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The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

William of St. Amour and the Perils of the Last Times

On a wintry dawn in March 1253, not far from where the new towers of Notre Dame rose above the streets of Paris, four students from the University of Paris were set upon — without provocation, say the university documents — by a patrol of the city's constabulary. One student was killed and the others thrown into prison, where in the course of an offical interrogation, their bones were broken. Police brutality had not been unknown before, but under this extreme provocation, the university felt compelled to resort to its only weapon, an economic one, for protecting its students: it called a strike. The local authorities responded slowly, but within a few months, two of the offending guards had been dragged through the streets behind horses and then hanged by the neck until dead, the others banished from the city forever. The town-gown clash thus came to a gruesome end, but the university-wide strike was to have other, more lasting issue. It led directly to the first outburst of violent controversy between the secular clergy and the friars and began a torrent of polemics against the fraternal orders. Here for the first time began to appear the symbolic language that would help to shape perceptions of the friars for the next two hundred years. Thus the melee of March 1253 marks the terminus a quo of the antifraternal tradition.

The Friars and the University of Paris

Before 1253 the young orders of friars had been peacefully welcomed into the church. Innocent III had blessed St. Francis's conception of a new order in 1209–10 and Honorius III formally authorized what became the official Franciscan Rule (the Regula bullata) in 1223. St. Dominic also received papal sanction for his Ordo Praedicatorum in 1216. Even among the later enemies of the orders, no one doubted the sanctity of these two founders, who were both canonized a few years after their deaths, Francis in 1228 and Dominic in 1234. No one disputed the piety of their ideals for the new orders, especially voluntary poverty and apostolic preaching. But a mere thirty years after the authorization of the Regula bullata both orders had come under violent attack. Tensions created by the conflicting interests and offices of the new friars and the traditional clergy had been building for some time, but the flashpoint was suddenly reached in 1253, when Paris erupted into open war.

Why Paris? Paris, to begin with, had the most eminent spokesmen for the secular clergy in the masters at the University of Paris, particularly in the Faculty of Theology. But Paris also had a local arena with its own strictly local issues in which the friars and secular clergy were ripe for a fight: the university. When the friars had first arrived in Paris in 1217–19 they had set up their own conventual schools nearby for members of their own orders. They taught no secular students at first and so did not compete with the university. Some of their students in fact were sent over to the theological faculty for further study. But in 1229, because of a local dispute (over police brutality) the university called a strike and dispersed for two years — except, as everyone noticed, for the studia of the friars. One of the Dominicans' most promising theologians, Roland of Cremona, had been studying in the university under a secular master, John of St. Giles, and in 1228 had been described as almost ready to become a master. John of St. Giles, who apparently opposed the strike, remained in Paris and Roland was allowed to complete his courses. And in 1229, without the approval of the absent theological faculty, the bishop of Paris bestowed upon Roland of Cremona the license in theology. Thus, under slightly questionable circumstances, the Dominicans acquired their first master of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, and with him the right to teach secular students. Worse yet from the secular masters' standpoint, the Dominicans continued to offer courses during the strike, and now that they had a regent master, opened their school to secular students. Not long after the strike ended in 1231, John of St. Giles himself became a Dominican but continued as regent master; and a short time later one of the most distinguished of the secular theologians, Alexander of Hales, entered the Franciscan order while retaining his chair. Less than fifteen years after the arrival of the friars in Paris, three of the twelve regent masters of the Faculty of Theology, together with all their students — not to mention the income that those students generated — had gone over to the mendicant orders.

These three chairs in theology were still with the same orders on the night of the melee in 1253. But since 1231 other reasons had appeared for the secular masters to fear the friars. It had become clear that the mendicants had the better teachers and intellects: after Roland of Cremona and John of St. Giles, the friars numbered among the holders of their three chairs Hugh of St. Cher, William of Meliton, John of La Rochelle, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas. The Franciscans, as M.-M. Dufeil argues, also appear to have had some aspirations to increase the number of their chairs. And they seemed to be gaining some very powerful friends, including the king of France, Louis IX, who chose his confessors from the orders, and the pope, Innocent IV. These fears were sufficient in 1252 for the masters of theology to pass a statute governing academic advancement (statutum de promovendis), which effectively eliminated the possibility of any further mendicant chairs. Henceforth candidates for the magisterium would have to have studied, been examined and approved, and to have lectured at one of the approved colleges or schools of the university. And furthermore each religious order (monastic as well as mendicant) was to have no more than one college and one master in theology. Anyone not abiding by the statute was excluded from the corporation of masters of theology. Since the Dominicans had two chairs, which they had held since 1231, and which they were not about to give up, they found themselves expelled.

