphere of doctrine, was speedily conveyed into Bavaria by the cardinal Napoleone Orsini, who had long been secretly planning and hoping for John's deposition. There, Ockham and his associates gladly fashioned it into a new weapon against the pope. He had already, they said, repudiated one point of the Christian faith, to wit the belief in the absolute poverty of Our Lord and the Apostles: now, he was repudiating a second. It was the very way heretics had always acted; little by little they came to deny the whole body of traditional belief. John, now obviously heretical to all the world, could not any longer be regarded as pope.

The pope's own attitude to the controversy he had occasioned is of the greatest interest. Significantly, he made no attempt to use his pontifical authority to support what he had said in his sermons. Quite the contrary: as one who had been doing no more than express an opinion which he considered to be as good as any other, and who, quite evidently, is surprised at the chorus of dissent, he now set theologians of various schools to examine the whole question and to report. Notable among them was the Cistercian cardinal, James Fournier, one day to succeed John as Benedict XII. He was an extremely competent professional theologian, and without difficulty he clearly showed that the opinion of John XXII had scarcely any support and that the body of tradition was firm against him; on the other hand, in the controversy against those who, like Ockham, were beginning to denounce the pope as a heretic, Fournier noted first of all that, so far, the Church had never expressed its mind on the question by a definition, and next that in these three sermons John XXII had made no claim or pretence whatever to be doing anything more than preach a sermon to the particular congregation which at the moment filled the church; the pope had spoken simply as any bishop or priest might have spoken, as a private theologian, and not as the pope laying down a definition of doctrine for the assent of the whole Christian Church.

But the controversy continued to rage for all the short remainder of John's life. The new head of the Friars Minor, the successor of the excommunicated Michael of Cesena, with sycophantic misunderstanding of the situation, became a most enthusiastic advocate of the pope's unusual views; and, unfortunately for himself, declaimed them at Paris, where he immediately fell foul of the greatest body of theologians in the Church. The university discussed the theory, found it contrary to the general teaching, and as such reported it to the pope. Then John XXII fell into his last illness. On December 3, 1334, from his sick bed, he made a public explanation, and a submission of what he had said to the teaching of the Church. He believed, he said to the assembled cardinals, that "the souls of the just, separated from their bodies, but fully purified from sin, are in heaven, in paradise, with Jesus Christ, in the company of the angels, and that, according to the common law, they see God and the divine essence face to face, clearly, as far as the state and condition of a soul separated from the body allows this." But this qualified retraction the pope explicitly submitted to the Church's decision. And the next day he died.

Benedict XII closed the controversy by the bull Benedictus Deus, of January 29, 1336, in which he defined, as the teaching of the Catholic Church, that the souls of the just (i.e. the souls of those who leave this world with no stain upon them that needs purifying, and those souls also which, after death, have been purified in purgatory) immediately after death (or on the completion of such purification) see the divine essence by an intuitive and even facial vision, and this before they are reunited with their bodies, before the general judgment. Moreover the souls of the lost are in hell from the moment of death. 591

THE AVIGNON REGIME

i. The Centralised Administration

The seven Avignon popes were a singularly competent line. Rarely indeed has there been, in the papacy, such a continuous succession of administrative ability. No less unusual — in its medieval history — was another feature of the regime, namely, that for as long as seventy years the papacy was established in the one place. Nowhere, in fact, had the popes — from the time of St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) at least — been less at home than in Rome; and for three-quarters of the century that divides the reign of Innocent III from the establishment at Avignon, the curia had wandered from one town to another of the papal state, settled anywhere rather than at Rome. Now, from 1309, that vast establishment was for seventy years stably fixed; and three successive generations of Catholics saw, as a new thing, what has, ever since, been so much the rule that it appears to us in the very nature of things, namely the pope and the great administrative machine through which he works permanently, and as it were immovably, placed.

To say this of the Avignon papacy is to say that conditions then favoured, as never before, all that conscious development of a centralised papal government of the universal Church, which had been so notable a part of the papal policy ever since St. Gregory VII had discerned in it a mighty means of reform and a strong defence of reforms accomplished. More than ever, then, this is a period which sees the translation of rights and law into the fact of a regular bureaucratic administration; the fixing into hard tradition of tile ways of administrators, financiers, judges. The Corpus Iuris Canonici is now, at last, really to begin to come into its full supremacy, not merely as an instrument which men use, but as that greater thing than any of these individuals, a law which they all serve; and it is to produce the most competent, completely centralised system of government — i.e. on a very great scale — which the Middle Ages knew. 592 Perhaps more than any individual pope of the next two hundred years it is this system which is to matter. In an age when theology declines, the canon law flourishes — as does its twin sister, the Roman law as the Middle Ages knew it; it is now that the Roman law receives a new birth in the genius of Bartolo. It was but the justice of history that, when the great catastrophe of the sixteenth century arrived, the canonists should come in for some of the blame. "Holy Father, it is the teaching of the canonists," so the report begins of the cardinals whom Paul III, in 1537, commissioned to examine the causes of the new revolt. 593

The pope's chief agents in the ruling and administration of the affairs of the Church universal continued to be the college of cardinals. Its numbers were still restricted, by comparison, that is, with the standards of the last four hundred years: 594 in the conclaves of this period (1305-1378) the number of electors fluctuates between eighteen and twenty-six. But never, after Boniface VIII, did the college shrink to the dozen and less, which was all that it counted in the great thirteenth century. 595

The importance of these high dignitaries in the life of the universal Church — in origin they are but the more prominent cf. the clergy of the local Roman Church — goes back, of course, to the decree of Nicholas II in 1059, which constituted the cardinals the sole electors of the pope. The Avignon period is most important in their history as a college because they now, very definitely, begin, as a college, to aim at influencing, and even controlling, the action of the pope. Here, and not in the universal episcopate, is the beginning of the dangerous movement to reduce the traditional administrative supremacy of the pope. The cardinals are few, they are wealthy, they all reside in the curia — for, as yet, in the rare event of the hat being conferred on a diocesan bishop, he leaves his see to live in the curia — and they are organised. Their pressure on the papacy is constant. At every vacancy, from the end of this century, they make election pacts to ensure their own enrichment and to fetter the action of the future pope. It is the bad will of the cardinals — if not their bad faith — that is primarily responsible for the Schism of 1378. They play the traitor to Urban VI in 1378, and — so general by now is the idea of their independence — in 1408 both sets of cardinals betray their masters, the rival pontiffs Gregory XII and Benedict XIII. At every crisis throughout the fifteenth century, and down to the very eve of Luther's revolt, the pope's first anxiety is how the cardinals will behave. Not until e coup d'etat of Leo X, who, in 1517, swamps the opposition. by creating thirty- one cardinals in one act, are the popes really free of their factious collegiate interference.

Meanwhile their importance could not be greater. It is in the consistory that the main acts of Church government take place, where each cardinal has rights of speech and of opposition. The pope needs their consent for many acts and, very notably, before creating additional cardinals — and to new creations the college is, almost by instinct, habitually opposed.

In the consistory there is also transacted much political and international business. This makes the cardinals objects of great interest to the different Catholic princes — an interest that increases steadily as the great states of modern times, and the new permanent international rivalries, take shape in the fifteenth century. But already, at Avignon, it is beginning to pay the princes to be on good terms with the cardinals, to attach particular cardinals to their interests, to make them handsome presents, to dower them with pensions.

