by Lance Ralston | May 10, 2015 | English |
This episode of CS is titled Erasmus.
As we begin, I once again want to do a brief, and I promise it will be brief, summary of the threads that conspired to weave the tapestry of the Reformation. Others might refer to them less as threads that weaved a tapestry as those that frayed in the unravelling of the Church caused by a pack of trouble-makers. The reason I’m compelled to do all this summarizing is because of the massive sea-change coming in our study and the need to understand it wasn’t just some malcontents who woke up one day and decided to bail on a healthy church. Things had been bad for a long time and the call for reform had been heard for a couple hundred years.
The Western European Church of the 14th and 15th C’s experienced a major crisis of authority. This crisis came from challenges both within and without. They combined to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of many about the credibility and legitimacy of Church leaders. Let’s review some of the things they’d done, and that happened to the Church, to create the crisis.
Due to the politics of late medieval Europe, Pope Clement V moved the papal seat to Avignon, France, in 1309 in what’s called the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” because the Pope came under the influence of the French throne. When another Pope was elected in Rome, the Church was faced with 2 men who claimed the title of “Vicar of Christ.” This Papal Schism confused the people of Europe and stirred strong feelings that the office of Pope was more a political fixture than a spiritual office. At the insistence of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Council of Constance ended the schism. But the solution raised serious questions about the authority of the papacy, further dividing church leaders and distressing the people of Europe.
In addition to these political shenanigans, the Church was marked by widespread corruption and fraud. Simony, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices, was common. Immorality among monks, priests, bishops and cardinals was at some times and places, not even hidden. The Church spent a fortune acquiring thousands of relics for its cathedrals and paying for them with the selling of indulgences, which we’ll talk about soon.
The Inquisition had terrorized whole regions of Europe, especially in Spain and while the Church justified its actions saying it was rooting our dangerous heresy, many knew some victims of the Inquisition were innocent. The Church simply wanted their property and wealth and had used the Inquisition as a means of enriching itself.
With the birth of the Renaissance and a new open-mindedness about thinking outside the realm of official authority, the Church became an object of ridicule and satire in pamphlets and books that were readily available with the invention of the printing press.
Let me be clear. Some of the harshest criticism of the Church came, not from outsiders, but from faithful priests and monks disgusted with the corruption and error they saw among their peers.
As a reaction to the stultifying academic pursuits of Scholasticism, there was a popular movement all across Europe known as Mysticism, in which people simply wanted to “feel” their faith and sought make contact with the divine through meditation and a more personal link to God than going through the official priesthood.
Most significant was the movement known as The Brethren of Common Life. Their most famous spokesman was Thomas à Kempis whose little book On the Imitation of Christ continues to be a widely read devotional classic. The Brethren stood in opposition to the monastic orders which for the most part had become centers of corruption. The Brethren breathed new spiritual life into the church. They stressed personal devotion to Jesus through meditative study, confession of sin, and imitating Christ. They emphasized holiness and simplicity in lifestyle. In many ways, the Brethren prefigured the Reformers of the 16th C.
With the Bible being translated into the common tongue, no longer did people have to rely on a priest telling them what it said.
The 16th C world was one of astonishing change. Medieval civilization, dominated by an institutional Church was disappearing. Modern nation-states challenged the Church for political and economic supremacy, and the voyages of discovery made the world seem smaller at the same time new worlds were opening. The Renaissance of Northern Italy saw many turn from a hide-bound and superstitious Catholicism to the romanticized glories of ancient Greece and Rome.
Into this changing world stepped one à Desiderius Erasmus.
Taking the pulse of the times, Erasmus ridiculed the Catholic church with biting satire. His works were wildly popular. In his most famous, Praise of Folly written in 1509, Erasmus took jabs at the church’s immorality, corruption, and decadence. He ridiculed such superstitions as fanatical devotion to relics, stories of bleeding Communion bread, and the cult of the saints. In another work, he depicted Saint Peter railing against Pope Julius II for his luxurious and opulent lifestyle and military conquests.
But it was in 1516 that Erasmus published his most important and influential work—a Greek edition of the NT. He examined and compared the available NT manuscripts and citations from the Church Fathers. The result was an accurate NT Greek text that became the NT of the Reformation.
One epigram regarding the Reformation states, “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.”
The illegitimate son of a Dutch priest, Erasmus lived in search of knowledge, in pursuit of piety, in love with books, and oppressed by the fear of poverty. Along the way, his writings and scholarship started a theological earthquake that didn’t stop until European Christendom was torn in two.
Born in Rotterdam and orphaned by the plague, Erasmus was sent from the school of St. Lebuin’s—which taught classical learning and the humanities—to a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life. There he learned an emphasis on a personal relationship with God but detested the strict rules of monastic life and intolerant theologians. They intended to teach humility, he later recalled, by breaking the students’ spirits.
Being poor with no prospects, Erasmus joined the Augustinians. He wanted to travel, gain some academic elbow room, and leave behind the, as he called them, “barbarians” who discouraged him from classical studies. As soon as he was ordained a priest in 1492, he became secretary to the bishop of Cambrai, who sent him to Paris to study theology.
He hated it there too. The dorms stank of urine, the food was atrocious, studies mechanical, and the discipline brutal. He began a career in writing and traveling that took him to most of the countries of Europe. Though his health was often poor, Erasmus was driven by a desire to seek out the best theologians of his day. On a trip to England in 1499, he complained of bad beer, the uncouth nature of the English, and terrible weather, but >> he met Thomas More, who became a friend for life.
On that same trip he heard John Colet teach from the Scriptures, not just quote from the commentaries he’d studied in Paris. Colet, who later became dean of St. Paul’s, encouraged Erasmus to become a “primitive theologian”- that is, someone who studied Scripture like the church Fathers, not like the argumentative scholastics who’d dominated theology for the last hundred years.
So, Erasmus devoted himself to learning the Koine or Common Greek in which the NT was written. The result was his most significant work: an edition of the NT in original Greek, published in 1516. Accompanying it were study notes as well as his own Latin translation, correcting over 600 errors in Jerome’s Vulgate.
Two of the most noteworthy praises of Erasmus’s work came from Pope Leo X and from a German monk named Martin Luther—who, a year later, launched the Reformation.
Before that turning point however, which would eventually consume Erasmus, he became famous for his other writings. There were plenty of them to be famous for. By the 1530s, some 15% of all the books sold were written by Erasmus.
Historians refer to Erasmus as a humanist, but that label has a very different meaning than it does in today. A humanist in the 15th C referred to someone who studied the humanities, that is, the social sciences of language, history, art and other subjects concerned with culture and society. But Erasmus was too brilliant a mind to simply study the humanities; he felt an obligation to better society. So he wrote to confront and correct the errors he felt had crept into the Church, an institution he knew had by the far the biggest influence in shaping culture. He found he had great skill in the use of satire to make his point and people enjoyed reading his books and tracts.
Those books brought him fame, as did his Greek NT. This and his attacks on the church caught Martin Luther’s attention, who wrote asking for support.
The two never met, but their fates were entwined. Erasmus’s enemies accused him of inspiring Luther who was accused of breaking up God’s Church. Erasmus found much he liked in Luther’s writings, describing him to Pope Leo X as “a mighty trumpet of Gospel truth.” At the same time, he privately told his printer to stop printing Luther’s writings because he didn’t want his own efforts to be identified with Luther’s.
For 4 years, Erasmus pleaded for moderation on both sides of the divide Luther’s work caused. When pressed, he sided with the Pope. Still, he hated the bickering and intolerance on both sides; saying, “I detest dissension because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature. I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss. It is clear that many of the reforms for which Luther calls are urgently needed.”
His mediating position satisfied neither side. He said, “My only wish is that now that I am old, I be allowed to enjoy the results of my efforts. But both sides reproach me and seek to coerce me. Some claim that since I do not attack Luther I agree with him, while the Lutherans declare that I am a coward who has forsaken the Gospel.”
Indeed, Luther attacked him as a Moses who would die in the wilderness without entering the Promised Land. And the Roman Church banned his writings.
by Lance Ralston | May 3, 2015 | English |
This 85th episode of CS, is titled, Dawn.
I want to take a brief moment here at the start to say “Thank you” to all those who’ve spread the word about CS to their friends and family. We’ve had a significant bump in subscribers and lots of new likes on the FB page. So—Kudos to all who’ve spread the word.
As most of you know, iTunes is by far the major portal for podcasts. So, if you use iTunes, a review of CS is a great way to boost our rating – and ratings usually translate into new subscribers. Why do we want more subscribers since there’s no commercial interest in CS? Because information and knowledge about history are crucial to a well-rounded worldview. I’m convinced an accurate view of history is crucial to overcoming prejudice, to tearing down the walls that divide people. That is when we discover not just WHAT people believe but WHY – it helps puts things in perspective and disabuses us of errant opinions.
Anyway, that’s my hope.
As I’ve learned about different groups, I’ve revised my opinions. Traditions almost always have some origin in history, in some ground that at the time seemed perfectly reasonable to the people who created them. We may not agree with them today, hundreds and even thousands of years later, but at least we can respect those who originally framed them; and if not respect, gain a modicum of understanding for the complexities they wrestled with.
Okay, back to it …
We’ve come now to one of the most significant moments in Church History; the Reformation. Since it’s considered by many the point at which the Protestant church arose, it’s important to realize a couple of things.
First – The student of history must remember almost all those who are today counted as the first Protestants were Roman Catholics. When they began the movement that would later be called the Reformation, they didn’t call themselves anything other than Christians of the Western, Roman church. They began as an attempt to bring what they considered to be much-needed reform to the Church, not to start something new, but to return to something true. When the Roman hierarchy excommunicated them, the Reformers considered it less as THEY who were being thrust forth out of the Church as it was those who did the thrusting, pushed them out of the true church which was invisible and not to be equated with the visible religious institution HQ’d in Rome, presided over by the Pope. It’s difficult to say for certain, but you get the sense from the writing of some of the Reformers that they hoped the day would come when the Roman church would recognize in their movement the true Gospel and come to embrace it. Little did they envision how deep and wide the break between them would become, and how their movement would shatter and scatter into so many different sects, just as the Roman hierarchy worried and warned.
Second – There’d been groups that diverged from Roman Catholicism and its Eastern cousin the Orthodox Church, for a long time. We’ve already considered the Nestorian Church which dominated the Church in the Far East for hundreds of years and didn’t lose its place of prominence until the Mongol invasions of the 13th C. There were little communities of what can be called non-aligned Christians scattered throughout Europe. And we’ll consider some of those as we turn now to the Reformation.
Long before Luther nailed his list of 95 topics for discussion to the chapel door at Wittenberg, others had sniped at the theological position of the Roman church. There’d always had been some who didn’t agree with its teaching, and many had broken off into separate religious communities.
By way of review …
Peter Waldo was one of the most effective of the pre-Reformers. A wealthy merchant of Lyons, France, moved by Matthew 19:21, he was convinced that poverty in the service to Christ was the path to heaven. So three centuries before Martin Luther, he sold his estate and gave the proceeds to the poor. Within a year, he was joined by others, both men and women, who called themselves the “Poor Men of Lyons,” and took on an itinerant ministry of preaching repentance and living from handouts. These were an early form of what came to be the mendicant monks.
Thinking themselves to be good Roman Catholics, they appealed to the Third Lateran Council in 1179 for permission to preach but were refused because they were considered ignorant and unlearned laymen. But they were convinced they were like the first followers of Jesus and should obey God rather than men. So, Peter and his followers continued to preach.
In 1184, Pope Lucius III excommunicated them for their disobedience. Contrary to what we might expect, this brought numerous supporters, and the movement spread into southern France, Italy, Spain, the Rhine Valley, and Bohemia. That they gained such support after being drop-kicked by Rome leaves the impression the Church’s reputation wasn’t so grand, at least in the regions where the Waldensians lived and worked.
It’s hard to know if all those called “Waldensian” were really followers of Peter Waldo or if contemporary opponents just used that term as a blanket description for the many disaffected individuals who opposed the Church. It’s possible as well that many smaller groups of non-aligned Christians emerged from hiding to join the Waldensians.
Whatever the case, they took the New Testament as a rule of life and used it in what we might call a legalistic sense. They went about 2 by 2, wearing simple clothing, preaching repentance, frequent fasting, and living from the gifts of others. They rejected the doctrine of purgatory, masses and prayers for the dead, and promoted the necessity for translations of Scripture in people’s native language. They insisted on the right of anyone to preach, man or woman—but they did have some organization among their clergy, with bishops, priests, and deacons.
While Peter Waldo never embraced the doctrines we’d call genuinely evangelical, his emphasis on Scripture as the basis of faith and practice opened the door for his followers to become so.
