A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 25

In three most important conceptions the Socinian thought is distinctly mediaeval, and mediaeval in the Scotist way.

Their idea of _faith_ is intellectual. It is _a.s.sensus_ and not _fiducia_. "In Scripture," says the Racovian Catechism, "the _faith_ is most perfectly _taught_, that G.o.d exists and that He recompenses. This, however, and nothing else, is the faith that is to be directed to G.o.d and Christ." It is afterwards described as the way in which one must adjust himself to the known commands and promises of G.o.d; and there is added that this faith "both makes our obedience more acceptable and well-pleasing to G.o.d, and supplies the defects of our obedience, provided it be sincere and earnest, and brings it about that we are justified by G.o.d." This is good Scotist doctrine. These theologians were accustomed to declare that all that the Christian needs is to have faith in G.o.d as the recompenser (_i.e._ to a.s.sent to the truth that G.o.d does recompense), and that with regard to all the other doctrines of the Church implicit faith (_i.e._ submission to the Church's teaching) is enough. Of course the extreme individualism of the Socinians coloured their conception of faith; they cannot accept an implicit faith; their a.s.sent to truth must always be explicit; what they a.s.sent to must recommend itself to their individual reason. They cannot a.s.sent to a round of truths which are presented to them by the Church, and receive them implicitly on the principle of obedience to authority. But what is to be observed here is that the Socinian type of faith is always a.s.sent to truths which can be stated in propositional form; they have no idea of that faith which, to use Luther's phrase, throws itself upon G.o.d.

They further declare, quite in accordance with Scotist teaching, that men are justified because of their _actual_ obedience to the _known_ commands and promises of G.o.d. There is not a trace of the Evangelical att.i.tude. The accordance with Scotist theology descends to very minute particulars, did s.p.a.ce permit to trace it.

The Socinian conception of _Scripture_ corresponds to their idea of faith. The two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith, as has been already said,[639] always correspond in mediaeval theology they are primarily intellectual and propositional; in Reformation thinking they are, in the first instance, experimental and personal. The Socinian conception allies itself with the mediaeval, and discards the Reformation way of regarding both faith and Scripture. With the Socinians as with mediaeval theologians, Scripture is the divine source of information about doctrines and morals; they have no idea of Scripture as a means of grace, as the channel of a personal communion between G.o.d and His trusting people. But here as elsewhere the new individualism of the Socinians compels them to establish both the authority and the dogmatic contents of Scripture in a way different from their mediaeval predecessors. They had rejected altogether the authority of the Church, and they could not make use of the thought to warrant either the authority of Scripture or a correct interpretation of its contents. In the place of it they put what they called _reason_. "The use of right reason (_rectae rationis_) is great in things which pertain to salvation, since without it, it is impossible either to grasp with certainty the authority of Scripture, or to understand those things that are contained in it, or to deduce some things from other things, or, finally, to recall them to put them to use (_ad usum revocari_)." The _cert.i.tudo sacrarum litterarum_ is accordingly established, or attempted to be proved, by a series of external proofs which appeal to the ordinary reasoning faculties of man. The Reformation conception of the Witness of the Spirit, an essential part of its doctrine of Scripture, finds no place in Socinian theology. They try to establish the authority of Scripture without any appeal to faith; the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. The Reformation and the Socinian doctrines are miles apart; but the Socinian and the mediaeval approach each other closely. It is somewhat difficult to know what books the older Socinians recognise as their rule of faith. They did not accept the Canon of the mediaeval Church. They had no difficulty about the New Testament; but the references to the Old Testament in the Racovian Catechism are very slight: its authority is guaranteed for them by the references to it in the New Testament.

When we turn to the Socinian statements about _G.o.d_, and to their a.s.sertions about the _nature and meaning of the Work of Christ_, we find the clearest proof of their mediaeval origin. The Scotist theology is simply reproduced, and cleared of its limitations.

A fundamental conception of G.o.d lay at the basis of the whole Scotist theology. G.o.d, it maintained, could best be defined as _Dominium Absolutum_; man as set over against G.o.d they described as an individual free will. If G.o.d be conceived as simply _Dominium Absolutum_, we can never affirm that G.o.d _must_ act in any given way; we may not even say that He is bound to act according to moral considerations. He is high above all considerations of any kind. He does not will to act in any way because it is right; and action is right because G.o.d wills to act in that way. There can be neither metaphysical nor moral necessity in any of G.o.d's actions or purposes. This Scotist idea, that G.o.d is the absolutely arbitrary one, is expressed in the strongest language in the Racovian Catechism. "It belongs to the nature of G.o.d that He has the right and supreme power to decree whatsoever He wills concerning all things and concerning us, even in those matters with which no other power has to do; for example, He can give laws, and appoint rewards and penalties according to His own judgment, to our thoughts, hidden as these may be in the innermost recesses of our hearts."

If this thought, that G.o.d is simply _Dominium Absolutum_, be applied to explain the nature and meaning of the work of Christ, of the Atonement, it follows at once that there can be no real necessity for that work; for all necessity, metaphysical or moral, is derogatory to the _Dominium Absolutum_, which is G.o.d. If the Atonement has merit in it, that is only because G.o.d has announced that He means to accept the work of Christ as meritorious, and that He will therefore free men from the burden of sin on account of what Christ, the Saviour, has done. It is the announced _acceptation_ of G.o.d which makes the work of Christ meritorious. A _meritorious_ work has nothing in its nature which makes it so. To be meritorious simply means that the work so described will be followed by G.o.d's doing something in return for its being done, and this only because G.o.d has made this announcement. G.o.d could have freed men from the guilt and punishment due for sin without the work of Christ; He could have appointed a human mediator if He had so willed it; He might have pardoned and accepted man as righteous in His sight without any mediator at all. He could have simply pardoned man without anything coming between His act of pardon and man's sin. This being the case, the Scotist theologians argued that it might seem that the work of Christ, called the Atonement, was entirely superfluous; it is, indeed, superfluous as far as reason is concerned; it can never be justified on rational grounds. But, according to the dogmatic tradition of the Church, confirmed by the circle of the Sacraments, G.o.d has selected this mode of getting rid of the sin and guilt of man. He has announced that He will _accept_ this work of Christ, Atonement, and therefore the Scotist theologians declared the Atonement must be believed in and seen to be the divinely appointed way of salvation. Erasmus satirised the long arguments and hypotheses of the Scotist theologians when he enumerated among the questions which were highly interesting to them: "Could G.o.d have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an a.s.s, a gourd, or a stone? How could a gourd have preached, done miracles, hung on the Cross?"[640]

It is manifest that this idea of _Dominium Absolutum_ is simply the conception of the extremest individualism applied to G.o.d instead of being used to describe man. If we treat it anthropomorphically, it comes to this, that the relation of G.o.d to man is that of an infinite Individual Will set over against a number of finite individual wills. If this view be taken of the relations between G.o.d and man, then G.o.d can never be thought of as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth, but only as a private individual face to face with other individuals; and the relations between G.o.d and man must be discussed from the standpoint of private and not of public law. When wrong-doing is regarded under the scheme of public law, the ruler can never treat it as an injury done to himself, and which he can forgive because he is of a kindly nature; he must consider it an offence against the whole community of which he is the public guardian. On the other hand, when offences are considered under a scheme of private law, they are simply wrongs done to a private person who, as an individual, may forgive what is merely a debt due to himself. In such a case the wrong-doer may be forgiven without infringing any general moral principle.

