John XXII begins his attack on the Franciscans by reiterating Giles and insisting that ‘Dominion over temporal things was not established by primeval natural law, understood as the law common to animals… nor by the law of nations, nor by the law of kings of Emperors, but by God who was and is the Lord of all things.’9 In this John XXII was following the traditional philosophical realist position, which saw natural law as an aspect of the divine reason that saturates the world with God’s plan as its final cause. Like the universal of fatherhood, a right was considered to be something that
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