A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

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.