The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  The trio did not stop until they crossed into Bavaria, where the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV was engaged in his own dispute with the pope. They met in Munich, where according to legend William of Ockham said to the emperor, “Defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen.” Ludwig accepted the offer. For the rest of his life, William of Ockham would devote himself to defending not only the emperor’s autonomy but every other secular ruler’s from the presumptions of Saint Peter’s successors.17 He found an eager audience.

  Ludwig had already assembled a team of experts on ancient Roman law to help him assert his rights against the pope, including a shrewd Italian ex-doctor named Marsilius of Padua. Marsilius was working on a treatise called Defensor Pacis (Defender of the Peace), which was redrawing the conceptual boundaries between secular and sacred power, which had barely budged since the era of Constantine. But with his usual incisive skill, Ockham cut to the heart of the matter with a simple but significant question: Why does the papacy exist in the first place?

  The answer came to him from reading Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle asserts that a ruler, any ruler, must promote and defend the welfare of all those subject to his rule. Clearly the same obligation applied to the pope. This was why Christ had told Saint Peter, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). As shepherd of Christ’s flock, Ockham wrote in late 1339, the pope “has authority from God only for preserving, not for destroying” the Catholic Church and faith.18

  Therefore, if a particular pope proved unable to do his job; if his actions or behavior brought the Church into danger or disrepute, as Pope John XXII’s clearly had—and Pope Benedict’s before him—then, Ockham concluded, the Church could dictate that he must go and have someone else take his place. By its nature as a community (the term he used was congregatio), the Catholic Church retained the power to “judge and depose” a pope, even against his will or express command.19

  Pope John XXII, of course, had read “Feed my sheep” very differently. Like Boniface, he saw it as enshrining papal authority over the sheep of secular society, including its secular rulers. So William of Ockham proceeded to take his famous razor to Boniface’s arguments.

  The pope had no such plenitude of power, Ockham replied; the faithful are neither sheep nor slaves. Nor are there two swords, as Boniface had claimed. There is only one, the one that kings and magistrates use to govern and protect their subjects. In fact, Christ had specifically forbidden his apostles from exercising the same kind of authority over the faithful that kings exercised over subjects (Matthew 20:25–27).20

  By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise. What could the congregation of the faithful (congregatio fidelium) do about it? To Ockham, the answer was clear. Because it exists in the temporal realm, the rules of that realm as described by Aristotle must apply. If those appointed to head the Church fail to do their job, then the members of the congregatio have the power to choose a new one—just as they have the power to invest every ruler with his authority over them.

  “To understand this it must first be known that the power of making human laws and rights was first and principally in the people,” Ockham wrote in 1328, “and hence the people transferred the power of making the law to the emperor,” or whomever else they choose to exercise authority over them.21 All mortals who are born free have the power voluntarily to put a ruler over themselves, including the Church and the pope. But the final power remained with the people. So having put the pope in office, the people were now free to end “his raging tyranny over the faithful” and push him out.22

  Not surprisingly, Ockham’s writings earned him an excommunication. But since he was living under the protection of an emperor who was himself excommunicated, the sentence did not affect him much.§ At the same time, the more Europe’s secular rulers looked at Ockham’s arguments, including the emperor Ludwig, the more compelling they seemed—at least on the question of the pope’s authority over them. The emperor Ludwig put this to the test in 1328 when he traveled to Rome for his coronation and announced he was deposing Pope John XXII, residing in Avignon. Instead, Ludwig designated an elderly city father as Pope Nicholas V and proudly had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

  It was a daring move, but largely a bluff. Ludwig and Pope John XXII managed to patch up their differences, and the “papacy” of Nicholas V was over almost as soon as it began. However, the deeper issues raised by Ockham’s A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government remained. A new battle line had been drawn between the heirs of Aristotle and the heirs of Plato, this time over the power of the papacy. All that was needed was an excuse to sound the charge.

  It came in the early spring of 1378. The Church’s cardinals assembled in Rome for the first time in three-quarters of a century, to elect a new pope. The last, a Frenchman, had died at Avignon. The cardinals who met were bitterly divided between Frenchmen, who took pride in having the Holy See on French soil, and Italians, who did not.

  The mood in the Eternal City was ugly. Chanting crowds had gathered outside the Church of Saint John Lateran, where the cardinals were meeting. Over and over the mob shouted: “Choose a Roman! Choose a Roman!” At one point, exasperated by the delays and fearful that yet another Frenchman would be chosen as supreme pontiff, the crowd broke through the church’s great bronze doors and charged into the conclave chamber. The terrified cardinals hastily proclaimed that they had indeed chosen a Roman and adjourned to escape the mob’s wrath.‖

  Over the summer, the disgruntled French cardinals met again in Avignon. There they proclaimed that their vote for Pope Urban VI had been coerced and was therefore illegal. On September 20 they chose their own pope, a Frenchman who took the name Clement VII.a The Great Schism was on.

  Europe had two popes, each claiming his share of church tithes and revenues; each claiming the power of appointment to church offices; each insisting that Catholics treat him as sole supreme pontiff. Two popes, in other words, when one would do. To many, that sounded like a problem for the Invincible Doctor himself, William of Ockham. Unfortunately, he had died in 1348, when the Black Death swept across Germany. However, his Ockhamist followers were free to bring up his solution to papal tyranny as a way to solve the problem of the Great Schism—namely, a general church council.

  A church council was hardly a novelty. The emperor Constantine had summoned the first back in 325 at Nicaea. For centuries, however, it was the supreme pontiff who called church councils into existence and ordered them to carry out the papal agenda, as part of his “fullness of power” over the Church. Certainly no bishop or abbot or professor of theology who attended one had ever thought of himself as an elected representative of the faithful, let alone as empowered to depose a pope if he felt so inclined.

  Yet that was exactly what William of Ockham claimed they were empowered to do. Council members were ex officio intermediaries between the faithful and the pope, acting on behalf of the body of the Church to protect it from harm. This was why if a pope was a notorious heretic, “a general council can be summoned without the authority of the pope to judge and depose” him, Ockham had said.23

  In the turmoil of the Great Schism, Ockham’s disciples took this a step further. Since the Church is “greater than the Pope,” wrote Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, this meant the power to make decisions on the Church’s behalf “remains at all times within the body of the Church” or anyone it delegated to act in its name, including a church council.

  Therefore, “a General Council can be summoned without a pope,” Gerson declared, since its powers and its members come directly from the congregatio fidelium, or the people themselves—a power the people never relinquish as long as they exist and which no pontiff, no matter how exalted, can take away from them.

  It was a sweeping and revolutionary concept. In 1378, medieval Europe had more than its share of what we call representative institutions, the most famous being England’s Parliament. The
se were all, however, outgrowths of feudal society and seen as articulations of its hierarchy and separate functions. No one had spoken of these bodies as somehow embodying the will of the people. For the first time, Europeans had a clear notion of a body of representatives chosen to act for the entire community, including the power to depose a ruler and replace him with another.

  After much negotiation and debate, in March 1409 a general council met in Pisa to resolve the schism according to the new formula. The members were not elected by any democratic means we would recognize. Most were chosen outright by the Holy Roman Emperor and other crowned heads. Still, the church council at Pisa did have the power to make all decisions by a simple majority vote.24 After it voted to depose the two popes in Rome and Avignon and declare the papacy vacant, it appointed Pope Alexander V to fill the post. When the delegates went home, it looked as though the Catholic Church had become Europe’s first constitutional monarchy.

  However, the two popes in Avignon and Rome refused to be deposed. So instead of two popes, the Pisa council had now given Europe three. The arguments and bickering continued, and what was now called “the conciliarist movement” fell apart almost as quickly as it had started. The kings of France and England, and the Holy Roman Emperor, struck their own private deals with the quarreling popes, promising to reinforce papal authority in exchange for control over their own national churches. When the next church council met at Constance in 1414, it resolved the schism by affirming rather than denying the pope’s absolute sovereignty over his Church. The heretic Jan Hus, whose religious views were a kind of theological outgrowth of conciliarism, was brought to Constance and burned at the stake.

  Europe returned to a single pope as well as the idea of the successor to Saint Peter as supreme head of the Church. Today it is popes who summon and dismiss church councils, not the other way around. Still, for a few crucial years a weak and divided Catholic Church came very close to being rebuilt along the principles of Aristotle’s Politics, thanks to Ockham and his disciples. Later, their arguments offered powerful ammunition to religious reformers during the Reformation.25

  Even more ironical, the notions of Ockham, Gerson, and Marsilius of Padua about the importance of popular consent and elected bodies acting for the people would boomerang back at the very same crowned heads who had used them to humble the Holy See. Ockham himself had said that protecting the public interest was the primary function of any government, not just the Catholic Church. If the pope’s powers were granted only as a matter of convenience, not as a permanent handover of sovereignty, then the same principle applied by analogy to lay rulers. In 1518, Ockham’s admirer Jacques Almain would write, “All sovereignty, lay as well as ecclesiastical, is instituted for the benefit not of the ruler but of the people.” The power to decide what that benefit is ultimately belongs to the people themselves. For a “free people is not subjected to anyone,” Almain would affirm, nor can anyone take away that fundamental freedom.26

  A century after Pisa, the monarchies that had used the arguments of Ockham and the conciliarists to beat the Catholic Church into submission would end up having the very same arguments used against them. A full-fledged theory of popular sovereignty broke surface for the first time in the sixteenth century in the writings of Almain and his colleague John Mair and then more explosively during the Reformation. It resurfaced again in the seventeenth century in authors like John Locke.

  Thus over time, the idea slowly took root that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” However, its advocates argued, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it” through their representatives “and institute new government,” organizing it as they see fit to provide for their safety and happiness.

  If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.27

  Even with the eclipse of conciliarism, the fact remained that by 1400, Aristotle reigned supreme in Europe’s universities and its intellectual life. Plato and the great exponents of Neoplatonism were still treated with enormous respect, especially Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard. University schoolmen would read Aristotle’s Metaphysics or On Interpretation inside buildings built in an international Gothic style like Merton College at Oxford, the stone-and-stained-glass tribute to the theology of light.

  All the same, “only Aristotle,” wrote Roger Bacon, “together with his followers, has been called The Philosopher in the judgment of all wise men.” Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.”

  He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (whose works were rehabilitated when he was canonized in 1323). Finally, the student would write up his own series of quaestiones, or logical debating points, that seemed to arise from the text, and which were themselves reflections on past scholars’ debates on Aristotle.28

  All this not only prepared the student for attaining his own academic degree, it also prepared him for passing down that same knowledge and the same commentaries to the next generation of students. Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize. The same was true of his equally dull commentators. In this way, the insights of Duns Scotus and Porphyry and Averroës and many lesser minds were preserved alongside Aristotle’s own writings, as pillars of an unchallengeable intellectual tradition.b

  By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

  Aristotle had become so indispensable to the life of the European mind that it seemed impossible he could ever be yanked out. However, what the medieval mind gained in certainty, it gave up in terms of curiosity and innovation. The study of nature was reduced to a science of final causes, and the last word on that subject, as on all subjects, was Aristotle, now dead for one thousand years. Imagination and creativity fled. The Aristotelian empirical spirit of Ockham and Roger Bacon was replaced by the dead letter of Aristotle himself. By the end of the Middle Ages, it had hardened into an arid virtuosity without passion or piety or joy. When Adam Smith arrived at Oxford in the 1740s, he was stunned to discover that students were using the same textbooks that William of Ockham had known four centuries before.

  Two spheres of late medieval life, and two spheres only, managed to escape Aristotle’s dry encyclopedic grasp. The first was the papacy in Rome. The defeat of conciliarism meant that popes could still speak of their absolute power, or plenitudo potestatis, in Neoplatonic terms, as an emanation from a celestial hierarchy giving them unquestioned sway over the community of the faithful. Even under the Borgias and the Medici, when the papal curia sank to new lows of corruption, no one dared to question the spiritual vision embodied in the Holy See. It was an intellectual environment in which, for all its hypocrisies and limitations, the soaring imagination of a Michelangelo and a Raphael could suddenly catch fire.

  The other place was the mystical tradition of Christian Neoplatonism. Driven from the universities, it found refuge in a totally unexpected place: the homes and hearts of Europe’s working families.

  * * *

  * Des
pite his Germanic name, Grosseteste was born in Suffolk around 1168 and studied at Paris as well as Oxford. When he returned home from Paris, he set up the first Franciscan school at Oxford in 1229.

  † There is some dispute about exactly where he actually came from. There is also a village named Ockham in northern Lincolnshire; some claimed he hailed from there instead of the tiny hamlet in Surrey on the road to Portsmouth, between Wisley and Riply.

  ‡ Or so it was believed; the Vatican had documents to prove he had. No one guessed in 1302–05 that the so-called Donation of Constantine was a forgery.

  § It was officially rescinded by an Avignon pope, Innocent IV, in 1359.

  ‖ They had lied. They did choose an Italian, however, the archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI.

  a Not to be confused with a late Medici pope, Clement VII (1523–34).

  b Peter Lombard’s Sentences, written in 1148–51, remained the standard textbook on theology at the Sorbonne until the end of the seventeenth century.

  C. Amberger, A Patrician Lady: the new face of Neoplatonist piety

  Sixteen

  ARISTOTLE, MACHIAVELLI, AND THE PARADOXES OF LIBERTY

  The Florentine people thought there could never be a life for them without liberty.

  —Leonardo Bruni, 1403

  The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

  We see their faces in the paintings of the Flemish masters Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, and Rogier van der Weyden. Sober, intelligent, and pious faces: the faces of merchants, shopkeepers, minor nobles, and sturdy city fathers—and city mothers. They are the faces of the devotio moderna.*