Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 438 - Don't Give Up Pope - Catholic Reformation.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Give Up Pope, Catholic Reformation. In his constitutional catechism for use in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Luigi Galanti, a Benedictine monk and member of parliament in 19th century Naples, exulted in the lack of religious liberty enjoyed by his nation. Having just one religion, he wrote, we do not need to proclaim freedom of worship as other countries where there are followers of different religions have been obliged to do. Happy as we are to have this powerful bond, we will not live in fear of those bloody scenes between Catholics and Protestants witnessed even in recent years in France. A people united under one faith, a faith that could trace itself back to the very roots of Christian tradition, all as if the Reformation had never happened. In fact, it hadn't happened for most of Southern Europe. In places like Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the old church had held on against Lutheranism, Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism, Presbyterianism, and so on. Only one ism was needed, the original one, namely Catholicism. This result, so essential for maintaining peace and so opposed to freedom of conscience, was the achievement of a second Reformation that dominated European religious and intellectual life for most of the 16th century and beyond. It emerged in explicit opposition to the Protestant Reformation, which is why it is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. Whether this is the best name for it is a matter of dispute. The German term Geggenreformation, meaning Counter-Reformation, came into use by historians in the late 18th century. As you might imagine, given that the expression reduces so much Catholic thought to a mere reaction against Luther and the other Reformers, it was especially favored by Protestant historians. In the 19th century, Catholic scholars hit on the idea of instead calling it a Catholic Reformation. A 1946 book by the Catholic church historian Hubert Yedin considered the choice between the two terms and suggested just using both. It's an attractive proposal, not just because it is so conciliatory, and as we'll see in a moment, being conciliatory in this context is rather appropriate, but because both locutions do capture a fundamental truth about this historical development. It was indeed a Counter-Reformation, insofar as Catholics of the 16th century were under tremendous pressure to respond to the movements started by Luther. They asserted the validity of medieval theology, long-established ritual, and papal authority. Knowing it would not be enough simply to assert that they had been right all along, they wrote at length in defense of Catholic doctrine. They took pains to establish exactly what the differences were between them and the Protestants, in other words, to draw a line between acceptable belief and heresy. And they took steps to clean house, cracking down on friezely misdeeds and the sale of indulgences, which made it all too easy for the Protestant opponents to criticize them. Which brings us to the justice of calling it a Catholic Reformation, because this was hardly the first time the church had noticed its own corruption and tried to do something about it. We can go back at least as far as Pope Gregory the Seventh, a reforming pope of the 11th century. We might also think of the tensions caused when reforming religious orders adopted a policy of voluntary poverty in criticism of the church's obscene wealth. Still later, church councils were called in reaction to the great schism and heretical innovations of Wycliffe and Hus around the turn of the 14th century. In short, Catholics were busily engaging in reform of their church well before Luther came along. They had centuries of practice reforming themselves for goodness sake. This, along with the deep conviction that God was on their side, must have made them confident that, with a few concessions, a bit less corruption, and a tidal wave of polemical literature, they could restore the unity of the Christian community under Rome. Which might in turn help to explain why it took them so long to organize a new church council to respond to the Protestant threat. It eventually started in 1545. For those keeping score, that's more than two decades after Luther launched the Reformation, and then it ran with interruptions until 1563. This was the Council of Trent, named for its location in northern Italy, and finding a politically acceptable spot was another reason it took so long to begin. You'll also see the adjective tridentine to describe Catholicism after this council because Trent is called tridentum in Latin. Even though this was a council, you wouldn't expect it to be very conciliatory, since the purpose was to defeat the critics of the church. In a sense it was, though. The churchmen deliberating at Trent took a big tent approach, seeking to define Catholic doctrine in a way that could accommodate the wide range of opinions held by those who were still loyal to the papacy. But they were also at pains to show that the Protestants fell outside the boundaries of acceptable belief. While agreeing that divine grace was a precondition for salvation, the theologians at Trent rejected the idea that humans are saved by faith alone. We exercise free will in accepting the gift of grace, and the church and its priests are needed to administer the sacraments that signify that acceptance. Speaking of which, certain Protestant views on the Eucharist were also anathematized. And in a sweeping rejection of the Protestants' idea that the truths of religion were to be found in scripture alone, Trent insisted on the authoritative status of church doctrines as they had developed over the centuries. For an example of an individual thinker involved in these events, let's consider Alfonso de Castro. He was a Franciscan who was trained at Salamanca, a city that will be important in the coming episodes, and he was in attendance at the beginning of the Council of Trent. Castro had already published an anti-Protestant work called Against All Heresies, and the deliberations