Book: A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

C >> Carlton J. H. Hayes >> A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.




[Sidenote: Royal Restrictions on the Church]

Gradually the national monarchs secured at least a partial control over
episcopal appointments, and in both England and France papal
jurisdiction was seriously restricted in other ways. In England the
power of the ecclesiastical courts had been reduced (1164); no property
might be bestowed upon the Church without royal permission (1279); the
pope might not make provision in England for his personal appointees to
office (1351); and appeals to Rome had been forbidden (1392).
[Footnote: All these anti-papal enactments were very poorly enforced.]
In France the clergy had been taxed early in the fourteenth century,
and the papacy, which had condemned such action, had been humiliated by
a forced temporary removal from Rome to Avignon, where it was
controlled by French rulers for nearly seventy years (1309-1377); and
in 1438 the French king, Charles VII, in a document, styled the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, solemnly proclaimed the "liberties of
the Gallican Church," that a general council was superior to the pope,
that the pope might not interfere in episcopal elections, that he might
not levy taxes on French dioceses. The Pragmatic Sanction was condemned
by the pope, but for three-quarters of a century after its issuance
there were strained relations between the Church in France and the
sovereign pontiff.

[Sidenote: Political Differences Distinct from Religious Differences]

Similar conflicts between spiritual and temporal jurisdictions were
common to all Christian states, but the national strength and the
patriotism of the western monarchies caused them to proceed further
than any other state in restricting the papal privileges. Despite the
conflict over temporal affairs, which at times was exceedingly bitter,
the kings and rulers of England and France never appear to have
seriously questioned the religious authority of the Church or the
spiritual supremacy of the pope. Religiously, the Catholic Church
seemed in 1500 to hold absolute sway over all central and western
Europe.

[Sidenote: Religious Opposition to Catholicism]

Yet this very religious authority of the Catholic Church had been again
and again brought into question and repeatedly rejected. Originally, a
united Christianity had conquered western Asia, northern Africa, and
eastern Europe; by 1500 nearly all these wide regions were lost to
Catholic Christianity as that phrase was understood in western Europe.
The loss was due to (1) the development of a great Christian schism,
and (2) the rise of a new religion--Mohammedanism.

[Sidenote: The Schism between the East and the West]

Eastern Europe had been lost through an ever-widening breach in
Christian practice from the fifth to the eleventh century. The Eastern
Church used the Greek language in its liturgy; that of the West used
the Latin language. The former remained more dependent upon the state;
the latter grew less dependent. Minor differences of doctrine appeared.
And the Eastern Christians thought the pope was usurping unwarrantable
prerogatives, while the Western Christians accused the Oriental
patriarchs of departing from their earlier loyalty to the pope and
destroying the unity of Christendom. Several attempts had been made to
reunite the Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the
East, but with slight success. In 1500, the Christians of Greece, the
Balkan peninsula, and Russia were thought to be outside the Catholic
Church and were defined, therefore, by the pope as schismatics.

[Sidenote: Mohammedanism]

Far more numerous and dangerous to Catholic Christianity than the
schismatic Easterners were the Mohammedans. Mohammed himself had lived
in Arabia in the early part the seventh century and had taught that he
was the inspired prophet of the one true God. In a celebrated book,--
the Koran,--which was compiled from the sayings of the prophet, are to
be found the precepts and commandments of the Mohammedan religion.
Mohammedanism spread rapidly: within a hundred years of its founder's
death it had conquered western Asia and northern Africa and had gained
a temporary foothold in Spain; thenceforth it stretched eastward across
Persia and Turkestan into India and southward into central Africa; and
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as we have seen, it
possessed itself of Constantinople, the Balkans, Greece, and part of
Hungary, and threatened Christendom in the Germanies and in the
Mediterranean.

