As noted in the previous chapter, the passions deepening that rut were legion. They pitted rich urban merchants against their less successful comrades; the entire city bourgeoisie against a proletariat that had forcibly been prevented from gaining the higher wages they expected to come its way as a consequence of the labor shortage following the Plague; the ever more impoverished lower nobility against its higher lords, the money men of the cities, as well as a peasantry that had indeed gained the post-Plague privileges that town workers had not; and diverse local authorities mobilized against anyone threatening to impose a more centralized unity upon them. An Italian proverb of the time taught that no man was too poor to own a dagger. Whether the average individual literally owned a weapon or not, it seems all too clear that most men were not ready to drop the daggers they held so tightly in their hearts against their neighbors—even as they watched as many consecrations as time would allow in order to collect as many fruits that a given Sunday morning’s viewing might provide.

There is no better way to tackle the more detailed problems of this all too natural, customary, sinful rut than by focusing our attention, first and foremost, on the Papacy’s continued insistence upon grappling with its own mission in an overwhelmingly political and administrative fashion. Once again, it was not that such matters could or should have been neglected entirely by wise pontiffs. Rome’s power and reputation, along with that of those forces historically allied with it, had, after all, been dragged deeply into the mud by the political and financial shenanigans of the forty-year schismatic circus. A major consequence had been that the “reform” Councils of Pisa and Constance had left the Papacy bereft of a significant proportion of its earlier economic means of survival. Separate negotiations with the various nations that had demanded recognition of their special status at Constance had repaired some of the damage, but most of these had produced temporary concordats allowing for regular, energy draining discussions regarding future Church-State adjustments.⁹⁰

Martin V (1417-1431) left Constance to return to a still troubled and half devastated Rome. He was practically penniless, unprotected, and even ridiculed by the street urchins along the way, happy to mock the hopelessness of the Homeric tasks lying ahead of him. Martin and almost every single one of his successors for the next century and more saw no other choice than to bury themselves in petty financial concerns, peninsular politics, military actions, and family alliances, merely to be able to ensure their basic economic and personal survival. Finding the means of pacifying and exploiting the resources of the lands directly under their theoretical control—a joint military, political, and business enterprise most popularly symbolized by the dubious exploits of the Della Rovere and Borgia popes, Sixtus IV (1471-1484), Alexander VI (1492-1503), and Julius II (1503-1513)—took up a much greater part of their daily schedule than any supernatural correction and transformation of Christendom as a whole. Unfortunately, it seems to have engaged the greater part of their spirit as well as their labor, making their own repeated reiteration of devotion to “a reform of head and members” a rut-like slogan especially offensive to men truly in love with the more substantive message of the Word in history.⁹¹

Rome’s political and military projects, difficult under the best of conditions, were made more so by the strength of the “vassals” of the Papacy, including feudal lords and bourgeois municipalities. None of these subordinates wished to be reintegrated into a seriously functioning Papal State, particularly one that might be firmly rooted in the proper hierarchy of values. Even more dangerous than rebellious subjects were the other rut-buried governments of the Italian peninsula, each of them practicing one form or another of civil control over spiritual activities. Such secular domination they justified with reference to the elegant sufficiency of arguments built up since the High Middle Ages to support mundane interference in the realm of the sublime.

Most perilous of all, in the long run, were the problems presented by what historians call the “new monarchies”: the nation-states of France, Spain, and England. These countries gradually overcame many of their recent, bloody, internal disputes and significantly rebuilt the central powers of their kings during the second half of the fifteenth century. New monarchies were in many respects more parochial minded than their “pre-apocalypse” counterparts. In fact, their mentality might be described as that of petty Italian principalities writ large. Nevertheless, when they set their mind to it, they were able to apply statist principles on a much greater scale than the Republic of Florence or the Duchy of Milan. And this then worked to the ultimate detriment of those fervent Italian models of “business as usual”, whose failure to think their way to a broader political vision ensured their conquest by such new—and much more powerful—self-interested, national entities.

New monarchies successfully blocked most papal efforts to regain a control over dioceses and taxes that had been lost during the Great Western Schism due to the maneuverings and incompetence of the three warring papacies. Monarchical demands and dynastic ability to recruit the parochial “words” of intellectuals on behalf of claims to be a “defender of the peace” were already amply clear at the time of the Council of Constance, when standard operating procedures were altered from those of previous synods precisely in order to represent more narrow national concerns. Praise of “a reform of head and members” coming from French, Spanish, and English lips actually entailed honoring a renewal that bent the Church slavishly to their local priorities—which might or might not be in conformity with the message of the Incarnation. Given that “reform” seems overwhelmingly to have been a question of nationalization of clerical benefices, it generally was not true reform. Full-fledged “national churches”, formally in union with Rome, were, therefore, well on the way to completion. Some of the most noble-minded churchmen of the age even praised these parochial developments as a magnificent display of concern for the original intent of the founding Christian vision. Let us return to Largarde on this subject:⁹²

From the end of the Fourteenth Century, writes Johannes Haller, the Church of England became a Church of the State. With the practical tolerance of certain pontifical interferences alien to her essence, she resembles an already completed construction that is still surrounded by scaffolding. Thus disguised, the Church of the State was already perfected under Richard II. She persisted under the Lancastrians, up until the day that a more personal monarch {i.e., Henry VIII} would judge it good to pull down the useless scaffolding of theoretical privileges of the Holy See.

Approving, from his standpoint, after the Council of Constance, both the ordinance of 1407 and that through which the Dauphin confirmed it in March of 1418, Gerson congratulated the Most Christian King for ‘having solemnly, through a decree registered by the Parlement, promulgated the ancient and legitimate liberties of the Gallican Church’. He judged that the king was right in holding it to be an intolerable error, blemished by an inadmissible usurpation, that anyone should accept ‘any judgment of any pastor whomsoever, even the Supreme Pontiff, that might directly or indirectly oppose this decree. To protect himself against a similar audacity, the king must be able to count upon the support and obedience of his subjects, above all the clergy, who must conform to the prescriptions of the Apostle ordering us to obey the king as excelling all others, above all when he uses his legitimate power to carry out his own oath and protect ecclesiastical liberty’.

Outside political pressures would perhaps have been less troublesome had there been some unity inside Rome herself. Contemporaries might well have considered hopes for such a unity to be the utopian fantasy of men lacking in all natural common sense. For the bitter rivalries of influential families resident in the Eternal City returned along with the destitute but nonetheless still prestigious Roman Pontiffs. These heirs of the Crescenzii and Tusculani fought with one another for positions in the College of Cardinals and for election to the See of Peter with both partisan fury as well as pure pagan joy in combat. So much did both Roman and other noble families court outside assistance and financial support that the cardinals coming from them were accurately referred to as “Florence” or “Venice” or “France” to indicate the true root of their strength as well as the central focus of their “loyalty”. Of course, this supposed loyalty was often put seriously to the test. It could change in character from one moment to the next, depending upon two things: the finances and military fortunes of possible patron states on the one hand, and the political choices made by other “princes” of the Roman Church representing rival families equally committed to undermining the power of the reigning pontiff on the other.

Many of these less than noble-minded cardinals were also perfectly happy to support those decrees of the Council of Constance that emphasized conciliar supremacy. Instead of confirming papal power, they followed Constance in calling for the convening of regular synods to keep the “chief minister of the Church” in line. The Papacy had never really fully accepted the legitimacy of the legislation embodied in the decrees Sacrosancta and Frequens, but several of the councils Constance mandated were, indeed, convoked by the Holy See, and did, in fact, meet. It was in the name of Constance and its theories that the Council of Basel, which stayed in session from 1431 until 1449, soon went down the road of rabid anti-Romanism. In fact, it went so far down that road that it deprived the Papacy of literally almost every single means of material survival, deposed the “tyrannical” Eugene IV (1431-1447) who disapproved of its teaching---and was driven from the Eternal City by local opponents---and created a new schism under the antipope Felix V (1441-1449).

Although proponents of reform almost universally detested the Roman cardinals and the Roman curia, government by council soon took its place close behind these earlier villains in their ever-thickening black books. Already before Pisa and Constance, when the French Church had resorted to national synods to express her outrage over the behavior of Benedict XIII, the tendency of conciliarist theory to accomplish little more than merely cut off excessive papal funding and stop Roman nomination of unacceptable bishops and abbots had become clear. Even then, the idea of government by council and the slogan of “protection of the ancient local Church liberties” had lent themselves to appropriate explanations for the “business as usual” concerns of parochial political interests and the advancement of the careers of unworthy clerical and academic opportunists. It was at least partly due to recognition of this truth that substantial opposition to tampering with central papal authority rather quickly arose from the ranks of a French episcopacy and a University of Paris that had at first been tempted down the conciliarist path.⁹³

Moreover, constant supervision of the Papacy was tedious, and the endless Council of Basel suffered badly from neglect by the “sovereign bishops repressed by Roman tyranny” who were supposed to rule the Church through its organs. Prelates basically left its conduct in the hands of ambitious scholars and benefice-hungry lesser clerics eager to exaggerate their role in the formation of Catholic doctrine and the administration of ecclesiastical affairs. Whatever prestige that synod might have possessed was squandered through the almost unbelievable money-grubbing of Felix V. Himself a secular ruler, the master of the Duchy of Savoy in his former life, Felix was painfully aware of just how little funding the “reforms” of Basel left him and just how much this ended by depriving the Council Fathers—whoever they might actually be—of any real impact as well. For in the final analysis, the Council of Basel, as the excellent, though embittered Strasbourg reform preacher Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445-1510) noted, was not even powerful enough to reform a single convent of nuns in the city in which it was still in session—once the local municipal council expressed its opposition to any change.⁹⁴ Reform, in the hands of the conciliar opponents of the plenitude of papal power, might just as readily have been labeled a total sell-out to secular self-interest and an open proclamation of ecclesiastical impotence.

In sum, despite the constantly reiterated statements of devotion to a “reform of head and members”, the low road was the route of preference in the post-reunion era. Church life was characterized by a succession of unseemly secular machinations, guided by religious leaders chosen primarily for their political and financial talents or contacts. Popes, even the best of them, were simply too busy seeking political survival to take their supernatural mission to heart for lengthy periods of time. The bad pontiffs were often under justifiable suspicion for condoning the most despicable of crimes. Government by councils had proven to be a recipe for the rule of more parochial forces equally if not more deeply buried in the earthbound rut. Under these circumstances, no cynic could be blamed for identifying power and money as the main concerns of the Church or for citing indifference to the life of the spirit as positive aids to the success of a clerical career—whether in the service of Papacy or council.

No wonder, then, that the external crusading ideal that had been the chief practical inspiration for the medieval reform movement continued to suffer.⁹⁵ We last discussed this vision with reference to the bad and costly joke that crusading seemed to have become after the resounding failure of the massive efforts of Blessed Gregory X to galvanize everyone behind a grand eastern assault in the 1270’s. Yes, there were a vast number of suggestions following the shock of the fall of Acre in 1291 regarding how best to move the whole enterprise forward, with calls for either one massive or many small campaigns, for the unification of the crusading orders, and for the designation of the King of France as commander in chief of the entire enterprise prominent among them. Unfortunately, however, the one truly impressive effort designed to clear the land route to Constantinople in 1396 under Sigismund (1368-1437), the King of Hungary and future Holy Roman Emperor, led to an embarrassing rout at the disastrous Battle of Nicopolis.

After that point, the movement appears to have become still more farcical. One cannot escape the conviction that for every man seriously engaged in crusading debates, there were a score of others who saw them either as merely highly entertaining rhetorical jousts or as opportunities for a storytelling useful solely for the further building of noble or merchant city prestige and privileges back at home. Certainly the work of the most active of the fourteenth and fifteenth century crusading orders, the Teutonic Knights, whose annual campaigns attracted soldiers from throughout Europe to their Baltic sphere of influence, overwhelmingly continued to appear to many reformers to be nothing other than self-serving humbug. And this became all the more obvious once the Lithuanians, whose paganism had served as justification for their “apostolate” in the region, converted to Roman Catholicism and joined in political union with the Kingdom of Poland.

Moreover, that aspect of the internal crusade that Innocent III and Blessed Gregory X thought most necessary for the success of the external one—namely, the reunion of the churches—was also impossibly obstructed by the strength of the customary rut. This is not to say that the reunion Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1446/1447) did not involve the active participation of a number of serious “high road” personalities, East and West, as well as precisely that debate of major doctrinal issues that the Greeks had always wanted and the Romans, up until this point, had sought to avoid. In fact, practically everything, from Trinitarian questions to the nature of sanctity itself, was examined at Ferrara-Florence in some detail. Nevertheless, the entire venture clearly reflected major tunnel vision problems, along with a lack of Christian charity and solid pilgrim spirit.¹⁹

Greek and Roman Christians had discovered ever more grounds for division since Patriarch Cerularius founded his own disputes with the West chiefly upon the matter used by the Latin Church for confecting the Eucharist: a distinction that still rankled in eastern minds in the fifteenth century. Aside from other long-term disagreements regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the recitation of the filioque clause in the Latin Creed, and mandated clerical celibacy, the atmosphere had been further poisoned due to newer debates over the fully developed concept of the plenitude of papal power, the doctrine of Purgatory, the validity of scholastic speculative theology, as well as teachings underlining the Hesychast spirituality discussed in the previous chapter. Given the increasing number and depth of the quarrels, many modern observers have quipped that perhaps the only thing that would have significantly contributed to a friendlier atmosphere would have been eastern joy at seeing Eternal Rome sacked, thereby avenging the savaging of the Queen City of Constantinople at the hands of a western “crusading” army in 1204.²⁰

Interestingly enough, many contemporary Greek prelates, the venerable Patriarch Joseph II (1360-1439) of Constantinople among them, were deeply interested in Church reunion. On the other hand, most were so hardened in their positions that nothing would allow them to see the contradictions in their familiar apologetics, or to take the conclusions of an honest theological debate seriously. Their narrowness of approach allowed them to attack the tyranny of papal claims while treating the Patriarch of Constantinople as “Father of the Churches” and defining his relationship to eastern bishops in a way that seemed to parallel the Roman ecclesiastical theories they claimed to detest. Their disdain for “Latin” philosophy as something utterly destructive of Tradition blinded them to the central role that the Greek Fathers had played in adapting Platonic teachings and Aristotelian logic to explicate Christian dogmas. Finally, their flawed ecclesiology and political closure to the pilgrim dance of life was reflected in their continued commitment to the idea of a necessary and eternal union of the Church with the rapidly collapsing authority of the Roman Emperor. This comes across very clearly in the response of Patriarch Antony IV (d. 1397) to the growing pretensions of the Turk-free Grand Duchy of Moscow:²¹

If the Byzantine Patriarch is the Ecumenical Patriarch, this is, in effect, because he is the Bishop of Constantinople, the second Rome. Rome was once the first because she was the capital of the Roman Empire: since Constantine, the true capital of the Roman Empire is Constantinople: it is just that her bishop has received the succession of the Roman Pontiff, who nevertheless retained before the ‘schism’ (let it be understood that it was Rome that caused the schism) a primacy of honor and a role of judge. The universality of the Church coincides with the notion of a universal empire, which the imperial Byzantine ideology never renounced. John Kalekas expresses this without detours when he writes, in the text cited above, that Constantinople is ‘the seat of the Church of God and of the Empire that comes from him’. The most explicit presentation of this theme is nevertheless found in a much later text, one that is much closer to the disaster befalling the Empire: in 1393, Anthony IV writes to Grand Duke Basil of Moscow, who wants to suppress mention of the Byzantine Emperor in the liturgies celebrated on his territory. The letter reaffirms the universality of the Church, that of the Byzantine Empire (on which all other sovereigns depend, qualified as ‘local sovereigns’), and the indissoluble bond between the two: ‘The Emperor holds in the Church a place that no local sovereign can have. It is the Emperors who have confirmed religion throughout the universe, called together the Ecumenical Councils, sanctioned the canons, combated the heresies, established the primates, the division of provinces and dioceses: this is what justifies their dignity and their place in the Church. Of course the pagans created the power and role of the Emperor. Nonetheless, the sacred Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans receives from the Church today the same ordination, the same rank, the same prayers (liturgical commemorations) and great anointing. …For Christians, there is no Church without the Emperor; Empire and Church are tightly united’. In consequence, the Patriarch, who is the symmetrical correspondent of the Emperor, is the head of the Church. Anthony calls himself ‘the universal doctor of Christians’; he ‘holds the place of Christ’: in Latin terms, he is the ‘Vicar of Christ’, a title that in the West is reserved to the Pope. This astonishing text, almost anachronistic, takes up the ancient themes of the imperial ideology, elaborated in the first centuries of the Christian Empire: as there is only one Christ in heaven, there is only one Empire on the earth, where the Emperor takes care for bodies and the Patriarch for souls.

Admittedly, there were good reasons even for open-minded easterners to consider the Council of Ferrara-Florence a less than purely spiritual event. It was a political and religious “hot potato” from the moment of its conception. Deciding who would host such a reunion synod pitted the supporters of Pope Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and the doctrine of the plentitude of papal power against the Council of Basle (1431-1444) with its call for a constitutional and synodal form of Church governance. Finding a home for the gathering stirred up international and interurban fears and rivalries, while its change of venues reflected the troubled state of a mid-century Italy plagued by the ambitions of the Duke of Milan and the ravages of the condottieri at his service. Besides this, the choice of the Eastern Emperor for a papal-guided council was understood by many to be a basically military decision, one that favored Eugenius over the conciliarists simply for being most capable of eliciting aid for a beleaguered Constantinople from western princes.

A determined imperial concern for gaining the succor of the West, together with the good will of the universally esteemed patriarch and the eagerness for a serious reunion on the part of the pope and a number of Latin and Greek prelates, ultimately succeeded in bringing the council to life in 1438. What then took place was a late medieval Blitzkrieg, with the Latins overwhelming their generally much less well-educated eastern counterparts on issue after issue. The Greek Acts of the Council record numerous debates in which the westerners clearly demonstrated four crucial points: that their supposed errors were actually essential developments of doctrine explicating the unchanging Faith under pressure of historical challenges to its teaching; that Church Fathers and saints honored by all of the synod’s participants could be shown to agree with what the Latins had said and done; that a number of the causes for division were due to exaggerated concern for purely local customs; and that failure to allow a pilgrim Church to deepen her knowledge and presentation of Catholic doctrine was tantamount to a declaration of paralysis condemning the Mystical Body of Christ to impotence in the face of fresh dangers to religion.

Men like Bessarion of Nicaea (c. 1403-1472), Isidore of Kiev (1385-1463), the lay imperial advisor George Scholarius (c. 1400-c. 1473), and the patriarch himself were deeply impressed by what they heard. Their realization that the grounds for the schism were to a large degree illusory, and that Greek adherence to an unexamined Tradition had blinded them to their own internal disagreements on many important matters, led them to support the Union of the Churches. As Scholarius noted:²²

But you all see that the Latins have contended brilliantly for the faith so that no one with a sense of justice has any reason to reproach them….They brought forward from the common Fathers of the Church the six most renowned in dignity, wisdom and the struggles for the faith (I pass over the others) as witnesses of their doctrine, each of whom must be judged the equal of all the men in the world, and those not just incidentally and casually but as if they were for us judges of the present dispute. They argued so precisely and clearly, expressing the question in exact words as befits teachers, appending also the reasons and the texts of Holy Scripture from which they had drawn that doctrine as an inevitable conclusion, just as they culled others from other texts….Besides, they put forward others from the common Fathers, those of the East I mean, adorned with an equal wisdom and honour who said, they too, just the same as those others, though not so plainly, if their words are examined in a spirit of truth and wisdom, and they offered in proof of their doctrine no merely specious reasoning, no coercion, but everything straightforwardly and as flowing from the divine Scriptures and the Fathers. On our part nothing was said to them to which they did not manifestly reply with wisdom, magnanimity and truth, and we have no Saint at all who clearly contradicts them. If indeed there were such, he should in some fashion or manner be made to harmonise with the majority much more justly than that the multitude of the Teachers should be forced into his mould….Nor shall we say that the Doctors are mutually contradictory, for this is to introduce complete confusion and to deny the whole of the faith. Who is so simple-minded as to believe that the Latins wish to destroy the faith and to adulterate the trinitarian theology of all the Doctors? Surely a man who affirms this deserves nothing but ridicule, for no accusation would be disproved by more numerous, more weighty and more truthful arguments than this one.

