[In the following essay, first published in 1968, Dickens discusses some of the prominent fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers of the Catholic Reformation.]

The period of decline in medieval Catholicism nourished many of the seedlings of Catholic Reformation. Among the features of the latter stands a notable revival of scholastic philosophy and especially of Thomism. Yet this revival had in fact begun among the Dominicans over half a century before the birth of its greatest figure Francisco de Suarez (1548-1617). Thomas de Vio, later famous as Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534), composed his treatise on the De Ente et Essentia of Aquinas while teaching at Padua in 1494-7. His famous commentaries on the Summa Theologica followed between 1507 and 1522: the first great monument of this neo-Thomism, they remain among the classics of the revival. Between 1520 and the rise of Thomist theory throughout the Council of Trent, the movement was defended by Domingo Soto and others against the attacks of biblical humanism. As the Dominicans had resuscitated Thomism, so in the fifteenth century the Franciscans had fostered Scotism, a less powerful and integrated tradition, yet one which was to inspire a succession of philosophers into and even beyond the seventeenth century. Today its points of divergence from Thomism may well seem to non-specialists quite marginal, yet they served to give life to the scholasticism of the sixteenth century and to prevent it from becoming monolithic. Alongside these revivals stood the classical or humanist tradition, literary, philological, historical and antiquarian, which so powerfully influenced many aspects of Catholic reform from the decrees of the Council of Trent to the education provided by the Jesuits. Like the Protestant Reformation, that of Catholicism made a distinctly selective approach to the work of the humanists, yet the latter did much to shape it, and they represented a tradition already—at least in Italy—some two and a half centuries old by the time of Trent.

Such were among the main intellectual foundations of the new Catholic world, and its spirituality was equally deep-rooted in tradition. Devotional books and concepts emanating from the fourteenth century were still lively in some circles during much of the seventeenth. Even the great figures in whom we find more originality and personal inspiration were nevertheless dependent at some phases of their development upon medieval instruments of devotion. At innumerable points, the new growth was firmly grafted upon the old. While recovering in 1521 from his painful wound at his father's castle of Loyola, the young Ignatius had exhausted the romances of chivalry when his thoughts were led into more serious channels by chance encounters with The Flower of Saints, a Spanish adaptation of The Golden Legend, and with the famous Life of Christ by the fourteenth-century Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony. These and similar books later left their marks upon Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. A more debatable inspiration came from the Exercises of the Spiritual Life, composed for monks as recently as 1500 by García de Cisneros, the Benedictine abbot of Montserrat. Yet undoubtedly the chief medieval influence upon Loyola's spiritual life was the Imitation of Christ (c. 1418), the great monument of the ‘new piety’, the devotio moderna of the Netherlands. This famous book Ignatius first read at Manresa: in his own words, he ‘preferred it ever afterwards to any other book of devotion.’ The Exercises of St Ignatius are of course predominantly meditative rather than mystical; they lead the mind through an ordered sequence of holy themes and images; they do not seek to empty the mind of images in order to make way for the indescribable ‘states’ of the mystic. Yet the two methods are not mutually exclusive; they had fused together in the devotio moderna, and, as we shall shortly argue, Ignatius and some other Jesuits were to retain more of the old mystical tradition than is commonly supposed.

Among the greatest names in Jesuit history is that of the Dutchman Peter Canisius, who soon after joining the Society published (1543) The True Evangelical Life: Divine Sermons, Teachings, Letters, Songs and Prophecies. These are taken partly from the works of Johann Tauler, the fourteenth-century mystic who had so deeply influenced Luther, but they also incorporate a number of other old Rhenish and Netherlandish writings, including important extracts from Ruysbroeck. Again, as St Teresa of Avila strove to discipline her spiritual impulses, she learned much from the recent Spanish mystics, Laredo, Osuna and her personal counsellor St Peter of Alcántara; yet she was also very familiar with the Imitation of Christ and with St Augustine's Confessions, while in her autobiography she also cites St Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419) and Ludolph of Saxony. A Spaniard among Spaniards, she nevertheless derived far more than she can have realized from Netherlanders of former generations, since in the Third Alphabet of Francisco de Osuna she was in fact imbibing mystical ideas derived from Thomas à Kempis, Ruysbroeck and Jan Mombaer. Still more striking are the continuities observable in the religious life of Italy. The Oratory which grew around St Philip Neri in Rome during the 1550s and 1560s lies at the very heart of the Catholic Reformation, and we know in detail what books were used as starting-points by his famous discussion groups. The list, highly traditional in character, forms a select bibliography of medieval devotional authors: Richard of St Victor, Innocent III, Denis the Carthusian, St Catherine of Siena, various Franciscan writers and the hymns of Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), reputed author of the Stabat Mater.

