The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief support in Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity, the Church.When the Church became corrupt, men ought to have drawn a distinction, and kept their religion in spite of all.But this is more easily said than done.It is not every people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to tolerate a lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward expression.But history does not record a heavier responsibility than that which rests upon the decaying Church.She set up as absolute truth, and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had distorted to serve her own aggrandizement.Safe in the sense of her inviolability, she abandoned herself to the most scandalous profligacy, and, in order to maintain herself in this state, she levelled mortal blows against the conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove multitudes of the noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into the arms of unbelief and despair.
Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually so great, react more energetically against the hierarchy; why did she not accomplish a reformation like that which occurred in Germany, and accomplish it at an earlier date?
A plausible answer has been Italian mind, we are told, never of the hierarchy, while the origin given to this question.The went further than the denial and the vigor of the German Reformation was due to its positive religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of justification by faith and of the inefficacy of good works.
It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means of the Papacy, and its instruments.105 Nevertheless, in the earlier religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the Huguenots, failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against it.Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their details, their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be demonstrated.The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our eyes, since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it, never all of them together.
The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward ecclesiastical customs which entered into daily life, and of a sense of dependence on sacraments and ceremonies.The great personal influence of religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of Italy.
That hostility to the hierarchy, which displays itself more especially from the time of Dante onwards in Italian literature and history, has been fully treated by several writers.We have already said something of the attitude of public opinion with regard to the Papacy.Those who wish for the strongest evidence which the best authorities offer us, can find it in the famous passages of Machiavelli's 'Discorsi,' and in the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini.Outside the Roman Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men among the bishops, and for many of the parochial clergy.On the other hand, the mere holders of benefices, the canons and the monks were held in almost universal suspicion, and were often the objects of the most scandalous aspersions, extending to the whole of their order.
It has been said that the monks were made the scapegoats for the whole clergy, for the reason that none but they could be ridiculed without danger.But this is certainly incorrect.They are introduced so frequently in the novels and comedies, because these forms of literature need fixed and well-known types where the imagination of the reader can easily fill up an outline.Besides which, the novelists do not as a fact spare the secular clergy.In the third place, we have abundant proof in the rest of Italian literature that men could speak boldly enough about the Papacy and the Court of Rome.In works of imagination we cannot expect to find criticism of this kind.Fourthly, the monks, when attacked, were sometimes able to take a terrible vengeance.
It is nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular class of all, and that they were reckoned a living proof of the worthlessness of conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical organization, of the system of dogma, and of religion altogether, according as men pleased, rightly or wrongly, to draw their conclusions.We may also assume that Italy retained a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great mendicant orders than other countries, and had not forgotten that they were the chief agents in the reaction against what is called the heresy of the thirteenth century, that is to say, against an unruly and vigorous movement of the modern Italian spirit.And that spiritual police which was permanently entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any other feeling than secret hatred and contempt.
