Sapience or sovereignty? Divine power, papal authority, and the “chain of being” in dispute in 13th-century Paris

The mendicant controversy at the 13th-century University of Paris provides the backdrop for understanding how two mendicant metaphysicians, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, interpret how ecclesiastical, angelic, and cosmological “chains of being” function. Faced with the seculars’ criticism that mendicants have no right to intervene in Paris’s sacramental economy and that their academic aspirations are incompatible with apostolic poverty, Aquinas and Bonaventure offer different responses. Aquinas assigns the pope the sovereign power to institute a “state of exception” and circumvent a local bishop’s authority, just like how God can suspend the natural law in soteriological emergencies. Bonaventure uses speculative Christology to argue that wisdom, which the mendicants instantiate through their pursuit of virtue, is metaphysically co-constitutive of the scientific knowledge the university aims at. These defenses of the mendicants’ presence in medieval academic life determine how these two thinkers frame the relationship between cosmology and soteriology.