| #### 2. CHRISTIAN LIFE AND THOUGHT, 1471-1517 |

| #### #### Just one hundred years separate the beginning of Martin Luther's assault on the papacy from the election of Martin V at Constance, the first pope for forty years recognised as such by the whole Church. During the last fifty years of that century, of the major anxieties which, from the time of that pope, never ceased to menace the peace of religion, one in particular, the problem how to make the Papal State a real guarantee of papal freedom of action, had thrust the rest well into the background. But the preoccupation of all the five popes from Sixtus IV to Leo X with this undoubtedly critical matter is not, of course, the whole history of the Church in their time. It will perhaps make that history more intelligible as a unity if, as we pass from the story of the diplomatic and military activities of these popes, something is said of all this as it appears related to the general political life of the t; me. For impatient as we may be at the spectacle of the pope turned prince, and impatient that the pope yielded so much to the pressure of the time, to be aware of the spirit of the time, and of its reality as a compelling force, is a first condition for understanding the gravity of that papal surrender. #### That spirit was not a papal creation; the papacy is victim, here, of something older than itself. In these last generations of the Middle Ages there had thrust into the life of Christendom a force very well aware of its own nature, very clear about its objective, and which now began to impose upon the whole of that life its own peculiar pace and rhythm. " The stubborn persevering progress of the State in its slow reconquest of its attribute of sovereignty is, as the sixteenth century rises above the horizon, the essential phenomenon of public life. This is the sign under which the Reformation is born." [ ] #### The hold upon the human spirit of its ancient enemy, the absolute state, had been loosened and then shaken off, once the Catholic Church overcame the empire of the Caesars. From time to time there had been desperate attempts by one prince or another to restore that state and reimpose its yoke, but always, so far, those attempts had been foiled. Now, from the end of the fifteenth century, the attempt to renew it became a more serious menace than ever, because the attempt was made under conditions more than ever favourable; the atomised states of the Middle Ages were now coalescing into the great monarchies of modern times. Since the marriage of the King of Aragon to the Queen of Castile in 1479 there was a united kingdom of Spain, and since 1505 its ruler was also King of Naples; since Louis XI (1461-1483) the French king was really master of all France; since the battle of Bosworth in 1485 there was a new monarchy in England. There still remained in face of the new assault the three great obstacles on which the earlier assaults had broken, the fifteen hundred years-old Catholic habit of mind, more especially the peculiarly Christian ideal of the sacredness of human personality, and finally the organisation of Christianity in that Catholic Church whose sovereign independence all princes and states acknowledged. But in the new states, leaders of new boldness and of a new political capacity are about to appear -- Charles V and Henry VIII for example, and their counsellors of genius. The scale of the conflict is suddenly magnified. It is in the modern world that the duel will be fought out. And popes of a new boldness and a new political capacity will also appear, popes also of a new personal rectitude and with something of the purer spirit of St. Gregory VII. [ ] #### This needed combination, of courage and capacity and otherworldliness, neither the Renaissance popes had possessed, nor the most part of their predecessors for two hundred years. It ought not to need proving that once the administrative system created by the medieval popes was permanently established, the presence of very great natural gifts in the popes was imperative for the well-being of religion. [ ] The pope is now very truly Dominus Ecclesiae, chef d'orchestre and composer too, since he has so centralised his administration and taken so much even of local affairs into his hands. Lacking a commanding intelligence in its chief, a machine so elaborate tends to become the sport of officials, its operation a matter of precedent merely and routine. In a state called into existence solely to promote the spiritual, such mechanisation means stagnation akin to death. Of the thirty-four popes whose reigns cover this period between St. Thomas and Luther, how many are there who rise above the mediocre? What has the office a right to demand of them? Holiness -- of course; then competent learning, in the sacred doctrine first of all, and next in the traditional lore of the religious ruler's art, the canon law; then judgment, and ability. Of all these thirty-four popes none has, so far, been canonised, [ ] but four have their place in the calendar as beatified. [ ] That almost all these popes are recruited from officials in the curia is but the continuance, in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, of a most ancient, and very natural, tradition. The time had not yet come when the cardinalate was regularly conferred on resident diocesan bishops. It is only now, in the fifteenth century, that we see the beginning of this practice. The cardinal was still, in fact, the actual counsellor and trusted man of the pope, and the cardinal lived where the pope lived. [ ] And of course the overwhelming majority of the popes were chosen from among the cardinals. [ ] Of the first popes in our period, those who close the great century of Innocent III, four had risen to fame in the great world of Scholasticism. [ ] Boniface VIII, renewing the tradition of the first half of his century, is an eminent canonist; and so are almost all the French popes whose reigns make up the tale of Avignon. The great exception here is Benedict XII -- one of the most competent theological scholars of his generation; and he is the last constructive legislator among the popes, on the grand scale, until the Council of Trent. With the Schism the decline in personality is very marked. The only really outstanding figures of the century that follows it are the two humanist popes, Nicholas V and Pius II; and their reigns are too short, and their bodies too broken, for their personality to be really effective. Then comes the lamentable time at which the story has arrived, an age inaugurated indeed -- such is the incredible fact -- by a Franciscan [ ] who was also a theologian of real merit, to whom succeed in turn the weakling Giovanni Cybo, a competent bureaucrat -- Rodrigo Borgia, a lifelong political intriguer of no particular training -- Giuliano della Rovere, and the superficial dilettante Leo X, who closes the series. #### Reviewing all this history the impression deepens that consistently, in one generation after another, the popes fail to read the signs of the times, and a study of the papal personalities helps to explain the failure. They do indeed discern a mortal foe of all they stand for in, for example, Marsiglio of Padua (though, so it would seem, they judge Ockham, as a speculative thinker that is to say, far too lightly). Repeatedly they do indeed point out to the faithful, with unmistakable clarity and vigour, how dangerous to faith Marsiglio's theories are; and to the best of their ability they prevent the circulation of his highly mischievous book. But never do they meet, with any constructive organisation of Catholic thought, the important fact which the Defensor Pacis and its sequel should surely have revealed to them, the fact namely that lay resentment at the cleric's desire to control the public life of Christendom is now beginning to crystallise into a system of "philosophy," a Weltanschauung even; and that Marsiglio speaks for a whole multitude of disgruntled, and educated, Catholic contemporaries. We are, in fact, here making early acquaintance with what is to become for centuries one of the permanent diseases of Christendom, the anti-clerical (and even anti-religious) spirit of the educated middle classes, burning somberly below deceptive ashes, its existence ignored, and implicitly denied, by a clerical regime that seems only aware of the surface of Catholic life. #### Thinkers of Marsiglio's calibre have always been rare, in any generation. And among those who, in his own age and the succeeding century, fed their discontent on his theories, there were no doubt far more who bandied about the catchwords of his doctrine than had ever stud; ed the learned evangel itself -- as, in our own time, there are far more Marxists than there were ever actual students of Das Kapital. Such " Marsiglini " as these last would have disappeared speedily enough if the visible abuses in the ecclesiastical system which bred their discontent had really been corrected. Heresy, or a professed sympathy with the heretical reformer, is, in its early stages, only too often, no more than a readily-snatched-at chance to "rationalise" the concrete grievance against those in authority. It was the terrible, and lasting, misfortune of the Church that in these centuries, even when sincere reformers sat on the papal throne they merely tinkered with the trouble; reform rarely went beyond trite exhortations, and new decrees that re-enacted the old decrees; and never did it explore the roots of the abuses, consider the question whether the whole ecclesiastical machine did not stand in some need of re-designing. These popes, it is often said, had other things to do, they lived with a hundred crises crowding upon them. This is true; and it is the whole tragedy, that amid the welter of urgent daily business, with the danger of a real disruption of Christendom threatening for several generations, they had to make a choice where best to be active, and -- allowing them the best intentions and a real good will -- their choice too often relegated to the secondary what is the principal task of popes at all times. #### In some respects, one is tempted to think, the medieval pope had an impossible task before him. Nothing could, of course, be further from reality than the picture of the Middle Ages as a golden time of universal peace and charity. The turbulence is chronic, and it is by the immense progress realised since the dark chaos of the ninth and tenth centuries that the achievement should be judged. Nor was the Holy See ever really able to exert all the needed control. The eleventh-century popes successfully drew closer the links that bound to Rome the local episcopate, as a first means of purifying it and of strengthening the local religious leader against the local tyrant. But communications -- the most material factor of all -- were never, in all these centuries, as good as they needed to be for the centralisation really to function steadily and regularly. What was accomplished is, indeed, more than remarkable. But it was not enough; and more was scarcely possible. So, for generations, the huge affair creaked and groaned, and it broke down continually. Nor did the episcopate, as a whole, ever come up to what Rome desired -- and indeed needed -- that it should be. It was never, as a whole, so able or so apostolic as its Roman chiefs. The popes were far indeed from having that freedom in appointing to sees the men of their choice which, to-day, we take for granted. Time and again vested interests were too strong for them, the will of the princes in Spain and France and England, the determination of the nobles in the chapters of Germany. All through the Middle Ages the popes are building a system -- and finding, all the time, opposition to their plans from vested interests, not infrequently the episcopate. Some popes are less able than others, than fifty sees were given to youths below the canonical age for consecration. These included the primatial sees of Poland, Hungary, and Scotland. Leo X gave Lisbon (and two other sees at the same time) to a child of eight, and Milan to another of eleven: both were children of reigning princes. [ ] Of the eighteen cardinals who elected Sixtus IV in 1471, four were non-resident diocesan bishops. At the next conclave (1484) the absentees were ten out of twenty-five, in 1492 they were eleven out of twenty-three, and in 1503 twenty-six out of thirty- seven. This grave abuse was, in the Sacred College, fast becoming the rule. Everywhere, by this time, there were powerful clerical vested interests to oppose reforms, not indeed by voting them down, but by systematically neglecting to put the decrees into execution. This is particularly true of the prince-bishops of Germany, of the episcopate in France, of the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia, which last institution was to defy for years even the zeal of the reforming popes of the Counter Reformation. [ ] #### Nothing could be more important than that there should be good bishops in all the seven hundred sees of the universal Church -- and that the popes should concern themselves with the quality of the men nominated would seem the most elementary duty of their universal administration. [ ] But the popes must first of all enjoy, in fact, a real freedom to appoint whom they chose. The sphere in which they were thus free was, all through the fifteenth century, steadily shrinking; and it shrank in part through the acts of the popes themselves. To free the future of the episcopate from the malign influence of such close corporations as the cathedral chapters had very often become, the popes built up the new system of appointment by papal provision. And now, as the rights of chapters to elect became a dim memory, the princes began to covet the power to name bishops which princes of the age before Hildebrand had enjoyed. At times the popes granted the right -- well limited -- as a favour or a privilege, and at times they did so in scarcely veiled surrender to threats. The period of the princely popes was naturally rich ill such surrenders. #### Already, in England, by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Statute of Provisors had paved the way for a system where the popes always came to name as bishop the man whom the king recommended. And the emperor had gained from Eugene IV in the last days of the Council of Basel, and its anti-pope, extensive rights over half a dozen important sees. [ ] In France the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, often condemned and ceaselessly reprobated, functioned nevertheless, and the popes had to put up with it, since to fight the king would have renewed all the chaos of the forty years' Schism, and possibly lost France to Catholic unity in the fifteenth century as so much of Germany was lost to it in the sixteenth. #### Sixtus IV was then, once more, only typical of his decadent century when in 1473 he made over to the emperor the right to present to some three hundred benefices, and in 1478 increased the number of sees in his patronage. In 1476 the Dukes of Saxony were similarly favoured and in 1479 the city of Zurich. Three years later, in 1482, the new Spanish monarchy also, after a fight in which the Catholic kings threatened to revive the Council scheme, was given new rights to name bishops. The next pope, Innocent VIII, although he fought off the claims of Portugal to hold up papal decisions and appointments, was defeated in his battle with Florence and other Italian states about the right to tax church revenues; and he further extended the rights of Spain when he gave to the crown rights to name bishops in the kingdom of Granada and in Sicily too, and indulged them in Sicily with that right to veto episcopal appointments which was to harass the popes in that kingdom down to our own time. [ ] Alexander VI has not to his charge, it would seem, any such surrenders; but Julius II, caught in the toils of political necessity, gave Spain extensive rights of patronage (in the West Indies) in 1508; and Portugal also profited from the mistaken liberality of Leo X, who gave the king various rights over the three military orders of the kingdom. The Lutheran crisis, in which Leo's reign ran out, was of course a golden opportunity for the princes of Germany to extort concessions. #### The newest phase of this surrender of direct control over the life of the local church, the most mischievous of all, was the appointment of one of its bishops, a cardinal, as legate a latere for the whole country, with faculties so ample that he became a kind of vice-pope and a final court of appeal. So Georges d'Amboise, Archbishop of Rouen, was appointed for France by Julius II in 1503; and so Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was appointed for England by Leo X and re-appointed, for life, by Clement VII. And Albrecht of Brandenburg was offered a like appointment for Germany. This mischief was all the greater because these prelates were the principal ministers of their sovereigns; it was the king's prime minister who was made the vice-pope, and he received his powers at the king's request. The one man was, locally, supreme in Church [ ] and state, free to manage the whole as a unity, for the king's profit. And meanwhile the local church would grow accustomed to the Roman authority being no more than a distant splendour. #### It was upon a papacy already slowly stripping itself -- under compulsion -- of its control of the distant provinces, that the new blow from Germany would presently fall. The most striking surrenders, however -- because not made to satisfy powerful prelates but creative of new institutions -- are those of Sixtus IV to Spain and of Leo X to France, the establishment in 1479 of the Spanish Inquisition, and the Concordat of 1516 with Francis I. #### The story has already been told [ ] of the first establishment of the Inquisition, two hundred and fifty years before the time of Sixtus IV -- a special new tribunal set up, for the detection and punishment of concealed heretics, in a place and at a time when the doctrines propagated and the hidden organisation of believers were considered, and correctly, to be a real danger to civilised life, and a menace to be destroyed before