9
The Catholic Reformation
On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church simultaneously manifested both deep piety and corruption; the religious environment was both rich and confusing.
Lateran V
The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) was the first serious official attempt to reform the Church, although the very circumstances of its meeting revealed the problems. In accord with conciliarist theory, and with royal support in France and Germany, several cardinals summoned a council at Pisa. To counter it, Pope Julius II, who was scarcely a reformer, convened a council at Rome.
True Reform
The most prominent figure at Lateran V was Giles of Viterbo (d. 1532), the general of the Augustinians, who articulated the orthodox Catholic idea that “Religion reforms men; men do not reform religion”, meaning that true reform (“to form again”) consists simply in bringing one’s behavior into accord with truth. Giles recalled the Church of his own day to the purity of the primitive Church and, like Colet and Erasmus, denounced the propensity of Christian kings to make war on one another. He was quite blunt in blaming recent popes for most of the abuses in the Church, but he also professed great hope for Leo X (1513-1521), who had succeeded Julius II.
The Evangelical Spirit
The revival of sacred learning and the discovery of the New World marked the beginning of a great new era, Giles predicted, and—ironically, in view of what would soon happen—so too did the great project to build a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Giles was an “evangelical” insofar as he advocated a closer study of Scripture and the still-controversial use of the Hebrew Old Testament, though he referred to “obstinate Jews”, who he believed willfully ignored the meaning of their own prophecies.
Abuses
The bishops at Lateran V were highly critical of the religious orders, because of their semi-independence from episcopal control and their sometimes scandalous behavior. According to one participant, the Council would actually have suppressed the friars had it not been for Leo’s personal intervention. Lateran V issued a compendium of condemnations against worldly prelates, bishops neglecting their responsibilities, and cardinals living away from Rome. The Council Fathers castigated the clergy for irregular ways of attaining benefices, nepotism, and unchastity. But the Council was not ready for sweeping reforms, as shown in the fact that it still permitted bishops to hold two benefices.
The Council condemned Averroism, which was still taught in some of the Italian universities, but did not address other questionable schools of thought. Like other councils, Lateran V took notice of apparently small things that it thought had significance, urging, for example, the establishment of pawn shops1 under Church auspices, to provide affordable loans to the poor.
The sudden and explosive eruption of religious dissent immediately after Lateran V to a great extent destroyed the possibility of moderate, gradual reform. But significant reform movements predated the Council and continued to flourish for decades.
Jiménez
The Spanish church was to some extent reformed around 1500, mainly under the leadership of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (d. 1517), a Franciscan who also served as the confessor to Queen Isabella of Castile (1479-1504). Personally austere, Jiménez warred on clerical corruption—on one occasion, he even shipped a boatload of uncelibate priests across to Muslim North Africa. He also opposed, as too mercenary, the collection for the new St. Peter’s Basilica. In the spirit of the Christian humanist movement, Jiménez founded the new University of Alcala for the education of the higher clergy and encouraged the scholars there to produce a Bible with the Hebrew and Greek texts alongside the Vulgate.
Reforming Bishops
There were also reforming bishops in Italy and France. Gian Matteo Giberti of Verona (d. 1543) set the pattern for later prelates by his vigorous reform of his clergy, his austere personal life, and his conspicuous concern for the poor. The French bishop Guillaume Briçonnet (d. 1534) briefly made his diocese of Meaux a center of pastoral evangelicalism, harboring both Lefèvre and several people who in time became Protestants.
New Religious Communities
As with every reform in the history of the Church, much of the impetus originated with visionary leaders who battled corruption within the religious orders. Often such efforts resulted in the founding of new religious communities.
Capuchins
The split within the Franciscan order was resolved in 1517, when the Conventuals were officially separated from Observants, with the two distinguished externally by their respective black and brown habits. But the perennial issue of poverty led Matteo da Bascio (d. 1552) to found a third branch in 1525. Its members were called Capuchins because of the distinctive style of their hoods, and they wore rough, untrimmed beards, in disregard of fashion.2 The Capuchins espoused radical poverty, and they devoted themselves to works of charity and to preaching in a plain, emotional style popular with common people.
Ursulines
St. Angela Merici (d. 1540) was a lay woman, affiliated with the Franciscans, who brought together a group of consecrated virgins whom she named the Company of St. Ursula, who, according to legend, had been martyred with numerous other virgins by barbarians. The members of the new community continued to live with their families but followed an intense spiritual regimen. Teaching children and ministering to the poor, they might have become the first active community of sisters in the history of the Church, but after Angela’s death, the Ursulines were required to become a cloistered order.
Hospitalers
St. John of God (d. 1550) and St. Camillus de Lellis (d. 1614) were soldiers—one Portuguese, the other Italian—who lived worldly lives before conversion. They both founded orders to nurse the sick: respectively, the Brothers Hospitalers and the Ministers of the Sick.
Oratory of Divine Love
The Oratory of Divine Love was founded in Venice—in some ways Europe’s most worldly city—by a group of pious priests and laymen who sought to live a genuine Christian life. Three of these men would become major figures in the Catholic Reformation.
Gasparo Contarini (d. 1542) was the scion of a noble Venetian family and served his city as a diplomat. Like many devout people of his time, he was dissatisfied with purely formal piety, and in 1511, he had a religious experience similar to the one Martin Luther would have a few years later, an experience that left him acutely aware of his own sinfulness, the futility of human effort, and his absolute dependence on God’s grace. The fact that he remained a layman was indicative of the uncertainties of the age, in that, traditionally, a conversion experience like his would have led to a monastery. Instead, Contarini entered the papal service and was eventually raised to the cardinalate, accepting ordination only when he was named a bishop.
Reginald Pole (d. 1558) was an Englishman of royal blood who imbibed the humanist spirit in Italy and befriended Contarini. He returned to England for a time but left in 1530. A third founder of the Oratory, Gian Pietro Carafa, was a bishop and papal diplomat who eventually ascended the papal throne as Paul IV (1555-1559).
Theatines
From the Oratory of Divine Love, there developed a new religious community, founded in 1524 by a bishop, St. Cajetan of Thiene (d. 1547), and dubbed the Theatines after his diocese. Its members, including Carafa, adopted a way of life different from that of both the monks and the friars. They wore no distinct habit and did not chant the Divine Office in common, but devoted themselves to preaching and to works of charity.
The Spirituals
Contarini and Pole were at the center of a loosely unified group that came to be called the “Spirituals”, because they identified the principal problem of the Church as the absence of deep inner faith and urged spiritual regeneration as the essence of reform. They were attracted to the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, because it demanded the inner conversion of the believer. They were wary of the idea of “good works”, for fear that it would encourage formalism and reliance on human effort.
The Zealots
Carafa, although linked with Contarini and Pole by a commitment to the reform of the Church, nonetheless looked on the Spirituals with increasing suspicion. He became in effect the head of a rival reform party dubbed the “Zealots” because of their eagerness to use disciplinary means to correct both heresy and moral disorders.
Society of Jesus
By far the most influential of the new religious communities was the Society (originally Company) of Jesus, whose enemies sarcastically pinned on them a negative epithet that stuck—Jesuits. The order was founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (d. 1556), who was another converted soldier. A minor Spanish nobleman imbued with the spirit of chivalry, Ignatius was a tradition-minded but highly intelligent man with a sense that a changing world required something new, whatever that might be.
Knight of Christ
Ignatius’ decisive experience of this new world came during a battle in which his leg was shattered by a cannon ball, a new technology that rendered traditional chivalry obsolete.3 During his long convalescence, Ignatius read all the tales of knightly daring he could find, then turned to the lives of the saints. Recognizing the saints as more heroic than the fabled knights, Ignatius was struck with a burning desire to be a knight for Christ.
An Uncertain Calling
Ignatius left his sickbed determined to do God’s will but with only a hazy sense of what that might be. At first, he explored traditional channels: visiting monasteries, living for a time as a hermit, imagining a crusade against the Muslims, and actually visiting the Holy Land, where the Franciscans found him rather dangerously rambunctious and advised him to return home.
Ignatius the Student
Sensing the need for an education, whatever use it might have, he practiced humility by sitting with children to learn Latin, then enrolled successively in two Spanish universities. In each, he encountered the spiritual sterility about which reformers complained, which led him to offer guidance to his fellow students, especially concerning sin. This got him into trouble with the Inquisition, under the suspicion that, though a layman, he was in effect assuming the priestly office. But when interrogated, Ignatius was found to be orthodox and was merely warned to cease giving spiritual direction.
The Company Formed
He next went to the University of Paris, then the intellectual center of the Catholic world, and there he attracted a small band of companions, most of them laymen like himself, who sought to live the spiritual life in a serious way. In 1534, they took private vows. Ignatius still hoped to go to the Holy Land to convert the Muslims, so he and his companions went to Venice and waited unsuccessfully for a year to get a ship for the Near East.
Their failure caused Ignatius to conclude that such was not God’s will. Instead he and his companions went to Rome to place themselves in the hands of the pope. By now, all of them were priests, and they went about performing basic apostolic tasks—visiting the sick, aiding the poor, instructing children, preaching, hearing confessions, and offering spiritual direction. Although they attracted a following, their unofficial status and the bluntness of some of their preaching also made them enemies, including important members of the hierarchy.
Official Approval
Contarini, however, befriended them, and in 1540, Paul III (1534-1547) recognized them as a new religious order, allegedly exclaiming as he did so, “I see the finger of God here!” The rule that Ignatius presented for papal approval was to some extent similar to that of the Theatines and was in certain ways revolutionary: it departed almost entirely from the patterns of monastic life, even the modified monasticism of the friars. Controversial though it initially was, the Jesuit rule became the model followed by most of the male religious orders founded after their time.
A New Rule
Ordinarily, Jesuits were to live in communities, but Ignatius foresaw that in some cases that might not be possible. They wore no distinctive habit but only the conventional dress of the diocesan clergy. The most controversial feature of their life was that not only did they not gather in the chapel to recite the Divine Office in common, they were actually forbidden to chant it and enjoined to recite it privately.
The point of all this was to orient the Jesuit toward activity in the world, eliminating those things that might impede apostolic zeal. Against the concern that such a regimen might produce worldly men with no spiritual depth, Ignatius prescribed an unusually long period of training and an intense program of personal prayer and meditation, so that, even if a Jesuit found himself away from a community for long years, he might continue to grow in the spiritual life.
A Fourth Vow
All Jesuits took the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and an elite took a fourth vow of special obedience to the pope. Whereas Francis of Assisi had made poverty the keynote of his community, Ignatius emphasized obedience, based on the paradox that free will is most fully exercised by free acts of submission.
Obedience
Unlike the quasi-republican structure of the monastic orders, Ignatius created a highly centralized organization, possibly on a military model, possibly on the model of the absolute monarchies of his day. A Father General was elected by a small number of “delegates” and served for life, with a chain of command emanating downward through regional superiors to individual priests and brothers. Unusual among religious orders in that time, the Society of Jesus had no female branch, and Ignatius forbade Jesuits to give spiritual direction to women.
Holy Pragmatism
Ignatian spirituality could be characterized as a kind of holy pragmatism. In searching for God’s will in his own life, Ignatius responded to what he saw as immediate needs, as when he gave spiritual guidance to his fellow students. Also while a student, he often spent long nights in prayer, until he concluded that, if God wanted him to be a student, he needed sufficient time for sleep and study. Asceticism, therefore, was to be practiced by his men only in moderation, so as to maintain the health and strength needed for work.
The Jesuits adopted the motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam (“For the greater glory of God”). They discerned God’s will with severe detachment, without regard for one’s own desires, exclusively in terms of how one might best promote divine glory. Having discerned God’s will, it was then necessary to determine the best means of fulfilling it and to pursue those means systematically.
Ignatius instructed his men to judge, in particular situations, the most effective way of winning people to Christ—sometimes boldly and sternly, sometimes softly and by indirection—advising Jesuits to “listen much, say little” until they could discern how best to achieve their purposes. (“Enter by the other man’s door; lead him out through yours.”) They were to be at ease with both the humble and the exalted, each in the appropriate way, something made possible by their cultivation of “detachment”—having no inner love of worldly things but making use of them insofar as they served the divine purpose.
A Variety of Apostolates
Having been forced to abandon hope of converting the Muslims in the Holy Land, Ignatius directed the early Jesuits toward a variety of roles: theologians and controversialists, advisors to princes, preachers, confessors, pastors, and missionaries. Quite early, Ignatius sent St. Francis Xavier (d. 1555), perhaps his most beloved companion, to the Orient, from which Xavier never returned, and in time, the Jesuits became the largest missionary order in the Church. Because of their missionary zeal, their learning, and perhaps because of their reputation for subtlety, Jesuits were sometimes employed as papal nuncios.
Education
Although the Jesuits eventually came to be thought of primarily as educators, Ignatius was at first reluctant to undertake that work, because it would tie men down to particular institutions, but he was eventually persuaded to acquiesce. Jesuits founded or taught in several universities, and a network of Jesuit secondary schools sprang up all over Catholic Europe in the later sixteenth century. Ignatius was deeply suspicious of Erasmus, but Jesuit education incorporated the study of the classics along with Scholastic philosophy, and it advanced humanist culture by encouraging religious drama.
Rapid Growth
Evidence that Ignatius had indeed discerned the needs of the time was the fact that, except perhaps for the early Franciscans, no religious order in the history of the Church grew more rapidly than the Jesuits in the first few generations of their existence. By 1627, the order had grown to more than sixteen thousand men.
The Protestant Reformation
Luther
As Lateran V drew to a solemn close in 1517, Giles of Viterbo was doubtlessly unaware that, as general of the Augustinians, he was the ultimate superior of a man who, within a few months, would ensure that most of the Council’s decrees were forgotten. Although great events are never the work of one man, the life of the German monk Martin Luther (d. 1546) embodied the late medieval religious crisis in all its dimensions. Christendom was ripe for an explosion, and he lit the match.
