Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 269 - Our Power is Real - The Clash of Church and State.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Our Power is Real, The Clash of Church and State. At the turn of the 14th century, Giles of Rome found himself on the wrong side of history. He was a steadfast supporter of Boniface VIII, the pope who fought a losing political battle with the French king Philip IV, known as Philip the Fair. It's safe to say that it wasn't Boniface who gave him that nickname. Reacting to the taxes levied on church property by Philip, and also the English crown, Boniface issued what I can't resist calling an angry papal bull, or even a whole herd of bulls, a series of documents commanding secular kings to bend to the authority of the papacy. In 1301, he wrote that as pope he was, "... placed above kings and kingdoms, with the responsibility and right to uproot and destroy, to disperse and scatter, to build and to plant." Invoking a biblical metaphor familiar to us from an earlier episode, Boniface argued that the church is given two swords of spiritual and temporal power. If kings wield temporal power, it is on behalf of the church, and at the command and by the permission of the priest, as Boniface put it. But Philip was not cowed. As one of his representatives put it when speaking to the pope, "... your power is verbal, ours however is real." The king showed this power by having Boniface arrested leading to the pope's death in 1303. It was commented that Boniface took the papacy like a fox, ruled like a lion, but died like a dog. It may surprise you to hear that medieval kings were standing up to the pope like this, and coming out as victors into the bargain, in the deeply religious medieval age. We are apt to think of the separation of church and state as a distinctively modern idea, but the medieval's would need no lessons from us on this score. At the turn of the 14th century, the church and the medieval states were not just separate, but at each other's throats. We know from our earlier discussion of the clashing of these two swords that this struggle was a constant of medieval culture, and really an inevitable one, given the substantial involvement of clerics in the temporal sphere, with vast landholdings and military forces at their command. Besides, the whole point of being a king or an emperor is that you don't answer to anyone. Such a monarch is the supreme authority in his sphere of action. Remember that this was even used to explain why wars must be fought, because there is no higher court of appeal to resolve conflicts between rulers. And then the pope comes along and says to these rulers, no actually, they answer to him and their otherwise supreme power is exercised at his behest and at his discretion. For the secular theorists in the debate, the problem was saying where royal power and authority did come from if not from the pope. Their answer was that such authority is granted directly by God. This is the kind of historical irony I really cherish. The idea that kings have a divine right to rule seems an obvious example of the way that religion and politics were intertwined in earlier times. Yet the idea was, to no small degree, put forward in order to resist the rival claims of the church. This is not to deny that compromise positions were available. A figure often seen as a moderate in the debate was John of Paris, whose on royal and papal power was written at the height of the confrontation between Pope Boniface and King Philip. John resists the urge to subordinate one power to the other. For him, the secular ruler and the pope receive their authorities separately from God, having dominion over temporal and spiritual concerns respectively. Each must take the lead within his own sphere. This may sound closer to the secularist position, since it would mean that the pope should stay out of temporal affairs, yet John also points out that each of the two powers is subject to correction by the other. A king might depose a wicked pope, a pope excommunicate a wicked king. Like an unenthusiastic accountancy student, Giles of Rome had no interest in such checks and balances. His treatise on the power of the church is as forthright a defense of the pope's position as you could hope to read, which is not particularly surprising given that it was dedicated to Boniface himself. Giles explicitly aims to prove the superiority of the spiritual order to the temporal order, and hence of the pope to all secular rulers. The pope wields both swords, though he allows secular rulers to use the sword of temporal authority at his command. Giles sees here a parallel to the relationship between soul and body. It is because of our dual nature, both spiritual and physical, that we fall under two kinds of authority, spiritual and temporal. But the church has spiritual authority over all human souls, and the temporal order is subordinate to spiritual authority just as a human's body is subordinate to that human soul. After all, the soul rules the body with the limbs moving as the soul dictates. In Aristotelian terms, Giles is here suggesting that church authority is an efficient cause of temporal affairs. It sets them in motion like the soul moves the body. But final causality is also relevant. Our ultimate goal, as humans, is a spiritual one, namely the soul's ultimate beatitude. Here Giles is recalling a doctrine of his teacher, Thomas Aquinas, and putting it to political ends. Our final end is the contemplation of God, and obviously it is not any secular king, but the head of the church who guides us towards that end. On this basis, Giles also rejects any notion that there could be two parallel orders that operate independently of one another. We have only one final end, not two, and all temporal goods must be used in pursuit of the single spiritual