Sunday, 7 December 2008

How do Giles and John differ over property and dominion?

 

Giles of Rome and John of Paris shared a rich intellectual heritage, from which they both drew widely. In terms of influences, their combined scholarly output appears as a montage of Biblical scholarship, Christian theology (particularly St. Thomas and St. Augustine), canon law, Roman law, Parisian scholasticism, Aristotelian reasoning and Christian historiography. Yet their conclusions were very different, only united in their radicalism. The different uses to which their common intellectual inheritance was put is indicative of its self-contradictory nature. Their disagreement over property and dominion was part of a wider debate which centred on the fundamental relationship between the temporal and spiritual powers, particularized at this time in the argument over ‘sovereignty’ (Tierney) between Pope Boniface VIII and the French king Philip IV.

Giles of Rome has often been presented as performing the same role for Boniface VIII as Cardinal Humbert had for Gregory VII. The vindication and publication of absolute papal rights over both the temporal and spiritual spheres was certainly not a new phenomenon. However, aspects of Giles’ argument were novel, as was the vehemence with which he presented it. Giles started, as Humbert had, from the (to him) self-evident premise that the spiritual being had an intrinsic and immutable superiority over the material being. As he put it, “Temporal things are appointed towards spiritual ends and must obey spiritual ends and serve them”.  This view was also present in Aquinas -“the secular power is subject to the spiritual power as the body is to the soul” – but Giles brought in an Aristotelian notion of the appointment of temporal things to a specific end (teleosis). A third aspect of Giles’ intellectual inheritance was also present in this conception, stemming from Augustinian thought, as the ‘end’ in question was divine not temporal. Such was the nature of much of Giles’ (and John’s) work; the careful reconciliation of a wide range of intellectual sources into a coherent world-view appropriate to their age and political situation.

The argument for the genesis of absolute papal power, the unquestionable and unerring papal plenitudo potestatis, was obvious to Giles. (Some scholars have suggested that the strength of this conviction explains his repetitious style; he was making arguments for that which need not even be argued.) His argument for papal plenitudo potestatis ran: Jesus had commissioned Saint Peter to ‘Feed my flock’ and to act as vicarus Christi during Jesus’ earthly absence. The Papal office had been established to continue this divinely-commissioned task, and when a newly-elected pope conferred the powers of papal office (most notably the power of binding and loosing) onto his human self (for no one else on earth had the power to confer them), he became the “spiritual man” (1 Cor. 2:15) who “judgeth all things; and he himself is judged of no man.” Therefore the pope was necessarily lord (dominus) of all temporalities as well as all spiritualities. Indeed, for Giles, all political auctoritas (whether temporal or spiritual) was derived from the Supreme Pontiff. His dominium was truly the entire world. Moreover, the pope had the exclusive right to intervene in any human interaction in the temporal world ratione peccati.

There were, however, a number of well-established problems with this view, and Giles’ conception of property and dominion was partly intended to rebuke those who attacked the papacy’s regular forays into international secular politics. Giles showed how Christ had allowed the early church to own property and have wealth, as they were important means to the ultimate Christian end of salvation. Indeed, the ‘ordering’ of the world (in a strongly neo-Platonic sense) remained subservient to this end throughout Giles’ work: “the whole corporeal nature is ordered towards the spiritual”. As we would expect on this basis, revealed Divine wisdom was for Giles necessarily more universal than that wisdom based on reason (i.e. philosophy in the Aristotelian sense). Thus, Giles was able to maintain Augustine’s eschatological pre-eminence without denying all value to earthly order and government: “temporal goods are not good except insofar as they are ordered towards spiritual ends”.

As an important corollary to the justification of papal ‘intrusion’ (Giles would not have seen it as such) into secular politics, Giles argued that all property on earth was (ultimately) within the dominium of the pope, and that he was therefore their ultimate owner while on earth. Giles’ logic was formidably simple in coming to this conclusion. All souls were governed by the Pope (as current holder of the Petrine commission and vicarus Christi); bodies were necessarily subject to souls (Aquinas held this view); temporal goods existed to serve the body; therefore, all temporalities could trace a path (in terms of dominium) back up to the pope, just by virtue of his (unquestionable and humanly irrevocable) spiritual superiority. Natural property rights, as Aquinas had conceived of them, simply did not enter into the equation. Giles’ justification of this was Augustinian in character, if rather different in detail: natural law was the state of man before the Fall, but was in a sense ‘recovered’ by the coming of Christ. Therefore, a man’s natural right to property was utterly dependent upon his being “a spiritual son of the church”, and thus dominium was dependent upon grace. The taking of the sacraments kept a man in a state of grace, and thus kept him a dominus. This was particularly significant to excommunication, since if a man was denied the sacraments by the church, he would technically have surrendered his property rights. Furthermore, since Giles expressed a view that the pope himself was ‘in a sense’ (quodam modo) the church itself (by virtue of his position at the apex), he was the sum of all human property rights of himself.

