CORRADO di GELNHAUSEN. — Theologian and canonist, born in the Palatinate around 1320 to a family of modest means, died at Heidelberg on 13 April 1390. He enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at Paris in 1344; in 1359 he was a canon at Mainz; in 1369 procurator of the German nation, as well as lecturer in canon law, at the University of Bologna; in 1380 he became provost of the cathedral of Worms, until he returned as a master to Paris, where he had been a student.
From 1388 to 1390 he taught at 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 celebrated library, together with a substantial sum for the foundation of a college on the model of the Sorbonne. He took an active part in the movement aroused by the Western Schism, and at Paris in 1380, at the invitation of the king of France, Carlo V, composed that Trastatus de congregando concilio tempore schismatis which, together with the Epistola concordiae, brought him fame and made him the foremost proponent of 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 Roberto I of the Palatinate, supported Urbano VI against the antipope Clemente VII. He maintained the thesis that the true head of the Church was Christ, real and living within the Church itself, and that it therefore could never be considered acephalous; whereas the pontiff acts only on a secondary and inferior level, and the faithful consequently depend neither on him nor on the college of cardinals,
since the Ecclesia universalis is represented by the general Council, which can operate even above the pontiff when exceptional circumstances make this necessary.
This theory, which was founded on the doctrines of Guglielmo di Occam, later found among its most fervent supporters another German theologian, Enrico di Langenstein.