goal shared by all humankind. An Aristotelian example might be that we should value money, a temporal good, only because it helps us display virtues, like generosity. But the implications of Giles' theory might better be illustrated with a case like the Crusades, where the military might of kings was used to achieve an objective set by the papacy and the soldiers were promised a heavenly reward, namely the remission of their sins. The chance of seizing a few temporal goods in the shape of landholdings or booty was, in theory at least, merely a welcome bonus. Giles' defense of papal supremacy invokes another idea familiar from Aquinas, the subordination of the sciences. We saw that for Aquinas, theology is the highest of all disciplines and gives principles to lower philosophical sciences. Giles has a similar idea, which he applies especially to the philosophy of nature. Physics is a lower science than metaphysics because it is more restricted in its scope. The student of nature studies only bodily things, whereas the metaphysician studies all things, both spiritual and bodily. In much the same way, the concerns and the authority of secular kings are particular and parochial, where the concerns and authority of the pope is universal. Giles goes so far as to suggest that the pope's universal rule over humankind is like God's rule over the created universe. God rules over all things, and natural causes are inferior to the supreme divine cause. In fact, a natural cause, like fire or an animal that generates another animal, involves what we might call delegated power. This is secondary causation, which derives ultimately from God's primary causal power and is always subject to being overturned by that power, which is what happens in a miracle. Also, the pope may frequently allow secular affairs to proceed as if they were independent, but he can always assert his ultimate authority if he wishes. We see this when he refrains from intervening in secular court cases, though he does have final authority which could be brought to bear when answering an appeal from a temporal judge. Just as God voluntarily restricts his own absolute power by usually exercising his power within an ordained set of natural laws, so the pope lays down laws and statutes for the running of the church and voluntarily obeys these laws. Really though, he is above their jurisdiction because of what Giles explicitly calls his absolute power. But one can't help wondering, what if the pope is a complete jerk? Do we really want to put ourselves in a position where a vicious man can exercise such untrammeled and unchallenged authority? Giles confronts this question and in doing so makes a point of perennial relevance. We should distinguish between the moral standing of a person and the moral standing of the position of authority that a person may occupy. In other words, even if the current pope is a vicious man, the papacy as such retains its supremacy. Conversely, the fact that some other person may have great moral virtue does not give that person spiritual authority. As Giles says, just the fact that you're a great singer doesn't make you the cantor in your local church. You have to be awarded the office. Here Giles may seem too relaxed about handing great power to wicked men. In a slightly earlier work called On the Abdication of the Pope, Giles had argued that popes are given their position through election by the cardinals and thereafter can be removed only voluntarily, that is, by abdication, the sole exception being popes who fall into heresy. Still, his comments on separating the dignity of the office from the moral status of the office holder can be read as a refreshing change from much ancient and medieval political writing which tended to emphasize above all the moral character of the ideal ruler. This is ironic, since Giles was himself a significant contributor to that moralizing tradition. Years prior to his defense of papal authority, he had written a work called On the Government of Princes. This became a hugely popular text translated into numerous European vernacular languages and preserved in about 300 manuscripts. It is an example of the so-called mirror-for-princes genre, texts that give moral and practical advice to rulers and aspiring rulers. Drawing extensively on Aristotle's ethical and political writings, this earlier treatise sees Giles arguing for the supreme rule of the secular monarch. This isn't necessarily in direct contradiction with the later treatise On the Power of the Church, since there Giles will recognize that the king is at the top of the temporal hierarchy, even if that whole hierarchy is subordinate to spiritual authority. But in a third work, his commentary on the sentences, Giles makes some remarks that cast doubt on the moralizing project of his mirror-for-princes. In Our Fallen State of Sin, he says, all secular authority is inevitably coercive and character. If a temporal ruler claims to rule with a view to the common good, this is always a pretense since post-Lapsarian humans are inevitably selfish in their motives. This is contrasted to the situation before the fall, when, Giles contends, Adam was in position of rule over Eve because men are superior to women, but this rule was based on mutual love, so involved no coercion. For a far more optimistic attitude towards secular rule, we can turn back to Dante Alighieri. Dante's political theory is diametrically opposed to that of Giles of Rome. Where Giles championed the cause of Boniface VIII, Dante condemned this pope to hell. Where Giles placed secular rule under the universal authority of the papacy, Dante puts all his trust in the universal, but temporal, rule of an emperor. His arguments to this end are presented in a work composed in Latin called On Monarchy. As one scholar wrote shortly after World War II in this work, the