Preaching at the Court of Pope Julius II by John W. O'Malley

In Erasmus’ dialogue Ciceronianus, Bulephorus describes a sermon he supposedly heard preached before Pope Julius II on a Good Friday. It is easy to infer , as many historians have, that Erasmus is recounting for his readers the substance of a sermon at which he himself was present when he visited Rome in 1509. If that is the case, the sermon as summarized by Bulephorus exemplifies a most inappropriate substitution of pseudo-Ciceronian rhetoric and pagan learning for a central Christian mystery. The exordium and peroration, together  almost longer than the body of the sermon itself, were filled with elaborate praises of the Pope as Jovis optimus maximus, whose power was unlimited and whose omnipotent right hand brandished a thunderbolt. The preacher used the body of the sermon to parade before his listeners tedious and irrelevant stories from Greek and Roman history. Bulephorus finally betrays his disgust by saying, ‘In such a fine Roman fashion did that Roman speak that I heard not a word about the death of Christ.’ Our worst suspicions about the quality of religion and theology at the papal court have thus been confirmed, this time by the prince of humanism himself.

Subsequent scholarship, when it deigned to take notice of the sermons at the papal court at all, accorded with Erasmus’ negative assessment. Burckhardt does not specifically discuss the sermons at the papal court, but his general evaluation of Renaissance preaching is well known: the sermons were concerned with problems of conscience, were empty of doctrinal content, and had only a temporary effect upon the hearers. Savonarola was his chief example. These sermons typified the difference between southern and southern piety: the former produced a ‘ mighty but passing impression,’ whereas the latter ‘worked for the ages.’

Ludwig Pastor [‘History of the Papacy’, Engl. Transl., 1923], who was himself influenced by Burckhardt, saw in the mendicant ‘preachers of penance’ one of the ‘most cheering signs in an age clouded with many dark shadows’. He esteemed the moral earnestness of the preachers. Curiously enough, he comments on the sermons preached at the papal court only occasionally and in the most generic terms, but he does leave the reader with the impression that by and large in these sermons classical forms disguised, deformed and displaced Christian substance. When Pastor calls attention to the Ciceronianus, it is obvious that he feels Erasmus was not describing an isolated case. His lamentation over the ‘extravagances’ which some of the Renaissance preachers allowed themselves would, seem, therefore, to have a certain application to the sermons preached before the popes:

 

We hear of preachers whose sermons were overcharged with vain learning, or hairsplitting theological questions, and again, of others who condescended too much to the taste of the populace. The newly revived pagan philosophy was too often brought forward in the pulpit at the expense of Christianity. Passages from the works of the heathen poets and teachers replaced the customary quotations from the Fathers. The glamour of the new learning obscured the old simple doctrines, and heathen Mythology was mixed up with Christian dogma. Equally objectionable was the conduct of the new preachers who, instead of aiming at the conversation and edification of the hearers, thought only of making a name for themselves. Such men invented all sorts of miracles, sham prophesies and silly fables . . .with politics and all sorts of worldly matters, and leaving out the one thing that was necessary.

Since Pastor’s day the sermons preached to the popes during the  Renaissance have received even less attention. The article on “Oratoria sacra’ in the Enciclopedia  cattolica passes them over without mention as does the otherwise informative article on ‘Preaching’ in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Even more significant is tye fact thy\at Johann Baptist Schneyer’s recent and impressive Geschichte der katholischen Predigt does the same. We might easily thereby conclude that no comment on these sermons is offered because no comment is deserved.

While working on as somewhat different subject last summer, I began to scan some of the sermons in various Roman libraries.  Gradually I became persuaded that they deserved more attention than they had hitherto received and that they had significance for the interpretation of the Roman religious scene in the late Quattrocento (15^th C) and early Cinquecento (16^th C). At the very least they provided new data, for they do not to have been seriously utilized by historians since the days they were printed . . .

In the Appendix I list the fifty sermons which I am at present prepared to discuss. Some of these sermons were chosen very deliberately because of specific themes developed in them, especially the theme of  the ‘dignity of man,’ while others were chosen rather at random simply to give a coverage of various pontificates and liturgical occasions. To these fifty printed sermons I join a ‘letter’ of Giles of Viterbo which is found only in manuscript and which until now has been ignored by scholars. This document is a sermon intended for the eyes of Julius II . . .

