Temptations emerging from basically naturalist delusions of such a kind were well described by a variety of thinkers, from John of Salisbury to St. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253) to Innocent III himself. St. Bernard summarized their thoughts most succinctly in his De Consideratione to his former pupil, Pope Eugenius III (1145-1153), now master of the Roman administrative machine:²³

I know the place where you now dwell: unbelievers and enemies of good order are about you. They are wolves, not sheep. Of such as these you are none the less the Shepherd. Before you lies the practical problem how to convert them, if this be possible, before they have perverted you…If I spare you not here and now it is that you may one day be spared by God. To this race you must show yourself a shepherd or deny your pastoral office. Deny it you will not, lest he whose seat you hold deny you to be his heir. Peter, that is to say, who had not learnt, in those far off times, to show himself decked out in silks and jewellery. No golden canopy shaded his head, nor felt he ever the white horse between his knees. There was no soldiery to support him, nor did he go about hedged round by a crowd of noisy servitors. Without any of these trappings he none the less thought it possible to fulfill the commandment of Our Lord: If thou lovest me, feed my sheep. In all this pomp you show yourself a successor indeed: but to Constantine not Peter.

The Palace resounds with the sound of laws, but they are the laws of Justinian, not those of the Lord. Is not the enriching of ambition the object of the whole laborious practice of the laws and canons? Is not all Italy a yawning gulf of insatiable avarice and rapacity for the spoil it offers? So that the Church has become like a robber’s den, full of the plunder of travellers.

Council after council, even now, even before the worst consequences of the papal bureaucratic explosion were felt, would vainly utter the same lamentations and warnings. Would that they had been heeded in time! For an exaggeration of the importance of the administrative and legal organs of the Mystical Body was to prove to be a direct highway to an enslavement to the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. This nature bound obsession would consistently steer the Church away from its true source of strength, which, once again, lay only in heeding and preaching the full message of the Word Incarnate in history and taking its prescriptions for long-term practical action seriously.

Unfortunately, the prestige and rewards of service at the papal court attracted many dangerously ambitious men into its ranks. These, alas, could be regularly counted upon to act basically on behalf of their own, personal, self-interested tunnel vision, just as much as anyone else in the increasingly avaricious society of the High Middle Ages. One sees the results at the very top of the structure, in the ever more bloated conceits, ambitions, and downright troublemaking of the members of the College of Cardinals itself. Self consciously important, rich, and tempted by possibilities for further wealth and power, these self-styled “successors to the apostles”—even when they were often only simple priests or laymen—were ready to block competitors for the papal throne by means of lengthy electoral maneuvers and the labors of reigning pontiffs through political obstructionism and open conspiracy. Their behavior was imitated, every step of the way, by the army of lesser bureaucrats and lawyers active in Rome, ready to promote or stall all business on the basis of profit considerations.

Perhaps the greatest of the problems connected with the growth of papal administrative machinery flowed from the need to find the tax money to pay for the entire project. Obviously, any tax collection enterprise, however worthwhile its purpose, inevitably engenders a certain amount of ill will. Tax collection for the sake of supporting arrogant and corrupt officials significantly adds to the potential anger. But the indirect taxation that the Holy See increasingly developed to pay for the administrative expenses connected with exercising “the plenitude of papal power” was destined to arouse the greatest fury of all. This involved providing salaries for men serving at the papal court in the form of parish, diocesan, and monastic benefices throughout Christendom. Such “papal provisions” of benefices encouraged a plethora of evils, including pluralism—possession of more than one See or abbey—and absenteeism, with all their negative side effects on local guidance of religious life and lay pastoral care.

Sad to say, the system of papal provisions, designed to facilitate religious reform, in effect underlined the worst aspect of the whole medieval Christian attitude towards a priestly position: viewing it not primarily as an office designed for the “cure” of souls but as one that gave to the man holding it a “living”; the aforementioned benefice. Moreover, the successful functioning of this system, given the immense number of different practical problems involved, often required compromises with local rulers, from princes to municipal councils. Secular authorities then exacerbated the potential for spiritual damage by demanding their piece of the ecclesiastical financial pie in exchange for secular compliance with papal will. Once again, council after Church council attacked such unfortunate developments, which were ultimately to prove to be as destructive to civic purity as they were to ecclesiastical honor and prestige.

Canon lawyers, trained in legal think tanks like the University of Bologna, were available in ever-greater numbers to take up the well paying positions the Papacy offered for their services. Their “appropriate explanations” of the law of the Church proved to be useful to an ecclesiastical life of “business as usual” on behalf of “nature as is” closed to correction and transformation in Christ in two immediately practical ways. First of all, they justified all such money grubbing with reference to deeply admired Roman Law principles, turning the popes into Caesars judged capable of running the Church through their personal fiat as princes alone. Secondly, they called attention to tax collection methods much more suitable for uncovering and gathering funds than those known up until now; methods concerned with workable efficiency rather than distributive and commutative justice.

But such “pragmatic” assistance was highly counterproductive, as it always must be when dealing with the life of the Mystical Body, whose vital principle is not technocratic in character. For one thing, the more that papal financial policies threatened the spiritual well being of the lands being racked for tax money, the more the reputation of those mendicants called to preach on behalf of its money grubbing machinery was jeopardized. The more that this was compromised, the louder and more frequently were Spiritual Franciscan calls for the Church to embrace the life of Apostolic Poverty to be heard on influential lay lips. And inasmuch as these calls resounded in an atmosphere where speculative thought continued to be deprecated, they discouraged a serious, systematic discussion concerning whether or not a life of clerical destitution was actually mandated by Catholic Tradition. Defense of the papal position in an anti-rational environment of this sort was also easily reduced to an appeal to its recognized “authority” and “will” alone: in other words, to an argument that was essentially Nominalist in nature, and (as we shall see) actually spelled out as such by the Roman courtiers of the fourteenth century.²⁴

That brings us to the second issue, the obsessive concern of the Papacy for the struggle against the Holy Roman Empire. Admittedly, even under the best of circumstances, practical conflict would inevitably have accompanied promotion of the underlying theories of the second wave of the western medieval reform movement. Gregory and his immediate successors on the one hand, and the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1105) and his followers on the other, represented two conflicting visions of how to incarnate the sacred in the temporal realm. Both saw the Empire as being part of an order of things ultimately designed for the greater glory of God, but in different ways. It was not surprising that they thus were drawn mutually to condemn and excommunicate one another. Their words were often backed by the strength of arms, seriously disrupting political and social life in both Germany and Italy. Antipopes and anti-kings were chosen in the process, forcing prelates, nobility, merchants, and common people to take sides in this dramatic contest of Papacy and Empire, whether they wanted to or not.

Although the fury of the battle continued beyond the death of its first participants, their departure from the scene did mark the gradual initiation of calmer discussion of the manifold issues involved. This debate addressed the many practical problems of a world wherein local churches were very much dependent upon lay patrons for financial survival and physical protection and where rulers clearly required ecclesiastical good will and help for political stability and the maintenance of legitimate social order. Theologians and canonists of the stature of St. Ivo of Chartres (c. 1040-1115) examined more carefully the “non-negotiable” demands of a reform movement insisting upon the total independence of a supernaturally grounded Church that nevertheless possessed political and social responsibilities. They compared them with the requirements of a Sacred Empire whose very survival depended upon the cooperation of a spiritually grounded Church in the proper execution of its own historically rooted secular and spiritual tasks. Their hope was to find a way of satisfying the valid concerns of both.

A first solution to the problem was offered in 1111. It was radical in nature, proposing a total abandonment by the Church of the temporal goods and positions given to it by a State that understandably expected political services in return. This answer was rejected, awakening prelates, as it did, to a clear recognition of just what such a judgment of Solomon would entail in both theory and practice. Personal bankruptcy along with political and social impotence loomed large as factors in their rebuff.

Concessions on both sides then led to that second, more pragmatic compromise embodied in the Concordat of Worms of 1122 and ratified by First Lateran Council one year later. This agreement underlined how deeply rooted in theology on the one hand, and history and practical need for assistance on the other, the joint claims of religious and secular authorities on the labors of bishops and many abbots actually were. It confirmed that “fact of life” by giving to Church and State respective control over the ceremonies, documents, and symbolic objects investing prelates with their distinct spiritual and socio-political tasks. Deeds to the lands awarded by the emperor were thus presented through his authority; the bishop’s mitre and crosier through that of the Church. With this pact, an explosive situation--whose tensions could never really be eliminated unless and until a reliable, educated, and entirely lay source of governmental labor were to be made available to the Empire—was reduced to a considerably more manageable level.²⁵

And it was extremely good for the Church that it did so, because the battle of Papacy and Empire brought with it many other unexpectedly embarrassing complications for the reform movement. Let us ignore for the moment the irony of Pope St. Gregory VII’s own spontaneous election by the whole of the population of Rome, which totally violated all of the recently established rules for choosing a new pontiff through the medium of the reformed College of Cardinals alone. Much more troublesome than this was the fact that the hunt for armed support for the papal reform cause was potentially causing as much spiritual and physical harm as help to the Holy See.

While many fellow reformers, like St. Peter Damien, disliked the concept of Knights of St. Peter theoretically, in and of itself, they could also point to the more obvious problem presented by the nature of the allies that political threats and actual warfare brought into the Pope’s camp. They wondered viva voce whether the Holy See really wished to encourage the kind of disruptive popular “strikes” against unworthy bishops that had characterized the work of the so-called pataria in Milan. For some of the arguments of this movement’s lay leaders suggested a medieval revival of Donatism, with its ironclad and heretical foundation of the Church’s practical exercise of authority not upon her life in Christ but upon the personal holiness of her ministers. Critics also asked whether the aid of the Norman conquerors of southern Italy and Sicily was truly worth both its symbolic and practical consequences. After all, the Normans of Robert (c. 1015-1085) and Roger Guiscard (1031-1101) were responsible for depredations that had long infuriated the Eastern Emperors, manifestly violated that same independence of the Church that the reformers were defending against Henry IV, and ultimately even “helped” the Papacy by sacking the city of Rome herself. And how could the generally narrow parochialism of German feudal opponents of the Empire—the new allies of the reformed Papacy—truly be viewed as a better basis on which to rebuild Christian order than an imperial government with a much broader vision of the needs of a universal Christendom?

Moreover, it could easily seem as though an uncompromisingly spiritual-minded reform movement was, in practice, often obsessed with quite mundane land and money issues generating another batch of peculiarly counter-productive results. The second wave of reformers claimed that independence from the Empire was intimately connected with the possession of certain contested territories in central Italy. But in order to gain these lands, the Papacy engaged in warfare engendering military expenses whose satisfaction required the non-canonical alienation of other Church properties. Fortunes of war then led to papal exile from Rome, the payment of unacceptable political debts, and heavy borrowing from dubious and usurious forces for basic survival. How did leaving the Eternal City over to the machinations of the old, grasping, Roman “noble” families, happy to be able to play Church against Empire, aid the cause of reform? In what way did the gaining of fresh territories justify granting to Normans—and many other “friends”—privileges that the possession of these lands was intended to assure the Papacy the means of resisting? And what good came from placing the Holy See at the mercy of moneylenders representing new and increasingly avaricious financial interests?²⁶

On the other hand, even though it reduced the tensions creating the problems cited above, the compromise represented by the Concordat of Worms, along with a similar agreement with the Kingdom of England, was not itself without noticeable risks. Let us remember that it involved recognition of an historical fact of life and not the enunciation of an ideal. As such, it could never lead to a liberation of a bishop or an abbot from the constant difficulty of serving two masters simultaneously. Potentially, it could do damage to the interests of the one or the other, or even both of them together. In fact, the more the existing reality of State service was confirmed and then related to precisely delineated political responsibilities and property grants, the greater its latent threat to the boat-rocking pilgrim spirit that a Church true to her mission must always nurture. The “cuts” that everyone in this compromise got came with a backsliding in commitment to corrective transformation in Christ and a steady advance towards practical acceptance of “feudal nature as is”. And yet all of this took place in a world that outwardly spoke with a more devout religious voice than ever before.

Compromise did not even prevent further battles of the Papacy and Empire, which again emerged under the Hohenstaufen Dynasty during the reigns of Frederick I “Barbarossa” (1151-1190) and Frederick II (1212-1250).²⁷ By the time of the latter conflict in particular the confrontation of Church and State had reached a peculiar fever pitch. This was due not only to the general increase in corporate and individual greed, jealousy, and rage but also to the passion unleashed by yet another example of the high medieval tunnel vision syndrome alluded to above: that involving Roman Law. For, with the recovery of the major texts offering westerners the full flesh on that skeleton of Roman Law that the Visigothic King Alaric II had provided for the use of his non-German subjects, there also came a disturbing entry into the potent legalist spirit that lay behind its standard operating procedures.

Georges de Lagarde offers an incomparable discussion of the whole of the explosive legal question brought about by this rediscovery in the first of his five volume series entitled La naissance de l’esprit laïque au declin du moyen age. Here, he explains that the Roman concept of a public authority that took its right to legislate for an entire society as an unquestionable given hit medieval intellectual circles like a mental thunderbolt. If contemporaries could adopt it to their use, it would, in effect, “liberate” legislators from an enormous burden. It would free them from negotiating with that intricate contemporary complex of testy representatives of endless corporate entities, parochial customs, and personal historical claims to jurisdiction over local populations and their individual lives, all of whose specific rights were enshrined in the varied oral and written statements that characterized “the law” in feudal society. Perhaps more importantly still, it would do so with reference to a prestigious theme that blinded many of even the most alert medieval thinkers to anything else of significance that lay plainly before them: namely, the majesty of ancient Rome.²⁸

For just as modern men have tended to treat anything “new” as obviously “better”, so did the “common sense” men of the Middle Ages tend to transform their admiration for anything “ancient”, with a Greek or Roman pedigree, into an uncritical acceptance of its manifest superiority. We have already encountered this irrational flaw with reference to what passed for the teaching of Aristotle. The same psychological disorder now worked to the advantage of the gems of legal wisdom arriving from the treasure chest of Eternal Rome. Lovers of ancient sagacity were unshakeable in their affections and thought that they could easily justify them. After all, had not the second wave of the reform movement itself urged Christians to get “back to the roots” of Tradition when correcting ecclesiastical corruption arising through the ages? Where better to find traditional western legal roots than in a Seed of the Logos planted by the venerable Roman res publica? And, once again, had not the Holy See itself adapted Roman legal procedures to its own use in developing and exercising the “plenitude of papal power”?

In any case, what followed, in practice, was what always inevitably happens when uncritical excitement and enthusiasm take precedence over the use of Faith and Reason working in tandem: namely, an unthinking surrender of a higher vision to the demands of uncorrected Seeds of the Logos at best, and the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” at worst. Hence, rather than stepping back for a moment to judge how, and under what circumstances, and to what degree Roman Law and Roman legal procedures might be acceptable and useful in a corrected and transformed Christian society, greater familiarity with their august—but, when left to their own devices, totally naturalist—spirit inspired many thirteenth century legalists to grant them an unwarranted, total obeisance.

Let me add that this total obeisance to Roman Law could involve manifold results in the hands of that complex and potentially hostile mix of existing medieval corporate authorities. The first of the two most important of these consequences was the assistance that it gave to the demand for an untrammeled authority on the part of whatever ruler could make good a claim to public sovereignty in a given region. Yes, it is true that the fullness of the ancient legal Tradition based its authority ultimately upon the will of the “People of Rome”. But this “popular Roman will” had no literal resonance with medieval men. What the term signified to them was merely the final result of the sacrifices of that mass of half-mythical manpower responsible for conquering “the world” already before Christ was born. The “People of Rome”, in practice, by the time of Octavian Augustus, indicated the prince that guided them and, therefore, the dictates of the imperial will. It was in such form that the legal thinkers serving the Hohenstaufen Dynasty appealed to the concept, citing the self-evident “majesty” of Roman Law to back up imperial decrees, and claiming for their masters a “sovereign” power that could not be blocked by the merely historical, customary, and local “rights” of the extensive network of corporate powers active in the medieval world, from the Papacy down through to the bailiwicks of petty, rural, baronial families.

But we have already seen that the Papacy had entered the lists against imperial pretensions to an exclusive authority even before the entry of Roman legal theory into the arsenal of weapons wielded by the Hohenstaufen. We have noted that that same body of thought exercised an enormous impact upon the Papacy as well as upon secular authorities, with the former using it to justify the pope’s “princely” exercise of the plenitude of his power. Popular awe before the “obvious” specific laws and legal procedures dictated by the common sense of the “nature as is” authorities of the ancient past even forced the Church to bow to its wishes in a variety of regrettable ways. These included adopting overly brutal Roman anti-Gnostic methods for dealing with contemporary heretics that she would never have encouraged on her own steam—including the practice of burning at the stake.

Exaggerated defenders of the plenitude of papal power, such as the Augustinian, Giles of Rome (1243-1316), himself an admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas, used Roman legal arguments to, in effect, claim a total papal control over all matters temporal as well as spiritual. Giles placed everything, from ordinary property questions to the keys to the heavenly kingdom, in the hands of the chief shepherd of the baptized. It was merely for convenience sake, he argued, that the pope allowed secular princes to treat of temporal affairs in regular day-to-day life. One result of his outlook was that Giles saw no need for a Donation of Constantine to endow the Papacy with secular authority. Gratian had already paid no heed to this forged document in his earlier canonical writings. But more and more papal apologists followed Giles in openly disdaining its value as the twelfth century advanced. After all, the jurisdiction that the Donation supposedly deigned to assign to the Holy See already belonged to the Papacy by the law of God:²⁹

In the same way that in the government of the cosmos there is only one source, one God, in whom lies all power, from which all other authorities derive, and to which all the other powers may be reduced; just so, in human government, and, in the Church Militant, it is necessary that there be but one source, one head, in which may be placed the plenitude of power…and which possesses the two swords, without which its power would not be complete. From that source derives all other authorities, to that source they all merge; and that unique source directs and shelters the whole Church under one unique law.

Attentive readers may also have guessed that it was not just the legal servants of the emperor and the pope who were ready to put the wisdom of the ancient Romans to work on behalf of their masters. By the thirteenth century, thinkers and administrators employed by the kings of France and England were busily laboring to demonstrate that their rulers were, in practice, “emperors” in their own lands—the obvious, clear, and therefore self-justified public authorities within their own more circumscribed realms. It was, therefore, to them that carte blanche for public sovereignty had to be assured. As might by now be expected, self-conscious municipal authorities appealing to a sovereign, public, Roman legal authority, were not lacking either. One finds them especially active in pressing similar claims to sovereignty in many parts of the Italian Peninsula, particularly where effective power already lay in the hands of the communal representatives of the local bourgeoisie.

A second major consequence of a total obeisance to the legal teachings of ancient Rome concerns the intellectual or spiritual basis on which the self-justified decisions of the obvious public coercive authority would be made. The “People of Rome”, certainly at their historical origins, were a notoriously pragmatic lot, not given to philosophical speculation. The result was that the “law”, whether in the hands of the Senate and the Popular Assembly to begin with, or emerging from the mouth of the imperial prince in later centuries, could simply mean whatever “worked” in order to achieve Roman “success”. In other words, a perfect recipe for the exercise of raw, willful power in a manner that an Isocrates and his imitators could take up and “appropriately justify” lay ready to concoct from the cookbooks of Roman Law newly opened up before medieval legalists’ eyes.

