This was open opposition; but there was besides another opposing force which, though it raised no noise of controversy, yet was far more widely severed from the views of the Church than either Wycliffe or Huss: this was the Renaissance, which began its reign in Italy during the 14th century. The Renaissance meant the emancipation of the secular world from the domination of the Church, and it contributed in no small measure to the rupture of the educated class with ecclesiastical tradition. Beauty of form alone was at first sought, and found in the antique; but, with the form, the spirit of the classical attitude towards life was revived. While the Church, like a careful mother, sought to lead her children, never allowed to grow up, safely from time into eternity, the men of the Renaissance felt that they had come of age, and that they were entitled to make themselves at home in this world. They wished to possess the earth and enjoy it by means of secular education and culture, and an impassable gulf yawned between their views of religion and morality and those of the Church.
This return to the ideals of antiquity did not remain confined to Italy, but the humanism of the northern countries presents no close parallel to the Italian renaissance. However much it agreed in admiration of the ancients, it differed absolutely in its preservation of the fundamental ideas of Christianity. But neither Reuchlin (d. 1522), Erasmus (d. 1536), Faber d’Étaples (d. 1536), Thomas More (d. 1535), nor the numerous others who were their disciples, or who shared their views, were in the least degree satisfied with the conditions prevailing in the Church. Their ideal was a return to that simplicity of primitive Christendom which they believed they found revealed in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Fathers.
To this theology could not point the way. Since the time of Duns Scotus (d. 1308) theologians had been conscious of the discrepancy between Aristotelianism and ecclesiastical dogma. Faith in the infallibility of the scholastic system was thus shaken, and the system itself was destroyed by the revival of philosophic nominalism, which had been discredited in the 11th century by the realism of the great schoolmen. It now found a bold supporter in William of Occam (q.v.), and through him became widely accepted. But nominalism was powerless to inspire theology with new life; on the contrary, its intervention only increased the inextricable tangle of the hairsplitting questions with which theology busied itself, and made their solution more and more impossible.
Mysticism, moreover, which had no lack of noteworthy supporters in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the various new departures in thought initiated by individual theologians such as Nicolaus Cusanus (d. 1464) and Wessel Gansfort (d. 1489), were not competent to restore to the Church what she had once possessed in scholasticism—that is to say, a conception of Christianity in which all Christendom recognized the convictions in which it lived and had its being.
This was all the more significant because Western Christendom in the 15th century was by no means irreligious. Men’s minds were agitated by spiritual questions, and they sought salvation and the assurance of salvation, using every means prescribed by the Church: confession and the communion, indulgences and relics, pilgrimages and oblations, prayers and attendance at church; none of all these were contemned or held cheap. Yet the age had no inward peace.
After the failure of the attempts at reform by the councils, the guidance of the Church was left undisturbed in the hands of the popes, and they were determined that it should remain so. In 1450 Eugenius IV. set up in opposition to the council of Basel a general council summoned by himself, which met first at Ferrara and afterwards at Florence. Here he appeared to score a great success. The split between East and West had led in the 11th century to the rupture of ecclesiastical relations between Rome and Constantinople. This schism had lasted since the 16th of July 1054; but now a union with the Eastern Church was successfully accomplished at Florence. Eugenius certainly owed his success merely to the political necessities of the emperor of the East, and his union was forthwith destroyed owing to its repudiation by oriental Christendom; yet at the same time his decretals of union were not devoid of importance, for in them the pope reaffirmed the scholastic doctrine regarding the sacraments as a dogma of the Church, and he spoke as the supreme head of all Christendom.
This claim to the supreme government of the Church was to be steadily maintained. In the year 1512 Julius II. called together the fifth Lateran general council, which expressly recognized the subjection of the councils to the pope (Leo X.’s bull Pastor Aeternum, of the 19th of December 1516), and also declared the constitution Unam Sanctam (see above) valid in law.