it destroyed all that was good and natural and free. The Spain of 1470-1500 was, in some ways, such another land as the Languedoc of the Albigensian wars. Here, too, was a large body with non-Christian traditions, Jews and Mohammedans; and here, too, it was suspected, there were among the Catholic population, and amongst those highly placed, many who at heart were still, like their ancestors, Jews and Mohammedans. For centuries, a] most from the morrow of the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century, the great effort of Christian Spain to throw out the infidels had never really ceased. Never had the various Christian races accepted the conquest as a permanent state of things to which they must now be resigned. For nearly seven hundred years, in that grim land, the fight had gone on, with very varying fortunes, of course, but with steady recovery of territory from the Moors. It was the great national achievement, the epic and the boast of a proud and military people. By the end of the fifteenth century only the Kingdom of Granada remained in Mohammedan hands, a strip of territory across the south-east corner of Spain, Granada its capital. In 1492 the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada too. For the first time since 711 the whole of Spain was under Christian rule. #### The reorganisation of the Inquisition in Spain as a means to rid the country of crypto-Jews and crypto-Moors -- Marranos and Moriscos -- was the act of Sixtus IV, [ ] done at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella. The chief novelty was that it left the choice of the inquisitors to the sovereign. In September 1479 the new tribunal began its operations, and very soon appeals against the way it worked began to pour into Rome. Whereupon the pope protested [ ] to the Catholic Kings, and reminded them of their duty to be merciful. But he did not refuse their petition for the extension of the system to Castile and Leon, and he consented that, for the future, the appeals to his own tribunal should be heard and finally decided in Spain, by the Archbishop of Seville (1483). But any decisions given in Rome were to be valid in Spain. The next step was the appointment of a Grand Inquisitor, who should be the pope's representative, and hear the appeals made to Rome from the tribunals in Spain. On the presentation of Ferdinand, the pope named to the new office the Dominican Thomas Torquemada, whose name has since been, for many people, almost a synonym for the tribunal he directed. Then the kingdom of Aragon, also, was brought under its authority. The Inquisition was by now an ecclesiastical machine set up by the pope's authority, and manned by ecclesiastics -- but at the king's service and, in fact, very much what the king wanted it to be. The day would come when the king would use it for all purposes that seemed good to him. #### Once the new tribunal got to work there was a steady exodus of Jews from Spain, to Portugal and to Rome, where the popes received them kindly enough, to the no small discontent of the Spanish sovereigns. In Spain there was for a time a state of war, the high peak of which was the skilfully planned murder of one of the inquisitors, a Canon Regular, Peter Arbues (September 15, 1485). [ ] Then, in 1492, it was determined to expel from Spain all the Jews who were not Catholics. They were given four months to choose between conversion and exile. Whereupon there was another exodus, and a certain number of conversions, whose sincerity no doubt varied from case to case. #### The year that followed this edict saw the election of one of Ferdinand's own subjects as pope -- Alexander VI. For a time the spirit of Spain seemed about to take hold of Rome too. There were arrests of suspected crypto-Jews and trials. But all the accused cleared themselves, or recanted, and there were no severities save the imprisonment of a bishop and his son. Alexander VI was far from being a persecutor; the reason for this activity was political, the need to reassure Ferdinand of the pope's sympathy for Spain. But Alexander stands recorded as granting to the king for his Inquisition, privileges that went far beyond what a pope should have granted. [ ] His successor, Julius II, had to see Ferdinand introduce the new system into his kingdom of Sicily (1500). But when the king went a step further, and in 1510 brought Naples, too, under it, the people resisted violently and successfully, and the pope is thought secretly to have encouraged the resistance. So great a diminution of papal authority so near to Rome would hardly have been welcome to such a pope as Julius II. Leo X, however, returned to the policy of surrender to Spain, and after the election of the new king, Charles, to be emperor also, he withdrew (though very reluctantly) those briefs of his predecessors which hampered the king's use of the Inquisition in Aragon. #### It was to matter enormously to the fortunes of the Catholic Church that, in the coming century of the Reformation, the monarch who ruled Spain and the Low Countries and a good half of Italy, and who was also emperor in Germany, remained true to the old religion. But it was a very real tragedy that, from the beginning of his reign, Charles V had reason to expect from popes, compliance, and, indeed, subservience on the grand scale. And had Leo X -- for example -- persisted in his first refusal of concessions about the Inquisition, Charles could have pointed to the pope's recent surrender to France, the greatest surrender of direct control which the papacy has ever made, the Concordat of 1516. #### The Concordat, a great papal surrender, it is true, but one that was balanced by an important royal renunciation, was a kind of sequel to the political revolution in northern Italy that followed on the great French victory of Marignano in 1515. The unlucky Leo X had been on the wrong side yet once again, as his cousin Clement VII was to be on the wrong side when, ten years late at Pavia, the French were beaten. The meeting with Francis I at Bologna in December 1515 was arranged, as Leo explicitly said, so that the pope could throw himself on the French king's mercy and remind him of the pope's claims on a victor who was yet a Catholic. But when, on December 11, Francis I suddenly asked the pope to confirm the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, the scope of the negotiations, and their tone, was changed entirely. The great question that had divided one council after another -- the question of the relation of the papacy to the episcopate -- and which ever since the days of Peter de Luna had seethed and fermented in the churches of France especially, was now placed fairly and squarely before the pope. To confirm the act of Bourges was to acknowledge as good in law all those decrees of Basel which the popes had never confirmed and always repudiated, and it was to accept explicitly the theory that in the Church the General Council is the pope's master; it would also be an acknowledgment of the right of the king to regulate Church affairs -- without any authorisation from the pope. Not even Leo X could confirm such an usurpation, not even for Francis I after Marignano. The pope countered the embarrassing demand with the offer of a concordat -- a treaty about ecclesiastical matters. Francis accepted the idea, and soon the legal experts of both parties were busy discussing the bases of the pact, the king's chancellor, Antoine Duprat, one of the most celebrated jurists of the day [ ] and, for Leo, the two cardinals Lorenzo Pucci and Pietro Accolti. #### By February 1516 the principles of the arrangement were mutually agreed; and no sooner were they known than opposition began to show, from all sides. The king was to abrogate the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, and the pope was to grant him the full right to nominate to all the sees and abbeys of the kingdom; the whole system of rights to future appointments -- expectations, reservations -- was to be abolished entirely. From the French side came strong protests, the jurists objecting to the surrender of the position assumed in 1438, the university hostile to the implied repudiation of what it had achieved at Constance and Basel, the higher clergy opposed to the final disappearance of the system of elections. The pope had to face at Rome criticism that was just as strong, from the cardinals, who thought the scale of the concessions to the King of France extravagant and dangerous. For another six months both the principals laboured hard to persuade their own supporters, and the opposition from the other camp; and in the interval, the pope won the important concession that the Concordat would contain the king's explicit repudiation and annulment of the Pragmatic Sanction. #### On August 18, 1516, the Concordat was signed: it regulated the religious life of France down to the Revolution. As finally agreed it gave the king the right to present to the pope for his confirmation the future bishops of the ninety-three sees of the kingdom and the abbots and priors of the 527 monasteries. Those presented for bishoprics were to be twenty-seven years of age and graduates in theology or law, those nominated for the monastic benefices were to be at least twenty-three and to belong to the religious order to which the abbey or priory belonged. If the nominee was a blood relation of the king, or a nobleman, he need not possess the stipulated qualifications. So there passed into the hands of the king, the all but absolute control of nomination to posts whose total income was almost equal to that of the state itself -- and to the French state this was, in 1516, the most important element in its victory. But it was not by virtue of any royal presentation that the bishop was bishop; the bishop's right still came through his appointment by the pope. If the pope, henceforward, placed his authority in this matter at the service of the king he did not, for all that, abdicate that authority; nor did the king deny that authority. Concession may have been pushed to the full extent of grave abuse, but there was never -- on the part of king or pope -- even a hint of the graver matter of a breach in the doctrinal trust. The difference between a system such as this and that which, twenty years later, the English king who saw the Concordat signed was to erect for his own realm, is one of kind, not of degree. #### The system of expectations and reservations was abolished, and it was agreed that, save for causae maiores, all appeals from episcopal tribunals were to be heard in France. There were, however, two notable omissions in the text. Nothing was said about the proposed abolition of that papal tax on collations to benefices called annates; and there was no mention of the theory of the supremacy of the General Council, no explicit repudiation of it, and therefore every chance for those who later would wish to revive the theory. #### At the end of the year, on December 19, 1516, the pope brought the Concordat before the General Council then sitting at Rome. It was now set out in the form of a bull -- Divina Disponente Clementia -- and the pope had the bull read in the council, meaning that it should go to the world as the council’s act also. Even now, and in Leo's very presence, opposition showed itself. But a speech from the pope on the advantages that must come from the French king's surrender of such a weapon as the act of 1438, won general assent to the bull. And of no less effect was the fact that, in the same session of the council, immediately after the bull ratifying the Concordat, there was read a second bull -- Pastor Aeternus -- which condemned and utterly annulled the Pragmatic Sanction, repudiated the claim that a General Council (Basel) had sanctioned it, and took occasion to affirm with great energy that the pope's sole and supreme right to control General Councils was the age-long traditional belief of the Church. [ ] #### These bulls were sent to Francis I together, and the king, in the next fourteen months, had to fight hard before he finally beat down the alliance of jurists, the university and the higher clergy -- the university of Paris even going so far as to demand an appeal to a future council, the infallible council now in session not being of the university's opinion. However, under the strongest pressure from the king, the Parlement of Paris finally gave way, and on March 22, 1518, registered the Concordat as law. Three weeks later, on April 14, the king by royal edict repealed the Pragmatic Sanction. #### On balance, was the Concordat loss or gain for the cause of religion? We inevitably study the act through our knowledge of the way the French kings abused it -- and were by compliant, necessity-driven popes, allowed to abuse it. Had the scheme been fairly worked, by kings not necessarily saints like Louis IX but even faintly interested in the spiritual, or had the times been such that popes could have refused the impossible names presented to them, the new system might not have done more harm than the old arrangement under which, for a good hundred years and more, the elective regime in France had bred a rich progeny of feuds, riots and schisms. [ ] There was never again to be a St. Louis, few indeed were the kings who in the next two hundred years were even respectably religious, and for the first fifty years of the new system [ ] the kings were allowed to name whom they would, with disastrous results to more than one French see and with indescribable results to the life of the religious houses. These are results which concern rather the later history of the Church, and which cannot, of course, be laid to the charge of Leo X. One last remark may be allowed which also concerns that later history, namely that the story of the French opposition to the Concordat of 1516 reveals the strong, deep-rooted attachment of many powerful interests in France to the idea that the pope ought to be controlled and managed in his government of the Church. This is an idea that never disappears; it continues to be active, indeed to be a dominant force in French life, down to 1789, and beyond. #### The tale of what these popes of the generation that bred Luther and Zwingli and Crammer and Henry VIII, as well as Fisher and More and Erasmus and Cajetan, did for the reform of abuses and the regeneration of the life of the Church is, alas, soon told. In the work of their classic historian the religious activities of Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X fill but a few dozen pages out of thousands. The thirteen years' reign of Sixtus IV, whose chief achievement was the bull Quoniam regnantium cura that never got beyond the stage of being drafted, produced some half-dozen briefs to various monasteries bidding them amend their ways, "isolated decrees", and that was all. Under Innocent VIII there was no reform of ecclesiastical abuses. #### Alexander VI, it may be thought, was hardly in a position to inspire belief that reform was necessary or that good living mattered. The great event of his reign, from this point of view, was the appointment in 1497, on the morrow of the murder of the Duke of Gandia, of a commission of cardinals to draft a scheme of general reforms. That scheme, worked out in detail through months of competent labour, was indeed never put into force, but it survives and, in the long train of curial weaknesses listed for correction, it is a terrible indictment. In the crucial business of episcopal appointments simony is to be put down, reservations abolished and also the bogus coadjutorships by which bishops secured, in their lifetime, that their see would pass to a relative; and bishops, it is laid down, are not to be translated against their will. The cardinals' way of life is to be altered; gaming and hunting are to cease, and none is to have a household of more than eighty, nor more than thirty of a mounted escort. Musicians, actors and youths are to be banished from their palaces, and there is to be no corruption in the conclave. Then the various curial offices are scrutinised, and in all of them, the bull insists, the opportunities for "graft" are to be abolished. Absentee bishops are to be punished and so are those who keep concubines. A new severity awaits "apostate" religious -- that is to say those who have abandoned their monasteries -- while, on the other hand, it is provided that monastic vows made by children are not binding. Princes are no longer to be granted tithes. Other evils noted are the granting of abbeys in commendam, the overriding of the rights of the patrons of livings, the changing of the destinations of pious legacies, and the alteration of conditions laid down in wills about pious foundations. So the list goes on, 127 headings in all, that cover every aspect of curial practice. The programme of things to be put right might have daunted St. Gregory VII himself. Alexander VI went no further than to read it. #### Julius II is the author of one really great reform, the bull (1503) which declared that simony in the election of a pope invalidated the election. [ ] He, too, appointed a reform commission of six cardinals, in 1504; but it is not known whether they even got so far as to draft a scheme. And finally, Julius, who was originally a Friar Minor, gave some attention to the condition of the religious orders. He encouraged Cajetan in his efforts to reform the Dominicans, and he strove, unsuccessfully, to reunite the warring parties in his own order. #### Leo X, it may well be, "never gave a thought to reform on the great scale which had become necessary." But like Sixtus IV and Julius II, he did give some attention to the state of the monasteries and convents. Nine of his briefs that treat of this most serious weakness are listed and many more await publication. [ ] And, successful where Julius II had failed, Leo X in 1517 brought to a final end the contentions about the rule which had divided the sons of St. Francis ever since the death of the founder. It has been told how John XXII cut the knot by measures which amounted almost to a new foundation of the order, a remodelling in which that attitude to ownership which was the speciality of St. Francis had no longer any official standing. But the spirit