The Accidental Pope

Jacques Fournier (c.1285 - 25 April 1342) was born in Foix, a county in the southern part of France. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, joined the Cistercians, and became abbot of the Cistercian Fontfroide Abbey in 1311. His organizational ability and intelligence brought him attention, and he was made Bishop of Pamiers in 1317.

As bishop he focused on rooting out Catharism, a heresy that was hanging on in his area. He helped Bernardo Gui and the Inquisition in this matter; the result was the Fournier Letters, records of the questioning that six centuries later became a best-seller. His efforts in fighting heresy brought him a promotion to Bishop of Mirepoix in 1326, and a cardinal a year later. While in Avignon, Pope John XXII—who was particularly concerned about magic—charged him with examining the works of William of Ockham, German mystic Meister Eckhart, Michael of Cesena, and others, looking for heresy.

Pope John died 4 December 1334; the Conclave was opened nine days later. The majority were ready to elect Cardinal Jean-Raymond de Comminges, but he had to promise not to return the papacy to Rome. Comminges would not make any prior commitments. The Conclave called his bluff by declaring their newest cardinal, Fournier, as a candidate. Because he was new, it was assumed he would not win an election. The Conclave should have planned more carefully: the vote was taken and Fournier won, surprising everyone who assumed they could vote for him but surely the majority would not, right?

Too late. The vote was legitimate, causing Fournier to exclaim "You have elected an ignoramus!" He took the name Benedict XII at his investiture on 8 January 1335. He worked hard to reform and standardize practices and expectations of the religious orders.

He died in his mid-50s, in 1342, but in his seven years as pope he accomplished a lot, and had a failure that led to one of the most defining events of the Middle Ages. We're going to take a look at the rest of his résumé tomorrow.

Making Stained Glass Windows

Creating sufficiently high temperatures needed to melt silica and fashion glass was difficult, but at some point we discovered that the addition of potash (potassium, from wood ash soaked in water), soda (sodium carbonate, from plant ash), and lead would lower the melting point, making production easier.

Now you have molten glass; how do you shape it?

The oldest stained glass windows were made from "muff" glass: a blob of molten glass, called a "gather," was placed on the end of the blowpipe. Using metal tools and wooden forms soaked in water, the glass was blown into a cylinder. The ends of the cylinder would be cut off, and the cylinder cut open so it could be flattened.

"Crown" glass (see illustration) started similarly with a gather of glass on the blowpipe; after introducing a bubble of air, the pipe would be spun back and forth quickly, causing the glass to spread out into a thin disk. This could also be accomplished by placing the molten glass on a contraption like a potter's wheel. The circle of glass could be cut to fit into square windows, or used round. Crown glass windows are recognizable because of the concentric circles formed during the spinning. They usually also have a "bull's-eye": the thicker blob at the center of the spun circle.

You may hear of "cathedral glass." This is rolled glass: molten glass poured onto a metal table and rolled thin with a metal roller. It was sometimes even put through a pair of rollers. This technique has nothing to do with medieval cathedrals, having been developed in the mid-1830s.

Coloring the glass was done by adding copper oxide (green or bluish green), cobalt (deep blue), or gold (wine red and violet). (Modern glass produces red using copper.)

For stained glass windows to survive wind pressure, it needed to be at least 3mm (1/8") thick. The production of red required a concentration of added material such that a 3mm window had so much coloring that the red was very dark; it could be mistaken for black without a very strong light source. This prompted the development of "flashed glass": adhering a thin pane of red to a thicker pane of clear.

Before we leave the subject of old windows, I want to tackle a common talking point that I have heard many times: "Glass is a liquid that flows very slowly; the proof is that medieval windows are thicker on the bottom than the top!" Sure, maybe. But let's remember Occam's Razor: common sense would tell the architect that a pane of glass that is not of even thickness—not an unexpected outcome considering the imprecise methods of manufacture—would be more stable if you put the heavier end as the base.

Being able to color panes and pieces of glass allowed creators of windows to offer elaborate pictures, such as stories from the Bible or history. Tomorrow I'll share a story of Theophilus, who was a common theme for church windows in the 13th century.

Predestination

Ephesians 1:11 says "In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will." The Old and New Testaments as well have other passages that declare God's will as the driving force behind all actions and events.

Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 CE) was fine with this. He maintained that God had foreknowledge of whether individuals would deserve heaven or hell. If God is omniscient, and omniscience includes knowledge of what is to come, then God knows what people will do. He also explained the sin of Pride as thinking that we are the ones who choose God rather than God's grace that empowers the initial act of faith. Some scholars claim that Augustine believed in "double predestination," the term that is used to explain that God chooses those who will be saved and those who will be damned.

