Reformations: The
Early Modern World, 1450–1650
by Carlos Eire: Yale University Press
Following are excerpts
from a review by noted historian Prof. Eamon Duffy; wherein he
summarizes some of the more compelling re-interpretations of the various ‘reformations’
that have shaped the modern world. The bolding is mine. JH
Next year marks the fifth centenary of one of the few precisely
datable historical events that can be said to have changed the world forever. In 1517, an unknown German professor from
an undistinguished new university protested against the sordid trade in
religious benefits known as “indulgences,” which were then being peddled
around Germany to fund grandiose plans to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Martin Luther’s protest initially took the form of a public challenge to an
academic debate on a swathe of theological niceties. But this was the first age
of print, and Luther was a publicist of genius. His list of topics for debate,
in the form of Ninety-Five Theses, was printed as a broadsheet (though the
legend that he nailed them to a church door is, sadly, probably untrue). The
theses nonetheless became the world’s most improbable bestseller. What might
have been a technical academic exercise in a Wittenberg lecture hall rapidly
escalated into a fundamental questioning of the theological underpinning of
Western Christianity.
In its wake, Europe divided, roughly north and south, and
the peoples of Europe were pitched into a series of murderous ideological wars
in which tens of thousands died, and during which the religious, cultural, and
political map of Europe was redrawn. We are all still living with the consequences.
This religious and
cultural earthquake has traditionally been known as the Reformation, a loaded
term with which Catholics have never been comfortable. To dub these
transformations as a Reformation implies that something that had gone radically
wrong was put right, that a good form of Christianity replaced a bad one. The fact that the term has traditionally
been capitalized and used in the singular also poses a problem. The new
religious identities and communities which emerged from these conflicts—Lutheran,
Calvinist, Anglican, and the more radical groupings often lumped together under
the name “Anabaptist”—did indeed share some beliefs and attitudes in common.
They
all prioritized the written Word of God in the Bible over traditional Church teaching
and discipline, and they all vehemently rejected the papacy and the allegedly
materialistic religious system which the papacy headed. But they were divided among themselves—often lethally—on almost everything
else. Within a single generation of Luther’s protest, “Protestants” were
excommunicating, fighting, and persecuting each other, as well as the common
Catholic enemy, and many were calling for a reform of the Reformation.
Even the timescale traditionally assumed has now been
challenged. In the older and mainly Protestant historiography, the overthrow of
Catholicism almost everywhere in Northeastern Europe, and its replacement by
“reformed” versions of Christianity, was seen as a swift process. Since
medieval Catholicism was believed to have been corrupt, decadent,
priest-ridden, and therefore unpopular with the laity, it was taken for granted
that it could have offered little resistance to the reformers’ message. And so
histories of the Reformation were conventionally histories of events in the early
and middle sixteenth century. Only
recently has the notion of a “long reformation” gained currency. Studies of
the problems that Protestant officialdom encountered in uprooting deeply
entrenched popular beliefs, practices, and loyalties, and in inculcating new
beliefs and disciplines, have brought home the realization that after the first
energies of “reformation” had passed, consolidating new religious identities at
the grassroots level was almost everywhere a difficult and painful process,
stretching over decades and even centuries. This realization requires a drastic
rethinking, still very much in process, of much that was taken for granted in
the older accounts. Some of that rethinking has been done under the rubric of
the history of “confessionalization,” a term used to denote the deployment of
religion to create or reinforce social and political identities. But this
approach has brought its own problems, tending as it does to reduce religion to
an instrument of social control and political manipulation.
Against the background of these shifts in historical
understanding, an avalanche of biographies of Luther and histories of the
religious revolution he launched has begun ahead of next year’s quincentenary.
Few of them will rival the sheer scale and ambition of Carlos Eire’s new
survey. Eire is one of America’s most distinguished historians of early modern
religion, and his absorption of the newer historiography is proclaimed in the
fact that his book is entitled Reformations, in the plural. His book “accepts
the concept of multiple Reformations
wholeheartedly,” and seeks to deepen the concept by paying equal attention “to
all the different movements and churches that emerged in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, stressing their interrelatedness.” The ambition to
present a synoptic account of the multiple sixteenth-century movements for
religious “reform,” Catholic and Protestant, has led some historians to search
for a single interpretative framework for the reform impulse, to suggest that
fundamental similarities underlay sixteenth-century religious reform wherever
it occurred. So, the French Catholic historian Jean Delumeau proposed that we
should understand both the emergence of Protestantism and the transformation of
Catholicism after Trent as twin aspects of a process of “Christianization.” On
this account, both Catholic and Protestant reformers laboured to replace the
inherited half-pagan folk religion of late medieval Europe with something more
authentically Christian, focused on the person of Christ rather than often
legendary saints, prioritizing orthodox catechesis and preaching over
quasi-magical ritual, and imposing religious and moral discipline on a
reluctant populace.
