the Christian religion and patriotism had been felt to be one and the
same thing. The seven hundred years' war, which the Christians of Spain
had waged with the Moors, had given strength and tenacity to their
religious sentiments, and their experience as Christians in daily
battle with an enemy of alien race and alien faith, left to themselves
in their Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Europe, had made them cling
all the more closely to that visible solidarity of all Christian people
which found expression in the mediæval conception of the mediæval
Catholic Church. Spain had given birth to the great missionary monastic
order of the Dominicans,--the leaders of an intellectual crusade
against the penetrating influence of a Moslem pantheism (Averroism),
--and to the great repressive agency of the Inquisition in its sternest
and most savage form. It was Spain that was to furnish the
Counter-Reformation, with its most devoted leader, Ignatius Loyola, and
with its strongest body of combatants, the Society of Jesus which he
founded.
It need scarcely be wondered at that it was in Spain that we find the
earliest systematic attempts made to save the Church from the blindness
and perversity of its rulers by the interposition of the secular
authority to combat the deteriorating influence of the Roman Curia upon
the local Church, and to restore discipline among the clergy. The Cortes
of the various small kingdoms of the Spanish Peninsula repeatedly
interfered to limit the overgrowth of clerical privileges, to insist on
the submission of the clergy to the common law of the land, and to
prevent the too great preponderance of clerical influence in secular
administration. The ordinances of their Kings were used, time after
time, to counteract the influence of harmful papal Bulls, and to prevent
the interference of Italian ecclesiastics in the affairs of the Spanish
Church. In the end of the fifteenth century the Spanish Bishops had been
reduced to a state of dependence on the Crown; all exercise of
ecclesiastical authority was carefully watched; the extent of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction was specifically limited, and clerical
courts were made to feel their dependence on the secular tribunals. The
Crown wrung from the Papacy the right to see that piety and a zeal for
religion were to be indispensable qualifications for clerical promotion.
All this regulative zeal was preserved from being simply the attempts
of politicians to control a rival power by certain fundamental elements
in the national religious character, which expressed themselves in
rulers as well as in the mass of their subjects. In Spain, more than in
any other land, asceticism and mystical raptures were recognised to be
the truest expression of genuine religious sentiment. Kings and
commonalty alike shared in the firm belief that a real imitation of
Christ meant to follow in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows, who
wandered about not knowing where to lay His head, and who was enabled to
endure what was given Him to do and to suffer by continuous and rapt
communion with the Unseen.
The ecclesiastical Reformer of Spain had all these elements to work
upon, and they made his task comparatively easy.
§ 2. _Reformation under Ximenes._
The consolidation of the Peninsula under Ferdinand and Isabella
suggested a thorough reorganisation of the Spanish Church. The Crown
extorted from the Papacy extraordinary powers to deal with the secular
clergy and with the monasteries. The great Queen was determined to purge
the Church of her realm of all that she deemed to be evil. She called to
her councils three famous Churchmen in whom she had thorough
confidence--the great Spanish Cardinal, Mendoza, her confessor, Hernando
de Talavera, and Francesco Ximenes. It was Ximenes who sketched the plan
and who carried through the reformation.
Francesco Ximenes de Cisneros, as he is called, had been a Franciscan
monk devoted to the ideals of his order. He belonged to a poor family,
and had somehow or other attracted the attention of Cardinal Mendoza, at
whose instigation the Queen had made him her father-confessor (1492).
She insisted on his accepting the dignity of Archbishop of Toledo
(1495), and had selected him to carry out her plans for the organisation
and purification of the Spanish Church. After his elevation to the
arch-episcopal chair he gave the example of what he believed to be the
true clerical life by following in the most literal way the maxims of
St. Francis about self-denial, devotion, and ascetic life. He made these
the ideal for the Spanish clergy; they followed where he led.
The Concordat of 1482 gave the Spanish Crown the right of "visitation"
(held to involve the power to dismiss from office) and of nomination to
benefices. Ximenes used these powers to the full. He "visited" the
monasteries personally, and received full reports about the condition of
the convents. He re-established in all of them monastic discipline of
the strictest kind. The secular clergy were put to like proof. The
secular power was invoked to sweep all opponents to reform from his
path. His Queen protected him when the vacillations of the papal policy
threatened to hinder his work. In the end, the Church in Spain secured a
devoted clergy whose personal life was free from the reproaches justly
levelled at the higher clergy of other lands.
Ximenes, having purified the morals of the Spanish clergy, next set
himself to overcome their ignorance and lack of culture. In every
Chapter within Castile and Aragon, two prebends were set apart for
scholars, one of them for a student in Canon Law, and the other for an
expert theologian. A special "visitation" of the clergy removed from
their places all utterly ignorant persons. New schools of theology were
instituted. In addition to the mediæval Universities of Salamanca and
Valladolid, Ximenes founded one in Alcala, another in Seville, a third
at Toledo. Alcala and Valladolid were the principal theological schools,
and there, in addition to the older studies of Dogmatic Theology and
Ethics, courses of lectures wore given in Biblical Exegesis. The
theology taught was that of Thomas Aquinas, to the exclusion of the
later developments of Scholastic under John Duns Scotus and William of
Occam. The Augustinian elements in Thomas were specially dwelt upon; and
soon there arose a school of theologians who were called the New
Thomists, who became very powerful, and were later the leading opponents
of the Jesuit teachers. There was also an attempt to make use of the New
Learning in the interest of the old theology. Ximenes collected at
Alcala the band of scholars who under his superintendence prepared the
celebrated Complutensian Polyglot.
The labours of Erasmus were sympathised with by the leaders of this
Spanish movement. The Princes of the Church delighted to call themselves
his friends. They prevented the Spanish monks from attacking him even
when he struck hardest at the follies of the monastic life. He was
esteemed at Court. The most prominent statesmen who surrounded Charles,
the young Prince of the Netherlands, the King of Spain, called
themselves Erasmians. Erasmus, if we are to believe what he wrote to
them,--which is scarcely possible,--declared that the work in Spain
under Ximenes followed the best type of a reformation in the Church.
But there was another and terrible side to this Spanish purification of
the Church and of the clergy. The Inquisition had been reorganised, and
every opinion and practice strange to the mediæval Church was
relentlessly crushed out of existence. This stern repression was a very
real part of the Spanish idea of a reformation.
The Spanish policy for the renovation of the Church was not a
reformation in the sense of providing room for anything new in the
religious experience. Its sole aim was to requicken religious life
within the limits which had been laid down during the Middle Ages. The
hierarchy was to remain, the mediæval conceptions of priesthood and
sacraments; the Pope was to continue to be the acknowledged and revered
Head of the Church; "the sacred ceremonies, decrees, ordinances, and
sacred usages"[650] were to be left untouched; the dogmatic theology of
the mediæval Church was to remain in all essentials the same as before.
The only novelty, the only sign of appreciation of new ideas which were
in the air, was that the papal interference in the affairs of national
Churches was greatly limited, and that at a time when the Papacy had
become so thoroughly secularised as to forget its real duties as a
spiritual authority. The sole recognition of the new era, with its new
modes of thought, was the proposal that the secular authorities of the
countries of Europe should undertake duties which the Papacy was plainly
neglecting. Perhaps it might be added that the slight homage paid to the
New Learning, the appreciation of the need of an exact text of the
original Scriptures, its guarded approval of the laity's acquaintance
with Holy Writ, introduced something of the new spirit; but these things
did not really imply anything at variance with what a devoted adherent
of the mediæval Church might readily acquiesce in.
§ 3. _The Spaniards and Luther._
Devout Spaniards were able to appreciate much in Luther's earlier work.
They could sympathise with his attack on Indulgences, provided they did
not inquire too closely into the principles implied in the
_Theses_--principles which Luther himself scarcely recognised till the
Leipzig Disputation. Their hearts responded to the intense religious
earnestness and high moral tone of his earlier writings. They could
welcome his appearance, even when they could not wholly agree with all
that he said, in the hope that his utterances would create an impetus
towards the _kind_ of reformation they desired to see. The reformation
of the Spanish Church under Cardinal Ximenes enables us to understand
both the almost universal welcome which greeted Luther's earlier
appearances and the opposition which he afterwards encountered from many
of his earlier supporters. Some light is also cast on that opposition
when we remember that the Emperor Charles himself fully accepted the
principles underlying the Spanish Reformation, and that they had been
instilled into his youthful mind by his revered tutor whom he managed to
seat in the chair of St. Peter--Adrian VI., whose short-lived
pontificate was an attempt to force the Spanish Reformation on the whole
of the Western Obedience.
If it be possible to accept the statements made by Glapion, the
Emperor's confessor, to Dr. Brück, the Saxon Chancellor in the days
before Luther's appearance at Worms, as a truthful account of the
disposition and intentions of Charles V., it may be said that an attempt
was made to see whether Luther himself might be made to act as a means
of forcing the Spanish Reformation on the whole German Church. Glapion
professed to speak for the Emperor as well as for himself. Luther's
earlier writings, he said, had given him great pleasure; he believed him
to be a "plant of renown," able to produce splendid fruit for the
Church. But the book on the _Babylonian Captivity_ had shocked him; he
did not believe it to be Luther's; it was not in his usual style; if
Luther had written it, it must have been because he was momentarily
indignant at the papal Bull, and as it was anonymous, it could easily be
repudiated; or if not repudiated, it might be explained, and its
sentences shown to be capable of a catholic interpretation. If this were
done, and if Luther withdrew his violent writings against the Pope,
there was no reason why an amicable arrangement should not be come to.
The papal Bull could easily be got over, it could be withdrawn on the
ground that Luther had never had a fair trial. It was a mistake to
suppose that the Emperor was not keenly alive to the need for a
Reformation of the Church; there were limits to his devotion to the
Pope; the Emperor believed that he would deserve the wrath of God if he
did not try to amend the deplorable condition of the Church of Christ.
Such was Glapion's statement. It is a question how far he was sincere,
and if so, whether he really did express what was in the mind of the
Emperor. Frederick of Saxony did not believe either in his sincerity or
in his representation of the Emperor's real opinions; and Luther himself
refused all private conference with Glapion. Yet it is almost certain
that Glapion did express what many an earnest Spanish ecclesiastic
thoroughly believed. We have an interesting confirmation of this in the
conversation which Konrad Pellikan had with Francisco de los Angeles,
the Provincial of the Spanish Franciscans at Basel. The Franciscan
expressed himself in almost the very same terms as Glapion.[651]
Three forces met at the Diet of Worms in 1521--the German movement for
Reform inspired by Luther, the Spanish Reformation represented by
Charles v., and the stolid inertia of the Roman Curia speaking by the
Nuncio Aleander. The first and the second could unite only if Luther
retraced his steps and stood where he did before the Leipzig
Disputation. If he refused, the inevitable result was that the Emperor
and the Curia would combine to crush him before preparing to measure
their strength against each other. The two different conceptions of
reform may be distinguished from each other by saying that the Spanish
conception sought to awaken the benumbed and formalist mediæval Church
to a new religious life, leaving unchanged its characteristics of a
sacerdotal ministry, an external visible unity under a hierarchy
culminating in the Papacy, and a body of doctrine guaranteed by the
decisions of Oecumenical Councils. The other wished to free the human
spirit from the fetters of merely ecclesiastical authority, and to
requicken the life of the Church through the spiritual priesthood of all
believers. The former sought the aid of the secular power to purge
national Churches and restore ecclesiastical discipline, but always
under a decorous air of submission to the Bishop of Rome, and with a
very real belief in the supremacy and infallibility of a General
Council. The latter was prepared to deny the authority of the Bishop of
Rome altogether, and to see the Church of the Middle Ages broken up into
territorial or National Churches, each of which, it was contended, was a
portion of the one Visible Catholic Church. But as separate tendencies
may be represented by a single contrast, it may be said that Charles
would have forgiven Luther much had the Reformer been able to
acknowledge the infallibility of a General Council. The dramatic wave of
the hand by which Charles ended the altercation between Official Eck and
Luther, when the latter insisted that General Councils had erred, and
that he could prove it, ended the dream that the movement in Germany
could be used to aid in the universal introduction of the Spanish
Reformation. If the ideas of reforming Spanish ecclesiastics and
statesmen were to requicken the whole mediæval Church, some other way of
forcing their acceptance had to be found.
§ 4. _Pope Adrian VI. and the Spanish Reformation._
The opportunity seemed to come when, owing to the rivalries of powerful
Cardinals and the steady pressure of Charles V. on the Conclave, Adrian
of Utrecht was elected Pope. The new Pontiff had a long reputation for
learning and piety. His courage had been manifested in his fearless
denunciation of prevailing clerical abuses, and in the way he had dealt
with difficult questions in mediæval theology. He had no sympathy with
the new curialist ideas of papal inerrancy and infallibility, nor with
the repeated assertions of Italian canonists that the Pope was superior
to all ecclesiastical law. He rather believed that such ideas were
responsible for the degradation of the Church, and that no amendment was
possible until the whole system of papal reservations, exemptions, and
other ways in which the Papacy had evaded the plain declarations of
Canon Law, was swept away. The public confidence in his piety,
integrity, and learning was so great that the Netherlands had entrusted
him with the religious education of their young Prince, and none of his
instructors so stamped themselves on the mind of Charles.
