in his conduct with the earlier pope.
The opening of the fourteenth century intensified the fall initiated in the thirteenth. During this period, the Grand Dialectic hastened its descent as the papacy plummeted beneath the temporal power both in concrete circumstances and on the level of theory. Not long after Boniface the papal throne relocated to Avignon, where it stayed for roughly 70 years. The popes during this period amounted to little more than lackeys of the French kings, having been deprived of their independence and in complete contrast to the superiority of Innocent III. The hierarchy also fell prey to the ills that had troubled it prior to Gregory, permitting the practice of simony that had provided an immediate cause for the eruption of the Grand Dialectic. The fall of the papacy was nearly exhausted in the “Babylonian Captivity” in which the spiritual authority devolved into a partisan of a particular ruler while suffering internal corruption. Its sorry condition was obvious to monarchs both within and outside of France.
Changes in political theory in the early fourteenth century were delicate and profound, indicating Docetism’s maturation into a new phase in its progress toward the Christ-Idol. Some canonists continued to advocate papal world-supremacy in the time of Boniface, with Giles of Rome contending that the authority granted by the papacy’s spiritual functions implied that the pope owned all the world’s material goods. The ocean between the language of spiritual purity and the reality of worldly ambition that characterized papist arguments had rendered them unconvincing to European leaders for decades, and this was no less the case with Giles. At this point royal thinkers continued to take cues from the papists, as a theory appeared in France that mirrored Roman claims inasmuch as it dreamed of the consolidation of vast territories under French rule. The philosopher Pierre Dubois advanced a scenario in which France would gain control over Germany, Constantinople, and Rome in addition to England and smaller European provinces. The fantasy of papal world-domination met its twin in the illusion of a universal temporal empire standing over the West as well as much of the East.
At the fall the soul aspires toward infinity and so descends toward the formlessness of possibility, with the body as the lower imitating the higher in the same dynamic. In like manner the kingdom duplicated the theoretical errors of a church in steep decline, justifying royal rule in the direction of the limitlessness that had progressively characterized papal aims since Gregory. The royal theorists who posited an infinite kingdom found their precedent in the theoretical application of that infinity to the church. This conceptual confrontation of infinite versus infinite equalizes the spiritual and the temporal and so undermines the higher by negating its superiority. Just as in fallen nature the flesh wars against the spirit in order to subdue it, the late-medieval kingdom pressed the church under its heel both through the physical relocation of the papacy to Avignon and in its claims to royal universality.
Nor is this all. John of Paris, arguably the most sophisticated thinker in his time, also maintained that the church and the kingdom each possessed a distinct and universal dominion, the church in spiritual affairs and the kingdom in temporal government. John then proceeded to redefine the pope’s authority in terms of his administration of ecclesiastical goods that belonged in fact to the people. Like temporal rulers, the pope exercised power for the benefit of the community and gained legitimacy from the righteousness of that exercise. This view had been popular regarding kings at least since Manegold, and John’s innovation was to apply it to ecclesiastical rule. The point was not that popes and kings did not retain legitimacy from God, as they did for John and would for some time, but that in John’s thought pope as well as king owed a substantive debt of responsibility to the populace, who could depose the pope through temporal rulers if he failed in his duties. In John one therefore finds both the dualism of universalized and distinct spheres of temporal and spiritual government and the grounding of each in a constitutional responsibility to the people.
John’s theories carry disturbing implications in light of the docetic logic, which they exemplify in a nascent but striking degree. For the universalization and distinction of the church and the kingdom, institutions designed to train man in his finitude, implies their foundation in the negative infinity of appeals to the people. Their growth toward the infinite in principle matures as they realize their legitimacy in the moment when law has not yet become concrete, in the will of a people unconditioned by an understanding of their lives as embedded in that law. John did not explicitly conceive of the people as so unconditioned, but in the constitutional principles that he helped set in motion the law in its divine and natural expressions eventually became detached from and subordinated to the community rather than the community being embedded in it. By this inversion the law relinquishes its validity inasmuch as it falls beneath a principle of change. Isolated and extracted in a way that would develop out of John’s constitutionalism, the people are that uninterrupted motion that is the abolishment of law and the fulfillment of its universalization. To base both temporal and spiritual institutions in the people is thus to base natural and divine law in the scattering. Such a direction prepares the way for Docetism’s annulment of law as the prerogative of man and his social world.
That world appeared, in the fourteenth century, to have relinquished the last vestiges of beneficent order. When the popes returned to Rome from Avignon, the Western Schism erupted as a new punishment. In the schism the papacy descended into jaw-dropping legal and practical confusion, with a multiplicity of popes advocating for the throne. That each made his case with cogent arguments presented a unique threat to papal legitimacy, undermining the viability of the office until the schism’s resolution in the fifteenth century. The same age saw Europe’s entrenchment in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1475), a conflict in which the papacy lacked the moral authority to criticize participating nations. Defined in the fourteenth century by papal alienation from Rome and the onset of war, not to mention the horrors of the Black Death (1348–1350), Western Christendom had fallen into such disrepair that rebirth might not have seemed possible.
During this age theological transformations emerged that mysteriously resonated with the foregoing legal changes in the Church. When the institution developed a new and ever-expanding law in canons distinct from theology and liturgy, it unintentionally introduced a new ontology and a new nature into the Church in contrast to the old. In earlier periods the mystery of the sacraments limited the reach of the law, but the legal apparatus knew no such limits, affirming in their place a systematic striving for perfection. The rest of the Church’s nature in the habit of grace thus came under threat from the infinite, and how long would it take before a new understanding of God took hold that mirrored the ontological shifts in Christ’s institutional body? If the Church could adopt a nature based on an infinitized law, could men not conceptualize God in the same manner? Could they not imagine him as an infinite law unbound by rest and reason, by the habit and pattern of nature? The nominalist God envisioned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries does just this. The essence of this God as absolute power extends without boundary over all things, asserting itself beyond reason as well as good and evil. If something is good, it is so because God decrees it and not because of the thing’s intrinsic rationality. A thing is evil likewise because God decrees it, not because of the corruption of a nature that is good as rational. The meaning of the thing moreover lies not in its nature but in the use to which God puts it, so that the form of the nature becomes immaterial to its content as an object of use. God himself arguably has no limiting nature or reason, but is an infinite will.
If men conceived of God as an infinite law, they could equally well portray themselves in his image. The Renaissance thus introduced the third rise in Docetism’s ongoing dialectic, a period of apparent resurrection unto life, of pride in man’s capacities after the preceding time of suffering. A few men of genius towered at the Renaissance’s cultural peak, determining the tastes and sensibilities of countless others across Europe. The universal man, the man of the Renaissance, mastering as many activities as he could, dedicating himself to various and unbounded pursuits, manifested the heights latent within the human spirit. Painter, engineer, and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci exemplified the ideal. He enjoyed the life of unlimited possibilities praised by Pico della Mirandola, who stressed the choice of man in reaching his potential while lauding him as a chameleon who could change for the better. So does the scattering deceive, so does it lead its captives
