§ 2. The Italian Roman Catholic Reformers.
There is no evidence of any widespread acceptance of the whole of Luther’s teaching, little appreciation of the thought that the Church may be conceived as a fellowship of God with man depending on the inscrutable purpose of God and independent of all visible outward organisation, none of the idea that the Visible Church Catholic exists one and indivisible in the many forms in which men combine to listen to the Word and to manifest their faith. The Catholic Church was always to these pious Italians the great historical and external institution with its hierarchy, and its visible head in the Bishop of Rome. A reform of the Church meant for them the reformation of that institution. So long as this was denied them they could always worship within the sanctuary of their own souls, and they could enjoy the converse of likeminded friends. So there came into existence coteries of pious Italians who met to encourage each other, and to plan the restoration of religion within the Church. Humanism had left its mark on all of them, and their reunions were called academies, after the Platonic academies of the earlier Renaissance. The first had come into being before the death of Leo. X.—a society of pious laymen and prelates, who met in the little church of Santi Silvestro et Dorotea in the Trastevere in Rome. The associates were more than fifty in number, and they were all distinguished by their love of the New Learning, the strict purity of their lives, and their devotion to the theology of St. Augustine. The members were scattered after the sack of Rome (1527), but this Oratory of Divine Love gave rise to many kindred associations within which the original members found a congenial society.
The most important found a home in Venice. Its most prominent members were Gasparo Contarini, a distinguished Senator, who afterwards was induced to become a Cardinal. With him were Cardinal Caraffa, already meditating upon taking another path, and Gregorio Cortese, then Abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore. The friends met in the beautiful garden of the convent. All shades of opinion were represented in this circle, where Humanists and Churchmen met to exchange views about a reformation of the Church. To share in such intercourse, Reginald Pole willingly spent his days far from his native England. Cardinal Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno, gathered a similar company around him at Genoa; and Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona, collected likeminded friends to talk about the possibilities of reformation. Modena and Padua had their Christian academies also. Nor must the influence of well-born, cultured and pious ladies be forgotten.
Renée, Duchess of Ferrara and daughter of Louis XII. of France, had accepted the Reformation in its entirety, and had surrendered herself to the guidance of Calvin. She corresponded with the great Frenchman and with Bullinger. She sheltered persecuted Italian Protestants, or had them safely conveyed to Switzerland.[657] But she saw good wherever it was to be found. Her letters, instinct with Christian graciousness, remind the reader of those of her kinswoman Marguerite of Navarre. She was full of sympathy with the circle of men and women who longed for a regeneration of Italy; and it is interesting to notice how the far more highly gifted Vittoria Colonna leant on the woman whose spiritual insight was deeper, and whose heart was purified by the trials which her decision in religious matters made her pass through.
Caterina Cybó, a niece of Pope Clement, Princess of Camerino, Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, Julia Gonzaga at Naples, and Vittoria Colonna at Viterbo and at Rome, formed a circle of highly intellectual and deeply pious women, who by their letters and intercourse inspired men who were working for the regeneration of the Church in Italy.
The network of their correspondence covered Italy from Venice to Naples and from Genoa to Camerino, and the letters exchanged between Marguerite of Navarre and Vittoria Colonna extended the influence of the association beyond the peninsula. The correspondents, men and women, regarded themselves as a band of companions pledged to each other to work together for the Reformation of the Church and of society. It is not easy to describe their aims, for they contented themselves for the most part with vague aspirations; and they all had their favourite likes and dislikes. It is impossible to doubt their earnestness, but it was of the high-bred placid kind. It had nothing of the Spanish exaltation of Teresa, of the German vehemence of Luther, of the French passion scarcely veiled by the logical precision of Calvin. They all admired St. Francis, but in a way out of sympathy with the common people, for they looked on asceticism with a mild wonder, and had no eagerness for that type of the imitation of Christ. Vittoria Colonna indeed found the convent at Viterbo a pleasant retreat for a few weeks at a time. A sigh sometimes escaped her that perhaps the nuns were all Marys who had chosen the better part, but that was only when she was weary with the perversities of the incomprehensible world. Their correspondence suggests an academy of the earlier Italian Renaissance, where the theory of Ideas had given way to doctrines of Justification, and the Epistles of St. Paul had taken the place of the Dialogues of Plato. There is a touch of dilettantism in their habits of thought, and a savour of the eighteenth century Salon in their intercourse. They longed to mediate between contending parties in the religious strife which was convulsing Europe beyond the Alps and might invade Italy; but they were unfit for the task. A true via media can only be found by men who see both sides of the controversy in the clear vision of thought, not by men who perceive neither distinctly. Sadoleto, to take one example, declared that he could see much to admire in the German Reformation, but what he approved were only the external portions which came from Humanism, not those elements which made the movement a religious revival. He disliked Luther, but had a great esteem for Bucer and Melanchthon. Indeed, the Italian Cardinal may be called the Melanchthon of Romanism. Melanchthon, rooted in Protestantism, felt compelled by his intellectual sympathy and humility to believe that there was some good in Romanism and to try to find it; Sadoleto, rooted in Romanism, was impelled to some sympathy with the Protestant theology. He had, however, a fatal lack of precision of thought. One doctrine tended to slide insensibly into another, into its opposite even, under the touch of his analysis. The man who could defend and commend auricular confession because it was an example of Christian humility, and saint-worship because it was a testimony to the immortality of the soul, ran the risk of being regarded as a trifler by Protestants and a traitor by Romanists. Such was his fate.
Contemporary with these offshoots from the Oratory of Divine Love was a revival among some of the monastic orders in Italy which had distinct connection with some of the members of the associations above mentioned.
