CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION

I.

1534-72. The Counter-Reformation in Italy.

Alessandro Farnese came forth from the Conclave of 1534 on October 12 as Paul III. A pupil of Pomponio Leto, and at the age of twenty-five, in 1493, invested with the purple by Alexander VI, he had taken part in all phases of the humanistic movement, and shared its glories and its sins. Now the sky had become overcast, but a clear sunny gleam from the best time of the Renaissance still lay over him, though his pontificate was to witness the inroad of Lutheranism on Italy, the appearance of the doctrine of justification by faith, and on the other hand the foundation of the Society of Jesus (September 3, 1539), the convocation of the long wished-for Ecumenical Council of Trent (1542), and also the reorganization of the Inquisition (1541).

The last Pope of the Renaissance, as we must call Farnese, left as the brightest memory of his reign the record of an effort, which proved fruitless, to unite the last and noblest supporters of the Renaissance who still survived in the service of the Church, for an attempt at reformation. This is celebrated as the Consultum delectorum Cardinalium et aliorum prelatorum de emendanda Ecclesia, and bears the signatures of Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Federigo Fregoso, Giberti, and Cortese. Contarini must be acknowledged to have been the real soul of the movement, which aimed at an inward reconciliation with the German party of reform. All these ideas had root in the conception represented by the scheme of Julius II. The greater number of those who worked at the Consultum of 1538 must be regarded as the last direct heirs of this great inheritance. The Religious Conference of Ratisbon in 1541 forms the crisis in the history of this movement: it was wrecked, not, as Reumont states, by the incompatibility of the principle of subjective opinion with that of authority, but quite as much, if not more so, by the private aims of Bavaria and France. So ended the movement towards reconciliation, and another came into force and obtained sole dominion. This regarded the most marked opposition to Protestantism as the salvation of the Church, and to combat it summoned not only the counter-reformation of the Tridentinum, but every means in its power, even the extremest measures of material force, to its assistance. The representatives of the conciliatory reform movement, Contarini, Sadoleto, Pole, Morone, became suspect and, despite their dignity of Cardinal, were subject to persecution. Even noble ladies like Vittoria Colonna and Giulia Gonzaga were not secure from this suspicion and persecution.

Paul IV (1555-9) and Pius V (1566-72) carried out the Counter-Reformation in Italy. While the pagan elements of humanism merged in the Antitrinitarian and Socinian sects, the Inquisition was stamping out the sola fides belief, but its terrorism at the same time crushed culture and intellectual life out of Italy. The city of Rome recovered from the Sack of 1527; but from the ruin wrought by Caraffa, the nation, or at any rate Papal Rome, never recovered. Whatever intellectual life still remained was forced in the days of Paul III to shrink more and more from publicity. The sonnets which Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo exchanged, the converse these two great minds held in the garden of the Villa Colonna, of which Francesco d’Ollanda has left us an account, were the last flickerings of a spirit which had once controlled and enriched the Renaissance.

What comparisons must have forced themselves on Michelangelo as all the events since the days of Lorenzo il Magnifico, his first patron, whom he never forgot, passed in review before his great and lonely spirit, now sunk in gloom. We know from Condivi that the impressions Buonarotte had received in his youth exercised a renewed power over his old age. Dante and Savonarola were once his leaders, they had never entirely forsaken him. Now the favole del mondo, as his last poems bear witness, fell entirely into the background before the earnest thoughts that had once filled his mind at the foot of the pulpit in San Marco. His Giudizio Universale sums up the account for his whole existence, and is at the same time the most terrible reckoning, made in the spirit of Dante, with his own nation and its rulers. All that Italy might have become, had she followed the dictates of Dante and Savonarola, floated before his eyes as his brush created that Judge of all the world whose curse falls on those that have exiled and murdered His prophets, neglected the Church, and bartered away the freedom of the nation. His Last Judgment was painted at the bidding of the Pope. Paul III can scarcely have guessed how the artist was searching into the consciences of that whole generation, which was called to execute what Julius had bidden Raffaelle and Michelangelo depict for all Christendom, and which had ignored and neglected its high office.

Since 1541 the Schism was an accomplished fact, a misfortune alike for North and South. The defection of the Germanic world deprived the Catholic Church of an element to which the future belonged after the exhaustion of the Latin races. Perhaps the greatest misfortune lay and still lies, as Newman has said, in the fact that the Latin races never realized, and do not even yet realize, what they have lost in the Germanic races. From the time of Paul III, and still more from that of Paul IV onwards, the old Catholicism changes into an Italianism which adopts more and more the forms of the Roman Curialism. The idea of Catholicity, once so comprehensive, was sinking more and more into a one-sided, often despotic insistence on unity, rendered almost inevitable by the continual struggle with opponents. And this was due, not to the doctrines of the Church, but to her practice. Romanism alone could no longer carry out a scheme such as that of which Julius II had dreamed. It is now clear to all minds what intellectual, moral, and social forces the schism had drawn away; this is manifest even in the fate of Italy. The last remnant of Italian idealism took refuge in the idea of national unity and freedom which had been shadowed forth in the policy of Alexander VI and Julius II, and which Machiavelli had written on the last wonderful page of his Principe as the guiding principle for the future. This vision it was which rose dimly in Dante's mind; for its sake the Italian people had forgiven the sins of the Borgia and of della Rovere; it had appeared to Machiavelli as the highest of aims; after another three hundred years of spiritual and temporal despotism it burst forth once more in the minds of Rosmini, Cesare Balbo, Gioberti, and Cavour, and roused the dishonored soul of the nation.