[Footnote 6: See, for instance, temp. Henri IV., _Sarpi"s Letters_, vol.
i. p. 233.]
Yet the cession of Saluzzo was really the first dawn of hope for Italy.
It determined the House of Savoy as an Italian dynasty, and brought for the first time into the sphere of purely Italian interests that province from which the future salvation of the nation was to come. From 1598 until 1870 the destinies of Italy were bound up with the advance of Savoy from a duchy to a kingdom, with its growth in wealth, military resources and political self-consciousness, and with its ultimate acceptance of the task, accomplished in our days, of freeing Italy from foreign tyranny and forming a single nation out of many component elements. Those component elements by their diversity had conferred l.u.s.ter on the race in the Middle Ages, by their jealousies had wrecked its independence in the Renaissance, and by their weakness had left it at the period of the Counter-Reformation a helpless prey to Papal and Spanish despotism.
The leveling down of the component elements of the Italian race beneath a common despotism, which began in the period I have chosen for this work, was necessary perhaps before Italy could take her place as a united nation gifted with const.i.tutional self-government and independence. Except, therefore, for the sufferings and the humiliations inflicted on her people; except for their servitude beneath the most degrading forms of ecclesiastical and temporal tyranny; except for the annihilation of their beautiful Renaissance culture; except for the depression of arts, learning, science, and literature, together with the enfeeblement of political energy and domestic morality; except for the loathsome domination of hypocrites and persecutors and informers; except for the Jesuitical encouragement of every secret vice and every servile superst.i.tion which might emasculate the race and render it subservient to authority;--except for these appalling evils, we have no right perhaps to deplore the settlement of Italy by Charles V. in 1530, or the course of subsequent events. For it is tolerably certain that some such leveling down as then commenced was needed to bring the const.i.tuent States of Italy into accord; and it is indubitable, as I have had occasion to point out, that the political force which eventually introduced Italy into the European system of federated nations, was determined in its character, if not created, then. None the less, the history of this period (1530-1600) in Italy is a prolonged, a solemn, an inexpressibly heart-rending tragedy.
It is the tragic history of the eldest and most beautiful, the n.o.blest and most venerable, the freest and most gifted of Europe"s daughters, delivered over to the devilry that issued from the most incompetent and arrogantly stupid of the European sisterhood, and to the cruelty, inspired by panic, of an impious theocracy. When we use these terms to designate the Papacy of the Counter-Reformation, it is not that we forget how many of those Popes were men of blameless private life and serious views for Catholic Christendom. When we use these terms to designate the Spanish race in the sixteenth century, it is not that we are ignorant of Spanish chivalry and colonizing enterprise, of Spanish romance, or of the fact that Spain produced great painters, great dramatists, and one great novelist in the brief period of her glory. We use them deliberately, however, in both cases; because the Papacy at this period committed itself to a policy of immoral, retrograde, and cowardly repression of the most generous of human impulses under the pressure of selfish terror; because the Spaniards abandoned themselves to a dark fiend of religious fanaticism; because they were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces; because they glutted their l.u.s.ts of avarice and hatred on industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life; because at the great epoch of Europe"s reawakening they chose the wrong side and adhered to it with fatal obstinacy. This obstinacy was disastrous to their neighbors and ruinous to themselves. During the short period of three reigns (between 1598 and 1700) they sank from the first to the third grade in Europe, and saw the scepter pa.s.sing in the New World from their hands to those of more normally const.i.tuted races. That the self-abandonment to sterilizing pa.s.sions and ign.o.ble persecutions which marked Spain out for decay in the second half of the sixteenth century, and rendered her the curse of her dependencies, can in part be ascribed to the enthusiasm aroused in previous generations by the heroic conflict with advancing Islam, is a thesis capable of demonstration. Yet none the less is it true that her action at that period was calamitous to herself and little short of destructive to Italy.
