8

Decline and Rebirth

A Troubled Time

Like the year 1000, the year 1300 conveniently marked a new era in the history of the Church, albeit in an entirely different way, as one of the Church’s most troubled periods.

A Fateful Conclave

In 1294, after a deadlocked, two-year conclave, the cardinals received a letter of rebuke from a saintly hermit, Peter di Morone, and in a sudden burst of emotion proceeded to elect its eighty-year-old author as pope. St. Celestine V (1294) was a seemingly inspired solution, but he had lived in his cell for forty years and proved incapable of governing the Church amidst serpentine intrigues and abdicated after a few months, the last pope to do so.¹

Boniface VIII

He was succeeded by Boniface VIII, one of the key intriguers of the conclave, who sent Celestine to prison, where he soon died. (Dante placed both popes in Hell, although not by name, Celestine because he was guilty of “the great refusal” that brought Boniface to the papal throne.)

Unam Sanctam

Boniface had perhaps the most exalted concept of the papal office of any pope, but changing circumstances made that concept untenable. In 1302, he issued Unam Sanctam (One, Holy), asserting that the pope had supreme authority in both religious and secular affairs and that “it is necessary that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff”, which was not a novel assertion. In the earlier Middle Ages, the popes had been the first bishops to wear miters. Now Boniface began wearing a double crown, representing his authority over both the spiritual and the temporal realms. A few years later, he added a third crown, the three together symbolizing his rule in Heaven, on earth, and in Purgatory.

Quarrels with Princes

Boniface VIII forbade secular rulers to tax the clergy and quarreled with Philip IV the Fair of France (1285-1314) and Edward I of England over the issue. He first supported, then abandoned, the kingdom of Scotland, which Edward was attempting to subdue, and he first rejected, then accepted, Emperor Albert I (1298-1308). He proclaimed a crusade against the family of Colonna, one of whom had been his chief rival for the papal office.

Philip the Fair

Philip IV was a devout man, very conscious of being the grandson of St. Louis, but he was committed to strengthening royal power by any means necessary. Pretending that Celestine was still alive and still pope, he called for a council to depose Boniface and arrested the papal legate. Boniface issued a bull, Clericis Laicos (Clergy and Laity), in which he made the sweeping claim that the laity had always been enemies of the clergy, and he excommunicated not only Philip but his yet-unborn descendants, to the fourth generation.

Philip sent troops to arrest Boniface, who cried, “I will to suffer martyrdom”, when they burst in on him at his palace at Anagni. The elderly pope was struck in the face and briefly kept prisoner until set free by the townspeople, but he died a month later.

The incident at Anagni was able to occur simply because Philip did not fear the Pope. The effects of excommunication had diminished greatly over time, perhaps mostly because of its use on behalf of the narrow political interests of the papacy. A century previously, the death of Boniface might have forced Philip to do penance. But while the murder of Thomas Becket at the hands of Henry II’s knights provoked a backlash and made Becket a saint, the mistreatment of Boniface had almost the opposite effect.

National States

Significantly, it was the king of France, not the emperor, who defeated the pope, since the emergence of the national state was the key political development of the late Middle Ages. Philip’s defeat of the papacy also marked the defeat of the larger ideal of a universal spiritual society. For three centuries, the movement of Christendom had been toward unity; now it began to reverse itself.

Denying the Authority of the Church

Philip the Fair had a group of “laicists” as his advisors, lawyers who claimed that worldly kingdoms were exempt from the authority of the Church and might therefore legitimately take the Church’s property.

Marsilius of Padua (d. 1343), a kind of Averroist, wrote Defender of Peace, in which he denied virtually all papal authority and proposed what amounted almost to a theory of ecclesiastical democracy. He based his theory on the Aristotelian idea of the state as a natural organism with no power above it, so that of necessity the Church had to be subject to the state, her authority limited to teaching only, with transgressions of divine law to be punished only in the next life. For Marsilius and some others, the Church was only an invisible community of believers, not an incarnate body He denied priestly hierarchy.

The Move to Avignon

Boniface VIII’s successor, Bl. Benedict XI (1303-1304), denounced Philip’s actions but did nothing to punish him. In 1305, to placate Philip, the cardinals elected a friend of the king, the Frenchman Clement V (1305-1314), who never set foot in Rome and made his headquarters at Avignon, a city that was culturally French but technically belonged to the king of Naples and which the Pope now purchased.

The Suppression of the Templars

Clement absolved Philip of all guilt, denounced Boniface, and annulled his bulls, although he resisted Philip’s demand that Boniface be tried posthumously for heresy. Clement also reluctantly acquiesced in Philip’s move against the Knights Templar. Philip had borrowed heavily from these banker-knights and sought to get possession of their great wealth. He accused them of blasphemy, heresy, sorcery, and sodomy, and a number were burned at the stake, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay.² Clement officially suppressed the order but assigned their treasure to other religious groups rather than to the king.

Papal Administration

The popes remained at Avignon for most of the rest of the century. Most of them were not scandalous in their personal lives, and some (Benedict XII [1334-1342] and Innocent VI [1352-1362]) were even reform-minded. Most—notably Clement VI (1342-1352)—were able administrators who centralized the administration of the Church and were particularly adept at finances, instituting the regular collection of papal fees from the various nations.

Papal Provisions

Because of the endemic factional strife in cathedral chapters, the Avignon popes succeeded in getting the authority to appoint all bishops and even to fill many lower church offices, although in practice they often merely ratified the nominations of princes. What came to be a serious abuse were papal “provisions”—promising a benefice to a man at the first vacancy, a favor that was often obtained by large payments to the Holy See and which sometimes resulted in several people in line for the same benefice. Like secular monarchs, the popes sold administrative offices to ambitious men, a practice that led to a swollen papal bureaucracy of sinecures who hoped to recoup their investments from fees.

Pluralism

Pluralism—holding more than one benefice at a time—and the necessary absenteeism that accompanied it, were also increasingly tolerated for payment of a fee. (One prelate—the future Julius II [1503-1513]—held seven bishoprics as well as other offices.) Nepotism (from the word for “nephew”)—the favoring of relatives for benefices—was rife. Notably, the Spaniard Calixtus III (1455-1458), although in general a conscientious pope, promoted his Borgia nephews, to the detriment of the Church.

Rome Abandoned

One of the Avignon popes’ greatest expenses was for armies of mercenaries who fought to preserve the Papal States in Italy during the popes’ absence. Their absence impoverished Rome and reduced it to near-chaos, so that at one point an official named Cola di Rienzo (d. 1354) seized control of the city and proclaimed the restoration of the ancient republic, until he was eventually defeated and murdered by a mob.

The prestige of the papacy now fell to its lowest point in over three hundred years, since, even if the Avignon popes were not dominated by the kings of France, they often appeared to be. By their abandonment of Rome, they seemed to have abandoned the claim to rule the universal Church and to have become merely competitors in international politics, unable to offer spiritual leadership but seeking only temporal security.

Pope and Emperor

Pope John XXII (1316-1334), one of the leading architects of papal administration, engaged in a prolonged struggle with Emperor Louis III (Louis of Bavaria) and several nations, notably England, passed laws restricting papal authority within their borders.

John XXII inadvertently raised the issue of papal infallibility when he preached “soul sleep”—the belief that at death the soul falls into a slumber from which it awakens only at the Last Judgment, a theory that seemed to deny the reality of Purgatory. Following protests, he recanted this view.³

Return to Rome

St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373) persuaded the reform-minded Urban V (1362-1370) to return to Rome, but he found conditions intolerable and did not remain. Pope Gregory XI (1370-1378), partly because of rebellion in the Papal States, returned to Rome in 1377 at the request of St. Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), a Dominican tertiary who exhorted him to do his duty.

After Gregory’s death, the cardinals met in one of the most momentous conclaves in the history of the Church. In the face of frenzied popular demands that the papacy remain in Rome, the cardinals elected Urban VI (1378-1389), an Italian who had been at the court of Avignon.

The Great Western Schism

Although Catherine counseled moderation, Urban strongly denounced misconduct on the part of some of the cardinals, perhaps to justify his plan to appoint mainly Italians to the Sacred College. He even had some cardinals tortured. The majority of the older cardinals were French, and they declared that Urban’s election had been coerced. They elected another pope, a Swiss, who was named Clement VII, thereby beginning the Great Western Schism that would last for forty years.

Clement returned to Avignon, and the rival popes spent most of their efforts bidding for princely recognition. France naturally supported Avignon, and the Empire recognized Rome. In some dioceses, there were actually two bishops, each loyal to a different pope.

A Third Pope

Attempts to negotiate a settlement failed, and in 1408, the supporters of the Avignon pope, including the king of France, abandoned him. The Avignon cardinals then met at the Italian city of Pisa, declared both popes deposed, and elected yet another—John XXII.⁴The result, however, was that there were now three papal claimants instead of two.

Conciliarism

The conciliar movement had its origins earlier in the Middle Ages, among canonists and theologians who argued that ultimate authority in the Church lay with the general council, of which the pope was merely the agent. An evil pope, therefore, could be deposed by the cardinals who had elected him, and papal decrees could be appealed to a council. The theory gained a great deal of support during the Great Western Schism, when no pope was able to govern the Church, and it retained vitality for over a century.

The issue had practical implications—some conciliarists wanted to curtail papal revenues and the right of the pope to appoint bishops—and it had implications for later democratic theory, in presuming that authority resided in the entire community and must be accepted by that community in order to be binding.

