Doctor Faustus Pope Adrian and Bruno Quotes

Here, Pope Adrian charges his cardinals with determining a punishment for Bruno, a Saxon man who has been declared pope by the German emperor. The Council of Trent was a meeting of bishops and cardinals that occurred every once in a while between 1545 and 1563 as a response to the challenges of the Reformation. Throughout the medieval period, the Catholic Church had all kinds of problems, the most common of which were divisions within the Church that occurred when people couldn't agree upon a Pope. The character of Bruno is supposed to be the product of one such a division.

Bruno has claimed that one of Pope Adrian's predecessors, Julius, recognized the Holy Roman Emperor as his lord, which is so not cool in Adrian's book. But in his response, Adrian contradicts himself, which doesn't make his argument look so sound. First, he says that Julius's decrees were invalid because he gave the Church too much power. Then he's all, "the papal office is infallible" (unable to make a mistake). But wait—if the papal office is infallible, how could Pope Julius's decrees have been invalid? This guy, like Faustus, could have used a logic class or two.

Pope Adrian's Catholic Church believed that Jesus gave the Pope the power to save and condemn souls. That means that, when it comes down to it, the decision to either forgive a sinner or kick him out of the Church altogether (a practice called excommunication) was with the Pope. To gain the Pope's forgiveness, folks would buy indulgences, or forgiveness for sins. Many folks felt that this practice amounted to nothing more than people buying their tickets to heaven, to put it bluntly, and this practice was one of the main things that members of the Protestant Reformation objected to when it came to the Catholic Church. This passage shows the Pope using the power to save or condemn souls in just the way the Reformation claimed it did—to gain power, and make all the world "stoop."

The Pope relies upon book-learning… sort of. Really, he's counting on the law books to help him in his case against Bruno. This is quite a different kind of knowledge than the one Faustus has come to rely on—the experience and exploration of the world, all thanks to Mephistopheles.

The Pope demands a display of submission from schismatic pope Bruno, forcing him to get down on his hands and knees so he can use his back as a step-stool. Talk about humiliating. Bruno only submits, he says, because he respects St. Peter, implying that he recognizes the power of the office of Pope (which Peter represents), but not the power of the man who now fills it.

The dispute between Adrian and Bruno is over who has the power to appoint the pope. Pope Adrian believes that this power belongs only to members of the Church, but Bruno argues that a former pope gave the Holy Roman Emperor this same power. This belief is why Bruno claims "right of law," i.e., that he's the lawfully chosen Pope.

Here the pope claims two powers that Catholics traditionally regarded as belonging to the church, as represented by its priests, cardinals, and/or popes. The first is the pope's power to decree infallibly in his papal office. What does this mean? Whatever he decrees officially, as pope, is totally and absolutely true. The other power belongs to all priests (including popes and cardinals). This is the power to forgive sins, here called the power to "bind or loose, lock fast, condemn or judge." With this power, the church controls an individual's access to salvation, since only when his sins are forgiven by a priest can he hope to enter heaven. Corresponding with this power is the "dreadful curse," meaning the ability to excommunicate someone, prohibiting that person from receiving the sacraments. But the Pope uses this power selfishly, to make the whole world "stoop," when that is presumably not what God intended it for.