The Waldensians were persecuted harshly for centuries. Part of the reason for their widespread distribution in Europe was that they were driven from their homeland. In Bohemia, they ultimately became part of the followers of Jan Hus. In their mountain retreat of the Alps between France and Italy, their homeland by the time of the Reformation, they met with representatives of the Swiss Reformation in 1532 and adopted the theology and government of the Swiss Reformers. Then, in 1545, about 4000 were massacred in Provence, France. It wasn’t until 1848 that they won recognition. Today they number about 20,000, the only medieval separatist group to survive to the present.
That brings us to the next pre-reformer, the Englishman JOHN WYCLIFFE, who we’ve already looked at.
John Wycliffe lived about 200 yrs after Peter Waldo. Like Waldo, Wycliffe was determined to derive his theology, both theoretical and practical, from Scripture. Like the Waldensians, Wycliffe encouraged the translation of the Bible into the common language and that anyone ought to be able to preach, not just sanctioned and licensed clergy.
Though he personally translated or supervised the translation of parts of the Bible, the version given his name wasn’t completed until after his death. Its widespread use had an influence on the development of the English language. Wycliffe was educated at Oxford and later became a master of Balliol College there. For a while chaplain to the king, with access to Parliament, he was able to reach some of the upper-class English. But he also sought to reach the common people, sending out lay evangelists to instruct them.
After 1375, Wycliffe’s reforming views developed rapidly. Pope Gregory XI condemned him in 1377 for his efforts, but he was protected by some of the nobles and the powerful John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III. These were the days of the Hundred Years War between England and France, when it was unthinkable an Englishmen would surrender one of their most outstanding countrymen to a pope at Avignon, under the domination of England’s French foes.
To Wycliffe, Scripture, which he interpreted literally, was the sole authority for the believer. Decrees of the pope were not infallible except as based on Scripture. The clergy were not to rule, but to serve and help people. He concluded that Christ and not the pope was the head of the church; in fact, the pope, if he were too eager for worldly power, might even be regarded as the Antichrist. Ultimately, Wycliffe repudiated the entire papal system. He also attacked transubstantiation, the Roman doctrine that the bread and wine of Communion become the actual body and blood of Christ in the Mass. Wycliffe condemned the doctrine of purgatory, the use of relics, pilgrimages, and indulgences. For all this, he’s called the Morningstar of the Reformation.
Wycliffe’s followers were forcefully suppressed in 1401. Those who held his views went underground and helped to prepare the way for the British Reformation a century later. Bohemians studying at Oxford in Wycliffe’s day carried his ideas to their homeland, where they influenced the teachings of Jan Hus, another pre-reformer we’ve already looked at, but whom we’ll consider again now in this set up for the Reformation.
Hus was the professor of philosophy at the University of Prague and lead preacher at Bethlehem Chapel. Historians used to think Hus transported Wycliffe’s views to Prague but it seems clear now that while Hus was later influenced by Wycliffe’s views, his reforms ran tandem to what was happening in England.
Hus’s approach was similar to Wycliffe’s but his influence in Europe was greater than that of the Englishman’s. Luther was greatly impressed with the work of Jan Hus. His greatest work was titled On the Church. He said that all the elect are members of Christ’s church, of which Christ, rather than the pope, is head. He argued against simony, indulgences, and abuses of the mass. He demanded a reform in the lives of clergy, and the right of laymen to take both the bread and wine in Communion.
Hus became the leader of a reform movement that spread across Bohemia. Almost the entire realm supported him, in spite of being excommunicated by the pope. After Hus’s death the reform carried on, and in the middle of the 15th Century the Bohemian Brethren rose out of the embers of the fire Hus lit. They still exist as the Moravians.
The 4th pre-Reformer was Savonarola who lived in Florence, Italy in the late 15th C. He was a fiery preacher against the worldliness and corruption of church and society. A Dominican, he was transferred to the priory of San Marco in 1482 and rose in influence and power in the city. His studies in the OT prophets and the book of Revelation made him a powerful preacher against the evils of a decadent society.
Savonarola served as the spiritual leader of the political party that came to power in Florence when the Medicis fled the city in 1494. Exercising a virtual dictatorship, he tried to reform both the church and state. But over time, the people of Florence found his rule too strict and used his criticism of the Roman Church as the excuse to remove him from office. Pope Alexander VI’s excommunication of Savonarola in 1497 was all the Florentines needed to arrest and try him for sedition and heresy. He was cruelly tortured then hanged in the piazza before the city hall, not far from where Michelangelo’s David would stand just 5 years later.
Although Savonarola demanded reform in the church, he never took the more advanced position of Wycliffe and Hus. He had no quarrel with the teachings or the organization of the church but seems to have believed in justification by faith.
At the same time, Wycliffe and Hus were leading their attempts at reform, a mystical movement flowered in northern Europe. Known as The Brethren of the Common Life, they emphasized Bible reading, meditation, prayer, personal piety, and religious education. The main aim of the Brethren was to secure a revival of practical religion. They gathered in homes rather than monasteries, held property in common, worked to support themselves, and avoided the ill-will of the communities in which they lived by not seeking tax-exempt status or begging. They had good relations with the townspeople but sometimes incurred the suspicion and opposition of the clergy and monks. They attended parish churches and had no peculiar doctrinal positions.
The Brethren were committed to education. They established several schools in the Netherlands and Germany that were outstanding for scholarship and piety. Four of their best-known students were Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Luther, and Thomas à Kempis, who’s credited with writing the widely distributed Imitation of Christ.
Europe was a seething kettle by 1500, ready to boil over. In the realms of economics, politics, education, and religion, the time had come for change. All that was needed was someone who could mold these explosive elements into a single movement. Such a movement could, and eventually would cover Europe.
There are a couple of reasons that need to be stated for why the Reformation succeeded—besides the obvious one many Protestant Christians would note first > It was God’s Will.
The more pedantic reasons are two-fold:
First – The Great Papal Schism had left a bad taste in the mouth of many Christians in Europe. How could the Pope, the Vicar of Christ not be able to keep the Church together? And how could the Pope become such an obvious tool in the hand of secular rulers? The corruption of the Church was so obvious, so blatant, even the most devoted churchmen were embarrassed and wrote impassioned pleas for reform.
And that leads us to the second reason the Reformation occurred; this was the age when the nation-states of Europe were emerging. Kings and regional governors were coming out from under the thumb of the Church hierarchy. Instead of Popes being king-makers, kings made popes. And some kings decided they didn’t want to play Rome’s game at all. They wanted to take their ball and go home to start their own game. If only someone would write some new rules.
Enter: Martin Luther.
In central Europe, the Holy Roman Empire which was essentially a German entity, had an emperor check-mated by numerous states with only slight allegiance to him. Muslim armies knocked at the doors of the empire not long after Luther tacked his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. After toppling Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks strolled across Eastern Europe until they stood at the gates of Vienna in 1529.
What really happened was this. Charles, a Hapsburg with holdings in central Europe and king of the Netherlands and Spain, was elected in 1519 as Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Francis I of France, surrounded by Charles’ territory and defeated by him in 1525, made an alliance with the Ottomans in 1526 to apply a pincer movement against Charles. The Emperor needed the help of all his German vassals to defeat the Muslims. When some of the German princes became supporters of Luther, Charles was no longer able to put religious pressure on them. If he did, they’d withhold aiding him politically and militarily. So Charles wasn’t able to force Luther’s political covering, the powerful Frederick of Saxony, to surrender Luther when the Pope demanded his head on a pike.
This is all very fun, isn’t it?
Now consider this à Just a few years after Luther’s birth, Columbus reached the New World in 1492 and launched the Spanish Empire in the West. Shortly after Luther posted his theses, Magellan’s expedition sailed around the world. At the same time, the Portuguese were establishing outposts of empire in Brazil, Africa, India, and the Far East.
Did you know Columbus and Luther were contemporaries?
Let’s not forget as well that a whole new world of thought had come in with the tide of the Renaissance. Rediscovering the literature and thoughts of the classical age, contributed to a greater secularization of life.
Humanism was one of the main features of the Renaissance, involving a new emphasis on man and his culture and an effort to make the world a better place in which human beings might live. The pull of the future life was not so great for the true child of the Renaissance as it had been for his ancestors during the Middle Ages. As has been said, the Renaissance man would rather eat his pie now than have it in the sky by and by.
In harkening back to the literature of the Classical Age, humanists put renewed emphasis on the study of Greek and Hebrew in an effort to read the classics in the original languages. The greatest of all ancient documents was the Bible, and the renewed emphasis on ancient languages led many to the Scripture.
The literary humanists included a good deal of biblical study in their academic diet, and it was in the north that the Reformation gained the most headway, among scholars like Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Erasmus.
Erasmus was a great satirist of the evils of the institutional church and society. That he got away with it and was so popular proves that criticism of Romanism by Renaissance leaders contributed to the success of the Reformation.
Adding to the effectiveness of the Reformation was the Renaissance spirit of individualism, which paved the way for Luther’s emphasis on the priesthood of the believer and its attendant ideas of the right of believers to go directly to God and to interpret the Scriptures for themselves.
Another important ingredient of the intellectual development of Europe on the eve of the Reformation was the invention of movable type and the spread of printing. Without it the Reformers would not have had the same impact. The tremendous literary activity of the Reformers was largely responsible for building the printing trade.
Lastly, an important phenomenon of the period was the rapid growth of universities, which provided education for a larger number of people, fostered a critical spirit, and provided a means for leaders of the emerging generation to be reached with Reformation principles.
As we end this episode, I wanted to let you know that the donation feature is once more active on the CS site. We had to block it for a while because fraud did a lot of damage. You’ve heard reports of identity theft. It seems once crooks snag a bunch of credit accounts, they check to see if they’re still valid by using sites like CS to post a bogus donation of 1 to $5. If it goes through, they know the accounts good and make real charges. Problem is, EVERY time my account gets one of these bogus donations, the bank charges me a transaction fee. Let’s just say, 10K bogus donations made for a hefty cost to the CS account. So we had to block the donation feature until the proper security could be installed. That’s done now thanks to the excellent work of Dade Ronan at Win at Web. Thanks, Dade. You’re a genius!
So, if you’d be so kind, a donation to keep the site up would be marvelous.
by Lance Ralston | Apr 12, 2015 | English |
This 84th Episode of CS is titled Lost & is a brief review of The Church in the East.
I encourage you to go back and listen again to episode 72 – Meanwhile Back in the East, which conveyed a lot of detail about the Eastern Church & how it fared under the Mongols and Muslim Expansion in the Middle Ages.
Until that time, Christianity was widespread across a good part of the Middle East, Mesopotamia, Persia, & across Central Asia – reaching all the way to China. The reaction of Muslim rulers to the incipient Mongol affiliation with Christianity meant a systemic persecution of believers in Muslim lands, especially in Egypt, where Christians were regarded as a 5th Column. Then, when the Mongols embraced Islam, entire regions of Christians were eradicated.
Still, even with these deprivations, Christianity continued to live on in vast portions of across the East.
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by Lance Ralston | Apr 5, 2015 | English |
This special episode of CS posts to the sanctorum.us website on Easter Sunday, 2015. I realize many subscribers will hear it at a later time, but since each week’s episode posts early Sunday morning, and this is Resurrection Sunday, a special podcast seemed appropriate. This week, we’ll be taking a look at the place of the celebration of Easter in the Early Church.
There’s considerable controversy over the origin of the word Easter as the label that’s come to be attached to the Christian commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ. It’s best to see the word coming from the Germanic languages & the Teutonic goddess of Spring, Eastre. Her festival marked the vernal equinox, & with the arrival of Christianity the holiday morphed to be the anniversary of the resurrection of Christ.
Today you’ll occasionally hear someone connect the word Easter to the Canaanite goddess Astarte, the Babylonian Ishtar, or some such other ancient deity. While there may be some etymological connection between the Teutonic Eastre & the Mesopotamian Ishtar, it’s submerged under the mists of time.
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by Lance Ralston | Mar 29, 2015 | English |
This is the 7th and last episode in our series The Long Road to Reform.
In Italy, the Renaissance was a time of both prosperity and upheaval.
Moderns of the 21st C are so accustomed to thinking of Italy as one large unified nation it’s difficult to conceive of it as it was throughout MOST of its history; a patchwork of various regions at odds with each other. During the Middle Ages and a good part of the Renaissance, Italy was composed of powerful city states like Florence and Venice who vied endlessly with each other. Exacerbating the turmoil, was the interference of France and Germany who influenced affairs to their advantage.
It was within this mix of prosperity, intrigue, and emerging Renaissance ideals the papacy carried on during the last decades of the 15th Century.
