The Theory of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Contribution of the Canonists

Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 179-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Watt
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The work of the medieval canonists has always formed a significant chapter in the histories of medieval political thought. The law of the Church and its attendant juristic science forms the proper source material for the examination of the system of ideas which lay behind the functioning of papal government. Ecclesiastical jurisprudence was the practical branch of sapientia Christiana. It was concerned with a constitution and the exercise of power within its terms; with an organization and the methods by which it was to be run. It had of necessity to be articulate about the nature of the papacy, the constitutional and organizational linchpin. In consequence the canonists were the acknowledged theorists of papal primacy. To them rather than to the theologians belonged that segment of ecclesiology which treated of the nature of the Church as a visible corporate society under a single ruler. In that period of nearly a century which lay between the accession of Alexander III and the death of Innocent IV, canonists were required to register the increasingly numerous and more diverse applications of papal rulership to the problems of Christian society. The concept of papal monarchy came to be reexamined in academic literature because of the accelerating tempo of papal action. Under the stimulus of an active papacy, the canonists were led to examine many of the assumptions on which the popes based their actions and claims. The world of affairs conditioned the evolution of a political-theory, which in turn helped to shape the course of events.

History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Stuart Gray
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Locus Classicus

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

University Education and English Ecclesiastical Lawyers 1400–1650

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Helmholz
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
University Education ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Negative Opinion ◽  
Ius Commune ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Academic Study

Most recent historians have expressed a negative opinion of the quality of legal education at the English universities between 1400 and 1650. The academic study of law at Oxford and Cambridge, they have stated, was easy, antiquated and impractical. The curriculum had not changed from the form it assumed in the thirteenth century, and it did little to prepare students for their careers. This article challenges that opinion by examining the inner nature of the ius commune, the law that was applied in the courts of the church, and also by examining some of the works of practice compiled by English civilians during the period. Those works show that the negative opinion rests in part upon a misunderstanding of the nature of legal practice during earlier centuries. In fact, concentration on the texts of the Roman and canon laws, as old-fashioned as it seems to us, was well suited for the tasks advocates and judges would face once they left the academy. It also provided the stimulus needed for advance in the law of the church itself; their legal education made available to potential advocates and judges skills that would permit a sophisticated application of the ius commune, one better suited to their times. The article provides evidence of how this happened.1

William of Auvergne and the Manichees

Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 63-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland J. Teske
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Latin West ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Church ◽  
Scholarly Attention

William of Auvergne became a master of theology in the University of Paris in 1223 and was appointed bishop of Paris by Gregory IX in 1228. William governed the church of Paris until his death in 1249, while continuing to write the works which constitute his immense Magisterium divinale et sapientiale. Despite the fact that he was the first of the thirteenth-century theologians to appreciate the value of the Aristotelian philosophy that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, his writings have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Étienne Gilson has sketched well the impact of the influx of Greek and Arabian philosophical works into the Christian West: Up to the last years of the twelfth century, when the Christian world unexpectedly discovered the existence of non-Christian interpretations of the universe, Christian theology never had to concern itself with the fact that a non-Christian interpretation of the world as a whole, including man and his destiny, was still an open possibility.

Saint Francis of Assisi’s Repair of the Church

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Anne Kirkham
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Lateran Council ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Saint Francis ◽  
The Church

A round 1230 Burchard of Ursperg, a Premonstratensian canon, writing about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), reported that ‘with the world already growing old, two religious orders arose in the Church – whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. The success of the Franciscans in contributing to what Burchard saw as the renewal of the Church’s youth was simultaneously assisted and celebrated by documenting the life of the founder, Francis (1182–1226), in words and images soon after his death and throughout the thirteenth century. Within these representations, the pivotal event in securing Francis’s religious ‘conversion’ was his encounter with the decaying church of San Damiano outside Assisi. His association with the actual repair of churches in the written and pictorial accounts of his life was a potent allegorical image to signal the revival of the Church and the role of Francis and his followers in this. This essay focuses on how references to the repair of churches were used to call attention to the role of the Franciscans in the revival of the Church in the thirteenth century.

7. St Augustine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Just War ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Orientations ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Augustine of Hippo's political thought. After providing a brief biography of St Augustine, it considers the fate of his texts within the world of academic political theory and the general suspicion of ‘religious’ thinkers within that world. It then analyses Augustine's understanding of the human person as a bundle of complex desires and emotions as well as the implications of his claim that human sociality is a given and goes all the way down. It also explores Augustine's arguments regarding the interplay of caritas and cupiditas in the moral orientations of persons and of cultures. Finally, it describes Augustine's reflections on the themes of war and peace, locating him as the father of the tradition of ‘just war’ theory.

