In an interesting essay titled “He is Outwith the World…that He Might Fill All Things” (in This is My Body, Baker Academic, 2008, 127-139.), Thomas J. Davis suggests that Calvin’s frequent emphasis on the spatial distance between Christ and the world is actually an accommodated way of speaking which metaphorically communicates an indescribable reality in a way we can understand it. The key to this interpretation of Calvin, for Davis, is found in certain passages in his commentaries.

Davis rightly points out that Calvin’s Eucharistic theology is conditioned by the dialectical tension of absence and presence. There are two seemingly antithetical points which Calvin was most concerned to uphold: 1. “[I]t is absolutely essential for the ascension to be understood as the removal of Christ’s body from earth to heaven so that it is corporeally absent from believers. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” And 2. “[I]t is absolutely essential that believers have access to the body of Christ in heaven so that it is present corporeally to them. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” (130)

We see both points being affirmed throughout Calvin’s writings. The clearest affirmation of the first point may be found in the Consensus Tigurinus

I see that it’s been over a month and half since the last post here, and it was Part IV of my series providing the Medieval background to Steven’s post on the Reformation “two kingdoms” doctrine. I do have more material to present, which takes the story through the Church-State controversies of the High Middle Ages, but due to full time teaching responsibilities I have as yet been unable to get this material into a form suitable for this blog. School begins on Monday, and so I’m afraid it may be a while longer before that material can appear. My apologies for the delay – and of course, for the terminal slowness of this blog in general.

By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, political discourse in the West had for several centuries been engulfed by numerous controversies between the papal and royal powers of the one Christian society. The typical Roman Catholic way of telling the story of these centuries (and indeed of all the centuries before and after) magnifies the authority claims of the papacy above all others and treats all others as if they were mere will-o-the-wisps advanced by novelty-loving heretics.

This is far from the truth, and if the preceding parts of this series have not yet demonstrated this, this part and the ones that follow should do so. In this part of the series, we will look at one of the most pivotal series of events that shaped Christian political discourse in the “High” Middle Ages, and which, in terms of the monistic doctrine of the papacy which emerged from it, substantially prepared the ground for the Reformation’s attempt to recover a more healthy “two kingdoms” viewpoint.

The ambiguity of Gelasius’ dualistic political theory created a great deal of intellectual and cultural fermentation in Christian society during the eighth and ninth centuries, when, as one scholar puts it, “Theocracy thrived: but so did the seeds of constitutionalism.”[1] The crowning of Charlemagne as “Emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 800 was a portent of much confusion to come. Viewed from a papalist perspective, it very much looked as if the spiritual power was conferring an authenticity upon the temporal power that the latter would not have had without the former. Viewed from a papalist perspective, it seemed as if the Bishop of Rome possessed both “swords,” the temporal and the spiritual, and that the former was his to give to or to withhold from anyone he wished.

In the first part of this series, we looked at Augustine’s epochal work the City of God which was enormously influential on the political thought of the Middle Ages. Of course, Augustine was not the only influence on Christian political thought, nor was the the first to try to formulate a theology of how Christians should interact with the civil power. As one scholar puts it, for the first three centuries of the Faith’s existence, “Christians did not engage in anything that one might recognise as political reflection or activity.” [R.W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pg. 71.] Generally speaking, thanks to repeated persecutions and to their own expectation of the imminent return of Christ to judge the world, Christians thought of their relation to the Empire in an adversarial manner. Christianity had literally to fight tooth-and-nail for its mere survival. Her apologists, though great and godly men, were hard pressed to offer defenses against the attacks, and had little, if any, time and energy to construct what we might call a “positive theology” of the state.

