A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 26

The labours of Erasmus were sympathised with by the leaders of this Spanish movement. The Princes of the Church delighted to call themselves his friends. They prevented the Spanish monks from attacking him even when he struck hardest at the follies of the monastic life. He was esteemed at Court. The most prominent statesmen who surrounded Charles, the young Prince of the Netherlands, the King of Spain, called themselves Erasmians. Erasmus, if we are to believe what he wrote to them,--which is scarcely possible,--declared that the work in Spain under Ximenes followed the best type of a reformation in the Church.

But there was another and terrible side to this Spanish purification of the Church and of the clergy. The Inquisition had been reorganised, and every opinion and practice strange to the mediaeval Church was relentlessly crushed out of existence. This stern repression was a very real part of the Spanish idea of a reformation.

The Spanish policy for the renovation of the Church was not a reformation in the sense of providing room for anything new in the religious experience. Its sole aim was to requicken religious life within the limits which had been laid down during the Middle Ages. The hierarchy was to remain, the mediaeval conceptions of priesthood and sacraments; the Pope was to continue to be the acknowledged and revered Head of the Church; "the sacred ceremonies, decrees, ordinances, and sacred usages"[650] were to be left untouched; the dogmatic theology of the mediaeval Church was to remain in all essentials the same as before.

The only novelty, the only sign of appreciation of new ideas which were in the air, was that the papal interference in the affairs of national Churches was greatly limited, and that at a time when the Papacy had become so thoroughly secularised as to forget its real duties as a spiritual authority. The sole recognition of the new era, with its new modes of thought, was the proposal that the secular authorities of the countries of Europe should undertake duties which the Papacy was plainly neglecting. Perhaps it might be added that the slight homage paid to the New Learning, the appreciation of the need of an exact text of the original Scriptures, its guarded approval of the laity's acquaintance with Holy Writ, introduced something of the new spirit; but these things did not really imply anything at variance with what a devoted adherent of the mediaeval Church might readily acquiesce in.

-- 3. _The Spaniards and Luther._

Devout Spaniards were able to appreciate much in Luther's earlier work.

They could sympathise with his attack on Indulgences, provided they did not inquire too closely into the principles implied in the _Theses_--principles which Luther himself scarcely recognised till the Leipzig Disputation. Their hearts responded to the intense religious earnestness and high moral tone of his earlier writings. They could welcome his appearance, even when they could not wholly agree with all that he said, in the hope that his utterances would create an impetus towards the _kind_ of reformation they desired to see. The reformation of the Spanish Church under Cardinal Ximenes enables us to understand both the almost universal welcome which greeted Luther's earlier appearances and the opposition which he afterwards encountered from many of his earlier supporters. Some light is also cast on that opposition when we remember that the Emperor Charles himself fully accepted the principles underlying the Spanish Reformation, and that they had been instilled into his youthful mind by his revered tutor whom he managed to seat in the chair of St. Peter--Adrian VI., whose short-lived pontificate was an attempt to force the Spanish Reformation on the whole of the Western Obedience.

If it be possible to accept the statements made by Glapion, the Emperor's confessor, to Dr. Bruck, the Saxon Chancellor in the days before Luther's appearance at Worms, as a truthful account of the disposition and intentions of Charles V., it may be said that an attempt was made to see whether Luther himself might be made to act as a means of forcing the Spanish Reformation on the whole German Church. Glapion professed to speak for the Emperor as well as for himself. Luther's earlier writings, he said, had given him great pleasure; he believed him to be a "plant of renown," able to produce splendid fruit for the Church. But the book on the _Babylonian Captivity_ had shocked him; he did not believe it to be Luther's; it was not in his usual style; if Luther had written it, it must have been because he was momentarily indignant at the papal Bull, and as it was anonymous, it could easily be repudiated; or if not repudiated, it might be explained, and its sentences shown to be capable of a catholic interpretation. If this were done, and if Luther withdrew his violent writings against the Pope, there was no reason why an amicable arrangement should not be come to.

The papal Bull could easily be got over, it could be withdrawn on the ground that Luther had never had a fair trial. It was a mistake to suppose that the Emperor was not keenly alive to the need for a Reformation of the Church; there were limits to his devotion to the Pope; the Emperor believed that he would deserve the wrath of G.o.d if he did not try to amend the deplorable condition of the Church of Christ.

