Religious Thought in the Reformation

Bernard M. G. Reardon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317889991
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Most general accounts of the reformation concentrate on its events and personalities while recent scholarship has been largely devoted to its social and economic consequences. Benard Reardon's famous book has been designed specifically to reassert the role of religion in the study of reformation history and make the theological issues and arguments that fuelled it accessible to non-specialists today.

Chapter 1

The Eve of the Reformation: Anticipations of Reform

Antipapalism

The succession of events which identifies the Reformation as a religious movement begins, by common consent, with the protest of Martin Luther, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, 1517, against what he regarded as a flagrant ecclesiastical evil. Yet the historian is confronted with abounding evidence of the church’s decline in prestige and spiritual influence long before this, a decline attributable not to any marked lessening of popular religious sentiment (the facts, rather, show the contrary to have been the case)¹ but to the worldliness, corruption and venality rife among its official representatives, including, most signally, the papacy itself². Demands for reform were voiced as early as the fourteenth century, and in the fifteenth the necessity was everywhere recognized by men of conscience. The difficulty was that so many persons judged their professional interest or material advantage to depend on the continuance of the existing system that agreement seemed impossible, not simply as to the means of reform but even on its real aims. Moreover, although widespread abuses in the ecclesiastical administration, financial exactions by the authorities of all ranks – ‘The Lord desireth not the death of a sinner,’ remarked a papal official, ‘but rather that he should pay and live’ – and the ignorance and immorality all too common among the clergy at large were the usual reasons for complaint, the basic principles on which the medieval church order rested were, on the whole, not the object of critical questioning. With the exception of a few exponents of ideas clearly heretical according to Roman standards, the traditional dogmas and the beliefs underlying familiar religious practices were taken for granted. What was lacking was forceful leadership at once conscious of an overriding religious mission and capable of harnessing religious discontent to the innovative tendencies of the age. In the sixteenth century such leadership did emerge, but by that time the need for change had become so insistent that reform swelled into revolution, the result of which was that the unity of western Christendom was shattered and startlingly new forms of faith and piety all but effaced the old Catholic tradition over large areas of Europe.

Responsibility for the church’s secularization must to a very considerable extent be laid at the door of the papacy, with its increasingly inflated claims to the plenitudo potestatis, explicitly asserting an absolute authority over the affairs of men, as well temporal as spiritual. For although the Roman pope was held to be supreme in the religious sphere – a supremacy which few in Catholic Europe contested – the medieval doctrine of the ‘two swords’ had envisaged a shared authority: the spiritual order and the civil possessed each its own realm by divine right. This division was one which the secular ambitions of the papacy, abetted by its canon lawyers, consistently tried to remove. The emperors for their part opposed the claim vigorously, and if for a time the popes triumphed their success was of short duration. Boniface VIII (1294–1303), in the bull Unam Sanctum of 1302 occasioned by his quarrel with Philip IV of France, declared that outside the ‘One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’ there is ‘neither salvation nor remission of sins’, reasserted the papal supremacy in uncompromising terms and urged the principle that to reject the pope’s authority was tantamount to ceasing to be a Catholic or even a Christian. He also contended, virtually as a matter of dogma, that the temporal and spiritual ‘swords’ were alike committed to the church, the latter to be wielded by the clergy directly, the former, though delegated to the secular authorities, to be used on behalf of the church and under its direction. To resist the spiritual power divinely conferred on St Peter and his successors was to contravene the law of God himself. This pronouncement marked the zenith of the papal pretensions in the medieval period. But in uttering it Boniface overreached himself. Arrested and imprisoned by the French, he died shortly afterwards, a broken and humiliated man. The so-called ‘Babylonish Captivity’ at Avignon followed (1309–77), and with it an inevitable fall in the papacy’s universal standing, accelerated moreover by John XXII’s ill-judged intervention in the quarrel over Louis IV of Bavaria’s election as emperor. Exiled from Rome and subject to pressure from the French king, the Avignon popes were not only bereft of political power but suffered a loss of ecclesiastical prestige as well, especially from the scandal of the Great Schism (1378–1417), with its absurd and humiliating spectacle of anti-popes. Thus the way was prepared for the promotion of ‘conciliarist’ ideas in the next century.

