Kaulbach And The Era Of The Reformation.
[Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: Kaulbach's picture of the Era of the Reformation now being on exhibition in this country, a republication of the above article from the pages of our French contemporary has seemed to us not inopportune.—ED. C.W.]
I call up matters still fresh in recollection, in proceeding to speak here of a work of art which so justly drew to itself the public attention at the Universal Exposition of 1867. I refer to the grand cartoon of Kaulbach, which, under the title of the Era of the Reformation, figured in the Bavarian department.
The purely artistic critic has already fulfilled his mission in regard to that remarkable composition, and it is not from the artistic point of view that I permit myself to reopen its study. I had already, years ago, admired that magnificent fresco, one of the most beautiful ornaments of the Berlin Museum; and after having a long while contemplated and meditated upon it, it seemed to me that one could not too highly praise the vigor of composition and the marvellous skill with which the artist had been able to group, within so narrow a space, so many different personages, and to render living to the eyes of the spectator one of the most stormy periods of modern times. But in this beautiful drawing there is something else than a work of art: there is a thesis. And that thesis is this: That the sixteenth century belongs wholly to the Protestant Reformation; that that Reformation is its centre, its heart, its vital principle; that everything of that period—theology, letters, science, art, the discoveries of human genius, political and military power—all came of the Reformation. Hence the name given to the tableau—the Era of the Reformation. Hence, also, the selection, the treatment, and the grouping of all the personages in it.
And since I cannot avail myself of the help of an engraving or photograph, I am going to attempt a rapid sketch, as a whole and in its principal details, of this vast composition.
In the centre, and as the culminating point toward which the whole movement of the picture converges, is figured Dr. Martin Luther. The former Augustinian monk holds himself erect, upon the uppermost step of that temple within whose walls a whole century is represented as in motion, and he raises aloft above his head, with both hands, the Bible—the Bible, that world at once both old and new, which, according to the Protestant hypothesis, the genius of Luther discovered, buried under the darkness of ignorance and Roman superstition, as, in like manner, thirty years before him the bold Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus—whom one sees at the left-hand side of the picture, resting his hand, firm and inspired, upon the map of the world—had found, in the ocean's midst, the vast continents of the American hemisphere.
At the left of Luther stand the theologians and pastors who adhered to his dogmatic teaching: Justus Jonas, and, next to him, Bugenhagen, who is distributing the Lord's Supper to the two princes, John le Sage and John Frederic, the two grand patrons of nascent Lutheranism. At the right of the Saxon monk stands Zwingle, holding also the book of the Scriptures, and Calvin, who is giving the bread and cup of the Lord's Supper to a group of Huguenots, among whom we distinguish Maurice of Saxony and Coligny.
The artist does not tell us, it is true—and I own that his pencil could hardly have told us—whether the Bible which Luther holds speaks the same language as the Bible placed in Zwingle's hands; nor how, within a step or two of the patriarch of the Reformation, Bugenhagen gives a Lord's Supper wherein is really contained, with the bread and wine, the body of Christ, while, alike near to him on the other side, Calvin is giving another Lord's Supper which is only a figure of that same body, and wherein the faithful partake of the communion of Jesus Christ by faith only.
A little beneath Luther, in the attitude of a submissive disciple and admirer, and indicating by a gesture the Wittenberg doctor, as much as to say, "There is the Master!" stands the mild Melanchthon, conversing with two savants of the times—Eberhardt of Tann and Ulrich Sazius. These two men are pressing each other's hands, as if the artist would express thereby the strange accommodations to which, in the matter of the Augsburg confession, the strict Lutherans, on the one side, and those who had a leaning toward the Zwinglian and Calvinistic ideas, on the other, lent themselves. [Footnote 13]
[Footnote 13: It is well known that Melanchthon—who personally inclined toward the ideas of Carlostadt and the sacramentarians respecting the Lord's Supper; who, moreover, upon the question of the outward hierarchy of the church, would have willingly lent himself to a compromise with the Catholics; who, underneath the whole, did not dare to contradict Luther—thought to reconcile all these difficulties by putting forth two editions of the Augsburg Confession—the edition invariata, or strictly Lutheran, and the edition variata, wherein concessions are made to Calvinistic ideas.]
Behind these corypheuses of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the precursors of the grand "liberalizing" movement have not been forgotten.
The Reformation, as is known, holds essentially to having a tradition—a rise and visible continuation, reaching back to the earlier ages. Behold them, then, these prophets and forerunners of the "word of life:" Here, Peter Waldo, Arnold of Brescia, Wickliffe, John Huss; there, Abelard, the bold metaphysician, the merciless dialectician, the same whom St. Bernard accuses of sacrificing faith to reason, and of destroying, by his explications, the essence of the mysteries; [Footnote 14] next, by his side, Savonarola and Tauler, the spiritual sons of the canonized monk of the thirteenth century, (St. Dominic,) to whose memory classic Protestantism never fails to attach the founding of the Inquisition, with all its attendant train of horrors: Tauler, of whom they desire to make one of the precursors of the new exegesis of the Scriptures; and Savonarola, whose animated and fiery gesture recalls at once the popular tribune, the Florentine republican chief, and the head-strong opposer of the church's hierarchical authority.
[Footnote 14: St. Bernard, letters 188th and 189th.]
Following upon these, come next in order all those other great geniuses of the human race, more numerous and prolific than ever in an age which justly calls itself the age of renewal, (de la Renaissance,) and when a thousand favoring circumstances had imparted mighty impulse to the human mind; and they all proceed to arrange themselves in a most harmonious manner around that renovation of Christianity and the church, which is, as it were, (in the picture,) the heart and the vital principle of all the movements of the era. Princes, warriors, statesmen, savants, artists, scholars, jurists, poets, critics, inventors—all have their place in this grand composition.
In the train of the haughty Elizabeth of England, but marching at some distance from that pitiless reformer, as if they desired to leave place for the gory shade of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, "Queen of Scots," appear Thomas Cranmer, More, Burleigh, Essex, Drake, and other gentlemen who represent the English Church. Another group brings together Albert of Brandenburg, William of Orange, Barnevelt, and, at the end, Gustavus Adolphus, evoked a century in advance, it is true, but nevertheless consecrated by his bold deeds of arms and his premature death as a hero—I was about to say as a saint—of the Protestant Church militant.
To warriors and statesmen the painter has given only a secondary place, in a work chiefly designed to glorify intellectual power; and, after the apostles of the Reformation, the honors of this grand piece of canvas are meted out to savants, scholars, and artists.
Bacon of Verulam, with his Novum Organum, makes a part of that group so vigorously designed, where are seen, with Christopher Columbus, Harvey, Vesalius, and Paracelsus. High up in the edifice, and properly placed there as in a sort of observatory, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler are studying the course of the stars, and calculating the laws of their revolutions. So much for science.
Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, and Nicolas de Cus represent philosophy, with Pico Mirandola, author of the celebrated thesis, De omni re scibili.
Petrarch, with the crown he received at the capitol, faces Shakespeare and the immortal author of Don Quixote, Michael Cervantes. The aged Hans Sachs, the popular poet of the Reformation, is there also, quite at the bottom of the picture, and bending under the weight of age. He represents that literature of the people which henceforward will always hold place growingly by the side of the special literature of the learned. This latter is personated in Reuchlin and Erasmus; and the artist has judged most wisely and properly in placing the latter of these close to Ulrich of Hutten and to Bucer, that is to say, in company with the brutal enemy of monks, and with one of those unfrocked monks whom the Rotterdam critic, with such cutting sarcasm, rallied upon their enthusiasm for a reformation which so generally, like the never-failing conclusion of a comedy, ended in marriage.
The painter has taken care not to forget the personages of the era who ought to be dearer to him than all the others together: Albert Dürer, Peter Vischer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and last, with the inspired gesture of a man who feels himself master of the future, the author of that magnificent discovery which men will henceforth make use of, alike with their reason and their freedom, their intelligence and their speech; here employing it to spread error, to persuade to falsehold, to sow dissensions; elsewhere, using it to serve for the diffusion of truth, the advancement of justice, the amelioration—intellectual, moral, and religious—of the human race: I mean Gutenberg, the immortal inventor of the art of printing. He holds in his hand that sheet, still fresh, which with deep emotion he has seen come forth from the first press, and with which he can speed round the world, crying out with Archimedes, carried away by enthusiasm, "I have found it! I have found it!"
And he has found, in fact, the mighty and formidable lever with which without difficulty he will lift the world of modern thought.
Such, so far as I have been able to describe it, passing by some personages or some details of secondary interest, is this famous picture, which, as a work of art, I admire with the fullest measure of sympathy, and have found it truly worthy of the high award made to it. But, I repeat, the artist has not been in it the artist only. He has also, at the same time, been the controversialist and the historian. He has not only made a chef-d'oeuvre of painting: he has wished also to write a page of the history of Europe. That was his right unquestionably, and I am far from disputing it with him. I will even add that, if I was a Protestant, I should be justly proud of the manner, so intelligent and bold, with which the illustrious author of the Berlin frescoes has been able to glorify the Reformation.
It is for this very reason, also, that I have profoundly studied this grand picture. In fact, if a work of art is at the same time a thesis of history or of theology, it is no longer amenable to artistic criticism only. Kaulbach has, so to speak, crowned the work of the Magdeburg centuriators, in making, as he has done, all the events of the sixteenth century the triumphal cortége of the Reformation. Historic science has the right, then, to intervene; and, without being a Baronius, one can try to answer this thesis, and to point out what there is in it of the purely systematic and exclusive.
II.
I commence by according thus much to it: To compress a whole century within the frame—narrow and always a little factitious—of a picture or of a historical representation, is no easy task. So many diverse facts to bring together, to condense, or at least to point out; so many movements and collisions of ideas to depict; so many personages to group together and arrange; then to gather this multitude into unity, to bring order out of this seeming confusion; to know precisely how to seize and place in proper relief that which can be called the culminating point of the epoch, and to make that point the centre around and from which shall radiate all the other events of the period—this is a work which demands at once great power of synthesis, a wide yet sure range of vision, an accurate sentiment of just proportions, and, in the case of a historical painting, a complete divesting of one's self of the spirit of mere system, and a most scrupulous impartiality.
Now, what strikes one, first of all, in looking at Kaulbach's grand picture, is the exclusive idea which has presided over the whole, as well as over all the details, of its composition. Even the title given by the author to his work is witness to this. It is not so much the sixteenth century that the artist has desired to paint as the Era of the Reformation; and the Reformation, moreover, solely as regarded from the Protestant point of view. Accordingly in the picture everything is treated with reference to Luther and Calvin; and the choir of great personages who figure in it serve only, so to speak, as the retinue of the new gospel and its first apostles.
But if the unhappy rupture which separated from the Catholic Church a large part of Northern Europe is one of the most considerable events of the century, it is not, however, so exclusively such that it has the right to absorb into itself all the other events of the period; and it is well known how numerous those events were in an age which should be regarded as one of the most eventful epochs in European history.
And it is not solely from the point of view of religious and artistic history that it is just to make this objection; it should be made, moreover, in behalf of political history. In fact, whatever influence Protestantism may have exercised upon the relations of the civil states among and toward each other, it is but slight up to the seventeenth century, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and the treaties of Westphalia, which caused new principles to prevail in the public law of Europe. He has been, therefore, entirely blind to the grandest political contest of the sixteenth century—that between France and Austria; a contest that holds too large a place in the history of that century not to be noticed and made mention of, at least by introducing into the sketch the princes in whom it was personified—Charles V. and Francis I.
Francis I., the enlightened patron of letters, the founder of the College of France, the friend of Benvenuto Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci, the secret supporter of the Lutherans of the empire, should have had, by these by-passages of his life, some right not to be forgotten by the pencil of the German painter. But if state policy caused him to lend a helping hand to the Protestants of Germany—the adversaries of Charles V.—that same policy, joined with religious motives, caused him to sign the edicts of proscription against the Protestants of his own kingdom; and the prince who, in despite of his sister's sympathies for Calvin, refused to drag France upon the precipice of the Reformation, could scarcely find favor with the panegyrists of Protestantism.
As to Charles V., even had he not joined to his title of Emperor of Germany the crown of Spain, with all his possessions in the Low Countries and in the New World, one would have still found it strange to see him excluded from the cortége of sovereigns, politicians, and statesmen who gave lustre to the sixteenth century.
A sketch of the sixteenth century, then, is incomplete without these two princes, who represent the fierce struggle between the two most powerful Catholic nations at an epoch in which the religious revolutions of the European world should have made such an omission, so it would seem, impossible. Strange antagonism indeed that between these two nations, who would have been able by their accord to arrest the political progress of Protestantism, and to hinder the theology of Wittenberg and Geneva from becoming subsequently a preponderating influence in the direction of the affairs of Europe! Strange and restless antagonism, which occupies a large part of the political history of the sixteenth century; fills, again, the seventeenth with Richelieu and Louis XIV.; seemingly is quieted for an instant when Marie Antoinette shares the throne of Louis XIV. and Marie-Louise that of Napoleon the First; survives, however, three centuries of wars, of changes and revolutions of every sort, to place anew the two peoples in hostile array upon the fields of Magenta and Solferino, and only seems bound to disappear when it has arrived at one of its extreme but logical consequences, namely, the exaltation of the power which most fully represents upon the European continent the Protestant enthusiasm and the ancient grudges against France. It is, in fact, only since the battle of Sadowa that this antagonism between these two great Catholic nations has seemed to give place to mutual intelligence of a common danger, and to that sympathetic regard which a recent and distinguished visit has consecrated, so to speak, in the face of Europe, and commended to the intelligent applause of the people of Paris.
The exclusive glorification of Protestantism in the master-work of Kaulbach has also been an occasion of another lamentable omission. It is not enough—be it said without excessive and immoderate partiality toward our own country—it is not enough to have made France represented only by Calvin and by Coligny in the imposing cortége of all the glories of the sixteenth century. This systematic exclusion is explained even by itself. In such a composition the places of honor were to be reserved to the countries which welcomed Protestantism with an enthusiasm so ardent, or submitted themselves to its dictation with so strange a docility. One knows, on the other hand, what insurmountable resistance France opposed to the introduction and establishment of Protestantism. It cost her, it is true, more than forty years of continual wars. And what wars those terrible fratricidal and religious strifes of the sixteenth century were; stirred up and kept alive on both sides by the most violent passions, and which, after the unhappy and sanguinary convulsions in which were consumed the reigns of Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III., would have ended surely in the breaking up of the ancient national unity, if Providence had not, at the conclusion of those frightful dissensions, caused to intervene a prince pre-destined to pacify the minds, quiet the discords, and close up and heal the deep wounds of the country! Henry IV. arrives at the end of the sixteenth century, as it were in order to bring about union between Protestantism vanquished and Catholicity triumphant. He gives to the latter the pledge of a public conversion; to the former, the benefit of a legal existence; and, especially in rendering sacred the respect due to minorities, he demonstrates, better than by all arguments, and perhaps for the very reason that his conversion was less a work of devotion than of policy, how the genius of the French nation was opposed to the doctrines of the reformers.
Whatever may be said of the equivocal sincerity of his Catholicity and of the blemishes of his private life, Henry IV., who belongs to the sixteenth century by his birth, by his elevation to the throne and some of the most considerable transactions of his reign, worthily represents, at the close of an epoch so disturbed, some of the highest and most rightful aspirations of what may be called, right or wrong, the spirit of modern times. Great prince assuredly was he who could cause to triumph over passions envenomed by the civil and religious wars of half a century that love of common country, in which, despite of all that would divide them, the French people ought to feel themselves children of the same mother and defenders of the same flag.
The exclusion—almost entire—of France from a picture designed to glorify the sixteenth century, is not the only, nor even the gravest, reproach which historical criticism has the right to address to its author.
It is, still further, authorized to demand of him if it is strictly just to cause this grand composition, artistic, scientific, and literary, to do honor solely to Luther and Calvin—a composition which, from a certain and strictly proper point of view, would have sufficed to the glory of an epoch—and above all, if it does not do a strange violence to truth to enroll under the banner of Protestantism such men as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus, Michael Angelo, and Raphael?
The name of Shakespeare, indeed, not long since stirred up quite a lively discussion upon this very subject In the eyes of a certain school it seemed to import absolutely that, to the honor of letters, the immortal author of Hamlet and of Othello did not belong to the Church of Rome—as if Corneille and Racine sparkled with any the less brilliancy because they were Catholics, or that the dramatic art had need to be ashamed of Polyeucte, Esther, and Athalie.
The question has been examined with all the attention which it merits, and the conclusion to which a conscientious inquiry seems to bring us is, that, if Shakespeare belonged by his birth to the time of the Reformation, it is not, nevertheless, necessary to ascribe, either to the gospel of Luther and Calvin or to the Draconian Protestantism of Queen Elizabeth, the masterly productions of his genius.
As to Christopher Columbus, who does not know, I will not say his obedience and filial devotion to the Church of Rome, but the profound piety of his soul and the tenderness of his religious sentiments? According to the chronicler who has preserved for us in Latin the admirable prayer made by that great man at that solemn hour of his life when, triumphant at last over so many distrusts and so many wrongs, over so many delays and so many obstacles, conqueror, so to speak, of the elements and of men, but always submissive to God, he cast himself upon his knees on the land of the New World, as if to take possession of it in the name of faith. "O God!" he said, "eternal and omnipotent, thou hast by thy holy Word created heaven and earth and sea. Blessed and glorified be thy name; praised be thy majesty which has deigned by thy humble servant to cause that thy holy name should be known and proclaimed in this other part of the world."
Now, by whom, think you, had the bold discoverer the intention of proclaiming and making known the name of Jesus Christ in the New World? Was it by the Methodist and Quaker missionaries? or by those apostolic men who, docile to the word of the Roman pontiff, and like him "fishers of men," went forth to announce the Gospel to every creature and to "cast the net of the word" amidst all nations? It is mere idle fancy, then, to connect with Luther and Calvin that wonderful movement, made up of theoretical science and of boldness, of learned calculations and of enthusiastic intuitions, which set out to open to the adventurous genius of the race of Japheth the vast field of enterprise presented by the continents of America and the Archipelagoes of Oceanica. Chronology, moreover, suffices to give the lie very explicitly to this iniquitous claim. Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, and died in 1506: the same year in which Martin Luther entered as a novice the Augustinian convent of Erfurt, and when no one looked to see him become one day an adversary of the Papacy.
The Papacy! Far rather with its remembrance should be associated that grand epoch of modern Europe, that new crusadal enterprise, not to recover the tomb of Christ, but to plant the cross, to propagate the Gospel, and to accomplish the prophecies respecting the universality of the church. It was, in fact, a pope, and that pope an Alexander VI.—the same that proved how much the grandeur of that institution is independent of the worth of individuals—it was Borgia, so severely judged by history, who promulgated the famous bull of 1493, designed to draw the line of demarcation between the discoveries of the Portuguese and those of the Spaniards. From that bull, and from the names of the peoples who bore away the palm from all the rest of Europe in the career of great discoveries, it follows that the Protestant Reformation had nothing to show or pretend to in that splendid episode of the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All those intrepid navigators were Catholics; and the only power which intervened to regulate and pacify the feverish movement that bore them onward was the Church of Rome—the Papacy!
It may be said, perhaps, that the Spaniards, in discovering America, put to shame the Catholic religion by their sharp cupidity and the disgraceful severity of their conduct toward the natives. We have not the slightest intention of transforming the soldiers of Cortez and of Pizarro into peaceful missionaries. If the ferocity of those men disgraced the Gospel, so much the worse for them. But as to the church, if it be insisted on that she shall be mixed up with the question, she has nothing to lose; for it was she herself, and she alone, who intervened to moderate the cupidity of the conquerors, and to defend against it the cause of the conquered. To her alone belongs the name, ever to be venerated, of Bartholomew Las Casas, the eloquent pleader in behalf of Catholicity and of its beneficent action upon society. As to the great Italian artists of the sixteenth century, and particularly as to Michael Angelo and Raphael, it is still more arbitrary, if possible, to have enrolled them in the army of the innovators. What could be more entirely Catholic than the inspirations and great works of these men of genius? Not to speak in detail of the inimitable Madonnas of Raphael, nor of the gigantic frescoes of Michael Angelo in the Sistine chapel, nor the many other marvellous works with which they have for ever enriched Italy and Europe; but of the church of St. Peter, upon which both had the glory of working, is it not, as it were, the very personification, at once ideal and plastic, of the entire Catholic Church? It is the grand church of the popes; it is there that repose, by the side of the illustrious chiefs St. Peter and St. Paul, the remains of so many sovereign pontiffs. It is under its dome that is celebrated, on the grand solemnities of the year and by the very hands of the vicar of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice of the Mass. It is from its balcony that is given, on those same solemnities, that pontifical benediction, preceded by that absolution and those indulgences, against which for three hundred years Protestantism never loses an occasion of casting its anathemas or its sarcasms; save perhaps when one of its children, assisting on Easter-Day at that wonderful solemnity, and hearing the sonorous and affecting voice of Pius IX., at the moment of imparting benediction to the world, mingling itself with the roll of drums, the discharge of cannon, and the chimes of the thousand bells of Rome, falls upon his knees in spite of himself, subdued by I know not what mysterious power, and rises up again with the confession that the inspirations of Catholicism are far differently fitted to charm the soul and seize hold upon the heart than the chilling ceremonial of a Calvinistic Lord's Supper under the arches of St. Paul's in London. In a word, everything of that grand basilica of the Eternal City, from its corner-stone to the cross which surmounts its dome, all has been inspired by Catholic thought; and it may be affirmed with assurance that all the grand artists who worked upon it could say as Raphael replied to Leo X.: "I love so much the Church of St. Peter!" [Footnote 15]
[Footnote 15: Reply of Raphael to the brief of Leo X., naming him superintendent of the work of the church. See, further, the will of Raphael, (cited in Audin's Leo X. t. ii. p. 347.)]
Moreover, independently of all individual names, can it not be said in a general manner that it is going quite counter to historic truth to attempt to connect the art-movement of the sixteenth century with the influence of Luther and Calvin? It is well enough known, in truth, what was the attitude of the Reformation, especially of the Calvinistic part of it, toward the beautiful and the divine in the arts. Many of our old cathedrals in France still bear, after three hundred years, the marks of the iconoclastic fury of the Huguenots. The literal interpretation—literal even to barbarousness—of the text in Exodus, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images," it translated, especially in its beginnings, into a relentless proscription; and the statues, pictures, and wonderful great church-windows, where the middle ages had expended so much of faith and often so much of genius, disappeared under the blows of a most savage vandalism.
They are ours, then, altogether ours, those divine men, as the Greeks would have called them, who have written in the history of art the immortal pages stamped with the names of Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. It is not around Luther and Calvin that they should be grouped, but around those Roman pontiffs who gave such a vigorous impulse to literature and the arts, and who caused all those beautiful poems of painting or of stone to serve for the glorification of the Catholic Church. On that point, moreover, public sentiment has passed judgment for all future time. The history of the arts does not know the era of Luther; it knows and will always know the era of Leo X.
III.
If it had been given to one of those masters of art of the sixteenth century to make a synoptical picture of that grand epoch, he would have singularly modified the perspectives and enlarged the horizons. In regard to that rebellious monk who holds up the Bible as a standard of revolt; in regard to those men who surround him, and among whom are found at the same time the co-workers and the adversaries of his work; a Melanchthon, who had been his disciple, and a Zwingle who had been his rival—strange council, where there is no unanimity except to attack and deny, and where there is division when the matter to be treated of is that of affirming and establishing—in this respect, one would have seen, majestically grouped upon the steps of a temple based, sixteen hundred years previously, upon immovable foundations, the Fathers of the Council of Trent, who, during a term of nearly twenty years, had brought together, classified, and fixed, in wonderful conformity with the whole current of tradition, the divers points of the doctrine and the discipline of the Christian church.
Five popes [Footnote 16] occupied the See of St. Peter during the holding of that memorable council. Some among them may, perhaps, be justly blameworthy for this or that fault, in their administration; but to have been able to convoke and reunite that immortal assembly; to have caused it to resume its labors when they had been interrupted; to have conducted them through so many obstacles and difficulties, coming from men or things, to their close; to have, at last, as was done by Pius IV., perpetuated, so to say, the authority and reformatory action of that oecumenical assembly by the institution of that Congregation of the council, whose mission, for three hundred years past, has been to explain and put into practical execution the decrees passed at Trent—this is evidently one of the most important pages of the history of the Reformation within the fold of Christianity, and is, perhaps, one where the divine power and the supernatural constitution of the church shine forth most visibly. For neither the popes who presided over the council nor the bishops who composed it were, taken individually, men of genius; and it is permitted to us to say that in great matters where the personal consideration of man appears the least, there the wisdom and power of God shine forth all the more strikingly.
[Footnote 16: Paul III., Julius III., Marcellus II., Paul IV., and Pius IV.]
And then, again, around those two centres which mingle themselves in one—the Papacy and the general council—and which represent so forcibly, in the face of the precocious divisions of Protestantism, the grand and living unity of the church of Jesus Christ, what astonishing fecundity for good, what varied resources, what fruitful germination of men and deeds! What souls, those great saints of the sixteenth century, recruited from among all ranks of society, and to whom Providence seems to have confided the mission of replying by some beneficent institution to all the attacks and all the negations of Protestantism!
Would that, then, be a picture wanting in grandeur, where a competent artist—wishing to glorify in the sixteenth century not the warlike Reformation which rent asunder without remorse the ancient and majestic unity of Christendom, but the peaceful and fruitful reform which multiplied, according to the needs of a much troubled and suffering age, grand inspirations and magnanimous self-sacrifices—should group around the living centre of the church Ignatius Loyola and his brave companions, the pastor Pascal Baylon and the grand nobleman Francis Borgia, St. Philip Neri and St. Camillus of Lelli, St. Charles Borromeo in the midst of the plague at Milan and St. Francis of Sales evangelizing the populations of Chablais? And yet this enumeration must be limited to the names of the more illustrious only, and to works the most considerable.
Now, in these names are found truly personified the inspirations which constitute, in its plenitude, the veritable spirit of Christianity.
First, the spirit of zeal and apostleship. Those who have seen the frescoes of the church of St. Ignatius at Rome remember with what just pride a Jesuit painter has represented the triumphs of the first fathers of his company over heresy and infidelity. And unless blinded by incurable prejudices, what a striking comparison can one make between Melanchthon, the disciple of Luther, and that student of the Paris University, the friend of St. Ignatius—that St. Francis Xavier who, setting out for the Indies in 1541 and dying in 1552, had converted, by himself alone, more heathen in a dozen years than all the Protestant missionaries united have been able to convert in a century; that man whose life would seem but a legend of olden times, were it not authenticated by most unexceptionable documents, and had it not appeared in the sixteenth century, which is far less the age of enthusiasm than that of criticism—that man, in fine, to whom a Protestant, Baldeus, has had the impartiality to render a splendid eulogy, closing with that apostrophe so naïve and nearly as honorable to the writer as to the hero, "Would to God that, having been what you were, you might be of us!"
