| #### 2. THE TROUBLED TIMES OF JOHN XXII i. The Friars Minor |

| #### #### Twelve days after the death of Clement V, the twenty-three cardinals met to choose the new pope in the palace of the bishop at Carpentras, [ ] the temporary seat of the curia (May 1, 1314). To elect the pope sixteen votes were needed, according to the law of Alexander III, [ ] but the college was so divided that no party commanded this needed two-thirds of the whole: there was a Gascon party -- the friends, relatives and fellow-countrymen of the late pope -- ten in all; there was a "Provencal" party of six, that included two Normans; and there were seven Italians, by no means united but continuing in France the hereditary feuds of unhappy Italian memory. For twelve weeks these groups steadily maintained a deadlock, Italians and "Provencaux" supporting an admirable candidate, Cardinal Guillaume de Mandagout, the Gascons resolved to have none but a Gascon. Presently there were quarrels, riots next, and then, July 24, armed bands of free soldiers, under the command of the late pope's nephew, raided the town, massacring what Italians they found, clerics and bankers, and pillaging the goods of the Italian cardinals. A blockade of the conclave seemed likely, and the Italian cardinals, with the troops clamouring for their lives, fled from the city. For the Gascon party this was their chance to remove to Avignon, and thence to declare themselves the conclave and to announce that whoever they elected would be the lawful pope. But a timely manifesto from the Italians checked this manoeuvre; and then, for nearly two years, the two groups, refusing to meet, gave themselves to endless and sterile negotiations. #### It was the future Philip V of France who, in the end, induced them to come together, at Lyons in March 1316. He had sworn not to use any violence against them, and to leave them free to enter into conclave when they chose. But when, in June, his brother the King of France (Louis X) died, and Philip left Lyons for Paris, his lieutenants disregarded the sworn engagement, and forced the cardinals into conclave, telling them that locked up they should remain until they found a pope (June 28, 1316). For six weeks there was again a deadlock, until three Italians joined with some of the "Provencaux" and the whole Gascon party to elect the Cardinal-Bishop of Porto, Jacques Duese (August 7). He took the name John XXII. #### The choice was singular, for Jacques Duese, a man of conspicuous administrative ability, and long episcopal experience, of exceptional legal talent, and sternly upright character, was a frail old man of seventy-two. He was, however, destined to last out another eighteen years of vigorous life, after escaping in the first months of his pontificate an attempt to get rid of him by arsenic and witchcraft, in which two bishops and one of the Gascon cardinals had a share. Whenever the constitutional history of the Church comes to be written, John XXII will be one of its greatest figures, for he is one of the chief architects of that centralised administrative and legal system through which, for centuries now, the popes have exercised their divinely instituted primacy. But " incomparable administrator " as he was, John XXII was no less a vigorous ruler, dealing as strongly as subtly with the host of problems that awaited him; and he was, above all else, a most militant defender of the traditional rights of the papacy. With this election the initiative in the affairs of Christendom passed once more to the pope, and to one of the strongest of all his long line. The first problem to which he set his hand was how to bring peace to the much troubled order of the Friars Minor. #### It has been told [ ] how as the companions of St. Francis grew, within a few years, to be numbered by the thousand, the simple informal "rule" that had served for the saint and his score of friends inevitably proved to be insufficient. If a movement that now extended half across Europe was to survive, and with it the special approach to the service of God that was the personal gift of St. Francis of Assisi, the ideal would need a carefully-devised protective code of legislation; and it has been told how the imposition of the new rule in 1223 left many sore hearts among those whose Franciscan life went back to the first early days. Such tragedies as these, when idealism has to face the cold air of reality and either develop a protective covering or die, are not infrequent in human history. Only an infinity of charity can, when they occur, save the ordinary idealist from ruin. #### But with the Franciscans there was one change especially which, from the moment it was made, caused very much dissatisfaction indeed among this little group of "primitives," for it seemed to them to affect the most characteristic of the new order's virtues, poverty. Religious poverty -- the renouncement of ownership, of the right to own property and the right to acquire it henceforward -- had been part and parcel of the monastic life from the beginning. From those first days in the deserts of Egypt, the religious who owned -- or who wanted to own -- anything had been regarded as highly unfaithful to the life to which he had consecrated himself. But when this first fashion, of solitary religious life in deserts, had given place to that of a common life lived in monasteries, although the individual monk -- whatever his rank -- continued to be a monk through religious poverty as well as through religious obedience, some proprietor there had to be for the monastic buildings, the lands which the monks worked, the woods, the farms and the like. That proprietor was the abbey or the order. #### It was the desire of St. Francis -- and the special characteristic of his religious ideal -- that not even the community of his brotherhood should own. The order as an order should profess, and practise, religious poverty. This was an ideal easily realised while the order was no more than a few groups of friars, making their way through the Umbrian countrysides that were their native home, preaching their simple exhortation to penance, begging the elements of sustenance at the first door to which they came, sleeping under hedges and in barns; beggar-men who were apostles, apostles who cheerfully lived the life of beggars. But as the numbers grew, the mission of the brotherhood expanded. Soon it had before it a much more complex work than this simple apostolate. And as a code of rules was called for, and courses of study, so too were stable centres where the brethren would live. There had to be buildings, no matter how simple, and land on which they were built. Who was to own all this? #### One important complication was the appearance, within the very lifetime of St. Francis, of Brother Elias, a friar with a genius for making the order "a going concern" and a "real success"; here was the practical man, who knew how to gather in the money, and how to spend it, and who rose indeed to the highest place in the order. His sad spiritual end strengthened the hands of the party called "the Spirituals" -- who wished for the impossible restoration of the order's first days. The Spirituals had much to say of the inevitable effect of deserting the first rule, and, no doubt truly, they could point to many friars, in these later days of elaborate organisation, who reminded men of nothing so little as St. Francis. But the zeal of the Spirituals did not stop here. They could see no good at all in any way but their own way, and they bitterly denounced, along with such friars who really were disgracefully unfaithful, the great mass of the order, the brethren who had settled down to live according to the popes' official interpretation of the mind of St. Francis. It is sad, but not surprising, to record that the poverty of these militant Spirituals was often only surpassed by their lack of charity in judging their fellows, and by their determined insubordination towards those very superiors to whom, for the love of God, they had vowed away their wills in religious obedience. #### The first great organiser, charged by the popes with finding a way out of this chaos, and so preserving the great ideal, was the seventh Minister-General, John of Fidanza, whom we know as St. Bonaventure (1221-1274). He served the order, humbly and patiently, as its head for seventeen years (1257-1274) and for his success in devising a way of life, faithful to the ideal of St. Francis, accessible to the man of average good will, and suited to the extended mission of the order, he has merited to be called its second founder. [ ] The solution which his long experience devised is set out -- often in St. Bonaventure's own words -- in the decretal bull published five years after the saint's death by Nicholas III. [ ] #### The problem how an order was to continue to exist that had no right to own, and of how religious pledged to so rigorous a view of poverty were to be faithful to it, and yet be able to accept from the faithful all that was needed to keep the community alive, the decretal solved by the device that the Holy See became the owner of whatever was given to the Friars Minor. In all their use of whatever was given for their use, the Franciscans were not their own masters; they were dependent on the good will of the Holy See. Nor need this have been the mere legal fiction which it has, very superficially, been made to seem. A truly conscientious man uses in a very different spirit and way the things that are his own and those which he has borrowed. The friars were still forbidden even to handle what St. Francis -- the wealthy