Adrian was a Dutch Ximenes. He had the same passionate desire for the
Reformation of the Church, and the same ideas of how such Reformation
could be brought about. He prized the ascetic life; he longed to see the
monastic orders and the secular clergy disciplined in the strictest way;
he had a profound admiration for Thomas Aquinas, and especially for that
side of the great Schoolman's teaching which represented the ideas of
St. Augustine. He so exactly reproduced in his own aspirations the
desires of the Spanish Reformers, that Cardinal Carvajal, who with the
grave enthusiasm of his nation was engaged in the quixotic task of
commending the Spanish Reformation to the authorities in Rome, desired
to take him there as an indispensable assistant. He was also in full
sympathy with the darker side of the Spanish Reformation. During his
sojourn in Spain he had become one of the heads of the Inquisition, and
was firmly opposed to any relaxation of the rigours of the Holy Office.
With Adrian in the chair of St. Peter, the Emperor and the leaders of
the Spanish Church might hope to see their type of a reformation adopted
to cure the ills under which the Church was suffering.
The new Pope did not lack sympathisers in Italy when he began his task
of cleansing the Augean stables without turning the torrent of
revolution through them. Cardinal Carvajal welcomed him in a speech
which expressed his own ideas if it displeased his colleagues in whose
name he was supposed to speak. A memorial drafted by Egidio, General of
the Augustinian Eremites, was presented to him, which practically
embodied the reforms the new Pope wished to see accomplished.[652] His
programme was as extensive as it was thorough. A large part of it may be
compared with the reforms sketched in Luther's _Address to the Nobility
of the German Nation_. He disapproved of the way in which _prebends_
were taken from foundations within national Churches to swell the
incomes of Roman Cardinals. He disliked the whole system of papal
_reservations_, _indults,_[653] _exemptions_, _expectances_, which under
the fostering care of Pope John XXII. had converted the Curia into a
great machine for raking in money from every corner of western
Europe.[654] He disapproved of the system of encouraging complainants to
pass over the episcopal courts of their own lands and bring their cases
at once before the papal court. But every one of these reforms would cut
off a source of revenue. It meant that hundreds of hungry Italian
Humanists would lose their pensions, and that as many pens would lampoon
the Holy Father who was intent on taking bread from his children. It
meant that hundreds of ecclesiastical lawyers who had invested their
savings in purchasing places in the Curia, would find themselves reduced
to penury. It meant that the incomes of the Princes of the Church would
shrink in an incalculable manner. Adrian set himself to show such men
how to meet the changes in prospect. He brought his old Flemish peasant
housekeeper with him to Rome, contented himself with the simple dishes
she cooked for him, and lived the life of an anchorite in a corner of
his vast palace on the Vatican hill; but in this case example did not
seem better than precept. It had seemed so easy to the simple-minded
Dutch scholar to reform the Church; everything was provided for in the
Canon Law, whose regulations had only to be put in force. His Spanish
experience had confirmed him in the possibility of the task. But at Rome
he found a system of Rules of Chancery which could not be set aside all
at once; there was no convenient Inquisition so organised that it could
clear all objectors out of his path; no secular power always ready to
support a reforming Churchman.
Where was he to begin? The whole practice of Indulgences appeared to be
what was most in need of reform. Its abuses had kindled the storm in
Germany. To purge them away would show how much in earnest he was. He
knew the subject well. He had written upon it, and therefore had studied
it from all sides. Rightly understood, Indulgences were precious things.
They showed how a merciful God had empowered His Church to declare that
He pardoned sins freely; and, besides, they proclaimed, as no other
usage of the Church did, the brotherhood of all believers, within which
the stronger could help the weaker, and the holier the more sinful, and
all could fulfil the law of Christ by bearing each other's burdens. Only
it was to be remembered that every pardon required a heart unfeignedly
penitent, and the sordid taint of money must be got rid of. But--there
was always a "but" for poor Adrian--it was shown to him that the papal
court could not possibly pay its way without the money which came in so
easily from the sale of Indulgences. He was baffled at the very start;
checks, for the most part quite unexpected, thwarted every effort. He
was like a man in a nightmare, set in a thicket of thorns, where no
hewing could set him free, clothes torn, limbs bleeding, till at last he
sank exhausted, welcoming the death which freed him from his impossible
task. Adrian was the distinguished martyr of the Spanish Reformation.
History has dwelt upon his failures; they were only too manifest. It has
derided his simplicity in sending Chieregati to Germany with the
confession that the Curia was the source of most of the evils which
beset the mediæval Church, and at the same time demanding the death of
Luther, who had been the first to show the fact in such a way that all
men could see it. It has said little of the success that came in due
time. Chieregati was unable to overcome the deeply rooted Evangelical
Reformation in Germany. But his mission and the honest statement that
the Curia was the seat of evil in the Church, date the beginnings of a
reaction, of a genuine Romanist party with a vague idea of reforms on
mediæval lines. It must be taken as the starting-point of the
Counter-Reformation in Germany. Adrian's example, too, did much to
encourage the few spiritually minded Churchmen in Italy, and its effects
can be seen in the revival of a zeal to purify the Church which arose
during the pontificate of Paul III.
CHAPTER III.
ITALIAN LIBERAL ROMAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR CONCEPTION OF A
REFORMATION.[655]
§ 1. _The Religious Condition of Italy._
Italy is the land which next to Spain is the most important for the
Counter-Reformation. While we can trace in Spain and in Germany a
certain solidarity of religious movement, the spiritual conditions of
Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century were as manifold as
its political conditions. It is impossible to speak of the Italians as a
whole. Italy had been the land of the Renaissance, but that great
intellectual movement had never rooted itself deeply in the people as it
had done in Germany, France, or England.
The Italian peasantry were a class apart from the burghers as they were
nowhere else. Their religion was usually a thinly veiled paganism, a
belief in the omnipresence of spirits, good and bad, to be thanked,
propitiated, coaxed or compelled by use of charms, amulets, spells, and
ceremonies. The gods of their pagan ancestors had been replaced by local
saints, and received the same kind of worship. To fight for their faith
had never been a tradition with them as with the Spaniards; they were
not troubled by any continuous sense of sin as were the people of the
northern nations; but they had an intense fear of the supernatural, and
their faith in the priest, who could stand between them and the terrors
of the unseen, was boundless. Goodness touched them as it does all men.
But the immorality of their religious guides did not embarrass them; a
bad priest had as powerful spells as a good one. The only kind of
Christianity which seemed able to impress them and hold them was that of
Francis of Assisi. He was the highest embodiment of the Christian spirit
for the Italian peasantry; the impression he had made upon the people of
the Peninsula was enduring; the wandering revivalist preacher who lived
as Francis had done always made the deepest impression. John of
Capistrano owed much of his power to the fact that he remained always
the Abruzzi peasant. During the whole of the period of the Renaissance
the peasantry and the clergy who served the village chapels were
regarded by those above them with a scorn that degenerated into hatred.
We may search in vain through the whole of the literature of the time
for the thought that any attempt ought to be made to lead them to a
deeper faith and a purer life. The whole of the peasant population of
Italy were believed to be beneath the level of desire for something
better than what the religious life of the times gave.[656]
The towns presented an entirely different picture. There was a
solidarity binding together all the civic population. The ordinary
division of ranks, made by greater or less possession of wealth or by
social standing, existed, but it did not prevent a common mode of
thinking. We can trace the same thoughts among artisans, small
shopkeepers, rich merchants, and the patricians of the towns. No country
presented so many varieties of local character as Italy; but the
inhabitants of Venice or Florence, Milan, Naples, however else they
might differ, were all on the same spiritual level. They thought much
about religion; they took the moral degradation of the Church and of the
clergy to heart; they longed to see some improvement, if it was only
within their own city. They were clearsighted enough to trace the
mischief to the influence of the Roman Curia, and their belief in the
hopelessness of reforming the evil Court gives a settled despondency to
their thought which appears in most of the Chronicles. The external side
of religion was inextricably interwoven with their city life. The civic
rulers had always something to do with the churches, monasteries, and
other ecclesiastical foundations within their walls. They had no great
interest in doctrine; what they wanted was a real improvement in the
moral living of clergy and of people. When an Italian town was blessed
with a good and pious Bishop, it is touching to see how the whole
population rallied round him.
When we turn to the outstanding men of the Italian peninsula, whose
opinions have been preserved in their writings or correspondence, we
find, to begin with, a great variety of religious opinions whose common
note is unconstrained hostility to the Church as it was then
constituted. The institution was a necessary evil, very important as a
factor in the game of politics, useless for the religious life. This
sentiment existed almost universally, both among those who merely
maintained a decorous relation towards the existing ecclesiastical
institutions, and among those who really believed in Christianity, and
acknowledged its power over their mind and life. The papal Curia
oppressed them; they were hopeless of its reformation, and yet there was
little hope of a revival of religion, with its social worship and its
"sacraments" unless it was reformed. The feeling of hopelessness is
everywhere apparent; the deepest spiritual longings and experiences were
to be treasured as sacred secrets of the heart, and not to be spoken
about. Yet the work of Savonarola had not been entirely consumed in the
fire that burnt the martyr, and the earlier message of Luther had found
an echo in many Italian hearts.
§ 2. _The Italian Roman Catholic Reformers._
There is no evidence of any widespread acceptance of the whole of
Luther's teaching, little appreciation of the thought that the Church
may be conceived as a fellowship of God with man depending on the
inscrutable purpose of God and independent of all visible outward
organisation, none of the idea that the Visible Church Catholic exists
one and indivisible in the many forms in which men combine to listen to
the Word and to manifest their faith. The Catholic Church was always to
these pious Italians the great historical and external institution with
its hierarchy, and its visible head in the Bishop of Rome. A reform of
the Church meant for them the reformation of that institution. So long
as this was denied them they could always worship within the sanctuary
of their own souls, and they could enjoy the converse of likeminded
friends. So there came into existence coteries of pious Italians who met
to encourage each other, and to plan the restoration of religion within
the Church. Humanism had left its mark on all of them, and their
reunions were called academies, after the Platonic academies of the
earlier Renaissance. The first had come into being before the death of
Leo. X.--a society of pious laymen and prelates, who met in the little
church of Santi Silvestro et Dorotea in the Trastevere in Rome. The
associates were more than fifty in number, and they were all
distinguished by their love of the New Learning, the strict purity of
their lives, and their devotion to the theology of St. Augustine. The
members were scattered after the sack of Rome (1527), but this _Oratory
of Divine Love_ gave rise to many kindred associations within which the
original members found a congenial society.
The most important found a home in Venice. Its most prominent members
were Gasparo Contarini, a distinguished Senator, who afterwards was
induced to become a Cardinal. With him were Cardinal Caraffa, already
meditating upon taking another path, and Gregorio Cortese, then Abbot of
San Giorgio Maggiore. The friends met in the beautiful garden of the
convent. All shades of opinion were represented in this circle, where
Humanists and Churchmen met to exchange views about a reformation of the
Church. To share in such intercourse, Reginald Pole willingly spent his
days far from his native England. Cardinal Fregoso, Archbishop of
Salerno, gathered a similar company around him at Genoa; and Ghiberti,
Bishop of Verona, collected likeminded friends to talk about the
possibilities of reformation. Modena and Padua had their Christian
academies also. Nor must the influence of well-born, cultured and pious
ladies be forgotten.
Renée, Duchess of Ferrara and daughter of Louis XII. of France, had
accepted the Reformation in its entirety, and had surrendered herself to
the guidance of Calvin. She corresponded with the great Frenchman and
with Bullinger. She sheltered persecuted Italian Protestants, or had
them safely conveyed to Switzerland.[657] But she saw good wherever it
was to be found. Her letters, instinct with Christian graciousness,
remind the reader of those of her kinswoman Marguerite of Navarre. She
was full of sympathy with the circle of men and women who longed for a
regeneration of Italy; and it is interesting to notice how the far more
highly gifted Vittoria Colonna leant on the woman whose spiritual
insight was deeper, and whose heart was purified by the trials which
her decision in religious matters made her pass through.
Caterina Cybó, a niece of Pope Clement, Princess of Camerino, Eleonora
Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, Julia Gonzaga at Naples, and Vittoria
Colonna at Viterbo and at Rome, formed a circle of highly intellectual
and deeply pious women, who by their letters and intercourse inspired
men who were working for the regeneration of the Church in Italy.