Almost all of their colleagues joined these men in accepting Union in July of 1439, but seemly more out of bewilderment, frustration, and homesickness than any truly deep conviction. A few, such as Mark of Ephesus (1392-1444), remained adamantly and openly opposed to reconciliation throughout the council and its conclusion. Their grounds for rejecting it were based upon a mixture of their general parochial stubbornness with the particular accusation that the documents supposedly demonstrating the agreement of the eastern and western saints had been distorted at Latin hands. Hence, Bessarion’s justified lamentation:²³

They brought forward passages not only of the western teachers but quite as many of the eastern…to which we had no reply whatsoever to make except that they were corrupt and corrupted by the Latins. They brought forward our own Epiphanius as in many places clearly declaring that the Spirit is from the Father and the Son: corrupt we said they were. They read the text mentioned earlier in Basil’s work against Eunomius: in our judgment it was interpolated. They adduced the words of the Saints of the West: the whole of our answer was ‘corrupt’ and nothing more. We consider and consult among ourselves for several days as to what answer we shall make, but find no other defence at all but that…

Patriarch Joseph died in Florence. Bessarion and Isidore went on to become cardinals. Mark, along with those of his compatriots who had opposed the Union in their hearts while voting in its favor, stayed on the offensive after returning home, maintaining an unchanging polemic that ignored the substance of what was discussed at the council. They continued to harp regularly on the same rut-inspired themes: that the Latins were ipso facto heretics; that they were indisputable manipulators of fraudulent texts; and that the Greeks who had accepted the Union had done so either due to unbearable political pressure or to outright bribery. So effective was this approach that, despite the best efforts of the succeeding patriarch, the emperor did nothing to promote the work of Florence. So effective was it that George Scholarius—an admirer of western theology, a translator of St. Thomas Aquinas, and one of the most scathing critics of the ignorance and parochialism of his fellow Greeks at the synod—repudiated his earlier acceptance of East-West friendship. This rejection of the Church Union translated into a general indifference to the outcome of the final conflict with the Turks in 1453. And it may not be far from the truth to say that the Sultan in effect rewarded Scholarius, now known by the monastic name of Gennadius, for his anti-western sentiment---by calling upon him to become the first Patriarch of Constantinople under Moslem rule. In short, another nail had been driven into the coffin of East-West understanding, burying hopes of Christian unity still further. Willful, stubborn, parochial-minded words had trumped a proper respect for the message of the Word.²⁴

But no one should think that most westerners were particularly far-sighted in outlook either. Petty political and military goals designed to gain the power and riches that “common sense” told them were needed to keep the machine of “nature as is” on even keel were everywhere more important in the minds of most clergy, kings, princes, and merchant republics than unifying Christians and protecting Christendom from invasion. Italian maritime cities in particular judged the level of their support for the Christian East on the basis of the financial gains that might flow from its success. They had begun to weigh the greater profit that might be realized through active cooperation with the Ottoman Turks from the moment that ferrying infidel soldiers and families across the Bosporus from Asia into Europe proved to be lucrative. A public reiteration of old crusading themes was of significance to them—as it was to many a powerful Christian king or knight—only insofar as it could be effective in stalling for time as they eked out a bit more gold from their “business as usual” enterprises.

We have seen that when confronted with the self-seeking of the late Empire, St. Augustine had wondered aloud if there were anyone who was still concerned for the common good. When looking at the relationship of East and West from the standpoint of the Moslem threat, and with respect to the union of the Churches that would strengthen Christendom’s ability to respond to it, one is tempted to pose the same question. Was there anyone who put the cause of the Eternal Word and the defense of the lands where His message had taken root above the mystical, ethnic, or varied materialist demands of their own parochial tunnel vision?

Yes, some men were, such as those who took part in the Battle of Varna in 1444. It was here that one of the chief Latin Fathers at the Council of Florence, Giulio Caesarini, died, while serving as papal legate with the unsuccessful crusading army Eugenius had helped to raise for the defense of Constantinople. Clearly, however, most were not. It is little wonder then, that Pope Pius II (1458-1464), in the wake of the capture of Constantinople in 1453, when the need for a true military crusade was the greatest, lamented the western game-playing of his age, and placed greater hopes in the conversion of Mohammed the Conqueror than in aid from the hypocritical Christian population.²⁵

In a long and eloquent letter he attempted to convert the Sultan Mohammed II to Christianity. If he accepted baptism, the Pope wrote, a second Roman Empire might arise in the East, with Mohammed at its head. Pius reminded the Sultan that Clovis had brought Christianity to the Franks, and Constantine to the Romans; he depicted a Europe once more united and, for the first time in centuries, at peace. The epistle…was widely circulated in Europe, but whether it ever even reached the Sultan is not known.

Despairing of both Turkish conversion as well as princely assistance, Pius assumed personal leadership of the crusade that he had called to liberate the East. His subsequent death in Ancona, while vainly awaiting the help of the flower of western chivalry—which had organized many a splendid banquet as pleasant venues in which to take the Cross—demonstrated how little even a pope could do when one was actually aroused to take his responsibilities as defender of Christendom from external assault seriously.²⁶

The Duke of Burgundy now said that he was too old to come. The King of France, exasperated by the Pope’s recent support of the accession to the Kingdom of Naples of Ferrante of Aragon, sent word that he could join no Crusade so long as he was still at war with England. England—torn by the Wars of the Roses—sent a similar message. Frederick III was engaged in invading the Kingdom of Hungary, while the envoys of that country—which alone, in the recent past, had defended Europe against the Turks—bitterly complained of this new menace. No single voice was raised to echo the old Crusade cry: ‘Deus lo vult—it is God’s will!’ Of the Italian rulers, Borso d’Este declared that his astrologers forbade him to attend; Malatesta suggested the employment of Italian mercenaries, but only to get their pay for himself. The Florentines and Venetians both feared the loss of their eastern trade, but Venice promised to furnish sixty galleys, if every expense was paid from the general treasury and she was given the supreme command of the naval forces and awarded the spoils of the war. ‘To a Venetian’, the Pope commented, ‘everything is just that is good for the State; everything pious that increases the Empire’.

In all the history of the Crusades there are few episodes more pathetic than this journey of the dying Pope up the Tiber and across the Apennines—well aware that his enterprise was doomed. Often, as they drew near the coast, his attendants would draw the curtains of his litter, so that he might not see the bands of deserters who, scenting the prospect of defeat, were fleeing home before they had even begun to fight…The last Crusade was over, with the death of the only man who had believed in it.

Pius II was an exceptional figure even in Rome herself. His own cardinals and curia looked upon his crusading fervor as nothing more than so much madness. After all, it interfered with the more practical business of local political and financial gain. Their calculations allowed no role for “fools for Christ”, with their naïve commitment to the common cause of the Word made flesh. As Chateaubriand would later remark, there are ages when far-sightedness and commitment are taken as signs of dull-witted limitation rather than prophetic genius and virtue. This was definitely one of them. It was an era that belonged to the Rut Triumphant when what was needed for the cause of Christ was an age dominated by the Church Militant. In order for that to happen, however, a better ecclesiology explaining what the nature of that militancy truly ought to be was desperately required. In short, the Long March to the death camp governed through the triumph of the willful was definitively picking up speed.

C. The Progress of the “Seeds of the Words”

But let us remember that Christendom’s burial in mankind’s Original Rut was not the sole reason for the traffic on the clogged low road to “a reform of head and members” in the post-reunification period. “Seeds of the words” continued to grow after 1418 as fast as, if not even more swiftly than beforehand. These more conscious and thoughtful stimuli to the Long March to 1517 and beyond must be addressed in two separate steps. First of all, we need to look to the “seed” represented by the intellectual and spiritual forces that had emerged before the mini-apocalypse of the fourteenth century and had already once combined to chastise the Roman Church for “abandoning the Christian foundation vision”. Secondly, we must turn our attention to an examination of another such germ, emerging from negative aspects of the “back to the sources” movement encouraged in parallel but different ways by Renaissance Humanism and the devotio moderna.

Little more needs to be added to what has already been said about the influence of Marsilius of Padua. We have seen that he was too complex, innovative, and contradictory a voice to found a discernable school of thought to carry on his teaching. But, once again, the radical legalism that Marsilius represented and the spirit behind his vision of a single, secular-religious community guided by the civil authorities was certainly very much alive in the practical political activity of the Italian city-states of his home peninsula. Although Marsilius’ writings figured prominently in the Songe de Vergier, the collection of legalist texts commissioned by King Charles V (1364-1380) of France, and Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469-1527) Prince (1515) seems to take up his concern for a monist, secular-guided society, Ockham’s more Catholic-sounding approach to secularization—his alternative good story—also played a role in both. Furthermore, a French and Machiavellian hunt for a secular-sacred State whose political decisions changed according to whatever “worked” to confirm and strengthen the sway of a given willful ruler certainly sounds more like Ockham than it does Marsilius. Nevertheless, it is only the continued presence of at least some Catholic faith or the total lack thereof that indicates whether the influence of the Englishman or the Italian was ultimately the greater.

William of Ockham’s extreme Nominalism continued to thrive. Eighteen new universities were founded in Europe between 1348 and 1506, and the via moderna in philosophy dominated most of them, including Innocent III’s great “think tank” of Paris herself. Men ranging from Nicholas of Autrecourt (c. 1299-c. 1369) to Pierre d’Ailly (1350-c.1420) and Jean Gerson (1363-1429) demonstrated its hold on the greatest minds of the age. The new (1477) University of Tübingen, with its admittedly somewhat eclectic luminary, Gabriel Biel (c. 1420-1495), was particularly important in Nominalism’s immediate pre-Reformation history. Everywhere that the so-called via moderna in philosophy ruled, the overriding importance of the divine will was stressed. Yes, men like Biel used divine willfulness to emphasize the arbitrary contract that God had made with men that happily---and irrevocably--- guaranteed that their good works would gain them eternal salvation. But other Nominalists feared that his position unacceptably limited God’s liberty, cheapened appreciation of His gratuitous gift to men, lulled them into a semi-Pelagian smugness regarding the value of their free will actions, and thereby contributed to the quid pro quo “rut” mentality poisoning the age. While struggling towards Luther’s God of absolute willfulness, unmoved by “good” human actions, they satisfied themselves with a basically willful and arbitrary Church. Hence, the approach of the influential and deeply pious theologian and reformer, Pierre d’Ailly:²⁷

But we are not altogether without clues to the spirit that animated his reforming activities. And those clues point—unexpectedly perhaps, but certainly with no little insistence—to the centrality of his preoccupation with ecclesiastical authority. Even his early theological writings make unambiguously clear how very great an emphasis he was prone to place, in matters religious as well as moral and legal, on will, power, and authority. At its very deepest, according to him, the roots of obligation are engaged, not in the persuasive grounds of reason, but in the executive prescriptions of the will. It is not from the rational ends it serves, however compelling they maybe, that every law, divine and natural no less than human, derives its obligating force, but rather from the command or prohibition of the competent superior authority.

Of all the themes emphasized in the imperial coalition of the first half of the fourteenth century, the most high-minded was the summons to “return” to the life of Apostolic Poverty. When such a call does not dethrone charity as the highest of virtues and works together with a healthy pilgrim spirit accepting the reality of historical change and development of doctrine it can serve as one of the most noble of tools for remedying the practical conduct of life according to the dictates of “nature as is”. We have seen that the Observant Franciscan cultivation of Apostolic Poverty was just such a “high road” venture in the era under consideration, and one that did indeed avoid the false steps taken by its Spiritual forbears. So, also, was the path that was trod by the Theatines. But, unfortunately, banners tying Apostolic Poverty with a foundation vision filled with heretical implications for the structure of the Church as a whole were hoisted alongside those proclaiming more modest goals.

Remaining English Lollards continued to wave one such flag, but Czech supporters of Apostolic Poverty raised most of them.²⁸ The latter had been stimulated by earlier developments in Britain following the marriage of King Richard II to a Czech bride and the subsequent quite close ties of Oxford with the new imperial University of Prague. Students returning to Central Europe from studies in England brought Wycliffe’s writings with them, where they influenced Jan Huss (c. 1369-1415), priest and preacher in Czech at the Bethlehem Chapel in the imperial city.

It was not really Wycliffe’s heresy that gripped this brilliant but somewhat inconsistent reformer’s mind and heart. Nor was it any desire to offer the laity an excuse to expropriate the clergy to satisfy its own equally earthbound ambitions. Rather, Hus was attracted by his perception of Wycliffe as a militant fellow traveler of an already potent Bohemian reform movement seeking both a pious secular society as well as a purified Church. Wycliffe’s symbolic appeal to Huss was so great that he began appropriating the Englishman’s heretical terminology in defending his own generally much more moderate outlook.

This was at least partly due to the fact that the atmosphere at the University of Prague was also heated by a bitter rivalry between German supporters of the Nominalism of the via moderna and Czechs who, like Wycliffe, were Realists of the via antiqua school. Whatever the reasons, Huss’ insistence on calling upon the English heretic’s arguments bewildered his judges at the Council of Constance—both Cardinals Zabarella and D’Ailly as well as Jean Gerson. Nevertheless, as good Nominalists themselves, the judges saw contumacy before an assertion of the divine authority of the Church as more than sufficient grounds for his condemnation anyway. Huss’ judgment and execution, despite the safe conduct provided him by the Emperor Sigismund, intensified Bohemian rage against a corrupt and unjust Church that the dead man’s preaching had helped mightily to arouse.

Still, the Hussite Movement that takes its name from him was highly complex. Yes, it exalted the role of the Bible in Church life, though not everywhere in the all-encompassing spirit that Wycliffe had encouraged. Moreover, rather than rejecting Transubstantiation, a large number of Huss’ supporters gave voice to the growing Eucharistic piety of the age, expressed, in their case, in a longing to receive Holy Communion under the forms of both bread and wine. And, far from favoring the imperial State authorities who were condemned for betraying Huss, it pursued still more vigorously the earlier Czech passion for a general reform of all of society, lay as well as clerical. Unfortunately, this passion, in the hands of its much more radical Taborite faction, evolved into a demand for the swift creation of a Republic of Virtue, participation in which was made dependent upon one’s public commitment to personal holiness—and apparently his ethnic background as well. Under such conditions, the painfully difficult confirmation, correction, and transformation of nature proclaimed through the message of the Word in history to all of mankind took on more and more of the characteristics of a willful, parochial, revolutionary Purge. Nuance and self-criticism in this zealous religious cleansing were as little welcome as any other satanic temptation. Besides, how could a Czech saint, an “obvious” servant of God, support anything that was wrong? Or a German sinner, an “obvious” tool of the devil, defend anything that might actually be right?

A joint Church and State crusade against self-proclaimed rebels to the Council of Constance and the Empire was inevitable. But insofar as that crusade failed to recognize and deal with the complexity of the natural and supernatural issues involved in the Hussite uprising as a whole, it threatened merely to intensify outrage over the pursuit of rut-inspired political and personal self-interests under the masquerade of service to the universal cause of Christendom. Failed or woefully incomplete efforts to separate the political from the religious elements active in the whole Hussite Movement occupied a good deal of the energy of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire of the fifteenth century. Such efforts were stalled by the conflict of the Council of Basel with Pope Eugenius IV. They were also thwarted by the violent internal squabbles of the moderate Utraquists—those concerned primarily with the reception of the Sacrament under both species—and the more radical Hussite factions. The final result was two-fold. Frustrated radicals nursed a bitterness ready to explode anew when a stronger enemy of the complex and serious work required to assure true transformation of men and society in Christ appeared on the central European scene in the first decades of the following century. Meanwhile, the first purely local and parochial- minded “church” on European soil—that of the Bohemian Utraquists—was pragmatically “accepted” by Roman pontiffs who understood that its basic subordination of a universal religion to national religious feeling bode no good for the future.²⁹

“Seeds of the words” nurtured in a millenarian and apocalyptic environment were soon to be powerfully fertilized by a general account of the whole of history highly detrimental to the Roman Catholic Church and her work of correction of nature and transformation of all things in Christ. For mobilization of the past, along with the power to define the “true” foundation stones of western civilization and identify their “real” friends and enemies, was about to slip more definitively from her hands. Both were to fall under the control of men literally more interested in “words” than in the substance of the Word; words that would then be shaped into black legends and alternative good stories manipulated by a Grand Coalition of the Status Quo that would now finally emerge from the underbrush into the full light of day.

Negative features of Renaissance Humanism powerfully assisted this unfortunate development.³⁰ Problems arose partly because of the exaggerated reactions of many humanists to the admittedly flawed tunnel vision of high medieval logicians, Aristotelians, and legalists. There is no doubt that such men’s militant narrowness had indeed done much to weaken that western cultivation of literary culture that was still very strong in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Alas, humanist rage grew to the point of turning an understandable campaign for the proper appreciation of ancient rhetorical culture into a real historical vendetta against a stylistically barren and therefore supposedly totally barbaric medieval civilization.

Systematic, speculative theology, the kind of theology that leaned heavily upon logic and other philosophical tools to build the grand cathedrals of Christian thought characteristic of medieval scholasticism, was among the prime targets of their barbs. The theme of a blind Dark Age, guided by overblown and drably expressed dogmatic and canonical visions out of touch with natural human life, was created. Such a thesis could not help but appeal to varied representatives of that wide swath of the population outraged by the financial grasping of the Avignon Papacy, the two and three courts of the Great Western Schism, and the political, military, and social disasters of the fourteenth century in general. It also attracted those followers of the devotio moderna who felt that medieval Christianity had chained the Faith in soul-killing theological, philosophical, and legalist fetters, thereby drying up the literary sources of past religious inspiration, which would have provided a healthy stimulus to the intuitive and more solid spiritual sense of the simple human heart.

An anti-medieval vendetta was accompanied by an unquestioning cult of the ancient world, an adulation of its founders and their will, and a desire to return to a life shaped by the choices outlined by them in the past. In short, a passion was awakened on the part of certain humanists and kindred spirits for a Second Childhood, whose heroic interpreters and standard bearers the man of letters now became. All of the talent, wit, and literary feel for “turning an argument” that lay at the disposal of the rhetorician committed to such a Second Childhood was put to the work of praising the genius of the Fathers of Antiquity as an infallible given. Similarly, those who suggested any need for prudence and criticism of the distant past were mocked as impassioned but obscurantist cave dwellers.

