9 - HENRY OF GHENT: Is a Subject Bound to Obey a Statute When It Is Not Evident that It Promotes the Common Utility?

Summary

Introduction

(For information on Henry of Ghent's life and writings, see the introduction to Translation 5.)

Thirteenth-century scholastic political and ethical thought stands in a direct and continuous line of tradition with the moral and pastoral theology of the twelfth-century schools. The academic milieu which had inspired the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 also provided the training and the personnel which subsequently put its reforms into practice. From Robert Grosseteste onwards, there was thus an intimate connection between the teaching of Aristotle's Ethics in Paris and the provision of effective pastoral care through sermons and confession. The effects of such a direct engagement with pressing social, ecclesiological, and political concerns can be traced throughout the quodlibetic questions determined by Parisian masters. Two issues stand out as having a particular relevance to political thought: first, the longstanding tension between secular clergy (that is, clergy who did not belong to a religious order) and the mendicant orders (that is, Dominicans and Franciscans); second, the imposition of taxes by the Capetian kings of France and by successive popes in Rome.

Hostility between secular and mendicant masters within the University at Paris was the source of acrimonious controversies in the 1250s and 1270s. In 1281, Martin IV issued Ad fructus uberes, a bull which granted privileges to mendicant friars and, in the process, appeared to dispense them from the statutes passed by the Fourth Lateran Council.