International Catholic University
Taking my cue from last week's lecture today I want to talk about the Thirty Years' War in Germany. The dates for the war are 1618-1648 and the end of this war with the treaty that accompanies it, the Treaty of Westphalia or the Peace of Westphalia, is generally taken to be the terminal date for the Counter-Reformation. It is clear by 1648 to the participants, to those involved, to those engaged in the fighting, that one side is not going to defeat the other. The battle has come to a draw, and henceforward there are going to be in Europe states that are Protestant alongside of the states that are Catholic. The Thirty Years' War began in Prague with what is known as the defenestration of Prague, or the throwing of some delegates of the Emperor out the window to the ground below, where they were fortunately not killed, but they were humiliated. This led the Emperor, Ferdinand II of Austria, to the conscious decision that he was going to reestablish Catholicism everywhere in his dominions, from the Alps to the Baltic, from beyond the Rhine to the frontiers of Poland. If he had succeeded in his endeavor Europe today would be Catholic. He did not succeed, and the principal reason he did not succeed was not his troops or that he was less dedicated to his cause than the Protestants or vice versa. He failed because of an outside force. That outside force, unforseen in some ways, others would say predictable in some ways, was the country of France.
The Thirty Years' War was really a continuation of the German civil wars or the German religious wars of the sixteenth century, but they were complicated by the entrance of foreign countries, first Sweden and then France. Or to put it another way, what was emerging and becoming clear as a force in Europe, which is still a force in Europe and in the world, was nationalism, the idea of one's nationality or the country to which one belonged being all important. It was because of this nationalism that Ferdinand failed. Ferdinand was trained by the Jesuits and he was ardently and sincerely Catholic. The war itself, the Thirty Years' War, is generally divided into four periods, each of them being a separate war. The first one was the Bohemian, and the second phase was the Danish and these two, the first two, are predominantly religious in character. They are religious wars; it's not false to call them religious wars. The third period is called the Swedish and the fourth is called the French. They are not religious wars so much as old fashioned political wars and both countries, Sweden and France, are interested in picking up bits or pieces of territory to add to their domain. Ferdinand and his forces were very successful at the beginning of the war. They had in fact one big victory, the Battle of the White Mountain, which occurred on the eighth of November in 1620, in which the Protestant army was defeated by the Austrian, or the Imperial General Tilly, and it led to the extirpation or the attempt to extirpate Protestantism in Bohemia and violent Counter-Reformation in Austria.
The Danes became involved and the Danish period of the war comes to an end with the Edict of Restitution on the twenty-ninth of March in the year 1629. This is a key in a critical date in the history of the Catholic forces and of the Germanies, because by terms of this Edict of Restitution all lands or ecclesiastical states confiscated since the year 1522 were to be restored. In other words, the terms of this edict said the Reformation is over. The forces of Catholicism have triumphed and any estates, which means lands, territories, that were taken, or had been confiscated after the year 1522 were to be restored. Politicians would refer to this as an attempt to go back to the status quo ante, the period before the war started.
This frightened some people in Europe. It frightened above all the effective day to day ruler of France, who was Cardinal Richelieu, the Kings right hand man, and it frightened him because he saw with this triumph of the Imperial forces of Catholicism of Ferdinand a triumph of the Hapsburgs. It helps just to look at a map of Europe for this time and to see what lands or what countries are Hapsburgs. If you do that you will see that France was surrounded by Hapsburg lands, or lands that had Hapsburg rulers. Cardinal Richelieu decided that it was in the best interests of France to weaken the Hapsburgs, so he made a pact with a foreign ruler, the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, and had him come into the war against the Imperial forces or against the Emperor. From the Catholic viewpoint the unfortunate thing is that Gustavus Adolphus was a military genius and he managed to undo in a little more than a year the effects of ten years of fighting.
