Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  An official in neighboring Bern wrote a letter to Calvin denouncing him for his approval of the sentence of burning, and a pastor in his old home town of Noyon sent him a scathing note observing that what he had done was worse than anything done by the Inquisition in either Spain or France. Genevans, too frightened to speak out publicly, employed the old familiar tactic of composing little uncomplimentary couplets that were sung sotto voce at night in alleys.

  It was in Basel where criticism was harshest. Basel still held great sway as the soul of enlightened humanism, and disapproval there could not be ignored. Bullinger, Calvin's most fervent supporter, entreated him to respond. He must seize the initiative and publish a defense of his actions. He must denounce Servetus so aggressively and pervasively that no one could possibly question the propriety of his behavior. “See to it, dear Calvin, that you give a good account of Servetus and his end, so that all may have the beast in horror,” he wrote, to which Calvin replied, “If I have but a little leisure I shall show what a monster he was.”

  So, early in 1554, Calvin published a short tract entitled Defense of the True Faith of the Sacred Trinity Against the Hideous Errors of Michael Servetus, Spaniard. It was a ferocious diatribe in which Servetus was portrayed not as a theological dissenter but as an enemy to all religion and a threat to civilization itself. “Knowing the poison to be deadly in its kind,” wrote Calvin, “and having regard to the amount of stupidity and confusion which God, to avenge Himself, inflicts on all who despise his doctrine, I have felt myself compelled as it were to take up the pen, and in exposing the errors of the man to furnish grounds for better conclusions. When Servetus and his like, indeed, presume to meddle with the mysteries of religion, it is as if swine came thrusting their snouts into a treasury of sacred things.” Calvin bragged about causing Servetus's arrest, initiating the prosecution, and drawing up the charges that he had first passed off on Fontaine.

  The pamphlet was published in both Latin and French and seemed at first to have little tangible impact. Calvin's supporters praised his candor and vigilance, while his detractors called the Defense self-serving and hypocritical. Indirectly, however, it turned out to be of great benefit to Calvin. Emboldened by the hope that the outside world had at last turned against their enemy, the Libertines under Perrin made one last pathetic attempt to obliterate the French influence and secure Geneva for the Genevans. One night, a bunch of them got drunk and decided to set fire to a house rumored to harbor armed Frenchmen. When they got there, an alert syndic appeared, carrying his baton of office. Perrin made as if to snatch the baton away—signifying that he, and not the syndic, represented the law—but in a move that epitomized the Libertines' political fumbling, paused in mid-grab. With that hesitation, Geneva lost what little remained of its opposition party. When a second syndic showed up, the patriots lost their nerve entirely and fled into the night to permanent exile in Bern.

  After the affair of the baton, there was no more unrest in Geneva, and Calvin consolidated his control of the city. He ordered the entire Council of Two Hundred to stand up, raise their right hands, and swear allegiance to the Reformation. The Little Council was subjected to a Cultural Revolution-like program of regularly scheduled meetings for “mutual correction,” during which they were required to point out one another's sins and faults (a directive that the councilors followed enthusiastically, although not necessarily in the spirit of brotherly solicitude that Calvin claimed to have intended). Immediately before elections, Calvin focused his sermons on the personal qualities that he felt were necessary to hold public office, leaving no doubt as to his own choices for syndic. His authority was so complete that when Geneva got its first dentist, the man was not allowed to practice until he had first worked on Calvin.

  Discipline was even more rigorously enforced than before. The merest breath of discontent meant a whipping, a tongue pierced with hot iron, or banishment. Mental illness was no excuse—an obviously deranged woman who thought Calvin was her husband was kicked out of town. Calvin took an especially dim view of adultery, a transgression with which he had some personal acquaintance, since apparently two of the loosest women in Geneva were his brother Antoine's wife (who was caught in the act with Calvin's hunchbacked servant) and his own stepdaughter, Judith. Judith tended to flaunt her sexuality, and after one of her more public affairs, “for days [Calvin] was too ashamed even to leave his house.”