After the year 1530 seven Spanish devils entered Italy. These were the devil of the Inquisition, with stake and torture-room, and war declared against the will and soul and heart and intellect of man; the devil of Jesuitry, with its sham learning, shameless lying, and casuistical economy of sins; the devil of vice-royal rule, with its life-draining monopolies and gross incapacity for government; the devil of an insolent soldiery, quartered on the people, clamorous for pay, outrageous in their l.u.s.ts and violences; the devil of fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of national well-being at their sources; the devil of petty-princedom, wallowing in sloth and cruelty upon a pinchbeck throne; the devil of effeminate hidalgoism, ruinous in expenditure, mean and grasping, corrupt in private life, in public ostentatious, vain of t.i.tles, cringing to its masters, arrogant to its inferiors. In their train these brought with them seven other devils, their pernicious offspring: idleness, disease, brigandage, dest.i.tution, ignorance, superst.i.tion, hypocritically sanctioned vice. These fourteen devils were welcomed, entertained, and voluptuously lodged in all the fairest provinces of Italy. The Popes opened wide for them the gates of outraged and depopulated Rome. Dukes and marquises fell down and worshiped the golden image of the Spanish Belial-Moloch--that hideous idol whose face was blackened with soot from burning human flesh, and whose skirts were dabbled with the blood of thousands slain in wars of persecution. After a tranquil sojourn of some years in Italy, these devils had everywhere spread desolation and corruption. Broad regions, like the Patrimony of S. Peter and Calabria, were given over to marauding bandits; wide tracks of fertile country, like the Sienese Maremma, were abandoned to malaria; wolves prowled through empty villages round Milan; in every city the pestilence swept off its hundreds daily; manufactures, commerce, agriculture, the industries of town and rural district, ceased; the Courts swarmed with petty n.o.bles, who vaunted paltry t.i.tles; and resigned their wives to cicisbei and their sons to sloth: art and learning languished; there was not a man who ventured to speak out his thought or write the truth; and over the Dead Sea of social putrefaction floated the sickening oil of Jesuitical hypocrisy.
CHAPTER II.
THE PAPACY AND THE TRIDENTINE COUNCIL.
The Counter-Reformation--Its Intellectual and Moral Character--Causes of the Gradual Extinction of Renaissance Energy--Transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Revival--New Religious Spirit in Italy--Att.i.tude of Italians toward German Reformation--Oratory of Divine Love--Gasparo Contarini and the Moderate Reformers--New Religious Orders--Paul III.--His early History and Education--Political Att.i.tude between France and Spain--Creation of the Duchy of Parma--Imminence of a General Council--Review of previous Councils--Paul"s Uneasiness--Opens a Council at Trent in 1542--Protestants virtually excluded, and Catholic Dogmas confirmed in the first Sessions--Death of Paul in 1549--Julius III.--Paul IV.--Character and Ruling Pa.s.sions of G.P.
Caraffa--His Futile Opposition to Spain--Tyranny of his Nephews--Their Downfall--Paul Devotes himself to Church Reform and the Inquisition--Pius IV.--His Minister Morone--Diplomatic Temper of this Pope--His Management of the Council--a.s.sistance rendered by his nephew Carlo Borromeo--Alarming State of Northern Europe--The Council reopened at Trent in 1562--Subsequent History of the Council--It closes with a complete Papal Triumph in 1563--Place of Pius IV. in History--Pius V.--The Inquisitor Pope--Population of Rome--Social Corruption--Sale of Offices and Justice--Tridentine Reforms depress Wealth--Ascetic Purity of Manners becomes fashionable--- Piety--The Catholic Reaction generates the Counter-Reformation--Battle of Lepanto--Gregory XIII.--His Relatives--Policy of Enriching the Church at Expense of the Barons--Brigandage in States of the Church--Sixtus V.--His Stern Justice--Rigid Economy--Great Public Works--Taxation--The City of Rome a.s.sumes its present form--Nepotism in the Counter-Reformation Period--Various Estimates of the Wealth acc.u.mulated by Papal Nephews--Rise of Princely Roman Families.
It is not easy to define the intellectual and moral changes which pa.s.sed over Italy in the period of the Counter-Reformation[7]; it is still less easy to refer those changes to distinct causes. Yet some a.n.a.lysis tending toward such definition is demanded from a writer who has undertaken to treat of Italian culture and manners between the years 1530 and 1600.
