The pursuit of glory, p.50
The Pursuit of Glory, page 50
In the view of one Catholic historian (E. E. Y. Hales), the dissolution of the Jesuits was ‘the most serious defeat the Church had suffered since Luther’s revolt’. Leopold von Ranke, who was nineteen when the Jesuits were restored in 1814, believed that Clement XIV had shown ‘serene wisdom’ in sacrificing his ‘Janissaries’, but he of course was a Protestant. Moreover, he also recognized that the dissolution had ushered in a terrible time for the Church: ‘since the outworks had been taken, a more vigorous assault of the victorious opinions on the central stronghold would inevitably follow. The commotion increased from day to day, the defection of men’s minds took a constantly widening range.’ In fact, the attack was already well underway, and significantly it came as much from within as from outside the Church. Emboldened by the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1765 the Assembly of the Clergy in France petitioned Louis XV to set up a commission to investigate the monasteries. With Archbishop Loménie de Brienne at the helm, the Commission des réguliers reported back with predictably hostile proposals. Eventually about a sixth of all French monastic establishments–458 houses of 2,966 examined–were suppressed. This was less serious than it looked, as by definition they were small establishments containing fewer than 3,000 individuals, or about a ninth of the total. What was more serious was the loss of morale inflicted on the other communities and those who might have aspired to join them, leading to a serious crisis of recruitment. A more radical purge was undertaken in the Habsburg Monarchy, where in 1781 Joseph II ordered the United Chancellery to prepare the dissolution of all religious orders that were ‘completely and utterly useless’ and therefore could not be pleasing to God. These he defined as those that did not run schools or hospitals or help their fellow beings in other practical ways. By the time of Joseph’s death, the imposition of this order had changed the Church in the Habsburg Monarchy radically and irreversibly. The 25,000 monks and nuns were reduced in ten years to just 11,000, a weeding-out which involved the dissolution of 530 monastic institutions in the central lands (Bohemia, Austria and Hungary) alone. In other words, from constituting 53 per cent of the clergy in 1780, the regulars had sunk to 29 per cent by the end of the decade. The counter-reformation in the Danubian Lands was over.
POPULAR RELIGION AND ‘DECHRISTIANIZATION’
As Derek Beales has written, the popular sobriquet for the eighteenth century–‘the age of reason’–has less justification than ‘the age of religion’ or ‘the Christian century’. It was characterized by dissenting movements within the established churches which testified to the undiminished and perhaps intensified vitality of lay devotion: Jansenism, Pietism and Methodism in the Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican churches respectively. In the Catholic world, the period after 1648 saw a great revival in pilgrimages, following the decline caused by the Reformation. Encouraged by the relative security of travelling in an age of numerous but restricted wars, never before had so many faithful been on the road to shrines near and far, old and new. Of the three peregrinationes maiores–Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostella–the two European destinations enjoyed major revivals. In a Holy Year, up to half-a-million pilgrims are said to have sought shelter at the main hospice for pilgrims in the Holy City, Santa Trinità dei Pellegrini, where they were given board and lodging and even a packed lunch for their visits to the seven churches necessary for an indulgence. At Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain, believed to house the body of St James, the crush of pilgrims in 1717 outstripped the supply of confessors. North of the Alps too there was a surge of support. As Henry Russell Hitchcock observed in his study of rococo architecture, pilgrimages in southern Germany became ‘unbelievably popular’ in the eighteenth century. Among other examples he cites the Benedictine monastery at Ettal in Bavaria, whose cult statue of the Virgin attracted 70,000 visitors a year and worked no fewer than 1,930 miracles between 1600 and 1761. Also popular were pilgrimage places of recent origin, such as Maria Taferl near Melk in Lower Austria, where in 1642 a dying oak tree was miraculously restored to health by the placing of a Pietá in its branches, a good deed it then reciprocated by performing miracles itself. To accommodate the growing number of pilgrims, construction was begun in 1661 of a magnificent baroque church, designed by Jakob Prandtauer, the architect of nearby Melk. In that year there were 36,000 communicants, a figure which had doubled by 1700 and went on rising to 186,000 in 1751 and 250,000 in 1760, despite the destruction of both the sacred oak and its protective Pietá by fire in 1755. The greatest pilgrimage place in the Habsburg Monarchy was Mariazell in Styria, where the Black Virgin or Magna Mater Austriae attracted between 120,000 and 150,000 pilgrims each year from all over Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, rising to 188,000 in 1727 and 373,000 in 1757. The pilgrimages also had an important influence on the ‘sacral landscape’ of Catholic Europe. To the parish churches and monasteries they added a plethora of crucifixes, shrines and chapels to mark their itinerary. During the 1680s, for example, forty-four chapels were added to the ‘Holy Way’ from Prague to Altbuzlau.
