The Age of the Reformation Part 29

backs in the intrigues of courts, was decided by a compromise to the effect that both dogma and reform should be taken up simultaneously.

But all enactments dealing with ecclesiastical irregularities were to bear the proviso "under reservation of the papal authority."

[Sidenote: Dogmatic decrees]

The dogmatic decrees at Trent were almost wholly oriented by the polemic against Protestantism. {392} Practically nothing was defined save what had already been taken up in the Augsburg Confession or in the writings of Calvin, of Zwingli and of the Anabaptists. Inevitably, a spirit so purely defensive could not be animated by a primarily philosophical interest. The guiding star was not a system but a policy, and this policy was nothing more nor less than that of re-establishing tradition. The practice of the church was the standard applied; many an unhistorical a.s.sertion was made to justify it and many a practice of comparatively recent growth was sanctioned by the postulate that "it had descended from apostolic use." "By show of antiquity they introduce novelty," was Bacon's correct judgment.

[Sidenote: Bible and tradition]

Quite naturally the first of the important dogmatic decrees was on the basis of authority. The Protestants had acknowledged the Bible only; over against them the Tridentine fathers declared for the Bible _and_ the tradition of the church. The canon of Scripture was different from that recognized by the Protestants in that it included the Apocrypha.

[Sidenote: Justification]

After pa.s.sing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the th.o.r.n.y question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The pa.s.sions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with {393} plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards. The decree as finally pa.s.sed established the position that faith and works together justify, and condemned the semi-Lutheran doctrines of "duplicate justice" and imputed righteousness. .h.i.therto held by such eminent theologians as Contarini and Cajetan.

Having accomplished this important work the council appeared to the pope ready for dissolution. The protests of the emperor kept it together for a few months longer, but an outbreak of the spotted fever and the fear of a raid during the Schmalkaldic war, served as sufficient excuses to translate the council to Bologna. [Sidenote: March 1547] Though nothing was accomplished in this city the a.s.sembly was not formally prorogued until September 13, 1549.

[Sidenote: Second period, 1551-2]

Under pressure from the emperor Pope Julius III convoked the synod for a second time at Trent on May 1, 1551. The personnel was different.

The Jesuits Lainez and Salmeron were present working in the interests of the papacy. No French clergy took part as Henry II was hostile.

The Protestants were required to send a delegation, which was received on January 24, 1552. They presented a confession, but declined to recognize the authority of a body in which they were not represented.

Several dogmatic decrees were pa.s.sed on the sacraments, rea.s.serting transubstantiation and all the doctrines and usages of the church. A few reform decrees were also pa.s.sed, but before a great deal could be accomplished the revolt of Maurice of Saxony put both emperor and council in a precarious position and the latter was consequently prorogued for a second time on April 28, 1552.

[Sidenote: Third period, 1562-3]

When, after ten long years, the council again convened at the command of Pius IV, in January, 1562, it is extraordinary to see how little the problems confronting it had changed. Not only was the struggle {394} for power between pope and council and between pope and emperor still going on, but hopes were still entertained in some quarters of reconciling the schismatics. Pius invited all princes, whether Catholic or heretical, to send delegates, but was rebuffed by some of them. The argument was then taken up by the Emperor Ferdinand who sent in an imposing demand for reforms, including the authorization of the marriage of priests, communion in both kinds, the use of the vulgar tongue in divine service, and drastic rules for the improvement of the convents and of the papal courts.

[Sidenote: Jesuits present]

The contention over this bone among the fathers, now far more numerous than in the earlier days, waxed so hot that for ten whole months no session could be held. Mobs of the partisans of the various factions fought in the streets and bitter taunts of "French diseases" and "Spanish eruptions" were exchanged between them. For a time the situation seemed inextricable and one cardinal prophesied the impending downfall of the papacy. But in the nick of time to prevent such a catastrophe the pope was able to send into the field the newly recruited praetorian guards of the Society of Jesuits. Under the command of Cardinal Morone these indefatigable zealots turned the flank of the opposing forces partly by intrigue at the imperial court, partly by skilful manipulation of debate. The emperor's mind was changed; reforms demanded by him were dropped.

The questions actually taken up and settled were dogmatic ones, chiefly concerning the sacrifice of the ma.s.s and the perpetuation of the Catholic customs of communion in one kind, the celebration of ma.s.ses in honor of saints, the celebration of ma.s.ses in which the priest only communicates, the mixing of water with the wine, the prohibition of the use of the vulgar tongue, and the sanction of ma.s.ses for the dead.

Other {395} decrees amended the marriage laws, and enjoined the preparation of an Index of prohibited books, of a catechism and of standard editions of missal and breviary.

[Sidenote: Subjection to papacy]

How completely the council in its last estate was subdued to the will of the pope is shown by its request that the decrees should all be confirmed by him. This was done by Pius IV in the bull Benedictus Deus. [Sidenote: January 26, 1564] Pius also caused to be prepared a symbol known as the Tridentine Profession of Faith which was made binding on all priests. Save that it was slightly enlarged in 1877 by the p.r.o.nouncement on Papal Infallibility, it stands to the present day.

[Sidenote: Reception of decrees]

The complete triumph of the papal claims was offset by the cool reception which the decrees received in Catholic Europe. Only the Italian states, Poland, Portugal and Savoy unreservedly recognized the authority of all of them. Philip II, bigot as he was, preferred to make his own rules for his clergy and recognized the laws of Trent with the proviso "saving the royal rights." France sanctioned only the dogmatic, not the practical decrees. The emperor never officially recognized the work of the council at all. Nor were the governments the only recalcitrants. According to Sarpi the body of German Catholics paid no attention to the prescribed reforms and the council was openly mocked in France as claiming an authority superior to that of the apostles.

To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent observer of the next generation, the council seemed to have been a failure if not a fraud.

Its history he calls an Iliad of woes. The professed objects of the council, healing the schism and a.s.serting the episcopal power he thinks frustrated, for the schism was made irreconciliable and the church reduced to servitude.

But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of {396} the great historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned. If the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain, she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what was left. Her power was now collected; her dogma was unified and made consistent as opposed to the mutually diverse Protestant creeds. In several points, indeed, where the opinion of the members was divided, the words of the decrees were ambiguous, but as against the Protestants they were distinct and so comprehensive as rather to supersede than to supplement earlier standards.

Nor should the moral impulse of the council be underestimated, ridiculed though it was by its opponents as if expressed in the maxim, "si non caste, tamen caute." Sweeping decrees for urgent reforms were pa.s.sed, and above all a machinery set up to carry on the good work. In providing for a catechism, for authoritative editions of the Vulgate, breviary and other standard works, in regulating moot points, in striking at lax discipline, the council did a lasting service to Catholicism and perhaps to the world. Not the least of the practical reforms was the provision for the opening of seminaries to train the diocesan clergy. The first measure looking to this was pa.s.sed in 1546; Cardinal Pole at once began to act upon it, and a decree of the third session [Sidenote: 1563] ordered that each diocese should have such a school for the education of priests. The Roman seminary, opened two years later, [Sidenote: 1565] was a model for subsequent foundations.

SECTION 4. THE COMPANY OF JESUS

If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of heathenism.

Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity.

Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo X there a.s.sembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.

The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished and turned its energies especially against the heretics.

Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the organization of the Company of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]

The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The _Lettres Provinciales_ of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order.

Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.

[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]

In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one of his auditors was--or might have been for she was undoubtedly present in the city--Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family, Inigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for his lady "no d.u.c.h.ess nor countess but one far higher"

and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors"

had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was probably punished severely.

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna.

Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May 23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The young man of about twenty-eight--the exact year of his birth is unknown--found himself a cripple for life.

To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what if you should even surpa.s.s them in sanct.i.ty?" His choice was fixed. He took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the knights he had read about in _Amadis of Gaul_. Then, with a general confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development was somewhat quieter and more normal--if, indeed, in the psychology of conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal.

At any rate where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occasion, Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Ignatius saw the Trinity as a clavichord with three strings, the miracle of transubstantiation as light in bread, Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, mysterious eyes, Jesus as "a big round form shining as gold," and the Trinity again as "a ball of fire."

But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his purpose.

[Sidenote: 1523] At first this took the form of a vow to preach to the infidels and he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be turned back by the highest Christian authority in that region, the politically-minded Franciscan vicar.

[Sidenote: 1524]

On returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and started to learn Latin with boys, for his education as a gentleman had included nothing but reading and writing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university of Alcala where he won disciples but was imprisoned for six weeks by the Inquisition and forbidden to hold meetings with them. Practically the same experience was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by the Holy Office for twenty-two days and again prohibited from holding religious meetings. Thus he was chased out of Spain by the church he sought to serve. Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition he was publicly whipped by the college authorities as a dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless, here he gathered his first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fevre of Savoy, Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Castilians, {401} James Laynez and Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, hardly over five feet two inches high, deformed and scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his mission and his book.

[Sidenote: _The Spiritual Exercises_]

If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the _Spiritual Exercises_ of Ignatius will rank high.

Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from _The Imitation of Christ_, some from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more he took from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.

The purpose of the _Exercises_ is stated in the axiom that "Man was created to praise, reverence and serve G.o.d our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director. The first week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his pa.s.sion; and the fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing the tremendous power of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in the application of it. But, subject only to the condition that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and depth of h.e.l.l, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies of the d.a.m.ned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the church. The Jesuit was directed ever "to praise all the precepts of the church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for her defence and nowise in her offence." There must be an unconditional surrender to her not only of the will but of the intelligence. "To make sure of being right in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold by the principle that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule it."

Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, agreeing to be called henceforth the Company of Jesus--a military term, the _socii_ being the companions or followers of a chief in arms--took vows to live in poverty and chast.i.ty [Sidenote: August 15, 1540] and to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With this object they set out to Venice and then turned towards Rome for papal approbation of their enterprise. Their first reception was chilling, but they gradually won a few new recruits and Ignatius drafted the const.i.tution [Sidenote: September 27, 1540] for a new order which was handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the bull _Regimini militantis ecclesiae_, which quotes from the formula of the Jesuits:

Whoever wishes to fight for G.o.d under the standard of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of perpetual chast.i.ty, consider that he is part of a society inst.i.tuted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in {403} life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the faith through public preaching, the ministry of G.o.d's word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and especially for the education of children and ignorant persons in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the giving of spiritual consolation.

Moreover it is stated that the members of the new order should be bound by a vow of special obedience to the pope and should hold themselves ready at his behest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels, heretics or schismatics, or to minister to believers.