In the last chapter I attempted to describe the depth of servitude to which the States of Italy were severally reduced at the end of the wars between France and Spain. The desolation of the country, the loss of national independence, and the dominance of an alien race, can be counted among the most important of those influences which produced the changes in question. Whatever opinions we may hold regarding the connection between political autonomy and mental vigor in a people, it can hardly be disputed that a sudden and universal extinction of liberty must be injurious to arts and studies that have grown up under free inst.i.tutions.
But there were other causes at work. Among these a prominent place should be given to an alteration in the intellectual interests of the Italians themselves. The original impulses of the Renaissance, in scholarship, painting, sculpture, architecture, and vernacular poetry, had been exhausted.
[Footnote 7: I may here state that I intend to use this term Counter-Reformation to denote the reform of the Catholic Church, which was stimulated by the German Reformation, and which, when the Council of Trent had fixed the dogmas and discipline of Latin Christianity, enabled the Papacy to a.s.sume a militant policy in Europe, whereby it regained a large portion of the provinces, that had previously lapsed to Lutheran and Calvinistic dissent.]
Humanism, after recovering the cla.s.sics and forming a new ideal of culture, was sinking into pedantry and academic erudition. Painting and sculpture, having culminated in the great work of Michelangelo, tended toward a kind of empty mannerism. Architecture settled down into the types fixed by Palladio and Barozzi. Poetry seemed to have reached its highest point of development in Ariosto. The main motives supplied to art by mediaeval traditions and humanistic enthusiasm were worked out.
Nor was this all. The Renaissance had created a critical spirit which penetrated every branch of art and letters. It was not possible to advance further on the old lines; yet painters, sculptors, architects, and poets of the rising generation had before their eyes the masterpieces of their predecessors, in their minds the precepts of the learned. All alike were rendered awkward and self-conscious by the sense of laboring at a disadvantage, and by the dread of academical censorship.
In truth, this critical spirit, which was the final product of the Renaissance in Italy, favored the development of new powers in the nation: it hampered workers in the elder spheres of art, literature, and scholarship; but it set thinkers upon the track of those investigations which we call scientific. I shall endeavor, in a future chapter, to show how the Italians were now upon the point of carrying the ardor of the Renaissance into fresh fields of physical discovery and speculation, when their evolution was suspended by the Catholic Reaction. But here it must suffice to observe that formalism had succeeded by the operation of natural influences to the vigor and inventiveness of the national genius in the main departments of literature and fine art.
If we study the development of other European races, we shall find that each of them in turn, at its due season, pa.s.sed through similar phases.
The mediaeval period ends in the efflorescence of a new delightful energy, which gives a Rabelais, a Shakspere, a Cervantes to the world.
The Renaissance riots itself away in Marinism, Gongorism, Euphuism, and the affectations of the Hotel Rambouillet. This age is succeeded by a colder, more critical, more formal age of obedience to fixed canons, during which scholarly efforts are made to purify style and impose laws on taste. The ensuing period of sense is also marked by profounder inquiries into nature and more exact a.n.a.lysis of mental operations. The correct school of poets, culminating in Dryden and Pope, holds sway in England; while Newton, Locke, and Bentley extend the sphere of science.
In France the age of Rabelais and Montaigne yields place to the age of Racine and Descartes. Germany was so distracted by religious wars, Spain was so down-trodden by the Inquisition, that they do not offer equally luminous examples.[8] It may be added that in all these nations the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries are marked by a similar revolt against formality and common sense, to which we give the name of the Romantic movement.
[Footnote 8: With regard to Germany, see Mr. T. S. Perry"s acute and philosophical study, ent.i.tled _From Opitz to Lessing_ (Boston).]
Quitting this sphere of speculation, we may next point out that the European system had undergone an incalculable process of transformation.
Powerful nationalities were in existence, who, having received their education from Italy, were now beginning to think and express thought with marked originality. The Italians stood no longer in a relation of uncontested intellectual superiority to these peoples, while they met them under decided disadvantages at all points of political efficiency.
