Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Even though Julius II in the time of Michelangelo was the only pope to ride armed into battle, many of the popes and other bishops continued to affect a warrior stance toward the designated heretics of their moment; and many of the Protestant leaders followed suit. Zwingli, for instance, clad like Julius in full armor, was cut down in a battle with Swiss Catholics, whom he had made desperate by imposing an economic blockade. Jesus’s blessing on “the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9) was hardly the most frequently quoted biblical text of the sixteenth century. Indeed, except among the universally reviled Anabaptists, the notion of peacemaking was hardly mentioned. Looking back, one might wonder why it never occurred to the war makers that they should be called the children of Hell.

  The Permanent Religious Divisions of Europe after 1648 (illustration credit 85)

  1 Robert F. Worth, “Struggle for Ideological Upper Hand in Muslim World Seen as Factor in Attacks [in Libya and Egypt],” New York Times, September 13, 2012.

  2 The Battle of Lepanto, won by a considerable Catholic force called the Holy League, made up mainly of Spanish and Italian troops raised by the pope, also deprived the Islamic powers of permanent control of the Mediterranean. This battle has often been cited, especially by Catholic commentators, as the turning point in preserving “Christian” Europe. G. K. Chesterton wrote a rousing, oft-quoted poem, “Lepanto,” praising Don John as “the last knight of Europe.” It may be the best pro-war poem ever written in English. (It surely demonstrates eloquently how difficult it is for any commentator to capture the many clashing movements of the sixteenth century.)

  3 One might write a book on the subconscious links between belief, cruelty, and sex in the psyches of religious radicals (and of far more orthodox figures).

  4 The German word for poison is Gift, which in the earliest Germanic languages meant bride-price. Though it’s easy to understand how bride-price developed into the current English meaning of “gift,” Gift as poison seems a bit of a stretch.

  5 There is much to be said in favor of Michael Servetus’s argument: see, for instance, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, page 17, on the “Trinitarian” doctrine of Philo of Alexandria, who knew nothing of the New Testament.

  6 Latin is certainly a good language for lawyers, but why it should be considered sacred I have no idea, unless usage by popes—in their fanciful role of replacing the Roman emperors—makes for sacredness. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek have far better qualifications.

  7 See especially Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580.

  8 The wily Duke of Northumberland had pressured the dying Edward to sign a will countervailing his father’s and establishing his fifteen-year-old cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his successor. Northumberland then had Jane married to his son Guildford Dudley. The unfortunate Jane reigned for nine days, after which Mary was proclaimed queen. Jane was later beheaded, along with her husband and her father-in-law. The English preferred as their sovereign a famously loyal Roman Catholic Tudor to a pious Protestant of more questionable pedigree.

  9 See How the Irish Saved Civilization, pages 213-15.

  10 It is on sexual issues, starting with contraception, that Anglicanism differs most strikingly from Roman Catholicism. The gulf may be examined by comparing recent papal documents (Pope Paul VI’s notoriously ill-considered anti–birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and Pope John Paul II’s painfully abstract and nearly interminable series of talks, The Theology of the Body) with The Body’s Grace, a realistic, uncondemning, and theologically innovative essay by Rowan Williams, recently retired archbishop of Canterbury.

  11 Whether or not the worshipping Huguenots were in strict conformity with the king’s wishes remains a point of some contention.

  VII

  HUMAN LOVE

  HOW TO LIVE ON THIS EARTH

  What’s past is prologue.

  The Tempest

  I fear that, despite my best efforts, I have subjected my readers to an awful lot of know-it-alls, men (almost always men) who know what is best for everyone, prescribers and proscribers who can articulate exactly what we all must think, believe, do, and avoid. Though the period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation is especially rife with such types, there are others whose welcome heads peek through the soil of history as if they were the first buds of spring. To them we will now turn, if briefly.

  There is an aspiration that runs through religious history, no matter which religion is being studied, that we might call the desire to limit membership—and limit it severely. I recall attending a religious publishing convention many years ago during which I was asked several times by people I was just being introduced to—and with all the unsmiling seriousness of a CIA inquiry—“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” To these questioners there was no point in further discussion of anything if I could not answer this question affirmatively. Such people are excluders, who want their circle—the circle of the saved—to be exclusive, as small and as (uncomfortably) intimate as possible. (Luckily for me, the convention was held in late-twentieth-century America, so I had no fear of being burned at the stake if I fumbled my answer. Still, I fancied I could see the licking flames in the eyes of my interlocutors.)

  But there also runs through each religious tradition an opposite aspiration: to include as many as possible, to open the windows to fresh air and the doors to all comers. Of course, to do this one must lower one’s standards—at least, in the eyes of the excluders. But from another perspective—the perspective of the includers—one is merely opening one’s arms to everything and everyone; one is acting as Jesus advises in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) and as Mohandas Gandhi advised in his repeated meditations on that sermon: “How can we, little crawling creatures, so utterly helpless as He has made us, how could we possibly measure His greatness, His boundless love, His infinite compassion, such that He allows man insolently to deny Him, wrangle about Him, and cut the throat of his fellow-man? How can we measure the greatness of God who is so forgiving, so divine? Thus, though we may utter the same words [as Jesus did] they have not the same meaning for us all.”

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many who yearned to cut the throats of “heretics,” and not a few who succeeded in doing so. There was also a growing procession of those who longed to include and embrace as many human beings as possible.

  1531–1540: NUNS WITH GUNS

  Their weapons weren’t actually guns; and, at least to start with, they weren’t even nuns. They were a group of well-born Lombardian ladies, led by Angela Merici, who came together to educate poor girls in the northern Italian city of Brescia. So far as I can ascertain, no one had ever thought to do this before them. In the same period, Anabaptist communities in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland were beginning to encourage universal “biblical literacy,” but this, often enough, referred to memorization of biblical texts rather than to actual literacy—and, in any case, the Anabaptist program was not especially directed toward poor girls. As we saw in the story of Thomas More, the education of girls, even those of educated households, was not a value in European society. The education of poor girls was an unthinkable innovation. What society had against the education of females was, of course, that it would put the weapons of knowledge into their hands: it would make them too much like males, able to hold real power over others.

  One recalls the remarkable result of the second communications revolution (this page), in which, because of the simplicity of the alphabet, it became possible for anyone, even a slave, to learn to read. So even slaves learned to read in the time of Moses and after, but another three thousand years would pass before the daughters of the poor would have the treasures of literacy opened to them. Their champion was a most unlikely warrior: a tiny, though pretty and charming, spinster.

  Angela Merici wished to form an elective association of women like herself, whose life experiences gave them sympathy for others, e
specially for other females of scant means. Angela, orphaned at ten, had lost her last remaining protector, her beloved elder sister, when she was thirteen. These losses, which might have turned a psychologically weaker girl into a broken woman, strengthened Angela: she sought solace in prayer and in dedication to others in need. She became a visionary in the strict sense: one who saw in advance the work that God had assigned her, as well as others, to accomplish. Her meeting with Pope Clement VII in 1525 resulted in his inviting her to lead a congregation of nursing nuns. Angela turned him down, something a lady, well born or not, was hardly in a position to do; but she knew the pope’s proposal wasn’t what God had in mind for her.

  Angela’s association in Brescia took as its spiritual patron Saint Ursula, a wholly legendary figure who served nonetheless as the medieval patron of universities. It was this connection of a female figure to university education that attracted the women, who came to be called Ursulines. Angela died in 1540, and in subsequent centuries, under subsequent popes, the Ursulines would be hemmed in by many papal rules about the conduct of their lives. Eventually, they were forced to assume the strict identity of nuns, which had not been their original intent. But their connection to the education of girls and women would never falter. Throughout Europe and at many of the sites of the new worldwide Catholic missions, the Ursulines built and staffed schools and universities for women, never entirely abandoning their original focus on the education of poor girls.

  1572–1616: MEN IN THE MIDDLE

  The sixteenth century witnessed the novel phenomenon of men who, like Gandhi, were not team players, who declined to be heated partisans of any one religious camp. Preeminent among them was the warmhearted Henry IV, who saw that the peace of a whole country—a country as unique and precious as France—did not require either an unyielding Protestant or a fanatical Catholic at its helm, just a king who loved his country and would look favorably upon his subjects, whatever their religious allegiance. Though such lack of partisanship was an abomination to zealots (and finally resulted in Henry’s murder), it was a supremely rational and balanced course, a sort of grander French flowering of the very virtues that had earlier distinguished the estimable Saxon prince Frederick the Wise, pious Catholic and protector of Protestants.

  Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, full of Machiavellian advice for rulers, was published in 1532. The advice is both profoundly realistic and deeply cynical, much of it modeled on the sterling example of the Borgias. The most cynical princes had little need of The Prince, of course, for they were already experts in ruthlessness. Far closer to the playfulness of Henry IV are the musings of his fellow countryman Michel de Montaigne, who in his still refreshingly modern essays, published in three volumes over the last two decades of the sixteenth century, urged self-knowledge before all else and a sense of proportion regarding one’s own importance: “Even if we mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit on our own backside.” (If I am not mistaken, this is especially meant as a humorous, if indirect, reference to His Holiness the Pope.)

  When it comes to the subject of kings and their ilk, however, there is probably no writer in the world who thought about them more penetratingly than William Shakespeare, who even knew a couple of them (Elizabeth I and James I). Shakespeare hides within his plays, standing behind his great and rounded characters. From these plays we know that Shakespeare understood as much about the inner human landscape as any writer who has ever written. His characters range across the entire gamut of human responses. Is there a note that he does not somewhere sound? I think not.

  These things being so, can you tell me what side Shakespeare was on in the religious wars of the sixteenth century? Was he a Catholic like his father, or was he a supporter of Elizabeth’s Church of England, or was he a dissenter of some sort? Though many books have been written on the subject of Shakespeare’s religious convictions, in truth no one knows the answer. That’s because he didn’t want us to know. Like Bruegel, he was politically smart enough to keep his religious opinions to himself—or at least to disguise them in such a way that no one could say for certain that he stood here or there on any controversial religious question.

  Does this mean that he was agnostic, a skeptic like so many educated men and women of the twenty-first century? Rather, I’d say he was a believer of a kind—of the kind that could, for instance, imagine himself into the fated druidic mysticism of prehistoric Britain, as he does so deftly in King Lear. To my ear, he has more in common with the religiousness of Gandhi than he does with the new scientific atheism of men such as, say, Richard Dawkins.

  But perhaps more important, Shakespeare tends to limit himself to this world and its dilemmas. He recognizes the similarity between himself and any king: “I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it does to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.” This is King Henry V speaking, while visiting his troops in the night before the great battle of Agincourt and unrecognized by them. Shakespeare’s religious vision embraces everyone, enfolds humanity itself, recognizing that the differences between one human being and another are as nothing when compared to their similarities. He may not be an orthodox believer, but he is surely some sort of proto-democrat—not an insignificant advance in a society of royalists, so many of them adherents of the divine right of kings.

  After the English have conquered the French—for they are in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War—King Henry V (in Shakespeare’s play of the same name) goes a-wooing the French princess Katherine. He begins by claiming to lack eloquence and warning her that if she accepts him, she will have to put up with his plain speech and inelegant manners: “For these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favors, they do always reason themselves out again. What? A speaker is but a prater, a rhyme is but a ballad; a good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curl’d pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow; but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or rather the sun and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.”

  This, I rather think, is William Shakespeare’s very earthly religion—the Religion of the Good Heart—spoken as plainly and with as little distracting decoration as he can manage. It is a religious expression that would have found favor with France’s Henry IV and Montaigne, as well as with another Shakespearean contemporary, the adventurous Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes.

  Cervantes had an exciting youth, fighting in his early twenties at the decisive Battle of Lepanto (this page). He was remembered by his fellow soldiers as a daring combatant who risked his own life without hesitation and lost the use of his left hand, for which loss he was given the admiring nickname of el manco de Lepanto (the one-armed man of Lepanto). Sailing back to Spain, Cervantes and his brother were intercepted by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers, where Cervantes spent five years in captivity. His eventual ransom and return to Spain, however, brought him little recognition, two stints in prison, and years of bleak poverty, only alleviated well after the 1605 publication of Part I of his masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha).

  Don Quixote is the world’s first modern novel and, by common assent, the greatest. Its marvelous—and hilarious—doings, its intricate meshing of reality and fantasy, idealism and absurdity, the subjective and the objective, leave us both exhausted and craving more. But, despite more than nine hundred pages of prose, it is impossible to place Cervantes in any known camp or club. His philosophical, religious, and even political opinions, like those of Shakespeare, remain obscure. His themes of self-deception and foolish (but commendable?) idealism give us no entrance into his pe
rsonal faith, if such he had.

  But Shakespeare and Cervantes were knowledgeable gentlemen of the world, who lived through the years that saw Giordano Bruno, a Dominican priest who was a sort of Lutheran Catholic, burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori for daring to suggest that a new model of the cosmos was needed if we were to appreciate its infinite extent. In 1616, the year of the two writers’ deaths (for both men died on April 23, 1616), Galileo Galilei suffered his first papal condemnation for daring to assert that the Earth revolved around the sun. This was a good time for the expansiveness of writers, free to write and stage many plays for eager audiences, free to fill many printers’ pages with the vagaries of their imaginations, so long as they stayed clear of certain topics that could get them killed or confined.

  1615–1669: THE DEEPENING

  In the seventeenth century we come upon extraordinary examples of believers who have internalized their faith so personally and deeply that it has lost all comradeship with the combative religious assertions of the partisans who waged the Thirty Years’ War. In these later figures there is also no verbal indirection, no hiddenness. Their faith is boldly stated, yet utterly lacking in aggression.

  When last we met John Donne (this page), he was a young, lascivious poet stripping his mistress of her garments. He was also a convinced Catholic (related to Thomas More on his mother’s side), who lived with a notable lack of security on account of his known affiliation. He was deeply affected by the sad fate of his younger brother Henry, imprisoned for harboring a Catholic priest, horribly tortured, dying of plague while confined to Newgate Prison. The poet began to question some of his family’s religious convictions.