In the Netherlands the continuity of the devotio moderna is especially impressive. During the later sixteenth century few devotional writers became more popular in the Catholic areas than François-Louis de Blois (Blosius, 1506-66) the Benedictine abbot of Liessies in Hainault. A reformer in his Order, he wrote with exceptional clarity ‘for simple but earnest people’, and his Institutio Spiritualis (1551) has long been accepted as a classic of its school. But despite its date the book belongs wholly to the devotio moderna. The favourite author of Abbot Blosius is Johann Tauler, and he is closely followed by Suso, Ruysbroeck, the Victorines and a number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century mystics. In this old tradition Blosius gently conducts his readers up the ladder of mystical prayer. Though he accepts the meditative technique (‘picture-making’) as helpful in the earlier phases, he looks forward to the stage when the devout man or woman will be able to abandon these crutches. Meanwhile, in France, the translation and printing of the late medieval mystics began with Lefèvre of Étaples (c. 1455-1536), the famous biblical humanist and student of mysticism who stands so ambivalently between Catholic and Protestant reform. Between 1570 and 1620 there followed very numerous editions both in French and Latin. They included not only modern contemplatives like St Teresa and Luis de Granada, but also Denis the Carthusian, Suso, Tauler, Catherine of Genoa, Angela of Foligno and others of the earlier age. From this stage, as Frenchmen made their most weighty contributions to the revival of Catholic spirituality, their debt direct and indirect to medieval tradition remains clear enough.

Similar things may also be said of the persecuted Catholics in Elizabethan and early Stuart England; still more of the many English Catholics then exiled on the Continent. The martyr of York, Margaret Clitherow (d. 1586), was a convert from Anglicanism and by that fact a significant figure of the Counter Reformation. During the 1570s her main reading was in the Imitation of Christ and in the recent Spiritual Exercises (1557) of the Dominican William Peryn, who derived both from Loyola and from medieval sources. The Imitation is again prominent among the books of Catholics who built up a community life in their prisons, like Father William Davies and his companions of the early 1590s in Beaumaris Castle. By this time the chief surviving master in the mystical tradition was an English exile; the Capuchin Benedict Canfield (d. 1611). Through him this tradition descended to numerous continental disciples including his fellow Capuchin Père Joseph, the éminence grise of Richelieu. Amongst the English their own native mystical heritage had also survived. During the reign of Mary Tudor pious Catholics like Richard Whitford and Robert Parkyn were writing devotional essays with close affinities to Richard Rolle and to that greater contemplative Walter Hilton. Even in the seventeenth century Father Augustine Baker (d. 1641) was introducing his English nuns at Cambrai to these old mystics, and observing that by this time a Latin translation might help them with the antiquated English. Even after the Restoration of 1660 these same writings were still being studied by Serenus Cressy in the household of Queen Catherine of Braganza.

Since Spanish mysticism stands among the most striking phenomena of the Catholic Reformation, the problems surrounding its origin assume a special importance at this stage of our inquiry. The interest of Spaniards in this approach to religion was not limited to a handful of choice spirits: it became almost a literary mass-movement. Menendez y Pelayo calculated the number of mystical works in print or in manuscript as amounting to some three thousand. Mystical authors can be numbered in hundreds between 1500 and 1675, around which latter date the school went into steep decline with the Quietist Miguel de Molinos. Many of these writers, it is true, were analysts of mysticism, or even sentimental romantics, rather than first-hand practitioners. ‘No one’, writes Allison Peers, ‘can appreciate the depths to which they can descend who has not read some of the worst.’ Interest has nevertheless tended to centre unduly upon the towering figures of St Teresa and St John of the Cross, before whom at least half a dozen major contemplative writers, mostly Franciscans, were active. The two great Carmelites should indeed be seen not in isolation but as the highest peaks in an impressive mountain range which also included such figures as Luis de Granada (d. 1585), St Peter of Alcántara (d. 1562) and Luis de Leon (d. 1591).