The Monk
Luther was in many ways a medieval man, taking for granted that the monastic life was the highest way of living the Christian life and entering a monastery after making an impulsive vow of the kind at which Erasmus would have scoffed. At a time of much corruption in religious life, Luther was a member of a reformed Augustinian house and claimed that on a trip to Rome he was scandalized by the worldliness, even the apparent blasphemous skepticism, of some of the clergy.
Education
Like so many, Luther was educated by the Brethren of the Common Life. Although he had some knowledge of the classics and advocated humanist education as a way of studying the Bible, he was not himself a humanist. When he translated the Bible into German (not the first to do so) he translated from the Vulgate, not from the Hebrew and Greek texts.
Like the humanists, Luther became convinced that Scholastic theology was a distortion of Christian teaching—more Aristotle than Christ. He was trained in nominalist theology and was familiar with Tauler’s mystical writings, both of which perhaps gave him his acute sense of God as remote, all-powerful, angry, and condemnatory. Since the will of God was both supreme and inscrutable, men could not ask why they were slaves to sin but simply had to accept the promise of salvation.
Despair
Struggling to be a good monk, and assured by his superiors that he was succeeding, Luther was nonetheless almost paralyzed by the conviction that, despite his best efforts, he was damned, that he was hateful in the sight of God, who saw his every sin and did not forgive him. But at some point, while Lateran V was in session, Luther, rereading Paul’s Letter to the Romans, was struck for the first time by what he understood to be the true meaning of the statement: “The just man lives by faith” (see Rom 1:17). Suddenly everything fell into place for him, as he saw his oppressive sense of his own sinfulness not as pathological but as a true understanding of the condition of all men, who were indeed hateful in God’s eyes and indeed deserved damnation.
Law and Gospel
Luther then opposed Law to Gospel. The Law was given by God not for man to fulfill, or even to approximate, but in order to show him his utter inability to overcome his sinfulness. The good news of the Gospel was the promise of salvation despite crippling sin—salvation by faith alone, by personal trust in the saving actions of Christ. For Luther, the Church had failed in her most basic task. She could not offer people a sure road to salvation, because she gave them a false sense of their own goodness, based on a concept of natural virtue and on pious practices (“good works”).
An Indulgence
Unpredictably, in 1517, Luther’s personal spiritual breakthrough exploded into a cataclysmic public conflict, triggered by the papal proclamation of an indulgence to raise funds for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. Some of the money collected in Germany also went to the archbishop of Mainz, to help him pay for the exemptions he had obtained from Rome in connection with his multiple benefices, but this scandalous fact was unknown to Luther and most other people.
Technically, the indulgence was not being sold; recipients had to be truly repentant of their sins, as well as give money, and poor people could gain the indulgence without payment. But even some orthodox theologians considered the practice of granting indulgences overly mechanical and self-centered, and some of the indulgence preachers, notably the Dominican Johann Tetzel (d. 1519), were extremely aggressive and appeared to be engaged in a sordid trade.
On any list of Catholic doctrines, indulgences would not rank near the top in importance, but they proved to be precisely the point where the Church was most vulnerable, because many things came together there in a concrete way: anxiety about sin and salvation, the credibility of official teaching, the significance of external acts, the rapaciousness of some of the clergy, and the apparent sale of a spiritual good.
Ninety-Five Theses
A professor at the University of Wittenberg, Luther formulated his Ninety-Five Theses (which he may or may not have posted on a church door) after encountering people who proudly displayed their indulgence certificates. The Theses were less an act of defiance than an invitation to debate a highly sensitive subject, although not in a spirit of academic detachment, because Luther believed that the salvation of souls was at stake. Without quite saying so, Luther seemed to deny the efficacy of indulgences altogether and even the existence of Purgatory. He implied that there were no temporal punishments due to sins that were forgiven and that good works could not remit those punishments. Such teaching, Luther believed, was a distortion, not actual Catholic doctrine, thus he did not condemn merely the “sale” of indulgences but indulgences themselves.
“Cheap Grace”
Although Luther has come down in history as a champion of human freedom against institutional tyranny, he actually accused the Church of being too easygoing, of falsely assuring people of salvation and thereby short-circuiting their process of repentance. But his anxiety also stemmed from his belief that, in requiring people to confess their sins and to overcome them, the Church was imposing an impossible burden. Christians should instead accept the reality of sin and rely entirely on divine mercy, since, in Luther’s view, sin is not so much specific actions as it is man’s very nature, his fundamental orientation toward evil.
“A Monkish Quarrel”
The Theses were quickly and widely disseminated, in both accurate and spurious versions, all over Germany and beyond. This widespread distribution, something made possible by the printing press, gave Luther an international influence that Hus, exactly a century before, did not achieve. Leo X initially dismissed the indulgence dispute as a “monkish quarrel” between Augustinians and Dominicans, but he was soon persuaded that the issues were serious and at first tried to use both the carrot and the stick.
“Sola Scriptura”
But Luther remained adamant. His decisive break with the Church occurred in 1519, when he entered into formal debate with the theologian Johann Eck (d. 1543). When Eck demonstrated that the doctrine and practice of indulgences were official Catholic teaching, Luther appealed first from the pope to a general council, then from a council to Scripture, proclaiming that the Bible alone (“sola scriptura”) was the locus of authority.
Luther published three pamphlets that set forth his basic theology and sharpened his attack on Catholic doctrine. He condemned all “man-made” laws as contrary to the Gospel and charged that such things as indulgences and Purgatory were devised by Church authorities merely to control gullible people and extract money from them.
Condemnation
Leo then formally condemned Luther and excommunicated him in a bull that began, “Arise, O Lord, for a wild boar is loose in the vineyards of the Church.” Luther responded with a public burning of the bull and of the Code of Canon Law. The next year he was summoned before Emperor Charles V (1519-1555) and the German princes at the Diet of Worms. (The Diet, from the Latin word for “day”, was the parliament of the Empire.) There Luther made a famous speech in which he appealed to conscience and said something like, “Here I stand; I can do no other”—a proclamation that over the centuries gave him the reputation of a modern man upholding the primacy of individual judgment. In reality, however, he believed that conscience had to be subordinated to the authority of Scripture.
A Radical Theology
Luther did not deny Church authority and therefore reject indulgences; rather his conclusion that indulgences were a distortion led him to question Church authority. If the Church was in error on crucial questions—if both indulgences and the monastic life offered false assurances of sanctification—it followed that all other Catholic teachings were also subject to question. In a great rush, Luther then began systematically measuring Church teachings against the Scripture as he understood it, rejecting almost the entire Catholic system: the authority of popes and bishops, seven sacraments (finally affirming only two—baptism and the Eucharist), Purgatory, the invocation of the saints, and many other things.
The Mass
The crucial issue was the sacrificial nature of the Mass. Catholic doctrine, properly understood, held that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross accomplished the redemption of mankind but that in the Mass the fruits of that redemption were made available through time—the continuation of the sacrifice of Calvary For Luther, this undermined the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice and made the Eucharist into a “good work” that the congregation offered to the Father. If the Mass was not a sacrifice, it followed that the clergy were “ministers” only, not priests, and all verbal or symbolic implications of sacrifice (priestly vestments, marble altars) were to be suppressed.
An End to Monasticism
After being condemned at Worms, Luther went into hiding and never returned to the monastic life, concluding that the very idea of religious vows was fallacious and that no Christian received a divine call that differed from that of every other Christian. This implied the rejection of celibacy, and after a few years, Luther married one of the many nuns who had left their convents as a result of his exhortations. He and his family lived in what had previously been his monastery.
Reform or Rebellion?
Beginning with Luther himself, the religiously disaffected did not at first think of themselves as breaking with the Catholic Church but rather as attempting to reform her, an expectation that faded as the list of disputed doctrines and practices got longer and longer. As events unfolded, some Evangelicals remained Catholics,4 while others broke with the Church. For a time, the latter continued to call themselves Evangelicals, not Lutherans, indignantly insisting that they followed Christ, not a man.
The Fate of the Humanists
Erasmus and Lefevre d’Etaples, whatever their dissatisfactions with the Church, remained Catholics, both dying in 1536. Erasmus made peace and charity the hallmarks of a true Christian and, despite his many criticisms of Catholic doctrine and practice, always made the unity of the Church paramount, including a certain deference to papal authority and to Tradition.
Erasmus
At first, Erasmus congratulated Luther, because indulgences were an example of what Erasmus considered superstition. But he was increasingly troubled at what he thought was Luther’s heedless divisiveness and dogmatic denial of free will. Erasmus urged mutual tolerance of disputed beliefs—a willingness to think oneself mistaken—but for Luther the meaning of the Gospel could not be left uncertain. Given his positive valuation of human nature, Erasmus also objected to Luther’s extreme pessimism, and Luther in turn denounced Erasmus as someone who had let pagan ideas obscure his understanding of the Gospel. Erasmus continued in a deliberately ambiguous position, moving back and forth between Catholic and Protestant cities, finally proclaiming himself a Catholic but spending his last years in the Protestant city of Basle, where he published a late work affirming Catholic teaching.
The Others
The leading humanists of the immediate pre-Reformation generation moved in various directions. After Wessel Gansfort’s death, his writings were formally condemned; whatever Gansfort himself might have intended, Luther praised him as a precursor. Reuchlin, although most of his students became Protestants, remained a Catholic, even being ordained a priest shortly before his death. Mutianus Rufus at first befriended Luther but eventually rejected his movement, and the skeptical Conradus Celtis was condemned posthumously by both Catholics and Protestants.
Pirckheimer
Willibald Pirckheimer (d. 1530) was a wealthy German humanist, a friend of both Erasmus and Luther. He wrote to the Pope to defend Luther, but he seemed not to espouse fundamental Lutheran teachings, merely demanding that the Mass be said in the vernacular and that Communion be given to the laity in both kinds. Pirckheimer opposed the introduction of the Reformation in Nuremberg, where he served on the town council and where two of his sisters were abbesses and three of his daughters were also nuns. He defended their way of life as genuinely Christian, although criticizing it as overly formal and tending toward pride. Like Erasmus, he cautioned against breaking with the Church, accusing some of the Reformers of fostering unbridled liberty, calling one former friend “Satan” and saying that he would rather live under papal authority than under that of the Reformers.
A Many-Centered Movement
If the Protestant Reformation had not been set off by Luther, it would have occurred in a different place around the same time, a classic illustration of the maxim that nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Other men besides Luther in other countries besides Germany were also demanding changes in the Church.
Zwingli
Huldrych Zwingli (d. 1531) was a parish priest of Zurich, Switzerland. For some time, he urged his flock to adhere more closely to the Scriptures and warned against human innovations in religion, and in 1522, some of his parishioners made the symbolic gesture of eating sausages on Ash Wednesday, thereby defying the laws governing the Lenten fast. The incident created a sensation in the city and provoked a crisis of authority, which was eventually settled by the town government. Zwingli’s leadership was officially accepted, so that in effect Zurich left the Catholic Church. Zwingli’s teachings were quite similar to Luther’s in many ways, albeit he rather defensively denied that his beliefs owed much to the German former monk.
Calvin
What eventually became the most widespread and influential of all Protestant movements did not arise until half a generation after Luther. John Calvin (d. 1564) was a Frenchman who, unusual among Reformation leaders, was a layman, trained as a humanist and a lawyer. As a student at Paris, Calvin was involved with an Evangelical group suspected of heresy, and in 1534, he and others fled the city after a nocturnal incident in which inflammatory religious handbills were nailed up all over the city, including on the bedroom door of King Francis I (1515-1547). Lefevre d’Étaples fell under suspicion and was among those who fled. Calvin found refuge with Marguerite of Navarre (d. 1549), Francis’ sister and queen of the tiny kingdom of Navarre in the Pyrenees.
Eventually, Calvin settled in Geneva, where he was ordained, attempted to set up a model Christian community, and through his Institutes of the Christian Religion produced the most comprehensive account of Protestant beliefs. His most famous doctrine was that of predestination: that God decreed from all eternity that some would be saved and others damned, so that no human effort could have any effect. His idea was not substantially different from Luther’s, but Calvin imposed a kind of fearful somberness on his followers, based on the awareness of their possible damnation, whereas Luther encouraged people to hope that they were saved.
In a way, the doctrine of predestination was the final culmination of the long-simmering complaint that, both in Thomistic theology and in its piety, the Catholic Church had made God too accessible to man. Luther cried, “Let God be God”, and Calvin saw God’s sovereign will as all-powerful and beyond questioning by men, so that predestination, including accepting the possibility of one’s own damnation, had to be accepted as just.
The Catholic Response
Ultimately, the Reformation was a battle of ideas, but Catholics were somewhat slow in mounting a defense. Luther did not immediately get the debate he wanted, because at first no one was prepared, a situation that was repeated in Zwingli’s Zurich a few years later. Catholic apologists were reluctant to write in the vernacular, lest it seem that doctrine was being submitted to popular judgment, and their formal Scholastic style was not effective against the blunt, even vulgar, rhetoric of Luther and others. Catholics were also slow to make use of the printing press.
Luther’s Catholic critics first sought to refute him by showing that his ideas implied things that the Church defined as heresy, an approach that sometimes allowed them to anticipate Luther’s ideas even before he articulated them himself. But rather than backing away from those implications, Luther grew increasingly radical.
Bible and Church
The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura struck at the heart of the Church’s authority and forced a clarification of Catholic beliefs about which there was not total consensus. At issue was Christ’s promise to be with His Church always and the continued presence of the Holy Spirit, from which flowed the authority of doctrines and practices not found explicitly in the Bible but that had unfolded over time. Central to the Catholic position was the fact that the Church herself had determined the canonical text of the Scripture; it was thus impossible to set the Bible over the Church.
Prierias and Cajetan
The Dominican Sylvester Prierias (d. 1523), Leo X’s own theologian, actually made the pope superior to Scripture. The Dominican Cajetan (Tommaso de Vio, d. 1534), one of the leading theologians of the day and soon to be a cardinal, was Luther’s earliest opponent, sent to Germany by Leo X to persuade Luther to recant. He argued that, while the seeds of all doctrines were found in Scripture, by itself it was inadequate as a guide to revelation. Tradition—something “handed down” and encompassing both the interpretation of Scripture and teachings of Christ not recorded there—also has authority.
Eck
Eck located revelation in the living Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, in contrast to a written Scripture that, if divorced from the believing community, was dead. He and other Catholic apologists often cited the conclusion of the Gospel of John—that Jesus said and did many things that were not written down—and they recalled that He promised to send His Holy Spirit to guide the Church.
Pigge and Ellenborg
The secular priest Albert Pigge (d. 1542) taught that Scripture had authority only because it had been accepted by the Church and that, since Tradition preceded Scripture, it was therefore superior to it. The Benedictine Nicholas Ellenborg (d. 1543) taught that the Holy Spirit supplemented the truths taught by Christ when He was on earth and that the saints were the principal recipients of that inspiration.
Henry VIII
King Henry VIII of England (1509-1547) was a militant Catholic who wrote The Defense of the Seven Sacraments to refute Luther, an act for which Clement VII (1523-1534) conferred on him the title “Defender of the Faith”, a title the English monarchs still claim. Henry also argued that Scripture was an inadequate guide to truth and defended the seven sacraments on the basis of papal authority.
Thomas More
Thomas More wrote an early Response to Luther, making him perhaps the first Erasmian humanist to recognize clearly what was at stake. A few years later, he was commissioned by the English bishops to refute William Tyndale (d. 1536), a priest who had become a Protestant and was sending his books to England from the Low Countries, including the first complete English Bible, which differed from Catholic teaching in some of its translations.
More, who eschewed formal theology and, like Tyndale and Luther himself, often resorted to scatological abuse, asserted that it was not essential that believers read the Bible, so long as the Church interpreted it for them. More had been something of a conciliarist, and he said little about the papal office. Instead, he made what was in a sense a historical, rather than a strictly theological, defense of the Church, extolling Catholicism as an entire way of life, including some things (the veneration of relics) of which he and other humanists had previously been critical. The Church was a great communion embracing all ages and all Christian peoples; her truth was preserved by the general consensus of believers, whereas heretics relied on their own judgments and thereby willfully cut themselves off from the totality of Christendom.
More argued that a vernacular Bible was unnecessary and that direct access to Scripture could be dangerous for untutored people. (Late in the sixteenth century, the seminary set up in France to educate English priests produced the Douai-Rheims Bible, the first Catholic translation into English, which predated the King James Bible but appeared long after Tyndale’s translation.)
Sadoleto
Jacopo Sadoleto (d. 1547), an Italian who was a bishop in southern France, wrote an open letter to the Genevans urging their return to Rome, professing loving solicitude for people he said had been misled by crafty seducers who sowed doubt and division. Unlike most Catholic apologists, Sadoleto, who was associated with the Spirituals, explicitly eschewed “subtle philosophy” in favor of simple obedience to the Word of God as preserved and expounded in the Church.
Baronius
The polemical battle with Protestantism was fought on the basis of history as well as theology. Oratorian Cardinal Caesar Baronius (d. 1607), for example, attempted to show in his Annals that the Church had preserved an unbroken tradition over the centuries.
Bellarmine
Ultimately, the most influential Catholic theologian was the Italian Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621), who presented a systematic case for Tradition and hierarchical authority. (Some of his own writings were briefly put on the Index, because they were thought to be insufficiently supportive of papal authority.)
The Crisis of Piety
Free Will
Beyond the fundamental question of authority, Catholic apologists affirmed the Thomistic (as opposed to the Ockhamist) position that, while God’s will is sovereign, He ordered the universe according to a rational pattern and gave men limited free will.
Deep theological issues probably passed over most people, who understood their faith primarily in terms of piety: Marian devotions, the cults of the saints, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, the veneration of relics, and indulgences. (Ironically, Frederick the Wise [d. 1525], the elector of Saxony and Luther’s protector, had the largest relic collection in Europe, including a feather from the wing of the Holy Spirit and a drop of the Virgin Mary’s mother’s milk!)
The beliefs and practices that were points at which the Church was vulnerable to the charge of unbiblical superstition were also the anchors of many people’s faith. The abolition of indulgences, the closing of shrines and monasteries, the destruction of images and relics, and dramatic changes in the liturgy sometimes aroused popular resistance, as in the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, which was an armed uprising in England that came close to succeeding.
The subtle doctrine of the Real Presence was a major issue between Catholics and Protestants, as demonstrated, for example, by people’s kneeling, or refusal to kneel, as the Blessed Sacrament passed in procession. But the sharpest conflicts arose when religious changes left people feeling bereft of supernatural help, as happened when prayers to the saints were suppressed. Another blow to the vivid sense of the communion of saints was the denial of Purgatory. This affected people even more deeply, since it seemed to cut them off from their ancestors by forbidding prayers for the dead.
Mary and the Saints
Devotion to Mary and the saints had long been a source of comfort, but since Protestants insisted that they were no longer to be regarded as intercessors and protectors, their images and shrines were destroyed in those regions controlled by Protestants. The leading Reformers continued to hold that Mary was the Mother of God and a perpetual virgin, but they were so determined to obliterate every trace of what they considered superstition that the figure of Mary almost disappeared from Protestant churches and, eventually, consciousness.
Long-beloved images provoked violent passions, as iconoclasts outraged traditionalists by destroying the “idols” that had long been the embodiment of the sacred. Especially in France and the Netherlands, iconoclasm was often accompanied by gang attacks, including murders, perpetrated by one religious group against another.
Monasticism
Monastic life manifested extremes, from the severe austerity of the Carthusians to houses that had been corrupted by wealth, lax discipline, and the interference of lay patrons—a scandal that sometimes led bishops to suppress religious houses on their own authority. Monasteries served as the destinations of pilgrims, places of hospitality for travelers, and centers of charity for the sick and poor, with considerable variations in their levels of generosity. Their dissolution excised institutions that had been an integral part of the local community for over a thousand years. Their suppression was symbolically revolutionary in seeming to condemn otherworldly asceticism and insisting that the Christian life be lived entirely within the world. A frequent criticism of monks was that they lived unproductive lives and were a drain on economic resources.
The Failure of Sola Scriptura
The Reformers did not teach the “private interpretation of Scripture” in the sense that each man’s personal understanding was to be considered valid for himself. Rather they expected that, shorn of centuries-old Catholic errors, the Bible would speak plainly to everyone and there would be full agreement. But quite early, it became apparent that sola scriptura was an inadequate principle, so that almost from the beginning the leading Reformers had to invoke some kind of church authority against the free interpretation of Scripture. (Frustrated that the Bible did not say explicitly what he was convinced it meant, Luther added the word “alone” to Paul’s proclamation that “the just man lives by faith”, and he considered discarding the Letter of James [which he called “an epistle of straw”] because it exalted good works.)
The Magisterial Reformation vs. the Radicals
The Reformers’ beliefs required them to hold that the Church had deviated from the authentic Gospel quite early. But Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others came to be called the Magisterial Reformers (“teachers” or “masters”), because they upheld the historic creeds against those whose understanding of the Scripture led them in other directions. The Magisterial accepted the authority of the ecumenical councils through the fifth century, by which time the fundamental doctrines of the Trinity (a word that does not appear in Scripture) and the Incarnation had been defined.
Luther and Zwingli
When Luther and Zwingli finally met, they agreed on most things but not on the meaning of Christ’s words, “This is My body”, with Zwingli insisting that He must have been speaking metaphorically and Luther insisting on the literal meaning, each claiming that the other misunderstood Christ’s words. Luther held that, while bread and wine remained, they also became the actual Body and Blood of Christ, a doctrine later called “consubstantiation” (“substances together”), while Zwingli saw the bread and wine as mere symbols of Christ’s Body and Blood.
Adiaphora
The question of “externals” also greatly divided some of the Reformers, with Lutherans accepting adiaphora (“things indifferent”), so long as the Bible did not explicitly forbid them, while Zwingli and others would only allow those things that the Bible explicitly authorized. Zwingli was the first of what were later called “Puritans”, who wanted to “purify” the Church of what they saw as historical accretions that smacked of superstition.
Anabaptists
Luther had to come out of hiding and return to Wittenberg in order to squelch unauthorized innovations by some of his followers, one of whom he expelled from the city for intransigence, even though the man claimed that he was simply implementing Luther’s own teachings. Luther also, as did Zwingli, had to confront small groups of “zealots” who, without formal ordination, dared to preach in public and, most seriously, demand that those who had been baptized as infants (practically everyone) be rebaptized as adults, a practice that led to their being called Anabaptists (“to baptize again”). Anabaptists were viewed as politically as well as religiously subversive because, based on their reading of the New Testament, they refused to swear oaths, which were the moral foundation of the legal system; espoused pacifism, even if there should be a Turkish invasion; and in some cases denied the validity of private property.
“Other Spirituals”
Virtually all these “Radicals” proclaimed the Lutheran principle of the freedom of the Christian, who bowed to no authority but God. Those who also got the name “Spirituals” even bypassed Scripture for the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Some of these were Unitarians or “Anti-Trinitarians”.
Protestant Scholasticism
The Magisterial leaders denounced the Radicals as false prophets, expelled them from their cities, and often put them to death, while Anabaptists in turn accused those leaders of compromising their own principles. To counteract doctrinal fragmentation, most Protestant groups, including even some Anabaptists, in time adopted formal creeds or “confessions” to which all members were required to adhere. Despite humanist and Protestant hostility to Scholastic theology, some Protestants even began to theologize in the Scholastic mode, as in the Lutheran formula of “consubstantiation”, in order to clarify disputed questions.
Church and State
Clergy in Politics
The Church as an institution was deeply involved in politics in the narrow sense, even apart from religious issues. The papacy had its own territorial interests, and prelates were often secular as well as spiritual lords. The Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII (1523-1534) continued to rule Florence through representatives, and cardinals such as Jiménez in Spain, Adrian Florensz (Pope Adrian VI) in the Empire, and Wolsey in England served as ministers of state as well as holding ecclesiastical office. The archbishops of Trier, Mainz, and Cologne were among the seven electors who comprised the inner circle of the German princes. Late in the sixteenth century, a cardinal even served briefly as king of Portugal. (At the other extreme, a Spanish bishop was executed for leading an armed rebellion against Charles I [Charles V of the Empire]).
Political and social prominence did not necessarily mean that a prelate was corrupt. Jiménez and Florensz lived austere lives, and Wolsey, although quite worldly, became increasingly pious toward the end of his life. After his death, he was discovered to be wearing a hair shirt.
Politics and Belief
Ultimately, the success or failure of the Reformation in particular areas was due almost entirely to the policies of its rulers. From the emperor to town councils, responses to the Reformation were determined by a complex interplay of secular interests and religious belief.
The Reformation succeeded mainly in northern Europe, in the territories that had not been part of the Roman Empire. Luther quite deliberately appealed to German resentment of what was considered a Roman sense of superiority, a division that seemed almost to replay the ancient Roman-barbarian conflict. Though Protestantism made some inroads into Eastern Europe, it did not become the dominant cultural influence there.
Charles V
Charles V recognized the emergent Lutheran movement as a threat to imperial unity, but it was only with difficulty that he was able to obtain Luther’s condemnation at the Diet of Worms. Although Lutherans stood condemned as heretics, Charles had to keep postponing action against them. (The word Protestant was originally applied not to theological dissent but to those who protested Charles V’s announced intention of suppressing their movement.)
Failed Compromise
Charles at one point offered the Lutherans clerical marriage and Communion in both kinds, an offer they rejected as too little, even as Pope Clement VII saw it as the emperor’s unwarranted assumption of ecclesiastical authority. These were understood by everyone to be disciplinary matters that could be changed (John Fisher said the laity were not given the chalice merely to prevent accidental spills), but knowledgeable people on both sides realized that the issues went much deeper. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 was the first Lutheran statement of faith and was agreed to in part by some Catholics, but it did not achieve complete acceptance and failed to heal the breach.5
Church Property
Luther urged the princes to undertake the forcible reform of the Church, if the clergy would not, charging that her great wealth had been stolen from gullible Germans. Like Henry VIII a few years later, princes who accepted Luther’s invitation became almost by default the heads of the Church in their domains, justifying their seizure of church property.
Bishops and abbots were among those who accepted Luther’s invitation, notably Hermann von Wied (d. 1552), the prince-archbishop of Cologne, and the entire military-religious order of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, whose last grand master, Albert of Hohenzollern (d. 1568), began the dynasty that would unite Germany in the nineteenth century.
The Free Cities
The Empire also encompassed a number of “free cities”, where civic authorities had the last word on such issues as the manner of the celebration of the liturgy. Those authorities tended initially to approach religious conflicts as matters of public order and, after a period of confusion, sought to restore order by favoring one faction over another. In Zurich and Geneva, the town councils responded to religious strife first by sponsoring public debates, then by authorizing the adoption of the Reformers’ programs.
