A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [314]
The too frequent use of excommunication for failure to take communion or keep feast days, so deplored by Gerson and other reformers, was a measure of the falling off of religious observance. Churches were empty and mass meagerly attended, wrote Nicolas de Clamanges in his great tract De Ruina et Reparatione Ecclesiae (The Ruin and Reform of the Church). The young, according to him, rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and décolleté gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of their headdresses, “immense towers with horns hung with pearls.” People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched. Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of services to have a drink and “when they hear the bell announcing consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.” Card-playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church, corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures.
Irreverence in many cases was the by-product of a religion so much a part of daily life that it was treated with over-familiarity, but the chorus of reproof at the end of the century indicated a growing element of disgust. “Men slept in indifference and closed their eyes to the scandal,” mourned the Monk of St. Denis. “It was a waste of time to talk of ways to reform the Church.”
Indifference, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a natural condition of human affairs. A new devotional movement arose at this time in the small trading towns of northern Holland, between desolate marshland and moor near the mouth of the Rhine—as if only in a remote corner of strife-torn Europe could fresh piety find a place to sprout. Because the members lived communally, they came to be known by their neighbors as the Brethren of the Common Life, although they referred to themselves simply as “the devout.” Their purpose was to find direct union with God, and through preaching and good works create a devout lay society. They were not extremists like the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit but simply, as they said, “religious men trying to live in the world”—meaning the lay world as distinct from the cloistered.
Gerard Groote, founder of the movement, was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant of Deventer in Holland. Born in the same year as Coucy, he spent a dissolute youth while studying law and theology at the University of Paris, where he dabbled in magic and medicine and made love to women “in every green woods and upon every mountain.” Finding the scholars’ disputations “useless and full of discord,” he left the University to join the secular clergy, and after a career as a worldly pastor in Utrecht and Cologne, experienced a conversion. Giving away his property in Deventer to charity, he went forth to preach a gospel of dedication to God springing from an “inner kernel of devotion,” rather than from baptism and the sacraments.
His zeal, gift of rhetoric, and an impressive personality attracted listeners in crowds that often overflowed the churches. People came to listen from miles away. Wearing an old gray cloak and patched garments, and trundling with him a barrel of books from which to confute critics after a sermon, Groote urged love of neighbors as well as of God, elimination of vice, and obedience to Christ’s commandments. Lamenting the corruption and predicting the impending collapse of the Church, he preached to the clergy in Latin and to the laity in the vernacular. A disciple took down his words and another went ahead to post announcement of a coming sermon on the church doors of the next town. Enthusiasts met in groups to adopt his principles and gradually joined to practice them, living together in houses segregated