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The legend dies hard of "the Middle Ages" as the golden age of the
Christian faith, the time when popes gave the law to a lovingly acquiescent
Christendom. This is to neglect such facts as that in one year out of two,
of the two hundred years that followed the accession of Gregory VII--the
High Middle Ages as the convention goes--the divine papal authority was
fighting for its life with the Catholic princes. As many as four times in
eighty years, during this period, the Holy See lay vacant for two and three
years at a time, and the popes were nowhere less safe than in Rome, as the
witness of their tombs in half a dozen Italian cities testifies to the
tourist, in Viterbo, Orvieto, Arezzo, Perugia, and the rest. Never were
there wanting, to threaten their freedom, not only warriors of the type of
Barbarossa, but such stark and dangerous political princes as Barbarossa's
son, the emperor Henry VI (1190-97), and the hard-faced brother of St.
Louis IX, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily (1265-85) In such contests with
ruthlessness itself, it behoved the ecclesiastic to look constantly to what
Monsieur Maritain has called "the purification of the means." Patriotism,
so to speak, was not enough and the one hundred per cent righteousness of
the cause. Woe to the pope who slipped! He inevitably contracted something
of the enemy's coldheartedness. Such champions of the freedom of religion
as Pope Innocent IV and Pope Boniface VIII were by no means bon papa all
the twenty-four hours of every day. And the thirteenth, "greatest of
centuries" in so many respects, ran out in the furious contest between the
last-named pope and the most dangerous of all the medieval kings, the grim
Philip IV of France (1285-1314), Philippe le Bel to his contemporaries, and
the great mystery man of the Middle Ages still to the historians--a contest
that culminated in a long blackmail of Boniface VIII's successor, the
unfortunate, cancer-ridden French pope, Clement V. This the setting of the
fifteenth General Council, the Council of Vienne.
There is no council about whose history there is more obscurity than this
Council of Vienne, summoned by Clement V under pressure from the King of
France, in order to bring about the destruction of a great religious order.
This is a pretty dreadful indictment--presuming that the order was not
guilty of the crimes with which it was charged; and it seems generally
agreed that it was innocent. And the story is the more horrible if it be
true that, to wring from the pope a consent to the destruction of the
Knights Templars, the King of France blackmailed him, holding over the pope
the threat to start a campaign for the posthumous trial, for various
alleged crimes, of his predecessor Boniface VIII. One of the crimes alleged
was the manoeuvring by which Boniface became pope--or as the king would
say, pseudo-pope. If Boniface had never been pope, what of the lawfulness
of Clement's own election?
And why was the King of France so set on the condemnation of the dead
Boniface? It was partly a question of the royal prestige--the king, as
might be said nowadays, must not lose face--and partly a question of the
binding force of various declarations of Boniface about certain public acts
of the king. These were declarations of principle that condemned, in
effect, the principles on which the king was reorganising the government of
France. Were the condemnations valid? If so they still bound the king,
i.e., in the eyes of those Catholics for whom the pope's sentences
mattered, these acts of the king had no force.
Of the various causes of friction which, from before the election of
Boniface VIII (1294-1303), had disturbed the relations of the king and the
Holy See, two may be mentioned: disputes between royal officials and
bishops over the frontier between their jurisdictions, and the claim of the
king to tax the property of the Church as he chose. These troubles began
around the years 1289-90. Boniface was elected in the last days of 1294.
England and France being at war, both kings, desperate for money, plundered
the Church revenues. There came a strong, general prohibition from Boniface
to the clergy, in 1296, to pay these taxes,[290] and soon retaliation from
Philip IV, in the shape of protest at Rome, and intrigues with the
discontented factions there--the Colonna cardinals, the little group of
Franciscans known as the "Spirituals," and all the Apocalyptic-minded
generally who were daily expecting the end of the world and their own
triumphant reign over their fellow men, Catholic fanatics for whom Boniface
was no pope, but rather Antichrist.
The French were successful in bringing the pope to his knees, for a time.
