Centuries of Latent Reform

Introduction

Popular history has traditionally attributed the start of the Protestant Reformation to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. However, nothing in Luther’s theses suggests that he intended to stir up such controversy. In fact, students and professors at sixteenth-century universities routinely posted such documents to propose an academic disputation among fellow intellectuals (Pettegree x). Yet within a few short years, Luther found himself at the center of an intense controversy that significantly altered the course of western civilization.

What happened? Earlier reformers sacrificed their lives striving to reform the church with comparatively little success. How did one professor in Germany seemingly unwittingly spark an international debate with civilization-altering ramifications? Clearly, Luther stumbled into a world of diverse and complex factors when he ascended the steps of the church in Wittenberg. To what extent did Luther truly start the Reformation?

Undoubtedly, Luther played a pivotal role in the Reformation, but from one perspective, he merely finished the work of those earlier reformers. Indeed, the previous reformers built upon centuries of latent reform before Luther’s day. Beginning especially in the fourteenth century, the church started to face pointed criticism from influential individuals like Dante and Petrarch. The Black Death and Western Schism, among other inciting events, intensified this atmosphere of reform in Europe, leading to the first significant reform movements championed by reformers such as John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. Thus, by the start of the sixteenth century, Luther happened upon a world already striving for reform. Of course, the German monk made brilliant contributions to the reformation effort, namely with his innovative and accessible writing style and forceful use of the printing press, but in one sense, Luther only built upon previous efforts amid extremely opportune circumstances to open the floodgates on a world already pregnant with the Reformation.

Beginnings of Criticism

Martin Luther and his fellow reformers hardly pioneered the practice of criticizing the church. Church criticism and anticlerical sentiments swirled around for centuries prior to the sixteenth century. Identifying the exact beginnings of these reformation tendencies proves an imprecise, and, at least for this paper, probably futile exercise. Nevertheless, the fourteenth century emerges as a particularly conspicuous period of church criticism and anticlerical sentiments.

In many ways, the thirteenth century represented the high point of civilization in the Middle Ages, especially for the church and papacy. The church exercised perhaps its greatest influence, monastic orders flourished, vibrant cities and universities developed, and the population and standard of living steadily increased. Pope Boniface VIII ended the century with a dramatic declaration of the supreme authority of the sword of the church in 1294, “Now, therefore, we declare, say, determine, and pronounce that for every human creature it is necessary for salvation to be subject to the authority of the Roman pontiff [pope]” (Kirsch).

The fourteenth century, however, shook the foundations of the church’s authority. In particular, the Avignon Papacy, Western Schism, and the Black Death severely undermined the church’s credibility and devastated the European continent.

Avignon Papacy

When Pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309, he invited a “dense and multifaceted critique” that “rose from every corner of Europe, and from a mixed group of people,” including Dante Alighieri and Francis Petrarch (Falkied 5).

In his Inferno, Dante traced the issues in the church back to Constantine in the fourth century, “Ah, Constantine, what wickedness was born—and not from your conversion—from the dower that you bestowed upon the first rich father!” (Barolini, lines 115-117). He based this claim on the Donation of Constantine, a document “which purports to bequeath Rome and its empire to the Church, [and] was held in Dante’s time to be a legal document written in Constantine’s court” (Barolini). Dante detested the “dower” depicted in the Donation of Constantine and attributed the church’s corruption to the temptation of such a massive material gift. According to Barolini, Italian humanists later discovered that the papal court had forged the document during the papal curia period half a millennium after Constantine. Dante did not witness this development, but even if he had, one can imagine how it would only have served to intensify his critique of the church.

And Dante’s poetry quickly gained popularity in the fourteenth century, which suggests that some aspect of his work struck a chord with a wide audience. Franco Sacchetti, a contemporary of Dante, told two stories that demonstrated the popularity of Dante’s poetry even among the less educated. “In the first Dante overhears a blacksmith who is (mis)singing his verse, and in the second, a donkey driver” (Ziolkowski 117). Of course, Dante may have intrigued and engaged a large and diverse assembly of readers and listeners for any number of reasons. But according to Barolini, his critique of the clergy represented a “long and critically important thematic thread” in his Divine Comedy. This requires, at the very least, that Dante’s wide audience, which included ordinary individuals in Italy, where the church held its greatest influence, did not resent his criticisms of the church or its clergy. Two centuries before Martin Luther, then, the general public had already shown some degree of sympathy for reformation ideas.

