Texts for a Poor Church: John Wyclif and the Decretals

The great, and sadly late, Wyclif scholar Michael Wilks remarked that while John Wyclif approved by and large of Gratian's twelfth-century Decretum as solidly based upon Scripture and the Fathers, "It was the insane novelties of the Decretales, full of papal decrees which were to be branded as lies seeking to falsify Scripture itself." ¹ There is much to what Wilks says, but (as so often with Wyclif) it is not quite that simple. Wyclif did not summarily dismiss the contents of those thirteenth- and fourteenth-century collections of papal letters which began with Gregory IX's 1234 Liber Extra. In fact, he thought certain texts were quite sound, and he conceded that the pope does have the right to pass laws for the good of the Church, providing that such statutes are in keeping with Holy Scripture. What really did upset him, however, was the notion that these statutes might aspire to equal authority with the Gospel simply by virtue of their papal sanction. ² It was the larger theory behind such collections that he bristled at: the principle that a pope could render theological judgments that would assume the force of law, dissent from which was labeled heresy. And for Wyclif this all hinged upon the question of authorship and its attendant authority. Every part of Holy Scripture must be of infinitely greater authority than a decretal, he argues, seeing that every decretal is merely the creation of some pope and his subordinates, while every part of Scripture is directly authorized by God. ³ While it is true that some decretals may be valuable and binding, they are so only insofar as they promote the truth of Holy Scripture. For in that case their authoritative content derives ultimately from God, even if promulgated by the pope.

1. Nicholas III and John XXII

There was one decretal in particular Wyclif so prized that he fought for its enduring validity, precisely because he regarded it as an expression of scriptural truth. Pope Nicholas III's 1279 Exiit qui seminat provided Wyclif with legal authorization for the evangelical poverty that he reckoned the perfect expression of Christian life. But whereas Franciscans, like Peter John Olivi and William of Ockham, were primarily interested in safeguarding Nicholas's interpretation of their own Rule, ⁴ Wyclif was interested in applying Exiit's principles to the entire clergy, mendicant and secular alike. He was not calling for all clerics to adopt the Franciscan Rule, of course, but he was certainly in sympathy with it for the very fact that, as Pope Nicholas said, the Rule was founded upon the Gospel. Nicholas writes in Exiit that the Rule came down from God the Father, was handed to the apostles through the example of the Son, and was finally breathed into Francis and his followers by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, it can be said to contain the testimony of the entire Trinity. ⁵ Nicholas claims here that the Franciscan Order was specifically following the example of Christ in his own poverty by rejecting not only lordship over things (dominium) but even the right of use (ius utendi), thus living by simple factual use alone (simplex usus facti). ⁶ Of great significance for future debates was Nicholas's insistence that the decretal be faithfully explained according to its literal sense (ad literam). Wary that the text might be distorted in some way, he specifically prohibits any glosses (glossae) of this decretal, except for the purpose of making the literal sense more intelligible. ⁷ Hence, while glossing may be considered a neutral activity in itself, it is viewed as prone to abuse. As we shall see, the whole question of glossing becomes crucial for Wyclif. ⁸

Some forty years later, Pope John XXII was waging an assault on the Spiritual Franciscans. In his 1322 Quia nonnunquam, he rejected the whole notion that he was bound by previous papal...