in matters of faith, and, in that case, acknowledged the competency of the judgment of the entire Church.1 It was thus possible that at the University of Paris a decided opposition should establish itself, which led, e.g., to the Pope being charged with heresy in connection with a doctrine of John XXII. The indefiniteness in which many Church doctrines (and theories of practice, e.g., in regard to ordination) still stood, and the hesitating attitude which the Popes assumed towards them, also prevented the dogmatic authority of the papacy from being taken as absolute. Although the falsification of history, by the publication of historic accounts that painted over in an incredible way the great conflict between the papacy and the Empire, reached its climax about 1300,3 and the principles of the Thomist policy always received a fuller adoption, the decisive question of the infallibility remained unsolved. From about the year 1340, indeed, the literature in which the papal system was delineated in the most extravagant way,5 ceased entirely to be

1 See the admission in Eymerici Director. Inquis., p. 295 (cited in Janus, p. 295).. 2 See the question of reordination in connection with "Simonists."

3 Martin of Troppau and Tolomeo of Lucca.

4 Thomas, de regimine principum, continued by Tolomeo.

5 The most extreme works are those of Augustinus Triumphus, Summa de ecclesiast.. potest. (ob. 1328) and of the Franciscan Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiæ (ob. 1352). From the Summa de potestate eccl. of the former, and from the work de planctu ecclesiæ of the latter, Gieseler II., 3, 2 Aufl., p. 42 ff. and 101 ff., gives full extracts, which show that the glorification of the Pope could not be carried further in the nineteenth century. Augustinus asserted generally: "Nulla lex populo christiano est danda, nisi ipsius papæ auctoritate;" for only the papal power is immediately from God, and it embraces the jurisdictio et cura totius mundi. Alvarus carried the identifying of Christ with the Pope to the point of blasphemy, and at the same time declared the Pope to be the rightful possessor of the imperium Romanum from the days of Peter. At bottom, both distinguish the Pope from God only by saying that to the earthly "dominus deus noster papa" (see Finke, l.c., p. 44 ff.; observe that I have placed the word "earthly" before the expression, which indicates the trope here employed, so far as there is one), adoration is due only "ministerialiter." (Finke, 1.c., pp. 40-44, has objected to this last sentence, and believes he has refuted it from the source, Augustinus Triumphus. That, according to Augustinus, there belongs to the Pope the servitus summa [i.e., the Latreia, full divine worship] I have not asserted. But certainly Augustinus teaches that the Pope possesses participative and exercises ministerialiter the summa potestas [the dominatio, the divine power of rule]; in accordance with this therefore must the dulia also be defined which belongs to the Pope. Instead of the somewhat short expression "ministerialiter," which it would be better not to use, I should have

produced. Only after 120 years did it re-appear, when it was a question of rescuing and asserting the old claims of the papacy against the Council of Bâsle. It was then that Cardinal Torquemada wrote that defence of the papal system,1 which, resting on a strict Thomistic foundation, was still regarded at the period of the Reformation as the most important achievement of the papal party. But from the middle of the fifteenth century the papal system, as a whole, was again gathering power, after the storm of the Councils had been happily exorcised by the brilliant but crafty policy of Eugene IV. Only the French nation maintained what ground of freedom was already won in opposition to the Pope (Bourges 1438). The other nations returned, through the Concordats, to their old dependence on the Autocrat in Rome; indeed, they were, to some extent, betrayed just by their own local rulers, inasmuch as these men saw it to be of advantage in hastening their attainment to full princely power to take shares with the Pope in the Church of the country. This fate overtook, in the end, even the French national Church (through the concordat of Dec. 1516), and yet in such a way that the king obtained the chief share of the power over it. While, as the fifteenth century passed into the sixteenth, the Popes were indulging wildly in war, luxury, and the grossest simony, Cajetan and Jacobazzi wrought out the strictest papal theory, the former including in it the doctrine of infallibility. The hopes of the nations in the Council were said: “The adoration" belongs in the way in which it is due to him who shares in the divine power of rule, and exercises it as an instrument of God.)

1 De Pontifice Maximo et generalis concilii auctoritate; see also his Summa de ecclesia and the Apparatus super decreto unionis Græcorum.

2 Rome, however, always understood these concordats as acts of grace, by which only the party admitted to partnership was bound. Even at an earlier time this view was maintained by Roman canonists, and was deduced from the supreme lordship of the Pope over all men.

3 Think of the development of the territorial-prince system in the fifteenth century. Great rulers (Emperor Frederick III.) and small literally vied with each other, till far on in the sixteenth century, in injuring the independence of their national churches. The local princes derived a passing, but the Pope the permanent, advantage.

In the period of conflict between the Popes and the Councils the question about he infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith had retired into the background. At the Union Council at Florence it was not mentioned. Even Torquemada admitted the possibility of a Pope falling into a heresy; from this, however, he did not conclude

quenched, the old tyranny was again set up; it was complained, indeed, that the ecclesiastical despotism was worse than that of the Turks, but, nevertheless, men submitted to the inevitable. About the year 1500 the complaints were perhaps more bitter than at any other time; but the falling away was slight, the taking of steps less frequent. Heresy seemed to have become rarer and tamer than in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially after the Hussite movement had exhausted itself. The "heretics" so it appeared - had really become the "silent in the land," who shunned an open breach with the Church; their piety appeared less aggressive. "It was pretty generally felt that it had happened to the Church with the Reformation, as formerly it had happened to the King of Rome with the Sibylline books; after the seed of corruption sown by the Curia had, for fifty years, borne a much larger harvest, and the Church itself made no more effort to save it, the Reformation had to be purchased at a much heavier price and with still smaller prospect of success." The Lateran Council at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which treated with scorn all wishes of the nations and promulgated the papal theory in the strictest sense,2 as if there had never been councils at Constance and Bâsle, was tacitly recognised. But it was the lull before the storm-a storm which the Pope had yet to experience, who had entered upon his office with the words: "Volo, ut pontificatu isto quam maxime perfruamur." (It is my wish that we may enjoy the pontificate in the largest measure possible.) 3

