PROSPECT OF DELIVERANCE
(THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION)
THE intellectual and social movement which was to dispel the darkness of
the
[72] Middle Ages and prepare the way for those who would ultimately
deliver reason from her prison, began in Italy in the thirteenth
century. The misty veil woven of credulity and infantile naïveté which
had hung over men’s souls and protected them from understanding either
themselves or their relation to the world began to lift. The individual
began to feel his separate individuality, to be conscious of his own
value as a person apart from his race or country (as in the later ages
of Greece and Rome); and the world around him began to emerge from the
mists of mediaeval dreams. The change was due to the political and
social conditions of the little Italian States, of which some were
republics and others governed by tyrants.
To the human world, thus unveiling itself, the individual who sought to
make it serve his purposes required a guide; and the guide was found in
the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. Hence the whole
transformation, which presently extended from Italy to Northern Europe,
is known as the Renaissance, or rebirth of classical antiquity. But the
awakened interest in classical literature while it coloured the
character and stimulated the growth of the movement, supplying new
ideals and suggesting new points of view, was only the form in which the
change of spirit
[73] began to express itself in the fourteenth century. The change might
conceivably have taken some other shape. Its true name is Humanism.
At the time men hardly felt that they were passing into a new age of
civilization, nor did the culture of the Renaissance immediately produce
any open or general intellectual rebellion against orthodox beliefs. The
world was gradually assuming an aspect decidedly unfriendly to the
teaching of mediaeval orthodoxy; but there was no explosion of
hostility; it was not till the seventeenth century that war between
religion and authority was systematically waged. The humanists were not
hostile to theological authority or to the claims of religious dogma;
but they had discovered a purely human curiosity about this world and it
absorbed their interest. They idolized pagan literature which abounded
in poisonous germs; the secular side of education became all-important;
religion and theology were kept in a separate compartment. Some
speculative minds, which were sensitive to the contradiction, might seek
to reconcile the old religion with new ideas; but the general tendency
of thinkers in the Renaissance period was to keep the two worlds
distinct, and to practise outward conformity to the creed without any
real intellectual submission.
[74]
I may illustrate this double-facedness of the Renaissance by Montaigne
(second half of sixteenth century). His Essays make for rationalism, but
contain frequent professions of orthodox Catholicism, in which he was
perfectly sincere. There is no attempt to reconcile the two points of
view; in fact, he takes the sceptical position that there is no bridge
between reason and religion. The human intellect is incapable in the
domain of theology, and religion must be placed aloft, out of reach and
beyond the interference of reason; to be humbly accepted. But while he
humbly accepted it, on sceptical grounds which would have induced him to
accept Mohammadanism if he had been born in Cairo, his soul was not in
its dominion. It was the philosophers and wise men of antiquity, Cicero,
and Seneca, and Plutarch, who moulded and possessed his mind. It is to
them, and not to the consolations of Christianity, that he turns when he
discusses the problem of death. The religious wars in France which he
witnessed and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) were
calculated to confirm him in his scepticism. His attitude to persecution
is expressed in the remark that “it is setting a high value on one’s
opinions to roast men on account of them.”
The logical results of Montaigne’s scepticism
[75] were made visible by his friend Charron, who published a book On
Wisdom in 1601. Here it is taught that true morality is not founded on
religion, and the author surveys the history of Christianity to show the
evils which it had produced. He says of immortality that it is the most
generally received doctrine, the most usefully believed, and the most
weakly established by human reasons; but he modified this and some other
passages in a second edition. A contemporary Jesuit placed Charron in
the catalogue of the most dangerous and wicked atheists. He was really a
deist; but in those days, and long after, no one scrupled to call a non-
Christian deist an atheist. His book would doubtless have been
suppressed and he would have suffered but for the support of King Henry
IV. It has a particular interest because it transports us directly from
the atmosphere of the Renaissance, represented by Montaigne, into the
new age of more or less aggressive rationalism.
What Humanism did in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries,
at first in Italy, then in other countries, was to create an
intellectual atmosphere in which the emancipation of reason could begin
and knowledge could resume its progress. The period saw the invention of
printing and
[76] the discovery of new parts of the globe, and these things were to
aid powerfully in the future defeat of authority.