It was to this preferential option for the ancient that later historians awarded the positive title of the Renaissance. Rediscovery and imitation of ancient man, its cultists insisted, would inevitably create a better world in all regards, spiritual as well as natural. On the one hand, a less intellectual, less structured, less legalistic, more scriptural, and more patristic-minded Christianity would thereby be fashioned. On the other, Greco-Roman philosophical, political, and social wisdom, expressed in that accessible literary form that the aesthetic spirit of classical culture considered to be the best way of spreading knowledge, would guide men to a more ordered and fulfilling secular life. Both, together, as the Neo-Platonist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) indicated, would permit “man the microcosm” to put all the wisdom of the universe at his service to complete his emergence from the darkness of the cave into the fullness of the light, there to fulfill his superhuman potential. The discovery of a literal New World at the very end of the fifteenth century seemed to confirm the validity of a fresh hope for the dawn of a bright and better morn, built ever more firmly upon the wisdom of the ancient founders of Greco-Roman-Christian civilization.

Although the attack on the past was noticeable everywhere that the influence of the Renaissance penetrated, the bitterness of the battle of the cult of Second Childhood against medieval obscurantism was perhaps most harsh in the Lowlands and the German world. It was here that the satirical writings of the greatest of the proponents of a happier, more intuitive, ancient Christianity, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), had their most powerful impact. It was here also that that famous struggle of contemporary scholarly demands against criticism of the possible accompanying dangers known as the Reuchlinstreit burst out, firing up the passion for the religious revolution that was to follow literally hot upon its heels.³¹

This conflict pitted Renaissance Humanism in the person of Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) and his supporters against the forces marshaled behind the Catholic theologian, Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469-1523). Reuchlin, a Hebrew scholar among his many other accomplishments, argued that a familiarity with the books of the Cabbala was essential to mastering a complete knowledge of the structure of that language and the proper meaning of its words. Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert, was horrified by the anti-Christian, anti-Creationist, and pronounced magical spirit of the cabbalistic writings, along with the discernable impact reading them had on believers in both the New and the Old Covenants. Brilliantly satirized by men like Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) in the Letters of Obscure Men (1515-1517), Pfefferkorn was enraged by the flippancy with which many humanists, whether sincerely or cynically, were treating the dangers that playing with false ideas could pose to Christian Faith and morality. And it is indeed with his well-grounded rage and fear for Catholic Truth that we arrive at the central problem of the low road followers of the Renaissance.

That there was an immense value to Renaissance critiques of the hidebound character of the universities, the gross superstitions of many individual clerics and monks, and the sterile use of speculative logic in the hands of mediocre disciples of the great thinkers of both the via antiqua as well as the via moderna is undeniable. But much Renaissance cultivation of a Second Childhood mentality amounted to little more than a simplistic promotion of yet another depressing form of tunnel vision: one that adulated the ancient literary past and its sophist non-speculative elements. Many Renaissance men of tunnel vision insisted that the literary approach was the guide of man through earthly life to eternal union with God, and that only literati could lead this pilgrim enterprise. The rhetorician became the heroic key to an elevated temporal existence and to eternity as well. He was both political and social orator as well as theologian, philosopher, and preacher, all at one and the same time. Should the Church remain closed to his rhetorical preoccupations and endeavors, such blindness would signify that the Mystical Body of Christ was herself an enemy of man and God. In short, the spirit of Isocrates had returned with a vengeance.

Alas, the Church was all too open to the Second Childhood mentality in the era of the Rut Triumphant, when whatever “worked” to gain political and financial security seemed best for the cause of the Word Incarnate. She, like the State, quickly learned that the employment of a talented humanist as a spokesman was, as Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351-1402) of Milan ruefully noted, worth a great deal more than a well-outfitted army for protecting the demands of “business as usual”. The blessings of “nature as is” that the humanist was capable of enumerating were legion; the noble sounding “appropriate explanations of the satisfaction of passion” that he could provide were inimitable. Active in Church service from the days of Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) onwards, humanist invasion of the papal court was especially assured when two of their number, Nicholas V (1447-1455) and Pius II (1458-1464), ascended to the throne of Peter.

An outline of all the specific problems born through abandonment to the Second Childhood tunnel vision of certain Renaissance humanists would be a Herculean task. Still, its general profoundly negative effect must be emphasized. Rather than a salutary liberation of Christianity from the deadening fetters of speculative scholastic and legal thought, all that such abandonment achieved was to tighten the grip upon the Church of the academic sophist, the unthinking pedant, the lover of words for words’ sake, and the murderer of a living Tradition that had actually been maturing in wisdom and in pilgrim spirit since its infancy. In the name of the blessings offered by Seeds of the Logos and the childhood of the Faith, this new parochialism worked to stifle the present existence offered by a pilgrim-minded Church that had corrected, transformed, and matured these ancient germs and that early youth more fully than any primitive Christian could have imagined.

Sad to say, such frivolous playing with words for words’ sake had more disastrous effects still. On the one hand, the supporter of a Second Childhood mentality ridiculed the brilliant achievements of medieval speculative theology, philosophy, and mystical thought, and mocked the canonical and administrative backbone of the Church—once again, her whole living Tradition and Body. On the other, he blithely presumed that nothing around him could ever undermine his simple, intuitive Christian Faith and behavior. But this was all too far from the truth. Even if the amount of humbug in the commentaries on the glosses of the tomes of the great speculative philosophers and theologians equaled their solid meat for the mind, a total destruction of the work of the intellect was no way to end the influence of truly obscurantist and secularizing dross. With substantive thought denigrated, the average priest, noble, merchant, or peasant buried in the routine of the era of the Rut Triumphant would not know what to say to defend Catholic Faith and morals should the day come that they would be subject to serious attack. At best, he would be able to point to his personal sentiments and passionate emotions, or call up the prettiest words he could string together from Scripture or pious, mystical writers to emphasize his intuitive feelings. At worst, the pressure finally to think through the rut of his daily routine might cause him to see that this, for him, was indeed based on sand; that the logic of a life that really required little or nothing in the way of any sacrificial change, perhaps actually demanded a frank acceptance of the vision of “nature as is”. All that was then needed was the opening of a full-fledged recruitment center for the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo to entice him to fly the Catholic coop and join in the open warfare of the “old time words” against the Eternal Word.

Once again, there is no better commentator on the dangers of this anti-intellectual Second Childhood approach than the great twentieth century English historian of the Roman Catholic Church, Philip Hughes. It is worth quoting at some length his joint critique of the work of the devotio moderna and of Desiderius Eramus—much of which he quite rightly appreciates—in order to get a complete sense of the suicidal disarmament their deconstruction of the medieval speculative achievement ensured:³²

That goodness matters more than learning, that it is the mistake of mistakes ‘to prefer intellectual excellence to moral’ no one will ever contest; nor that the learned may need, even frequently, to be reminded of this. But of all forms of goodness truth is the most fundamental, and yet, while learning is the pursuit of truth, it is hardly deniable that the author of the Imitation—and others of this school with him—do continually suggest, at least, an opposition between advance in virtue and devotion to learning, even to sacred learning; and certainly the tone of such admonitions is far removed from the teaching of St. Thomas that learning—even the study of letters—is a most suitable ascetic discipline for religious.

The facts are, however, that to all but a very select few, knowledge, even of truths about supernatural reality, only comes through the ordinary natural channels—faith is by hearing. It is the natural human intelligence that must lay hold of the truths of faith and make the judgment that these are things it must believe. It is no part of Christian perfection to neglect the ordinary means of making contact with these truths—namely the teaching of those already learned in them—and to trust for a knowledge of them to the possibility of the extraordinary favor of a special personal revelation. And although it is most certainly true that theological learning is by no means a prerequisite for sanctity, such learning remains, nevertheless, a necessary instrument for those whose lot it is to journey towards sanctity by guiding others thither. Hence, when good men begin to suggest that the world of piety can manage very well—if not, indeed, very much better—without the presence of theologians acting upon it, there is surely something wrong; and when priests write books about holy living which suggest that the theologians are more likely to go to the bad through learned vanity than to save their souls through the deeper knowledge of divine truth that is theirs, there is something very wrong indeed. Once more, we are brought up against the all-important role of theological learning as the salt that keeps Christian life healthy. And what theology is to piety, metaphysical truth is to theology; for it is the natural condition, the sine qua non of healthy intellectual certitude in the mind of the theologian. Once the direction of so delicate a thing as the devotio moderna passes into the hands of those unlearned in theology, all manner of deviation is possible. It can become a cult of what is merely naturally good, a thing no worse—but no more spiritual—than, say, the cult of kindness, courtesy, tidiness and the like. And what the master, unwittingly, is soon really teaching is himself; he is the hero his disciples are worshipping; there are, in the end, as many Christianities as there are masters, and chaos begins its reign.

Once it ceases to be recognized that there must exist an objective rule by which to judge the whole business—theory and practice, maxims, counsels, exhortations, ideals, and criticism of other ways—of the inner life and the business of the director with the directed, and that this objective rule is the science of the theologian, substitute rules will be devised to fill the absent place, rules which, there is every chance, will be no more than the rationalization of a man’s chosen and preferred activities. Someone, somewhere, must be interested in compunction’s definition, or it will soon cease to be understood that there can be, and is, a certainty about what compunction is and what it is not; and if that certainty goes, very strange things indeed will begin to wander about, claiming the name of compunction in the lost land that once was Christendom.

The Christian mind, then, unable to think itself out of the impasse to which ‘thought’ has brought it, and mortally uneasy at the now unresolved fundamental contradiction that the teachings of Faith and the findings of reason may be incompatible, is bidden for its salvation resolutely to ignore the contradiction, to stifle reason, and to seek God in the interior life; again, to seek Him with what? With a mind accepting on Faith what it knows may be impossible? The eternal lesson recurs, that we cannot manage our religious affairs without true philosophy, however elemental; that the true religion does not survive healthily unless philosophy flourishes. For without philosophy, or with a philosophy that is false, the educated mind turns to skepticism—theoretical or practical; and assents to religious truth made by a mind that is skeptical about natural truth, produce in the end superstition; and from the educated mind the poison seeps down, until in time it corrupts the faith of the whole community.

Further gruesome developments accompanied the savaging of the medieval Catholic achievement, digging paralyzed Christendom’s grave still deeper. As unilateral Christian disarmament in the intellectual realm proceeded, the full character of the ancient world began more and more to manifest itself. This fullness had been hidden by the long centuries of Catholic effort to work only with the Seeds of the Logos to be found therein, to eliminate their inevitable errors, and to destroy their exaggerations by harmonizing them all within the proper hierarchy of values. A general adulation of the unadulterated achievement of antiquity meant that everything that was at worst unacceptable and at best disordered came back with a clean bill of approval. For the Second Childhood mentality insisted that the will of the founders of western civilization, as revealed through their great literary works and historical accomplishments, had to be obeyed lest the blindness of obscure men continue to darken Christian Europe.

The result was the same as if children, hearing a long lost relative with the gift of the gab praised by their parents for his unquestionable grandeur, were suddenly to meet him and discover that in addition to being a good storyteller he was also a committed and openly self-proclaimed pederast. Interestingly enough, the cult of Second Childhood actually did end by convincing a number of Renaissance humanists that this particular vice should be rehabilitated along with many others. But to my mind, symbolically at least, the worst of its rehabilitations stemmed directly from the games that it played as a consequence of its tunnel vision love affair with Plato.

As a man who himself prefers reading Plato to Aristotle, and believes that the rediscovery and cultivation of Platonic studies was an unquestionable blessing for Catholic culture, this development is a particularly painful one to discuss. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the cult of Second Childhood ended by adulating not only the real wisdom of Plato—the Seeds of the Logos to be found in his writings—but also the willingness of his careless followers to enter into the most far-ranging and ultimately anti-Christian speculations. Its chance to accomplish this unhappy labor came along with the teaching of the deeply interesting but clearly pagan Gemisthos Plethon, the translations of Plato produced by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), and the enthusiasm for Platonic and Neo-Platonic studies unleashed both at the Florentine Academy Ficino presided over, as well as elsewhere throughout Europe.³³

In their efforts to probe every aspect of nature and thereby bring light into the darkest recesses of mankind’s cave, some ancient Platonic thinkers---Neo-Platonists in particular---had joined with the devotees of “nature as is” in the pursuit of magical studies. Many of their Renaissance admirers therefore did the same. They thus helped mightily to give to a magical tradition passed down only through the medieval underworld, in the books of the Jewish Cabbala and as the wisdom attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus, a seemingly valid philosophical pedigree. This was then combined together by them in a syncretist hunt for a basic, perennial wisdom, a prisca teologia, that could conceivably reduce Christianity to merely one idiosyncratic expression of deeper truth among many.

Humanists who wished to remain Christian defended this study of magic and its naturalist bag of tricks as a tool provided man by the Holy Spirit in order to understand a universe that was indeed a highly mysterious Mirror of God. But the whole ethos of magic is based not upon an attempt to appreciate nature as an integral part of the divine plan but as a means of achieving an irrational manipulation of the cosmos for the satisfaction of uncorrected human passion. It was for this reason that the Church had publically and properly chastised it through the ages. Recourse to speculative logic would have been able to identify in the magical trade an abuse rather than a proper use of God’s Creation; an unhealthy “power game”. But, alas, such a scholastic tool was ridiculed as “ugly” and “obscurantist”. And therefore it was dismissed by wise men whose knowledge of life came through a return to a Second Childhood.

All those ready to encourage the rebirth of the willful totalitarian State that the founders of the ancient polis appeared to have taken as a “given” welcomed manipulative magical wisdom and the power over nature that it promised. Nominalists who had lost their Faith, sought “closure” with Christianity, and were ready to “move on” to impose their own whims on a universe that no longer had a loving God in charge of it were equally open to its charms. Hence, one of the great ironies of the Renaissance is the fact that some of its misled Platonist representatives cultivated “Seeds of the words” more representative of the central error of Isocrates than their master’s own truly liberating doctrine. And the two greatest consequences of this error were the fact that: 1) it helped to replace the hunt to know, love, and serve the Truth with a pursuit of the knowledge of the most effective path to the triumph of the will; and, 2) that it aided and abetted the handing over of the teaching of man’s end to those offering uncorrected and merely appropriate explanations of the willful and passionate manipulation of nature. The long-term effects of both, as Plato himself would have recognized, would be to silence the literary muse of man along with his Faith and Reason. Unfortunately, few humanists of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries chose to believe that such an outcome was in any way possible.

Moreover, the danger that the new world in the making would become a laboratory for cultivating a willfulness that could also mock the very past that Renaissance man now unguardedly adored was also threatening. In fact, a number of the rabid opponents of the medieval Dark Ages were already actively pointing out this possible disdain. Their passion for imitating the ways of the ancients was leading them so to abandon all concern for the correction and transformation of fallen man that even many of the teachings of their own classicizing heroes might happily be rejected. What then remained to guide them was a pure pagan naturalism. And this, in turn, was sharpened by an individualism fueled by a Christian exaltation of the glory of the human person now cut off from a sense of its dependency upon supernatural revelation and grace for its perfection. Hence, the career of Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), born in the year of Columbus’ first voyage to that truly “New World” that would one day see itself as the playground of the unchained individual. Let us hear him praised by an admirer of his spirit of total independence:³⁴

Untrammeled by convention, dominated by instinct, swept along by his nature, fulfilling his fate with the agility of an acrobat, yet true to his inner essence, his mysterious virtù—this was the compulsive image which Renaissance man created for himself. Instead of the stage being the mirror of life, it seemed rather as if the characters of melodrama had usurped the true characters of men. In no other man of this age is the image more sharply mirrored than in Pietro Aretino—the first Bohemian.

‘I am a free man’, Aretino wrote, ‘I do not need to copy Petrarch or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry themselves about style and so cease to be themselves. Without a master, without a model, without a guide, without artifice, I go to work and earn my living, my well-being, and my fame. What do I need more? With a good quill and a few sheets of paper I mock the universe.’ And he did, riotously, splendidly, until in his vigorous sixties, he roared too vehemently at a bawdy joke, had apoplexy, and died. But what a life he had lived—shameless, selfish, magnificently free from humbug and splendidly creative.

D. Total Depravity Macht Frei

Where might a combination of revulsion over the Rut Triumphant, influence of the Seeds of the words, and cultivation of the cult of Second Childhood lead? To begin with, it was to lead to the convulsion of Western Christendom by a man with an innovative doctrine whose results he himself certainly did not completely foresee or really even fully want to unfold. The man was Martin Luther (1483-1546), the doctrine was that of total depravity, and its immediate consequence was the passage that it opened for the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo finally to emerge from its underworld and “take flesh” in the historic life of Christendom.

In the long-run, Luther’s doctrine has proven to be crucial to the construction of that death camp ruled by willful passion that now extends throughout the globe. Its open and comprehensive assault on the message of the Word in history began with reference to noble sounding words from the Bible. What made this biblical rhetoric all the more treacherous was that its summons to treat the world as a living hell was quickly identified as the arrival of a new age of freedom for all. For those who bring themselves to believe such an extraordinary claim, the entrance into the death camp of modernity should be topped with a luminous sign engraved with the motto Total Depravity Macht Frei. A greater self-deception concerning the individual, society, nature, and God is hardly imaginable. How could this have come about in the heartland of the venerable and Catholic Holy Roman Empire?³⁵

Despite Germany’s brilliant Catholic past, the fact that the first solid political and social incarnation of a Grand Coalition built around Word- destroying words emerged here is not surprising. The Triumph of the Rut was in many respects a quite thorough one in Central Europe, with all of its pathetic effects on catechesis and the administration of the Mystical Body of Christ. Moreover, regardless of the efforts of the Emperor Maximilian (1486-1519), progress towards creation of a “new monarchy” in Germany was very slow compared to that in England, France, and Spain. The German world remained badly splintered. This made it a much more tempting target for papal efforts to milk its pious peoples for funds that could not be obtained as effectively in other lands. It also made it a cauldron bubbling with as many different critiques of exploitation—or mutually profitable negotiated settlements to keep it going—as there were princes and municipal councils of varying strength, will, and anticlerical feeling to give clout to them.

Luther himself became a monk and a priest in a typically confused late medieval fashion, after a hasty oath in time of danger, and without philosophical and theological preparation, all of which came only after his ordination.³⁶ Having been given the standard anti-speculative Nominalist university education of the day, he was then won over to the humanist approach to learning. Humanist methodology focused his attention on Scripture and the Church Fathers, St. Augustine in particular. Repeating unceasingly his commitment to the Gospels—hence, the birth of the term Evangelical Christianity—Luther brought to the reading of those bible and patristic texts his own deeply-felt and willful choice of themes—exactly what one would have expected, given his Nominalist training. This choice was based upon his own personal spiritual problem—his profound sense of inescapable guilt—and an “obvious” message from the Holy Spirit regarding how to deal with it that his character already predisposed him to hear.

Like many a “simple”, pious, but learned man emerging from a Nominalist environment, Luther was psychologically prepared to equate his personal feelings with the will of God, and thus, as he himself admitted, to “force” the Scriptures to say what they really wanted to say---even to the point of tossing out those parts of Holy Writ that did not support his “Spirit-inspired” vision. That same Nominalist background prepared him to argue that Faith in God and the Scriptures demanded unqualified acceptance of this personal and willful doctrine---even though it was contrary to everything that councils and popes had historically taught and that a speculative, rational, and logical believing mind might conclude to be valid. In short, a deeply felt passion, negative and self-reproaching, was molded into the anti-natural, anti-speculative, and anti-Catholic doctrine of total depravity. And this became the grounds for Luther’s efforts to understand everything relating to God, man, and the pilgrim dance of life.

Luther’s conviction that human beings were completely corrupted and incapable of pleasing God after Original Sin was thus the centerpiece of his entire theological edifice. It was only because of his insistence that men could never be purified, either in this world or the next, that the concept of justification by Faith alone became necessary for him. For if man could not please God through good works, the sacraments, and sanctifying grace, then his only hope lay in complete abandonment to Divine Will. Moreover, it was only due to the total depravity doctrine that the “words” of Scripture, interpreted through the voice of the Holy Spirit, as deeply felt by Luther, became the sole possible teacher of individual Christians. For if the Church, supposedly the Word Incarnate continued in time, could be shown to have definitively opposed this teaching throughout her history, she thereby demonstrated the horrible impact of total depravity upon even the most revered of social institutions—in her case, that of wickedly rejecting the “obvious” Christian foundation Truth. The faithful individual could not trust her, and was forced to rely on the word of God---with the aid of the Holy Spirit and Luther---on his own. It was through this Lutheran doctrinal discovery that all of the Seeds of the words of the last few hundred years were finally joined together in an enduring compact. What was thereby created was a seemingly “Gospel-friendly” tool permitting the underground GCSQ to plant the banner of opposition to all notion of a corrective and transforming mission of the Word Incarnate openly and firmly in a Catholic land. Let us allow Philip Hughes once again to summarize the attendant horror:³⁷

It is the surrender to despair—in the name of greater simplicity, which ‘simplicity’ is presented as the road back to primitive truth and the good life; to despair: as though true religion was incompatible with the two great natural necessities, the ownership of material goods and the activity of the speculative intelligence; as though material destitution and contented, uncritical ignorance were conditions sine quibus non for the preservation on earth of the work of that Incarnate Wisdom through Whom the Creator called the earth into being.

All those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces that had plagued and hindered the medieval Church for centuries, whose chronic maleficent activity had, in fact, been the main cause why—as we are often tempted to say—so little was done effectively to maintain a generally higher standard of Christian life; all the forces that were the chronic distraction of the medieval papacy, were now stabilized, institutionalized in the new reformed Christian Church. Enthronement of the will as the supreme human faculty; hostility to the activity of the intelligence in spiritual matters and in doctrine; the ideal of a Christian perfection that is independent of sacraments and independent of the authoritative teaching of clerics; of sanctity attainable through one’s own self-sufficing spiritual activities; denial of the truth that Christianity, like man, is a social thing;—all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance, the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others, now have their fling. Luther’s own special contribution—over and above the key doctrines that set all this mischief loose—is the notion of life as radically evil.

Propagating his message with superb literary ability and bitter satire in a divided Germany angered by papal financial exactions and prepared by the Reuchlinstreit to view the critics of humanism as nothing but obscurantist fools, Luther was able to overwhelm his opponents. Yes, early enemies, such as Johann Eck (1486-1543), did respond to him with the proper tools, but they were not the dominant Catholic teachers of the day, and so they found themselves to be but voices crying in the wilderness. They were, in effect, the equivalent of present-day intellectuals contesting the dicta of well-constructed blogs offering ever more titillating though dubious information to those tuned into them. What was needed to fight Luther was not just consistent support from religious and political authorities but also a hard-hitting, theological and spiritual counterattack rooted in the use of all of the tools of the Mystical Body of Christ. And it was precisely this that was lacking in the era of the Rut Triumphant.

Thus, that which took place in the decades after 1517, the year that Luther’s doctrine “went public” through its application to the German Indulgence Controversy, was what had to take place: a full-scale rout.³⁸ The condemnation of the Edict of Worms in 1521 was not enforced, partly due to anti-Hapsburg politics and partly because the King-Emperor Charles V (1519-1556) was too busy in his non-German domains to back its threat up personally. Sometime repression gave way to uncomprehending concessions, and both together to a justified impression of weakness and illogic. Princes and municipal councils were baffled as to what to do but sensed that that the attack on the structure of the Church in the name of the foundation Words of God might be useful to them. Perceiving that it could rid them of many obstacles to fulfillment of their own willful desires and save them a great deal of tax money in the bargain, they opted to take advantage of Luther’s destruction of ecclesiastical institutions. Both a clergy thirsty for reform of abuses, as well as corrupt bishops and priests who had always seen their positions merely as a means of obtaining three square meals a day, joined in the abandonment of the old order out of a mixture of sincere and totally self-interested motives. Since everyone agreed that the Word of God in Scripture was a holy thing, and since Luther hammered at the argument that he and he alone was concerned for what this was and what it meant, an improperly catechized population tended to decide that it should follow his “clear” path until things were finally “put right”. Local princely and municipal churches had long been prepared to make the decisions necessary to effect the change. Bishops themselves could not explain why they should oppose them. Tinder lay all around and Luther merely lit the match, throwing new and unexpected fireworks onto the flammable materials whenever his opponents thought they finally had him cornered.

Erasmus was the chief example of the impotence of most Catholic-minded voices in the face of the Lutheran explosion. His humanist “word games” could not match the energy unleashed by this bull in the vineyard of the Lord, as the papal encyclical excommunicating Luther labeled the heresiarch. Like many humanists, Reuchlin among them, Erasmus turned against the reformer when the direction of his ideas became clear in pamphlets such as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and the Freedom of a Christian Man. There was simply no way that admirers of the ancients, inspired by the Renaissance vision of the dignity of man as microcosm, could accept the fatalist notion of the total enslavement of the human will to sin. Luther was willfully promoting a doctrine about the pointlessness of the human will. Nevertheless, uncovering this precise flaw in his teaching required the use of serious theology and philosophy. These were tools that Erasmus was incapable of employing. For, as the ever-perceptive Philip Hughes notes, Erasmus’ approach had always been one of an anti-intellectual, pious simplicity that was falsely supposed to be up to the task of conquering every obstacle in its path:³⁹

Under all the varied activity of this most industrious scholar, the single persisting aim is always evident, namely to bring men back to Christ; and this, Erasmus is persuaded, can best be done by setting before men Christianity as it first existed. His method is that of the humanist who would reconstruct Ciceros’s Rome or Plato’s Athens, namely the critical use of the oldest literary monuments of the time that have survived. The one way back to Christ, in fact, is through study of the New Testament, and if our idea of Christ’s doctrine gains in simplicity the more we read, this is a sure indication that we are on the right way. Here, in this craving for simplification, in a violent impatience with whatever is not grammatically self-evident, we have one leading motif of Erasmus’s theological activity. He posits, in fact, of the inexhaustible content of revelation, the simplicity which belongs to the assent of faith through which the content is made accessible. This simplicity of statement for which Erasmus yearns, he does not find in the theologians. What has destroyed it there, so he thinks, is the theologians’ use of philosophy, of metaphysics, in their task of exposition. With the theologians as they face their eternal problem—the need to determine what doctrines actually mean, to solve the apparent contradictions, to resolve the seeming opposition between them and what is reasonably known—Erasmus has no sympathy at all. From such problems he shrinks; and he has a marked antipathy for those who face them, and immense scorn for their barbarous, unclassical Latinity, their carefully devised technical terminology, and their methods of logical analysis, and of strict definition.

His own method will not give any doctrinal precision, and he does not desire it from any other method. Doctrinal precision is, in fact, not necessary; zeal for it is a mark of Christian decadence, not of progress in knowledge of God. In the hands of Erasmus, Catholic dogma thins out until it vanishes to nothing; and he would meet the problem of the real need, of even the most ordinary of mankind, for knowledge of the mysteries appropriate to the level of their intelligence, by scrapping technical language on all sides. Precision in these matters, he thought, was not worth what it cost; and even, for example, such a vitally necessary tool as the term homoousion ought to go, ought never to have been devised. It is not surprising if, in his theology, there are mistakes, inexactitudes, contradictions, and this especially in the matters then so violently controverted, doctrines about marriage, confession, the monastic life, the Roman primacy.

Deficient in theological and philosophical instruments, Erasmus’ toolbox did include satirical commentaries lambasting medieval religious thought and practices. Many contemporaries understandably felt that these had paved the way for Luther’s focus on the importance of Scripture alone as a guide to the Christian life:⁴⁰

…the moral is continuously pointed out that true religion is far different from all this, that what now obtains needs to be purified and simplified, and that what a man needs is to know Christ as the Bible speaks of Him and to follow His way. On its positive side the spiritual direction is that of the Devotio Moderna; but, allied now with the hostile critique of so many Catholic practices and institutions, and lacking the needed reference to man’s need of sacraments and of Church-taught doctrine, and with the seeming theory that private study of the Bible is all-sufficient, and given to the world under the author’s name barely two years after Luther’s condemnation and with all northern Europe now in convulsion, the book {The Colloquies}, henceforward, lined up Erasmus as Luther’s ally in the minds of a host of the Catholic partisans. Erasmus crying ‘Back to Christ in the Bible’ was too like Luther crying ‘The Bible only’. (Colloquies, 152.)

No wonder then, that his foray into anti-Lutheran polemics, in his work in defense of the freedom of the will, could not plug the Catholic dike punctured everywhere by the power of the Protestant tsunami:⁴¹

For his theological insufficiency, and his own unawareness of it, he paid again and again. Luther’s theories of the will as enslaved, for example, filled him with horror. Erasmus attacked the German unsparingly, but with what weapons? Here was a philosophical question, and the humanist had done nothing about philosophy all his life but ridicule the miserable philosophers of his experience.

‘Caught unprovided with any such technical formation’, says a theological historian of the controversy about Free Will, ‘{these humanists} had only their personal tastes to trust to, and their own powers of initiative, seeking shelter, for good or ill, behind such Greek writers as Origen and St. John Chrysostom, whose scattered views had never been formed into a systematic theory about these problems, nor enjoyed any appreciable prestige in the Church. The intervention of such improvised theologians had the effect of creating, inside the theological system of Catholicism, a new antithesis, whose consequences were to be far reaching indeed…’. And Mandonnet instances Erasmus who, ‘without any study of the classical theology of the Church, improvises solutions, and despite his circumspection…comes to affirm such enormities as this: ‘That nothing comes about without the will of God, I readily allow; but, generally, the will of God depends on our will’.”

Let us pause for a moment to reiterate that this Protestant tsunami only inundated the western Christian landscape through a contradictory mix of heretical reformist zeal, bewildered reaction to it, and self-interested manipulation on the part of perceptive proponents of “nature as is”. The contradictions began with Luther himself, for the father of Evangelical Christianity had a decidedly split personality and does not appear himself to have been logical in the development of his own teaching. How could he be? Once again, few men of his day and his background were trained to treat speculation on immediately and strongly felt principles seriously in the first place; logic was a weapon used simply for denigrating the value and pretensions of philosophically grounded theological meditation. Instead, one has the clear impression that Luther simply stumbled onto only a few of the consequences of his own thought, and these gradually and almost against his choice.

Moreover, despite his role as a new kind of humanist preaching authority, his early dependence for survival upon anti-Hapsburg princely and communal political support quickly limited the development of so-called Evangelical Christianity in any direction other than one that would be permitted by more traditional public Defenders of the Peace. After having given an appropriate explanation for the failures of medieval Christianity through a doctrine of total depravity that he attributed to the founding principles of the Faith; after having denigrated speculative reason, individual human freedom, society, and nature as a whole; after having posited his will as the divine will and thereby raised up the preacher as the hero defending the original intent of the founders of Christianity against the wicked machinations of the true friends of the Incarnate Word in history; after all of this, he shrank back in horror over the “enthusiastic” madmen who utilized his teachings to baptize their own much more radical beliefs and actions. And the consequence was that he willfully handed the arbitrary power to shape the religious world around him back to the State authorities and the “business as usual” considerations that their more conservative vision of nature represented. Luther openly proclaimed these authorities to be the “necessity bishops” of the Church that he had intellectually obliterated. The either-or option that he enunciated was one of accepting religious guidance from the State on the one hand or from either the papal Whore of Babylon or radical “enthusiasts” on the other. Very swiftly, kings, princes, and municipal councils throughout all of Europe heard his message and acted upon it. In the name of Gospel religion, they openly became the arbiters of the faith and morality that they had “pragmatically” been guiding in the name of Christian order and reform since the latter days of the Avignon Papacy and the Great Western Schism. Hence, the example of Zürich, “reformed” by Ulrich Zwingli, where the Mass was abolished on April 11, 1525, and obligatory Protestant worship was introduced four years later, in ways that Marsilius of Padua would have appreciated. “The last Mass was celebrated before a crowd of people”, Jedin notes. “Therefore something that was still entirely alive was abolished by official decree.”⁴²

With the introduction in 1529 of the obligation of attending worship and the prohibition of attendance at Catholic Masses outside the territory, the city congregation completely controlled the lives of the citizens. In opposition to Zwingli’s spiritualism and to his thesis of the inherent power of the Gospel, but at the same time also in consequence of it, the secular authority had seized control of ecclesiastical government. The church congregation had been absorbed into the civil community.

Mention of the situation in Zürich calls attention to the fact that anyone looking for more consistent speculative development of the doctrine of total depravity has to turn away from Luther: to Ulrich Zwingli first, but, much more importantly still, to Jean Calvin (1509-1564), the founder of Reformed Christianity.⁴³ Frenchman, lawyer, writer, and zealot, Calvin—and those following in his path—squeezed from the concept of total depravity almost everything that a man could eek from it while still believing in Christ. Calvin may not have seen how his own beliefs gave succor to the developing Unitarian Movement, but he was painfully aware of the dangers of entrapment in the Lutheran political labyrinth and determined that his own reform would, if anything, subject the State to religious controls rather than the other way around. This he sought to accomplish by creating a new kind of “Church”, built upon base communities of believers—congregations—guided by their preachers and capable of being elaborated on city, provincial, and nation-wide levels. His prestige thus rose among independent-minded men, and Reformed Christianity became the form of Protestantism that penetrated most of Europe. The charismatic preacher and the triumph of his will as God’s will were thus secured a heroic role for the future. Calvin’s option for Christians was to be centered round a choice either for the inspired Preacher of the Words or for the wickedness of nature—whether this latter evil was represented by the world-changing Word guided by a “satanic” Papacy or by some secular tyrant closed to the godly message of divine word merchants like himself.

E. A Renaissance in Black Legends

Persistent and enthusiastic work on the part of the many Evangelical and Reformed Christians conversant with humanist methodology transformed their literary talents into potent weapons in the anti-Roman arsenal. Labeled innovators by their Catholic opponents, and yet convinced, as they were, that the Church had introduced changes disastrous to the true message of the words of God in Scripture, these Protestants hammered at arguments drawn from positive theology to drive home their apologetic points. They knew how to uncover scriptural, patristic, legal and liturgical problems embarrassing to the Church of the era of the Rut Triumphant. They also learned how to weave these into broad historical assaults calling her whole mission as Christ-continued into question. Their feel for language, extended, by Luther, to an often inflammatory and obscene vernacular in addition to the ancient tongues, enabled them to present their accusations in gripping, often rude, but always crystal-clear ways to wide audiences. Publishing houses exploiting the new technology of printing and smelling a profit in such works aided mightily in their dissemination. Hence, with a sense of purpose, science, and style, they fixed the theme of medieval Catholic corruption and obscurantism ever more firmly in the minds of both the intellectual elite and the masses. And it was for this reason that they were also able to drill into the minds and spirits of the

inmates of their new death camp the notion that its prison guards were actually their liberators.⁴⁴

Martyrology was one field of study of Christian behavior that Protestants used to build up black legends concerning the Catholic enterprise from a very early date. What they did was to link up the suffering of Christian heroes from the past with those of “Gospel Christians” of their own day, so as to show that the persecution of true believers was a specialty of the Roman Church from time immemorial. Catholics through the ages had prepared the way for them in this regard, claiming each new heretical appearance as a revival of an older one rather than attempting to discuss its own fresh substantive principles. Martyrologies of this new type appeared in many languages. Prominent among them were Martin Luther’s The Burning of Brother Henry in Dithmarschen (1525), William Tyndale’s Examination of Thorpe and Oldcastle (1535), Ludwig Rabus’ Stories of God’s Martyrs (1552), Jean Crespin’s The History of Martyrs (1554), Matthias Flacius Illyricus’ Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth (1556), Adriaen van Haemstede’s History and Death of the Pious Martyrs (1559), both the Latin and English editions of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1559/1563), Agrippa d`Aubigne’s poem, Les Tragiques (1580), and Simon Goulard’s more ambitious History of the Reformed Churches of the Kingdom of France (1580).

A sub-category of such literature involved a specific attack on the Inquisition. This was especially useful in places where it was at first difficult openly to condemn the Roman Church and where one might also tap into anti-Hapsburg and anti-Spanish sentiment. In this line were the anonymous On the Unchristian Tyrannical Inquisition that Persecutes Belief, Written from the Netherlands (1548), Francesco de’Enzinas’ History of the State of the Low Countries and the Religion of Spain (1558), and A Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtell Practices of the Holy Inquisition (1567) by “Montanus” (Antonio del Correo), translated into English by Thomas Skinner (1568). Though not a Protestant, the Venetian Servite Paolo Sarpi’s On the Office of the Inquisition (1615/1638) was a further addition to the genre. It was out of these and related attacks that the narrower use of the term “Black Legend” was born, through which figures like Philip II could be dehumanized, and people spared the—by definition—impossible task of finding serious reasons behind any action undertaken by a Catholic prelate or prince.

Again, as some of the titles noted above demonstrate, Protestant efforts went beyond using and drawing conclusions from merely one field of study of Christian behavior in the assault on Catholicism. A complete anti-Catholic history had to be written, with respect to individual nations as well as with regard to the life of Christendom as a whole. Martin Luther and Jean Calvin were both involved in this sketching-out of the broad Romaphobic landscape, the former tracing the roots of Catholic error to an ever earlier date, the latter adding the Carolingian Family and its insatiable ambition to the list of villains responsible for the deviation of the Church from its proper purely spiritual constitution.

But the most impressive Reformation-inspired Church History, because of the universal vision it offers, was the mainline Lutheran work produced by Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575) and his associates at the city of Magdeburg. This text was referred to as The Centuries (Eight Volumes, 1559-1574), its name clearly following from its manner of dividing up the material presented. Here one finds many of those spicy but erroneous tales, such as the story of Pope Joan, which still figure into the average “educated” man’s anti-Catholic repertoire. Here, one also finds praise of virulent anti-papists like Marsilius of Padua, despite their manifest secularism.

Hence, by the end of the sixteenth century, homelands where those opposed to the effort to correct and transform nature could openly go about their labors had been founded in various sections of Europe. Black legends and alternative good stories tearing to pieces the history of Christ’s Church and finding ample material for their libels in battles of previous centuries were being regularly broadcast about. They were being presented in the name of the “words of God” and in the name of the “primitive Christian foundation vision”. Through such legends and stories, the picture of a ceaseless Catholic assault on Reason and Freedom was being painted as well. The special irony of this secondary attack, was that the artists providing such a tableau were Christians who believed, as Luther said, that Reason was a “whore” and that human freedom was an absurdity.

It ought not to have been difficult for an awakened Body of Christ to respond to the contradictory “words” of what really amounted to an egregious, erroneous foundation myth. Still, to do so, it needed the energy that comes from the strength of the Word in history. It ought not to have been difficult for the Church to demonstrate that the Protestant obsession with the omnipresence of sin could itself, in the long run, totally deprave a world that was not, in fact, essentially entirely corrupted by evil; that it could unnecessarily construct a death camp ruled by arbitrary will. But in order to undertake this project, the Body of Christ had, precisely, to be so awakened. The power of the Rut Triumphant had proven to be very strong indeed. Catholic awakening, first and foremost, required that the Church be shaken free from its deadly, self-destructive, and self-blinding grip.

