Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (114 page)

Also troubled by Spanish officialdom were two religious later to become among the most famous personalities in the history of Christian mysticism, Teresa of Avila and Juan de Yepes (John of the Cross). In the Inquisition's terms, both were automatically suspect by the fact that their families were
conversos
, and they might be seen as emerging from that maelstrom of religious energy released by the religious realignment of Spain in the 1490s (see pp. 584-91). They both joined the Carmelite Order (and their close personal relationship also attracted official worries); Teresa sought to bring the Carmelites to realize more intensely the significance of their origins in the wilderness by a refoundation of the order in which the men and women of the Reform would walk barefoot (Discalced). She struggled to persuade the Church authorities to make a leap of imagination, to allow the women who joined her to engage in a Carmelite balance of contemplation and activism. The journeyings of the soul characteristic of the mystic in every century would be paralleled by journeyings through the physical world, as and when necessary. Through many troubles and setbacks, Teresa developed what one of her admirers has called 'a gift for making men give her the orders she wanted to obey'.
²⁵

Teresa is often remembered now in the dramatic and highly sexualized statue of her ecstasy which Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted for the Church of Our Lady of Victory in Rome. She would not have been pleased by this, because (according to one of her nuns) in a typically precise and much more decorous piece of self-fashioning, she made sure that she breathed her last posed as the penitent Mary Magdalene was commonly seen in paintings.
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She spoke plainly, and told her ascetics to do the same:

Let them also be careful in the way they speak. Let it be with simplicity, straightforwardness, and devotion. Let them use the style of hermits and people who have chosen a secluded life. They should not use the new-fangled words and affectations - I think that is what they call them - that are popular in worldly circles, where there are always new fashions. They should take more pride in being coarse than fastidious in these matters.
²⁷

Teresa certainly spoke of her meetings with the divine in the passionate and intimate terms that mystics (mostly but not exclusively female) had employed for centuries. She spoke of the piercing of her heart, of her mystical marriage with the divine, although she managed to avoid quite the degree of physical relish exhibited by Agnes Blannbekin (see p. 421). She was very conscious of the tightrope which any woman walked in the Spain of her time when putting herself forward to speak on spiritual matters, but she still grittily insisted that women had something distinctive to say, and that it was their Saviour who made them say it: 'Lord of my soul, you did not hate women when You walked in the world; rather you favored them always with much pity and found in them as much love and more faith than in men.'
²⁸

For both Teresa and Juan, the erotic biblical poem the Song of Songs became a key text for the divine revelation. Juan was not afraid of repeatedly picturing himself as the lover, and frequently the bride, of Christ, appropriating for himself the image which is more conventionally given to the institution of the Church or the female soul, and as a result, expressing himself in ways which now sound startlingly homoerotic:

Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover. Lover transformed in the Beloved! Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone, There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret. As I parted his locks; With his gentle hand, he wounded my neck. And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved. All ceased, and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
²⁹

Juan found that even the ancient technical language of theology, the Chalcedonian Definition of 451, could be fired with his own sense of what the Song of Songs might mean:

After the soul has been for some time the betrothed of the Son of God in gentle and complete love, God calls her and places her in his flowering garden to consummate this most joyful state of marriage with Him. The union wrought between the two natures and the communication of the divine to the human in this state is such that even though neither change their being, both appear to be God.
³⁰

