After his death his movement slowly ebbed away, but the seeds were in the soil and became fertile when the real Reformation broke through.
Now this shows you cannot reform the Roman church on the basis of sectarian criticism, even if this criticism is as radical as it was in Wyclif. You can reform only in the power of a new principle, the power of a new relationship to God. This is what the Reformers did.
Counter-Reformation; Roman Catholicism.
Now I am at the end of the pre-Reformers and should come to the Reformation.
But before doing so, I will go to the Counter-Reformation development of the Roman church, from the Council of Trent up to the present day, in order to get: rid of this part which is so important for you that you must – no, not :get rid,” because it is one of the most important things we must learn: what is, really, the Roman Catholic church, with which we live on every place together? Do we really know what it is? You know much about the Reformation, and it is important that you learn about the history of the Church and also the history of the Roman church after the Reformation.
Through councils, there were many attempts in the Reformation period to overcome the splits. There were many councils – the great one of Worms and Augsburg, in which the Reformation got its final formulation and its classical expression. But the demand for a general council never stopped and finally a council was called to the place which you call Trent – Triente, in the southern slopes of the Alps, a very beautiful place. And there, for several decades, continuously interrupted, sessions took place from which the Reformers were actually excluded.
So instead of becoming a universal council, it became a council of the Counter- Reformation.
Now the Counter-Reformation is reformation: it is not simply reaction. It is reformation insofar as the Roman church, after the Council of Trent, was not what it was before. It was a church determined by its self-reaffirmation against the great attack of the Reformation. And this is always something quite different. If something is attacked and reaffirms itself, it is not the same. One of the characteristics is that it has been narrowed down. Don’t see the medieval Church in the light of present-day, post-Tridentine Catholicism. It is something quite different. The medieval Church was open, in every direction, and had for instance such tremendous contrasts as that of the Franciscans and Dominicans (Augustinians and Aristotelians); it had the tremendous contrasts of the realists and nominalists, of the Biblicists, and mystics, etc. All this was possible. Then in the Counter-Reformation, many possibilities which the Roman church had, were shut off completely forever. The Roman church now became the church of “counter” – namely, the “counter” of reformation, as the Protestant church, the prophetic principle, became the principle of protest against Rome.
This is the unwholesome split of Christianity. The Reformation, instead of becoming the reformation of the whole Church, became the dogma of the protesting group,. the “Protestants,” to which we belong. The non-protestants reformed themselves, but in terms of “counter,” in terms of opposition to something, not in terms of immediate creativity. And this is also always the historical situation: if group has to resist, it narrows down. Now take simply the attack of Communism on the Western world, on this country, and the tremendous amount of narrowing down of the freedoms, for which this country stands, in the defense of these freedoms. It is exactly the same situation, and the situation which we always have in history. The Reformation itself was very wide open. Then in and against the Reformation, all kinds of attacks were made and the result was a very narrow Protestant Orthodoxy – we call it here “fundamentalism” – which was not the Reformation itself, but the narrowing down of the Reformation, in the resistance against external attacks. This leads me immediately to the first points of the Council of Trent. which is the basis for the development of the Roman church..
Council of Trent. The doctrine of the authorities in the Catholic Church.
