While thus trampling out these successive revolts, the church was blind to the lesson taught by their perpetual recurrence. The minds of men were gradually learning to estimate at its true value the claim of the hierarchy to veneration, and at the same time the vices of the establishment were yearly becoming more odious, and its oppression more onerous. The explosion might be delayed by attempts at partial reformation, but it was inevitable.
[XXIV.]
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Neither the assaults of heretics nor the constant efforts at partial reform attempted by individual prelates had thus far proved of any avail. As time wore on, the church sank deeper into the mire of corruption, and its struggles to extricate itself grew feebler and more hopeless. We have seen that, early in the fifteenth century, Gerson advised an organized system of concubinage as preferable to the indiscriminate licentiousness which was everywhere prevalent. Even more suggestive are the declarations of Nicholas de Clemanges, Rector of the University of Paris and Secretary of Benedict XIII. (Pedro de Luna). He does not hesitate to say that the vices of the clergy were so universal that those who adhered to the rule of chastity were the objects of the most degrading and disgusting suspicions, so little faith was there in the possible purity of any ecclesiastic. He also records the extension of a custom to which I have already alluded when he states that in a majority of parishes the people insisted on their pastors keeping concubines, and that even this was a precaution insufficient for the peace and honor of their families.[962] In another tract he describes the mass of the clergy as wholly abandoned to worldly ambition and vices, oppressing and despoiling those subjected to them and spending their ill-gotten gains in the vilest excesses, while they ridiculed unsparingly such few pious souls as endeavored to live according to the light of the gospel.[963] In most of the dioceses the parish priests openly kept concubines, which they were permitted to do on payment of a tax to their bishops. Nunneries were brothels, and to take the veil was simply another mode of becoming a public prostitute.[964] Cardinal Peter d’Ailly declares that he does not dare to describe the immorality of the nunneries.[965] In a similar indignant mood Gerson stigmatizes the nunneries of his time as houses of prostitution, the monasteries as centres of trade and amusement, the cathedral churches as dens of ravishers and robbers, and the priesthood at large as habitual concubinarians.[966] That he felt these evils to be inseparable from the condition of the church is evident when, in an argument to prove the necessity of celibacy, he is driven to the assertion that it is better to tolerate incontinent priests than to have no priests at all.[967] He argues that the clergy are worthy of as many sentences of damnation as they seduce souls to perdition by their corrupt example, and he asks, when he who destroys himself by his own sins is to be condemned, whether he who draws with him numerous others is not still more worthy of perdition.[968] Theodoric a Niem represents the bishops of Scandinavia as carrying with them their concubines on their pastoral visitations, and as inflicting penalties on such of the parish priests as they found living without similar companions, while these women habitually took precedence in church of the wives of the neighboring gentry—and he adds that the clergy of the south of Europe were no better.[969] Theodoric Vrie, a learned and pious churchman of Saxony, is equally unsparing in his denunciations of the Teutonic clergy[970]—and, indeed, the testimony of the writers of the period is so unanimous that their descriptions of clerical vices cannot be regarded as the mere rhetorical declamation of disappointed reformers.
It was evident that the efforts of local synods were fruitless to eradicate evils so general and so deeply rooted, while the necessity for some reform became every day more apparent. Though Lollardry had been crushed in England under the stern hand of Henry V., yet it was reappearing in Bohemia in a form even more threatening. The council of Pisa had not succeeded in healing the Great Schism, and there arose a general demand for an Œcumenic Council in which the church universal should assemble for the purpose of purifying itself, of eradicating heresy, and of settling definitely the pretensions of the three claimants of the papacy. John XXIII. yielded to the pressure, and the call for the Council of Constance went forth in his name and in that of the Emperor Sigismund.
So powerful a body had never before been gathered together in Europe. It claimed to be the supreme representative of the church, and though it acknowledged John XXIII. as the lawful successor of St. Peter, it had no scruples in arraigning, trying, condemning, and deposing him—an awful expression of its supremacy, without precedent in the past, and without imitation in succeeding ages. As regards heresy, it did the best it could, according to the lights of its age, by burning John Huss and Jerome of Prague. Its functions as a reformer, however, required for their exercise more nerve than even the condemnation of a pope. Many members were thoroughly penetrated with the conviction that reform was of instant necessity, and such men as Gerson, Peter d’Ailly of Cambrai, and Nicholas de Clemanges were prepared to shrink from none of the means requisite for so hallowed an end. In the existing corruption, however, of the body from which representatives were drawn, such men could scarcely form a controlling majority. After the council had been in session for nearly two years, the reformers began to despair of effecting anything, and Clemanges did not hesitate to assert that nothing was to be expected from men who would regard reform as the greatest calamity that could befall themselves;[971] while another of the members of the council declared that every one wanted such a reform as should allow him to retain his own particular form of iniquity.[972] These estimates, indeed, of the character of the majority of the good fathers of Constance is borne out by the contemporary accounts of the multitudes who flocked to it to ply their trades among the assembled dignitaries of the church, showing that they were by no means all devoted to mortifying the flesh.[973]
The feelings of those who sincerely desired reform, as they saw the prospect rapidly fading before their eyes, may be estimated by a sermon of a sturdy Gascon abbot, Bernhardus Baptisatus, preached before the council in August, 1517, about three months before the conservatives succeeded in carrying their point by electing Martin V. He denounces the members of the council as Pharisees, falsely pretending to be devout in order to elude the punishment due to their crimes. The masses and processions, which were the main business of the assemblage, he declares to be valueless in the eye of God, for most of those who so busily took part in them were involved solely in worldly cares, laughing, cheating, sleeping, or demoralizing the rest with their ungodly conversation. The Holy Spirit did not hold the acts of the council acceptable, nor dwell with its unrighteous members.[974] Such a convocation could have but one result.
It is easy therefore to understand the influences that were brought to bear to defeat the expectations of the reformers; how the subject could be postponed until after the questions connected with the papacy and with heresy were disposed of; and how, after the election of Martin V., those who shrank from all reform could assume that it might safely be intrusted to the hands of a pontiff so able, so energetic, and so virtuous. In all this they were successful. The council closed its weary sessions, April 22, 1418, and during its three years and a half of labor it had only found leisure to regulate the dress of ecclesiastics, the unclerical cut of whose sleeves was especially distasteful to the representative body of Christendom.[975]
Still, the reformers had made a stubborn fight, and had procured the appointment of a commission to consider all reformatory propositions and prepare a general scheme for the adoption of the council. This body labored as diligently as though its deliberations were to be crowned with practical results, and various projects of reform proposed by it have been preserved. In one of these the severest measures of repression were suggested to put an end to the scandal of concubinage which was openly practised in the majority of dioceses. Under this scheme, while all the canonical punishments heretofore decreed were maintained in full vigor, deprivation was pronounced against all holders of ecclesiastical preferment, from bishops down, who should not within one month eject their guilty partners; their positions were declared vacant ipso jure, and their successors were to be immediately appointed. Those who did not hold benefices were similarly to be declared ineligible to preferment. It appears that scandals had arisen in many places from the Hildebrandine and Wickliffite heresy whereby parishioners declined the ministrations of those who were living in open and notorious sin; and to avoid these, while the commission declined to pass an opinion on the propriety of such action, it advised that such private judgment should not be exercised.[976] In another elaborate system of reform, which bears the marks of long deliberation, the attempt was made to eradicate the long-standing abuse of admitting to preferment the illegitimate children of ecclesiastics, and it was declared that papal dispensations should no longer be recognized except in cases of peculiar fitness or high rank.[977] The same code of discipline struck a significant blow at the inviolability of the monastic profession when it endeavored to check the prevailing and deplorable licentiousness of the nunneries by decreeing that no woman should be admitted to the vows beneath the age of twenty, and that all vows taken at a younger age should be null and void.[978] These projects are interesting merely as indicating the direction in which the reforming portion of the church desired to move, and as showing that even they did not propose to remove the celibacy which was the chief cause of the evils they so sincerely deplored.