• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3467 0

and when either died his cardinals quickly elected another. Thus there was no way of healing the schism except by bringing to bear some power superior to both popes. It was clear that one of them must be legitimate, therefore a power superior to a legitimate pope had to be found. The only solution lay in a General Council. The University of Paris, led by Gerson, developed a new theory, giving powers of initiative to a Council. The lay sovereigns, to whom the schism was inconvenient, lent their support. At last, in 1409, a Council was summoned, and met at Pisa. It failed, however, in a ridiculous manner. It declared both popes deposed for heresy and schism, and elected a third, who promptly died; but his cardinals elected as his successor an ex-pirate named Baldassare Cossa, who took the name of John XXIII. Thus the net result was that there were three popes instead of two, the conciliar pope being a notorious ruffian. At this stage, the situation seemed more hopeless than ever.

But the supporters of the conciliar movement did not give in. In 1414, a new Council was summoned at Constance, and proceeded to vigorous action. It first decreed that popes cannot dissolve councils, and must submit to them in certain respects; it also decided that future popes must summon a General Council every seven years. It deposed John XXIII, and induced the Roman Pope to resign. The Avignon Pope refused to resign, and after his death the king of Aragon caused a successor to be elected. But France, at this time at the mercy of England, refused to recognize him, and his party dwindled into insignificance and finally ceased to exist. Thus at last there was no opposition to the Pope chosen by the Council, who was elected in 1417, and took the name Martin V.

These proceedings were creditable, but the treatment of Huss, the Bohemian disciple of Wycliffe, was not. He was brought to Constance with the promise of a safe conduct, but when he got there he was condemned and suffered death at the stake. Wycliffe was safely dead, but the Council ordered his bones to be dug up and burnt. The supporters of the conciliar movement were anxious to free themselves from all suspicion of unorthodoxy.

The Council of Constance had healed the schism, but it had hoped to do much more, and to substitute a constitutional monarchy for the papal absolutism. Martin V had made many promises before his election; some he kept, some he broke. He had assented to the decree that a council should be summoned every seven years, and to this decree he remained obedient. The Council of Constance having been dissolved in 1417, a new Council, which proved of no importance, was summoned in 1424; then, in 1431, another was convoked to meet at Basel. Martin V died just at this moment, and his successor Eugenius IV was, throughout his pontificate, in bitter conflict with the reformers who controlled the Council. He dissolved the Council, but it refused to consider itself dissolved; in 1433 he gave way for a time, but in 1437 he dissolved it again. Nevertheless it remained in session till 1448, by which time it was obvious to all that the Pope had won a complete triumph. In 1439 the Council had alienated sympathy by declaring the Pope deposed and electing an antipope (the last in history), who, however, resigned almost immediately. In the same year Eugenius IV won prestige by holding a Council of his own at Ferrara, where the Greek Church, in desperate fear of the Turks, made a nominal submission to Rome. The papacy thus emerged politically triumphant, but with very greatly diminished power of inspiring moral reverence.

Wycliffe (ca. 1320–84) illustrates, by his life and doctrine, the diminished authority of the papacy in the fourteenth century. Unlike the earlier schoolmen, he was a secular priest, not a monk or friar. He had a great reputation in Oxford, where he became a doctor of theology in 1372. For a short time he was Master of Balliol. He was the last of the important Oxford scholastics. As a philosopher, he was not progressive; he was a realist, and a Platonist rather than an