of St. Francis it was beyond the power of any regulation utterly to extinguish. Very soon a new movement for the primitive observance had begun within the remodelled order. It had the great advantage over the older " Spiritual" movement that it was not bound up with such unorthodox theories as the reveries of Joachim of Flora. Nor did those attached to it maintain that their special way of living the Franciscan life was the sole way of salvation. The new Observants -- as they were called -- were in nothing more truly the brethren of the first friars than in their charity. Their more rigorous interpretation of the ideal was never a stick with which pleasantly to belabour the rest of their brethren, and gradually the new movement gained a permanent hold in one convent after another. Whole convents were gained over to it, great saints appeared in its ranks, Bernadine of Siena, for example, and John of Capistrano, and James of the March, preachers and itinerant missionaries of immense power and wide influence. The friars who followed the Observance were gradually allowed to be organised, within the order, under a special vicar of their own, and the independence of their General was now carefully protected by one pope after another. By the end of the fifteenth century the majority of the Friars Minor were Observants, and the problem before the order now was rather the fate of the Conventuals, the official Franciscans -- one might say -- ever since the time of John XXII. Here was a paradoxical state of things indeed. Leo X solved it by separating the two types of friars, and organising each in a separate religious order, both of which were to be called, and with equal right, Friars Minor. But it was to the General of the Observants that he ordered that the seal of the order should be made over, and the title "successor of St. Francis" be given. #### This reorganisation of the great order was perhaps the most beneficent act of Leo's reign. Two other laws that call for mention are his bull forbidding the Latins in the East to change or suppress or hinder the Greek ritual of the Catholics of the eastern churches, and the bull against the enslavement of the natives of the newly discovered Americas. #### More spectacular than any of these, however, was the General Council held in the Lateran 1512-1517. Its most important act was a dogmatic definition, about the immortality of the human soul, which explicitly referred to the relations between natural knowledge and revealed, a vital topic with Christian thinkers for centuries now, and one on which St. Thomas had long ago -- all too unheeded -- said the decisive word. Of the plight that befell Catholic thought, once it went back on the great progress realised by the Dominican saint's theory of knowledge and his careful distinction of the spheres of reason and faith, something has already been said. And before we come to the Lateran definition, and to the other activities of the council, that account needs to be supplemented by some reference to the last phases of the philosophical and theological decline, in the century since the Council of Constance, and to a new birth of the thought of St. Thomas. #### For the generation to which the fathers of Constance belonged, and to its successor, it was Gerson who, undoubtedly, stood out as the great religious thinker and preacher and writer. [ ] No other had anything like the prestige of this most attractive man who had been Chancellor of the university of Paris in the hour when the university really dominated the whole life of Christendom. He had played his part faithfully at Constance, he had shown himself a man of really pious life and marvellously void of ambition. All through the last twelve years of his life, when, an exile at Lyons, his chief occupation was the religious formation of the children he gathered round him from the streets, Gerson continued to influence the whole Church. As a thinker he must be classed, like Peter d'Ailly, among the Nominalists. But Gerson was not by nature a speculative. It was the practical aspect of religious truth that most attracted him, the rules of good Christian living, the itinerary of the soul’s way to God. Hence in Gerson's sermons and in his writings there is a great deal of needed correction of current popular errors and superstitions, and a merciless exposure of bogus saints and mystics. #### This practical direction was his greatest service to the spiritual life of his own time, and indeed of all the following century. The forty years of the Schism had been a very springtime of false visionaries and crazy doctrines about the mystical life -- about the inner life of the soul in communion with its Creator and its relation to ordinary conduct. The tide of false mysticism was, indeed, rising so high as to threaten to swamp the ideas of genuine Christian piety. And, usually, the danger was a development of that Beghard teaching which, through all the later Middle Ages, was at work, secretly and persistently, never really out of sight, a kind of caricature of the classic Christian idea of asceticism and prayer as the way to union with God. #### What the Beghards were can be read in the great condemnation of their doctrines decreed at the General Council of Vienne in 1311. Man can in this life, they taught, attain to such a degree of perfection that he becomes unable to sin. When he reaches this stage, man is no longer bound to pray nor to fast, his sense nature being now so perfectly subjected to his spirit and his reason that he can freely grant his body all it desires. Again, once man has reached this stage he is not bound to obey any human authority, nor to keep any commandments of the Church. Where there is the spirit of God there is liberty, and the practice of the virtues is a mark of the imperfect man: the perfect soul emancipates itself from the virtues. From which seemingly remote abstractions the Beghard comes down to everyday life with a practical illustration and example, also condemned by the Council, to wit that whoever kisses a woman, unless led by sexual impulse, sins mortally, while no sexual act is sinful if it is done from a sexual impulse; such acts are especially free from blame if they are a yielding to temptation. [ ] #### These are ideas that have never ceased to have a certain vogue in out-of-the-way places, giving life to a host of cults that might be called "curious". In Gerson's time, and for long after, they were much more than that. The early years of the Reformation were to see such theories the inspiration of armed hordes and carrying all before them, the basis of the new Jerusalem, established in concrete fact in the lands beyond the Rhine. #### Gerson [ ] has left behind a mass of writing about this urgent matter. There are works of instruction and direction for those who feel called to set all else aside but the life of prayer, and there are treatises which criticise and attack the false mysticism and explain by what signs the tendencies towards it are to be recognised. To the exaggeration of those who declare "We can know nothing about God", he opposes the fact that the Faith teaches us much about Him. He will not allow that the contemplative life is meant for all; the divinely created differences of temperament are facts that must be reckoned with and allowed for, and differences also of duties. He notes acutely, as a matter that can be observed every day, the contemplative's temptation to be his own guide. Everyone knows, he says, how obstinately they hold to their own ideas, to false and absurd ideas at times; and how much more easily than others they fall victims to such ideas. The great examples here are the Beghards. Another pitfall is sentimentality. There are many who tend to imagine themselves devot, and called to the life of contemplation by experiences that are nothing else than their own emotional upheavals; if such is the basis of their spiritual life the end is certain, and Gerson notes how often false mysticism and a certain looseness about sex- morality go together. At the other extreme are those interested with a merely intellectual interest in the activities of the spiritual life, in prayer, and devotion; and contemplation as human activities and for their own sake, experts in the art of conversing on these topics, hard, proud, insubordinate amid all their spiritual learning. There are the quietists who neglect everything to drift in their spiritual day dreams, and those who assert that the last thing there is any need to be anxious about is one's own salvation. #### Against all these chronic maladies -- now for the first time studied, as it were systematically, on the grand scale, and therapeutically, Gerson's remedies are simple. The first need of the contemplative is knowledge; true knowledge, to be got from the approved doctors and the teaching of the Church. As for the credentials of the new prophets, the moral standard of the disciples is one good test of the master's orthodoxy. But the only real judge whether the mystic's ideas are orthodox is the theologian. Finally, Gerson constructs a whole theology of practical spiritual direction, basing himself largely on St. Bonaventure [ ] -- whom he so closely resembles -- and on the writer still held to be Denis the Areopagite. #### Nothing could be wiser, more orthodox, than this practical apostolate of Jean Gerson. He was by nature practical -- not a speculative. His speculative ideas he took from his age, and, like his age, in one fundamental matter Gerson was seriously in error. The essence of morality, for him as for others of the family of Ockham, was in the divine will. Actions that are good are only good because God has so decreed. Gerson was not the only theologian to be saying this in the early years of the fifteenth century, but no other had anything like his prestige, and none, for generations, had his influence as a moralist and spiritual guide. It is very rare that active minds who turn their back on speculative thought -- who, for one reason or another, refuse to think things out, or to have things thought out for them -- escape serious blunders; and these, only too often, vitiate all that their generous practical activity produces. Gerson was not alone in his error of enthroning the practical reason above the speculative, and in every age since there have been hundreds to imitate him. In his case this mistaken line of conduct made it impossible for the greatest spiritual force of the time really to be certain about the bases of his own action (and of the action he urged upon others); and it helped on, very considerably, the attitude to speculative theology now becoming fashionable among men who proposed to lead a holy life. #### Jean Gerson died in 1429, living just long enough to hear of the marvellous events that centred round St. Joan of Arc and to express his belief in the reality of her visions. Four years later, at the Council of Basel, the new genius appeared who was to carry on his work as an apostle, a reformer and a Catholic thinker. This was the Rhinelander, Nicholas of Cusa, and here was another to whom the best traditions of scientific theology had not spoken, or had spoken in vain. Of the work of reform which this great ecclesiastic accomplished, some account has been given already. What of his role as a teacher and guide of the Christian intelligence? #### Nicholas of Cusa is the first complete species of the Renaissance man born and bred north of the Alps. Though his first formation, his professional equipment, is juristic, there is no learning that he has not sampled and delighted in. He sympathises with all the anxieties of his age, and willingly slaves to remove them. He possesses the new cult for the ancient literatures, and he has distinguished himself beyond measure by discovering twelve lost comedies of Plautus. He is a scientist also, and perhaps the first to put out the complete hypothesis of the revolution of the earth round the sun. In his writings all the elements of the varied intellectual life of the time find their place. #### The two leading, original, ideas in what -- yet once again -- is a practical doctrine, a programme to be followed, a methodology rather than a philosophy, are the docta ignorantia as the beginning of wisdom and the vision of the " coincidence of contradictories " as its peak. The intelligence -- the reasoning reason -- is the lowest of man's powers of knowledge, and it is not able to grasp reality. Knowledge of its own powerlessness is the highest knowledge it can achieve - - this is docta ignorantia. Why this powerlessness? Such is the nature, in the first place, of truth, and next, of knowledge. All knowledge can but be approximation and conjecture. But in God all can be known, and in Him can be seen the ultimate coincidence of contradictories. The great good for man, then, is to come to the point where he will see this coincidence, and thus really know; and man arrives at this by rising above the reasoning intelligence, and by knowing through his higher faculty of intuition. How is all this to be? Nicholas does not know; but he continues to "speculate,” to gather views, to try out ideas; and, in a matter where words are of so little service, he makes use of symbols, and especially of geometrical symbols. All things are in God, and what is implicit in God becomes explicit in His creation. Every thing is a reflection of every other thing, all is contained in all. Of no creature is this so true as of man; and man, if ever he comes to a full understanding of himself, will know and possess all else. There are many ideas suggested here that will have a famous history in later centuries, but it will be a history well outside the tradition of thought that is Christian. From Nicholas of Cusa as a thinker the cause of the classic synthesis of Faith and Reason, labouring now all these years in adversity, had not much to hope. #### Nicholas of Cusa is the last great "original" of the Middle Ages. Next, in order of time, there appear those Florentine Platonists [ ] who have been noted in their more fundamental character as men of letters. And the century closes with Gabriel Biel, [ ] who would be a celebrity for this, if for nothing else, that he is the one scholastic for whom Luther seems to have had a good word, the master indeed of Luther's own masters. It cannot be said that there is anything strikingly new about Master Gabriel, but he is beyond all doubt an Ockhamist; and, a teacher of great personality, he imposed the via moderna upon the new university of Tubingen when, in 1484, a very old man, he was appointed its rector and began to teach theology there. #### Gabriel Biel, in whose commentary on the Sentences Ockham's theology yet once again makes its appearance, "so openly, so systematised, and so completed," [ ] the chief theological luminary of the last half of the fifteenth century, is, however, the last Catholic theologian of his school; and this is perhaps his real significance for whoever studies the history of Catholic thought. The revolution was indeed already preparing, in the very years when Biel so successfully "Ockhamised" the theological teaching at Tubingen, that was to destroy the via moderna once and for all, so that it sank from Catholic theology with scarcely a trace. What was, in fact, imminent was the return of St. Thomas, and the first sign of the coming event was the substitution of the Summa Theologica for Peter Lombard, as the basic text of all theological teaching, by the Dominican masters in the University of Pavia in 1480, and the sanction given to this by the Dominican Chapter-General at Cologne in 1483. [ ] #### Meanwhile the via moderna continued in the enjoyment of its primacy, and for a long time yet such all-important principles as, for example, what has been called Voluntarism, continued to dominate fashionable theological thought. As we are about to see this principle developed in quite a new way, by another professor of theology, in yet another new German university, Brother Martin Luther, and fashioned into an evangel that really is something new in Christian experience, the mention of Gabriel Biel is an opportunity to recall how the principle appeared in the last years before it was associated with the great heresiarch and his new kind of religion. And lest these controversies seem to be about abstractions, and remote from human life, the reminder may be allowed that they in fact concern the very basis of religious life, and that theology, however speculative, is in fact the science of salvation. [ ] #### We can take as a fair statement of the essence of the Voluntarist's view of God and man's relation with Him, the proposition of Duns Scotus, Omne aliud a Deo est bonum quia a Deo volitum. [ ] In all the Divine Life where This is directed towards created reality, it is the Divine Will which gives character and colour to the Divine Activity. And it is by means of his own will -- rather than by means of his intelligence -- that man will enjoy, once he is saved, the happiness of the absolute good that God is. Ockham -- in as full revolt against Scotus as the arch-Nominalist can be against such a realist -- maintains, however, and develops, this adherence to the general theory of "will rather than intelligence"; and he sums up in a marvellously concise phrase the relation of God as Creator to the goodness of created reality, eo ipso quod ipse vult bene et iuste factum est. [ ] The attention of the theologians all through the next hundred and fifty years after Ockham is more and more directed to the role of the Divine Will (and, indeed, of the human will, too) as against the intelligence. It becomes a general state of mind; another aspect of which is the revival of the ancient notion -- long ago condemned -- that, in the matter of salvation there is nothing beyond the power of man's will to accomplish. Man, say the theologians -- Gabriel Biel notably in this generation -- has a natural capacity for loving God above all else; for to love God thus is what reason rightly instructed bids man do; and to all the commands of reason rightly instructed the will, by its own natural forces, is able to conform itself. Against this point of contemporary teaching -- and the state of mind that goes with it -- and against Master Gabriel by name as an eminent promoter of it, Luther will now, very soon, violently revolt. It will be, for him, one reason to reject "the scholastic theology" outright. #### If the tendencies of fashionable theological teaching in the latest and newest schools -- developments indeed of ideas now nearly two centuries old -- were thus to aid the coming age of heresy, the erroneous philosophical doctrines held by many orthodox theologians, and their superficial grasp of the relation between theology and philosophy, were to prove a serious weakness in another way. Again we approach a vital doctrine, and again we need to go back some centuries and to see first a false view of it; then the error corrected thanks to a mind philosophically well formed; and finally, as this last philosophical position is abandoned, a chronic malaise in the mind of the theologian who, believe he never so sincerely, yet must continue, being a man, to think. #### The point at issue is the extent of man's share in the business of his salvation, of man's responsibility -- should he lose his soul -- for his own damnation; it is one of the topics on which Luther's divergence from Catholicism will be most evident and most far-reaching. Peter Lombard had taught, in the twelfth century, that the all-important grace which makes man pleasing to God, which "justifies" man as later theologians were to say, was charity dwelling in the soul, and that this divinely given, supernatural, charity was nothing else than God Himself, the Holy Ghost. [ ] "So highly," says St. Thomas, about to criticise the theory, "did the Master [ ] esteem charity." St. Thomas would have none of this theory. It was an impossibility. It could not ever be true. And for this reason, that man's love for God if it proceeded from such a Source and in such a way would be in no way spontaneous, his voluntary act; and therefore it would be devoid of merit. The act of any nature, says the saint, is perfect in so far as it proceeds from within that nature. Were the act of loving God, man's supreme activity, not to proceed from that free will which is at the heart of all that is human in man, it would be less perfect than man's other acts. Here, it is evident, the criticism of the Lombard and the solution of the difficulty that is offered, are wrapped up in a philosophy. #### From that solution subsequent theologians did not move away. But they moved far indeed, the most of them, in the next two centuries, both from the philosophy and from St. Thomas's conception of the relation between philosophy and theology. While they maintained the solution as true, because it was of faith, they nevertheless declared that, philosophically speaking, it was no more than probable. God had acted this way; he might have acted otherwise; that he had not acted otherwise was at any rate probable; and no more than probable. There is no need to labour the point that sooner or later such a division in the mind of the thinker must end either in the destruction of his belief, or the sterilisation of his power of thought. What is more nearly our business is to note that here is one of those philosophical speculations about what God might have done which we see taken, in Luther's mind, as what God actually did. What theologians of this type were doing was to fill the mind of the time with a host of such "probabilities," accompanying and associated with the certitudes of faith. It was only a matter of time before, in the mind of one or another of their hearers, the probability gained over what was only certain because taught authoritatively by the Church -- victory not for the probability which coincided with the faith as taught, but for its contrary which philosophically, was always probable so long as, in the mind of the thinker, the doctrine of faith was less than certain philosophically too. #### On this most important point -- where Luther's divergence was to create the key doctrine of all Protestantism -- the Catholic theologians, of all schools, continued to teach that it is a nature that God has saved, and that it is saved not through a grace which works outside it, but through an activity of grace in which it has a real share. Charity is a virtue, through which man's salvation is operated by man's action too. Sanctifying grace -- the grace which, making man pleasing to God, justifies man -- is a real vital principle, whence acts proceed that really are man's acts; man's merit before God is a reality, as man's freedom to posit these acts is a reality, and as the supernatural efficacy of those acts when posited is real. And all the theologians defend too the great principle Naturalia manent integra: [ ] sin does not destroy human nature, because nothing can destroy a nature but God who called it into being by creation. Nothing could be more striking than this theological agreement, or than the general movement of theologians away from the immense authority of Peter Lombard when once he had gone wrong on this point. Nothing could be more directly opposed to all that was about to come in the wake of Luther. But it was a great misfortune that, for so long, so many theologians had testified to their faith, and to the traditional teaching, in an atmosphere vitiated by their enslavement to the probable. #### In the early years of that dead time which followed the disappearance from the scene of Nicholas of Cusa and Pius II, and within a short two years of one another, five very remarkable men were born. At Gouda in Holland in 1467 Desiderius Erasmus was born; at Rome in 1468 Alessandro Farnese, who, as Pope Paul III, was one day to sanction the Jesuits and to assemble the Council of Trent; in 1469 Machiavelli was born at Florence, Thomas de Vio -- Cardinal Cajetan -- at Gaeta, and at Beverley, in Yorkshire, St. John Fisher, the solitary bishop in the hundred years that lay between St. Antoninus of Florence and St. Thomas of Villanueva to attain canonisation. Nine years later, in London, St. Thomas More was born. From four of these men, in the last few years before Luther's entry into world history, came the most characteristic work of their genius, four books which have influenced all subsequent thought: Cajetan's commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas began to appear in 1507, Machiavelli's The Prince was composed in 1513, Thomas More's Utopia was printed in 1516, and Erasmus's edition of the Greek Testament that same year. With these works of these great men the tableau is complete of Christian thought as Luther's revolt found it. Erasmus and Cajetan are priests and religious; More and Machiavelli laymen. Erasmus and Cajetan are ecclesiastically learned, though after a very different manner; More and Machiavelli are directly interested in the common life of men, in the Commonwealth. Let us begin with the laymen. #### The Utopia and The Prince are classics too well-known to need much description. Some study of them has been part of the general culture of western Europeans for centuries. The authors are finished humanists, both of them; More is the English character at its very best, Machiavelli the Italian almost at its basest. The Italian is already, however, a figure in the public life of the time, a diplomatist who knows by long experience the great world of princes that is the subject of his meditations: More is but on the threshold of his career. #### At this moment the future martyr is thirty-eight years of age, by profession a lawyer and one of the most successful advocates in the English capital. He is a scholar of the new type, a wit, a family man, and a man of deeply religious life, about whose ways with God there has clung something of the Carthusian spirit ever since the years when, as a young man, he lived as a guest in their London cloister. More fasts regularly, he has regular hours for prayer, he wears a hair shirt, he spends the midday hours of every Friday in meditation on the Passion of Our Lord, he not only hears mass daily but very frequently receives Holy Communion. Such is the man who in the Utopia uses brilliant and kindly satire to criticise the very foundations of his world. This he sees as a place where wickedness and greed flourish unchecked, and where the poor are more and more oppressed, despite the fact that rich and poor alike profess themselves believers in the doctrine that they are brothers in Christ, and that this fraternity is the one thing that matters. What a mess Christians are making of this Christian world, he seems to say. Even from pagans who knew only of God that He existed, more than this might be rightly expected. The book appeared in Latin, at Louvain in 1516, and it had from the beginning a great popularity. [ ] Thomas More was already known to humanists everywhere through the praise of his friend Erasmus; henceforward he was known, and as among the foremost of the humanists, in his own right. #### Few books have suffered more from serious misunderstanding. This has been due, in part, to lack of knowledge about its author, and also to the prejudgment with which the critics -- friendly for the most part to More -- have begun their study of it. It is not a visionary book, nor an unpractical scheme of real living, but a philosophical satire upon the contemporary abuses of Catholic Europe, written by a passionately sincere Catholic. It does not discuss Catholicism, but it attacks the neglect of Catholics really to put into practice the faith which is their boast. As for the religion -- the natural religion -- of these Utopians, the remarkable thing is how closely, in some important points, it resembles Catholicism. Against two contemporary fashionable aberrations on the part of thinkers who are Catholics the Utopia is in violent reaction -- against Pomponazi's philosophical trifling with the doctrine that man's soul is immortal, and against the a-moralism whose representative figure is Machiavelli. " Parts of Utopia read like a commentary on The Prince''. [ ] More is all against the new emancipation from fundamental dogma, against the new statesmanship, against the autocratic prince, and against the idea of "nations as totally independent, gladiators in the European arena." He is filled with horror at such ideas, and at their practical consequence that there are now Christian states that will look on as spectators, with complacency and even with satisfaction, while the Turks destroy the power of their own Christian neighbours. #### The author of the Utopia is not blind to the acute general problem of religious disorder. But he is no destructive revolutionary. What he desiderates when, for example, considering the vexed business of the clergy's immunity from the law of the state, is not the abolition of the system -- which is a check on the tendency of the state to absorb the whole life of its people -- but a better clergy, " of exceeding holiness" indeed, and more carefully recruited and trained, who shall not need so frequently to shelter behind such immunities. As to another clerical matter, generally regarded as one of the great sores of the time, the condition of the monasteries, once again More is conservative. Monasteries -- good ones, of course - - are necessary; Monasticism is, indeed, the one European institution that the Utopians approve of. #### There is hardly a single aspect of contemporary life -- even to the matter of colonising the newly discovered Americas -- that More's keen, kindly, humorous eye does not light upon. For each he has the appropriate comment, and for the innumerable victims of the social system, the new landless, rightless, proletariat, infinite pity. In Utopia there are no class distinctions, [ ] no slaves, no serfs, all men are free men, are workers, are students; and all at need are soldiers. By comparison with what is there pictured -- and with what could be, in this Catholic Christendom, were all really Catholic -- the commonwealths of the day are indeed "a conspiracy of rich men". [ ] #### The Prince, written three years earlier than More's Utopia, [ ] 8 and addressed to Leo X's nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, lately become the ruler of Florence, was the work of a man whose political career had just come to an end, at the age of forty-four. In that career of nearly twenty years in the service of Florence, his native state, Niccolo Machiavelli had risen to be the head of a leading branch in what we might call the Ministry of the Interior, and he had also been employed in half a dozen most important diplomatic missions. He had been sent to Cesare Borgia in the duke's great hour when he was all but King of the Romagna; he was at Rome when disaster came to the duke with the death of Alexander VI; he was with Julius II in the famous march on Perugia and Bologna in 1507, and three years later he was with Louis XII of France, fanning the king's hatred of Julius and advising him to stir up the Roman barons against the pope. With the restoration of the Medici at Florence, in 1513, Machiavelli fell. He was for a time imprisoned and tortured, but his life was spared. No public man is resigned, at forty-four, to the idea that his life is over, and The Prince, the first of Machiavelli's works, is in intention a first move to capture the good will of the Medici " tyrant" and gain a place in his counsels -- employment and money. For Machiavelli was not one of those philosophers who live only for thought. He was the Italian humanist at its best and worst, all the literary scholarship and skill, all the brilliance, all the scepticism, and all the vices, the deceit, the extravagance, the profligacy, and the cult of personal glory to the point of mania; the very antithesis in character of Thomas More. #### The Prince is a slight pamphlet written in a new classical Italian prose, to be read in an hour or two, and meditated on for the rest of a lifetime. Its main theme is the way a prince ought to act who has lately become the master of a state which has previously been under the rule of another. The model for such a prince's imitation is, Machiavelli declares, Cesare Borgia; and the book is, substantially, an analytical account of the rise and fall of tyrants, with special reference to this hero, and with the moral always carefully drawn. The style is simple, unimpassioned, and for its power of irony beneath ordinary language and unimpeachable sentiments, the forerunner of Swift and Voltaire. Here is the political practice of contemporary rulers -- the state of things that provoked some of the most telling passages in the Utopia -- not now condemned for the bad thing it is, nor for the menace it holds for coming ages, but built into a doctrine, a kind of political religion, with villainy analysed and classified, its practice set out in appropriate maxims and precepts, and with warnings against using the right villainy at the wrong time. Well, indeed, may it be said that the little tract "marks the culminating point of the pagan renaissance." Here is the new gospel that, since the world is full of bad men, it is useless for the good to waste time considering what men ought to be, and dangerous to treat the wicked as only the good deserve to be treated. Bad men cannot be governed except by descending to their own level. Treachery, bad faith, cruelty, the careful affectation of the appropriate goodness, all these are called for, and must be studiously employed by the ruler who, in a wicked world, wishes to survive. And Machiavelli calmly debates the comparative usefulness of these vices, and explicitly enjoins his prince to make use of them. #### States need, too, a religion: there is no instrument more useful to the ruler than the religion accepted by his subjects. Whether the ruler himself believes in that religion or not, and even if he knows it not to be true, it is an elementary duty to his welfare to foster it. This ideal national religion, whose importance -- from the ruler's point of view -- lies in its power to unify the nation and serve as a means through which to govern it, could hardly be Catholicism. Nor does Machiavelli mean that it shall be. Catholicism, as the religion not of the hated popes merely but of Jesus Christ, a religion that teaches mankind to look elsewhere than in the state for the abiding city, can never serve the ends of the prince. Moreover its doctrines of love, of self-denial, of pity and of compassion tend to form a type of character than which nothing could be more hostile, nay fatal, to the state he has in mind. The ideal religion is that of pagan antiquity and Machiavelli explicitly says this. [ ] Paganism alone will, by deifying the state, crown the achievement of the good prince. #### A later generation of Catholics was to see the by then notorious treatise placed upon the Index of books forbidden to be read. But addressed to the nephew of Leo X it brought no immediate reprobation on its author, and in 1515 the pope was asking him for advice in the dilemma caused by the schemes of the new King of France and the shifting papal diplomacy. The pope's cousin -- the Cardinal Giulio who was afterwards to be Pope Clement VII -- still stood between Machiavelli and a new employment at Florence, but in 1519 he too was consulting him, asking for a statement on the best way of governing the state, and in 1520 he obtained for him, from Leo X, the commission which produced the great History of Florence. #### The Prince is, evidently, in every line and turn of phrase a Renaissance product, and the worst feature of the book, the final pessimism about human nature, [ ] is no doubt the effect upon a well-placed observer of the sight of such universal cynical indifference to the elements of morality in the conduct of public affairs. Even the popes, as rulers, had now descended to the level of the condottieri princes. But there is another, and more enduring reason, for the pessimism. It is a reflection in the political writer of the contemporary revival of Aristotle according to Averroes, of the movement which at Padua, under the influence of Pietro Pomponazzi, was now carrying all before it with the youth of the university. Here, rooted in stern and compelling logic, was the old curse of the theory that man is wholly at the mercy of an impersonal world force, held in the grip