But the triumph of freedom depended on other causes also; it was not to
be brought about by the intellect alone. The chief political facts of
the period were the decline of the power of the Pope in Europe, the
decay of the Holy Roman Empire, and the growth of strong monarchies, in
which worldly interests determined and dictated ecclesiastical policy,
and from which the modern State was to develop. The success of the
Reformation was made possible by these conditions. Its victory in North
Germany was due to the secular interest of the princes, who profited by
the confiscation of Church lands. In England there was no popular
movement; the change was carried through by the government for its own
purposes.
The principal cause of the Reformation was the general corruption of the
Church and the flagrancy of its oppression. For a long time the Papacy
had had no higher aim than to be a secular power exploiting its
spiritual authority for the purpose of promoting its worldly interests,
by which it was exclusively governed. All the European States based
their diplomacy on this assumption. Since the fourteenth century every
one acknowledged
[77] the need of reforming the Church, and reform had been promised, but
things went from bad to worse, and there was no resource but rebellion.
The rebellion led by Luther was the result not of a revolt of reason
against dogmas, but of widely spread anti-clerical feeling due to the
ecclesiastical methods of extorting money, particularly by the sale of
Indulgences, the most glaring abuse of the time. It was his study of the
theory of Papal Indulgences that led Luther on to his theological
heresies.
It is an elementary error, but one which is still shared by many people
who have read history superficially, that the Reformation established
religious liberty and the right of private judgment. What it did was to
bring about a new set of political and social conditions, under which
religious liberty could ultimately be secured, and, by virtue of its
inherent inconsistencies, to lead to results at which its leaders would
have shuddered. But nothing was further from the minds of the leading
Reformers than the toleration of doctrines differing from their own.
They replaced one authority by another. They set up the authority of the
Bible instead of that of the Church, but it was the Bible according to
Luther or the Bible according to Calvin. So far as the spirit of
intolerance went, there
[78] was nothing to choose between the new and the old Churches. The
religious wars were not for the cause of freedom, but for particular
sets of doctrines; and in France, if the Protestants had been
victorious, it is certain that they would not have given more liberal
terms to the Catholics than the Catholics gave to them.
Luther was quite opposed to liberty of conscience and worship, a
doctrine which was inconsistent with Scripture as he read it. He might
protest against coercion and condemn the burning of heretics, when he
was in fear that he and his party might be victims, but when he was safe
and in power, he asserted his real view that it was the duty of the
State to impose the true doctrine and exterminate heresy, which was an
abomination, that unlimited obedience to their prince in religious as in
other matters was the duty of subjects, and that the end of the State
was to defend the faith. He held that Anabaptists should be put to the
sword. With Protestants and Catholics alike the dogma of exclusive
salvation led to the same place.
Calvin’s fame for intolerance is blackest. He did not, like Luther,
advocate the absolute power of the civil ruler; he stood for the control
of the State by the Church—a form of government which is commonly called
theocracy;
[79] and he established a theocracy at Geneva. Here liberty was
completely crushed; false doctrines were put down by imprisonment,
exile, and death. The punishment of Servetus is the most famous exploit
of Calvin’s warfare against heresy. The Spaniard Servetus, who had
written against the dogma of the Trinity, was imprisoned at Lyons
(partly through the machinations of Calvin) and having escaped came
rashly to Geneva. He was tried for heresy and committed to the flames
(1553), though Geneva had no jurisdiction over him. Melanchthon, who
formulated the principles of persecution, praised this act as a
memorable example to posterity. Posterity however was one day to be
ashamed of that example. In 1903 the Calvinists of Geneva felt impelled
to erect an expiatory monument, in which Calvin “our great Reformer” is
excused as guilty of an error “which was that of his century.”
Thus the Reformers, like the Church from which they parted, cared
nothing for freedom, they only cared for “truth.” If the mediaeval ideal
was to purge the world of heretics, the object of the Protestant was to
exclude all dissidents from his own land. The people at large were to be
driven into a fold, to accept their faith at the command of their
sovran. This was the principle laid down in the
[80] religious peace which (1555) composed the struggle between the
Catholic Emperor and the Protestant German princes. It was recognized by
Catherine de’ Medici when she massacred the French Protestants and
signified to Queen Elizabeth that she might do likewise with English
Catholics.
Nor did the Protestant creeds represent enlightenment. The Reformation
on the Continent was as hostile to enlightenment as it was to liberty;
and science, if it seemed to contradict the Bible, has as little chance
with Luther as with the Pope. The Bible, interpreted by the Protestants
or the Roman Church, was equally fatal to witches. In Germany the
development of learning received a long set-back.