Tertullian (160-220), who famously wondered what Jerusalem had to do with Athens, also made it plain that “Nothing is more foreign to us [the Christians] than the State.” [Apologeticus 38.3, as cited by Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pg. 10.] Origen (185-254) thought of the Empire as having brought “a milder spirit” without which the spread of the Gospel would have been much more difficult,[Contra Celsum, ii.30.] On the other hand, Cyprian (d. 258), wondered how something that “had originated as a refuge for robbers” could be in any sense eternal.[W.H.C. Frend, “Church and State: Perspective and Problems in the Patristic Era,” in Studia Patristica Vol. XVII, Part One, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), pg. 44.] Later, the apologist Arnobius (d. ca. 330) wrote that the Roman Empire was “a curse to humanity…born for the destruction of the human race.”[Frend, ibid., pg. 42.]

“No bishop, no King,” James VI of Scotland and I of England famously stated in his controversy with the Presbyterians. But his statement could just as easily be reversed. Without a King, or perhaps better, without a Caesar, would we have bishops? Would we have sees? In asking these questions, one learns that in so many ways, the Reformation mirrored the climate of Late Antiquity and the early Church.

Without the Roman Empire, would Christendom ever have been? The question goes beyond mere politics or church government. The imperial church granted us the creeds and unified the liturgy (with certain notable exceptions which themselves display socio-political lines). It gave us the legacy, the narrative, by which we now teach our children who they are. And this is both a blessing and a burden.

Peter Heather, in his The Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the way in which the Christian Church came to enjoy its role as a public institution. He notes, “After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the long-standing claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked” (123).

Rather than a clash, there is a coalescence.

The June TLS has an article version of Richard Seaford’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association, given earlier this year, on the Greek discovery of money and their wisdom of limits, freedom, and desire. He says

Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various
spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual , narrative, and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in the basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.” The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

The postmodern devotion to abolishing “Western” (that is Greek) metaphysics would be illuminated by considering the economic conditions of its genesis. Just as our politico-economic discourse assumes the maximization of of earning and expenditure (even of borrowing) by groups and individuals alike, so our theoretical discourse is hostile to all forms of closure.

Earlier, he remarks that what makes the Greeks figure so largely in our memory is that they are enough like us to be easily enough intelligible, yet unlike us enough to exercise and challenge our minds. Because of this, there has been a whole history of hastily generalized “Greekdoms,” each of which have been made to play one role or another in European and American Christendom’s conversation about itself. In one recent episode of that history, Oswald Spengler famously emphasized the idea of limit as definitive of the Greeks, as opposed to the drive for the infinite and the dissolution of all boundaries supposedly characteristic of Western, “Faustian” communities.

Seaford is wiser by far than Spengler; Seaford, like the Greeks, is not dealing in essentializations. He is simply suggesting that the Greeks, through custom and circumstance and reasoning and choice, were disposed to limits, and that the modern West, from a similar combination of factors, is much less so. These aren’t necessary effects of any supposed cultural “nature” (which is a contradictio in adjecto), but are rather contingent effects of chosen policies. The Greek leaders contemplated and deliberated, as men are meant to do, and what they saw of God’s pattern for creation- what Lewis in The Abolition of Man called the “Tao”- they put into practice as best they could. They were often muddled and certainly made many mistakes, but they arrived at a sort of real wisdom. Seaford explicitly, and rightly, denies that the Greek culture of limit is wholly imitable by us. It is not imitable by us in many of its neutral particulars, and certainly not in any of its vicious particulars. But he does suggest it as an edifying model in certain respects. He calls the Hellenic legacy “one of a number of precious resources”, and so it is; we have many others, too, which might help us in our civic conversations about the nature of freedom, society, and the role of money and wealth.

As always, the Greeks do have something to tell us; everybody does, really, but the Greeks are by Providence among our nearest historical neighbors and antecedents, and thus our Reformers took them as teachers in matters of cosmic and civic wisdom. Not their only or even primary teachers; but eminent teachers nonetheless.

