Volume 3, Chapter 3

THE RETURN OF ST. PETER TO ROME, 1362-1420

Section 1: INFELIX ITALIA, 1305--1367

Section 2: THE POPES LEAVE AVIGNON, 1362-1378

Section 3: CHRISTIAN LIFE, MYSTICS, THINKERS

Section 4: THE SCHISM OF THE WEST, 1378-1409

Section 5: THE CHURCH UNDER THE COUNCILS, 1409-1418

INFELIX ITALIA, 1305--1367

WITH the death of Innocent VI in 1362 and the election of Urban V to succeed him, a new stage begins in the history of the "Avignon Captivity." There now comes to an end the only time when the papacy can really be said to have seemed stably fixed there. At no time was it any part of the policy of these Avignon popes to establish the papacy permanently outside of Italy. What had kept the first of them -- Clement V -- in France throughout his short reign was a succession of political accidents and crises. His successor, John XXII, strove for nearly twenty years -- as will be shown -- to make Italy a safe place for popes to return to and to dwell in. But he failed disastrously. And it was upon that failure that there followed the long central period of the Avignon residence -- the reigns of Benedict XII, Clement VI and Innocent VI -- when for the popes to return to Italy was something altogether outside the range of practical politics. It is this period, [659] of enforced stable acquiescence in the exile, which the election of Urban V brings to an end. For with this pope the idea of the return to Rome now begins once again to inspire papal policy, and in 1367 Urban V actually realised the idea.

Now, whatever the personal preference of any of these popes for residence in his own country, and whatever the pressure exercised over their choice by the various French kings, there was another, permanent, factor, beyond any power of the popes to control, which, throughout the period, was, time and again, a final deciding consideration against any movement to return. This factor was the political condition of Italy. The anxious dilemma which these popes had to face was not of the* making, although -- it can hardly be denied -- by every year of the* absence from Italy they increased the difficulties that stood in the way of the* return. It was, in essence, the dilemma as old as the Papal State itself, and indeed older still. How was the central organ of the Christian religion -- the papacy -- to be securely independent of every other power in the exercise of its authority as teacher and spiritual ruler of the Christian Church? The papacy would not be regarded as free in its action ii the popes were subjects of any particular prince. Therefore the popes must themselves be sovereigns. But once the popes are sovereigns, there is not only created a state where the ruler is elected but -- because of that state's geographical situation -- an elective sovereignty whose policies have a vital effect on all that international Mediterranean life which, in those days, is the Western world's very centre. Control of the papacy, once the pope is sovereign, is indeed a prize; and inevitably, with the establishment of the Papal State, the competition begins among the noblesse of the Papal State to capture the prize for their own families. Inevitably, too, one extra-Italian power, the emperor, is never indifferent to this competition. Constantly he intervenes -- to protect the papacy from its barons, and to seize the prize for himself, in order to make the papacy an organ of his own government. Never, for nearly three hundred years after the first establishment of the Papal State (754), are the popes so strong as temporal rulers that they can control their own barons without that assistance from the emperor for which they, yet, must pay by some new surrender of freedom.

Then the great series of monk -- popes, of whom Hildebrand -- St. Gregory VII -- is the most famous, finds a way out of the dilemma. In a spirit of wholly unworldly zeal for the restoration of the spiritual, these popes denounce the protecting emperor's encroachment on their spiritual jurisdiction as a sin; they reject it, and defy him to do his worst. Thence come the first of the mighty wars between empire and papacy that fill the next two centuries (1074-1254).

These popes of the Hildebrandine restoration are first of all monks and apostles; and, because they are men of holy life, moved to action by horror at the universal degradation of Christian life, they manage to use the temporal arm without prejudice to the wholeness of their own spirituality, and without any such scandal emerging as the encouragement of clerical ambition disguised as zeal for the gospel. [660] Their successors, if good men and fighting for the best of causes, are yet not saints. They are not sufficiently careful about the purification of the means they needs must use -- law, diplomacy, the military arts, their financial system, their own characters, the characters of all their subordinates, and of their allies. And by the time when they too achieve victory over the would-be temporal lord of the world of religion, the ecclesiastical character shows evident signs of grave deterioration.

The most serious sign of this in the papal action would seem to be that, as though the Church were a great temporal state, it is in the natural, political and military arts that the popes now chiefly put their trust. There is a difference in kind between the spirit at work in the wars of St. Gregory VII against Henry IV, and in those of Boniface VIII against Philip the Fair, or those of John XXII against Lewis of Bavaria. The golden key to the eternal dilemma, found by St. Gregory VII, has indeed, by these later successors, been dropped in the dust; and once more the Church suffers because the popes are victims of the dilemma. Are they to go back into Italy and to Rome? Then they must be certain that they can live there safe from the rebellion of their own barons and the Roman mob, and so be strong that no foreign prince will think of assailing them. There must be security that Anagni will not be repeated. The Papal State must, for the future, be something like what all states are from now on to be, a strong kingdom, in every part of which the prince really rules. Before the pope can go back to Rome a whole world of anti-papal Italian turbulence must first be conquered. There is now no other way in, but by a victorious war.

At the time when the election of Clement V began the series of Avignon popes (1305), it was more than eight hundred years since Italy had been effectively united under a single political authority. The name was, quite truly, no more than a geographical expression. The island of Sicily formed, since 1302, the kingdom officially styled Trinacria; the southern half of the peninsula was the kingdom called, now and henceforth, Naples; an irregular central Italian territory formed the Papal State, over the greater part of which the papal rule had never been much more than a name; the rest -- Tuscany, Lombardy, Liguria, the ancient March of Verona -- was, for the most part, still the territory of a multitude of city states. Some of these communes were still republics, the great trading and maritime states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa for example, Florence again and Lucca; others had already become the prize of those great families whose names are household words, at Verona the della Scala, at Milan the Visconti, at Ferrara the Este, at Mantua the Gonzaga; and these last states were despotisms, where the princes' whims were indeed law. In the north-west corner a group of states survived of the kind more general in western Europe, feudal in their organisation, the marquisate of Montferrat, the marquisate of Saluzzo and a border state -- as much French as Italian -- the county of Savoy.

The history of the relations of the exiled papacy to the seething political life of an Italy so divided is far too complex to be intelligible, unless the story is told in a detail which the scale of this book altogether forbids. Briefly it may be said that Sicily and Naples play very little part in that history; the King of Naples is, usually, the pope's more or less inactive ally throughout. The main problem for the popes is, first, to recover control of the Papal State that has, in effect, fallen into a score of fragments, each the possession now of the local strong man, or of some lucky adventurer; and then, simultaneously with this, to regain the old papal influence in the leading small states to the north of the Papal State, most of which are now dominated by the anti-papal, Ghibelline faction. So long as the papal faction is not dominant in these city states (whether they are still republics or, like Milan, ruled by a "tyrant") the popes can never hope for peace in their own restless frontier provinces, and especially in Bologna, the most important of all their cities after Rome.

The turning point of the story that begins with Clement V, in 1305, is the despatch to Italy, as legate, of the Spanish cardinal Gil Albornoz in 1353. Until that great man's appearance on the Italian scene, the story is one long tale of incompetence and disaster. It is Albornoz who makes all the difference. It is the ten years of his military campaigns, and of his most statesmanlike moderation as ruler, which at last make it possible for the popes to return to Rome as sovereigns.

The tale of disaster is simple enough to tell, in its essentials. The first chapter is the military action of Clement V in defence of his rights over the city of Ferrara and its surrounding hinterland. When his vassal, Azzo d'Este, died in 1308, it was found that the dead man had bequeathed the succession to his natural son. But Azzo had two brothers, and they disputed this son's right. Whence came a civil war and an appeal, by both sides, to "the foreigner": to Padua by the brothers, to Venice by the son. The son was victorious and Padua, deserting the brothers, went over to him. The brothers appealed to their overlord the pope. Clement thought he saw his chance to recover the old direct hold over Ferrara, always a highly important strategic point in Italian affairs, and now not unlikely to become more a Venetian possession than papal. Venice had, in fact, already won a concession of territory from her Ferrarese protege and ally. So, in August 1308, a war began between the pope and Venice which was to last for a good five years. The pope was finally victorious, and, it is important to note, in the war he used the spiritual arm at least as effectively as the temporal. For he excommunicated the Venetians, put their lands under interdict, and declared the war against them to be a crusade; all who joined in against Venice were, by the fact, enriched (supposing, of course, true contrition for their sins and reception of the necessary sacraments) with all those spiritual favours once only to be had by the toilsome business of fighting the Saracens in the Holy Land. The small states that for years had hated and feared the great republic eagerly joined the alliance. Soon Venetian commerce began to feel the effect of the boycott, and a peace movement began. But the pope inexorably demanded unconditional surrender, and at last Venice had to yield. The republic gave up all the rights it had acquired over Ferrara, agreed to pay the costs of the war, and to surrender many of the commercial advantages and treaty rights which had been one great source of its power in the north.

The pope had won -- and now he had to provide for the government of a singularly turbulent city. The chronic weakness of these French popes showed itself immediately. Clement would trust none but the French -- until, after four years of bloodily inefficient rule under French administrators, the state of affairs at Ferrara compelled him to withdraw them and to offer the rule of the city to the King of Naples. This semi-French administration fared no better than the other; and in three years the Ferrarese had driven out the Neapolitans and recalled the Este. Except for the huge cost of the war to the papal finances, and the huge mass of anti- papal hatred in Ferrara, things were now, in 1317, where they had been before the war started.

Clement V was as ill-advised in beginning the war of Ferrara as he was ill-starred in his victory. But at least he had for a reason the solid fact that a valuable possession of the Church was threatened -- something that was actually his, and valuable from the point of view of the independence of the Papal State. The next war, however -- of John XXII in Lombardy and Emilia -- originated in a claim of the pope that since there was no emperor he had the rights of the emperor, and so the right to interfere in the internal affairs of Milan (that was never a papal city at all), and to demand of its anti-papal ruler, Matteo Visconti, that he surrender to the pope the one-time pro-papal ruler of Milan whom he had long ago displaced and since held in prison. The demand was refused, and there followed eighteen years of war.

The pope looked round for allies but, this time, they were not forthcoming. Then he declared the war against the Visconti a crusade (1322), and presently Milan -- which the pope had laid under an interdict [661] -- forced out its excommunicated leader. Next, when John seemed on the point of victory, Lewis of Bavaria intervened on the Visconti side (1324), as has been told already. [662] In 1327, however, the pope was once more master of Bologna, and he planned to make this his headquarters, and to transfer the curia from Avignon. But first the Ghibelline hold upon northern Italy must be really destroyed. The King of Bohemia [663] now, in 1330, came to the pope's aid, and John XXII, taking up a great scheme that went back to the days of Nicholas III, [664] proposed to carve out for him in Lombardy a new hereditary kingdom, to be held in fief of the Holy See. The Sicilian experiment was now to be renewed in the north, Italians again to be ruled by a foreigner under the papal suzerainty, for the benefit of the Papal States and the freedom of the Church (1331). But upon the news of this new combination, all parties, Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the cities, came together. Twice in the one year (1333) the papal armies were defeated; the King of Bohemia abandoned the enterprise; Bologna revolted and drove out the papal government and then, in March 1334, John's legate, at the end of his resources after these many years of struggle, fled the country. With his return to Avignon, in the spring of 1334, the last hope for John XXII's great scheme disappeared. "The return of the Holy See to Italy, bound up so closely with the annihilation of the Ghibellines, remained, for the time, all but impossible." [665] And the war had absorbed the totality of the very high papal revenue of John's long reign. [666]

Pope John did not long survive this last of his Italian catastrophes. His Cistercian successor, Benedict XII, was wholly a man of peace. There was no attempt to reinforce the papal armies, nor to renew the war. The pope explicitly declared that not even to recover his states would he go to war. Peace -- of a sort -- was indeed achieved; but it was the local tyrants who, everywhere, really reaped its fruits and now consolidated their usurpations. The rot continued all through the next reign also, city after city in Romagna and the Marches falling into the hands of such powerful -- and notorious -- families as the Malatesta.

