Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

22

History Heads North: the Intellectual Impact of Protestantism

‘Peter and Paul had lived in penury, but the popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived like Roman emperors.’ In 1502, according to a parliamentary estimate, the Catholic Church owned 75 per cent of all the money in France.¹ In Germany, twenty years later, the Diet of Nuremberg calculated that the church there owned 50 per cent of the wealth in Germany. Such massive riches brought certain ‘privileges’. In England, priests routinely propositioned women entering the confessional box: absolution was offered in exchange for sex.² William Manchester quotes a statistic that, in Norfolk, Ripton and Lambeth in England, 23 per cent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, who comprised less than 2 per cent of the population. The abbot of St Albans was accused of ‘simony, usury, embezzlement and living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of the monastery.’ The most widespread corrupt practice was the sale of indulgences. There was a special office of quaestiarii, or pardoners, who had the pope’s authority to issue indulgences. As early as 1450, Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University, remarked that ‘sinners say nowadays: “I care not how many evils I do in God’s sight, for I can easily get plenary remission of all guilt and penalty by an absolution and indulgence granted me by the pope, whose written grant I have bought for four or six pence”.’ He was exaggerating – other accounts tell of indulgences being sold for ‘two pence, sometimes for a draught of wine or beer . . . or even for the hire of a harlot or for carnal love’. John Colet, dean of St Paul’s in the early sixteenth century, was not the only one to complain that the behaviour of the quaestiarii, and the hierarchy behind them, had deformed the church, so that it was now no more than a ‘money machine’.³

The tipping point came in 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV declared that indulgences also applied ‘to souls suffering in purgatory’. This ‘celestial confidence trick’, as William Manchester terms it, was an immediate success: peasants would starve their families and themselves to buy relief for dead relatives.⁴ Among those who took cynical advantage of this situation was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who evolved his own peripatetic circus act. ‘[He] travelled from village to village with a brass-bound chest, a bag of printed receipts, and an enormous cross draped with a papal banner. His entrance into town was accompanied by the ringing of church bells . . . Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by calling out, “I have here the passports . . . to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of paradise.” The fees were dirt-cheap, he insisted, especially when one considered the alternative. He appealed to the conscience of those listening to atone for their dead relatives who had gone to their graves unshriven: “As soon as the coin rings in the bowl, the soul for whom it is paid will fly out of purgatory and straight to heaven”.’⁵ At his very worst, Tetzel wrote letters which promised to the credulous that the sins a person was intending to commit would be forgiven.

He went too far. Traditionally, Tetzel’s flamboyance and exaggerated claims are held to have attracted the attention of a priest who was also a professor of philosophy at Wittenberg, north of Leipzig in Germany – Martin Luther. Recently, however, Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford, has drawn attention to several other developments in Catholicism which set the stage for Luther. For example, in the early sixteenth century there was already a difference between north and south Europe in the types of sermon preached in churches – in the north the preacher threw the spotlight on the congregation (the penitents) themselves, whereas in the south the sermons paid more attention to the priest and his role as a mediator in the absolution of sin.⁶ There was much less dissatisfaction with the status of priests in Italy than further north and this seems to have had something to do with the role of guilds.⁷ In and around Switzerland Landeskirchen were emerging, locally-run churches where the magistrate of the area, rather than the priest, played a leading role in teaching doctrine,⁸ and there was a big increase in the number of Bibles available, which helped more and more people interiorise their faith.⁹ The king of France called a council of cardinals in Pisa in 1511, to discuss church reform,¹⁰ while in 1512 certain works of Origen became available in Latin, which suggested that there had been no Fall, as traditionally understood, and that everyone, including the devil himself, would be saved and return to Paradise.¹¹ On this reading, change was in the air.

Nevertheless, it was Luther who sparked that change. He was ‘stocky, lusty’, the son of a mine owner. At university he had hoped to become a lawyer but in 1505, during a storm, he underwent a mystical experience and came to believe ‘that God was in everything’.¹² It was a fundamental change. Until then, he had been part of the humanist fraternity, a disciple and colleague of Erasmus and had translated several classics. After his conversion-experience, however, he turned in on himself, shunned the company of the humanists and became obsessed with inner piety. In 1510 – the peak of the Renaissance, when Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were all thriving – he visited Rome. It shocked him. True, he adored the masterpieces of painting and sculpture and the great religious monuments, but he ‘shuddered’ at the behaviour of the priests and cardinals, in particular their cynical approach to the liturgy which, he felt, was the basis of their privilege.¹³

Back in Wittenberg by 1512, he led a quiet life there for a number of years. He had been profoundly shocked by his experiences in Rome and he turned away even more from the worldliness of the humanists, as much as from the corrupt cynicism, as he saw it, of the Catholic hierarchy. Instead, he returned to the scriptures themselves, in particular the Church Fathers, and above all St Augustine. He continued to observe the world around him with dismay and, as Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish say, he was perhaps at this time ‘incubating both his views and his courage’. By 1517, however, he could no longer hold himself in and on 31 October, the eve of All Saints’ Day, he made his move. In an action which would reverberate around the world, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg church ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, and daring any one at all to come forward and argue with him.¹⁴ ‘I, Martin Luther, Doctor, of the Order of Monks at Wittenberg, desire to testify publicly that certain propositions against pontifical indulgences, as they call them, have been put forth by me . . .’

