Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Chapter IX

by Reginald Lane Poole

CHAPTER IX.

THE OPPOSITION TO THE TEMPORAL CLAIMS OF THE PAPACY.

The eclipse of the empire in the latter part of the thirteenth century furnished an opportunity, of which we cannot wonder that the popes availed themselves, for augmenting and extending their political pretensions. Now however they were involved in a more difficult struggle, since an unsuspected obstacle had arisen in the growing national spirit of England and France. It is principally these changed conditions that make the pontificate of Boniface the Eighth a turning-point in the history of the medieval papacy; and it is an interesting study to watch the interworkings of the new motives in political speculation, now that the oppressive weight of the imperial conception was for the time removed.^[1] One of the most curious essays in this regard is a treatise written in the latter part of the year 1300 by a certain royal advocate in Normandy, a person whom we may confidently identify with Peter du Bois, who held that office in the bailliage of Coutances, and is elsewhere known as a hot partisan of Philip the Fair in his contest with Boniface.^[2] The professed aim of this treatise is to give a short and easy method of avoiding wars so far as the king of France is concerned; and for this purpose, the author holds, the best thing for society would be that the whole world should be subject to French rule. For, he explains, it is a peculiar merit of the French to have a surer judgement than other nations, not to act without consideration, nor to place themselves in opposition to right reason. To reap the full advantage of the arrangement it is necessary moreover that the king should be born and bred in France, because experience teaches that there the stars present themselves under a better aspect and exercise a happier influence than in other countries.

These postulates being granted, du Bois proceeds to indicate the steps by which the desirable result might be attained. He concedes the right of the papacy to all the territories comprised in the grant of Constantine, but adds that it is plainly beyond the power of the pope to carry his rights into effect. Being commonly an old and infirm person, and since he is not and cannot be a soldier, his very position is an incitement to the ambition of wicked men. Wars therefore are stirred up; numbers of princes are condemned by the church with their adherents, and thus there die more people than one can count, whose souls probably go down into hell and whom nevertheless it is the pope's duty to guard and to preserve from all danger. If however he should surrender his temporal domain, he would be all the freer to devote himself to the proper functions of his office, and a main cause of strife would be removed. But the means by which our speculator proposes to secure this end shew with singular directness how entirely the papacy had come to be regarded, not as a spiritual power standing apart from and above the temporal polity of Europe, but as a state to be treated with like any other state. The diplomatic agency, we read, of the king of Sicily might be employed to obtain from the church the title of senator of Rome for the French king, who should receive the holy patrimony, the city of Rome, Tuscany, the coasts and the mountains, Sicily, England, Aragon, and all the other countries, in exchange for an adequate pension to the pope, their present sovereign. Lombardy itself, it is explained, although legally subject to the king of Germany, should offer no insuperable difficulties; since its nominal ruler is well aware of the hopelessness of undertaking its reduction to a state of real vassalage, and therefore everything might be easily arranged by a secret treaty either with himself or his electors.^[3] This being secured it would perhaps be necessary to conquer the Lombards; any expedient would be lawful against them since nothing could authorise them to refuse obedience to their prince; and it is clear that they would in time yield to the force of arms assisted by the ravaging of their lands and the ruin of their commerce. The conquest of Lombardy would create so powerful an impression among other nations that the king of France could not fail soon to receive the submission of the rest of Europe; and thus a lasting peace would be secured for society.

A visionary scheme like this, the work of a layman and a lawyer, even with all its national vanity and exaggeration, is sufficiently indicative of the new horizon of political ideas that opened upon men in the end of the thirteenth century, to be deserving of comment. It shews us that the conception of the empire had already dwindled in the eyes of foreigners into that of a German kingdom, and that the temporal sway of the popes was seen to be the cause of endless mischief both to society and to the spiritual basis of the papacy itself. Nor can it escape notice that our theorist enunciates, as it were in a parenthesis, as a doctrine to which no one would think of objecting, that principle of necessary obedience to the temporal ruler which papal advocates had always been inclined to throw into the background or even formally to deny. It is in cases like this that the limitations of the medieval mind reveal themselves. To it only the two extremes are possible, absolute obedience to the sovereign or absolute obedience in all things to the church. When the supporters of the latter speak of civil rights they appear as though their single wish was to carry out what we should call a constitutional system; it is only when their correlative doctrine about the prerogative of the church is known, that we see how far they are removed from modern ideas: and in the same way it is regularly their opponents who are the defenders of pure, unrestrained absolutism, however much they may engage our approval when they argue against the temporal pretensions of the spiritualty with all the attendant inconveniences of ecclesiastical exemptions and privileges, and urge a far-reaching reform of the entire church-system, a return to primitive purity and primitive simplicity.^[4]

