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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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-


387

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.