But the papacy that sought to win back its old position was itself no longer the same as of old. Eugenius IV.’s successor, Nicholas V. (1447-1455), was the first of the Renaissance popes. Under his successors the views which prevailed at the secular courts of the Italian princes came likewise into play at the Curia: the papacy became an Italian princedom. Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II. were in many respects remarkable men, but they were scarcely affected by the convictions of the Christian faith. The terrible tragedy which was consummated on the 23rd of May 1498 before the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, casts a lurid light upon the irreconcilable opposition in which the wearers of the papal dignity stood to medieval piety; for Girolamo Savonarola was in every fibre a loyal son of the medieval Church.
Twenty years after Savonarola’s death Martin Luther made public his theses against indulgences. The Reformation which thus began brought the disintegrating process of the middle ages to an end, and at the same time divided Western Catholicism in two. Yet we may say that this was its salvation; for the struggle against Luther drove the papacy back to its ecclesiastical duties, and the council of Trent established medieval dogma as the doctrine of modern Catholicism in contradistinction to Protestantism. (See also [Papacy]; [Renaissance]; [Reformation], and biographies of popes, &c.)
Authorities.—For sources see U. Chevalier, Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen-âge (Paris, 1903); A. Potthast, Bibliotheca historica medii aevi (Berlin, 1896); W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter (7th ed., Stuttgart, 1904); A. Molinier, Les Sources de l’histoire de la France (Paris, 1901). General Treatises: Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (12 yols., 5th ed., New York, 1889-1892), vol. iv. Medieval Christianity; W. Moeller, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. ii. Das Mittelalter (Freiburg, 1891); H.H. Milman, History of Latin Christianity (6 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1857). Particular Treatises: J. Lingard, The History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (2 vols. 3rd ed., London, 1845); E. Churton, The Early English Church (London, 1878); A. Martineau, Church History in England from the Earliest Times to the Reformation (London, 1878); W. Hunt, The English Church from its Foundation to the Norman Conquest (London, 1899); W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (3 vols., London, 1874-1878); A. Bellesheim, Geschichte der kathol. Kirche in Schottland (2 vols., Mainz, 1883; Engl. transl. with Notes and Additions by O.H. Blair, 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1887-1890); W. Stephen, History of the Scottish Church (Edinburgh, 1894-1896, 2 vols.); W.D. Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (2 vols., London, 1875-1878); A. Bellesheim, Geschichte der kath. Kirche in Irland (3 vols., Mainz, 1890-1891); F. Rettberg, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands (2 vols. Göttingen, 1846, 1848); A. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands (4 vols., Leipzig, 3rd ed., 1904); Gallia Christiana in provincias eccl. distributa (16 and 3 vols., Paris, 1715-1900); F.N. Fager, Histoire de l’église cathol. en France depuis son origine (19 vols., Paris, 1862-1873); Ughelli, Italia sacra (10 vols., Venice, 1717-1722); P. Gams, Kirchengeschichte von Spanien (5 vols., Regensburg, 1862-1879); H. Reuterdahl, Svenska Kyrkans historia (3 vols., Lund, 1838-1863); A. v. Maurer, Die Bekehrung des norwegischen Stammes (2 vols., Munich, 1855-1856); Bang, Udsigt over den norske Kirkes historie under Katholicismen (Christiania, 1887); P. Gams, Series episcoporum ecclesiae catholicae (Regensburg, 1873); C. Eubel, Hierarchia catholica medii aevi (2 vols., Münster, 1898, 1901); P. Hinschius, System des kath. Kirchenrechts (6 vols., Berlin, 1869-1896); E. Friedberg, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts (5th ed., Leipzig, 1903); U. Stutz, “Kirchenrecht” (Holtzendorff-Kohler, Encyklopaedie der Rechtswissenschaft, 6th ed. II. Leipzig, 1904); B. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris, 1872); F. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte der mittleren Zeit (Freiburg, 1882); A. Ebert, Allgem. Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande (3 vols., Leipzig, 1874-1887); C.F. v. Hefele, Conciliengeschichte (2nd ed., 9 vols., Freiburg, 1873-1890).