The Mediterranean had ceased to be the high road of commercial enterprise and naval energy. Charles V."s famous device of the two columns, with its motto _Plus Ultra_, indicated that illimitable horizons had been opened, that an age had begun in which Spain, England and Holland should dispute the sovereignty of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Italy was left, with diminished forces of resistance, to bear the brunt of Turk and Arab depredations. The point of gravity in the civilized world had shifted. The Occidental nations looked no longer toward the South of Europe.
While these various causes were in operation, Catholic Christianity showed signs of re-wakening. The Reformation called forth a new and sincere spirit in the Latin Church; new antagonisms were evoked, and new efforts after self-preservation had to be made by the Papal hierarchy. The center of the world-wide movement which is termed the Counter-Reformation was naturally Rome. Events had brought the Holy See once more into a position of prominence. It was more powerful as an Italian State now, through the support of Spain and the extinction of national independence, than at any previous period of history. In Catholic Christendom its prestige was immensely augmented by the Council of Trent. At the same epoch, the foreigners who dominated Italy, threw themselves with the enthusiasm of fanaticism into this Revival. Spain furnished Rome with the militia of the Jesuits and with the engines of the Inquisition. The Papacy was thus able to secure successes in Italy which were elsewhere only partially achieved. It followed that the moral, social, political and intellectual activities of the Italians at this period were controlled and colored by influences hostile to the earlier Renaissance. Italy underwent a metamorphosis, prescribed by the Papacy and enforced by Spanish rule. In the process of this transformation the people submitted to rigid ecclesiastical discipline, and adopted, without a.s.similating, the customs of a foreign troop of despots.
At first sight we may wonder that the race which had shone with such incomparable l.u.s.ter from Dante to Ariosto, and which had done so much to create modern culture for Europe, should so quietly have accepted a retrogressive revolution. Yet, when we look closer, this is not surprising. The Italians were fatigued with creation, bewildered by the complexity of their discoveries, uncertain as to the immediate course before them. The Renaissance had been mainly the work of a select few.
It had transformed society without permeating the ma.s.ses of the people.
Was it strange that the majority should reflect that, after all, the old ways are the best? This led them to approve the Catholic Revival. Was it strange that, after long distracting aimless wars, they should hail peace at any price? This lent popular sanction to the Spanish hegemony, in spite of its obvious drawbacks.
These may be reckoned the main conditions which gave a peculiar but not easily definable complexion of languor, melancholy, and dwindling vitality to nearly every manifestation of Italian genius in the second half of the sixteenth century, and which well nigh sterilized that genius during the two succeeding centuries. In common with the rest of Europe, and in consequence of an inevitable alteration of their mental bias, they had lost the blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance. In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible. The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste. The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, lumbering dulness, somnolent and stagnant acquiescence in accepted formulae. At first the best minds of the nation fret and rebel, and meet with the dungeon or the stake as the reward of contumacy. In the end everybody seems to be indifferent, satisfied with vacuity, enamored of insipidity. The brightest episode in this dreary period is the emergence of modern music with incomparable sweetness and lucidity.
It must not be supposed that the change which I have adumbrated, pa.s.sed rapidly over the Italian spirit. When Paul III. succeeded Clement on the Papal throne in 1534, some of the giants of the Renaissance still survived, and much of their great work was yet to be accomplished.
Michelangelo had neither painted the Last Judgment nor planned the cupola which crowns S. Peter"s. Cellini had not cast his Perseus for the Loggia de"Lanzi, nor had Palladio raised San Giorgio from the sea at Venice. Pietro Aretino still swaggered in lordly insolence; and though Machiavelli was dead, the "silver histories" of Guicciardini remained to be written. Bandello, Giraldi and Il Lasca had not published their Novelle, nor had Cecchi given the last touch to Florentine comedy. It was chiefly at Venice, which preserved the ancient forms of her oligarchical independence, that the grand style of the Renaissance continued to flourish. t.i.tian was in his prime; the stars of Tintoretto and Veronese had scarcely risen above the horizon. Sansovino was still producing masterpieces of picturesque beauty in architecture.
