267. Taborites

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Bohemia in a passion

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)

The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War

Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period

2. The Religious Movement

Continued

p413 [Huss burned at the stake at the Council of Constance 1414] ... Hitherto the followers of Huss had confined themselves... to professing the ideas of Wycliffe. A certain number of them remained faithful to these ideas: these were the Utraquists, so called because they communicated "in the two elements." [Both bread and wine. ] But the mass of the people, under the spur of religious passion, suddenly pushed the doctrine to its extreme consequences. Since the Bible proclaimed the Word of God, it must be obeyed in everything not only in such matters as regarded the soul, but also in all that related to the body. Hence the ecclesiastical organization, no less than the civil organization, ought simply to disappear. The Kingdom of God must be established in this world, by reconstituting the whole of humanity in accordance with the Holy Scriptures. Such was the enthusiastic dream of a young people, [the Czechs] a people full of illusions, and history shows no pendant to their behavior save that of the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917. They set to work immediately, under the conviction that the Czech nation was the Chosen of the Lord. The Catholic clergy was dispersed, its property confiscated, and the churches and monasteries were destroyed. A partiarchal [patriarchal?] constitution, on the lines of the Old Testament, was given to the people, and on the site of the castle of Kozihradek... the Holy City of Tabor was built, from which the New Hebrews received their name of Taborites... The revolution was thus in full control of the country... from all parts of the world exalted mystics, members of the associations of Bogards, or the proletariat of the industrial cities, hastened toward this country in which the Kingdom of God had been proclaimed, and their communistic aspirations, or their paradisiacal visions, gave rise to some singular sects amidst the Biblical rigorism of the Taborites. The sect of the Adamites, founded by a Belgian weaver, affords the curious example of the exaltation of their adepts. The disciples of the new Adam, who settled on an island in the river Nezarka, professed to live there, in a state of the completest communism, the life of the Garden of Eden, Like the first of our race, they wore no clothes, and their morals were as primitive as their costume. They soon caused such a scandal that John Ziska, in 1421, had them massacred.

p415 The faith of the Hussites was too ardent to allow them to neglect the duty of propagating it...The adjacent Slav regions, Poland, Moravia and Silesia, where the language of its apostles was readily understood, and where the masses of the people were living wretchedly under the oppression of the nobles, immediately provided it with thousands of adepts. It even made some progress among the poorer inhabitants in the German regions of Austria. And its prestige appeared more dazzling than ever in the light of its triumphs. The victories of John Ziska and Procopius over the German chivalry sent against them by the Pope and Sigismond [King of Germany] inevitably reminded the faithful of the victories of David or of Gideon over the Amalekites.
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p416 The religious and social radicalism of the Taborites ended by provoking a definitive rupture between them and the Utraquists. Almost  the whole of the nobility had gone over to the side of the Utraquists, and at Lipan, on March 30th, 1434, they won a bloody victory for their cause. Bohemia, exhausted by the war, asked for nothing more than peace... The difficulties were evaded rather than solved. All the efforts, all the enthusiasm, all the bloodshed, profited, in the end, only the Czech nobles, who divided the property of the convents among themselves... They thereby acquired such power that little danger was to be feared henceforth from the discouraged sectators among the people...
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Of the [reform] work of the Council [of "Basle"] nothing survived. The Church had preserved its monarchical form; after so much effort, so many hopes, everything was as it had been in the beginning.

p417 ...The Papacy remained supreme within the Church. But the Church was no longer what it had been in the Middle Ages. It no longer extended its authority over the temporal as over the spiritual domain. To a certain extent it turned inward upon itself, and... decided to specialize in its religious role. Following the Emperor, the Pope in his turn disappeared from the stage of the world as a universal power. From the middle of the 15th century there were to be no more Antipopes. However, after the deposition of the King of Bohemia, George Podiebrad, by Paul II, the quarrels of the kings would no longer be submitted to Papal arbitration.

I'm still trying to get my mind around the idea that it was the urban bourgeoisie driving the economic transformation of Europe from the 11th?? century and now I have to get used to the idea that, while it was the Third Estate starting to taking control of the political power in the 14th century, it was the petite bourgeoisie (recruiting spear carriers from the proletariat) who were behind the mystical religious tendency that led to centuries of mindless violence and sectarianism. It is always disquieting to see what "the people" get up to when left to their own devices. 