The papacy’s exorbitant jurisdictional claims, resisted in practice by temporal rulers like Philip IV and Edward I of England, were impugned on theoretical grounds by civil lawyers who appealed to ancient Roman law in support of the royal authority in both temporal and ecclesiastical concerns, and by such philosophical thinkers as William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347) and Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1275–1342). The former, a Franciscan friar teaching at Oxford, became involved in a dispute with John XXII at Avignon, whence he sought refuge with the Bavarian prince, under whose protection he remained for the rest of his life. It was during these latter years that he inveighed against the pope in favour of the imperial authority and its policies, arguing not only that the pope had no right to determine the validity of an imperial election but that the emperor, on the contrary, had a positive duty to depose a heretical pope, as he himself deemed John XXII in fact to be.³ Marsiglio, who also became a protégé of Louis’s, is best known as the author (in collaboration with John of Jandun) of the famous treatise ‘Defender of the Peace’ (Defensor Pacis) (1324). In this work, in which the influence of Aristotle’s Politics is evident, he maintains that the state, which derives its authority from the people themselves – who retain the right to censure and even overthrow the ruler – is the great unifying power in society, and to it as such the church, which has no intrinsic jurisdiction temporal or spiritual, must be wholly subordinate. Its legal rights no less than its property are conferred upon it by the civil power. Marsiglio further held that the ecclesiastical hierarchy is of human not divine institution, that St Peter was never accorded the primacy among the apostles, and that the popes cannot be proved to be his successors. In his own opinion a general council, comprising laymen as well as clerics, is the true authority in ecclesiastical matters. That so audacious a book should have been condemned by the papal censors at Avignon and Marsiglio himself excommunicated can have surprised no one, least of all its author. Translated first into French and then into Italian and English, it was known to Wycliffe and Luther, and could scarcely have failed to influence Reformation thinking. Certainly in England Thomas Cromwell made it the subject of assiduous study.⁴

Nothing abashed, the papacy in no way moderated its ambitions, as was demonstrated by the bull Execrabilis et Pristinis of Pius II (1460), and that of Leo X, Pastor Aeternus (1516), published on the eve of the Reformation itself. The difficulty lay not simply in the popes’ temporal pretensions but in their spiritual absolutism, amounting to the doctrine that all religious and ecclesiastical authority so far lies with the pope as universal bishop that members of the episcopate have no other role than that of delegated functionaries. Indeed in this context the very word ‘spiritual’ carries a more material significance than authority in faith and morals; all church property was covered by it, in the aggregate a vast territorial domain in the governance whereof the pope ultimately had sovereign rights the exercise of which, since the clergy everywhere were in a quite literal sense the pope’s subjects, could and did involve perpetual incursions on those of temporal princes all over Europe. So closely intertwined were the spiritual and the temporal that to separate them might at times be impossible. In the nature of the case therefore the vexation which resulted from a repeated clash of interests did nothing to enhance respect for an establishment whose boast was in possessing the sole power under God to dispense the means necessary for man’s salvation.

Conflict, had the ecclesiastical administration been a thoroughly enlightened one, would in the prevailing circumstances have been unavoidable; but when, as so commonly in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it revealed itself as avaricious and corrupt, when in fact the very fount of spiritual authority on earth, as the mere iteration of the names of Alexander VI (Borgia), Julius II (della Rovere) and Leo X (Medici) serves to remind us, had become a by-word for a worldliness that even secular princes did not surpass, there can be little wonder that to some at least any effective reform of the ecclesiastical institution was not compatible with the papacy’s continuance.

The growth of heresy

It was this conviction that gave impetus to certain of the heretical movements of the later Middle Ages. Heresies had appeared at intervals during the medieval period (for example, the Albigensians in southern France in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries) but had not hitherto posed any serious threat to the unity of Christendom. However, the increasing authoritarianism of the papacy now furnished for such movements more urgent grounds for dissent. Thus a radical reformist programme was advanced during the Avignon years by the English scholar-statesman John Wycliffe (c. 1330–84).⁵ His career was spent mainly at Oxford, except for the final decade of his life when he held the benefice of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. From 1371 he was employed in the service of the government, and more particularly of the Black Prince and John of Gaunt, on whose behalf he entered into negotiations with the Roman Curia in 1374; indeed it was Gaunt and the prince’s widow who later protected him against ecclesiastical censure. He first gained a reputation for himself as a philosopher, attacking nominalism and upholding a Platonist-Augustinian realism not unmixed with Thomas Bradwardine’s determinism; but as a theologian his inspiration came from the Bible – ‘God’s law’, as he was wont to call it – and the early church Fathers rather than from the philosophical schools.

His biblical and patristic interests also led him to rethink the doctrine of the church as such, and although his distinction between the ideal or ‘invisible’ society, which, like Augustine, he identified with the totality of the elect, and the visible, historic institution, to which he ascribed no authority that did not derive from the former, was by no means novel, it was one which, in the conditions of the age, could only detract further from the spiritual standing of the ecclesiastical order. At first his views took a less critical course, expressing no open opposition to tradition or to the hierarchy, but as time passed he became increasingly dissatisfied with the religion of his day, and in his treatise ‘On Civil Dominion’ (De civili dominio) (1375–6) he argued that all authority, whether ecclesiastical or secular, depended on the grace of God, and that bishops or priests who manifestly ceased to be in a state of grace could be lawfully deprived by the civil power. These opinions were quickly condemned by Pope Gregory XI and thereafter Wycliffe’s hostility towards the papacy sharpened. In three more writings – ‘On the Church’ (De Ecclesia), ‘On the truth of sacred scripture’ (De veritate sacrae scripturae) and ‘On the power of the pope’ (De potestate papae) (1377–8) – he insisted that the Bible is the only valid criterion of doctrine, to which ecclesiastical tradition may add nothing, and that papalism has no real basis in scripture. His ecclesiology, moreover, took on a more rigid Augustinianism: it was improper to describe the church as ‘the whole body of faithful travellers’, or to say that ‘Christ is the head of all men, both of the faithful and the unfaithful’, inasmuch as the Lord is the head of the elect only, even though ‘as each man shall hope that he is safe in bliss, so he should suppose that he is a limb of the Church’.