F. Liberation From the Rut Triumphant

We have already seen that many orthodox groups and individuals throughout Europe were outraged over the state of the Church Universal and had deeply wished for a major reform of Head and Members before the birth of Evangelical and Reformed Christianity. Unfortunately, as they were the first to admit, the bad angels seemed to be triumphing over the good in the life of Renaissance Catholicism. What this meant was what we have outlined above: that the explosion that took place in the Reformation found the Mystical Body of Christ unprepared to deal with a full-fledged attack on her raison d’être. She had nothing but insubstantial words, slogans, and “business as usual” methods to handle the revolution before her. What she needed, instead, was the arsenal of divine and divinely transformed weapons that would be available if she really trusted the full message of the Incarnation. Her self-limitation to the earthly and parochial realm prescribed by the proponents of “nature as is” had enabled her opponents to seize and run with the vision of an ancient Gospel Christianity more pure than that existing in Europe in the 1500’s —to the detriment of all truth, both supernatural and temporal.

One might have hoped for an immediate effective response to the devastating Protestant revolt. The sad history of the Sack of Rome of 1527 proves that this was not to be the case. That history has its origins in the French-Spanish struggle for hegemony in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its proximate cause was the clash between the political program of the harried Medici pope, Clement VII (1523-1534), and the ambitions of Charles V (1516-1558), King of Spain, King of Germany, and Holy Roman Emperor. If its agents were actually mutinous, unpaid, imperial soldiers, these nevertheless could say that they were merely following the examples of their more illustrious clerical ally, the Cardinal Pompeo Colonna (1479-1532), who had already plundered the Vatican side of the Tiber some eight months earlier.

Whatever the specific responsibilities of pope, Catholic king-emperor, and prince of the Church might have been, the end result was indeed a nightmare. On May 6, 1527, Rome suffered the worst assault that she had ever known, far more serious than anything befalling her at the time of the barbarian migrations. Nothing was spared, sacred or profane. Clement VII’s escape to and confinement within the walls of Castel Sant’Angelo until December, listening to the taunting of German mercenaries calling for his death and replacement by “Pope Luther”, were the least of the indignities. Various cardinals and prelates, including one future pope, Julius III (1550-1555), were humiliated and tortured, altars were ransacked, the Sistine Chapel used as a stable, riches confiscated, patients in hospitals and children in orphanages gratuitously butchered. Rape and rapine, exacerbated by raids of hoodlums under the direction of the abbot of the nearby monastery of Farfa, were followed by the onset of plague. Rome and the stench of death became one.⁴⁵

Often, and with seemingly good reason, the Sack of Rome has been looked upon as a symbol of the boundary between the Renaissance and Catholic Reformation eras in Church History. Before this chastisement, the argument runs, control of Church affairs lay in the hands of the proponents of “business as usual”, men obsessed with politics, tied to corrupt and ineffective administrative methods, and insensitive to the significance of the Protestant revolt in Germany. After its visitation, however, the Great Awakening had definitively begun.

I, too, once took it for granted that the Sack of Rome was an eye-opener. Still, the more work that I did on the period in question, the more it became clear to me that this was not the case. Those whose eyes were open before the Sack may have had them opened wider still, but those with clear vision were still relatively few in number. With rare exceptions, men who were blind remained blind. An event of such magnitude, whose mere possibility in the abstract might have seemed apocalyptic beforehand, was digested when it finally did occur in reality as though it were simply another move on the chessboard of ordinary political life. Indeed, most Catholics, clerics and laymen alike, afterwards as before, went about their daily affairs, changing nothing, watching the collapse of the Church’s position in Germany, uninspired to lift a finger to arrest it, even when possessing the authority to do so.

One thing that united many of the proponents of “business as usual” was the conviction that they represented the “Tradition” of the Roman Church, by which, of course, they meant merely the standard operating procedures of papal and diocesan courts and curias. These “traditions” were under attack at the time, but not only by the men who, after the Diet of Speyer of 1529, would be referred to as Protestants. As noted earlier in this chapter, there were a limited number of fervent Catholics from reform circles, inspired by saints like Catherine of Genova, who also demanded a root and branch revamping of standard operating procedures and the canonical justifications for them. This they wanted in order more effectively to fight the brutal war for the souls of men and the health of secular society that they feared the Reformation portended.

In the minds of the defenders of “Tradition”, such Catholic critics of papal and episcopal courts and curias were, at the very least, the sort of deluded, destructive zealots that centuries of bureaucratic prudence and pragmatism had sought to tame. At worst, they themselves were seen to be the true problem of the day, unnecessarily aggravating that Protestant tempest-in-a-teapot that could be quelled through the tried laws and methods of practical professionals. This latter line of argument, which so rejected a closer examination of Catholic failings that it literally verged on the point of treating the Protestant revolt as a non-event, was particularly deadly. One can easily see from Herbert Jedin’s magisterial history of the Council of Trent that nothing favored the Reformation more than this widespread delusion regarding its lack of any real ultimate significance.⁴⁶

Fortunately for the survival of the Church, these “conservatives” suffered at least a partial defeat, the “traditions” which they supported being exposed for what they were. These “traditions” were something that readers by now will readily recognize---namely, abuses fortified by many spurious, self-deceptive arguments, so old and familiar as to have taken on a sacred aura; crimes and betrayals covered by good stories that unfortunately bore no relation to the truth. Fortunately for Rome, an effort was made to rebuild its walls with something more suitable and more sturdy than whatever happened to be merely familiar: a reaffirmation of the authentic and eternal Catholic Tradition and its call for correction and transformation in Christ, a deeper understanding of which revealed the flaws of the immediate past and indicated a surer path to a better future.

It is instructive to investigate for a moment one major reason for this partial victory of real Tradition over false customs masquerading as an essential element of the Christian heritage. Successful Catholic reformers realized that they could not deal with problems facing the Church merely by a legalist cataloguing of the endless abuses to be noted practically everywhere in Christendom and precise remedies for the correction of each. Almost nothing could shake most authorities’ commitment to their standard operating procedures, corrupt and ineffective though these might be. Prelates had to be awakened to another and qualitatively different means of viewing their responsibilities, that advocated by St. Catherine of Genova. If churchmen could not endure a direct attack on the flawed practices to which they were devoted, or if they could always find inventive techniques for legally circumventing attempts to change them, then the path to improvement must be opened by trying to focus them on a second, more spiritual framework in which to judge their activities. This high road could, perhaps, “seduce” them to reform by the innate strength of its truth and beauty and avoid more predictable, customary, time-wasting, and ultimately futile efforts to refute them in the process.

In short, Catholic reformers understood that they could not fight their opponents on their own turf. Naïve as this approach might seem, rather than discussing in exaggerated and all too familiar legal detail the minutiae of episcopal duties and their innumerable violations, all of which would be met by the interminable counter-quibbles of the bishops’ own canonical experts, they thought that it was more fruitful to address prelates forthrightly on the plane of conscience alone. One needed openly to emphasize the mortal sin of an Ordinary who failed to be a good shepherd. A bishop who could be won over to a realization of what he was obliged to do by directing him to a vision of the day that he had to justify his behavior before the throne of Almighty God would eventually become a new man. He would contrast remarkably with one whose decisions were made on the grounds of whether or not the papal court in the course of the previous four hundred years had visited this or that immoral practice with the precise penalties prescribed under one or the other of fifteen extenuating circumstances. Bishops reformed in a qualitatively higher sense would see and use even a flawed law in a purer light. In contrast, even those who sought to correct themselves from a narrow, legalist perspective, and honestly did close the door to several wrong or inadequate practices in consequence, would nevertheless miss the higher spiritual meaning of ecclesiastical laws that were intrinsically good. It was the spiritual break with a corrupt past that was crucial. The legal change was secondary.⁴⁷

There is no better way to discuss this summons “back to Christ” than to return to the extraordinarily illuminating history of the Theatines.⁴⁸ Its earliest stages were not without their drama. Many members of the rut-bound Curia doubted the success of their rigorous insistence upon evangelical poverty. Apparently only the intervention of Giberti, a man of great influence at the papal court and a loyal friend, saved Thiene’s idea. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the bull Exponi nobis approved the creation of the Order of Clerks Regular on June 24^th, 1524. It was given some brief guidelines by Carafa, who became its first head, in 1526, and a more formal structure only later. A certain initial ridicule on the part of the cynical Roman population did not trouble its early life as much as did the 1527 Sack, which forced its members to flee, along with those of other religious foundations, to the security of the Venetian Republic. The Neapolitan Church of San Niccolo da Tolentino in Venice, beginning in 1533, and San Andrea della Valle in Rome later in the century became the first main foci for the Theatines’ activity.

It might be wise, at this point, to mention something about the two most important figures in early Theatine history, San Gaetano da Thiene and Gian Pietro Carafa. Although both came from noble families and were animated by extraordinary religious fervor, their resemblance ends there. Thiene was a northerner from Vicenza; Carafa was a Neapolitan. The former led a somewhat irregular life before his ordination in 1516. Carafa, on the other hand, shared a childhood vocation with his sister, who became a religious, and with whom he remained in constant, affectionate contact. Thiene, the man of more harmonious virtues, the officially canonized saint, was by far the more tranquil of the pair. His writings are almost all letters on spiritual topics. Carafa, the passionate, extroverted, active foil to the almost invisible Thiene, has left a mass of historical evidence behind him. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that Thiene upheld the soul of the Theatine movement but that Carafa was its driving force. Their combination was by no means an unfortunate one, as historians of the Order have contended.⁴⁹

But it is indeed just to recognize that without the diplomatic ability of Carafa, and without his audacity, Gaetano would not have succeeded in giving life to and then maintaining his new institution. Providence paired the talents of the one with those of the other, and availed itself of the defects of Carafa, counterbalanced by the greater interior virtues of Gaetano, to give vigor to the new institution, which was to be then the model of many others.

So concerned for the cause of renewal was the Order of Clerks Regular that contemporaries are said to have applied the name Theatine indiscriminately to clerical reformers as a whole. “Renewal”, in the minds of men like Thiene and Carafa, meant primarily internal revivification, the attainment of sanctity. Nevertheless, the Theatines, like their Clunaic predecessors from the age of the new ascent of Mount Tabor, did not believe that they could fulfill their mission through prayer alone. Instead, they displayed a passionate interest in those admittedly secondary measures that still must be adopted to put the Body of Christ in better working order. This interest was founded upon the assumption that institutional order, like regularity in one’s good habits, is the mundane basis for the flight of the spirit.

Reference should be made to four specific sources in detailing the Theatine program for institutional reform. None of these sources involve Thiene, who again in this regard proves to be a somewhat elusive historical figure. One is a document, undated and unsigned, entitled Ricordi richiesti da Marcello II di santa memoria. This commentary on the initial phase of Church reform in the first half of the sixteenth century emanated from a Theatine pen in Naples, clearly sometime during or after the brief reign of Pope Marcellus in 1555.

The other three sources all concern Carafa. Carafa left behind him as an indication of the Theatine attitude his actions upon being raised to the See of Peter as Paul IV (1555-1559) and his many letters, but first of all a document addressed to Pope Clement VII on October 4^th, 1532. This memorial, inspired by Carafa’s dismay over the inadequate treatment of the heterodox opinions and irregular behavior of several Venetian friars, was given by the Theatine to Fra Bonaventura da Venetia to relate personally to the Holy Father. The pope accorded Fra Bonaventura a polite but very brief audience. Clement was too preoccupied with really significant “business as usual”, particularly an impending meeting with Charles V at Bologna, to become involved with the Venetian issue. Carafa’s memorial, though without immediate impact, was of sufficiently broad a nature to live on as a model for the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia, the first real effort to tackle Church reform, under Paul III in 1537. This latter report was prepared by a commission under the presidency of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1532) including Carafa, Giberti, and a number of other men---several former members of the Roman Compagnia among them.

Three deeply-rooted evils aided and abetted by a mentality subverting the proper hierarchy of Catholic values were brought to light by all the written sources noted above: the confused and corrupt behavior of clerics, particularly religious; the venality of the Roman Court; and, finally, the unacceptably moderate approach towards dealing with heterodoxy and rebellion adopted by the Papacy. Religious life, especially that of friars, Carafa notes, “is already deformed and collapsed”.⁵⁰ It was not unusual, he claims, to find lay friars hearing confessions, tempted by the prospect of monetary compensation for their absolutions. Priests were abandoning their habits and religious were apostatizing. An added difficulty was the fact that such men nevertheless often continued with their preaching in lay clothing. Indeed, some “wandering” religious and apostates had obtained positions as substitutes for absentee priests. Believers were being told that papal excommunications were of little importance, and that restrictions on their conduct were so few that many “excuse themselves by saying that their confessors gave them the license to do certain things which must not be done by good Christians”.⁵¹

The Pope’s conscience will surely allow him no rest, Carafa argues, when he grasps the fact that these confused and corrupted religious exercise great influence over the Christian population. Such “rogues” had long held the care of souls, been in charge of convent and noble chaplaincies, and run schools for children, everywhere disseminating pastoral poison. Even now, even after their clear abandonment of either their habits or their entire life as religious, their preaching still has an effect on all classes. Why? Due to the fact that such preachers retain the aura and mannerisms of religious, because their arguments have the appeal of novelty, and since they give to everyone, high and low born, the chance to justify his own specific form of licentious behavior.⁵² In short, they had learned how to use some remaining prestigious Catholic characteristics to tell a titillating alternative good story, presented as being “new”, but actually as old as the hills.

It is interesting to note here a certain educated irritation with the spread of error and confusion. One ought to mention that many of the men connected with the various Compagnie and their offspring were themselves tied to Christian Humanist circles. Vernazza had contacts with a number of those representative of the movement. Dati produced works on the American discoveries, Scipio Africanus, and mathematical tables useful for calculating the times of eclipses. Big scholarly guns like Giacomo Sadoleto (1477-1547) were fellow travelers. The Theatines applied scholarly rigor to the special task of revising the breviary entrusted to them by Rome, Carafa brutally attacking the “many foolish statements and dreams of apocryphal books” found in abundance in the older volumes. Such Catholic reformers, therefore, often depicted the struggle against their enemies as one of Christian enlightenment versus self-deluding ignorance, “considering that the heresies of these rogues are all old things already confuted and extinct from Holy Church for a long time…”. The spread of error, as already indicated above, was thus frequently attributed not to the intellectual strength of the concepts that were being propagated but, rather, simply to the fact that friars and others “are badly disposed and immediately receive that doctrine which conforms to their customs and their life…”⁵³ Everyone was merely on the hunt for an “appropriate justification” for his particular passion.

The second enormous problem facing the Church was the venality of the Roman Court. This evil was said to be particularly blatant in the Datary and the Penitentiary. Both offices were potentially lucrative for those working within them, responsible as they were not only for the confirmation of many and varied petitions but also for the granting of dispensations and the lifting of penalties, all of which involved payment of certain fees. Weak or vicious clerics succumbed all too readily to the many temptations around them. Carafa, in a letter to Giberti, bemoans the evil impression left by:⁵⁴

those most rapacious Cerberi that surround that poor prince, selling, at base price, the soul and the honor of His Holiness without his hearing one case out of a thousand. It is from this source that the immoderate favor comes which so many—not merely the most pernicious and criminal, but also those most heretical and hostile to Christ, His Holiness, and the whole of Holy Church—find and enjoy in that Court to the great dishonor and offense of God and His Church.

This brings us to the third problem, that of the Holy See’s moderation in the face of heterodoxy and rebellion. “Accidental” kindness, as a given method in a particular case, is one thing, Carafa explains, but leniency in principle is definitely another. The treatment accorded heretical and rebellious Venetian friars practically amounted to a passionate embrace, so much so that dissidents were wandering about claiming that acceptance of heresy was just the tactic required in order to be “honored and named and rewarded by His Holiness”. It was a notorious fact, he insists, that dispensations from sacred vows could easily be obtained in Rome, simply through payment of the requisite fees. When questioned regarding their status, laicized friars, for example, merely display the bulls that they have received, arguing that they were “forcibly placed in the monastery as a minor”, or that they no longer had “the spirit to stay there”, or that they have “contracted an incurable illness, and other lies”.⁵⁵

Friars refused to purge their own order by arguing that the pope had not yet shown any concern for heresy and, hence, that they should not exceed his zeal. How could the rest of the Christian world be expected to move against error within the Church, Carafa and his fellow Theatines lamented, when the Eternal City was filled with heretics and nothing was being done to dislodge them? The lack of movement, the “unnecessary marks of respect and pusillanimity” justified by the fear that a harsh stance would drive the restless into outright rebellion, depriving the Church of sufficient ministers, was the “greatest favor” that heresy could expect. It made the heretic “more crafty and insidious”, harmed the reputation of the papacy, and “saddened the souls of faithful Christians who see themselves offended by these scoundrels…under the title of the authority of the Apostolic See”. Is it not a scandal, the Neapolitan document asks, that the papal power, supreme in the Church, is frequently utilized to relax discipline, but never to enforce it?⁵⁶ In short, a bored, blasé, business as usual mentality totally unconcerned with Divine Truth was destroying the Body of Christ.

A two-fold approach to that institutional reform absolutely essential to the cause of renewal is suggested in these sources. On the one hand, as the Consilium later openly indicated, it is necessary to admit the false attribution of certain privileges to the Holy See; to recognize that “the fundamental cause of the ills of the Church is the immense exaggeration of the pontifical power occasioned by the refined adulation of canonists without conscience”.⁵⁷ Carafa begs that the Papacy not interfere in the day-to-day operations of sound religious communities, such as those of Spain and Portugal, and, most importantly, that the traffic in apostolic dispensations be brought within some proper bounds. “And for the love of God”, he writes in his instructions to Fra Bonaventura, “entreat His Holiness to put a brake upon His Ministers, that such an abundance of Apostolic Bulls not be released for every most vile and alien thing”.⁵⁸

On the other hand, the Theatines, and particularly Carafa, had the most exalted notions of that which the Papacy, acting in its proper sphere, might be capable of accomplishing. The future Paul IV writes that an active pontiff would have the ability to “make the giant mountains tremble down into the abyss”.⁵⁹ What was required was simply vigorous, uncompromising application of reform measures. This insistence upon the futility of half-hearted reform was axiomatic in Theatine circles. The Neapolitan document, for example, notes that the decades-long commitment to the cause of reform on the part of popes, along with Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) and the first sessions of the Council of Trent (1545-1547, 1551-1552), had still, by the 1550’s, achieved practically nothing. This was because such reform had always remained within the realm of abstract discussion rather than leading directly to action. Escape routes were regularly left open by councils and the Holy See in that great care was exercised in delineating the conditions under which abuses might continue to flourish. These “where licit” clauses of reform constitutions demonstrated that problems were being treated not “according to what they are in fact and in practice, but by way of theory and in abstract”. Sanctity was the least of their concerns. They simply encouraged, or at least publicly tolerated, the practice of obtaining dispensations. Moreover, given the nature of men, the exception was inevitably elevated into the rule and then despoiled of its limited “justifying” conditions:⁶⁰

Then, when they are put into practice, they are despoiled by men of those ‘legalizing’ circumstances and dressed, most often, in a totally different fashion; thus, if one wishes to end usury, it is not enough to say ‘such a contract made with such a condition is licit’, but it is necessary to see if it is made with that condition, or true that the disease is inflicted by the law. Therefore, I believe that things similar in themselves, even under certain licit conditions, when it is discovered that in fact and in practice they have for a long time been badly used, must be reformed by means of total prohibition, because it is not enough to say: ‘I have written a good law’; but it is necessary to see if it is used as well as it is written, the prudence required being almost impossible given the quantity of evil that reigns in the world.

