JOHN OF GAUNT’S FIRST commitment was to his family. The people he loved most were his mother the Queen, his elder brother the Black Prince, and the first and third of his wives. His second commitment was to the chivalric code and remained so until his death. He enjoyed fighting on the battlefield and was an inveterate sponsor of and participant in tournaments. His behavior toward aristocratic women showed his recognition of courtly love. He moved readily and eagerly within the circumscribed but civilized lifestyle of the Anglo-French aristocracy.
Gaunt’s third commitment was to the management of his vast estates, which lay mostly in northern England and in Aquitaine. He employed a skillful and tightfisted group of managers for his English estates, which produced revenues of around $500 million a year.
Gaunt also had a commitment to what historians call his “affinity,” or retainers, the thousands of lesser nobility, gentry, and mercenaries bound in their loyalty to him by one form of contract (such as indenture) or another. Many of them wore the Lancastrian badge, and they fought for him, if they were able-bodied and he summoned them to France, Spain, or Scotland. His obligation to them involved grants of land, sharing of war booty, helping to arrange marriages, and support in the law courts, especially in civil (property) disputes.
Some of his affinity also received government jobs, such as sheriff, tax collector, justice of the peace (a local magistrate), and as members of Parliament. But careful research has shown that Gaunt did not pursue bureaucratic rewards for his affinity as much as he could have. It was part of his nature to limit the use he would make of his position as a royal prince. He was conscious that maximizing the advantages of his status could arouse resentment among the nobility and commoners alike.
In addition to pursuing all these activities, Gaunt became involved with religious leaders and groups, activist peasants, Parliament, and his unfortunate nephew Richard II. Given his status, wealth, and visibility, these involvements are not surprising and in many instances were unavoidable. But Gaunt’s involvement with the heretical don, preacher, and writer John Wyclif for about a decade was his own choice and shows a disposition, for a time, toward radical religious ideas.
A papal inquisition was a special Church court set up to prosecute religious heretics, including those who had strayed from the Roman Catholic faith and had set up subversive counterchurches. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries papal inquisitions were frequently at work in southern France, where there was a massive heretical movement, the Albigensians.
A papal inquisition had never operated in England, partly because Henry II had kept out of the country the inquisitorial judges mandated to discover and punish religious heretics and partly because after his reign no heretics were visible in England. Before 1350 the classic law of doctrinal error remained active in southern France, the Rhine Valley, and northern Italy. If there was a popular heretical movement in England during the thirteenth century, it had to have functioned deep underground, and historians have not discovered it.
A heretical movement finally began in England in the 1360s, led by John Wyclif (d. 1384). Wyclif was an ambitious and disgruntled Oxford don from the lower gentry, the source of most medieval academics. He taught assiduously and also wrote very learned and highly polemical theological treatises in both Latin and English. He preached frequently in the university church.
Wyclif seems in the beginning to have been motivated by hostility to and jealousy of the friars, Franciscan and Dominican. As a secular priest (not a monk or friar) and college don, he did not have the financial help that the religious orders provided for their members studying at Oxford.
Although Wyclif eventually obtained enough Church preferment to finance his advanced studies, he had already become an embittered extremist, and in the Oxford philosophy faculty he found no mentor to get him to moderate his views.
Wyclif was philosophically a Platonist, or, as an adherent of Platonism was then called, a “realist.” For Wyclif, only pure ideas had reality, i.e., permanence, integrity, legitimacy. Compared with the pure idea of a church, the English Church of his day was far from ideal. Any material involvement of bishops and friars detracted from their legitimacy, in his view.
Wyclif was a brilliant polemicist and he had a masterly, encyclopedic knowledge of the Scriptures. It was not easy to debate with him, although several dons tried. In his own eyes, Wyclif never lost a debate. He was a charismatic figure in the academic world and his fame began to spread to wider circles.
