The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY

THE NEW QUESTIONING ATTITUDE. The student can hardly have followed the history of educational development thus far without realizing that a serious questioning of the practices and of the dogmatic and repressive attitude of the omnipresent mediaeval Church was certain to come, sooner or later, unless the Church itself realized that the mediaeval conditions which once demanded such an attitude were rapidly passing away, and that the new life in Christendom now called for a progressive stand in religious matters as in other affairs. The new life resulting from the Crusades, the rise of commerce and industry, the organization of city governments, the rise of lawyer and merchant classes, the formation of new national States, the rise of a new “Estate” of tradesmen and workers, the new knowledge, the evolution of the university organizations, and the discovery of the art of printing—all these forces had united to develop a new attitude toward the old problems and to prepare western Europe for a rapid evolution out of the mediaeval conditions which had for so long dominated all action and thinking. This the Church should have realized, and it should have assumed toward the progressive tendencies of the time the same intelligent attitude assumed earlier toward the rise of scholastic inquiry. But it did not, and by the fifteenth century the situation had been further aggravated by a marked decline in morality on the part of both monks and clergy, which awakened deep and general criticism in all lands, but particularly among the northern peoples.

The Revival of Learning was the first clear break with mediaevalism. In the critical and constructive attitude developed by the scholars of the movement, their renunciation of the old forms of thinking, the new craving for truth for its own sake which they everywhere awakened, and their continual appeal to the original sources of knowledge for guidance, we have the definite beginnings of a modern scientific spirit which was destined ultimately to question all things, and in time to usher in modern conceptions and modern ways of thinking. The authority of the mediaeval Church would be questioned, and out of this questioning would come in time a religious freedom and a religious tolerance unknown in the mediaeval world. The great world of scientific truth would be inquired into and the facts of modern science established, regardless of what preconceived ideas, popular or religious, might be upset thereby. The divine right of kings to rule, and to dispose of the fortunes and happiness of their peoples as they saw fit, was also destined to be questioned, and another new “Estate” would in time arise and substitute, instead, in all progressive lands, the divine right of the common people. Religious freedom and toleration, scientific inquiry and scholarship, and the ultimate rise of democracy were all involved in the critical, questioning, and constructive attitude of the humanistic scholars of the Renaissance.

These came historically in the order just stated, and in this order we shall consider them.

HUMANISM BECAME A RELIGIOUS REFORM MOVEMENT IN THE NORTH. In Italy the Revival of Learning was classical and scientific in its methods and results, and awakened little or no tendency toward religious and moral reform. Instead it resulted in something of a paganization of religion, with the result that the Papacy and the Italian Church probably reached their lowest religious levels at about the time the great religious agitation took place in northern lands. In the latter, on the contrary, the introduction of humanism awakened a new religious zeal, and religious reform and classical learning there came to be associated almost as one movement. In England, Germany, the Low Countries, and in large parts of northern France, the new learning was at once directed to religious and moral ends. The patriotic emotions roused in the Italians by the humanistic movement were in the northern countries superseded by religious and moral emotions, and the constant appeal to sources turned the northern leaders almost at once back to the Church Fathers and the original Greek and Hebrew Testaments for authority in religious matters.

Colet, from England, who had spent the years 1493-96 in Florence (p. 254), during the period when Savonarola (1452-98) was preaching moral reform there, returned home, not only a humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of Utopia), among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom were also deeply interested in a reform of the practices of the Church.

Erasmus, in particular, labored hard by his writings to remove religious abuses. His Colloquies (1519), a widely used Latin reading book, was banned from the classrooms of the University of Paris (1528), and forbidden to be used in Catholic lands by the Church Council of Trent (1564), because of the way in which it held up to ridicule the abuses in the Church, the superstitions of the age, and the immoralities in the lives of the monks and clergy. His work as Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, his numerous editions of the writings of the Church Fathers, and his Latin-Greek edition (1516), of the New Testament [1] all alike tended to turn theological scholars back to the original sources instead of to the scholastics for the foundations of their religious faith. In Germany such men as Hegius (p, 271), Reuchlin (p. 254), and Melanchthon (p. 270) began, by similar methods, to go back to Greek and Hebrew sources and to the Church Fathers for new interpretations as to religious doctrines. In so doing they discovered that many practices and demands of the Church, all of which had grown up during the long mediaeval period, were not in harmony with the earlier teachings of Christ, the Apostles, or the early Fathers. In France, Jacques Lef�vre (c. 1455-1536), a humanist and a pioneer Protestant, contended for the rule of the Scriptures and for justification by faith, and translated the Bible into the French (New Testament, 1523; complete, 1530) that the people might read it.

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION. The reaction against the mediaeval dogmas of the Church and the demand by the humanists of the North for a return to the simpler religion of Christ gradually grew, and in time became more and more insistent. This demand was not something which broke out all at once and with Luther, as many seem to think. Had this been so he would soon have been suppressed, and little more would have been heard of him.

Instead, the literature of the time clearly reveals that there had been, for two centuries, an increasing criticism of the Church, and a number of local and unsuccessful efforts at reform had been attempted. The demand for reform was general, and of long standing, outside of Italy and southern France. Had it been heeded probably much subsequent history might have been different. A few of the more important attempts at reform may be mentioned here, as a background for our study.

The first organized revolt against the Church occurred in southern France, in the early thirteenth century, and the revolters (_Albigenses_) were so fearfully punished by fire and sword that it was not attempted there again.

[Illustration: FIG. 86. JOHN WYCLIFFE (1320?-84) A popular English preacher (Drawn from an old print)]

In 1378 there was a disputed papal election, and for nearly forty years there were two Popes, one at Rome, and one at Avignon in southern France, each attempting to control the Church and each denouncing the other as Antichrist. The discussions which accompanied this “Great Schism” did much to weaken the authority of the Church in all Christian lands. In England a popular preacher and Oxford divinity graduate by the name of John Wycliffe was led, by the sad condition of the Church there, to a careful study of the Bible. He came to the conclusion that many of the claims of the Popes and many practices of the Church were wrong (R. 147) and he refused to accept teachings of the Church for which he could not find sanction in the Bible. His revolt was as direct and vigorous as that of Luther, in German lands, a century and a half later (R. 148). So great was his zeal for reform that he and his scholars attempted a translation of the Bible [2]

into English (see Figure 93), that the people might read it, and he and his followers (called Lollards) went about the country teaching what they believed to be the true Christianity. What had before in England been a widespread but undefined feeling of disaffection for the rich and careless clergy and monks, the work of Wycliffe organized into a political and social force.

Due to the then close connection of the English and Bohemian courts, through royal marriages, Wycliffe’s teachings were carried to Bohemia, where a popular preacher and university theologian by the name of John Huss (1373-1415) expounded them. He denounced the evil conduct of the clergy, and he and his followers tried to introduce several new customs into the Church. For this Huss was first excommunicated, and then burned at the stake as a dangerous heretic. [3] After a series of terrible massacres his followers were forced, in large part, to accept once more the old system.

[Illustration: FIG. 87. RELIGIOUS WARFARE IN BOHEMIA Sacking a village in true German style (From a picture in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg)]

In 1414 a Council of the Church was called at Constance, in Switzerland, to heal the papal