International Catholic University
Good day and welcome to International Catholic University's class on the Counter-Reformation. Before getting down to the business of the lectures I have a few introductory remarks. First thing to note is that there is a textbook for this course. The author of the text is R. Po-chia Hsia and the title is The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770. It was published 1998 by Cambridge University Press. There is a second book that we may call a co-text for the course and it is written by Mark Greengrass: The Longman Companion to the European Reformation, 1500-1618. It was published by Longman in 1998. Both of these are essential to the course, to following the lectures and to getting the full benefit from them. The first, Hsia's, will function as an actual textbook. You will be expected to read the entire book from cover to cover.
The second, the co-text, Greengrass, will function also as a text but it will not be necessary, although it would helpful and valuable, to read this book too from cover to cover. This is more like an encyclopedia or a treasury where you will find straight history, religious history, secular history, background on the makeup of the Church and how the Church functioned. It will have facts in it that you would have to search for in odd places otherwise, but they are all conveniently gathered here. One thing to note further about this book is that it concerns the European Reformation. The English Reformation is not part of this text. It is the Continental or the European Reformation.
I would like to recommend very highly two other books which are not texts but which are very valuable, one of which I would make required reading if it were still in print, if we could get it, and that is John Olin, The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius of Loyola: Reform in the Church, 1495-1540. This is a book of documents, and very well chosen documents, most of them given in full and introduced by very perceptive introductions. And you will find in this book documents that you will find no where else, as far as I know, in English. Finally, R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton have written a textbook in modern European history. The title is, A History of the Modern World, and the fifth edition is now out. It is published by Knopf, and I cannot recommend this book too highly. I believe that it is the finest, the best textbook in history ever written in the United States. And if you follow the course of the Reformation in Palmer's chapters two and three and supplement that, as it were, with the lectures of this course and the text, you should be able to comprehend quite well what is meant by the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and how each developed and why they developed in the ways that they did.
Before going on to lecturing on the subject itself I would like to run through some bibliographical material. There will be five sets, or different kinds of books, in this bibliography. I will give you three in this lecture and save two for later on in the course.
The first thing that we should note about the Counter-Reformation bibliographically is that there is no entirely satisfactory overview of the topic. In this bibliography there will be two kinds of books: those that deal specifically with the Counter-Reformation and those that are either about Europe at the time of the Reformation or about the Reformation itself as opposed to the Counter-Reformation. A number of books stand out, and any student of the Counter-Reformation should at least be aware of them. It would be helpful if he could get his hands on them and dip into them.
The first is by Jean Delumeau, a Frenchman. The title of the book is Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation. Though it says "a new view", the book was published in 1977, and it was written earlier by Delumeau, so it's already twenty-five years old, and perhaps some of the newness has worn off, but it is a very challenging book and one that has had profound influence in the European Continent and also in England on the course of Reformation and Counter-Reformation studies. It's a book with a thesis, and the thesis is controversial. Delumeau believes that there was no such thing as the Christian Middle Ages; they are a myth -- that in the sixteenth century the popes and Martin Luther and John Calvin were all engaged on the same task, to convert Europe to Christianity. As I say, it is a very influential book, and a number of authors in English, especially one, John Bossey, derived much of their material or their approach to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation from Delumeau. It is a challenging and controversial book; unfortunately the author is not always well served by the translator; the translation leaves much to be desired.
Another one is John Bossey, Christianity in the West 1400-1700, and it's published by Oxford University Press in 1985. It is an intriguing overview of Christian beliefs or the beliefs of men and women at large and their impact. Like Delumeau, Bossey makes heavy use of the method of sociology. So it is not what we might call the old fashioned narrative history; rather it is history informed by and at times shaped by sociology. Another book that is very valuable, seminal is probably the best word to describe it, is by H. O. Evennett, an Englishman who taught at Cambridge. It's titled, The Spirit of the Counter Reformation. It was published at Cambridge University Press in 1968. It is a joy and a delight to read but it is for advanced students. But Evennett has had a direct influence on Bossey, and both of them together have influenced Counter-Reformation studies today.
