Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (94 page)

The significance of this contrast is that the Purgatory-centred faith of the north encouraged an attitude to salvation in which the sinner, lay or clerical, piled up reparations for sin; action was added to action in order to merit years off Purgatory. It was possible to do something about one's salvation: that was precisely the doctrine which Martin Luther was to make his particular target after 1517. So the difference between attitudes to salvation in northern and southern Europe may explain why Luther's first attack on some of the more outrageous outcrops of the soul-prayer industry had so much more effect in the north than in the south. He was telling northern Europeans that some of the devotions which most deeply satisfied them, and convinced them that they were investing in an easier passage to salvation, were nothing but clerical confidence tricks. This message was of much less interest or resonance in the Mediterranean lands, which had not paid so much attention to the Purgatory industry.

PAPAL MONARCHY CHALLENGED (1300-1500)

Martin Luther's rebellion against late medieval views on salvation was also a rebellion against papal authority, but he was by no means the first to question the assumptions of papal monarchy. He could borrow virtually all his language of condemnation from the poison created by 'Imperialists', apologists for the Holy Roman Emperor in thirteenth-century conflicts with the papacy, and by similar abuse created during the clash between certain popes and the Spiritual wing of the Franciscans (see pp. 410-11). It was imperial spokesmen who first regularly termed the pope 'Antichrist', that enemy of Christ constructed out of various apocalyptic passages in the Bible - papal spokesmen were rather less successful in fastening the same image on the emperor. The Franciscan Spirituals elaborated talk of the Antichrist, particularly to condemn Pope Boniface VIII (Pope 1294-1303). In order to become pope, Boniface had summarily displaced and brutally imprisoned a disastrously unworldly hermit-partisan of their movement who had been unwisely elected pope as Celestine V.
¹⁵

Boniface went on to claim jurisdiction for the papacy throughout the world in a bull of 1302,
Unam Sanctam
('One Holy [Church]'). This was a culminating moment in the universal pretensions of the papacy, but the Pope's aspirations were curtailed by his imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of King Philip the Fair of France. A French successor-pope then chose to live in the city of Avignon, a small papal enclave in southern France. There were many good reasons why Pope Clement V should choose Avignon in 1309: it saved him encountering the constant infighting in Rome, and since the papal court was now a bureaucratic centre affecting all Europe, it made sense to find a more accessible place from which it could operate. Nevertheless, the move brought the papacy closely under French influence, and it caused great indignation in Italy, where the great poet Petrarch described it as a 'Babylonian captivity'. It showed how far the pope had moved from the intimate association with the body of St Peter which had brought him his power in the Church.

Pope John XXII made further vocal enemies when after first crushing the Spiritual Franciscans, he further infuriated the 'Conventual' wing of the order which had made careful arrangements to avoid holding property while still establishing a regular life in convents. In 1321 John reversed earlier papal pronouncements supporting Franciscan poverty, and repudiated previous papal trusteeship of their goods, restoring ownership to the Franciscans themselves, a far from welcome gift. Pope John's canonization of Francis the following year by no means mollified the Franciscans: new identifications of the Pope with Antichrist outdid all previous efforts in shrillness, and some Franciscans accused John of heresy for repudiating the pronouncements of his predecessors. That lent an urgent topicality to earlier rather theoretical discussions about how to deal with a pope who was a heretic. One of the most distinguished of Franciscan philosopher-theologians, the Englishman William of Ockham, was among those leading the campaign. He had no hesitation in declaring Pope John a heretic to whom no obedience was due: 'Our faith is not formed by the wisdom of the Pope. For no one is bound to believe the Pope in matters which are of the faith, unless he can demonstrate the reasonableness of what he says by the rule of faith.'
¹⁶
Ockham survived John XXII's condemnation for this opinion, and his nominalist approach to philosophy flourished, becoming one of the most influential modes of philosophical and theological argument in late medieval Europe.

