In the doctrinal discussions between the Greeks and the Latins, all the major points of difference that had historically separated the two churches received detailed attention. The Greeks acknowledged the primacy of the pope, and the Latins acknowledged the right of the Greeks to ordain married men into the priesthood. The chief sticking point, as always, was the doctrine of the Filioque: Did the Holy Spirit in the Trinity proceed from the Father only, as the East taught, or “from the Father and the Son” (ex Patre Filioque), as the Western addition to the text of the Nicene Creed affirmed? Almost all those present at Ferrara-Florence came to an agreement that the dispute over the Filioque was chiefly one of words, not of content, since it could be amply documented that both versions of the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit had substantial attestation from the teachings of the Church Fathers in both churches. Agreement on the Filioque and on all other points at issue led to the adoption of a document of union, Laetentur coeli (“Rejoicing of heaven”), promulgated on July 6, 1439 (and still commemorated in a plaque on the wall of the Duomo in Florence). But the reunion came too late for both sides. It was repudiated in the East in Constantinople, where the memory of Crusader violence persisted, as well as in other Orthodox churches, notably the Church of Russia. Once again, as on so many occasions throughout Christian history, the reunion of the Eastern and the Western churches proved to be a dead letter and an unattainable goal. Roman Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation The decline of Scholastic theology
The transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation was gradual. One development that was both a cause and an effect of that transition was the decline of Scholastic theology. As practiced by its leading expositors, Aquinas and Bonaventure (who differed greatly on many issues), Scholasticism was the systematization of the Roman Catholic understanding of the relation between the claims of human reason and the authority of divine revelation. To that end it had made use of philosophy, and particularly the newly available works of Aristotle, to describe the powers and limits of human ways to truth in order to enthrone Christian theology as “the queen of the sciences.”
With good reason have historians seen in this schema of reason and revelation the counterpart in the life of the mind to the schema of church and society set forth earlier in the 13th century by Pope Innocent III. These historians draw a similar correlation between the waning prestige of the papacy in the late Middle Ages and the shattering of the Scholastic synthesis by philosophical theologians such as William of Ockham. Some of the theological descendants of Bonaventure, less confident of the powers of human reason than he, elevated the primacy of faith and the authority of Scripture to an almost exclusive position as a way to truth, while some of the philosophical descendants of Aquinas appeared, at least to their critics, to be expanding the realm of what was knowable by natural means to the point that the primacy of faith was threatened by an all-engulfing rationalism. All the varieties of Scholastic teaching, moreover, were under attack from those leaders of late medieval Roman Catholic piety who contended that the crisis of faith and of the church called for a return to the authentic religious experience of the primitive church as set forth in the New Testament. Expressions of spirituality and folk piety
Late medieval spirituality cannot be dismissed as merely a symptom of the general malaise in Roman Catholic Christendom; it must be recognized as a dynamic force. One of its noblest monuments, the devotional manual titled The Imitation of Christ (1441), became the second most widely circulated book in Christian history, second only to the Bible itself. The Imitation, though impeccably orthodox in its doctrinal emphases, takes the reader beyond (or behind) the authoritative structures of both church and dogma to the inner meaning of the Gospels and the inner life of the believing heart: the Christ of the creeds is above all the Christ of the Gospels, who summons his followers not only to orthodoxy in their theology but to discipleship in their lives. The Imitation is traditionally attributed to Thomas à Kempis. The author was a member of the Brethren of the Common Life, one of many lay communities, both female and male, that sprang up during the 15th century as centres of the devotio moderna, a religious movement that stressed the inner spiritual life over ritual and works.
Other expressions of folk piety, too, were flourishing on the eve of the Reformation. Partly as a continuing effect of the establishment of the orders of friars in the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a revival of interest in preaching throughout Roman Catholic Europe. Along with it developed a growing attention to the Bible, which for the first time began to circulate widely, also in vernacular translations, as a consequence of the invention of printing. The 15th century is also in many ways the high point in the history of Roman Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary. At the same time, there is evidence of a tide of anticlericalism among the common people—much of it in reaction to the corruption of the church and the clergy—and of a growing skepticism among intellectuals and secular rulers, even about fundamental Roman Catholic teachings. Roman Catholicism and Renaissance humanism
At least some of this skepticism arose within the intellectual and literary milieu of Renaissance humanism, whose relation to Roman Catholicism was far more complex than has often been supposed. The efforts of 19th-century historians of the Renaissance—many of whom were themselves under the influence of both anticlericalism and skepticism—to interpret humanism as a neopagan revolt against traditional Christian beliefs have been fundamentally recast by modern scholarship. Not only were many of the popes of the 15th and 16th centuries themselves devotees and patrons of Renaissance thought and art, but there were also Renaissance figures such as Nicholas of Cusa, arguably the greatest mind in Christendom East or West during the 15th century, who was at the same time a metaphysician of astonishing boldness and creativity, an ecumenical theologian looking for points of contact not only with other Christians but even with Islam, and a reform cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
Thus the humanists emerge as Christians who were working simultaneously for the reform of the church and of literary culture. To achieve those ends, they urged a return to the basics of Christian civilization—that is, to the Greek and Latin classics and to the monuments of biblical and patristic literature. Lorenzo Valla in Italy and Desiderius Erasmus in the north are by no means isolated cases of humanists arguing for this blending of Christianity and Classical culture. Erasmus ridiculed the Scholastics for their philosophical abstractions and for their bad Latin, and in his anonymous satire Julius exclusus e coelis (“Julius Excluded from Heaven”) he lampooned the efforts of Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13) to get into heaven. Erasmus also edited the writings of most of the major Church Fathers in both Latin and Greek. His edition of the Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum (1516), was intended to stimulate a renewal of Christian faith and life, which he himself called “the philosophy of Christ.” Significantly, this merciless critic of the current state of Roman Catholicism nevertheless found it impossible to affiliate himself with the Protestant Reformation when it arose, and he died a faithful, if unappreciated, member of the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism and the emergence of national consciousness