But it would be an error to suppose that the views of the French publicists, on the relations of church and state, of which du Bois is perhaps the earliest exponent, correspond in more than the object of their common attack with those of the imperial partisans. In the Enquiry touching the Power of the Pope,^[5] also probably the work of du Bois, we have a clear statement of the distinction between the relations of a kingdom like France^[6] to the pope, and those of the empire. The pope, he says, evidently the temporal lord of the emperor; for the latter needs to be confirmed and crowned by the pope, whereas no such authorisation is required in France. Undoubtedly this freedom from traditionary, even though disputable, restraints upon the title of their sovereign, helped to give a broader and bolder scope to the speculations of French writers; and the head and front of the literary opposition to the papacy during the early part of the fourteenth century, was found in the university of Paris. Besides, as we have said, the idea of nationality, an idea fatal to the empire, was becoming well understood; and John Quidort, better known as John of Paris, a contemporary of du Bois, dwells upon this as the proper basis of political organisation just as strongly as Thomas Aquinas from an opposite point of view had done before him.

Thus while the imperialists were more or less obliged to answer any given pretension of the papacy by another theory, possibly no less distorted, of their own, the French writers were able to discuss matters in a more philosophical spirit. Nothing for instance can be more admirable than the criticism of John of Paris with reference to the worldly possessions of the clergy. The Waldenses, he says, maintain that these possessions, originating in the Donation of Constantine, are the root of the demoralisation of the church; while others hold that they are intrinsically involved in the prerogative of the pope as the vicar of Jesus Christ. The former alternative was no doubt tempting to the opponents of papal claims, but John's sound sense was not deceived by the convenience of the argument. The truth, he decided, lay in the middle between the two extremes: the church might unquestionably have worldly property; but as a matter of fact she did not hold it by virtue of any vicarship or apostolical succession, but simply by way of grant from princes or other persons, or by similar titles of possession. With equally clear judgement du Bois disposed of the common use of Biblical phrases to prove anything that could be extracted from them by a violent adaptation of metaphor. It is no doubt usual, he says, among professors of theology to take a double sense in the words of Scripture, the literal or historical, and the mystical or spiritual: but for purposes of argument none but the former can be valid.^[7] He at once applies this axiom to demolish the favourite theory, at least as old as Gregory the Seventh, which found in the relation of the sun to the moon an apt and conclusive evidence of the subordination of the secular to the spiritual power, and suggested a variety of arithmetical puzzles as to the exact amount of their proportional magnitudes.^[8]

It was in fact in the purely critical work of controversy that the assailants of the hierarchy had almost uniformly the advantage: when they passed from criticism to the building up of a system of their own, their proposals are, in the view of a political philosopher, hardly less weak than those of their opponents. The French, as we have said, write with greater freedom than their imperial brethren; but in the latter too we find no lack of skill, no lack even of historical perception: and if their ablest recruits were drawn from the university of Paris, still the man who overtopped them all in the abstract splendour of his ideal was an independent Italian. Yet Dante's books De Monarchia, striking as they are, labour under the inevitable defect attaching to the attempt to exchange one impossible theory for another equally impossible. Supposing the human race to be entirely homogeneous, one might at once concede Dante's main proposition that the right and necessary form of government is that of one universal state by a sole universal ruler. But in truth he has no practical arguments to adduce in favour of this, only the general a priori principle of the virtue of unity, and the examples or precedents of ancient Rome. The resounding lines of the Aenëid on which he relies,

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos,

might come genuinely enough from a witness of the age of Augustus: in the fourteenth century, with the empire at its nadir and the Ghibellins of no small part of Italy, and Dante himself, suffering under a common proscription, they ring almost as an irony. Dante's scheme, as has been finely said, was proved not a prophecy but an epitaph.

If an attempt thus to restore the glories of the empire failed of fruit because it looked backward instead of forward, those of some of Dante's contemporaries, the literary allies of the emperor Lewis the Fourth, were not less unsuccessful because they erred in the opposite direction, because they proceeded on the basis of a more advanced polity which it needed centuries for men to understand. Both alike were disappointed by reason of their neglect of the actual circumstances of their own day. Beyond question the most notable of the latter class of theories is that of the Defensor Pacis, a book which announces a clear constitutional system such as in the present day either exists not at all or exists only in name in the greater part of Europe. Its author, Marsiglio de Maynardino,^[9] was one of those rare philosophers to whom fortune gave an opportunity of carrying their conceptions into practice; who discovered also that, however capable of constructing from the foundation, they were impotent to reconstruct in face of the old-established and irreconcilable facts of society with which they had to deal. The life of Marsiglio, of which we can only give a bare outline, is therefore of exceptional interest.

