The hundred years after Innocent saw the decline of papal supremacy over the temporal sphere, a development ironically forwarded by the grand pope. When Innocent introduced prince Frederick II as the successor of Otto IV, the emperor whom he deposed in 1215, he unwittingly raised up an adversary who harassed the papacy until mid-century. As emperor, Frederick ruled a Sicilian government that operated with brilliant efficiency while setting his sights on subduing all Italy under his authority. Innocent, who died in 1216, would not have dreamed of allowing Frederick such power, and the popes who followed him shared the same aversion to the emperor. For the duration of Frederick’s reign they found themselves on the defensive side of political squabbles and military threats.
Aside from convening a council to condemn and depose Frederick in 1245, Pope Innocent IV used every means at his disposal to gain supporters from across Europe for his duel with the emperor. Spiritual claims and privileges were deployed to effect temporal ends, debasing the papacy in the minds of those it hoped to influence. The papacy was fighting for its political life and, in order to protect its position, had vigorously adopted the habits and attitudes of a temporal political establishment. The popes continued to argue for Rome’s supremacy, claiming that the papacy was imbued with both the sacerdotal and the royal powers of Christ, but their rhetoric was marred by the reality of an emperor determined to ignore papal assertions and annul Roman power.
The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas lent intellectual credibility to the distillation of the kingdom from the church that developed in the first half of the century. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas affirmed that political life derived from man’s nature as a social animal. Reflection on the nature of man provided a framework for a political life fit for that nature and that facilitates the kinds of activity inherent in its design. By this reasoning Thomas crafted a theory of politics without overt reference to the supernatural or divine law. This theory had a noticeable impact, for just as one could conceptualize the kingdom with lenses that were not self-evidently theological, so kings could justify their powers in distinction from popes. If the pontiffs pointed to the royal rule handed down to them by Christ, after Aquinas the kings could answer that the temporal order possessed legitimacy independent of such rationales.
The dispute over national sovereignty and the right of popes over the nation’s churchmen brought the papacy to its knees, pitting the French king Philip IV against Pope Boniface VIII (1295–1303). The first of their battles concerned the right of kings to tax the clergy. When Boniface announced that kings had no power over the persons and goods in their realms that belonged to the church, Philip answered by halting all exports of currency and precious metals to Rome. This decree deprived the papacy of its principle source of revenue, with the result that Boniface succumbed to Philip’s right of taxation. The second dispute arose over Philip’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment of a French bishop, a matter carried out in spite of canon laws stating that only a pope could put a bishop on trial. After a multitude of papal bulls against Philip that met with the king’s own propaganda campaign, Boniface proclaimed his unqualified supremacy as pope in Unam Sanctam. Promulgated in 1302, the bull affirmed that all the church’s sheep belong to one shepherd, lest they not constitute one flock. It also argued that “the spiritual power has to institute the earthly power and to judge it if it has not been good,” a perspective that elevated Boniface over Philip as a lord over his subject. The bull so emphasized the pope’s authority that it pronounced it “altogether necessary to salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” One could hardly imagine a more explicit and forceful combination of the papacy’s spiritual foundations with its supposed temporal authority.
Philip responded to Unam Sanctam by commissioning a military attack on the person of Boniface, who had recently taken up residence in his hometown of Anagni. In 1303 the king’s leading minister and an army of mercenaries assaulted the town in an effort to find the pope, discovering him after an afternoon of fighting. The minister and an associate entered the papal chambers and saw Boniface, an old man, dressed in pontifical attire and clutching a crucifix. The invaders insulted and mistreated him but could not finally decide what to do regarding their captive. A delay of three days permitted the people of Anagni to expel the mercenaries, with the pope escaping and returning to Rome. Yet the humiliation of the affair had done its work, with a shocked Boniface dying a few weeks later. His successors capitulated to Philip, even lauding the king for the piety he had displayed in his conduct with the earlier pope.
The opening of the fourteenth century intensified the fall initiated in the thirteenth. During this period, the Grand Dialectic hastened its descent as the papacy plummeted beneath the temporal power both in concrete circumstances and on the level of theory. Not long after Boniface the papal throne relocated to Avignon, where it stayed for roughly 70 years. The popes during this period amounted to little more than lackeys of the French kings, having been deprived of their independence and in complete contrast to the superiority of Innocent III. The hierarchy also fell prey to the ills that had troubled it prior to Gregory, permitting the practice of simony that had provided an immediate cause for the eruption of the Grand Dialectic. The fall of the papacy was nearly exhausted in the “Babylonian Captivity” in which the spiritual authority devolved into a partisan of a particular ruler while suffering internal corruption. Its sorry condition was obvious to monarchs both within and outside of France.
Changes in political theory in the early fourteenth century were delicate and profound, indicating Docetism’s maturation into a new phase in its progress toward the Christ-Idol. Some canonists continued to advocate papal world-supremacy in the time of Boniface, with Giles of Rome contending that the authority granted by the papacy’s spiritual functions implied that the pope owned all the world’s material goods. The ocean between the language of spiritual purity and the reality of worldly ambition that characterized papist arguments had rendered them unconvincing to European leaders for decades, and this was no less the case with Giles. At this point royal thinkers continued to take cues from the papists, as a theory appeared in France that mirrored Roman claims inasmuch as it dreamed of the consolidation of vast territories under French rule. The philosopher Pierre Dubois advanced a scenario in which France would gain control over Germany, Constantinople, and Rome in addition to England and smaller European provinces. The fantasy of papal world-domination met its twin in the illusion of a universal temporal empire standing over the West as well as much of the East.
At the fall the soul aspires toward infinity and so descends toward the formlessness of possibility, with the body as the lower imitating the higher in the same dynamic. In like manner the kingdom duplicated the theoretical errors of a church in steep decline, justifying royal rule in the direction of the limitlessness that had progressively characterized papal aims since Gregory. The royal theorists who posited an infinite kingdom found their precedent in the theoretical application of that infinity to the church. This conceptual confrontation of infinite versus infinite equalizes the spiritual and the temporal and so undermines the higher by negating its superiority. Just as in fallen nature the flesh wars against the spirit in order to subdue it, the late-medieval kingdom pressed the church under its heel both through the physical relocation of the papacy to Avignon and in its claims to royal universality.
Nor is this all. John of Paris, arguably the most sophisticated thinker in his time, also maintained that the church and the kingdom each possessed a distinct and universal dominion, the church in spiritual affairs and the kingdom in temporal government. John then proceeded to redefine the pope’s authority in terms of his administration of ecclesiastical goods that belonged in fact to the people. Like temporal