By 1632 things were again at sixes and sevens; it was clear that the Edict of Restitution was not going to be enforced or put into effect and they would continue fighting. What the outcome would be was again doubtful. Gustavus Adolphus was killed in battle, and it looked as if the Imperial forces might be able to regain the advantage and to impose their will on the countries that they conquered. Richelieu thought that it was in the best interest of France for this not to happen, so French forces came into the war on the side of the Protestants who were fighting the Emperor and the Imperial forces. The war dragged on and dragged out and we can say that it had a number of results that came from it.
The first was the physical devastation of many of the German-speaking lands. They were simply ravaged because the Swedish forces and the French forces were marauders in the eyes of the natives. They frequently lived off the land, and they had no interest in not destroying monuments, bridges, what today many would call the infrastructure of the state or of society. They proceeded to act as conquering armies frequently do, so that Germany was devastated, physically devastated. On top of this there was exhaustion; they were simply tired of fighting, and the war stopped as much from exhaustion as from a desire for peace, or anyone seeing the value of peace. It had this momentous effect for secular history apart from religious history. What it meant was that Germany was pretty much out of it and was going to be out of it for quite some time.
In other words there was a vacuum in Germany. If you look at the map and see where Germany is located, you will recognize how critical it is to the continent of Europe. It was not to anyone's interest to allow that vacuum to continue. And the vacuum was filled eventually by a country in which the people spoke German but which had not really been considered part of the Germanies and was certainly not part of the Empire, and that was Prussia. In other words, the end of the war in Germany set the stage for the rise of Prussia from which modern Germany has evolved.
The third thing to note about the war is how it ended or what was negotiated at the Treaty of Westphalia or the Peace of Westphalia. What was decided there really makes it a key date in European history, and many would say that the history of modern Europe begins in 1648. In many universities they would start the history of modern Europe at 1517. But it would be either 1517 or 1648 -- in other words either with the beginning date for this religious movement or what many consider to be the concluding date for this religious movement. In any case it is a critical and a key date in the history of Europe, and it is really the seal of the Reformation. It was living proof that at that time Catholics, or the Catholic forces, had failed to restore religious unity to Europe.
The peace of Westphalia, or we can say the Thirty Years War, was a definite sign that the Catholic Church through its head, the pope, would no longer be a recognized force in the public life of Europe. Previous to this time when wars had been fought and then peace treaties were negotiated, if the pope had an interest in it he would be represented at the treaty. He would have a legate attend, and that legate would represent the pope and present his interest or the interest of the Church to the warring parties who were making peace. The pope was allowed to have no representative at the treaties that led to the peace of Westphalia. In other words, he was not represented at the treaty conferences and he would be henceforth excluded, so that to this day the pope works on the periphery, as it were -- on the outside. It's a stage in the development of the secularization of European society. What this means is that in the future, and it had been this way for some time and the Emperor had been trying to undo this, but it means that definitely for the future the Catholic Church will be a church in Europe not the Church.
There are many churches henceforward in Europe. And this, of course, has serious and profound effects, not just in Europe but for any lands to which the Europeans will go overseas. We can see it right here in our own Western Hemisphere. South of the Rio Grande the colonization, the settlements, the setting up of empires was mainly by Spain or Portugal, and so there are Catholic countries there. North of us in Canada, the first part of Canada colonized and settled was Quebec, and that was Catholic. In our country there were early settlements by the Spanish that did not last or endure, and the first permanent settlement here in the thirteen original colonies was in Virginia, and it was by the Protestant English. So the United States is in its origins a Protestant country whereas to the north of us and to the south of us we have countries that were in their origins Catholic. The reason for that is simply that the Reformation in one way ended in a draw with neither side winning and in some sense neither side liking the conclusion but unable to do anything about it.
