TRENT AND ALL THAT FIFTY YEARS TRYING TO NAME IT
John O'Malley - Weston Jesuit School of Theology
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, March 25, 1998
I am delighted to have been invited to deliver the Archbishop Gerety
Lecture in Ecclesiastical History at the School of Theology of Seton
Hall University, and I want to thank you for having me come. I have put
the Council of Trent in my title for this occasion for several reasons.
The most fundamental is the intrinsic importance of the Council of Trent
for the history of the Catholic church. The words Trent and Tridentine
figure in all serious Catholic theological discourse, but they are also
invoked outside academe, sometimes as battle cries, even by people who
have never read a line of the council's decrees.
The Council of Trent, as you know well, was an official gathering
principally of Roman Catholic bishops, who met in the little town of
Trent in northern Italy. Their meeting stretched out intermittently over
eighteen years, 1545-63, and issued a volume of decrees dealing with a
large number of issues related to Roman Catholic Church, to a great
extent in response to Luther and other Protestant Reformers. Historians
disagree about a lot of things and interpret events differently, but no
historian has ever denied that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and King Henry
VIII set off an explosion that rocked the history of Europe. Among other
things, we are told, they were reacting to the degenerate state of the
Catholic church, which was rotten with abuses.
What about the Catholics? How did they respond to these challenges?
Well, they responded in many ways, but the one historians have tended to
give most attention to is the Council of Trent. What did the Council of
Trent try to do? We are told it did two things: (1) it rejected
Protestant teaching, and (2) it set about reforming the Catholic church
of abuses. Some historians deem the impact of the council so profound
and pervasive that they have called the hundred years from 1545 to 1648
`the era of the Council of Trent' or, more briefly `the Tridentine era'
(tridentinum), thus suggesting the Council affected almost every aspect
of culture. Among the council's decrees, for instance, was one on
religious art, which is often interpreted as inhibiting and restrictive,
as putting the lid on the free creativity of artists, as an attempt to
rein in the achievements of the Renaissance.
My second reason for choosing this topic concerns an anniversary. Three
years ago was the 450th anniversary of the opening of the Council of
Trent, 1545. I thought the anniversary provided an occasion to take a
closer look at early modern catholic culture, usually called Counter
Reformation or Catholic Reformation, and what has been attributed to it.
This is important and appropriate because in my opinion we are right now
at a new historiographical moment regarding that phenomenon, as
historians pursue the subject with an interest and zeal never known
before and apply new categories of interpretation to it.
Two years ago marked another anniversary that even more directly
provided me with my topic and title and also with a procedure that might
allow me to deal intelligibly with such a vast topic in the short space
of a lecture. In 1946, on the occasion of Trent's 400th anniversary,
Hubert Jedin, a German Catholic priest, published a famous pamphlet
entitled Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? (Catholic
Reformation or Counter Reformation?). Jedin's subtitle was "an essay
toward the clarification of the concepts."1 In other words, he was
trying to find out what these terms might mean. Jedin was forty-six at
the time of publication, on his way to becoming perhaps the most
important historian of Catholic Church History in this century. He was
within three years of publishing the first of the four volumes of the
great project of his life, the standard history of the Council of Trent,
which he completed in 1975, five years before his death in 1980.2
What Jedin tried to do in his essay was lay to rest the confusion and
controversy that up to that point had reigned among historians over what
to call "the Catholic side" during the Reformation epoch. His essay
remains the most authoritative statement on the topic, the classic point
of reference for all subsequent discussion. And for fifty years
discussion there has certainly been! Whatever Jedin's essay
accomplished, it did not lay the problem to rest, even though it
continues to have considerable influence, often on scholars and students
unaware they are following Jedin's lead.
Hence my subtitle: `Fifty Years Trying to Name It.' What I am going to
concentrate on this afternoon is the confusion among historians during
the past half-century about what to call `the Catholic side' of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the almost contradictory
interpretations their names for it imply. This may sound abstruse and
irrelevant to you, far removed from what actually happened in those
centuries. In my defense I will simply say to you what I often say to my
students, `What happened is sometimes less important than what people
think happened.' What historians do is tell us what they think happened,
and the first way they do this is by assigning names to what
happened...for instance, by `Middle Ages' historians originally meant a
degenerate slump between the greatness of ancient Rome and Greece and
the greatness of modern times. It was not a neutral term or a term
without content. Terms like "Middle Ages" that we blithely toss around
to designate historical eras did not fall from heaven. They were created
at a certain time and place by flesh-and-blood historians, who operate
to a greater of lesser extent out of the prejudices and limits of their
own cultural situation.
In Jedin's essay he first reviewed the history of the terms or concepts
for designating the Catholic side of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. Here are the highlights of that history. By the middle years
of the eighteenth century Lutheran historians had appropriated
Reformation as the designation for the Protestant side. No term existed
for the Catholic side until in 1776 a German Lutheran jurist named
Johann Stephan Pütter coined Gegenreformationen to mean the return to
the practice of Catholicism in areas once Lutheran imposed by force by
Catholic kings and nobles. Note that Pütter used the word in the plural
(Counter Reformations), for he meant to indicate a series of unconnected
actions, and note also that he gave the word a quite precise and narrow
definition. Counter-Reformation meant exactly what the words say,
Anti-Reformation--more specifically, the military, political and
diplomatic measures Catholics in certain localities were able to
marshall against German Lutherans, measures that culminated in the
Thirty Years War, 1618-48, when Catholics and Lutherans fought each
other furiously and wrought terrible destruction on Germany.