There matters stood for a year and a month. AU parties simmered until the student-police fracas of March 1253 brought them all to the boiling point. The university voted itself on strike; the mendicants refused to participate (as everyone remembered they had done in the dispersion of 1229–31). This aroused the anger of the entire university, and the consortium of all the masters of all the faculties, not just theology, this time not only expelled but also excommunicated the three mendicant masters. To make their position perfectly clear they established a requirement that any magisterial candidate swear an oath to observe the statutes of the university. And lest anyone still might have misunderstood, they decreed that lecturing during a strike was prohibited on penalty of expulsion, for eternity. The friars understood. They appealed for aid to the most powerful friends they could muster, the pope and the royal court. And so began the open controversy between the seculars and mendicants, which at Paris lasted, in its first phase, until 1257.

Briefly, the central local issue was whether the friars had a right to participate in the magistral governing body (consortium magistrorum), though many other issues of theological and ecclesiastical importance came to be involved. In July 1253 Innocent IV nullified the friars' excommunication and ordered that they be received back into the consortium of masters, charging the bishops of Senlis and Evreux to see that they were. When the masters refused, they were censured and suspended from their office, in all four faculties of the university. It was by then the autumn, and perhaps to justify their position to the returning students, the university masters republished their edict, declaring the friars excommunicated and dissociated from the university. When the beadles attempted to post the edict at the Dominican school a swarm of friars jumped on them, tore up the bill, and beat two of them, drawing blood. In February 1254, the secular masters began a campaign to broaden their base of support, as the friars had already done, by appealing to powerful friends. They issued a manifesto retracing the course of events, accusing the friars and justifying their own position, and sent it to all the prelates, all the chapters, and all the universities of the Christian realm.

Meanwhile in Paris an outrageously heretical work by a Franciscan had appeared, the Introductorius ad Evangelium Aeternum by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who had gleaned from the writings ofjoachim of Fiore what he took to be a prophecy of the overthrow of the Gospel by a Third Testament, the Eternal Gospel (Evangelium Aeternum) of the Holy Spirit, which would be administered by new orders of religious, that is, the friars. For reasons that will emerge shortly, Gerard's fanatical work proved to be pivotal, not only in the local controversy but in the history of antifraternalism.

In the interim, the university, along with the friars, had been asked by the pope in August 1253 to send a delegation to the curia so that the pope might arbitrate. In the spring of 1254, William of St. Amour, a master in the Faculty of Theology and the acknowledged leader of the secular party, set off for Rome, taking with him not only the masters' arguments concerning the friars in the university and in the church, but also a copy of thirty-two excerpts from Gerard's Introductorius that the secular masters judged to be in error. One immediate success of the university's mission was the establishment of a commission of cardinals to examine the work, which they condemned on 4 November 1255. Other successes were forthcoming. Innocent IV, who until now had acted almost entirely in the mendicants' favor, began rather suddenly to tilt toward the seculars. On 10 May 1254 he issued a bull complaining of abuses of confession and burial by certain unnamed privileged orders. On 4 July he declared obligatory all the statutes passed by the university masters. And finally, and most dramatically, on 21 November, he issued Etsi animarum, which imposed radical qualifications on the friars' pastoral privileges: they might no longer, for example, administer confession without permission of the parish priest; they must provide to the latter one-fourth of any bequests if burial took place at the friars' church; they could not celebrate Mass in their churches at a time when it was being celebrated in a parish church. Etsi animarum was nigh total victory for William of St. Amour and the secular clergy. Unfortunately for them, the worst sort of political disaster occurred sixteen days later: Pope Innocent IV died.