Then, at the eleventh hour, Clement VI intervened (1350), and once more a papal army marched across Italy to assert the papal rule over the last of what remained to the pope of the Romagna. The expedition failed, as badly as such expeditions had ever failed. The Visconti, from Milan, took a hand and, in October 1350, Bologna received them as its masters. Next the pope's general, failing to receive from Clement the money to pay his troops, disbanded the army. Whereupon the Visconti immediately hired it. As of old, excommunications and interdict were decreed against the Milanese ruler, but this time they were totally ignored. Clement applied to Florence for aid, but Florence was not to be moved. Whereupon the pope reversed the policy of generations of popes, and, in a mood of anger against Florence, admitted the Visconti claims, acknowledged him as the lord of Bologna and planned with him a league against Florence, September 1352. Where this terrible series of blunders would have led no man can say, but luckily the death of the pope (December 6, 1352) ended the crisis.

The next pope, Innocent VI, had this great advantage over his predecessors, that his own personal glory was in no way bound up with the fortunes of the Italian War. Also the Visconti was, first of all, alarmed by the possibility that the Emperor Charles IV might enter the field, and he was eager to make peace with Florence to leave his hands free for a projected attack on Venice. It was not difficult for the papal diplomacy to reconcile Florence and Milan, and Florence and the Holy See. Within four months of his election Innocent VI, by the Treaty of Sarzana (March 31, 1353), had skilfully extricated his cause from a really dangerous entanglement. And, for the task that still remained, of recovering his hold upon the states of the Church, the pope found to hand, at Avignon, the ideal agent -- churchman, statesman, and soldier at once -- the Spanish cardinal Albornoz.

Gil Alvarez Carillo Albornoz, the greatest ecclesiastical figure of his generation, was at this time a man in the early fifties. He was a Castilian, and descended from the two royal families of Leon and Aragon. From an early age he had been destined for a career in the Church and, his university studies ended, he was named to a post at the court of Alfonso XI of Castile (1312-1350). In 1338, while still on the young side of forty, Albornoz became Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, and Chancellor of Castile. He showed himself, as archbishop, a capable and intelligent reformer of Christian life. When the war against the Saracens of Andalusia was renewed he was appointed papal legate to organise the crusade, and in a critical moment of the great battle of Tarifa (1340) it was Albornoz who rallied the wavering army of crusaders and turned defeat into victory. This was the beginning of a new career. He played a great part in the siege of Algeciras in 1342, and in the siege of Gibraltar seven years later. Then, in 1350, Alfonso XI died. His son, Peter the Cruel, promptly disgraced all his father's friends and Albornoz left Castile for Avignon. Clement VI received him generously, and at the consistory of December 1350 created him cardinal.

Albornoz was commissioned as legate just three months after the Treaty of Sarzana was signed, and on August 13, 1353, he left Avignon for Italy. For the next ten years all turns on his action; and the result of that long activity -- though compromised more than once by the weakness of the sovereign he served -- was to make the popes' authority over their state more of a reality than it had ever been before. It was at last possible for the popes to feel secure from violence within their own frontiers. Not even the long crisis of the Schism that was to come, so shook the work of Albornoz that it needed to be done anew. To few of its servants has the papacy been more indebted than to this great Spaniard, who, very truly, was the second founder of its temporal power. [667]

Albornoz entered Italy with the design of recovering territories long lost, in hard fact, to the popes. His first care was to secure that no Visconti hostility should either block his communications with Avignon or sow fresh trouble by knitting alliances between the defiant usurpers of papal territory and the host of petty tyrants along the neighbouring frontiers. His diplomacy at Milan was entirely successful, and in 1354 he passed on to the first part of his task, the recovery of Rome and the province called the Patrimony, [668] the centre and first nucleus of the popes' state. Here conditions were worse -- politically -- than in any other part of Italy. The French officials whom the French popes had obstinately continued to send as their agents, had been tyrannous, corrupt, and incompetent. Civil war between the various cities was continual, a Ghibelline was master of Rome and busy with the conquest of the rest of the province. The war went on until June 1354, when the Ghibelline, Giovanni di Vico, yielded and by the Treaty of Montefiascone (June 5, 1354) accepted the legate's terms. The Patrimony was henceforward undisputed papal territory. Albornoz proceeded to reclaim the Duchy of Spoleto, and by the end of the year, here too he had been successful.

In 1355 he crossed the Apennines to face the more difficult work of subduing the ever-restless cities of the Marches and Romagna. There was a victory in the field in April at Paderno, and a great siege of Rimini. Fermo too was taken, and Ancona. The chief of the tyrants -- Galeotto Malatesta -- made his submission and the Parliament of Fermo, June 24, 1355, marked the definitive pacification of the Marches.

But now Albornoz came up against the greatest difficulty so far -- Ordolaffi, the tyrant of Forli in the Romagna. Here, in July, the papal army was beaten in a pitched battle. A crusade was proclaimed against Ordolaffi, and in the first months of 1356 reinforcements of supplies and men came in to Albornoz. Nevertheless, he still failed to take his enemy's stronghold of Cesena, and through the rest of 1356 Ordolaffi successfully held his own.

And now the cardinal began to suffer something worse than checks from the enemy. The great successes of these last two years had roused the fears of the Visconti. The hold they had established, in Clement VI's time, on Bologna was in danger; and soon, at the papal court, they were busy undermining the pope's confidence in his greatest man. Already there had been serious differences between Innocent VI and his lieutenant. The pope thought Albornoz dealt too leniently with the rebels he overcame. For the cardinal -- far more of a statesman than the pope, a realist who knew men where the pope remained in many respects what he had been most of his life, a professor of canon law -- strove always to ensure that his late enemy should become his ally, and the faithful servant of the papacy. Never did he utterly crush any of them. When they surrendered, and abandoned all their claims, Albornoz appointed them to govern, as papal officials, a part at least of the territories they had once claimed for their own.

The intrigues of the Visconti were, in the end, only too successful. Albornoz received orders to negotiate with the rebel in Bologna the cession of the city to the Visconti. This, giving his reasons, he refused to do, and in March 1357 the Abbot of Cluny was sent out to supersede him. The abbot's diplomatic manoeuvres at Bologna failed, as Albornoz had known they must fail, and when it was clear that the pope's policy was to reinstate the Visconti in this key city, the cardinal asked to be recalled. Innocent was sufficiently disturbed to beg him to remain until Ordolaffl -- now besieged in Forli -- had been subdued. In June Cesena was taken at last, but Ordolaffi still held out, and in August Albornoz handed over his powers and sailed for Avignon. The last great act of his administration was the promulgation, at the Parliament of Fano (29 April-1 May, 1357), of the Constitutiones Aegidienses which were to remain for nearly five hundred years [669] the law of the Papal State.

Twelve months of disaster under the incompetent Abbot of Cluny determined the pope to reappoint Albornoz, and in the last days of 1358 the cardinal once more made his appearance in the Marches. Within six months he had overcome the formidable Ordolaffi, whom he treated with his habitual generosity. He visited the Patrimony to arrest the beginnings of new trouble, and then, in 1360, he approached once again the problem of regaining Bologna. Again the Visconti marched to its assistance, and for a good four years the steady duel was maintained. Albornoz took it; the Visconti besieged his conquest (1360); at the approach of an army of Hungarian crusaders they raised the siege, only to renew it the next year (1361). In June 1361 the Visconti forces were heavily defeated at Ponte Rosillo, and what was left of their army fled to Milan. But Albornoz realised that this was an enemy altogether too strong for his resources. He therefore negotiated an anti-Visconti league, in which the della Scala, Este, Gonzaga, and Carrara joined forces with him, and 1362 saw the war renewed more hopefully.

And then, September 12, 1362, came the death of Innocent VI, to throw the alliance into momentary confusion and uncertainty. No one could tell which of the cardinals would be elected -- it so happened that none of them were, for the new pope was chosen from outside the Sacred College -- nor what a new pope's policy would be. The Visconti, naturally, were ready at Avignon to persuade whoever was elected, that peace, at any price, was a pope's first duty. But Innocent's successor -- Urban V -- resisted the intrigues, and, for the first year of his reign, gave Albornoz strong support. A new crusade was preached against the Visconti; they were once more defeated in battle at Solaro (April 6, 1363); and when the vanquished sought again to win by intrigue what they had failed to hold by force, the pope again stood firm. But this holy pope was no match for the wily Visconti leader. Urban V's great ideal was the renewal of the Holy War against the Turks, masters, by this, of all the Christian lands in Asia Minor and now, for the first time, possessed of a territory in Europe also. [670] The pope dreamed of uniting against them the hordes of savage mercenaries -- the free companies -- who, no longer employed in the Hundred Years' War, were now ravaging at will through France and Italy.

It was easy to persuade such a man that the needed first condition for the crusade was peace in Italy, and that it could not be bought too dearly. Albornoz was superseded (November 26, 1363) at the very moment when such strong forces from Germany, Poland and Hungary were coming in to him that the final victory seemed certain. Three months later -- March 3, 1364 -- the Visconti restored to the pope all the cities and fortresses they had occupied in his states, and the pope, in return, agreed to pay them the immense indemnity of half a million florins.

The treaty was a signal victory for the wily Visconti over the political simplicity of Urban V. All the fruits of Albornoz's diplomacy and military skill through four hard years were thrown away. The pope had more confidence in the word of his treacherous enemy than in his own legate and general. Once more the incompetent Abbot of Cluny was named legate for the north of Italy, and Albornoz -- who had asked to be recalled -- was urgently begged to remain in Italy as legate to the Queen of Naples. Cut to the heart by the pope's disastrous failure to support the real interests of the Holy See in his own dominions, Albornoz yet continued his work for the suppression of the free companies. He fell seriously ill at the end of 1365 and then Urban, accepting as true charges of corrupt handling of public moneys, without hearing the cardinal, deprived him of his authority in the Romagna. Again Albornoz demanded his recall; accusations of this sort, the multitudinous hates amid which he was living, he said, were too much for him in his old age (he was now well over sixty) and he had a strong desire for more leisure for the care of his soul.

But he was much too useful to the papacy in Italy for the pope to be willing to agree. Publicly, in the consistory of January 30, 1365, Urban declared him innocent of all these calumnious charges, and he besought the cardinal to continue as legate in Naples. Luckily for the pope, and for the papacy, the great cardinal rose above the immense disappointment of seeing his work scrapped for the profit of the Church's enemies. He remained at his post, and it was his continued skilful diplomacy, and military success against the companies, which, by the end of 1366, made at least the Patrimony of St. Peter and Rome a territory to which the pope and the curia might safely return.

THE POPES LEAVE AVIGNON, 1362-1378

The conclave of 1362 that followed the death of Innocent VI [671] was one that produced many surprises. There were twenty cardinals to take part in it and the strongest group was that of the Limousins, compatriots of the last two popes. They were not indeed a majority, but the remainder had nothing to unite them except their determination that there should not be a third Limousin pope. The first vote was taken before there had been time for any prearrangement; and, in the hope of delaying the election until some profitable combination had been devised, each cardinal followed his own instinct to vote for the least likely man. But these chance-inspired votes happened to fall, in the required two- thirds majority, on the same cardinal; he was a Limousin; and the brother of the last pope but one, Clement VI. The disappointment of the cardinals was general, and unconcealed. But the pope-elect, the cardinal Hugues Roger, preferred to decline the high office, and thence onwards, in the ballots that followed, the cardinals were so careful about their votes that it soon became evident that no one of them stood any chance of gaining the votes of as many as two-thirds of his colleagues.