The Socinians, following the mediaeval Scotist theologians, invariably applied the principles of private law to the relations between G.o.d and man. G.o.d, the _Dominium Absolutum_, the Supreme Arbitrary Will, was never regarded as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth where subjects and rulers are constrained by the same moral laws. Sins are simply private debts due by the individual finite wills to the One Infinite Will. From such premises the Scotists deduced the conclusion that the Atonement was unnecessary; there they stopped; they could not say that there was no such thing as Atonement, for the dogmatic tradition of the Church prevented them. The Socinians had thrown overboard the thought of a dogmatic tradition which had to be respected even when it appeared to be irrational. If the Atonement was not necessary, that meant to them that it did not exist; they simply carried out the theological premises of the Scotist-Pelagian mediaeval theologians to their legitimate consequences.

In these three important conceptions--faith, Scripture, the nature of G.o.d, involving the character of His relations to man--the Socinians belong to a mediaeval school of thought, and have no sympathy whatever with the general principles which inspired Reformation theological thinking.

But the Socinians were not exclusively mediaeval; they owed much to the Renaissance. This appears in a very marked manner in the way in which they conceived the very important religious conception of the _Church_.

It is a characteristic of Socinian theology, that the individual believer is considered without much, if any, reference to the Church or community of the saved. This separates the Socinians not only from mediaeval Christians, but from all who belonged to the great Protestant Evangelical movement.

The mediaeval Church always regarded itself, and taught men to look to it, as a religious community which came logically and really before the individual believer. It presented itself to men as a great society founded on a dogmatic tradition, possessing the Sacraments, and governed by an officially holy caste. The pious layman of the Middle Ages found himself within it as he might have done within one of its great cathedrals. The dogmatic tradition did not trouble him much, nor did the worldliness and insincerity often manifested by its official guardians.

What they required of him was implicit faith, which really meant a decorous external obedience. That once rendered, he was comparatively free to worship within what was for him a great house of prayer. The hymns, the prayers, many of the sermons of the mediaeval Church, make us feel that the Inst.i.tution was for the mediaeval Christian the visible symbol of a wide purpose of G.o.d, which embraced his individual life and guaranteed a repose which he could use in resting on the promises of G.o.d. The records of mediaeval piety continually show us that the Church was etherealised into an a.s.sured and historical fellowship of believers into which the individual entered, and within which he found the a.s.suring sense of fellowship. He left all else to the professional guardians of this ecclesiastical edifice. Probably such are the unspoken thoughts of thousands of devout men and women in the Roman and Greek communions to-day. They value the Church because it represents to them in a visible and historical way a fellowship with Christ and His saints which is the result of His redeeming work.

This thought is as deeply rooted in Reformation as in mediaeval piety.

The Reformers felt compelled to protest against the political form which the mediaeval Church had a.s.sumed. They conceived that to be a degradation from its ideal. They saw the manifold abuses which the degradation had given rise to. But they always regarded visible Christendom as a religious community called into being by the work of Christ. They had always before them the thought of the Church of Christ as the fellowship which logically and really comes _before_ the individual believer, the society into which the believer is brought; and this conception stood with them in close and reciprocal connection with the thought that Jesus, by His work of Atonement, had reconciled men with G.o.d, had founded the Church on that work of His, and, _within_ it had opened for sinners the way to G.o.d. They protested against the political form which the Church had a.s.sumed; they never ceased to cling to the thought of the Catholic Church Visible which is founded on the redeeming work of Christ, and within which man finds the way of salvation. They described this Church in all their creeds and testimonies; they gave the marks which characterised it and manifested its divine origin; the thought was an essential part of their theology.

The Socinians never felt the need of any such conception. Jesus was for them only the teacher of a superior kind of morality detailed in the commands and promises of G.o.d; they looked to Him for that guidance and impulse towards a moral self-culture which each man can appropriate for himself without first coming into a society which is the fellowship of the redeemed. Had they ever felt the burden of sin as the Reformers felt it, had they ever yearned for such a fellowship with Christ as whole-hearted personal trust gives, or even for such as comes in the sense of bodily contact in the Sacrament, had they ever felt the craving to get in touch with their Lord _somehow_ or _anyhow_, they would never have been able to do without this conception of a Church Catholic of some kind or other. They never seemed to feel the need of it. The Racovian Catechism was compelled to make some reference to the kingly and priestly offices of Christ. It owed so much to the New Testament.

