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

by Thomas M. Lindsay

When we turn to the outstanding men of the Italian peninsula, whose opinions have been preserved in their writings or correspondence, we find, to begin with, a great variety of religious opinions whose common note is unconstrained hostility to the Church as it was then constituted. The institution was a necessary evil, very important as a factor in the game of politics, useless for the religious life. This sentiment existed almost universally, both among those who merely maintained a decorous relation towards the existing ecclesiastical institutions, and among those who really believed in Christianity, and acknowledged its power over their mind and life. The papal Curia oppressed them; they were hopeless of its reformation, and yet there was little hope of a revival of religion, with its social worship and its “sacraments” unless it was reformed. The feeling of hopelessness is everywhere apparent; the deepest spiritual longings and experiences were to be treasured as sacred secrets of the heart, and not to be spoken about. Yet the work of Savonarola had not been entirely consumed in the fire that burnt the martyr, and the earlier message of Luther had found an echo in many Italian hearts.

§ 2. The Italian Roman Catholic Reformers.

There is no evidence of any widespread acceptance of the whole of Luther’s teaching, little appreciation of the thought that the Church may be conceived as a fellowship of God with man depending on the inscrutable purpose of God and independent of all visible outward organisation, none of the idea that the Visible Church Catholic exists one and indivisible in the many forms in which men combine to listen to the Word and to manifest their faith. The Catholic Church was always to these pious Italians the great historical and external institution with its hierarchy, and its visible head in the Bishop of Rome. A reform of the Church meant for them the reformation of that institution. So long as this was denied them they could always worship within the sanctuary of their own souls, and they could enjoy the converse of likeminded friends. So there came into existence coteries of pious Italians who met to encourage each other, and to plan the restoration of religion within the Church. Humanism had left its mark on all of them, and their reunions were called academies, after the Platonic academies of the earlier Renaissance. The first had come into being before the death of Leo. X.—a society of pious laymen and prelates, who met in the little church of Santi Silvestro et Dorotea in the Trastevere in Rome. The associates were more than fifty in number, and they were all distinguished by their love of the New Learning, the strict purity of their lives, and their devotion to the theology of St. Augustine. The members were scattered after the sack of Rome (1527), but this Oratory of Divine Love gave rise to many kindred associations within which the original members found a congenial society.

The most important found a home in Venice. Its most prominent members were Gasparo Contarini, a distinguished Senator, who afterwards was induced to become a Cardinal. With him were Cardinal Caraffa, already meditating upon taking another path, and Gregorio Cortese, then Abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore. The friends met in the beautiful garden of the convent. All shades of opinion were represented in this circle, where Humanists and Churchmen met to exchange views about a reformation of the Church. To share in such intercourse, Reginald Pole willingly spent his days far from his native England. Cardinal Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno, gathered a similar company around him at Genoa; and Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona, collected likeminded friends to talk about the possibilities of reformation. Modena and Padua had their Christian academies also. Nor must the influence of well-born, cultured and pious ladies be forgotten.

Renée, Duchess of Ferrara and daughter of Louis XII. of France, had accepted the Reformation in its entirety, and had surrendered herself to the guidance of Calvin. She corresponded with the great Frenchman and with Bullinger. She sheltered persecuted Italian Protestants, or had them safely conveyed to Switzerland.[657] But she saw good wherever it was to be found. Her letters, instinct with Christian graciousness, remind the reader of those of her kinswoman Marguerite of Navarre. She was full of sympathy with the circle of men and women who longed for a regeneration of Italy; and it is interesting to notice how the far more highly gifted Vittoria Colonna leant on the woman whose spiritual insight was deeper, and whose heart was purified by the trials which her decision in religious matters made her pass through.

Caterina Cybó, a niece of Pope Clement, Princess of Camerino, Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, Julia Gonzaga at Naples, and Vittoria Colonna at Viterbo and at Rome, formed a circle of highly intellectual and deeply pious women, who by their letters and intercourse inspired men who were working for the regeneration of the Church in Italy.

