WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Because he understands the authority of law to proceed from its representation, in the
speech of the Pope or the Emperor, Hostiensis necessarily constrains law to its contextual
meaning. Infidels, who are outside our “dominium,” cannot be treated peacebly as if they were
subject to our laws simply because, to him, law is not an ontological universal quality but an
ontological (almost ontic) subjective relationship of faith. Paradoxically, it is in respecting their
radical difference from the faithful, in respecting their inability to cognize Christian speech, that
Christians must act in violence against the infidel Other. For in relation to in-fidelity, the
Christian subject does not stand in relation to a universal law but only in relation to the being of
an absolute, unknowable and untranslatable “other,” who must not be essentialized as speaking a
universal language.
We can see why Vladimiri’s arguments would be particularly influential at at time in
which the power of the Papacy was being curtailed by a Council made up of scholars, exegetes,
and canonist. By condemning the linguistic basis of authority, Vladimiri effectively prohibits any
single individual from embodying the fullness of power and from having a privileged relation
outside rational law. If Christians may not licitly take infidel lands by virtue of being Christians,
neither can the Pope assume absolute authority of the Church by virtue of being a Pope. In
asking, “Can a Christian take infidel property?” Vladimiri is doing nothing more than repeating
an old scholastic discussion about the role of Papal infallibility: is the sovereign above the law?
Is the enforcer of the law subject to law’s precepts? Is it possible to say, that authority is outside
of law or, as Carl Schmitt would reformulate the problem in the twentieth century, that
“sovereign is he who decides on the exception”? 79
79 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005) 5.
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