Luther’s attack was directed not just at Tetzel, or the Vatican behind him. It was directed at the theology represented by indulgences. Indulgences existed, so the theory went, because of the ‘surplus grace’ that existed in the world. Jesus, and the saints who came after him, did so much good that there was a surplus of grace on earth. Purchase of an indulgence put the purchaser ‘in touch with’ this surplus. Luther didn’t like the idea that grace could be traded like potatoes in the first place but, no less important, it obscured the important fact that purchase of an indulgence freed the buyer from penance for a sin, but not from the sin itself. For Luther, the sale of indulgences was therefore deeply misleading and untheological. It was not far from this point of view to Luther’s second innovation, a return to the twelfth-century idea that ‘true inward penitence’, contrition, was needed for the proper remission of sins. The popes might claim plenary remission of all penalties but Luther insisted that contrition was a necessary condition. This next step was equally short but much more momentous. If, without contrition, an indulgence was invalid, then it soon became clear to Luther that contrition alone, ‘without any papal paraphernalia’, was itself sufficient. In making salvation dependent on an individual’s faith and contrition only, Luther simply removed the need for the sacraments and for a hierarchy to administer them.¹⁵ The idea of intercession – the very basis of the Catholic Church – went out of the window.

These, then, were the simple theological ideas that formed the basis of the Reformation, what Diarmaid MacCulloch has called ‘an accidental revolution’.¹⁶ But there was another side to what subsequently happened, a political dimension.¹⁷ Many of the humanists supported Luther when he denounced the abuses of the Church. People like Erasmus shared his concern to reintroduce piety and Christian virtue back into worship rather than rely on dogma and scholastic hair-splitting. But these supporters drew back when they saw that Luther was attacking the very basis of the Church itself, burning his books of canon law and papal edicts.¹⁸ And this is where a nationalistic element emerged, which also had profound consequences. Most of the humanists who refused to follow Luther all the way were non-Germans.

In his theses and other writings, Luther didn’t hold back: he made it plain that he saw the pope as little better than a thief and a murderer. He wanted German clerics to reject their allegiance to Rome, and he wanted a national church established, with the archbishop of Mainz at its head. Once he had gained the courage to speak out, Luther’s imagination stretched into other areas that no one had dared enter before. For example, he insisted that marriage was not a sacrament, that a wife married to an impotent man might take other lovers until she conceived, and that it would not be improper to pass off this bastard as her husband’s. He said he thought bigamy ‘more sensible’ than divorce.¹⁹ He ranked different parts of the Bible in importance and in his edition of 1534 he separated out those sections that he was suspicious of, such as 2 Maccabees, into the ‘Apocrypha’.²⁰

One can imagine how Erasmus, not to mention the Vatican, took such arguments. But Luther was not completely alone, not by any means. There was, after all, a long history of antipathy between Germany and the papacy, going all the way back to the Investiture Struggle, and even to the barbarians. In 1508, even before Luther went to Rome, the German Diet had voted to prevent papal revenues raised by indulgences leaving Germany. In 1518, the Diet of Augsburg resolved that the ‘real enemy’ of Christendom was not then the Turks but what they called the ‘hound of hell’ in Rome.²¹ In theory, the leader of the Germans should have been the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. But he had his own ambitions and looked to Spain, newly rich through the discovery of America. He remained therefore a Catholic, who ‘took Rome as his anchor’. All this only helped Luther. But he found that, much as his criticisms applied to the church throughout Christendom, it was easier to effect reform in his own country: ‘He turned from reforming a world church into building a German one.’²² This became clear in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), in which he adopted a tone little short of revolutionary, denied the belief that the clergy formed a ‘separate spiritual estate’ and urged German nobles to appropriate the lands of unreformed churchmen. There was no shortage of knights and princes ready to profit in this way, and so what had begun as a religious reform was soon merged with a wider struggle for political and economic supremacy seen in a national context.²³

In the course of this ‘nationalisation’ of Protestantism, however, the first hints of its own form of corruption began to appear. In its original guise Lutheranism maintained that, in order to be free, one should never act, or be forced to act, against one’s conscience. That was the true course of total honesty and was the intellectual backbone of the time, not just of Protestantism but of humanism and of the scientific revolution, then getting under way. But Luther changed. In an alarmingly small number of years he came to accept – and even to justify – the use of the sword (‘civil force’) in support of the faith.²⁴ He brought this on himself in a way, since he was forced into this new stance by three sets of overlapping events: the Knights’ War, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Anabaptists.

The first of these events, the Knights’ War, flared up as a direct result of Luther’s own exhortation that the lands belonging to the church be confiscated. But this war, which broke out in 1522, failed, though it did succeed in making the political situation in Germany very tense. Three years later, in 1525, the German peasants, pressured beyond endurance by the nobles (who were starting to feel the pinch of inflation, stimulated by the arrival of American silver), and fortified by their understanding of Luther’s doctrine that the word of God had revealed that all men are equal, rose in a rebellion of their own. Here, however, and unfortunately, the leadership of the rebellion was taken over by the Anabaptists. Taking their name from their opposition to infant baptism, on the grounds that infants were too young to have faith, and that without faith the sacrament was invalid, the importance and relevance of the Anabaptists lay in their total rejection of the papal hierarchy, which was replaced for them by a devout reliance on the word of God, as revealed in the scriptures. In fact, many Anabaptists were a good deal more extreme, believing that they themselves were directly in touch with the Holy Spirit and so had no need of the scriptures. For them, the return of Christ was once again imminent and the apocalyptic ‘purification’ of the world was at hand. The twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim has argued that this alliance of ‘chiliasm’ – a belief in Christ’s imminent return – together with the rebellion of the peasants, marked a decisive turning-point in modern history. His argument was that it introduced the era of social revolution. ‘It is at this point that politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from “above”.’²⁵