One of the  few sermons that Pastor specifically commented upon was the panegyric in honor of St. John delivered by the Roman humanist Pietro Marso during the pontificate of Innocent VIII in 1485. Pastor said ‘The wealth of classical reminiscences which the reader encounters stands in singular contrast to the subject of the speech, praise of John the Evangelist.’ Pastor simply could have not read the sermon and passed such a judgement! The sermon a somewhat abstract rehearsal of John’s virtues, especially his virginity, is replete with quotations or paraphrases from the Old and New Testaments, with a special preference shown for St. Paul. Moreover, there are five or six quotations from St. Jerome and St .Augustine and one from Gregory the Great. If a ‘singular contrast’ occurs in this sermon, it results from te juxtaposition of this ‘wealth’ of Christian ‘reminiscences’ along side one brief quotation  each from Plato and Seneca and a very perfunctory mention of Aristotle. No matter what our final judgment of the quality of this sermon might be, it certainly cannot be criticized for substituting pagan sources for Christian ones.

Marso’s   panegyric is not an exception. Critical editions of the sermons would be required to determine with a scientific accuracy the precise incidents of reference to various sources. However, even without such detailed studies, it is clear that Scripture was the source these preachers quoted most liberally and that second to Scripture came the Fathers of the Church, especially Jerome and Augustine. Occasionally in sermons which deal with a more philosophical subject, such as Marso’s on human immortality, the references to classical authors are more numerous. But  these ‘authorities’ are either rejected as ignorant of Christian truth or are seen as confirmatory of it. . . .These preachers were not loath to display their classical learning but there was  no question, however, of this learning swamping a sermon’s them and submerging it.

Scholastic authors are referred to very sparingly by name, and only rarely do traditional scholastic terms such as potential absoluta and ordinate, actus and potentia, materia prima and Marso’s puris naturalibus appear. This does not mean the preachers wee uninfluenced by scholastic doctrine. In some instances, indeed, direct dependence is obvious. But they eschewed scholastic arguments and scholastic distinctions in their sermons. Marso explicitly rejects  ‘inane disputations’, and Augustinus Philippus Florentinus confesses to a Socratic ignorance concerning the nature of God. Although the other preachers are not so explicit as these two, they in general imply that for them living and loving were far more important than theological subtleties, which in any case were inadequate to the mysteries being discussed. .  .  .

One of the fundamental themes of the sermons, no matter what formal category expressed, was that the universe as God’s creation, was or ought to be a universe of unity, concord and harmony. In such a context we should not be surprised that considerable emphasis is given to the virtue of charity, which had much to recommend it to the preachers. Marso, once again using a scholastic expression, extols is as ‘the form of all virtue.’ One of the most telling commendations of charity comes from Ferrariensis. He puts in the mouth of Christ the reproach that what he found more reprehensible about men was not their delivering him up to death, but their exercising no mercy or piety towards one another. Although man was to be restored to the tranquility and concord of Original Justice, he had not been created that ‘he might pass his days with hands tied, but that he might be active.’ The activity thus commended often relates directly to the question of trying to establish peace among the Christian princes and, paradoxically, taking military measures to contain and defeat the Turks [ though the princes were reluctant]. But it is more generally viewed in a more specifically religious  context of prayer, acts of virtue, and diligent praise of God. There is very little, if any, consciousness of man as the builder of the earthly city, and Marso, indeed, comes close to an explicit rejection of this idea. What was important, as Florentinus never tired of reminding his hearers ,was transformation of life . . .

 

What is certain is that these preachers [above their ambiguous treatment  of the relationship between  grace and free will] hoped to move the listeners to a better way of life, to encourage them to practice the art of ‘good and holy living’. This phrase, so often on their lips, was of course Cicero’s. It’s meaning, however, was translated in terms of Christ’s example and message. For the rest, the preachers expected their listeners to react to the great truths they were propounding to them with the appropriate emotions, emotions which of course varied with the subject matter. However, if one emotion predominates more than the others, it is that of joy –joy at the Incarnation, joy over Christ’s abiding presence, joy even over the final outcome of Adam’s fall and Christ’s death, as interpreted with the liturgical formula of Holy Saturday’s felice culpa. Finally, there was joy over the recognition of the marvelous dignity of man, a dignity which derived from man’s relationship to Christian mystery

The theme of the dignity of man recurs with amazing frequency in these sermons preached to the pope and his court.  . .We should perhaps not be surprised that this is the case .Most of these preachers seemed, at the very least, to have been exposed to the humanist tradition and, therefore, exposed to the dignity-of-man in its humanist form. Moreover, Renaissance theory that  panegyric was more effective than scolding in producing moral change might well have had a special attraction for these preachers and they used the tradition of what Harry Levin calls Renaissance ‘rhetoric of congratulation.’

