The Counter-Reformation
was given its name by Protestant historians who assumed that it was born to oppose the Protestant Reformation. Catholic historians see it differently, as the second stage of a movement for Church reform which had a continuous history from the conciliarists of the late fourteenth century to the Council of Trent. One must stress, however, that the Counter-Reformation was not some sort of autarkic historical engine operating in isolation. Like the Renaissance and the Reformation, it interacted with all the other great phenomena of the age.
The paralysis reigning at the centre of the Catholic Church eased during the pontificate of Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, 1534–49). Known as ‘Cardinal Petticoat’, Paul III was a flagrant nepotist, brother of a papal concubine, and the lavish patron of Michelangelo and Titian. At the same time he saw the urgency of change. He revitalized the Sacred College, commissioned the key inquiry into Church reform,
Consilium de emendanda ecclesia
(1537), patronized the Jesuits, established the Holy Office, and launched the Council of Trent. Until the 1530s the Sacred College of Cardinals, which elected the Popes, was one of the Church’s weaker pillars. But with its budget cut, and its numbers increased by several brilliant appointments, it became the Vatican’s power-house for change. Its outstanding names included Cardinals Caraffa (later Paul IV, 1555–9), Cervini (later Marcellus II, 1555), and the Englishman Reginald Pole, who missed election in 1550 by one vote. The next run of popes was of a different stamp. Pius IV (1559–65) did not hesitate to condemn to death the criminal nephews of his predecessor. The austere and fanatical Pius V (1566–72), sometime Inquisitor-General who walked barefoot in Rome, was later canonized. Gregory XIII (1572–85), who rejoiced at the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, was wholly political.
The Society of Jesus has been called the
corps d’élite
of Catholic Reform. It combined the fierce piety and military lifestyle of its Basque founder, Íñigo López de Recalde (St Ignatius Loyola, 1491–1556), author of the
Spiritual Exercises
(1523). Approved in 1540 by Paul Ill’s Bull
Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae
, it operated under direct papal command. Its members were organized in ranks under their General, and were trained to think of themselves as ‘companions of Jesus’. Their aims were to convert the heathen, to reconvert the lapsed, and, above all, to educate. Within a few decades of their formation, their missionaries appeared all over the world from Mexico to Japan. Their colleges sprang up in every corner of Catholic Europe, from Braganza to Kiev. ‘I have never left the Army,’ said St Ignatius; ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ And elsewhere: ‘Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever.’ At his canonization it was said, ‘Ignatius had a heart large enough to hold the universe.’
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Despite their successes, the Jesuits aroused immense fear and resentment, among Catholics as well as Protestants. They were famed for their casuistry in dispute, and were widely thought to hold that ‘the end justifies the means’. They came to be seen as the Church’s secret thought police, accountable to no one. Already in 1612 the forged
Monita Secreta
, published in Cracow, purported to reveal the instructions of their worldwide conspiracy under the formidable General Acquaviva, ‘the Black Pope’. The Society was suppressed in 1773 but restored in 1814.
The Holy Office was established in 1542 as the supreme court of appeal in matters of heresy. Staffed by leading cardinals, it assumed supervision of the Inquisition and in 1557 issued the first Index, the list of prohibited books. In 1588 it became one of the nine reorganized Congregations, or executive departments of the Roman Curia. It worked alongside the Office for the Propagation of the Faith, which was charged with converting the heathen and heretics,
[INDEX] [INQUISITIO] [PROPAGANDA]
The Council of Trent, which met in three sessions, 1545–7,1551–2, and 1562–3, was the General Council for which Church reformers had been praying for decades. It provided the doctrinal definitions and the institutional structures which enabled the Roman Church to revive and to meet the Protestant challenge. Its decrees on doctrine were largely conservative. It confirmed that the Church alone could interpret the Scriptures, and that religious truth derived from Catholic tradition as well as from the Bible. It upheld traditional views of original sin, justification, and merit, and rejected the various Protestant alternatives to transubstantiation during the Eucharist. Its decrees on organization reformed the Church orders, regularized the appointment of bishops, and established seminaries in every diocese. Its decrees on the form of the Mass, contained in a new Catechism and a revised Breviary, affected the lives of ordinary Catholics most directly. After 1563 the same Latin Tridentine Mass could be heard in most Roman Catholic churches throughout the world.
Critics of the Council of Trent point to its neglect of practical ethics, its failure to give Catholics a moral code to match that of the Protestants. ‘It impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age,’ wrote an English Catholic, ‘and perpetuated … the spirit of an austere immorality.’
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The Protestant historian Ranke stressed the paradox of a Council which had intended to trim the Papacy. Instead, by oaths of loyalty, detailed regulations, and punishments, the entire Catholic hierarchy was subordinated to the Pope. ‘Discipline was restored, but all the faculties of directing it were centred in Rome.’
