Europa: In the Age of the Fourth Race of Kings

[volksmarschall]

BOOK II: THE REFORMATION

PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION


I

The Origins of an Inadequate Response​

It is somewhat commonplace in contemporary historiography to shy away from the term “Counter Reformation” and prefer, in its place, to use “Catholic Reformation.” Such historiography, if we were to follow Thomas Carlyle, is defeatist in that it concedes, implicitly, of the glorious event and nature that is “Reformation.” But as I’ve given consideration the idea of a benign “Reformation” discounts the obvious falsity of that disposition. As hitherto stated, the Reformation as a benign and glorious event is purely Protestant in stock and lineage—it is blind to the realities that the Reformation unleashed near two centuries of sectarian conflict, unleashed the most brutal war then seen in Europe,[1] saw the dissolution of the monasteries and the plight of over 20,000 religious as a result, and was moved by political considerations.

Given the political nature of the Reformation, at least in its inception, where German princes and English nobles saw the Reformation as an instrumental tool for their own self-advancement and power, the Counter Reformation was a deeply inadequate response to a purely political event in its genesis and carried on as a political event despite the theologizing done by various Protestant Reformers. The Catholic response was theological and intellectual, responding to the Protestant ecclesiological and theological criticisms rather than to the more obvious matter of Protestant usurpation and political dissidence. In this respect the Counter Reformation was no Counter Reformation at all. For the legacy of the Protestant Reformation was not the schism of the Western church but the fracturing of Christendom, the division of Europe along politico-religious lines, the elevation and subsequent enslavement of the aristocracy to the power of debt-finances, and finally the ascension of the bourgeois professionals who benefited from the laxed economic laws of Protestant policy-makers.

The real Counter Reformation was the Evangelical Wars, were religious and theological concerns were never really the focal point, but wrapped up in the prevailing political zeitgeist. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church hunkered down in its intellectual mentality following Protestant revolution and never recovered politically. Where Catholicism and politics intertwined it was not moved at the reunification of Christendom but the defense of Europe from external invasion and, as became the case in France and the Habsburg dominions, a form of Gallicanism or Austrianism where the political establishments attempted to curb what public influence the church held apart from the political establishment. That is, these states saw themselves in conflict with the church over public loyalty and sought to subordinate the church to the state in much the same manner as happened in England, Denmark, and the German Protestant principalities.

Irrespective of these facts the Counter Reformation was born in 1538 at the Council of Rodez which would last until 1555. The choice of Rodez, a small communal municipality in southern France, seems like an odd choice. But the prominence of France as the “first daughter of the church” wielded its influence to secure Papal blessings for the council. Moreover, with political tensions arising throughout much of northern France, Germany, and northern Italy, the location of Rodez was a safe spot for the senior churchmen to convene as time permitted them to discuss the theological and intellectual topics of the day.

SCREENSHOT 1: The Council of Rodez is called, 1538.​

Nicholas I, the son of the great duke and king Charles IV, was the leading French political voice in lobbying for the council to be held in France. While the First Italian War (1520-1523) ended in French victory, it did not exterminate the Protestant cause in northern Italy but French soldiers could guarantee safe passage of senior clerics into France through maintenance of the roads through northern Italy. Pope Boniface IX, hearing the petitions of Nicholas, was not swayed by the Angevin prince despite having been the beneficiary of Nicholas’ father’s actions during the First Italian War. What really swayed Boniface in selecting Rodez was the French control of the College of the Cardinals. Eleven of the senior cardinals were from France: Armagnac, Armor, Anjou, Berry, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Lyon, Orleans, Paris, and Rethel. The pressure of the “French Lobby” as modern historians have taken to calling it, outweighed the pressure from the Spanish and Italian churchmen. And given France’s recent role in the Italian Wars in fighting off the Protestants, Pope Boniface felt duty-bound to reward France with the council.

The main force within the College to secure the Council of Rodez was Cardinal Bishop Jacques de Siorac, the Cardinal Bishop of Angers. The leading French churchman, and the Bishop-advisor to Nicholas I, Siorac was a precursor to Cardinal Richelieu in every way. In fact, Richelieu gave credit to Siorac as one of his major inspirations and role models. Siorac was much a politician as he was a theologian. A fierce traditionalist, a man who by modern standards would be charitably labelled reactionary, he was also the leading voice in French intervention in the Italian Wars and sought, with the emerging Angevin Dynasty, to strengthen the position of the Angevin lands and the church’s role with the Angevin rulers. While he was unable to secure Angers as the seat of the council, Siorac’s forceful and skillful maneuvers would have certainly merited commentary by Machiavelli if the latter had lived to grow aware of the influence of Siorac over French and clerical policy in the 1520s-1540s.

Siorac was aware of the “dual threat” posed by the Protestant Reformation: theological and political. He hoped that the council would address both, but as the fate of history moves the council would only address the theological concerns and miss the political problems that faced the church and the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, Siorac, in opening the council, declared, “Never before the in history of the church is the matter of her integrity under threat.” By integrity he was referring to the church’s role as the walls of Christendom holding the disparate polity together. At the same time Siorac noted the fateful circumstances that led to this “accidental” but “beneficial” construction—those who argue that the church always wanted political power and cozied up with Constantine and Theodosius know the slightest amount of Roman or church history. The privileged political position that the church found itself in by the sixth century was purely circumstantial. The civil and political collapse of the Roman Empire in the West left the church as the last remaining institution of law and order in what was the former territories of the Roman Empire in the west. Peoples, tribes, and kings, all looked to this last vestige of the old order for refuge, which the church gave. With this accidental and newfound power the church tried to legitimate itself through illegitimate means—like the Donation of Constantine—but this was all after the fact.

FIGURE 1: Cardinal Bishop Jacques Siorac (1497-1557), the leading French churchman during the Counter Reformation and the leading conciliar father. He was considered to be the next likeliest pope after the death of Boniface in 1557 but died just after the convocation to elect a new pope began. Siorac remains a legendary and polarizing figure in French history, no less than his devotee Cardinal Richelieu. His successor, Cardinal Bishop Jean de Rély, who served as Siorac’s young aide at the council, would be elected pope in 1568 as Alexander VII.​

The church felt compelled by the forces of historical necessity to maintain the order and legality which remained after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west. Lives hung in the balance—quite literally so, as the church was seen in this period of pacification of the Arian Germanic tribes as the great lawgiving force. Thus, the coronations and bestowing of legal order by the Germanic kings of the western territories was always in union with clerics. The Protestant Reformation brought a wrecking ball to the walls of not only the church, but to Christendom, the last atrophied vestige of the Roman Empire according to Peter Heather.[2]

Yet, the biggest problem with the formation of the Council of Rodez was its lack of political orientation. Whatever political orientation might be derived esoterically—the call for Christian theological unity would necessarily have political ramifications—the reality is that the church was woefully inadequate to deal with the real problems facing Europe: the birth of nation-states and the subordination of religious institutions to the state. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation took the attention of the Roman church away from the growing threat of the Ottomans in the east as the Protestants were a more immediate threat to Catholic hegemony. This would have disastrous consequences for Lithuania and Hungary, in particular, who bore the brunt of Ottoman invasion as the Evangelical Wars began and consumed central Europe. France would, soon enough, find itself split between fighting in Germany, Italy, the Mediterranean, and North Africa to combat the Protestant Alliance and the Ottoman invaders who were knocking on the doorsteps of Vienna and Rome.

