to say that it is his duty to obey God rather than man, and that his duty to God obliges him to go to the Pope. To the Pope therefore he will go, even though the King forbids him; but he is ready at the same time to bear patiently the spoiling of his goods as the penalty of going. This is assuredly not an appeal to the Pope in the same sense as the appeals made by William and Thomas.
Anselm does not assert clerical privileges. Among the marks of difference in the cases is that both William and Thomas strongly assert the privileges of their order; none but the Pope may judge a bishop. Anselm never once, during his whole dispute with William Rufus, makes the slightest claim to any such privilege; he never breathes a word about the rights of the clerical order. The doctrine that none but the Pope may judge the Archbishop of Canterbury—nothing is said about other priests or other bishops—is heard of only once during the whole story.[1] And then it is not put forth by Anselm; it is not openly put forth by anybody; it is merely mentioned by Eadmer as something which came into the minds of the undutiful bishops as a kind of after-thought. This most likely means that it was not really thought of at the time, either by the bishops or by anybody else, but that Eadmer, writing by fresh lights learned at Rome and at Bari, could no longer understand a state of things in which it was not thought of by somebody. The truth doubtless is that in Anselm's day the doctrine of clerical exemption from temporal jurisdiction was a novelty which was creeping in. It was well known enough for Odo and William of Saint-Calais to catch at it to serve their own ends; it was not so fully established that it was at all a matter of conscience with Anselm to assert it. By the time of Thomas every doctrine of the kind had so grown that its assertion had become a point of conscience
- ↑ See above, p. 516.