The explosive implication of this logic in juristic terms was that any secular dispute could be referred to canon law, given that canon law was the law of the church, and the pope was the earthly head of the church (and, in a sense, was the church in juristic terms). If the Pope was truly concerned with the health of all men’s souls, and had the universal temporal and spiritual authority to rule over their temporalities, then why would he risk allowing any secular power structures, courts or interference? Giles answers this charge along Augustinian lines, namely, that temporal rulers and courts did not exist because of any defect in the pope’s spiritual power (which was by definition perfect since it came directly from God), but because it was inconsistent with the dignity and excellence of papal power itself to concern itself with the mundane aspects of the regulation of daily life. However, the pope reserved the right to exercise temporal jurisdiction (by virtue of his plenitudo potestatis) in special circumstances ratione peccati. Giles put this papal prerogative in no uncertain terms:

“The spiritual power can concern itself with all temporal things, since the just or unjust possession of such things are matters which bear upon the infirmity or health of souls.”

This argument, however, went a stage further. The pope, whose earthly role was the maintenance of “healthy souls”, had an implicit duty to intervene when a secular ruler was acting in a manner which threatened the health of any of the pope’s flock, who happened to be subject to the less meaningful secular laws of the ruler.

                Implicit within all Giles’ work is the abject lack of distinction between the concepts of iurisdictio and dominium. The papal right to “judgeth all men” in temporal and spiritual affairs implied, or, rather, was (in essence), the same as holding dominium over all their property. When men spoke of their ‘property’, they were simply speaking of their use of what really belonged to the pope, and ultimately to God. (This was a very Franciscan conception of property, which John of Paris would refute vehemently.) Indeed, if a man was not baptized, he did not even have a right to this use. His birth as a man was the result of the copulation of his parents as ‘secondary agents’, and his existence could only be explained in terms of his potential baptism. This absolutist hierocracy, whereby men only attain status by virtue of their relationship with the head of the just party (i.e. the pope) was a central tenet of Giles’ work, and the ultimate expression of plentido potestatis.

 

John of Paris drew a very different set of conclusions from the same stands of intellectual thought to which Giles of Rome had access. In order to understand fully John’s objection to Giles’ position on property and dominium, a brief excursus is required into John’s reading of Thomist metaphysics. Fundamental differences over the nature of man as a political animal underpinned Giles and John’s disagreement over how spiritual and temporal powers fitted together, and their understanding of natural law and its impact on human property rights. The most fundamental piece of property a man may own is his own being (whether conceived of as separate body and soul as Giles did, or composite body-soul as John did). We shall now turn to man’s ‘ownership’ of himself.

                Coleman has argued that the origins of John’s work were in a late thirteenth-century dispute between the Franciscans and Dominicans over the right of religious orders, in their imitation of the vita apostolica, to own property. Underwriting this debate was a metaphysical argument over how ‘man’ could be both an individual and a species simultaneously. Dominicans claimed that the body and soul were not separate, but intrinsically connected. They maintained that the soul of each man was immattered in a particular body, on the basis that sensational experience provokes thoughts and feelings (of the soul). The ‘world of things’ is a distinguishing feature of human existence only when it is actualized as human existence. Therefore, human acquisition is natural (and thus of God’s will) since it is not only a means to the survival of the body-soul composite (an irrefutable part of Thomist ‘nature’), but the very means to who people are individually – whilst remaining, in essence, one species. Indeed, the soul requires the actualization by objects (it cannot ‘be’ of itself), and (in strongly Aristotelian terms) man’s use actualizes matter through human labour and acquisition. In terms of property and dominium, there can therefore be no separation of the use (usus) and ownership (dominium) of property.

                This fundamental distinction which John had developed from Dominican theologians[1] and canonists working from the 1270s implied another fundamental rejection of Giles’ work, namely, the refusal on Giles’ part to recognize the distinction between iurisdictio and dominium (ownership). For John, each man is dominus of that which he acquires through “his own skill, labour and diligence, and individuals, as individuals, have right and power over it and valid lordship”. This idea had been espoused by the secular theologian Godefroid of Fontaines, but John justified it in terms of a Thomist interpretation of man’s natural condition. John took it to the extreme, when he claimed that “neither prince nor pope has lordship or administration of such properties”. This view was potentially at least as radical when applied to the French king, which lends credibility to Coleman’s argument that the majority of De Potestate was written during the 1290s in response to the work of Franciscan theologians, rather than a work primarily on behalf of the French king. One cannot imagine Philip IV taking the justification for his deposition lightly, in spite of John’s argument for papal deposition.

