by Peter Watson
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 tur
ned 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 mid-air. ‘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.
23
The Genius of the Experiment
To Chapter 23 Notes and References
The scientific revolution ‘outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.’ These are the words of Herbert Butterfield, the British historian, in his book The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, published in 1949.1 They typify one view of ‘the scientific revolution’, that the changes which took place between Copernicus’ publication of his book on the solar system, in 1543, and Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, some 144 years later, in 1687, transformed our understanding of nature fundamentally and for all time–modern science was born. The Aristotelian view of the world was thrown out, to be replaced by the Newtonian view. (Newton, complained his contemporaries, some of them anyway, had destroyed the romance of the rainbow and killed the need for angels.) It was now that austere, cumulative, mathematical rationality replaced the fuzzy, haphazard, supernatural speculation of the Middle Ages. As Butterfield also insisted, this was the most important change in thinking since the rise of ethical monotheism.
This argument has come under attack in the last quarter of a century. The assault has a great deal to do with the discovery, mentioned in the Introduction to this book, of certain papers belonging to Newton, which were first discussed publicly by John Maynard Keynes. These papers showed that, besides his interest in physics and mathematics, Newton had an abiding fascination with alchemy and theology, in particular biblical chronology. This has led certain modern scholars–Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and I. Bernard Cohen, for example–to question whether, with such interests as these, Newton and some of his contemporaries can be said to have had truly modern minds. Dobbs and Cohen remind u
s that Newton sought to demonstrate the laws of ‘divine activity’ in nature, in order to show ‘the existence and providential care of the Deity’ and they have therefore cast doubt on whether the transformation in thought was really so profound. They also point out that the change to modern chemistry came well after Newton, in the eighteenth century, and therefore, they argue, we cannot really speak of a scientific ‘revolution’, if by that we mean ‘a change that is sudden, radical, and complete’.2 They point out, further, that Copernicus was a ‘timid conservative’ in his private life–hardly a revolutionary–that there were barely ten ‘heliocentrists’ in the world in 1600, and that Kepler was a ‘tortured mystic’. None of these ‘heroes’ were cold rationalists. The reader is warned therefore that the version of events which follows is very much in contention. I shall return to this discussion at the end of the chapter.