CORPUS JURIS CANONICI. - The term corpus denotes a collection of documents; "corpus iuris" is a collection of legal documents, especially if arranged in systematic order. Sometimes the term is meant to designate the authentic and complete collection of all the laws by which a society is governed; thus when Benedict XIV sent to the doctors and students of Bologna the first volume of his Bullarium, in the constitution he prefixed to it (Iam fere sextus) he explains that this volume certainly falls outside the C. i. c., if one gives this term its more usual meaning, of which we shall speak shortly, but that it falls within it instead if "appellatione corporis iuris canonici intelligendum est quidquid ab Apostolica auctoritate promanat."
I. GENERAL NOTIONS
The term C. i. c., however, has for several centuries indicated the collection of well-determined sources; and the term and its fortune plainly reflect the influence of the analogous designation that entered universal usage from the 12th century onward for the Justinianic codification. One may set aside the sources that in remote periods were designated, though never with a character of generality, by this term or analogous terms (Corpus decretorum). It suffices to recall how, at least from the 16th century (but already the Council of Basel at session XXIII, c. 6 alludes to "reservationibus in corpore iuris clausis," intending to refer to provisions of the Liber sextus), it comprises three unofficial collections and three official collections: namely, respectively, Gratian's Decretum, the Extravagantes Joannis XXII and the Extravagantes communes; Gregory IX's Decretales, Boniface VIII's Liber sextus decretalium, the Clementinae (the motu proprio Arduum sane munus of 19 March 1904 (Acta Sanctae Sedis, 36 [1904], pp. 549-51), which ordered the codification of canon law, truly says that the present "corpus quod dicitur iuris canonici praesertim coalescit" from Gregory IX's Decretales, the Sextus, and the Clementinae cum Gratiani decreto).
The work was never promulgated as a single whole: the C. i. c. is a unity by virtue of tradition and doctrine; it cannot, on the other hand, be considered for any purpose as a code that derives its unity from legislative will, whereby all its parts have the same value. Gregory XIII, with the constitution Cum pro munere of 1 July 1580, approved the work carried out by a commission of cardinals and scholars (correctores romani) appointed by Pius V in 1566 with the task of revising, correcting and expurgating from spurious additions the Decretum of Gratian (it was chiefly for this that the revision was needed), the Decretals of Gregory IX, the Sext, the Clementines, the Extravagantes; and thus he approved the edition printed in officina populi Romani, to be adopted as a model, granting to that printing house for ten years the privilege of reprinting the work. With the other constitution Emendationem decretorum of 2 June 1582 the Pontiff limited himself to approving the emendation of the Decretum of Gratian, carried out on the basis of the oldest codices and of the authors whom Gratian had used. Noteworthy in the constitution Cum pro munere are the expressions: «... ut... hoc Iuris canonici corpus fideliter et incorrupte iuxta exemplar hic Romae impressum... imprimi possit... providere volentes ut hoc ius canonicum sic expurgatum ad omnes ubique Christifideles sartum tectum perveniat... nulli omnino hominum... liceat huiusmodi libris dicti iuris canonici... quicquam addere»; that is, the constitution uses indifferently the three expressions C. i. c., Ius canonicum, Libri iuris canonici. As for the value of the Cum pro munere, it is plainly a matter of the approval of an edition, which may well be called an official edition, not of the promulgation of a body of laws. And in fact it was never doubted that the norms contained in the various parts of the C. i. c. could not be considered homogeneous as regards efficacy, but that the more ancient ones could well have been abrogated by the more recent ones, and those of general scope derogated from by special ones: according to the usual general criteria of interpretation and of mutual balancing of different laws.
II. THE «DECRETUM» OF GRATIAN
The oldest part of the C. i. c. consists of the so-called Decretum Gratiani, the work of the monk Giovanni Gratian, a Camaldolese, born, it seems, at Carraria near Ficulle (according to others at Chiusi), who taught in a conventual school of the monastery of Sts. Felix and Nabor of Bologna. Almost nothing is known of him, unless one accepts legendary data. The work must have been completed in 1140. The title of Decretum, which is probably a derivation from that of the homonymous work of Ivo of Chartres (v.), is found in the oldest codices; but in other ancient codices one reads instead that of Concordia discordantium canonum, which better conveys the content of the compilation and the aims proposed by the author.
The latter, through numerous collections of canons of the 11th and 12th centuries (to a much lesser degree through direct research on the sources), gathered a very vast material, consisting of pseudo-apostolic canons, canons of Eastern, African, Spanish, French, German and Italian councils held between the 4th and the 12th century, letters of popes (many spurious) from Anacletus to Innocent II, passages of the Fathers of the Church and of ecclesiastical writers (Ambrose, Jerome and above all Augustine are largely used), fragments of the Corpus iuris civilis, of the Codex Theodosianum, of the Lex romana Visigotorum, of the Frankish capitularies.
