Communication

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editors:
I would like to thank Kenneth Pennington for his challenging review of my book Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (AHR, October 2005, 1239–1240), the majority of which (7 of 8 chapters) he generously calls "quite convincing," without, however, providing much of an account of its contents. The concluding chapter, in contrast, he considers a "harder sell" because of its pursuit of "a different agenda": namely, "to find 'errors' in other scholars' interpretations," foremost that of Brian Tierney, Pennington's onetime doctoral supervisor. This is at best a partial summary of a conclusion whose purpose is entirely conventional: to draw out the consequences of the previous chapters. Those chapters slowly reveal that the main primary source used by scholars for the Apostolic poverty controversy—the after-the-fact and ideological Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite—demonstrably misrepresents the origins of the controversy in 1322–1323: this becomes clear through a reconstruction of the crucial role played by Cardinal Bertrand de la Tour from his writings in a Vatican manuscript made for the private use of Pope John XXII. My conclusion argues that the Chronicle's tendentious narrative distorts the meaning of John's bulls on poverty by supplying them with a skewed context. Modern scholars are criticized primarily for echoing or amplifying this distortion. The Chronicle's story was meant to convince the world that John was a heretic because he contradicted a doctrine of the Church determined in Pope Nicholas III's Exiit qui seminat. Tierney's classic Origins of Papal Infallibility argues that Pope John XXII had no notion of infallibility on theological matters because he thought he could revoke any previous papal decree and even contradict a doctrinal pronouncement therein (specifically in Exiit). This thesis largely repeats, in a modernized form, the story of the Chronicle which the textual discoveries of my book call into question.
According to Pennington, my interpretation is "that John XXII did not assert the right to contradict or to annul Exiit." This is not the case. In fact, it misses the very point of my argument. Exiit is a text about the Franciscan Rule, and of its circa 6,500 words, only about 100 concern Christ and the Apostles. John's opponents present Exiit as a seamless whole whose doctrinal and disciplinary threads cannot be disentangled. I, and others such as James Heft, contend that John XXII saw Exiit as a sum of distinguishable parts, most of which (the disciplinary arrangements concerning the Franciscan Order) could be revoked, but some (the doctrinal statements on Christ and the Apostles) could not be contradicted. Part vs. whole, Church discipline vs. Christian doctrine are by no means "obscure distinctions" today; nor were they in the fourteenth century. So my reading of Quia nonnumquam claims that John did not assert a right to contradict the doctrinal statements in Exiit; nor did he "introduce the theme" of their "revocation." This text and John's other bull Ad Conditorem Canonum are explicitly aimed at disciplinary parts of Exiit and therefore are immaterial to the Chronicle's accusation of heresy and to Tierney's consideration of papal infallibility (or lack thereof) on theological matters.
Not all textual scholars will agree with Pennington's views on the pièce justificatif appended to the book, a transcription of Bertrand's unpublished quaestio on poverty from the Vatican manuscript of expert opinions commissioned by John XXII himself in 1322 and used in the drafting of his bulls. There would have been little point in consulting the Venetian manuscript used by Felice Tocco in his serviceable "edition" of Bertrand's other texts because, as Tocco himself hypothesized and subsequent editors have confirmed, this codex is just a copy of John XXII's original (noted on p. 34 and p. 43 n. 1). Furthermore, a reader can reasonably infer that Bertrand's text did not have a manuscript circulation independent of the Vatican collection of opinions from the fact that I list (28–29) those exceptional texts which did. Last, my "practice of not identifying all the citations in the text" is standard for the genre of theological quaestiones: a citation is identified at its first occurrence and the reference is not repeated at subsequent instances in the text.
Patrick Nold Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich

Kenneth Pennington does not wish to respond.
The Editors

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