Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Therines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians

Abstract

This work belongs to a group of recent monographs which focus on the life and writings of one medieval French theologian in order to provide readers with a fresh angle on well-known events. William Chester Jordan has chosen his theologian well. Jacques de Thérines was an influential Cistercian scholar and abbot whose works appeared from 1306 to 1320, during the period known to French television audiences as that of les rois maudits. The alleged curse on the dynasty laid by the Templar master Jacques de Molay as he was burned at the stake in 1314 has come to symbolise the sufferings of France between the beginning of the fourteenth century and the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337. Contemporary chroniclers bear out the judgement that this was a time of ‘unceasing strife, unending fear’, which they regularly contrasted with the golden age of St Louis that they believed had preceded it. Jacques de Thérines participated in or wrote about all the great crises that occurred during his adulthood, although, as with the case of the Flemish war, he was sometimes concerned only with their financial results. As abbot, first of Chaalis and then of Pontigny, he wrote from a remarkably detached position. Secure in the support of his order, he could articulate his own views with only a modicum of deference to the power of the crown, unlike the secular master Bertaud of St Denis who orchestrated Philip IV's appeal in Paris against Boniface VIII or the Dominican Hervé de Nédellec who strongly supported the attack on the Templars. As he emerges from Jordan's pages, Jacques' considerable self-confidence grew from his conviction that his order remained the best exemplar of religious vocation in the early fourteenth-century world. He would have been horrified by the common historical verdict that the Cistercians had lost their primitive simplicity by the beginning of the thirteenth century. For him, secular clerics (including the bishops) were entirely responsible for the church's departure from true Christian values, because their discipline was far too lax, as was also that of the friars. Jacques attributed unsullied Cistercian virtue in part to the order's enjoyment of exemption from episcopal control; he therefore became the most ardent and most extreme proponent of such exemption, guaranteed by papal power. From this position he sought (ineffectually) to limit both royal and papal rights to tax the order. His belief in exemption explained his somewhat complex view of the Templar trial. On the one hand, he did not believe that the Templars enjoyed true exemption, because they shed blood and were not properly cloistered; on the other, he had the courage to raise serious doubts about the quality of Templar confessions at the council of Vienne. His independence of mind had earlier been attested when, in late 1306, he argued in Paris that the expulsion of the Jews, just concluded, could only be temporary. Jordan has created a convincing portrait of a courageous monk who thought for himself, wrote polemic when he thought polemic necessary, upheld the constitution of his order even when it was very difficult, and played a significant role on the stage of the church international. It is perhaps sad that he should have been involved in the condemnation of another courageous person of independent mind, Margaret Porete; but the proceedings were so skewed as to make the verdict almost inevitable. Jacques' praise for Cistercian discipline should be taken into account by any biographer of the later Cistercian pope Benedict XII, whose career as an ecclesiastical reformer is often portrayed as a return to standards long forgotten. And it is always valuable to be reminded that Philip IV and his sons faced ecclesiastical as well as secular opponents, even if the former had to express their opinions with caution and in a language that few understood. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book lies in Jordan's careful reassessment of Jacques' figures for the costs borne by Cistercian monasteries for wars at home and crusades abroad. If, as Jordan argues, there was only one serious scribal error in the figures Jacques submitted to Pope John XXII, then we now have another index of the suffering of northern Europe in the second decade of the fourteenth century.