CHAPTER 1
The Roman Catholic Church
1300–1517

I. THE SERVICES OF CHRISTIANITY

RELIGION is the last subject that the intellect begins to understand. In our youth we may have resented, with proud superiority, its cherished incredibilities; in our less confident years we marvel at its prosperous survival in a secular and scientific age, its patient resurrections after whatever deadly blows by Epicurus, or Lucretius, or Lucian, or Machiavelli, or Hume, or Voltaire. What are the secrets of this resilience?

The wisest sage would need the perspective of a hundred lives to answer adequately. He might begin by recognizing that even in the heyday of science there are innumerable phenomena for which no explanation seems forthcoming in terms of natural cause, quantitative measurement, and necessary effect. The mystery of mind still eludes the formulas of psychology, and in physics the same astonishing order of nature that makes science possible may reasonably sustain the religious faith in a cosmic intelligence. Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. Now life is rarely agnostic; it assumes either a natural or a supernatural source for any unexplained phenomenon, and acts on the one assumption or the other; only a small minority of minds can persistently suspend judgment in the face of contradictory evidence. The great majority of mankind feel compelled to ascribe mysterious entities or events to supernatural beings raised above “natural law.” Religion has been the worship of supernatural beings–their propitiation, solicitation, or adoration. Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accept faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end.

Moreover, we covet survival, and find it hard to conceive that nature should so laboriously produce man, mind, and devotion only to snuff them out in the maturity of their development. Science gives man ever greater powers but ever less significance; it improves his tools and neglects his purposes; it is silent on ultimate origins, values, and aims; it gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by death or omnivorous time. So men prefer the assurance of dogma to the diffidence of reason; weary of perplexed thought and uncertain judgment, they welcome the guidance of an authoritative church, the catharsis of the confessional, the stability of a long-established creed. Ashamed of failure, bereaved of those they loved, darkened with sin, and fearful of death, they feel themselves redeemed by divine aid, cleansed of guilt and terror, solaced and inspired with hope, and raised to a godlike and immortal destiny.

Meanwhile, religion brings subtle and pervasive gifts to society and the state. Traditional rituals soothe the spirit and bind the generations. The parish church becomes a collective home, weaving individuals into a community. The cathedral rises as the product and pride of the unified municipality. Life is embellished with sacred art, and religious music pours its mollifying harmony into the soul and the group. To a moral code uncongenial to our nature and yet indispensable to civilization, religion offers supernatural sanctions and supports: an all-seeing deity, the threat of eternal punishment, the promise of eternal bliss, and commandments of no precariously human authority but of divine origin and imperative force. Our instincts were formed during a thousand centuries of insecurity and the chase; they fit us to be violent hunters and voracious polygamists rather than peaceable citizens; their once necessary vigor exceeds present social need; they must be checked a hundred times a day, consciously or not, to make society and civilization possible. Families and states, from ages before history, have enlisted the aid of religion to moderate the barbarous impulses of men. Parents found religion helpful in taming the willful child to modesty and self-restraint; educators valued it as a precious means of disciplining and refining youth; governments long since sought its co-operation in forging social order out of the disruptive egoism and natural anarchism of men. If religion had not existed, the great legislators—Hammurabi, Moses, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius—would have invented it. They did not have to, for it arises spontaneously and repeatedly from the needs and hopes of men.

Through a formative millennium, from Constantine to Dante, the Christian Church offered the gifts of religion to men and states. It molded the figure of Jesus into a divine embodiment of virtues by which rough barbarians might be shamed into civilization. It formulated a creed that made every man’s life a part, however modest, of a sublime cosmic drama; it bound each individual in a momentous relation with a God Who had created him, Who had spoken to him in sacred Scriptures, Who had therein given him a moral code, Who had descended from heaven to suffer ignominy and death in atonement for the sins of humanity, and Who had founded the Church as the repository of His teaching and the earthly agent of His power. Year by year the magnificent drama grew; saints and martyrs died for the creed, and bequeathed their example and their merits to the faithful. A hundred forms—a hundred thousand works—of art interpreted the drama and made it vivid even for letterless minds. Mary the Virgin Mother became “the fairest flower of all poesy,” the formative model of feminine delicacy and maternal love, the recipient of the tenderest hymns and devotions, the inspirer of majestic architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. An impressive ceremony raised daily, from a million altars, the mystic and exalting solemnity of the Mass. Confession and penance purified the contrite sinner, prayer comforted and strengthened him, the Eucharist brought him into an awesome intimacy with Christ, the last sacraments cleansed and anointed him in expectation of paradise. Rarely had religion developed such artistry in its ministrations to mankind.

The Church was at her best when, by the consolations of her creed, the magic of her ritual, the nobler morality of her adherents, the courage, zeal, and integrity of her bishops, and the superior justice of her episcopal courts, she took the place vacated by the Roman Imperial government as the chief source of order and peace in the Dark Ages (approximately 524–1079 A.D.) of the Christian world. To the Church, more than to any other institution, Europe owed the resurrection of civilization in the West after the barbarian inundation of Italy, Gaul, Britain, and Spain. Her monks developed waste lands, her monasteries gave food to the poor, education to boys, lodging to travelers; her hospitals received the sick and the destitute. Her nunneries sheltered mateless women and directed their maternal impulses to social ends; for centuries the nuns alone provided schooling for girls. If classic culture was not completely lost in the illiterate flood, it was because monks, while allowing or causing many pagan manuscripts to perish, copied and preserved thousands of them, and kept alive the Greek and Latin languages in which they were written; it was in ecclesiastical libraries, at St. Gall, Fulda, Monte Cassino, and elsewhere, that the humanists of the Renaissance found precious relics of brilliant civilizations that had never heard the name of Christ. For a thousand years, from Ambrose to Wolsey, it was the Church that trained Western Europe’s teachers, scholars, judges, diplomats, and ministers of state; the medieval state rested on the Church. When the Dark Ages ended—say with the birth of Abélard—it was the Church that built the universities and the Gothic cathedrals, providing homes for the intellect, as well as for the piety, of men. Under her protection the Scholastic philosophers renewed the ancient attempt to interpret human life and destiny by reason. Through nine centuries almost all European art was inspired and financed by the Church; and even when art took a pagan color the popes of the Renaissance continued their patronage. Music in its higher forms was a daughter of the Church.