A few decades later, Petrarch, sometimes called the father of humanism, wrote to a friend about the Avignon papacy. In his scathing letter, he boldly decried the wealth and corruption of the papacy at Avignon. He wrote, “Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their predecessors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations” (Robinson 502-503). He went so far as to describe the papal court as criminal, licentious, foul, slothful, and unkempt (Robinson 503). This intense letter reveals an intense anticlerical sentiment that rivals even Luther’s famously harsh language over 150 years later. And as a central figure of humanism, a crucial and influential intellectual movement leading up to the Reformation, his critique bears considerable significance.

Western Schism

When the controversy of the Avignon Papacy reached its climax with the Western Schism in 1378, the church faced a dire threat to its credibility. For almost forty years, at least two men simultaneously laid claim to the papacy. Less than a century after Boniface VII declared that everyone must submit to the pope for their salvation, the church could not confidently identify the pope. In an increasingly humanist age that saw the “rise in piety and theological awareness on the part of the laity,” the laity met a stuttering church that simply could not muster a united front (McGrath 11). Just as “the individual was on its way to gaining an equal standing with societal groups” like the church, the church began to reveal severe vulnerabilities (Lingelbach 55). In this way, the Western Schism gravely undermined the credibility of the church. As McGrath put it, “It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the papacy at Avignon and the ensuing schism upon the medieval church. To whom should believers look for an authoritative - or even provisional - statement concerning the faith of the church?” (16).

Black Death

While the Avignon Papacy and Western Schism invited new criticisms and eroded the church’s credibility, the Black Death ravaged the European continent and exacerbated many of the doubts already surrounding the church as an institution. “For centuries, the medieval social structure had depended on the authority of the church… Society inextricably linked itself to ecclesiastical power and support” (Lingelbach 54). The church boasted such a central role in society largely because it “provided its people with stability and guidance,” especially during crises like the Black Death (Zentner 1). As the plague devastated Europe, “death seemed nearer, and salvation more important, than ever, and the clergy were put to a real test” (Gottfried 82).

But the church proved just as helpless as everyone else. When the plague swept the continent, “its religious, spiritual, and instructive capabilities were found wanting” (Zentner 2). The plague drastically reduced the population in Europe between 1347 and 1351, with even the most conservative estimates suggesting that at least a third of the population perished (Horrox 234). And the clergy fared no better than the general population. In fact, the mortality rate among clergy may have exceeded that of the laity (Horrox 235).

This apparently greater susceptibility of the clergy to the plague belittled the reputation of the clergy in three key ways. First, it served to humanize the officials in the church. For most of the Middle Ages, typical Christians regarded priests as almost superhuman, but “after the plague, his vulnerability so strikingly exposed, all trace of the superhuman must have vanished” (Zeigler 211). The common European Christian suddenly recognized that bishops and priests might not hold special spiritual power. If the clergy proved no more equipped to respond to the plague, what made the clergy more qualified to administer sacraments or even interpret Scripture?

Second, the greatly diminished personnel of the church simply could not fulfill its obligations to the people. “The frequent inability of the Church to perform effectively its responsibilities to the laypeople reveals the struggles it faced in the aftermath of the plague to adapt to the extreme losses of its clerical members” (Zentner 8). Even when the church managed to replace a clergy member, the laity often found the replacement to be incompetent or corrupt. In the diocese of Hereford, for example, churchgoers met “glaring cases of misfits at the altar, men who were patently inept at exercising the arts of arts, some on account of ignorance, poor training and spare opportunity for learning, others out of an incompetence that was not adequately challenged by the usual pastoral authorities of rural dean, archdeacon or bishop” (Dohar 156). Beyond only incompetence, many less scrupulous priests revealed their corruption and started to demand excessively high wages in light of the increased demand for qualified clergymen (Zentner 15).

Third, and perhaps most significantly, the scattered and precarious church hierarchy exposed a new vulnerability to protests and revolts. According to Ziegler, “The abrupt disappearance of nearly half the clergy, including a disproportionately great number of the brave and diligent, inevitably put a heavy strain on the machinery of the church and reduced its capacity to deal effectively with movements of protest or revolt” (212). The Flagellant Movement provides the most immediately relevant example. The movement emerged in late 1348, as if in response to the Black Death. According to Zentner, “Flagellants traveled to towns and cities and made great claims about their abilities to perform miracles and grant salvation to sinners” (23). Of course, the church promptly condemned the movement in 1349 (Gottfried 71). Within one year, however, flagellants had already gained tremendous popularity among Christians in Europe, and the movement therefore proved rather difficult to effectively subdue (Zentner 34).

