The Conciliar movement—a serious and important attempt to reform the Church from within—was brought about by the labours of certain moderate reformers, of whom Gerson, Peter D’Ailly and Zabarella are the most notable. Dietrich Niem represents a German influence; but the main source of inspiration was the University of Paris, firmly orthodox and nominalist and immensely influential. In 1394 the University invited its members to send in opinions as to the best means of ending the Schism. Thousands of answers were received; but the most outstanding members of the University were convinced that the summoning of a General Council was the only expedient that gave any hope of success. The ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham—more especially the latter—had borne fruit, and an age in which the idea of representation was ‘in the air’ decided to apply the principle to the Church for the urgent practical purpose of removing a notorious scandal. The apologia for the scheme is to be found in the writings of Gerson and D’Ailly, and of Niem, if Niem is indeed the author of the tractate, ‘De modis uniendi et reformandi Ecclesiam.’[173] The plenitudo potestatis of the Church resided in its whole body, as represented in a General Council.[174] With the assent of such a council, the Church could even dispense with a pope.[175] It was legitimate for the civil authority to summon a General Council. It was easy to cite the practice of Roman Emperors to that effect.[176] Christ, urged representatives of the University of Paris to the French king, had submitted to the authority of His mother and Joseph. Was the Pope greater than Christ that he should not submit to the authority of his mother, the Church?[177] The proposition, so worded, seemed mildly reasonable, certainly most orthodox. In truth it was a democratic innovation of the utmost significance. ‘Pisa,’ wrote Gregorovius, referring to the first of the series of councils which provide the chief interest of the opening years of the fifteenth century, ‘was the first real step towards the deliverance of the world from the papal hierarchy; it was already the Reformation’; while the decree of the second and most important of the councils, that of Constance, in which it declared its superiority to the Pope, has been pronounced to be ‘probably the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world.’[178] When brought up against the glaring abuse of the papal schism it was not only Wycliffe and Hus and their followers that became revolutionaries; Gerson, D’Ailly, Niem and their adherents became revolutionaries also. In the reforming programmes of Wycliffe and Hus there was much that might have been expected to gain the sympathies of the fathers who met at Constance: yet they condemned both as heretics and consigned Hus and Jerome of Prague to the flames.
The explanation is easy enough. It was precisely because their scheme was revolutionary that the cardinals and other clergy assembled at Constance were so anxious to make it clear to Christendom that such revolutionary practice was perfectly compatible with strict orthodoxy regarding the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, that they were the guardians of the unity and continuity of the essential life and identity of the Church. A proof of this was urgently needed to safeguard a position which had precarious elements. The opportunity of dealing with Hus would probably have been welcomed for that reason alone. As to the fact of Wycliffe and Hus being dangerous heretics the fathers assembled at Constance had no doubt whatever. Zealous for the reform of clerical abuses as many of them were, they could only see in the invectives against the hierarchy and the doctrines concerning Predestination and the Eucharist, in which the English and the Bohemian teachers indulged, an attack upon the whole edifice of the Catholic Church.[179] Reconstruction they might desire; but the specific of Wycliffe and Hus seemed to be extensive demolition preparatory to the creation of a new structure. Hus, therefore, came to Constance as one ‘suspect of heresy,’ virtually pre-condemned.
He answered the Council’s summons, relying upon the security of Sigismund’s celebrated safe-conduct, expecting to take part in a public debate, to receive a fair and courteous hearing for his defence of his theological views. Instead he found himself treated as a criminal, thrown into prison, to answer a formidable indictment before judges who were also prosecutors. The Council virtually resolved itself into an inquisitorial court and followed inquisitorial methods of procedure. Compared indeed with an ordinary trial by the Inquisition that of Hus was remarkably lenient. He had powerful friends and the undertaking of Sigismund counted for something, although certainly not very much.
