The Vatican as a World Power/Chapter 11
THE ESCORIAL, AND VERSAILLES
Michaelangelo's dome above St. Peter's Cathedral was finished in 1590. The most majestic crown which ever a metropolitan city wore seems to reach heaven without leaving earth. The reality which it symbolizes has never faded, is alive and forever in consonance with it- self. When the silver trumpets blare down from under its mighty span, they stir hearts which beat in unison with the dead of many gen- erations and with millions of living brethren who in all parts of the world profess the same faith. Pope Sixtus V at whose order the dome was completed, had once been a lowly shepherd boy, and as a Pontiff loved to look at the many roofs outside his window. With Browning he could have said: "How good is life, the mere living"; but he also loved to rule over the living. The successors to his throne, the best of whom have given it increased significance and the worst of whom have not been able to destroy it, have witnessed until now no revolu- tion.
Not far from Madrid the monotonous grandeur of the Escorial rises up over a vast, bare landscape. In this palace Philip II gave form to his idea of world empire but also to his own emotionless, stiff, cold spirit. One is shown a poorly furnished room in which the monarch sat, with his infected leg high up on a support, in an arm-chair under Cellini's great crucifix, and followed divine service at the high altar through an orifice in the wall. The worldly head of the European Counter-reformation could there reflect upon ambitions that had come to naught. The Netherlands had cast off his bloody rule, the ships of the Armada, cumbersome behemoths, had gone out to do battle against the Protestant England of Elizabeth but had been dashed to pieces by the storms. His attempt to establish his own dynasty in France had failed. The Escorial is today a monument to a dream that did not come true.
Visitors to the Palace of Versailles are shown a window from which Louis XVI proclaimed his willingness to bow to the revolutionary will of his people. That day marked the end of the glory which had be- gun with France's victory over Philip, at a rime when a Franco-Spanish league had sought to tear the land asunder from within. Hard pressed.
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Henry III summoned the Protestant Bourbon Henry of Navarre to his aid; and when he himself was murdered, this same Bourbon ascended the throne in 1589 as Henry IV. He quelled the fighting between the religious factions, healed the wounds of a thirty-year-old civil war, granted the Huguenots freedom of religious worship by the Edict of Nantes, and welded the now united national forces together in oppo- sition to the common Spanish foe. But the great achievements of his reign, the strengthening of the crown against the power of the Dukes and the escape from the threatening absorption of France into the Spanish world empire, could not have succeeded had he not been con- verted to the Catholic Church in 1593. When he fell in 1610 by the hand of Ravillac, national France was also a Catholic power. Two princes of the Church, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, managed, un- der the kings who followed Henty, to defend the crown against domes- tic peril at the hands of the nobles, and against foreign peril at the hands of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, clung to the straight course of their policy. His generals led France to power and super-power of a kind Europe had not seen for centuries. But under this absolutism the inner energies of the state, of society, industry,- and of spiritual life were drained. France profited as little from the spirit of Versailles as did the other European states. This Palace of Pleas- ures has since met the same fate that history meted out to its sombre rival, the granite, monastic palace of Philip on the bleak, raw Sierra of Guadarrama.
What attitude did the Papacy adopt toward this wrestling bout between Catholic powers? How did it escape the danger of becoming the vassal of the one and the enemy of the other?
Pope Sixtus V had, as Felice Peretto, herded his father's swine and had then run off to the Franciscans in order to learn how to read and write. He was born in the year Pope Leo X died (1521), and had been a witness to the debate between the Renaissance and the Counter- reformation. He seemed to have reconciled both in his person. From 1551 on he exercised vast influence as a Roman pulpit orator; and those who desired reform the Zelanti met in his cell, among them being Ignatius of Loyola, Charles Borromeo, and Philip Neri. Pope Pius V made him a cardinal and his personal confessor. During
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the reign of Gregory XIII, who had been his opponent, the energies of this indefatigable man were divorced from public life. When he received the tiara they gushed forth again as might a fountain once covered over by a fallen wall.
The Pope swept the Papal States clean of grafters with an iron broom. On the very day he was crowned, four young persons paid the penalty for carrying small-arms, which had long since been for- bidden, on the gallows at San Angelo's. Neither they nor any of the countless others whose heads were seen dangling from poles, trees and fountain monuments in fields and forests, towns and castles, were helped aught by the intercession of the great or the lowly. Similarly he cut in half the army of Sbirri, paid robbers whom his predecessors had mustered; for he invented a system by means of which he cap- tured bandits with bandits. If one of them turned over a fellow in crime to Papal justice, he himself went scot free; and if he then con- tinued his trade either the same fate was meted out to him by another of his tribe, or he was caught in the meshes of the Sistine police. The Pope had set a price on the head of every robber, and this the family or the community to which the criminal belonged had to pay. More- over the towns and magistrates in which damage was done had them- selves to make this good. Thus the inhabitants of the Papal States were mobilized in their own interest, and agreements reached with bordering states rendered it impossible for the bandits to escape. This ruthless system of justice created order and security inside of two years, and the Pope was greatly pleased when ambassadors passing through the Papal States praised both newly acquired assets.
Sixtus obtained the moneys required for the building he did in the Eternal City from fields that were again peaceful, from the resurrected practice of selling offices in the Curia and in the State (which practice the Council arid the theologians combatted in vain), from taxes in- creased to the breaking-point, and from the great savings that accrued from transforming the Papal court into a domicile of monastic sirrt- plicity. He had found the treasury empty because the sums ex- pended by his predecessors for buildings and wars, for the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, for the Jesuit foundations in Rome and throughout Europe, and for help against the Huguenots from the Kings of France (nothing more could be expected from Spain after
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the bankruptcy of 1575) had greatly exceeded the income. The pains taken to replenish the treasury were as great as those spent on rebuild- ing the city. It was, of course, at the cost of irreparable damage to the monuments of antiquity and primitive Christianity that he constructed great aqueducts, the new Lateran palace, the present residence of the Pope, and the Vatican Library. He ordered the completion of the Dome of St. Peter s, and the erection (despite infinite difficulties) of the obelisk of Caligula on its present-day site in the centre of St. Peter's Square. This monolith had once stood in front of the Egyptian Tem- ple of the Sun in Heliopolis, and had then witnessed the races and the martyrdom of Christians in Nero's Circus. By order of the Pope it now bore the inscription, Christtts vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.
Sixtus V is also customarily numbered among the Popes who paid heed to politics and finance. Yet these two matters were not his sole concerns. It was not merely as a builder but also as a reformer of the Curia (which even at the present time is essentially the same in structure and organization as it was when he died) ; and as the founder of a special printing press for the publication of ecclesiastical authors and of the Latin Bible of the Church (Vulgata) he left the imprint of his genius and determination upon the life of the Church. Giving labels to the Pope was something Sixtus already disavowed. "Rome," he wrote in confidence, "sometimes changes usage and methods ac- cording to the individual desires of a Pope, but at bottom it alwayt remains the same. . . The princely testimonials of submission to and reverence for the Holy See are wasted." Thus he was really first and last a politician, who utilized his connections and accepted favours without binding himself to anything.
It was the European concept of the balance of power which de- termined his use of the Papal power. He imposed the ban on Henry of Navarre who despite his "conversion" had again tended toward Protestantism; but the fact that he thereupon established closer relations with Spain, which was fostering a Catholic league in France, was actuated by a hope that he could recover England and the Nether- lands for the Catholic Church. He needed King Philip and he used him cautiously, as a dangerous instrument. This monarch, who was like a Pope in his own country, and could get along without Rome so
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far as the Spanish Church was concerned, remained forever incon- venient but none the less sometimes a welcome supporter. The Pope expressed a fear that the Holy See would have to pay Spain's debts in heaven; but when the great blow against England, to which he himself had urged Philip, had failed, and when France seemed to cling to a Catholic policy, the Pope assumed an attitude of watchful waiting toward the league. The Holy See must not be tied to one nation alone. Spain, however, demanded that the Vatican formally disavow Henry and his followers. Stormy sessions between Sixtus and Oli- varus, Philip's ambassador, followed. The Pope adhered to his pro- gram: "We wish to restore peace in France, but without enslaving it to alien ambition." The time was in all truth past when Catholic dynasties served the Pope for the sake of the Papacy. Though the House of Habsburg remained the protector of the Vatican, it never in doing so transgressed against its own interests. Contrary to Six- tus' hopes the Bourbons failed to respect the obligations involved in the tide of "Most Christian King." Henceforth it was to be the difficult business of the Vatican not to put the Church at the disposi- tion of one of the Catholic houses struggling for hegemony in Europe. The three following pontificates were still dominated by Spanish influence. Then there came Clement VIII (15921605), a distin- guished Florentine of the House of Aldobrandini, and with him the French question was solved. Henry's return to the Church of Rome re-established the balance of power between the two rulers of the West and allowed Papal policy a freer reign. Liberated from the Spanish bondage, Clement could bring about a peace between the monarchs in 1598. Spain's dominance was surrendered completely to France un- der Philip III. Now the king who had become a Catholic soon found occasion to bring the lilies of France into renewed favour at the Roman Court. He aided the Pope to acquire a fief left vacant when the Duke of Este-Ferrara died without children. Under the Papal rule, the flourishing aesthetic activities of the court and city where Tasso had loved, suffered and sang, sank into elegiac stillness. But now in Rome (1600) Giordano Bruno, the fantastic, philosophizing prophet of a God who does not exist, ended his stormy and harassed life in a fire lighted by the Inquisition. This foe of every convention and every certitude stood and fell at the close of the Renaissance as a sym-
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bol of the decomposition of those energies which the time had struggled to unite. Neither from within nor from without did there come to him the saving hand that could have given order to the chaos which he himself was, and which he sought to spread everywhere he set foot on the road between Naples and Oxford. Nor could the seven years which he spent in prison induce this former mendicant friar to return to the Church. On the pyre he turned his face away from the crucifix. Thus the Inquisition, after a long and patient trial, gave another widely influential martyr to that anarchy which calls it- self liberty.