(This seems to argue against the doctrine of Free Will, that human beings choose to do good or do bad, and hence are responsible for the ultimate fate of their souls. In my (Roman Catholic) youth, we were taught that God's knowledge does not "lock us in" to a certain path. It was explained as foreordination: God simply knows ahead of time the choices we will make.)

Of the three main Jewish sects in the 1st century CE, the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus (c.37 - c.100) wrote that the Sadducees did not have any thoughts on predestination, but the Essenes and Pharisees felt God's providence ordered all human events. The Pharisees still believed that man could choose between right and wrong. We don't know how scholarly an interpretation this was by Josephus.

Pope Clement I (d.99 CE) wrote a letter to the Corinthians in which he appeared to express a predestinarian view of salvation.

Valentinus (c.100 - c.180 CE) believed it depended on what kind of nature you were born with, either good or bad or a mix of the two. A person born with good nature will be saved, with a bad nature will never be saved, with a mixture can go either way.

St. Irenaeus believed Valentinus' view was unfair, and that humans were free to choose salvation or not.

After Augustine, most arguments for or against predestination were based on agreeing with or refuting his explanations.

When the Middle Ages got well and truly underway, people like Gottschalk of Orbais (c.808 - 868) believed in the above mentioned double predestination. (I will say more about him tomorrow.)

Thomas Aquinas believed in free will, but also taught that God predestines certain people to a special closeness to God (called the beatific vision) based solely on God's own goodness.

William of Ockham (c.1287 - 1347) taught free will, but God predestines based on people's good works that He foresees.

The Cathars denied free will.

This is a subject on which there is likely never to be universal agreement.

That Gottschalk of Orbais really stirred things up when he weighed in. Stay tuned.

Church & State, Part 3 of 3

Part 1 showed how Christian writers eventually came to the conclusion that the State was not the result of Man's sinful nature, and had validity of its own. Part 2 talked about how the Church tried to assert its dominance in the Two Swords metaphor, especially with Pope Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam.

Immediately after Unam Sanctam, John of Paris wrote De potentate regia et papali ("On royal and papal power"). John was a Dominican who may have been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas. His work intended to defend the rights and standing of the French king. His argument was that autonomous political institutions existed before Christ established the Church. They were therefore created by human nature, which was created by God. There was no reason to suppose that political institutions such as nations (or their rulers) owed anything to the Church.

Things got more heated in 1323 when Pope John XXII tried to interfere in the election of Louis IV of Bavaria, saying it was not valid until the pope confirmed it. Louis had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome anyway. A quarrel ensued in which William of Ockham, currently under the protection of Louis for supposed heresies, took part. Ockham's approach was not just to give the State its due as ultimately an institution that is approved by God. His approach was that the monarch is granted his power by the collective consent of the governed. The pope, therefore, has no power to interfere in a nation's elections.

Moreover, Ockham said that the pope may well be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, but that does not mean he should be allowed absolute authority. There should be a check on papal authority, a council that advises and can overrule him. Many of the established religious orders worked this way.

Although popes may have opposed this idea, it took a council, the Council of Constance in 1414, to resolve the Western Schism started in 1378 when two men claimed to be the legitimate pope. Still, the relationship between Church and State will be debated forever, I am sure.

Nominalism vs Realism

Realism [link]

At the foundation of philosophy is a question: what defines reality? There are several questions that are connected to this. Let us start with: when we say that a lot of different animals are all dogs, to what quality are we referring that makes the Dachsund and the Great Dane both dogs? Is there an essential quality of "dog-ness"? Some universal concept that is inclusive of all dogs, despite the particular differences between breeds?

There it is: universals and particulars.

Realism says that both universals and particulars exist. That is, we recognize that different dogs/houses/trees are those things because, although they have different particulars, there is a universal essence of dogs/houses/trees that exists. Plato and Aristotle were Realists.

Nominalism says that the world is made only of particulars. Things we see are put into categories by our thought processes and our language, not by the existence of some abstract universal. William of Ockham and Jean Buridan were Nominalists.

In the two diagrams shown, we see that in Realism, although John and David have different Particulars, they are defined by their Universal quality as human beings. Nominalism, however, shows John and David only defined by their Particulars. The category of Humanity is created by us. There is no abstract "Humanity" essence that exists independent of John and David.

Nominalism [link]

Getting at the truth produced some fascinating thought experiments. One—The Puzzle of Theseus' Ship—was posed by Plutarch (46-120 CE). The ship of Theseus was preserved in Athens for several generations. As pieces of it decayed, they were replaced with new wood, so that the ship would stay intact. If a thing is based on its particulars, then with the particulars of this ship having changed over the years, is it still Theseus' ship? If there is some universal of Theseus' ship (as Realism says) then it is still his ship. If there are only particulars (as Nominalism says) then it isn't.