If the Company of Jesus represents in so high a degree the spirit of zeal, behold St. Theresa and St. Peter of Alcantara, who represent none the less worthily the spirit of penitence—that essential part of the Christian life, so entirely foreign to the heroes and the works which spring forth from Protestantism.
In contrast with the rehabilitation of the flesh, openly preached and practised by Luther, by Henry VIII., by the Landgrave of Hesse and the principal corypheuses of the Reformation, see how, in the train of these two Spaniards—that reformer of Carmel and that son of St. Francis—whole generations follow. They embrace with enthusiasm that hidden life of the cloister, where the superficial glance of the man of the world sees only an arbitrary captivity and aimless mortifications; but where the eyes of faith discover the secret of those acts and movements of reparation which preserve from ignominy and ruin the ages dragged along the dangerous declivity of scepticism and immorality, by teaching men that, if unbelief and luxury destroy individuals and societies, it is the force of prayer, united to that of sacrifice, which alone can raise them up again.
Finally, after the spirit of zeal and the spirit of penitence, the spirit of charity completes the fulness of the Christian life.
Now, can Protestantism take any offence, if, in looking over with it the list of its founders and apostles, we demand of it where there is to be found, among those ardent adversaries of Roman superstitions, a single man to whom one can conscientiously give the title of benefactor and consoler of men?
I see Luther, indeed, presenting the Bible to Germany surprised and misled; and Calvin administering the cup of the Lord's Supper to gentlemen of the court of Francis I. or to the rich burgesses of Geneva. Here, in one place, Reuchlin and Ulrich of Hutten are jeering, and laughing at the monks, and there, in another, Gustavus Adolphus is brandishing his valiant sword in defence of the new gospel; but still, again, among these bold promoters of the Reformation, among these indefatigable champions of gospel-christianity, as they proudly entitle themselves, would that I were shown one of those souls inspired from above to pour upon the miseries of the age the treasures of divine consolations! I behold party-leaders, Bible-expounders, soldiers, politicians, and savants; but of friends of the poor, of protectors of old age and deserted infancy, of men who sacrifice all and who sacrifice themselves even, to gain the right, the privilege, of drying up the tears of the afflicted and of holding out the helping hand to the unfortunate—of these I see none. These are all in the ranks of that church whose privilege it will always be, and which no sect has ever been able to take from her, to prove that she alone is the veritable spouse of Jesus Christ, because she alone is the true mother of men! Behold St. Philip Neri and his companions of the Oratory of Rome, whose remembrances still live in the hospital of the Trinity for pilgrims—St. Philip Neri, whose name, after more than three hundred years, is always associated in the Eternal City with the idea of whatever is most tender and good. By the side of St. Philip, his contemporary and friend, St. Camillus of Lellis, institutor of a congregation specially devoted to the care of the sick poor; while, by a like inspiration, the Spaniard, St. John of God, established, in 1540, that charitable order, spread since then throughout Christendom, and whose members rival in self-sacrificing devotion the disciples of St. Camillus in consecrating themselves to the work of relieving human infirmities. In fine, if St. Vincent of Paul constitutes the glory and, more than the glory, the consolation of the seventeenth century, the sixteenth century has, nevertheless, the right to claim him in part; for it saw his birth, and it gave to him the first inspirations of that zeal and charity which draw down every day upon his name the grateful benedictions of all who languish and suffer—upon that name at once the humblest and the most popular of all names.
In conclusion, if, in this picture of the Catholic glories of the sixteenth century, it were necessary also to find place for men of the sword and men of law, are there many figures more martial than that of Bayard, the chevalier "without fear and without reproach," or those of the admirable Knights-Hospitallers of Malta, who, in 1585, under the orders of their grand-master, La Valette, stood as a living rampart, against which all the forces of Islamism dashed and broke themselves, and who did for Christian Europe in the sixteenth century what, a century later, the immortal Sobieski had to do with his brave Polanders?
As to men of law, Catholic France has the right to name with pride the grand-chancellor Hôpital; and Protestant England has not the right to claim Thomas More. It was this courageous magistrate who refused to subscribe to the divorce of Henry VIII., and who, when entreated by his wife not to expose himself to capital punishment by opposing the king's wishes, replied in these beautiful words: "What! Would you have me compromise my eternity for the sake of twenty years which yet perhaps remain for me to live?" He died upon the scaffold, the 6th of July, 1535, with the constancy of a martyr; worthy precursor of that long and illustrious generation of witnesses to the faith, who, during all the second half of the sixteenth century, watered with purest of blood the soil of England, and did more honor, it seems to me, to the ancient renown of "The Isle of Saints" than a Cranmer, the courtly and apostate archbishop, or an Essex, one of the numerous lovers of that princess who foully stained with mire and blood the throne upon which she sat, and that state church of which she made a mere vassal of that throne.
