João de Paris

John of Paris (c.1260–1306)

John of Paris was a prominent Dominican theologian at Paris at the end of thirteenth century. He began his career with polemical works in defense of Thomist positions. In them, he asserts the distinction between essence and existence, the unity of substantial form and the function of matter as principle of bodily individuation. John later took part in wider controversies, including those between the French crown and the papacy. His best known work is a treatise on the mutual independence of secular and spiritual authority.

John of Paris (or John Quidort) spent much of his life as a controversialist. After the deaths of Thomas Aquinas in 1274 and Albert the Great in 1280, the Dominicans were pressed to explain their appropriation of Aristotelian doctrines in theology (see Aristotelianism, medieval). However, the strife between Thomists and anti-Thomists, or ‘Aristotelians’ and ‘Augustinians’, was symptomatic of deeper tensions in the theological use of philosophy. The controversies produced by these tensions dominated John’s career as a teacher and writer.

The year of John’s birth is uncertain. Probably he was studying as a Dominican in Paris by the end of the 1270s. What is certain is that John’s first large-scale work, written in the early 1280s, was a work by a Dominican on behalf of Dominicans. It had its origin in a controversy that threatened the standing of the order generally and of its Parisian house in particular: the controversy over Thomas Aquinas’ adaptations of Aristotle.

After March 1277 and before August 1279, the Franciscan William de La Mare wrote his Correctorium fratris Thomae (Correctory of Brother Thomas), a collection of about 118 passages from Aquinas’s works, mostly from the first part of the Summa theologiae. William described, criticized and refuted each passage by authoritative texts drawn from the Bible and other authorities. In 1282, the Franciscan order decreed that Aquinas’ Summa was not to be read in Franciscan houses except when it was accompanied by William’s ‘declarations’. However, the Dominicans, who dubbed William’s work the ‘Corruptory’, had already begun to produce rebuttals. John of Paris undertook to write one of these, which is known by its opening word as Sciendum. His eclectic defence of Thomas is marked by an emphasis on the logic of terms and demonstrations, and is concerned primarily with showing flaws in the complaints of his opponents.

In 1292, John began his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in which he takes up and augments Thomist positions. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that sixteen theses in it were singled out as heterodox. John’s point-by-point replies to the charge seem scattered and pusillanimous. Still, John also defended himself in a public disputation on the distinction between essence and existence. His defence contains several striking passages of metaphysical analysis.

John’s best known and most influential work is the short treatise De potestate regia et papali (On Royal and Papal Power), his contribution to the quarrel between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII. The quarrel began in 1296 over the crown’s right to tax clerical property without seeking permission from the papacy. The resolution of the immediate dispute did not settle its principles, the most pertinent of which was the king’s claim that in the temporal regimen of his kingdom he was not subject to the rule of the pope. Boniface asserted the papacy’s right to judge the actions of all, kings included. The French party replied with a call for Boniface’s trial before a general council of the Church on charges of heresy and simony. In this atmosphere, but before agents of the French king finally arrested the pope, John wrote his measured defence of the separation of royal and papal power.

The treatise traces something like the dialectic of a medieval disputed question. Its first ten chapters describe general principles of secular and ecclesiastical power, including the principle that bishops have as such no civil jurisdiction. In the eleventh chapter, John rehearses forty-two arguments for the opposing, papal side. He then turns in Chapters 12 and 13 to deciding the question, to weigh the merits of the two sides. He argues that God gave to the Church a spiritual power comprising the capacity to perform its sacraments, the authority to teach the faithful and to coerce those who despise the sacraments, and a proper provision both for the differentiation and support of its ministers. God did not give the Church as such any direct temporal power or jurisdiction. Having set forth this determination, John proceeds in Chapters 14–20 to reply to each of the forty-two arguments advanced from the other side. He then adds five chapters in something like an appendix, addressing the so-called ‘donation of Constantine’, the claim that the papacy was immune from criticism and the issue of papal abdication. John’s treatise proved quite influential, especially in the Gallican movement of the seventeenth century.

Determinatio de modo existendi corporis Christi in sacramento altaris (Determination on the Manner of Existing of Christ’s Body in the Sacrament of the Altar), John’s last and in some ways most controversial work, was an attempt to offer an alternative to Aquinas’ understanding of the transubstantiation of bread and wine in the celebration of the Eucharist, namely that Christ assumes the bread and wine as he assumed a human body. This view was immediately contested. In 1305, John was censured by an episcopal commission for his alternative teaching. He died at Bordeaux in September 1306 while awaiting a ruling on his appeal to the papacy.