Thankfully, tunnel vision in the thirteenth century was not complete enough to reach this end result just yet. One sign of that happy truth was the conclusion drawn by many scholastics from their digestion of Aristotle’s broader philosophical vision and its application to concepts concerning law in general. For Aristotle, in discussing the State, brilliantly roots its character not in any vague hunt for what is “useful”, but in man’s nature, both individual and fraternal at one and the same time. He explains that men need the State in order to fulfill their very raison d’être as individuals who are simultaneously social beings. Hence, the greatest of the thirteenth century commentators on Roman Law, men like the Italian thinker, Accursius (1182-1260), who clearly looked to both Aristotle as well as to imperial decrees for guidance, recognized that mere possession of power was not enough of a justification for the action of the law giver. The will of the prince could only have the force of law if his actions ultimately served the common good.

Still, how did one learn the nature of the “common good”? Here, a truly dangerous tunnel vision already manifested itself in the pronouncements of certain contemporary legalists, leading some of them to argue for the total independence of the law-giving mind from the corrective and transforming mission of the Church. It is for this reason that Accursius himself could say that, having rediscovered Roman jurisprudence in its entirety, theological knowledge was no longer of any importance to the legislator, because “all things are to be to be found in the body of law”.³⁰ Unfortunately, it was but a small step from this position to the definition of the “common good” as the mere maintenance of that “public order” that was the chief concern of the ancient imperial authorities and the historical Roman population itself. And that public order, without the aid of an outside philosophical and theological hunt for the “logos of things”, natural and supernatural, swiftly degenerated into whatever the “business as usual” demands of the most willful proponents of “nature as is” of any given time or place said that it was.

Thankfully, the same age also possessed geniuses like St. Thomas Aquinas, hard at work for the defense and teaching of the full message of the Word in history. He, and others like him, ranging from James of Viterbo, the Augustinian Archbishop of Naples (1255-1308) and one of the first authors on ecclesiology, to the State-friendly John of Paris (1255-1306) and the imperialist poet and essayist, Dante Alighieri, all, in varying ways, emphasized a happier and broader vision. Each of them, with Aquinas in the forefront, saw that Aristotle’s arguments, as Seeds of the Logos, necessarily led men away from the dark, back wall of the cave, demanding increasingly more light for understanding the essence of man’s individual and social nature. With the ever deeper grasp of the meaning of human existence stemming from this increasing knowledge, they also gained a correspondingly ever more accurate definition of the “common good”.

Aristotle—like Plato through his philosophical transformation and perfection of an otherwise “dumb” rhetorical science—opened to Roman Law an understanding of its meaning and purpose that its native founders never possessed. And, even though he himself could not have imagined it, Aristotle, following Plato, pointed the way to a supernatural revelation and an institution that would incarnate, correct, and transform his own magnificent labors to the still greater glory of God. He breeched a passage to a St. Thomas Aquinas, who, seeing everything through the eyes of Christ, drew forth from Aristotle and Roman Law a vision of Church and State working in tandem to gain a truly accurate understanding of the common good and the kind of public order that would permit it to triumph. Such, James of Viterbo insisted, is always the primary task of the Word with respect to all authority: not to usurp it, as Giles of Rome often suggested, but to “inform it”, spiritually, and by thus correcting and transforming it, to give it a greater sense of its own meaning and a deeper confidence in its own proper employment.³¹

Putting all this aside, what most concerns us now is simply whether or not the Holy See’s particular strategy in its conflicts with the Empire escaped the limitations of “tunnel vision” and accurately gauged contemporary as well as future spiritual dangers. Alas, one can safely say that it did not regularly follow the required high road. It did not always root its often quite legitimate and necessary public resistance to imperial abuses in its real source of strength as spokesman for the Word continued in time. Especially after the pontificate of Innocent III, it seems, step-by-step, to have abandoned efforts to root even its most justifiable measures in their proper theological and philosophical context. In consequence, it badly jeopardized its sense of the nuance always crucial to the proper performance of the Christian dance of life.

There is no doubt, for example, that the practical defense of the doctrine of the plenitude of papal power called forth use of the weapons of interdict, excommunication, and even crusading on an ever more extensive and exclusively political level, disturbing both to the community’s daily religious life as well as to individual Christian consciences. And it is certain that the hunt for support for papal demands once again entailed the cultivation of highly parochial German and Italian allies whose interests were not those of a general, stable, political and social order that worked for the benefit of the common good. In Italy, this fueled the already long-lasting Guelf (papal) versus Ghibelline (imperial) battle, which ended by pitting not only city against city but also each and every one of the internal urban factions mentioned above against its manifold competitors for power.³²

Papal exaggerations aroused an equally ferocious imperial response. Frederick II and his advisors passionately excoriated the dangerous path the popes had taken. “They say that the Court of Rome is our mother and our nurse”, the emperor lamented, but “her acts do not come from a mother. It is necessary to recognize in them rather the excesses of a stepmother”. The Roman Pontiffs, he insisted, had become “devouring wolves”, whose legates were sent “to excommunicate, to suspend, to punish all those who hold an authority”, while, at the same time, “you see them dissipating the goods of holy churches, the shelters of the poor, the homes of the saints that our fathers, in their piety and their simplicity, founded for the sustenance of the wretched and of pilgrims and the support of religious”. Taking a cue from the Spiritual Franciscans, he argued that it “was in poverty and simplicity that the primitive Church was founded and that she gave birth to saints”, and that her contemporary successor should take guard “lest her riches shall soon have provoked her ruin”. Recognizing that the claims of exaggerated defenders of the plentitude of papal power and the coercive ecclesiastical actions individual popes had taken had offended even such deeply pious rulers as St. Louis IX, Frederick called upon all princes throughout Christendom to recognize that their own legitimate authority was threatened when the rights of the emperor were attacked:³³

Raise your eyes, stand up, sons of men…Cry over the scandal of the universe, the discord of nations, the exile of justice. The ancients of the people who seemed to govern it now only produce the Babylonian Plague. Judgment is changed into bitterness, the fruit of justice into absinthe. Take heed, princes, peoples, hear our cause…Do not forget, above all, princes, that our cause is your cause. Run to your homes with buckets full of water when fire devours the wall of your neighbor…Take fear that the slyness of the pope does not turn against you. It will be easy to humiliate all the other princes and kings if he can bring to nothing the power of the Roman Caesar whose shield has received the first arrows…It is time for you to understand that the honor of all is at stake each time that one touches one member of the body of secular princes.

In making this appeal, Frederick also reminded his audience of the social revolution that the Gregorian reform had everywhere provoked, thereby adding to the pot of mutual envy that seemingly everyone in the age of the new ascent of Mount Tabor incessantly stirred. Hence, his reference to the competition for riches stimulating the avarice of all medieval corporate bodies, from the highest to the lowest, in an era of tremendous economic boom and bust:³⁴

Those whom one looks to now as clerics, finding themselves insufficiently fattened by their alms, oppress the sons of the donors of these alms, and even the sons of our subjects, forgetting the condition of their fathers, and do not deign to give witness to any respect towards their emperor, neither towards their king, each time they receive the title of apostolic fathers…How can you display yourselves to be obedient to these men with a false exterior of sanctity, whose ambition leads them to hope that the whole of the Jordan River might flow into their mouth? Oh!...if the simplicity of your credulity looked to defend itself against this evil leaven of Scribes and Pharisees which is hypocrisy according to the word of the Savior, how abundant would be the revenues spared which now go to enrich them while impoverishing a crowd of kingdoms….

Neither did the emperor’s summons to a general “rising” against papal policies go unanswered. English barons, Italian municipalities, and even, as the following passage indicates, the greatest lords of the Kingdom of France in a forceful protest of 1245, all bitterly registered their discontent with the maneuvers of the Holy See. Once again, all the anger over the social revolution that the ecclesiastical reform of the High Middle Ages assisted entered into such calls for resistance to the clergy. Once again, such purely natural concerns were accompanied by high-minded references to the supposed superiority of the foundation vision of a primitive Church characterized by an Apostolic Poverty possessing no political or social pretensions. And behind it all, there lay the clear threat of the possible use of violent force to flay those wicked clerics who refused to heed the original intent of the Christian founders:³⁵

Whereas clerical fantasies, failing to take into account that the Kingdom of France was converted from the error of the pagans to the Catholic Faith by the wars and by the blood of many men under Charlemagne and other princes, and at first seduced us with an appearance of humility when they actually came to us as foxes; whereas upon the very ruins of the castles which we founded, the clergy so absorbs the jurisdiction of secular princes that the sons of serfs judge according to their law the children and the sons of free men, when, on the contrary, according to the law of the first conquerors, they should rather be judged by us; whereas one should not take away by new constitutions the customs of our predecessors; whereas they create for us a situation worse than God intended the condition of the pagans to be, when He said: ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’: all of us, the Lords of the kingdom, reflecting attentively that the kingdom was acquired not by written right or by the arrogance of the clergy, but through the sweat of warriors, we lay down and sanction through the present decree, on the oath of all, that no cleric or lay person will in the future make a claim before an ordinary judge or his delegate, unless that be for heresy, marriage, or usury, under pain for the transgressors of losing their goods and being mutilated in their members so that our jurisdiction may raise up and breathe, and that the clerics, enriched up until now through our impoverishment…might be led back to the state of the primitive church, live in contemplation, while we shall lead as befits us an active life, and thus cause to be reborn the miracles of which the world is since long time deprived.

D. The Welcoming Committee of the Grand Coalition

Although none of the many proponents of the various forms of the tunnel vision mentality noted above were ready to take a final, determined, and openly anti-Catholic step in the thirteenth century, thereby entering into full-fledged participation in the ranks of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, temptations to do so lay all around them. For outright members of the GCSQ, horrified at the progress of the Word in that age of the new ascent of Mount Tabor “when values descended to the earth”, were already on the spot to urge them to cross the thin but still very real line from outraged believer or problem child to open enemy of the full message of Christ. Who, exactly, formed part of this unhappy welcoming committee?

Still active in the GCSQ were a number of those first trenchant enemies of the Christian name, the highly parochial-minded Jews of the post-Temple era. It was really only in the 1200’s that Church authorities themselves started to become aware of just what the Faith of these representatives of the first Covenant actually entailed. Up until that point, their presumption was that Judaism was simply an incomplete Old Testament religion. It was primarily converts from Judaism who made Catholic leaders conscious of the truly dominant elements in contemporary Jewish intellectual life: namely, the Talmud and the Cabbala. If the first of these influences was threatening simply due to the hatred of Christianity that it inspired, the second was much more dangerous because its magical components were couched in a pseudo-spiritual language masquerading their clear support for a willful manipulation of the fruits of “nature as is” that was potentially tempting to all. For the Cabbala’s offer of unmeasured physical power over the universe could easily play on the ordinary day-to-day passions of every sinful man and institution. And these, we have repeatedly seen, had already been stirred to fever pitch by the raging cupidity and corporate jealousies of the time.³⁶

But the day of the Talmud and the Cabbala as major factors in the collapse of Christendom had yet to come. At the moment, a much more significant GCSQ problem was posed by the outright supporters of Gnosticism. Whether native-born or emerging from missionary activity out of heretical centers of Byzantium, a western Gnosticism of Manichean character and in close contact with the East had, by the twelfth century, become very strong in southern France, northern and central Italy, and sections of the Rhineland. Known by westerners much more under the names of Catharism—signifying the hunt for purification—and Albigensianism—with reference to the city of Albi, at the center of a region of particular Catharist strength—this movement was not concerned with correcting abuses in an enterprise otherwise recognized as praiseworthy in character. It rejected the very possibility of a political and social transformation of mankind through any tools, one or many, Catholic, Jewish, or evenly purely natural in character. We have already seen that it viewed such a project as a blasphemous attempt to baptize the inevitably satanic earthly realm; a horrifying whirl with the devil rather than a joyful dance of life, dramatic and risky though this latter inevitably must be.

One of the reasons that western Catharists made headway was the fact that, like all good Manicheans, they deconstructed solid Christian tools and redirected them to the advancement of their peculiar missionary enterprise. Organized in a parallel Church, the self-sacrifice of their preachers and “perfect ones” made them appear to be true practitioners of an Apostolic Poverty that was disdained by wicked popes, prelates, and priests. These “honest laborers” in the vineyard of the Lord then dedicated themselves to work in areas troubled by disorder and scandal, and frequently among “outsiders”, like women, who felt that their religious and local civil needs were badly neglected by the orthodox establishment. Far from appearing in any way dangerous, Catharists could thus seem to many ordinary believers to be nothing other than infinitely more admirable representatives of the primitive Catholic Faith than the “modernist” mainstream clergy.

Gnostic “Christianity” and “self-sacrifice” were, however, in reality, based upon a loathing for the material world dangerous to all institutions claiming to work for the correction of the evils of daily, natural life, with the Church and the State being simply the most immediately and obviously affected by it. It was thus of primary importance in fighting them to emphasize the essential difference of Catharist and Catholic visions of nature, along with the full consequences of accepting one as opposed to the other. Recognizing this, Innocent III and his successors wisely deployed the Dominicans and Franciscans in militant spiritual combat against the heretics.

Mendicants lived a way of life that could arouse the same kind of admiration felt by neglected believers for Catharist holy men. Nevertheless, they cultivated their vocation of self-sacrifice in order to direct the faithful to the Catholic teaching regarding the basic goodness of a fallen Creation and the corrective, transforming grace of the Incarnation. Even better, mendicants knew how to tell a good story about their true tale of Creation, Sin, and Redemption. Through such tools as the use of the crèche, men like St. Francis were able to show the Church’s love for women, children, and nature in general in a manner that vividly uncovered the hatred felt by the Gnostics for everything involving the body, childbirth, and the female as mother and nurturer. This hatred was so intense as to lead them to spit at the pregnant women they encountered in public, as well as to give them a prominent place in modern histories of contraception and abortion.

Unfortunately, force, whether in the form of regular armies, local vigilante groups, or an Inquisition backed by the authority of the State, was also clearly needed to crush medieval Gnostics. It was because of this that Innocent III called a crusade to eliminate their threat in southern France. While completely justified, the use of such force was subject to the same kind of physical abuses connected with crusading in other contexts. This meant that clever storytellers could deceive people into thinking either that every deed of an anti-Gnostic crusader was Catholic and good or, crossing to the other side of the barricade, that Catharists were totally innocent victims of a perverse Church and State unified in their torment of the just and poor in spirit. Both such “good stories” portended significant future troubles for understanding and defending the true progress of the Word in daily life. For both refused to recognize either the reality of a universal truth on the one hand or the ever-present danger of human sinfulness disgracing its precepts in practice on the other.³⁷

Two other GCSQ squadrons active in this era are somewhat difficult to pin down precisely: pagan literati and atheist materialists. That their spirit was certainly alive is indicated by a mass of evidence from various sources. These include the pagan and erotic poetry composed by learned bishops benefiting from the cultivation of the Latin cultural heritage during the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissance, and the naturalist, forest-centered tales, evocative of later, Rousseau-like concepts of “simplicity” and “sincerity”, cultivated by the Anglo-French Plantagenet Family in its opposition to the intensely religious, crusading imagery of the Capetian Monarchy. A naturalist spirit can also be noted in many aspects of even the most important troubadour Songs of the Deed, as well as in the practical and open mockery of Christian moral principles expressed in the verses of some of the wandering student “Goliard” minstrels of the age. Finally, clear indications of the Averroist vision of a universe built upon necessity and devoid of freedom, at least in the form that this mentality may have seeped into the popular student mind at the University of Paris, can be found in works such as the renowned Romance of the Rose.³⁸

In any case, all the materialism and potential atheism noticeable in their many racy lines and speculations fed the lamentations of numerous contemporary preachers. These preachers also insisted upon expressions of actual hatred for the Faith to be heard from the mouths of both common people as well as influential laymen. What is hard to know, however, is who, among such “unbelievers”, were really anti-Christian by conviction and who were not. For many troubadours, Goliards, and bishops who wrote Latin poetry and romances antithetical to Christianity may simply have been following what were deemed to be unchangeable literary conventions handed down from the founders of the classical tradition. They may not have been expressing their true feelings, which might have basically remained those of honest believers. Some “pagan” literati may also have exaggerated their commitment to ancient literary conventions as a reaction to the tunnel vision and pedestrian prose of many of the supporters of logic, law, and Aristotle. These, as we have seen, were just as passionately, though more rationally, criticized by thinkers of unquestionable orthodoxy, such as John of Salisbury, the Bishop of Chartres.

Moreover, people mumbling what seemed to preachers to be materialist guides to action may have been driven to do so merely by the standard operating procedures of their professions, which inevitably focused their daily attention in temporal directions, without leading them to draw truly serious anti-religious conclusions from their “practical atheism”. In addition, what appeared to preachers as disdain for the Faith in the thirteenth century often revealed nothing more than a momentary—and perhaps frequently very well justified—rage over the kind of corporate clerical avarice chastised above. And, after all, the voices that exploded in anger over clerical immunities and ecclesiastical courts in commercial towns frequently belonged to the same men who actively supported the work of the mendicant friars and invested a great deal of money and physical labor into rebuilding the cathedrals of Europe.

By this point, however, all of the incendiary materials present in the era when values descended to the earth now lie before the eyes of the reader: tunnel vision; avarice; appropriate explanations of desire, ignorantly or hypocritically justifying the “business as usual” desires of “nature as is” in the name of the Apostolic Faith; Jewish parochial and magical influence; Gnostic denial of the value of Creation; a literary naturalism; and a practical atheism. These incendiary materials rubbed against one another in an atmosphere charged with millenarian expectations. All that was needed to set them off was the mini-apocalypse that did indeed now explode inside and outside Christendom.

E. Confrontation and Apocalypse in Miniature

Each and every one of the obstacles hindering success in the Internal Crusade grew still more formidable in the last decades of the thirteenth century. Although those barriers to unity intensifying the East-West division that Blessed Gregory X considered the greatest of Christendom’s open wounds must eventually be mentioned in the context of this worsening situation, the logical development of our story requires a preliminary focus on two other factors.

Initially more important was, once again, the continuing battle of Church and Empire. Already by the end of the twelfth century, this conflict had centered round the addition of Sicily to the imperial possessions of Germany and northern Italy and the effects that such an acquisition could have on papal independence of action. When Frederick II died, and his descendants, Manfred (1232-1266) and Conradin (1252-1268), emerged as imperial champions in the southern part of the peninsula, the papal hunt for a political solution to the Sicilian Question reached almost maniacal proportions.

Crusading paladins were sought everywhere. Despite the skepticism and reticence of St. Louis, the king’s brother, Charles of Anjou (1226-1285), took up the cudgel, brutally destroying the last of the Hohenstaufen Dynasty by 1268. After the uprising of the so-called Sicilian Vespers of 1282 successfully contested Charles’ own locally detested rule, and the Kingdom of Aragon ultimately gained control of the island, the Papacy pressed France herself into the “crusade” against the heirs of the Hohenstaufen and, thus, her own first and unjust imperialist war. Meanwhile, this seemingly endless papal-imperial struggle mingled with and was used for the appropriate justification of the all too earthbound quarrels, internal and external, of most of the growing cities of the entire Italian peninsula. Papal appeal to the weapons of interdict and excommunication in such Guelf and Ghibelline party strife thereby became an almost “normal” staple of everyday Italian urban political life. It is hard to overestimate, in consequence, the non-sacramental existence that many Italian Catholics were forced to lead, sometimes for years at a stretch, and this during the thirteenth, supposedly the greatest of Christian centuries.³⁹

Before moving on to the second, spiritual front, let us note that as the “holy war” against Sicily took up more and more attention, crusading against the Moslems was faltering badly. The inability to get anywhere with what Blessed Gregory X at the Second Council of Lyons had expected to be the mother of all crusades, and then the misappropriation of the funds collected for its prosecution, were a mere foretaste of the troubles soon to arrive. But nothing quite prepared westerners psychologically for the reality of total loss of all direct control over the Holy Land. This came in 1291, when Acre, the last of the Latin outposts in the Levant, fell into the hands of the Moslems.