Then, about the year 1300, weary of being "an obliging agent for the
schemes of Philip the Fair,"[291] the pope in Boniface triumphed over the
politician. The king's recent violation of all law in the arrest and trial
of one of the French bishops, without any reference to the pope, moved him
to renew his stand against the movement to make religion subservient to the
state. In a series of private letters he seriously warned the king that
what he was doing was mortally sinful, and that to continue was to risk the
salvation of his soul. The pope asked that the bishop should be released,
and sent to Rome, and he suspended all the privileges granted to the king
allowing him to tax the Church. Moreover he summoned a council of all the
bishops of France, to meet in Rome in November 1302, The king's reply was
to organise the nation against the pope by a great propaganda campaign.
This culminated in a national council--a parliament of an unprecedented
kind--of clergy, nobles, and plebeians at Notre Dame, Paris, in April 1302.
The king's case was put, and strong speeches made by his ministers about
the pope's tyranny and usurpations, and how (thanks to the pope) true
religion was in danger. Finally it was decided to send a national protest
to the cardinals, setting down all the charges against the pope; "he who at
this moment occupies the seat of government in the Church" is how they
described him; and the word Antichrist was used.
Three months packed with drama followed. When the delegates from Paris
presented to Boniface the letters from the clergy, in which they begged him
to cancel the council, and spoke of the king's anger and the national
feeling, the pope warned them that Philip was the most hated man in Europe,
and that he was facing disaster. The king was, at this moment, at war with
the communes of Flanders. Only thirteen days after that audience the French
were unexpectedly routed, with great slaughter, at the Battle of the Golden
Spurs,[292] and the three counsellors of the king whom the pope had denounced
by name were among the slain. Whereupon a great change on Philip's part,
permissions to the bishops to go to Rome for the council and an embassy to
represent himself. There was not, at the council, any "trial" of Philip the
Fair, nor sentence against him. All that happened, publicly, was the issue
of a reasoned declaration about the pope's authority to correct what is
morally wrong in a ruler's conduct as ruler. This is the famous bull called
Unam Sanctam (1302).[293] Privately, the pope again warned the king, and sent
him some kind of ultimatum to mend his ways.
In reply the king planned to arrest the pope and bring him before a
council; and to prepare public opinion for this he organised a nation-wide
propaganda, depicting Boniface as a heretic, an idolater, a man who
worshipped the devil, and a man of evil life, whom the cardinals and
bishops ought to bring to trial. There were, once again, great public
meetings in Paris, where all estates were represented. The assembly adjured
the king to bring about a council which should try this great criminal. And
the king solemnly accepted this duty. Only one of the twenty-six bishops
present refused to set his seal to the act. From Paris royal commissioners
toured the country, organising like demonstrations everywhere.
As the news came in of what was afoot in France the pope began to prepare
the bull excommunicating the king and threatening his deposition. But the
king's chief executive advisor, William de Nogaret, with an armed troop
broke into the papal palace at Anagni,[294] on the eve of the day appointed
for publication of the bull. They found the old man seated on his throne
robed, holding his crucifix. They demanded he should withdraw his sentence
and submit himself to judgment. He replied that he would rather die. One of
the Colonna offered to kill him, but was restrained. He then hit the pope
in the face. And now the townsfolk broke into the palace and drove out the
French. From this shock the pope never recovered. Three weeks later he was
dead (October 11, 1303).
There was only one way in which Philip the Fair could clear himself of a
general reprobation that would last as long as life itself--have it proved
in legal form that all the things charged against Boniface were true. And
when he had succeeded in that, he would have brought low, not the dead
man's memory only, but every shred of prestige that clung to his successors
in the office. Such was the man and the mind whose political needs brought
on the fifteenth General Council, which met just eight years after the
death of Pope Boniface.
The truly saintly Dominican next elected pope, Benedict XI, reigned for
eight months only. The conclave that followed lasted for all but a year,
and it then elected, from outside the college of cardinals, a French
subject of the English king, the Archbishop of Bordeaux. He called himself
Clement V (June 5, 1305). This is the pope who summoned and presided at the
Council of Vienne. Nothing would have more surprised him, as the news was
brought to him from Italy, than to learn that he was destined never to see
Italy as pope, and that his successors for the next seventy years and more
would rule the universal church from France. For the so-called Avignon
captivity of the papacy, it is now known, was not the outcome of any willed
policy of this pope, but rather of a series of accidents. In the critical
years of Boniface VIII, Clement had been one of the minority loyal to that
pope, and he had taken part in the Roman council whence came the Unam
Sanctam. He was an accomplished canonist and a man of long practical
experience in church administration. But he was something of a ditherer by
nature, vacillating to put it more formally, and in no way a match for the
arts of Philip the Fair.
