Wyclif and Hierarchy

Abstract

Nowadays it is widely realized that much discussion concerning the nature of the Church and of government in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was fuelled by the conceptions of hierarchy that are found in the writings of Denis the pseudo-Areopagite. Denis was invoked and quoted in varied and conflicting ways in consideration of questions concerning the structure and the unity of the Church, the relationships between bishops, mendicants and the papacy, the location of the state of perfection within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the relationship between temporal and spiritual jurisdiction. From the treatises on the Celestial and on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy was derived knowledge of the arrangement of the angelic society in heaven into nine orders. They constituted an exemplar for the corresponding arrangement into nine orders of the Church Militant on earth. So an examination of the hierarchical structure of the contemporary Church seemed to require an understanding and an interpretation of the celestial hierarchy, and that entailed knowledge of the teachings of Denis. The basic propositions were familiar to many before the composition of the Bull Unam Sanctam in which they are enshrined: St. Paul has written that the powers that be are ordained of God, that is, they are arranged or constituted into an ordering, for they are not equal. To Paul’s disciple on the Areopagus in Athens were ascribed the treatises in which this ordering was elaborately explained in the light of the principle that every spirit belongs to an order or grade which forms part of a continuous hierarchy, so that the lower orders are connected to the highest ones, not directly but by the intermediate orders. Denis himself typically wrote of the differences between created beings in terms of the degree to which these unequal beings participate in the divine light which shines progressively less strongly the further it is transmitted down the orders in the hierarchy. Many medieval readers seized upon the implications of this for the exercise of jurisdiction, secular as well as spiritual. Denis’s angelology had been given a political and social extension by writers such as Alan of Lille who died in 1203 and William of Auvergne whose Magisterium divinale was written from about 1223 onwards. The role played by Denis’s writings and ideas in the debates and polemics concerning lay as well as ecclesiastical power continued to be a substantial one in the fourteenth century.