With this material Gratian composed his work, which consists of three parts. The first, divided into 101 distinctiones, in turn subdivided into canons (but this is a distribution later than Gratian), treats of law in general, of that of the Church in particular and of its sources, of clerics and their obligations, of the conferral of the various grades of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and of the requirements demanded for them. In the second, divided into 38 causae, subdivided into quaestiones which are further divided into canons, the author deals with judicial and penal law, with various questions of patrimonial law, with the relations between secular and regular clergy, with matrimonial law. In the third (divided into five distinctions, subdivided into canons: and here too the distribution is later than Gratian) he treats of the consecration of churches, of the Eucharist, of Baptism, of various questions of liturgy, of certain points of theology. On the model of the De misericordia et iustitia of Alger of Liège and of the Sic et non of Peter Abelard, Gratian strives to link the texts to one another and to set out the conclusions that emerge from them. Often the author explains how the contradictions of the texts are only apparent or how they must be overcome: ratione significationis (appealing to the spirit of the norm), ratione temporis (the more recent norm prevails), ratione loci (the local character of a norm), ratione dispensationis (one canon constitutes the general rule and the other a dispensation from the observance of this rule). More precisely: in the first part, at the beginning of each distinctio, Gratian summarizes the general principles that will be developed in it and sometimes takes care to link the distinctio to the one preceding it; in the second part each causa begins with the exposition of an imaginary practical case, to which Gratian has follow the enunciation of the various questions that must be resolved in order to succeed in giving a solution to the case; in both parts (the third is a pure exposition of texts) individual texts are often followed by a brief commentary, many times with the very purpose of resolving the apparent contradictions with other texts; all these passages constitute the so-called Dicta Gratiani. Each canon then has a brief title, summarizing its content. Incorporated into the Decretum are certain passages, called Paleae, later than the primitive edition, and attributed to the oldest commentator, Paucapalea. The work had an enormous diffusion, and was truly a fundamental work for the development of canon law (in the heaven of the sun Thomas Aquinas shows Dante the light of Gratian [Par., X, 103-105]); moreover, as has been recalled, it never obtained legislative sanction.
The usual manner of citing the Decretum is: for the first part, the numbers of the canon and of the distinctio (e.g., c. 1, D. X); for the second, of the canon, of the causa, of the quaestio (e.g., c. 1, C. XII, q. 1); for the third (which, on account of the first subject treated in it, goes under the title de consecratione) the citation is made as for the first, making the abbreviation de cons. follow the number of the distinctio (e.g., c. 1, D. I de cons.).
III. «DECRETALES» OF GREGORY IX
In 1230 Gregory IX entrusted to his chaplain and penitentiary, the Dominican Raymond of Peñafort, later raised to the honors of the altars, the task of making a new collection of decretals. The bull of promulgation, the Rex pacificus of 5 Sept. 1234, with which the new collection is sent to the Universities of Bologna and Paris, thus indicates the practical aims of the work: « diversas constitutiones et decretales epistolas praedecessorum nostrorum, in diversa dispersas volumina, quarum aliquae propter nimiam similitudinem, et quaedam propter contrarietatem, nonnullae etiam propter sui prolixitatem, confusionem inducere videbantur, aliquae vero vagabantur extra volumina supradicta, quae tanquam incertae frequenter in iudiciis vacillabant, ad communem, et maxime studentum, utilitatem... illas in unum volumen resectis superfluis providimus redigendas, adicientes constitutiones nostras et decretales epistolas, per quas nonnulla, quae in prioribus erant, dubia, declarantur ».
The name immediately adopted for the collection was that of Decretales Gregorii IX, although the other name of Liber extravagantium (that is, of the decretals wandering outside Gratian's Decretum) or of Liber extra was also widely used. The material is formed by papal decretals (for the most part from the period 1145-1234), by a small number of conciliar canons, passages from the Bible, the Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, and secular laws. The compiler, however, drew on the original sources only for the more recent decretals; for the others he made use of five compilations later than Gratian's Decretum, the so-called Quinque compilationes antiquae. The material is distributed, according to the arrangement of Bernard of Pavia, into 5 books (whose approximate content is indicated by the mnemonic verse index iudicium clerus connubia crimen), subdivided into titles with an indication of the subject matter (for example, De in integrum restitutione) and into chapters (each having an inscriptio, that is, the indication of the source of the chapter, which, however, is not infrequently erroneous, and a summarium, a synthetic formulation of the rule of law enunciated by the passage that constitutes the chapter). In conformity with its practical purpose, the compiler mutilated the decretals, suppressing the parts that appeared to him superfluous or that contained particular cases rather than enunciations of general principles (the suppression is usually indicated by an et infra), sometimes interpolated them, and often distributed fragments of one and the same decretal among various titles, in conformity with the subject matter treated in the different passages.
The Rex pacificus established that only the new collection was to be used in the courts and in the schools; it is disputed whether this was equivalent to an abrogation of the juridical efficacy of the provisions not received into the collection.