The most important for its influence on the religious life of the people was the Order of the Capucins. It took its rise from Matteo de Grassis, a man of no intellectual powers, but endowed with more than the usual obstinacy of the Italian peasant. He was an Umbrian, like Francis himself. He belonged to a district where traditions of the great mediæval revivalist had been handed down from parents to children for generations, and one of these insisted that St. Francis had worn a hood with its peak pointed and not rounded, as the fashion among the monks then was. He declared that St. Francis had appeared to him in a vision, and had said that the brethren of the order ought to obey his rules “to the letter, to the letter, to the letter.” He for one resolved to obey. He threw away rounded hood and wore one with pointed peak. The peasants refused to recognise the novelty, and drove him off with stones; his brethren argued with him, and belaboured him with their fists; but Matteo stuck to his pointed hood. The shape was nothing, but the Founder’s commands were everything; Matteo would die before he would wear the rounded thing which had never been hallowed by St. Francis. The Princess Caterina Cybó took compassion on the hunted man, and gave him an asylum within her little principality of Camerino, where he wore his pointed capuze in peace. He soon sank back into the obscurity from which he had for a moment emerged. But new life was stirring among the Franciscans. Many were dissatisfied with the laxity of the order, and were longing for a monastic Reformation. All down the Middle Ages the watchword of every monastic revival had been, “Back to the Founder’s rules.” The pointed hood was a trifle, but it was the symbol of a return to the rigid discipline of Francis. Men heard that Camerino was an asylum for Franciscans discontented with the laxity of the superiors of the order, and gradually they flocked to the little principality. Vittoria Colonna had long mourned over the decadence of the genuine monastic life; she encouraged her friend the Princess Caterina to beseech her uncle the Pope to permit the pointed hood, and gradually there came into being a new fresh offshoot of the Franciscans, called the Capucins, who revived the traditions of St. Francis, and went preaching among the villages after the fashion of his earlier followers. Francis had told his disciples to beware of books when making their sermons; he had advised them to talk to the women as they washed, Italian fashion, by the side of streams, to masons while they were hewing, to artisans at their work, to find out what their religious difficulties were, what prevented them becoming really Christians in their lives, and then to discourse on the things they had heard. This old Franciscan preaching was restored by the Capucins, and they did more than any others to bring the people of Italy back to the discredited Church. They were accused of heresy. What “reformation” of the Franciscans was not? They were called Lutherans; and a good deal of Luther’s Evangelical teaching was unconsciously presented in their sermons; but they could always quote St. Francis for what they said; and who could gainsay what Francis had taught?
This monastic revival affected the commonalty; another spoke to the educated classes. As early as 1504 an attempt had been made to reorganise the great Benedictine order, and a number of Benedictine abbeys had united to form a Congregation, which soon after its institution took the name of the Benedictine Mother-Cloister, Monte Cassino. Gregorio Cortese, one of the members of the Oratory of Divine Love, entered into the movement, and as Abbot of the Benedictine convent on the Island of Lerina on the Riviera, and afterwards in the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, led his monks to show that their convents were the centres of learning dedicated to the service of the Church. He interested himself more especially in historical studies with a view of maintaining the historic traditions of the Church, which were beginning to be shaken by historical criticism, then in its infancy.
The improvement of the secular clergy was more important for the Church in Italy than any reforms of the monastic orders. An attempt to do this was begun by two members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Giovanni Pietro Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Their idea was that in every diocese there ought to be a small band of men doing the work of secular clergy but bound by monastic vows. Their idea was taken from Augustine’s practice of living monastically with some of his clergy; and fulfilled itself in the order of the Theatines. The name was derived from Theate (Chieti), the small See of which Caraffa was Bishop. These picked clergy were to be to the Bishop what his staff is to a general. The Theatines were not to be numerous, still less to include the whole secular clergy of a diocese; but they were to incite by precept, and above all by example, to a truly clerical life. The idea spread, and similar associations arose all over Italy.[658]
Such were the preparations in Italy for the Counter-Reformation. There was no prospect of any attempt to set the Church in order while Pope Clement VII. lived. He exhausted all his energies in preventing the summoning of a General Council—a measure on which Charles V. was growing more and more set as the only means of ending the religious dispute in Germany.