This school emerges with dramatic suddenness in the year 1500 with the works of Gómez García and García de Cisneros, all the more dramatically since during the previous two centuries, the contribution of Spaniards to mystical literature had proved almost negligible. For the sudden flaring of this experience and literature no single factor can account. Several specialist scholars and historians of literature have frankly ascribed it—especially in the case of Cisneros—to belated Netherlandish and German influences from the worlds of Tauler and the devotio moderna. Even where overt links do not appear, the close similarities of theme and method cannot be wholly due to coincidence. Again, some of the Spanish mystics show obvious debts to the neo-Platonism of Ficino, Pico and other Italians of the High Renaissance. On the other hand, it seems equally clear that about 1500 the Spanish mind stood prepared not merely to accept these foreign influences but to develop them further than they had hitherto been developed in the West. In examining the writings of the great Carmelites one finds more inducement to stress their independence than their traditionalism. Nevertheless, the Castilian temperament with its strange blend of morosity and ardour is a factor which no one who knows this people will ever take lightly. Even in the Spain of our own day it is impossible to avoid being struck by a capacity for ecstatic worship, an idealism which counts the world well lost for a cause. Medieval Spain had infused these qualities of mind into the harsh tasks of warfare against the infidel, and after the conquest of Moorish Granada they flowed into new channels: into the interior life, into military adventure and imperialism. There seems to have occurred a cultural release comparable with that which occurred in the northern Netherlands a century later, when the Dutch first savoured their newly-born independence and nationhood. Yet again, the Spanish Church was the first to experience rigorous reform; and while the accidents of individual genius must not be discounted, the growing host of monks, friars and nuns provided seed-beds incomparably larger than those of any other European nation.

Despite the remarkable phenomena of Protestant ‘spiritualist’ religion, it must be acknowledged that the Western mystical tradition has in general been closely linked with monasticism, which alone afforded conditions making for the higher degrees of mental concentration. And if one Order be singled out as a special nurse of this tradition, it should certainly be that of the Carthusians, whose external influence—considering the enclosed character of their rule—proved surprisingly widespread and extended to many members of other Orders. Even so, it would seem unrealistic to ‘explain’ the Catholic revival chiefly by reference to spiritual enterprise on these exalted levels. The Netherlandish devotio moderna and its parallels elsewhere in Europe owed much to the high mystics, yet it nurtured in its offspring a mild and beneficent pietism, a spiritual integrity rather than a sense of close union with the divine. These people were mostly literate, middle-class laymen and laywomen, or else secular priests also living the ‘active’ life. As they read the Imitation of Christ and the numerous guides written in its spirit, they did not very seriously aspire to scale the pinnacles of religious experience. But alongside the immense output of hagiographical and other books catering for the mere popular cults, there grew throughout the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century an extensive literature dealing with the interior life and largely intended for the use of people in the world as distinct from the cloister. These range from simple primers to sophisticated guides, mostly in fact by members of religious Orders. They include the works by Cisneros and his Spanish successors, those of Giovanni Battista Carioni (d. 1534) and Serafino Aceto da Pratis (d. 1534) in Italy, of William Bonde (fl. 1500-30), Richard Whitford (d. c. 1555) and William Peryn (d. 1558) in England, together with a long succession of Netherlanders in the Ruysbroeck tradition from Henry Herp (d. 1477) to Francis Vervoort (d. 1555) and Nicholas van Esch (d. 1578). Little is known about some of these authors. The long-popular Gospel Pearl went through a dozen Netherlandish editions and several foreign translations; it was ascribed by van Esch merely to a ‘holy woman’ who died in 1540 at the age of seventy-seven.

Unquestionably this voluminous literature did much to fortify Catholicism in the minds of the middle ranks of European society, and to prepare the way for religious education as methodized by the Jesuits and other teaching Orders. Amongst its authors there figure numerous friars, and no account of the earlier phases of Catholic revival would be complete without a distinct emphasis upon the living spirit of St Francis. Needless to add, this is especially true of the Italian revival. We tend perhaps too often to imagine the Catholic Reformation against a backcloth of harsh sierra and tableland in Castile. At least equally may an imaginative traveller sense its lingering spirit along the shores of Maggiore and Garda; better still in the Franciscan homeland itself, as he gazes from the crest of Assisi across the gentle, velvet distances of Umbria.