Simultaneously with this manifestation of revolutionary feeling there were tend encies in the sphere of pure thought in essential antagonism to the teaching of the Church. The labor of the thinkers of the Middle Ages was to reconcile faith, as inculcated by religious author ity, with human reason as they found it embodied in the accessible writings of Aristotle. In the 13th century, the Arabic texts of Aristotle, and notably that of the great commentator Aver rhoes, made their way into the Christian schools, and thenceforward a leaven of skepticism was a present element in all the universities of Europe. As a result of the teaching of Averrhoes, a name of the most sinister import to every true son of the Church, materialism and pan theism became common creeds among thinkers, and the notion spread even among intelligent laymen that Christian ity was not the absolute thing the Church had taught them to believe. In Dante's (died 1321) fierce exclamation that the knife is the one reply to him who denies the immortality of the soul we have the outburst of a passionate faith in presence of a wide-spread libertinism of thought.
But the most serious menace against the integrity of the papal system lay in the political development of Europe during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages. As the countries of west ern Europe became more and more in dividualized, their peoples grew every year into a fuller consciousness of dis tinct national interests and national ideals. While this was the tendency of the various nations, the Pope during these centuries gradually lost his position as the disinterested umpire of Europe, and sank into an Italian prince, with a temporal policy of his own which led him to seek allies among other poten tates, as they fell in with his own special ends of the moment. But such alliances naturally gave offense to the princes ex cluded from them, and led to a sus picious discontent with the Roman see, which, as was afterward proved in the case of England, needed only the requi site occasion to flame into outright re bellion. The saying of Philip Augustus (died 1223)—"Happy Saladin, who has no Pope l"—expressed the feeling which every century grew stronger, that the ,Pope would become an impossible factor in Europeanpolitics. To this feeling should he added the fact that, as the middle classes grew in intelligence and well-being they looked with envy on the immense wealth of the clergy, and grumbled at the large sums that annu ally went to the coffers of Rome.
During the 14th and 15th centuries mediwvalism gave every sign of a har monic phase of human development. By the so-called Babylonish Captivity, when the papal residence was fixed for 70 years at Avignon (1305-1376), and by the Great Schism (1378-1417), during which the spectacle was seen of first two and afterward three Popes claiming to be the vicars of God on earth, the papacy suffered a loss of prestige in the eyes of all Europe which it never after ward fully recovered. It was the fur ther misfortune of the Church during this eclipse of its ancient glory that spiritual life seemed to have gone out of every rank of its clergy. Testimonies from every country prove beyond ques tion that by the end of the 15th century the clergy had become often illy, .some times grossly, unfit to be the spiritual guides of the people. The sources of in tellectual life had equally failed where ever the old philosophy authorized by the Church continued to be the subject of teaching and study. In the later half of the 15th century scholasticism had become the veriest casuistry which ever engaged the mind of man. In all the in
terests of man's well-being, therefore, a renaissance was needed to evoke new motives and supply new ideals which should lift humanity to a higher plane of endeavor. Such a renaissance came and evolutionally the Church did not prove equal to suppressing this second burst of life as it had suppressed that of the 12th and 13th centuries.
It was again in Italy that the new life first declared itself. While N. of the Alps scholasticism reigned in all the schools, the movement known as the Renaissance had in Italy been in full course for above a century. In itself the Renaissance was as far as possible from leading men to higher ideals in religion, yet in two of its results it gave a direct impetus to the Reformation. In spired by the life of antiquity, the hu manism of the Renaissance paganized the Church and quickened that moral disintegration which was the prime cause of the religious revolution. On the other hand, through its opening of men's minds by new studies, and new measures of things, the Renaissance lightened the load of tradition, and made a new departure in the life of Christen dom a less formidable conception. In Erasmus (1467-1536), who has always been regarded as a true nursing father of the Reformation, we clearly discern these two results of the revival of the ancient literatures. In so many words he states his grave fears lest the Church should be wholly paganized by the uni versal imitation of classical modes of thought and speech; while his own un sparing criticism of the Church and its traditions proves how much he owed to the so-called "new learning." The very zeal with which the revival of antiquity was pursued in Italy was itself a countercheck to religious reform in the country that of all others needed it the most. All contemporary literature proves that during the later part of the 15th and the opening of the 16th century he court of Rome was as profoundly immoral as that of any of the heathen emperors had been in the same city. The spiritual claims of the papacy were the jest of ecclesiastics themselves. "This fable of Christ," a certain digni tary of the Church is reported to have said in the Vatican, "has been to us a source of great gain." Among the Italian people, however, there was never the slightest indication of a national movement toward any serious breach with the papacy. The religious melodrama enacted by Savonarola at Florence (1489-1498) never struck at the central ideas of papal Christianity; and Savonarola, besides, never like Luther or Knox woke a deep response in the national consciousness. While in Italy, therefore, there was no widespread re ligious quickening as in other countries of Christendom, there was no political reason such as elsewhere produced a breach with the papacy. For the Italian people the Pope was not a foreign prince with temporal interests of his own con flicting with those of the nation at large. The different republics which partitioned the country might at times regard the Pope as an enemy to their individual ambitions; but the nation as a whole was fully conscious of the honor of having the vicar of God in their midst, and as in the past they had stood by him against the emperors, so in the great religious revolution of the 16th century they also remained faithful to him throughout the gradual dismemberment of his spiritual dominion.