Keith Tyler

Medieval Europe

Final

After years of strong leadership overseeing the progress of Western Christianity, the Roman Church began to lose its grip on the faithfulness of the European people. Such a decline was inevitable, but the Church, the Pope, and especially his policies were not exactly preventative. Perhaps it was arrogance and pride, or perhaps simple devotion, that drove the Church to spread itself so thin that it could never reclaim the universal importance it enjoyed for much of the medieval period.

Spirituality had remained an important and even vital part of the lives of Europeans, especially common people but even nobility, for most of the middle ages. Monastic life was popular among both disillusioned nobility as well as frustrated lower classes. Moreover, in a period where Roman thought had been either lost or thrown out, spiritual knowledge was the only way in which one could grasp the workings of the world. Perhaps crafted by the administrators of the Church specifically to keep civilization from falling apart, Church teachings were what maintained the meager, yet reasonably stable and orderly, way of life of Christians.

What weakened the Church in many ways was the increasing pride of its popes. During much of the medieval era, popes would involve the Church in disputes of the land. Obviously, there were understandable religious reasons to attempt to solve disputes, settle wars, etc. But often in the later middle ages, the Pope would simply have political, and not religious, reasons for interfering in a battle. This came to a hilt when Pope Boniface interfered with the battle for Sicily. This is not to mention the politics often involved with the selection of Holy Roman Emperors. The pride of the Popes had also, for almost the entire period, been criticized by small religious orders who objected to the wealth, power, and homage which the papacy had collected over the years. From the St. Francis to John Wyclif, some churchmen gathered persistent opposition to papal wealth.

It was the Church's tendency to use its power frivolously which helped usher in the major element which began its fall. Although the crusades against the Moors in Spain were largely applauded, it would result in Western Civilization uncovering a lot of lost treasure which it had harkened back to, but avoided. In the libraries and schools of the Muslims were found the impressive intellectual works of the Greeks and Romans, specifically Aristotle. Along with the range of scientific knowledge unearthed from the dark peninsula, Aristotle's logic would stand to become the basis for much of future Church opposition.

For all its desires to control the destiny of itself and its empire, the Church had done little to defend itself from the workings of simple reason. Before, public opinion was easily swayed in opposition to groups of heretics, not only because of the people's fear of God and the Church, but also because these groups were often fringe groups, easily branded as infidels and freaks. But the rise of the university, which happened parallel to the rise of the great cathedrals, encouraged students to have an open mind with which to accept knowledge. The logic and science of the Greek philosophers found happy homes in such forums.

Now, heretics such as Wyclif and Hus had intellectual ground to stand on to make their claims about the reality of religious beliefs. Theologists began to call endeared Church doctrine, and even the Bible, into question under the rules of logic. Although the Church excommunicated Wyclif and had Hus burned at the stake, it was not enough anymore to simply brush these inquiries away as simply the whimsies of heretics. As reason became popular among the educated class, their arguments also gained support.

Although the Church won temporary victories in removing heretics of this period in order to get them out of the way, through power of Church office, inquisition, excommunication, interdict, and burning, it did not truly eliminate the spreading of this revolutionary thinking among sincere Christians. Although it is not within the time scale of our period of study, we know that many of the challenges made by Hus, Wyclif, and others were echoed in the development in later years of the many Protestant sects and other religious denominations which denied control by the Roman pope.

The Church had enjoyed many years as the most powerful force in all of Europe. Through the devotion of the wide majority of its people, and the importance of church officials throughout the continent, the Church could challenge, in its own terms, the most powerful of rulers. In its arrogance, it inadvertently rediscovered the classical knowledge which it had purposefully avoided. With Western civilization on the verge of a renaissance of culture and scholasticism, the Church had no refuge from the challenges that followed.