Some basic teachings of medieval Christianity have to be outlined first.
1. We live in a fallen, imperfect world.
2. The church taught that there were two complementary roads
to
salvation.
Nonetheless, the church provided a variety of self-help methods by which one could improve the odds. By the fifteenth century, the number of meritorious actions and devotions available was extremely large. Let's look at some of these, beginning with a closer examination of the sacraments.
Strategies of salvation
The Eucharist, or communion, was perhaps the key one for late medieval
Christians. The reason for this is simple. Jesus had very clearly
commanded Christians to eat bread and wine together, and had said that
when done appropriately that bread and wine was his body and blood.
In other words, communion was direct contact with the Savior. Participating
in
communion, or even attending the mass where the body and blood was
recreated, were acts that gave grace, at least if you were in the right
state of mind.
Penance, or confessing one's sins to a priest, was a less common activity for most people, but very important nonetheless. One could not avoid sinning, and so one had to make amends to God. Admitting one's fault, being forgiven to a priest, and then working off one's guilt in whatever way the priest prescribed, was how one made peace with God. This procedure paralleled the ending of a feud between human beings. In fact, confession had a social aspect. One could not be at peace with God unless one was at peace with the neighbors, and was willing to end one's disputes with them.
There were less direct but still effective approaches to God. One was through devotion to the saints, the holy dead who were with God in paradise. This was a very old part of Christianity, with its origins in the early martyr cults in the days of persecution.
By the fifteenth century there were thousands of saints, most of whom
were less fearsome and more approachable, almost like friends or godparents.
In fact the adoption of saints' names as personal names in the Middle Ages
was an
effort to forge a special link with one saint who would be part of
the family.
Saints and penance come together in the practice of the pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage sprang from the feeling that to be where some holy event
had taken place, or where the testimony of it still existed, was good for
the
soul.
Relics were often part of the body of a saint, or his or her clothing, or something that had come into contact with him or her or even just the tomb. Seeking such things out was not just inspirational. Relics had power, power to cast out demons or cure the body. This belief in cures cannot be dismissed as paganism or superstition. It was a basic part of the faith.
Pilgrimage, leaving home, family, and safety, was one form of asceticism,
of renunciation. Lay people quite
commonly gave up food, sex, and comfortable clothing, temporarily or
permanently, and even beat themselves to subdue the flesh and to focus
their minds on repentence for sin and eternal life. Perhaps the most
common ascetic practice was fasting, for it was prescribed by the clergy
for all Christians on certain days, especially during Lent, the 40 days
before Easter, when meat, milk, butter, cheese and eggs, were all to be
given up. Besides the compulsory, or at least prescribed fasts, there
were those
people took on voluntarily.
The mass itself was a sacrifice to God: it was considered a repetition of Christ's original sacrifice of himself on the cross. It was particularly important to have masses said for you after you were dead. This practice was quite old, and had inspired many early medieval kings and nobles to found monasteries, in the hopes that holy men gathered praying around the relics of their holy founder would do some good for the benefactor, during life and after death.
By the later Middle Ages, this had grown into a full-fledged doctrine
of purgatory. If you died with serious sins on your soul, there was
no help for you, you were damned. But even if you had confessed them
before death, and been forgiven, immediate entrance to heaven was not likely.
There was still the satisfaction due to God; until you had paid the satisfaction,
made recompense, or someone had done it for you, you suffered in an
unpleasant ante-room of heaven called purgatory. One thing that could
help you out was the prayers of the living, and especially masses.
Thus there was a great trade in masses. Rich people set up funds
to make sure those masses were said, eternally.
The doctrine of purgatory encouraged people to do something that they
had already been doing for quite a while -- form fraternities or guilds
in which the members acted as a spiritual (and earthly) mutual aid society.
It was the fraternities that built many of the chapels and side altars
to be seen in medieval churches. They also prayed for each other
and their
departed brethern on a personal basis.
Finally, what we think of as charity was also a method of gaining merit, and easing one's way into heaven. Charity meant, among many other things, personal "volunteer work" among the sick, poor, and prisoners, especially one's own hard-up friends, not just giving money.
These traditional practices provided, in potential at least, the Christians
of the fifteenth century with a
multitude of religious outlets that met many emotional and even practical
needs.
The practice of the Christian religion had important implications for
life on this earth. John Bossy, a recent scholar of the church in
the early modern period, has argued eloquently that traditional Christianity,
which had grown up largely in a fragmented, localized society, was one
method of keeping the peace between but especially within communities.
In the fifteenth century, this function was still a necessary one.
In the later Middle Ages, charity was not mainly good deeds directed to
strangers, but what one tried to practice every day towards one's immediate
neighbors. The sins of indulgence, like lust, gluttony, and sloth,
were somewhat less important than the sins that disrupted decent human
concourse, such as envy, pride, and avarice.
Of course solidarity has its down side, which is the exclusion of the outsider. The ultimate outsiders in a Christian society were the Jews, who as the supposed killers of Christ were the ultimate enemy. Jews at the beginning of early modern times had already been expelled from a number of countries and would be expelled or ghettoized in many more before it was over. In Spain, the idea that Jews were a race apart and that any trace of Jewish blood made one suspect was becoming stronger all the time -- an explosive idea in a country where there was a large and very ancient Jewish population. The same kind of ideas would influence Martin Luther.
