Their errors, as taught by one of their most noted leaders, Walter
Lolhard, who was burned at Cologne in 1322, had a tinge of the
Manichæism of the Albigenses, for Satan was to them an object of
compassion and veneration.[933] Their prevalence in Bohemia prepared
the ground for Huss, and left deep traces in the popular mind which
were not eradicated in the eighteenth century; while their proselytes
in England served to swell the party of Wickliffe, and eventually
gave to it their name, though their peculiar doctrines bore little
resemblance to his.[934] Antisacerdotalism, however, was the common
tie, and in this Luther, Zwingli, and Knox were the legitimate
successors of Dolcino and Michael di Cesena.
Another precursor of Wickliffe and Huss was John of Pirna, who in 1341
taught the most revolutionary doctrines. According to him, the pope was
Antichrist and Rome was the whore of Babylon and the church of Satan.
The Silesians listened eagerly to his denunciations of the clergy, and
the citizens of Breslau, with their magistrates, openly embraced his
heresy. When the Inquisitor, John of Schweidnitz, was sent thither
by the Holy Office of Cracow, the people rose in defence of their
leader and put the Inquisitor to death. John of Pirna appears to have
maintained his position, but after his death the church enjoyed the
pious satisfaction of exhuming his body, burning it, and scattering the
ashes to the winds.[935] It was easier to do this than to destroy the
leaven which was working everywhere in men’s minds. No sooner were its
manifestations repressed in one quarter than they displayed themselves
in another.
In the ineradicable corruption of the church, indeed, every effort to
purify it could only lead to a heresy. Except on the delicate point of
Transsubstantiation, Wickliffe proposed no doctrinal innovation, but
he keenly felt and energetically sought to repress the disorders which
had brought the church into disrepute. His scheme swept away bishop,
cardinal, and pope, the priesthood being the culminating point in
his system of ecclesiastical polity. The temporalities which weighed
down the spiritual aspirations of the church were to be abandoned,
and with them the train of abuses by which the worldly ambition of
churchmen was sustained—indulgences, simony, image-worship, the
power of excommunication, and the thousand other arts by which the
authority to bind and to loose had been converted into broad acres
or current coin of the realm. In all this he was to a great extent a
disciple of the Fraticelli, but his more practical mind escaped their
leading error, and he denounced as an intolerable abuse the beggary
of the mendicant friars. Indeed, the monastic orders in general were
the objects of his special aversion, as having no justification in
the precepts of Christ, and his repeated attacks upon them have a
bitterness which shows not only his deep-rooted aversion, but his sense
of their importance as a bulwark of the abuses which he assailed.[936]
He reduced holy orders to two—the priesthood and diaconate—but he
maintained the indelible character of ordination as separating the
recipient from his fellows, and he urged that all ministers of Christ
should live in saintly poverty.[937] All this was unreasonable enough
in a perverse and stiff-necked generation, but his unpardonable
error was his revival of the doctrine of Gregory VII. regarding the
ministrations of unfaithful priests, which he carried out resolutely to
its logical consequences.[938] According to him, a wicked priest could
not perform his sacred functions, and forfeited both his spiritualities
and temporalities, of which laymen were justified in depriving him. Nay
more, priest and bishop were no longer priest or bishop if they lived
in mortal sin, and his definition of mortal sin was such as to render
it scarce possible for any one to escape.[939]
What his opinions were on the subject of clerical celibacy was a
mooted point even shortly after his death. Thomas of Walden, the
confessor of Henry V., in his _Doctrinale Fidei_, written to confute
the errors of Lollardry, declares that he could not persuade himself
that the Wickliffites derived from their leader their opposition to
celibacy until he had recently read in Wickliffe’s Sermon on Midsummer
Eve the passage which says that “prestis ben dowid and wyflees agens
Goddis autorite.... And this is the caste of the fend to kyndle fir
in heerdis” &c.,[940] and Mr. Arnold, the latest editor of Wickliffe,
seems to entertain no doubt as to the authenticity of the text, or of
the views of the reformer as expressed there, and in other passages of
tracts attributed to him.[941] Yet had Wickliffe taught this doctrine
it would have been as widely known as his other errors, it would have
been condemned in the repeated proceedings taken against him and his
teachings, and it would not have been left for Thomas of Walden to
discover it in one of the numerous sermons which passed from hand to
hand as the works of the heresiarch. Wickliffe was too earnest and
sincere in his convictions to leave anyone in doubt as to his belief on
any point that he thought worth discussion.