Not that the cardinals are necessarily poor men otherwise. Far from this, they are in the fourteenth century a byword for wealth, pomp and luxurious living; Petrarch in Italy and Langland in England speak here a common tongue. By law they have a right — that is to say the college — to divide equally with the pope the taxes called servitia comunia. 596 In the eighteen years of John XXII, pope and cardinals thus shared more than a million gold florins. They enjoyed the revenues of the numerous benefices which it was now common form should be heaped on each of them, parishes, canonries, abbeys and diocesan sees — benefices they never saw, where the work was done by a deputy at a fixed salary, while agents farmed the revenues for the absentee cardinal titular. Then there were the gifts made by the popes at fixed occasions, on their election for example, and on its succeeding anniversaries. So John XXII, in 1316, and Benedict XII, in 1334, divided up 100,000 florins between the cardinals. Clement VI, in 1342, gave them 108,000; Innocent VI, 75,000 in 1352; Urban V, ten years later, only 40,000.

The princely style in which the cardinals lived brought them bitter words from Petrarch — somewhat ungratefully, for he had his share of it in his time. And it brought, also, frequent reproof from the popes. Cardinals began to be most unpopular figures in the Church. The feud between them and the bishops deadlocked, and nearly wrecked, the Council of Constance. Continually, for the next hundred-and-fifty years, whenever projects of reform take practical shape the first item is usually that the cardinals shall diminish their households, dismiss the horsemen, the jesters, the actors, and all the varied paraphernalia of their courts, that they shall take for their service only clerics, and that these shall be dressed as clerics and live as clerics, and so forth. But all will be in vain, for all that time, until the day comes when the Dutch reforming pope, entering his States on his election, will need to have it explained to him that the gaily-caparisoned princes who salute him are indeed the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church.

One last word about the college under the Avignon popes — it is almost wholly French. The seven French popes of this time created between them 134 cardinals; 111 of them were French, there were sixteen Italians, five Spaniards, two Englishmen. It will be noted there was none from Germany, the perpetually unsolved problem of the papal administration But this was not merely because these popes were French. There had been no German cardinal in the sixty years before the "Captivity" began. Nicholas of Cusa, created cardinal in 1448 by Nicholas V, was well-nigh the first German cardinal for two hundred years.

Like every other system of government, the papacy had had to create a highly-organised department where all state documents were prepared, and whence they were despatched: grants, licences, monitions, and appointments of various kinds; this was the Chancery and at its head was the vice-chancellor. In its archives copies were preserved of all the documents despatched, and also the original petitions from which so many had originated. Here was a vast secretariat which put into writing, in the appropriate form, the day-to-day decisions of the pope and saw to their transmission to the interested parties. But for matters of conscience which touched the private lives of individuals there was a special office called the Penitentiary. 597 Here, under the direction of the cardinal grand penitentiary, a host of experts in theology, and canon law, dealt with such matters as requests for dispensation from the innumerable impediments to marriage; or for the removal of excommunications, interdicts and suspensions; or for power to absolve from sins reserved to the pope. This department had its own staff of clerks, and also a staff of eighteen penitentiaries who sat in the churches of the city to hear the confessions of all comers, with special faculties to absolve from sins reserved and also from reserved censures.

Another feature, common alike to the government of the Church and of states, was a system of law courts. Here the Avignon popes were great innovators. Their predecessors had devised the practice of naming judge-delegates who did all that was necessary in a lawsuit save to give the sentence — this being reserved to the pope and, generally, his personal act. But the number of cases which came in to the pope for decision increased so enormously, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, that the popes now began to grant, to the judge-delegates whom they appointed, power to give a definitive sentence. Alongside these new methods the old permanent tribunals continued to function: the consistory, and the court that came to be called the Rota.

The consistory was the whole body of cardinals present in curia, with the pope in person presiding. it was the primitive, omni-competent, engine of the ecclesiastical system; the pope's cabinet, his council, his tribunal for any case it cared to hear; where all kinds of business was transacted, spiritual, political, administrative, international; where ambassadors were heard and treaties signed. And during the Avignon period it remained the principal instrument of government as before.

The origin of the court which, about this time (1336), came to be called the Rota is obscure. It is really the "court of audience for causes of the Apostolic Palace, " and its competence extends to all cases sent to it for judgment by the pope or the vice- chancellor. 598 But its principal, and indeed usual, employment is to hear and decide suits arising out of presentations to benefices. This is the period, as will shortly be explained, when the papal centralisation reaches to such a height that almost every clerical appointment may come within reach of the papal curia. What hordes of petitions, and cross-petitions, pour in to Avignon from now on can easily be guessed. The judges of the Rota- the auditors, there are eight of them ill 1323 — hear and decide these disputes. From their sentence there is no appeal. But the elaborate law of procedure gives the litigant a rich variety of means to delay the sentence, or to hold up the trial. When the canons of Hamburg and the citizens of the town brought their disagreements before this court, the ingenuity, first of one side and then of the other, dragged out the case for as long as sixteen years. 599 So many were the pleas for delay, and so great an opportunity was thereby offered to legal chicanery, that the popes set up a special court to examine the expedients brought in to delay discussions. This was the court of "audience of disputed letters" (audientia litterarum contradictarum), more usually called "the public audience. " 600 It seems not to have been notably successful, and, in the end, only added yet another complication to the already complicated system.

There were also courts where the various cardinals were judges. But these were courts that only functioned when commissioned by the pope to judge a particular case. For the most part, they undertook the preliminary enquiries needed to bring out, for the pope or the consistory, the real facts at issue in the suit. Clement V greatly simplified their procedure; but there were two serious inconveniences? always, for those who made use of these courts. The one was that, since cardinals were liable, at any time, to be despatched on missions abroad, there was great uncertainty when the case before them would finish; and the other was the extent in these courts of what is best and most expressively described as "graft, " if not for the cardinal's services, then for those of his household and his officials.

The law administered in all these courts, 601 to which suitors came from every diocese in Christendom — they were indeed the only courts that could hear suits between sees in different ecclesiastical provinces 602 — was the canon law as this was promulgated in the great compendium of 1234, 603 to which Boniface VIII had, in 1296, added a sixth book 604 and John XXII, in 1317 605, the laws of his predecessor, Clement V — the Clementines. It was a law made up of the decrees of councils, and decrees and decisions of earlier popes; some of these had been enacted for the generality of the Church, and others were decisions given in particular cases but establishing a general doctrine of law, and henceforward given force of law universally.

The first legal foundation of this massive, and — by this time- scientifically organised, instrument of government was the collection of disciplinary canons of the earliest councils of the Church, as far as these were known, and of what rules of discipline could be found in the history of the earliest popes. Much of the more ancient part of this lore — whatever its legal usefulness, or its intrinsic truth — was, historically, mere apocrypha, the — as yet unsuspected — invention of ingenious ninth-century forgers, anxious to produce new and most convincing evidence in support of beliefs and practices long traditional.