British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) took this a step further: if all the removed pieces were assembled into a complete ship, then which is Theseus' ship? Are they both Theseus' ship? He concludes that this would be absurd.

Even the early scholars understood that there were problems with these concepts, and struggled to reconcile the issues. Still, they did their best to understand how reality worked, and how that would help them to understand everything else.

...such as whether we have individual souls. That discussion will take us back to Averroes tomorrow.

William of Ockham

The goal of Daily Medieval is to present a sampling of the infinite array of information about the Middle Ages in small, digestible amounts. It offers a taste of the thousand years of people, events, and ideas that don't get covered in the streamlined history books of standard academic courses. To that end, it tries to avoid those things that people "already know" and focus on the lesser-known lights that shone at the foundation of modern civilization. Sometimes, however, the obscure overlaps the well-known, and I find myself "forced" to write about something or someone that I worry is known well enough that the daily entry won't give the reader anything "new." My goal then becomes to broaden the reader's knowledge in unexpected ways.

Which brings us to William of Ockham. I would be surprised if readers of Daily Medieval had not heard of Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor, a guiding principle that says one should not make more assumptions than absolutely necessary to try to explain something.

William of Ockham (c.1285-1349) was responsible for so much more, however. Believed to have been born in Ockham in Surrey, England, he wrote about metaphysics, logic, theology, politics, and more. All this writing, however, happened when he left Oxford University in 1320 without a degree in theology. The prevailing theory for this unexpected departure is that he would not acquiesce to changing his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a common part of the final examination for university students.

The basis for the theory is how the situation blew up years later. Ockham was summoned to Avignon to appear before Pope John XXII and a committee that would examine his writings. The committee, chaired by John Luttrell (an ex-chancellor of Oxford) found 51 heresies among William's commentary on the Sentences. It is believed that William escaped punishment by appealing to the Holy Roman Emperor (at the time, Louis IV), who was not always on good terms with the pope, saying to him "You defend me with the sword and I will defend you with the pen." In effect, he placed at the disposal of the Emperor his intellectual gifts, which (if this story is true) must have been known to be considerable for this ploy to work.

How did William earn his intellectual reputation? Between leaving Oxford in 1320 and arriving in Avignon in 1324, he spent three years in a Franciscan monastery, writing prolifically. One of the topics he put his mind to was whether priests should be allowed to own property. Franciscans believed priests should live a life of poverty. This put them into conflict with Pope John XXII, so the summons to Avignon and condemnation may have had more to do with that question than his Oxford writings.

Besides challenging the Church's ideas about material wealth, he was also challenging the ideas of people like Thomas Aquinas that reason was sufficient to determine everything we needed to know about the world.

But that's a story for another day.

Final Exams

Early copy of the Sentences

In the Middle Ages, The Bible was recognized as the most important book in existence. No book was more discussed and commented upon. Many of the commentaries themselves, such as those of the Early Church Fathers, became only slightly less significant objects of study. The Early Church Fathers did not always agree, however, which led to confusion, and (if you weren't careful in your reading and expounding on what they said) to heresy. Into this dilemma stepped Peter Lombard.

Peter Lombard (c.1095-1160) was born in Italy. He studied at Reims and Paris, and taught for ten years in the cathedral school at Notre Dame where he would have met some of the greatest theologians of the time. He was ordained by 1156, and was made bishop of Paris in 1159.

At some point he found time to write. Although he wrote commentaries of his own, his great work was the Libri Quatuor Sententiarum (Four Books of Sentences), in which he attempted to cover the entirety of biblical scholarship and knowledge by laying out passages from the Bible with relevant commentary from the Early Church Fathers and others. He tries to show where there is agreement among the commentators; where there is disagreement, he tries to reconcile the opposing viewpoints.

The four books covered the Trinity, Creation (and the world), Christ and salvation, and the Sacraments. The Sentences became the standard theology textbook for the next 400 years, and formed the basis for understanding the Bible and Christianity.

Because of the fundamental position the Sentences takes in theology, it was at the center of most theological study. Therefore, students were given a simple task: write your own commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Your masters would read your commentary to see if you understood the Bible and its learned analyses properly. If you did not, you were told to correct your commentary. If you corrected your commentary, all was well and good. If you decided that you were right and that you should argue with your masters, you ran the risk of (at the very least) not having your degree conferred, or (at worst) being declared heretical.

...and that's what one of the most famous medieval thinkers—the one whose name everyone today knows—did, and it got him expelled from Oxford University.

