The History of the Reformation…The Goose That Became a Swan…John Huss

True, -- our correspondent did not describe anything but his Castles and Dragons imagination. Thank you for the correction.

My question on "why bring up this mess" wasn't meant to imply that history is unimportant! Far from me to even suggest such a thing!!! It has brought me to Catholicism. But this post is not "history" as one would expect to find in a scholarly post or site. It is quite simply a biased, one-sided version that jokingly condemns the buffoon Church and applauds the Church-burning Protestants who were doing God's will...

Such "types" of history are not convincing to the "fence-sitter", nor are they conducive to any sort of ecumenical movement. They merely entrench the Protestant in their division - a work of the devil, as Paul would say.

Regards

Precisely because history is important, it is a good idea not to post such garbage as Browning's.

Sir/Ma'am:

I have no idea where the quote you retrieved came from, but here is the text of Unam Sanctum:

UNAM SANCTAM (Promulgated November 18, 1302)
Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, as the Spouse in the Canticles [Sgs 6:8] proclaims: 'One is my dove, my perfect one. She is the only one, the chosen of her who bore her,' and she represents one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God [1 Cor 11:3]. In her then is one Lord, one faith, one baptism [Eph 4:5]. There had been at the time of the deluge only one ark of Noah, prefiguring the one Church, which ark, having been finished to a single cubit, had only one pilot and guide, i.e., Noah, and we read that, outside of this ark, all that subsisted on the earth was destroyed.
We venerate this Church as one, the Lord having said by the mouth of the prophet: 'Deliver, O God, my soul from the sword and my only one from the hand of the dog.' [Ps 21:20] He has prayed for his soul, that is for himself, heart and body; and this body, that is to say, the Church, He has called one because of the unity of the Spouse, of the faith, of the sacraments, and of the charity of the Church. This is the tunic of the Lord, the seamless tunic, which was not rent but which was cast by lot [Jn 19:23-24]. Therefore, of the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster; that is, Christ and the Vicar of Christ, Peter and the successor of Peter, since the Lord speaking to Peter Himself said: 'Feed my sheep' [Jn 21:17], meaning, my sheep in general, not these, nor those in particular, whence we understand that He entrusted all to him [Peter]. Therefore, if the Greeks or others should say that they are not confided to Peter and to his successors, they must confess not being the sheep of Christ, since Our Lord says in John 'there is one sheepfold and one shepherd.' We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal. For when the Apostles say: 'Behold, here are two swords' [Lk 22:38] that is to say, in the Church, since the Apostles were speaking, the Lord did not reply that there were too many, but sufficient. Certainly the one who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has not listened well to the word of the Lord commanding: 'Put up thy sword into thy scabbard' [Mt 26:52]. Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.
However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other and temporal authority, subjected to spiritual power. For since the Apostle said: 'There is no power except from God and the things that are, are ordained of God' [Rom 13:1-2], but they would not be ordained if one sword were not subordinated to the other and if the inferior one, as it were, were not led upwards by the other.
For, according to the Blessed Dionysius, it is a law of the divinity that the lowest things reach the highest place by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back to order equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior. Hence we must recognize the more clearly that spiritual power surpasses in dignity and in nobility any temporal power whatever, as spiritual things surpass the temporal. This we see very clearly also by the payment, benediction, and consecration of the tithes, but the acceptance of power itself and by the government even of things. For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgement if it has not been good. Thus is accomplished the prophecy of Jeremias concerning the Church and the ecclesiastical power: 'Behold to-day I have placed you over nations, and over kingdoms' and the rest. Therefore, if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power; but if a minor spiritual power err, it will be judged by a superior spiritual power; but if the highest power of all err, it can be judged only by God, and not by man, according to the testimony of the Apostle: 'The spiritual man judgeth of all things and he himself is judged by no man' [1 Cor 2:15]. This authority, however, (though it has been given to man and is exercised by man), is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him (Peter) and his successors by the One Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, 'Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven' etc., [Mt 16:19]. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2], unless he invent like Manicheus two beginnings, which is false and judged by us heretical, since according to the testimony of Moses, it is not in the beginnings but in the beginning that God created heaven and earth [Gen 1:1]. Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

From The Medieval Sourcebook.