Yet the Reformation involuntarily helped the cause of liberty. The
result was contrary to the intentions of its leaders, was indirect, and
long delayed. In the first place, the great rent in Western
Christianity, substituting a number of theological authorities instead
of one—several gods, we may say, instead of one God—produced a weakening
of ecclesiastical authority in general. The religious tradition was
broken. In the second place, in the Protestant States, the supreme
ecclesiastical power was vested in the sovran; the sovran had other
interests besides those of
[81] the Church to consider; and political reasons would compel him
sooner or later to modify the principle of ecclesiastical intolerance.
Catholic States in the same way were forced to depart from the duty of
not suffering heretics. The religious wars in France ended in a limited
toleration of Protestants. The policy of Cardinal Richelieu, who
supported the Protestant cause in Germany, illustrates how secular
interests obstructed the cause of faith.
Again, the intellectual justification of the Protestant rebellion
against the Church had been the right of private judgment, that is, the
principle of religious liberty. But the Reformers had asserted it only
for themselves, and as soon as they had framed their own articles of
faith, they had practically repudiated it. This was the most glaring
inconsistency in the Protestant position; and the claim which they had
thrust aside could not be permanently suppressed. Once more, the
Protestant doctrines rested on an insecure foundation which no logic
could defend, and inevitably led from one untenable position to another.
If we are to believe on authority, why should we prefer the upstart
dictation of the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg or the English Thirty-
nine Articles to the venerable authority of the Church of Rome? If we
decide against Rome, we must do so by means
[82] of reason; but once we exercise reason in the matter, why should we
stop where Luther or Calvin or any of the other rebels stopped, unless
we assume that one of them was inspired? If we reject superstitions
which they rejected, there is nothing except their authority to prevent
us from rejecting all or some of the superstitions which they retained.
Moreover, their Bible-worship promoted results which they did not
foresee. [1] The inspired record on which the creeds depend became an
open book. Public attention was directed to it as never before, though
it cannot be said to have been universally read before the nineteenth
century. Study led to criticism, the difficulties of the dogma of
inspiration were appreciated, and the Bible was ultimately to be
submitted to a remorseless dissection which has altered at least the
quality of its authority in the eyes of intelligent believers. This
process of Biblical criticism has been conducted mainly in a Protestant
atmosphere and the new position in which the Bible was placed by the
Reformation must be held partly accountable. In these ways,
Protestantism was adapted to be a stepping-stone to rationalism, and
thus served the cause of freedom.
[83]
That cause however was powerfully and directly promoted by one sect of
Reformers, who in the eyes of all the others were blasphemers and of
whom most people never think when they talk of the Reformation. I mean
the Socinians. Of their far-reaching influence something will be said in
the next chapter.
Another result of the Reformation has still to be mentioned, its
renovating effect on the Roman Church, which had now to fight for its
existence. A new series of Popes who were in earnest about religion
began with Paul III (1534) and reorganized the Papacy and its resources
for a struggle of centuries. [2] The institution of the Jesuit order,
the establishment of the Inquisition at Rome, the Council of Trent, the
censorship of the Press (Index of Forbidden Books) were the expression
of the new spirit and the means to cope with the new situation. The
reformed Papacy was good fortune for believing children of the Church,
but what here concerns us is that one of its chief objects was to
repress freedom more effectually. Savonarola who preached right living
at Florence had been executed (1498) under Pope Alexander VI who was a
notorious profligate. If Savonarola had lived
[84] in the new era he might have been canonized, but Giordano Bruno was
burned.
Giordano Bruno had constructed a religious philosophy, based partly upon
Epicurus, from whom he took the theory of the infinity of the universe.
But Epicurean materialism was transformed into a pantheistic mysticism
by the doctrine that God is the soul of matter. Accepting the recent
discovery of Copernicus, which Catholics and Protestants alike rejected,
that the earth revolves round the sun, Bruno took the further step of
regarding the fixed stars as suns, each with its invisible satellites.
He sought to come to an understanding with the Bible, which (he held)
being intended for the vulgar had to accommodate itself to their
prejudices. Leaving Italy, because he was suspected of heresy, he lived
successively in Switzerland, France, England, and Germany, and in 1592,
induced by a false friend to return to Venice he was seized by order of
the Inquisition. Finally condemned in Rome, he was burned (1600) in the
Campo de’ Fiori, where a monument now stands in his honour, erected some
years ago, to the great chagrin of the Roman Church.
