FRA BERNARDINO OCHINO.
The blessed Bernardine, the glory of Sienna and of the Franciscan order, had a sad counterpart in him who forms the subject of this sketch. Fra Bernardino Ochino, one of the conspicuous scandals of the sixteenth century, was a son of Domenico Tommassino, of Sienna. He received his surname from the Via del Oca, which contained the residence of his obscure parents. Having taken the habit of the Observantines, he left his convent to study medicine at Perugia. He there formed a friendship with Giulio de' Medici, afterwards Clement VII. Returning to his order, he received successive places of dignity; but whether dissatisfied with these, or really seeking a more perfect life, he again left it to embrace the austere rule of the Capuchins, then for the first time established in Sienna. Few details remain of this portion of the life of Ochino, and historians differ in explaining the motives of this change. Whatever they might have been, it is certain that his fame as a preacher was acquired shortly after his entrance in the Capuchin order. His reputation grew daily. The most exacting critics gave him unqualified praise. Sadoletus ranked him with the greatest orators of antiquity. The Bishop of Fossombrone addressed him the most flattering sonnets, and Charles V. was heard to exclaim that the spirit and unction of Fra Bernardino could melt the very stones. The over-fastidious Bembo had said of the preachers of his day, "Why should I go to listen to their sermons? One hears nothing but the subtle doctor disputing with the angelic, and, finally, Aristotle called in to settle the question."
Nevertheless, Ochino stood even the test of Bembo's criticism. For the latter wrote from Venice to the Marquis of Pescara, April 23d, 1536:
"I send inclosed to your illustrious lordship the letters of our reverend Fra Bernardino, whom I have heard with inexpressible pleasure during the too short period of this Lent."
To the parish priest he wrote:
"Do not neglect to force Fra Bernardino to eat meat. For, unless he suspend his Lenten abstinence, he cannot resist the fatigue of preaching."
This last remark of Bembo reveals to us something of Ochino's way of life at that time. He had, indeed, adopted those severe austerities which, according to the unanimous doctrine of the saints, though often the means of advancement in the supernatural life, yet, when undertaken or persevered in from an ill-advised spirit, generally lead to ruin, and become at once food and clothing for the most diabolical pride. The famous preacher travelled always on foot, bare-headed and unshod. He slept at night beneath the trees that grew on the wayside, or, if under the roof of some noble host, on the pavement of the guest's chamber. As he begged from door to door, in the crowded cities, the throng knelt, awed by his wan features and fiery eye, and the thin emaciated frame, which seemed barely to support the coarse brown habit of his order. At the tables of the nobility he did not vary the least detail of his penitential abstinence, eating from only one dish, and never even tasting wine.
When he preached, says a contemporary, the churches could not contain his hearers, and a great crowd followed him wherever he went. Nor was his preaching without fruit. The infamous Aretino either underwent or feigned a conversion, and wrote to the pope, at the instance of Ochino, begging pardon for his libels against the papal court. In the same letter, dated from Venice, April 21st, 1537, he says that Bembo "has sent a thousand souls to paradise by transferring from Sienna to this Catholic city Fra Bernardino, a religious as humble as he is virtuous."
While at Venice, Ochino procured a convent and installed there a community of Capuchins. In June, 1539, by invitation of the municipal assembly, he preached at Sienna. This he did again in the following year, with great success and fruit. It was on this occasion that he introduced the devotion of the Quarant' Ore. It appears, however, that instead of the blessed sacrament, the usual object of this devotion, Fra Bernardino exposed for veneration the crucifix. In a letter to the confraternity of St. Dominic, preparatory to the introduction of this pious practice, he writes:
"You are asked in charity to join with many others in accomplishing two very pious and holy works—the first of which consists in inviting and encouraging one another, with a holy love, to do penance with a true contrition, a sincere confession, and entire satisfaction, joining spiritual and corporal alms with fasts strictly kept and holy prayer, in order to meditate on the transformation of the soul in Christ, her well beloved; and, humbly prostrate at his sacred feet, to expose to him our particular spiritual wants and those of all our brethren, encouraging and aiding our soul, by good will, to clothe herself with those divine virtues, faith, hope, and charity."
The remainder of the letter sets forth in detail the arrangements for carrying out the public ceremonies of the Quarant Ore, all breathing the fragrance of Catholic piety. Yet it is more than probable that the first plague-spots had already become visible in his character. Boverio, the Capuchin annalist, still praises him, thus sketches this portion of our history, and says that Fra Bernardino was
"endowed with sagacity, good manners, and practical skill in management gained by a long and varied experience, gifted with a penetration and generosity of soul fit for the greatest enterprises, of an exterior so modest and retiring that every one recognized in him a rare stamp of virtue and sanctity; an admirable preacher, whose eloquence won souls, so that, by unanimous approval, in the third chapter of the entire order, he was elected general, in 1538. He governed the order with such good sense, prudence, and zeal for the observance of the rules, himself giving an example of every virtue, that his brethren applauded the choice of such a man. He visited all the convents, nearly always on foot. His exhortations to poverty, to observance of the rule, and other virtues were made with such admirable eloquence that the reputation which he had acquired both at home and abroad could not but increase; he enjoyed such great confidence with kings and princes that they employed him in the most difficult undertakings; the pope held him in the highest esteem; so much so, that it was necessary to have recourse to the pope in order to obtain him for preacher; the largest churches did not suffice to hold the throng of his hearers, so that temporary porticoes had to be erected, many even raising the tiles of the roof and climbing into the church to hear him. While preaching at Perugia, in 1540, he settled the most angry feuds. At Naples, having recommended from the pulpit some pious work, the alms collected amounted to five thousand sequins."
To this we may add that when three years, his term of office, had expired, Fra Bernardino was reëlected. Yet, despite all this fair appearance, things had not gone well in his heart. His passions, restrained from sensual outbreaks and left more free in other things, developed pride, and confidence in his own judgment, to the contempt of others. The desire of gaining souls yielded slowly and almost imperceptibly to the ambition of the orator. Moreover, he drew from the works of Luther that fatal tendency to find in Holy Writ a response to the dictates of private passion and prejudice. It is said that, while preaching at Naples, in the church of San Giovanni Maggiore, he had been incited by Valdes to insult Paul III., because the holy father had not decorated him with the purple. Certain it seems to be, that Valdes was intimately associated with the friar, and helped to fill his heart with ambition and his head with the doctrines of the Swiss and German heretics. The viceroy, Pedro de Toledo, being informed that he was teaching the Lutheran novelties, complained to the ecclesiastical authorities; but Ochino either fairly stood the test of inquiry, or concealed his real opinions under astute forms of speech. The latter is probably the case; for the Dominican Caracciolo, in his MS. life of Paul IV., says,
"Since he"—Ochino—"concealed within himself the venom of his doctrines under the appearance of an austere life, (a fair cloak,) and because he pretended to thunder against vice, the number of persons was small who could detect the cunning of the fox. Nevertheless there were some who discovered it; and among the first, as I have learned from my elders, could be cited our venerable fathers Don Gaetano and Don Giovanni; but they saw it more clearly in 1539, when Ochino, preaching in the pulpit of the cathedral, uttered many propositions against purgatory, indulgences, and the ecclesiastical laws about fasting, etc.; and, what is worse, the impious monk was accustomed to present as an interrogation that which St. Augustine has said in a simply negative form, as in the following passage: Qui fecit te sine te, non salvabit te sine te?—thus giving his audience to understand that faith alone suffices, and that God saves us without any good works on our part to coöperate with his; just the contrary of that which St. Augustine really teaches."
Caracciolo further narrates that systematic means were secretly taken to spread these doctrines of Ochino, and that clandestine meetings of those infected contributed to this end. Yet Fra Bernardino still kept his fair fame, and maintained perfectly his Catholic exterior; for the ensuing year witnessed the public devotions at Sienna to which we have before alluded. It was at Venice, in 1541, that he was for a time suspended from preaching. This was not due to any plain and palpable errors of doctrine. For, although accusations against him had been made by several persons, he had in a private interview relieved the nuncio's present suspicions, if not his forebodings of the future. The temporary prohibition to preach was caused by the distrust of the nuncio, which was greatly aggravated by an allusion on the part of Ochino to the arrest of Giulio Terenziano. The latter was a theologian of Milan, an avowed and contumacious preacher of heresy, whom the nuncio had silenced in the previous year. From the pulpit Ochino appealed to the Venetians against such an exercise of authority. He placed himself on the same footing with Terenziano, and cried, "What have we done, O Venetians? What plots have we arranged against you? O Bride and Queen of the Sea! if you cast into prison, if you send to the gallows, those who announce the truth to you, how shall that truth prevail?" Nevertheless, in three days the nuncio restored to him his faculties, owing to the pressure brought to bear by the friends and admirers of the monk.