After having rectified and completed, so far as it has been given me to do, this painting, so original and vigorous, but at the same time so manifestly devoted to a preconceived and systematized idea, I arrive at a conclusion which is applicable not to the sixteenth century only, but to all the epochs of history.
It is that, after the likeness of man himself, each phase of the life of humanity bears in it two souls, and, as it were, two humanities. These are the twins that struggled together in the womb of Rebecca, and on the occasion of which the Lord responded to the troubled mother: "Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided out of thy womb, and one people shall overcome the other." (Gen. xxv. 23.)
Yes, as each one of us bears within him two men, whose unceasing struggle makes up the whole prize and the whole grandeur of the moral life, so in like manner each age of the world bears within it two ages: the one which is the docile instrument of God in the pursuit of truth and the accomplishment of justice; and the other, which paralyzes a part of the living forces of humanity by leading them astray into error, or by putting them to the service of selfishness and evil.
This grand principle of the philosophy of history, due to Christian psychology and the true knowledge by man of himself, has been admirably demonstrated by St. Augustine. One sees, from numerous passages in his writings, how that holy doctor was impressed by the perpetual antagonism and irreconcilable opposition between these two powers, or "cities," (as he terms them,) who always and everywhere are making war upon each other, and to whom each succeeding century serves but as a battle-field.
Quite as much and even more than others, does the sixteenth century present to the look of the observer the militant dualism of these two principles: the one, calling itself the Reformation of the church by disorder and violence; the other, wishing to be, and which has been, the fruitful and pacific renovation of Christian life by humble zeal and true charity. The Protestant Reformation claims the sixteenth century as exclusively its own. I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated that, by its most beautiful and most enduring parts and characteristics, the century belongs neither to Luther nor Calvin; but that the Catholic Church can exhibit it with just pride alike to her friends and her enemies.
From this study, made in the light of this principle, I would also deduce a second conclusion and apply it directly to the times in which we live.
Are we not ourselves witnesses of and actors in a struggle like or analogous to that which, before our day, divided our fathers? Yes, our century, soon to complete the third quarter of its term, itself also is engaged in this struggle between, so to term it, two opposing cities or communities. For some time past, this struggle seems to have entered upon a new phase and into a most sharp crisis.
With whom will victory rest, and which of the two principles shall carry captive the other in its triumph, so as to decide definitively the character of this epoch? That is a secret as yet only known to God, and it is not mine to attempt a reply to so hidden and mysterious a question. What I do know is, that we ought to oppose, with all our might, those who, wishing to bring about a violent retrograde movement in European society, threaten every day to carry us back to the age of Voltaire, and who present to us the saturnalia of '93 as the ideal of liberty, prosperity, and progress!
What I know, again, is, that but yesterday the antagonism between these two opposing powers (des deux cités) was personified in two men, upon whom, if I mistake not, the judgment of posterity has already begun to be made up: One of them, who represents, in all his serene majesty and with impressive authority even in his weakness, the force of right—the august and mild pontiff, whom twenty-two years of revolutions and ingratitude do not dishearten and dissuade from blessing the world, and calling down, by his prayers, upon sorely tried and troubled society, the spirit of wisdom, counsel, and peace; the other, that incorrigible leader of the antichristian army, the man of those bold deeds whose ephemeral triumph aspires to build up right upon force, but which one day, I hope, Italy will disavow in the name of her religious traditions, as well as in the name of her true and sound liberal traditions.
No; this nineteenth century, where by the side of so much that is evil there is so much that is good—so many generous sallies of self-devotion, so many hidden acts of self-sacrifice, so many solid virtues—the century which has given us a Curé of Ars and a Pius IX., an Affre and a Lamoricière, a Lacordaire and a Ravignan, an O'Connell and a Zamoyski, a Jane Jugan—founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor—and those students to whom not only France, but the Catholic world, are indebted for the institution of the Conferences of St. Vincent of Paul; this century will never be dragged down to the gemoniae scalae [Footnote 17] of history with the ignominious stamp upon it of having been the Era of Garibaldi. It will triumph over all the obstacles heaped upon its pathway by scepticism, by false science, and by the violence of party-spirit. These adverse forces seem at this hour, it is true, to take up with renewed energy the struggle which for eighteen centuries nothing has interrupted; but by so doing they only serve to show us more clearly our duty, and to urge us on the more strenuously to fulfil it.
[Footnote 17: The gemoniae scalae were steps in ancient Rome, near the prison called Tullianum, down which the bodies of those who had been executed in prison were dragged and thrown into the Forum, to be there exposed to the gaze of the multitude. TRANS.]
Translated From The French.