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Several Catholic monarchs, including Philip II of Spain, so feared the Tridentine decrees that they curtailed their publication.
The particular religious ethos promoted by the Counter-Reformation emphasized the discipline and collective life of the faithful. It reflected the wide powers of enforcement given to the hierarchy, and the outward show of conformity which believers were now required to display. It insisted on regular confession as a sign of submission. It was supported by a wide range of communal practices—
pilgrimages, ceremonies, and processions—and by the calculated theatricality of the accompanying art, architecture, and music. Catholic propaganda of this vintage was strong both on rational argument, and on devices for impressing the senses. The Baroque churches of the era, crammed with altars, columns, statues, cherubs, gold leaf, icons, monstrances, candelabra, and incense, were designed to leave nothing to the private thoughts of the congregation. Unlike the Protestant preachers, who stressed individual conscience and individual probity, all too often the Catholic clergy seemed to urge their flock to blind obedience.
INQUISITIO
S
IXTEENTH-CENTURY SEVILLE.
Jesus Christ has returned to earth, and has been caught performing miracles. He is promptly arrested. The Grand Inquisitor conducts the prisoner’s interrogation in person. ‘Why have you come to meddle with us?’ he asks. And answer received he none.
Among many recriminations, the Inquisitor accuses Christ of misleading people with the gift of Free Will. Man is by nature a rebel and given the choice will always choose the path to damnation. For their own good, he implies, people must be denied their freedom in order to save their souls. ‘Did you forget that a tranquil mind, and a tranquil death, is dearer to Man than freedom in the knowledge of Good and Evil?’
Moreover, the Inquisitor claims, the facts of History support his case. People are too weak to resist temptation. For 1,500 years, they have wallowed in sin and suffering, incapable of heeding Christ’s behests. ‘You promised them bread from Heaven, but can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, vicious, and always ignoble race of men? We are more humane than you.’
The Inquisitor charges that Christ did not rebut the Devil’s challenge, and did not give proof of his Divinity. He failed the threefold test on Mystery, Miracle, and Authority. The Papacy, in fact, is secretly on the Devil’s side. ‘We have been with him, and not with you,’ the Inquisitor reveals, referring to the Catholic-Orthodox Schism, ‘for eight centuries’.
The Inquisitor bitterly foretells the victory of faithless materialism. ‘Do you know that centuries will pass, and mankind will proclaim … that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, and only starving people? “Feed them first, and then demand virtue!” That’s what will be written on the banners with which they will destroy your temple.’
In the Inquisitor’s dungeon, the conclusion seems inevitable.’You have been disgorged from Hell’, he tells Christ; ‘You are a heretic. Tomorrow I shall burn you!’
At the last moment, Christian forgiveness triumphs. Christ kisses the Inquisitor on the cheek. Overcome by the power of love, the Inquisitor relents, and the prison gate is opened….
Such a summary might serve as introductory student notes on ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. The creator of ‘The Legend’ was a young Russian author, Ivan Karamazov, who lived with his father and brothers in the 1860s. The Karamazovs’ own saga, like the ‘Legend’, which forms one of its central episodes, poses the eternal questions of Good and Evil. Father Karamazov is a nasty debauchee, against whom the elder son, Dmitri, has already rebelled. Ivan and Aloysha, Dmitri’s half-brothers, are respectively the sceptical atheist and the trusting optimist. But it is the fourth, bastard son, Smyerdyakov or ‘Stinker’, who kills the Father before killing himself. At the trial, Ivan is racked by guilt for inciting the deed, and tries to take the blame. But in an atrocious miscarriage of justice, the innocent Dmitri is condemned. In a final scene, the family’s children show their elders how to live in harmony.
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The creator of
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880) was Feodor Dostoyevsky.
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In it, he re-worked many of the themes and insights of a lifetime’s writing. In the view of Sigmund Freud, it is ‘the most magnificent novel ever written.’ About the Creator of Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky had no doubts.
Dostoyevsky invented the Grand Inquisitor’s Legend as the vehicle for European literature’s most penetrating critique of the Christian Church. In it, he presages the moral objections to totalitarianism. He imagines a fictional event. It well illustrates the author’s prejudices against Catholicism, but also his belief in the essential unity of Christendom.
On the surface, Dostoyevsky was a Russian chauvinist. He disliked ‘merciless’ Jews; he despised Catholics, especially Poles, whom he often portrayed as criminals; and he hated socialists. He took the Russian Orthodox Church to be what its name proclaimed—the only True Faith. ‘In the West there is no longer any Christianity’, he ranted; ‘Catholicism is transforming itself into idolatry, whilst Protestantism is rapidly changing into atheism and to variable ethics.’
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Allegedly, his formula was: ‘Catholicism = Unity without Freedom. Protestantism = Freedom without Unity; Orthodoxy = Freedom in Unity, Unity in Freedom.’