Born about the year 1270 of a plain burgher's family at Padua, he went no doubt through the customary course of studies in the university of his native town. He turned to medicine, perhaps to the active profession of arms; but we are ignorant of the particulars of his probably wandering, unsettled life^[10] until he emerges in 1312 as rector of the university of Paris: this office a brief term of tenure opened to most of the distinguished masters in the faculty of arts who taught there. At that time the Invincible Doctor, William of Ockham, the second founder of nominalism, held undisputed supremacy over the minds of the Parisian scholars; and it is natural to claim the English schoolman^[11] as one from whom Marsiglio derived more than the elements of his political, as of his metaphysical, ideas.^[12] With Ockham Marsiglio went beyond the limits of speculation preserved by the liberal but prudent university to which they belonged. Both subsequently abandoned it in order to devote their intellects to the defence of Lewis the Bavarian, of whose political aims they were aware, and whose infirmity of purpose and want of resource only time could shew. Of the band of Franciscans who gathered round the German king, Marsiglio was the confessed leader; unlike his companions he was a secular clergyman, by occupation, as it seems, a physician.

Marsiglio must have already meditated a flight from Paris when in 1324^[13] he took a man of like spirit, John of Jandun, a village in Champagne, into his counsel and planned with his help the Defensor Pacis: within, it is said, the space of two months the friends produced the most original political treatise of the middle ages. Soon afterwards they betook themselves to Nuremberg, the seat of Lewis's court. To them and to their Franciscan fellow-workers is due whatever of principle and of permanent historical significance belongs to that prince's scheme to rescue the empire from the unendurable pretensions of John the Twenty-Second, and to reassert for it a power and dignity such as even in the strongest days of the Franconian or Suabian Caesars had been proved totally incapable of lasting vindication. Lewis's career in Italy was short and inglorious.^[14] He became for the moment master of Rome; an antipope was chosen, and Marsiglio was named papal vicar in the city. But the opening of the year 1330 saw Lewis again in Germany: his Italian projects had failed utterly, his advisers were branded as heretics. In 1336 he was a suppliant to the power which he had defied. But Marsiglio remained firm in his opinions until his death, which happened not long before April 1343. It is not necessary here to discuss how far the collapse of the undertaking was determined by the irresolution of Lewis, or by the hardy perseverance of his antagonist. The issue indeed lay in the nature of things. The real significance of Marsiglio is to be found less in the events in which he was of necessity precluded from exercising paramount control, even had he been able to exercise it with the desired success, than in the book of which those events were so impotent illustrations.

The Defensor Pacis starts from the same beginning as Dante and Peter du Bois had chosen for the first principle of their political treatises; namely, that government is established tor the purpose of maintaining peace. Marsiglio traces the origin of civil association in close conformity with the teaching of the Politics of Aristotle^[15]: he adopts the definition that the state exists in order that men may live well; and to live well he finely explains in the sense that men may have leisure for liberal tasks, such as are those of the virtues of the soul as well of thought as of action. Turning then to the various modes of government by which this end is sought to be attained,—these too Marsiglio enumerates according to Aristotle's classification,—he decides that a perhaps a kingly rule is the more perfect. The qualified terms in which he expresses this preference at once distinguish our author from the common rank of imperialistic writers, especially when we remember that his own book is dedicated to the emperor. His postulates of the character and attributes of the prince, his definitions of law and of the nature of the state itself, are indeed quite different from theirs. That which he insists upon as the very basis of the social organism is a principle which civilists were inclined altogether to ignore. The sovereignty of the state, he held, rested with the people; by it properly are the laws made, and to it they owe their validity. From the nation itself proceeds all right and all power; it is the authoritative lawgiver among men, humanus legislator fidelis superiore carens. If the making of laws be entrusted to a few, we should not be secure against error or self-seeking: only the whole people can know what it needs and can give effect to it. The community therefore of all the citizens or their majority, expressing its will either by elected representatives or in their assembled mass, is the supreme power in the state.^[16]

But it must have an officer to execute its behests, and for this purpose the people must choose itself a ruler. In Marsiglio's view election is the only satisfactory form of monarchy: to the hereditary principle he will make no concession whatever. There must be, he says, a unity in the government; but a unity of office, not necessarily of number: so that the executive functions may be as effectively exercised by means of a committee as by a single prince; only no member of such a committee must venture to act by himself separately, its policy must be directed by the vote or by a majority of the entire body. If however, as is usually the wiser course, a king be chosen, he must be supported by an armed force, large enough, according to the rule of Aristotle, to overpower the few but not large enough to overpower the mass of the nation. But this force is not to be entrusted to him until after his election, for a man must not secure the royal dignity by means of external resources, but by virtue of his own personal qualities.

The desirability of an universal monarchy Marsiglio leaves altogether an open question. He is as little disposed to magnify the pretensions of the prince to whom he addressed his work, as he is to admit any theory of the indefeasible prerogative of kingship per se; prerogative indeed, strictly speaking, the king has none, for the authority which he receives by the act of election is purely official; the 'fountain of justice' remains with the law-giver, the people, whose instrument he is and to whom he is responsible.^[17] He has to interpret the law, not to make it. So too the officers of the state derive their commission from the people, albeit the king, in conformity with law, decides the detail of their appointment, together with the other necessary arrangements of the executive government. Once establish the principle, and the consequences are easy to draw. The king's power is limited in every possible direction. He has the eye of the people or of its delegates on all his actions. He may be restrained or even deposed if he overpass his prescribed bounds; and even though his conduct be not amenable to the letter of the law, he is still subject to the final judgement of the national will.^[18] On no side is there any room for despotism; in no point is he absolute.

