The Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century 257The Struggle for the Transformation of Piety
The issue of church governance became entangled in a
growing dispute over the forms of piety. This conflict,
which was about two different ways of living a Chris-
tian life, had been present implicitly in the reform
movements of the twelfth century. The dominant form
of piety that had emerged from the early Middle Ages
was forged by the monastic tradition. It saw the clergy
as heroic champions whose chief function was to serve
as intermediaries between the laity and a God of judg-
ment. They did this primarily through the sacrament of
communion (the Eucharist), which was considered a
sacrifice, and through oral prayers of intercession. This
view, with its necessary emphasis on the public repeti-
tion of formulae, was challenged in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries by Bernard of Clairvaux and other
monastic theorists who sought a more personal experi-
ence of God through private devotions and mental
prayer. Their views were adopted by the Franciscans
and eventually popularized by them, though the
process was lengthy and incomplete. Personal piety was
especially attractive to the Observant Franciscans,
whose interpretation of the Rule of St. Francis made
corporate devotions difficult.
To those who sought a transformation of their in-
ner life through personal contact with God, the older
forms of piety were unacceptable. They came to be-
lieve that excessive emphasis on the sacraments and on
oral prayer encouraged complacency as well as contrac-
tualism, the habit of making deals with God in return
for special favors. The point is arguable, but in their cri-
tique of popular piety they were on firmer ground.
Much late medieval piety was mechanistic and involved
practices that would today be regarded as abuses. The
sale of indulgences, the misuse of pilgrimages, and the
proliferation of masses for the dead were all symptoms
of the popular obsession with death and purgatory that
followed in the wake of the bubonic plague. Salvation
was assured by the sacraments of the church, but every
sin committed in life carried with it a sentence to be
served in purgatory. As the pains of purgatory were like
those of hell, without the curse of eternal separation
from God, much effort was spent in avoiding them. A
mass said for the soul of the dead reduced the penalty
by a specified number of years. Henry VII of England,
who seems to have had a bad conscience, left money in
his will for ten thousand masses. Many priests survived
entirely on the proceeds from such bequests and had
no other duties. An indulgence was a remission of the
“temporal” or purgatorial punishment for sins that could
be granted by the pope out of the church’s “treasury of
merits.” Its price, too, was related to the number of
years it subtracted from the buyer’s term in purgatory,
and an indulgence sometimes could be purchased in ad-
vance for sins not yet committed.
Such practices were deeply rooted in the rich and
varied piety of the Middle Ages. If some religious were
scandalized by them, other priests were unwilling to
condemn genuine expressions of religious feeling, and
still others no doubt accepted them out of ignorance.
No systematic education had been established for
parish priests, and thanks to absenteeism, many
parishes were served by vicars or substitutes whose
qualifications were minimal at best. However, the
church’s critics did not reject pilgrimages, indulgences,
the proper use of relics, or masses for the dead. They
merely wished to ground these “works” in the faith and
good intentions that would make them spiritually valid.
They opposed simpleminded contractualism and “arith-
metical” piety, but their concerns intensified their con-
flict with a church that remained immobilized by
political and organizational difficulties.
Of those forms of piety that sought personal con-
tact with God, the most ambitious was mysticism. The
enormous popularity of mysticism in the later Middle
Ages was in some respects a measure of the growing in-
fluence of women on religious life. Many of the great
mystics were women. Others were men who became
involved with the movement as confessors to convents
of nuns. Mysticism may be defined as the effort to
achieve spiritual union with God through ecstatic con-
templation. Because the experience is highly personal,
it had many variants, but most of them fell into two
broad categories. The first, and probably the most
common, was to experience visions or infusions of
the Holy Spirit in the manner of St. Catherine of
Siena (1347–80) or Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416).
The second, best typified by Meister Eckhardt
(c. 1260–1328) and the Rhineland mystics, was influ-
enced by the Neoplatonic concept of ideas and aimed
at a real union of the soul with God (see document
14.2). They sought to penetrate the divine intelligence
and perceive the universe as God perceives it. Both
views were rooted firmly in the medieval tradition of
interior piety, but Eckhardt and those like him were sus-
pected of heresy because they seemed to deny the vital
distinction between the Creator and the human soul.
Neither form of experience was easy to achieve.
Both involved a long process of mental and spiritual
preparation that was described in an ever-growing