Wyclif gained further attention by propounding the doctrine of dominium, which had been articulated by Marsilius of Padua and William of Occam early in the century. According to this doctrine, since the state had sovereign power, it could and should divest the churchmen of their lands. Marsilius and Occam were not obscure figures. They were prominent professors. Marsilius taught at the University of Paris. In a long treatise he contended that only complete domination by the state over the church allowed for social peace and stability.
Occam was a philosophical genius who was a member of the radical wing of his order, the Franciscans, at Oxford. He adhered to the doctrine of apostolic poverty, which advocated that churchmen give up their property and live as mendicants. This revolutionary doctrine was condemned as heresy by the papacy in 1322.
Inevitably both Marsilius and Occam fell afoul of Church authorities. They found refuge at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Lewis IV of Bavaria.
Occam and Wyclif belonged to opposing philosophical schools. Occam was a nominalist, or anti-Platonist; Wyclif a realist, or Platonist. Yet in spite of contrasting philosophical assumptions, Occam and Wyclif ended up with similar antiecclesiastical conclusions. For Occam the idea of the Church as a universal institution had no intellectual merit. For Wyclif, the Church fell far short of its institutional ideal and therefore had lost its moral authority.
Wyclif was a brilliant and immensely learned man who translated his personal contempt for most churchmen of his day into radical ideas. All three—Marsilius, Occam, and Wyclif—looked to the power of the state as the means of social salvation and the route to enhancement of their unfulfilling academic careers.
Wyclif became more radical as time went on, attacking the Church’s sacramental system and the doctrine of transubstantiation, the theoretical basis for the sacrament of the Eucharist and for the Mass. He denounced the papacy as evil. Some of Wyclif’s disciples translated the Bible into English for literate workers and gentry, something the more conservative bishops regarded as a subversive move. Wyclif’s graduate students went out of Oxford into the countryside and preached his radical doctrines; they were called Lollards.
About five hundred pages of Lollard writings have survived. These pages are written in English. The Lollard writers call for “reformation of the holy church of England.” The pope is “a blasphemer and Lucifer and anti-Christ.” The contemporary priesthood is “not the priesthood for which Christ ordained his apostles.” The Church is “full of idolatry.”
Such inflammatory statements reflect a growing unease among the English people about the rectitude of the clergy. They also reflect the postadolescent radicalism among graduate students in all times and places. Wyclif capitalized on these feelings, articulating them into elaborate theological treatises, mostly written in Latin.
University teachers were allowed a wide doctrinal latitude by the medieval Church on what they communicated orally. It was when they wrote down and circulated their radical ideas that the authorities became alarmed. Yet despite his radical writings, most of the English bishops preferred to ignore Wyclif; they had no tradition of persecuting heretics, as there was in France. But William Courtenay, Bishop of London (later Archbishop of Canterbury), was a hardliner. He got permission from the papacy to set up a court of inquisition.
Wyclif sometimes preached at the royal court. John of Gaunt had become acquainted with him there. Gaunt offered the rebellious don patronage and protection. He arranged for Wyclif to be appointed to a diplomatic mission to Belgium. As Britain’s leading landowner, Gaunt undoubtedly was attracted to the doctrine of dominium in Wyclif’s teaching, since it legitimated royal and aristocratic expropriation of Church property.
The Black Death and the malaise it caused had set off novel spiritual quests, and this also affected Gaunt, as it did others. He wanted to give Wyclif a hearing. When Wyclif was at last forced to appear before an inquisitorial court in London headed by Bishop Courtenay, Gaunt set off a riot.
Bishop Courtenay was popular among the street people in London. That did not prevent Gaunt at one point from threatening to drag him out by the hair of his head. The inquisitorial court broke up in confusion and Wyclif was not condemned.
Wyclif was never again brought to trial by the Church authorities, although some of his Lollard followers, so summoned, either recanted or received very moderate punishment. This was not France. After supporting Wyclif for a decade, however, Gaunt separated from him. Pursuing the religious quest fashionable at the time, Gaunt had become enamored of the Carmelites, a small and very strict order of friars. The Duke switched his religious patronage to the Carmelites, moving from radical to conservative extremes.