What his views were on this subject can perhaps best be sought in the
most mature of his works, the Trialogus, the authenticity of which I
believe is indisputable. No one can read the chapters on Sensuality and
Chastity without seeing that the whole line of argument is directed
towards proving the superiority of virginity over marriage, even to
the fanciful etymology of “cœlibatus” from the state of the “beati
in cælo;” while in the chapter on the riches of the clergy, they are
regarded as virgins betrothed to Christ, and the vow of chastity which
they take is likened to their similar vow of poverty, and not to be
infringed.[942] Wickliffe’s austerity, in fact, was deeply tinged
with asceticism, and in aiming to restore the primitive simplicity
of the church, he had no thought of relegating its ministers to the
carnalities of family life, which would render impossible the Apostolic
poverty that was his ideal. Even the laity, in his scheme, were to be
so rendered superior to the lusts of the flesh that he pronounced those
who married from any other motive than that of having offspring to be
not truly married.[943] He evidently had no intention to interfere
with clerical celibacy, and the passages which have been cited to the
contrary may safely be regarded as supposititious. Either the writings
in which they occur have been erroneously ascribed to Wickliffe, or the
passages themselves have been interpolated by too zealous disciples,
eager to procure the authority of the master for the later development
of doctrines that were not his—a pious fraud too common in all ages of
the church to excite surprise.
It is easier to start a movement than to restrain it. Wickliffe might
deny the authority of tradition, and yet preserve his respect for
the tradition of celibacy, but his followers could not observe the
distinction. They could see, if he could not, that the structure of
sacerdotalism, to the overthrow of which he devoted himself, could not
be destroyed without abrogating the rule which separated the priest
from his fellow-men, and which severed all other ties in binding him
to the church. In 1394, only ten years after Wickliffe’s death, the
Lollards, by that time a powerful party, with strong revolutionary
tendencies, presented to Parliament a petition for the thorough
reformation of the church, containing twelve conclusions indicating the
points on which they desired change. Of these, the third denounced the
rule of celibacy as the cause of the worst disorders, and argued the
necessity of its abrogation; while the eleventh attacked the vows of
nuns as even more injurious, and demanded permission for their marriage
with but scanty show of respect.[944] This became the received doctrine
of the sect, for in a declaration made in 1400 by Arundel, Archbishop
of Canterbury, concerning the Lollard heresies, we find enumerated
the belief that those in holy orders could take to themselves wives
without sin, and that monks and nuns were at liberty to abandon their
profession, and marry at pleasure.[945]
The fierce persecutions of Henry V., to repress what he rightly
considered as a formidable source of civil rebellion as well as heresy,
succeeded in depriving the sect of political power; yet its religious
doctrines still continued to exist among the people, and even sometimes
obtained public expression.[946] They unquestionably tended strongly to
shake the popular reverence for Rome, and had no little influence in
paving the way for the revolt of the sixteenth century.