The Peasants’ War
Lutheranism was almost dealt a fatal blow by the massive Peasants’ War of 1524-1525, when thousands of poor farmers rose up against their lords. Although they did not inflict great loss of life, they burned fields and buildings and destroyed the legal documents that defined their servile status. A manifesto issued by the rebels—probably composed by a priest—cited Luther’s words about Christian freedom as justification for their actions, and Luther at first responded by condemning the rebellion but also faulting the princes for injustices. But when his response was cited by the rebels as further justification or defense of their revolt, he published a pamphlet titled Against the Robbing and Murdering Horde of Peasants.
Lutheran Freedom
The rebellion was put down with great brutality, and Luther made it clear that his idea of Christian freedom from Law applied only to spiritual matters, because true freedom was interior. The princes who supported him were reassured by this, and in his subsequent writings Luther exalted political authority virtually without limit.
Münster
Anabaptism was definitively if unfairly discredited when in the period from 1535 to 1536 a group of extreme sectarians seized control of the German city of Munster, which was predominantly Catholic, and acted out a nightmare of antinomianism—putting their opponents to death, proclaiming their own leader to be a divinely ordained king, and not only permitting but requiring promiscuous sexuality and polygamy. The uprising was eventually crushed and, along with the Peasants’ Revolt, forced mainstream Protestants to give more authority to law than they had initially been willing to do, especially since Catholics had always warned that the Lutheran idea of freedom would lead to moral anarchy.
The Turkish Threat
Looming always over the German situation was the threat of the Turks, who continually menaced the Empire’s eastern borders, causing Charles V to avoid as long as possible the inevitable civil war that would erupt if he attempted to enforce the edict of Worms against the Lutherans. Even the Catholic princes of Germany did not necessarily favor the complete suppression of Protestantism, because such action would strengthen the power of the emperor at the expense of the princes. Charles’ move against the Lutherans finally came in 1546, immediately provoking a Protestant rebellion that a dying Luther, because of his view of the sanctity of civil authority, could not bring himself to endorse.
Hapsburgs and Valois
The long-standing Hapsburg-Valois conflict was the central reality of European politics, destroying any possibility of a united Catholic political front. When Charles V was on the verge of defeating the German Lutherans, Henry II of France (1547-1559), even as he struggled to suppress the Calvinists in his own domains, sent an army to help the Lutherans.
Peace of Augsburg
Faced with a stalemate, Charles in 1555 negotiated a settlement—the Peace of Augsburg—that, however limited, was the first official recognition of religious tolerance in European history. He then abdicated in favor of his brother Ferdinand I (1555-1564) and retired to a Spanish monastery, where he lived in austere preparation for death. Ironically, in view of Luther’s ringing declarations of spiritual freedom, the Peace of Augsburg was summed up in the maxim cujus regio ejus religio (“whose rule, his religion”), which allowed each prince to determine the religion of his subjects and required nonconformists to go into exile, while the free cities were required in theory to tolerate both Catholics and Lutherans. (In some places, those who did not adhere to the official religion could leave the territory on Sunday to worship in a neighboring jurisdiction.)
Ferdinand was relatively tolerant, so that some of the provisions of Augsburg, such as the exclusion of Calvinists and the protection of Catholic property, were not enforced. His successor, Maximilian II (1564-1576), was actually thought to be sympathetic to Lutheranism.
Scandinavia
Lutheranism spread rapidly throughout northern Germany and into Scandinavia, where the way was prepared by scholars who had studied abroad. The final decisions, however, were made by the kings of Denmark, Frederick I (1523-1533) and Christian III (1534-1559), who also ruled Norway, and Gustavus I (Vasa), king of Sweden (1523-1560), who also ruled Finland.
France
Gallicanism
Just as there was an Anglican (“English”) church that was founded by Henry VIII in 1534 which split from Rome, there was also a Gallican (“French”) church that maintained formal ties to the papacy while seeking to remain as independent as possible. In a concordat (“agreement”) that would plague the papacy for three centuries, Pope Leo X officially recognized the French king’s right to nominate bishops and many other high church officials, although papal ratification was required.
Huguenots
From Geneva, Calvin sent trained clergy back to France, where they made converts among both the aristocracy and the merchant class. (For unknown reasons, the French Calvinists came to be called Huguenots.) In 1559, the French king, Henry II, was killed in an accident, leaving three young sons—Francis II (1559-1560), Charles IX (1560-1574), and Henry III (1574-1589)—each of whom would rule and each of whom would prove to be weak and ineffective, leaving real power in the hands of their mother, Catherine de Medici (d. 1589), who was influenced by the ideas of Machiavelli.
Civil War
At first Catherine forced Catholics to engage in theological discussion with the Huguenots; however, when an agreement was not forthcoming, both sides began committing acts of violence against each other, especially while their opponents were at worship. The violence escalated into a civil war that lasted for most of the rest of the century. It was essentially a three-way conflict, in which it was impossible to separate religion from dynastic ambitions. Those of the reigning house of Valois were Catholics, while their cousins the Bourbons (Marguerite of Navarre’s family) became the leaders of the Huguenot party. Still another family of cousins, the Guises, accused the Valois of compromising the Catholic faith, put themselves forward as its true champions, and received support from Spain. From time to time, leaders on both sides were assassinated.
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew
In a perilous situation, Catherine, suspicious that both the Guises and the Bourbons wanted to install themselves on the throne, tried to control the kingdom by treading a middle path. She made a series of grants of toleration to the Huguenots, the extent of each one dictated by the political situation at a given moment.
In 1572, the situation was ostensibly resolved when Henry of Bourbon (d. 1610), Marguerite of Navarre’s grandson, married Charles IX’s sister Marguerite (d. 1615). But the phenomenon of a “mixed marriage” was still unfamiliar. Politics might demand such a union, but Pius V (1566-1572) refused a dispensation, and the ceremony—performed by a Bourbon cardinal—was considered merely a blessing, not a sacramental act.
Six days later, on St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24), Catholics began systematically slaughtering Protestants in Paris and other cities, killing as many as five thousand. The St. Bartholomew Massacre became the most infamous religious atrocity in a century filled with such atrocities. Catherine and Charles may have instigated the massacre, in order once again to pit Guises and Bourbons against one another. (Pope Gregory XIII [1572-1585] ordered a Te Deum sung in Rome in celebration of the event, although he may not have known all the facts.)
Henry IV
The civil war continued. In 1588, the duke of Guise was murdered at Henry III’s instigation, and the next year the king himself was assassinated by a Dominican friar, Jacques Clement, probably in retaliation. (Clement was killed on the spot and was venerated by some Catholics as a martyr.)
Henry of Bourbon, who had reverted to Protestantism after St. Bartholomew’s Day, now claimed the throne as Henry IV (1589-1610) and made good his claim by taking control of Paris. A few years later, he announced his reconversion to Catholicism, allegedly with the cynical remark, “Paris is worth a Mass”, although it was later reported that he had become a sincere Catholic. Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605) recognized Henry as king after his conversion, but the Guises, with Spanish support, continued to make war against Henry, at one point, proclaiming an elderly cardinal as the rightful king.
Edict of Nantes
Henry IV triumphed and in 1598 ended the forty-year-old French religious struggle by issuing the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Huguenots freedom of worship on the estates of their adherents and in the several hundred towns where they were numerous. Remarkably, they were even allowed to fortify those towns as a defense against any future repeal of the edict. (Clement VIII disapproved of the edict.) Henry IV proved to be a popular king who restored order to the kingdom, but in 1610 he too was assassinated by a Catholic, because of the king’s plans for war with Spain.
England
In England, a rapid series of religious changes were almost entirely acts of state. These began during the reign of Henry VIII and continued for the next forty years.
The Royal Marriage
Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536), daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and Charles V’s aunt, a union that gave him only one living offspring, his daughter, Mary (d. 1558). Worried about the survival of the Tudor dynasty and attracted to a younger woman, Anne Boleyn (d. 1536), Henry petitioned Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage, on the grounds that Catherine had previously been married to his older brother. Pope Julius II had granted a dispensation for the marriage, but the king now contended that divine law itself forbade such a union.
Clement VII
Partly in deference to the emperor, Clement followed a policy of delay, probably hoping that Henry’s interest in Anne would cool. The basis for the requested annulment was also problematical, since for the pope to acquiesce would be to limit papal authority over marriage, forever thereafter forbidding marriage to a brother’s widow as contrary to the law of God. (Another issue was whether Catherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated, while canon law also forbade Henry to marry Anne because he had previously had sexual relations with her sister.)
The Attack on the Papacy
When the court set up by the Pope to hear the case failed to deliver a verdict, the king’s frustration boiled over. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (d. 1530), who was both Henry’s lord chancellor and one of the two papal judges assigned to the case, fell from power. Henry then attempted to pressure Clement by getting Parliament to enact a series of laws designed to curtail papal authority in England—appointments to office, taxes, and appeals to the papal court—and intimidating the bishops by threatening them with prosecution for having accepted Wolsey as papal legate, an appointment Henry himself had arranged.
Excommunication
Apparently wishing to placate Henry as far as possible, Clement quickly confirmed Henry’s nomination of the royal chaplain Thomas Cranmer (d. 1556) as archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer, who had Protestant leanings and was secretly married, immediately declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine invalid and officiated at his marriage to Boleyn, whereupon Clement at last reached a decision and excommunicated both Henry and Anne.
“Supreme Head”
Far from being deterred by the papal action, Henry in 1534 had himself declared “Supreme Head of the Church in England”, an act without legal equivalent in any other country. Paradoxically, he still considered himself a Catholic and retained almost everything of the old faith, so that people of Lutheran or other heretical inclinations continued to be burned at the stake.
Suppression of the Monasteries
The exception to the king’s Catholicism was monasteries (including convents of women) and some other endowed institutions, which he ruthlessly suppressed in order to get possession of their wealth, with their inmates given pensions. But ironically, even after there were no monasteries left in England, to deny the validity of religious vows was still defined as heresy and still carried the death penalty.
King and Bishops
Henry VIII’s claim to be head of the Church renewed the old issue between Henry II and Becket—whether the king could be truly supreme in his own kingdom if the Church possessed a higher moral authority. Logically, Henry VIII had Becket’s tomb—the shrine of one of the very few Catholic martyrs of the previous half-millennium—destroyed and his remains disposed of.
Most of the English bishops had risen through the royal service, and only one—St. John Fisher (d. 1536)—withstood the king. Henry’s position as Supreme Head of the Church meant that loyalty to the pope was now treason, and in a brief period Henry put to death everyone who refused to affirm the new order, including Fisher and Thomas More.
Thomas More
More did not openly oppose the king but instead resigned from public office and retired to private life. But Henry demanded his old friend’s overt support; and when More would not give it, he was executed on the basis of perjured testimony. (Erasmus, when he heard of his friend’s martyrdom, regretted that More had become involved in matters from which he should have remained aloof.)
Pole
Pole, at first a moderate conciliarist, had written a strong defense of papal authority that earned him the king’s undying enmity and led to the brutal judicial murder of Pole’s elderly mother, Bl. Margaret Pole (d. 1541). The execution of Margaret Pole was also motivated by the king’s fear that the Pole family in some ways had a better claim to the throne than did his Tudor dynasty.
Edward VI
When Henry died, the throne passed to his young son Edward VI (1547-1553), an ardent, theologically precocious Protestant who encouraged Cranmer and others, working through Parliament, to move the Anglican church further toward Continental Protestantism. The liturgy was translated into English and shorn of all implications of sacrifice, clergy were allowed to marry, and Protestant theologians were imported from the Continent to bring England into the mainstream of the Reformation. But in some places, there were popular uprisings against the introduction of the new Book of Common Prayer.
Mary I
When the sickly Edward died at age sixteen, the throne passed to his older half-sister Mary I (1553-1558), Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, who repulsed a Protestant effort to deny her the throne and later put down a rebellion that aimed to depose her. Since the survival of a restored Catholicism depended entirely on a Catholic heir, Mary quickly married the future Philip II of Spain (1555-1598). He remained in England for a year but, when no pregnancy resulted and he inherited the Spanish throne, returned home.
The Catholic Restoration
Just as her father and half-brother had used royal authority and a cooperative Parliament to take England out of the Catholic Church, Mary now used the same methods to bring it back, repealing all the ecclesiastical legislation of the previous two decades. In keeping with the new reform spirit, she nominated bishops whose careers had been spent primarily in the Church, not the state, an action whose wisdom was vindicated when all but one of them remained Catholic after her death and had to be deposed by her successor.
Pole returned to England as archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate and in those capacities oversaw the formal return of his native country to the Church. He absolved those who had apostatized and supported the persecution of Protestants but advised Mary not to reclaim the church lands that had been seized by her father. (Instead she founded several new monasteries.)
Carafa remained hostile to his one-time associate and after becoming pope removed Pole as legate and summoned him to Rome, where he would probably have been charged with heresy. Mary, however, withheld the Pope’s letter from the cardinal, who continued in his offices until his death, on the same day as Mary’s own.
Elizabeth I
The throne then passed to Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth I (1558-1603), daughter of Anne Boleyn, who at first gave ambiguous signals as to her personal beliefs but soon committed herself to a Protestant restoration, using royal and parliamentary authority—for the fourth time in twenty-five years—to effect religious change. As “Supreme Governor” of the church (she was not sure that a woman could be “Supreme Head”), she attempted to forge a comprehensive national church that would encompass everyone except “extremists” on both sides.
In the earlier years of her reign, the dominant religious spirit could probably be called conservative. Most people were still attached to old beliefs and practices but were not Catholics in a deliberate, self-conscious way, attending Anglican services while retaining elements of the old faith.
Puritanism
Puritanism—the desire for a Protestantism untainted with Catholic elements like bishops—was strongest in London and the mercantile Southeast, while Catholicism was strongest in the feudal North. In 1569, the last great English feudal uprising occurred, with the rebels gaining control of much of the North and, among other things, restoring the Mass and other elements of the Catholic faith. However, like the Pilgrimage of Grace a generation before and the riots against the Book of Common Prayer under Edward VI, the rebellion was soon crushed.