I daresay the world today would be a lot better off if the temporal leaders of today would recognize that they have spiritual accountability for their temporal actions.

For the correct, in context, reading of the "spiritual power judging the temporal power" phrase, I suggest you look at the paragraph beginning with For, according to the Blessed Dionysius. In the correct context, the meaning is significantly different.

And, btw, Wyclif was excommunicated for his rabid denial of the reality of transubstantiation. Huss was excommunicated for subscribing to the heretical Wycliffite doctrine.

However, there is one little minor point that you protestants never seem to get right. The Church does not execute people. The Church excommunicates people. The State executes people. There is a difference.

I agree with what you are saying. I have one addition which I find interesting.

Remember the Scripture in which God, through Peter, executes the couple who withheld their money? Hmmm. Not many people like to talk about that, but clearly, there it is... I am not saying that the Church SHOULD execute anyone. But it is interesting, nonetheless that this is God's Word.

Regards

We need to understand how these traditions were formed and if we are in sinc with scripture

Harley, you know I agree with that statement! But where is that in the post? Where do we see the legitimate development of the Sacrament of Penance from the Church Fathers? No. All we see is the idiotic Church making things up as we go to raise money for the Crusades or to build a church in Rome. This is insulting to those who take the development of doctrine seriously, who realize that the Sacrament has developed over the millenium, but existed from the beginning of Christianity.

Regards

600 years ago the State and the Church throughout Europe was virtually synonymous.

If you say so. I can imagine that things would be a whole lot different (and far better) if your supposition was a fact, rather than a fantasy.

The actual process for heretics was that the Church had an ecclesial trial. If found guilty of heresy, the heretic would be given an opportunity to recant his heresy and to confess. If not, the heretic would be excommunicated. Once excommunicated, the Church has washed her hands of the person unless and until that person repents. Therefore, the Church provides no protection to that person against the state executing its power.

BTW, excommunicated literally means out of communion. It is the most severe penalty that the Church can impose. Essentially, it means that, until the problem that caused the excommunications is cleared, repented of, etc., the Church washes its hands of the individual.

As St. Paul said to Titus:

Tit 3:10-11, After a first and second warning, break off contact with a heretic, realizing that such a person is perverted and sinful and stands self-condemned.

The ultimate goal of breaking contact, or excommunicating, is tough love, as stated in the following:

I Ti 1:19b-20, Some, by rejecting conscience, have made a shipwreck of their faith, among them Hymenaeus 11 and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.

Hopefully that helps your understanding.

Subordination is not the same thing as subjugation. In Medieval time when someone subjugated himself to a king or nobleman he literally became that man's property. The king was not his boss, but his owner.

You simply do not know what you are writing about. Slavery in the ancient world usually resulted from being captured in war. Even then a slave could not simply be treated as mere property, though it often came close to that. Some slaves in the ancient world did enter slave status by their own free will, being forced to do so out of poverty etc. They had fewer rights as slaves than did medieval serfs.

We don't know much about the origins of serfdom. It seems that some, perhaps many, early medieval serfs voluntarily entered into a subject relationship because the time were horribly dangerous and it was better to be an unfree dependent of a powerful military lord than to be responsible for defending yourself and your family.

Some certainly entered serfdom because of poverty, perhaps because illness had reduced them to poverty, or because invading terrorists had destroyed their homes and property or because some powerful lord forced them into it--the origins are certainly quite varied. But we do have documents showing that people did voluntarily enter into serf relationships with great lords in the early Middle Ages.

The status was hereditary. It was a contract. In the contract the serf preserved some rights. The contract was not written because no contracts were written. Ancient custom governed the relationship--after several generations the original voluntary subordination continued, obviously now involuntary but the lord was restricted by law (custom law, the Common Law--books of laws were called "customaries") in what he could and could not do. The lord had obligations. He could not deprive the serf of the land he worked. He owed the serf a means of feeding himself and his family. He was obligated under law to defend the serf and his family and his goods from the lord's enemies. I could go on.

Did all lords fulfil their obligations? No, no more than all employers fulfill theirs, all government officials fulfill theirs, all parents fulfill theirs today. But the serf had recourse under law for redress of violations of his rights. Did he always get redress? No. There were unjust judges then as there are now. But property of the lord the serf was not.

Many medieval serfs were set free by the 1200s--the market forces of an expanding economy and new land brought under cultivation meant that an enterprising lord who needed peasants to bring forested or swampy land in Poland or eastern Germany under cultivation could offer as an incentive personal freedom to serfs if they'd leave the more settled west and join him in the east. It was illegal but serfs simply picked up an left. Or, in order to keep them, the lord back home had to counter with an offer of freedom. The peasant remained on the land he had always had a right to but now he was a free man. By the late Middle Ages, the time of Huss and Wyclif, serfdom had nearly entirely disappeared from Europe because the labor shortage after the Great Plague of the 1350s meant the serfs had far greater bargaining power--their labor was in great demand and they could insist on being granted freedom and other privileges. They started working on a wage basis for the lord, yet he could not turn them off the land they worked for him--they had a guaranteed source of a living. Now, more money was often to be made in the towns which were growing, so freed serfs might leave for town. The lord could not stop them and in the end, he had to pay higher and higher wages or grant concessions while the rents the peasants owed him for being able to work his land stayed the same because they were fixed by "ancient custom." The lords had no concept of inflation-indexing and they got squeezed and squeezed badly. Wycliff's and Huss's movement were in part associated with social unrest resulting from an increasingly impoverished lower nobility, an increasingly uppity peasantry, and increasingly powerful towns, often allied with kings and near-royal dukes who were trying to crush the nobles's power.

Finally, as a tax-serf in the state-capitalist empire of the United States today you have less freedom and less liberty and pay more of your income in taxes to the Leviathon state than did most medieval serfs, certainly more than did serfs at the time of Huss. So get off your high horse about "subjugation." You are the one who is really subjugated and you are helpless to prevent it.

And yes, subordination is the same as subjection. Modern English gives the words different connotations but the fundamental meanings are the same. A subject is under the authority of someone (sub-iectus]. A subordinate is under the authority of another [sub-ordinatus, sub-ordinated, sub-ordered]. You confuse the condition of being under someone with the manner by which one comes under subjection.

All of us today are subject to someone else. Even the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is sub-iectus to the board of directors; the three branches of our government are mutually sub-jecti, a teacher is sub-jectus to his principal who is sub-jectus to his superintendant who is sub-iectus to his school board and they are all sub-iecti to the laws of the state and nation. The president of the US is subject to the law, subject to God, subject to the voters, subject to his wife (and she to him) if he's married.

You Protestants read medieval history through the jaundiced eyes of the modern bourgeois attack on kingship and hierarchy. The hypocrisy of modern people who so arrogantly point at medieval people as being totally oppressed and crushed and abused compared to modern people who are free and independent--it's arrant nonsense. The bourgeois revolutions (and the Protestant Reformation) replaced one set of authorities and hierarchies with another set. The Protestant Reformers threw off the authority of bishops and replaced it with that of university-educated theologian/pastors. The bourgeois revolutions threw off the authority of kings and replaced it with the rule of constitutions, which, for a time in the US meant a fairly widespread rule of the people but as we all know because the Constitution was misinterpreted and abandoned in practice, has resulted in subjection to an oligarchy of nine supplemented by the arbitrary and crushing rule of bureaucrats.

And in between this situation and the MIddle Ages lay the worst ever period of autocratic rule, that of absolute kings who consolidated all power in themselves, something medieval kings could only imagine in their dreams. And the Protestant states and city-state pioneered this union of all rule, both church and state, under the state. Catholics learned it from them and never enshrined it into law, merely did it de facto.

If you actually took time to study the Catholic Middle Ages you'd discover it alllowed more individual liberty than at any time in the ancient world or anytime between 1500 and 1776.

