The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

Savonarola was a social, and not a religious, reformer. He has often been proclaimed a pre-Reformation reformer, but there was no doctrine of the old Church that Savonarola did not accept, and it was for political and not theological reasons that he was put to death, though ecclesiastics had so much to do with it. All the characteristic doctrines of the Church--devotion to the Saints and to the Blessed Virgin, the Blessed Sacrament, Transubstantiation--are dwelt on in his writings, and he is even the author of a hymn to the Blessed Virgin [{185}] and of a treatise on devotion to her. Nor was he at all carried away with the idea of self-judgment and independence in religion. No one teaches more emphatically than he the power of the Pope and the necessity for obedience to Rome. Nothing stronger or more explicit in this regard has ever been written than some passages that have been found in his writings.

It is too bad that his great social influence for good was not allowed to work itself out into important social reforms. Great churchmen of the after-time have recognized the sad misfortune of his death, and Pope Benedict XIV, whose authority in the matter of the canonization of Saints and the honor to be paid them is the highest, made use of an expression which shows in what lofty veneration Savonarola was held by one of the greatest of the popes. As Cardinal Lambertini, Pope Benedict said: "If God gives me the grace to get to Heaven, as soon as I shall have consoled myself with the Beatific Vision my curiosity will lead me to look for Savonarola." Half a century later a parallel expression, which is almost more striking, was reported to have been used by Pope Pius VII, who said: "In Heaven three serious questions will be solved: The Immaculate Conception, the suppression of the Society of Jesus and the death of Savonarola." [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: How soon this vindication of Savonarola began to be felt in the minds of high ecclesiastics will perhaps be best realized from the fact that when, some ten years after the friar's death, Raphael was asked to decorate the stanze of the Vatican, he introduced Savonarola beside St. Thomas Aquinas, among the great doctors of the Church in the very first fresco that he painted. This fresco was seen and studied carefully by the Pope and greatly praised by him. Almost needless to say Raphael's action in the matter would never have been permitted, only that the reaction in favor of Savonarola had set in very strongly.]

As a matter of fact, all the sentiment of the great Catholic scholars and historians of modern times has been intent on vindicating Savonarola's character. It is not the Church but churchmen who condemned him and not for religious but political reasons. Unfortunately in English the general impression with regard to him is derived from George Eliot's "Romola," and that distinguished English novelist, in spite of her erudition, was least of all fitted by temperament or [{186}] intellectual training and eminently unfitted because of her religious ideas to write the life of Savonarola and his relation to his time. No one saw the social abuses so well as he and no one called attention to them so effectively. He recognized them as abuses, however, and not in any sense as consequences of the religious system. He would have been the last one in the world to have wished for serious disturbance of the Church. He had for years held high positions in the Dominican order and was in the most complete sympathy with the religious orders and the hierarchy of his time.

One of the greatest of the social workers of this century is undoubtedly Bartolomé de Las Casas, who did so much to moderate the abuses in the treatment of the Indians, which had unfortunately crept in under the Spanish sovereignty in the early days. He was the son of Francisco Casas, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage and brought back an Indian boy, whom he left to his son as a servant. Bartolomé studied law at Salamanca, secured a high reputation as a lawyer and then became the counsel to the Spanish governors of the Antilles and later of the Island of Hispaniola. After some years of successful legal practice Las Casas became a priest and devoted himself to the alleviation of the condition of the Indians. In becoming a priest his position as a reformer became assured. Strange as that may seem to some who do not understand the period, he gained almost complete freedom of speech and, having no solicitude for his material needs, could devote all his time and energy untrammelled to his chosen life work. He made mistakes, he was eminently unpractical, but there is no doubt at all about his absolute devotion to the cause of humanity and his untiring activity and zeal in the cause of proper Christian treatment of the Indians. He aroused the attention of the men of his time and, above all, of the sovereigns of Spain and the most influential men and women of that country.

