Professor Brian Tierney
Catholic scholar and Bomber Command navigator who challenged the Church on papal infallibility
PROFESSOR BRIAN TIERNEY, who has died aged 97, was a leading authority on medieval church law and political thought; during the Second World War, he served as a navigator with Bomber Command, winning a DFC and Bar.
Tierney’s first book, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (1955), based on his PHD thesis, dealt with a 15th-century dispute about the constitution of the church. In 1415 the Council of Constance, seeking to heal the Great Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon, declared that a general council was superior to a pope in matters of faith and the reform of the Church.
Many Catholic theologians had argued that this was an aberration, while the Anglican theologian Neville Figgis had suggested that conciliarism was simply an extension and application of the practices of parliamentary governments that were springing up around Europe to the realm of the church.
After mining a largely forgotten heritage of commentaries by medieval canonists, however, Tierney concluded that the idea that the power of the Catholic Church is derived from the universal body of the faithful rather than from the pope alone was grounded on an established body of constitutional law formulated in earlier centuries, beginning with Gratian’s Decretum (c 1140).
Conciliarism, Tierney argued, was not about the quasi-heretical ideas of Marsilius of Padua or William of Ockham superimposed on a solid foundation of papal monarchy, or a translation of conceptions of secular constitutional monarchies to church government. Instead, it was the natural culmination of the evolution of 200 years of canon law.
The debate within the Church had ended in defeat for conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512-17. However, Tierney found himself something of an international star after the calling of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), his book providing historical backing for those promoting a more democratic vision of the Church.
The most controversial of Tierney’s works was Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350, first published in 1972. The Vatican Council of 1870 had declared that the infallibility of the pope on matters of faith and morals was a part of “the ancient and constant faith of the church”.
Tierney asserted that the doctrine was in fact a late-medieval novelty, originating in the late 13th century among dissident Franciscans, and had been advanced with the goal not of enhancing papal power but of limiting it via the insistence that popes were bound by the inerrant teachings of their predecessors.
The doctrine had been explicitly formulated for the first time by Pietro Olivi (1248-98), a Franciscan theologian who believed that Christ and his disciples owned nothing individually or in common, and so neither should religious orders, a claim which put him at odds with the rest of the Order and led to charges of heresy.
Pope Nicholas III (1277-80) had declared that renunciation of property was a way to attain salvation, and to protect this doctrine Olivi proposed that such papal pronouncements were infallible – contrary to traditional teaching that popes were sovereign, that is, free to revoke the decrees of their predecessors, but could not at the same time be infallible, capable of making irrevocable decrees binding on their successors.
In 1323 Pope John XXII (1315-34), relying on his papal sovereignty, had produced a document, Qui quorundum, denouncing the doctrine of papal infallibility as “the work of the Devil” and revoking Nicholas’s decree. Subsequently, however, John found himself accused of heresy and began to claim that he had not revoked a decree of faith and morals, leaving the door open to the idea that a pope could in such matters make irrevocable decisions.
Papal theologians subsequently rushed through that open door and created the modern idea of papal infallibility to strengthen the hand of the pope against the conciliarists.
Tierney’s book was published shortly after Hans Küng had published his Infallible? An Inquiry, which argued that papal infallibility had not always been universally accepted, and which eventually cost him his position as Professor of Catholic Theology under Pope John Paul II.
Küng welcomed Tierney’s study as an important contribution that filled in gaps in his own argument. Most scholars came to accept that Tierney correctly located the first discussions of papal infallibility in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, though some criticised his work for overstating the opposition between sovereignty and infallibility and for overlooking the ways in which many elements of the doctrine were present earlier than 1300.
Brian Tierney was born in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, on May 7 1922, to Roman Catholic parents of Irish descent, and remained a practising Catholic throughout his life.
He left school at 16 and in July 1941 enlisted into the RAF Volunteer Reserve, training as a navigator in Canada under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
After being commissioned and returning to Britain in October 1942, he trained on bombers before joining a Wellington squadron. He attacked targets in the Ruhr and after completing 30 operations he was rested and spent a year as a navigation instructor.
After converting to the Mosquito in 1944, Tierney returned to operations and joined 105 Squadron, part of Bomber Command’s Pathfinder Force. Using the Oboe marking aid, flares and coloured target indicators were dropped to provide the bomb aimers of the main force with accurate aiming points. Over a six-month period he completed almost 60 operations, many to Berlin in the final months of the war.
In February 1945, Tierney was awarded the DFC and a few months later he received a Bar for his “utmost fortitude and courage”.
In May 1945 the crews of 105 Squadron turned their attention to humanitarian aid. The Dutch people were starving and Operation Manna was launched to deliver food to them. The Mosquitos marked dropping areas for the heavy bombers who delivered tons of food dropping supplies from very low level into the designated areas.
Tierney left the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant and was accepted to read History at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in a shortened course made available to veterans. Graduating in 1948 with a First, he went on to do his PHD in conciliar theory under Walter Ullmann, completing his thesis in 1951.
The same year Tierney joined the faculty of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, rising to the position of associate professor. In 1959 he was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Cornell University, where he became Goldwin Smith Professor of Medieval History then the first Bryce and Edith M Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies, before retiring in 1992.
Tierney was also known for his work on the ecclesiastical origins of theories of natural rights, often assumed by scholars to have originated in the (supposedly) secular Enlightenment.
In The Idea of Natural Rights (1997), Tierney demonstrated that 12th-century canonical decretals about papal and episcopal rights and responsibilities anticipated nearly the whole of modern rights theory, a tradition that had been overwhelmed by the tide of absolutism that engulfed Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries.
“The practices of representation and consent that characterise secular constitutional government are not alien to the tradition of the church,” Tierney wrote. “And if in the future the Church should choose to adopt such practices to meet its own needs in a changing world, that would not be a revolutionary departure but a recovery of a lost part of the church’s own early tradition”.
Tierney’s other major works were The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (1964); Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650 (1982) and Liberty and Law. The Idea of Permissive Natural Law, 1100-1800 (2014).
He was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association and received numerous awards. He was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
A keen outdoorsman, Tierney enjoyed sailing, skiing, swimming, fishing and camping. He was predeceased by his wife Theresa and is survived by two sons and two daughters.
Professor Brian Tierney, born May 7 1922, died November 30 2019