6. The Transition to a New Order.
In the meantime
new forms of heresy had been arising, and they
gained
additional strength from the abuse that was being made
of such
things as indulgences, from the jealousy felt
toward ecclesiastical
property, and from national feel-
ing against
the intrusions of papal power into one
country and another. From about 1374
John Wycliffe
in England was preaching against the excessive wealth
of
the Church and claiming that the monarch should
decide how much of this
should be retained—a gospel
that brought him the patronage of a
powerful and
covetous nobility. He lost some of his humbler allies
when he attacked the problem of the eucharist, declar-
ing that Christ was present spiritually but that the
bread and
wine retained their former substance. Em-
phasizing the absolute power of the will of God—a
form of
emphasis which the influence of Saint
Augustine as well as contemporary
movements in phi-
losophy
encouraged—Wycliffe ran to predestinarian
views which were
calculated to lessen the role of
church offices in the work of salvation.
He encouraged
the reading of the Bible (and its translation into the
vernacular) because the Scriptures were of higher au-
thority than the traditions of the Church.
Some analogies to the later Protestantism are appar-
ent in all this; but the first Lancastrian monarch of
England,
Henry IV (1399-1413), desired the Church's
recognition of his title to the
throne of England, and
his parliament carried a new statute, requiring
the
burning of heretics—a statute which was severely exe-
cuted during the reign of his son. The
“Lollard” fol-
lowers of
Wycliffe, some of whom had tended to revo-
lutionary ideas, could survive only as ineffectual secret
heretics.
Partly under the influence of the English movement,
John Hus led a similar
revolt against ecclesiastical evils
in Bohemia, and, though he avoided some
of Wycliffe's
doctrinal innovations, he was burned in 1415 by the
Council of Constance, which wished to show that at
least it did not
tolerate heresy. Some of Hus's associates
came nearer to the ideas of
Wycliffe, and there
emerged a popular radical movement which attacked
monasticism, the adoration of saints, purgatory, indul-
gences, etc., on the ground that these things were
not
authorized by the actual words of Scripture. And here,
as in
England, a powerful and richly endowed Church,
rife with obvious abuses,
was challenged by a danger-
ous picture of
Apostolic Christianity—the concept that
the clergy should be
poor men leading a simple life
as they guarded their flocks.
In 1419 the Czechs revolted and their religious
grievances, which gave the
conflict at times something
of an apocalyptic character, combined with a
tremen-
dous national hatred against the
Germans, who had
acquired a strong position at court, in the
university
of Prague, and in the industry of the towns. Successive
campaigns against the rebels came to disaster, and
though the extremists
were defeated in 1434, an agree-
ment had to
be made with the moderates which put
the Bohemian church in a special
position (e.g., in
regard to the reception by the laity of communion
in
both kinds). Bohemia remained, indeed, a region of
potential
revolt, potential heresy.
It might have been argued that the fifteenth century
had a special need for
the Christian religion at its best,
since deep forces in society were
producing a great
secularization of life—producing indeed a
society that
increased the mundane claims on human beings. The
growth of
industry and commerce, the development
of high finance, the increasing
importance of a bour-
geois class, and the
blossoming of virtual city-states in
Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands
provided a new
dynamic for the secular activities of men. The
resulting
erosion of the traditional feudal forms of society was
bound
to produce disorder in the period of transition,
and the Church had tied
itself unduly to the older order
of things—the very pattern of
its organization ceased
to correspond with the systems that were
developing
in the world. The exile of the papacy in Avignon, the
ensuing Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement had
increased the tendency
of separate regions to look after
their local religious affairs, and the
national govern-
ments were growing in
strength and importance, legis-
lating
against papal interference or making their own
terms with the popes.
The principle of nationality was itself receiving
recognition, even in the
organization of General
Councils and universities. The Renaissance in Italy
and
the more effective recovery of the thought of antiquity,
assisted
a secularization which, however, had also been
showing itself in the
development of vernacular litera-
ture and
its advance to high artistic status. And the
secularization showed itself
within the great develop-
ment of the visual
arts, especially in Italy—perhaps
also in the tendency of some
scholastic writers to move
over to science, to problems of celestial
mechanics, for
example.
But all this—and the palpable abuses in the Church
itself—did not mean that Christianity was coming to
its terminus
or that there had been a serious decline
of religious faith as such. The
very revolts against the
Church were born of religious
zeal—themselves signs
of a questing kind of religion that gets
behind the
conventions and seeks the original fountain of the faith.
The interesting eruptions of spontaneous life are not
antireligious but are
more like a groping for fresh
adventures in religion, longings for an
almost noninsti-
tutional kind of
piety, as though it were felt necessary
to cut through the artificialities
and go direct to the
essential things. Most significant of all are the
devo-
tional movements, that press for
contemplation and
austerity, or seek a mystical apprehension of
Christ.
And the Imitation of Christ which has been
the inspi-
ration of both Protestants and
Catholics—written in
the mid-fifteenth century, and more widely
published
and translated than anything in Christianity except the
Bible—contains hardly a reference to the Church in
spite of its
devotion to the Eucharist. An interesting
feature of the new age is the
involvement of the laity
in the new religious movements, and the
association
of these with municipal life.
