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The confused and tumultuous circumstances surrounding the election to the papacy of Urban VI, its corollaries, the subsequent defection of thirteen of the cardinals, their election of a rival pontiff, and the ensuing years of dismal division within the Church—these form the general background to this tract, which is a product, therefore, of the immense outburst of polemical writing occasioned by the onset, in 1378, of the Great Schism. The more immediate circumstances surrounding it are the failure by 1403 of the French withdrawal of obedience from the Avignonese pope to produce a settlement of the Schism, the breakdown of all subsequent negotiations between the rival pontiffs, and finally the convocation, by dissident cardinals from both camps, of a general council which was to meet at Pisa in March, 1409.

It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:This sacred synod of Constance, forming a General Council … represents the Catholic Church and has immediate power from Christ which anyone, of whatsoever status and condition, even if holding the Papal dignity, is bound to obey in matters pertaining to the Faith, extirpation of the schism and reformation of the said Church in head and members.

Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council? Despite the current interest in things conciliar this is a strange and, no doubt to some, a rather forced juxta position. For what, after all, is there to be said about it? The council may indeed have been a great non-event in the religious history of the sixteenth century but it was surely a highly papalist non-event. Was it not, in form and procedure, a faithful copy of the papal general councils of the pre-Conciliar era—of Lateran IV (1215), of Lyons (1274), of Vienne (1311)? To what did it owe its convocation if not the desire of Julius II to cut the ground from under the feet of the dissidentconciliabulumof Pisa (1511–12)—itself, of course, summoned by the cardinals of the opposition with the support of the French king and very much a conciliarist's council? Were not the first half-dozen sessions occupied almost exclusively with the condemnation of the activities of that council, the proscription of those who persisted in adhering to it and the reconciliation of those who had abandoned it? Did not the eleventh session witness the definitive rejection of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, the base from which for so long conciliarist thinkers had been able to operate with impunity? Did it not witness also the unambiguous assertion of the superiority of pope to council, and was not this principle underlined in practice by the craven responsiveness of the council fathers to papal demands? And so on. It is easy enough to envisage the questions, the queries, the dissents.1

During the last couple of years two articles have appeared in these pages, both concerned primarily with what one of them calls “the theology of nominalism.” This in itself is significant because it reflects a growing interest among theologians and ecclesiastical historians in the theological positions characteristic of those late medieval thinkers who belonged to the “nominalist” or “terminist” school. But more significant is the fact that the authors of the two articles should adopt diametrically opposed approaches to these positions, for it illustrates in a very concrete fashion the pioneer state in which the study of later medieval scholasticism still lingers. Much of the land on this particular frontier is not merely untenanted but even uncharted, and those brave or foolhardy enough to work in the area enjoy a freedom of movement bewildering to others whose business confines them to the more settled regions of earlier or later centuries. It is not so much that the wilderness is trackless as that one is still free to choose from among several possible routes each of which has its own potent inducements to offer to those who are anxious to grasp the lay of the land. There is still a great deal of debate about the respective worth of these various routes and nothing that can be said at present is likely to put an end to it.

R. G. Collingwood has suggested that the basic contrast between the Greek view of nature and what he calls the Renaissance view, springs from the difference between their respective analogical approaches to nature. Whereas, he argues, the Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was based on an analogy between the world of nature and the individual human being, the Renaissance view conceived the world analogically as a machine. Instead of being regarded as capable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and, it might be added, according to its immanent laws, the world, to such a view, is devoid both of intelligence and life, the movements which it exhibits are imposed from without, and “their regularity due to 'laws of nature' likewise imposed from without.” Coiling- wood concludes, therefore, that this view presupposed both the human experience of designing and constructing machines, and the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God.

“And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night.”Matthew ArnoldPerhaps it is somewhat less than fair that to one whose interests lie in earlier centuries than theirs, the recent exchanges between Donald J. Greene and Peter J. Stanlis should have called irresistibly to mind the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Unfair, indeed, admittedly unfair, but not wholly without its moral. The strife has been ferocious and the crash of opposed artillery truly deafening. But the smoke remains dense, the objectives obscured, and so many of the projectiles hurled have spent their force on phantom targets. And why is this so? In part, no doubt, because of disagreements about the very nature of Dr. Johnson's views — but a medievalist would be presumptuous indeed to contemplate even the most tentative of interventions on this score. More germane to his interests, however, and surely no less fundamental to the impasse, is the dangerously impoverished historical landscape against which these views have been measured.This comes out very clearly in Stanlis's abuse of the label “Calvinist” — for which Greene correctly upbraids him. It comes out, too, in Greene's reliance on that shopworn tag “Augustinian,” with which Stanlis is rightfully uneasy — though, conceivably, for the wrong reasons. But it comes out most clearly of all in the assumption, common, it seems, to both parties, that it is safe and meaningful to speak of the Scholastic conception of natural law.

THE return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, the disputed papal election of I378, the subsequent protracted schism and the failure of repeated attempts to end it-these are the events that ensured the rise to prominence of that particular form of ecclesiastical constitutionalism that has come to be known as "Conciliar theory." At the heart of this theory lay the belief that the pope was not an absolute but rather a constitutional monarch, that he possessed a merely ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church, and that the final authority in the Church lay, therefore, not with the pope but with the whole body of the faithful or with their representatives gathered together in a general council. It was in response to this belief that the Councils of Pisa (I409) and Constance (I4I4-I4I8) assembled to put an end to the schism, and that the conciliarists at the Council of Basel (I43I-I449) defied the authority of a pontiff, the validity of whose title to office was uncontested. TI'he failure of the conciliarists at Basel to make good their claims against the Pope and the subsequent condemnation of conciliar theory by Pius II led to a decline in its fortunes. But for two centuries or more the memory of these three councils continued to disturb the ecclesiastical consciousness of Europe, as also did the two great decrees promulgated at Constance-Sacrosancta, which asserted that general councils, acting alone, are superior in authority to the pope, and Frequens, which provided for the assembly of such councils at frequent and regular intervals. In the last few years, stimulated perhaps by the quatercentenary of the Council of Trent and the convocation of the Second Vatican Council, there has been a notable quickening of interest in the conciliar movement, a growing realization of its importance both in the history of constitutional and political thinking and in the more arcane realm of ecclesiological speculation. This interest has focused largely, however, if not exclusively, upon