The council’s concern to stop clerical abuse and excess, the formation of new monastic orders and religious practices, and the confrontation with anti-sacramental theology were all well and good. But it missed, to paraphrase a modern euphemism, “the bigger picture.”


[1] This timeline’s “Evangelical Wars,” our timeline’s Thirty Years’ War.

[2] See Peter Heather’s Restoration of Rome.

SUGGESTED READING

Carlos Eire, Reformations

Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders​

 

[stnylan]

I like the hints - well, more broad statements - about the Ottoman threat.

 

[volksmarschall]

I like the hints - well, more broad statements - about the Ottoman threat.

And they've been all over, especially in the Image Appendix updates. The great threat. The great showdown! Which, alas, we have to wait until Part III to get to; which we will get to soon enough. A great green giant sits in the east that dwarfs everything, save for some overseas colonial empires, by comparison...

And what a struggle it was, remains, and will be as we shall hopefully see soon enough.

 

[Nikolai]

Petty European Princes, squabbling while the Muslims gather their strength in the Balkans...

 

[volksmarschall]

BOOK II: THE REFORMATION

PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION


II

Theology or Anthropology?​

I will no longer belabor the point of the Council of Rodez and the Counter Reformation being insufficient and inadequate in addressing the actual problems that beset Europe during the first half of the 16th century, other than to say that any honest reader will see the obvious political dimensions of the Reformation as we have already covered from the dissolution of the monasteries to the German princes forcing Luther’s hand for schism—to which the now Protestant aristocracy was the obvious beneficiary of.

One of the major divides between what we now call Roman Catholicism—a term invented by Anglicans who considered themselves Catholic, that is, universal—and the emerging Protestant churches is what one might call theological-anthropology, or to dichotomizing scholars the contest between theology and anthropology. Any student of philosophy knows that Christianity’s greatest gift imparted to the Western intellect was its extensive study of the nature of man. As Catholic anthropology saw God and man united as one—as Augustine recounts in Confessions, to discover and know oneself is simultaneously the discovery and coming to know of God—Catholic theology was obsessively concerned with the nature of man leading to the rise of humanism and the cultural arts of the Renaissance which the church was an extensive patron of. The doctrine of humanism—not “secular humanism” as is often promoted today—is religious in its origins; for humanism asserts that man is the most sublime of all creatures that exist on the earth, indeed, the reason for the earth’s existence is to be the home of man. Moreover, humans have a nature, and to achieve happiness and ontological flourishing, man is meant to live in accord with his nature. Thus, the two major points of humanism: the exceptionalism of man and that life exists for happiness—though one finds antecedent roots of both ideas in the late Platonists and Aristotelians (Aristotle and Cicero especially)—were extensively nurtured by the Christian religion and still persists with many today in the most peculiar and ironic of ways (especially given that many of the heirs of the Christian humanist tradition are entirely ignorant of its genesis). Considering this is historical fact, the development of Catholic theology has therefore been concerned with the understanding of the nature of man moreover than understanding the nature of God—or, understanding God comes through an understanding of man; especially when one considers the reality of the incarnation and the role that the incarnation plays in Christian theology and soteriology.

If Catholicism concerned itself with the study of man (not to the exclusion of God), then Protestantism concerned itself with the study of God rather than the study of man. While the Anglicans never embraced the doctrine of total depravity as annunciated by Luther and Calvin and their progeny, Protestant theology, from Anabaptism to Lutheranism to Reformed Calvinism, emphasized the total depravity of man. Man, being depraved, is not a creature of celebration and exceptionalism as envisioned in the Catholic imagination. As such, Protestant concerns turned away from the exceptionalism of man and to the nature of God and soteriology: To understand God’s salvific character and actions in history and how gracious humans ought to be, in piety and reverence, to this God who saves despite humans not deserving such salvation.

Both sides drew on Augustine, the revered and original doctor of the church. Catholics emphasized the substance of Augustine’s theology and anthropology. Protestants emphasized the logical deduction of Augustine’s theology and anthropology. The battle over Augustine between Western Christianity can be summarized as this: Roman Catholicism follows Augustine’s writings in their substance but doesn’t deviate from it; Protestantism, particularly Calvinism and Lutheranism, often sidestep Augustine’s substance in favor of the logical exhaustivity of his positions. To highlight a single of many possible points, Catholics affirm, with Augustine, that man, though corrupted in his reasoning, still desires the good and true even in what we Christianity would otherwise call “sinful” action. That is, man always acts—however ignorantly and foolishly—in hopes of gaining happiness; something that is, in a way, intrinsically good as nothing is intrinsically evil. Since man does desire the good and true, man is always seeking God and God responds to this seeking to impart his grace into man’s heart so as to know him (as God is Truth itself) and live in proper accordance to his nature, thus leading to salvation. Calvinists and Lutherans, by contrast, ignore Augustine’s substance but play with his logic: If fallen man cannot know the good and true then his actions for the good and true will never lead to happiness and is therefore always harmful to the individual and anyone else who might be involved in this concupiscence (hurtful desire). Man’s desire for the good and true has no bearing over his attaining knowledge of the good and true therefore it requires God to take the first action to save him, thus leading to his salvation.

FIGURE 1: A portrait of St. Augustine of Hippo. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in their theologies and visions of man, both drew from Augustine; though drew from him and moved him to different directions and conclusions.​

To the uninitiated one might ask ‘so what’? But notice the sharp difference as the substantial anthropology of Augustinian Catholicism and the theological logic of Augustinian Protestantism plays itself out to the end. In its Catholic form the first mover is, technically, man—for it is man who always wills to be happy, though fallen he is, and God answers this yearning by entering into man’s life to fulfill him. In its Protestant form the first mover is God, since man’s fallen desires can never lead him to God, so man’s desire for God is irrelevant; if God does not enter into men’s lives then he is forever lost.