of a fixed, unchanging, eternal cosmos. Everything has always been the same; it will always be so. Since this is the truth about life, and man's destiny, it is best to arrange life accordingly, and to crush out all talk of ideals and betterment and what we should call "progress," for beliefs of this kind can only cause activities in the state that are futile, fated to futility indeed, and a necessary cause of mischievous instability. Averroism, indeed, had never died despite St. Albert and St. Thomas, and Duns Scotus. And now, in the general disintegration, it was again in the forefront of life, threatening as always the very fundamentals of Christian belief. Its most evident assault was against the belief that the human soul is destined for a separate, personal immortality. [ ] #### A French scholar of our own time has linked Erasmus, with Machiavelli and Thomas More, as a pioneer in political philosophy, for Erasmus also wrote his Prince. [ ] But, without demurring for a moment to the great Dutchman's right to figure prominently in such a history, his main importance in Catholic history lies elsewhere. In 1516 Erasmus was close on fifty, and he had reached that position as an influence in European life which no man of letters before, and none since -- not even Voltaire -- has ever attained. [ ] For what was he known, in these last hours before the Lutheran controversies began? and whither did his influence upon educated Christians tend? #### He had begun as an eager, and unusually gifted, student of classical Latin literature, in that monastery of Steyn where, in a kind of despair, this unwanted child of a long-dead priest had been over-persuaded, by guardians only too anxious to get him off their hands, to vow himself for life as an Austin Canon-Regular. The monastery was one of that congregation of Windesheim whose ideals and outlook have been described; its spirit for good, and for the less than good, was that of the Devotio Moderna. Erasmus was continuing here in the way of his early schooling under the Brothers of the Common Life, and there is no reason to doubt that he simply set down the facts when, in later days, he said of his brethren that among them "the least inclination for literature was then looked upon as little better than a crime." However, Erasmus was professed, in the way then general, solemn vows after a novitiate of twelve months, at the age of nineteen or twenty. #### It cannot have been long before he realised the scale of the mistake he had made. The patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai provided a first way out, and after serving some time in his household, Erasmus presently found himself in the schools of Paris. Then came the momentous first visit to England, in 1498, the meeting with Colet and Thomas More, and the realisation of what must henceforth be his life's work, the restoration of a religious spirit in the clergy through their better education; and to better their education the preparation of improved editions of the classic Christian literature. This was, in the end, to be the main work of his most industrious life, and it is by what he achieved here, and by the spirit that directed his efforts, that Erasmus must be judged. One of the great ideals of Nicholas V -- the new humanism perfected by religion, religion still more splendidly set out and defended by the new humanism, the application of the new scholarship to Christian literature -- was to be realised at last, in the face of a thousand difficulties and anxieties, by the genius and enthusiasm of this obscure religious. #### Those difficulties left a permanent searing mark upon his spirit. Penury, first of all; dependence on patronage for the very freedom which the task called for; the utter inability to understand, on the part of those in whose power it lay to arrest the work at any moment -- to understand not only his own competence for it, but religion's need that the work should be done; and hanging over him, through all these years, the possibility of a recall to the unsuitable monastic life and its sterility, where his talent must run to seed for lack of intelligent employment by superiors, and his mind turn in on itself; of a recall which would leave, as the only alternative, disobedience and disgrace, the terrible fate which then awaited the apostate religious, a life of concealment and an ultimate return to the religious life via the monastic prison. Erasmus knew his age thoroughly. Not Machiavelli, nor Thomas More, was more familiar with the spectacle of clerical disorder in the high places, the spectacle of church revenues squandered on worldliness, and neither was so well placed for the contrasts to be such a torment. [ ] That it was the friendship of Thomas More which made all the difference to this refined and much- tried spirit, no one will doubt. The meeting of 1498 was a turning point for Erasmus in more respects than one. #### The first of Erasmus's books, the Adagia, appeared in 1500. It was a new kind of introduction to Latin studies, and an important factor in the development of a better method of teaching the classical language. Then, in 1502, studying Valla, the idea came to him of preparing a critical edition of the New Testament text, and Erasmus set himself to the study of Greek. It was not, however, until 1516 that the long awaited work appeared, dedicated not to his friend, the Bishop of Rochester, St. John Fisher, as Erasmus first intended, but to Leo X, who willingly accepted the dedication and wrote the famous enthusiastic praise of it which prefaces the third edition. Here was a critical edition of the text, with notes and a new Latin translation, and in the twenty years between its first appearance and the death of Erasmus, the bulky folio was reprinted sixty-nine times. And now, in succession, there appeared a series of new editions of the Fathers, St. Jerome, St. Athanasius, St. Basil and St. Cyprian (1516-1520), Arnobius, St. Hilary, Prudentius, St. John Chrysostom, St. Irenaeus, St. Ambrose and Origen, St. Augustine, Lactantius and St. Gregory of Nazianzen (1520-1531). And, of course, wherever he was, Erasmus formed others in the same way of scholarship. #### But long before the tale of this gigantic work was completed, Luther had appeared, and Erasmus had become involved in the controversies about the new doctrines. In these controversies he satisfied neither side; and he won for himself the reputation as a doubtful kind of Catholic which he has, perhaps even yet, not lost. That reputation, which has too long over- shadowed his immense services, is also bound up with his strong, published criticisms of the abuses in the practice of Catholicism in his time. The most famous of the books in which these chiefly appear was The Praise of Folly dedicated to More, and published long before Luther had been heard of: but the other, a book designed to teach boys Latin conversation, the Colloquies, though also written in early life was only published, as a manual, in 1522. Here, in places, there is set out with biting satire the seamy side of ecclesiastical life in all its unpleasantness; here are all the scandals about which reforming councils, and outspoken popular preachers, have been occupying themselves for generations, unworthy clerics, ignorant clerics, sinful clerics -- and monks, the debasing popular superstitions, the mechanical unintelligent use of religion; here it all is, in words of one syllable, set out in condemnation, and in warning; abuses smiled at, sometimes politely, sometimes ironically, sometimes with the bitterness of a good man not a saint who has come nigh to despair of the only human force that can correct it all; and 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, 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 " #### But the most fatal weaknesses of all arose from the total absence in the great scholar's own formation of anything at all of the classic theology of the schools. To Scholasticism, indeed, Erasmus was as much opposed as Luther himself, and with perhaps less understanding of what it was that he was opposing. It would be a waste of time to belabour Erasmus for this lack of knowledge, of time better spent in enquiring where a religious of his antecedents could have got the kind of knowledge of scholastic theology that would really have informed his mind. What kind of a spectacle, in fact, did the world of Scholasticism present to a young Austin Canon in a Dutch priory of the Windesheim group, in the closing years of the fifteenth century? or to the student in the grim College de Montaigu of the Nominalist-rotted university of Paris? In a sense there was too much Scholasticism, Thomists, Scotists, Ockhamists of a score of schools, all disputing against each other. Which was in the right? And with what else were the most of them busy but with sterile inter-scholastic disputation? A young Friar Minor studying in the convents of his order with an unusually good master might be made into a useful Scotist thinker; or a young Dominican, if so lucky as to be taught by some Cajetan, might prove an effective Thomist. But outside these rare cases? #### The life had, in fact, gone out of the business, and almost everywhere the philosophers and theologians of the via antiqua did little more than repeat their predecessors. A new world of literature and imagination had developed, and they ignored its existence. Their own technical Latin had actually declined in quality, and taken on a new barbarity, in the very age when nothing was so characteristic of the educated man as a carefully polished, classical Latinity. And the scholastics made no use at all of the new literary forms of the vernacular languages. The new humanism had brought to the West, not only new texts of Plato and Aristotle, but the means whereby all might read the masters in their own tongue. But the scholastics were too indifferent to their own origins to seize the great opportunity. And despite the fourteenth and fifteenth century critics who had already demonstrated the inadequacy of the Aristotelian physics, the universities clung to them with a truly stupid determination, refusing utterly to consider the new sciences, deliberately ignoring the way of experiment. The once great movement was now, by its own choice, cut off from all that was alive in the world of thought; and the needed systematisation, the constant relating of the old knowledge to the new which is the real life of the mind, had long since ceased. #### Erasmus was by nature anything rather than a metaphysician, but in an age of more reasonable Scholasticism he could have been taught enough of this first of the sciences to understand why it is the first, and how all else depends on it, and that, without it, the theologian soon finds himself in difficulties once he is beyond wading-depth in his speculation. For Erasmus the consequences were disastrous. He had too great a mind not to suffer cruelly wherever he was deficient, and his role was too high for his mistakes to be small matters. 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 he 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’." [ ] #### These controversies were however, in 1516, hidden in the unknown future. The pope had blessed the new work on Scripture and enthusiastically recommended it, and the only critics Erasmus had had to face, as yet, were obscurantist Catholics. But what these now were muttering, others, once the Lutheran storm broke, would soon be proclaiming loudly, and declaring that Erasmus, by his teaching about the role of Scripture, and his criticism of monastic life and devotional practices, was no better than Luther himself. #### 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 Cicero'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. [ ] Nor is it surprising if the next generation, its theological mind formed by the greatest of scholastic revivals, and its adherence to the scholastic method intensified by the Church's life and death struggle with the Reformation divines, should come to hold in abhorrence the great mind which, in these important matters, seemed stricken so perversely. Upon Catholic theology Erasmus, then, left no lasting mark; nor did his failure to appreciate its importance do any damage or lessen its prestige. Here the contemptuous blows he struck fell upon the air. For one thing the revival had begun; and next, theology had already become what it has since remained, a technique that only interested theologians and clerics. The sole effect of his excursions into theology was to discredit Erasmus with the theologians for ever. But the effect of Erasmus on the future of philosophy was very different. Philosophy had once been the occupation of all the educated, and it would in time become that again. Here, the scornful mockery of Erasmus for the Scholastics as he had known them, barbarous in diction, futile and sterile in act, came as a last blow from humanism in its classical age; and Erasmus, in this, helped enormously among educated men everywhere the prejudice from which, only in our own time, is the philosophy of the schools recovering. [ ] #### As we review the personalities and the effective work, of Machiavelli and Erasmus and St. Thomas More, we seem to have parted company entirely from the medievals and to have rejoined our own contemporaries. Cajetan, their contemporary, was undoubtedly a medieval; [ ] and yet, in him also, we make a contact with later times, with our own time indeed in the strictest sense, for the spirit we encounter in Cajetan is the Catholic intellectualism of this mid-twentieth century, the age of Maritain and Gilson, of Leo XIII and Pius XII. Here, in Cajetan, is a rebirth of St. Thomas; here are the beginnings of his effective primacy in the Catholic schools as doctor communis. #### Cajetan is, by birth, James de Vio -- Thomas in religion; and, born at Gaeta, made a Dominican at Gaeta, Bishop of Gaeta, Cajetanus inevitably for all time. He entered the Friars Preachers at the age of sixteen, in that very year when the Chapter- General made the momentous decision that the lectors should use St. Thomas as the basis of their teaching instead of Peter Lombard. In 1488 he was sent to Bologna, still a student; and after his ordination in 1491, to Padua, then exceedingly alive not only with the contention between the Dominicans and the great Scotist, Antonio Trombetta, but with the controversies that centred round the revival of Averroism and the graceful culture of its high priest Pietro Pomponazzi. #### It was at Padua that Cajetan began his career as a teacher, and that he finally received that form of the complete metaphysician which was henceforth to be the vital principle of all his intellectual activity. [ ] In 1494 he made a brief appearance before a greater world when, in the theological tourney which, in those days, enlivened the meetings of the General Chapter, he met and brilliantly jousted with Pico della Mirandola, the hero, it will be recalled, of the early manhood of St. Thomas More. Cajetan was given the chair of Theology at Pavia in 1497; he went thence in 1499 to Milan, and in 1501 he was named Procurator-General of the order, its representative at the Roman Curia. Although, along with this, he obtained a chair in the Roman university, his career as a teacher was over, he was more important now as one of the order's superiors. [ ] In 1508, at the age of thirty-nine, he was elected Master-General of his order. #### Cajetan held this office for nearly ten years, and showed himself in it as a reformer of great constructive power. Two things above all, he told his brethren, must be attended to, the restoration of a life that was genuinely a life in common -- a restoration, therefore, of monastic poverty -- and, at the same time, [ ] the raising of the level of Dominican studies. For other orders, he said, studies might be an ornament: for the Friars Preachers, they were life itself. "Once we cease to carry weight as teachers of theology," he said grimly, "our order's day is over"; and every novice has heard that other reported dictum that the Dominican who fails to study four hours a day is in a state of mortal sin. #### But the Master-General was not kept exclusively to the service of his order. Julius II made all possible use of his genius in the theological controversy with the pseudo-council of Pisa, [ ] and Cajetan was a leading figure in the General Council of the Lateran, and not only as a theologian but also, once again, as a man who saw the rotten state of the spiritual city and how urgently drastic reform was needed. [ ] #### At the end of the council Leo X made him a cardinal. [ ] and in May 1518 sent him to Germany as Papal Legate. One of his tasks was to unite the princes into an effective opposition to the new Turkish offensive; after a respite of thirty years a great soldier had again arisen among the Ottomans, and Christendom was once more in danger. An equally important commission was sent on to him some four months later. [ ] It concerned Luther, by this time cited to answer at Rome a charge of heresy. Luther's sovereign -- Frederick III of Saxony -- had persuaded Leo X to allow the enquiry to be held in Germany, and Cajetan was now put in charge of it, with power to give a definitive sentence, and to absolve Luther should he retract; with orders to have him arrested and sent on to Rome did he prove obstinate. #### The two met at Augsburg, October 12, 1518, Dominican and Augustinian, Thomist and Ockhamist, the Papal Legate and the rebel. Much has been written about that celebrated interview, amongst others by Luther himself. Nothing came of it in the way of reconciliation. No reconciliation was possible; and Cajetan did not succeed in having the heresiarch arrested. But at the interview he spoke to Luther as one scholar to another, as one religious to another, laying aside his high rank and treating Luther -- we have the Augustinian's word for it -- with marked kindliness. But at Rome the legate seems, henceforward, to have been, for his superficial superiors, the man who had failed. One of his brethren of our own day has surely judged his action truly. "From the outset [Cajetan] realised, what many Catholics even after four hundred years have