Late medieval crisis and the forerunners of reform

A church shaken

In the thirteenth century the popes claimed, and often wielded, authority over the kings of Europe. The fourteenth brought them low. In 1309 the papal court settled at Avignon, on the Rhône in what is now southern France, and stayed there until 1377. All the popes of those years were French, the papal tax system grew, and the Italian poet Petrarch likened Avignon to Babylon. Urged by Catherine of Siena among others, the pope returned to Rome in 1377.

Worse followed. In 1378, months after electing a pope in Rome, the same cardinals declared the election invalid and chose another, who went back to Avignon. The kingdoms of Europe took sides, and when the Council of Pisa (1409) deposed both popes and elected a new one, there were three. The Great Schism ended only at the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which removed the rival claimants and in 1417 elected Martin V. Constance declared that a general council receives its authority directly from Christ, and for a time many hoped that councils rather than popes would reform the church; later popes rejected the claim that a council stands above the pope.

Meanwhile, from 1347 to 1351, the Black Death swept across Europe; many historians think a third or more of its people died. Priests died in great numbers caring for the sick, and fear of death and judgment coloured the piety of the age. In places Jews were blamed and massacred; Pope Clement VI condemned the killings but could not stop them. It is one of the church's shameful pages.

New ways of thinking and praying

Theology changed too. William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), an English Franciscan, held that universals such as ‘humanity’ are names or concepts in the mind; what really exists is individual things. This is called nominalism. He stressed that God is bound by no necessity: the order of grace and salvation stands because God freely willed it so. His followers came to be called the ‘modern way’, as distinct from the ‘old way’ of Thomas Aquinas and others.

Teachers of the modern way, above all Gabriel Biel in the fifteenth century, are commonly summed up as teaching that God has freely promised not to deny grace to those who do what lies in them. They meant to honour God's freedom and generosity, but the teaching seemed to put the first step of salvation in human hands. There were medieval voices against such trends. Thomas Bradwardine, who died of the plague in 1349 soon after becoming archbishop of Canterbury, denounced the ‘new Pelagians’ of his day and defended Augustine's teaching on grace. Luther, schooled in the modern way at Erfurt, would later reject it with Paul: "There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God" (Romans 3:11).

In the Low Countries the Modern Devotion grew from the preaching of Geert Groote of Deventer (1340–1384). Lay men and women formed the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, praying, working, copying books and teaching children. From this movement came The Imitation of Christ, traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), though its authorship has long been debated. It calls readers to humility, inward repentance and the following of Christ, and says that it is better to feel contrition than to know how to define it. Protestants have loved it too; John Wesley published an English edition.

Back to the word

John Wyclif (c. 1330–1384), an Oxford scholar, set Scripture above every church tradition and above the authority of the pope. He taught that the church is the company of the elect and that a pope who does not follow Christ need not be obeyed, and he attacked transubstantiation. His teachings were condemned in 1382, and he died two years later in his country parish. Around that time his followers produced the first complete Bible in English, translated from the Latin; how much of it was Wyclif's own work is uncertain. His followers, nicknamed Lollards, carried it and preached from it, and were persecuted; in 1409 the English church forbade anyone to translate Scripture into English, or to read such a translation, without a bishop's approval.

What they longed for, the psalmist had already said:

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

Psalm 119:105

Matthew Henry writes on that verse, "The word of God directs us in our work and way, and a dark place indeed the world would be without it" Matthew Henry. Amos warned of days when God would send a famine, not of bread or water, but of hearing the words of the LORD (Amos 8:11). For many who heard Scripture only in a language they did not understand, the late Middle Ages were such a time. Henry adds that some feel that famine keenly and "will travel far to hear a good sermon" Matthew Henry.

Wyclif's writings travelled to Bohemia and reached Jan Hus (c. 1372–1415), who preached in Czech at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague and rebuked the corruption of the clergy. In On the Church (1413) he taught that Christ alone is the head of the church, and that the church is the company of the elect Jan Hus, On the Church; Paul, too, calls Christ the head of the body, the church (Colossians 1:18).

Hus went to the Council of Constance under a safe-conduct from Sigismund, King of the Romans and later emperor, but was soon imprisoned. He would not recant unless shown his error from Scripture, and on 6 July 1415 he was burned. The same council condemned Wyclif, and in 1428 his remains were dug up and burned. The story that Hus, whose name means ‘goose’, said at the stake that they were roasting a goose but that in a hundred years a swan would come is a later legend. His movement, though, lived on in Bohemia.

To the sources, and the threshold of reform

Humanism, born in fourteenth-century Italy and flowering in the fifteenth, cried ad fontes, ‘to the sources’: read the classics, the Bible and the Fathers in their own languages rather than through layers of later commentary. Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536), who had studied at the school in Deventer, brought out at Basel in 1516 the first Greek New Testament ever published, with a new Latin translation and notes Erasmus, Greek New Testament. In its preface he wished that the farmer might sing Scripture at his plough and the weaver hum it at his loom.

The Greek made familiar words new. Where Jesus says, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (Matthew 4:17), the Latin Bible's ‘paenitentiam agite’ could be heard as ‘do penance’; Erasmus explained that the Greek speaks rather of a change of mind and heart. How far ordinary readers took the Latin to mean the sacrament of penance, scholars judge differently. Even in Thomas Aquinas's Catena, the writer known as Pseudo-Chrysostom, whose commentary once passed under Chrysostom's name, says of this verse that "repentance corrects the will" Pseudo-Chrysostom. Erasmus stayed in the Catholic Church and hoped for reform from within, but his Greek New Testament opened the way back to the original text for Luther and the Reformers.

It would be unfair to paint the late medieval church only in dark colours. Priests died at the bedsides of the sick, lay people sought to imitate Christ, and councils and scholars laboured to reform the church. In the same Catena, Pseudo-Chrysostom sets out the standard the church knew it should meet: "Christ’s Gospel should be preached by him who can control his appetites, who contemns the goods of this life, and desires not empty honours" Pseudo-Chrysostom.

Yet reform could no longer wait. Two and then three popes had shaken the church's authority; many believers heard God's word only in a tongue they did not know; and the teaching that they must do what lay in them left many consciences asking whether they had done enough. Hus and many Lollards paid with their lives. Their questions, what is the final authority in the church and how a sinner stands before God, broke open in the sixteenth century (see The Reformed Faith course's lesson The story of the Reformation, and Luther in this course).

Practice