The accession of Paul III. (1534) seemed to inaugurate a new era full of hopes for the advocates of reform at the centre of the Roman Church. The new Pope made Gasparo Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, and Pole Cardinals. A Bull, which remained unpublished, was read in the Consistory (January 1536), sketching the possibility of reforming the Curia. The Pope appointed a commission of nine members to report upon the needful reforms, and the commission was everywhere regarded as a sort of preliminary Council, a body of men who were appointed to investigate and tabulate a programme of necessary reforms to be laid before a General Council. The Commissioners were Contarini, Caraffa, Ghiberti, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, all of whom had been members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Aleander who had been Nuncio at the Diet of Worms, and Tomaso Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. They met and drafted a report which was presented to the Pope in 1537, and is known as the Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum prælatorum de emendanda ecclesia. A more scathing indictment of the condition of the Roman Church could scarcely be imagined, nor one which spoke more urgently of the need of radical reformation. Its very thoroughness was disconcerting. It revealed so many scandals connected with the Papacy that it was resolved not to make it known. But it had been printed as a private document; a copy somehow or other reached Germany; it was at once republished there, with comments showing how a papal commission itself had justified all the German demands for a reformation of the Church. At Rome the appearance of reforming activity was maintained. Contarini, Caraffa, Aleander, and Badia were appointed to investigate the workings of those departments of the Curia which had most to do with the abuses detailed in the report of the Commission of Nine—the Chancery, the Datary, and the Penitentiary, where reservations, dispensations, exemptions, etc., were given and registered. They presented their report in the autumn of 1537. It was entitled Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo III. super reformatione sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ. But Contarini evidently felt that the Pope needed pressing. When the Commission of Nine had been appointed, the Pope had summoned a General Council to meet at Mantua in May 1537, in a Bull published on May 29th, 1536, and had also published a Bull of Reformation in September of that year. The Council never met—the war between Charles V. and Francis I. preventing. The Council was then summoned to meet at Vicenza, but was again postponed. The Emperor had no wish for a General Council in Italy, and the Pope was determined not to call one to meet in Germany. In these circumstances Contarini published his Epistola de potestate Pontificis in usu clavium, and his De potestate Pontificis in Compositionibus.[659]
Historians differ about the sincerity of Pope Paul III. in the matter of reform, and there is room for two opinions. His Italian policy was anti-Hapsburg, and the German Romanist Princes, at all events, had little belief in his sincerity, and were seriously meditating on following the example of Henry VIII. Cardinal Morone, the Nuncio in Germany, made no concealment of the difficulties attending the position of the Romanist Church there, and urged continually substantial reforms in Italy, and the necessity of a General Council. Perhaps these energetic messages stirred the Pope to renewed activity in Rome, and also to the necessity of formulating a definite policy with regard to the Lutherans beyond the Alps. In April (1540) commissions were appointed to reform certain offices in the Curia—the Rota, the Chancery, and the Penitentiary. Consultations were held about how to deal with the state of affairs in Germany. For the moment the ideas of the more liberal-minded Italian Reformers were in the ascendant. Charles had determined to find out whether it was not possible to reunite the broken Church in Germany. Conferences were to be held with the leading Lutheran theologians. The Pope determined to reject the advice of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, and to refrain from pronouncing judgment on a series of Lutheran propositions sent to him for condemnation. Cardinal Contarini, whose presence had been urgently required by the Emperor, was permitted to cross the Alps to see, in conference with distinguished Lutherans, whether some common terms of agreement might be arrived at which would serve as a programme to be set before the General Council, which all were agreed must be summoned sometime soon.
§3. Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa.
This mission of Contarini’s to Germany dates the separation between two different ways of proposing to deal with the Reformation movement. The two methods were embodied in two men, Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa. They had both belonged to the Oratory of Divine Love; they were both zealous to see the Church reformed in the sense of reviving its moral and spiritual life; they both longed to see the rent which had made itself apparent repaired, and the Church again reunited. They differed entirely about the means to be adopted to bring about the desirable end. The differences originated in the separate characters and training of the two leaders.
Gasparo Contarini belonged to an ancient patrician family of Venice, and spent the greater portion of his life in the service of the Republic. He was looked on as the ablest and most upright of its statesmen. He had drunk deeply of the well of the New Learning, and yet can hardly be called a Humanist. He had been a student at Padua, and had there studied and learned to appreciate Scholastic Theology. He had been trained as a Venetian statesman, and clung to the political ideas of the mediæval jurisprudence. The whole round of mediæval thought encircled and possessed him. Christendom was one great commonwealth, and embodied three great imperialist ideas—a world King, the Emperor; a world priest, the Pope; a realm of sanctified science, the Scholastic Philosophy under Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. He held these three conceptions in a broad-minded and liberal way. There was room under the Emperor for a community of Christian States, under the Pope for a brotherhood of national Churches, under Scholastic for the New Learning and what it brought to enrich the mind of mankind.
Erasmus had ridiculed Scholastic; Contarini’s friend Cortese called it a farrago of words; Luther had maintained that it sounded hollow because at its centre was the vague eternal Something of Pagan Philosophy and not the Father who had revealed His heart in Jesus Christ; but Contarini saw the grandeur of the imposing edifice, believed in its solidity, and would do nothing to destroy it. But this did not prevent him sympathising strongly with Luther’s doctrine of Justification by Faith, nor from believing that room might be found for it and other Protestant conceptions within the circle of medieval theological thought. He had little sympathy with the enthusiasm which some of his friends—Cardinal Pole for example—expressed for Plato. Aristotle was for him the great master-builder of human systematic thinking; but the Aristotle he recognised as the Master was not the sage revealed in the Greek text or commentaries (although he studied both), but the Aristotle who had cast his spell over Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was firmly persuaded that the Bishop of Rome was the Head of the Church, and as such had his place in the political system of Christendom from which he could not be removed without serious danger to the whole existing framework of society; but he looked on the Pope as a constitutional monarch bound to observe in his own person the ecclesiastical laws imposed by his authority on the Christian world. Luther, he believed, had recognised this in his earlier writings, and in this recognition lay the possibilities of a readjustment which would bring Christendom together again. On the other hand, Calvin’s Institutio filled him with mingled admiration and dread. He recognised it to be the ablest book which the Protestant movement had produced; but the thought of a Christian democracy with which it was permeated, the stress it laid on the procession of the divine purpose down through the ages, and the manner in which it taught the prevenience of divine grace, were conceptions whose acceptance, he thought, would be dangerous to the political governance of mankind.
He dwelt with complacency on the thought that he had never longed for ecclesiastical place or power. The Pope had persuaded him to permit himself to be made Cardinal because the Holy See had need of his service. He was conscious with a sort of proud humility that he was generally esteemed the foremost Italian of his generation, that enthusiastic friends spoke of his learning and virtue as “more divine than human.” He thought much more of his position as a Venetian Senator and the trusted counsellor of the Republic, whose constitution he believed to be the embodiment of the best political principles of the time, than he did of his place in the Roman Court. “I for my part, to tell the truth, do not think that the Red Hat is my highest honour,” he was accustomed to say. Such was the leader of the liberal-minded Roman Catholics of Italy, who was asked by the Pope and urgently entreated by the Emperor to visit Germany and end the schism by his persuasions.