Excommunication of Elizabeth
Possibly in response to the 1569 rebellion, Pius V the next year excommunicated Elizabeth, dismissing her as a “pretended monarch” and releasing the English people from their allegiance to her. Probably Pius believed that the people were waiting to rise in rebellion if given the right to do so, but the principal effect of the papal bull was to allow the English government to define Catholicism as treason. (Incongruously, a few years later Pope Sixtus V [1585-1590], expressed great admiration for Elizabeth, a woman he thought showed remarkable determination.)
Missionary Priests
Around 1570, missionaries began arriving in England, the best known of whom were Jesuits but most of whom were secular clergy educated at English seminaries in France and Spain. They were missionaries in the sense that ultimately they hoped to convert the entire kingdom, but their immediate task was merely preservative: to provide the sacraments and spiritual guidance to a small minority of recusant Catholics and to persuade those faithful to Rome but willing to accommodate themselves to the Protestant regime that it was wrong to conform to the established church.
Of necessity, Elizabethan Catholicism had a dominantly aristocratic character, since the missionaries could only function by traveling secretly from one great house to another, ministering primarily to landowners, their servants, and their tenants. The numbers they reached were small, but the government had cause for concern at the way in which talented young men from good families, such as the Jesuits St. Edmund Campion (d. 1581) and St. Robert Southwell (d. 1595)—both accomplished scholars and writers—renounced the established church to embrace the old faith.
The story of the English missionaries is one of the most dramatic in the history of the Church, combining a heroic commitment to their cause, including martyrdom, with clandestine cloak-and-dagger activities such as false identities and hiding in secret rooms called “priest holes”. Priests, along with those laymen who aided them directly, were treated as traitors if caught—put to death by being hanged, cut down alive, and disembowled.
Rebellion?
Most Catholics, including most priests, eschewed politics, insisting that their sole concern was the salvation of souls. However, some others, including the influential Jesuit Robert Parsons (d. 1610) and Cardinal William Allen (d. 1594), whom the Holy See treated as the head of the English Catholics, believed that the queen should be overthrown. There was conflict between Jesuits and secular priests on the mission, a conflict that even persisted among those in prison, with the seculars generally taking a less openly resistant stance toward the monarchy.
The Armada
Several half-baked plots against Elizabeth (one of them endorsed by Pius V) were easily thwarted, but after years of preparation, Philip II in 1588 launched his Great Armada against England—thirty thousand men in 130 ships—with the aim of deposing Elizabeth in accord with Pius’ bull, although Sixtus V considered the venture foolhardy. Philip aimed to place a Catholic on the English throne, an ambition that perfectly united religious and political interests, since the English had given help to anti-Spanish rebels in the Netherlands and were preying on Spanish treasure ships from the New World. But the Armada was routed by a combination of the English navy and severe storms, and Philip’s dream of restoring European Catholicism through military might was thereby crushed. In England, the equation of Protestantism with patriotism was made complete.
Mary Stuart and the Scots
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542-1567), grandniece of Henry VIII and daughter of a Guise mother, succeeded to the throne of Scotland after having been widowed by Francis II of France. But she found a country that had changed considerably in her absence.
A Scot, John Knox (d. 1572), was perhaps Calvin’s most ardent disciple and, having fled the England of Mary Tudor, denounced her cousin. Many of the leading Scottish nobles had become Presbyterians, named after the Calvinist system of church government, and Knox forged in them an iron religious conviction wedded to the traditional feudal determination to be free of royal power. As on the Continent, religious passions were often violent. After the first burning of a Scottish Protestant, a group of men burst in on the archbishop responsible, stabbed him repeatedly, and desecrated his body.
Posthumously, Mary became a Catholic heroine, but she was not a candidate for sainthood. She made no effort to combat Presbyterianism, and her personal life was full of scandal. Her second husband, Henry Darnley (d. 1567), suspected that she was having an affair with her Italian secretary and had the secretary brutally murdered in her presence, partly in the hope of causing her to have a miscarriage. Darn-ley himself subsequently died in a mysterious explosion, and Mary, in a Protestant ceremony, married James Bothwell, the man suspected of being responsible for the murder.
The marriage occasioned a full-scale rebellion that forced Mary to flee to the protection of her cousin in England. But Elizabeth did not relish Mary’s presence and made her a prisoner in a distant castle, where, with or without her own knowledge and cooperation, Mary became the center of various schemes to topple Elizabeth, some of which involved Robert Parsons. After one such plot in 1587, Elizabeth was persuaded to assent to Mary’s execution.
James VI and I
But when the never-married Elizabeth died in 1603, the English throne passed to James VI of Scotland (1567-1625), the son whom Mary Stuart had been forced to leave behind as an infant when she fled her own country. Thus he was also James I of England. Though James had been baptized a Catholic, he had been raised as a Protestant.
Ireland
A papal nuncio sent to Ireland in the 1540s stayed only a month and complained that the corruption of the clergy and the fractiousness of the nobles made it impossible to achieve religious reform. But the English government, whose effective power did not extend very far beyond Dublin (“the Pale”), found the Irish equally unreceptive to Protestantism. In many ways, Ireland, so remote from the rest of Europe, remained the only country where pre-Reformation Catholicism survived unchanged, although later in the century, the English seminaries on the Continent also began sending priests to Ireland.
The Netherlands
When Charles V divided his Habsburg domains in 1556, the Netherlands remained under the rule of Spain, even though in geography, language, and religion it would have fit better with the Empire. The contrast between the Netherlands and Spain was almost complete: the former a half-germanic, religiously diverse, predominantly mercantile society; the latter a still largely feudal, Mediterranean society, in which the long struggle against Islam had forged a deep commitment to Catholic orthodoxy.
The people of the Netherlands may not have been tolerant by conviction—there were periodic outbursts of mob violence by one side against the other—but their survival, in a semi-barren land continually threatened by the sea, required hard-working, economically productive people willing to accept almost anyone who met those requirements. The majority were Catholic, with significant Lutheran, Anabaptist, Jewish, and, above all, Calvinist elements.
Philip II
After Charles’ abdication, Philip II, as king of Spain and its vast overseas domains, including the Netherlands, was the leading Catholic monarch of Europe, and he took very seriously his divine mandate to defend the Church and suppress heresy. His commitment to the Church fit closely with his idea of absolute royal power, since religious dissent was of its very nature a defiance of the king’s authority, but Philip did have a pious streak. His palace of the Escorial was built on a gridiron pattern—because of his devotion to St. Lawrence, the third-century deacon who had reputedly been roasted on such a device—and the royal apartment was like a monk’s cell. The popes, however, were wary of Philip, as they had been of his father, because of the Hapsburg claims in Italy. Despite what Philip himself believed, the interests of Spain and the Catholic Church were by no means identical.
Philip could not comprehend the pragmatic economic priorities of his distant Netherlandish subjects, nor could he appreciate their religious diversity, which constituted defiance of his authority. To Philip, toleration of heresy would have been a dereliction of his God-given responsibilities. In 1565, he announced that the Inquisition would be enforced in the Netherlands, an announcement that brought forth immediate protests from almost all sections of society, who both cherished their semi-independence from a distant Madrid and feared the economic consequences of the suppression of Protestantism.
Rebellion
The arrival of a Spanish army under the sometimes brutal duke of Alba (d. 1582), who had earlier invaded the Papal States during the interminable Italian wars, galvanized the Netherlands into massive resistance that was helped by Catholic France in order to strike a blow at Spain. The leadership of the rebellion was put in the hands of William of Orange (William the Silent, d. 1584), a prince who had been both a Lutheran and a Catholic and who now became a Calvinist, largely because the Calvinist bourgeoisie of the province of Holland played the major role in the revolt.
Despite many setbacks, by 1572, the northern Netherlanders had successfully driven out the Spanish troops, leaving Spain in control of the southern provinces that would eventually become the nation of Belgium. The newly independent United Provinces of the north retained a formal policy of religious toleration, but they were increasingly dominated by Calvinists who imposed burdens of various kinds on Catholics. William of Orange was assassinated by a Catholic in 1584, the first political assassination ever perpetrated with a gun.
Poland
In Poland (a much larger country in the sixteenth century than in modern times) Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius (d. 1579) presided over vigorous Counter-Reformation efforts, but there remained a significant Protestant presence. Poland became one of the most tolerant countries in Europe, a place of refuge for sectarians not welcome even in Lutheran and Calvinist lands. The Confederation of Warsaw (1573) included an official guarantee of toleration, although it extended to the princes only.
Hungary
Though it remained mostly Catholic, part of Hungary was under Muslim rule in the sixteenth century. There was a significant Calvinist presence, especially among the nobility.
Persecution and Toleration
Both the ideal and the reality of Christendom as a single international society virtually disappeared in the sixteenth century, but the concept of a unified society based on faith survived and was even strengthened at the national and local levels. Each territorial government believed that it had the duty to uphold true religion, and in the end, the religion of the people was largely determined by their rulers. A few bishops expressed reservations about the use of coercion, on the grounds that it led to insincere conversions.
The Secular Arm
As it was not established in most countries, the Inquisition was not the only body employed in religious persecution. France set up the Chambre Ardent (“burning court”) to deal with heresy, and in England, heresy was also prosecuted under civil law.
For reasons that remain unclear, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the great age of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe, an activity carried out by Catholics and Protestants with equal zeal.
Martyrdom
In the sixteenth century, for the first time in over twelve hundred years, all serious Christians were potentially faced with the possibility of persecution, as illustrated by the war of words between More and Tyndale, which continued until both were sent to their deaths in 1535—More by his former patron Henry VIII, Tyndale by the Inquisition at Antwerp. The Justinian Code, which was the basis for most European law codes, prescribed the death penalty for heresy because heresy was regarded as a spiritual disease that had to be suppressed lest it kill people’s souls.
Erasmus came close to advocating toleration, in his ceaseless urging of forbearance and charity among Christians. But More, while he suffered death for his faith, himself participated in the prosecution of heretics, of which he fully approved,6 just as Tyndale would probably have approved the burning of Anabaptists by Lutherans and Anglicans, and Calvin burned a Spanish physician, Miguel Serveto (d. 1553), who denied the Trinity. This was not hypocrisy. Men did not demand for themselves a toleration they denied to others but demanded simply that truth be promoted and error punished.
The Radical Reformation
The left wing of the Reformation—those generally if imprecisely called Anabaptists—alone rejected the idea that religious conformity should be enforced by civil authority because they did not think it either possible or desirable to organize the whole society on Christian principles. To the extent they were able, they simply withdrew into little communities where they tried to live according to what they considered Gospel teachings like pacifism and communal property
Almost alone, the radicals opposed persecution in principle, because they thought most people were damned in any case, and coercion was therefore useless. Those who favored tolerance usually cited Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, showing that that there was to be no separation of people until the Last Judgment.
Spain
The long struggle for the Reconquista of Spain gradually reached its goal during the fifteenth century. The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479-1516) in effect created a united Spain for the first time, although the two kingdoms remained officially distinct. The “Catholic Monarchs”, as Pope Alexander VI designated them, mounted a final assault on the Muslim kingdom of Granada, which fell in 1492.
The Conversos
A wave of anti-Jewish violence broke out in Castile around 1400 and soon spread throughout much of the Iberian Peninsula. A century later, at the urging of Jiménez, the crown embarked on a program of forced conversions, creating a new category of people—theconversos—who were suspected of secretly practicing their old religion. Theoretically, non-Christians were not supposed to be forced to convert, but having at last vanquished the Muslims, the crown now gave Muslims and Jews a choice between conversion and expulsion. Most chose the former, although a large number also went into exile.
As archbishop of Toledo and Grand Inquisitor, as well as the highest royal official, Jiménez was the most powerful person in Spain after the monarchs themselves, and he organized a kind of crusade in North Africa, in which he accompanied the Christian armies in the field and which resulted in the conquest of parts of Tripoli.
Inquisition
Aragon and Castile shared the Inquisition, a special Spanish branch of which was established by papal authority but existed under royal control and was used for political as well as religious purposes, since the presence of large numbers of Muslims and Jews seemed to threaten political stability. The institution became extremely powerful, ranking above the secular courts and even able to prosecute important people. Although many of the accused were found innocent and many of the guilty repented and suffered lesser penalties, approximately five thousand were burned between 1480 and 1530.
The Inquisition was concerned with possible heresy, but its primary interest was in the conversos. Probably most of the first generation of converts were in fact of doubtful sincerity. However, later generations produced a disproportionate number of important people who were also exemplary Catholics. The Dominican Tomas de Torquemada (d. 1498), one of Isabella’s confessors and himself the Grand Inquisitor, was of conversos stock. Beyond the suspicion that conversos were insincere, many Spaniards also became obsessed with the idea of “purity of blood”, requiring that people prove that they had no Jewish ancestry before they could be fully accepted into society.
Martyrdom in England
More, Fisher, and a small group of Carthusians and Franciscans executed by Henry VIII were the first Catholic martyrs of the Counter-Reformation. About 130 Catholic priests were killed in the Netherlands during the religious conflicts there, most of them by armies or by mob violence rather than through formal persecution, as also happened in France. By far the largest group of Catholic martyrs was in England. Although almost every ruler executed religious dissenters, persecution under Edward VI was minimal. But Elizabeth I (1558-1603) executed over three hundred—mainly priests, some laymen, mostly men, a few women—who were defined as traitors rather than as heretics.
The number of Catholics martyred during Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign was about the same as the number of Protestants martyred during her half-sister’s five-year reign, including Cranmer, after he had twice recanted his heresy, then recanted his recantations. Most of those burned under Mary seem to have been not mainstream Protestants but simple people who belonged to left-wing sects. Protestant propaganda burdened the queen indelibly with the epithet “Bloody Mary”, as though she were uniquely intolerant.
Elizabeth I burned an occasional Anabaptist, but during her reign, religious dissenters were usually hanged as traitors. Demanding only external conformity, the Elizabethan government imposed heavy fines on not only Catholics but also native English Protestants who did not attend Anglican services. The severity of the fine varied according to the political situation at the particular moment.
Protestant Martyrs
The first Protestant martyrs of the age were two members of Luther’s Augustinian order, burned at Brussels in 1523. An estimated forty-four hundred Protestants were put to death in all countries, many of them by other Protestants, since “Anabaptists” were subject to the death penalty almost everywhere. The largest number of Protestants executed under Catholic auspices were in France and in the Netherlands (including modern Belgium), but in Germany, where the Reformation began, most Protestants were protected by territorial princes sympathetic to their faith.
Roman Inquisition
The Roman Inquisition was given renewed authority in the face of Protestantism, but its effectiveness in the various Italian city-states depended on the cooperation of the local governments, which were influenced by complex political factors. Its activities reached a peak around 1600, when it summoned about four hundred people per decade, many of whom were in effect acquitted and only a small number of whom were put to death, the most common punishments being public penance and relatively short stays in prison.
Bruno
In one of its most famous cases, the Inquisition in 1600 burned Giordano Bruno (d. 1600), a Dominican who was accused of heresy but who was in many ways scarcely a Christian at all—a mysterious figure who combined a precocious interest in science with belief in ancient Egyptian cults, who reportedly called Jesus a conjuror, and who at his execution turned his face away from the crucifix.
Inquisitorial Procedures
The Inquisition operated according to strict rules that were fair by the standards of its time. Most of those summoned were denounced anonymously, but, although not entitled to confront their accusers, they were allowed to submit a list of enemies who might wish to harm them and who were punished if found to be lying. The accused could not be represented by a counsel but could consult one (paid for by the Inquisition, if necessary), and the Inquisitors’ handbook included suggestions as to how the accused might answer particular charges.
Recantation
Above all, the Inquisition sought to uncover the truth, not to punish people indiscriminately, since its principal aim was to bring about conversions. Torture was used when a suspect was thought to be lying, but it was used sparingly because the Inquisitors did not want insincere confessions, and such a confession could be recanted within twenty-four hours. The Inquisition often showed greater skepticism about accusations of witchcraft than did the secular authorities and sometimes even rebuked those authorities for being overly credulous.
Those Investigated
Despite the Inquisition, few Protestants were put to death in Italy and Spain, simply because there were very few and the Inquisition concerned itself with morals, witchcraft, suspicious foreign visitors, and Catholics who had traveled in Protestant lands or had been ransomed from the Muslims and might therefore have been affected by Muslim beliefs. Also investigated were Catholics with questionable beliefs. Under royal authority, the Spanish Inquisition was so powerful that an archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza (d. 1576), spent seventeen years under arrest, as the tribunal’s complex procedures ground slowly, and was finally released only after retracting certain of his writings that were deemed to be carelessly in error.
Valdés
The works of Erasmus had great appeal to Spanish humanists, but with the advent of Protestantism, the Inquisition began to scrutinize such people. The Erasmian Juan de Valdes (d. 1541) fled to Italy to avoid prosecution, where he enjoyed the patronage of Clement VII and other churchmen, although after his death he was condemned as a Lutheran. (Ochino and Vermigli were close associates of Valdes. See pp. 286-87.)
Questionable Groups
The Spanish Inquisition also concerned itself with the Alumbrados (“enlightened ones”), a mystical movement of Franciscan origins that emphasized the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit and total passivity in the hands of God, a movement with which Loyola was briefly suspected of being in sympathy. The Spanish Inquisition also continued to investigate conversos, including those of Portugal, after Spain gained control of that kingdom in 1598. In 1609, the remaining Moriscos (Muslims) were expelled from Spain.
Nicodemism
Both Catholic and Protestant authorities warned zealots not to seek martyrdom. Subterfuges—disguises, false names, hiding places, flight—were permitted, but an outright denial of one’s faith was not. Nevertheless, recantations in the face of prison or torture were not uncommon. Nicodemism—named after the Pharisee who visited Jesus only in secret—was the name given to those who conformed to the official religion in order to avoid persecution, while continuing to practice another faith in secret. Both Catholic and Protestant leaders denounced this, but there were occasionally notable examples, such as a Swiss bishop who publicly presided at the Catholic liturgy while secretly participating in Calvinist prayer services.
Martyrdom
Protestants recalled Old Testament martyrs, while Catholics claimed the innumerable early Christians who had suffered under the Roman Empire. For centuries those saints had been venerated primarily for their patronage (curing illnesses, for example), but now the circumstances of their deaths became once more relevant.
Both Protestants and Catholics kept martyrologies of the recent heroes of their faiths, emphasizing the way in which the martyrs had gone to their deaths joyfully and with unshakable courage but at the same time warning that courage alone was not a guarantee of truth—misguided fanatics might face death as resolutely as true martyrs.
“Sanguis Martyrum”
As in the early centuries, the blood of martyrs was the seed of Christians, as brave deaths on both sides aroused admiration and sometimes conversions. English Catholics dipped cloths in the blood of martyred priests and spirited away parts of their bodies, venerating them as saints long before they were officially canonized.
A Share in the Passion
For Catholics, martyrdom also offered the ultimate way of sharing in the Passion of Jesus, and More meditated on that in prison, passing beyond the theological quarrels with which he had previously been involved. Martyrdom was a meritorious “good work” of the kind that Luther denounced; the martyrs’ deaths added to the “treasury of merit” that was available to the faithful through indulgences granted by the Church’s authority.
The Problem of Royal Authority
Obedience to the monarch was rendered problematical in the sixteenth century by the fact that many devout believers found themselves living under governments that promoted what the believers considered a false faith. Paradoxically, claims of absolute royal power were sometimes made, as in France, precisely in order to require believers to accept official policies of toleration.
The Right of Rebellion
The right of subjects to rebel, even including the right to assassinate a “tyrant”, was asserted by those who opposed such toleration. Calvin himself was skeptical, but some Calvinists asserted that right, as did the Jesuit theologians Bellarmine and Francisco Suàrez (d. 1617), who claimed that the pope alone had authority directly from God and that the authority of the state existed only for the needs of the people. Limits to state authority make rebellion against overreaching authorities permissible. The Jesuit Juan de Mariana (d. 1624) anticipated later theories that government arose from the consent of the governed who create political order to serve human needs.
While neither Catholicism nor Calvinism provided kings with unqualified support, the Calvinist insistence that God alone was holy and everything human was infinitely far from Him was impossible to reconcile with the concept of sacred monarchy. In France, Calvinist iconoclasm even extended to desecrating some of the royal tombs.
Presbyterianism
Whereas Luther, almost by default, created a territorial church controlled by the princes, Calvin in Geneva created a semi-autonomous church that had a somewhat uneasy relationship with the city government but in which law and public policy were supposed to be in close conformity to the Gospel. Calvinism’s Presbyterian structure—government by councils of clergy, with strong lay involvement—fit well with the republican government of most of the cities, but Calvinism also appealed to feudal nobles in France, Germany, and Scotland.
Religion and Society
Wealth
Conversely, although Calvinism had a special appeal to the commercial middle class, the Catholic merchants of the Italian city republics did not find it necessary to change their religion. Classical Calvinism did not teach that wealth was a sign of divine favor, nor did Calvinism give birth to capitalism, which had existed for a long time. Both Calvin and some Catholic moralists offered cautious justification for the profit motive and began to distinguish between usury and interest on loans to business ventures, although Luther did not.
But there were differences in economic outlook. In Calvinism, money was to be spent prudently, and thrift was a virtue. While both lay and religious lords lived in palaces and wore brightly colored clothes of rich material, Calvinist businessmen saved money, typically living in more modest houses and wearing the plain black garments shown in their seventeenth-century portraits by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (d. 1669).
Morality
There were divisions in the sixteenth century that were as much cultural as religious in nature and that cut across Catholic-Protestant lines. Protestants and Catholics differed very little over practical moral questions, with Protestant leaders continuing to condemn the practice of contraception, for example. But there was some division over public morals. While Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans did not condone prostitution, dancing, gambling, or drunkenness, they tended to tolerate those things as perennial and unavoidable sins that could be restrained but not suppressed. Puritans, on the other hand, were those Protestants who attempted to create “godly communities” where public sin was systematically suppressed. Along with Calvinists, they condemned almost all aspects of popular religious culture—art and music, pious practices, and communal celebrations such as fairs and carnivals, some of which Lutherans and Anglicans tolerated.
The Poor
Perhaps due mainly not to religion but to the development of capitalism, attitudes toward charity were changing. In Protestant countries, the abolition of monasticism implied that poverty no longer had positive value and was to be eliminated by one means or another.
Medieval almsgiving had been somewhat indiscriminate—giving unconditionally to those who begged—something that fulfilled God’s will and thereby contributed to one’s own salvation. From a worldly perspective, it also showed that the donor was not miserly, that he spent freely on himself and others. But Calvinists demanded greater accountability, so that the campaign to eliminate poverty moved in two directions simultaneously: on the one hand, efforts to lift up the poor through education, and on the other, harsh measures to discourage begging, which was now seen as shameful. Property seized from the Catholic Church, when it did not remain in the hands of those who took it, was to some extent used to endow schools and other philanthropic institutions.
The Road to Reform
The Popes
For decades, the popes of the Reformation period were scarcely able to cope with the religious crisis. So fierce were ecclesiastical rivalries that a faction of cardinals once attempted to poison Pope Leo X, who had their leader executed, then packed the Sacred College with thirty-one new appointees. He was succeeded by Adrian VI (1522-1523). A Netherlander who had been the tutor of Emperor Charles V and held high office in the Empire, he would be the last non-Italian pope until 1978. Despite this background, Adrian—yet another student of the Brethren of the Common Life—was a reformer whose austere ways made him unpopular with some of the cardinals. After Adrian’s brief pontificate, the cardinals elected Leo’s cousin (both were Medicis from Florence) as Clement VII. Like his cousin, Clement was well-meaning but proved unable to deal with the crisis.
The Sack of Rome
Charles V, despite his sincere Catholicism, also remained committed to Hapsburg territorial claims in Italy, which from time to time put him on a collision course with the papacy. In 1527, the imperial troops—mostly mercenaries, many of them Lutherans who had not been paid for a long time—entered Rome and subjected it to a brutal sacking that went on for a week and forced Clement VII to take refuge in the Castel St. Angelo.
The Sack of Rome was one of the low points in the entire history of the city, and Clement interpreted it as divine punishment for his own sins and those of Rome. He was not inspired to embrace a reform program, but he did commission Michelangelo’s rendition of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, a terrifying reminder of sin and punishment, in dramatic contrast to the triumphant scenes of the creation the artist had painted in the same place a generation earlier.
Paul III
Papal support for the reforming impulse in the Church began with Paul III, who had led a scandalous life. He fathered children, and his ecclesiastical career flourished primarily because of his aristocratic Farnese family connections and the fact that his sister had been one of Pope Alexander VI’s mistresses. By the time of his election, he had undergone a change of heart, although he still used his office to favor his children.
The Roman Curia had for a long time been a place of notorious corruption, and Paul began the mundane but important change—implemented over decades—of the reform of canon law and papal finances, especially the abolition of the intricate network of exemptions from rules that had been the cause of so much corruption.
The Commission for Reform
Most importantly, Paul named Contarini, Carafa, Pole, and Sadoleto to a Commission for the Reform of the Church, the result of which, in 1536, was a blunt diagnosis of evils and how they were to be corrected, not sparing the papacy itself. The report contained nothing new, its importance stemming from the prestige of its authors and the fact that the Pope accepted it.
Spirituals
Protestantism placed the Spiritual party of Catholic reformers in a difficult position, since the Pauline doctrine of justification was now the principal basis of dissent from Catholic teaching, forcing men like Pole and Contarini to struggle to formulate the concept of justification by faith in such a way as also to affirm that good works did have merit in the eyes of God.
Regensburg
The viability of their position was tested in 1542, when Contarini represented the Holy See at a conference at Regensburg (Ratisbon)7 in Germany, where an attempt was made to resolve the Catholic-Lutheran differences. Luther himself did not participate, but his chief disciple, Philipp Melanchthon (d. 1560), agreed with Contarini on the nature of justification. However, there proved to be no meeting of the minds on the ecclesial issues—the priesthood, the Mass, the sacraments, and papal authority. Contarini returned to Rome and died soon afterward. The failure at Regensburg to some extent ended the Spiritualist phase of the Catholic Reformation, although it was rumored that Pole would have been elected pope in 1549 or 1550 had he indicated his willingness to accept the office.
Apostasies
The Spirituals suffered acute embarrassment when Bernardino Ochino (d. 1564), the third general of the Capuchins and a renowned preacher of reform, shocked the Catholic world by fleeing from Italy and eventually going to Geneva, where he became a Calvinist. (He moved steadily leftward in his theology and died in Poland, alienated from all recognized religious groups.) Peter Martyr Vermigli (d. 1562), another Italian theologian, also became a Protestant, as did Pietro Paulo Vergerio (d. 1565), at one time the papal nuncio to Germany.
The Council of Trent
Difficulties
Throughout the history of the Church, great crises have usually been resolved by a general council, and cries for another such meeting began almost as soon as Lateran V ended. But there were formidable issues: whether Lutherans should participate, as they demanded; whether the Council should be fully under papal authority or be semi-independent, in accord with conciliarist theory; and the degree to which secular rulers would exert influence. Not until 1545—more than a quarter of a century after the beginning of Lutheranism—were the obstacles overcome sufficiently to enable Paul III to summon a council at Trent.
