Benedict XII

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Benedict XII — born Jacques Fournier at Saverdun in the county of Foix around 1285, pope from 1334 to his death in 1342 — was the third of the Avignon popes and the man who closed a quarrel about what the saved actually see after death. A Cistercian monk who rose to abbot and then bishop, he came to the papacy as a reformer with an inquisitor’s training, and his pontificate is remembered less for grand policy than for two things: the settling of a doctrine, and a register of interrogations that would become, six centuries later, one of the most-read documents of medieval village life. The two achievements look like opposites — one a single sentence fixed forever, the other a sprawl of unguarded speech — but the same instrument produced both: a mind that wanted exact answers and knew how to extract them.

The Palais des Papes at Avignon; the sober Old Palace at its heart was begun under Benedict XII from around 1335. — Prem Kaji Kafle, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From Boulbonne to the curia

Fournier’s beginnings were monastic and provincial. He entered the Cistercian order — the reformed Benedictine observance whose austerity the twelfth century owed largely to Bernard of Clairvaux — first at the abbey of Boulbonne, then at Fontfroide, near Narbonne, whose abbot was his uncle Arnaud Nouvel (later a cardinal). He studied theology at the University of Paris, took the doctorate, and succeeded his uncle as abbot of Fontfroide. The formation matters: the Rule under which he was raised prized order, sobriety, and the suspicion of display, and these remained his temper to the end. He was made bishop of Pamiers in December 1317, translated to the see of Mirepoix early in 1327, and created cardinal by John XXII in December of that year. By the 1320s he was one of the curia’s working theologians, consulted on the doctrinal trials of the age and, near the end, on the very question of the vision of God that would define his own reign.

When John XXII died in December 1334, the cardinals — divided and exhausted — turned to the Cistercian almost by default; the story that Fournier himself told the conclave it had chosen an ass is a later embellishment, but it caught something true about a man without faction or family ambition. He took the name Benedict, and with it inherited a problem his predecessor had created.

The quarrel John XXII left behind

Pope John XXII, whose sermons of 1331–32 on the deferred vision of God left the quarrel that Benedict XII would settle; 14th-century miniature. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The doctrinal question was not Benedict’s own making. In three sermons preached in the cathedral at Avignon between All Saints’ Day of 1331 and early 1332, John XXII had advanced an opinion that startled Christendom: that the souls of the just do not behold God directly at death, but wait — even after any purgation in purgatory is complete — in a lesser, deferred contemplation of the humanity of Christ, and come to the vision of the divine essence itself only at the resurrection of the body and the general judgment at the end of time. The opinion had respectable roots in certain Fathers and could be argued from scripture, but it cut against what the Latin Church had long assumed without ever formally defining: that the purified soul enjoys the sight of God at once.

The reaction was fierce. The University of Paris condemned the theories in 1333; Philip VI of France forbade their teaching and, by some accounts, threatened the pope himself. John consulted commissions and theologians, most of whom told him he was wrong. In a consistory of January 1334 he protested that he had never intended to define anything contrary to the faith, and on his deathbed in December 1334, pressed by his own relatives, he issued a retraction — qualified, ambiguous, and contested ever after. The dispute did not die with him. It fell, unsettled, to his successor, who as Cardinal Fournier had already been one of those asked to weigh the arguments, confronting among others the opinion of the Dominican theologian Durand of Saint-Pourçain. Benedict, characteristically, did not rush. He heard the partisans of the deferred vision, set a commission of theologians to some four months of patristic research, and only then spoke.

Benedictus Deus

On 29 January 1336 Benedict issued the constitution Benedictus Deus. Its language is deliberately total. The souls of the blessed — those of the saints already departed, those who die in grace needing no purgation, and those who are cleansed after death — see the divine essence, the document declares, “with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision, but immediately, plainly, clearly and openly.” The vision begins as soon as purgation, where needed, is finished; it does not wait for the end of the world; and once begun it “has continued and will continue without any interruption and without end until the Last Judgment and from then on forever.” In the same act the constitution drew the strict corollary that in such souls faith and hope cease, since one no longer believes or hopes for what one sees and holds. The opposite errors — the souls of the damned descend at once to hell — were defined in the same breath.