Thus, when the Black Death wreaked its greatest havoc in the middle of the fourteenth century, it left in its wake a continent rather disillusioned with the church as an institution. After the church’s inadequate response to the plague, “people quickly turned against the hierarchy of the Church and began to look elsewhere [e.g. flagellants] for salvation, and to find other ways in which they could repent for their own individual sins” (Zentner 34). In other words, over 150 years before the Protestant Reformation, a great many individuals in Europe had already begun to look for a reformation. And those individuals did not have to wait very long.

John Wycliffe

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first true champions of reform gained traction in the immediate context of the aforementioned Western Schism. While the church continued to suffer from the consequences of the Black Death, intensely heightened by the controversy of the schism, John Wycliffe started to amass a following and attract the church’s attention. Like Dante and Petrarch and many others before him, Wycliffe “attacked the abuses of the church, from the priests to the pope” (Calhoun). But the disarray of the schism created a new opportunity for legitimate reform. Wycliffe himself recognized this, writing that Christ “hath begun already to help us graciously, in that he hath cloven the head of Antichrist, and made the two parts fight against each other” (Wood 76). This opportunity came toward the end of his life, but he still managed to accomplish much and leave a lasting legacy. In particular, Wycliffe rejected the church’s claim to temporal authority and elevated the place of Scripture among Christians.

Drawing from Augustine’s City of God, Wycliffe wrote On Divine Dominion and On Civil Dominion, which argued that the church had no real claim to earthly power. Unsurprisingly, the pope at the time responded with five papal bulls against Wycliffe, citing eighteen errors from On Civil Dominion, all of which pertained to “ecclesiastical authority and organization rather than basic creedal beliefs” (Roberts). However, the church was “unable to control or silence Wycliffe” because his “help was gladly embraced by the state in its ongoing battle with the church over issues of status, power, and control” (Calhoun). In this way, Wycliffe successfully frustrated the monopoly of the church for a short time.

Although the church did eventually manage to silence the great reformer, the institution failed to silence his most significant contribution to the reformation effort. In his Truth of Holy Scripture, Wycliffe aimed to elevate “the Bible to its supreme place” and insisted “that it be made available to all Christians in their own language” (Calhoun). Accordingly, when Wycliffe withdrew to the Lutterworth parish after his condemnation, he devoted himself to translating the Scriptures into the vernacular English. While Wycliffe and his colleagues produced an imperfect translation from the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Hebrew and Greek texts, the English Bible still represented a clear and important step towards the sola scriptura rallying cry of the Reformation (Roberts).

By the time Wycliffe died in 1384, he had inspired a group of followers known as “Lollards.” These followers continued his work, but the church strongly opposed and persecuted the Lollards in England (Roberts). Nevertheless, his followers exerted enough influence that Chaucer depicted the parson as a Lollard in his Canterbury Tales a few years later, portraying him in an overwhelmingly positive light (Calhoun). Still, the church’s strong response effectively suppressed the movement in England. However, students of Wycliffe carried his ideas and writings to the European continent, where the next major reformer took up his cause and continued his work (Roberts).

Jan Hus

Jan Hus first discovered the ideas of Wycliffe when Jerome of Prague, one such former student of Wycliffe and a personal friend of Hus, introduced his theological works to Bohemia at the turn of the fifteenth century (Odložilík 636). Although Hus initially implored Jerome to throw the books into a nearby river, after a more careful study of his work, Wycliffe’s writings “began to awaken in Huss [sic] a fire and a bolder zeal for reformation” (O’Reggio 107). As a result, Hus began to build upon Wycliffe’s work.

While not quite as radical as Wycliffe, Hus’s reformation efforts closely resembled those of the earlier English reformer. He aimed to “return the Church to the primitive piety of the apostolic age . . . to the teachings and practices of the gospel of Christ” (O’Reggio 108). Much like Wycliffe, Hus emphasized the use of the vernacular, preaching an estimated 3,500 sermons in Czech (O’Reggio 109). He expanded upon Wycliffe’s Truth of Holy Scripture, further fleshing out the foundational reformation doctrine of sola scriptura by asserting that “that the Bible alone should be the source of truth and rule of faith and conduct. No obedience to the church is obligatory that is not distinctly based on the scriptures” (O’Reggio 110). Also like Wycliffe, he denounced the corruption of the church and attacked the sale of indulgences (Schwanda).

