John Huss was rather a reformer than a heresiarch. Admirer though he was of Wickliffe, even to the point of wishing to risk damnation with him,[947] he avoided the doctrinal errors of the Englishman on the subject of the Eucharist. Yet his predestinarian views were unorthodox, and he shared in some degree Wickliffe’s Gregorian ideas as to the effect of mortal sin in divesting the priesthood of all claim to sacredness or respect. According to his enemies, he asserted that no one could be the vicar of Christ or of Peter unless he were an humble imitator of the virtues of him whom he claimed to represent; and a pope who was given to avarice was only the representative of Judas Iscariot.[948] His friend, Jerome of Prague, maintained with his latest breath that Huss was thoroughly orthodox, and was only inspired by indignation at seeing the wealth of the church, which was the patrimony of the poor, lavished on prostitutes, feasting, hunting, rich apparel, and other unseemly extravagance.[949] In the Bohemian clergy he had an ample target for his assaults, for they were in no respect better than their neighbors. During the latter half of the fourteenth century scarce a synod was held which did not denounce their vices, gambling, drunkenness, usury, simony, and concubinage; and when to put an end to the latter irregularity a strict visitation was made throughout the archiepiscopal diocese of Prague, the cunning rogues sent away or secreted their partners in guilt, and openly recalled them as soon as the storm had passed. The following year, Archbishop Sbinco peremptorily commanded that all concubines should be dismissed within six days, under pain of perpetual imprisonment, but this was evidently regarded as a mere brutum fulmen, for the next year a new device was resorted to, by pronouncing all concubinary priests to be heretics.[950] All this might certainly seem to warrant any effort that might be made to accomplish what the authorities so signally failed in doing, but that any individual should assert the right of private judgment in reforming the church in its head and its members threatened results too formidable to the whole structure of sacerdotalism, and the condemnation of Huss was inevitable. Still, like Wickliffe, he was a devout believer in ascetic purity. His denunciations of the wealth and disorders of the clergy raised so great an excitement throughout Bohemia that King Wenceslas was forced to issue a decree depriving immoral ecclesiastics of their revenues. The partisans of Huss took a lively interest in the enforcement of this law, and brought the unhappy ecclesiastics before the tribunals with a pertinacity which amounted to the persecution of an inquisition.[951]
Unlike the Lollards, the Hussites maintained the strictness of their founder’s views on the subject of celibacy. If the fiercer Taborites cruelly revenged their wrongs upon the religious orders, it was to punish the minions of Rome, and not to manifest their contempt for asceticism; and, at the same time, even the milder Calixtins treated all lapses from clerical virtue among themselves with a severity which proved their sincerity and earnestness, and which had long been a stranger to the administration of the church.[952] One of the complaints against the priesthood formulated in the proclamation of Procopius and the other chiefs in 1431, at the assembling of the Council of Bâle, was that the clergy were all fornicators, committing adultery with men’s wives, or having wives and “presbyterissæ” of their own;[953] and when, in 1562, the Emperor Ferdinand endeavored to procure from the Council of Trent the use of the cup for the Utraquists or Calixtins of Bohemia, he urged in their favor that they would not admit the ministrations of any priest who did not lead a celibate life.[954] Traces of the teachings of the Fraticelli, moreover, are to be found in the doctrines which dissevered temporal from spiritual power, and denied to the clergy all ownership or dominion over landed possessions.[955]
The Hussite movement thus was an efficient protest against some of the forms of sacerdotalism. The nominal reconciliation effected by the Council of Bâle, against the wishes of the papacy, afforded considerable scope for religious liberty, which was strengthened by the alliance between Bohemia and Poland. The reigns of George Podiebrad, Vlasdislav, and Louis, which extended from 1458 to 1525, favored this spirit and prepared the soil for the rapid spread of Lutheranism throughout those regions, which in the sixteenth century narrowly escaped permanent separation from Catholic unity.
One fragment of the Hussites, however, held wholly aloof from reconciliation to Rome and professed to uphold in their purity the doctrines of their founder. These called themselves the Orthodox Brethren, but were stigmatized by their adversaries with the opprobrious name of Picardi, in allusion to an obnoxious heresy of the previous centuries. In process of time they admitted the validity of priestly marriage, though it was discouraged among them in view of the dangers to which they were exposed and the constant risk of martyrdom incurred by all who ventured to be conspicuous among them, for Hussite and Catholic alike sought their extermination. Yet they bravely maintained their existence until the Reformation, when they eagerly fraternized with Luther,[956] such minor differences as existed in the organization of the respective churches being amicably regulated in 1570 by the agreement of Sendomir.[957]
Wickliffe and Huss were not the only inheritors of the antisacerdotal spirit of the Fraticelli. About the close of the fourteenth century there arose in Thuringia a heresiarch of the flagellants named Conrad Schmidt, whose teachings swept away the forms and observances which had so thickly incrusted the simple doctrines of Christianity. The sacrifice of the mass, image-worship, fasting, feasts, purgatory, confession, and absolution, all fell before the fearless logic of the reformer, and his disciples fondly treasured him in memory as a second incarnation of Enoch. For forty years the sect flourished in secret, but at length it was discovered in Misnia, where its members were known as Brethren of the Cross, and where it was exterminated in 1414 by the fagots of Sangerhausen. The licentious doctrines attributed to them by the monkish chronicler show that sacerdotal celibacy was one of the observances which they repudiated.[958] Similar in its tendency, and almost identical in details, was the heresy which, in 1411, was condemned in Flanders by Peter d’Ailly, Archbishop of Cambrai. Giles Cantor, a layman, and a Carmelite known as William of Hilderniss gathered around them followers who assumed the title of Men of Intelligence. Like Conrad Schmidt, they rejected the empty formalism which had to so great an extent usurped the place of religion. The Atonement had satisfied God for all; there was no necessity for the intervention of sacerdotal ministrations, for confession and absolution were useless, Christ was not present in the sacrament, purgatory did not exist, and all mankind, besides the fallen angels, would in the end be saved. There was, however, little of the temper of martyrs about them, and a public renunciation of their errors at Brussels speedily deprived them of all importance.[959]
Savonarola can scarcely be classed among heretics. Though he was tortured and put to death by the church for his rebellious attempts to purify it, still his doctrines never varied from strict orthodoxy, and Benedict XIV. even included him in a catalogue of the holy servants of God.[960] Yet Savonarola, when his career was cut short, was rapidly becoming a schismatic, as was inevitable with all reformers of ardent temperament as soon as they discovered the impossibility of removing the corruptions of the establishment. If, instead of the fickle support of the Florentine populace, which betrayed him at his utmost need, he had enjoyed the steadfast protection of such a patron as the Elector Frederic of Saxony, he would doubtless have ripened in time, as Luther subsequently did, into a full-blown heresiarch, though his innate defects of character would scarcely have enabled him, under any circumstances, to conduct successfully so complicated a movement as a separation from the church.
The principal feature of his history which concerns us is the good-natured indifference with which Alexander VI. endured his repeated attacks on the scandals and vices of the papal court. There were so many political interests entangled in Savonarola’s career that it is not always easy to reach the hidden springs of action at work, but it may be assumed that Alexander, if left to himself, would have allowed the reformer to declaim unmolested. More than once he interdicted the Dominican from preaching and ordered him to Rome, but took little heed of disobedience. At length he launched an excommunication, which for nearly a year received as little respect as his previous orders, and when at length a sudden revulsion of feeling among the Florentine mob enabled him to dispose of his adversary under the forms of law, it is probable that even then he would not have pushed matters to such extremity had not Savonarola been led to an act of aggressive rebellion. The Duke of Milan forwarded to the pope intercepted letters in which the reformer, by command of God, urged the monarchs of Europe to call a general council under pretext that the church was without a head, since Alexander was an infidel who had obtained the tiara by simony and had polluted it with unimaginable vices. In his capacity of prophet, Savonarola promised the rulers triumph over their enemies if they would aid in the good work of cleansing the church, and he engaged to prove before the council the truth of his allegations by working miracles.[961] It would probably be unjust to condemn him as an imposter, but such conclusion is only to be escaped by pronouncing him partially insane. That fierce age was not apt to invoke such considerations in palliation of so flagrant an attempt at revolution, and Savonarola was doomed.