447. Andrés Messmer on Spanish Protestantism

Yes, there were Spanish Protestants! Andrew (Andrés) Messmer joins us to explain how they drew on humanism and philosophy to argue for their religious agenda.

• A. Messmer, “Hablando el lenguaje protestante con acento español: La Declaración, o confesión de fe de Casiodoro de Reina entre otras confesiones reformadas durante 1523-1561,” Cuadernos de Reflexión Teológica 1 (2020), 73-100.

• A. Messmer (ed.), Una introducción a la crítica textual de la Biblia (Barcelona: 2021).

• A. Messmer, “The Inspiration, Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture in the History of Christian Thought,” Evangelical Review of Theology 45 (2021), 294–315.

• A. Messmer (ed.), Casiodoro de Reina. Su vida, Biblia y teología. Ensayos en honor del 500 aniversario de su nacimiento (Barcelona: 2023).

• A. Messmer (ed.), Clásicos de la fe: Obras selectas de Casiodoro de Reina (Brentwood: 2023).

• A. Messmer (ed.), Credo. La confesión de fe de Casiodoro de Reina (Trujillo: 2023).

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

Peter Adamson: Today's episode will be an interview about the Reformation in Spain with Andrés Messmer, who is the Academic Dean at Seville Theological Seminary. He also goes by Andrew, or Andy, because he's actually from the United States, despite that introduction. We are going to be talking about, as I just said, a kind of surprising subject, which is the Reformation in Spain and even Protestantism in Spain. And as I said to you before, when we were talking about this, I was surprised that there's anything to discuss here, because obviously we think of Spain as a Catholic country, and we probably think that the Church authorities did a pretty good job of stopping Protestantism from really getting much of a foothold in Spain. So can you say something about why there is anything for you to work on?

Andrés Messmer: Yeah, that is a great question. And I often forget that because I kind of live in this day by day. I'm always reading their works and studying this out. So I forget how surprising it is for people to find out that there were Protestants in Spain, that there are Protestants in Spain. And just to maybe illustrate that, Martin Luther, just one reformer, we have more of his works than all of the Spanish reformers combined. So there isn't a ton to work with. Yeah, there is a bit of a problem that we have. In fact, even just we're talking about the Spanish Reformation, just defining the limits of exactly what we're talking about, who we're talking about. There were Christian humanists who didn't really like the Roman Catholic Church. Do we count them as Spanish Protestants or not? What do we mean by the word Spain? Spain today is pretty isolated, restricted to the peninsula, but it wasn't in the 16th century. The low countries, the southern half of Italy, that was also Spain. We have this kind of unique phenomenon called the Nicodemite phenomenon of people who publicly were Roman Catholics, but privately were Protestants. That's a well-documented phenomenon. You also have people writing from outside of Spanish borders, maybe from Germany or France or England, but they are Spaniards. So how do you work through that? They ran away from the Inquisition or they became Protestant in their travel. What do we do with that? I take a pretty broad definition to Spanish Protestantism. If I took a narrow one we probably wouldn't be able to teach the courses here that we teach, so I take a broad definition of Protestants who were from Spain, or who lived in Spain and they would have continued to live in Spain if they had the chance. So that's kind of the definition that I put on it. So if we take this definition of Spanish Protestantism, we have three sources that we use to get information. The first one is actually the Inquisition documents. So they kept meticulous documents. I mean, it's word for word. It's like a modern stenographer. It's, you know, this person said this and then this person said this. And you really feel like you're in a conversation when you read them. We have a few documents that were written in Spain by Spanish Protestants, not necessarily openly, but maybe subtly writing as Protestants. But most of our material comes from people who fled Spain and then they ended up writing their works, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in French or Latin. Those are the sources we use to kind of reconstruct what Protestantism was like in Spain.

Peter Adamson: Okay, great. I love your definition of Spanish Protestants as people who wish they lived in Spain, or are in fact in Spain.

Andrés Messmer: Well, it is a little sad because in their writings, they talk about how much they love Spain and they had pretty hard lives when they left Spain. Most of them were what we would call a hand-to-mouth existence, living off of donations of other people. I mean, you think about it, a monk goes to Germany, doesn't speak the language, doesn't have many marketable skills. So he's homesick and his poor family, often the families were punished when someone would convert to Protestantism. So they lived with a lot of economic and psychological hardships, but some of them really were homesick. So they wanted to go back to Spain, but it was a death sentence.

Peter Adamson: Right. Okay. So we're talking about kind of exile community. Actually reminds me of some things we've seen in Jewish philosophy as well, which obviously is often in the context of exile and you have these longings to go back to the Holy Land and so on. Obviously the Inquisition, which you've already mentioned, presents a major factor in this whole story. And I'm wondering what the effect of the Inquisition was on these Protestants, not so much practically speaking. So obviously if they're caught being Protestants in Spain, they could get in huge trouble. They could even be killed. But I was wondering about it more at the level of their thoughts. Are they making some kind of accommodations to make their Protestantism more acceptable to Catholics or are they doing the reverse? Are they making their Protestantism even more extreme as a kind of backlash against the Inquisition or do they just ignore it intellectually speaking?

Andrés Messmer: One of the effects I referenced, the Nicodemite phenomenon, and I should probably define what that is. John Calvin coined that term. He's taken it from the Gospel of John, and there's a figure in there. His name is Nicodemus. And publicly he was a Pharisee, but kind of privately, secretly, he was a follower of Jesus. He coined that term to talk about Protestants who publicly were still Roman Catholics, but privately they were Protestants. And the Inquisition had this influence on them at a practical, at a theological, and even at a philosophical level where they really had to hold their cards close to their chest and not really show people what they believed. Unfortunately, I think it had two kind of negative impacts on them. One of them was ended up reconfirming their worst fears that the church was really corrupt, the Inquisition, they were modern-day Pharisees, the Pope was the Antichrist, and that they were living in the end times. That's what they thought. And going to your question, in some ways they were trying to accommodate Roman Catholic theology to an extent, but in another way they went to an extreme. And when you think that the church is completely corrupt and that it's like Pharisees, it's a worst-case scenario where everything is inverted and it's on its head. At least what they did was they preached very hard against it and wrote very hard against it. So it kind of had this double effect on Spanish Protestants. They wanted to go home. They wanted to, let's say, exalt their national honor. They wanted to be proud of being a Spaniard. So to that extent, they were trying to accommodate, if you will. They were trying to be open, trying to be, let's say, ecumenical. But on the other hand, because they saw so much corruption and because they ran away from Spain, but their friends didn't and they were processed by the Inquisition and killed, they also were preaching very hard against it.

Peter Adamson: Okay, well, we could obviously keep talking about this at great length as a historical and indeed as a theological phenomenon, but since this is a philosophy podcast, let's get on to the relationship between these figures and philosophy. We've seen that on the Catholic side, counter-reformation figures like the Jesuits, for example, were very interested in philosophy. And we've also seen that Protestants from northern regions had a fairly complicated attitude towards philosophy. I would say that some of them were more willing to embrace it. Others were quite skeptical. Is there anything general we can say about these Spanish Protestants and how interested they were in philosophy, what kinds of philosophical sources they use?

Andrés Messmer: Yes, most of them had a typical mixture between scholastic and humanist training, especially at the University of Alcala. There they would have received training not only in scholastic Thomism, Scotism, nominalism, but also in the more humanistic side of things, textual criticism and ancient languages and all of that. And that was the seedbed actually of Protestantism. So most of the leaders were very familiar with philosophy. Just to give you a few examples, I think you've covered some of these people already, but Pedro Nunez was influenced by Peter Ramos and he ended up being a professor of another philosopher, Pedro Gallas. Very interesting figure, not really well known, is Sebasti·n Fox Morcillo. He ended up actually made it one of his life's goals to harmonize Plato and Aristotle. He ended up dying at the age of 32 in a shipwreck, but a really brilliant person. And he was also a Protestant. There are lots of figures here. Lots of them were professors, especially at Alcala, but also in Seville. They were professors of Thomism, Scotism, but probably the best known example that we have, and again, we're working with limited sources here, would be Constantino de la Fuente. And his personal library had a thousand volumes in it, which for a personal library in the 16th century, that was a pretty extensive library. And he had all of the classics you could imagine, not just theological classics, but philosophical classics as well. And in his writings, they come out and he uses them. He talks about Plato, he talks about Aristotle, he talks about all the political philosophers. So they were generally speaking, pretty well informed on, let's say the layout of the philosophical land in 16th century.

Peter Adamson: And are they actually using philosophical sources or arguments to argue against Catholicism?

Andrés Messmer: That's a good question. I mean, what separates Protestants from Roman Catholics isn't only philosophy. I mean, there are a lot of things, for example, the debate over justification, that's kind of a linguistic debate. There are other debates that are more historical, such as the canon or how many sacraments there are. Other debates are based like on piety, how do you use images? What about Mary? But there are some philosophical debates that end up separating Protestants from Roman Catholics. And one of the more famous debates is on the Eucharist. It's actually kind of a funny story. I guess it's funny just because he was so young when it happened, but there's a Spaniard, I think he was seven years old. He went to a public lecture at a university. And there the lecturer, he was talking about how it's impossible for a substance to be present at two different places at the same time. And he was applying that even to a Eucharist, or he was receiving questions. Okay, you're saying this professor, but what about the Eucharist? And he would not answer the question on, you know, if this was a philosophical possibility. But that planted a thought in his mind on the philosophical, I don't know what you want to call it, the philosophical difficulty of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. And later on, as he grew up, that seed started to germinate. And I think it was his early 20s, he ended up fleeing Spain, because he said philosophically, this just doesn't make sense. And this is just one example of many in which they're using philosophy, especially this issue of the relationship between substance and accidents, applying it to the Eucharist, and then really coming up with a difficulty.

Peter Adamson: The problem there, I guess, is that the body of Christ is a substance, and it would have to be in two different places at the same time, because it's in two different Eucharistic hosts. You know, the seven-year-old kids are thinking, this doesn't make any sense. Or just thinking, 'answer the question, man. It's a good question.'

Andrés Messmer: Yeah. Well, see, if he were to answer it, he could get in big trouble. I mean, it's that issue where, you know, he wants to be, you know, let's say externally, he has to say the right answer, because if he doesn't, he can get in big trouble. But he also, I mean, he's a philosopher, this university lecturer, he's a philosopher, and he has to be able to look at himself in the mirror. And I can imagine him saying, you know, I don't know what to do, because if I say a substance can be in two different places at the same time, and that the Eucharist is completely philosophically justifiable, I'm not going to be able to put up with myself. But if I deny it, I'm going to get in trouble.

Peter Adamson: The hazard of living in miracles. Something else you mentioned is that they were often trained in humanism. So they've gone through this classic kind of educational program that we've come to expect in the 15th and especially now 16th centuries, where people are learning Greek as well as Latin, sometimes even learning Hebrew, as well as Greek and Latin. What is their attitude towards humanism in general? And maybe in particular, do they have a stance, these Spanish Protestants, on the extremely controversial question of how to apply humanist philology to the Bible?

Andrés Messmer: A large number of them were well trained in humanism. A person comes to my mind is, his name is Francisco de Encinas, and he was actually the first one to translate the Bible into Spanish from greek. And he actually did that living in Philip Melancthon's house. He lived with him, and Philip encouraged him and he ended up translating. Interesting story, Francisco hand delivered the first edition of his printed Bible to Emperor Charles V, asking for his blessing on it. And from the report, the emperor was happy to receive it, but he gave it to his confessor, Pedro de Soto, who was not happy to receive it. And Francisco was arrested and then he miraculously escaped and then continued to write and teach at Cambridge. But they were very open to, let's say, a humanistic impulse to study the original sources and then actually to translate them and make them available so that everyone could read them. So the specific issue of translating the Bible, there was an argument that if we let normal, uneducated people read such a sophisticated text like the Bible, we're going to have heresy on our hands. And as you know, in the 16th century, heresy and anarchy went hand in hand. So there was a lot of fear of translating the Bible into Spanish. And in his preface, Francisco, he says, it's not the actual text itself, whatever the text may be, in this case, the Bible, it's not the text itself. that's the problem. It's how people interpret the text. That's the problem. And so as a good humanist, he said, we need to first translate the Bible into, in this case, Spanish. And then we have to teach people how to interpret it based on at least some objective standard on what a good hermeneutic is as compared to a bad one. So yeah, I'd probably say he's probably the best example when it comes to Bible translation of humanism injecting itself into the church. As time goes on, the Bible translators, at least in the Spanish speaking world, they start to depart, let's say, from a humanistic emphasis and they start going more towards a confessional emphasis, but we don't have to get into that. That's not philosophy. That's more theology.

Peter Adamson: So actually, the emphasis that he places there on educating people is also very close to Melanchthon, who of course is very, as we've seen in earlier episodes, he's a really key figure in Protestant educational reform. The idea of a house guest of Melanchthon, like, what would a house guest of Melanchthon wind up doing? Well, probably translating the Bible and then trying to explain to everyone what it meant, I guess the most Melanchthonian thing you could do.

Andrés Messmer: Yeah. And as you look at the other prefaces, they'll say, look, we're not doing anything new or radical. They'll talk about how the Bible was translated into Latin, how it's been translated into Coptic, how it's been translated into all sorts of languages. But it just seems strange to us because in the moment we live in Latin is the only language it's allowed to be in. So they were trying to show historic continuity with their project.

Peter Adamson: Oh, that's interesting. So they're kind of aware of the accidental historical moment that they live in that Latin hasn't always been the universal language and maybe it won't always be the universal language. That's interesting. You were just talking about the political aspect of this. So if you let people read the Bible and decide what they think it means, that will lead to anarchy. And this, of course, was a standard Catholic criticism of the humanist projects. That brings us on to something I wanted to ask you about, which is their attitudes towards politics and centralized authority. When we were talking about Northern Protestantism, we talked a lot about their views on the contest between church authority and secular political power. Of course, this is in a way something that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. Right. So you have the "two swords" controversy and whether the papacy would have any secular power. Can bishops be running around with armies as they were? And so on. So anyway, this is a long running story. How do your Spanish Protestants deal with this? And how do they, I guess in particular, how do they respond to the Catholic claim that their church is a supreme power which rules over all other powers, both secular and spiritual?

Andrés Messmer: I like the way that you put that because that really was how the Roman Catholic church has seen itself, especially since the high Middle Ages, as it's no longer two swords. It's one ring to rule them all. They had complete total control over everything. And the secular powers were more or less like puppets, you know, the little pawns the pope could move as he wanted to because he had the power to do so. And as I've thought about this, it's very interesting to see the parallels between the kind of, let's say, the Roman Catholic approach to authority and Protestant approach to authority and see how that actually plays out. There is a coherence parallel between how they understand authority and how they understand the Eucharist, interestingly enough. So, you know, a Roman Catholic, the way that they understand the Eucharist philosophically is that there really is no bread at a substantial level after the words of consecration are said. Maybe at an accidental level, sure, but at a substantial level, it's actually no longer bread. It's actually the body of Christ. And that's their view of politics. Maybe, let's say, at an accidental level, there may happen to be kings or may happen to be princes and governors, but at a substantial level what's there is the church. It's the church authority. Where as you go to a Protestant understanding of these two concepts, Protestants were much more open to kind of this two sword idea, maybe we shouldn't call it two swords, but two realities, a political reality and a spiritual reality. And that actually maps over quite nicely onto their understanding of the Eucharist, where they weren't denying the substantial existence of either of them. They were both present, but they were both there present in their own way. And so when we go to the Spanish Protestants, they were understanding this similarly, that they were upholding the reality, the facts of the political entity, but they were also upholding the reality of a church entity. And the way that they put these two things together was they reversed what the Roman Catholic Church was saying. So the Roman Catholic Church was putting the church above the state and really just dissolving the state. And the Protestants were actually putting the state above the church, at least in some ways. So it's interesting to think how this could be actually an outworking. I can't remember if you and your listeners have gone through anything like the Council of Chalcedon, where Christians are trying to philosophically work out the relationship between the two natures of Christ. But the way that the Spanish Protestants are trying to work this out, it's an application of how do we put the two natures of Christ together? You've got this human nature and this divine nature. How do these things go together? And their conclusion was that, well, they're both there. I mean, we can't mix them. We can't separate them. They're kind of both there. And that's how they were understanding political theory too. They were not trying to confuse them. We're not trying to separate them. They both have to go together. Each has its right to exist, but in its own way.

Peter Adamson: Yeah, we did talk about that a little bit, by the way, when we did Byzantine philosophy, so a long time ago. But it may not be fresh in the minds of all the listeners. I guess that to achieve the position thereafter there, they have to somehow define the sphere of competence of both kinds of power. So they have to have a very clear definition of what it is that lies in the authority of a secular power to determine and also what lies in the power of the Protestant church to determine. Because otherwise you get conflicts that can't be resolved except for violence, right? So let's move on to a specific figure. And you have already named some of the Protestant reformers from Spain that you have in mind. But there's one that I thought we should touch on, because in one of your writings, you call him Spain's first reformer. That makes him sound pretty important. And this is someone I haven't touched on. So his name is Juan de Valdez. Can you briefly introduce us to him? Maybe you can say his name better than I just did. And can you say something about maybe like how he would compare to some of the figures we've been looking at on the Catholic side, like maybe Ignatius Loyola, for example, who is similarly seen as a kind of pioneering counter-reformation figure?

Andrés Messmer: I intentionally, for the sake of the hearers, been trying to use a thick English accent when I pronounce the Spanish name so that they understand who I'm talking about. But Juan de Valdés, he is pretty universally regarded as Spain's first reformer. He was actually influenced by the Alumbrados. That was a Spanish movement. You can kind of think of them as mystics, but people who know theology probably will get frustrated with that term too, because mysticism can be such a broad movement as well.

Peter Adamson: The so-called 'illuminated ones,' right? I talked to them about them a bit. These, actually these episodes, while we're having these conversations, these episodes haven't aired yet, so you couldn't possibly know this. But I talked about the Alumbrados a little bit, for example, to lay down context for figures like Teresa de Avila and also, in fact, Ignatius Loyola, because they were both accused of being sort of close to the so-called Alumbrados who were suspect in the eyes of the Inquisition because of their excessive spirituality and so on.

Andrés Messmer: Perfect. Yeah, that's exactly who we're talking about as far as the influence in Juan de Valdés. He went to the University of Alcala, and while he was there, before he graduated, he published a book called The Dialogue of Christian Doctrine, which brought him to the attention of the Inquisition. And he ended up leaving Spain, going to Rome, and then down to Naples, where he started a community of Protestants and of, we'll call them, evangelical-minded Roman Catholics. I'm not sure if you've covered the Spirituali. That was kind of the Alumbrado equivalent in Italy, but he was someone who sought to internalize the Christian faith and to bring coherence between the internal and the external. So one of his main worries with the Church was that Christianity was becoming something that was only external, and what he wanted to do was to internalize that without necessarily undoing a lot of the external, but for there to be a coherence between the two. Maybe some things did have to go, but what he wanted to focus on was internalizing that. And so he wanted what's called an intimate personal relationship with God through Christ, and that's really what he dedicated his life and his writings to was a personal relationship, I guess you could call it, to use our modern lingo, a personal relationship with God.

Peter Adamson: It actually does sound a lot like what we find in Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises or in Teresa de Avila.

Andrés Messmer: Yeah. Let me say something about that just so listeners are aware. There is a difference, at least I've seen a difference, when I read Ignatius of Loyola himself and when I read his followers, there seems to be a big difference between the two. So Ignatius of Loyola, I've read him and I really enjoy what I read and I like it. And then I see kind of what happened later on with the movement. And this happened with all movements, but this has happened with the Jesuit movement that what the founder said and what his followers said are not always the same thing.

Peter Adamson: Yeah. Well, it happened to Aristotle, so it can happen to anybody. Okay. So, I mean, in a way that's, I think it almost points toward a tragic fact about 16th century Spain, but maybe it's even true for Europe in general. And in previous episodes, I've talked about parallels between the Protestant reform movement and the Catholic Reformation, which can be thought of as a reform movement internal to the Catholic Church. So sort of too bad that they didn't find consensus and common ground, but they didn't. And in fact, obviously Spain went on to become or to remain a Catholic country. It's still a Catholic country today. So what were the historical fortunes of Spanish Protestantism? Was it sort of an unsuccessful experiment? Was it something that could only exist ever in exile? And so it ultimately tails off into historical insignificance? Or do you think that it has a more significant legacy than that?

Andrés Messmer: That's a really good question that can probably be answered from a couple different ways. I guess I could real quickly tell you the story of what happened. There was a Bible smuggler who delivered the wrong book to the wrong person in the year 1557. And that's the first time the Inquisition realized that there were Protestants in Spain. That sparked hundreds of arrests around Spain. And then that led ultimately to the famous Autos de Fe, where the Inquisition has the big public square burning of heretics, 1559, 1560, and 1562. And that was the end of Protestantism in Spain. So it all ended because of an accident. In fact, in the Inquisition records, there was a very famous Protestant. His last name was Cazalla, AgustÌn de Cazalla. And he actually told the Inquisition, 'if you had given us five more months, we would have been the ones doing this to you guys.' Apparently, he was at least optimistic enough that things were advancing so quickly at an underground level that the momentum was about to change. So, but anyways, that didn't happen. And that was the end of Protestantism in Spain. I guess the great legacy would probably be someone like Juan de Valdés. He made it out to Italy, and he ended up influencing quite a few people. He influenced Peter Vermigli, who had a huge impact across Europe, Bernardino Ochino, who also had a pretty big impact on the Spirituali. And I've read that even people like Michelangelo were part of that group. I'm not an expert on the Spirituali, but that's at least I've read it in academic sources that he was and that it actually shows up in some of his later works. So it ended up dying off because of the Inquisition. And there were never enough Spanish Protestants in any one place to kind of keep an exile community going. They would constantly go to London. That seems to be their favorite destination, but it was more of a slow trickle than anything else. They can never really form a community, maybe from time to time they did, but really the 16th century was the end of Spanish Protestantism as we know it.