Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 11, 2025
To prevent or at least to delay such a result and to strengthen the hands of the English agents at Rome, he determined to follow the advice that had been given him by Thomas Cranmer, namely, to obtain for the separation from Catharine the approval of the universities and learned canonists of the world. Agents were dispatched to Cambridge and Oxford to obtain a verdict in favour of the king.
His conclusion was that the notion of the indissolubility of marriage, or even the modified law of England and of other countries, authorizing divorce only for certain gross reasons, were mere relics of superstitious tradition, the concoction of the Canonists and Sacramentalists in the ages of sacerdotal tyranny, unworthy of more enlarged views of justice and liberty, and a canker and cause of incalculable misery in the heart of modern society.
That is, however, a mistake. Even the Canonists themselves were never able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the indissolubility of matrimony which could commend itself rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual union though they were cautious about using the term sacrament on account of its ecclesiastical implications so far from believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in the reverse sense.
Among the priests who refused the oaths were some men eminent in the learned world, as grammarians, chronologists, canonists, and antiquaries, and a very few who were distinguished by wit and eloquence: but scarcely one can be named who was qualified to discuss any large question of morals or politics, scarcely one whose writings do not indicate either extreme feebleness or extreme flightiness of mind.
Amongst the other state officials the title of qadhi may count as a spiritual one, and the public may to a certain extent share this reverence; but in the eyes of the pious and of the canonists such glory is only reflected from the clerical robe, in which the worldling disguises himself. To the mufti criticism is somewhat more favourable than to the qadhi.
Theology, or rather that branch of it which we may call Christian ethics, laid down certain principles of right and wrong in the economic sphere; and it was the work of the canonists to apply them to specific transactions and to pronounce judgment as to their permissibility. The conception of economic laws, in the modern sense, was quite foreign to the mediæval treatment of the subject.
Here, however, I must commence by stating that, as it appears to me, Lord Coke and others attach to the very word jurisdiction a narrower sense than it bears in popular acceptation, or in the works of canonists a sense which excludes altogether that of the canonists; and also a sense which appears to be the genuine and legitimate sense of the word in its first intention.
Trained civilians and canonists also attended, while abbeys and churches contributed extracts from chronicles, carefully compiled by royal order, with a view of illustrating the king's claims. On May 10 Edward met the assembly in Norham parish church.
But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any great extent, except for a brief period, maintained by theologians or canonists. The Pope conferred the imperial dignity on Charlemagne and his successors, but not the civil power, at least out of the Pope's own temporal dominions.
The Ottomans owed their Khalifate to their sword; and this was the only argument used by such canonists as thought it worth their while to bring such an incontestable fact into reconciliation with the law. This was not strictly necessary, as they had been accustomed for eight centuries to acquiesce in all sorts of unlawful acts which history demonstrated to be the will of Allah.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking