The Counter-Reformation

Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World

Anthony D. Wright

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351892216
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Modern scholarship has effectively demonstrated that, far from being a knee-jerk reaction to the challenges of Protestantism, the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fuelled primarily by a desire within the Church to reform its medieval legacy and to re-enthuse its institutions with a sense of religious zeal. In many ways, both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were inspired by the same humanist ideals and though ultimately expressed in different ways, the origins of both movements can be traced back to the patristic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that many contemporaries, and subsequent historians, came to view the Catholic Reformation as an attempt to challenge the Protestants and to cut the ground from beneath their feet. In this new revised edition of Dr Wright's groundbreaking study of the Counter-Reformation, the wide panoply of the Catholic Reformation is spread out and analysed within the political, religious, philosophical, scientific and cultural context of late medieval and early modern Europe. In so doing, this book provides a fascinating guide to the many doctrinal and interrelated social issues involved in the wholesale restructuring of religion that took place both within Western Europe and overseas.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Counter-Reformation and Augustinian Europe

The Counter-Reformation was originally the creation of modern historians. The negative view, adopted by nineteenth-century German, and essentially Protestant, scholars, of those developments in Western Christendom which were opposed to the sixteenth-century Reformation, was characterized by the term ‘anti-Reformation’. Since such opposition to the spread and consolidation of the Protestant Reformation was seen, not without reason, as a largely political and military story, the concept of a movement designed to counter the true Reformation of religion seemed natural. Historical study, not least of the great figures of the Reformation such as Luther himself, could not overlook the literary and polemical campaigns of Western Europe in the age of religious division, and the mixture of theological learning and personal abuse. But the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were regarded as clearly antithetic, utterly distinct, and having no common ground. For even the arguable antecedents of the Protestant reformers, among the Christian humanists of the beginning of the sixteenth century, had been condemned, ever since the days of Luther, Bucer and Erasmus, or Pole and Vergerio themselves, in those cases where commitment to the reformed faith did not in the end follow.

More recently, in the twentieth century, appreciation of a more positive aspect of the Counter-Reformation became evident, even among Protestant writers in England, for example. The enthusiasm of Catholic reformers of the later sixteenth century for purifying their own Church, as well as their zeal for persecuting Protestants, was acknowledged. But this intermediate understanding of the Counter-Reformation still shared with the pristine picture the portrayal of Catholic action, remedial as well as repressive, as a reaction to the challenge of Protestantism. Only gradually, in English historical writing at least, was the singularity of the Protestant Reformation reduced, together with the reactionary quality of Catholic reform, and a more accurate perspective provided. By the time of the posthumous publication of Evennett’s penetrating discussion of the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, it could clearly be seen that both Reformation and Counter-Reformation had common origins. The continued attempts at reform of the medieval Western Church, despite the disappointed hopes aroused by Conciliarism, produced, at the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth century, a religious revival that was both institutional and personal. While some leaders of this revival, such as Savonarola at Florence, preached the need for individual conversion of life, only subsequently becoming involved in wider questions of Church and state – with tragic results in his case – other friars, and monks and laymen, cardinals and bishops, inquisitors and rulers, promoted institutional reform in different parts of Europe. The restoration of discipline was in each case confined, to a religious order or to a diocese, or to the spontaneous activity of those seeking a new form of religious life entirely, rather than the strict observance of an ancient rule, as in the case of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands, or the first oratories in Italy. The nationalism of fifteenth-century Western European states and language-areas, evident in the General Councils of the century, was encouraged by the papal schism which those Councils had originally been designed to resolve. Papal reaction to both schism and Conciliarism further divided such efforts for Christian renewal. But such dissipation of effort was to some extent at least countered by the new common language and learning of the humanists, whose revival of classical ideals soon extended to the recovery of Christian antiquity, and the resurrection of the Church.

Different Protestant reformers, like Luther or Bucer, thus owed much to the twin developments of the late medieval and Renaissance Western Christian revival: the institutional and the intellectual. These two men, for example, had both been friars, and had experience of the internal struggle to reimpose a properly regular life on the Augustinians, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, carried on in different ways in the German lands, in Spain, in Italy and elsewhere. Both men were also at one time participants in the common correspondence of Christian humanists, before precisely doctrinal questions separated them from Erasmus. The denunciation of their former companion did not however mean their dissociation from the biblical and patristic learning of the Christian humanists. That was neither desired nor possible, any more than Luther’s desire to shed all remnants of medieval scholasticism proved possible. The Nominalism which he so despised not unnaturally continued to influence his thinking. Luther’s original call for the reform of the Church, not the creation of a new one, was, for a brief time, the same as the search of Erasmus or Colet to rediscover the truly Christian life, by studying the evidence of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. The elevation, by Luther first, and then by other magisterial Protestant reformers, and even by the literalist as opposed to the spiritualist wing of the radicals, of the Bible to a unique position as source of faith and revelation of the divine, did not in fact end Protestant attention to the writings of the Fathers of the Church. The age of division in Western Christendom and of accompanying religious polemic was that of a continued patristic revival. Both Catholic and Protestant writers made selective use of the Fathers of the Church, in an effort to prove, in the one case the continuity of the traditional Church from the apostolic age to the contemporary era, in the other the discontinuity caused by papal power and other medieval developments, a recreation of the one true Church.