Such are the conditions which Marsiglio deemed proper for the main object of his speculations, the defence of peace in the civil state, and which occupy the first book of his treatise. But among the six necessary constituents of society which he enumerates from Aristotle, – those who devote themselves to husbandry and handicraft, to provide its material support, those who defend it from danger without or sedition within, those who amass wealth, and those who execute the office of religion and administer justice, – one, that of the priesthood (which, Marsiglio admits, has not been universally considered necessary to the existence of the state), presents special difficulties. For whereas the peculiar province of the clergy is to instruct the people according to the teaching of the Gospel with a view to their eternal welfare, – for which purpose it is well that they should arm themselves with all possible knowledge, as well in the departments of thought as of action, – they have so far abandoned this exclusively spiritual function as to usurp all manner of temporal claims over secular as well as spiritual persons, and in particular over the Roman emperor: and these pretensions of the papacy, Marsiglio holds, are the chief causes of discord in the world. Accordingly in his second book our author addressed himself to the examination of the real nature of the spiritual office, and of its relation to the civil state.

The name church Marsiglio would recall to its first and apostolical, its truest and most proper signification, as comprehending the entire body of Christian men: all, he says, are alike churchmen, viri ecdesiastici, be they laymen or clerks. It is intolerable that its prerogatives should be usurped by the sacerdotal order. Excommunication, for instance, cannot rightly be decreed by any single priest or any council of priests: they should doubtless be consulted as experts with reference to the charges alleged, but the actual decision belongs to the congregation in which the offender lives, or to its superior, or to a general council.^[19] While moreover the clergy have no right to engross the name of churchman, they have also no right to extend the application of the word spiritual to all they do, as when they use it to cover their property and incomes in order to exempt them from legal burthens or conditions. The clergy have indeed a spiritual office in the church, but their dealings outside these definite functions, their tenure of land, their financial and other temporal engagements, are just as much secular as those of their lay brethren, and are just as much subject to the law of the state. Who would say that a clergyman's crimes, should he commit theft or murder, were to be regarded as spiritual acts? These are evidently to be punished like other men's only with greater strictness, because the culprits have not the same excuse of ignorance. The clergy are in these cases, and equally in all, other civil relations, simply members of society, and as members of society they must be treated; they can claim no sort of exemption in virtue of their religious character. More than this, since the business of government is to maintain peace, it is the duty of the ruler to limit the number of clergymen in any part of the kingdom, should their growth appear likely to disturb the order and tranquillity of the state.

The power of the clergy is thus not only restricted to spiritual affairs; it can only be given effect to by spiritual means. Temporal pains and penalties do not belong to the law of the Gospel, which indeed is not, properly speaking, a law at all but rather an instruction, doctrina; for it is not laid down that any man should be compelled to its observance, and coercive force is part of the definition of law. The priest then may warn and threaten, but beyond this he has no competence. If a heretic become obnoxious to the civil law – if, in other words, his doctrine is dangerous to society – by that law he is to be tried: but of heresy, as such, there is but one judge, Jesus Christ, and his sentence is in the world to come; errors of opinion lie beyond the cognisance of any human judicature.^[20] Marsiglio has arrived at the fully matured principle of religious toleration, which modern writers are apt to vaunt as their own peculiar discovery.

It may be objected to Marsiglio's entire view of the spiritualty, that he seems to leave out of account the existing constitution of the church, that he seems to forget that custom had classified the priesthood in ascending orders of dignity and authority, each with its proper province of power and jurisdiction. But in truth, he maintains, this arrangement is destitute of any scriptural warrant. In the New Testament bishop and priest are convertible designations of the same persons; and the popedom, however convenient as symbolising the unity of the church, is none the less a later development of which the historical growth is clearly traceable. Saint Peter had no superiority over the other apostles; but even supposing he had, it is hazardous to say that he communicated it to his successors in the Roman see, since we cannot say for certain that he himself ever visited, far less was bishop of, Rome at all.^[21] The preëminence of the bishop of Rome proceeds in fact not from saint Peter's institution but from the connexion of the see with the capital of the Roman empire. The supreme power in the church is the church itself, that is, a general council, formed of the clergy and laity alike, and convoked not by any pretended spiritual authority but by the source of all legislation and jurisdiction, the civil state. Thus constituted a general council may not only decide ecclesiastical questions but even proceed to excommunicate the temporal ruler and place his land under an interdict, just because it represents the authority of the universal church and speaks the voice of the entire community both in its spiritual and temporal capacities. That it has power over the pope follows necessarily from the principles already laid down.