Ockham was naturally supported in his attacks by Imperialists, and they had their own powerful spokesman in a former rector of the University of Paris, Marsilius or Marsiglio of Padua, principally presented in his
Defensor Pacis
('Defender of Peace') of 1324. What was so effective about Marsilius's polemic on papal jurisdiction was that it was a careful dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, and through him with Aristotle, punctiliously backed up at every stage by biblical quotation. Since Thomas had so effectively shown that Aristotle could be reconciled with Christian doctrine, if it appeared that Aristotle's teaching on political arrangements clashed with current Christian understandings, then the fault must lie with mistaken Christian teachers, not with the great philosopher. And the chief Christian teacher was of course the Holy Father in Rome, who could further be shown to have caused much of the political troubles of Christendom in his own time. Protestant monarchs and their publicists much relished Marsiglio's arguments two centuries later; in the 1530s Marsiglio was to be translated (and judiciously tweaked) to support Henry VIII's break with Rome, on the initiative of his unusually well-educated minister Thomas Cromwell.
¹⁷

Although Gregory XI a generation after John XXII tried to cure the wars in his Italian possessions by moving back to Rome in 1377, the situation which emerged from the political wrangles of the late fourteenth century was still worse: from 1378 there were two rival popes, both lawfully elected by the College of Cardinals.
¹⁸
An effort to solve the situation at the Council of Pisa in 1409 only resulted in a third candidate emerging: in 1414 one of them, John XXIII, took action in conjunction with the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to call a council safely outside Italy across the Alps at Konstanz. The council finally ended four decades of schism when, in 1417, it recognized the election of a new pope acknowledged by all factions, Martin V. In the midst of the complex wrangles which produced this result, the council produced a decree, '
Sacrosancta
', proclaiming itself to hold its authority 'immediately from Christ; everyone, of every rank and condition, including the Pope himself, is bound to obey it in matters concerning the faith, the abolition of the schism, and the Reformation of the Church of God in its head and its members'.
¹⁹

There could be no clearer statement that papal primacy was to be put firmly in its place in favour of a general council, but Konstanz added a further idea in its decree of 1417, ordering that a council should henceforth meet every ten years. If this took effect, a council was to become an essential and permanent component of continued reform and reconstruction in the Church. The next few years saw increasing tension between those wishing to develop this conciliar mechanism and successive popes seeking to build on the papacy's newly restored integrity. The eighteen-year session of a council at Basel from 1431 helped to discredit the conciliar option because despite much constructive work, including setting up its own legal processes to rival Rome's, it culminated in a fresh schism. In 1460 a former conciliarist sympathizer, now Pope Pius II, formally forbade appeals from a decision of the papacy to a general council, in a bull entitled
Execrabilis
. Pius II's change of heart was understandable: seven years before, Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks. For a pope contemplating this disaster and trying to summon fresh crusades to defend what remained of Christian Europe, now was no time to risk the future of the West by collective leadership which might be divided and uncertain.

Moreover, there was much that was incoherent or unresolved in the bundle of ideas carrying the conciliarist label. Conciliarists never achieved consensus as to how to define the Church or account for the authority of a council. Was it a representation of all the people of God, in which case its authority rose up or ascended from the whole body of the faithful? Or was it an assembly of God's ordained representatives, the clergy, in which case its power descended from God through the Church's hierarchy? Who precisely among the clergy were to be represented? Konstanz had been an assembly of bishops and cardinals; Basel widened its membership so that lower clergy were also given delegates, even with a voting majority over the bishops. Conciliarists tended to be clergy and were naturally clericalist in their outlook; this was not a movement which viewed lay participation with much sympathy. And if conciliarists were drastically limiting the pope's power, how did that affect the centuries-long disputes between the pope and secular rulers? It was unlikely that Philip the Fair's successors as kings of France were going to accept a new rival for power in an effective and permanent General Council of the Church, at least not without a good deal of careful explanation from sure-footed theologians that their own power was not affected by the special sacred status of the council.

When the French theologian Jean Gerson, one of the most prominent activists in the Council of Konstanz, consequently struggled to find a way of reconciling conciliarism with the traditional claims of the French monarchy, he developed a view of the Church's history later of great importance to Reformation leaders who sought to achieve the same balance between Church and secular commonwealth against more radical Christian thinkers. Gerson saw a threefold development in the Church: a first primitive heroic era while it was still unacknowledged and often persecuted by the Roman Empire; a second period after the Emperor Constantine I had allied with it, when Church leaders had justifiably and responsibly accepted power and wealth; but then a third era of decay after the time of Gregory VII, when this process had been taken to excess, so that it must now be curbed. Gerson was not a revolutionary, but in his meditations on the Church he had hit on that perpetually subversive anonymous writer Dionysius the Areopagite. One of the aspects of Dionysius's picture of a heavenly hierarchy which especially appealed to Gerson was an insistence on the highest standards possible for the clerical order, clergy's imitation of the order of Heaven itself. This Dionysian emphasis resonated with many reform-minded clergy; often it produced a clericalism so high as to seem almost anticlerical.
²⁰

Gerson was not seeking to destroy hierarchical Church structures, simply to recall them to purity, but he did not see a hierarchy as necessarily culminating in a papal monarchy. He was also a strong defender of parish clergy against the pretensions of monks and friars, pointing out that there had been no monastic vows in the Church in the time of Christ, Mary and the Apostles.
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Sixteenth-century Reformers and the princes who supported them chose what they wanted from these various emphases in his writings. They took note of what Gerson had said about history, hierarchy, monks and friars, just as they took notice of Marsiglio's views on authority in the Church. For the problem which conciliarism had originally raised - principally, how to deal with a pope who cannot lead the Church as God wishes - would not go away. After 1520, Martin Luther was forced to give the drastic answer, going way beyond Ockham and the fourteenth-century Franciscans, that if the pope turned out to be Antichrist, then one must walk out of the pope's false Church and recreate the true body of Christ. Even though in political terms conciliarism faced eclipse from the mid-fifteenth century, plenty of leading churchmen and academics (particularly canon lawyers) continued to believe that conciliar action to solve the Church's problems would be preferable to the rapid rebuilding of centralized papal power now taking place.

Meanwhile, the papacy consolidated its recovery. For a while the rival council that in 1438 the Pope had called to Ferrara and Florence seemed to have achieved spectacular results in reunifying Christian Churches, both East and West, under papal leadership (see pp. 492-3). From 1446 popes were once more permanently based in Rome, never again willingly to desert this symbol of their supremacy in the Church. Soon after, in 1460, came a remarkable piece of accidental good fortune for the Pope when large deposits of alum were discovered at Tolfa, in the papal territories north-west of Rome. This mineral was highly valuable because of its use in dyes, and before that it could only be imported at great expense from the Middle East. The new source of income (which the popes were careful to ensure became a monopoly supply of alum in Europe) began benefiting the papacy just when Pius II reasserted its central power with
Execrabilis
. Various practical expressions of this power followed, taking their cue from a grant made by Pope Nicholas V in 1455 to the Portuguese monarchy of the right to rule in certain regions of Africa.
²²
Now that popes were back in Italy, it was unsurprising that they took a particular interest in Italian politics like the other Italian princes around them, and it was no fault of theirs that suddenly in the 1490s Italy became the cockpit of war and the obsessive concern of the great dynastic powers of Europe. The trigger was the ambition of the Valois dynasty of France, when in 1494-5 Charles VIII intervened in the quarrels of Italian princes with a major military invasion; this gained France little, but threw the various major states of Italy into chaos, war and misery for more than half a century.

Amid this suddenly unbalanced high politics, it was a natural protective strategy for the papacy stranded in the middle to redouble its self-assertion, a mood which in any case came naturally to the successive popes Alexander VI (1492-1503) and Julius II (1503-13), despite their mutual detestation. Alexander followed the example of Nicholas V with an adjudication in 1493-4 between the claims of the two European powers which were now exploring and making conquests overseas, Portugal and Spain; he divided the map of the world beyond Europe between them, commissioning them to preach the Gospel to the non-Christians whom they encountered, in an action which had all the ambition of the twelfth-century papacy. Likewise, fifteenth-century popes began to restore the architectural splendour of their sadly ramshackle city; display was an essential aspect of power for secular rulers, and surely it was all the more important for Christ's representative on earth. The most important - and, as we shall see, the most fateful - project was the demolition of the monumental basilica of St Peter built by the Emperor Constantine, so that it could be replaced with something even more spectacular. This was a particular enthusiasm of Julius II, one of the most discriminating but also one of the most extravagant patrons of art and architecture in the papacy's history (see Plate 26).