John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 2

by Lewis Sergeant

JOHN WYCLIF.
(FROM BALL'S "SUMMARIUM.")

CHAPTER II.

THE SEETHING OF EUROPE.

ERHAPS the fairest test of the true greatness and importance of any man who has played his part in the shaping of history may be found in the disposition of his admirers to consider, not merely what he did for his country and his age, but also what his circumstances and antecedents had previously done for him. It is a truism to say that every man, great or small, is a product of the conditions which surround him; but only when we find ourselves face to face with an original and creative mind do we think it worth while to ask how this mind was itself created—how, in fact, the moulder of one generation had been moulded by the generations which preceded him.

Few men better deserve or more justly claim such treatment than John Wyclif, who was unquestionably a moulder of men and a shaper of history. Wyclif stood at the parting of the ways which led from the Middle Ages to the revival of learning and letters. He was himself the main connecting link between the intellectual hardihood of the Schoolmen and the definite revolt of the Teutonic world from Rome. Essentially throughout his life a secular English clergyman, still his early mental standpoint was on the continent of Europe rather than in England. Rome had so long been the metropolis of religion, as the French universities had been the capitals of scholastic theology and law, that many if not most of Wyclif's predecessors in the long struggle for the emancipation of human thought had lived and died on the continent. The time was at hand for the English Church and the English State to break away from their foreign trammels; but a series of mighty efforts was needed in both cases, and it was only with the eye of faith that Wyclif could see the chains of Romanism and feudalism finally snapped.

It must therefore greatly assist us to arrive at a fair understanding of the problems in which John Wyclif was concerned if we ask ourselves in the first place what was the condition of Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, what were the relations between the Papacy and the different European governments, and especially what effect our constant wars with France would naturally have upon our relations with the popes at Avignon. Narrowing the inquiry from this point, we may note the internal condition of England, having particular regard to the national character of the English Church, the attitude of the monks and friars towards those whom they denounced as innovators, and the phases of life and thought in the university of Oxford, where Wyclif for the most part lived, and to which he was always devotedly attached.

After the breaking up of the vast empire of Charles the Great, the continent of Europe had come to be parcelled out into a large number of kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and republics, few of them possessing any exceptional importance, whilst the majority were quite insignificant. The most powerful overlordships, apart from that of the popes, were the Holy Roman Empire—extending from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and dividing the kingdom of Hungary and the Polish dukedoms from western Europe—the Byzantine Empire, the kingdom of France, and the States of the Spanish and Italian peninsulas. Over each and all of these, the popes had claimed not merely a spiritual but a political supremacy.

From the middle of the thirteenth to the close of the fourteenth century—to speak without absolute precision—the great central empire of Europe was gradually shrinking down to proportions roughly corresponding to those of Germany and Austria (proper) at the present moment. On the west and south-west this shrinkage was especially noteworthy. Burgundy had enlarged her borders; Switzerland had already adopted the federal republicanism which she has maintained ever since; the Low Countries, Savoy, and most of northern Italy, had fallen away. The strength of feudalism had begun to wane; for a long time there was the name of empire without an imperial .head or bond. All that was not German, but only conventionally Roman, tended to separate from the solid core, whilst the true Germany and the Teutonic spirit remained, as they had always been, the chief rival and obstacle of the Papacy on the continent.

The kingdom of Castile, in which Leon had been absorbed, was steadily forcing the Moors of Granada upon the Mediterranean shore. But before the expulsion of Africa from Spain was completed, Asia had begun to overflow into the other extremity of southern Europe, and the Byzantine Empire became the mere shadow of its former greatness. The Crusaders had but irritated and provoked the vast nomadic fanaticism by which western Asia and northern Africa were penetrated and dominated. The Christians had gained some slight successes on the Syrian coast, but they could not long maintain their footing. The king of Jerusalem, the prince of Antioch, the counts of Jaffa, Nablous, and Edessa, with other petty local potentates, were brushed aside by sultans scarcely less petty than themselves, and the Mahomedan flood swept strongly and steadily onward until, at the close of the thirteenth century, Ottoman Turks had mastered almost the whole of Asia Minor. Half a century later they had crossed the Bosphorus into Europe.

