The Council of Constance, like any other serious event involving many people and lasting over a considerable period of time, can be studied from many points of view. It started out as a gathering for purely ecclesiastical purposes. But some twenty or thirty thousand persons from every class of society, except, perhaps, the lowest, cannot come and remain together for almost four years to discuss one set of difficult and complicated questions without, intentionally or unintentionally, raising many other questions, social, religious, philosophic, economic and political, and forming for the moment, as it were, a microcosm of the forces of the age. Most of the issues that agitated Europe five hundred years ago cropped up sooner or later at Constance, the cost of living, the obnoxiousness of robber barons and private warfare, the right and wrong of tyrannicide, the conflict between Germans and Poles in the East and between English and French in the West, to say nothing of the special issues with which the Council was expected to deal, the claims of three popes to be the only true successors of St. Peter, the perilous teachings of Wiclef and Hus and the worldliness and corruption of church administration.

The School of St. Victor derived its name from the monastery, or rather priory, of St. Victor, situated near Paris. The monastery became a school when William of Champeaux, in 1108, gave up his chair of philosophy at the Cathedral school in Paris and retired there to devote his life to monastic seclusion. His reputation as a teacher was such that students followed him to the monastery and at their insistence he resumed his career as teacher, and continued to give lectures until he was promoted to the bishopric of Chalons-sur-Marne. The place, however, owes its fame as a center of philosophical studies not to William of Champeaux, but primarily to Hugh the founder of its system of mysticism and in a less degree to Richard the scholar, and to Adam the poet. Hugh of St. Victor, in the opinion of his contemporaries and of some of the most discriminating of modern writers, deserves to rank not only with the greatest of the philosophers and theologians of the twelfth century but of the entire Middle Ages. He was an indefatigable student, a man of broad culture, of independent judgment, and a scholar who influenced profoundly the course of philosophical and theological thought and speculation. Though there is considerable discussion as to his nationality it seems reasonably certain that he received his early education in the monastery of Hamersleben near Halberstadt. It was in order to become a student of William of Champeaux that he came to Paris and to the monastery of St. Victor. He commenced to teach in 1115, and from 1133 until his death in 1141 he was the head of the school. The reproach which was so frequently brought against Hugh that he was opposed to profane science is shown by Ueberweg-Baum-gartner to be utterly without foundation, and it is clearly proved that he was interested in all science, and that he was convinced that secular art and science are valuable auxiliaries in the promotion of theological knowledge. His writings embrace treatises on theology, philosophy and exegesis, together with several works dealing expressly with mysticism or contemplation. The best known of these works on the subject of mysticism are De Contemplatone et ejus Speciebus, De Meditando, De Amore Sponsi ad Sponsam, De Arca Noe Mystica, De Arca Noe Morali, De Vanitate Mundi, De Arrha Animae, De Laude Caritatis, De Modo Orandi.

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.