In order to understand the transition of Italy from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation manner, it will be well to concentrate attention on the history of the Papacy during the eight reigns of Paul III., Julius III., Paul IV., Pius IV., Pius V., Gregory XIII., Sixtus V., and Clement VIII.[9] In the first of these reigns we hardly notice that the Renaissance has pa.s.sed away. In the last we are aware of a completely altered Italy. And we perceive that this alteration has been chiefly due to the ecclesiastical policy which brought the Council of Trent to a successful issue in the reign of Pius IV.
[Footnote 9: These eight reigns cover a s.p.a.ce of time from 1534 to 1605.]
Before engaging in this review of Papal history, I must give some brief account of the more serious religious spirit which had been developed within the Italian Church; since the determination of this spirit toward rigid Catholicism in the second half of the sixteenth century decided the character of Italian manners and culture. Protestantism in the strict sense of the term took but little hold upon Italian society. It is true that the minds of some philosophical students were deeply stirred by the audacious discussion of theological principles in Germany. Such men had been rendered receptive of new impressions by the Platonizing speculations of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, as well as by the criticism of the Bible in its original languages which formed a subordinate branch of humanistic education. They had, furthermore, been powerfully affected by the tribulations of Rome at the time of Bourbon"s occupation, and had grown to regard these as a divine chastis.e.m.e.nt inflicted on the Church for its corruption and unG.o.dliness. Lutheranism so far influenced their opinions that they became convinced of the necessity of a return to the simpler elements of Christianity in creed and conduct. They considered a thorough-going reform of the hierarchy and of all Catholic inst.i.tutions to be indispensable. They leant, moreover, with partiality to some of the essential tenets of the Reformation, notably to the doctrines of justification by faith and salvation by the merits of Christ, and also to the principle that Scripture is the sole authority in matters of belief and discipline.
Thus both the Cardinals Morone and Contarini, the poet Flaminio, and the n.o.bles of the Colonna family in Naples who imbibed the teaching of Valdes, fell under the suspicion of heterodoxy on these points. But it was characteristic of the members of this school that they had no will to withhold allegiance from the Pope as chief of Christendom. They shrank with horror from the thought of encouraging a schism or of severing themselves from the communion of Catholics. The essential difference between Italian and Teutonic thinkers on such subjects at this epoch seems to have been this: Italians could not cease to be Catholics without at the same time ceasing to be Christians. They could not accommodate their faith to any of the compromises suggested by the Reformation. Even when they left their country in a spirit of rebellion, they felt ill at ease both with Lutherans and Calvinists. Like Bernardino Ochino and the Anti-Trinitarians of the Socinian sect, they wandered restlessly through Europe, incapable of settling down in communion with any one of the established forms of Protestantism. Calvin at Geneva inst.i.tuted a real crusade against Italian thinkers, who differed from his views. He drove Valentino Gentile to death on the scaffold; and expelled Gribaldi, Simone, Biandrata, Alciati, Negro. Most of these men found refuge in Poland, Transylvania, even Turkey.[10]
There were bold speculators in Italy enough, who had practically abandoned the Catholic faith. But the majority of these did not think it worth their while to make an open rupture with the Church. Theological hair-splitting reminded them only of the mediaeval scholasticism from which they had been emanc.i.p.ated by cla.s.sical culture. They were less interested in questions touching the salvation of the individual or the exact nature of the sacraments, than in metaphysical problems suggested by the study of antique philosophers, or new theories of the material universe.
[Footnote 10: See Berti"s _Vita di G. Bruno_, pp. 105-108.]
The indifference of these men in religion rendered it easy for them to conform in all external points to custom. Their fundamental axiom was that a scientific thinker could hold one set of opinions as a philosopher, and another set as a Christian. Their motto was the celebrated _Foris ut moris, intus ut libet_.[11] Nor were ecclesiastical authorities dissatisfied with this att.i.tude during the ascendancy of humanistic culture. It was, indeed, the att.i.tude of Popes like Leo, Cardinals like Bembo. And it only revealed its essential weakness when the tide of general opinion, under the blast of Teutonic revolutionary ideas, turned violently in favor of formal orthodoxy. Then indeed it became dangerous to adopt the position of a Pomponazzo.