I've always read the European Religious Wars as someone raised a Lutheran. I wonder how this will look as I approach it again not having a dog in the fight. Almaric may have been on to something after all when he (maybe) said "Kill them all and let God sort them out." (And I see that this quote comes from the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade. So the Crusaders, like the loyal Imperial Japanese soldiers of the Pacific War, might even have appreciated the privilege of dying for the cause.)

I think football (what we Americans call soccer) may be a good analogy for the religious wars of all denominations. And I have in mind the way football looks to an American who would prefer the fate of Sisyphus to having to actually sit through an entire soccer match. (Cricket might be even better as the rules appear to have been drafted by mad men.) I don't know the teams or the players and don't care who wins. Everyone but the goalies seem to get a good workout, but why am I watching them run about the field? 

To be fair, I've written extensively about baseball and basketball, which are also pretty inane -- though at least things happen frequently. But, with the possible exception of hockey players, nobody thinks these games are worth dying for. And yet it seems that there is no religion crazy enough for people not to feel that it is worth dying for. Is it because you can't see the thing you worship? Is it that the religious idea is our greatest invention and so we will fight to the death for our particular version of that general idea? 

And here's a spoiler, my Regieren blog will probably be returning this summer as I finally get around to blogging The Magic Mountain itself. (I've referred to it so often my book club has decided to give it a try.) I'm having trouble, reading this, imagining Naphta as the spokesman for the Catholic orthodoxy that is falling apart in the centuries we are now looking at. (Maybe Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor would be a better option.) It almost seems like the Church is protecting the people from religion. So is it the new level of oppression or just the brush with strange ideas that has opened Pandora's Box? I imagine most of the followers of Huss and Wycliffe and even our old friends the Albigensians were mostly illiterate. So there must be a small number of educated people who are preaching to the masses. Both Wycliffe and Huss would have been educated by the Church through the universities of the time. 

I ran into a couple interesting quotes about Wycliffe in Wiki, "Thomas Bradwardine was the archbishop of Canterbury, and his book On the Cause of God against the Pelagians, a bold recovery of the Pauline-Augustine doctrine of grace, would greatly shape young Wycliffe's views,^[8] as did the Black Death which reached England in the summer of 1348.^[9] From his frequent references to it in later life, it appears to have made a deep and abiding impression upon him. According to Robert Vaughn, the effect was to give Wycliffe "Very gloomy views in regard to the condition and prospects of the human race."^[10]" And then, "Wycliffe completed his arts degree at Merton College as a junior fellow in 1356.^[11] That same year he produced a small treatise, The Last Age of the Church. In the light of the virulence of the plague that had subsided only seven years previously, Wycliffe's studies led him to the opinion that the close of the 14th century would mark the end of the world. While other writers viewed the plague as God's judgment on a sinful people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment of an unworthy clergy. The mortality rate among the clergy had been particularly high, and those who replaced them were, in his opinion, uneducated or generally disreputable.^[9]"

This would suggest that it was not anything to do with the cities, but people trying to make sense of the Black Death that was driving the religious feeling. Now this makes more sense to me. Though the logic is absurd. 

The Church trades in the life after death, a perfect business model as dissatisfied customers can't really complain. But after the Black Death, people were bargaining for their lives in This World, and this was a competition that science would eventually win, but not for a long time. And even now there are plenty of people happy to believe any well presented magic solution.   

266. John Wycliffe & the Beguines

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Link to Table of Contents

Proto-Protestants

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)

The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War

Chapter I
General Characteristics of the Period

2. The Religious Movement

p398 ...it is evident that about the middle of the 13th century the Church had attained the maximum of its power. It had ceased to grow, and presently began to decline... Without intention, without being really conscious of what they were doing, men were gradually turning away from the influence of the Church. [Toward their economic concerns.] And the Church was not aware of this desertion... The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua... expounded ideas of which we may note the first traces in the entourage of Frederick II and Philip the Fair. But only now were they fully developed, and they amazed the world by their boldness. For Marsilius the pretensions of the papacy were merely an intolerable usurpation, as incompatible with the interpretation of Holy Scriptures and the usages of the primitive Church as they were disastrous to the peace of the world. The Pope was merely a bishop like any other... All interference in the temporal domain, all jurisdiction over laymen should be refused him. And expatiating on this question, Marsilius defined the Church: the community of all those who believe in Jesus Christ. Before Wycliffe and before Huss, he declared that the layman belonged to the Church no less than the priest, and he categorically insisted that the "clerks" should be subject to the secular power in all temporal relations. Of course, we must not exaggerate the influence of these declarations... They had, as yet, only the importance of a symptom, and in religious as in social questions, contemporaries do not usually notice the symptoms which precede a crisis.