First cousins to the pilgrimages, indeed often difficult to separate from them, were religious processions. In the great cities these could be highly elaborate affairs, crossing the boundaries between official and popular initiatives, as prelates, priests and secular authorities were also often involved. In Paris, according to John McManners, their splendour made them important tourist attractions. He cites the annual procession by the parishioners of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles to a statue of Notre Dame de la Carolles, reaching a climax with the burning in effigy of the Swiss Guard who, three centuries earlier, had stabbed the statue in a drunken fit of iconoclasm. By 1743 this harmless bonfire party no longer matched the image the Church wished to project, and the ecclesiastical authorities tried to replace it with a High Mass. They were ignored. And so were the Anglican clergy who tried to put a stop to the ‘superstitious practices’ accompanying the numerous processions that survived the Reformation in Great Britain. On Anglesey, for example, the religious element of the Easter procession was diluted by the secular recreations which followed, such as egg-collecting for the children and football matches and cockfighting for the adults. Everywhere, beating the bounds of the parish at Rogationtide (Ascension Day) not only thanked God for the fruits of the field but also performed an important practical function. At a time when there was no Ordnance Survey to fix parish boundaries, this formal perambulation gave a ‘mental map’ of where one belonged, what church one went to, where one’s rites of passage were performed, and where one applied for alms. As W. M. Jacob has well put it: ‘It established a collective memory for the community and defined those who were inside the community, and who and what should be prayed for.’
Also a blend of sacred and profane were the numerous confraternities and other forms of religious association. If they were not the invention of this period, they certainly flourished during it. Although this was in part due to the encouragement they received from the new Orders, especially the Jesuits, they could not have attained their prominent role in both urban and rural life without a powerful response from the laity. The eighteenth century is often labelled the age of the voluntary association, but it is invariably secular organizations such as reading clubs and Masonic lodges that are advanced as evidence. Yet when it came to membership, it was the confraternities that posted the highest scores. A survey of forty-one parishes in the Electorate of Trier, for example, revealed that all except one had a confraternity and most had two or more. Looking at it from the other direction, Ronnie Hsia has concluded: ‘Tridentine Catholicism succeeded in the long term not by suppressing “superstitions” but by grafting orthodoxy onto traditional and popular spirituality.’ But it was not always sweetness and light. As enlightened influence permeated the clergy and their secular masters, popular forms of piety came under attack. As we shall see when we examine the issue of toleration as part of the state’s modernizing agenda, the motives were various. Together with a distaste for ‘superstition’ went more materialist concerns such as the maximization of productivity. A good example was provided by the drastic reduction of religious festivals decreed by one government after another. In France, depending on the actual diocese, around a hundred working days per year were lost to festivals, excluding Sundays. Even after the bishops had carried out a purge, there were still thirty-four days of compulsory leisure (fêtes chomées) in the diocese of Rouen and more than seventy in Bordeaux and Autun. The same motive lay behind the ban on lengthy pilgrimages. It was at least partly the wish to turn celibate monks and nuns into procreating members of society that lay behind the attacks on the monasteries that gathered momentum during the second half of the eighteenth century.
The devout laity could accept many of these changes. It was when the authorities turned their attention to religious practices that real trouble began. In most cases the decrees ordering the removal of this or that wonder-working statue, or the cessation of this or that pilgrimage, were simply ignored, and that was the end of it. But where this immoveable object met a force that aspired to be irresistible, as it did most spectacularly in the case of Joseph II, violence was sure to follow. One example must suffice. In 1787 the ecclesiastical authorities in the Electorate of Mainz ordered the introduction of a vernacular hymn book. Despite their best efforts to prepare the ground, the rumour soon spread among laity that it was heretical, the fact that the hymns were written in German and were given numbers–just like the Lutheran books–being regarded as especially suspicious. In fact explicit instructions had been given to the compilers not to include any Protestant hymns. The dissidents remained unconvinced. In most parishes they were content simply to ignore the new hymn book and continue singing in Latin, but where the local priest insisted on carrying out the Vicariate’s orders, conflict resulted. Copies which did find their way into the hands of the peasants were promptly torn up and burnt. They may well have been incited by the regular clergy, as the provincial head of the Capuchins was told that if members of his Order continued to preach against singing hymns in German, action would be taken against the Order as a whole. In a number of villages in the Rheingau there were outbreaks of violence and intimidation, and at Rüdesheim something approaching an insurrection broke out. Led by a cooper called Kron, variously described by observers as ‘inflated’ and ‘somewhat unbalanced’, the pious citizens took the law into their own hands. On a Sunday in June 1787, Kron and his supporters brushed aside a detail of soldiers outside the church and proceeded to conduct a service themselves in what they believed to be Latin. On the same evening a brawl erupted when one of the Electoral officials was unwise enough to remonstrate with a group of dissidents. The conflict reached a climax a few days later when a group of citizens broke into the local jail and freed one of their imprisoned leaders. At this point the central government in Mainz intervened, and despatched three hundred troops to quell the rising.