Seaford’s own observation about certain fashions of our time should not go unremarked. He is very shrewd to see that the “postmodern” hostility to the tradition of Western metaphysics expresses the still very modern hostility to all forms of limit. Limits, where they are real, are from being; being, whose lineaments are traced by wisdom. Some would-be orthodox theologians seem to think that rejecting the Greeks and their ongoing legacy is a useful move in combatting what Seaford, at the end of his essay, calls “our hyper-monetized , atomized, and self-destructive culture of the unlimited”. They are only too happy to avail themselves of the postmodernist toolkit’s chisels and hammers of deconstruction in this undertaking. But by rejecting the wisdom of being, they are forced to posit categories of faith in their stead. The true wisdom of revelation, however, is not opposed to the wisdom of being which man can attain by reason; it presupposes it. Thus a faith-knowledge which rejects philosophy  is not truly a knowledge from revelation; it is simply “faith” in the modern sense- unaccountable, arbitrary personal preference, an idiosyncratic “value”, which is just as subjective and wilful as the worst aspects of modernity it claims to want to oppose. Francis Schaeffer was absolutely right to always insist, against certain kinds of modern theologizing, on “true truth”; and to insist on that is to find one’s self, consciously or not, as both disciple and fellow student of the Greeks.

Randall Balmer, Episcopal priest and American church historian, relates here an encounter with the notorious Ten Commandments Judge of Alabama, Roy Moore.

Balmer takes some easy shots at Moore in his description of him and his campaign. One wishes that Balmer’s Coastal condescension were not so evident as it is; I, for one, don’t like to wince when I read things, but perhaps the priestly historian is working especially hard to insure that his readers won’t mistake him as somehow being the same sort of Christian as Judge Moore. The description of Moore seems meant to emphasize more than differences in theology proper. Balmer, for some reason, finds it necessary to tell us that Moore is a “former kickboxer”. The suggestion seems to be that Moore’s Christianity is aggressive and visceral, one might even say primitive- as opposed, I take it, to a more scholarly and cosmopolitan and unassuming style of belief, exemplified, I take it, by Balmer. More basically this implicit comparison seems to serve as a figure for the purported red/blue division of the United States; and Balmer seems to be taking pains to let us know where he lives. I’m not at all persuaded of the usefulness of the boxing criterion as an indicator of one’s intellectuality or politics. The Leftist academic sociologist Loic Wacquant, for example, took up boxing, and even wrote a book about it; and I’ve known a number of brainy and left-leaning boxers myself. The really primitive sport here is Balmer’s unkind jabbing at what Moore supposedly represents. Given his picture of Moore as an affable and naive, but nevertheless primitively severe magistrate, Judge Moore comes out looking like- I believe the comparison has been drawn before- that other Judge Roy of Western legend, the ridiculous but no less dangerous Hanging Judge Roy Bean.

In this post and several to follow, I’d like to give some of the Medieval background to Steven’s post below entitled “Reformation And The Two Kingdoms of Christendom.”

Behind all of this, as is the case with so much of Christian theology, is the epoch-making work of St. Augustine. Here the work of most importance is the City of God, written between 413 and 426 A.D. to answer the charge of educated pagans that the city of Rome, mistress of the whole world, had fallen to the barbarians because she had abandoned her ancient gods and embraced the novel God of the Christians.

In the City of God, Augustine divides God’s creation into “Two Cities,” the City of God and the City of Man. He defines and explains these two cities in several places throughout the work. Basically, the City of God is that entity made up of all the elect angels and elect men, while the City of Man is that entity made up of all the non-elect angels and non-elect men. The City of God is characterized by its love of God above all things which God has made, while the City of Man is characterized by its love of things which God has made above God Himself. At the same time, however, in terms of their membership both cities are mixed (permixta): the City of God gets her converts from the City of Man, and likewise, some members of the City of God on earth will turn out to have been non-elect men who in truth belonged to the City of Man.

