Paper 16: Counter
Reformation
For Dr O’Reilly
How,
and to what extent, did post-Tridentine Catholicism become ‘global’?
Reflecting
rising interest in ‘world history’ and exchanges between Europe
and other continents1,
the ‘global Counter Reformation’ has become a subject of
increasing interest for historians. Instead of focusing on religious
developments of this period purely within Europe, a number of recent
studies have examined the extent of Catholic missionary work and
penetration overseas, in particular in the New World Iberian colonies
and in Asia, but also with more limited success in Africa.2
Partly, this new interest has entailed a switch of perspective:
rather as Walter D. Mignolo attempted to provide a new way of
understanding the Renaissance by considering its repercussions for
South American colonialism in his work The
Darker Side of the Renaissance3,
so a consideration of the impact of the Catholic Reformation and
missionary work on non-European peoples has provided fresh insights
not only into the dynamics of European colonisation and interactions
with native cultures, but also on something of the essence of the
Catholic revival of this period in its zeal for conversion and
schizophrenic oscillation between optimism at the virgin territories
ripe for salvation, and trepidation at the scale of the scale of the
project. Clearly, an interest in the ‘global’ dimensions of
post-Tridentine Catholicism can contribute much to our understanding.
This essay will, however, sound a note of caution. To designate this
as a period of ‘global’ Catholicism runs the risk of misleading,
however, when taken to imply a monolithic Church: throughout this
period, outside Europe and also within it, Catholicism remained
closely grounded in its specific localities, resisting the type of
consolidation and centralisation which caricatured descriptions of
the Tridentine reforms suggest.
The
Catholic Church certainly developed global aspirations
in the post-Tridentine
era. This can be seen most clearly in the work of the Society of
Jesus - the Jesuits - in their missionary activities in South America
and Asia. As Luke Clossey emphasises, the Jesuits as an organisation
can be seen to epitomise the global impulses of Catholicism in this
period. Firstly, the dense networks of Jesuit missionaries made this,
to a considerable extent, a single and united enterprise: Jesuit
missionaries working in different countries certainly had a common
sense of purpose, and Clossey’s concept of ‘global salvific
Catholicism’4
is a useful one for understanding the motivations of the missionaries
themselves. It suggests both the age-old Christian desire to save as
many souls as possible, and a new framing for this urge within an
enlarged perception of the potential Christian community to embrace
notions of global Christianity, and a far greater harvest of souls
for conversion made possible to a large extent by the European
conquest of the Americas, and by the opening of commercial routes and
colonial ventures in Africa and Asia. Interestingly, the Jesuits
motivation appears to have stemmed as much -if not more so - from
concerns for their own salvation as for that of the converts, yet
this did not detract from their undeniable zeal and sense of global
mission. Awareness of the soteriological heart of missionary work
overseas (however apparently self-serving) equally provides a
corrective to earlier accounts which subordinated religious
motivation to social and political domination: the two, in this
period, were intimately connected, and the genuine religious impulses
and visions of a global Church cannot be reduced merely to a cover
for European colonisation. There were of course significant
differences between the evangelisation in different areas: in China
and Japan, the focus was more strongly on inner conversion, whereas
in the Iberian colonies evangelisation was closely related to
military conquest and compulsion, but in all cases a sense of
religious duty and vision cannot be dismissed.5
Yet
despite the development of a global vision of a worldwide Catholic
Church, the success of these attempts at Christianisation outside
Europe can be called into question. While European sources
frequently depicted the story of evangelization in heroic terms, a
mode which traditional historiography frequently adopted, more
recent, post-colonially inspired, studies have also pointed to the
widespread resistance to Christianization and its shallow roots in
indigenous communities. In the Iberian colonies, conversion was
largely something enforced, rather than an inner experience. Using
the case study of early colonial Peru, Sabine MacCormack argues that
initial attempts at persuasion and reasoning rapidly gave way to an
almost exclusive on the imposition of outward conformity and
regurgitation of the crudest tenements of the Christian faith, with
little interest in depth of either understanding or conviction.6
In China, early missionaries did meet some degree of early success,
converting around 200,000 Chinese by 1700, but cannot be said in any
way to have Christianised the country. When, in 1724, Emperor
Yongzheng banned European missionaries from the empire, this did not
signal the complete extinguishing of Christianity in that country,
since certain Jesuit missionaries continued clandestine operations,
and native clergy also continued to operate, but the repression which
Christianity faced from henceforth, and the increasing perception of
Christianity as something alien and foreign, effectively put an end
to what had not been, on balance, a strikingly successful operation.
Where
Catholic practices were adopted, they tended to be strongly
influenced by local culture and traditions, which leads on the second
major point of this essay, which is that - for all the utopian
visions of a global Church - Catholicism in this period remained not
only largely European but particularist and localist in its essence
and appeal, which even the post-Tridentine move towards Church
consolidation, and the (not wholly planned) increase in papal
authority, counter-acted. In the extra-European context we can see
this most clearly. To
succeed in China, the Jesuits built close linkages with the emperor's
court and with elite literati in Peking. To ease integration they
dressed in silk robes after the mandarin fashion and lived in
well-appointed houses that contrasted sharply with their vows of
poverty and egalitarian ideals. To facilitate communication they
delved into Confucianism and argued that it was not a religion but a
secular system of politics and ethics; hence, its practices could be
recast within a Christian mould. Critics pounced on their tolerance
of ancestor tablets within the Chinese Rites, despite Jesuit
protestations that these were no longer for ‘worship of ancestors’
but simply paid ‘gratitude’ to forebears. A cynic could seize on
the fact that when Ricci died in 1610 and was allowed to be buried
near Peking, other Jesuits appealed to their Confucian duty to care
for an ancestor's tomb to justify their continued presence.