The range of arguments favoring man’s dignity is broad and subtle, but it can be reduced tp two general headings: 1) arguments deriving in some way from man’s nature or his creation by God, 2) and arguments deriving grace or from man’s redemption by Christ. Charles Trinkaus has convincingly shown the pivotal role the image-and-likeness verse from Genesis played in the general humanist tradition on the dignity of man .The preachers at the papal court also latched onto that verse, and it is quoted or paraphrased frequently. Simply by reason of his creation man already has a sublime dignity, which indeed prompted Marso to refer to him in seemingly hermetic terms as divinum animal. ‘Ours is a singular dignity, observes Arzius. In terms clearly inspired by Pico’s Heptaplus, he continues: ‘the earth and sea serve man, heaven does battle for him, and the spirits of heaven care for his salvation and well being.’ Through the nobility and beauty of the union of body and soul, man was for Ticinensis a ‘microcosm.’ For Arzius and Vasques he was, as citizens of the heavens an as lord of the earth, the true binding force of the universe; mundi copula et hymenaeus [the world's bond and their marriage]. . . .

One of the most marvelous qualities of human nature is its thirst for the divine. God is not so cruel as to deny us of the quenching of this thirst, maintains Totis, and He calls us to his Friendship. But part of man’s dignity consists in the fact that he was endowed with free will, that the Creator deigned to share His causality with him, that he in some mysterious way can choose to fulfill or to frustrate his desire for God. The argument thus gradually moves from man’s excellence as created in the image and likeness of God to his transformation or even ‘deification’ as redeemed by Christ and subject to the workings of grace. The image and likeness, deformed by sin, is restored and even perfected by the grace of the Redeemer, so that man becomes more truly a son of God than ever before. He is, in fact, divinized.

For Ferrariensis nothing is more conducive to man’s dignity than to be able to do those good and just things which others are incapable of doing. This capacity derives from grace and constitutes man’s dignity. Through the sacraments, according to him, the charity of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who now dwells within us. In another sermon he reminds his listeners that God created their souls in love, and that through love they will transform themselves into gods. The emphasis is not on the depths of man’s depravity which would require such a salvation, but upon the immense quantities of God’s love which inspired it. They assess Adam’s sin as the felix culpa, a truly ‘happy sin’ because it merited so great a Redeemer; as the result of the benefits conferred upon man by Christ’s redemption, man was in a better condition than he would have been if Adam had not sinned. .  .  .

Conclusion

First of all, we must resist the impressions about the content and quality of the sermons at the papal court which we inherited from Erasmus, Burckhardt, and Pastor; a significant body of that literature does not correspond to what those authors led us to believe. Whenever  the classics played a role, they were subordinated scriptural and patristic sources. Although there was a vigorous element of moral exhortation in these sermons, not even the mendicants could be described as ‘preachers of penance’. They avoided scholastic arguments and showed a decided preference for  Christian doctrines which preoccupied thinkers during the patristic era. They tried to relate these doctrines, abstract and abstruse though they sometimes were, to the lives of their hearers. If the papal court during the Renaissance was in many respects ‘pagan’ or ‘exceedingly worldly’ it certainly was not so in the quality of the sermons it heard.

What was the nature of religion or piety proposed in these sermons? It was doctrinal and attitudinal It did not rest on the performance of innumerable and specified external practices of devotion, such as pilgrimages and the  veneration of relics, nor was a great deal of emphasis placed on the sacraments themselves . . .there is an amazing little in them that is supportive of ecclesial institutions. Despite the important ethical concerns expressed in the sermons, the religion they propound cannot be described principally as ethical, if by that term simply the performance of morally correct acts. The preachers invited their hearers to contemplate with them some of the central Christian mysteries, and the hoped to evoke from the same hearers the proper attitudinal and affective response- belief, wonder, joy, gratitude, love.  They realized full well, however, that the love or charity with which the Christian life should inspire was not theirs to give. It was poured into the hearts of their listeners by the Holy Spirit. . .

