GIOVANNI di PARIGI (QUIDORT, LESOURD, Dormiens, Surdus). — Dominican scholastic, born c. 1269, died at Bordeaux on 22 September 1306. He entered the Order of Preachers after obtaining the bachelor’s degree in arts and distinguished himself by the ardor with which he embraced and defended Thomism. He taught in the faculty of arts and in 1304 obtained the licentiate in theology. A special theory of transubstantiation brought him a trial, which he lost before the masters of Paris (1305). He appealed to Pope Clement V, but death overtook him while he was preparing his defense.
He wrote a Correctorium; De unitate esse et essentiae in creatis; a commentary on the Meteorologica and the Physica; a Commentario on the Sentenze; a treatise De Antichristo, against Arnaldo da Villanova; and another, better known, De potestate regia et papali, with which he took part in the literary and political struggle between the followers of Bonifacio VIII and Filippo II Bello. He has often been cited by the Gallicans for some of his obiter dicta, but he deserves to be remembered chiefly for having conceived and expounded a balanced system concerning the relations between Church and State. He is not a proponent of universal monarchy and maintains that civil power does not derive from the pope but, like spiritual power, directly from God through popular election. Ecclesiastical authority is not entrusted with the government of temporal affairs but, by reason of the preeminence of its end, with a regulatory action exercised through a moral jurisdiction over the conscience of peoples, and especially of those who direct their political affairs.
1922, pp. 1-603; J. Rivière, Le problème de l'Église et de l'État au temps de Philippe le Bel, Parigi 1926, pp. 148-50, 281-300; H. Weisweiler, Die Impanatumslehre des J. Quidort, in Scholastik, 6 (1931), pp. 161-95; J. Leclercq, Jean de Paris et l'ecclésiologie du XIIIe siècle, Parigi 1942. Ugo Mariani