The medieval church was a body of men and women set apart by
ordination or vows from the rest of the community. Bishops, canons,
priests, deacons, chaplains, vicars, curates, monks, friars, nuns,
notaries and university students - all were separated from the
rest of the world. They were separated by their membership in
a recognized organization, the Church.
This membership not only separated them from laymen but bound
them together. The church had for many centuries been highly institutionalized.
Like all institutions, it devoted much of its attention to keeping
its organization intact, to the preservation of its immunities,
the increase of its power, the extension of its functions and
the maintenance of the uniformity of its doctrine. Its members,
therefore, were much occupied with adopting rules and exercising
discipline within their own body, attending meetings of various
groups of churchmen, settling internal disputes, holding elections
or making appointments, and gaining for themselves or others promotion
within the church.
In the middle of the thirteenth century this mighty structure,
although beaten upon by many storms, still stood practically unshaken.
Its dominion over the minds of men, its means of obtaining obedience,
its recognition by the state, were all so great that it seemed
all-powerful in its wide sphere. But the events which were to
follow brought a profound change. The foundations of the church
were sapped, its fabric was weakened, it was subjected to new
and adverse forces, both from within and from without. By the
middle of the fifteenth century it was an organization relatively
impotent, awaiting the dismemberment and spoliation of the Reformation
and the rejuvenation of the Counter-Reformation that came a generation
later.
The papacy itself was never the same after the Avignon period
and the great schism. Almost three generations of exile from its
natural center at Rome, the pronounced French influence and character
of the papacy during that period, the increasing insistence on
its financial prerogativesÑall this had diminished the
devotion and affection formerly felt toward the head of the church.
The schism with its conflicts and jealousies left the organization
weakened.
And yet these were but episodes in the history of the church.
The capital could be reestablished at Rome. The schism could be
healed. There was a more serious threat which claimed the attention
of the Council at Constance (1414-1417). This was the spread of
heresy. Heresy was a danger not only to the organization of the
church, but to its internal unity and coherence.
Heresy had been on the increase during the period of the captivity
and the schism, favored doubtless by the widespread criticism
of church morals and intensified by the intellectual activity
of the age, but it had been a serious problem for a long time.
There was little sympathy with heresy, which was recognized and
acknowledged as such. At a time when the church and Christianity
were thought to be identical, any belief officially condemned
by the church was, in the minds of orthodox Christians, treason
against God, betrayal of the common faith, the worst of crimes.
Heretics were set apart from all other men. They were deprived
of all rights and considered an object of contempt and condemnation.
But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were great
numbers of men whose beliefs differed, whose doubts were not set
at rest, and whose religious longings were not satisfiedÑwith
what the official church provided. What was heresy and what was
truth was not clear.
There was also mysticism, always closely allied to heresy. Take
one bizarre example:
Widely scattered on the continent were the writings and the prophecies
of the half-mythical Abbot Joachim of Flora. He seems to have
been in real life a worldly young nobleman of Calabria. The story
goes that he visited the the Holy Land about 1175. There he was
converted, saw visions, was inspired with prophetic powers, and
was commissioned by God to speak and write concerning the future.
He was also inspired then to interpret the scriptures. He was
miraculously provided with the necessary scholarly equipment by
Òdrinking deeply of a river of oil in a vision.Ó
He returned to Italy, was ordained as a priest and took the vows
of the Cistercian Order. Unwillingly he was made abbot of the
monastery of Curazzo, but fled from his charge in order to devote
himself to still more rigorous self-discipline and to obtain freedom
to preach and to write. He wrote such things as The Harp with
Ten Strings, The Unfolding of Revelation, The Harmony of the New
and Old Testament.
His sayings and writings and the legends that grew up about him
became a great mass of popular tradition. What Merlin was in the
field of romance, Abbot Joachim became in the field of religion.
He could explain all the mysterious meanings of the Bible and
foretell the future. His books were added-to in the thirteenth
century by a series of works popularly attributed to him, The
Prophecies of Cyril, Commentaries on Jeremiah, Prophecies of the
Popes, The Seven Ages of the Church, and others.
The sayings and writings of Abbot Joachim were often incoherent.
They interpreted every episode of the Old Testament in terms of
the New and of both in the terms of later history. Each Biblical
character or event represents some person or occurrence or condition
in the present, or prefigures some state of man or of the church
in the future. He taught that there were three periods of the
world: the period of the Law or of the Father; the period of the
Gospel or the Son; and the period of the Holy Spirit.
The second period, in which people were then living, was marred
by avarice, lustfulness and irreligion in the church and unhappiness
among the people. But this period was approaching its end. The
end was supposed to come exactly in the year 1260. Joachim had
figured this out by calculating that it was about forty-two generations
from the birth of Christ. He arrived at this conclusion by citing
the story of Judith, who the scriptures said had remain in widowhood
for three years and a half years, or forty-two months, which was
1260 days. The Bible also said that with the Lord a day was like
a year. At that pointÑthat is in the year 1260Ñthe
present hierarchy would disappear; a new order of monks, truly
spiritual men, would then guide mankind; and the human race would
enjoy its long Sunday rest.
In symbolic drawings, in oral and written form, the dreams, the
fantastic analogies, the predictions, the allegories of Abbot
Joachim furnished much of the food of the marvelous and mysterious
on which it seems the souls of mankind must feed from time to
time. With its bitter condemnation of existing religion, its free
criticism of the church, its prophecies of a new era soon to begin,
in which ecclesiastical observances would be superfluous and men
would live in a continual ecstasy, the lore of Joachim, while
it excited the fancy, must have obscured the teaching and lessened
the authority of the church in the minds of hundreds of thousands.