Pierre d’Ailly (d. 1420)—chancellor of the Sorbonne, a cardinal, and one of the most influential figures of the age—was a leading conciliarist, as was his pupil, the canonist Jean Gerson (d. 1429), who was also chancellor of the Sorbonne. Gerson proposed a theory by which the pope functioned as a kind of constitutional monarch under the authority of the general council but was able to function on his own authority if necessary. The German bishop Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), one of the most original thinkers of the entire Middle Ages, also espoused a moderate conciliar position, although he became disillusioned by the movement and entered the papal service, ending his life as a cardinal in Rome.

Council of Constance

In 1413, Emperor Sigismund (1410-1437) forced the Pisan pope, John XXII, to summon a council to resolve the crisis. John soon resigned; the Roman pope, Gregory XII (1406-1415), approved the council and abdicated; and the Avignon pope was deposed.⁵The Council of Constance, meeting in Switzerland, which was part of the Empire, elected Pope Martin V (1417-1431), who within a few years was able to reenter Rome and regain control of the Papal States.

Conciliarism Repudiated

At his election, Martin was required to agree that a general council was to be summoned at least every five years and, if the pope failed to do so, could meet on its own authority. After his election, Martin repudiated those decrees as illegitimate interference with papal authority, but he reluctantly summoned a council to meet at Basle (Switzerland). Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447) was also required to agree to conciliar demands at his election, but he dissolved the Council of Basle before it could meet.

Gallicanism

A few years later Charles VII of France (1422-1461) issued the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, the classic statement of what came to be called Gallicanism—the quasi-independence of the French church from the papacy. The general council was declared superior to the pope, and the king claimed the authority to nominate bishops.

Italian Politics

As always, the politics of Italy was exceptionally complex and unruly, with popes and emperors vying for control and quasi-independent city-states (Milan, Venice, Florence) struggling against popes, emperors, and each other. Guelf and Ghibelline factions existed in most of the major cities, and papal armies strove to drive out the former and establish the latter, as well as to increase the boundaries of the Papal States.

Basle and Florence

Amidst these intrigues, Pope Eugene was driven out of Rome and took refuge in Florence. Unauthorized, a council met at Basle, summoned Eugene to answer charges of misuse of office, declared him deposed for heresy when he failed to appear, and elected an antipope, the last in the long history of that phenomenon. Eugene himself then summoned a council that met at both Florence and at Ferrara, where he scored a triumph in seeming to obtain the submission to Rome of the representatives of Eastern Orthodoxy (see Chapter Seven above, p. 205). The Council of Florence-Ferrara also declared that papal authority was directly from God.

Decline of Conciliarism

The Basle anti-pope had little support, and the conciliar movement began a slow decline, remaining alive mainly on paper. (One of the original adherents of the Basle anti-pope, Cardinal Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, himself later became pope as Pius II [1458-1464] and condemned Conciliarism.) Conciliarism was an impractical theory, since it was difficult for anyone other than the pope to summon a council. It was not even certain who had voting rights—doctors of theology and canon law did so at Constance—and bishops were reluctant to travel to meetings that might last several years.

“The Bad Popes”

Sixtus IV

Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), a Franciscan who was notoriously immoral in his private life, set out to make the papacy a feared military force, placed his nephews in important principalities, and arranged their marriages with an eye to effecting strategic alliances. He supported a plot to assassinate the Medicis, the ruling Florentine family, who were to be killed at Mass by two priests. (An archbishop was hanged for his role in the affair.)

Alexander VI

Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) was a Spanish cardinal, a member of the Borgia family, and a papal diplomat and curial official. After defeating Sixtus’ nephew in a fierce election, he became one of the most notorious of all the popes, the worst since the tenth century. Alexander pursued Sixtus’ goal of a militarily powerful papacy, but he also used his office to favor his children (eight altogether), marrying his daughter Lucrezia (d. 1519) to important princes (her multiple marriages gave her an unjustified reputation as a poisoner) and promoting the career of his son Cesare.

In 1494, Charles VIII of France conquered much of northern Italy and drove Alexander out of Rome, precipitating a decades-long series of wars in which the papacy was deeply entangled. Alexander subsequently made peace with Louis XII of France (1498-1515), granting him an annulment of his marriage on grounds of nonconsummation, in return for Louis’ effecting the marriage of Cesare to a French duchess. With French support, Cesare then embarked on a campaign to conquer all of northern Italy, an effort that failed only at his father’s death. In an ironic way, Alexander testified to the continuing power of faith in a worldly time, in that he was apparently not a cynic but a believer whose conscience was troubled by his sins.

Julius II

After a very brief interim papacy, Sixtus IV’s nephew was elected as Julius II. He had no sons of his own and did not favor his family, but he exiled Cesare Borgia to Spain and plunged into Italian politics, regaining lost territories and sometimes himself donning armor and joining the papal armies in the field.

Disorder and Discontent

Demands for religious reform echoed continuously through the later Middle Ages, but there were only limited efforts to implement it. Anticlericalism was common: lay people often denigrated the clergy for greed, lust, laziness, dishonesty, and other real or imagined sins. Usually people did not lose their faith in the sacramental power of the priest, but sometimes this dissatisfaction led to doubts about Catholic doctrines.

Langland

The English poet William Langland (d. ca. 1400), in The Vision of William concerning Piers [Peter] the Ploughman, lamented the decline of Christendom and the defeat of true Christianity by the spirit of hardened selfishness. Like Dante, he was a deeply devout Catholic who was dissatisfied with the ways of the Church. A believer in the papacy, he deplored the failure of papal leadership and mourned the breakdown of the universal order of Christendom.

The English Peasants’ Revolt

The higher clergy remained princes as well as prelates, living lives of luxury and often devoting themselves as much to secular politics as to religion. At the other extreme, the priest John Ball was a leader of the great English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in which the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, was murdered while at prayer. (Ball was hanged.)

Clerical Corruption

There was a prevalent impression that religious life had become quite corrupt, with monks and nuns violating their vows, living in quasi-luxury, taking lovers, or remaining away from their monasteries for long periods. The Camaldolese hermits were one of the strictest orders, but one Italian abbot attempted to murder his mistress’ husband. An English Carmelite bishop, Thomas de Lisle (d. 1361), eventually had to flee the kingdom, after presiding for years over an organized gang of thieves and murderers. St. Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510), although herself a Franciscan tertiary, sharply rebuked a friar who claimed that his religious habit showed the superiority of his way of life, and Gerson advised his pious blood sisters to remain in the lay state.

Chaucer

In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) satirized abuses through some of his characters, especially the Pardoner and the Summoner, two minor ecclesiastical officials who boasted that they could remit any offense for a suitable fee. Against them, Chaucer posed the character of the Parson, or parish priest, whose “tale” was a straightforward sermon on the seven deadly sins, fervently setting forth the Gospel teaching about true repentance.

The Black Death of 1347-1349 was the greatest natural disaster in Western history, a pandemic that first showed itself in a Mediterranean port and spread rapidly northward. It was probably a combination of bubonic plague spread by fleas dwelling on rats and pneumonic plague spread by direct human contact. The pattern was irregular and unpredictable. During the initial outbreak, some cities escaped almost entirely, while elsewhere whole towns were wiped out. The overall mortality rate was probably about a third of the entire European population within a two-year period, but the disease then subsided, only to reappear as an occasional local phenomenon for the next four centuries. The Black Death increased the use of morbid images on funeral monuments, such as the Dance of Death—a skeleton with a scythe “harvesting” souls by pulling them along in a frenzied line.

Clergy and religious were particularly vulnerable to the plague, both because they usually lived in close communities and because they were expected to minister to the dying. Their response, predictably, ranged from cowardly flight to heroic self-sacrifice. The Black Death caused a great shortage of priests, mitigated only by the drastic reduction in the number of laity requiring their ministry, so that to some extent bishops were forced to ordain dubiously qualified men to fill the void.

A Surfeit of Priests

But after Europe had recovered, the sheer number of the ordained (236 priests for two churches in one German town, for example) contributed to what seemed like clerical rapaciousness. Many priests had to scramble to obtain whatever marginal benefices they could get, performing parochial duties at minimal pay for absentee pastors or, as “Mass priests”, living on stipends that required them to do little but pray for the souls of deceased donors.

Heterodox Movements

In a pervasive atmosphere of spiritual anxiety and uncertainty, the difference between authentic searching and heresy often seemed unclear, with philosophical and theological movements, political ideas, reform movements, and conventional dynastic politics in complex relationships with one another.

Flagellation

The practice of flagellation—scourging oneself in order to share in Christ’s sufferings, as a penance for sin and as a weapon against temptation—began with the early monks and nuns and continued throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. In monasteries and convents, as in secular life, it was also inflicted as punishment. Although the practice was highly ritualized, it was intended to be painful and in some cases was carried to extremes (St. Clare’s body, after years of scourging, was said to be covered with scars).

In the mid-thirteenth century, ritualized public flagellation began to be practiced by organized groups of lay people in reparation for sin and to ward off divine punishment. The participants wore distinctive garments and went in procession from town to town, on a journey of thirty-three days (for the years of Jesus’ life on earth), each person whipping the person in front of him and loudly calling for repentance. Flagellants placed themselves completely under the authority of a lay master and sometimes repudiated clerical authority, and priests in turn were often hostile, especially when it seemed that flagellation was a substitute for sacramental confession.