But Wyclif was not forsaken by people in high circles. He was given a rich parish, to which he retired from Oxford, and he spent his remaining years turning out more heretical treatises. His doctrines were similar to that of the radical Protestantism in the late sixteenth century out of which the Congregational and Baptist communities developed.
Wyclif’s teaching affected another European country: Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). Gaunt’s nephew Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, and Wyclif’s writings migrated from the English royal court to Prague. Wyclif’s doctrine thereby inspired the rise of a great heretical movement in Bohemia under the early leadership of John Hus. After a prolonged struggle, the Hussites formed the first Protestant state in Europe in the fifteenth century, antedating Lutheran Germany.
There was a definite connection between the Lancastrian court and the Lollards, starting with Gaunt’s early support of Wyclif. Gaunt’s son Henry IV (r. 1399-1413) discovered, a half-dozen years into his reign, that perhaps a dozen knights in the royal court, members of the highest stratum of the gentry, were supporters of the Lollard preachers. The King brought down upon the “Lollard knights” all the power of Church and state. Henry IV was convinced the Lollard knights were subversive.
Their response was to organize a bizarre insurrection in the early months of Henry V’s reign. The insurrection, led by a prominent mercenary and military hero, Sir John Oldcastle, was put down handily and Oldcastle was hunted down. It was alarming to both Henry IV and Henry V that Lollardy had penetrated into the highest ranks of the gentry.
The persecution of the Lollard knights seems to have stopped this threat. There is no doubt that the Lollard knights were religious idealists, true believers. But after the government had suppressed them, the Lollards retreated to country districts in the north, where they lived mainly among peasant families.
When Henry VIII separated England from Rome in the 1530s, the remaining tiny group of Lollards joined up with the Lutherans, whose pamphlets were imported from the Continent in herring barrels. By 1420 the Lollards had become like the Amish in the United States today. They were a very small group of hardworking farmers in the north for whom Wyclif’s teachings had become a bonding identity.
How different it would have been if Gaunt had persisted in his early public and private support of Wyclif. He could have played the decisive role that Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, took in Martin Luther’s lifetime in the founding of the Lutheran Church, a role—even though Luther and his aristocratic patron never met face-to-face—that was almost as great as that of Luther himself.
The younger Gaunt was looking for some kind of novel spiritual commitment in the fearsome age of the Black Death when faith healing was not having much success. Gaunt could have become a devotee of the mystics who were appearing all over the country. But the mystics’ message was too amorphous for him and their prescribed contemplative lifestyle too detached and static for a man of Lancaster’s military activity and sex drive.
For a time Wyclif appealed to Gaunt. The Oxford don’s powerful preaching, his immense learning, and his courageous onslaught upon the religious establishment as well as his justification for expropriation of Church lands by the state and aristocracy—all this appealed to Gaunt. But the furious ramblings of this quarrelsome and ambitious professor grated on Gaunt’s refined aristocratic disposition.
Wyclif’s scurvy graduate students, the Lollards, preaching in market and town, brought home to Gaunt the potential serious consequences of the Wyclifite movement. Perhaps Gaunt got wind of the spread of Lollardy to court gentry.
In any event, Gaunt drew back from being at the center of a social and religious maelstrom. He found an uncontroversial and satisfying outlet for his spiritual quest: his support and patronage of the austere Carmelite order of friars. This kind of moderate religious gesture had been embraced defensively by the great families for centuries. This conservative spiritual behavior and break with Wyclif fit in well with the mind-set of the grandest and richest knight in Christendom.
In this respect Gaunt was clearly a man of the Middle Ages rather than of the early modern world. Religion was a matter for private cultivation through his personal devotions and his patronage of the Carmelites. Religion was, after all, not a public, social, or political matter, not a mechanism for transforming culture.
This was the Catholic way. The medieval aristocracy thought of religion as a deeply personal thing, and gave churchmen resources to pursue their mission of converting and comforting souls. Medieval aristocrats like Gaunt did not want to see religion as an entry point for transforming the structure of society and government.
