Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  He married for love, incurring the enmity of his powerful father-in-law, and was reduced to penury. His wife, Anne, bore twelve children, two of whom were stillborn, three of whom died in childhood. After sixteen years of marriage, always pregnant or nursing a child, Anne died. The carefree, even reckless lover—called “Jack” by his friends—gradually turned into a thoughtful, even grave older man whose only evident links to his younger self were his razor-sharp mind and lightning-quick wit. When he was nearly fifty, having been ordained an Anglican priest at the insistence of King James, Donne was named dean of Old Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. His sermons there were as dazzling as his poems had been and laid the foundation stones for an Anglicanism built on Catholicity.

  Perhaps nothing reveals the inner Donne more nakedly than his famous meditation on death:

  Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die. Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.… The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

  Hemingway stole from this meditation, as did Thomas Merton. As do we all.

  Holland is the home of genial, fair-haired, red-cheeked people whose genius for business and whose general inventiveness have always been admired by outsiders. Dutchmen are skilled, sensible, down-to-earth doers; they do not encourage fantasy and they discourage wildness of any kind. There are, therefore, among them logicians, mathematicians, and practical, thoughtful, mildly humorous folk (like Erasmus and Santa Claus); but there are not among them many famous painters and sculptors, poets and dramatists, or even composers (though the Dutch excel at performing the musical compositions of others).

  The monumental exception is Rembrandt van Rijn, a painter who genially inhabits the exclusive circle of the colossi. There is no way to approach Rembrandt adequately as this book draws to its close, but I wanted at least to bow deeply in his direction, for he is a prime example of the quiet and uncombative deepening of personal belief that begins to manifest itself throughout the seventeenth century.

  Born in Leiden, Rembrandt lived most of his life in Amsterdam, already in his time the most tolerant city in Europe, tolerant not so much of extravagant eccentricity as of personal privacy: in Amsterdam one could quietly be whatever one wanted to be. Because of this we have no idea whether Rembrandt considered himself Catholic or Protestant. Some have, not without reason, tried to assign him to the Anabaptists, but that assignment runs up against the significant difficulty that he allowed his children to be baptized. His life, like Donne’s, was beset with sadness (his wife died after eight years of marriage; three of his four children died in infancy) and financial woes (which included bankruptcy). His art has many subjects: his landscape drawings, according to John Walker, “mark a limit of Western art. Only the Chinese have gone further.” His paintings, especially the late ones that lost him his early popularity with Dutch buyers, reveal a grasp of physical reality suggesting, in Walker’s words, “the touch-resistance of compact atoms, the density of substance Rembrandt renders so irresistibly that one’s finger tips tingle with the same intense tactile impulse one feels before certain pieces of sculpture, the bronzes of Donatello, for example.” This Dutchman is at heart an Italian.

  Throughout his life as a painter he was himself his favorite subject. Reproductions of four of his many self-portraits are given here. The first, of 1627 [Plate 58], shows us Rembrandt as a serious twenty-one-year-old, but in shadows, suggesting that the young man was then a mystery even to himself. The second, of 1634 [Plate 59], shows us a self-assured, successful painter, nearing thirty. The third, of 1659 [Plate 60], reveals a resigned middle-aged man, who has been battered by life. In the fourth, finished perhaps in 1669 [Plate 61], the year of Rembrandt’s death, we behold a laughing subject, not cynical but surely not merely happy-go-lucky or pleased with himself. Rather, this last Rembrandt is a man who has found the comedy even in his tragedies, not so much a man who simply accepts his reverses as an old codger who shakes his head, and can even chortle, at the absurdities of life.