To look at it in another way we can say that what the Treaty or the Peace of Westphalia does is to give official status to Protestantism. In other words, the Emperor has to accept the fact that there are now, and there are going to be in the future in his empire, in his realm, men and women who are not Catholic, who are Protestant. They may be Lutheran, they may be Calvinists, they may belong to another Protestant group, but they will not be Catholic, they will not accept the authority of the pope. This means then that in the future there will be two cultures in Europe, a Protestant culture and a Catholic culture. To simplify, and simplification has been done frequently in the past, again if you look at a map colored for Protestantism and for Catholicism, you would see that most of the Protestant countries are in the north of Europe and the countries that stayed Catholic are in the south. This led to the idea sometimes written up and put into history books that Protestantism is a northern thing and that Catholicism is a southern or a Latin thing. But there are always exceptions to prove the rule, as it were, or to show the weakness in the argument. The Protestant strongholds, for instance, in France have always been in the south; the Catholic strongholds, if we can use that term for Catholic France, were in the north. It does not mean really that there is anything necessarily Protestant about the north of Europe or anything necessarily Catholic about the south of Europe. So we have a divided Europe emerging from the failure of Catholicism to assert itself so that the emperor could have a religiously unified empire. That was his desire and he was unable to achieve that.
Another view that you will sometimes run across is old and under the impact of the writings of the new historians about the Counter-Reformation your chances of running into this are fortunately becoming slimmer and slimmer. But there was a time when many wrote that because the modern world began to exist after the Reformation that the Reformation then was necessary for the beginnings of the modern world. They see this especially for what was done in science and technology, and if the writers are Protestant they say these things happened because the men, the scientists and others, were free of the shackles of dogma. They were not tied in with a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, after therefore because.
But more than anything I think that there is a lesson to be learned from the history of the Counter-Reformation. What it shows is the importance of religion and we know that it is only in this century that the full effects of the Reformation, or the upheaval itself, began to settle. We can speak really of the end of the Reformation in some way occurring in the twentieth century. Some Catholics would say that Trent and the view of Catholicism that it imposed on the Church, or gave to the Church, took hold and continued on until 1962. They would say the opening of the Second Vatican Council then marks the end of an era, the Tridentine era of Catholicism.
Somewhere in the twentieth century, some might say somewhere between 1914 and 1945, or in what some historians call the Second Thirty Years War, what we call the two World Wars, I and II, that in that the Reformation settled and came to an end. What is meant by that is that confessional allegiances are not less important, but they are less divisive, and that henceforward Catholics and Protestants who in some way see that they both should have the same concern, and that is the drying up of belief, that is skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, or simply lack of belief in God. Others would call it secularism, secular humanism, or whatever, but there is no doubt that we can see that the age that we are living in, and the age that has shaped us and will shape your sons and daughters, is an age that was in some way formed by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In other words the Counter-Reformation was in some way the matrix for what we can call modern Catholicism.
In my next and final lecture I want to talk not about effects of the Counter-Reformation but about some men who were alive during the Counter-Reformation who took no active part in the religious wars, with one exception, but simply went about doing their duties and at the same time contributed very much either to the modern mentality or the Catholic view, or the Counter-Reformation view of life.
The Counter-Reformation is a European as well as a religious phenomenon. In the last chapter of his study of the Counter-Reformation, Marvin O'Connell refers to the quality of mind of Europe. In fact he uses that as the title for the chapter, and he calls the Counter-Reformation the last age of the ancient world, not because of religion or politics but because as he says, and this is a direct quotation, "It was innocent of that mathematical physics which has created the modern world." And he believed that the Counter-Reformation mind had a double thrust, one below the surface and the emerging scientific view, and the other what we would call the humanists or the men who worked with words. And he singles out five men for extended treatment. This is how he ends his history, religious history, or history of this religious phenomenon called the Counter-Reformation. He deals with the Frenchman Montaigne, who was the inventor of the essay; he deals with the political and legal scholar Jean Beauden, and also deals with the political and polemical writings of the centuriorators of Magdeburg. And finally he gives the last word to two literary craftsmen, we might be more inclined to say two geniuses, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare.
