The Reformation Did Not Take Place

The Reformation Did Not Take Place

(With Apologies to Jean Baudrillard)

(Actually, This Should Really be Called 'The Reformation Did Take Place, Mostly, But Not Like You've Probably Heard,' But That's Not As Catchy)

Subtitle: I'm Really Sorry For How Long This Is

Second Subtitle: Really, I Am Sorry. Sorry.

[NB: This is not an academic essay. It's not even really an essay at all. It is, rather, something much more like a sketch of ideas and big-picture narratives for a potential essay, essays, book, or books to be written perhaps one day. I have, as a matter of a fact, read more, including scholarly work, about the Reformation than it might appear from this; but this is very deliberately not an essay with citations and references and sources or anything of the sort. It is, rather, a kind of intellectual synthesis of the things I've read and heard and thought on the topic, a sketch of a particular interpretation of history; or, better yet, the incoherent ramblings of a graduate student with a keyboard and far too much time on his hands. Do not take it as other than such.]

So what is the Reformation, anyway?

From the beginning of the year until now, news articles, television journalists, religious leaders, and Twitter accounts have all assured me that this year, 2017, is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation; this event is duly being celebrated or at least commemorated by many people throughout the world.

Yet the great difficulty in commemorating--or writing about--the Reformation is trying to figure out just what people are actually commemorating--and what I'm actually writing about.

Still, those commemorations, and this essay, do in fact exist, for some reason or other. So let's take that as our starting point; 500 years ago, something happened--something important enough that it is still remembered five hundred years later.

This much, at least, we all seem to agree on: five hundred years ago this year, a monk named Martin Luther nailed some theses onto a door--or maybe he didn't, maybe that story's actually apocryphal, but anyway, this guy named Martin Luther clearly did something important; thereafter, lots of things happened, and have continued to happen ever since: Luther's German translation of the New Testament, the Peasant's Revolt, John Calvin writing The Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution, the Great Awakening, the Holocaust, the election of Donald Trump...

Which of these events are to be considered to be either part of or the result of "the Reformation" or Martin Luther's hammer, and how, differs a lot depending on just who you're reading, and when and where and why they're writing.

Still, if you want to write something about the Reformation, you have to come up with something. Stories, narratives, have their own rules; they need to have, among other things, characters, a plot you can follow, and generally some conscious themes as well. If you want to give a narrative of "the Reformation," you need to come up with all these things, somehow.

In some understandings, the Reformation seems to be taken, implicitly or explicitly, as nothing more than a historical period, covering, perhaps, the years from about 1500 until...1600, perhaps? 1800? Certainly, historical periods are very tricky things, constantly created and fought and refought and buried and resurrected and winced over by historians the world over--but they also have a neutrality to them, an objectivity, that can be quite comforting.

Still--if all we're talking about when we say "the Reformation" are the years between 1500 and 1600, we surely don't seem like it. After all--I don't know of too many people celebrating the beginning of Late Antiquity, or the Age of Exploration, these days. The Reformation--in whatever guise--is clearly something more than a particular set of years and whatever happened to take place during them: it is...shall we say, an event? An action?

Still, if the Reformation is an action, we're obliged to ask who did it; and if it is an event, we're going to need to figure out what happened. Certainly, Martin Luther nailing some pieces of paper to a door (if it actually happened) is both a single action, and a discrete historical event: this much is quite clear, which is perhaps why it is this event and action whose 500th anniversary is actually being celebrated this year. But when we say the Reformation, we do not merely mean this one action of Luther's--we do not merely mean all of Luther's actions. We are clearly talking about a whole set of different actions, carried out by innumerable different people and institutions over a very long period of time; actions that somehow add up to a single thing called "the Reformation."

There are, in fact, any number of ways to unify multiple events and actions into a single larger event or narrative--some perfectly reasonable, some not so much. In general, though, events are unified based on some kind of commonality: whether this is a common cause or effect or telos or time period or category. It is this which allows us, say, to talk about the Fall of the Roman Empire as a unified historical event--inasmuch, as say, the Sack of Rome, the deposition of Romulus Augustus by Theodoric, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, and many other events and actions all shared as a common cause the breakdown of Imperial government in Western Europe, led to similar effects in furthering that breakdown, took place at around the same time, and shared many other similarities in kind and interrelationships as well.