Ritual flagellation threatened to go out of control during the Black Death, and Clement VI forbade the practice, partly because it was often accompanied by violent attacks on Jews. But it continued underground in some places, treated by the Inquisition as a heresy.

Beguines and Beghards

Although the more moderate Beguines and Beghards were tolerated, a number of people were burned at the stake for what was sometimes called the Beguine heresy, that is, the rejection of the sacramental priesthood. In 1310, the Flemish Beguine Margaret Porete was burned for teaching that the soul was entirely “free”, not in any way bound by the strictures of intellect or will. The movement was ordered suppressed but was later given tentative approval.

Fraticelli

The Spiritual Franciscans, who were sometimes identified with the Beguines, continued to flourish, splitting the Franciscan order into two factions, the Spirituals and the Conventuals (from “convent”).

In 1317, the Spirituals were condemned by John XXII for teaching that prelates who did not practice poverty had no authority. John declared that Christ and the Apostles owned property and that it was heresy to make absolute poverty the mark of a true Christian. The general of the Franciscans, Michael of Cesena (d. 1342), favored the Spirituals and was deposed by John, whereupon Michael took refuge at the court of Emperor Louis the Bavarian (1314-1347), who supported the Spirituals as part of his own continuing quarrel with the Pope.

The Franciscan William of Ockham (d. ca. 1349), the most important philosopher of the age, was a friend of Marsilius of Padua and also favored the Spirituals. He fled with Marsilius to Louis’ court and supported the emperor in his quarrel with Pope John, whom Ockham condemned as a heretic. (Ockham probably died excommunicated.)⁶

Wycliffe

John Wycliffe (d. 1384) was a priest and Oxford professor whose excoriation of clerical misconduct and privilege escalated into an attack on the priesthood itself, including the claim—recurring throughout the history of the Church—that a sinful priest cannot validly administer the sacraments. Like Marsilius, he wanted the Church to be stripped of all wealth and temporal power. He eventually denied Transubstantiation, confession to a priest, indulgences, clerical celibacy, and the veneration of images and relics, accusing the Church of having departed from biblical teachings. The true church, he held, was invisible, made up of those whom God predestined to salvation.

Wycliffe was condemned as a heretic, but powerful nobles not only protected him (he was never arrested) but actually pressed for changes in the Church in keeping with his program. Eventually, however, his movement lost most of its aristocratic support, especially after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which some people blamed on Wycliffe’s attacks on authority but which in fact he condemned.

Lollardy

Although some of Wycliffe’s associates made a partial translation of the Bible into English, his movement survived primarily among unlearned people who came to be called Lollards, which was apparently a colloquialism for “psalm-singer”. The Inquisition never existed in England, but after Wycliffe’s death, Parliament passed a law against heresy, and a number of Lollards were burned at the stake, some of them after an armed rebellion. Lollardy survived as a small underground movement until the Protestant Reformation.

Hus

Jan Hus (d. 1415) was a Bohemian priest and professor who held ideas similar to Wycliffe’s and may have been influenced by him. The Bible had been translated into the Czech language by his time, and he cited it as an authority against that of the Church. Hus survived for a time amidst the labyrinthine politics of the Great Western Schism, but its end left him vulnerable. He went to the Council of Constance with a promise of safety by Emperor Sigismund, but the Council condemned him nonetheless; he was burned at the stake, his close lay associate Jerome of Prague following shortly thereafter.

Utraquists

The Husite movement flourished in Bohemia, as the kingdom divided along religious lines, with Hus’ followers demanding Communion in both kinds for the laity, uncensored preaching, and the abolition of church property, although they remained in formal union with the Church. The first of these demands led to their being called Utraquists (from the Latin word for “both”), their heresy being their insistence that the Eucharist was invalid unless Communion was administered in both kinds.

Taborites

A more radical strain of Husites were millenarians who called themselves Taborites, after the biblical mountain. They broke openly with the Church and took up arms against the king of Bohemia but were eventually crushed. Kings tolerated the Utraquists to some extent, and in 1485, the kingdom was divided into Catholic and Husite zones, each of which enjoyed religious freedom.⁷

Millenarianism

Other kinds of millenarianism continued to appear from time to time, some of it orthodox. The Spanish Dominican St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419) saw the Great Western Schism as a sign of the end times and, after having supported the Avignon pope, helped bring the schism to an end. On the heterodox side, Hans Bohm, the “drummer of Niklashausen”, attracted crowds to his obscure German town in 1476 by predicting the imminent Second Coming and urging radical social equality. He was put to death.

Witchcraft

Belief in witchcraft existed from time immemorial in almost every culture of the world; in the High Middle Ages, it attracted relatively little attention. But a systematic attack began in the late fifteenth century, possibly because of the pervasive spiritual anxiety of the age. Two German Dominican inquisitors, Henry Kramer (d. 1484) and Jacob Sprenger (d. 1495), were commissioned by Innocent VIII to study the phenomenon, and in 1486 they published a highly influential book, The Hammer of Evildoers.

Previous witch beliefs had been made up of scraps of folklore, but the Hammer now delineated a complex system of practices, such as intercourse with the devil, allegedly engaged in by those (mostly women) who sold themselves to Satan. As a printed work rather than oral tradition, the Hammer had wide influence in providing a theoretical account of popular beliefs and in standardizing procedures of prosecution.

Over the next almost two centuries, accusations of witchcraft were pursued very aggressively almost everywhere in Europe, as accused witches were closely interrogated and often tortured into confessing satanic practices.⁸ Witchcraft was under the authority of the Inquisition because it was considered a species of heresy. Although some bishops and civil authorities resisted the Inquisition’s authority, and the inquisitors themselves sometimes showed skepticism about popular superstitions, those who were convicted of witchcraft were burned at the stake.⁹

Spiritual Searching

There was deep dissatisfaction with what seemed like the oppressive complexity of church life. Abstract theology was an academic specialty that seemed remote from people’s spiritual needs; the hierarchy was immersed in worldly concerns; greed was institutionalized; canon law was a bewildering system of legalisms that seemed to exist primarily for the purpose of granting exemptions; the liturgy was celebrated in such a way that the laity stayed at a distance; and the elaborate network of piety involved innumerable kinds of devotions to innumerable saints, seeming almost to exclude the possibility of direct access to God.

God Near and Far

Paradoxically, late medieval Catholicism on the one hand seemed to make God inaccessible—by requiring the believer to navigate a complex system of doctrines, laws, and practices—and on the other, seemed to make him overly accessible, as necessarily responsive to successful navigators. But in the midst of all the spiritual confusion, the later Middle Ages was also a deeply religious time.

Traditional Piety

Traditional piety still had great power, and the invention of printing around 1450, probably by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany (d. 1468), allowed Mass books, books of hours, and manuals of simple instruction to be produced for the laity. The Golden Legend was immensely popular, and devotion to the saints continued at the heart of popular piety. Particular saints were invoked for particular causes, and there was a great deal of credulity about miracles and supernatural experiences of all kinds. Shrines were visited by large numbers of pilgrims: the English laywoman Margery Kempe (d. ca. 1433), for example, was married with fourteen children but nonetheless made pilgrimages as far away as Jerusalem and kept a spiritual journal that was widely read.

The Passion

Devotion to Christ in His Passion was pervasive, with increasingly graphic representations of His sufferings, culminating in the great Issenheim Altarpiece of the German artist Matthias Grünewald (d. 1528). The Passion was often reenacted in processions out of doors and eventually brought inside churches in the form of the stations of the cross. The veneration of extremely graphic representations of the Passion was intense particularly in Spain, in part perhaps to manifest the difference of Catholicism from Judaism and Islam, both of which forbade the use of images.

Mary and Joseph

Belief in the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary, while not official dogma, was common, advocated particularly by Franciscans. Paralleling her Son, Mary was the object of devotion both in her sufferings and in her triumphs. Devotion to St. Joseph, which had been neglected in earlier centuries, grew in popularity after 1400, although in the West it was still rare for either men or churches to be named for him.

Women Saints

Unique among saints, Bl. Margaret of Città-di-Castello (d. 1320) was a young noblewoman who was physically deformed and was abandoned by her parents after an expected miraculous cure failed to occur. Taken in by others, she became a Dominican tertiary and spent her life mainly caring for children.

Also as a Dominican tertiary, St. Catherine of Siena lived as an ascetic in her family’s home, had mystical experiences, and offered her sufferings for the good of the Church, denouncing corruption and urging reform, especially of the hierarchy. She was greatly troubled by visions of large numbers of souls falling into Hell.

St. Bridget of Sweden was a widowed noblewoman, the mother of eight, who founded a religious order (named after her) that continued the otherwise obsolete practice of double monasteries of both men and women under an abbess. (Bridget justified the arrangement on the grounds that Mary had presided over the Apostles after the Ascension.) Like Catherine, Bridget was a mystic who enjoined the pope to return to Rome.

St. Frances of Rome (d. 1440), who was widowed after forty years, gathered a group of women who worked among the poor without vows or a formal community.

St. Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) was forced into marriage, separated from her husband, then reunited with him. He supported her charities, and she attracted a number of followers.

Joan of Arc

The most extraordinary saint of the age (indeed, of any age) was Joan of Arc (d. 1431). As a woman and a visionary, she was not unusual on the roll of the saints, but as a peasant, the story of her life went completely contrary to the society of her time.

Leader of Men

Throughout most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, England and France were engaged in the Hundred Years’ War, which was essentially an English invasion of France. By Joan’s time, the king of England successfully claimed to be king of France, and the yet-uncrowned French claimant, Charles VII (1422-1461), was sunk in lethargic inactivity. Joan appeared at his court claiming to have heard voices of saints commanding her to instruct Charles to mount resistance against the invaders. After much skepticism and numerous delays, he sent armies into the field, with Joan accompanying them in armor and rallying their spirit. The armies had sufficient success for Charles finally to be crowned.

“A Witch”

But the complexities of feudal politics were such that Charles’ greatest vassal, the duke of Burgundy, was allied with the English. Joan was captured by the Burgundians; turned over to the English, with Charles doing nothing to rescue her; and tried by an ecclesiastical court made up of Frenchmen in league with England. From the English standpoint, her claims of supernatural revelations could only be evidence of sorcery. She was therefore tried as a witch. She confessed under pressure to being an imposter but then repudiated her confession and was burned at the stake.¹⁰

Henry VI

As always, religion and politics fit together in unpredictable ways. The English king under whom Joan was executed—Henry VI (1422-1461)—was a weak but pious monarch who was deposed and killed during the civil conflict called the Wars of the Roses. He himself came to be popularly venerated as a saint.

John of Capistrano

St. John of Capistrano (d. 1456) also had an unusual history. An administrator in the Papal States, he separated from his wife and entered the Franciscans, of which he eventually became minister general, reforming his order and scathingly criticizing the corruption of the clergy. He was sent to Bohemia to help suppress the Husite movement and while there also instigated measures against the Jews. A few years before his death, he personally led a battlefield charge that routed the Turks at Belgrade.

The Eucharist

Devotion to the Eucharist flourished even though sometimes independent of the reception of Communion, especially by adoring the sacred host in a monstrance. But Nicholas of Cusa, one of the greatest bishops and theologians of the age, found it necessary to remind his people that the Eucharist was intended as food, not primarily for adoration. Every church of any size had auxiliary altars, many of which were erected and maintained by guilds or confraternities and reserved for the use of the donors. Chantry(“singing”) chapels or altars were endowed by pious people to ensure prayers for their souls after their deaths.

Sermons

Preaching was highly valued, to the point where in large churches the pulpit was often erected midway down the nave, so that the whole congregation could hear the preacher, something that also had the effect of separating the sermon from the Mass. Sermons were sometimes preached outside the context of the Mass altogether, and many churches had outdoor pulpits for that purpose.

Music

Except in monasteries, there was a movement away from the simplicity of Gregorian chant. Organs were introduced in churches, and patrons commissioned elaborate polyphonic Masses by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), a development that tended to place church music in the hands of professionals rather than congregations.

Penance

There were serious efforts to implement the proper reception of the sacrament of penance. To effect this, guides were produced for the clergy, such as the English priest John Mirk’s (d. ca. 1415) Instruction for Parish Priests. Jean Gerson provided detailed instructions on how to prepare people for death, identifying the deathbed as the crucial moment when the soul is suspended between salvation and damnation. Extreme unction (“last anointing”) was usually administered only when the recipient was thought to be near death, and it was crucial that he make a final confession.

Indulgences

In life, prudent people endeavored to gain indulgences that would alleviate their sufferings in Purgatory, and such indulgences could be applied to the souls of those already dead. The last will and testament was also crucial, in that it was the legator’s final effort to set his affairs in order, especially by proclaiming his faith, making gifts to charity, and providing for prayers for his soul. To die intestate was thought to show that the deceased had been unprepared.

The Holy Year

In 1300, Boniface VIII announced the first Holy Year: a year of jubilee, pilgrimage, and the forgiveness of debts and offenses, and two hundred thousand pilgrims visited Rome. A century and a half later, the jubilee was still so popular that a limit had to be imposed on the time pilgrims could remain in the city.

Martyrdom

One crucial element of classical sanctity was no longer attainable: those who were orthodox in their beliefs had little prospect of martyrdom, although some devout souls admitted that they longed for the opportunity. It was now mainly heretics who suffered for their faith.

Reform

The Heart of the Gospel

Much of the religious spirit of the age expressed itself outside formal Church structures, although not necessarily in opposition to them. In the face of those dauntingly complex structures, personal religious experience more and more seemed to be the most reliable path to God. The spirit of reform was often toward a more spiritual and interior kind of piety, a liberation from burdensome traditions in order to return to a purer, earlier form of Christian practice.

Brethren of the Common Life

The Netherlander Gerhard Groote (d. 1384) declined to become a priest and accepted ordination as a deacon only so that he could preach, something that he was, however, eventually forbidden to do. He attracted followers and, although he was not in favor of monastic life, eventually formed a community called the Brethren of the Common Life, with houses for both men and women. Some members followed the rule of the Augustinian canons, but all were free to leave the community at any time. They took no vows but lived a life of poverty, supported by their own labors.

A disciple of the mystic Bl. John Ruysbroeck (d. 1381), Groote formulated what came to be called the New Devotion, in which there was in fact little that was new. Its novelty lay entirely in its simplicity, in contrast to the complexities of Scholastic theology and elaborate forms of piety.

Kempis

Its greatest expression was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471), which, next to the Bible, is the most widely read book in the history of Christianity and, along with the Bible, the only book continuously in print almost since the invention of printing. Kempis urged his readers simply to follow the teaching and example of Jesus in the Gospel: the spirit of humility, charity, and submission to God’s will.

While not denigrating practices like the rosary or pilgrimages (he had great devotion to Mary), Kempis urged inner transformation of the soul, identifying stages in the soul’s rise, of which a love of suffering for Jesus’ sake was the highest. Men were to live always in expectation of imminent death. The last part of the book was an extended meditation on the Eucharist, in which Kempis urged the frequent reception of Communion.

Although widely read by lay people, the book in many ways seems to have been intended for monks and nuns. There was little of value in the world that could not be found in a monastic cell, Kempis warned, and each time a monk left his monastery he returned spiritually diminished.

Anti-Intellectualism

There is a distinct note of anti-intellectualism in the work, as Kempis repeatedly warned that, of itself, knowledge might be sterile, whereas a heartfelt effort to do God’s will was salutary. Whereas for Aquinas and other Scholastics, a virtuous act was any act motivated by the intellect’s assent to truth and the will’s decision to act accordingly, for Kempis actual emotion was a necessary sign of authenticity. The penitent should shed real tears and experience desolation.

The Brethren taught in schools that stretched across northern Europe, their chief purpose being not so much learning as the inculcation of piety and moral character in their students. Great emphasis was placed on reading the Bible.

Mysticism

The highest expressions of late medieval piety were mystical, a phenomenon in which the soul transcended all objective manifestations of God, such as sacred images or even conscious thoughts, and encountered Him directly, amidst overwhelming light. Mysticism owed much to the Neo-Platonism of Pseudo-Dionysius, according to which the soul first emanated from God through stages of descent into this world, then returned to God through a series of ascents. The German Theology was an anonymous mystical work which taught that, since God was wholly transcendent, the divine could not enter the soul unless the human personality was suppressed.

Despite it being an indescribable experience, mysticism was not incompatible with rigorous Scholastic intellectualism—three of the leading mystics were German Dominicans.

Eckhart

Johannes Eckhart of Hochheim, usually called Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), was a kind of Thomist who nonetheless taught the Platonic doctrine that at its core the soul possesses a spark that unites it with its divine source. He was posthumously condemned for the heresy of pantheism (“everything is God”)—absorbing all of creation into God’s infinity—but the intended meaning of his work remained ambiguous and obscure. Johannes Tauler (d. 1361) also taught the existence of a divine “ground” of the human soul.

Suso

Bl. Henry Suso (d. 1365) made daring use of the language of courtly love, which he applied to the love between God and the soul in order to describe the stages of ecstasy through which the soul passed, culminating in its being “ravished” by God and becoming one with Christ. In Pseudo-Dionysian terms, he referred to God as “eternal nothingness”. (The use of courtly love imagery by mystical writers derived in part from the Song of Songs, understood as an allegory of the relationship of the soul and God.)

Ruysbroeck

Ruysbroeck, a Flemish canon regular, described the mystical state but warned against false signs and insisted that pride and uncharity were incompatible with its attainment.

English Mystics

There was also a school of English mystics. In contrast to Ruysbroeck, Bl. Richard Rolle (d. 1349), who became a hermit, taught that even works of charity might interfere with pure contemplation. The Cloud of Unknowing was an anonymous work whose title referred to God’s dwelling in an impenetrable obscurity that could only be pierced by emptying the mind of all content. Walter Hilton (d. 1396), a canon regular, wrote The Ladder of Perfection, describing the stages by which the soul moved beyond reason to a direct knowledge of God, a process in which the will was absorbed into perfect divine love.

“Julian” of Norwich

The most prominent female mystic of the age, who wrote a long account of her ecstatic experiences, was called Bl. Julian of Norwich (d. ca. 1415), because she lived as an anchorite at a church dedicated to St. Julian. (Her actual name is unknown.) Like some other medieval writers, she sometimes referred to God as “mother” as well as Father, probably because every perfection, including that of motherhood, is necessarily present in God.

Anti-Mysticism

Mystics were sometimes suspected of tending toward antinomianism (believing that they could rely on inspiration rather than the moral law) and quietism (placing themselves so completely in the hands of God as to cease all striving for perfection).