Now O'Connell wrote his history as part of a series, and he had the time frame given to him. He was dealing with the period 1560-1610, and he took these five men as being representative of the Counter-Reformation because they lived and worked within this period. We go to 1648, and I think it right to jump forward, and I would like to take two men who lived and worked within this period and use them as examples of the kind of men produced by the Counter-Reformation who were not saints, who were not working directly in some way for the Counter-Reformation forces, but who were very religious men and who were very much aware of the age in which they lived and of what it needed. I should, just by way of preface to the two men that I want to talk about, say that Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries, and each would be admitted, with very few demurring or disagreeing, each would be admitted to be the premier name in his country's literature. There is no name in English literature greater than Shakespeare. There is no name in Spanish literature greater than Cervantes.
Shakespeare was not professedly a Catholic, although some have tried to make out that he came from a Catholic milieu. Cervantes was; Cervantes was part of Philip II's Spain, and you could not be in Philip II's Spain, or sixteenth century Spain, without being aware of your religion, of your faith. Cervantes wrote as a Catholic, and each of them produced masterpieces. Cervantes of course is Don Quixote, which is part of the universal legacy of European literature. Shakespeare wrote his plays, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear to name just three of the greatest. But these works were produced while this movement, the Counter-Reformation and the Reformation, was going on. While the wars were being fought, these men were doing things. And of course Shakespeare and Cervantes both surmount their age; they stand above and outside their age, or to use the phrase that is something of a cliche, they are men for the ages.
Two men that I would like to talk about now, both of whom were Catholic, and both of whom lived in the seventeenth century, are Blaise Pascal, a Frenchman, and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, an Italian. Pascal was born in 1623 and died in 1662. So he died quite young. He was well educated. He was educated not in school or in a traditional way but at home. We would say he was home-schooled today, and his father was his educator. His father was an accomplished mathematician and lawyer. Most of Pascal's life was lived during the Thirty Years War when the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were being decided on the field of battle. Pascal himself fought in battles but not military ones. His were theological but not with Protestants; they were with his co-religionists, and they were fought in the name of a purified form of Catholicism that we call Jansenism, which we do not have time enough to treat in these lectures. But the Counter-Reformation in France leads logically and intellectualy, avoidably into this movement within France that is called Jansenism.
To understand Pascal we have to remember that he was French, that he was a Catholic of a certain kind, a Jansenist, and that he was a mathematical and scientific genius and a master of French prose. It is this last which gives him claim to influence and makes his name known far beyond the shores of France. Almost in passing to mention his mathematical and scientific work. He wrote at the age of sixteen a path-breaking treatise on conical sections. He invented an arithmetical machine which was the forerunner of the calculator and the computer. He demonstrated the existence of the vacuum and he established the foundation of calculus and probabilities. In his day, while he was alive, he was known primarily as a mathematician and a scientist. But of even greater significance than his scientific work were his two religious conversions. Not one but two. His first in 1646 was to Jansenism; his second, which was far more profound, was nothing less than a revelation of the living God. It occurred on the night of 23 November 1654 and is enshrined in his brilliantly written memorial, and this conversion marked him literally for the rest of his life.
Each of these conversions are responsible for a literary work of Pascal, the Jansenist for his work called The Provincial Letters, a work really ephemeral by nature and given life far beyond its importance by its authors enduring fame. The letters were written in defense of the Jansenist theology against the Jesuits. They poke fun at the Jesuits, and they have been used by enemies of the Jesuits as weapons against the Jesuits. They are really inflated in importance. Pascal was not honest in his treatment of the Jesuits or in his dealings with them in his letters. But when the letters were published (they were published serially), they were the talk of all Paris. They are a milestone, though, in the development of French prose and were enormously popular, literally the talk of the town.
If we take those Provincial Letters and place them beside his other work, the Pensées, the Thoughts, we can see the Provincial Letters shrink in importance. Pascal's undoubted masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of all Christian literature is the Pensées. and the notes were left in any kind of order, helter skelter almost, in disorder really. It was up to editors, men who came afterwards, to put them into some kind of order.