This cycles into a multitude of other anthropological questions. The most famous being free will among the many others so I will again only concentrate on this single example instead of boring the reader with the specificity of Christian doctrine which few people know though which many would likely find interesting if coming to such concerns with an inquisitive mind. Augustine argued that man, by virtue of being will, for man is made in the image of Trinity which is mind, word, and spirit (or memory, intellect, and will). Man as mind links man to God through his soul, which is the rational part of the human mind, which is understood to be God the Father (eternal and immutable nature and Truth). Man as word, that is reason (the logos), links man to God so as to know himself and by knowing himself, as man is mind, and mind is God, he comes to know God. Seeing that the Word is Christ, then it is true, doctrinally, that only Christ is the bridge to the Father as the Word, that is Reason itself, is the only path to knowing the Truth—who is God the Father. Man as spirit, or thumos, or will, links to man to God in that man wills to know the truth and in willing to know the truth he desires to know the truth which requires the Word. Though man, on his own, that is separated by the divine image within him—half mind and half word and half spirit—cannot come to this knowing and embodiment in life, ensures that man has a free will by definition. Since man is will he has a free will, so Augustine argued. (I would also be remiss not to point out that this understanding of man as imago Trinitatis, image of the Trinity, is not unique to Augustine but is, at least, first established by St. Irenaeus, that most glorious and great French saint, in his work Against Praxeas; but seeing that Augustine was declared an original doctor of the church and Irenaeus has not yet been made a doctor of the church, anything that Augustine touched and systemized—as Ireneaus’ ruminations on this topic is minor and not extensive—automatically ensures Augustine’s reputation as the go to citation.)

Calvinists, in particular, reject free will—at least as understood and defended in Catholicism. Luther happened to agree as he wrote in The Bondage of the Will. Their argument follows the logic of corruption to total depravity. If man’s mind and word are corrupted, and the word—intellect—was corrupted from the corruption of man’s mind, then it should follow that corruption continues into the will and thus corrupts the will (so the Calvinists argued in response to the Catholic position in taking the Catholic position at its word, pardon the pun). But, as the Calvinists charged in their position, the Fall of Man is man’s desire to decide for himself what is true and what is good to bring about his own happiness apart from Truth and Nature (e.g. God); thus, man’s fall is tied to the lust for domination—and here lies another ingenious aspect to Augustine’s anthropology that I will simply point out here and not address for the sake of brevity—and, as Calvin argued, that means the first order of corruption entered from the will and not the mind so it follows that the will is corrupted and from the will a corruption of the word and mind followed leaving man in his totally depraved state of total corruption. As Calvin succinctly wrote, “Though man has still the faculty of willing there is no soundness in it. He falls under the bondage of sin necessarily, and yet voluntarily.”[1] Practically speaking, free will is irrelevant and pointless as it, being under the bondage of sin, cannot choose God, therefore, however free in its natural state of will (to lower goods), it cannot bring about man’s salvation.

FIGURE 2: A portrait of John Calvin, arguably the most influential and important Protestant Reformer and theologian; apart from Augustine, whom he strongly admired, no other Christian writer—save St. Paul—has so influenced Christianity.​

Augustine, for what it is worth, did not argue that; instead articulating the opposite as we already covered: In man’s perpetual desire for the good and true, which means his perpetual desire for God, man’s will is not corrupted as he always seeks the good and true. Man’s corruption stems from his lack of knowledge—per St. Paul in the first chapter of the Letter to the Romans—which leads to his disordered life and miserable state of being (being unhappy and unsatisfied). Man willed this disobedience, that much is true, but it was for the end to which his uncorrupted will also sought: namely happiness. Being so corruption did not enter the will but infected the soul (mind and word).

Other commentators, and scholars, more notable than I, have pointed out, that Augustine's hesitancy to condemn the will is likely a reflection of his battles against the Manichaens who condemned the body as evil. As Christianity maintains the goodness and sanctity of the body, as the body is something God created, the condemnation of the will comes close to a return to Manicheanism as the will moves the body to sinful action. To preserve the goodness of the body, and things contingent to the body, Augustine put the focus of man's corruption onto the soul, the mind, the very thing that the Manicheans asserted was untainted. From the Catholic perspective, the danger of condemning the will is the nigh impossible task of slipping into a sort of Gnosticism that shuns the body as evil; something that orthodox Christians have always regarded as heretical.

As such, the Council of Rodez, when it was called, thought it necessary to confront Protestant theology and defend the Catholic understanding of man (and by contingent relationship, God). Given the more pertinent political crises, it is funny that Protestants and Catholics remained divided, as Christendom remains divided, because of political fracturing and lack of unity, though they blame theology; as Machiavelli bemused, the Christian world, which celebrates the intellectual and contemplative life to the point of being so high in the clouds to be unable to see what is going on before their eyes on earth, finds himself in this return to “real life” lost in a world that has changed because he was stuck arguing about books and other intellectual matters rather than be attune to the political material crises before him. Regardless, the movement into the Council of Rodez and the Catholic Counter Reformation, in response to the theologies of the Protestant Reformation, leads us to the unavoidable conclusion that Protestantism focuses on God, often at the exclusion of man, while Catholicism focused on man, often at the point of forgetting about God.


[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.3.5.

SUGGESTED READING

St. Augustine, Confessions; City of God; The Trinity (De Trinitate); De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis); Freedom of the Will.

St. Ireneaus, Against Praexeas.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will.​

 

[stnylan]

I find it really quite fun about Augustine that, for all the massive importance of City of God etc. on later theology, in his own time he was most concerned with addressing the Donatist Heresy. Though one can argue, I suppose, that Luther and Calvin might have had somewhat in common with Donatus and his followers.

 

[volksmarschall]

BOOK II: THE REFORMATION

PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION


III

Gallicanism vs Latinism ​

The term “Roman Catholic” and is modern; while St. Ignatius of Antioch used the term ‘catholic’ to describe the true church—that it was universal and not isolated in smallness as later heretical sects would claim—the identification of the Catholic church as catholic is a largely modern phenomenon. The Holy Roman Church, Roman Church, and Church of Rome were more common names throughout history, and the official name of the church is the Catholic Church, having been solidified during the Council of Rodez.[1] In the English-speaking world “Roman Catholic” was created by the Anglicans, who claiming their catholicity, wanted to distinguish those who professed allegiance to the national catholic church of the English people centered at Canterbury with the increasingly idolatrous (Anglican claim) of the “Roman” church seeking a sort of imperial dominance over the traditional catholic custom of local authority.

