Volume I Part 2 (1/2)
A body of theologians of admitted eminence necessarily spoke with authority. In France the decisions of the Sorbonne were accepted as final upon almost all questions affecting the doctrine and practice of the Church. Abroad its opinions were esteemed of little less weight than the deliberate judgments of synods. Difficulties in church and state were referred to it for solution. In the age of the reformation the Sorbonne was invited to p.r.o.nounce upon the truth or falsity of the propositions maintained by Martin Luther, and, a few years later, upon the validity of the grounds of the divorce sought by Henry the Eighth of England. But, unhappily, the reputation of the faculty was tarnished by scholastic bigotry. Slavish attachment to the past had destroyed freedom of thought. With a species of inconsistency not altogether without a parallel in history, the very body which had been active in the promotion of science during the Middle Ages a.s.sumed the posture of resistance the moment that the advocates of substantial reform urged the necessity of immediate action. Abuses which had provoked the indignation of Gerson, once Chancellor of the University of Paris, and employed the skilful pen of the bold Rector Nicholas de Clemangis, met with no word of condemnation from the new generation of theologians.
Such was the Sorbonne of the beginning of the sixteenth century, when intriguing doctors, such as Beda and Quercu, ruled in its deliberations.
An enemy of liberal studies as well as of the ”new doctrines,” the faculty of theology was as ready to attack Erasmus for his devotion to ancient literature, or Jacques Lefevre for establis.h.i.+ng the existence of the ”three Marys,” as to denounce the Bishop of Meaux for favoring ”Lutheran” preachers in his diocese. Against all innovators in church or state, the sentiments of the Sorbonne, which it took no pains to conceal, were that ”their impious and shameless arrogance must be restrained by chains, by censures--nay, by fire and flame--rather than vanquished by argument!”[44]
[Sidenote: Number of students.]
Meanwhile, in the external marks of prosperity the University of Paris was still in its prime at the period of which I speak. The colleges, cl.u.s.tered together in the southern quarter of the city--the present _Quartier Latin_--were so numerous and populous that this portion continued for many years after to be distinguished as _l'
Universite_.[45] The number of students, it is true, had visibly diminished since one hundred years before. The crowd of youth in attendance was no longer so great as in 1409, when, according to a contemporary, the head of a scholastic procession to the Church of Saint Denis had already reached the sacred shrine before the rector had left the Church of the _Mathurins_ in the Rue Saint Jacques, a point full six miles distant.[46] Yet the report of Giustiniano, in 1535, stated it as the current belief that the university still had twenty-five thousand students in attendance, although this seemed to be an exaggerated estimate. ”For the most part,” he added, ”they are young, for everybody, however poor he may be, learns to read and write.”[47] Another amba.s.sador, writing eleven years later, represents the students, now numbering sixteen or twenty thousand, as extremely poor. Their instructors, he tells us, received very modest salaries; yet, so great was the honor attaching to the post of teacher within the university walls, that the compet.i.tion for professorial chairs was marvellously active.[48]
The influence of the clergy fell little short of that of the university in moderating the arbitrary impulses of the monarch.
[Sidenote: The Gallican liberties.]
The Gallican Church had for many centuries been distinguished for a manly defence of its liberties against the encroachments of the Papal court. Tenacious of the maintenance of doctrinal unity with the See of Rome, the French prelates early met the growing a.s.sumption of the Popes with determined courage. At the suggestion of the clergy, and with their full concurrence, more than one French king adopted stringent regulations intended to protect the kingdom from becoming the prey of foreigners. Church and State were equally interested in the successful prosecution of a warfare carried on, so far as the French were concerned, in a strictly defensive manner. The Papal treasury, under guise of _annats_, laid claim to the entire income of the bishopric or other benefice for the first year after each new appointment. It seized upon the revenues of vacant ecclesiastical offices, which the king specially affected. Every bull or brief needed to secure induction into office--and the number of these articles was almost unlimited--was procured at a heavy expense. Further sums were exacted for p.r.o.nouncing a dispensation in favor of those appointees whom youth or some other canonical impediment incapacitated for the acceptance and discharge of the requisite functions.
[Sidenote: Objects of the Gallican party.]
The main objects of both crown and clergy were, consequently, to secure the kingdom from the disastrous results of the interference of Italians in the domestic affairs of France; to preserve the treasure of the realm from exhaustion resulting from the levy of arbitrary imposts fixed by irresponsible aliens, and exacted through the terrors of ecclesiastical penalties; to prevent the right of election to lucrative livings from falling into the hands of those who would use the privilege only as a means of acquiring riches; and to rescue clergymen themselves from being hurried away for trial beyond the confines of their native land, and possibly from suffering hopeless confinement in Roman dungeons. In a word, it was the aim of the Gallican party to prove that ”the government of the church is not a despotism.”[49]
[Sidenote: Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis.]