His crusade had much to do with the promulgation of the "New Laws" in 1542 and their amendments in 1543 and 1544. These did not abolish serfdom, but they greatly limited it, so that it was even said that a native enjoyed more privileges than a Creole. He refused the bishopric of Cuzco in Peru [{187}] declaring that he would never accept any Church dignity, and it was only after much urging that he consented to become bishop of Chiapas in Southern Mexico. His powers of administration did not prove as great as his humanitarian ideals and, while he talked much of abuses, he was not able to correct them as well as many others who did not set out to be so radical as he. He has written much and his books have appeared in many editions. His was a great soul that found a supreme purpose and devoted to it a long life of ninety years. A less ardent advocate than he would almost surely have failed of accomplishing the great reform that was needed. Like our own Abolitionists, he was too radical in many of his views, and yet his very enthusiasm carried others along into the execution of great good. His writings have been a storehouse of information with regard to conditions in the colonies and, while they have to be discounted from the standpoint of his tendency to exaggeration of interest in the Indian questions, that exaggeration is justified to a great extent by the great humanitarian purpose that dictated it. Las Casas must undoubtedly be considered one of the world's great philanthropists.

An important social influence, if the name of social reformer does not quite suit him, was the Duke of Gandia, who is better known as St. Francis Borgia. He was a great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI, and his grandfather, Juan Borgia, who had acquired the hereditary Duchy of Gandia in the kingdom of Valentia in Spain, was assassinated by an unknown hand, possibly that of his brother, Caesar Borgia. On the maternal side the Duke of Gandia was the great-grandson of Ferdinand the Catholic. His grandfather had been the Archbishop of Saragossa. He himself became a brilliant courtier at the Court of Charles V, and in the absence of the Emperor was considered the head of the Imperial household. He and his wife were the favorites of the Empress. After the death of the Empress he was commissioned to convey her remains to Granada and, having to identify them formally there before burial, was shocked on the opening of the coffin at the change which a few days of death had brought in the sovereign whom he had served so zealously. He turned [{188}] to make his life mean something, not for passing honor but for the good of others. In fulfilment of this purpose he joined the Jesuits and eventually became the third General of the order. His change of life attracted wide attention and did almost more than anything else to lessen many selfish tendencies among the nobility of the time due to the pagan spirit of the Renaissance. It was a social reform that made the Borgian name as much of an inspiration for good as it had been for ill.

Perhaps even more important for this period is what may be called the negative side of its social history. Apparently a great many people are quite convinced that the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance were witnesses of many severe cruelties and torturing practices, some of them legal, which reveal, if not an actual barbarity, a sad, almost inhuman, lack of kindliness and fellow-feeling on the part of the men and women of this time. Most people who have heard of cruelties and torture are quite sure that in general these reached their climax of bitterness in the later Middle Ages and that even the Renaissance time was not free from them. In the more recent centuries, particularly the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth, men are supposed to be climbing out of the slough of despond in this matter into which humanity unfortunately had sunk during the mediaeval period. We rather pride ourselves on this evolution of humanity, quite forgetting for the moment how much greater than all the old-time barbarity is the suffering incident to our industrial development. This is, however, set down to inadvertence at most, while mediaeval and Renaissance cruelty is thought of as deliberate.

There are not many impressions more false than this in history, and it is entirely due to the ignorance of the date of a number of historical events which are sometimes massed together as mediaeval or at least not modern, modern history being supposed to begin as a rule with the discovery of America. As a matter of fact, the refinements of torture all came after Columbus' Century. The Virgin of Nuremberg, the iron boots into which wedges were driven for torture purposes, the iron gauntlets in which the hands of living [{189}] people were roasted and many other of the hideous contrivances that rightly find a prominent place in history were made in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not in Columbus' time nor during the mediaeval period. The worst refinements of legal torture nearly all were devised in the course of the witchcraft delusion which swept over Europe in the later sixteenth and during the seventeenth century. There was comparatively little witch baiting and witch hunting and very few witches put to death during the earlier centuries. Witchcraft was a post-Reformation delusion.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (Ninth Edition), in its article on torture, emphasizes particularly the fact that: "It is the boast of the common law of England that it never recognized torture as legal. Instances of torture as a means of obtaining evidence were invariably ordered by the Crown or Council, or by some tribunal of extraordinary authority such as the Star Chamber, not professing to be bound by the rules of the common law." "The infliction of torture became more common under the Tudor monarchs," this article continues. "Under Henry VIII it appears to have been in frequent use." May I add that its frequency is an incident of the end of his reign after the religious difficulties began. "Only two cases are recorded under Edward VI and eight under Mary. The reign of Elizabeth was its culminating point. In the words of Hallam, 'the rack stood seldom idle in the tower for all the latter part of Elizabeth's reign.' The varieties of torture used at this period are fully described by Lingard, and consisted of the rack, the scavenger's daughter, the iron gauntlets or bilboes, and the cell called 'little ease.' The registers of the council during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns are full of entries as to the use of torture, both for state and for ordinary offences."