Reform and Counter-Reform

The sixteenth century was notable for two great changes which have shaped the subsequent history of the Christian West. First, Spain and Portugal acquired vast new empires in the Americas and the Far East which made Christianity a global religion.

The origins of the Catholic revival predated the Reformation, and lay in the new strength achieved by Iberian Catholicism from the union of the Spanish kingdom under Ferdinand V the Catholic (1452-1516) and his wife Isabella (1451-1504). These ‘Catholic Sovereigns’ patronised the church-reforming programme of the Queen’s Observant Franciscan confessor, Cardinal Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros (1436-1517), the scourge of unreformed conventualism, founder of the humanist Univer­sity of Alcala, and patron of its most famous production, the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, with its parallel texts in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Ferdinand and Isabella also favoured the Spanish Inquisition established in 1479, which, under its most famous Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada (1420-98), reinforced national as well as religious unity against former Jews and Moors deemed as ‘Marranos’ and ‘Moriscos’ to have been inadequately converted to Christianity.

A militant and military Spanish Catholicism was to have an equal influence on the wider European stage: the disputed Aragonese overlordship of southern Italy led to two centuries of Spanish domination of the Italian peninsula, while Ferdinand the Catholic’s grandson Charles V (1500-58), also grandson of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Maxi­milian I (1459-1519), inherited both the Spanish Empire and the Habsburg dominions in Austria, Germany and the old Burgundian Netherlands. Charles was elected emperor in 1519, and his efforts to contain the Protestant challenge within his ramshackle Holy Roman Empire was to be sustained by Spanish soldiers and silver as well as by Spanish sanctity. Charles’s Spanish empire in the Old and New Worlds was inherited by his son Philip II (1527—98), whose armies championed the Catholic cause not only in his own possessions in Italy and Flanders, but in France and Germany, and against England, indeed wherever the Catholic Church had need of new crusaders.

Spanish sanctity also produced the principal spiritual defender of the Roman Catholic Church in the ex-soldier Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), who after periods of mystical ascetism and some belated univer­sity study, laid the foundations in Paris in 1534 of the Society of Jesus, approved by the Papacy in 1540 and destined soon to become, under its ‘General’, the ‘Black Pope’, the most impressive, powerful and hated of the propagandist orders of a new Catholicism.

Yet Spanish Catholicism also exalted the royal authority dominant in the Church.

The Papacy was a large part of the Church’s prob­lem. From the mid-fifteenth century, a sequence of able, unscrupulous and increasingly secular-minded popes became entirely absorbed in the sordid and murderous intricacies of Italian politics and the enrichment of their own families. The Papacy reached its moral nadir with the pontificate of Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI (1431-1503), though a still greater notoriety for politi­cal ruthlessness was won by his soldier-son Cesare Borgia (1475-1507). Their work for the consolidation of the central Italian States of the Church was continued by the warlike Julius II (1443-1513), but the greatest achieve­ment of the Renaissance Papacy lay in its patronage of the visual arts, which were overwhelmingly religious in content, and Julius II was especially notable for his employment of Donato Bramante (1444—1514), Raphael (Raffaele) Sanzio (1483-1520) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), who gave Christianity some of its most enduring images, the new St Peter’s, the Sistine Madonna, the Pietà and Sistine Chapel frescos. Julius also convened the Fifth Lateran Council (1512—17), but while it defended papal authority against conciliar theory, it made no major reforms, and left the Roman Church under the pleasure-loving Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope Leo X (1475-1521), wholly unprepared for the religious storms whipped up by new religious values and ideals.

The causes of the Reformation are only partly to be found in the pastoral and moral failures of late medieval Catholicism, as orthodox Catholics had deplored as much as heretics the concubinage, plural­ism, neglect of religious duty and venality of many of the clergy. Much of rural Europe was poorly served by uneducated or absentee priests, but though the religiosity of the Middle Ages has been much overrated, the growth of guilds and chantries attested to the vigorous spiritual life of the towns. Medieval religion was a house with many mansions, with room for considerable philosophical disagreement, as between ‘realists’ and ‘nominal­ists’, and for both the individualistic mysticism of such masters of the spiritual life as the English Richard Rolle (c. 1300-49) and the German Johann Tauler (c. 1300-61), and the devotio moderna of the Brethren of the Common Life, a Dutch and German religious movement given its most diffused expression in the Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471). The spiritual seriousness of the Brethren influenced the tone and preoccupations of Renaissance humanism in northern Europe, and of their most celebrated pupil Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), a Dutch-bom but inter­nationally-minded and free-ranging intellectual indifferent or hostile to local and ecclesiastical tradition and custom, and given to brilliantly witty satire of the Papacy, his own monasticism and of popular religion. This he regarded with a true intellectual’s disdain as contaminated with monkish superstition. From the mid-fifteenth century, the invention of printing by Johann Gutenberg (c. 1396-1468) multiplied Bibles and Testaments in north­ern Europe, and Erasmus’ edition and translation of the Greek New Testa­ment represented a scholarly recall to the sources of Christianity, to recover its simplicity, purity and power.

The Erasmian reforming programme, learned but rather untheological, at first captured the educated religious mind of Europe. In Germany, this ‘New Learning’ was the subject of attacks on the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1455—1522), but it flourished in England in the early humanist ideals of St Thomas More (1478-1535) and John Colet (1466-1519) and in France in the circle of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1455-1536).

Luther owed his appeal in part to patriotic German resentment of Roman taxation and abuse of power, and to the lack of an effective central imperial authority to restrain the princes, cities, knights and peasants who rallied to support him. He repudiated the violence of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 and its Anabaptist leader Thomas Miintzer (c. 1490-1525), and it was the princes who proved to be his most important allies in the creation of a new Lutheran church order, even if they were also moved by greed for church property. The Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became in 1525 the first Hohenzollern Duke of Prussia, and the very word ‘Protestant’ itself arose from the protest of the Lutheran princes at the Diet of Speyer in 1529. In 1530, Luther’s most attractive and eirenic younger dis­ciple, the humanist Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), was chiefly respon­sible for framing the first of the great Protestant confessions of faith, that of Augsburg. In 1526, the Ottoman Turks overran most of Hungary, and Charles V, too occupied with these and other threats to his vast dominions, did not break up the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant princes until 1547. He failed in the attempt to impose a religious settlement on the Empire in the

Interim of Augsburg of 1548, and the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 acknow­ledged the existence of Lutheranism as well as Catholicism, on the principle of confessional absolutism, cujus regio ejus religio, that the religion of the ruler should decide the religion of his people.

The Lutheran reform was also officially victorious by 1540 in Denmark and newly independent Sweden, where it greatly strengthened royal authority over the nobility as well as the Church, and whence it was spread by force and royal command as well as by evangelism to the dependent regions of Norway, Iceland and Finland. Later Roman mis­sions left undisturbed this nearly total Lutheran monopoly of Scandinavian Christianity. In 1528, a Lutheran martyr, Patrick Hamilton, was burnt at the stake in Scotland. In England a Lutheran circle formed around Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), who was secretly married to the niece of the German reformer Andreas Osiander (1498-1552). As Archbishop of Canterbury from 1532, Cranmer provided Henry VIII (1491-1547) with the theological justification to break the Church in England’s ties with Rome in 1534. A more radical reform was reserved to the brief reign of Edward VI (1537-53). Again by 1560, Lutheran ideas in Austria and southern Germany were attracting a majority of the population. By that date, however, outside Scandinavia and northern and central Germany, where there was a steady consolidation of the Lutheran pastoral ministry, the Protestant advance took place on more radical lines than Luther’s, as the Reformed tradition disputed with Lutheranism the division of the Protestant world.

Luther’s liturgical instincts were conservative, and he quickly repudiated the lawless iconoclasm and violence of his disciple Andreas Carlstadt (c. 1480-1541) and of the spirit-filled ‘Zwickau prophets’. The first architect of Reformed Protestantism was the Zurich pastor Ulrich Zwingli (1484—1531), a former chaplain to Swiss papal mercenaries, who converted the Mass into a simple vernacular memorial communion service, and banished all images, statues, vestments, organs and ritual from the churches in an effort to confine Christianity to the explicit teaching of the gospel. Zwingli lacked Luther’s earthy peasant realism, the German’s instinc­tive feeling for the concrete and the material, and in 1529, at the Colloquy of Marburg, Zwingli denied Luther’s doctrine that the Body and Blood of Christ coexist in the Eucharist with the bread and wine. Though Zwingli fell in battle with the Swiss Catholic cantons in 1531, his Swiss type of reformed Protestantism was given an international influence through the reformation of the French-born John Calvin (1509-64).

Calvin was an organiser of genius who in a long ministry at Geneva (1536-8; 1541-64), refined the ecclesiological experi­ments of his predecessors like Martin Bucer (1491-1551) in Strasbourg into a new church order for Protestantism, a fourfold ministry of presbyters, elders, teachers and deacons, with authority over the religious, moral, educa­tional and charitable life of the Church, its courts of discipline and congrega­tions. Calvin was also a theologian of genius, a master of French and Latin prose, who gave Protestantism a systematic theology based on a crystalline conception of God’s providence for all his creatures, containing an infinitely consoling assurance to the elect that he had chosen and predestined them to salvation from all eternity.

The doctrine of predestination was not new; it was rooted in Scripture, it was taught by Augustine and Aquinas, and there was much in the logic of Reformed ideas to thrust it to the foreground, as in harmony with the Augustinian emphases on the sovereignty of grace, the power of original sin and the unfreedom of the human will. But St Ignatius Loyola urged that predestination was no part of ordinary Christian teaching and preaching, and it was Calvin who transformed it, albeit without some of the refinements of his successors, from a theological conundrum into a central strand of popular religion. By 1620, the negative aspect of Calvinism was producing a revolt against it in the very churches it had helped to form. But at first its power was wholly positive, and this power was apparent even before Calvin’s death, in the rise of the ‘Huguenot’ Church in France, with two thousand congregations in 1560; in the triumph of the Reformation, in Scotland in 1560, under Calvin’s disciple John Knox (c. 1513-72); and in the return of Protestantism to power in England on the accession of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) in 1558, after the brief Catholic reaction under Mary Tudor (1516-58), though here the Elizabethan church settlement combined a Cal­vinist theology with a liturgy respectful of tradition, and with the traditional episcopal church order. Calvinism also spread under noble patronage into Hungary and Poland, and Calvinists made a contribution wholly dispropor­tionate to their numbers to the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule from 1566, which led in 1579 to the division of the Catholic south from the increasingly Calvinist north, the origin of modern Belgium and Holland.

The most important of the territories disputed between Catholicism and Calvinism was France, where more than thirty years of civil war (1562-94) were ended by the conversion to Catholicism of the Protestant King Henry IV (1553-1610), and by the Edict of Nantes of 1598, granting a measure of political autonomy and of freedom of worship to the Protestant minority. The Huguenots lost their political privileges in 1629 at the hands of the French statesman Cardinal A.J. du Plessis Richelieu (1585-1642), who saw them as an obstacle to French national unity, and the last vestiges of religious toleration were destroyed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (1638-1715) in 1685. Most Protestants con­formed to Catholicism or fled into exile, and despite desperate Calvinist ‘Camisard’ risings in the Cevennes in 1702 and 1709, Protestantism remained proscribed until 1787, so that Calvin hardly survived as a prophet in his own country.

Not that Calvin favoured religious toleration any more than Catholicism. One interconfessional form of persecution, the late medieval European witch craze, lasted in Protestant countries as well as in Catholic middle Europe until the later seventeenth century. Catholics and Protestants also united against the ‘Radical Reformation’. Just as Zwingli in the 1520s drowned Anabaptists, so Calvin, acting on information from Catholics, was responsible for the burning at the stake of the Antitrinitarian Spaniard Michael Servetus (1511-53). Hostility to orthodoxy, Catholic or Protestant, seems to have been the special characteristic of the small number of Spanish or Italian Protestants: Socinianism, the denial of the full divinity of Christ, owes its name to Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604), who carried his teach­ing to Transylvania and Poland where he founded Unitarian churches; and Poland was also the scene of mission of the Protestant former Capuchin Bernadino Ochino (1487-1564), who repudiated both Calvinism and the Trinity. Protestants were historically correct in rejecting the radical spiritual­ist teachings of the Anabaptist leaders of the 1520s, Thomas Müntzer, Bal­thasar Hübmaier (1485-1528) and John Denck (1495-1527), for Anabaptism, especially in its apocalyptic element, owed less to the Reformation than to the late medieval heresies, and by denying infant baptism, albeit with some good Protestant arguments, the Anabaptists repudiated the principle of a Church conterminous with the whole community. The Protestant Landgrave of Hesse joined with the Catholic Bishop of Münster to rescue that prelate’s cathedral city from the rule of an Anabaptist madman, Jan of Leyden (executed in 1535), but more pacific Anabaptist communities of Mennonites and Hutterites developed in Holland and Moravia, and after enduring many persecutions established still surviving co-operative colonies in the New World. The pre-Reformation Bohemian (later Moravian) Brethren also sur­vived, by adopting a Lutheran confession.

If the Protestant fringe might seem to discredit the Protestant appeal from the Church to the Bible, the Protestant failure to present a united front to Rome, and the jealousies between Lutheranism and Calvinism especially, in part explains the Protestant inability to acquire any significant new territory from Catholicism after 1570. Lutheranism was itself divided by controversy between the compromising Philippists who followed Melanchthon and the Gnesiolutherans under Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-75), who developed Lutheranism into a stern unbending orthodoxy without the spirit which in Luther gave it life. Calvinism also hardened into the rigid systems of Theodore Beza (1519-1605), Calvin’s successor at Geneva, and of Francis Gomar (1563-1641) of Leyden, whose controversy with Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) led in 1610 to the ‘Remonstrance’, a statement of the Dutch ‘Arminian’ position that Christ died for all and not only the elect, and that divine sovereignty was compatible with human freedom. The Remonstrants were condemned by the Synod of Dort (1618-19), but the influx of Arminian opinion into the Church of England in the 1620s led to the consolidation of a more distinctively ‘Anglican’ theologi­cal school, stemming from the writings of Richard Hooker (c. 1554—1600), with a more definite theological defence of episcopal order and formal liturgical worship. The movement received the patronage of King Charles I (1600-49) and William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury, and precipitated both a Calvinist rebellion in Scotland in 1637, which restored Presbyterian church order, and from 1641, a civil war in England, in the course of which the king and archbishop were executed and a Puritan republican Commonwealth was established under the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658). The Westminster Assembly of 1643 drew up the Calvinist Westminster Confession, but Presbyterianism did not every­where prevail, and though episcopacy and Catholicism were proscribed, the extraordinary efflorescence of Protestant free thought produced many Inde­pendent and Baptist congregations, and the pacifist Society of Friends estab­lished by the Quaker mystic George Fox (1624-91). The experiment ended with the permanent restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660, though Scottish episcopacy, which was also then restored, faced great opposition and was replaced by Presbyterianism in 1690.

England was by far the largest and most important of the conquests of the Reformation, and after 1600 the emergence of her first American colonies, with those of the vast new trading empire of Holland, gave Protestantism its most important modern role, in the rise of a great Protestant state in the New World. But while Catholicism in England survived as a genuine native growth, it was restricted to an aristocratic and gentry-dominated minority, especially in remote parts of Lancashire and elsewhere in northern England. There was, however, no adequate Protestant effort to evangelise the Irish, who remained obdurately Catholic through four centuries of rule by English heretics, though after 1600 a Protestant minority was introduced by dispossession of the Catholic landlord class, and Protestant immigrants, mostly Presbyterians from Scotland, became a majority in one province, Ulster.

