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Bible Encyclopedias
The Reformation
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or The Reformation, as commonly understood, means the religious and political revolution of the 16th century, of which the immediate result was the partial disruption of the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of various national and territorial churches. These agreed in repudiating certain of the doctrines, rites and practices of the medieval Church, especially the sacrifice of the Mass and the headship of the bishop of Rome, and, whatever their official designations, came generally to be known as " Protestant." In some cases they introduced new systems of ecclesiastical organization, and in all they sought to justify their innovations by an appeal from the Church's tradition to the Scriptures. The conflicts between Catholics and Protestants speedily merged into the chronic political rivalries, domestic and foreign, which distracted the European states; and religious considerations played a very important part in diplomacy and war for at least a century and a half, from the diet of Augsburg in 1530 to the English revolution and the league of Augsburg, 1688-89. The terms " Reformation " and " Protestantism " are inherited by the modern historian; they are not of his devising, and come to him laden with reminiscences of all the exalted enthusiasms and bitter antipathies engendered by a period of fervid religious dissension. The unmeasured invective of Luther and Aleander has not ceased to re-echo, and the old issues are by no means dead.
The heat of controversy is, however, abating, and during the past thirty or forty years both Catholic and Protestant investigators have been vying with one another in adding to our knowledge and in rectifying old mis takes; while an ever-increasing number of writers pledged to neither party are aiding in developing an idea of the scope and nature of the Reformation which differs radically from the traditional one. We now appreciate too thoroughly the intricacy of the medieval Church; its vast range of activity, secular as well as religious; the inextricable interweaving of the civil and ecclesiastical governments; the slow and painful process of their divorce as the old ideas of the proper functions of the two institutions have changed in both Protestant and Catholic lands: we perceive all too clearly the limitations of the reformers, their distrust of reason and criticism - in short, we know too much about medieval institutions and the process of their disintegration longer to see in the Reformation an abrupt break in the general history of Europe. No one will, of course, question the importance of the schism which created the distinction between Protestants and Catholics, but it must always be remembered that the religious questions at issue comprised a relatively small part of the whole compass of human aspirations and conduct, even to those to whom religion was especially vital, while a large majority of the leaders in literature, art, science and public affairs went their way seemingly almost wholly unaffected by theological problems.
That the religious elements in the Reformation have been greatly overestimated from a modern point of view can hardly be questioned, and one of the most distinguished students of Church history has ventured the assertion that " The motives, both remote and proximate, which led to the Lutheran revolt were largely secular rather than spiritual." " We may," continues Mr H. C. Lea, " dismiss the religious changes incident to the Reformation with the remark that they were not the object sought, but the means for attaining the object. The existing ecclesiastical system was the practical evolution of dogma, and the overthrow of dogma was the only way to obtain permanent relief from the intolerable abuses of that system " (Cambridge Modern History, i. 653). It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the secular and spiritual interests intermingled and so permeated one another that it is almost impossible to distinguish them clearly even in thought, while in practice they were so bewilderingly confused that they were never separated, and were constantly mistaken for one another.
The first step in clarifying the situation is to come to a full realization that the medieval Church was essentially an international state, and that the character of the Protestant secession from it was largely determined by this fact. As Maitland suggests: " We could frame no acceptable definition of a State which would not comprehend the Church. What has it not that a State should have ? It has laws, law givers, law courts, lawyers. It uses physical force to compel men to obey the laws. It keeps prisons. In the 13th century, though with squeamish phrases, it pronounced sentence of death. It is no voluntary society; if people are not born into* it they are baptized into it when they cannot help themselves. If they attempt to leave they are guilty of crimen laesae majestatis, and are likely to be burned. It is supported by involuntary contributions, by tithe and tax " ( Canon Law in the Church of England, p. loo). The Church was not only organized like a modern bureaucracy, but performed many of the functions of a modern State. It dominated the intellectual and profoundly affected the social interests of western Europe. Its economic influence was multiform and incalculable, owing to its vast property, its system of taxation and its encouragement of monasticism. When Luther made his first great appeal to the German people in his Address to the German Nobility, he scarcely adverts to religious matters at all. He deals, on the contrary, almost exclusively with the social, financial, educational, industrial and general moral problems of the day. If Luther, who above all others had the religious issue ever before him, attacks the Church as a source of worldly disorder, it is not surprising that his contemporary Ulrich von Hutten should take a purely secular view of the issues involved. Moreover, in the fascinating collection of popular satires and ephemeral pamphlets made by Schade, one is constantly impressed with the absence of religious fervour, and the highly secular nature of the matters discussed. The same may be said of the various Gravamina, or lists of grievances against the papacy drafted from time to time by German diets.
But not only is the character of the Reformation differently conceived from what it once was; our notions of the process of change are being greatly altered. Formerly, writers accounted for the Lutheran movement by so magnifying the horrors of the pre-existing regime ity of the that it appeared intolerable, and its abolition consequently inevitable. Protestant writers once contented themselves with a brief caricature of the Church, Position of Object.
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Between F and A A Virtual Virtual, erect, diminished Erect, same size CO Between oc and A A a superficial account of the traffic in indulgences, and a rough and ready assumption, which even Kostlin makes, that the darkness was greatest just before the dawn. Unfortunately this crude solution of the problem proved too much; for conditions were no worse immediately before the revolt than they had been for centuries, and German complaints of papal tyranny go back to Hildegard of Bingen and Walther von der Vogeiweide, who antedated Luther by more than three centuries. So a new theory is logically demanded to explain why these conditions, which were chronic, failed to produce a change long before it actually occurred. Singularly enough it is the modern Catholic scholars, Johannes Janssen above all, who, in their efforts further to discredit the Protestant revolt by rehabilitating the institutions which the reformers attacked, have done most to explain the success of the Reformation. A humble, patient Bohemian priest, Hasak, set to work toward half a century ago to bring together the devotional works published during the seventy years immediately succeeding the invention of printing. Every one knows that one at least of these older books, The German Theology, was a great favourite of Luther's; but there are many more in Hasak's collection which breathe the same spirit of piety and spiritual emulation. Building upon the foundations laid by Hasak and other Catholic writers who have been too much neglected by Protestant historians, Janssen produced a monumental work in defence of the German Church before Luther's defection. He exhibits the great achievements of the latter part of the 15th and the early portion of the r6th centuries; the art and literature, the material prosperity of the towns and the fostering of the spiritual life of the people. It may well be that his picture is too bright, and that in his obvious anxiety to prove the needlessness of an ecclesiastical revolution he has gone to the opposite extreme from the Protestants. Yet this rehabilitation of pre-Reformation Germany cannot but make a strong appeal to the unbiased historical student who looks to a conscientious study of the antecedents of the revolt as furnishing the true key to the movement.