In general, then, I have no problem with the unification of historical events and actions into larger events, narratives, and periods; but I also believe there are clear rational standards for when and where and how this can reasonably be done.

This may seem rather academic, but it is nevertheless important if we are to make sense of the Reformation, both as it actually was and as it has been understood and narrated in the past.

For make no mistake: the very concept of "the Reformation" is, for everyone who uses that term, indelibly marked with the narratives of the past people and institutions and societies who have used that term. When we speak of "the Reformation"--whether we are atheists or Catholics or Zoroastrians or Evangelicals--we are using terms, and thinking of stories, that we have not originated, but received. The fact that we think of the Reformation as a single, unified event to be commemorated--the fact that we see it as beginning with Martin Luther nailing some theses to a door--the fact that we even remember it today, and see it as important--the fact that we call it "the Reformation." These are all legacies of narratives and histories past.

Each one of these narratives made sense on its own terms--that is to say, each one answered the basic questions I have posed above in at least minimally satisfactory way. It explained what the Reformation was, how far it extended, and what commonalities unified its various deeds and happenings into a coherent event. Each one of these narratives also succeeded at least minimally as a narrative: that is, it supplied characters, themes, a plot, and events enough to maintain at least some interest in those who heard or read about it.

Our culture no longer really has such a narrative about the Reformation--indeed, even many of those who belong to groups that once had coherent narratives about the Reformation no longer really buy into them anymore. So we are left, more and more, with confusion.

This essay does not exactly aim at clearing up this confusion--to a great extent, it aims to increase it. Nevertheless, I will, naturally, end up telling some stories, and creating some big narratives, related in some way to "the Reformation" as a cluster of events and actions and concepts; and in doing so, I will be operating on the basis of the questions I have laid out here. I will be aiming always, that is, to clearly lay out on the common ends, categories, causes, or other similarities on the basis of which I am unifying--or separating--historical events.

Again, if all that bores you: I am going to tell some stories.


Histories of Future Past

There are any number of reasons why you might want to come up with a narrative about the Reformation; perhaps the simplest and most compelling is because it gave birth to you.

Most historical accounts and narratives of the Reformation in history, in fact, have functioned almost exactly like those amusing stories you hear about how your grandparents met; colorful, meaningful anecdotes explaining just how it was that the storyteller, his people, or his religion came into being.

The first of these narratives, of course, came into being with active, religious Protestants; people who believed in God, worshiped and practiced in a non-Catholic ecclesial community of some kind, and were, all told, pretty happy with that fact. From this perspective, the Reformation as a historical event immediately comes into focus: it is precisely that historical movement that began with Luther, and carried through whatever changes and gyrations over decades or centuries were necessary to beget you and your church.

Herein lies the issue, though; if the Reformation is precisely that process by which I, the Protestant, came into being qua Protestant, then one very obvious question immediately presents itself: what kind of Protestant am I?

If there is one huge, glaring difficulty in talking about the Reformation, it is precisely the famously fissile nature of Protestantism itself. If things had gone differently--if Luther or someone, at some point in history, had succeeded in building a united Protestant Church or movement, with consistent beliefs, principals, and organization--the history of the Reformation could easily be nothing more than the history of Protestantism, as a discrete historical institution or doctrine. It is precisely because this never happened--because, in fact, Protestantism divided almost from its very inception into a dizzying variety of sects, movements, and national churches, and has continued to divide ever since--that telling the story of the Reformation is such a vexed matter.

Indeed, if there is anything more difficult than telling the story of the Reformation, it would probably be defining Protestantism in such a way as to take account every religious group commonly grouped under that banner.

Still, for most of Protestant history, this was hardly a problem; since Protestantism was de facto organized into a number of more or less coercive, more or less heterogenous national churches. Because of this convenient reality, most Protestants could, with little difficulty, narrate the Reformation simply as the story of how their particular national church, their rock-solid melding of political, ethnic, and religious affiliation, had come into being. First, Luther; then, whatever particular "Reformers" were, however loosely, associated with the founding of the national church; then, all the particular scholars and preachers of one's national and religious tradition. Even those radicals and sectarians who rejected in some way the prevailing national church of their territory could, with little difficulty, do the same with the particular founders of their own, continuing sect.