But then that would require you actually to do some study instead of waving propaganda at us.

I did not veer off into corporations and government. If you knew the least bit about the origins of the very idea of a corporation as a legal person, you'd know that this concept was pioneered by medieval church lawyers and in doing this they created one of the buildings blocks of our commercial structures to this day. It also laid the basis for the universities as well as the artisans guilds as well as the status of the church.

Remember the Scripture in which God, through Peter, executes the couple who withheld their money?

Sorry, but I don't remember St. Peter laying a hand on those two. If we're talking about the same incident, it's in Acts 5:

A man named Ananias, however, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. He retained for himself, with his wife's knowledge, some of the purchase price, took the remainder, and put it at the feet of the apostles. But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart so that you lied to the holy Spirit and retained part of the price of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain yours? And when it was sold, was it not still under your control? Why did you contrive this deed? You have lied not to human beings, but to God."
When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last, and great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men came and wrapped him up, then carried him out and buried him.
After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in, unaware of what had happened. Peter said to her, "Tell me, did you sell the land for this amount?" She answered, "Yes, for that amount."
Then Peter said to her, "Why did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen, the footsteps of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out."
At once, she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men entered they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.

St. Peter predicted Sapphira's death, but he took no action to cause either.

Frankly, had he done so, it would be a really scary precedent, because it would provide authority for the Church to take a person's life. As it stands, those actions were always accomplished by the State.

But, yes, again that provides another proof of the scriptural conduct of the Church in these matters...thanks!

600 years ago the State and the Church throughout Europe was virtually synonymous.

Total nonsense. No historian, secular, Marxist, Protestant or Catholic would defend this. The understanding of government was that all power came from an omnipotent God who granted some to the temporal ruler (king, prince, lord) and some to the spiritual ruler (bishop, pope). They were to work together, the secular ruler listening to the admonition of the spiritual ruler about what he should do but in his own name and authority issuing laws and enforcing them to make for a stable and just society in which God could be worshiped and the Church could flourish.

The Church needed the physical protection of the temporal ruler; the temporal ruler needed the spiritual leadership and guidance (pastoring) of the Church if he was to get to heaven. Because the soul is higher than the body and ultimately it's far more important that we get to heaven that that we amass wealth or power on earth, the spiritual authority was higher than the temporal authority but the spiritual authority did not rule the temporal temporally, only spiritually, and vice versa.

Innocent III made high claims for the superiority of the pastoral power of the bishop/pope in the 13th century but he did not claim temporal power or governance--he claimed the ultimate dominance of spiritual authority over the distinct temporal authority--he moved from two swords side-by-side to two swords with one subordinate to the other. Boniface VIII did make claims to a sort of temporal governance as an outgrowth of ultimate spiritual authority along the lines of Innocent in the early 1300s but in part because the growing power of the kings of France was making precisely the opposite overweening claims to control the Church in France. (Innocent made his claims in response to the effort by the German emperor, Frederick II, to totally control the Church.)

This battle the Church lost and probably should never have attempted it, certainly not in the form Boniface took--Innocent's claims are perhaps defensible but still, unwise viewed from hindsight. In the period you are talking about there was, in fact, a growing closeness of state-church rule but only because the state (for the first time we can even begin to talk about a "state" in France or England) was gaining the upper hand against the Church. The reason the conciliar movement at Constance (where Huss was tried under temporal authority--he was summoned to Constance by the emperor and executed under the emperor's authority) and Basel failed because the princes were interfering in the church's business at the council.

But there was no identity of church and state until Zwingli begged the state (city council of Zurich, which governed not just the city but a large block of rural territory) to take over the church. He want to throw off the rule of the bishop, wanted to be freed of having to answer to the bishop of Constance, so he developed the theory that the state should run the Church. That, my friend, is the first true state church and it took place in Reformed Protestant Switzerland.