Giovanni Picture’s Caraffa, the intimate, the rival and the supplanter of Contarini, belonged to one of the oldest noble families of Naples. His house was intimately allied to the Church, and for more than one hundred years its members had been Archbishops of Naples, and several had been made Cardinals. The boy was destined for the Church. As a child he had longed to enter a cloister, and had once set out to join the Dominicans. His family, however, had other views for him. He was sent when eighteen years of age to the papal court, and was soon almost burdened with marks of distinction and with offices. He had been highly educated while at Naples, and had steeped himself in the New Learning. At the Humanist Courts of Alexander VI. and Julius II. he studied Greek and Hebrew, and became an accomplished theologian besides. In 1504, much against his will, he had been consecrated Bishop of the small diocese of Chieti (Theate), lying in the wild Abruzzi district, almost due east of Rome, on the slopes from the highest spurs of the Apennines to the Adriatic. He found his people demoralised by constant feuds, and the priests worse than their parishioners. Caraffa, determined to reduce his unruly diocese to order, began with persuasion; and finding this of small avail, flogged people and clergy into something like decency by repeated spiritual censures and rigidly enforced excommunications. His methods revealed the man. His talents were of too high an order and his family influence too great to permit him to linger in his uncivilised diocese. He was sent as Nuncio to England and thence to Spain. His visit to the latter country made an indelible impression on his strong nature. His earnest petitions for the independence of his native Naples were contemptuously refused by the young King Charles, and the fierce Neapolitan pursued the Emperor with an undying hatred. But what was more important, his stay in Spain imbued him with the ideas of the Spanish Reformation. He was too much an Italian and too strong a believer in the papal supremacy to adopt the thought of secular interference in the affairs of the Church, but with that exception the Spanish method of renovating the Church took possession of him heart and soul. The germs of fanaticism, hitherto sleeping within him, were awakened to life, and never afterwards slumbered. He sympathised with the projects of Adrian VI., and was a power during his brief pontificate. During the reign of Clement VII. he took little part in public affairs, but all the attempts to put new life into the monastic orders were assisted by him. He viewed with some suspicion the attempt to conciliate the Germans; and the results of Contarini’s dealing with the Protestants at Regensburg filled him with alarm.
Contarini’s attempt to reunite the Church by reconciliation was twenty years too late. It is doubtful whether anyone in Germany save the Emperor had much faith in the uniting influences of a conference. Morone, who had for years represented the Vatican at the Court of Ferdinand of Austria, and who was perpetually urging the Pope to summon a General Council, was afraid ever since Hagenau that conferences benefited the Protestants more than the Romanists. Contarini himself had said that what was needed to overcome the German movement was neither conferences nor discussions about doctrine, but a Reformation in morals. The Curia regarded his mission as a dangerous experiment. They tied his hands as firmly as they could by his letter of instructions: He was to inform the Emperor that no Legate, not even the Pope himself until he had consulted the other nations, could modify the doctrines of the Church for the sake of the Germans; he was to do his utmost to prevent the assembly of a National Council for Germany. He heard from Paris that the French Romanists believed that he was about to betray the Church to the heretics. No one encouraged him except his own circle of immediate friends. The men with whom he was to work, Cardinal de Granvelle and Dr. Eck, were suspicious of him and of his antecedents. Nevertheless his natural and confirmed optimism urged him to the task.
The situation, looked at broadly and from the point of view taken by a contemporary who had made himself acquainted with the theology and constitution of the mediæval Church, was not so hopeless as it must seem to us with the history of what followed to enlighten us. The great mass of mediæval doctrines lay uncodified. They were not codified until the Council of Trent. The extreme claims made by the supporters of a papal absolutism—claims which may be briefly expressed by the sentence: The Church Universal is condensed in the Roman Church, and the Roman Church is represented by the Pope—which had been used to crush the Lutheran movement in its earliest stages, were of recent origin. Curialism could be represented to be almost as much opposed to the mediæval theory of the Church as anything that Luther had brought forward. There was a real via media, if it could only be discovered and defined. The commonplace opinions of men who were sincerely attached to the mediæval conception of the Church, with its claims to catholicity, with its doctrines, usages, ceremonies and hierarchy, could scarcely be better represented than in the declaration said to have been made by Charles V. to his sister Maria, his governor in the Netherlands:
“It happened that on the Vigil of St. John the Baptist the Emperor held a banquet in the garden. Now, when Queen Maria asked him what he thought of doing with the people and with the Confession (the Augsburg) that had been presented, he made reply: ‘Dear Sister, when I was made chief of the Holy Roman Empire, the great complaint reached me that the people who profess this doctrine were more wicked than the devil. But the Bishop of Seville gave me the advice that I should not think of acting tyrannically, but should ascertain whether the doctrine is at variance with the articles of the Christian faith (the Apostles’ Creed). This advice pleased me, and so I find that the people are not so devilish as had been represented; nor is the subject of dispute the Twelve Articles, but a matter lying outside them, which I have therefore handed over to the scholars. If their doctrine had been in conflict with the Twelve Articles I should have been disposed to apply the edge of the sword.’”[660]
The Twelve Articles, as the Apostles’ Creed was called, always occupied a peculiar position in the Western Church. They were believed to contain the whole of the theologia revelata. The great Schoolmen of the most opposite parties (Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus alike) were accustomed to deduce from the Apostles’ Creed fourteen propositions, seven on God and seven on the Incarnation, and to declare that they contained the sum of revealed theology; everything else was natural theology on which men might differ without being considered to have abandoned the essentials of the Christian faith. Charles V. had been taught at first, probably by Aleander’s insistent reiterations, that Luther had denied some portion of this revealed theology; he had come to learn that he had been wrongly informed; therefore conference and adjustment were possible.
Men like Charles V. and Contarini could honestly believe that so far as doctrine was concerned a compromise might be effected.
§ 4. The Conference at Regensburg.
The Diet was opened at Regensburg in February 1541. The Emperor explained his position and intentions. He declared that the most important duty before them was to try to heal the division in religion which was separating Germany into two opposing parties. The one duty of the hour was to endeavour to come to a unanimous decision on religious matters, and to bring about this he proposed to name some peace-loving men who could confer together upon the points in debate. Count Frederick of the Palatinate, brother of the Elector, and Cardinal de Granvelle were nominated presidents: three pronounced Protestants, two pronounced Romanists, and one whose opinions were doubtful, were the assessors; Eck, Gropper, and Pflug were to support the Romanist side, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Pistorius were the speakers for the Protestants. Perhaps the only name that could be objected to was that of Eck; it was impossible to think of him as a man of peace. The Legate Contarini guided everything.
During preliminary conferences an understanding was come to on some practical questions which served to preserve an appearance of unanimity. It was thought that marriage might be permitted to the clergy and the cup to the laity within Germany; that the Pope might be honoured as the Primate of the Church, provided it was clearly understood that his position did not give him the power of perpetual interference in the affairs of the national Churches; that the hierarchy might be maintained if the episcopal jurisdiction were exercised conjointly by a vicar appointed by the Bishop and a learned layman appointed by the secular authority.
It was the business of the conference to discuss the deeper theological differences which were supposed to separate the two parties. So in the opening meetings the delegates began to consider those questions which gathered round the thought of Justification.
It was agreed that there was no distinction between the ordinances of grace and those of nature in the original condition of man. This declaration involved the denial of the distinction between the dona supernaturalia and the dona naturalia made so much of in Scholastic Theology, and the basis of a great deal of its Pelagian tendencies. It was expressly conceded by the Romanist theologians that man had lost his original freedom of will by the Fall—a concession directly at variance with the future declaration of the Council of Trent.[661] The statement agreed upon about the origin of sin was given almost in the words of the Augsburg Confession, and agrees with them. The doctrine of the tenacity of original sin scarcely differs from a statement of Luther’s which had been condemned in the Bull Exurge Domine of Pope Leo X.[662] In the discussions and conclusions about this first head of doctrine the conclusions of Protestant theology had been amply vindicated.
There was more difficulty on the matter of Justification. Two definitions suggested by the Romanist theologians and by Melanchthon were successively rejected, and one brought forward, it is said by Contarini himself, was accepted after some discussion. It was couched in language which the Lutheran theologians had not been accustomed to use. It embodied phrases which Pole, Contarini, and other liberal Italian Roman Catholics had made their own. The Protestants of Germany, however, saw nothing in it to contradict their cherished ideas upon Justification, and they gladly accepted the definition. The statement, repeated more than once, that grace is the free gift of God and is not merited by our works, expressed their deepest thought, and completely excluded the meritorious character of ecclesiastical good works. They seemed rather pleased than otherwise that their thoughts could be expressed in language suggested by Romanist theologians.[663] It appears that Eck, while consenting to the definition, wished to avoid signing it, but was compelled by Granvelle to fix his name to the document.[664]
The fact that the Romanist and Protestant members of the conference could agree upon an article on Justification caused great rejoicings among Contarini’s friends in Italy. Cardinal Pole was convinced that every obstacle in the way of reunion had been removed, and the most extravagant expectations were cherished.[665] The Protestant members of the conference were entirely satisfied with the results so far as they had gone.
The conference then turned to questions affecting the organisation and worship of the Church.
Somewhat to their surprise, the Protestants found that their opponents were willing to accept their general theory of what was meant by the Church and what were its distinguishing characteristics. The Christian Society was defined without any reference to the Pope as its permanent Head on earth. This provoked strong dissents from Rome when the definition was known there. Differences emerged when the power of the Church was discussed, and as there was no prospect of agreement it was resolved for the meanwhile to omit the article.[666]
The question of the Sacrament of the Holy Supper evoked differences which were felt to be almost insuperable. It was inevitable. For here the one fundamental divergence between the new Evangelical faith and mediæval religion came to practical expression. Nothing could reconcile the Evangelical thought of a spiritual priesthood of all believers with the belief in a mediating priesthood who could give and could withhold God. Doctrines might be stated in terms which hid this fundamental difference; a definition of Justification by Faith alone might be conceded to the Protestants; but any thought of a priestly miracle in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper had to be repudiated by the one party and clung to by the other.
At first things went smoothly enough; it was conceded that special ways of dispensing the Sacraments were matters indifferent, but whenever the question of Transubstantiation emerged, things came to a deadlock. It was perhaps characteristic of Contarini’s somewhat surface way of dealing with the whole question at stake between the two parties, that he never probed the deeper question. He rested his plea for Transubstantiation on the ground that an important article of faith which had been assented to for so long must not be questioned.[667] The Protestants held a private conference, at which all the theologians present were asked to give their opinions in turn. There Calvin spoke, dwelling on the thought that Transubstantiation implied adoration, which could never be conceded. His firmness produced unanimity. Melanchthon drafted their common opinion, which was given in writing to Granvelle, who refused in strong language to accept it, and the conference came to an end. The more difficult practical subjects of the sacrificial character of the Mass and of private Masses were not discussed.[668]
This conference at Regensburg may almost be said to be the parting of the ways. Up to 1525 the movement under Luther had the appearance of a Reformation of the whole Church in Germany. From 1525 to the date of this conference there was always the expectation that the Lutherans who had formed territorial Churches might yet be included in a general Reformation of the whole German Church. Joachim II. of Brandenburg cherished the idea long after 1541; and Charles v. still believed that what could not be effected by mutual compromise might be done by a mediating creed imposed upon all by the authority of the Emperor. But compromise failed at Ratisbon, and there was no further hope of its succeeding.