[Sidenote: Western Heresies]

Even in western Europe, the Catholic Church had had to encounter
spasmodic opposition from "heretics," as those persons were called who,
although baptized as Christians, refused to accept all the dogmas of
Catholic Christianity. Such were the Arian Christians, who in early
times had been condemned for rejecting the doctrine of the divinity of
Christ, and who had eventually been won back to Catholicism only with
the greatest efforts. Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the
Albigensian heretics in southern France had assailed the sacramental
system and the organization of the Church and had been suppressed only
by armed force. In the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe appeared in
England and John Hus in Bohemia, both preaching that the individual
Christian needs no priestly mediation between himself and God and that
the very sacraments of the Church, however desirable, are not
essentially necessary to salvation. The Lollards, as Wycliffe's English
followers were called, were speedily extirpated by fire and sword,
through the stern orthodoxy of an English king, but the Hussites long
defied the pope and survivals of their heresy were to be found in 1500.

[Sidenote: Skeptics]

In addition to these heretics and the Jews, [Footnote: For detailed
accounts of the Jews during the middle ages as well as in modern times,
see the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, ed. by Isidore Singer, 12 vols.
(1901-1906).] many so-called skeptics no doubt existed. These were
people who outwardly conformed to Catholicism but inwardly doubted and
even scoffed at the very foundations of Christianity. They were
essentially irreligious, but they seem to have suffered less from
persecution than the heretics. Many of the Italian humanists,
concerning whom we shall later say a word, [Footnote: See below] were
in the fifteenth century more or less avowed skeptics.


THE PROTESTANT REVOLT

[Sidenote: A Religious and Political Movement]

We have seen in the preceding pages that prior to 1500 there had been
many conflicts between kings and popes concerning their respective
temporal rights and likewise there had been serious doubts in the minds
of various people as to the authority and teachings of the Catholic
Church. But these two facts--political and religious--had never been
united in a general revolt against the Church until the sixteenth
century. Then it was that Christians of Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland,
and England, even of the Low Countries and France, successfully
revolted against the papal monarchy and set up establishments of their
own, usually under the protection of their lay rulers, which became
known as the Protestant churches. The movement is called, therefore,
the Protestant Revolt. It was begun and practically completed between
1520 and 1570.

[Sidenote: Political Causes of Protestant Revolt]

In explaining this remarkable and sudden break with the religious and
ecclesiastical development of a thousand years, it is well to bear in
mind that its causes were at once political, economic, and religious.
Politically, it was merely an accentuation of the conflict which had
long been increasing in virulence between the spiritual and temporal
authorities. It cannot be stated too emphatically that the Catholic
Church during many centuries prior to the sixteenth had been not only a
religious body, like a present-day church, but also a vast political
power which readily found sources of friction with other political
institutions. The Catholic Church, as we have seen, had its own
elaborate organization in every country of western and central Europe;
and its officials--pope, bishops, priests, and monks--denied allegiance
to the secular government; the Church owned many valuable lands and
estates, which normally were exempt from taxation and virtually outside
the jurisdiction of the lay government; the Church had its own
independent and compulsory income, and its own courts to try its own
officers and certain kinds of cases for every one. Such political
jurisdiction of the Church had been quite needful and satisfactory in
the period--from the fifth to the twelfth century, let us say--when the
secular governments were weak and the Church found itself the chief
unifying force in Christendom, the veritable heir to the universal
dominion of the ancient Roman Empire.

But gradually the temporal rulers themselves repressed feudalism.
Political ambition increased in laymen, and local pride was exalted
into patriotism. By the year 1200 was begun the growth of that notable
idea of national monarchy, the general outline of which we sketched in
the opening chapter. We there indicated that at the commencement of the
sixteenth century, England, France, Spain, and Portugal had become
strong states, with well-organized lay governments under powerful
kings, with patriotic populations, and with well-developed, distinctive
languages and literatures. The one thing that seemed to be needed to
complete this national sovereignty was to bring the Church entirely
under royal control. The autocratic sovereigns desired to enlist the
wealth and influence of the Church in their behalf; they coveted her
lands, her taxes, and her courts. Although Italy, the Netherlands, and
the Germanies were not yet developed as strong united monarchies, many
of their patriotic leaders longed for such a development, worked for
it, and believed that the principal obstacle to it was the great
Christian Church with the pope at its head. Viewed from the political
standpoint, the Protestant Revolt was caused by the rise of national
feeling, which found itself in natural conflict with the older
cosmopolitan or catholic idea of the Church. It was nationalism
_versus_ Catholicism.