The great advantage of these narratives, of course, is that they were in essence religous narratives, whose primary actor was not any particular human being, but rather God himself, the Lord of history. Thus, the unity of the Reformation was safeguarded precisely by its status as the action of a single, primary cause, working for rational purposes, and producing the effects desired. God, in other words, and not Luther, was the actor of the Reformation; and what he set out to produce was simply one's particular sectarian form of Protestantism: Christianity purified and reformed to produce something plainly visible, existing as clear as daylight, and obviously correct and satisfying.

If things had stayed that way, the matter might have been difficult, if doable; but unfortunately, in rather short order, something very vexing started to happen to the members of these national churches: many of them completely secularized, gradually or suddenly dropping most of the supernatural beliefs of historical Christianity--while still maintaining their fervent belief in their nation, and maintaining equally strongly their belief in their direct historical origins in the Reformation.

In Scotland in the 18th century, for instance, David Hume rejected belief in God completely and set up instead a new philosophy that removed even the most basic rational bases of Christianity--yet in his work as a historian and philosopher, he still found it in himself to praise the Reformation as one of the greatest examples of progress in human history. Hume, naturally, loathed the actual Reformers and their religious and supernatural beliefs as the rankest superstition and "enthusiasm"; but he was nevertheless quite adamant that the Reformation was a good thing inasmuch as the historical and social forces it unleashed had, in time, led inexorably to the increasingly secularized Britain of his day--as well as, of course, David Hume himself.

This basic, secularized-Protestant-Enlightenment narrative of the Reformation, is, in fact, the dominant one reflected in popular culture in our nation and time; and it is not too much to say that it has dominated entirely all historical understanding, in England and America, for at least the last three hundred years.

By this narrative, championed at first by the scions of the British Empire, and later by those of the American Empire, the Reformation once again takes on a clear shape, and clear outlines. The Reformation is precisely the process by which the present, successful British or American citizen has been produced, along with his science, his industrialism, his secularized beliefs and ethics, and--most importantly--his dominance of the rest of the world. The story begins with Luther, naturally--but it quickly leads through a dizzying variety of economic and political changes, revolutions and wars and persecutions, to the present, satisfactory state of affairs.

These narratives could be and often were wedded to the former sort of explicitly religious narrative--with God called in to support and approve the Empire on which the sun never sets--but over time, this was seen as less and less necessary.  After all, the superiority of the present state of affairs over the past could be proven rationally and scientifically, without appeal to Divine Revelation or its source; and after all, the rational and scientific principles governing history could also be discerned just as easily. Increasingly, Progress, the great god of the 19th century, provided all the narrative coherency and unity required.

This is still, in all honesty, the basic narrative that most people are taught about the Reformation--the basic narrative that most people, even religious Protestants--Hell, even Catholics--have about the Reformation. Nevertheless, it is, in almost every respect, an ahistorical and nonsensical myth.

So What the Hell Happened?

Still, the fact that I am, in fact, writing an essay about the Reformation at least poses the question of whether I have, even in the barest outlines, anything better to say about it. The answer, hopefully, is yes; though I will leave the final verdict to the long-suffering judgment of my readers.

For, if you've been paying attention, you have already seen me sketching the beginning of several historical narratives; stories about the many different sorts of people who have, over the past few hundred years, traced their origins back to the Reformation. This in itself would be of interest--even if the Reformation itself had never taken place.

As a matter of a fact, though, I do in fact think that the Reformation--or rather, an important set of historical events that might as well be conveniently given that name--actually happened. That is, I believe that some very important things did change, or begin to change, in the 15th century--and that this set of events and actions do, in fact, have some kind of rationally-discoverable coherency.

What that coherency is--what common causes, effects, logic, and other similarities tie together this set of events--it now remains for me to attempt, in some measure, to describe.