Rejecting the negative judgments implicit in Delumeau’s
notion of “Christianization,” the English historian John Bossy, himself by
upbringing and education a Catholic, offered a rather less benign overarching
analysis of the Catholic and Protestant reformations of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The central contention of Bossy’s short but
scintillating Christianity in the West was that medieval Christianity had been
fundamentally concerned with the creation and maintenance of peace in a violent
world. “Christianity” in medieval Europe denoted neither an ideology nor an
institution, but a community of believers whose religious ideal—constantly
aspired to if seldom attained—was peace and mutual love. The sacraments and
sacramentals of the medieval Church were not half-pagan magic, but instruments
of the “social miracle,” rituals designed to defuse hostility and create
extended networks of fraternity, spiritual “kith and kin,” by reconciling
enemies and consolidating the community in charity.
But in the
Renaissance era, and even more so in the Reformation period which followed,
reliance on symbol and image gave way to the privileging of the printed or
spoken word . . . . Christianity
became a system of beliefs and moral behaviours. By 1700, “the Christian world
was full of religions, objectives and moral entities characterized by system,
principles and hard edges.” And above that multiplicity loomed “a shadowy
abstraction, the Christian religion.”
Both Delumeau and Bossy feature in Eire’s bibliography, but
he has little sympathy with these attempts at an overarching morphology of
“Reformation.” For him, what characterizes the religious transformations of the
sixteenth century, and their out-workings in the seventeenth, is not a single
unifying energy, good or bad, but their variety
and multiple incompatibilities. The occasion of his book is the upcoming
Luther anniversary, and he does justice to Luther’s unique role in triggering
the collapse of the medieval religious synthesis. But he is keen to emphasize
that Luther was just one, if the first, of the agents of the dramatic upheavals
of the period, and in the long term, by no means the most important. Zwingli, a
former humanist whose abandonment of medieval Catholic orthodoxy predated
Luther’s, gets extended treatment, as does Calvin, who built on Zwingli’s
initiatives . . . . alongside a
meticulous analysis of the theology we get ample quotation illustrating
Luther’s disconcerting penchant for scatological insult and a preoccupation
with excreta aimed indiscriminately at Catholics and the devil.
Eire’s final chapter on the great Reformer is headed “Luther the reactionary” . . . . Luther’s fear of anarchy and horrified
determination to distance himself from the rebels elicited some of his least
appealing writing: “Let everyone who can smite, slay, and stab . . . remembering
that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is
just as when one must kill a mad dog. . . . Stab, smite, slay, whoever can.” He
never retreated from this position. Years later, he would tell admiring
disciples, “It was I, Martin Luther, who slew all the peasants . . . for I
commanded them to be slaughtered. All their blood is on my head. But I throw
the responsibility on our Lord God, who instructed me to give this order.”
. . . . Among the
greatest merits of Eire’s survey are its remarkable
clarity in expounding difficult theological ideas and complex political
changes, its calm comprehensiveness, and its sober judgments, expressed with an
unemphatic evenhandedness. Eire first made his mark as a historian in 1989
with The War Against the Idols, a
study of Reformation iconoclasm and the theology that underlay it. His ease
with difficult theological concepts, not least his immersion in the thought of
Erasmus and the long line of thinkers and activists who took Erasmus’s ideas in
a more radical direction, is evident throughout his account of the early
Reformation. Though Eire recognizes and explains the political and practical
considerations that often drove religious change, he insists on the centrality of theology in any explanation of the
power and appeal of the Reformation. His analysis of Luther’s complicated
and often inconsistent theological development is a model of lucid exposition.
