Seattle Catholic is not affiliated with the Archdiocese of Seattle
A Journal of Catholic News and Views
15 Feb 2006
The Great Western Schism (Part II)
by Dr. John C. Rao
[Read Part I of The Great Western Schism.]
No Solution "By the Book"
Three suggestions were offered, and played with by both the Roman and the Avignon Courts, as means of exiting from the Schism: the Via facti, or reliance on military support; the Via concessionis, which sought a solution to the problem through joint resignation; and, finally, the Via conventionis, or resolution of the division through the meeting either of representative cardinals of both papal courts or a General Church Council. Despite the early appeal to the Via facti, employed both by Urban and Clement — the Avignon pope in alliance with France and its claims to the Kingdom of Naples — the future really lay with the latter two suggestions.
Jean Gerson, the great theologian and later Chancellor of the University of Paris, in both a discourse of 1391 and a treatise Super materiam unionis Ecclesiae, saw the path to sanity in a joint resignation of both men for the common good of Christendom. The ten thousand graduates of the University of Paris who placed their comments regarding possible means for ending the confusion in a chest at the Church of St. Marthurin in January of 1393 thought the same. They urged the calling of a commission or a General Council only should mutual abdication fail. Others, however, were already mapping out the precise route that the Via conventionis would have to take. These even included firm supporters of Urban VI like Henry of Langenstein, Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Paris, who addressed the subject in his Proposition of Peace for the Union and Reformation of the Church by a General Council of 1381.
Political pressure of some sort would be required to get either of these two approaches involving resignation or conciliar negotiation moving. Gerson and Philippe de Mèzières, a prolific, devout, crusading and spiritual author of the day, argued that such pressure must inevitably come from the King of France. Charles VI (1380-1422) was certainly willing to play the role of royal nudge, though his increasing insanity ensured that any French activity would be sifted more and more through the conflicting influences of his brother Louis, the Duke of Orleans, his cousin John, the Duke of Burgundy, and his uncle, the Duke of Berry.
Although Clement VII had enough influence with the French Court to deflect such growing pressures, and the good sense to die before they became overwhelming, his successor, Benedict, was under the gun from the very outset of his reign. The new Avignon pontiff had, after all, hesitantly taken an oath, along with the other papabili during the Conclave, to resign if his Roman counterpart did the same. He repeated this solemn promise, voluntarily, after his election. When it instead became clear that he had repudiated his pledge and showed some preference for the Via facti, the French government turned against him. A Council of Paris, in early 1395, presided over by Simon de Cramaud, Bishop of Poitiers and a notable representative of that legalist Gallican spirit which was again very much active in its push for vigorous state interference in Church affairs, publicly called for the joint abdication of the two popes. The king's relatives, accompanied by university experts, went to Avignon from May 22 to July 9th in a frustrating mission to get Benedict to agree to the Via cessionis. Negotiators were dispatched to other countries, like England, to obtain their backing for the proposal as well.
Benedict adamantly rejected requests for his early retirement. When his stubbornness became clear, the University of Paris radicalized, its utilitarian-minded canonists above all others. Anti-papal writings multiplied. A new Council, attended by three hundred archbishops, bishops, abbots of monasteries, and delegates from each cathedral chapter and university, once again presided over by de Cramaud, met in May 1398 to tackle the problem. Thoughtful, careful theologians like Gerson and his great teacher and friend, the future Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, urged tremendous moderation in dealing with Benedict. If for no other reason, they argued, moderation was dictated by the need to avoid giving scandal to ordinary believers. Nevertheless, the Council, stirred by the preaching of two Gallicans, the Abbé Pierre Leroy of Mount St. Michel and Bishop Gilles Deschamps of Coutances, withdrew its support from the Avignon pope and established a new Church order for the Kingdom of France. A number of Benedict's cardinals eventually joined in the action. Withdrawal of obedience was followed, in September, by an outright assault on Avignon and a lengthy siege of the Apostolic Palace by a royal army under the command of a French Marshal.