If Erasmus did not hear about Christ in the Good Friday sermon in 1509, he listened to a sermon very different from the ones we have been investigating. My researches  confirm Trinkaus’ thesis about the basically religious, and even theological, inspiration of the theme of the dignity of man in the Italian Renaissance for the period under discussion. It is in this theme as propounded by the preachers I studied, we find the data to support Trinkaus’ assertion that the Renaissance vison of man was based on ’possibly the most affirmative view of human nature in the history of thought and expression’ . It was a vision projected ‘within the inherited framework of the Christian faith.

What I am trying to say, at a minimum, is that this style of religion and religious discourse can be clearly distinguished from scholasticism and from the crude devotional and juridical piety which Erasmus so often decried for us in scathing terms. The emphasis on inner attitude and especial the emphasis on God’s charity, which is the basis for the continuation or restoration of pax and concordia in the universe, are specific characteristics which are common in these speeches. Also common is the strong Christocentism, which qualified and specifies the description ‘anthropocentric’ sometime applied to humanist religion. Perhaps most important of all is the viewing of the process of the individual’s response to the great mysteries of his religion’ as the transformation of a total personality through love.’ Bouwsma sees such an emphasis on this transformation as characteristic of the spirituality of the Italian Renaissance. Our sermons certainly confirm that judgment.

Finally we might submit, that Trinkaus’ term, ’rhetorical theology’, is an accurate and suggestive one for describing this spirituality. The terms serves to distinguish this style of religion and religious discourse from ‘monastic theology’ and ‘scholastic theology’. More important, it suggests that it is a body of literature held together by certain common presuppositions about the nature and truth of religion, and tat its ultimate objective as ‘practical’ and ‘active,’ persuasional. Not abstract speculation, but transformation of life was its goal.

 

A Sketch of Nominalism in the Late Middle Ages by Heiko A,. Oberman

 

With his categories, Paul Tillich would have described this era as in search for new symbols of security. Exactly in this way has the former Marxist, Frantisek Graus, pointed to the Hussite revolution as the crisis, not of the monetary system, not a feudal or political crisis, but as the crisis of symbols of security; he thus explained the Hussite concern with the sacraments.

In this section, I should like to purse the late medieval effort to deal with one central aspect of the quest for new forms of security, namely, the bridging of the distance between sacred and the profane, one could say the elimination of the ontological opposition, the contrast and gap between the sacred and profane.

In view of the present state of scholarship, we have no grounds for assuming from the beginning a common thrust pervading all late medieval movements. We are therefore well-advised to deal successively with late medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Whereas Renaissance scholarship  provides us –relatively speaking- with the fewest problems, in view of the surprising persistence and influence of Burckhardt’s modernity thesis, late medieval scholasticism is still largely known, when known at all, as a chapter in the history of philosophy. Its place among the creative forces of the time is rarely mentioned. When it is dealt with, it is usually adduced to show the confusion of the epoch, the despair of reason, the divorce between faith and daily experience, and the fearful clinging to the authority of the Church. Its own self-understanding and its views on the world, on man and his society are still largely terra incognita. Yet late medieval scholasticism is the heyday of Franciscan thought, impregnated by ideas transmitted by the Order most deeply involved in the crisis of the times.

To refer to this movement as nominalism or via moderna – in themselves problematic labels- is for two reasons more  appropriate than to name it Scotism in the fourteenth century, after Duns Scotus, and Ockhamism in the fifteenth century, after William  of Ockham. In the first place,’Scotism’ and Ockhamism’ suggest too strongly a merely academic setting, whereas the ideas of via moderna are on a wide scale absorbed by non-Franciscans, infiltrating even the doctrinally well-disciplined Dominican order and shaping thee piety of thousands of sermons preached all over Europe – a source still of largely untapped by scholarship. In the second place, nominalism proves to be the more comprehensive category, as the movement that not only survived, but even flourished long after Ockham and Ockhamism were condemned by the University of Paris in September, 1339 and again in December, 1340.

I regard it as beyond the ken of the historian to determine whether the rapid spread of nominalist ideas reflect the spirit of the times in its search for new securities or whether it was a real (co-) agent in bringing forth these ideas. But the movement is not sufficiently charted if the following elements are not taken into consideration.

