In 2002 Ulrich Horst was invited to give the first Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame; the lectures are here published in book form. In a condensed but well-documented and readable form the three chapters, ‘Thomas Aquinas on papal teaching authority’, ‘The medieval Thomist discussion’ and ‘Papal teaching authority in the school of Salamanca’, present topics which the author has investigated in more detail in a number of works published in German over the years.
The mendicants relies on a strong understanding of papal jurisdiction to legitimise their activities; but, as Horst makes clear, this did not necessarily result in a strong doctrine of the Pope's personal dogmatic authority.
Aquinas apparently saw no need even to mention the possibility, familiar to canonists, of a heretical pope or a conflict between pope and council; and, as he shed dubious authorities and arguments used in his earlier writings, his position became less rather than more clear on the relationship between the inerrancy of the Church and the specific role of the Pope.
Horst brings out well the somewhat paradoxical way in which the dispute over Franciscan poverty focused the issue of papal teaching authority in the early fourteenth century. When John XXII denied the Franciscan contention that the highest poverty, as practised by Christ and the Apostles, involved the renunciation of common as well as private property, the more intransigent Franciscans bolstered their rejection of his teaching by ascribing irreversible dogmatic authority to a bull in which a previous pope, Nicholas III, accepted their doctrine. Aquinas's main contribution to the discussion at this stage was in fact his anti-Franciscan theory of religious poverty, and it is perhaps a pity that Horst offers a rather edulcorated account of the conflict between Franciscans and Dominicans on this topic. The letter issued by the two superiors general in 1274, to which he refers on p. 26, was far from being the first call for peace: as early as 1234 the Dominican General Chapter proposed setting up what we might call joint ‘cease-fire’ monitors in each province (MOPH III 5.16-20), and an argument as to which order practised the greater poverty was integral to the quarrel over recruits which Matthew Paris reports under the year 1243 (Chronica maior IV 279 in the Rolls Series edition).
One interesting point brought out by Horst is how persistently Dominican theologians, until almost the end of the period he covers, refused simply to identify the dogmatic authority of the Pope with that of the Apostolic See and subjected papal declarations of doctrine to procedural conditions such as adequate consultation and a fair, thorough discussion of the relevant issues. It was not conciliarism, he argues, which forced a change but (at least in the school of Salamanca) the upsurge of Spanish Protestantism.
The scope of the original lectures unavoidably imposed a degree of selectivity – the Renaissance Italian Dominicans whom Horst studied in Zwischen Konziliarismus und Reformation (Rome 1985), for example, go almost entirely unrepresented, as do the later theologians he examined in Unfehlbarkeit und Geschichte; but it is high time that a sample of his formidable scholarship was made available in English, and it is fitting that it should be prefaced by an appreciative introduction from one of his former pupils.
