The pursuit of glory, p.49
The Pursuit of Glory, page 49
Until recently, the history of the monasteries in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attracted little attention from scholars other than architectural historians. A long-rooted aversion to the Catholic exuberance of the baroque, so much at odds with the austerity of the Anglophone Protestant tradition, no doubt played its part. Very recently, however, their importance has been recognized, illustrated and explained by Derek Beales in a trail-blazing work of revision. Among many other things, he demonstrates just how ubiquitous were the ‘regular clergy’ (i.e. men and women who belonged to a religious order) in old regime Europe. In 1728–9, Montesquieu wrote: ‘On the roads of Italy you cannot turn your head without seeing a monk, and in the streets of towns without seeing a priest. All carriages, all boats are full of monks…Italy is the paradise of monks. There is no Order that is not lax. The business that all the world’s monks have in Rome make the roads crowded.’ Italy was, admittedly, the most clerical country in Europe, demographically speaking. A papal inquiry of 1649–50 reported that there were in excess of 6,000 male monasteries and that the major orders alone numbered almost 70,000, including lay brothers. It was on the strength of that revelation that in 1652 Innocent X suppressed more than a thousand small houses with fewer than six monks. In the face of Italian enthusiasm for a cloistered life, it was to no avail and the pre-reform total of 6,000 was soon regained. By the middle of the eighteenth century, one in every hundred inhabitants of the Italian peninsula was a monk or a nun. That was just the average. In certain cities, the clerical presence was much more obtrusive, and not only in Rome. In 1781 there were more than 100 male monasteries in the city of Naples housing 4,617 monks, and nearly 100 convents housing 5,871 nuns. As the total population amounted to 376,000, one in every thirty-six inhabitants was a member of the regular clergy. Their share of the adult population was, of course, much higher. If the south might be thought especially clerical, it can be recorded as a statistical counterweight that in Florence in the mid-seventeenth century there were more nuns than married women.
No other Catholic country achieved these levels of monastic saturation. Beales has estimated that there were fifteen times more monastic institutions in Italy than in the Holy Roman Empire, although it might be thought that a house such as Ottobeuren counted for more than fifty of the midget monasteri and conventi that dotted the Italian countryside. Impressive scores were also recorded by Lisbon, which had 50 monasteries–32 for men and 18 for women; by Paris, which had 58 for men and over 100 for nuns; and by several Spanish towns–Valladolid with a total of 46, Toledo with 39, Madrid with 57 and Seville with 64. If the German towns could not achieve these scores, they too often had a strong monastic flavour–Munich, for example, whose very name means ‘little monk’, had eighteen male and female houses in 1760 when the population was around 50,000. Everywhere the ubiquity of religious houses and their occupants gave to Catholic towns the same sort of distinctive flavour acquired by Oxford and Cambridge from their Colleges. Like the latter, their extensive buildings occupied large central sites, they owned large amounts of real estate, they gave employment to a significant proportion of the local people, and their clocks and chapel bells tolled the passing of the hours. Also like Oxbridge Colleges, their inmates enjoyed a lifetime of cosseted insulation from the outside world. Indeed, it was not unknown for children to enter a monastic school at the age of five or six and never to re-enter the secular world. Three such sisters were released after a number of years to participate in an outing organized by their brother: ‘On one of these excursions the girls had the misfortune to encounter a herd of cattle on their way to be slaughtered. In the cloister they had never seen such big animals. Terrified, they begged their guide to take them back as quickly as possible. “That’s the world”, they said, “Oh, how hideous it is!” They quickly offered themselves to be Carmelites.’ In France this period was a golden age for religious women. Founded in 1633 by Vincent de Paul, the Sisters of Charity were running 70 charitable institutions by 1660, more than 200 by 1700 and 420 by the outbreak of the Revolution. That last total included 175 hospitals, prompting Florence Nightingale to observe that if there had been a British equivalent of the Order, her efforts would have been unnecessary. There were many other such orders of women who took simple vows, worked in the community and devoted themselves to practical charity such as educating the poor and looking after the sick. The Breton-based ‘Filles de la Sagesse’, for example, founded in 1702, had some 300 sisters in 77 houses by 1789. As Olwen Hufton has observed, the superior rates of literacy above the ‘Saint Malo–Geneva’ line can be attributed as much to the more active role played by the female orders in the region as to its greater wealth.