The network of their correspondence covered Italy from Venice to Naples
and from Genoa to Camerino, and the letters exchanged between Marguerite
of Navarre and Vittoria Colonna extended the influence of the
association beyond the peninsula. The correspondents, men and women,
regarded themselves as a band of companions pledged to each other to
work together for the Reformation of the Church and of society. It is
not easy to describe their aims, for they contented themselves for the
most part with vague aspirations; and they all had their favourite likes
and dislikes. It is impossible to doubt their earnestness, but it was of
the high-bred placid kind. It had nothing of the Spanish exaltation of
Teresa, of the German vehemence of Luther, of the French passion
scarcely veiled by the logical precision of Calvin. They all admired St.
Francis, but in a way out of sympathy with the common people, for they
looked on asceticism with a mild wonder, and had no eagerness for _that_
type of the imitation of Christ. Vittoria Colonna indeed found the
convent at Viterbo a pleasant retreat for a few weeks at a time. A sigh
sometimes escaped her that perhaps the nuns were all Marys who had
chosen the better part, but that was only when she was weary with the
perversities of the incomprehensible world. Their correspondence
suggests an academy of the earlier Italian Renaissance, where the theory
of Ideas had given way to doctrines of Justification, and the Epistles
of St. Paul had taken the place of the Dialogues of Plato. There is a
touch of dilettantism in their habits of thought, and a savour of the
eighteenth century Salon in their intercourse. They longed to mediate
between contending parties in the religious strife which was convulsing
Europe beyond the Alps and might invade Italy; but they were unfit for
the task. A true _via media_ can only be found by men who see both sides
of the controversy in the clear vision of thought, not by men who
perceive neither distinctly. Sadoleto, to take one example, declared
that he could see much to admire in the German Reformation, but what he
approved were only the external portions which came from Humanism, not
those elements which made the movement a religious revival. He disliked
Luther, but had a great esteem for Bucer and Melanchthon. Indeed, the
Italian Cardinal may be called the Melanchthon of Romanism. Melanchthon,
rooted in Protestantism, felt compelled by his intellectual sympathy and
humility to believe that there was some good in Romanism and to try to
find it; Sadoleto, rooted in Romanism, was impelled to some sympathy
with the Protestant theology. He had, however, a fatal lack of precision
of thought. One doctrine tended to slide insensibly into another, into
its opposite even, under the touch of his analysis. The man who could
defend and commend auricular confession because it was an example of
Christian humility, and saint-worship because it was a testimony to the
immortality of the soul, ran the risk of being regarded as a trifler by
Protestants and a traitor by Romanists. Such was his fate.
Contemporary with these offshoots from the _Oratory of Divine Love_ was
a revival among some of the monastic orders in Italy which had distinct
connection with some of the members of the associations above mentioned.
The most important for its influence on the religious life of the people
was the Order of the Capucins. It took its rise from Matteo de Grassis,
a man of no intellectual powers, but endowed with more than the usual
obstinacy of the Italian peasant. He was an Umbrian, like Francis
himself. He belonged to a district where traditions of the great
mediæval revivalist had been handed down from parents to children for
generations, and one of these insisted that St. Francis had worn a hood
with its peak pointed and not rounded, as the fashion among the monks
then was. He declared that St. Francis had appeared to him in a vision,
and had said that the brethren of the order ought to obey his rules "to
the letter, to the letter, to the letter." He for one resolved to obey.
He threw away rounded hood and wore one with pointed peak. The peasants
refused to recognise the novelty, and drove him off with stones; his
brethren argued with him, and belaboured him with their fists; but
Matteo stuck to his pointed hood. The shape was nothing, but the
Founder's commands were everything; Matteo would die before he would
wear the rounded thing which had never been hallowed by St. Francis. The
Princess Caterina Cybó took compassion on the hunted man, and gave him
an asylum within her little principality of Camerino, where he wore his
pointed _capuze_ in peace. He soon sank back into the obscurity from
which he had for a moment emerged. But new life was stirring among the
Franciscans. Many were dissatisfied with the laxity of the order, and
were longing for a monastic Reformation. All down the Middle Ages the
watchword of every monastic revival had been, "Back to the Founder's
rules." The pointed hood was a trifle, but it was the symbol of a return
to the rigid discipline of Francis. Men heard that Camerino was an
asylum for Franciscans discontented with the laxity of the superiors of
the order, and gradually they flocked to the little principality.
Vittoria Colonna had long mourned over the decadence of the genuine
monastic life; she encouraged her friend the Princess Caterina to
beseech her uncle the Pope to permit the pointed hood, and gradually
there came into being a new fresh offshoot of the Franciscans, called
the Capucins, who revived the traditions of St. Francis, and went
preaching among the villages after the fashion of his earlier followers.
Francis had told his disciples to beware of books when making their
sermons; he had advised them to talk to the women as they washed,
Italian fashion, by the side of streams, to masons while they were
hewing, to artisans at their work, to find out what their religious
difficulties were, what prevented them becoming really Christians in
their lives, and then to discourse on the things they had heard. This
old Franciscan preaching was restored by the Capucins, and they did more
than any others to bring the people of Italy back to the discredited
Church. They were accused of heresy. What "reformation" of the
Franciscans was not? They were called Lutherans; and a good deal of
Luther's Evangelical teaching was unconsciously presented in their
sermons; but they could always quote St. Francis for what they said; and
who could gainsay what Francis had taught?
This monastic revival affected the commonalty; another spoke to the
educated classes. As early as 1504 an attempt had been made to
reorganise the great Benedictine order, and a number of Benedictine
abbeys had united to form a Congregation, which soon after its
institution took the name of the Benedictine Mother-Cloister, Monte
Cassino. Gregorio Cortese, one of the members of the _Oratory of Divine
Love_, entered into the movement, and as Abbot of the Benedictine
convent on the Island of Lerina on the Riviera, and afterwards in the
convent of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, led his monks to show that
their convents were the centres of learning dedicated to the service of
the Church. He interested himself more especially in historical studies
with a view of maintaining the historic traditions of the Church, which
were beginning to be shaken by historical criticism, then in its
infancy.
The improvement of the secular clergy was more important for the Church
in Italy than any reforms of the monastic orders. An attempt to do this
was begun by two members of the _Oratory of Divine Love_, Giovanni
Pietro Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Their idea was that in every
diocese there ought to be a small band of men doing the work of secular
clergy but bound by monastic vows. Their idea was taken from Augustine's
practice of living monastically with some of his clergy; and fulfilled
itself in the order of the Theatines. The name was derived from Theate
(Chieti), the small See of which Caraffa was Bishop. These picked clergy
were to be to the Bishop what his staff is to a general. The Theatines
were not to be numerous, still less to include the whole secular clergy
of a diocese; but they were to incite by precept, and above all by
example, to a truly clerical life. The idea spread, and similar
associations arose all over Italy.[658]
Such were the preparations in Italy for the Counter-Reformation. There
was no prospect of any attempt to set the Church in order while Pope
Clement VII. lived. He exhausted all his energies in preventing the
summoning of a General Council--a measure on which Charles V. was
growing more and more set as the only means of ending the religious
dispute in Germany.
The accession of Paul III. (1534) seemed to inaugurate a new era full of
hopes for the advocates of reform at the centre of the Roman Church. The
new Pope made Gasparo Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, and Pole Cardinals.
A Bull, which remained unpublished, was read in the Consistory (January
1536), sketching the possibility of reforming the Curia. The Pope
appointed a commission of nine members to report upon the needful
reforms, and the commission was everywhere regarded as a sort of
preliminary Council, a body of men who were appointed to investigate and
tabulate a programme of necessary reforms to be laid before a General
Council. The Commissioners were Contarini, Caraffa, Ghiberti, Sadoleto,
Pole, Fregoso, all of whom had been members of the _Oratory of Divine
Love_, Aleander who had been Nuncio at the Diet of Worms, and Tomaso
Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. They met and drafted a report which
was presented to the Pope in 1537, and is known as the _Consilium
delectorum cardinalium et aliorum prælatorum de emendanda ecclesia_. A
more scathing indictment of the condition of the Roman Church could
scarcely be imagined, nor one which spoke more urgently of the need of
radical reformation. Its very thoroughness was disconcerting. It
revealed so many scandals connected with the Papacy that it was resolved
not to make it known. But it had been printed as a private document; a
copy somehow or other reached Germany; it was at once republished there,
with comments showing how a papal commission itself had justified all
the German demands for a reformation of the Church. At Rome the
appearance of reforming activity was maintained. Contarini, Caraffa,
Aleander, and Badia were appointed to investigate the workings of those
departments of the Curia which had most to do with the abuses detailed
in the report of the Commission of Nine--the _Chancery_, the _Datary_,
and the _Penitentiary_, where reservations, dispensations, exemptions,
etc., were given and registered. They presented their report in the
autumn of 1537. It was entitled _Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo
III. super reformatione sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ_. But Contarini evidently
felt that the Pope needed pressing. When the Commission of Nine had been
appointed, the Pope had summoned a General Council to meet at Mantua in
May 1537, in a Bull published on May 29th, 1536, and had also published
a Bull of Reformation in September of that year. The Council never
met--the war between Charles V. and Francis I. preventing. The Council
was then summoned to meet at Vicenza, but was again postponed. The
Emperor had no wish for a General Council in Italy, and the Pope was
determined not to call one to meet in Germany. In these circumstances
Contarini published his _Epistola de potestate Pontificis in usu
clavium_, and his _De potestate Pontificis in Compositionibus_.[659]
Historians differ about the sincerity of Pope Paul III. in the matter of
reform, and there is room for two opinions. His Italian policy was
anti-Hapsburg, and the German Romanist Princes, at all events, had
little belief in his sincerity, and were seriously meditating on
following the example of Henry VIII. Cardinal Morone, the Nuncio in
Germany, made no concealment of the difficulties attending the position
of the Romanist Church there, and urged continually substantial reforms
in Italy, and the necessity of a General Council. Perhaps these
energetic messages stirred the Pope to renewed activity in Rome, and
also to the necessity of formulating a definite policy with regard to
the Lutherans beyond the Alps. In April (1540) commissions were
appointed to reform certain offices in the Curia--the Rota, the
Chancery, and the Penitentiary. Consultations were held about how to
deal with the state of affairs in Germany. For the moment the ideas of
the more liberal-minded Italian Reformers were in the ascendant. Charles
had determined to find out whether it was not possible to reunite the
broken Church in Germany. Conferences were to be held with the leading
Lutheran theologians. The Pope determined to reject the advice of Faber,
the Bishop of Vienna, and to refrain from pronouncing judgment on a
series of Lutheran propositions sent to him for condemnation. Cardinal
Contarini, whose presence had been urgently required by the Emperor, was
permitted to cross the Alps to see, in conference with distinguished
Lutherans, whether some common terms of agreement might be arrived at
which would serve as a programme to be set before the General Council,
which all were agreed must be summoned sometime soon.
§3. _Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa._
This mission of Contarini's to Germany dates the separation between two
different ways of proposing to deal with the Reformation movement. The
two methods were embodied in two men, Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa.
They had both belonged to the _Oratory of Divine Love_; they were both
zealous to see the Church reformed in the sense of reviving its moral
and spiritual life; they both longed to see the rent which had made
itself apparent repaired, and the Church again reunited. They differed
entirely about the means to be adopted to bring about the desirable end.
The differences originated in the separate characters and training of
the two leaders.
Gasparo Contarini belonged to an ancient patrician family of Venice, and
spent the greater portion of his life in the service of the Republic. He
was looked on as the ablest and most upright of its statesmen. He had
drunk deeply of the well of the New Learning, and yet can hardly be
called a Humanist. He had been a student at Padua, and had there studied
and learned to appreciate Scholastic Theology. He had been trained as a
Venetian statesman, and clung to the political ideas of the mediæval
jurisprudence. The whole round of mediæval thought encircled and
possessed him. Christendom was one great commonwealth, and embodied
three great imperialist ideas--a world King, the Emperor; a world
priest, the Pope; a realm of sanctified science, the Scholastic
Philosophy under Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. He held these
three conceptions in a broad-minded and liberal way. There was room
under the Emperor for a community of Christian States, under the Pope
for a brotherhood of national Churches, under Scholastic for the New
Learning and what it brought to enrich the mind of mankind.
Erasmus had ridiculed Scholastic; Contarini's friend Cortese called it a
farrago of words; Luther had maintained that it sounded hollow because
at its centre was the vague eternal Something of Pagan Philosophy and
not the Father who had revealed His heart in Jesus Christ; but Contarini
saw the grandeur of the imposing edifice, believed in its solidity, and
would do nothing to destroy it. But this did not prevent him
sympathising strongly with Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith,
nor from believing that room might be found for it and other Protestant
conceptions within the circle of medieval theological thought. He had
little sympathy with the enthusiasm which some of his friends--Cardinal
Pole for example--expressed for Plato. Aristotle was for him the great
master-builder of human systematic thinking; but the Aristotle he
recognised as the Master was not the sage revealed in the Greek text or
commentaries (although he studied both), but the Aristotle who had cast
his spell over Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was firmly
persuaded that the Bishop of Rome was the Head of the Church, and as
such had his place in the political system of Christendom from which he
could not be removed without serious danger to the whole existing
framework of society; but he looked on the Pope as a constitutional
monarch bound to observe in his own person the ecclesiastical laws
imposed by his authority on the Christian world. Luther, he believed,
had recognised this in his earlier writings, and in this recognition lay
the possibilities of a readjustment which would bring Christendom
together again. On the other hand, Calvin's _Institutio_ filled him with
mingled admiration and dread. He recognised it to be the ablest book
which the Protestant movement had produced; but the thought of a
Christian democracy with which it was permeated, the stress it laid on
the procession of the divine purpose down through the ages, and the
manner in which it taught the prevenience of divine grace, were
conceptions whose acceptance, he thought, would be dangerous to the
political governance of mankind.
He dwelt with complacency on the thought that he had never longed for
ecclesiastical place or power. The Pope had persuaded him to permit
himself to be made Cardinal because the Holy See had need of his
service. He was conscious with a sort of proud humility that he was
generally esteemed the foremost Italian of his generation, that
enthusiastic friends spoke of his learning and virtue as "more divine
than human." He thought much more of his position as a Venetian Senator
and the trusted counsellor of the Republic, whose constitution he
believed to be the embodiment of the best political principles of the
time, than he did of his place in the Roman Court. "I for my part, to
tell the truth, do not think that the Red Hat is my highest honour," he
was accustomed to say. Such was the leader of the liberal-minded Roman
Catholics of Italy, who was asked by the Pope and urgently entreated by
the Emperor to visit Germany and end the schism by his persuasions.
Giovanni Picture's Caraffa, the intimate, the rival and the supplanter
of Contarini, belonged to one of the oldest noble families of Naples.
His house was intimately allied to the Church, and for more than one
hundred years its members had been Archbishops of Naples, and several
had been made Cardinals. The boy was destined for the Church. As a child
he had longed to enter a cloister, and had once set out to join the
Dominicans. His family, however, had other views for him. He was sent
when eighteen years of age to the papal court, and was soon almost
burdened with marks of distinction and with offices. He had been highly
educated while at Naples, and had steeped himself in the New Learning.
At the Humanist Courts of Alexander VI. and Julius II. he studied Greek
and Hebrew, and became an accomplished theologian besides. In 1504, much
against his will, he had been consecrated Bishop of the small diocese of
Chieti (Theate), lying in the wild Abruzzi district, almost due east of
Rome, on the slopes from the highest spurs of the Apennines to the
Adriatic. He found his people demoralised by constant feuds, and the
priests worse than their parishioners. Caraffa, determined to reduce
his unruly diocese to order, began with persuasion; and finding this of
small avail, flogged people and clergy into something like decency by
repeated spiritual censures and rigidly enforced excommunications. His
methods revealed the man. His talents were of too high an order and his
family influence too great to permit him to linger in his uncivilised
diocese. He was sent as Nuncio to England and thence to Spain. His visit
to the latter country made an indelible impression on his strong nature.
His earnest petitions for the independence of his native Naples were
contemptuously refused by the young King Charles, and the fierce
Neapolitan pursued the Emperor with an undying hatred. But what was more
important, his stay in Spain imbued him with the ideas of the Spanish
Reformation. He was too much an Italian and too strong a believer in the
papal supremacy to adopt the thought of secular interference in the
affairs of the Church, but with that exception the Spanish method of
renovating the Church took possession of him heart and soul. The germs
of fanaticism, hitherto sleeping within him, were awakened to life, and
never afterwards slumbered. He sympathised with the projects of Adrian
VI., and was a power during his brief pontificate. During the reign of
Clement VII. he took little part in public affairs, but all the attempts
to put new life into the monastic orders were assisted by him. He viewed
with some suspicion the attempt to conciliate the Germans; and the
results of Contarini's dealing with the Protestants at Regensburg filled
him with alarm.
Contarini's attempt to reunite the Church by reconciliation was twenty
years too late. It is doubtful whether anyone in Germany save the
Emperor had much faith in the uniting influences of a conference.
Morone, who had for years represented the Vatican at the Court of
Ferdinand of Austria, and who was perpetually urging the Pope to summon
a General Council, was afraid ever since Hagenau that conferences
benefited the Protestants more than the Romanists. Contarini himself had
said that what was needed to overcome the German movement was neither
conferences nor discussions about doctrine, but a Reformation in morals.
The Curia regarded his mission as a dangerous experiment. They tied his
hands as firmly as they could by his letter of instructions: He was to
inform the Emperor that no Legate, not even the Pope himself until he
had consulted the other nations, could modify the doctrines of the
Church for the sake of the Germans; he was to do his utmost to prevent
the assembly of a National Council for Germany. He heard from Paris that
the French Romanists believed that he was about to betray the Church to
the heretics. No one encouraged him except his own circle of immediate
friends. The men with whom he was to work, Cardinal de Granvelle and Dr.
Eck, were suspicious of him and of his antecedents. Nevertheless his
natural and confirmed optimism urged him to the task.
The situation, looked at broadly and from the point of view taken by a
contemporary who had made himself acquainted with the theology and
constitution of the mediæval Church, was not so hopeless as it must seem
to us with the history of what followed to enlighten us. The great mass
of mediæval doctrines lay uncodified. They were not codified until the
Council of Trent. The extreme claims made by the supporters of a papal
absolutism--claims which may be briefly expressed by the sentence: The
Church Universal is condensed in the Roman Church, and the Roman Church
is represented by the Pope--which had been used to crush the Lutheran
movement in its earliest stages, were of recent origin. Curialism could
be represented to be almost as much opposed to the mediæval theory of
the Church as anything that Luther had brought forward. There was a real
_via media_, if it could only be discovered and defined. The commonplace
opinions of men who were sincerely attached to the mediæval conception
of the Church, with its claims to catholicity, with its doctrines,
usages, ceremonies and hierarchy, could scarcely be better represented
than in the declaration said to have been made by Charles V. to his
sister Maria, his governor in the Netherlands:
"It happened that on the Vigil of St. John the Baptist the Emperor
held a banquet in the garden. Now, when Queen Maria asked him what
he thought of doing with the people and with the Confession (the
Augsburg) that had been presented, he made reply: 'Dear Sister,
when I was made chief of the Holy Roman Empire, the great complaint
reached me that the people who profess this doctrine were more
wicked than the devil. But the Bishop of Seville gave me the advice
that I should not think of acting tyrannically, but should
ascertain whether the doctrine is at variance with the articles of
the Christian faith (the Apostles' Creed). This advice pleased me,
and so I find that the people are not so devilish as had been
represented; nor is the subject of dispute the Twelve Articles, but
a matter lying outside them, which I have therefore handed over to
the scholars. If their doctrine had been in conflict with the
Twelve Articles I should have been disposed to apply the edge of
the sword.'"[660]
The Twelve Articles, as the Apostles' Creed was called, always occupied
a peculiar position in the Western Church. They were believed to contain
the _whole_ of the _theologia revelata_. The great Schoolmen of the most
opposite parties (Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus alike) were
accustomed to deduce from the Apostles' Creed fourteen propositions,
seven on God and seven on the Incarnation, and to declare that they
contained the sum of revealed theology; everything else was natural
theology on which men might differ without being considered to have
abandoned the essentials of the Christian faith. Charles V. had been
taught at first, probably by Aleander's insistent reiterations, that
Luther had denied some portion of this revealed theology; he had come to
learn that he had been wrongly informed; therefore conference and
adjustment were possible.
Men like Charles V. and Contarini could honestly believe that so far as
doctrine was concerned a compromise might be effected.
§ 4. _The Conference at Regensburg._
The Diet was opened at Regensburg in February 1541. The Emperor
explained his position and intentions. He declared that the most
important duty before them was to try to heal the division in religion
which was separating Germany into two opposing parties. The one duty of
the hour was to endeavour to come to a unanimous decision on religious
matters, and to bring about this he proposed to name some peace-loving
men who could confer together upon the points in debate. Count Frederick
of the Palatinate, brother of the Elector, and Cardinal de Granvelle
were nominated presidents: three pronounced Protestants, two pronounced
Romanists, and one whose opinions were doubtful, were the assessors;
Eck, Gropper, and Pflug were to support the Romanist side, Melanchthon,
Bucer, and Pistorius were the speakers for the Protestants. Perhaps the
only name that could be objected to was that of Eck; it was impossible
to think of him as a man of peace. The Legate Contarini guided
everything.
During preliminary conferences an understanding was come to on some
practical questions which served to preserve an appearance of unanimity.
It was thought that marriage might be permitted to the clergy and the
cup to the laity within Germany; that the Pope might be honoured as the
Primate of the Church, provided it was clearly understood that his
position did not give him the power of perpetual interference in the
affairs of the national Churches; that the hierarchy might be maintained
if the episcopal jurisdiction were exercised conjointly by a vicar
appointed by the Bishop and a learned layman appointed by the secular
authority.
It was the business of the conference to discuss the deeper theological
differences which were supposed to separate the two parties. So in the
opening meetings the delegates began to consider those questions which
gathered round the thought of Justification.
It was agreed that there was no distinction between the ordinances of
grace and those of nature in the original condition of man. This
declaration involved the denial of the distinction between the _dona
supernaturalia_ and the _dona naturalia_ made so much of in Scholastic
Theology, and the basis of a great deal of its Pelagian tendencies. It
was expressly conceded by the Romanist theologians that man had lost his
original freedom of will by the Fall--a concession directly at variance
with the future declaration of the Council of Trent.[661] The statement
agreed upon about the origin of sin was given almost in the words of the
Augsburg Confession, and agrees with them. The doctrine of the tenacity
of original sin scarcely differs from a statement of Luther's which had
been condemned in the Bull _Exurge Domine_ of Pope Leo X.[662] In the
discussions and conclusions about this first head of doctrine the
conclusions of Protestant theology had been amply vindicated.
There was more difficulty on the matter of Justification. Two
definitions suggested by the Romanist theologians and by Melanchthon
were successively rejected, and one brought forward, it is said by
Contarini himself, was accepted after some discussion. It was couched in
language which the Lutheran theologians had not been accustomed to use.
It embodied phrases which Pole, Contarini, and other liberal Italian
Roman Catholics had made their own. The Protestants of Germany, however,
saw nothing in it to contradict their cherished ideas upon
Justification, and they gladly accepted the definition. The statement,
repeated more than once, that grace is the free gift of God and is not
merited by our works, expressed their deepest thought, and completely
excluded the meritorious character of ecclesiastical good works. They
seemed rather pleased than otherwise that their thoughts could be
expressed in language suggested by Romanist theologians.[663] It appears
that Eck, while consenting to the definition, wished to avoid signing
it, but was compelled by Granvelle to fix his name to the document.[664]
The fact that the Romanist and Protestant members of the conference
could agree upon an article on Justification caused great rejoicings
among Contarini's friends in Italy. Cardinal Pole was convinced that
every obstacle in the way of reunion had been removed, and the most
extravagant expectations were cherished.[665] The Protestant members of
the conference were entirely satisfied with the results so far as they
had gone.
The conference then turned to questions affecting the organisation and
worship of the Church.
Somewhat to their surprise, the Protestants found that their opponents
were willing to accept their general theory of what was meant by the
Church and what were its distinguishing characteristics. The Christian
Society was defined without any reference to the Pope as its permanent
Head on earth. This provoked strong dissents from Rome when the
definition was known there. Differences emerged when the power of the
Church was discussed, and as there was no prospect of agreement it was
resolved for the meanwhile to omit the article.[666]
The question of the Sacrament of the Holy Supper evoked differences
which were felt to be almost insuperable. It was inevitable. For here
the one fundamental divergence between the new Evangelical faith and
mediæval religion came to practical expression. Nothing could reconcile
the Evangelical thought of a spiritual priesthood of all believers with
the belief in a mediating priesthood who could give and could withhold
God. Doctrines might be stated in terms which hid this fundamental
difference; a definition of Justification by Faith alone might be
conceded to the Protestants; but any thought of a priestly miracle in
the Sacrament of the Holy Supper had to be repudiated by the one party
and clung to by the other.
At first things went smoothly enough; it was conceded that special ways
of dispensing the Sacraments were matters indifferent, but whenever the
question of Transubstantiation emerged, things came to a deadlock. It
was perhaps characteristic of Contarini's somewhat surface way of
dealing with the whole question at stake between the two parties, that
he never probed the deeper question. He rested his plea for
Transubstantiation on the ground that an important article of faith
which had been assented to for so long must not be questioned.[667] The
Protestants held a private conference, at which all the theologians
present were asked to give their opinions in turn. There Calvin
spoke, dwelling on the thought that Transubstantiation implied
adoration, which could never be conceded. His firmness produced
unanimity. Melanchthon drafted their common opinion, which was given in
writing to Granvelle, who refused in strong language to accept it, and
the conference came to an end. The more difficult practical subjects of
the sacrificial character of the Mass and of private Masses were not
discussed.[668]
This conference at Regensburg may almost be said to be the parting of
the ways. Up to 1525 the movement under Luther had the appearance of a
Reformation of the whole Church in Germany. From 1525 to the date of
this conference there was always the expectation that the Lutherans who
had formed territorial Churches might yet be included in a general
Reformation of the whole German Church. Joachim II. of Brandenburg
cherished the idea long after 1541; and Charles v. still believed that
what could not be effected by mutual compromise might be done by a
mediating creed imposed upon all by the authority of the Emperor. But
compromise failed at Ratisbon, and there was no further hope of its
succeeding.
The decisive character of the Regensburg conference was seen in Italy
almost at once. Its failure involved the destruction of the party of
Italian Romanists who hoped to end the religious strife by a compromise.
When Contarini returned to Italy he found that his influence was gone.
He was rewarded with the Government of Bologna, which removed him from
the centre of things. He died soon after (Aug. 24th, 1542), leaving none
behind him to fill his place. Ghiberti survived him only sixteen months.
Caraffa had become more and more alienated from his early friends.
Sadoleto, Pole, and Morone remained, all of them men of intellect, but
lacking the qualities which fit men to be leaders in trying times. Pole
lived to make atonement for his liberalism by hounding on the
persecutions in England, and Morone by becoming the champion of
ultramontanism at the close of the Council of Trent. The conception of a
Catholic Reformation disappeared; the idea of a Counter-Reformation took
its place.
CHAPTER IV.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE COMPANY OF JESUS.[669]
§ 1. _At Manresa._
The little mountainous province of Guipuzcoa, lying at the corner of the
Bay of Biscay, bordering on France, was the district of Spain which
produced one of the greatest of her sons, Iñigo de Recalde de Loyola,
the founder of the Society of Jesus. The tower which was the family seat
still stands, rough and windowless as a Scottish border keep, adorned
with one ornament only, a stone above the doorway, on which are carved
the arms of the family--two wolves in quest of prey. Guipuzcoa had never
been conquered by the Moors, and its nobles, poor in their barren
highlands, boasted that the bluest Gothic blood ran in their veins. The
Recaldes belonged to the very oldest nobility of the district, and
possessed the highly valued privilege of the right of personal summons
to the coronation of the Kings of Leon. Their younger sons were welcomed
at Court as pages, and then as soldiers; and the young Iñigo was a page
at the Court of Ferdinand. He was well educated for a Spanish noble;
could read and write; composed ballads; and could illuminate manuscripts
with miniatures. Most of his spare time was employed in reading those
romances of chivalry then very popular. When older he became a soldier
like his elder brothers.
In 1521, when twenty-eight years of age (b. 1493), he was the youngest
officer in command of the garrison of Pampeluna, ordered to withstand a
combined force of invading French troops and some revolting Spaniards.
The enemy appeared before the place in such overwhelming numbers that
all but the youngest officer wished to surrender without a struggle.
Iñigo's eloquence persuaded the garrison to attempt a desperate defence.
No priest was among the soldiers; the Spaniards, according to their
custom, confessed each other, and were ready to die at their posts. A
bullet struck the young officer as he stood in the breach encouraging
his men. His fall gave the victory to the besiegers.
The conspicuous bravery of Iñigo had won the respect of his enemies.
They extricated him from the heap of dead under which he was buried, and
conveyed him to the old family castle. There his shattered leg was so
badly set as to unfit him for a soldier's career. He had it twice broken
and twice reset. The prolonged torture was useless; he had to believe
that he would never fight on horseback again. The dream of taking a
man's part in the conquests which all Spaniards of that age believed lay
before their country, had to be abandoned. His body was a useless log.
But Iñigo was a noble of the Basque provinces, and possessed, in a
superlative degree it was to be discovered, the characteristics of his
race--at once taciturn and enthusiastic, wildly imaginative, and sternly
practical. He has himself recorded that, as soon as he was convinced
that he could never become a distinguished soldier, he asked himself
whether he might not become a famous saint like Dominic or Francis, and
that the question arose from no spiritual promptings, but simply from
the determination to win fame before his death. As he lay bedridden,
thinking much and dreaming more, it suddenly occurred to him that no one
could become a saint unless he lived very near God, and that his life
had not been of such a kind. He at once resolved that he would change;
he would feed on herbs like a holy hermit; he would go to Jerusalem as a
devout pilgrim. This vow, he tells us, was the earliest conscious
movement of his soul towards God. His reward came soon in the shape of
his first revelation. The blessed Virgin, with the Child Jesus in her
arms, appeared to him in a dream. He awoke, hustled out of bed, dragged
himself to the small window of his turret-room, and looked out. The
earth was dark, an obscure mingling of black shadows; the heavens were a
great vault of deepest blue strewn with innumerable stars. The sight was
a parable and an inspiration. "How dull earth is," he cried, "how
glorious heaven!" He felt that he must _do_ something to get nearer God.
He must be alone in some holy place to think things out with his own
soul. His brother's servants hoisted the maimed body of the once
brilliant soldier on an ass, one foot in a boot, the wounded leg still
swathed in bandages and its foot in a large soft slipper, and Iñigo left
the old castle determined to live a hermit's life on Montserrat, the
holy hill of Aragon.
There in the church of Our Lady of Montserrat he resolved to dedicate
himself to her service with all the ceremonies prescribed in that
masterbook of mediæval chivalry, Amadis of Gaul. He hung his arms on her
altar, and throughout the long night, standing or kneeling, he kept his
watch, consecrating his knightly service to the Blessed Virgin. At
daybreak he donned an anchorite's dress, gave his knightly robes to the
first beggar he met, and, mounted on his ass, betook himself to the
Dominican convent of Manresa, no longer Iñigo Recalde de Loyola, but
simply Ignatius.
At Manresa he practised the strictest asceticism, hoping to become in
heart and soul fitted for the saint life he wished to live. Then began a
time of unexpected, sore and prolonged spiritual conflict, not unlike
what Luther experienced in the Erfurt convent. Who was he and what had
been his past life that he should presumptuously think that God would
ever accept him and number him among His saints? He made unwearied use
of all the mediæval means of grace; he exhausted the resources of the
confessional; he consulted one spiritual guide after another without
experiencing any relief to the doubts which were gnawing at his soul.
The whole machinery of the Church helped him as little as it had Luther:
it could not give peace of conscience. He has placed on record that the
only real help he received during this prolonged period of mental agony
came from an old woman. Confession, instead of soothing him, rather
plunged him into a sea of intolerable doubt. To make his penitence
thorough, to know himself as he really was, he wrote out his confession
that he might see his sins staring at him from the written page. He
fasted till his life was in danger; he prayed seven times and scourged
himself thrice daily, but found no peace. He tells us that he often
shrieked aloud to God, crying that He must Himself help him, for no
creature could bring him comfort. No task would be too great for him, he
exclaimed, if he could only see God. "Show me, O Lord, where I can find
Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I can only learn the way of
salvation." His anguish prompted him to suicide. More than once, he
says, he opened his window with the intention of casting himself down
headlong and ending his life then and there; but the fear of his sins
and their consequences restrained him. He had read of a saint who had
vowed to fast until he had been vouchsafed the Beatific Vision, so he
communicated at the altar and fasted for a whole week; but all ended in
vanity and vexation of spirit.
Then, with the sudden certainty of a revelation, he resolved to throw
himself on the mercy of God, whose long-suffering pity would pardon his
sins. This was the crisis. Peace came at last, and his new spiritual
life began. He thought no longer about his past; he no longer mentioned
former sins in his confessions; the certainty of pardon had begun a new
life within him; he could start afresh. It is impossible to read his
statements without being struck with the similarity between the
spiritual experience of Ignatius and what Luther calls Justification by
Faith; the words used by the two great religious leaders were different,
but the experience of pardon won by throwing one's self upon the mercy
of God was the same.
This new spiritual life was, as in Luther's case, one of overflowing
gladness. Meditation and introspection, once a source of anguish, became
the spring of overpowering joy. Ignatius felt that he was making
progress. "God," he says, "dealt with me as a teacher with a scholar; I
cannot doubt that He had always been with me." Many historical critics
from Ranke downwards have been struck with the likeness of the
experience gone through by Luther and Ignatius. One great contrast
manifested itself at once. The humble-minded and quiet German, when the
new life awoke in him, set himself unostentatiously to do the common
tasks which daily life brought; the fiery and ambitious Spaniard at once
tried to conquer all mysteries, to take them by assault as if they were
a beleaguered fortress.
He had his visions as before, but they were no longer temptations of
Satan, the source of doubt and torture. He believed that he could
actually see with bodily eyes divine mysteries which the intelligence
could not comprehend. After lengthened prayer, every faculty
concentrated in one prolonged gaze, he felt assured that he could _see_
the mystery of Transubstantiation actually taking place. At the supreme
moment he saw Christ in the form of a white ray pass into the
consecrated bread and transform it into the Divine Victim (Host). He
declared that in moods of exaltation the most impenetrable mysteries of
theology, the Incarnation of our Lord, the Holy Trinity, the
personality of Satan, were translated into visible symbols which made
them plainly understood. These visions so fascinated him, that he began
to write them down in simple fashion for his own satisfaction and
edification.
In all this the student of the religious life of Spain during the
sixteenth century will recognise the mystical devotion which was then
characteristic of the people of the Peninsula. The Spanish character,
whether we study it in the romances of chivalry which the land produced,
or in the writing of her religious guides, was impregnated by
enthusiasm. It was passionate, exalted, entirely penetrated and
possessed by the emotion which for the time dominated it. In no country
were the national and religious sentiment so thoroughly fused and
united. The long wars with the Moors, and their successful issue in the
conquest of Grenada, had made religion and patriotism one and the same
thing. Priests invariably accompanied troops on the march, and went into
battle with them. St. James of Compostella was believed to traverse the
country to bring continual succour to the soldiers who charged the Moors
invoking his name. A victory was celebrated by a solemn procession in
honour of God and of the Virgin, who had delivered the enemy into the
hands of the faithful. This intensity of the Spanish character, this
temperament distinguished by force rather than moderation, easily gave
birth to superstition and burning devotion, and both furnished a
fruitful soil for the extravagances of Mysticism, which affected every
class in society. Statesmen like Ximenes, no less than the common
people, were influenced by the exhortations or predictions of the
_Beatæ_,--women who had devoted themselves to a religious life without
formally entering into a convent,--and changed their policy in
consequence. It was universally believed that such devotees, men and
women, could be illuminated divinely, and could attain to a state of
familiar intercourse with God, if not to an actual union with Him, by
giving themselves to prayer, by abstinence from all worldly thoughts and
actions, and by practising the most rigid asceticism. It was held that
those who had attained to this state of mystical union received in
dreams, trances, and ecstasies, visions of the divine mysteries.
The heads of the Spanish Inquisition viewed this Mysticism, so
characteristic of the Peninsula, with grave anxiety. The thought that
ardent believers could by any personal process attain direct
intercourse, even union with God, apart from the ordinary machinery of
the Church, cut at the roots of the mediæval penitential system, which
always presupposed that a priestly mediation was required. If God can be
met in the silence of the believer's soul, where is the need for the
priest, who, according to mediæval ideas, must always stand between the
penitent and God, and by his action take the hand of faith and lay it in
the hand of the divine omnipotence? Other dangers appeared. The Mystic
professed to draw his knowledge of divine things directly from the same
source as the Church, and his revelations had the same authority. It is
true that most of the Spanish Mystics, like St. Teresa, had humility
enough to place themselves under ecclesiastical direction, but this was
not the case with all. Some prophets and prophetesses declared
themselves to be independent, and these _illuminati_, as they were
called, spread disaffection and heresy. Hence the attitude of the
Inquisition towards Mystics of all kinds was one of suspicious
watchfulness. St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Ignatius himself, were
all objects of distrust, and did not win ecclesiastical approbation
until after long series of tribulations.
It is necessary to insist on the fact that Ignatius had a deeply rooted
connection with the Spanish Mystics. His visions, his methods, the
_Spiritual Exercises_ themselves, cannot be understood apart from their
intimate relations to that Mysticism which was characteristic of the
religion of his land and of his age.
