The Reformation by Will Durant
The thirteenth session of the Council (October 1551) reaffirmed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: the priest, in consecrating the bread and wine of the Eucharist, actually changes each of them into the body and blood of Christ. Thereafter it seemed useless to hear the Protestants, but Charles insisted on it. The Duke of Württemberg, Elector Maurice of Saxony, and some south German towns chose the members of a Protestant delegation, and Melanchthon drew up a statement of Lutheran doctrine to be submitted to the Council. Charles gave the delegates a safe-conduct, but these, remembering Constance and Huss, required also a safe-conduct from the Council itself. After much discussion this was granted. However, a Dominican friar, preaching on the parable of tares, in the very cathedral in which the sessions were held, pointed out that the heretic tares might be endured for a time, but in the end they would have to be burned.43
On January 24,1552, the Protestant deputies addressed the assembly. They proposed that the decrees of the Councils of Constance and Basel on the superior authority of councils over the popes should be confirmed; that the members of the present body should be released from their vows of fealty to Julius III; that all decisions hitherto reached by the Council should be annulled; and that fresh discussions of the issues should be held by an enlarged synod in which the Protestants would be adequately represented.44 Julius III forbade consideration of these proposals. The Council voted to postpone action on them till March 19, when additional Protestant delegates were expected.
During this delay military developments supervened upon theology. In January 1552, the King of France signed an alliance with the German Protestants; in March Maurice of Saxony advanced toward Innsbruck; Charles fled, and no force could prevent Maurice, if he wished, from capturing Trent and swallowing the Council. The bishops one by one disappeared, and on April 28 the Council was formally suspended. By the treaty of Passau (August 2) Ferdinand conceded religious freedom to the militantly victorious Protestants. They took no further interest in the Council.
Paul IV thought it prudent to let the Council hibernate during his pontificate. Pius IV, a kindly old man, played with the thought that the granting of communion in both kinds might appease the Protestants, as it had done the Bohemians. He summoned the Council to reconvene at Trent on April 6, 1561, and invited to it all Christian princes, Catholic or Protestant. To this new session the French delegates brought an imposing list of the reforms they desired: Mass in the vernacular, communion in bread and wine, the marriage of priests, the subordination of the papacy to general councils, and an end to the system of papal dispensations and exemptions;45 apparently the French government was for the moment in a semi-Huguenot mood. Ferdinand I, now Emperor, seconded these proposals, and added that “the Pope .... should humble himself, and submit to a reform in his own person, his state, and the Curia”; the legends of the saints should be purified of absurdities, and monasteries should be reformed so “that their great wealth might no longer be expended in so profligate a manner.” 46 Matters loomed perilous for Pius, and his legates looked with some trepidation to the opening of the session,
After leisurely or strategic delays the seventeenth session of the Council convened on January 18, 1562, with five cardinals, three patriarchs, eleven archbishops, ninety bishops, four generals, four abbots, and sundry lay representatives of Catholic princes. At Ferdinand’s request a safe-conduct was offered to any Protestant delegate who might care to attend; none came. The Archbishop of Granada and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, led a movement to reduce the prerogatives of the pope by asserting that the bishops held their power not through him but by direct “divine right”; and the Bishop of Segovia repeated one of Luther’s heresies by denying that the pope was supreme over the other bishops in the early Church.47 This episcopal uprising was snuffed out by the parliamentary skill of the papal legates, the loyalty of the Italian and Polish bishops to the Pope, and some timely papal courtesies to the Cardinal of Lorraine. In the end the papal authority was not lessened but enlarged, and every bishop was required to take an oath of complete obedience to the Pope. Ferdinand was appeased by the promise that on the termination of the Council the Pope would allow administration of the Eucharist in both kinds.
This basic quarrel over, the Council quickly dispatched its remaining business. Clerical marriage was forbidden, and severe penalties were decreed against priestly concubinage. Many minor reforms were enacted to improve the morals and discipline of the clergy. Seminaries were to be established where candidates for the priesthood could be trained to habits of austerity and piety. The powers of the Curia were curbed. Rules were laid down for the reform of Church music and art; nude figures were to be sufficiently covered to avoid stimulating the sensual imagination. A distinction was drawn between the worship of images and the worship of the persons represented by them; in the latter sense the use of religious images was upheld. Purgatory, indulgences, and the invocation of the saints were defended and redefined. Here the Council frankly recognized the abuses that had sparked Luther’s rebellion; one decree read:
In granting indulgences the Council .... decrees that all criminal gain therewith connected shall be entirely done away with, as a source of grievous abuse among the Christian people; and as to other disorders arising from superstitution, ignorance, irreverence, or any cause whatsoever—since these, on account of the widespread corruption, cannot be removed by special prohibitions—the Council lays upon each bishop the duty of finding out such abuses as exist in his own diocese, of bringing them before the next provincial synod, and of reporting them, with the assent of the other bishops, to the Roman Pontiff.48
Pope and Emperor agreed that the Council had now reached an end of its usefulness; and on December 4, 1563, it was finally dissolved amid the happy acclamations of the wearied delegates. The course of the Church had been fixed for centuries.
