[historic ideological split The next three issues of…]

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historic ideological split The next three issues of Socialist Press will feature a series of articles on the English Revolution of 1640 which, in the most violent and dramatic way brought the ostensibly 'peaceful' and 'democratic' capitalist class to power. This article sketches some of the material and . ideological developments that preceded that Revolution.

'Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyards of Christ'-thus wrote Edward Gibbon, the monumental obituarist of the Catholic Church's claims to either virtue or divine authority.

April of this year marks the six hundredth anniversary of the 'Great Schism' (between the papacies of Rome and Avignon) in that much and scandalously divided organisation.

The contending cardinals were divided by not one shred of moral or theological principle, but by numerous conflicting ambitions.

And to celebrate their reunification, thirty seven years later, they burnt at the stake one of the most principled and popular of reformers, John Hus of Prague.

First translation 1378 was also (though more approximately) the ime when the first translasion of the whole Bibie into i popular tongue-Englishregan to be widely disseminated.

In that year came the first attempt to bring to trial for heresy the scholar of Oxford University who promoted the translation, John Wycliffeone of rather few men ever to have extracted revolutionary ideas from the Latin quarter of Cowley.

It was no accident that all of these events coincided. Rather the opposite, as the actions of the Church leaders testified.

The same Council of Constance (near Zurich) which in 1415 executed Hus and reassembled behind a single, compromise Pope, also found Wycliffe, the populariser of the Bible and Hus's inspirer, guilty of no less than two hundred and sixty heretical assertions!

Ordered

The assembled prelates accordingly ordered (Wycliffe having died of natural causes more than thirty years cefore that his bones be dug un and burned.

•His vile corpse, said a got who witnessed the scene, 'they consigned to hell, and the river absorbed his ashes.

But not his memory. And :. is instructive to ask why, = 13°8. as the Church was sitting apart, it was such an mammator! matter to make he Bible accessible to that The burning of John Hus and women who could neither read nor write, and who understood not a word of Latin.

The answer lies as much in economics as in theology. In the previous two hundred and more years medieval society had experienced a process of creeping disintegration.

Unwieldy

The laborious, unwieldy apparatus of production and exploitation found it more and more difficult to extract a sufficient surplus from the multitude of peasants, each tied to their petty plot.

And the Church, as both the biggest exploiter and the chief justifier of exploitation, was at the centre of the crisis.

Orthodox Christian doctrine was by this time a complex contradictory and delicate construction.

The work of generations of disputatious theologians, it had only the most fragile connexion with the ideas preached by the Jewish nationalist Jesus of Nazareth and his first followers, who had composed the gospel narratives.

Egalitarianism

Christianity had shed eat ly egalitarianism. Chi he scattering of his ashes had thickly overlaid the scriptures on which they were supposedly based.

Certain gospel teachingssuch as that of Matthew 19:xxiv "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God"-had, evidently, to be taught to the populace cautiously, and with many qualifications.

Much of the splendid Church art of the late Middle Ages had its origins in the need to provide, in tandem with the sermons, a suitably embellished and edited version of the Bible stories to an illiterate congregation.

Erupted

And conversely, the numerous movements of reform and rebellion which erupted from the eleventh century onwards tended to find their spokesmen and their leading ideas in that tiny minority of churchmen who, being able to read the seriptures in Latin, took them literally and used them in criticism of the Church as it actually existed.

Such intellectuals were very few, but they were among the most learned and clear-sighted of their age and

Much

repression, works of proportion indulgence: John XXI Wycliffe all proportion to their numbers.

To the twin dangers of dissent and organised resistance the medieval Church replied with a two-pronged reaction: drives against 'heresy' , and torce ot armes.

In 1155 Arnold of Brescia was burnt in Rome. Basing himself on the gospels, he had preached to considerable crowds, that priests were not necessary to confession, and that clergy who accumulated wealth would never achieve salvation.

The most energetic of the crusades of the thirteenth century was the one organised against the 'Albigenses' in southwest France, near the town of Albi.

Justification

They taught, also finding their justification in scripture, that salvation could be had without the expensive ministrations of the clergy, but by a simple act of repentance before death.

Faith and prosperity alike summoned the Church to wipe out such a heresy and (the property of heretics being forfeit) there was no shortage of loyal recruits.

The Church for its part was determined on results, regardless of cost. When the crusaders were entering Beziers, where the Albigenses were powerful, they asked how they should tell heretics from the faithful in the general slaughter.

'Kill them all' replied the representative of the Pope (the misnamed Innocent III). 'God will recognise his own' It was in this carnage that Simon de Montfort, the godfather of English parliamentarism, baptised his reputation.