Among other books or works on the Counter-Reformation we could mention one by a professor at Notre Dame, Marvin R. O'Connell, who in 1974 published The Counter Reformation, 1559-1610. It is published by Harper and it is a book in the Langer Series of Modern History. It is a basic straightforward old-fashioned survey, and it has a full up-to-date bibliography up to year 1974. Another work of interest is Evan Cameron, The European Reformation, published by Oxford Clarendon Press 1991. It is a recent survey, as the date says, and it is a good survey, but it does not treat explicitly the Counter-Reformation. Another work would be Janelle, The Catholic Reformation, published in Milwaukee in 1949. The best way probably to describe it is that it is old, pious and respectable.
Another work that is certainly worth more than a glance and which a student of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation should be aware of is The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. The editor is Hans J. Hillerbrand. It is in four volumes, published by Oxford University Press in 1996. This work should be consulted by any student studying the Reformation. It has up-to-date bibliographies and a wide range of articles. There are also a number of histories of the Reformation itself which within the Reformation treat the Counter-Reformation. One is by Olin Chadwick simply titled The Reformation, Penguin, 1964. Another is Phillip Hughes, A Popular History of the Reformation, Garden City, 1956. And a third is Joseph Lortz, The Reformation: A Problem for Today, Westminster, Maryland, 1964. It is quite obvious these three are pretty old; the chances of finding them in print are slim, although Chadwick is still in circulation. But they do not intend to treat the Counter-Reformation except insofar as it impacts on or it shapes the course of the Reformation.
Finally a professor at Yale, Roland Bainton, has written three books that fit no standard category but which should be of interest to students of the Reformation. All three books start with the title, Women of the Reformation. The first is Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy. The second, Women of the Reformation in France and England. The third, Women of the Reformation from Spain to Scandinavia. All three are published in Minneapolis.
You will note that all of the books that I have mentioned thus far are in English. So that we are not misled, ordinarily being an English speaker means that we have access to a wide variety of materials and studies. But in Church history it means that we labor somewhat under a handicap because there are certainly not as many books in English as there are in French or German or Italian about the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation. Really to taste fully the range and the extent of studies in the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation one should be able to read, however haltingly, a foreign language. The two most valuable would be French or German.
The Reformation is both an event in the history of Europe and an event in the history of the Catholic Church, so it makes sense to check histories of the Church to see what they may have to say about the Counter-Reformation. As a rule the best books to consult are the multi-volume histories of the Church or of the modern world. There is a standard multi-volume history of the Church that is ten volumes, general editor Hubert Jedin, and it is published by Crossroad. It is a bit advanced for undergraduates and perhaps for some graduate students. Volume five deals with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and it has a good up to date bibliography. In fact if you would check Jedin's bibliography you would find very few books in English. Most volumes would be in German or French.
Another multi-volume history of the Church is by Fernand Mourret, A History of the Catholic Church, and volume five covers the Renaissance and the Reformation. It is a traditional historical manual. It's dated, but it has the advantage of being detailed.
Finally there is the New Cambridge Modern History. There are three volumes in this series that touch on the Reformation. The one that touches most directly on what we will be taking in this course is simply called, The Reformation. It is volume two, and the editor is G. R. Elton, Cambridge, 1962. It's a good survey; it has chapters written by various authors, which means that it's uneven in value. But there is an excellent chapter on the new religious orders by Evennett which should really be looked at.
Volume three is called the Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, which we might think would be more to our point but I think most students would not find it as valuable as volume two. The general opinion of it is that it was disappointing. And finally there is a volume edited by J. P. Cooper called The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War: 1609-1648/59. All these are in print. What the third volume tells us is that there is much more involved in the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation than simply affairs of the Church. Affairs of State impinge on this and affect the Counter Reformation. Sometimes they will shape it; sometimes they will direct it.