D’Ailly was suspicious of mysticism and favored instead a simple and practical kind of spirituality, and Gerson also wrote a treatise on mysticism that emphasized common sense, humility, charity, the natural human virtues, and submission to the hierarchy. (But despite his suspicions of religious enthusiasm, Gerson championed the sanctity of Joan of Arc.)

Theology

The later Middle Ages was also a time of considerable intellectual ferment. Aquinas had constructed a grand synthesis of faith and reason, but not all who came after him were persuaded. The philosophers of the fourteenth century contented themselves with answers that they considered probable rather than certain.

Scotus

John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) was a Scottish Franciscan who taught at Oxford and Paris, carrying forward the intellectual tradition of Bonaventure and Grosseteste. For Scotus, the mind could not know being in itself, only individual beings, so that where Aquinas spoke of universals, Scotus emphasized haecceity (“this-ness”). The significance of this seemingly abstruse point was to render Aquinas’ great synthesis of knowledge—his proof that the entire universe constitutes an intelligible whole—less credible, requiring men to accept their ignorance.

It was not possible to prove the existence of God by beginning with sensible objects, Scotus thought, because the natural order of nature could not rise to the supernatural. Thus Aquinas’ First Cause was not God but something that was part of the universe itself.

Scotus was in the Augustinian tradition in giving the will primacy over the intellect: the mind informed the will, but the will first determined the perceptions of the mind. The best “proof” of the existence of God was the tendency of the human will toward absolute good, which must exist, since the will could not incline toward nonexistence. Whereas Aquinas emphasized that God decreed good and evil in accordance with the objective order of the universe, Scotus held that good was whatever God chose, although He could not will contradictions. To love God was the only thing that was good in itself; all other goods were merely decreed by God.

Nominalism

Following Scotus’ idea of haecceity, later thinkers doubted the existence of universals and instead saw them in Abelard’s terms, as mere names conveniently given to things that resembled one another. From that doctrine, the principal movement of late medieval philosophy came to be called Nominalism.

Ockham

William of Ockham was the most influential of the nominalists, holding that, since the mind could “perceive” things that did not actually exist (dreams, illusions), it did not know real things but only its own ideas, to which it gave names. Thus the scope of human reason was quite limited, and a great synthetic understanding of the universe was not possible. (“Ockham’s Razor” was the principle that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon was to be preferred.)

Ockham undercut Aquinas’ arguments for the existence of God by holding that, although the mind could follow the sequence of cause and effect as it encountered it in experience, it could not infer the existence of a cause from its effects. Thus God was unknowable on the basis of His creatures.

Fideism

This skepticism marked a crossroads in Western thought, allowing later philosophers to conclude that there is no rational basis for religious belief. However, instead of denying the validity of such belief, nominalists fell back on a kind of fideism (from the Latin word for “faith”)—belief without a rational basis. In a sense, Ockham repudiated Anselm’s principle that faith seeks understanding. Ockham saw no conflict between faith and reason but thought that man necessarily believed without understanding.

Voluntarism

Nominalism required a voluntaristic morality: the belief that right and wrong were simply decreed by God’s inscrutable will and were not open to human understanding in the way that Thomistic realists thought they were. Nominalists considered the divine will so absolute that some (although not Ockham himself) speculated that God could lie, reverse the definitions of good and evil, will sin, and undo events that had already happened.

The Divine Absolute

After Scotus’ time the battle between the “Old Way” (Realism) and the “New Way” (Nominalism) was a feature of university life. Nominalism, like mysticism, had an acute sense of the absoluteness of God, far beyond all human categories of understanding, and was partly a sense that both Thomistic theology and formal religious practices had made God too accessible. Gerson, for example, welcomed Nominalism because it discouraged speculation, which he thought inhibited God’s freedom by making divine actions subject to the laws of human reason.

Predestination

Nominalists tended to reject Anselm’s explanation of the Incarnation, holding that God simply willed to become man and that it was presumptuous to inquire further. Mankind could have been redeemed by a simple act of the divine will, so that Christ’s death was in no way necessary. Some late-medieval theologians held a theory of predestination—that God decrees who is saved and who is damned—since otherwise it seemed to them that men, by their actions, would have the power to force God to grant them salvation.

Logic

In abandoning metaphysics as unknowable, nominalists became acute logicians, concerning themselves with technical problems that could be solved. No philosopher actually speculated on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but it would have been a legitimate nominalist subject, not in order to seek a numerical answer but in order to clarify the ideas of space and of spiritual beings.

Science

In transferring attention from the unknowable realm of metaphysics to the realm of empirical experience, Nominalism also contributed to the eventual development of modern science. During the fourteenth century, some philosophers—Giles of Rome (d. 1316), Jean Buridan (d. 1358), Nicole d’Oresme (d. 1382)—discarded the Aristotelian model of the universe and speculated that it was the earth that moved, not the sun.

Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa, perhaps the most original mind of the age, attempted to transcend Scholastic debates partly through Pseudo-Dionysius’ negative theology (“learned ignorance”, as Cusa called it) and by returning to Plotinus’ idea of the One from which all things emanated and to which they returned. Cusa deemphasized rational speculation, positing the Infinite as the ultimate reality, knowable only by semi-mystical intuition. All religions contained some truth (he urged the study of the Qur’an, which he thought would prove the truth of Christ), but Christ alone embodied the full truth, resolving all contrarieties. Cusa was little understood, however, and had few disciples.

Tradition

Theologically, one of the most important developments of the later Middle Ages was a growing tendency to separate Scripture and Tradition, to treat them as two distinct sources of truth. Ockham, in denying that the pope had ultimate authority in matters of dogma, held that the fullness of revelation, much of it handed down by word of mouth, resided in the entire Church, and d’Ailly too denied that all the teachings of the Church were found in Scripture. (On the other side, the English bishop Reginald Pecock [d. ca. 1461] made Scripture superior to the Church and denied the existence of oral tradition.)

Latin Averroism

Latin Averroism—pure Aristotle—still flourished in Italy, especially at the University of Padua, its proponents tending toward a kind of materialism. Its chief representative, Pietro Pomponazzi (d. 1525), taught the Averroist idea that immortality is proper only to God, not to men, although he accepted the immortality of the soul as a doctrine of faith.

The Italian Renaissance

Humanism

Overall, however, the intellectual life of Italy moved in a quite different direction from Averroism. As John of Salisbury had foreseen, the rise of Scholasticism had led to a devaluing of humanistic studies, and the movement later called the Renaissance (“rebirth”) was made up of “humanists” seeking to recover ancient classical civilization. It arose first in Italy around 1350, perhaps because Italians were especially conscious of the greatness of ancient Rome and because the Italian universities were independent of church control.

The Renaissance began merely as an interest in “humane letters”, including grammar, rhetoric, history, and poetry, which were called the “liberal arts”, because they freed the mind. Grammar and rhetoric were taught in the medieval universities but were overshadowed by philosophy, while history and poetry were not part of the curriculum at all and were regarded by philosophers as of a much lower order of truth.

Rhetoric

Whereas for Aristotle man was a “rational animal”, humanists regarded the passions as equally important and venerated the imagination as highly as the analytic faculty, jibing at what they considered Scholasticism’s arid “logic-chopping”, remote from human concerns. Humanists especially emphasized rhetoric—the art of persuasion—which Scholastics held in suspicion because men could be persuaded by things other than logical argument. But for the humanists, this had great religious relevance: whereas the Scholastics engaged in sterile attempts at definition, rhetoric and poetry could move the heart and thereby bring about genuine conversion to a living faith.

Humanists versus Scholastics

Thus there were often bitter quarrels between Scholastics and humanists, especially in vying for influence in the universities and the intellectual world in general. For the most part, these quarrels were not over issues of fundamental truth but over such things as humanist attempts to establish professorships in fields like rhetoric or Greek.

Philology

Humanists were philologists (“lovers of the word”), with specialized knowledge of both the subtleties of language and of ancient manuscripts, and one of their most important works was publishing those old texts, most of them for the first time. Patrons such as the Medici family of Florence kept agents busy acquiring manuscripts wherever they could be found.

Latin remained the language of formal treatises in the West, as well as the language of conversation among educated people. But to the humanists, this had led to Latin’s deterioration: it no longer adhered to the stylistic and grammatical standards of the ancients, to which they now sought to return. One of the most popular books of the Renaissance, the Christiad of the Italian humanist Marco Vida (d. 1566), recounted the story of Jesus in the style of the Roman epic poet Virgil (d. 19 B.C.).

The Recovery of Greek

The Greek language had been largely forgotten in the West for centuries, and the earliest humanists could not read it. But they passionately wished to do so, and gradually they learned it—through travel, from Byzantine scholars who immigrated to the West, even from Greek sailors—and by the later fourteenth century it was an essential part of their education. They rediscovered Greek texts in Western libraries and imported other manuscripts from the East, a process stimulated by the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The humanists paid considerable attention to Scripture, primarily through methods of literary analysis: the precise meaning of words, metaphors, and other poetic qualities. Several humanists made new Latin translations of the New Testament, working from old Greek texts in order to offer an alternative to the Vulgate, and a few of them even learned Hebrew.

The Rediscovery of Plato

In an intellectual culture dominated by Aristotle, the humanists rediscovered Plato, whom they much preferred, because of his poetic mode of philosophizing and his use of the dialogue method, in which truth was not definitively expounded by a master but was discovered through discussion among men of differing opinions.

