Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/519

Rh notice at Rome. The popes of the Renaissance were profoundly uninterested in theology; they were far more at home in an art gallery, or in fighting to recover their influence as temporal Italian princes, gravely shattered during the long residence of the papal court at Avignon in the 14th century. But these secular interests came to an end with the so-called sack of Rome in 1527, when Charles V. turned his arms against Clement VII., and made the pope a prisoner in his own capital. Thenceforward there was no more thought of territorial aggrandisement. The popes, as the phrase went, became Spanish chaplains, with a fixed territory guaranteed to them by Spanish arms; apart from the addition of Ferrara and one or two other petty principalities on the extinction of the reigning house, its boundaries remained unchanged till Napoleonic times. Under Clement's successor, Paul III., a new state of things began to dawn. Hitherto the way had been blocked by a horde of protonotaries, dataries and other officials—purveyors of indulgences, dispensations and such-like spiritual favours—to whom reform spelt ruin. Even the Reformation did not move them; if less money came in from Germany, that was all the more reason for leaving things unchanged in France and Spain. But among Paul's cardinals were three remarkable men, the Italians Contarini and Sadolet, and the Englishman Reginald Pole, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury under Mary. All three were disciples of Erasmus, the great apostle of a new, tolerant, scholarly religion very different from the grimy pedantry of the medieval doctors. It was better, he said, to be weak in Duns Scotus, but strong in St Paul—than to be crammed with all the learning of Durandus, and ignorant of the law of Christ. Men trained in this school were not likely to be tender towards vested interests in darkness, least of all when they stood in the way of a reconciliation with the Protestants: for the cardinals thought that the strength of the Reformation lay much less in the attractiveness of Luther's doctrines than in his vigorous denunciations of the vices of the clergy. Once root out abuses with a firm hand, and they believed that a few timely concessions on points of doctrine would tempt most Protestants back within the Roman pale. This belief was shared by

Charles V. Together they persuaded the unwilling pope to call a general council. It met in December 1545, at the Tirolese city of Trent, with Pole as one of the three presidents (see ).

As a means of reconciliation the council was a signal failure. The Protestants refused to attend an assembly where even the most conciliatory prelate could hardly condescend to meet them on equal terms. Nor was Pole allowed to use the only possible means of overcoming their reluctance. He had wished to begin by reforming abuses before proceeding to sit in judgment on doctrinal errors. But this arrangement was cried down as a revolutionary departure from all established precedent; and he had much ado to secure the compromise that doctrines and practical reforms should be simultaneously discussed. But in the midst of its labours the council was prorogued (March 1547) in consequence of a quarrel between the pope and emperor. In 1551 it met again, only to be again prorogued in 1552. Ten years later it met again for a third and final session, lasting throughout 1562 and 1563. During those ten years great changes had taken place. Charles V. had followed Pole and his peace-loving colleagues to the grave; in his place stood his son, Philip II. of Spain, while the intellectual leadership of the council fell to Jaime Laynez, general of the newly founded Society of Jesus. There was no longer any question of reconciliation with the Protestants. North Germany, England, Scandinavia were irretrievably lost to Rome; wars of religion had broken out in France. Clearly the one hope was to enter into a desperate struggle for the possession of such countries as still hung in the balance; and that could best be done by striking at the heart of the Reformation. Protestantism centred—or was by Catholics supposed to centre—in a mysterious “right of private judgment”; the council accordingly retorted by hymning the praises of obedience, of submitting to authority and never thinking for

oneself. To waverers it held up an absolutely sure and uniform Rule of Faith, contrasting impressively with the already multitudinous variations of the Protestant Churches. Moreover, thanks to Laynez, it accomplished this task without running the obvious danger of tying itself hand and foot to the past. When old-fashioned theologians talked about the canons and councils of antiquity, Laynez answered that the Church was not more infallible at one time than another; the Holy Ghost spoke through the decrees of Trent quite as plainly and directly as through the primitive Fathers. Thus the council's authority became at once peremptory and elastic. But the real gainer was the pope. Hitherto infallibility had been thought of as the supreme weapon of the Church's armoury, destined only for use at some extraordinary crisis; hence it was naturally conceived of as residing only in the extraordinary authority of a general council presided over by the pope. Since the outbreak of the Reformation, however, extraordinary crises, calling for immediate decision, might arise at any moment. It was no longer possible to wait for the assembling of a general council; stronger and stronger grew the tendency to ascribe infallibility to the pope alone, as being always on the spot.

Doctrine and discipline once settled at Trent, the work of counter-reformation could begin. Rebels were won back

by force wherever force could be applied. In Spain the Inquisition soon snuffed out the few Reformers. In Italy, though declared Protestants were few, there was widespread sympathy with some of Luther's ideas; a committee of cardinals at Rome was accordingly organized into an Inquisition, with branches at the chief Italian towns. For half a century trials were many at Venice and elsewhere, but actual executions were only common at Rome; the most illustrious victim was the philosopher Giordano Bruno, burnt in 1600. In the imperial dominions, however, there could be no recourse to the stake. The peace of Augsburg (1555) forbade the German princes to persecute, though it recognized their right to determine to what religion their subjects should belong, and to banish nonconformists. At first this compromise had worked in favour of the Reformation, but presently the Catholic princes began to turn it against their Protestant subjects. “Governments learned to oppress them wisely, depriving them of church and school, of pastor and schoolmaster; and by those nameless arts with which the rich used to coerce the poor in the good old days. Fervent preachers came amongst them, widely differing in morality, education, earnestness and eloquence from the parish clergy, whose deficiencies gave such succour to Luther. Most of those who, having no taste for controversy, were repelled by scandals were easily reconciled. Others, who were conscious of disagreement with the theology of the last thousand years, had now to meet disputants of a more serious type than the adversaries of Luther, and to meet them unsupported by experts of their own. Therefore it was by honest conviction, as well as by calculated but not illegal coercion, that the Reformation was driven back” (Acton, Lectures on Modern History, p. 123).

This system was not an unmixed success; for its extension to Bohemia early in the 17th century brought about the Thirty Years' War. But it obliged the authorities to pay anew attention to the training of the clergy. The “seminary system” came into being—that is, the custom of obliging candidates for ordination to spend several years in a theological college, whence lay influences were carefully excluded. But ecclesiastical learning of a wider type was also promoted. Gregory XIII. (1572-85) and Sixtus V. (1585-90) dreamed of making Rome once more the capital of European culture. Gregory reformed the Calendar, and founded the university that bears his name. Five years of power were enough for Sixtus to reform the central government of the Church and the administration of the Papal States, to set on foot the Vatican press and issue an official edition of the Vulgate. Their efforts bore fruit in many quarters. In Rome arose Cardinal Baronius, first of