Leopold von Ranke, perhaps the most important and influential historian
of the past two centuries, mediated the entrance of the word Counter
Reformation into the mainstream of historical vocabulary in the early
19th century. He sometimes used it in the singular, thus postulating a
certain unity in Catholic efforts that sprang from three major
sources--the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, and the papacy. He promoted
the tendency to move the term out of its originally narrow definition,
almost identifying it with Catholicism of the late 16th and early 17th
century. For him it meant not merely a phenomenon but also defined an
era of European history: "After the era of the Reformation [1517-1555]
came the era of the Counter Reformation," which he understood to stretch
from 1555 to 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War.
By the end of the 19th century the term had begun to wend its way into
other languages, taking on connotations consonant with these different
cultures--contre-réforme in France, controriforma in Italy,
contrarreforma in Spanish-speaking lands, and Counter Reformation. In
Italy, for instance, where the nineteenth-century battles of the
Risorgimento for Italian unity (which the papacy opposed) were far from
forgotten, Francesco De Sanctis early on and Benedetto Croce later
interpreted the term to signify not so much the opposition of the church
to Protestantism as its opposition to the freedom of the human spirit,
which caused Italy to fall from its cultural preeminence during the
Renaissance into the backwardness, as well as into the literary and
artistic ugliness of the Counter Reformation.
Meanwhile in Germany in the late nineteenth century Eberhard Gothein and
Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, two German Lutherans, picked up on von Ranke's
thesis that the Catholic phenomenon was propelled in part by spiritual
and religious forces--it was not just brute force--and in 1880
Maurenbrecher coined the new term, katholische Reformation, Catholic
Reformation. Maurenbrecher was by the very employment of the term the
first historian to parallel in a broadly influential way the Reformation
with a "Catholic Reformation." Maurenbrecher's usage enraged many of his
fellow Lutherans, for Reformation was so laden with theological
presuppositions in Protestant circles as to mean no rival was possible.
Some Catholic historians also rejected the term, suspicious of its
Protestant origins and assumptions, even denying the possibility that
the church might need reform.
Other historians began using "Catholic Restoration" and "Catholic
Renaissance." Art historians spoke of `baroque catholicism' and
"baroque" in those days was not a complimentary term as an artistic
style, for baroque implied overwrought and florid emotions, bizarre
deviations from classical norms. French historians eschewed Counter
Reformation and Catholic Reformation, preferring terms like Pré-réforme,
Évangélisme, and for the seventeenth century le grand siècle.
British and American historians showed inconsistencies similar to those
in most other cultures but with Counter Reformation tending to
predominate. With volume four of The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908,
"Counter Reformation" received a resignedly reluctant approval in a long
and influential article by J. H. Pollen, an English Jesuit historian
specializing in the Elizabethan period. For Pollen Counter Reformation
actually meant Catholic Reform in the sense of a strictly spiritual
renewal or revival, inspired by saints like Ignatius of Loyola, whom he
calls "its pioneer." It was carried forward by Trent and "great
reforming popes." Pollen never mentioned any punitive institutions like
inquisitions or the banning of books; he paid no attention to art or
literature.
You can see from even such a rapid survey the multiplicity of terms
designating the Catholic side but betraying only the slightest hint of
the almost massive confusion that reigned about what any single term
signified--are we talking about an era or a phenomenon, are we talking
about sainthood or military machines, are we indicating parallels with
Protestantism or radical difference from it, are we talking about
culture or ecclesiastical politics--and, whatever we are talking about,
when did it begin, when end, what was its significance and impact?
Despite the vast diversity within the Reformation, historians of it then
and now seem to have better conceptual instruments for naming it than
those dealing with Catholicism.
It was out of this mess, in any case, that Jedin tried to create order
in 1945. He winnowed through the many terms and then sanctioned Catholic
Reform(ation) and Counter Reformation as best capturing the reality. He
gave them, however, his own definitions and even chronological
boundaries--Catholic Reformation indicated the impulses toward reform of
abuses in the church that began in the late Middle Ages and continued
even into the modern era; Counter Reformation meant the defence of
itself that the Catholic Church had to mount against the Protestant
attack, which first took shape in the middle of the sixteenth century.
You will note that in designating Counter Reformation a "defence," Jedin
deftly redefined the term, which both etymologically and historically
meant not defense but attack.
Although according to Jedin these two realities were in general related
to one another like soul (Catholic Reform) to body (Counter
Reformation), they were sometimes separable. With impeccable logic Jedin
pointed out that Saint Bernardine of Siena, who died in 1444, obviously
had nothing to do with Counter Reformation, but Bernardine was part of
Catholic Reform, part of a spiritual revival that wanted to eliminate
abuses. Moreover, both the Council of Trent and the Society of Jesus
could be described as embodying now Catholic Reform, now Counter
Reformation. The solution he hit upon for the problem was to accept both
terms: the correct designation for the Catholic side was "Catholic
Reformation and Counter Reformation."