It was, then, upon the name of an outsider that agreement was at last reached (September 28, 1362), and the cardinals elected the Benedictine monk Guillaume de Grimoard, Abbot of St. Victor at Marseilles; a man fifty-two years of age, and at the moment papal nuncio in the kingdom of Naples. He was a man of very holy life, whose monastic spirit high offices, and years of external employment as nuncio, had never in any way diminished. He reached Avignon a month after his election, chose the name Urban V, and was crowned on November 6, privately, in a purely religious ceremony, within the walls of his palace, resolutely putting aside all the apparatus of secular magnificence that was now the rule. As pope he contrived to lead the life of a monk, never wearing any dress but his religious habit, and keeping faithfully all the monastic fasts and austerities.

Urban V was a most industrious worker, and scholarship owes him many acknowledgments. Like all these Avignon popes, he was a very real patron of learning. He founded new universities at Orange, at Cracow and at Vienna, and a school of music at the existing university of Toulouse. He restored his own university of Montpellier, and he found the means to support as many as fourteen hundred students in different universities. It was made a reproach to him at the time, and it has been held against him since, that his liberality and charities were a serious burden on the papal resources. For, as has been said, [672] the finances had now settled down into something like chronic bankruptcy. But, it will be admitted, there have been less deserving reasons for financial embarrassment, and it was ever Urban V's own justification to his critics that to promote true learning -- whether the student persevered in his clerical calling or returned to secular life -- was the best investment any pope could make who regarded the Church's future. [673]

It has also been laid against Urban V that he had little skill in the arts of ruling, and was too easily the victim of political roguery, and that he failed as a religious reformer. But all these defects -- very real, of course -- shrink beside the double glory that he continued to live his own holy life in surroundings of which St. Catherine of Siena could say that they stank like hell, [674] and that, at the first opportunity, he left Avignon, and, despite all the opposition, took the papacy back to Rome.

It was in September 1366 that Urban V made known his intention. Immediately, and from all sides, good reasons to the contrary rained upon the pope. The King of France sent special embassies to explain that nothing but the presence of the pope could heal the feuds that were destroying his kingdom. Was the pope to show himself a hireling, by flight? The cardinals, all but unanimously, opposed him. Albornoz, of course -- still in Italy -- welcomed the decision. He considered that the return of the pope, at this moment, when in Rome and the Patrimony his authority was secure and order re-established, would consolidate the work of restoration.

Urban held firmly to his resolution. He disregarded a last threat from his cardinals that they would leave him to make the voyage alone, and on April 30, 1367, left Avignon. By May 6 he had reached Marseilles; there was a long wait for favourable weather, and then the great fleet, the papal galleys and an escort provided by all the maritime states of Italy, made its leisurely way along the coasts of Provence and Liguria. Toulon, Genoa, Pisa and Piombino in succession saw the convoy that bore such precious auguries. On June 3 the pope landed, in his own states, at Corneto. Albornoz was there to meet him. Thence he passed to Viterbo, where he remained for four months, and here he had the great misfortune to lose Albornoz, for the great cardinal died on August 22. [675] And at Viterbo the old rioting now broke out again. For three days the city was in the hands of the mob, and there were cries of "Death to the Church, long live the people. " But the pope remained unmoved, and on October 16 he at last entered Rome.

For a time all went well. The return of the papal court was a beginning of new prosperity for the city. There were visits from reigning princes -- the Queen of Naples and the Emperor Charles IV -- that brought crowds of visitors, and once again new trade and wealth. The ruined churches began to be restored, and the old permanent traffic between Christendom and its natural centre took up its wonted course. For the hot Roman summer the pope went to live at Montefiascone, forty miles to the north, on the shores of Lake Bolsena. It was during his stay there, in 1370, that the papal city of Perugia rose in rebellion, and the Romans came to its aid. Urban took refuge at Viterbo and there he was presently besieged by the rebels, who had now hired one of the most notorious of the "free companies" led by the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood. The pope had no choice but to surrender the town. And now the forces of the Visconti crossed into Tuscany, making for the Patrimony. Urban appealed for help to the emperor, and to the King of Hungary. But they were deaf to his needs, and, finally, he decided to return to Avignon. Though the Romans outdid all former shows of loyalty, and though St. Bridget of Sweden prophesied to the pope's face that his return would be followed by a speedy death, Urban was now as resolute to depart from Italy as he had previously been resolute to leave Avignon. On September 5, 1370, he sailed for France. He arrived at Avignon on the 27th and there, three months later, as had been foretold to him, he died (December 19, 1370). [676]

But the unfortunate ending of the great venture attempted by Urban V did not -- as might have been expected -- sterilise, for yet another generation or so, the ideal which inspired it. His successor, Gregory XI, made it clear, from the beginning of his reign, that it was his intention also to take the papacy back to Rome.

Gregory XI was one of those rare popes elected unanimously by a conclave that lasted only a matter of hours (December 30, 1370). This last Frenchman among the popes -- Pierre Roger de Beaufort -- was a Limousin, the nephew of Hugues Roger, who had been elected eight years before but had declined, and of Clement VI, elected in 1342. It was this papal uncle who had made Pierre Roger a cardinal, at the age of nineteen. The young prelate had shown immediately the manner of man he was, when he deserted the splendid opportunity of worldly fortune and enjoyment thus opened to him, and returned to his study of law at Perugia, then the centre of a real transformation of legal learning, with the great Bartolo teaching Roman law as the development of principles and thereby founding a new science, and with his pupil Baldo de Ubaldis infusing a like new life into the understanding of the canon law. Under such masters the youthful cardinal became an accomplished canonist, with a really deep knowledge of law and with great gifts of judgment. And he grew up to be a man of prayer. Gregory XI was not yet forty-two when he was elected pope, but his health was frail, and he was already tending to be a permanent invalid.

From the first winter of his reign the new pope had determined that, with him, the papacy would return to Rome. And from Rome itself there now came, to urge this upon him as his first duty, the voice of that veteran admonitrix of the popes, St. Bridget. Through her, so she now declared to the pope, Our Lady sent him a message that was at once a command, a promise and a warning. Gregory was to go to Rome by April 1372, and if he obeyed, his soul would be filled with spiritual joy. Should he fail, he would assuredly feel the rod of chastisement; and his young life would be cut short. The pope, who had stood at his predecessor's side when, only twelve months before this, St. Bridget had prophesied to Urban V that his return to Avignon would be followed by a speedy death, was sufficiently moved to order his legate in Italy to ask further explanations of her. What the saint told the legate is not recorded, but we do know the message she sent for the pope's own ear. "Unless the pope comes to Italy at the time and in the year appointed, the lands of the Church, which are now united under his sway and obedience, will be divided in the hands of his enemies. To augment the tribulations of the pope, he will not only hear, but will also see with his own eyes that what I say is true, nor will he be able with all the might of his power to reduce the said lands of the Church to their former state of obedience and peace. " [677]

This message was apparently sent to the pope in the first months of his reign. Nearly two years later, on January 26, 1373, the saint had a second vision that she was bidden transmit to him. This time it was Our Lord who appeared to her, and told her that the pope was held back by excessive attachment to his own kinsfolk, and coldness of mind towards Himself. Our Lady's prayers for the pope would, in the end, the saint was told, overcome these obstacles and Gregory would, one day, return to Rome.

Then, in February of that same year (1373), came a new vision, in which St. Bridget beheld the pope standing before Christ in judgment, and heard the Lord's terrifying speech to his vicar. "Gregory, why dost thou hate me?. . . Thy worldly court is plundering My heavenly court. Thou, in thy pride, dost take My sheep from Me. . . . Thou dost rob My poor for the sake of thy rich. . . . What have I done to thee, Gregory? I, in my patience, allowed thee to ascend to the supreme pontificate, and foretold to thee My will, and promised thee a great reward. How dost thou repay Me?. . . Thou dost rob Me of innumerable souls; for almost all who come to thy court dost thou cast into the hell of fire, in that thou dost not attend to the things that pertain to My court, albeit thou art prelate and pastor of My sheep. . . . I still admonish thee, for the salvation of thy soul, that thou come to Rome, to thy see, as quickly as thou canst. . . . Rise up manfully, [678] put on thy strength, and begin to renovate My Church which I acquired with My own blood. . . . If thou dost not obey My will, I will cast thee down from the Court of Heaven, and all the devils of hell shall divide thy soul, and for benediction thou shalt be filled with malediction -- eternally. . . . If thou dost obey me in this way, I will be merciful to thee, and will bless thee, and will clothe thee with Myself, so that thou wilt be in Me and I in thee, and thou shalt possess eternal glory. [679]

Gregory was sufficiently shaken to send his legate yet once again to ask the saint for some definite sign. In July 1373, a few days only before her death, [680] St. Bridget sent her last word to him, and it was a word of practical counsel about the latest difficulty that had arisen to hinder Gregory's departure -- the new war with the Visconti. The pope is bidden to make peace at all costs "rather than so many souls perish in eternal damnation. " He is to place his trust in God alone and, heedless of the opposition, to come to Rome for the establishment of peace and the reformation of the Church; and he is to come by the following autumn. [681]

And now, soon after the death of the Swedish saint, Gregory XI made his first contact with a still more wonderful woman, Catherine Benincasa, the child of a dyer of Siena, sister of penance in the third order of St. Dominic. St. Catherine of Siena -- for it was she -- was at this time in her twenty-seventh year, and since her very babyhood not only had she been, manifestly, a child of special graces and divine attentions, but one around whom the marvellous and the miraculous flowered as though part of her natural course through life. Prayer; a life of charitable activity; corporal austerity; solitude without churlishness in the midst of a busy family life -- a family where she was the twenty- fourth child; a refusal of marriage, but no desire for the life of a nun; the direction of the friars of the neighbouring Dominican church; visions; colloquies with the saints, the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord; the great wonder of her mystical marriage in sign of which He set on her finger the ring she thenceforward never ceased to see there; the stigmata; and the great vision in which -- so she always believed she had really died, and been sent back to life for the purpose then divinely made known to her; such was the saint's life through all these years, in which she had never left her native town and hardly even her father's house, or her own little room in it. But never was any saint to fulfil more exactly in the Catholic Church the role assigned to the prophets of old, to appear suddenly in the public life of the time, to correct rulers -- the highest ruler of all, the very pope -- and, divinely commissioned, to offer them guidance back to God; and never did any saint offer better illustration of the doctrine traditional in her order since St. Thomas Aquinas, that in the highest form of contemplation the activity flows over into a charitable apostolate and care for all mankind. Already, in Siena, Catherine was a power, and the radiance of her unearthly personality had gathered around her a most extraordinary band of followers, men and women, friars, tertiaries, poets, artists, noble and plebeian, married and single, the most of whom she had converted, all of whom she instructed, and who were one great means of the apostolate of peace that was now her life.

It was, of course, in the midst of war that St. Catherine of Siena's life was passed; of the bitterest wars of all, the bloody feuds that were the life of all the fourteenth-century city states in Italy. In Siena, as in Florence and in a host of lesser towns, there was blood everywhere, as the never-ceasing cycle turned of revolution and counter-revolution; oppression, conspiracy, arrests, torture, executions, revolts, a new regime and then oppression and the rest yet once again; an age of horrible cruelties, of which the terrible savagery that accompanied our own Wars of the Roses is only a pale reflection. And in St. Catherine's many letters, and in her great mystical book of Christian teaching, the Dialogue, -- it is not surprising -- the thought of the Blood, and the word is rarely absent from a single page, of the Blood of Christ shed in love to save sinful man.

