ALMAIN, JACQUES. — French Gallican theologian, b. at Sens around 1480, d. in Paris in 1515. First a student and then, from 1512, a professor at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, he owes his fame, which earned him the name splendor academiae, to the work published in 1512 against the theories of Cardinal Gaetano de Vio. The latter had the previous year expounded the doctrine of the Pope’s superiority over the Council in his pamphlet De comparatione auctoritatis Papae et Concilii (Rome 1511), which had not met with the approval of Louis XII, then engaged in a struggle against Julius II. The king asked the Sorbonne to refute the pamphlet, which was considered insulting to the Church’s holy councils. The Sorbonne refused. A. was then entrusted with the response; in his Liber de auctoritate Ecclesiae et Conciliorum generalium adversus Thomam de Vio (Paris 1512), he maintained that executive power does indeed belong to the Pope, but authority resides in the Church, that is, in the bishops and the faithful gathered in council; therefore, while the Pope is superior to bishops and faithful taken individually, he is subject to the universal Church, as a part is to the whole; and the general council, which alone is infallible, is superior to the Pope, who may be judged and deposed by II. He had occasion to return to the same subject, in refutation of a pamphlet by William of Ockham, in an Expositio circa decisiones Magistri G. Occami (Paris 1518), where he maintains that the authority of the prince derives neither from God nor from the Pope, but from the people, who first choose a leader for themselves, and God approves him; and he reasserts the superiority of the council over the Pope.
A.’s theories were refuted by Cardinal Gaetano in two Apologiae (Rome 1512) and by Cardinal Bellarmine both in the Controversiae and in De Conciliis et Ecclesia; but they were also, unfortunately, invoked, as those of a classic authority in the field, in the same manner as Gerson, Pierre d’Ailly and Giovanni Major, by Bossuet, Fénelon and Febronius in their defense of Gallicanism.
Other works by A. are: Moralia, on certain points of general morality (Paris 1510); In tertium sententiarum utilis editio, published posthumously cura Nicolai Mallarii (Paris 1516).