It is remarkable that a younger Gaunt was tempted by Wyclif’s revolutionary vision. But as Gaunt aged, he returned to the traditional aristocratic dichotomy of religion and the world. If society and government needed restructuring, the aristocracy would do it, soothed by the chanting of traditional monks like the Carmelites.
Back in the late eleventh century a group of cardinals and monks led by Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) had sought to unite the Church and the world and restructure society under papal leadership. The aristocracy of the time defied the Gregorian reformers and prevailed over them. Wyclif was antipapist, but he too wanted to integrate the Church and society, or so Gaunt came to suspect. This kind of radical idealism could not be allowed to prevail, in Gaunt’s mature judgment.
Historians have called the Wyclifite movement the Premature Reformation. In the end it was mostly unsuccessful, but it was not premature. In Gaunt’s lifetime English society was ready for a reformation, for several reasons.
First, the papacy had disgraced itself and had acquired a bad reputation in England. Since the first decade of the fourteenth century the popes, always now Frenchmen, had resided in Avignon on the Rhone River and had become closely associated with the French monarchy. There was a popular national antipapal feeling in England, compounded by heavy papal taxation of the English clergy.
What was particularly grating in England was the papacy’s persistent and partly successful effort to control appointments in the English Church or cathedral canons and priests in the larger and more lucrative parishes. The appointees were almost invariably Italians or Frenchmen and usually they did not appear in England to do their work. Instead they would appoint an Englishman as a vicar who actually did the job. Meanwhile the Italian or French appointee would collect a significant share of the income afforded by the ecclesiastical office. What was on the surface a dispute about Church organization and discipline was inflamed by nationalist feeling against foreigners.
The ecclesiastical situation became worse in 1378, when the minority of Italian cardinals went back to Rome and elected a pope. The French majority among the cardinals continued to reside in Avignon and elected their own pope. There were now two contending popes in Christendom. This scandalous Great Schism lasted until 1417.
A second ground for a reformation in England had been laid by the socially radical preaching of the Franciscans. In the early fourteenth century the Pope had condemned the radical wing of the Franciscan order, but the radicals’ egalitarian ideas had already penetrated into Christian culture. Although Wyclif was at odds with the order, purged of radicalism by his day, he built upon the leftist antipapal and anti-hierarchical teachings of the now condemned Spiritual Franciscans.
A third reason for a potential reformation in England came from the widespread criticism of the clergy as corrupt and ineffective. The older monasteries in particular had become very rich land corporations and contributed little to society. The monks’ daily consumption of an enormous amount of food was legendary: the fat, lazy monk became the staple of a growing anticlerical literature. Geoffrey Chaucer contributed to this anticlerical literature in The Canterbury Tales. His descriptions of the Prioress, Monk, Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner are all detrimental to the image of the Church. Only the lowly Parson represents the true spirit of Christianity.
What was lacking in the highly combustible religious ambience in late-fourteenth-century England was secular political leadership to break with Rome and open the floodgates to a reformation. Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s was to provide that opening. But in fourteenth-century England, Gaunt’s abandonment of Wyclif after supporting him early on precluded the reformation. It was Gaunt’s turning away from the radical professor that stopped a religious revolution.
The ingredients of Protestantism in 1370 lay deep in English culture and society. These ingredients could have led to a substantially reformed Church in England. But the extremism of the later Wyclif and the lack of discipline among his Lollard followers made it impossible for Gaunt to continue to cooperate with them. Thus the Wyclifites lost the political leadership they needed to foment a reformation 150 years before Henry VIII.
There was a time in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries when England’s bishops and abbots, under strong leadership from Rome, asserted the Church’s identity and made a claim for autonomy. By Gaunt’s time, those days were long gone. The Church in England had come completely under the domination of the royal government and the great aristocratic families. Parliament even passed a law (which was not observed) prohibiting churchmen in England from communicating with the papacy without permission of the royal government.
