CHAPTER II.
THE SPANISH CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[649]
§ 1. The Religious Condition of Spain.
The country, however, where all these various conceptions of what was meant by a reformation of the Church were combined in one definite scheme of reform which was carried through successfully, was Spain. It is to that country one must turn to see what mediævalists, who were at the same time reformers, wished to effect, and what they meant by a reformation of the Church. It included a measure of secular control, a revival and enforcement of all canonical laws framed to purify the morals of the clergy, a measured accommodation with Humanism, a steady adherence to the main doctrines of the Scholastic Theology, the preservation in their entirety of the hierarchy, the rites and the usages of the mediæval Church, and a ruthless suppression of heresy. Spain furnishes the example of what has been called the Catholic Reformation.
In Spain, as nowhere else in mediæval Europe, the firm maintenance of 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 Œcumenical 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.