But all did not work out well with this 1398 settlement. The anti-Benedict Blitzkrieg shocked even many of those people who were not disposed to be friendly to him. English policy changed with the death of the pro-French King Richard II. A Gallican Church in a semi-chaotic France proved easily controlled by ambitious noblemen and the women whom they wished to please. Further disputes among the king's close relatives, opposition from a clergy which discovered that corrupt and hateful Church taxes were being more efficiently collected by royal officials, and growth of precisely that scandal among the common faithful feared by Gerson and d'Ailly condemned the Gallican scheme to a swift death. The coup de grace came with the pope's dramatic escape from his besieged palace on May 11, 1403 to freedom in Provence. On May 28th of that same year, an assembly of bishops gave up the rebellion and restored French obedience to Benedict and the Avignon line.
Still, restoration of obedience did not mean surrender to Benedict's obstinacy and perceived perjury. Jean Gerson, in a sermon preached before the pope in Tarascon, on New Year's Day, 1404, continued to urge pursuit of every lawful means to end the schism. The radicalized University of Paris remained exceedingly hostile to him and attracted to still more heretical and legalist theories of ecclesiastical order, ones that recalled the arguments of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua alongside those of Philip the Fair's anticlerical advisors. These theories viewed the popes as simply useful instruments of the Church at large, which, through the agency of General Councils — and the State standing behind them — could judge pontiffs and limit or even withdraw their powers should necessity demand it.
By this point, however, sincere and less radical supporters of the Via cessionis were encouraged by hopeful noises coming out of Rome. Boniface had steadfastly refused all proposals for healing the split, profited from his competitor's woes, and seen his prestige rise through the relative success of the Jubilee pilgrimage to the Eternal City in 1400. But now his successor, Innocent VII (1404-1406), claimed that he would never even have been elected had Benedict XIII shown some readiness to resign. Innocent thus pledged his full support to a swift and peaceful resolution of the dilemma.
Benedict, alas, had now once again given his heart over to the Via facti, and was making military advances into Italy and pumping reliable financial resources to fund them. Renewed indignation over his selfish inflexibility stimulated the radicals of the University of Paris and the Burgundian party allied with them to seize the advantage, open direct negotiations with Innocent, and declare a second withdrawal of obedience from Avignon in January of 1407. Irritation with Benedict became more strident still due to his strange tango with Innocent's successor, Gregory XII. This began in December of 1407, when both men agreed to meet together to discuss the Via cessionis at Savona. Benedict's subsequent delays and hedging led to Gregory's annoyed abandonment of the project. That renunciation was followed by the Avignon pope's dubious change of heart, his swift appearance at the designated meeting place, and the shedding of many crocodile tears over the absence of his Roman sparring partner. Dietrich von Nieheim, in a satirical Letter of Satan to Giovanni Dominici of Ragusa (Gregory's nephew and advisor), expressed the nagging belief of many horrified observers that this comedy of contradictory moves may have been a fraud contrived from the very outset by two incomparably hypocritical pontiffs to stymie real efforts to obtain their resignations.
By 1408, all Christendom was in a Via conventionis uproar, moderates and radicals alike. The Avignon and Roman popes were left dependent on local support, Benedict retiring to Perpignan, on the safer territory of his native Aragon, and Gregory to the cities of a variety of Italian patrons. Given these unfortunate circumstances, seven of Gregory's cardinals and four of those from the Avignon line gathered at Livorno, in Italy, to begin negotiations for a way to end the farce on their own steam. Their number eventually reached nineteen, and, with the help of both political as well as theological and canonical backing, these princes of the Church called the Christian world to Council in Pisa on March 25th, 1409.
Almost five hundred fathers sat at their assembly, twenty two cardinals and eighty bishops among them, though scholars predominated, jurists most noticeably. Moderates like Gerson and d'Ailly were present alongside more radical heretical and legalist elements, including the president of the gathering, the seemingly ubiquitous Simon de Cramaud. All, whether reluctantly or jubilantly, knew that they were there to judge, rebuke, and potentially remove both claimants to the Papacy. Witnesses were heard testifying to papal cruelties, secret agreements, perjuries, and even dabbling in sorcery. Benedict and Gregory, both of whom refused to answer the Council's order to appear, were jointly condemned and excommunicated on June 5th, 1409. The cardinals who summoned the council were thereupon delegated to select what the canonist Francesco Zabarella now called merely the principle minister and servant of the Church. Their choice, on June 26th, 1409, fell on Peter Philarghi, the Greek-born Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who took the name of Alexander V. Alexander's short reign was followed, in 1410, by the election of the man who many suspected of having poisoned him: Baldassare Cossa, the governor of Bologna, thereafter styled Pope John XXIII.