After the close of Lent in 1542, Ochino gathered at Verona many of the Capuchins of the Venetian province, and taught them his errors with all that subtlety of argument and eloquence of persuasion which seems to have characterized both his private and public speaking.[43] He had now passed the zenith of his career and was fairly started on his downward course. The luxury which he had ordered Fra Angelo to use in rebuilding the convent at Sienna, was so openly against the letter and spirit of his rule that many devout persons looked for his speedy punishment. St. Cajetan Tiene had prevented him from preaching at Rome. Among the number of those greatly alarmed for his safety was Angela Negri de Gallarate, a friend of the Marquis del Vasto, the latter at this time an intimate friend and private correspondent of Ochino. This excellent lady, after hearing Fra Bernardino at Verona, where he commented on the epistles of St. Paul, predicted that he would fall into heresy. It soon became only too manifest. His disgust for prayer, his absence from the choir, his weariness in assisting at the sacred mysteries shocked his brethren, so long edified by his pious bearing and assiduity in these good works. Among others, Fra Agustino, of Sienna, gently reproved him, saying, "When you go to administer the sacrament without prayer, you remind me of a rider setting forth without stirrups; take care that you do not fall." Fra Bernardino, whose soul was withering for want of that celestial dew which falls only in the calm evening stillness of prayer, all worn and jaded as he was with earthly labors, and, alas! success, could only answer, that he did not cease praying who kept on doing good.
He was now engrossed with secular things, giving counsel in the affairs of princes; and so completely was his time occupied, that he requested the holy father to be relieved from the daily recitation of the divine office. At this same period he entered into friendly relations with the heretics, and eagerly read all their works.
The pope still had hopes of holding him back, invited him to Rome, and even dreamed of giving him the purple. This brought affairs to a crisis. Before accepting or rejecting the invitation, Ochino took council with his friends. Giberti, the holy Bishop of Verona, sent him to consult Cardinal Contarini, at Bologna. The latter was too ill to hold a long conversation, and Ochino left him immediately to seek Peter Martyr Vermigli, at Florence. This visit to Peter Martyr, who, already rotten to the core, was shortly to fall, convinced the Capuchin that his doctrines could not stand the censorship of Rome, and that, if he went there, he must be prepared to renounce them. This conviction and the urgent advice of Peter Martyr decided him to leave Italy immediately. On the 22d of August, 1542, he writes to the Marquis of Pescara, detailing his anxieties and the causes of his flight.
"I have learned," he writes, "that Farnese says I have been summoned to Rome for having preached heresy and scandalous things. The Theatine Puccio, and others whom I do not wish to name, have spoken so as to cause people to think that, if I had crucified Christ, they could not have made more noise about it."
Further on he shows consciousness of the sensation he is creating. "These men," he says, "tremble before a poor monk."
Flight being determined upon, he took refuge, first, with Catharine Cibo, Duchess of Camerino. Thence he fled to Ferrara.
Here he received letters of introduction to the principal heretics of Geneva. On his way across the Apennines he had taken with him Fra Mariano, a saintly lay-brother, of whose dove-like tenderness and simplicity sweet anecdotes are told, recalling the early memories of Assisi. Mariano, under the impression that they were going to preach to the heretics, agreed to lay aside the religious habit; but, on learning the fraud which Ochino had practised on him, sought to recall his unfortunate superior. The haughty orator was proof to the tears and entreaties of his humble brother, and the latter finally turned back alone, carrying the seal of the order, which the apostate had kept to the last.
Arrived at Geneva, Ochino was welcomed by the heretics as a great accession.
Calvin wrote to Melancthon, "We have here Fra Bernardino, the famous orator, whose departure has stirred Italy as it has never been moved before." Prayers for him, indeed, were offered throughout Italy. Among the Capuchins—who, it is said, came near being suppressed—great pains were taken to eradicate the evil germs sown by Ochino; and Fra Francesco, vicar of Milan, renouncing his heresies, expiated them by a severe penance. Cardinal Caraffa, who, a few years later became Paul IV., publicly lamented the apostasy of Ochino in most eloquent terms, contrasting the austere Capuchin with the unfrocked preacher, and calling on the erring son to return to his mother. He promised in this case, moreover, kind treatment from the pope, who had always shown great favor to Ochino.
In a letter from Geneva, in April, 1543, the apostate sought to justify his career and to explain his later course of action. This letter, addressed to Muzio, begins with that allusion to youthful enthusiasm, which has since become the threadbare apology of those who fling away the cowl. He describes his life among the Observantines in the words of the apostle, "I made great progress in the Jews' religion, above many of my equals in my own nation, being more zealous for the traditions of my fathers." (Galat. i. 14.) But very soon he was enlightened by the Lord to the following effect: "That it is Christ who has satisfied for the sins of his elect, and has merited for them paradise, and that he alone is their justification; that the vows pronounced in the religious orders are not only invalid but impious; and that the Roman Church, although of an exterior splendid to carnal eyes, is none the less an abomination in the sight of God." This, he would have us believe, took place before his entering the Capuchin order. This doctrine of the vanity of good works, of the sinfulness of monastic vows, his excuse for abandoning both, was rooted in his mind during those years of rugged asceticism, while he still preached prayer and penance, as we have seen at Sienna! A liar or a hypocrite? Perhaps neither. For the remainder of the letter is full of that fanatical declamation against Antichrist and the harlot of Babylon, and all that railing cant in which weak brains and over-excited imaginations have, ever since, found expression and relief. The magistrates of Sienna also received a pointed letter, in which Ochino set forth his doctrine on justification. The letter is in very much the same style as that to Muzio.