The patristic revival of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century was thus a common inspiration for both the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, since both in fact emerged from the single movement for Christian revival, personal and communal, of the late medieval and Renaissance period. The Protestant Reformation, in its search for a purified Christian life, and the authority of the Fathers for that, was thus in one sense, and for all its early and further internal divisions, a continuation of important aspects of immediately pre-Lutheran religious reform. The Counter-Reformation too was a direct development from the pre-Lutheran attempts at renewed devotion, restored religious observance, and reformed diocesan government, whatever the additional elements of reaction to Protestantism which soon became evident. Among the Fathers of the Church whose writings were thus consulted by those in pre-Lutheran and those in religiously divided Europe, in their search for a reform of Western Christendom, the figure of Saint Augustine was clearly predominant. This was not, perhaps, simply the result of his prolific composition, or even of his stature as arguably the greatest of the Western Fathers, whose experiences were more immediately applicable to the conditions of later Western Christendom than those of the Eastern Fathers. Fifteenth-century disillusionment with institutional reform, as Conciliar, papal and political power struggles divided the endeavours of those seeking corporate renewal, suggested an interior approach to the problem of salvation. Here Augustine’s confessional discussion of personal conversion, his obsession with the doctrines of Justification and predestination, proved of compelling attraction. After Luther’s own private doctrinal development, on a scriptural basis, had started, Augustine seemed to provide support for Luther’s personal convictions, from the age of the Fathers; while to Catholic writers the importance of Augustine as a resident bishop, countering heretics by force as well as by argument, had an equally obvious authority.

The authority of Augustine had, in one sense, never been lacking in the Western medieval Church. But the incorporation of his views in medieval thought, by the process of textual inclusion, the reproduction of sentences from an authority, but often at second-hand, via another author, remained ultimately fragmentary. What was new, in parts of Europe at least, in the fifteenth century, was the apparent revival of attention to Augustine’s views in extenso, above all to his doctrinal discussions, as opposed to quotation of his views in a political or philosophical context. The medieval evolution of a largely Aristotelian philosophy, not least in the work of Aquinas, represented the accumulation of Augustinian references. The search for some notional separation of Church and state, increasingly in later medieval Western Europe, produced a particular concern with the City of God. But in the fifteenth century, even before the advent of printing had had its effect, a new attention to the essentially theological views of Augustine seems to be evident. The argument from the numbers of manuscript copies of a work made at any time is inevitably uncertain, because of the migration of manuscripts and the accidents of survival. But it is still striking that for most works of Saint Augustine it would seem to be the fifteenth century which, in Italy at least, produced the largest numbers of complete manuscript texts. With the exception of the City of God, there seems to have been something of a caesura, in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Italy, in the production of complete manuscripts of his works. The interest in his views which could motivate such copying revived only gradually, it appears, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: more in the fourteenth, but a clear revival, on a different scale, in the fifteenth. Moreover two works which are well represented in these fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts are the De gratia et libero arbitrio and the De libero arbitrio, both on questions of grace and free will, such as were to divide Erasmus, Luther and Calvin: the one work dating from AD 426, the other from AD 388. These two works, in other words, are compositions from either side of the division in Augustine’s life, identified by historians of the Augustinian era as occurring from AD 417, which produced a changed outlook, and a more distinctively and unreservedly ‘Augustinian’ view of man’s fate, in the later works.

Such evidence of a new concern with Augustine’s opinions on salvation and predestination is admittedly less clear for other parts of Western Europe. In the British Isles, again allowing necessarily for the chances of manuscript migration and survival, the fifteenth century produced the greatest number of copies of some works of Augustine, but for other works more appeared in the fourteenth or earlier centuries. In the Iberian peninsula the greatest number of manuscript copies of Augustine’s works often dates from the fifteenth, but sometimes from earlier centuries. But the Italian example is the most striking, given the importance of Italy, together with the Netherlands and other parts of Northern Europe, in the patristic revival which characterized Christian humanism, alongside Catholic ‘evangelicism’, of a more purely scriptural inspiration. This was evident in Italy as early as Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) and Petrarch (1307–74), despite their different religious and intellectual concerns. In the Netherlands the importance of manuscript copying in the new regular activity of the Brethren of the Common Life led, again, to the reproduction of Augustinian as well as scriptural texts; while the associated canons of Windesheim represented, in their observance, the attempt to revive the purity of the primitive rule attributed to Saint Augustine, in a way common to parts of other religious orders elsewhere, at the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth century, which followed versions of that rule.

