The Pope, however, had already passed files pertaining to him on to the Holy Office. At the end of December 1789, some seven months after his arrival in Rome, Cagliostro was arrested along with eight members of his Lodge, one of them American. For the next eighteen months, he was subjected to ‘examination’ in the Castel Sant’ Angelo. On 21 March 1791, the Holy Office condemned him to death for heresy – a sentence commuted by the Pope to life imprisonment. On 4 May 1791, the Pope ordered all Cagliostro's documents and manuscripts, Masonic regalia and accoutrements, to be burned in the Piazza Santa Maria Minerva by the public hangman. One dossier, containing stray papers, personal notes and letters, apparently escaped the flames. In the early 1970s, an Italian author, Roberto Gervaso, requested permission to examine this material, but was denied access to it by the head of the Holy Office.15 Cagliostro himself, still imprisoned, died in 1795.
Another well-known Freemason to run foul of the Holy Office in Italy was Cagliostro's contemporary, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova di Seingalt (1725–98). After being expelled from seminary for allegedly outrageous conduct, Casanova, like Cagliostro, travelled widely and was initiated into Freemasonry in 1750. He was later to write that induction into a Lodge was a mandatory step in the education, development and career of any intelligent and well-bred young man who desired to make a mark in the world. When he returned to his native Venice, Casanova was pounced on by the Holy Office, who accused him of impiety and magical practices. After first being coerced into spying on Masonic and other suspect activities, he was imprisoned. Eventually, in circumstances worthy of a swashbuckling thriller by Dumas, he managed to escape, and embarked on the career for which he subsequently became famous.
Casanova's posthumously published memoirs established his reputation as an adventurer, a hustler, a confidence man, a seducer and amorist on a scale worthy of Don Juan. But he was also a gifted self-publicist, with an ego that cast a shadow the size of a blimp; and his memoirs unquestionably contain much exaggeration, much hyperbole, much poetic licence. Quite apart from their lavish self-advertisement, however, they offer a profoundly insightful and revealing panorama of the manners and mores of the age. What is more, Casanova was a talented writer. He produced historical works in Italian and one phantasmagorical novel of some literary merit in French. In 1788, he published a detailed account of his imprisonment by the Holy Office and his escape, Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de Venise, which constitutes one of the most valuable sources available on the workings of the Holy Office during the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Papal Paranoia
It is extraordinary to reflect that as late as the 1790s – after the American War of Independence, during the French Revolution, when western Europe had embarked on the ‘Modern Age’ – the Holy Office still possessed the power to imprison people, even to impose the death penalty. That power, however, was soon to be curtailed and abrogated. The French Revolution, the revolutionary movements that ensued in Italy and Napoleon's invasion of the peninsula all left the Church, the Papacy and the Holy Office badly shaken. So, too, did the French plundering of the Vatican's archives, much of which remains to this day in Paris, in the Arsenal Library. In several Italian cities, Freemasons sought vengeance on their former persecutors, and more than a few Inquisitors were obliged to flee lynch mobs.