St. Catherine had already, early in 1372, written to Gregory's legate at Bologna, Cardinal d'Estaing, bidding him make charity the foundation of all his acts, "Peace, peace, peace! Dearest father, make the Holy Father consider the loss of souls more than that of cities; for God demands souls more than cities. " [682] This was to be the keynote of her apostolate to the popes. When Gregory himself sent to ask her advice, the saint had no other message but that he should turn from his nepotism, his tolerance of bishops who were "wolves and sellers of the divine grace, " and reform the Church: "Alas, that what Christ won upon the hard wood of the Cross is spent upon harlots. " [683]

The pope, however, continued in his own way, pressing the Visconti hardly in the field, diplomatically waiting for the opportune moment to do the will of God as he saw it, and especially waiting for the Visconti to be conquered before finally defying the universal opposition at Avignon and setting his course towards Italy and Rome. It is a nice question -- hardly a historian's question -- what ought Gregory XI to have done, or, better, what did he think God wanted him to do? The messages from St. Bridget had clearly left him uneasy. But, so far, his neglect of them and his use of the natural means, of arms and diplomacy, and his preoccupation with the affairs of France and England, had not brought upon him the judgments which St. Bridge. had seemed to foretell. On the contrary, the pope's good offices, for which the two kings had begged, and for the sake of which they had both besought him to delay his journey to Rome, had resulted in the Truce of Bmges (June 27, 1375) and a year's truce with the Visconti, made in that same month, seemed about to bring peace to Italy too. All was now ready for the voyage to Rome, but the pope's innumerable relatives won new delays from him. Twice within a month the decision to sail was countermanded, and then, on July 28, the expedition was put off until the spring of the next year (1376).

But, in the autumn of 1375, the storm broke in central Italy. and all that St. Bridget had foretold was speedily fulfilled to the letter. At the heart of the storm was Florence's fear of what a papal-Visconti alliance, with a French pope again at Rome, French legates and governors through all the papal cities along her frontiers, might hold in store for her. The summer was busy with efforts to knit together an anti-papal league. A general rebellion was successfully engineered in the pope's own territory. By the end of the year (1375) eighty of his cities had gone over to the league. In March 1376 Bologna, too, joined it. This was about the time that Gregory had finally hit upon for his journey to Rome. Instead, he was once more caught up in the full business of war, and on March 31, putting aside all Catherine's counsel to rely on love, to work for peace alone, and her pleas for leniency, the pope put Florence to the ban. Interdict, excommunication, and a general command to Catholics everywhere to join in the war against her -- if only by confiscating Florentine property wherever found. So began the most bitter struggle of the pontificate.

" Sweet Christ on earth," St. Catherine now wrote to Gregory, "let us think no more of friends and kinsmen, nor of temporal needs, but only of virtue and of the exaltation of spiritual things." And in June the saint made her appearance at the pope's court, envoy of the Florentines, driven near to desperation by the losses to their commerce and the ruin that seemed at hand. But a change of government in Florence destroyed the saint's usefulness as an intercessor. "Believe me, Catherine," the pope said to her, "the Florentines have deceived and will deceive thee. . . if they send a mission it will be such that it will amount to nothing." [684] In part he was right; but it was also true that the pope's own excessively harsh terms held up the negotiations. It was hard for the saint to ask mercy for the Florentines, now, as repentant children, when they had disowned her in order the better to prepare a new campaign.

Catherine turned to the greater matter of the pope's return to Rome. In one of her first audiences she spoke openly of the wickedness in the curia, and of Gregory's tolerance of it, and when the pope asked for her advice about the matter of Rome the saint finally convinced him that she spoke in God's name, for she told him what none but himself knew, how, in the conclave of 1370, he had secretly vowed to God that, if elected, he would return to Rome.

From about this time (July 17, 1376) preparations really began to be made for the voyage, and then for two months the saint fought the cardinals for the soul of the pope, one only of them all -- d'Estaing -- supporting her. They used all weapons against her, among them the very subtle one of a "revelation" through a holy man that contradicted Catherine's own message. But this time there were no further delays, and on September 13, 1376, the last of the French popes left the great palace by the Rhone, stepping manfully over the last obstacle of all, his old father, who threw himself down at the threshold in a last desperate argument.

The voyage was stormy and disastrous. At Genoa there was even a consistory to discuss whether it was not now obviously God's will that Gregory should stay at Avignon. But Catherine also was at Genoa; and the pope, too fearful of his cardinals to receive her publicly, went to her by night, in disguise, to be strengthened in his purpose. On October 29 he sailed from Genoa and, at long last, on January 17, 1377, the pope landed from his galley in the Tiber before the great basilica where lies the body of St. Paul.

"Come like a virile man, and without any fear. But take heed, as you value your life," the saint had once written to Gregory XI, " not to come with armed men, but with the Cross in your hand, like a meek lamb. If you do so, you will fulfil the will of God; but if you come in another wise, you would not fulfil but transgress it." [685] Side by side with the preparations for the great return, however, preparations had also gone forward for the renewal of the war against Florence. A papal army -- mercenaries from Brittany and England in part -- was raised, and set under the command of the cardinal Robert of Geneva. As part of the campaign against the great key city of Bologna they ravaged and burnt right up to the city walls. Then (July 1376) they were defeated at Panaro. Bologna still held firm. Next -- a fortnight only after Gregory's arrival in Rome, and a week after his refusal to lower his terms to Florence -- there took place the horrible massacre of the civilian population at Faenza, for which Robert of Geneva must bear the blame. All through the summer of 1377 the negotiations for peace dragged on, and the war of skirmishes continued. The pope rejected St. Catherine's plans "useful for the Church if they had been understood," [686] -- but, at his wits' end for money to pay his troops, he again sent the saint to Florence in the hope of inducing a surrender. Florence too was desperate, and presently a congress had been assembled at Sarzana to discuss a settlement. It had hardly begun its work when the news came of Gregory's death, March 27, 1378. He was still two years short of fifty.

Twelve days later the cardinals chose to succeed him an Italian, Bartolomeo Prignani, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI (April 8, 1378). Six months later these same cardinals, who had been steadily drifting away from Urban since a fortnight or so after his election, declared him no pope, and in a new conclave, at Fondi, elected Robert of Geneva. He took the name of Clement VII. The division of Christendom into two allegiances, to the popes of rival lines at Rome and at Avignon, which then began, lasted for close on forty years.

CHRISTIAN LIFE, MYSTICS, THINKERS

The names of St. Bridget of Sweden and of St. Catherine of Siena, coming upon every page of the critical story of the last two popes, are a reminder -- should we need one -- that, beneath that history of the Church which we see as a dramatic pageant, there lies another history, the real and truly vital history of the Church, the history of the inner life of each of the millions of Christian souls. To the actuality, and to the paramount importance indeed, of this other history the saints are, at all times, the standing witness, and it is never an idle criticism of any account of Christian history to ask "Where are the saints?" The presence of saints in the public life of the Church, and the reception given to them, is indeed a kind of touchstone by which we may judge the tone of that life in any particular age.

In this interior history of the Church -- in its fullness known only to God -- there is no distinction or rank, save that which comes from the use of opportunities accorded. Here all are equal. Popes, bishops; religious, clergy; kings, nobles; scholars, merchants; peasants, townsfolk, beggars -- what more are any of these but souls equal in their need of salvation, equal in their utter inability to achieve salvation by any power of their own? And all the vast apparatus, at once as simple and as complex as man himself, of theology, of ritual, the divinely-founded Church, nay the sacred humanity itself of God the Saviour, what are all these but means to that single end, the salvation of man, the return of the rational creature to his Creator for the Creator's greater glory?

Although we cannot ever know more than mere fragments of such a history as here is hinted, this history is a fact never to be lost count of as the more obvious maze of visible activity is explored and all that it holds assessed. For example, the one sole business for which popes and bishops and clergy exist is to lead man back to God Who is man's sole happiness. All popes have known this, all bishops, all clergy; and therein lies, not only the basis of the most terrible judgment that can ever be passed upon them, but the reason for the horror which failure on the grand scale in this primary pastoral duty caused to the serious-minded among the contemporaries of such sinners, and also the source of our own incredulity, as, to-day, reading much of their history, we remind ourselves with an effort that these men were indeed popes, bishops, religious, priests.

What has chiefly occupied this history, so far, is the story of the ruling of religion, of the administration of the bona spiritualia, and the care of the ruling authority to defend the greatest of these, the freedom of religion, from forces that would destroy it in the interest of civil government; it has been, also, a history Or thinkers, of priests and of religious. Something has been told of the success of all these eminent personages; of their mistakes also; of their failings and their sins; and of their never-ceasing struggles. It has been very largely the history of the Church teaching and ruling, rather than of the Church taught and ruled, the story of the shepherds rather than of the flock; and when the flock has been glimpsed it has been, very often, at a moment when in hostile reaction against its shepherds. For with whom else, in this constant battle, are the popes ever engaged but with Catholics, their own spiritual children? It is important to see history from the point of view of these also at whose expense history is made. Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi, and Church History, too, has its Greeks; of whose lives we do not by any means, as yet, know nearly enough to be able to call our story complete. What of their spiritual history in these years of continual warfare between the sacerdotium and the imperium? Much of it is written -- sometimes indeed between the lines -- in the lives of the contemporary saints.

It must already be evident, even from the summary account which is all that a general history can attempt, that during the hundred years between Gregory X and Gregory XI (1276-1370) the pastoral sense in high ecclesiastical authority had suffered grievously. From the point of view of that internal history of which we have been speaking this might seem the most important fact of all. But it is not the only fact; and against it we need to set all that can be reconstructed of that inner history. "It is the spirit that giveth life" and, lest we falsify by omission, something needs to be said of those for whom attendance on the Spirit is the main business even of earthly life. For this century, that saw in the public life of the Church so many victories of the world over the gospel, is also the century of the first great attempt to popularise the mystical life by a literary propaganda that describes its joys and analyses its processes; it is the century of Eckhart and Tauler and Suso, of Ruysbroeck and Gerard Groote, of St. Luitgarde and St. Lydwine, of Angela of Foligno as well as of Angelo Clareno, of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden, of our own Richard Rolle, of "The Cloud of Unknowing" and of Mother Julian of Norwich; it is the century also of the "Theologia Germanica", of heretical mystical Beghards, Beguines, and others innumerable; and it is the century in which one of the greatest of English poets set out in his Vision of Piers Plowman the whole theory of the life with God as St. Thomas Aquinas had elaborated it, an achievement complementary to that of Dante, and comparable with it. [687]

What then of the saints of the time? Who were they, and in what corps of the militant Church did they come to sanctity? What of the role of these many celebrated pioneers of the literature of mysticism? And what other new manifestation of the spirit does the century offer, whether in religious orders, or devotional practice? [688]

Dunng the hundred and four years which this book has so far covered (1274-1378) there appeared, in one part of Christendom and another, some 130 of those holy personages whom the popes have, in later times, found worthy of public veneration, 27 as saints and 103 as beati. [689] Sixteen of the 130 were bishops, (four of these popes); fourteen came from the old monastic orders; five were secular priests; twenty-one were laymen; and seventy-four belonged to the new orders founded since the time of Innocent III. The share of the new orders is really greater still, for of the sixteen bishops eleven were friars, and of the twenty-one layfolk sixteen were members of the various third orders. It would, no doubt, be rash to say that the number of canonised, and recognisably canonisable, personages alive at any given epoch is an index of the general tone of the life of the Church. There are, it may be supposed, many more souls, whose holiness is known to God alone, than there are those whose repute brings them to the ultimate testimony of canonisation. On the other hand, sanctity, in the technical sense, involves the practice of all the virtues in the heroic degree and this is not only a marvel so rare that it can hardly long escape recognition, but it is the fruit of such extraordinary supernatural action in the soul that it may almost be taken for granted that the subject of that action is meant by God to be recognised as such. Without, then, any desire to propose a few comparative statistics as a new, rapid and infallible guide by which to assess in any given age the force of the mysterious tides of grace given to man, we can perhaps agree that there are times when saints abound and times when they are rare, and examine with something more than curiosity the distribution of these 130 personages over the century or so in which they "flourished. "

The richest period of all is the first third of this century, the last generation to be born in what has been called, with some excuse, "the greatest of the centuries. " [690] Between the second Council of Lyons (1274) and the election of the first Avignon pope (1305) we can note as many as eighty-eight "saints. " [691] In the next generation (1305-1342) they are fewer; thirty-seven of these eighty-eight have died, and only seventeen new " saints " appear to fill the gap. In the thirty years that follow next the lifetime of St. Catherine of Siena -- the "saints" are fewer still; of the sixty-eight "saints" active between 1305 and 1342, forty-five have died and only twelve new " saints" appear. These thirty years, from just before the Black Death to the Schism of 1378, are, in fact, the most barren age of all. The actual period of the Schism -- the forty years 1378-1418 -- reveals itself however, as a time of revival; twenty-three of the thirty-five "saints" of the previous generation have died by 1378, but they are replaced by no fewer than thirty-five new "saints"; more new "saints, " in fact, in forty years than in the previous seventy.