  Calvin's personal problems, however, had no effect on his growing reputation. Religious refugees continued to pour into the city. These newcomers were more than willing to put up with the rigors of the regime, since many of them were coming from places from which they had just barely escaped with their lives. The political energy of the Reformation became more and more concentrated within Calvin's realm.

  But Calvin had never intended that his vision be restricted to one city or even one country. When Geneva was secure, he turned his attention to the battle for the soul (and souls) of Europe.

  Now a veteran of twenty years of struggle, Calvin once more took up the weapons that had forged Protestant success—books, reading, and education. The public elementary school system in Geneva became acknowledged as the best in Europe. He founded the University of Geneva to nurture a new generation of reform scholars; he trained missionaries and then sent them out to spread the word, not just in Europe, but everywhere in the known world. The Calvinist scholar John T. McNeill wrote, “It was not only the future of Geneva but that of other regions as well that was affected by the rise of the Geneva schools. The men who were to lead the advance of the Reform church in many lands were trained in Geneva classrooms, preached Geneva doctrines, and sang the Psalms to Geneva tunes.”

  Calvin did not simply rely on missionaries to spread the word. Copies of the Institutes flooded the Protestant centers of England, the Netherlands, and Germany and made their way surreptitiously into every Catholic country in Europe. Calvin's great insight was his awareness that the best way to mold the minds of the common people was to have them do the very thing that the Catholic Church had forbidden for centuries. Thus he encouraged the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages and its distribution to merchants, artisans, and farmers. In 1560, printers in Geneva published a Bible in English and shipped it off to Elizabethan England, where it became hugely successful and led directly to the King James version in the following century.

  By the time John Calvin died of tuberculosis in 1564, he had become an industry unto himself, exporting revolution. His aim was nothing less than the annihilation of Catholicism. And he might well have succeeded except for one remarkable man who single-handedly shouldered the Catholic colossus and turned it from the brink of extinction, perhaps the most influential figure in Church history after Christ himself.

  IÑIGO DE OÑEZ Y LOYOLA was Calvin's mirror image. Physically, they were both small thin, frail, short-tempered, and constantly beset by illness. Spiritually, both were intense, committed, indomitable, and utterly convinced of their godliness.

  Loyola was born in northern Spain, Basque country, in 1491, the youngest of thirteen children. He had studied for the priesthood as an adolescent, but before he was ordained, he was recruited as a page to Juan Velásquez de Cuellar, treasurer to Ferdinand and Isabella for the kingdom of Castile. It didn't take long for him to abandon spiritual pursuits for the much more glamorous life of a courtier. By his own admission, he became obsessed with extravagant dress, drinking, gambling, and whoring about, all to the greatest extremes possible.

  Although barely five feet tall, Loyola loved swordplay and was a fierce and fearless fighter. When Velásquez died in 1517, Loyola joined the army. In 1521, during Francis's invasion to reclaim Navarre, the French besieged the fort at Pamplona. The commander wanted to surrender, but Loyola, a junior officer, urged him to fight on and then heroically led the resistance. On May 10 he was hit in the legs by a cannon ball. His left calf was torn open and his right shin broken. After Loyola's fall, the garrison surrendered.

  Loyol
a had been so brave that he was treated with great solicitude by the French. Instead of sending him to prison, they set his leg, and French soldiers carried him home on a litter. The leg had been set incorrectly, however, and had to be rebroken and reset, all without benefit of anesthesia. This second setting was not much better than the first. A knob of bone protruded at the top of his shin. With that deformity, it would have been impossible to fit into the high, tight calf boots that were all the fashion at court, so Loyola had the offending knob sawed off, also without anesthesia. Then, in an attempt to match the now-foreshortened right leg to the normal left, he demanded that the leg be stretched out by weights. The pain of all this was excruciating and went on for week after interminable week. (It didn't even work-he was left with a limp for the rest of his life.)

  Eventually, Loyola developed a fever, and the doctors told him that he was going to die. Then, on June 29, the eve of the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul, the fever broke, and from there he slowly regained his strength. But he still faced months of recuperation, confined to his bed.

  Excruciating pain was replaced by mind-crushing boredom. In order to help pass the time, Loyola requested some of the swashbuckling romance novels that he favored, but they didn't have any, so instead he was given a book on the life of Christ and one on the saints. With no other choice, he spent his days devouring each and, when he was done, began to consider what it might take to become a saint himself. He could fast longer than this one, become more pious than that one, endure more than a third.

  He convalesced until March 1522, lying in bed and planning. After his body had healed, he left the castle, placed his sword and dagger on the altar of a Benedictine shrine, gave all his clothes and worldly possessions to the poor, and, dressed in sandals and sackcloth, carrying only a staff, began a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On the way, Loyola stopped at a town called Manresa but having no money was forced to put up in a cave outside the city.

  He lived in the cave for ten months, determined to purge himself of sins of the flesh. He fasted so severely that his digestive system became permanently damaged. He prayed, scourged himself (self-flagellation with a whip or branches), and undertook other extreme forms of penance. When he emerged, austere and ascetic, his focus was on Christ alone. With the endurance and will forged from two years of almost unendurable hardship, he set out to remake the Catholic Church.

  It took over fifteen years. Loyola (who abandoned Iñigo for the Latinized Ignatius) was beaten, thrown in jail, kicked out of two universities, expelled from Jerusalem, and brought in front of the Inquisition but eventually found himself at the head of a small group of believers at the University of Paris. He was there at exactly the same time as Servetus and Calvin, but they ran in far different circles. Loyola's group took vows of chastity and poverty and adopted the Ig-natian practices of begging, fasting, and going barefoot. In 1539, he had a vision in which God said to him, “Ego vobis Romae propitins ero” (“I will be favorable to you in Rome”), and he set off to see the pope.

  IN ROME, THE HEDONISTIC appeal of the Renaissance papacy was fading. The sacking of Rome and the spread of Protestantism were seen as God's condemnation of the degeneracy of the Church. It had finally become clear that despite its numerical superiority and material advantages, and regardless of Protestant squabbling, if Rome did not find a way to match Calvin's commitment, brilliance, and intensity, it might well lose Europe.

  When Pope Clement VII died in 1534, there were rumblings that the next pope should move aggressively to clean up the mess. Instead, in a more or less rigged election, the cardinals elevated the sixty-six-year-old Alessandro Farnese, who had just missed being pope twice before.

  The genial and easygoing Farnese, who became Pope Paul III, had been educated at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent and enjoyed art, culture, and food. In his first official act, he confounded both his supporters and detractors by appointing a six-cardinal commission to study the state of the Church and recommend reforms. Each of the six was known for scholarship, piety, and disgust with the old order.

  The commission worked for three years. In their report, they recommended such obvious changes as abolishing the sale of benefices and indulgences, renewing the commitment to chastity, particularly by bishops and cardinals (and, by implication, popes), and curbing the rampant nepotism in Rome.

  Paul welcomed these recommendations, apparently with total sincerity. He did not, however, seem to understand that they applied to him as well. At the same time as he was preaching austerity and a renewal of faith, he was giving parties, lavishing money on the arts, and undertaking grand (and expensive) new projects. He plotted, seized territory, and installed relatives in positions of power.

  Loyola succeeded in obtaining an audience with Paul, who found the vision of a new order of paramilitary zealots who swore total allegiance and obedience to him alone irresistible. Loyola, an indefatigable attacker, stressed the need for the Church to aggressively recruit converts and just as aggressively woo the faithful. Paul, who had his own ideas, had the perfect job for his new recruits, dubbed the Society of Jesus.