Despite the fact that the Pisan popes were able to gain considerable European-wide backing, and John XXIII even to establish himself in Rome, their two competitors remained a permanent nuisance. Gregory and Benedict retained support in important countries. Both held or tried to hold councils of their own to back up their legitimacy. Moreover, the Pisan faction was itself very quickly plagued by internal disputes. Everyone came to loathe cardinals of all description as an extraordinarily venal, ambitious, and incompetent body of men. Many Italians militating in Pisan ranks bristled at French influence and the spread of heretical and legalist ideals therein. While reform was on the lips of all, each national group had different ideas of what constituted a scandal requiring instant action: for some, it was the pro-papal teaching of the omnipresent Franciscan friars; for others, it was the failure of the Church to secure positions for the graduates of the vocal University of Paris. A new reform council, which his Pisan electors obliged John XXIII to hold, met just long enough in Rome to turn disgustedly against this pontiff as the chief obstacle to purification of the Church.
Finally, the perennial struggle for the Neapolitan throne having taken a perilous turn, the Pisan pope was forced to quit the Eternal City and petition the rulers of Europe for new political protection. Help, under the circumstances of that particular moment in time, was only available from Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor since 1410. Sigsmund was personally eager to rebuild the shattered prestige of his realm and contribute to doing so by finding a definitive way out of the continuing papal horror show. He and his Empire had never accepted the results of Pisa, so their defense of John XXIII was a tricky one to say the least. It came to entail the summoning of yet another Council, which opened at Constance on November 1, 1414, with the usual suspects from throughout Europe — practically all of them — in attendance.
John initially presided at Constance as the legitimate pontiff. Nevertheless, Sigismund and the Council Fathers, Gerson and D'Ailly prominent among them, soon saw the abdication of all three popes as an essential prerequisite to enjoyment of a single universally recognized head of the Church. Hopes for the success of this renewed appeal to the Via concessionis were temporarily complicated by the fact that the erratic John, who swore to abdicate in March of 1415, changed his mind and fled the city for the Black Forest to try his luck anew. His efforts floundered, and, becoming aware of the desperation of his position, he ultimately threw himself on the Council's mercy. Its fathers found him guilty of being an unworthy and unlawful pope, removed him on May 29th , and popped him straight into prison.
Events now took a dramatic turn. The aged Gregory XII spontaneously and unexpectedly offered his own abdication. Interestingly enough, though already considered deposed by Pisa, he managed to bow out in a manner that most subsequent writers argue to have bolstered Rome's claim to possess the legitimate line of pontiffs. Ludwig von Pastor describes the abdication scene as follows:
"The way in which this was done is of the highest significance, and must by no means be viewed as a concession in non-essentials to the assembled Bishops. Gregory XII, the one legitimate Pope, sent his plenipotentiary, Malatesta, to Constance, where the prelates of his obedience had already arrived, and now summoned the Bishops to a Council. His Cardinal-Legate, who had made his entry into the city as such, read Gregory's Bull of Convention to the assembled Bishops, who solemnly acknowledged it. Malatesta then informed this Synod, (i.e., the beefed-up Council of Constance—author's note) which Gregory XII had constituted, of his abdication (4 July, 1415). His summons had given the Synod a legal basis. (Pastor, I, pp. 200-201).