not grasped, that this was not just any kind of a revolt, but a revolt of the mind; that these demands of Luther were not a mere claim that the flesh should be emancipated, but demands in the domain of the spiritual, and, more particularly, demands in the domain of the theological. Cajetan was taken advantage of, and he was beaten; how could he possibly not have been? But this much at least must be said, that he did not touch the already gaping wounds of Christendom with hands that were not respectful and clean." [ ] #### But it is Cajetan's influence as a thinker that is our subject, his permanent influence on his own and later ages. [ ] Cajetan's chief importance to Catholic history lies not only in this that he was the first to publish a commentary [ ] on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, the classic masterpiece of Catholic theology, but in the spirit which informed that great commentary, still the classic commentary after four hundred years. Cajetan, considered in his own right, is the greatest theologian of his own time, and one of the greatest the Church has known. [ ] It was also his great merit that he understood the needs of his age, and that old methods must be adapted accordingly. His commentary on the Summa is the work of an original mind and it proved, from the first, a great originating work. What it first of all accomplished was the long needed reconciliation of the scholastic learning and the new culture of the humanists. The commentator understood his own time, realised fully the gross error of only too many theologians, to wit their indifference to the new critical scholarship and to the new positive sciences, and, so much a metaphysician himself that he was scarcely anything more, he yet brought the new learning to the assistance of the old. In this he is indeed a second Aquinas, bringing into synthesis humanism and Aristotelianism as the thirteenth-century doctor had brought together Aristotelianism and the theology of St. Augustine. #### It is in the long series of Scripture commentaries to which the last years of his life were given that the flexibility of Cajetan's genius is most evident, his readiness to use the new learning and his skill in its use. But this spirit is already to be seen, fully at work, in the great commentary on the Summa. Like the best of the humanists he makes a critical use of the Scriptures in his argumentation, keeping rigorously to the literal sense, and observing scrupulously his own critical rule of not mixing the literal and spiritual senses indiscriminately -- a fault to which the classic theologians of the Middle Ages often tended, [ ] and which was never more evident than in the works of the great encyclopaedist of the generation before Cajetan -- Denis the Carthusian. [ ] And wherever he can do so he makes it his business to study the whole work in which his opponents' views are expressed, by no means content to judge them on the mere opposition of a text. Cajetan again shows himself of the new age in his scrupulous re-thinking of the author he is explaining. Nothing, not even unanimity among other theologians, will dispense him from this. And in nothing else does he separate himself more from his contemporaries, and his immediate predecessors, than in his violent repudiation of their formalist treatment of St. Thomas. [ ] This, and his candour, make Cajetan a singularly attractive author. There is about him an independence and an objectivity that is new. Here is the wisdom of St. Thomas given new life, and speaking to the Renaissance in an idiom it can understand. Here at last among the scholastic theologians was a great thinker, sensitive to all the life of his time, his work free from all those faults which drew upon his profession the wrath of Erasmus and the mockery of Rabelais. It is something to know that Erasmus was not only aware of Cajetan's existence, but of the different kind of thing his great work was, that he praised it highly -- and disinterestedly -- only wishing that books of this sort could be written by the score. [ ] #### Cajetan was not an isolated figure in his own order. The Renaissance of St. Thomas's doctrine had begun about the time he entered the order, he was one of its earliest fruits. But almost his contemporary was the gifted Francis de Sylvestris of Ferrara (1474-1528) who published in 1525 the first, and greatest, commentary on the Contra Gentiles; and only ten years younger than Cajetan was Francis of Vittoria (1480-1546), [ ] the Spaniard whose lectures on the State and on the moral aspects of political life are a main foundation of the modern science of International Law. [ ] It is Cajetan's work, however, which is the real foundation of all the later achievement; it is due to him above all others that there was a new living theology in the university world of the later sixteenth century, ready when the great opportunity came to serve those two great inventions of that time which have especially formed the modern Church, the diocesan seminary and the Society of Jesus. [ ] And if Cajetan is the progenitor of the theological scholarship of modern Catholicism, Erasmus too has his Catholic progeny, no less distinguished, no less necessary to the fullness of Catholic life, the critical scholars and historical theologians and the exegetes, the Benedictines of St. Maur for example and the Bollandists, Petavius, Mabillon and Papebroch. #### The General Council summoned by Julius II (in what circumstances has already been described) [ ] to meet in the Lateran Basilica of Rome, came together on May 3, 1512, and it was not dissolved until almost five years later, March 12, 1517. Many things in its history make the Fifth Lateran a thing apart among General Councils. It met very rarely -- seven times only in the last four years; its activities are recorded not in the usual list of canons and decrees but in a series of papal bulls; the attendance was never large, and the eighty or ninety bishops present were almost all Italians, from the Papal State and the kingdom of Naples; and, finally, the reform decrees it enacted were often openly ignored, sedente concilio, by the pope himself. "Au total rien de serieux" says a French scholar, truly enough; and it is hard to see what more could have been expected of such a character as Leo X, upon whom the conduct of the council fell from March 1513. #### The most immediate practical effect of the council was that it broke the nascent schism fostered by the King of France and the, emperor; it reaffirmed the declaration of earlier popes that General Councils are instruments of government subordinate to the pope, primate and ruler of the whole Church of Christ; and it secured the assent of the French king to the condemnation of the Pragmatic Sanction as unlawful, null and void. [ ] And the council did a great service to the cause of the faith, and of right thinking, by its condemnation of the new Averroism of Pomponazzi, "pernicious errors concerning the nature of the rational soul, namely, that it is mortal and that it is the same [soul] in all men, and that this is true at least in philosophy." [ ] The bull goes on to say, " Since truth does not contradict truth, we declare that every assertion contrary to truth illuminated by faith is absolutely false," and it orders that those who lecture on these subjects in universities shall set themselves to refute the arguments of these philosophers, all of which will yield to reasoning. No cleric in holy orders shall, for the future, give himself in his first five years at the university to the exclusive study of philosophy or the poets; after that time, he may, as it were, specialise in them, provided always that, at the same time, he continues his study of theology and canon law. #### There are two other acts of the council which show concern for the welfare of the Catholic mind, the bull on censorship [ ] and that on preaching. [ ] The first begins with a paean of thanksgiving to God for the recent marvellous invention of printing, and a recital of the new prospects thereby opened out to learning and to religion. The new art, however, is lending itself also to less worthy causes. Books are appearing filled with mistakes about the faith, and with all manner of harmful teaching, the very opposite of Christianity; and also books filled with slander, even of eminent personages. Whence this new law that, for the future, no one is to print anything before it has been sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority -- by the pope's officials in Rome, by the bishop or his diocesan officials elsewhere. Those who ignore this law risk a heavy complexity of penalties; the book will be confiscated, publicly burned, the printer fined 100 ducats, suspended from printing for a year and excommunicated. #### The decree about preachers is interesting for what it reveals of current practices in the all-important office. It is indeed almost wholly taken up with them. Preachers are not to put their own personal interpretations on Sacred Scripture; they are expressly forbidden to predict future calamities in any definite way, or the coming of anti-Christ, or the end of the world. Those who have done this already are liars, and their wickedness is one reason for the contempt that has come upon preachers in general. Let no one, for the future, preach that any particular future event is foretold in Holy Scripture, nor say that he has a revelation from the Holy Ghost to state this, or any other like inane divination. Preachers must keep to the Gospel, teach a hatred of vice and a love of virtue. They must be a source of peace, not sowers of dissension. Especially must they abstain from scandalous denunciation of the faults of bishops and other superiors, "whom not only imprudently, but intemperately, they lecture and worry in sermons before the common people and laity"; and they must abstain from open declarations of the wrongdoing of superiors, even mentioning their names. It is, of course, always possible that a preacher may really have a special revelation, and a divine commission to make it known. But it belongs to the pope's authority to judge whether this really is so, and before anything of this kind is publicly preached it must be submitted either to the pope or, if there is no time to consult the pope, to the local bishop, who, along with three or four theologians, will carefully examine the matter. For those who ignore the law there awaits the penalty of an excommunication from which only the pope can release them. #### Three decrees treat of reform. The lengthy bull Supernae dispositionis arbitrio [ ] recalls and renews all the old legislation, going back to 1179, designed to ensure good bishops in all the sees of Christendom. The pope's responsibility is stressed, and the bull explicitly reminds him that at the last day he will answer to God for his appointments. All the vices which, at this moment, disfigure the system are listed, and it is announced that the law that bans from the episcopate minors and the ignorant, and that forbids favouritism, the use of commendams, appointments of administrators -- and, in fact, everything that Leo X was at the moment doing and would continue to do to the end of his reign -- is henceforward to be enforced. The decree makes no difficulty about saying that the failure to observe these ancient laws has brought the papacy into disrepute throughout the Church; and it also renews all the laws designed to prevent monasteries from being made a means to give prelates and cardinals an income, while the monks starve and religious life dries up. The cardinals are then mildly admonished, in stereotyped language that merely repeats what was said at Constance and after Constance, about their duty to live pious and sober lives, and a vast amount of space is given to regulations about their dress and that of their households, and to set a limit to the expenses of their funerals -- 1,500 florins. There is a new law to punish blasphemy in clergy and laity, the obstinate sinner going to the galleys if he is a commoner, losing his nobility if he is a noble and, if a cleric, losing all his benefices. Concubinage, yet once again, figures as a custom that still flourishes, and bishops are warned not to let offenders off lightly on the plea that the custom is after all so general. There is a renewal of the old laws against simony, against encroachment on the rights and property of the Church, and against violation of the privilege of clerics. All this is, once again, little more than repetition. The legislation merely forbids and enacts penalties; the way has not yet been found to secure that the law will actually be put into force. [ ] And there is a special clause denouncing witchcraft and punishing those who resort to it, clerics and laity; and another clause calling for strict application of the heresy laws against pseudo-Christians. #### A second bull [ ] strengthens the bishop's hand against the chapters and canons who resist his endeavours to correct them, on the plea that they are exempt from his authority; and it strengthens the prestige of the episcopal courts. Finally, the bishops are bidden to observe the law, which has long been a dead letter over four-fifths of the Church, that a provincial council should be held every three years. #### The law that the bishops of every ecclesiastical province should meet in provincial council every three years was first made at the Fourth General Council of the Lateran -- the greatest of all the medieval councils -- by Innocent III ill 1215. In the period 1270-1517 there were held, for the 74 provinces then effectively existing, 235 provincial councils: had the law been observed everywhere, throughout that time, there would have been more than 6,000 councils held. The purpose of the provincial council -- it must be remembered -- was not merely to make laws: it was designed by Innocent III as the instrument by which episcopal slackness and shortcomings were to be corrected by the bishops of the province. Herein lay the chief usefulness of Innocent III's invention; and in the utter inability of the popes to enforce this law lay, undoubtedly, one of the chief reasons for the steady decline of religion and the ultimate corruption of such masses. It is not without interest to note that never were fewer councils held than in the years of the so-called conciliar movement -- 63 councils in 30 provinces. In many provinces no council was ever held. So, notably in Italy, where there were 29 provinces, councils were never held at all in 22 of them; in the rest there was one council in Benevento in 1378, one in Palermo in 1388, the fourth and last of Aquileia (i.e. held during these 247 years) took place in 1339, of Ravenna in 1317, of Grado in 1320, of Spoleto in 1344, of Padua in 1350. Of the 16 metropolitan provinces of France, most held councils, many of them at least once in an average man's lifetime; though at Arles, Embrun and Aix there was none after 1365, nor at Auch after 1387, though at Bordeaux the series ended in 1327, and at Toulouse in 1368, though Lyons (the primatial see) had but one council (after 1300) in 1376, and Reims only one in 111 years (1344-1455), and Rouen none in 140 years (1304-1445). The tale is much the same in Spain, although, at Toledo and Tarragona, councils were really frequent (six at Toledo and fourteen at Tarragona). In Germany, where there were seven provinces, councils were only regularly held at Prague and Magdeburg; Cologne had none from 1324 to 1423, Salzburg none from 1310 to 1409; Bremen had none at all after 1292, and Treves none after 1310. In Poland between 1285 and 1420 there was but one council, held in 1375; and there was but one in Portugal, held in 1436, in all the period 1270-1464. In Scotland, too, the law was a dead letter; a council was held in 1280 and the next was in 1436. Sweden went for 120 years without any provincial council (1275-1396), and Hungary for 130 years (1318-1449). Norway did not fare so badly until half-way through the fourteenth century, the council of 1351 being the last until 1436. In Denmark the series ends in 1389. In Ireland (where there were 4 provinces) there are only the two councils of Dublin in 1348 and 1351. #### The third bull, [ ] of December 19, 1516, brings to an end the latest, and most clamorous, of all the struggles between the bishops and the mendicant orders, a quarrel so violent that the pope had to put off the next session of the council for months. "We are in the heart of a terrific storm," the general cf. the Augustinians [ ] wrote, " the attack upon us and upon all the mendicant orders by the bishops has now raged furiously for three years in the very council." The cause was the old, old cause -- the privilege which the Mendicants enjoyed of exemption from all authority but that of the pope. The bishops charged the friars with using the privilege to make money out of the laity at the expense of the parish and diocese, and charged them also with an abundance of wicked living; let them be brought under the common law of the Church. The regulars riposted by a staggering catalogue of episcopal sins. "Before you call upon us to observe the common law of the Church," they said, "why not begin to observe it yourselves?" If it were not for the regulars, they boldly declared to the pope, the very name of Christ would be forgotten in Italy. Who else but the friars ever preached? The bishops pressed for the abolition at least of the privileges lately showered on the Mendicants by the Franciscan pope Sixtus IV, the bull called Mare magnum. #### It was only the personal action of Leo X that saved the friars. [ ] He arranged a compromise, and the bull Dum intra mentis arcana of the eleventh session sets it out. Bishops were to have the right to make visitations in parish churches held by the friars and to enquire into all that concerned their parochial activity. Friars would need the bishop's approval before they could hear the confessions of his subjects. Friars were not to absolve from episcopal excommunications or other censures, nor were they, without leave of the parish priest, to administer Extreme Unction to the dying or give them Holy Viaticum. Laymen who wished to be buried in the habit of a religious