Eire has an eye for the telling quotation, and he punctuates his narrative with
lists designed to help the reader through the tangle of intellectual
complexities—the five key influences on Luther’s early theological development,
the five core beliefs underlying the apparently endless variations of the
so-called “radical reformation,” the four indicators of the religious dimension
of early modern violence, and so on. His adeptness with this sort of exposition
is especially on display in his chapter on the “left wing” of the Reformation,
the dissident radicals who rejected any alliance between the “world”—and hence
the state—and the Church, on the grounds that Christian faith was above
everything else a personal religious choice for the individual . . . .
Another notable feature of Eire’s survey is the space he
allocates to the Catholic Reformation . . . . Though he starts this section
with a chapter entitled “Facing the Challenge,” and recognizes the realities
encoded in the older designation “Counter-Reformation,” Eire treats the internal transformations of early modern Catholicism,
and its missionary outreach east and west, as expressions of “reformation” in
their own right, and not mere reactions to Protestantism. This emphasis is
of course neither unique nor new. The debate about how Catholic reform should
be characterized is an old one, but the extended attention given here to the
multiple energies of early modern Catholicism is welcome. An especially
valuable feature is Eire’s alertness to changing attitudes toward the
supernatural and the miraculous in the period, and the significance of such
shifts for understanding the parting of ways between Catholics and Protestants.
So, some of the most absorbing sections of the book deal with the place of
miracles and mysticism in post-Tridentine Catholicism, with the role of
demonology and witchcraft in the new landscapes of belief in seventeenth
century Europe, and a fascinating—and hair-raising—treatment of the importance
of hell in Baroque religious culture.
. . . . Though he provides a vivid account of Pascal and
Jansenism to illustrate the divisions within seventeenth century French
Catholicism and emphasizes the violent opposition encountered by Catholic
reformers like Charles Borromeo and John of the Cross, Eire’s treatment of the
divisions within Catholic reform in general is less vividly realized than his
treatment of the corresponding tensions with Protestantism, though Catholic
reform could be every bit as fiercely contested and divided. Eire never mentions, for example, the
so-called “Spirituali,” the remarkable group of reform-minded Italian
Catholics, which included Michelangelo and was loosely associated with the
Englishman, Cardinal Reginald Pole, while he was governor of the Papal Legation
of Viterbo in the 1530s and 1540s [influenced by St. Thomas More and Erasmus].
This group became suspect as it inclined dangerously towards the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. The group patronized outstanding preachers like
Bernard Ochino and Peter Martyr Vermigli who later seceded to Protestantism,
and was responsible for the distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the
notorious tract Beneficio di Cristo, written by a Cassinese protégé of Pole’s,
and which incorporated without acknowledgment swathes from the first version of
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Some of Pole’s closest
associates in this group, including his friend Cardinal Giovanni Morone, would
be arrested and imprisoned in the 1550s on suspicion of heresy by the fanatical
Carafa pope, Paul IV. Carafa tried unsuccessfully to recall Pole himself from
his crucial role as Archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate in Mary Tudor’s
England, in order to burn him.
Released on Carafa’s death, Morone would go on
to become a dominant figure in the final sessions of the Council of Trent, and
some of the reform measures Pole devised for England, including the
establishment of seminaries, found their way via Morone into the Council’s
proceedings. But Morone doesn’t even make it into the index of this book, and
it would be hard to gather from Eire’s account that the Council itself was at
times a cock-pit for contested conceptions of Catholic reform, disagreements
which would persist and issue, among other places, in the quarrels over
Jansenism.
In any survey on this scale, however distinguished,
specialist readers are bound to find something to criticize: All the same, it
seems to this British historian that the least satisfactory sections of Eire’s
book are quite certainly those dealing with England. The main contentions of his account of the English Reformation could
have been written thirty years ago, embodying as is does many of the
familiar tropes of an older historiography. This is clearest in in his
portrayal of the Elizabethan settlement as a deliberate via media between
Protestantism and Catholicism, an
interpretation which has been the target of much of the best writing about the
period for more than twenty years. In this account, Puritans feature
essentially as dissidents whose leaders tended towards separation. But most
recent writing on Puritanism has followed the late Patrick Collinson,
unquestioned expert in Puritan studies, in seeing Puritanism as part of the
mainstream of the Elizabethan church, which was more decidedly Protestant than
Eire contends.
What does Eire think was the outcome of two centuries of Reformations?