Nicholas of Cusa was born in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 1401, in the German city of Kues, to a “middle-class” boatman and vineyard owner. As a young man Nicholas was influenced by the “Modern Piety” (devotio moderna), a reform movement that had begun in the late fourteenth century and spread throughout Germany and parts of France and Italy. This movement stressed several things which were, at the time, very controversial and offensive to the established hierarchical authority structure of the Medieval Church. First was a stress on the “simple” Christian life, which the advocates of the Modern Piety thought had been lost after the “Golden Age” of the primitive Church. Second was the importance of not relying merely upon external aids to salvation, such as the Church and her sacramental system, but of focusing seriously on a genuine “interior” spiritual life. Third was a conviction that the mysteries of Christianity were available not merely to intellectuals but to common people as well. Fourth was a stress on intense emotions regarding the suffering of Christ and one’s relationship with Him. In these ways, the devotio moderna had significant connections to the outlook of St. Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas a Kempis. As well, it was a major impulse in the founding of the influential Brethren of the Common Life.

From the age of 16, Nicholas studied at the University of Heidelberg, and took his doctorate in canon law (doctor decretorum) in 1423. Subsequently he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Cologne. These studies prepared him for the great work he was destined to perform in the service of Christ’s Church. At that time the Church was mired in the destructive after effects Western Schism. The Schism, based on the total breakdown of the system of papal government, had consumed the resources and strength of European Christianity for four decades and had only recently been healed by the actions of the Council of Constance (1414-1418). However, even as Nicholas was completing his education, a renewed battle was shaping up between the two major visions of ecclesiastical government which had fought each other during the Schism, namely, papalism and conciliarism. Some of the major principles of this debate hearkened back to the ninth century with the disputes of Hincmar of Rheims with Pope Nicholas I, while others had been slowly hammered out in the centuries-long debates of the two groups of canon lawyers known as the Decretists and Decretalists.

The Council of Constance had issued two major decrees, Haec Sancta (April 6, 1415) and Frequens (October 9, 1417), both of which limited the power of the Papal Monarchy. Papal power had heretofore been nearly illimitable, and the Schism had showed that it was a very serious danger to the peace and stability of Christendom. Although Constance had healed the Schism, it had failed, for various reasons, to implement its other major purpose: that of reforming the Church “in head and members” (in capite et membris). A succession of popes had capitalized on this failure, starting with the one elected by Constance itself, Martin V (r. 1417-1431). Constance’s decree Frequens had specified that General Councils should be held on a specific timetable (five years after Constance, again seven years after that, and then at an interval of every ten years). Despite their continuing pretensions to be absolute rulers, accountable to no one on earth, the popes for the rest of the fifteenth century and into the middle of the sixteenth would live under constant agitation from antipapalist forces rallying around Constance’s decree Haec sancta. They would also live under substantial pressure to adhere to Constance’s decree Frequens.

Pope Martin V felt this pressure acutely, because it cut deeply into the presumed political and ecclesiastical sovereignty of the papacy and created a serious risk of an outside power possessing the ability to regulate the feudal-financial affairs of the pope. The fedual powers of the papacy included the increasingly onerous interference of the Church’s judicial system into the business of the civil judicial system. This interference of the spiritual power in the affairs of the civil power constituted a fundamental violation of the central principle of the Medieval political order, known as Gelasian dualism. That principle, rooted in the epochal work of Augustine in his City of God and formulated as an actual principle of political theology by Gelasius I, bishop of Rome, in 494 A.D., stated that Christendom was made up of two distinct entities, the spiritual and the civil. The two entities were distinct from each other, and independent of each other in their own spheres of operation. However, if their jurisdictions ever overlapped (as they often would in the Middle Ages), the two entities were supposed to constructively cooperate with each other to resolve difficulties.