These forgeries, which we know as "the False Decretals, " 606 added nothing to the substantial foundation of the corpus of the canon law. Much more important was the influence upon that corpus, in its critical nascent years, of the contemporary revival of the study of Roman law. Like all the other early medievals, the first professional practitioners of the canon law (whether they functioned as legislators or in the ecclesiastical tribunals) could not have escaped — even had they so wished — the far- reaching influence of this great creation of legal thought. It is not so much that here is a code of laws ready made for a variety of occasions; but here is law as a body of coherent thought; here are legal principles and doctrines, laws seen as the fruit of law; and also a most remarkable, technical, legal language. 607 The first founders of the canon law, as this appears from 1234 in the papal books, were no less skilled in the Roman law, the civil law, as it is also called; and in the legal procedure thence onwards built up by papal legislation, the influence of the Roman procedure in law is everywhere apparent. Roman influence is apparent elsewhere too, in more than one canon-law doctrine, and also in the spirit in which the canonists develop the administrative machinery by which the popes rule the Church divinely committed to their supreme authority. 608

It was not, however, the canonist who was the leading figure at the Avignon curia. The pope's most confidential adviser, the official whose word was necessarily most weighty, was the cardinal placed at the head of the finances, the Camerarius. 609

And here something must be said of a new practice — not the invention of the Avignon popes indeed, but one which' they developed enormously, namely the reservation to the Holy See, and its use in practice, of the right to present to benefices throughout the universal Church. Here is the most striking act of the centralised papacy of the Middle Ages. It began forty years before the "Captivity" when Clement IV, in 1268, by the famous decretal Licet, declared that for the future the popes would keep in their own hands the nomination to all benefices vacant by the death of their holder while at the Roman curia. The principle set forth was speedily developed by succeeding popes. Boniface VIII, in 1296, extended "at the Roman curia" to mean within two days' march of the Roman curia. Clement V's extensions, and those of John XXII, as codified in the constitution Ex debito, bring within the papal reserve all benefices vacant through the deposition or privation of the last incumbent, or through his election not being' confirmed, or by his resignation made to the pope, or vacant by the incumbent's acceptance of a new benefice through papal provision or papal translation, and a host of other ingenuities. Further extensions followed until, by the end of Gregory XI's reign, almost every benefice in the Church was at the pope's disposal.

This new development inevitably increased the work and importance of the Camerarius. At every nomination, or concession of a provision, there were fees to be paid. At every death of a beneficiary nominated by the pope there were certain rights due to the pope. The Camerarius needed to have agents in every diocese of Christendom, and, because of the wide range of his department, no officer of the curia was so much in touch with the universality of the papacy's problems. By his office, too, it was the business of the Camerarius to know all about the rights and privileges of the Holy See everywhere. In political crises he was, for this reason, an extremely important person; and, financial transactions on his imperial scale necessarily involving contacts with governments, the Camerarius was, at all times, the pope's chief agent for the day-to-day business with the Christian princes; the political correspondence of the Holy See was done through his clerks; and his collectors — who are already by this time the regular source of the Holy See's information about the state of Europe — will one day develop into the nuncios who, with the Secretariat of State, to-day make up the papal diplomatic service.

The Camerarius had also his own system of courts — with a special bar — to hear and decide the inevitable, and innumerable, disputes about assessments and payments. He had a special prison at his disposal, and he controlled the papal mint.

The vast engine of collectors which the Camerarius controlled is, perhaps, to students of the vernacular literature of these times, to readers of Chaucer say, or of Langland, the best known, indeed the most notorious, feature of the "Avignon Captivity." It was, from the papal exchequer's point of view, a most admirably devised machine. Never before had so much milk been got from the cow. The system of taxes and charges was twofold; one series was payable at the curia itself, while the other was collected in the taxpayer's own diocese. In all cases it was a taxation of Church property and of Church revenues only.

All bishops and abbots paid, on appointment, one third of the annual assessed income of their see or abbey, and also a second tax which varied in amount from one twelfth to one twenty-fourth of this income; the receipts from the first tax (servitia communia) were divided between the treasuries of the pope and the sacred college, those from the second went to officials and to the officers of the cardinals. If the prelate was an archbishop he had pallium fees also; and if he were actually consecrated at the curia (or blessed) there were additional fees amounting to a sixth of what he paid as servitia communia. From these fees only those were exempted whose revenue was less than, say, 500 pounds a year, present (1946) value. 610 At fixed intervals bishops were bound to make, personally or through an agent, a pilgrimage "to the threshold of the Apostles" to report on the state of their dioceses, and to pay a special ad limina tax. There were of course, as in all governments, taxes and fees at every stage of the concession of privileges, licences, appointments; another source of revenue lay in the money payments to which vows and penances were at times "commuted." And there was also the tribute, paid annually by the vassal kings of Naples, Sicily, Aragon and England. 611

More familiar to the generality of Christians, however, were the taxes gathered by the small army of officials sent from the curia into every part of the Church. These taxes were of two kinds. First of all there were taxes levied for special occasions; the tithe for example, that is to say one tenth of the income of all benefices as this had been officially assessed, and the "loving aid" (subsidia caritativa). 612 This last was, originally, a voluntary contribution made by a benefice holder in response to an urgent general appeal from the Holy See. But by the time of the Avignon popes it had ceased to be voluntary; the collector fixed the amount due, and delay was punished (as everywhere in the system) by excommunication.

The permanent taxes were, of course, a much more serious matter. The most profitable was that called Annates, the first year's revenue of every benefice after the appointment of a new incumbent. It was Clement V who devised this system, first of all for England only, in 1306, and for benefices vacant by the death of their holder while at the curia (apud curiam Romanam). Twenty years later this tax was extended to the whole Church for all benefices to which the Holy See had nominated. The number of benefices where the Holy See reserved to itself the right to nominate grew steadily all through the fourteenth century, and by 1376 hardly any see was exempted from this extremely heavy tax.

A second principal permanent means by which the popes drew on the resources of the clergy anywhere and everywhere was the right called "spoils." From the custom of pillaging the household goods of a dead bishop or abbot, there arose the retaliatory practice of the bishop or the abbot pillaging in the same way when beneficiaries died who were under their jurisdiction. As the Holy See became, more and more, the universal collator to all benefices of any value, it took over this right of spoils, and under Urban V it was extended to the property of all benefice holders whatsoever, regular or secular, wherever they died. The local representative of the papal collector entered into possession. He paid all debts due for work that had profited the Church or the benefice, and he paid off the servants. The dead man's heirs were given his books and all else that had been bought either with his private fortune or from the fruits of his own industry. The church ornaments and plate the collector left undisturbed (unless he could prove these had been bought out of benefice revenues in order to defraud the pope) and he did not take the food, wine, cattle and tools. But the rest he sold up. These sales of the moveables of dead bishops often brought in vast sums. Their best vestments and church plate the popes often kept for the papal treasury; and they also kept the valuable books. So, between 1343 and 1350, their library at Avignon was the richer by no fewer than 1,200 valuable works. 613

As the popes now claimed the first year's revenue of the newly- appointed holder of a benefice, so they also began to demand all the revenue for the time the benefice had lain vacant. A final, general, permanent charge on sees was that levied for dispensations for procurations. A "procuration" was the amount of money which a bishop had a right to receive when he made the visitation of a benefice. Originally this was no more than hospitality for himself and his suite. But, gradually, it had become a money payment and in 1336 the maximum amount was fixed by a law of Benedict XII. The practice now began that bishops begged the Holy See for the right to exact the procuration even though they had not made the visitation, and the popes began to grant such petitions, on the understanding that the bishop paid to them a fee that varied from a half to two-thirds of the sum he himself received. The bishops next endeavoured to recoup, by a diocesan tax, the sums they had been compelled to disgorge to the curia, but here the popes intervened and a law of Urban V, in 1369, forbade the practice.

How far did the system really work? What sums of money did it bring in? The accounts of the central exchequer, and of the collectors dispersed through the different sees of Christendom, survive in very large part and they have been extensively studied. 614 From them we can trace the financial history of the Avignon popes through fifty years of fluctuating solvency to a final state that borders on chronic bankruptcy. For expenses always outran receipts, and it was upon a papacy that had exhausted its own resources, that had scarcely any effective hold on its own territories, and that had severely tried the patience of Catholics everywhere, that the terrible crisis of the Great Schism fell.