Much is made of the fate of Bruno because he is one of the world’s
famous men. No country has so illustrious a victim of that era to
commemorate as Italy, but in other lands
[85] blood just as innocent was shed for heterodox opinions. In France
there was rather more freedom than elsewhere under the relatively
tolerant government of Henry IV and of the Cardinals Richelieu and
Mazarin, till about 1660. But at Toulouse (1619) Lucilio Vanini, a
learned Italian who like Bruno wandered about Europe, was convicted as
an atheist and blasphemer; his tongue was torn out and he was burned.
Protestant England, under Elizabeth and James I, did not lag behind the
Roman Inquisition, but on account of the obscurity of the victims her
zeal for faith has been unduly forgotten. Yet, but for an accident, she
might have covered herself with the glory of having done to death a
heretic not less famous than Giordano Bruno. The poet Marlowe was
accused of atheism, but while the prosecution was hanging over him he
was killed in a sordid quarrel in a tavern (1593). Another dramatist
(Kyd) who was implicated in the charge was put to the torture. At the
same time Sir Walter Raleigh was prosecuted for unbelief but not
convicted. Others were not so fortunate. Three or four persons were
burned at Norwich in the reign of Elizabeth for unchristian doctrines,
among them Francis Kett who had been a Fellow of Corpus Christi,
Cambridge. Under James I, who
[86] interested himself personally in such matters, Bartholomew Legate
was charged with holding various pestilent opinions. The king summoned
him to his presence and asked him whether he did not pray daily to Jesus
Christ. Legate replied he had prayed to Christ in the days of his
ignorance, but not for the last seven years. “Away, base fellow,” said
James, spurning him with his foot, “it shall never be said that one
stayeth in my palace that hath never prayed to our Saviour for seven
years together.” Legate, having been imprisoned for some time in
Newgate, was declared an incorrigible heretic and burned at Smithfield
(1611). Just a month later, one Wightman was burned at Lichfield, by the
Bishop of Coventry, for heterodox doctrines. It is possible that public
opinion was shocked by these two burnings. They were the last cases in
England of death for unbelief. Puritan intolerance, indeed, passed an
ordinance in 1648, by which all who denied the Trinity, Christ’s
divinity, the inspiration of Scripture, or a future state, were liable
to death, and persons guilty of other heresies, to imprisonment. But
this did not lead to any executions.
The Renaissance age saw the first signs of the beginning of modern
science, but the mediaeval prejudices against the investigation
[87] of nature were not dissipated till the seventeenth century, and in
Italy they continued to a much later period. The history of modern
astronomy begins in 1543, with the publication of the work of Copernicus
revealing the truth about the motions of the earth. The appearance of
this work is important in the history of free thought, because it raised
a clear and definite issue between science and Scripture; and Osiander,
who edited it (Copernicus was dying), forseeing the outcry it would
raise, stated untruly in the preface that the earth’s motion was put
forward only as a hypothesis. The theory was denounced by Catholics and
Reformers, and it did not convince some men (e.g. Bacon) who were not
influenced by theological prejudice. The observations of the Italian
astronomer Galileo de’ Galilei demonstrated the Copernican theory beyond
question. His telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter, and his
observation of the spots in the sun confirmed the earth’s rotation. In
the pulpits of Florence, where he lived under the protection of the
Grand Duke, his sensational discoveries were condemned. “Men of Galilee,
why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” He was then denounced to the Holy
Office of the Inquisition by two Dominican monks. Learning that his
investigations were being considered
[88] at Rome, Galileo went thither, confident that he would be able to
convince the ecclesiastical authorities of the manifest truth of
Copernicanism. He did not realize what theology was capable of. In
February 1616 the Holy Office decided that the Copernican system was in
itself absurd, and, in respect of Scripture, heretical. Cardinal
Bellarmin, by the Pope’s direction, summoned Galileo and officially
admonished him to abandon his opinion and cease to teach it, otherwise
the Inquisition would proceed against him. Galileo promised to obey. The
book of Copernicus was placed on the Index. It has been remarked that
Galileo’s book on Solar Spots contains no mention of Scripture, and thus
the Holy Office, in its decree which related to that book, passed
judgment on a scientific, not a theological, question.