Above all, the Church at her zenith gave to the states of Europe an international moral code and government. Just as the Latin language, taught in the schools by the Church, served as a unifying medium for the scholarship, literature, science, and philosophy of diverse nations, and just as the Catholic—i.e., universal—creed and ritual gave religious unity to a Europe not yet divided into sovereign nationalities, so the Roman Church, claiming divine establishment and spiritual leadership, proposed herself as an international court, to which all rulers and states were to be morally responsible. Pope Gregory VII formulated this doctrine of a Christian Republic of Europe; the Emperor Henry IV recognized it by submitting to Gregory at Canossa (1077); a century later a stronger emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, after a long resistance, humbled himself at Venice before a weaker pope, Alexander III; and in 1198 Pope Innocent III raised the authority and prestige of the papacy to a point where for a time it seemed that Gregory’s ideal of a moral superstate had come to fulfillment.

The great dream broke on the nature of man. The administrators of the papal judiciary proved human, biased, venal, even extortionate; and the kings and peoples, also human, resented any supernational power. The growing wealth of France stimulated her pride of national sovereignty; Philip IV successfully challenged the authority of Pope Boniface VIII over the property of the French Church; the King’s emissaries imprisoned the aged Pontiff for three days at Anagni, and Boniface died soon afterward (1303). In one of its basic aspects—the revolt of secular rulers against the popes—the Reformation there and then began.

II. THE CHURCH AT NADIR: 1307-1417

Throughout the fourteenth century the Church suffered political humiliation and moral decay. She had begun with the profound sincerity and devotion of Peter and Paul; she had grown into a majestic system of familial, scholastic, social, international discipline, order, and morality; she was now degenerating into a vested interest absorbed in self-perpetuation and finance. Philip IV secured the election of a Frenchman to the papacy, and persuaded him to move the Holy See to Avignon on the Rhone. For sixty-eight years the popes were so clearly the pawns and prisoners of France that other nations gave them a rapidly diminishing reverence and revenue. The harassed pontiffs replenished their treasury by multiple levies upon the hierarchy, the monasteries, and the parishes. Every ecclesiastical appointee was required to remit to the papal Curia—the administrative bureaus of the papacy—half the income of his office for the first year (“annates”), and thereafter annually a tenth or tithe. A new archbishop had to pay to the pope a substantial sum for the pallium—a band of white wool that served as the confirmation and insignia of his authority. On the death of any cardinal, archbishop, bishop, or abbot, his personal possessions reverted to the papacy. In the interim between the death of an ecclesiastic and the installation of his successor, the popes received the net revenues of the benefice, and were accused of prolonging this interval. Every judgment or favor obtained from the Curia expected a gift in acknowledgment, and the judgment was sometimes dictated by the gift.

Much of this papal taxation was a legitimate means of financing the central administration of a Church functioning, with diminishing success, as the moral government of European society. Some of it, however, went to fatten ecclesiastical paunches, even to remunerate the courtesans that crowded Avignon. William Durand, Bishop of Mende, submitted to the Council of Vienne (1311) a treatise containing these words:

“Wolves are in control of the Church,” cried the high Spanish prelate Alvaro Pelayo, “and feed on the blood” of the Christian flock.² Edward III of England, himself an adept in taxation, reminded Clement VI that “the successor of the Apostles was commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to pasture, not to fleece them.”³ In Germany papal collectors were hunted down, imprisoned, mutilated, strangled. In 1372 the clergy of Cologne, Bonn, Xanten, and Mainz bound themselves by oath not to pay the tithe levied by Gregory XI.

Amid all complaints and revolts the popes continued to assert their absolute sovereignty over the kings of the earth. About 1324, under the patronage of John XXII, Agostino Trionfo wrote a Summa de potestate ecclesiastica in reply to attacks on the papacy by Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. The power of the pope, said Agostino, is from God, Whose vicegerent he is on earth; even when he is a great sinner he must be obeyed; he may be deposed by a general council of the Church for manifest heresy; but short of this his authority is second only to God’s, and transcends that of all earthly potentates. He may dethrone kings and emperors at will, even over the protests of their people or the electors; he may annul the decrees of secular rulers, and may set aside the constitutions of states. No decree of any prince is valid unless the pope gives it his consent. The pope stands higher than the angels, and may receive equal reverence with the Virgin and the saints.⁴ Pope John accepted all this as following logically from the generally conceded establishment of the Church by the Son of God, and acted on it with adamantine consistency.