On the death of Clement V (1313), there was a sum of something more than 1,000,000 golden florins in the treasury. But the dead pope's generosity to his heirs left his successor, John XXII, little more than 70,000 of them. It is this pope who was the chief architect of the system just described. The new taxes which he devised, and the system of collecting them, raised the revenue to an annual sum of 228,000 florins. Expenses, however chiefly due to the wars in Italy — topped receipts throughout his long reign, and John XXII would have died insolvent but for loans and timely legacies. As it was, he left to the new pope, Benedict XII, a fortune of 750,000 florins. Under this Cistercian pope drastic economy ruled, and the Italian wars slackened; Benedict was even able to remit taxes (including the highly profitable first fruits) and to manage on a revenue of less than a fourth of what his predecessor had enjoyed. At his death (1342) the treasure, nevertheless, amounted to more than 1,100,000 florins. But Clement VI, to whom all this came, was the most princely of all these popes in his way of life, a pale but sinister forerunner of the Medici and della Rovere of the next age. As his expenses mounted, the taxes mounted too. Soon the revenue was 188,000 florins, threefold what it had been under Benedict XII. But, even so, it did not nearly suffice, and the pope was forced to borrow. To Innocent VI, who succeeded him in 1352, Clement VI yet managed to leave 300,000 florins. The next ten years are the last in which the financial situation is even tolerable. Taxes contrive to mount indeed, and the annual revenue rises to a quarter of a million florins, but the war in Italy is once more raging violently and it eats up all this and more. The Holy See falls now into a chronic state of debt; and under the last two of the Avignon popes, Urban V (1362-1370) and Gregory XI (1370-1378), though the hold on benefices is pushed to the extreme limit and the taxes are crushing, the financial history of the Apostolic See is one long misery.

The discontent which the system caused was general and it was immense. Where did the money go? To judge from the discontent, as the new popular literature expresses it, the complainants, naturally enough, saw it as the life blood of the princely style in which the Avignon popes lived, the means by which they maintained one of the most splendid courts of the time. But modern study of the accounts has made it clear beyond all doubt that the amount spent on the court was small indeed compared with the sums swallowed up by the endless wars waged in Italy for the recovery and defence of the papal states. The total revenue received by John XXII, for example, in the eighteen years of his reign, amounted to 4,200,000 florins. 615 The household expenses for one year that we know (1329-30) were 48,600 florins 616; if this were an average year the total on this account would be in the neighbourhood of 875,000 florins; but the Italian wars cost this pope no less than 4,191,446 florins. 617 Nothing so sweals away the riches of a government as war.

We do not, however, need to turn to the poets, the novelists and the satirists of the time for evidence of the immense discontent, nor to the papacy's foes. We can find it in the outspoken comment of such personages as St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena, and, even, in the very account books of the collectors. And were there no evidence at all, given the facts of human nature, we could surely take it for granted; at no time would men ever have continued to suffer such a yoke in silence. In France the royal officials systematically did all they could to hinder the functioning of the system — and it was in France that the business was best organised, for there were as many collectors for France as for all the rest of Christendom together. In Germany the collectors were frequently attacked and imprisoned, and at times the clergy banded together in non-payment leagues, taking oath to stand by one another if penalties were inflicted. In England the joint business of the taxation of benefices 618 and the extension of the papal right to collate, raised a very great storm indeed.

England, since King John's surrender in 1213 to Innocent III, had been subject to the Holy See in temporal matters too, that is to say as a vassal to its suzerain. But this had never hindered the English bishops from protesting strongly against the popes' provision of foreign clerics to English benefices; and the barons — speaking for the lay patrons whose rights were thus, at times, curtailed — were more vehement still. The one personage in England whose action was always uncertain, and ever seemingly inconsistent, was the chief patron of all, the king. Whatever the king's personal resentment at new extensions of the papal claims to collate and to levy taxes, he had usually too great a need of the pope's aid in the complexities of international diplomacy to allow his resentment free play. From the time of Edward I (1272- 1307) onward England offers the interesting picture of laity eager to protest against this papal policy and to check it, of clergy willing to connive at the protest, and of the crown seeking to use this situation as a means whereby to coax, or coerce, the pope in other policies.

The first anti-papal, parliamentary event to have any lasting effect was the debate in the Parliament of Carlisle in January 1307, the last parliament of Edward I's reign. Here all the grievances of the time were set out in a petition to the king: complaints about papal provisions as an injury to the rights of patrons, about papal claims to first fruits. The king listened to the petition but it was not allowed to mature into a law. The one law certainly made in this parliament 619 is a prohibition against monasteries which owe obedience to foreign superiors paying taxes and tributes to them or lending them money.

Edward I died within six months of the Parliament of Carlisle, and in the twenty years' anarchy of his successor's reign — Edward II — there is more than one protest from the clergy against the double taxation to which they were now beginning to be continually subjected: the popes taxed them for papal purposes, and the kings taxed them — with the popes' permission — for national purposes. Edward II, like his father before him, seized the priories subject to alien superiors and confiscated their revenues for a time; and in 1325 a royal writ ordered the bishops to ignore all papal bulls unless the king had given leave for their introduction into the realm. 620

But the events of 1307 bore no real fruit until the reign of the next king, Edward III (1327-1377). Once Edward III had begun the great war with France (1338) it could not be long before the English kicked hard against the French popes. Not only were the French legates these popes employed unpopular, but by the papal hold on appointments, and their taxation of English clerics, good English money was now flowing, via the papal treasury, into the war fund of the national enemy. 621 In 1343 a bill was introduced into parliament to make it a penal offence to bring into the country any bulls from the pope, any provisions to benefices, or reservations, and forbidding the acceptance of such provisions; also, clergy who, on the basis of such provisions, brought suit, either against the patron of a benefice or against the incumbent whom the patron had presented, were also to be punished. In 1344 the penalty of outlawry, perpetual imprisonment or exile was proposed against those violating this law; also, a most significant addition, the same penalties were to be enacted for those who appealed in these matters from the royal courts to the Holy See. Neither of these projects passed into law. For the moment the king held back the indignation of his subjects. The barons, in May 1344, sent a petition of grievances to Clement VI, but the pope answered evasively. In 1347 the barons made a new attempt to enact the bills proposed in 1343 and 1344. They were again not successful. These hints to the papal officials, threats of what might be done, were wholly without effect at Avignon, and the king at last consented to allow the enactment of a statute. So there was passed, in 1351, the first Statute of Provisors. 622 This famous law begins by telling the story of the Carlisle petition of 1307, and makes its own the complaint of that document that the papal policy of granting English benefices to foreign clerics — who are always absentees — is doing serious harm to every kind of religious activity. Now, in 1351, the mischief is worse than ever. English kings are bound, by law and by their oaths, to provide remedies for it. So, with a statement that the legislation of 1307 has never been repealed, it is now enacted that all elections of bishops and abbots are to continue to be freely made by the various chapters, and that all ecclesiastical patrons are freely to present to the benefices in their gift, and that where the Roman curia "in disturbance of the free elections, collations or presentations aforenamed" has made provision of a benefice, the presentation is, for that occasion, to fall to the king. Anyone who, fortified with a papal provision, presumes to disturb the person presented by the king or by an ecclesiastical patron, 623 is to be arrested and, on conviction, imprisoned until he pays a fine left to the king's discretion, makes satisfaction to the party aggrieved and also gives security that he renounces his claim and that he will not prosecute his suit or make any appeal in the pope's court. If the provisor cannot be found he is to be outlawed.

