92 JOSEPH P.

HUFFMANN

alongside an increasing intolerance of dissent and heterodoxy in the name of forg-

ing a perfected and holy Christendom worthy of God’s blessing. Communal purity
demanded single‐minded obedience to the now standardized norms, and Christian
attitudes toward Jews (stereotyped with the sin of avarice), Muslims (stereotype for
the sin of impure belief as infideles), and other non‐conformists became increasingly
hardened and eliminationist.

Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries: The Return of the Apocalypse and

Later Medieval Spirituality

The pressures of success seemed to catch up with every reform movement, which in
time found itself as the new face of outmoded thought in the undertow of yet another
reform movement. This was certainly true of the Cluniacs and Cistercians, and it would
be true of the Franciscans as well as the papacy. Innocent III’s pontificate is justifiably
recognized as the pinnacle of the medieval papacy and the second medieval synthesis,
but this only makes obvious a subsequent decline was to follow. Many of his own policies
and assertions of papal authority contributed to the decline in papal influence and inde-
pendence. And though the papacy had been well advanced beyond monarchies in the
formation of administrative and institutional structures of governance, its own success
led to growing charges of bloated bureaucracy and financial corruption in Rome, even
as European Christians sent their varied appeals to Rome in record numbers. Finally,
what Innocent III did not fully appreciate in the midst of his numerous contentious
interventions into the lives and politics of Europe’s kings and emperors was that in var-
ying degrees they too were developing administrative monarchies that would soon be
ready to challenge papal claims to super‐territorial jurisdiction as Christendom’s senior
pastor (Oakley 1979).
Copyright © 2016. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Growing proto‐national kingdoms with their intensifying resistance to papal inter-

ventions, and the inevitable spiritual inflation that occurred with every papal use of
excommunication and interdict, ultimately proved to undermine papal authority over
a supposedly uniform and unified Christendom. And this decline set in at the abso-
lutely worst time possible, when pastoral leadership was needed more than ever. The
Age of Trauma dawned in the fourteenth century, when climate change and the global
transportation system combined to produce a series of debilitating famines followed
by the unimaginable horrors of the Black Plague by mid‐century. The last two horse-
men of the Apocalypse also arrived in the form of wars (e.g. Hundred Years War) and
the death they produced on a record scale as royal armies swelled in size, destructive
capacity, and duration in the field. Kings were finally recovering their sovereignty after
the feudal age of aristocratic and clerical dominance, and they were determined to
consolidate their kingdoms into territorial states. And one of the key elements in this
strategy was to return the Church once again to a sub‐set of Christendom under the
sovereign king.
Clerical inability to solve any of these traumatic crises produced a new criticism of
their impotence and even irrelevance, while traditional critiques of the Church’s corpo-
rate wealth (often a product of centuries of the laity’s pious bequests) continued apace.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, edited by Lamin Sanneh, and Michael McClymond, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucd/detail.action?docID=4461582.
Created from ucd on 2025-01-31 16:49:45.
 THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS 93

Lay anticlericalism had much to complain about as one failure of ecclesiastical lead-
ership after another piled up without any meaningful reform movement engendered
in this era of crisis. The Papacy’s exile in Avignon (1305–1377) followed by the Great
Schism (1378–1417) nearly eclipsed the papal office again, with a serious yet narrowly
unsuccessful ecclesial reform to an episcopal synod model of leadership as advocated
by the Conciliar Movement. The papacy narrowly preserved its monarchical status
in Rome through mortgaging its prerogatives over the Church to regional monarchs
and princes, and the popes themselves then turned to functioning as territorial Italian
Renaissance princes themselves.
Lay spirituality throughout this troubled era, however, remained remarkably
vibrant and engaged, with a major outpouring of support for memorial chantries,
charitable bequests, religious feasts, and communal rituals (Duffy 2005). Yet some
communities began to contemplate direct access to God without the need for cleri-
cal mediation (Arnold 2005). Later medieval lay devotion was centered on two dis-
tinct themes: (1) the changing image of Christ from an incarnate savior to a suffering
martyr‐God, and (2) prophetic mysticism, both of which seem quite appropriate for
an age of enormous human suffering and a clergy both in conflict with itself and
highly politicized (Vauchez 1993bb; 1993c). Mystics abounded in this period, in
which we finally hear female voices that were counted sacred: thousands of people
from every ethnicity, class, age, gender, and educational attainment were claiming
to have had direct, personal encounters with Christ, saints, or angels and were often
given prophetic words for the moral renewal of the Church. In this egalitarian age
of prophets and prophetesses eclipsing priests, the likes of Margery Kempe, Meister
Eckhart, St. Catherine of Siena, Marie d’Oignies, Handwijch of Flanders, Julian of
Norwich, St. Bridget of Sweden, the Solitary of Durham, Walter Hilton, Joan of Arc,
and many more gave to the Church memorable visions of Christ’s suffering alongside
his pilgrim flock as well as deeply intimate divine offers of union – even a “mystical
Copyright © 2016. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

bridal‐union” – amid the “stench of corruption” emanating from the papacy as St.
Catherine of Siena saw it.
Intolerance of dissent and heterodoxy was therefore sustained in this free‐wheeling
prophetic environment, and both clergy and monarchy proved hypersensitive to them
as threats to their legitimacy. Hence, when individuals like John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Joan
of Arc, and their followers (who would have deeply disagreed with each other) proved
either to reject the ecclesiastical or political order of the day or encouraged others to
flout them and set up on their own with a Bible as the only authority, they were dis-
patched in short order as heretics (though for Wycliffe there was a posthumous deg-
radation of his body). It was as though the flames that engulfed these new heretics
were a measure of the fever that had taken hold of Christendom in yet another age
of anxiety, and claims to membership in the heavenly Church Triumphant did little to
save one from the reactionary Church Militant on earth. Even for those who remained
in the orthodox fold there was coercion to obey, as when female members of lay con-
fraternities, beguinages, and various spiritual communities were commanded by Pope
Boniface VIII in 1298 to be immediately and permanently cloistered as nuns in order
to better manage the mystical visions of these independent laywomen (Bynum 1988).
Such was the defensiveness of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a world that had changed

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, edited by Lamin Sanneh, and Michael McClymond, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucd/detail.action?docID=4461582.
Created from ucd on 2025-01-31 16:49:45.