Why Religion Endures
Religion is often understood late in life. Young people tend to look at inherited traditions with impatience, and only later wonder how faith survived the criticism of thinkers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Hume, and Voltaire. One answer is that many aspects of human experience cannot be fully explained by science through cause and effect or quantitative measurement. Even the most advanced knowledge leaves a vast territory of the unknown.
Human beings rarely remain content with uncertainty. A small minority can stay permanently undecided, but most people attribute events to forces beyond nature. In this sense religion can be defined as the worship of supernatural powers, together with the effort to win their protection through praise, devotion, and appeasement. Belief gives suffering a meaning, gives history a moral direction, and answers the wish for survival beyond death.
What Science Does Not Provide
Science gives us better tools, but it says little about ultimate purposes and values. For this reason many people prefer the certainty of religious teaching to the instability of shifting opinions, and they welcome the authority of an established church, the relief of confession, and the continuity of inherited doctrine.
Religion and Social Order
Religion also serves society and the state. Its rituals connect generations, its buildings and music shape public life, and it gives moral rules a sacred authority. Human instincts were formed over hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and insecurity, so they must be restrained daily for civilization to function. Families, educators, and governments have long relied on religion for this purpose. Rulers from Hammurabi to Numa Pompilius were credited with using religious sanction to support law, and the claim is that if religion had not existed, lawgivers would have invented it.
The Church at Its Height
For roughly a thousand years, from the reign of Constantine to the age of Dante, the Christian Church gave European peoples a common belief and a shared moral story. It taught that every individual stood in a direct relationship with a God who had created, instructed, and redeemed humanity. Art, architecture, music, and liturgy grew from this vision, and the sacraments of confession, penance, communion, and last rites guided a believer from birth to death.
Institutions That Preserved Civilization
After the barbarian invasions of Italy, Gaul, Britain, and Spain, the Church became the main institution of order and recovery. Its contributions included:
- Monks who cleared and cultivated neglected land.
- Monasteries that fed the poor, taught children, and sheltered travelers and pilgrims.
- Church hospitals that cared for the sick and weak.
- Convents that educated girls and gave women a place in social work.
- Scribes who copied manuscripts and kept Greek and Latin alive, so that Renaissance humanists later found ancient texts in monastic libraries.
- Universities and Gothic cathedrals, where scholars and scholastic philosophers worked under church protection.
For many centuries nearly all scholars, teachers, judges, diplomats, and ministers of Western Europe were educated in the Church. Latin, taught through church schools, served as a shared language of learning across nations.
A Moral and International Authority
At its peak the Church also acted as a moral court above national governments. Pope Gregory VII promoted the idea of a Christian commonwealth, and Emperor Henry IV acknowledged papal authority by his submission at Canossa in 1077. Later, Frederick Barbarossa yielded to Pope Alexander III at Venice, and under Innocent III in 1198 papal power reached its highest point. For a time it seemed that a moral authority above all states had become reality.
The Decline of Papal Authority
This vision was undermined by human weakness. Church officials proved as ambitious and acquisitive as other people, and rulers increasingly resented supernatural claims over their territory. Philip IV of France challenged Pope Boniface VIII over control of church property in France, and the pope, seized by royal agents at Anagni, died soon afterward in 1303.
The Avignon Papacy
Between 1307 and 1417 the Church suffered political defeat and moral decay. Philip IV arranged the election of a French pope who moved the papal seat to Avignon, where for sixty-eight years the papacy appeared dependent on the French crown. Other countries responded by reducing their respect and their payments.
To replace lost income, the papacy multiplied fees and taxes:
- New officeholders paid the first year of their revenue, called
annates, and a tenth in later years. - A new archbishop paid a large sum for the woolen pallium, the symbol of his office.
- The property of a deceased church official passed to the pope, and the revenues of a vacant post went to the papal treasury.
- Favorable judgments in the papal court often required gifts.
Contemporary critics condemned the result. Guillaume Durand, bishop of Mende, told the Council of Vienne in 1311 that reform would come if the Church removed its worst members. The Spanish bishop Alvaro Pelayo wrote that wolves were living under the Church's protection, and King Edward III of England reminded Pope Clement VI that shepherds should lead the flock, not slaughter it. In Germany papal tax collectors were attacked, and in 1372 several groups of clergy refused to pay a tax imposed by Gregory XI.
Papal Claims Against Growing Resistance
Even so, theorists such as Agostino Trionfo argued in 1324 that the pope's power came from God, that he could be removed only by a general council for heresy, and that he could depose rulers and annul laws. Yet the flight from Rome and the dependence on France weakened this claim. Of 134 cardinals chosen at Avignon, 113 were French. England resented papal loans to France during the Hundred Years' War, German electors rejected papal interference in imperial elections, and Italian condottieri seized papal lands. In 1376 Florence confiscated church property and closed church courts during its quarrel with Gregory XI. Having begun to lose Europe, Gregory returned the papacy to Rome in 1377.
The Western Schism
After Gregory died in 1378, the cardinals, under pressure from the Roman crowd, elected an Italian, Urban VI. His harshness and resistance to reform led them to declare the election invalid and to choose Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII and ruled from Avignon. The resulting Western Schism (1378-1417) grew out of the rise of national states and of France's need for papal support in its conflict with England.
A Divided Christendom
Naples, Spain, and Scotland followed France in recognizing Clement, while England, Flanders, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Italy, and Portugal recognized Urban. Each side questioned the sacraments performed by the other, which raised fears about baptism, absolution, and last rites. A divided Christianity also gave encouragement to rival faiths. The deaths of Urban in 1389 and Clement in 1394 did not heal the split, since each side elected a successor, and the Avignon cardinals chose the Spaniard Benedict XIII.
The Conciliar Movement
The theoretical basis for resolving the crisis had been prepared about a century earlier. William of Ockham argued that the Church was the whole community of believers, not only the clergy. Marsilius of Padua held that a general council represented the concentrated wisdom of Christendom and might include lay representatives. Heinrich von Langenstein concluded that only a general council, which stood above both popes and cardinals, could end the disorder.
From Pisa to Constance
The Council of Pisa met in 1409 and deposed the two rival popes, yet the new pope, Alexander V, became a third claimant. After his death the cardinals elected John XXIII, a former military-minded churchman with a scandalous reputation. John delayed the next council and finally opened it at Constance on 5 November 1414. On 6 April 1415 the assembly issued a revolutionary decree stating that a general council held its authority directly from Christ and that everyone, including the pope, must obey it on matters of faith, ending the schism and reform.
Outcome of the Council
- John XXIII was deposed on 29 May 1415 after the council accepted fifty-four charges against him.
- Gregory XII resigned on 4 July 1415, after first being allowed to convene the council himself.
- The reformer Jan Hus was condemned and burned on 6 July 1415.
- Benedict XIII was removed on 26 July 1415 and died in Spain still claiming the papacy.
- On 17 November 1417 Cardinal Oddone Colonna was elected Martin V, and the schism ended.
The council's success in ending the schism did not bring the reform it had promised. Martin V took control of the papal powers, divided the national delegations, and persuaded them to accept only a minor reform. The exhausted council dissolved on 22 April 1418. The unresolved corruption and the growing independence of rulers became two of the forces that later led to the Reformation.