I need to insert a cautionary footnote at this point. As this is the last of our series laying out the history for WHY the Reformation occurred, we need to deal with something that may be a bit unsettling for some of our listeners; the string of popes who were, how shall I describe them? Less than holy, less than the men of God others were. Even many loyal Roman Catholics acknowledge the men who’ve ridden Peter’s chair haven’t always been of sterling reputation. Not a few have been a ragged blight on the Holy See. That there was a string of them in the 15th Century helped set the stage for the Reformation.
And I hope this mini-series in CS has made it clear that Reform only became something OUTSIDE the Church when the decades old movement for it WITHIN the Church was forced to exit. Never forget Luther began a Roman monk and priest who was forced out.
During his reign in the mid-15th C, Pope Eugene IV sought to decorate Rome with the new artistic styles of the early Renaissance. He recruited Fra Angelico and Donatello. This began a trend among the Popes to imbibe the ideas of the Renaissance, especially in regard to art. They sought to adorn the city with palaces, churches, and monuments worthy of its place as the capital of Christendom. Some of the popes moved to greatly enlarge the papal library.
All this construction wasn’t cheap, especially the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica. So the popes came up with new ways to raise funds. A subject we’ll come back to later.
Not all Renaissance popes focused on the arts. Some were warlords who led military campaigns. Others took delight in playing the high-stakes game of political intrigue.
Eugene IV was succeeded by Nicholas V, who spent his term from 1447 to 55 trying to gain political dominance over the Italian states. His goal was to turn Rome into the intellectual center of Europe. He recruited the best authors and artists. His personal library was said to be the best. But, being a scholar didn’t preclude him being brutal. He ruthlessly pursued and executed any who opposed him. During his reign, Constantinople fell to the Turks. He called for a great Crusade to retake the City, but everyone knew he only wanted it to increase his own prestige, so they ignored him.
His successor was Calixtus III, who served only 3 years. Calixtus was the first pope of the Spanish family of Borgia. Under the guise of standing against an invasion by the Turks, Calixtus embarked on a campaign to unite Italy by military conquest. Nepotism reach a new height during his reign. One of the many relatives Calixtus elevated was his grandson Rodrigo, whom he appointed as a cardinal. This Rodrigo would later become the infamous Alexander VI.
The next pope was Pius II who served from 1458 to 64. Pius was the last of the Renaissance popes who took his office seriously. He tried to bring about the much-needed Reformation of the Church but his plan was stalled by powerful cardinals. Pius was a true scholar who began work on a vast Cosmography. Unable to complete the work before he died, it was instrumental in shaping the ideas of a certain Genoese ship’s captain named Cristofor Columbo.
Pius II was followed by Pope Paul II, an opportunist who, upon learning that his uncle, Eugene IV, had been made pope, decided a career as a churchman was more promising than his occupation as a tradesman. His main interest was collecting jewelry. His lust for luxury was proverbial, his concubines acknowledged by the papal court. Pope Paul wanted to recover the architectural glory of pagan Rome and devoted vast sums to the work. He died of internal bleeding, brought on by his debauchery.
Sixtus IV served from 1471 to 84 and came to power by literally buying the papacy. Corruption and nepotism reached new heights. His sole goal was to enrich his family, one of whom would become Pope Julius II. Under Sixtus, the church became a family business, and all Italy was involved in a series of wars and conspiracies whose sole purpose was to enrich the pope’s nephews. His favorite was Pietro who at the age of 26 he made a cardinal, the patriarch of Constantinople, and archbishop of Florence. Another nephew plotted the murder of one of the Medicis in Florence who was stabbed to death before the altar while saying mass. When the dead man’s relatives took revenge by hanging the priest who murdered him, the pope excommunicated the entire city of Florence and declared war.
Despite all these groteque shenanigans, history remembers Sixtus for something else entirely; the Sistine Chapel, which was named after him.
Before his election in 1484, Innocent VIII made a solemn vow to quit the nepotism that had become endemic to the Papacy. But as soon as he was pope he declared, since papal power was supreme, he wasn’t bound by the prior oath.
What’s the old phrase? “It’s good to be King.”
I guess we could also say, “It’s great to be Pope.”
Innocent VIII wasn’t! Innocent that is. He was the first pope to acknowledge several of his illegitimate children, on whom he heaped honors and wealth. Under the management of his son, the sale of indulgences became a shameless business proposition. Pope Innocent ordered Christendom to be cleared of all witches. Hundreds of innocent women were executed.
After Innocent’s death, Rodrigo Borgia bought the cardinals’ votes and became pope under the name of Alexander VI. He ruled from 1492 to 1503. Under Alexander, papal corruption reached its all-time zenith, or we should say, it’s nadir.
I hope Roman Catholic listeners don’t hear this and assume I’m just Catholic bashing. It’s Catholic scholars who chronicle all this. It’s simply a sad chapter in Church History.
Pope Alexander was a moral wretch who publicly committed all the capital sins, save for gluttony because of a persistent case of heartburn. The people of Rome, well-acquainted with Alexander’s excesses, said of him, “Alexander is ready to sell the keys, the altars, and even Christ himself. But, he’s within his rights, since he bought them.”
Alexander had numerous affairs with the wives of the men of court. These women gave him several children he openly acknowledged. The most famous of these were the infamous pair, Cesare and Lucrezia. Italy was besmirched by blood because of his many plots and wars. His court was so corrupt many fabricated tales were hatched. Sad, since there was no need to embellish the list of sins attached to his reign, which for long after hurt the reputation of the papacy.
Alexander VI died unexpectedly. The suspicion is that he mistakenly took a poison meant for another. His son Cesare had hoped to inherit the Holy See but was struck by the same ailment. So the cardinals elected Pius III, a reformer. He lasted 26 days before dying mysteriously. Can anyone say “Conspiracy?”
This brought Julius II to the papal seat, a worthy successor to Alexander.
When Popes are elected, they pick a name they want to take for their tenure as the head of the Church. The papal name gives us a hint how he sees his role; what he hopes to accomplish.
Julius was only the second to take that name, which exists as a harbinger for what he aimed to do. Appointed a cardinal by his uncle Sixtus IV, Julius modeled himself more after Julius Caesar than any saint. Like many of the popes of that era, Julius was a patron of the arts.
During his pontificate, Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel, and Raphael’s frescoes decorated the Vatican.
But this pope’s favorite pastime was war.
Visitors to the Vatican today are struck by the bright colors of the Swiss papal guard. The only way they could be called camouflage is if they were trying to hide in a Jason Pollock painting. It was Julius who reorganized the papal guard, dressing them in uniforms said to have been designed by none other than Michelangelo.
We might expect a Pope to make a poor general, but he was in fact so successful in his military and diplomatic exploits, it was rumored he might finally achieve the unification of Italy. Of course, France and Germany opposed these plans, but Julius defeated them both in diplomacy and on the battlefield. He died in 1513, earning the epithet, Julius the Terrible by his contemporaries.
He was succeeded by Giovanni, son of Lorenzo de Medici. Giovanni took the name of Leo X. Like his famous father, Leo was a patron of the arts. He failed to consolidate Julius’ military and political gains and in 1516 was forced to sign an agreement with Francis I of France that gave the king enormous authority in church affairs.
Leo’s immersion in the world of the arts overshadowed his pastoral concerns. He was determined to complete St. Peter’s in Rome. The financing of that project was the main purpose for the sale of indulgences that provoked the protests of a German monk named Martin Luther.
In our next episode, since we’ve now come right up to the Reformation in Europe, we’ll get caught up with our narrative of the Church in the East.
Martin, John, and Philip – that is Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon are just chomping at the bit to jump in.
by Lance Ralston | Mar 22, 2015 | English |
This is the 6th episode in our podcast mini-series The Long Road to Reform.
Much of the reform energy in the European Church of the Late Middle Ages was among the poor. Being poor meant being illiterate. The poor and illiterate don’t, as a rule, write books about their hopes and dreams. So it’s often from sources hostile to the reforming movements of this era we learn of them. That hostility colors the picture of them much of history since has regarded them by.
Wycliffe’s ideas lived on, not so much among scholars or nobles who initially endorsed them, as among the poverty-committed Lollards who went from village to village, carrying his reforms like torches, continually setting new places ablaze with reforming zeal. The Lollards preached a simple Gospel that contradicted a great deal of what commoners heard from local priests.
In Bohemia, the ideas of Jan Hus, at first so popular among the gentry, ended up being embodied by an Apocalyptic sect called the Taborites, made up largely of the illiterate poor.
Another movement took place in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance that rarely seems mention. We’ve already talked about how some women were drawn to the monastic life and lived in sequestered communities affiliated with a men’s compound. There were orders for women in both the Franciscans and Dominicans. But in the late Middle Ages, the number of women seeking inclusion in these orders swelled dramatically. So many applied, the orders had to limit their intake of new sisters. Those rejected didn’t just shrug their shoulders and go home; back to the default of being a wife and mother. Many of them decided—if the established orders wouldn’t take them, they’d form their own communities. Though not sanctioned by the Church, they devoted themselves to corporate lives of prayer, devotion, and poverty. Called beguines, [beg-geenz] their communities were usually large houses they converted into beguinages. Just what the word ‘beguine’ means is unclear; most likely a less than complimentary label assigned these women by critics. Because they lived outside the church sanction, they were suspected of being aberrant at best and probably downright heretical, if tested.
The Low Countries had many lay-Beguine orders from the 13th thru 16th Cs. While they lived in semi-monastic communities, they didn’t take formal religious vows. They promised not to marry, but only so long as they remained a Beguine, something they could step out of at any time. In a practical sense, the Beguines were an attempt to re-connect with the simplicity of the Gospel as it altered one’s relationship with God and others. So Beguines focused on personal devotion to God and the care of one’s fellow man. Their charitable works were well-known across Northern Europe.
Though the Church in many places passed rules banning these unofficial monastic communities, their popularity grew and soon men formed their own version. Such men where called “beg-hards” a word which eventually morphs into today’s “beggar.”
Another popular movement first appeared in 1260; the flagellants. They got off to a slow start, but by the 14th C, their numbers swelled.
While the personal discipline of flagellants took many forms, the primary method, the one yielding their name, was to whip themselves with the flagellum. Self-flagellation as penance for sin wasn’t new. It was a practice common to many monastic houses. Now it was a popular craze. Thousands of people from all levels of society lashed themselves till bloody, convinced by current events and the fiery preaching of Apocalyptic Announcers the end was near; that God was about to destroy the world for its failure to repent.
But don’t think this was all just a bunch of emotionally-worked up illiterates who’d been stoked into some kind of mass hysteria. No: Flagellants followed a specific rite of self-flagellation and other forms of personal mortification. The movement held to a rigid discipline. While the specific details altered over time and place, typically, those who wished to join the Flagellants did so for 33½ days. During that time they owed total obedience to their spiritual overseers.
Twice a day, Flagellants marched two by two while singing hymns to the local church. After praying to Mary, they went, still singing, to the public square. They formed a circle and knelt in prayer with bared backs. Then, as they prayed or sang, they commenced the lashes until their backs poured blood. Occasionally, one of their leaders would preach to them on the sufferings of Christ. Then they’d rise, cover their bleeding back and again, withdraw in an ordered procession. Besides these two daily public self-flagellations, they were committed to a private third.
As I said, they did this for 33½ days. But for ever after, they were supposed to renew the scourging annually on Good Friday.
At first, Church officials saw little danger in the movement. But flagellants soon began to refer to what they were doing as penance and a “second baptism;” a term the Early Church had used for martyrdom. This talk of self-induced penance concerned church officials because it threatened their hegemony. The Flagellants were accused of seeking to usurp the “power of the keys,” given only to St. Peter and his successors, the officially sanctioned church hierarchy who alone could prescribe proper penance.
In several countries, Flagellants were persecuted and eventually, the practice of public flagellation was abandoned. Despite this, the movement continued for generations. You can still find lingering echoes of the flagellants in the American Southwest.
There were individual instances of attempts at reform that took place all over Europe in the Late Middle Ages. I’ll give just one of those many tales. It centers on a man named Hans Böhm [Boohm] and the village of Nicklashausen, in Wurzburg, Germany.
During the Lenten Season of 1476, Hans, a young shepherd and street entertainer, claimed to have a vision of the Virgin Mary calling him to preach a message of radical reform. He burned the drum that was the means of his entertaining income in one of those Bonfires of the Vanities that had becomes popular across Europe.
Times were bad in the region of Wurzburg. Many crops had failed, yet the bishop oppressed the poor with ever higher taxes.