Poor, despised Carlstadt, when he saw his hopeful pupil upset (as he then supposed) the pope and cast the church to the winds, thought that surely Luther would not assume to himself infallible authority and supreme jurisdiction. In this he was mistaken, as he found to his cost. For men who aid in rebellion against lawful authority too often find themselves a prey to usurpers; and the Bible, torn from the anointed hands of its only rightful interpreter, became simply a slave; its sacred text an exordium for every fanatic and an accomplice to every scoundrel. The position which Ochino took was the same as that of all other heresiarchs, from him whom St. Polycarp addressed as "the first born of Satan," down to the very latest. He constantly applied to himself the language which only one apostle dared to use. Although he did not profess to have seen the third heaven, yet he did profess to be thoroughly competent to teach and determine the Christian revelation. Under these circumstances, it is not strange that he soon found himself in bad odor at Geneva, where an authority, equally respectable, and likewise acknowledging the right of private examination, nevertheless burned alive poor wretches who were so unfortunate as not to agree with it. After founding the Italian Church at Geneva, and there publishing several works, so outrageous in their character as to draw condemnation even from some Protestant historians, Ochino became embroiled with the Calvinists. The natural result of these quarrels was his excommunication and banishment by the latter. He fled with a woman to whom he had been sacrilegiously married. At Basle, he published his sermons. Thence he was called to preach at Augsburg, where he enjoyed great popularity and a salary, until the invasion of Charles V. compelled him to flee with Stancari of Mantua. Having met, at Strasburg, his old friend, Peter Martyr, who, meanwhile, had openly apostatized, he journeyed with him to England, and there preached to the Italian refugees. On the death of Edward VI., he returned to Switzerland, and was chosen pastor of the exiles of Locarno, who had obtained from the Senate the use of a church and their native language. But as at Geneva, so at Zurich, the right of private judgment involved not merely the right to believe as one might list, but also the right, if one were able, to force every body else to believe in like manner. Ochino was accused of anti-trinitarianism and also of sanctioning polygamy, and obliged to swear that he would live and die in the faith of—what? who? The Catholic Church, whose demand on the human intellect is at once a command to believe and a reason for believing, backed by the pledged word of Jesus Christ? No! Ochino had rejected her authority. He now swore to live and die in the teaching of Zwinglius. This oath, however, seemed to lose its force in a few days. For he shortly attacked what he had sworn to defend, and, in his Laberinto, denied almost every article of the Christian faith. Banished from Switzerland, he fled, in the dead of winter, with his four children, into Poland, where he soon afterward earned universal contempt, by publicly countenancing King Sigismund in a projected bigamy. Bullinger, whom Ochino had called the "pope of Zurich," says of him, "He is far advanced in the science of perdition, and an ungrateful wretch toward the senate and the ministers, full of malice and impiety." Beza also characterizes him as "Bernardinum Ochinum, monachum magni nominis apud Italos, et auctorem ordinis Capucinorum, qui in fine se ostendit esse iniquum hypocritam. Bernardino Ochino, a monk of great name among the Italians, founder of the Capuchins," (this a mistake,) "who finally showed himself to be a wicked hypocrite."
From these words of Beza, Boverio has sought to infer that the apostate finally repented and was restored to the Catholic communion. He has also introduced testimony to prove that Ochino was poniarded at Geneva, after professing the Catholic faith and confessing to a priest. But historians seem to favor the tradition recorded by Graziani, who says, "Ochinus Polonia excessit, ac omnibus extorris ac profugus, cum in vili Moraviæ pago a vetere amico hospitio esset acceptus ibi senio fessus cum uxore ac duabus filiabus, filioque una peste interiit. Ochino died in Poland a universal outcast, after having accepted the hospitality of an old friend, in an obscure village of Moravia. Here, worn out with age, he perished, together with his wife, two daughters and son, in one pestilence."
To rehearse the various opinions of Ochino would be a difficult and thankless task. Like most of the reformers, he taught the total depravity of human nature and human reason, and, in order to establish the motives of faith, appealed to private illumination, assuming for the disciple what he denied to the teacher.
Besides this miserable travesty of the Christian distinction between the natural and supernatural orders, there is in his doctrine scarcely one point of resemblance to the Catholic faith. Having cast away the ballast that had steadied his earlier years, the power which had carried him on such a brilliant course proved his ruin. His ignominious death did not excite enough pity to cause itself to be remembered. He disappeared a lonely and abandoned wreck.