The church, the councils, and reform: the legacy of the fifteenth century

13. The Conciliar Church

13 The Conciliar Church } giUsePPe alberigo The sharp tension between the Council of Basel and Eugenius IV,the legitimate successor of Martin V, imposed a marked check on the reception of the decisions of the Council of Constance. It is quite true that these were the banner of the new council,or at least of its majority; but,in the meantime,a crystallization of a difference that threatened to transformitself intoadenialacceleratedanddeepened.Inthenewsituationrecoursetothecouncilhadeverlessthesignificanceof theonehope of Christendom, and risked assuming instead the opposite appearance of a threat to recovered unity. At Basel it seemed inevitable and proper to “use” the decrees of Constance as instruments of struggle without stopping short of their enlargement. However, at Rome and elsewhere the supporters of the pope had opposing intentions. Although Eugenius IV and the papal monarchy gained the upper hand, they could not stop short of a polemic against the decisions that, twenty years before, had restored unity to the church while restoring the Roman papacy. Having vanquished the threat of perpetuation of the Great Schism, the Western Church did not find the strength to confront the very causes of the schism. Ecclesiastical decadence and the indiscriminate exercise of central authority weighed down the church more than ever,and every effort to provide a remedy aroused harsh resistance and divisive conflicts. This adversarial approach risked dissipating the results that the patient research of two generations had condensed in the decisions of 271 This essay was translated from the Italian by Thomas M.Izbicki. Constance.In this state of things it was not easy to pull out of the perverse spiral of conflict that seemed to perpetuate itself and lead to decisions that in every case caused further mutilation of the church: one could stand with the council and, therefore, struggle against the pope or, vice versa, stand with the pope, not just struggling against the council but renouncing reform of the church.We know almost nothing of the echoes that this confrontation had in the daily life of Christendom .It is probable that the need for tranquility,the still-living memory of the struggles of the schism, and the difficulty of discerning between the arguments of the two parties checked almost every echo of the great institutional duel in progress. A precise echo is heard in the universities1 and religious orders, where there prevailed in the long run a solidarity with Basel, above all in the transalpine lands.2 Nevertheless,even in these environments sympathy for the council lacked sufficient force to sustain the luxuriant and creative literature written between 1380 and 1415.Instead,one has the impression that the conviction of secure possession of the truth prevailed,without a disposition to allow oneself to ask about problems in the new situation, nor a commitment to confront them with an attachment that was not merely repetitive.Also there prevailed an analogous situation within the council. The conciliar movement, which had animated the church diffusely during the preceding decades, enjoying the most generous support for overcoming the schism,did not exist any longer.A spontaneous phenomenon,graphically conditioned by circumstance—and, nevertheless, easily recognizable for the force that it had exercised in the leadership of Christendom—such a movement was spontaneously dissipated when,with the election of Martin V,unity was restored,and one could hope that reform of head and members would follow.Although reform had not eventuated,the conciliar movement did not reconstitute itself as robustly as it had existed at Constance within the Council of Basel,and this helps explain the lack of creativity and its slow but inexorable deterioration. Nevertheless, the spiritual and theological patrimony that had nourished the overcoming of the schism had not been dispersed, above all after having found a solemn sanction in the decisions of Constance, crowned by the universal ac272 GiuseppeAlberigo 1. Cf. Josef Wohlmuth, “Universität und Konzil: Verfassungs- rechtliche und wissenschaftstheoretische Einflüss der Universitäten auf die Konzilien von Konstanz und Basel,” in “Scientia” und “Ars” im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter , ed.Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg and Andreas Speer (Berlin:De Gruyter,1994),22/II:877–94. 2.Inthiscontextoneshouldconsultabovealltheresearchof StieberandSwanson,andotherminorworks that I have listed in my “Il movimento conciliare (XIV–XV sec.) nella ricerca storica recente,”Studi medievali, ser. 3,19 (1978):913–50. ceptance of the new pope chosen by the council. This patrimony had found in the University of Paris a center of zealous defense, one already conditioned by the...