Excerpt from Medieval Political Ideas, Vol. 2

The church entered the Middle Ages as a complex structure of many offices whose mutual relations of p0wer were not clearly defined. Of these the papacy, like the secular monarchy, offered itself as the first obvious nucleus upon which doctrines of concentrated power might form, but with even greater case than in the case of the secular kingship. For, throughout the Middle Ages, its claim to direct divine institution through Christ's commission to Peter was rarely disputed; the tre mendous terms in which the keys of heaven had been granted to Peter argued a virtually limitless authority; it was easy to deduce from the lofty dignity of the Vicar of Christ an unconditioned duty of obedience and the doctrine that the pope, like the 'spiritual man' of the Scriptures, could 'judge all and be judged by none.'1 Moreover, the influence of Roman law could work with more effect on the law of the church than on that of secular kingdoms. Although all levels of the hierarchy were hallowed by tradition, precedents - genuine or accepted as such for papal intervention in every sphere of ecclesiastical activity were laid down in the confused period that preceded the systematization of the canon law; and when the canonists in the twelfth century began their work of codification and analysis, the materials for a theory of papal omnicompetence were already available to them. Unlike the lawyers who tried to adapt Roman concepts to the structure of the secular kingdoms, the canonists were not hampered by feudal con ceptions of divided dominion; the church was already an organized structure of offices; long before the secular kingdoms it looked like a state, though it was not till the early fourteenth century that James of Viterbo first defined it as a regnum. In the terms in which its law was couched and in its very geographical structure it was reminiscent of the Roman empire. Thus the rules of Roman law could be easily borrowed by the canonists for organization and interpretation of the law of the church, and, inevitably, the characteristics of the Roman i mperium were applied to the papacy.

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