  For some time, the idea of a general council to reconcile with the Protestants had been making the rounds. This kind of sweeping diplomacy appealed to Paul, but the prospect of a peaceful Germany and an unoccupied Charles once again facing Rome had caused him to rethink the idea. Instead, he had proposed a council of internal reform. He issued invitations in 1536 to all significant parties, both within the Church and without, including every Catholic monarch in Europe.

  It had taken nine years, but in December 1545 the nineteenth ecumenical council, the Council of Trent, was convened. As his personal representatives, the seventy-eight-year-old pontiff sent two young members of Loyola's group. Although Loyola himself did not attend, the influence of the Jesuits (a nickname originally bestowed by Calvin, who did not mean it as a compliment) became overwhelming. They were tougher, more focused, more dedicated, and more pious than anyone else there, and as a result, for the first time there was a genuine movement toward reform within the Church.

  Loyola now had his opportunity and he was not a man to let it pass by. By the time of his death in 1556, the Society of Jesus had taken control of over one hundred universities throughout Europe, and would come to dominate Catholic education (including the English College at Rome). Within fifty years, Loyola's order would have missions as far away as India, China, Japan, Africa, and the New World. The confessor to the king of France would be a Jesuit.

  With it all, perhaps Loyola's greatest achievement was in changing the Church's attitude toward reading. Almost since the religion had been founded, Church leaders had tried to restrict common people's access to books. Literacy was discouraged, and censorship was employed regularly to keep those who could read from actually doing it. The Bible was forbidden, of course, as was anything that the Church deemed heretical—the works of Servetus being prominently featured in this category. Censorship had been mostly random, however. A book or author forbidden in one province might be allowed in another. In 1559, under the new pope Paul IV, who as Cardinal Caraffa had been a member of the council of six that had recommended Church reforms, and then of another council of six that reinstated the Inquisition, the first official papal list of forbidden books was published.

  It was called the Index Librorum et Auctorum. It forbade the reading of forty-eight editions of the Bible deemed heretical, including all those in vernacular languages, as well as anything at all printed by sixty-one different publishers. No book printed in the previous forty years that lacked an author's name, the name of the printer, or place or date of publication could be read by a Catholic. From that date forward, any book lacking official ecclesiastical approval was forbidden.

  In the wake of Paul's order, thousands of books were burned—ten thousand in Venice in a single day. Still, the list was so restrictive, and the penalties for transgression so extreme, that within months even conservative members of the Curia lobbied for change. After Paul died
, the Council of Trent redrafted the Index to make it more specific, and in 1571 a special congregation was formed to maintain the list and make periodic revisions to keep it up to date.

  Loyola went at the problem from an entirely different direction. Censorship had not worked, and with more and more books available to more and more people, it was not likely to work in the future. So if you can't prevent someone from doing something that displeases you, try to ensure that they do it under conditions that are to your liking. Like Calvin, he wanted the faithful to read, the more the better. The trick was persuading them to read what the church deemed desirable and avoid that which it didn't.

  To accomplish this, Loyola, for once, chose the carrot instead of the stick. He demanded that the leaders of the order write and be published. Not just write, but write in a clear and accessible way. The use of vernacular languages should be encouraged, not banned, since that was the way to get the most material into the hearts and minds of the most Catholics in the shortest period of time.

  The Jesuits took up the call. Books poured out of universities and monasteries. The emphasis on printing spread. Peter Canisius, one of the Society's key early leaders and the man often credited with having saved Catholicism in Germany, urged the order to create a college of authors. He lobbied for the appointment of cardinals and bishops who could write for the masses to defend the faith against Protestants. He entreated the pope to grant yearly subsidies to the Catholic printers of Germany, and to permit German scholars to edit Roman manuscripts. He oversaw the translation of foreign writings into German. He persuaded the city council of Catholic Fribourg to establish its own press, and he secured special privileges for printers who would print literature favorable to the order.