[Sidenote: Economic Causes of Protestant Revolt]

Economically, the causes of the Protestant Revolt were twofold. In the
first place, the Catholic Church had grown so wealthy that many people,
particularly kings and princes, coveted her possessions. In the second
place, financial abuses in ecclesiastical administration bore heavily
upon the common people and created serious scandal. Let us say a word
about each one of these difficulties.

At the opening of the sixteenth century, many bishops and abbots in
wealth and power were not unlike great lay lords: they held vast fair
dominions--in the Germanics a third of the whole country, in France a
fifth, etc.--and they were attended by armies of retainers. Most of
them were sons of noblemen who had had them consecrated bishops so as
to insure them fine positions. Even the monks, who now often lived in
rich monasteries as though they had never taken vows of poverty, were
sometimes of noble birth and quite worldly in their lives. The large
estates and vast revenues of Catholic ecclesiastics were thus at first
the lure and then the prey of their royal and princely neighbors. The
latter grew quite willing to utilize any favorable opportunity which
might enable them to confiscate church property and add it to their own
possessions. Later such confiscation was euphemistically styled
"secularization."

On the other hand, many plain people, such as peasants and artisans,
begrudged the numerous and burdensome ecclesiastical taxes, and an
increasing number felt that they were not getting the worth of their
money. There was universal complaint, particularly in the Germanies,
that the people were exploited by the Roman Curia. Each ecclesiastic,
be he bishop, abbot, or priest, had right to a benefice, that is, to
the revenue of a parcel of land attached to his post. When he took
possession of a benefice, he paid the pope a special assessment, called
the "annate," amounting to a year's income--which of course came from
the peasants living on the land. The pope likewise "reserved" to
himself the right of naming the holders of certain benefices: these he
gave preferably to Italians who drew the revenues but remained in their
own country; the people thus supported foreign prelates in luxury and
sometimes paid a second time in order to maintain resident
ecclesiastics. The archbishops paid enormous sums to the pope for their
badges of office (_pallia_). Fat fees for dispensations or for
court trials found their way across the Alps. And the bulk of the
burden ultimately rested upon the backs of the people. At least in the
Germanics the idea became very prevalent that the pope and Curia were
really robbing honest German Christians for the benefit of scandalously
immoral Italians.

There were certainly grave financial abuses in church government in the
fifteenth century and in the early part of the sixteenth. A project of
German reform, drawn up in 1438, had declared: "It is a shame which
cries to heaven, this oppression of tithes, dues, penalties,
excommunication, and tolls of the peasant, on whose labor all men
depend for their existence." An "apocalyptic pamphlet of 1508 shows on
its cover the Church upside down, with the peasant performing the
services, while the priest guides the plow outside and a monk drives
the horses." It was, in fact, in the Germanics that all the social
classes--princes, burghers, knights, and peasants--had special economic
grievances against the Church, and in many places were ready to combine
in rejecting papal claims.

This emphasis upon the political and particularly upon the economic
causes need not belittle the strictly religious factor in the movement.
The success of the revolt was due to the fact that many kings, nobles,
and commoners, for financial and political advantages to themselves,
became the valuable allies of real religious reformers. It required
dogmatic differences as well as social grievances to destroy the
dominion of the Church.

[Sidenote: Abuses in the Catholic Church]

Nearly all thoughtful men in the sixteenth century recognized the
existence of abuses in the Catholic Church. The scandals connected with
the papal court at Rome were notorious at the opening of the century.
Several of the the popes lived grossly immoral lives. Simony (the sale
of church offices for money) and nepotism (favoritism shown by a pope
to his relatives) were not rare. The most lucrative ecclesiastical
positions throughout Europe were frequently conferred upon Italians who
seldom discharged their duties. One person might be made bishop of
several foreign dioceses and yet continue to reside in Rome. Leo X, who
was pope when the Protestant Revolt began, and son of Lorenzo de'
Medici, surnamed the Magnificent, had been ordained to the priesthood
at the age of seven, named cardinal when he was thirteen, and speedily
loaded with a multitude of rich benefices and preferments; this same
pope, by his munificence and extravagance, was forced to resort to the
most questionable means for raising money: he created many new offices
and shamelessly sold them; he increased the revenue from indulgences,
jubilees, and regular taxation; he pawned palace furniture, table
plate, pontifical jewels, even statues of the apostles; several banking
firms and many individual creditors were ruined by his death.

[Sidenote: Attacks on Immorality of Clergymen]

What immorality and worldliness prevailed at Rome was reflected in the
lives of many lesser churchmen. To one of the popes of the fifteenth
century, a distinguished cardinal represented the disorders of the
clergy, especially in the Germanics. "These disorders," he said,
"excite the hatred of the people against all ecclesiastical order; if
it is not corrected, it is to be feared that the laity, following the
example of the Hussites, will attack the clergy as they now openly
menace us with doing." If the clergy of Germany were not reformed
promptly, he predicted that after the Bohemian heresy was crushed
another would speedily arise far more dangerous. "For they will say,"
he continued, "that the clergy is incorrigible and is willing to apply
no remedy to its disorders. They will attack us when they no longer
have any hope of our correction. Men's minds are waiting for what shall
be done; it seems as if shortly something tragic will be brought forth.
The venom which they have against us is becoming evident; soon they
will believe they are making a sacrifice agreeable to God by
maltreating or despoiling the ecclesiastics as people odious to God and
man and immersed to the utmost in evil. The little reverence still
remaining for the sacred order will be destroyed. Responsibility for
all these disorders will be charged upon the Roman Curia, which will be
regarded as the cause of all these evils because it has neglected to
apply the necessary remedy." To many other thoughtful persons, a moral
reformation in the head and members of the Church seemed vitally
necessary.

Complaints against the evil lives of the clergy as well as against
their ignorance and credulity were echoed by most of the great scholars
and humanists of the time. The patriotic knight and vagabond scholar,
Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), contributed to a clever series of
satirical "Letters of Obscure Men," which were read widely, and which
poked fun at the lack of learning among the monks and the ease with
which the papal court emptied German pockets.

[Sidenote: Ulrich von Hutten and Erasmus]

Then, too, the great Erasmus (1466-1536) employed all his wit and
sarcasm, in his celebrated "Praise of Folly," against the theologians
and monks, complaining that the foolish people thought that religion
consisted simply in pilgrimages, the invocation of saints, and the
veneration of relics. Erasmus would have suppressed the monasteries,
put an end to the domination of the clergy, and swept away scandalous
abuses. He wanted Christianity to regain its early spiritual force, and
largely for that purpose he published in 1516 the Greek text of the New
Testament with a new Latin translation and with notes which mercilessly
flayed hair-splitting theologians.

Thus throughout the fifteenth century and the early part of the
sixteenth, much was heard from scholars, princes, and people, of the
need for "reformation" of the Church. That did not signify a change of
the old regulations but rather their restoration and enforcement. For a
long time it was not a question of abolishing the authority of the
pope, or altering ecclesiastical organization, or changing creeds. It
was merely a question of reforming the lives of the clergy and of
suppressing the means by which Italians drew money from other nations.

[Sidenote: Religious Causes of Protestant Revolt]

In the sixteenth century, however, a group of religious leaders, such
as Luther, Cranmer, Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox, went much further than
Erasmus and the majority of the humanists had gone: they applied the
word "reformation" not only to a reform in morals but to an open break
which they made with the government and doctrines of the Catholic
Church. The new theology, which these reformers championed, was derived
mainly from the teachings of such heretics as Wycliffe and Hus and was
supposed to depend directly upon the Bible rather than upon the Church.
The religious causes of the Protestant Revolt accordingly may be summed
up as: first, the existence of abuses within the Catholic Church;
second, the attacks of distinguished men upon the immorality and
worldliness of the Catholic clergy; and third, the substitution by
certain religious leaders of new doctrines and practices, which were
presumed to have been authorized by the Bible, but which were at
variance with those of the medieval Church.

[Sidenote: Date and Extent of the Protestant Revolt]

For the great variety of reasons, which we have now indicated,--
political, economic, and religious,--the peoples of northern Germany,
Scandinavia, the Dutch Netherlands, most of Switzerland, Scotland,
England, and a part of France and of Hungary, separated themselves,
between the years 1520 and 1570, from the great religious and political
body which had been known historically for over a thousand years as the
Catholic Christian Church. The name "Protestant" was first applied
exclusively to those followers of Martin Luther in the Holy Roman
Empire who in 1529 protested against an attempt of the Diet of Speyer
to prevent the introduction of religious novelties, but subsequently
the word passed into common parlance among historians and the general
reading public as betokening all Christians who rejected the papal
supremacy and who were not in communion with the Orthodox Church of
eastern Europe.

Of this Protestant Christianity three main forms appeared in the
sixteenth century--Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism. Concerning
the origin and development of each one of these major forms, a brief
sketch must be given.


LUTHERANISM

[Sidenote: Martin Luther]

Lutheranism takes its name from its great apostle, Martin Luther.
Luther was born in Eisleben in Germany in 1483 of a poor family whose
ancestors had been peasants. Martin early showed himself bold,
headstrong, willing to pit his own opinions against those of the world,
but yet possessing ability, tact, and a love of sound knowledge.
Educated at the university of Erfurt, where he became acquainted with
the humanistic movement, young Martin entered one of the mendicant
orders--the Augustinian--in 1505 and went to live in a monastery. In
1508 Luther was sent with some other monks to Wittenberg to assist a
university which had been opened there recently by the elector of
Saxony, and a few years later was appointed professor of theology in
the institution.

[Sidenote: Justification by Faith]

While lecturing and preaching at Wittenberg, where he was very popular,
Luther developed from the writings of St. Paul and St. Augustine an
important doctrinal conviction which differed widely from the faith of
the Catholic Church. It concerned the means of eternal salvation. The
Church taught, as we have seen, that she possessed the sole means, and
that every Christian must perform certain "good works" in order to
secure salvation. Luther, on the other hand, became convinced that man
was incapable, in the sight of God, of any good works whatsoever, and
could be saved only by faith in God's promises. In other words, this
monk placed his doctrine of "justification by faith" in opposition to
the generally accepted belief in "justification by faith and works."

[Sidenote: Tetzel's "Sale" of Indulgences]

So far, Luther certainly had no thought of revolting against the
authority of the Church. In fact, when he visited Rome in 1511, it was
as a pious pilgrim rather than as a carping critic. But a significant
event in the year 1517 served to make clear a wide discrepancy between
what he was teaching and what the Church taught. That year a certain
papal agent, Tetzel by name, was disposing of indulgences in the great
archbishopric of Mainz. An indulgence, according to Catholic theology,
was a remission of the temporal punishment in purgatory due to sin, and
could be granted only by authority of the Church; the grant of
indulgences depended upon the contrition and confession of the
applicant, and often at that time upon money-payments. Against what he
believed was a corruption of Christian doctrine and a swindling of the
poorer people, Luther protested in a series of ninety-five Theses which
he posted on the church door in Wittenberg (31 October, 1517).

[Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses]

The Theses had been written in Latin for the educated class but they
were now speedily translated into German and spread like wildfire among
all classes throughout the country. Luther's underlying principle of
"salvation through simple faith" was in sharp contrast with the theory
of "good works," on which the indulgences rested. "The Christian who
has true repentance," wrote Luther, "has already received pardon from
God altogether apart from an indulgence, and does not need one; Christ
demands this true repentance from every one." Luther's attitude
provoked spirited discussion throughout the Germanics, and the more
discussion, the more interest and excitement. The pope, who had
dismissed the subject at first as a mere squabble among the monks, was
moved at length to summon Luther to Rome to answer for the Theses, but
the elector of Saxony intervened and prevailed upon the pope not to
press the matter.

[Sidenote: Disputation at Leipzig, 1519]

The next important step in the development of Luther's religious ideas
was a debate on the general question of papal supremacy, held at
Leipzig in 1519, between himself and an eminent Catholic apologist,
Johann Eck. Eck skillfully forced Luther to admit that certain views of
his, especially those concerning man's direct relation with God,
without the mediation of the Church, were the same as those which John
Hus had held a century earlier and which had been condemned both by the
pope and by the great general council of Constance. Luther thereby
virtually admitted that a general council as well as a pope might err.
For him, the divine authority of the Roman Catholic Church ceased to
be.

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