Reformation
Netherlands / Rome
Catholic
Works placed on the Index of Forbidden Books
Also: Pighius · Albertus Pighius
⭐⭐ He is the person on this thread who most deserves to be remembered, and the one most easily left out. Four hundred and fifty-nine years later, in 1999, Catholics and Lutherans signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, and what it did has the same structure as what he did in 1540 — but the three sources this site now uses were all written before it or did not get to include it, so this module has no node for it for now. ⚠ That is: of the only serious attempt at reconciliation on this thread and the only possible closing point, one has a node on this site and the other does not yet.
Below: first his own position, then the church’s verdict — kept separate. A rejected opinion keeps equal weight here.
His own position
⭐⭐ The only serious attempt at reconciliation on this thread came from him. At the Colloquy of Worms in 1540, where he took part as an adviser on the Catholic side, he too held, to bring about reconciliation with the Protestants, a form of double justification — as González gives it, one justification is inherent in the righteous person, and the other is the righteousness of Christ imputed to him. The plan is usually tied to Article 5 of the Regensburg Book at the Colloquy of Regensburg the next year (drafted by Gropper and Bucer, finalized by Contarini). ⚠ Look at the structure of this proposal: it is not a compromise but an admission that two justifications hold at the same time — the kind Catholics speak of (inward, inherent) and the kind Protestants speak of (alien, imputed) are each true, only they are not talking about the same thing.
⚠ There is something even more surprising about him: as González puts it, he also clashed with Catholic theology in his view of sin, declaring that sin is imputed — he applied the idea of imputation to sin.
The church’s verdict
⭐ Neither side accepted it. As González notes, this view did not satisfy the parties involved in the dispute, and it was later condemned by the Council of Trent. His writings on these subjects were put on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1624. ⚠ But remember also who he was: he was one of the most ardent defenders of papal authority. In 1538 he published Affirmation of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which, González records, asserted that no pope had ever erred, and tried to explain counter-examples such as Liberius and Honorius as the result of historical misunderstanding and of tampering with ancient texts — González notes that these views helped lead the First Vatican Council to declare that the pope cannot err. ⭐ That is: the man who put forward this proposal for reconciliation was not someone whose position had gone soft, but someone who elsewhere was among the hardest of all. ⚠ His views on church history were later taken up by two cardinals, Bellarmine and Baronius, and González remarks that his writings did have a lasting influence; he is also regarded as one of the forerunners of Molinism.
What was at stake for salvation
What he wanted to guard was this: if the righteousness Protestants speak of and the righteousness Catholics speak of are really two different things, then this division may not have needed to happen. ⚠ And the reasons both sides rejected him were symmetrical — each held that the kind it spoke of was justification itself, and would not let it be lowered to one of two kinds. ⭐ This deserves slow thought from our readers: a division is sometimes kept going not by the disagreement itself, but by both sides refusing to admit that the other is speaking of a different question.
Principal works
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Affirmation of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1538
Affirmation of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; ⚠ not related to this thread, but shows who he was
Threads he belongs to
Justification
Dispute Carries on ⭐⭐ The only serious attempt at reconciliation on this thread: double justification — two kinds of righteousness, each holding in its own right. Neither side was satisfied, and it was later condemned by Trent. It came 459 years before the Joint Declaration of 1999 (counting from Worms, 1540).