Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [22]
The archbishop’s suspicious view of human nature extended to his own priests and confessors. In the late 1570s, when a woodworker named Rizzardo Taurini was commissioned to build five confessionals for the new Jesuit church of San Fedele in Milan, he provoked Borromeo’s rage by fractionally curtailing one of the partitions at the bottom of the standard double sentry-box design. The Jesuit provost of San Fedele recalled the archbishop’s outraged protest – ‘the confessor can easily touch the woman’s feet with his own.’ Borromeo repeated the objection several times, to the evident exasperation of the provost, who found the archbishop’s insistence on the moral dangers inherent in a proximity between two people’s feet more than faintly absurd. ‘He greatly insisted on this,’ the provost remembered, ‘as if lust enters the body through one’s shoes, and he is unaware that in his confessionals the woman’s mouth is close to the confessor’s ear.’23 The Jesuit knew a truth that Borromeo did not want to acknowledge: no matter how strong the grilles and walls of any confessional box, nothing could absolutely prevent priests and penitents from harbouring feelings for one another. The partitions intended to separate man from woman might even enhance the illict thrill of such emotions. This exchange between the worldly provost and the archbishop reveals the paranoid fear of sinfulness – and the corresponding desire to close off almost every avenue of human sensuality – that lay at the heart of Borromean piety.
Borromeo believed that confession was nothing less than an instrument, given to him by God, to purify the world. The sacrament of penance already gave the confessor a fearsome weapon for the discipline of each soul – the power to grant or withold absolution. But Borromeo enhanced that power by putting checks in place to ensure that penance was true and not merely a matter of words and assurances. He insisted that confessors make enquiries about their penitents with their parish priests. Those priests in turn were instructed to tell confessors of any conditions that might disqualify a particular penitent from absolution – adultery, for example, or cohabitation outside wedlock. If absolution were not granted, the penitent would soon find himself or herself before the episcopal magistrates, and under the threat of imprisonment.
Borromeo also ordered his confessors to interrogate their penitents for any knowledge they might have of heretics, or of anyone harbouring prohibited books. This cast the net wide, since such was the repressive cultural effect of the Counter-Reformation that the list of banned books – the Index – included many of the works now considered part of every Italian’s intellectual heritage: Boccaccio’s Decameron, the poetry of Petrarch and Ariosto, the political theory of Machiavelli, to name just some.24 Anyone who made too public a display of owning any of those books was likely to find themselves given away to the authorities.
The situation in Milan was not unique, in that harsh measures against heresy were being taken in cities all across Italy, but it was extreme. For example, when the Roman Inquisition recommended that Catholic confessors should encourage their penitents to inform on heretics, Borromeo applied the condition with particular severity. In Milan any confessor too fastidious to enquire about heresy was summarily excommunicated; and if a penitent did confess to knowledge of heretical activities, he or she was immediately sent to higher authorities to give further information about these enemies of the faith – to supply names and addresses, to give details of what they had done or might be planning to do. Only then might the penitent return to their confessor to hear