The next time I post on this stream we will begin to enter the life and works of Martin Luther himself and the events we know collectively as The Protestant Reformation. As we close the build-up to October 31, 1517, there is a legitimate question of whether the break-up of the Roman-Latin Western Church was an inevitability. My opinion: the explosion in learning and science would have triggered some sort of intellectual revolution in matters of Church doctrine and discipline: linguists and Church scholars would have eventually questioned the literal nature and egregiously poor translations of the official Vulgate Latin text of the Bible, for example, in the fashion of the Renaissance Catholic scholar Erasmus [1469-1536].
It was Luther’s claim that the Church needed reform in capite et membris, [Latin, “in head and members.”], that is, at the top and the bottom. Our last several posts examined the “membris” and found many of them anxious for reform, if somewhat disorganized and disjointed. The failure of the last century before Luther was primarily a matter of the “capite,” the papacy and the college of bishops. By the early 1400’s the papacy was in shambles, with three separate men claiming the Chair of Peter. During this period, as the Church wrestled with a solution, the ancient concept of bishops’ exercising a collective authority over the Church returned to the forum of university thought. Termed Conciliarism, the legal concept of universal bishops exercising an ultimate authority in the Church was the guiding principle for the Council of Constance [1414-1418]. How well did the last three Councils address reform of the capite before 1517? The Council of Constance was a wild and woolly affair, involving the discrediting and exiling of all three claimants to the papacy. The Council finally elected Martin V as valid successor of Peter but exercised its conciliar power to extract a commitment from Martin and presumably his successors to call a church-wide council of bishops periodically, at intervals of five or ten years. Having concluded the Great Schism of multiple popes, the Council turned its attention to reform, or at least its perception of what reform looked like. It attacked the ideas of John Wycliffe (England) and Jan Hus (Czechoslovakia); Wycliffe was the father of the “Lollards” and Hus the champion of the chalice for the faithful at Mass. Wycliffe was long dead; Hus had been invited to the Council under safe passage, which was revoked by the Council, and he was burned alive. This did not augur well for future advocates of Church reform. Martin V was anxious to restore the papacy to its previous preeminence and delayed calling another Council until near death in 1431. It is a measure of its disarray and poor attendance that the Council of Basel-Ferara-Florence [1431-1449] lingered nearly two decades and divided into at least two distinct councils, one of which attempted to excommunicate the pope over the issues of Conciliarism and reunion with the Eastern Orthodox Church. At the very least, this council soured the thought of another one for six decades. Of more interest is the Fifth Council of the Lateran [1512-1517]. The very dates of this Council speak volumes; it dissolved in the same year that Luther came to prominence. As a Council, Lateran V did little. The historian Carlos Eire put it this way: “In essence, all that the Fifth Lateran Council seemed to accomplish was to confirm the death of Conciliarism and the weakness of the high clergy, leaving nothing in its wake but missed opportunities for reform, along with censure and dissent.” (Carlos M.N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, p. 115) In fairness, Lateran V did address standards for pawnshops. Eire, in his conclusion of the state of Catholicism on the eve of Luther, summarizes conditions well: “At the end of the Middle Ages, then, Catholic reformers were more or less on their own. This is not to say that reform could not take place, but rather that it was difficult to for any reformer to have an impact beyond a local level. Without papal or conciliar support, the best anyone could do was to focus on one’s immediate environment.” [p. 115] It is no accident that most of the medieval reformers adopted some degree of poverty into their religious agendas, i.e., the absolute poverty of Jesus, who had “no place to lay his head.” Laity, religious, and a fair number of clergy longed for a Church whose leaders, structures, and preoccupations spoke of Jesus as he appeared in the newly printed Bibles that were now circulating through all levels of society in local translations. Were the leaders of the Church oblivious to this? I would say that the hierarchical Church of late medieval times carried a different paradigm or model from local soul seekers. Way back in this stream I described the papacy of Boniface VIII and his encyclical Unam Sanctam in 1302, which claimed that all spiritual and secular power ultimately resided with the Bishop of Rome. It is easy to scoff at such a claim today, but Boniface saw himself and his office as a protector of world order, a role that a few of his predecessors had necessarily assumed, such as St. Gregory the Great in the 500’s. His mistake, I believe, was identifying himself as the Vicar of the Trinity and not the vicar of Christ, who saved by serving others to the point of giving up his very life. The claim to ultimate worldly supremacy was discredited in Boniface’s own lifetime, but his successors understood themselves as enjoying supreme spiritual authority and rigorously protecting Church practice and thought. If this involved the suppression of pious practice and original writing and thought on the natures and health of the Church, such was the price of doing business. It is also true that a “follow the money” factor played into the separation of leaders from laity. Popes were elected from among the richest families of the day, such as the Borgias and the Medici’s. Bishops—often appointed by kings and regional sovereigns--depended heavily upon the benefices or wealth of their dioceses, often holding multiple dioceses at the same time they worked for the popes in the legal work of the Church. To reform in the fashion of the return to Christ’s poverty would mean financial and social ruin for the upper tiers of the hierarchy. As noted above, Catholic reformers were generally locally based and attempts by the Inquisition to censor their views sorely limited their influence. What makes the Lutheran Reformation different is the perfect storm of a scholarly Catholic monk, torn by his own doubts about salvation, scandalized by the Rome of his day and its questionable practices [e.g., the sale of indulgences], deeply influenced by his reading of the Bible [notably St. Paul], and protected by local German princes by the reach of the Inquisition. Next week we will begin walking in Luther’s shoes to understand his motives and actions intended to reform the Catholic Church. There are thousands of books written about Luther, and for our purposes here I am recommending Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) as well as the Reformations work by Dr. Eire cited above.