The precision is the point. Where John XXII had spoken in sermons, as a private doctor offering an opinion, Benedict spoke as pope defining the faith, and he chose the strongest possible words: immediate, intuitive, face to face, without intermediary, unending. The pronouncement gave the Beatific Vision its settled Catholic definition — the Beatific Vision understood not as a reward postponed but as a sight granted at once — and that definition has stood, unrevised, ever since. It is the rare medieval constitution whose wording is still quoted as binding dogma seven centuries on. What looks from the outside like a fine scholastic distinction was, inside the frame, the answer to the most concrete of questions: what becomes of the dead the instant they are dead, and whether the goal of every Christian life is enjoyed now by those who have reached it or merely awaited.

The reformer

The vision Benedict defined for the dead he tried, with less success, to impose on the living Church. He came to the papacy convinced that the religious orders had drifted from their rules, and he legislated against the drift with the thoroughness of a former abbot who knew exactly where the slackness lay. For his own Cistercians he issued Fulgens sicut stella matutina in July 1335 — consolidating the finances of indebted houses, making attendance at the general chapter compulsory, tightening discipline, and reorganizing the studies of the monks. For the black monks he promulgated the constitution remembered as the Benedictina in 1336, and for the Franciscans a parallel reform the same year. He abolished the practice of granting abbeys to absentee abbots, overhauled the papal penitentiary and the machinery of papal correspondence, and waged a steady war on pluralism and the holding of benefices by men who never went near them. Contemporaries judged him austere and incorruptible, hard on the worldliness of the curia, slow and exacting in business, and unmoved by the arts of patronage; Petrarch, no friend, mocked his table and his appearance, but even hostile witnesses conceded that he could not be bought. He founded no order and left no school of disciples — his mark was on the institutions he tried to mend, not on a body of doctrine carrying his name.

Two facts of his reign turned on a single refusal. Benedict declined to return the papacy to Rome — the great absence that defined the Avignon century — and instead began, around 1335, to build it a permanent home. The architect was his compatriot from the county of Foix, Pierre Poisson, and the building reflected the man: the massive, sober, almost fortress-like structure now called the Old Palace, raised for safety and order rather than splendor, the austere first core of what later, more worldly popes would swell into the largest Gothic palace of the age. The Cistercian who distrusted display built the papacy a stronghold; his successors made it a court.

The massive, fortress-like exterior of the Palais des Papes; later popes enlarged Benedict’s Old Palace into the largest Gothic palace of the age. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The bishop of Pamiers and the register

Before Avignon, before the cardinalate, Fournier had been the inquisitor of the Pyrenean foothills. Between 1318 and 1325, as bishop of Pamiers, he conducted a meticulous inquisition into the last surviving Cathars of the high valleys, along with Waldensians and other suspected heretics. By his day the Languedocian dualist church was already a remnant. The crusades and inquisitions of the previous century had broken it; the mass burning at Montségur in 1244 had decapitated it; and what Fournier hunted was the final revival led by the bons hommes Pierre and Guillaume Authié, perfected heretics who had slipped back into the Sabarthès to reconsecrate a faith all but extinguished. He pursued it with patience that became, in its results, a kind of accidental ethnography.

The ruined keep above Montaillou, the Pyrenean village whose daily life Fournier’s depositions preserved. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For Fournier did not interrogate as his thirteenth-century predecessors had. Where earlier inquisitors had recorded terse notes of who had given bread to a heretic, he wanted to know what people actually thought, and he let them talk — demanding, returning to a deposition months later, catching contradictions, pressing for the texture of belief. The records he kept, gathered in a single codex now held in the Vatican Library as Latin manuscript 4030, run to hundreds of depositions of extraordinary length and detail. Villagers spoke under questioning about the soul and the afterlife, about the consoling of the dying and the wanderings of the Good Men, but also about sex and adultery and the village priest, about debts and inheritances, about gossip and grudges and the seasonal movement of sheep across the mountain pastures. The shepherd Pierre Maury, the noblewoman Béatrice de Planissoles, the worldly priest Pierre Clergue — people who would otherwise have left no trace whatever in the record of the past — survive because Benedict’s inquisition wrote down, word by word, what they said when they were most afraid.