* * * * *
John Huss was rather a reformer than a heresiarch. Admirer though
he was of Wickliffe, even to the point of wishing to risk damnation
with him,[947] he avoided the doctrinal errors of the Englishman
on the subject of the Eucharist. Yet his predestinarian views were
unorthodox, and he shared in some degree Wickliffe’s Gregorian ideas
as to the effect of mortal sin in divesting the priesthood of all
claim to sacredness or respect. According to his enemies, he asserted
that no one could be the vicar of Christ or of Peter unless he were an
humble imitator of the virtues of him whom he claimed to represent;
and a pope who was given to avarice was only the representative of
Judas Iscariot.[948] His friend, Jerome of Prague, maintained with
his latest breath that Huss was thoroughly orthodox, and was only
inspired by indignation at seeing the wealth of the church, which was
the patrimony of the poor, lavished on prostitutes, feasting, hunting,
rich apparel, and other unseemly extravagance.[949] In the Bohemian
clergy he had an ample target for his assaults, for they were in no
respect better than their neighbors. During the latter half of the
fourteenth century scarce a synod was held which did not denounce their
vices, gambling, drunkenness, usury, simony, and concubinage; and when
to put an end to the latter irregularity a strict visitation was made
throughout the archiepiscopal diocese of Prague, the cunning rogues
sent away or secreted their partners in guilt, and openly recalled
them as soon as the storm had passed. The following year, Archbishop
Sbinco peremptorily commanded that all concubines should be dismissed
within six days, under pain of perpetual imprisonment, but this was
evidently regarded as a mere _brutum fulmen_, for the next year a new
device was resorted to, by pronouncing all concubinary priests to be
heretics.[950] All this might certainly seem to warrant any effort that
might be made to accomplish what the authorities so signally failed
in doing, but that any individual should assert the right of private
judgment in reforming the church in its head and its members threatened
results too formidable to the whole structure of sacerdotalism, and
the condemnation of Huss was inevitable. Still, like Wickliffe, he was
a devout believer in ascetic purity. His denunciations of the wealth
and disorders of the clergy raised so great an excitement throughout
Bohemia that King Wenceslas was forced to issue a decree depriving
immoral ecclesiastics of their revenues. The partisans of Huss took a
lively interest in the enforcement of this law, and brought the unhappy
ecclesiastics before the tribunals with a pertinacity which amounted to
the persecution of an inquisition.[951]
Unlike the Lollards, the Hussites maintained the strictness of their
founder’s views on the subject of celibacy. If the fiercer Taborites
cruelly revenged their wrongs upon the religious orders, it was to
punish the minions of Rome, and not to manifest their contempt for
asceticism; and, at the same time, even the milder Calixtins treated
all lapses from clerical virtue among themselves with a severity
which proved their sincerity and earnestness, and which had long
been a stranger to the administration of the church.[952] One of the
complaints against the priesthood formulated in the proclamation of
Procopius and the other chiefs in 1431, at the assembling of the
Council of Bâle, was that the clergy were all fornicators, committing
adultery with men’s wives, or having wives and “presbyterissæ” of
their own;[953] and when, in 1562, the Emperor Ferdinand endeavored to
procure from the Council of Trent the use of the cup for the Utraquists
or Calixtins of Bohemia, he urged in their favor that they would not
admit the ministrations of any priest who did not lead a celibate
life.[954] Traces of the teachings of the Fraticelli, moreover, are
to be found in the doctrines which dissevered temporal from spiritual
power, and denied to the clergy all ownership or dominion over landed
possessions.[955]
The Hussite movement thus was an efficient protest against some of
the forms of sacerdotalism. The nominal reconciliation effected by
the Council of Bâle, against the wishes of the papacy, afforded
considerable scope for religious liberty, which was strengthened by the
alliance between Bohemia and Poland. The reigns of George Podiebrad,
Vlasdislav, and Louis, which extended from 1458 to 1525, favored this
spirit and prepared the soil for the rapid spread of Lutheranism
throughout those regions, which in the sixteenth century narrowly
escaped permanent separation from Catholic unity.