Whether or not Mannheim was right, it needs emphasising that this reaction was not Luther’s aim (the accidental revolution again). In fact, he supported the princes against the peasants. His view was that faith and politics should not be mixed and that it was the duty of Christians to obey legitimate authority. Specifically, for him, the church was subservient to the state. ‘For Germany, the result of Luther’s thought was a division between the inner life of the spirit, which was free, and the outer life of the person, which was subjugated to unattackable authority. This dualism in German thought has lingered from Luther’s day to this.’²⁶

The truth is, there was something in Luther’s character that didn’t add up. Part of him favoured authority but overall, it has to be said, Lutheranism destroyed authority, certainly so far as organised religion was concerned. In freeing men from religious authority, Protestantism set men free in other ways as well. The discovery of America, and the scientific revolution, both occurring simultaneously with Protestantism, were the perfect arenas where men who rejected authority, who could let their individuality shine through, would benefit. Luther himself was not over-fond of the growing economic individualism he saw around him – it didn’t always sit well with the piety he valued. But it was ultimately unreasonable of him to expect religious individualism without all the other forms he had helped set loose.²⁷

Very different from Luther was John Calvin. Born a generation later in 1509, he came from a bourgeois family in Noyon, Picardy, his given name being Jean Chauviner or Caulvin. He was intended for the church but abandoned theology for the law. His father sent him to Paris, where he studied at the Collège de Montaigu, where Erasmus and Rabelais also studied theology.²⁸ Dark haired, pale skinned, with a ‘keen’ temper, Calvin later had a ‘sudden conversion’ to Protestantism but in a sense he had been primed: his father had died ‘excommunicate’ and Calvin faced a ‘sea of troubles’ in obtaining a Christian burial for him. This embittered him against the Catholic church.

Turning his back on Rome after his conversion, Calvin also left France and, to begin with, when he was still not thirty, composed the first sketch of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, ‘the most significant and lucid text of the Reformation’. Whereas Luther’s writings had been emotional tirades, out-pourings of his pent-up inner feelings, Calvin began to set down a system of tightly reasoned, logically formulated morals, policy and dogma. A book that began as six chapters had, by the late 1550s, grown to eighty.²⁹ ‘The core of this dogma was that man was a helpless being before an omnipotent God.’ Calvin took Luther’s arguments to their logical – even fanatical – conclusion. Man, he said, could do nothing to alter his fate: he was either born saved or predestined for hell. On the face of it this was hardly an optimistic doctrine but, under Calvin’s system, no one ever quite knew whether they were saved or not. He said that, by and large, the ‘elect’ – his word for saved – would show it by their ‘exemplary’ behaviour on earth. But you could never be sure. It was, in some ways, a form of religious terror.

As it happened, Geneva had just turned on its Catholic bishop and the chaos that followed played into Calvin’s hand and his view that the state should be subordinate to the church, that obedience to God came before obedience to the state (it was a replay, in different clothes, of the Investiture Struggle). With anti-Catholic feeling at fever-pitch in Geneva, with religious images being broken up, Calvin – as the distinguished author of the Institutes – was invited there to help organise it as a city on the biblical model.³⁰ On his arrival he was made a ‘Reader in Holy Scriptures’ and, strictly speaking, was never anything more than a pastor. But that is like saying that Nero was never anything more than a violinist. Calvin accepted the invitation only on condition that the Genevois adopt his terms – terms embodied in yet more regulations that he had drawn up, the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques and the Ordonnances sur le régime du peuple. From then on, the people of Geneva lived according to Calvin. Pastors visited each household once a year to ensure people remained true to the faith. Anyone who objected was forced to leave, jailed or, in the worst circumstances, executed.³¹

The essence of Calvinism was that morality was enforced and enforced strictly, while Protestant doctrine was developed at the University of Geneva, which Calvin founded.³² And he set up two main arms of government, the Ministry and the Consistory. The main aim of the Ministry was to produce what might be called an ‘army’ of preachers who had to follow a particular programme and way of life and set an example. It was the job of the Consistory to govern morals. It comprised a court of eighteen – six ministers and twelve elders – and had the power of excommunication. It was this court, which met every Thursday, that was responsible for the dictatorship of terror in Geneva, what Daniel Boorstin calls the reign of biblical morality. It was in Geneva that a certain way of life – one that would become very familiar – was instigated: getting up early, hard work, being always concerned to set a good example (for example reading only uplifting literature). Thrift and abstinence were all-important virtues. As one historian put it, ‘This was an attempt to create a new man . . . the church was not simply an institution for the worship of God, but an agency for the making of men fit to worship Him.’³³ The regime gave its name to the ‘Puritan’ movement.³⁴

But the social and intellectual changes implied by Lutheranism and Calvinism were more textured, more nuanced than this. For example, as biblical fundamentalists, they were not comfortable with the new findings of science, covered in the next chapter. However, philosophically speaking, these findings stemmed from observation, by individuals following their own conscience, and the Protestants had to support that. No less relevant was the fact that the new preachers were not intercessors, who controlled access to the deity through the sacraments, but the ‘first among equals’ who led a literate congregation who read the Bible for themselves in the vernacular. The stress in Calvinist schools was on equality of opportunity: and no one could determine where that would lead.³⁵

Calvin’s economic views also looked forward, rather than back (and, in a sense, away from the Bible). The traditional view, that people had no need of anything which is ‘beyond what is necessary for subsistence’, he thought outmoded. This – medieval – view had ‘stigmatised the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a thief’. Calvin disliked the ostentatious use of riches for their own sake but he conceded that the accumulation of wealth, properly handled, could be useful.³⁶ He agreed that a merchant should pay interest on the capital he had borrowed, because that enabled everyone to make a profit.³⁷ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber created a lively controversy in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argued that, although the conditions for the evolution of capitalism had existed at many stages of history, it was only after the emergence of Protestantism, with its concept of ‘the calling’ and ‘worldly asceticism’, that a ‘rational economic ethic’ emerged. Later, R. H. Tawney, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, stressed Calvinism as even more sympathetic to capitalism than Lutheranism was.³⁸

But there was a more direct way in which the Reformation created modern politics – by helping the rise of the modern state. The success of Luther’s arguments not only destroyed the universalist ambitions of the Catholic hierarchy but it made religion (outside Geneva) subordinate to the state, the clergy being relegated to the role of guardians of only the ‘inner life’ of the individual. The religious conflict which followed, in Germany, France and then throughout the continent in the Thirty Years War, helped shape the Europe which emerged – a Europe of independent, sovereign nation-states.³⁹ A territorial nation-state and a business-based middle class are the two most important elements in what we call modern history. Luther never intended this but Protestantism was the main reason why, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, power in Europe slipped away from the Mediterranean countries and settled north of the Alps.

The authorities in Rome badly misjudged what was happening in the north. Germany had been trouble to the popes for centuries but had always remained in the fold. This helps explain why there was no swift, terrible response from Rome, why Leo X, the pope of the time, felt that the Protestant revolt was a mere ‘squabble among monks’.⁴⁰ In any case, it was next to impossible for a corrupt organisation to change. Inside the hierarchy the one senior figure who smelled danger was Cardinal Boeyens of Utrecht who, in 1522, became Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope in history. In his first speech to the college of cardinals, he frankly confessed that corruption was so bad that ‘those steeped in sin’ could ‘no longer perceive the stench of their own iniquities’.⁴¹ If he’d had his way, Adrian would have cleansed the stables from top to bottom, but he was surrounded by Italians with vested interests, who nullified his every move. Not that they needed to hold him up for very long – Adrian died after only a year. He was succeeded by Giulio de’ Medici, who became Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–1534). He was a weak man from a (hitherto) strong house, a fatal combination. While Luther was pursuing his reforms in Germany, Clement played elaborate diplomatic games on the world stage – or what he thought of as the world stage. He tried to aggrandise himself and the papacy by playing off the king of France against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, then ensconced in Spain. Clement signed secret treaties with both, but was found out, earning the healthy distrust of both. More disastrous still, the pope’s misjudgements made Italy – weak in comparison to France and Spain – a battleground. Predatory eyes turned to Rome.⁴²

In fact, the first attack came not from Spain or France but from one of the traditional enemies of Rome – the Colonna. In 1526, Pompeo Colonna – a cardinal himself – led an assault on the Vatican. Several of the pope’s associates were murdered but Clement himself took advantage of a secret corridor built in anticipation of just such an eventuality. The two warring families patched up their quarrel but the skirmish only underlined Rome’s weakness. The real sack occurred twelve months later. Although the troops responsible nominally belonged to Charles V, they were in fact near-mutinous Landsknechte, mercenaries who had not been paid, despite breaking the army of the king of France. The kernel of the forces were Teutons – and therefore Protestants – from the Germanic lands of central Europe. Interested as much in the spoils of war as in religious beliefs, they marched enthusiastically on the capital of western Christendom.⁴³

The sack itself, which began on 6 May 1527, was truly terrible. Anyone who resisted the Teutons was murdered. Mansions and palaces that weren’t put to the torch were pillaged. The pope, the bulk of the cardinals in residence, and the Vatican bureaucracy, sought safety in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though one cardinal, with the gate already closed, had to be chair-lifted to safety in a basket. As for the rest of the population . . . ‘Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomised, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than two thousand bodies were floating in the Tiber, nearly ten thousand others awaited burial and thousands more lay eviscerated in the streets, their remains half-eaten by rats and hungry dogs.’⁴⁴ Some 4 million ducats changed hands in ransoms alone – those who had the wherewithal to pay were freed, the rest killed. Tombs were broken, the bones of saints tossed to the dogs, relics denuded of their jewels, archives and libraries torched, save for enough paper to provide bedding for horses, which were stabled in the Vatican. The pillage only ended when, after eight months, the food ran out, there was no one left to ransom and plague appeared.⁴⁵

Financial imprudence on the part of Charles V may have been the immediate cause of the sack of Rome but the Europe of the day was not short of other theories. Chief among them was the idea of divine retribution. Even a senior officer on the emperor’s army agreed. ‘In truth,’ he wrote, ‘everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgement of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the papal court.’⁴⁶ On the other hand, of course, the barbarity shown by the Teutons in Rome was seen there as ‘the true face of the Protestant heresy’, and while Rome at last woke up to the threat, the sack also hardened its heart. Rome would return brutality with brutality, intolerance with intolerance – ‘the God of the Catholics demanded as much’.⁴⁷

The great irony was that the original deformation of the Catholic church, which had driven so many believers from the faith of their ancestors, still flourished. Senior Catholic clergy were still profligate and dissolute, leading the same luxurious lives. Bishops still neglected their dioceses, and the Vatican was as familiar as ever with nepotism. The pontiffs of the day simply refused to see this and committed the church to virulent repression of dissent. A forest of trees was felled to provide for bull after bull deploring all aspects of Protestantism.⁴⁸ As William Manchester puts it: ‘All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny . . . The archbishop of Toledo, because he had openly expressed admiration of Erasmus, was sentenced to seventeen years in a dungeon.’ In France, the mere possession of Protestant literature was a felony and promulgating heretical ideas sent someone to the stake. Informing on heretics could be very lucrative – informers were given a third of the condemned person’s estate. The court became known as la chambre ardente, the burning room.⁴⁹