Nevertheless the flight of the popes from Rome, and their subservience to France, undermined their authority and prestige. As if to proclaim their vassalage, the Avignon pontiffs, in a total of 134 nominations to the college of cardinals, named 113 Frenchmen.⁵ The English government fumed at the loans of the popes to the kings of France during the Hundred Years’ War, and connived at the attacks of Wyclif upon the papacy. The Imperial electors in Germany repudiated any further interference of the popes in the election of kings and emperors. In 1372 the abbots of Cologne publicly agreed that “the Apostolic See has fallen into such contempt that the Catholic faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled.”⁶ In Italy the Papal States—Latium, Umbria, the Marches, the Romagna—were seized by condottieri despots who gave the distant popes a formal obeisance but kept the revenues. When Urban V sent two legates to Milan to excommunicate the recalcitrant Visconti, Bernabò compelled them to eat the bulls—parchment, silken cords, and leaden seals (1362).⁷ In 1376 Florence, quarreling with Pope Gregory XI, confiscated all ecclesiastical property in its territory, closed the episcopal courts, demolished the buildings of the Inquisition, jailed or hanged resisting priests, and called upon Italy to end all temporal power of the Church. It became clear that the Avignon popes were losing Europe in their devotion to France. In 1377 Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome.

When he died (1378) the conclave of cardinals, overwhelmingly French but fearful of the Roman mob, chose an Italian as Pope Urban VI. Urban was not urbane; he proved so violent of temper, and so insistent upon reforms uncongenial to the hierarchy, that the reassembled cardinals declared his election invalid as having been made under duress, and proclaimed Robert of Geneva pope. Robert assumed office as Clement VII in Avignon, while Urban persisted as pontiff in Rome. The Papal Schism (1378–1417) so inaugurated, like so many of the forces that prepared the Reformation, was conditioned by the rise of the national state; in effect it was an attempt by France to retain the moral and financial aid of the papacy in her war with England. The lead of France was followed by Naples, Spain, and Scotland; but England, Flanders, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Italy, and Portugal accepted Urban, and the divided Church became the weapon and victim of the hostile camps. Half the Christian world held the other half to be heretical, blasphemous, and excommunicate; each side claimed that sacraments administered by priests of the opposite obedience were worthless, and that the children so baptized, the penitents so shriven, the dying so anointed, remained in mortal sin, and were doomed to hell—or at best to limbo—if death should supervene. Expanding Islam laughed at disintegrating Christendom.

Urban’s death (1389) brought no compromise; the fourteen cardinals in his camp chose Boniface IX, then Innocent VII, then Gregory XII, and the divided nations prolonged the divided papacy. When Clement VII died (1394) the Avignon cardinals named a Spanish prelate to be Benedict XIII. He offered to resign if Gregory would follow suit, but Gregory’s relatives, already entrenched in office, would not hear of it. Some of Gregory’s cardinals abandoned him, and called for a general council. The King of France urged Benedict to withdraw; Benedict refused; France renounced its allegiance to him, and adopted neutrality. While Benedict fled to Spain his cardinals joined with those who had left Gregory, and together they issued a call for a council to meet at Pisa and elect a pope acceptable to all.

Rebellious philosophers, almost a century before, had laid the theoretical foundations of the “conciliar movement.” William of Ockham protested against identifying the Church with the clergy; the Church, he held, is the congregation of all the faithful; that whole has authority superior to any part; it may delegate its authority to a general council of all the bishops and abbots of the Church; and such a council should have the power to elect, reprove, punish, or depose the pope.⁸ A general council, said Marsilius of Padua, is the collected wisdom of Christendom; how should any one man set up his own intellect above it? Such a council, he thought, should be composed not only of clergymen but also of laymen chosen by the people.⁹ Heinrich von Langenstein, a German theologian at the University of Paris, applied (1381) these ideas to the Papal Schism. Whatever logic there might, be, he argued, in the claims of the popes to supremacy, a crisis had arisen from which logic offered no escape but one: only a power outside the papacy, and superior to the cardinals, could rescue the Church from the chaos that was destroying her; and that authority could only be a general council.

The Council of Pisa met on March 25, 1409. It summoned Benedict and Gregory to appear before it; they ignored it; it declared them deposed, elected a new pope, Alexander V, bade him call another council before May 1412, and adjourned. There were now three popes instead of two. Alexander did not help matters by dying (1410), for his cardinals named as his successor John XXIII, the most unmanageable man to mount the pontifical chair since the twenty-second of his name. Governing Bologna as papal vicar, this ecclesiastical condottiere, Baldassare Cossa, had permitted and taxed everything, including prostitution, gambling, and usury; according to his secretary he had seduced 200 virgins, matrons, widows, and nuns.¹⁰ But he had money, and an army; perhaps he could conquer the Papal States from Gregory, and so reduce him to impecunious abdication.

John XXIII delayed, as long as he could, the calling of the council decreed at Pisa. When he opened it at Constance on November 5, 1414, only a fraction had arrived of the three patriarchs, twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, 150 bishops, 300 doctors of theology, fourteen university delegates, twenty-six princes, 140 nobles, and 4,000 priests who were to make the completed council the largest in Christian history, and the most important since the Council of Nicaea (325) had established the trinitarian creed of the Church. On April 6,1415, the great gathering issued a proud and revolutionary decree:

The Council demanded the abdication of Gregory XII, Benedict XIII, and John XXIII. Receiving no answer from John, it accepted the presentation of fifty-four charges against him as a pagan, oppressor, liar, simoniac, traitor, lecher, and thief; sixteen other accusations were suppressed as too severe.¹² On May 29, 1415, it deposed him. Gregory was more pliant and subtle; he agreed to resign, but only on condition that he should first be allowed to reconvene the council on his own authority. So reconvened, the council accepted his resignation (July 4). To further attest its orthodoxy, it burned at the stake (July 6) the Bohemian reformer, John Huss. On July 26 it declared Benedict XIII deposed; he settled in Valencia, and died there at ninety, still holding himself pope. On November 17, 1417, an electoral committee chose Cardinal Ottone Colonna as Pope Martin V. All Christendom acknowledged him, and the Papal Schism came to an end.