Two further acts of parliament supplement the Statute of Provisors and, thereby, perfect this new instrument of royal control of Church affairs; they are the Statute of Treasons (1352) 624 and the Statute of Praemunire (1353). 625 The first of these was enacted in order to state with precision what those offences were which amounted to high treason, and one clause of the statute declares that all who procure from the papal curia any provison to a benefice fall outside the king's protection; they are outlaws and whoever finds them may do as he wills with them. This is only incidental to the main purpose of the act, but the papal jurisdiction in matters of benefices is the very subject of the second statute. This first Statute of Praemunire does not indeed make any mention of the pope or his courts. It declares that many of the king's subjects complain that they are cited abroad to answer in a foreign court for things cognizable in the king's court, 626 and also that appeal is made to "another court" from decisions in the king's court. This is a manifest injury to the king's authority and to the common law. So it is now enacted that whoever, bearing allegiance to the king, thus draws another out of the realm, or who sues in another court to defeat a judgment given in the king's court, shall be given two months and a day to answer personally in the king's court for this contempt. If he comes not — and here follows the penalty known henceforward as a Praemunire, and still good law for various offences — he is from that day outside the king's protection, the whole of his property is forfeited to the king, and when found he is to be imprisoned for as long as the king chooses.

Papal presentations to benefices in England are, from this time onward, by English law, null. It is a crime to procure them, and a crime to make any appeal to the pope's courts to bring about the execution of the pope's provision — and indeed a crime to make any use of the pope's court for matters where the king's court claims jurisdiction. Here is the most ingenious instrument so far devised by which a nation can check the pope's universal power of control over the Church. The interesting thing is that the kings made almost no direct use of this instrument. The next forty years saw many conflicts between the English and the popes; in 1364 the penalties of Praemunire were renewed in an act of finer mesh that brought in all those accessory to the offence of using the pope's courts; in 1366 the whole nation repudiated for ever the papal suzerainty; in 1369 the alien priories were seized once more, and their monks finally banished in 1377; strong complaints were made in parliament in 1376 about the heavy papal taxation of English benefices and the luxury in which the collectors of these taxes lived — and also of the way in which the best of the benefices went to absentee cardinals of the papal curia. The Statute of Provisors was evidently not in operation — even as a threat it was hardly effective; and there was thus no occasion for the Statute of Praemunire to be put into force. The fact was that the king continued to find the pope useful, and had no desire to begin a major quarrel on such a general issue as underlay these English statutes. In the Concordat of Bruges, of 1375, neither side raised the issue of principle; and both agreed to annul actions which contravened the legal arrangements made by the other, and to remit the penalties incurred. But in 1390 the Statute of Provisors was re-enacted, 627 and in 1393 the Statute of Praemunire. 628

To accept a benefice in contravention of the law entailed, from now on, banishment for ever; and the same penalty was decreed against whoever harboured those so exiled. Also all who brought into the realm any summons, sentence or excommunication affecting those who put the Statute of Provisors into execution were liable to capital punishment. The new Praemunire law declares its motive to be the recent acts of the pope. 629 He has excommunicated English bishops who, in accordance with English practice, have instituted to benefices the presentee declared to be such by a decision of the king's court; and he has planned to translate bishops from one see to another, without their consent and without the king's consent — which translations go against English law, and to acquiesce in this policy would be to submit the crown of England to the pope. At the suggestion of the Commons the king has put the matter to the Lords temporal and spiritual. The barons, like the Commons, agree to stand by the king. The bishops and abbots will neither deny nor affirm that the pope can so excommunicate or translate bishops, but they agree that such excommunications and translations are against the king and his crown. And it is thereupon enacted that all who have any share in such excommunications or translations "or any other things whatsoever which touch our lord the king, against him, his crown, and his royalty or his realm" incur from now on the penalties of Praemunire.

The effect of all this legislation — against which, in 1426, Martin V protested strongly but in vain — was to make the king so far master in his own house that, although the popes continued to name and provide to benefices, and Englishmen to accept the provision, in contravention of the law, none was named to whom the king had any objection; and to bishoprics the popes always provided the man the king named to them. Not until the closing years of the fifteenth century was any foreign absentee cleric named to an English see, and then it was done at the king's request, the cleric provided being the king's ambassador at the papal court. 630 The laws brought about a tacit understanding between the papacy and the crown — so long as pope and king continued to be friendly the laws might as well not have existed. But the instrument lay by, ready for service whenever crisis came. Thanks to these laws, long before Henry VIII's new invention of the Royal Supremacy the English were well habituated to a very great measure of royal control in religious affairs. It is no more than the bare truth to say that Henry's Catholic ancestors had furnished him, not only with an armoury of useful precedents, but with more than one of the main instruments his policy called for. 631

In the end, the curia broke down these alliances of princes and people against its claims, by the simple policy of offering to the prince a share of the tax; and by a system of agreement as to the candidate to be provided to the vacant sees, it gained the princes as allies against the discontented chapters now deprived of their right to elect.

But to the last the papacy remained powerless, comparatively speaking, in Germany, where the bishops were themselves sovereign princes. Here the chapters — close corporations with their membership reserved to aristocratic and princely families — steadily ignored the system of papal provision and elected their own candidates. There are stories of the canons, arms in hand, driving out the papal nominees; and one Bishop of Wurzburg even forbade, under pain of death, that anyone should bring into his jurisdiction a papal provision. To assert their rights, in the face of such opposition, and to avoid at every vacancy conflicts which would never end, the popes were reduced to the miserable expedient of first quashing the election (as invalid) and then themselves nominating to the see the man whom the chapter had elected.

Gradually, however, the system of papal provision established its hold almost everywhere, and it is one mark of the new state of things that prelates now begin to style themselves, "Bishop of X by the Grace of God and the favour of the Apostolic See."

It was once a thesis largely taken as proved that one thing alone had produced this system of papal provision, to wit papal greed for power and money, libido dominandi. Certainly abuses now began to flourish as never before; and it was perhaps the immense fact of the abuses that distracted the attention of scholars from the question why the popes came to construct and to extend this system of reserving benefices to their own appointment. There is a world of evidence 632 that the elective system had, by the fourteenth century, so broken down that, in one see after another, it led to double elections, to doubtful elections, to disputes, riots, feuds, and even to schisms. It is also becoming certain that the popes were really alarmed at the fact that, in Germany, religious life was passing into the control of a laicised clerical aristocracy, whose power they were resolved to break by destroying their right to co-opt others of their kind as their successors. A very high proportion of the opposition to the system of papal provisions — as distinct from the opposition to abuses in the system — came from that lay aristocracy whose hold on religion the popes had been steadily fighting ever since the days of Gregory VII. It is only in recent years that a study of the actual process of Provisions as a working system has begun to reveal these all-important elements of the question. 633

They are, indeed, all-important elements, because the terrible abuses which, in the end, accompanied the system everywhere did more than anything else to bring about that indifference of Catholics to the cause of the Church as such, which is, perhaps, the chief single cause of the collapse of Catholicism in the sixteenth century. For with papal reservations the systematic practice grew of giving papal dispensations for the same man to hold more than one benefice — the grave abuse called pluralities; an easy way for popes to reward (or to maintain) high officials to whom they could not pay a sufficient salary. 634 With the appearance of pluralities as an ordinary feature of high ecclesiastical life, there came simultaneously the inevitable, related abuse of absentee pastors — bishops or parish priests — who drew the revenues while some deputy did the work (in his fashion) for what stipend the titular could be compelled to pay. Here are the seeds of incredible scandals, of sees left for generations without a resident bishop, and of bishops appointed to sees solely for the sake of the revenue they will draw from them, bishops who do not so much as trouble to seek consecration, nor even ordination as a priest. It is now that the hideous ulcers begin to form which disfigure the Church of those later years in which were born such iron reformers as St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Charles Borromeo. And over it all there begins to be noticeable the stench of accretions of immense ecclesiastical wealth, 635 of wealth acquired or wealth desired; wealth that comes according to law and by lawful dispensation; wealth that comes against all law, in ways no dispensation can legitimate — by simony. It is one of the greatest sources of all these evils that the benefice — an ecclesiastical office that carries with it a right to a sure, ascertained income — comes more and more to be discussed as a property (which of course, in part, it is) and that considerations of Canon Law rather than Pastoral Theology inspire the discussions.