If we examine the list of those new " saints " whose appearance relieves the sombre history of the disastrous fourteenth century so far as we have traced it -- they are twenty-nine in all -- we notice among them three bishops (one a Benedictine, [692] two Carmelite friars [693] ); there are two others from the older orders, namely the canon regular, John Ruysbroeck and a second Benedictine; [694] and there are eleven more friars [695] and the founder of a new order, the Jesuati. There are, also, six nuns (who came, all of them, from the new orders), one layman and five laywomen. The high direction of ecclesiastical affairs is, evidently, no longer a nursing ground for saints, nor do saints any longer appear among the princes of Christian thought. The most striking changes, by comparison with the figures for the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, are the greatly lowered number of saints among the bishops, [696] and the reduction to vanishing point of the saints from the old monastic orders, from the Benedictines and the Cistercians especially.

It is the spirituality of the new orders of friars that gives to the sanctity of this period its special characteristics; and the special character of the vocation of the friars, and the new way of religious life which they have constructed in order to carry out their special work, are far-reaching indeed in their effect upon the whole interior life of the Church. The friar is, almost by definition, a religious who lives in a town. The life of the vows, with its foundation of the divine office chorally celebrated, its discipline of fasts, vigils, enclosure and other austerities, was now brought before the daily notice of every Catholic. And as with the friars -- whose foundations ran easily into tens of thousands by the beginning of the fourteenth century -- so was it with the new orders of women associated with the friars from the very beginning; their convents, too, were in the towns. And around these numerous new town churches -- Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, Carmelite and Servite churches -- whose very raison d'etre was the sermon, churches of a new architectural type, great preaching -- halls in fact, [697] there speedily grew up the great militia of the orders of penance: associations of layfolk who really formed part of the new religious order, who continued to live their ordinary life in the world, but in the spirit of the order, according to a definite rule and under the guidance of the order's priests. St. Dominic's new invention of the priest-religious who was an active missionary, and for whom the monastic life was but the designed means to this apostolic end, transformed the whole business of the management r of a Christian life; and in nothing did this show so powerfully as in the sudden appearance of a whole new literature treating | of this matter, a literature in which, for the first time, the most I learned of theologians and the most mystical of contemplatives said their say in the vulgar tongue. The life of devotion -- la vie devote -- now became the main business of thousands and thousands of lay men and women also, and the immediate consequence was a great multiplication of pious books. The Bible especially -- in translations -- was the popular devout reading, book of this multitude, such classics too as St. Augustine's City of God, St. Bernard's sermons, St. Gregory's collection of the marvellous lives of the saints of old, and the meditations on the ' Life of Our Lord still -- and for centuries yet to come -- ascribed to St. Bonaventure, meditations in which the imaginative art of the writer developed, above all else, the terrible reality of the human agony of the divine Redeemer. Such a book -- well in the new, Franciscan tradition and the kindred works of the Dominican Ludolf of Saxony, [698] gave new life (and a new direction) to the popular devotion to the sacred Humanity; and these books were among the main sources of those many forms of prayer to Our Lord in His passion which are the best-known feature of the last two centuries of medieval piety. In the statues and the painted windows and the pictures of the time there is, from now on, no subject more frequent, nor any more lovingly wrought. The same influence is to be seen in the countless brotherhoods spontaneously formed to foster and to practise these devotions, and it received a powerful aid in the Book of Revelations written by St. Bridget of Sweden about the detail of the sacred passion, and in the sermons and writings of the German Dominican, B. Henry Suso.

Of new religious orders there is but one of any importance, that founded by St. Bridget. This was an order for men and women, consecrated to devotion to the passion of Our Lord. The nuns were strictly enclosed, but the monks were preachers, itinerant missionaries. The monasteries were subject to the bishop of the diocese where they were founded, and, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, they were ruled by an abbess. The first foundation was at Vadstena, in Sweden, in 1371. The order grew slowly. By 1515 there were twenty-seven houses, thirteen of them in Scandinavia. [699] But everywhere the spirit of Christian charity is seen active in foundations, now, of hospitals and refuges of various kinds, in the organisation of companies of nursing sisters and brothers, a movement that is summed up in the great figure of St. Roch, the patron of the poor and needy sick, whose cult, from the day of his death in 1350, has never ceased.

The outstanding feature of all this new birth of the spirit is the avidity for news about the life with God -- unmistakable everywhere, in all ranks of society -- and the literature which this need created. From this literature we may gather some notion of the perfect life as it was presented to the Catholics of these last generations before the catastrophe of the Schism unchained the forces of anarchy; and we may also read there signs of future development and, alas, of future disintegration. For the life of devotion is not a thing antithetical to the life of Christian thought, but, rather, closely dependent on it. Mysticism and scholasticism are not alternative ways of arriving at the one goal; [700] and in some of the new spiritual exercises now devised, and proposed to Christians as the way to union with God, we meet the last, and the most ruinous consequence, so far, of the failure of the Catholics of this century to rally to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

To-day the word "mystic" is used for so many purposes that it has almost ceased to have any recognisably definite meaning beyond that of emotional sensitiveness to the non-material. But for our purpose the mystic is the man whose main interest and care in life is to unite himself in mind and will with God. It is for men and women of this kind that the monastic life was devised, as providing the ideal setting for those activities to which they had chosen to devote themselves. And now, in the fourteenth century, the kind of people we thus call mystics had, largely through the activity of the various orders of friars, come to be a very notable element of the public life of the Church. The new literature of mysticism had developed in order to provide this new mystical public with matter for its prayerful meditation, and with advice about the pitfalls of this high adventure; but it also studied the happenings of the mystical life so as to offer the mystic some means of checking his course, and from this it was an obvious next step to discuss the nature of mysticism, and especially the nature of the mystic's union with God, and the role and importance of the unusual happenings with which the lives of the mystics were, from time to time, studded. The mystics whose needs called forth this new literature were, as has been said, very largely the spiritual children of those new religious orders, and it was these orders which also had created the new scientific theology we call scholastic. That these corps of professional theologians should be attracted to the study of mysticism for its own sake, as one of the normal features of Christian life, was inevitable. Soon, the discussions about the nature of the mystical fact became a commonplace in theological literature. The solutions -- like the advice offered to mystics and the practical recipes -- varied as the theological colour of the different orders varied. There were to be controversies between the different schools about mystical questions, as there were controversies about so many other questions.

There are then, from this time, two kinds of mystical writing, that written for the use and help of the mystics themselves, and that written to analyse and explain what mysticism is and how it all comes about. Among the writers of both types of book not only theologians are to be found, but others too, with minds not trained perhaps to orderly thought, or the saving niceties of technical correctness, but with a tale to tell of experiences that have transformed their lives, and driven by an apostolic charity to convey the glad news to whoever will hear it.

Who these first pioneers of popular mystical literature were, what story they had to tell, the different points of view from which they told it, the variety of explanations they offered, and the sources which -- often enough unconsciously -- influenced their mystical outlook, may be read in the well-known book of M. Pourrat, who has collected a list of some sixty or more writers active between the time of St. Thomas and Luther's revolt. [701] What a general history, it would seem, needs to signalise as especially important in all this development, is the emergence of a really new school, after nearly a century and a half of the influence of the Friars; a school whose influence continued and developed until the very end of the period this volume studies. This is the school which produced the so-called Devotio Moderna and, as cautiously as may be, [702] something needs to be said of the way in which some of its leading adepts regarded, not so much the theologians of their time, as the role of the theologian and the place of theology in the life of the spirit. And something must be said, too, of the way in which, ever since Ockham, theologians had been moving still further away from St. Thomas's conception that there is necessarily a harmony between faith and reason. For these two contemporary developments have the effect, ultimately, of converging forces.

The simplest way in which to understand what is meant by the Devotio Moderna is to take up again, and devoutly read, the Imitation of Christ: for this is the classic production of the school. What is there modern about it? how is it new? and who were the men that made up the school whence came the Imitation and many other works, now perhaps forgotten, of like character?

The Devotio Moderna was a product of the country we to-day call Holland, and the pioneer in the movement was a native of Deventer, Gerard Groote (1340-1384). He was a man of considerable education, bred in the schools of his native town, of Aachen and in the universities of Cologne and Paris. He never seems to have proceeded beyond his mastership in arts, nor was he a priest; and for some years he led an ordinary worldly kind of life until, when he was about thirty-five, he was converted through his friendship with the greatest of all the Flemish mystics, B. Jan Ruysbroeck.

In the last few years of his life Gerard, [703] who died an early death in 1384, gathered round him, in his native town, a group of like-minded associates and together they formed the " Brotherhood of the Common Life" (1381). The associates were not bound by any vows, but they met for regular exercises of prayer, and they gave their lives to copying pious books -- forming the equivalent, in that age, of a religious press association. [704] A later development was the foundation and direction of schools for poor boys; the most famous of these, that at Zwolle, came to number 1,200 scholars. In their youth Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, and Luther too, came under the influence of the brothers in their schools. From Deventer some of the brethren passed to make a new foundation at Windesheim, but this group definitely went over to the religious life in the technical sense of the word, becoming canons-regular of the Augustinian type. The congregation of Windesheim flourished, and next eighty years (1384-1464) it came to number eighty-two priories. At Windesheim, and in the other priories, the spirit of Gerard Groote inspired all, and the priories also continued to be centres for the spread of spiritual books. The best known of all these Windesheim canons is the German, Thomas of Kempen, [705] the most likely candidate for the signal honour of being the author of the Imitation; and known to his contemporaries as a calligrapher of unusual skill.

It was not in the minds of the pioneers of this movement that the brethren should themselves be authors. But gradually books began to grow out of the little addresses with which, within the seclusion of these Dutch cloisters, they exhorted one another to perseverance in virtue and prayer and recollection, and in fidelity to the life of withdrawal from the world and its occasions of sin. And all these books -- collections of sayings, or sermons, or set treatises on special topics -- bear an extremely close resemblance to each other. There is little sign anywhere of the diversity of personalities among the authors. But what is everywhere evident -- and immediately evident -- to the reader is that the author is a man in whose life the loving communion with God is scarcely ever interrupted. And the reader can always understand what is written directly he reads. For the treatment of the great theme is concrete, and practical. With a most finished, albeit unconscious, artistry the writers set out their instructions in maxims, simply stated, with all the finality of proverbs or axioms; [706] and always, the guidance offered is so perfectly related to what every man knows the better side of himself craves for, that as he reads, it seems rather as though he were actually listening to his own better self. From time to time the flow of the maxims in which the reader sees the better things, and once again professes them, is broken by touching colloquies between the soul and Christ Our Lord.

Once these books composed by the new religious began to appear, they made headway rapidly -- there was, of course, at work here, besides the quality of what was offered, the new immense advantage that to propagate such literature was the congregation's main activity. The earliest manuscript of the complete Imitation that has survived is of 1427; in another forty years the book was known, and used, and loved, all over Europe.