The victory of the council in this regard defeated its other purpose—to reform the Church. Martin V at once assumed all the powers and prerogatives of the papacy. Playing off each national group of delegates against the others, he persuaded them to accept a vague and innocuous minimum of reform. The council yielded to him because it was tired. On April 22, 1418, it dissolved.

III. THE TRIUMPHANT PAPACY: 1417–1513

Martin reorganized the Curia to more effective functioning, but could find no way to finance it except by imitating the secular governments of the age and selling offices and services. Since the Church had survived for a century without reform, but could hardly survive a week without money, he concluded that money was more urgently needed than reform. In 1430, a year before Martin’s death, a German envoy to Rome sent his prince a letter that almost sounded the theme and tocsin of the Reformation:

Martin’s successor faced the accumulated problems of the Apostolic See from the background of a devout Franciscan friar ill equipped for statesmanship. The papacy had to govern states as well as the Church; the popes had to be men of affairs with at least one foot in the world, and could rarely afford to be saints. Eugenius IV might have been a saint had not his troubles embittered his spirit. In the first year of his pontificate the Council of Basel proposed again to assert the supremacy of general councils over the popes. It assumed one after another traditionally papal function: it issued indulgences and dispensations, appointed to benefices, and required annates to be sent to itself instead of to the pope. Eugenius ordered it to dissolve; instead it declared him deposed, and named Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, as Antipope Felix V (1439). The Papal Schism was renewed.

To complete the apparent defeat of the papacy, Charles VII of France convened an assembly of French prelates, nobles, and lawyers, which proclaimed the superior authority of general councils and issued the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438): ecclesiastical offices were henceforth to be filled through election by the local clergy, but the king might make “recommendations”; appeals to the papal Curia were forbidden except after exhausting all judicial avenues in France; and annates were no longer to be sent to the pope. In effect the Sanction established an independent Gallican Church and made the king its master. A year later a diet at Mainz adopted resolutions aiming at a similar national church in Germany. Bohemia had already separated itself from the papacy. The whole edifice of the Roman Church seemed about to collapse.

Eugenius was rescued by the Turks. As the Ottomans came ever nearer to Constantinople, the Byzantine government decided that the Greek capital was worth a Roman Mass, and that a reunion of Greek with Latin Christianity was an indispensable prelude to winning military or financial aid from the West. Greek prelates and nobles came in picturesque panoply to Ferrara, then to Florence, to meet the Roman hierarchy summoned by the Pope (1438). After a year of argument an accord was reached that recognized the authority of the Roman pontiff over all Christendom; and on July 6, 1439, all the members of the conference, with the Greek emperor at their head, bent the knee before that same Eugenius who had seemed, so recently, the most despised and rejected of men. The concord was brief, for the Greek clergy and people repudiated it; but it restored the prestige of the papacy, and helped to bring the new schism, and the Council of Basel, to an end.

A succession of strong popes, enriched and exalted by the Italian Renaissance, now raised the papacy to such splendor as it had not known even in the proud days of Innocent III. Nicholas V earned the admiration of the humanists by devoting Church revenues to the patronage of scholarship and art. Calixtus III established that genial custom of nepotism—giving offices to relatives—which became a pillar of corruption in the Church. Pius II, brilliant as author and barren as pope, struggled to reform the Curia and the monasteries. He appointed a commission of prelates reputed for integrity and piety to study the shortcomings of the Church, and to this commission he made a frank confession:

The committee made laudable recommendations, and Pius embodied them in a bull. But hardly anybody in Rome wanted reform; every second functionary or dignitary there profited from some form of venality. Apathy and passive resistance defeated Pius, while the abortive crusade that he undertook against the Turks absorbed his energy and his funds. Toward the end of his pontificate he addressed a final appeal to the cardinals:

Despite the labors of popes like Nicholas V and Pius II, and of sincere and accomplished ecclesiastics like Cardinals Giuliano Cesarini and Nicholas of Cusa, the faults of the papal court mounted as the fifteenth century neared its end.¹⁶ Paul II wore a papal tiara that outweighed a palace in its worth. Sixtus IV made his nephew a millionaire, entered avidly into the game of politics, blessed the cannon that fought his battles, and financed his wars by selling church offices to the highest bidders. Innocent VIII celebrated in the Vatican the marriages of his children. Alexander VI, like Luther and Calvin, thought clerical celibacy a mistake, and begot five or more children before subsiding into reasonable continence as a pope. His gay virility did not stick so sharply in the gullet of the time as we might suppose; a certain clandestine amorousness was then accepted as usual in the clergy; what offended Europe was that Alexander’s unscrupulous diplomacy, and the ruthless generalship of his son Caesar Borgia, rewon the Papal States for the papacy and added needed revenues and strength to the Apostolic See. In these policies and campaigns the Borgias used all those methods of stratagem and death which were soon to be formulated in Machiavelli’s Prince (1513) as indispensable to founding a powerful state or a united Italy. Pope Julius II out-Caesared Borgia in waging war against rapacious Venice and the invading French; he escaped whenever he could from the prison of the Vatican, led his army in person, and relished the rough life and speech of martial camps. Europe was shocked to see the papacy not only secularized but militarized; yet it could hardly withhold some admiration from a mighty warrior miscast as a pope; and some word went over the Alps about the services of Julius to art in his discriminating patronage of Raphael and Michelangelo. It was Julius who began the building of the new St. Peter’s, and first granted indulgences to those who contributed to its cost. It was in his pontificate that Luther came to Rome and saw for himself that “sink of iniquity” which had been Lorenzo de’ Medici’s name for the capital of Christendom. No ruler in Europe could any longer think of the papacy as a moral supergovernment binding all the nations into a Christian commonwealth; the papacy itself, as a secular state, had become nationalistic; all Europe, as the old faith waned, fell into national fragments acknowledging no supernational or international moral law, and doomed to five centuries of interchristian wars.