The “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy in Avignon and then from 1378 to 1417 the Great Schism, with popes in both Avignon and Rome, severely damaged the Church’s image among the lay population. But even aside from this disaster, the bishops, abbots, and heads of religious orders in England had come to adopt a national rather than international perspective. They were dependent on and subservient to the royal government and the aristocracy. Therefore when Wyclif and his disciples attempted a radical reform of the Church, they made very little progress because they lacked the necessary secular support among the elite.
That the Wyclifite movement was antipapal cut Wyclif and his followers off from the support of whatever remained of the Church as an international institution. The Wyclifite movement for reform could only be a national one.
In the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, Protestant and secular historians spoke of the “decline of the medieval Church.” They are less inclined to do so today because, while the Latin Church suffered from severe institutional problems, the period between the 1370s and the coming of Henry VIII’s Reformation in the 1530s was one of flourishing of medieval religion at the ground level, within local communities and among individuals.
It was a period remarkable for building of parish churches and family chantries. It was a period in which cults of particular saints proliferated and visitation of their shrines flourished. In all towns and the larger villages, processions in which religious statues, pictures, and relics were carried through the streets took place very frequently.
Above all, the late fourteenth century was a period of flowering of English mysticism. Individuals who withdrew to caves or the tops of hills to meditate on union with God were much admired. The English mystical movement encompassed both kinds of mystical experience, the positive and the negative.
Positive mysticism was the traditional Platonic kind going back to the second century A.D., in which the saint disciplines himself or herself to reach up to God. Negative mysticism (more common in East Asia and fashionable in the United States today) involves the effort to cast off all consciousness of the body and individual personality, the creation of total material and intellectual emptiness, so that the torrent of divinity can rush in. It represents the sensibility closest to that of the seeker of nirvana to appear in European religious literature. The classic text of negative mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, was written anonymously by an English monk in Gaunt’s lifetime. It merits a long extract:
Translated by Karen Armstrong in The English Mystics, published by kind permission of the author and Kyle Cathie Limited.
So for the love of God be careful and don’t put any great strain on your mind or imagination. For I tell you truthfully, you cannot achieve it by any such strain, so leave your intellectual and your imaginative skills strictly alone.
And don’t imagine that because I refer to a “cloud” or “darkness” that I am talking about a cloud of vapours that evaporates into thin air or a darkness you see in your house when your candle has been extinguished. That is the kind of darkness you can imagine with some degree of mental ingenuity on the brightest summer’s day, just as on the darkest winter’s night you can imagine a bright shining light. Do not you waste your time with any of these false ideas. I didn’t mean anything like that. When I use the word “darkness” I mean an absence of knowledge, as when you say that the things you don’t know or have forgotten are “dark” to you because you cannot see them with your inner eye. And for the same reason, this “cloud” is no cloud in the sky but a “cloud of unknowing” between you and your God …
If you want to stand fast in virtue and not fall prey to temptation, never let your intention fail. Beat constantly against the cloud of unknowing between you and your God with a piercing dart of longing love and be loath to let your mind wander on anything less than God. Don’t give up for anything, because this is absolutely the only work that destroys the ground and root of sin. It doesn’t matter how much you fast or keep long vigils, how early you get up, how hard your bed is or how painful your hair-shirt. Indeed, if it was lawful for you—as, of course, it isn’t—to pluck out your eyes, cut your tongue from your mouth, stop your ears and nose, lop off your limbs and inflict all the pain that is possible or that you can imagine on your body, none of this would do you any good at all. The impulse and the temptation to sin would still be embedded in you.
What else can I tell you? However much you weep with remorse for your sins or sorrow for Christ’s Passion or however firmly you fix your mind on the joys of heaven, what benefit would you derive? Certainly it would give you much good, much help, much profit, much grace. But compared with this blind yearning of love, it can do very little … For if this loving impulse is properly rooted in the soul, it contains all the virtues, truly, perfectly and effectually, without in any way diluting the intention of the will towards God. Indeed, it doesn’t matter how many virtues a man acquires, without this true love they are bound to be warped and thus imperfect.
