Freedom and Authority: The Law, Peter Olivi, and the Second Vatican Council

155 Franciscan Studies 62 (2004) FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY: THE LAW, PETER OLIVI, AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL Introduction In the earliest days of Christianity, the primitive community accepted the notion that the Church was a continuation of the Synagogue. St. Paul went to the synagogues to preach and St. James was associated with the synagogue in Jerusalem. This perception of the intimate relationship between the Christian notion of the Church and the Hebrew understanding of community was still operative into the twelfth century. “St. Bernard considered the Jewish community to be a figura of the earthly Church. . . . Bernard saw the earthly Church as an extension of the Synagogue and this conception of the religious community concentrated attention on the people of God, the congregation of the faithful.”1 Bernard’s understanding was consistent with the Pauline texts of the New Testament concerning the “Body of Christ” and so also with the experience of the early Church. In a way, it was also compatible with the cultural experience of the Germanic tribes that settled Europe from the first to fifth centuries of the modern era. Otto von Gierke, the great historian of Germanic law at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, characterized the Germanic tribal sense of corporation (Genossenschaft) as bearing “resemblance to Christian concepts of the Church as ‘one person’, a corpus mysticum.”2 As the Roman Empire solidified west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, its form and shape began to become a receptacle for the emerging Christian Church. The sense of unity and solidarity was part of imperial self-understanding and by the third century, Origen, and in the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea, viewed the empire, even 1 Stanley Chodorow, Christian Political Theory and Church Politics in the Mid-Twelfth Century: The Ecclesiology of Gratian’s Decretum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 70, 73-74. 2 Cited in H. J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 217. 156 FRANK LANE before the coming of the emperor Constantine, as the arena in which the kingdom of God would be established on earth. Eusebius even understood the pre-Christian Roman Caesars as contemporary versions of Cyrus and Darius (the 6th Century BC Persian rulers who had served as God’s instruments in the re-establishment of the People of Israel as they returned from the Babylonian Exile). Despite persecutions of the past, these Roman pagan rulers, he claimed, now fulfilled God’s plan in preparing the earth for the coming of his kingdom. This preparation came to fruition in the reign of Constantine. For Eusebius, “the Roman Empire and the Christian church are not only essentially connected; they move toward identity.”3 So fixed was this identity that in 481 A.D. when Clovis came to the Frankish throne, St. Remigius wrote him a long instruction on the proper exercise of his office without ever inviting him to convert to Christianity.4 Only in 507 when the Emperor Anastasius made Clovis an honorary Consul of Rome with insignia, did Remigius begin to catechize him, baptizing him in 508.5 The strong sense of the mirror reflection of the Church and the Empire as two realities that merged into one during the era of Constantine was damaged when the Empire began crumbling through internal decay and pressure from the wandering tribes of Europe. During the disintegration of Roman hegemony, a powerful episcopate emerged in the West as a moderating influence on the warring tribal chieftains and kings. Beginning with Clovis and the Council of Orleans in 511 A.D., the Roman vision resurfaced. The “New Constantines of the North”, as Fletcher calls them (the Merovingian and Carolingian kings of the Franks), began to merge the ecclesiastical and civil power of the Frankish Kingdom and Carolingian Empire. This Western version of “caesaro-papism” developed with but minor challenges until the Cluniac Reform reached into the papacy, especially in the reign of Gregory VII in the eleventh century. In what Harold Berman calls “the Papal Revolution,” Gregory began to claim a spiritual autonomy and civil ascendancy for the Church. To accomplish this, he...