But that's a story for another day.

Pre-Inertia

Expositio & questiones manuscript

Jean Buridan (c.1300-c.1361) was a University of Paris scholar who was not afraid to tackle some of the big scientific and philosophical issues of the day. That meant, in some cases, taking a critical look at one of the most revered figures in science and philosophy, Aristotle. Buridan, like William of Ockham (c.1288-c.1348),  believed in the observable reality around him, and believed that observation of the world was the key to understanding it. Challenging Aristotle could be risky, but as more and more scholars observed the world around them, they realized that Aristotle's theories needed amendment. He wrote Expositio & questiones (Expoition and questions) to analyze Aristotle's work.

For example, Aristotle believed that an object set in motion—let's say, a rock thrown by a human hand—continues to move after it has left the hand because there must be some continuous external force exerted on it. He theorized that, in the same way a hand swished through water creates little eddies and swirls in the water around it, so the rock's movement is continued by eddies and currents of the air. If there were no movement in the medium that helped carry the rock forward, he believed, the rock would stop its forward course (and presumable drop the the ground). The currents eventually faded, allowing the rock to end its forward flight.

Buridan was not satisfied with this. Building on the work of others (such as John Philoponus and Avicenna, both of whom deserve their own entries some day), he believed that there must be a property in the rock itself that accounts for its action once it has left the motive force of the hand. He called this property of the object impetus (from Latin impetere, literally "to rush toward, to attack").

The property or quality of impetus was clearly changeable. To hurl a heavy rock required you to give it more impetus than to hurl a pebble. Also, impetus was obviously used up over time, allowing the rock to cease its movement and fall. He also explained that a falling object gained impetus the longer it fell (are you paying attention, Galileo?). Unlike Aristotle, who believed that the medium of air in which the object moves helps it along, Buridan saw the air as resistance, causing the object to use up its impetus.

He expanded this theory by looking up. A question had bothered some philosophers for ages: why don't the planets slow down? Will they move forever? Buridan extrapolated his theory to say that a thrown rock in a vacuum would experience no resistance and its impetus would last indefinitely. If the planets were moving in a vacuum...

Well, actually, he couldn't go that far. He agreed with Aristotle that a vacuum couldn't exist in space, since there was no container to keep matter from rushing into the empty area. If above our atmosphere were filled with quintessence, however, Aristotle's "fifth element" that was pure, unchangeable, and frictionless, then the impetus imparted to the planets by whatever initial agency would continue to move forever! The idea of an eternal universe was supportable by science!

Wycliffe in Politics

A church reformer gets his start.

We don't know a lot about the early years of John Wycliffe (c.1324-1384). There were likely a few "John Wycliffe"s around this time, and there are doubts that the one who went to Merton College in Oxford in 1346 was the same one who was master of Balliol (a far more liberal-minded college) in 1360, who was given a position in the parish of Fillingham. His time at Oxford might have overlapped that of William of Ockham; it is certain that the Wycliffe in whom we are interested was familiar with and influenced by Ockham's writings.

His running of Fillingham (and a succession of parishes) did not prevent him from living at Oxford and participating in the college as an instructor and a scholar. He became known and respected as a theologian, and received his doctorate in theology in 1372.

Wycliffe's entrance to politics is presumed to be in 1365, when he advised John of Gaunt (the king's son, but a powerful political figure in the wake of King Edward III's increasing senility) to deny Pope Urban V the 33 years of feudal tribute for which England was in arrears. The tribute had been established by King John, but Wycliffe told Gaunt that the papacy was wealthy enough and did not need or deserve the money. Gaunt and Parliament were all to willing to agree: Edward III had the habit of outspending his income, money was always needed in case a war with France should arise again, and this was the time that the papacy itself was in Avignon, France. Giving money to the pope in France felt like giving money to the enemy against whom you might need to fight a war some day!

By this time, Wycliffe had developed strong opinions opposing the wealth of the church. He was not branded a heretic (yet!). Had he been openly thought of this way, he would hardly have been included in the delegation that attended the peace congress in Bruges in 1374. Bruges had two purposes: establishing reduced hostilities between England and France, and dealing with the papacy's problems in the English church. He seems to have attended purely as a respected theologian whose opinions were academic, not militant. At the time he was still friends with men like the monk John Owtred, who held that St. Peter proved the union of spiritual and temporal power—an idea totally opposite to Wycliffe's thoughts on the subject.

That would change in the next decade. By the time of Wycliffe's death ten years later, he would lose his friends, his positions, and the respect of the papacy and many of his colleagues. He would also start a reform movement, produce a controversial Bible, and influence a reform movement in Bohemia. More tomorrow.