Ideas

by Peter Watson

  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, t
he 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