WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Still, even if Hostiensis, by virtue of claiming that infidels do not recognize the concept
of authority, allows Christians to take their property, it does not follow that such a taking should
be done through the violation of Christian law. As Hostiensis writes,
Concedimus tamen quod infideles qui dominium ecclesie recognoscunt sunt ab ecclesia
tolerandi…Alios autem infideles in pace degentes: et etiam illos quod servos tenemus non per
bellum: non per violentiam aliquam sed tamen per predicationem dici converti debere.
We concede, nevertheless, that the infidels who recognize the sovereignty of the Church must be
tolerated…But other infidels now living in peace (and even those whom we hold as slaves) not
through war: not through any violence but nevertheless through preaching should be said to be
converted. 74
For Hostiensis, both infidels who understand sovereignty and those who peacefully live side by
side with Christians “sunt ab ecclesia tolerandi” ‘must be tolerated by the Church.’ That is, their
lives must not be encroached by violence or war because this stands against Christian teaching.
Instead, they must be persuaded peaceably to be part of the Christian church. The illegal exercise
of authority by zealous Christians does not come from its founding principle. As James Muldoon
makes clear, Hostiensis argued that to take the goods of infidels who recognized the true Church
was illicit and that Christians “should not use their claim to universal domination as the initial
basis for dealings with infidel societies.” 75
Yet for Vladimiri, as well as for the fourteenth-century colonialist tradition he tackles,
Hostiensis’s arguments are not simply legal positions; rather, they are ontological speculations
about the nature of authority itself. This ontology sees in Christianity not a mere correction of an
individual’s beliefs to some ideal good but a fundamental change of an individual’s physical and
spiritual nature. In this, he does not misrepresent Hostiensis’s claims since they mimic a Pauline
position about the law in relating the idea of coming from sin “si qua ergo in Christo nova
creatura vetera transierunt ecce facta sunt nova” ‘If anyone therefore is in Christ, he is a new
74 Qtd. in Ibid. 167 notes 60, 61.
75 Ibid. 17.
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