But Hus did not merely follow Wycliffe. In fact, he probably exercised far more influence than Wycliffe. To a much greater extent than in Wycliffe’s England, “the political and religious circumstances of Bohemia presented a startling intersection between nationalism and religious reform” (O’Reggio 103). According to Milman, “John Huss [sic] then was no isolated teacher, no follower of a condemned English heretic: he was more even than head of a sect; he almost represented a kingdom, no doubt much more than half of Bohemia” (168). Thus, a century before Luther reignited the reformation effort with a similar sense of national identification, the church faced its first “national revolution” that “showed that for the sake of religion a whole people might rise in revolt” (O’Reggio 104).

In the end, the monopoly of the church prevailed in the fifteenth century, but the church's response to Hus demonstrated that the movement posed a serious threat. When Hus attacked the church’s indulgence campaign, “it marked the beginning of the loss of support from the king” (O’Reggio 113). Eventually, the church imprisoned the Bohemian reformer, condemned him as a follower of Wycliffe, and burned him at the stake in 1415 (Schwanda). Additionally, the church posthumously condemned John Wycliffe, burned his writings, and disposed of his remains in a river, further testifying the extent to which the ideas and work of Wycliffe and Hus threatened the church (Roberts).

Acknowledging Luther's Contributions

Taken together, these various instances of reform impulse indicate that the Reformation started long before Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Of course, Luther made his own brilliant contributions to the reformation effort. Under his supervision, the Reformation developed and expanded more rapidly than it had under Wycliffe or Hus. For example, he “wrote 30 publications which sold over 300,000 copies between 1517 and 1520 – and spread quickly throughout the Empire via printed copies” (Rubin 7). While an unprecedented intersection of advantageous political, economic, and technological circumstances certainly greatly aided this success, his own determination and ingenuity played a central role as well.

In Brand Luther, Pettegree outlines two key ways in which Luther advanced the reformation effort by his own merit. First, he pioneered a new style of theological writing that was clear, short, and accessible to a wider audience in their own language. Second, he “intervened directly and forcefully in the management of the [printing] press” (xii). Additionally, Luther championed the rediscovery of redemption by faith, an essential aspect of the Reformation that the previous reformers lacked (Mocanu 170). In these and many other regards, the German professor deserves recognition for his vital and innovative role in the reformation efforts.

However, in many ways, Luther merely continued the work of Wycliffe and Hus, such that Luther’s reformation can hardly be considered an ideologically distinct movement. For instance, Luther insisted on the primacy of Scripture, emphasized the use of the vernacular, denounced the abuses of the clergy, and attacked the campaign of indulgences. In fact, Erasmus, whom monks accused of laying the egg that Luther hatched, associated Luther’s work directly with John Wycliffe. In 1523, he wrote, “Once the party of the Wycliffites was overcome by the power of the kings; but it was only overcome and not extinguished” (Calhoun). And Luther himself identified as a Hussite when he famously declared, “I have taught and held all the teachings of Jan Hus” (Schwanda). Further, he purported to fulfill Hus’s legendary prophecy, “St. John Huss [sic] prophesied about me when he wrote from his prison in Bohemia, ‘They will roast a goose now (for “Huss” means “a goose”), but after a hundred years they will hear a swan sing, and him they will endure.’ And that is the way it will be, if God wills” (Luther). And a Bohemian psalter that depicts “Wycliffe striking the spark, Hus kindling the coals, and Luther brandishing the lighted torch” indicates that others agreed with Luther’s assessment” (Calhoun).

Conclusion

Ultimately, the steadily growing reform impulse in the centuries before Martin Luther rejects the simplistic notion that the Reformation began with the 95 Theses. The reception of Dante’s work at the beginning of the 14th century showed that many already possessed some measure of sympathy for reformation ideas two hundred years before Luther. Petrarch’s scathing letter revealed the depth and intensity of anticlerical sentiments long before the sixteenth century. Church controversies and the plague heightened these sentiments, culminating in two radical reform movements more than a century before the rather ordinary occasion when Martin Luther approached the door of the church with hammer and nail in hand. When the German monk climbed those steps, he did so with centuries of latent reform at his heels. Indeed, he did so in a world groaning in the pains of childbirth as it anticipated the birth of a movement that would release those centuries of tension and finally bring to fruition the work of those earlier reformers.

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