 

1.     The insistence on God’s potentia ordinata can easily leave the impression that we are confronted here with an ‘establishment’ theology. After all, the nominalist point of departure is that God could have decreed –de potentia absoluta- to create another world, to choose other means of salvation, and to establish another order. As a matter of fact, de facto, de potentia ordinata, however, God has committed himself to this world, to this Church, to this order. To remind ourselves that we are moving here in the orbit of Franciscan theology, suffices to warn us against any conclusions to hastily drawn in this regard. The established reality de potentia ordinata is never divorced from the possibilities de potential  absoluta. By this, at every step, we are reminded that this, our world, is contingent, not an ontologically necessary outflow or reflection of eternal structures of being, but the result of a decree, a contract, a pactum Dei.

 

2.    Contingency is perhaps the best one-word summary of the nominalist program. This contingency is understood in two directions, embracing both the vertical relation God-world -man and the horizontal elation world-man-future. We cannot now pursue this second contingency which concerns the so-called question ‘De futuris contingentibus.’ When applied only to the future but also to the past, it provides for a truly scholarly basis of historical studies by its tendency to eliminate supernatural factors in the interpretation of the course of events.

Contingency should not be understood to mean unreliable, threatened by the alternatives de potentia absoluta. The contingency of creation and salvation means simply that they are not ontologically necessary. The point is that in the vertical dimension our reality is not the lowest emanation and level in the hierarchy of being which ascends in ever more real steps to the highest reality, God.

 

3.    Against the implication that our world is a mere reflection and shadow of higher levels of being, the nominalist insists on the full reality of our experienced world. Hunger for reality is so much the mark of nominalism, that it is a perhaps humorous but certainly a misleading tradition that bequeathed upon its opponents the name ‘realist’. What is often called Ockham razor, is the slashing away of the hierarchy of being, of ideas and concepts, which sheer speculation had invented.

 

4.    The protest against ‘wild speculation’ or against ‘vain curiosity’ is not merely a sign of anti-intellectualism. Admittedly this is not alien to the Franciscan tradition, and more generally it is a trend of the times. It is particularly noticeable in the beginning stages of the devotio moderna, which propagated the crusade into the interior and hence presented withdrawal as answer to the challenge of security.

 

In nominalist thought we encounter the sternest opposition to the claims of intellect and reason when not verified by the tests of experience. On this basis, nominalism provided the setting for modern science, replacing the authority-based deductive method with the empirical method. The combination of experientia and experimentum allowed for a fresh investigation, by trial and error,  such basic phenomena as movement and retardation. In this way the chain of causation is reduced to observable second causes, a major advance in the transition from the speculative law of nature to the observable laws of nature.

 

More generally it can be said that the underlying intention of nominalism is best described in terms of the medieval revolutions against the meta-categories that obfuscate reality. Just as it rejected metaphysics to establish physics, so nominalism ventured to strip theology of her distorting meta-theological shackles, with the result that the Scriptures and the prior decrees of God were emphasized at the expense of natural theology. In this attack on meta-categories I find the most revealing parallel with aspects of Italian humanism.

5 This sketch would be incomplete if in conclusion no mention were made of an emerging new image of God implied in the emphasis on God’s potential ordinate. God is a covenant God, his pactum or foedus is his self-commitment to become the contractual partner in creation and salvation. Here originates the Pelagianism* of the facere quod in se est (to do what is in one's self), which stands in the area of justification for the meager but  sufficient human moral efforts which  God has contracted, accepted or pledged to reward. In this emphasis on covenantal and not-necessary relationship between God and his world, as well as between God and his Church, man is no longer primarily a second cause moved by the prime mover and first cause. In the nominalist view man has become the appointed representative and partner of God responsible for his own life, society and the world, on the basis and within the limits of the treaty or pactum stipulated by God.

Because of the frontal attack upon traditional ontology and meta-categories nominalism could make the impression on contemporary ecclesiastical and secular authorities and did make the impression on the later interpreters that it merely enhanced the climate of crisis and accelerated the late medieval disintegration of stability and time-honored structures. Nominalism did call traditional truths and answers into question in order  to replace them with a new vision of the relationship between the sacred and the profane by presenting coordination as an alternative to subordination and partnership instead of the hierarchy of being.

 

 

*Pelagianism: the theological doctrine of Pelagius and his followers, in particular the denial of the doctrines of original sin and predestination, and the defense of innate human goodness and free will.