Criticism is always an ungracious task, and never more so, surely, than when the critic is set to examine coldly the elements of a work inspired by the love of God, and stamped in every line with generous dedication of self to God's service. The Imitation of Christ, for example, is a work that all humanity has agreed to call golden. This makes the historian's task hard, but nonetheless necessary. For this Devotio Moderna was not all-sufficient; and once it had passed beyond the cloisters where it was born, and had begun to flourish in a different setting, its insufficiency might, and did indeed, tell increasingly.

The most notable insufficiency was that almost nowhere, in the literature of this school, was piety related to doctrine, [707] which is as much as to say that about much of it there is nothing specifically, necessarily, Catholic. It is a piety which, taken by itself, is, in the modern phrase, very largely undenominational; and, as everyone knows, the chef d'oevre of the school [708] has for centuries been used as extensively by those outside the Church as by those within. The absence of any care to relate piety to those revealed doctrines which the Church was divinely founded to set forth, is the more serious because it was deliberate. Not, of course, that these writers were indifferent to Catholic doctrine or hostile to it. They were, all of them, excellent Catholics, as whole in faith as in charity or in zeal; they would presuppose a dogmatic foundation, known and accepted. But they were Catholics in violent reaction against the fashionable spirituality of their time -- or rather, against its excesses -- and this had been a learned spirituality, very much occupied with theories about the mystical life, concerned to elaborate systems based on its theories, and interested, in some cases perhaps over-interested, in theological subtleties.

The great figure of this earlier movement had been the German Dominican Eckhart; and the Dominican priories and the convents of Dominican nuns in the Rhine provinces were the centres where it chiefly flourished. John Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso, also Dominicans, masterly theologians and great mystics, preachers and writers too, were the leading figures in the world of mysticism during the generation in which Gerard Groote grew up. Eckhart -- who had taught theology at Paris during the years when Scotus taught there, and who was involved in the controversies around the Franciscan's teaching -- was indeed a theologian of the very first class. [709] But over the end of his long and active life there lies the shadow of the condemnation of many of his doctrines -- after his death -- as heretical. [710] About the exact meaning of that condemnation scholars are now divided. The texts of Eckhart's work, as they have been known for the last three centuries, are far from trustworthy. It is only in the last few years, indeed, that any critical work has been done on his Latin writings. But whether Eckhart, the real Eckhart, was orthodox or not -- the gravest charge is that he was, in fact, a pantheist -- he is in these texts extremely obscure. This is by no means true of Tauler and Suso. Tauler was a master of spiritual direction, as learned in the workings of the human personality as in the ways of the Spirit, who had the rare gift of bringing home to the most workaday congregation the real importance of ideas. Henry Suso, no less learned in theology, and no less faithful, like a true Dominican, to the duty of associating piety with what can only be apprehended by the intelligence, namely truth divinely revealed, was a more passionate soul. In burning words he preached to all comers devotion to the divine intelligence, to the eternal wisdom of God. It was around this love for the second Person of the Blessed Trinity that all spiritual life turned for Suso; and to the propagation of this devotion he brought -- what obviously the task requires -- deep and sure theological learning. Above all others his master is St. Thomas Aquinas, whose calmly-argued ideas break into flame once they make contact with Suso's ardent mind.

The effect of Christian doctrine preached in this fashion had been to produce a host of mystics of rare quality in the Rhineland, and especially among the nuns of the order from which these preachers chiefly came. The movement was not, however, confined to friars and nuns; for it was one of the special characteristics of this Dominican school to teach that the life of the mystic is open to every Christian; that it is not, in kind, a new life which is the special privilege of contemplative monks or nuns, but a simple extension of, and an intensification of, that Christian life inaugurated in every soul by baptism. Hence the care of these German Dominicans, as of Ruysbroeck, to preach -- and also to write -- in their native tongues; and hence also, what has often caused surprise, their preaching about these high themes to the ordinary congregations who filled their churches.

It is not hard to understand that, once out of the hands of men really masters of their task, really theologians as well as holy men, such an apostolate could easily go astray. The subtle explanations of the soul's mystical union with God could, and did, give rise to idle and mischievous debates among the less learned and the half-learned; the delicate business of the practical relation of the workaday moral virtues to the high theological virtues could be neglected, and men and women, who visibly reeked of pride, insubordination, injustice and intemperance of every sort, could ignore their sins while they busied themselves with the higher prayer. And, of course, the movement will not have been spared its host of camp followers, many times larger than the army of disciples -- infinitely noisier and much more in evidence -- whose main occupation was to exchange gossip masked in the phrases of high theological learning, to turn these into party slogans, and, in the devil's eternal way, accomplish to perfection all the complicated manoeuvres of the religious life while their hearts were wholly unconverted, their wills obstinately unrepentant.

The reaction of the brethren of Deventer and Windesheim against what has been called [711] the speculative school of spiritual teaching, was, no doubt, very largely a reaction against the dangerous humbug into which this particular way of the interior life had tended to degenerate. But it was a reaction that went much further than a protest against abuses. For example, it was not merely the abuse of learning that was now decried in many sayings of the Devotio Moderna, but the idea that learning had any necessary part to play in the interior life: "Henceforward," wrote Gerard de Groote in his rule of life, [712] "no more benefices, no more learned titles, no more public disputations. . . . The learning of learning is to know that one knows nothing. . . the one research that matters is not to be sought out oneself." " Do not spend thy time," he also said, [713] " in the study of geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, dialectic, grammar, songs, poetry, legal matters or astrology; for all these things are reproved by Seneca, and a good man should withdraw his mind's eye therefrom and despise them; how much more, therefore, should they be eschewed by a spiritually-minded man and a Christian. . . the purpose of a degree is either gain or preferment, or vain glorification and worldly honour, which latter things if they lead not to the former are simply useless, empty and most foolish, being contrary to godliness and all freedom and purity." Only the carnal-minded could, he thought, be happy in a university.

Nearly a hundred years later than Gerard Groote the same spirit can be seen in one of the greatest teachers associated with the movement, [714] John Wessel Gansfort (1420-1489), a friend of Thomas a Kempis and a pioneer in the business of systematic meditation. [715] "There is a strong and weighty argument against universities to be drawn from the fact that Paul secured but little fruit at Athens, accomplishing more in the neighbouring city of Corinth and in Thessaly, which was then almost barbarous, than in the Attic city, at that time the fountain of Greek philosophy. It goes to show that liberal studies are not very pleasing to God." [716]

There is a sense in which the Imitation, too, can be called "a late medieval protest against the vanity of all philosophy," [717] and indeed the best known of such, and the most influential. All the world knows the passages in the opening pages of the Imitation, "What doth it profit thee to discuss the deep mystery of the Trinity, if thou art from thy lack of humility displeasing to the Trinity. . . . I would rather choose to feel compunction than to know its definition. . . . Vanity of vanities, all is vanity save to love God and serve Him only. . . . Have no wish to know the depths of things, but rather to acknowledge thy own lack of knowledge. . . ." That goodness matters more than learning, that it is the mistake of mistakes " to prefer intellectual excellence to moral" [718] no one will ever contest; nor that the learned may need, even frequently, to be reminded of this. But of all forms of goodness truth is the most fundamental, and yet, while learning is the pursuit of truth, it is hardly deniable that the author of the Imitation -- and others of this school with him -- do continually suggest, at least, an opposition between advance in virtue and devotion to learning, even to sacred learning; and certainly the tone of such admonitions is far removed from the teaching of St. Thomas that learning -- even the study of letters -- is a most suitable ascetic discipline for religious. [719] With these authors, however, learning, it is suggested, is for most men the highroad to pride and vanity -- "the greater part in knowledge than in virtuous living" -- and he who gives himself to the pursuit of holiness is in better case if he is not handicapped by any desire to know. "Quieten thy too great desire for learning, for in learning there is discovered great distraction and much deception." As for the learned generally: "those who are learned gladly choose to be regarded, and to be hailed as wise men. . . . Would that their life were in accordance with their learning, then would they have read and studied well." Again: "Happy is the man whom Truth instructs through itself, not through passing images and words, but as itself exists. . . . And wherefore should we be anxious about genera and species? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks, is set free from the multitude of opinions." Learning -- this is definitely said -- is not, in itself, blameworthy, that is to say "simple notions about things": it is indeed good, and part of God's scheme of things, but a good conscience and virtuous living is always to be preferred to it.

The facts are, however, that to all but a very select few, knowledge, even of truths about supernatural reality, only comes through the ordinary natural channels -- faith is by hearing. It is the natural human intelligence [720] that must lay hold of the truths of faith and make the judgment that these are things it must believe. [721] It is no part of Christian perfection to neglect the ordinary means of making contact with these truths -- namely the teaching of those already learned in them -- and to trust for a knowledge of them to the possibility of the extraordinary favour of a special personal revelation. And although it is most certainly true that theological learning is by no means a prerequisite for sanctity, such learning remains, nevertheless, a necessary instrument for those whose lot it is to journey towards sanctity by guiding others thither. Hence when good men begin to suggest that the world of piety can manage very well -- if not, indeed, very much better -- without the presence of theologians acting upon it, there is surely something wrong; and when priests write books about holy living which suggest that the theologians are more likely to go to the bad through learned vanity than to save their souls through the deeper knowledge of divine truth that is theirs, there is something very wrong indeed. Once more we are brought up against the all-important role of theological learning as the salt that keeps Christian life healthy. And what theology is to piety, metaphysical truth is to theology; for it is the natural condition, the sine qua non of healthy intellectual certitude in the mind of the theologian. [722] Once the direction of so delicate a thing as the Devotio Moderna passes into the hands of those unlearned in theology, all manner of deviation is possible. It can become a cult of what is merely naturally good, a thing no worse -- but no more spiritual - - than, say, the cult of kindness, courtesy, tidiness and the like. And what the master, unwittingly, is soon really teaching is himself; he is the hero his disciples are worshipping; there are, in the end, as many Christianities as there are masters, and chaos begins its reign.

Once it ceases to be recognised that there must exist an objective rule by which to judge the whole business -- theory and practice, maxims, counsels, exhortations, ideals, and criticism of other ways -- of the inner life and the business of the director with the directed, and that this objective rule is the science of the theologian, substitute rules will be devised to fill the absent place, rules which, there is every chance, will be no more than the rationalisation of a man's chosen and preferred activities. Someone, somewhere, must be interested in compunction's definition, or it will soon cease to be understood that there can be, and is, a certainty about what compunction is and what it is not; and if that certainty goes, very strange things indeed will begin to wander about, claiming the name of compunction in the lost land that once was Christendom. [723]

Let us turn from the defects, now so easy to be seen, in the Devotio Moderna, recalling only -- what will occupy us more hereafter -- how it is into one of the priories of the Windesheim congregation that, some eighty years ahead of the date our survey has reached, a pupil of the Brothers of the Common Life, and now an unhappy lad of eighteen, will be thrust to become, in spite of himself, a canon-regular, Erasmus Or Rotter (lam: in his career we shall surely see the shortcomings of the system hampering the greatest Catholic scholar of his generation, at a time when Catholicism is fighting for its very life. Let us leave the thought that Erasmus is the greatest witness to what the Devotio Moderna lacked, and consider now another group of pious men who, in this same late fourteenth century, are diligently sapping the foundations of men's intellectual certitude about the saving faith -- though of this they are utterly unconscious. These are the new theologians, products of the Via moderna, and they are, professedly, defending the faith. But their faith has gone awry; in this fact -- that they are wrongheaded and are fashionable -- as in the deficiencies of the spirituality of the pious Hollanders, we can read signs that are ominous. At the moment when certain mystics were beginning to hint that those who wished to advance in virtue had best leave theological problems alone, since ability to discuss them would lead inevitably to pride and vainglory, certain theologians were beginning to say that these same problems were insoluble, since no one could know anything at all with certainty, and that the only safe thing, for a Christian, was to cease to think about divine truths and to content himself with a faithful acceptance of them and a life of prayer. The influence of the mysticism that despaired of the theologian's salvation, was to be reinforced by that of theologians who now despaired of theology, and this because they had come to despair of reason itself.