  The painter, in addition to relying on his own image, returned again and again to the Bible for complex and dramatic subjects. His scenes from the Old Testament are many, often modeled by Jewish neighbors who were Rembrandt’s friends and acquaintances. Perhaps the most profound of these many arresting canvases is The Return of the Prodigal Son [Plate 62] painted, like Rembrandt’s laughing portrait, in the last year of his life and based on one of Jesus’s most affecting parables. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus replies to his critics, who have been speaking against him for welcoming “sinners” and even entertaining them, by informing the critics of the “joy that shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”

  By way of illustration Jesus narrates three parables, the last about the Prodigal Son:

  A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

  Having spent all his father’s money, the Prodigal ends up feeding pigs and sharing their food, which leads him to think a new thought:

  How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

  The tenderness of the scene as imagined by Rembrandt is exceedingly physical: the head of the tattered, shamed, kneeling son pressed against the f
ather’s chest, the father’s prominent hands pressing down on his son’s shoulders, the father’s face, full of both tenderness and ecstasy. Everything else on this earth, including the three detached observers, is beside the point; only this embrace, this very physical embrace of reconciliation, matters. When the (typical) older sibling has a hissy fit about the party in progress for his unworthy younger brother, who “transgressed” the father’s “commandment” and “devoured thy living with harlots,” the father quickly sets him straight: “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

  The picture doesn’t tell us whether Rembrandt was a Catholic or a Protestant. But it may have a message for all religious controversialists: the only thing that matters in this world is forgiveness, which God gives freely, as should we.

  POSTLUDE

  HOPE AND REGRET

  It is a heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in ’t.

  The Winter’s Tale

  Here at the book’s end, I regret many things I have had to leave out. This was meant to be a full treatment of neither Renaissance nor Reformation, but an investigation of how each of those immense movements has given us a part of the mechanism of our functioning contemporary selves. Though Renaissance and Reformation occur in roughly the same period, and though each may spring initially from the scholarly, and especially the linguistic, interests of the early humanists, each morphs quickly into a very different beast, requiring separate tracking and separate analysis.

  There is in this book almost nothing about the Scandinavian countries, which cry out for more attention, especially to the ways in which their very Lutheran societies developed so very differently from Germany, leading to essential religious philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and to a politics of social welfare rather than of fascism. Even within the story of German Lutheranism, we have had to leave Luther before his very happy, if exceedingly conventional, marriage to an ex-nun, and before his hateful rants against Jews.

  A far more serious absence from this book is the thrilling story of the development of music over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, led by such religion-inspired composers as Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, Byrd, Purcell, Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach, to name but a few. Bach, in particular, nearly edged himself into the last chapter as part of “The Deepening,” but his period is a little late for this book. Perhaps, Deo volente, he will find himself in the next and last (planned) volume of this series. Bach is so wonderfully Lutheran, sounding in music every note that Luther played in rhetoric but raising the conversation to a wholly transformed and even transcendent level.

  Beyond the Lutherans, I regret that so little attention could be devoted to the new Catholic religious orders, which had so much to do with raising Catholic numbers throughout the world. My moments of attention to the Jesuits and the Ursulines can scarcely be considered sufficient. All religious orders are now on the wane, but for centuries they supported and kept strong the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.

  The Anabaptists are another near omission. They became in time the Mennonites, the Bruderhof, the Quakers. Though universally despised in the early modern period, persecuted, and often drowned by both Catholics and Protestants, their main reforms beyond adult baptism—that is, a heightened sense of community, compassion for the poor, prison reform, elimination of the death penalty, refusal to take up arms, peacemaking—are now the ideals of almost all their former persecutors, whether Catholic or Protestant. From a historical point of view, this is an astounding reversal. Today, in a way we are all Quakers. We are certainly not the religious vigilantes who took up arms and murdered as many of their religious opponents as could be found.

  So much for regrets. But I would leave you to contemplate three figures of hope, one a German Protestant in the Lutheran tradition, one an Italian Catholic, the third an American Episcopalian—all three catholic with a small “c.” The first figure, hanged by the Nazis in 1945, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the second is Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Roncalli, a Lombardian peasant who died of stomach cancer in 1963, the third is Muriel Moore, a New York woman not famous like the other two but known to many nonetheless.

  In the years leading up to the rise of Hitler and World War II, Bonhoeffer was a young German theology student, acknowledged by his teachers to be of extraordinary scholastic ability and astonishingly penetrating mind. His high bourgeois family members, who were only occasional churchgoers, were shocked when he chose to study theology and seek ordination. His initial interest in the nature of the Christian Church developed into his thesis, Communio Sanctorum (Communion of Saints), for which he was awarded his doctorate at the age of twenty-one. Although he was already moving in the direction of a broadly ecumenical path, his visits to Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the United States, Latin America, England, and North Africa opened Bonhoeffer even more to engaging in fellowship with non-Lutheran Christians. While pursuing postgraduate study at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he heard for the first time the African American spirituals that would become a passion of his.

  In January 1933, about fourteen months after Bonhoeffer’s ordination, Hitler became chancellor. Two days later, Bonhoeffer, just days before his twenty-seventh birthday, delivered an anti-Hitler national radio address in which he was cut off the air in mid-sentence. Thereafter, Bonhoeffer initiated a movement to oppose the gradual nazification of the Lutheran churches, to speak out against the persecution of the Jews, and even to find ways to thwart the broader nazification of German society. Speaking of the persecution of Jews, Bonhoeffer insisted that Christians must not only “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.” His new organization came to be called the Confessing Church.

  But as Nazism clamped an ever firmer grip on Germany, Bonhoeffer was moved to establish an underground seminary to train students who would be genuine Christians, rather than Nazis. Soon thereafter, his authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was revoked and he was denounced as a “pacifist and enemy of the state,” both of which he was. In 1937 he published The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the “cheap grace” of the majority of German Christians in favor of the “costly grace” that linked Christian belief to social courage. The Gestapo found his seminary and closed it down.

  In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. More than a year later, the Gestapo uncovered documents that linked him to a high-level conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which Bonhoeffer had indeed taken part in, casting aside all Lutheran qualms about obeying the prince. He was condemned to be hanged and was marched naked to his execution at the Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before two divisions of the United States Infantry would liberate the camp. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution testified that he was “deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed.… I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

  Another lovable Christian was Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, a man from the other side of the Alps, but one who had also lived most uncomfortably under a fascist dictatorship. A historian rather than a theologian, and for long a faithful servant in the papal diplomatic service, Angelo, though no mouse, had seldom been noted for renegade opinions that clashed with the papal party line of the moment. He was full of such opinions, but these had all been couched in such diplomatic language that virtually everyone had missed them.

  At Pentecost 1944, for instance, he had spoken to his congregation in the tiny Catholic cathedral of Istanbul—to which he was then the Vatican’s ambassador (or apostolic delegate)—about the Holy Spirit and how necessary its presence is to humane life. Left to itself, said Angelo, the human race resembles “one of those iron-age villages, in which every house was an impenetrable fortress, and people lived among their f
ortifications.” It was, said he, so easy to stay within one’s group, especially for Catholics, cutting ourselves off from “our brothers, who are Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, believers in other religions, or non-believers.” But, he added, “I have to tell you that in the light of the Gospel and Catholic principle, this logic of division makes no sense. Jesus came to break down barriers; he died to proclaim universal brotherhood; the central point of his teaching is charity—that is, the love that binds all human beings to him as the elder brother and binds us all with him to the Father.” Angelo said that he hoped for “an explosion of charity,” in which the word “Catholic” would no longer carry any exclusive connotation but would signify universal unity.

  In late October 1958, Angelo, already in his late seventies, was elected pope, expected to play his part in a quiet, interim pontificate between that of Pius XII, a know-it-all control freak, and whoever (and whatever) might come next. The conclave cardinals who elected Angelo wanted less excitement. It was not to be. As John XXIII, Angelo called a council of the universal church for the purpose of “updating.” He laid out very few specifics, except that his council was to condemn no one. Rather, he said, he wanted to open the windows and let in some fresh air. Oh, and he wanted to invite representatives of all Christian churches and communities, Orthodox, Protestant, everyone.

  It took the assembled bishops about a year to realize that the new pope was not about to tell them what to do (or think). He actually meant for it to be their council; they were to decide. When he spoke to the non-Catholic Christian observers at the council, he told them that he “felt comforted by their presence” and reassured them that he didn’t “like to claim any special inspiration. I hold to the sound doctrine; everything comes from God.” So much for the late, embarrassing doctrine of papal infallibility. I even believe John wanted these observers to be upgraded to voting members of the council but was waiting for the council fathers to issue that invitation, which never came.