He spoke not only of love in such very physical modes, but also searingly explored the ultimate loneliness of humanity - the loneliness and sense of rejection and debasement to which he himself had sunk during nine months' close solitary confinement in 1577-8 at the hands of the leadership of his own Carmelite Order, from which imprisonment he had to effect a dramatic escape. His incomplete meditation
Dark Night of the Soul
was the culmination of the treatise which he called
The Ascent of Mount Carmel
. The
Ascent
described this 'dark night' as the third stage of the soul's experience after its early sensuality and subsequent purification, 'a more obscure and dark and terrible purgation'.
³¹
The treatise presents itself as an exposition of the eight-stanza love poem, whose later stanzas have already been quoted. It breaks off before no more than a few lines have been subjected to John's intense scrutiny: in its detailed and patient explanation of the myriad meanings which they present to the reader, it reveals how far the mystic might travel beyond the deep sensuality of the poetry, which has the power to astonish the modern secular reader. This journey in the poem is what Juan describes as purgative contemplation, which causes passively in the soul the negation of itself and of all things referred to above. And this going forth it says here that it was able to accomplish in the strength and ardour which love for its Spouse gave it for that purpose in the dark contemplation aforementioned. Here it extols the great happiness which it found in journeying to God through this night with such signal success that none of the three enemies, which are world, devil and flesh (who are they that ever impede this road), could hinder it.
³²

After all the conflicts which Teresa and Juan experienced and to some extent initiated, the Discalced Carmelites were left flourishing, backed at the highest levels of Spanish society. The order was determined not merely that Rome should recognize its foundress as a saint (achieved in 1612, only thirty years after her death) but, in a much more ambitious project, that she should replace Santiago himself as the patron saint of Spain. This was both a devotional act and a political self-assertion against all the forces of the Church which had made life so difficult for Teresa and Juan: luckily for the Carmelites, it had the backing of the Spanish monarchy. In 1618 King Philip III, strongly seconded by the Castilian assembly, the Cortes, persuaded the Pope to designate Teresa co-patron of Spain, though opposition was by no means at an end, and became much entangled in Spanish high politics.
³³
John of the Cross had to wait until 1726 before he was finally officially declared to be a saint of the Church.

TRENT DELAYED: FRANCE AND POLAND-LITHUANIA

In the early sixteenth century, the Habsburgs had been balanced by the 'Most Christian King' of France, and the Valois dynasty which looked back to Clovis's conversion remained consistently loyal to Rome all through the Reformation years. Circumstances nevertheless conspired long to prevent the French Church implementing the major decisions made at the Council of Trent on such vital matters as uniformity of worship, doctrinal instruction and clergy training and discipline. In a ghastly irony, the Valois monarchy was crippled when, in 1559, Henri II died in agony after an accident in a tournament which was celebrating the end of more than half a century of Valois war with the Habsburgs, through a treaty signed on their mutual frontier at Cateau-Cambresis. His death left the realm in the hands of his wife as regent for her young sons. Queen Catherine de' Medici's real talents for government were not equal to the dire religious crisis which then engulfed France and led to four decades of frequently atrocious civil war between Catholics and Protestants (see Plate 54). A very substantial community of Huguenots, led by powerful noblemen, proved impossible to defeat, even though they were still a minority across the realm.

The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in 1572 was the worst incident, and illustrated just how deep the passions in France now ran. It was sparked by an event intended to heal the kingdom's wounds: the marriage of the King of France's sister Marguerite to Henri, King of Navarre, now the head of the Huguenot party in France. An assassination attempt on the Protestant leader, Gaspard de Coligny, a provocatively self-invited guest at the wedding, spurred Huguenots to fury, and their reaction in turn frightened Catherine and her royal son to allow counter-attacks by their own troops. Catholic crowds took the hint, and around five thousand Protestants were murdered and many more terrorized throughout the realm.
³⁴
St Bartholomew's Day long remained for Protestants across Europe a symbol of Catholic savagery and duplicity, but at the time many French Catholics were also shocked by the extremism displayed by their co-religionists. French Catholics bitterly disagreed among themselves as to how far - if at all - concessions should be made to the Huguenots, and the talented but unstable Henri III found it impossible to impose any sort of statesmanlike settlement. In 1589 he was stabbed to death by a Catholic extremist, and since he was the last of the Valois line, his heir was that same Henri of Navarre, who in the end was able to unite moderate ('
politique
') Catholics behind him against the ultra-Catholic Ligue (League), after his adroit conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism.

