Before the century was out, the result was apparent. When St. Francis erected poverty into an object of adoration, attaching to it an importance as insane as that attributed to virginity by the early ascetics, he at once placed himself in opposition to the whole system of the church establishment, though his exquisite humility and exhaustless charity might disguise the dangerous tendency of his doctrines.[929] As his order grew in numbers and wealth with unexampled rapidity, it necessarily declined from the superhuman height of self-abnegation of which its founder was the model. Already, in 1261, the council of Mainz can hardly find words severe enough to condemn the mendicant friars who wandered around selling indulgences and squandering their unhallowed gains in the vilest excesses. One of these lights of the order publicly preached, in the horse-market of Strassburg, the doctrine that a nun who surrendered her virtue to a monk was less guilty than if she had an intrigue with a layman.[930] This falling from grace naturally produced dissatisfaction among those impracticable spirits who still regarded St. Francis as their exemplar as well as their patron. The breach gradually widened, until at length two parties were formed in the order. The ascetics finally separated themselves from their corrupted brethren, and under the name of Begghards in Germany, Frèrots in France, and Fraticelli in Southern Europe, assumed the position of being the only true church. Their excommunication at the council of Vienne, in 1311, in no wise disconcerted them. The long-forgotten doctrines of Arnold of Brescia were revived and intensified. Poverty was an absolute necessity to true Christianity; the holding of property was a heresy, and the Roman church was consequently heretic. Rome, indeed, was openly denounced as the modern Babylon.
While thus carrying out to its necessary consequences the sanctification of poverty, which was the essence of Franciscanism, they were equally logical with regard to the doctrines of ascetic purity which had been so earnestly enforced by the church. Their admiration of virginity thus trenched closely on Manichæism, and in combating their errors the church was scarcely able to avoid condemning both the vow of poverty and that of celibacy, which were the corner-stones of the monastic theory.[931] Active persecution, of course, aroused equally active resistance. The Fraticelli espoused the cause of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, in his long and disastrous quarrel with John XXII., whom they did not hesitate to excommunicate. Exterminated after a prolonged and desperate struggle, their memory was blackened with the slanders disseminated by a priesthood incapable of emulating their ascetic virtues; and principal among these slanders was the accusation which we find repeated on all occasions when an adversary is to be rendered odious—that of promiscuous and brutal licentiousness. No authentic facts, however, can be found to substantiate it.[932]
The Fraticelli form a connecting link in the generations of heresy. Their errors, as taught by one of their most noted leaders, Walter Lolhard, who was burned at Cologne in 1322, had a tinge of the Manichæism of the Albigenses, for Satan was to them an object of compassion and veneration.[933] Their prevalence in Bohemia prepared the ground for Huss, and left deep traces in the popular mind which were not eradicated in the eighteenth century; while their proselytes in England served to swell the party of Wickliffe, and eventually gave to it their name, though their peculiar doctrines bore little resemblance to his.[934] Antisacerdotalism, however, was the common tie, and in this Luther, Zwingli, and Knox were the legitimate successors of Dolcino and Michael di Cesena.
Another precursor of Wickliffe and Huss was John of Pirna, who in 1341 taught the most revolutionary doctrines. According to him, the pope was Antichrist and Rome was the whore of Babylon and the church of Satan. The Silesians listened eagerly to his denunciations of the clergy, and the citizens of Breslau, with their magistrates, openly embraced his heresy. When the Inquisitor, John of Schweidnitz, was sent thither by the Holy Office of Cracow, the people rose in defence of their leader and put the Inquisitor to death. John of Pirna appears to have maintained his position, but after his death the church enjoyed the pious satisfaction of exhuming his body, burning it, and scattering the ashes to the winds.[935] It was easier to do this than to destroy the leaven which was working everywhere in men’s minds. No sooner were its manifestations repressed in one quarter than they displayed themselves in another.
In the ineradicable corruption of the church, indeed, every effort to purify it could only lead to a heresy. Except on the delicate point of Transsubstantiation, Wickliffe proposed no doctrinal innovation, but he keenly felt and energetically sought to repress the disorders which had brought the church into disrepute. His scheme swept away bishop, cardinal, and pope, the priesthood being the culminating point in his system of ecclesiastical polity. The temporalities which weighed down the spiritual aspirations of the church were to be abandoned, and with them the train of abuses by which the worldly ambition of churchmen was sustained—indulgences, simony, image-worship, the power of excommunication, and the thousand other arts by which the authority to bind and to loose had been converted into broad acres or current coin of the realm. In all this he was to a great extent a disciple of the Fraticelli, but his more practical mind escaped their leading error, and he denounced as an intolerable abuse the beggary of the mendicant friars. Indeed, the monastic orders in general were the objects of his special aversion, as having no justification in the precepts of Christ, and his repeated attacks upon them have a bitterness which shows not only his deep-rooted aversion, but his sense of their importance as a bulwark of the abuses which he assailed.[936] He reduced holy orders to two—the priesthood and diaconate—but he maintained the indelible character of ordination as separating the recipient from his fellows, and he urged that all ministers of Christ should live in saintly poverty.[937] All this was unreasonable enough in a perverse and stiff-necked generation, but his unpardonable error was his revival of the doctrine of Gregory VII. regarding the ministrations of unfaithful priests, which he carried out resolutely to its logical consequences.[938] According to him, a wicked priest could not perform his sacred functions, and forfeited both his spiritualities and temporalities, of which laymen were justified in depriving him. Nay more, priest and bishop were no longer priest or bishop if they lived in mortal sin, and his definition of mortal sin was such as to render it scarce possible for any one to escape.[939]
What his opinions were on the subject of clerical celibacy was a mooted point even shortly after his death. Thomas of Walden, the confessor of Henry V., in his Doctrinale Fidei, written to confute the errors of Lollardry, declares that he could not persuade himself that the Wickliffites derived from their leader their opposition to celibacy until he had recently read in Wickliffe’s Sermon on Midsummer Eve the passage which says that “prestis ben dowid and wyflees agens Goddis autorite.... And this is the caste of the fend to kyndle fir in heerdis” &c.,[940] and Mr. Arnold, the latest editor of Wickliffe, seems to entertain no doubt as to the authenticity of the text, or of the views of the reformer as expressed there, and in other passages of tracts attributed to him.[941] Yet had Wickliffe taught this doctrine it would have been as widely known as his other errors, it would have been condemned in the repeated proceedings taken against him and his teachings, and it would not have been left for Thomas of Walden to discover it in one of the numerous sermons which passed from hand to hand as the works of the heresiarch. Wickliffe was too earnest and sincere in his convictions to leave anyone in doubt as to his belief on any point that he thought worth discussion.
What his views were on this subject can perhaps best be sought in the most mature of his works, the Trialogus, the authenticity of which I believe is indisputable. No one can read the chapters on Sensuality and Chastity without seeing that the whole line of argument is directed towards proving the superiority of virginity over marriage, even to the fanciful etymology of “cœlibatus” from the state of the “beati in cælo;” while in the chapter on the riches of the clergy, they are regarded as virgins betrothed to Christ, and the vow of chastity which they take is likened to their similar vow of poverty, and not to be infringed.[942] Wickliffe’s austerity, in fact, was deeply tinged with asceticism, and in aiming to restore the primitive simplicity of the church, he had no thought of relegating its ministers to the carnalities of family life, which would render impossible the Apostolic poverty that was his ideal. Even the laity, in his scheme, were to be so rendered superior to the lusts of the flesh that he pronounced those who married from any other motive than that of having offspring to be not truly married.[943] He evidently had no intention to interfere with clerical celibacy, and the passages which have been cited to the contrary may safely be regarded as supposititious. Either the writings in which they occur have been erroneously ascribed to Wickliffe, or the passages themselves have been interpolated by too zealous disciples, eager to procure the authority of the master for the later development of doctrines that were not his—a pious fraud too common in all ages of the church to excite surprise.
It is easier to start a movement than to restrain it. Wickliffe might deny the authority of tradition, and yet preserve his respect for the tradition of celibacy, but his followers could not observe the distinction. They could see, if he could not, that the structure of sacerdotalism, to the overthrow of which he devoted himself, could not be destroyed without abrogating the rule which separated the priest from his fellow-men, and which severed all other ties in binding him to the church. In 1394, only ten years after Wickliffe’s death, the Lollards, by that time a powerful party, with strong revolutionary tendencies, presented to Parliament a petition for the thorough reformation of the church, containing twelve conclusions indicating the points on which they desired change. Of these, the third denounced the rule of celibacy as the cause of the worst disorders, and argued the necessity of its abrogation; while the eleventh attacked the vows of nuns as even more injurious, and demanded permission for their marriage with but scanty show of respect.[944] This became the received doctrine of the sect, for in a declaration made in 1400 by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, concerning the Lollard heresies, we find enumerated the belief that those in holy orders could take to themselves wives without sin, and that monks and nuns were at liberty to abandon their profession, and marry at pleasure.[945]
The fierce persecutions of Henry V., to repress what he rightly considered as a formidable source of civil rebellion as well as heresy, succeeded in depriving the sect of political power; yet its religious doctrines still continued to exist among the people, and even sometimes obtained public expression.[946] They unquestionably tended strongly to shake the popular reverence for Rome, and had no little influence in paving the way for the revolt of the sixteenth century.