Only the Avignon pope, now in Aragon, was left. Personal efforts by Sigismund to obtain Benedict's voluntary withdrawal delayed proceedings against him for some time. Negotiations having finally failed, the Council tried him in absentia, declaring his deposition by July of 1417. Support for de Luna faded away, and he himself fled, along with three remaining Cardinals, to the fortress of Peñiscola. The way was thus sufficiently well cleared for Odo Colonna to be elected the sole truly serious pope on 11 November, 1417, though by an innovative method involving the addition of national representatives to the cardinals united in conclave. He took the name of Martin V (1417-1431). The new pope confirmed the Council's grant to the ex-Gregory XII of the Cardinal Bishopric of Porto and made him permanent papal legate in the March of Ancona. John XXIII went from prison life to the position of Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum. Benedict lived unreconciled until his death in 1422 or 1423, leaving two warring successors behind him. One of these, a mysterious Benedict XIV, lived and died somewhere in France. The other, Gil Muñoz, Pope Clement VIII, finally abdicated in 1429 and was rewarded with the Bishopric of Majorca. Clement VIII's College of Cardinals then brought a final and rather unsurprising end to the Great Western Schism by entering into conclave in Peñsicola and formally electing Martin V as his successor.
But the Schism, so many decades in duration, had not, exactly, ended "by the book", according to crystal-clear existing canonical rules. Just look at the complications involved in the solution to the problem again. How "legal" was the pressure exerted by Sigismund and the other secular powers and university scholars in gaining the desired results? Had it not precisely been the contention of the Church, since the time of the reforms of the eleventh century, that such intervention in the affairs of the Papacy was nefarious? What rendered this particular involvement permissible? What was the legality of the strange addition of national electors to the College of Cardinals in the Constance conclave? And what about the man elected? If Gregory XII really was the legitimate Pope, what did this have to say about the actions of Odo Colonna, one of his renegade cardinals? The future Martin V had, after all, fled Rome, taken part in the Council of Pisa, and helped to elect Alexander V and John XXIII. Why did he not have to do penance for his "schismatic" activity before becoming Supreme Pontiff? But, then again, how could he have humbled himself without rendering the abdication of his former master, Gregory XII, itself ludicrous? And what should one think of Alexander V? The next universally recognized Clement and Benedict took up the numbering that had been used by the Avignon pontiffs of those names (VII and XIII), therefore, historically identifying them as anti-popes. On the other hand, the next Alexander, Rodrigo Borgia, who ought, by right, to have styled himself the fifth of that line, assumed that he was the sixth. Does this mean that he believed Alexander V to have been legitimate? Apparently. If so, then how could the simultaneously reigning Gregory XII have also been the true pope? And why was Alexander's successor, John XXIII, not valid, as Angelo Roncalli appears to have made clear in 1958 by adopting the numbering previously used by Baldassare Cossa?
What all this says to me is that the Church recognized that she was dealing, in the Great Western Schism, with a specific historical problem for whose resolution she did not have all the answers at her fingertips. Under these trying circumstances she therefore had to rely solely on the one thing that she knew to be absolutely certain: that Christ would never abandon His Bride. Just because there was confusion and division over who, exactly, the pope might be, such perplexity did not signify that there was no pontiff at all. There had to be a legitimate pope, but the immediate problem was obtaining a legitimate pope to whom everyone would give his obedience. Just because existing, fallible Canon Law and its interpreters could not adequately and effectively identify him did not mean that the Mystical Body had to throw in the towel and close up shop. The Word was more powerful than the words of the law books and the dicta of the canonists. And if keeping the Bride of Christ alive and well temporarily involved a bewildered respect of the otherwise problematic interventions of Parisian pedants, renegade cardinals, puppet electors promoting parochial national causes, and emperors evoking powers rejected several centuries earlier, all could be forgiven in the end. What counted in the uncertainties of the perplexing moment was the sanctity of the absolutely proper goal of reestablishing a unified Papacy. Judged in this context, the actions of Pisa, Constance, Sigismund, and Odo Colonna to end the Great Western Schism come off fairly well. They bore little resemblance to other, more wickedly irregular maneuvers in the Church's past, such as those which the famous Robber Council of Ephesus permitted itself in the Fifth Century. Does this mean that there were no bad motivation and heretical, legalist, or simply wrongheaded theories whatsoever at play in the conclusion of the Great Western Nightmare? Not at all. There were plenty. But a Church which did not know precisely how to confront these ills while seeking to emerge from her practical labyrinth seems to have thought their judgment best left to history and Almighty God.