merchant's son -- held in peculiar abhorrence, money. Not even through a third person, was any friar to use money for his own profit. But he was not bound to refuse, of what was given him, all beyond what sufficed for his own immediate personal necessity. It was lawful, for example, for the monastery to lay in a store of food. But always, and in all things, the friar was supposed, and commanded, to make such a use of this power of using as would accord with the high ideal of St. Francis. Martin IV, in 1283, added a practical detail to this system by appointing an official (called syndic) to act for the Holy See as a protector of the temporalities in every town where there was a Franciscan house. #### These were the years when the war of the Sicilian Vespers was bringing upon the Holy See the succession of disasters already described, and it has been noted how a revival of Joachimite fantasies now developed and how, as in an earlier generation, the Franciscan Spirituals were again prominent in that revival. [ ] The system set up by the decretal of Nicholas III was, in Italy and in southern France, rudely shaken before it could well settle. Next came the advent of the hermit pope, Celestine V, in whom the Spirituals saw, not only a holy man who had led their own kind of life for sixty years and more, but the papa angelicus foretold by Joachim, as they were the new religious order which the prophet had seen. One of the few personal actions of this hermit pope's short pontificate was the permission granted to the Italian Spirituals to form themselves into a new order, on the model of Celestine's own institution, a kind of Benedictine foundation, and with the Celestinian rule. This solution Boniface VIII had revoked. Moreover, Celestine's scheme had left untouched the problem of the Spirituals outside the mountain lands of central Italy. And the stormy reigns of Boniface VIII and Clement V went by to the accompaniment of violent anti-papal agitation from this turbulent Franciscan minority. #### The division in the order was by this time (1311) one of the papacy's chronic troubles, a perpetual menace to the general peace, and, given the vast expansion of the order, a potential threat to the general unity of the Church. [ ] And side by side with this fresh trouble within the order, there was a steadily developing trouble from without, the complaints -- true or false -- from every part of Christendom about the friars' abuse of their privilege of exemption from the authority of the local bishop and the parochial system. Hence Clement V, once the meeting of the General Council of Vienne was decided, appointed a commission to review the whole Franciscan problem. Its findings could be studied at the council and a lasting decision then be taken. #### But that decision -- given in Clement's bull Exivi de Paradiso [ ] -- was so even and so nuanced that both Spirituals and Conventuals -- so their opponents were coming to be called (the common party, the party of the conventus) claimed a victory. The trouble was thus barely appeased and when, after Clement's death two years later, the Holy See remained vacant for two and a quarter years, it had ample time to break out in all its old fury. In more than one city of Tuscany and Provence feeling ran so high that the Spirituals, throwing off their obedience, drove out the Conventuals after riots and fighting. To add to the trouble the Minister-General now died, and by the time the long vacancy of the Holy See was ended these provinces of the order were in a state of anarchy. To reduce that anarchy was one of the first of the tasks to which the new pope, John XXII, set his hand. #### The new pope was a professional legist, a trained and experienced administrator. His sense of order, his well-earned name as a strong and capable administrator, his acute legal mind can have left no one doubting how he would solve the problem. But long before John XXII had finished with the troubles of the Friars Minor, even his tenacity and native toughness must have felt the strain. In a bull [ ] of 1317 he excommunicated and summoned to an unconditional surrender, the rebellious Spirituals from Tuscany who had now made Sicily their headquarters, and he gave characteristically strong support to the new Minister-General, Michael of Cesena, [ ] who offered the same terms to the insubordinate friars of Provence. After a hearing in his own presence, where both parties were represented, the pope ordered the Spirituals, under pain of excommunication, to abandon their claim to wear a different kind of habit, and to accept it as good Franciscan doctrine that it was lawful for the convent to take the normal measures to secure that there was food enough for the brethren. #### But the sequel had its tragic side. All but twenty-five of the Spirituals gave in; these twenty-five were handed to the Inquisition. They were not only disobedient in a grave matter, defying even excommunication, but, it was ruled, heretics also, for they had expressly declared that the ground on which they refused obedience was that the pope had no authority to alter the rule of the order. Of the commission of theologians responsible for this example of "constructive heresy," the Minister-General was one. The "heretics" were condemned to the stake, and four of them who held out to the end were actually burnt at Marseilles (May 1318). Thereupon an uneasy peace settled upon the friaries of Provence. #### Four years later the affairs of the Friars Minor again troubled the pope. It was not now the small band of Spirituals whom he had to bring to heel, but the whole order; and this in a matter of such importance that, by the time the dispute was over, John XXII had made the order into a different kind of thing. #### In the bull [ ] which marked the final defeat of the Spirituals the pope had warned them that great as is the virtue of poverty, it is not the greatest of virtues. The new dispute turned precisely on this point, namely the theoretical or doctrinal point of the exact value of religious poverty as the Friars Minor conceived this. A Franciscan had been denounced to the Inquisition in Provence for stating in a sermon that, like the Franciscans, Our Lord and the Apostles had neither owned anything as individuals nor as a body. Among the judges was another Franciscan, and he declared that so far from this being heresy, it was the Church's own teaching. This was towards the end of 1321, and within a few months the dispute was occupying the whole attention of the papal court. From the beginning the Franciscans made much of the fact that in the decretal which was the Magna Carta of the order's ideals, Exiit qui Seminat, [ ] Nicholas III had not only declared that the friars in giving up all things were showing themselves true followers of Our Lord, but had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, any further reopening of this question. John XXII now suspended this prohibition, and soon a tremendous theological tourney was in full swing. #### The Franciscans argued for the consecration as Catholic doctrine of the theory that their own way of life was exactly that of Our Lord and the Apostles; that Our Lord was, as one of them actually said, a Franciscan in all but the habit. The other orders, resentful of the suggestion that the Franciscan way was a more perfect following of Our Lord than any other, joined with the secular clergy to oppose them. The air was filled with the extravagances of the rival parties, and all the charges ever made against the Friars Minor were now vindictively renewed. Then, while the question was still sub iudice, the General Chapter of the order, meeting at Perugia, declared, in a public manifesto, that it had been for many years part of the Catholic faith that Our Lord had lived in the utter poverty of St. Francis, and they appealed to the pope to support them and to renew the law, and the prohibition, of his predecessor Nicholas III. #### The rash public action of the General Chapter raised a second question that went beyond the simple question of fact (i.e. whether Our Lord had indeed lived in this way), the question namely whether it had ever been declared that all Catholics must believe this as a part of their faith. #### The pope proceeded, in orderly fashion, to answer both questions, in two decisions given 8 December, 1322, [ ] and 12 November, 1323. [ ] #### The first decision does not touch the question of doctrine at all. It is a practical ruling as to how the ideal of poverty must be carried out by the Friars Minor, and it is an argued reply to the contentions of their agent at Avignon, Bonagratia of Bergamo. This friar, a highly-skilled theologian and lawyer, had examined the question, What is ownership? from all points of view, seeking to show that no matter what theory of it one adopted, the Franciscan contention was right. The pope followed him point by point in careful refutation; [ ] and, developing the point he had made against the Spirituals six years earlier, he laid it down that religious poverty does not of itself constitute perfection, using here that teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, on charity as the essence of perfection, which had preserved the other great medieval order from disputes of this sort. The pope noted -- a good fighting jab that Bonagratia had not looked for -- the singular fact that the Franciscan order, so anxious to bear this distinction of a peculiarly absolute poverty, was, as a matter of fact, more anxious to acquire property than any of the other orders. The plan of Nicholas III, that made the friars users only and the