Such was Glapion's statement. It is a question how far he was sincere, and if so, whether he really did express what was in the mind of the Emperor. Frederick of Saxony did not believe either in his sincerity or in his representation of the Emperor's real opinions; and Luther himself refused all private conference with Glapion. Yet it is almost certain that Glapion did express what many an earnest Spanish ecclesiastic thoroughly believed. We have an interesting confirmation of this in the conversation which Konrad Pellikan had with Francisco de los Angeles, the Provincial of the Spanish Franciscans at Basel. The Franciscan expressed himself in almost the very same terms as Glapion.[651]

Three forces met at the Diet of Worms in 1521--the German movement for Reform inspired by Luther, the Spanish Reformation represented by Charles v., and the stolid inertia of the Roman Curia speaking by the Nuncio Aleander. The first and the second could unite only if Luther retraced his steps and stood where he did before the Leipzig Disputation. If he refused, the inevitable result was that the Emperor and the Curia would combine to crush him before preparing to measure their strength against each other. The two different conceptions of reform may be distinguished from each other by saying that the Spanish conception sought to awaken the benumbed and formalist mediaeval Church to a new religious life, leaving unchanged its characteristics of a sacerdotal ministry, an external visible unity under a hierarchy culminating in the Papacy, and a body of doctrine guaranteed by the decisions of Oec.u.menical Councils. The other wished to free the human spirit from the fetters of merely ecclesiastical authority, and to requicken the life of the Church through the spiritual priesthood of all believers. The former sought the aid of the secular power to purge national Churches and restore ecclesiastical discipline, but always under a decorous air of submission to the Bishop of Rome, and with a very real belief in the supremacy and infallibility of a General Council. The latter was prepared to deny the authority of the Bishop of Rome altogether, and to see the Church of the Middle Ages broken up into territorial or National Churches, each of which, it was contended, was a portion of the one Visible Catholic Church. But as separate tendencies may be represented by a single contrast, it may be said that Charles would have forgiven Luther much had the Reformer been able to acknowledge the infallibility of a General Council. The dramatic wave of the hand by which Charles ended the altercation between Official Eck and Luther, when the latter insisted that General Councils had erred, and that he could prove it, ended the dream that the movement in Germany could be used to aid in the universal introduction of the Spanish Reformation. If the ideas of reforming Spanish ecclesiastics and statesmen were to requicken the whole mediaeval Church, some other way of forcing their acceptance had to be found.

-- 4. _Pope Adrian VI. and the Spanish Reformation._

The opportunity seemed to come when, owing to the rivalries of powerful Cardinals and the steady pressure of Charles V. on the Conclave, Adrian of Utrecht was elected Pope. The new Pontiff had a long reputation for learning and piety. His courage had been manifested in his fearless denunciation of prevailing clerical abuses, and in the way he had dealt with difficult questions in mediaeval theology. He had no sympathy with the new curialist ideas of papal inerrancy and infallibility, nor with the repeated a.s.sertions of Italian canonists that the Pope was superior to all ecclesiastical law. He rather believed that such ideas were responsible for the degradation of the Church, and that no amendment was possible until the whole system of papal reservations, exemptions, and other ways in which the Papacy had evaded the plain declarations of Canon Law, was swept away. The public confidence in his piety, integrity, and learning was so great that the Netherlands had entrusted him with the religious education of their young Prince, and none of his instructors so stamped themselves on the mind of Charles.

Adrian was a Dutch Ximenes. He had the same pa.s.sionate desire for the Reformation of the Church, and the same ideas of how such Reformation could be brought about. He prized the ascetic life; he longed to see the monastic orders and the secular clergy disciplined in the strictest way; he had a profound admiration for Thomas Aquinas, and especially for that side of the great Schoolman's teaching which represented the ideas of St. Augustine. He so exactly reproduced in his own aspirations the desires of the Spanish Reformers, that Cardinal Carvajal, who with the grave enthusiasm of his nation was engaged in the quixotic task of commending the Spanish Reformation to the authorities in Rome, desired to take him there as an indispensable a.s.sistant. He was also in full sympathy with the darker side of the Spanish Reformation. During his sojourn in Spain he had become one of the heads of the Inquisition, and was firmly opposed to any relaxation of the rigours of the Holy Office.

With Adrian in the chair of St. Peter, the Emperor and the leaders of the Spanish Church might hope to see their type of a reformation adopted to cure the ills under which the Church was suffering.