It is evident then that the pope in his quality of Christian bishop can claim no right of supreme judgement in human things, even over the clergy. If he possess any such right it must have been conceded to him by human authority; as a spiritual person he has absolutely none, and therefore properly he ought to possess none. The power bequeathed by Christ to the priesthood can only concern religious affairs: it is idle to suppose that in granting to it the keys of heaven and hell he gave any temporal jurisdiction. The keys open and close the door of forgiveness, but forgiveness is the act of God, determined by the penitence of the sinner. Without these conditions the priestly absolution is of no avail. The turn-key, claviger, is not the judge. As for the special proof of the pope's superiority to the secular estate taken from his act in the ceremony of crowning the emperor, a ceremony, it is plain, can confer no authority: it is but the symbol or public notification of a fact already existing. The same function as the pope has at the coronation of the emperor, belongs at that of the king of France to the archbishop of Rheims; but who would call this prelate the superior of his king? Marsiglio goes over the standard arguments in favour of the papal assumptions and rejects them one after another, partly by his resolute insistence on a literal interpretation of the text of Scripture, partly by his grand distinction between the sacred calling of the priesthood and their extrinsic or worldly connexions. With his ideal of a church in which these worldly ties have no existence, with his view of them as mere indications of the distance by which the actual church is removed from primitive purity, there is no room for any talk of ecclesiastical privileges or exemptions. The sole privilege of the clergy is their spiritual character. Temporal sovereignty or jurisdiction is an accident of their civil position; and all inferences from the Bible which have been imagined to authorise it, such as the famous argument of the two swords, are incompatible not only with the conception of a church but also with the plain meaning of the texts from which they are deduced. My kinqdom is not of this world.

The two books of the Defensor Pacis thus comprise,—though we have been able to give but the briefest abstract of a work which fills more than a hundred and fifty folio pages in Goldast's edition of the original,—the whole essence of the political and religious theory which separates modern times from the middle ages. The significance of the reformation, putting theological details aside, lay in the substitution of a ministry serving the church, the congregation of Christian men, for a hierarchical class. The significance of the later political revolution, even now far from universally realised, lay in the recognition of the people as the source of government, as the sovereign power in the state. Both these ideas Marsiglio appropriated. He had not only a glimpse of them as from afar off : he thought them out, defined them, stated them with the clearest precision, so that the modern constitutional statesman, the modern protestant, has nothing to alter in their principle, has only to develop them and fill in their outline. Marsiglio may be stigmatised as a doctrinaire, but he belongs to that rarest class of doctrinaires whom future ages may rightly look back upon as prophets. It is this quality, this prescience of the new order for which the world was becoming ripe, that raises him above the whole body of antagonists to the hierarchical policy of the church in the middle ages. His great colleague Ockham, his successor Wycliffe, were immersed in the petty, or at best the transitory, interests of scholasticism. In theological doctrine Wycliffe may by some be considered to have done more signal service. But his thoughts and those of his fellows move within the confined limits of their own time. The political theory of Wycliffe, noble as it is, rests upon as wilful, as preposterous, a treatment of the Bible as that of any of his hierarchical adversaries. Carried into practice by those who were not able to appreciate his refinements, it resolved itself into a species of socialism which was immediately seen to be subversive of the very existence of society. Marsiglio of Padua on the contrary is almost entirely free from the trammels of tradition. Except when he urges the necessity of a return to evangelical poverty, and when he enlarges on the points at issue between the emperor Lewis and John the Twenty-Second, we are hardly recalled to the age in which he lived. But for these reminders we should be almost disposed to think his book a production of one of the most enlightened of the publicists, or of the advocates of civil and religious liberty, of the seventeenth century.

Yet if Marsiglio learned much from Ockham in the years when they worked together at Paris, the principles which he then adopted, he elaborated with far greater independence than his friend. Ockham remains through all his writings first and foremost a scholastic theologian; Marsiglio ventures freely into the open field of political philosophy. Nor on the other hand can it be questioned that Ockham in his turn fell strongly under the influence of the Italian speculator. All his known works on ecclesiastical politics were produced at a time posterior to the publication of the Defensor Pacis. The latter was written while Marsiglio was still at Paris; it was in all probability the thoughts brought into train by its composition that decided him to throw in his lot with the Bavarian emperor. Ockham's writings on the contrary are the effect of his association in active resistance to the pope; they are the defence and justification of his action. Thus though Marsiglio ran far ahead of him, though he shews us so marked an advance upon any previous theory of the relation of church and state, Ockham's books are the later in point of time. In fact, while the former quite overleaps the confines of the middle ages, Ockham preserves the orderly sequence and continuity of medieval thought: and more than this, while Marsiglio in the daring of his speculation stands absolutely alone and without a successor, Ockham, in virtue of his greater conformity to the spirit of his day, not to speak of his eminence as a philosopher, unequalled among contemporaries and hardly surpassed by Thomas Aquinas or John Duns Scotus, handed down a light which was never suffered to be extinguished, and which served as a beacon to pioneers of reform like Wycliffe and Huss. In politics, as well as in some points of doctrine, Ockham may be claimed as a precursor of the German reformers of the sixteenth century; but Marsiglio exercised little direct influence on the movement of thought.^[22] The truths which he brought into view had to be rediscovered, without even the knowledge that he had found them out beforehand, by the political philosophers of modern times.