Holy See the owner, had worked out badly. It was to be abolished and henceforth the Franciscan order would be, as an order, on a footing similar to the others. [ ] All the subtle argumentation by which Bonagratia had endeavoured to show that the friars did not only not own even the food they put to their lips -- an ownership which would have sufficed to disprove the absoluteness of poverty they claimed -- but could so use (and thereby destroy) it without having that right to destroy which is a mark of ownership, the equally argumentative pope routed with ease. Henceforth the Franciscans must be content to be poor, [ ] in the same way that the other orders were poor, however much they might continue to make poverty their speciality. #### The chiefs of the order did not take this decree calmly. Bonagratia replied to the pope with a violence and contempt that earned him imprisonment. He no doubt saw that the revolution now commanded in the practical way Franciscan poverty was lived, foreshadowed a judgment no less drastic on the doctrinal question. #### This matter seems to have been most carefully considered during the ensuing months, and all parties were heard. Then came the decision, [ ] 12 November, 1323. To declare that Our Lord and the Apostles were not owners (i.e. had not a right to use the things they used, a right to sell them, to give them away, to use them in order to acquire other things) is heresy. #### The order, before this solemn and serious adverse judgment, was silent and submissive; but a few months later the condemned ideals found an unlooked-for champion in the emperor, Lewis of Bavaria. He had, for a long time now, been openly at war with the pope, and recently -- 23 March, 1321 had been excommunicated. And he found it a useful thing, in the new defiance that was his reply to the pope, to cry out to all Europe that John XXII was a heretic, whose wickedness spared not Christ nor His mother nor the saints. Seven popes, said the emperor, have approved the rule of St. Francis, and Christ by the stigmata of the saint has sealed it with His own seal. And now this enemy of God, and so forth. #### But still the order as a whole did not move against the pope: it remained obedient and loyal. The pope, however, replying to the emperor, undertook [ ] to reconcile his direction for the Franciscan way of life with that of Nicholas III, and thence sprang a new controversy, for here the pope was dealing with something less privileged than dogmas and heresies. At the General Chapter of 1325 [ ] Michael of Cesena had to remind the brethren not to speak disrespectfully of the pope. And then Michael himself fell. #### The pope had summoned him to Avignon. There were rumours (August 28, 1327) [ ] that he had come to an understanding with the emperor, and that he was to be the expected imperial anti-pope. Michael arrived at Avignon in December of that year, and spent some months making certain changes in the administrative staff of the order at the pope's command. Then, on April 9, 1328, there was a tremendous scene in open consistory when the pope's anger at the Minister-General’s dissimulation broke all bounds and overwhelmed him, John blaming him for the declaration at Perugia in 1323 that had been the source of so much trouble. Michael did not deny his responsibility and now, so he tells us, resisted Peter to his face. He was placed under open arrest, and a few weeks later, with Friar Bonagratia, he escaped from Avignon. Outside the city a guard was waiting, sent by the emperor for their protection, and at Aigues Mortes there was a ship to take them to Lewis at Pisa. #### At Avignon Michael had found one of his subjects who was also in difficulties with the pope. This was Ockham, so far indifferent to these public questions that were rending his order. But Michael now showed him how John XXII was a heretic, contradicting the "faith" as Nicholas III had taught it. And when the General fled to Pisa, William of Ockham accompanied him. It is at this moment that the Englishman passes into the history of European politics, and its literature; and the Franciscan problem ceases to be a major problem troubling the harmony of Catholic life. A few faithful followers went out with Michael into the wilderness, as the remnants of the Spirituals had already done, to form yet another element in that underworld of religious rebels which everywhere seethed below the surface of medieval life, devoted, narrow, fanatical, apocalyptic, and ineffective as all tiny groups must be which are wholly cut off from the life of their time. ii. The Last War with the Empire, 1314-1356 #### At the moment when the Franciscan chiefs, and their English brother with them, threw in their lot with Lewis of Bavaria, the emperor's fortunes in his war with Pope John XXII were mounting to their highest point. #### It was now nearly four years since Lewis had first defied the pope; in all that time -- the same years that saw John XXII's troubles with the order of the Friars Minor -- the war had never slackened. From the emperor's point of view it was a war of independence; to the pope it was a crusade. The question that divided them was the old, old question yet once again, what rights had the pope, as pope, over the empire. Although the protagonists did not know it, this was to be the last of these great conflicts. Lewis was indeed to end broken and defeated, like many an emperor before him, but the cause he defended was, this time, to win through, and in less than ten years from his death be tacitly given droit de cite by the papacy. #### The wisdom of John XXII's successor -- Innocent VI -- tacitly granting that right when he ignored a new "provocation" by the successor of Lewis in 1356, no doubt neutralised much of the mischief to religion which such struggles as these inevitably caused. But, like that earlier fight, between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, this contest too had its literary side; and the two chief writers who supported Lewis, Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham, were not only publicists but, as political thinkers, adversaries of far greater weight, and more permanently dangerous, than any the popes had yet had to face. Against them the popes might publish condemnations and sentences of excommunication, but, on the Catholic side, there was no thinker equal to them. Their anti-papal, anti-clerical, anti-religious writings survived the condemnations, to be studied more and more, in university circles, slowly infecting Catholic life everywhere, to become indeed the first great literary source and reasoned justification of that "laicism" which the modern popes never cease to denounce as the deadliest foe of religion. In these centuries between St. Thomas and Luther there is no more powerful agent of disintegration than the work of Marsiglio and Ockham. #### To understand something of the German situation as the newly-elected John XXII faced it, [ ] the history of papal- imperial relations during the previous eight years must be recalled, the results of the election as emperor, in 1308, of the Count of Luxembourg, Henry VII. #### His short reign (1308-1313) was almost wholly taken up with an active military intervention in the complicated politics of Italy. The then pope -- Clement V -- suspicious of imperial schemes that would give new life to the anti-papal party in every Italian state and city, sought an ally in his vassal the King of Naples -- Robert the Wise. Henry strove to form a league against Naples, incurred excommunication by the attack he made, and then, as he marched south from Siena, he was suddenly carried off by fever (August 24, 1313). #### Clement V understood to the full the opportunity that had now fallen to him. The late emperor had ignored his formal commands about Naples, and had disregarded the conditions set by the pope for his coronation at Rome. The pope now announced that, during the vacancy, the Holy See would administer the empire. He explained that the oaths sworn by Henry VII (at his coronation) were real oaths of fidelity to a suzerain, [ ] and acting as suzerain he quashed [ ] the sentence of deposition passed by Henry (April 26, 1313) on Robert of Naples. The terms of this papal declaration are all one might expect from a pope so versed in the traditions of the canon law: it is "In virtue of the undoubted supremacy which the Holy See enjoys over the empire, of the right which the head of the Church possesses to administer the empire when there is no emperor, and by that plenitude of jurisdiction which the successor of St. Peter has received from Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords" that he annuls the emperor's sentence. #### Clement V soon followed the emperor out of this world (April 20, 1314) and it was not until six months after the pope's death, and while the Holy See was still vacant, that the German princes met to elect Henry VII's successor. They made a double election: five of them voting for Lewis, the Duke of Bavaria, and two for Frederick of Habsburg (October 19, 1314). Each was acknowledged as emperor by his own partisans and both were crowned, and on the same day, though in different cities. As the cardinals continued to keep the Holy See vacant for the best part of another two years, the situation in Germany had time to harden. By the time John XXII was elected (August 7, 1316), a miniature civil war was in progress, and the Italian princes (the papal or Guelf part of them) were suggesting that here was the pope's opportunity to end the noxious institution which the empire continued to prove itself, to Italy, to