The Great Schism
The other great crisis of European civilization against which backdrop
Joan's drama was staged was the Great Schism of the Roman Catholic church.
Between 1378 and 1417, church leadership was claimed by two popes, one
residing at Rome and the other at Avignon. From 1409 to 1415, there was
also a third claimant. But the roots of the problem and its consequences
for believers such as Joan the Maid stretched farther backward and forward
in time than those dates might suggest.
One of the victories of king Philip IV of France was the humiliation
of the papacy in the person of Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), who died
after escaping from a detachment of French troops come to arrest him in
Italy. Boniface's successor, an archbishop of Bordeaux who took the name
Clement V, seconded Philip's major religious policies: he annulled his
predecessor's offensive acts, confirmed Philip's destruction of the Knight's
Templar, and in 1309 moved the permanent residence of the pope from Rome
to Avignon, a papal city of the Rhone River directly opposite the kingdom
of France. Public opinion in much of the rest of Europe was so consistently
distressed, sometimes outraged, by that surrender of the Papacy's ancient
role and symbolic seat that the papacy returned to Rome in 1376 amid general
rejoicing, even in France.
Two years after the return, however, a disputed election split the papacy
once more. One line of popes claiming exclusive legitimacy remained in
Rome thereafter; another line claiming the same legitimacy returned to
Avignon. In 1409 a church council meeting at Pisa succeeded in producing
a third claimant. This stubborn scandal was resolved only in 1415 thanks
to a major alteration in the constitution of the church, the recognition
of a broadly representative Gerneal Council as finally superior to the
office of pope. The restored Roman papacy, headed by a native Roman of
ancient lineage, Marin V (1417-31), committed itself to undercutting this
innovation at every turn.
 During
the years of the schism, the English king and Parliament had supported
the Roman pope, at least partly because the French kings supported the
Avignonese pope. Since Scotland was determined to maintain its independence
of English pressure, the Scots supported the Avignonese claimant; parallel
situations arose throughout Christendom. The Avignonese and Roman popes
excommunicated their rivals and their rivals' supporters, thus denying
them the sacraments of the true church. But how could one be sure which
pope was the valid dispenser of the sacraments? One apocalyptic preacher
even claimed to have been shown in a vision that no one had entered heaven
since the Great Schism began.
Some of the best minds and most idealistic spirits of European society
committed their hope for the reform of this scandal and of the church as
a whole to the institution of the General Council. One such council, attended
by thousands of clerics and laymen from every province and interest group
in Christendom, met at the city of Constance on the upper Rhine between
1414 and 1417, and a second met at the nearby city of Basel between 1431
and 1437. The intellectual leadership of the University of Paris was overwhelmingly
in favor of conciliar reform. Not surprisingly, the majority of that university's
faculty also supported the Plantagenet claimant to the crown of France:
a dual monarch would be likely to have his hands so full that he would
need to rely on the parliamentary institutions of the two kingdoms. Edward
III had shown the way by his cultivation of the English parliament during
his long and popular reign (1327-77); his young and insecure great-great-grandson
Henry VI would clearly have to go even farther in ruling his French kingdom
through the Estates-General, an institution that tended (for good reason)
to make the Valois kings nervous.
Modern admirers of Joan who also admire the tradition of representative
democracy may feel a certain conflict on that score. The merciless fury
of the Paris intelligentsia against the Maid is disturbing, but it is easy
to see how she must have represented for them a mindless regression to
the inept tyranny of monarchic absolutism, whether royal or papal. This
ambivalence makes the reactions of Jacques Gelu and especially Jean Gerson,
a consummate intellectual who supported both the General Council and the
Valois cause, all the more important to understand.
From: Régine Pernoud and M.V. Clin, Joan of Arc, Herstory in
her Context, translated and revised by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. St. Martin's
Press, 1998.
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