Protestants were offered safe conduct to attend (none did), but with the understanding that the assembly would judge them, not engage in dialogue. The Pope remained in Rome but appointed legates directly answerable to himself. Trent, in northern Italy, was technically part of the Empire, which satisfied Charles V, but this led France in effect to boycott the proceedings, thereby leaving the Italian bishops as the large majority of the participants, along with some Spanish and Germans and a smattering of others.
Factions
There were recognizable factions at the Council, some along national lines, others doctrinal. As in previous councils, the final decrees were sometimes the result of negotiations that resulted in ambiguous wording. Debates were often acrimonious—on one occasion (reminiscent of St. Nicholas at Nicaea) a Greek bishop angrily yanked out the beard of an Italian prelate.
The Three Sessions
The first session lasted less than two years, suspended because war broke out in Germany and disease struck the city of Trent. The second session did not meet until 1555, under the aegis of Julius III (1550-1555), who had been one of the original papal legates at the Council. It too soon ended, both because of war and because, following Julius’ death and a brief interim pontificate, Carafa was elected pope as Paul IV and he opposed the Council as a threat to papal authority. The final session of Trent, by far the most productive of the three, met from 1561 to 1563 under the aegis of Pius IV (1559-1565), who officially approved all the conciliar decrees.
Doctrine and Discipline
Even before the Council, there had been differences between the Spirituals—who gave priority to reform, in the sense of correcting the abuses that Protestants attacked—and the Zealots, who favored an all-out offensive against heresy. After much debate, the Council decided to consider disciplinary and doctrinal issues simultaneously, both correcting abuses and clarifying and amplifying doctrine.
The Sins of the Clergy
The Reformation was only peripherally a protest against clerical misconduct. Zwingli, for example, admitted that as a priest he had been unchaste, and Luther jibed at fornicating clergy primarily to urge that they take wives. However, the notorious sins of so many of the clergy, including some of the highest-ranking prelates, made them less than credible as spiritual leaders.
Pluralism
The root of abuses, as had been diagnosed on many previous occasions, was the bishops’ neglect of their dioceses, where they were responsible for right order. At the beginning of the Council, there were no fewer than eighty bishops habitually living in Rome and absent from their sees, and one French cardinal simultaneously held three archbishoprics, five bishoprics, and several abbeys. Trent not only required episcopal residence but abolished pluralism and the granting (in effect selling) of exemptions from the residency rule. The Council required that those appointed bishop already be in holy orders, thereby eliminating the abuse whereby laymen (often young boys), or their families, could collect the revenues of their sees without bothering to become priests. The Council also forbade nepotism.
Episcopal Authority
Although those decrees were not controversial in themselves, they provoked debate over whether bishops received their authority from the Holy See or directly from God. Jesuit theologians in particular upheld papal authority, and some bishops expounded an ecclesiology that was almost Eastern Orthodox in its assertions of episcopal autonomy
Seminaries
While members of religious orders were adequately educated in their monasteries, and elite clergy attended universities, Trent recognized the low state of education of many of the parish clergy, most of whom in effect learned by the apprenticeship system. The Council therefore decreed that each diocese was to establish a seminary (“seed place”), where candidates for ordination could be properly formed intellectually and spiritually and carefully scrutinized as to their worthiness, an institution that came to be adopted by Protestants as well. The phenomenon of the vagabond priest was curtailed by requiring all priests to be directly under a superior and to have a specific assignment. Elaborate procedures were prescribed for dealing with this and other clerical irregularities.
Marriages
The Council forbade “clandestine marriages”—those celebrated without prior public announcement and without the presence of the parish priest and two witnesses—but at the same time it permitted marriage without the consent of the parents, something that some civil governments did not allow. It also issued miscellaneous decrees against dueling and other practices.
Clarity of Doctrine
To an extent, many Catholics in the earlier sixteenth century were responsive to Protestantism because they found themselves confronted with ideas they had never heard before. (For example, the Eucharist was sacred, but the concept of Transubstantiation meant little.) Thus the Church found herself called upon to clarify teachings that were now seen as imprecise, just as the Protestants had to formulate confessions in order to distinguish true from false understandings of the Gospel. Trent also authorized the first comprehensive catechism of Catholic doctrine.
“Anathema”
Trent condemned heretical propositions but did not attribute them to anyone by name, a procedure designed to avoid controversies as to whether particular persons actually held the condemned doctrines. Each proposition stated a false belief and declared, of those who held it, “Let them be anathema”, a Greek word for “condemned”.
Scripture
The root of all theological issues was the nature and locus of authority. The Council affirmed the authority of the Vulgate, including those books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Maccabees 1 and 2) that Protestants had rejected as uncanonical, and it declared that no one could interpret Scripture in ways contrary to the doctrines of the Church. Most significantly, the Council affirmed “unwritten tradition” as a source of truth along with the Bible, the authenticity of that tradition guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.8
Grace and Free Will
As at Regensburg, the issue of justification was recognized as both the heart of the theological conflict and as the subtlest and most difficult of issues, the opposing errors being on the one hand the Protestant denial of the efficacy of good works and on the other a Pelagian optimism about human nature.9 All sides appealed to the authority of Augustine, and Jerome Seripando (d. 1563), the general of the Augustinians, played an important role at Trent in ensuring that any condemnation of Protestantism did not catch Augustine himself in its net.
Justification
The Tridentine definition of justification was subtle. Men stood condemned because of Original Sin and were saved only by the sacrifice of Christ. They had to respond freely to the offer of salvation, but that response was made possible only by “predisposing grace” that was offered to all, without any merit on their part, since God desired that all should be saved. Once accepted, such grace rendered human works meritorious in God’s sight, so that, contrary to the Lutherans, justification was not merely “imputed” to men by a merciful God, but men were actually made righteous by Christ’s sacrifice.
Men could overcome sin, because concupiscence, although an ineradicable part of human nature, was merely a disposition to sin, not sin itself. As often as men fell, they could be raised up again, especially through the sacrament of penance, because even mortal sin caused the loss only of grace, not of faith.
Although faith was received as a gift, by cooperating with grace and performing good works, believers could grow in hope and charity and be made capable of obeying the Law. But they should also not have “vain confidence” that they could never lose the gift of salvation, as the Protestant doctrine of predestination implied, since, because of their free will, men could either grow in righteousness or lose grace through their own fault.
Indulgences
On the issue that had set off the Reformation, the Council reaffirmed the doctrine and practice of indulgences but decreed that their reception should not (except for the cruzada in Spain) be tied to any kind of monetary payment. In response to another frequent complaint, it warned against the abuse of excommunication for trivial purposes, especially those having to do with money.
Ecclesial Issues
The ecclesial issues that had made agreement impossible at Regensburg were defined with relative ease: seven sacraments rather than two; the sacraments as actually conferring grace, not merely symbolizing it; the sacraments as having their effect ex opere operato, that is, by objective divine power, not the subjective state of the priest or the recipient; the Mass as the continuation of the sacrifice of Calvary; the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; Transubstantiation; the appropriateness, therefore, of eucharistic adoration; the “power of the keys” whereby priests had the ability to forgive sins in the name of Christ; Purgatory; the invocation of the saints; the veneration of images and relics; prayers for the dead.
On disputed disciplinary issues, priestly celibacy was reaffirmed; celebration of Mass in the vernacular was forbidden; and Christ was declared to be present “whole and entire” under both eucharistic species, thus it was not necessary to receive Communion under both kinds, and laymen were not permitted to do so. As part of the renewed eucharistic piety, Trent also encouraged more frequent Communion, although—surprising to modern Catholics—the Council thought that weekly Communion was sufficient even for those in an advanced stage of training for the priesthood, and monthly Communion was sufficient for nuns.
The Jesuit Theologians
Jesuits were among the leading champions of orthodoxy. The Spaniard Diego Laynez (d. 1565), who succeeded Ignatius as General of the Society, was perhaps the most important theologian at Trent, where he especially upheld papal authority. The Netherlander St. Peter Canisius (d. 1597) guided the Counter-Reformation in Germany, writing books and pamphlets, preaching widely, and founding schools, all of which had tangible results in attracting Protestants back to Rome.
The Index
Lateran V had urged the censorship of books, and Trent renewed that demand, leading to the formal establishment of the Index of Forbidden Books, which began with theological works but eventually expanded to encompass philosophical works considered fallacious and works of fiction deemed to be immoral. Placing a book on the Index did not necessarily imply its definitive condemnation but merely that it was deemed imprudent to read it. Even high-ranking prelates might have their writings banned at least temporarily, and many books were eventually removed from the list.
Liturgy
Trent decreed almost complete uniformity of liturgy throughout the Church, something that was perhaps made possible for the first time by the printing press, which allowed the approved Roman Missal (Mass book) to be used everywhere. The expansion of the Roman Curia after the Council included a new Congregation of Rites, whose responsibility was to regulate the liturgy, and for the next four hundred years there would be almost no liturgical change.
The Tridentine Spirit
Trent was a beginning, not an end, and for the next two centuries, reform-minded popes and bishops had to struggle against entrenched political and ecclesiastical interests to implement its decrees. The spirit of the Catholic Reformation, forged at Trent, was one of strict orthodoxy and morality, deep personal piety, and obedience to Church authority, a revival that was profoundly successful in giving the Church a character that would endure for four hundred years.
Although sometimes thought of as an attempt to preserve the Middle Ages, the Catholic Reformation was in fact a new, distinctively modern chapter in the history of the Church. It was a creative period that produced new conceptions of religious life (the Jesuits), catechizing and evangelizing in ways never before attempted, and a daring new style of religious art—the Baroque.
The Effects of Trent
Pope Paul IV
Paul IV, who as a cardinal had set up the Roman Inquisition and as pope established the Index, enforced clerical good conduct by imprisoning or exiling those whom he considered corrupt and imposing draconian laws on Rome, where prostitution had been rife. At first, he blatantly favored nephews who showed themselves wholly unworthy, but eventually he turned against them.
Ignatius Loyola had his own mandate of obedience tested when Paul, an old enemy of the Jesuits, after considering suppressing the Society entirely, required the Jesuits to resume the monastic practice of the communal Office, something Ignatius thought undermined their work. (Paul’s animosity seems to have stemmed merely from his increasingly rigid suspicion of anything new.) When asked what he would do if the Society were suppressed, Ignatius responded that, after a quarter of an hour in which to collect himself, he would accept it as the divine will. He died during Paul IV’s pontificate, without knowing if his order would survive.
Pope Pius IV
Pius IV expelled his predecessor’s unworthy relatives, even executing a Carafa cardinal. Pius was himself a nepotist, but some of his relatives proved to be exemplary, notably St. Charles Borromeo (d. 1584), whom Pius made archbishop of Milan, a cardinal, and papal secretary of state when the prelate was only twenty-one years old. Borromeo proved to be the model of a Counter-Reformation bishop.
Pope Pius V
St. Pius V, the last pope to be canonized for three centuries, was an ascetic Dominican who had been head of the Inquisition and who vigorously implemented the decrees of Trent, including publishing the Catechism, Missal, and Breviary (a “short” Divine Office) authorized by the Council.
Pope Gregory XIII
Although Gregory XIII had fathered a child, he was a conscientious pope, particularly in streamlining the papal court to eliminate offices that seemed to be mere excuses to collect fees, thereby reducing some of the taxes that had aroused wide resentment. Gregory’s most lasting achievement was promulgating the new calendar that bore his name, which was devised in order to eliminate discrepancies in the existing solar calculations. Among other things, it restored January 1 as the beginning of the new year.
Pope Sixtus V
Highly unusual for the time, Sixtus V, a Franciscan of blunt manners, was of peasant origins. Like Gregory, he had led a less than exemplary life, but once elected he proved to be a draconian moralist like Paul IV, enforcing order in the Papal States, vigorously prosecuting both heresy and civil crime, even imposing the death penalty for adultery. Sixtus also continued the process of restructuring the Roman Curia, limiting membership in the College of Cardinals to seventy and transforming the cardinals from semi-independent princes into agents of papal government.
Nuncios
In the late sixteenth century, the Holy See formalized its system of papal nuncios (“heralds” or ambassadors), partly because a whole territory could be won back to the Church if the ruler himself were converted. One Jesuit was sent as papal nuncio to the court of Ivan IV the Terrible of Russia (1533-1584), without result. Two others were dispatched to Sweden, where they disguised their identities from everyone but a receptive King John III (1568-1592), who secretly converted but returned to Lutheranism when Gregory XIII refused to authorize priestly marriage, the Mass in the vernacular, or Communion in both kinds for the laity.
Saints
Borromeo
The key to reform at the local level was a zealous bishop, of whom there were an increasing number after the midpoint of the century. Borromeo was the model, leading an austere life of prayer and penance, visiting plague victims, and relentlessly striving to reform his clergy. Zealous reformers could expect sometimes fierce resistance—a group of unreformed Franciscans in Milan tried to have Borromeo assassinated as he presided at Vespers in his cathedral, and St. John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes, d. 1591), who was involved in reforming the Carmelites, was at one point abducted by some of his brethren, kept a prisoner, and severely beaten.
Francis Borgia
Witness to the success of reform was St. Francis Borgia (d. 1572), a Spanish duke who first brought the Jesuits into his territory, then joined them, becoming Ignatius’ second successor as general of the Society. Borgia was the great-grandson of the wicked Pope Alexander VI and the grandson of an archbishop.
Teresa of Avila
St. Teresa of Avila (Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, d. 1582) joined a Carmelite convent whose nuns were mostly aristocrats who, by traditional Carmelite standards, led somewhat pampered lives. But she underwent a conversion and as mother superior began reforming her convent, requiring the nuns once again to go without shoes (“discalced”); enforcing a strict discipline of prayer, poverty, and self-denial; abolishing the requirement that novices bring dowries with them; and refusing to recognize worldly rank within the convent. Because of this, she was called upon to reform Carmelite houses all over Spain, where she often encountered fierce resistance, and she also founded a number of new convents.
Philip Neri
St. Philip Neri (d. 1595) was an eccentric Roman priest who took delight in revelry and jokes and often wore odd clothes. He gathered together a group of men to work among the poor, then formed them into a new community, the Oratorians (from the Latin word for “prayer”), who reflected their founder’s informal style, eschewing a strict rule and constituting themselves as diocesan priests living in communities. While the Jesuits conducted highly structured retreats, the Oratorians practiced a less formal kind of spirituality, such as small groups that met to pray and discuss spiritual books.
Spiritual Renewal
Penance
Amidst all the upheavals of the century, a great spiritual revival occurred under Catholic auspices. Though in response to the long-standing dissatisfactions with the overly formal, even mechanical, nature of so much traditional piety, the movement was intensified by the Protestant emphasis on faith as an interior state of soul. Trent, in this as in other things, sought for unity between interior and exterior, as in its approach to the sacrament of penance: the formal confession of mortal sins to a priest was required but great stress was also laid on genuine contrition.
Reform of lay morals was part of the general program of renewal, so that in places visited by vigorous preachers there was sometimes a measurable decline in the rate of illegitimate births. Frequent recourse to the sacrament of penance was taken as a hallmark of authentic Catholicism, the primary means through which lay people were disciplined in the practice of their faith. One Jesuit church in Cologne had twenty confessionals to accommodate the large numbers of penitents, and in Spain, vigilant clergy kept track of those who failed to confess, regarding it not only as moral laxity but as a possible sign of heresy
The Spiritual Exercises
Recalling the spiritual confusion he had encountered among his fellow students in Spain, Ignatius conceived the characteristically bold idea that lay people and secular clergy needed spiritual formation just as vowed religious did. Some late-medieval spiritual directors urged their disciples to undertake “spiritual exercises”—planned and organized regimens of prayer and penance—and Ignatius, who was familiar with much of that literature, composed the “Spiritual Exercises” as a handbook for spiritual directors, laying out for the first time a systematic plan for what came to be called “retreats”.
Ignatius had mystical experiences, some of whose authenticity he eventually came to doubt, but Jesuit spirituality was forged primarily for people living in the world. The Exercises were rigorous and systematic, embodying a shrewd understanding of human psychology. Retreatants were to proceed step by step, day by day, beginning with an acute awareness of their own sinfulness and a sincere desire to repent, and with “discernment of spirits”—the ability to recognize when inspirations were from God and when they might originate merely from the individual himself or even from the devil. The retreatants proceeded through a systematic meditation on the Gospels and at a climactic moment were asked to visualize two armies confronting one another across a battlefield—one the army of Christ, the other of Satan—and commanded to make a deliberate choice between them. Having chosen Christ, they were then to embark on a regimen of penance, prayer, and meditation that prepared them to do battle for Him in the world. Frequent confession, preceded by an exacting examination of conscience, was one of the principal means by which the individual maintained his commitment to Christ. At the end, the individual was to assess his concrete situation in terms of how best he could promote the greater glory of God.
Part of the effectiveness of the Spiritual Exercises was that they were adaptable to individual needs and to people at various stages of spiritual development—vocal prayer, which was the recitation of verbal formulae; mental prayer or meditation, which was consciously thinking about holy themes, especially from Scripture; and contemplation, which meant placing oneself in the presence of God and allowing the sense of His presence to suffuse the soul.
Mysticism
The Catholic mystical tradition was carried to new heights during the sixteenth century, especially by the Carmelites in Spain. This greatest flowering of mysticism in the history of the Church, while remaining firmly Catholic, plumbed the interior of the soul more deeply than any Protestant undertook to do.
Teresa of Avila
Besides reforming the Carmelite order, the mystic St. Teresa of Avila wrote a series of books—her autobiography, The Interior Castle, and others—that described the movement of the soul toward God more fully than anyone else had ever done. For Teresa, the spiritual life was not the deliberate cultivation of esoteric experiences but simply living and praying as a Christian should. The mystical experience was not to be sought for its own sake, nor was it an exotic psychological state; it was simply the culmination of a life lived entirely for God.
The Practical Life
Although in the mystical experience the soul transcended the mundane world, it did not abandon the world. To the contrary, Teresa, who was herself intensely active all her life, insisted that the spiritual life be lived amidst daily responsibilities, to the point where she even urged superiors to restrict the time for prayer of nuns who neglected their mundane duties.
Orthodoxy
If some earlier schools of mysticism were suspected of heterodoxy, Teresa insisted on complete adherence to the teachings of the Church. Not well-educated herself, she told her readers to submit themselves to the judgment of competent theologians. She was the first woman to be declared a doctor of the Church, because what she lacked in formal theology she more than made up for in spiritual wisdom.
Consolations
For Teresa, as with Ignatius, the individual began with an acute sense of sin and a determination to live a life of virtue, implicitly affirming the efficacy of good works, and proceeding humbly, by means of vocal prayer. (Teresa herself once went for eighteen years unable to pray except from a book.) As the soul entered more deeply into the life of prayer, it received many graces, especially joyful “consolations”, sometimes even visions. Such experiences were a sign of progress in the spiritual life but could also prove treacherous if the soul were insufficiently cautious.
Purgation and Illumination
The next stage of development—the “purgative (purifying) way” identified by some previous mystics—occurred when Christ began to strip from the soul everything that was self-centered, depriving it of its comforts. Instead, the soul experienced sufferings, no longer feeling itself to be especially blessed but, to the contrary, having a heightened sense of its own wretchedness. It was thereby emptied, Teresa explained, in order to be filled by a truth that was wholly divine and that enabled the soul to rise above the world and to understand the things of Heaven. This was the “illuminative way” of traditional mysticism. The soul was now blind, in contrast to the many ideas and images it previously had enjoyed, but it was the paradoxical kind of blindness caused by light itself.
Unity
Teresa described the soul’s intricate journey into the deepest chamber of itself, where the Bridegroom lived, a journey that could be completed only by a wholly passive surrender to the divine will. In this “unitive way”, the soul finally achieved fulfillment of its longing. Teresa described this as an ecstasy, in which her heart was pierced by an arrow and she was set on fire by the Bridegroom’s all-consuming love, a pain that she hoped would last forever.
John of the Cross
John of the Cross was a younger contemporary of Teresa, and their paths crossed briefly. Since he was a learned theologian, his writings were more systematic than hers, although perhaps less direct and vivid. His major work, The Dark Night of the Soul, described the sense of utter abandonment that the soul experienced as it was being led into the high realms of spiritual union.10
The Arts
One of the major religious divisions of the age was not over doctrine as such but between liturgical and nonliturgical churches—Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans in the first group, Calvinists and others in the second—a division that profoundly affected the arts.
Protestant Divisions
Thus Zwinglians, and after them Calvinists, smashed statues and stained-glass windows, whitewashed the inside of churches, and allowed no music except the unaccompanied chanting of Psalms. Rembrandt was practically the only Calvinist artist of note, and biblical scenes were practically the only acceptable form of Protestant religious art, although even they were not permitted in churches. In this as in other things, Luther proved to be the most conservative of the Reformers, retaining vestments, candles, altar crosses, paintings, instrumental music, even, for a time, incense and Latin. Swedish Lutherans especially retained a particularly “high” kind of liturgy.
The Tridentine Spirit
Catholic churches, on the other hand, were huge, lavishly decorated buildings that, along with being places of worship, were in effect museums of painting and sculpture. Trent enjoined an austerity in art and music thought appropriate to the spirit of reform; however, appropriately, the Catholic Reformation inspired great artistic creations (including drama), since one of the most profound differences with Protestantism was the Catholic mediation of the spiritual through the material.
The Baroque
This sacramentalism justified the dazzling new expressions of art and music called the Baroque, a term of uncertain origin. (Because of the Baroque’s departures from the ideal symmetries of classical art, it may have derived from a Portuguese word for a twisted pearl.) The Baroque was the preeminent art of the Catholic Reformation, uniting doctrinal orthodoxy with dramatically new stylistic forms. Like the organization of the Jesuits, it was a major example of the highly innovative, in some ways even revolutionary, creativity of the sixteenth-century Church.
The Baroque spread as far as Latin America and Japan, but it flourished best in Europe, its exuberance stemming from religion but made possible by the aristocratic mentality that disdained economic prudence and spent lavishly as a sign of wealth and generosity It was used also in palaces and public buildings and at one extreme could shade into a mere reveling in sensual splendor.
Patrons
Both lay and ecclesiastical princes, especially the great papal families of the age—Medici, Farnese, Borghese, Barberini—commissioned artistic works that proclaimed their piety but also their importance. Typically, the façade of St. Peter’s in Rome, completed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (d. 1680), announced not only its patron saint but Paul V Borghese (1605-1621), one of the popes who brought it to completion. Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa was in a chapel whose patrons, the Coronari family, looked down on her from the box of a theatre, and it embodied the ambiguity of so much Renaissance art: a powerful dramatization of the mystical experience that could also be seen as a celebration of human passion.
Dynamism
Since the universal harmony of Christendom had been shattered, the religious conflicts of the age seemed, at least temporarily, to render the serene spiritual harmonies of the Gothic impossible. Thus the Baroque expressed dynamism rather than settled order and the restless rather than the untroubled spirit. Its palpable stylistic tensions were perfectly suited to express the dramatic struggle to subdue the will, which presupposed the Catholic affirmation of free will and the efficacy of good works. In the Baroque, peace of soul was attainable only through intense and unceasing struggle, as in the Spiritual Exercises and the interior journeys of the mystics. The mystical experience was the highest expression of this striving, making the Ecstasy of St. Teresa perhaps the highest achievement of Baroque sculpture—the saint swooning as an angel pierced her heart with a golden arrow.
Rising to the Heavens
The Baroque expressed energies barely held in, the exuberant urge to break through boundaries, restlessness channeled into a longing for infinity, the desire to rise above the mundane world, access to the eternal through the temporal. The path to Heaven was a strenuous one, but glorious rewards were visible to those who dared look up as they struggled. Thus at ground level, Baroque art might portray bewilderingly complex worldly scenes, then lead the eye higher and higher, often culminating in domes painted so as to seem open to the sky, where people visibly escaped into the heavens, where the visible and the invisible, the finite and the infinite, the natural and the supernatural dramatically and gloriously united.
Saints Triumphant
Baroque art tended to be highly celebratory, representing great spiritual triumphs, with creativity lavished on the tombs of both secular and ecclesiastical princes, as in the papal tombs in Rome, which did not invite the viewer to “remember death” but instead represented the popes enthroned and bestowing their blessings. A favorite theme was the entry of a saint into Heaven, as on the tombs of Philip Neri and Ignatius Loyola in their respective Roman churches. Ignatius’ tomb showed not only his entry into Heaven but a sculpted representation of damnation—two naked men tumbled into Hell as angels ripped out the pages of heretical books identified on their spines as having been written by Luther and Calvin.
The Piety of Artists
The artists of the age were not merely filling commissions; Michelangelo, Bernini, Palestrina, and most others were devout Catholics who expressed their faith through their creations. Michelangelo agonized over his sins, and in The Last Judgment he allegedly painted himself on the skin of St. Bartholomew, which the saint, who was flayed alive, is holding over Hell.
Architecture
The renewed emphasis on eucharistic piety had effects on architecture. The altar was the focus of the worshipper’s attention, often under a magnificent canopy, and the tabernacle was set on the high altar as a visible affirmation of the Real Presence. Churches were built as large open spaces, without rood screens and with as few pillars as possible, in order not to interfere with the worshippers’ view of the altar and the monstrance. Since Jesuits did not celebrate the Divine Office in common, their churches also dispensed with the choir stalls that separated the laity from the sanctuary in many medieval churches.
The Church Triumphant
As the Baroque style developed, it became the vehicle of Catholic triumph, celebrating an admittedly partial victory over Protestantism and a successful reassertion of the Church’s spiritual authority. The theme of the triumph of the soul over the heaviness of earth—its flight to the heavenly realms—blended almost imperceptibly into the celebration of the triumph of the Church over her enemies, both merging into a single event in which the victory of truth over falsehood made possible the soul’s triumph over evil.
Rome Rebuilt
Sixtus V systematically rebuilt Rome around its most important churches, putting the statues of Peter and Paul on top the columns of the Roman emperors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and setting up Egyptian obelisks at strategic points around the city, each surmounted by a cross, thereby symbolizing the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The papal project of rebuilding the city provided unparalleled opportunities for architects and artists, and, among others, the Jesuits and the Oratorians commissioned great churches in the new style—Philip Neri the Chiesa Nuova (“new church”) and the Jesuits the Church of the Gesù—although there was some tension between Tridentine austerity and the new style.
St. Peter’s Completed
Urban VIII (1623-1644), during whose pontificate the Papal States reached their greatest extent, opened St. Peter’s Basilica in 1626 as the greatest structure in Christendom, where almost every detail was a proclamation of a faith that had survived its greatest crisis: the papal throne and the giant statue of St. Peter reaffirming papal authority, the pillars around the high altar serving as huge reliquaries, the wide panoply of saints overlooking St. Peter’s Square promising their protection and intercession to the faithful. The opening of St. Peter’s marked the successful completion of a project that had begun as a disaster, when the indulgence preached on its behalf triggered events that seemed to threaten the end of the Church. Both the brand-new churches and the rebuilt older ones were monumental testimonies to the revival of the papacy and of the Church herself.