War, of course, the division of Europe into more or less self-contained
Catholic and Protestant camps, intractable ideological confrontation, and the
growth of skepticism and doubt in the face of sometimes murderously
self-confident orthodoxies, whether Catholic or Protestant. “By 1648,” he
writes, “it had become all too clear to far too many Westerners that religion
was no longer a social glue binding civilization together, but rather something
corrosive and explosive which in the long run would have to be circumvented,
perhaps even ignored.” Eire is cautious in offering judgments about the
distinctive outcome of the Protestant reformations. Here he differs strikingly
from another distinguished American Catholic historian of early modern religion,
Brad Gregory. Gregory, like Eire, is an authority on the radical reformation,
and author of Salvation at Stake, the best study of Reformation martyrdom,
Catholic and Protestant. In his
brilliant but controversial recent study of the consequences of the Reformation,
The Unintended Reformation, Gregory
has no doubt that its outcomes were, on balance, negative. The principal of
sola scriptura and the rejection of
the Church’s teaching authority in the end, he thinks, led to a “market of values” in which all
certainties dissolved.
The abolition of the
vowed religious life of monks and nuns removed a powerful institutional witness
to Christian ambivalence about material prosperity, and opened the door to the
acquisitive society. By contrast, the intractability of post-Reformation
religious disagreements contributed to the emergence
of societies which found their rationale in purely materialistic concerns such
as the protection of property and the contractual guarantee of the rights of
the individual. In the pioneering early modern secular states, notably the
Dutch Republic, Gregory argues, men and women decided to stop killing each
other over what seemed hopelessly irresolvable religious differences, and went
shopping instead. In the long run, because there were no universally accepted
norms for truth, religion became a private matter, and this privatization
became one of the building blocks of Enlightenment social theory. “It does me
no injury,” declared Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbour to say there are twenty
gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Here, Gregory thinks, lies the origin of a
rootless modern “hyperpluralism,” in which there is no objective basis for
shared value, and in which good and bad become matters of arbitrary personal
preference, or, as Gregory expresses it, “whatever.”
Eire shies away from overarching assessments of this kind,
preferring “to allow the past to be understood on its own terms, free from
teleological trajectories or presentist agenda.” All the same, his conclusions,
though expressed more restrainedly, seem not so very different. Eire sees the Protestant revolutions as
having brought about an underlying set of “paradigm shifts,” similar to
those Gregory identifies. Protestantism
“desacralized” the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality
into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation
iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and
wine of the Mass, relics, images—could be vehicles of spiritual reality. The
Reformation, Eire suggests, restricted the supernatural “to heaven and the
ancient past.” It thereby changed “the
very essence of the Christian religion as it had been lived for the previous
1,500 years.” By outlawing prayer
for the dead and denying that the saints could pray for us, the Reformation
“stripped religion of mediation and intimacy . . . with the dead,”
transforming it into “something strictly for the living. . . . more
pragmatically focused on this world.” The result was the emergence of two “very
different kinds of Christianity, and of two worldviews within Western culture.”
And it was this fragmentation, inaugurated by contested reformations, that gradually turned religion “into a private
concern rather than a public one.” Western Christendom “ceased to exist,”
leaving Christians in their various camps “warily keeping an eye on one another
and on the rising tide of unbelief and materialism.”
It is hard to dissent from the detail of all this. Yet one
may well feel that whether in Gregory’s stark dissection of the leading ideas
of Protestantism as the unwitting corrosive which dissolved the moral and
religious coherence of Christendom, or in Eire’s more hesitant and nuanced
analysis, there is something left unsaid. The
principle of sola scriptura and
Protestantism’s consequent inability to arrive at workable criteria to
determine Christian orthodoxy certainly contributed to the breakdown of
Christendom and the emergence of a secular society. But so too did the
repressive authoritarianism of post-Tridentine Catholicism, the emergence of a Catholic ecclesiology
inimical to true communitas by its
overemphasis on clerical power and centralized authority, and the acceptance
into Catholic theology, philosophy, and anthropology of a dualistic
Cartesianism every bit as inimical to the medieval intellectual and moral
synthesis (if such a thing can be said to have existed) as anything that
emerged from Wittenberg or Geneva. Nonetheless, Eire’s majestically
comprehensive survey leaves no doubt about the enduring consequences, for good
and ill, of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries.
His readers will decide for themselves whether there is much to cheer about in
2017.
Eamon Duffy is
professor emeritus of the history of Christianity at the University of
Cambridge, and a fellow and former president of Magdalene College.