The rise of the Papal Monarchy system of government as a result of the Investiture Contest of the late eleventh to early twelfth century had set the papacy on a course in which it thought of itself as being totally dominant over the civil sphere as well as over the spiritual sphere. From the time of the Investiture Contest forward, the popes thought of themselves as not just the heads of the universal Church, but also as the final authority over earthly political powers. Consequently, as Gelasius I himself had warned against when he formulated the principle of governmental dualism, the popes frequently allowed their civil concerns to overpower their spiritual concerns. This mired the papacy increasingly in worldliness, and over time, much protest was raised against it from other quarters of Christendom. Though in theory the universal lords of the world, the popes were in actual practice frequently contradicted by civil rulers, and their authority was subjected to intensive scrutiny and debate within the Christian academic world. Nicholas of Cusa was one of many heirs to this critical scrutiny of papal power, and he would put his education in these matters to excellent use challenging the excesses of the Papal Monarchy in the fifteenth century.

Another issue of deep concern to the pope was his “privilege” (privilegium) of dispensing with benefices and indulgences for purposes of filling the coffers of the Papal States which had been depleted by the papacy’s usurpation of and widespread use of temporal power throughout Europe. The popes were immersed in secular business, not least of which was the waging of wars either to gain or to recover territory and other possessions, and because they were feudal lords as well as spiritual governors, the popes could not let their temporal pretensions go. Conciliarism, the theory that the highest judicial power in the Church was the General Council acting directly in Christ’s Name and with powers that overruled all others, represented a serious threat to the papacy’s claims of both spiritual and civil sovereignty. Accordingly, Martin V spent fourteen years after his election by the Council of Constance carefully, but deviously, politicking against conciliarism. He was successful in manipulating affairs so that the papacy remained largely unchallenged until the Council of Basel was convened, per Frequens, in July of 1431.

Nicholas of Cusa had been elevated in 1430 to the position of chancellor for a local noble, Ulrich von Manderscheid. In this capacity, he went to the Council of Basel in February of 1432 for the purpose of defending his lord’s claim on the archbishopric of Trier, one of the seven electorates of the Holy Roman Empire. Shortly after his arrival, he was incorporated into the council’s administrative body, specifically into the Committee on Faith. From this position he would become embroiled in the council’s bitter dispute with Martin V’s successor, Pope Eugenius IV (r. 1431-1447) over issues of the council’s authority relative to the pope’s. Eugene had tried peremptorily to dissolve the Basel assembly and transfer it to an Italian site, partly so that he could more easily attend it himself and partly because representatives of the embattled Greek Church had contacted the West and asked for a more convenient location for a council to discuss reunification of the two bodies, sundered since 1054.

However, since the Council of Basel had already formally organized itself and renewed Constance’s decree Frequens, connecting its authority to that of the earlier Council, it rejected the papal bull of dissolution when it arrived two months after Eugenius issued it. In its next session Basel renewed Haec sancta as well, adding further insult to the pope’s pretensions. In the midst of this controversy, Nicholas arrived at Basel. A subcommittee of the Committee on Faith in which he participated in August of 1433 judged Eugenius’s bull of dissolution to be invalid and no restriction on the authority of the Council. This substantially raised the pressure on the pope, and Eugenius then declared conciliarism a heretical ecclesiology. The Council, however, ignored his pretentious rumblings and continued on with its business.

A brief respite from the conflict was introduced in October of 1433 when the Emperor Sigismund arrived at the Council and successfully arbitrated the dispute so that Eugenius appeared to give in to the conciliarist program. Though at that time he formally declared the council legitimate from the time of its inception and formally revoked his earlier bulls against it, informally, as is shown by his private letters, he did not recant his position that conciliarism was heresy. At about this time, Nicholas wrote his masterpiece, the Catholic Concordance, which elaborately argued from the very nature of the universe itself that General Councils are superior to the Roman Pontiff. A few citations from this work will be of interest here.

No rational person can doubt that a council which represents the church has power over the papacy to direct its occupant in accordance with the needs of the church which is greater than the decision of one man concerning a papal office which has been given to him in the name of the church and for its benefit [The Catholic Concordance, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pg. 123]

We see that by the grace of God the Council of Basel has now been strengthened in a marvelous way—although at the beginning it was convulsed by doubt and fluctuation—, and this can come only from God who is lasting truth. Therefore let us firmly believe that all its actions from the beginning were inspired by the Holy Spirit….The Holy Spirit undoubtedly inspired these actions so that if perhaps the pope wished to resist, there would be no doubt as to the universality of the council. On these three matters there has already been a definitive and immutable decree in the Council of Constance. And so by divine inspiration the Council [of Basel ] concerned itself with this before any difficulty arose.