at Trent encouraged him to write another one, on the just punishment of heretics. But if Castro was unflinching in his condemnation of the Protestants, he was also willing to point out the shortcomings of his own side. Explaining how heresies arise in the first place, he named several factors, including substandard preaching, negligence on the part of bishops, and vice amongst the clergy. Books could also be dangerous. Translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, allowing non-specialists to read it, was a potential source of heresy, as was in cautious use of pagan literature, including philosophy. Apart from avoiding these mistakes, the best bulwark against heresy was the church hierarchy. The Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops held their positions by divine law and could not be rightly deposed, not for mortal sin, and not even for holding heretical opinions themselves. Despite his enthusiasm for hierarchy though, Castro believed that the best way to establish church doctrine would be the sort of thing happening at Trent, a universal church council. Decisions made by more local groups of clergy would be more likely to go astray, as when the masters at Paris had succumbed to political pressure and supported Henry VIII's divorce. Castro helps us to see that, from a philosophical point of view, the most interesting thing about the Council of Trent was that it was indeed a council. From the point of view of bishops who wanted to go skiing, the most important thing is that it was at Trent. One can see Trent as the culmination of the long development within the church that scholars call conciliarism. If you think of the Pope as a monarch, as mirroring the function of a king or emperor in the secular realm, then the church council would be analogous to a group of advisors, or a parliament. As we know, the 15th and 16th centuries saw an increasing trend towards limiting royal power by giving a role to political councilors or lawmakers, even as the monarch retained supreme authority. Conciliarism was a parallel development within the church. Or, actually, the direction of influence may go the other way around. The idea that church doctrine is settled at councils, not by decisions handed down straight from the pope, would have helped the same kind of structure to seem attractive and plausible in the secular realm. After all, if the sacred power of a pope is compatible with the authority of a lower legislative body, surely the same can be true for a king. In an apparent confirmation of this connection, we find that some of the same thinkers who embraced conciliarism in church affairs also wanted to restrict the monarchy in secular affairs. An example would be the English scholastic John Mair, who argued for both positions. It's handy that scholasticism has just come up, since this is another significant connection between philosophy and the Catholic Reformation. As you know, the Protestant opposition to scholasticism is greatly exaggerated. That's something we discuss when looking at figures like Melanchthon and in the interview with Helen Huthub in episode 387. Still, the vindication of church tradition at Trent went hand in hand with an embrace of scholastic thought, and especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who was elevated to the status of Doctor of the Church in 1567. I'll be devoting a whole episode to the resurgence of Thomism in the context of the Catholic Reformation. Aquinas, and the scholastics in general, were crucial for the Jesuits, whose tireless defense of the church, missionary work, and intellectual contributions were a prominent feature of the Catholic Reformation, and arguably its single most important feature when it comes to the history of philosophy. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, studied at the Sorbonne beginning in 1528, where in his own words he learned all about Aristotle and his logic. Following suit, a whole series of Jesuit thinkers, especially in the Iberian peninsula, updated and elaborated upon the work done by medieval philosophers. Which is not to say that humanism, the constant competitor of scholasticism in this period, will go unmentioned in this miniseries. Admittedly, Loyola did say that theology could manage perfectly well with a little less Cicero, and at Trent the ancient Latin version of Scripture by Jerome was declared to be preferable, despite humanist quibbles against it, because of its long use. Worse still, works by Erasmus were placed on the index of books prohibited by the church, in the most backhanded of compliments to the challenging nature of his biblical scholarship. Still, I hardly need to remind you that the epicenter and source of humanism in Western Europe was Italy, which was also the epicenter and source of the Counter-Reformation. We'll be seeing how humanism found fertile soil in Spain as well. This illustrates a more general pattern, which is that trends found in the Protestant Reformation were often mirrored in the Catholic one, and vice versa. The same tactics deployed by Protestants were put to use by Catholic propagandists. For instance, the Reformers are famous for their emphasis on preaching, but I've already mentioned that Catholics, like Castro, also saw this as a key weapon in retaining the faithful and warding off heresy. Another tool we associate with the Protestants is the printing press. You might remember that they especially used the cheap pamphlets that scholars call Flugschriften, or flyers, to spread reformist ideas. While this connection is indeed important, it's not as if Catholics failed to notice the power of printing. As I mentioned when discussing the printing press in episode 372, those indulgences that attracted so much criticism were printed in mass quantities. The publishers would leave blank spaces to write in the individual details about the sinner who was paying for forgiveness. Print was also enthusiastically used by supporters of Savonarola, the fiery preacher who was something of a harbinger of the Reformation at the heart of Catholic Italy. Once Protestantism did arrive, the works of Catholic polemicists and apologists were churned out as fast as the presses could print them. In fact, in the 