Patristics

The Scholastics routinely cited the Fathers of the Church, but the humanists published new patristic texts, including those of the Eastern Fathers. Many of the Fathers had been influenced by Plato and could therefore serve as alternatives to Scholasticism, Augustine’s intensely personal Confessions (the classic expression of Catholic religious experience) having special appeal.

Classical Culture

Most humanists remained believing Catholics, but their attacks on Scholasticism sometimes made them seem unorthodox. As with most intellectual pioneers, they were sometimes carried away with uncritical enthusiasm for new ideas, and a few of them attempted a synthesis between Christianity and classical pagan thought.

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, d. 1374), the first important humanist, was an avid lover of the Roman authors Cicero (d. 43 B.C.) and Virgil. With Humanism under suspicion of being pagan, Petrarch attempted to turn the tables on its critics by accusing the Scholastics of being more familiar with the teachings of Aristotle, including his errors, than of Moses and Christ. Aristotle was spiritually deficient, because he could define virtue but his words lacked the power to motivate men to lead virtuous lives, while Plato came closer to the truth, without fully attaining it.

Slyly, Petrarch boasted of his own ignorance, in contrast to the Scholastics’ pretense to know things they could not know, and he extolled Christian humility, since the truths of God are known to simple people who lead lives of virtue. He dubbed the Scholastic distinction between faith and reason “insane” because it was impossible for a believer to lay faith aside. In the Augustinian tradition, Petrarch valued will over intellect: it was not possible to know God adequately in this life, but it was possible to love Him, so that virtue was far more important than knowledge.

Salutati

Collucio Salutati (d. 1406) was a humanist influenced by Nominalism’s sense of the inscrutable power of God and the consequent inadequacy of natural theology. Following Augustine, he turned inward to discover truth, seeing the human will, conformed to the divine will, as the principal means of discovery.

Humanists adapted the classical idea of Fate or Fortune—the impersonal powers that determined events on earth—to the idea of the allpowerful God. (Some humanists even referred to God the Father by the pagan title “thundering Jupiter”.) Thus Salutati urged his fellow Florentines not to flee the plague, because it was God’s will, and he stoically accepted the death of two of his sons from the disease.

Valla

Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) thought free will mysterious, since God foreordained human actions, including the hardening of the heart, in such a way that man could not choose to be virtuous. He wrote a treatise on the Eucharist in which he affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence but in somewhat naturalistic terms: God was present in many places simultaneously, just as the sun or the human voice, and miracles simply manifested the mysteries of natural existence.

Valla was one of the most uncompromising critics of Scholasticism, because only human experience could be the starting point for the discovery of truth. He denounced the “arrogance” of philosophers (Aristotle, he judged, was damned) and insisted that theology had no need of philosophy.

Historical Consciousness

The humanists’ study of the classics gave them a keener sense of history than their predecessors, an understanding of historical context—how things change over time—and a certain skepticism about historical claims, such as the authenticity of relics.

Valla carried that new consciousness to its furthest point, arguing, for example, that the works of Pseudo-Dionysius did not date to apostolic times and writing a commentary on the Greek New Testament that called into question certain passages of the Vulgate. Most important was his demonstration that the Donation of Constantine (see Chapter Five above, p. 116) was not written in the time of Constantine but was an eighth-century forgery, a conclusion Valla reached through analysis of the style of the document and the fact that it was not known until the eighth century.

Ficino

Perhaps the most important of the Italian humanists was Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499), the head of the Academy founded at Florence under the patronage of the Medici family, in emulation of Plato’s Academy at Athens. Contrary to Valla, Ficino insisted that theology and philosophy needed each other—theology in order to keep philosophy from skepticism, philosophy to save theology from ignorance—and he opposed Nominalism for its separation of faith and reason.

Ficino translated all of Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin and wrote a Platonic Theology, based on the Augustinian teaching that the image of God could be discovered in the soul, a kind of natural religion that was in principle accessible to everyone. All significant truth was contained in Plato, as a kind of natural revelation of divine reality, but Jesus was the Mediator who led men by stages from the earthly to the spiritual realm for which the exiled soul yearned.

Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) was a Florentine nobleman who studied Jewish, Muslim, and ancient pagan texts and undertook to show that all systems of belief are ultimately compatible. The Jewish mystical work the Kabbalah, for example, was part of revelation, he said, handed down from Moses. (Pico was investigated and briefly imprisoned on suspicion of heresy.)

The Recovery of Hebrew

The French Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349) was rare for his time both in knowing Hebrew and for emphasizing a primarily literal understanding of Scripture, in contrast to the medieval fourfold interpretation. Giannozzo Manetti (d. 1459) was a Florentine diplomat who made a special effort to read Hebrew, translated parts of the Old Testament, and also studied the Kabbalah. Eventually, however, he wrote a refutation of Judaism.

Humanist Clerics

Although Humanism was in many ways a lay phenomenon, it was not anticlerical. Of its leading figures, Petrarch was in minor orders and was for a time an official at the papal court at Avignon, Ficino was a priest, and Valla was a layman in the service of Pope Nicholas V, who apparently was not bothered by the discrediting of the Donation of Constantine, since the popes no longer cited it as a basis for their authority. One of the greatest Renaissance artists, Fra (“Friar”) Angelico (Giovanni da Fiesole, d. 1455), was a Dominican mystic who painted exclusively religious subjects, both in Florence and under papal patronage at Rome.

The “Dark Ages”

The greatest classical writers were pagans, and the humanists’ admiration of them logically implied that the coming of Christ had had a negative effect on civilization, a conclusion no humanist reached explicitly.

Petrarch lamented that civilization had lain in darkness for centuries but predicted that it was about to undergo a rebirth. He grieved that Cicero did not know Christ but took comfort in the thought that at least the Roman philosopher had knowledge of the one true God. Like Jerome, Petrarch found Scripture inferior to pagan writings in literary qualities. Salutati contrasted “St. Socrates” with the cowardly St. Peter and thought Socrates would have been the greatest of the martyrs had he been a Christian.

Pagan Heroes

Valla, on the other hand, thought that there were no authentic pagan heroes, since all men were motivated by the selfish desire for pleasure. Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1459), who was for many years a papal bureaucrat, then (like Salutati) chancellor of Florence, disbelieved the legends of Roman history, which he thought constituted a “wretched story”. But he praised the courage of a heretic whom he saw burned at the stake, comparing him to Socrates.

Human Nature

The fundamental ambiguity of Humanism was precisely its view of human nature—whether man was by nature good or, left to himself, capable of great evil. The Church continually warned against pride and avarice and urged ascetic renunciation, but this presented a dilemma to the humanists, because the Greeks and Romans did not understand moral failure as the product of sinful human nature but merely as excess, to be constrained by a cultivated sense of moderation and a proper regard for law. Thus without formally denying Original Sin, some humanists in effect seemed to disbelieve in fallen man’s inclination to sin. Following classical models, they were trustful of the natural virtues and extolled freedom.

The Paradox of Petrarch

Partly as a counter to Innocent III’s treatise on contempt for the world, Petrarch wrote On Human Dignity, which he based on the divine image in the soul. Man was lower than the angels in absolute terms but higher by virtue of having been redeemed by Christ, and he had been given lordship over nature, including the power to transform the world. Man’s upright posture, unlike that of the animals, pointed to Heaven.

Petrarch later modified this view. His brother was a Carthusian, for whom Petrarch wrote a treatise against worldly vanities. The humanist related how he once climbed to the top of a mountain to admire the beauty of the world but at the summit opened Augustine’s Confessions at random and was stunned to read there a warning that men admire high mountains but neglect their own souls. He then saw his “aimless wanderings” as an expression of his troubled yearning for salvation and vowed henceforth to concentrate his mind on God.

Valla the Epicurean

Valla held an almost opposite view. There had always been Christian Stoics, but Valla was unique in being a Christian Epicurean, finding virtue in itself to be harsh and unattractive. Thus there could be no such thing as natural virtues; supernatural virtues were the means by which men, who were like animals in everything except their immortal souls, curbed their earthly pleasures in order to live for the eternal pleasure of Heaven.

Love and Lust

A general humanist consensus held that classical poetry offered instruction in the nature and pitfalls of human love and that the pagan poets, having concealed their monotheism behind a fanciful polytheism, offered at least glimpses of the divine.

The traditional teaching about the procreative purposes of marriage was strongly upheld by the Church. The Franciscan preacher St. Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444), for example, accused husbands who practiced contraception of treating their wives as property used for the purpose of satisfying husbandly lust. The humanists, however, while not repudiating the ideal of chastity, were influenced by the writers they admired. Some classical writers, such as Ovid (d. 17), offered a literary model of easy hedonism and frank bawdiness. The courtly love tradition developed literary genres that extolled romantic love and even adultery. Valla denigrated natural virtue to the point where, in the natural order, the prostitute was more enviable than the virgin. For him, there was no inherent value in sexual continence, and a moderate degree of sensuality was desirable.

The humanist Pietro Aretino (d. 1556) wrote outright pornography, and as a young man, the future Pope Pius II also wrote irreverent and scabrous verses, of which he was later ashamed. The Decameron (ten tales for each of ten days) of Giovanni Boccaccio (d. 1375) was a compilation of racy stories told in a hedonistic spirit by worldlings who, trying to insulate themselves from the plague, learned a moral lesson—inevitably they all succumbed to the plague.