Much of this mystic lore was too vague to be subjected to doctrinal
tests and too widely disseminated to be brought under authority.
But Joachim's essay on the Trinity was condemned as heretical
eleven years after his death. A council at Arles in 1260 condemned
his writings and those who accepted them. Nevertheless, Dante
revered Joachim and placed him in Paradise. His influence is recognizable
in the work of Roger Bacon. His vague cult spread widely, especially
in Languedoc, where the Albigensian doctrines had presumably been
crushed by the crusade against them. The few smoldering embers
of that heresy were supposed to be put out by the bull ad extirpandum
of 1252, but the people of Lanquedoc were still unsettled in their
belief long afterward.
Much more conformable to the thought of the time was that wave
of mysticism, known as the Òmodern devotion,Ó which
spread from the valley of the Rhine to the Netherlands between
1300 and 1400. This type was always on the borderland between
acceptance of the practical religious ministrations of the church
and an effort to obtain a more personal, intimate and direct union
with divinity. Master Eckhart and his two disciples Tauler and
Suso, all Dominicans, spent their lives of study, preaching and
writing at Cologne, Erfurt and Strassburg, with periods of study,
refuge and educational work at Paris, and in Switzerland and Bohemia.
The practical piety that accompanied this search for God, the
constant use of the Bible as a source of knowledge, the distaste
for what seemed to them the empty or misused ceremonies of the
church, led them to the formation of group after group of adherents
of a contemplative life.
So, The "Friends of God," the "Brethren of the
Common Life," the students of the ''new devotion,'' gave
the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries two new things:
an independent educational movement and the dreamy piety of the
Imitation of Christ, the most famous book which this movement
produced. Both the independent educational movement and the dreamy
piety were lacking in ecclesiastical regularity. Many of the ideas
emanating from them were subsequently condemned as heretical.
But what in reality was heresy? It was by no means certain. Independent
thinkers claimed that what the pope or bishop or their opponents
in controversy called heresy was really the true doctrine of the
church. In the unending theological disputes of the time the charge
of heresy was brought so freely that it became little more than
a term of abuse. It was frequently disregarded unless pronounced
with formality and followed up with force.
These theological arguments were addressed to scholars. They were
dependent for their reception on the learning, the keenness of
mind and the habit of discussion of the intellectual classes of
the time. The whole question whether their authors were heretics
or not was a matter of debate. Such works were sometimes declared
heretical by one pope only to have his judgment reversed by his
successor, or indeed, in some cases, under pressure, by himself.
In the meantime they were widely held to be orthodox, even among
learned churchmen. The church was not absolutely homogeneous or
settled beyond question in its beliefs anymore.
The Inquisition was established in Italy, France, Burgundy and
Spain from the middle of the 13th to the early 15th centuries
with the task of rooting out these heretical beliefs. But scarcely
had it made headway against heterodoxy in one form and lighted
the fires which were intended to purify the church, when a new
heresy or an old one raised its head again. The old heresy of
the Albigensians or Cathari, with its anti-sacerdotalism and its
dualistic conception of God, crushed in the open country, lived
on in the remote valleys of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Apennines
and the Abruzzi, and even in the obscure parts of some Italian
cities.
The Waldensians, who were like the Cathari, except that they were
mostly poor men, were still scattered through the southeast of
France and extended their influence south into Italy and north
along the Rhine and into Bavaria, Moravia and Bohemia. A host
of dreamers or seekers who so easily passed the border separating
piety from heresy went their ways of deviation from the narrow
paths of orthodoxy until they were forced by bishops or inquisitors
to conform or to become martyrs to their faith.
How many heretics there were, what proportion of the population
was in silent or active opposition to the doctrines of the church,
is impossible to tell. When a contemporary chronicler declares
that ''You would hardly meet two men upon the highroad of whom
one would not be a Lollard''Ñ or we read of 54 being burned
in ParisÑor note the hostility to clergymen shown by so
many peasant insurgentsÑor hear the charge of heresy so
freely madeÑyou might get the impression that disaffection
was ubiquitous and universal. But the number of non-conformists
was probably slight, in comparison with the number of those obedient
to the teachings and the authority of the church.
At the Jubilee of 1300 some 200,000 pilgrims visited Rome and
kissed the hands of Pope Boniface VIII. That would seem to indicate
that faithful adherence to official doctrine was still the prevailing
practice. It is clear that churchmen and most laymen hated heresy
and despised the heretics. There is little doubt that a great
body of the population, as far as they were interested at all,
accepted naturally and dutifully, often unthinkingly, the existence
and authority of the organized church, obeyed its requirements
and used its ministrations.
As far as outward submission was concerned, that was practically
imperative. The church had sufficient material power to force
all but the most highly placed of laymen to do its bidding. Yet
on the whole in these centuries the structure of the church could
be kept intact only by constant disciplinary action and frequent
prosecutions by local officials and by the officers of the Inquisition.
As time went on, criticism became more and more outspoken. The
church itself became less and less satisfying to the intellectual
and spiritual needs of the people. The standards of the church
inevitably were lowered. It was without a doubt a low period in
the history of the Christian Church. Devotion seldom sprang up
of itself within her boundaries. When it did it met a chilling
reception from her governors. The greater freedom and vigor of
thought that accompanied life in the cities, the increase of wealth
and the extension of international contacts in this period found
no echo of liberalism in the church. Liberals and free thinkers
were forced to take refuge in secularism or in heresy.