order could be buried in the order's churches and cemeteries if they so desired. Bishops had the right to examine a friar's suitableness before they gave him Holy Orders; and it is the bishop of the diocese who must be asked to give this sacrament, and also to consecrate the friars' churches, bless their bells, and perform all other episcopal functions they may need. Friars are not to marry any of the faithful without the leave of the parish priest; they are to be careful to remind those who come to confession to them of their duty to pay tithes to the parish priest; and, if the priest asks it of them, they are to make a point of this in their sermons. Members of the Third Orders who live in their own houses have no right to receive from the friars of their order the so-called parochial sacraments (that is Easter Communion, Extreme Unction, and Holy Viaticum), though they may confess to the friars, and be buried with them, and by them, should they choose. Such tertiaries are bound by the same obligations as other layfolk, and they are not free from the jurisdiction of lay judges. Nor can they, in times of interdict, hear mass in the churches of the order to which they belong. But if the members of the Third Order live a common life, in a convent, they enjoy all the rights and privileges of the order. #### The recital of the details of the compromise shows how the life of the orders had, by now, penetrated minutely into every nook and cranny of the Christian republic. At every turn there was room for friction between the two systems of jurisdiction, the episcopal and the exempt. And even the roughest survey of the lives of the saints and holy people of the century between Constance and this act of Leo X, shows the mendicant orders as the great active source of almost all the sanctity of the time -- so far as sanctity is known to us. #### A biographical catalogue of saints [ ] gives a total of 150 saints and beati/ae who "flourished" between the beginning of the Schism and the end of the reign of Leo X (1378-1521). The "causes" of the great majority have so far not proceeded beyond the stage called beatification: only 26 out of the 150 have been canonised. Of these 150, the mendicant orders can claim as many as 115. Four of these were bishops, 35 nuns, 9 lay men and women members of the various Third Orders, and the rest priests and lay brothers; Franciscans and Dominicans account for over two-thirds of them. [ ] This huge lead the mendicant orders maintain to the end of the period. In the fifty years which this last chapter covers, this age of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI and Leo X, 76 saints and beati/ae "flourished", and 55 of them belonged to the mendicant orders, 19 women and 36 men. This ultimate glory of so many of their subjects -- their Italian subjects [ ] -- was hidden indeed from the generals of the orders- at that time, but how history has justified their reply to the bishops' assault made in the Fifth General Council of the Lateran ! #### There is yet another decision given by Leo X in the council which is of interest, not only in itself, but as the most important sign so far of the Church's recognition that the world has reached a new age in social and economic organisation; this is the bull Inter Multiplices [ ] which declares the new charitable pawnshops to be lawful, and protects them against the critics who had been denouncing the system as nothing else than usury. No crime, throughout the whole of the Middle Ages had been more continuously denounced by the Church than usury, and no sinners more severely punished. Nor did Leo X's sanction, given to pawnshops so organised that, while no interest was asked for the loan, a small charge was made to cover administration costs, alter in any way the definition of usury or moderate the condemnation of the crime. But while reviewing once again the nature of the reprobated "contract of usury", the pope explicitly reproved old-fashioned theologians who declared that whatever accrued to those who lent money must, in all circumstances, be usury. #### Great changes, in progress by this time for a hundred years and more, had brought it about that money now had another use beyond that which all thinkers so far had considered could be its only use, namely, to be a means of making payments. In an economic system where, if money was not used to make a payment it was not, and could not, be used at all, all loans of money were necessarily unproductive loans. The money lent was as truly consumed in the borrower's use of it, as was ever a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine. Any charge made for any loan of money was, then, necessarily a usurious charge, the charge being inevitably a gain accruing directly from the mere act of loaning, and claimed as such. #### But once industries began to be specialised and commerce to spread over a wider field, to pass from the transactions confined to one village, or town, and to take in first a whole country, then a continent and finally other lands at the very extremities of the world as known, a new use for money gradually developed. Any man could lend his money to these industrial and commercial pioneers, and legitimately qualify for a share in their profits -- as he also incurred a share in their risks. What such a man received from those to whom he lent his money was a share in what their use of the total moneys they controlled brought in; it was a fruit of industry and business capacity, not any longer a payment exacted simply for the loan of what could not be productive. To profits accruing from money used in this new way that the growth of commerce had made possible, the criticisms directed against usury could not apply. And it became necessary, in such a system as the Catholic religion, that those whose business it was -- whether by private or public direction of men's consciences -- to keep a clear idea of moral obligations before mankind, should take note of the new institutions which the changing circumstances of life were calling into existence. #### The fourteenth century, which produced so much activity of a scientific kind -- and minds that, by preference, studied facts (and here, of course, Ockham's insistence on the importance of the fact told very favourably indeed) -- saw the first reflections of these new developments in what has come to be called Moral Theology. Durandus of Saint-Pourcain, for example, studied the nascent credit system and raised the question, which increasingly agitates our minds to-day, whether the state should not organise so important an element of man's well being. Francois de Mayronnes pointed out how money was beginning to have more than one use, and asked the great question if interest could not therefore sometimes be lawful. Jean Buridan sketched a theory of value, of exchange, and of money. Nicholas of Oresme, whose place in the history of other sciences has been referred to already, wrote his book on Money, its origin, nature, rights and exchange in which Gresham's Law makes its first appearance. All these men were clerics, and their first interest was the ultimate end of their fellows. They did not study Political Economy for the mere interest of the subject, but to clarify doubts whether certain commercial activities were lawful or sinful. It is not surprising that these questions, from now on hotly debated in the country that was the centre of the new finance, Italy, attracted the attention of the missionaries of the new Franciscan reform movement -- the Observants -- who, for the moment, were there carrying all before them as reformers of Christian moral life. In their sermons, and notably in those of St. Bernadine of Siena, there is a new precision in what is said on these questions which so vitally affect man's chances of salvation: questions of usury, of interest, of mortgages. But the crown of all this new movement was the work of a Dominican, St. Antonino, Archbishop of Florence from 1446-1459, in the very height of the career of Cosimo de' Medici. #### St. Antonino [ ] was a disciple of Bl. Giovanni de Dominici, the Dominican who organised the great reform in his order that produced the famous Congregation of Lombardy, and who as a cardinal stood by Gregory XII, almost alone, in the dark days of the Council of Pisa. The saint grew up in the new, reformed monasteries of Fiesole and St. Marco; he had served as a missionary, as prior and as the head of his group of houses, and he had won a great name as a canonist, when Eugene IV gave him the see of Florence in 1446. It was one of those rare appointments where the man was ideally right for the place and the time, thinker, ruler, saint, and understanding his age from life-long contact with all its actuality. #### The great work for which St. Antonino is chiefly known, the four volumes of the Summa Moralis, was written while he was archbishop, and it was meant, of course, for the use of his clergy. It is a new kind of work in two respects. First it treats exclusively of theology as this relates to conduct -- it is the pioneer work of the science that has come to be called Moral Theology. And next, it is specially devoted to these new anxieties about commercial morality and the use of money, and the ultimate moral import of what we should call economic doctrines. Here is to be found dispassionate analysis and discussion of all manner of problems that are still with us; poverty in itself is an evil, though it may be an occasion for good; possessions are good and ordained by God for the service of man; to serve God as God wills He shall be served, man needs a certain freedom from anxiety, a certain leisure -- and possessions secure this for him. The saint considers wealth in its production, distribution, and consumption, and discusses the comparative importance of labour and capital in the production of wealth. There is a careful detailed study of various methods of commercial fraud, of the question of usury, of interest on bills of exchange, of the distinction between money as coin and money as capital, and of the lawfulness of taking interest for money lent to the state. There is an attempt to state a principle whereby to determine the just price of goods, just to the seller and to the buyer; an examination of monopolies, and trusts; of the duties of the state to its citizens, its duty to provide for the poor, the aged, the sick -- and even its duty to provide, for the poor, doctors paid by the state; of the duty of employers to pay a just wage. #### Florence, in St. Antonino's time, was as much the financial capital of the world as New York or London has been in our own. The evils which he analyses and deplores are the product of the last two hundred years or so before the Reformation; and already, in the Low Countries as in Italy, and in western Germany too, "there was sometimes a capitalism as inhuman as anything which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants." [ ] It was not the least of scandals to the poor as Catholics that, among their oppressors, were highly-placed clerics. St. Thomas More, in the Utopia, notes, for example, that monasteries too are prominent in that wicked development that is turning farms into sheep runs and thereby increasing the horde of wretched proletarians and vagabonds in the towns. #### And it was another scandal that the popes had, for generations, made such use of the bankers. [ ] It was the skill of the French pope Urban IV, negotiating an agreement with the bankers of Siena in 1263, that had made possible the expedition of Charles of Anjou and the final defeat of the Hohenstaufen. Bankers played a great part in the supreme days of la fiscalite pontificale, during the Avignon regime. "In the first half of the fifteenth century the Medici or their representatives were always in attendance on the popes." [ ] John XXIII had Cosimo with him when he made the fatal journey to Constance in 1414, and he raised 15,750 florins from the firm on a magnificent mitre. Twenty-five years later Eugene IV, during the Council of Florence, raised a further 25,000 from the Medici on pledges of plate and jewels. Under Nicholas V the bank received the 100,000 gold florins which the pilgrims contributed at the Jubilee of 1450. By this time the great Florentine firm had branches everywhere, at Rome, Venice, Pisa and Milan in Italy; at Antwerp and Bruges; at London, Lyons, Avignon, Geneva, Valencia and Barcelona, and at Lubeck; and thereby it offered the pope a means to gather in revenues that was no doubt lawful enough in itself, but a means that lent itself easily to scandal. For example, " Fees had to be paid by any nominee to a bishopric or an archbishopric. The Roman house accepted the bull of nomination, dispatched it to that branch of the business which had, or was likely to have, business connexions with the new bishop, and this branch then delivered the bull on payment of the dues. If the dues were not paid, the bull was sent back." [ ] #### The bankers were also used to collect the money offered by those who sought to gain some of the indulgences, [ ] and the classic example of scandal here is the indulgence of Leo X as it was preached in Germany in 1516, the indulgence which gave Luther his opportunity to secure for the new theology its first notoriety outside the universities of Wittenberg and Erfurt. #### The movement called the Reformation, when it came, was but one of several revolutions simultaneously active, and the latest of them in time. This attempt to picture the setting in which the first events of the Reformation took place needs, in order to complete it, some mention of the new importance of the middle classes, and for this I should like to borrow the words of a recent French writer. The only "class to make any progress" -- he is speaking of the fifteenth century -- "is the middle class. The development of banking and industry, all that blossoming of capitalism which characterises the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries makes for the advantage of this class alone. On a par with this economic strength, is the hold which the middle class gains, little by little, on political life, the municipal authority and the parliaments. Well-established families dominate the municipal councils; in the Low Countries they take an ever-increasing part in public affairs, in Italy more than one of them rises to be ruler of the state. The other side of the picture is that, in all the large towns, a wretched proletariat already exists with no means to express itself in the national life; and this section of the community the great social and religious changes will toss about mercilessly. There is thus in formation, within the great industrial cities, a powerful commercial aristocracy, independent, critical of authority, with a tincture of literary tastes, of interest in law and theology, ambitious to exert its strength, to enforce its claims, a middle class seeking power and privileged status -- and there is a considerable mass of poor people, raw material for any revolutionary movement, just as ready to support the ambition of the middle classes, or the king's authority, or a peasant rebellion; to turn and sack the possessions of the clergy to-day or, to-morrow, to change sides and become a church-enthusiastic mob." [ ] #### Here the veil is lifted that still hangs over too much of medieval history, and something shows of the life and thought of the ordinary man, not only of him at whose expense history is so largely made, but of him whose scarcely recorded reaction to the direction of his betters often, at the turning points, makes history. It was to help this class that the Franciscan Observants had come with their invention of the Monts de Piete, protected now by Leo X in the General Council of the Lateran. What of the religious life of the ordinary man at this moment? #### The movement of theology away from philosophy, more and more marked as the fourteenth century drew to an end, was more closely followed by a movement of devotional life away from theology -- though not, as yet, of devotional life away from the faith. It was not to the depths of the mysteries that men now turned for food for their souls, but to the mysteries as they had been shown to the senses. There is, from now on, an increasing familiarity in the tone of men's commerce with the supernatural world, and they make greater use of their imagination in their effort to make a contact with that world. Their meditation on it is more colourful, the emotions play a greater part in their spiritual life than ever before. The change is reflected in a new development in religious art; there are new subjects for the painters and sculptors and a new treatment of the old subjects. It matters much now that the representation shall be picturesque. And the great catastrophe which came half way through the fourteenth century, the Black Death, gave a sudden impulse, more powerful than all the new philosophical developments, to man's new preoccupation with emotions and imagination, to the attainment of a new stage in his devotional life, and to hasten the coming age of Pathos. On the one hand new luxury and new lusts, and on the other a new deep-rooted melancholy. Then came the terrible trials of the Schism and of the long-drawn-out uncertainties of the duel of the popes with the councils. Here are catastrophes and crises that remind men violently how brittle a thing is worldly glory, how short-lived man's happiness and how far from Christian perfection most Christians are, even the most highly-placed. The new age is much preoccupied with the thought of sin and its consequences, and with death as the moment when merited punishment will begin. As well as being the age that created the new moving iconography of the Passion, such devotions as the Stations of the Cross and the Five Wounds, and such touching images as that of Our Lord awaiting the last torture of the cross or of the Pieta, this is also the age of the Danses Macabres. "It is only Death who dances, in the procession; the rest follow unresisting, drawn along wherever the fatal cortege goes. The buffoon who zig-zags at its head is more than man can bear to look upon closely, with his strips and scraps of rotting flesh, his mockery