Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Calvin, grinding his teeth over Michael’s theological presumptuousness and not wishing anyone to mistake him for such a heretic, had already cooperated secretly with Roman Catholic inquisitors in Lyon, whence Michael escaped to Geneva. Throughout Europe, Calvin was praised for the burning by Catholics, Lutherans, and Zwingli’s successors in Zurich. Though this was Calvin’s only burning, he eventually managed the beheadings of several of his civic enemies on trumped-up charges.

  And just as Zurich had destroyed all church art, forbidden all music, and almost all ritual, Calvin did the same. Let the people hear the words of Scripture and his own weighty sermons and sing only the plainest, unaccompanied psalms (“Geneva psalms,” as they are known to this day). Geneva became the first European city to ban both prostitution and theater. Dancing, singing, and fortune-telling now brought severe fines or imprisonment on the malefactor; adultery led to execution; laughing during a sermon could put you in danger of criminal punishment, as could making fun of Calvin. In Geneva, there wasn’t much left to laugh about, anyway.

  Calvin was a difficult man to love. But he has not a few defenders who see him as, at worst, a transitional figure, a stage in the necessary evolution of Christianity from an even more restrictive and airless climate to more open, humane, and appropriate standards. Marilynne Robinson, one of America’s most vibrant and alluring writers, sees him this way, pointing out (in her extraordinary essay on Moses in When I Was a Child I Read Books) the aspect of Calvin that does not lurk in the shadows but stands in the sun. She even quotes this passage from the Institutes in which, as she says, “Calvin establishes a profound theological basis for liberality, openhandedness”:

  The Lord commands us to do “good unto all men,” universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honor and love; but that this image is most carefully to be observed in them “who are of the household of faith” [Galatians 6:10], inasmuch as it is renewed and restored by the spirit of Christ. Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance. Say he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a character which ought to be familiar to you; for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image. Say that you are obliged to him for no services; but God has made him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important benefits. Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess. If he not only deserved no favor, but, on the contrary, has provoked you with injuries and insults—even this is no just reason why you should cease to embrace him with your affection and to perform to him the offices of love. He has deserved, you will say, very different treatment from me. But what has the Lord deserved? Who, when he commands you to forgive all men their offenses against you, certainly intends that they should be charged to himself.

  I agree that the above is beautiful, elegant, eloquent (even if momentarily parochial, in the way it refers—by way of Paul—to those “of the household of faith”). And it certainly highlights an aspect of Calvin that I have failed to spotlight. And even though I acknowledge that we are all composites of good and evil, that (like Luther) none of us is ever capable of complete consistency, how is this passage to be reconciled with the burning of Michael Servetus, the self-justifying, blind, and bullying betrayal of Michael Servetus, who is rightly revered today as an early martyr to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience and a distinguished forebear of the Declaration of Independence? For this question I have no answer.

  1545–1563: CATHOLICS GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER

  In 1545, Pope Paul III called an ecumenical council, intended as a plenary meeting of the bishops of the Catholic Church. Such a council had been seen as a necessary step toward reforming Catholicism long before Luther had been heard from. But the Lutheran challenge and the several subsequent forms of doctrinal and political challenge had only increased the calls for a universal council, especially from those who saw that, without such an instrument, the very necessary Catholic reformation would remain impossible.

  The popes had delayed and equivocated, fearful that the old bugaboo of Conciliarism—the theory that the pope was subservient to an ecumenical council—would again raise its head. Not a few of the popes were far too sunk in more worldly concerns—their political power, their art collections, their fortunes and those of their children, their sensual pleasures—to be bothered thinking about a council. In fact, even by the rather low standards that the papacy set for itself, there had not been a saintly pope since 1370, when (subsequently Blessed) Urban V had died in Avignon, hardly an appropriate home for the bishop of Rome (see this page). Over the centuries, indeed, few saints had occupied the supposed throne of Saint Peter, whereas the number of papal rascals and knaves had almost always outpaced the holy fellows. As the Renaissance dawned, the papacy had, as we saw earlier (this page and following), fallen into the clutches of one scoundrel after another. Because many princes had a hand in appointing their bishops and controlling them, the choice of a site for the council became a major obstacle. The emperor wanted the council to meet inside the Empire; the French king wouldn’t hear of it. At last, the Tyrolean town of Trent was chosen, just outside imperial territory and at the very edge of Italian influence.

  Looking backwards from the twenty-first century, the results of this Tridentine council look shabby. The long-cherished hopes that such a council would find a way to reconcile the innovations of the reformers with Catholic traditions—or, at the least, open a dialogue with Protestants—proved wholly empty. Had the council met years earlier, such outcomes might have been possible. By the time the council fathers assembled amid the hills of the Tyrol, too much had happened too long ago and too many modes of dissent had turned into establishments of their own. It was probably impossible now to bridge the divisions. In any case, the bishops at Trent did not try.

  Rather, without conceding anything to any dissenter, they proceeded to defend Catholicism in its most anti-Protestant and pro-Roman form. Against Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, Catholic tradition was also held to be a valid source of belief and practice. A human being’s justification was not by faith alone; good works were necessary. The true church, founded by Christ, was the Roman Catholic Church, a hierarchical institution with the pope at its summit. The role of the Catholic clergy was to interpret scripture and tradition; the laity’s role was to pay and obey. This true church rejoiced in its seven sacraments (no more, no less). Its central act was the mass, celebrated only by a validly ordained priest, in which the Sacrifice of Christ on the cross was mystically repeated, as it would be by priests throughout the world till the end of time in the supposedly sacred but increasingly unintelligible language of Latin.6

  But even the conciliar bishops and their theological advisers realized that the bald reassertion of all traditional Catholic theological positions in their most extreme forms would not be enough. There needed to be a reform of clerical life if anyone was to take seriously this Counter-Reformation. So, strict and even punitive standards were set in place for the formation of clergy and vowed religious. Gradually, over succeeding decades, these reforms would be implemented to the letter, thus rooting out the more public forms of sexual laxity and worldliness that had afflicted the Church for so long. By the close of the council, it was inconceivable that a sitting pope would ever again appoint his bastards cardinals—though popes would, for several decades to come, continue to sire bastards. (Upon his election in 1534, Paul III had made two of his teenaged grandsons cardinals and awarded them
lucrative ecclesiastical benefices, but once the Tridentine decrees were promulgated, such appointments began to be disdained as de trop.)

  Henceforth, the pope and his bishops would permit no quarter to dissent from the Tridentine decrees. Bishops and theologians who had hoped for compromise were marginalized. Pope Paul saw to it that within the papal bureaucracy a new office was established called the Roman Inquisition, and its mission was to sniff out and extirpate heresy wherever it might take root. Eventually, the work of this gruesome body would be supplemented by a further instrument, the Index of Forbidden Books, which listed all the books one could not read without attracting the interest of the Inquisition.

  The Council of Trent met off and on for nearly two decades, long after the pontificate of Paul III. When it opened, only thirty-odd bishops were in attendance. Attendance remained spotty throughout its infrequently summoned sessions. One might even question whether Trent could be called an ecumenical council in anything but name. Certainly, the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII in 1962, presented a very different face to the world, as it refused to condemn anyone and insisted on input not only from the entire Christian spectrum but even from non-Christian religious figures, especially from the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam. Its participants numbered in the thousands, splendidly accommodated not in a minor alpine town but for all the world to see—in the great nave of Saint Peter’s basilica, the building of which precipitated Luther’s original protest.

  From a geopolitical perspective, the most astonishing difference between these two councils may lie in the national origins of their participants. Trent was a wholly European affair, reflecting Christianity as the exclusively European concern it was then thought to be. But even during the years of the Tridentine council, the map of Christianity was beginning to be redrawn in radical shifts that would make Catholicism the first worldwide religion. Missionary priests and brothers had already begun to sail on the ships that would eventually bring Europeans to every corner of the globe. The newly formed Jesuits, spiritual sons of Ignatius Loyola, were particularly keen to rack up conversions among the pagans of the world, setting up utopian sanctuaries for the horrifically hunted “Indians” of the New World, learning the obscurest languages of the Far West and the Far East, even inserting themselves into xenophobic East Asian courts as astrological wise men. One of their number, the Spaniard Francis Xavier, blazed a trail of baptisms through India, Malaysia, and Japan and died at the gates of China in 1552. In the seventeenth century, French Jesuits were tortured and martyred by Iroquois and Mohawk tribesmen in what is today upstate New York. Throughout this entire period, Catholics were the world’s only missionaries, showing up in one impossibly distant port after another, Jesuits and other priests of newly founded orders, Franciscans and other friars bound by medieval rules, all helping to create the worldwide numbers that would make Catholicism a religion of more than one billion souls, while neither Protestantism nor Orthodoxy would ever reach even half that number.

  This aggressive global initiative on the part of reforming forces within Catholicism would also go a long way toward making up for losses of obedience within Europe itself. For by the close of Trent’s council, a wide arc of northern Europe—most of Germany, much of Austria, whole regions farther east, all of Scandinavia, all of Britain, most of the Netherlands, much of France—appeared to be permanently lost to the old faith and order. There would, however, be one additional shift within Europe, a shift that would depend principally on the undamming of vast rivers of blood during the continent-wide conflict we call the Thirty Years’ War. Before that horror occupies us, however, let’s have a look at England, where a sort of religious compromise was in the course of being built, if somewhat intermittently.

  1558–1603: THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENT OF A VIRGIN QUEEN

  As a boy in the Bronx, I was taught this quatrain by an ancient Irishman:

  Oh, trouble me not with your clergy,

  Nor speak to me of your faith.

  For the Church of England was founded

  On the ballocks of Henry the Eighth.

  There are several folkloric versions of this ditty, one of them occasionally attributed to Brendan Behan, though the rhymed thought must predate him by generations. The lines are of course intended as insult and provocation. Don’t count on the Irish for peacemaking.

  The first two lines may be haughtily dismissive, but there is undeniable truth in the last two. Careful scholarship7 in recent decades has established rather conclusively that the English Church in the reign of Henry VIII was not in desperate need of a reformation; rather, it may have been the most devout, serious, and well-functioning branch of European Catholicism. Henry’s willfulness was an expression of his own personal needs—for a male heir, for a younger wife, for congress with Anne Boleyn—not a reflection of the desires or needs of the English people.

  Henry was not much interested in the particulars of reformation, certainly not in applying them to his own realms. He loathed Luther—which loathing was entirely mutual—and he had no higher opinion of the subsequent continental reformers. He loved the Latin mass and the Latin Bible and was suspicious of ordinary people reading the Bible by themselves in the crude tongue of English. He simply wanted to do what he wanted to do, and if that entailed cutting England off from the larger church, so be it. He and his people were ill served by the pope, who, because Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was aunt to the Emperor, did not see fit to annul Henry and Catherine’s marriage, having earlier provided the necessary dispensation for it to take place. Henry was right to assume that the pope normally had no problem bestowing royal annulments. Too bad that Henry was wed to Charles’s aunt and that the pope was at the time Charles’s prisoner in all but name.

  It was such complicating political considerations, rubbing raw the massive ego of the king, that brought about the English Reformation. When Henry married for the sixth time, Luther summed it up thus: “Squire Harry means to be God and do as he pleases.” The German professor would have enjoyed the Irish quatrain.

  The story of the permanent separation of England from Catholic unity hardly ends with Henry. His three children were the paltry result of so much marrying (though as a progenitor the king almost certainly labored under the impediment of a royal case of syphilis). Each child in turn occupied the throne after Henry, each loyal to the religious preferences of his or her dead mother (or maternal family of origin). First came Henry’s only son, Edward VI, a frail nine-year-old whose mother, Jane Seymour, had expired weeks after his birth. Edward favored a Calvinistic Reformation and introduced the eloquent Book of Common Prayer, edited and mostly written by Thomas Cranmer, appointed archbishop of Canterbury by Henry (who knew little of Cranmer’s Calvinistic theology—and nothing of Cranmer’s hidden wife—and was simply satisfied with the careful Cranmer’s political inventiveness).

  Edward died of consumption at fifteen and was succeeded (after some bizarre high jinks)8 by his half sister, Mary, in accordance with Henry’s will. Loyal to her mother, Catherine, Mary brought the realm back to the Catholic fold and burned Cranmer and a number of others who refused to resume their Catholicism, thus winning for herself the appellation Bloody Mary, though this tragic woman, a humiliated pawn for most of her life, was relatively pacific, even kind, by the standards of her day. But her reign was slightly shorter than her brother’s.

  As a child, Mary, whose very existence had been a continuing embarrassment to her father, had been hidden away in various country castles and deprived of her mother’s loving presence. Whatever she may have been taught in these years of being shunned, she possessed scant sense of statecraft. She made the great mistake of marrying her cousin Charles’s son, the king of Spain. The last thing the English people wanted was a Spaniard in the works, a man who could eventually claim the English throne. So, by this marriage—not by her Catholicism—Mary forfeited the previously warm allegiance of her subjects. Her inattentive Spanish consort, eleven years her
junior, could hardly wait to get away to more agreeable realms once the marriage ceremony had taken place. Mary, thinking she was pregnant, soon discovered she had stomach cancer. The continuing bonfires of heretics eventually erased all her subjects’ previous love for her. Why should men be incinerated for adhering to beliefs that so recently had been required of them?

  Mary’s death in November 1558 brought her half sister, Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, to the throne. Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who had been decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and witchcraft, as Henry had tired of her charms and was disappointed that she had not presented him with a male heir. He who was so sure that God disapproved of his marriage to Catherine (why else had she not provided the male heir?) now understood that God disapproved of Anne, as well. As she was a slut and a witch, they had not had a real marriage—and Elizabeth, like Mary before her, was declared a bastard.

  Unlike Mary, Elizabeth was a natural politician. She knew she was expected to be Protestant. What else could possibly be in prospect from the only child of the very Protestant Anne? And in any case, Elizabeth had been viewed as a bastard, not only by her own father, but by the pope, who could hardly have sanctioned Henry’s second union as a lawful marriage after militantly refusing to allow it altogether. In Rome’s view, Mary had been a queen; Elizabeth was an imposter.

  These things being so, Elizabeth returned England to Protestantism in a series of moves that revealed not only keen intelligence but skill in political and diplomatic maneuvering that few women—or men—have ever equaled, or even approached, in the long history of the Western world. Henry had ascended the throne in 1509 as an eighteen-year-old. Between his declaration in 1534 that he himself was “Protector and only Supreme Head of the Church” of England and the day of his daughter Elizabeth’s ascent, thirty-four years had passed. In that time, the English populace had been jerked hither and yon, first to a Catholicism without the pope, then to a Calvinism that kept the un-Calvinistic office of bishop in place and an order of service that looked very like the mass, if in English. Under Edward, the Calvinistic and un-Catholic elements became even more pronounced. Under Mary, all this was swept aside and the churches were returned to Catholicism, and statues and icons, so recently jeered at, defaced, and removed, were put back in place.