One fragment of the Hussites, however, held wholly aloof from
reconciliation to Rome and professed to uphold in their purity the
doctrines of their founder. These called themselves the Orthodox
Brethren, but were stigmatized by their adversaries with the
opprobrious name of Picardi, in allusion to an obnoxious heresy of the
previous centuries. In process of time they admitted the validity of
priestly marriage, though it was discouraged among them in view of the
dangers to which they were exposed and the constant risk of martyrdom
incurred by all who ventured to be conspicuous among them, for Hussite
and Catholic alike sought their extermination. Yet they bravely
maintained their existence until the Reformation, when they eagerly
fraternized with Luther,[956] such minor differences as existed in the
organization of the respective churches being amicably regulated in
1570 by the agreement of Sendomir.[957]
* * * * *
Wickliffe and Huss were not the only inheritors of the antisacerdotal
spirit of the Fraticelli. About the close of the fourteenth century
there arose in Thuringia a heresiarch of the flagellants named Conrad
Schmidt, whose teachings swept away the forms and observances which
had so thickly incrusted the simple doctrines of Christianity. The
sacrifice of the mass, image-worship, fasting, feasts, purgatory,
confession, and absolution, all fell before the fearless logic of the
reformer, and his disciples fondly treasured him in memory as a second
incarnation of Enoch. For forty years the sect flourished in secret,
but at length it was discovered in Misnia, where its members were known
as Brethren of the Cross, and where it was exterminated in 1414 by the
fagots of Sangerhausen. The licentious doctrines attributed to them
by the monkish chronicler show that sacerdotal celibacy was one of
the observances which they repudiated.[958] Similar in its tendency,
and almost identical in details, was the heresy which, in 1411, was
condemned in Flanders by Peter d’Ailly, Archbishop of Cambrai. Giles
Cantor, a layman, and a Carmelite known as William of Hilderniss
gathered around them followers who assumed the title of Men of
Intelligence. Like Conrad Schmidt, they rejected the empty formalism
which had to so great an extent usurped the place of religion. The
Atonement had satisfied God for all; there was no necessity for the
intervention of sacerdotal ministrations, for confession and absolution
were useless, Christ was not present in the sacrament, purgatory did
not exist, and all mankind, besides the fallen angels, would in the end
be saved. There was, however, little of the temper of martyrs about
them, and a public renunciation of their errors at Brussels speedily
deprived them of all importance.[959]
* * * * *
Savonarola can scarcely be classed among heretics. Though he was
tortured and put to death by the church for his rebellious attempts to
purify it, still his doctrines never varied from strict orthodoxy, and
Benedict XIV. even included him in a catalogue of the holy servants of
God.[960] Yet Savonarola, when his career was cut short, was rapidly
becoming a schismatic, as was inevitable with all reformers of ardent
temperament as soon as they discovered the impossibility of removing
the corruptions of the establishment. If, instead of the fickle
support of the Florentine populace, which betrayed him at his utmost
need, he had enjoyed the steadfast protection of such a patron as the
Elector Frederic of Saxony, he would doubtless have ripened in time,
as Luther subsequently did, into a full-blown heresiarch, though his
innate defects of character would scarcely have enabled him, under any
circumstances, to conduct successfully so complicated a movement as a
separation from the church.
The principal feature of his history which concerns us is the
good-natured indifference with which Alexander VI. endured his repeated
attacks on the scandals and vices of the papal court. There were so
many political interests entangled in Savonarola’s career that it is
not always easy to reach the hidden springs of action at work, but it
may be assumed that Alexander, if left to himself, would have allowed
the reformer to declaim unmolested. More than once he interdicted the
Dominican from preaching and ordered him to Rome, but took little
heed of disobedience. At length he launched an excommunication, which
for nearly a year received as little respect as his previous orders,
and when at length a sudden revulsion of feeling among the Florentine
mob enabled him to dispose of his adversary under the forms of law,
it is probable that even then he would not have pushed matters to
such extremity had not Savonarola been led to an act of aggressive
rebellion. The Duke of Milan forwarded to the pope intercepted letters
in which the reformer, by command of God, urged the monarchs of Europe
to call a general council under pretext that the church was without
a head, since Alexander was an infidel who had obtained the tiara by
simony and had polluted it with unimaginable vices. In his capacity
of prophet, Savonarola promised the rulers triumph over their enemies
if they would aid in the good work of cleansing the church, and he
engaged to prove before the council the truth of his allegations by
working miracles.[961] It would probably be unjust to condemn him as
an imposter, but such conclusion is only to be escaped by pronouncing
him partially insane. That fierce age was not apt to invoke such
considerations in palliation of so flagrant an attempt at revolution,
and Savonarola was doomed.