To judge these Renaissance popes fairly we must see them against the background of their time. Northern Europe could feel their faults, since it financed them; but only those who knew the exuberant Italy of the period between Nicholas V (1447–55) and Leo X (1513–21) could view them with understanding lenience. Though several of them were personally pious, most of them accepted the Renaissance conviction that the world, while still for so many a vale of tears and devilish snares, could also be a scene of beauty, intense living, and fleeting happiness; it did not seem scandalous to them that they enjoyed life and the papacy.

They had their virtues. They labored to redeem Rome from the ugliness and squalor into which it had fallen while the popes were at Avignon. They drained marshes (by comfortable proxy), paved streets, restored bridges and roads, improved the water supply, established the Vatican Library and the Capitoline Museum, enlarged the hospitals, distributed charity, built or repaired churches, embellished the city with palaces and gardens, reorganized the University of Rome, supported the humanists in resurrecting pagan literature, philosophy, and art, and gave employment to painters, sculptors, and architects whose works are now a treasured heritage of all mankind. They squandered millions; they used millions constructively. They spent too much on the new St. Peter’s, but hardly more in proportion than the kings of France would spend on Fontainebleau and Versailles and the châteaux of the Loire; and perhaps they thought of it as transforming scattered crumbs of evanescent wealth into a lasting splendor for the people and their God. Most of these popes in private lived simply, some (like Alexander VI) abstemiously, and resigned themselves to pomp and luxury only as required by public taste and discipline. They raised the papacy, which had so lately been scorned and destitute, to an impressive majesty of power.

IV. THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

But while the Church seemed to be growing again in grandeur and authority, Europe was undergoing economic, political, and intellectual changes that slowly undermined the structure of Latin Christianity.

Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy. Every harvest is a miracle of the earth and a whim of the sky; the humble peasant, subject to weather and consumed with toil, sees supernatural forces everywhere, prays for a propitious heaven, and accepts a feudal-religious system of graduated loyalties mounting through vassal, liege lord, and king to God. The city worker, the merchant, the manufacturer, the financier, live in a mathematical world of calculated quantities and processes, of material causes and regular effects; the machine and the counting table dispose them to see, over widening areas, the reign of “natural law.” The growth of industry, commerce, and finance in the fifteenth century, the passage of labor from the countryside to the town, the rise of the mercantile class, the expansion of local to national to international economy—all were of evil omen for a faith that had fitted in so well with feudalism and the somber vicissitudes of the fields. Businessmen repudiated ecclesiastical restraints as well as feudal tolls; the Church had to yield, by transparent theological jugglery, to the necessity of charging interest for loans if capital was to expand enterprise and industry; by 1500 the old prohibition of “usury” was universally ignored. Lawyers and businessmen more and more replaced churchmen and nobles in the administration of government. Law itself, triumphantly recapturing its Roman Imperial traditions and prestige, led the march of secularization and day by day encroached on the sphere of ecclesiastical regulation of life by canon law. Secular courts extended their jurisdiction; episcopal courts declined.

The adolescent monarchies, enriched by revenues from commerce and industry, freed themselves day by day from domination by the Church. The kings resented the residence, in their realms, of papal legates or nuncios who acknowledged no authority but the pope’s, and made each nation’s church a state within the state. In England the statutes of Provisors (1351) and Praemunire (1353) sharply restricted the economic and judicial powers of the clergy. In France the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was theoretically abrogated in 1516, but the king retained the right to nominate archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors.¹⁷ The Venetian Senate insisted on appointing to high ecclesiastical office in all Venetian dependencies. Ferdinand and Isabella overrode the popes in filling many ecclesiastical vacancies in Spain. In the Holy Roman Empire, where Gregory VII had maintained against Henry IV the papal right of investiture, Sixtus IV conceded to the emperors the right of nomination to 300 benefices and seven bishoprics. The kings often misused these powers by giving church offices to political favorites, who took the revenues—but ignored the responsibilities—of their abbacies and sees.¹⁸ Many ecclesiastical abuses were traceable to such secular appointees.

Meanwhile the intellectual environment of the Church was changing, to her peril. She still produced laborious and conscientious scholars; but the schools and universities that she had founded had raised up an educated minority whose thinking did not always please the saints. Hear St. Bernardino, toward 1420:

Probably the business class was the least pious; as wealth mounts, religion declines. Gower (1325?-1408) claimed that the merchants of England cared little about the hereafter, saying, “He who can get the sweetness of this life, and lets it go, would be a fool, for no man knoweth whither or by what way we go” after death.²⁰ The failure of the Crusades had left a slowly fading wonder why the God of Christendom had permitted the victory of Islam, and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks refreshed these doubts. The work of Nicholas of Cusa (1432) and Lorenzo Valla (1439), in exposing the “Donation of Constantine” as a forgery, damaged the prestige of the Church and weakened her title to temporal power. The recovery and publication of classical texts nourished skepticism by revealing a world of learning and art that had flourished long before the birth of that Christian Church which, at the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1512–17), had denied the possibility of salvation outside her fold: nulla salus extra ecclesiam .²¹ The disco /ery of America, and the widening exploration of the East, revealed a hundred nations that with apparent impunity ignored or rejected Christ, and had faiths of their own as positive, and as morally efficacious, as Christianity. Travelers returning from “heathen” lands brought some rubbing of strange creeds and rituals with them; these alien cults touched elbows with Christian worship and belief, and rival dogmas suffered attrition in the market place and the port.