In a later work, ‘On apostasy’ (De apostasia) (c.1382) Wycliffe launched a scathing attack on monasticism, for which again he found no scriptural warrant, and he appealed now to the government to reform the whole English church system. The pope, he declared, so far from being the church’s jure divino head, might not, on predestinarian doctrine, even be a member of it, any more than was Judas, although he had been numbered among the apostles. For the same reason much of the traditional sacramentalist piety – absolution, confirmation, extreme unction, even the priesthood itself – was of dubious authority or value. Assuredly on matters of faith papal decisions were worthless unless based on scripture. Wycliffe further held that the theory as well as the practice of indulgences was to be rejected, along with clerical celibacy, useless church dignities and the not very edifying custom of begging as adopted by the mendicant orders.

But it was his teaching on the eucharist which finally led to his breach with the university of Oxford and retirement to Lutterworth. Transubstantiation he denied outright, as unsound philosophically, an encouragement to popular superstition and the main prop of sacerdotal power. Christ, he believed, was indeed present in the eucharist, but ‘sacramentally, spiritually and virtually’ (sacramentaliter, spiritualiter et virtualiter), not corporeally – phraseology which sometimes suggests receptionism, or the view that the presence is dependent on the state of mind of the recipient himself.

Wycliffe’s ideas, reaffirmed in his Trialogus, dating from about 1382, are easy enough to grasp. A clear-minded, not to say doctrinaire, academic, he expressed his opinions with lucidity and forcefulness, if sometimes also at inordinate length and with no very exact appreciation of what was or was not practicable. Save for government patronage he would undoubtedly have suffered the fate of a convicted heretic. On 18 May 1381 he published a defence of his views in the form of a Confession, which resulted in a condemnation both of his doctrines and of his followers’ by Archbishop Courtenay at a council held at Blackfriars, London, in 1382.⁶ It is significant that the condemnation did not include Wycliffe himself, despite the widespread if erroneous impression that his writings had in large measure been the cause of the Peasants’ Revolt, rather as Luther in his day was to be blamed for a similar uprising in Germany. As a man indeed Wycliffe is not readily assessable, since we know little about his inner disposition. Always very much the theorist, ideas interested him more than people, and he seems to have been deficient in religious feeling: anything resembling the doctrine of justification by faith appears not to have occurred to him. A rebel by temperament, his dislike of ecclesiasticism may have been deepened by his failure to gain preferment. The upshot was that his conception of church – state relations developed into a thoroughgoing erastianism, while his detestation of clerical wealth became almost obsessive, with his blistering denunciations of ‘the religion of fat cows’. (His attacks on the pope – ‘a poisoned weed’, ‘the head vicar of the fiend’, and so on – were as embittered as those of Luther himself.) Undoubtedly he had courage, even if he did enjoy the royal protection, but it can hardly be said that his character attracts; with all his evangelical zeal, charity and forbearance were somehow lacking.

What then of his influence? Of greater consequence probably than any of his original writings, at least in England, was his sponsorship of a vernacular translation of the Bible. This to begin with was crudely literal, but it was replaced by an improved version for which his secretary at Lutterworth, John Purvey, was mainly responsible.⁷ The fact that some two hundred manuscripts of it survive, most of them produced subsequently to the council at Oxford in 1407 which forbade the making of any fresh translations (or the use of any translation done ‘in the times of John Wycliffe or since’) except with diocesan or synodical approval, suggests that the popular demand for the scriptures in English was considerable.

Towards the end of his life Wycliffe’s views began to carry less weight even with his sympathizers, proving too extreme for those who genuinely wanted reform; in any case the impact of his teaching was localized rather than nationwide. Nevertheless the so-called Lollard movement sprang from it and maintained a more or less underground existence until well into the sixteenth century, when it gave way to continental influences.⁸ The real extent to which Lollardy spread is not easy to estimate, especially as in its later phases it became somewhat amorphous, being confined, apart from a few priests, mercha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The eve of the Reformation: anticipations of reform
• 2. Desiderius Erasmus
• 3. Martin Luther: I. The religious revolutionary
• 4. Martin Luther: II. The founder of Protestantism
• 5. Huldrych Zwingli
• 6. Melanchthon and the development of Lutheranism
• 7. Calvin and reformed Christianity: I. Strassburg and Geneva
• 8. Calvin and reformed Christianity: II. A pattern of sound doctrine
• 9. The radical Reformation
• 10. The Reformation in Britain: I. Crisis
• 11. The Reformation in Britain: II. Consolidation
• 12. Counter-Reformation: the Council of Trent
• Bibliography
• Index