No Awakening "on the Cheap"
But this decision did not mean that firm correction of the spiritual, intellectual, political, and social problems giving birth to the nightmare of the Great Western Schism in the first place could be avoided. The Church's main task, as always, was that of offering salvation and reconnecting with the profound work of giving flesh to the consequences of the Incarnation which the medieval reform movement understood to be central to the task of saving souls. If she her to shoulder this burden properly, then it was essential for her to digest the lessons of her recent divisions, to understand all the forces working against transformation in Christ, including those in her own bosom, and to seek advice from every single bit of wisdom offered by her Sacred Tradition. Unfortunately, however, her ability to grapple with this crucial but daunting mission had been crippled through the recent chaos. The entire reputation of the Papacy and all those forces historically allied with it had been dragged deeply into the mud by the forty year schismatic circus. Martin V was left to return to a still troubled and half-devastated Rome practically penniless and unprotected. He and most of his immediate successors saw no other choice than to bury themselves in petty financial concerns and peninsular politics merely to be able to survive. Meanwhile, opponents regularly called up heretical and legalist conciliar theories to keep the ever-suspect "chief minister of the Church" in line. The Council of Basel, which stayed in session from 1431 until 1449, soon went so far down the road of anti-Romanism as to depose the "tyrannical" Eugene IV (1431-1447) and create a new schism under the antipope Felix V (1441-1449). Curia and cardinals remained universally detested and viewed by nations and cities merely as tools to be manipulated to attain papal approval of their own parochial desires. And while a conciliar reform of Church and society to restore a happier, mythological Apostolic Age was very vocally discussed, the world weariness, cynicism, and anti-incarnational outlooks of powerful ecclesiastical and secular forces made swift, substantive improvement an absolute impossibility. The Council of Basel, as Geiler von Kaysberg, a contemporary critic noted, was not even powerful enough to reform a single convent of nuns in the city in which it was still in session, once the municipal council stood in its way. There simply appeared to be no element of late medieval society, ecclesiastical or secular, healthy enough to think through and give sufficient support for Christendom's climb above petty concerns to more lofty heights. The view would be wasted on those who arrived there under current circumstances anyway. Hence Ludwig von Pastor's citation of John Nider, a Dominican thinker dedicated to Church reform, with respect to the hope of improvement:
"Is there any hope for a general reformation of the Church in its Head and its members? 'I have', answers Nider, 'absolutely none in the present time, or in the immediate future; for goodwill is wanting among the subjects, the evil disposition of the prelates constitutes an obstacle, and, finally, it is profitable for God's elect to be tried by persecution from the wicked. You may see an analogy in the art of building. An architect, however skillful he may be, can never erect an edifice unless he has suitable material of wood or stone. And if there is wood or stone in sufficient quantity, but no master-builder, there will be no proper house or dwelling. And, if you knew that a house would not be fitting for your friend, or when built would be a trouble for him, you certainly would be prudent enough not to build it." (Pastor, I, 355-356).
Pastor, mercifully, has another more encouraging reason for quoting this passage from Nider. He wishes to show that, despite the enormous obstacles in their way, some contemporaries who grasped the importance of the earlier medieval reform movement were quietly and slowly once again working to effect serious change according to its precepts. Such men understood that the Church took a self-destructive "low road" when she gave her primary attention to fallible political, legal, and administrative means of carrying out her mission. A primary attention to such measures overturned the hierarchy of values and opened her up to the cynicism of those who really in their heart of hearts did not believe in raising nature to the greater glory of God. They wished her to move boldly and confidently down the "high road", to become a "fool for Christ", to subordinate her natural tools to the greater task of making all of nature a conduit for grace.
"High road" reformers constructed out of the rubble of the Great Western Schism the magnificent achievements of Christian Humanism, the Tridentine Reformation, Baroque culture, and the post-French revolutionary Catholic revival. Over the centuries, they have given to the Church a deeper knowledge of everything in her jewel box: Scripture, Patrology, Scholasticism, and the Classical culture proving nature's ability to cooperate with grace. They have shown her how all of these jewels compel her to more vigorous missionary work and the creation of a social order open to Christ. Perhaps most importantly for practical purposes, they have delineated for her, more clearly than ever before, exactly who her chief enemy is, and where his greatest strength lies.