With Napoleon's fall, the Church, instigated by the Holy Office, resumed its self-proclaimed vendetta against Freemasonry, a campaign that would become progressively more rabid and more paranoid as the nineteenth century unfolded. In 1814, after Napoleon's first abdication, a new Bull against Freemasonry was promulgated. Further denunciations would follow, by Pope Pius VII (1800–23), by Leo XII (1823–9), by Pius VIII (1829–30) and by Gregory XVI (1831–46). Pope Pius IX, who was subsequently to declare himself infallible, issued an encyclical condemning Freemasonry in 1846, his first year of office, and followed it with further condemnations on no fewer than seven separate occasions. Freemasonry was denounced as ‘the synagogue of Satan’ and a ‘damnable sect of depravity’.16
Pius IX's successor, Leo XIII, ascended the Papal throne in 1878 and occupied it until 1903. In 1884, he published an encyclical that constituted the most virulent denunciation of Freemasonry ever to issue from the Church. Read before all church doors at the Pope's explicit orders, the encyclical begins:
The human race is divided into two different and opposing parties… The one is the Kingdom of God on earth – that is, the Church of Jesus Christ; the other is the kingdom of Satan.17
The text than focuses specifically on Freemasonry:
In our days… those who follow the evil one seem to conspire and strive all together under the guidance and with the help of that society of men spread all over, and solidly established, which they call Free-Masons.18
The Pope goes on to enunciate explicitly the source of the Church's paranoia – the fear of a supposed rival. Freemasons
say openly what they had already in secret devised for a long time… that the very spiritual power of the Pope ought to be taken away, and the divine institution of the Roman Pontificate ought to disappear from the world.19
In his 1914 narrative Les caves du Vatican (published in Britain as The Vatican Cellars and in America as Lafcadio's Adventures), André Gide dramatises in fictionalised form an episode reportedly rooted in historical fact. In the late nineteenth century, during the pontificate of Leo XIII, two ingenious confidence tricksters are seen wandering about the provinces of southern France. They are dressed in clerical garb and carry with them a carefully prepared and detailed list of wealthy Catholics residing in the vicinity. They present themselves at the doors of these victims, gain admission and recount – in what purports to be the most urgent and portentous secrecy – a horrifying story.
The figure seen at intervals on the balcony of Saint Peter's is not, they report, the Pope. He is in fact a double, a lookalike, an impostor installed by means of a pernicious Masonic conspiracy. The real Holy Pontiff has been kidnapped by Freemasons. He is being held hostage under strict guard at some undisclosed location. Unless a stipulated ransom is raised in time, he will be executed, and the entire Papacy will be taken over by Freemasonry. In consequence, loyal and devout Catholics are being approached discreetly to make donations to the Pope's ransom. Not surprisingly, the two confidence tricksters make off with a tidy fortune.
Such stories were not uncommon at the time. There is no way of knowing which of several Gide might have had in mind, or how much artistic licence he took with the actual facts of the scam. But his narrative bears eloquent testimony to the trepidation about Freemasonry fostered by the Holy Office at the time, and the delusional paranoia to which the Church and its adherents were prone. That paranoia has continued to the present day. As recently as the early 1990s, lavishly printed four-page broadsheets from a hardline Catholic organisation were shoved through letter-boxes in London's Belgravia, once again alleging a nefarious Masonic conspiracy bent on world domination – and erroneously citing as Free-masons men such as Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who were never Freemasons at all.
10
The Conquest of the Papal States
By the last third of the nineteenth century, the Church, and the Holy Office with it, had become uncomfortably beleaguered. Since Diderot's novel The Nun, published more than a century earlier in 1760, priests, monks, abbots, bishops, cardinals and especially Inquisitors had been cast with increasing frequency as arch-villains, figuring in such ‘Gothic novels’ as The Monk by Matthew Lewis and the more serious literary work of writers such as Stendhal. And in 1879–80, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor seared into both Russian and Western consciousness an indelible and definitive image of a cynically ruthless patriarch prepared to send Jesus himself to the stake in order to preserve the vested interests of the Church and its hierarchy.
Nor was it only through ‘high culture’ that Rome was receiving a distinctly bad press. The Church had always inspired hostility in substantial segment
s of the population. Now, through increasing freedom of speech, the dissemination of education and the proliferation of newspapers, journals and popular literature, such hostility was becoming ever more effectively equipped to express itself; and it received additional reinforcement from the attitudes and values percolating down from the cultural summits. In largely Protestant countries such as Britain and Germany, antipathy to the Church's aggrandisement of power was an accepted given. In the United States, despite the influx of Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland, anti-Catholic prejudice was rife.
The Church found itself subject to other threats as well. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This was followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man, an even more theologically explosive work, which questioned scriptural accounts of the Creation. For nearly three centuries, the scales of Western values had swayed in precarious equilibrium between science and organised religion. Now, seemingly at a single stroke, they tipped decisively in favour of science, and Western civilisation assumed a secular dimension that would have appeared unthinkable only a short time before. In the past, any deviation from religious orthodoxy, not to mention atheism, had been a criminal and punishable offence. As recently as the end of the eighteenth century, in Protestant England, Shelley had been expelled from Cambridge for atheism; and penalties in spheres where the Church exercised influence were considerably more severe. Now, however, a mere sixty-odd years later, atheism, and the agnosticism promulgated by Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, had become not just respectable, but eminently fashionable. So, too, in ever more vociferous quarters, had the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Karl Marx, with its repudiation of organised religion as ‘the opiate of the people’ – even though Marxism itself was ultimately to prove a no less deadly opiate. As such inimical ideas were diffused across Christendom, the Church, stripped of its power to suppress them, could only look on with enraged impotence. The Inquisitors of the Holy Office, who had formerly rampaged like bloodhounds, were now leashed and kennelled.
A further threat was posed by the development of German historical and archaeological scholarship, and the methodology it employed. Until the mid nineteenth century, the methodology and procedures of historical and archaeological investigation, which we take more or less for granted nowadays, simply did not exist. There were no generally accepted standards, no premises for establishing a coherent discipline and training. There was no real awareness that such research might constitute a form of ‘science’ – or that it might demand the rigour, the objectivity, the systematic precision that any science does.
Under the auspices of Germanic scholarship, this state of affairs altered dramatically. The change was illustrated conspicuously by Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), born in Germany and naturalised as an American citizen in 1850. Since boyhood, Schliemann had been captivated by the Homeric epics of the Trojan War, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He became increasingly persuaded that these poems were not mere fictitious fables, but mythologised history – chronicles exalted to legendary status yet based on events, people and places that had once actually existed. The Siege of Troy, Schliemann insisted, had been a genuine historical occurrence. Troy was not just the product of a poet's imagination. On the contrary, it had once been a real city.
Schliemann proceeded on the assumption that Homer's poems could be used as a map, whereby certain recognisable geographical and topographical features could be identified. The approximate speeds of travel at the time could be computed and distances thereby estimated between one point and another cited in the Greek texts. By such techniques, Schliemann insisted, the itinerary of the Greek fleet in the Iliad could be retraced and the actual site of Troy located. After performing the appropriate calculations, Schliemann was convinced he had found ‘the X that marked the spot’.
Through his commercial activities, Schliemann had become immensely wealthy. With the vast financial resources at his disposal, he embarked on what seemed to his contemporaries a quixotic enterprise – to undertake a full-scale excavation of the ‘X’ he had located. In 1868, starting from Greece and using a two-and-a-half-millennia-old poem as his guide, he set about retracing the route ascribed by Homer to the Greek fleet. At what he concluded to be the relevant site in Turkey, he began to dig. And to the world's amazed admiration, Schliemann there found Troy – or, at any rate, a city that conformed to Troy in Homer's account. In fact, Schliemann found a number of cities. During four campaigns of excavation, he exhumed no fewer than nine, each superimposed on the ruins of its predecessor.
Schliemann proved triumphantly that archaeology could do more than just confirm or disprove the historical validity behind archaic legends. He also demonstrated that it could add flesh and substance to the often skeletal, starkly simplistic chronicles of the past. It could provide a comprehensibly human and social context for such chronicles, a framework of daily life and practices that revealed the mentality and milieu whereby they had been engendered. What was more, he demonstrated the applicability to archaeology of rigorous scientific methods, such as the careful observation and recording of data. In exhuming the nine superimposed cities of Troy, Schliemann utilised the same approach that had only recently come into favour in geological studies. This led him to a recognition of what the modern mind might find self-evident – that one stratum of deposits can be distinguished from others on the basic premise that the lowest is the earliest. Schliemann thus pioneered the archaeological discipline now known as ‘stratigraphy’. Virtually single-handedly, he revolutionised the entire sphere of archaeological thought and methodology.
It was quickly appreciated that Schliemann's scientific orientation could productively be employed in the field of biblical archaeology. Within a few years, British investigators were vigorously at work in Egypt and Palestine, burrowing, among other sites, beneath the Temple of Jerusalem. Sir Charles Wilson, then a captain in the Royal Engineers, here found what were believed to have been Solomon's stables.
The scientific methodology that had proved so dramatically effective in archaeology was also applied to history. Schliemann's discoveries, after all, had derived in large part from his meticulous scrutiny of Homer's epic poems, his rigorous scientific insistence on separating fact from fiction, his application of a discipline systematic enough for geological studies. It was inevitable that other men should bring the same sort of ruthless and uncompromising scrutiny to bear on scripture.
The man most responsible for this process was the French historian and theologian Ernest Renan. Born in 1823, Renan had originally imagined himself destined for the priesthood and enrolled at the seminary of Saint Sulpice. In 1845, however, he abandoned his supposed vocation, having been prompted by Germanic biblical scholarship to question the literal truth of Christian doctrine. In 1860, he undertook an archaeological journey to Palestine and Syria. In 1863, he published his highly controversial La vie de Jésus, which was translated into English a year later. Renan's book endeavoured to demystify Christianity. It depicted Jesus as ‘an incomparable man’, but nothing more than a man – an altogether mortal and non-divine personage – and adumbrated a hierarchy of values that might be comfortably accommodated by the ‘secular humanism’ of today.
Renan's book was almost immediately placed on the Index. In the years that followed, no fewer than nineteen of his works were to be banned by the Holy Office. But Renan was no obscure academician. Neither was he a sensationalist hack. On the contrary, he was one of the most profoundly respected and prestigious intellectual figures of his era. As a consequence, The Life of Jesus provoked one of the greatest traumas in the course of nineteenth-century thought. It became one of the half-dozen or so bestselling books of the entire century, and has never since been out of print. For the ‘educated classes’ of the age, Renan was as much a household name as Marx, Freud or Jung might be in our own century; and, given the absence of cinema and television, he was probably much more widely read. At a single stroke, The Life of Jesus revolutionised attitudes towards biblical scholar
ship to a degree that would have been unthinkable only shortly before. And for the next thirty years, Renan was to remain a self-appointed gadfly to the Church, publishing controversial examinations of the Apostles, of Paul and of early Christianity in the context of imperial Roman culture. In effect, Renan loosed from its previously sealed bottle a genie which Christianity has never since contrived to recapture or tame.
Garibaldi and the Unification of Italy
Through Darwin and his followers, science presented an increasingly serious threat to the Church. A further threat was posed by the newly applied rigour and scientific methodology of biblical archaeology and scholarship. There were also influential and widely read philosophers – Schopenhauer, for instance, and Nietzsche, proclaiming the ‘death of God’ – who challenged, even blasphemously assaulted, conventional Christian ethical and theological assumptions. Under the French writer Théophile Gautier's doctrine of ‘l’art pour l'art’, ‘art for art's sake’, the arts were becoming a self-contained religion of their own, moving increasingly into sacred territory which organised religion seemed increasingly to have abdicated. Thus, for example, Wagner's theatre at Bayreuth became in effect the temple of a new cult; and well-educated Europeans deemed it quite as acceptable to be ‘a Wagnerian’ as to be a Christian. By the end of the century, the artist would have usurped the role of the priest, becoming, in Joyce's famous phrase, ‘a priest of the imagination’.
And then there was the ever more volatile political situation. Between 1805 and 1808, Napoleon had established his own regime in Italy, dividing the country into kingdoms ruled by himself and one of his brothers, then one of his marshals, Joachim Murat. In 1809, Napoleon had abolished all temporal holdings and power of the Papacy. On being excommunicated by Pope Pius VII, the ‘Corsican monster’ had responded by having the pontiff thrown into prison. The Papacy was never wholly to recover from this humiliation.
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