The advent of printing encouraged scholarly comparison of texts of the Fathers, in the preparation of editions, just as it encouraged critical exegesis of scriptural texts. The Christian humanism of the Netherlands was again influential here, not least by virtue of the heroic work of Erasmus as a patristic editor, as well as biblical commentator. Erasmus published an edition of Saint Jerome in 1516, of Saint Cyprian in 1520, and of the commentaries on the psalms of Arnobius the Younger in 1522. Like the other patristic editions of Erasmus, his Hilary was first published by the Froben press at Basel. This edition, of 1523, improved on that edited by Robert Fortune and published by Bade in Paris in 1511. The improvement was based precisely on Erasmus’s comparison of the Paris edition with other manuscript copies. His work on an edition of Augustine naturally proved long, but a complete edition was finally published in 1529 in ten folio volumes. Such a monument to the religious preoccupations of divided Christian Europe was not left without competition, however. At the end of the sixteenth century an edition of Augustine emerged, again in the Netherlands from the Catholic University of Louvain: an edition which was later to be regarded as a ‘Jansenist’ one, in the light of Louvain’s importance from the time of the commentary on the City of God begun there by Juan Luis Vives in 1520, which was condemned by local and papal authorities. Louvain was the place where Baius taught, and a centre of Catholic Augustinianism. So in seventeenth-century France another edition of Augustine was published, in answer to the ‘Jansenist’ one: this ‘orthodox’ edition (1669–1700; 11 volumes) being the work of the Maurists, the French Benedictine congregation dedicated to renewed standards of study and scholarship. The works of Augustine had thus become, in the space of two centuries, a contested field, occupied not only by Catholics and Protestants, with their differing interpretations, but also by rival groups of Catholics, claiming the validity of their own reading of the Saint, on the basis of their own editions. The climax of this polemical appropriation of Augustine’s authority, within the Catholic Church, may be seen in the portrait of Saint-Cyran, who can be regarded as in some ways the founder of French Jansenism. His portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, a painter associated with the Jansenist communities of Port-Royal, shows him supported by the authorities of the Bible and of Augustine. In this restrained triumph of the Word over more external Works, from within the Catholic, not the Lutheran tradition, the authority of Augustine is finally assimilated, in splendid isolation, to the status of the scriptures.

The preoccupation of Western Christendom with the views of Augustine, then, was not a product of the Protestant Reformation, nor a concern confined to the confrontation between Catholics and Protestants. The ‘Augustinian moment’ lasted rather from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, symbolizing an obsession with the most central problems of the Christian faith, salvation and grace, Justification and predestination, which finally alienated many minds, not so much because of the terrible cost of supposedly religious wars and civil strife in Western Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as because of the increasingly sterile and embittered struggles of factions within Catholic society itself, each claiming unique access to the true statement of doctrine. The political overtones of these struggles, and the involvement above all of the Society of Jesus, led eventually to the transformation of a doctrinal into a jurisdictional dispute. So that what had once been a debate about belief became increasingly a conflict over the rights of Church and state within Catholic Europe. The questions once faced by Augustine in the City of God were again more topical, not least in France; just as they had already been for the Venetian friar, Sarpi, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with his interest in Gallican thought from Gerson onwards, in his own conflicts with the papacy.

The genesis of the Augustinian age, in the mid-fifteenth century, is arguably more obscure. The mutual recriminations of Luther and subsequently of other Protestants on the one hand and of Catholic theologians on the other, as at the Council of Trent, denouncing their opponents as Pelagians, perhaps give a clue in this context. The theological revolution effected in Western European belief by Saint Anselm (c. 1033–1109) had at first meant a greater degree of personal involvement in the salvation of the individual, a refinement of the dependence on the victory of Christ over sin and death, in the cosmic struggle against the demonic forces. But by the fifteenth century, in ‘popular’ religion at least, the concentration on the human sufferings of Christ, in the redemptive process, seemed once again to have been dissociated from the terrible demands of God as judge: destroying the subtle union of debt and redemption demonstrated by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo. This dislocation of Christ’s sacrificial person is possibly shown pervasively from the fifteenth century in religious art, with the separate dominance of scenes of judgement, dances of death, and the apocalyptic vision of Diirer and Cranach, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, finally disseminating a millenary expectation by means of the new techniques of visual reproduction; while the elaboration of physical torture in depictions of Christ’s passion is equally distinct.

This dissociation of religious sensibility has sometimes been seen as the result of temporal suffering, in Western Europe terrified by the effects of war, plague and famine. But such a materialist explanation, vague in its chronology, is perhaps less satisfactory than a more strictly theological account. Among the marks of popular belief and practice in fifteenth-century Western Christendom, from Italy to England, the growth of the devotional as opposed to the sacramental is striking. The golden age of the indulgence and of the indulgenced relic, of sermon and pilgrimage, of continued confraternity activity, including both the charitable and the flagellant, is the age of the devout layman, rather than of the priestly administration of the sacraments of the Church. Quite apart from the emergence of the Brethren of the Common Life, or subsequently of the lay and clerical membership of the Italian oratories of Divine Love, or the mixed lay and regular circles in early sixteenth-century Venetian piety, the predominance of the priest is already qualified. For while it is true that the eventual growth of anti-clericalism in Western Europe was distinct from the Lollard and other survivals of specifically heterodox attacks on the sacramental powers and status of the priesthood, the increasing independence of lay devotion is undoubted. While lay literacy, to some extent, was the basis for orthodox, even if suspected mysticism and piety in fifteenth-century England or the Netherlands, and not in fact a monopoly of Lollardy, the illiterate faithful were gaining a relative freedom from clerical mediation in practice, though not in doctrinal theory. The popularity of sermon and of pilgrimage demonstrates the efficacy of lay action in common, especially where the preachers were chosen or licensed by civic authorities: a process reaching a climax of international importance during the years of Savonarola’s influence within the Florentine Republic. The growth of the system of paying for an indulgence gave a greater assurance to the purchaser of the value of his or her acquisition, no longer entirely dependent on the assertion of hierarchical authority over souls in life and in eternity by verbal promise alone. The confraternities chose their own preachers and confessors, so that even the sacramental ministrations of their chaplains were at the ultimate disposal of those who employed them. In the chantries of fifteenth-century Europe, finally, the orthodox doctrines of priestly sacramental powers, efficacy of prayers for the dead, and validity of requiem masses were all asserted in conclusive triumph. But the individual or family or guild who erected and maintained the chantry once again exercised an economic selection in the choice of clergy to serve as mass-priests and singers. They were no more necessarily dependent on the parish priest than was the peasant who sought absolution rather from the itinerant friar.

The lack of confidence in the secular clergy which is thus demonstrated in immediately pre-Lutheran lay devotions is not surprising, in the light of the known deficiencies of a clerical caste characterized by legal privilege rather than by vocational formation. The pre-Lutheran reformers in Spain, France, England and elsewhere who endeavoured to provide some specific training for the clerical profession, especially for the non-graduate clerical proletariat, drew attention to this problem themselves. But the moral deficiencies of the parochial clergy, which in the German lands, for example, led so readily to civic approval of a return to an older German tradition of a married clergy, were perhaps more influential than the educational disabilities. The growth of self-administered devotions among the laity – as in the case of devotion to the human sufferings of Christ, as well as in Marian piety and veneration of the saints – and the elaboration of extra-parochial provision of mass and the sacraments, reduced lay dependence on the parish clergy, and allowed for individual or group employment of priests thought sufficient for the needs of the faithful. Precisely where the sacraments were still required, for mass even in the absence of frequent lay communion – whether offered for the living or for the dead, and for confession, the choice of priest mattered most. The official teaching of the Church, that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the validity of the priest’s ordination, but not on his individual moral quality, had never won perfect acceptance in the popular mind. The rejection of the services of the priest living in sin, or at least lingering suspicion of the worth of his services, could not be entirely eradicated. In this way the confrontation between the Donatists and Saint Augustine, centuries before on the North African littoral, was still repeated in Western Europe on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The admission, in the age of papal schism and Conciliar response, of the need for reform of the Western Church, underlined an unease which was both learned and popular. The failure, in effect, of the Conciliar programme for reform, was made more acute by the equal disillusionment which followed the theoretical reunion of Eastern and Western Christendom, in the face of imminent Islamic victory, at the Council of Florence, in the mid-fifteenth century.

The final adoption – largely for conspicuous reasons of political necessity – of the reform programme by the papacy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, produced in the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council public recognition of standards acknowledged to be still largely absent in the Church, on what turned out to be the eve of Luther’s challenge. While popular reaction retreated to the external works which lay piety could provide for itself, without priestly ministration, the learned response was rather to consult the earliest traditions of the Church, in the search for the true identity of the Christian life: a search conducted not, until Luther, in the scr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Counter-Reformation and Augustinian Europe
• 2 Religion and Magic in Augustinian Europe
• 3 Scholasticism and Science
• 4 New Problems of Catholic Expansion
• 5 Religious Divisions and Political Similarities
• 6 Catholic Reform and Augustinianism
• 7 Puritanism of the Right and Baroque Effect
• 8 Conclusion
• Revised Bibliography
• Index