During the fourteen hundred years or so that had passed since St Pachomius founded the first monastery at Tabennisi near Denderah in Egypt in 318, a great deal of property of various kinds had passed from secular into monastic hands. The monks had proved to be enterprising cultivators, earning from Guizot (a Protestant) in his history of civilization the sobriquet ‘the agriculturists of Europe’. By the eighteenth century, the accumulation of pious bequests, together with the familiar tendency of ‘immortal’ institutions to keep any land in perpetuity, had made many monasteries rich and some very rich indeed. By the time of the French Revolution, the Benedictine abbey of St Germain-des-Prés had an annual income of a quarter-of-a-million livres, and the nearby abbey of St Geneviève almost as much. A popular but necessarily vague guess at the time was that the monasteries owned about a quarter of all real estate in Paris. They probably owned about 5 per cent of the total cultivable area of France, from which they drew around 80,000,000 livres in rents and dues, to which must be added around 120,000,000 livres from tithes. The contemporary estimate that monasteries owned a half of all land in Naples and Bavaria must have been an exaggeration, although it is well attested that in the latter 28 per cent of all peasants had the larger monasteries as their landlords, so the total must have been higher. In Lower Austria they owned 20 per cent of all land and a half of church property. The rebuilding of the great abbey of Melk, whose gradual appearance to a traveller coming down the Danube by boat remains one of the most powerful combinations of architecture and landscape anywhere in the world, cost three-quarters of a million gulden but was paid for out of income. The grandest of all European monasteries was surely St Sergius-Trinity to the north of Moscow, which owned 106,000 serfs on its over one hundred estates scattered across six provinces. An English traveller, William Coxe, found it ‘so large as at a little distance to have the appearance of a small town…Beside the convent or habitation for the monks, the walls enclose an imperial palace and nine large churches constructed by different sovereigns.’ Simon Dixon has estimated that in 1762, when all monastic land was expropriated, the Russian monasteries owned around two-thirds of Russia’s ploughed land, a total which had doubled during the previous two centuries.
With wealth went power. The prestige still enjoyed by the great foundations ensured that their abbots and provosts were well placed to secure further preferment in both the secular and the ecclesiastical world. Of the eighteenth-century popes, Benedict XIII (1724–30) was a Dominican, Clement XIV (1769–74) a Franciscan and Pius VII (elected 1800) a Benedictine. In the Iberian peninsula the relationship between ruling house and the monastic world was especially close, symbolized as it was by Philip II’s grim palace-cum-monastery of El Escorial, and was also especially durable. In Spain, Bourbon princes and princesses emulated their Habsburg predecessors by withdrawing to monasteries, while John V of Portugal built his own version of the Escorial at Mafra between 1717 and 1730 with 880 rooms and 330 cells for the monks. Of all the orders, the most successful in gaining that all-important proximity to sovereign power was the Society of Jesus. By the end of the seventeenth century most of the Catholic rulers of Europe had Jesuits as their confessors. Through their control of most universities and many secondary schools, the Jesuits were also well-placed to influence the elites in a more indirect fashion. ‘Give me a child until he reaches adolescence and he will be mine for life’ was a boast popularly attributed to the Order, although its validity looks suspect when the educational background of such anti-clericals as Voltaire and Diderot is considered.
In the Holy Roman Empire, the more important abbeys were reichsunmittelbar, that is to say represented in the Reichstag and ruling over their own secular territories as the monastic equivalents of the prince-bishops examined in a previous section. More remarkably, despite their wealth and power, they had not fallen into the hands of the nobility. Indeed they offered the fastest route for advancement open to any Catholic commoner, although only a tiny handful could benefit. These were small territories, with just 10,000–20,000 inhabitants, so it is some measure of the fierce cultural competition between them that it prompted the Abbot of Weingarten to build a gigantic church capable of holding a congregation of 12,000, or successive abbots of Ottobeuren to spend more than fifty years completely rebuilding their abbey. Even those abbots who were ‘mediated’, that is to say subject to a secular authority, could often exert political influence through their membership of the Estates, having benefited at the time of the Reformation from the search by Catholic princes for allies against the predominantly Protestant nobility. Such was the case in Bavaria, where the heads of twenty-five Benedictine, six Cistercian and eight Augustinian houses made up the bench of prelates in the Electorate’s Estates. A similar situation prevailed in Austria, where the Abbot of Melk was made President of the First Estate of the Lower Austrian Estates in 1631. In this capacity he became more of a politician and administrator than a spiritual leader, spending much of his time in Vienna, residing at the ‘Melkerhof’ and leaving his abbatial duties back at Melk to the prior.
Melk had been granted to the Benedictines in 1089 by Margrave Leopold I, so falls into that category of the very old foundations whose members, in the view of McManners, were both the wealthiest and the most idle: ‘those who had come earliest to work in the vineyard were the first to retire to the shade’. In truth, the contemporary reputation of all monks was the same, their functions memorably summed up by Voltaire in the lapidary triad: ‘they sing, they eat, they digest’. Certainly it would be difficult to reconcile the lifestyle of the monks of Melk or Mafra with the biblical text on which monasticism is based–‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh’ (I John 2: 15–16). Of course it might be thought that few, if any, institutions of the Church would survive a rigorous application of scriptural tests. Yet there is more to be said for the old regime monks than the comments by the Reverend McManners and Voltaire might suggest.
In the first place, they appear to have been relatively benevolent landlords. Any peasant offered the choice between a secular and an ecclesiastical lord would have done well to have opted for the latter. Of course that is to take the short-term view. It must be conceded, sub specie œternitatis, that the grasp of so much property in the ‘dead hands’ of the monasteries probably stifled enterprise and inhibited agricultural productivity. A Spanish official commissioned by Charles III to look after the interests of the common people expressed the view that ‘a town over which a wealthy religious corporation…has gained control falls in a few years into the deepest misery. For, more influential than all their townsmen, they buy up today the fields, tomorrow the vineyards, later the houses, and finally all real property, until they have forced once useful subjects down to the miserable level of beggars.’ Especially the rural population preferred to see the direct benefits conferred by the monasteries, not least as employers. It has been estimated by Dietmar Stutzer that perhaps as many as one in ten of the Bavarian labour force were employees of the monasteries or their dependants. The monasteries were also sources of charitable relief at times of harvest failure, as in 1768–9 when thousands of Galician peasants flocked to Santiago de Compostela. Many monks served as parish priests, returning to their monasteries only occasionally, as did 600 Premonstratensians in France. In the eighteenth century more than a third of the monks of Melk were engaged full-time in parochial duties (a practice which continues). Those who remained behind certainly liked to make themselves comfortable, introducing stoves to their cells in the late seventeenth century, for example, but they also appear to have been diligent in their observance of canonical duties. They were also assiduous in promoting popular education through their schools and in protecting elite culture through their collections. At Melk music was a special beneficiary: in the course of the 1770s the monks acquired eighty-three symphonies and seventy-three Masses. According to one eminent authority (Richard van Dülmen), the early Enlightenment in Bavaria can be described as ‘part of the monastic renaissance beginning c. 1700’. If the Enlightenment did not feature prominently on the Spanish intellectual landscape, monks were to the fore in what there was of it, notably the Benedictine Benito Feijoo.
