was summoned in 1424; then, in 1431, another was convoked to meet at Basel. Martin V died just
at this moment, and his successor Eugenius IV was, throughout his pontificate, in bitter conflict
with the reformers who controlled the council. He dissolved the council, but it refused to consider
itself dissolved; in 1433 he gave way for a time, but in 1437 he dissolved it again. Nevertheless it
remained in session till 1448, by which time it was obvious to all that the Pope had won a
complete triumph. In 1439 the council had alienated sympathy by declaring the Pope deposed and
electing an antipope (the last in history), who, however, resigned almost immediately. In the same
year Eugenius IV won prestige by holding a council of his own at Ferrara, where the Greek
Church, in desperate fear of the Turks, made a nominal submission to Rome. The papacy thus
emerged politically triumphant, but with very greatly diminished power of inspiring moral
reverence.
Wycliffe (ca. 1320-84) illustrates, by his life and doctrine, the diminished authority of the papacy
in the fourteenth century. Unlike the earlier schoolmen, he was a secular priest, not a monk or
friar. He had a great reputation in Oxford, where he became a doctor of theology in 1372. For a
short time he was Master of Balliol. He was the last of the important Oxford scholastics. As a
philosopher, he was not progressive; he was a realist, and a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian.
He held that God's decrees are not arbitrary, as some maintained; the actual world is not one
among possible worlds, but is the only possible world, since God is bound to choose what is best.
All this is not what makes him interesting, nor does it seem to have been what most interested
him, for he retired from Oxford to the life of a country clergyman. During the last ten years of his
life he was the parish priest of Lutterworth, by crown appointment. He continued, however, to
lecture at Oxford.
Wycliffe is remarkable for the extreme slowness of his development. In 1372, when his age was
fifty or more, he was still orthodox; it was only after this date, apparently, that he became
heretical. He seems to have been driven into heresy entirely by the strength of his moral feelings--
his sympathy with the poor, and his horror of rich worldly ecclesiastics. At first his attack on the
papacy was only political and moral, not doctrinal; it was only gradually that he was driven into
wider revolt.