John of Paris on Royal and Papal Power

John of Paris: On Royal and Papal Power. J. A. Watt translation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002.

 

Christianity posed a problem to the world—quite intendedly so, as its Founder insisted. He testified to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God, a new regime (though arguably the oldest) challenging all existing regimes, beginning with the Roman Empire. At the same time, the citizens (or perhaps subjects) of this new regime were commanded to obey the regimes of this world, which did not wield the sword in vain. Given the new regime’s stern means of enforcing its own way of life—eternal damnation—it too wielded a mighty sword, however. And its purposes might easily conflict with the purposes of all other regimes, which worshipped gods the new regime despised as demons. That the two swords might clash was seen, horribly, in the Founder’s crucifixion. That they would continue to clash was guaranteed when the new regime’s ecclesia or assembly acquired substantial property controlled by the assembly’s monarch, reigning in Rome.

Jean Quidort “of Paris” considered this religio-political dilemma in the early 1300s. In his excellent introduction, J. A. Watt recounts the controversy which had arisen between King Philip IV of France (“Philip the Fair”) and Pope Boniface VIII. For nearly a century, the Roman Catholic Church had denied the right of secular power to tax church property without the pope’s permission. The penalty for so doing was excommunication; if prolonged until death, excommunication meant damnation, according to Catholic doctrine. Philip was the latest French king to chafe under this proscription, needing revenues for his war against Edward I of England, who had also taxed church property and outlawed clergy who protested. Philip enraged Boniface when he arrested the “loudmouthed” and seditious bishop of Pamiers in October of 1301 on charges of treason against France, to which the royal chancellor soon added charges of simony, heresy, and blasphemy. “The issue at stake was sovereignty,” a word deriving from the Latin superanus, meaning “any elevated place” whether physically, morally, or politically on high. “Who was then ‘souverain es choses temporeix‘ in France?” 

In the event, Boniface was seized by the king’s agent, Guillaume de Nogaret; the pope was tried by the French parlement and died six weeks later. That didn’t stop the judicial proceeding, which continued until March 1310, with the predictable outcome: the pope was judged guilty, the king’s right to tax church lands affirmed. Yet while force majeure combined with a legal judgment settled the question in practice in that time and place, it scarcely addressed its theoretical dimension. A Dominican who had written a defense of Thomas Aquinas, John of Paris defended the king’s stance with arguments from both natural law and Scripture. 

As a Christian Aristotelian might well do, John begins by exercising the virtue of moderation, situating himself between two extreme doctrines. The Waldensians, he writes, deny that popes have any power in temporal affairs or any legal right to temporal wealth, charging that “when the church accepted Constantine’s donation” of Rome and its environs for its capital on earth “it became Roman and no longer the true church of God.” The Herodians make the opposite claim, that Christ’s kingship “was of the human kind” and, as a consequence, “the pope, in so far as he stands in Christ’s place on earth has a power over the properties of princes and barons as well as cognizance and jurisdiction of them” owing to the pope’s receipt of “primary authority, derived directly from God.” By contrast, “the prince” “has his power mediately from the pope.” According to Herodias, “other prelates and princes,” in contrast to the pope, “are not lords but guardians, agents, stewards.” 

John demurs. “Truth lies midway” between these claims. While “it is not wrong for prelates to have lordship and jurisdiction in temporalities,” this power “is not theirs because of what they are or because they are vicars of Christ and successors of the Apostles”; rather, they have power over worldly things “in virtue of of the concession and permission of rulers if they are so endowed through the piety of rulers,” like Constantine, “or receive them from some other source.”

John defines royal government in Aristotelian terms, as “the government of a perfect or self-sufficient community by one man for the sake of the common good.” [1] As a community, it differs from animal herds, which govern themselves by “natural instinct” and from human beings “who live a solitary life,” governing themselves “by reason.” Aristotle had distinguished political life from that of animals and of gods; as a Christian, John cannot use the example of ‘gods,’ and so changes it to solitary rational beings, who might be human or the one God. Self-sufficiency differentiates the political community from sub-political communities, especially families, which Aristotle regards as incapable of living a fully human life on their own. The common good differentiates the royal regime from the bad regimes—tyranny first of all, but also oligarch and democracy—and “by one man” distinguishes that regime from the good regimes consisting of a few or many rulers—aristocracy and “polycratia,” John’s term for Aristotle’s politeia or ‘mixed’ regime. Government so defined “has its roots in the natural law and the law of nations,” which consist both of human needs and of human reason. 

As Aristotle teaches, “man is a social or political and social animal,” and men outside the political community” do “not live as men according to what is proper to their nature,” remaining stunted, somewhat bestial. Political communities evince a certain ruling order or regime, which may or not conduce to the fulfillment of human nature. Of those that do, the good regimes, John prefers royal government. “Government of a community is more effective when conducted by one man according to virtue, than when exercised by many or few virtuous men,” for four reasons. First, “virtue is more united and therefore the stronger in one ruler than when divided among many”; second, “there can be no community where unity and concord is missing,” and “the single ruler better upholds that unity of the community,” so long as he is virtuous; third, “a single ruler has a sharper eye for the common good than many rulers can have even if they are ruling according to virtue” because he can more readily consider the community as a whole, standing farther apart from particular interests than the few or the many; finally, “in the law of nature all government is reduced to overall unity just as in any body composed of a mixture of parts there is one element which is master over the others,” as the soul rules the “heterogeneous human body.” 

Where, then, does the priesthood come from? Unlike Aristotle, Christians insist that “man is not merely ordered to such good as nature can bestow on him, which is to live virtuously, but that he is also ultimately ordered to a supernatural end, which is life eternal.” Given the superiority of the royal regime, “it follows that there must be some one person who will have the direction of all to this end.” Were it “possible to achieve this end simply through human nature,” the king would rightly take this function, but since a human being “cannot secure eternal life through purely human virtue” the ruler in question can only be God—that is, “Jesus Christ, who in making men sons of God has brought them towards eternal life.” Christ was not only a wise king (as attested in the Book of Jeremiah 23:5) but a priest. Priests offer sacrifices to divinity, reconciling men with divinity; that is their function. Unique among priests, Christ “offered himself as a sacrifice” for the purpose of removing “the universal obstacle,” sin, between men and God. “For this [Christ] is [the] true priest.” Christ as embodied in human form died on the Cross and subsequently awakened from death, returning to His Father in Heaven. He left behind His ecclesia, His church; this assembly of human beings needed “to establish certain remedies through which this general benefit” of human salvation from sin “might be applied in some way.” “These remedies are the sacraments of the Church,” which are physical embodiments of Christ’s “spiritual power,” embodiments “placed on the same plane as their principal agent, the incarnate Word, to whom they owe their spiritual power.” Absence the physical presence of Christ on earth, “it was necessary for him to institute ministers who would administer these sacraments to men,” conferrers of “sacred things” because “they are leaders in the sacred order” who “teach sacred truths” as “intermediaries between God and man” in action and word or argument. “The priesthood is the spiritual power, given by Christ to the ministers of his church, of administering the sacraments to the faithful.” As in the political communities, so in the regime of God there should be “one supreme head,” who is “the Roman pope, successor of Peter,” responsible for maintaining the unity of God’s assembly when “diversity of opinion” threatens to “divide the Church, whose unity demands unity of belief.” 

“Therefore it is by God’s decision that there is a subordination of church ministers to one head. But it does not follow that the ordinary faithful are commanded by divine law to be subject in temporalities to any single supreme monarch.” The world is too diverse for that. Climates, languages, and conditions vary around the world; “in order to live well together” the nations need to “choose the sort of rulers appropriate for the sort of community in question.” Royal government or kingship may be the best of the best regimes, but that regime may not be best for a particular community; as Aristotle teaches, circumstances count when you get down to cases. Further, “one man alone cannot rule the world in temporal affairs as can one alone in spiritual affairs,” as the sanction of “spiritual power” is verbal, a matter of the Word of God, whereas “secular power…cannot so easily extend its sword so far, since it is wielded by hand.” In keeping with the physicality of temporal communities, worldly regimes consist of property owners; “each is master of his own property as acquired through his own industry,” unlike ecclesiastical property, which “was given to the community as a whole.” Finally, “all the faithful are united in the one universal faith, without which there is no salvation,” but that doesn’t mean that “all the faithful should be united in one political community,” as “what is virtuous”—as distinguished from what is salvific—in “one community is not virtuous in another, as is true also for individuals, of whom the Philosopher speaks in Ethics Book II, that one thing may be too little for one man and too much for another.” Not only the philosopher Aristotle but the Christian Augustine holds “that a society is better and more peacefully ruled when the authority of each realm was confined within its own frontiers,” that “the cause of the Roman empire was its ambition to dominate and the injurious provocation of others,” leading to its cataclysmic fall.

Although the papal monarchy is superior in dignity to that of any secular monarch—salvation being even more important than the happiness virtue enables and, as Aristotle himself argues, “what is concerned with the final end is more complete and more worthy and gives direction to what is concerned with an inferior end”—it “does not follow” that “the priestly is a more dignified function than the royal” in “every respect.” “The power of neither of these derives from the other but rather both from some superior power.” That superior power isn’t hard to find in the Bible. “Both take their origin immediately from one supreme power, namely God,” and “hence the inferior is not subject to the superior in all things but only in those matters in which the supreme power has subordinated the inferior to the superior.” No one would claim that because a teacher of letter or of morals “guides a household to a nobler end, knowledge of truth, than its doctor,” the guide to bodily health, that “the physician should be subject to the teacher in the preparation of his medicines.” The rulers of Rome have consented to the authority of the priests, but this local “custom” need not, should not, be universalized to all cities, all political communities. Rather, the Roman dispensation symbolized “the greater excellence of the priesthood of the future,” when the greatest and truest Priest will return to rule a new Heaven and a new earth. A similar anticipation may be seen in France. “Because in the future it was to be in France that the religion of the Christian priesthood was to flourish best, divine providence ensured that among the Gauls the pagan priests called druids gave definition to Gallic life,” just as the Roman papacy now anticipates the rule of the supreme Priest.

Because Constantine donated Rome to the Catholic Church, it belongs to the Church as a whole, not to any one person. The bishop of Rome has the right to ordain its use; he wouldn’t be entitled (for example) to sell it. He is the “steward” of Church properties, not their “lord.” What is more, just as a monastic community may “depose its abbot” so the Church “might do the same to its bishop, if it has been established that he has squandered the property of the monastery or church and that he has broken faith in taking for his private gain what was for the common good.” “Even less” is the pope lord of lay property; “nor is he its steward, unless perhaps in some extreme need of the church,” such as “pagan invasion or some such disaster”— one “so great and obvious” that he “could demand tithes and fixed contributions from individual members of the faithful, though these should be according to their means”—or “the common spiritual good”—such as the need to pay for additional assistant priests in a growing parish when revenues have not risen commensurate with the increase of spiritual services to the parishioners. The penalty for non-compliance is “ecclesiastical censure,” not jail time or some other bodily or material punishment. This is because lay property isn’t granted to the community as a whole, “but is acquired by individual people through their own skill, labor and diligence, and individuals, as individuals, have right and power over it and valid lordship,” entitled thereby to “order his own and dispose, administer, hold or alienate it as he wishes, so long as he causes no injury to anyone else, since he is lord.” 

Although Christ as God had lordship over all men and their property, Christ “as man did not have it.” And even if He did, he didn’t “pass it on to Peter.” Christ is king in three senses: He is king of all creation; He is king of men because “what he did in the flesh leads us to membership of a kingdom, not indeed of this world” but of “the kingdom of heaven”; and He is head of “all the faithful,” who, “in so far as they are his members, one with Christ the head through faith and charity, are kings and priests” in their own, lesser, right. But Christ “as man” is not king. As man, He was poor, His kingdom not of this world, and he exercised “no authority or judicial power over temporalities,” giving instead simply an “example of virtue.” Therefore, no Christian priest “may claim to be Christ’s vicar” respecting temporalities. When He drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, when He sent his disciples to fetch an ass and a colt, when He exorcised demons by forcing them into pigs who hurled themselves into the sea—all violations of property rights if performed by a man—He exercised “authority as God,” not as man. Those who argue that a Christian convert subjects himself to the pope in property matters “in the same way as men are subject to their kings” unwittingly imply “that Christ had changed his kingdom into an earthly one.” It is rather that Christ rules by faith, governing “the hearts of men and not their property.”

Even if Christ did claim or exercise jurisdiction over lay property as a man, he didn’t “hand it on to Peter.” It is true that Christ functioned as head of the Church “according to his human nature, not only according to his divinity.” But in anticipation of His death and resurrection, He gave His spiritual authority to Peter, leaving His corporal authority to Caesar, who already had “received it directly from God.” He didn’t even confer all spiritual authority to Peter, giving him the power to forgive sins but not to “dismiss” them, to wipe them off an individual’s moral balance sheet altogether. Only He made the supreme priestly sacrifice by His work on the Cross.

The division between spiritual and temporal authority comports with the way God has ordered creation. “The more a thing has perfect being, the more its being is distinct.” John means that, for example, when God created animals, and in particular man, “male and female he created them”; hermaphroditism is “an error of nature,” an imperfection whereby the organs of generativity are confused, indistinct. Or, in the poorly ordered household as described by Aristotle, “one person is occupied by many tasks.” There is no adequate division of labor. God has so ordered His Church that it attends only to its proper task; “it is inappropriate that one person alone should be entrusted with such diverse duties as the priestly function and the royal lordship.” In the words of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to the priesthood, “Your jurisdiction is over sin not possessions.” thus “the pope has neither the power of both swords nor any jurisdiction in temporal affairs unless it has been granted to him out of piety by a secular ruler,” such as the Emperor Constantine. “To say,” as some do, “that royal power came first directly from God and afterwards from the pope is quite ludicrous” because royal office “comes indisputably from God” and God gave Peter no “power of conferring the royal office.” 

John devotes the remainder of his book to listing 42 arguments advanced “by those who maintain the contrary position” to the one he has taken and then, Thomas-like, responding to them. He groups the argument in seven clusters of six arguments each. The first cluster consists primarily of Scripturally-based arguments, the most telling of which derives from Matthew 16:19, which states, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” The second cluster consists of citations from the Canon Law, as when the pope is empowered to depose an emperor or to hear appeals from a secular judge. The arguments in the third cluster attempt to establish that the superiority of spiritual over temporal matters means that spiritual authority encompasses temporal authority: “Who can do the greater thing can do the lesser,” and “since therefore the pope can command in spiritual matters, so he can in temporal matters.” Fourth-cluster arguments purport to find in spiritual things the causes of temporal things, “deduc[ing] from this argument that it is the pope who gives to the prince the laws according to which they exercise or should exercise their jurisdiction, nor can a secular prince receive law from any other source without its being papally approved.” The arguments in the fifth cluster center on justice, that “without true justice a republic cannot be ruled and that there cannot be true justice in a republic when Christ is not its ruler”; therefore, it is reasoned, the temporal sword may be wielded justly “by the hand of the soldier, but at the priest’s signal and the emperor’s command.” The arguments in the sixth cluster relate temporal and spiritual “as means to end,” saying that since the pope wields spiritual power the king’s temporal power must serve the pope’s purposes. The seventh cluster consists of ‘real world’ arguments. Since “the pope must be self-sufficient as regards both types of religious life, active and contemplative,” and since “he cannot be self-sufficient for the active life unless he has direct and meaningful power over temporalities,” and moreover because “the clergy are more vigorous in reasoning and intellect than the laity,” clergymen generally and the pope above all must take the lead over kings. 

John begins his reply with some “general ideas.” Aristotle observes that “nature does not fall short in what is essential; when it gives a power, it gives it only with all aids sufficient to the proper exercise of that power in the manner appropriate for its operation.” God “is more perfect than nature”: in giving “spiritual power to priests, he gives them those means necessary for its proper execution.” There are five such means: sanctification and consecration of the sacraments (the means of action); correct instruction and knowledge of the sacraments through doctrine (a means of the mind); “coercion of those who despise the sacraments” through “fear of legal punishment” (a means of enforcement); “due differentiation and orderly arrangement of those who administer the sacraments” (the means of ordination); and provision of what is necessary for supporting the lives of the ministers so ordained (a means of funding). Christ Himself also granted six powers to the Apostles and “therefore” to the ministers of the Church, powers whereby these means can be enacted: the power of consecration (“Do this in remembrance of me”); the power of administering the sacraments (the power of the keys to the Kingdom, especially the forgiveness of sins); the authority of the apostolate seen in preaching; the judicial power “to coerce in the external forum by which sins are corrected through fear of punishment,” namely, anathema; the power of establishing ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the power to receive the materials means of whatever may be needed to “maintain a suitable standard of living” for the clergy. The Apostles received “these six” powers from Christ and “no others” except the power to work miracles which bishops and priests today no longer have, “for the confirmation of our faith is so manifest as no longer to need confirmation by miracles.” 

In his thirteenth, central chapter John draws the conclusion from the previous chapter, announcing in his title, “Prelates of the Church have neither lordship nor jurisdiction in temporal affairs by virtue of the powers granted to them nor on their account are princes subject to them in temporal affairs.” The first three powers (consecration, forgiveness, and preaching) are obviously spiritual. “The nub of the difficulty lies in the fourth power,” the judicial power. John proposes two “keys” to understanding what Christ means by this power of coercion. His disciples ask Him what they should do if one brother in Christ sins against another. Jesus tells them to confirm the charge with witnesses and to admonish him. “If he refuses to listen to you, tell it to the Church. And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector”—that is, an outsider. The consequence of this judgment will “bind,” will be authoritative, in earth and in heaven. The penalty on earth is exile from the Church; Christ makes no mention of any other punishment. Further, “sin can be committed in temporal matters in two ways”: by error respecting doctrine, obviously a matter for an “ecclesiastical judge” only; and by “aiming to secure another’s property for oneself or making threats to do so,” a matter for a civil judge under the civil laws. Property laws exist to “ensure that property is put to those proper human uses which would be neglected if everyone held everything in common”; indeed, “if things were held unreservedly in common, it would not be easy to keep the peace among men.” As Augustine teaches, by “natural law there is equal freedom and common possession for everyone in everything,” but once sin was introduced into the world only property law was left to prevent men from ruining one another. That property law was initially introduced by God (“Thou shalt not steal”) but the Roman emperors also upheld it. Ecclesiastical law, by contrast, pertains to the thing all Christians do hold in common, namely, the Holy Spirit. As Bernard of Clairvaux advised Pope Eugenius, “Your power is not in possessions but in hearts.” As John puts it, “both the pope and emperor have universal jurisdiction, though the one has spiritual jurisdiction and the other temporal.” The pope may therefore excommunicate a sinner, including an emperor but that is the limit of his authority; he may request the “barons and peers of the kingdom” to correct the offender, but no more. Similarly, if a pope himself becomes “delinquent in spiritual matters,” the cardinals should first warn him; if they can’t remove him “on their own,” they may request that the emperor do so. “This is the way two swords are bound to lend help to each other in that common charity which united the members of the Church.” 

Chapters 14 through 20 are given over to refutations of the forty-two arguments for papal supremacy in temporal affairs stated in Chapter 11. The first cluster of six arguments, based on Scripture, tend toward what John calls “mystical exposition of the text”—symbolical readings, such as an interpretation of a passage describing the moon as reflecting the light of the sun as representations of the emperor and the pope, respectively. No such reading can “be accepted unless a proof is found from some other passage of Scripture, because mystical exegesis does not proceed by proof.” In this instance, without any more textual explanation, “moon” and “sun” might be said to represent any pair of persons or of things, a procedure limited only by the ingenuity of the reader. And even granting the symbolic reading, it doesn’t prove what it’s said to prove, inasmuch as “the moon has a virtue proper to itself, given to it by God, which it does not receive from the sun, by which it can cause” sublunary effects other than those caused by the sun. 

The second cluster of arguments, drawn from Canon Law, supposedly entitling a pope to depose an emperor, derive from “de facto situations, being concerned with what has in fact been done, rather than with what ought to have been done.” To put it in our terms, they derive from precedent. But precedent has no validity if it contradicts the letter of ‘constitutional’ law. Compared to laws set down in the Bible, Canon Law resembles mere statutory law. Further, the supposed precedents contradict one another, as “there are many arguments concerned with past practice which can be used to demonstrate the contrary of this alleged papal power.”

No argument in the third cluster, which consists of arguments maintaining that spiritual power encompasses temporal power, withstands the test of logic. For example, it is true that a pope may denounce an emperor for sin, but “denunciation does not give the pope jurisdiction.” “If it did, all civil jurisdiction would be utterly obliterated,” contra the clear teaching of Christ. And true, the pope’s power is greater than the emperor’s power, but that doesn’t mean that it extends to control over the emperor’s sphere of authority. “The orders or genus are different: if my father can generate a man, it does not follow that he can generate a dog nor that if a priest can absolve from sin, he can absolve from a money debt.” The power to generate a man is more impressive than the power to generate a dog, but its superiority in that regard does not entail the lesser power. In the fourth cluster’s attempts to find spiritual causes for temporal things, John finds another ‘category mistake.’ “In a well-ordered household it is not he who teaches letters and morals, a spiritual function who appoints the physician; both are appointed by the head of the household”; similarly, “the whole world is a single community under God as its supreme power who appoints both pope and prince.” “In so far as a king is concerned to be a faithful Christian,” the pope “directs him in faith but not in government.” And if the prince proves a tyrant? God works in mysterious ways for the spiritual benefit of His people: “tyranny of princes can exist for punishment of sinners,” or a means of “prov[ing] the endurance of subjects, or to force them to take refuge with God who alone can change the hearts of kings for the better.” These tests have their limits, however, as one must not “fall into the error of Herod who thought fearfully that Christ would destroy the earthly kingdom.”

Against fifth-cluster arguments justifying the superiority of papal power over temporal power, John replies that “moral virtues can be complete without theological virtues.” This leads John to reject ‘papist’ reading of Luke 22:38 on the “two swords.” “There is nothing here except a certain allegorical reading from which no convincing argument can be drawn.” As with the symbolic interpretations put forward in the first cluster of arguments, “allegory is insufficient to prove any proposition unless some clear authority can be produced from another source to substantiate it.” In this passage, John suggests, the two swords refer not to the royal and papal powers but to the Old and New Testaments, or perhaps “to the sword of the Word and the sword of impending persecution.” And even if it be granted that the conventional reading of the “two swords” is correct, the text doesn’t say that “they are to be Peter’s or any other Apostle’s, for Peter did not touch one of them, namely the secular sword, since it was not his.” And Christ told him to put even the spiritual sword into the scabbard, “for certainly an ecclesiastical judge ought not to use his spiritual sword precipitately for fear it might be despised, but only after much consideration and in circumstances of great necessity”—a cautionary monition to any pope, and to popes inclined to emulate Boniface, in particular.

The sixth cluster of arguments, consisting of claims that secular power serve only as means to spiritual ends, John follows Aristotle’s treatment of the relation between the moral and theoretical virtues, rather than (for example) Augustine’s more Platonic integration of human motivation under the rubric of love, whereby he denies the morality of any but those virtues founded on caritas. “The Lord appointed a king for the Jewish people at the same time as the priesthood or even before.” And even this king ruled in a mixed regime, not in a true, purely royal, regime, and the mixed regime’s aristocracy “rule[d] according to virtue” without the guidance of priests. Here, John shifts his earlier argument in favor of monarchy, recalling Aristotle’s teaching in Book III of the Politics, that monarchy “joined with aristocracy and democracy…is better than the pure form, because, in a mixed regime, all have some share in government,” and “through this sharing, the peace of the community is preserved” because “everybody loves a government of this type and watches over it.” John goes so far as to commend this regime to the Church itself. “It would certainly be the best constitution for the Church if, under one pope, many were chosen by and form each province, so that all would participate in some way in the government of the Church.” Further, a pure monarchy “easily degenerates into tyranny” because “perfect virtue is to be found in few.” God eventually shifted Israel’s regime to a pure monarchy at the request of the Israelites, but only “as if in displeasure…because they were rejecting a regime more beneficial to them.” Surely the papacy should not be organized in a manner appropriate to the Israelites in their condition of moral decline.

To the arguments in the seventh cluster, the ones based on a sort of hard-nosed realism, John reverses the reality. It is the prince who must, realistically, be “permitted to withstand the abuse of the spiritual sword as best he may, even by the use of the material sword, especially when abuse of the spiritual sword conduces to the mischief of the community whose care rests on the king”—as when a pope claims revenues needed to pay for defensive wars against foreign powers, whether pagan or Christian. “Otherwise, [the prince] would be ‘bearing the sword in vain.'” John defines “spiritual” as something whose “relationship to the divine spirit is through causality or concomitance”; for example, “the sacraments of the Church are spiritual as is their administration, because they contain grace and cause it.” Popes are entitled to tithe Catholic Christians for such a purpose; “it is by virtue of spiritual function that right to tithe is held.” As to the claim that clergy excel the laity in “intellectual power,” “if this is so, they ought not therefore dominate in everything but only in the higher and the better, namely, in spiritual matters.”

In his final five chapters, John turns first to a consideration of the donation of Constantine and to what it entitles popes to do. “Some people” claim that “by reason of this gift, the pope is emperor and lord of the world and that he can appoint kings”—for example, the king of France—and “get rid of them like an emperor.” To this, John replies that Constantine donated one province of his empire to the Church, and it was Italy, not France. What is more, “the donation was displeasing to God,” according to no less an authority than St. Jerome. Civil and doctrinal disorder followed in its wake. As far as France is concerned, although the Gauls submitted had to the Roman yoke, the Franks never did, in keeping with the meaning of their name, ‘fierce.’ And is the Roman Empire, even in its current iteration as the Holy Roman Empire, a sacrosanct thing? Even if the pope does rightly rule it, will it last? Hardly so, as “it seems to be quite expressly stated in Scripture that the Roman empire should fail just like any other.” And popes themselves are not entitled to perpetual rule. A pope can resign or be pushed out for good cause: If he proves “totally unsuitable or useless, or if some impeding condition such as insanity occurs later, he ought to seek release from the people or from the college of cardinals, which in this case stands in place of the whole clergy and people.” Were this not so, “what was instituted in charity would be warring against charity, should he continue to rule injuriously, causing evil and confusion in the church and imperiling his own soul.” God bestows the papacy, but “through human cooperation.” It is “in a certain degree way natural” that “some men have jurisdiction over others,” but that jurisdiction is both conferred and “may be taken away” by the consent of the governed. A pope’s priesthood is permanent, but his ‘popehood’ is not. He took an oath of office when he was elevated to the papacy; if he violates that oath he may rightly be removed. 

Some fearful souls worry that a book like this should not exist, making as it does “judgment about these issues concerning the pope.” To this John replies in proto-Kantian fashion, ‘Dare to know’: “I believe it not blameworthy to speak the truth”; in fact, “ignorance is dangerous,” not truth.

 

 

 

Note

1. He later refines this definition, writing that a regime is royal “only when whoever rules it does so according to laws he has himself made,” in distinction not only from tyranny but from what would later be called a ‘constitutional monarchy,” where the monarch “rules not according to his own will but according to laws which the citizens and others have made”—what Aristotle calls a ‘mixed regime’ or what John calls “a civil or political constitution, not a monarchical one.”