Ockham indeed, with a philosophy that directly tended towards rationalism, was by far the more practical speculator than his swifter and bolder fellow-worker. He was more sensible of the difficulty, of the almost hope less intricacy, of the problems that called for solution.^[23] As strenuous as any man in contesting the 'plenitude of power' arrogated for the papacy, he was unwilling to transfer it to any other individual or to any body of human beings. The pope was no supreme autocrat; indeed the emperor was within certain limitations his natural judge. But if the pope was fallible, so also was a general council. Even such an assembly, of the most perfect composition, – strictly representative, according to Marsiglio's scheme, both of clergy and laity, both (this is his own addition) of men and women,^[24] – he would not entrust with the absolute, final decision in matters of faith. Any man, all men, may err; and Ockham is disposed in the last resort to find consolation in the scriptural paradox which speaks of the truth vouchsafed to little children. He is convinced that the faith must live, but cannot admit without qualification any of the suggested sureties for its maintenance. He is so embarrassed by the various alternatives that have been propounded, so persuaded of the elements of truth that each contains in different degrees, that he seems unable to form any fixed resolution on the whole subject. Revelation of course cannot but be infallible, but he is not sure, or at least he does not tell us his opinion, of the limits to which the name is to be restricted. All that we can conclude with certainty is that Ockham does not extend its authority to the Decretals or to any part of the special Roman tradition.

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to affirm any thing in detail about Ockham's views is that his principal works on the subject with which we are concerned are written in the form of a dialogue or of quaestiones.^[25] The method allows him to throw out the most startling suggestions, but at the same time saves him from the necessity of formulating his own express answer. We are in most cases left to guess it from a balance of more or less conflicting passages. Thus we are hardly even able to arrive at a clear view of his conception of the empire and the papacy, in themselves and in their mutual relations. He hints that in a certain state of society it might be better to have several popes and several sovereigns; and a although he recognises in some sort the claims of the theoretical universal empire, there is an air of unreality about his assertions which lets us see that he had not forgotten his English birth and French training. No human institution is absolute or final, and neither pope nor emperor can claim exemption from the general law of progress and adaptation. If however at the present time, Ockham argues, the prerogative of the empire reaches over the entire world in its temporal relations, this must inevitably exclude the pope from all but spiritual functions. Ockham has travelled by a different road to the same point as Marsiglio. Neither is really in love with the imperial idea: all that is of importance to them is to erect the state into an organic, consolidated force independent of, and in its own province superior to, that of the spiritualty; and this done, they circumscribe even the spiritual part of the papal authority by making it in all respects subject to the general voice of Christendom. The pope remains the exponent of the church, but appeal is always open to the church, to the whole society, itself. The only difference in the results of the two theorists is that Marsiglio is confident, while Ockham hesitates, about the unerring sagacity of this final arbiter.

But there is, as we have said, a fundamental distinction between the way in which they approach their subject. Marsiglio proceeds from purely philosophical reasoning; theology he proves that he knew well, but he is not primarily a theologian. He is in orders, but he is neither monk nor friar. Ockham on the other hand starts from the point of view of a theologian and of a Franciscan. Now it is well known that the fact which of late years had roused the great body of the Franciscans to opposition to John the Twenty-Second, was the latter's condemnation of their newly proclaimed doctrine of the necessity of evangelical poverty. From that day John became in their eyes a heretic; and although most of them had yielded to the papal threats in 1322-1324, yet the general of their order, Michael of Cesena, and a number of others, passed over to swell the ranks which supported Lewis the Bavarian. Among these was Ockham. It was thus a purely theological dispute, almost a mere matter of partisanship, from which he advanced to combat the general assumptions of the papacy. Once grant the doctrine that the clergy are bound to hold no property, and the whole territorial fabric of the Roman church falls to the ground. From this it is but a step, if it is not essentially involved in the same principle, to refuse to the clergy any temporal jurisdiction or in fact any temporal position whatsoever. With Marsiglio on the contrary the doctrine of evangelical poverty is the consequence, lot the premise, of his argument; it flows inevitably from the larger doctrine of the spiritual character of the clergy. Which of the two speculators had the stronger influence upon posterity has been variously estimated; but both in different ways left an unbroken line of successors until the enduring elements in their aims found a partial realisation the religious revolution of the sixteenth century.

References

1. In collecting materials for the present chapter I have derived very great assistance from the able work of Dr. Riezler on Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers. I may notice that what I refer to as the second volume of Goldast's Monarchias, Romani Imperii, 1614, appears as the third volume in the reïssue of that work, in which only the title-page and table of contents are new, dated 1621.
2. See Natalis de Wailly, Mémoire sur un Opuscule anonyme intitulé Summaria brevis et compendiosa Doctrina felicis Expeditionis et Abbreviationis Guerrarum ac Litium Regni Francorum, in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-lettres 18 (2) 435-494; 1849. M. de Wailly is able to fix the date minutely, pp. 471-476, and discourses with much acuteness and ingenuity about the author and his other works, pp. 481-493. [See also M. C. V. Langlois' introduction to du Bois' tract De recuperatione terre sancte, 1891.]
3. The former, our author specifies, on the supposition that it is true, as is reported, that the king possesses, or ought to possess, the right of transmitting his kingdom to his heirs, p. 445.
4. Compare the earlier instance of Robert Grosseteste in G. Lechler, Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation 1. 192-200; 1873.
5. This treatise is printed by Pierre Dupuy in the collection of Acts et Preuves appended to the Histoire du Différend d'entre le Pape Boniface VIII et Philippes le bel, Roy de France, pp. 663-683, 1655 folio.
6. Dr. Riezler speaks of 'Frankreich und England,' as though the author had abandoned his previous notion (see above, p. 226) of the English vassalage. The difference indeed might lead one to conjecture that the hypothesis of the common authorship of this work and of the Summaria brevis just now described, was not so well grounded as we have affirmed. But the truth is that, instead of ranking England in the same class with France, du Bois expressly distinguishes its position: 'Aliquae causae sunt in imperatore quare subditus sit papae in temporalibus, quae non inveniuntur in aliquibus regibus, sicut in regibus Franciae et Hispaniae, et fuit etiam aliquando in rege Angliae, videlicet, usque ad tempus regis Ioannis, qui dicebatur Sine terra,' &c.: p. 681.
7. The same statement occurs in the Supplication du peuple de France au roy contre le pape Boniface le VIII, Dupuy 216,–also nearly certainly the work of du Bois.
8. According to one calculation the pope was thus 7744½ times greater than the emperor; another made the ratio as low as 47:1. See Friedberg l. 6 n. 4.
9. So the name is given in a document of 1328, the Examen iudiciale Francisci Veneti asseclae Marsilii de Padua, Baluze, Miscell. 2. 280 a, ed. Mansi. Dr. Friedberg, pt. 2. 21, writes Maynardina. Albertino Mussato calls the author Marsilius de Raymundinis: see Riezler 30. But this seems to be an error.
10. Dr. Riezler, p. 33, is probably right in rejecting the story that Marsiglio studied in the interval at Orleans. But if exception be taken to his interpretation of the passage in the Defensor pacis ii. 18, Goldast 2. 252 sq., which has given rise to this supposition, it may be suggested that the passage is due to John of Jandun, who is expressly named as joint-author of the work. A few insertions of this kind would better satisfy the description than either Dr. Riezler's view, p. 195 n. 2, that John made a French version of the book, or Dr. Friedberg's suggestion, pt. 2. 25 n. 2, that he undertook merely its transcription.
11. [See however Mr. James Sullivan's arguments to the contrary, in the American Historical Review, 2. 413 sqq., 1897.]
12. Marsiglio may also have learned from John of Paris, whose death however is presumed to have taken place as early as 1306, Riezler 149. Dr. Friedberg, pt. 1. 18, in dating it in 1304 has apparently confounded John's deprivation with his death, which occurred later while he was at Rome prosecuting an appeal against that sentence. See the continuators of William of Nangy and Gerard de Frachet, Bouquet 20. 592 C, 21. 25 H. On the other hand, according to the Memoriale historiarum of John of Saint Victor, ibid., vol. 21. 645 E, F, John's deprivation seems to have been decreed in 1305.
13. The date, which is given by Dr. Riezler, p. 196, as between the summer of 1324 and the autumn of 1326, is fixed precisely to 24th June, 1324 by the lines in the Vienna manuscript, 464 f. 117 A, which I have verified:
    Anno trecenteno milleno quarto vigeno
    Defensor est iste perfectus festo baptiste
    Tibi laus et gloria Christe.
    
14. See the narrative in Riezler, pp. 42-94.
15. It is noticeable that in another connexion Marsiglio recurs to the old ecclesiastical notion, which was abandoned as we have seen, above, p. 214, even by Thomas Aquinas, that civil institutions are a consequence of the fall of man. Adam, Marsiglio says, was created in a state of innocence or original righteousness, 'in quo siquidem permansisset, nec sibi nec suae posteritati necessaria fuisset officiorum civilium institutio vel distinctio; eo quod opportuna quaeque ac voluptuosa sufficientiae huius vitae in paradiso terrestri seu voluptatis natura produxisset eidem, absque ipsius poena vel fatigatione quacunque:' cap. 6 p. 161, misprinted 171. On account of the frequent errors in the numeration of pages in Goldast's edition I have sometimes found it less confusing to refer simply to the chapters of the works cited without further specification.
16. Nos autem dicamus secundum veritatem atque consilium Aristotelis, 3 politicae, ca. 6, legis latorem, seu causam legis effectivam primam et propriam, esse populum, seu civium universitatem aut eius valentiorem partem, per suam electionem seu voluntatem in generali civium congregatione per sermonem expressam, praecipientem seu determinantem aliquid fieri seu omitti circa civiles actus humanos sub poena vel supplicio temporali: valentiorem, inquam, partem, considerata quantitate in communitate illa super quam lex fertur, sive id fecerit universitas praedicta civium aut eius pars valentior per se ipsam immediate, sive id alicui vel aliquibus commiserit faciendum ... Et dico consequenter huic quod eadem auctoritate prima non alia debent leges et aliud quodlibet per electionem institutum approbationem necessariam suscipere, &c.: Defensor pacis i. 12 pp. 169 sq.
17. We have, says Marsiglio, to explain the 'causam effectivam, instituentem et determinantem reliqua officiorum seu partium civitatis. Hanc autem primam dicimus legislatorem [the synonym with Marsiglio for 'civium universitas']; secundariam vero, quasi instrumentalem seu executivam, dicimus principantem, per autoritatem huius a legislatore sibi concessam, secundum formam sibi traditam ab eodem, legem videlicet, secundum quam semper agere ac disponere debet, quantum potest, actus civiles:' Lib. i. 15 pp. 175 sq.
18. Siquidem [principantis excessus] lege determinates, secundum legem corrigendus; si vero non, secundum legislatoris sententiam: et lege debet determinari quantum possibile fuerit: Cap. 18 p. 185.
19. I have translated the last two alternatives as they stand in Marsiglio's text, although they have rather the appearance of being saving clauses not very naturally connected with the argument. 'Its superior,' which Dr. Riezler, p. 211, renders by 'repräsentant,' would seem to be the emperor; 'exilium generale' in Goldast is a mere misprint for 'concilium.' The passage occurs in Goldast 2. 207 and belongs to the seventh chapter of book ii, which in the edition has been accidentally united with chapter 6.
20. Nemo quantumcunque peccans contra disciplinas speculativas aut operativas quascunque punitur vel arcetur in hoc seculo praecise in quantum huiusmodi, sed in quantum peccat contra praeceptum humanae legis: Cap. 10 p. 217.
21. Dr. Riezler makes the singular remark, p. 215 n. 1, 'Marsiglio übersieht hier dass Petrus nach Paulus nach Rom gekommen sein kann.' This is exactly the conclusion that Marsiglio inclines to adopt: 'Romae vero non contradico, sed verisimiliter teneo ipsum [Petrum] in hoc non praevenisse Paulum, sed potius e converso,' Cap. 16 p. 246.
22. [This statement requires to be modified. Mr. Sullivan, who underrates the influence of Ockham on later opinion, has shown, ubi supra, pp. 597-604, that there is a continuous strain of testimony to that of Marsiglio down to the period of the reformation and later.]
23. The text of Ockham's Dialogus, of which a fragment (wanting the last six tractatus of the third part) fills five hundred and sixty of Goldast's closely printed pages, I do not pretend to have read consecutively through. Dr. Riezler, pp. 258-271, has however selected a sufficient number of passages to illustrate Ockham's general position; and I have sometimes contented myself with verifying his citations in the original.
24. The principal points of difference between Marsiglio and Ockham in this respect appear to me to be two: first, what Marsiglio intended as a regular part of the constitution, the ordinary originator of legislation, Ockham thought of only as an instrument to be used in the last resort, in the case of the pope falling into heresy: the scheme of the one was political, that of the other was ecclesiastical. Secondly, unless Ockham was consciously committing himself to a paradox, he is distinguished from his colleague by the admission he makes of women to election to general councils, 'propter unitatem fidei virorum et mulierum, quae omnes tangit et in qua non masculus nec foemina... Et ideo ubi sapientia, bonitas, vel potentia mulierum esset tractatui fidei (de qua potissime est tractandum in concilio generali) necessaria, non est mulier a generali concilio excludenda:' p. 605. That Ockham was sensible of the ridicule with which the proposal would be received, appears plainly from the opening of the following chapter. For the rest, though it is possible that Marsiglio at an earlier time drew a good deal from Ockham; still the date of the Defensor Pacis furnishes a presumption of the former having the priority in his general conclusions.
25. It appears to me that the Dialogus was never written to form a single work. The second part admittedly stands by itself; and the third opens the whole subject of the first afresh, and compara- tively seldom assumes conclusions which one might think had already been (from the author's point of view) proved many times over in the first part. It is also, unlike its predecessors, subdivided into tractatus as well as into books and chapters. How lax the composition of the Dialogus is, we may learn from the title of Ockham's Opus nonaginta dierum, Goldast 2. 993, which speaks of it as belonging to the sixth tractatus of the third part of the former work. [Compare Mr. A. G. Little's Grey Friars in Oxford, pp. 229-232, Oxford 1892, and my article on Ockham in the Dictionary of National Biography, 41. 359 sq., 1895.]