Philosophy, which in the thirteenth century had been the handmaid of theology, devoting itself to finding rational grounds for the orthodox faith, liberated itself in the fourteenth century with William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua, and in the sixteenth became boldly secular, flagrantly skeptical with Pomponazzi, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini. Some four years before Luther’s Theses Machiavelli wrote a startling prophecy:

V. THE CASE AGAINST THE CHURCH

Shall we recapitulate the charges made by loyal Catholics against the Church of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? The first and sorest was that she loved money, and had too much of it for her own good.* In the Centum Gravamina, or Hundred Grievances, listed against the Church by the Diet of Nuremberg (1522), it was alleged that she owned half the wealth of Germany.²³ A Catholic historian reckoned the Church’s share as a third in Germany and a fifth in France;²⁴ but a procurer-general of the Parlement calculated in 1502 that three quarters of all French wealth was ecclesiastical.²⁵ No statistics are available to check these estimates. In Italy, of course, one third of the peninsula belonged to the Church as the Papal States, and she owned rich properties in the rest.†

Six factors served to accumulate lands in the possession of the Church. (1) Most of those who bequeathed property left something to her as “fire insurance”; and as the Church controlled the making and probating of wills, her agents were in a position to encourage such legacies. (2) Since ecclesiastical property was safer than other property from ravage by bandits, soldiers, or governments, some persons, for security, deeded their lands to the Church, held them as her vassals, and surrendered all right to them at death. Others willed part or all of their property to the Church on condition that she should provide for them in sickness or old age; in this way the Church offered disability insurance. (3) Crusaders had sold—or mortgaged and forfeited—lands to ecclesiastical bodies to raise cash for their venture. (4) Hundreds of thousands of acres had been earned for the Church by the reclamation work of monastic orders. (5) Land once acquired by the Church was inalienable—could not be sold or given away by any of her personnel except through discouragingly complex means. (6) Church property was normally free from taxation by the state; occasionally, however, kings reckless of damnation forced levies from the clergy, or found legal dodges to confiscate some portion of ecclesiastical wealth. The rulers of northern Europe might have grumbled less about the riches of the Church if the income therefrom, or the multifarious contributions of the faithful, had remained within the national boundaries; they fretted at the sight of northern gold flowing in a thousand streamlets to Rome.

The Church, however, looked upon herself as the chief agent in maintaining morality, social order, education, literature, scholarship, and art; the state relied upon her to fulfill these functions; to perform them she needed an extensive and expensive organization; to finance this she taxed and gathered fees; even a church could not be governed by paternosters. Many bishops were the civil as well as the ecclesiastical rulers of their regions; most of them were appointed by lay authorities, and came of patrician stock accustomed to easy morals and luxuries; they taxed and spent like princes; sometimes, in the performance of their multiple functions, they scandalized the saints by donning armor and lustily leading their troops in war. Cardinals were chosen rarely for their piety, usually for their wealth or political connections or administrative capacity; they looked upon themselves, not as monks burdened with vows, but as the senators and diplomats of a rich and powerful state; in many instances they were not priests; and they did not let their red hats impede their enjoyment of life.²⁶ The Church forgot the poverty of the Apostles in the needs and expenses of power.

Being worldly, the servants of the Church were often as venal as the officials of contemporary governments. Corruption was in the mores of the time and in the nature of man; secular courts were notoriously amenable to the persuasiveness of money, and no papal election could rival in bribery the election of Charles V as emperor. This excepted, the fattest bribes in Europe were paid at the Roman court.²⁷ Reasonable fees had been fixed for the services of the Curia, but the cupidity of the staff raised the actual cost to twenty times the legal sum.²⁸ Dispensations could be had from almost any canonical impediment, almost any sin, provided the inducement was adequate. Aeneas Sylvius, before becoming pope, wrote that everything was for sale in Rome, and that nothing could be had there without money.²⁹ A generation later the monk Savonarola, with the exaggeration of indignation, called the Church of Rome a “harlot” ready to sell her favors for coin.³⁰ Another generation later, Erasmus remarked: “The shamelessness of the Roman Curia has reached its climax.” ³¹ Pastor writes:

It was unusual for impecunious merit to mount in the Church of the fifteenth century. From the moderate fee charged for priestly ordination to the enormous sums that many cardinals paid for their elevation, nearly every appointment required the clandestine lubrication of superiors. A favorite papal device for raising funds was to sell ecclesiastical offices, or (as the popes saw the matter) to appoint to sinecures or honors, even to the cardinalate, persons who would make a substantial contribution to the expenses of the Church. Alexander VI created eighty new offices, and received 760 ducats ($19,000?) from each of the appointees. Julius II formed a “college” or bureau of 101 secretaries, who together paid him 74,000 ducats for the privilege. Leo X nominated sixty chamberlains and 141 squires to the papal household, and received from them 202,000 ducats.³³ The salaries paid to such officials were looked upon, by giver and recipient, as endowment policy annuities; but to Luther they seemed the rankest simony.

