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Because of these involvements in the matter at stake, Boniface lacked the impartiality that is supposed to be an essential qualification for the position of arbiter, and in retrospect that would seem to be sufficient reason why the English embassies to the Curia proved so fruitless.
But when the situation was so complicated that even Nogaret, one of the principal actors in the drama, could misinterpret the pope's motives, it is possible that Othon and his companions, equally baffled, attributed their difficulties to a more immediate cause.
This was Boniface's monumental tactlessness.
`` Tact '', by its very derivation, implies that its possessor keeps in touch with other people, but the author of Clericis Laicos and Unam Sanctam, the wielder of the two swords, the papal sun of which the imperial moon was but a dim reflection, the peer of Caesar and vice-regent of Christ, was so high above other human beings that he had forgotten what they were like.
He was a learned and brilliant man, one of the best jurists in Europe and with flashes of penetrating insight, and yet in his dealings with other people, particularly when he tried to be ingratiating, he was capable of an abysmal stupidity that can have come only from a complete incomprehension of human nature and human motives.

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