There is, for instance, the revealing story of Nicholas of Autrecourt, a Parisian theologian, who has been called the Hume of the fourteenth century, [724] in whose work Ockham's principles reach their last extreme consequences. Nicholas used the new dialectic to examine Aristotle, and he finds thereby that Aristotle did not really know -- that is to say possess certitude about -- any one of the basic metaphysical truths on which his thought is built: for these truths -- if truths, and they may be truths -- are not things that can be known. We do not know, and it can't be known, that there are such things as substances, causes, ends, and the like. There is, says Nicholas, no "evidence" for their existence. "Evidence" is one of his favourite terms; "probable" is another, and this word "probable" sums up increasingly the mentality of the fourteenth-century thinkers. No philosophical truth is any longer certain: probability is all that human reason can attain. For example, Nicholas asks whether matter is eternal, and he answers that we cannot say with certainty that it is; but that it is eternal is more likely than not; it is probable. It is of course now, at this moment, that this is probable; what it will be, hath not yet appeared, and Nicholas, a devout ecclesiastic, conscious that thought (if this is all that thought really is) cannot offer itself as a way to truth, whether to Christians or to others, can only warn Christians of this and exhort them to stick more closely to the teachings of faith. He has, of course, if only by implication, suggested thereby to the Christian that reason and faith tend to contradict each other, that they can be in permanent opposition, [725] after which it seems a poor way out, indeed, to advise the Christian to stick to the one rather than the other. For what is faith but an assent of the reason? and with what other reason can the Christian give his assent but with that which has already been described by Nicholas as necessarily incapable of certitude?

To study Aristotle is also, therefore, pure waste of time; and Nicholas says so, expressly. Then what of the great doctors whose minds fed so largely on him? St. Thomas, for example, and Duns Scotus. It is barely thirty years since Scotus died, and not yet twenty since John XXII canonised St. Thomas with the most resounding eulogy of his work; but for Nicholas (and the many whom he will influence) the mass of all this writing is but so much lumber. Advancing a stage from his great discovery, "scared," says Gilson, "by the conclusions to which his logic has brought him," this philosopher who is a good Catholic looks for a remedy, and finds it; and here his solo voice anticipates what a whole chorus of superficial simpletons [726] will presently be bawling. What is needed, he tells us, are "spiritual men who will not waste their whole time in logical argument or the analysis of Aristotle's obscure propositions, but who will give to their people an understanding of God's law." [727] It is the old final-wisdom- seeming sophistry of the "practical" minded that is still with us. And this first of such prophets is a man whose theories of knowledge "cut us off from the only ways by which we can come to God." [728]

Nicholas of Autrecourt was a good man [729] who proposed to make the world a safe place for Faith by showing the utter impossibility of thought. It was not long before this tragic aberration brought him to the notice of the authorities, and after Clement VI had condemned eighteen of his leading theses, [730] he made a humble submission. [731] Nicholas may seem an obscure personage, but the most astonishing part of the story is this, that forty years later a personage who was by no means obscure, a chancellor of the university of Paris, and one of the two brightest ornaments of the world of Christian thought in that day, was explaining that the real reason for the condemnation of 1346 was jealousy, and offering as proof of this the fact that these theses were now publicly taught in the universities. Such is Peter d'Ailly's superficial comment on this grave affair. [732] The other glory of Paris, and of France and of Christendom, in this generation was d'Ailly's pupil and successor as chancellor, Jean Gerson, one of the holiest men of his time (1363-1429). He too was an Ockhamist, and he too sought in the cult of the interior life an escape from these difficult and urgent intellectual anxieties. " Lorsque la foi desespere de la raison, c'est toujours vers l'intuition mystique et la vie interieure qu'elle se retourne pour s'y chercher un plus solide fondement." [733]

The Christian mind, then, unable to think itself out of the impasse to which "thought" brought it, and mortally uneasy at the now unresolved fundamental contradiction that the teachings of Faith and the findings of reason may be incompatible, is bidden for its salvation resolutely to ignore the contradiction, to stifle reason, and to seek God in the interior life; again, to seek Him with what? With a mind accepting on Faith what it knows may be impossible? The eternal lesson recurs, that we cannot manage our religious affairs without true philosophy, however elemental; that true religion does not survive healthily unless philosophy flourishes. For without philosophy, or with a philosophy that is false, the educated mind [734] turns to scepticism -- theoretical or practical; and assents to religious truth made by a mind that is sceptical about natural truth, produce in the end superstition: and from the educated mind the poison seeps down, until in time it corrupts the faith of the whole community. [735]

For the popular and fashionable philosophers and theologians Aristotle was now, at the end of the fourteenth century, finished; and the famous Thomistic alliance of thought and faith at an end. A further blow was dealt to the prestige of that older school -- a prestige bound up inevitably with the prestige of Aristotle -- by the appearance in these same years of the first non-Aristotelian physicists, of the critical work of Jean Marbres [736] and, especially, of Nicholas of Oresme, [737] Bishop of Lisieux. It was theological speculation that set these clerics to their radical reconstruction of Aristotle the physicist, Oresme writing, perhaps all the more damagingly, in his native French -- yet another of the many signs that a new age is at hand. From the Bishop of Lisieux' work came ultimately three great discoveries linked to three better known names, Copernicus' hypothesis of the movement of the earth, Galileo's theory of the law of falling bodies, and Descartes' invention of analytical geometry. Here are far-off medieval origins of important elements in our modern scientific knowledge; in the circumstances in which they appeared they served to give the coup de grace to Aristotle as a force to be reckoned with in the university world. And that world, in the fourteenth century, was in process of a remarkable extension. Nine new universities were founded in northern Europe between the years 1348 and 1426, [738] and another nine [739] between 1456 and 1506. In the better part of these it was the Via moderna that dominated the philosophical outlook.

And now it is that there befalls the Church one of the most fearful calamities of all its long history, the so-called Great Schism of the West -- a forty years wandering in a wilderness when no one knew with certainty who was the head of the Church, a forty years in which the unity of belief was indeed marvellously preserved, but in which administrative chaos reigned and in which there sprang up an abundance of new anarchical theories about the nature of the papacy and its role. That catastrophe came at the end of a century when the whole strength of the politicians had been exerted to compel the Church to retire from all concern with temporal affairs; in an age when thinkers would have had it retire from the field of thought, and mystics would divorce its piety from the pursuit of truth; the trader, too, will be pleased if religion will now abandon its claim to regulate the morality of exchanges, and Marsiglio's ideal is only slumbering that will satisfy all of these by making religion a matter of rites alone and of activities within a man's own soul. [740]

THE SCHISM OF THE WEST, 1378-1409

i. The Two Conclaves of 1378.

"This is milk and honey compared with what is to come, " St. Catherine had said, [741] when the news reached her, in 1376, of the general rebellion of the Papal State against Gregory XI. Already the saint foresaw the Schism, the forty years during which two -- and even three -- "popes" simultaneously claimed the allegiance of Catholicism, which thereupon split -- geographically -- into several "obediences. "

Gregory XI died on March 27, 1378. Twelve days later the cardinals elected in his place Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop of Bari -- Urban VI. Four months went by and then, on August 2, these same cardinals publicly declared that this election of Urban VI was no election; and on September 20 they proceeded to fill the alleged vacancy by electing as pope the cardinal Robert of Geneva -- Clement VII. Urban VI reigned until 1389; he was followed by Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-1406) and Gregory XII (1406-1415). Clement VII, meanwhile, reigned until 1394; and Benedict XIII, elected to succeed him, lasted for twenty-eight years more. Of these two lines, which were the real popes? To decide this we should first have to decide a question of historical fact; was Bartholomew Prignani, on April 8, 1378, really elected pope? or did the election take place in such a manner that it cannot be held a true election?

It is all-important, if the history of the Church in the next forty years is to be understood at all, to realise not only the fact of the ensuing division in Christendom, but the sincerity of the doubts and hesitations on both sides, and also the apparent practical impossibility -- especially once the generation passed away of those who, by their double election, had made the division -- of determining by any investigation of facts where the truth of the matter lay, the truth, that is to say, about the election of Urban VI. [742]

There exists an immense mass of information about that election from contemporaries, many of whom were eye-witnesses and participants in the great event. But the greater part of this evidence was set down after the second election, that is, after the dispute had begun. Party spirit is already evidently active, and in these accounts flat contradiction about simple matters of fact is frequent. Nevertheless, despite the unsatisfactory nature of much of the material, it is possible to reconstruct with certainty [743] the main events of the forty hours of crisis that began with the entry into the Vatican, for the conclave, of the sixteen cardinals [744] then in Rome, on Wednesday, April 7, at about five in the afternoon.

From the moment when Rome learnt of Gregory XI's death, one thought alone, seemingly, possessed the whole city; at all costs the cardinals must be brought to elect a pope who would not return to Avignon, a pope, therefore, who was Italian and not French. All through the next eleven days the excitement grew, and very soon Rome was wholly in the hands of those who could rouse and manoeuvre the mob of the city. The nobles were driven out; guards were set at the gates to prevent any electors from escaping while the see remained vacant; the shipping in the Tiber was stripped of sails and rudders. Thousands of peasants and brigands were brought in from the surrounding countryside, and armed bands paraded the streets, escorting the cardinals wherever they went, advising them of the best choice they could make, Romano lo volemo, o almanco Italiano. . And when the day at last arrived for the conclave to begin the cardinals had to make their way to the Vatican through a crowd as numerous as the very population of the city. [745]

The guardians of the conclave had been careless in their preparations, and they showed themselves weak and ineffective once the cardinals had arrived. Some of the mob, armed, to the number of seventy, made their way in with the cardinals, impressing upon them to the last, with coarse familiarity, the importance of making a right choice. When these were got rid of, there arrived the heads of the thirteen regions into which Rome at that time was divided (the Caporioni), with their escorts, demanding audience. They too were admitted, and once more the cardinals had to hear what, throughout the night, the mob continued to shout and chant, Romano lo volemo and the rest. The cardinals managed to be rid of the Caporioni without any definite answer, and after pillaging what they could they too left.

The night was noisy. The mob had settled down to a kind of kermess, its revelling helped on by the feat of those who had broken into the wine cellars of the palace. Just before dawn the cardinals were summoned to the first of two masses they were to hear, and while the second was in progress the mob wakened up to fresh activity. Presently the tocsin was heard to ring, and the bells of St. Peter's to answer it. While the senior cardinal was formally opening the proceedings the governor of the conclave sent in an urgent message. " Haste, for God's sake; elect an Italian or a Roman, or you will be massacred." Stones were indeed beginning to come through the windows, and axes to be plied against the doors.

Excitement flared high within the chapel where the cardinals, still isolated, were gathered. After half an hour they agreed to tell the mob that they would elect an Italian, and this was announced by the junior among them, James Orsini. On his return to the chapel this cardinal now suggested a mock election, of some Friar Minor who could be persuaded to play the part, be dressed in papal robes and presented to the mob -- what time the cardinals got away, to hold a real election elsewhere, later. But to this none would agree. And now it was that, within the conclave, the name of Bartholomew Prignani was first mentioned, [746] by the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna. A rapid consultation among the little group showed that two-thirds of them would vote accept him. The voting then began, by word of mouth, the Cardinal of Limoges casting the first vote for the future Urban VI. Three alone, of the sixteen, demurred; of whom, two, in the end, came to agree with the rest. Orsini alone held out to the last, declaring that in his opinion there was not sufficient freedom for the election to be valid.

