An euloguim is due to the victorious firmness of Philip, in opposition to these extravagancies: the commoners and the nobles of France supported him; the clergy, though already imbued with ultramontane maxims, was led away by the ascendancy of the two former orders. The prelates at all times adhered to the king with a reservation in favour of ‘the faith due to the pope’, and thirty-four of them proceeded to Rome in defiance of Philip.
A letter of this prince to Boniface, VIII. commences with these words:
“Philip, by the grace of God, “king of the French, to Boniface pretended pope, “little or no greeting. Let your very great Fatuity “take notice, &c.”
These insulting expressions, but little worthy of him who employed them, would have very badly succeeded, addressed to any pope who had at all less merited them than Boniface; but his pretensions really bordered on delirium, and he was altogether destitute of the political address requisite for their success. Three men, in the course of the thirteenth century, have checked the menacing progress of the pontifical power. Boniface VIII. by disgracing it with his impotent excesses;²⁵³ Philip IV., in publishing this discreditable conduct with unpunished insults; but above all, Louis IX. whose resistance, edifying like his other good works, had assumed against the worldly pride of the popes, the character and authority of the religion of Jesus Christ.
²⁵⁴ For the manners and religious opinions of this pope, see the pieces published by Dupuy. p. 523—560 of the Hist, of the dispute between Boniface and Philip the Fair. Many witnesses depose, that Boniface spoke with derision of the sacraments, of the mysteries, of the gospel, and even of the immortality of the soul. "We must," he said, "speak like the people, but we need not think like them.”
Gregory VII. or Boniface VIII. would infallibly have excommunicated Louis IX.: the anathemas of the former would have been formidable, those of the latter could injure the court of Rome alone.
Boniface caused an ecclesiastical code to be compiled, which bore the name of ‘Sexte,’ because it was considered as a sixth book, added to the decretals compiled under Gregory IX., by Raymond de Pennafort. This sixth book itself is divided into five, which correspond in the distribution of their contents with those of Raymond’s collection, and embrace, with the decretals of Boniface VIII., those of his predecessors since the death of Gregory IX. When so many pontifical laws become accumulated in the several codes, ecclesiastical tribunals, of course, become requisite in order to apply them: episcopal courts therefore sprung up. Father Thomassin fixes their origin under Boniface VIII. and this opinion appears to us a more probable one than that which traces this institution up to the twelfth century.