Europe: A History (162 page)
In Russia, in contrast, the Orthodox establishment enforced severe restrictions on religious diversity. Although the Protestants of the ex-Swedish provinces of the Baltic, the native Christians of the Caucasus, and the Muslims of Central Asia enjoyed a large measure of autonomy, the Jews, Roman Catholics, and Uniates of the ex-Polish provinces were subject to state control, harassment, and discrimination. The Jews were legally required to reside in the so-called Pale of Settlement (see Appendix III, p. 1311), beyond which they could only live by special licence. The Roman Catholic Church was run via the so-called Holy Synod, and was deprived of all direct contact with the Vatican. St Petersburg refused all official ties with Rome until it succeeded in arranging the Concordat of 1849 on its own terms. The Uniates were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy, in the Empire in 1839 and in the ex-Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1875.
Theological debate was stimulated across Europe by three separate developments^—by the interchange of Protestant and Catholic viewpoints that were now emerging from their isolation cages, by the profound interest of the Romantic period in exotic religions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, and by the growth of scientific attitudes. In the course of the century, many theologians acquired an interdenominational and an international reputation. These included the Silesian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a Calvinist and professor at Berlin, the radical Breton abbé Hugues Lamennais (1782–1854), the Bavarian Catholic J. J. Ignaz von Dollinger (1799–1890), Rector at Munich, the Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry-Newman (1801–90), and the gloomy Dane Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55), whose works were not understood till decades after his death.
Schleiermacher, who was influential in the Prussian Union of Churches, brought theological rigour to an integrated view of human art and culture. His
Über die Religion
(1799) taught the Romantic generation that their outward contempt belied profound sympathies; his major work,
Der Christliche Glaube
(1821–2), is the standard summary of Protestant dogmatics. His
Kurze Darstellung
(1811) or ‘Brief Outline of Theology’ was still being cited in 1989 as the best introduction to the subject.
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The Abbé Lamennais set out to reconcile the Church to those parts of the revolutionary tradition which he judged to be compatible with Christianity. Under the device of ‘Dieu et Liberté’, he gradually pushed Rome to disown him. Scandalized by the outcome of the Revolution of 1830, by the Vatican’s betrayal of Catholic Poland, and by the Church’s disinterest in social justice, he became a scourge of the Establishment. Faith was not to be confused with loyalty to the Church, nor patriotism with loyalty to the state. The titles of his books speak for themselves—
Paroles d’un croyant
(1833),
Les Affaires de Rome
(1836),
Le Livre du
peuple
(1837),
UEsclavage moderne
(1840). Lamennais’s work has had a profound impact on the dissident tendency within European Catholicism, where a critical mind was no obstacle to profound belief.
Döllinger led the resistance to the doctrine of papal infallibility (see below). His
Der Papst und die Konzil
(1869) was described as ‘the severest attack on the Holy See in a thousand years’. Newman, sometime Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, is particularly interesting, since his career illustrates the interaction between Protestants and Catholics. He came to prominence in the 1830s as a leader of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement within the Anglican Church. The polemical series of ‘Tracts for the Times’, which he prepared in the company of Edward Pusey (1800–82) and John Keble (1792–1866), sought to reconcile the Anglican and the Roman Catholic traditions. But attacks on his
Tract 90
(1841), which linked the Thirty-Nine Articles with the views of the early Church Fathers, destroyed his faith in Anglicanism and provoked his resignation. His
Apologia pro Vita Sua
(1864) examines his spiritual struggle with great candour. As he records, his entry into the Catholic fold occasioned much bleating. He later clashed with his fellow convert and cardinal, H. E. Manning (1808–92), on the issue of papal infallibility; but he did not push his dissent to the point of disobedience.