It is a somewhat anomalous circ.u.mstance that the first decided step in repressing the arrogant claims of the Papal See was taken by a monarch whose singular merits have been deemed worthy of canonization by the Roman Church. Louis the Ninth had witnessed with alarm the rapid strides of the Papacy toward universal dominion. His pride was offended by the pretension of the Pontiff to absolute superiority; his sovereign rights were a.s.sailed when taxes were levied in France at the pleasure of a foreign priest and prince. He foresaw that this abuse was likely to take deep root unless promptly met by a formal declaration placing the rights of the French monarch and nation in their true light. For this reason he issued in 1268 a solemn edict, which, as emanating from the unconstrained will of the king, took the name of the ”_Pragmatic Sanction_ of Saint Louis.”
The preamble of this famous ordinance, upon the authenticity of which doubts have been unnecessarily cast,[50] declares the object of the king to be to secure the safety and tranquillity of the church of his realm, the advancement of divine wors.h.i.+p, the salvation of the souls of Christ's faithful people, and the attainment of the favor and help of Almighty G.o.d. To his sole jurisdiction and protection had France ever been subject, and so did Louis desire it to remain. The provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction were directed chiefly to guarding the freedom of election and of collation to benefices, and to prohibiting the imposition of any form of taxes by the Pope upon ecclesiastical property in France, save by previous consent of the prince and clergy.[51]
In this brief doc.u.ment had been laid the foundation of the liberties of the Gallican Church, not under the form of novel legislation, but of a summary of previous usage.
[Sidenote: Philip the Fair and Boniface.]
Political reasons, not long after the death of Louis, gave new vigor to the policy of opposition to which this king had pledged France. His grandson, the resolute Philip the Fair, found fresh incitement in the extravagant conduct of a contemporary Pope, Boniface the Eighth. The bold ideas advanced by Hildebrand in the eleventh, and carried into execution by Innocent the Third in the thirteenth century, were wrought into the very texture of the soul of Boniface, and could not be concealed, in spite of the altered condition of mediaeval society.
Intolerant, headstrong, and despotic, he undertook to exercise a theocratic rule, and commanded contending monarchs to lay down their arms, and submit their disputes to his arbitrament. To such a summons Philip was not inclined to submit. The crafty and unscrupulous prince, whose contempt for divine law was evidenced by his shameless practice of injustice, whose coffers were filled indifferently by the confiscation of the rich spoils of the commanderies of the Templars, and by recklessly debasing the national currency, did not hesitate to engage in a contest with the most presumptuous of Popes. He appealed to the States General, and all three orders indignantly repudiated the suggestion that their country had ever stood to the Papacy in the relation of a fief.
The disastrous example of the English John Lackland had found no imitator on the southern side of the channel. The Pope was declared a heretic. Emissaries of Louis seized him in his native city of Anagni, within the very bounds of the ”Patrimony of St. Peter,” and the rough usage to which he was then subjected hastened his death. His successors on the pontifical throne proved somewhat more tractable.
[Sidenote: The Popes at Avignon.]
During his short and unimportant pontificate, Benedict the Eleventh restored to the chapters of cathedrals the right of electing their own bishops. Upon his death, Philip secured the elevation to the pontifical dignity of an ecclesiastic wholly devoted to French interests, the facile Clement the Fifth, who, in return for the honor conferred upon him, removed the seat of the Papacy to Avignon. Here for the seventy years of the so-called ”Babylonish Captivity,” the Popes continued to reside, too completely subject to the influence of the French monarchs to dream of resuming their tone of defiance, but scarcely less exacting than before of homage from other rulers. In fact, the burden of the pecuniary exactions of the Popes rather grew than diminished with the change from Rome to Avignon, and with the inst.i.tution of rival claimants to the tiara, each requiring an equal sum to support the pomp of his court, but recognized as legitimate by only a portion of Christendom.
The devices for drawing tribute from all quarters were multiplied to an almost insupportable extent. So effectual did they prove, that no pontiff, perhaps, ever left at his death a more enormous acc.u.mulation of treasure than one of the Popes of Avignon, John the Twenty-second. Much of this wealth was derived from the rich provinces of France.
[Sidenote: The Schism.]
Close upon the ”Captivity” followed the ”Schism,” during which the generally acknowledged Popes, who had returned to Rome, were opposed by pretenders at Avignon and elsewhere. A double incentive was now given to the monarchs of Europe for setting bounds to the ambition of the Papacy.
For while the Popes, through the loss of a great part of their authority and prestige, had become less formidable antagonists, their financial extortions had waxed so intolerable as to suggest the strongest arguments appealing to the self-interest of kings. Hence the frequency with which the demand for ”a reformation in the head and the members”
resounded from all parts of the Western Church. And hence, too, those memorable councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle, which, coming in rapid succession at the commencement of the fifteenth century, bade fair to prove the forerunners of a radical reformation. It does not belong here to discuss the causes of their failure to answer this reasonable expectation. Yet with one of these a.s.semblages is closely connected a very important incident in the history of the Gallican Church.
[Sidenote: The Council of Bourges.]
The Council of Basle had not yet concluded its protracted sessions when Charles the Seventh summoned the clergy of France to meet him in the city of Bourges. The times were troublous. The kingdom was rent with intestine division. A war was still raging, during the progress of which the victorious arms of the English had driven the king from his capital and deprived him of more than one-half of his dominions. The work of reinstating the royal authority, though well begun by the wonderful interposition of the Maid of Orleans, was as yet by no means complete.