That enemy, at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, is the same one identified at the opening of this article. It is the union of all those world-weary, cynical, hypocritical, and heretical forces which either practically or theoretically deny that transformation of all things in Christ which is so central to the work of saving souls. It is that alliance which had already become immensely powerful and troublesome in the age preceding the years of the Great Western Schism. It is that coalition whose power was increased by certain aspects of the Renaissance, and even more strengthened by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the playing out of all of their manifold anti-incarnational and naturalist presuppositions from the 1500's down through to the present.
We, the living, are the unfortunate inhabitants of an age when this alliance has had its most striking, shocking, and complete successes. Anti-incarnationalist forces have, by our time, dismantled Christendom and turned the society in which we seek our salvation into a battleground of various forms of unbridled, naturalist willfulness. They have managed to do their work, in pluralist-dominated lands, while claiming to have shaped the most suitable environment for living the Catholic life. Horrifying to say, they have seduced both prelates and most members of the laity into praising and aiding their labors. They have reduced the Church to the sociological significance of a cheerleading squad for a technologically advanced but barbarian civilization, whose warehouses are filled with intellectual and material goods which lead men away from the light and back into the darkest recesses of Plato's cave.
The turmoil and confusion experienced by Catholics in the last forty to fifty years of conciliar disaster have exposed us to a situation analogous to that faced by our ancestors of six centuries ago — even if the specific difficulty of the legitimacy of the current Pope is, thankfully, not one of our problems. How can this disaster be turned round? Should it be any wonder that a proper response to and awakening from the contemporary ecclesiastical nightmare may be just as complex a matter as that experienced by our forbears? Will it really be any surprise that substantive improvement may require much criticism from scandalized believers? Can anyone honestly be stunned that some horrified men and women will not follow the advice of "moderates" who wish to make a hopelessly illogical distinction between an "acceptable" criticism of one or two abuses and their perpetrators and an "unacceptable" critique of the entirety of the scandal as far up on the totem pole as it extends? May it not also be the case that laity similar to the interfering Emperor Sigismund and prelates like the schismatic Cardinal Odo Colonna end up, in the long run, in the Church's list of historic "good guys"? Alongside other noble figures working for high road reform more quietly "by the book"?
Our reform-minded brethren emerging from the Great Western Schism knew that there was no "cheap" way for them to exit from their ecclesiastical nightmare. Our only hope today lies in taking the same "high road" that they preached. This entails tearing ourselves away from a fixation on merely one or two of our immediate problems whose solution will not address our more fundamental woes. It requires recognition of the fact that our battle is part of a centuries-old fight for the right of the Incarnation to do what it must against enemies who will not allow it to work its miracle of grace, and that we need to use all the tools that Sacred Tradition and a natural world allied with her have to offer to win it. But are we really willing to take up such a challenge?
The history of the Church since the late Middle Ages has indicated that we are not yet ready to do so. For despite the glorious work that has been done in the past six hundred years to make Catholics more aware than ever before of the jewel box Tradition places before them, they have stubbornly persisted in making the stingiest use of it possible. Some have appealed to the desires of the reigning pope but not to those of past pontiffs; some to Scripture but not to the living authority of the Bride of Christ; some to St. Thomas but to none of the Church Fathers; some to St. Augustine while reviling the Scholastics; some to dogmatic purity but not to the social doctrine that teaches us how to practice our Faith; some to theology but not to history; some to the Holy Spirit in history but not in fixed and unchangeable truth. Everything truncated tempts us to put on blinders and eventually return to the "low road". Only exposure to the fullness of the Tradition can allow us to move from merely keeping the ecclesiastical boat afloat to winning the war for the soul of modernity.
The modernist vision is ultimately a willful one. Modern man does what he does because he chooses to do so, calling his choice "natural" and even dictated by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps God wishes us to redeem the willfulness so essential to modernity by an honest act of Catholic will: the will to pick up and read the whole book of Tradition; to appreciate all the spiritual and natural wisdom to be found working together in its various chapters; to open up its jewel box and use the gems that shine so brilliantly therein. If now is not the time to make such an act of will when will it arrive?
Short Bibliography