This is because virtue is nothing else but a properly ordered and deliberate turning of the soul to God. Why? God as he is in himself is the one and only source of all the virtues, so much so that if anyone is inspired to acquire a single virtue with mixed motives, even if God is uppermost in his mind, that virtue is bound to be flawed. We shall understand this better if we concentrate on just one or two particular virtues, and these may as well be humility and love. For anyone who has acquired these two virtues doesn’t need any more; he has got them all.
Set to work, therefore, with all possible speed: beat against this high cloud of unknowing—you can rest later! It is extremely hard work for the beginner, make no mistake about that, unless God makes it easier with a special grace or simply because after a while one gets used to it.
But in what sense exactly is it hard work? Certainly not in the devout and urgent motion of love that is always springing up in the will of a contemplative, because this is not produced mechanically but by the hand of almighty God, who is always ready to act in each eager soul who has done and continues to do everything in his power to prepare himself for this work.
So why is it so arduous? Obviously in the trampling on all memory of God’s creatures and keeping them enveloped by that cloud of forgetting I mentioned earlier. This really is hard work because we have to do it, with God’s help; the other aspect of the work, which I have just described—the urgent impulse of love—is entirely the work of God. So do your part and, I promise you, that he will not fail to do his.
Get to work as soon as possible, then. Let me see how you are bearing up. Can’t you see that God is waiting for you? For shame! After just a short, hard period of effort you will find the immense difficulty of the work beginning to ease. It is true that it is hard and repressive at the start, when your devotion is weak, but later when you are more devout what once seemed extremely arduous has become much easier and you can begin to relax. You may only have to make a little effort—or even no effort at all, because sometimes God does everything himself. But this doesn’t always happen and never for very long but whenever he chooses and as he chooses. But you will be more than happy then, so let him do what he likes.
Now you are going to ask me how you can destroy this stark awareness of yourself. You might be thinking that if you destroy this sense of yourself, you will destroy everything else too and you will be right. But I will answer this fear by telling you that without a very special grace from God and without a particular aptitude on your part, you will never be able to get rid of this naked sense of self. For your part, this aptitude consists in a robust and profound sorrow of spirit.
But it is essential that you exercise discretion in this matter. You mustn’t put any excessive strain on your body or soul but should, as it were, sit quietly, almost as if you were asleep and entirely saturated and immersed in sorrow. This is what true and complete sorrow is like and if you can achieve it you will find that it helps you. Everybody has a special reason for grief, but the person who has a deep experience of himself existing far apart from God feels the most acute sorrow. Any other grief seems trivial in comparison. Indeed, anybody who has never experienced this grief should be really sorry for himself because he has never felt perfect sorrow! Once we have acquired this sorrow it not only purifies our souls, but it takes away all the pain merited by sin and thus makes the soul capable of receiving that joy which takes from a man all sense of his own being …
Everybody should know and experience this sorrowful weariness with self in some way or other. God promises to teach his spiritual disciples according to his good pleasure, but there must be a corresponding readiness in the disciple’s own soul and body as he ascends the ladder of contemplation and cultivates the right disposition before he can be wholly united to God in perfect love—or as perfectly as possible in this world—if God wills.
The author of The Cloud of Unknowing was very possibly a Carmelite friar. This religious text fits in with the Carmelites’ worldview.
The Carmelites were the later Gaunt’s favorite religious order. In reading The Cloud of Unknowing we get a sense of the religious ambience in which Gaunt was immersed. It is a long way from the warrior ethos he shared with the Black Prince. There is no evidence that Gaunt tried to reach a Carmelite nirvana. But being subjected to this kind of extreme mysticism, as he was because of his attendance on the Carmelites, affected his sensibility. It helps to explain a certain diffidence and hesitancy in his behavior. We are all part of what we have met. Listening to mystical sermons of this kind must have had some effect on Gaunt’s outlook in his later years.