Before the time of Thomas theology took no part in this im

that the council was superior to him, for a heretical Pope was ipso facto deposed by God. This impracticable, imbecile assumption was first rejected by Cajetan, who reverted to the doctrine of Thomas, which was based on fictitious passages from the Fathers, while he added himself a new falsification by suppressing the proposition laid down at Constance: " error est, si per Romanam ecclesiam intelligat universalem aut concilium generale." With him also originated the famous proposition, that the Catholic Church is the born hand-maid of the Pope.

1 Janus, p. 365.

2 The Pope, it is said in the Bull "Pastor acternus," has the "auctoritas super omnia concilia"; he alone may convene, transfer, and dissolve them.

3 On the handing down of this saying, see Janus, p. 381, n. 407.

posing development of the papal theory; even after him the share taken by it was small. The development was directed by jurisprudence, which founded simply on external, mostly forged, historic testimonies, and drew its conclusions with dialectic art. The meagre share of theology is to be explained on two grounds. First, Rome alone had a real interest in the whole theory; but in Rome theology never flourished, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. There was practical concern in Rome neither with Scripture exposition nor with the dogmatic works of the Fathers. Whoever wished to study theology went to France. For the Curia, only the student of law was of any account; from the time of Innocent IV. a school of law existed in Rome; the great majority of the Cardinals were well-equipped jurists, not theologians, and the greatest Popes of the Middle Ages, Alexander III., Innocents III. and IV., Boniface VIII., etc., came to the papal chair as highlyesteemed legal scholars.1 When it was now much too late, men with clear vision, like Roger Bacon, or pious patriots, like Dante, saw that the ruin of the Church was due to the decretals, which were studied in place of the Church Fathers and Scripture. The former, in particular, demanded very loudly that the Church should be delivered from the secularised Church law which was poisoning it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were complaints constantly made about the papacy, and about the corrupted Church law ("Jurists bad Christians") as being the real source of all evil. It was the spirit of ancient Rome that had settled down on the Mediæval spirit, that Roman spirit of jurisprudence, which had now, however, degenerated into a spirit of tyranny, and used as its means audacious forgeries. But the slight share of theology in the development of the hierarchical conception of the Church is to be explained not merely from the lack of theology, but, second, from the fortunate incapacity of theology (till past the middle of the thirteenth century) to lower itself to this notion of the Church. Anyone who reflected as a theologian on the Church, instituted researches into the works of the Church fathers, especi1 See Döllinger, Ueber das Studium der deutschen Geschichte (Akad. Vorträge II., pp. 407 ff., 418 f.

ally Augustine. But here the spiritual conception of the Church (i.e., the Church as corpus Christi [body of Christ], as multitudo fidelium [multitude of the faithful], as universitas Christianorum [entire mass of Christians]) came so clearly to view that for the time it riveted reflection, and there was failure to force one's way with any confidence to the hierarchical, not to speak of the papal, conception, or it was only touched on. This explains how all the great theologians before Thomas, from Anselm onwards, even those of Gregorian tendency, achieved as theologians very little in promoting the development of the hierarchical conception of the Church. They taught and wrote like Augustine, indeed they still remained behind him in precise definition of the Church as an external society. Theology did nothing for the development and establishment of the papal system till far on in the thirteenth century, and it may here be said at once in its honour, that with a single, and that even not a perfect, exception (Thomas), it did only half work in the time that followed, leaving the most to be done by the Post-Tridentine theology. So far as I know, there is nothing to be found in the theological writings of the Schoolmen in the shape of rounded off formulæ for, nothing of strictly systematic exposition of, the conception of the Church (as in the case of the doctrine of the Sacraments). On the other hand, both in Hugo St. Victor, and in the later Schoolmen also, not a few fundamental lines of proof with regard to the notion of the Church can be pointed to which were directly and without change taken over by the

1 See Hugo of St. Victor, de Sacr. II., p. II., c. 2 sq. In his Sentences the Lombard made no mention whatever of the papacy! So far as others dealt with the Church at all, even the firmness of Cyprian in apprehending the hierarchical notion of the Church was not reached. Numerous proofs in Langen, Das Vaticanische Dogma, 2. Theil. If Hugo differs from the other earlier theologians in entering more fully into a description of the Church, this has a connection with his interest in the Sacraments. What he says about the hierarchy and the Pope falls behind the Gregorian ideas, and therefore does nothing to advance them. Even about the relation of the Church (the Pope) to the State he has still evangelical ideas. And yet here, as elsewhere also, he must be held as in many respects the precursor of

Thomas.

2 It is amazing that in Thomasius-Seeberg (p. 196) the sentence: As in general, so also with regard to the Church, Scholasticism set itself the task of proving that what exists ought to exist," is followed at once by the other: "It must be emphasised here first of all, that Scholasticism does not know of a dogma of the Church."