At first, Böhm preached on the need for repentance and a return to classic, Christian virtue. But being moved by the poverty of so many of the pilgrims that flocked to hear him, his message took on a more strident note. He began calling out the contrast between the commands of the Gospel and the greed and corruption of a corpulent clergy. As his popularity grew, he announced a day was coming when all would be equal, and all would work for a living; including those indolent, rich fat-cats who at that time were living of the labor of the good, honest, hard-working folk of Wurzburg.
He urged his nearly 50,000 followers to act in advance of that great day by refusing to pay taxes and tithes. He set a date when all would march together to claim their rights.
On the eve of the appointed day, the bishop’s soldiers seized him and dispersed his followers. Böhm was tried and convicted of being a heretic and burned.
That didn’t dissuade his followers who continued gathering at Nicklashausen. The bishop put the entire village under an interdict. Still they came. The archbishop of Mainz [Minez] ordered the Nicklashausen Church destroyed. So, now with no leader and no headquarters, Böhm’s movement dissolved. Many scholars believe they fueled the Anabaptist movement of the 16th C.
This was just one of many similar movements in the late Middle Ages where calls for justice merged with the cry for reform in the church. These movements were often put down by force of arms, which only served to further alienate commoners against the nobility and clergy. It was only a matter of time until enough of the clergy would themselves recognize the need to reform a Church grown too cozy with secular power.
Another factor fueling the call for Reform was the intellectual quagmire Scholasticism fell into in the Late Middle Ages. After reaching its zenith in Thomas Aquinas, scholastic theology morphed into the proverbial serpent that eats its own tail.
Scholasticism began as an attempt to provide a reasonable base for the Christian Faith.
John Duns Scotus used the tools developed BY Scholasticism to introduce a divide between faith and reason. William of Occam turned that divide in a great divorce and introduced a bifurcation between theology and philosophy that exists in the minds of many moderns today.
Scholastic theologians began to ponder such complex, and pointless, issues as à
1) Can God make a rock so big even He can’t lift it?
2) How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
3) Does God do good, because it is inherently and intrinsically good, or is it good because God does it?
While these questions may cause us to pause and say, “Huh, interesting,” to the hundreds of thousands of commoners who were concerned with having enough bread for tonight’s dinner, that the Church which was supposed to guardian their souls, pre-occupation with such things seemed a terrible waste of time and resources. While clergy were concerned with angels and pin heads; the peasantry began to think the pin-heads were the clergy! They assumed there was a vast divide between religion and daily life. And THAT – was a totally new idea; one fostered by the excesses of a Scholasticism run-amok.
This is not to say all priests were died-in-the-wool Scholastics of the Scotus or Occam variety. Many of the clergy reacted against the complexities of late-Middle Age Scholasticism by calling for a return to the simplicity of the Gospel. The best-known book voicing this reaction is the classic, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’Kempis. The book asks, and I paraphrase à What good is it if you’re able to discuss the Trinity with great profundity, but lack humility, and thereby offend the Trinity? For high sounding words do not make one holy and just. Only a life of virtue is acceptable to God. Were you to memorize the entire Bible and all the sayings of the philosophers, what good would this be without the love of God and His grace? Vanity of vanities. All is vanity, except loving God and serving Him.
Now, much could be said at this point, as we trace the Road to Reform, which is the theme of this series within CS, about the Renaissance. And the fact is much HAS BEEN SAID about it. So I’m not going to. I certainly have nothing to add to what far more learned and erudite teachers have written and said on the subject. I suspect that not a few of our CS subscribers know a whole lot MORE about his subject than I.
So let me sum it up by offering this . . .
While we call it the Renaissance, Rebirth; it would be wrong to assume the Middle Ages were left behind, dropped like a cast-off doll. Yes, the people of Renaissance Europe knew their societies were going through a monumental shift and that new ideas were afoot. But the Renaissance was built on a foundation provided by the Middle Ages, it was not a clean break from it.
As the Turks took over the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire folded, many scholars moved West, bringing their manuscript-treasures with them. These manuscripts were in Greek, a language that by the 13th C had been nearly lost in Europe. These Eastern scholars revived it and presided over a reinvestment of study in the ancient classics of the Greco-Roman world. Those works fueled even more study as scholars realized the brilliance of writers like Cicero and Aristotle. This literary awakening began in Italy then spread beyond the Alps.
This interest in antiquity was also seen in art. Sculptors, architects, and painters sought inspiration in pagan sources rather the Christian themes that had dominated their craft for hundreds of years. And though they imbibed, then emulated the styles of the Classical Era, they didn’t wholly abandoned the Gothic. Renaissance art is in many ways a fusion of Gothic and Classical as those who’ve been to Florence and Rome know.
This interest in a return to the Classical Era coincided with Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in 1439. Printing had long been done by inked woodcuts pressed on paper. Gutenberg’s invention had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, but it took a while – for a reason not often mentioned.
It turns out that most early printing was difficult to read because it was in either Latin or Greek rather than the vernacular. And the typography of the day imitated, get this à handwritten script. So printed books looked LIKE they’d been hand-written rather than printed! Why was that? Because only the wealthy could afford books prior to the printing press. So it was the wealthy who bought books. The printing press was originally conceived of as a way to make expensive books more cheaply for rich people. Only later did printers work out the economics and realize they could make a lot more money by standardizing their type and printing lot of books at cheaper prices.
Gutenberg didn’t even publicize his invention. His original aim was to produce a large numbers of books he could sell as expensive manuscripts. So, rather than simplifying the printed page, he made it as elaborate as any traditional hand-written manuscript. Take a look at a Gutenberg Bible if you get a chance – and you’ll see this laid out before you.
Eventually though, printers realized how their presses could be used to mass produce books, and deep learning was made available for people who never thought it possible. Put in those books dangerous new ideas about reform, and who knows what might happen?
We’ll conclude our series The Road to Reform next episode as we take a look at the Popes of the Renaissance and see why so many in Europe were so, so ready for Reform.
by Lance Ralston | Mar 15, 2015 | English |
This is the 5th episode in the podcast mini-series we’re calling “The Long Road to Reform.”
What do you think of when I say “The Inquisition”?
Many shudder. Some get a queasy feeling in their stomach because of the way the Inquisition has been cast in novels and movies. There’s a bit of truth in that portrayal, one-sided and stereo-typed as it may be.
We’re backing up yet again in our timeline as we take a closer look at this sad chapter of Church History.
The 4th Lateran Council of 1215 was the high-water mark of the medieval papacy under Innocent III. The Council was little more than a rubber-stamp committee for Innocent’s reforms. Those brought much needed positive change to the morals of the clergy, but installed structures that worked against later reform. The 4th Lateran Council established the doctrine of transubstantiation and the sacrament of penance. It also made official the Inquisition, which had begun as a commission of inquiry under Pope Alexander III a generation before, but now became a permanent feature.
The major challenge Innocent III faced was from the Albigensians, AKA the Cathars, inhabiting Southern France. Since we covered this maybe-heretical group in an earlier episode, we’ll just say that, if the reports by their opponents about them are true, they were a dualistic pseudo-Christian cult-turned-movement that possessed a lot of energy during its relatively short life. Innocent sought to convert them by preaching and debates, but early efforts met with little success. So he approved a Crusade against them from 1209 that lasted the next 20 yrs. The Crusade crushed the Albigensians, devastating Southern France in the process. It was the Albigensians that so provoked Dominic, and propelled his efforts in launching the Dominicans.
Though this heresy was eventually put down, their earlier success convinced Innocent the Church would be better served if it had a means to conduct official investigations into questions of doctrine. Earlier popes authorized bishops to investigate accused heretics based on rumor alone. It was up to the accused to prove their innocence. This became the foundational premise of the Inquisition.
The Inquisition was an ecclesiastical institution whose aim was to search out and punish heretics. The punishment for heresy was death, since heresy was regarded on par with treason and witchcraft; crimes that stood to imperil the health and well-being of thousands. In 1199, Innocent III issued a decretal saying for the first time that heresy was treason under Roman law.
In the late 12th C, bishops turned confirmed heretics over to secular authorities for execution. The 4th Lateran Council confirmed these regulations and threatened excommunication of temporal rulers who failed to rid their territory of heresy.
In 1229, the Synod of Toulouse drew up the procedures for seeking out and punishing heresy. The Inquisitor was subject to no law outside the Pope’s authority and word. He was prosecutor and judge. The “trial” was secret, with the accused having to prove their innocence, as in all courts following Roman law, without the benefit of counsel or knowledge of the accusers.
The final step came in 1252 when Pope Innocent IV authorized torture as a means of getting information and confessions from accused heretics.
Till then, Church leaders and thinkers rejected with horror the very thought of using torture. But no such reserve remained after Innocent III ascended the papal throne and the Catholic Church achieved its majestic and powerful unity. Noteworthy among the tortures used by the Inquisition is that, while execution was still carried out by the civil government, it was priests who did the torturing, with fire, stretching on the rack, or beatings that allowed no blood-letting. Remember, good Christians can’t shed blood.
It was an ugly business, but following the ideas of Augustine, almost everyone agreed that saving the body by amputating a rotten limb was the path of wisdom. The Church was the body; the heretic the rotten limb. One more abhorrent idea we can attribute to Augustine.
The Inquisition developed a complex system for classifying heresy and heretics. There were heretics who simply added additional beliefs to the essentials; then there were those who denied those essentials. There were perfect and imperfect heretics. Those accused of heresy were categorized as lightly suspect, vehemently suspect, or violently suspect.
Typically, the Inquisitor would arrive in a town and begin his work by preaching a sermon calling for people to bring forth charges against those they knew were guilty of something damnable, or confessing something in themselves they feared was aberrant. People were given a period of grace to make this initial confession. This was called the “General Inquisition.” When that period expired, the “Special Inquisition” began and the accused were summoned to trial.
The Inquisitor then functioned as Prosecutor, Judge and Jury. The trial was held in secret, the testimony of only two witnesses enough to condemn. The accused most often wasn’t even aware of the charges against them. So they had no context for answering questions. Witnesses weren’t named but there was no defense attorney. Well, there might have been, except for the fact that any lawyer who rode defense was likely to then be brought up on charges himself.
Trials could last years, while the accused was kept in prison. Once torture was applied, it was kept on until a confession was secured. All this because the Inquisition followed strict rules. One of them the repeating of torture. It could only be used ONCE; in one hearing, which might last months, even years. So, once torture was applied, it was with the understanding the victim would either die or confess. As I said, the Inquisition followed a strict set of rules, except when it didn’t; which as a rule, was often.
Children, the elderly, and pregnant women were exempt from torture. Except when they weren’t.
Those convicted of lighter charges then recanted their error were allowed to do penance and bore physical markers of their having fallen afoul of the Inquisition for the rest of their lives. The worst of the heretics were hauled to the stake. Their lands and possessions confiscated by the Inquisitor, who kept them, adding them to the Church’s treasury, or sold off. The heirs of heretics who’d lost lands were technically able to reclaim them, but were practicably rarely able to.
The Inquisition met with varying success around Europe. In Spain, it was co-opted by the crown. The Spanish Inquisition then became a thing of abject terror; what most think of today when they hear the word “Inquisition.” The Spanish Inquisition was turned to both religious and political ends, with the accused often being convicted more for the acquisition of their property than for heresy.
In Germany, the Inquisition was fierce under the zealous fanatic Conrad of Marburg, but when he was murdered, it fizzled out. France’s Inquisitorial campaign differed from North to South. In Southern France, Inquisitors continued to root out the Cathars, while in the North, trials were often a reflection of old feuds, with nobles accusing one another for political and economic ends. Italy, with its patchwork of provinces saw spotty application of the Inquisition. In England, it hardly appeared.
Modern Christians find it nearly impossible to understand the medieval attitude toward heresy. We regard faith as a matter of personal choice and seldom think of religious beliefs as a matter of life and death. Why should anyone die for their faith, or kill another for theirs?
In Medieval Europe, Christians would consider our modern view equally odd. Faith wasn’t a private and individual intellectual preserve. The Christian Faith was the cement of society. Denial of a single article of the Faith was understood as a kind of treason because it imperiled one’s neighbors. An apostate or heretic, if not punished by the civil authorities might incur God’s wrath. He might punish those who let the heretic get away with error.
The heavy emphasis on the individual that’s such a prominent feature of the Modern Western world is very far from the collective community that dominated the thinking of Medieval Europe. There was no such thing as private religious faith. Society itself was thought to be a manifestation of the Christian faith. The Church was society’s soul. Under such a worldview, heresy was a spiritual malady that imperiled well à Everything!