France, and to the Church. #### But John XXII refused to be drawn into this plan. He was inclined to a policy that would protect the independence of religion by balancing the forces of the contending princes; the central point of the policy was the idea that there should be no prince in Italy so powerful that he dominated the whole peninsula. So of the rivals in Germany he supported neither, calling on both to submit their claims to a peaceful arbitration. Then, in 1317, he announced that he considered the empire as vacant; and acting as its administrator, he appointed Robert of Naples imperial vicar in Italy. #### For the next five years there was no change in the situation, until, at the battle of Muhldorf (September 28, 1322), Lewis overwhelmed his rival, and took him prisoner. Then the pope, after an interval of some months, in which Lewis asked for recognition, stated his terms, in the spirit of Clement V's intervention in 1313. Lewis refused to ask the empire as a gift from the pope and thereupon the new war began. #### It may be asked how far this new war was necessary, a war -- as it proved -- singularly disastrous for religion. Had John XXII not been the fiery-tempered old man he was; had he shown the awareness of, say, Innocent VI, that a new world had come into being since the fall of the Hohenstaufen, a world in which the empire was so little more than a shadow dignity that it was folly to fight a war about one's rights over it, and still more mischievous to link up the cause of religion with those rights; had the pope been something younger than a man of eighty, could this catastrophe not have been averted? John XXII's temperament cannot, it is true, be discharged of much heavy responsibility for many of the troubles of his reign and their long-lasting consequences. #### But, it must also be considered, Lewis of Bavaria was, at this moment, and had been for a considerable time, a most helpful ally to those Ghibelline foes in Italy with whom, for the last five years, the pope had been at war; a war intended to make Italy really safe for the papacy by destroying the Ghibelline power wherever found. [ ] The pope, in the spring before Muhldorf was fought, had called in, against the anti-papal party in Italy, the aid of Lewis's rival. Now that Lewis was victorious in Germany there was every reason to believe he would pass into Italy as the Ghibelline leader. That he brushed aside the condition by which the pope designed to protect the papal interests against him, confirmed this suspicion. In April 1323 Lewis's envoys in Italy demanded the withdrawal of the papal armies from before Milan; in May they won over to Lewis, Mantua and Verona, at the very hour these were making their submission to the pope. In July Lewis sent a force to assist the Ghibellines of Milan, a small force it is true, but sufficient to relieve the city. The whole situation in northern Italy, lately so favourable to the pope, was in six months, and by the emperor's action, wholly reversed. #### These are the very months, it will be remembered, in which the pope has remodelled the order of Friars Minor; [ ] he is about to destroy a cherished Franciscan opinion about the peculiar relation of their order to Our Lord; [ ] and Lewis, in the Declaration of Sachsenhausen (May 22, 1324), will denounce the pope as a heretic for these actions, and take the order under his protection in the hope that throughout Germany, and especially throughout Italy, he will now be possessed of a whole army of enthusiastic propagandists. #### On October 8 of that same year, 1323, then, the pope warned Lewis to cease to act as emperor within three months, or excommunication would follow. Lewis, playing for time, secured a delay of another two months; but finally the blow fell (March 23, 1324); just eighteen months after the victory of Muhldorf had made him master, in name, of the German world. #### The next event in the war belongs to the history of political science; it was the appearance on June 24, 1324, of Marsiglio of Padua's great book The Defender of Peace. [ ] The empire, it was here argued, was something wholly independent of the Holy See; the prerogatives invoked by a succession of popes were mere usurpation. There was much other revolutionary doctrine in the work, as will be seen, and presently its authors [ ] fled from what awaited them in Paris to the court of the emperor. #### Lewis, on July 11, was once more excommunicated and deprived now of all right ever to be elected emperor. Against him the Habsburg party in Germany now combined with the King of France (Charles IV, 1322-1328) to elect, with the favourable support of the pope, a more suitable kind of emperor. But Lewis countered this by freeing his old rival Frederick of Austria, also a Habsburg, and coming to an arrangement by which Frederick should rule in Germany while Lewis would remain emperor and be master of Italy. And now Lewis, with the aid of Marsiglio's advice, began to prepare for the Italian expedition. #### The great affair opened with a kind of congress at Trent (January-March 1327), where the purpose of the expedition was announced, a war for religion against "the priest John" who is a heretic; it was a procedure very reminiscent of Philip the Fair's national assemblies against Boniface VIII. [ ] In March Lewis marched out of Trent. He was crowned King of Lombardy at Milan (March 31) and then slowly made his way from one city of northern Italy to another. The misfortunes of Henry VII, and the military mistakes that had caused them, were carefully avoided. By October Lewis had gained Pisa and in the first week of the new year (January 7, 1328) he was at Rome and in possession of St. Peter's, where enthusiastic services of thanksgiving marked this first fruits of triumph. #### And now began a series of highly-spectacular happenings. The emperor, reconciled by their apparent usefulness to the most revolutionary of all Marsiglio's political theories, and as though he had never opposed to the papal claims his own theory that he was emperor by God's direct institution, now consented to appear before the world as the elect of the populus romanus. On January 11, 1328, at a great assembly, "the People" voted him the imperial crown; and, moreover, chose four proctors to invest him with it. Six days later Lewis was anointed as emperor, with the usual ritual, by two bishops, and then crowned by one of the proctors: this proctor was no less a personage than Sciarra Colonna, the assailant of Boniface VIII at Anagni a quarter of a century before. #### John XXII had not, of course, looked on idly at the invasion of Italy. While the crown of Lombardy was still a fresh joy to Lewis the pope declared him deprived of his hereditary states, [ ] and about the time that Lewis entered Pisa the pope condemned him as a heretic for his patronage of the Franciscan Spirituals and also of Marsiglio. [ ] In that same bull the Defensor Pacis was also condemned. Then, in January 1328, the month of Lewis's new "election" as emperor, the pope had declared the war against him to be a crusade, and had ordered it to be preached everywhere as such; and in Germany, brushing aside the Habsburg claim because the party would not submit it to his judgment, the pope, acting as the vacant empire's overlord, had summoned the electors to a new election. They obeyed, and met: but were not able to come to any agreement. #### To all this papal activity Lewis replied by allowing Marsiglio to persecute those who, in Rome, dared to stand by the pope. But as the weeks went by, shows still more bizarre were prepared. Three times within a month, "the People" were summoned to exercise, in full assembly, their sovereign rights. On April 14 they solemnly presented John XXII for the emperor's judgment, accusing the pope of heresy; four days later, at another assembly, Lewis, crowned and bearing the imperial insignia, delivered sentence on the pope for his "heretical" declaration about the nature of Our Lord's poverty, and for the treason of his attack on the emperor; the sentence was, of course, deposition. Then on May 12, Ascension Day, a new pope was presented for "the People's" approval. He was, of course, a Friar Minor, Brother Peter of Corvara. The assembly approved him with acclamations, three times in all, and Lewis thereupon invested him with the fisherman's ring. On Whit Sunday following Peter was consecrated and crowned in St. Peter's as Nicholas V. [ ] There is about all this that note of naive comedy which never, somehow, fails to be absent from solemn anti-clerical incursions into the realms of liturgy and ecclesiastical ceremonial. #### It was just six days after Peter's coronation that the Minister-General of the Friars Minor made his escape from Avignon, bringing out with him, for the emperor's service, that still greater power -- as yet unsuspected -- William of Ockham. #### At this very moment of triumph, however, Lewis of Bavaria's good fortune left him, never to return. He was to live for another nineteen years, in all that time to claim to be emperor, and to attempt to enforce his claims by what arms he could gather, and by diplomacy with a succession of popes. But never again was he to achieve a victory of any kind, and only the failure of his many enemies to combine saved him, as he drifted helplessly through these years. Only three months after the grandiose installation of "Nicholas V" the emperor was forced out of Rome; his army shrank to little more than a bodyguard; every city in Italy closed its gates against him; by the close of 1329 Lewis was once more in Germany. #### The anti-pope, of course, fared no better than his master. Never had he exercised any power except in those rare districts of Italy where Lewis could command obedience, and nine months after his coronation "Nicholas V" issued his last bull (March 4, 1329). He had left Rome with the emperor, hissed and booed by the most treacherous populace of all the Middle Ages, and thereafter, for some time, he had followed in the imperial suite. But to Lewis he was not worth the trouble of transporting into Germany and, left behind, he disappeared from sight, until John XXII's agents discovered him. A public confession of his follies might be serviceable to the papal cause, and a generous pardon was offered to induce him to submit. So, clad in his friar's habit, with a halter round his neck, Brother Peter at last made his ceremonial submission to the pope (Avignon, July 25, 1330), to disappear thereafter from history. [ ] #### For the short remnant of John XXII's long reign, it was the policy of Lewis to seek reconciliation. But John was inflexible in his demand for an unconditional surrender: whatever happened Lewis was never to be acknowledged as emperor, a new election should choose in his stead someone more suitable. In 1333 [ ] all the parties came to a complicated agreement, one part of which was the emperor's resignation. But this plan, so it seemed to the King of Naples, would make France too powerful in Italy, and he combined with the schismatic Franciscans at the Bavarian court to persuade Lewis to withdraw his assent. [ ] #### Five months later John XXII died. [ ] From the new pope, Benedict XII -- a theologian where John had been a canonist, a man of peace where John had been a fighter, conciliatory and not intransigent -- Lewis had, seeming] y, much to hope. The seven and a half years of Benedict's short reign were filled with negotiations between the two. Benedict never repelled the emperor, he was not over-exacting; Lewis continued to be his weak and vacillating self. But the negotiations never came to anything. Always the King of France, unwilling to see pope and emperor reconciled, managed to influence the pope and to delay the settlement that ever seemed so near. Benedict XII knew well what the French were at, though he seems not to have known how to defeat their diplomatic finesse: he had none of the political gifts. Edward III of England was, in these years, preparing to open the long Hundred Years' War with France, and looking for allies on the Continent. Benedict foresaw what would happen. " The Germans," he said, " will understand, in the end, where the real cause of all these delays lies, and they will make common cause with the English." Which, of course, came to pass; [ ] and with the beginning of the war all communication between Lewis and Avignon ceased. #### But in the next few years two things happened in Germany that foreshadowed the new age, which, all unsuspected as yet, was surely approaching. All these wars between pope and emperor, that had gone on with so little interruption for now nearly two centuries, had necessarily had a most brutal effect upon the daily religious life of the unhappy peoples of Germany. Sooner or later, in all these wars, the emperor was excommunicated, and thereupon all who sided with him would share the terrible sentence which deprived a man of all right to receive sacraments and which cut him off from the divine life that enlivens the members of the mystical body of Christ. And, as often as not, there would follow upon this excommunication the sentence of interdict, local or general, which closed all the churches, often for years at a time., depriving the whole people of the mass and indeed of all sacraments but those for the newly born and the dying. [ ] #### Would the generality of mankind, understanding the policy behind the interdict, co-operate with the pope by accepting it in a spirit of religious humility, and, associating themselves with it penitentially, offer up these grave spiritual inconveniences in a kind of reparation, embracing the very interdict as an opportunity to deepen their own private spiritual life? Such expectations could only be nourished by those whose optimism could see in the average man and woman a soul obviously called to serve God in the high perfection of some strict religious order. The enforcement of the interdict meant in practice -- not necessarily, of course, but as things usually are -- a grave falling off in the liveliness of faith and in morality: while to disobey it entailed, of course, sacrilege each time the forbidden religious rite was performed. #### And to add to the chaos there was, very frequently indeed, what amounted to a kind of schism, the activity of the two factions, pro-pope and pro-emperor, which everywhere divided sees and parishes, monasteries and religious orders. While the scholar was hesitating (in another matter) between Thomas and Scotus and Ockham, the ordinary man -- if he really cared about religion -- was wondering which of the rival clergy he knew was telling the truth, or knew what the truth was. #### Here, in part, are some of the causes of that decline in religion which the contemporary preachers and mystics describe so luridly, and against which councils are forever legislating, and which has its reflection in the tales and poems of the new vernacular literatures, where -- very significantly -- it is not so much matter for reprobation, or shocked surprise, as it is unconsciously supplied as part of the natural background of the story's action. #### Germany, by the year 1338, had suffered nearly fifteen years of spiritual chaos, and the prelates and princes now besought Lewis to be reconciled with the pope, and petitioned the pope in the same sense. To this appeal the pope appears not to have made any reply; and in the July of that year, the prince-electors, meeting at Rense, made a joint declaration on oath that they would defend the rights and freedom of the imperial dignity, which they declared was not the creation of the pope but derived directly from God; the man whom they elected was, they asserted, emperor by the very fact; no papal confirmation or approval was in any way necessary for the lawfulness of his acts. They declared, moreover, that John XXII's various sentences of excommunication passed on Lewis were unjust, and they threatened the pope to his face that they would provide remedies of their own should the Holy See not withdraw these sentences. #### Was it the genius of Marsiglio of Padua that shaped such declarations? He certainly had a share in the next innovation, a very foolish intervention by the emperor in the discipline of the sacraments. For Lewis, in 1342, of his own imperial authority, declared null (on the ground of the man's impotence) the marriage between John of Bohemia and Margaret, the heiress of the Tyrol. He wanted Margaret (and the Tyrol) for his own son, another Lewis, and since these two were doubly related within the forbidden degrees, the emperor now issued dispensations from the impediment of consanguinity. And Marsiglio wrote a treatise to justify him. #### When the austere, but somewhat unpractical, Benedict XII died (April 25, 1342) the cardinals chose [ ] in his place the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, Pierre Roger, as near an approach to Aristotle's magnificent man as the order of St. Benedict has ever known. Clement VI -- so he chose to be called -- was a personage far too experienced in public life to waste any time over the debris of the emperor's hopes and chances. Lewis was bidden, somewhat in the manner of John XXII, to cease to style himself emperor; and his position in Germany, where his incompetence was now regarded as the main hindrance to peace, was by this time so desperate that he made a very humble submission to the pope and offered to abdicate (September 18, 1343). #### The pope's first inclination was to accept this surrender. But once again, while he debated, other influences prevailed, the combination of the emperor's many foes in France, in Italy and in Germany. Clement stiffened the terms of submission -- only to find that he had now roused all Germany against him. [ ] But it was not in favour of Lewis that the German princes moved, for a few days later they decided on the man whom they would like to see in his place, Charles of Moravia, the son and heir of the blind King of Bohemia who had been Lewis's great enemy in Germany. [ ] Lewis had all but ruined Germany, they thought, and "No more Bavarians" was their answer when he ventured to plead for his own line. #### And now, at last, the pope shook himself free of his political tutors. The French king preferred to see Lewis acknowledged rather than Charles elected. But Clement VI, this time, ignored the French. He again declared Lewis no emperor (April 13, 1346), and called upon the prince electors to fill the vacancy. This they did, two months later, electing Charles: three of his five electors were prelates, the pope supported him, and so Charles IV has come down as "the priests' emperor." The gibe was no more than a last flicker from the party of Lewis. He died of apoplexy (October 11, 1347), and when his successor died soon after (June 14, 1349) Charles IV's troubles from the house of Wittelsbach were at an end. #### " The priests' emperor " had succeeded in great measure because of the pope's powerful aid; and the pope had first used every care to make sure that Charles was really his man. The emperor-to-be, French by his upbringing and Clement's one- time pupil, had appeared at Avignon and had sworn cheerfully to accept all manner of restrictions on