The late fourteenth century was a time of brooding religious sensibility in England. A hundred years later, much of this radical sensibility was submerged by the advancement of classical humanism. But for now it was deeply expressed in religious literature.
The Cloud of Unknowing was at the Carmelite extreme on this band of sensibility. More moderate was the elegiac poem Pearl, written anonymously in the 1370s by a member of the gentry about one hundred miles north of Oxford. A recently deceased young girl is presented metaphorically as Pearl, to whom the grieving poet wants to communicate across the river of mortality but cannot, because he is held back by the inevitable corruption of his human nature:
Translated by Marie Boroff in Pearl: A New Verse Translation, by permission of W. W. Norton and Company. Copyright 1977 by W. W. Norton and Company.
Had I but sought to content my Lord
And taken his gifts without regret,
And held my place and heeded the word
Of the noble Pearl so strangely met,
Drawn heavenward by divine accord
I had seen and heard more mysteries yet;
But always men would have and hoard
and gain the more, the more they get.
So banished I was, by cares beset,
From realms eternal untimely sent;
How madly, Lord, they strive and fret
Whose acts accord not with your content!
This was common sentiment, as common as the chivalric and Arthurian literature recited in the great aristocratic dining halls. It was central to Gaunt’s cultural ambience and it affected his mind-set and behavior. This was still a Christian world.
We are today two historical stages removed from medieval Christianity. The first stage was the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century. The second stage, more revolutionary, was the steady rise of secularism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among industrialized and urbanized peoples.
The first stage was marked by efforts to return to earlier phases of Christianity and to impose more discipline upon both clergy and laity. The second stage was marked by withdrawal from church attendance and the decisive lessening—almost to the point of zero among some groups—of religious impact in daily life. Shaped by the two stages, we do not find it easy to uncover and realistically formulate the structure of medieval Christianity.
In the early years of the first century A.D., Christianity was a small sect in the radical fringe of Judaism. By A.D. 200 the Christian Church had separated itself from Judaism and had become the religion of a small but significant proportion of the population of the Roman empire. By A.D. 400 Christianity was the religion of 95 percent of the population of the Roman Empire. It was greatly aided by state authorization and by material and institutional support from the state.
In the course of this triumph Christianity itself underwent fundamental changes. Its emphasis hitherto on community, friendship, and spiritual equality was now restricted to the monastic orders. Instead, the Church emphasized the power to open the gates of Heaven and it was organized in a hierarchical form. One gained greater religious power, material well-being, and political influence the higher one ascended in this hierarchy, which culminated with the Bishop of Rome in the Latin West and the bishops of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch in the Greek-speaking East.
The original sectarian, communal, personally friendly Church of the early first century A.D. was compromised into the hierarchical Church of the Middle Ages in three stages. First, ecclesiastical officials in the large cities of the Roman empire were almost inevitably bound to develop positions of leadership and greater wealth compared to the laity and the other, less fortunate clergy. Second, the authorization and support of the Church by the Roman state in the fourth century had a conservatizing and hierarchical effect on Church organization and teaching. But the third stage, the one with the most compromising impact on the Church, especially in the Latin West, came about through the enmeshing of the lay nobility with the Church after A.D. 800.
The compromising of the early Church by the medieval aristocracy took two forms. First, the Church taught a very conservative political doctrine of subservience to kings and lords: “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Second, the aristocracy came to control the Church at various levels by providing “livings,” sustainable income for the parish priests, and endowments for the monasteries, and had the right to interfere in the election of abbots of the larger monasteries plus a very substantial part in the appointment of clerics at the level of bishop and cathedral canon.
By 1050 ecclesiastics were talking about the intermixing of ecclesia and mundus, of church and world. The whole institutional structure and material foundations of the Latin Church were now dependent on the goodwill, generosity, and political action of the aristocracy. Compare this to the words of Jesus of Nazareth: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Knowledge of Church history was very meager in the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastical history began to be seriously pursued—first among Protestants—only in the sixteenth century. Except for the radical wing of the Franciscan order and a small group of heretics, the unquestionable true picture of the earliest Apostolic Church as emerging among the poor and humble was ignored.