of likeness to a man, and the irreverent display of ' what should be covered up in the earth'. " Here are the extremes of the new plane in which the popular religion lives and moves, skirting too often the fringes of the morbid, through the hundred and fifty years between the Schism and Luther. #### Meanwhile the Third Orders flourished, and in the towns the guilds continued to build their corporate life around the means of grace -- prayer, the sacraments, almsgiving, and works of charity. New monastic foundations were extremely rare -- how could more be needed, all possible wants were surely long ago supplied? The charity of the munificent went now to colleges rather, to schools and to hospitals and to "homes" for the unfortunate; " homes " for orphans and foundlings and nursing mothers, for repentant street walkers; for old sailors, for pilgrims and for the poor of every sort. [ ] The poor are indeed not lacking. It is an age of "commercial expansion" and the tale of the ruined victims is considerable. #### Another sign of spiritual vitality is the vast number of religious books, of all kinds, in the vernacular languages, diffused now through the new invention of printing, Soul’s Guides, Ways to Heaven, Christian Missions and the rest. More important still are the Catechisms and handbooks of doctrine, such for example as the Libretto della doctrina christiana, Kalendrier des Bergers, Espeio de bien vivre, Instructions for Parish Priests. [ ] It is an age of preachers, in every country; and pious Christians make provision in their wills for the preaching of sermons and the maintenance of the preachers, "to assure them the leisure for the study they need." [ ] Sermons begin to be collected and printed. In Germany we know of a hundred such. But of all books (everywhere but in England) it is the Bible that is the most popular. It was translated into Italian by a Camaldolese monk Nicholas Malermi, and in Germany, by 1517, nineteen editions of German translations had appeared. " All Christians," say the editors of a Cologne edition, "should read it with devotion and reverence and in union with God." #### An account of Christian life during these years when ideals were so gravely compromised by the bad example given in high places, would be singularly misleading did it say nothing of the violent reaction, open, at times defiant, when good men protested against the scandals of ecclesiastical life. In Italy "the upper and middle classes were in a ferment of hostility" [ ] to this papacy of princes. The " racket " was evident and bitterly resented. One who for years lived at its centre, and upon it, the servant of both the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, has expressed in bitter words that resentment which, in all ages, is the most dangerous product of the ecclesiastic's unwillingness to allow that his administration can need criticism or reform -- namely that whatever the layman's loyalty to the Catholic faith, his impatience with clerical incapacity and self-sufficiency may lead him to welcome any movement which promises to shake up the clergy. Guicciardini -- for it is the great historian's words we are about to quote -- was no doubt an embittered man when he put together his Reminiscences and, like many another educated Italian of his time, not too sure of his religion. But here he only says more forcibly what, in all such times and circumstances, men naturally say. After speaking of the clerical wickedness he had witnessed -- ambition, covetousness, excesses -- and the scandal it must give, he says that his relations with various popes made him prefer their greatness to his own interests. "Had it not been for this consideration" -- he is writing now in 1529, after the event -- "I would have loved Martin Luther as myself; not that I might set myself free from the laws imposed on us by Christianity, as it is commonly interpreted and understood, but that I might see this scoundrelly rabble (questa caterva di scelerati) confined within due limits, so that they might be forced to choose between a life without crime or a life without power." [ ] #### Guicciardini did not stand alone. Others of his contemporaries, who explicitly declare their attachment to the papacy, do not hesitate to complain about the scandal given by the contrast between what the office demands and the way those who hold the office conduct themselves. [ ] In England there are the profound criticisms scattered through the works of St. Thomas More; and St. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, made his protest too. If the pope did not presently reform his court, said the future martyr, God would find a means to reform it for him. [ ] #### But by far the most striking protestation was that of the Dominican Jerome Savonarola, a very great figure indeed, and still the centre of lively controversy among Catholic scholars. [ ] Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452 and after a good humanist education in that centre of the Italian renaissance, sickened by the renascent paganism of life, and somewhat morbidly preoccupied already with the sinfulness of human nature, he offered himself to the Dominicans in 1475, joining, at Bologna, the austere reformed congregation of Lombardy. Fifteen years later, as the newly-appointed prior of San Marco at Florence, he broke into the Italian scene with the force of a thunderbolt. Yet once again the combination of a passionate austerity of life, of utter and absolute disinterestedness to all but the salvation of the hearer, of clear and exact theological understanding, and of the very perfection of the oratorical temperament and gifts, proved irresistible. Savonarola was, after St. Bernadine of Siena, the greatest preacher of the Italian middle ages; and he was a pioneer in the new apologetic, the apologetic now beginning to be urgently necessary if the educated Catholics exposed to the seduction of the newly discovered pagan ideals were to be kept true to their belief. Within a couple of years the Dominican had conquered Florence. The gay, licentious capital had become a convent, said its cynical neighbours. #### In no matter had Savonarola showed himself more outspoken and independent than in his condemnation of the Medici -- the founders and patrons of the very monastery he ruled, but, for the prior, the primary source of the city's sins, and the tyrannical oppressors of its liberties. And it was when the revolution of 1494 drove them out and Savonarola began, as the oracle of God, to be the inspiration of the new government of the republic, that there began also the stage in his career that could only end in tragedy. All Italy now -- save only Florence -- was combining to resist the French invader. The pope -- Alexander VI -- was naturally the leader in this combination, for Charles VIII not only menaced the Papal State, but, so it seemed, threatened immediately the pope's hold on the papacy itself. The king was urged on all sides to call a General Council, whose main business would be to depose the pope as a simonist and a man of evil life. And Savonarola, who had before this already begun to denounce in his sermons the pope's heinous sins, now began to preach that it was God's will -- revealed to him, Savonarola -- that Florence should be the French king's ally. #### Alexander now summoned him to Rome (July 25, 1495) and when the Dominican managed to evade the summons, the pope forbade him to preach (September 8 and October 16). He even offered to make him a cardinal. [ ] For a while Savonarola was quiet, but after four months of silence he returned to his pulpit and took up again his mission to rebuke the sins of the pope. On May 12, 1497, Alexander excommunicated him. Whereupon the sermons against Alexander took a new turn. "Whoever excommunicates me," said the friar, " excommunicates God." In a series of letters prepared for the princes of Europe, [ ] he invited them to correct the pope's life and to thrust him out, for he was no pope, being elected by simony, and indeed not even believing in God; and the friar repeated the claim that his own mission was divine and that the excommunication was, therefore, void in the sight of God. "If ever I ask absolution from this excommunication," he said, in sermons preached about this time, [ ] " may God cast me into the depths of hell, for I should, I believe, have committed thereby a mortal sin"; and again he declared that those who allowed that the excommunication had any force were heretics. #### The illusion that had been the weakness of Savonarola's whole career was working out to the very fullness of its terrible possibilities. For, from the beginning, although his doctrine v. as always orthodox, Savonarola, in the whole of his preaching, gave himself out as a man directly inspired by God to say what he said and to direct the action of others. There must not ever be contradiction, or opposition, to what he proposed or ordered. He recounted in his sermons, as warrant for his assumption, his dreams and his visions, and he foretold in what events God would chastise this disobedient generation. Lorenzo de' Medici was shortly to die, and Innocent VIII also -- which came to pass. The French would come in and overthrow the sinful Medici tyranny; his own mission would last just eight years and he would then die at the stake and his ashes be cast into the Arno. This also came to pass. But the Turks were not converted in ten years, as he also had foretold, nor was Rome taken and sacked and filled with desolation. #### This burning conviction of his divine call -- which no man must question -- had been the main force of all Savonarola's public action. It was the main secret of the amazing ascendancy over his own followers, which by 1497 had filled San Marco with a host of new Dominican recruits, [ ] and riveted upon Florence a kind of moral dictatorship, in which the prophet's followers were organised to observe and correct the vices of their neighbours, and children were trained to report the sins of their parents. All the exaggerations in Savonarola's views of human misconduct, and the crazy severity imposed indiscriminately for some years under his influence, bred of course an immense resentment. Under the surface Florence was seething with discontent. The Dominican's want of prudence, his wild, unmeasured denunciations, had been a source of anxiety to his own brethren -- and not merely to the relaxed monasteries of his order -- and his success had been extremely galling to the traditional rivals of his order, the Friars Minor. If ever his ascendancy were shaken, it would go hard with the Prior of San Marco. Long before the time when he was convoking the Christian princes, half the city was watching for the chance to dethrone him. One defeat, and he would have no friend save his immediate disciples. And at Rome the pope knew, now, that when he chose to strike he could, with impunity, make an end of the embarrassing prophet. #### In March 1498 the government of Florence -- threatened with an interdict by the pope -- induced Savonarola to desist from preaching. Alexander was not too pleased; they should have given an order, to which the friar ought obediently to have submitted. It was the scandal of his flagrant, rebellious -- and successful -- disobedience which, to the pope's mind, was the real crime. But although the Dominican was now silent, the controversy in Florence still raged, the Franciscans keeping up the attack and the Dominicans replying. Out of this pulpit warfare the final crisis suddenly flared. A Friar Preacher declared himself ready to go through fire to prove, by his survival, that his master was the prophet of God. A Franciscan publicly took his words at their literal value. He too would go through the fire. He would, he knew, be burned, but so would the other, and it was worth a life to expose the impostor. And so, on April 7, 1498, the government arranged the ordeal. An immense crowd gathered to watch. There were disputes about the procedure -- the Franciscans alleging that Savonarola might put a spell upon his champion; the Dominican demanding that he be allowed to carry the Blessed Sacrament as he walked through the flames. Out of this a theological dispute developed, and then came a storm and rain. Finally, to the disappointment of the crowds, the whole affair was put off. #### The following day -- Palm Sunday -- the disappointed faction stormed the Dominican priory of San Marco, the authorities intervened, and arrested the prior and his two chief supporters in the community. When they sent the news to the pope, Alexander demanded that the accused should be sent to him for trial. This the republic refused, but they allowed Alexander's demand that the final sentence should be left to him. The prisoners were tortured, and on the admissions thus obtained -- Savonarola, it was said, confessing that he was an impostor -- condemned them. Then the pope sent to Florence as his commissaries Francisco Remolini, a Spanish canonist, who was his own kinsman, and Jerome Torrigiani, the aged and vacillating Master-General of Savonarola's order. Once more -- May 19 -- the prisoners were tortured; once more there were admissions. The final scene took place on May 23, 1498. In the Piazza della Signoria, along with the scaffold, three platforms were erected. At the first Savonarola's fellow religious, the Bishop of Vaison, [ ] degraded the three [ ] from their priestly rank and religious status. Then the papal commissaries declared them proved guilty of schism and heresy -- and announced that the pope, in his mercy, offered them a plenary indulgence. Savonarola bowed his head in sign of acceptance. At the third platform were the civil authorities, to sentence the three to death. They were immediately hanged, their corpses burnt, and the ashes thrown into the Arno. #### It was, of course, a terrible retribution for the wild, unmeasured language in which the Dominican had attacked the evil life of the monstrously bad man who then disgraced the chair of St. Peter, and for the endeavours he had made to dislodge him from it. But such were the ideas then, and for centuries yet to come, of the punishment appropriate to acts even less harmful socially than the calling in question of a ruler's right to the position he filled. Nevertheless, to choose the heresy process as the convenient instrument of the destruction of the friars was a scandalous perversion of justice -- it was the case of the Templars and of St. Joan all over again, but with the pope a leading agent in the wickedness. #### There was no reaction to follow the death of the Prior of San Marco. A faithful few clung fast to all he had taught them, but the great commercial city continued on its even way, corrupted and contented, as did, for many years yet, the papal curia against whose scandals the great Dominican had witnessed. #### The Church, in these opening years of the sixteenth century, is by no means a body devoid of spiritual life. In the seething Renaissance activity, spiritual forces are active, too; the supernatural finds a generous response. Abuses are extensive and no doubt a more potent cause of scandal in their actuality than can be realised by those who only know them in the two dimensions of the literary record -- but reform has definitely begun in more than one place; among the reformers there are serious men, high in authority? and the promise is good. #### In Spain, for twenty years, there has been the great Franciscan primate Ximenes; in England St. John Fisher. If, in a monastery of the Austin Friars in Germany, Martin Luther is growing up to be the genius who will draw all the disease and discontent to a single blazing-point of revolt, in another house of the same order in Spain the young religious is maturing who, as St. Thomas of Villanueva, and Primate of Aragon, will atone for the long Borgia oppression of that see. In other centres in Spain other saints too are being formed, who will presently come forth to astound the world by their spiritual achievement, heroes of the authentic Christian type, men of prayer, utterly careless of self-interest or self-comfort (even in religion), wholly devoted to God, infinite in charity as in zeal: St. Peter of Alcantara, who will renew in all its splendour the authentic ideal of the Franciscans; St. Luis Bertrand, who will do as much for the Order of Preachers; St. John of God, who will found a new order of charitable workers; Blessed John of Avila, whose life as an evangelist will put new heart into the parochial clergy of Spain; and the Basque soldier in the service of Spain, now approaching the great moment of his conversion, Inigo Loyola. In England, in these same years, there is growing to maturity the generation of bishops which will presently apostatise, but the generation also of More and of Fisher, of the heroic Carthusians and the Friars Minor of the Observance. The weakest places are France and Germany and Italy. But in Italy there are signs of better things -- other signs besides those of indignation at the continued presence of abuses. In various cities of the north the saints are maturing who, within the next ten years, will found the much-needed new religious orders to face the new problems and needs: St. Jerome Aemilian founding the Somaschi, St. Antony Maria Zaccaria the Barnabites, St. Cajetan of Thiene -- from the very court of Julius II -- the Order of Theatines, whence was to come a whole new episcopate to be the chief executant of the reform. And, associated with this last saint, there has begun, so quietly that its early history is hard to trace, the as yet all but unknown Oratory of Divine Love. It is a brotherhood of priests and laymen, pledged to works of charity, meeting regularly for prayer in common. It began in Genoa in 1497, and now, in 1519, it is at work in Rome, where -- the happiest augury of all -- it has gathered in leading members of the curia of Leo X. In what seems universally agreed is the chief centre of all the mischief, there is set a pledge of better days. With all this, and with Cajetan and Erasmus and More in full active maturity of mind, what prospects might not seem at last to be opening, after the dark days since Sixtus IV? #### "Alors se leva Luther." [ ] ####  |