Outwardly the Reformation would seem to have begun when, on the 10th of December 1520, a professor in the university of Wittenberg invited all the friends of evangelical truth among his students to assemble outside the wall at the ninth hour to witness a pious spectacle the burning of the " godless book of the papal ecclesiastical state of which the bishop of Rome was head. Now, a prince or legislative assembly that accepted the doctrine of Luther, that the temporal power had been " ordained by God for the chastisement of the wicked and the protection of the good " and must be permitted to exercise its functions " unhampered throughout the whole Christian body, without respect to persons, whether it strikes popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or whoever else " - such a government could proceed to ratify such modifications of the Christian faith as appealed to it in a particular religious confession; it could order its subject to conform to the innovations, and could expel, persecute or tolerate dissenters, as seemed good to it. A " reformed " prince could seize the property of the monasteries, and appropriate such ecclesiastical foundations as he desired. He could make rules for the selection of the clergy, disregarding the ancient canons of the Church and the claims of the pope to the right of ratification. He could cut off entirely all forms of papal taxation and put an end to papal jurisdiction. The personnel, revenue, jurisdiction, ritual, even the faith of the Church, were in this way placed under the complete control of the territorial governments. This is the central and significant fact of the so-called Reformation. Wholly novel and distinctive it is not, for the rulers of Catholic countries, like Spain and France, and of England (before the publication of the Act of Supremacy) could and did limit the pope's claims to unlimited jurisdiction, patronage and taxation, and they introduced the placet forbidding the publication within their realms_ of papal edicts, decisions and orders, without the express sanction of the government - in short, in many ways tended to approach the conditions in Protestant lands. The Reformation was thus essentially a stage in the disengaging of the modern state from that medieval, international ecclesiastical state which had its beginning in the ecclesia of the Acts of the Apostles. An appreciation of the issues of the Reformation - or Protestant revolt, as it might be more exactly called - depends therefore upon an understanding of the development of the papal monarchy, the nature of its claims, the relations it established with the civil powers, the abuses which developed in it and the attempts to rectify them, the sources of friction between the Church and the government, and finally the process by which certain of the European states threw off their allegiance to the Christian commonwealth, of which they had so long formed a part.
It is surprising to observe how early the Christian Church assumed the form of a state, and how speedily upon entering into its momentous alliance with the Roman imperial government under Constantine it acquired the chief of the and rerc prerogatives it v'as so long to retain. privilegesp g g In the twelfth book of the Theodosian Code we see the foundations of the medieval Church already laid; for it was the 4th, not the 13th century that established the principle that defection from the Church was a crime in the eyes of the State, and raised the clergy to a privileged class, exempted from the ordinary taxes, permitted under restrictions to try its own members and to administer the wealth which flowed into its coffers from the gifts of the faithful. The bishop of Rome, who had from the first probably enjoyed a leading position in the Church as " the successor of the two most glorious of the apostles," elaborated his claims to be the divinely appointed head of the ecclesiastical organization. Siricius (384-389), Leo the Great (440-461), and Gelasius (492-496) left little for their successors to add to the arguments in favour of the papal supremacy. In short, if we recall the characteristics of the Church in the Weft from the times of Constantine to those of Theodoric - its reliance upon the civil power for favours and protection, combined with its assumption of a natural superiority over the civil power and its innate tendency to monarchical unity - it becomes clear that Gregory VII. in his effort in the latter half of the 11th century to establish the papacy as the great central power of western Europe was in the main only reaffirming and developing old claims in. a new world. His brief statement of the papal powers as he decrees." He committed to the flames the whole body of the canon law, together with an edict of the head of the Church which had recently been issued against his teachings. In this manner Martin Luther, with the hearty sympathy of a considerable number of his countrymen, publicly proclaimed and illustrated his repudiation of the papal government under which western Europe had lived for centuries. Within a generation after this event the states of north Germany and Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands and portions of Switzerland, had each in its particular manner permanently seceded from the papal monarchy. France, after a long period of uncertainty and disorder, remained faithful to the bishop of Rome. Poland, after a defection of years, was ultimately recovered for the papacy by the zeal and devotion of the Jesuit missionaries. In the Habsburg hereditary dominions the traditional policy and Catholic fervour of the ruling house resulted, after a long struggle, in the restoration of the supremacy of Rome; while in Hungary the national spirit of independence kept Calvinism alive to divide the religious allegiance of the people. In Italy and Spain, on the other hand, the rulers, who continued loyal to the pope, found little difficulty in suppressing any tendencies of revolt on the part of the few converts to the new doctrines. Individuals, often large groups, and even whole districts, had indeed earlier rejected some portions of the Roman Catholic faith, or refused obedience to the ecclesiastical government; but previously to the burning of the canon law by Luther no prince had openly and permanently cast off his allegiance to the international conceived them is found in his Dictatus. The bishop of Rome, who enjoys a unique title, that of " pope," may annul the decrees of all other powers, since he judges all but is judged by none. He may depose emperors and absolve the subjects of the unjust from their allegiance. Gregory's position was almost inexpugnable at a time when it was conceded by practically all that spiritual concerns were incalculably more momentous than secular, that the Church was rightly one and indivisible, with one divinely revealed faith and a system of sacraments absolutely essential to salvation. No one called in question the claim of the clergy to control completely all " spiritual " matters. Moreover, the mightiest secular ruler was but a poor sinner dependent for his eternal welfare on the Church and its head, the pope, who in this way necessarily exercised an indirect control over the civil government, which even the emperor Henry IV. and William the Conqueror would not have been disposed to deny. They would also have conceded the pope the right to play the role of a secular ruler in his own lands, as did the German bishops, and to dispose of such fiefs as reverted to him. This class of prerogatives, as well as the right which the pope claimed to ratify the election of the emperor, need not detain us, although they doubtless served in the long run to weaken the papal power. But the pope laid claim to a direct power over the civil governments. Nicholas II. (1058-1060 declared that Jesus had conferred on Peter the control ( jura) of an earthly as well as of a heavenly empire; and this phrase was embodied in the canon law. Innocent III., a century and a half later, taught that James the brother of the Lord left to Peter not only the government of the whole Church, but that of the whole world ( totum seculum gubernandum).' So the power of the pope no longer rested upon his headship of the Church or his authority as a secular prince, but on a far more comprehensive claim to universal dominion. There was no reason why the bishop of Rome should justify such acts as Innocent himself performed in deposing King John of England and later in annulling Magna Carta; or Gregory IV. when he struck out fourteen articles from the Sachsenspiegel; or Nicholas V. when he invested Portugal with the right to subjugate all peoples on the Atlantic coast; or Julius II. when he threatened to transfer the kingdom of France to England; or the conduct of those later pontiffs who condemned the treaties of Westphalia, the Austrian constitution of 1867 and the establishment of the kingdom of Italy. The theory and practice of papal absolutism was successfully promulgated by Gratian in his Decretum, completed at Bologna about 1142. This was supplemented by. later collections composed mainly of papal decretals. (See Canon Law and Decretals, False.) As every fully equipped university had its faculty of canon law in which the Corpus juris canonici was studied, Rashdall is hardly guilty of exaggeration when he says: " By means of the happy thought of the Bolognese monk the popes were enabled to convert the new-born universities - the offspring of that intellectual new birth of Europe which might have been so formidable an enemy to the papal pretensions - into so many engines for the propagation of Ultramontane ideas." Thomas Aquinas was the first theologian to describe the Church as a divinely organized absolute monarchy, whose head concentrated in his person the entire authority of the Church, and was the source of all the ecclesiastical law ( conditor juris ), issuing the decrees of general councils in his own name, and claiming the right to revoke or modify the decrees of former councils - indeed, to make exceptions or to set aside altogether anything which did not rest upon the dictates of divine or natural law. In practice the whole of western Europe was subject to the jurisdiction of one tribunal of last resort, the Roman Curia. The pope claimed the right to tax church property throughout Christendom. He was able to exact an oath of fidelity from the archbishops, named many of the bishops, and asserted the right to transfer and dispose them. The organs of this vast monarchy were the papal Curia, which first appears distinctly in the firth century (see Curia Rommana), 'See further, Innocent III.
and the legates, who visited the courts of Europe as haughty representatives of the central government of Christendom. It should always be remembered that the law of the Church was regarded by all lawyers in the later middle ages as the law common to all Europe (jus commune). The laws of the Carolingian empire provided that one excom municated by the Church who did not make his peace p within a year and a day should be outlawed, and this general principle was not lost sight of. It was a capital offence in the eyes of the State to disagree with the teachings of the Church, and these, it must be remembered, included a recognition of the papal supremacy. The civil authorities burnt an obstinate heretic, condemned by the Church, without a thought of a new trial. The emperor Frederick II.'s edicts and the so-called etablissements of St Louis provide that the civil officers should search out suspected heretics and deliver them to the ecclesiastical judges. The civil government recognized monastic vows by regarding a professed monk as civilly dead and by pursuing him and returning him to his monastery if he violated his pledges of obedience and ran away. The State recognized the ecclesiastical tribunals and accorded them a wide jurisdiction that we should now deem essentially secular in its nature. The State also admitted that large classes of its citizens - the clergy, students, crusaders, widows and the miserable and helpless in general - were justiceable only by Church tribunals. By the middle of the r3th century many lawyers took the degree of doctor of both laws (J.U.D.), civil and canon, and practised both. As is well known, temporal rulers constantly selected clergymen as their most trusted advisers. The existence of this theocratic international state was of course conditioned by the weakness of the civil government. So long as feudal monarchy continued, the Church supplied to some extent the deficiencies of the turbulent and ignorant princes by endeavouring to maintain order, administer justice, protect the weak and encourage learning. So soon as the modern national state began to gain strength, the issue between secular rulers and the bishops of Rome took a new form. The clergy naturally stoutly defended the powers which they had long enjoyed and believed to be rightly theirs. On the other hand, the State, which could count upon the support of an ever-increasing number of prosperous and loyal subjects, sought to protect its own interests and showed itself less and less inclined to tolerate the extreme claims of the pope. Moreover, owing to the spread of education, the king was no longer obliged to rely mainly upon the assistance of the clergy in conducting his government.
The chief sources of friction between Church and State were four in number. First, the growth of the practice of " reservation " and " provision," by which the popes assumed the right to appoint their own nominees to vacant sees and other benefices, in defiance of the claims of the crown, the chapters and private patrons. In the case of wealthy bishoprics or abbacies this involved a serious menace to the secular authority. Both pope and king were naturally anxious to place their own friends and supporters in these influential positions. The pope, moreover, had come to depend to a considerable extent for his revenue upon the payments made by his nominees, which represented a corresponding drain on the resources of the secular states. Secondly, there was the great question, how far the lands and other property of the clergy should be subject to taxation. Was this vast amount of property to increase indefinitely without contribution to the maintenance of the secular government? A decretal of Innocent III. permitted the clergy to make voluntary contributions to the king when there was urgent necessity, and the resources of the laity had proved inadequate. But the pope maintained that, except in the most critical cases, his consent must be obtained for such grants. Thirdly, there was the inevitable jealousy between the secular and ecclesiastical courts and the serious problem of the exact extent of the original and appellate jurisdiction of the Roman Curia. Fourthly, and lastly, there was the most fundamental difficulty of all, the extent to which the pope, as the universally acknowledged head of the Church, was justified in interfering in the internal affairs of particular states. Unfortunately, most matters could be viewed from both a secular and religious standpoint; and even in purely secular affairs the claims of the pope to at least indirect control were practically unlimited. The specific nature of the abuses which flourished in the papal monarchy, the unsuccessful attempts to remedy them, and the measures taken by the chief European states to protect themselves will become apparent as we hastily review the principal events of the 14th and 15th centuries.
As one traces the vicissitudes of the papacy during the two centuries from Boniface VIII. to Leo X. one cannot fail to be The impressed with the almost incredible strength of the ecclesiastical state which had been organized and fortified by Gregory VII., Alexander III., Innocent III. and Gregory IX. In spite of the perpetuation of all the old abuses and the continual appearance of new devices for increasing the papal revenue; in spite of the jealousy of kings and princes, the attacks of legists and the preaching of the heretics; in spite of seventy years of exile from the holy city, forty years of distracting schism and discord, and thirty years of conflict with stately oecumenical councils deliberating in the name of the Holy Spirit and intent upon permanently limiting the papal prerogatives; in spite of the unworthy conduct of some of those who ascended the papal throne, their flagrant political ambitions, and their greed; in spite of the spread of knowledge, old and new, the development of historical criticism, and philosophical speculation; in spite, in short, of every danger which could threaten the papal monarchy, it was still intact when Leo X. died in 1521. Nevertheless, permanent if partial dissolution was at hand, for no one of the perils which the popes had seemingly so successfully overcome had failed to weaken the constitution of their empire; and it is impossible to comprehend 'its comparatively sudden disintegration without reckoning with the varied hostile forces which were accumulating and combining strength during the 14th and 15th centuries. The first serious conflict that arose between the developing modern state and the papacy centred about the pope's claim that the property of the clergy was normally exempt from royal taxation. Boniface VIII. was forced to permit Edward I. and Philip the Fair to continue to demand and receive subsidies granted by the clergy of their realms. Shortly after the bitter humiliation of Boniface by the French government and his death in 1303, the bishop of Bordeaux was elected pope as Clement V. (1305). He preferred to remain in France, and as the Italian cardinals died they were replaced by Frenchmen. The papal court was presently established at Avignon, on the confines of France, where it remained until 1377. While the successors of Clement V. were not so completely under the control of the French kings as has often been alleged, the very proximity of the curia to France served inevitably to intensify national jealousies. The claims of John XXII. (1316-1334)1334) to control the election of the emperor called forth the first fundamental and critical attack on the papal monarchy, by Marsiglio of Padua, who declared in his Defensor pacis (1324) that the assumed supremacy of the bishop of Rome was without basis, since it was very doubtful if Peter was ever in Rome, and in any case there was no evidence that he had transmitted any exceptional prerogatives to succeeding bishops. But Marsiglio's logical and elaborate justification for a revolt against the medieval Church produced no perceptible effects. The removal of the papal court from Rome to Avignon, however, not only reduced its prestige but increased the pope's chronic financial embarrassments, by cutting off the income from his own dominions, which he could no longer control, while the unsuccessful wars waged by John XXII., the palace building and the notorious luxury of some of his successors, served enormously to augment the expenses. Various devices were resorted to, old and new, to fill the treasury. The fees of the Curia were raised for the numberless favours, dispensations, absolutions, and exemptions of all kinds which were sought by clerics and laymen. The right claimed by the less, as a statute of 1379 complains, benefices continued to be given " to divers people of another language and of strange lands and nations, and sometimes to actual enemies of the king and of his realm, which never made residence in this same, nor cannot, may not, nor will not in any wise bear and perform the charges of the same benefice in hearing confessions, preaching or teaching the people." When, in 1365, Innocent VI. demanded that the arrears of the tribute promised by King John to the pope should be paid up, parliament abrogated the whole contract on the ground that John had no right to enter into it. A species of anti-clerical movement, which found an unworthy leader in John of Gaunt, developed at this time. The Good Parliament of 1376 declared that, in spite of the laws restricting papal provisions, the popes at Avignon received five times as much revenue from England as the English kings themselves. Secularization was mentioned in parliament. Wycliffe began his public career in 1366 by proving that England was not bound to pay tribute to the pope. Twelve years later he was, like Marsiglio, attacking the very foundations of the papacy itself, as lacking all scriptural sanction. He denounced the papal government as utterly degraded, and urged that the vast property of the Church, which he held to be the chief cause of its degradation, should be secularized and that the clergy should consist of " poor priests," supported only by tithes and alms. They should preach the gospel and encourage the people to seek the truth in the Scriptures themselves, of which a translation into English was completed in 1382. During the later years of his life he attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and all the most popular institutions of the Church - indulgences, pilgrimages, invocation of the saints, relics, celibacy of the clergy, auricular confession, &c. His opinions were spread abroad by the hundreds of sermons and popular pamphlets written in English for the people (see Wycliffe). For some years after Wycliffe's death his followers, the Lollards, continued to carry on his work; but they roused the effective opposition of the conservative clergy, and were subjected to a persecution which put an end to their public agitation. They rapidly disappeared and, except in Bohemia, Wycliffe's teachings left no clearly traceable impressions. Yet the discussions he aroused, the attacks he made upon the institutions of the medieval Church, and especially the position he assigned to the Scriptures as the exclusive source of revealed truth, serve to make the development of Protestantism under Henry VIII. more explicable than it would otherwise be.
Wycliffe's later attacks upon the papacy had been given point by the return of the popes to Rome in 1377 and the opening of the Great Schism which was to endure for forty years. There had been many anti-popes in the past, but never before had there been such pro- (1377" longed and genuine doubt as to which of two lines 1411. of popes was legitimate, since in this case each was supported by a college of cardinals, the one at Rome, the other at Avignon. Italy, except Naples, took the side of the Italian pope; France, of the Avignon pope; England, in its hostility to France, pope to fill benefices of all kinds was extended, and the amount contributed to the pope by his nominees amounted to from a third to a half of the first year's revenue (see Annates). Boniface VIII. had discovered a rich source of revenue in the jubilee, and in the jubilee indulgences extended to those who could not come to Rome. Clement VI. reduced the period between these lucrative occasions from one hundred to fifty years, and Urban VI. determined in 1389 that they should recur at least once in a generation (every thirty-three years). Church offices, high and low, were regarded as investments from which the pope had his commission.
England showed itself better able than other countries to defend itself against the papal control of church preferment.
From 1343 onward, statutes were passed by parliament forbidding any one to accept a papal provision, and cutting off all appeals to the papal curia or ecclesias tical courts in cases involving benefices. Neverthe sided with Urban VI. in Rome, Scotland with Clement VII., his rival; Flanders followed England; Urban secured Germany, Hungary and the northern kingdoms; while Spain, after remaining neutral for a time, went over to Clement. Western Christendom had now two papal courts to support. The schism extended down to the bishoprics, and even to the monasteries and parishes, where partisans of the rival popes struggled to obtain possession of sees and benefices. The urgent necessity for healing the schism, the difficulty of uniting the colleges of cardinals, and the prolonged and futile negotiations carried on between the rival popes inevitably raised the whole question of the papal supremacy, and led to the search for a still higher ecclesiastical authority, which, when the normal system of choosing the head of the Church broke down, might re-establish that ecclesiastical unity to which all Europe as yet clung. The idea of the supreme power on earth of a general council of Christendom, deliberating in the name of the Holy Spirit, convoked, if necessary, independently of the popes, was defended by many, and advocated by the university of Paris. The futile council of Pisa in 1409, however, only served to increase to three the number of rival representatives of God on earth. The considerable pamphlet literature of the time substantiates the conclusion of an eminent modern Catholic historian, Ludwig Pastor, who declares that the crisis through which the church passed in this terrible period of the schism was the most serious in all its history. It was at just this period, when the rival popes were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, that heretical movements appeared in England, France, Italy, Germany, and especially in Bohemia, which threatened the whole ecclesiastical order.
The council of Constance assembled in 1414 under auspices hopeful not only for the extinction of the schism but for the general reform of the Church. Its members showed no patience with doctrinal innovations, even such moderate ones as John Huss represented. They turned him over to the secular arm for execution, had been raging between the Bohemians and Germans, was destined to cause Eugenius IV. much anxiety. It reaffirmed the decree Sacrosancta, and refused to recognize the validity of a bull Eugenius issued in December 1431 dissolving it. Two years later political reverses forced the pope to sanction the existence of the council, which not only concluded a treaty with the Bohemian heretics but abolished the papal fees for appointments, confirmation and consecration - above all, the annates - and greatly reduced papal reservations; it issued indulgences, imposed tenths, and established rules for the government of the papal states. France, however, withdrew its support from the council, and in 1438, under purely national auspices, by the famous Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, adjusted the relations of the Gallican Church to the papacy; and Eugenius soon found himself in a position to repudiate the council and summoned a new one to assemble in 1438 at Ferrara under his control to take up the important question of the pending union with the Greek Church. The higher clergy deserted the council of Basel, and left matters in the hands of the lower clergy, who chose an anti-pope; but the rump council gradually lost credit and its lingering members were finally dispersed. The various nations were left to make terms with a reviving papacy. England had already taken measures to check the papal claims. France in the Pragmatic Sanction reformulated the claim of the councils to be superior to the pope, as well as the decision of the council of Basel in regard to elections, annates and other dues, limitations on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and appeals to the pope. While the canonical elections were re-established, the prerogatives of the crown were greatly increased, as in England. In short, the national ecclesiastical independence of the French Church was established. The German diet of Regensburg (1439) ratified in the main the decrees of the council of Basel, which clearly gratified the electors, princes and prelates; and Germany for the first time joined the ranks of the countries which subjected the decrees of the highest ecclesiastical instance to the placet or approval of the civil authorities. But there was no strong power, as in England and France, to attend to the execution of the provisions.
In 1448 Eugenius's successor, Nicholas V., concluded a concordat with the emperor Frederick III. as representative of the German nation. This confined itself to papal appointments and the annates. In practice it restored the former range of papal reservations, and extended the papal right of appointment to all benefices (except the higher offices in cathedrals and collegiate churches) which fell vacant during the odd months. It also accorded him the right to confirm all newly elected prelates and to receive the annates. Nothing was said in the concordat of a great part of the chief subjects of complaint. This gave the princes an excuse for the theory that the decrees of Constance and Basel were still in force, limiting the papal prerogatives in all respects not noticed in the concordat. It was Germany which gave the restored papacy the greatest amount of anxiety during the generation following the dissolution of the council of Basel. In the " recesses " or formal statements issued at the conclusion of the sessions of the diet one can follow the trend of opinion among the German princes, secular and ecclesiastical. The pope is constantly accused of violating the concordat, and constant demands are made for a general council, or at least a national one, which should undertake to remedy the abuses. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks afforded a new excuse for papal taxation. In 1453 a crusading bull was issued imposing a tenth on all benefices of the earth to equip an expedition against the infidel. The diet held at Frankfort in 1456 recalled the fact that the council of Constance had forbidden the pope to impose tenths without the consent of the clergy in the region affected, and that it was clear that he proposed to " pull the German sheep's fleece over its ears." A German correspondent of Aeneas Sylvius assures him in 1 457 that " thousands of tricks are devised by the Roman see which enables it to extract the money from our pockets very although they did not thereby succeed in checking the growth of heresy in Bohemia (see Huss). The healing of the schism proved no very difficult matter; but the council hoped not only to restore unity and suppress heresy, but to re-establish general councils as a regular element in the legislation of the Church. The decree Sacrosancta (April 1415) proclaimed that a general council assembled in the Holy Spirit and representing the Catholic Church militant had its power immediately from Christ, and was supreme over every one in the Church, not excluding the pope, in all matters pertaining to the faith and reformation of the Church of God in head and members. The decree Frequens (October 1417) provided for the regular convocation of councils in the future. As to ecclesiastical abuses the council could do very little, and finally satisfied itself with making out a list of those which the new pope was required to remedy in co-operation with the deputies chosen by the council. The list serves as an excellent summary of the evils of the papal monarchy as recognized by the unimpeachably orthodox. It included: the number, character and nationality of the cardinals, the abuse of the " reservations " made by the apostolic see, the annates, the collation to benefices, expectative favours, cases to be brought before the papal Curia (including appeals), functions of the papal chancery and penitentiary, benefices in commendam, confirmation of elections, income during vacancies, indulgences, tenths, for what reasons and how is a pope to be corrected or deposed. The pope and the representatives of the council made no serious effort to remedy the abuses suggested under these several captions; but the idea of the superiority of a council over the pope, and the right of those who felt aggrieved by papal decisions to appeal to a future council, remained a serious menace to the theory of papal absolutism. The decree Frequens was not wholly neglected; though the next council, at Siena, came to naught, the council at Basel, whose chief business was to put an end to the terrible religious war that neatly, as if we were mere barbarians. Our nation, once so famous, is a slave now, who must pay tribute, and has lain in the dust these many years bemoaning her fate." Aeneas Sylvius issued, immediately after his accession to the papacy as Pius II. the bull Execrabilis forbidding all appeals to a future council. This seemed to Germany to cut off its last hope. It found a spokesman in the vigorous Gregory of Heimburg, who accused the pope of issuing the bull so that he and his cardinals might conveniently pillage Germany unhampered by the threat of a council. " By forbidding appeals to a council the pope treats us like slaves, and wishes to take for his own pleasures all that we and our ancestors have accumulated by honest labour. He calls me a chatterer, although he himself is more talkative than a magpie." Heimburg's denunciations of the pope were widely circulated, and in spite of the major excommunication he was taken into the service of the archbishop of Mainz and was his representative at the diet of Nuremberg in 1462. It is thus clear that motives which might ultimately lead to the withdrawal of a certain number of German princes from the papal ecclesiastical state were accumulating and intensifying during the latter half of the 15th century.
It is impossible to review here the complicated political history of the opening years of the 16th century. The names of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. of France, of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. of England, of Maximilian the German king, Popes Alexander VI. Julius II. and Leo X.
g ? p X., the loin stand for better organized civil governments, with growing powerful despotic heads; for a perfectly worldly papacy absorbed in the interests of an Italian principality, engaged in constant political negotiations with the European powers which are beginning to regard Italy as their chief field of rivalry, and are using its little states as convenient counters in their game of diplomacy and war. It was in Germany, however, seemingly the weakest and least aggressive of the European states, that the first permanent and successful revolts against the papal monarchy occurred. Nothing came of the lists of German gravamina, or of the demands for a council, so long as the incompetent Frederick III. continued to reign. His successor, Maximilian, who was elected emperor in 1493, was mainly preoccupied with his wars and attempts to reform the constitution of the empire; but the diet gave some attention to ecclesiastical reform. For instance, in 1501 it took measures to prevent money raised by the granting of a papal indulgence from leaving the country. After the disruption of the league of Cambray, Maximilian, like Louis XII., was thrown into a violent anti-curial reaction, and in 1510 he sent to the well-known humanist, Joseph Wimpheling, a copy of the French Pragmatic Sanction, asking his advice and stating that he had determined to free Germany from the yoke of the Curia and prevent the great sums of money from going to Rome. Wimpheling in his reply rehearsed the old grievances and complained that the contributions made to the pope by the archbishops on receiving the pallium was a great burden on the people. He stated that that of the archbishop of Mainz had been raised from ten to twenty-five thousand gulden, and that there had been seven vacancies within a generation, and consequently the subjects of the elector had been forced to pay that amount seven times. But Wimpheling had only some timid suggestions to make, and, since Maximilian was once more on happy terms with the pope, political considerations served to cool completely his momentary ardour for ecclesiastical reform. In 1514 the archbishopric of Mainz fell vacant again, and Albert of Brandenburg, already archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of Halberstadt, longing to add it to his possessions, was elected. After some' scandalous negotiations with Leo X. it was arranged that Albert should pay 14,000 ducats for the papal confirmation and 10,000 as a " composition " for permission to continue to hold, against the rules of the Church, his two former archbishoprics. Moreover, in order to permit him to pay the sums, he was to have half the proceeds in his provinces from an indulgence granted to forward the rebuilding of St Peter's. A Dominican monk, Johann Tetzel, was selected to proclaim the indulgence (together with certain supplementary graces) in the three provinces of the elector. This suggestion came from the curia, not the elector, whose representatives could not suppress the fear that the plan would arouse opposition and perhaps worse. Tetzel's preaching and the exaggerated claims that he was reported to be making for the indulgences attracted the attention of an Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, who had for some years been lecturing on theology at the university of Wittenberg. He found it impossible to reconcile Tetzel's views of indulgences with his own fundamental theory of salvation. He accordingly hastily drafted ninety-five propositions relating to indulgences, and posted an invitation to those who wished to attend a disputation in Wittenberg on the matter, under his presidency. He points out the equivocal character of the word poenitentia, which meant both " penance " and " penitence "; he declared that " true contrition seeks punishment, while the ampleness of pardons relaxes it and causes men to hate it." Christians ought to be taught that he who gives to a poor man or lends to the needy does better than if he bought pardons. He concludes with certain " keen questionings of the laity,' ? as, Why does not the pope empty purgatory forthwith for charity's sake, instead of cautiously for money ? Why does he not, since he is rich as Croesus, build St Peter's with his own money instead of taking that of poor believers ? It was probably these closing reflections which led to the translation of the theses from Latin into German, and their surprising circulation. It must not be assumed that Luther's ninety-five theses produced any considerable direct results. They awakened the author himself to a consciousness that his doctrines were after all incompatible with some of the Church's teachings, and led him to consider the nature of the papal power which issued the indulgence. Two or three years elapsed before Luther began to be generally known and to exercise a perceptible influence upon affairs.
In July 1518 a diet assembled in Augsburg to consider the new danger from the Turks, who were making rapid conquests under Sultan Selim I. The pope's representative, Cardinal Cajetan, made it clear that the only safety lay in the collection of a tenth from the clergy and a twentieth from laymen; but the diet appointed a committee to consider the matter and explain why they proposed to refuse the pope's demands. Protests urging the diet not to weaken came in from all sides. There was an especially bitter denunciation of the Curia by some unknown writer. He claims that " the pope bids his collectors go into the whole world, saying, ` He that believeth, and payeth the tenths, shall be saved.' But it is not necessary to stand in such fear of the thunder of Christ's vicar, but rather to fear Christ Himself, for it is the Florentine's business, not Christ's, that is at issue." The report of the committee of the diet was completed on the 27th of August 1518. It reviews all the abuses, declares that the German people are the victims of war, devastation and dearth, and that the common man is beginning to comment on the vast amount of wealth that is collected for expeditions against the Turk through indulgences or otherwise, and yet no expedition takes place. This is the first recognition in the official gravamina of the importance of the people. Shortly after the committee submitted its report the clergy of Liege presented a memorial which, as the ambassador from Frankfort observed, set forth in the best Latin all the various forms of rascality of which the curtizanen (i.e. curiales, officials of the curia) were guilty. From this time on three new streams begin to reinforce the rather feeble current of official efforts for reform. The common man, to whom the diet of Augsburg alludes, had, long been raising his voice against the " parsons " ( Pfaffen); the men of letters, Brand, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and above all Ulrich von Hutten, contributed, each in their way, to discredit the Roman Curia; and lastly, a new type of theology, represented chiefly by Martin Luther, threatened to sweep away the very foundations of the papal monarchy.
The growing discontent of the poor people, whether in country town, is clearly traceable in Germany during the 15th century, ostility and revolutionary agitation was chronic in southern Germany at least during the first two decades of the 1 6th. The clergy were satirized and denounced in popular pamphlets and songs. The tithe was an oppressive form of taxation, as were the various fees pp ?
demanded for the performance of the sacraments. The so-called " Reformation of Sigismund," drawn up in 1438, had demanded that the celibacy of the clergy should be abandoned and their excessive wealth reduced. " It is a shame which cries to heaven, this oppression by tithes, dues, penalties, excommunication, and tolls of the peasant, on whose labour all men depend for their existence." In 1476 a poor young shepherd drew thousands to Nicklashausen to hear him denounce the emperor as a rascal and the pope as a worthless fellow, and urge the division of the Church's property among the members of the community. The " parsons " must be killed, and the lords reduced to earn their bread by daily labour. An apocalyptic pamphlet of 1508 shows on its cover the Church upside down, with the peasant performing the services, while the priest guides the plough outside and a monk drives the horses. Doubtless the free peasants of Switzerland contributed to stimulate disorder and discontent, especially in southern Germany. The conspiracies were repeatedly betrayed and the guilty parties terribly punished. That discovered in 1517 made a deep impression on the authorities by reason of its vast extent, and doubtless led the diet of Augsburg to allude to the danger which lay in the refusal of the common man to pay the ecclesiastical taxes. " It was into this mass of seething discontent that the spark of religious protest fell - the one thing needed to fire the train and kindle the social conflagration. This was the society to which Luther spoke, and its discontent was the sounding board which made his words reverberate." 1 On turning from the attitude of the peasants and poorer townspeople to that of the scholars, we find in their writings a good deal of harsh criticism of the scholastic theology, satirical allusions to the friars, and, in Germany, sharp denunciations of the practices of the Curia. But there the German humanist who perhaps approached most nearly the Italian type, furnishes a good illustration. He believed that Christianity had existed from all eternity, and that the Greeks and Romans, sharing in God's truth, would share also in the celestial joys. Forms and ceremonies should only be judged as they promoted the great object of life, a clean heart and a right spirit, love to God and one's neighbour. He defined faith as commonly understood to mean " not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion upon divine things founded upon credulity which seeks after profit." " With the cross, " he declares, " we put our foes to flight, we extort money, we consecrate God, we shake hell, we work miracles." These reflections were, however, for his intimate friends, and like him, his much greater contemporary, Erasmus, abhorred anything suggesting open revolt or revolution. The extraordinary popularity of Erasmus is a sufficient (1464- indication that his attitude of mind was viewed with sympathy by the learned, whether in France, England, Germany, Spain or Italy. He was a firm believer in the efficacy of culture. He maintained that old prejudices would disappear with the progress of knowledge, and that superstition and mechanical devices of salvation would be insensibly abandoned. The laity should read their New Testament, and would in this way come to feel the true significance of Christ's life and teachings, which, rather than the Church, formed the centre of Erasmus's religion. The dissidence of dissent, however, filled him with uneasiness, and he abhorred Luther's denial of free will and his exaggerated notion of man's utter depravity; in short, he did nothing whatever to promote the Protestant revolt, except so far as his frank denunciation and his witty arraignment of clerical and monastic weaknesses and soulless ceremonial, especially in his Praise of Folly and Colloquies, contributed to bring the faults of the Church into strong relief, and in so far as his edition of the New Testament furnished a simple escape from innumerable theological complications.
A peculiar literary feud in Germany served, about 1515, to throw into sharp contrast the humanistic party, which had been gradually developing during the previous fifty years, and the conservative, monkish, scholastic group, who found their leader among the Dominicans of the university of Cologne. Johann Reuchlin, a well-known scholar, who had been charged by the Dominicans with heresy, not only received the support of the newer type of scholars, who wrote him encouraging letters which he published under the title Epistolae clarorum virorum, but this collection suggested to Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten one of the most successful satires of the ages, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. As Creighton well said, the chief importance of the " Letters of Obscure Men " lay in its success in popularizing the conception of a stupid party which was opposed to the party of progress. At the same time that the Neo-Platonists, like Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, and the pantheists, whose God was little more than a reverential conception of the universe at large, and the purely worldly humanists, like Celtes and Bebel, were widely diverging each by his own particular path from the ecclesiastical Weltanschauung of the middle ages, Ulrich von Hutten was busy attacking the Curia in his witty Dialogues, in the name of German patriotism. He, at least, among the well-known scholars eagerly espoused Luther's cause, as he understood it. A few of the humanists became Protestants - Melanchthon, Bucer, Oecolampadius and others - but the great majority of them, even if attracted for the moment by Luther's denunciation of scholasticism, speedily repudiated the movement. In Socinianism (see below) we have perhaps the only instance of humanistic antecedents leading to the formation of a religious sect.
A new type of theology made its appearance at the opening of the 16th century, in sharp contrast with the Aristotelian scholasticism of the Thomists and Scotists. This was due to the renewed enthusiasm for, and appreciation of, St Paul with which Erasmus sympathized, and which found an able exponent in England in John Colet and in France in Lefevre of Etaples (Faber Stapulensis).
Luther was reaching somewhat similar views at the same time, ists. are many reasons for believing that the older estimate of the influence of the so-called Renaissance, or " new learning," in promoting the Protestant revolt was an exaggerated one. The class of humanists which had grown up in Italy during the 5th century, and whose influence had been spreading into Germany, France and England during the generation immediately preceding the opening of the Protestant revolt, represented every phase of religious feeling from mystic piety to cynical indifference, but there were very few anti-clericals among them. The revival of Greek from the time of Chrysoloras onward, instead of begetting a Hellenistic spirit, transported the more serious-minded to the nebulous shores of NeoPlatonism, while the less devout became absorbed in scholarly or literary ambitions, translations, elegantly phrased letters, clever epigrams or indiscriminate invective. It is true that Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) showed the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, denied that Dionysius the Areopagite wrote the works ascribed to him, and refuted the commonly accepted notion that each of the apostles had contributed a sentence to the Apostles' Creed. But such attacks were rare and isolated and were not intended to effect a breach in the solid ramparts of the medieval Church, but rather to exhibit the ingenuity of the critic. In the libraries collected under humanistic influences the patristic writers, both Latin and Greek, and the scholastic doctors are conspicuous. Then most of the humanists were clerics, and in Italy they enjoyed the patronage of the popes. They not unnaturally showed a tolerant spirit on the whole toward existing institutions, including the ecclesiastical abuses, and, in general, cared little how long the vulgar herd was left in the superstitious darkness which befitted their estate, so long as the superior man was permitted to hold discreetly any views he pleased. Of this attitude Mutian (1471-1526), 1 Lindsay.
although in a strikingly different manner and with far more momentous results for the western world. Martin Luther was beyond doubt the most important single figure in the Protestant revolt. His influence was indeed by no means so decisive and so pervasive as has commonly been supposed, and his attacks on the evils in the Church were no bolder or more comprehensive than those of Marsiglio and Wycliffe, or of several among his contemporaries who owed nothing to his example. Had the German princes not found it to their interests to enforce his principles, he might never have been more than the leader of an obscure mystic sect. He was, moreover, no statesman. He was recklessly impetuous in his temperament, coarse and grossly superstitious according to modern standards. Yet in spite of all these allowances he remains one of the great heroes of all history. Few come in contact with his writings without feeling his deep spiritual nature and an absolute genuineness and marvellous individuality which seem never to sink into mere routine or affectation. In his more important works almost every sentence is alive with that autochthonic quality which makes it unmistakably his. His fundamental religious conception was his own hard-found answer to his own agonized question as to the nature and assurance of salvation. Even if others before him had reached the conviction that the Vulgate's word justitia in Romans i. 16-17 meant " righteousness " rather than " justice " in a juridical sense, Luther exhibited supreme religious genius in his interpretation of " God's righteousness " ( Gerechtigkeit ) as over against the " good works " of man, and in the overwhelming importance he attached to the promise that the just shall live by faith. It was his anxiety to remove everything that obscured this central idea which led him to revolt against the ancient Church, and this conception of faith served, when he became leader of the German Protestants, as a touchstone to test the expediency of every innovation. But only gradually did he come to realize that his source of spiritual consolation might undermine altogether the artfully constructed fabric of the medieval Church. As late as 1516 he declared that the life of a monk was never a more enviable one than at that day. He had, however, already begun to look sourly upon Aristotle and the current scholastic theology, which he believed hid the simple truth of the gospel and the desperate state of mankind, who were taught a vain reliance upon outward works and ceremonies, when the only safety lay in throwing oneself on God's mercy. He was suddenly forced to take up the consideration of some of the most fundamental points in the orthodox theology by the appearance of Tetzel in 1517. In his hastily drafted Ninety-five Theses he sought to limit the potency of indulgences, and so indirectly raised the question as to the power of the pope. He was astonished to observe the wide circulation of the theses both in the Latin and German versions. They soon reached Rome, and a Dominican monk, Prierius, wrote a reply in defence of the papal power, in an insolent tone which first served to rouse Luther's suspicion of the theology of the papal Curia. He was summoned to Rome, but, out of consideration for his patron, the important elector of Saxony, he was permitted to appear before the papal legate during the diet of Augsburg in 1518. He boldly contradicted the legate's theological statements, refused to revoke anything and appealed to a future council. On returning to Wittenberg, he turned to the canon law, and was shocked to find it so completely at variance with his notions of Christianity. He reached the conclusion that the papacy was but four hundred years old. Yet, although of human origin, it was established by common consent and with God's sanction, so that no one might withdraw his obedience without offence.
It was not, however, until 1520 that Luther became in a sense the leader of the German people by issuing his three great pamphlets, all of which were published in German as well as in Latin - his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, his Babylonish Captivity of the Church, and his Freedom of the Christian. In the first he urged that, since the Church had failed to reform itself, the secular government should come to the rescue. " The Romanists have with great dexterity built themselves about with three walls, which have hitherto protected them against reform; and thereby is Christianity fearfally fallen. In the first place, when the temporal power has pressed them hard, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them - that, on the contrary, the spiritual is above the temporal. Secondly, when it was proposed to admonish them from the Holy Scriptures they said, ` It beseems no one but the pope to interpret the Scriptures,' and, thirdly, when they were threatened with a council, they invented the idea that no one but the pope can call a council. Thus they have secretly stolen our three rods that they may go unpunished, and have entrenched themselves safely behind these three walls in order to carry on all the rascality and wickedness that we now see." He declares that the distinction between the " spiritual estate," composed of pope, bishops, priests and monks, as over against the " temporal estate " composed of princes, lords, artisans and peasants, is a very fine hypocritical invention of which no one should be afraid. " A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man has his own calling and duty, just like the consecrated priests and bishops, and every one in his calling or office must help and serve the rest, so that all may work together for the common good." After overthrowing the other two walls, Luther invites the attention of the German rulers to the old theme of the pomp of the pope and cardinals, for which the Germans must pay. " What the Romanists really mean to do, the ` drunken Germans' are not to see unti
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'The Reformation'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/t/the-reformation.html. 1910.