This was a disturbing element, not to say an abiding cause of panic, for the nations of the south and west; and the fact must enter into every consideration of the state of Europe in the fourteenth century. The Papacy and Chivalry between them were responsible for the crusades, and it was on the popes and barons that the worst immediate results of the irruption were to fall. Apart from the rash aggressions of the earlier crusades, which clearly (to us in these days) involved the ultimate rebound of the Turk into Europe, the light-hearted wickedness of the fourth crusade was enough in itself to account for all that followed. The Marquis of Montferrat, the Count of Flanders, and the host of adventurers in their train, presumably stirred to religious enthusiasm against the infidel, devoted themselves to two years of ravage and plunder in Christian Europe. They pillaged Constantinople, usurped the Empire of Byzantium, and destroyed the human barrier against barbarism, which needed to be strengthened by every conceivable means. This was in 1202-1204. The Byzantine Greeks regained their empire in 1261; but by this time the natural guards and sentinels of Europe were not only demoralised beyond recovery, but also completely alienated from the Church and the States of the west.

It had been proved by this expedition, and it was confirmed on many occasions within the next century and a half, that the descent was easy from militant chivalry to wholesale rapine. In the fourteenth century it had become apparent that Chivalry, the Feudalism on which it was based, and the Papacy which had played into the hands of both, were involved in a common catastrophe. The popes had lost their hegemony, the barons were losing their feudal authority, and at the moment of greatest need there was no chance of a combination of forces such as would have sufficed to drive back the Turkish hordes. Edward III. proposed it to the French king, and Pope John proposed it to more than one of the monarchs; but it was too late. The seething of Europe had begun. The seventy years' exile of the popes at Avignon, 'the hundred years' war between England and France, the desperate civil wars in both those countries, were already fore-doomed and inevitable. The establishment of the new order in western Christendom could not come to pass—as the history of the world was being developed—save at the cost of liberty and civilisation in the Eastern Empire.

Whilst the Turk was forcing the gates of Europe, Calais was sacked, and the battles of Crécy and Poitiers were fought and won. Whilst the infidels overran Thrace and closed round the devoted city of Constantinople, two of the most powerful Christian nations were exhausting their strength in wars which had but the slightest shadow of justification. The delusive treaty of Brétigny (1360), which coincided in date with the capture of Adrianople, gave to England the provinces of Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumais, and Limousin, with Calais and Ponthieu in the north-east; and, though much of the territory was lost again before the reign of Edward had closed, France was convulsed by invasion and civil war for another sixty years.

Such was the condition of Europe during the life of Wyclif and of the youngest of his disciples. He preached to ears which were never free from ghastly records of slaughter, and to souls perpetually startled by the portents of an eventful epoch.

The story of the Papacy itself in the fourteenth century is as important and striking as that of any of the larger European States. The State of the Church had been built up by successive papal assumptions on the basis of religious authority perverted into secular feudalism, and by means of extravagant tolls levied upon the religious devotion of Christendom. The dramatic surrender of the Emperor Henry at Canossa in 1077, followed by the bequest of the Countess of Modena a few years later, set the coping-stone on a principality which then extended from the Lombard kingdom of Naples to the banks of the river Po. The subjection of England by Innocent III., at the beginning of the thirteenth century, was as thorough in its way as that of Germany by Gregory VII.; for John not only resigned his crown and kingdom into the hands of the papal legate, but received them back in the character of a tributary vassal. And, though John's cleverness overreached itself, yet he doubtless saw clearly enough, as other monarchs saw before and afterwards, that resistance to the Pope meant a paralysing isolation, whilst submission to him brought effective aid and solid advantages. As a matter of fact, Innocent actively assisted the English King against his subjects from the moment when his contumacy came to an end.

The Italian Lothario Conti, known to us as Innocent III., raised the assumptions and usurpations of Rome to the highest pitch. He imposed submission on Castile, Portugal, and Arragon, dictated to Philip Augustus of France, and even received the spiritual homage of the Eastern Empire (from the usurper Baldwin), and of the kings of Bulgaria and Armenia. "In each of the three leading objects which Rome had pursued," says Hallam, "independent sovereignty, supremacy over the Christian Church, control over the princes of the earth, it' was the fortune of this pontiff to conquer."

Precisely in the fulness of its power and authority, the Papacy began to work its own downfall. Its ever increasing and accumulated assumptions were extended from the reigning monarch to the humblest of his subjects, from national and international relations to the bed and board of every individual in every State of Christendom, until at last the very nausea of oppression produced inevitable revolt. Christianity would have been repudiated and rejected by the nations of Europe if they had not distinguished between the faith itself and the guardians of the faith who had violated it. For not only religion, but even morality and the sanctions of society were made to depend on the subtleties of fallible men, who, whilst discrediting the intellect, applied their own imperfect intellects to the definition of good and evil for their fellow-creatures.

And this was not by any means the worst of the spiritual assumption, for the Pope claimed power, after laying down the law of good and evil, to dispense men from the obligation to' do good, and to indulge them in the commission of evil. Pope Innocent, and doctors of the Church like St. Thomas Aquinas, declared that the Supreme Pontiff, in the plenitude of his power, might lawfully dispense with the law—a claim which is not set up for the Deity himself, nor by nature, as interpreted by their works. Obstructions may divert the spiritual and physical laws, but only as proceeding from a different source, and from a cause external to the law. When the authority which had promulgated the law of right and wrong was found dispensing with the right and selling indulgences for the wrong, it was no longer regarded as a lawgiver. Of necessity, and with an impassioned conviction of truth, devout men considered it as an obstruction to moral law.

Before the fourteenth century dawned this conviction had penetrated many a thoughtful mind, and the wonder is that such a clear and cogent truth, put forward by Wyclif and his friends with logical completeness, should not have won the battle of reformation at least a century and a half before it was actually won. But, in point of fact, the reformation of religion, in England as in Germany, passed through several phases. The awakening of the popular conscience was one of these phases; but it could not reach its full development apart from the political rejection of the papal assumptions, the arbitrary suppression of the monastic Orders, and the legislative conversion of the national Church. All these things were on their way, and Wyclif brought them as near to realisation as any man could have done in the fourteenth century. But the hour had not struck, and the instruments were not all ready to hand.

It is true that the movement in England, which Wyclif inspired and led, came nearer to success than has sometimes been supposed. The suppression of monasteries actually began in the generation after his death. Parliament had declared boldly against the Pope; and if the Commons had been made of sterner stuff—if they had realised their strength, and had not been driven into panic by the revolt of the peasants, they might, even in the fourteenth century, have moulded the national Church on the nation's will. There was indeed no discontinuity in the protest which our ancestors raised against the innovations of Rome. Wyclif drew a line at the close of the first Christian millennium, and declared that after the thousandth year of Christ Satan was loosed, and Antichrist was enthroned in the pontifical chair. At any rate from the eleventh century there was never a time in England when the spiritual and temporal pretensions of the Popes were not categorically opposed. The Schoolmen headed the protest on the intellectual side. Lanfranc complained of Berengar that he wished to ignore the sacred sanctions, and to have recourse to mere logic and argument. This was the point at which Scholasticism had its origin; the protest of the Schoolmen was against the intolerable claim of Rome that her traditional sanctions and authorities should impose a limit upon intellect, morals, and individual conscience.

And if the popular mind, and the minds of a few scholars and preachers here and there, were outraged and alienated by the spiritual usurpations of the Papacy, its temporal and political assumptions were resisted in each successive generation, however intermittently, by the monarchs and statesmen of the day. Henry II. and John both measured swords against the enemy of their country. Each of them, indeed, found his blade too short, and extricated himself from his difficulty by a politic compromise. It may even be argued that the payment of tribute from 12 13 to 1333 rather assisted than hindered the growth of the national independence, in an age when the temporal power of Rome was at its zenith. The tribute did not prevent Henry III. and Edward I. from continuing the struggle. A like combative spirit was displayed by the Holy Roman Empire. The extreme personal humiliation of the Emperor Henry IV. and Frederick Barbarossa merely point us to two conspicuous instances of German resistance.

Up to the close of the thirteenth century, these contests of the civil against the ecclesiastical authority, and of the national spirit against the encroachments of Rome, appeared to have little practical or permanent result. It was reserved for France to give the Papacy its first effectual check, and to stagger it by a blow from which it never entirely recovered.

Benedict Cajetano, Pope Boniface VIII., was the most capable man and the most politically aggressive pontiff who had sat in the chair of St. Peter since Innocent III.; but he carried the policy of his predecessor to a wild extreme, and invited the active hostility by which he was speedily overwhelmed. It is true that in Edward I. of England and Philip the Fair of France he had encountered two monarchs of more than ordinary mettle, and that a conflict with one or both of them was virtually inevitable. As it happened, he had to fight them both; and the manner in which he launched his lightnings and hurled his thunderbolts showed with how light a heart this ill-fated Pope sought to assert his authority as the vice-gerent of God on earth.

Revolt against Rome was ripe in every sense. She had not only encroached on the civil governments, but also harassed and offended the hierarchies of the national Churches. By her interdicts, excommunications, and depositions, she had exasperated monarchs and peoples alike. She had asserted the rights of mandate and investiture, and frequently overruled the elections of metropolitans and bishops, ignoring the claims of the clergy as well as of the Crown. She had exacted large sums of money in the shape of annata on promotions and translations, of direct levies from the Churches, and of tribute from the monarchs. She had set up the papal Curia as a jurisdiction external to every country, yet claiming supremacy in all; and she authorised her legates to override the decisions of the hierarchies, and even the provincial councils of the national Churches. When, on the other hand, clergy, monks, or friars abused their privileges to the manifest detriment of the State, Rome almost invariably encouraged her subordinates to defy and resist the civil power, claiming for them both a moral and a material immunity against the jurisdictions of the land in which they lived.

The vast possessions of the clergy and religious Orders, especially after the new corporations of friars had forsworn their original vows of poverty, excited the alarm, not to say the cupidity of the monarchs, and whetted the edge of their hostility to Rome. England, France, the Empire, and Castile had at different times taken measures to curtail the growing evil. In England alone, it was found in the reign of Edward I., something like one half of the knights' fees, which had contributed to the revenues of the Crown under William the Norman, had passed into the hands of the clergy and monks. In order to check further diversions of the national wealth into the coffers of the Church, the Statute of Mortmain (1279) forbade the alienation of estates to religious corporations, under pain of forfeiture. But the statutes of those days did not grind very small, and the mischief went on.

Meanwhile the English Church, from motives amongst which we may fairly include those of national independence and patriotism, had paid subsidies from their growing revenues to the crippled resources of the State. This had been done in the reign of Henry III., and was continued in the reign of Edward, the Church virtually admitting its liability to taxation, but making an occasional stand in regard to the amount. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the King was badly in want of money, and he was not very particular as to the means of raising it. He made heavier demands upon the clergy, to the extent of one fifth and even one half of their income, until in self-defence they denied their liability altogether. Edward threatened to confiscate their property, and partly carried out his threat; whereupon the clergy appealed to the Pope, contending that their aids were due to Rome alone.

The same struggle was proceeding at the same time upon the continent. Boniface had begun his pontificate by calling on the monarchs of Europe to settle their differences by referring them to his arbitrament. The sincerity of this plausible injunction may be measured by the fact that he was soon offering, for his own purposes, to dethrone the Emperor Albert and to give his crown to Charles of Valois. In this and other matters the Pope laid himself open to the suspicion that his aim was not so much to maintain peace in Christendom as to fish in troubled waters.

The trial of strength between Boniface and Philip endured throughout the seven years of that fatal pontificate. The first blow was struck by Boniface, who in peremptory language required the French and English kings to abstain from laying any taxations whatever upon the clergy. This was not the only form of papal interference, but it aggravated and governed all the rest. The challenge was unmistakable, and Philip took it up at once. He refused to obey the Pope, who then issued his bull Clericis laicos, declaring in general terms, for the benefit of Philip, Edward, and anyone else whom it might concern, that monarchs had no right to exact taxes or aids from the clergy, even in the shape of voluntary grants, without the sanction of the Holy Father. Philip's answer was to prohibit the export of gold, silver, precious stones, food, and the munitions of war—a prohibition which of course included the aids of the clergy and the contributions of the faithful. Placed thus between two injunctions, the clergy ended by paying to the nearest creditor; the Kings obtained their subsidies, and the Pope was left to starve.

The quarrel continued with varying fortunes. An award delivered by Boniface in an arbitration between Philip and his enemies, being regarded in Paris as manifestly unjust and prejudiced, was torn up by the Count d'Artois in the King's presence. The "little bull" of 1300, in which Boniface wrote—"We desire you to know that you are subject to us in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs," was ordered to be publicly burned. The Pope stormed and threatened. Philip threw himself on the support of the States-General, which was apparently the first assembly of its kind in France, summoned within forty years of the first English Parliament; and the three orders of nobles, clergy, and commons addressed three distinct memorials to the Pope, even the clergy refusing to admit the temporal supremacy of Rome. Nevertheless some of the bishops obeyed the summons of Boniface to a council which was to consider and determine upon the offences of their King; whereupon Philip promptly confiscated their property, and took occasion at the same time to throw upon the absentees the growing scandal and odium of the Inquisition.

By openly claiming the temporal supremacy, Boniface had gone too far to retreat. Backed by his most uncompromising supporters, and impelled by the complaints of the French bishops, he drew up the famous bull, Unam sanctam (June, 1302), which brought to a point the infatuated and fatal claim of universal temporal dominion. The Church, he declared, is one holy and undivided body, having but a single head. "The spiritual and the temporal sword are alike under the control of the Church; the latter must be employed by those who wear it on behalf of the Church, and the former by the Church itself—the former wielded by a priestly hand, the latter by the hand of monarchs and soldiers, though only at the summons and under the sanction of the priest. Moreover, the one sword ought to be subject to the other, and the temporal to the spiritual authority. . . . Furthermore" [or perhaps "from henceforth," porro] "we declare, state, lay down and pronounce, that it is an indispensable article of faith for every human being that he is a subject of the Roman pontiff."

No words could be more precise or definite than these. Their chief effect was to seal the doom of Boniface, and to explode the claim of Rome to any kind of temporal sovereignty outside the States of the Church. In the course of a few months Philip was excommunicated, Boniface was arraigned before the French Estates, the legitimacy of his election was solemnly impugned, his heresies were denounced, appeal was made from him to a new and legitimate Pope, and this appeal was endorsed by the States-General, by a majority of the secular clergy, by the religious Orders, and by the University of Paris. Philip was determined to lose nothing for want of audacity. He sent his avocat-royal, with the two Cardinals Colonna who had previously taken refuge in Paris, to seize the person of the Pope at Anagni; and, though Boniface was rescued and conveyed to Rome, he died a few days later from the shock of his humiliation. And so the saying of the ex-Pope Celestine, whom Boniface had compelled to resign, and afterwards imprisoned, was fulfilled: "This cardinal, who stole like a fox into the chair of St. Peter, will have the reign of a lion and the death of a dog."

"Imprisoned, insulted, deprived eventually of life by the violence of Philip, a prince excommunicated, and who had gone all lengths in defying and despising the papal jurisdiction, Boniface," says Hallam, "had every claim to be avenged by the inheritors of the same spiritual dominion. When Benedict XI. rescinded the bulls of his predecessor, and admitted Philip the Fair to communion without insisting on any concessions, he acted perhaps prudently, but gave a fatal blow to the temporal authority at Rome."

Blow after blow was given to that authority. On the death of Boniface the cardinals had hastily elected Benedict XI., who died within the year. The next pope was Philip's nominee, and he transferred the headquarters of the Papacy to Avignon. There, for seventy-three years, seven popes,^[1] all Frenchmen, with a French majority in the College of Cardinals, abode under the shelter of the kings of France. Rome herself, meanwhile, was successively courted and almost won by Ludwig of Bavaria and the tribune Rienzi; and throughout western Christendom the minds of the faithful were profoundly disturbed, not to say unstrung, by what seemed to be the irreparable ruin of the Vicars of Christ.

Such was the condition of Europe and of the Papacy when John Wyclif was born; and Wyclif himself, in the ripeness of life and the fulness of activity, was to witness the great Schism of 1378, by which the diminished authority of Rome was to be still further impaired and depreciated.

He might have repeated to himself in his old age, with pardonable exultation, that eloquent sentence of the historian of ancient and secular Rome: "Habent imperia suos terminos; huc cum venerint, sistunt, retrocedunt, ruunt."

1. 1305, Clement V.; 1316, John XXII.; 1334, Benedict XII.; 1342, Clement VI.; 1352, Innocent VI.; 1362, Urban V.; 1371, Gregory XI. Gregory returned to Rome in 1378, and died there in the same year, being succeeded by Urban VI. at Rome and Clement VII. at Avignon.