Galileo was silenced for a while, but it was impossible for him to be
mute for ever. Under a new Pope (Urban VIII) he looked for greater
liberty, and there were many in the Papal circle who were well disposed
to him. He hoped to avoid difficulties by the device of placing the
arguments for the old and the new theories side by side, and pretending
not to judge between them. He wrote a treatise on the two systems (the
Ptolemaic and the Copernican) in the form
[89] of Dialogues, of which the preface declares that the purpose is to
explain the pros and cons of the two views. But the spirit of the work
is Copernican. He received permission, quite definite as he thought,
from Father Riccardi (master of the Sacred Palace) to print it, and it
appeared in 1632. The Pope however disapproved of it, the book was
examined by a commission, and Galileo was summoned before the
Inquisition. He was old and ill, and the humiliations which he had to
endure are a painful story. He would probably have been more severely
treated, if one of the members of the tribunal had not been a man of
scientific training (Macolano, a Dominican), who was able to appreciate
his ability. Under examination, Galileo denied that he had upheld the
motion of the earth in the Dialogues, and asserted that he had shown the
reasons of Copernicus to be inconclusive. This defence was in accordance
with the statement in his preface, but contradicted his deepest
conviction. In struggling with such a tribunal, it was the only line
which a man who was not a hero could take. At a later session, he forced
himself ignominiously to confess that some of the arguments on the
Copernican side had been put too strongly and to declare himself ready
to confute the
[90] theory. In the final examination, he was threatened with torture.
He said that before the decree of 1616 he had held the truth of the
Copernican system to be arguable, but since then he had held the
Ptolemaic to be true. Next day, he publicly abjured the scientific truth
which he had demonstrated. He was allowed to retire to the country, on
condition that he saw no one. In the last months of his life he wrote to
a friend to this effect: “The falsity of the Copernican system cannot be
doubted, especially by us Catholics. It is refuted by the irrefragable
authority of Scripture. The conjectures of Copernicus and his disciples
were all disposed of by the one solid argument: God’s omnipotence can
operate in infinitely various ways. If something appears to our
observation to happen in one particular way, we must not curtail God’s
arm, and sustain a thing in which we may be deceived.” The irony is
evident.
Rome did not permit the truth about the solar system to be taught till
after the middle of the eighteenth century, and Galileo’s books remained
on the Index till 1835. The prohibition was fatal to the study of
natural science in Italy.
The Roman Index reminds us of the significance of the invention of
printing in the struggle for freedom of thought, by making
[91] it easy to propagate new ideas far and wide. Authority speedily
realized the danger, and took measures to place its yoke on the new
contrivance, which promised to be such a powerful ally of reason. Pope
Alexander VI inaugurated censorship of the Press by his Bull against
unlicensed printing (1501). In France King Henry II made printing
without official permission punishable by death. In Germany, censorship
was introduced in 1529. In England, under Elizabeth, books could not be
printed without a license, and printing presses were not allowed except
in London, Oxford, and Cambridge; the regulation of the Press was under
the authority of the Star Chamber. Nowhere did the Press become really
free till the nineteenth century.
While the Reformation and the renovated Roman Church meant a reaction
against the Renaissance, the vital changes which the Renaissance
signified—individualism, a new intellectual attitude to the world, the
cultivation of secular knowledge—were permanent and destined to lead,
amid the competing intolerances of Catholic and Protestant powers, to
the goal of liberty. We shall see how reason and the growth of knowledge
undermined the bases of theological authority. At each step in this
process, in which philosophical speculation, historical
[92] criticism, natural science have all taken part, the opposition
between reason and faith deepened; doubt, clear or vague, increased; and
secularism, derived from the Humanists, and always implying scepticism,
whether latent or conscious, substituted an interest in the fortunes of
the human race upon earth for the interest in a future world. And along
with this steady intellectual advance, toleration gained ground and
freedom won more champions. In the meantime the force of political
circumstances was compelling governments to mitigate their maintenance
of one religious creed by measures of relief to other Christian sects,
and the principle of exclusiveness was broken down for reasons of
worldly expediency. Religious liberty was an important step towards
complete freedom of opinion.
[1] The danger, however, was felt in Germany, and in the seventeenth
century the study of Scripture was not encouraged at German
Universities.
[2] See Barry, Papacy and Modern Times (in this series), 113 seq.