The Counter Reformation succeeded in its principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war.49 But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind. Prostitution, which had been a major industry in Renaissance Rome and Venice, now hid its head, and chastity became fashionable. The authorship or publication of obscene works was made a capital offense in Italy; so Niccolo Franco, secretary and enemy of Aretino, was hanged by order of Pius V for his Priapeia.50 The effect of the new restrictions on art and literature was not indisputably harmful; baroque art is emerging timidly from disrepute; and from a purely literary standpoint Tasso, Guarini, and Goldoni do not fall precipitately from the level of Boiardo, Ariosto, and the dramatist Machiavelli. Spain’s greatest age in literature and art came in the fullness of the “Catholic Reaction.” But the joyous character of Renaissance Italy faded; Italian women lost some of the charm and exhilaration that had come from their pre-Reformation freedom; a somber and conscious morality produced an almost puritan age in Italy. Monasticism revived. From the point of view of the free mind it was a loss to mankind that the comparative Renaissance liberty of thought was ended by ecclesiastical and political censorship; and it was a tragedy that the Inquisition was restored in Italy and elsewhere just when science was breaking through its medieval shell. The Church deliberately sacrificed the intellectual classes to the pious majority, which applauded the suppression of ideas that might dissolve its consoling faith.
The ecclesiastical reforms were real and permanent. Though the papal monarchy was exalted as against the episcopal aristocracy of the councils, this was in the spirit of the times, when aristocracies everywhere, except in Germany, were losing power to the kings. The popes were now morally superior to the bishops, and the discipline required for ecclesiastical reform could be better effected by a centralized than by a divided authority. The popes ended their nepotism, and cured the Curia of its costly procrastinations and flagrant venality. The administration of the Church, according to non-Catholic studen
All in all it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products of the Protestant Reformation.
Epilogue
RENAISSANCE, REFORMATION, AND ENLIGHTENMENT
THE Renaissance and the Reformation are the two springs of modern history, rival sources of the intellectual and moral freshening of modern life. Men might be divided by their preference and lineage here, by their conscious debt to the Renaissance for liberating the mind and beautifying life, or their gratitude to the Reformation for quickening religious belief and the moral sense. The debate between Erasmus and Luther goes on, and will, for in these large matters such truth as men can attain is begotten by the union of opposites, and will ever feel its double parentage.
In a sense the debate is ethnic and geographical, between the Latins and the Teutons, the plein-air, sensuous South and the misty, hardy North; between peoples conquered by Rome and receiving the classic heritage, and peoples resisting Rome—some conquering Rome—and loving their own roots and climes far more than Greeks bringing gifts or Romans bearing laws. Italy and Germany divided between them the forming of the modern soul: Italy by going back to classic literature, philosophy, and art, Germany by going back to early Christian faith and ritual. Italy was almost succeeding in its second effort to conquer Germany—now through tithes and humanism; Germany resisted again, expelled the Church, and silenced the humanists. The Reformation repudiated the Renaissance and its emphasis on earthly affairs and joys, and returned to that aspect (only one!) of the Middle Ages which counted human achievements and delights trivial and vain, called life a vale of tears, and summoned sinful man to faith, repentance, and prayer. To the Italian of the Renaissance, reading Machiavelli and Aretino, this seemed a medieval reaction, a restoration of the Age of Faith in the struggling adolescence of the Age of Reason. The Italian who had heard Pomponazzi, and lived under the easy rule of the Renaissance popes, smiled to find Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII keeping all the marvelous dogmas of the medieval creed—a God-dictated Bible, a triune deity, predestination, creation by divine fiat, original sin, incarnation, virgin birth, atonement, the last judgment, heaven, and hell—and rejecting precisely those elements of medieval Christianity—the worship of the Virgin, a God of love and mercy, the invocation of intercessory saints, a ritual adorned with all the arts—which had given to that faith a tenderness, solace, and beauty warranting a wink at the myths that allowed enjoyment of the arts.
