Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (115 page)

Sometimes the story of the Polish Counter-Reformation has indeed been presented as a one-man-band achievement by the Jesuits. This is dangerously oversimplified. In reality, many Polish-Lithuanian Catholics deeply distrusted the Society, which they saw as too inclined to uphold the monarchy or even advocate increases in royal power, and so threaten the liberties of noblemen in the Commonwealth. Poland, after all, from the time of the Council of Florence, had been one of the strongholds of conciliarism (see pp. 560-63), and at the end of the sixteenth century that tradition remained strong in the face of the Jesuits' Tridentine papalism. Yet in a strange paradox only recently perceived by historians, this level of Catholic distrust of the Jesuits, which one might think would have encouraged defections to Protestantism, equally benefited Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania. The Polish Dominicans, long-established in the venerable University of Cracow and in major towns of the Commonwealth, hated the Jesuits, rightly suspecting them of wanting to take over existing Dominican educational institutions, and they frequently obstructed Jesuit work, earning themselves sad and angry royal rebukes. The Dominicans' consistent and open hostility to the Jesuits demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to be a good Catholic and still detest the Society of Jesus: one did not have to go over to the Protestant side.
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Equally significant was King Sigismund III's triumphant Catholic diplomacy which led to the creation of the Greek Catholic Church in the Commonwealth through the Union of Brest in 1596 (see pp. 534-6). The existence of the Greek Catholic Church, whatever its subsequent troubles in relation to Russian Orthodoxy, meant that there was yet a third possible identity for those Poles and Lithuanians who wished to keep their allegiance to the Holy See in Rome. Ultimately they had the choice of placing their faith in the Society of Jesus, applauding cussed Dominican harassment of the Society, or exercising their religion in churches of Orthodox tradition, adorned with icons, whose clergy wore beards and had wives and families. All these options represented Catholicism. Accordingly, the Catholic Church increasingly flourished in its diversity, while a long slow decay affected the divided ranks of the Protestants in the Commonwealth. Polish constitutional toleration was undermined by the monarchy's steadily more confessional Catholicism and by the circumstance that further dynastic problems, which gave the kings of Sweden a claim to the Polish throne, ranged Lutheran Sweden against Poland in war. It was easy in that traumatic era to see Protestantism as an enemy of the Commonwealth's independence. The Socinians were expelled en masse from the Commonwealth in 1660, although in their dispersal they were to have a remarkable effect on western Europe and the Christian story generally (see pp. 778-9). This sign of a new intolerance in Poland-Lithuania came amid the growing stream of conversions back to Catholicism among its Protestant elites.

Thus the future of Poland, once such a fertile seminary of Protestant experiment, proved against all the odds to be bound into that of the Catholic Church. When the political institutions of Poland-Lithuania were wrecked and then utterly destroyed by the selfish acquisitiveness of eighteenth-century monarchs in Prussia, Russia and Austria, the Catholic Church was all the Poles and Lithuanians had left to carry forward the identity of their once-mighty commonwealth. One extraordinary twentieth-century product of the alliance between Polish national identity and an increasingly monolithic Catholic Church was the career of Karol Wojtyla, who as Pope John Paul II might be seen as a belated embodiment of the Counter-Reformation (see pp. 994-1000). Yet beyond his quarter-century papacy, the consequences of destroying the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and of the painful rebuilding of national identities in eastern Europe aided by the Catholic and Greek Catholic Churches, are still unfolding in the politics of our own age.

LIVES SEPARATED: SAINTS, SPLENDOUR, SEX AND WITCHES

The Reformation and Catholic Reformation dividing Latin Christendom, previously remarkably united across a whole continent, produced a rift in the rhythms of life to a degree without parallel in Christian history. The shape of the year became experienced in very different ways in Protestant and Catholic regions. Protestant societies which had rejected the power of the saints observed few or no saints' days, so holidays ceased to be the 'holy days' of the saints and some (usually not many) were reinvented as Protestant feasts. In England, yearly November bonfires and celebrations reminded the English of their new Protestant heritage in defeating the Spanish Armada (1588), foiling a Roman Catholic who tried to blow up the king and Parliament (1605) and eventually ejecting a Roman Catholic king who appeared to threaten the whole Protestant settlement of the British Isles (1688). By contrast, the Europe loyal to Rome discovered new saints and festivals to emphasize that loyalty. A happy coincidence helped: in 1578 a large number of Christian catacombs (see p. 160), almost unknown for centuries, were rediscovered beneath the soil of Rome and seemed to be full of the bones of early Christian martyrs. The bones were exported all over the Catholic world, a great morale-booster against Protestants in underlining the glorious history of suffering in the Roman Church, and they were joined in their fruitful travels by countless fragments of Ursula's eleven thousand virgins from Cologne. The Jesuits were chief brokers in this sacred commerce.
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The greatest separation came in the way in which Protestants and Catholics approached their God in church. In most Reformed Churches, it quickly became the norm to lock church buildings between services to discourage superstitious devotions by individuals who did not have the benefit of community instruction from the pulpit (and those who tried were often punished). This went hand in hand with the drastic slimming down of the Protestant ministry in the interests of greater professionalism in preaching: churches were there for sermons and the occasional community Eucharist. Their most prominent piece of furniture was not an altar but a pulpit. With varying degrees of thoroughness, Lutheran church interiors tended to be remoulded in this pattern, as were parish churches in the Church of England, increasingly ambiguous in its Reformed identity though it was.
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By contrast, Catholic churches continued as in the pre-Reformation past to be open and available for private devotions between the frequent communal liturgical acts. As before, there would be plenty of clergy for laypeople to encounter on the premises. Priest-confessors would commonly be available to relieve afflicted consciences, increasingly using a new piece of liturgical furniture, an enclosed double box with a communicating grille hiding the identity of priest and penitent, which was pioneered by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo for his archdiocese of Milan, as part of his intensification of confessional discipline for the faithful.
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Borromeo's penchant for order was paired in Counter-Reformation Catholicism with a carefully regulated enthusiasm for the extrovert. Counter-Reformation clergy and their architects, anxious to harness and concentrate the devotional enthusiasm of its people, swept away the screens of medieval churches which obstructed congregations' view of the high altar in church. They placed the tabernacle of the reserved eucharistic Sacrament on the altar itself, where previously the tabernacle had often been separate from it. So the high altar became overwhelmingly the visual focus of a Counter-Reformation church, just as the single altar had been in the early basilicas, though the Western Church's medieval host of side altars remained undisturbed. After some initial gestures towards remedying late medieval excesses in architecture and music by greater austerity, Catholics realized that splendour was one of their chief assets. Worship in Catholic churches became ever more expressive of the power and magnificence of the Church, as a backdrop to feast and fast.

The city of Rome, enhanced by its newly discovered martyrs and receiving crowds of pilgrims to its ancient holy places, was the greatest of all these Catholic theatre sets. It now became ever more stately after centuries of decay, through a huge investment in building. This was led by the papacy and aided by the wealth of the cardinals resident in the city, who paid particular attention to the various parish churches of which they were theoretically the parish priests, together with palaces to provide a suitable backdrop for their own lives of splendour. The centrepiece of Rome was not its cathedral of St John Lateran, grand though that was, but the triumphant (not to say triumphalist) completion of the new St Peter's Basilica. Between 1602 and 1615, this was hugely extended by Carlo Maderno, westwards from the earlier centrally domed building designed by Donato Bramante and Michelangelo and slowly completed over the previous hundred years. Maderno's least happy achievement is the basilica's western facade, which partly thanks to problems with its foundations that became apparent during its construction, fails to soar or inspire. Yet the resulting architectural bathos was redeemed within half a century by being fronted with one of the most extraordinary public spaces not just of the Counter-Reformation, but of all Christian architecture.

This oval colonnaded piazza was designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini, Baroque architect of genius as well as inspired sculptor. Bernini had already provided the chief coup de theatre of the basilica's interior, the monumental bronze canopy or baldachino over the high altar and tomb of St Peter. His piazza, which he artfully extended at either end by smaller funnel-shaped piazze, so that it could lead up to the basilica and still fit round older buildings impossible to pull down, brilliantly performs two functions. It provides a breathtaking pathway to the basilica from the River Tiber (an effect helpfully enhanced by Mussolini's modern demolitions), but it is also a space capable of holding thousands of pilgrims, ready for their glimpse of the pope if he chooses to appear at one of the windows of the Vatican Palace, which rather untidily looms above the south colonnade. Over the last century, the technology of amplification has made this piazza an especially effective dramatic backdrop for the pope when he communicates from his palace with a constantly changing multitude of the faithful from all over the world, week by week eager to pray with him or cheer to the skies his greetings and devotional and ethical pronouncements. No other modern Christian leader enjoys a setting so ready-made for dominating his flock, although some contemporary Pentecostals and televangelists have done their best. The combination of microphone and Baroque architectural magnificence offers formidable obstacles to overcome, should any future pope wish to depart from the monarchical style to which the Bishops of Rome have become accustomed.

Jesuits, who had initially been discouraged by Ignatius even from celebrating sung High Masses in their churches because of his fears of excessive elaboration, enthusiastically adopted the new extrovert strategy of the Church in tackling the problem of formalization of religious practice and indifference. Taking their cue from an order of priests known as Barnabites, who had been another product of the Italian renewal movements of the 1530s, the Society began drawing on every device of dramatic sensation to capture the imaginations of people who had a fixed idea of what the Church represented, and apparently thought little about it. They staged spectacular devotional missions, seizing the churches and streets of a particular community and its locality for days or even weeks on end. The Jesuits became actors and showmen: their visit must be a heart-stopping special occasion, bringing God's circus to town. This was carnival, but the carnival employed that ultimate carnivalesque reversal of human hierarchies, in which all humanity is laid low in death, as Jesuit preachers pitilessly reminded their enthralled audiences from pulpit or market cross. The Church offered the remedy: its contact with the divine, summed up in the consecrated Host exhibited amid a blaze of candles, promised hope and salvation. Although the means of salvation differed, the histrionics and the saving of the desperate from despair were not dissimilar in their message from themes prominent in the revivals which Protestants began to foment a century later (see chapter 20).
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Time itself was divided by the Reformation. An energetic and intellectually curious pope, Gregory XIII, took it upon himself, with the new-found papal confidence of the Counter-Reformation, to reform the deficiencies of the existing Julian calendar, from 15 October 1582. He was much concerned for unity with the Eastern Churches, that process which indeed did produce the Union of Brest under his one of his successors fourteen years later. So to emphasize the temporal as well as ecclesiastical role of the papacy as focus for world unity, Gregory decided to model himself on Constantine the Great. According to Eusebius, Constantine had been commanded by God to convene the Council of Nicaea in order to fix a universally reliable date for Easter in the face of the Julian calendar's inaccuracy. Unsurprisingly, Protestants took the papacy's overdue scientific correction as a sinister plot. They took a long time to accept it, at different dates in different parts of Europe, to the despair of later historians trying to work out relative dates in documents. In England, the delay extended to 1752, over 150 years after the more Protestant but also more logical Scots had accepted (without obvious public gratitude) that the Pope was right.
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Having made the correct scientific decision over the calendar, Rome made a disastrous miscalculation in its treatment of the great Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for providing empirical evidence for the radical revision of cosmology proposed by the long-dead Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1616 the Church had belatedly declared Copernicus to be in error; the Roman authorities then forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved round the sun and not the other way round, because his observations challenged the Church's authority as the source of truth. There were good theological reasons why they should reject heliocentric theory: the Bible presents creation in moral terms, and depicts a cosmic drama of sin and redemption centred on God's relationship with humankind. It was not unreasonable to assume that in his creation, he would have made the planet earth, the stage for that drama, the centre of his universe, rather than a morally neutral fiery disc.