The main problem of the Church in this century of the Avignon popes is, of course, the eternal problem, how to keep men good, how to keep them up to their obligations and their professions. It was one great, and inexplicable, weakness of these popes of the later Middle Ages that they never devised a system of training adequately the parochial clergy. Laws of clerical behaviour there were in plenty; on every possible occasion they were proclaimed anew, and when opportunity offered they were stiffened up enthusiastically. But none of these popes seems ever to have taken stock of the problem as a whole, to have proposed or considered such a reconstruction as, for example, John XXII introduced as a solution for the disorders that for so long had vexed the Friars Minor. Denunciation of sins there is indeed in plenty, but nowhere a constructive policy that will affect, as well as the causes of sin, the circumstances that serve to assist these causes. The "State of the Church" problem begins now to be chronic, and to the official ecclesiastical world it is in danger of becoming an inevitable element of Christian life. Officialdom never ceases to protest against abuses, nor to call for amendment; but it never effects any substantial lasting improvement. The day comes, at last, when the whole framework begins to fall apart. By that time the papal control of the whole initiative of Christian life has been, for centuries, a fact known to every Christian man; it is not possible so to take on the burden of a universal administration and to remain untouched in the hour of disaster. The papacy was to feel the full force of the storm, and nowhere more than in the collapse of men's faith in the divinity of its origins; and in that same day it would be seriously suggested as a necessary measure of reform, that the totality of the religious orders be abolished.

ii. The Popes, 1334-1362

John XXII had survived to the great age of ninety. He was active and mentally vigorous to the end, and in some respects his death seems to bring to a close a whole age. It was not merely that the pope was so old that he could recall the momentous pact between the great French pope, Urban IV, and the crown of France from which had come the destruction of the Hohenstaufen (and also the new menace of the Angevin princes); nor that, in him, there had been active a personality formed as long ago as the age of St. Louis IX. But John XXII was the last of the series of popes whose genius created the canon law; with him there was finally brought to completion the work that had begun with Gratian's own pupil, Alexander III. For a hundred and seventy-five years now the genius of that first great papal jurist had dominated the public action of the papacy. In all that time the great popes — with scarcely an exception — had been great canonists, churchmen who had viewed their world, and worked for its betterment, through the medium of this new great instrument. It was then a striking reversal of history that John XXII was succeeded by a pope who was a theologian and a monk, and that in this pope, Benedict XII, there reappeared for the moment the kind of pope who had characterised not so much Gratian's age, but rather the age that had produced Gratian, the golden age of those monastic popes who, from the time of St. Gregory VII, had pulled the Church free of the slough of the Dark Ages.

Benedict XII was still, at the time of his election, a faithfully observant Cistercian, after nearly twenty years spent in public life. Inevitably he was a reformer. There was already much to reform; it is now indeed that we first begin to meet, as an acknowledged feature of Christian life, the "State of the Church" problem. Benedict XII — it is his great glory — gave himself wholeheartedly to its solution. Though he was still some months short of fifty when he was elected, he reigned for little more than seven years, but in that time he laboured to restore or remodel every one of the greater religious orders. To this fruitful activity the Bullarium is a simple and striking witness, where Benedict's decrees occupy three times the space taken by the acts of the longest-lived pope of all this period. 636

The Cistercian pope came to the supreme charge with an enviable record as a good, competent and hard-working bishop in the two poor country sees he had occupied. 637 He seems to have been especially successful in his work against the heretics — Vaudois and Cathars — who still lingered in those mountainous regions. This was, however, hardly the career to train a man for the first place in the government of Christendom. The monkpope's inexperience of diplomatic business, and of general politics, was to cost him many a reverse, and a certain narrowness of outlook was to give some of his monastic legislation a rigidity of detail that would not stand the strain of practice. But Benedict has the great merit that he recognised the nature and the scale of the evil of monastic decay, and much of what he did remained until the Council of Trent — and has remained even to our own day — the basis of the organisation of the great religious orders. 638

The pope began early, sending home from Avignon, only a month after his election, the innumerable bishops who had deserted their sees to live there in expectation of favours to come. In May 1335 he abolished the iniquitous system of granting abbeys to non- resident abbots (who, often, were not even monks) to be held in commendam, and in December of that same year he revoked all grants made of the next appointment to benefices. The system of papal provisions he maintained, but showed himself most conscientious about the qualifications of those to whom they were granted — so conscientious, in fact, and so personally concerned, that the system began to break down, the pope keeping places vacant for months until he found a man thought really suitable. He was a striking exception to almost all the popes of this and the following century in his horror of nepotism, and he was almost as exceptional in his disregard of the wishes of ruling princes about appointments.

Something has already been said about Benedict XII's share in the remodelling of the Curia Romana. He showed himself a deadly enemy to the systematic jobbery that disgraced it, and in the first month of his reign there was a general flight from Avignon of guilty officials anticipating discovery and punishment. The history of the papal finances during this century shows how Benedict XII was able to carry through the work of building the great palace of the popes at Avignon, and yet leave the treasury in good condition, despite a generous surrender of fruitful sources of revenue. This was due in part to the pope's careful administration, but also to his resolute abandonment of the war policy of his predecessor. At the very outset of the reign Benedict XII declared explicitly that he would not resort to war even for the defence of the territories of the Church. The Church, he declared, could in the long run only lose by using such a means. 639

Benedict XII secured peace also in the heart of the curia, in the delicate business of the pope's relations with the Sacred College. For he habitually worked with his cardinals, discussing all matters fully with them, and labouring to win their consent to his plans. He was sparing in his creations, adding only seven to the college, in the consistory of 1338, of whom all but one were French, and four were religious. In the next conclave there would be eighteen cardinals, fourteen of them Frenchmen.

The work of Benedict XII as a restorer of the life of the religious orders began with an attempt in the bull Pastor Bonus, 640 to check an evil from which none of them was free, the presence all over Europe of monks and friars who, on one pretext or another, had taken to live outside their cloisters. Superiors were urged to find out where their missing subjects had gone, and were given new powers to compel their return. They were also to work for the return of those who, without proper authorisation, had made their way into other orders, and to make provision for the return of those who had abandoned the monastic state altogether — the apostates in the technical language of the canon law. To make the path of these last unfortunates smooth, the superiors were authorised to lighten the penances due for this offence, and indeed Benedict urged upon them that clemency was a duty.

Next the pope took up the reform of the several orders, Cistercians, Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinian Canons-Regular. In every case he took the superiors of the order into his confidence, and — with the exception of the Dominicans — they all agreed to, and accepted, the reforms he proposed.