Jedin concluded with an assessment of the importance of the Council of
Trent for the phenomenon that allowed him at least implicitly to
introduce and justify a shorter designation for his long-winded
"Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation." That designation was
"The Tridentine Era," or the Era of the Council of Trent." With Jedin
Trent held center stage for whatever happened in Catholicism. He
concluded the essay with a resoundingly positive assessment of
Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation as a kind of spiritual
miracle--ein Wunder--as the Church was rescued from what was, for all
the pre-1517 attempts at reform, a morass of moral, doctrinal, and
disciplinary abuses.
To read the essay today is to be struck again by Jedin's erudition and
careful scholarship but also to realize not only how much more we know
about so many aspects of the sixteenth century than did Jedin and his
generation but especially how the very practice of history has changed.
For all Jedin's learning, he in the essay, as was true of him until his
death, ignored and even disdained French historical writing, which was
on the verge of reshaping the historian's craft. He worked with an
essentially political model of history and took no account of literature
or art or religious sentiment. Moreover, his definition of the key
concept "reform" lacked sharp edge. His essay is badly out of date--yet
we still use the terminology that he inherited, reinterpreted and, along
with many others of course, transmitted to us.
What difference does it make what label we use, I hear you asking?
What's in a name? ("You know what I mean?" as we so often say in
conversation...which usually means we don't know what we mean because we
can't name it). In any case, I pretty much shared that nonchalant
attitude until a few years ago I had several experiences that made me
conclude that there's very much indeed in a name, especially in the
names Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation. I have time, however, to
mention only the most ongoing of these experiences, researching and
writing my book, The First Jesuits. As is often true of historical
research, the book led to me to conclusions I had not altogether
anticipated. Among these was the necessity of jettisoning the two
reasons historians, including Jedin, have for generations adduced as the
reasons the Jesuits came into being, namely, combatting the Reformation
and reforming the Catholic Church. These are the categories, please
observe, applied to Catholicism in general, and then applied to the
Jesuits by osmosis, I came to believe, rather than consideration of the
evidence.
The Jesuits were an association of Catholic priests founded by a
Spaniard named Ignatius of Loyola in the mid-sixteenth century that
quickly spread throughout Europe and sent missionaries to the New World
and Asia. Although historians have often recognized that opposition to
the Reformation was not uppermost in the minds of Loyola and his
companions in their earliest days together, beginning about 1534, I was
surprised to find out just how incidental it was in their program until
about 1555 and how in many or most parts of the world it was a secondary
or non-existent aspect of it even after that date. What did it mean to
missionaries like Francis Xavier in India and Japan, to Matteo Ricci at
the imperial court in Beijing? It never occurred to me to question,
however, that they had always had reform of the church as one of their
great aims. Nonetheless, I gradually began to see how inadequate--nay,
how misleading--"reform of the church" was as a way to describe the
agenda the Jesuits set for themselves. Not only did they never ascribe
to themselves the task of reforming the church or use the expression in
relationship to their Society, but by virtue of certain practical
decisions they took about their way of life they effectively shut
themselves out from undertaking most aspects of that task, as the
expression was understood in the sixteenth century, most notably at the
Council of Trent. Trent's instruments for its reforms were disciplined
bishops and pastors of parishes--Jesuits refused for themselves both
offices, that is, they stayed out of the hierarchy. They steered clear
of "the church," in that sense. The Jesuits did not want to reform the
church, that is, the institution; they wanted to make people better
human beings by being better Christians--which is not the same thing.
Jedin, following on von Ranke, singled out three agents for
Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation--the popes, the Jesuits,
and the Council of Trent. At a certain point he practically identified
them with each other, never suggesting that their interests might be
different, even conflicting. What Trent intended the popes carried out,
with the Jesuits "a powerful instrument in their hands."
But I had come to the conclusion that as a primary designation for the
Jesuits, Jedin's categories were distorting. At about the same time, a
distinguished Italian scholar, Paolo Prodi, published his book called
The Papal Prince, the first really serious examination of the early
modern papacy in almost a hundred years. For Jedin the "renewed" papacy
was the driving force behind both Catholic Reform and Counter
Reformation after 1555. What defined the papacy was that it was animated
by religious and disciplinary ideals of Trent and made decisions
according to them. But according to Prodi, a disciple of Jedin, the
papacy evolved and acted, rather, as a creature of the new social,
political, and cultural situation at the end of the Middle Ages. Prodi
of course does not deny that the popes took an energetic role in
interpreting and enforcing Tridentine legislation, but his thesis is
that the papacy in the early modern era was a protagonist in the new
political reality of Europe and that it began to look like and act like
a modern bureaucratic state. Its reorganization in 1588, after Trent,
for instance, had nothing to do with Trent--that is, with Catholic
Reform or Counter Reformation--but was the result of this bigger
situation.
If Jedin's categories do not adequately capture the Jesuits or the
papacy, I began to suspect that we needed to question the whole
construct--and even devise new terms. This is, in fact, precisely what
some historians had already been doing, beginning long before I caught
on, beginning almost at the moment fifty years ago that Jedin hoped he
had resolved the problem. Even when historians continued to use Catholic
Reform or Counter Reformation or Jedin's combination of the two, they
disturbingly often expressed uneasiness and felt they had to justify
their usage. So often one reads in books: "Yes, I'm calling it Counter
Reformation [that is Anti-Reformation], but I don't mean it." What this
indicates to me is that we are not here dealing with a dead metaphor, as
with Middle Ages, but with a live issue where discontent and discussion
over naming indicate a deeper problem seeking resolution.
Here is the point. All our historiographical categories are of course
impositions on a fluid reality that can never be fully and adequately
captured by them. Nonetheless, among live categories some of more
helpful or at least less misleading than others. It is no accident that
everybody accepts Reformation for "the Protestant side" of early modern
history, even when further categories of analysis like "social
disciplining" help reveal what was going on. It is no accident that none
of the traditional terms for the Catholic side--Catholic Reformation,
Counter Reformation, Catholic Restoration, Baroque Catholicism,
Tridentine Catholicism, and so forth--never seem precisely to fit.
What's in a name? How serious an issue is this? Is it a mere verbal
quibble? I cannot let it go that easily, for I have come to agree with
what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said many years ago, ". . .
definitions--though in form they remain the mere assignment of
names--are at once seen to be the most important part of the subject.
The act of assigning names is in fact the act of choosing the various
complex ideas which are to be the special object of study. The whole
subject depends on such a choice." Names are the definition of what we
are talking about. If name and subject matter do not match, confusion
results.
I think Whitehead's reflections correspond exactly with historians'
experience of writing and research. The important thing is to get the
questions straight--a long, arduous and precarious undertaking in which
one can slip at almost any step. Names are implicit questions, or
answers to implicit questions. Even if they are dismissed as not meaning
what they seem to say (as, for example, historians so often try to do
when they use "Counter Reformation"), I believe they have a subtle way
of focusing attention on certain issues whilst they distract us from
others. They give direction to our research. They can lead us, among
other things, to take the part for the whole. They can seduce us into
that common but most pernicious fallacy in historical writing, the
fallacy of misplaced emphasis.
They sometimes blind us to incongruities staring us in the face, as I
believe happened, for instance, with a placard and painting at the
magnificent "Age of Rubens" exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in
the fall of 1993. Rubens, the great Dutch artist of the early
seventeenth century, was a devout Catholic. The placard entitled
"Painting and the Counter Reformation" described a newly vigorous
Catholic Church that, unlike most Protestant churches, aggressively
brought art and artists into its service and patronized them. It
concluded, however, with the qualification: "Bishops and Church leaders
constantly monitored the `decorum' of religious painting, guarding
against inappropriate imagery and unconventional interpretations." In
other words, they censored it. They censored it to eliminate
`inappropriate imagery,'that is pictures inappropriate for a church
setting. Within three feet of the placard hung Ruben's "The Holy Family
with Saint Anne" from the Prado, done probably in the late 1620's--by
Rubens, the devout Catholic and artist employed on an international
basis by Catholic prelates and princes for just such paintings. In this
painting a frontally nude Jesus stands on his mother's lap with his left
hand caressing her neck. The Virgin Mary is one of Ruben's typically
ample young women in contemporary dress. To steady himself, her infant
son rests his left hand on her exposed right breast. To me, somehow, the
placard and the painting did not quite seem to go together! This is
Counter-Reformation censorship? I cannot imagine this painting (lovely
as it is) being tolerated today in the United States in any church,
Protestant or Catholic.
I am sure that the text that ultimately begot that placard in the Boston
Museum was the single but often quoted line from Trent's decree on
sacred images, which goes, `. . . in the painting of sacred subjects all
sensual appeal must be avoided, so that images are not painted or
adorned with seductive charm.'
Did that line from Trent inhibit artists and result in `reformed' art?
The line was much commented upon in the years immediately after the
council and taken seriously, but it was interpreted differently at
different times and in different places. If the elimination of seductive
charm means covering the human body from head to toe the line does not
seem to have influenced Rubens, or any number of other artists painting
religious, to say nothing of secular subjects under Catholic auspices.
How `tridentine,' how `counter-reformation,' I ask, is the art of the
so-called Counter Reformation?
Well, what has been going on with naming since 1946? The debate
continues over the traditional terms. Out of the many scholars I might
mention, I will single out Paolo Simoncelli, a distinguished and
prolific Italian historian who in the course of a long and important
article ten years ago took sharp issue with Jedin's distinction between
Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation, and especially attacked
"Catholic Reform" as a deceitful euphemism. What Jedin failed to do,
even tried to hide, says Simoncelli, was the intrinsic relationship
between repression and so-called Catholic Reform. Simoncelli thus
rejects the definition of Catholic Reform as Jedin proposed it to mean
essentially a spiritual revival, and he makes it indistinguishable from
the old fashioned definition of Counter Reformation--that is, the
repressive and retrograde actions of the Catholic Church after 1542 or
1555 that turned it into an essentially repressive and retrograde
institution, squashing human freedom and inhibiting cultural
achievement.
Mention of Simoncelli provides an occasion to note that even today these
historiographical debates sometimes seem as much related to contemporary
politics and ideologies as to the religious issues of the past, a
phenomenon especially pronounced in Italy with its almost impassible
line of demarcation between secular and Catholic intellectuals that goes
back at least to the Risorgimento, 150 years ago. On the secular side
especially, the resentments still smolder. Moreover, although Simoncelli
differs utterly from Jedin in his assessment of what was happening, he
argues within the same institutional framework as Jedin did, that is, he
deals directly and head-on with church institutions like the inquisition
and with churchmen like the popes and cardinals. His is, like Jedin's, a
ecclesiastical approach, by somebody who is not himself an ecclesiastic.
Besides this ongoing but, I believe, increasingly sterile debate over
the terms Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation, some historians in
the past fifty years have devised categories that are either more
sharply defined or at least try to be less loaded with ideology. The
most important break-throughs came from Germany and France and began to
appear at about the same time, although the historiographical situation
in France in which that break-through occurred was more radical and
longer in the making.
Let's look at Germany first. Beginning in the late 1950's several German
Catholic historians, notably Ernst Walter Zeeden and Wolfgang Reinhard,
asserted that what is most striking at a distance of 400 years was not
how the Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic churches differed from one
another but how much they resembled each other in their basic structures
and assumptions, in their basic religious and moral styles, in their
efforts to discipline their own members and repel threats from the
outside, in their formulating their own creeds, sometimes called
confessions. These historians speak not of the Age of the Counter
Reformation, not of the Tridentine Age, but of the Confessional Age--as
a more neutral, more precise and at the same time more comprehensive
name than either of the others.
Reinhard and with him the German Lutheran Heinz Schilling have also
given prominence to the term `social disciplining' as an almost defining
characteristic of the Confessional Age. By social disciplining they mean
the imposition of standards of behavior on the laity and lower clergy of
both Catholic and Protestant churches that make them conform to some
abstract norm. It meant restriction and restraint, almost puritanical
observances, and is now being taken as practically a synonym for the
older term, reform. In other words, the upper classes--princes and the
higher clergy of all the churches--tried to make the lower classes
behave.
Characteristic of this approach, which has a wide diffusion especially
in Italy and in scholars studying Italy--and, hence, is particularly
relevant to our subject--is the focus on the institutions that have
traditionally occupied the historians of the religious upheavals of the
16th century--the church and the state--and by church I mean the
official and public institutions of the church in question, for example,
bishops, pastors, elders, tribunals, and, of course official legislative
bodies of the churches like consistories, synods and councils. In other
words, this approach also is strongly ecclesiastical.
Altogether different is the "French approach," of which the so-called
Annales school and its kin are emblematic. The approach was born at the
University of Strasbourg in the 1920's, and created an approach to the
past that differed in almost every respect from what until then was the
reigning orthodoxy, namely, that the proper subject of history was
politics, important events, great men. The new approach would be
multi-disciplinary--economics, sociology, geography, psychology would
all be brought into play. Perhaps even more important, as we see clearly
in retrospect, it set out to dethrone politics-centered, event-centered,
great-men-centered history. It set out to dethrone the unquestioned
primacy of the written political document as the proper source the
historian used--and "political" included the documents of ecclesiastical
politics, broadly understood. To some extent, it set out to study what
we used to call "the common people."
In 1929 Lucien Febvre, a founder of the approach, published one of the
most famous articles ever written about historical approaches to the
Reformation and its Catholic counterpart, whose full title rendered into
English is "A Badly Put Question: The Origins of the French Reformation
and the Problem of the Causes of the Reformation." This passionate
article dismissed as ridiculous the standard thesis that revulsion at
ecclesiastical abuses caused the Reformation.
For Febvre, who had an amazingly positive and uncritical attitude toward
the doctrines and ethos of early Protestantism, the Reformation was
spiritually too powerful to have been caused simply by a reaction to a
bad state of affairs. To understand what happened we must, according to
him, set aside our preoccupation with such institutional factors and
turn to the thoughts, aspirations, and desires of the men and women of
the time. The Reformation succeeded not because it dealt with abuses but
because "it was the outward sign and the work of a profound revolution
in religious sentiment." We must, therefore, study religion, not
churches--sentiment, not institutions--if we hope to understand the
sixteenth century.
Of all the points Febvre scored in his article, one stands out
especially for Jedin's essay and our subject: "abuses" do not explain
what happened. Febvre did not deny that abuses existed, or that both
Martin Luther and the Council of Trent tried to deal with them, but he
displaced them from center to periphery. If what he postulated was true,
then the concept and term "reform," which is nothing other than response
to abuses, needs to move to the background.
Febvre, his disciples, and his fellow travelers--and other French
historian-sociologists like Gabriel Le Bras--nudged scholarship away
from church history to the history of Christianity, from the history of
churchmen to the history of practicing Christians, from the history of
laws, regulations, doctrines and decrees to the history of religious
culture and to the social history of Christianity. In Italy they helped
inspire Don Giuseppe De Luca to formulate a project for the history of
piety, as a history of the love of God.
Of the immense number of historians today influenced by these
developments, two are especially famous--Jean Delumeau and John Bossy.