When the king and the pope met, at the pope's coronation at Lyons, it was
suggested to Clement that he remain in France until a great scandal--now
revealed to the pope for the first time--was investigated and dealt with.
The scandal was the alleged condition of the military order of the Knights
Templars.
These knights of the military orders, of which there were several, were
religious in the full technical sense of the word, i.e., professed with the
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, bound to a strict monastic round
of prayer and penance, and to protect pilgrims and defend the Christian
possessions in the Holy Land. Their monasteries were fortresses, and down
to the time of the capture of St. Jean d'Acre, when the master-general of
the Templars fell sword in hand (1291), they had been, along with the
contemporary order of the Knights Hospitallers, the main defence, for 150
years, of what had been won from the Mohammedans.
Since the disaster of 1291 there had been no Christian forces at all in the
East. The Templars, what remained of them, were lodged in their
commanderies, in the various countries of western Europe. Their principal
occupation had been finance. Their European castles had, for many years,
been the places where princes, merchants, and the wealthy generally, could
be certain their money was safe. And from being guardians of these deposits
this international order had developed into something like an international
bank, saving this nascent commercial world of the Middle Ages the dangerous
necessity of transmitting boxes of coin from one country to another. The
profits the Templars made were, it was alleged, enormous. It seems agreed
that what really moved the King of France, at this moment, was the prospect
of laying his hands on vast landed properties and a fortune in ready cash.
The pope was told that it was being said everywhere that the Templars were
utterly corrupt. They had long lost the faith, for they worshipped in their
monasteries an idol, and this with obscene rites, formally denying Christ
at their professions and spitting on the crucifix. In their masses the
priest-members of the order--the knights' chaplains--always left out the
words of consecration, and (the reader will be expecting this) unnatural
vice was systematised as a kind of ritual. The pope was in no way impressed
by this horrendous tale-- no more than the King of Aragon had been
impressed when it was told to him.
The French king set himself to "find" evidence which should bring the pope
to order the suppression of the knights, and the confiscation of their
property. This "evidence," from Templars already imprisoned for various
offences, still left Clement V unmoved, but the menace of the campaign
provoked the Grand Master of the order to beg the pope to order an enquiry
(August, 1307) . Seven weeks later the king regained the initiative when,
on a single day, October 13, every Templar in France[295] was arrested by his
orders and there began that systematic torturing to wring from them
confessions of guilt that is still so sickening to read about, after six
hundred years and more. The royal formula was simple--pardon and liberty
for those who, self-confessed, were guilty of crime; death for all who
maintained they were innocent. From the French Revolution until recently,
evidence obtained by torture was what no man would consider seriously. But,
just as universally, in the days of Clement V, torture was thought a
reasonable and legitimate way of obtaining reliable evidence.[296] The pope
was so impressed that he took the whole business into his own hands, and
set up special courts throughout the church for the investigation: a court
in each diocese where there was a house of the order, with the final
authority to judge the knights left to the provincial council of the
bishops; and a papal commission to consider what to do with the order
itself; finally, the whole affair would be brought before a specially
summoned General Council, which would meet at Vienne on October 1, 1310--
two years and a half hence.
One feature was common to all these trials: whenever, in France, the
knights, free of the king's jurisdiction, appeared before the bishops they
immediately revoked their confessions. Describing the tortures they had
endured they declared they would have sworn to anything, and that if the
horrors were renewed they would again admit whatever their tormentors
demanded. This revocation, of course, could be dangerous--among the charges
was heresy, the worship of an idol. The punishment for heresy could be
death, and for the heretics who, once self-convicted, retracted their
confessions, death was certain. And so, in May 1310, fifty-four Templars
were burnt in a single execution at Paris, on the sentence of the bishops
of the Provincial Council. And, by a violent personal act of the king, the
Grand Master himself was burnt, only a few hours after the ecclesiastical
court had sentenced him to life imprisonment, because in his relief at the
thought that his life was safe he solemnly retracted all his confessions,
and vouched for the innocence of the order as such.
