CHAP. I.] REFORMS WITHIN THE CHURCH. 9 however, was ripe for a reformation. The doctrines of Wiclif were far from being extinct in that country. Since the beginning of the century, the records of the bishops' courts abound with prosecutions for heresy. In 1525 we read of an "Association of Christian Brethren" in London, who employed themselves in distributing testaments and tracts.7 In 1527 a union of those holding Lutheran doctrines, for Calvin was not yet much known, was formed at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which may be regarded as a seminary of the new opinions. The movement of reform was not felt exclusively without the pale of the Church: it penetrated into the Church itself. Even in Rome, amid the sceptical Court of Leo X., a reaction took place. In that pontificate was established the Oratory of Divine Love, a sort of spiritual society, which numbered nearly sixty members, several of whom became cardinals, as Contarini, Sadolet, Giberto, Gianpietro Caraffa, afterwards Paul IV., and others. Their tenets, and especially that of justification by faith, bore some resemblance to Protestantism. They held their meetings in the church of S. Silvestro and Sta. Dorotea in the Trastevere, not far from the spot where St. Peter is supposed to have lived. After the sack of Rome by Bourbon's army, many of this society proceeded to Venice, at that time the only city of refuge in Italy for men of compromised opinions; for Florence was a despotism, and Milan the constant theatre of war. Among other refugees, Venice gave shelter to Cardinal Pole, who had quitted England to escape the innovations in religion made by Henry VIII. Several orders of monks were either founded or reformed. That of the Camaldoli having become much corrupted, a new congregation of the same order, called Monte Corona, from the mountain on which its principal establishment was situated, was founded in 1522 by Paolo Giustiniani. The Franciscans were once more allowed to reform themselves, and produced the capuccini, or Capucins (1525), who became celebrated as preachers. Remarkable among the new orders was that of the THEATINES, founded by two members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene, afterwards canonised. The Theatines were priests, not monks, though they took the monastic vows. The order became in time peculiar to the nobility, -a seminary of bishops. The Barnabites, founded by Zaccaria Ferrari and Morigia at Milan, were designed to mitigate the evils of war by works of charity and beneficence." Froude, Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 26. Ranke, Popes, bk. ii. ch. i. (Mrs. Austin's transl.) 10 THE JESUITS AND THEIR FOUNDER. [Book III. But of all these new institutions that of the JESUITS was by far the most remarkable and important. Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde, the youngest son of the noble house of Loyola, born in the castle of that name in Guipuscoa, was destined to the profession of arms, and was bred up at the Court of King Ferdinand, and in the suite of the Duke of Najara. Spanish chivalry had imbibed a strong religious colour from the Moorish wars, and Inigo, or Ignatius, whose temperament naturally inclined him to devotion, had composed in early youth a romance, of which the hero was the first apostle. His wound at Pampluna, and the course of religious reading on which he entered during his convalescence, have been already related.10 When his strength was recruited he journeyed to Montserrat, where, hanging up his lance and shield before the image of the Virgin, after the fashion of the secular knight-errant, putting off his knightly accoutrements, clothing himself in the coarse raiment of the hermits of those mountains, and taking in his hand the pilgrim's staff, he sank before the image in prayer. He afterwards shut himself up in a Dominican convent at Manresa, where his conduct seemed influenced by the delusions of insanity, being marked as well by an inclination to suicide as by imaginary revelations of the most extraordinary kind. If, however, it was madness, it was not without a method. He was conscious that his zeal would be useless without learning; he felt his deficiency in theological attainments; and at the mature age of thirty-seven he repaired to the University of Paris, the last stronghold of scholasticism, to devote himself to the seven years' course of study necessary to graduate in theology (1528-1535). Here he met his first two disciples, Peter Faber, a Savoyard, and Francesco Xavier of Pampluna; and their little society was afterwards joined by three other Spaniards, Salmeron, Lainez, and Bobadilla. In 1537 we find Loyola at Venice, where he attached himself to Caraffa, who had founded there a convent of Theatines. But so mild a superstition did not satisfy Loyola's zeal, who was still influenced by his early military ideas, and pleased himself with the thoughts of making war upon Satan. He and his companions enrolled themselves, like soldiers, in a company, which they called the Company of Jesus; and as obedience is one of the first of military duties, they added that vow to those which they had already taken of poverty and chastity, and bound themselves blindly and unhesitatingly to perform whatever the Pope should command. With these views they proceeded to 10 See Vol. I. p. 407. CHAP. I.] THE INQUISITION AT ROME. 11 Rome to offer their services to the Pontiff, and in 1540 obtained a limited sanction to their order, which, three years afterwards, was followed by a complete one. As the monastic dress of the regular orders, and the singularity of their whole existence, which had made so strong an impression in the middle ages, had now lost all their charm and influence, except with the lowest and most ignorant classes, and had become, on the contrary, an object of repulsion and ridicule, the Jesuits resolved to adapt themselves to this new state of feeling, and to spread their influence in the world by becoming its instructors. With this view they rejected all monastic habits, placed themselves under a general elected for life, and devoted themselves to the pulpit, the confessional, and the education of youth. Thus, out of the visionary dreams of Loyola, at length arose an institution of singular practical utility, and which may be said to have been one of the main supports of the Papacy since the Reformation. In 1542 Loyola assisted Caraffa in establishing the inquisition at Rome, where the ancient Dominican inquisition had long fallen into decay. Rules of remarkable severity were drawn up for the guidance of this tribunal, and the priestly as well as the military principle of unreasoning submission, to which Loyola had subjected himself and his order, was also established in this court. Woe to the wretch who ventured to defend himself! To attempt it was to resist justice; and any person who tried to clear himself, or sought the protection of any prelate or potentate, was only treated with the greater severity. He who confesses indeed is also guilty; but he is contrite, humiliated, obedient, and may therefore be absolved. Thus the main object of the institution was to break down and subdue all resistance, and the inquisition became an instrument, not of justice, but of conquest and domination over the human soul." The necessity of some concession to the new ideas had penetrated the mind of the Pope himself. In 1537 Paul III., in anticipation of the assembly of the promised general council, issued a bull for the reformation of the city of Rome and of the Papal Court; a measure opposed by Schomberg, a German, and Cardinal of S. Sisto, on the ground that it would afford a handle to the enemies of the Church, and be quoted by them in justification of reform. It was, however, supported by Caraffa, whose advice at first prevailed. A commission of nine cardinals was appointed, with Contarini at their head; in whose report, of which Luther published a trans "Caracciolo, MS. Vita di Paolo IV. ap. Ranke, Popes, B. i. S. 212; Michelet, Réforme, p. 434. 12 SCHOLASTICISM REVIVED IN SPAIN. [BOOK III. lation with biting marginal notes, abuses are candidly exposed, and liberal propositions made for their amendment. It is a curious. fact that the commission recommended the abolition of the conventual orders; a measure actually adopted by the French National Assembly in 1791. They also proposed some useful measures of reform, as well as some repressive ones; but no practical effect followed from their recommendations.12 Latin Christianity was however effete: care might preserve its remnants, but could never restore its pristine glory. The old political ideas which it had once inspired were dying out, even in countries which still remained Roman Catholic; of the truth of which there cannot be a stronger instance than the alliance of Francis I. with the Turk. The same progress which had destroyed feudalism destroyed also the prestige of Rome. To this general observation, however, Spain affords a remarkable exception. While light was arising in other countries, Spain retrogaded in darkness. The scholastic philosophy was first domiciled there, when it was being fast expelled from the rest of Europe. With the view of rendering the high school of Paris not indispensable to Spaniards, Alfonso de Cordova introduced the Nominalist doctrine at Salamanca, and at the same time Francisco de Vittoria the Realist, as something new. The latter found the greater number of disciples, and from his school proceeded the most famous theologians.13 Both in Spanish theology and literature, the exclusive doctrines of the Latin Church continued to flourish. Although Erasmus enjoyed the favour of the Court, Diego Lopez Zuniga made it the business of his life to attack the innovations of that author; and in 1527, two Dominicans having formally indicted the writings of Erasmus of heresy before the Spanish inquisition, his Colloquies, Praise of Folly, and Paraphrase of the New Testament were condemned. As the spiritual authority of the Popes was broken by Luther and the Reformation, so also their temporal power received a great blow under Clement VII. through Bourbon's capture of Rome, and Clement's consequent subjection to the Emperor. After this period, the Popes pretty well abandoned their pretension of deposing monarchs, of the exercise of which but very few instances subsequently occur. The same causes acted on the material pros 12 P. Sarpi, Hist. Conc. Trident. lib. i. p. 77 (Opera, t. i. ed. 1671); the Report of the Commission (Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia), in Le Plat, Monum. Trident. t. ii. pp. 596-605. Luther's translation is in his Werke, B. xvi. S. 2394 ff. The Report was to have been kept secret, but the Cardinal S. Sisto sent a copy into Germany, it is supposed with the privity of the Pope. 13 Nic. Antonii Biblioth. Hisp. sub voe. Franciscus, ap. Ranke, Deutsche Gesch. B. iii. S. 112. CHAP. I.] FIRST VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE. 13 perity of Rome. That city had flourished under the profuse and splendid government of Leo X., who, by a liberal commercial policy, the abrogation of monopolies and encouragement of free trade, had made it the resort of Italian merchants; while his generous patronage of art and letters rendered it the capital of the polite and learned of all nations. After the sack of the city and its other calamities in the pontificate of Clement VII., its inhabitants were reduced, when Paulus Jovius wrote, from 85,000 to 32,000.14 The glory of that brilliant literature and art, which obtained for the pontificate of Leo X. the distinction of an epoch, it lies not within our plan to describe.15 In resuming the progress of maritime discovery, we may notice that the grand idea of Columbus-a passage to India by a western navigation-was realised in 1520, but by a much more circuitous route than might have been anticipated. In that year Magellan, or Magelhaëns, a Portuguese in the service of Spain, coasted the continent of South America, doubled its southern extremity, and gained the Chinese and Indian seas by traversing that great Pacific Ocean which Balboa had discovered. Magellan was slain at the Philippine Isles, but his companions continued the voyage. At the Moluccas, they fell in with the astonished Portuguese; and returning to Spain by the Cape of Good Hope, they completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. The papal boundary between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions might now have fallen into jeopardy, had there not been verge enough in the unexplored countries of America to employ all the strength of Spain without quarrelling about the Indies. Grijalva had discovered, in 1518, the existence of a civilised empire in the North American continent, and in the following year Fernando Cortes undertook with a few hundred men the conquest of Mexico. The Mexicans, although much superior in courage as well as civilisation to the tribes of Hayti and Cuba, or even to the ferocious Caribs, yet wanted, like them, the three most terrible and effective appliances of war-iron, gunpowder, and horses. In three years the conquest was completed, and Mexico became New Spain. A few years later one of the companions of Balboa, Francisco Pizarro, together with his brothers, subdued the still richer and more important empire of Peru. The subjugation of Quito, Chili, Terra Firma, and New Granada, followed in quick 14 Jovii Vita Leon, X. lib. iv. p. 95 (ed. 1551). 15 The English reader will find an account of the state of learning and art in the age of Leo X. in Roscoe's Life of that Pontiff, and in Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe. |