Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (95 page)

The two popes who between them occupied St Peter's throne for two decades had a very selective understanding of what might glorify the papacy. Alexander VI, from the Valencian noble family of Borja (Borgia), shielded his vulnerability as an outsider against his many Italian enemies by ruthlessly exploiting the Church's most profitable offices to promote his relatives, including his own children by his several mistresses. It was a scandalous flouting of the clerical celibacy imposed by the twelfth-century Reformation, even if Lucrezia and Cesare, the Pope's most notorious children, had not provided extreme examples of aristocratic self-indulgence. Julius II relished being his own general when he plunged into the Italian wars which proliferated after the French invasion, and he was especially proud when in 1506 he recaptured Bologna, second city of the Papal States after Rome, lost to the papacy seventy years before.
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Nor was Julius a pioneer in this. He merely improved on the previous practice of the Papal States, where for a century or more cardinals had been the military commanders most trusted alike by the pope and by their mercenary soldiers. One of the most effective generals of the early fifteenth century had been a cardinal, Giovanni Vitelleschi; his spiritual duties as Archbishop of Florence, still less his titular status as Patriarch of Alexandria, do not seem to have curbed his streak of sadism. A recent study describes him as 'a master of sackings, massacres and summary executions', and his own death by summary execution in 1440 had reputedly forestalled his seizure of the papal fortress in Rome, Castel Sant'Angelo, with a view to the papal throne itself.
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NOMINALISTS, LOLLARDS AND HUSSITES (1300-1500)

A centralized papacy, particularly one which recruited such dubious assistants, could not stop people thinking new thoughts. Two movements, the Lollards and the Hussites, rose to challenge the Church authorities. Another potential challenge was from the nominalism espoused by William of Ockham. The Franciscan Ockham denied the assumptions embodied in the Dominican Thomas Aquinas's adaptation of Greek philosophy to Christianity, centring on the word
nomen
. At its simplest this is the ordinary Latin word for 'name', but in the philosophical terminology of the time it signified the universal concept of a particular phenomenon: the word 'tree', for instance, is the
nomen
which unites our perception of every individual tree and points to the universal concept of a tree. Ockham and his fourteenth-century nominalist successors denied that there was any such individual reality behind a
nomen
. For them, it was simply a word to organize our thinking about similar phenomena - thus individual examples of objects which we decide to label trees. If this was accepted, it became impossible to construct overall systems of thought or explanation by the use of reason. This denied the value of Aquinas's work, with its majestic system of relationships throughout the cosmos: it implied that the line of analytical thought derived from Aristotle was pointless.

To turn from trees to the problem of discussing one of the chief issues of the Christian faith: what happens when bread and wine are consecrated in the Eucharist? If they become the body and blood of Christ, as virtually all medieval Western Christians agreed was the case, how can this be explained? As we have seen, those theologians or philosophers like Aquinas who drew on the vocabulary provided by Aristotle, could do so in terms of 'substance' and 'accidents' (see pp. 405-6). Ockham and nominalist philosophers or theologians denied the usefulness of this language of substance and accidents, so they had no way of constructing such an explanation. The doctrine, and indeed any other doctrine of ultimate divine truths, could only be treated as a matter of faith, relying on the authority of the Church. And what would happen if one felt that the authority of the Church was at fault, as many nominalist-trained clergy were to do in the sixteenth century? As a result, nominalism was a corrosive doctrine for the accepted principles of medieval Western Christianity; while still glorying in the disputes of scholastic debates, nominalist academic debaters disrupted many of the given principles within those debates, and split apart the concerns of philosophy and theology. Still nominalism came to dominate the universities of northern Europe during the fifteenth century, wherever the Dominicans could not defend the standing of their hero Aquinas. Many Protestant Reformers gained their university education in a nominalist tradition.

Yet nominalism should not simply be seen as a high road to Protestantism, because in one vital respect, its soteriology (view of salvation), it provided a thoroughgoing explanation of how human beings could have a role in their own salvation, despite Augustine's pessimism about human capacity. The school of nominalist theology known as the
via moderna
('present-day/modern system') squared this circle by fusing medieval economic theory with the language of 'contract', which had so appealed to Francis of Assisi in thinking of a merciful God's relationship with his people (see pp. 416-17). Human virtues may be worthless because of Adam's fall, but they can be treated like a technically worthless or token coinage issued by monarchs in a time of emergency: after all, there could be no greater emergency for humanity than Adam and Eve's sin in Eden. Such temporary coins, unlike the normal silver coinage of medieval Europe, possess no value other than what the ruler decrees them to bear. The ruler has entered an agreement, a contract or covenant, with his people to sustain this fiction for the general good. So God in his infinite mercy ascribes value to human worth, and makes an agreement with humanity to abide by the consequences and let it do its best towards its salvation. In a famous phrase of the fifteeenth-century nominalist theologian Gabriel Biel, he allows a human being 'to do that which is in oneself' (
facere quod in se est
). The system avoids troubled scrutiny of Augustine's view of humanity's utterly fallen state, as long as one accepts its principles.

When nominalism removed the human relationship with God from the sphere of reason, it came close to the mysticism which flourished from the thirteenth century. This also spoke of the unknowability of God, and it broadened into a style of personal piety known as 'presentday /modern devotion',
Devotio Moderna
. In Gabriel Biel, indeed, the two streams of nominalism and the
Devotio
flowed together. The
Devotio
became the dominant outlet for pious expression in the fifteenth-century West: it was an intense and creatively imaginative mode of reaching out to God. It also tended to introspection, aided by that crucial contemporary technological advance in the spread of texts, printing. Printed texts made far more easily available to an increasingly literate public the writings of the mystics, or works which meditated as John de Caulibus had done (see pp. 417-18) on aspects of the life of Jesus. For someone who really delighted in reading, religion might retreat out of the sphere of public ritual into the world of the mind and the imagination. Reading privileges sight among the other human senses, and it further privileges reading text among other uses of the eye; it relies not at all on gesture, which is so important a part of communicating in liturgy or in preaching.

So without any hint of doctrinal deviation, a new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society which valued book-learning for both profit and pleasure; the Netherlands, which had a level of urban life more concentrated than in any other part of Europe and high levels of literacy, were particularly prominent in this development. Even if such people were in the crowd at the parish Mass, they were likely be absorbed in their layfolk's companion to the Mass, or a Book of Hours - books commonly known as primers. These primers had already been mass-produced in the days of manuscript book production, but printing made them far cheaper and more widely available, and there quickly developed an eager market for primers in the major European languages. The wealthier folk in such congregations increasingly built themselves an enclosed private pew in their church to cut themselves off from the distractions provided by their fellow worshippers.
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One should not overemphasize this exclusive characteristic of the
Devotio
. It also had the capacity to offer laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, the chance of achieving the heights and depths of religious experience in their everyday lives and occupations, just as if they had set out on pilgrimage. The earliest great name in the movement, the fourteenth-century Dutch theologian Geert Groote, was never ordained beyond the order of deacon; after spending some time in a Carthusian monastery near Arnhem, he went on to conduct a roving ministry of preaching in the Netherlands and to found his own informal community of friends in his native Deventer. After Groote's death in 1384, this group did take on the character of a formal religious order, the Brethren of the Common Life, which spread widely through central Europe and enrolled clergy of the calibre of the mystical writer Thomas a Kempis, the philosopher-theologian Gabriel Biel and the future Pope Adrian VI.

Despite this, the
Devotio Moderna
was never a purely clerical movement. Even the formally organized Brethren discouraged members from becoming ordained clergy, and they put their houses of Sisters and some of their own communities under the control of local urban corporations rather than the Church authorities.
²⁶
Notably, married couples (and of course their children) might be involved on an equal basis in a lifestyle inspired by the
Devotio
. Its promise was that serious-minded laity could aspire to the high personal standards which had previously been thought more easily attainable by the clergy: a programme of practical action and organization of one's thoughts and life which was summed up in the title of Kempis's famous devotional treatise
The Imitation of Christ
. The idea of imitating Christ was not much older in the Western tradition of Christianity than the twelfth century; it sat uneasily with Augustinian assumptions about fallen humanity. It was also a solvent of that assumption which had developed particularly in the West, that clergy and religious had a better chance of getting to Heaven than laity.

Those same thoughts - the comparability of layfolk and clergy, and the calling of all to the highest standards - were behind the two movements of Church reform which sprang like nominalism from universities, but which were forced out by official opposition and repression. John Wyclif, an Oxford philosopher, was the reverse of a nominalist: in the manner of philosophers like Aquinas, he championed the idea that there were indeed universal, indestructible realities, greater than individual phenomena. Wyclif's career in controversy was comparatively brief, no more than a decade or so. In the mid-1370s, well into his career, having returned from an unproductive royal mission to Bruges to argue the case for a remission of England's taxation to the pope, he began turning his philosophical assumptions into an attack on the contemporary institutions of the Church: not merely their everyday faults, but their whole foundation. Enemies said that this new departure arose because Wyclif was angry at the lack of promotion in the Church, while his fellow delegates were well rewarded. That is not impossible; Wyclif would not be the first or the last to be jolted into genuinely principled indignation by mundane disappointments.

Wyclif contrasted the universal reality of the invisible true Church with the false Church which was only too visible in the everyday world. He maintained that the true Church was made up solely of those who were saved, not just in the next world, but here and now. There were some people, probably most, who were eternally damned and who therefore never formed part of the true Church. No one could know who was damned or who was saved, and therefore the visible Church, that presided over by popes and bishops, could not possibly be the same as the true Church, since it claimed a universal authority in the world. Moreover, since all authority to rule or the right to own property (
dominium
) was in the hands of God, only those in a state of grace could enjoy them. Wyclif argued that it was more likely that rulers chosen by God like kings or princes were in this happy condition than was the pope, and therefore
dominium
should be seen as being entrusted to them. Churchmen who were critical of the Church had discussed
dominium
before, particularly in the controversies around papal authority at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they had pointed out that it was ultimately still in the power of God, but rarely with this radical conclusion.
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Wyclif's arguments were decidedly convenient for the English prince and noblemen who acted as his patrons and protectors, but they had other implications for the whole people of God. In place of the Church's authority, Wyclif urged people to turn to the Bible, reading and understanding it, for it was the only source of divine truth. Readers would see that the Mass, on which so much of the Church's power was based, was a distortion of the Eucharist which Christ had instituted. Wyclif deeply loathed not merely the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation which was now standard within the Western Church, but the whole notion of divine bodily presence in bread and wine. He regarded the doctrine as a clerical deception developed during the Church's eleventh-century usurpation of worldly power - so his philosophical realism had led him in a completely different direction from Aquinas's Aristotelian realist arguments.
²⁸
He plunged the University of Oxford into bitter divisions; although political circumstances saved him from what ought to have been inevitable condemnation and death for heresy, he retreated to his country rectory, his literary attacks on the Church and his revisions of his earlier work becoming ever more extreme. Several decades elapsed after his death in 1384 before the Church authorities sent a commission to his Leicestershire grave to dig up his bones and burn them for heresy.