his authority. Once securely elected he did not even trouble to ask the pope's confirmation. He did not, indeed, break his promise not to enter Italy until the pope had confirmed the election. But so long as he would not ask such confirmation, Clement would not give the desired permission for his coronation at Rome. The peace was never broken, but the deadlock endured as long as Clement VI reigned. #### Charles found the next pope -- Innocent VI [ ] easier: leave was given for the expedition into Italy and Charles was crowned, by the papal legate, in St. Peter's, on April 5, 1355. And now, secure of his position, and certain that there would be no resistance from the pope, he published on January 13, 1356, the famous "Golden Bull" which regulated anew the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. In this it is declared that the election of the emperor is a matter for the prince- electors alone, and that during vacancies the Elector of Saxony is to act as imperial vicar for the north and the Count Palatine for the south. Of all the great papal claims, so resoundingly set forth (and exercised) for centuries, and were, so recently, the occasion of a twenty years' war, there is not a single word. They are not denied, but simply ignored, treated as though they had never been. #### Here truly is a sign that a new age has begun; and this, not only in the definitive secularisation of the imperial dignity by the unilateral act of the emperor, but, even more, in the tacit acceptance of this act by the pope. For Innocent VI, who had known, for months beforehand, what was in preparation, remained silent. He could not approve, but he did not condemn. True enough, there was in the bull substantial compensation for the papacy. The empire as such is, henceforth, to mean Germany only. The fatal ambition to realise imperial rights through an actual domination of Italy was thereby cut out forever from the imagination of the German imperial mind. When next a Holy Roman Emperor plays any part in Italian affairs it is because he happens to be, at the same time, the hereditary King of Naples. [ ] But that claims so great were allowed by the papacy to fall so silently [ ] -- this was surely a great event, and it marks a real turning point in history. iii. Marsiglio of Padua #### The surrender of Innocent VI to the fait accompli of the Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV is still more striking when it is set beside the contemporary theories of Marsiglio of Padua, as to the proper place of the Church in the Christian State, set out in the Defensor Pacis; [ ] theories which, as yet, were mainly important by reason of Marsiglio's position among the counsellors of Lewis of Bavaria. Lewis had indeed been badly beaten where "the priests' emperor" was now, in 1356, victorious; but it was, none the less, the patronage and protection of Lewis that had preserved Marsiglio, and his book, despite the massy condemnation of John XXII. The Defensor Pacis, so preserved, was now to take on a new lease of life; its doctrines to become yearly more "actual," and more and more infect the world of Catholic thought, and to influence the political advisers of Catholic princes until the book became, in fact, what its author intended it to be, " one of the strongest implements of war ever imagined against the social action of the Church." [ ] #### For in Christendom, as Marsiglio proposed to reorganise it, the pope was not merely fettered in his function, as the legists would have fettered him: he was not to function at all. It is the peculiar and lasting mischief of Marsiglio that he creates, for the controversy, an entirely new politico-religious atmosphere, where the problem of Church and State is treated in all its generality. No longer is it any particular right or claim of the Church which is called in question; what is now attacked is the very idea of the Church as an institution. And the layman's desire to throw off the cleric's control of social life is now itself made the basis of a kind of religious teaching. #### About the life of Marsiglio we know very little. One of the rare facts is that in 1312-1313 he was rector of the University of Paris. We do not know at what university his student days were passed, nor what he studied. He is, not impossibly, the Marsiglio de Maynandrino to whom John XXII, in 1316, provided a canonry at Padua; and the " Italian named Marcillo " of whom the same pope complained, three years later, that he had gone to the future Charles IV of France (1322-1328) as an envoy of the Italian Ghibellines. We meet him again, seemingly, as a witness to the profession of faith, made, at the demand of ecclesiastical authority, by the Averroist philosopher of Padua, Peter of Abano; and a set of verses by another fellow citizen, Albertino Mussato, describes Marsiglio as hesitating between a career in the law and medicine, and also as seduced from his medical studies by the lure of a military life in the service of two of the great condottieri of the day, Matteo Visconti and Can Grande della Scala. #### Marsiglio was, very evidently, a man of parts, and in his great book the student will find, turn by turn, the influence of very varied tastes and accomplishments. He is the passionate Italian patriot; he is religiously anti-Catholic; but he is never the legist, never the philosopher. Aristotle is indeed his master, Aristotle idolised as the Averroist tradition did idolise him; [ ] but Marsiglio's interest in the Philosopher was scientific, not philosophical. He was, very evidently, not of that elect company possessed of the metaphysical intuition of being and this, inevitably, vitiates his understanding of that part of Aristotle's work upon which he concentrated his vigorous militant mind, the social philosophy of the Politics. As the strongest part of the Defensor Pacis is its main section, that which deals with the nature and role of the Church, so the weakest is the political introduction where Aristotle's theories are discussed, and his formulae used, by a mind that is not metaphysical but positivist, not interested really in natures and causalities, and which therefore is prone to overlook the profound ideas that lie behind simple and seemingly obvious terminology. Marsiglio is not a philosopher, in the strict sense of the term. [ ] Nor is he a jurist, although he is familiar (as an educated man might be who has frequented the company of jurists) with the legal aspect of the social questions that interest him. Nor is Marsiglio at all a theologian, and what religious ideas he has are akin to those of the Waldenses. Finally, there is every probability that Marsiglio knew, and had been in personal contact with, the group of French legists who, led by Nogaret, had waged the last stages of Philip the Fair's war on Boniface VIII; and he was an active Ghibelline. Considering all these elements in his formation one by one, it may be thought there could hardly be a better recipe from which to prepare the genius who was to devise the most mischievously anti-Christian work of the whole Middle Ages. [ ] #### Marsiglio's objective was nothing less than the social influence of the Catholic religion, exercised through popes and bishops and clerics generally upon the whole life of the time. This he proposed to destroy by explaining to the Catholic world what the State really is, and what is the true place of the true religion of Christ within the State rationally constructed. It is, then, necessary to say something about each part of his elaborate argument; and first, about his theory of the State and its powers. #### Marsiglio's master, Aristotle, sees man as an animal which is social and political by its nature; and Aristotle's great commentator St. Thomas, understanding that problems about natures are metaphysical problems, and being himself no mean metaphysician, draws from Aristotle's principle a whole corpus of sociological teaching. But always St. Thomas relates his ideas to this first idea of what man's nature is. So, for example in discussing the great questions, What exactly are States? What kind of authority is it that they exercise? How does the citizen stand, relative to the State? What are the right and duties of each? it is to a truth about human nature that St. Thomas, each time, returns. It is by a theory built on a consideration of what natures are, that he answers such questions. How do there come to be States? Why, because it is the nature of men to live in a multitude, "and so there must be in men something by which the multitude is ruled": [ ] and the saint speaks of the natural impulse [ ] of men towards the State, which State came into being through human action originating in that urge of human nature. #### The importance of seeking the beginnings of any understanding of human political action in such a fundamental as a nature, quite escapes the non-metaphysical Marsiglio. His thought remains on the surface; and he interprets the Aristotelian teaching in the light of a conjectured historical beginning, where the gathering of men in a community is due to circumstance alone, physical or economic. What ultimately, in his view, decides the new move to live in ordered groups is the fact that to form such a group is the choice of the majority. The State is, essentially, nothing more than this "collection" of individuals; and its only unity is that which comes from the imposition upon this multitude of a single will, to which all their individual wills now conform. #### In the State -- as Marsiglio conceives it -- force is thus not merely an instrument by which the ideal of Social Justice