The new pope was the cardinal protector of the Franciscans, and Alexander IV did not stint in his support of the mendicants now. One of his first acts was to restore to the friars all their privileges by overthrowing Etsi animarum. And the following April (1255), he issued Quasi lignum vitae, which, though it was conciliatory in tone, attempted to settle the university dispute once and for all in favor of the mendicants. The bull modified most of the provisions of the magistral statutes of 1252 and 1253. Most important, it left to the chancellor the power of deciding how many chairs a religious order might have; it modified the oath to be taken before ascending to the magisterium; and it ordered the immediate reintegration of the mendicant masters into the consortium magistrorum. The secular masters now became desperate. Rather than embrace the odious friars within their society, they dissolved the consortium magistrorum, in effect dissolving the university. In June, some twenty days later, the bishops of Orleans and Auxerre, charged with enforcing Quasi lignum vitae, excommunicated all the secular masters. In October, at the beginning of the next term, the masters again and more formally dissolved their society, and demanded from the pope the lifting of the excommunication against them together with the retraction of Quasi lignum vitae.

In the early months of 1256, a synod of the archbishops of Bourges, Rheims, Sens, and Rouen was held at Paris, and King Louis IX put pressure on them to try to work out an acceptable compromise. The pope would have none of it. He continued to insist on the reintegration of the mendicants, and began to concentrate his offensive on the ringleaders of the secular party. On 17 June he ordered that William of St. Amour, Odo of Douai, Nicholas of Bar-sur-Aube, and Christian of Beauvais be deprived of their benefices, expelled from the university, and excommunicated; and he asked the help of the king and the bishop of Paris to see that these measures were enforced. In October he issued a condemnation of William of St. Amour's chief polemical tract, written a year earlier, the De periculis novissimorum temporum, and secured the promise of Odo and Christian (who had been summoned to the curia) to subscribe to that condemnation, and more importantly to submit to the provisions of Quasi lignum vitae and to allow the entry of mendicant masters in the Faculty of Theology. William himself fell sick at the curia after his unsuccessful defense of De periculis, and returned not to Paris but to St. Amour. In August 1257 the pope forbade him to return to Paris at all. Christian of Beauvais made a public retraction in the same month and in October the mendicant masters were finally readmitted with surprisingly little fanfare to the consortium of masters.

The Sense of an Ending

Ironically, the condemned De periculis novissimorum temporum was destined to become the most important antifraternal work of the next two centuries. Although William of St. Amour never returned to Paris, his works were already circulating widely, and their influence long outlived their author. They include, besides the De periculis, two sermons of the same year, De Pharisaeo (20 August 1256) and another, untitled, delivered on 1 May, on the text "Qui amat periculum peribit in illo" (Ecclus. 3:27); two quaestiones from late in 1255, De quantitate eleemosyne and De valido mendicante; a defense presented to the commission of cardinals assigned to investigate him in October 1256, entitled (by a modern editor) the Responsiones; and finally the vast Collectiones, the summary statement of William's life, finished in banishment in 1266 and providing what he considered a final warning to the church to beware of the dangers the friars represented.

Considering their reputation as polemical attacks, the most startling feature of all these works is the almost total absence of any reference to the friars themselves. In both the De periculis and the Collectiones William asserts that he is writing against no particular persons or groups within the church, but rather about the sins of evil men prophesied in Scripture and about dangers to the church universal. In fact he used that assertion as a legal defense. When he was summoned before a synod of bishops, shortly after the appearance of the De periculis, to answer charges of defamation brought by the friars, he said he had never attacked any order approved by the church. The De periculis was not about the friars, but rather a treatise about the "perils of the last times" predicted in Scripture, about false apostles, pseudopraedicatores, penetrantes domos, and other figures "taken from Scripture," as the full title specified: Tractatus de periculis novissimorum temporum ex Scripturis sumptus. The De periculis — so William would have us believe — is not a political treatise but first and foremost an exegetical treatise on the Last Times.

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Excerpted from The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature by Penn R. Szittya. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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