San Lorenzo del Escorial: the palace complex of King Philip II of Spain, late sixteenth century. Architects: Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera.
Carlos Eire, author of A Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, 2009), examines how “Catholics embraced their dead even more tightly than before” in response to the Protestant Reformation. Here is a breathtaking account of morbidity from the sixteenth century:
In Spain, arguably the most influential Catholic nation on earth at the time, a prime exemplar of this renewed Tridentine piety was the king himself, Philip II, who worked very hard at reifying not only his role as a Catholic monarch but also the church’s power over the dead, and the bond between the living and the dead. For starters, King Philip built for himself and his successors a palace-monastery complex unlike any other on earth, the axis of which was the cult of the dead. Built between 1563 and 1596, at the cost of an entire year’s worth of treasure from the New World, the immense structure of San Lorenzo del Escorial was in its day the largest building in the world. Within its perimeter, Philip crammed a palace, monastery, basilica, library, and seminary, along with 8,000 relics of the saints, the world’s largest and most meticulously catalogued collection, to which were assigned tens of millions of years of indulgences. Staffed by Hieronymite monks, whose sole purpose was to pray for the king and the royal family, both living and dead, the monastery at San Lorenzo was a veritable ritual machine, where masses were offered constantly at numerous altars–except when the Hieronymite rule forced the monks to sleep–and where hundreds of monks chanted the entire psalter day after day, ceaselessly.
Not content with merely living with his monks and priests, King Philip also build his private chambers as close as possible to heaven, directly behind the main altar of the basilica, which was flanked on all sides by the 8,000 relics, and he positioned his room in such a way as to be able to see the main altar from his bed. Directly below the altar, and therefore also beneath his bed, Philip built an immense crypt for the entire Hapsburg dynasty, including his father, himself, and all his future successors to the throne. Whenever Philip stayed at the Escorial, which was as often as he possibly could, he lived and worked and slept directly over his father’s corpse and the grave he himself would soon occupy, as well as the grave of his son and of all descendants not yet born.
In his will, Philip addressed so many saintly intercessors that his list of advocates matched name for name the total list of saints invoked in every will written in Madrid. He also pulled out all the stops when it came to suffrages, consigning the Hieronymite fathers to perpetual labor and laying heavy demands on priests elsewhere. Even the Escorial was not enough. First, Philip wanted masses to be said by every single priest at the Escorial for nine days following his death. Then he asked for 30,000 masses to be said “as quickly as possible” by Franciscans throughout the realm, “with the greatest devotion.” Not content with this, Philip also requested that a High Mass be said for his soul at the main altar of the Escorial basilica every single day until Christ’s second coming, and added a special prayer for his soul to the Hieronymites’ daily canonical hours. Let us not even consider how many tens of thousands of other masses he requested for his relatives, or how he dwelt on every detail of his funeral, or how he practiced dying, or how many memorial services were held throughout the realm after his death and how many hundreds of thousands of candles were used. It might make us lose all our bearings.
Lest this hallucinatory tour of the Escorial prove unimpressive, given that extravagance befits a king, let us consider that Philip and his prayer factory-cum-city of the dead were just the tip of the iceberg. What we find when we examine the wills of his subjects are thousands upon hundreds of thousands, even millions of mirrors reflecting the same sort of obsession, only at a relatively smaller scale. Taken as a whole, the masses and prayers requested by Spaniards during the time of Philip II and his successors, Philip III and Philip IV, would dwarf the efforts at the Escorial and make them seem like a mere period at the end of one sentence in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. When the cost is finally tallied some time in the future, as I am sure it will be, chances are that the amount of money spent by the subjects of these three Philips on their souls and those of their dead could easily dwarf the amount spent by the monarchs and add up to much more than several years’ worth of treasure from the New World.
Providence, I believe, compelled the Protestant Reformers to bury this cult of the dead so that Christians could return to the land of the living.
March 15th, 2010 | 8:07 pm | #1
If only we’d had Protestant Reformers around in the first century – maybe we wouldn’t have those ghastly Roman catacombs.
March 16th, 2010 | 11:29 am | #2
Cult of the dead? Hardly. God is not God of the dead, but of the living. Those who have died in Christ are not dead, but live in him.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t rightly mock such extravagances of the past. But the “reformers” didn’t bury a “cult of the dead.” They turned their backs on members of the Body who live in Christ.
March 16th, 2010 | 1:26 pm | #3
I might buy that if the communion of saints appeared after the resurrection of the dead (an eschatological hope) in the Apostle’s Creed instead of between the Church and the forgiveness of sins (present realities). Or if Paul gave any indication that, when speaking about the unity of the Body (1Cor 12) he was indicating something not yet realized.
As it is, I’ll take Augustine: “Neither are the souls of the pious dead separated from the Church which even now is the kingdom of Christ. Otherwise there would be no remembrance of them at the altar of God in the communication of the Body of Christ.”
March 16th, 2010 | 3:02 pm | #4
You don’t really build an affirmative case for your theology by pointing out the very most absurd absurdities of the very most absurb people who ever held to a theology on the other side of the schism. There’s some nutty, goofy stuff in the backwaters of contemporary American evangelical practice, but I’d never suggest that that stuff somehow invalidates the piety of sober, faithful Protestants.
So I’d agree thaqt Philip II was a bit, um, obsessed with his own and his family’s salvation. But that doesn’t proves to me that its wrong/unfruitful to pray for the soul of my departed grandmother, or that its wrong/unfruitful for me to ask St. Jospeh to pray for me to The Lord our God that I might be graced with the wisdom and strangth to be a better father. As I’m sure you’d object to me saying that Joel Osteen’s cross of gold preaching proves that the whole Luther/Calvin business was an attempt to get rid of the suffering Savior.
March 17th, 2010 | 7:24 am | #5
To refer to this practice as the cult of the dead stacks the deck in the favor of Protestantism. It is better described as the cult of the saints, but in the eleventh century Odilo of Cluny did change things some by suggesting that one add to the “feast of all saints” a second “feast of the departed faithful,” which became the feast of all souls. This allowed Cluny to honor departed monks who were not saints. Because of Cluny’s power as a monastery at the time, the feast spread, and this, in turn, blurred the distinction between saints and other Christians in popular medieval Christianity.
Rituals began to be more elaborate in the late Middle Ages for a variety of reasons (not least because of the Black Death and also the emergence of purgatory as a doctrinal development). It was the elaborate nature of these rituals that early Protestant Reformers reacted against and Philip II of Spain sought to reify. Spain is the home of Tridentine Catholicism in many ways, which proved to be positive and negative.
sd is probably correct that we can all (Catholics and Protestants) recognize the excesses in each other, and that these should not be taken as representative of the teaching of either communion.
Quoting from Augustine’s City of God by JSullivan is fair (at least that seems to be where the quotation comes from), but one must take into consideration that purgatory as a doctrine had not developed yet. So, Augustine represents an earlier stage of thinking on the communion of the saints. He seems deeply concerned to distance saints’ shrines from “pagan” practices of honoring their dead, but he also acknowledges that miracles have occurred at these same shrines. These lines become increasingly blurred in different locales throughout the Middle Ages, and this impacted the practice of Christianity as it still does.
It’s not quite fair to say that Protestants turned their back on the saints. They did not and do not. There are Reformers who upheld the communion of the saints in terms of the church triumphant. The questions concern the ongoing role of the saints in the affairs of Christians who remain physically alive on earth. These questions were no doubt complicated by “All Souls Day,” and, of course, the introduction of All Hallows Eve in all of this.
March 17th, 2010 | 12:49 pm | #6
I agree with your understanding of cult in the sense of worship practices. It is the genitive “of the dead” that is probably not fair although I think the generic description is a way of underscoring the connections between All Saints and All Souls days.
March 26th, 2010 | 11:42 am | #7
Anybody considered the possibility that this was fanboy obsession, financed by all the Gold and Silver “Money for Free” coming in from their American conquests?
I’ve been in various fandoms for many years, and the true no-life over-the-top fanboys are always mooching off some sucker. In this case, Spain was mooching off the sweat and pain of their American holdings and using all that to be a collective Trust Fund Kiddie. ANd since this was long before Communism and Anarchism, they went over the top with their state religion.
Also, Spain had this pathological reaction to the Protestant Reformation where they defined themselves as Uber-Uber-Catholic (Much More Than The Pope) and firewalling everything even remotely Catholic to the max. You see the same dynamic in Holiness splinter churches — “Whatever they do, We Do The Opposite!”
(Oh yeah, the Spanish Hapsburg Dynasty didn’t survive to fill that crypt with only family. They “kept the bloodline pure” with an unforked family tree until they literally died off from inbreeding. The last Hapsburg King of Spain was not only mentally retarded and infertile, his Hapsburg Jaw was so extreme he couldn’t even close his mouth. I think that happened a couple generations after Philip II.)
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