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I had laid out the format for two remaining posts prior to addressing Luther and the Protestant Reformation directly. Next week will look at the last Councils of the Church prior to 1517 and how they failed to produce the reforms necessary to keep the Western Church together. Today’s post is one last look at the religious orders of Catholicism prior to the emergence of Luther.
In looking at my own growth curve regarding the Reformation, I was brought up in my Buffalo Catholic enclave to believe that Luther was an assault on the sinless Catholic Church. In my neighborhood no one was ever baptized with the names Luther or Calvin, and people named Cal were suspect. [Thankfully, Cal Ripken, Jr. came along much later in my life.] My youthful sense of history embraced a terrible upheaval with Luther, and the Church fought back, and was continuing to fight back even as I was growing up. Then I went to college and graduate school and discovered that some of the “Protestant ideas” weren’t so crazy after all, and the Church had not done such a good job in policing its excesses. I learned that I had been correct about the “fighting back” part and came to understand that I had been raised in the post-Tridentine era [i.e., after the Catholic reform Council of Trent, 1545-1563]. Today I am more attuned to the common problems of all the Christian Churches, including mine: the abandonment of all Churches which incorporate faith, tradition, and teaching authority. This trend away from “organized religion” is not new, though when the heat of the Reformation died down, there was greater freedom of expression for intellectuals to write and voice doubts about the churches. [I have not included Evangelicals in this post because I sense that at the present time Evangelicals in the U.S. are deeply divided among themselves as to whether they are a religious entity or a social/political one.] At this juncture of our Reformation posts, I hope that we all have a better sense of the complexity of the Church in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance Era. The Church stood in grave need of reform in 1500, but the need was one of leadership. Last week we visited the many varied forms of grass-roots piety that demonstrate how the Church never lost its mission of holiness. Today I am looking back at a remarkable burst of Catholic energy before the Reformation which spilled into the Catholic Counter-Reformation after Trent, the religious orders. Beginning around 1450 the existing orders began wholesale renew of spirituality and apostolic energy. What is more surprising is the number of new religious communities which sprung forth during the Renaissance, nearly all of them created to serve in the marketplace of human service and education. Their appearance around the time of the Reformation upheaval put them at the vanguard of Church reform, eager to carry forth the renewal spirit of the Council of Trent. Robert Bireley’s The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation [1999] explores how the renewal and establishment of religious life developed before the Reformation and became a vital force in the centuries immediately following the rupture, putting forward the model of the Catholic Church as a servant Church in contrast to the monarchical papacies of the 1500’s. Bireley’s work was very helpful to me, and 15 years ago I wrote a review which sums up the life of the Renaissance Church as well as anything I can add today. From 2003: [The Refashioning of Catholicism] is an interesting introduction to an era that traditionally bears the name “Counter Reformation.” Bireley, a Jesuit Professor of History at Loyola University of Chicago, argues persuasively in his opening remarks that the term “Counter Reformation” has outlived its usefulness in the study of Catholic history. In fact, he observes, nearly all of what we would call today post-Tridentine reform not only has roots in the fifteenth century but in many cases was in full bloom and inspired the Council of Trent to do what it did. Trent, in his view of things, was the institutional crest of a wave that had been building for a century. Moreover, Bireley’s global view—geographic, political, scientific, theological—invites the reader to view the Church against the backdrop of forces it could not control and critique the many accommodations made by the Church to the world of the seventeenth century. Why 1450? One reason was geographic exploration. The exploits of DeGama and Columbus reflected a growing sense of the cosmos, later amplified by Galileo and others; a new economic world order, so to speak; and the increasing sense of nationalism and centralization of governments, later abetted by formalized “confessions” of religious doctrine and worship after Luther. Another reason for this new delineation of Catholic epochs was the Renaissance and the humanistic philosophy it nurtured, which the author maintains had significant impact upon many major Catholic leaders of the time, including Ignatius Loyola and Francis de Sales. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, Bireley designates 1700 as a marker because of the impact of Cartesian rationalism upon official Catholic thought in the bigger context of the Enlightenment itself . Without ignoring the contemporary problems of the “Catholic confession”—papal excesses, poor training of priests, etc.—Bireley is remarkably upbeat about the condition of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation and the Council of Trent in the sense that the need for reform was widely recognized and in many places being addressed already. Popular piety throughout Europe was strong in pockets, and the printing press, so often termed a tool of Protestant reformers, was cranking out thousands of copies of “The Imitation of Christ.” The author notes that in the late fifteenth century the existing religious orders, or at least many of them, were distinguishing themselves by excellent preaching, pastoral practice, and adaptation. After 1500, however, the combined challenges of Protestant confessions, humanist demands of higher education, and missionary work, not to mention ecclesiastical reform itself, led to a veritable explosion of new religious orders. Not surprisingly, the Jesuit phenomenon is extensively chronicled. But to his credit, Bireley gives significant attention to Francis de Sales and the Salesian efforts to address the spiritual needs of the new humanized Catholic. Joined with the efforts of the new Capuchins, Ursulines, Oratorians, Hospitalers, Theatines, Oratorians, Visitandines, Piarists, Barnabites, Sulpicians, and the Christian Brothers, to cite several, these movements addressed the above cited needs in ways that have sculpted the Catholic experience to the present day. It is probably obvious that none of the above-named orders is, strictly speaking, contemplative. Bireley contends that the paradigmatic shift in Catholic thinking in this era was toward the world, not away from it. Educators, confessors, and spiritual directors and writers consciously or subconsciously picked up the gauntlet set down by Machiavelli, whose thesis broadly read argues that the marketplace is the arena of practicality, not faith. It is no accident that the curriculum of Catholic schools at every level broadened to include the best of classical thought, that Aquinas and the idea of synthesis came back into style, and the Jesuits added drama and the fine arts to their standard cursus studiorum. Theologically speaking, it was an age of “doing.” Loyola himself did not impose choir upon his men to free them for mission. The case study or manualist method of moral theology was born. Certainly, no collective group was doing more than the missionaries. The work of the Church in the new worlds is complex and not without controversy on many levels. Bireley is somewhat limited by this complexity in his attempt to give an overview of the missionary situation, but in general no one can deny that it was not large scale and heroic. The argument is often made that Catholic missionary efforts were part of a larger colonization effort. Bireley implies in his overview that this accusation is probably more appropriate to those missionaries whose monarchs exercised state control of the Church in their kingdoms, such as Spain and Portugal. By contrast, missionaries working more directly with the papacy and the newly formed Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, such as the Jesuits in the East, worked with remarkably less baggage, the Malabar Rites Controversy notwithstanding. Although only two hundred pages, this is a thought provoking work that overall depicts a Roman Catholicism of considerably more vigor and spirituality than is generally attributed to the Reformation era. The author’s thoughts on the importance of the new religious orders, humanism, and ecclesiastical globalization call for further reading and reflection. Curiously, this work, published by The Catholic University of America, was printed in China. One way or another, Francis Xavier was going to get there. It was only a matter of time. One of the major focuses of modern day medieval Church history is the mystical life of its members. There have been countless histories of the “institutional” Church, e.g., studies of popes, administrative machinery, interactions with secular kings and prices, and the like. There are numerous works in academia translating and exploring the writings from medieval Church scholars and universities of that time, what history would call the pillars of scholasticism and foundational theology. Medieval mysticism, on the other hand, until recent times has gotten at best a short shrift and at worst wholesale condemnation. Today I checked my review of Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970) by the venerable Englishman R.W. Southern, and in a concluding remark I said that
Southern's penultimate chapters are devoted to what he called the fringe orders; today we would think of these in part as the Beguines and the multitude of spontaneous mystical and devotional movements associated with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His final chapter, "A Confusion of Tongues," continues his account of spiritual diversification leading to early Protestant thought and practice. I happen to be an admirer of Dr. Southern, who was knighted by the Queen in 1975, but were he alive today he would have access to better documentation and translations, not to mention the greater appreciation among scholars for the vitality and influence of grassroots movements of spirituality. In speaking of mysticism, we are addressing the intense internal experiences of individuals and their communications to a following of people disposed to embrace an accompanying lifestyle. The first question, naturally, is whether the religious experience of a mystic is real or “valid.” Here, the traditional criterion for credibility is Biblical, “by their fruits ye shall know them.” Even today the Church is very slow to offer a pastoral opinion on the origins of devotional religious movements or reported visions, unless its proponents stray from Church Tradition and practice. The “fruits” would be identified as maintaining an organic connection to the teaching Church and a holy way of life. Mystics. Francis of Assisi at his heart was a conservative and loyal son of the Church who sought the permission of a sitting pope (Innocent III) for his little band, its mission of preaching penance, and the austerity of his primitive rule. On the other hand, in the fourteenth century the Spiritual Franciscans—an extreme branch of the entire Order—were condemned as heretical for maintaining that no pope could change the Order’s rule as written by Francis, who had died a century earlier. The Spirituals, with their austerity, devotion, and unbreakable respect of Bible and founder, served as catalysts and spiritual directors or chaplains for many like-minded Catholics of the age in many parts of Europe. Another question is the relationship of mystics and spiritual movements to religious founders and established religious orders. Here the answer is more complex. Not every religious order was founded by a mystic, but the template of the order’s lifestyle became an inspiration and eventually a way of life for laity who witnessed the communities in their midst. It is little surprise that monasteries were magnets for laity seeking a closer relationship with God with an intense experience of prayer. There is frequent reference in medieval paperwork regarding lay persons building huts and residences next to monasteries, and the same Innocent III who blessed Francis of Assisi issued a prohibition against lay women entering the Premonstratensian Order of monks itself! Mysticism and mystical communities took shape throughout Western Europe, and in some places with notable intensity. Moreover, the focus of local spirituality and the type of religious intensity varied from place to place. Medieval Irish mysticism included intensely penitential focus, austerity, and missionary fervor, certainly colored in part by Celtic culture, landscape, the weather, and the rough seas. (One of our faithful readers told me once that there would be no Irish folk music had Prozac been developed centuries ago.) It is no accident that individual repeatable confession originated in Ireland in the later part of the first millennium. One of the lesser-known qualities of the Franciscan movement was advocacy of pacifism, which disturbed civil authorities to no end when they attempted to raise forces for the many medieval clashes. On the other end of the spectrum from the friars were the controversial Knights Templar. I have not yet read Dan Jones’ The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors (2017, New York Times best seller), but this controversial movement of warrior spirituality developed as a response to the atrocities of the First Crusade (1095-1099) and the spiritual encouragement of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose own biography is a study in medieval spiritual identity. The Knights, “fighting monks,” began as a religiously structured military protection force for pilgrims in the Holy Land, developed into a fighting elite or flagship army in successive Crusades in union with King Richard the Lion Hearted, and later into something of a medieval House of Rothschild financial empire, until the Church—for complicated reasons—signed off on their execution, disbanding, and confiscation of goods in the early 1300’s. The overarching piety of motivated lay Catholics in much of continental Europe was a movement called Devotio Moderna, which overlapped and integrated many local spiritual movements. DM was a move toward simpler and uncomplicated religious life, with emphasis upon the interior life over external manifestations. It originated in the Low Countries and much of its best literature comes to us in Dutch. Devotio impacted religious orders as well as lay clusters, and its roots seem to have sprung from disenchantment with institutional Church life and the conduct of the clergy, though sources differ on the point. It is safe to say that religious enthusiasm probably did not find many parochial channels in the routine of life in the centuries leading up to the Reformation. The spirituality of Devotio Moderna had the advantage of outstanding authors—whose translation into English continues to this day—and the newly expanded printing and binding industry. One product of this spirituality may be the most published devotional of all time, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. I am posting a link here to the Mercer University edition, which provides a scholarly description of the work and a good sampling of the text itself. [When I attended a high school boarding seminary in the 1960’s, The Imitation of Christ was the one work that helped me get through some hard times.] Translator William Creasy explains the attraction of this work, and by extension the Devotio movement itself: that everyone has the choice to capitulate to the fear and chaos of his time or seek security within the depths of his soul of eternal truths. By 1500 the Catholic Church was experiencing massive internal difficulties in reforming diocesan and parochial life to the point where its most venerable rites and leaders were able to feed the longings of its baptized members for that safe harbor in the turbulence of what we now call the beginnings of the modern age.The outcroppings of spiritual movements and devotions to fill this void had met this need for many and probably postponed a Reformation-scale rupture for a time. The last hope for the spirit of medieval spiritual reform to save the unity of the Church was the Council Lateran V (1512-1517). Summoned by a Borgia pope and badly attended by bishops, it dissipated early in the same year that Luther posted his 95 Theses. The preparation for our next post is going slowly, but I hope to have the next installment up by April 19.