Ignatius was no ordinary Mystic, however. What seemed the whole or the
end to Teresa or Osuna was to him only a part, or the means to something
better. While he received and rejoiced in the visions vouchsafed to
him, he practised the keenest introspection. He observed and analysed
the moods and states of mind in which the visions came most readily or
the reverse, and made a note of them all. He noted the postures and
gestures of the body which helped or hindered the reception of visions
or profitable meditation on what had been revealed. He saw that he could
reproduce or at least facilitate the return of his visions by training
and mastering his mind and body, and by subjecting them to a spiritual
drill which might be compared with the exercises used to train a soldier
in the art of war. Out of these visions, introspections, comparisons,
experiments experienced in solitude at Manresa, came by long process of
gradual growth and elaboration the famous _Spiritual Exercises_, which
may be called the soul of the Counter-Reformation, as Luther's book on
_The Liberty of the Christian Man_ contains the essence of
Protestantism.
Ignatius spent nearly a year at Manresa. He had accomplished his
object--to find himself at peace with God. It remained to fulfil his vow
of pilgrimage. He laid aside his hermit's garb, and with it his ascetic
practices; but he believed it to be his duty to renounce all property
and live absolutely poor. He left all the money he possessed upon a
bench and walked to Barcelona, supporting himself by begging. There he
was given a passage to Venice, and thence he sailed for the Holy Land.
His enthusiasm, and above all his project for beginning a mission among
the Turks, alarmed the chief of the Franciscans in Jerusalem, who
insisted on shipping him back to Italy. He reached Barcelona determined
to pursue such studies as would enable him to know theology. He had
never learned Latin, the gateway to all theological learning, and the
man of thirty entered school, and seated himself on the bench with boys.
Thence he went to Alcala and to Salamanca, and attended classes in these
towns. Before he had quitted Manresa he had begun to speak to others
about his visions, and to persuade them to submit themselves to the
spiritual drill of his _Exercises_. Some ladies in Barcelona had become
his devoted disciples. At Alcala and Salamanca he had tried to make
converts to his system. The ecclesiastical authorities of the districts,
fearing that this was a new kind of dangerous Mysticism, seized him, and
he was twice incarcerated in the episcopal Inquisition. It would
probably have fared ill with him had it not been for the intercession of
some of the distinguished ladies who had been his disciples. His
imprisonment in both cases was short, but he was forbidden to
discriminate between mortal and venial sins (a thing essential if he
acted as a spiritual director) until he had studied theology for four
years.
§ 2. _Ignatius at Paris._
With prompt military obedience Ignatius decided to study at Paris. He
reached the city in the beginning of 1528, driving an ass laden with his
books and clothes. He went naturally to the College Montaigu, which
under its Principal, Noël Béda, was the most orthodox in Paris; but with
his well known determination to see and judge everything for himself, he
soon afterwards obtained leave to reside in the College Ste. Barbe, one
of the most liberal, in which George Buchanan was then a Regent.[670]
His sojourn in Paris could not fail to make a deep impression on the
middle-aged Spaniard, consumed with zeal to maintain in its minutest
details the old religion, and to destroy heresy and disobedience. Two
passions possessed him, both eminently Spanish. He could say with St.
Teresa that he suffered so much to see the Lutherans, whose baptism had
rendered them members of the Church, lose themselves unhappily, that had
he several lives he would willingly give them to deliver only one of
them from the horrible torments which awaited them; but he also believed
that it was for God a point of honour to avenge Himself on those who
despised His word, and that it belonged to all the faithful to be
instruments of the vengeance of the Almighty.
His keen practical nature grasped the religious situation in Paris (City
and University), and suggested his lifework. He saw the strength of the
Roman Catholic democracy face to face with the Reformation, and to what
power it might grow if it were only organised and subjected to a more
than military discipline. Ignatius was in Paris during the years when
partisan feelings ran riot.
Francis I. was by taste and training a man of the Renaissance. It
pleased him to be called and to imagine himself to be the patron of men
of letters. He was as devoted as his selfish, sensual nature permitted
him to be, to his sister Marguerite d'Angoulême, and for her sake
countenanced such Reformers as Lefèvre and the "group of Meaux." He had
a grudge against the Sorbonne and the _Parlement_ of Paris for their
attempts to baffle the Concordat of 1516; while he recognised the power
which these two formidable associations possessed. He was an
anti-Sorbonnist, who feared the Sorbonne (the great theological faculty
of the University of Paris), and could not help displaying his dread. He
had long dreamed of instituting a _Collége de France_, a free
association of learned teachers, men who could introduce the New
Learning and form a counterpoise to the Sorbonne which dominated the
University. The project took many forms, and never came to full fruition
until long after the days of Francis; but the beginnings were sufficient
to encourage Reformers and to irritate to fury the supporters of the
Sorbonne. The theological faculty of the University was then ruled by
Noël Béda, a man of no great intellectual capacity, who hated everything
which seemed to menace mediævalism. Béda, by his dogged courage, by his
unflinching determination, by his intense conviction that he was in the
right, was able to wage a pitiless warfare against the New Learning and
every appearance of religious reform. He was able to thwart the King
repeatedly, and more than once to attack him through Marguerite, his
sister. His whole attitude and activity made him a forerunner of the
Romanist League of two generations later, and, like the Leaguers, he
based his power on organising the Romanist fanaticism lying in the
populace of Paris and among the students of the Sorbonne. All this
Loyola saw under his eyes during his stay in Paris. He heard the
students of the Sorbonne singing their ferocious song:
"Prions tons le Roi de gloire
Qu'il confonde ces chiens mauldicts,
Afin qu'il n'en soit plus mémoire,
Non plus que de vielz os pourris.
Au feu, au feu! c'est leur repére
Fais-en justice! Dieu l'a permys";
and the defiant answer:
"La Sorbonne, la bigotte,
La Sorbonne se taira!
Son grand hoste, l'Aristote,
De la bande s'ostera!
Et son escot, quoi qu'il coste,
Jamais ne la soûlera!
La Sorbonne, la bigotte,
La Sorbonne se taira!
La saincte Escriture toute
Purement se preschera,
Et toute doctrine sotte
Des hommes on oublîra!
La Sorbonne, la bigotte,
La Sorbonne se taira!"[671]
Amidst this seething crowd of warring students and teachers, Ignatius
went, silent, watchful, observing everything. He cared little for
theological speculation, being a true and typical Spaniard. The
doctrines of the mediæval theology were simply military commands to his
disciplined mind; things to be submitted to whether understood or not.
Heresy was mutiny in the ranks. He had a marvellous natural capacity for
penetrating the souls of others, and had cultivated and strengthened it
by his habits of daily introspection and of writing down whatever, good
or bad, passed through his own soul. It is told of him that in company
he talked little, but quietly noted what others said, and that he had
infinite genius for observing and storing details.[672] He sought to
learn the conditions of life and thought outside Paris and France, and
made journeys to the Low Countries and to England, saying little,
thinking much, observing more. All the time he was winning the
confidence of fellow-students, and taking infinite pains to do
so--weighing and testing their character and gifts. He played billiards
with some, paid the college expenses of others, and was slowly,
patiently making his selection of the young men whom he thought fit to
be the confidants of his plans for the regeneration of Christendom, and
to be associates with him in the discipline which the _Exercises_ gave
to his own soul.[673]
He finally chose a little band of nine disciples--Peter Faber, Diego
Lainez, Francis Xavier, Alonzo Salmeron, Nicholas Boabdilla, Simon
Rodriguez, Paul Broet, Claude Jay, and Jean Codure. Codure died early.
Faber, the first selected, was a Savoyard, the son of a poor peasant,
with the unbending will and fervent spiritual imagination of a
highlander. No one of the band was more devoted to his leader. Francis
Xavier belonged, like Loyola himself, to an ancient Basque family; none
was harder to win than this proud young Spaniard. Lainez and Salmeron
were Castilians, who had been fellow-students with Ignatius at Alcala.
Lainez had always been a prodigy of learning, "a young man with the
brain of an ancient sage." He, too, had been hard to win, for his was
not a nature to kindle easily; but once subdued he was the most
important member of the band. Salmeron, his early companion, was as
impetuous and fiery as Lainez was cool and logical. He was the eloquent
preacher of the company. Boabdilla, also a Spaniard, was a man of
restless energy, who needed the strictest discipline to make him keep
touch with his brothers. Rodriguez, a Portuguese, and Jay, from Geneva,
were young men of insinuating manners, and were the destined
diplomatists of the little company. Broet, a phlegmatic Netherlander
among these fiery southerners, endeared himself to all of them by his
sweet purity of soul.
Such were the men whom Ignatius gathered together on the Feast of the
Ascension of Mary in 1534 in the Church of St. Mary of Montmartre, then
outside the walls of Paris. There they vowed that if no insuperable
difficulty prevented, they would go together to Palestine to work for
the good of mankind. If this became impossible, they would ask the Pope
to absolve them from their vow and betake themselves to whatever work
for the good of souls His Holiness directed them to do. No Order was
founded; no vows of poverty and obedience were taken; the young men were
a band of students who looked on each other as brothers, and who
promised to leave family and friends, and, "without superfluous money,"
work together for a regeneration of the Church. Faber, already in
priest's orders, celebrated Mass; the company dined together at St.
Denys. Such was the quiet beginning of what grew to be the Society of
Jesus.
The companions parted for a season to meet again at Venice.
§ 3. _The Spiritual Exercises._
All the nine associates had submitted themselves to the spiritual
guidance of Ignatius, and had all been subjected to the training
contained in the _Exercitia Spiritualia_. It is probable that this
manual of military drill for the soul had not been perfected at the date
of the meeting at Montmartre (1534), for we know that Loyola worked at
it from 1522 on to 1548, when it was approved by Pope Paul III.; but it
may be well at this stage to give some account of this marvellous book,
which was destined to have such important results for the
Counter-Reformation.[674]
The thought that the spiritual senses and faculties might be
strengthened and stimulated by the continuous repetition of a prescribed
course of prayer and meditation, was not a new one. The German Mystics
of the fourteenth century, to name no others, had put their converts
through such a discipline, and the practice was not unusual among the
Dominicans. It is most likely that a book of this kind, the
_Exercitatorio dela vida spirital_ of Garcia de Cisneros, Abbot of the
Monastery of Montserrat (1500), had been studied by Ignatius while he
was at Manresa. But this detracts nothing from the striking and unique
originality of the _Exercitia Spiritualia_, they stand alone in plan,
contents, and intended result.[675] They were the outcome of Loyola's
protracted spiritual struggles, and of his cool introspection of his own
soul during these months of doubt and anguish. Their evident intention
is to guide the soul through the long series of experiences which Loyola
had endured unaided, and to lead it to the peace which he had found.
It is universally admitted that Ignatius had always before him the
conception of military drill. He wished to discipline the soul as the
drill-sergeant moulds the body. The _Exercises_ are not closet-rules for
solitary believers seeking to rise to communion with God by a ladder of
meditation. A guide was indispensable, _the Master of the Exercises_,
who had himself conquered all the intricacies of the method, and who,
besides, must have as intimate a knowledge as it was possible to acquire
of the details of the spiritual strength and weakness of his pupil. It
was the easier to have this knowledge, as the disciple must be more
than half won before he is invited to pass through the drill. He must
have submitted to one of the fathers in confession; he must be made to
understand the absolute necessity of abandoning himself to the exercises
with his whole heart and soul; he must promise absolute submission to
the orders of the director; he must by frequent confession reveal the
recesses of his soul, and describe the most trivial thoughts which flit
through it; above all, he must enter on his prolonged task in a state of
the liveliest expectation of the benefits to be derived from his
faithful performance of the prescribed exercises.[676] A large, though
strictly limited, discretion is permitted to the _Master of the
Exercises_ in the details of the training he insists upon.
The course of drill extends over four weeks[677] (twenty-five days). It
includes prolonged and detailed meditations on four great subjects:--sin
and conscience; the earthly Kingdom of Christ; the Passion of Jesus; and
the Love of God with the Glory of the Risen Lord.[678] During all this
time the pupil must live in absolute solitude. Neither sight nor sound
from the world of life and action must be allowed to enter and disturb
him. He is exhorted to purge his mind of every thought but the
meditation on which he is engaged; to exert all his strength to make his
introspection vivid and his converse with the Deity unimpeded.
True meditation, according to Ignatius, ought to include four things--a
preparatory prayer; _præludia_, or the ways of attuning the mind and
sense in order to bring methodically and vividly some past historical
scene or embodiment of doctrine before the soul of the pupil; _puncta_,
or definite heads of each meditation on which the thoughts are to be
concentrated, and on which memory, intellect, and will are to be
individually exercised; _colloquia_, or ecstatic converse with God,
without which no meditation is supposed to be complete, and in which the
pupil, having placed the crucifix before him, talks to God and hears His
voice answering him.
When the soul's progress on the long spiritual journey in which it is
led during these meditations is studied, one can scarcely fail to note
the crass materialism which envelops it at every step. The pupil is
required to _see_ in the mirror of his imagination the boundless flames
of hell, and souls encased in burning bodies; to _hear_ the shrieks,
howlings, and blasphemies; to _smell_ the sulphur and intolerable
stench; to _taste_ the saltness of the tears, and to _feel_ the
scorching touch of the flames.[679] When the scene in the Garden of
Gethsemane is the subject of meditation, he must have in the _camera
obscura_ of his imagination a garden, large or small, see its enclosing
walls, gaze and gaze till he discerns where Christ is, where the
Apostles sleep, perceive the drops of sweat, touch the clothes of our
Lord.[680] When he thinks of the Nativity, he must conjure up the
figures of Joseph, Mary, the Child, _and a maid-servant_, hear their
homely family talk, see them going about their ordinary work.[681] The
same crass materialism envelops the meditations about doctrinal
mysteries. Thinking upon the Incarnation is almost childishly limited to
picturing the Three Persons of the Trinity contemplating the broad
surface of the earth and men hurrying to destruction, then resolving
that the Second is to descend to save; and to the interview between the
angel Gabriel and the Virgin.[682]
A second characteristic of this scheme of meditation is the extremely
limited extent of its sphere. The attention is confined to a few scenes
in the life of our Lord and of the Virgin. No lessons from the Old
Testament are admitted. All theological speculation is strictly
excluded. What is aimed at is to produce an intense and concentrated
impression which can never be effaced while life lasts. The soul is
alternately torn by terror and soothed by the vision of heavenly
delights. "The designed effect was to produce a vivid and varied
hypnotic dream of twenty-five days, from the influence of which a man
should never wholly free himself."[683]
The outstanding feature, however, of the _Exercises_ and of the
_Directory_ is the minute knowledge they display of the bodily
conditions and accompaniments of states of spiritual ecstasy, and the
continuous, not to say unscrupulous, use they make of physical means to
create spiritual abandon. They master the soul by manipulating the body.
Not that self-examination, honest and careful recognition of sins and
weaknesses in presence of temptation, have no place in the prolonged
course of discipline. This is inculcated with instructions which serve
to make it detailed, intense, almost scientific. The pupil is ordered to
examine himself twice a day, in the afternoon and in the evening, and to
make clear to himself every sin and failure that has marked his day's
life. He is taught to enter them all, day by day, in a register, which
will show him and his confessor his moral condition with arithmetical
accuracy. But during his own period of spiritual struggle and depression
at Manresa, Ignatius, in spite of the mental anguish which tore his
soul, had been noting the bodily accompaniments of his spiritual states;
and he pursued the same course of introspection when rejoicing in the
later visions of God and of His grace. The _Exercises_ and the
_Directory_ are full of minute directions about the physical conditions
which Ignatius had found by experience to be the most suitable for the
different subjects of meditation. The old Buddhist devotee was
instructed to set himself in a spiritual trance by the simple hypnotic
process of gazing at his own navel; the Ignatian directions are much
more complex. The glare of day, the uncertainty of twilight, the
darkness of night are all pressed into service; some subjects are to be
pondered standing upright motionless, others while walking to and fro in
the cell, when seated, when kneeling, when stretched prone on the floor;
some ought to be meditated upon while the body is weak with fasting,
others soon after meals; special hours, the morning, the evening, the
middle of the night, are noted as the most profitable times for
different meditations, and these vary with the age and sex of the
disciple. Ignatius recognises the infinite variety that there is in man,
and says expressly that general rules will not fit every case. The
_Master of Exercises_ is therefore enjoined to study the various
idiosyncrasies of his patients, and vary his discipline to suit their
mental and physical conditions.
It is due chiefly to this use of the conditions of the body acting upon
the mind that Ignatius was able to promise to his followers that the
ecstasies which had been hitherto the peculiar privilege of a few
favoured saints should become theirs. The Reformation had made the world
democratic; and the Counter-Reformation invited the mob to share the
raptures and the visions of a St. Catherine or a St. Teresa.
The combination of a clear recognition of the fact that physical
condition may account for much in so-called spiritual moods with the
use made of it to create or stimulate these moods, cannot fail to
suggest questions. It is easy to understand the Mystic, who, ignorant of
the mysterious ways in which the soul is acted upon by the body, may
rejoice in ecstasies and trances which have been stimulated by sleepless
nights and a prolonged course of fasting. It is not difficult to
understand the man who, when he has been taught, casts aside with
disdain all this juggling with the soul through the body. But it is hard
to see how anyone who perceived with fatal clearness the working of the
machinery should ever come to think that real piety could be created in
such mechanical ways. To believe with some that the object Ignatius had
was simply to enslave mankind, to conquer their souls as a great
military leader might master their lives, is both impossible and
intolerable. No one can read the correspondence of Loyola without seeing
that the man was a devout and earnest-minded Christian, and that he
longed to bring about a real moral reformation among his contemporaries.
Perhaps the key to the difficulty is given when it is remembered that
Ignatius never thought that the raptures and the terrors his course of
exercises produced were an end in themselves, as did the earlier
Mystics. They were only a means to what followed. Ignatius believed with
heart and soul that the essence of all true religion was the blindest
submission to what he called the "true Spouse of Christ and our Holy
Mother, which is the orthodox, catholic, and hierarchical Church." We
have heard him during his time of anguish at Manresa exclaim, "Show me,
O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I only learn
the way of salvation!" He fulfilled his vow to the letter. He never
entered into the meaning of our Lord's saying, "Henceforth I call you
not servants ... but friends"; he had no understanding of what St. Paul
calls "reasonable service" (=logikê latreia=). The only obedience he knew
was unreasoning submission, the obedience of a dog. His most imperative
duty, he believed, lay in the resignation of his intelligence and will
to ecclesiastical guidance in blind obedience to the Church. It is
sometimes forgotten how far Ignatius carried this. It is not that he
lays upon all Christians the duty of upholding every portion of the
mediæval creed, of mediæval customs, institutions, and superstitions; or
that the philosophy of St. Thomas of Bonaventura, of the Master of the
Sentences, and of "other recent theologians," is to be held as
authoritative as that of Holy Writ;[684] but "if the Church pronounces a
thing which seems to us white to be black, we must immediately say that
it is black."[685] This was for him the end of all perfection; and he
found no better instrument to produce it than the prolonged hypnotic
trance which the _Exercises_ caused.
§ 4. _Ignatius in Italy._
In the beginning of 1537 the ten associates found themselves together at
Venice. A war between that Republic and the Turks made it difficult for
them to think of embarking for Palestine; and they remained, finding
solace in intercourse with men who were longing for a moral regeneration
of the Church. Contarini did much for them; Vittoria Colonna had the
greatest sympathy with their projects; Caraffa only looked at them
coldly. The mind of Ignatius was then full of schemes for improving the
moral tone of society and of the Church--daily prayer in the village
churches, games of chance forbidden by law; priests' concubines
forbidden to dress as honest women did, etc.;--all of which things
Contarini and Vittoria had at heart.
After a brief stay in Venice, Ignatius, Lainez, and Faber travelled to
Rome, and were joined there by the others in Easter week (1538). No
Pontiff was so accessible as Paul III., and the three had an audience,
in which they explained their missionary projects. But this journey
through Italy had evidently given Ignatius and his companions new ideas.
The pilgrimage to Palestine was definitely abandoned, the money which
had been collected for the voyage was returned to the donors, and the
associates took possession of a deserted convent near Vicenza to talk
over their future. This conference may be called the second stage in the
formation of the Order. They all agreed to adopt a few simple rules of
life--they were to support themselves by begging; they were to go two by
two, and one was always to act as the servant for the time being of the
other; they were to lodge in public hospitals in order to be ready to
care for the sick; and they pledged themselves that their chief work
would be to preach to those who did not go to church, and to teach the
young.
The Italian towns speedily saw in their midst a new kind of preachers,
who had caught the habits of the well-known popular _improvisatori_.
They stood on the kerb-stones at the corners of streets; they waved
their hats; they called aloud to the passers-by. When a small crowd was
gathered they began their sermons. They did not preach theology. They
spoke of the simple commands of God set forth in the Ten Commandments,
and insisted that all sins were followed by punishment here or
hereafter. They set forth the prescriptions of the Church. They
described the pains of hell and the joys of heaven. The crowds who
gathered could only partially understand the quaint mixture of Italian
and Spanish which they heard. But throughout the Middle Ages the Italian
populace had always been easily affected by impassioned religious
appeals, and the companions created something like a revival among the
masses of the towns.
It was this experience which made Ignatius decide upon founding a
_Company of Jesus_. It was the age of military companies in Italy, and
the mind of Ignatius always responded to anything which suggested a
soldier's life, Other Orders might take the names of their founders; he
resolved that his personality should be absorbed in that of his
Crucified Lord. The thought of a new Order commended itself to his nine
companions. They left their preaching, journeyed by various paths to
Rome, each of them meditating on the Constitution which was to be
drafted and presented to the Pope.
The associates speedily settled the outlines of their Constitution.
Cardinal Contarini, ever the friend of Loyola, formally introduced them
to the Pope. In audience, Ignatius explained his projects, presented the
draft Constitution of the proposed new Order, showed how it was to be a
militia vowed to perpetual warfare against all the enemies of the
Papacy, and that one of the vows to be taken was: "That the members will
consecrate their lives to the continual service of Christ and of the
Popes, will fight under the banner of the Cross, and will serve the Lord
and the Roman Pontiff as God's Vicar upon earth, in such wise that they
shall be bound to execute immediately and without hesitation or excuse
all that the reigning Pontiff or his successors may enjoin upon them for
the profit of souls or for the propagation of the faith, and shall do so
in all provinces whithersoever he may send them, among Turks or any
other infidels, to the farthest Ind, as well as in the region of
heretics, schismatics, or unbelievers of any kind." Paul III. was
impressed with the support that the proposed Order would bring to the
Papacy in its time of stress. He is reported to have said that he
recognised the Spirit of God in the proposals laid before him, and he
knew that the associates were popular all over Italy and among the
people of Rome. But all such schemes had to be referred to a commission
of three Cardinals to report before formal sanction could be given.
Then Loyola's troubles began. The astute politicians who guided the
counsels of the Vatican were suspicious of the movement. They had no
great liking for Spanish Mysticism organised as a fighting force; they
disliked the enormous powers to be placed in the hands of the General
of the "Company"; they believed that the Church had suffered from the
multiplication of Orders; eight months elapsed before all these
difficulties were got rid of. Ignatius has placed on record that they
were the hardest months in his life.
During their prolonged audience Paul III. had recognised the splendid
erudition of Lainez and Faber. He engaged them, and somewhat later
Salmeron, as teachers of theology in the Roman University, where they
won golden opinions. Ignatius meanwhile busied himself in perfecting his
_Exercises_, in explaining them to influential persons, and in inducing
many to try their effect upon their own souls. Contarini begged for and
received a MS. copy. Dr. Ortiz, the Ambassador of Charles V. at Rome,
submitted himself to the discipline, and became an enthusiastic
supporter. "It was then," says Ignatius, "that I first won the favour
and respect of learned and influential men." But the opposition was
strong. The old accusations of heresy were revived. Ignatius demanded
and was admitted to a private audience of the Pope. He has described the
interview in one of his letters.[686] He spoke with His Holiness for
more than an hour in his private room; he explained the views and
intentions of himself and of his companions; he told how he had been
accused of heresy several times in Spain and at Paris, how he had even
been imprisoned at Alcala and Salamanca, and that in each case careful
inquiry had established his innocence; he said he knew that men who
wished to preach incurred a great responsibility before God and man, and
that they must be free from every taint of erroneous doctrine; and he
besought the Pope to examine and test him thoroughly.[687] On Sept.
27th, 1540, the Bull _Regimini militantis ecclesiæ_ was published, and
the _Company of Jesus_ was founded. The student band of Montmartre, the
association of revivalist preachers of Vicenza, became a new Order, a
holy militia pledged to fight for the Papacy against all its assailants
everywhere and at all costs. In the Bull the members of the Company were
limited to sixty, whether as a concession to opponents or in accordance
with the wishes of Ignatius, is unknown. It might have been from the
latter cause. In times of its greatest popularity the number of members
of full standing has never been very large--not more than one per cent
of those who bear the name.[688] The limitation, from whatever motive it
was inserted, was removed in a second Bull, _Injunctum nobis_, dated
March 14th, 1543.
§ 5. _The Society of Jesus._
On April 4th, 1541, six out of the ten original members of the Order
(four were absent from Rome) met to elect their General; three of those
at a distance sent their votes in writing; Ignatius was chosen
unanimously. He declined the honour, and was again elected on April 7th.
He gave way, and on April 22nd (1541) he received the vows of his
associates in the church of _San Paolo fuori le mura_.
The new Order became famous at once; numbers sought to join it; and
Ignatius found himself compelled to admit more members than he liked. He
felt that the more his Society increased in numbers and the wider its
sphere of activity, the greater the need for a strict system of laws to
govern it. All other Orders of monks had their rules, which stated the
duties of the members, the mode of their living together, and expressed
the common sentiment which bound them to each other. The Company of
Jesus, which from the first was intended to have a strict military
discipline, and whose members were meant to be simply dependent units in
a great machine moved by the man chosen to be their General, required
such rules even more than any other. Ignatius therefore set himself to
work on a Constitution. All we know of the first Constitution presented
by the ten original members when they had their audience with Pope Paul
III., is contained in the Bull of Foundation, and it is evident that it
was somewhat vague. It did contain, however, four features, perhaps
five, if the fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope be included,
which were new. The Company was to be a fighting Order, a holy militia;
it was to work for the propagation of the faith, especially by the
education of the young; the members were not to wear any special or
distinctive dress; and the power placed in the hands of the General was
much greater than that permitted to the heads of any other of the
monastic Orders. At the same time, constitutional limitations,
resembling those in other Orders, were placed on the power of the
General. There was to be a council, consisting of a majority of the
members, whom the General was ordered to consult on all important
occasions; and in less weighty matters he was bound to take the advice
of the brethren near him. Proposed changes tending to free the General
from these limitations were given effect to in the Bulls, _Licet debitum
pastoralis officii_ (Oct. 18th, 1549) and _Exposcit pastoralis officii_
(July 21st, 1550); but the Bulls themselves make it clear that the
Constitution had not taken final form even then. It is probable that the
completed Constitution drafted by Ignatius was not given to the Society
until after his death.
The way in which he went to work was characteristic of the man, at once
sternly practical and wildly visionary. He first busied himself with
arrangements for starting the educational work which the Company had
undertaken to do; he assorted the members of his Society into various
classes;[689] and then he turned to the Constitution. He asked four of
his original companions, Lainez, Salmeron, Broet, and Jay, all of whom
were in Rome, to go carefully over all the promises which had been made
to the Pope, or what might be implied in them, and from this material to
form a draft Constitution. He gave them one direction only to guide them
in their work: they were to see that nothing was set down which might
imply that it was a deadly sin to alter the rules of the Company in time
to come. The fundamental aim of his Company was different from that of
all other Orders. It was not to consist of societies of men who lived
out of the world to save their own souls, as did the Benedictines; nor
was it established merely to be a preaching association, like the
Dominicans; it was more than a fraternity of love, like the Franciscans.
It was destined to aid fellow-men in every way possible; and by
fellow-men Ignatius meant the obedient children of the catholic
hierarchical Church. It was to fight the enemies of God's Vicar upon
earth with every weapon available. The rules of other Orders could not
help him much. He had to think all out for himself. During these months
and years Ignatius kept a diary, in which he entered as in a ledger his
moods of mind, the thoughts that passed through it, the visions he saw,
and the hours at which they came to him.[690] Every possible problem
connected with the Constitution of his Company was pondered painfully.
It took him a month's meditation ere he saw how to define the relation
of the Society to property. Every solution came to him in a flash with
the effect of a revelation, usually in the short hour before Mass. Once,
he records, it took place "on the street as I returned from Cardinal
Carpi." It was in this way that the Constitution grew under his hands,
and he believed that both it and the _Exercises_ were founded on direct
revelations from God.
This was the Constitution which was presented by Lainez to the assembly
which elected him the successor of Loyola (July 2nd, 1558). The new
General added a commentary or _Directorium_ of his own, which was also
accepted. It received papal sanction under Pius IV.
In this Constitution the Society of Jesus was revealed as an elaborate
hierarchy rising from Novices through Scholastics, Coadjutors, Professed
of Four Vows, with the General at its head, an autocrat, controlling
every part, even the minutest, of the great machine. Nominally, he was
bound by the Constitution, but the inner principle of this elaborate
system of laws was apparent fixity of type qualified by the utmost
laxity in practice. The most stable principles of the Constitution were
explained or explained away in the _Directorium_, and by such an
elaborate labyrinth of exceptions that it proved no barrier to the will
of the General. He stood with his hand on the lever, and could do as he
pleased with the vast machine, which responded in all its parts to his
slightest touch. He had almost unlimited power of "dispensing with
formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening and lengthening the
periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career."
Every member of the Society was bound to obey his immediate superiors as
if they stood for him in the place of Christ, and that to the extent of
doing what he considered wrong, of believing that black was white if the
General so willed it. The General resided at Rome, holding all the
threads of the complicated affairs of the Society in his hands,
receiving minute reports of the secret and personal history of every one
of its members, dealing as he pleased with the highest as well as the
lowest of his subordinates.
"Yet the General of the Jesuits, like the Doge of Venice, had his
hands tied by subtly powerful though almost invisible fetters. He
was subjected at every hour of the day and night to the
surveillance of five sworn spies, especially appointed to prevent
him from altering the type or neglecting the concerns of the Order.
The first of these functionaries, named the Administrator, who was
frequently also the confessor of the General, exhorted him to
obedience, and reminded him that he must do all things for the
glory of God. Obedience and the glory of God, in Jesuit
phraseology, meant the maintenance of the Company. The other four
were styled Assistants. They had under their charge the affairs of
the chief provinces; one overseeing the Indies, another Portugal
and Spain, a third France and Germany, a fourth Italy and Sicily.
Together with the Administrator, the Assistants were nominated by
the General Congregation (an assembly of the Professed of the Four
Vows), and could not be removed or replaced without its sanction.
It was their duty to regulate the daily life of the General, to
control his private expenditure on the scale which they determined,
to prescribe what he should eat and drink, to appoint his hours for
sleep, and religious exercises, and the transaction of public
business.... The Company of Jesus was thus based upon a system of
mutual and pervasive espionage. The novice on entering had all his
acts, habits, and personal qualities registered. As he advanced in
his career, he was surrounded by jealous brethren, who felt it
their duty to report his slightest weakness to a superior. The
superiors were watched by one another and by their inferiors.
Masses of secret information poured into the secret cabinet of the
General; and the General himself ate, slept, prayed, worked, and
moved beneath the fixed gaze of ten vigilant eyes."[691]
Historians have not been slow to point out the evils which this Society
has wrought in the world, its purely political aims, the worldliness
which deadened its spiritual life, and its degradation of morals, which
had so much to do with sapping the ethical life of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It is frequently said that the cool-headed Lainez
is responsible for most of the evil, and that a change may be dated from
his Generalship. There seems to be a wide gulf fixed between the Mystic
of Manresa, the revival preacher of Vicenza, the genuine home mission
work in Rome, and the astute, ruthless worldly political work of the
Society. Yet almost all the changes may be traced back to one root, the
conception which Ignatius held of what was meant by true religion. It
was for him, from first to last, an unreasoning, blind obedience to the
dictates of the catholic hierarchic Church. It was this which poisoned
the very virtues which gave Loyola's intentions their strength, and
introduced an inhuman element from the start.
He set out with the noble thought that he would work for the good of his
fellow-men; but his idea of religion narrowed his horizon. His idea of
"neighbour" never went beyond the thought of one who owed entire
obedience to the Roman Pontiff--all others were as much outside the
sphere of the brotherhood of mankind as the followers of Mahomet were
for the earliest Crusaders. Godfrey of Bouillon was both devout and
tender-hearted, yet when he rode, a conqueror, into Jerusalem up the
street filled with the corpses of slaughtered Moslems, he saw a babe
wriggling on the breast of its dead mother, and, stooping in his saddle,
he seized it by the ankle and dashed its head against the wall. For
Ignatius, as for Godfrey, all outside the catholic and hierarchic Church
were not men, but wolves.
He was filled with the heroic conception that his Company was to aid
their fellow-men in every department of earthly life, and the political
drove out all other considerations; for it contained the spheres within
which the whole human life is lived. Thus, while he preferred for
himself the society of learned and devout men, his acute Basque brain
soon perceived their limitations, and the Jesuit historian Orlandino
tells us that Ignatius selected the members of his Company from men who
knew the world, and were of good social position. He forbade very
rightly the follies of ascetic piety, when the discipline of the
_Exercises_ had been accomplished; it was only repeated when energies
flagged or symptoms of insubordination appeared. Then the General
ordered a second course, as a physician sends a patient to the cure at
some watering-place. The Constitution directs that novices were to be
sought among those who had a comely presence, with good memories,
manageable tempers, quick observation, and free from all indiscreet
devotion. The Society formed to fight the Renaissance as well as
Protestantism, borrowed from its enemy the thought of general culture,
training every part of the mind and body, and rendering the possessor a
man of the world.
No one can read the letters of Ignatius without seeing the fund of
native tenderness that there was in the stern Spanish soldier. That it
was no mere sentiment appears in many ways, and in none more so than in
his infinite pity for the crowds of fallen women in Rome, and in his
wise methods of rescue work. It was this tenderness which led him to his
greatest mistake. He held that no one could be saved who was not brought
to a state of abject obedience to the hierarchic Church; that such
obedience was the only soil in which true virtues could be planted and
grow. He believed, moreover, that the way in which the "common man"
could be thoroughly broken to this obedience was through the
confessional and the directorate, and therefore that no one should be
scared from confession or from trust in his director by undue severity.
In his eagerness to secure these inestimable benefits for the largest
number of men, he over and over again enjoined the members of his
Society to be very cautious in coming to the conclusion that any of
their penitents was guilty of a mortal sin. Such was the almost innocent
beginning of that Jesuit casuistry which in the end almost wiped out the
possibility of anyone who professed obedience committing a mortal sin,
and occasioned the profane description of Father Bauny, the famous
French director--"Bauny qui tollit peccata mundi per definitionem."
The Society thus organised became powerful almost at once. It made rapid
progress in Italy. Lainez was sent to Venice, and fought the slumbering
Protestantism there, at Brescia, and in the Val Tellina. Jay was sent to
Ferrara to counteract the influence of Renée of France, its Duchess.
Salmeron went to Naples and Sicily. The chief Italian towns welcomed the
members of the new Order. Noble and devout ladies gave their aid.
Colleges were opened; schools, where the education was not merely free,
but superior to what was usually given, were soon crowded with pupils.
Rome remained the centre and stronghold of the Company.
Portugal was won at once. Xavier and Rodriguez were sent there. They won
over King John, and he speedily became their obedient pupil. He
delivered into their hands his new University at Coimbra, and the
Humanist teachers, George Buchanan among them, were persecuted and
dispersed, and replaced by Jesuit professors.
Spain was more difficult to win. The land was the stronghold of the
Dominicans, and had been so for generations; and they were unwilling to
admit any intruders. But the new Order soon gained ground. It was native
to the soil. It had its roots in that Mysticism which pervaded the whole
Peninsula. Ignatius gained one distinguished convert, Francis Borgia,
Duke of Candia and Viceroy of Catalonia. He placed the University he had
founded in their hands. He joined the Order, and became the third
General. His influence counterbalanced the suspicions of Charles V., who
had no liking for sworn bondmen of the Vatican, and they soon laid firm
hold on the people.
In France their progress was slow. The University and the _Parlement_ of
Paris opposed them, and the Sorbonne made solemn pronouncement against
their doctrine. Still they were able to found Colleges at St. Omer,
Douai, and Rheims.
Ignatius had his eye on Germany from the first. He longed to combat
heresy in the land of its birth. Boabdilla, Faber, and Jay were sent
there at once. Boabdilla won the confidence of William, Duke of Bavaria;
Jay insinuated himself into the counsels of Ferdinand of Austria, and
Faber did the most important work of the three by winning for the
Society, Petrus Canisius. He was the son of a patrician of Nymwegen,
trained in Humanist lore, drawn by inner sympathy to the Christian
Mysticism of Tauler, and yet steadfast in his adherence to the theology
of the mediæval Church. Faber soon became conscious of his own
deficiencies for the work to be done in Germany. His first appearance
was at the Religious Conference at Worms, where he found himself face to
face with Calvin and Melanchthon, and where his colleagues, Eck and
Cochlæus, were rather ashamed of him. The enthusiastic Savoyard lacked
almost everything for the position into which, at the bidding of his
General, he had thrust himself. Since then he had been wandering through
those portions of Germany which had remained faithful to Rome, seeking
individual converts to the principles of the Society, and above all some
one who had the gifts for the work Ignatius hoped to do in that country.
It is somewhat interesting to note that almost all the German Roman
Catholics who were attracted by him to the new Order were men who had
leanings towards the fourteenth century Mystics--men like Gerard
Hammond, Prior of the Carthusians of Köln. Faber caught Canisius by
means of his Mysticism. He met him at Mainz, explained the _Exercitia
Spiritualia_ to him, induced the young man to undergo the course of
discipline which they prescribed, and won him for Loyola and the
Company. "He is the man," wrote Faber to Ignatius, "whom I have been
seeking--if he is a man, and not rather an angel of the Lord."