But I think rather than talk about the Pensées, or the Thoughts, the best thing to do is simply to read one or two of them. Perhaps the most famous one, it was used as the title of a novel in England about seventy years ago, is The Thinking Reed. Pascal said man is a reed, but a thinking reed. But here are two examples of these thoughts of his. These are very short. Others are longer, a full paragraph, a page, three pages.
The way of God who disposes all things with gentleness is to instill religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace.
One of the most famous of his Pencees is 423,
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
and then he follows that with 424,
It is the heart which perceives God, not the reason. That is what faith is. God perceived by the heart, not the reason.
Any reading of the Pensées shows that this man, Pascal, had thought long and deeply about his faith, and he was in the process of putting this down on paper and organizing it when he died. In other words he was unable to accomplish or finish what we see as the chief work of his life.
We cannot say that about the next man, the Italian artist and sculptor John Lorenzo Bernini, who lived from 1598-1680. He lived a long, full, and very productive life. I have chosen Bernini to end this series of lectures on the Counter-Reformation because he is, I think, the logical choice for anyone who visits or has visited Rome. I said in an earlier lecture that Sixtus V began the transformation of Rome from a Renaissance city to a Baroque city. The man who more than any other put a Baroque stamp on Rome was Bernini the sculptor. He is the greatest sculptor and architect of the Counter-Reformation. Like Mozart he was a child prodigy, and he learned his trade, being a sculptor and an artist, from his father. He lived in Rome; he was born in 1598, and started living in Rome as a child in 1605 and lived there until 1680 except for six months spent in Paris. He was architect of St. Peter's Basilica for more than fifty years, and he directed many works throughout the city. He worked indefatigably, very very hard, and adorned most of what he touched. In one sense we can say the inscription that is found on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in Saint Paul's in London could be said equally well of Bernini. The inscription says: "If you seek his monument look around you." We could say that about Bernini and baroque Rome.
What about the art of Bernini? I think it best simply to read a short selection here from Kenneth Clark's book on Civilization. He said of Bernini that
he was a very great artist, and although his work may seem to lack the awe inspiring seriousness and concentration of Michelangelo, it was in its century even more pervasive and influential. He not only gave baroque Rome its character, but he was the chief source of an international style that spread all over Europe as Gothic had done and as the Renaissance style never did.
And then Clark goes on to say, "No sculptor ever carved marble more skillfully than Bernini."
I would suggest simply two works for consideration. You can't miss them if you go to Rome and if you go to Saint Peter's. The first is the Piazza of Saint Peter's itself with its enormous colonnade which frames and makes both the facade of the basilica and the piazza a unit. We should note that the effect on the viewer, that is if we go to Rome today, is less than what it was a hundred years ago before the street, the Via della Conciliatione, was cut leading directly into the piazza. So as you come down that street we can see the piazza. A hundred years ago it was not there, and you came to the piazza and then entered, and the effect was dramatic, probably almost melodramatic, because it just opened up for you and you could see the piazza and then the basilica itself. If you go through the piazza and enter the basilica what you see immediately as you come in the door and as you look straight ahead is the baldacchino over the high altar of the basilica itself. Some have said that that baldacchino is the greatest work of the Baroque. It is certainly a masterpiece of the baroque, and it is as well a masterpiece of engineering. It was enormously expensive, but the pope who was the patron of Bernini and promoted him spared no expense and was probably extravagant in what he did spend on it. But we of a later age are the lucky ones, we can see that. I'm ending with Bernini because without intending it he sums up, not through his person, not through what he wrote, but through his work, through what he produced, the mind of the Counter-Reformation and of Counter-Reformation popes at the end of the Counter-Reformation period.
Some find it a little extravagant; some might find it triumphalist. But as we see Saint Peter's and see the high altar, or the baldacchino over the high altar, we are given some idea of what the men and women of the times and especially what the popes thought of themselves and what they wanted others to think. We can say, in a sense with two meanings, that we are back where we began. The Reformation began with the building of Saint Peter's. I am ending these lectures on the Counter-Reformation with the building of Saint Peter's.