Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (111 page)

The land which Juan de Valdes now made his home was by then renewing Catholicism in its own fashion. Gilds, more commonly known here as brotherhoods or confraternities, flourished in Italy as they had done for centuries. Their popularity has been seen as the chief reason why Italians had so little investment in the anti-clerical rhetoric common in northern Europe, but they also threw up some surprising variants beyond the Church hierarchy's control, under the stress of shocks to society like the Black Death or the French invasions of the 1490s: the flagellant movement (see pp. 400-401) and the Florentine
Piagnoni
, who revered Savonarola's memory (see pp. 592-3). Now their capacity for renewal and self-propagation produced more surprising offshoots. In 1497 Ettore Vernazza, a layman from Genoa, founded a confraternity which he called the Oratory of Divine Love. He was much influenced by his spiritual contacts with an aristocratic mystic, Caterina Adorno: she was preoccupied both with reverence for the Eucharist and with comforting and helping the sick, particularly victims of that new and especially terrifying and shaming disease syphilis, which appeared for the first time alongside French armies in the 1490s (see p. 563). The Oratory reflected these twin concerns: clergy and laity combined communal devotions and care for the sick, including the administration of a syphilis hospice. Not unconnected with this latter work was provision for gentlefolk in financial or other distress, a distinctively Italian charitable concern which became a prominent feature in various parallel foundations in other cities.
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Several leaders prominent in the Italian Church's later recovery of nerve against the Reformation learned pious activism in oratories, and some extended this into the renewal of various religious orders. One founding member of an Oratory of Divine Love in Rome between 1514 and 1517 was a nobleman of Naples, Giovanni (Gian) Pietro Carafa. Carafa turned away in self-disgust from a comfortable Church career as a papal official financed by multiple benefices, and in 1524 he joined with Gaetano da Thiene, a nobly born priest from Vicenza and fellow member of the Roman Oratory, to found a congregation of clergy under special vows, or 'clerks regular', in an echo of the 'Canons Regular' of long-standing Augustinian usage (see p. 392). Their austere life was intended to provide a shaming example of vocation to less conscientious priests. Carafa was at that time Bishop of Chieti or 'Theate', hence the new order was called the Theatines.
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In northern Europe, such commitment among serious-minded articulate clergy was rapidly being diverted into new forms of Protestant clerical ministry: the difference in this Mediterranean initiative by a former papal diplomat was its complete loyalty to the papacy. That loyalty, which fatefully shaped Carafa's entire career, was twinned with his talent for hatred, the diverse if not contradictory objects of which included Spaniards (loathed automatically by all patriotic Neapolitans as their colonial power) but extended also to Erasmus, Protestants and Jews.

A different form of loyalty to Rome was shown by another member of the Roman Oratory, Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian nobleman and diplomat, who helped to set up a similar group in Venice. Around 1511 he experienced the sort of spiritual crisis that a few years later overtook Luther, and it had a similar result. When Lutherans began preaching Luther's message of free justification by faith, Contarini recognized what they were saying, and he devoted his distinguished later career in the Church to an effort (ultimately vain) to bring the opposed sides together. In the 1530s he became acquainted with Juan de Valdes, and introduced him to a cultured English emigre, Reginald Pole. Pole was born with a rather better hereditary claim to the throne of England than King Henry VIII; after some hesitation (a feature of his whole career), he bit the royal hand that was feeding him in his expensive Italian education and sided with the King's wronged wife Catherine of Aragon, leading to permanent exile in Italy. Pole's enforced leisure, exalted birth and reasonably comfortable income combined with a strong sense of duty and a thoughtful, introspective piety to make him a major player in Italian theological ferment. Like Contarini, he emphasized the central role of grace by faith in the Christian life, and he was not blind to the fact that Martin Luther had proclaimed the same message.