Kierkegaard’s writings were aimed first at the philosophy of Hegel and secondly at the cosy practices of the Church of Denmark; but they penetrated far beyond, into intellectual regions otherwise unexplored. His
Fear and Trembling
(1843),
The Concept of Dread
(1844) and
Sickness unto Death
(1849) enter and explore the psychology of the unconscious. His
Unscientific Postscript
(1846) is often taken as the lead text of existentialism. All his works constitute a devastating offensive against rationalism. Subjectivity, according to Kierkegaard, is truth. ‘The history of Christendom’, he wrote, ‘is the history of the subtle disregarding of Christianity.’ In a passage strangely prescient of the tragedy of the
Titanic
, he once likened Europeans to the passengers of a great ship, passing the night in revels as they sailed towards the iceberg of doom.
In the course of these debates, theology and biblical scholarship began to adopt many of the methods and values of literary and historical criticism. The most daring foray in this direction,
The Life of Jesus
(1863) by Ernest Renan (1823–92), led to its author’s suspension from the College de France. Even so, ‘modernism’ continued to make headway, especially when solemnly denounced by the hierarchy.
Religious fervour is not easily measured; but there is no doubt that the Christian faith now aroused greater passions among greater numbers of people than in the previous century. The general trend towards literacy strengthened religious as well as secular education; and missionary campaigns were targeted as much on the poor and lapsed souls of the new industrial towns as the pagans of distant continents. Especially in the Protestant countries, the Churches provided a measure of social leadership and social discipline that was previously unknown. The revivalist movements such as German Pietism or English Methodism now gripped whole districts, whole sections of society. In other countries, as in Ireland or parts of Poland, popular piety became associated with national resistance. Everywhere there occurred a great outpouring of religious art, often inspired and infused by medieval models. It found expression in the wave of Gothic church-building, in hymn-writing, in religious-minded art movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites in England or the Nazarenes in Germany, and in a great body of Church music. According to C. F. Schinkel (1781–1841), the Neo-Gothic architect, ‘Art itself is Religion’. Composers from Berlioz to Franck worked to meet the demands for ever new settings of the Mass,
[MISSA]
The Roman Catholic Church was by no means immune from the changes, though its reluctance to move with the times was manifest. The Catholic heartlands in Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, and southern Germany were less immediately affected by industrialization and modernization. What is more, the higher echelons of the Catholic hierarchy had been shocked to the roots by the events of the revolutionary era, and were frozen into an ultra-conservative stance from which they did not begin to emerge until the 1960s. The Vatican was further frightened by the long rearguard action that was fought in Italy over the Papal States, which were suppressed in 1870. Ultramontanism returned to fashion, not least under pressure from the embattled French bishops and from the Jesuit Order, restored in 1814.
[BERNADETTE]
Under Pius IX (r. 1846–78), whom Metternich had initially mistaken for a liberal, dogmas were adopted that exceeded the claims of the most assertive medieval Popes. In 1854 the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin was promulgated. In 1864 the Encyclical
Quanta Cura
asserted the Church’s supremacy over all forms of civil authority, whilst the Syllabus expounded an extraordinary list of ‘modern errors’ including everything from civil marriage to religious toleration. In 1870, by the doctrinal constitution
Pastor Aeternus
passed by the General Vatican Council, the dogma of papal infallibility was introduced in matters of faith and morals. These positions were so extreme that the Papacy lost much respect both within and without the Church. A major conflict, the
Kulturkampf
, was provoked in Germany, and a number of Swiss, German, and Dutch clerics broke away to form the Old Catholic Church. Pius IX died in the Vatican Palace, stripped of all temporal powers, protesting he was ‘a moral prisoner’. His loyal servants the Jesuits were expelled from Germany in 1872, from France in 1880.
[SYLLABUS]
Under Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), the ‘Pope of Peace’, the Church moved much closer to modern thinking on political and especially social issues. The Encyclical
Libertas
(1888) sought to affirm the positive aspects of liberalism, democracy, and freedom of conscience. Another,
Rerum Novarum
(1891), put the Church on the side of social justice, condemning the excesses of unrestrained capitalism and exhorting all states to promote the welfare of all their citizens. Under Pius X (r. 1903–14), however, the Encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis
(1907) flatly denounced modernism as ‘the résumé of all heresies’, and seemed to raise the reactionary banner once again.
