The Balance Sheet of the Catholic Reform
The Catholic reform movement succeeded in carrying out its aims. People, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike, went on lying, stealing, seducing, selling offices, killing and making war. But the moral conduct of the clergy improved, the unbridled freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed and bowed to the rights and merits of human beings. Prostitution, which had become a major trade in Renaissance Rome and Venice, now hid itself in shame, and chastity became the approved fashion of the age. Writing or publishing lustful or obscene works was made a capital offense in Italy; and for this reason Niccolò Franco, Aretino's secretary and enemy, was hanged by order of Pope Pius V for writing a book called Priapea.
The effect of the new restrictions on art and literature was certainly not wholly harmful, since on the one hand the Baroque, for all the reproach it has met, came into being in that age, and on the other hand Tasso, Guarini and Goldoni, in purely literary terms, were hardly inferior to Boiardo, Ariosto and the playwright Machiavelli. In Spain the greatest literary and artistic movement arose in the midst of the "Catholic reaction." But the high-spirited temper of Renaissance Italy was gone. Italian women lost some of the freshness and charm that had become second nature to them through the freedom before the Reformation; constant attention to dry and somber moral principles brought on an age of Puritanism in Italy; and monastic life revived.
The Costs
It was certainly a great loss to humanity that the relative freedom of thought of the Renaissance gave way to stifling Church and political censorship, and it was a pity too that, just when science was about to break out of its narrow medieval mold, the Inquisition grew strong again in Italy and other countries. The Church deliberately sacrificed intellectual minorities to the believing majority; but that majority was content to see trampled the ideas that might have weakened the faith that consoled them.
Lasting Reforms
The Church reforms were real and lasting. Although the monarch-like power of the popes prevailed over the aristocracy of episcopal councils, it was the spirit of the age that everywhere, except in Germany, aristocracy yielded power to kings. Now the popes were morally superior to the bishops, and a centralized government could better than a divided power maintain the discipline that any church reform requires. The popes set self-seeking aside and cleansed the papal court of harmful negligence and open profiteering. Even in the words of non-Catholic scholars, the administration of Church affairs became, in effectiveness and honesty, a model worthy of imitation.
Dark wooden boxes for confession were invented (1547), and so that a priest might not fall into temptation through the chance beauty of his penitents, their use was made compulsory (1614). The traveling sellers of indulgences vanished; in other words, in most cases the Church's mercy and the forgiveness of sins could be won only through loyalty to the faith, self-sacrifice and charity, and not, as before, by money and gifts to the Church. Instead of retreating before Protestantism and freedom of thought, Catholic clergy set out to capture the minds of the young and to win power. The determined, self-reliant, active and disciplined spirit of the Jesuits became the true spirit of the Church Militant.
On the whole the Church rose from its sickness and recovered remarkably, and this was one of the most brilliant results of the Protestant Reformation.
Epilogue: Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment
The Renaissance and the Reformation are two sources of contemporary history, two springs that have each watered our intellectual and moral life today. Here people divide, according to their taste and heredity: either, aware of their debt, they turn to the Renaissance, which freed thought and made life beautiful, or they feel gratitude toward the Reformation, which strengthened the foundations of faith and improved the principles of morality.
The debate between Erasmus and Luther has gone on in history and always will, because in such general questions the truth that people can reach usually arises from the meeting of opposite poles, and for that reason every truth always carries within it a twofold heritage.
North and South
In one respect this debate has an ethnic and geographic side. It is a debate between Latins and Teutons, between a bright, pleasure-loving south and a misty, hard-living north, between peoples who had been conquered by the Romans and had accepted the classical inheritance and peoples who had stood against Rome, and even overcome it, and had preferred their own roots and northern climes to a Greek who offered gifts and a Roman who made laws. (The generalizations about the "national character" of whole peoples are the author's, and are presented here only as his framing.) Italy and Germany divided between themselves the responsibility for shaping the spirit of the modern age: Italy by returning to the sources of classical literature, philosophy and art, and Germany by returning to the doctrines and fundamentals of Christian faith.
Italy came close to conquering Germany on a second attempt, this time through church tithes and humanism; and Germany resisted again, pushed back the Church and silenced the humanists. The Reformation rejected the Renaissance, with its worldly pleasures and commerce, and itself turned toward that one side, and that side only, of the Middle Ages which held human progress and achievement to be vulgar and vain, called life a vale of tears, and summoned sinners to repentance, prayer and faith.
How Each Side Saw the Other
In the eyes of Renaissance Italians, who read Machiavelli and Aretino, this was a medieval reaction, or the return of the sway of the "Age of Faith" over the "Age of Reason," which was just beginning its militant youth. Italians who listened to Pomponazzi and lived under the prosperous rule of the Renaissance popes laughed in their hearts at Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII, who clutched with both hands such medieval beliefs as the inspiration of the Bible, the Trinity, predestination, creation by divine command, original sin, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atonement, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell; while on the opposite side they had cast aside such principles of medieval Christianity as the worship of Mary, the worship of a God of love and mercy, the invocation of saints, and the performance of rites adorned with every art, which had given that noble religion its peace, consolation and beauty.