Two abuses, the Bull Fulgens, 12 July, 1335, suggests, lie at the root of the Cistercian decay, namely the abbots' disregard of the monks in their administration of the monastic properties, and the growth of new customs which have destroyed all real community life. The pope, in great detail, now forbids abbots to alienate property, to grant leases, or to contract loans without the consent of their monks. Abbots are to take an oath to observe this law, and their officials also. The bursars of the monastery, who are to be appointed by the abbot and the senior monks, are to render a quarterly account. Abbots are henceforth to be fined who refuse, or neglect, to attend the general chapter of the order — that mechanism whose good functioning is the condition sine qua non of Cistercian well-being; and new powers are given to the superiors of the order to punish those abbots who neglect to pay their quota to the order's general fund, which fund is to be collected and administered according to rules put beyond the chapter's power to alter. The order is sternly recalled to its first austere ideals, by decrees that forbid all use of silver plate, and that limit to a single companion the train of abbots en voyage. There are to be no more dispensations from the rule of perpetual abstinence from flesh meat, and those hitherto granted are revoked. Breaches of this rule are to be punished by three days of bread and water, and a flogging. 641 Abbots and monks alike are to wear the same simple habit. All are to eat the same food, in the one common refectory, and all are to sleep in a common dormitory — where cells have been built they are to be destroyed within three months, under pain of excommunication. There are to be no more arrangements to divide revenues as between the abbot and the community, and concessions of this sort are revoked. Abbots who break this law are to be deposed, and the monks imprisoned. A long section which forbids the abuses by which monks have, in fact, become owners, says much, in its carefully detailed prohibition, of the general decay that has come upon the fundamental monastic ideal of voluntary poverty. Finally, there is a careful provision for monastic studies. In every abbey a master is to be engaged who shall teach grammar, logic and philosophy to the young monks; and every year monks are to be sent — in the proportion of one for every twenty monks in the monastery — to the various universities, Paris, Oxford, Toulouse, Montpellier, Salamanca, Bologna and Metz. Monks found suitable for university degrees in theology are to be left to complete their course, but none are to study canon law, the science which is the high road to ecclesiastical preferment and a standing temptation to the monastic vocation.

The bull in which Benedict XII sets his hand to the restoration of the classic monachism of St. Benedict is one of the longest of all. 642 It repeats very largely the provisions in the Cistercian reform about care for monastic property, for a revival of the life in common, and for study. It recalls the famous decree of 1215 which imposed on the Benedictines the Cistercian invention of provincial chapters, and it went a step further in the same direction by now grouping the Benedictine houses of the various countries into provinces, thirty-one provinces in all. 643

The same defects in the community life are legislated against, yet once again, in the long bull that remodels the Augustinian Canons. 644 The abbeys and priories of this rule were, seemingly, establishments on a very much smaller scale than the Benedictine or Cistercian monasteries. Special reminders are given that the canons are not to go hunting, nor to carry arms without the leave of their superiors; and again that conspiracies, and sworn pacts amongst the brethren, are to be sternly put down.

Benedict XII did not wait to be crowned before he publicly expressed his opinion on the state of the order of the Friars Minor — still, it may be supposed, unsettled by the late tragedy of Michael of Cesena and Ockham. In the Advent Consistory of 1334 the pope reproached the Franciscans with their tendency to heresy, their scorn for the hierarchy, their relaxed discipline and their revolutionary turbulence. Two years later the bull Redemptor Noster 645 prescribed appropriate remedies. The tone of the bull is extremely severe. Yet once again, all tendencies towards the "Spiritual" movement are condemned; the friars are bidden to take more seriously the duty of the choral recitation of the Divine Office, all are to be present at it, and there is to be no levity in carrying it out. Once again there are special laws to restore a common table, with silence and reading during meals. The brethren are to be given sufficient food; and all are to have the same food, clothing and sleeping quarters — superiors and subjects alike — so that none may have excuse to live lives of their own outside the community. The greatest care is to be taken as to what friars shall preach outside the convents. None is to be sent unless of mature years and formed character; and even so, he is not to go unless with a kind of passport that states exactly what his mission is, and until what date he is lawfully outside his friary. 646 One very necessary condition of good preaching is theological knowledge, and Benedict XII is here most insistent In addition to the studies made in the convents of the order; he decrees that every year three friars are to be sent for theological studies to the university of Paris, three to Oxford and three more to Cambridge — all of whom must first have read the four books of Peter Lombard with the commentary of approved doctors. 647 The pope goes out of his way to insist that all friars thus engaged in studies are to be treated with special care and respect by their brethren, and lays down that each convent shall be plentifully supplied with books of grammar, logic, philosophy and theology. Also, there is to be a careful censorship of new publications.

The Minister-General of the order is to visit personally, within ten years of his election, all the provinces — except Ireland, Greece and the Holy Land, to which remote territories he is allowed to send a deputy. Finally — a most important innovation — novices are to be sent for their training to a special house, under the care of a special "master of novices"; and until they reach the age of twenty-five the professed friars also are to be under the rule of a "master of the professed."

When Benedict XII publicly lectured the Franciscans in 1334, he held up to them as a pattern of life their great rivals, the Friars-Preachers, even saying that St. Dominic headed all the orders. It is a curious irony that with the Dominicans alone the pope's efforts at reform failed, and even produced a violent struggle, that only ended with the pope's death.

Benedict XII died, all too soon, after a short seven years and a half, before he had had time to do more than promulgate his many schemes of reform. His austerity and his reforms gained him enemies everywhere, and especially among the courtiers and humanists. He died one of the most reviled of all the popes. Yet if there is any other of the long line whom this great Cistercian brings to mind, it is the Dominican, St. Pius V, the one undoubted glory of the Counter Reformation. So great then was the effect of a saint upon the papal throne, when a saint did finally appear there, that even his naturally easy-going successor was compelled to a faithful continuation of his work. Benedict XII was less fortunate. Those who had chafed at the new rigour had their way in the conclave which followed his death. 648 His successor, Clement VI, was also, it is true, a monk; he was a brilliant man of affairs, and an experienced administrator, but one who, by the prodigality with which he scattered dispensations of all kinds, ruined much of his predecessor's work. The next ten years' reign was indeed a time "du laisser-aller et des largesses." 649

The crowd of needy clerics that had lately fled Avignon now returned, at the new pope's express invitation to send in their petitions within two months. To satisfy them, and as a means to put into execution his own express declarations that "no one should leave a prince's presence discontented," and that "a pope ought to make his subjects happy," Clement extended the reservations of appointments to cover the whole field of benefices. When complaints were made of this prodigal use of his authority, he had but one word, "My predecessors did not know how to be popes." Whether these sayings are really authentic, they undoubtedly describe the spirit which reigned at Avignon for the next six years — when the Black Death suddenly descended and carried off half the population. 650

Clement was liberality itself to his own innumerable relations and to the French kings, 651 and to his princely neighbours, lending them huge sums of money. He completed the great palace that Benedict XII had begun, and it was he who, in 1348, finally bought from its lord the city of Avignon. Upon Clement VI there lies the main responsibility for the chronic bankruptcy in which the popes henceforth laboured. In many respects Clement VI is an unique figure among the Avignon popes, and it is of him alone that the conventional picture of an Avignon pope is true. The fourteenth century was a time when ways of life were rapidly growing more luxurious, and that clerical life — the life of the clerical aristocracy — reflected this is, of course, yet another evidence of religious decay. "The pope," says M. Mollat, examining critically the charges brought against the Avignon popes, "regarded himself as a king, and as a king he surrounded himself with a magnificent court where the cardinals took the position of princes of the blood-royal. . . . In the fourteenth century no power, not even one essentially spiritual in kind, could dominate the world, if its means of action were not based on territorial property, on moneyed wealth, and above all on that pomp and circumstance which simple folk have always looked on as the characteristic evidence of wealth and authority. . . . The example given by the pope became contagious. . . . The clergy began to dress sumptuously, wearing the check silks and long-toed shoes which were then the height of fashion and, what went contrary to all ecclesiastical custom, with their hair allowed to grow its length." 652 That a pope who chose to live in such a style — a pope who was still in the prime of life — should be accused of grave moral offences is not surprising. Petrarch, especially, has piled up against the memory of Clement VI "un requisitoire accablant." 653 But Petrarch is far from being a disinterested witness, and a very different kind of testimony must be adduced before Clement VI can be condemned for this also.