rights of the secular state as against Vatican direction are maintained with an emphasis that would have shocked Aquinas, but was destined to be quoted with many a chuckle by Benito Mussolini. Dante hoped that his theory would find historical embodiment in the person of Henry VII of Luxembourg, a Holy Roman Emperor whose invasion of Italy was greeted with great enthusiasm by Dante. In the Paradiso, he would immortalize Henry and lament the ultimate failure of imperial rule in Italy by having Beatrice say that, in heaven shall sit the soul of noble Henry, he shall show Italy the righteous way, but when she is unready. The contrast between Giles of Rome and Dante gives us a nice example of the fact that the same premise can be used to reach very different conclusions. Like Giles, Dante avails himself of the idea that humankind in general shares a single end, the perfection of our intellectual capacities. Since we all have this goal in common, there should be a single political order which seeks to help us along to reach our shared objective. This means that we should have a single ruler, whose imperial authority should ideally stretch over the entire earth, bounded only by the ocean, as Dante puts it. Like Giles, Dante sees a parallel here to the providential rule of the one God over the universe. There are many advantages to be expected from this political arrangement. Peace will reign without multiple political entities competing for domination. The sole ruler will also be without greed, because his power will be so supreme that there will be nothing left for him to desire. And there are more abstract, dare I say philosophical, justifications for a single imperium. Dante refers to the theory of transcendentals, reminding us of the scholastic teaching that unity correlates to goodness. This shows that a single rule is also the best rule. Furthermore, he cites the Neoplatonic work called the Book of Causes for the idea that the higher a cause, the further its reach should be. It follows that the highest political rule must reach to all things. Dante thinks that Aristotle would agree with him about all this, which is less than entirely convincing given that Aristotle conceived of politics within the context of a city-state or polis, a far smaller political entity than a world-spanning empire. For Dante, the real ancient model is of course not Athens, but Rome. He thinks that divine providence settled on Rome as the center of imperial authority, something shown even by the fact that King David was supposedly born at the same time that Aeneas, again supposedly, founded the city of Rome. You might complain that Rome was for many centuries a republic and not the seat of empire. To this Dante would triumphantly remind you that Christ himself was born during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. What could be a greater indication of God's approval? On the last page of On Monarchy, Dante somewhat grudgingly admits that the emperor owes respect and deference to the pope as a son does to his father. But apart from this, ecclesiastical power appears in the work solely as an undesirable obstacle to the imperial project. Dante here reflects on the tensions between the papacy and secular rule in his own lifetime. He rejects the biblical interpretation that has two swords being put in the hands of the church and denies that political authority was ever in the gift of the church, either by nature or by divine command. Where Giles of Rome referred to the Old Testament passages to prove that kings were invested with their office by priests among the Hebrews, Dante points out that the Christian church arose only after the establishment of the Roman Empire under Augustus. This obviously shows that imperial authority cannot derive from the command of the popes, since the church didn't even exist when imperial authority was originally, and most successfully, exercised. Just as there has been scholarly controversy as to whether the philosophical ideas of the convivio are retained in the divine comedy, so interpreters don't agree about the relationship between the Dante of On Monarchy and the Dante of the Comedy. It's been proposed that On Monarchy represented a passing phase of enthusiasm for secular rule with a more theological attitude emerging in the famous poem. But there are numerous signs that Dante's political attitudes remained fairly constant throughout his career. He champions the Roman Empire in the convivio as well, and in both On Monarchy and in the comedy decries the idea that the Emperor Constantine placed the western realms of Christendom under the power of the papacy. Even if Constantine did this, he had no legitimate standing to do so, since the realms of the empire must remain united and under a sole temporal ruler. Dante even has Constantine appear in Paradise to admit his error. And just in case we're not yet sure how Dante feels about the medieval papacy, Canto 19 of Inferno predicts the damnation of Boniface and treats us to the spectacle of another pope being punished for simony by being buried head down in the earth with his legs and feet writhing as they are burned by flames. While it would be hard to imagine anyone taking a firmer stance against the misdeeds of the church, we're about to meet another Italian who gave it a good try. Our next author will be just as staunch in his advocacy of secular authority and just as implacably opposed to the political claims of the popes. But he will do more than either Giles or Dante to advance the theoretical justification of legitimate political rule. Exiled from his life as a scholastic in Paris, this scholar made his way to a city that still today offers a refuge for wandering philosophers, Munich. So get ready to say a hearty Grüskot to Marsilius of Padua next time here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.