Outside France the Templars were everywhere acquitted, in Aragon, Castile,
England, Scotland, the Empire. In Provence, Sicily, and the States of the
Church, there were a number of condemnations but not many. As the date
fixed for the meeting of the council drew near the order might,
legitimately, have felt hopeful.
What, meanwhile, of the French king's other line of attack, his
determination to blast the good name of his dead adversary Boniface VIII?
He had first showed what he had in mind in one of his interviews with
Clement V at Poitiers in the spring of 1307, eighteen months or so after
the pope's coronation. Boniface VIII must be tried for his "crimes." All
attempts to still the threats failed. The king demanded that the body of
Boniface should be dug up and burned as that of a heretic, and that
Celestine V--his alleged victim--should be canonised. In the end the pope
pledged himself that the trial should take place, and fixed a provisional
date two years hence, February 1309.
Clement V, like his namesake who had to deal with King Henry VIII two
centuries later, had not the strength to say no to these requests to co-
operate in a crime. He assented outwardly, and hoped the day would never
come when he had to keep his promise. It was not until March 1310 that the
misery began anew for him, when there appeared at Avignon to represent the
king a team of lawyers headed by Nogaret, the hero of Anagni. All through
that summer the lawyers fought, with the pope in person presiding and using
every expedient possible to adjourn the court, finally deciding that both
the "prosecutors" and the defence should state their case in writing and
that the oral proceedings should cease. He also called politics to his aid,
and the news that there was in contemplation the creation of a new kingdom
on the eastern frontier of France--all the lands east of the Rhone, from
the Mediterranean up to Besancon--now halted the French king. In February
1311, seven months before the General Council was due to meet, he agreed to
call off his team. The order of Knights Templars, it was understood, would
definitely be destroyed at the Council,[297] and Philip the Fair would drop
the case against Boniface VIII. On April 27, Clement V issued a series of
bulls. Philip the Fair was cleared of any complicity in the Anagni
incident, and praised for his good intentions. All the papal acts directed
against him from November 1, 1300, to the end of the reign of Benedict XI
were cancelled. Nogaret, too, was absolved, with the penance that he must
go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land at the next crusade, and spend the rest
of his days there, unless dispensed by the Holy See.
Even so, Clement V was to hear yet more of the case against his
predecessor.
The General Council of Vienne was opened on October 16, 1311. The original
convocation had been for 1310, but by a bull of April 4 of that year the
pope postponed the opening. This second bull of convocation did something
else. It made the singular innovation that not every bishop was summoned to
the council, but only a chosen 231. And from these, 66 names were struck
out by the French king. In the end there assembled 20 cardinals, 122
bishops, 38 abbots, with proxies, representatives of chapters and others
that brought the number "assisting" at the council to around 300. The
bishops had had ample time to prepare, as the pope following the precedent
of 1274 had asked, reports on matters that called for reform. They found a
new conciliar procedure awaiting them. For each of the main problems before
the council a commission was named, representative of all ranks, and
charged to find a solution. The solution then came before the pope and
cardinals in consistory and, if they accepted it, it was presented to the
council as a whole in the shape of a papal bull to be accepted and signed.
There were to be no general debates in which the whole council took part.
The commission on the matter of the Templars reported in December. The
knights should be heard before the council, it decided, and by a large
majority. The pope, for the moment, set this embarrassing act aside. The
bishops occupied themselves with schemes for the crusade and for various
reforms, while the pope gave no sign of holding the next public session.
Philip's representatives had only one comment to make, in all these
discussions, "It must wait until our master arrives." The new year 1312
brought the king to. Lyons--a mere twenty miles away, where the States-
General of the realm were meeting (January to March). And from Lyons he
played upon the unhappy pope with threats to revive the campaign against
Boniface VIII. Towards the end of March he came in person to the council,
and brought it about that the Templars commission revoked their
recommendation, and voted, by 4 to 1, that the order should be suppressed
(March 22, 1312). Two weeks went by, while Clement struggled with the king
about the order's vast properties. Then, on April 3, the second public
session of the council was held. It began with yet another procedural
novelty--the pope forbade any member of the council to speak, under pain of
excommunication. There was then read his bull, Vox in excelso, suppressing
the order. The pope gave no judgment about the crimes alleged--the
question, Guilty or innocent? was ignored. The bull explained that Clement
V was acting not as judge at a trial, but as an administrator in the
fullness of his apostolic authority. On May 3 the decision about the
Templars' property was announced. The pope had found the courage to resist
the king. The vast fortune was to go to the order of the Knights
Hospitallers, except in Spain where the beneficiaries were the three
Spanish military orders.
Three days later, May 6, the council came to an end with its third public
session.
There is in the corpus of Canon Law a mass of legislation attributed to
this council, laws headed Clement V at the Council of Vienne. It is by no
means certain that all of this was there enacted, nor do we know at what
stage of the council what was certainly its work was actually enacted. Of
the official records of the council, we have hardly a trace. And these laws
of Clement V were not promulgated until the reign of his successor, John
XXII, in 1317.
We can be certain of three decrees about the faith, definitions of dogma.
In one of these it is defined that the rational or intellectual soul is per
se and essentially the form of the human body.[298] A second condemns as
heresy the statement that usury is not a sin.[299] Thirdly, there is a
decree listing various heresies of the people known, if men, as Beghards,
and, if women, as Beguines; theories about what spiritual perfection is,
and the obligations of those who are perfect. Man can attain to such
perfection in this life that it is not possible for him to commit sin. Once
he has achieved this a man is not bound to fast or to pray, his body being
so spiritualised that he can freely grant it whatever he chooses. The
perfect are not bound to obey any other human being, nor to keep the
commandments of the Church, for--so they argue--where the spirit of the
Lord is, there is freedom. Man can attain, in this life, to that perfection
of happiness that he will enjoy in the life of the blessed. To kiss a
woman, unless our nature prompts the act, is a mortal sin. But carnal acts
are not sins, if done from the movements of our nature, and especially if
done under temptation. No special act of reverence should be made at the
elevation of the body of Jesus Christ [i.e., at mass], for it would be an
imperfection in a man if he so descended from the pure heights of his
contemplation to attend to the sacrament of the Eucharist or the passion of
Christ's humanity.[300]
All these odd ideas are specimens of that false, self-taught mysticism that
is ageless, and in every generation lurks in comers here and there. With
these wandering, unauthorised, semi-religious[301] people the propagation of
such notions could become a real social plague.[302] The severe prohibitions
of General Councils to would-be founders of new religious orders are not
unrelated to the fear that they would prove a breeding ground for cranks
and fanatics.
The disciplinary decrees of the Council of Vienne take up, I suppose, a
good thirty pages of the text of Fr. Schroeder's book. From the twenty-one
certain decrees, and the eighteen less certain,[303] I select for notice the
famous decree Exivi de Paradiso,[304] by which the council hoped to put an
end to the disputes that were tearing the order of Franciscans apart,
disputes as to the meaning of St. Francis' teaching about poverty. But the
bulk of the decrees are what we have already met, rules about the duties of
bishops, about the layman's usurpation of church jurisdiction and attempts
to make church property his own, principles to settle disputes about rights
of presentation to benefices and the like. The historical interest of these
lengthy (and tedious) repetitions is that they are the outcome of the
reports, brought in by the bishops and the religious orders from all over,
on the state of the Church. As we read these decrees there is scarcely one
of the disorders that troubled the generation upon which the Reformation
came, two hundred years later, that is not to be seen already mischievously
active. The remedies provided in the decrees are all admirable, if only
they had been generally obeyed, and if, in those centuries of such
miserable communications, there had been some way of enforcing obedience.
What the decrees chiefly lack is any sense that the ills of the time call
for new methods and new institutions. To read, in canon 15, the thirty
complaints of the religious against episcopal oppression, or, in canon 16,
the seven complaints of bishops and prelates against the religious, is to
become aware of chronic weaknesses bound to drain away vitality like a
running sore.
There is a story that as the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was fastened
to the stake on that island in the Seine where he was done to death, he
lifted up his voice and by name summoned his three oppressors to the
judgment seat of God. Certainly they died within the year, the pope, the
king, and William de Nogaret. Philip the Fair left three sons, young men,
healthy, vigorous, well married. But not one of them had a son, and within
fourteen years of his death the direct line of descent was extinct.
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