overcomes whatever hinders its accomplishment, but it is an essential constituent of Law. Law is the imposition of the State's will upon the citizen; [ ] where there is no force there is no legal obligation, and wherever, in that will, there is force, there is force of Law. Law that does not conform to the objective standard of justice, St. Thomas roundly says, is not Law at all; rather it is mere wickedness. [ ] But Marsiglio explicitly contradicts this -- wickedness too is Law, if only it is commanded under legal penalties. #### This same defect, that makes the goodness and badness of actions derive from something outside the act -- from laws, for example -- vitiates Marsiglio's theory of public authority. For the ruler's authority, in his view, originates in the expressed intention of these who make him the ruler. Whatever he does in accordance with that intention is good, whatever he does against it is bad; and the ruler so acting in accordance is the pattern for all his subjects' acts, their rule indeed and their measure. #### Whence comes this designation of any particular individual to be ruler? Who is it that confers on him this extraordinary kind of power? Here we come to the best known feature of Marsiglio's theory, namely, his teaching about the sovereignty of the people. The source of all authority in the State is the will of the people. The proof of this, apparently, does not lie in any truth about the nature of man, but in the practical consideration that such "consultation" of the people must make for future harmony in the government of the State; and a wise ruler will also "prepare" the people, before he submits any matter to their judgment. Also, a most important consideration, it is the whole body of the people, assenting to the sanctions that accompany laws, which gives to laws that which really makes them laws: it is the whole people that can alone impose what obliges universally. "Sanctions: in this consists the whole being of law, and the people alone has the power needed for the imposition of sanctions. In this is summed up the whole theory of Marsiglio." [ ] #### This is, of course, no more than a very general summary of an elaborate discussion that runs to far more pages than there are here lines. And the discussion may seem remote enough from Church history, whose business is to record the fortunes of the Gospel. But some familiarity with Marsiglio's leading notions is necessary in order to understand what is by no means remote, the character and scale, that is to say, of his attack on the traditional Catholic theory of the Church. For it is with the aim of producing an ecclesiastical revolution that Marsiglio has constructed his version of Aristotle's Politics. #### The great source of all the evils that afflict the age, he says, is the hold which the clergy have secured on religious life. One main instrument of their power is the false notion of the Church which they have devised. For the Church, like any other " society, " is really no more than the aggregation of the individuals who compose it; it is "the ensemble of faithful believers who invoke the name of Christ." All such believers are equally "of the Church"; the distinctions which now obtain between, for example, clergy and laity are secondary, not essential, and produced by human authority merely. The Church, in the traditional sense, has no real existence, nor ever had any. #### In Marsiglio's sense the Church has only one divinely instituted function, the administration of sacraments. The power to say mass, to forgive sins, to ordain priests is indeed of divine origin, and belongs only to priests themselves duly ordained. But with these essential liturgical functions clerical activity ceases. It is not for any clergy to decide who it is shall be ordained, nor in what part of the Church and in what capacity, and under what conditions the priest shall exercise his priesthood. Everywhere in the primitive history of the Church -- as Marsiglio reads it -- the determining factor at every stage of the evolution of Catholicism has been the action of the generality of the faithful. Here is still the true source of religious authority, the guarantee of fidelity to Christ's teaching. It is from this source that general councils derive what authority they possess, from here that the right to designate to particular offices derives, and also the right to inflict the supreme sanction of excommunication. In such a scheme there is obviously no place for episcopal authority, nor for the universal primacy of the pope. This last, particularly, is a flagrant usurpation #### We never go far in studying such schemes before we are halted by inconsistencies, and by unresolved, and unresolvable, contradictions. For example, the question soon suggests itself whether these faithful, collected together in the Church, are an authority, a religious sovereign, distinct from themselves as the sovereign people of the State. Is this -- seemingly -- democratic Church independent of the -- seemingly -- democratic State? We would hardly expect it to be so; and indeed, by carefully thought out distinctions, Marsiglio shows how all the powers of ruling the Church which he denies to the clergy really belong to, and should lawfully be exercised by, the civil ruler. The Church is, indeed, no more than the religious aspect of civil society, the reflection of what that society feels, at any given moment, about religion. #### Not only, then, may the civil ruler lawfully exercise all authority in the Church: to do so is, for him, a primary duty. For example, nothing is more fatal to the State, as Marsiglio conceives it, than the clear distinction between the legality of what it ordains and the intrinsic goodness (or badness) of these acts. It is therefore highly important, in practice, that there should never be any moral criticism of legislation. But, for centuries now, the Church of the popes has had the inconvenient habit of making such criticism; it is indeed one of the popes' chief activities. Laws have been denounced as tyranny because contrary to justice; rulers have been lectured, warned and punished for enacting laws declared to be unjust; subjects have been told that they need not, indeed must not, obey such laws. The State of the future must, then, see to it that no pope or bishop or other cleric is ever suffered to put into action a doctrine so treasonable, destructive indeed of the very basis of civil authority. The spheres of conscience and of obedience to civil authority are distinct, separate, and independent. Activities proper to the first must never be allowed to overflow into the second, or the most terrible confusion will follow and the peace and unity of the State be forever endangered. #### " Unity within the State" -- here is an ideal very close to Marsiglio's heart. Therefore, within the State let there be one single authority, one single jurisdiction, no privileged bodies, no immunities. To introduce a second jurisdiction, to seek immunities for a particular section of the citizens (judicial immunities, legislative immunities, fiscal immunities) is treason to the State in the highest degree. The ruler must then, in simple duty to the peace of the State, destroy the privileges of the clergy. Also, in those matters where the divine law needs human agents for its execution, it is the State which must be that agent; for there cannot be two coercive jurisdictions operating over one and the same people. Only thus will the State become, what it needs to be, the real ruler of all its citizens. Law is, as it were, the atmosphere of a particular country -- all who live in that country must breathe the same air. Nothing, Marsiglio argues, with undisguised bitter passion, has been more noxious to the peace of states than that immunity of the clergy from the prince's jurisdiction which the popes have championed for so long; and in a kind of parody of the concluding phrases of Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam [ ] he declares his own gospel, that for its own well-being the Church, all the faithful people of Christ, must be subjected to the civil ruler, his laws and his judges. #### The needed subjection of the Church to the State will not, however, be achieved by such merely negative acts as the destruction of clerical privilege. A more continuous, positive, action upon the Church is needed, and this is in fact vital to the welfare of the State. Here Marsiglio -- like all his followers ever since, down to our very contemporaries -- flings consistency to the winds, and having first divorced morality from the business of ruling, he now proclaims that to foster morality is one of the State's gravest duties; the State, undoubtedly, has moral and even spiritual functions. The secularist patriarch enlarges on them with evident and conscious unction. #### There is, for example, the State's duty to promote among its citizens the practice of virtue and of all the duties which God's revelation has made known to us, which last (we note) is not only necessary if man is to save his soul, says Marsiglio, "but is also useful for the needs of this present life"; and so the state must appoint learned men to teach religion and to organise divine worship. There is nothing spiritual, he says, that does not somehow affect the welfare of the body politic. Therefore the State must control the spiritual. It ought, for example, to regulate the lives of the clergy, determining the standards of their conduct, their fasts, prayers, mortifications and so forth. It must decide the nice question whether they will not be better clergy if they do