Original scientific paper
The Concept of the Authorities in the Treatise Tractatus de Ecclesia by Ivan Stojković
Relja Seferović
Abstract
At the end of the Middle Ages the Christianity was confronted with various challenges, from the exterior pressures in the shape of the Ottoman penetration in the East and the Wycliffite and Hussite movements in the West, to the interior doubts whether the Pope should remain an undisputed Head of the Church. It was then that theory of conciliarism gained in popularity in the Catholic world. It appeared in the twelfth century and thrived in the time of the great Church Councils of Constance and Basle in the fifteenth century.
One of its main adherents and a very prominent participant at both Councils was a Dubrovnik-born friar, Ivan Stojković (1392/5-1443). In the treatise Tractatus de Ecclesia he expressed his ideas about how to overcome all the existing divisions within the Christian world, which he comprehended as ‘Catholic’. Pleading for a new form of the universal ecclesiastical community named Ecclesia militans, he emphasized how important it was for the Church to be reformed from within and he attributed to the Pope the rank of the first among the equals, thus denying him absolute authority. Stojković formed his thoughts during the religious disputes against the representatives of the Hussite movement at the Council of Basle and against the Byzantine clergy in Constantinople. The formal failure of the negotinations he had wih the Husisites and the Byzantines induced him to look for the new authorities which would corroborate his ideas. From the institutional point of view, he found them at the universities. Viewed politically, his hope to create a new society were projected in the community named Ecclesia militans. And finally, from the theological point of view, he found the arguments for his theory in the idea of the Divine Grace. He concluded with the necessity to establish a conection among the religiously divided Slavic world within the universal community of Roman Church, wich was a symbol of the unity of faith.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
11626
URI
Publication date:
23.5.2004.
Visits: 2.329 *