In looking over our Reformation stream I note that, chronologically speaking, I left us burying the dead in the Great Plague (1347-1353) with the aftermath of a more affective, apocalyptic, and fear-driven popular spirituality. I commented last Thursday that the high middle ages were a time of significant Eucharistic piety, but the late middle ages saw the development of a division in Christian life that Kevin Madigan describes so well in his Medieval Christianity (2015). In my review of this work I concluded with this observation:
Madigan brings his overview of the age to a climax of sorts by highlighting the increasing intensity and volatility of the spirituality of the fifteenth century. In many respects I found this the most impressive sequence of the entire work. Contrary to popular belief, the Church was not moribund on the eve of the Reformation. Religious orders on the whole were energetically revitalizing themselves. If anything, the fifteenth century spiritual life of the Catholic Church might best be described as bipolar. On the one hand were those who worked day and night, to the point of mania, to assure themselves escape from hell fire. It is little surprise that the concept and practice of gaining indulgences would take hold among sellers and buyers alike. On the other hand were those who regarded the efforts to save one's self by “doing” (what Madigan calls the "Facere" Doctrine) with fatalism, particularly in Germany. Just how many indulgences, rosaries, Masses, confessions and the like were necessary to be saved? In truth, no one could say, and anxious souls like Martin Luther would despair of salvation altogether until a new collective mood of passivity and absolute trust in God, "justification by faith, not works," would effectively end the age of the Medieval Synthesis. Three years later I stand with that assessment, but the fifteenth century is complex on so many levels that one might do better to call it the age of the Renaissance. Madigan’s history follows the Church closely, and he integrates matters of church and culture fairly well. I spent a good part of yesterday reading the opening of The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople (2013) by Sara Wise Bauer. Bauer covers a period of roughly 1100-1450 A.D. She does not take the reader all the way to the Declaration of Luther in 1517, but in her analysis of European life it becomes clear that much of what we call the Renaissance (or cultural rebirth) emerged much earlier than the dates we found in our school day history texts and was responsible for the religious upheavals of Luther’s day. A Renaissance historian is more likely to look at the Reformation as a product of all the factors of the time, not strictly the religious ones. A good example of this is a pair of events in the 1400’s in the arena of secular history that would both impact Catholic life. The first was the work of the famous Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator. His mapmaking and other studies enabled Portuguese sailors to work their way down the west coast of Africa for purposes of trade and exploration. His seminal work led to the discovery of new Western European trade routes in all directions, including eventually the Americas, while bypassing the Moslem military strength of the Middle East. [The proliferation of the Portuguese African slave trade by 1500 created a moral dilemma for the Church.] Sea-faring oceanic trade exploration—coupled with the invention of printing around 1455—led to a change in the daily life of Europeans that equals the twentieth century’s atomic and computer-driven technological breakthroughs. Consider the impact of the printing press on the Church alone. Volumes of the Bible were now attainable for regular reading of the laity, who prior to Gutenberg’s invention had limited exposure to Biblical content aside from sermons, morality plays, and observances of feasts. Even with the Inquisition investigating the writings of late medieval mystics, their written proliferated, along with reform-minded followers of men like Jan Hus and John Wycliffe. What resulted was a “democratization” of religious practice and thought that the Church was finding harder to police. A second major marker of the fifteenth century was the conquest of Constantinople by the Moslem Turks of the Ottoman Empire in 1453. [Sir Steven Runciman’s work on the catastrophe remains a classic.] It is my understanding that news of the fall took two weeks to reach Rome, and the impact of the great city now in the hands of infidels is hard to describe today. For one thing, people of the time—certainly in Rome--still thought of Constantinople as the enduring legacy of the original Roman Empire. Constantine had moved the headquarters of the empire in the fourth century to Byzantium and renamed it after himself. [Today it is Istanbul, Turkey.] In 1493 Constantinople was a shadow of its earlier glory, but Western Christendom throughout the middle ages had seen Constantinople as a bulwark against invaders of the East, even though Rome had excommunicated Constantinople and vice-versa in the 1000’s. The defeat in 1453 insured that Eastern Europe and Western Asia would become permanent members of the Ottoman Empire until World War I (1914-1918). Western Christians viewed this event apocalyptically, as the end of the world then perceived. Indeed, one world was ending, but another was beginning, for the great minds of Eastern Christendom had been immigrating west for many years before the final fall of Constantinople. They brought with them texts that the West was barely aware of, in all disciplines, and they found employment and eager audiences in the approximately 200 universities across Western Europe. It is no accident that the Renaissance is remembered today for its renewed interests in the ancient writings of Greece and Rome. These two events--the development of Portuguese navigation/trade and the fall of Constantinople--were not directly related to matters religious. But their impacts would profoundly change the pre-Luther landscape of religious ideas and thoughts. With the discovery of the Americas and the first contacts with the Asian East, the Church would need to revisit a definition of its essential worship rites, particularly in India and in China. And with centuries of Roman and Greek writers and themes now available, late medieval and Renaissance Christians were now able to push the envelope of thought further than the prescribed certainties of Aquinas and the high medieval scholasticism. Obviously, there is much more to say about the last years before the Reformation, but I am winding down to just four more pre-Luther posts: the European mystics, the Council of Constance (1414-1417), Conciliarism [i.e., the collective power of bishops], and the state of religious orders when Luther entered the monastery. I took some time to see if and how the Protestant Churches in my town are observing Holy Thursday this evening. The local Episcopal Church observes a full schedule of the Triduum virtually parallel to the Roman Catholic rites, and refers to this day as Maundy Thursday, as did the Roman Catholic Church in my memory [though Holy Thursday was the more popular Catholic usage.] The term “Maundy” is derived from the Gospel of tonight’s Mass, where Jesus, after washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, tells them that “I have given you a new commandment” [mandatum, Latin “mandate”] to wash the feet of one another. [John 13: 1-15] It is curious that after Vatican II, when the official title of this day was confirmed as Holy Thursday in the Catholic world, other Christian Churches retain the name “Maundy.”
The Presbyterian Church is observing “Maundy Thursday” with a 6 PM Worship followed by a dinner. The Church of the Nazarene is conducting a 7 PM service. The Nazarenes are descendants of the Wesleyan evangelical tradition of the 1700’s which began when John Wesley’s evangelical preaching and theology created a radical break from the strict Calvinists. [A reformation of a reformation, you might say.] The Methodist Church here in town, also descendants of Wesley, is observing a “Maundy Service” at 7 PM. The Methodist guidelines are very interesting in that they parallel much of the Roman Catholic Thursday practice except for the Eucharistic procession. The two largest Baptist Churches in town have no reference to any Triduum-like observance except that one church is closing its office on Good Friday. I have to say that some of these churches, which used to be quite powerful in town, appear to be much smaller now from information gathered on their websites, which suggests to me that Catholicism is not alone in its difficulties retaining members. I had started my search with the Lutheran Church, given that Martin Luther’s theology of the Eucharist is rather intense. The church here does not have a website, and I moved over to the Missouri Synod data base in search of a possible link, only to discover that the official membership of my neighbor church is less than 60. The Evangelical Lutheran national webpage indicates that the reception of communion is part of the Maundy Thursday rite where it is celebrated. Given that Martin Luther rejected the term “transubstantiation” and that interfaith communion is not permitted in most circumstances in Roman Catholic discipline, there is a temptation to play down the sanctity of communion shared in the Reformation Churches and to accentuate “deficiencies” in the bread and cup shared in other denominations. This is an unfortunate and often inaccurate misunderstanding of what the many Christian churches celebrate in good faith around the world, including on Maundy/Holy Thursday. Vatican II states that while all truth necessary of salvation subsists in the Catholic Church, it also recognized the holiness of churches with good will who worship Christ in ways and rites that Catholic theology might describe as incomplete. The Catholic Church recognizes the validity of baptism administered by any church that baptizes in the Trinitarian formula. It may be of some help to understand how Luther and others came to differ in defining the meaning of Eucharistic Presence. Christians from earliest times understood that Christ was present in “the breaking of the bread” and that there was true reception of the Lord in the Eucharistic rite. Christians believed that Jesus remained in the sacred species, as we know from ancient accounts of Eucharistic bread brought to the sick and prisoners. Exactly how this process took place—in what we might call scientific or analytic ways--was never much debated; reception of the Eucharist was and remains an act of faith, which is why we say “Amen” upon reception, a statement of belief. The first analytical description of the Eucharist appears to have come from St. Paschasius Radbertus, a ninth century abbot, who coined the term transubstantiation, “the change of substance by which the bread and the wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass, become, in reality, the physical Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ.” Later, Thomas Aquinas adapted the Aristotelian terms of substance and accidents to round this definition into logical completeness: the essence or reality of a thing might change, but its outward qualities could remain the same. Not everyone accepted the Paschasius definition; in the 1050’s the first great debate in the Church on Eucharistic presence was sparked by Berengar of Tours, who countered that the elements of the bread and wine became symbols of the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, and nothing more. Berengar’s theory was condemned several times, but it persisted till the IV Lateran Council (1213-1215) which declared the process of change known as transubstantiation to be infallibly true. Eucharistic devotion was enhanced considerably through the high middle ages by the introduction of the Feast of Corpus Christi and the writings of Aquinas, whose work includes the majestic Pange Lingua sung during tonight’s Eucharistic Procession after communion. The next serious challenge to Eucharistic doctrine came with the reformers of the late medieval era, whose primary focus was not so much the idea of communion as the philosophical system which described it. I discussed on this stream a few weeks ago the writings of the Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham, who maintained among other things that the claims of Thomistic philosophy (known generically as scholasticism) were excessive and basically faulty. Ockham is remembered today for a competing philosophy of reality called nominalism which holds that the best we can know about anything is its name (from the Latin nomen, name.) Martin Luther was well versed in philosophy, and his sympathies lay with Ockham. He found the Thomistic or scholastic approach to reality excessive in its hold on the Church. He turned to Sacred Scripture itself and did not find basis for the process of transubstantiation. He did not deny Real Presence and searched for another way of explaining it. He came to accept a term used by the earlier reformers the Lollards, consubstantiation, whereby the real body and blood of Christ is present alongside the substance of the bread and wine. This is essentially what Lutheran theology holds todays. The first reformer to outright deny Real Presence was Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531). He broke relations with Luther on issues of the Mass and the Eucharist. Zwingli, whose radical thinking profoundly divided the Reformation, held that transubstantiation was impossible because the Mass itself was a presumptuous denial of Scripture. He argued that the Bible defined Christ’s death as a one-time event which was sufficient for all men in all times. To repeat it in worship was viewed by Zwingli as a blasphemy against the Bible. John Calvin, when he arrived on the scene, also denied transubstantiation and Real Presence, but he did hold that real communion with Christ could take place spiritually with an individual. The development of the many sects and denominations of Protestantism and their respective stances on the meaning of communion would take days to elucidate. Many of the mainstream churches incorporate communion into their rites, at least periodically, which shows that even a purely symbolic gesture by Catholic standards has the impact upon believers of encountering Christ individually and in fellowship. While our differences in understanding do not permit full intercommunion, we can on this Holy Thursday rejoice with the idea that fellow Christians are with us spiritually on this holy night with equal hopes in their respective traditions of meeting Christ in the breaking of the bread. Coming to you live from San Pedro Retreat Center near Orlando, Florida, with a fine parish staff for a day of recollection. Unfortunately, I’ll have to postpone the Reformation until next week. One of my first reviews for Amazon was The Great Mortality (2005) by John Kelly, the story of the Black Plague that ravaged Europe from 1347 through 1352. This catastrophe which claimed about 50% of the European population had immense impact upon the Church in terms of contributing to events that would make the Reformation something of an inevitability.
I am going to switch the format today, suggesting that you read my review of the account of the plague, now thirteen years old. The link is here. What follows is my own recent take on the plague and its relation to the Reformation. In my review, I did observe the loss of many of the best clergy, who remained to comfort, nurse, and bury their parishioners, and who did not flee to the rural mountains with other clergy and nobles. What I did not know then was the dating of the “Little Ice Age,” a meteorological shift toward generally wetter and cooler conditions, beginning around 1300, which impacted food supplies and farming in much of Europe. By the time of the arrival of the Great Plague in 1347, not only were there significant weaknesses in the economy, but also a general weakening of the collective immune system. It is doubtful that even the most robust medieval peasant or worker could have withstood the initial onslaught of this Y-Pestis bacteria unaffected, but the recurrence of the plague in waves over five years resulted in a human death toll akin to those related to earthquakes and aftershocks. Every enterprise of European life was severely strained and interrupted, and it is not much of a stretch to speak anachronistically of a PTSD impact. Kelly’s description from medieval accounts emphasize (1) the grotesque impact of the infection at onset, and (2) the sudden onset of death. A man infected at noon might die by nightfall. Our term “bubonic plague” comes from “buboes” or ugly swellings in the body; the 1347 strain was particularly gruesome in this respect. Medieval peoples were no strangers to plagues and sudden deaths, but the events of this magnitude led to apocalyptic fears and confusions. Even before the plague, bands of flagellants (i.e., those who whipped themselves in public) roamed the continent under no ecclesiastical supervision in an active moral crusade against sin. During and after the plague many pious and fearful souls took refuge in extremist forms of religious experience to save themselves. The intensive fear of death and punishment after the grave never receded, and by 1500 the quest for safety and certainty led to a hearty trade in relics and indulgences. If some looked inside of themselves for a relation to what could only be described as a mighty reaction of the anger of God, a good many others looked to outside scapegoats. The Plague unleased a wave of anti-Semitism, already a grave sin in the Western Church. Christians had always held the Jews guilty for the death of Christ, but as Kelly records, violence against the Jews became more deadly and universal when some Christians expounded the theory that the plague was an organized plot by European Jews to destroy Christianity. Like Hitler’s era six centuries later, murder and other mayhem against Jews was condoned with little or no intervention of church and state. In these circumstances the movement toward Church reform was significantly sidetracked. Of the few groups emotionally removed from the suffering, the cardinals and popes [then living in Avignon, France] continued their exertions relatively unimpeded. If they considered the plague a curse of God, there is no record in the several councils prior to Luther that the bishops established any substantive plan for their own reform. It would not be until 1563 that the Council of Trent would mandate exacting reforms of residential bishops, and this was prompted by Protestant rebellion, not Y-Pestis. Universities continue to offer degrees in the interpretation of reality, and not simply in the realm of religion. We call such interpreters “philosophers” and the world cannot live without them. [I have a B.A. in Philosophy from Catholic University, but I never get invited to the philosophers' Christmas party.] Socrates taught us to question what we see and hear; Plato, to search for the highest absolute of beauty; Aristotle, to observe everything and draw our truths from experience, the scientific method. By the fourteenth century the Christian Church of the West had, for all practical purposes, designated the Philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas’s (1225-1274) world view as the official vision of how Christians think and articulate matters of life and thought vis-à-vis the revelation of God. Aquinas was so widely respected that his legacy of thought in the universities became the generic noun for medieval theological work, scholasticism.
Aquinas was a philosophical outlier who incorporated the ancient Greek thinkers into his theological/philosophical writing. That he borrowed heavily from the pagan Aristotle’s system was quite remarkable—and more than once questioned. That he received Greek philosophy from Islamic scholars is even more remarkable. To summarize his understanding of reality, he adopted Aristotle’s approach that every created thing is real in itself, and that from the similarities of things it is possible to deduct general principles and norms. For Aquinas, the end or ultimate purpose of all created matter was God, who was the perfect embodiment of all things. We utilize Aquinas’s system in Catholic schools, where everything—the arts and the sciences--taught under its roofs is a window on the wonder of God. Religion is not (or should not be) relegated to last period as a standalone subject of the day, unrelated to geometry, history, or Shakespeare. The Church cherished Aquinas’s philosophy for at least two reasons. The first was the precision of its language involving the sacraments, and particularly the mystery of the consecration of the bread and wine, Transubstantiation. Aquinas and Aristotle agreed that all things have substance and accidents [or measurable externals.] Consequently, the words of the priest changed the substance of the food into the body and blood of Christ, without changing the accidents—the taste, texture, weight, etc. of unleavened bread and fermented wine. The line between philosophy and theology was very thin in medieval times, and the second advantage of the Thomistic scholastic system of thought was its unity of authority: with the meaning of all reality summarized in Aquinas’s writing, the Western Church enjoyed a high level of certainty in its teachings and laws, enabled to declare them timeless and changeless for all eternity. Again, we see this claim of timeless and changeless authority asserted even as we speak; Pope Francis, in his encyclical on the family, was harshly criticized for his perceived reservation about denying Eucharist to those in second marriage without annulment. The criticism was and is the perception that Francis does not recognize the timeless, ageless, and absolute nature of the Church’s teaching on divorce, unchangeable because the essence of moral law is changeless. Even in Aquinas’s time, though, there were hints that the Aristotle-Aquinas monolith was not foolproof. All thinkers of the fourteenth century were familiar with the principle of analogy: that we can never define God precisely, but only provide human ideas or explanations of what God might be like. A philosophical-theological system is not the exact same thing as the thing itself, in this case the mind and essence of God and his creation. Aquinas knew this well. In fact, toward the end of his life he began having divine visions while saying Mass, and shortly before he died, he referred to his body of work as “straw” in comparison to his mystical experiences of the Christ of the altar. Mysticism, a powerful force in late medieval times, defied systematization, and thus was regarded as a serious threat to Church order. [There will be several posts on medieval mystics down the road.] To critique the thinking of Thomas Aquinas involved critiquing the official Church, a rather dangerous business in the fourteenth century when the Inquisition, staffed by Aquinas’s own Dominican order, was well established in its work of preserving academic and ethical order in the Church. A man needed “cover,” so to speak, and thus it is not surprising that such a counter-thinker would emerge from the other burgeoning medieval order, the Franciscans. William of Ockham (1287-1347) is best known today for “Ockham’s Razor,” the handy principle that states, in so many words, the simplest explanation is usually the best one. It is helpful to our purpose here to understand that Ockham and his Order were immersed in controversy with the Avignon popes over the issue of poverty. After the death of St. Francis of Assisi in 1226, various popes had softened the uncompromising position of St. Francis on the issue of ownership of property. One wing of the Order, the “Spiritualists,” had broken off and eventually dissolved, contending that not even a pope had the power to dissolve vows or contradict the words of Jesus in Scripture. However, once the papacy moved to Avignon in 1309, the royal luxurious standard of the French papal court became a general matter of concern, and the Franciscan identity as poor men and beggars was renewed and intensified throughout the order. The friars in general contended that poverty must be real, not symbolic or spiritual, and their austere lifestyle and preaching were seen as a rebuke to the excesses of Avignon popes. Ockham and his superior Michael of Cesena found it necessary to flee to Bavaria and the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. Ockham recommended that the emperor have supreme control over church and state; he was excommunicated for his trouble but was never in significant danger. He died, ironically, just before the arrival of the Black Plague in 1347. Ockham viewed the world through different glasses than Thomas Aquinas, no doubt impacted by events swirling around him, and his philosophy and world view are considerably different. In the first instance, he believed that scholasticism was too ambitious in its claims and provided the Church with an unhealthy sense of never needing reform. But he went further and questioned the very idea of “universals.” Ockham stated that the only truth one could know about a thing was its name, hence his philosophy is known as nominalism (from the Latin, nomen, “name.”) He denied the ability to take observations to a higher plane, e.g., the establishment of universals and laws. Ockham did not deny God or religious observance, but he held that reasoned propositions like those used by St. Thomas could not speak with certainty about God. Ockham was influential in his day, but more so after his death. He made a distinction in the ways we can know God. Aquinas had maintained that reason [the mind], properly informed and disciplined, could come to a knowledge of God. Ockham, on the other hand, held that free will brought access to God. For Ockham, experience of God was wedded to the subjective human situation of obedience to God’s law made known in Revelation. A baptized person could choose to obey or not to obey the revealed mind of God in the Scripture. The Spiritual Franciscans held similar views, arguing that the words of Jesus [“sell everything you have, and come follow me…”] trumped the exhaustive body of principles and laws formed by the Church over the centuries. Ockham opened the door to a freedom of conscience and thought that would be branded as problematic by the Church [though, interestingly, never outright heretical.] He influenced a shift toward the supremacy of human conscience that Luther, well versed in philosophy, would utilize in his teaching on the priority of Scripture in the working of the human conscience. Luther believed that scholasticism was a negative force on the Church, an unjustified and unbiblical intrusion in much the same way as the Spiritual Franciscans had two centuries before. Ockham has left one more impact upon us today: the separation of religious experience from science and the secular arts. Philosophers from the Renaissance till the present time have labored to find a system of thought that includes some way to integrate a divine being. In American culture, we seem to bracket religious data and experience as unrelated to secular life. The challenge of evangelization, it seems, must begin with some agreement on the nature of reality. We still need our interpreters to square circle. During the 1300’s as the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism were playing out on the continent, another crisis was brewing in England that directly prefigured the Reformation. Kevin Madigan called his treatment of this matter “’Morning Stars’ or Heretics?” in reference to an upheaval of thought centered around an English theologian, John Wyclif (1330-1384), and those who championed his cause, the “Lollards.” Looking back on thinkers such as Wycliffe from this age, it is critical to reflect upon the nature of heresy and reform, specifically the perennial problems of conveying eternal mystery within the limitations of language and human thought processes and bringing accountability to those entrusted with teaching faith and morals in the name of God.