not possess property, but if, instead, surrendering all right to be owners, they throw themselves -- for maintenance -- on the generosity of the State, as God's agent, once they have committed all their care to Him: evangelical poverty imposed by the State on all the clergy will be yet another means of control. Finally it is the State's duty to take into its own hands the whole vast business of education, of forming, controlling, directing the literate class of the future, and of so shaping it that it will be yet another willing instrument of State policy. #### The Defensor Pacis was completed on the feast of St. John the Baptist, 24 June, 1324. While its author was planning the new venture of setting up as a lecturer in theology, his book was denounced to the Church authorities. Marsiglio and his ally, the notorious Averroist, John of Jandun, saved themselves by flight (1326). They joined Lewis of Bavaria at Nuremberg and thenceforward their history is one with his; their influence upon his action alternating curiously with that of the emperor's other anti-papal allies, the Franciscans Michael of Cesena and Ockham. The first papal condemnation of the book, which does not, seemingly, name its author, is a bull of 1326 which has not survived. [ ] The next year, April 3, 1327, a second bull, [ ] addressed to Lewis, upbraids him for his patronage of these two "sons of perdition," but even yet the full text of the book does not seem to have reached the papal court. But by the date of the next bull, October 23 [ ] of the same year, the pope is more fully informed, through the bishops of Germany. In this bull five of the six propositions which the bishops sent on as resuming Marsiglio's leading ideas, are condemned after a most understanding criticism. The pope went directly to the heart of the subversive doctrine, and set in the broad light of day the mischievous principles that underlay the mass of subtle argumentation, satire and bitter, passionate rhetoric. The condemnation was, indeed, one of the most characteristic and masterly acts of John XXII's long, eventful reign. #### The Defensor Pacis -- appearing in the midst of a war between pope and emperor -- naturally made a sensation. It was translated into French (1330) and into Italian (1363). In Germany especially it was a success. Nevertheless, it seems certain that there were but a few copies of the original in circulation before the time of the Schism (1378). It is not without interest to note that the so-called "democratic" theories of Marsiglio appear to have caused no comment at all. What, everywhere, roused attention was his application of them to the Church. How ruinous this was to traditional belief was immediately understood on all sides. Lewis of Bavaria himself cuts a somewhat comical figure, earnestly striving to dissociate himself from such scandalous ideas and explaining, in 1336, to Benedict XII that he has no head for these matters and has never really understood what Marsiglio had in mind. #### But whatever the scandal caused by the Defensor Pacis to the mind of Catholic Europe, it remained unanswered, save for the papal condemnation. [ ] Was it indifference, on the part of theologians, to a work which, in its new "positivist" approach to a theological problem, was an offence to current scholastic good form, and which, thereby, classed itself with all the rest of the new scientific knowledge of the fourteenth century? It is surely strange, and disconcerting, that Marsiglio's attack did not stimulate some Catholic to produce, not merely a controversial rejoinder, but a new constructive statement of traditional doctrine. Be that as it may, when the ideas of Marsiglio came alive again, in the last years of the fourteenth century, they met no contradiction from Catholic learning. His influence is evident now in France, in John Wvcliff, and in the heresies that from this time begin to dominate Bohemia. We find no less a person than Gerson recommending the book, and it undoubtedly played a part at the General Council of Constance. [ ] It was more and more copied in the fifteenth century, more and more eagerly read, as the breakdown of Christendom drew nearer. The first printed edition appeared in 1517, the year of Luther's first appearance as an innovator, and the publication of an English translation, in 1535, was one of the earliest moves of Thomas Cromwell, then busy with the publicist strategy that accompanied the creation of the Church of England as we know it to-day. [ ] iv. The End of John XXII #### Marsiglio's adversary, John XXII, was harassed by trouble and crisis literally to the very end of his life. For his last hours, ere he passed from this world, at ninety years of age, were given to a theological controversy, and one which his own act had begun. In this controversy, about the state of souls in the interval between death and the General Judgment of mankind at the end of the world, the pope took a line that went against the general body of received opinion and tradition. The peculiar ideas which he championed were set forth in three sermons, preached at Avignon on All Saints' Day, 1331, on December 15 of the same year and on the following January 5. In these sermons John XXII declared that the souls of the just do not enjoy the intuitive vision of God (in which consists their eternal heavenly reward) until, after the last day, they are again united with their bodies; and also that neither the souls of the lost nor the devils are as yet in hell. but will only be there from after the last day. #### These sermons of the aged pope astonished the theological world, at Avignon and elsewhere. The startling news of this papal innovation, in a matter belonging to the sphere of doctrine, was speedily conveyed into Bavaria by the cardinal Napoleone Orsini, who had long been secretly planning and hoping for John's deposition. There, Ockham and his associates gladly fashioned it into a new weapon against the pope. He had already, they said, repudiated one point of the Christian faith, to wit the belief in the absolute poverty of Our Lord and the Apostles: now, he was repudiating a second. It was the very way heretics had always acted; little by little they came to deny the whole body of traditional belief. John, now obviously heretical to all the world, could not any longer be regarded as pope. #### The pope's own attitude to the controversy he had occasioned is of the greatest interest. Significantly, he made no attempt to use his pontifical authority to support what he had said in his sermons. Quite the contrary: as one who had been doing no more than express an opinion which he considered to be as good as any other, and who, quite evidently, is surprised at the chorus of dissent, he now set theologians of various schools to examine the whole question and to report. Notable among them was the Cistercian cardinal, James Fournier, one day to succeed John as Benedict XII. He was an extremely competent professional theologian, and without difficulty he clearly showed that the opinion of John XXII had scarcely any support and that the body of tradition was firm against him; on the other hand, in the controversy against those who, like Ockham, were beginning to denounce the pope as a heretic, Fournier noted first of all that, so far, the Church had never expressed its mind on the question by a definition, and next that in these three sermons John XXII had made no claim or pretence whatever to be doing anything more than preach a sermon to the particular congregation which at the moment filled the church; the pope had spoken simply as any bishop or priest might have spoken, as a private theologian, and not as the pope laying down a definition of doctrine for the assent of the whole Christian Church. #### But the controversy continued to rage for all the short remainder of John's life. The new head of the Friars Minor, the successor of the excommunicated Michael of Cesena, with sycophantic misunderstanding of the situation, became a most enthusiastic advocate of the pope's unusual views; and, unfortunately for himself, declaimed them at Paris, where he immediately fell foul of the greatest body of theologians in the Church. The university discussed the theory, found it contrary to the general teaching, and as such reported it to the pope. Then John XXII fell into his last illness. On December 3, 1334, from his sick bed, he made a public explanation, and a submission of what he had said to the teaching of the Church. He believed, he said to the assembled cardinals, that "the souls of the just, separated from their bodies, but fully purified from sin, are in heaven, in paradise, with Jesus Christ, in the company of the angels, and that, according to the common law, they see God and the divine essence face to face, clearly, as far as the state and condition of a soul separated from the body allows this." But this qualified retraction the pope explicitly submitted to the Church's decision. And the next day he died. #### Benedict XII closed the controversy by the bull Benedictus Deus, of January 29, 1336, in which he defined, as the teaching of the Catholic Church, that the souls of the just (i.e. the souls of those who leave this world with no stain upon them that needs purifying, and those souls also which, after death, have been purified in purgatory) immediately after death (or on the completion of such purification) see the divine essence by an intuitive and even facial vision, and this before they are reunited with their bodies, before the general judgment. Moreover the souls of the lost are in hell from the moment of death. [ ] ####  |