Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] In the previous three videos, we looked briefly at what it was like to be a Christian before the Reformation, before 1517. Then we looked at Martin Luther. We looked at his ideas and the spread of his ideas, as well as the violence that resulted.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:19] For our final video, we want to look at the response by the Catholic Church. Whereas we call what Luther and his followers did the Protestant Reformation, the church’s response is referred to as the Counter-Reformation, the word “counter” here meaning “against.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:36] Well, the church had lost a lot. The church had lost lands, It had lost…
Dr. Harris: [0:43] Faithful.
Dr. Zucker: [0:43] That’s right. It lost souls.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] In the last video, we ended talking about violence.
Dr. Zucker: [0:49] But the violence wasn’t always against people. Sometimes it was also against things, and churches, that is, the architecture of the Roman Catholics, which existed throughout Western Europe, was an important focus of the violence of the Protestants against the Catholic Church.
Dr. Harris: [1:04] The practice of Catholicism was incredibly visual. There was a real concern among the Protestants, not so much by Luther, but mostly by his followers, that images were being abused. That they were being prayed to as if the images had power themselves, instead of just a way of reaching the divine, of passing through the images to the divine.
Dr. Zucker: [1:26] That’s right. Calvin specifically had a problem with this and believed that the images in churches were actually creating a kind of idolatry. This goes back to the Second Commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that isn’t the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
[1:45] This notion that to create is in a sense usurping a little bit of God’s responsibility. That is, God creates. When an artist creates, it is a kind of falsehood. It is creating an idol.
Dr. Harris: [1:57] Protestants began waves of iconoclasm, that is, the destruction of images.
Dr. Zucker: [2:04] Let’s take apart that word for a moment, “iconoclasm.” It’s a compound that’s made of two words “icon,” which is Greek for “image,” and “clasm,” which means violence. It is literally violence against images.
Dr. Harris: [2:17] There were iconoclastic riots within five years or so after Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.
Dr. Zucker: [2:23] This is one of the great tragedies in the history of art, actually, where an untold number of paintings, of sculptures, were destroyed.
Dr. Harris: [2:32] This happened especially in Northern Europe, in the Netherlands.
Dr. Zucker: [2:36] In essence, what the Protestants often did is they took over a Catholic Church and they stripped it of all of those sensual forms, all of that sculpture, those tapestries, and left it a kind of pristine space.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] We know that Luther is going against Church teaching in all these different ways. Faith is the path to salvation, not good works. Scripture is the way to understand God, not listening to the teachings of the Church.
[3:05] Now, the Catholic Church didn’t take all of this lying down. We know that there were efforts to make Luther bend to their will. At the Diet of Worms, for example, Luther was excommunicated after that.
Dr. Zucker: [3:17] By excommunicated, we mean basically is no longer a member of the Church.
Dr. Harris: [3:22] In 1545, the Church holds something called the Council of Trent, essentially a meeting of all of the highest levels of the Church in Europe. At first, the idea was really to reconcile with the Protestants. Protestants were invited. They didn’t show up, however, and in the end, reconciliation was clearly impossible.
Dr. Zucker: [3:44] One of the most important outcomes of the Council of Trent was that the Catholic Church reaffirmed its doctrines. That is, it doubled down. It said the very things that Luther had taken issue with were reaffirmed.
Dr. Harris: [3:57] Regarding the issue of whether good works have a role in salvation, the church said indeed they do. Regarding purgatory and the efficacy of indulgences — do indulgences do anything? Does purgatory exist? The church affirmed all of that.
[4:13] The church affirmed transubstantiation, the changing of the bread and wine during the Eucharist to the body and blood of Christ.
Dr. Zucker: [4:20] By doing so, it affirmed the power and importance of the priesthood and of the hierarchy of the church.
Dr. Harris: [4:28] Lastly, the church affirmed that scripture alone wasn’t enough, that one really also needed the teachings, the traditions of the church, so they gave very little ground. All they did was agree that in some areas there was room for reform.