Or it was explained away by saying that under Divine Providence, the Church and its senior personnel had, by God’s will on the way to the Last Judgment, become rich and politically influential. In other words, the Church had reached its level of hierarchy, power, and wealth by historical evolution controlled by Christ. But even this historicizing doctrine was not sufficient for the papacy. It rejected the Spiritual Franciscans’ doctrine of apostolic poverty and caused the radical wing of the Franciscan order to be disbanded.
In monasteries, nunneries, priories, and, much more rarely, among cathedral clergy, there was still an echo of the earliest Church—an egalitarian, friendly community of faithful. But even the “regular” (monastic) clergy had been subject to the impress of hierarchy. By the thirteenth century abbots no longer slept in communal dormitories and took their meals with the brethren. They lived in separate, upscale houses on the abbey’s grounds and dined separately, often entertaining the aristocracy, of which—half the time, at least—they were offspring.
It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that Gaunt in his later years should have had a special affection for the Carmelite friars, a small religious order that, after the downfall of the radical Franciscans, most clearly echoed the communal, self-abnegating, impoverished original Church. There was something in Gaunt’s makeup that attracted him to these Carmelite exemplars of earliest Christianity.
The same subterranean character disposition played some part in attracting Gaunt to John Wyclif for a while. But while Gaunt in time came to be troubled by the radical implications of Wyclif’s words and actions, he did not see the Carmelites’ code as an implied criticism of the established Church. The Carmelites were part of a complex tapestry of ecclesiastical life. They were engaged in personal renewal, not reversion to Christianity to its original form, although no doubt they were inspired in part by the Church of poverty and friendship portrayed in the Gospels and the Book of Acts.
Most of the time, however, Gaunt, like the other aristocrats, accepted the Church that was highly visible—the hierarchical, wealthy, complex institution that was responsible for a distinctive culture and social organization we call medieval Christianity.
For Gaunt the Church was a congeries of ideas, practices, personnel, and artistic and literary forms that were central to the environment he lived in, part of the air he breathed. Just so do we accept Wall Street brokers and Harvard professors, in spite of their corruptions and limitations and defects, as overwhelmingly admirable groups to which we would be happy to belong. Gaunt readily accepted the teachings of the Church of his day. He could not conceive of the Church, in spite of its problems, as being other than highly beneficial to himself, his family, and society in general. The ecclesiastics were a bit disorganized and sometimes lacking in discipline—he saw that. But they were still on the whole worthy of respect and patronage.
There are some parts of the United States and Western Europe where this is still the prevailing view held of the Catholic Church today.
No one can appreciate the texture of medieval Christianity who has not seen and heard a candlelight procession of black-gowned nine- and ten-year-old boys in the nave of a cathedral.
No one can appreciate medieval Christianity who has not seen working people dressed in their Sunday best silently receiving the wafer and wine in communion at the altar.
No one can appreciate medieval Christianity who has not turned the parchment pages of an illuminated codex of a saint’s life.
No one can appreciate medieval Christianity who has not run his eye and hand over the sculptured effigies of a lord and lady behind the altar of a church, as with Gaunt and Blanche at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Medieval Christianity was not going anywhere. It had no progressive vision other than the Last Judgment, which waited upon the Second Coming of Christ to the whole world, including the feared Muslims to the south and the inscrutable heathen Slavs to the East.
Until these ultimate events, the Church was in a condition of stasis, of waiting and stability, of application of all arts to the glory of God.
The great majority of people never saw their forty-fifth birthday, or even hoped to. The Church provided for nearly all of them the only high satisfactions they knew, including faith healing and the probability, after a suitable time paying for their sins in Purgatory, of heavenly reward.
The Church’s vision closely resembled that of aristocrats like Gaunt. Cultivate in this short life what God has given you, and appreciate the divine message communicated through music and the visual arts—that, along with food, sex, and defecation. It was a still, wistful world but it was not without joy, faith, and love.