More than anything else, Acre’s fall was significant as a vivid symbol of a much deeper disease eating at the heart of Christendom. Defense of the Holy Land, believers thought, ought clearly to have been at the center of the Church’s concerns. But what were the popes doing with their plenitude of power as the infidel prepared his attack? They were occupied playing their centuries old anti-imperial political game. They were, in short, concerned with the petty obsessions of an earthbound spirit of “business as usual” while their higher labor on behalf of the salvation of the Christian People as a whole was left miserably unattended.⁴⁰

Correcting the errors of a politicized Church blind to truly spiritual needs was very much a project of the Apostolic Poverty Movement, with those Franciscans who were eager for a full embrace of St. Francis’ vision of total renunciation of all possessions in its forefront. The battle of these Spirituals with the Conventual Franciscans, whose attitude towards mendicant property and its use was much more nuanced, was a dramatic and sometimes brutal one. It went through many twists and turns throughout the whole of the thirteenth century and beyond. Spiritual hopes that a radical change for the better, one indicating that the approach of the reign of the Holy Spirit predicted by Joachim of Fiore was imminent, were strongly encouraged by the election of Pope St. Celestine V in 1294. It was the enthusiasm aroused by his public blessing of the Spiritual Franciscan position and seemingly committed desire to support what they believed to be a central feature of the founding Christian vision that made the sting of his swift abdication all the more disruptive. Sorrow over the loss of this heroic “Angelic Pope”, ready to lead the return to the original intent of the Apostolic Church, was likely to cast suspicion upon his successor, Benedetto Caetani, Boniface VIII (1294-1303), even if the new pontiff had offered no further grounds for the Spirituals to attack him. Such grounds, alas, he immediately gave.

This is not to say that Boniface did not perform yeoman service for the Church in a number of respects, beginning with the role he played in urging Celestine to opt for early retirement. Cardinal Caetani realized that the “Angelic Pope’s” simple, monastic approach to governance was an open invitation to his sovereign, Charles II (1285-1309), the Angevin King of Naples, to manipulate the Holy See for his own all too “common sense” purposes. Moreover, Boniface knew how to tell a good story for the sake of the doctrine of the plenitude of papal power—a teaching which, when defined accurately and employed properly on behalf of the corrective and transforming message of the Word, was an enormous blessing for all of Christendom.

Celestine’s replacement gave witness to his valuable story-telling ability in two ways. One was through his proclamation of the Jubilee Year of 1300. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flooded to Rome in response to the papal call to celebration at that dramatic moment, indicating to the world at large that the power of the head of the Mystical Body to motivate men without any appeal to the force of arms was clearly still immense. Secondly, Boniface knew how to express the true extent of Christ’s practical power over all individual believers in simple, palpable terms. He did so in what is perhaps the most famous of all papal documents, Unam sanctam (1302). The chief import of this work, which, despite the claims of its detractors, was a highly traditional statement of the papal argument, much more nuanced than anything to be found in the writings of zealots like Giles of Rome, was its emphasis upon the fact that values could not descend to the earth in some sentimental, ethereal way. They could only do so, as the pope insisted, by being firmly embodied in a vivid force of flesh and blood: first in the figure of the Incarnate Word Himself and then in the Body of a Church possessing the same kind of muscle and bone as the Savior; a Church firmly guided by the one, visible hand of the Roman Pontiff.

Unfortunately, the good story that Boniface told was flawed by the harm that he did through his own regrettable tunnel vision, revealed through his depressingly mundane fixation on his family’s personal power. This had the effect of weakening his otherwise magnificent statement on behalf of the legitimate corrective and transforming work of the Church, which could indeed only be made substantive and real through a proper appreciation of papal authority. Boniface, sadly, made it seem that the plenitude of papal power meant nothing more sublime than the universal jurisdiction and self-aggrandizement of the Caetani Family.

Caetani tunnel vision then benefitted the ambitions of the equally if not even more grasping Colonna Family. The pope’s pretensions permitted the Colonna to masquerade their opposition to Boniface VIII as being representative of a religious and spiritually inspired high road leading ultimately to the kind of poor, humble, primitive Church that alone would be pleasing to Christ. Such word merchandising allowed the Colonna to shine with the aura of heroic sanctity cultivated by the Spiritual Franciscans. Meanwhile, the apocalyptic and political naiveté of the latter tempted them to give encouragement to all of the enemies of Boniface: including precisely those who hid their “business as usual” obsessions under the slogan of a noble crusade for a rebirth of apostolic purity.⁴¹

However, Boniface’s reign is most remembered for another disaster for which he alone was not responsible. For it was during his pontificate that the Papacy really began to pay the price for devoting so much attention to the war of attrition with the Sacred Empire. Tragically, this obsession had caused it to ignore the way in which Roman Law, ethnic feeling, and outward expressions of religious piety could be manipulated to serve the interests of other political authorities, from municipal councils to nation-states, to the detriment of the cause of Christendom and Christ as whole. These authorities’ more parochial-minded time had now arrived. And although the Italian city-states and England regularly demonstrated their ability to inflict serious wounds, the first real blood in the battle of Church and Sacred Parochialism was actually shed in conflict with a totally unexpected opponent: the Kingdom of France.

France, like Germany, boasted of its rule by an anointed monarch who could claim to be an heir of Charlemagne’s Christian mission. Still, the Capetian Family, the French royal family since the tenth century, not being Carolingian, had to work, like the Ottonians, to overcome its rise through circumstance and election. It had to prove that it, too, possessed Heil. This it did by cementing an ever-closer relationship with medieval reform, peace, and crusading ventures. Abbot Suger of Saint Denis was particularly important in creating the religious and political symbolism accompanying this powerful and effective association of Dynasty and Faith. The work of sacralization of the French Monarchy was so fruitful, that by the time of Philip Augustus’ (1180-1223) great victory at Bouvines in 1214, the king could present himself as a Moses dispersing the enemies of a people that had become a New Israel. King Louis IX then added immeasurably to the already impressive Capetian aura by himself being universally recognized by all of Christendom as a saint.

Holy France was simultaneously digesting developments in imperial use of ancient political and legal wisdom, applying them to the work of the Capetians, who, as indicated above, were designated “emperors in their own land”. Her digestion was so perfect that imperial spokesmen began to dream that emperors might someday become “kings of France in their own Empire”. By this point, all that was needed for a first class ecclesiastical nightmare to begin was for ministers of government with rhetorical talent to follow up on the above-mentioned complaints of the highest lords of the realm from 1245. They could then offer appropriate explanations of passionately desired despotic State actions on the basis of both “infallible” Roman Law principles and the “obvious” sanctity of the French Monarchy. Should such a crisis come to pass, opposition to the monarch’s wishes would be depicted not just as hostility to natural political wisdom but also to Catholicism and the well being of Christendom as a whole. Words on behalf of French monarchical “business as usual” would then be able to overturn the influence of the Word in history in the name of Christ and of the Faith themselves.⁴²

Precisely this did take place at the hands of King Philip IV the Fair (1285-1314) and his anticlerical legal advisors: enemies of a corrective transformation in Christ par excellence. Desperately in need of money as a result of a lengthy war with England, and eager to make of the French State the overall arbiter of European destiny, Philip’s court hunted for funds from every conceivable corporate and individual stronghold: Church, bourgeois, and international crusading order, with the Jewish community thrown in for good measure. Resistance emerged. And with that resistance came the decision on the part of Philip’s legal advisors to pit the sacred Catholic King against the “heretical and immoral” forces wickedly opposing him, no matter how highly placed they might be.

Both the pope, who protested the despoiling of French dioceses, and the crusading Knights of the Temple, rich in properties and gold, and correspondingly accused of all manner of revolting crimes, figured prominently in the ensuing struggle. Philip’s legalists summoned the aid of all “high minded men” to rid the Church and the world of two demonic forces: a papal villain who dared to stand in the way of a self-evidently pious king’s mission, and a group of false crusaders who had penetrated the sacred precincts of the Mystical Body merely to mock its sanctity through their hypocritical militancy, their blasphemy, and their immorality.

The alliance these servants of the Crown created and the tools that they used to achieve their goals represented a conglomerate of the aforementioned “Seeds of the words”. Philip’s courtiers mobilized for their campaign not only Roman Law thinkers justifying an absolute State power but also the proponents of a primitive Apostolic Poverty outraged over the worldliness of an all too fleshly Church, ambitious Roman families and cardinals eager to overturn the plenitude of the power of the Caetani pope, and democratic “public opinion” to boot. This last force was put to use to guide the first painfully rigged meetings of the Estates General as well as to facilitate the macabre proceedings of history’s original Purge Trials.

All such game playing was designed to create the appearance of an overwhelming swell of righteous indignation over the actions of unquestionably wicked criminals that no one other than the undeniably selfless sacred king could effectively enlist sufficient forces to punish. The physical attack on Boniface at Anagni in 1303, the demand for his condemnation for heresy during the succeeding pontificates, along with the demoralizing, Stalinist destruction of the Knights of the Temple (1307) under the bewildered and seemingly helpless eyes of Pope Clement V (1305-1314) were the chief practical fruits of this clever combination of sanctimonious propaganda and brute force. What is truly extraordinary is the way in which the specifics of that propaganda are still believed by considerable numbers of fervent Catholics, while the tyrannical violence of the monarchy, especially in the case of the actions taken against the Templars, is ignored, denied, or even passionately justified.⁴³

Examples of the approach of the new storytellers are to be found in pamphlets such as the Disputatio inter clericum et militem, the Rex Pacificus, the Antequam essent clerici, and the official memoirs of royal officials such as Pierre Dubois (c. 1255-c. 1321) and Guillaume de Nogaret (1260-1313). One finds here the most arrogant and blatant claims to date regarding the State’s religious responsibilities and the Church’s need for obedience and humility in dealing with public affairs. Hidden threats lie everywhere in their pronouncements. These are often couched in a heavily prophetic biblical language, as in the second of de Nogaret’s apologiae for his attack upon Boniface VIII in Anagni. Here, he laments the fate of the Church:⁴⁴

…the mother of piety, under the chains of such a brigand, displaying in the temple of the Lord the abomination of our desolation, all that which the Book of Daniel can say of Nero, or rather of Simon, or of all other ignominy of crimes still unknown. Where can one look for a sure place; where can one look for a refuge, if the venerable temples of the Lord, if the Roman Church is besieged by such avidities? Where will the wall of integrity, the rampart of the faith be found if the execrable thirst of riches invades the most venerable…Cry and shout, you who approach your lips to the sacred chalice…gird yourselves and groan, priests and ministers of God, cry over the Roman Church, your mother…Rise up, all you who sleep, behold that laws rise up and arms are unsheathed for vengeance.

Consistent statist attacks on ecclesiastical rights during Philip’s reign explain the Holy See’s preoccupation with conditions in his troublesome kingdom at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Popes who were fully aware of the spiritual strength coming from reliance on the Word, a power just recently confirmed by the response to the Holy Year of 1300, might have taken advantage of the general European indignation over the manhandling of Boniface to humble the French Monarchy for decades to come. Instead, their by now ingrained tendency to focus on the political factors that men of “common sense”, wise in the ways of the world, considered to be central to truly pragmatic ecclesiastical decision-making, dictated both a policy of temporary papal presence in or near France, as well as the selection of a line of Gallic popes suitable for handling French affairs. Pontifical absence from Rome contributed mightily to the spread of the chaotic conditions disturbing much of Italy in the 1300’s, where the breakdown of imperial authority had also aided the solidification of the power of autonomous, quarreling city-states. Increasing Italian instability then, in turn, confirmed papal resolve to stay at its “temporary” residence in the city of Avignon, the entirety of which was finally purchased during the reign of Clement VI (1342-1352). Here, directly adjacent to the Kingdom of France but on the road that led to Rome, the popes could make the best of their ever-longer Gallic political vacation.

Ironically, however, the “good story” presented by the supporters of Philip the Fair did not, at least in the short run, succeed. France was troubled by succession problems leading to a change of dynasty within a few decades of Philip’s death. French pretensions crumbled also as a result of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) with England. Fallout from this conflict brought a myriad of festering and bitter social problems still further to the fore, not the least of which was an intensification of the desire for riches on the part of the warring nobility and their bloody-minded malitia. All these problems delayed consistent furtherance of the monarchy’s potential totalitarian ambitions until well into the fifteenth century.⁴⁵

But the Avignon Papacy could not rest in consequence. Fresh problems, confounding the performance of the dance of life as presently understood, swiftly arose, all of them only properly confronted by a fully awakened Mystical Body possessed of a solid pilgrimage spirit. One such horror was the Black Death, which appeared for the first time in 1348, returning repeatedly for some hundreds of years to come. Another was the arrival on European soil of the Moslem threat in the form of the Ottoman Turks. The first killed off as much as half or more of the population of the lands affected, with the clergy figuring prominently among the chief victims, bringing a myriad of nasty religious developments and still further social divisions in its train. The second threatened to sever the land connection with Constantinople, to conquer New Rome herself, to menace the European West, and, worst of all, actually to convert whole Christian communities to Islam. And the Hundred Years’ War, with all its attendant horrors, continually brought new destructive surprises that made it little in the way of compensation for its weakening of French governmental pressure on the Roman Pontiffs.⁴⁶

Finally, the advancing fourteenth century brought with it another battle of the Holy See with the Holy Roman Empire that the Papacy vacationing in Avignon had to confront. Although this was actually one of its first serious problems in its new Gallic home, I have left its discussion till last because of its long-term spiritual, intellectual, and political importance. For even though the reality of the rise of the national monarchies, as well as the increasingly anarchic character of the three kingdoms of Germany, Burgundy, and Italy nominally ruled over by the man called the emperor, made this conflict in and of itself something of an anachronism, it nevertheless gave rise to a ferment providing more solid spiritual and intellectual meat for the proponents of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” than ever before. This meat was to prove to be of immense value for the growth of what we justly call “modernity” as such. But before it can profitably be introduced, we must, as so often in history, first return to a discussion of the failure of Christians to put their primary faith in the Word and their tendency to rely, instead, upon secondary words of their own making in dealing with the challenges of temporal existence.

F. Resistance on the Cheap,

Fundamental Truths, & Foundation Myths

Most Catholics somewhat familiar with the problems outlined above think of the post-Boniface VIII era as one of papal captivity and weakness. In almost every respect, this was not the case. French kings, as we have seen, had too many life-and-death quandaries over the course of the next century to pursue a consistent policy of papal humiliation. The popes ultimately came to and left France and Avignon at will. Moreover, the Church, as the Bride of Christ, was always in a position to strike back at the Seeds of the words and the new problems she was facing with the power of the full, substantive Christian vision.

Unfortunately, she did not do so, and, instead, tried to resolve her troubles “on the cheap”. She was content to use an arsenal stuffed with mere words rather than one filled with weapons provided by the Word made flesh. The Bride of Christ continued to try to make her case with overwhelming reference to the demands of an administrative power machine guided by canonists whose legal theories were in many respects not that much different from those of their secular counterparts. All this indicated a diversion from the Church’s understanding of her main mission and what was best suited to fulfilling it. It revealed a “preferential option for the low road”, a massive placing of her faith in purely earthly tools and gimmicks, a bow to the cynical preoccupations of those who did not really, in practice, believe in the strength coming from spiritual transformation in Christ but, instead, in whatever it was that “worked” in the eyes of men obsessed with “nature as is”—men who did not really have the Church’s best interests at heart.

For the men of Avignon refined therein the most centralized bureaucratic apparatus that the Church had yet possessed; one that both imitated and often surpassed in efficiency those of any of the more troubled secular governments of the day. Popes, cardinals, and officials of the Chancery and Apostolic Camera appointed bishops, collected taxes, and imposed disreputable political interdicts and excommunications throughout much of Christendom with greater abandon and less concern for the spiritual well being of the faithful than ever before. They did so in tight association with countless princes and other representatives of the late medieval Establishment. Bankers were particularly welcome in their entourage. As Alvaro Pelayo (c. 1280-1352), a Spanish canonist and himself a fervent supporter of the plenitude of power of the Holy See, noted in De planctu ecclesiae: “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the Papal Court, I found brokers and clergy engaged in weighing and reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”⁴⁷

A myriad of astonishing abuses, many of them justified and even encouraged by pro-papal canonists influenced heavily by Roman Law and purely utilitarian power considerations, became associated with the Avignon administration. Charitable covers for raking in illicit funds were multiplied. Sees were left vacant or filled in ways that furthered the increase of gross curial muscle and wealth. Legal cases were painfully delayed so as to milk more loot from long-suffering plaintiffs and defendants. And, once again, all this was frequently done in dangerous cahoots with locally important political and banker hacks.

Even more destructive was the persistent treatment of diocesan matters as property rather than pastoral questions. Bishoprics continued to be assigned either to curial officials--to provide, from their endowments, salaries the Papacy could not otherwise pay--or to friends of political allies whose cooperative behavior needed to be rewarded. Since it was impossible for papal employees to leave their governmental positions in Avignon to tend to even one diocese—much less the two or more often entrusted to their misuse—episcopal charges inevitably entailed the same absenteeism now consistently practiced by the Roman Pontiff himself. Perhaps the most bizarre development from such unfortunate policies was to be the creation of nominal bishops who were occasionally not even priests. Such “bishops” got the revenues from their “property”, and then employed some consecrated hireling to do the episcopal tasks they themselves could not or would not perform. Meanwhile, once again, all of these abuses were justified with reference to a plenitude of Petrine power backed by a papal “will” that tragically resembled an application of Nominalist theological principles to the daily practical life of the Body of Christ. Hence, the words of the author of the anonymous Determinatio compendiosa of 1342:⁴⁸

Especially is he, the pope, above every council and statute…; he it is, too, who has no superior on earth; he, the pope, gives dispensations from every law….Again, it is he who possesses the plenitude of power on earth and holds the place and office of the Most High….He it is who alters the substance of a thing, making legitimate what is illegitimate…and of a monk making a canon regular,…he it is who by absolving on earth absolves {also} in heaven, and by binding on earth binds {also} in heaven….Again, it is to him that nobody may say: ‘Why do you do that?’…He it is for whom the will is reason enough, since that which pleases him has the force of law (ei quod placet, legis vigorem habet);…he is not bound by the laws…etc (solutus est legibus). Indeed, the pope is the law itself and a living law (lex viva), to resist which is impermissible. This then is the Catholic and orthodox faith, approved and canonized by the holy fathers of old, from which all justice, religion, sanctity and discipline have emanated. If anyone does not believe it faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved, and without doubt will perish eternally.

Given such sentiments and actions, it is no wonder that political authorities, from national governments to municipal councils, eventually resorted to serious measures limiting or even prohibiting such papal misrule entirely. England provides major examples of successful actions of this sort, with its acts on Provisors that brought appointment to office under national control. The following instance comes from the generally still more troubled German world:⁴⁹

In October, 1372, the monasteries and abbies in Cologne entered into a compact to resist Pope Gregory XI in his proposed levy of a tithe on their revenues. The wording of their document manifests the depth of the feeling which prevailed in Germany against the Court of Avignon. ‘In consequence’, it says, ‘of the exactions with which the Papal Court burdens the clergy, the Apostolic See has fallen into such contempt that the Catholic Faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled. The laity speak slightingly of the Church because, departing from the custom of former days, she hardly ever sends forth preachers or reformers, but, rather, ostentatious men, cunning, selfish and greedy. Things have come to such a pass that few are Christians more than in name.’ The example of Cologne was soon followed.