The decisive character of the Regensburg conference was seen in Italy almost at once. Its failure involved the destruction of the party of Italian Romanists who hoped to end the religious strife by a compromise. When Contarini returned to Italy he found that his influence was gone. He was rewarded with the Government of Bologna, which removed him from the centre of things. He died soon after (Aug. 24th, 1542), leaving none behind him to fill his place. Ghiberti survived him only sixteen months. Caraffa had become more and more alienated from his early friends. Sadoleto, Pole, and Morone remained, all of them men of intellect, but lacking the qualities which fit men to be leaders in trying times. Pole lived to make atonement for his liberalism by hounding on the persecutions in England, and Morone by becoming the champion of ultramontanism at the close of the Council of Trent. The conception of a Catholic Reformation disappeared; the idea of a Counter-Reformation took its place.
CHAPTER IV.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE COMPANY OF JESUS.[669]
§ 1. At Manresa.
The little mountainous province of Guipuzcoa, lying at the corner of the Bay of Biscay, bordering on France, was the district of Spain which produced one of the greatest of her sons, Iñigo de Recalde de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. The tower which was the family seat still stands, rough and windowless as a Scottish border keep, adorned with one ornament only, a stone above the doorway, on which are carved the arms of the family—two wolves in quest of prey. Guipuzcoa had never been conquered by the Moors, and its nobles, poor in their barren highlands, boasted that the bluest Gothic blood ran in their veins. The Recaldes belonged to the very oldest nobility of the district, and possessed the highly valued privilege of the right of personal summons to the coronation of the Kings of Leon. Their younger sons were welcomed at Court as pages, and then as soldiers; and the young Iñigo was a page at the Court of Ferdinand. He was well educated for a Spanish noble; could read and write; composed ballads; and could illuminate manuscripts with miniatures. Most of his spare time was employed in reading those romances of chivalry then very popular. When older he became a soldier like his elder brothers.
In 1521, when twenty-eight years of age (b. 1493), he was the youngest officer in command of the garrison of Pampeluna, ordered to withstand a combined force of invading French troops and some revolting Spaniards. The enemy appeared before the place in such overwhelming numbers that all but the youngest officer wished to surrender without a struggle. Iñigo’s eloquence persuaded the garrison to attempt a desperate defence. No priest was among the soldiers; the Spaniards, according to their custom, confessed each other, and were ready to die at their posts. A bullet struck the young officer as he stood in the breach encouraging his men. His fall gave the victory to the besiegers.
The conspicuous bravery of Iñigo had won the respect of his enemies. They extricated him from the heap of dead under which he was buried, and conveyed him to the old family castle. There his shattered leg was so badly set as to unfit him for a soldier’s career. He had it twice broken and twice reset. The prolonged torture was useless; he had to believe that he would never fight on horseback again. The dream of taking a man’s part in the conquests which all Spaniards of that age believed lay before their country, had to be abandoned. His body was a useless log.
But Iñigo was a noble of the Basque provinces, and possessed, in a superlative degree it was to be discovered, the characteristics of his race—at once taciturn and enthusiastic, wildly imaginative, and sternly practical. He has himself recorded that, as soon as he was convinced that he could never become a distinguished soldier, he asked himself whether he might not become a famous saint like Dominic or Francis, and that the question arose from no spiritual promptings, but simply from the determination to win fame before his death. As he lay bedridden, thinking much and dreaming more, it suddenly occurred to him that no one could become a saint unless he lived very near God, and that his life had not been of such a kind. He at once resolved that he would change; he would feed on herbs like a holy hermit; he would go to Jerusalem as a devout pilgrim. This vow, he tells us, was the earliest conscious movement of his soul towards God. His reward came soon in the shape of his first revelation. The blessed Virgin, with the Child Jesus in her arms, appeared to him in a dream. He awoke, hustled out of bed, dragged himself to the small window of his turret-room, and looked out. The earth was dark, an obscure mingling of black shadows; the heavens were a great vault of deepest blue strewn with innumerable stars. The sight was a parable and an inspiration. “How dull earth is,” he cried, “how glorious heaven!” He felt that he must do something to get nearer God. He must be alone in some holy place to think things out with his own soul. His brother’s servants hoisted the maimed body of the once brilliant soldier on an ass, one foot in a boot, the wounded leg still swathed in bandages and its foot in a large soft slipper, and Iñigo left the old castle determined to live a hermit’s life on Montserrat, the holy hill of Aragon.
There in the church of Our Lady of Montserrat he resolved to dedicate himself to her service with all the ceremonies prescribed in that masterbook of mediæval chivalry, Amadis of Gaul. He hung his arms on her altar, and throughout the long night, standing or kneeling, he kept his watch, consecrating his knightly service to the Blessed Virgin. At daybreak he donned an anchorite’s dress, gave his knightly robes to the first beggar he met, and, mounted on his ass, betook himself to the Dominican convent of Manresa, no longer Iñigo Recalde de Loyola, but simply Ignatius.
At Manresa he practised the strictest asceticism, hoping to become in heart and soul fitted for the saint life he wished to live. Then began a time of unexpected, sore and prolonged spiritual conflict, not unlike what Luther experienced in the Erfurt convent. Who was he and what had been his past life that he should presumptuously think that God would ever accept him and number him among His saints? He made unwearied use of all the mediæval means of grace; he exhausted the resources of the confessional; he consulted one spiritual guide after another without experiencing any relief to the doubts which were gnawing at his soul. The whole machinery of the Church helped him as little as it had Luther: it could not give peace of conscience. He has placed on record that the only real help he received during this prolonged period of mental agony came from an old woman. Confession, instead of soothing him, rather plunged him into a sea of intolerable doubt. To make his penitence thorough, to know himself as he really was, he wrote out his confession that he might see his sins staring at him from the written page. He fasted till his life was in danger; he prayed seven times and scourged himself thrice daily, but found no peace. He tells us that he often shrieked aloud to God, crying that He must Himself help him, for no creature could bring him comfort. No task would be too great for him, he exclaimed, if he could only see God. “Show me, O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I can only learn the way of salvation.” His anguish prompted him to suicide. More than once, he says, he opened his window with the intention of casting himself down headlong and ending his life then and there; but the fear of his sins and their consequences restrained him. He had read of a saint who had vowed to fast until he had been vouchsafed the Beatific Vision, so he communicated at the altar and fasted for a whole week; but all ended in vanity and vexation of spirit.
Then, with the sudden certainty of a revelation, he resolved to throw himself on the mercy of God, whose long-suffering pity would pardon his sins. This was the crisis. Peace came at last, and his new spiritual life began. He thought no longer about his past; he no longer mentioned former sins in his confessions; the certainty of pardon had begun a new life within him; he could start afresh. It is impossible to read his statements without being struck with the similarity between the spiritual experience of Ignatius and what Luther calls Justification by Faith; the words used by the two great religious leaders were different, but the experience of pardon won by throwing one’s self upon the mercy of God was the same.
This new spiritual life was, as in Luther’s case, one of overflowing gladness. Meditation and introspection, once a source of anguish, became the spring of overpowering joy. Ignatius felt that he was making progress. “God,” he says, “dealt with me as a teacher with a scholar; I cannot doubt that He had always been with me.” Many historical critics from Ranke downwards have been struck with the likeness of the experience gone through by Luther and Ignatius. One great contrast manifested itself at once. The humble-minded and quiet German, when the new life awoke in him, set himself unostentatiously to do the common tasks which daily life brought; the fiery and ambitious Spaniard at once tried to conquer all mysteries, to take them by assault as if they were a beleaguered fortress.
He had his visions as before, but they were no longer temptations of Satan, the source of doubt and torture. He believed that he could actually see with bodily eyes divine mysteries which the intelligence could not comprehend. After lengthened prayer, every faculty concentrated in one prolonged gaze, he felt assured that he could see the mystery of Transubstantiation actually taking place. At the supreme moment he saw Christ in the form of a white ray pass into the consecrated bread and transform it into the Divine Victim (Host). He declared that in moods of exaltation the most impenetrable mysteries of theology, the Incarnation of our Lord, the Holy Trinity, the personality of Satan, were translated into visible symbols which made them plainly understood. These visions so fascinated him, that he began to write them down in simple fashion for his own satisfaction and edification.
In all this the student of the religious life of Spain during the sixteenth century will recognise the mystical devotion which was then characteristic of the people of the Peninsula. The Spanish character, whether we study it in the romances of chivalry which the land produced, or in the writing of her religious guides, was impregnated by enthusiasm. It was passionate, exalted, entirely penetrated and possessed by the emotion which for the time dominated it. In no country were the national and religious sentiment so thoroughly fused and united. The long wars with the Moors, and their successful issue in the conquest of Grenada, had made religion and patriotism one and the same thing. Priests invariably accompanied troops on the march, and went into battle with them. St. James of Compostella was believed to traverse the country to bring continual succour to the soldiers who charged the Moors invoking his name. A victory was celebrated by a solemn procession in honour of God and of the Virgin, who had delivered the enemy into the hands of the faithful. This intensity of the Spanish character, this temperament distinguished by force rather than moderation, easily gave birth to superstition and burning devotion, and both furnished a fruitful soil for the extravagances of Mysticism, which affected every class in society. Statesmen like Ximenes, no less than the common people, were influenced by the exhortations or predictions of the Beatæ,—women who had devoted themselves to a religious life without formally entering into a convent,—and changed their policy in consequence. It was universally believed that such devotees, men and women, could be illuminated divinely, and could attain to a state of familiar intercourse with God, if not to an actual union with Him, by giving themselves to prayer, by abstinence from all worldly thoughts and actions, and by practising the most rigid asceticism. It was held that those who had attained to this state of mystical union received in dreams, trances, and ecstasies, visions of the divine mysteries.
The heads of the Spanish Inquisition viewed this Mysticism, so characteristic of the Peninsula, with grave anxiety. The thought that ardent believers could by any personal process attain direct intercourse, even union with God, apart from the ordinary machinery of the Church, cut at the roots of the mediæval penitential system, which always presupposed that a priestly mediation was required. If God can be met in the silence of the believer’s soul, where is the need for the priest, who, according to mediæval ideas, must always stand between the penitent and God, and by his action take the hand of faith and lay it in the hand of the divine omnipotence? Other dangers appeared. The Mystic professed to draw his knowledge of divine things directly from the same source as the Church, and his revelations had the same authority. It is true that most of the Spanish Mystics, like St. Teresa, had humility enough to place themselves under ecclesiastical direction, but this was not the case with all. Some prophets and prophetesses declared themselves to be independent, and these illuminati, as they were called, spread disaffection and heresy. Hence the attitude of the Inquisition towards Mystics of all kinds was one of suspicious watchfulness. St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Ignatius himself, were all objects of distrust, and did not win ecclesiastical approbation until after long series of tribulations.
