A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [338]
Nevertheless, as hope of joint abdication faded, theologians on both sides increasingly discussed a Council and debated its problems. Who would convoke it? What was its legitimacy if convoked by temporal rulers? Did it have authority over the person of a Pope? If summoned by one pontificate in the present impasse, would its decisions be accepted by the other? How might both popes and both hierarchies ever be persuaded to act in concert? On June 30, 1394, a French royal audience heard the forbidden subject relentlessly exposed.
Arranged by Philip of Burgundy to present the University’s findings from the referendum, the audience was held in great solemnity. The King was on his throne, with the royal Dukes and principal prelates, nobles, and ministers in attendance. The argument for cession in the form of a 23-page letter to the King was read by the Rector of the University, Nicolas de Clamanges, a friend of Gerson and d’Ailly. One of the humanists within the University, he was considered the finest Latin stylist in France and an orator unmatched for his “Ciceronian eloquence.”
Clerical polemic in the Middle Ages was not cool. In a tirade of invective hurled at both popes, Clamanges piled up passion and hyperbole in his depiction of the suffering of the Church and the urgent and immediate need for a cure. Whichever of the two popes refused to accept one of the Three Ways, he proclaimed, should be treated as a “hardened schismatic and consequently a heretic”; a ravisher, not a pastor, of his flock; a “devouring wolf,” not a shepherd, who should be driven from the fold of Christendom. If in their overconfidence the popes postponed any longer the offered remedy, they “will repent too late of having neglected reform … the harm will be incurable.… The world, for so long unhappy, is now on a dangerous slope toward evil.”
“Do you think,” he cried, in the eternal voice of protest, “that people will suffer forever your bad government? Who do you think can endure, among so many other abuses, your mercenary appointments, your multiple sale of benefices, your elevation of men without honesty or virtue to the most eminent positions?” Every day prelates are appointed who “know nothing of saintliness, nothing of honesty.” Exposed to their extortions, “the priesthood has become a misery reduced to profaning its calling … by selling relics and crosses and chalices and putting at auction the mystic rites of the sacrament.” Some churches hold no services at all. If the early Church fathers returned to earth, “they would find no vestige of their piety, no remnant of their devotion, no shadow of the Church they knew.”
He spoke of Christianity as a laughingstock among the infidels, who hope that “our Church thus divided against herself will destroy herself by her own hands.” He pointed to the rise of heretics, whose poison “like gangrene makes progress every day.” He predicted that worse would come as internal strife within the Catholic Faith promoted dissension and disrespect. He raised all the arguments against a General Council and deflated each, quoting the Old Testament—Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job—to establish its authority. “Has there ever been, will there ever be,” he thundered, “a more urgent necessity for a Council than at this moment when the whole Church is convulsed in its discipline, its morals, its laws, its institutions, its traditions and oldest practices, spiritual as well as temporal—at this moment when it is menaced by frightful and irreparable ruin?”
Turning to the King, he did not hesitate to refer to Charles’s personal tragedy, saying that if God had answered prayers to restore the King, it must be that he might awake to the interests of his people and of Holy Church, to