Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (112 page)

It was the Spanish Inquisition's unfavourable interest in this devotional activity which led to Loyola's hasty exit from Spain for the University of Paris in 1528, a year before Valdes's own flight. Around the exiled Spaniard gathered a group of talented young men who were inspired by his vision for a new mission to the Holy Land. To their severe disappointment, the international situation in 1537 made it impossible for them to take ship, but the friends resolved to look positively on their setback and create yet another variant on the gild/confraternity /oratory model: not a religious order, but what they called a
Compagnia
or Society of Jesus. Soon the Society's members were known informally as Jesuits: a weapon to be placed in the pope's hand as a gift to the Church. Ignatius never lost his courtly skills, particularly with pious noble ladies of exceptional political power, and his pastorally sensitive intervention in a papal family crisis was the main spur to secure the Society Pope Paul III's generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. It was an astonishingly quick promotion for such an unformed organization, whose purposes were at that stage unclear.
⁷

The early history of the Jesuits has been interestingly obscured in light of their extraordinary later success and institutionalization. The reasons for that obscurity are enmeshed in the turbulent politics of the 1540s which decided the future direction of the Catholic Reformation. Before this outcome, the Jesuits were part of that multiform movement of spiritual energy, the
Spirituali
, and like much else in
Spirituale
activity, their work could easily have been destroyed.
⁸
That they and their work were not is a tribute to the inspired political talents of both Ignatius and his successors. A curious feature of Ignatius's voluminous surviving correspondence is that almost all of it concerns matters of business. One has difficulty gauging from it what spiritual qualities singled out the writer to be a saint - this author of that key text of Catholic spirituality, the
Exercises
. The silence indicates a huge missing body of letters. Evidently an efficiently comprehensive hand, probably in the 1560s, refashioned the early years of the Society by deleting large portions of the story.
⁹

REGENSBURG AND TRENT, A CONTEST RESOLVED (1541-59)

There was good reason for this prudence. In the early 1540s the
Spirituali
might seem to be shaping the future of reform in the Church; yet against Cardinal Contarini's energetic efforts to find common ground with Protestants, particularly on justification by faith, was ranged the hostility of Cardinal Carafa to any such concession. Carafa's suspicion of the newly formed Jesuits was equally heartfelt, for he detested Ignatius Loyola. The dislike may have been personal, but in the Neapolitan Carafa's mind the crucial factor was that Loyola came from Spain.
Spirituali
and Jesuits now faced a crisis. Contarini's peace-making efforts gained warm backing from the Holy Roman Emperor, but the Cardinal failed to clinch an ambitious scheme of reconciliation proposed in discussions with Protestant leaders (a 'colloquy') around the Imperial Diet at Regensburg (Ratisbon) in 1541. Within a year Contarini died a bitterly disappointed man under house arrest. After that, some of the more exposed leaders of the
Spirituali
fled north to shelter with Protestants. Valdes avoided the emergency, having died in 1541, but Ochino and Vermigli led the stampede, their departure causing a huge sensation - Ochino was by then General of the Capuchin Order. Prominent among other defectors were wealthy merchants, more able to relocate their assets than either humble adherents or members of the nobility; soon they and the intellectuals they financed were bringing a remarkable variety of religious views and free-thinking to the Reformed lands of eastern and northern Europe, with momentous long-term consequences (see pp. 640-42 and 778-9).

Gian Pietro Carafa's hour had come. The conciliators had not merely failed to land a result from the Regensburg Colloquy (an enterprise which he had consistently denounced), but many of their brightest stars were revealed as traitors to the Church, and tainted all their associates who stayed. Now Carafa could persuade the Pope to set up a Roman Inquisition, modelled on the Spanish Inquisition founded seventy years before, with Carafa himself as one of the Inquisitors-General. One of its functions (a function which remains to the present day in the Roman Inquisition's rather more bland guise as the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was to determine what the norm for theology was within the Catholic Church. It usurped this role from the Sorbonne in Paris, a venerable academic institution, but inconveniently beyond the pope's control. There was much less incentive now for remaining
Spirituali
to feel any commitment to the traditional Church. Cardinal Pole, who always tried to avoid closing options or drawing clear boundaries, did what he could to protect his dependants, who included some of Valdes's former admirers, and to keep them faithful to the Church. His friend Cardinal Giovanni Morone held the Inquisition at bay in his religiously turbulent diocese of Modena by an extensive campaign of swearing leading citizens to a Formulary of Faith which Contarini had designed to persuade truculent evangelicals back into the fold.

Some persisted within the Church. The most influential work of Italian spirituality in these years, the
Beneficio di Cristo
, was published in 1543 under Pole's patronage and apparently sold in tens of thousands before being translated into other European languages. Originally written by a Benedictine monk, Benedetto da Mantova, drawing on Benedictine devotional themes, it was revised by Benedetto's friend Marcantonio Flaminio, a protege of Valdes and Pole, to heighten its presentation of the spiritual and mystical aspects of Valdesian theology, and it also silently incorporated substantial quotations from the 1539 edition of John Calvin's
Institutes
! The text emphasized justification by faith alone and celebrated the benefits of suffering for the faith, yet Cardinal Morone loved it for its eloquence on the benefits of the Eucharist. The new Roman Inquisition's opinion of it (and therefore Carafa's) can be gauged by the fact that of all the thousands of copies printed in Italian, none was seen again from the sixteenth century down to 1843, when a stray turned up in the University Library in Cambridge, England. That disappearance, proof of the Inquisition's energy when it felt the need, is an eloquent symbol of the exclusion of the
Spirituali
from the future of the Catholic Church.
¹⁰

Only now did a council of the Church meet, in a compromise location to satisfy the mutual distrust of Pope and Emperor. It took place south of the Alps, but in a prince-bishopric which was imperial territory, at Trent in the Tyrol. The episcopal host and chairman from 1545, Cristoforo Madruzzo, was a
Spirituale
sympathizer and old friend of Reginald Pole, and Pole was one of the Pope's three legates - but soon it became clear that other forces, among whom Carafa was an
eminence grise
, were directing the agenda. The council's decrees rained down to shut out compromise. First was a decree on authority, which emphasized the importance of seeing the Bible in a context of tradition, some of which was unwritten and therefore needed to be exclusively expounded by an authoritative Church. Then came a decree on justification which achieved the remarkable feat of using Augustine's language and concepts to exclude Luther's theology of salvation, particularly his assertion that sinful humanity cannot please God by any fulfilment of divine law. Before that decree was passed in January 1547, Pole had left the council, his plea of illness all too real in terms of mental anguish.

The last chance for the now dispirited
Spirituali
came on Pope Paul III's death in 1549. There was a distinct possibility that Pole might become pope - the dying pontiff had been one of those recommending him - but Carafa's dramatic intervention with charges of heresy against the Englishman turned a series of close votes away from him and a safe papal civil servant was elected as Julius III. Pole was not the sort of man to put up a fight. Even though in private correspondence with trusted friends in the 1550s he was prepared to declare the Roman Inquisition satanic in its operations, he was always inclined to leave the Holy Spirit to do the political manoeuvring. One might regard that instinct as admirably unworldly. It could also be seen as unrealistic, egotistically idealistic, or even springing from an apocalyptic certainty that God's purposes were about to be summed up in the Last Days, with Pole as his agent.
¹¹
The Holy Spirit did not oblige, and with Pole's defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved.

One sign of radical change and of the quashing of alternative futures in that decade after 1545 was a literally spectacular volte-face from the best-informed family in Italy, the Florentine Medici. Throughout the 1540s, Duke Cosimo de' Medici continued to extend patronage and protection to disciples of Juan de Valdes, not least because Cosimo hated both Paul III (who was not above sheltering admirers of the unmentionable Savonarola) and Cardinal Carafa, who became Pope Paul IV in 1555. Apart from his fear of the family ambitions of a Farnese pope, Cosimo shared the determination of his own patron, Charles V, to seek ways of conciliating Protestants in the fashion of the Regensburg Colloquy. He prolonged his policy dangerously late. For a decade from 1545, the Medici were paying for a new scheme of fresco decoration for the choir and family chapels in their ancestral parish church of San Lorenzo, one of Florence's oldest and most famous churches. Their frescoes were an open declaration of support for evangelical reform in the Catholic Church.

It is unlikely that the artist, Jacopo da Pontormo, himself dreamt up the iconography of this highly sensitive project, startling in what it did not depict: any emblem of Purgatory, sacraments, institutional Church or Trinity. What it did draw on were themes from the
Catechism
of Valdes, already prohibited in 1549 by the authorities in Venice, later also by the Roman Inquisition - images which clearly pointed those with eyes to see to the doctrine of justification by faith. Like Valdes's tract, Pontormo's paintings approached this incendiary theme through well-known Old Testament stories such as Noah building his ark, or Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. With Pontormo dead in 1556 and Paul IV's death in 1559 bringing a pope much more congenial to the Medici, silence descended on the conundrum of why Pontormo had painted what he had painted. Medici publicists, led by the art historian Giorgio Vasari, attributed the fresco design to the artist's mental instability, and while the Medici became devout patrons of the Counter-Reformation (gaining an augmented title of Grand Duke from Pope Pius V), the unfortunate Pontormo has gone down in art history as a lunatic. Although his frescoes survived much criticism and perplexity up to 1738, now we only have some of his original cartoons and a few rough sketches.
¹²

It is worth focusing on this episode, because it illuminates the murky and uncertain background to the early development of the Jesuits. It is no coincidence that they remained aloof from the work of the Inquisitions, conscious of the harassment which their founder had suffered in Spain; indeed no Jesuit has ever sat on an inquisitorial tribunal, leaving that duty to the various orders of friars. Ignatius and his successors played their hand through those turbulent and dangerous years with consummate skill and remarkable creativity. They more or less sleepwalked into one of their future chief occupations, secondary and higher education. They quickly set up 'colleges' in certain university towns, originally just intended as lodging places for student members of the Society. Unfortunately, potential lay benefactors were not excited by the inward-looking reference of such projects, which was an incentive for the Society to think about expanding the colleges' roles. By the 1550s, city authorities across Europe were scrabbling to secure de luxe school facilities like the first Jesuit experiments in Spain and Sicily.

Although Jesuit education was proudly proclaimed as free of charge (the Society put a huge and increasingly professional effort into fund-raising to ensure this), their limited manpower was concentrated on secondary education. It was very difficult for children of the poor to get the necessary primary grounding to enter schools at such an advanced level; so without any single policy decision, a Jesuit educational mission emerged to secure the next generation of merchants, gentry and nobility - in other words, the people who mattered in converting Europe back to Catholic obedience. In time, Jesuits allied with another unconventional religious organization, the Ursulines, and steered Ursuline energies towards parallel female education, which was obviously problematic for males to undertake. It was a fruitful cooperation, which did not end the Ursulines' ability to mark out for themselves new initiatives in charitable and educational work.
¹³

The Jesuits created a highly unusual form of the religious life: while keeping tight central control through their Superior-General, they had no regular decision-making community gatherings corporately 'in chapter', or a daily round of communal worship, gathering 'in choir' in church. Moreover they refused to require a distinct dress or habit for members, nor were they even necessarily ordained, despite the fact that their core tasks, preaching and hearing confessions, were the same as the orders of friars. It was not surprising that the Society soon attracted resentment from friars for what could be regarded as wilful selectivity from past disciplines - Jesuits did not always help themselves by their patronizing attitude to other organizations, an unfortunate side effect of the fact that they were very well trained and mostly very clever. Whatever their faults, their non-clerical style (given that laymen were among their numbers) did address the excessive pretensions of clergy which had provoked much of the passion behind the Protestant revolution. They did not wish to become an enclosed monastic order because Ignatius passionately wanted to affirm the value of the world, and believed that it was possible to lead a fully spiritual life within it. He had after all seen more of the world than most Europeans, in wanderings as far as London and Jerusalem.