Dr. Zucker: [4:44] They did try to stamp out the kind of corruption that had in part led to the Reformation. Let’s get back to the images for a moment because that was also important in the Council of Trent.
Dr. Harris: [4:54] The council said this: “Images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be placed and retained, especially in the churches, and due honor and veneration is to be given to them.” They’re reaffirming immediately — images belong in the church.
Dr. Zucker: [5:11] What’s important is why.
Dr. Harris: [5:12] They say, “because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which they represent.”
Dr. Zucker: [5:19] So if somebody is honoring a statue of the Virgin Mary, they are actually affirming the honor to the Virgin Mary herself, but the Church said there was even more benefit.
Dr. Harris: [5:29] Yes. “Let the bishops diligently teach that by means [of] the stories of the mysteries of our redemption portrayed in paintings and other representations that people are instructed and confirmed in their articles of faith.”
Dr. Zucker: [5:44] So art was a way of didactically getting the ideas of the Church across to laypeople, many of whom were still illiterate.
Dr. Harris: [5:52] And deepening their faith. That’s right. “Also, that great profit is derived from all holy images, because through the saints, the miracles of God and salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful, so that they may fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the saints, and be moved to adore and love God and cultivate piety.”
Dr. Zucker: [6:16] The way in which art functions as an example that we can follow in our daily lives.
Dr. Harris: [6:21] The Church’s response is threefold. One, they reaffirm all the basic doctrines of the Church that had been attacked by the Protestants. They begin a major campaign to spread the teachings of the Catholic faith all around the world.
Dr. Zucker: [6:35] Remember, this is the Age of Discovery. The new world has been discovered. There’s increasing trade with Asia and with Africa. The Catholics are really evangelizing in all of these places.
Dr. Harris: [6:47] The last in this threefold response of the Church is an effort to stamp out heresy. The Church establishes the Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition. The Church also creates the Index of Forbidden Books.
Dr. Zucker: [6:59] It’s just at this time that Ignatius Loyola founds the Jesuit Order. The Jesuits are all about faithfulness. They have an absolute faith in the pope, and they are at the pope’s disposal.
Dr. Harris: [7:13] The Jesuits established schools, they spread the Christian faith throughout the world, and they fought Protestantism.
Dr. Zucker: [7:19] There’s a fabulous and very literal example of all of these ideas of the Counter-Reformation in a sculpture by an artist whose name is Le Gros, in the mother church of the Jesuits in Rome.
Dr. Harris: [7:32] The title of this sculpture is “Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred.”
Dr. Zucker: [7:37] First of all, it’s important to know that the sculpture is just to the right and below a very large altar to Saint Ignatius Loyola.
Dr. Harris: [7:45] At the top left, we see the figure of Religion wielding a thunderbolt and a cross.
Dr. Zucker: [7:51] Now, by religion, Le Gros means Roman Catholicism.
Dr. Harris: [7:55] Religion is looking down at and about to attack two figures. One is an older female figure who represents hatred, and the other figure falling towards us, wrestling with snakes, is the allegorical figure that represents heresy.
Dr. Zucker: [8:11] He’s falling over a series of books, and one of those books has on its spine Luther’s name, so heresy here couldn’t be any more explicit. Heresy is Luther, it is Protestantism. And as if that isn’t making the point sharply enough, on the left, we see a little angelic figure who’s ripping pages out of the book by Luther’s follower, Zwingli.
Dr. Harris: [8:34] It’s important to remember that each side saw the other as the devil. Luther called the pope the Antichrist. The pope called Luther the Antichrist. It was a time of black and white. There was no middle ground.
Dr. Zucker: [8:52] These divisions literally reshaped the countries of Europe. Even now, the countries in Southern Europe are predominantly Catholic. The countries in Northern Europe are predominantly Protestant. Even as late as the 20th century, there is violence that erupts between these factions. We saw that through most of the 20th century in Ireland, for example.
Dr. Harris: [9:13] It’s also interesting to think about the ways that the Protestant Reformation set the stage for the modern world. This idea of not listening to a single authority, but listening to your own conscience. I think this is a key feature of the modern world.
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