Medieval Heresy & the Inquisition

But the task of the Church in reforming itself was one of great difficulty. It was essential in purifying conduct to take the utmost precautions against adulterating the purity of the faith, and in reforming the papacy to maintain the fundamental continuity of the Church, its orders, its sacraments, and its traditions. Individual would-be reformers were carried away by their fervent zeal, led into proposing the most unheard-of innovations. Wycliffe actually demanded the sweeping away of the higher orders of the priesthood and the monastic orders as a condition of suppressing corruption. Such theories were clearly heretical, and it was no solution to the spiritual troubles of the Church to weaken it further by making concessions to revolutionaries or by invalidating sound doctrine. Such was the point of view of moderate reformers like Gerson, D’Ailly, and Niem—men perhaps just as earnest as Wycliffe and Hus in their desire for purity, but anxious, as those others were not, for the preservation of the Catholic faith untouched.

And it is easy to understand the position they adopted. The general conditions of their time, political and social as well as religious, made a strong appeal to the conservative instinct. England and France were both suffering from the havoc of the Hundred Years War. There was schism in the empire as well as in the papacy. The terrible scourge of the Black Death laid all countries low. Social unrest was widespread and alarming. Vagrant, masterless men devoured with avidity any doctrines of a communist savior, and to such people, the Wycliffite thesis of "dominion founded on grace" had an obvious and dangerous attractiveness. Just as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so now in the case of Wycliffitism and Husitism, heresy was regarded not as a purely religious matter, but also as a social danger. Another phenomenon that conservatives naturally viewed with misgiving was the early translation of the Bible into the vernacular.