In thousands of cases the appointee lived far away from the benefice—the parish or abbacy or episcopacy—whose revenues supported his labor or luxury; and one man might be the absentee beneficiary of several such posts. So the active Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI to be) received from a variety of benefices an income of 70,000 ducats ($1,750,000?) a year; and his furious foe, Cardinal della Rovere (later Julius II), held at one time the archbishopric of Avignon, the bishoprics of Bologna, Lausanne, Coutances, Viviers, Mende, Ostia, and Velletri, and the abbacies of Nonantola and Grottaferrata.³⁴ By this “pluralism” the Church maintained her major executives, and, in many instances, scholars, poets, and scientists. So Petrarch, sharp critic of the Avignon popes, lived on the sinecures that they granted him; Erasmus, who satirized a hundred ecclesiastical follies, regularly received Church pensions; and Copernicus, who did most damage to medieval Christianity, lived for years on Church benefices involving a minimum of distraction from his scientific pursuits.³⁵

A more serious charge than pluralism was laid against the personal morality of the clergy. “The morals of the clergy are corrupt,” said the Bishop of Torcello (1458); “they have become an offense to the laity.”³⁶ Of the four orders of friars founded in the thirteenth century—Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians—all but the last had become scandalously lax in piety and discipline. The monastic rules formulated in the fervor of early devotion proved too rigorous for a human nature increasingly freed from supernatural fears. Absolved by their collective wealth from the necessity of manual labor, thousands of monks and friars neglected, religious services, wandered outside their walls, drank in taverns, and pursued amours.³⁷ A fourteenth-century Dominican, John Bromyard, said of his fellow friars:

Erasmus repeated the charge after a century: “Many convents of men and women differ little from public brothels.” ³⁹ Petrarch drew a favorable picture of discipline and devotion in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, and several convents in Holland and Western Germany retained the spirit of study and piety that had formed the Brethren of the Common Life and produced The Imitation of Christ .⁴⁰ Yet Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim (c. 1490), denounced the monks of this Rhenish Germany with violent hyperbole:

Guy Jouenneaux, a papal commissary sent to reform the Benedictine monasteries of France, turned in a gloomy report (1503): Many monks gamble, curse, haunt inns, carry swords, gather riches, fornicate, “live the life of Bacchanals,” and “are more worldly than the mere worldling.... . Were I minded to relate all those things that have come under my own eyes, I should make too long a tale of it.”⁴² In the growing disorder of the monasteries a great number of them neglected those admirable works of charity, hospitality, and education which had entitled them to public trust and support.⁴³ Said Pope Leo X (1516): “The lack of rule in the monasteries of France and the immodest life of the monks have come to such a pitch that neither kings, princes, nor the faithful at large have any respect left for them.” ⁴⁴ A recent Catholic historian sums up the matter, as of 1490, with possibly excessive severity:

The secular clergy, if we take a lenient attitude toward concubinage, present a better picture than the friars and monks. The chief sin of the simple parish priest was his ignorance,⁴⁶ but he was too poorly paid and hard worked to have funds or time for study, and the piety of the people suggests that he was often respected and loved. Violations of the sacerdotal vow of chastity were frequent. In Norfolk, England, out of seventy-three accusations of incontinence filed in 1499, fifteen were against clergymen; in Ripon, out of 126, twenty-four; in Lambeth, out of fifty-eight, nine; i.e., clerical offenders numbered some 2 3 per cent of the total, though the clergy were probably less than 2 per cent of the population.⁴⁷ Some confessors solicited sexual favors from female penitents.⁴⁸ Thousands of priests had concubines; in Germany nearly all.⁴⁹ In Rome it was assumed that priests kept concubines; and some reports estimated the prostitutes there at 6,000 in a population not exceeding 100,000.⁵⁰ To quote again a Catholic historian:

In fairness to these lusty priests we should consider that sacerdotal concubinage was not profligacy, but an almost universal rebellion against the rule of celibacy that had been imposed upon an unwilling clergy by Pope Gregory VII (1074). Just as the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church, after the schism of 1054, had continued to permit marriage to its priests, so the clergy of the Roman Church demanded the same right; and since the canon law of their Church refused this, they took concubines. Bishop Hardouin of Angers reported (1428) that the clergy of his diocese did not count concubinage a sin, and that they made no attempt to disguise their use of it.⁵² In Pomerania, about 1500, such unions were recognized by the people as reasonable, and were encouraged by them as protection for their daughters and wives; at public festivals the place of honor was given as a matter of course to priests and their consorts.⁵³ In Schleswig a bishop who tried to outlaw the practice was driven from his see (1499).⁵⁴ At the Council of Constance Cardinal Zabarella proposed that if sacerdotal concubinage could not be suppressed, clerical marriage should be restored. The Emperor Sigismund, in a message to the Council of Basel (1431), argued that the marriage of the clergy would improve public morals.⁵⁵ Aeneas Sylvius was quoted by the contemporary historian Platina, librarian of the Vatican, as saying that there were good reasons for clerical celibacy, but better reasons against it.⁵⁶ The moral record of the pre-Reformation priesthood stands in a better light if we view sacerdotal concubinage as a forgivable revolt against an arduous rule unknown to the Apostles and to the Christianity of the East.

The complaint that finally sparked the Reformation was the sale of indulgences. Through the powers apparently delegated by Christ to Peter (Matt. 16 :19), by Peter to bishops, and by bishops to priests, the clergy were authorized to absolve a confessing penitent from the guilt of his sins and from their punishment in hell, but not from doing penance for them on earth. Now only a few men, however thoroughly shriven, could rely on dying with all due penances performed; the balance would have to be paid for by years of suffering in purgatory, which a merciful God had established as a temporary hell. On the other hand, many saints, by their devotion and martyrdom, had earned merits probably in excess of the penances due to their sins; Christ by his death had added an infinity of merits; these merits, said the theory of the Church, could be conceived as a treasury on which the pope might draw to cancel part or all of the temporal penalties incurred and unperformed by absolved penitents. Usually the penances prescribed by the Church had taken the form of repeating prayers, giving alms, making a pilgrimage to some sacred shrine, joining a crusade against Turks or other infidels, or donating money or labor to social projects like draining a swamp, building a road, bridge, hospital, or church. The substitution of a money fine (Wehrgeld) for punishment was a long-established custom in secular courts; hence no furore was caused by the early application of the idea to indulgences. A shriven penitent, by paying such a fine—i.e., making a money contribution—to the expenses of the Church, would receive a partial or plenary indulgence, not to commit further sins, but to escape a day, a month, a year in purgatory, or all the time he might have had to suffer there to complete his penance for his sins. An indulgence did not cancel the guilt of sins; this, when the priest absolved a contrite penitent, was forgiven in the confessional. An indulgence, therefore, was the remission, by the Church, of part or all of the temporal (i.e., not eternal) penalties incurred by sins whose guilt had been forgiven in the sacrament of penance.

This ingenious and complicated theory was soon transformed by the simplicity of the people, and by the greed of the quaestiarii, or “pardoners,” commissioned or presuming to distribute the indulgences. As these purveyors were allowed to retain a percentage of the receipts, some of them omitted to insist on repentance, confession, and prayer, and left the recipient free to interpret the indulgence as dispensing him from repentance, confession, and absolution, and as depending almost entirely upon the money contribution, About 1450 Thomas Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University, complained that

The popes—Boniface IX in 1392, Martin V in 1420, Sixtus IV in 1478—repeatedly condemned these misconceptions and abuses, but they were too pressed for revenue to practice effective control. They issued bulls so frequently, and for so confusing a variety of causes, that men of education lost faith in the theory, and accused the Church of shamelessly exploiting human credulity and hope.⁵⁸ In some cases, as in the indulgences offered by Julius II in 1510 or by Leo X in 1513, the official wording lent itself to the purely monetary interpretation.⁵⁹ A Franciscan friar of high rank described with anger how chests were placed in all the churches of Germany to receive payments by those who, having been unable to go to Rome for the jubilee of 1450, could now obtain the same plenary indulgence by money dropped in the box; and he warned the Germans, a half-century before Luther, that by indulgences and other means their savings were being drained off to Rome.⁶⁰ Even the clergy complained that indulgences were snaring into papal coffers contributions that might otherwise have been secured for local ecclesiastical uses.⁶¹ Again a Catholic historian sums up the matter with admirable candor:

Almost as mercenary as the sale of indulgences was the acceptance or solicitation, by the clergy, of money payments, grants, legacies, for the saying of Masses supposed to reduce a dead soul’s term of punishment in purgatory. Large sums were devoted to this purpose by pious people, either to relieve a departed relative or friend, or to shorten or annul their own purgatorial probation after death. The poor complained that through their inability to pay for Masses and indulgences it was the earthly rich, not the meek, who would inherit the kingdom of heaven; and Columbus ruefully praised money because, he said, “he who possesses it has the power of transporting souls into paradise.”⁶³

A thousand other grievances swelled the case against the Church. Many of the laity resented the exemption of the clergy from the laws of the state, and the dangerous lenience of ecclesiastical courts to ecclesiastical offenders. The Nuremberg Diet of 1522 declared that no justice could be had by a lay plaintiff against a clerical defendant before a spiritual tribunal, and warned that unless the clergy were subjected to secular courts there would be an uprising against the Church in Germany;⁶⁴ the uprising, of course, had then already begun. Further complaints alleged the divorce of religion from morality, the emphasis laid on orthodox belief rather than on good conduct (though the Reformers were to be in this particular greater sinners than the Church), the absorption of religion in ritual, the useless idleness and presumed sterility of monks, the exploitation of popular credulity through bogus relics and miracles, the abuse of excommunication and interdict, the censorship of publications by the clergy, the espionage and cruelty of the Inquisition, the misuse, for other purposes, of funds contributed for crusades against the Turks, and the claim of a deteriorated clergy to be the sole administrators of every sacrament except baptism.

All the foregoing factors entered into the anticlericalism of Roman Catholic Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. “The contempt and hatred of the laity for the degenerate clergy,” says Pastor, “was no mean factor in the great apostasy.”⁶⁵ A London bishop complained in 1515 that the people “be so maliciously set in favor of heretical pravity that they will .. _k condemn any cleric, though he were as innocent as Abel.”⁶⁶ Among laymen, Erasmus reported, the title of clerk or priest or monk was a term of bitter insult.⁶⁷ In Vienna the priesthood, once the most desired of all careers, received no recruits in the twenty years preceding the Reformation.⁶⁸

Throughout Latin Christendom men cried out for a “reform of the Church in head and members.” Passionate Italians like Arnold of Brescia, Joachim of Flora, and Savonarola of Florence had attacked ecclesiastical abuses without ceasing to be Catholics, but two of them had been burned at the stake. Nevertheless, good Christians continued to hope that reform might be accomplished by the Church’s loyal sons. Humanists like Erasmus, Colet, More, and Budé dreaded the disorder of an open break; it was bad enough that the Greek Church remained resolutely apart from the Roman; any further rending of “the seamless robe of Christ” threatened the survival of Christianity itself. The Church tried repeatedly, and often sincerely, to cleanse her ranks and her courts, and to adopt a financial ethic superior to the lay morality of the times. The monasteries tried again and again to restore their austere rules, but the constitution of man rewrote all constitutions. The councils tried to reform the Church, and were defeated by the popes; the popes tried, and were defeated by the cardinals and the bureaucracy of the Curia. Leo X himself, in 1516, mourned the utter inefficacy of these endeavors.⁶⁹ Enlightened churchmen like Nicholas of Cusa achieved local reforms, but even these were transient. Denunciations of the Church’s shortcomings, by her enemies and her lovers, excited the schools, disturbed the pulpits, flooded the literature, mounted day by day, year by year, in the memory and resentment of men, until the dam of reverence and tradition burst, and Europe was swept by a religious revolution more far-reaching and profound than all the political transformations of modern times.