Note 450 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Some remarkable intellectual phenomena, however, do connect with the French university life of the first half of the fourteenth century. William of Occam (d. 1347), the English Franciscan, who taught at Paris, is on the whole the most rationalistic of medieval philosophers. Though a pupil of the Realist Duns Scotus, he became the renewer of Nominalism, which is the specifically rationalistic as opposed to the religious mode of metaphysic; and his anti-clerical bias was such that he had to fly from France to Bavaria for protection from the priesthood. His Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica, and his Defensorium directed against Pope John XXII (or XXI), were so uncompromising that in 1323 the Pope gave directions for his prosecution. What came of the step is not known; but in 1328 we find him actually imprisoned with two Italian comrades in the papal palace at Avignon. Thence they made their escape to Bavaria.450 To the same refuge fled Marsiglio of Padua, author (with John of Jandun) of the Defensor Pacis (1324), “the greatest and most original political treatise of the Middle Ages,”451 in which it is taught that, though monarchy may be expedient, the sovereignty of the State rests with the people, and the hereditary principle is flatly rejected; while it is insisted that the Church properly consists of all Christians, and that the clergy’s authority is restricted to spiritual affairs and moral suasion.452 Of all medieval writers on politics before Machiavelli he is the most modern.