Book censorship was a new necessity in suppressing deviation. Printed books were still a novelty in the mid-sixteenth century but already it was clear to Rome that they represented the best way for seditious and heretical opinions to be broadcast. In the 1540s the church introduced a list of books which it was prohibited to read or possess. To begin with, it was left to local authorities to search out the offending books, destroy them and punish their owners. Later, in 1559, Pope Paul IV issued the first list of forbidden books for the entire church, the Index Expurgatorius, which, the pope said, would threaten the souls of anyone reading them.⁵⁰ All of the works of Erasmus were on the list (works that earlier popes had found a delight), as was the Qu’ran, as was Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, which would remain there until 1758, and Galileo’s Dialogue, proscribed until 1822. The Tridentine Index followed Paul’s list, in 1565. This banned almost three-quarters of the books printed in Europe. In 1571 a Congregation of the Index was established to control and update the list. Canon law now required the imprimatur, ‘Let it be published’, to be printed in a permitted book, and on occasions the words nihil obstat, ‘nothing prohibits’, were included with the name of the censors.⁵¹ The list included scientific and brilliant artistic works – Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example.

But people didn’t take the Index lying down, as it were. Authors moved cities to avoid the censor, like Jean Crespin, who fled France to Geneva to write his influential account of Huguenot martyrs. Even in Catholic countries, the Index was not popular. The reason was simple commerce – books were a new technology and a new business opportunity. For example, in Florence Duke Cosimo calculated that if he were to comply with the church’s directive, the cost in books lost would amount to more than 100,000 ducats. His reaction was typical. He organised a token book burning, disposing of books on magic, astrology etc. – books that were clearly Index-worthy but not so valuable commercially. Furthermore, local Index representatives often showed themselves as amenable to argument – for example, they agreed that Jewish medical books be spared: they were needed so that scientific progress might be made. And so, in one way or another, by delay, procrastination, or by decisions that certain books were exempt from the Index locally, the Florentines (as happened elsewhere – for example, France) managed to get round most of the legislation so that prohibited books continued to be circulated more or less freely. In any case, Protestant printers specialised in titles that were on the Index (which only made people curious) and had them smuggled to Catholic countries. ‘Priests, monks, prelates even, vie with each other in buying up copies of [Galileo’s] Dialogue on the black market,’ one observer remarked. ‘The black market price of the book rises from the original half-scudo to four and six scudi all over Italy.’⁵²

The reactionary response of the Catholic church to the ideas of Luther and Calvin became known as the Counter-Reformation, or the Catholic Restoration. The Roman Inquisition and the Index were two early – and enduring – aspects of this battle of ideas, but by no means the only ones. Of the others, four were to have a lasting impact on the shape of our world.

The first set of events took place in England and became known as the Tyndale affair. William Tyndale was an English humanist and, like his colleagues, had welcomed the accession of Henry VIII.⁵³ When Henry sent word to Erasmus, in Rome, inviting him to settle in England, the humanists in London were encouraged still further. They were mistaken. Once Erasmus had arrived, Henry lost interest. And, to begin with at least, the king grew more Catholic than ever. Heretics were shown little mercy in Henry’s England.

It was against this (for a humanist, tense) background that William Tyndale decided on an English translation of the Bible. The idea had first come to him while he was an undergraduate (at both Oxford and Cambridge) and no sooner was he ordained, in 1521, than he set to work. ‘If God spare me,’ he told a friend, ‘ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than you do.’⁵⁴ Translation seems such an innocuous matter these days that it is not easy for us to grasp the full enormity of what Tyndale was about. But the sobering fact remains that the Church did not want a wide readership of the New Testament. Indeed, the Vatican actively rejected it – access to the Bible was reserved for the clergy, who could then interpret the message to suit the interests of Rome.⁵⁵ In such circumstances, a vernacular translation of the New Testament might well be dangerous.

The first hint that Tyndale had of the trouble ahead came when he failed to find a printer in England who was willing to set his manuscript into type. Forced across the channel, he at first found a publisher in (Catholic) Cologne. At the last moment, however, when Tyndale’s text had already been set, the news was leaked to a local dean who appealed to the authorities and publication was squashed. Realising now that his very life was at risk, Tyndale fled the city. The Germans contacted Cardinal Wolsey in England, who alerted the king. Henry declared Tyndale a fugitive and criminal and posted sentries at all English ports, with orders to seize him on sight.⁵⁶ But Tyndale was passionate about his life’s work. In Protestant Worms, in 1525, he found another printer, Peter Schöffer, who agreed to publish his work. Six thousand copies – a huge print run for the time – were freighted to England. But Tyndale was still a marked man and didn’t dare settle anywhere for a good few years. Only in 1529 did he judge it safe to make a home in Antwerp. It was a mistake. His presence came to the notice of the British and, at Henry’s personal insistence, he was jailed for more than a year in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels. He was eventually tried for heresy, convicted and garrotted in public. To ensure he didn’t become a martyr, his remains were burned at the stake.⁵⁷

Yet Tyndale’s Bible lived on. It was a good rendering into English (serving as the basis for the King James version in 1611), although Thomas More dismissed it as flawed and misleading. Such was its popularity that copies that had been smuggled into England were passed from hand to hand and Protestant peers deep in the countryside were lending them out, ‘like public libraries’. The Catholic hierarchy in England did what it could to stamp out this practice – for example, the bishop of London bought up all the copies he could find and had them burned at St Paul’s.⁵⁸

Rome was grateful to Henry and showed it. Earlier popes had conferred titles on the kings of Spain (‘Catholic Sovereigns’) and the French also (‘Most Christian’). In Henry’s case, Pope Leo came up with the title Defensor Fidei, Defender of the Faith.⁵⁹ No greater irony was ever contained in just two words.