Its perfunctory sentences show that our Lord was for the Socinians simply a Prophet sent from G.o.d to proclaim a superior kind of morality.

His highest function was to communicate knowledge to men, and perhaps to teach them by example how to make use of it. They had no conception that Jesus came to _do_ something for His people, and that what He _did_ was much more valuable than what He said, however precious that might be.

They were content to become His scholars, the scholars of a teacher sent from G.o.d, and to become members of His school, where His opinions were known and could be learned. They had no idea that they needed to be saved in the deeper sense of that word. They have no need, therefore, for the conception of the Church; what they did need and what they have is the thought of a school of opinions to which they could belong.[641]

In this one thought they were equally far apart from the circle of mediaeval and of Reformation theological thinking. In most of their other theological conceptions their opinions were inherited from mediaeval theology. They had little or no connection with Reformation theology or with what that represents--the piety of the mediaeval Church.

BOOK VI.

_THE COUNTER-REFORMATION._

CHAPTER I.

THE NECESSITY OF A REFORMATION OF SOME SORT UNIVERSALLY ADMITTED.[642]

In the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the urgent need for a Reformation of the Church was recognised by all thoughtful men everywhere throughout western Europe, and was loudly expressed by almost everyone outside the circle of the influence of the Roman Curia. Statesmen and men of letters, n.o.bles and burghers, great Churchmen as well as monks and parish priests--all bewailed the condition of the organised Christian life, and most of them recognised that the unreformed Papacy was the running sore of Europe. The protest against the state of religion was not confined to individual outcries; it found expression in the States-General of France, in Diet of Germany, and in the Parliament of England.

The complaints took many forms. One of the most universal was that the clergy, especially those of higher rank, busied themselves with everything save the one thing which specially belonged to them--the cure of souls. They took undue share in the government of the countries of Europe, and ousted the n.o.bles from their legitimate places of rule.

Clerical law-courts interfered constantly with the lives of burghers; and the clergy protested that they were not bound to obey the ordinary laws of the land. A brawling priest could plead the "benefit of clergy"; but a layman who struck a priest, no matter what the provocation, was liable to the dread penalty of excommunication. Their "right of sanctuary" was a perpetual encouragement to crime.[643] They and their claims menaced the quiet life of civilised towns and States.

Const.i.tutional lawyers, trained by Humanism to know the old imperial law codes of Theodosius and Justinian, traced these evils back to the interference of Canon Law with Civil, and that to the universal and absolute dominion of a papal absolutism. The Reformation desired, floated before the minds of statesmen as a reduction more or less thorough of the papal absolutism, and of the control exercised by the Pope and the clergy over the internal affairs of the State, even its national ecclesiastical regulations. The historical fact that the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages were being slowly transformed into modern States, perhaps furnished unconsciously the basis for this idea of a Reformation.

The same thought took another and more purely ecclesiastical form. The papal absolutism meant frequently that Italians received preferments all over western Europe, and supplanted the native clergy in the more important and richer benefices. Why should the Churches of Spain, England, or France be ruled by Italian prelates, whether resident or non-resident? It was universally felt that Roman rule meant a lack of spirituality, and was a source of religious as well as of national degradation. Men longed for a change, clergy as well as laity; and the thought of National Churches really independent of Rome, if still nominally under the Western Obedience, filled the minds of many Reformers.[644]

The early mediaeval Church had been a stern preacher of righteousness, had taught the barbarous invaders of Europe lessons of pure living, honesty, sobriety; it had insisted that the clergy ought to be examples as well as preachers; Canon Law was full of penalties ordained to check clerical vices. But it was notorious that the higher clergy, whose duty it was to put the laws in execution, were themselves the worst offenders. How could English Bishops enforce laws against incontinence, when Wolsey, Archbishop, Cardinal, and Legate, had made his illegitimate daughter the Abbess of Salisbury? What hope was there for strict discipline when no inconsiderable portion of a Bishop's annual income came from money paid in order to practise clerical incontinence in security? Reformers demanded a reformation of clerical morals, beginning with the Bishops and descending through all grades to monks and nuns.[645]

Humanism brought forward yet another conception of reform. It demanded either a thorough repudiation of the whole of Scholastic Theology and a return to the pure and simple "Christian Philosophy" of the Church of the first six centuries, or such a relaxation of that Scholastic as would afford room for the encouragement of the New Learning.