Revolutions of History

It is my basic contention that the Reformation is, in essence, a historical revolution; that is to say, an important, consequential change affecting the social, economic, political, and religious life of all or at least the vast majority people in European society.

To understand what I mean by a historical revolution, an analogy is helpful. The rise of Christianity, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the societies that followed from it, was a long, tempestuous process that took centuries to complete. This process in the end, though, produced a society, that while it was in most ways in broad continuity with what went before it, exhibited clear and evident changes in all spheres of life; a society where people differed radically from their ancestors in their most basic conceptions of the universe, the human person, society, economics, and the personal goals and struggles of human life.

What shapes a society most--what allows us to even talk about a society or civilization--is not the explicit rules that govern society so much as the unexamined assumptions that all people in society take for granted. It is these assumptions that are most determinative in shaping both ordinary day-to-day life, and also the greatest institutions and causes.

These assumptions are not necessarily explicit ideas in the sense we think of them, let alone explicit dogmas or beliefs; they are always shaped by human nature, as well as by the economic and material conditions of life, as well as such things as the imaginative conceptions and narratives that people produce and absorb and conform themselves to. All these assumptions are, though, generally capable of being analyzed explicitly, even where they work primarily on an implicit and subconscious basis.

People are knowers, desirers, and doers; they shape their lives on the basis of what they know and perceive, what they desire, and what they do; and all these things, in turn, shape people.

These things are always, of course, changing in one way or another; each generation is shaped by the one before it, while economic and social and political conditions change with the turning of the tides and the seasons, and particular teachers and artists come and go.

Nevertheless, there are times in history where these basic assumptions change, in a radical way; where what has been implicit and universally accepted is challenged, and even overthrown. The early Christians did this when they declared the gods of their ancestors demons, and overthrew or abandoned their temples as a sign of the triumph of their crucified God. So, in some measure, did that strange event we call the Reformation.

To understand just what revolution was effected in the Reformation, it will require a great imaginative leap; inasmuch as we are all (and this is my most basic contention) heirs of the Reformation, it will take a certain amount of effort, of unlearning, to try to understand what things were like, and how the world was understood, before the Reformation--just as great a leap as it takes for moderns, trained in particular conceptions of "religion" and "justice" and "the state," to understand the radically different world of ancient pagan religion and politics.

The Faith of the Ancestors

The world of Medieval Christendom--the words themselves are controversial, but no more convenient ones have yet been found for the historical realities described--was a vastly different one from our own. Its basic assumptions were not just slightly, but radically, different from our own.

I cannot, in this essay, even begin to scratch the surface of all the ways this society (or rather societies, stretching from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to France to North Africa to Ireland) differed from our own, in so many areas of life. Luckily, there exist many Medievalists and experts in Late Antiquity who have written many wonderful works on the subject. You should really read them, and not my own imaginative ramblings on the topic.

There are, though, a few important points about that imaginative rambling that I would like to make clear at the outset, before diving into my narrative of the Reformation itself:

To begin with, the Christians of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, generally speaking, whether in the Byzantine Empire or in the Latin West, saw the Church as a universal society; that is, for them, the Church was not just a particular institution within society, even a governing one: the Church was society. Or rather, the Church was bigger than society; the Church was, in a real sense, bigger than the cosmos. If we do not grasp this, we grasp nothing of pre-Reformation life.

The basic narrative that governed life for such people was the story of the triumph of Christianity; how the Church had arisen in a far-off land (or at least a far-off time), among the poor and uneducated, how it had been  persecuted by the rich and powerful, with many martyrs gloriously triumphing over death by being tortured to death in agony, and how it had, with a marvelous and indeed miraculous rapidity, converted the whole world.

The universe in which everyone, more or less, lived, was one defined by the stories and images of the great martyrs of the past, all of whom bore witness of the triumph of the Church over the world. Every power of the world had been met by the Church on the field of battle, and overcome.

In this, there was no "secular" or "non-religious" realm as we conceive of it; there was nothing "outside of" the Church. The Church, to be sure, was a radically diverse body--as diverse as the world itself. Everything in it, though, was assumed to be Christian, and was defined, in some regard, with reference to the Church and the God that had created it. The king was a Christian king; the law was a Christian law; the festivals were Christian festivals.

Here, though, we should be very clear on what was meant by the Church; for it does not bear very much resemblance even to what most Catholics today think of when they hear the word. The Church was, in essence, the totality of the world in contact with the totality of God: the fundamental and universal term of relationship between God and creation.

This was in many ways not a very optimistic idea of the Church; the Church was not a pure society of the holy: it was rather a great, rambunctious ark, filled with every manner of beast and monstrosity, winding its unsteady way towards God. On this ark, there were both evil men and good; both the saved and the damned. This was a ship built out of both natural things, the imperfect created works of God, marred by sin and death, and the totally supernatural life and calling of the Gospel. Some of these things were destined to endure forever in a totally transcendent way, in God; most of them, though, were fundamentally transient, and doomed to perish.

It was for this reason that the Church was able to be the world; because it was, really and truly, larger than the world. It alone spanned both life and death, material and spiritual creation, God and man.

I have no wish to give a rosy picture of life in Medieval Christendom, or any other Christian society; far from it. Indeed, if I did so, it would be rather unfitting: for no society in the history of humanity has ever had so fundamentally negative a view of itself as the Medieval Latin West. This was a society marked by terrible movements of reform and counter-reform; a society where order after order and saint after saint attacked the abominable greed, lust, and depravity of modern society in the darkest of terms, and demanded penitence from people high and low.

Christian theologians were not very much given to speculation on the number of the saved; the question did not loom in their minds nearly as large as it did for post-Reformation people. Still, almost everyone who did so speculate, with many caveats, concluded that the majority of people in their society--baptized, more or less practicing Catholics--would most likely be damned to Hell for all eternity.

It was for this reason, more than anything else, that everything in society was able to be Christian; because it was not, really, a very high bar to clear. A bad king was still a Christian king; a bad law was still a Christian law; a bad man was still, fundamentally and inescapably, a Christian man. All of these things, indeed, were doomed to perish eternally; all of them must frequently be opposed to the death; but all of them were still within the Church.

To be sure, there were people "outside" the Church; Muslims, Jews, pagans, heretics. Each one of these, though, was entirely defined by reference to the Church; and most were often taken as fundamentally within her anyway. Jews, to the degree they were accepted as part of society, were seen as living reminders of the history of the Church, the life and blood of Christ, and the consequences of rejecting him; they were the only group to be officially, by Papal and Imperial edict, granted religious toleration, precisely because of their genetic relationship to the Church. Likewise, when they were persecuted and slaughtered by Christian mobs (very much in defiance of Papal authority), they were slaughtered precisely as the anti-Christian (and ethnically and socially foreign) other, the negative image of Christian society. Pagans, too, were either ancient people who existed before, but still in preparation for, the Church, people who had laid the foundations of (necessarily Christian) philosophy and art and science, or else they were distant, mostly rather theoretical people who had yet to be made a part of her. Muslims, too, were always regarded, not as a rival religion (what is a religion in such a cosmos?), but rather as heretics, followers of the Christian heresiarch Mohammed.

Heretics, too, were indelibly a part of the Church they had rejected and opposed: for the heretic was simply and paradigmatically someone who had chosen to willfully separate himself, not just from a particular (even dominant) religious group within society, but rather from the one universal society of the cosmos. We lack, really, a category adequate to express what this meant to most Christians throughout history. A heretic was not just a religious dissenter: he was something much more like, but really far more terrible than, a political revolutionary, or even a terrorist. A heretic's aim was not just to change some doctrine or found one more "religion" or "sect" within society; a heretic's aim was to harm, violate, and destroy the one thing greater than the cosmos.

For this was, in essence, the one weakness of this society; the one weakness of the Church as the universal, cosmic relationship between God and man: it depended, ultimately, on a vast network of relationships, relationships of trust and belief and fidelity, extending from the very top of society to the bottom, and across the whole of Christendom. This network of relationships, though, was, in fact, capable of being broken; the Church, this vast collection of good and bad, human and divine things, was capable of being wounded, limbs cut off, face bloodied. This was always a theoretical possibility; and always, to some extent, a practical reality--and those with authority within the Church, both temporal and spiritual, were always terribly aware of this fact. This vast relationship between man and God was in truth a fragile, delicate reality, depending on a vast number of institutions and beliefs and social realities, and a vast number of people. Inasmuch as those people failed to uphold their proper role in the network of the Church--inasmuch as they even actively sought to harm and overthrow her--there was little limit to the evil that could occur.