The Inquisition and the Index were both essentially negative responses by the Catholic church. This attitude was exemplified in the person of Paul III, who set up both fearsome instruments. Merely to possess a book on the Index was punishable in Spain by death for a long time.⁶⁰ (The list was kept up to date until 1959, and was finally abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1966.) Paul IV was just as uncompromising. He had been the first Inquisitor General and, once pontiff, it was he who put fig leaves on the Vatican’s famous collection of antique statues. It was Paul who found Daniele da Volterra, the painter instructed to paint over the ‘more striking bits of nudity’ in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.⁶¹ Pius V was much the same. As Bamber Gascoigne says, ‘Calvin was known as the pope of Geneva, but Pius certainly proved himself the Calvin of Rome.’ Another erstwhile Grand Inquisitor, he proposed to make adultery a capital offence and tried hard to remove the prostitutes from the city. He failed in both tasks but at best Pius V realised that negative measures were not enough and he was largely responsible for acting on the decisions of the Council of Trent, which had sat, on and off, from 1545 to 1560.

Together with the Council of Nicaea, and Lateran IV, the Council of Trent was the most important council in the history of the church. To begin with, many Catholics hoped that the council would explore areas of compromise with the Protestants, but they were to be disappointed. The officers of the council dismissed Protestant theology completely and rejected any hope that the people might receive the bread and the wine in the mass or even hear the liturgy in their own language. The very dates of the council are revealing. It had taken some twenty years to be convened, a time-delay which confirms the conflicting forces within the hierarchy, though several princes had yet to make a definite decision as to which side they were on and there had been hopes for a deal in 1541–1542.⁶² Rome also had an instinctive and traditional distrust of councils that, in the fifteenth century, had invariably attacked papal centralisation. We shall thus never know if the Protestant flame could have been snuffed out had the church responded more quickly. As it was, by the time the council began its deliberations, Luther could no longer be the focus of any attack. Within months of the council getting into its stride, he died in 1546.

Initially, the constitution of the council was unimpressive, comprising just four cardinals, four archbishops, twenty-one bishops, five heads of religious orders, plus various theologians and experts in canon law.⁶³ The first order of business was to decide how the cardinals and bishops should live during the council, a verdict being reached that their lifestyle would be ‘frugal, pious and sober’. Only in the following year, by which time attendance had doubled, did the council turn to the meat of its problems. The very first decision took the Protestants head-on, for the council decided to award the ‘traditions’ of the Catholic Church – for example, the biblical commentaries of the Church Fathers – equal authority with the scriptures.⁶⁴ There could have been a no more uncompromising move, for the council was endowing the Catholic Church’s traditions with divine authorship, on a par with scripture.⁶⁵ But the major battle, as expected, was fought over the concept of justification by faith alone. Luther’s revolutionary idea was that all a sinner had to do was to truly believe in Christ and he would be redeemed. The council reiterated that this was not nearly enough. The Church’s argument was that, though damaged by the Fall, man retained the capacity to choose good over evil, but that he required Christ’s example, as interpreted by the church, so as to be, in effect, good by informed consent.⁶⁶ The council also reaffirmed that there were seven sacraments – Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, Matrimony – countermanding Luther’s claim that, in the Bible, there were just two, Baptism and Holy Communion.⁶⁷ The number of sacraments was of course central to the structure of the church, for penance (confession) could only be heard by priests, who could only be appointed by bishops. And the council insisted that Purgatory, in reality a sixth-century ‘revelation’, really existed. In turn this helped maintain the doctrine of indulgences, though the council did outlaw any commerce in them.⁶⁸ Thus the main thrust of the Council of Trent was to reassert Catholic doctrine in all its corrupt glory, making many issues even more black and white than they had been before. The intransigence at Trent laid down the basis for the terrible wars of religion of the seventeenth century.⁶⁹

Each of these Counter-Reformation manoeuvres mentioned so far was negative, prohibitive and/or violent. But there were those in the hierarchy who saw that the real way forward was to seize the initiative intellectually, to take the spiritual battle, and the argument, to the enemy. One who grasped this was Ignatius Loyola. Born in 1491 at the castle of Loyola in the Basque country, in the north of Spain, Ignatius might easily have become one of the increasing numbers of conquistadors then flocking across the Atlantic. By his own admission he was given over to ‘the vanities of this world’. In fact, he did become a soldier but that career soon came to an end when his leg took a direct hit from a cannon ball during a siege. Recovering in his castle, so the story goes, he discovered that none of the books available was to his taste. Irritated, he picked up one of the lives of the saints and it proved a turning-point. There and then, ‘He seems virtually to have decided to became a saint himself, a new sort of romantic hero. “St Dominic did this, therefore I have to do that; St Francis did this; therefore I have to do it”.’⁷⁰ The method of training that he set himself ‘for sainthood’ showed the discipline and attention to detail you would expect in a military man. Entitled Spiritual Exercises, it is still the basic course for self-discipline in the order which Loyola founded: the Jesuits. ‘It is, literally, a four-week programme of exercises, a spiritual assault-course for the soldiers of Jesus, aiming to detach the mind from this world by concentrating on the horrors of hell, the saving truth of the gospel story, and the example of Christ.’⁷¹ One exercise, intended to induce physical self-loathing, reads: ‘Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.’

When he was thirty-three, Ignatius went to study at Barcelona University, later transferring to Paris. There, as his ideas developed, he attracted a small but dedicated band of followers, who performed his Exercises, and eventually took a joint vow to serve Christ, by offering themselves to Pope Paul III in Rome, promising ‘complete obedience’.⁷² In their charter they announced that their primary purpose was ‘the propagation of the faith’, in particular the ‘instruction in Christianity of children and the uneducated’. They saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, of the pope, who would go wherever the pontiff sent them, ‘whether to the Turks or to the New World or to the Lutherans or to others, be they infidel or faithful’.

By the time Ignatius died in 1556, the Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, had already been commissioned. Today, opposite his tomb, lies a memorial to the soldier in Christ who took over from him. A fellow student from Paris, St Francis Xavier led the Jesuits’ unprecedented mission to bring Christianity to the infidel in the East. Known as the conquistador das animas, the conquistador of souls, Xavier travelled from Goa to the Spice Islands and Japan. He died in 1552, waiting to gain access to the great jewel of the East, the closed empire of China.⁷³

In fact, the Jesuits’ experience in the East was very mixed. Inside Europe they specialised in educating the aristocracy, which reflected their policy of concentrating on leaders and opinion formers, as we would say, and the same was true in Asia. There was, after all, a good Christian precedent, in Constantine. They had an early success around 1580 with the Indian emperor Akbar, a Muslim. In China, however, it was rather different. The Jesuits did win the confidence of the emperor, but more through science than through theology. It took them many years to negotiate even access to Peking and when they did so their first gifts to the emperor comprised a statue of the Virgin and a clock which sounded the hours. The emperor was very taken with the clock, much less so with the Virgin, which he quickly passed on to the dowager empress, his mother. The Jesuits were a presence for nearly two centuries in Peking, becoming accepted for their superior skills in mathematics and astronomy. But they made few converts. On the contrary, they found a great deal to admire among the Chinese, so much so that they were soon wearing mandarin silks and attending Confucian ceremonies of ancestor worship.⁷⁴

Japan, at least at first, seemed a better proposition altogether. In 1551, Xavier said that he had left behind him a community of about 1,000 converts, mainly daimyos, or local lords. By the early seventeenth century, however, the Jesuits claimed 150,000 converts and, on some counts, as many as 300,000. ‘The warrior class or samurai were particularly susceptible, perhaps because they felt a kinship with many of the Jesuits who also had aristocratic or military backgrounds.’ But this only made Christianity an issue in the internal politics of the Japanese ruling class and when this turned violent, around 1614, conversion backfired on the new Christians. A Japanese Inquisition emerged in which the Christians became the victims of torture methods which, when it came to cruelty, were easily the equal of anything that occurred in Europe. At Yedo, for example, three-score and more Japanese Christians were crucified upside down on the beach, ‘to be drowned by the incoming tide’.⁷⁵

The Jesuit efforts in the Far East were, overall, a comprehensive failure. They were, however, rather more successful in the West (the Christians of Latin America today form the largest single group in the church of Rome). But the Jesuits were not the only new orders to arise at the time of the Counter-Reformation: the Theatines, the Barnabites, the Somaschi, the Oratorians and the Fathers of the Nail (because they first worshipped at a church which preserved a relic of the nail used in the cross) all emerged as proselytising or teaching orders. Rome at last realised that, in the new climate, the best way to keep people within the Catholic faith was to catch them young.

Among the other effects of the Reformation we may underline the point that there were several Protestantisms: besides Lutheranism and Calvinism, there emerged for example the Anglican form, which made more of the sacraments and liturgical prayer than it did of preaching, as was the case on the mainland continent of Europe, where the paramountcy of the sermon ‘led to the drastic restructuring of Reformed church interiors from Ireland to Lithuania. This dramatically canopied wooden preaching-turret now became the chief focus of the congregation’s eyes rather than the altar or communion table.’⁷⁶ Sermons were accompanied by an hourglass so that the faithful knew exactly how much more was to come. Diarmaid MacCulloch says the sermon was a much more popular form of theatre than the playhouse – in London there were ‘hundreds’ of sermons each week compared with only thirteen playhouses. This cult of the sermon was supported by the growth of catechisms, handbooks on religious doctrine, ‘which for more than a century was the most common form of education throughout [Europe.]’⁷⁷ Further, this weekly ‘diet of abstract ideas from the pulpit’ made Protestant Europe more book-conscious and probably more literate than the Catholic south. According to one calculation, as many as 7.5 million copies of ‘major religious works’ were published in England between 1500 and 1639, in contrast to 1.6 million secular poems, plays and sonnets, while between 1580 and 1639 the religious writings of William Perkins ‘scored’ 188 editions compared with Shakespeare’s 97.⁷⁸ This literacy had an incalculable effect on the later fortunes of the Protestant north.

Protestantism also revived the communal aspects of penance (the stool of repentance became familiar) and the so-called ‘theatre of forgiveness’, which sounds to us today like a great intrusion but had much to do with the discipline of capitalism that Weber made so much of. Protestantism kept illegitimacy rates low, and Thomas Cranmer’s new wedding service was the first to affirm that marriage could be enjoyable ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other’.⁷⁹ The Reformed churches paid fresh attention to the idea of women’s equality before God and established divorce as part of normal marriage law. Protestantism changed the ancient Catholic attitudes to medicine and created a desire for worship, not as solitary figures, or in a massive Europe-wide Church, but in small groups, which eventually became Methodists, Quakers and so on. These different sects were one way by which tolerance grew . . . and doubt. An accidental revolution indeed.