Heretics, religious rebels, were equally despised, and for unclear reasons the fear of witches was increasing. But enmity with other Christians easily broke out. As in normal life, a close tie with some people often meant acquiring the enemies of your friends at the same time. As families feuded, so did cardinals, fraternities, religious orders, universities (still church run), and perhaps even their patron saints.
This vast structure of salvation-oriented activities, and social-religious alliances was more complex than it ever had been in the fifteenth century. The amount of merit that could be earned by each prayer, mass, or action, or even by contributing to a church-sanctioned cause, could be calculated to the last day of purgatory avoided. Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who became almost despite himself Martin Luther's chief protector, began his religious life as a champion collector of relics: such things as a piece of yarn spun by the Virgin Mary, a piece of Jesus's diaper, two pieces of hay from the manger, and a piece of the burning bush from which the Lord spoke to Moses [Reformation, 47-48]. By 1520 the collection included 19,013 relics, and viewing them at the right time as established by a papal grant, would would excuse you from 1,902,202 years and 270 days of purgatory, according to the official inventory [Bainton, 53]. Similarly with saints. Every saint had some affliction or disaster that he or she was good for -- and they could take on new functions as necessary.
Even at the time, the very complexity of this structure was criticized by some as a distraction from the serious business of true penitence, which should involve a true change of heart. The Protestant reformers were able to take over many denunciations from earlier times when they denounced indulgences, masses for the dead, and other mechanical-looking devotions.
Certainly some of the complexity of fifteenth-century Christendom was
dysfunctional. The church was not only a constellation of families
seeking salvation and peaceful co-existence, it was also a hierarchy in
which different groups held different privileges, powers, and property
rights.
There was a lot of conflict between these various branches of the clergy,
not just over different pastoral philosophies, or different theological
preferences, but over rights and money. The church had a dispute
resolution mechanism, the papal court, but it was weakened by a couple
of factors. The pope, his cardinals, and his officials, known
collectively as the papal curia or court, were also a privileged
group (actually several) with their own financial interests and the right
to judge and tax all other members of the clergy. Thus they were
not trusted by the rest, and this weakened a theoretically strong authority.
Second,
one of the easiest ways that the curia could raise money was by selling
exemptions to the rules it was meant to uphold. This was sometimes
justified, but when done routinely, as it was, it reduced respect both
for the rules and for the papacy.
The clergy as a whole was privileged in respect to the lay people, who
ultimately paid much of the freight. Non-clerics were subject to
clerical judgement in a number of areas, especially in marriage; they paid
tithes and other taxes to support parish churches and other institutions;
they paid rent to ecclesiastical landlords. All these things could
irritate, but on top of payments to the clergy was the fact that the clergy
did not pay taxes to secular authorities (at least most of the time) and
did not
undertake civic duties that fell all the more heavily on everyone else.
(That these privileges were severely eroded in recent years was not necessarily
obvious.)
Nor were only laypeople upset. There were many clerics, too,
who denounced the hierarchy, the morals of the clergy, even the papacy
itself. We've already mentioned John Wyclif; Savonarola, the famous
preacher of late 15th c. Florence compared the church of his time unfavorably
with that of the early fathers: "In the primitive church the chalices
were of wood, the prelates [leaders] of gold; in these days the church
has chalices of gold and prelates of wood" [Aston, 126].
The fifteenth century saw no great turning away from the church. Yet all was not well. Two long, debilitating crises underlined the problems and reduced support for the institutions that gave a shape to the western church (in its own view the catholic, that is, universal church). I will just briefly mention them.
First was the papal schism of the late 14th and early 15th century. During the early 14th century disorder in Italy had forced the popes to move to Avignon in southern France, where they stayed for about 60 years. In that time French clerics came to dominate the papal bureaucracy and supply most of the popes. There was a lot of pressure to return to Rome, and eventually a pope did return. When he died, though, Italian and French cardinals each elected a successor, and for nearly 40 years there were two competing papal courts, and at one point, three.
The clerical theory was that the pope was the vicar of Jesus Christ, with delegated powers from the Savior to lead, judge, and discipline the church. The split (schism) made a laughing stock of what should have been the leading figure of Christendom (at least, in the west). Popes lost real power, too, as the competing courts bribed monarchs with powers and privileges to guarantee their support. Eventually the schism was ended, but the prestige of the papacy was gravely wounded.
Second, at about the same time as the papal schism, in the early 15th century, there was a major revolt against the international church in Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). Disgust with the corruption of the clergy and the monarchy, combined with a revival of Czech nationalism against German and other "outside" elements, led to a religiously-motivated "Hussite" uprising (named after Jan Hus, who was executed by the international church for heresy in 1415). This uprising pitted a revolutionary Czech state against all of its neighbors (think of the Iranian revolution). The best efforts of various Catholic powers succeeded only in forcing the Czechs to withdraw support from the most violent and doctrinally extreme elements of the movement. When peace was ultimately made, papal authority was not restored in Bohemia and Moravia.
Thus almost a century before Martin Luther a central European country (right next door to Luther's Saxony, in fact) had withdrawn from the international (Catholic) church and set up its own state church, teaching doctrines in some ways similar to later Protestantism.
Though it would be unfair to call the church of the 15th century irredemiably corrupt, it was clear, long before Luther was born, that the structure as a whole was beginning to fall apart.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Margaret Aston, The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of
Europe .
Roland Bainton, Here I Stand
John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700
Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Reformation
Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.