| Those few who have paid attention to the life and thought of Adam, Cardinal Easton, O.S.B. (c. 1330–1397) have considered him to be essentially a conservative apologist for the papacy in its struggle against the secular authorities. This dissertation argues instead that Easton pursued a much broader and more fundamental project. Informed by his own long experience as a controversialist at the very highest levels of intellectual achievement and political power, Easton's writing exemplified a perceived thematic unity among some of the most pressing controversies of the day, an interconnection that has been too little explored.;This dissertation offers a new appreciation that the mendicant orders and John Wyclif were being viewed together as threats to human hierarchical authority, interrelated through a cluster of ideas centering on dominium , evangelical poverty and ecclesiastical disendowment as aspects of, rather than parallel to, episcopal and papal juridical rights, reflecting a growing underlying mistrust of the notion of human mediation of divine authority. This theme of hierarchy and mediation informed all of Easton's thought, epitomized in his last work, a defense of the revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden. In particular, Easton's major book, Defensorium ecclesiastics potestatis (1378), is most profitably read not as an apology for ecclesiastical as opposed to secular “power,” but as a sort of summa hierarchiae (in the fourteenth-century sense of the word “summa”), in which Easton strove to rescue the concept of hierarchy itself from the ecclesiological scandal of the friars and, ever more pressingly, from the associated dangers of Wyclif's Augustinian/realist “immediatism.” In the process, Easton sought to reconcile Aristotelian notions of natural government with Augustinian emphasis on God's unmediated sovereignty over creation, all within a Dionysian hierarchical framework. In doing so, he exhibited an outlook that was decidedly humanistic and in fact remarkably modern. Hierarchy embodied for him the legitimacy of various forms of human coercive jurisdiction as mediators of God's power. Yet it did not exist to suffocate or dominate the lower ranks, but acted as the very guarantee of the natural and innate dignity and freedom of all the ranks. |
