Die Gegenreformation

Gegenreformation, Die (Counter-Reformation), developed as a consequence of the Reformation, which spread from Germany to many European countries during the first half of the 16th c. It culminated a hundred years later in the Thirty Years War (see Dreissigjähriger Krieg). The peace of Augsburg (see Augsburger Religionsfriede) of 1555 is generally held to mark the beginning of the Counter-Reformation. From the theological viewpoint, however, it began during the Renaissance as an internal Roman Catholic movement against detrimental developments in the 1520s, before the effects of the Protestant movement (see Protestantismus) were fully evident through the Church of J. Calvin. Initially Luther had not aimed at a schism but at reforms within the body of the Church of Rome.

The reform of the Roman Catholic Church was not promoted as a uniform movement but by separate Orders which originated in the 1520s and 1530s, notably the Capuchins (1536), the Theatines, the Barnabites, and Ursulines of 1535 who combined charitable work with the promotion of spiritual regeneration and, by the end of the century, the education of girls. The powerful Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534, and in 1537 the Consilium de emendenda ecclesia began to investigate deficiencies within the Church. The progressive provocation of papal authority by the Protestant movement, of which many German princes took advantage in order to gain independence from Rome, resulted in a more radical assertion of constructive movements for reform within the Roman Catholic Church. This assertion increasingly took the form of repression and persecution by the Inquisition, which spread with secular support from Italy to all Catholic countries within the Holy Roman Empire (see Deutsches Reich, Altes). In 1559 the Index Librorum prohibitorum listed numerous books which were to be banned and burnt. During this time of change and schism, of scientific progress and ecumenical regeneration (especially after the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545), there were in the lower strata of the populace still sections practising witchcraft. By fighting against this and other misinterpretations and aberrations (including the doctrine of indulgences) the Roman Catholic Church hoped to create a general unifying ecumenical movement. This remained largely ineffective during the succeeding centuries, and has only assumed importance in the 20th c. by the creation of the World Council of Churches. From the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church the Counter-Reformation thus stretched over four centuries and ended with the recognition of the Protestant churches.

Viewed in its historical context, the second half of the 16th c. was increasingly dominated by unrest among the European countries, an unrest which was motivated by both religious intolerance and dynastic struggles for power on every conceivable level. That the Prager Fenstersturz should have gone down in history as the immediate cause of the bitter persecution and brutal armed conflict which seized a whole generation is a piece of grim irony. The middle of the 17th c. saw a new map of Germany (see Westfälischer Friede), the silent witness of untold suffering. Writers of the pre-war era include Th. Murner, J. Fischart, and J. Nas. Goethe's play Egmont, Schiller's Don Carlos, and Grillparzer's Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg are set against the background of this period. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had by the beginning of the war completed essential parts of the work which provoked his arrest and trial by the Inquisition. It is the subject of Brecht's play Leben des Galilei, G. von Le Fort's story Am Tor des Himmels, and the novel Galilei in Gefangenschaft by Max Brod.