Lastly, a few pious souls, with the clear vision of G.o.d which purity and simplicity of heart and mind give, declared that the Church had lost religion itself, and that the one reformation needed was the rediscovery of religion and the gracious enlightenment of the individual heart and conscience.[646]

The first conception of a reformation which looked for a cure of the evils which all acknowledged to the supremacy of the secular over ecclesiastical rule, may be seen in the reformation of the local Churches of Brandenburg and Saxony under Frederick of Brandenburg and William of Saxony. Archbishop Cranmer believed that the only way of removing the evils under which the Church of the later Middle Ages was groaning was to subordinate the ecclesiastical to the secular powers.

The reformation of the Church of England under Henry VIII. carried out this idea to practical issue, but involved with it a nominal as well as a real destruction of the political unity of the mediaeval Church. His actions were carefully watched and admired by many of the German Romanist Princes, who made more than one attempt, about the year 1540, to create a National Church in Germany under secular guidance, and remaining true to mediaeval doctrine, hierarchy, and ritual.[647] The thought of a reformation of this kind was so familiar to men of the sixteenth century, that the probability of Henry VIII.'s separation from Rome was matter of discussion long before it had entered into the mind of that monarch.[648]

CHAPTER II.

THE SPANISH CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[649]

-- 1. _The Religious Condition of Spain._

The country, however, where all these various conceptions of what was meant by a reformation of the Church were combined in one definite scheme of reform which was carried through successfully, was Spain. It is to that country one must turn to see what mediaevalists, who were at the same time reformers, wished to effect, and what they meant by a reformation of the Church. It included a measure of secular control, a revival and enforcement of all canonical laws framed to purify the morals of the clergy, a measured accommodation with Humanism, a steady adherence to the main doctrines of the Scholastic Theology, the preservation in their entirety of the hierarchy, the rites and the usages of the mediaeval Church, and a ruthless suppression of heresy.

Spain furnishes the example of what has been called the Catholic Reformation.

In Spain, as nowhere else in mediaeval Europe, the firm maintenance of the Christian religion and patriotism had been felt to be one and the same thing. The seven hundred years' war, which the Christians of Spain had waged with the Moors, had given strength and tenacity to their religious sentiments, and their experience as Christians in daily battle with an enemy of alien race and alien faith, left to themselves in their Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Europe, had made them cling all the more closely to that visible solidarity of all Christian people which found expression in the mediaeval conception of the mediaeval Catholic Church. Spain had given birth to the great missionary monastic order of the Dominicans,--the leaders of an intellectual crusade against the penetrating influence of a Moslem pantheism (Averroism), --and to the great repressive agency of the Inquisition in its sternest and most savage form. It was Spain that was to furnish the Counter-Reformation, with its most devoted leader, Ignatius Loyola, and with its strongest body of combatants, the Society of Jesus which he founded.

It need scarcely be wondered at that it was in Spain that we find the earliest systematic attempts made to save the Church from the blindness and perversity of its rulers by the interposition of the secular authority to combat the deteriorating influence of the Roman Curia upon the local Church, and to restore discipline among the clergy. The Cortes of the various small kingdoms of the Spanish Peninsula repeatedly interfered to limit the overgrowth of clerical privileges, to insist on the submission of the clergy to the common law of the land, and to prevent the too great preponderance of clerical influence in secular administration. The ordinances of their Kings were used, time after time, to counteract the influence of harmful papal Bulls, and to prevent the interference of Italian ecclesiastics in the affairs of the Spanish Church. In the end of the fifteenth century the Spanish Bishops had been reduced to a state of dependence on the Crown; all exercise of ecclesiastical authority was carefully watched; the extent of ecclesiastical jurisdiction was specifically limited, and clerical courts were made to feel their dependence on the secular tribunals. The Crown wrung from the Papacy the right to see that piety and a zeal for religion were to be indispensable qualifications for clerical promotion.

