subtlety in observing these conventions greatly affected the listener or
reader; eleganti (the name for them) captured his good will; but the
historian today is concerned with the interpretation and purpose of the
treatise or memorandum, not with its contemporary adornments, and
it is absurd to suppose that because much Conciliar thought is wrapped
in these conventions, it is therefore nebulous and lacking in practical
sense.

So much is obvious, and is another way of saying that medieval
controversy demands much patience. But "academic" has another
shade of meaning. It may be the attribute of the would-be university
reformer, whose theories break down before the hard facts of royal
administration and papal finance; and that, I think, is the sense which
Figgis had in mind. He considered that the academics, borrowing
from the current doctrine and practice of representation, were advocating
for the Church a constitutional system which that deeply-rooted mon-
archy found alien to its structure and repugnant to its dominant theory
of the Petrine supremacy; and that in so doing they left out of account
forces which less intelligent and more worldly men might easily have
appreciated: some degree of nationalist sympathy for one or other
of the contending Popes (as in the case of Aragon with Benedict XIII);
the vested interest of the curiales; the conservatism of ecclesiastical
corporations like cathedral chapters, and so forth. Perhaps this was the
main cause why the movement, "so reasonable and so respectable," is
considered to have broken down: yet for Figgis and other more recent
writers, the academics did at any rate leave to posterity statements of
theory that became part of the liberal tradition of Western Europe.
These men thought that the Church was a polity, a mixed government,
not a unitary absolutism; that the Popes were subject to natural and
divine law, and that the papal power could be both curtailed and regu-
lated by periodical assemblies of Western Christendom. They struck
a blow for constitutional freedom by treating the Church as a society
amenable to the enlightened remedies of the time; they had a view
of history which enabled them to justify their theories by precedents
drawn from earlier periods in the life of the Church.

This may, perhaps, stand as a statement of present-day opinion about
Conciliar thought. The tendency of critics has been to regard it, so
far as method is concerned, as a body of speculation applying to the
Church the terms and concepts used by contemporary liberals and con-
stitutionalists in discussing the scope and limits of secular authority. ¹
Without denying the usefulness of this approach, one may suggest that

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