So the question follows: What is heresy? In the 12th C, it was the denial by a Christian of any doctrine of the Christian faith. But the list of what were considered inviolable doctrines was a bit different from what Protestants hold as essentials today. The unity of the Church and the divine appointment of the Pope as head of the Church were part and parcel of the standard body of beliefs Christians were to hold. Variance from the beliefs of the official Church was considered heresy.
In dealing with heretics, the church had 2 objectives:
First was the return of the heretic to a position of approved faith.
Second—The protection of Christian society.
The central question was—How far can the Church go to protect the Faith and the Society that Faith sustained? Is it right to take a life in order to protect other lives, not just their physical lives, but their eternal souls?
We won’t understand the Medieval world’s posture toward heresy until we understand it in these terms. The Church viewed itself as the moral and spiritual steward of European civilization.
The challenge of heresy drove the Western Roman Church to its greatest internal conflict: The question of how the Church could employ violence as a safeguard to orthodoxy and a peaceful society? The tragic answer to that question was the Inquisition; a permanent blight on the Church’s reputation. The Inquisition demonstrates what happens when people substitute common sense, political expediency, and pure reason for Biblical fidelity. On the surface, it’s impossible to get from the crucified Christ who said “Follow Me,” to the horrors of the Inquisition. Yet à the prosecutors of the reign of terror known as the Inquisition saw themselves as the agents of Christ. The Inquisition not only executed heretics, it first subjected them to prolonged torture. In driving out one demon, the Church opened the door for 7 others. But, the absurdity of the entire thing wasn’t apparent at the time. Oh sure, there were a few who were uncomfortable with what was being done in God’s name, but they kept silent for fear of being the Inquisition’s next victim. Most went along with the Inquisition because the pace for killing in the name of God had already been set by the Crusades. A Church that sent crusading armies against infidels could certainly condemn and execute heretics. Everyone agreed a pure church was the will of God. The question was how to get there.
While there were real threats to the doctrinal purity of the Church, many of the attacks the Church faced came from genuine believers who saw corruption in the clergy and wanted reform. It was easy for those church leaders being called out to use the power of their office to brand their critics as heretics and bring down the full weight of society on their sorry heads. Other critics didn’t attack corrupt clergy, but rather—beliefs that diverged from Scripture. While these doctrinal challenges occasionally did see a realignment with God’s Word, more often they were labeled as pernicious assaults by the forces of hell and the challenger was summarily done away with.
One of the earliest voices against the worldliness of the Roman Church was Arnold, Abbot at Brescia, in northern Italy. In a sermons series, Arnold said the vices of the clergy were a result of the Church’s marriage to civil power. He urged the Church to surrender its property and secular influence back to the civil government and return to the poverty and simplicity of the early church. He said that the True Church’s mission was the Gospel.
By 1139 Arnold managed to raise enough support that he turned the people against their bishop. Pope Innocent II banished Arnold from Italy. He went to Paris where he studied under Abelard, another thorn in the Church’s side.
After 5 years in exile, Arnold returned to Rome and joined a movement to overthrow the Pope. The Romans, filled with dreams of the ancient Roman republic, seized power during the Pope’s absence and Arnold became the leader of a new, purely secular government. He announced that the clergy should live in apostolic poverty, and denounced the College of Cardinals as a den of thieves.
Arnold and his group managed to retain power for 10 years before Pope Hadrian IV placed Rome under an interdict and persuaded the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to intervene. Arnold was captured and executed a year later in 1155 by being burnt. The final insult was having his ashes thrown in the Tiber River.
People had barely forgotten Arnold when another voice for reform arose in eastern France, Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons. One day Waldo heard a wandering troubadour singing the virtues of the monastic life. The ballad was about young Alexis whose wealthy Roman parents pressed him into an arranged marriage. But the reluctant groom was dedicated to the ideal of chastity, so on his wedding night he made a pact of virgin purity with his bride and immediately left for the Holy Land. Alexis’ parents searched for him in vain. Years later he returned home a beggar, so emaciated from his lifestyle of self–denial no one recognized him. He lived in the courtyard on scraps from the family table. Only as he lay dying did he reveal his identity, too late for the grieving family to claim him.
The moral of the Ballad was clear to Peter à A Christian must be willing to sacrifice everything in this life for the sake of the next. Struck to the heart by the story, he sought a priest to find out how to live like Christ. The priest turned him to the answer Jesus gave to the rich young ruler in Matt. 19:21: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” The same text 9 centuries before had launched the monastic movement with Anthony in Egypt, first of the Desert Fathers.
Waldo determined to follow the same path. He provided an adequate income for his wife, placed his two daughters in a convent, and gave the rest of his estate to the poor. To launch his mission, Waldo enlisted a couple priests to translate portions of the Bible into French. After memorizing long passages, Waldo began teaching commoners how to imitate Christ by practicing voluntary poverty. His innovations lay in applying the life of poverty and discipleship to all believers , not just monks, as Francis soon would. As followers joined his growing ranks, Waldo sent them out 2 by 2, after the apostolic pattern, into villages and market places, to teach and explain the Scriptures. They called themselves the “Poor in Spirit.” We know them as Waldenses.
But Waldo’s unauthorized preaching soon met the opposition by the Archbishop of Lyon, who ordered him to stop. Waldo refused, quoting Peter in Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than men”. The Archbishop excommunicated him.
Waldo and his followers appealed to the Pope. They arrived in Rome and found it crowded with churchmen attending the 3rd Lateran Council of 1179. They were able to gain a hearing before the Council but had the misfortune of being ridiculed by a smooth, fast–talking Englishman named Walter Map. Pope Alexander III found no evidence of heresy among them and was impressed by their poverty. They were mere laymen, however, so he ruled that they could preach only by the invitation of bishops, which of course was highly unlikely.
Peter Waldo was convinced the Scriptures commanded him to preach to the poor with or without approval. Along with a growing bevy of followers, he continued to preach and practice apostolic poverty. The movement spread into southern France and across the Alps into Italy. By 1184, their disobedience compelled Pope Lucius III to excommunicate them.
The conflict is understandable. The Waldenses wanted to purify the church by a return to the simple life of the apostles. This meant the surrender of worldly power. Their aim, like that of the Roman church, was salvation. But their means were radically different.
The Pope couldn’t renounce the church’s right to give the sacraments; He couldn’t forfeit the priesthood, nor admit that faith in God might be something other than the mandates of Rome made it. From their side, the Waldenses came to feel more and more that no teaching except Christ’s was binding. The Scriptures must rule. But how could they find support for their cause if everyone lived in apostolic poverty? Slowly they came to accept—just as early monastic houses had—two levels of Christian commitment. The main members of the movement were bound by special vows and worshiped together in simple services. Another circle of “friends” remained in the main Catholic church but supplied new recruits and support for the movement.
Even after their excommunication, the Waldenses gained so many members the Church launched an all-out assault on them, encouraging some of the Crusades to begin in Europe by practicing the skills they’d need to use on the Muslims, by slaughtering the Waldenses.
The Waldenses were so clearly a back–to–the–Bible movement that over the years some have called them “reformers before the Reformation.” Compared to the Roman church’s doctrine of papal authority, the Waldensian call to return to the Bible does indeed sound like Luther or Calvin. But their view of salvation, a life of penance and poverty, lacks the clear note of God’s grace that sounded so powerfully in the Reformation.
by Lance Ralston | Mar 8, 2015 | English |
This is the 4th episode in a mini-series we’re calling “The Long Road to Reform.”
It was late Spring of 1490 when a Dominican friar stood at the gates of Florence. This was not the first time the 33 year old Girolamo [ger-all-a-mo] had made the 160 KM / 100 miles trip from his native Ferrara to the city of the Medici’s. He’d lived for a spell in the city. The Florentines admired his scholarship but were put off by the vehemence of his preaching. They had a hard time adapting to his accent. But now he returned at the invitation of Lorenzo de Medici; Lorenzo the Magnificent, who virtually owned Florence, and to whom he’d been recommended by the famous philosopher Mirandola.
Girolamo Savonarola joined the monastery of St. Mark and began a series of lectures for his fellow friars. Soon others joined the sessions causing them to relocate to the main hall. The lectures turned into sermons. By the Lenten Season of 1491, Savonarola’s growing fame saw him invited to preach at the main church in Florence. Short on tact, Savonarola lambasted the decadence of the city’s rich, of which there were not a few. Lorenzo de Medici was especially displeased. Who did this upstart think he was? He’d only come to Florence at Lorenzo’s invitation. This was no way for a guest in HIS city to act. Medici hired another preacher to attack Savonarola. It failed since the people sided with Savonarola. He’d become their champion in decrying the exorbitant luxuries of the wealthy.
The mercenary preacher refused to accept defeat. He went to Rome to plot his revenge.
Savonarola was then elected prior of St. Mark’s and within a short time, reformed the life of the community so thoroughly, the people of Florence all remarked on how holy the order had grown. Savonarola sold off some of the monastery’s estates and gave the proceeds to the poor.
Savonarola’s reputation was unimpeachably. Though bitter enemies, when Lorenzo lay dying, he asked for the prior to come bless him. Lorenzo’s successor was Pietro de Medici, who promptly lost all respect from the Florentines. The French King, Charles VIII, was on his way to claim the rule of Naples. Instead of organizing the defense of Florence as he ought, Pietro tried to buy him off. The Florentines were furious and sent their own embassy under Savonarola. They expelled the now hated Pietro and settled with the French by becoming allies. Though Savonarola was technically just a monastic prior, he’d become the civil leader. The Florentines asked him to design a new government. He recommended a republic and installed reforms to heal the ailing economy. He gathered a good part of the gold and silver of the many city churches and sold it to feed the poor. This was the high-water mark of his term.
History regards Savonarola as a religious fanatic & ignorant monk. He wasn’t. He was simply someone who understood that the Church and Italian society had gone far from the Biblical ideal. What Savonarola was, was an anti-politician. That is, he had little to no capacity for compromise; doom for anyone engaged in civil politics. Savonarola was unable to distinguish between rules and principles; between non-negotiables and his own opinions. As a result, he was on a collision course with the very people who’d put him in power.
Savonarola believed study ought to be at the center of reformation. So the friars at St. Mark’s studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. He railed against the luxuries of the wealthy, placing them all under the rubric “vanity.” These vanities, he railed, were a distraction that weakened the soul and made it prone to sin. So, at his urging the people of Florence regularly gathered to pile such vanities up and set them ablaze. First, a large pile of wood was erected in the main square. Under it was placed straw and kindling sprinkled with gunpowder. Onto of the pile people put their vanities; frilly dresses, jewelry, wigs, and ostentatious furniture. Amidst singing and ceremony, the thing was set on fire – a Bonfire of the Vanities. These bonfires replaced the traditional celebration of carnival just before Lent, something else Savonarola had banned.
His reforms were echoed in surrounding cities. When Florence’s rival republic of Siena requested Savonarola’s assistance, he went with twenty fellow monks. They arrived in Siena and went to work with their reforms. First order of business was to clear house in the monastery there. When some of the expelled monks resisted the reforms, Savonarola decided if they weren’t going along with his plans, he’d leave. He had more luck at Pisa and the monasteries scattered round Tuscany.
As we might expect, Savonarola’s downfall came about because of his inability to play the political game.
Alexander VI, one of the worst of the popes, made an alliance against France that included a good part of Italy, Germany, and Spain. The smart move was to join the pope’s party. But Savonarola insisted on keeping his promise to the French. The pope responded with severe measures against Savonarola personally, then against all Florence. These measures were largely economic in nature. When the Florentines realized they’d lost a great deal of trade because their pastor was being stubborn, opposition grew. The City became increasingly fractured between supporters and opponents. On the opponent’s side were most of the wealthy. His supporters declared Savonarola a prophet and demanded he perform miracles. When something he foretold came to pass, they grew even more enthusiastic. But when he failed to perform the required miracles, they turned on him.
A mob marched on St. Mark’s to apprehend him. Savonarola refused to defend himself. He forbade friends resisting the mob lest an innocent be harmed. He was hauled to the City Square where he was beaten and turned over to the authorities, some of whom had longed for this day for years.
This was it; the civil showdown. The authorities had to find something damning to accuse him of. To elicit a confession, he was tortured for days. But the most they could make him confess to was something he’d never claimed to begin with; being a prophet.
The pope sent legates to assist in the trial. These also tortured Savonarola. All they could obtain was an admission he’d planned to appeal to a church council. Savonarola admitted he’d been too proud in his call for reform, saying, “Lord, if even Peter, on whom you had bestowed so many gifts and graces, failed so thoroughly, what else could I do?”