The spirit of Luther no less than that of Loyola compelled the Popes to be on their guard and to proceed on their way uprightly, proof against the inquiries of the woild. Since the days of baroque art there have been no wicked Popes, and few one would hesitate to num- ber among the good. Paul V (1605-1621) a Borghese, wore the tiara as earnestly as did Clement VIII and defended its claims to the verge of sternness. Though his mind was fully awake, he dreamed once again the dream of the unity of power; and the most determined opponent he met in this effort was Paolo Sarpi, a Catholic, a priest and a religious. The Pope was embroiled with all his Italian neighbours, particularly with Venice. Questions concerning jurisdiction, the levy- ing of taxes upon the clergy by the Republic, the damage done to the Venetian printing presses by the growing number of forbidden books, Papal disfavour to liturgical tomes published by the city's famous ed- itors: these and other matters which concerned more deeply the rights of the Church were the reasons why the conflict arose between a too-aggressive Curialism and an arrogant state church.
Councillor to the Republic in religious matters was the Servite monk Sarpi, author of a history of the Council of Trent which is rich in both esprit and malice. A man of calm intellect who had studied logic with the help of the rising natural sciences, he was one of the friends and teachers of the young Galileo. He fought against the ex- cesses of the Papal power which, he maintained, had during the course of time made boundless inroads into the rights of the episcopal office and of civic independence. As a vigorous defender of secular au- thority, which in his view was subservient within its own sphere to no other sovereign save God alone, he encountered Roman theory as
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expounded by the Pope and by the Jesuit, Saint Robert Beilarmine, This theory, he declared, led logically to the dissolution of all secular sovereignty and even of princely power. Venice, represented by this fiery attorney who hated Rome, refused to alter its laws or to extradite the offending priests about whom the struggle really centred. The Pope imposed the ban and the interdict. Sarpi, who was secretly affiliated with the Reformation, wrote a treatise on the theology of the state which gave the boldest expression to reformation ideas. The Doge and the Senate remained firm, and in obedience to their will the clergy also continued to officiate. But the new Orders in the Repub- lic, including the Jesuits, submitted to the Pope; and pursued by the police, they left the city of the lagoons in a few barques. Despite the interdict Venice celebrated the Church feasts with more than usual splendour; and thus the breach seemed almost irreparable. The Cath- olic powers were compelled to intervene lest there be war. The Pope had to content himself with a laconic profession of friendship on the part of Venice, and the Jesuits remained exiles from the city. But a compensating source of comfort for the Pope may well have been the signs of the deepening of Catholic life in those years for example the activity of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, and the rise of new Orders which Pope Paul himself could still confirm.
The retreat of this Pope before the political autonomy of a neigh- bouring state almost seems a prologue to the role of the Papacy in the Thirty Years* War. Like all the religious energies bound up with this tremendous struggle, the Papacy was neither a mover nor a guide of events, but only a means which the parties used to serve their own ends. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the imperilled Catholic Imperial princes saw themselves threatened by a singularly composite coalition against the House of Habsburg. This stretched all the way from Paris to Constantinople, and its allies were France, which was governed part of the rime by cardinals, the Netherlands, the German Calvinists (above all the restless, booty-loving Prince Electors of the Palatinate) , the Calvinist princes of Bohemia and Aus- tria, the prince of Siebenbuergen, and the Turks. When the War began in 1618, Paul V sent handsome sums o money to Emperor Ferdinand and the Catholic League, celebrated the Habsburg victory
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at Prague with a Church service in Rome, and, as a result of a stroke suffered while he marched in the procession, died hoping that a new Catholic unification o the West would be effected. But the devasta- tion of Europe ended with the realization that both confessions were invincible, and that the dream of a Spanish world Empire was over. The powers reached a peace without giving heed to the protest of the Curia against the losses inflicted upon the Church. With the close of the century the second epoch of a universal Papacy was also at an end: the magnificent attempt by the Counter-reformation to enfold the whole of Europe once more in the unity of the Church and its cultural program had failed. Catholic countries, too, fell during the subsequent age of absolutism into subservience to the state and bothered very little about the will or the advice of the Vatican Sovereign as they lived en through the twilight diffused by their ruling princes. But even so the Pope did not cease to govern the Church, nor did the Church cease to grow exteriorly when it could not take deeper root; and some- times out of the depths themselves out of the misery of hearts laden with care there came a cry for faith and for the decisions of Papal authority. Missionary activities, the struggle with absolutism, and the religious movements inside the Church were the major con- cern of the pontificates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Gregory XV (16211623), himself a tired old man, was fortunate enough to be able to entrust Papal affairs to young and diligent hands. His nephew Lodovico Ludovici, a cardinal of princely bearing, was responsible for almost everything accomplished during this brief reign. In exchange for Rome's help in gaining for him the title of Prince- Elector, the ruler of Bavaria presented the rich library of Heidelberg to the Vatican. And the finally completed Basilica of St, Peter's with Maderna's facade served, as did later on Bernini's double colonnade which opens like arms spread wide to welcome the world, as a symbol of the confident hope with which the Papacy now undertook the con- quest of continents across the seas, despite all the losses suffered north of the Alps, in both Eastern and Western Europe. The work of the "Propagation of the Faith" had been inaugurated half a century pre- vious; but now Girolamo de Narni, the great Roman preacher and Capuchin, conceived the idea of developing this institute into a centre for all missionary activities.
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The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622) looked upon the whole earth as its territory. The hierarchically destitute regions of England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and above all the countries o the New World and of Eastern Asia were entrusted to it. The authority of the Papacy had been so great even under the Borgias that Spain and Portugal had invited Alexan- der VI to arbitrate in 1493 their quarrel over the disposition of lands discovered by Columbus. The Pope drew a boundary line from pole to pole, one hundred ten miles west of the Azores. Both countries received from Rome the right to be the patrons of all missionary foundations within their colonies. Everyone knows the sad part played by the Christian conquistadores, and also by many monks who figure in the history of this missionizing work. Pope Paul III had to summon to mind the human rights of the Indians; and during the sixteenth century Las Casas, the fiery Dominican, had to make seven trips to Spain in order to defend the Christianity of the Cross against the Christianity of the Catholic Crown. Jesuit missionary activity in the New World (in Paraguay, where Christian communism throve according to the Utopian plans of St. Thomas More and Campanella) , in Indo-China and in Japan (where the adjustment of the new to the old seemed for a time to involve the merging of religions) re- mained on the whole a torso despite all the heroism, and all the daring and cunning, of the methods used in colonization and civilization. If nothing else had been accomplished but the signal service rendered by the Propaganda to the study of peoples and languages, the incal- culable expenditure of energy would not have been wasted. The Papacy always realized that every missionary activity, whether domes- tic or foreign, cannot prosper without the personal heroism of the few. It canonized or beatified the most successful of these heroes of the Counter-reformation: Ignatius Loyola; his magnificent fellow-Jesuit, Francis Xavier; Teresa of Avila, who both as a mystic and a re- formatrice was a woman of genius; her fellow religious, John of the Cross, who is the classic expounder of Spanish mysticism; and Philip Neri, to whom Goethe paid his glowing tribute.
The wishes and demands of France and its Church exacted more and more attention from the Vatican Chancellery. Richelieu, ten
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times more Frenchman and royal minister than priest and cardinal, determined the conduct of both state and Church in France. He sub* dued the particularistic nobles and likewise put an end to the political power of the Huguenots. Then he combed the lands and the seas for rivals of the Habsburgs and therewith also servants of his own country. Among these were the German Protestants. In so far as was compatible with his fear lest a North German and Scandinavian alliance constitute a great political power, he supported Gustavus Adol- phus against the Emperor. When the Swedish monarch died on the battlefield, Richelieu himself took the leadership of the anti-Imperial party. The Pope endeavoured to bring about an understanding be- tween Habsburgs and Bourbons; but out of deference to France he defined his neutrality ail too strictly. Concerning this his own Curia said indignantly that the King of Sweden displayed more zeal for Lutheranism than did the Holy Father for the faith which alone can save. Thus nothing was really done to stave off the last phase of the struggle the Franco-Swedish war, which had such dire con- sequences for Germany and the Church. None of the millions which Sixtus V had hoarded in San Angelo's reached the Catholic party.
The Pope in question was Urban VIII (1623-1644), a Barberini, whom the splendour and riches of his princely house interested all too greatly. On his study table there were peacefully assembled plans of fortifications, designs for new cannon, sketches for further Roman buildings, poems he himself had written, and Christian hymns of the early Church to which he had given classical forms modelled on his beloved Roman authors. Under his management the Papal States embraced more territory than ever previously, but the most powerful manorial estates in his jurisdiction were soon in the hands of the Barberini. It would seem that war was that with which he most loved to concern himself; and he entertained a veritable passion for armour, fortifications and moulding cannon (unfortunately out of antique bronzes). In Tivoli a firearms factoiy was erected. The rooms of the Vatican Library were turned into arsenals. Neverthe- less when he tried to cany his theories into effect during a war with Parma, which had been forced on him by relatives, he lost. The soul of this man who loved to call himself the Padre Commune was com-
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pounded of contradictions and oppositions. To the Inquisition he allotted the power with which it blackened itself for all time by per- mitting its lawyers to interfere in the rights of the inquiring reason: Galileo, threatened with the torture, renounced as erroneous his de- fense of the Copernican system.
Innocent X (16441655) of the Pamfili family, was obliged to open his reign by placing on trial some of his predecessor's favourites. They were accused of tampering with Papal justice and with the treasury. A saying went the rounds later on that the bees in the Barberini coat of arms had grown so fat because they had sucked their fill of honey during the twenty years of Urban's reign. Nevertheless the accused found a protector in Mazarin, who had a short time previously be- come cardinal and prime minister and who was indebted to their family. They fled to France and the Pope confiscated their offices and goods. Then the French government intervened, the case was quashed, and they were given back all that had been taken from them.
Soon Innocent himself was given reason for not making war on nepotism. Prior to receiving the tiara he had been a cardinal whom everyone respected an active, just man of rich diplomatic experi- ence who was above all criticism; but the imperious will of the woman who now gained control over him was stronger than the goodwill of the seventy-year-old Pontiff. Energy and softness, determination and inability to make up his mind were strangely paired in him. They are revealed in Velasquez's immortal portrait of 1648, with its eyes that speak many things, its long, strong chin, and its refined, inactive hands. Already as a Cardinal he had owed a great deal to Olimpia Maidalchini of Viterbo, his brother's widow, who had brought a great fortune to the house of Pamfili. She knew how to make the Pope pay for it all. Olim pia nunc impia, said the Roman satirists. She became the most powerful personage in the Vatican. Cardinals hung her picture in their rooms, princes and bearers of petitions sought out her favour as a means by which they could attain their ends. Ambassadors visited her first, and courts sent her presents in order to be assured of an audience. Her house well nigh resembled a court for splendour and society; she married her children to rich partners. But as is so often the case with daughters of fortune, she was soon to
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have a rival. This woman also bore the name of Olimpia, belonged to the Aldobrandini family, and was the richest heiress of Rome. The quarrels of these women filled the Papal household. When Innocent bestowed his favour on a distant relative and made him a cardinal, the tumult grew by leaps and bounds. The older Olimpia was des- patched; but the younger Olimpia and her husband were so jealous of the Pope's favourite and distant relative that things did not improve. Accordingly the sister-in-law was sent for again to restore order, but she carried on as she had previously and managed to bring about the fall of the hated favourite. After having lost his newly acquired rank, he had to leave the palace.
Innocent suffered, realized that the situation in which he found himself was utterly incompatible with his dignity, but did not know what to do. While he was weighing plans of battle against his clan he was taken mortally ill. As he lay dying he did not own either a spoon or a dish, possessing nothing beyond the shirt on his body, an old bed quilt and a zinc candlestick. Before he breathed his last even the candlestick had been exchanged for a wooden one. Olimpia ap- proached his bed (ad Olimpia piu che all' Olimpo mirava.no gli occhi del papa) , waited for the final breath, and after the end had come took the Pope's last pennies from under his bed. The corpse was borne on a woebegone bier from the Quirinal to St. Peter's. The cover was so short that the feet protruded. None of the favourites were seen in the little cortege of palace attendants and priests. Three days passed before the funeral. Olimpia did not even want to pay for a wooden casket, excusing herself on the ground that she was a poor widow. The Pope lay in the room in which the Vatican masons kept their tools, stripped of all the pomp in which Velasquez had portrayed him for the benefit of future eras. Out of pity one of the artisans lighted a candle beside the dead man. A stranger paid a watchman to stay with the body and keep the mice away. On the next day, a mon- signor ordered a coffin to be made of poplar wood, and a dismissed rnajorniomo of the Pamfili decided not to repay ill with ill, and gave five scudi to pay for the funeral. Placed on the backs of two donkeys, the corpse was carried after midnight to St. Agnese without any official cortege. This baroque Church, which the Pope himself had built, was to furnish his tomb.
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During the next eighty years, no man of exceptional endowments occupied the See of Peter. There was no lack of storms, and during them the idea of the Papacy lost much of its power everywhere in the world; on the other hand, however, it proved its inner strength by withstanding the upheaval in the Church and the world despite the lack of strong Popes. The historian must rivet his gaze not on these Pontiffs but on the events which filled their time and which affect them rather than are affected by them.
Political and religious life were interwoven most closely and often most undesirably, so that clashes with the claims and rights of Rome were frequent. Against the spirit of parity breathed by the Treaty of Westphalia Pope Innocent X had protested in vain at Cologne through Monsignor Chigi, Nuncio to Germany.
Soon there was no dearth of men honestly concerned with bringing about a reunion between the confessions for the sake of peace. Bishop Bossuet in France and the all too confident Leibnitz are examples. In addition, a number of princes were converted to the Catholic faith, among them Queen Cristina of Sweden, the temperamental daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. Therewith the hope was aroused that a more general return to the Catholic Church would set in. This hope did not materialize for many reasons, among which the theological an- titheses were not the most important* Wholly different habits of mind and forms of human relationship to the Eternal had already cut too deep a gulf between the two camps; and princes, politicians and parliaments did everything they could to widen the breach. It was everywhere fully understood that unity of faith is a guaranty of na- tional unity and strength. This insight fostered attempts to root out heresy at home and to foment it in alien lands. The Bourbons were the best allies the German Protestants had: nothing could have seemed to them more undesirable than that the prayers of the Church for the religious unification of the world should be fulfilled. If religion it- self had already become a means for reaching political ends, could it be avoided that the Papacy, too, should become a means to such ends? Perhaps already at the beginning of the seventeenth century there had been conceded to the great Catholic powers the right to veto a Papal election. This claim to the privilege of barring one candidate at each Conclave was adhered to until 19034. It was an encroachment upon
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the Church's right to self-government, but the danger involved was not so very great since the absolutistic states had already barred Papal influence on any decisions they took and had subordinated the life of the Church to the Business of the State.
When Alexander VII (1655-1667) he had been the Cardinal Chigi we have met as Nuncio at Cologne ascended the Papal throne despite French opposition and then quarrelled with the Duke of Crequi, a more serious conflict was imminent. The Duke was French Am- bassador to Rome, and added seriously to the problems of Papal justice and police administration when he misused his immunity in order to afford protection to criminals. The Pope's Corsican bodyguard sur- rounded the ducal palace and killed several people during a struggle with the retainers. The King conveyed the Nuncio to France, oc- cupied the Papal fiefs of Avignon and Venaissin, and ordered his troops to march on Rome. The Pope ordered the guilty persons executed, but this was not deemed sufficient. He was compelled to disarm his Corsicans, to exile his own brother from the Papal States, to send two cardinals to Paris to sue for peace, and to erect a pillar in Rome on which the insult and the penalty exacted for it are inscribed.
Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi of Pistoja, who had been Papal Secretary of State, was raised to the throne as Clement IX with French support and reigned from 1667-1669. He was unselfishly generous, deeply cultured, and greatly averse to loud display; but he was old, and only two years were granted him to govern beneficently a city which felt the pressure of poverty and rising prices, and a citizenry for which, in every part of the Papal States, he sought to care in accordance with the no- blest principles of social welfare. The pastoral appeal of this man of noble character also carried great weight when die "war which Louis XIV declared against Spain came to an end with the Treaty of Aix- la-Chapelle in 1668. When a furious theological debate between the Jesuits and their spiritual adversaries broke out in France (there will be more to say of this later on) his readiness to meet the Jansenists half way effected a beneficent lull in the argument. The Pope's heart was broken when he realized that despite all the support he had given Venice in its wars against the Turks, and despite all his pleas to the Christian powers for grants of aid in this conflict, the loss of Crete to Islam could not be prevented. After he died men realized the truth
GALLICANI3M
of the inscription around the Pelican which he made his symbol Alliis non sibi Clemens. The Sun-king had, as his own ambassador to Rome declared, appointed this Pope as dictatorically as he might have appointed the chairman of a merchant's guild. Thereafter a grave conflict between the state church and the Papacy was inevitable. Gallicanism was as old as France. Louis XIV surpassed all previous bearers of the French crown in carrying out the political rule that the clergy must be kept under control by the Pope . . . while the Pope was being kept under control by a nationalistic clergy. Clement X (16701676) was a Pontiff who favoured Spain. Louis retorted by venting his animosity on a Vatican so openly sympathic with the enemies of France. The Crown had the right to enjoy the income of a bishopric during an interregnum, and to dispense the religious offices at its disposal. This right was now extended to provinces in which it had never previously been enforced. Ecclesiastical posses- sions were confiscated. The king conferred upon himself full powers to tax Church instances for military purposes, and retained moneys due to Romans who possessed sources of income in France. The clergy bowed before the King in filial loyalty. Kneeling beside Madame dc Montespan in the Chapel at Versailles and blending his prayers with hers, he made up by appearing to be a good Catholic for what he lacked to be a good Christian. Harlay advised him to kiss the Pope's feel and tie his hands! Louis followed the second part of the advice much more assiduously than he did the first. But Pope Innocent XI (1676- 1689) , the irreproachable Cardinal Odescalchi of Lake Como, managed to get both hands free. He was a gentle benefactor whom the people venerated as a saint, but he warded off bankruptcy from the Papal States with a firm hand and resolutely took up the gauntlet which Louis had thrown down. He affirmed his solidarity with two bishops who had refused to obey the Gallican edict and had since lived under a torrent of abuse emanating from the King. Soon the issue became still more decisive it was a question of the Pope's rights vis-a-vis the King. The Gallican clergy were astounded when Rome dared to offend die "oldest son of the Church,** and clamoured for a national Council. Louis summoned ecclesiastical delegates from all the prov- inces to a general assembly of the clergy of France. In 1682 this proclaimed the Liberte dc Feglise Gallicane, which Bossuet condensed
3 02 ROME, THE ESCORIAL, AND VERSAILLES
into four basic tenets and announced by royal edict. In worldly matters the Pope had no authority over kings; his spiritual power was also subordinate to the authority of general Councils; Gallican rights and customs were inviolable; and finally (this declaration was new) the judgment of the Pope in matters of faith was not unchangeable unless the Church concurred in it. These decisions were declared laws of the state, and all colleges and universities were compelled to swear fealty to them. Anyone who wished to obtain the doctorate had to defend them in one of his theses, but in Rome Pope Innocent burned them and refused to confirm the bishops whom the King ap- pointed. After six years the number of vacant dioceses had increased to thirty-five.
Louis' actions did not meet with the world's approval. Therefore he took occasion to prove his Catholic zeal in another way, and pro- ceeded to root out the Protestants. The nature of a unified state could no longer put up with the separate political organization of the Huguenots, who had their own constitution, their own armies and fortresses, and the right to convene Councils. A King so omnipotent and godlike also took it very much amiss that there should be subjects who considered his faith erroneous. Richelieu had only partly de- stroyed their power, and Mazarin had also suffered them to live in peace. This second Cardinal even declared that his red hat did not prevent him from according recognition to the services rendered by the Protestants. But his royal master entertained the ambition to be a new Constanrine and Theodosius, Little by little he curtailed the room inside which the heretics lived. They summoned courage to resist, forcibly reopened their churches which the King had ordered locked, and gathered round their preachers on the ruins of such houses of worship as had been destroyed. The government answered by sending out bloody dragoons, the missionaires bottes to convert them. Madame de Maintenon, mindful of her Calvinist past, condemned this brutal use of force, and was of the same mind in this regard as the Pope. He said that Christ had not employed this method that men must be led into the temple, and not dragged in by the hair. But the use of arms resulted in such numbers of conversions among those who did not go into exile that the Edict of Nantes could be abrogated
THE as meaningless. The future, however, proved the wisdom of those who had looked upon all this critically. Catholic priests, thought Marshal Vauban, might take things easy because they had none to oppose them or watch them. The haste of these conversions, prophesied Pierre Bayle the philosopher, would have as a consequence the spread of infidelity in France.
Louis' mission to the heretics also did not dispose the Pope favourably to Gallican freedom, and new disturbances deepened the misunder- standing. The abuse of immunity by the French embassy in Rome continued, and as a consequence numerous bandits were abroad again. Innocent declared that henceforth he would recognize only such ambassadors as disavowed this right. Most of the states bowed to the Pope's wish as just, but Venice and France opposed it. The threat of the ban did not prevent Louis' ambassador Lavardin from entering the Papal city with eight hundred men armed to the teeth and demanding lodging for them. But when he insisted upon an audience this was refused. Then Lavardin ordered a High Mass read in the French national Church of San Luigi. The Pope imposed the ban on him and placed the church under the interdict. With numerous followers Lavardin marched into St. Peter's and drove out the clergy. In Paris, the Nuncio was treated like a prisoner. The County of Avignon (then administered by Rome) was occupied once more and the Pope was threatened by an army.
Innocent clung firmly to his conviction in this as in the greater dispute. The danger of a French universal monarchy inside which the Pope would play the part of a foreign minister of ceremonies compelled him to join sides with all the enemies of France. Against the intrigues that came from the West, he brought about a union between Poland and Austria, kept the armies of the Emperor and of Sobieski together despite all the offers of bribes that came from Paris, and gave these armies money which enabled them to beat off the last strong attack of the Moslems. It also worked to the detriment of France when he supported the Protestant invasion of William of Orange into England, which was governed by a ruler who had become a Catholic and had promised the Old Church a new dominion over the Islands. But Pope Innocent preferred to bless the ships of William rather than the head of James II, the absolutist, who was Louis' ally and therefore strengthened French absolutism. James might have added an English schism to that which was brewing in France.
The Pope's firm resistance to Gallican claims was rewarded. Under Pope Alexander VIII, Louis surrendered the ambassadorial right to accord refuge and ceded Avignon. Pope Innocent XII lived to see a change of heart in the Bourbon monarch, who had need of the tiara during the quarrel that broke out between France and the Emperor Leopold over the Spanish succession. Louis now agreed to a reconciliation with regard to ecclesiastical matters. The Gallican articles themselves remained in force, but the obligation to teach them was removed and the appointed bishops were permitted to obtain Papal confirmation. In so far, however, as they had participated personally in the Assembly, they had to demonstrate their contriteness to Rome. For the sake of the support he desired, the King gladly permitted them to confess "kneeling at the feet of His Holiness, their inexpressible sorrow."
The War of the Spanish Succession also spread to the Papal States. The Papacy lost its rights to Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and later also to Parma and Piacenza. No attention was paid to the protests of Pope Clement XL Throughout the conflict between France and the Habsburgs, there lingered on, sometimes in association with that conflict, a quarrel of eighty years standing over Jansenism* This was enkindled by a book which Cornelius Jansenius of Holland had written in 1640 concerning the theology of St. Augustine. The book delved deeply into problems which had tormented Luther and which still disturb every pious soul problems concerning the extent to which human nature which has been corrupted by the Fall, concerning the power of the will, concerning the efficacy of grace, and concerning predestination. In Jansenius' book the emphasis was placed on tightness of conscience in the innermost soul, and upon a condition of freedom arrived at by surrender a freedom that is really the necessity which compels the will to love the Eternal Law and the Good in itself. Though he approximated to the point of view of the reformers (Augustine was their source and his) , Jansenius and his friend Vergier de Hauranne of Saint Cyran remained on the whole in conformity with Catholic belief. He placed tradition on the same level with the Bible, demanding merely that it be cleansed of non-essentials. Yet this at- tempt at purification brought him into conflict with the penitential commandments of the Church; and he was still more violently at odds with the ethics, the religious practices and the conduct of the Jesuits.
These had all too greatly lightened the burden of Christ and had thus weakened the strength of the Catholic system. In other words, they had lowered the scale of prices in the realm of eternal values. Their casuistry cleverly increased or lessened the law and the penalty for its breach in accordance with the objectives they sought; and their dialectical skill in finding excuses for real sin, as well as in creating sins when there were none, resulted ultimately in the corruption both of those they controlled and of themselves. The many excellent men who were among them could no longer prevail over those who had lost sight of real values or were themselves errant and insecure. In the same France which had once exiled them as a sect dangerous to the state they now lost their way all too completely amid the moral disarray that surrounded the throne. All too strong a reliance upon secular means, on power, splendour, renown and everything which the pious soul frowns on and the saint smiles at, tempted them to form an alliance with the Caesaristic, semi-Asiatic despotism which prevailed at the Court of Louis. The two great objectives of their society — to fight the battles of the Papacy and to keep the mighty of this world within the Church — were confused, to the injury of both. So eager were the Jesuits to render service to the Court that they forgot die duty of rendering service to the higher absolutism of ethical law. How long would Ambrose or Chrysostom have remained in the position which Auger Coton and Le Tellier occupied under French Kings? Of course one realizes that a body of men whose objectives and energies were confided to thousands of educators, missionaries, confessors, scholars and politicians who affected all parts of civil society more deeply even than did the Huguenot state within a state — because their influence upon human inner life was so much deeper and more secret — could also run the risk of error and of misuse of power. But one can realize also that resistance to such abuses was bound to come. Popes themselves, Alexander VIII and Innocent XII, condemned a o6 ROME, THE ESCORIAL, AND VERSAILLES
long series of questionable, ultra-lax statements contained in the moral treatises of the Jesuits. But the Jansenists took the field against them much more vigorously than did all other antagonists, though numbered among these were most of the Orders of the Church, the universities, and the secular clergy whose own rights had been threatened.
Jansenius' book had also attacked the ethics of the Jesuits and their conception of religion. They avenged themselves by ferreting out his weakness in dogmatic theology, and succeeded in getting Pope Urban VIII to forbid the book. It soon found defenders who ce- mented the religious opponents of Loyola's Order into a party. The headquarters became the Nunnery of Port Royal des Champs outside Paris. This house lay in an amiable, quiet valley surrounded by wooded hills. The spiritual family which gathered here throughout years and decades included such members and friends of the house of Arnauld as Saint-Cyran, Pascal, Racine, Tillemant, It affected the fife of France and of Europe as a whole in innumerable ways. That which differentiates this movement of reform from others that have taken place within the Church is an element of opposition. One could be a Benedictine, a Franciscan or a disciple of Ignatius, without engaging in internecine ecclesiastical strife, but one could not be a Jansenist, a disciple and friend of Port Royal, on the same terms. A profound predilection for the inner life here led customarily to mum- bling and to barking back at that which had driven its protagonists to that inner life by annoying and irritating them. Jansenists who adopted the pose of the Publican standing afar off from the altar, hid in their pockets fists to be used against everything which they did not like either in those who served the temple or in the temple itself. The fact that religion had become more of an institution than of a mystical exchange between God and the soul, and a confident enjoyment of the outward guaranties of salvation rather than an obedient, passive con- dition of the soul, aroused the Jansenist to make exceptions to the uni- versal love and humility which he held on principle. In so far as the piety which had taken on unworthy forms under Jesuit management was concerned, the Jansenists had a good deal of sound reason on their side. On the other hand their insistence on being exceptional, on keeping up opposition, and (one must admit) even on hating, arc limitations of their greatness. They went from one extreme to the
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other. Carried out to its logical conclusion, Jansenism tumbles from protests against the institutionalism of the Church into a dearth of re- gard for the Church as an institution. Criticizing exaggerated views of the values of reason and the will, it gives an answer which proclaims the bankruptcy of human existence. Pascal wrote his Pensees in the name of the universal human condition of moral nakedness; but though these fragments are immemorable and contain lasting truth, they are nevertheless only a fragment of the whole of religion. His Lettres Provinciates, the attack on the Jesuits which he forged and hammered in the name of all his friends, is no product of the virtues which he thought the Jesuits did not possess. It fails to recognize the eternal validity of principles which they had merely brought into ill repute through misuse and over-emphasis.
The Popes in part the same Popes who had found fault with Jesuit casuistry also attacked the Janscnistic maxims. In Port Royal it was not contended that the Pope had no right to condemn these maxims, but it was denied that the Janscnists had ever held the views which Rome attributed to them. When Alexander VII de- cided that error had really been taught, the Jansenists replied that here the teaching authority was manifestly encroaching on the territory of the qttasstio facti, the question as to whether the intention which had been read out of the condemned statements had really been con- tained in them. The Pope's decision aroused much ill-will among the Janscnists; and under Pope Clement X, Rome retreated. The objectionable statements were as always condemned, but the question as to what the real meaning of their author had been was left open. It almost seemed as if there was to be peace between Rome and Port Royal. Then there was issued an edition of the New Testament with commentaries by the Jansenist Quesnel; and this was endorsed by Cardinal Noailles, later on Archbishop of Paris. This edition rapidly became very popular. The Jesuits attacked it violently, some bishops forbade its use and Noailles got into difficulties over it with both Rome and Versailles. At the King's request, the book was ex- amined anew by the Vatican and was condemned, with the connivance of the Jesuits, by the bull Unigcnitus in 1713. The bitter quarrel over Quesnel and the bull lasted until the Archbishop made an uncondi- tional submission before he died in 1728.
3 o8 ROME, THE ESCORIAL, AND VERSAILLES
Meanwhile the State, acting on the counsel o the Jesuits, broke up the community of Port Royal, dispersed the nuns, and razed the buildings to the ground just as if they had been an enemy fortress. The meagre ruins which still stand are traces of a civil war fought out between two camps in the Church which, one of them little, and the other big, today still secretly oppose each other.
AWAY