Abstract

The text titled Quaestio de potestate papae or Rex Pacificus, as it became known from its incipit, is one of the booklets that appeared in France, in 1302, during the clashes between Philip IV the Handsome, and Boniface VIII. Written from the perspective of the French king, it rejects the doctrine of the papal fullness of power instigating the king himself to take the word to claim and to fight for his royal rights. The exhortation deserves to be emphasized particularly when considered that, in such a context, the word was not only the Pope’s ecclesiastical privilege, but also subject to restrictions, interdictions, and rituals; in fact, according to Foucault’s hermeneutics, the political order always lays under the order of discourse. Furthermore, king Philip IV was also plotting to summon a General Council which would represent the decisive word of the reunited Church, therefore superior to the Pope’s, whom he intended to have judged and convicted as heretic. Even though the words Rex Pacificus explicitly refer to King Solomon, it is evident that they were deliberately chosen in order to praise the actions of the French king as the ‘new Solomon’ and, by the same token, criticize Boniface VIII as agitator and source of political dissensions and disputes. Thus, peace is not only exalted as the most precious temporal gift, but also as condition to achieve the highest spiritual good one can aspire to: the salvation of the soul. Hence, if the Pope claims the temporal power owned by princes and kings to himself, he becomes a source and cause of conflict – and, in doing so, he ends up subverting the temporal peace and turning the spiritual goal pursued by the militant Church an unattainable goal.