16th century, there were only two years, 1561 and 1562, where more Protestant material was printed than Catholic material. Of course, printing books and pamphlets makes more sense when your target audience can read. So again, though we associate increasing literacy more with Protestantism than Catholicism, there were educational efforts on both sides of the confessional divide. The Jesuits are important here. Invoking the motto, Querilis institutionse estrenovatio mundi, meaning education of youth is the renewal of the world, they founded schools of three levels for different age groups, calling them respectively colleges, academies, and universities. Overall, between 1550 and 1700, the Catholics founded more new universities than the Protestants did, outpacing them 50 to 33. The relevance of this for our concerns should be obvious. Philosophy was taught at these institutions, and sometimes at the highest of levels, as in the aforementioned Scholastic Center of Salamanca founded way back in 1218. Of course, philosophy wasn't the only discipline that could be pressed into the service of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Among closely adjacent fields, a particularly important one was history. Historiography keeps flitting in and out of our story, as with Machiavelli's engagement with Roman history in his discourses, or Francois Hoffman's Franco Gallia, which looked back to medieval political arrangements in France to mount an argument for curbing the power of the monarchy. Hoffman's history was on behalf of the Huguenots, but Catholics could play the game too. Take for instance Cesare Baronio, a cardinal and historian whose ecclesiastical annals laid out the Church's perspective on its own development. His method was to provide extensive documentation, putting a massive evidence at the reader's disposal. Some scholars have seen this rather modern technique as being intention or even contradiction with Baronio's theological agenda, but Stefania Toutino argues that to the contrary, it was that very agenda that explains his approach. He assumed that his ample quotations would, as he put it, let the truth shine more and more clearly. In a letter, he explained why, in history we need to let the dogma appear through the traditions and through the truth, not through the historian's own arguments, so that we may leave it to the reader, be he Catholic or heretic, to discover the certainty of the truth from the things that are being said. But as Toutino shows, you did not have to be Protestant to think that certainty had not been reached. Paolo Beni, who was for a time a Jesuit until he was kicked out of the order in 1593, became a commentator on Aristotle's rhetoric, which made him reflect on just this issue of certain and merely probable arguments. Beni concluded that Baronio's annals, which he admired apart from their excessive length, were indeed the work of a theologian and not a historian. He had failed to recognize that the story of the Church is one of human action, not divine verities. And in the realm of human action, our explanations and reconstructions must inevitably remain uncertain, falling more within the remit of rhetorical persuasion than demonstrative proof. Speaking of persuasion, a final commonality between the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, or at least the last one I'll mention here, is the way political power and social structures became linked to religious persuasions. The most obvious point here is that your religious confession was mostly determined by your location. Except for the odd dissenters and recusants, people in places like England, Scotland, Switzerland, and most of Germany would be Protestant, whereas the Italians and Spanish were overwhelmingly Catholic. Even France and the Low Countries, after extensive warfare, eventually settled on confessional boundaries. But when scholars speak of confessionalization, they mean more than this. They are also talking about how the state and its mechanisms increasingly became involved in religious life. Whether in Catholic or Protestant realms, secular authorities worked together with religious authorities to enforce religious orthodoxy, which meant everything from weaving religious instruction into the broader educational programs, as I've already described, to checking that rituals were being carried out correctly in the churches, to the demanding of oaths. In extreme circumstances, the authorities turned to stricter measures still, censorship and persecution, up to and including torture and execution. Such violent enforcement of orthodoxy is, sadly, something else that spanned the religious divide. The execution of Serbatos in Calvin's Geneva was notorious, and provoked Castello into writing his pioneering defense of religious freedom. Over in England, Elizabeth used all the power of her state to enforce what she saw as a moderate Protestantism, and her victims included both Catholics and Puritans. But I have no doubt that when you think of religious oppression in this period, the things that leap to mind first come from the Catholic sphere, the index of condemned books, and the Inquisition. Though you might imagine the Inquisition as a purely church-based phenomenon, in fact it illustrates the Reformation-era trend toward collaboration between state and religious institutions. The history of church inquisition actually goes back well before the 16th century, at least to 1184, when bishops were instructed to search for heretics amongst their flocks. But in the form that interests us, it began in 1478, under Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian leaders of the so-called Re-quanquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This marked the first time that a secular power took charge of religious persecution. Still, the practice took on a new meaning and level of activity in the wake of Protestant reform. In 1542, we see the introduction of a holy office of Cardinal of Resears for inquisition around Europe and beyond. What was the intellectual rationale for this, and what were its effects, especially on philosophical activity? Yes, it's the Spanish Inquisition. That's what to expect next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps