Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (98 page)

Eventually the central document of the Christian Church, its ultimate
fons
, the Bible, must come under humanist scrutiny. Now the humanists' preoccupation with words was very relevant, because the Bible's words were translations at various different levels. Christians saw them as interpretations of the mind of God to humanity, but beyond this ultimate translation from the perfect to the imperfect, readers experienced the biblical texts at different removes from their original human writers. Medieval Western Christianity knew the Bible almost exclusively through the Vulgate, the fourth-century Latin translation made by Jerome (see pp. 294-6). Humanist excavation now went behind the Vulgate text to the Tanakh and its principal Greek translation, the Septuagint. Jerome had done his considerable best to re-examine the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint; nevertheless, faults remained. Some of his mistranslations in the Old Testament were more comic than important. One of the most curious was at Exodus 34, where the Hebrew describes Moses's face as shining when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns - and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo's great sculpted Moses now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli ('Saint Peter in Chains'), yet another commission for Pope Julius II. One finds them frequently in the paintings of Moses and Aaron flanking the Commandment boards in English parish churches, dating as late as the nineteenth century.
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Examining the New Testament had more profound consequences. In translating the Greek, Jerome had chosen certain Latin words which formed rather shaky foundations for very considerable theological constructions by the later Western Church, like the doctrine of Purgatory, as the prince of humanists Desiderius Erasmus was to demonstrate (see p. 96). It was not simply that Jerome gave misleading impressions of the Greek text. The mere fact that for a thousand years the Latin Church had based its authority on a translation was significant, when scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street-Greek poured out by Jesus's post-Resurrection convert Paul of Tarsus, as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God. The shock of the familiar experienced in an unfamiliar form was bound to suggest to the most sensitive minds in Latin Christianity that the Western Church was not so authoritative an interpreter of scripture as it claimed. If there is any one explanation why the Latin West experienced a Reformation and the Greek-speaking lands to the east did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the New Testament text.

Humanist scholarship had general consequences for the way in which the Bible was experienced in the Western Church, and moved it still further from the common tradition which had united Catholicism and Orthodoxy, just at the time when political circumstances were doing the same thing. Increasingly, the Bible would be perceived as a single text and read as other texts might be - or perhaps, more accurately, as a library of self-contained continuous texts, each of which might be read in a different way. Previously, congregations in the West as in the East would have experienced the Bible primarily as performance: countless fragments of it rearranged mosaic-like in the liturgy, mediated through the words of a preacher or experienced in declaimed paraphrase in the Bible plays, which perhaps reached their apogee in the English vernacular dramas, staged in open-air processional stations by urban gilds or 'mysteries'. This public performance of the Bible had depended in turn on a clergy who knew the Bible as an intricately layered set of allegorical meanings, because they used it as the basis for contemplation. One word might point beyond itself, so that at the very simplest level the boy Isaac who was to be sacrificed was God the Son, and his father Abraham who was to sacrifice him was God the Father. 'Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, ' sang the psalmist: Jerusalem had been replaced by Rome, so the psalmist was actually asking for peace for the pope. Since the ninth century, when a group of Frankish scholars had created the commentary known as the
Glossa Ordinaria
, the Church had provided an increasingly rich databank of such allegories. Now the humanist perception of the Bible as a text written and then to be read like any other book began to place a question against a great deal of this venerable tradition.

It is perfectly possible that the Western Church could have survived these shocks intact. The Reformations which actually took place were not what the humanists sought; they had no intention of overthrowing the old ecclesiastical system. Bishops and cardinals hastened to be the patrons of humanists, and they were prominent in widening university curricula by founding colleges whose statutes specifically promoted humanist studies, with the particular aim of creating a pool of experts in Greek and Hebrew to aid biblical scholarship. Not surprisingly some humanists, excited at the novelty of what they were doing, sounded what might seem a call to revolution when they trumpeted their achievement at the expense of older scholarship. This was adolescent self-assertion from a new type of intellectual discipline previously subordinate to theology in the universities, and (as usual with adolescent self-assertion) it annoyed older professionals who had good reason to be proud of their traditional learning and resented non-professionals giving themselves airs. So university theologians attacked Lorenzo Valla for his presumption in undertaking textual criticism of the Bible. They likened it to 'putting one's sickle into another man's crop', and it became a common charge against humanists.
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Many humanists chose not to enter the traditional university system. They produced their scholarly editions in close cooperation with printers, who were inclined to set up workshops in big commercial centres, rather than in university towns. Many humanists also saw the value of entering the service of powerful and wealthy people who would pay for their skills as wordsmiths, employing them to produce official documents in sophisticated Ciceronian Latin to maintain courtly prestige among other powerful people. Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas, closely involved with ordinary life and government, in contrast to isolated ivory-tower academics who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists). A less cynical way of looking at this stand-off would be to see it as a dispute about the best road to discovering truth: was it best done through the persuasive skills of rhetoric, which the humanists valued, or through formal analysis and enquiry in argument, the refinement of dialectic which scholastic theologians had perfected?

It would be misleading to see humanism as the only path to Church reform. Many professional theologians whose primary loyalty was to scholasticism felt as dissatisfied as the humanists with the nominalist scholasticism which had dominated university theology faculties over the previous century and a half. The Italian Dominican Tommaso de Vio (usually known as Cajetan,
Gaetano
, from his Italian home town Gaeta) returned to the philosophical and theological achievement of his own order's most celebrated product, Thomas Aquinas, determined to restore Thomism to its central place in the Church. Between 1507 and 1522 Cajetan published a commentary on the
Summa Theologiae
, Thomas's greatest work, which he was reputed to be able to recite by heart. He did not confine himself to expository scholarship, and won both enemies and, in 1517, a cardinal's hat for his consistent support of papal authority, which he was determined to see used for the renewal of the Church. One of his characteristic achievements was to stop Pope Julius II establishing a new feast of the sufferings of Mary, the Mother of God. Commissioned to investigate the possibility, de Vio reported back in 1506 that popular devotion to her swooning away out of grief at Christ's death on the Cross was an unscriptural idea. He craggily commented that in any case swooning was a 'morbid state' which irreverently implied that Mary had suffered some bodily defect: the Queen of Heaven could suffer only mental anguish on behalf of her son. No more was heard of the proposed feast, and Cajetan's intervention began a long process of official restraint on the physical exuberance of Western piety, a restraint which as well as being a feature of the Protestant Reformation affected the Counter-Reformation Church also.
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Cajetan's volumes sparked a major revival of interest in Aquinas's thought, and in the Reformation turmoil, for all Thomas's emphasis on the mystery of God, Thomism came to seem the perfect weapon for the pope against Protestantism's radical pessimism about the human mind's capacity to approach the divine. The Society of Jesus (see pp. 665-7) obliged its members to follow Aquinas in theological matters. After all, Thomism fought Protestantism on its own ground, in a shared reverence for Augustine, whose thought had from 1490 been made more widely available to humanists and scholastics alike, through the first scholarly printed edition of all his known works, a formidable task undertaken by the Basel printer Johann Amerbach. No one could have predicted that Augustine would spark a religious revolution. With this new resource, there was a general move among theologians over the next century, whether traditionalist in their scholasticism, humanist or Protestant, to listen afresh to the Bishop of Hippo.
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The problem was what to take from the breadth of Augustine's discussion of the Christian faith. As the twentieth-century Princeton historian of theology B. B. Warfield famously observed, 'The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church.'
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Western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of Augustine's thought mattered more: his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church or the discussion of salvation which lay behind the rebellion by Martin Luther and other theologians in his generation. From one perspective, a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.

REFORMING THE CHURCH IN THE LAST DAYS (1500)

European-wide yearning for renewing the Church long predated Martin Luther's turbulent public career. At the end of the fifteenth century, it was easy to believe that God had some new and decisive purpose for his creation. We have already seen that Orthodox Christians and Muslims were convinced that 1492-3 would witness the end of the world (see pp. 523-4), and even when that milestone passed without apparent incident, the obvious fact remained that 1500 marked a millennium and a half since the presumed date of Christ's birth. To east and south, the Ottoman Turks and other Islamic rulers continued to press in on Christian Europe, relentlessly conquering new territories in the Balkans and terrorizing large swathes of the Mediterranean coast with their piracy.
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Only in the west in Iberia was there Christian success - but this was a spectacular exception, leading to the greatest upheaval of culture and population in the peninsula since the first eruption of Islam, with profound consequences for all Europe. The year 1492 did prove to have a special significance, but not in the way anticipated in Moscow or Constantinople. Centuries of gradual Christian reclamations from the Moors culminated in the capture of the Islamic kingdom of Granada, in the extreme south of the peninsula; the news was celebrated all over Christian Europe. The victorious troops were in the service of two monarchs who had joined in marriage in 1474: Fernando, ruler of eastern Spanish kingdoms, Aragon and Valencia and the principality of Catalonia, and Isabel of Castile, the much larger though mostly much more thinly populated kingdom which ran from north to south through Iberia. Mindful of the symbolism of their victory, they chose their future burial place at the heart of their new conquest on the site of Granada's main mosque, in a splendid chapel which they commissioned alongside a brand-new cathedral (see Plate 57).

Aragon and Castile, precariously united by the joint accession of Fernando and Isabel when they married, remained separate political entities, and there was no reason for them to remain linked when Isabel died. However, the death of her successor, Philip of Burgundy, after only two years resulted in a second union of the crowns under her widower, Fernando; henceforth they were never again divided, and Aragon and Castile could be regarded for external purposes as a single Spanish monarchy. To the west, the kingdom of Portugal, at the remote edge of Europe on the Atlantic seaboard, had won its struggles against the Muslims long before; it had also secured its independence against Castile, and kept that independence until 1580. First Portugal and then the Spanish monarchs launched expeditions across the seas westwards and southwards, which from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries turned Christianity into the first worldwide religion, a story which we will trace in Chapter 19.

Constant medieval warfare against Islam (and the Judaism which it sheltered) gave Spanish Catholicism a militant edge and an intensity of devotional practice not found elsewhere in western Europe. Even after the sequence of medieval reconquest (
Reconquita
) had been largely completed, Iberian Christian culture showed a frequently obsessive suspicion of former members of the rival cultures. In 1391, a particularly vicious wave of anti-Jewish preaching provoked the massacre of around a third of the Jews in Christian Spain, and forced the conversion of another third. Such Jewish converts ('New Christians' or
conversos
: former Muslims were known as
Moriscos
) remained a perennial object of worry, to be scrutinized for doubtful loyalty in any time of heightened tension, despite their theoretical shared membership of the Body of Christ. Even when they were long-established Christians and had rejected all connection with Judaism, 'Old Christians' found a new reason for hating them: they were now eligible rivals for positions of power in Church and commonwealth. In return 'New Christians' were furious that their genuinely held faith and loyalty to the Crown should be questioned, and their fury occasionally erupted into violence.
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