When negotiating with moderate Ligueurs in 1593, Navarre, now Henri IV of France, is often said to have mused, 'Paris is worth a Mass.' Although this famous quotation is even more insecurely founded than Martin Luther's precisely contradictory sentiment, 'Here I stand, I can do no other', it should not be jettisoned from history, for it likewise encapsulates a vital moment in the Reformation. In its weary rejection of rigid religious principle, the phrase echoes what many of Europe's politicians and rulers felt after seventy years of religious warfare across Europe.
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Taking advantage of France's war-weariness, in 1598 Henri brokered a settlement, the Edict of Nantes, a version of schemes which Henri III had never been able to enforce in the face of bitter opposition from the Ligue.
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Now Huguenots had not universal toleration but a guaranteed privileged corporate status within the realm, with their own churches and fortified places. Henri IV's much more sincerely Catholic successors spent the next nine decades whittling away these privileges, but during that time, France represented western Europe's most large-scale example of religious pluralism, despite a major upsurge of French Catholic renewal and rebuilding. In the end they created one of Europe's most impressive Counter-Reformations.

This belated Counter-Reformation in France was linked to another delayed Catholic Reformation far away in Poland-Lithuania, through the peculiar circumstance that for a few months in 1574 they shared a common monarch, Henri, Duke of Anjou. We have met Henri in Poland, as the distinctly unwilling agent in 1573 of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's remarkable enactment of religious toleration, the Confederation of Warsaw (see pp. 643-4). The hopes which all sides placed in that agreement for a golden future under their imported French king were not to be fulfilled, for Henri did not prolong his stay in his new kingdom. He was dismayed not only by a seemingly boundless and unfamiliar realm, but by intimidating excitement from his middle-aged prospective bride (last of the previous Jagiellon dynasty), and by his dawning consciousness that the Polish nobility were even less deferential than their French counterparts. Then only a few months after his coronation in Cracow, he received astonishing news: his brother Charles IX of France was dead and consequently he had become King of France, as Henri III. Henri's secret flight across Europe and back to Paris in June 1574 was a bitter blow to his subjects in the Commonwealth, and they swiftly disabused him of any illusion that he could rule the Commonwealth in addition to France (it might have been better for Henri if he had stayed). After two years of political chaos, a replacement candidate emerged who could once more block the Habsburgs: Istvan Bathori, the current Prince of Transylvania, better known when King of Poland as Stefan Bathory.
³⁷

Bathory proved to be an excellent choice in his exceptional wisdom and military capacity. He was a devout Catholic, but was not going to jeopardize his chances of the Polish throne by objecting to the toleration clause in the Confederation of Warsaw, which in any case had been anticipated eight years earlier in the declaration of his native Transylvania at Torda. Yet it was from Bathory's reign that the demoralized and divided Catholic Church in the Commonwealth began consolidating its position which eventually produced one of the very few successes for Catholic recovery in northern Europe. Against the great variety of Protestant activity in Poland-Lithuania, Roman Catholicism already had some advantages. It never lost control of the Church hierarchy or the landed endowments of the old Church - in any case rather more modest than further west in Europe, and therefore perhaps less vulnerable to secular greed.

Crucially, the Polish monarchy never finally broke with Catholicism, and that, combined with unbroken adherence from most of the lower orders in the countryside, proved decisive over a century and a half. Already before Stefan Bathory's reign, in 1564, the Society of Jesus had established a foothold in Poland. Now King Stefan was responsible for founding three major Jesuit colleges in the far north-east of the commonwealth at Polotsk, Riga and Dorpat, deliberately chosen as cities where the Reformed Churches were at their strongest. From the late 1570s there was a Jesuit-run academy (university college) in Vilnius, chief city of Lithuania, and by the early seventeenth century, every important town (more than two dozen scattered throughout the Commonwealth) had a Jesuit school. Lutheran, Reformed and anti-Trinitarian schools could not compete with such large-scale educational enterprise. The steady work of the Society of Jesus in providing schools and colleges attracted members of the gentry and nobility, even Protestants, to send their children for a good education, and that schooling remorselessly thinned the ranks of the Protestant elite.