It is obvious that contemporary events seemed, in the long run, to favor the most extreme opponents of the Catholic vision. The true story of the Incarnation of the Word and the impact that this was meant to have on all of nature could easily now be made to look overblown or even completely wrongheaded. Gnostic and apocalyptic thinkers had merely to point to the wickedness of Catholic leaders and crusading institutions, the divisions in the Catholic ranks, and a world filled with the horrors of the Plague to gain effective support for their false but tempting story. Materialist cynics needed no intellectual argument to do the same. Surely now, critics of “giving flesh” to the consequences of the Incarnation might argue, anyone who thought that nature was meant to serve the greater glory of God had to see that he was battering his head against a brick wall. Surely now he had to realize that actively working to achieve such a goal made him either a fool or a conscious cooperator with malevolent forces far beyond his ability to control and master. This encouragement of cynicism was the major reason the Church’s scandals were so detested by orthodox believers, bringing forth the harsh, prophetic, and well-known attacks of St. Bridget of Sweden (c. 1303-1373) and St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), along with their saintly warning that worse was yet to come if evils were not put right.

It was just as the “low road” character of the Avignon period was first taking shape that the ecclesiastical-political peace was once again broken along the imperial front. The roots of this new hostility lay in the valiant though abortive efforts of Henry VII (1308-1313) to re-establish the imperial position in Italy. His labors, which stirred the Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel in the peninsula to a fever pitch once again, demonstrated that the ideal of the Empire, despite all of the blows that it had received, still was attractive on many levels. The vision of the universal peace and rational rule of law that it once provided in ancient times---and could conceivably provide again—a peace and order that might be pleasing to both God and man, permitting Church and State to operate justly, each in its proper sphere, was shared by intellectuals as well as ordinary men and women. That this was true can be seen, on the one hand, in the De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri, favorable as it was to Henry’s efforts, and, on the other, in the recurring popular legends regarding the arrival of an Angelic Emperor. Such prophetic myths generally focused on Frederick II, who was said now to lie concealed, like the Hidden Imam of the Twelver Shi’ites, but ready to rise again as Mahdi to lead the People of God to the establishment of a Christendom more holy and more just than that guided by the Avignon Papacy.

Henry’s early death led to an intensification of the budding clash. This took its definitive shape through the struggle of the Papacy against Louis IV (1314-1347) of Bavaria in his attempt to gain recognition as King of Germany and Roman Emperor. Although this conflict, like that involving Henry, did, indeed, cause bloodshed, its greatest significance lay on the intellectual plane, with respect not only to its indication of the future contours of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo but also to that alliance’s inner contradictions and weaknesses. For an odd, but by now somehow strangely familiar combination of distinct forces came together from 1324 onwards to provide Louis with powerful support in the midst of what might otherwise have been a much more traditional imperial political skirmish with the popes. The struggle that these forces waged on his behalf became one over the fundamental structure of Church, State, corporate society, and even all of nature as such.⁵⁰

It is important, at this juncture, to note what has been alluded to repeatedly in the pages above: namely, the passion of a number of those groups afflicted by the tunnel vision syndrome to see correction of the evils of contemporary life in a return to the wisdom of the foundation elements of Christendom, both sacred and secular. These all came together in the battle now under consideration, and on behalf of a heroic, imperially guided return to the original intent of the founders of the Christian order. Battle was joined in opposition to a Papacy that was condemned for having gone far astray from the traditional principles of the constitution of the Church and for having recently rid itself of the one Angelic Pontiff ready to right its wrongs. What this conflict would show is just how powerful on the one hand, as well as sophistic and dangerously anachronistic on the other, such arguments could simultaneously be.

Apostolic Poverty did the work of the angels in the imperial “original intent” camp. This theme, readers will remember, lay at the heart of Spiritual Franciscan concerns. Spirituals claimed not only that such poverty was good, but also seemingly suggested that it was an essential mandate for the whole of the clergy, handed down by Christ, the apostles, and primitive Christianity in general. Spiritual Franciscans’ association of Apostolic Poverty with the Christian message as such was so strong that they even somehow equated the term “primacy”—an authoritative and administrative principle—with the abandonment of physical possessions. In any case, Louis IV’s Appeal of Sachsenhausen of 1324 transformed a familiar political quarrel with the Papacy into an overwhelmingly ideological battle; one that tied the mission of the emperor with the attempt of the Spirituals to bring the Universal Church back to the purity of the founders’ vision.

Michael of Cesena (c. 1270-1342), the Minister General of the Franciscans, who fled from Avignon to the emperor’s headquarters in Munich in 1327, brought to this aspect of the imperial project an even greater credibility. For Michael was no extremist, nor did he even have any particular political axe to grind in allying himself with the emperor against Pope John XXII. He was shocked into action due to spiritual decisions taken by that pontiff that he believed entailed a heretical attempt to tamper with an “infallible” proclamation of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-1292) of crucial importance to all Franciscans. Michael had agreed with John in his attack on the Spirituals for their seeming elevation of the practice of a life of poverty above the virtue of charity. The problem now was that the pope, who entirely rejected the myth of the Founding Vision of the Primitive Church, had, by 1327, destroyed all Franciscan claims to living any kind of life of poverty whatsoever. He did this by abandoning Pope Nicholas’ assertion of the Holy See’s ownership of the goods that the members of the Order merely “used”. John thus publicly thrust legal title to property directly into the hands of the Franciscans as a whole, devastating the argument for a life of poverty of moderate friars as well as that of the more intransigent Spirituals. Surely, Michael of Cesena thought, the errors of the pope had to be corrected. And who else could correct them but the man whom “Apostolic Christianity” identified as the traditional defender of the Church—the Roman Emperor?⁵¹

Insistence upon imperial responsibility for Church affairs brings us to a discussion of an extraordinary figure with great influence in the imperial camp in the late 1320’s---Marsilius of Padua (c. 1270-1342).⁵² Little is known about his background, except his birthplace in one of the most troubled centers of Italian political life and his activity at the University of Paris during that period of terrible Church-State turmoil under the reign of Philip the Fair. There has long been intense debate over the precise nature of the Aristotelian, Averroist, legalist, and outright heretical influences on Marsilius’ thought and career. Georges de Lagarde insists that all of them together played some role in shaping the man’s vision, with the heretical element perhaps the strongest of the factors at work upon him, and the Aristotelian the least consistent in its impact. If this be true, it would mean that Marsilius emerged from the extreme Waldensian wing of the “original intent” camp, with its Scripture-based attack upon a fleshly, papal-guided Church and all the activities associated with her. In other words, he would have arisen from an environment that disdained the entire undertaking of a new ascent of Mount Tabor, all of it anathematized as a deviation from the primitive will of the holy founders, including, most importantly, Christ Himself.

Marsilius’ heretical background gives us the primary explanation as to why he might take for granted the continued “Christian” character of the new order he delineates, despite the fact that his vision, viewed as a whole, annihilates any distinctly supernatural spiritual influence over life and rejects all deeper philosophical investigation of existence along with it. The shocking nature of what he was saying may also literally have blinded even a man with Marsilius’ sense of unique personal mission to the logical consequences of his own radical arguments. Whether he was aware of these or not, the impact of all the above-mentioned factors, religious and non-religious together, led him to a political and social theory that replaced a spiritual correction and transformation of nature in Christ with the opposite endeavor: one that openly sought to correct and transform all things spiritual through the teachings of an unexamined natural order. Marsilius makes this absolutely clear in the tome that led to his condemnation by John XXII and his flight to the court of Louis IV, the Defensor Pacis (1324)—The Defender of the Peace—as well as in a follow- up piece entitled the Defensor Minor (c.1342).

As the title of his principal work indicates, “peace” and the kind of order needed to achieve it lay at the heart of Marsilius’ concern. However, “peace” is defined by him in such a way as to make the world safe for the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” alone. No internal struggle for peace against any evil inside a man’s soul or in the environment he inhabits figures into Marsilius’ study. Peace, for him, is the normal condition of any society so long as there is no outside disturbance violating man’s hunt to satisfy his obvious needs. The “outside disturbance” overturning a society’s regular state of tranquility comes from any attempt to compete with the civil authority—nature’s self-evident “defender of the peace”.

Although many such troublesome forces flourished in Marsilius’ day, due to the tremendous diversity of the medieval corporate order, the greatest threat came from the highly organized, Faith and Reason loving Church of Rome, ruled by pontiffs armed with the doctrine of the plenitude of papal power. In order to intensify recognition of the extent of the danger coming from this monster, Marsilius exaggerated the Church’s claims upon the aid of coercive authority far beyond the wildest fantasies of the most extreme of her defenders. But exaggerated or not, the Roman Church’s sin was crystal clear. Her evil lay in the fact that she had placed all manner of impediments in the path of the “defender of the peace” by daring to suggest that the civil authority’s actions might be in need of correction and transformation according to the demands of both supernatural and natural law.

A civil authority provides “peace” on the basis of the “majesty of the law”. But what enters into the ruler’s calculations in making majestic laws? Marsilius would call it Reason, but what that Reason amounts to is simply the ability of the defender to impose his will. For law, in Marsilius’ universe, is simply that which coercive force is used to impose. Ultimately, as Georges de Lagarde notes, the law, for Marsilius, is what a man must obey in order not to be hung. Any attempt to define it further would open up questions regarding justice that would bring competitive “outside” authorities and concerns into this peaceable Kingdom of the Will—with the pope in the front lines of the troublemakers.

Although the precepts of the Defender of the Peace are valid for any civil authority in any given land, they were designed to aid the cause of the fundamental Christian State par excellence, the universal Roman Empire. Marsilius promoted the vision of this State’s mission in his role as consultant to Louis IV, whom he urged on expedition to the Eternal City in 1328 for a dramatic coronation in defiance of the opposition of Pope John XXII. This coronation called attention to one of the inescapable aspects of the Roman Foundation, namely the need to show that the emperor’s ultimate legitimacy, along with that of the majesty of his laws, lay in the “will” of that by now mythically understood force identified as “the Roman People”.

Now the real Roman People in the fourteenth century were a particularly wild, unreliable, flighty, and downright treacherous bunch, but that was no particular problem for Marsilius’ theory. According to its precepts, “the prince”, aided by his intellectual advisors, was actually understood to be the only force that could effectively “create” the People in the first place and then awaken them to that popular will whose authoritative spokesman the ruler must always be. Besides, so long as he could hang the population, his coercive force would demonstrate that the People had already invested him with legitimate authority anyway.

Unfortunately for Marsilius, the Roman Church, with her mischief making Papacy insistent upon its plenitude of power, was actually alive and vigorous and had to be confronted. To this heretic taking for granted the truth of the call for a primitive, spiritual, Scripture based Church truly loyal to the Founder of Christianity, all that Rome claimed, from the reality of Peter’s presence in the Eternal City to the need for a hierarchical priestly order, was nothing other than papal mythmaking. A Church obedient to “original intent” simply had no right to exist as an organized, peace-disturbing body with an effective visible head. Nor could she legitimately call upon the use of any coercive force on her behalf. The fact that she did so exist in fleshly form, and openly did demand such physical assistance, identified her as an enemy of Christ as well as guilty of subversion of that civil order that alone was intended to defend concerns both sacred and secular.

Papal obstinacy meant that in the name of Christ and nature the defender of the peace—the Roman Emperor—was duty bound to summon a General Council representing the entire Christian population. Original intent, as Marsilius understood it, identified the Christian People as the source of all ecclesiastical legitimacy, in the same say that the Roman People were the fount of imperial authority. Of course they, like their secular counterpart, also had to be “created”, and their will awakened and shaped, through the presidency of the emperor and his advisors. This imperial-guided General Council reflecting the awakened popular Christian will was then empowered to punish the contemporary Roman Church’s blasphemy. Such an assembly, “prepared” by intellectual experts to give the answers expected of it, and backed by the coercive authority of the State, possessed the infallible majesty of the law and was therefore eminently suitable to the task of bring the fantasies of the papal beast to heel. First and foremost, this meant driving Jacques Cahors—a man who dared to call himself “Pope John XXII” and had proven himself to be a contumacious heretic by rebelling against the imperial authority and the bible—from his illegitimate and wicked bully pulpit.

Once we have reached this point, we can grasp the real meaning of the peaceful purified order of “original intent” for the future of the Church and Christendom as a whole. In this tranquil paradise, there would be no more Church-State problem for the simple reason that there would no longer be any distinct Church to cause any difficulties for the State. The “Church”, Marsilius claims, only existed as an institution due to the unfortunate work of Constantine permitting her a structural life, and then endowing her with property, in the first place. Everything that this unfortunate ecclesiastical disturber of the peace sought to do could and should, by rights, lie in the hands of the prince, who spoke for the Christian People. The defender of the peace must thus concern himself with man’s obvious spiritual needs, along with everything else affecting his wellbeing. The emperor must define doctrine, canonize saints, and punish heresy—most important of all, that form of heresy that consisted in even daring to contemplate a theoretical questioning of the rights of the civil authority to deal with sacred matters. Indeed, the thinking Christian gadfly had to be treated even more severely than his politically active counterpart. The defender of the peace already knew what was best for man—mind, body, and soul, in temporal and in supernatural life. In fact, eternal life, in Marsilius’ corrected and transformed version of it, was depicted merely as an unending extension of earthly existence and man’s temporal needs and responsibilities. In this realm, God would use His law—His coercive authority—to punish unceasingly the secular crimes that the emperor chastised during life as though they were sins against the Trinity.

Marsilius gives his ideal prince, the Roman Emperor, the self-evident right to conquer the entire world, so as to provide the blessings of peace to those who might otherwise disturb it from outside its existing borders. Nevertheless, any prince in any land could easily tailor his arguments to fit his specific situation. Therefore it should come as no surprise to the reader that Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540), the intellectual advisor of Henry VIII, immediately commissioned a translation of the Defensor Pacis as a powerful tool for crushing Roman troublemakers preventing the king’s construction of his own independent Anglican Church in the early 1530’s. Neither will it be shocking to learn that Marsilius’ recipe for fusing sacred and profane into one, absolutist, “peaceful” society—which he stated in his own twisted parody of Unam sanctam—was perfectly designed to whitewash all future political violations of religious and personal freedom. Let us hear Georges de Lagarde on these matters:⁵³

The definition of Marsilius is particularly aggressive since he takes over, turning them to his own purpose, the very terms of the bull, Unam sanctam: ‘We declare all human creatures to be subject to the Roman Pontiff’, which become, through his pen: ‘All the Christian faithful, that is to say, the Church, must be subject to the princes of the world’, or ‘all men, of whatever state or condition they may be, in reality and personally must be subject to the jurisdiction of the princes of the world…’.

The modern State can successively make use directly of the social support of the Christian life, tolerate it while ignoring its social aspect, or condemn it as contrary to the life of the State through its social pretensions. These are all fashions of applying the fundamental principle of Marsilius refusing to the Church the right to live as a social reality distinct from the State and recognized as such.

No one reads Marsilius of Padua any more, but if his thought is still alive, that is above all due to the jealous zeal of political societies that consider themselves to be the most advanced to take away from Christian religious life all that could give it its own social support. Since the appearance of the first edition of our work, thirty years ago, the city of Marsilius has found new and intolerant sectarian disciples. The monism that he extols has a long life. A long future is still reserved for it.

Marsilius’ liberation of the otherwise innately peaceful social order from the divisive, corrective and transforming action of the Word in history, given practical clout through the power of the Roman Church, not only consigned the direction of everything, temporal and spiritual, to the “will of the political community”. It also delivered it over to the deadening materialist demands of the strongest and most willful interpreter of “nature as is” with a proven ability to hang those who defied the majesty of his particular version of sacred and temporal “law”. An open invitation to construct a world in which the most powerful defender of the peace ready to create the kind of People that would demand the imposition of his willful coercive authority was aided by the third of Louis’ intellectual supports: William of Ockham (c. 1288-1348).

This brilliant English Franciscan fled to the emperor’s camp along with Michael of Cesena in 1327. He did so after attempting to defend himself at the papal court in Avignon from the accusations of heresy filed against him by his Chancellor at the University of Oxford. Those charges concerned both his philosophy as well as the particular arrogance with which he promoted it. But Ockham’s potential problems with John XXII increased due to the outrage that he shared with his fellow Franciscans over the pontiff’s opposition to seemingly any opening whatsoever to the life of Apostolic Poverty. His indignation was intensified still further by that pope’s other, admittedly often quite dreadful sallies into theological disputes, especially his denial of the particular judgment experienced by the individual soul after death before the universal Final Judgment taking place at the end of time. These unfortunate pronouncements were as offensive to John’s most loyal supporters as to as his most violent critics.

In any case, once in open opposition, Ockham’s extreme Nominalism offered him yet another weapon useful to bringing low his loathed papal enemy. He regularly employed the logical tools provided by the via moderna to reveal what he considered to be the insubstantial humbug lying behind the speculative concepts justifying John’s demands for obedience. Given that this “humbug” included the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and the plentitude of papal power through which she was governed, and that such teachings were simultaneously mobilized to undermine the cause of Louis IV within the Empire, Ockham quite naturally turned his anti-papal rhetoric towards ecclesiology and promotion of the contested imperial vision. And he did this alongside Spiritual Franciscans and a Marsilius of Padua whose other principles he did not necessarily share and often even fully rejected.⁵⁴

We can best grasp the dangers emerging from Ockham’s crusade by first beginning with his discussion of the nature of the Church, her Magisterium, and the legitimacy of authoritative attempts to promote and defend them. In doing so, we must remember that Ockham took up these subjects in an age when ecclesiology was in many respects still in its perilous infancy. Yes, the Church was regularly called the “Mystical Body of Christ”, and was seen to continue the work of the Savior in time. Nevertheless, thinkers also simultaneously referred to her as the “union of all the faithful” and even equated her with “Christendom”—the joint religious, political, and social entity that Marsilius had exploited for his own secularizing purposes.

It was the confusion to which such lack of clarity could give birth that St. Thomas Aquinas and James of Viterbo had sought to end. They tackled issues like the role of Tradition, Scripture, and doctrinal development in the life of the Magisterium; the exact nature, rights, and limits of the Petrine primacy and the plenitude of papal power; the distinctions between men as individuals and as authorities entrusted with an ecclesiastical office to perform; and, very importantly for the current battle, the reconciliation of the possible errors of a pope as a private theologian with the infallibility of his guidance of Christendom when speaking on matters of faith and morals in the name of the Roman Church as such. Their labors provided answers that would really only be fully appreciated by latter generations.⁵⁵

This was due to the fact that the digestion of their arguments, as well as the further studies that were required to complete them, were for all intents and purposes abandoned in the century following their deaths. Such abandonment was the direct result of the internecine philosophical warfare of the late Middle Ages and the corruption of the intellectual endeavor in the midst of the practical political conflagrations pitting Philip the Faith’s scholars against those backing Boniface VIII. Hence, real ecclesiological truths were improperly defended, ensuring that ill-prepared defenders of the papal cause would regularly make embarrassing arguments that logicians like Ockham, who specialized in revelation of the misuse of overblown theological terminology, could easily expose to ridicule and distortion.

In any case, spurred by his concern to attack the pretensions not just of John XXII but of his successor, Benedict XII, as well, Ockham, from 1327 onwards, put together another revolutionary criticism of the nature of the Church and her mission in history. The Church, for him, really was Christendom as a whole. But it was a Christendom conceived of as a mere collection of individuals living by the same faith, seeking salvation for the individual persons composing it, and providing itself the religious and political institutions that it required in order to achieve this ultimately atomistic goal. It was not Christendom as a holistic entity, different from the sum of its members. Such a vision of Christendom would, after all, in his mind, be nothing other than the equivalent of yet another “empty” universal philosophical concept.