The network of their correspondence covered Italy from Venice to Naples and from Genoa to Camerino, and the letters exchanged between Marguerite of Navarre and Vittoria Colonna extended the influence of the association beyond the peninsula. The correspondents, men and women, regarded themselves as a band of companions pledged to each other to work together for the Reformation of the Church and of society. It is not easy to describe their aims, for they contented themselves for the most part with vague aspirations; and they all had their favourite likes and dislikes. It is impossible to doubt their earnestness, but it was of the high-bred placid kind. It had nothing of the Spanish exaltation of Teresa, of the German vehemence of Luther, of the French passion scarcely veiled by the logical precision of Calvin. They all admired St. Francis, but in a way out of sympathy with the common people, for they looked on asceticism with a mild wonder, and had no eagerness for that type of the imitation of Christ. Vittoria Colonna indeed found the convent at Viterbo a pleasant retreat for a few weeks at a time. A sigh sometimes escaped her that perhaps the nuns were all Marys who had chosen the better part, but that was only when she was weary with the perversities of the incomprehensible world. Their correspondence suggests an academy of the earlier Italian Renaissance, where the theory of Ideas had given way to doctrines of Justification, and the Epistles of St. Paul had taken the place of the Dialogues of Plato. There is a touch of dilettantism in their habits of thought, and a savour of the eighteenth century Salon in their intercourse. They longed to mediate between contending parties in the religious strife which was convulsing Europe beyond the Alps and might invade Italy; but they were unfit for the task. A true via media can only be found by men who see both sides of the controversy in the clear vision of thought, not by men who perceive neither distinctly. Sadoleto, to take one example, declared that he could see much to admire in the German Reformation, but what he approved were only the external portions which came from Humanism, not those elements which made the movement a religious revival. He disliked Luther, but had a great esteem for Bucer and Melanchthon. Indeed, the Italian Cardinal may be called the Melanchthon of Romanism. Melanchthon, rooted in Protestantism, felt compelled by his intellectual sympathy and humility to believe that there was some good in Romanism and to try to find it; Sadoleto, rooted in Romanism, was impelled to some sympathy with the Protestant theology. He had, however, a fatal lack of precision of thought. One doctrine tended to slide insensibly into another, into its opposite even, under the touch of his analysis. The man who could defend and commend auricular confession because it was an example of Christian humility, and saint-worship because it was a testimony to the immortality of the soul, ran the risk of being regarded as a trifler by Protestants and a traitor by Romanists. Such was his fate.

Contemporary with these offshoots from the Oratory of Divine Love was a revival among some of the monastic orders in Italy which had distinct connection with some of the members of the associations above mentioned.

The most important for its influence on the religious life of the people was the Order of the Capucins. It took its rise from Matteo de Grassis, a man of no intellectual powers, but endowed with more than the usual obstinacy of the Italian peasant. He was an Umbrian, like Francis himself. He belonged to a district where traditions of the great mediæval revivalist had been handed down from parents to children for generations, and one of these insisted that St. Francis had worn a hood with its peak pointed and not rounded, as the fashion among the monks then was. He declared that St. Francis had appeared to him in a vision, and had said that the brethren of the order ought to obey his rules “to the letter, to the letter, to the letter.” He for one resolved to obey. He threw away rounded hood and wore one with pointed peak. The peasants refused to recognise the novelty, and drove him off with stones; his brethren argued with him, and belaboured him with their fists; but Matteo stuck to his pointed hood. The shape was nothing, but the Founder’s commands were everything; Matteo would die before he would wear the rounded thing which had never been hallowed by St. Francis. The Princess Caterina Cybó took compassion on the hunted man, and gave him an asylum within her little principality of Camerino, where he wore his pointed capuze in peace. He soon sank back into the obscurity from which he had for a moment emerged. But new life was stirring among the Franciscans. Many were dissatisfied with the laxity of the order, and were longing for a monastic Reformation. All down the Middle Ages the watchword of every monastic revival had been, “Back to the Founder’s rules.” The pointed hood was a trifle, but it was the symbol of a return to the rigid discipline of Francis. Men heard that Camerino was an asylum for Franciscans discontented with the laxity of the superiors of the order, and gradually they flocked to the little principality. Vittoria Colonna had long mourned over the decadence of the genuine monastic life; she encouraged her friend the Princess Caterina to beseech her uncle the Pope to permit the pointed hood, and gradually there came into being a new fresh offshoot of the Franciscans, called the Capucins, who revived the traditions of St. Francis, and went preaching among the villages after the fashion of his earlier followers. Francis had told his disciples to beware of books when making their sermons; he had advised them to talk to the women as they washed, Italian fashion, by the side of streams, to masons while they were hewing, to artisans at their work, to find out what their religious difficulties were, what prevented them becoming really Christians in their lives, and then to discourse on the things they had heard. This old Franciscan preaching was restored by the Capucins, and they did more than any others to bring the people of Italy back to the discredited Church. They were accused of heresy. What “reformation” of the Franciscans was not? They were called Lutherans; and a good deal of Luther’s Evangelical teaching was unconsciously presented in their sermons; but they could always quote St. Francis for what they said; and who could gainsay what Francis had taught?

This monastic revival affected the commonalty; another spoke to the educated classes. As early as 1504 an attempt had been made to reorganise the great Benedictine order, and a number of Benedictine abbeys had united to form a Congregation, which soon after its institution took the name of the Benedictine Mother-Cloister, Monte Cassino. Gregorio Cortese, one of the members of the Oratory of Divine Love, entered into the movement, and as Abbot of the Benedictine convent on the Island of Lerina on the Riviera, and afterwards in the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, led his monks to show that their convents were the centres of learning dedicated to the service of the Church. He interested himself more especially in historical studies with a view of maintaining the historic traditions of the Church, which were beginning to be shaken by historical criticism, then in its infancy.