In Europe, Protestantism was in retreat after 1590, having made all its conquests over the medieval Catholicism still unreformed by the Council of Trent (1545—63). The council was a predominantly Italian and Papacy-controlled affair, which with theological subtlety and clarity reaffirmed and redefined the doctrinal and devotional content of Roman Catholicism. The origins of this Italian Catholic reform lay in the Oratory of Divine Love established in Rome around 1517 by Pietro Caraffa, later Pope Paul IV (1476-1559), the founder, in 1524, with the gentle Cajetan (1480-1547), of the Theatines, the first of the new evangelist and activist orders of priest ‘Clerks Regular’. These orders were supplemented by the most numerous and popular of all the Counter-Reformation religious insti­tutes, the Franciscan Capuchins, established in 1529 by Matteo di Bassi (d. 1552). No reform, however, was achieved in the short pontificate of the well-meaning Dutchman, Hadrian VI (1459-1523). The brutal sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527 rang the knell of the secular Roman Renaissance, and sent Gian Matteo Giberti (1495-1543) back to his diocese of Verona to set a new pastoral standard for the episcopate; but it was only in 1537 that the Farnese Pope Paul III (1468-1549) began effective reforming measures with the radical recommendations of the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia. A last attempt was made by Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542) and the moderate reform-minded spirituali to find ground for a reconciliation with the Protestants at Ratisbon in 1541, but after its failure, the conservative zelanti, led by Caraffa, prevailed in Rome, and a new Roman Inquisition began the repression of Italian heresy in 1542. The spiritual regeneration of Rome itself was the work of the most delightful of Counter-Reformation saints, Philip Neri (1515-95), the ‘Apostle of Rome’, whose congregation of priests, the Oratory, gave its name to the oratorio deriving from the spiritual songs composed for Oratorian devotional use, some of them by Neri’s penitent Giovanni Palestrina (c. 1525-94), the modern founder-patron of Catholic church music.

After the savagely puritan pontificate of Paul IV, who banished the Roman prostitutes and published the first index of Prohibited Books, a succession of dedicated if ruthless pontiffs restored the religious prestige of the Papacy. Pius IV (1499-1565) confirmed the decrees of Trent and published the summary Profession of Tridentine Faith known as the ‘Creed of Pius IV’. Pius V (1504—72) reformed the Roman Missal, Breviary and Catechism, Gregory XIII (1502-85) reformed the Calendar and Sixtus V (1521-90) revolutionised Roman town planning, rid the Papal States of bandits and reorganised the government of the Church under fifteen con­gregations of cardinals. Outside Rome, much reform rested on individual or local initiative, as in the great archdiocese of Milan, in which the Archbishop, Charles Borromeo (1538-84), Pius IV’s nephew, made the Tridentine decrees effective through a unique personal combination of pastoral effi­ciency, compassion and charismatic sanctity.

Outside Italy, however, acceptance of the council depended on secular authority, and in southern Germany and Austria the most efficient instrument of the Catholic revival was the Jesuit Order, under the propagandist direction of Peter Canisius (1521-97), as its scores of new schools and universities founded after 1556 reconciled the educated laity to the Roman Catholic Church. Their most willing pupil was the Archduke Ferdinand (1578-1637), who eliminated Protestantism from his domains in Inner Austria after 1595 and carried his crusade into the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) after becoming emperor in 1619. In the 1620s, Bohemia was recovered from Calvinist rule and forcibly re-Catholicised, and the Edict of Restitution in 1629 demanded the return of all territories in the Empire Protestantised since 1552. The Protestant cause in Germany was saved from disaster in the 1630s by the armies of Gustavus II Adolphus (1594—1632), King of Sweden, and by his Catholic ally, France, which feared too powerful an empire. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 signalled the end of a century of religious war, the failure of the Catholic reconquista and the legal existence in the Empire of Calvinism, which also survived in Turkish Hungary under Ottoman protection. All ecclesiastical power was now the weaker for the rise of the nation-state, a fact of which the Papacy was only too aware. Yet the Protestant share of Europe had fallen to a fifth by 1650, as Catholicism kept what it had reconquered. One signal success of wholesale re-Catholicisation was in Poland-Lithuania, where religious toleration of Protestants declined during the long reign of Sigismund III (1566-1632). After 1650, the final touches to St Peter’s by the supreme architect and sculptor of the age, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680)—the colonnades to the Piazza and the huge bronze reliquary for St Peter’s Chair—marked the triumphant resurgence of Roman Catholicism.