CHAPTER XI. THE REFORMATION IN ITALY AND IN SPAIN: THE COUNTER-REFORMATION IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. PROTESTANTISM, which in the course of one generation spread over a great part of Central and Northern Europe, penetrated beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees. But here, in the Italian and Spanish peninsulas, it encountered the first effectual resistance. Here were organized the forces that were to arrest its march, and even to reconquer territory which had been surrendered to the new faith. After the emancipation of Italy from the control of the German emperors, by the downfall of the Hohenstaufen line, in the middle of the thirteenth century, a period of two centuries and a half elapsed prior to the invasion of Charles VIII. Then Italy became the field and the prize of the conflict between the Spanish-Austrian house and France. The long interval of independence preceding this epoch, notwithstanding the turbulence and confusion. that marked the political history of Italy, was the era in which art, letters, trade, and commerce flourished most; the period in which the intellectual superiority of Italy among the European nations was most conspicuous. But municipal liberty was gradually lost. The conflicts, in the northern and central cities, between the nobles and the commons, generally issued in the triumph of the latter; but the next step was the grasping of supreme power by a single family. The dominion of a tyrant or lord was built up on the ruins of republicanism. Florence followed the fate of other cities, and fell at last under the rule of the Medici.1 The division of Italy into states, at the beginning of the fifteenth century of which Naples, the Papal Kingdom, Florence, Milan, and Venice, were the chief was favorable to the Reformation. There was no one central government with power to crush the new opinions. It might be possible for those who were persecuted in one city to flee into another. On the other hand, the decline of the spirit of liberty, which took place in the age before the Reformation, the brilliant age of literature and art, was an inauspicious event! Italy was a near spectator of the venality and profligacy of the Roman curia, and the victim in the strife that was kindled by the ambition of the pontiffs to extend their temporal dominion and to aggrandize their relatives. The rebukes that were thundered from the pulpit of Savonarola were not stripped of their influence in consequence of his death, for which the enmity of Alexander VI. was largely responsible. In the Council of the Lateran, in 1512, Ægidius, General of the Augustinian Order, and the Count of Mirandola, among others, denounced the abuses that menaced the Church and religion itself with ruin. The arraignment of the papal administration by the Transalpine reformers would naturally meet with a sympathetic response in Italy. Yet there was a national pride connected with the Papacy; and this sentiment was strengthened by the circumstance that the Papacy was often attacked as an Italian institution, and in a style that was adapted to wound Italian feeling. As far back as the twelfth century, Arnold of Brescia, inspired by the teachings of Abelard with a love of truth, and catching the spirit which the struggle for municipal 1 On the condition of Italy in the 15th century, see Sismondi, Hist. d. Républ. Ital. d. Moyen Age, VII. ch. x.; Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages, ch. iii. THE RELIGIOUS POSITION OF DANTE. 387 liberty was beginning to nourish, demanded that the clergy should renounce their worldly possessions and temporal power, and return to a life of apostolic simplicity. For a time his eloquence carried the day in Rome itself. He perished at last, a martyr to his principles.1 The follies and vices of the clergy, even the iniquitous doings of Popes, had been castigated by Italian writers from the dawn of the vernacular literature. The lofty and bitter invectives of Dante are aimed at the temporal ambition and at particular misdeeds of incumbents of the Holy See. At the very opening of the "Inferno," he paints the existing Church, clothed with temporal power, as — "A she-wolf, that with all hungerings, And many folk has caused to live forlorn." 2 Pope Anastasius he charges with heresy and places among the lost; Pope Celestine V., for abdicating the papal chair to give room for Boniface VIII., lies at the mouth of hell among those whom mercy and justice both disdain ;* and Boniface himself expiates his crimes in a deeper abyss of perdition. The Popes had turned from shepherds into wolves, and neglecting the Gospels and the Fathers, had only conned the Decretals : "Their meditations reach not Nazareth." 6 Manfred, the son of the Emperor Frederic II., died excommunicate; but in Purgatory he was found having the promise of everlasting happiness : By malison of theirs is not so lost So long as hope has anything of green." 7 But Dante receives the dogmas of the Church; his whole work is cast in the mould of the traditional theology; he 1 For the literature respecting Arnold of Brescia, see Schmidt's article in Herzog's Real-Encycl., i. 547. 2 Inferno, i. 49-51. 5 Ibid., xix. 53. 4 Ibid., iii. 59. 3 Ibid., xi. 8. 6 Paradiso, ix. 137. 7 Purgatorio, ii. 133-135. places in the joys of Paradise, in "the heaven of the sun," Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Peter Lombard, and the other great lights of orthodoxy.' Heresiarchs groan under a doom from which there is no deliverance. 2 It is the abominations in the conduct of ecclesiastics, and especially their seizure of worldly dominion, with the wealth and pride which accompany it, that move the solemn poet's ire. Against this temporal rule and party spirit of his successors, St. Peter inveighs in Paradise. He exclaims: "In garb of shepherds the rapacious wolves Are seen from here above o'er all the pastures." 8 Dante's ideal is the empire restored to universal rule and having its seat in Italy. This theory of a monarchy is the subject of his political treatise. Petrarch takes the same general position, although his denunciations of the pollution of the Papal curia, the mystical Babylon of the Apocalypse, surpass in intensity the most fiery declamation of Protestants in later times. Boccaccio goes a step further. His treatment of the Church, had we no other knowledge of him than what the Decamerone affords, would even lead to the conclusion that he had no reverence for its teaching. Ecclesiastical persons are made to figure in ludicrous and scandalous situations. One of his tales, for example, is the story of a Jew whom a friend. endeavored to convert to the Christian faith. The Jew 1 Paradiso, x. 98, 99, 107; xii. 127. 2 Inferno, x. 3 Paradiso, xxvii. 55-56. 4 A class of critics have unsuccessfully attempted to show that Dante was really hostile to the spiritual sovereignty of the Popes. One theory is, that the principal poets of that age belonged to secret anti-sacerdotal associations. This theory is advocated by Gabriele Rossetti: Sullo Spirito antipapale che produsse La Reforma, etc., translated into English by Miss Ward (London, 1834). Among the instructive works upon Dante is that of Prof. V. Botta, Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet, New York, 1865. A valuable list of works on Dante, some of which relate directly to his theology, is given by Prof. Abegg in his Essay: Die Idee der Gerechtigkeit u. die strafrechtlichen Grundsätze in Dinte's göttl. Comödie, in the Jahrb. d. deutschen Dante-Gesellschaft, vi., p. 180, n. See also Prof. J. R. Lowell's learned article on Dante, N. A. Review, July, 1872. INFLUENCE OF THE HUMANISTS. 389 resolves to go from Paris to Rome in order to see Christianity at its head-quarters — a purpose that strikes with dismay his Christian friend, who doubts not that the iniquitous lives of the Pope, of his cardinals and court, will chase from the Jew's mind all thoughts of conversion. But in due time he comes back a Christian believer, and explains to his astonished friend that the spectacle which he had beheld in the capital of Christianity had convinced him that the Christian religion must have a supernatural origin and divine support; else it would have been driven out of the world by the profligacy and folly of its guardians.1 It is generally conceded that after the time of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the passionate study of the ancients, which these great writers had fostered, suspended in a remarkable degree the development of Italian literature, in the path of original production.2 The Renaissance was antiquarian and critical in its spirit. All that could be done for a long time was to count and weigh the treasures of antiquity which enthusiastic explorers discovered within the walls of monasteries, or brought from the East. The revival of letters led to the exposure of fictions, like the pretended donation of Constantine, which Laurentius Valla, whom Bellarmine called a precursor of the Lutherans, disproved in a treatise that produced a general excitement. The sceptical tone of Italian Humanism reduced to a low point the authority of the Church among the cultivated class. But the Humanists seldom possessed the heroic qualities of character which qualified them to endure suffering for the cause of truth. The love of fame, a passion which the Christian spirit in 1 This jest is reproduced in a different shape by Voltaire, who says of "our religion": "It is unquestionably divine, since seventeen centuries of imposture and imbecility have not destroyed it." Quoted by Morley, Voltaire, p. 305. On Boccaccio's treatment of ecclesiastics and of religion, see Ginguené, Hist. Littéraire d'Italie, iii. 120 seq. 2 Sismondi, Hist. View of the Lit. of the South of Europe, i. 306. |