| ### CHAPTER 2: ‘THE AVIGNON CAPTIVITY’, 1314-1362 ###  |

| #### 1. 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." [ ] #### 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. [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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." [ ] #### 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." [ ] #### 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 tobe 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, [ ] 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 [ ] 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) [ ] 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." [ ] 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." [ ] 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 [ ] then so fosters that, at the Council of Constance, an effort is actually made to give this abuse force of law. [ ] 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: [ ] 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. [ ] Once this mentality developed, a whole host of arguments, classic with the canonists for two centuries and more, would simply disappear overnight. [ ] 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. [ ] 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 [ ] and James of Viterbo [ ]; 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 [ ], 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 [ ] -- 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; [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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. [ ] 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. [ ] 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" [ ] -- 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." [ ] 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! [ ] #### 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. [ ] 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" [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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. [ ] Knowledge of the ancient languages then -- no one should rely on translations -- of mathematics [ ] 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 [ ] 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. [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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. [ ] 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. [ ] 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, [ ] born somewhere about 1285. [ ] 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. [ ] And, since 1922, we possess the report of the Avignon Commission appointed by the pope to enquire into his orthodoxy. [ ] 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, [ ] 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 [ ] 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," [ ] 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. [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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; [ ] 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. [ ] #### 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 [ ] 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." [ ] 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. [ ] 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. [ ] ####  |