Sigismund has been arraigned as a monster of turpitude for allowing Hus to be tried, condemned and executed after he had granted him a safe-conduct. It is certain that Hus, while clearly apprehensive of what might ensue from his bold step of entering the stronghold of his enemies, had implicit confidence in Sigismund’s protection, and when despite the security promised by the man who was both Emperor and president of the Council, Hus was consigned to the stake, at first sight unmitigated baseness on the part of Sigismund would appear to be the only explanation.[180] If he cannot be entirely exonerated, on the other hand, it is quite clear he never had any idea of protecting a heretic, and that he was overruled by the Council, who, arguing from the customary rules regarding heretics, could legitimately maintain that no guarantee could have any validity whatever in the case of one suspected of heresy, that Sigismund’s safe-conduct might certainly apply to the empire and secular states, might be valid while Hus was on his journey, but had no validity as regards the Church. The heretic or a man suspect of heresy could enjoy neither rights nor privileges. This was good law, both ecclesiastical and civil; and once granted that the Council must regard Hus as suspect of heresy, it was legally unanswerable.[181]
The trial resolved itself into a dialectical duel between Hus and Cardinal D’Ailly, with divers interruptions and at times uproar. Against the uproar, with which his statements were sometimes greeted, Hus strongly protested; and the proceedings would appear to have been more seemly subsequently.[182] He was accused of a large number of doctrinal errors and of such absurdities as that of claiming to be a person of the Trinity.[183] Generally speaking, the object of his prosecutors was to show that his opinions were identical with those of Wycliffe, which had already been condemned as heretical by the Council. It was easy enough to show that Hus had inveighed against the organization and practices of the Church as then existing; it was not so easy to convict him of heretical dogma. From the first Hus’s attitude was perfectly consistent. He wished to argue his thesis; but that not being allowed, he declared himself perfectly willing to abjure all tenets which he had at any time avowed if the Council proved them from Scripture to have been erroneous, but he strongly protested against the ascription to him of statements he had never made and interpretations that he had never intended.[184] The Council, on the other hand, contended that it was the duty of the suspect heretic to put himself unreservedly in the hands of the Council, making an entire submission to their ruling and a complete abjuration of all the heresies with which he was charged. One doctor told him that if the Council told him he had only one eye, though he knew he had two, he ought to agree that it was so. Hus replied: ‘If the whole world told me so, so long as I have the use of my reason, I could not say so without resisting my conscience.’ It is right to add that the doctor subsequently withdrew his remark, agreeing that he had not used a very good illustration.[185]
Where Hus gave his enemies their best opportunity was in his teaching with regard to the predestined. He had declared that no man living in a state of mortal sin had any right to exercise authority. By this ruling Sigismund himself would have been excluded. Apart from that, as has been said already, the doctrine was undeniably of perilous implication. The King of the Romans could appreciate the seriousness of the political application at all events. He pertinently reminded Hus of the truth that no man lives without sin.[186] But the decisive factor in the trial of Hus proved eventually to be his absolute sincerity. He refused to be false to himself, to commit perjury in order to save his life. ‘Serene Prince,’ said he to Sigismund, ‘I do not want to cling to any error, and I am perfectly willing to submit to the determination of the Council. But I may not offend God and my conscience by saying that I hold heresies that I have never held.’[187] As he put it again in a letter written shortly before his death, ‘Assuredly it is fitting for me rather to die than to flee a momentary penalty to fall into the Lord’s hand and afterwards, perchance, into everlasting fire and shame. And because I have appealed to Christ Jesus, the most potent and just of all judges, committing my cause to Him, therefore I stand by His judgment and sentence, knowing that He will judge every man not on false and erroneous evidence but on the true facts and merits of his case.’[188] Hus died a martyr for no specific theological dogma, heretical or otherwise, but for the noblest cause for which a man can ever die—sincerity to the truth that is in him.
After the condemnation and burning of Hus, the Council proceeded to the trial of Jerome of Prague, who after a recantation repented of it and elected to die like his greater comrade. The proceedings against him were marked by great heat and acrimony, for he had made many personal enemies. Moreover, controversialist passions, which had indeed been apparent in the trial of Hus—for Hus was condemned as much because he was a realist as anything—flared up with still greater violence. Among the interested spectators of the death at the stake of Jerome of Prague was the great Italian humanist, Poggio. Much struck by the martyr’s eloquence and genius, he thought it was a great pity that he should have turned his attention to heretical ideas, and half pityingly, half uncomprehendingly, wondered that a man should be willing to die merely for the sake of an opinion.
This chance connection between Jerome, the ardent scholastic reformer, and Poggio, the cynical forerunner of the New Learning—between the old order and the new, is remarkable and prophetic. The movement towards change, which Jerome of Prague represented, whether it was a conservative movement as interpreted by Gerson and D’Ailly, or radical as it became in the hands of Wycliffe and Hus, definitely failed. The mediæval system had indeed been challenged by that movement, which had resulted from the glaring scandals of Avignon and the papal Schism; but the system, though severely shaken, yet remained; and pontiffs such as Martin V, Eugenius IV and Pius II were able by politic means to bolster it up through a restoration of influence, mainly of a temporal nature, to the Papacy. The Conciliar method of ecclesiastical reform failed for a variety of reasons—partly because of defects in organization and policy, still more because of a natural failure to recognize the great significance of national differences and the need, or at least the demand, for variety of treatment as between states, which produced the Pragmatic Sanctions of Bourges and Mainz, of the years 1438 and 1439 respectively; yet more, precisely because the attempted reforms were not sufficiently far-reaching and thorough in character, a tinkering, not a renewal.
The movements of Wycliffe and Hus were also abortive of really direct results. Lollardy certainly lived on, but, as has been already noted, probably did not have any considerable influence among the various forces which brought about the English Reformation. The influence of Hus in Bohemian history is far greater and the triumphs of Ziska and Prokop in the wars that are known after the name of the great heresiarch won national and religious independence for the Czechs up to the time of the battle of the White Mountain in the Thirty Years War. It is true also that Luther expressed his own indebtedness to Hus, declaring, ‘We have all been Husites without knowing it.’ Nevertheless, the decisive influences which brought about the complete overthrow of the mediæval system and the substitution of the modern belong to the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These influences were the humanism, which in its Italian form became critical, pagan, drawing its influence from the Greek world to which all the ‘ages of faith’ had been as an opaque curtain; which in its German form had a theological bias and a moral aim, as interpreted by Reuchlin and the school of Deventer. The other influence was the apotheosis of a cynical nationalism, whose exponent is Machiavelli, which produced the secularization of politics and the segregation of Church and State.
It is, therefore, fanciful and erroneous to trace back the causes of the Reformation and the break-down of the mediæval world-state to the mediæval heresies and movements of reform.[189] On the other hand, to ignore them would be equally mistaken. They had a minor effect, but it was not insignificant. It may be the violence of the storm that rends and tears away the structure; yet its havoc has been aided by the almost unseen, unheeded shifting of the sands.