The same state church model was adopted by Henry VIII in England in the 1530s. Luther too invited the state to take over the church because he believed the bishops were too corrupt to be entrusted with reform. However Luther differed from Zwingli: he thought that once the prince had set up a commission to draft a constitution for the reform of the church in his territory (a Kirchenordnung) then the church should resume self-government. In practice, once invited in, the state never got out of the business of interfering in the church, though in theory the church in Lutheran states had some degree of self-government.

Calvin was the closest to the medieval Catholic approach: both state government and church government should be independent but interrelated--they should work hand-in-glove, each to facilitate the other but without confusing the distinct role of each. In practice, Calvin's attempts to stand up to the city council repeatedly failed so in fact in Geneva the state ran the church more than Calvin wanted it to. In other Calvinist areas, e.g., Massachusetts Bay Colony, an official state church Calvinism grew up, so too in the Netherlands. So although Calvin's theory was much more like medieval Catholic practice, in practice, Calvinists had the state running the church just like Zwingli had done.

So what you asserted was true of late medieval Catholic Europe is untrue of that period and is in fact very true of your own miserable Protestant state church tyranny in the 1500s and following.

And that's what I mean by the falsehoods and distortions of the article HarelyD posted and on which you commented.

Huss was treated unjustly, not by the church but by Emperor Sigismund, who promised him safeconduct and then reneged. He also was a heretic and deserved excommunication His followers became vicious terrorist and burned monks alive, pillaged and raped up and down what is now Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Austria. His followers justified their viciousness because of what had happened to Hus. Two wrongs don't make a right. But what Sigismund did to Hus was unjust and deserves to be excoriated.

Where do we see the legitimate development of the Sacrament of Penance from the Church Fathers? No. All we see is the idiotic Church making things up as we go to raise money for the Crusades or to build a church in Rome.

Hopefully I will get to the history of doctrinal development. I doubt many Catholics will agree with that as well.

Total nonsense. No historian, secular, Marxist, Protestant or Catholic would defend this.

My, my. You should read The Three Musketeers. It based upon the control and influence the Church had on the King of France.

**The sharp knives of the "unholy spirits" will be here soon, no doubt.**

We are not unholy spirits. We only want to publish the other side of the story. Fair and balanced, OK?

If Huss and Wycliffe can be held against the modern, post-Vatican II Catholic church, than as a Presbyterian, I have to apologize for the death of Severtus.

You cannot hold against the Church things that, by virtue of vicious custom, society universally held to be correct. It may have been wrong, but very few people living then recogized that. You cannot judge the medieval Catholic Church by the standards of a 21st-century Constitutional system that recognizes freedom of religion.

I have no idea where the quote you retrieved came from, but here is the text of Unam Sanctum:

It is actually part of a summary of Unan Sanctum by Denzinger. And I must say it agrees fully with with the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia's summary:

Both swords are in the power of the Church; the spiritual is wielded in the Church by the hand of the clergy; the secular is to be employed for the Church by the hand of the civil authority, but under the direction of the spiritual power.

The one sword must be subordinate to the other: the earthly power must submit to the spiritual authority, as this has precedence of the secular on account of its greatness and sublimity; for the spiritual power has the right to establish and guide the secular power, and also to judge it when it does not act rightly. When, however, the earthly power goes astray, it is judged by the spiritual power; a lower spiritual power is judged by a higher, the highest spiritual power is judged by God.

This authority, although granted to man, and exercised by man, is not a human authority, but rather a Divine one, granted to Peter by Divine commission and confirmed in him and his successors. Consequently, whoever opposes this power ordained of God opposes the law of God and seems, like a Manichaean, to accept two principles.

Did you read the rest of my posts on this thread?

I think the truth is a good thing. But it's a shame that the faithful from both sides of the aisle waste their time squabbling over misunderstandings (and slinging insults) when they could be working together.

You should read The Three Musketeers

Or at least watch the movie, if you cannot master the source.

This is a work of fiction. Do you not know the difference between historians and literary fiction? Moreover, if you read it carefully, you'd see that it actually is closer to my interprettation than yours. You don't know anything but modern Englishtenment Catholic bashing so when you read things you see tyranny and miss the precise limits on power that are in front of your face.