The oratories did not simply foster elite or clerical spirituality. One of their founding inspirations had been a woman, and now a relatively humble and not especially educated woman, Angela Merici, companion to a widowed noblewoman in Brescia, made it her goal to encourage single women to embrace a religious life while living in their own homes, rather like the early beguines in northern Europe. She laid down no specific tasks for her association, but she was insistent that only virgin women - not even widows - could join. To underline her intention, she took as her symbolic patron a supposed fourth-century martyr, St Ursula. The point was that Ursula, in the course of what appears to have been a scribal error in a medieval manuscript, had acquired eleven thousand virgin companions, all massacred by an industrious army of Huns near Cologne. In a true miracle, these fictional ladies now became reality in Italy and far beyond: a host of enthusiastic Ursulines, thirsting to help a rather startled and intimidated male-run Church.

The Ursulines considered their options and began concentrating on working among the poor and teaching children in settings which men either did not want to or could not enter. In 1544 Pope Paul III supplied a Rule which moulded them into something more like a traditional religious order, but still its model was the free-form adaptability of the Augustinians (see p. 392), and crucially it did not provide for central direction. From the 1560s Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, a great believer in central control so long as he was at the centre, sought to discipline the Ursulines under his jurisdiction by forming them into an order of nuns, but even then, Merici's original vision of individuality survived and inspired new Ursuline initiatives. Under the cloak of Ursuline identity, a number of strong-minded women pressed their own vision of vocation in the Church and seized varied opportunities offered to them, with a judiciously deaf ear to alternative plans laid down by the hierarchy. It was a recurrent pattern in the Catholic Reformation.
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Juan de Valdes eventually settled in Naples, Spanish-governed but happily free from the Spanish Inquisition, where from his arrival in 1535 he developed a circle of friends, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and for promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith. They included two powerful preachers, leading figures in their respective religious orders, Bernardino Ochino from a newly founded Franciscan reformed order named the Capuchins, and Piermartire Vermigli ('Peter Martyr' in his later north European career), an Augustinian who became Abbot of San Pietro ad Aram in Naples. Both men set off on individual paths. Brooding on the message of his order's patron, Augustine of Hippo, Vermigli went further than Contarini and developed a predestinarian theology of salvation as thoroughgoing as Luther, Bucer or Calvin. Ochino's followers whitewashed over the frescoes in the Neapolitan church in which they met, not a conventional action for Italian Catholics.
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Among Valdes's other admirers were talented members of some of Italy's premier noble families, such as the two poets, artistic patrons and lay theologians Vittoria Colonna and her cousin by marriage Giulia Gonzaga. Gonzaga was a celebrated beauty who, in her widowhood, retired to a Neapolitan convent to become part of the Valdes circle in Naples - indeed, provided the equivalent of a salon for it. The Colonna, an ancient dynasty in Rome, had produced two popes and claimed others as ancient family members - one relative had been Cardinal Prospero Colonna, who in the fifteenth century pioneered investigative archaeology (see pp. 576-7). With such support, Valdes had a ready entry to courts and noble palaces all over Italy.

Divergent preoccupations naturally emerged from such a group, yet central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace. Associates of the movement were indeed soon characterized as
Spirituali
, and it is equally possible to acknowledge the leading role of Valdes in their thought and call them Valdesians. They brooded much (like Luther far away in Wittenberg) on the Cross and Passion of Christ, themes which dominated the later art and poetry of Michelangelo, who was a close friend of Vittoria Colonna. Valdes produced two of their key texts: one the so-called
Alphabet
, the other yet another specimen of a
Catechism
(they were now proliferating, as Europe argued about what sort of Christianity to teach the uninstructed). Valdes was an assiduous commentator on and translator of the Bible. There is evidence that he read Luther with interest. However, he parted company with north European evangelicals in his belief that the Spirit progressively offered its light to Christians: he believed that some favoured children of God would be led to ever deeper union with Christ, and the scriptures might not be the only or chief illumination on the way. He was notably reticent in what he said about the Trinity, perhaps because he regarded it as one of the deeper mysteries of the faith for initiates, but perhaps for more dangerous reasons. He also had little to say about the sacraments or the institutional Church - an Erasmian indifference, perhaps, but one has to remember his Jewish
converso
ancestry and weigh up these silences.

Among the Valdesians, Vittoria Colonna became the subject of discreet pressure from Reginald Pole, who urged this prominent patron of the
Spirituali
more fully to acknowledge that the institutional structures of the Church were of vital importance in the Christian life. Pole's insistence on loyalty to the visible Church did seem more plausible from the mid-1530s, because now the papal machine seemed at last to be harnessing its potential resources. Poor Pope Clement VII, overwhelmed by multiple catastrophes which had included Martin Luther, died in 1534. His successor, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, came from the same northern Italian aristocratic circle as Clement, and devoted much of his fifteen years as Pope Paul III to indulging his scandalously greedy children and family, just like his notorious predecessor and former patron Alexander VI, the Borgia pope. Paul was nevertheless also a perceptive and intelligent Renaissance prince anxious to capitalize on all his assets.

While he made two of his teenage grandsons cardinals in 1535, the Pope additionally bestowed cardinals' hats on respected promoters of reform: Pole, Contarini, Carafa, Jacopo Sadoleto and the imprisoned English bishop John Fisher. Fisher's pleasure in this honour may have been qualified by the effect of the news on an infuriated Henry VIII, who immediately had him beheaded. The Pope even appointed Contarini, Pole, Carafa and other reformers to a commission to consider faults in the Church, and although this commission,
De emendanda ecclesia
, confined itself in its report of 1537 to recommending an administrative shake-up, its frankly expressed picture of corruption and misused resources immediately proved a mine of congenial information for Protestant polemicists. Paul then began making plans for a general council of the Church, much to the alarm of northern European rulers who had broken with papal obedience. The Emperor Charles V was also extremely suspicious, and his obstruction was one of the main forces postponing the council meeting for nearly a decade.

Carafa was happy to cooperate with Pole and Contarini in the commission
De emendanda
, but their friendly personal relations were increasingly strained by Carafa's mistrust of their religious agenda and by his conviction that any concession to Protestants was a blasphemous betrayal of the Church. Senior clerics sympathetic to Carafa's bleakly rigorist and authoritarian style of Catholic reform have often been described as the
Zelanti
('the zealous ones'). In the confused and developing situation, relationships never amounted so crudely to two team line-ups,
Spirituali
and
Zelanti
, but the descriptions still have some value in identifying two polarities while clergy and theologians argued about the best way to save the Church. As we observe the answers emerging, some curious cross-currents will become apparent, notably in the development of one of the greatest forces for revival in the Roman Church, the Society of Jesus. Like Valdesianism, it was a movement which sprang from the Iberian peninsula. It was founded by a Basque gentleman who had been a courtier of Charles V and who, like Valdes, had to take refuge from the Spanish Inquisition. Inigo Lopez de Loyola (see Plate 15) has become known to history as Ignatius after making the most of a scribal error over his Christian name when he matriculated in the University of Paris.
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Like Luther and Contarini, Inigo had a crisis of faith, but his crisis, triggered by devotional reading during prolonged convalescence from a severe war wound, led in the opposite direction to Luther: not to rebellion against the Church, but to a courtier's obedience. In medieval knightly style, in 1522 he spent a vigil night in dedication to his lady before departing on crusade to the Holy Land - the lady was God's Mother, in the shape of the pilgrimage statue of the Black Madonna at Monserrat. In fact his departure for Jerusalem was to be much postponed, and Jerusalem proved not to be the goal of his life that he hoped. Amid many painful and poverty-stricken false starts, Loyola began to note down his changing spiritual experiences. This was raw material for a systematically organized guide to prayer, self-examination and surrender to divine power. He soon began using the system with other people. It was to reach a papally approved final form in print in 1548 as the
Spiritual Exercises
, one of the most influential books in Western Christianity, even though Ignatius did not design it for reading any more than one might a technical manual of engineering or computing. It is there to be used by clerical spiritual directors guiding others as Ignatius did himself, to be adapted at whatever level might be appropriate for those who sought to benefit from it, in what came to be known as 'making the
Exercises
'.