Liquidation

The final liquidation of the French heretical sects was entrusted to an arm of the Church bureaucracy specially created to root out heresy: the 'Inquisition' By the fourteenth century, therefore, the Western Church was an organisation seasoned in both high politics and base repression.

It was the violent quarrels between the oligarchs of Rome that drove the Papal court to the French town of Avignon, near the south of the Rhone, in 1305.

But its exile from Rome did little to make the Papacy a less extravagant or profitable institution.

Feudal economy was static: the surplus was not reinvested to increase productivity, but spent directly.

Indulgencies

of it went on ceremonies and art. But no small went on sheer :: in 1330 Pope I held a feast at (doubtless with God's assistance) eight oxen, fifty five sheep, four boars, eight pigs, six hundred and ninety fowl, five hundred and eighty partridges and three thousand eggs!

Emphatic

Wycliffe's views on Papacy were emphatic:

"If anyone saith, here at Avignon is the Christ, believe them not, for the deeds shall show who is the antichrist"

The merchants of the Italian cities, however, anxious to have such lucrative custom back, sent a series of emmissaries to Avignon.

But only in 1376 did the beautiful young mystic Catherine Benincasa (later canonised as Saint Catherine of Siena*) persuade Pope Gregory XI to return to Italy.

Not long after arriving in Rome, however, he died.

The majority of cardinals were French. However, they were intimidated by the Roman crowd into electing an Italian, the obsessive Church functionary, Urban VI.

He took office in April 1378. But shortly after retreating from Rome, the French cardinals convened again and elected one of their own number, Clement VII.

He was in effect the creature of the King of France (who gleefully commented, on his election, 'now I am Pope!').

Recognised

England, France's enemy, automatically re cognised Urban. For over thir ty years the division into two papacies was maintained by national rivalries.

Clement, failing to take Rome, retreated to Avignon. Urban remained in Italy seeking, with sacraments and sword, to enforce his mission throughout the peninsula.

A contemporary account describes him, beseiged near Naples, excommunicating an entire army thrice a day, while they showered his citadel with arrows.

Meanwhile, from the fusion:

"If there were a hundred popes, and if all the friars were turned into cardinals, their opinion on matters of faith ought not to be believed except insofar as they have been iounded upon Scripture"

To this opinion Wycliffe added others, still more unsettling: the clergy ought -quite literally-to live in that poverty and with that humility which (the gospels clearly indicated) Christ had prescribed for himself and his disciples.

'Transubstantiation' (the transformation of the bread and wine of the Mass into the body and blood of Christ, and the consequent salvation of the communicants) was not caused by the clergy; they merely celebrated it:

The highest duty of priests therefore was lively preaching to rescue people from sin.

Wycliffe accordingly helped recruit and train 'Poor Preachers' who travelled through the countryside, spreading these ideas.

Agitational

His translation of the Bible was intended as their chief help. It was, in a very real sense, an agitational document.

And, in a period which saw the eruption and the bloody suppression of the Peasants' Revolt (1381), it was judged extremely dangerous.

"Thus" , wrote a worried reactionary, "the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden under foot of swine"

It is probable that Wycliffe himself was only saved from violence at the hands of Richard II by his doctrine that the English monarchy owed obedience and taxes to the Pope only insofar as this was prescribed by Scripture (which, conveniently, had nothing explicit to say on the subject).

Harsher steps were, however, taken against Wycliffe's expanding movement soon after his death.

In 1401 Parliament passed an Act with the candid title De Haeretico Comburendo -On the Desirability of Burning Heretics.

These early 'reformers' of the Church were the forerunners of the Lutheran reformation, which successfully challenged Papal supremacy and irreversibly split the western Church.

The struggle to wrest the Bible from the hands of the priesthood was an essential element in undermining the dictatorship of the feudal church, and thereby in preparing the social revolution which overthrew feudalism.

With the development of printing (which reached England about 1474) the struggle intensified again.

Translation of the Bible became a capital offence. The publication of the first English printed Bible in 1525) was the work of another scholar from Oxford, William Tyndale.

He also was burned for his efforts (as were many copies of his Bible).

Irony Few men can have done more for the revolutionary education of England. By a bitter irony it was in the London primary school named after William Tyndale that the education authorities recently chose to stage a witch-hunt of left-wing teachers for trying to teach in a way accessible to working class children.

The learned bureaucrats who sacked the Tyndale teachers would do well to recall Tyndale's own words:

'Ere many years | will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the

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