Thus was Urban VI elected, towards nine in the morning of Friday, April 8, 1378. But not only was the elect not a cardinal: he was not, at this moment, within the palace, and between him and the news of his destiny was a city at the mercy of an armed and hostile mob. Until the archbishop accepted the election it could not be announced; and the first hint to the mob outside that the election had been made was the command from the cardinals to half a dozen Italian prelates -- of whom Prignani was one -- to come immediately to the Vatican.

It was, however, some hours before they came, and meanwhile the mob grew ever more violent and began to find its way into the palace. The six Italians arrived while the cardinals were at their midday meal. They, too, were given a meal by the guardians of the conclave, [747] who joked with them about the probability that one of the six had been elected, and made mock petitions for favours; and then, before Prignani could be summoned to hear of his destiny, the strangest scene of all took place.

Fear had now really invaded the minds of some of the electors -- fear that because Prignani was not a Roman the savages outside would resent the choice, and put the palace to the sack. When, after their meal, the cardinals met in the chapel, someone proposed that, since the mob now seemed less active, they should take advantage of the lull and re-elect Prignani. But "We all agree to him, don't we?" said a cardinal, and all present assented (thirteen of the sixteen who had taken part in the morning election). But by now the mob was at the end of its patience. It was the afternoon of Friday, almost twenty-four hours since the election had begun. This time nothing could halt the Romans, and by all manner of ways they poured into the palace and into the conclave itself, whose terrified guardians surrendered the keys. Some of the cardinals, the better placed, fled; others were arrested as they tried to leave. And to appease the mob -- supposedly enraged because a Roman had not been chosen -- other cardinals went through the farce of dressing up in papal robes the solitary Roman in the Sacred College, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, hoisting him, despite his threats and curses, on to the altar and intoning the Te Deum. This exhibition lasted for some hours, and it was, seemingly, from the old man's protestations against this mockery -- "I am not the pope; it is the Archbishop of Bari " -- that Prignani, somewhere in the palace, and by this time hiding from a mob to whom all that savoured of prelacy was spoil, learnt that he had been elected.

The palace was, indeed, thoroughly pillaged, and at last the mob went off elsewhere. Night fell, and in the Vatican there remained two only of the cardinals, and the man whom they had all, twice, agreed upon as the pope, but found no time to notify of the fact.

Gradually, on the next day, Friday, April 9, the cardinals began to come in from their hiding-places in the city. It took the best part of the day to persuade the six who had gone to St. Angelo that they could safely emerge. By the evening there were twelve cardinals in the Vatican. They first met, themselves alone, in the chapel of the election, and immediately sent for the Archbishop of Bari. They announced to him his election. Me accepted it; and chose the name of Urban VI. Whereupon he was robed in the papal mantle, enthroned, and homage was done to him as pope by all, while the Te Deum was sung.

Two days later was Palm Sunday. Urban presided at the great liturgy of the day, and all the cardinals received their palm at his hands. They took their traditional places by his side at all the Holy Week ritual. On Easter Sunday he was crowned in St. Peter's (April 18) and took possession as pope of his cathedral church of St. John Lateran.

Urban VI at this moment was, to all appearances, as much the lawful pope in the eyes of the cardinals as ever his predecessor, Gregory XI, had been. How then did they come to abandon him, to denounce their own electoral act as invalid? and when did this movement begin? It is not easy fully to answer either of those questions.

What does seem certain and beyond all doubt is that from the very first day of his reign -- the Monday after his coronation -- Urban began to act so wildly, to show himself so extravagant in speech, that historians of all schools have seriously maintained that the unexpected promotion had disturbed the balance of his mind. He had evidently made up his mind that his first duty was to cleanse the augean stable of the curia, to banish clerical worldliness and impropriety, and to begin this good work by reforming the cardinals and the other major prelates. The first signs of the new policy given to the world were violent general denunciations of whoever appeared before the pope to transact ecclesiastical business. When, for example, all the bishops present in Rome came to pay their homage, Urban rounded on them for hirelings who had deserted their flocks. An official of the Treasury came in to make some payments of moneys due and was met by an imprecation from Holy Writ, "Keep thy money to thyself, to perish with thee." [748] The cardinals were rated in consistory as a body, for their way of life, and singled out for individual reprobation; one was told he was a liar, another was a fool, others were bidden hold their tongues when they offered an opinion. When the Cardinal of Limoges appeared, the pope had to be held down or he would have done him violence, and the noise of the brawl when the Cardinal of Amiens came to pay his first homage, filled the palace. Urban boasted that he could now depose kings and emperors, and he told the cardinals that he would soon add so many Italians to their body that the French would cease to count for ever.

This extravagance of manner was the more disturbing because it was utterly at odds with the habits of a man who was by no means a stranger to any one of his electors. Urban VI was, at this time, a man close on sixty, and he had been one of the leading figures in the curia at Avignon for nearly twenty years. Urban V had, long ago, made him assistant to the vice-chancellor, perhaps the highest post that could be held by one who was not a cardinal; then, in 1364, the same pope had given him the see of Acerenza and when Gregory XI returned to Rome he had brought Bartholomew Prignani back with him to be, in all but name, his vice- chancellor. Urban VI, then, had been for the fourteen months preceding his election the chief personage of the curia after the pope himself; and among the cardinals he had enjoyed, very deservedly, the reputation of an extremely competent and serviceable official. He was learned, modest, devout; and, from his long life at Avignon, he was, so they thought, if not a Frenchman, as near to it as any mere foreigner could hope to be. This pope whom the cardinals now beheld, daily "breathing out threats and slaughter," was not the same man at all as the peaceable Archbishop of Bari. They were consternated; and so was all the curia with them. And whether Urban had indeed gone somewhat out of his mind, or whether this was merely the excessive noise of the explosion of a good man's disgust too long repressed, it seems certain that it is in these extravagances -- now the order of the day -- that the beginnings of the general breakaway are to be found. Had Urban shown ordinary tact and prudence there would never -- it seems certain -- have been the second conclave and election of 1378, whatever the doubts about the legality of his election that may have existed in the minds of some of his electors; or, at any rate, that second election would never have so impressed the world outside -- for its impressiveness, when it came, lay in the fact that it was the act of the whole college of cardinals.

The chief architect of the Schism, so Urban VI declared, [749] was the one-time Bishop of Amiens, Cardinal Jean de la Grange. This cardinal had not taken part in the momentous conclave; diplomatic business kept him at Sarzana during Gregory XI's last illness, and long before he could reach Rome Urban had been elected. When he arrived -- already enraged that his colleagues had chosen an Italian -- he had a violent, unfriendly reception from the new pope, who publicly called him a traitor to the Holy See for his activities at Sarzana. This was somewhere about April 25, and from now on the palace of Jean de la Grange was a kind of headquarters where all whom the pope's methods antagonised could meet and plot. One of the cardinal's first associates was his colleague Robert of Geneva, the cardinal whom Gregory XI had made commander-in-chief, and who was responsible for the massacre of Cesena. Between them these two did much to encourage the French commander in St. Angelo not to hand over the fortress to Urban, and with it the papal treasure taken there, on the day of the election, by the camerlengo the Archbishop of Arles.

One by one the cardinals now began to leave Rome for Anagni, the reason first alleged being the increasing heat of the Roman summer. The first two left on May 6, and by June 15 all the French cardinals were there together. On June 24 Peter de Luna, the Aragonese, and the ablest man in the whole college, joined them. From Anagni they called to their aid the Free Company of Gascons that had served Gregory XI. At Ponte Salario a body of Roman troops barred the way. There was a fight, but the Gascons won through, killing two hundred of the Romans (July 16, 1378). The cardinals, all the world could see it, were now a power beyond Urban's reach.

The pope was seriously alarmed. He had already sent three [750] of the Italian cardinals to offer terms, promising better treatment in the future. But the only result of this was to enable the whole college to meet away from any influence the pope might exercise. At that meeting momentous decisions were taken; the cardinals agreed that the election made on April 8, was void, and means were discussed to rid the Church of the "usurper." For a time these three Italian cardinals, indeed, strove to be neutral, but in the end they made common cause with their brethren, who, on August 2, had issued a manifesto stating that the election made in April was void by reason of the pressure exerted upon the electors, that Urban, therefore, was not pope, and inviting him to recognise the fact and to cease to exercise the papal office. One week later than this, after a mass of the Holy Ghost and a sermon, an encyclical letter of the cardinals was read aloud in which they solemnly anathematised Bartholomew Prignani as an usurper. From Anagni the cardinals moved, on August 27, to a refuge safer still at Fondi, just beyond the papal frontier, in the kingdom of Naples. Here the sovereign -- Queen Giovanna -- supported them, and it was now that their Italian colleagues, abandoning their neutrality, joined them. The address of the cardinals to the Christian world had gone out already, and their embassy to the King of France -- Charles V -- had won him to their view that the election made in April was null and void. The king's reply reached them on September 18. Two days later they went into conclave, and at the first ballot they chose as pope Robert of Geneva. He called himself Clement VII. [751] The three Italian cardinals, although present in the conclave, did not vote; but they acknowledged Clement and did him homage at his coronation on October 31.

For the next nine months the rival popes confronted each other in Italy, separated by a mere sixty miles and their own armed forces. Urban, on November 29, excommunicated Clement and some of his chief supporters; and Clement, in December, held his first consistory, creating six new cardinals and appointing legates to the various Christian princes.

Clement's cause, indeed, at the beginning of the new year 1379, seemed the more promising of the two. If England stood by Urban, and most of Germany too, France was decidedly for the Frenchman, and the Spanish kingdoms had at any rate refused to accept Urban, while in Italy Clement had Sicily on his side and also the Queen of Naples. But the situation changed greatly once Urban managed to hire the army of the best Italian captain of the day, Alberigo di Barbiano. On April 27, 1379, the French garrison that still held out in Castel S. Angelo at last surrendered to Urban, and three days later Alberigo routed and destroyed Clement's army at the battle or Marino. Clement now made for Naples, where the Queen received him with great pomp (May 10). But the populace rose in indignation that, in Naples, a Frenchman should be preferred to a pope who was a Neapolitan, and three days only after his arrival Clement had to flee to save his life. If he was not safe in Naples he could be safe nowhere in Italy; his first -- and, as it happened, his main -- attempt to drive Urban from Rome had failed indeed; nine months to the day after his election Clement sailed for Avignon (June 20, 1379).

ii. Discord in each 'Obedience,' 1379-1394.

These tremendous events had not gone by without comment from St. Catherine. At the moment of Urban VI's election the saint was at Florence -- whither Gregory XI had sent her -- and she was still there when, in July 1378, she wrote her first letter to Urban. It was a strong plea that his first care should be to reform the Church, and a reminder that for such a task "You have the greatest need of being founded in perfect Charity, with the pearl of justice. . . letting the pearl of justice glow forth from you united with mercy," and so to correct "those who are made ministers of the blood." [752] The cardinals were, by this time, already leaving Rome, and the next letter of the saint to the pope which we possess is dated September 18 -- the very day, had St. Catherine known it, when the cardinals went into the conclave that was to make Robert of Geneva Clement VII.

When this news reached her the saint straightway wrote to Urban the warning that, more than ever, must he now be " robed in the strong garment of most ardent charity"; she also wrote to the Queen of Naples, and to the cardinals who had elected Clement. Already, when first the division between them and Urban was becoming known, St. Catherine had written to Pedro de Luna, then considered as Urban's main supporter and the principal cause of his election, reminding him above all "never to sever yourself from virtue and from your head. All other things -- external war and other tribulations -- would seem to us less than a straw or a shadow in comparison with this." How the saint wrote to the schismatic electors can be guessed, "men, not men but rather demons visible." It is not true, St. Catherine tells them, that it was through fear of death that they had elected Urban "and, if it had been, you were worthy of death for having elected the pope through fear