It is necessary to insist on the fact that Ignatius had a deeply rooted connection with the Spanish Mystics. His visions, his methods, the Spiritual Exercises themselves, cannot be understood apart from their intimate relations to that Mysticism which was characteristic of the religion of his land and of his age.
Ignatius was no ordinary Mystic, however. What seemed the whole or the end to Teresa or Osuna was to him only a part, or the means to something better. While he received and rejoiced in the visions vouchsafed to him, he practised the keenest introspection. He observed and analysed the moods and states of mind in which the visions came most readily or the reverse, and made a note of them all. He noted the postures and gestures of the body which helped or hindered the reception of visions or profitable meditation on what had been revealed. He saw that he could reproduce or at least facilitate the return of his visions by training and mastering his mind and body, and by subjecting them to a spiritual drill which might be compared with the exercises used to train a soldier in the art of war. Out of these visions, introspections, comparisons, experiments experienced in solitude at Manresa, came by long process of gradual growth and elaboration the famous Spiritual Exercises, which may be called the soul of the Counter-Reformation, as Luther’s book on The Liberty of the Christian Man contains the essence of Protestantism.
Ignatius spent nearly a year at Manresa. He had accomplished his object—to find himself at peace with God. It remained to fulfil his vow of pilgrimage. He laid aside his hermit’s garb, and with it his ascetic practices; but he believed it to be his duty to renounce all property and live absolutely poor. He left all the money he possessed upon a bench and walked to Barcelona, supporting himself by begging. There he was given a passage to Venice, and thence he sailed for the Holy Land. His enthusiasm, and above all his project for beginning a mission among the Turks, alarmed the chief of the Franciscans in Jerusalem, who insisted on shipping him back to Italy. He reached Barcelona determined to pursue such studies as would enable him to know theology. He had never learned Latin, the gateway to all theological learning, and the man of thirty entered school, and seated himself on the bench with boys. Thence he went to Alcala and to Salamanca, and attended classes in these towns. Before he had quitted Manresa he had begun to speak to others about his visions, and to persuade them to submit themselves to the spiritual drill of his Exercises. Some ladies in Barcelona had become his devoted disciples. At Alcala and Salamanca he had tried to make converts to his system. The ecclesiastical authorities of the districts, fearing that this was a new kind of dangerous Mysticism, seized him, and he was twice incarcerated in the episcopal Inquisition. It would probably have fared ill with him had it not been for the intercession of some of the distinguished ladies who had been his disciples. His imprisonment in both cases was short, but he was forbidden to discriminate between mortal and venial sins (a thing essential if he acted as a spiritual director) until he had studied theology for four years.
§ 2. Ignatius at Paris.
With prompt military obedience Ignatius decided to study at Paris. He reached the city in the beginning of 1528, driving an ass laden with his books and clothes. He went naturally to the College Montaigu, which under its Principal, Noël Béda, was the most orthodox in Paris; but with his well known determination to see and judge everything for himself, he soon afterwards obtained leave to reside in the College Ste. Barbe, one of the most liberal, in which George Buchanan was then a Regent.[670]
His sojourn in Paris could not fail to make a deep impression on the middle-aged Spaniard, consumed with zeal to maintain in its minutest details the old religion, and to destroy heresy and disobedience. Two passions possessed him, both eminently Spanish. He could say with St. Teresa that he suffered so much to see the Lutherans, whose baptism had rendered them members of the Church, lose themselves unhappily, that had he several lives he would willingly give them to deliver only one of them from the horrible torments which awaited them; but he also believed that it was for God a point of honour to avenge Himself on those who despised His word, and that it belonged to all the faithful to be instruments of the vengeance of the Almighty.
His keen practical nature grasped the religious situation in Paris (City and University), and suggested his lifework. He saw the strength of the Roman Catholic democracy face to face with the Reformation, and to what power it might grow if it were only organised and subjected to a more than military discipline. Ignatius was in Paris during the years when partisan feelings ran riot.
Francis I. was by taste and training a man of the Renaissance. It pleased him to be called and to imagine himself to be the patron of men of letters. He was as devoted as his selfish, sensual nature permitted him to be, to his sister Marguerite d’Angoulême, and for her sake countenanced such Reformers as Lefèvre and the “group of Meaux.” He had a grudge against the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris for their attempts to baffle the Concordat of 1516; while he recognised the power which these two formidable associations possessed. He was an anti-Sorbonnist, who feared the Sorbonne (the great theological faculty of the University of Paris), and could not help displaying his dread. He had long dreamed of instituting a Collége de France, a free association of learned teachers, men who could introduce the New Learning and form a counterpoise to the Sorbonne which dominated the University. The project took many forms, and never came to full fruition until long after the days of Francis; but the beginnings were sufficient to encourage Reformers and to irritate to fury the supporters of the Sorbonne. The theological faculty of the University was then ruled by Noël Béda, a man of no great intellectual capacity, who hated everything which seemed to menace mediævalism. Béda, by his dogged courage, by his unflinching determination, by his intense conviction that he was in the right, was able to wage a pitiless warfare against the New Learning and every appearance of religious reform. He was able to thwart the King repeatedly, and more than once to attack him through Marguerite, his sister. His whole attitude and activity made him a forerunner of the Romanist League of two generations later, and, like the Leaguers, he based his power on organising the Romanist fanaticism lying in the populace of Paris and among the students of the Sorbonne. All this Loyola saw under his eyes during his stay in Paris. He heard the students of the Sorbonne singing their ferocious song: