CHAPTER V - REFORM MOVEMENTS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
The earlier heresies of the Middle Ages were of importance for their own day and generation only, leaving no permanent imprint on history. The Church was on the whole very successful in combating them, actually securing the destruction of the Albigenses and throughout western Europe generally keeping the danger well in check by the activities of the Holy Office. The story of the Spiritual Franciscans, on the other hand, has a deeper significance, for it is intimately connected with momentous events which betokened the overthrow of the mediæval order, the rooting up of certain fundamental ideas associated with the matured conception of the Civitas Dei. The one feature common to Waldensianism, Catharism and the other early mediæval heresies, which gives them any lasting importance, was their anti-sacerdotalism. Clerical, and in particular papal, pretensions tended to increase after the fall of the Hohenstaufen, which left the papacy triumphant as the result of its long struggle with the empire. The high-water mark of those assertions was reached in 1300, when Boniface VIII declared himself to be not only Pope but also Caesar.[117] By two most important bulls Boniface sought to put his claims into practice, Clericis laicos, which defined the rights of the clergy to immunity from secular taxation, Unam sanctam, which declared unequivocally the absolute supremacy of the pope over the lay power, over every human creature in all respects. The same uncompromising spirit was shown a little later on by John XXII, the oppressor of the Spirituals, an old man of immense vigour and a range of view which embraced even the minute concerns of the secular states of Europe.[118]
Unhappily for itself, the setting forth of the papacy’s highest pretensions was coincident with the maturing of certain forces which tended to render those pretensions null and void. The most important of these was the force of nationality, the growth of nation-states, in particular under the strong royal houses of the Capets and the Angevins respectively in France and England. In such nation-states the papacy was to find a more formidable obstacle to the realization of its temporal ambitions than the Empire had ever presented, especially as they had no such tradition of alliance with the papacy as was the heritage and indeed the technical origin and justification of the Holy Roman Empire.[119] The distinction between the relation of the Pope to the Emperor and the relation of the Pope to the King of France is brought out forcibly in a work entitled ‘An Enquiry touching the Power of the Pope,’ by Peter du Bois, who in the year 1300 published a very remarkable treatise which advocated a modest proposal for uniting the whole of Europe under French sovereignty. The Emperor was dependent upon the Pope, because he had to be confirmed in his office and crowned by the Pope. No such necessity existed in the case of the French King.[120]
Certainly the conduct of Philip IV showed plenty of independence in his relations with the Roman pontiff. When Boniface in 1301 asserted that Philip held his crown of him and summoned him to appear at a council about to be assembled at Rome, the papal bull was solemnly burnt in the French capital. The States-General was then convened to give national expression to a protest against the action of Boniface; and bishops and lesser clergy united with the people as a body, and most important with the lawyers, to address letters of remonstrance to Rome. The civil law directly challenged the canon law.
In England the national feeling against papal exactions and interference was extremely bitter and vociferous under Henry III. Edward I gave a blunt answer to the claims of Clericis laicos in ruling that if the clergy were to be free of the law in respect of its duties they should be free of it also as regards its privileges and its protection, should be outlaws in fact. The stand taken by the French and English kings on the subject of clerical taxation was so firm that Boniface was forced to nullify the bull Clericis laicos by the bull Etsi de statu. Not only the royal will, but popular feeling is evidenced under Edward III by the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire.
While in Germany the imperial dignity had much sunk in credit since the days of the Hohenstaufen, on the other hand the importance of a national sentiment there was revealed in the general support given to Lewis of Bavaria. It is true that he failed in his expedition to Italy, whither the German king journeyed in order to establish his imperial dignity, despite his excommunication by John XXII, by coronation at Rome, but in Italy his forces were recruited by adherents more valuable than armies in the General of the Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, and a yet greater Franciscan, William of Ockham. The issue that had been joined was in reality one between papal and national sovereignty; but in the lengthy war of words that ensued upon Lewis’s failure in Italy the controversy appeared to be concerned with the theological question of the poverty of Christ, so that the feud between Spiritual and Conventual became a European question. It now possessed a significance extraneous from, and much wider than, the original cause of quarrel: for in the doctrine of apostolic poverty could be focussed all the widespread anti-sacerdotal feeling which revolted at the secular preoccupations and ambitions of the clergy.
A heavy blow was struck at the overweening claims of the papacy by Philip IV’s attack upon Boniface VIII, and, as it has been said, ‘the drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa.’[121] But worse humiliations were to follow, when the papacy was brought under French tutelage by the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ of Avignon. Worse still, to the humiliation was added infamy. The corruption at the new papal court speedily became notorious. It surpassed all previous bounds, and the cost of its luxury and prodigality was defrayed by unparalleled extortion and simony.[122] More powerful than ever, therefore, became the denunciation of the ugly materialism and spiritual decadence of the papacy. The scandal of Avignon was followed by one more deplorable still—the Schism. Christendom was presented with the unedifying sight of successive rival pontiffs, each anathematizing the other and reviling him in terms of vulgar scurrility.[123] No mystic halo could remain undimmed, no sense of reverence unimpaired by a spectacle so profane. The resistance of princely prerogative, the emotion of national resentment against caste privilege and exemption were reinforced by a general consciousness of the violence done to men’s ordinary sense of fitness, a consciousness mirrored in the literature, and particularly the polemics, of the day.
If disgust with the papacy led Dante in his ‘De Monarchia’ to find a solution of the world’s troubles in a revival of the universal empire, of an effective imperial authority, his vision being one of a golden age in the past, in this respect he stood alone, and other writers looked forward to a radical alteration and amendment in the ecclesiastical polity. It was indeed a radical innovation, but it was not so conceived by its authors, who regarded it as the true practice of the Church and were in some cases ready to denounce the Pope as a heretic for disregarding it. The pulpits of the Grey Friars resounded to denunciations of John XXII as a heretic because he clave to earthly possessions and repudiated the doctrine of the poverty of Christ and His Disciples. But indeed the arguments of John’s opponents were often so startling that it is in no way surprising that he with all honesty perceived in them the heretics. Michael of Cesena, in a tract against the errors of the Pope, treated John as a mere heretic, and appealed from him to a General Council representative of the Catholic Church, since a Pope might err both in faith and in conduct, as indeed many had erred before, while the Catholic Church was infallible, and its representative, a General Council, was necessarily endowed with the like infallibility.[124]