DOMINION AND GRACE

It is a characteristic of the century that elapsed between the death of Aquinas and the outbreak of the Great Schism that both thinkers and leaders of parties followed out their ideas or their principles of action to what seemed their logical issue but what was in fact a point outside the sphere—beyond the horizon, so to say—of a world of human beings and practical relationships: to a point, that is to say, where logic becomes fallacious and harmful. The extreme papalist writers, the no less extreme secularists, the Franciscan advocates of the Poverty of Christ, though especially notable, are but examples of this general tendency. No less striking in their intransigence are the various leaders on either side of the controversy on Lordship and Grace.

The theory of Lordship or Dominion and Grace first became a living issue in the worlds of thought and politics with the appearance in 1302 of the work De ecclesiastica potestate of the Austin friar Giles of Rome. In this treatise, which is throughout an assertion of papal claims in their most extreme form, Giles maintained that dominion can only exist within the Church or with the permission of the Church, and that in fact only faithful Christians can have just dominion since they alone can derive their right through the Church from Christ the supreme Lord of all things. The basis of this position consists of the two propositions that only the just are susceptible of God's gift of dominion, and that only those in a state of grace within the Church are truly just.