Ockham did not deny that the historical “data” vouchsafed a major role for the Roman Pontiffs in the ordinary life of the Church and Christendom to date. Nevertheless, he insisted that the collectivity of the faithful, in seeking to respond to its changing, contemporary needs, could give itself a different kind of governance in the future. Just as it sometimes did without a pope for several years, as was the case with an interregnum, it might envisage a much more extended period of time when no papal leadership was required. In fact, it might face a time when two popes would serve it, or perhaps even one pontiff for each nation, diocese, or city.

Would this not wreak havoc with the Church’s practical teaching authority, as well as Christ’s promise to be with her until the end of time? Not at all, Ockham argued. Christian Faith was known with infallible certainty through a recognition of its foundation documents—the Holy Scriptures—assisted by that intuitive Reason appreciated by the via moderna and confirmed through its universal acceptance by the whole body of the faithful. What was at question in his own time, he claimed, was the addition to the Foundation Message of a novel doctrine concerning the plenitude of papal power that allowed for the so-called John XXII to treat his attack on Apostolic Poverty, as well as his other erroneous teachings, as though they were part of the Deposit of Faith. The only way such a dubious addition could be admitted would be by proving its absolute accord with Scripture, intuitive Reason, and by demonstrating its acceptance by literally each and every one of the Christian faithful without exception. And the only way all this could be ascertained was by openly critiquing papal actions and then publicizing such criticism rather than trying to deny and silence its existence.

In other words, Christ’s promise to prevent the Church from falling into error was in no way disturbed by a cacophony of voices contradicting papal teaching, because that teaching was automatically presumed to be a novel distortion of fundamental doctrine requiring criticism. Furthermore, Ockham argued, the promise of Church indefectibility would be maintained so long as just one person— perhaps unknown to all others, perhaps just a recently baptized child—refused to submit to papal change and distortion of the Faith. Thus, on the one hand, Ockham froze Catholic doctrine, denying any possibility of its development in time. Then, on the other, and in total contrast to a Catholic Truth that everyone to date seemingly had accepted, he rooted indefectibility not in the shared public teaching of the Body of Christ but in a personal maintenance of a pure faith that might actually remain forever hidden to the community at large. As de Lagarde complains: ⁵⁶

Under these conditions, it would be more frank to say, as Luther would say later, that there is not and there cannot be any doctrinal authority in the Church other than the letter of the Bible as clarified by the Holy Spirit. Ockham only goes part of the way. He maintains the principle of authority, but so well ruins the substance of it that its recognition is nothing other than an occasion to organize a distrust, suspicion, and, if need be, the revolt of the Christian in the face of it. The doctor teaches, controls, and condemns the pontiff. The layman keeps things under surveillance and, if necessary, punishes the doctor, the cleric, the bishop, or the pope. In the name of the faith, one justifies an anarchic and disordered activism of the entire ecclesiastical body, and the logic of the system forbids any institution within it whatsoever from controlling it efficaciously. If there were any reforming ferment that Ockham set into motion in the Church, it was indeed through his theory of the doctrinal magisterium that, while claiming to safeguard the principle of all traditional institutions, irremediably undermines the base of them.

What would happen to the corrective and transforming mission of the Word in history under circumstances where there might be one pope, many, or none at all, and an eternally contested teaching authority? Ockham might well wonder what corrective and transforming mission one was suggesting in the first place. For to say that “the Church” had such a mission was precisely to make her into something “other”, as a whole, aside from her existence as a collection of individuals seeking personal salvation. Yes, Christ was indeed King of the Universe as its Divine Master. But in His simultaneous role as a man in history, attested to by Scriptures and illuminated by intuitive Reason, the Founder showed His intent to be one not of command over the world but of humble obedience to its existing authorities. In other words, the Church qua Church had no specific worldly mission other than one that her historically highly flexible government might fulfill by accident—as, for example, in the midst of the chaos of an invasion or the neglect of the maintenance of order on the part of the proper secular authorities. Aside from this, confusion had arisen over “the Church’s” supposed worldly mission precisely because the Roman Pontiffs, through their illicit ambitions, had falsely defined many activities that were purely temporal concerns as spiritual responsibilities, thereby usurping control of them from their natural overlords.

Nevertheless, Ockham, like Marsilius, had to contend with the fact that there actually was a powerful pope, speaking in the name of the Roman Church, with real hopes of calling upon the aid of loyal authorities to coerce men into acceptance of his manifest heresies. Under these circumstances, the whole Church, the community of the faithful, had to destroy him and take over the work of guiding Christendom. Would it be just for it to do so? Yes, because it needed to go down such a pathway in order to survive. Would its actions be infallible? Not unless all that it might teach in the course of its endeavors demonstrated an accord with Scripture and intuitive Reason, and received the consent of every single believer, the hidden ones included—something that, in practice, simply could never be ascertained.

Be that as it may, a General Council, representing all of Christendom, would be the most effective tool for achieving the immediately essential task of reining in a Papacy violating the original intent of the Founder of the Catholic Faith. But how would such a Council be called? The answer was patent. It had to be summoned and presided over by the emperor. Why? Because Scripture informed Christians that Christ was born under the Roman Empire and obeyed its laws, thereby identifying the imperial State as the sole political institution suitable for guiding Christendom until the end of time.

Interestingly enough, the same Ockham who began by treating the historical role of the Papacy as a valid but contingent one, and who gave the Church no special mission for correcting and transforming the world, then changes his tune once a Roman Emperor, presiding over a General Council, enters into the picture. Through such a Council, Ockham grants to Caesar an almost limitless physical coercive power to legislate in the name of God. In fact, he now says that Christ’s promise to be with his Church through all time would miserably fail if the Emperor and his assistants did not use such coercive authority and demand obedience to it, even from those still questioning the orthodoxy of a particular action; even without the approval of all believers without exception. “There will be no Church and State”, Lagarde explains, in describing Ockham’s ideal Christendom. “The two words are only two sides of the same reality: the community of the faithful, spiritually and civilly organized, for the temporal wellbeing and the defense of the Christian Faith”.⁵⁷

Ockham himself seemed conflicted regarding exactly how to identify the ultimate ground and authority for the extensive decisions that this Imperial State-Church would make. After urging the secular authorities to listen to the spiritual “advice” of the learned clergy in shaping their actions, he admitted that they could actually base their commands on the purely earthbound needs of the individual members of the Christian community alone—an understanding of which the data of life once again imposed infallibly upon their own personal, rational minds. “One comes to wonder”, as Lagarde notes, “if the justification at all costs of the established order is not the first and last word of this rather poor philosophy of society and history”.⁵⁸

But then, having reduced the foundation for judgments concerning human behavior to the innate, intuitive, “rational” feeling and desire of the existing rulers of society, Ockham immediately leapt back into an eternal world guided by the wishes of the Trinity. This allowed him to identify the personal, utilitarian judgments of the existing authorities with the will of God. Perhaps more astonishingly still, he then associated that will of God with the decisions of a permanently valid imperial Roman State; a “Roman State” whose pretensions were being rendered daily more laughable by the many contemporaries who completely ignored them, even in their German base of operation. “This apologist of empirical knowledge”, Lagarde marvels, “testifies to a total lack of knowledge of the reality of a social life in evolution. It did not seem unreasonable for him to explain the power of Louis of Bavaria by means of a reality that had disappeared at least ten centuries previously.”⁵⁹

In short, Ockham constructed a Christendom founded simultaneously upon two pillars: 1) the earthbound data of a contemporary natural order, whose unchanging historical character he took for granted as a given, and whose decisions were transmitted through individual men; and, 2) a blind faith that this eternally valid and willful State, guided by willful individuals, reflected the Divine Will of God. He thus preached a political philosophy simultaneously pragmatic (though really quite anachronistic) and doctrinal in character; one that we shall see in many respects foreshadows that of the American pluralist system of the twentieth century:⁶⁰

Since the civil authority is of human origin, since it flows from the exercise of rights conceded by God and by nature, it seems that one could found the legitimacy of established powers on arguments accessible to reason and the simple common sense. But when one does it, one perceives that nothing is decisive for removing all doubt. Only an undeniable fact can get us out of this tight spot (a charter, a privilege, a contract, a constitution, etc.)…And what a windfall to know that there is nothing to look for, since revelation has freed us from all care in testifying that the Empire is legitimate for at least fourteen centuries. It is in this sense that Richard Scholz is right in saying: ‘State, Church, Papacy, Empire…are placed by Ockham in the domain of truths of the faith and, in consequence, are necessarily justified by divine revelations contained in the Bible’. He is wrong in adding that ‘they are not free human institutions’, because the text of Ockham cries out the contrary, at least in that which concerns the State and the Empire. But it is indeed true that despite this conviction, the reference to Scripture (as a simple attestation of legitimacy) is so commanding that the theory of free human institutions becomes under the pen of Ockham, as Scholz well says, ‘a new theology of politics and the political order’.

It is here that Ockham’s realism lacks foresight. His extremely pertinent conception of the structure of the regime of estates in full expansion is associated with a theory of empire as anachronistic as it is unreasonable. How could he have convinced himself for one instant of the rights of an empire maintained inviolate since Christ through so many collapses, transfers of authority, and changes? How could he be satisfied with that supposedly universal authority that no one obeyed any longer?

Ockham’s explication {of his conviction} reveals a resignation of Reason before that revealed fact. Once again we have difficulty admitting that the sense of the text that he invokes is really that of revealing to us the legitimacy of the Roman Empire and still more conceiving that we are in a realm that concerns eternal salvation. The natural philosophy of authority ends in a theological positivism.

Let us review all these dramatic intellectual developments anew before moving on. Ascetic-minded Franciscans who had previously served as the right hand of the Papacy joined together with a Marsilius of Padua of heretical background whose Averroism leaned him towards the vision of a universe ruled by necessity. They joined too with a William of Ockham whose chief concern was assuring the victory of the free will of God and the Christian People as expressed through the personal choices made by Roman imperial authorities with ultimately earthbound concerns. Only two threads linked all three of these strange allies together. The first was a common opposition to Pope John XXII. The other was a firm commitment to one or the other version of a Foundation Vision whose original truth and eternal message an innovative and disruptive Roman Catholic Church was chastised for violating. This triple set of allies of Louis of Bavaria thus shared a “good story” that played on the wickedness of a detested pontiff who was proclaimed “heretical” for the mayhem his religious and civil policies brought to Germany, Italy, and the Catholic world as a whole.

What their good story hid—perhaps from them as much as from the rest of the Christian community—was that the success of its proponents would replace a pontifical mayhem that could still be corrected by reference back to that message of the Word Incarnate in which its authority ultimately was rooted with something much more horrendous. Their victory would replace it with nothing more than “appropriate explanations” for the triumph of the uncontrolled will of a civic despot posing as God’s unchanging temporal agent in a changing world. For the presence of proponents of Apostolic Poverty praising the heroic actions of an Angelic Emperor taking up the fallen standard of the Angelic Pope gave a nice ascetic cover to the reality of natural, willful, coercive power freed from any practical corrective and transforming guidance whatsoever.

This reality was assured by the materialism and totalitarianism of Marsilius’ theories, which nevertheless made constant rhetorical hay out of the words “Scripture”, “Rome”, “Roman Emperor”, “Peace”, and rule “not by men but by the Majesty of the Law”. And it was made certain by an Ockham who worked to the same end, using somewhat more recognizable Catholic language to carry out his subversion of Christendom. For despite his own adulation of an unchanging imperial authority reflecting the divine will, Ockham’s Nominalism pointed to a political world concerned purely with the satisfaction of the desires of the powers that be, manipulating individual bits of uncorrected natural data, presented as the dictates of irresistible rational judgments and the demands of God Almighty. Spiritual Franciscans, Marsilius, and Ockham may indeed not have “chosen” the triumph of the fallen will to follow as an unavoidable consequence of their call to return to the Foundation Vision. But, then again, “choice” and “truth” are two different words. “Choice” mistaken for “truth” can hide a great deal of humbug even from the eyes of those responsible for the equivocation.

Unfortunately for the immediate success of this curious alliance, Louis of Bavaria lost his bid for regal and imperial power. Germany and Italy were both embittered and worn out from the long-lasting struggles it entailed. Moreover, we have seen that the real, contemporary Empire as a whole lacked sufficient strength to back the universal aspirations that Louis proclaimed. Bowing to reality, it recognized, through the Emperor Charles IV’s (1346-1378) Golden Bull of 1356, the effective limitation of its “universal” ambitions to Germany alone. The independent-minded princes and municipal councils composing that still large and agonizingly unruly kingdom contested even this more restricted authority in the decades to come, basing themselves on the reality of those local resources and powers that reformers from the time of Cluny to St. Thomas Aquinas and James of Viterbo had sought to confront, tame, and sanctify.⁶¹

William of Ockham and the via moderna found many men ready to carry their torch in the immediate future. His words would not be forgotten. And even if Marsilius of Padua was too much of a unique composite to create a school of thought to follow through on his work, it is safe to say that the various Italian city-states, ever more at odds with one another, remained effective repositories of the whole contradictory mishmash of his Legalist, Averroist, Statist vision. They also continued to combine this together with Nominalism and the Spiritual Franciscan dream. And they did so until such time as the larger European nations, always open to a noble sounding but secularizing message, were ready and able to take the entire vision back under their own more powerful wing, gaining for it a seemingly permanent, European and worldwide victory.

One final force must be mentioned at the present, even though it was not itself connected with the imperial designs of Louis IV. This force was also obsessed with a “return” to the “foundation principle” of the “primitive Church” through a general renunciation of ecclesiastical property. Emerging from Britain, the force in question was shaped through the writings of the Oxford scholar-cleric, John Wycliffe (1324-1384). His influence, which was very pronounced in the so-called Lollard Movement in England as well as in the fifteenth century Hussite conflict in Bohemia, brought with it new elements absent from the mentality of the Spiritual Franciscans, but just as dangerous to the cause of the Word in history as anything coming from the mind of Marsilius of Padua or William of Ockham.⁶²

Even at his best a cranky and disappointed individual, Wycliffe ended life with what appears to have been a pronounced persecution complex. Still, like almost every sensible educated man of the late fourteenth century, he was justifiably irritated by the misuse of the plenitude of papal power for the purpose of making unfortunate appointments to benefices in England in support of the Avignon administrative machine. A prolific and well-known writer, he was called to serve on a government commission engaged in negotiations with the Papacy over this matter and a battery of related issues, just before the outbreak of the Great Western Schism. Wycliffe’s increasing anger over the abuses of the Holy See, perhaps exacerbated by his experiences during his public mission, led him to embrace the idea of a total material spoliation of the clergy.

An exaggerated form of the philosophical Realism dominating the via antiqua was at least partially responsible for his doing so. This caused him to see a direct relationship between an existing temporal phenomenon and the universal concept to which it referred. To his way of thinking, Realism meant that God’s ecclesiastical kingdom on earth had to be a replica of His eternal kingdom in heaven. Of course, even a brief glance at the state of Christendom made it clear that this excluded any acceptable role for a corrupt institution manipulated by the Papacy and its property-hungry minions. Hence, he redefined the Church as the union of all those predestined to be with God for eternity. Such a Church would necessarily have to be invisible, since no one could know with certainty on earth which believers might be saved eternally. Parenthetically, evocation of the theme of predestination called attention to an increasing fatalism noticeable in Wycliffe’s thought; a fatalism that would lead him ultimately to say that all that happens had to happen and that God Himself could thus perhaps actually be considered the author of sin.

Wycliffe justified spoliation by combining his philosophical Realism with certain ideas that he picked up from Richard Fitz Ralph (1327-1377), the Vice Chancellor of Oxford and Archbishop of Armagh. Archbishop Fitz Ralph, an ecclesiastical reformer, was as horrified as any other concerned Christian by the state of the fourteenth century Church. But he was also a man of his age, and this was still ruled by feudal law. Fitz Ralph argued in a book entitled the Armachanus that God was like the king in the feudal system, the eternal possessor as well as the author of all property rights. Just as the king could withdraw property that ultimately belonged to him due to felony, the clergy’s property could be withdrawn from its possession due to felony to God. Such felony was manifested through sin. Wycliffe intensified the argument, claiming that no cleric could ever possess property without falling into sin. Having thus sinned by the mere fact of possession, the clergy was guilty of felony. Justice then demanded that the king, in the absence of a Church of flesh and blood that no one had the means of identifying, must stand in the place of God the Father and confiscate their ecclesiastical fiefs.

Such a call for a State guided coercive push to assert the foundation principle of Apostolic Poverty meant that the First Estate would be presented with an offer it could not refuse: spiritual perfection or destruction. In one fell swoop the complications of the clerical dance to sanctity would be eliminated. This charmed many noblemen and ordinary Englishmen who were fed up with their own seemingly unending economic woes. It proved to be especially attractive to John of Gaunt (1340-1399), the Duke of Lancaster, who appears to have been the representative of the “angry young men” of the age, who had been brutalized by Edward III’s (1327-1377) wars with France. These Young Turks also shared in the general spirit of mutual envies and ambitions that were repeatedly exacerbated by the consequences of the various recurring outbreaks of Plague.⁶³

Why Wycliffe should not have held up the laity to the same high standard as the clergy, with personal sinfulness requiring spoliation of its property, seems to have been due to the fact that he saw no such demand in Scripture. It was also probably owed to the need to find some source of practical help in aiding the king to deal with what he perceived to be an infinitely greater clerical evil. And it also simply reflected the spirit of the new age that Lagarde’s masterpiece discusses:⁶⁴

One perhaps will be astonished that religious spirits, justly alarmed over the deficiencies of the clergy and of certain spiritual authorities, might make an act of confidence so naïve and so imprudent in laymen and secular authorities whose insufficiencies were certainly not less openly clear. But nothing is more symptomatic of the turn of opinion that we have called the “birth of the lay spirit”. Two centuries previously, tired of feudal anarchy, one had turned toward clerics to assume tasks which would have been more suitably given to laymen, but which these neglected or sabotaged. A movement of reflux now carried laymen not only to retake the secular terrain that had been seized from them, but also to take over the role in the religious domain of clerics, whose failure was proclaimed.

In any case, the regal will, in the waning days of Edward III and its immediate aftermath, seemed as though it might conceivably mean whatever John of Gaunt and his angry young followers said that it meant. A spiritual Church might be Wycliffe’s dream, but the first consequence of it would inevitably be the satisfaction of the all too obvious “business as usual” demands of these lay proponents of “nature as is” serving as God’s—and their own families’—real estate agents.

Still, Wycliffe represented more than a desire for Apostolic Poverty. His Ultra Realism made him look upon the Bible as the only visible guide for Christians in the way that Moslems approached the Koran: namely, not as a mere sacred tool but as the manifestation of an eternal, divine entity. It was from the Bible and the Bible alone that a Church loyal to the original intent of her founders had to be fed. Such exaggerated Realism, in its insistence upon the need for an unchangeable connection of eternal concepts with their earthly avatars, also meant that the essence of bread and wine could never disappear from the elements consecrated for the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Wycliffe therefore opposed the doctrine of Transubstantiation and claimed that Christ’s Body and Blood were present in the Eucharist as an “efficacious sign” alone.

Faced with growing opposition from the orthodox clergy, and, through the defeat of John of Gaunt’s political faction, from the royal government as well, Wycliffe sent out apostles to preach his gospel. These priests of the Church of the Predestined quite predictably encouraged a vernacular Bible reading already popular with the English population. In doing so, they added commentaries expressing the “obvious” interpretation that had to be given to a Scripture true to the founding vision—namely, their own.