[Footnote 11: This maxim is ascribed to the materialistic philosopher Cremonini.]
The mental att.i.tude of such men is so well ill.u.s.trated by a letter written by Celio Calcagnini to Peregrino Morato, that I shall not hesitate to transcribe it here. It seems that Morato had sent his correspondent some treatise on the theological questions then in dispute; and Calcagnini replies:
"I have read the book relating to the controversies so much agitated at present. I have thought on its contents, and weighed them in the balance of reason. I find in it nothing which may not be approved and defended, but some things which, as mysteries, it is safer to suppress and conceal than to bring before the common people, inasmuch as they pertained to the primitive and infant state of the Church. Now, when the decrees of the fathers and long usage have introduced other modes, what necessity is there for reviving antiquated practices which have long fallen into desuetude, especially as neither piety nor the salvation of the soul is concerned with them? Let us, then, I pray you, allow these things to rest. Not that I disapprove of their being embraced by scholars and lovers of antiquity; but I would not have them communicated to the common people and those who are fond of innovations, lest they give occasion to strife and sedition. There are unlearned and unqualified persons who having, after long ignorance, read or heard certain new opinions respecting baptism, the marriage of the clergy, ordination, the distinction of days and food, and public penitence, instantly conceive that these things are to be stiffly maintained and observed. Wherefore, in my opinion, the discussion of these points ought to be confined to the initiated, that so the seamless coat of our Lord may not be rent and torn.... Seeing it is dangerous to treat such things before the mult.i.tude and in public discourses, I must deem it safest to "speak with the many and think with the few," and to keep in mind the advice of Paul, "Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself before G.o.d.""[12]
[Footnote 12: _C. Calcagnini Opera_, p. 195. I am indebted for the above version to McCrie"s _Reformation in Italy_, p. 183.]
The new religious spirit which I have attempted to characterize as tinctured by Protestant opinions but disinclined for severance from Rome, manifested itself about the same time in several groups. One of them was at Rome, where a society named the Oratory of Divine Love, including from fifty to sixty members, began to meet as early as the reign of Leo X. in the Trastevere. This pious a.s.sociation included men of very various kinds. Sadoleto, Giberto, and Contarini were here in close intimacy with Gaetano di Thiene, the sainted founder of the Theatines, and with his friend Caraffa, the founder of the Roman Inquisition. Venice was the center of another group, among whom may be mentioned Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, Luigi Priuli, and Antonio Bruccioli, the translator of the Bible from the original tongues into Italian. The poet Marcantonio Flaminio became a member of both societies; and was furthermore the personal friend of the Genoese Cardinals Sauli and Fregoso, whom we have a right to count among thinkers of the same cla.s.s. Flaminio, though he died in the Catholic communion, was so far suspected of heresy that his works were placed upon the Index of 1559. In Naples Juan Valdes made himself the leader of a similar set of men. His views, embodied in the work of a disciple, and revised by Marcantonio Flaminio, _On the Benefits of Christ"s Death_, revealed strong Lutheran tendencies, which at a later period would certainly have condemned him to perpetual imprisonment or exile. This book had a wide circulation in Italy, and was influential in directing the minds of thoughtful Christians to the problems of Justification. It was ascribed to Aonio Paleario, who suffered martyrdom at Rome for maintaining doctrines similar to those of Valdes.[13] Round him gathered several members of the great Colonna family, notably Vespasiano, Duke of Palliano, and his wife, the star of Italian beauty, Giulia Gonzaga.
Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, imbibed the new doctrines in the same circle; and so did Bernardino Ochino. Modena could boast another a.s.sociation, which met in the house of Grillenzone; while Ferrara became the headquarters of a still more p.r.o.nounced reforming party under the patronage of the d.u.c.h.ess, Renee of France, daughter of Louis XII. These various societies and coteries were bound together by ties of friendship and literary correspondence, and were indirectly connected with less fortunate reforming theologians; with Aonio Paleario, Bernardino Ochino, Antonio dei Pagliaricci, Carnesecchi, and others, whose tragic history will form a part of my chapter on the Inquisition.