A third group of books that we should be aware of when studying the Counter-Reformation is the books that treat the papacy. We would expect in many ways that the place to start to study the Counter-Reformation would be to look at the popes, and what is surprising is that none of the Counter-Reformation popes has been the subject of a good biography. That's in any language, really, but even worse, there is nothing recent in English. So where do we go? The logical place to start is a history of the popes: The History of the Popes by Ludwig Pastor. It's in forty volumes published by Herder in Saint Louis, in translation from 1923-53, and the relevant volumes would be 15-25 -- that is from Pope Pius IV through Paul V. As one historian has recently remarked, and this is a direct quote, "In most cases Pastor's biographies of the individual popes remain the most thorough treatment available." Now also of value we will find will be some books that have been written recently about the papacy as an institution or about the papacy in a particular time. I'm thinking first of all of the book by Eamon Duffy titled Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, published in 1997 by Yale University Press in both England and the United States. It's recent, it's up to date, and it's lively history by an English historian who teaches at Cambridge. But as his name tells you, he is of Irish extraction. And what some might find to their liking is that there is a six-cassette video that accompanies the book. I recommend it very highly and especially his bibliographical essays at the back of the book.
A second volume that could be looked at is J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes. This was published by Oxford University Press in 1986 and it is the best of such books on the papacy. Duffy's book is a narrative history or study of the papacy from Saint Peter down to today. Kelly's book on the other hand is what it says. It's a dictionary or a biography of the different popes. So you have as many biographies as there are popes, and most of them are quite short, but they are compact and they are historically reliable. A book on the papacy that has been in the news lately is one by Richard McBrien titled, Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from Saint Peter to John Paul II. It was published in San Francisco by Harper Collins in 1997. One might think that this is a history of the popes, but it is really not a history but a tract written from a specific point of view to promote a specific program for the Church through the papacy. As McBrien himself admits, he draws heavily upon Kelly, and historically it would not be as valuable as Kelly.
There are just a few more books that should be mentioned in general. If you want to find out something about the Counter-Reformation or Counter-Reformation popes you could go to encyclopedias. In English there is The New Catholic Encyclopedia, in German if you read German there is the, Lexikon der Päpste und des Papsttums, and in French among the Dictionaires for which the French are famous is, the Dictionaire Théologique Catholique (the Dictionary of Catholic Theology). And there is also The Dictionary of Ecclesiastical History and Geography. If you read French these are certainly worth looking at.
Finally a book that fits no category but which should be of some value to students is the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by E. H. Livingston and F. L. Cross. It is now in its Third Edition which was published in 1997. Contrary to what it might seem, the Oxford Dictionary is both a work of history and theology, and more history than theology. So you will find good, in most cases, reliable articles on the popes or on the Church written from an Anglican point of view. But good articles and even more valuable, perhaps one might say an invaluable, bibliography. The articles are known for their up-to-date, thorough, and complete bibliographies.
In this second lecture of our course I want to talk about we can call the preliminaries of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation or some events that surround these events and in some ways inform them or shape them. As everyone knows a few years ago when John XXIII was pope of the Catholic Church he called a council that met at the Vatican, the Second Council of the Vatican. He surprised the world, and nobody more than members of the Church and bishops, when he did this. And many thought that it would not happen, but it did. And before the Council got underway, the German bishops sat down and wrote a joint pastoral letter which they asked to be read in all the Catholic Churches of West Germany. Here is a part of that letter.
The bishops say: "In our confiteor before the Council we should include the centuries-old scandal of divided Christianity. In Germany especially where the Western schism was born" (by that they mean the Reformation) "do we suffer with particular anguish from this deep wound in the mystical body of Christ. We cannot simply accept this situation as an unalterable fact. Instead we feel ourselves involved in a thousand ways in the great tragedy of the Church in our country. The straightforward objectivity of historical research conducted by Catholic scholars as well as by others shows that there were many great abuses and serious scandals in the life of the Church at the end of the Middle Ages. Consequently we feel compelled openly to confess the guilt we share through solidarity with our forefathers."
A hundred years ago, before the First Council of the Vatican was convened, it would have been unthinkable for the German bishops to write something like that. One reason they wrote that way, as they admit, is that historical study and research has shown that there were abuses and there were defects in the Church. In other words, reform of some kind was needed and reform came. At the beginning not in the shape or the way in which many Church men wanted, but nonetheless it came. It helps also to remember that if we take the long view of the history of the West or the history of the Catholic Church in the West, we can see that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation are part of a process that had been going on for some time and which goes now under the general name of secularization.
I want to read you now a paragraph from R. R. Palmer's History of the Modern World, which is at the beginning of Chapter Two. He wrote this:
Latin Christendom was the first modern society to embark on the momentous, troublesome, and long drawn out process of secularization. In 1300 Europe was still primarily a religious community. The clergy were the prestige enjoying class. All else was somehow oriented to or pervaded by religious belief. Three centuries later religion was one interest among many. The Church itself was divided. The Christian faith still stood, indeed it was purified and reaffirmed both by those who became Protestant and by those who remained Catholic. But other interests made equal claims upon the attention of men. Government, law, philosophy, science, the arts, material and economic activities were pursued without regard to Christian values. Power, order, beauty, wealth, knowledge, control of nature were all accepted as desirable in themselves.
And then Palmer concludes by saying: "It is this process of secularization that gives unity to the intricate history set forth in the present chapter."
So we have the Apologia or the confession of the German bishops, the observation that the Reformation along with the Counter-Reformation is part of a process that the Church was really resistant to.
And now we should note what we mean by the Counter-Reformation. In some ways there are as many definitions as there are historians. This definition that I will give you now is from an article by Evennett. And he says:
By the Counter Reformation is here meant the long and difficult process by which after the unexpected shock of the Reformation the Church underwent a spiritual revival and an administrative renovation putting her own house in better order and deploying her rejuvenated forces against her assailants. It was an active movement in one way or another from the early decades of the sixteenth century to the middle decades of the seventeenth. A many sided phenomenon that formed a decisive stage in the transition from Medieval to modern Catholicism.
What Evennett is saying there is that it meant one thing to be a Catholic when Saint Ignatius of Loyola was born in 1491 and it meant something different when Saint Vincent De Paul was alive and working in France in 1648 or 1650. What was responsible for that was first the Reformation and then what we call the Counter-Reformation. Before going into the causes of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation I think it would be helpful just to give in no particular order some facts or events and dates that it would be helpful to keep in mind. We can call them the surround, as it were, of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Some might say these are necessary background. Some things would be from Church history and some from simply the history of Europe or European states at this time. As I say, there is no particular order and therefore it doesn't mean that number one is more important than number eight or number eight more important than number fifteen, if we get that far.
We will start by noting that in the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth century Europe was dominated not so much by one power as by one family, and that family was the Hapsburgs. During the course of the Reformation the Hapsburgs stayed loyal and faithful to the Church. They were the Catholic champions, and they occupied two of the premier thrones in Europe. A Hapsburg was the King of Spain, and a Hapsburg was the Holy Roman Emperor. Here are three names of famous, important Hapsburgs. Charles V, who was the Emperor at the time when Luther nailed his theses on the Church door. An emperor up until the 1550s, who really beseeched almost, as it were, the pope to call a council to deal with the religious question that had erupted with Martin Luther. Charles V was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon who was the wife of Henry VIII. Another Hapsburg would be Philip II, who was King of Spain and who for a brief period in the 1550s was married to Mary Tudor, who was the Queen of England and who lived in England. Philip is the man who launched the Armada against the English. A third Hapsburg would be Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor in the seventeenth century. He was trained by the Jesuits, and he had as his goal the Restoration of Catholicism in all of the Imperial lands. He came within an ace of succeeding.
Within this we should note especially the dominance of Spain. If there was one power in the sixteenth century that could lay claim to almost universal dominion, or to what the men and women of the time called universal monarchy, it was whoever was on the throne of Spain. Spain had the first empire on which the sun never set, and from 1580 to 1640 the throne of Portugal along with its dominions was ruled by the King of Spain. What does this mean? It means that in the new world or the new worlds everything South of the Rio Grande in 1600 was ruled by Spain. The King had possessions also in the Orient, the Philippines and others. Portugese outposts as well. Now what this means on a very practical level is if you take out a map of Europe, there is one country in the center, or the heart of Europe, France, which is surrounded by Hapsburgs. Wherever the King of France would look he would see Hapsburgs. Hapsburgs in Spain, in Portugal, in the Empire. Holland and Belgium were parts of the Empire at this time. And what this leads to is something that for some is hard to comprehend: that when the Reformation comes down to fighting, that France, which is Catholic and whose Kings are Catholic, France will frequently take the side of the Protestants. It gives rise to the saying to describe French policy, France Catholic at home, Protestant abroad.
Another point to note is that toleration, or tolerance, upon which we place so high a value today, had no value for either side in the Reformation. It was not a virtue; in fact it was considered to be foolishness. Another point: the exploration and the settlement of the world or the new world in the sixteenth century was pretty exclusively a Catholic or Latin enterprise. There were no Protestant settlements in North America to speak of, that lasted, until the seventeenth century.
If we look beyond Europe we can see that Islam was on the move, and that Islam was a threat to Europe or to Christendom. It used to be put this way the Turk was at the gate. There are two critical battles that are fought in this time. One is a sea battle the other a land battle. The first was the battle of Lepanto in 1571, which meant that Islam would not be able to turn the Mediterranean into an Islamic lake. The Christian cause was promoted most actively by the pope and Philip II of Spain. The second battle took place in 1682 in Vienna, in which under the leadership of a Polish King the Christian forces drove back the Turk who was at the gates of Vienna and saved the Danube Valley for Christendom -- for the Christian faith, whether Protestant or Catholic, for both forms, and this is 170 years almost after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door. So the Turk is there and we must always remember that. A third battle took place which has burned itself into the memory of English speaking peoples, of the English especially, and that was the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. In religious terms it meant that England was not going to be conquered for the Catholic faith.
The next is perhaps the most critical of all the points to note about the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation, the success of one or the failure of one, and it is this. The Reformation started in Germany with the Germans, by a German, Martin Luther, and when it is all over, no matter what date we put to the end of the Reformation period, the Germans are the only major people in Europe to come out of the Reformation religiously divided and almost evenly so. In other words some are Catholic, some are Protestant. Elsewhere the usual pattern is that if Protestantism triumphs then the people go overwhelmingly Protestant, as in England. Or if they hold for Catholicism then they stay overwhelmingly Catholic, as in France or Italy or Poland.
This leads to a further point not so much about the Germans, or Germany as it is called. The Germans were not just religiously divided, they were also politically divided. In the sixteenth century there was no Germany and there was no Italy as we understand them today. There were Germans living in a countless number of small principalities, cities, states, some ruled by bishops, some ruled by Princes, and all in some way under the Emperor. In Italy in the nineteenth century Count Metternich said of Italy that it was a geographical expression. In other words it was not a country, and that's all the more so in the sixteenth century. There are Italians living on the Italian peninsula and there are a number of states there, some of them controlled or dominated by Spain or the Spanish, but in the very middle of the Italian peninsula lay the Papal States. This brings up a very important point which is that the pope was a secular as well as a religious ruler. He was not ruling over a postage stamp country in the sixteenth century; he would have been the largest landholder in the Italian peninsula. He had to take care then of not just the spiritual welfare of Catholics but also the material welfare of his subjects.
Finally, a number of dates which it helps to keep in mind. 1453 was the fall of Constantinople, and that made the threat then of Islam or the Turk very real in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. 1492 is the central date in Spanish history, and it leads of course to the discovery of the New World. 1493 the Line of Demarcation divides the New World or worlds between Spain and Portugal. That line was drawn by the pope. 1517 Martin Luther starts the Reformation. 1527 Spanish and German mercenaries were in Rome for one of the countless wars that were going on at the time, and they sacked Rome. They took the pope prisoner and many atrocities occurred. This burnt itself into the memory of popes and the Romans. 1555 was the Peace of Augsburg. 1648 was the Peace of Westphalia, the traditional date for the end of the Reformation.