Pride and Avarice

Classical authors also encouraged pride in the achievement of fame and power, with the accumulation of wealth merely taken for granted. Valla was a realist in politics, seeing the drive for power as dominant and finding no virtue in obeying the law, since in politicsvirtue (from the Latin word for “a male”) meant forceful action. Bracciolini held that men were governed by avarice and could be lifted up only by divine grace. Even the monastic life did not bring happiness.

Civic Humanism

Whereas in the North, students not destined for an academic career aspired to church positions, in Italy many became civic officials or bureaucrats, devoting their lives to the interests of their particular cities, a revival of the classical idea of citizenship as the principal avenue of human fulfillment: civic Humanism.

Usury

In the commercial, northern Italian cities, the official prohibition on usury was a serious issue, since banking was one of the principal industries. (Florentine bankers served as papal tax collectors.) St. Antoninus, archbishop of Florence (d. 1459), was both an austere reformer of the clergy and a theologian who cautiously allowed charging interest on loans that were made for investment purposes.

Fame

The culture of Renaissance Italy was under the patronage of ambitious and successful men who commissioned portraits of themselves as a way of displaying their achievements and preserving their memories (the “Fame” of which the Romans had made so much), looking out from their portraits with varying expressions of pride and self-satisfaction.

Funeral monuments became increasingly elaborate, with the body encased in a coffin before burial and the tomb not only asking for prayers but summarizing the deceased’s achievements. The tomb of a prince might be surrounded by statues of priests and courtiers weeping and praying on his behalf. For the first time, tombs also bore images that appear to have been realistic likenesses of the deceased, sometimes as though asleep, sometimes with eyes open, awaiting judgment.

Uneasy Consciences

But consciences were not fully at ease. Merchants and bankers who enjoyed wealth and civic prestige often commissioned works of religious art, even built entire churches, as acts of penance for having been too worldly. Sometimes a commissioned painting displayed the mixture of piety and pride that lay behind it: a scene of Christ’s Nativity, for example, with the patron and his family kneeling at the crib along with the shepherds.

Cloister and World

The medieval Church’s exaltation of the monastic life did not fit readily with Humanism. However, Petrarch, although he was scathing in his criticism of the worldliness of prelates, defended religious life, as did Salutati. But Valla questioned why the termreligiousshould be reserved for those who took vows, and he denied that there was a hierarchy of callings in the Church. Some lay people were exposed to greater perils in the world than are monks in the cloister and therefore deserved greater credit, he thought, while many religious acted out of fear. Against the Franciscans, Valla argued that it was not necessary to become a beggar in order to help beggars and it was better to practice spiritual rather than material poverty.

Human and Divine

Some humanists ultimately broke decisively with Aristotle by denying in effect that men had any fixed nature. Ficino thought that men stood outside the fixed order of the cosmos, imitating God in their creative powers and using natural magic as an extension of those powers. As Plato taught, both poets and mystics suffered from a kind of “divine madness”.

In their striving to become everything, Ficino announced, men manifested their desire to be like God and their refusal to admit their own limitations. The desire for fame, for example, was really the desire for eternity. Unhappiness therefore stemmed from man’s discontent, his peculiar nature that left him unsatisfied. Man created human society because of his unwillingness to face his own loneliness. The reality of this yearning made it unthinkable that men should not be immortal, even divine.

Manetti too argued against Innocent III’s exhortation to despise the world and even compared man to the mythical Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, except that the Christian shaped nature by making use of his God-given powers. Men should not consider themselves lowly, although—because man was reluctant to allow any authority higher than himself—the excellence of human nature was a temptation to sin.

Happiness

Two humanists of Bologna engaged in a print debate over human happiness, with Giovanni Garzoni (d. 1505) emphasizing the Fall of Adam and the human misery stemming from it and Benedetto Morandi (d. 1478) finding each instance of misery to be part of some greater, perhaps unseen, good. The capacity for laughter was a sign of fundamental human happiness, Morandi argued.

Morandi was one of the very few humanists to depart explicitly from Christian orthodoxy, daringly implying that sexual morality was largely a matter of social custom and that suicide was appropriate within the context of pagan ethics. Also unusual for his time, he seems to have believed in the idea of progress: that change makes the world better.

The Summit of Freedom

Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man became perhaps the most famous of all Renaissance texts. Like Ficino, he departed from the traditional idea of a fixed hierarchy of human society and instead celebrated human subjectivity, which gave man the freedom to aspire to the level of the divine but also carried with it the possibility of a great fall.

Traditional Piety

In spite of affluence and Humanism, traditional piety still had a strong influence, even among people who might have seemed to have fallen into a kind of neo-pagan worldliness. Pico was notorious for his sexual escapades, but toward the end of his short life, he considered becoming a monk. Bernardino of Siena, John of Capistrano, and others were immensely popular practitioners of revival preaching, which reached its climax with the Florentine Dominican Girolamo Savonarola (d. 1498).

Savonarola

Florence was the most sophisticated city in Europe, but in 1494, the year of Pico’s death, Savonarola, influenced by Joachim of Flora’s speculations about the end times, appeared as a prophet of fire and brimstone, warning the Florentines that their worldly ways would lead to eternal damnation. Perhaps surprisingly, many (including Pico) took his message to heart and came forward to throw rich tapestries, clothes, jewels, even books and paintings, onto the “bonfire of the vanities”¹¹ that Savonarola kindled. The great artist Sandro Boticelli (d. 1510) burned some of his own paintings of pagan subjects.

Savonarola’s political involvements caused his undoing. He opposed the ruling Medici family and became an increasingly harsh critic of Pope Alexander VI, who arranged for Savonarola to be burned at the stake on a trumped-up charge of heresy.

Machiavelli

In his famous book The Prince (1513), Niccolo Machiavelli (d. 1527) in a sense unwittingly brought humanist optimism to an end, by drawing out the full implications of the natural desire for power—virtue as forceful action—that Valla had identified as the true nature of politics. Machiavelli was the first political thinker to ignore the moral basis of politics and to offer instead a purely realistic analysis, a picture of a world without higher law. (Not insignificantly, he modeled his amoral prince on Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI.)

Although he may have been a believing Catholic, Machiavelli thought the Christian virtues of humility and charity made men weak and vulnerable, and he extolled the ancient pagan religions for fostering virility and boldness. If the prince wished to retain power, Machiavelli advised, he could not be restrained by moral or religious scruples but had to employ terror, deceit, and treachery as necessary. Many people were shocked by Machiavelli’s emptying politics of moral content, so that after him an unreservedly optimistic Humanism was no longer possible.

Architecture

The great flowering of art in the Renaissance was in theory a return to the styles of Greece and Rome, but in reality it was one of the greatest bursts of originality in the history of the world.

Architecture

Classical architecture was based on symmetrical harmonies that medieval buildings, with their towers of different heights, flying buttresses, and almost chaotic forests of sculptured figures, often violated. In the 1420s, the Gothic cathedral of Florence was completed by being capped not with a high tower but with a great dome—the largest in the West since Roman times—designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (d. 1446). Thereafter, domes continued to increase in fashion, culminating in St. Peter’s in Rome in the later sixteenth century. (Petrarch was the first to dub the medieval cathedrals “Gothic”, meaning “barbaric” and “crude”, in contrast to classical architecture.) But much of the wealth, effort, and pride that had been invested in cathedrals during the High Middle Ages was now directed into constructing town halls and the urban palaces of the rich.

The Nude

Pictures and statues of nude persons were produced during the Renaissance for the first time since Roman days. While viewers were obviously not insensitive to its erotic content, according to classical theory, the principal purpose of nude art was to celebrate the beauty of the human body, with a perfectly proportioned body reflecting the perfection of the soul.

Religious Themes

Artistic creativity continued to be devoted primarily to religion. A census of Renaissance paintings and sculptures would probably show that three-quarters still portrayed biblical subjects or the lives of the saints, culminating in the great Pietà of Michelangelo Buonarroti (d. 1564).

Portraits

But the art of portraiture—likenesses of people that were flattering but also recognizable—was also a humanist rediscovery. During the Middle Ages, the sculptured images of kings and popes, for example, were stereotyped and idealized, not representations of individuals but of the offices they held. Now both sculpture and the revived art of painting on canvas or wood began to show individuals as they really were, even with the crooked noses or bald heads that captured their individuality. Humanist values were also manifest in scenes that captured, for example, the love between husband and wife or parents and children and in a new genre of historical painting representing scenes from classical antiquity or the triumphs of later princes.

Levels of Meaning

The new art could have meaning on several different levels simultaneously. Michelangelo’s statue of the biblical David was commissioned by the city of Florence and, besides its religious significance, was meant to celebrate the city’s victory over powerful enemies, even as the boy David had slain the giant Goliath. Michelangelo also took the opportunity to display a well-proportioned nude body and demonstrated his genius at making hard marble look like sinews and flesh.

Later, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican (named for Sixtus IV, who had it built), Michelangelo painted the unfallen Adam as a perfect human specimen, his muscled body displayed to fullest advantage as he stretched out his arm to touch the finger of God, who Himself appeared as an impressive human figure.

Papal Patronage

Even before Savonarola’s time, papal support for the new cultural movements was almost complete, not least among some of the more notorious pontiffs of the age, who seemed to imbibe the classical spirit of easy worldliness.

