Pope burns the book against friars after St. Thomas Aquinas answers it

ANAGNI, October 5, 1256 AD — Pope Alexander IV condemned the book written to drive the begging friars out of the University of Paris, in a bull dated October 5, 1256 AD, and had it burnt at Anagni. In the same judgment he ordered that the friars be admitted to the doctorate. It was the degree the Paris masters had been keeping from Saint Thomas Aquinas, a thirty-one-year-old Dominican whose answer to the book was in the Pope’s hands.

St. Thomas taught theology at Paris. There the masters who belonged to no religious order wanted the Dominicans and Franciscans out of the university’s teaching chairs, and they could refuse the friars the degree. The friars wanted to go on teaching and to take their degrees, and the decision was the Pope’s.

A Paris master, William of Saint-Amour, denied that the friars had any right to teaching chairs at all. William and his followers taught that friars who lived by begging, and did no work with their hands, could not save their souls by study and contemplation alone. William set out his case in a book, De periculis novissimorum temporum (The Perils of the Last Times).

On Palm Sunday this year, St. Thomas was preaching in the church of Saint-Jacques in Paris when a university officer, Guillot, walked in and stopped the sermon. Guillot read aloud a letter from William and the other masters attacking the friars, and St. Thomas in particular. St. Thomas said nothing while Guillot read, then went on with his sermon.

On May 4 Pope Alexander IV wrote to the chancellor of the University of Paris to congratulate him on letting St. Thomas teach in public again. In the letter the Pope called St. Thomas “Brother Thomas of Aquino, of the Order of Preachers, a man eminent for his birth, and for his virtues, and for the treasure of science with which God has enriched him.” In June the Pope took from William and three other masters on William’s side their teaching chairs, their church posts and their incomes.

Envoys of the King of France, Saint Louis IX, carried William’s book to the Pope at Anagni. Pope Alexander IV named four cardinals to examine it. He also asked the head of the Dominicans, Humbert of Romans, to have theologians of the order study it, and said he wanted St. Thomas among them. Humbert called St. Thomas from Paris to answer it.

Humbert handed St. Thomas the book at Anagni, at a meeting of the friars. The friars wept, because they were afraid for the order against such powerful opponents. St. Thomas took the book and asked them to pray for him. When he had read it, St. Thomas told the friars: “Have no fear, my brethren, for I have examined it, and find it to be captious, perfidious, and erroneous.” St. Thomas wrote his reply quickly. He called it Contra impugnantes religionem (An Apology for the Religious Orders) and built it on the opening verses of Psalm 82: “For lo, Thine enemies have made a noise: and they that hate Thee have lifted up their head.”

In Anagni Cathedral the friars’ defenders read their answers to the book before the Pope. For the Dominicans, St. Thomas read his, and so did his old teacher, Saint Albert the Great. Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan whose degree at Paris had been held up alongside St. Thomas’s, read for his order.

The four cardinals then reported that the book attacked the authority of the Pope, the bishops and the friars who beg for God’s sake. They found it was turning people away from giving alms and from entering religious life. Pope Alexander IV accepted St. Thomas’s answer and judged it truly Catholic.

The bull condemned William’s book for ever, tamquam iniquum, scelestem, et exsecrabilem (as wicked, criminal and detestable). Anyone who owned a copy had eight days to burn it or be excommunicated. No one, whoever he was, might read, approve or defend it. The sentence was read out publicly in the cathedral. Then William’s book was burnt, with the Pope looking on. With the condemnation, the Pope ordered that the begging friars be admitted to the doctorate.

The men the university had sent to argue its side protested against the burning and pressed for the sentence to be withdrawn. Instead, they had to put their names to the condemnation.

On October 23, two of the masters who had lost their chairs with William in June, Odo of Douai and Christian of Beauvais, came to the papal palace at Anagni and publicly dropped their opposition. They swore before the Pope to preach, at his court and in Paris, that the friars’ poverty, taken up for the love of Christ, was a state of perfection. They swore, too, to preach that friars who give themselves to preaching and study may live on alms without working with their hands. And they swore to receive the Dominicans and Franciscans into the university, naming two friars in particular: St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure.