A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [221]
Formal assent was obtained from an imposing group assembled at the Château de Vincennes on May 7 in the presence of the King and Anjou and the Sire de Coucy, among other leading nobles, ministers, prelates, and masters of theology. After each cardinal in turn was again asked by the King to declare on his conscience all he knew of the circumstances, in order to clear all hesitant minds of doubt and “fortify their faith,” the assembly, with hidden anguish in many hearts, voted unanimously in favor of the new Pope. A week later for the benefit of the public a great ceremony was held in the plaza of Notre Dame, where on a platform especially erected for the occasion the four cardinals supported by the Duc d’Anjou proclaimed the advent of Clement VII and declared schismatic anyone who refused obedience.
The University of Paris remained unreconciled. Masters of Theology, less affected by the compromises of worldly office, did not bend so easily as bishops. To them the succession of St. Peter was a serious matter. Under extreme pressure from the crown, they formally accepted Clement on May 30, but the acquiescence was sullen, not unanimous, and a precursor of trouble. Two years later, after the death of Charles V, all four faculties passed a resolution in favor of a General Council to put an end to the schism, and appealed to the crown to summon one. Although authority to convene was uncertain, fifteen such councils had been held so far in the history of the Church to settle grave issues of doctrine. The University’s appeal in 1381, presented by a master of theology, Jean Rousse, was necessarily addressed to the hostile ears of the Duc d’Anjou, then Regent. As a fearsome example to quiet all such talk, he had Rousse arrested and imprisoned in the Châtelet. The insult to clergy and University created a scandal, not appeased when Rousse’s release was secured only at the cost of an order by Anjou prohibiting any discussion of a council or a papal election.
Alienated and dismayed, prominent doctors of theology fled to Rome to join Urban. Others too were leaving. Students and faculty of Urbanist countries, unable to remain under Clementist obedience, departed for universities in Italy, the Empire, and Oxford. “The sun of knowledge” in France, said a departing master, “has suffered an eclipse.” At this time the decline of the University of Paris as a great cosmopolitan center began.
In England the schism brought Wyclif to the turning point that led to protestantism. At first he welcomed Urban as a reformer, but as the financial abuses of both Popes grew more flagrant, he came to regard both as Anti-Christs and the schism as the natural end of a corrupted papacy. Since the moment the Church allowed penance to be commuted by money, he believed, nothing but evil had been the result. Despairing of reform from within after the schism, he came in 1379 to a radical conclusion: since the Church was incapable of reforming itself, it must be brought under secular supervision. He now saw the King as God’s Vicar on earth from whom bishops derived their authority and through whom the state, as guardian of the Church, could compel reform. Going beyond the abuses of the Church to attack the theory, Wyclif was now prepared to sweep away the entire ecclesiastical superstructure—papacy, hierarchy, orders. Having rejected the divine authority of the Church, it was now that he came to his rejection of its essence—the power of the sacraments, specifically of the Eucharist.
In a culminating heresy, he transferred salvation from the agency of the Church to the individual: “For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world.
When he had preached disendowment of the Church’s temporal property, Wyclif had had powerful friends, but when he rejected the sacerdotal system, his patrons, fearing heresy arid