The Church needed no more ecumenical councils, no more decrees, and no more pious sermons. Action alone could deal with the problem. Action was itself the best argument—action based on the strength that came from the life of Christ.

Carafa himself offered many specific suggestions for exactly how the Mystical Body should proceed. Preachers and confessors, he explained, must be examined carefully with regard to their orthodoxy, an office that he himself performed for a time in Rome. Permission to read heretical books ought to be restricted—once again, due to their appeal to the licentious, ever anxious to justify their wicked behavior on the basis of something “new”. A reformed, restructured, and strengthened Inquisition must be established under papal control. Creation of a military-religious order, directly subject to the Holy See and founded upon a Venetian fragment of the secularized order of Teutonic Knights, was also commended. It was only with regard to the religious orders that “half measures” were urged, “by reason of the great number of the worst types that are found therein, who so oppress the good that they can prevail in nothing”.⁶¹ Here, he claims, it would be best simply to set aside houses for observant religious, in order that they might possess some safe havens in which to fulfill their vows without hindrance. All useful steps, moreover, must first be taken in Rome, in the pope’s own garden. Only then, with a proper example given by the successor of St. Peter, could the movement for correction and transformation in Christ be expected to spread throughout Italy and the remainder of the Christian world.

Carafa was certainly true to his word upon obtaining the tiara in 1555.⁶² Proponents of a new session of the Council of Trent, which had first met under Paul III ten years earlier, were not surprised to see that it was not re-convoked during his reign. Instead, Paul IV sought to reform by means of unilateral actions, his ferocity in this regard becoming legendary. The Theatine Pope fell down upon the Datary with a sincerity that no man could question, cutting his own revenues in half when the “common sense” of the business as usual mentality told him that he could least afford to do so. “Wandering monks”, having failed to respond to his call to return to their monasteries, were rounded up and shipped off to the galleys. So certain was he of the importance of the work of the Inquisition that he attended its sessions even on the verge of his death. Paul’s discovery, after years of blindness, of the corruption of the Carafa family members that he himself had placed in positions of authority, led to so swift and complete a punishment that the whole of Italy, reformers included, were taken aback. Indeed, his greatest failure, his war with Spain, stemmed from his uncompromising desire to free the Church from the secularizing forces covering themselves with a Catholic cloak that he felt to be active in the court of a Philip II. It was ironic, however, as Paul himself may have realized by the last year of his reign, that he, of all men, should have been guilty of placing what many perceived to be a political issue above the cause of reform in more clearly Church-related matters.

What reformers of the Theatine variety were arguing was the general need for the Church to “get out of her rut”, and to do so by seeking freedom from the Zeitgeist or “spirit of the times”. We have repeatedly seen that attainment of this independence is not an easy task, for the Zeitgeist always maintains certain advantages in its struggle with Christian Truth for control over man’s mind and will. The spirit of the times is always taken for granted, and its erroneous axioms are a man’s daily bread. So strong is it, so omnipresent its guiding hand, that it uses the average Catholic to penetrate the Church herself. It bends the theologian to its will by attacking him on two fronts. His need to oppose secularism is satisfied by directing his wrath against the dead Zeitgeist of yesteryear, while his acceptance of the present, living spirit of the age is encouraged by its convincing him that its embrace is dictated solely by intelligent reasoning. He, of course, could not be influenced by the purely atmospheric conditions around him! Once firmly ensconced in an ecclesiastical setting, it determines, to its own advantage, the battleground on which the Church may fight, the weapons that she may use, and the time that the conflict may begin. Counsel is given against taking the very measures most useful in freeing the Church from its grip, the work of the Zeitgeist being praised as the movement of the spirit of God. That which is easy to correct is depicted as being difficult and even impossible; that which is wise is ridiculed as the handiwork of the foolish.

Independence of the Zeitgeist is essential to the successful completion of the Church’s supernatural mission, and such independence the Theatines, to a large degree, possessed. What did they do to attain this freedom? Little more than devote themselves to the proper goals of Catholic priests, and call things by their proper names. For, despite the difficulty of avoiding the influence of the spirit of the times, the means of effectively battling it are always immediately available at the believer’s fingertips: honest dedication to the corrective and transforming character of the Christian life and straightforwardness in one’s dealings with society on the basis of Catholic teachings. The perspective won by the Theatines through their break with “accepted” clerical patterns of the day demonstrated to them the complete insignificance of and unwarranted importance granted to the cautions of time-serving prelates, the demands of well-entrenched bureaucrats, and the wishes of powerful laymen. No one was in a position to strike more boldly at the ways of the world and the petty illusions of daily existence than the single Catholic saint (or group of men struggling towards sanctity) plainly stating the simple Christian truths and the requirements of Christian morality. St. Catherine of Genova had understood this clearly. Renaissance popes had not.

Some have claimed that such freedom from the Zeitgeist did the Clerks Regular little good; that the Theatines, and especially Carafa as their most famous historical spokesman, were, like most reformers, too intense, and ultimately self-defeating. Was it really necessary, such critics ask, for the Order to go so far as to live in stables to demonstrate its embrace of Apostolic Poverty? Did Carafa truly have to send monks to the galleys? Could not his reaction to his own family’s corruption—for whose flowering his own blindness was chiefly responsible—have been a bit more balanced? And what, in the end, did his zeal for the independence and reform of the Church achieve? Defeated in a most unfortunate war with Spain, reviled by the Roman population, which entertained itself after his death by attacking symbols of his reign, treated by many subsequent historians as an obscurantist fanatic, Carafa’s pontificate is said to have been a double proof of both exaggerated Theatine rigor as well as its ultimate uselessness.

One does gain the impression that the Theatine attitude towards institutional reform, as represented by Carafa and some of his colleagues, lacked the prudence required to govern the Church over a long period of time. It may, however, be the case that a blood-letting, in the form of rigorous and even brutal house-cleaning, was, given the general enslavement to the Rut Triumphant, the corruption of the Church of the day, and the cynicism of much of the reform-minded Christian population, temporarily demanded to end Catholic torpor. It is certainly the case that once Carafa’s scythe had cut through the papal court and papal Rome, the props of the Renaissance Church were gone forever. Long-hallowed corruption was no longer sacrosanct. Old legends crumbled, as the Papal States did not collapse along with the powers of the Datary. Open abuses were obliged, to a certain degree, to go underground. And the next papal nephew to hold a position of great authority in the Church after Carafa’s reign was a saint: Charles Borromeo (1538-1584).

If Paul IV and the Theatines were not necessarily the best instruments for directing a long-term reform of the universal Church, they were nevertheless crucial as vanguards destroying the age-old barriers blocking the pathway of surgeons carrying the medicine of Trent. As travel guides indicating the route to that personal Christian renewal for which institutional reform was but a means to an end, their importance was lasting and unmatched. They showed that what Catholics need to do in order to fulfill the mission of the Word Incarnate is not to follow the “pragmatic” suggestions of enemies whose true wish is to destroy them but to be nothing other than what they really are.

G. Tridentine Reform, the Advance of the Word, and the Catholic Fight for Human Freedom

Despite torturous delays in responding to an increasingly bleak situation; despite continuous temptations to rely on “appropriate explanations of reality” to avoid dealing with it, the Catholic Church finally turned back to her one absolutely solid source of strength: the full doctrinal message of the Incarnation and the consequences to be garnered from it. She did so partly out of love for the truth in and of itself, and partly due to her recognition of the unhappy practical consequences of allowing erroneous belief to spread uncontested. Most importantly, however, she did so because nothing else was effective in combating the proponents of “nature as is”.⁶³

It is interesting to note that the work of a return to the roots began underneath the guidance of Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III (1534-1549), a corrupt member of a self-seeking family that no one would ever have expected to lead a pilgrim march back to a Catholicism firmly based upon the Word. And yet it was he who set up the above-mentioned Reform Commission that courageously identified the chief source of the problem in the rut-drenched “traditions” of the Roman curia, and whose official report was so devastating that the Protestants themselves used it as a propaganda tool. It was he who was to approve the pilgrim work of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) and the Society of Jesus. It was he who convened an ecumenical council that finally did have some serious impact on the Catholic world at large.

For despite the disdain of Paul IV, the Catholic return to sanity is most popularly associated with the work of the Council of Trent, which met in three stages between 1545 and 1563. This synod did more than simply reiterate the teachings of the past; it also developed their doctrinal significance much further. In doing so, it gave to the word “Tridentine” a broader two-fold significance: first of all, as a symbol for every aspect of the Catholic vision most detested by that Grand Coalition of the Status Quo; and, secondly, as a real badge of honor for believers in the Incarnation and its corrective and transformative effects on man and nature.

Tridentine Catholicism’s Christ-centeredness was reflected in a joint concern both for authoritative doctrinal teaching as well as the more mundane specifics of daily pastoral activity. The spirit of the council informing this new era in the Church’s history was one that saw that ideas and action must work cohesively. Its pilgrimage fervor generated the development of innovative practical strategies for the application of objective Catholic truths to the diverse parochial conditions tossed up by the complex dance of life. These strategies involved strenuous efforts to harmonize the unchangeable, universal demands of the Christian vision with legitimate, changeable, local and individual human problems. Fresh clerical training and catechesis programs were initiated, speedily demonstrating their superiority to many of those of previous centuries. Critical assaults on past practices deemed openly harmful accompanied all such changes.

Diverse pastoral strategies were implemented with that militant sense of urgency always demanded of the faithful. Prompt mobilization of all social forces on every level of European life, aimed at the attainment of quick and palpable results, was recognized as absolutely crucial given the initial strength and scope of the Protestant assault. Fast, clear success was especially required to distinguish Trent from previous synods whose mountains of ineffective decrees appeared to masquerade that cynical commitment to “business as usual” which was so disturbing to Theatines like Carafa.

By the end of the 1620’s, this authoritative, pastoral, pilgrim-minded, and militant Tridentine Catholicism had indeed obtained many very positive results. A worldwide missionary expansion, begun with the discovery of the Americas and the opening of more extensive contact with the Orient, progressed ever more vigorously. This growth involved truly remarkable illustrations of the continued strength of a Catholic pilgrim spirit ready to accept new steps in the dance of life, especially notable in Jesuit recognition of the splendors of Chinese civilization and openness to the Seeds of the Logos that could be found therein. Calls to external crusade in a more traditional sense once again stirred Christian hearts, first in order to stop the advances of the Ottoman Turks in Europe, and then, by the late 1600’s and early 1700’s, to reverse them and regain lands once feared lost forever. Closer to home, much territory that had temporarily gone over to the Protestants in central and eastern Europe was won back for the Church, while a number of Eastern Christian communities in the same regions accepted papal authority and were reunited with Rome.

One major reason for these impressive Catholic results, already alluded to above, was that the model of the Roman prelate and priest was reinvigorated, nourished by roots grounded in the full, authentic Tradition, and aimed away from the merely customary, legalist, political, secularist obsessions of the late medieval period. That model was more powerful as a deterrent to abuse than more rigorously defined and enforced canonical penalties. Positive example trumped negative sanction. The fact that it had this impact is revealed somewhat by the difficulty historians now have in explaining to contemporary Catholics the failure of early sixteenth century bishops and priests to live in their own dioceses and parishes. Raised in a Church that has at least partly digested the spirit of the Tridentine reform, they automatically presume that residence is an obvious clerical duty, regardless of the existence of any canonical loopholes through which an escape from its demands might legitimately be upheld.

The Society of Jesus remains uppermost in people’s minds as a symbol of the change that had overtaken the Church, and with good reason. Ignatius of Loyola represents acceptance of everything that the Word Incarnate would have men respect to spread His message. He appreciated speculative theology, humanism, the devotional practices and methodology of the Brethren of the Common Life, sound doctrine, and good pastoral work at one and the same time. And there is no better example of someone literally picking up his pallet, walking, and then throwing himself into the hands of God, than Ignatius and, along with him, the men of the University of Paris who ended up everywhere from the rocks along the coast of China to the chopping blocks of Britain.⁶⁴

Although the achievements of the Society of Jesus are justifiably cited as classic manifestations of the Tridentine spirit responsible for Catholic gains, it remains true that popes, nuncios, other international religious orders, national episcopacies, monarchs, and the laity of each of the three Estates can all be shown to have played their role in obtaining them as well. Numerous men and women, lay as well as cleric, in every sphere of activity, from architecture to mysticism, were involved in raising the sights of Catholics to a deeper sense both of how the “natural” individual achieved union with God, through Christ, His Church, and Creation as a whole, as well as what it was that that union ultimately entailed.

Aside from pointing to the global accomplishments of the Jesuits, historians generally look to Spain and Italy for examples of the practical application of the Tridentine spirit. It is more suitable, in this work, to turn our attention to France, and not only because of her importance in terms of numbers of Catholic faithful, her illustration of the nuances required by local conditions, and her significance for future revolutionary developments. Tridentine France should also be studied because nothing can better illustrate a contrast to our contemporary world’s vision of a society of formless openness dominated by word merchants serving the interests of the willful than the educated, systematic, Word-drenched alternative nurtured by many seventeenth century Catholics on her soil. The breeze wafting in from a tradition-soaked Gaul nudged people into that kind of pilgrimage towards a

distinct, splendid, and, hence, “divisive” goal that our own pluralist culture regularly condemns.⁶⁵

A kaleidoscope of diverse and very committed Tridentini were at the forefront of the reformed French pilgrimage to God. What came to be called the dévot party in seventeenth-century France included bishops such as Cardinal François de la Rochefoucauld (1558-1645) of Clermont/Senlis and priests such as Adrien Bourdoise (1584-1665), active at the Parisian Church of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet. Religious from reformed Benedictine, Carmelite, Cistercian, and Dominican houses, especially in or near Paris, added their fervor to the cause. Members of the new Capuchin, Discalced Carmelite, Fatebenefratelli, and Ursuline orders originating in Italy and Spain were also active, not to speak of the fathers of the Society of Jesus, who provided such dévot leaders as Nicolas Caussin (1583 -1651), confessor to Louis XIII (1610-1643). Orders founded by French-speakers, including St. Vincent de Paul’s (1581-1662) Congregation of the Mission and the Visitandines of St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) and St. Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641), played a significant role as well. Moreover, organizations of secular priests, ranging from the network of Aa (Association d’amis) to Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle’s (1575-1629) French Oratory, Jean-Jacques Olier’s (1608-1657) Company of Saint Sulpice, and St. Jean Eudes’ (1601-1680) Congregation of Jesus and Mary offered many zealous foot soldiers for the movement.

All these prelates, priests, and religious were aided immeasurably in making their influence felt by an army of laywomen, among them Madame Barbara Acarie (1566-1618), who eventually entered religious life as the Carmelite Marie de l’Incarnation, and Louise de Marillac (1591-1660), whose work with St. Vincent de Paul led to the creation of the Daughters of Charity. Louise’s uncle, Michel de Marillac (1563-1632), was one of the most important political figures from the large pool of laymen in the dévot camp. While Jesuit Marian congregations, along with sodalities sponsored by other priests and religious, were often the locus for lay involvement, private homes also became dévot foyers. Nobles such as Henri de Lévis (1596-1680), Duke of Ventadour, created and fueled the lay Company of the Blessed Sacrament, which operated in France on behalf of a variety of different causes.

If one thing could be said to unite all these diverse elements, that cement, as indicated above, would have to be found in their joint concern for an education that taught, corrected, and transformed the human mind and spirit: education of the clergy, the average man, and society at large to the fullness of the message of the Word Incarnate in history. Education of the clergy to a sense of its dignity and its lofty responsibilities was the theme set by de la Rouchefoucauld in his De la perfection de l’état ecclésiastique (1597). From 1612 onwards, Bourdoise used his church to provide unofficial seminary training in a Paris still lacking clerical preparatory institutions. Creation of a new secular clergy, almost da capo, was the special mission of de Bérulle’s Oratory, and this spirit lay behind the work of Olier and Eudes as well. St. Vincent de Paul sought to instruct Parisian priests by means of a continuing series of Wednesday conferences. Meanwhile, colleges of Jesuits and Oratorians, the circles around the Cistercians of Port Royal, and, a bit later, the Brothers of the Christian Schools of St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle (1651-1719), sought the elevation of laymen. Laywomen, whose education was more and more considered to be crucial to the improvement of family life, were formed, to begin with, by Ursulines and Visitandines, and later, with the encouragement of Louis XIV’s (1643-1715) second wife, Madam de Maintenon (1635-1719), and the great François de Salignac Le Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715), Bishop of Cambrai. General education was continued through the development of the episcopal pastoral letter and the perfection of the preaching art, which reached its apex by the end of the century with Fénelon, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet of Meaux (1627-1704), and the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704). The Jesuits made innovative use of the theater as a teaching tool, while the period also saw the widespread dissemination of devotional and catechetical works. Jesuits, Eudes, and the Congregation of the Mission, convinced that France itself was a mission country in need of evangelization, organized highly sophisticated sweeps of the countryside to teach, preach, and firm up commitment to practice of the faith. Each sortie was repeated at regular intervals to make sure the good seed had not fallen by the wayside.

In the long run, of course, this was education of the soul in its approach to union with God, and mystical in its flavor. The mystical character of the movement was indeed aided by stimuli from Italy and Spain, but also by the rediscovery or republication of works of the early Christian centuries, such as those of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. A rich French strain of mystical writing soon emerged, including the Capuchin Benoit de Canfield’s (1562-1660) Règle de perfection (1609), Pierre de Bérulle’s Discours de l’état et des grandeurs de Jesus (1623), Olier’s Journée chrétienne (1670), and the posthumous (1694) compilation of the teachings of the Jesuit Louis Lallemont (1588-1635), the Doctrine spirituelle. Marie Guyard (1599-1672), an Ursuline active in Canada under the name Marie de l’Incarnation, and many others, taught mystical concerns by example. Different in their specific approaches, all urged some form of meditation on Christ’s Sacred Heart and His love for mankind, self-abasement before His majesty, grace, and goodness, imitation of the Holy Family, friendship with Mary, and specific penitential and Eucharistic practices. One type of devotion to the Sacred Heart received especially powerful support from the revelations to Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) and the writings of her Jesuit confessor, Charles de la Colombière (1641-1682).

But were personal and corporate prayer life alone sufficient for education and elevation of the soul to union with God? A resounding “no” came from different dévot circles. What was referred to as “devout humanism”, as found in the Jesuit Pierre Coton’s (1564-1626) Interieure occupation d’une âme dévote (1608), or the spirituality of Saint Francis de Sales’ Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and Traite de l’amour de Dieu (1616), spoke volumes about the need for active individuals to raise themselves to God through their particular vocations in the world and their specific duties. Everything, from the theater to the State, had to be called upon, as any ancient Platonic proponent of paideia understood, in order to aid the passage of souls to God. All Christians, St. Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, and their friends argued, had charitable responsibilities to perform for the sick and the poor. Social sins ranging from dueling to the neglect of agriculture and the peasantry to the disturbance of the peace of Europe in general were problems that dévots--from the time of St. Vincent and the Company of the Blessed Sacrament to Fénelon in his great work, Télémaque (1699)--believed that the Christian on pilgrimage to God had to tackle. In sum, social and political action figured into the dévot agenda perhaps as much as catechesis and direction of individuals.

