Welcome back.
We’re going to continue with the Reformation.
We’re going to talk about the Counter-Reformation.
It’s no surprise that an institution as large and as powerful as the Catholic Church
is not going to take this schism lying down; they’re going to respond to it.
There are three major institutions of the Counter-Reformation that I want to briefly
talk about.
One is the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus; another is the Council of Trent; and the third
is the Inquisition.
So let me start with the Jesuits.
The full name is the Society of Jesus.
It’s founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola who lived in the first half of the 16th century.
He had a war wound and in his recovery he had an epiphany, and in that epiphany he decided
to devote the rest of his life to the service of Christ.
He founded the Jesuits in 1534, dedicated to poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem.
This requirement would later be changed to obedience to the Pope.
These Jesuits are very well educated, probably the best educated men in Europe, taught philosophy
and theology and natural history and languages, and very devout men of great piety, energy.
We’ll see them here in the context of the Counter-Reformation and of course, we’ve
already seen them and we talked about the Middle Ground, European imperialism, in a
lecture a few lectures ago.
Remember the Jesuits are there in New France, negotiating with the Indians.
So these are remarkably energetic, pious men whose purpose is to turn the Protestant heretic
back to the Catholic orthodoxy to make the Church whole again.
Anyway, it occurred to me that I’m using a lot of terminology here that may be difficult
for you.
Let me just go through a couple of these phrases that I use a lot, so you know what we’re
talking about.
Heresy is from the Greek; it means to choose.
In the context of religious history it means to choose wrongly.
So the Protestant heretic in this case is not only breaking with the Catholic orthodoxy
or the right way to think or believe, but they’re doing it provocatively and knowingly.
Now another term we’re going to hear is martyr; we’ve already heard it.
I want to stress a couple of things about the martyr.
Number one, he has agency.
That is, the martyr has the will and the capacity to act.
He does not have to die.
He does not have to be hung or burned at the stake.
What the martyr can do to escape death is to recant.
A recantation is a disavowal of his religious beliefs and that presumably he will rejoin
the Catholic orthodoxy, again the right way to think or believe.
So recantation is a disavowal of beliefs.
We heard the word excommunicate, this separation of the heretic from the body of Christ, from
Christ’s Church.
This is a severe punishment.
It’s not physical death, but it is spiritual death, as you are removed from the body of
Christ.
That is, upon your death you will spend eternity in hell.
Now I’ve heard theologians and historians talk about this with regard to martyrdom that
the martyr chooses death here on Earth, and you can envision the burning at the stake
of Protestant martyrs in the 16th century.
Why would they choose that instead of a recantation and life?
They’re making a bargain essentially, to suffer here on Earth, to suffer badly, for
a few minutes while they’re being burned, as opposed to a recantation, and then eternal
burning in hell.
So I toss these words around a lot and I thought it might be helpful if you guys had some notion
of their meaning.
Now we’d talked about the Jesuits.
The second institution of the Counter-Reformation, I’m just going to briefly summarize here,
is the Council of Trent.
This is a high-level Ecclesiastical meeting.
It takes places over a decade in the middle of the 16th century.
There are three great sessions here.
It’s dominated by the Italian clergy.
Again, it’s a response to the Reformation.
It’s an attempt to either reaffirm Catholic dogma or attempt to tweak it in such a way
as to carry out internal reforms.
And then the final institution is of course, the Inquisition, and we’ve all seen depictions
of the Inquisition in movies.
I think even Monty Python had some fun with the Inquisition.
At the Vatican, called the holy office, which maintains an index of literature that is forbidden
– you may remember Galileo got in trouble with the holy office for sort of poking fun
at the Pope – and of course, there could be severe punishments handed down by the Inquisition.
We’ll see some depictions of heretics being tortured here, and you see that these depictions
have some things in common.
You see the priest with a quill and a piece of paper or parchment, as the heretic is being
tortured the priest is waiting for the recantation.
Of course, torture has a tendency to make you focus on the issue at hand, and these
Catholic authorities, for them the issue is a disavowal or a recantation of these incorrect
beliefs.
So the purpose of the Inquisition is to establish religious uniformity in Europe.
Now I want to make just another couple of remarks here since we’re talking about the
Inquisition and dissent and sort of chaos in the body of politic.
We said earlier that one of the consequences of the Reformation was the emergence, the
widespread emergence of witchcraft.
Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 people are accused of witchcraft in
the 16th and 17th centuries.
Many of these people are tortured and killed.
The majority of these witches are women.
For the historian, we have to ask the basic question – why?
Why women?
And there are a number of reasons.
First, women are less able to defend themselves physically against attack.
Two, there are two basic archetypes in Christian history for women – on the one hand – Eve,
on the other hand – Mary.
Mary, of course, is perfect.
Eve, of course, is a source of trouble, is she not?
Mischievous, disobedient, lustful, things like that.
So here during the Reformation in the 17th century you see this emergence of witchcraft
with Christian mindset turning back to that Eve archetype of feminine behavior.
Of course, women are also viewed as being less than men, less physically developed,
not as strong, not as big, less intelligence, they have presumably a smaller brain, women
are incomplete men.
Women are viewed as – I don’t know, how would you put it – empty vessels for the
devil, for which the devil can pour his mischief into.
Women are vain and gossipy, and susceptible to the devil’s deceit and trickery.
There are other reasons that women are attacked as witches, especially vulnerable, or those
women who are single, perhaps widowed, running their own estate, taking care of the family’s
farm, or taking care of the family business.
By doing these things, a single woman is acting in a masculine fashion, and this is a sign
of witchcraft.
It’s traditional in European society to divide space into masculine and feminine spheres.
The public space is masculine; that’s where men conduct business and politics and commerce.
The domestic or private sphere is where women tend to the home and raise children.
So when a woman ventures into the public or masculine sphere, she’s inviting trouble.
She’s not dependent upon a man; that in itself is a sign of trouble.
She’s operating in the public sphere, a masculine space.
So widowers, or widows, and other single women, women operating in public are especially susceptible
to charges of witchcraft.
So let’s sum up here.
The Catholic Counter-Reformation is an attempt to reform the Church from within to create
religious uniformity again, to put the Catholic Church back together after its unity was shattered
by the Protestant Reformation.
So we’ll stop there and I’ll see you next time.
Thank you.