…If there is no doubt that the Holy Spirit dictated this syllogism to this holy Council, what need is there to doubt or dispute further whether the pope can be bound by the reform decrees so that he cannot contravene them? [The Catholic Concordance, pp.139-140]

Echoing the earlier conciliarists Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, John of Paris, and William Durandus the Younger, Nicholas agreed that the power of the General Council is directly from Christ, not indirectly through the pope, that in times of emergency the Council may conduct itself without the consent of the pope, and that it may even remove the pope from office for heresy and incompetent governorship.

In the context of a papalist system that was entrenched in Christendom and which claimed to be traditional and argued that conciliarism was a “novelty,” Nicholas of Cusa’s theory of conciliarism was everywhere marked by moderation, not radicalism. He affirmed that the papacy is part of the divinely-willed scheme of ecclesiastical government, that it possessed significant power and primacy in its own right, and that it was not merely the creature of the General Council. His basic theory was “triadic,” meaning that it was organized according to threes. Nicholas argued that there are nine choirs of angels and nine heavenly spheres above. Below, the world is divided into rational, sensate, and vegetative. Just as man is body, soul, and spirit, so too is the church made up of sacraments, priethood, and the faithful.

Through in-depth analyses of many historical records and principles of canon law, Nicholas argued several key points. First was that the See of Peter is the head of the Church because of the “consent of the Church” (consensus ecclesiae). Second, when the pope wants to make a law he must consult the Church represented in a council. Third, that corporate realities are more important than individual ones, and so, as the early conciliarists had said, “the health of the whole body is the supreme law” as over against any laws made by only the head. Fourth, that following from that the “greater and sounder part” (maior et sanior pars) of a council cannot err in its decisions about doctrine. Fifth, that “positive law” (the law on the books) is not absolute. Sixth, that a General Council may be distinguished from a pseudo-council (conciliabulum) by means of an intricate theory of “representation.” For Nicholas, representation included a graded hierarchy of presiding officials (praesides) and other representatives (legati) of various groups, including ordinary laymen. This last was an astounding claim at this point in history, so it is noteworthy that Nicholas takes steps to distance himself from the similar-sounding, but more democratic and revolutionary theory of Marsilius of Padua (1270-1343).

Nicholas’ arguments for conciliarism in the Church are, as it turns out, also arguments for the proper ordering of temporal society. Like most theologians of the Middle Ages Nicholas was aware of and tried to uphold the principle of governmental dualism. This led him to write, against the pretensions of the papacy for the previous several centuries to have the power to control the temporal sphere as well as the spiritual, that the Holy Roman Emperor is in his sphere of government the equivalent of the pope in his sphere of government. In Nicholas’ day the ideological construct of “universal empire” generally speaking, and of the “universal empire of the Romans” particularly, was losing ground to rising forces of nationalism and constitutionalism. Nevertheless, Nicholas argued that the emperor is both the protector of the Church (advocatus ecclesiae) and that even nations of Christendom such as France and England which do not recognize imperial authority should submit to the emperor’s administration of conciliar decrees. This is due to the fact the emperor is, in the temporal sphere, the “minister of God” and the “vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.” As Nicholas saw it, the Christian society (societas Christiana) was being rent by two forces: excessive centralization in the papacy, and excessive decentralization in the empire. Sadly, his cogent type of thinking about how to reform these matters was not to be followed, and the problems he saw would, by the next century, become excerbated to the point where only a thoroughgoing Reformation could hope to fix them.