Wycliffe’s call for Apostolic Poverty, his new definition of the Body of Christ, his exaltation of the Bible, his attack on Transubstantiation, and a certain touch of that apocalyptic, millenarian spirit that never disappeared from late medieval Europe, became the hallmarks of the so-called Lollard Movement. Whatever the etymology of this name, its anti-papal, anticlerical equation of a spiritual, scripturally based Church with that of the original intent of the founders of Christianity exercised a wide appeal that did not effectively lessen until the passage of stringent anti-heretical laws in the first decade of the 1400’s. Even though in remission by then, Lollardy survived. It began to grow in importance again from the 1490’s onward, just in time to be able to provide a sympathetic hearing for the initial Protestant preachers in Britain. But before any of this could come to pass, the Church’s commitment to “resistance on the cheap” was to provide still more of the same scandals that had brought Christendom to this stage of degradation—to the horror of faithful believers but the overjoyed amusement of the welcoming committee of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.

G. More of the Same

For our tale of apocalyptic woe is unfortunately not yet finished. Chaotic conditions in a France crippled by the Hundred Years’ War eventually threatened the security, both physical and financial, of Avignon. Italy beckoned. Still, before a return to Rome could be contemplated, the Eternal City had herself to be pacified. Pacification led to further political and military preoccupations burying still more deeply papal spiritual concerns. It required a calming not only of the power of a large number of local notables and their mercenary bands but also of many other troublemakers from central Italy, Naples, and as far afield as Milan.

Different popes tried diverse tactics. Innocent VI (1352-1362) relied upon the military-backed mission of Cardinal Alborñoz (1353-1363) and the aid of that curious, semi-utopian, republican adventurer, Cola di Rienzi (c. 1313-1354), while his Benedictine successor, Urban V (1362-1370), bet on a personal sojourn in Italy and peaceful persuasion. Gregory XI (1370-1378) returned permanently to Rome in early 1377 before the work of pacification was in any way complete. He died on March 27^th, 1378, as the situation hung between negotiations and continuation of an ugly, unedifying, and very expensive papal war with the neighboring Republic of Florence.⁶⁵

The conclave that met at Rome in April of 1378 was ill prepared and heated. Two Gallic factions, both of which disliked Italy, nevertheless felt compelled to promise the threatening inhabitants of the Eternal City that they would once again be given a pope who was at least Italian. So fearful were some of the electors of the possible reaction of the parochial-minded mob to their choice of the Archbishop of Bari, Bartholomoeo Prignani, as Pope Urban VI (1378-1389), that they temporarily passed off the half-dead Roman Cardinal Tebaldeschi as the new pontiff and then fled for their lives.

But the well-known Urban actually proved to be acceptable to the local citizenry, his coronation was performed without incident, and the frightened Princes of the Church returned. Unfortunately for them, however—and for the Church as a whole—this pure, austere, and learned man quickly alienated his electors and their corrupt entourage through reform measures that did not reflect a reliance on the full message of the Word but on his own “naturally arbitrary and extremely violent and imprudent” character.⁶⁶

But instead of proceeding with the prudence and moderation demanded by a task of such peculiar difficulty, he suffered himself from the first to be carried away by the passionate impetuosity of his temper….The very next day after his coronation he gave offence to many Bishops and Prelates who were sojourning in Rome, some of them for business, and some without any such reason. When, after Vespers, they paid him their respects in the great Chapel of the Vatican, he called them perjurers, because they had left their churches. A fortnight later, preaching in open consistory, he condemned the morals of the Cardinals and Prelates in such harsh and unmeasured terms, that all were deeply wounded….Urban also issued ordinances against the luxury of the Cardinals, and these measures were no doubt most excellent. Would only that the Pope had proceeded in a less violent and uncompromising manner! He certainly did not take the best way of reforming the worldly-minded Cardinals, when, in the Consistory, he sharply bade one of them be silent, and called out to the others ‘Cease your foolish chattering!’ nor again, when he told Cardinal Orsini that he was a blockhead….St. Catherine of Siena was aware of the severity with which Urban VI was endeavouring to carry out his reforms, and immediately exhorted and warned him. ‘Justice without mercy’, she wrote to the Pope, ‘will be injustice rather than justice.’ ‘Do what you have to do with moderation’, she said in another letter, ‘and with good will and a peaceful heart, for excess destroys rather than builds up. For the sake of your Crucified Lord, keep these hasty movements of your nature a little in check.’

There was to be no patience or compassion from this unruly personality. Urban remained intransigent, convincing many of the men around him, worldly or not, that he had gone stark raving mad. By August 9^th, the thirteen Gallic cardinals had had enough. They condemned his election as coerced and correspondingly illicit. Then, on September 20^th, at Fondi, south of Rome, with the quiet support of their three Italian counterparts, they elected Robert of Geneva—who had distinguished himself as the “Butcher of Cesena” in the pacification of the Papal States—as Pope Clement VII (1378-1394) in his place. The Great Western Schism had begun. The Christian world as a whole was to pay a just price for the Church’s ever more intense reliance on strategies designed to ensure it success of the kind appreciated by sophist word merchants rather than that promised by the message of the Eternal Word made flesh.

Rome had undergone a “mystic invasion” due to the return of the Papacy to the Eternal City. Saints like Catherine of Siena, one of the generals leading that holy assault, were scandalized by the action of the renegade cardinals and begged for their peaceful return to the allegiance of Urban VI. But the “Roman” pope, to the horror of the real servants of the Word, thought that he, too, could solve his woes through military force alone. He called yet another political crusade, this time against Queen Joanna of Naples (1343-1382), who had offered sanctuary to Clement. Urban did succeed in forcing his competitor out of Italy after the Battle of Marino. This initial victory did not, however, prevent Clement from returning triumphantly to Avignon (June 29^th, 1379). Here, he was able to make immediate good use of the bulk of the abusive papal administrative apparatus, which had never followed Gregory XI to Italy in the first place.

By 1379, both sides, their bases established, began a fervent competition for political and financial support. Tax collectors from Rome and Avignon appeared almost everywhere. Bankers, with their usual concern for even-handedness, often served both pontiffs simultaneously. In many dioceses, two bishops and two cathedral chapters emerged, with the very validity of the masses offered by the opposing sides coming under theoretical and actual physical attack. Pro-Urban bishops were barred entry to certain Sees and pro-Clement prelates to others. Serious servants of the Word looked upon the spectacle with an equal mixture of confusion and horror. Archbishop Peter Tenorio of Toledo, a praiseworthy prelate, prayed simply, in the Canon of the Mass, for the man who was truly pope, since he himself could not determine who that might be. Still, at least he continued to offer supplication. In some places, public worship ceased altogether.⁶⁷

Supporters of Urban included most of the States of the Church, the emperor, Flanders, England, and Portugal. Clement gained the backing of important sections of the emperor’s hopelessly splintered domains, such as Speyer and Mainz, along with Savoy, Scotland, and—after much soul searching and delay--Aragon, Castile, and Navarre. Many French prelates and the University of Paris were terribly troubled by the split. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of France accepted Clement in 1379 after an orchestrated public assembly of the sort perfected by the legalists of Philip the Fair to give that monarch’s crimes a broad respectability. The University’s coerced public stamp of approval in 1383 led faculty and students who disagreed with the decision to leave for new centers of higher learning like Heidelberg and Lerida. Many cities and some states, like Naples, really could not make up their minds concerning whom they wished to support or switched their allegiance due to dynastic changes. Even the army of mystics eventually divided in two along with the rest of Christendom, Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) remaining firmly with Urban, while Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) and Peter of Luxembourg (1369-1387) were linked with Clement.

The Roman line of popes suffered due to its lack of administrative structures. It also has an inadequately documented history. We know that Urban’s situation remained forever troubled. He had miserable relations with his twenty-nine newly created cardinals, some of whom he imprisoned, tortured, and put to death under atrocious conditions. Difficulties with Naples pursued him throughout his reign, while he continued the very abuses that he had so vigorously condemned beforehand. Prignani’s successor was the sick, badly cultivated, and apparently impossibly simoniac Boniface IX (Pietro Tomacelli, 2 November 1389-1 October, 1404). Boniface was perpetually destitute and lived by dubious expedients, offering enough examples of sales of benefices and plenary indulgences, Jubilee corruption, and outright robbery to give credence to Nicholas de Clémangis’ claim, in his book On the Ruin of the Church (1401), that “money was the origin of the Schism and the root of all the confusion.”⁶⁸ He was followed onto the Roman throne by Innocent VII (Cosimo Megliorati, 17 October, 1404-6 November, 1406) and Gregory XII (Angelo Corrario, 30 November, 1406-4 July, 1415). Avignon’s line is much better known. It is also simpler to memorize. Clement VII, who died on 16 September, 1394, was followed only by the Aragonese Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna, 28 September, 1394-either 29 November 1422 or 23 May, 1423). Nevertheless, this one superhumanly wily figure, ordained a priest only after his election, gave the Roman popes more than a run for their money for the prize of greatest irritant to prostrate Christendom.

As the original protagonists of the Schism died, more and more contemporary Catholics began to echo Archbishop Tenorio’s fear that there might not be any definitive way to know the identify of the true pope. Perplexity was accompanied by an expansion of local and national efforts to ensure self-protection, thereby promoting a shriveling of the universal spirit of Christendom to ever more parochial levels. Aragon very speedily organized its own Apostolic Camera to collect Church taxes. England soon re-enacted laws promulgated during earlier tiffs with the pre-1378 Avignon Papacy to fill the kingdom’s bishoprics. Others then followed suit, with certain rulers beginning to enjoy the benefits of the game so much as to remember William of Ockham’s arguments and suggest that there should forever be as many popes as there were political jurisdictions. Peter Suchenwirt (c. 1320-1395), an Austrian poet, related popular reactions to the situation in simple rhythmic form:⁶⁹

In Rome itself we have a Pope--in Avignon another; And each one claims to be alone--the true and lawful ruler. The world is troubled and perplext—’twere better we had none; Than two to rule o’er Christendom--where God would have but one. He chose St. Peter who his fault--with bitter tears bewailed; As you may read the story told--upon the sacred page. Christ gave St. Peter power to bind--and also power to loose; Now men are binding here and there--Lord loose our bonds we pray!

Meanwhile, the number of apocalyptic-minded lamentations and expressions of heretical contempt grew ever higher:⁷⁰

The preaching of a Saint Vincent Ferrer responded to the expectations of the crowds to whom he announced the arrival of the Antichrist. The whole labor of Gerson displays his horror before the peril that the schism caused the Church to run. It is to the people that the preaching of Wycliffe and Huss were addressed. The numerous prophecies of the epoch, Hildegarde, Saint Briget, Ermine, Telesphorus well illustrate the popular inquietude. The recluse, Marie Robine…saw ‘appear before Christ all the curates of the world, the priors, the abbés, the bishops, the pope and twelve cardinals; they were simply dressed, but their words were lying…Against them was raised the cry of vengeance of all those who died, through their fault, without being succored’.

Given the general failure to think on the higher supernatural plane, contemporaries again followed Ockham and hunted for whatever solutions simply might “work” to save Mother Church. Three “practical” and “workable” suggestions for exiting from the Schism were offered and toyed with by both the Roman and the Avignon Courts: the via facti, or reliance on military support; the via concessionis, which sought a solution to the problem through joint resignation; and, finally, the via conventionis, or resolution of the division through the meeting either of representative cardinals of the two papal courts or a General Church Council. Despite the early appeal to the via facti, employed both by Urban and Clement—the Avignon pope in alliance with France and its claims to the Kingdom of Naples—the future really lay with the latter two suggestions.

Jean Gerson (1363-1429), the great theologian and later Chancellor of the University of Paris, in both a discourse of 1391 and a treatise Super materiam unionis ecclesiae, saw the path to sanity in a joint resignation of both men for the common good of Christendom. The ten thousand graduates of the University of Paris who placed their comments regarding possible means for ending the confusion in a chest at the Church of St. Marthurin in January of 1393 thought the same. They urged the calling of a commission or a General Council only should mutual abdication fail. Others, however, were already mapping out the precise route that the via conventionis would have to take. These even included firm supporters of Urban VI like Henry of Langenstein (c. 1325-1397), Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Paris, who addressed the subject in his Proposition of Peace for the Union and Reformation of the Church by a General Council of 1381.⁷¹

Political pressure of some sort would be required to get either of these two approaches involving resignation or conciliar negotiation moving. Gerson and Philippe de Mèzières (c.1327-1405), a devout, crusading, and prolific spiritual writer of the day, argued that such pressure must inevitably come from the King of France. Charles VI (1380-1422) was certainly willing to play the role of royal nudge, though his increasing insanity ensured that any French activity would be sifted more and more through the conflicting influences of his brother Louis, the Duke of Orleans, his cousin John, the Duke of Burgundy, and his uncle John, the Duke of Berry.

Although Clement VII had enough influence with the French Court to deflect such growing pressures, and the good sense to die before they became overwhelming, his successor, Benedict, was under the gun from the very outset of his reign. The new Avignon pontiff had, after all, hesitantly taken an oath, along with the other papabili during the conclave, to resign if his Roman counterpart did the same. He repeated this solemn promise, voluntarily, after his election. When it instead became clear that he had repudiated his pledge and showed some preference for the via facti, the French government turned against him. A Council of Paris, in early 1395, presided over by Simon de Cramaud (c. 1345-1423), Bishop of Poitiers, future cardinal and a notable representative of that legalist and parochial spirit that was again very much active in its push for vigorous State interference in Church affairs, publicly called for the joint abdication of the two popes. The king’s relatives, accompanied by university experts, went to Avignon from May 22 to July 9^th in a frustrating mission to get Benedict to agree to the via cessionis. Negotiators were dispatched to other countries, like England, to obtain governmental backing for the proposal there as well.

Benedict adamantly rejected requests for his early retirement. When his stubbornness became painfully clear, the University of Paris radicalized, its utilitarian-minded canonists above all others. Anti-papal writings multiplied. A new council, attended by three hundred archbishops, bishops, abbots of monasteries, and delegates from each cathedral chapter and university, once again presided over by de Cramaud, met in May 1398 to tackle the problem. Thoughtful, careful theologians like Gerson and his great teacher and friend, the future Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly (1351-1420), urged tremendous moderation in dealing with Benedict, if for no other reason than the need to avoid giving scandal to ordinary believers. Nevertheless, the council, stirred by the preaching of two proponents of national Church government, the Abbé Pierre Leroy of Mount St. Michel and Bishop Gilles Deschamps of Coutances, withdrew its support from the Avignon pope and established a new Church order for the Kingdom of France. A number of Benedict’s cardinals eventually joined in the action. Withdrawal of obedience was followed, in September, by an outright assault on Avignon and a lengthy siege of the Apostolic Palace by a royal army under the command of the brother of the most renowned marshal of the French Army.

But all did not work out well with this 1398 settlement. The anti-Benedict Blitzkrieg shocked even many of those people who were not disposed to be friendly to him. English policy changed with the death of the pro-French King Richard II (1377-1399). A national or “Gallican” Church in a semi-chaotic France proved easily controllable by ambitious noblemen and the lovely ladies whom they wished to please. Further disputes among the king’s close relatives, opposition from a clergy which discovered that corrupt and hateful Church taxes were being more efficiently collected by royal officials, and growth of precisely that scandal among the common faithful feared by Gerson and d’Ailly condemned the Gallican scheme to a swift death. The coup de grace came with the pope’s dramatic escape from his besieged palace on May 11, 1403 to freedom in Provence. On May 28^th of that same year, an assembly of bishops gave up the rebellion and restored French obedience to Benedict and the Avignon line. Still, restoration of obedience did not mean surrender to Benedict’s obstinacy and perceived perjury. Jean Gerson, in a sermon preached before the pope in Tarascon, on New Year’s Day, 1404, continued to urge pursuit of every lawful means to end the schism. Moreover, the radicalized University of Paris remained exceedingly hostile to him and attracted to ever more heretical and legalist theories of ecclesiastical order.

At best, critics of the Papacy could be men who simply wanted to find a way to make the machinery of the Church work more justly and efficiently than was the case in the immediate past. Radicals could sometimes be Nominalist in outlook, inspired by the work of William of Ockham, who, readers will remember, did not view the structure of the Church as something written into the Deposit of the Faith, but, rather, as ecclesiastical furniture that could be rearranged according the character and needs of the day. On the other hand, they might be men who lived off another variation of the “Return to the Foundation” theme---the pleasant myth that a broader, more representative government of the Church reflected the spirit of a happier, collegial minded Apostolic Age that the ambitions of the See of Rome for a plenitude of power alone had sadly overturned. Both these approaches viewed the popes as simply useful instruments of the Church at large. Applying their suggestions meant that the Mystical Body of Christ, through the agency of a General Council, could judge pontiffs and limit or even withdraw their powers should necessity demand it. Still more radical thinkers, either directly influenced by Marsilius of Padua or accidentally touching upon the same themes that he had underlined, supported what became known as “Conciliarism” chiefly because it guaranteed local civil society a greater practical power to direct and subordinate religious affairs to secular “business as usual” concerns.

By this point, however, sincere and less radical supporters of the via cessionis were encouraged by hopeful noises coming out of Rome. Boniface had steadfastly refused all proposals for healing the split, profited from his competitor’s woes, and seen his prestige rise through the relative success of the Jubilee pilgrimage to the Eternal City in 1400. But now his successor, Innocent VII (1404-1406), claimed that he would never even have been elected had Benedict XIII shown some readiness to resign. Innocent thus pledged his full support to a swift and peaceful resolution of the dilemma.

Alas, Benedict had now once again given his heart over to the via facti. He was much too busy making military advances into Italy and pumping reliable financial resources to fund them to parley with Rome. Renewed indignation over his selfish inflexibility stimulated the radicals of the University of Paris and the Burgundian party allied with them to seize the advantage, open direct negotiations with Innocent, and declare a second withdrawal of obedience from Avignon in January of 1407. And their irritation with Benedict became more strident still due to his “change of mind” and odd tango with Innocent’s successor, Gregory XII.

This began in December of 1407, when both men agreed to meet to discuss the via cessionis at Savona. Benedict’s subsequent delays and hedging, along with his own second thoughts regarding abdication, led to Gregory’s abandonment of the project. That renunciation was followed by the Avignon pope’s renewed, but dubious, change of heart, his swift appearance at the designated meeting place, and the shedding of many crocodile tears over the absence of his Roman sparring partner. Dietrich von Nieheim, in a satirical Letter of Satan to Giovanni Dominici of Ragusa—Gregory’s advisor—expressed the nagging belief of many horrified observers that this comedy of contradictory moves may have been a fraud contrived from the very outset by two incomparably hypocritical pontiffs to stymie real efforts to obtain their resignations.

By 1408, all Christendom was in a via conventionis uproar, moderates and radicals alike. The Avignon and Roman popes were left dependent on local support, Benedict retiring to Perpignan, on the safer territory of his native Aragon, and Gregory to the cities of a variety of Italian patrons. Given these unfortunate circumstances, seven of Gregory’s cardinals and four of those from the Avignon line gathered at Livorno, in Italy, to begin negotiations for a way to end the farce on their own steam. Their number eventually reached nineteen, and, with the help of both political as well as theological and canonical backing, these princes of the Church called the Christian world to council in Pisa on March 25^th, 1409.

Almost five hundred fathers sat at their assembly, twenty-two cardinals and eighty bishops among them, though scholars predominated, jurists most noticeably. Moderates like d’Ailly were present alongside more radical, heretical, extreme Nominalists. Legalist elements were there as well, including the president of the gathering, the seemingly ubiquitous Simon de Cramaud. All, whether reluctantly or jubilantly, knew that they were called to judge, rebuke, and potentially remove both claimants to the Papacy. Witnesses were heard testifying to papal cruelties, secret agreements, perjuries, and even dabbling in sorcery. Benedict and Gregory, both of whom refused to answer the council’s order to appear, were jointly condemned and excommunicated on June 5^th, 1409. The cardinals who summoned the council were thereupon delegated to select the man whom the canonist Francesco Zabarella (1360-1417) now called merely the principal minister and servant of the Church. Their choice, on June 26^th, 1409, fell on Peter Philarghi (c. 1339-1410), the Greek-born Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who took the name of Alexander V. Alexander’s short reign was followed, in 1410, by the election of the man whom many contemporaries suspected of having poisoned him: Baldassare Cossa (c. 1370-1419), the governor of Bologna, thereafter styled Pope John XXIII.