Many critics consider that Dostoyevsky put the Inquisitor’s arguments more forcefully than Christ’s. In the confrontation between Church and Faith, the Faith appears to lose. This was probably his intention, since he rated logic far lower than belief. ‘Even if it were proved to me that Christ were outside the Truth’, he once wrote, ‘I would still stay with Christ.’
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Dostoyevsky’s critique of the West was unremitting (which may explain his star rating among Western intellectuals). Yet he saw the division of Christendom as an instance of the Evil which would ultimately be overcome. He believed fervently that evil could be conquered. Sin and suffering precede redemption. The scandals of the Church were a necessary prelude to Christian harmony. By this reasoning, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were an indication of Christianity’s ultimate triumph. In his heart of hearts, the old reactionary was a universal Christian, and, in the spiritual sense, a devout European.
Above all, Dostoyevsky believed in the healing power of faith. On the title-page of
The Brothers Karamazov
, he added the verse ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’
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Those same words were carved on his tombstone.
PROPAGANDA
P
ROPAGANDA
is the child of conflicting belief, and of people’s determination to spread their own doctrines against all others. Its origins undoubtedly lay in the religious sphere. It is in essence biased, being most successful when it appeals to hatred and prejudice. It is the antithesis of all honest education and information.
To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed informational arena, it can mobilize all means of communication—printed, spoken, artistic, and visual—and press its claims to maximum advantage. To this end, the Roman
Officium de Propaganda Fidei
, from which the term derives, worked alongside the Inquisition. It became one of the Vatican’s permanent congregations in 1622.
Propaganda was no less prevalent in Protestant and Orthodox countries, where the Churches were subordinated to state power. Political propaganda, too, had always existed, though without the name. It was boosted by printing, and later by newspapers and broadsheets. It was most in evidence in wartime, especially during civil and religious wars. During the 1790s, French soldiers were given to appearing in the enemy camp armed only with leaflets.
In the twentieth century, the scope for propaganda was dramatically expanded by the advent of new media, such as film, radio, and TV; by the techniques of marketing, mass persuasion, commercial advertising, and ‘PR’; by the appearance of Utopian ideologies; and by the ruthlessness of the totalitarian state. ‘Total propaganda’ and the art of ‘the Big Lie’ was pioneered by the Bolsheviks. Lenin, after Plekhanov, distinguished between the high-powered propagandist, who devised the strategy, and the low-level agitator, who put it into practice. Where Soviet
agitprop
led, the Fascists were quick to follow.
Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
In this regard, one of the supreme masters acknowledged his antecedents. ‘The Catholic Church keeps going’, said Dr Goebbels, ‘because it has been repeating the same thing for two thousand years. The National Socialist Party must do likewise.’
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One of the more insidious forms of propaganda, however, is that where the true sources of information are hidden from recipients and propagators alike. This genre of so-called ‘covertly directed propaganda’ aims to mobilize a network of unsuspecting ‘agents of influence’ who pass on the desired message as if they were acting spontaneously. By feigning a coincidence of views with those of the target society, which it seeks to subvert, and by pandering to the proclivities of key individuals, it can suborn a dominant élite of opinion-makers by stealth.
Such, it seems, was the chosen method of Stalin’s propaganda chiefs who spun their webs among the cultural circles of leading Western countries from the 1920s onwards. The chief controller in the field was an apparently harmless German Communist, an erstwhile colleague of Lenin in Switzerland and sometime acquaintance of Dr Goebbels in the Reichstag, Willi Munzenberg (1889–1940). Working alongside Soviet spies, he perfected the art of doing secret business in the open. He set the agenda of a series of campaigns against ‘Anti-militarism’, ‘Anti-imperialism’, and above all ‘Anti-fascism’, homing in on a handful of receptive milieux in Berlin, Paris, and London. His principal dupes and recruits, dubbed ‘fellow-travellers’ by the sceptics, rarely joined the Communist Party and would indignantly deny being manipulated. They included writers, artists, editors, left-wing publishers, and carefully selected celebrities—hence Romain Rolland, Louis Aragón, André Malraux, Heinrich Mann, Berthold Brecht, Anthony Blunt, Harold Laski, Claud Cockburn, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and half the Bloomsbury Set. Since all attracted strings of acolytes, dubbed ‘Innocents’ Clubs’, they achieved a ripple effect that was aptly called ‘rabbit breeding’. The ultimate goal has been nicely defined; ‘to create for the right-thinking, non-communist West the dominating political prejudice of the era: the belief that any opinion that happened to serve … the Soviet Union was derived from the most essential elements of human decency.’
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Such cynicism has few parallels. It can be judged by the fate which the Great Leader reserved for all his most devoted propagandists such as Karol Radek, and probably Munzenberg himself, who was found mysteriously hanged in the French mountains. Brecht’s comment on Stalin’s victims was less of a joke than he thought. ‘The more innocent they are’, he wrote, ‘the more they deserve to be shot’.
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