* * * * *
While thus trampling out these successive revolts, the church was
blind to the lesson taught by their perpetual recurrence. The minds of
men were gradually learning to estimate at its true value the claim
of the hierarchy to veneration, and at the same time the vices of the
establishment were yearly becoming more odious, and its oppression
more onerous. The explosion might be delayed by attempts at partial
reformation, but it was inevitable.
XXIV.
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Neither the assaults of heretics nor the constant efforts at partial
reform attempted by individual prelates had thus far proved of any
avail. As time wore on, the church sank deeper into the mire of
corruption, and its struggles to extricate itself grew feebler and
more hopeless. We have seen that, early in the fifteenth century,
Gerson advised an organized system of concubinage as preferable to the
indiscriminate licentiousness which was everywhere prevalent. Even
more suggestive are the declarations of Nicholas de Clemanges, Rector
of the University of Paris and Secretary of Benedict XIII. (Pedro de
Luna). He does not hesitate to say that the vices of the clergy were
so universal that those who adhered to the rule of chastity were the
objects of the most degrading and disgusting suspicions, so little
faith was there in the possible purity of any ecclesiastic. He also
records the extension of a custom to which I have already alluded
when he states that in a majority of parishes the people insisted on
their pastors keeping concubines, and that even this was a precaution
insufficient for the peace and honor of their families.[962] In another
tract he describes the mass of the clergy as wholly abandoned to
worldly ambition and vices, oppressing and despoiling those subjected
to them and spending their ill-gotten gains in the vilest excesses,
while they ridiculed unsparingly such few pious souls as endeavored
to live according to the light of the gospel.[963] In most of the
dioceses the parish priests openly kept concubines, which they were
permitted to do on payment of a tax to their bishops. Nunneries were
brothels, and to take the veil was simply another mode of becoming a
public prostitute.[964] Cardinal Peter d’Ailly declares that he does
not dare to describe the immorality of the nunneries.[965] In a similar
indignant mood Gerson stigmatizes the nunneries of his time as houses
of prostitution, the monasteries as centres of trade and amusement, the
cathedral churches as dens of ravishers and robbers, and the priesthood
at large as habitual concubinarians.[966] That he felt these evils to
be inseparable from the condition of the church is evident when, in
an argument to prove the necessity of celibacy, he is driven to the
assertion that it is better to tolerate incontinent priests than to
have no priests at all.[967] He argues that the clergy are worthy of as
many sentences of damnation as they seduce souls to perdition by their
corrupt example, and he asks, when he who destroys himself by his own
sins is to be condemned, whether he who draws with him numerous others
is not still more worthy of perdition.[968] Theodoric a Niem represents
the bishops of Scandinavia as carrying with them their concubines on
their pastoral visitations, and as inflicting penalties on such of the
parish priests as they found living without similar companions, while
these women habitually took precedence in church of the wives of the
neighboring gentry—and he adds that the clergy of the south of Europe
were no better.[969] Theodoric Vrie, a learned and pious churchman
of Saxony, is equally unsparing in his denunciations of the Teutonic
clergy[970]—and, indeed, the testimony of the writers of the period
is so unanimous that their descriptions of clerical vices cannot be
regarded as the mere rhetorical declamation of disappointed reformers.
It was evident that the efforts of local synods were fruitless to
eradicate evils so general and so deeply rooted, while the necessity
for some reform became every day more apparent. Though Lollardry had
been crushed in England under the stern hand of Henry V., yet it was
reappearing in Bohemia in a form even more threatening. The council
of Pisa had not succeeded in healing the Great Schism, and there arose
a general demand for an Œcumenic Council in which the church universal
should assemble for the purpose of purifying itself, of eradicating
heresy, and of settling definitely the pretensions of the three
claimants of the papacy. John XXIII. yielded to the pressure, and the
call for the Council of Constance went forth in his name and in that of
the Emperor Sigismund.