Constant vigilance--constant reform--was the price Medieval Christians paid for their view of the cosmos. Repentance must be preached constantly--new orders started to spread the Gospel and live out more fully the call of the Gospel--the greed and pride of secular rulers kept constantly in check--the supremacy of the Pope and the clergy defended--bishops and priests kept from worldliness--heretics suppressed--and so on. This was the great task of the Church on earth--to keep herself holy even in the midst of the world, the flesh, and the devil. It was a task she never wholly succeeded in.

Lying behind all of this, though, and embedded in it, are particular and highly characteristic views of the human person, relationships, and society. Some of them should already, at least in their outlines, be clear; but we will aim to examine these things in more detail in their proper place, when we come to the actual ideas and conflicts of the Reformation.

For if the Reformation means anything, it is the destruction of this basic view of the world, and all the assumptions that went with it. If the Reformation accomplished anything, it was to destroy the Church.

Setting the Stage

So why did the Reformation take place? Didn't it, as a matter of fact, have something to do with "corruption in the Church"?

Of course not.

I would like to be very clear on this; because it is perhaps the most repeated and most misleading aspect of Reformation history.

By most traditional narratives of the Reformation, the Catholic Church in 15th century Europe was in truly abysmal shape, shaken and rotted from within by monstrous corruption among the clergy, and especially at the Papal Court. Good people everywhere, in fact, were constantly and monstrously disgusted by this corruption; and so the Reformation began and was carried out, in large part, as a protest against such clerical corruption, and a call to return to the simpler ways of the early Church.

This is really a monstrously misleading, and very silly, account of the Reformation; for it fails to grapple at all with the actual conditions of these centuries, and what in fact makes them different from what had gone before.

Certainly, many clergymen in the 15th century were "corrupt," in various related ways: i.e. they lived worldly livestyles, had concubines, or sometimes were simply local lords or local lords' cousins who had managed to get themselves ordained or acquire clerical benefices through various more or less conventional forms of chicanery. This condition, though, varied greatly from country to country and even from town to town; and it was very far from its worst in the 15th century. In fact, it almost certainly had already improved in many ways, not least of all because of the constant movements for reform in such things that marked life in this century. The nadir for clerical corruption of this sort would almost certainly be found in the 9th and 10th centuries; and it was in fact this type of corruption that had helped to kickstart the Papal Reform movement that had dramatically changed the face of Europe, setting off massive social changes, and a great social, political, and religious conflict that would end, finally, with the Pope's virtual captivity in Avignon, under the thumb of the French King. Certainly, too, the Papal court in the 15th century was corrupt, in various obvious ways; i.e. many of the officials, lay or nominally clerical, who worked there were very far from saints, bribery and other financial irregularities occurred there as in every other court in Europe, and so on. Yet even here, things had certainly improved since the horrific nadir of the Avignon Papacy, when such corruption reached monstrous and indeed proverbial proportions: so that the seat of this politically subservient French Papacy came to be called "Babylon" and the titles of the Whore of Babylon applied to it. By the time the actual Reformation happened, though, this was certainly in the past.

The corruption of Catholic clergy, then, could not possibly explain the Reformation; anymore than the corruption of any other segment of society within the Church. Reformers throughout the Middle Ages railed against such corruption--but precisely because clerics were held to higher standards than everyone else, because they were people whose role in the universal society of the Church was to image and make present in the material and social world of the everyday the higher supernatural realities of Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection. In the spiritual realm, the corruption of clergy was assumed to have terrible, cosmic consequences; and certainly, as a Catholic, I am not averse to such interpretations. Still, the fact remains: this basic reality was a constant through all Christian ages and civilizations, was certainly not at its worst at the time before the Reformation, and so simply cannot be used to explain the Reformation in its totality as a historical event.