BERNADETTE
B
ETWEEN
11 February and 16 July 1858, in a grotto near the town of Lourdes in Bigorre, a malnourished, asthmatic waif, Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, saw a series of eighteen remarkable apparitions. She heard a rushing wind, then saw a beautiful young girl in a white dress and a blue sash, with golden roses at her feet. The apparition told Bernadette to pray, to be penitent, to build a chapel, and to drink of the fountain. On one occasion, it announced, in patois, that it was
immaculada concepciou
, ‘the Immaculate Conception.’ It let itself be sprinkled with holy water as proof against the Devil; and it showed itself capable of punishment and reward. Townspeople who blasphemed about it fell sick. Others who trampled the roses near the grotto found their property damaged. The water from the fountain proved to have healing powers.
At first, neither the civil nor the ecclesiastical authorities were impressed. They interrogated Bernadette at length, creating a large corpus of evidence; and they placed a barrier round the grotto. When they could restrain neither the locals nor the stream of visitors, they removed Bernadette to a convent at Nevers. In due course, they decided to join what they could not beat, building a huge basilica to receive the pilgrims, and a Catholic medical centre to test the claims of miraculous cures. Lourdes was to become the largest centre of Christian faith-healing in Europe.
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In Church History, St Bernadette (1844–79) belongs to the large company of Marian visionaries and Catholic devotionalists who upheld traditional religion against advancing secularism. Together with the consumptive St Thérèse Martin (1873–97), ‘the Little Flower of Lisieux’, whose autobiographical
History of a Soul
became a sensational best-seller, she helped to demonstrate the sanctity of the suffering believer. As such she was recruited for the French Church’s struggle against its foes. She was canonized in 1933, eight years after St Thérèse.
In another respect, the case of Bernadette Soubirous suggests that the age of social modernization in which she lived was not quite so simple as conventionally portrayed. Historians have described the process whereby peasants were being steadily changed by state schooling and military service into uniform Frenchmen.
2
But the events of 1858 show other factors at work. Everyone in Lourdes, even the bishop, spoke patois. No one suggested that Bernadette was mad, or a devil-worshipper. She described no ordinary Madonna, and no Christ-child. She belonged to a timeless community, where water was venerated and where the rituals of washing, whether of clothes or of the dead and the newborn, was strictly woman’s work. She lived in a region, where, though the bishop had been repairing Marian shrines, the caves and grottos of the Pyrenean wilderness were
still held to be the haunt of fairies. She even called the apparition
petito demoisella
—a phrase sometimes used for ‘fairy’. Her barefoot, lice-ridden body, her stubborn consistency, and, above all, the long hours on her knees in positions of ecstasy, proved very convincing. It has been suggested that her body language was acting as ‘a non-verbal vehicle for social memory’.
3
Bemadette was conveying something which her neighbours took to be authentic.
The Orthodox world saw changes principally in the sphere of national politics. As Ottoman power receded in the Balkans, separate autocephalous Churches were established in Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, each subject to its own synod or Patriarch. They provided an important focus for the developing identity of the Balkan nations. The Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople correspondingly lost much of their previous prestige and influence. Repeatedly deposed by the Porte, they were particularly threatened by the pretensions of the Russian Orthodox Church, which increasingly claimed to exercise protection and patronage over all the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. The divisions between Christians proved hard to heal: there was no general wish for unity or intercommunion. The Russian Orthodox showed a certain interest in the Old Catholics; and at the Tsar’s coronation in 1895 the first of a series of contacts were made with the Church of England. Yet the early stirrings of ecumenism were necessarily confined to the Protestant world. The Church Union of 1817 in Prussia brought Calvinists and Lutherans together. The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the YMCA (1844), and the YWCA (1855) were pioneering examples of interdenominational and international co-operation. Generally speaking, the Roman Catholic hierarchy stood aloof, until the scandal of competing missionary organizations in Africa and Asia eventually prompted action. The World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 gave rise to the International Missionary Council, one of two acknowledged sources of the subsequent ecumenical movement.
