Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (116 page)

Yet Galileo's observations represented reality. Obstinately he turned his humiliation by the Roman authorities to positive use: after they had forced him in 1633 to abject recantation for the boisterous boldness of his astronomical discussions in the
Discorsi
, he set to work in house arrest secretly producing a new version, calmly discussing the physics of motion. This last work before his death was perhaps his greatest contribution to Western thought: an enterprise of truly rational investigation of empirical evidence, ignoring the pressure from powerful traditional authority. It anticipated the detached investigation of phenomena which has become one of the hallmarks of Europe's Enlightenment culture. Were it not for the papacy's defensiveness after Luther's rebellion, it is unlikely that the Catholic Church would have made such a major mistake. Galileo's trial also happened during the Thirty Years War, a destructive battle for the soul of central Europe between Catholic and Protestant, and a time when the Pope was feeling unusually vulnerable. Protestants should not be too quick to sneer at Pope Urban VIII, because much Protestant scholarship showed itself just as suspicious of the new science of observation.
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For there was much to unite the Church of Rome and the magisterial Reformations, both Lutheran and Reformed. Both sides based their beliefs on the pronouncements of the Bible, however much they disagreed on what the Bible meant. Those who appeared to challenge that authority, like radical Christians or Galileo, could expect to find themselves regarded as enemies of God. Both sides remained suspicious and contemptuous of other religions, although Protestants generally were more inclined to tolerate Jews because they found Jewish biblical scholarship a useful tool against Catholics. The Reformed in particular, thanks to their various political troubles, came to have the same experience of exile and loss as they saw in the history and present experience of the Jewish people.
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Such impulses notwithstanding, there was still a powerful hankering for a restoration of a lost Christendom which would be characterized by a single God-given order on both sides of the Reformation. Europe became a newly intensively regulated society, as Catholics and Protestants vied with each other to show just how moral a society they could create. More than a century ago, the sociologist Max Weber wrote at length to argue for a fundamental difference between the two religious groupings, which resulted in Reformed Protestants becoming identified with self-discipline and a 'spirit of capitalism', and Protestants associated with a highly regulated 'work ethic' rarely possessed by Catholics. The notion still holds some sway in popular consciousness, but detailed acquaintance with the story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation makes it dissolve into qualification and contradiction; it is an idea best avoided. Discipline and the urge to order people's lives were ecumenical qualities.
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One motive for this had little to do with the Reformation and much to do with that newly rampant sexually transmitted disease syphilis, which generated much anxiety about social habits. Also echoing in the minds of rulers was Erasmus's rhetorical question, 'What is the state but a great monastery?' (see p. 600). When Protestants closed the old monasteries en masse, that question became all the more pressing - including subsidiary problems, such as how Protestant societies would relieve the poor or disabled if there were no religious houses or confraternities dependent on the soul-prayer industry to do the job. Protestants had another new reason for unease and social regulation, because they were shifting the moral emphasis in sexuality. When they closed celibate communities and proclaimed that clergy were no different from other men and should make a practical demonstration of a theological point by getting married, they were prioritizing heterosexual marriage over celibacy: indeed, casting a large question mark against the motives for compulsory celibacy. Protestant ministers were soon in the habit of growing substantial beards to back up their theology.
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Both sides of the religious divide energetically shut down the brothels which the medieval Church had licensed as a safety valve for society (though brothels had a way of discreetly reopening). Both sides stepped up the pressures to suppress male homosexuality, the celibate Catholic clergy especially terrified of anything which might justify Protestant slurs on their sexual inclinations. In self-defence, Catholics could point to a long tradition of discussion and celebration of the family, but Protestants could point to an innovation which was distinctly theirs in Western Christendom, and which overall proved a real success: their reestablishment of the clerical family. The parsonage was a new model for Europe's family life. It was perhaps not the most comfortable place to live, on a modest income and under constant public gaze, but children grew up there surrounded by books and earnest conversation, inheriting the assumption that life was to be lived strenuously for the benefit of an entire community - not least in telling that community what to do, whether the advice was welcome or not. It was not surprising that clerical and academic dynasties quickly grew up in Protestant Europe, and that thoughtful and often troubled, rather self-conscious parsonage children took their place in a wider service. Such personalities as John and Charles Wesley, Gilbert and William Tennent, a trio of Bronte novelists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr took their restlessness and driven sense of duty into very varied rebuildings of Western society and consciousness, not all of which their parents might have applauded.

One of the aspects of Reformation in which there are the most puzzling connections between Catholic and Protestant is in the treatment of witches. Both sides, with honourable exceptions such as Martin Luther and the Spanish Inquisition (an unpredictable combination), moved from the general medieval belief in witches to a new pursuit, persecution and execution of people thought to be witches. Encouraged by the precedent of medieval scholarly analysis dating back to the fourteenth century (see p. 420), they considered these unfortunates to be agents of the Devil. It is remarkable how seriously Protestants fearful of witchcraft took a misogynistic and rambling textbook on witchcraft written by two pre-Reformation Dominicans, one of whom, Jacobus Sprenger, had also been instrumental in promoting the Marian devotion of the Rosary: this was the egregious
Malleus Maleficarum
('Hammer of Witches'), first published in Strassburg in 1487.
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Maybe forty or fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on witchcraft charges between 1400 and 1800, most noticeably from around 1560, at just about the time when large-scale execution of heretics was coming to an end. The activity had curiously different peaks and troughs in different parts of Europe, and the common stereotype of the witch as a gnarled old woman does not reflect the reality in England that accused were characteristically prosperous or significant figures in their community, though commonly not the most peaceable. If they were indeed elderly women, there was often a long history of accusations against them, but also a sudden lack of male protection when their husbands died.
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A high incidence of witchcraft prosecutions was often found in western European regions, both Protestant and Catholic, which evolved effective systems of court discipline which people living under them would have difficulty in challenging. Individual personalities might then make all the difference. Some of the worst persecutions took place in the Archbishopric of Cologne after it was secured for the Bavarian Wittelsbach family. Ferdinand, Archbishop of Cologne from 1612, was a typical product of the radical Counter-Reformation self-discipline which characterized both his own Wittelsbach dynasty and the more militant Habsburgs in alliance with them (see p. 671). It has been plausibly suggested that these devoutly Catholic rulers were fighting more than the Protestantism which certainly obsessed them: their Jesuit mentors gave them a preoccupation with sin and judgement, now strengthened for the clergy among them by the new demands of a clerical celibacy much more conscientiously maintained than in the pre-Reformation Church. As Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and an array of conscientious Counter-Reformation bishops struggled with their own temptations, witches became symbols of the general temptations which Satan used to torment society.

Among Protestants it took one independent-minded Dutch Reformed minister, Balthazar Bekker, to excoriate witch-hunting in an influential book,
Bewitched World
(1691); this finally shamed many Protestant authorities in Germany into giving up witch trials. The Dutch Reformed Church did not thank him. Their colleagues in the mid-seventeenth-century Church of Scotland had distinguished themselves by one of the most statistically intense persecutions in Europe, which was not unconnected to the Scottish clergy's constant struggle to assert their authority in the kingdom against secular authority. The Scots Kirk had the distinction of inventing that form of torture still popular in the contemporary world, sleep deprivation, in order to extract confessions.
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The pattern in eastern Europe was different again: the paranoia started later, lasted longer and in fact climaxed in the eighteenth century. By then half of those charged with witchcraft in now strongly Catholic Poland ended up being burned, whereas the proportion had been around 4 per cent in the sixteenth century. The 'State without Stakes' was increasingly belying its reputation, in parallel to the decline in its tolerance of religious diversity. The executions ended only with a Polish royal decree in 1776, by which time perhaps around a thousand people had died, a similar figure to that in Hungary and Transylvania through the same period. The eastern persecutions were being fuelled by new crises and social tensions in the lands where Habsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern were remaking the map and disposing of ancient political rivals.

By the end of the seventeenth century, despite losses to Russian Orthodoxy in the east, far more of the religious life of Europe was under Catholic obedience than in 1600. There had been a number of political milestones on that journey: the Union of Brest in 1596, which had seemed to absorb most of the Orthodox of eastern Europe into the Catholic Church; the Battle of White Mountain, which had crushed Bohemian Utraquism in 1620; the Treaty of Westphalia, which restricted Protestant recovery of territory in 1648; the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which repudiated Henri IV's generous vision of two Christian confessions coexisting in a single kingdom. The story was partly of war, high diplomacy, official persecution and coercion; but it was also the result of much patient missionary work, preaching, rebuilding of a devotional life part traditional and part as innovative as anything Protestants did. And those Jesuits, friars or secular priests who laboured in the forests and plains of eastern Europe, or tried to spark fresh vigour into Church life in secretive villages down the heel of Italy, were encouraged to do so because they knew that they were part of a still wider mission. Not for nothing did the Jesuits refer to the remote parts of Europe in which they laboured as the 'Indies' - because the Society had also reached Indies overseas, both India and lands newly named and hitherto unknown to Europeans. The missionary goal was to make a reality of Pope Gregory VII's ancient vision: to see the world turning in obedience to the Church ruled over by Christ's Vicar on earth.

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A Worldwide Faith (1500-1800)

IBERIAN EMPIRES: THE WESTERN CHURCH EXPORTED

The distinctive Christianity of Spain and Portugal in the Iberian peninsula, which during the fifteenth century had destroyed the last non-Christian societies in western Europe, simultaneously began to extend Western Christendom beyond its historic frontiers across the sea. Their successes were in sharp contrast to Christian defeats and contraction in the East. The Portuguese took the lead: their seafaring expertise was forced on them by their exposed position on the Atlantic seaboard and by their homeland's agricultural poverty, but they also had a tradition of successful crusading against Islam. They began in North Africa, capturing the Moroccan commercial centre of Ceuta in 1415, and went on to contest for dominance in African trade, seeing their efforts as a fight for Christianity as well as a quest for wealth. Portuguese ships soon became more ambitious, fuelled in their adventures by the optimistic myth of 'Prester John', an unbeatable ally against Islam (see pp. 284-5), and although he never fulfilled European hopes, the galvanizing effect was enough. The Portuguese eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope, reaching India by 1498 and sailing around the Chinese coast by 1513. In 1500 they made their first landing on the east coast of what later became their colony of Brazil.

Once abroad, the Portuguese turned their crusading ethos to religious intolerance as extreme as anywhere in western Europe. Having established a secure Indian base in Goa in 1510, they massacred six thousand Muslims, and by mid-century they had also forbidden the practice of Hinduism in Portuguese royal dominions; for good measure they despised and severely harassed the heretical 'Nestorian' Dyophysite Christians of India.
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If later Christian missions based on the worldwide Portuguese Empire showed a certain humility and caution in their operations, it was largely because the Portuguese never overcame their poverty. Their empire, run on a shoestring, consisted of a motley collection of fortified but under-garrisoned coastal trading posts. The historian Garrett Mattingly once unkindly but accurately commented that by the mid-sixteenth century the King of Portugal had become the proprietor of 'a bankrupt wholesale grocery business'.
²
Consequently the Portuguese usually lacked the military power to impose Christianity over widespread territories or on their African or Asian neighbours, with significant consequences for missionary strategy (see pp. 704-9).