William of Ockham and Augustinus de Ancona on the Righteousness of Dissent

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND AUGUSTINUS DE ANCONA ON THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF DISSENT As the first western theologian to break with a reigning pope on matters of faith, Ockham holds a special place in the history of dissent. Earlier authors had supported opposition to the papacy on such important practical matters as the appointment of bishops or the taxation of the Church by secular rulers. Their writings were undoubtedly suggestive for later thinkers in search of a non-papal basis for defining Christian orthodoxy. But the doctrinal frontal attack on John XXII and his successors carried on by Ockham in the second quarter of the fourteenth century was of a different order. That the leading Franciscan theologian in the generation after Scotus should conclude that the pope was a heretic, flee the papal court at Avignon in company with the Minister General of his order, take refuge with an excommunicate claimant to the title of Roman emperor, and maintain his position voluminously for nearly twenty years, while his nominalist academic theology at the same time began to exert a major influence in the universities of Europe: all of this is a startling episode in the history of Christian thinkers— but not, as I want to emphasize,1 so startling a development in the 'Following Michael J. Wilks in The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964): 521: "This is the fruit of conciliarism: the 'most extreme defender of the papal monarchy' can be found to have anticipated all that 'the great destroyer' had to say on the subject." Wilks saw Augustinus's anticipation of Ockham on the points considered here as inconsistent with papal-hierocratic principles. William D. McCready, in "The Papal Sovereign in the Ecclesiology of Augustinus Triumphus" (Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977): 177-205), exonerates Augustinus of formal contradiction, but the question remains whether he successfully resolves the tensions Wilks identifies. That the two most relevant and apparently conflicting questions in Augustinus come one after the other near the beginning of his work suggests to me that he may have wished to avoid too neat a theory. Several of the passages considered in the present essay are discussed by Wilks in the context of conciliarism (pp. 488-523), reasonably enough in view of later events, 143 Franciscan Studies (54) 1994-1997 144A.S. McGRADE history of Christian thought, for Ockham's position on the general question of dissent from papal doctrinal pronouncements is similar in important respects to that of his slightly older contemporary, Augustinus de Ancona, whose Summa de ecclesiastica potestate is rightly considered a curialist or papalist classic. Although my concern here is with anti-papal dissent as such, a few words, negative and positive, may be in order about the specific issues on which Ockham dissented. First, then, it should be noted that Ockham's break with John XXII had no obvious connection with his nominalism. When he fled Avignon in May, 1328, the theological works of his Oxford years had indeed undergone scrutiny by a papally appointed commission, but the theses the commission extracted for censure were never formally condemned, nor was Platonism included among the astonishing multitude of errors Ockham claimed to have found in the pope's constitutions. On the contrary, ironically, it was John, not Ockham, who maintained that communities are fictive persons and Ockham who argued indignantly that this entailed the unreality of the Church.2 Nor was Ockham's opposition due, at least initially, to the general ideas concerning ecclesiastical and secular power on which his reputation as a political thinker chiefly depends. There is no evidence that Ockham had any but this is not to say that either Augustinus or Ockham endorsed the regular superiority of council to pope. More on this in what follows. 2On the examination of Ockham at Avignon, see my The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974): 7-9; hereafter Political Thought, with references. Ockham takes John to task for asserting that the Franciscan order was a persona imaginaria in ch. 6 of the Opus nonaginta dierum (Opera política I, 371-3). He also held that John's understanding of the distinction between God...