The Saint of Italy
Bernardino Ochino passed through every stage of religious ascent. Born at Siena, near the birthplace of St. Catherine of Siena, he rivaled her in holiness. He first joined the Franciscans, but finding their discipline too lax and mild for his temperament, he moved to the stricter Capuchins. All the friars of that order regarded his ascetic self-denial and rapt austerity with awe, and when they chose him as their great preacher they felt they had chosen a saint as their leader. His sermons, at Siena, Florence, Venice, Naples and Rome, echoed through all Italy, for nothing equal to them in fervor of faith and eloquence had reached the ears of Italians since Savonarola a hundred years before. Charles V went to hear him; Vittoria Colonna was deeply moved by his words; Pietro Aretino, who had scarcely left a sin untried in his life, was shaken by his preaching and took the road of piety and devotion. No church was large enough to hold his hearers, and no one imagined that such a man would die a heretic.
But in Naples he met Valdes, and through him came to know the works of Luther and Calvin. The belief in salvation by faith suited his spirit, and he pointed it out frequently in his sermons. In 1542 he was summoned before the permanent papal nuncio in Venice and strictly ordered to refrain from any preaching.
Flight over the Alps
Soon afterward Paul III invited him to Rome to confer about the religious views of the Capuchin order. Ochino might have trusted the word of that enlightened pope, but he was gravely afraid of the long arm of the Inquisition, and Cardinal Contarini also warned him of the danger. Suddenly this saint and idol of Italy, meeting Vermigli in Florence, decided to cross the Alps as Vermigli had and reach the land of Protestantism. One of Vittoria Colonna's brothers gave him a horse, and at Ferrara Renee gave him a garment. Ochino went to Zurich and then to Geneva, where he praised and supported the strict, puritanical discipline Calvin wished to establish; but since he knew German better than French, he continued his journey to Basel, Strasbourg and Augsburg, forced to earn his bread by speech or pen. In 1547 Charles V, who had crushed the Protestants at Muhlberg, entered Augsburg as master of all Germany. He learned that a Capuchin friar whose name he had heard in Naples was living in that city as a married man; he ordered the magistrates to arrest him, and they themselves helped Ochino to escape.
He fled to Zurich and then to Basel, and when it seemed his livelihood had been cut off, he received a letter from Archbishop Cranmer inviting him to England. For six years (1547-1553) Ochino served at Canterbury on a salary assigned from church revenues, and meanwhile wrote a book whose influence on Milton's Paradise Lost is strongly evident; but when Mary Tudor came to the throne, he hurried back to Switzerland.
Exile and Death
At Zurich he was taken into a pastor's service, but his ideas, which according to the source rested on a complete unity of God rather than the Christian Trinity, hindered his work; and when he published a dialogue in which the arguments for one view of marriage outweighed those for the other (the source's wording is vague, and the topic is only touched on here), he was dismissed outright. Although it was December (1563), he was ordered to leave Zurich within three weeks. Basel would not shelter him and Nuremberg allowed him only a short stay; Ochino turned with his family toward Poland, which at that time counted as a refuge for "dissenting" thinkers. For a while he preached at Krakow, but when the king ordered the expulsion of all non-Christian foreigners from Poland (1564), he too was banished. On the road from Poland to Moravia three of his four children died of plague. His own turn came two months later, in the town of "Shaku" (the source's spelling, December 1564). In his last days Ochino had said: "My inner wish is to be neither a follower of Bullinger, nor of Calvin, nor of the pope, but only a Christian." And in those days nothing was more perilous than that.
Why Italy Did Not Turn Protestant
Of course Italy could not accept Protestantism. The common people there, though they resented the influence of the clergy, were inwardly religious even if they did not go to church. They found their consolation in sacred rites hallowed by time, in kindly and comforting saints, and in an unshaken belief that sinful man is saved by the sacrifice of his Savior, a belief that freed them from the narrow walls of their poor houses and made them witnesses of the grandest drama ever to enter the human mind. Italy's political dominance over a fiercely religious Spain was itself a factor that kept both peninsulas Catholic. The wealth of the papal government was for Italy a profitable inheritance, and any Italian who proposed dismantling that tribute-collecting machine would have seemed mad to his countrymen.
Although the ruling classes of central Italy contended with the papacy as a political power, they considered Catholicism a vital means of preserving the social order and keeping their rule in peace. They understood that Italian art was born of the inspiring legends of religion and the generous gold of the Church. Catholicism itself had become an art, with its sensuous elements prevailing over its ascetic and theological ones: stained glass, incense, music, architecture, sculpture, painting and even theater were all born in the Church and from the Church, and in their wonderful whole seemed inseparable from it. Italy's artists and scholars did not have to turn away from Catholicism to follow their own taste and thought, for they had clothed Catholicism in the dress of their own art and learning. Hundreds and thousands of scholars and artists flourished under the patronage of bishops, cardinals and popes, and many humanists and some well-mannered skeptics rose to high positions in the Church's service. Italy loved attainable beauty too well to sacrifice itself for unattainable truth.
Had the austere northern reformers, or the stern "little pope" of Geneva (that is, Calvin, as the translator notes), or the harsh ruler on England's throne, really grasped the truth? What wearisome nonsense the northern reformers were reciting, just when Italy's enlightened classes had banished fear of hell from their minds! It was acceptable for reformers to reject the principles of Christian theology quietly and secretly in favor of a vague and gentle theism, but to reject belief in transubstantiation in order to enthrone the dread of predestination was like fleeing from a promising symbol to a ruinous absurdity. At the very time the Church was spreading the wings of mercy over the heretical inclinations of the Italian nation, Calvin was inviting the world to be bound in a puritanism whose only aim was to empty the field of life of every passion and joy. And if the northern peoples were to refuse to send their coins into Italy, how could Italy's joy and art flourish?