properly belonged to the bishops. The cardinals, and others who found the existing
system beneficial, naturally opposed the Gallican solution of permanent partial
subtraction, but many of them were prepared to take more drastic short-term action to
force compliance with the via cessionis. Thus was born the concept of total subtraction of
obedience from a particular pope who, by refusing to abdicate, was perpetuating the
Schism, thereby falling into heresy and losing the capacity to perform any papal function.
Total subtraction would in no way diminish the powers of the papacy but, by removing
them from a particular pope, could be invoked to hasten the end of the Schism.
The driving force in France behind total subtraction of obedience was Simon de
Cramaud, patriarch of Alexandria, a protégé of the duke of Berry, the French prince most
dedicated to ending the Schism. At a first council in Paris, early in 1395, the French
prelates, under prodding from the government, finally endorsed the via cessionis. A
second council, meeting in Paris in the summer of 1396, debated ways of enforcing this
policy, and the university made a determined bid to have the government adopt its
Gallican program, which included partial subtraction. The effort failed, but in the process
papal supporters launched a counterattack against the via cessionis itself.
Neither Cramaud nor Berry was present for the second council of Paris, and in the
months that followed Cramaud, who was no Gallican, produced his treatise De
subtraccione obediencie, a powerful argument for total subtraction that was destined for
wide circulation. His purpose was to head off a papalist reaction without alienating the
Gallican supporters of partial subtraction. A third Paris council, in 1398, voted for
subtraction of obedience, and for three years the Avignon papacy was denied much of its
authority in France and Castile.
Because of international political factors, however, Cramaud and the French
cessionists were not able to get wide European backing at this time, and in 1401 the
government abandoned the policy of subtraction. Five years later, the climate was more
auspicious. At a fourth Paris council, in 1406–07, even the University of Paris favored
full subtraction. In the end, unilateral subtraction of obedience by France failed to coerce
Benedict XIII, but the French debate and the wide circulation of Cramaud’s treatise
produced many conversions to the via cessionis. As it happened, only a general council of
the church could bring to bear enough pressure to end the Schism. At Pisa, in 1409–10,
Cramaud had the satisfaction of presiding at a gathering that declared both popes deposed
on the basis of doctrines he had been espousing.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: AVIGNON PAPACY; SCHISM, GREAT]
Cramaud, Simon de. De subtraccione obediencie, ed. Howard Kaminsky. Cambridge: Medieval
Academy of America, 1984.
Kaminsky, Howard. Simon de Cramaud and the Great Schism. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1983.
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