In 1970 Delumeau published his Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire.
The title itself is significant--"Catholicism," not Catholic
Reformation, not Counter Reformation, not even Catholic Church.
Delumeau's approach scuttles that older terminology--a development whose
significance the English-language editors obliterated when they took it
upon themselves to add a subtitle not found in the French original
Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter
Reformation--an indication of just how difficult it is to effect a shift
in historiographical tradition and nomenclature.
In 1985 John Bossy published his book Christianity in the West,
1400-1700. The very title suggests his relationship to "the French
school." One of the major aims of his book is, like Delumeau, to show
that in the 16th century Christianity underwent a significant change
that had both Protestant and Catholic modes. But Bossy repudiates words
like "abuses," and "reforms"--and he refuses, for reasons that I hope
are clear by now, to use the names he earlier used freely--Counter
Reformation and even Tridentine Catholicism. He dislikes almost any use
of reform or reformation since it implies, for both Protestantism and
Catholicism, that a bad form of Christianity was replaced by a good
form. What he sees happening in the sixteenth century into the
seventeenth, rather, is a movement from more natural, spontaneous,
fraternal realities to things more rationalized, impersonal,
individualistic and bureaucratic. Religion did not of itself cause this
movement but was, rather, one of its many manifestations. It was both
agent and patient in the process.
* * *
The most obvious thing I have tried to show in this rapid and highly
selective review of the past fifty years is how little Jedin's essay
really settled regarding naming the Catholic side. (Just a few months
ago, for instance, R. Po-chia Hsia's new book appeared entitled, The
World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770.) There is much, much more that can
and should be said on this subject, but--breathe a sigh of relief--not
on this occasion. Let me at this juncture move on to indicate, in eight
points, where we are today and where we need to be heading in this
problem of naming, i.e, interpreting, Early Modern Catholicism. By
indicating the problem with the term Early Modern Catholicism, I have of
course tipped my hand as to how we might better deal with it, but more
about that later. Here are the points.
1. The basic question has changed. Fifty years ago the question
historians of all persuasions asked was "What caused the Reformation?"
This meant for our subject, "What in the Catholic Church caused--allowed
or occasioned--the Reformation?" The answer was "abuses." The next
question was "What impact did the Reformation have on the Catholic
Church?" The answer was, it made it reform itself. These questions
resulted in a focus on the church, on "abuses," and on their remedies.
The new question historians are asking, or need to ask, is, quite
simply, "What was Catholicism like?" This new question puts the subject
on an radically new footing. It releases it from the constrictions of
"Catholic Reformation" and "Counter Reformation," Lutheran in origin,
you remember, and also (almost thereby) releases it from the necessity
of attributing everything to the Council of Trent. "What was Catholicism
like--not just in its laws and dogmas, not just in its discipline, but
in its art, in its festivals, in its mystics, in its attitude toward
life and death, in its ordinary folk?" That is what many historians are
asking today.
2. The basic focus has thus to a large extent changed. The traditional
focus was "the church," understood as the institution comprising popes,
bishops, councils and inquisitions (often seen as working hand in glove
with "the state"). Although this focus persists in much German and
Italian historical writing, and in some ways seems to be gaining force
through exploitation of the category of social disciplining, in French
and English-language scholarship attention is being given to "religion."
This means that after seventy years Lucien Febvre's call to study not
church but religion is in some quarters being heeded.
3. These shifts of course point to basic shifts in method. From
traditional "church history" based on a political model (that is, the
church treated like a state), we have moved ever more toward social
history in its various forms, to at least taking some account of
cultural anthropology, to a growing awareness of the contribution of art
history and literary history, and to attending to feminist perspectives,
especially on seventeenth-century France--in other words, to a more
comprehensive approach. This shift has of course occurred in the study
of all historical subjects, so that scholars in our postmodern times
realize they must reckon with a rich multiplicity of perspectives. This
is confusing but unavoidable as well as extremely helpful.
4. These shifts have lead to a change in terminal date. Although Jedin
showed some flexibility in this regard, historians and their textbooks
insisted the Counter Reformation ended in 1648, with the end of the
Thirty Years War. This was a legacy, of course, of the
eighteenth-century and German origin of the term, because that's when
the Thirty Years War ended in Germany. For Germany and perhaps even for
"church" this may make some sense, but not for Catholicism, whose
character evolved along a fairly continuous course until at least well
into the Enlightenment, perhaps until the French Revolution, that is,
throughout early modern history--the dates in Hsia's title, you recall,
end with 1770.
5. A shift is taking place towards a multi-cultural perspective. We now
see that we need to integrate into our purview of Catholicism the
realities symbolized by Bartolomé de las Casas in Latin America, by the
Jesuit painting academy in Nagasaki, Japan, and by Matteo Ricci's
experiment in Beijing, where in the 17th century the Jesuits tried to
assimilate into Christianity what they found best in Chinese
Confucianism. We need to integrate into our understanding not simply how
the European missionaries saw their enterprise but the indigenous
peoples saw the missionaries.
6. A basic shift in perception has taken place. Traditionally the
Catholic phenomenon has been viewed as more monolithic than its many
Protestant counterparts. Fifty years ago Jedin saw the Catholic Church
moving after 1563 with monolithic splendor through three agents: (1) the
decrees of Trent, (2) as implemented by "a renewed papacy," (3) who used
the Jesuits as their agents. This was the "Tridentine Church." This was
Catholicism.
Today we are much more aware of the seemingly endless variety and
diversity within Catholicism. Moreover, many of the characteristics
attributed to Trent and its implementation, such as increased
bureaucratization, surveillance, and punitive institutions are seen now
rather as across-the-board traits of early modern culture and early
modern religion.
Is, for instance, the "severe morality" that supposedly gripped
Catholicism in the late sixteenth century the result of Trent, popes or
Jesuits? Why is it even stronger in John Calvin's Geneva, and why does
it sound so much like Erasmus, the supposedly playful author of `The
Praise of Folly,' the supposedly easy-going humanist? If I had to point
a finger at one person, I would point it at him, the Prince of the
Humanists, who inculcated a stringent morality in season and out of
season when his books were in everybody's hands for a generation and a
half. His repeated excoriations of a supposed lasciviousness in
religious paintings make Trent's few words on the subject seem
lily-livered indeed.
Moreover, while there's no denying in some places and circumstances a
morality and religious sentiment in which skulls, hellfire and brimstone
play a determining part, there's also no denying a more optimistic side,
especially as we enter the seventeenth century. Pamela Jones's recent
study of Federico Borromeo speaks of his "Christian optimism," in
striking contrast to his dour cousin, Saint Charles. This side is
perhaps most manifest in the two greatest Catholic artists--Bernini and
Rubens--working out of the two great centers, Rome and Antwerp. The art
historian John Martin speaks of their "exuberance and voluptuousness,"
of their outlook as "optimistic and expansive."
7. Basic shifts have occurred in our ideas about the agents, process and
rate of change (or continuity). For Jedin the papacy with its Jesuit
agents successfully established the Catholic Reformation as proposed by
Trent. Today we are more aware of resistance to any kind of "reform"
imposed by "the church" and even to "social disciplining" attempted by
any social, ecclesiastical or intellectual elite. "Negotiation" took
place, it seems, at all levels--of bishops with Rome, of pastors with
bishops on the one hand and with their flocks on the other, of accused
with inquisitors, and so forth--with even illiterate villagers emerging
as effective negotiators when their interests were at stake. At the same
time we have become ever more aware especially within Catholicism of
duration and persistent continuity of many of its institutions, slowing
down and conditioning whatever changes took place.
8. A basic shift has occurred in evaluating the character of the changes
within Catholicism. Fifty years ago Catholics seem to have been taken
seriously when they maintained that, while their church might have now
more, now fewer sinners among its members, it did not change in other
ways. Any change that occurred was measured in terms of spiritual, moral
or disciplinary decline or improvement, suggested by Jedin's evaluation
in 1945 of the final result of the Tridentine reform as Ein Wunder--a
moral miracle!
The shift in evaluation that has taken place has two aspects. First,
historians have shown how change occurred on the deeper and more
pervasive levels of basic structures of society and mentality that
affected every aspect of Catholicism--even spirituality was different.
Second, while wary about evaluating with categories like better and
worse, historians have in certain areas rehabilitated the fifteenth
century, seeing religious practice as less superstitious and ignorant
than earlier historians would have conceded--and no reputable historian,
so far as I know, would still see the post-Trent situation as Ein Wunder
in Jedin's sense of almost a moral miracle.
If these are eight ways in which our historiography has changed in the
past fifty years, it has remained consistent in its inconsistency about
how to name "the Catholic side." Still predominating are the old
war-horses Catholic Reform/Reformation and Counter Reformation, but with
the latter rarely appearing in Anglophone authors without a word of
explanation or, more usually, embarrassed apology. Catholic
Reform/Reformation fares somewhat better in North America in this
regard, but with more and more historians either avoiding or explicitly
repudiating it for reasons I have been able only to suggest.
Tridentine Reformation also harkens back to Jedin and, in my opinion,
labors under even more problems than Catholic Reformation. It is truly
amazing, for instance, how many characteristic features of early modern
Catholicism Trent bypasses without mention, such as missionary
evangelization in the newly discovered lands, surely one of the most
distinguishing and important characteristics of early modern
Catholicism. What allowance does Trent make, indeed, for the poet/mystic
John of the Cross? Moreover, the many so-called active orders of nuns
that sprang up in the seventeenth century, like the Daughters of
Charity--few things more tellingly characteristic of modern
Catholicism!--did so despite Trent, not because of it, for Trent decreed
that nuns be strictly cloistered in their convents.
Does all this mean, therefore, that we should utterly jettison Catholic
Reform/Reformation and Counter Reformation, as somebody as distinguished
as Paolo Prodi has recently advocated? I think that would be a mistake,
for when taken in a specific sense, they capture some utterly crucial
aspects of Early Modern Catholicism.
Was there a "Catholic Reform" or, better, Catholic Reforms? The word
reformatio appears too often in the sources to be dismissed, but it had
the rather precise meaning of changes in systems, whether of theology or
discipline, self-consciously undertaken by leadership in order to
improve the behavior and morals of both clergy and laity. That is, by
and large, what the sixteenth century meant by reform, even if we want
to call it social disciplining. There are numerous examples of it, like
John Calvin on the Protestant side. Among Catholics the best known would
be Saint Charles Borromeo's attempt to implement the disciplinary canons
of Trent in the archdiocese of Milan beginning in 1565.
Calvin and Borromeo were thus surely reformers. But was Ignatius of
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits? Only if we wish to apply the name
"reformer" to every religious figure of great intensity and influence,
so that it would apply to Saint Augustine or Saint Francis of Assisi or
Billy Graham. But, if we wish to use the term in an historically precise
way, Ignatius was not a reformer because he was not about a
self-conscious change in system, especially a legal and disciplinary
system. In other words, reform is an appropriate way of naming certain
realities within Early Modern Catholicism, roughly 1400-1700, but it
should not be applied with slap-dash promiscuity. Social disciplining
has the advantage of more precise definition, but it carries with it an
anthropology that tends to reduce all motivation to the will to power.
What about Counter Reformation? It is a bad name for the Catholic
reality after 1550 taken as a totality but a good name for an important
aspect of it. It is a species of those changes self-consciously
undertaken by leadership, in this case, to repel a hostile system and,
if possible, destroy it, or at least to protect the native's against the
enemy's onslaught. It is incontestable this happened in Catholicism and
that it permeated into institutions that antedated 1517 and affected
them, just as it happened in analogous ways in the other churches--or
"confessions"--in the "Confessional Age."
The term should not, however, be used as a synonym for Early Modern
Catholicism. Nor should it be sloppily extended to include everything
that historians might find repressive or artificial or impersonal or
centralizing or bureaucratic or whatever about later Catholicism. These
general characteristics, undoubtedly more prominent than before, were
often riding the tide of larger cultural movements--and can be found in
other churches and in secular political entities. "Confessionalization"
is a wonderful category of analysis, but it moves within the
church-state spheres and it slights the continuity between the
pre-Reformation and the post-Reformation situation in Catholicism.
In a word, Catholicism with its sluggish continuities as well as its new
realities, was bigger than "Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation,"
too big as well to be called "Tridentine," too complex to be reduced to
"social disciplining." Building on recent research and naming, I propose
adding Early Modern Catholicism as an umbrella designation that contains
and validates all the others while at the same time going beyond them.
It suggests both change and continuity and leaves the chronological
question open at both ends, so that it can be further determined for a
given issue in a given locality. It implicitly includes Catholic Reform
and Counter Reformation as important categories of analysis when
precisely defined, while surrendering the attempt to draw too firm a
line between them. It welcomes further categories like
confessionalization and social disciplining, which help offset its
blandness. It is neutral on whether before 1517 all forces were tending,
inevitably and ineluctably, toward the Protestant Reformation and on how
much afterwards in Catholicism was due to it.
It seems more welcoming to the results of history about ordinary men and
women than any of the above categories, which indicate more directly
concerns of ecclesiastical officialdom. It includes better the
burgeoning realities of missions, ministries, art, mysticism, and the
new roles played by women. It is less obviously Eurocentric and can more
easily handle realities symbolized by las Casas in Latin America and
Ricci in China. Even more important, it suggests that important
influences on religious institutions and mentalities were at work in
early modern culture that did not originate with religion and church as
such but that had great impact on them.
At this late point in my lecture, many questions are doubtless occurring
to you--at least I hope they are. For some of you I imagine I see gently
wagging heads, knitted brows and lips pursed to ask, for instance, "What
do we mean by Early?" or "What, by Modern?" or even "What indeed is
Catholicism?" "Our lecturer surely does not think, does he, that Early
Modern Catholicism is an ideologically neutral term?" Or, from those of
you forced by your professor to attend this lecture, "Who cares?"
But maybe there is another question. Does our esteemed lecturer really
believe that Early Modern Catholicism has the slightest chance of
carrying the day? Does he seriously think that his solution will clarify
rather than further obfuscate the problem? Whence and whither this
pride?
Your question, patient listeners, does not come as a surprise to yours
truly. No, I have given it thought. And I have to admit, given the sad
history of the others terms I have described to you, I can hardly be
optimistic about the fate of the term Early Modern Catholicism. All I
can say is that I did not settle upon it a few years ago in order to
back a winner in the naming sweepstakes. I did not enter this fray
because I like a fight but because I found myself unable to avoid it--as
I struggled to define what I was writing about. I settled on Early
Modern Catholicism because for me it captured the breadth of "the
Catholic side" in ways more helpful and less distorting than other names
that I encountered and ultimately had to reject as comprehensive
designations.
The more realistic hope I have is not that Early Modern Catholicism
would triumph as oil upon troubled waters--quite a long shot--but that
by simply proposing it and arguing for it I might move you to look at
the Catholic side more closely and then to speak of it with greater
precision and with greater awareness of its complexity and variety--that
I might alert you to the advantages of the other terms but also to the
subtle but serious problems they pose. Ah, my term still may not be the
best, but perhaps you will at least grant me that it is better than what
I started with--"Trent and All That."