The relationship of England and Rome is a peculiar historical study, and not simply in matters of religion. Before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar became the first Roman general to cross the English Channel (60 B.C.), beginning an arduous and lengthy effort to subdue the outpost island, and Constantine was acclaimed emperor by his troops (306 A.D.) in York, of all places. Given the great military difficulties encountered by the Romans, it is not surprising that later the English would present governing difficulties for a Christian Church centered in Rome. Christian missionaries were sent in concentrated numbers by Pope Gregory I (or St. Gregory the Great, r. 590-604 A.D.) and the history of the growth of Christianity in England is remarkable in many respects, including the emergence of scholars such as Bede the Venerable and Alcuin, the development of universities, most notably Oxford, and an energetic concept of the episcopacy. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, was the driving force in the composition and passage of the Magna Carta (1215 A.D.), today the icon of representative democratic government. A medieval history professor at Catholic University—specifically, the one who tossed me out of that discipline in college, no hard feelings—told me of how he earned his doctorate. He went to England, bought a bike, and spent a year or two visiting surviving medieval parishes, where he found in the records that a surprisingly large number of pastors had university degrees from Oxford and other notable schools, suggesting that Catholic laity were unusually well educated and informed in their local settings under the tutelage of their clergy. It is into this setting that John Wyclif became a noted professor at Oxford, with ambitions to write a Summa along the lines of St. Thomas Aquinas a century earlier. However, he became involved in politics and attended sessions of parliament, where he witnessed two Dominican scholars debate the question “whether, in times of emergency, the state could legitimately seize the property of the Church.” (Madigan, p. 388) Wyclif sided hypothetically with the right of the king, explaining that only God “owns” property, and only righteous men have claim to rent it, so to speak. Wyclif was headed down the same ideological road as the Spiritual Franciscans, still a force in his lifetime, who believed that absolute poverty was the mother all virtues. Wyclif viewed the Church as severely tainted by its significant holdings, but his words in parliament were also a commentary on Church “owners,” i.e., the clergy, as unworthy of serving as God’s landlords. “Any cleric living in a state of mortal sin would inescapably have forfeited his claims to ecclesiastical dominions or lands.” Wyclif wrote that a civil ruler would be within his rights to seize the holdings in question. Taking Wyclif’s contentions to their logical conclusion, a sinful cleric cannot exercise his ministry, including administering the sacraments. This is a heretical contention from the fourth and fifth centuries, a movement called Donatism, which holds that the validity of sacraments depends upon the worthiness of the priest presiding over the rite. Catholic teaching to this day holds that sacraments are valid exclusive of the defects of the cleric. Wyclif had revived the Donatist sentiment in his disputations and writing, no small thing for a published Oxford professor. Wyclif’s teachings put him at odds with Church authorities, and Pope Gregory XI issued a condemnation of eighteen errors in his teaching. Not surprisingly, the professor was ably protected by—naturally—civil rulers and princes, such that Wyclif never appeared before a tribunal or saw the inside of a prison cell. Curiously, his views and writings do not seem to have interfered with his work at Oxford, suggesting that his colleagues tacitly shared his critique of Church mores. Wyclif, unfortunately, would take a valid concern for reform and holiness and run riot with an apocalyptic vision of his age as “the worst of times” compared to his imaginary concept of the purity of the early Church that he drew from the Bible. No historian questions his sincerity, but nearly all agree that he was a poor historian and quite naïve in his thinking and in appreciating the full dimensions of his work upon his contemporaries. In his quest for the “pure age” he began to adopt the concept of sola scriptura, “Scripture alone.” To purify the Church, he argued, all its non-biblical elements must be purged. He worked backward, starting with the institution of the papacy; if a pope was corrupt, believers are not bound to obey him. Monasticism would be castigated for its drift from the ancient discipline of hermitage in the desert. Religious orders, including the Franciscans, were “private religions.” Later he would deny the ranks of Holy Orders themselves as unbiblical. His greatest mistake was his denial of Transubstantiation, the change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Wyclif maintained that this article of faith was non-Biblical. He might be forgiven many things by his Oxford friends and students, but devotion to the Mass and Real Presence was the third rail of personal and communal belief throughout Medieval Europe. Having alienated much of his following, his works fell under closer scrutiny by local bishops without civil intervention, though Wyclif himself continued his studies and writings until his death in 1384. He was the inspiration for the Wyclif Bible, the first translation of the sacred text into English. In 1428 the bishop of Lincoln exhumed his body and had it burned publicly, an odd gesture of ecclesiastical censure for a man forty years in the grave. What this suggests is that Wyclif’s writings and teachings had an energetic life after his death. His followers came to be known as “Lollards” or “mumblers” (a slang term for heretical mystics). The Lollards continue to intrigue historians, and Madigan comments on the twentieth century debate about the composition and beliefs of the group. In the 1960’s the Lollards were viewed as something of a social phenomenon, a collection of the disenfranchised poor who saw in Wyclif an agent of social reform. Madigan, writing from a contemporary perspective, states that “contrary to scholarly views expressed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Wyclif’s followers were organized, powerful, learned, and linked by common appreciation of Wycliffite theological views and not, as had been argued, by economic or social factors.” (p. 393) Madigan’s description resonates with my Catholic University professor, Dr. Lytle, in his findings during doctoral research, that a strong educated laity was in place to discuss and promulgate theological issues. Although later persecuted, the Lollard movement survived until the Reformation where it morphed into the several reformed churches then developing under Henry VIII. Wyclif’s England gives us an indication that the Protestant Reformation did not emerge ex nihilo (out of nothing). The span of his lifetime gives evidence to considerable sympathy for Church reform; enthusiasm for a return to the sources of the Church, notably the Bible; civil rulers who resisted various Vatican disciplinary interventions; and a well-versed laity who did not interpret reform as dissent or heresy. Moreover, the interest generated in the Wyclif affair was transported across the Channel and received in parts of the Continent. Around 1400 a Czechoslovakian reformer, Jan Hus, would appear in Eastern Europe, inspired in part by Wyclif’s theology. Hus was burned at the Council of Constance, giving the reform movement the inspiration of a martyr. |
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February 2024
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