Negotiating Knightly Piety: The Cult of the Warrior-Saints in the West, ca. 1070–ca. 1200

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. MacGregor
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Violent Behavior ◽  
The West ◽  
Proper Equilibrium ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

Around 1184, Alan de Lille composed a sermon addressed to Europe's knights (Ad milites) as part of a treatise on the art of preaching (Ars praedicandi). In it, Alan condemned the felonious and violent behavior of Western warriors and reproached them for their mistreatment of the poor and the Church—the very groups that knights ought to protect in an ideal Christian society. According to Alan, such actions must cease and knightly behavior must be reformed. Using scriptural precedent, he encouraged knights to consider their spiritual welfare by articulating a difference between internal and external military service. Knights, if they wish to be soldiers of God, must wield both temporal and spiritual arms: the former to protect the Church and their homelands, the latter to combat the enemies of their souls. Balance between the two was essential since external service (earthly combat) was empty and meaningless without its internal counterpart (spiritual combat). By ensuring the proper equilibrium, knights could fulfill their assigned role in the world while actively working to ensure their own salvation.

Two Currents in Contemporary English Political Theory

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Peardon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
Eric Voegelin

There is widespread discontent today with the state of English political theory. This does not seem to have been so a generation ago. In 1915, Ernest Barker certainly revealed uneasiness about some intellectual tendencies of the time, but his overriding belief was that the new psychology and the new awareness of the personality of groups within society would enrich thinking in the long run. Ten years later, Lewis Rockow was distinctly optimistic at the end of his Contemporary English Political Thought. Having surveyed the first quarter of this century, he was impressed by “the richness of the contemporary mind” and the boldness of its political speculation. How different is the self-judgment of our own day. “In the present generation,” declared Professor Catlin in 1952, “England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries.” There were only a few men—Laski, Barker, Oakeshott, E. H. Carr—whom he would put in a high category, while apart from them he went on to say, “a drear darkness has fallen on British political theory which was so bright.” A little later, and speaking of the world in general rather than of England alone, Professor Cobban lamented “a general tendency to cease thinking about society in terms of political theory.” He could find no original thought since the eighteenth century and concluded that the idea of democracy had become a mere shibboleth—and not even a serviceable one, since all camps used it. He felt that the study of politics had taken a wrong turn, being corrupted by a neglect of the moral element, by an indifference to the practical problems besetting men, and by a deep pessimism about the possibility of resolving the dilemma between “moral man and immoral society.” Eric Voegelin seems at first to strike a more cheerful note when he speaks of “the revival, not to say the outburst, of political philosophy at Oxford in recent years,” but his article is critical of some of its tendencies and even goes so far at one point as to refer to its “distressing state.”

Conciliarism, Republicanism and Corporatism: the 1415-1420 Constitution of the Florentine Clergy*

1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
The Church

A striking feature of fifteenth-century historiography is the manner in which accounts of political thought in this period have tended to follow two basically distinct courses. One group of historians has pursued the avenue of humanist political theory, primarily in Florence, running from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni at the beginning of the fifteenth century down to Machiavelli at its end, tracing the rise and decline of the republican ideal, or myth, in Florentine politics and from there into the mainstream of Western political theory. Another group has concerned itself with conciliar theory in the Church, pursuing its development through the councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel to its demise in the early sixteenth century. These historians, too, have connected conciliar thought to the broader course of Europe's political development.

The Statesmanship of Job: Puritan Joseph Caryl on Job as the Model Magistrate

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-230
Author(s):  
Adam M. Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
The People ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

This article examines English Puritan Joseph Caryl’s political reading of the biblical book of Job. In his era’s definitive commentary on that work, Caryl included parts of the book within the ‘mirror for princes’ genre, a long-standing genre focused on instructing current and future rulers. Focusing on Job 29, Caryl described Job as exemplifying what magistrates should pursue, why they should pursue it, and how they should do so, namely a ruler dedicated to justice, protective of the people and the church in an evil age, and an impartial administrator of the law. This article adds to the literature on English Puritan political thought, which has not directly addressed Caryl’s reading of Job, as well as contributing to present discussions on the characteristics of good rulers in present times.

American Political Thought and the Study of Politics

1957 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theory Lead

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

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