[Footnote 13: Though as many as 40,000 copies were published, this book was so successfully stamped out that it seemed to be irrecoverably lost.
The library of St. John"s College at Cambridge, however, contains two Italian copies and one French copy. That of Laibach possesses an Italian and a Croat version. Cantu, _Gli Eretici_, vol. i. p. 360.]
It does not fall within the province of this chapter to write an account of what has, not very appropriately, been called the Reformation in Italy. My purpose in the present book is, not to follow the fortunes of Protestantism, but to trace the sequel of the Renaissance, the merging of its impulse in new phases of European development. I shall therefore content myself with pointing out that at the opening of Paul III."s reign, there was widely diffused throughout the chief Italian cities a novel spirit of religious earnestness and enthusiasm, which as yet had taken no determinate direction. This spirit burned most highly in Gasparo Contarini, who in 1541 was commissioned by the Pope to attend a conference at Rechensburg for the discussion of terms of reconciliation with the Lutherans. He succeeded in drawing up satisfactory articles on the main theological points regarding human nature, original sin, redemption and justification. These were accepted by the Protestant theologians at Rechensburg and might possibly have been ratified in Rome, had not the Congress been broken up by Contarini"s total failure to accommodate differences touching the Pope"s supremacy and the conciliar principle.[14] He made concessions to the Reformers, which roused the fury of the Roman Curia. At the same time political intrigues were set on foot in France and Germany to avert a reconciliation which would have immeasurably strengthened the Emperor"s position. The moderate sections of both parties, Lutheran and Catholic, failed at Rechensburg. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should fail; for the breach between the Roman Church and the Reformation was not of a nature to be healed over at this date. Principles were involved which could not now be harmonized, and both parties in the dispute were on the point of developing their own forces with fresh internal vigor.
[Footnote 14: It should be observed, however, that Luther rejected the article on justification, and that Caraffa in Rome used his influence to prevent its acceptance by Paul III.]
The Italians who desired reform of the Church were now thrown back upon the attempt to secure this object within the bosom of Catholicism. At the request of Paul III. they presented a memorial on ecclesiastical abuses, which was signed by Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, Giberto, Cortese and Aleander. These Cardinals did not spare plain speech upon the burning problem of Papal misgovernment.
Meanwhile, the new spirit began to manifest itself in the foundation of orders and inst.i.tutions tending to purification of Church discipline.
The most notable of these was the order of Theatines established by Thiene and Caraffa. Its object was to improve the secular priesthood, with a view to which end seminaries were opened for the education of priests, who took monastic vows and devoted themselves to special observance of their clerical duties, as preachers, administrators of the sacraments, visitors of the poor and sick.
A Venetian, Girolamo Miani, at the same period founded a congregation, called the Somascan, for the education of the dest.i.tute and orphaned, and for the reception of the sick and infirm into hospitals. The terrible state in which Lombardy had been left by war rendered this inst.i.tution highly valuable. Of a similar type was the order of the Barnabites, who were first incorporated at Milan, charged with the performance of acts of mercy, education, preaching, and other forms of Christian ministration. It may be finally added that the Camaldolese and Franciscan orders had been in part reformed by a spontaneous movement within their bodies.
If we compare the spirit indicated by these efforts in the first half of the sixteenth century with that of the earlier Renaissance, it will be evident that the Italians were ready for religious change. They sink, however, into insignificance beside two Spanish inst.i.tutions which about the same period added their weight and influence to the Catholic revival. I mean, of course, the Inquisition and the Jesuit order. Paul III. empowered Caraffa in 1542 to re-establish the Inquisition in Rome upon a new basis resembling that of the Spanish Holy Office. The same Pope sanctioned and confirmed the Company of Jesus between the years 1540 and 1543. The establishment of the Inquisition gave vast disciplinary powers to the Church at the moment when the Council of Trent fixed her dogmas and proclaimed the absolute authority of the Popes. At the same time the Jesuits, devoted by their founder in blind obedience--_perinde ac cadaver_--to the service of the Papacy, penetrated Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the transatlantic colonies.