p399 ...In its profoundest and most spontaneous features the piety of the 14th century was essentially mystical. In its efforts to attain to God the Church no longer sufficed it. Without hesitation, it took flight towards Him; it sought to contemplate Him face to face in the intimacy of consciousness, without the intermediary of the priest. Moreover -- and this is a peculiarly characteristic innovation -- it no longer expressed itself in the tongue of the Church. Nearly all the mystics -- Eckhardt (1327), Tauler (1365), Ruysbroek (1381) -- wrote in the language of the people, thus for the first time giving religious thought a secular form, and so undermining the prestige of the clergy, who had hitherto enjoyed the sole monopoly of religious ideas... Mysticism took alarm at the fact that a conventual [relating or belonging to a convent] rule necessarily imposes constraint upon spiritual liberty. It preferred solitary contemplation, as a voluntary practice, or such congregations as were exempt from perpetual vows, like the beguinages, or the community of the Brothers of the Common Life, founded by Goert Groot (1384). Here piety could still expand beyond the boundaries which the Church had created to confine it. For neither the Beguines nor the Begards nor the Brothers of the Common Life were religious orders. They did not consider that the secular life was incompatible with devotion, or that it was necessary to flee the world in order to enter relations with God...

p401 This spread of mysticism in the lay community was doubly perilous for the church. To begin with, it represented a danger to orthodoxy... The danger was all the greater inasmuch as these naive zealots were without theological training, since most of them came from the ranks of the people or the petite bourgeoisie... During the Black Death of 1347-1348 bands of penitents, urged onward by a sort of ecstatic delirium, went from city to city, exciting the people, like Oriental fakirs, by their singing, their dancing, or their public flagellations. In Italy, France and Germany obscure sects appeared which seemed to have preserved something of the doctrines and the dreams of the Albigenses; they were known as "Spirituals, Apostolics, Friends of God." All these mystics -- and this was the second danger to the Church -- aspired to lead the world back to evangelical poverty. This question of poverty troubled the whole of the 14th century. Among the workers in the manufacturing cities, and the English rebels in 1384, it gave rise to communistic aspirations, which the secular power proceeded to stifle. But even more widespread, and even more difficult to contend with, was the criticism of the religious authorities, beginning with the highest of all, the papacy...
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p403 Wycliffe was the first to tread the path which was to lead to the Reformation. He had nothing in common with the heretics who had troubled the Church before his time, and whose doctrines had their essential foundation, like that of the Albigenses, in the dualism of flesh and spirit. Wycliffe... did not rebel against Christian dogma nor against Christian morality, but simply against the Church, and even more... against the Papacy. The only head of the Church, he taught, was Christ. His word, recorded in the Bible, sufficed for the salvation of those who had faith... As for the Pope, far from being the representative of Christ on the earth, he was actually the Antichrist. Before the people could practice the true religion it must go back to the Bible, with which it was no longer familiar... He even went so far... as to deny the Transubstantiation of Christ in the Communion. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, might vainly accuse him of heresy... but the Parliament was so obviously favorable to Wycliffe that no one dared to persecute him, and in 1384 he died peacefully in his own parish of Lutterworth... It was only after the advent of Henry of Lancaster (Henry IV), that the king, desiring to obtain the support of the Pope for his new dynasty, turned against Wycliffism, or, to use the term employed by the adversaries of the reformers, against the sect of the Lollards. At the beginning of his reign -- 1399 -- he introduced the first law which ever condemned heretics to be burned at the stake in England, and which forbade the translation of the Bible into the national tongue... These violent measures hampered the movement without suppressing it. Until Protestantism made its appearance, the disciples of Wycliffe never ceased to influence the religious thought of England and to prepare it for the great transformation of the 16th century... Transplanted into Bohemia by John Huss, this doctrine... was to shake the very foundations of the Church and of Germany.

p405 ...[At this time] the Papacy... flung itself into the famous crisis which is known as the Great  Schism, and which for forty years was to rend Western Christendom in twain (1373-1417)...
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