Clement VI's reign was marked by two great catastrophes, the effective opening of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the Black Death. The immense upheaval caused by the war in the social life of both countries is a commonplace of general history. In that general deterioration — and from that deterioration — the religious life suffered too, as it must, when such calamities come upon a generation where religion is already failing and lacking zealous and competent leaders. 654

The Black Death is the special name given to the great plague which, between 1348 and 1350, visited every country of Europe in turn, carrying off from all of them between a third and a half of the population. The witness of the contemporary writers in all these various countries is roughly concordant. In the proportion of dead to survivors which they give their accounts tally, as they do in the description of the symptoms and course of the disease. What the effect — the immediate effect, first of all — was of this sudden appalling catastrophe on the general spirit of the age, on its religious organisation and life, on its social and economic history, no one has yet worked out in detail, with the full contemporary documentation which the proof of any thesis about the matter must call for. The old theory that the Black Death wrought an immediate revolution in modes of land tenure, and was the cause of an immediate social upheaval, no longer has the universal approval of the historians. And the readiness of apologists to lay to the score of this great plague all the ills which manifestly afflicted religion a hundred and fifty years later, has bred an equally unscientific tendency — in people who are not apologists — to speak as though it were impossible that the unprecedented calamity could have had any really important lasting effects. 655

It was in the early weeks of 1348 that the disease first appeared in the West, at Genoa, brought thither by a ship from the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea. Thence it rapidly spread to Venice, where 100,000 died, and down through central Italy, to Florence, where again 100,000 is given as the number of the dead, and to Siena, where 80,000 died, four-fifths of the population. Sicily was especially its victim. At Marseilles, where the disease began to show itself in the same month it arrived at Genoa, 57,000 died in a month — two-thirds of the population — with the bishop, all his canons, nearly all of the friars. The ravages at Narbonne and Arles and at Montpellier — the seat of the great medical university of the Middle Ages — were just as severe. Avignon suffered still more severely, losing more than half its population in the seven months the plague raged. As the year wore on the contagion gained the north of France, 80,000 falling victims at Paris, and in July it reached the south coast of England, whence it spread, during the next eighteen months, over the whole of the country.

No part of northern and western Europe escaped. The plague ravaged Spain in 1349 and, crossing the Alps from Italy, it passed through Switzerland and the valley of the Rhine to Germany and to the Low Countries, and by Denmark to Sweden and Norway. The ease with which the infection was taken, the speed with which death followed, the seeming hopelessness of the case once the disease took, caused everywhere the most terrible panic and, with the general fear, a general feeling of despair that showed itself in wild outbreaks of licentiousness.

At Avignon the luxury-loving Clement VI rose to the occasion, organising what scientific knowledge was at his command, sanitary services and medical aid; and, when the horror and the terror found an outlet in a furious burst of anti-Semitism — the Jews had caused it all by poisoning the streams and wells — especially in the Rhineland cities, the pope intervened to denounce the calumny, and threw open his own state to the persecuted fugitives.

Gradually, in the winter of 1349-1350, the plague wore itself out, and the survivors slowly took up the task of reconstructing their social and political life. Ten years later the disease appeared again (1361), to ravage France and England once more, and more severely than any plague, except that of 1348. Who shall reckon the extent of the moral disaster of these visitations? Did they indeed, coming at a time when spiritual resistance was already low, take the heart out of the Middle Ages?

Certainly the Black Death was not the sole begetter of the complication of spiritual evils under which the medieval organisation of religion ultimately went down. But in many respects life was never the same. The population seems never to have climbed back to its earlier density, the elan of the earlier time was never recovered, the note of despondency, of pessimism. in religious writers is now hardly relieved, the spring has indeed been taken out of the year. One particularly heavy loss ought to be mentioned. The Church, considered as a great organisation of human beings, finds itself henceforward faced with the insoluble problem of staffing its innumerable conventual institutions from the depleted and less generously-spirited population. The thousands of its great abbeys depend, ultimately, for their spiritual effectiveness on the diligent performance of the Opus Dei, the daily round of solemn liturgical prayer. If in an abbey, over a long period, there are not monks or nuns enough to ensure this as a matter of course, its end as a spiritual power-house is inevitable; and not only does the semi-derelict abbey cease to be useful to religion, it is a parasite, an active source of new serious weakness. And more and more this now came to pass. Very few indeed were the abbeys which, after the plagues of the fourteenth century, ever regained the full number of religious needed for the fullness of healthy community life. From such a situation there was but one way out — the suppression and amalgamation of the depleted houses, retrenchment until better times should come. It was not taken. The great monastic reforms of Benedict XII were thus, at the outset, seriously checked by the social catastrophe that fell so soon after they were decreed, and then by the ensuing development, within the world of monasticism, of an entirely new situation.

Innocent VI, who succeeded Clement VI in 1352, was, in ideals and intention, another Benedict XII. But he was already a very old man, vacillating and despondent, and from the outset depressed by the immensity of the task his lighthearted and prodigal predecessor had bequeathed to him.

The conclave which elected him lasted little more than a day, but the cardinals found time to draft the first of those election pacts — called capitulations — which are an eloquent sign of new anti-papal tendencies, even in the Sacred College, and which were from now on to be the bane of pontifical activity. This pact, to which all the electors swore, bound the future pope in such a way that he would be little better than the chairman of a board of governors. There were, for example, never to be more than twenty cardinals, and no more cardinals were to be created until the present numbers had fallen to sixteen, nor should anyone be made a cardinal without the consent of the cardinals. Similarly, without their consent the pope would not depose a cardinal, lay censures upon him, or deprive him of any rights or properties. Again, before alienating, or granting in fief, any province, city or castle of the dominions of the Church, the consent of two-thirds of the cardinals would be required; and the consent of the same majority must be sought for any appointments to the chief places in the curia. The future pope would not make grants of money to princes without the consent of the cardinals, and for the future the papal exchequer would pay over to the treasury of the Sacred College one half of all the revenues. As though somewhat doubtful of their right to make these conditions, the cardinals had attached to the pact a restrictive clause, "If and in so far as this is according to law." 656

Innocent VI, for all his age and his weaknesses, was still too much the famous lawyer he once had been 657 not to find a way out of the pact. Six months after his election he declared it null, as being contrary to the conclave laws of Gregory X and Clement V, which forbade the cardinals to busy themselves in the conclave with anything else than the choice of a new pope.

Once again a more rigorous spirit informed the curia, the legal qualifications for benefice holders ceased to be a matter of form, and there was an exodus of idle clerics from Avignon. Innocent VI had his troubles with the Franciscans, and his severity towards the remnants of the old "Spiritual" group drew down on his memory terrible words from St. Bridget of Sweden. 658 It was before this pope that so much of the enmity of the secular clergy against the friars found vent in the famous speech of the Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitz Ralph (November 8, 1357), a new quarrel which the pope stifled by imposing silence on all parties. The condition of the Friars-Preachers, that Benedict XII had vainly endeavoured to improve, had, in places, been seriously worsened by the Black Death, and now the Master-General of the order had no choice but to call in the pope to aid him in his work of reform. Once more the proposed reforms seemed likely to split the order; by a majority of four the definitors voted the deposition of the Master-General; but, after a papal enquiry into the charges against him, Innocent restored him to office.

Innocent VI's reign ended miserably — not through any fault of the pope. He was never able to make good the financial disasters of his predecessor, and finally he was compelled to sell off paintings and other art treasures, jewels and church plate. To add to his distress the truce of 1357 between France and England, and the definitive peace of Bretigny three years later, set free thousands of hardened mercenary troops, and these descended on the helpless Papal State. Only at the last moment was the pope saved, by a general rally of new crusaders from Aragon and southern France, and even so it cost him thousands to bribe the mercenaries to leave his territories and betake themselves to the wars in Italy. Then, in 1361, came a renewal of the plague, and in three months 17,000 people died of it at Avignon, including a third of the cardinals. By the time Innocent himself came to die, September 12, 1362, all the glory of the Avignon papacy had gone, never to return.

Notes

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