CONRAD OF GELNHAUSEN. - Theologian and canonist, b. in the Palatinate ca. 1320 to a family of middling condition, d. at Heidelberg on 13 April 1390. He enrolled in 1344 in the faculty of philosophy at Paris; in 1359 he was a canon in Mainz; in 1369 procurator of the German nation, as well as lecturer in canon law, at the Studium of Bologna; in 1380 he was provided with a canonry of the cathedral of Worms, until he returned as master to Paris, where he had been a disciple.

From 1388 to 1390 he taught in the new University of Heidelberg, of which he was the first chancellor and to which he bequeathed his rich collection of books, the original nucleus of the later famous library, and a large sum for the founding of a college after the manner of the Sorbonne. He took an active part in the movement aroused by the Western Schism, and at Paris in 1380 he composed, at the invitation of the king of France, Charles V, that Tractatus de congregando concilio tempore schismatis which, together with the Epistola concordiae, gave him fame and made him the enunciator of the conciliar theory. Driven by circumstances, he departed from the tradition that affirmed the absolute primacy and the plenitudo potestatis of the pontiff, successor of Peter, in order to establish the authority of the Council, above the pope, as the supreme organ of the Ecclesia fidelium.

C., together with his prince Rupert I of the Palatinate, sided with Urban VI against the antipope Clement VII. He maintained the thesis that the true head of the Church was Christ, real and living in the Church herself, and that she therefore could never be considered headless; whereas only on a secondary and lower plane does the pontiff act, and hence the faithful do not depend on him nor on the college of cardinals, since the Ecclesia universalis is represented by the general Council, which also operates above the pontiff, when exceptional cases make it necessary.

This theory, which had its foundation in the doctrines of William of Ockham, later found among its most fervent supporters another German theologian, Henry of Langenstein.

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: Il Tractatus, in E. Martène-U. Durand, Thesaurus novus anecdotorum, II, Paris 1717, 1200-26; the Epistola brevis, in Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, 3 (1900), p. 381 ff. On C.: A. Kneer, Die Entstehung der Konziliartheorie, Leipzig 1893; F. P. Bliemetereder, Das Generationsstil im grossen abendländ. Schisma, Vienna 1904; id., Literar. Polemik zu Beginn, d. gr. abendländ. Schisma, ibid. 1910; cf. A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, Italian trans., Messina 1933, p. 492 ff.

Pier Fausto Palumbo

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Conrad of Gelnhausen

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