Beginning with Nicholas V, almost every pope supported Humanism, with the papal court itself becoming a major employer of humanist scholars. Rome had fallen into ruins during the era of the Avignon Papacy, and Nicholas commissioned some of the greatest artists and architects to begin an ambitious rebuilding program that lasted two hundred years. He moved the papal headquarters from the Lateran to the Vatican and turned the Vatican Library into the greatest collection of manuscripts in the West. Pius II was himself a noted humanist—his use of a pagan name (Aeneas Sylvius) being a fashion among humanists—but he also spent his pontificate in a vain effort to mount yet another crusade.

Rome

Around 1500, Rome began to supplant Florence as the artistic center, with more and more artists placing themselves under papal patronage. Raphael (Sanzio, d. 1520) decorated the papal apartments, and his many paintings fixed permanently in people’s minds the image of the biblical world.

Michelangelo

The strong-willed warrior Pope Julius II was the greatest of the papal patrons of the arts, commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine ceiling and to design the original plan for St. Peter’s Basilica. He had strong opinions about these and other works he desired from Michelangelo and frequently quarreled with the equally strong-willed artist.

The Northern Renaissance

Burgundy

In the North, the dukes of Burgundy, whose territories included much of the Low Countries as well as parts of France, also patronized art and learning, making Bruges and Ghent centers of a kind of Renaissance. Here, too, much of the art was religious in nature, for example, The Adoration of the Lamb by Jan Van Eyck (d. 1441), the first accomplished use of three-dimensional perspective in painting.

Northern Humanism

Northerners were aware of Italian Humanism and often made sojourns in Italy to imbibe it, but some northerners found Italian Humanism too pagan. Some were also scandalized by the worldliness of the papal court. Partly because it interacted with the New Devotion, northern Humanism developed in more consistently Christian ways than in Italy.

Paradoxically, however, this had the consequence that northern humanists were often sharp critics of the Church and even sometimes crossed into heresy, as Italians seldom did. To some extent, there was a spirit of tenacious bluntness in the North that demanded answers to troublesome questions, in contrast to a kind of easygoing sophistication in Italy.

Gansfort

Wessel Gansfort (d. 1489) was a Netherlander educated by the Brethren of the Common Life and personally acquainted with Thomas a Kempis. He remained a layman, learned Greek and Hebrew, and taught at the Sorbonne, where he dismissed even Aquinas as someone whose Latin was faulty and who knew no Greek. For a time, Gansfort was in the service of the scandalous Pope Sixtus IV, who protected him from accusations of heresy. Later he returned to his native Netherlands, where he had considerable influence over younger scholars.

Gansfort epitomized the uncertainties of the age. Under the influence of certain mystical writings, he exalted the power of divine love, which draws everything to itself and renders lesser things unnecessary. Although he insisted that he would believe nothing contrary to the faith, at various times he seemed to teach the primacy of Scripture over the Church, justification by faith, and the priesthood of all believers. He sometimes appeared to deny Transubstantiation, indulgences, Purgatory, and the need for confession.

Rufus

Mutianus Rufus (d. ca. 1526), a priest and yet another product of the Brethren’s schools, was influenced by Platonism to the point of almost seeming to become a kind of Manichaean, denying that the carnal side of man had any relationship to God, minimizing Jesus’ human nature, and respecting the sacraments only as symbols of divine love. Since the birth of Christ occurred before all the ages, there was truth in all religions, Mutianus claimed, and he frequently cited the Qur’an.

Celtis

Conradus Celtis (d. 1508) was unusual among Northern Humanists in not having been educated by the Brethren and even more unusual in being a kind of pagan in his open embrace of hedonism, his exaltation of human love, and his composition of erotic love poetry. Anti-papal and a fierce German patriot, he urged his fellow Germans to harass the Romans as their barbarian ancestors had done, and he praised the ancient Germanic myths as equal in value to those of the Greeks and Romans. Celtis acquired a vague mystical idea of God from Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa, but he doubted the immortality of the soul. He ridiculed Transubstantiation and other Catholic doctrines, although he also had a certain semi-superstitious devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

Reuchlin

Johannes Reuchlin (d. 1522) learned Hebrew in order to study the Old Testament and the Kabbalah, which he learned about from Pico and which he thought contained secret divine revelation handed down from the time of Adam. Because of Reuchlin, the Dominicans of Cologne obtained a ban on the reading of Hebrew books, an act that provoked a fierce quarrel in which humanists satirized the Scholastics as willfully ignorant. But a few years later, Leo X (1513-1522) sponsored the publication of the Talmud in Rome.

Lefèvre

Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, d. 1536) was the leading French humanist of the age, influenced both by mysticism and by Neo-Platonism. He made a Latin translation of Paul’s Letters that seemed to express the doctrine of justification by faith, and later he produced the first French Bible. With Lefevre, emphasis on the literal sense became a hallmark of the humanist approach to the Bible.

Colet

The English priest John Colet (d. 1519), although he studied in Italy, thought that the pagan classics had no relevance to Christianity. Deeply influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius (although Valla had denied the alleged identity of that writer), Colet also rejected the Scholastic idea of theology as a science, believing instead that wisdom was attained only through divine illumination. Colet devoted his scholarship to Paul’s Letters, paying close attention to the words and to literary style in order to expound their meaning with a fresh eye, largely ignoring centuries of commentaries by theologians.

Colet combined the love of learning with a reforming zeal that was characteristic of some Christian humanists. He denounced the financial burdens placed on the laity, the abuse of benefices, and legalism, exhorting the clergy to begin to reform the Church by reforming themselves. In a sermon before the court of Henry VIII (1509-1547), he condemned the propensity of Christians to make war on one another.

Erasmus

Colet befriended the Netherlandish humanist Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus of Rotterdam, d. 1536) and persuaded him to turn his attentions away from purely literary pursuits and to the Bible itself. In time, Erasmus became the “prince of humanists” and the most influential intellectual of his age.

Erasmus embodied the religious ambiguities of his time. He was of illegitimate birth, his father (he thought) probably a priest. Educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, he imbibed their devotion to simple biblical piety but found their spirit overly rigid and narrow. Aspiring to a life of learning, he entered a branch of the Augustinians but found monastic life also too constricting and left to become secretary to a bishop. Later, when asked to return to the monastery, he protested that he had been too young (seventeen) even to understand what he was doing when he became a monk. His canonical status remained irregular for many years, until he received papal permission to live in effect as a layman.

A Severe Critic

Erasmus was the rare scholar who was also capable of reaching a general audience—those who knew Latin but were not specialists. Throughout his career, he questioned, usually through satire, many aspects of traditional Catholicism: the superstitions of simple people, the hypocrisy of monks and nuns, and academic theology. No one skewered clerical misconduct more effectively than Erasmus, especially in his Praise of Folly, which ridiculed both clergy and laity, the high and the low. In the anonymous satire Julius Excluded (attributed to Erasmus), the worldly Julius II was denied entry into Heaven because St. Peter did not recognize the bellicose pontiff.

Erasmus wrote a treatise on the education of the Christian prince that was an anticipatory refutation of Machiavelli, emphasizing the need to inculcate Christian virtues in the prince from an early age, so that he would rule entirely for the good of his people, with no thought to his own glory. Like Colet, Eramus thought the prevalence of war among Christians was the greatest betrayal of the Gospel.

A master rhetorician, he was deliberately ambiguous about his real thoughts. Especially from his satires, many people inferred conclusions that Erasmus himself did not state forthrightly, e.g., not only was the monastic life corrupt, it was not an authentic Christian vocation; not only did sacramental ritual foster credulous superstitions, it was an obstacle to faith; and not only was the great edifice of formal dogma remote from the spirit of the Gospel, it was a distortion of Christ’s teaching. Some of those who drew these conclusions condemned Erasmus as a heretic, while others welcomed him as a liberator from religious tyranny.

The Greek New Testament

His principal life’s work was the recovery of what he considered authentic early Christianity, especially the Fathers of the Church, by making use of the tools of learning. Although he favored vernacular translations of the Bible, his greatest achievement was an edition of the Greek New Testament, based on the best manuscripts he could find and published alongside the Vulgate. His Greek text did not differ from the Vulgate in any crucial way, but it raised two nagging questions: whether for centuries the Bible might have been misunderstood, because no one in the West had access to its original text, and whether scholars like Erasmus could question doctrines and practices on that basis.

Philosophy of Christ

Erasmianism became a reform program with fluid boundaries, aimed at the simplification of the Christian life, made possible by a direct encounter with the Gospel as originally written. He called it the “philosophy of Christ”, a deliberately paradoxical phrase, in that Christ was not a philosopher in an academic sense.

Thomas More

St. Thomas More (d. 1535), a friend of both Colet and Erasmus, was an English layman who entered the service of King Henry VIII partly in order to fulfill the humanist hope of marrying wisdom to power. Despite their close friendship, More was unlike Erasmus in his very traditional kind of piety. While studying law, he lived in a Carthusian monastery and was powerfully attracted to the monastic life, eventually abandoning that idea, perhaps because did not feel able to live celibately.

Like Erasmus, More championed humanist learning. His best-known work, Utopia (“nowhere”), was an account of a fictional society that, even though lacking Christian revelation, was based on principles of natural justice and shamed Christians who, despite the benefit of the Gospel, had done worse.

Printing

The intellectual life of the West changed dramatically in the 1450s with the invention of movable type, which allowed ideas to be spread far more rapidly than was possible through the painstaking copying of manuscripts by hand. Parts of the Bible were naturally among the first products of the new invention; and as the Middle Ages came to an end, a biblically based Christian Humanism stood at the center of the troubled religious life of northern Europe.