                John, as was the case with Giles, did not conceive of property without its Christian context. Indeed, it was only through John’s theological discussion of the nature of the church and papacy that he tackled ownership and property at all. John agreed that the pope possessed iurisdictio in matters of doctrine (in a sense the spiritual dominium), but did not possess iurisdictio by virtue of his papal status amongst temporalities. His arguments for this came predominantly from the Scriptures, although twelfth and thirteenth century canonists were also extremely significant.  Stemming from his Thomist conception of the unity of the human species, John contended that, just as in the temporal realm, the origin of the pope’s personal power (rather than the divinely-sanctioned power of his papal office) had its true locus in the congregatio fidelium. Nothing could have been further from Giles’ hierocratic presentation of absolute papal monarchy. For John, the pope was simply an administrator (procurator; dispensator) of possessions which the members of the elect owned in common. Even his personal (as opposed to that of his divinely-sanctioned office)  iurisdictio in spiritual matters actually derived from human delegation during the process of election. (John argued that during conclaves cardinals acted as representatives of the congregatio fidelium.) Interestingly, John had in one sense merely applied the principles which canonists had developed for thinking about the workings of the lesser parts of the church onto the whole entity itself. To put it another way, John claimed that as a bishop administers his diocese, so the pope administers the church. He is nothing but the steward of the universal church’s property:

“The pope is no more universal lord of all ecclesiastical property than are lesser prelate lords of the property of their chapters. The pope is in fact manager and steward of ecclesiastical property...he has no power therefore over this property, except such as the common necessity and welfare of the church requires.”

                John was careful to point out that as vicarus Christi, the pope did not have dominium over mankind, ratione peccati or otherwise. Christ was not a temporal lord (to think so was Herod’s fallacy), but a Lord in heaven. John writes, “Something can be attributed to Christ as God which was not in his power as a man.” Christ reigns over men’s souls by faith (ratione fidei), and did not communicate this power in the Petrine commission. Indeed, John was clear; “All the Apostles received the same power as Peter, as may be seen in Matthew 18.” The pope cannot claim to rule over temporalities as an extension of Christ or Peter’s power. Indeed, this is the king’s purpose, whose power also comes directly from God Himself. Since (by Aristotelian and subsequent Thomist reasoning), nothing can have more than one purpose, the pope is effectively attempting to usurp the king’s purpose by claiming dominium over temporalities. As John put it:

“It is inappropriate that one person alone should be entrusted with such diverse duties as the priestly function and the royal lordship.”

The Gospels had divided sacerdotal and temporal rules, in contrast to the Jewish faith which had explicitly combined them. John strengthened his argument by using the authority of the Church fathers. He quoted St. Bernard’s gloss of Luke 12:13-15:

“It cannot be shown that any of the Apostles [including Peter] ever sat as judge of men or as an adjudicator of boundaries or as a distributor or lands. I read that the Apostles had to stand as men under accusation; I do not read that they sat as accusers.”

Thus John set out, in explicit terms which used both the Scriptures and their official church interpretation, incontrovertible evidence first that the Pope (as the human executor of his divine office) was Peter’s heir (not Christ’s), and that he had no right to judge secular men in temporal matters.

                John pursued these natural limitations on papal power to their radical conclusions, demonstrating a facility to synthesise new arguments on proprietary rights where previous canonist scholars had focused more on pedantic detail. He went as far as to claim of the pope:

“As a man, he does not have communication or contact with those who are in the church; those who have given property to the church did not intend to transfer proprietary right and lordship to Christ with as God, because everything is already his, or as man, because he now has no use for such authority.”

The pope therefore did not even have the claim to appropriate even ecclesiastical property, since he is only steward, not dominus.  John, again, takes this argument to its most radical conclusion: “if the pope deprives anyone arbitrarily, not in good faith, what he does is illegal”. This view could not be further from Giles’ claim that the Pope has universal dominium and has a divinely-sanctioned duty to intervene in matters of property when the souls of the flock are at risk. Should the pope “betray his trust in taking the property of churches for reasons other than the common good, which as chief bishop is his especial charge, he can be deposed.” Scholars have pointed out that by the same logic, a king could be deposed for failing to attend to the temporal good of his subjects, and John is in agreement with this. The deposition of popes was not a Johnian innovation, and he relied heavily on the Si Papa treatise from the canonist Decretum in support of his stance.

 

                John and Giles reworked different strands of their intellectual heritage to promote very different ends. The main difference, perhaps the prism through which we should see their conceptions of property and dominion, was their respective emphases on the importance of natural law. Giles took a view from Augustine, whereas John looked to St. Thomas, although neither accepted all the conclusions of their predecessors. For John, the divine inspiration of natural law within men meant that, when considered together as a community, they constituted a locus of power that their lords (whether spiritual or temporal) could not match.



[1] Watt argues that up to one third of De Potestate is plagiarised from other writers. This is of little relevance since the argument remains consistent throughout.