Despite the fact that the Pisan popes were able to gain considerable European-wide backing, and John XXIII even to establish himself in Rome, their two competitors remained a permanent nuisance. Gregory and Benedict retained support in important countries. Both held or tried to hold councils of their own to back up their legitimacy. Moreover, the Pisan faction was itself very quickly plagued by internal disputes. Everyone came to loathe cardinals of all description as an extraordinarily venal, ambitious, quarrelsome, and incompetent body of men. Many Italians militating in Pisan ranks bristled at French influence and the spread of heretical and legalist ideals therein. While reform was on the lips of all, each national group had different ideas of what constituted a scandal requiring instant action: for some, it was the pro-papal teaching of the omnipresent Franciscan friars; for others, it was the failure of the Church to secure positions for the graduates of the vocal University of Paris. A new reform council, which his Pisan electors obliged John XXIII to hold, met just long enough in Rome to turn disgustedly against their new pontiff as the chief obstacle to purification of the Church.

Finally, the perennial struggle for the Neapolitan throne having taken a perilous turn, the Pisan pope was forced to quit the Eternal City and petition the rulers of Europe for new political protection. Help, under the circumstances of that particular moment in time, was only available from Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor since 1410. Sigismund was personally eager to rebuild the shattered prestige of his realm and contribute to doing so by finding a definitive way out of the continuing papal horror show. He and his Empire had never accepted the results of Pisa, so their defense of John XXIII was a tricky one to say the least. It came to entail the summoning of yet another council, which opened at Constance on November 1, 1414, with the usual suspects from throughout Europe—practically all of them together at this point--in attendance.

John initially presided at Constance as the legitimate pontiff. Nevertheless, Sigismund and the Council Fathers, Gerson and D’Ailly prominent among them, soon saw the abdication of all three popes as an essential prerequisite to enjoyment of a single universally recognized head of the Church. Hopes for the success of this renewed appeal to the via concessionis were temporarily complicated by the fact that the erratic John, who swore to abdicate in March of 1415, changed his mind and fled the city for the Black Forest to try his luck anew. His efforts floundered, and, becoming aware of the desperation of his position, he ultimately threw himself on the council’s mercy. Its fathers found him guilty of being an unworthy and unlawful pope, removed him on May 29^th , and popped him straight off into prison.

Events now took a dramatic turn. The aged Gregory XII spontaneously and unexpectedly offered his own abdication. Interestingly enough, though already considered deposed by Pisa, he managed to bow out in a manner that most subsequent writers argue to have bolstered Rome’s claim to possess the legitimate line of pontiffs. Ludwig von Pastor describes the abdication scene as follows:⁷²

The way in which this was done is of the highest significance, and must by no means be viewed as a concession in non-essentials to the assembled Bishops. Gregory XII, the one legitimate Pope, sent his plenipotentiary, Malatesta, to Constance, where the prelates of his obedience had already arrived, and now summoned the Bishops to a Council. His Cardinal-Legate, who had made his entry into the city as such, read Gregory’s Bull of Convention to the assembled Bishops, who solemnly acknowledged it. Malatesta then informed this Synod, {i.e., the beefed-up Council of Constance} which Gregory XII had constituted, of his abdication (4 July, 1415). His summons had given the Synod a legal basis.

Only the Avignon pope, now in Aragon, was left. Personal efforts by Sigismund to obtain Benedict’s voluntary withdrawal, even under the same conditions as that of Gregory, delayed proceedings against him for some time. Negotiations having finally failed, the council tried him in absentia, declaring his deposition by July of 1417. Support for de Luna faded away, and he himself fled, along with three remaining Cardinals, to the fortress of Peñiscola.

The way was thus sufficiently well cleared for Odo Colonna to be elected the sole truly serious pope on November 11th, 1417, though by an innovative method involving the tallying of the votes of representatives gathered in separate national units alongside those of the cardinals united in conclave. He took the name of Martin V (1417-1431). The new pope confirmed the council’s grant to the ex-Gregory XII of the Cardinal Bishopric of Porto and made him permanent papal legate in the March of Ancona as well. John XXIII went from prison life to the position of Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum. Benedict survived, in opposition, until his death in 1422 or 1423, leaving two warring successors behind him. One of these, a mysterious Benedict XIV, lived and died somewhere in France. The other, Gil Muñoz, Pope Clement VIII, finally abdicated in 1429 and was rewarded with the Bishopric of Majorca. Clement VIII’s College of Cardinals then brought a final and rather unsurprising end to the Great Western Schism by entering into conclave in Peñsicola and formally electing Martin V as his successor.

But the Schism, so many decades in duration, had not, exactly, ended “by the book”, according to the crystal-clear rules of a canonical system that had previously acted as though it had all the infallible answers to every ecclesiastical problem. Just look at the complications involved in the solution to the problem once again. How “legal” was the pressure exerted by Sigismund and the other secular powers and university scholars in gaining the desired results? Had it not precisely been the contention of the Church, since the time of the reforms of the eleventh century, that such intervention in the affairs of the Papacy was nefarious? What rendered this particular involvement permissible? What was the legality of the strange addition of national electors to the College of Cardinals in the Constance conclave? And what about the man elected? If Gregory XII really were the legitimate Pope up till then, what did this have to say about the actions of Odo Colonna, the future Martin V, one of his own renegade cardinals? Colonna, after all, had fled Rome, taken part in the Council of Pisa, and helped to elect Alexander V and John XXIII. Why did he not have to do penance for his “schismatic” activity before becoming Supreme Pontiff himself? But, then again, how could he have humbled himself without rendering the abdication of his former master, Gregory XII, itself ludicrous?

Moreover, what should one think of Alexander V? The next universally recognized Clement and Benedict took up the numbering that had been used by the Avignon pontiffs of those names (VII and XIII), therefore, historically identifying the Frenchmen as anti-popes. On the other hand, the next Alexander, Rodrigo Borgia, who ought, by right, to have styled himself the fifth of that line, assumed that he was the sixth. Does this mean that he believed Alexander V to have been legitimate? Apparently. If so, then how could the simultaneously reigning Gregory XII have also been the true pope? And why was Alexander’s successor, John XXIII, not valid, as Angelo Roncalli perhaps clarified in 1958 by adopting the numbering previously used by Baldassare Cossa?⁷³

What all this says is that the Church recognized that in dealing with the Great Western Schism she was confronting a specific historical problem for whose resolution she did not have all the answers at her fingertips. Under these trying circumstances she therefore had to rely both on her pilgrim spirit as well as her firm conviction that Christ would never abandon His Bride. Just because there was a confusion and division over the present identify of the pope, such perplexity did not signify that there could be no pontiff in the future. The immediate problem was obtaining a legitimate pope to whom virtually everyone would give his obedience. Just because existing, fallible Canon Law and its willful interpreters could not adequately and effectively identify the present pope did not mean that the Mystical Body had to presume that Ockham was right, and that she could, should, and would function with two, three, or maybe even innumerable local pontiffs. The Word was more powerful than the words of the law books and the dicta of the canonists, as St. Bernard had already insisted during the schism of the early 1100’s that he had helped to end by supporting the “healthier” candidate for the pontifical throne. And if keeping the Bride of Christ alive and well temporarily involved a bewildered respect for the otherwise problematic interventions of Parisian pedants, renegade cardinals, puppet electors promoting parochial national causes, and emperors evoking powers that had been rejected several centuries earlier, all could be forgiven in the end. What counted in the uncertainties of the perplexing moment was the certainty of the need for a unified Papacy; what counted was what James of Viterbo had called “thinking on the universal level”. Here was a supreme illustration of the pilgrim spirit in action in troubled times, dancing new steps in the dance of life that no one had ever imagined necessary or even possible beforehand. Here was an illustration of that rooted and principled pilgrim spirit, worlds apart from any policy shaped by the anchorless meandering that would be guaranteed by an Ockhamite Church.⁷⁴

Judged in this context, the actions of Jean Gerson, Pierre d’Ailly, Pisa, Constance, Sigismund, and Odo Colonna to end the Great Western Schism come off fairly well. They bore little resemblance to other, more wickedly irregular maneuvers in the Church’s past, such as those that the famous Robber Council of Ephesus permitted itself in the fifth century at the time of the Monophysite Controversy. Does this mean that bad motivation and heretical, legalist, and opportunistic theories and behavior played no role whatsoever in the conclusion of the Great Western Nightmare? That would be inaccurate. There was plenty of bad to match the good. But a Church that had been deeply bewildered regarding precisely how to confront her many ills while seeking to emerge from her practical administrative labyrinth seems to have thought their judgment best left to history and Almighty God.

Nevertheless, all too much damage had been done to the Church and her ability to correct and transform all things in Christ throughout the entire era of “resistance on the cheap” stretching from time of Boniface VIII to that of Martin V. It is this unfortunate truth---along with the recognition of the powerful assistance that the long detour of the Body of Christ away from her real sources of strength and her proper evangelical mission provided for the further growth of the “Seeds of the words”---that required our dedicating so much space to the twists and turns of the period of the Avignon Papacy and the Great Western Schism. What would really be important for the long-term future as a whole was whether the road to recovery paved at Pisa and Constance was to be a “high road” or remain a “low road” reflecting a continued resistance “on the cheap” to a world filled with terrible dangers pulling men to a cynical acceptance of “nature as is”.

If the high road were taken—the path back to the corrective and transforming message of the Word Incarnate—the route that would lead to a new attempt to address the obvious lacunae in Catholic ecclesiology and pastoral activity would somehow be found. If not, the concatenation of forces and circumstances promoting an understanding of nature as the realm of inexplicable divine and human willfulness would be allowed to solidify. If the high road were to be taken, the pilgrim spirit tying the development of doctrine and experiment together with the unchanging Deposit of Faith would grow and prosper. Entering upon the low road would permit the accidentally Nominalist aspects of the Church’s contemporary flirtation with trying “whatever works” in new and difficult situations to become the essential guiding principle in her daily life. This would wreak havoc with the fullness of the Christian message, and embolden the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo to emerge from the underbrush into the full light of day. Unfortunately, it was to be the second of these itineraries that was to be the favored thoroughfare in the immediate future. And this made for a tragic continuation of the Long March to that camp of the willful in whose precincts we are still forced to pitch our own tents.

Chapter 6

The War of All Against All? Or the Peace of the Reinvigorated Word?

A. The High Road to Recovery

A restoration of papal unity, important though this was, was not a sufficient corrective to the problems weakening the Church’s ability to deal with her primary work on earth. That work, as the medieval reform movement had confirmed, was one focused on a redemption of individual human beings that simultaneously required the correction and transformation in Christ of the natural, social environment in which they lived. Unfortunately, it was precisely this transformative ideal that was the undeserving loser in the entire pathetic history of the Church in the years between the humiliation of Boniface VIII and the end of the Great Western Schism. “They say that the world must be renewed”, the friar Giovanni dalle Celle (1310-1396) cried out, giving voice to the enormous temptation of even the most orthodox thinkers to abandon commitment to the full message of the Incarnate Word in reaction to a sea of troubles; “I say, it must be destroyed”.⁷⁸

If the reunified Church were to defeat such despair, then it was essential for her to regroup and reform, undertaking three projects simultaneously. First was the revitalization of the brilliant intellectual endeavor that promised to deepen her understanding of her own nature and structure as the Body of Christ: what is known as the study of ecclesiology. Sound ecclesiological investigations could not help but clarify the proper role of everything of significance to her teaching and administrative authority—the character, strengths, and real limitations of papal power included. With these investigations would also come a better appreciation of her relationship to the State and the whole of corporate society. A second task involved a commitment to serious pastoral activity that would inspire and aid the hunt for individual sanctity in the ranks of both clergy and laity. Thirdly and finally, the Church had to fend off further temptations to a resistance on the cheap that merely reflected the wisdom and the desires of the varied proponents of “business as usual”. These included not only the worldly “common sense” suggestions for dealing with the dance of life that openly led Christian men and society headlong into the abyss. They also involved those zealous and seemingly high-minded calls for a return to a foundation vision that actually served as a tool for a manipulation of the full message of the Word in history by the strongest and most willful elements in society. In short, true Christian reform of head and members demanded a “high road” to recovery whose signposts were provided by the Word.

Certainly, the century from the Council of Constance (1414-1418) to the advent of Martin Luther (1517) rang forth with many noble sounding “words” calling for a “reform of head and members” at all levels of Christendom. And, thankfully, many contemporaries were indeed laboring to effect serious corrective and transformative change according to the precepts of the greatest of the medieval reformers. A rush through events of fifteenth century ecclesiastical significance in order to get to the “big news” of the Reformation often blinds one to the intensity of the contemporary traffic on the high road to the understanding and fulfillment of the Catholic vision of the Word in history. Modern historians have published excellent studies illustrating the fact that practical reforms and substantive action firmly grounded in a solid hierarchy of values took place even in the deadliest of decades since the mini-apocalypse had begun. Far from ending at the time of Constance, these praiseworthy enterprises continued and even picked up impressive speed in the century to follow.⁷⁹

Contemporaries on the high road well understood that the Church had been wasting time on a self-destructive low road towards implementation of the teachings of Christ; a low road that had paid overwhelming attention to fallible, political, legal, and administrative means of carrying out her mission. This low road had neglected the meaningful teachings of the scholastics, Peter Cantor, and Innocent III, and had cherished rhetorical slogans offering “appropriate justifications” of insufficient parochial strategies for the victory of the Word in history instead. The reformers of the high road saw that giving primary attention to secondary tools in effect overturned the hierarchy of values and blinded the Church to the source of her real strength. For Catholic muscle, as always, was built through recourse to that revelation and grace that gave her the power to transform all flawed earthly endeavors for the greater glory of God and the consequent benefit of individual men. Those on the high road by no means rejected the cultivation of ordinary political and structural tools. They simply insisted that these must always be used as a “fool for Christ” would use them: not according to the dictates of a limited tunnel vision, but in subordination to the exalted mission of making all of nature a conduit for transforming grace.

A number of the high road reformers fought the good fight by tapping into the uncompleted intellectual enterprise of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century speculative theologians and ecclesiologists. By the end of the 1400’s, Duns Scotus’ works were being collected and systematically studied, and a proper school of thought that would reach its peak by around 1600 was in formation. Men such as John Capreolus (c. 1380-1444), the so-called “Prince of the Thomists”, had always maintained loyalty to the thought of the Angelic Doctor, while Juan de Torquemada (1388-1468) applied Thomistic teaching to a variety of uses, including the struggles of Pope and Council, Church and State, and East-West reunion. Soon, the even more significant figure of Tommaso de Vio, known popularly as Cajetan (1469-1534), would also demonstrate the vigorous strength of this Thomist revival, working through it to address manifold problems, including those arising from an age of exploration and discovery of new worlds.

Members of monastic and mendicant communities worked zealously to bring their fellow religious back to an appreciation of their true foundation missions. Prominent among these were the so-called “four pillars of the Franciscan Observance”: St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444), St. John of Capistrano (1385-1456), Blessed Albert of Sarteano (1385-1450), and St. James of the March (1391-1476). Preaching was a great strength of all these men, whose approach in many respects built upon the massive, highly organized “revival campaigns” organized by their Dominican predecessor, St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419). They dedicated much of their lives to reconciling bitter private and public disputes, convincing sinners to replace their faith in a worldly wisdom divinizing the hunt for power and riches with a primary devotion to Christ—whose Holy Name (and corrective power) St. Bernardino taught people to cherish above all other “words”. Meanwhile, the age especially abounded in pragmatic guides to living the Catholic life. An admirable work of practical catechesis was particularly notable in lands disturbed by heretical movements, as was England due to the impact of the Lollards. In some areas, high road reformers attempting to purify clerical and lay spiritual life received the vigorous aid of political leaders. The cooperation of Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros (1436-1517) and Isabella the Catholic (1474-1504) in Castile is a major case in point, but certainly not the only one.⁸⁰

Finally, a pilgrim spirit ready to deal with new steps in the dance of life different from those required at the time both of the Christian foundation as well as that of the new medieval ascent of Mount Tabor was also visible. Prelates like St. Antoninus of Florence (1389-1459), who aided in the scholastic revival encouraged by Capreolus and Torquemada and later taken up by Cajetan, built upon the earlier vision of Peter Cantor and Innocent III. Antoninus did this by applying central Catholic principles to the fresh problems faced by varied social groups each in their own specific spheres of action. Even if such vibrant, pastoral-minded bishops did not satisfactorily answer all the questions that they raised, they nevertheless did Origen-like service in providing the basic language and framework for studying and addressing them more effectively in a rapidly changing climate. Their situation, in short, was in many respects similar to that of the first scholastics when confronting Aristotle’s political and scientific writings and seeking to use their teachings to deal with the high medieval social order.⁸¹

All these initiatives encouraged the recovery and further development of an understanding of the full message of the Word in history. Nevertheless, two other forces illustrative of contemporary vitality, those represented by Renaissance Humanism and spiritual confraternities, must also be singled out to move our story forward. Examining them will help to explain both the brilliant explosion of Catholic thought and practice that would follow upon the Tridentine reform and also the dangerous revolution unleashed by Martin Luther. Double-edged swords these forces may have been, but that is the fate of every natural tool in our fallen world. Besides, the acceptable edge of the swords they wielded was sharply positive indeed.

Renaissance Humanism, as begun by Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), was, at its best, an invitation to Christendom to attend a highly necessary “finishing school”.⁸² It was in many respects simply a call to recognize the pressing need to complete divine and abstract disciplines—namely, fields such as theology, logic, and mathematics—with others that focused on human affairs and the skills essential to plumb their message—studies of literature, the languages used to produce it, and history being chief among them. Without the knowledge provided by these “human-centered” disciplines, one could not have a complete appreciation of how men succeed or fail to fulfill the demands of God and nature on the practical level. One could easily be “lost in space” in consequence, capable of forming theories about the essences of things but lacking in all perception of the specific problems individuals and societies face while performing the dance of life in our magnificent but sin-ridden earthly ballroom.

The studies that Petrarch developed and that we now call “humanist” lay at the center of the aesthetic approach to life nurtured by the ancient Greeks and their Roman imitators. This aesthetic outlook sought to understand the universe by grasping the character of “the beautiful” and perfecting the methodology for gaining possession of it. Cultivation of such subjects led humanists to a special regard for the greatest representatives of aesthetic achievement in various ancient fields of endeavor. These included Cicero and Virgil for Latin prose and poetry, Homer for Greek epic, and Plato for his success in presenting philosophical arguments in practical human settings with a fine feel for rhetorical style. Aesthetic heroes of the ancient artistic and architectural world were soon to join the ranks of humanist models. An impassioned hunt began for missing ancient literary texts and artistic objects, so that the fullness of the Greco-Roman genius might be revealed, its linguistic and creative skills imitated, and its spirit revived. That hunt also led to the cultivation of a Greco-Roman inspired devotion to physical education unknown to medieval man, justified by the need to develop a healthy body as a solid home for a sound mind.

