Search Results

This chapter examines the role of the Council of Constance in addressing not only the threat posed at both ends of Europe by the Wycliffite and Hussite heresies, but also the pent-up demand for reform in the Roman Catholic Church that had been mounting in urgency for at least a century and a half. Constance made a more effective response to the demand for church-wide reform than historians in the past were usually willing to concede. In order to comprehend the formidable nature of the challenges the council was to confront, this chapter looks at the fundamental and long-term disabilities under which the medieval Church had persistently laboured, as well as the immediate, near-term circumstances precipitating the crisis that finally overtook it in the late 14th century.

Although an uneasy peace was maintained in the years after Photius, during the tenth and eleventh centuries political, cultural, and religious factors rapidly drove East and West further part. The mutual excommunications of Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius in 1054, often called the beginning of the “Great Schism” between East and West, reignited the filioque debate, as its omission from/addition to the creed came to be seen as sign of the other’s heretical ways. While the Greek-speaking East continued to rely heavily on the claims put forward in the Mystagogia, Latin scholastic theologians like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas advanced an entirely new series of arguments in favor of the doctrine. Theological encounters between the two sides (with some notable exceptions) only exacerbated the tension, and following the Fourth Crusade there seemed little chance of healing the breach that had grown up between Christian East and West.

This chapter examines the roots of conciliarism in the Roman Catholic Church during the 15th century. It focuses on the pattern of conciliarist thinking that rose to prominence during the years stretching from the onset of schism in 1378 to the dissolution of the Council of Basel in 1449. One strand in the conciliarist thinking of the classical era sought to give institutional expression to the Church's corporate nature by envisaging its constitution in quasi-oligarchic terms, its government ordinarily in the hands of the curia, and the pope being in some measure limited in the exercise of his power by that of the cardinalate, with whose ‘advice, consent, direction, and remembrance’ he had to rule. This point of view inspired the dissident cardinals in 1378 when they rejected the demand for a general council and took it upon themselves to pass judgement on the validity of Urban VI's election, thereby precipitating the Great Schism.

For a Church with a global presence and the drawbacks attendant upon so marked a degree of centralized monarchical control combined with so small a measure of jurisdictional accountability, it is puzzling that the memory of the age-old constitutionalist strand in the Catholic ecclesiological experience appears to have been repressed. One would have thought that ecclesiologists and reformist churchmen might more frequently have found something of value in a constitutionalist tradition that had contrived somehow to endure for more than half a millennium. Also, that ecclesiologists might by now have become a little more conscious of the confusion and disarray prevalent in Catholic circles in face of the interpretative challenges posed by the Great Schism, the 15th-century councils, and their historic enactments. However, that has not proved to be the case, and one can only speculate, by way of conclusion, upon the consequences that may well follow from that particular failure to attend to the past.

This introductory chapter presents a comprehensive biography of Marquard von Lindau, constructed from a new examination of the original documentary evidence. The biography considers in particular depth Marquard's role in the Great Schism, his tenure as provincial minister of the South German province of the Franciscan Order, and his disputations with the Prague rabbi Yom‐Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen. A thematic overview and categorization of his numerous and diverse works is offered for the reader's orientation, and sketches drawn of the milieu in which Marquard operated and the audience for which he wrote. The introduction localizes Marquard's pragmatic works within the late medieval development of ‘Frömmigkeitstheologie’, and builds on Berndt Hamm's theory surrounding that concept, and that of ‘normative Zentrierung’, to position Marquard's oeuvre within the history of pre‐Reformation ideas.

The long, drawn‐out‐division between Eastern and Western Christianity, the Great Schism, arose, in part, because of the addition of the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed. In and around this, the Western Church introduced radical changes in the status of the bishop of Rome and in the list of Fathers. Both these developments represent a move to bring epistemology into the very heart of the Church. Thus the division between East and West was more than a political operation; it involved subtle changes in the way the canonical heritage of the Church was identified and construed. In particular, the informal adoption of papal infallibility marked a radical shift in perspective within the life of the Church as a whole.

This chapter speaks about stability of canon law during the later Middle Ages and the early Tudor period. The contrast between the stability of this period and the advances in law that had taken place during the 12th and 13th centuries is dramatic. Relatively few changes in the nature of the law, its sources and its institutions, are to be found in the records of the later Middle Ages. Despite its stability overall, the history of the canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England from the last half of the 13th century to the start of the reign of Elizabeth was not without incident. Within the canon law itself, notable events occurred. Provisions were enacted to deal with the contests between the mendicant friars and the secular clergy. Legislation related to the Conciliar movement and the Great Schism was adopted.

This prologue provides a background of Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar who later received papal canonization. Ferrer was born in Valencia in 1350, two years after the Black Death devastated Europe. His adulthood would be marked by the years of the Great Schism (1378–1414) that divided the “seamless garment of Christ” into two and then three papal obediences, and his career played itself out against a backdrop of persistent political crises: the Schism, the Hundred Years' War, rising hostility against religious minorities on the Iberian Peninsula, and a change of dynasty in the Crown of Aragon that paved the way for the unification of Spain. Vincent entered the Dominican order in the convent in Valencia in the winter of 1367, taking his vows the following February. He then acquired a reputation as a teacher, preacher, and peacemaker, later accepting the chair in theology at the Valencia cathedral in 1385.

This chapter details changes engendered in the eleventh century by the pontificates of Popes Leo IX (1048–54) and Gregory VII (1073–85), when papal reformers argued that the papacy’s divine mandate required recognition of the pope’s complete authority over all ecclesial and secular powers. Yet even after the excommunications of 1054 the debate was not about the primacy itself, except to ask how the pope could maintain that position while embracing “heretical” teachings (e.g., the filioque and use of azymes). It was not until the crusades that this changed and a series of Byzantine authors brought forward the arguments against the primacy that would characterize Orthodox polemics for the next several centuries. For this reason this period marks, perhaps better than the definitions of 1870, the real “point of no return” vis-à-vis the East’s attitude toward the papacy, when diverse understandings of the Roman primacy truly became ecclesiologically incompatible.

In late medieval Bologna and Liège, urban warfare represented a particularly frequent mode of conflict. This was reflected, and in turn stimulated, by a political framework of rich, but highly unsettled, internal and external political units. Unusually politicized ecclesiastical institutions in Liège and a powerful university-related agency in Bologna, as well as guilds and parties or factions in both cities were well-resourced, but lacked integration into a coherent political framework. All this had the effect of stimulating or even forcing city dwellers to seek ever newly-configured political coalitions, which often relied on violence to establish themselves. Internal volatility was complemented by volatility outside the city walls: neighbouring cities in the hinterland of Liège and powerful forces in Bologna’s contado, external warfare and the Great Schism all contributed to this unstable environment, and fuelled the extraordinary frequency of revolt in Bologna and Liège.

This chapter introduces the reader to issues involved in studying the papacy’s reception and/or rejection in the Christian East. While other theological issues (e.g., the filioque and the use leavened/unleavened bread in the Eucharist) might have caused the schism between East and West, most today would agree that today “the primacy of Rome is the principal obstacle standing in the way of [Catholicism’s] reconstituted unity with the Orthodox Church.” Examining the sources and history of the debate may not immediately solve the so-called “problem of the papacy,” but an objective reading of the biblical, patristic, and historical evidence may go a long way toward understanding it.