The customary manner of citing passages from it is: the chapter, the work (indicated by an X, from Extra), the subject of the title, the number of the book and of the title: for example, c. 2, X, de consuet., I, 4.
IV. THE «LIBER SEXTUS»
Boniface VIII, noting the uncertainty that reigned concerning the papal legislative work later than 1234, charged William Mandagot, archbishop of Embrun, Berengar Fredoli, bishop of Béziers, and Richard Petroni of Siena, vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, with preparing a new collection. It was promulgated by the bull Sacrosanctae Romanae Ecclesiae of 3 March 1298, with transmission to the University of Bologna and then to others. The bull established that the collection, to be added to the 5 books of the Decretales of Gregory IX, would be called Liber sextus; and it warned that the decretals later than the work of Gregory IX which had not been included in the new compilation or expressly preserved by provisions of it were to be considered abrogated.
The Liber sextus contains canons of the Councils of Lyons I and II of 1245 and 1274, and papal decretals of the period 1239-98; the last chapter is formed by 88 Regulae Iuris of Dino da Mugello.
Here too the texts were retouched in conformity with the practical purposes of the collection. This is subdivided, according to the same systematics as the Decretales of Gregory IX, into 5 books, divided into titles and chapters. The manner of citing is likewise the same as that indicated for the Decretales of Gregory IX, with in VIᵒ substituted for X in the indication of the collection (for example, c. 1., in VIᵒ, de elect., I, 6).
V. THE CLEMENTINES
With the constitution Quoniam nulla iuris of 25 Oct. 1317, John XXII published, by sending it to the universities, the collection of decretals issued by his predecessor Clement V, which represent the reforming work of the Council of Vienne of 1311 (Clementinae; but the collection was at first designated as Liber septimus; the Quoniam nulla does not indicate any name for the collection).
According to the constitution, it is a matter of the simple promulgation of the collection already prepared, a promulgation which death prevented Clement V from carrying out; it seems instead that John XXII retouched the decretals that his predecessor had already published in the Consistory of Monteux near Carpentras on 21 March 1314.
The division follows the usual systematic arrangement into 5 books, subdivided into titles and chapters; the manner of citation is the usual one: c. 1., in Clem., de rescriptis, I, 2.
VI. THE «EXTRAVAGANTES»
In the manuscripts and in the early printed editions there are found, added to the collections mentioned here, various decretals later than the Sextus, sometimes published in an appendix to it, more often to the Clementines. According to the editions, the decretals included and their distribution vary.
In the edition prepared in 1500 by the Parisian booksellers Ulrich Gering and Berthold Rembolt, the licentiate in law Jean Chappuis, charged with preparing that edition, added to the three official collections two others. One of them consists of 20 decretals of John XXII (which already in 1325 Zenzelinus de Cassanis [Jenselin de Cassagnes] had collected and glossed as a whole in itself), and bears the title Extravagantes Joannis XXII; the decretals are distributed into 14 titles subdivided into chapters. The other collection comprises the decretals customarily printed with the official collections and furthermore 40 new ones; it is entitled Extravagantes communes; the decretals are divided among the 5 books of the traditional systematic arrangement, except that quartus liber vacat; the 4 books are subdivided into titles and chapters; the decretals belong to the period 1281-1478.
These two collections of Extravagantes passed into all the subsequent editions and thus entered into the traditional formation of the C. i. c., even though they never received official sanction. Manner of citation of the two collections: c. 2, Extrav. Joann. XXII, de concets. praeb., IV; c. un., Extrav. comm., de celebr. missarum, III, 11.
VII. EDITIONS
The work of the correctores romani, notable especially in relation to Gratian's Decretum, was not perfect, because of the rather scant knowledge that in their time was had of the sources Gratian had used. To the reconstruction of the Decretum, however, the Spaniard Antonio Augustino (Augustin) made a valuable contribution with his De emendatione Gratiani libri duo, published in 1587.
Still in the second half of the 16th century, the two brothers Pierre and François Pithou prepared a critical edition, based on various manuscripts, of the entire C. i. c., which, however, saw the light only in 1685-87. An edition, also of the entire C. i. c., by far more correct, was the one edited by Just Henning Böhmer, which saw the light in 1747; there followed, to mention only those that mark a stage in the scholarly elaboration of these texts, the edition of Aemilius Ludwig Richter of 1835 and finally that of Emil Friedberg, published by Tauchnitz of Leipzig in 1879-81. In the Decretum Friedberg restored the genuine text of Gratian (accepting only the division introduced and the Paleae), noting the alterations accepted or introduced by the correctores romani; in the Decretales of Gregory IX he adopted the text of the 1580 edition (indicating in notes the points where it differs from the original), but he published in full the decretals that Raymond of Peñafort, in relation to his practical purpose, had mutilated, printing in italics the part that had been suppressed; for the other collections he adopted the text of 1580, indicating in notes the points at which it departs from the original text. - See plate XXX.