Despairing of finding charges severe enough to execute him, the judges condemned Savonarola and two friends as “heretics and schismatics,” without identifying what heresy they espoused. They were turned over to the civil authorities to be executed, for again, the Church must not kill. The only mercy Savonarola received was that he and his friends were hanged before being burned. Their ashes were then thrown into the Arno River flowing through Florence. This was considered the height of infamy. By scattering one’s ashes, there was nothing left of them to remember; no place people could mark a memorial and keep their name alive. In spite of this, there were many of Savonarola’s supporters who kept his relics.
I’ve been to Florence and stood at his little memorial on the paving stones of the Main Square.
Years after his death, when Rome was sacked by the Germans, some saw it as the fulfillment of Savonarola’s prophecy. To this day, there are those in the Roman Church who argue Savonarola was a saint, and that his name should be added to the official list.
As we end this episode, I wanted to take a quick moment to say thanks to all the new CS subscribers and the many of you who’ve liked us on FB, or written a review on iTunes.
by Lance Ralston | Mar 1, 2015 | English |
This is part three of “The Long Road to Reform.”
In our last episode we looked at The Conciliar Movement that formed to end the Great Papal Schism and so many hoped would be a permanent fixture for reform in the Church. As well-intentioned as the movement was, it ended up resurrecting the Schism instead of solving it. In its long battle with the Papacy, Conciliarism eventually lost.
We turn now to look at a reformer from Bohemia named John Hus; or more properly Jan Hus. One of my personal, all-time favorite church leaders.
Bohemia was an important part of the Holy Roman Empire; a sovereign state with its capital at Prague. Today, it roughly corresponds with the Czech Republic. It had a long history as a place of vibrant Christianity, especially monasticism. In 1383, Bohemia and England were linked by the marriage of Anne of Bohemia and the English King Richard II. With this union, students of both countries went back and forth between the colleges of Prague and Oxford where the pre-reformer John Wycliffe.
The revolt Wycliffe started at Oxford, expanded when he was booted and met with greater success in Bohemia than England because unlike England, it was joined to a strong national party led by a man named Jan Hus.
Hus came from peasant parents in the southern Bohemian town of Husinetz. He studied theology at the University of Prague, earning a Master of Arts before teaching there and diving into the cause of religious reform.
While a student, Hus was introduced to the early philosophy of Wycliffe, but it was only after his appointment as the pastor at Bethlehem Chapel that was exposed to Wycliffe’s more radical views on religious reform. He immediately adopted Wycliffe’s views that the church was an invisible company of the elect, with Jesus as its head rather than a Pope.
Bethlehem Chapel was located near the University of Prague, giving Hus an open door to circulate Wycliffe’s writings. As his ideas took hold, paintings began to appear on the walls of the church contrasting the behavior of the popes and Christ. In one, the pope rode a horse while Jesus walked barefoot. Another showed Jesus washing the disciples’ feet as the pope’s were kissed.
Bethlehem Chapel had been founded in 1391 to encourage the national faith of Bohemia, so Hus’s strong sermons in Bohemian stirred up popular support for reform. And wouldn’t you know it? Where do you think the first protests came from–That’s right: Students rioted both for and against the ideas of Wycliffe being promoted by Hus and his supporters.
The Archbishop of Prague realized the threat Hus’s activities had for the upper echelons of Church Hierarchy and complained to the pope. The Pope responded, “Root out the heresy.” So the Archbishop excommunicated Hus. Bad move; for right away the Archbishop realized how little local support he had. When Hus realized he held the backing of the people, he ramped up his criticisms and attacked the pope’s sale of indulgences to support of his war against Naples. That was too much for the Bohemian King Wenceslas. Hus might have the support of the common people, but his condemnation of the sale of indulgences impacted a political issue the king didn’t want messed with. Negotiations between the Pope and king saw Prague being placed under a papal interdict; a political and religious slap on the wrist that had an immediate impact on people across the board. When under an interdict, people remained members of the church, but the sacraments were suspended. All of this happened because of Hus, so he left Prague to live in exile in southern Bohemia. It was during this time Hus wrote his most notable work, titled On the Church.
The Council of Constance we recently looked at was fast approaching. This was the council set to solve the problem of the Great Papal Schism. At the urging of the Emperor Sigismund, Hus agreed to appear. He hoped to present his views on the nature of the Church to the members of the Council. He ended up instead a victim of the Inquisition.
The rule of the Inquisition was simple. If enough witnesses testified to the guilt of the accused, he had to confess and renounce his error or he’d be executed by being burned, because, well – being good churchmen, they couldn’t shed blood. If the accused confessed, the sentence was life in prison, which in most cases was hardly better than being burnt at the stake. Hus’s case was handled in a manner typical for the Inquisition of that time. Greedy Inquisitors often went after someone simply because they lusted for their property. So people were accused of some grievous crime and there were usually enough witnesses-for-hire around who’d say whatever the Inquisitors paid them to. In Hus’s case, the Inquisitors weren’t after his wealth; the Church simply wanted him gone, so he was accused and found guilty of heresies he’d never taught.
Now, Hus said he’d alter his views—IF they could be shown to be contrary to Scripture. But he refused to recant the heresies he’d been falsely accused of. It was a matter of principle; to recant of them, he’d have to admit he taught them. He hadn’t. How could he recant something he’d never taught? But the Inquisitors were adamant: Hus must recant.
In words similar to what Martin Luther would say some time later while on Trial at Worms, Hus said, “I have said that I would not, for a chapel full of gold, recede from the truth. . . . I know that the truth stands and is mighty forever, and abides eternally, with whom there is no respect of persons.”
It’s clear in the letters Hus wrote at this time his main anxiety was that “liars would say I’ve slipped back from the truth I preached.” This trial of Hus is one of those special stand-out moments in church history. His fidelity and refusal to swerve from Truth, even to save his life was duplicated many times over by thousands of the un-named, but it was Hus who forged the template.
For 8 months he lay in prison in Constance. His letters during his last month rank among the great in Christian literature.
“O most holy Christ,” he prayed, “draw me, weak as I am, after Yourself, for if You do not draw us we cannot follow You. Strengthen my spirit, that it may be willing. If the flesh is weak, let Your grace precede us; come between and follow, for without You we cannot go for Your sake to cruel death. Give me a fearless heart, a right faith, a firm hope, a perfect love, that for Your sake I may lay down my life with patience and joy. Amen.”
On July 6th, 1415 Jan Hus was led out of his cell and began the walk to the place where he was to be burned. On the way he passed thru a churchyard and saw a bonfire of his books. He laughed, and told those looking on not to believe the lies being passed around about him. On arriving at the stake in a spot called The Devil’s Place, Hus knelt and prayed. Following protocol, the official in charge of the execution asked him for the final time if he’d recant and save his life. Hus replied, “God is my witness that the evidence against me is false. I have never thought nor preached except with the one intention of winning men, if possible, from their sins. In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught, and preached; today I will gladly die.”
The Inquisitors thought Hus’s condemnation and execution would put the kibosh on the calls for Reform. They thought burning Hus was a kind of back-fire that would put out the forest-fire lit by Wycliffe’s criticisms. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The Bohemian rebellion grew and developed into both a moderate and a militant wing. The moderates were called Utraquists, a Latin term meaning “both” since their protest called for freedom to receive both the bread and the cup in Communion.
The militants were called Taborites after the city in Bohemia that served as their headquarters. This was an apocalyptic group that called for radical reform.
Facing armed resistance from the Bohemian King at the urging of the Pope, the various groups of Hus’s followers, loosely called Hussites, agreed to what’s called The Four Articles. Under the Articles, while the various groups might differ on this or that, they were far more united with each other in facing the King. The Four Articles were, à
1) The Word of God was regarded as the chief authority and was to be taught freely throughout the kingdom.
2) Per the Ultraquists, Communion would be given by BOTH bread and cup.
3) All agreed that clergy should give up their wealth and live in apostolic poverty.
4) Simony and any other public sin was to be punished.
When King Wenceslas died in 1419, his successor was Sigismund, the guy who’d failed Hus at Constance. The Hussites demanded he agree to the Four Articles and grant them freedom of worship. Sigismund refused and petitioned the Pope to proclaim a Crusade against them. The Pope agreed and Sigismund marched on Prague where he and his army was crushed by the Hussites.
Their leader was Jan Zizka who turned the many peasant carts into a kind of war chariot. In a follow up battle, the remnant of Sigismund’s army was wiped out. Then, a year later, an army of a hundred thousand crusaders fled yet again before Zizka’s carts. A 3rd Crusade, a year after that, in 1422, dissolved before it even met them.
Under different leaders, the Bohemians crushed 2 later Crusades called against them, one in 1427 and the other in 31. The Council of Basel extended an olive branch to the Hussites, but they, fearing the same treatment Hus had met at Constance, refused. So yet ANOTHER Crusade was called against them. This was also put down. Good Grief! When are these people going to learn?
Actually, this defeat convinced the Catholics negotiation with the Hussites was necessary. As a result of that negotiation, the church in Bohemia rejoined the rest of Western Christendom, but was allowed to retain Ultraquist communion as well as a modified form of the Four Articles.
While most of the nobility accepted this arrangement and honored Sigismund as King, many of the commoners left the Church, and formed the Unitas Fratrum—or “Union of Brethren.” Their numbers grew in Bohemia and nearby Moravia.
They’ll become closely aligned with the Reformation later.
What the lives of Wycliffe and Hus make clear is that if the Church of Rome was going to be reformed from within, it had ample opportunity in the 14th and early 15th Cs. By the end of the 15th , those who hoped to bring reform by councils were themselves frustrated and by their opponents, repudiated. The treatment of Wycliffe and Hus by church authorities made clear to all the reform-minded how they were going to be dealt with. It was now clear: Reform of the papal church from within was impossible. A time of “judgment” had come.
In our next episode, we’ll take a look at an Italian Reformer from a bit later in the 15th C; Savonarola.
by Lance Ralston | Feb 22, 2015 | English |
This is part 2 of “The Long Road to Reform.”
Before diving into the THE Reformation, we’ll do some review and add detail to the story of the Church. We do this because I fear too many of us may have the impression Martin Luther and John Calvin were wild aberrations. That they just sprang up out of nowhere. Many Protestants assume the Roman Catholic Church got progressively more corrupt during the Late Middle Ages and that Luther was a lone good guy who stood up and said, “Enough!” Many Roman Catholics would agree that the late medieval Church got a bit off but see what Luther did as a gross over-reaction that took him off the rails.
So in this series of podcasts within the larger Church-story, I want to make sure we understand The Reformation was the inevitable result of a long attempt at reform that had gone on for awhile. To do that, we need to go back over some of the ground we’ve already covered.
Pope Clement V made his headquarters the French city of Avignon. For the next 70 years, the popes resided there and bent their policies to the advantage of the French throne. The rest of Europe wasn’t real excited about this, giving this period the title of “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.”
When Clement V died in 1314, the cardinals found it difficult to agree on a successor so they decided to elect a 72 year old, assuming he’d not last long, but it would afford them time to reach a consensus on a real pope. But Pope John XXII turned out be far more than a mere place-holder. He lived for 18 years and surprised everyone with his vigorous rule. Pope John was determined to make the Italians honor his papacy and sent troops to force down recalcitrant nobles. To finance these military excursions as well as funding the expansion of the papal court at Avignon, John devised a complex tax system. This only added to resentment against his rule.
In the decade Pope Clement VI reigned, nepotism in the Church reached new heights and the papal palace at Avignon rivaled those of the secular courts of Europe in pompous luxury.
Innocent VI made arrangements to move back to Rome but died before doing so.
The eight years of Pope Urban V were marked by reform. Urban was an austere man of great personal discipline. He simplified the life of the court and removed from office anyone who wouldn’t abide his reforms. In 1365, he returned to Rome to the acclaim of the people. But his policies weren’t pro-Italian enough and loyalty to him quickly eroded. When his rule was defied by large groups, he moved back to Avignon.
When Urban V died in 1370, Gregory XI was elected. Gregory’s uncle was Pope Clement VI who made him a cardinal at the age of 17. It’s that nepotism thing I mentioned a moment ago. This Gregory is the pope St. Catherine of Siena urged to return to Rome, we talked about in an earlier episode. On January 17, 1377, amid great rejoicing, Gregory entered Rome. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church was over and most assumed things would return to normal. It was not to be. The Great Papal Schism is just around the corner.
The Avignon Papacies engaged in numerous intrigues and conducted military forays into various regions of Europe that had to be funded. So the popes came up with ingenious ways to raise revenue that furthered corruption. When an ecclesiastical position was vacant, its income was sent to Avignon. So the popes rather preferred that these positons weren’t filled and churches went without bishops. When the positon WAS filled, it was auctioned off to the highest bidder in a return to the practice of simony Pope Gregory VII had worked so hard to end. Since these ecclesiastical offices were a source of income, some men managed to secure several of them. But, being that they could only be in one place at a time, they served as absentee landlords in their parishes. Added to this simony and absenteeism, the nepotism that marked the Avignon Papacy was so bad, by the end of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, there was a widespread sense of the need for radical reform of the Church. And since it was the papacy itself that needed reform, the voices calling for it increasingly understood reform would need to come from someone other than the Pope.