Cathars expelled from Carcassonne in 1209, from the Grandes Chroniques de France (c. 1415); the crusades of the previous century had broken the movement Fournier later hunted. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The line he hunted was a real and a persecuted one. The Cathars held that the visible world was the work of an evil principle and the soul a stranger trapped in matter — a doctrine the medieval Church named heresy and answered with fire, the same machinery a generation earlier had loosed in the Rhineland under Conrad of Marburg. Fournier’s proceedings ended in penances, prison, the yellow cross, and a number of burnings; the apparatus was coercive and its outcomes were grim, and the fullness of the register is itself the fullness of a court that could compel speech. Whether Catharism was the organized counter-church its inquisitors described, with real Balkan roots in Bogomilism, or substantially a construct projected onto local dissent by the very heresy-hunters who recorded it, is a question modern historians genuinely dispute — the maximalist reading of Bernard Hamilton and Peter Biller against the minimalism of R. I. Moore and the constructivism of Mark Pegg. The register is at once the best evidence for the movement and a monument to the means by which such evidence was obtained.

The afterlife of a court record

For six centuries the register was an obscure item of canon-law and inquisition history, consulted by a handful of specialists. The earliest substantial edition, J.-M. Vidal’s partial transcription, appeared in 1903; Jean Duvernoy published the full critical Latin text in 1965 and a French translation in 1978. It was Duvernoy’s edition that put the material into the hands of the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975; English translation by Barbara Bray, 1978) reconstructed, almost entirely from Fournier’s depositions, the daily life of a single Pyrenean village — its households and hearths, its loves and quarrels, its shepherds and its surviving heretics. The book became one of the founding works of microhistory and an international bestseller, and through it Benedict XII is now known to far more readers as the inquisitor whose questions preserved a village than as the pope who defined a dogma. The testimony he extracted to destroy a heresy became, against every intention, the means of its remembrance.

The texts and the scholarship

The two halves of Benedict’s reputation rest on two very different bodies of evidence, each with its own editorial history. The doctrine survives in the act itself: Benedictus Deus is preserved in the papal registers and printed in the standard dogmatic collections, with the full constitution available in English translation and the underlying controversy reconstructed in Christian Trottmann’s study of Fournier’s role, Benedict XII and the Beatific Vision. Trottmann and the contributors to the 2020 collaborative volume on Benedict’s pontificate have shown how much of the pope’s theology can be recovered from the arbitrations he composed as cardinal — that the definition of 1336 was the work of a doctor who had already spent years on the question. The reform legislation, likewise, survives in its own constitutions; the Cistercian bull Fulgens sicut stella matutina of 1335 set the template for the parallel reforms of the black monks and the friars.

The inquisition register has a longer and stranger editorial afterlife. The codex itself — Vatican Library, Latin manuscript 4030 — passed quietly through the centuries until J.-M. Vidal’s partial edition of 1903 brought a portion into print; Jean Duvernoy’s full critical Latin edition of 1965 and his French translation of 1978 made the whole of it usable, and it was that edition Le Roy Ladurie mined for Montaillou. The wider scholarly argument the register feeds — over whether the Cathars it documents were an organized dualist church or a category half-invented by their persecutors — remains unsettled in the literature, and the register is read today as much for what it reveals about the inquisitor’s method as for what it reports about the accused.

The single mind

It is tempting to keep the two Benedicts apart — the careful theologian who fixed the sight of God, the careful interrogator who wrung confessions from frightened villagers — but the documents will not allow it. The exactness that made him weigh four months of patristic testimony before defining the vision is the same exactness that made him return again and again to a deposition until its inconsistencies cracked. He asked one kind of question of the dead and another of the living, and in both he refused to accept a vague answer. What the blessed behold, he ruled, they behold immediately, plainly, clearly and openly, with no veil between the seer and the seen; and it was precisely such unveiled sight, demanded of men and women who would rather have hidden, that filled the codex in the Vatican. The pope who insisted that nothing should stand between the soul and the truth it sees had spent his episcopate making sure that nothing stood between the heretic and the truth he was made to speak.

→ Related: Conrad Of Marburg · Thomas A Kempis · Middle Ages · Catharism · Purgatory · Heresy · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Benedict Of Nursia · Beatification · Monasticism · Asceticism · Dualism