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A Crisis in the History of Trent

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A Crisis in the History of Trent A Crisis in the History ofTrent ]OH COURTNEY MURRAY, S.J., M.A. URING the last fifty years the labors of historians, largely under the inspiration of Leo XIII, have been D powerfully focused on the Council of Trent, the central point of that most complicated, most fascinating, most misunderstood epoch in Church history, the Catholic Reformation. The research done has been prodigious in its extent, profound in its scholarship, and all impregnated with that spirit of insistence on integral presentation of the truth that was the great Leo's ideal in historical writing. And the result has been a remarkable clarification of the relations that existed between the Council and the Popes, and a com­ plete vindication of the ideals that underlay the Papal re­ form policy as formulated by Paul III and brought to fru­ ition by Pius IV. The ghost of Fra Paolo Sarpr, which had prowled down the centuries right into our own times through the pages of Le Courayer, Ranke, Driiffel, Brandi, and even Dollinger, has at long last been effectuaJly laid; and similarly, the shade of the sturdy Jesuit, Pallavicini, must now cer­ tainly rejoice at the happy fulfilment of the task which he strove so mightily and failed so signally to accomplish. However, in spite of all the light let in upon the T riden­ tine era, several prominent figures have remained hitherto rather shadowy, notably the tall, handsome, aristocratic fig­ ure of Charles Guise, second Cardinal of Lorraine. Pastor several years ago termed his attitude toward the Holy See "a mystery,m and remarked that "a biography complying with the requirements of modern science, of the Cardinal, ~ttOry of die Pope', ed. Kerr, Vol. XVI, p. 158, note 3. 464 d CRISIS AT TRENT who was a man of most complex character, is still very much wantcd.112 Dr. Richard, too, in his recent definitive history of Trent,' points out the lack of an adequate study of Lor­ raine as one of the f cw remaining lacunae in the Tridentinc documentation. Obviously, then, the recent volume of Mr. H. Outram Ev,ennett4 has been awaited. It forms the first part of the complete reinterpretation of Lorraine undertaken by the dis­ tinguished Cambridge don. And though its first and most eminent success consists, of course, in the decisive manner in which it rescues the great French Cardinal from the thicket of historical misunderstanding in which he has so long wand,crcd, alone and almost friendless, yet it has besides a wider significance. For the solidity and sense of the Papal ideals concerning the orientation of the Counter-Reform movement arc set in relief more luminously than ever by contrast with the hollowness and impossibility of another set of ideals that found their last personification in Lorraine. Upon this single aspect of Lorraine's significance it might be interesting briefly to dwell. II At the outset we must recall that there was among Cath· olics themselves in the early and middle sixteenth century 3 lamentable lack of unanimity as regards the proper method of meeting the Protestant menace, and more especially as regards the relative emphasis that ought to be put on a~­ tempts at reunion and efforts for reform. The Papal att•· tude, though always paternal and not seldom weak, was nevertheless fundamentally intransigent; it never seriouSly envisaged the possibility of reunion with the dissidents; and this fact gave the handle to one of Fra Paolo's chief com· IJbid., p. 154, note 1. d. 'R,Me-Lttlercq, Hi_1t1i,t- dn Corrri/11, t. IX, Con<il, d, Tr,fllt, /ar P. R,c/,or ' Ir, Pti~. I• 17. 4Tbe Cardinal of Lorr• ine and the Council of Trtnr, A Study in rhe Counter· Rdonmtion, Cambridce, 1930, pp. xvii•SI 7. A CRISIS AT TRENT 465 plaints against the Council of Trent, and consequently. against the Popes to which it was supposedly "enslaved," namely, that by its "gratuitously unnecessary dogmatic defi­ nitions" it had widened irreparably the rift in the unity of Christendom. History, however, supreme arbiter of all contemporary differences of opinion, has abundantly established the right­ ness of the Papal attitude; viewed in retrospect, the rupture with the heretics is easily seen to have been from the outset irremediable. Yet not a11 had the vision to see or the cour­ age to accept this fact at the time. And from this lack of vision and courage there arose, at least in large part, the so­ called continuation controversy between France and the forces of Pius IV. The controversy raged during the in­ terval between the latter's election in 1559 and the reopening of Trent in 1562, and the point at issue was5 whether Trent should be resumed, or whether :in :ittempt should be made to summon an entirely new council, one so constituted :is to win the good will of the Christians who had seceded from the obedience of Rome, and thus to hold out hope of re:.toring the broken unity of Christiandom. The resumption of Trent meant the definite abandonment of hopes of reunion; a new Council might serve as fuel to keep those hopes faintly flickering yet a while longer. In France feeling against the resumption of Trent ran high, and on its crest rode Charles Guise. And as he was the coryphaeus of the anti-continuationists, so also and most naturally he was the sponsor of a National Council for an autonomous settlement of French religious difficulties, with which project was in turn associated the search after formu­ lae of reunion with the Calvinists. These, together with the <JUCStion of toleration (upon whose many thorns, however, Lorraine was too circumspect to rend his scarlet robes), were the issues of the day and by his stand on them Lorraine found himself at odds with the saner, more ecumenical ideals •Evinnctl, op. cit., p. xiv. {66 A CRISIS AT TRENT of Pius IV, and at the head of a school of thought that neither moved nor spoke with Rome. He undertook to pit Gallic logic against Roman grasp of facts, with the future course of the Counter-Reform hanging on the issue of the combat. Natu rally one asks the reason for such hardiness, and in the answer lies the reason why Lorraine simply had to be worsted. He was fighting for a cause already lost before he so much as entered the lists; Gallic logic was far too fragile a weapon with which to stem the onrush of history. All of which needs some explanation. III First of all, what was the motive of Lorraine's opposition to Rome? Personal vanity, ambition, the vision of himself as patri­ arch of a schismatical France, a subterranean inclination toward heterodoxy- all these were at the time alleged, and since then have been widely believed. Now, however, it must be recognized that Lorraine's campaign against Tre~t and more especially his support of the National Council were based on a set of principles that he really held with great sincerity. These principles he had inherited from the past, his own and that of France; their soundness was ap­ parently confirmed by the exigencies of circumstances; their hold on him was strengthened by their congeniality with certain peculiar elements of his own character; they deter­ mined his course, and held him in it even though it might cut across the path plotted out by Rome. In the first place, when in the famous memorandum he prepared for the Lutheran princes in 1561, Lorraine stated that his "main object was the reestablishment of Christian unity, which is vital for the preservation of Christianity itself, and is demanded alike by the honor of God and the safety of the State," he was undoubtedly speaking from the heart, whatever we may think of the ingenuousness of other parts of the document. Christian unity, to be sought under A CRISIS AT TRENT 467 the double formality of a religious desideratum and a politi­ cal necessity, was the ideal set in the center of all his activity. And the ideal was certainly traditional enough to be quite legitimate. But Lorraine, like Charles V before him, egre• giously erred ~n his choice of methods wherewith to pursue that ideal; and, in fact, he was wrong in his initial judgment upon the possibility under existing circumstances of the ideal itself. Still, his reasoning, however erroneous, was clear enough. The Calvinist Re/orme had, in 1558, leaped almost over­ night into a serious threat against the political and social fabric of the French nation. Persecution had been tried, but, as always, had proved a weapon that broke in the hands of those who used it. Toleration, on the other hand, was altogether illogical; if there were only one true religion how could it consistently allow any other to stand by its side? Nevertheless, some sort of a solution of the problem was im­ perative. And in arriving at it no help was to be looked for from beyond the Alps; the salvation of the unity of France was not a matter that could safely be trusted to the hands of Italian lawyers. Obviously then, concluded Lorraine, reunion with the Calvinists was the only possible remedy; reason and experience ( and prejudice) excluded all others. Moreover, his own peculiar character added its weight to the balance. He was a congenital opportunist, gifted by nature with an extraordinary facility for adapting himself to circumstances; he ·had been brought up in the atmosphere of the old Re/ormisme of the reign of Francis I, that smacked so much of the idealism of Contarini and of an Erasmian spirit of compromise; he had been educated by a theologian of the stamp of Claude d'Espe~ce wh? ':as well known and not a little suspected for his convi~tlon that esy was to be met with argument and persuasion and a her · d.ff B .
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