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Cellini, who had little praise left for others after meeting his own needs,
Three years later he surrendered his flesh to time.
Protestantism could not favor science, for it based itself on an infallible Bible. Luther rejected the Copnernican astronomy because the Bible told of Joshua commanding the sun—not the earth—to stand still.
In 1526–31 the monks of Troyes formally excommunicated the caterpillars that were plaguing the crops, but added that the interdict would be effective only for lands whose peasants had paid their Church tithes.
Luther joined the commonalty in attributing most diseases to demons entering the body—which, after all, is not altogether unlike our current theory. Many believed that diseases were caused by the evil eye or other magical means, and that they could be cured by magic potions—which again is not too far removed from our present practice. Most remedies were administered according to the position of the planets; hence medical students studied astrology.
The Church officially frowned upon astrological predictions, as implying determinism and the subjection of the Church to the stars;
the Spanish Inquisition branded stories and confessions of witchcraft as the delusions of weak minds, and cautioned its agents (15 3 8) to ignore the popular demand for the burning of witches.
stated what was later to be known as Gresham’s law: “Bad money .... drives the old, better money away”32—i.e., when a government issues a debased coinage, the good coins are hoarded or exported and disappear from circulation, the bad coins are offered as taxes, and the king is “paid in his own coin.”
Calvin answered Copernicus with a line from Psalm XCIII, I: “The world also is stabilized, that it cannot be moved”—and asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?“
the Copernican revolution was far profounder than the Reformation; it made the differences between Catholic and Protestant dogmas seem trivial; it pointed beyond the Reformation to the Enlightenment, from Erasmus and Luther to Voltaire, and even beyond Voltaire to the pessimistic agnosticism of a nineteenth century that would add the Darwinian to the Copernican catastrophe.
In 1581 Bishop Kromer raised a monument to Copernicus against the inner wall of Frauenburg Cathedral, next to the canon’s grave. In 1746 the monument was removed to make place for a statue of Bishop Szembek. Who was he? Who knows?
denounced his critics as Bescheisser and Arschkrätzer (cheaters and rear-scratchers),
Italy loved attainable beauty too much to despoil itself over unattainable truth.
One could understand a quiet and private rejection of Christian theology in favor of a vague and genial deism, but to replace the mystery of transubstantiation with the horror of predestination seemed a passage from a heartening symbolism to a suicidal absurdity.
By example, precept, and firm discipline, he reformed his clergy; soon, says a Catholic historian, “the dungeons were full of concubinary priests.”
He had character without morals, and intellect without wisdom.
The Protestants would not admit that a priest could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; and the Catholics felt that to surrender transubstantiation would be to give up the very heart of the Mass and the Roman ritual.
When Charles neared victory (1546) Paul withdrew the papal contingent that he had sent to him, for again he trembled lest an Emperor with no Protestant problem in his rear would be tempted to subdue all Italy. The Pope became a pro-tempore Protestant, and viewed Lutheranism as a protector of the papacy—much as Suleiman had been a protector of Lutheranism.
For if the Church was divine, her opponents must be agents of Satan, and against these devils perpetual war was a religious obligation to an insulted God.
Free thought, according to its most virile English historian, survived better in Catholic than in Protestant countries; the absolutism of the Scriptures, enforced by Protestant divines, proved, till 1750, more damaging to independent investigation and speculation than the Indexes and Inquisition of the Church.
It was a pity that in reforming the Church he had remembered Torquemada and forgotten Christ.
the fourth session of the Council (April 1546) reaffirmed every item of the Nicene Creed, claimed equal authority for Church tradition and Scripture, gave the Church the sole right to expound and interpret the Bible, and declared the Latin Vulgate of Jerome to be the definitive translation and text.
Catholicism as a religion of infallible authority dates in practice from the Council of Trent, and took form as an uncompromising response to the challenge of Protestantism, rationalism, and private judgment.
The thirteenth session of the Council (October 1551) reaffirmed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: the priest, in consecrating the bread and wine of the Eucharist, actually changes each of them into the body and blood of Christ.
it was a tragedy that the Inquisition was restored in Italy and elsewhere just when science was breaking through its medieval shell.
The Italian who had heard Pomponazzi, and lived under the easy rule of the Renaissance popes, smiled to find Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII keeping all the marvelous dogmas of the medieval creed—a God-dictated Bible, a triune deity, predestination, creation by divine fiat, original sin, incarnation, virgin birth, atonement, the last judgment, heaven, and hell—and rejecting precisely those elements of medieval Christianity—the worship of the Virgin, a God of love and mercy, the invocation of intercessory saints, a ritual adorned with all the arts—which had given to that faith a tenderness,
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no man can be tolerant except where he is indifferent.
“This is the honor and weakness of Protestantism, that it appeals to the intellect, which is always changing; and the strength of Catholicism lies in its refusal to adjust itself to the theories of science, which, in the experience of history, seldom survive the century in which they were born.
Catholicism proposes to meet the religious demands of the people, who have barely heard of Copernicus and Darwin, and have never heard of Spinoza and Kant; such people are many and fertile.
despite its original intolerance, the Reformation rendered two services to the Enlightenment: it broke the authority of dogma, generated a hundred sects that would formerly have died at the stake, and allowed among them such virile debate that reason was finally recognized as the bar before which all sects had to plead their cause unless they were armed with irresistible physical force.
Protestantism, in time, helped to regenerate the moral life of Europe, and the Church purified herself into an organization politically weaker but morally stronger than before. One lesson emerges above the smoke of the battle: a religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme.