Such successes were exuberantly expressed in the many faces of that culture which we call the Baroque. Tridentine, Baroque civilization, symbolized by the work of the Jesuits and directed by their devotion to the greater glory of God, lay particular stress on the grandeur to be found in the Creation. It did this to answer the Protestant disdain for the universe. Hence, it filled everything from dress to architecture with vibrancy, color, gold, and majestic beauty. Who could not think of the glory of God and of the possibility of Heaven when in a Baroque Church in the Baroque sections of Rome? Any visit to a Baroque city from the seventeenth century Catholic world yields a clear insight, even today, into the spirit of Tridentine Christendom, along with the varied means employed to urge believers on to accept and fulfill its promise.

That spirit, in its public manifestation, was nothing more than a further elaboration of the basic truth that all previous explosions of zealous Catholic spirituality and activity had emphasized, each in its own particular way: the conviction that nature had been mishandled by sinful man; that a Creation true to its God-given mission and responsibilities had more surprises to offer us than the naked faithless eye wished to admit; that it was intended to be an icon of its Maker; that the flawed world could be raised to the greater glory of God; and that through its redemption, it could give inestimable assistance to the individual in his central task of seeking transformation in Christ. But the Drama of Truth, as always, was that individual and nature had to be sanctified in tandem and that this joint sanctification regularly tossed up new challenges to add to perennial, unchanging, and therefore all too familiar dilemmas. And another and highly difficult act in that Drama of Truth was now about to begin.

Chapter 7

The Global Battle for Nature: The Grand Coalition of the Status Quo and Naturalism

A War to Define the Meaning of “Nature” and “Natural”

Tridentine Catholicism was threatened from the outset along a variety of fronts, denying it sufficient time and strength to fulfill its Word-centered program for man and society. Threats external to Christendom played a certain role in limiting the global expansion of the vision it inspired. But these external threats pale in significance compared to the continued Christian religious divisions and reactions to them that threatened Christendom from within. Most importantly, however, the Tridentine movement was brought to bay by the final ascent of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo to dominance over the western world and the brilliance of the “words” used to disguise the true meaning of its triumph.

Discussing the rise to power of the GCSQ entails examination of three contributing factors, none of which can be ignored if a clear picture of its strengths and long-term weaknesses is to be obtained. The first of these is the broad internal Protestant development of the central principle of Reformation theology—the doctrine of total depravity. A second element is the movement referred to by historians as the Enlightenment, which emerged by the latter part of the seventeenth century and the beginning decades of the 1700’s. Its proponents were to argue that the means needed for attaining individual and social perfection could only be obtained by lessening or entirely eliminating guidance of the natural world by either the Protestant or the Catholic understanding of God and Faith. Finally, we shall have to turn our attention to the tragic stimulus to the growth of the GCSQ afforded by various battles over unresolved doctrinal and pastoral problems inside the Roman camp.

In the years following the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, first incarnated in Christendom through the Reformation after centuries of hidden existence, finally came to term. Mobilizing arguments coming from Protestant, Enlightenment, and even Roman Catholic sources themselves, its word merchants “seized” control of the concept of “nature” with that “appropriate explanation of reality” we call “naturalism”. Global battle was then joined with the remaining defenders of a vision of life obedient to the message of the Incarnation. Both camps hoisted hostile banners bearing two opposing definitions of what was “natural” and “unnatural” inscribed upon them.

Alas, many believers once again abandoned their best weapons—the weapons of the Word Incarnate—in this global battle for nature. Once again, as so often in the past, they tried to defend their Faith on the grounds provided by enemies who wished to destroy it. Yes, it is true that some contemporary Catholics did awaken to the danger posed by radical members of the GCSQ who openly and violently persecuted them. Unfortunately, however, many others became so bewildered by the way the moderate faction active within the Grand Coalition used familiar Christian terms and themes to propagate its message that they began to think that its more subtle approach to accepting “nature as is” actually represented “the Catholic vision”. They viewed the moderate strategy as though it were the true Catholic alternative to the violent silencing of the message of the Faith. But whether through brutal or gentle means, the ascendancy of the GCSQ was equally assured. And with that victory came the inevitable deliverance of “nature” over to the triumph of the will—and the ever more bloody combats of the increasingly divided and battling ranks of the willful.

B. External Obstacles to the Expansion of the Tridentine Spirit

When one speaks of external obstacles to the Tridentine spirit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first thing that comes to mind is the seemingly invincible military might of the Ottoman Empire. And the threat of the inexorable march into central Europe of this Moslem representative of the divinization of willful power was indeed all too real at the start of the period under consideration. Concern for assuring a unified response to that threat was itself a powerful force both aiding the growth of Protestantism and also explaining the many painful delays in convening the Council of Trent. Armed Ottoman incursions into the Christian world continued down till the 1683 siege of Vienna, affecting the religious and political situation of Catholic Europe in a myriad of often disturbing ways.⁹⁶

Two additional powerful external threats to the Tridentine Catholic advance were the new Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan (1600) and the Manchu Dynasty in China (1644). Both these forces were suspicious of the foreign Christian influence that had penetrated the lands come recently under their control, and ultimately acted strenuously against them. This was particularly true in the case of a Japan that looked, for a moment, as though its conversion to Catholicism were imminent. The Tokugawa closing of the Japanese homeland to Catholic proselytizing proved to be almost airtight in the centuries to come, cheering to the hearts of the parochial minded in both Asia as well as Europe.⁹⁷

Nevertheless, such threats were by no means decisive in and of themselves in curtailing the external progress of the Tridentine program of correction and transformation in Christ. We have already noted the eventual Ottoman reduction to the defensive and the re-conquest of wide swaths of former Christian territory under Turkish control by the 1700’s, all of which was accompanied by an impressive revival of the old crusading spirit. Tragic events in Japan and China were not reversed, but this was really chiefly due to the complicity of “Christian” forces with nefarious European purposes in mind. Protestant states like Britain and the Dutch Republic were of some significance in frightening the shoguns into opposing what were presented as overbearing papal political pretensions in Japan, but for commercial as much as religious reasons. Even more importantly, it was the bitter, European-wide discussion of questions concerning Jesuit missionary work in China that was to prove to be of greatest significance in the simultaneous weakening of the Church’s expansion in Asia and the strengthening of the GCSQ at home. But that particularly sad tale may only be told in the next chapter, after first introducing internal Christian and Enlightenment developments into our story.

C. Christian Disunity and the Limitation

of the Effects of the Incarnation

Let us begin our discussion of internal problems leading to the global war over the relationship of God with nature with the most basic scandal of all—the continued failure to maintain Christian unity. Sadly, Christian divisions became even more entrenched, organized, and complex in the Tridentine Era. The final effect of the seemingly endless debates among groups all calling themselves Christian was to encourage the contempt of the enemies of the Word and to aid them as they disparaged thinking and acting upon the basis of any faith-filled concepts whatsoever. Even believers were badly affected by these demoralizing developments. More and more people began to wonder how anyone could take seriously the teachings of a religion whose many denominations all pointed to the same Christ as the one saving force in human life, but whose adherents could in no way agree regarding the character of His message. An either-or choice against the forces of disbelief simply could not be offered under such circumstances, for the “either” alternative was a house divided against itself that perhaps could not stand on its own very much longer. Worse still, the sight of the proponents of the religion of love butchering one another in the name of Christ did considerably more than any theological, philosophical, or scientific argument to facilitate the claim that Christian Faith endangered not only belief in the “real” God but natural life and the satisfaction of legitimate natural individual and communal desires as well.⁹⁸

Despite the several Acts of Union noted briefly in the previous chapter, Western and Eastern Christianity remained almost entirely separated. Moreover, almost every one of the older centers of the Eastern Christian world lay under Moslem domination, with the energies of their clergy and laity generally dedicated to questions of basic survival. The already powerful temptation of Eastern Christianity to “freeze” the development of the Word, expressing its teachings in magnificent ritual but avoiding discussion of their theological meaning and thereby hiding real divisions regarding doctrine and practice behind a deceptive liturgical unity, was further encouraged. Under these circumstances, almost any belief could gain an influence over the Orthodox population, so long as the substantive and potentially dangerous teaching contained therein were masqueraded by the proper ritual gestures.

But Church leaders, forced to answer for their flocks’ loyalty, in some respects became yet more politically important than ever before. This was certainly true of the Patriarch of Constantinople, responsible as he became for the good behavior of the Christian population or “millet”. Political importance then tempted ambitious lay families and individuals from among the believing population to deeper involvement in Church affairs. Trapped inside second-class, ethnic hot houses, Eastern Christian flocks tended— most especially among the older, heretical denominations—to indulgence in the ever more intense parochial battles that losing factions are historically wont to cultivate. Ossification, secularizing political obsessions, and parochialism then rendered the hope of contemporary theological discussions fruitful to reunion an even more utopian project than in the past.⁹⁹

Adding to Eastern Christian problems was the fact that its one major center that was free—Tsarist Russia—struggled under a variety of Word-limiting tendencies of its own. Aside from those inevitably connected with its great size and isolation, it was home to a peculiar mixture of traditional Orthodoxy and exaggerated monastic and lay influences. Moreover, it also nurtured a messianic parochialism that unjustifiably privileged the position of Russia in salvation history. When efforts were made by Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681) of Moscow to awaken the Russian Church to its need to reconnect with the broader Eastern Christian tradition, a predictable, narrow-minded schism resulted. This Old Believers Schism, while in some respects appealing because of the great courage displayed by many of its leaders in the face of persecution, was ultimately responsible for weakening ecclesiastical unity and social influence permanently throughout the land. Schism, in turn, made the Church more vulnerable to an intense political manipulation by the “sacred” Tsarist state. And that manipulation was especially dangerous because, from the time of Peter the Great (1689-1725) onwards, it was further corrupted by Romanov acceptance of the power-enhancing secularism characterizing political and social life in the outside Protestant world.¹⁰⁰

Secularism as such was certainly not the aim of the original Protestant Reformers. We have seen that most of them argued that this was precisely the effect brought about by an arrogant, blasphemous, worldly Catholic Church that had strayed from the Christian foundation vision, arrogated to herself the prerogatives that belonged only to the supernatural God, and dangerously exaggerated the value of human works to the detriment of divine grace. Protestant reformers did not wish to destroy God’s law and an order of things in which that law was honored and obeyed. They simply sought to disabuse individual men of any belief that personal success or failure in following that law aided in the work of their own salvation. Only God’s will, expressed through his free offer of divine grace, could bring them to safe port. Recognition of all these truths would follow a Christian return to the original intent of the Apostolic Church as expressed in those fundamental documents of the Faith known as Holy Scriptures.

Moreover, one must also remember that the reformers operated in a world formed by centuries of Catholic efforts to transform nature in Christ. The power of custom, habit, and pure inertia over many of them was very strong, indeed. Certainly Luther, despite his vulgarity, obscenity, and pompous boasting, cannot personally be charged with wanting all the secularizing developments that will be catalogued below. Like Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish Soviet Foreign Minister of the 1930’s, who crossed himself while boarding airplanes “because he was a Russian”, we have seen that Luther often contradicted the consequences of his own notions “because he was still in many respects a Catholic”. Jeremy Bentham is said to have blunted suggestions that utilitarian, democratic rule might give birth to atrocities with the comment: “Englishmen do not act that way”. Luther could have attributed my little shop of Protestant horrors to a vivid papist imagination. “Reformers”, he might have said, “simply do not act that way”. He could not necessarily foresee the practical long-term historical outcome of those applications of his basic concepts that he himself did not wish to be made. His “choice” regarding what would happen through his Church of Original Intent was in many respects as Catholic as he still remained. And this was even more true of some his followers, starting with his closest associate, the systematic thinker Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560).¹⁰¹

While absolving Protestants, one must nevertheless anathematize Protestantism as such. Protestantism’s foundation doctrines stand on their own two feet, and they are in no way friendly to or compatible with that full message of the Word that was taught by Catholicism. They were unacceptable in 1517 and they grew even more so as their significance unfolded over the course of time. When one meditates upon the foundations of Catholicism, he irons out the dangerous human kinks corrupting its divine machinery. When one meditates upon the foundations of Protestantism, he ensures that its consequences contradict the continued good desires of its practitioners.

One of these good desires was that of avoiding secularization. And yet Protestantism made a secularization that was conducive to the triumph of the will logically inevitable. It did this for two specific reasons. First of all, it reduced the human person to his individual atomist state and thereby deprived him of his crucial, authoritative, social dimension. And, secondly, Protestantism destroyed everything natural that remained to man in this badly truncated and therefore inhuman condition.

Let us remember that Catholicism taught men that they were part of a community, the Mystical Body of Christ, guided by the Savior through the Church authorities and made capable of aiding one another in their path to God. Community and authority were thereby shown to be absolutely essential to man’s happiness and end. This Mystical Body was seen to be forever vital, death in Christ being no obstacle to valuable assistance from and to the living. Its cult of the saints encouraged daily contact with immortals and ensured a constant recognition of the existence and efficacious power of the supernatural. The world beyond was made a palpable reality in the world here and now. All legitimate communities and authorities were told that they, too, in their own fashion, could aid in the perfection of their individual members. They gave flesh to their goals and the virtues required to achieve them in the same concrete way that the Church gave flesh to the Christian message and the Christian way of life.

But with Protestantism, Christianity logically became a purely individual phenomenon. This is true even for Reformed Protestantism, whose congregations and national synods often wielded a practical power, but with no substantive spiritual or intellectual foundation. Communities and authorities like the Church and her bishops were, after all, no less depraved than man was himself. They were incapable of tempering the evils that their sinful character merely helped to encourage. Atomistic Christianity, founded solely on the Bible, became a lonely, individual, bookish religion, a religion of words alone, a phenomenon that lost its vibrancy on the date that the last scriptural passage was written. Reduced to this lifeless state, Protestantism ceased to be a sociological force of great importance. Human beings need to see things draped in flesh and blood if their nature is to be accommodated, and if they cannot observe a visible Church engaged in a flesh and blood pre-announcement of an invisible world, then they will not take Christianity and the God that it worships seriously. Protestantism could not be seen, and it thereby left its practitioners easy targets for secularists eager to wean them away from interest in all things divine.

Moreover, a logical Protestantism had to apply the same atomistic principles that had been used to destroy the Church to all authorities and communities. If the Church were pretentious in its claims to aid and perfect the individual, so were states, municipal governments, universities, guilds, and families. All such communal authorities had to be tamed in order that the individual might face existence alone, as he was meant to do. But since real men could not successfully face existence alone, and since they positively required communities and authorities to embody in manifold fashion the purpose of human life and the moral behavior demanded to achieve it, the results of this general dismantling of the western communal structure were to prove to be horrendous. All of that social assistance that aimed men towards correction of their purely material, fallen nature and might possibly even guide them back to God was removed. A downward, secularizing spiral was rendered logically inevitable.

Even if the individual, left to his own devices, might still meditate on the world and how he should act while living within it, Protestantism left him precious little to lean upon for help in reaching solid conclusions. For social institutions and authorities were not the sole natural forces presenting problems for the believer according to the Protestant vision. His Faith taught him that the whole environment in which he operated was totally depraved.

We have spoken of the religion of the Word Incarnate as one that understands life to be a dance to sanctity, involving a combination of firm commitment to unchangeable truth and pilgrim openness to the reality of historical change. But the vision of Catholicism can also be said to be one that sees the universe to be an Unfinished Symphony. It calls an orchestra together under the vaulted hall of the heavens and explains to its musicians that a composer has given them parts of a magnificent piece that he has prepared and now wishes to test their ability to play. It notes that the entire symphony will be given to them only after successful performance of the first movement. The musicians realize that this is a fraternal project, and they develop an ever more powerful esprit de corps as they grasp the quality of the composition that they are playing. They begin to polish their instruments more carefully, put on their finest clothing, and walk with individual and fraternal confidence and pride in their labor. They wait for the day that they will be given access to the rest of the piece with patient humility, but also with great joy. For they know that they can finish the Unfinished Symphony.

Protestantism shuns the dance to sanctity because it views the ballroom of nature as something wicked. It never permits a hope for the completion of the symphony of the universe because it never allows it to begin. The musicians who arrive to audition for it are told that there has been a dreadful misunderstanding. They are assured that men can never play the music of the spheres; that, even if they could do so, it could not be in union with one another, as a social group possessing its own unique esprit de corps, but only as lonely, isolated individuals; that they, even as individuals, are hopelessly incapable of sprucing themselves up to undertake such an impossible project, and that the instruments necessary for its execution are not available anyway. And even though they are then told that someday, a great orchestra will play whatever part of the symphony it might be given to appreciate, the immediate disappointment that the musicians feel is so great that they file out of the hall, and the heavens fall silent forever. In short, the downward spiral of outright secularization is accompanied by a rising appreciation of the inescapability of ugliness leading to the same result: abandonment of all higher vision.

Yes, the believer was told that he had to obey God’s law in this valley of tears, but as a schizophrenic, knowing that his doing so was of no practical significance for his eternal destiny. And what if he lost his Faith? What tools would be left available to him to judge how he was to act without it? He would have none. A Catholic who lost his Faith might still look to the help of natural beauty to steer his heart and soul upwards, but a faithless Protestant had no guidelines for discerning beauty in a depraved universe. Without Faith, he was left with no sense of balance and harmony to teach him. A Catholic who lost his Faith might still use his Reason, but the doctrine of total depravity disdained this along with the rest of Creation. The result was that the individual thinking Protestant who lost his Faith had no Reason left to guide him either. Abandoned on his own in a realm deprived of both Faith and Reason, he could play carelessly with his mind. Nothing—not balance, not harmony, nor Aristotelian logic nor Platonic vision—was there to bind him. A Catholic who lost his Faith might still find guidance in natural love, but for the Protestant love also lay outside the divine scope of things. Man remained unlovable even in Heaven, where he was granted droit de cité only through an extrinsic grace. How could nature enter where even God’s will did not tread?

In sum, human meditation and effort made of an untruth—the unrelenting evil of the fallen world—a “self-fulfilling prophesy”. A natural order that was not totally depraved seemingly became so. An atomized, secularized Protestant society would, indeed, be the abomination of desolation, and, ironically, the free human will of men loyal to the doctrine of total depravity would bring this into being. With nature turned into a savage free for all, a war of all against all, man’s environment was transformed from a music hall designed for the dance of life into one, boundless death camp, fit only for a danse macabre. And what made this hellish death camp more horrible still was the fact that its pathetic inmates continued to praise its willful architects and prison guards as though they were liberating angels.

At this point, however, we must return to the historical reality of the difference between Protestantism and Protestants. Yes, all of the consequences discussed above do, indeed, flow logically from Protestantism and the doctrine of total depravity. Nevertheless, a remaining Catholic spirit allowed a number of Protestants to return to solid theological and philosophical principles that had nothing to do with what was truly distinct about their own original religious position. These believers---and they are many---are not the targets of our discussion here.

Meanwhile, there were other Protestants who fled from all belief in a God who could allow for the existence of such a natural hell. When they did so, they had two possible directions to take. They could either continue to see nature as totally depraved, although now godless as well as hopeless. Or, like many rebellious children, they could insist that the universe was exactly the opposite of what their parents told them, and therefore spotlessly good. But regardless of whether their faithlessness led them into a natural jungle or a spotless universe, both were left free to deal with life as they willed, without reference to any rules of God or man. This victory of the triumph of the will, whether arising from an exaggeratedly hopeless or an absurdly hopeful starting point, does concern us a great deal.