Illustrations from Chinese Jesuit publications show a mix of standard
Christian and Chinese motifs: a seventeenth-century Madonna and Child
image from Shaanxi province, for example, shows the Christ Child with
a topknot, a class indicator marking the Ming scholar/official.7
A
similar blending, or perhaps over-laying of imported Catholic ideas
upon traditional culture, can be seen in Peru, where natives
frequently conformed outwardly to the new Christian norms imposed
upon them, but without internalising their meanings, or by grafting a
learnt Catholic practice onto a traditional set of beliefs.
MacCormack notes, for instance, that while Indians would fast during
Lent, as they were obliged to do, they generally integrated this
practice into their own, decidedly non-Christian, definition of
fasting. Where church attendance was compulsory, non-Christian holy
objects were often surreptitiously integrated into the structure of
the church.8
These are examples of deliberate avoidance of Christianity and its
message, yet in other cases the intermeshing was more complex and
ambiguous: Christianity was not always outright rejected, but nor was
it practiced in forms approved by Rome.
The
same could be said of Catholicism within Europe. Although Trident did
introduce some greater elements of ‘centralisation’, local
studies also show the endurance of stubbornly local patterns of
belief and worship and the high degree of regional variation
throughout Europe. On the other hand, Catholicism in this period
could also be closely linked to national identification and
state-formation in a manner which was decidedly at odds with
ultramontanism. If by ‘global’ Church is to be understood one
embodying a universal set of beliefs, practices and allegiances among
its adherents, then Catholicism in this period bore little
resemblance to such an image. The continuing strength of the
‘confessionalisation thesis’9
and the allied concept of ‘social disciplining’10
as major paradigms through which to view this period have tended to
homogenise Catholic religious culture. Something of the diversity, or
more precisely the ongoing specificity and localism, of experiential
Catholicism throughout this period is captured in William Christian’s
study of local religion in sixteenth-century Spain.11
From his study of responses to a 1575 survey, it is apparent that
most lay people - not limited only to peasants and rural communities,
but also urban elites and other prominent figures - imagined and
experienced Catholicism in terms closely bound up with their own
localities and its specific landscapes. Small towns made covenants
with specialised saints to ward off natural disaster, relics were a
source of intense local pride, local shrines and chapels provided a
focus for worship and personal piety, and acts of nature were seen to
represent specific divine messages for the communities involved.
Although
Christian’s study deals only with New Castile, it is likely that
his findings are representative for large parts of early modern
Europe, where Catholicism as a day-to-day structure and set of
meanings had little to do with ideas of a universal church or the
authority of Rome, and everything to do with the personal and
regional identification with specific healing saints, sense of local
community, and a doctrinally fluid faith which blended elements of
orthodox teaching with more ‘popular’ beliefs frequently
classified by educated clergy as mere ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’.
Drawing on
the work of R.W Scribner on popular religion12we
can even question the extent to which most ordinary people understood
piety in terms of adherence to particular theological doctrines.
Ritual and sacrament provided cosmological order and inscribed
meaning, but were not bound to one, closely-defined confession.
Scribner draws attention to ease with which early moderns flitted
between these categories. Priests’ concubines might, for example,
practice magic, while ‘Christianity’ and what appears to be a
form of polytheism, encompassing belief in an almost infinite number
of demons and spirits, might comingle within one individual without
any apparent sense of contradiction.13
Peter Burke’s work, among others, proposes a ‘taming’ of these
‘superstitious’ practices and promiscuous approaches to
theology,14
but other sources suggest their stubborn persistence among Catholic
communities well into at least the nineteenth-century. ‘Social
discipline’ and ‘confessional identity’, then, can take us only
so far in understanding lived Catholicism in this period.
When Catholicism was extrapolated
out from the local context in which it was, on a daily basis,
embedded to a wider sense of belonging and identity, the result was
more frequently linked to explicitly national
than to universal
sentiment. This is especially the case, perhaps, in France, where
Catholic renewal in the seventeenth century was inextricably linked
with the restoration of royal authority after the upheavals of the
French wars of religion. Under Louis XIV, especially, Catholicism was
closely identified with royalism, and the Gallican Church steered a
firm path between the Scylla of Calvinism on the one hand and the
Charybdis of the type of ultramontane Catholicism which had found its
expression in the militant Catholic League - which had allied itself
with the Spanish enemy in an act of religious, rather than political,
solidarity, on the other.15
Here, the development of Catholicism as a metaphor for expressing the
nation and the king’s relationship with his people worked strongly
against universalist rhetoric of a ‘global’ Church.
In
conclusion, then, we can see that while post-Tridentine Catholicism
developed aspirations which were global in scale, it also never
overcame the strong forces of localism and particularism - both
within Europe and abroad - to become a truly ‘global’ Church.
Attempts at missionary work outside Europe left either only a
superficial impression or were received in which remained strongly
conditioned by traditional native beliefs and practices. Relatively
few indigenous missionaries and priests served these areas - partly
due to the ongoing scepticism of European missionaries about their
capacities - and it is fair to say that post-Tridentine Catholicism
remained, if no longer wholly a European affair, then at least
heavily skewed towards its traditional heartlands. And although Trent
introduced some greater elements of doctrinal clarity, and the years
after the Council witnessed an increase in papal status, the early
modern Catholic Church did not in this period become a single,
cohesive body but continued to be mediated through diverse cultures
and to be associated with rival centres of secular power, which
defined themselves alongside, but also partly in opposition to, the
papacy.
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