Link to Chronology
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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