The new Pope did not lack sympathisers in Italy when he began his task of cleansing the Augean stables without turning the torrent of revolution through them. Cardinal Carvajal welcomed him in a speech which expressed his own ideas if it displeased his colleagues in whose name he was supposed to speak. A memorial drafted by Egidio, General of the Augustinian Eremites, was presented to him, which practically embodied the reforms the new Pope wished to see accomplished.[652] His programme was as extensive as it was thorough. A large part of it may be compared with the reforms sketched in Luther's _Address to the n.o.bility of the German Nation_. He disapproved of the way in which _prebends_ were taken from foundations within national Churches to swell the incomes of Roman Cardinals. He disliked the whole system of papal _reservations_, _indults,_[653] _exemptions_, _expectances_, which under the fostering care of Pope John XXII. had converted the Curia into a great machine for raking in money from every corner of western Europe.[654] He disapproved of the system of encouraging complainants to pa.s.s over the episcopal courts of their own lands and bring their cases at once before the papal court. But every one of these reforms would cut off a source of revenue. It meant that hundreds of hungry Italian Humanists would lose their pensions, and that as many pens would lampoon the Holy Father who was intent on taking bread from his children. It meant that hundreds of ecclesiastical lawyers who had invested their savings in purchasing places in the Curia, would find themselves reduced to penury. It meant that the incomes of the Princes of the Church would shrink in an incalculable manner. Adrian set himself to show such men how to meet the changes in prospect. He brought his old Flemish peasant housekeeper with him to Rome, contented himself with the simple dishes she cooked for him, and lived the life of an anchorite in a corner of his vast palace on the Vatican hill; but in this case example did not seem better than precept. It had seemed so easy to the simple-minded Dutch scholar to reform the Church; everything was provided for in the Canon Law, whose regulations had only to be put in force. His Spanish experience had confirmed him in the possibility of the task. But at Rome he found a system of Rules of Chancery which could not be set aside all at once; there was no convenient Inquisition so organised that it could clear all objectors out of his path; no secular power always ready to support a reforming Churchman.

Where was he to begin? The whole practice of Indulgences appeared to be what was most in need of reform. Its abuses had kindled the storm in Germany. To purge them away would show how much in earnest he was. He knew the subject well. He had written upon it, and therefore had studied it from all sides. Rightly understood, Indulgences were precious things.

They showed how a merciful G.o.d had empowered His Church to declare that He pardoned sins freely; and, besides, they proclaimed, as no other usage of the Church did, the brotherhood of all believers, within which the stronger could help the weaker, and the holier the more sinful, and all could fulfil the law of Christ by bearing each other's burdens. Only it was to be remembered that every pardon required a heart unfeignedly penitent, and the sordid taint of money must be got rid of. But--there was always a "but" for poor Adrian--it was shown to him that the papal court could not possibly pay its way without the money which came in so easily from the sale of Indulgences. He was baffled at the very start; checks, for the most part quite unexpected, thwarted every effort. He was like a man in a nightmare, set in a thicket of thorns, where no hewing could set him free, clothes torn, limbs bleeding, till at last he sank exhausted, welcoming the death which freed him from his impossible task. Adrian was the distinguished martyr of the Spanish Reformation.

History has dwelt upon his failures; they were only too manifest. It has derided his simplicity in sending Chieregati to Germany with the confession that the Curia was the source of most of the evils which beset the mediaeval Church, and at the same time demanding the death of Luther, who had been the first to show the fact in such a way that all men could see it. It has said little of the success that came in due time. Chieregati was unable to overcome the deeply rooted Evangelical Reformation in Germany. But his mission and the honest statement that the Curia was the seat of evil in the Church, date the beginnings of a reaction, of a genuine Romanist party with a vague idea of reforms on mediaeval lines. It must be taken as the starting-point of the Counter-Reformation in Germany. Adrian's example, too, did much to encourage the few spiritually minded Churchmen in Italy, and its effects can be seen in the revival of a zeal to purify the Church which arose during the pontificate of Paul III.

CHAPTER III.

ITALIAN LIBERAL ROMAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[655]

-- 1. _The Religious Condition of Italy._

Italy is the land which next to Spain is the most important for the Counter-Reformation. While we can trace in Spain and in Germany a certain solidarity of religious movement, the spiritual conditions of Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century were as manifold as its political conditions. It is impossible to speak of the Italians as a whole. Italy had been the land of the Renaissance, but that great intellectual movement had never rooted itself deeply in the people as it had done in Germany, France, or England.

The Italian peasantry were a cla.s.s apart from the burghers as they were nowhere else. Their religion was usually a thinly veiled paganism, a belief in the omnipresence of spirits, good and bad, to be thanked, propitiated, coaxed or compelled by use of charms, amulets, spells, and ceremonies. The G.o.ds of their pagan ancestors had been replaced by local saints, and received the same kind of wors.h.i.+p. To fight for their faith had never been a tradition with them as with the Spaniards; they were not troubled by any continuous sense of sin as were the people of the northern nations; but they had an intense fear of the supernatural, and their faith in the priest, who could stand between them and the terrors of the unseen, was boundless. Goodness touched them as it does all men.

But the immorality of their religious guides did not embarra.s.s them; a bad priest had as powerful spells as a good one. The only kind of Christianity which seemed able to impress them and hold them was that of Francis of a.s.sisi. He was the highest embodiment of the Christian spirit for the Italian peasantry; the impression he had made upon the people of the Peninsula was enduring; the wandering revivalist preacher who lived as Francis had done always made the deepest impression. John of Capistrano owed much of his power to the fact that he remained always the Abruzzi peasant. During the whole of the period of the Renaissance the peasantry and the clergy who served the village chapels were regarded by those above them with a scorn that degenerated into hatred.

We may search in vain through the whole of the literature of the time for the thought that any attempt ought to be made to lead them to a deeper faith and a purer life. The whole of the peasant population of Italy were believed to be beneath the level of desire for something better than what the religious life of the times gave.[656]

The towns presented an entirely different picture. There was a solidarity binding together all the civic population. The ordinary division of ranks, made by greater or less possession of wealth or by social standing, existed, but it did not prevent a common mode of thinking. We can trace the same thoughts among artisans, small shopkeepers, rich merchants, and the patricians of the towns. No country presented so many varieties of local character as Italy; but the inhabitants of Venice or Florence, Milan, Naples, however else they might differ, were all on the same spiritual level. They thought much about religion; they took the moral degradation of the Church and of the clergy to heart; they longed to see some improvement, if it was only within their own city. They were clearsighted enough to trace the mischief to the influence of the Roman Curia, and their belief in the hopelessness of reforming the evil Court gives a settled despondency to their thought which appears in most of the Chronicles. The external side of religion was inextricably interwoven with their city life. The civic rulers had always something to do with the churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical foundations within their walls. They had no great interest in doctrine; what they wanted was a real improvement in the moral living of clergy and of people. When an Italian town was blessed with a good and pious Bishop, it is touching to see how the whole population rallied round him.

When we turn to the outstanding men of the Italian peninsula, whose opinions have been preserved in their writings or correspondence, we find, to begin with, a great variety of religious opinions whose common note is unconstrained hostility to the Church as it was then const.i.tuted. The inst.i.tution was a necessary evil, very important as a factor in the game of politics, useless for the religious life. This sentiment existed almost universally, both among those who merely maintained a decorous relation towards the existing ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions, and among those who really believed in Christianity, and acknowledged its power over their mind and life. The papal Curia oppressed them; they were hopeless of its reformation, and yet there was little hope of a revival of religion, with its social wors.h.i.+p and its "sacraments" unless it was reformed. The feeling of hopelessness is everywhere apparent; the deepest spiritual longings and experiences were to be treasured as sacred secrets of the heart, and not to be spoken about. Yet the work of Savonarola had not been entirely consumed in the fire that burnt the martyr, and the earlier message of Luther had found an echo in many Italian hearts.

-- 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 fellows.h.i.+p of G.o.d with man depending on the inscrutable purpose of G.o.d 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 inst.i.tution with its hierarchy, and its visible head in the Bishop of Rome. A reform of the Church meant for them the reformation of that inst.i.tution. So long as this was denied them they could always wors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.s.sociations 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.

Renee, d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.s through.

Caterina Cybo, a niece of Pope Clement, Princess of Camerino, Eleonora Gonzaga, d.u.c.h.ess 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.lysis. The man who could defend and commend auricular confession because it was an example of Christian humility, and saint-wors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociations 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 Gra.s.sis, 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 mediaeval 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 Cybo took compa.s.sion on the hunted man, and gave him an asylum within her little princ.i.p.ality 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 princ.i.p.ality.

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 cla.s.ses. 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 inst.i.tution took the name of the Benedictine Mother-Cloister, Monte Ca.s.sino. 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 a.s.sociations 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 praelatorum 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 doc.u.ment; 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 ent.i.tled _Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo III. super reformatione sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae_. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 p.r.o.nouncing 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 mediaeval jurisprudence. The whole round of mediaeval 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 const.i.tutional 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 _Inst.i.tutio_ 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 const.i.tution 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 n.o.ble 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.