All this regulative zeal was preserved from being simply the attempts of politicians to control a rival power by certain fundamental elements in the national religious character, which expressed themselves in rulers as well as in the ma.s.s of their subjects. In Spain, more than in any other land, asceticism and mystical raptures were recognised to be the truest expression of genuine religious sentiment. Kings and commonalty alike shared in the firm belief that a real imitation of Christ meant to follow in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows, who wandered about not knowing where to lay His head, and who was enabled to endure what was given Him to do and to suffer by continuous and rapt communion with the Unseen.

The ecclesiastical Reformer of Spain had all these elements to work upon, and they made his task comparatively easy.

-- 2. _Reformation under Ximenes._

The consolidation of the Peninsula under Ferdinand and Isabella suggested a thorough reorganisation of the Spanish Church. The Crown extorted from the Papacy extraordinary powers to deal with the secular clergy and with the monasteries. The great Queen was determined to purge the Church of her realm of all that she deemed to be evil. She called to her councils three famous Churchmen in whom she had thorough confidence--the great Spanish Cardinal, Mendoza, her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, and Francesco Ximenes. It was Ximenes who sketched the plan and who carried through the reformation.

Francesco Ximenes de Cisneros, as he is called, had been a Franciscan monk devoted to the ideals of his order. He belonged to a poor family, and had somehow or other attracted the attention of Cardinal Mendoza, at whose instigation the Queen had made him her father-confessor (1492).

She insisted on his accepting the dignity of Archbishop of Toledo (1495), and had selected him to carry out her plans for the organisation and purification of the Spanish Church. After his elevation to the arch-episcopal chair he gave the example of what he believed to be the true clerical life by following in the most literal way the maxims of St. Francis about self-denial, devotion, and ascetic life. He made these the ideal for the Spanish clergy; they followed where he led.

The Concordat of 1482 gave the Spanish Crown the right of "visitation"

(held to involve the power to dismiss from office) and of nomination to benefices. Ximenes used these powers to the full. He "visited" the monasteries personally, and received full reports about the condition of the convents. He re-established in all of them monastic discipline of the strictest kind. The secular clergy were put to like proof. The secular power was invoked to sweep all opponents to reform from his path. His Queen protected him when the vacillations of the papal policy threatened to hinder his work. In the end, the Church in Spain secured a devoted clergy whose personal life was free from the reproaches justly levelled at the higher clergy of other lands.

Ximenes, having purified the morals of the Spanish clergy, next set himself to overcome their ignorance and lack of culture. In every Chapter within Castile and Aragon, two prebends were set apart for scholars, one of them for a student in Canon Law, and the other for an expert theologian. A special "visitation" of the clergy removed from their places all utterly ignorant persons. New schools of theology were inst.i.tuted. In addition to the mediaeval Universities of Salamanca and Valladolid, Ximenes founded one in Alcala, another in Seville, a third at Toledo. Alcala and Valladolid were the princ.i.p.al theological schools, and there, in addition to the older studies of Dogmatic Theology and Ethics, courses of lectures wore given in Biblical Exegesis. The theology taught was that of Thomas Aquinas, to the exclusion of the later developments of Scholastic under John Duns Scotus and William of Occam. The Augustinian elements in Thomas were specially dwelt upon; and soon there arose a school of theologians who were called the New Thomists, who became very powerful, and were later the leading opponents of the Jesuit teachers. There was also an attempt to make use of the New Learning in the interest of the old theology. Ximenes collected at Alcala the band of scholars who under his superintendence prepared the celebrated Complutensian Polyglot.