The Archbishop had imposed his will, but he was sensible enough to realize that the limits of his authority had been reached. In the following year a new edition of the offending book was published, accompanied by the proviso that ‘neither force nor punishments’ were to be employed in its introduction. Further concessions allowed a mixture of German and Latin hymns or the two forms to be used on alternate Sundays. In reality, the laity did as they pleased, a state of affairs formally recognized in 1791 when a purely Latin liturgy was allowed once more. By that time, the threat from revolutionary France was making disputes of this kind seem decidedly parochial. The French armies which ravaged the Rhineland repeatedly from 1792 proved to be incomparably less sensitive to popular forms of piety than even the most enlightened reformer of the old regime. Everywhere in Catholic Europe, the revolutionaries’ violent anti-clericalism and iconoclasm inflicted the rudest shock to the faith in all of Christian history. The response of the faithful was to intensify their attachment to traditional practices. No matter how hard the occupation authorities tried, they could not put a stop to processions, pilgrimages and all the other public religious demonstrations.
As we shall see when examining counter-revolutionary movements in Europe after 1789, religious enthusiasm could make life very difficult for the French. It was not just faith that was at stake, it was also material existence. For those who believed that God was a presence both permanent and ubiquitous, propitiation of Him was a matter of life and death. The following example from the Rhineland will serve for most rural, and many urban, communities across Europe:
Experience has shown, since time began, that when we do not carry out the usual processions in public in the weeks of the Cross [leading up to Ascension Day], to seek God’s blessing and protection for our crops, and now that we are forbidden to do so by the French authorities, that just about every year the harvest fails: sometimes it is the corn which is ruined, sometimes the buckwheat, and the yields are generally poor: if one is sparing in one’s worship of God, so will God be sparing in the blessings he bestows on the world. So now we have an almost unbroken run of bad years, one after the other.
It was an unfortunate fact of confessional geography that the regions immediately adjacent to France were among the most clericalist and demonstratively pious on the continent: the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), the Rhineland, Spain and Italy. Invasion by the first avowedly secular state in European history made them more clericalist and more demonstratively pious. One sign of the intense religious excitement of the period was the rash of miracles which followed. In the Puglian town of Andria, a statue of Christ exhorted the citizens to resist the French invaders, promising a squadron of angels with flaming swords to help them; at Aachen a company of angels intervened to replace a market-cross removed by the French; at Arezzo it was St Donato and the Virgin herself who paid a visit to foment unrest; at the church of St Remigius at Bonn, following a forty-hour prayer, the lights on the altar formed the letters ‘V.M.F.’ to stand for ‘Vivat Max Franz’, the Elector of Cologne, whose capital Bonn was. And so on, and so forth.
This explosion of popular piety would seem to give the lie to the view that the eighteenth century was marked by a process of ‘dechristianization’. On the other hand, many contemporaries can be found lamenting the decline of true religion and the growth of impiety: in Montpellier, Madrid, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, even Rome. As early as the later seventeenth century, a Parisian parish priest was told by one of his parishioners, a lawyer: ‘Sir, I am in no state to confess my sins or receive the sacraments, although you were good enough to clarify my difficulties on the Christian religion which I have professed externally to avoid notice and save appearances. In the bottom of my soul I feel it is all a fairy tale. And I am not alone in this: 20,000 other people in Paris share my views. We know each other, we hold secret meetings, and we strengthen each other in our irreligious resolve.’ However fragmentary, this kind of evidence does suggest that important changes were underway. Whether it justifies the use of the word ‘dechristianization’ is a different matter. It seems reasonable to conclude that in France some people ceased to believe, and that their numbers were probably growing. On the other hand, there is persuasive statistical evidence to show that a very large number of French men and women of all classes remained devout. For example, when a change in the publishing laws in 1778 made it easier for the works of deceased authors to be reprinted, almost two-thirds of the two million volumes which then poured from the presses were religious. Some of the changes, at least, can be explained in terms of a change in the style of religious practice rather than its substance. Orthodox Catholics may well have taken the view that Jansenism was like the River Danube–beginning Catholic, becoming Protestant and ending infidel–but the Jansenists themselves believed they were not just devout Christians (which they undoubtedly were) but also true Catholics. Moreover, the boundary between outright rejection and fervent devotion was (and remains) both broad and hazy. Of the occasional conformers jolted out of indifference by the shock of the French Revolution, some became aggressively anti-clerical, while others returned to active defence of the faith. Some historians have detected ‘a disintegration of Christian discourse…the decline of Christian commitment’ (Daniel Roche), but others have taken the view that ‘it was in the eighteenth century that the piety of the Catholic Reformation won the day…it was the truly Christian century’ (Dominique Julia). If it is impossible to reconcile these generalizations, it can probably be agreed, with John McManners, that ‘dechristianization’ is too strong a term to summarize developments before 1789 and is best reserved for the blitz launched by the revolutionary regimes.
Outside France, there is little evidence to suggest that Paul Hazard’s famous claim that ‘One day, the French people, almost to a man [sic], were thinking like Bossuet; the day after, they were thinking like Voltaire’ can be exported. As we have seen, in most of Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, reform came from above, in association with the authorities. In France, Jansenism was persecuted; in the rest of Catholic Europe, it was promoted. Its Protestant equivalent, Pietism, began as a reaction against the established churches, for its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and informal devotional groups, on the need for a born-again conversion experience and the priority of the ‘inner light’, together with its spontaneity and emotion, all conspired to alarm the Lutheran clergy. Yet it was eventually absorbed within the established structure. Consequently, organized religion did not acquire the image of reactionary ossification that afflicted the Church in France.