Humanism proved to be immensely useful to the Church for the development of what is called “positive theology” in distinction to “speculative theology”. Speculative theology uses logic to draw forth the consequences of the primary data of Christian revelation in a systematic and therefore ultimately more intellectually comprehensible and applicable way. We have seen that St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus were the chief representatives of speculative theology in the Middle Ages. But a careful reading of what they said should actually lead the Catholic to an appreciation of positive theology as well. This, in contrast to its speculative confrère, explores the root data in se. A positive theologian’s material includes the direct study of Holy Scriptures, liturgical texts, early canonical legislation, decrees of Church councils, and information regarding the historical behavior of the faithful through the ages.

With the greater facility in Latin and Greek (and an eventual familiarity with Hebrew) obtained through humanist schooling, examination of such source materials became more fruitful still. As humanists went about their work in positive theology, they began to realize the importance of understanding “contexts” to grasp the real meaning of the Latin and Greek words they loved so dearly. This proved to be yet another stimulus to interest in Church History and its valuable teachings regarding the practical problems of life. Fascination with history, in turn, made humanists even more aware of the significance of the Church Fathers. They looked to St. Augustine in particular, whose pre-scholastic style was, like that of Plato, especially appealing to their refined classical aesthetic tastes.

Prudence and reserve in approaching anything new—even when it is at root ancient—is perfectly understandable, especially when its impact on sacred studies is as yet unclear. Unfortunately, mainline schools and universities were not only slow to respond to humanist enrichment of the store of western knowledge; they were often openly hostile to its passion for rediscovery of neglected aspects of the ancient past. Such a display of scholarly tunnel vision helps to explain the need for humanists and their patrons to open their own academies, the best of which cherished the new studies alongside with and in deep respect for the old. The fact that a comprehensive Humanist education could be a Word as well as a word- drenched accomplishment of major proportions is shown to us by men of the caliber of Guarino da Verona (1370-1460), Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446), John Colet (1467-1519), and many others. The following passages regarding Vittorino’s achievement in Mantua capture the spirit of their amalgam of secular and sacred studies most succinctly:⁸³

He believed that education should concern itself with the body as well as the mind, with the senses as well as the spirit. Wrestling, fencing, swimming and riding alternated with hours devoted to Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Demosthenes. Luxury was eschewed, and Vitttorino educated the poor with the rich. Nor was he prejudiced about the sexes; the Gonzaga princesses enjoyed the same extensive education as the princes.

A villa, formerly the recreation hall of the Gonzaghi, was transformed by him into an ideal schoolhouse. Because of its pleasant surroundings and the spirit that prevailed therein, it was called the ‘Casa Jocosa’ or ‘Pleasant House’. All the scholars were boarders and Vittorino endeavoured to make the school as pleasant and enjoyable as the ideal home…The instruction given was of the new Humanistic type but Christian in character and spirit. It was not merely a literary training but embraced the physical and moral requirements of a liberal education. Letters (Latin and Greek), arithmetic, geometry, algebra, logic, dialectics, ethics, astronomy, history, music, and eloquence were all taught there, and frequently by special masters. The pupils were directed also in some form of physical exercise, chosen usually according to their needs, but, at times, according to their tastes…He was an exemplary Catholic layman and as a teacher strove to cultivate in his pupils all the virtues becoming the Catholic gentleman. Every day had its regular religious exercises at which, like morning prayer and Mass, all assisted. He was a frequent communicant, and desired his students to approach the Sacraments every month.

One group of contemporaries that shared the humanists’ love for at least some ancient Christian ideas and practices that they believed had been neglected in the immediate past were the supporters of the Dutch reformer, Gerhard Groote (1340-1384), and the so-called modern devotion—the devotio moderna.⁸⁴ Disturbed, like so many other pious Catholics, by the disasters of his own time, Groote blamed the mini-apocalypse of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the failure of the world around him to plumb the original roots and spirit of the Christian message. What was chiefly needed, as far as he was concerned, was not Apostolic Poverty but a firm focus on Christ Himself: Christ, both as the intellectually unadorned model for proper daily behavior presented to us in the Scriptures as well as Christ through His Real Presence in the Eucharist. Hence, the theme of the greatest literary monument to the movement, Thomas à Kempis’s (1380-1471) Imitation of Christ, with its call for a simple, intimate piety opening our hearts and souls to a struggle to incarnate Jesus in our ordinary day-to-day existence. Hence, also, the movement’s commitment to discovering a systematic spiritual methodology that would keep Christ permanently close to the individual soul and thereby avoid the religious torpor that all too regularly followed hard upon past eruptions of new fervor in the life of the faithful.

Groote, along with a friend, Florens Radewyns (c.1350-1400), was the most important figure behind the society called the Brethren of the Common Life that lived and prayed together according to the devotio moderna. Although they did not generally take vows, some of the Brethren did wish to follow a clerical rule and formed a congregation of Augustinian monks that spread throughout the Rhineland and beyond. Both the lay Brethren and the Canons Regular spiritually associated with them eventually became involved in schooling. Even though they generally had little interest in the secular literary pursuits of the humanists, those supporters of the devotio moderna engaged in education inevitably promoted their own “back to the sources” vision. As the decades advanced, this would in certain respects parallel the work being done by the Italians, but in a way that gave special encouragement to positive theological interests.

The Brethren were not without their enemies. However, the enthusiastic assistance of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson—the latter of incalculable significance as a sage guide for all serious late medieval paths to sanctity and mysticism—enabled them to defend themselves successfully at the Council of Constance. There, they faced a variety of accusations, including that of entertaining heretical inclinations similar to those of the thirteenth century Beghards, whom they in many quite innocent respects did, indeed, approximate.

In the history of a period replete with so many dismal religious developments, the Brethren of the Common Life were one positive element. A second constructive factor needing emphasis here was the impressive contemporary expansion of the network of congregations, sodalities, and corporations that professed their spiritual responsibilities fervently and publicly. The later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were especially rich in the creation of small, tightly knit bands of laymen or laymen and clerics together, all aiding attainment of that individual Christian perfection that was essential to the general elevation of public community activity, secular and sacred as well. The more the low road became the route of preference for the bulk of the powers that be in the life of Christendom, the more these Catholic high road cadres seemed to gain in popularity, particularly in the numerous cities dotting the Italian Peninsula. A Franciscan and Dominican spirituality, guided through the work of preachers as different from one another as St. Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola (1452-1498), was seminal in shaping many of them.

Another highly significant influence on such congregations was St. Catherine of Genova (1447-1510). Born into an old aristocratic family, St. Catherine was the recipient of a unique spiritual experience that gave her a life-long insight into the absolute purity of God and the corresponding horror of a failure, through sin, to fulfill one’s role as a Christian. This gave her an appreciation of the suffering of the souls in Purgatory, which she also described as an ineffable joy, given their realization that their punishment was the means by which they would be united with the source of eternal love. Anyone grasping the message of St. Catherine had to understand what it meant to become a true, reform-minded, soldier of Christ. For the vision that she received was akin to that of the apostles who saw Christ in all His glory, transfigured on Mount Tabor. And no one sharing such a vision could ever have the temerity to argue that having recourse to willful papal judgments or taking advantages of loopholes in canon law gave him the “right” or the “privilege” of staining the purity of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Whoever the guiding force upon them might be, spiritual firebrands organized in confraternities took the socio-political role that was part of their path to sanctification very seriously indeed. This is vividly illustrated in a startling variety of ways, including the aforementioned dedication to resolution of public and private feuds, the creation of the so-called Monti di Pietà as alternative sources of credit for poverty stricken men and women who were otherwise subject to the oppressive burden of usury, and Savonarola’s dramatic “bonfires of the vanities”.⁸⁵

One example of the corporate embodiment of such spirituality was the Compagnia del divino amore, the details of whose history are instructive for the future in many ways.⁸⁶ This was established in Genova on 26 December 1497 with a membership of thirty-six laymen and four clerics. The Compagnia’s chief aims were the stimulation of piety, the encouragement of frequent communion, the offering of spiritual aid to condemned criminals, and the promotion of charitable work among the poor. Also important among its functions was care for the incurably ill, especially those suffering from syphilis, an office which ultimately resulted in its funding of the Genovese hospice called the Ridotti degli’incurabili. A Rule provided for a prior elected for the brief term of six months.

Ettore Vernazza (1470-1524), a wealthy Genovese layman, appears to have been an animating force in the Compagnia. Vernazza, a spiritual pupil of St. Catherine, whose first biography he wrote, was a selfless apostle of the work of “divine love”. He died in the plague of 1524, after having inspired charitable activities in Naples similar to those of Genova and after having aided in the formation of a Roman Compagnia centered round the Church of Saints Silvestro and Dorotea in Trastevere.

This Roman Compagnia del divino amore, established sometime between 1513 and 1517, was to prove to be of enormous influence. The Church of Saints Silvestro and Dorotea probably was chosen as its seat due to its proximity to the Genovese quarter of Rome as well as to the sympathy of its Rector, the Florentine Giuliano di Domenico Dati, a penitentiary of the Basilicas of St. Peter and St. John the Lateran. Like its model in Genova, the Roman Compagnia founded a hospital—that of St. Jacopo degl’incurabili at St. Giacomo in Augusta. It was also responsible for the Monastery of the convertiti near Santa Maria Maddalena al Corso, which aided former prostitutes. Associated with the Compagnia, or, later on, with one or another of its various activities, were an entire generation and more of Catholic proponents of renewal: among them, Gian Pietro Carafa (1476-1559), San Gaetano da Thiene (1480-1547), Gaspare Contarini (1483-1542), and Gian Matteo Giberti (1495-1543). Their regular gatherings in Trastevere encouraged both a positive direction for their piety and charity as well as a spiritual camaraderie in a common cause. The Catholic Reformation orders of Barnabites, Camilliani, Oratorians, Scolopi, and Somaschi were all, to a large degree, products of the Compagnia’s influence.

A direct offspring of the Roman brotherhood was also the Order of Clerks Regular. This was first born in the mind of Gaetano da Thiene and then put into effect with the aid of Carafa and several others. Thiene envisioned it as having a positive impact by promoting a union of simple diocesan priests living a common life dedicated to prayer, proper intellectual formation, sound liturgical performance, good preaching, frequent communion, and selfless works of charity. These were all lessons that he had learned in the school of “divine love” provided by the Compagnia.

Two practices of the Order of Clerks Regular seem to have been particular developments of such lessons. The first of these, based on the recognition of the greater efficacy of any solidly knit organization, was the clear intention of forming an elite corps. The “Theatines”, as they were commonly called, after the Latinized name of Carafa’s See at Chieti, were designed for exclusivity. Not only did they keep from their ranks insufficiently rigorous members but also excluded those who might be useful elsewhere for the work of religious renewal. They thus respected an evangelical division of labor. Hence, in addition to establishing particularly strict rules for the entrance of novices that showed no concern for how this would limit their expansion, the Clerks Regular blocked the efforts of even men of the highest merit to join them. Giberti, the Bishop of Verona, whose reform constitutions for that city’s clergy were later useful as models to Trent, was mercilessly excluded, despite his fervent entreaties. Joining the Theatines would have required an abandonment of his episcopal privileges, and, perhaps, brought an end to the good that he was doing in the Veneto. Indeed, if Thiene had had his way, Carafa himself would not have been admitted, since he, too, would thus be forced to retire from his work of reform in the diocese of Chieti. Only a passionate scene, during which Carafa apparently fell on his knees before Thiene, stating that he would hold the latter responsible for the state of his soul before God on Judgment Day were he not allowed to enter the envisaged Order, occasioned an exceptional bending of what was to be the otherwise inflexible rule.

A second development of the spirit of the Compagnia by the Theatines was their insistence upon an absolute Apostolic Poverty. But this poverty was not elevated above charity as the highest virtue, as it had been with many of the Spiritual Franciscans. Selfless expenditure of one’s energies for the sake of the poor was the rule of “divine love”, and total abandonment of one’s means of survival as a priest became the guidelines for the Theatines. They even rejected the model of Franciscan and Dominican mendicancy. Theatines simply “waited” for whatever aid came their way. Not only did such rigor complete their witness to the life of charitable self-abnegation; it also assisted the work for general renewal, demonstrating to the public the serious commitment of at least some priests in the midst of general clerical laxity. So sincere were the Theatines in this matter that they often lived in abysmal conditions, turning down any offer of steady contributions from regular donors, fearful as they were of anything that would compromise them and cause them to grow lax. Carafa, as required, retired from his diocese, retaining merely the title of bishop, and abandoned all of his revenues and his entire family inheritance. Even after having been named a cardinal under Paul III (1534-1549), he vigorously rebuked every effort to accord him episcopal privileges. In fact, fulfillment of the necessary duties of this princely office, for which he held the greatest respect, often forced him to appeal to the pope for defense from literal hunger. This high road was thus as difficult to negotiate as any that a man might imagine. And it was proof positive that the world that Giovanni delle Celle wished to see destroyed was not beyond redemption.

B. A Much Too Trafficked Low Road

However impressive the travelers on the Catholic high road may have been, the contemporary low road does appear to have been much more clogged with traffic. The voyagers pushing and shoving their way down this thoroughfare plodded along in their familiar mindless way, endlessly repeating their seemingly noble slogans regarding God, man, and “the reform of head and members”. As they did so, they continued to assure one another that they were on the right path to eternity. But the fact that their pleasant sounding slogans were disguising a hike away from transformation in Christ was about to be made clear for all who had eyes to see. For traffic on the low road would soon be openly identified as a march to a kingdom ruled by a doctrine of total depravity. And this doctrine would permit all of the varied “Seeds of the words” to deliver one common deathblow to the concept of correction and exaltation of the individual and his natural environment. Once again, this deathblow was to be delivered in the name of the Christian foundation vision, its apostolic doctrine, and the proper worship of God. It would prove, however, to be the most potent recipe for the victory of the strongest and most willful proponents of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” to date. Those partially awakened Catholics who trod this path with some trepidation were to discover that they could do nothing to quell their laudable fears until they ran back to the high road with their whole heart and their whole mind. Would that escape from the low road had not proved to be as difficult both to contemplate as it was to execute!

General treatment of “a reform of head and members” as a meaningless slogan meant that those men and women who were indeed able to climb above petty contemporary concerns to contemplate the world around them from the perspective of the Eternal Word had a pretty dismal view from their loftier heights. Many reformers, horrified by what they saw through the eyes of Christ, found it hard to escape the continued grip of the despair expressed by Giovanni delle Celle. It did not seem to them that there were a sufficient number of ecclesiastical or secular elements healthy enough to encourage the rest of Christendom and give their efforts to correct and transform nature any universally substantive effect. This was the conviction of John Nider (1380-1438), a Dominican thinker passionately dedicated to Church reform no matter what the obstacles in its path. His judgment regarding the hopelessness of a “general” as opposed to a painstakingly slow and piecemeal set of improvements was expressed in a work entitled, appropriately enough, the Formicarius, or the Ant Hill:⁸⁷

Is there any hope for a general reformation of the Church in its Head and its members? ‘I have’, answers Nider, ‘absolutely none in the present time, or in the immediate future; for goodwill is wanting among the subjects, the evil disposition of the prelates constitutes an obstacle, and, finally, it is profitable for God’s elect to be tried by persecution from the wicked. You may see an analogy in the art of building. An architect, however skillful he may be, can never erect an edifice unless he has suitable material of wood or stone. And if there is wood or stone in sufficient quantity, but no master-builder, there will be no proper house or dwelling. And, if you knew that a house would not be fitting for your friend, or when built would be a trouble for him, you certainly would be prudent enough not to build it.’

Temptations to take the low road to reform and recovery of the grand medieval vision were three-fold. The first and most important of these was the perennial strength of the natural, customary, human “rut”. That rut was, of course, initially dug into man’s soul by Original Sin. Its repeated command to commit oneself to “things as they really are” was the “stuff” that every sophist word merchant counted upon to get on with his labors on behalf of an unchangeable natural order. This rut was deepened and widened still further with each unimaginative, routine response to the repetitive evils of late medieval life. What the age needed was to attack continuously identified evils from the ever-fresh perspective provided by viewing nature with God’s eyes, in and through participation in the life of the correcting and transforming Word. What the age got, for the most part, was the dull, cold shower provided by the wisdom of the rut. And, worse still, this was offered to it as though it actually were the complete, substantive message of the Catholic Faith, working in tandem with an obvious, pragmatic, common sense.

For the clergy, enslavement to the rut signified tunnel vision efforts to attend to immediate, “practical”, clerical matters. Such practical considerations, to begin with, involved doing whatever was necessary to replenish ranks horrifyingly depleted by the various bouts of Plague. Ravages caused by that hideous disease had the effect of opening the clerical estate to almost anyone available, clearly including men eager for nothing more exalted than obtaining three square meals a day with minimal harassment from either ecclesiastical or secular superiors. Rut-like pragmatism also entailed finding some kind of agreeable position once the gap in clerical ranks was eventually in some areas actually even overfilled. The emergence of an often desperate clerical proletariat and underpaid priestly lower class out of the superabundance of the ordained then fanned all manner of angry, materialist, and, ultimately, revolutionary passions. This was especially true when invidious comparisons could be made with the condition of comfortably settled monks, priests, and prelates, many of whom paid scanty wages to replacements from the ranks of the disadvantaged to carry out the functions they either could not legitimately perform or were happy to neglect.

For the laity—whose situation, once again, differed from country to country and from urban to rural areas—commitment to the rut often emerged as the potent downside to its otherwise quite positive corporate-and ritual-drenched spirit. Without reference to the Eternal Word, such a spirit inspired a conviction that one did what he did because that was what he was obliged to do on behalf of the group to which he belonged. It led to the belief that one received what he received from prescribed actions since that was what fulfillment of communal and individual ritual responsibilities definitively promised. Failure to extricate oneself from this rut meant that the fruits that flowed from one’s spiritual labors were viewed mechanically, as a kind of automatic “gift”, emerging necessarily out of the customary structure of things. Anyone interested in the limitations of such an outlook should take a closer look at the frustratingly repetitive problems faced by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) in his grand tour of the German world in 1451-1452 on behalf of the joint cause of consolidation of papal power and general ecclesiastical reformation and enlightenment.⁸⁸

One poignant example of the attendant danger to the Catholic vision can be seen with reference to devotion to the Real Presence, which grew ever stronger in the post-reunification era. Although Eucharistic piety is obviously an intrinsically good thing, many of the fruits that communities and individual believers seem to have expected from the display of the consecrated elements, either at Mass or in a monstrance in Church or on procession were secular, mundane, and highly fanciful.

But even when the fruits they awaited were of a higher character, believers generally lacked a recognition that the “seen” Real Presence was a consequence of a sacrifice offered by Christ the High Priest, first of all in the person of the ordained clergyman, but also with the laity united with Him through membership in His Mystical Body. Such a recognition, were it present, would have brought with it an understanding that the truly present Christ should regularly be received and used to make a sacrificial, corrective, and transforming offering of one’s whole life in its natural, social context to Almighty God. For a gift is not the same thing as a sacrificial offering, and Catholics needed a sense of both gift and offering for a complete grasp of the full meaning and methodology of Christ’s redemptive mission. A Christendom based solely on the concept of the gift was reminiscent of the Carolingian era—a time when Redemption for the many seemed to be a reward for the labor of the king-emperor and his clergy alone. It had discouraged that active participation in the pilgrimage to God that reformers of the High Middle Ages knew to be a vast advance on the skeletal work done to implement the Catholic vision before them.⁸⁹ For a central problem of the “gift mentality” was this: while one waited passively for the gift to be delivered, the rut created by an unexamined cultivation of material desires and social hatreds continued to offer men their main, substantive guidance for the conduct of their daily lives. It was this rut that preachers like St. Bernardino and Savonarola— prudently in the case of the former and tragically impatient in the case of the latter—were vigorously trying to weaken or even entirely overcome.