Returning to an earlier theme, Nicholas’ moderation, designed to threat a path through many conflicting claims, is in keeping with the methodology he learned in his training as a canon lawyer. That method, following the father of Medieval canon law, Gratian of Bologna, tried to resolve contradictory texts by harmonizing them into a middle position (medium concordantiae). It is his moderation, in fact, which provides the biggest clue to the dramatic reversal of his loyalty which took place in May of 1437. Although he propounded the theory that conciliar business should proceed through disagreements toward a goal of reconciliation through what he called a “coincidence of opposites,” he was unable to continue following the conciliarist program when a radical faction at Basel took control of the council. This faction, which became the majority, rejected Nicholas’ idea of “divided sovereignty” in which the pope and the Council shared power and added mutually to each other’s credibility.

As pressure mounted on the West to meet the Greek representatives for serious talks about reunification, and as Basel came to be virtually controlled by a group which wanted not merely to reform the papacy but to reduce it to a creature of a perpetual series of councils, Nicholas abandoned the assembly and became a champion of Pope Eugenius’ cause. When Eugenius transferred the council to Ferrara in 1437, Nicholas and several other moderates left Basel to its own devices and threw their weight into the reforming and reunification efforts in Ferrara. So great was the authority of Nicholas that his labors for the papacy would later provoke Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II (r. 1458-1464), to call him “the Hercules of the Eugenians.”

In succeeding centuries, much has been made by papalists of Nicholas’ seeming abandonment of the conciliar cause and supposed embracing of the papalist one, but a careful reading of the history and of Nicholas’ own total program argues for the conclusion that it has been much ado about nothing. Despite his seeming “defection” to papalism after the radical faction took over the Council of Basel, one must note that Nicholas continued over the years to support the general ideas behind conciliar theory, especially the principles of the primacy of the “consensus of the Church” and the lawfulness of the Church as a whole to withdraw from obedience to the pope if he begins to threaten the health of the “greater and healthier” part of the body.

The Council of Ferrara soon became the Council of Florence due to a hasty move to protect the assembly from brigands. Ferrara’s overly-confident reunification decree, Laetentur Coeli , issued in 1439, was almost instantly rejected by the Greek authorities in Constantinople because it conceded too much to that which the Greek Church had so resolutely opposed for centuries: unfettered papal primacy. Four years later, Constantinople was sacked by the Muslim armies, putting an end to a thousand years of Eastern Christian civilization. Nicholas was made a cardinal in 1449 by Eugenius IV’s successor, Pope Nicholas V (r. 1447-1455), and it is perhaps ironic that as a cardinal he received a written call for a new General Council nailed to his door by conciliarists in 1451. In 1450 he became the Bishop of Brixen in Tyrol, which because of the feudalization of the Church at this time brought him into some unfortunate territorial conflicts with the Duke of Tyrol, Sigismund. As late as 1460, only four years before his death, he could still be found advocating a “representative” form of government for the Church, putting the lie to papalist caricatures of the reasons for and implications of his “papalist reversal” two decades earlier.

Other than the Catholic Concordance, Nicholas of Cusa is known for his brilliant work On Learned Ignorance, published in 1439, and an oddly ecumenical (for the times) book called On Peace in Faith, published in 1453. Nicholas’ contributions to conciliar theory also pre-saged some developments in what we now think of as “Modern” constitutional theory. This is particularly seen in his theory that representation is not, as had often previously been the case, a case of one party autonomously impersonating another, but instead a case of one party being consciously chosen by another to stand in its place. Nicholas is largely responsible for moving Christian political discourse at this time more solidly away from monarchichal absolutism and further along towards a “separation of powers” doctrine. Given that so much is made of the so-called “death of conciliarism” in the fifteenth century, it is ironic to find Nicholas’ work quoted approvingly by the sixteenth century papalist Cardinal Bellarmine.

Nicholas of Cusa died in Rome in 1464. It is fitting that such a brilliant Christian scholar should be physically remembered in his own home town of Kues by a library (many of whose books bear annotations in his own hand) and a home for the aged, which still stand today as possibly the oldest private foundations in Europe.