Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/257

Rh just because it represents the authority of the universal church and speaks the voice of the entire community both in its spiritual and temporal capacities. That it has power over the pope follows necessarily from the principles already laid down.

It is evident then that the pope in his quality of Christian bishop can claim no right of supreme judgement in human things, even over the clergy. If he possess any such right it must have been conceded to him by human authority; as a spiritual person he has absolutely none, and therefore properly he ought to possess none. The power bequeathed by Christ to the priesthood can only concern religious affairs: it is idle to suppose that in granting to it the keys of heaven and hell he gave any temporal jurisdiction. The keys open and close the door of forgiveness, but forgiveness is the act of God, determined by the penitence of the sinner. Without these conditions the priestly absolution is of no avail. The turn-key, claviger, is not the judge. As for the special proof of the pope's superiority to the secular estate taken from his act in the ceremony of crowning the emperor, a ceremony, it is plain, can confer no authority: it is but the symbol or public notification of a fact already existing. The same function as the pope has at the coronation of the emperor, belongs at that of the king of France to the archbishop of Rheims; but who would call this prelate the superior of his king? Marsiglio goes over the standard arguments in favour of the papal assumptions and rejects them one after another, partly by his resolute insistence on a literal interpretation of the text of Scripture, partly by his grand distinction between the sacred calling of the priesthood and their extrinsic or worldly connexions. With his ideal of a church in which these worldly ties have no existence, with his view of them as mere indications of the distance by which the actual church is removed from primitive purity, there is no room for any talk of ecclesiastical privileges or exemptions. The