At its very last session in December 1563 the Council of Trent turned its attention to the role of the arts in the post-Lutheran world.⁸⁰ The role of painting in the instruction of the faith was reaffirmed but, in the mood of the times, the council insisted that holy stories be strictly adhered to, as laid down in the scriptures, and the clergy was given the task of keeping watch over the artists. The very fact that the clergy were given this role sparked a spate of manuals by priests interpreting the decisions of the council. Many of these reached conclusions that were even more oppressive than Trent intended.⁸¹

In his examination of the effects of the Council of Trent on art, Rudolf Wittkower says that these interpreters – people like St Charles Borromeo, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, Gilio da Fabriano and Raffaello Borghini – stressed three things: art should be clear and straightforward, it should be realistic, and it should offer an ‘emotional stimulus to piety’.⁸² The chief change that came about, in contrast to Renaissance idealisation, Wittkower said, was that a stark display of truth ‘was now deemed essential’. Where necessary, in the Crucifixion say, Christ should be shown ‘afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale and unsightly’. In addition, meticulous care had to be shown in regard to a figure’s age, sex, expression, gesture and dress. Artists had to pay attention to what it said in the scriptures and abide by those ‘rules’. At the same time, the council took care to proscribe the worship of images: ‘the honour shown to [the paintings and sculptures] refers to the prototypes which those images represent’.⁸³

These unsettled intellectual circumstances combined to produce a great number of changes in art. The most important was the Baroque style, which was essentially the style of the Counter-Reformation. Following the Council of Trent, the energetic papacy of Sixtus V (1585–1590), during which he sought to rebuild Rome, to replace its glory after the sack, was the first move in the new art form. It was summed up by Cardinal Paleotti, who described the art of Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century in this way: ‘The Church wants . . . both to glorify the courage of the martyrs and to set on fire the souls of her sons.’ This is a good description of the aim of Baroque art. One of the popes who succeeded Sixtus, Paul V, completed the building of St Peter’s and so between them Sixtus and Paul converted pagan Rome into Christian Rome, their aim being, ‘by placing this sumptuous spectacle before the eyes of the faithful’, to make the church ‘the image of heaven on earth’. They did this especially in architecture and sculpture.⁸⁴ ‘The High Baroque, at its best and fullest, is a union of the arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, acting in concert on the emotions of the spectator; inviting him, for example, to participate in the agonies and ecstasies of the saints.’⁸⁵ Its greatest exponent was Bernini, who did in stone what many people could not even do in paint.

But, while the flamboyant, swaggering figures of Bernini are classical Baroque, there was an upsurge of spiritual confidence at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which produced the very simple, but very strong, paintings of Caravaggio – very real, with meticulous attention to detail but with a powerful piety. Looking back on the Baroque, one cannot help but feel that, while the aims of the Counter-Reformation were kept in mind by artists such as Bernini and Caravaggio, there was also an exuberance, a love of art for art’s sake, which the Council of Trent had abjured. This was the time, under Paul V, for example, that most of the fountains went up in Rome, which is now a city of fountains.

The new spiritual confidence was also reflected in an era of church-building, in Rome in particular, in which the churches, often dedicated to the new orders, were vast. These new buildings, designed to overwhelm the congregation, saw great, fiery sermons being preached from ornate, spectacular pulpits, under vast canopies – of gold and silver, jewels and fine textiles – and above all a new iconography. There was a marked shift away from traditional images, from Jesus narratives towards heroic examples (David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes), on models of repentance (St Peter, the Prodigal Son), on the glory of martyrdom and saintly visions and ecstasies.⁸⁶ In line with this, and with the larger churches, pictures themselves grew in size and grandeur. This High Baroque is, as mentioned, typified by Bernini, ‘a man of the theatre’, who served five popes but, most of all, Urban VIII (1623–1644). Together they took a more aesthetic approach to art which helped improve its quality, moving it away from the mawkish mysticism that had characterised much turn-of-the-century Baroque art. The best example of this is possibly Bernini’s St Teresa, a sculpture of the saint in rapture, which appears itself to be suspended in midair. ‘This can only appear as reality by virtue of the implied visionary state of mind of the beholder.’⁸⁷ Throughout Baroque art miracles and wondrous events are given a great air of verisimilitude. This was essentially based on Aristotle’s reasoning in Rhetoric, where he says that the emotions are the basic ingredient in humans whereby persuasion is made to happen.

An entirely different set of events in art at this time was the development of the ‘genres’ – in particular, landscape painting, still-lifes, battle scenes and hunting scenes. Many art historians believe that a decisive step was taken in the seventeenth century, from a world in which art was primarily religious towards a more secular form. Rudolf Wittkower is one of these: ‘It was in the years around 1600 that a long prepared, clear-cut separation between ecclesiastical and secular art became an established fact.’⁸⁸ After the first quarter of the seventeenth century artists were for the first time able to make a living by devoting themselves wholly to specialised genres. While still-lifes and battle scenes were popular, it was landscape painting which would become the most important of all non-religious genres, leading to Poussin and Claude.

When all is said and done, however, the outstanding achievement of Baroque Rome is St Peter’s, and therein lies an important irony. This magnificent complex took two generations to complete (the baldacchino was finished in 1636, other parts in the 1660s). But the Peace of Westphalia (1648), ending the Thirty Years War, made it clear that, henceforth, the great European powers would settle their affairs without reference to the Holy See. At the point of her greatest physical glory, the intellectual ascendancy of Rome had begun, irrevocably, to wane. Power, and intellectual leadership, had moved north.