While I’d love to dive into the story of the Great Papal Schism, I don’t think it would make for very good podcast material. We’ve already given a decent summary of it in previous episodes. Any more would devolve into a long list of names that become a jumble. The intrigues that went on during this time are rich and complex and would make for a great TV miniseries. But we’re going to pass over it now and just say that the emergence of 2, then 3 popes all claiming to be Peter’s rightful heir is one more obvious evidence things had gone horribly awry in the leadership of the Western Church.
It became clear to everyone reform was needed. And in fact, many voices called for it.
During the Great Schism, the conciliar movement wanted to reform the structure of the church while leaving its doctrine alone. Others, like John Wycliffe, who we recently looked at, and Jan Hus we have yet to – concluded it wasn’t just the structure of the Church that needed reform; so did its doctrine.
As a backdrop to all this were the frequent popular movements, especially among the poor, who saw the Mongol threat to the East, the Hundred Years’ War, and the devastation of the Plague as harbingers of the End Times and potential judgments of God on a corrupt State and Church.
The Conciliar Movement arose to deal with the Great Schism. Church leaders realized the history of the church had been dramatically shaped by its councils. They’d kept it ON THE RAILS at times it was being threatened with de-railing. It began all the way back in the 4th C, when Constantine called the first at Nicaea. Other crises were solved by similar councils over the centuries. Then, when popes gained power, the councils became instruments to enforce their power. This was especially true in the famous Fourth Lateran Council, which adopted a long list of polices of Pope Innocent III.
But as papal authority diminished during the Great Schism, many hoped a new council would convene and undo the wrongs that had settled in as the status quo in both Church and State. As this theory grew, advocates said such a council held more authority than the pope because it would represent the WHOLE church, and not the partisan interests of one. Therefore, the council could select a new pope all could and should agree on.
Now, this may seem imminently reasonable to us in the 21st C, but the issue was tied up in a sticking point its advocates had a hard time resolving à and that was this:
Who had authority to call such a council. The first council was called by Constantine. Subsequent councils were convened by a notable church leader, and eventually by the popes. And—the findings of a council had to be officially endorsed by the Pope or they weren’t valid.
This problem was solved in 1409 when cardinals of both sides in the Great Schism, agreed to a great council in Pisa. è And they all lived happily ever after.
You know enough of the history of this period to know that’s not how the story goes. On the contrary, each of the rival popes called his own council to pre-empt the one at Pisa. You gotta’ wonder who would consent to such silliness and be on one of those councils. Wouldn’t you get an invitation and say, “Ah, thanks, I’m so honored. But, ummm, I have to decline. I need to uhhh, ummm – visit my dying uncle in Tuscany.”
It seems this was in fact what some did because both papal councils failed. So the rival popes retreated to strongholds to await the outcome of the Pisan Council. It had the support of both colleges of cardinals and most courts of Europe.
Rather than saying one of the two papal claimants was right, the council declared both unworthy and deposed them. The council then renewed opposition to simony and several other ecclesiastical ills. They elected Alexander V as the new Pope.
Convinced they’d ended the schism, the council adjourned.
Ready for some fun? Here we go . . .
All of this illustrates just how BADLY the Church needed reformation.
Though the Pisan Council deposed the rival popes and installed Alexander, they refused to step down and had enough support to retain their position, in title at least. So now there were 3 popes. Then, months after being elected, Alexander died, and the cardinals appointed John XXIII. Turmoil saw John flee to the German Emperor Sigismund, who was himself in a tussle with 2 claimants to the throne, each supporting a different pope.
Sigismund called another council to put an end to the now 3-way schism. John assumed this new council would endorse his papacy and agreed with Sigismund to call it in 1414 at Constance. The council realized John was not the reformer they needed and deposed him. He fled but was captured and returned to Constance where he agreed to resign. Worried he’d flee again and set up somewhere else, he was consigned to prison for the rest of his life.
Then the Roman pope, Gregory XII, resigned as he’d promised if his rivals did likewise. The Constance council passed some rules for reformation and began the process of picking a new pope, which resulted in the selection of Martin V.
Benedict XIII, last of Avignon popes, took refuge on the coast of Spain, where he continued his claim as pope, but by now, no one was listening. When he died in 1423, no successor was elected.
Those who gathered at Constance hoped to rid the church of heresy and corruption. So they condemned Jan Hus, a guy they should have embraced as a fellow reformer.
Then they fumbled when it came to ridding the church of simony and absenteeism simply because so many in the church’s hierarchy had attained their position that way. It issued some decrees and made provision for future councils that would meet regionally to address local issues.
The next council, called by Martin V as agreed at Constance, gathered at Pavia in 1423, but then moved to Siena due to the plague. Attendance was thin and not much was done. As 1430 and the next council drew near, Pope Martin was inclined to skip it. Advisors informed him the urge for conciliarism was still strong and if he failed to convene it might provoke a new crisis. The council met in Basel, during which Martin died. The council picked Eugene IV as his successor and as soon as he was elected, Eugene adjourned the council. But they refused, and considered deposing him. Under threat by Emperor Sigismund, Eugene withdrew the decree of adjournment.
Up to this point, the Basel Council had gone virtually unnoticed by Europe, but now, all eyes were on it. A council seemed to have gained power over a Pope. Some said the council ought to stay convened and rule the church directly.
It was then that an urgent request for help came from Constantinople being severely threatened by the Turks. Both the Byzantine emperor and patriarch said they were willing to rejoin the Western church and take part in the council, if it would move to a city closer to Constantinople. Eugene saw this as a way to regain some of his mojo and moved the council to Ferrara in NE Italy. Most of the council refused to relocate, but some, in hopes of ending the long rift between East and West, went to Ferrara.
And so it was that the conciliar movement, which had come into being as a response to schism, was itself “schized” (yeah, I know that’s not a word). There were now 2 councils à and 1 pope.
The Council of Ferrara later moved to Florence where it gained recognition for seeing the Eastern Church accept papal authority.
The Council of Basel, meanwhile, became more radical in its pronouncements, causing increasing numbers of its members to leave and head off for Ferarra. Basel deposed Pope Eugene and named Felix V as the new Pope.
Are you keeping track? There are now 2 councils and 2 popes. The conciliar movement, conceived as a way to end the schism resurrected it!
But the truth is, the council in Basel had dwindled down to such a small number that people paid little attention to it. They moved to Lausanne and eventually disbanded when they realized they were irrelevant to church life. Felix V gave up his claim to the papacy.
While it seemed for a while that conciliarism would be a standing feature of church life, in the end, the Popes won. Any future councils would be at their discretion.
by Lance Ralston | Feb 15, 2015 | English |
This episode is the first of several I’m calling “The Long Road to Reform.” As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, we’ll track the Church’s long march to the Reformation, then pause before picking it up acwith THE Reformation by doing some episodes tracking Church History into the East.
Until recently, most treatments of the History of Christianity have focused almost exclusively on the Church in Europe and what’s often called “Western” Christianity. Mention is made of the Church’s growth into other regions like North Africa, and the Middle and Far East. But it’s barely a nod in that direction. For every 10,000 words devoted to the Church in Europe, 10 are given to the Church of the East. What’s sad is that this Church has a rich history. We won’t make up for the lack of reporting on the history of the church in these regions, but we will seek to fill in some of the gaps and give those interested resources for learning more.
Okay, here we go. We embark now on The Long Road to Reform.
At the dawn of the 13th C with Innocent III, the papacy reached the zenith. The Dominicans and Franciscans carried the Gospel far and wide, new universities were hotbeds of theological enterprise, and Gothic Cathedrals seemed to defeat the law of gravity.
Europe was united under the pope and the emperor; in theory at least. Because the Crusaders had taken Constantinople, the breach between East and West looked to have been finally healed. Yeah – it looked like Christendom was about to enter a Golden Age.
As is often the case, looks can be deceiving. These were.
By 1261, the West’s influence in Constantinople was over as well as the bogus union the 4th Crusade claimed to have forged. Over the next 2 centuries, Europe saw several changes that set the scene for the modern world.
One of the most important was in the realm of economics.
When we think of the Middle Ages in Europe, we remember feudalism with its strict rules of class. There was the land-owning nobility and the commoners, serfs who worked the land for nobles in exchange for protection. We don’t have time to go into it here, but feudalism was largely the result of developments in the technology of warfare. Armored warriors, called knights, were expensive. It took a vast economic base to field them. So serfs worked lands in exchange for protection by knights. These serfs gave loyalty, called fealty, to nobles in ever higher levels from counts and barons to dukes and earls, with the king at the top. A third class in this tiered structure of medieval society were the clergy. The Church also owned lands and had serfs who worked for them. This made priests and abbots responsible for the secular rule of church and monastery estates. But toward the end of the Middle Ages, the cities of Europe began to grow and a new class of commoner emerged – the merchant.
There were several reasons for the proliferation of merchants and the growth of villages into town and towns into cities. One of the most important was the boom in trade. The Crusades stimulated Europe’s taste for new things. Someone needed to buy up what Europe produced, which was a lot of wool, and take it to the East were all the goodies were. Increased trade meant increased wealth for merchants, who weren’t land-owners but who did buy themselves nice homes in the growing cities. Those houses needed furniture and art and all the other luxuries that mark a successful merchant so industries popped up to supply those wants – bringing even MORE to the cities. New credit systems were developed as extra money meant people looking to invest for a profit. And slowly but surely, a NEW social class developed – the middle-class who didn’t fit the strict class structure that had dominated Europe for several hundred years. When nobles began taxing the trade crossing their land, the merchants protested and called for a stronger central government that would reign in the nobles. A king could protect trade, quash the bandits that harassed caravans, establish a common currency, and put an end to silly conflicts that disrupted trade.
Kings saw the merchants and emerging middle-class that supported them as a way to do an end run around the nobles who so often gave them grief. The king didn’t have to depend now on those nobles to supply knights and men at arms. From the taxes raised from the middle-class, they could field their own army.
The growth of strong kings during the late Middle Ages in Europe goes hand in hand with the rising middle-class. And it’s out of this process the modern nations of Europe emerged. Regions that shared a common language and culture coalesced around strong central governments. So, nationalism became one of the factors that will lead to problems for the Church. Until the 13th Century, Europeans identified themselves by their town, city or county. By the 15th Century they identified themselves as English, French, Swedish …
Where this emerging nationalism effected the Church was when a pope leaned in his policies toward this nation or that. When he did, that nation or this ignored his rule. And this led to the overall denigration of the pope’s office and authority. That in turn led to not a few looking to someone other than the Pope to lead in reform of the Church.
What’s often neglected in a discussion of the roots of the Reformation is the impact of the Hundred Years’ War on Church History. Lasting almost 140 yrs, from 1337 to 1475, the war dragged in almost all of Europe at one point or another. Basically a conflict between France and England, it lasted so long and was filled with such intrigue, everyone seemed to want to weigh in at some point and take a few swings at the other guy.
It was during the Hundred Years’ War that a French teenager named Joan had visions that stirred her countrymen to rally behind the French prince and give the British a good run for their money. Actually, money was the perennial British problem in this War. They’d win amazing victories on the battlefield at places like Crecy and Agincourt, then have to withdraw for lack of funds.
This long conflict with all its many chapters had enormous consequences for the Church. It was during this time the so-called “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy” took place, with the popes relocating from Rome to the French city of Avignon. Popes became virtual puppets of the French throne. So the English disregarded the papacy. Then, during the Great Papal Schism, when two rival popes vied for control of the Church, Europeans aligned under whichever pope supported their cause in the War. That made putting the Schism to an end, even MORE difficult. All of this of course, weakened the claims of the Pope to universal authority.
And what are to say of the Plague that devastated whole regions of the continent? The Little Ice Age of the 14th C set crop yields back and led to virtual famine in some places. This in turn shattered the fragile economy and set those already living hand to mouth into a physically vulnerable position. Their immune systems were degraded so when the Plague arrived, hundreds of thousands were susceptible to its ravages. Between 1348 and 50, the Black Death swept Europe. While numbers vary, with a general account of a third of Europeans dying, there were some regains were as much as HALF the population succumbed. Just imagine what that did to the social fabric of these places! Well, imagine what it would be like living where you do with only half the people. For those in urban centers, that may sound like a dream come true – at first. But realize half those who die are the only ones with the know-how or skill to do a good part of the work that keeps your system running. Half the houses are now empty. Half the stores, closed. You get the idea.
The Plague sent a shockwave through the collective conscious of Europe. How could a society so dominated by Christianity have suffered such a devastation? Maybe the Church had gone astray so badly God’s wrath was in evidence. Could the Black Death be His way of cleaning house? While life had always been precarious, death now hovered over all, so life became little more than preparation for life after death. Pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem were sought. The poor who couldn’t make such a journey went on local pilgrimages to local holy spots. Trade in relics boomed, even though the Fourth Lateran Council tried to put a kibosh on it.
In the mid-15th Century, when it was clear the Turks were determined to take Constantinople, the Byzantine emperors appealed to the West for help, even though the 4th Crusade had been a colossal failure. In trade for assistance, the popes required the East affirm their loyalty to Rome. Under threat of imminent demise, the East agreed to terms at the Council of Ferrara in 1439. But the Pope wasn’t able to persuade the Knights and armies of Europe to go to the aid of Constantinople. In the East, many of the Christians there saw the emperor’s bowing to Rome as a capitulation to heresy. They refused to fight for him or his cause. In 1443, the patriarchs of, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem rejected the Council’s decisions and broke communion with Constantinople. In 1452, after more than 400 yrs of animosity, a Roman mass was celebrated in Hagia Sophia. But Constantinople’s days were numbered. A year later, Muhammad II laid siege to the City. His new guns punched holes in those once impregnable walls. Emperor Constantine XI died defending the City. The great Hagia Sophia became a mosque and the city was renamed Istanbul.
It was King Philip IV of France who managed to wrap the papacy tightly around his finger. His long contest with Pope Boniface VIII is what helped lead to the Avignon Papacy and Great Schism.
The next Pope was Benedict XI. A Dominican of genuine piety who sought to undo the acrimony Boniface had managed to stir up across Italy and France. Despite Benedict’s attempts at harmony, King Philip insisted on calling a council to condemn the acts of Boniface. Benedict refused as it would be yet another denigration of papal authority at the hands of the French monarch. But this wasn’t enough for the conservatives regarded Benedict’s reconciliatory acts as giving away of too much papal mojo. He died after only a year as Pope.
A rumor spread he’d been poisoned; both sides claiming the other had done the deed. And by both sides, I mean those French cardinals who backed Philip and the Italian, German and English cardinals who backed Rome. Except for those who didn’t. Yeah, I know it gets confusing. è Welcome to church history.
Through a clever bit of subterfuge, the French cardinals wrangled an agreement to elect Clement V. Clement seemed to be a neutral candidate, when he’d in fact been scheming with the French all along. During his term as Pope, from 1305-14, he never visited Rome even once.
He appointed 24 cardinals; all but 1 of them, French; ensuring the next several Popes would also be a pro-French interest. Several of these cardinals were his relatives. While Clement V’s papacy was abysmal, probably the most shameful moment was his consent to the destruction of the Templars.
The Templars were one of the military orders founded during the Crusades. Since the Crusades were over, the Templars were really obsolete. But they were incredibly wealthy and powerful. This was at a time when King Philip was on a campaign to assert his absolute dominance over all French nobility. The Templars were an obstacle to overcome as they provided both funds and arms to the very nobles Philip wanted to subjugate. He also owed them a considerable sum in the loans he’d taken from them. So in a fascinating tale of intrigue, Philip persuaded others to do his dirty work for him. He had the Templars accused of disgusting crimes, besides the more pedantic evil of heresy. Under torture, some Templar leaders confessed, including their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. De Molay later recanted his confession, but it was too late. He and a companion were executed. The Templars were disbanded, their wealth confiscated by the French Crown.
We’ll pick it up at this point next time.
by Lance Ralston | Feb 8, 2015 | English |
This episode is titled “The Witness of Stones.”
I’ve had the privilege of doing a bit of touring in Europe. I’ve visited the cathedral at Cologne, Germany on several occasions. I’ve been to Wartburg Castle where Luther hid out. Mrs. Communion Sanctorum and I did a 2-week tour of Florence and Rome for our 30th Anniversary. We saw lots of churches and cathedrals. No matter what your thoughts about medieval Christianity, you can’t help but be impressed by the art and architecture the period produced.
Some modern Christians, especially those of the Evangelical stripe, visit a medieval European cathedral, and come away impressed at the architecture, but mystified and maybe, a few anyway, a bit angry.
Mystified on WHY people would go to such extremes to build such an immense and impressive structure. Angry at the massive expense such a structure meant.
This episode seeks to explain the why behind medieval cathedrals.
Churches in general and cathedrals in particular served two main purposes. First, the building was a place for worship; that worship being centered on the Mass. Second, the church was a place of instruction.
The architecture was used as a tool for BOTH of these.
In an age when only a small portion of society was literate, church buildings became a kind of “book in stone,” telling God’s story in the paintings and carvings that adorned the walls, and later, in the dazzling light of stained glass windows.
Churches and cathedrals were made elaborate because of the theology of the Mass that we’ve looked at in the episode on the Eucharistic controversy. While the debate was long, the Church eventually settled in on the doctrine of transubstantiation; the belief that at the words of the priest, the bread and wine of Communion are transmuted into the literal body and blood of Christ. A portion of the consecrated host is kept in a container called a tabernacle, making the church into a house that holds the most precious thing in the universe; the body of Christ. It’s for this reason churches have long been regarded as sacred refuges. The church’s specialness derived from the presence of the host. And of course, that host deserved a house worthy of its importance.
Think of the consecrated host as the finest gem. Such a jewel deserves an elaborate setting. It was this mentality that fueled the building of Europe’s Medieval Cathedrals. While churches were the meeting place of the faithful, their primary function was to serve as the location where the great miracle of transubstantiation took place.
Following the Edict of Milan ending official persecution of Christians, the first church buildings were built in the same pattern and plan as Roman basilicas. These were civil government buildings used for a variety of purposes but officially designated as the hall where the king held court. The Roman basilica was in the shape of a capital “T.” Churches built in the 7th thru 11th C, a period called Romanesque, were built in a small “t” floor plan. The addition of the space at the top of the “t”, called the apse, was to provide room for the clergy who became increasingly distinct from the laity. As more priests and monks were added to the choir, the apse grew.
Another major change in Romanesque churches was their roofs. They went from wood to stone. Stone roofs were possible because of the use of semi-circular arches that supported the additional load. When arches transect each other, it forms a vault. The challenge these arches, vaults, and stone roofs put on builders was the lateral stress they exerted. The weight of all that stone had to go somewhere and where it went was to the walls of the church. To keep them from toppling over, they were made sturdier by adding weight and width. So Romanesque churches are massive, imposing structures of thick walls and few windows.
In the mid-12th C, Romanesque architecture gave way to a new movement called Gothic. That label was applied much later by those who considered the style barbaric, so worthy of association with the Goths who’d helped bring Rome down. The basic floor plan for churches remained the same, but Gothic architects used pointed, rather than semi-circular arches and vaults. This allowed much higher ceilings. The weight was born by columns rather than walls, which doubled and trebled the lateral thrust on the columns. So external columns were built outside the church and used as additional support for the internal columns by means of an ingenious prop called a flying buttress. Since the weight was now born by columns rather than walls, the walls grew lighter and could be replaced by large stained- glass windows, whose scenes depicted stories from the Bible and lives of the saints.
Just imagine the first time a peasant wandered into Cologne Cathedral! The only church he’d ever known was the centuries old massive block building back home that could hold no more than 200. He stands in the plaza in front of Cologne cathedral and tilts back his head as he takes in the church’s front façade, carved with hundreds of statues of Apostles and saints. His head keeps going back and back because there seems no end to the spires that rise ever higher, pointing like fingers toward God in His heaven. Dumbstruck that anything could be so big and reach so high, he stumbles in the front door, expecting to be greeted by the thick gloom he’s used to in the church back home. But this church isn’t dark; it’s filled with light. On his right is the main sidewall of the church, pierced by the most magnificent works of art he’s ever seen. More than that—than he’s ever even conceived! They are massive windows of colored glass through which the light streams. And they cast images of stories he’s heard many times. These are the Apostles, Jesus, Mary, and the saints. And the ceiling over his head is so high he can’t see it because it’s veiled in shadow. He stands there with mouth hanging open and wonders how he’s going to make his wife and family believe the wonders he’s seeing. He simply has no words to describe it; no point of reference in all his experience.
Earlier I said that medieval churches were books in stone. These books told the story of God’s creation and the human condition. The average town church only told a few chapters of that story while a cathedral was an entire encyclopedia.
The story begins outside, looking at the front façade. While the Gothic cathedrals of Europe are all unique, they bear many similarities. Most have twin towers that soar into the sky. Most are entered via 3 doors; a North, Center, and South entrance that leads to the center and side aisles of the nave of the central hall. Cathedrals were built on an East-West axis with the façade at the west end. Above the central entrance is a large circular stained-glass window, called the Rose window. The central porch and entrance are the largest and were often kept closed for normal church services as they were for the exclusive use of the king or nobles. Commoners used the north and south doors.
The porches for each door were elaborately decorated with sculptures of dozens upon dozens of figures both large and small. The left or North porch was often devoted to depictions of normal, everyday life. The labor of the months and various occupations are found there. The idea was to capture the human condition, especially as it intersected with the Life of Faith.
The Central porch was more often than not a rendering of the Last Judgment. So, Jesus is seen seated in glory at the apex, judging the souls of mankind, who are found lower down rising from the dead. At the very bottom are depictions of hell and the torment of those souls cast into eternal damnation. Flying around Jesus’ throne are the saved in heaven and myriad angels.
The South, right-hand porch was often given to the elevation of Mary.
Standing across the front of the entire façade are statues of the OT prophets, the Apostles, and Saints.
Poised above the central portal is the West Rose Window. From outside one cannot see the beauty of its stained glass, but the design is still noteworthy. Many of these rose windows have the appearance of an elaborate spoked wheel.
If you stroll around the outside of the cathedral, rather than rushing to enter through one of those glorious portals, you’ll note how though the building lies heavy and squat on the land, it’s many spires and vertical embellishments all seem to lighten the effect. Like they are “lifting” it off the ground.
Those gruesome gargoyles that have fascinated so many aren’t just for decoration. They served an important architectural and engineering purpose. They added weight to the columns that bore the load of the roof. Figures of fearsome demeanor, perched outside, they reminded people making their way into the church that while evil was outside in the world, the Church was a holy sanctuary free of such malevolence.
Tourists entering a medieval cathedral today are often met by a lot of stone. The walls are gray, the stone rough. When first built, these walls were awash in color. The sculptures were painted. Gold-leaf was everywhere. And the treasures of the church were on full display. Well, they were when times were good. When not so good, they were sold and used to buy food or outfit soldiers for defense of the realm. Yes, cathedrals were a kind of public storehouse, kept against times of trouble.
Inside, as you arrive at the head of the central aisle, you approach the altar area and the choir, or apse; sacred place for the clergy. Cathedrals were built where they were because they possessed some special relic from the Church’s past, a piece of the true Cross; the thumb of some saint. These relics were often kept in a special box called a reliquary and stowed away in a vault under the main altar of the church. They would be taken out and carried in procession at special events and days of the year.
The back of the apse, so the East wall of the cathedral, was the building’s most elaborate and largest stained glass windows.
Protestant visitors to Europe’s medieval churches and cathedrals are often confused on why there are so many little side rooms that dot the walls of the nave. They appear almost as places were smaller services were held – and that is in fact what they were; chapels for smaller services. Some of these were the donation of wealthy patrons and families where they would conduct their own private services. It’s in these chapels that some of Europe’s greatest art is to be found.
As we end this episode, I want to again thank all those who’ve left a message on FB or gone by and Liked the page. Those reviews on iTunes are stellar and one of the best ways to get the word out to others about the podcast. Each country has its own iTunes store, so reviews from each country are only seen by people there. So I encourage our many international listeners to leave a review of CS on their iTunes store. Thanks.
Let me give a quick preview of what’s coming . . .
I’ve been doing a LOT of reading and study for our next phase of Church History. The next era we’ll dive in to is the Reformation in Europe. The more I read, the more I realize we need to go back a bit and take a closer look at the call for reform that had been heard in the Western church long before Martin Luther came on the scene. It’s a real injustice to the history of the Church to think he arose out of thin air. That fact is, Luther could have done nothing if there hadn’t already been a lot of work done in moving for reform.
Once we’ve laid the groundwork for the Reformation, we’ll take a look at what was happening in the rest of the word as far as the Faith was concerned. Then we’ll return to the story of Reform in Europe.
So, get ready for some fun stuff.