Most important to our present theme is that large number of Protestants who opted to continue to live in a schizophrenic universe, theoretically retaining their basic religious principles, language, and attendant Bible-centered Faith while more and more actually ignoring their horrible meaning and unpleasant life-changing teachings in practice. For what this produced was a hybrid monster that lent itself, bit by bit, to manipulation by outside anti-Christian forces, so as to become one of the chief workhorses for recruitment directly into the ranks of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. And when it did so, it eventually became a tool for channeling Catholic volunteers into its blithe acceptance of “nature as is” as well.

Pietism is the most important phenomenon to mention in presenting this development. The path of Pietism moved from Britain, through the work of Englishmen like William Ames (1576-1633), author of The Marrow of Theology (1627), over to the Dutch Republic, with that of Willliam Teelinck (1579-1629), Gisbertius Voetius (1589-1679), and Jadocus Lodensteyn (1620-1677), and into the German Lutheran world with Johann Arndt (1555-1621), Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), August Hermann Francke (1663-1725), and Nicolaus Graf von Zinzendorf (1700-1760). Spener’s book, Pia desideria (1675), gave the movement its lasting name.¹⁰²

Pietism’s essential concern was commitment to a Christianity that could visibly be recognized as a truly vibrant force in the lives of men. Such a Christianity, its supporters lamented, was lamed or even totally smothered by the highly creedal denominations, dogmatic theologies, and ceremonial practices of a politicized Europe, Protestant as well as Catholic. Hence, Pietism stressed the need to hunt for a “real” as opposed to a stultified and artificial faith, born of the experience of each individual’s soul and judged with reference to that faith’s obvious external fruits—a highly ironic conclusion, given the original Protestant disdain for human “works”.

Such guidelines could, given circumstances, end in very traditional territory. They influenced men like John Wesley (1703-1791), who gained from Pietism a general concern for an internal conversion active in the love for neighbor without shunning ordinary organized Church teachings, ceremonies, and structures. A Pietism of the Wesleyan Methodist variety could easily open a man to the practice of good works on a natural level while still retaining a central goal of mystical union with God that tapped into the mainline of Christian contemplative history. It was, in effect, on the road back to the full message of the Word Incarnate; in some respects, a Protestant “Seed of the Logos”.

Nevertheless, Pietism was a double-edged sword. Its abandonment of the corrective weapon of theological and philosophical thought for all intents and purposes continued the work of Erasmus, and, with it, his inability to respond effectively to strong willed men intent on changing what people “obviously” believe and how they “clearly” behave. It thus provided a disguised and seemingly Christian entry into the acceptance of “nature as is”. Along with this, it provided membership in a Grand Coalition of the Status Quo in which all of the worst consequences of the doctrine of total depravity would still prove capable of running riot. We can see this best by first turning our attention to important developments in the Kingdom of Prussia.¹⁰³

Prussia, rather poor and insignificant in comparison with the major nations on the European scene, desperately needed an ironclad unity in order to survive. It feared religious controversy as an obstacle to this essential cohesion. Unfortunately, its population at the time of the proclamation of the kingdom in 1701 was divided, with its majority of Evangelical believers split in feuding factions and its ruling House of Hohenzollern Calvinist, and thus Reformed Christian in its faith. Unity under these circumstances could only be obtained by deemphasizing doctrine and insisting that “common sense” and “natural virtues” conducive to procuring the kingdom’s secular power and wealth were the sole true means of knowing, loving, and serving the Christian God in our world of sin.

Such a task would best be accomplished if religious leaders themselves could be enlisted in support of the redirection of man’s primary attention towards the attainment of natural goods; if a Christian blessing upon a central change of focus could be obtained, thereby providing a sign of supernatural approval for a secular project. Pietism, a movement that was already powerful within the Evangelical camp, thus became attractive to the Hohenzollerns as a valuable tool in the work of Prussian unification. Its continued ritual attachment to the customary themes of Gospel Christianity meant that scriptural “words” would be readily available to back up the “all for one and one for all” secular spirit needed to keep the Kingdom of Prussia not just alive but politically thriving.

It was not John Wesley’s approach that worked here but, rather, the quite distinct Pietism of Francke, the chief protégé of Spener. Francke was appointed Professor of Near Eastern Languages at the University of Halle in Prussia in l692. Francke’s Pietism, unlike Wesley’s, and, for that matter, unlike Spener’s as well, was very much tied in with the need to overcome a personal experience of despair and disbelief which struck with particular fury at one moment in his life and threatened constantly to return. He became convinced that God would give him the sense of His presence and the peace that indicates forgiveness of sin only if he developed an intensely disciplined and constant activity on behalf of the good of his neighbor. He would know that he was persevering on the right track if his labors were crowned with success. Success could not help but witness to God’s blessing. Lack of success, inactivity, and failure to maintain the inner personal discipline needed to sustain one’s enterprise promised a return of existential anxiety.

Francke’s Pietist labors, which he wished to serve as a model for a worldwide Christian renewal, involved the creation at Halle of what are referred to as the Anstalten or Frankesche Stiftungen, various institutions at whose core lay clearly charitable ventures, such as well-structured orphanages. Since, however, charitable endeavors required money to survive, Francke’s foundations also encompassed commercial organizations designed to procure needed funds. Educational projects intended to form men with the iron-like inner discipline that could sustain constant commitment to enterprise and the service of one’s neighbor also played a crucial role in his labor at Halle. Francke provided Lebens-Regeln to guide them, rules that emphasized the task of breaking the individual’s self-will and rebuilding it for social-minded tasks in the way that his own conversion experience demonstrated God unquestionably wanted.

Charitable, commercial, and educational Anstalten moved forward vigorously under Francke’s direction from the 1690’s onwards. They were fortunate in finding favor with King Frederick William I, who had himself undergone a similar conversion experience, independently of Francke. He, like his father Frederick I (1688/1701-1713) before him, sought some means of unifying religiously divided Prussians. Instead of attempting this through Lutheran-Calvinist creedal or ceremonial union, he thus began to place his hope in a Pietist-inspired commitment to common, practical Christian activism. By the 1720’s, the king was eagerly promoting the Anstalten and incorporating Francke’s educational ideals into his own plans for the general instruction of the entire Prussian population.

For Frederick William, as for Francke, a self-disciplined, constantly active citizenry, alert to the good of one’s neighbors in society-at-large, needed to be successful to demonstrate its retention of God’s favor. A man in Frederick William’s position, and with his responsibilities, perforce needed to see this success reflected in the growth and benefit of the Kingdom of Prussia. Christian action on behalf of one’s neighbor in society must, to him, to a large and indeed primary degree, mean the co-operation of all individuals and groups in the development of the Prussian State, whose every victory would mean a further confirmation of divine approval.

Prussia, like other German states, was already familiar with what was called “cameralism”—a set of studies designed to form administrators who could better manage governmental resources and performance. Halle Pietism taught the cameralist the divinely ordained duty urging him on to perform his task, while simultaneously passing down to all Prussians in their various stations in life an inner sense of personal responsibility for sharing in the bureaucrat’s labor. Pietism bestowed the blessings of heaven upon all the manifold endeavors undertaken by the active citizen in the City of Man, with its highest approbation for work on behalf of the State. This could now be baptized as eminently Christian work for a God-fearing Christian State. Francke’s educational methodology, with its complex system of surveillance of pupils and insight into their psychology, insured that the lesson of the moral importance of such labors would stick for life. Mobilization of the clergy as a teacher of morals and a morals police seemed to Frederick William to be the most suitable means of drilling the Pietist message into the population-at-large. The clergy, too, had to learn and utilize the Francke spirit and method systematically, turning away from unproductive and immoral theological dispute that would sinfully weaken the State in the process.

Helpful to the day-to-day demands of Prussian survival and expansion all this undeniably was. But was Pietism able to stand in judgment of the successes achieved? Could it in any way admit that some of these triumphs might actually be unjustifiable and therefore desperately in need of correction with reference to the higher message of the Word? Was the Kingdom of Prussia open to a transformation in Christ? On what grounds could the Pietist even begin to suggest that such correction and transformation were possible? None whatsoever. Whatever “worked” was Christian. Open proponents of “nature as is” from the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo could not help but smile if they joined in this game and said their Sunday prayers with Prussian piety. All such pious paraphernalia provided a solid, traditional-sounding “appropriate explanation” for “business as usual” of a particular State-centered character.

D. Enlightenment Naturalism

It is now time to turn our attention to the second element contributing to the rise of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo to a position of dominance in the West. This was the so-called Enlightenment, which proved, in practice, to provide a one-way ticket back into the darkness of Plato’s cave, together with a sack filled with still more arguments useful in convincing its prisoners to praise their guards as liberating angels. For our purposes, it is best to discuss that deceptive movement of ideas with reference to the division between what historians refer to as the Radical Enlightenment and its contrasting Moderate or Whig counterpart.

The Radical Enlightenment emerged directly out of the teaching of Renée Descartes (1596-1650), a man who, like Luther, would almost certainly have been horrified by the consequences followers drew from his philosophical labors.¹⁰⁴ Descartes always professed himself to be a believing Catholic. His work was welcomed by many of his fellow believers because of the value it seemed to possess in weakening the invasion of a murky and dangerous magical outlook into both spiritual and natural life. This, the reader will remember, had been launched as a result of Renaissance flirtations with the Cabbala, Hermes Trismegistus, and occult subjects in general. Such studies were designed to uncover “hidden qualities” of nature that were then subtly confused with forces truly supernatural in character. The hunt for such occult hidden qualities seemed by the early 1600’s to be threatening a magical takeover of theology, philosophy, and natural science as a whole, with far-reaching, nefarious ecclesiastical, political, and social consequences.

Descartes was deeply troubled by magical intrusion into natural studies, but, as a man who had himself been a soldier in the Thirty Years War, even more disturbed by the entire ensemble of contemporary spiritual and intellectual divisions. His answer to such division was to question the basis of knowledge until he could find an absolutely sure ground in mathematically “clear and distinct ideas” that could unite all minds. This led him to a methodological separation of the approach to gaining knowledge of the realms of spirit and matter. All material substances had to be dealt with solely in a mechanical fashion. Occult or magical qualities could not be mechanically weighed and measured, and were therefore altogether excluded from the natural scientist’s calculations. The magician and the alchemist had to retreat to their murky underworlds. Faith and Reason could breathe purer air in consequence. And both would be reunited in the end.

New problems immediately arose, however, especially over the question of how to relate the human body, which had been approached mechanically, with the non-mechanical mind and soul that Descartes firmly believed that a man possessed. These difficulties were examined by Catholic followers of Descartes in France such as Fr. Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Fr. Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715), and many others. Nevertheless, it was the Protestant Dutch Republic, where the French thinker spent much of his career, which became the most important center for developing Cartesian ideas and confronting the quarrels that would surround them. Judgments regarding Descartes’ methodology entered into those bitter religious battles of the Reformed Christian Church that pitted the Pietist Gisbertius Voetius at Utrecht versus Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669) at Leiden and led many Dutchmen to run in horror from all future doctrinal disputes. But the Frenchman’s approach was also employed by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the chief figure responsible for the radicalization of the Cartesian methodology and, with it, the development of modern atheism.¹⁰⁵

For Spinoza, the problem of the relationship of mechanical matter to a non-mechanical mind and spirit was ultimately no difficulty at all. What was a difficulty was the fact that Descartes had not carried the labor of thinking with mathematically clear and distinct ideas far enough. When a more logical approach led a man to realize that “one realm”, that of the world of matter operating by mechanical principles alone, was more clear and distinct than “two realms”, involving an imaginative spiritual order that no human could actually see, weigh, and measure, the painful enterprise of relating the duality entirely disappeared. There was no need to harmonize what was actually already unified. For Spinoza, everything was in some way a part of physical nature and therefore mechanically explicable, whether one might be speaking of the kind of matter we call bodies or of the kind of matter we call spirit.

It is easy to envisage a receptive and historically awakened reader of Spinoza placing his works on a bookshelf next to a copy of Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis. One unified civil order had finally gained one unified, mechanical philosophy to guide it, thereby giving still more encouragement to those eager to fight the conviction that nature should or even could be corrected and transformed through aid from “another world”. And yet just as Marsilius was wrongly praised as a Christian hero by Protestant creators of the black legends, Spinoza was going to find fervent admirers within the rapidly secularizing Reformed Christian world to spread his teachings as though they were actually God-fearing ones.

Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), in his book of 1691 entitled De Betovorde Welt (The World Bewitched), contributed to Spinoza’s simplifying materialist tendencies in a way that captured both the popular reading public’s imagination as well as its growing irritation with witch hunting. Many others accompanied him on this path, although the most influential to do so was Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695 onwards). Bayle was crucially important in his own right as the proponent of the concept of a co-operative international work of enlightenment to be undertaken through an intelligentsia that inhabited its own distinct polis: its own “Republic of Letters”. He had the success that he did because he masqueraded as an opponent of Spinoza while effectively endorsing the Dutchman’s interpretation of a mechanical methodology applicable to all aspects of life.

In short, Spinoza and his followers “seized the image” of “clear and distinct ideas”. They then worked assiduously at making anyone who would not draw the absolutely necessary conclusion of an all-encompassing mechanist vision of reality to appear to be an undetected mental incompetent. Accepting nature “as is” was the first article of the Constitution of the Republic of Letters. Interference with “business as usual” was thereby excoriated as the work of an obscurantist religious mentality. And Bayle knew how to tell a “good story” regarding these constitutional principles better than anyone up until his own day.

Spinoza’s disguised atheism, and the highly radical movement for intellectual and political change that it inspired, engendered many varied, shocked responses in both the Protestant and Catholic worlds. Most such responses were based solely on the hope that the evil wind blowing in from Holland could be calmed by means of censorship and other legal penalties alone. They did, however, also include the unique but ultimately not particularly effective one presented by Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), a noble supporter of the significance of all aspects of nature in the spirit of the full message of the Word, and a man as deeply troubled by the spiritual and intellectual divisions of the western world as was Descartes.¹⁰⁶

Unquestionably, however, the answer that made the greatest impact was that provided by the so-called Moderate or Whig Enlightenment.¹⁰⁷ The intellectual component of this reaction was first popularized through the renowned series of lectures endowed by Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and begun in 1692. These conferences had an enormous impact on the development of institutions like the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which had already been founded some decades earlier, in 1660. The Royal Society and its most famous guide, Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), were then associated in men’s minds with the entire outlook, which was to be treated by many as the sole truly thoughtful and effective response to Spinoza’s atheism.

Boyle was indeed a believing Protestant. Like the Pietists who were emerging in Britain as well as in other splintered Protestant countries about the same time, he also was horrified by divisions among reformers that he believed could not help but aid the Catholic cause. More than this, however, he was desperate to calm debilitating theological dispute in order to “save” a supernatural God from Spinoza’s vision of a purely natural universe where everything unfolded from a spiritless mechanical necessity. Boyle was therefore ready to make the same kind of retreat from doctrinal controversy that Pietists in general were to urge, and Newton joined in the same project. But, in addition to finding religious unity in commitment to a system of Christian morality that everyone “obviously” still accepted, they both sought to aim the scientific mind towards God as well.

This they did by focusing on the “mystery” of the contemporary growth in knowledge of the splendor of the universe. For, unlike Spinoza, Boyle and Newton saw God’s hand in the workings of a nature that believers were confronting and putting to human use in ever more successful ways. A concentration on understanding the universe, developing its natural uses, obtaining successes in this realm, and yet accepting the mysterious grandeur of the entire enterprise seemed to them simultaneously to demonstrate the glory of God’s Creation and man’s ability to share, successfully, in fulfilling its plan.

Although mathematics certainly was to play a major role in the expanding knowledge of Creation, the real key to putting it to effective use was to be the experimental method taught by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). This, in one sense, was more respectable to the believing Christian from the very outset, precisely because it was not tainted by any mathematically engendered atheism. Attention to the dictates of experimental science and the wonders emerging from its exploitation, combined with a similar acceptance of the “obvious” truths of a Christian morality recognized by “common sense” and human experience, and then driven home by pious Bible reading and attendance at traditional Church services, were the keys to a healthy, holistic outlook on life. All, together, would emphasize the glory of God and God’s Creation along with the dignity of human effort, thereby serving as secure bulwarks against the deadening mechanical fatalism of Spinoza.

Did this “Protestant” Baconian vision logically fit together with the original doctrine of total depravity? It certainly seemed too hopeful regarding the uses of nature to do so. But did it not, in another sense, as Leibniz feared, actually deprave Reason, common sense, and science by reintroducing the concept of “hidden occult qualities” in nature, through its labeling of everything “mysterious” in the universe as the obvious work of the hand of God? Besides, equating “mystery” with “God’s hand” could ultimately be corrosive to the faith of the believer, given that what is mysterious today might prove to be explicable tomorrow. A gradual “filling in of the gaps” could therefore create the impression that God’s hand in the universe might progressively disappear as a force to be reckoned with by the rational mind. And this, in fact, was one of Spinoza’s chief arguments.

Then again, there was another difficulty at work here. Bacon himself had openly praised the labors of the magicians and their efforts to accomplish marvels with an environment that did not, on the surface, appear to wish peacefully to comply with their desires. Did he not merely substitute experimentation for esoteric spells in order to obtain the same, magical, utopian, and, perhaps, sinful goals? Had not Bacon envisaged the creation of “Royal Societies” dedicated to experimentation as, in effect, nothing other than a more secure pathway to the construction of a fabulous New Atlantis (1627) than anything that could be produced in the laboratories of the alchemists and magicians?¹⁰⁸

Who could say what might finally come out of their labors? How could one know whether the consequences were acceptable if the theological and philosophical tools for investigating such questions were to be abandoned as divisive and dangerous to that Protestant ecumenism needed to “fight atheism”? How could one avoid becoming a mere cheerleader for the demands of “nature as is” if he insisted on seeing God’s glory through successful achievements arising from experiments with microscopes and forceps that previous generations might have condemned as being evil? How could any potential flaws of nature be admitted and corrected if the Christian moral code were equated fully with what was deemed “obvious” in the thought and the behavior of the world around us? And would the problem not become worse as the perhaps unacceptable successes of science rapidly changed that environment and our perceptions regarding how it worked and where it was headed? Hidden, convinced proponents of “business as usual” might happily recite their Books of Common Prayer if strange powers over nature attributed to “the glory of God” were given to them in exchange, and if unquestioning acceptance of the value of their labors shaped the next generation’s “common sense” judgments regarding their morality—whatever the actual words of the Sunday hymns might praise or chastise regarding them.

What is truly obvious in all this is that a general retreat from open religious controversy and an attempt to approach God through common sense morality and the successful development of His Creation alone were very attractive to the eighteenth century British mind. Memories of nearly two hundred years of unpleasant political and social consequences stemming from religious disputes remained painfully vivid to Englishmen, while the unifying wonders produced through practical, experimental science were more and more impressive to the naked eye. Dogmatic disputes had proven to be fruitless disasters, while any “sensible” man could see that a religious fervor aimed at correcting daily and shocking failures to live up to a code of behavior that “everyone” theoretically and publicly accepted would be a praiseworthy activity. Clearly, what was needed, above all else, “common sense Christians” of this kind argued, was a campaign for the reformation and uplifting of basic morals that were contested by no one of sound mind; a reform which, while teaching the need to avoid intellectual and spiritual conflict, would focus attention upon helping oneself and one’s fellow man through “practical” and therefore truly “godly” improvements in personal behavior and the natural sciences.