The sincerely believing Catholic had his own argument against the Reformation. He too resented tithes, but he could not dream of destroying the Church. He knew quite well that the monks were getting out of hand, but he felt that there should be room and institutions in the world for men dedicated to contemplation, study, and prayer. He accepted every word of the Bible with two provisos: that the law of Christ had abrogated the law of Moses, and that the Church, having been founded by the Son of God, had equal authority with the Bible, and should have the final right to interpret it and adjust it to the changing needs of life. What would happen if ambiguous and apparently contradictory passages in Scripture were left to the free interpretation and judgment of the individual man?—would not the Bible be torn to pieces by a thousand minds, and Christianity be shattered into a thousand warring sects?
The modern Catholic continues the argument through every phase of modern life. “Your emphasis on faith as against works was ruinous, and led to a religion whose coldness of heart was concealed behind the piety of its phrases; for a hundred years charity almost died in the centers of your victory. You ended the confessional and generated a thousand tensions in the soul of men struggling between instinct and civilization, and now you belatedly restore that healing institution under dubious forms. You destroyed nearly all the schools we had established, and you weakened to the verge of death the universities that the Church had created and developed. Your own leaders admit that your disruption of the faith led to a dangerous deterioration of morals in both Germany and England. You let loose a chaos of individualism in morals, philosophy, industry, and government. You took all the joy and beauty out of religion, and filled it with demonology and terror; you condemned the masses of mankind to damnation as “reprobates,” and consoled an insolent few with the pride of “election” and salvation. You stifled the growth of art, and wherever you triumphed classical studies withered. You expropriated Church property to give it to the state and the rich, but you left the poor poorer than before, and added contempt to misery. You condoned usury and capitalism, but you deprived the workers of the restful holy days a merciful Church had given them. You rejected the papacy only to exalt the state; you gave to selfish princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects, and to use religion as a sanction for their wars. You divided nation against nation, and many a nation and city against itself; you wrecked the international moral checks on national powers, and created a chaos of warring national states. You denied the authority of a Church founded, on your own admission, by the Son of God, but you sanctioned absolute monarchy, and exalted the divine right of kings. Unwittingly you destroyed the power of the Word, which is the only alternative to the power of money or the sword. You claimed the right of private judgment, but you denied it to others as soon as you could; and your refusal to tolerate dissent was less understandable than ours, for we had never defended toleration; no man can be tolerant except where he is indifferent. Meanwhile see what your private judgment has led to. Every man becomes a pope, and judges the doctrines of religion before he is old enough to comprehend the functions of religion in society and morals, and the need of the people for a religious faith. A kind of disintegrative mania, unhindered by any integrative authority, throws your followers into such absurd and violent disputes that men begin to doubt all religion, and Christianity itself would be dissolved, and men would be left spiritually naked in the face of death, were it not that the Church stands firm amid all the fluctuations of opinion and argument, all the fashions of science and philosophy, and holds her regathering flock together against the time when those of you who have come to understand, and are really Christians, will submit your pride of individuality and intellect to the religious needs of mankind, and will come back to the one fold that can preserve religion despite the blasphemous ideologies of this unhappy age.”
Can the Protestant answer this indictment? “Let us not forget the cause of our divergence. Your Catholic Church had become corrupt in practice and personnel, your priests were not functioning, your bishops were worldlings, your popes were the scandal of Christendom; do not your own historians confess it? Honest men called upon you to reform, and meanwhile kept their loyalty to the Church; you promised and pretended to reform, but you did not; on the contrary, you burned at the stake men like Huss and Jerome of Prague because they cried out for reform. A thousand efforts were made to reform the Church from within; they failed until our Reformation forced you to act; and even after our revolt the pope who tried to cleanse the Church became the laughingstock of Rome.
“You pride yourself on producing the Renaissance, but everyone agrees that the Renaissance was issuing in such immorality, violence, and treachery as Europe had not known since Nero; were we not right in protesting against this paganism, flaunting itself even in the Vatican? Granted that morals declined for a while after our Reformation began; it took time to rebuild a moral life whose religious foundations and ministrations had decayed; ultima
“We acknowledged the secular authority as divine—as your own theologians had done before us—because social order requires a respected government. We rejected the international authority of the popes only after they had flagrantly used it not to arbitrate justice among nations but to advance their own material interests. The inability of your self-seeking popes to unify Europe for a crusade against the Turks shows that the dishonesty of the papacy had broken the unity of Christendom long before the Reformation. And though we supported the divine right of kings, we also, in England, Scotland, Switzerland, and America, favored the development of democracy, while your priests in France, Italy, and Spain were truckling to kings; and our rebellion against the authority of your Church broke the spell of despotism, and prepared Europe to question all absolutisms, religious or secular. You think we made the poor poorer. But that too was a passing phase; the same capitalism that for a while exploited poverty learned to enrich the average man as never before; and the standard of living is surely higher in Protestant England, Germany, and America than in Catholic Italy, Spain, and France.