While the council was called in France, and while the French lobby was growing in strength, the Roman curia and papacy was mostly Italian (or Latin). From the middle ages through the Renaissance, until the “French conspiracy” elected Cardinal Bishop Jean de Rély as Pope Alexander VII in 1568 which broke the Italian or Latin control of the office of Pontifex Maximus (and coincided with the coming of age of Louis-Joseph). That said, France is considered the “first daughter of the church” and holds a sort of special spiritual status in the Catholic church. If the Latins were chosen to run the church, the French were chosen to ensure the success of the church. It was the adoption of Roman orthodoxy by the Frankish chiefs that cemented Roman Christianity as the official form of Christianity after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. It was the Frankish chiefs turned kings who would rise to construct the structural foundations for the Holy Roman Empire which, while having its seat of power in Germany, had its genealogical roots through the Franks. Then there was the so-called “Babylonian Captivity” of the church when the French effectively split the Roman church with the pro-French popes at Avignon from 1309-1376, after which the successors returned to Rome but a line of anti-popes claiming papal authority reigned from Avignon which caused schism where various other kings and kingdoms aligned with Avignon and Rome based on their own political calculations.

FIGURE 1: The Papal Palace at Avignon, where the “Avignon Papacy” was seated from 1309-1376. Avignon eventually fell back to the dominions of the Angevins. The Papal Palace of Avignon was restored in 1542 as the sometime (unofficial) residence of the popes from 1568-1667.​

The achievement of the selection of Rodez as the seat of the new ecumenical council was a double-edged sword. On one side it represented a restoration of French-Roman relations. On the other side it represented the renewed power and vigor of the French attempt to achieve clerical and ecclesiastical dominance. This is especially true when the French cardinals, with coerced support from the cardinals in northern Italy who were “saved from the Protestant heretics” because of French support, elected a French cardinal as pope—the first since Gregory XI.

The election of Jean de Rély as pope was only possible because of the prestige and newfound power of the French cardinals in exercising their authority and power in securing Rodez as the seat of the council. While political circumstances in the Italian Wars also secured the blessing of northern Italian senior clerics to the French cause, the thoroughly political instrumentalization of the papacy by the French throne had long been sought after and, in the eyes of senior French clerics and the French throne, necessary given the political realities that were besetting Europe.

As mentioned, the Protestant Reformation had broken European unity as northern Europe fell under national Protestant sway. The Evangelical Wars turned the attention of European princes and kings to war against their former brothers while the Ottomans swept across the Danube and sacked Budapest. The Italian Wars, which was a series of conflicts attempting to decide Italian supremacy politically, with a newly added religious dimension to it following the rapid advancement of Calvinist rebellion through northern Italy, saw France’s prestige rise—and the Angevin star in particular; Louis-Joseph to be exact who became the “Great Catholic King” and “Savior of Christ’s Church” in his defeat of the Protestant rebels and lifting of the siege of Rome during the Fourth Italian War.

The dangerous and volatile political and cultural situation in Europe during the late sixteenth century also necessitated a new national mythology for the French to see themselves as the saviors of Europe. To be the saviors of Europe entailed that the French were the chosen people of God, like the Israelites of the Old Testament, and this necessitated the French have special status among all the Catholic peoples—and what better way to achieve this than to have control of the curia? It ensured the inseparable connection between the French people and their religion; it ensured the indissoluble bond between the Catholic church and the “fourth race of kings.” To this end the Roman church, from 1568-1667 was the “strong arm” of the French throne. An unbroken line of ten popes were French.

FIGURE 2: “The Adoration of the Magi” (with an aged Louis-Joseph depicted as the first wise man giving worship to the infant Jesus) by Peter Paul Rubens. From about 1570-1660, coinciding with the height of French power in the church, both the Roman church and French Kingdom were extensive patrons of the arts.​

There was also the matter of pressing French claims across Italy – to which control of the Roman church would serve as an indispensable ally in this effort. Moreover, there was also the growing attention to the crisis of the Ottoman Empire and her growth through the Balkans and central Mediterranean. In 1481, the Turks sailed into Otranto and sacked the city; briefly seizing its control and beheading nearly 900 non-combatants who refused to convert to Islam—immediately being recognized as holy martyrs.

Italian city-states, notably Genoa and Venice, were busy defending the trade lanes against the Turks. The two most powerful northern Italian states were thereby in no position to renew efforts at possible northern Italian hegemony—not to mention Venice already being defeated in the First Italian War by the Franco-Genoese alliance which I briefly covered in the first book. But the prize, as I also mentioned in the first book, was also Naples and the Kingdom of Naples. The Angevins were pressing their claims back into Naples through intermarrying into the kingdom. Naples had achieved autonomy as the crowns of Castile and France had beaten Aragon into the ground. But with Castile and Aragon uniting, the Angevins looked to prevent any possible Spanish inheritance.

To this effect, with the Papacy as the sort of United Nations of Renaissance Europe, to avoid bloodshed and dispute petitions for Papal Privilege would certainly be pressed. After all, Spain, through Aragon, still had a genealogical claim to Naples given the Aragonese ascendency during the “other Hundreds’ Year War.” France, through the Angevins, could equally press their claims through the marriage of Marie-Anne to Prince Roberto, now King Roberto. And a French controlled Curia would certainly side with the French throne in any political matter pertaining to France.

FIGURE 3: The skulls of the Martyrs of Otranto, the Otranto Cathedral, present day. Southern Italy and the coasts of Italy would become a major battle zone between the Holy Alliance, led by France, against the Ottomans.​

In this regard the Counter-Reformation, with its political ramifications, further weakened the church in the sense that France was becoming the premier political power of the continent and, with “blessings” from the church, ensured its headship over the church. While it is true that the church had already been losing secular authority over the centuries; in part due to the earlier iteration of Papal-French conflict leading to the Avignon Papacy, the later developments of obvious subordination of church authority and power to the interests of the French crown and the Angevin dominions in particular. And in this struggle France was, in weakening Latin power and control over the church, paving her way into Italy.

French supremacy was further advanced with the reign of Louis-Joseph himself. Having married Princess Charlotte du Lusignan, the claimant to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and eventually becoming King of Cyprus and titular King of Jerusalem before his death, France (and Russia) began developing new political theologies as the “Third Rome.” Cardinal Bishop Henri d'Euse, one of the chief cardinal ministers to Louis-Joseph after the election of Jean de Rély as Pope, made it a point to stress this continuity and to vigorously promote Louis-Joseph as the defender of the faith against all heretics and enemies of Christ.


[1] In our timeline, the Catholic Church as a definitive name was applied by the Council of Trent.

 

[Arnulf Floyd]

Very impressive and well researched AAR

 

[stnylan]

French influence over the Church is a true Scourge that might well make one become Protestant

 

[volksmarschall]

Very impressive and well researched AAR

Glad you've dropped in to show your presence Arnulf Floyd! Also glad to know you're enjoying the AAR.
Cheers!

French influence over the Church is a true Scourge that might well make one become Protestant

Spoken like a true Englishman!

 

[volksmarschall]

APPENDIX OF IMAGES 2B

FIGURE 41: “Adoration of the Magi,” by Peter Paul Rubens.

FIGURE 42: Headshot of Michelangelo’s “David.” The sculpture of David was the embodiment of man in all of his glory—the Christian humanism that undergirded the concept of human exceptionalism which rests as the pillar of humanist thought. St. Augustine, in Confessions and De Genesi ad Litteram, argued that God forming order out of watery chaos (man’s unordered desires) led to beautification. Hugh of St. Victor, following Augustine in his commentary over Genesis, added the same but punctuated the role divinization in opus restaurationis (work of restoration). Beautification became synonymous with divinization and restoration in Christian thought by the Renaissance. Protestants rejected this outlook. One of the dividing lines between Catholicism and Protestantism was the majesty and depravity of man; Catholics emphasizing the former and Protestants the latter.

FIGURE 43: “St. Teresa in Ecstasy,” by Gian Bernini. Renaissance work, in many ways, were an Augustinian neo-Platonic rebellion against the rigidity of Scholasticism and the “faith alone” theologies of Protestantism (later Renaissance to Baroque period work). Theological eros and the “erotic sublime” was a major focus of late Renaissance and Baroque Catholic artwork which sought to emphasize the redemptive and transformative power of love. No amount of distinctions or intellectual ascents to “faith” or “belief” could transform the heart like love could.

FIGURE 44: Nicholas Poussin’s “Arrival of Princess Charlotte in France.”* The marriage of Louis-Joseph, then 16 years old, to Princess Charlotte du Lusignan, then 21 years old, sealed the bond between France and Cyprus, giving Louis-Joseph and his descendants the titular claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

*Real painting is Poussin’s “Birth of Venus.”

FIGURE 45: Mehmet enters Constantinople; the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire and the capture of Constantinople sent shockwaves across Europe and opened the floodgates for Ottoman advancement into central and eastern Europe. The Ottoman rulers, upon conquering the Byzantine Empire, took the title “Emperor of Rome” and considered themselves to be the successors of the Roman Empire. The Patriarch of Constantinople gave blessing and sanctified the transfer, in part, due to anti-Western sentiment. This led to further division between Latin and Greek churches; with Latin Christians seeing the Greek patriarch’s approval of Turkish usurpation as tantamount to blasphemy.

FIGURE 46: The Battle of Dresden, 1596. The Battle of Dresden led to the destruction of the Protestant Alliance in Germany during the Evangelical Wars. From 1579-1597, culminating in the Treaty of Salzburg, reinstated Catholic rule in Bavaria. Maximilian’s son, Philip, was restored to the Bavarian throne. The Battle of Dresden changed political dynamics in Germany. As the southern allies, including the Palatinate, were subdued, Brandenburg and Denmark forged a new alliance, alongside the aggrieved Saxons, and the “Campaigns of the Protestant Ascendency” would commence in 1601. The Catholic victory at Dresden by Imperial (Catholic) forces marked the height of Catholic power during the wars.

FIGURE 47: “Christ Ascending on the Cross,” Peter Paul Rubens. One of the aspects of the Counter Reformation was the heavy patronage of the arts by the Catholic Church and Catholic leaders. Art was one of the means to combat the iconoclastic Protestants.

FIGURE 48: “The Family of Darius Before Alexander the Great” by Paolo Veronese. During the 16th and 17th centuries, European art and literature focused on Western exploits in the eastern lands; this was partly motivated to inspire Europeans to take up arms against the marauding Ottomans like the heroes of antiquity had done (Persians being equated with the exotic and foreign Turks of the east). The romantic epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, by Torquato Tasso, written in the aftermath of the Battle of Lefkada, published in 1581, mythologically retold the First Crusade. It was the bestselling work of Italian literature for the next two centuries—surpassing even Dante’s Divine Comedy. Catholic art and literature focusing on eastern exploits, war, and conquest, all aimed at inspiring Europeans to unite against a common eastern enemy. Italy, especially, was the center of such work; likely due to the threat the Ottomans posed to Italy: Otranto, Genoa, and Venice had all been sacked by the Ottoman navy.

FIGURE 49: “The Heroism of Titusz Dugovics” at the Siege of Budapest.* The fall of Budapest to the Ottomans prompted the formation of the Holy Alliance: France, the Papal States, Naples, and Spain, with support from the Habsburgs, to fight against the Ottomans who were now threatening Rome and Vienna. The fall of Budapest followed on the heels of the Sack of Genoa. Ottoman power seemed unstoppable during the sixteenth century.

*Real painting is the Siege of Belgrade (1456).

FIGURE 50: Anthony van Dyck’s “Armida discovers the sleeping Rinaldo,” a scene from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. While an Italian success, the poem was also a bestselling hit across Catholic Europe inspiring major paintings from Baroque period artists who had read the work. In this particular scene, the Knight Rinaldo is asleep during battle and is taken hostage by the Saracen sorceress Armida to prevent him from fighting with the Christian armies. Initially tempted to kill him, Cupid (the god of love) prevents this; instead, the two fall in love. Towards the end of the poem, Armida is distraught with her actions toward Rinaldo and the defeat of her warriors at the hands of Christian knights and prepares to commit suicide but Rinaldo prevents her from doing so. Armida then converts and marries Rinaldo.

FIGURE 51: Domenico Tintoretto, “Tancred Baptizes Clorinda.” Another scene from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delievered, this painting depicts the culminating climax of the relationship of Tancred and Clorinda and their story arc. Clorinda, a Saracen warrior who had earlier tried to kill Tancred, suddenly finds herself in love with him and he her. During a siege, Clorinda sets fire to a Christian siege tower and is struck down by Tancred unknowingly. Taking of the soldier’s helmet, the two see each other’s eyes—the eyes are the gateway to the soul—and confess their love for each other. Before she dies Tancred seals their love through the act of baptism and Tancred promises that they shall be united in heaven. As Tancred seals the act of baptism with Clorinda, he speaks to her, “Unless thyself, thyself heaven's joys envy, And thy vain sorrow thee of bliss deprive, Live, know I love thee, that I nill deny, As angels, men: as saints may wights on live: This said, of zeal and love forth of her eye An hundred glorious beams bright shining drive, Amid which rays herself she closed from sigh, And with new joy, new comfort left her knight.” Clorinda’s final words to Tancred after receiving baptism are, “And loving will I die, oh happy day Whene'er it chanceth! but oh far more blessed If as about thy polished sides I stray, My bones within thy hollow grave might rest, Together should in heaven our spirits stay, Together should our bodies lie in chest; So happy death should join what life doth sever, O Death, O Life! sweet both, both blessed ever.”

FIGURE 52: “Annunciation of the Virgin Mary,” by Francois Lamoyne.

FIGURE 53: “Christ on the Cross,” by Peter Paul Rubens.

FIGURE 54: Tintoretto’s “The Penitent St. Mary Magdalene.” Note the crescent moon in the right-hand corner. The crescent moon was actually an early Christian iconographic symbol (inherited from earlier Sumerian iconography) before being coopted by Islam through the Islamic conquests.

*The real life volksmarschall has written a paper on cultural iconography in the Byzantine Empire and early Christian iconography. You can freely access it here if you like: “The Mesopotamian Origins of Byzantine Symbolism and Early Christian Iconography,” Valley Humanities Review, Spring 2015: pp. 1-13.



SUGGESTED READING

Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered.
​

 

[stnylan]

I love the Penitent Mary Magdalene

 

[Arnulf Floyd]

Interesting update for this AAR, I've heard many new things regarding Reformation and Counter-Reformation

 

[volksmarschall]

BOOK II: THE REFORMATION

PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION


IV

The Wars of Religion​

An inescapable aspect of the Counter Reformation was the militant anti-Protestant tone set by the Roman Church in stamping out dissidents; particularly in its historic homelands: France and Italy most especially. As the Reformation swept much of southern and northern Germany, the Reformation also spread into Switzerland, northern Italy, and the borderlands of France. To this extent the Wars of Religion spilled over into the Italian Wars by the 1570s. As we covered earlier, the First Italian War (1520-1523) was fought largely over competing alliances for regional hegemony over northern Italy. The First Italian War sparked a nearly 50 year on-off engagement between France, Austria, Switzerland, Milan, Genoa, Venice, Tuscany, and the Papal States for dominance over northern Italy.

While southern Italy was eventually re-consolidated under Angevin rule with the coronation of Louis-Joseph’s brother, Frédéric, as King of Naples in 1565, northern Italy remained decidedly fragmented between Genoa, Milan, and Venice, with the growing presence of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany having consolidated much of north-central Italy. But the growing French presence, primarily through the Angevins’ absorption of the Duchy of Savoy to their titles, was also a cause of alarm for the Habsburgs who, as Holy Roman emperors, historically exercised nominal hegemony over the region. Compounded by the fact that Swiss Reformers spread Genevan Calvinism into northern Italy, the dynamics of the Fourth Italian War (1572-1575) was much peculiar as it pitted Catholic Austria in an alliance with the Calvinist Swiss Confederation and Protestant Italian rebels (mostly centered in Milan) against the French who, now led by the famous Louis-Joseph I, exercised Papal privilege to eliminate the heresies and restore the true and catholic faith back to the northern Italians. I will have more to say, in greater detail, about the various religions wars in next part of this book, but need to make mention it here as an integral part of the Counter Reformation.

FIGURE 1: Frédéric I, King of Naples. While Louis-Joseph was the far more important king and royal, he and his brother shared a close filial and political relationship during their reigns. Frédéric reigned from 1565-1614.​

It is generally accepted that two unintended consequences of the Reformation was the rise of secularization; secularism, in this account, being the divorce of state and church. While one might look to the Protestant nations as not having achieved the separation of church and state in the manner promoted by contemporary anti-religionists, the secularism established by the Reformation in Protestant realms was the state control over religion. Instead of religion standing alongside the state with the possibility of interfering in the secular order, the secular order—and secular in Latin (saeculum) simply means temporal—was now the order of prominence after the Protestant Reformation.[1] This also, as many scholars assert, helped to spur the development of democracy as ecclesiastical appointments were democratically nominated and voted upon by a collection of existing ecclesiastical authorities in conjuncture with political authorities. The second uninentended consequence of the Protestant Reformation was the phenomenon of disenchantment. The Catholic theological imagination, far more “pagan” and naturalistic than it was “bookish,” retained a heavily mystical and enchanted view of the world which came under threat by biblioidolaters and the reductionist new science of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Nicolaus Copernicus. As the philosopher William Barret wrote:

At first glance, the spirit of Protestantism would seem to have very little to do with that of the New Science, since in matters religious Protestantism placed all the weight of its emphasis upon the irrational datum of faith, as against the imposing rational structures of medieval [Catholic] theology, and there is Luther’s famous curse upon ‘the whore, Reason.’ In secular matters, however—and particularly in its relation toward nature—Protestantism fitted in very well with the New Science. By stripping away the wealth of images and symbols from medieval Christianity, Protestantism unveiled nature as a realm of objects hostile to the spirit and to be conquered by puritan zeal and industry. Thus Protestantism, like science, helped carry forward that immense project of modern man: the despiritualization of nature, the emptying of it of all the symbolic images projected upon it by the human psyche. With Protestantism begins that long modern struggle, which reaches culmination in the twentieth century, to strip man naked. To be sure, in all of this the aim was progress, and Protestantism did succeed in raising the religious consciousness to a higher level of individual sincerity, soul-searching, and strenuous inwardness…Protestant man begins to look more and more like a gaunt skeleton, a sculpture by Giacometti. A Secular civilization leaves him more starkly naked than the iconoclasm of the Reformation had ever dreamed.[2]​

The Wars of Religion, then, were not purely political. Though there was an obvious political dimension to it that we will cover in some greater detail in the subsequent parts of this book. The wars of religion were also metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological. It was the battle between the mystical, mythological, and “manifest image” on the Catholic side which emphasized analogy, allegory, the erotic, mystical, and conceptual, against the Protestant side which, in its iconoclasm, had the unintended consequence of stripping away the mystical, mythological, and “manifest image” of the Platonic philosophical tradition which de-emphasized analogy, allegory, the erotic, mystical, and conceptual to exhausting itself into the historical, concrete, and “scientific.”

FIGURE 2 (Left): Plato; FIGURE 3 (Right): John Calvin. Part of the Reformation’s legacy was the contest and legacy of Plato. Catholic Christianity was deeply tied to Platonism and most modern scholars who don’t harbor an anti-religious grudge recognize the Platonist core of Catholicism. John Calvin, though a follower of St. Augustine, the most preeminent Christian Platonist of Late Antiquity, took a more fervently “bookish” approach to Christianity and sought to strip Christianity of the conceptual images that, in his mind, served as a barrier for the Christian’s relationship to God. Protestantism, barring the Lutheran romantic revival of the late 18th and early 19th century, moved in a decisively anti-Platonist direction. The Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon even claimed that the Catholic Church worshipped Plato and Aristotle instead of Christ.​

Indeed, this divergence regarded the “conceptual image of man”, as the philosopher of science Wilfrid Sellars described, is seen in the Catholic use of art as the primary means of waging war against Protestantism when swords and guns were not clashing with each other. Art is, of course, image-based. It is supposed to make associative connections which calls men to it; the realization of the “image.” Given the central doctrine of theosis, or divinization, to Catholicism where Catholic man is literally transformed into an embodied image of the incarnate god-man, Christ, it is unsurprising that the Catholic church took the route that it did. Protestants, by contrast, were busy destroying art and images; rejecting the “conceptual image of man” and replacing it with a mechanical image of man more suitable to the emergence of the anthropology of the new science. As man was not a conceptual image needing images to direct him to the Good, True, and Beautiful, Protestantism took to the printing press and mass education to advance their cause. The democratization of literature, education, and hermeneutics is what followed.

On this note it is wrong to assert, as has been the case, that the Roman Church never embraced vernacular translations of the Bible. The original biblical corpus was in Hebrew and Greek, eventually becoming all Greek with the Septuagint. St. Jerome took up the monumental task of translating the Greek into Latin—which was, in the fourth century, the language of the Roman Empire in the west. The Latin Vulgate, or the Latin Bible, was the first vernacular translation of the Bible. Even before the Reformation some late baptized European tribes, the Croats and Bohemians, possessed Bibles and liturgies in their native language sanctioned with approval by the Roman church. But as the legacy of the Roman Empire faded, and with it the loss of the Latin tongue except among the educated elite, many of them churchmen who also served as historians and writers of the court, Latin simply persevered as the language of the Western church until the Reformation brought this to a spectacular end.

Taking a longer view of history, though American “conservatives” would protest this because of their unawareness to philosophy, progressivism, liberalism, and, indeed, secularism, all find their root in Protestantism. Reactionaryism, conservatism, and the mystical self, find its seed in Catholicism which, in the words of Camille Paglia, inherited and built from, without destroying, the heart of the pagan soul.[3] Indeed, Paglia, explaining the sensation of image-culture, said, “Paganism is eye-intense. It is based on cultic exhibitionism, win which sex and sadomasochism are joined. The ancient chthonian mysteries have never disappeared from the Italian church. Waxed saints’ corpses under glass. Tattered armbones in gold reliquaries. Half-nude St. Sebastian pieced by arrows. St. Lucy holding her eyeballs out on a platter. Blood, torture, ecstasy, and tears. Its lurid sensationalism makes Italian Catholicism the emotionally most complete cosmology in religious history.”[4]

We can say that the Counter Reformation, then, sought to retain the pagan spirit of man—that is, not really “pagan” but primordial. Catholic man was Dionysian rather than Apollonian, and the task of Catholic soteriological theology was the divinization of the erotic. Deep, mystical, and mythological man—imaginative man—was threatened by Protestantism which pushed a hollow man, stripped of imagery, focused solely on deconstruction and materialism, essentially leading to a neo-Gnostic flight from the world. The wars of religion, as it relates to man, was a battle between the man of dwelling (Catholic) and the man of detachment (Protestant).


[1] See Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation for a good book dealing with this subject. Also read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

[2] William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, pp. 27-28.

[3] See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, p. 33.

[4] Ibid.

 

[Arnulf Floyd]

Another good chapter, this is one of my favourite AARs

 

[stnylan]

Those Protestants do try to ruin everything, don't they

 

[volksmarschall]

Another good chapter, this is one of my favourite AARs

Thanks again AF.

Those Protestants do try to ruin everything, don't they

Heretic Scum!

Due apologies for the long delay here, but with school and work, and my more honored commitments to Empire for Liberty, this has, of course, somewhat taken the backseat to my AARland projects. Though, fret not, gentle readers--as Jonathan Swift would say--I will have something here later in the month. A wise man once said slow and steady wins the race. I guess this is true here.

Cheers!

 

[volksmarschall]

BOOK II: THE REFORMATION

PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION


V

Rodez and Its Critics​

While there was an unmistaken amount of French court politicking to have the great council of Rodez called in France, the critics of Rodez[1] have often attacked the council for invisible blasphemies and apostasy. Indeed, it is important for Monergistic Calvinists to claim that Rodez was the moment when the “Catholic Church” went into apostasy and the ancient faith was preserved, by way of Remnant, the historic and ancient faith which Monergistic Calvinism presents itself as.

FIGURE 1: The Cathedral of Rodez, where the council was held.​

Monergism is the theological doctrine that, in accordance with double-predestination, as expounded most clearly by Theodore Beza, the Holy Spirit spiritually regenerates an individual and is irresistible unto the individual who is among the preordained Elect. In other words, there is nothing that an individual can do to “accept” salvation and there is nothing an individual can do to lose his salvation. Monergistic Calvinists like to claim that they are the heirs of the hyper Augustinian tradition and the Synod of Orange and that the Catholic Church of Rome, that “Whore of Babylon,” fell into semi-pelagian heresy at Rodez.

This is nonsense. And, as already shown, while Calvinists take inspiration from Augustine, they deviate from him on numerous places. Relating to salvation, as Augustine makes clear in his magisterial City of God, God’s work of salvation is a one-way highway of activity and not two-way (i.e. not double-predestination). God comes into the lives of the Elect to be sure, but God does not condemn the reprobate to damnation. The reprobate choose their own damnation. Furthermore, Augustine’s image of God is in the image of the Trinity: Memory, Intellect, and Will. Calvin’s doctrine of the imago Dei is only Intellect and Will; this is important because in the fallen condition there is no memory, or knowledge, of goodness in Calvin’s fallen creature. His is a total depravity. Augustine’s inclusion of memory ensures, as any reader of Confessions knows, that there is still a flame of goodness inside of fallen man. He does, in fact, seek to do good but fails on his own power to always choose the good because he is weak. Those who desire to do good but fail need the help of God. Fallen humans still retain traces of the good even after the Fall.

I do not wish to get bogged down into the semantics of syllogistic reasoning and logic as Calvinists do regarding Augustine. For, the Calvinist will say, if man cannot do good without the help of God, and if God doesn’t actively help those who self-condemn themselves, and God is absolutely sovereign, is not God, by fact of his total sovereignty and choice not to help the reprobate, actively condemning them? If yes, the Calvinist will say, then we are the true heirs of the “spirit of Augustine” and the Council of Orange.

The Catechism of the Council of Rodez states clearly, and reaffirms Orange in every way, against the Pelagian heresies, “Not only does God protect and govern all things by his providence, but He also, by an internal power, impels to motion and action whatever moves and acts, and this in such a manner that, although He excludes not, He yet precedes the agency of secondary causes.”[2] Likewise, the sixth session which dealt with predestination, justification, and grace, begins by reaffirming everything the Synod of Orange had already established in settling the Pelagian heresies:

CANON I. - If any person says that man may be justified before God by his own works, either through the teaching of human nature, or by that of the Law, without the grace of God through his Son Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.

CANON II.-If any person says that the grace of God, through his Son Jesus Christ, is given only for this: That man may be able to live more easily and justly, and to merit eternal life, as if, by free will without grace, he could do both, and without difficultly; let him be anathema.

CANON III.-If any person says that without the prevenient inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and without his help, man can believe, hope, love, and be repentant as he should, so as that the grace of Justification may be bestowed upon him; let him be anathema.​

The opening three canons of the sixth session very clearly, and articulately, reaffirm Orange and keep condemned the claims that Rodez fell into semi-Pelagian heresy whereby Monergistic Protestantism is the heir of that ancient faith.

The seventh session, interestingly, and to some shocking degree—no doubt the work of the Holy Spirit—preserved an outright condemnation of Protestants as being apart from the Body of Christ. In more recent years the Catholic Church has softened its tone against Protestants, from heretics to “separated brethren.” If the only great modern English Catholic cleric is right, and he likely is, Cardinal John Henry Newman, that Catholic doctrine doesn’t change but unfolds to its solidified understanding overtime, then the acceptance of Protestants as separated brethren and, by virtue of their baptism, made members of the Body of Christ, originates from Rodez at the first official response to Protestantism. Yes, Protestantism is a heresy insofar that it does not teach the fullness of the faith; but Protestants are baptized, still, into that ark which is Christ’s Body as even Rodez implicates in the fourth canon of the seventh session:

CANON IV.- If any person says, that the baptism which is given even by heretics [Protestants] in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, with the intention of doing what the Church does is not a true baptism; let him be anathema.​

The irony of the critics of Rodez is that certain hardcore anti-Protestant traditionalists are actually not traditional and in err from the very teachings of ecumenical councils. Here, the fourth canon very clearly specifies, as the clear teaching of the modern Church indicates, that Protestant baptism is valid and, moreover, has always been recognized as valid for near 500 years.

The biggest issue with Rodez, from the Protestant perspective—again, mostly from a Reformed outlook—was on the question of justification. Martin Luther famously edited the Epistle of the Romans to include “by faith alone.” He claimed, syllogistically, the implication of the Apostle’s words implied it. This became the battleground between Protestants and Catholics.

FIGURE 2: The Council of Rodez in session.​

Catholics uphold, in line with ancient tradition, the historic faith, and the Bible, that salvation comes by way of faith and grace. The sixth session reaffirming Orange and condemning the Anabaptists who were guilty of semi-Pelagianism clearly spells this out. Chapter IX is usually targeted by Calvinists as evidence of this anti-faith alone apostasy, “For God forsakes not those who have been once justified by His grace, unless he be first forsaken by them. Wherefore, no one ought to flatter himself up with faith alone, fancying that by faith alone he is made an heir, and will obtain the inheritance, even though he suffer not with Christ, that so he may be also glorified with him. For even Christ Himself, as the Apostle saith, Whereas he was the son of God, learned obedience by the things which he suffered, and being consummated, he became, to all who obey him, the cause of eternal salvation.” The problem with the question of “by faith alone” is that, in the very Scriptures that the Protestants have, the holy epistle of St. James says that faith without works is dead. Jesus, in the gospels, routinely talks of fruit as the signs of faith.

The Catholic Church never taught, and does not teach, a works-based salvation. What the Catholic Church affirms is that the signs of faith are in the works that one does. Works are the fruits of the good seed of faith, in other words. And these good works, as the council made clear, are the product of God’s unfolding grace in a person’s life. Faith and grace go together. There is no faith alone without grace. This is what Protestants object to, and some go as never mentioning that the Catholic rejection of faith alone is because it about keeping faith and grace together.

It is, of course, important that Calvinists win their argument that Rodez was the culmination of the great apostasy of the Roman Church and that they are the heirs of the faith. Hence the insistence of the monergists that Rodez repudiated Orange and adopted semi-Pelagianism like the anabaptists and the logic of “believers’ baptism” entails. For if one is truly Elect, the work of saving faith and grace began before the beginning of time. Infant baptism, something that all Protestants except Anabaptists and their various outgrowths accept, is the sign of the covenant. God’s covenant is not imparted unto a believer at their moment of “belief” which implies a semi-Pelagian belief that the individual chooses their salvation in a moment of “professed belief.”

But Protestants did score numerous victories even by not being present. The Council of Rodez eliminated the selling of indulgences. The Council also established a new method of training clergy and opened the clerical ranks to include more than just sons of wealthy families. Vague teachings, which Protestants long objected to for not being clear, were promised to be defined in clarity and greater detail. In many ways, if the Protestants were just interested in cleaning up the church, confronting corruption, and ending the practice of the sale of indulgences, then they achieved what they wanted with the Council of Rodez—unfortunately it came somewhat too late as the schisms had already occurred. Nevertheless, the wars unleashed by the Reformation and Counter Reformation in theology, art, and philosophy was soon to come to the fore with the sword rather than the pen.



[1] The Council of Rodez is our timeline’s Council of Trent. The cited sessions and canons of “Rodez” are taken straight from my English translations of the Latin minutes of Trent. The real life @volksmarschall is trying to translate the Latin into a more understandable modern English than older translations which use an older style of Elizabethan-esque English.

[2] Article 1 of the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

SUGGESTED READING

The Catechism of the Council of Trent

The First and Second Helvetic Confessions (Reformed)

Heidelberg Catechism (Reformed)​

 

[stnylan]

Interesting discussion

Down with the heterodox.

 

[Arnulf Floyd]

Another good and interesting chapter. I am a Romanian Orthodox Christian myself but I am attracted more by Western Christianity than Eastern one because I have a soft spot for Western culture and literature