By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Falkeid, Unn. The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History From Dante to Catherine of Siena. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. 269 pp. Cloth, $49.95.
This is the story of the Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) and of the seven Popes who governed the Church from Provence in southern France, but it is more than that. It is a chronicle of warfare, civic decay, and intellectual conflict in Europe as a whole. It is the period of war-torn Italy and of the Hundred Years’ War between France and Germany.
Early in the volume, Unn Falkeid identifies the chief protagonists of her narrative as Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Francis Petrarch, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, as she narrates a tale of conflict between lords spiritual and lords temporal.
The principle of two realms, clerical and secular, may have been universally recognized since the time of St. Augustine, but that did not prevent one order from attempting to dominate the other. Boniface’s Bull of 1302, Unum Sanctum, united Falkeid’s protagonists in opposition to what they considered exaggerated claims of papal authority.
It was during the Avignon period that the Church underwent an extraordinary process of centralization, a period of consolidation that may have prompted excessive claims of ecclesial power.
Falkeid devotes a chapter to each of her protagonists. Dante’s Inferno VI and his Monarchia are discussed at length. Dante, we are told, may have favored a separation of terrestrial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, but he also longed for a monarch capable of bringing peace, not only to a war-torn Italy but to the Continent. Universal peace requires a universal monarchy, he believed.
Dante had a romantic attachment to the old Roman Empire where, in his judgment, universal harmony existed at least during the government of Emperor Augustus. “Divine Augustus,” Dante calls him. The mark of a just ruler is humble service in the interest of people, something he found in Augustus.
A chapter on Marsilius of Padua follows that on Dante. Former rector of the University of Paris, physician, and confident of Ludwig of Bavaria, Marsilius is known in academic circles primarily for Defensor Pacis (1324), a tract regarded as one of the most important political treatises produced in the Middle Ages. Like Dante, he was a strong opponent of the doctrine of plenitudo potestatis. Unn Falkeid then provides a comparative reading of Dante’s Inferno VI and Marsilius’ Defensor Pacis.
Marsilius’ solution to conflict among the Italian city-states was not a call for a strong ruler or a prince of true virtue, something that Dante thought necessary. Marsilius belonged to the scholastic tradition, which held that instead of virtuous individuals, the common good is better served by strong institutions and the rule of law freely adopted.
Taking his lead from Aristotle’s Politics 3, he held that the proper efficient cause of the law is the people themselves, the universal body of citizens, or the prevailing part. It is the supreme will and consent of the citizens that validates their governance. Like Aristotle, Marsilius excludes young boys, women, strangers, and slaves from participation in the lawmaking process.
A well-tempered principality, Marsilius acknowledged, may be found under different regimes, that is, in monarchies, aristocracies, or polities. But when the common good is subjected to factional interests corrupt versions may be found in all three, namely, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.
The main reason for discord and lack of tranquility in Italy, Marsilius alleged, is something Aristotle could not have foreseen, namely, the Church’s interference in civic affairs by the Bishop of Rome, insofar as the Pope claimed universal jurisdiction.
The chapter on William of Ockham not only provides a discussion of his Breviloquium but offers some insight into the Franciscan Order and its divisions as it sorted out its mission within the Church.
Trained at Oxford, William is known in philosophical circles primarily as a logician and man of science. In matters ecclesiastical and on the present topic, Ockham acknowledged papal authority and regarded the papacy as a divine institution. He even allowed for papal influence in temporal matters, but only when the temporal sphere becomes adverse to the Christian faith or becomes evil. In general, he held, spiritual power is limited by the rights and liberties granted to mankind by God and by nature. What has often gone awry in human history, Ockham explains in the Breviloquium, is the failure of authorities to acknowledge limits to their power. Human liberty for Ockham is an absolute, given that it exists by divine law.
Subsequent chapters are devoted to the work of Petrarch, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena. The three have in common the desire to see the papacy reestablished in Rome. As Petrarch insisted, Rome, not Avignon, is the true institutional, political, and cultural center of the Church.
Birgitta and Catherine followed his lead in their vast correspondence. It is not clear whether their many letters were persuasive, but Pope Gregory XI returned the papal court to the See of Peter in 1377.
This is a fine book. Readers of Unn Falkeid’s acclaimed Dante: A Critical Reappraisal know her as professor of the history of ideas at the University of Oslo. In the Avignon Papacy Contested she has condensed a wealth of scholarship, otherwise not readily available into a readable volume accessible to laymen, and one not without value to fellow scholars of the 14th century.
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