So the monasteries were not moribund in the eighteenth century. As Beales has now shown, it was then that they reached a climax of power and prosperity. However, as he also demonstrates, after the middle of the century, hostile pressures began to grow. It was not that the monks and nuns were less pious or less useful or whatever, rather that the attitude of the secular world had changed. When William Beckford visited the Escorial and was shown their most precious relic–a feather from the wing of the Angel Gabriel–his report neither reflected nor was intended to excite reverence. On the contrary. Plebeian pilgrims from all over Catholic Europe continued to flock to Weingarten to venerate the drop of the Sacred Blood of Christ kept there or to Mariazell to adore the image of the Black Virgin, the Magna Mater Austriae, but higher up the social scale, indifference and hostility were growing. Most fatally, sovereigns were beginning to distance themselves from the monastic ideal. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI (1711–40) planned to turn the Augustinian monastery of Klosterneuburg outside Vienna into an Austrian version of the Escorial; his daughter, Maria Theresa, cancelled the project and returned to Schönbrunn, the Austrian version of Versailles. Of the pious Portuguese King John V (1706–50), the builder of Mafra, Voltaire wrote: ‘when he wanted a festival, he ordered a religious parade. When he wanted a new building, he built a convent. When he wanted a mistress, he took a nun’; his son, Joseph I, abandoned Mafra to its monks.
Joseph I also abandoned the Society of Jesus to his enlightened minister, the Marquês de Pombal. Taking advantage of an attack on the King’s life in 1758, the latter secured royal approval for the expulsion of the Order from Portugal the following year. This proved to be the chink in the dyke, which not even papal support for the Jesuits could close. They were expelled from France in 1764 and from Spain, Naples, Parma and even Malta in 1767. Conspicuously absent from this list was the Habsburg Monarchy, where Maria Theresa and her co-regent Joseph II remained neutral in the campaign which now began to abolish the Order altogether. Joseph may have believed that the regular clergy were ‘by their very nature the scourge of all Catholic provinces, and the most implacable leeches of the poor labourer and artisan’, but he also recognized the invaluable services performed by the Jesuits in education. Neutrality was not enough to save them. In 1773 Clement XIV abandoned the protracted rear-guard action he had been fighting since his election in 1769 and issued the Bull Dominus ac Redemptor, in which he announced: ‘We dissolve, suppress, extinguish, and abolish the said Society.’ With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the Catholic powers moved to confiscate its assets and expel its members. Ironically, the ex-Jesuits now found refuge in non-Catholic countries such as Prussia and Russia, whose enlightened rulers used them to educate their Catholic minorities. When criticized by d’Alembert for giving refuge to the Jesuits, Frederick the Great rejoindered that he was being tolerant as a matter of principle: ‘if you accuse me of being too tolerant, then I am proud of this failing; one could wish that your criticism could be levelled at all princes’.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is not difficult to appreciate why the Jesuits were so hated and so vulnerable. As the complementary principles of state sovereignty and nationalism developed, so did the Order’s vow of absolute obedience to the papacy become increasingly offensive to the secular powers. As a mainly urban order, whose members frequently moved from place to place, country to country and even continent to continent, it had failed to put down the deep regional roots that made the older monastic orders so resilient. Rich, powerful, privileged and secretive, its apparently over-mighty members naturally attracted hostility from outsiders, including members of other religious orders. All kinds of weird and wonderful stories circulated about the Jesuits, about their penchant for sexual irregularity, about their fabulous wealth, about their regicide conspiracies, about their plans for world domination, and so on. They were believed by people who ought to have been more sceptical, by the marquis d’Argenson, for example, who was convinced that ‘nasty Italian monks’ were putting together a great army in their possessions in South America, that it was already 60,000 strong and would eventually allow them to take over the world. Their vulnerability stemmed from a long-term shift in the balance between the papacy and the Catholic powers described earlier in this chapter. The pass was sold when the Bourbon powers (Spain, France and Naples, aided and abetted by their close relation Joseph II, who was actually in Rome at the time) combined at the Conclave of 1769 to secure the election of a pope less committed than Clement XIII to Jesuit survival. The successful candidate, the Franciscan friar Lorenzo Ganganelli, may not have given an absolute commitment to dissolve the Order prior to his election but he was known to be less than resolute in its support. And so it proved.
