Ockham and the Avignon Papacy: the Controversy with John Xxii, Benedict Xii and Clement Vi

chapter 12 Ockham and the Avignon Papacy: The Controversy with John xxii, Benedict xii and Clement vi

Isabel Iribarren

1 Introduction

Of the three Avignonese Popes to have engaged in a dispute against Ockham, his followers, or his ideas, John xxii undoubtedly occupies the centre-stage. The latter’s long dispute with the Franciscans over the issue of apostolic poverty is well known, and has benefited, by way of a virtuous circle, from much scholarly attention. Although the poverty controversy indeed marks the gene- sis of Ockham’s intervention in the dispute against the “pseudo-Pope,” we shall see that the Franciscan’s grievances extend to John’s followers, Benedict xii and Clement vi. The former were convinced that those who fail to resist the error of a heretic will ultimately fall into error themselves. The initial anti- Johannite sentiment thus gradually becomes a distinct anti-Avignonese— indeed Ghibelline—political conviction. Modern assessments of the relation between Ockham’s politics and his dispute with the papacy vary according to historical period and the preference given to particular polemical works. Scholars are agreed that Ockham’s political ideas exercised considerable influence on following generations, most par- ticularly on conciliar authors labouring to re-establish Church unity during the Great Schism.1 Following this line of thought, the discussion in the 1930s seems to have been dominated by the question of the degree of kinship between Ockham and Marsilius’s thought regarding the role of a general council and the relation between ecclesiastical and secular power.2 After the war, during the

1 See F. Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (New Haven, Conn., 1964); B. Tierney, “Ockham, the Conciliar Theory, and the Canonists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), 40–70; H.S. Offler, “The ‘Influence’ of Ockham’s Political Thinking: The First Century,” in Die Gegenwart Ockhams (eds.) W. Vossenkuhl and R. Schönberger (Weinheim, 1990), 338–365. 2 See for example C.H. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York, 1932), 293–296; R.W. Carlyle and A.J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1903–1936), 6:44–51. For a full survey on the historiography, see T. Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2007), 6–32.

Ockham and the Avignon Papacy 335 thirty-odd years between the 1940s and the 1970s, historians were divided over the issue of the relationship between Ockham’s philosophical and theological speculation and his political thought. Different perceptions of the influence that his nominalism, his voluntarism and the dialectic of divine omnipotence had on his ecclesiology yielded different portrayals of Ockham either as a herald of the Reformation,3 a traditional political thinker,4 a constitutional lib- eral5 or an apolitical theologian.6 Current interpretations of Ockham’s political thought and the nature of his dispute with the papacy seek to disengage themselves from a reductionist approach based on the alleged relationship between his theology and his political thought. Jürgen Miethke, Brian Tierney, A.S. McGrade, and John Kilcullen, to mention only the better known, all seek to assess Ockham’s polemical work within an accurate context. Despite recent attempts to define Ockham’s own motivation for engaging in the dispute against the papacy, his input has either been blended into the Michaelist collective voice, or been dissociated from its circumstances in favour of more systematic accounts of his political thought. The purpose of this contri- bution is to assess the state of the question on the nature and motivations of the dispute with the Avignonese Popes, while keeping in consideration the circumstances which brought it about. In doing so, we shall attempt to establish the role that the popes’ antagonism played on the one hand in the development of Ockham’s ecclesiological and political thought, notably in the context of the apostolic poverty debate and the beatific vision controversy, and on the other in the reception of his philosophical and theological ideas in the university milieu.

2 The Dispute with John xxii

The controversy with the Avignon papacy occupied the second half of Ockham’s life,7 roughly the twenty years between 1328 and 1347, that is, from

3 See G. de Lagarde, La Naissance de l’esprit laïque au decline du Moyen Âge, 6 vols. (Paris, 1932– 1946). For a similar viewpoint, see also M.J. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963). 4 For similar views, see J.B. Morrall, “Some Notes on a Recent Interpretation of William of Ockham’s Political Philosophy,” Franciscan Studies 9 (1949), 335–369; C.C. Bayley, “Pivotal Concepts in the Political Philosophy of William of Ockham,” Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949), 199–218. 5 See G. Knysh, Political Ockhamism (Winnipeg, 1996). 6 See R. Scholz, Wilhelm von Ockham als politischer Denker und sein Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico (Stuttgart, 1944), esp. 1–28. W. Kölmel, Wilhelm Ockham und seine kirchenpolitischen Schriften (Essen, 1962). 7 For this period of Ockham’s life, see among others: L. Baudry, Guillaume d’Occam: sa vie, ses oeuvres, ses idées sociales et politiques (Paris, 1949); J. Miethke, Ockhams Weg zur