New Things

If you want to really understand why this revolution happened at the time and place it did, you need to do the one thing that Marx always said you had to do: you need to look at the material conditions.

Corruption in the Church in the 15th century was, really, a lot like it had always been; what was very different, what was beginning to change in new and truly unprecedented ways, was just about everything else.

It is no coincidence that the Reformation happened at just about the first time in history that it makes any sense to talk about Europe, rather than Christendom; also just about the first time in history that it makes any sense to talk about nation-states; also just about the first time in history that it makes any sense to talk about colonialism; also just about the first time in history that it makes any sense to talk about mass media; and the list could go on and on and on.

This is, more or less, the obvious truth preserved by most of the secular-Enlightenment narratives of the Reformation I talked about above: obviously, when new things came into society, religion would change along with everything else. In many very, very obvious ways, the new Protestantisms were much more creatures of their age, in keeping with the ideas and technologies and developments of their time, than was the old Catholicism; and certainly, if they were not initially, they could be made to be, being (in their dominant form of national state-regulated churches) quite malleable. Protestantism was a creature of the text; and the printing press was filling all Europe with text after text after text of mass-produced writing, entering into and permeating the ordinary lives of ordinary people in hitherto inconceivable ways. Protestantism was a creature of the nation, with its worship in the vernacular and its rites enforced by law; and the rise of strong ethnic-national states had been first made a reality by France centuries before, and now was jealously being copied by just about every nation in the world, while vernacular literature began to flourish as never before, and new professional armies changed the way wars were fought.

Again, this could be taken almost to infinity; but in this rambling excuse for an essay, I am, as always, more interested in the big-picture narrative than the specific details. What I am above all interested in, in fact, is the question of just how the universe of the Church was shattered and broken apart. And while it is true that Protestantism was very much a creature of its time, marked with the perpetual brand of all such transitory phenomena, and while all of these material factors would certainly have changed religious practice in drastic ways no matter what happened--I do not, in fact, think that the Reformation was inevitable given these social changes.

Indeed, as modern scholarship has pointed out very well, the Church in the 15th century, and even into the 16th century, had already adapted quite well to most of these changes, or at least was well in the process of doing so: and obviously, Catholicism, as a religious system, endured quite well through all the changes in society in the 15th and 16th century, remaining the dominant religion of half of Europe, and, in fact, expanding as never before, being spread in rapid succession throughout the whole world, into Asia and North and South America and Africa and beyond.

Most, in fact, of the obvious religious changes we think of as having been produced by the Reformation were really things that had already taken place within the Church, or were in the process of doing so by the time the Reformation actually occurred. Greater lay participation in the Church was something brought about by the social conditions of the time; so, too, was greater lay engagement with the Scriptures and other written texts of the Church, as now made newly accessible through the printing press. These things were already established facts of life by the time the Reformation occurred; and while it may have accelerated them, it did not make them any less inevitable, and in fact at times even retarded their progress by associating them with revolutionary fervent and heresy, leading Church authorities and governmental powers alike, Catholic and Protestant, to take strong steps to regulate and control.

Still, if there is one big thing all these historical developments had in common, it was simply this: all of them gave greater and greater power to people and institutions who had not had it before. Nationalism gave new power to governments, kings, and princes; colonialism, too, even in its barest infancy, gave newfound wealth and power to the governments and individuals and institutions who could exploit their opportunities; mass media, in the form of the printing press, gave new power to anyone who could control the production of information, put their own words and thoughts out there to be read by others; and the growing wealth and power brought on by all these things and other factors, by economics and technology and all these material conditions, added up to a gradual and growing injection of power into a very old civilization. If there is one thing power always does, it is to strain relationships; precisely because it gives people the practical opportunity, if they wish, to break them. Power is the first requisite of independence; and for those unfamiliar with power, independence, the breaking of relational bonds, the living in the illusion of self-sufficiency which power alone makes possible, has a great deal of attraction.

The Church, though, was not merely another institution within society, within economic or political life; it was the great world encompassing all of these things. Unlike political or economic realities, it could not be altered on a whim.

Still, the Church on earth was, as we have seen, as a relation between God and man and man, was in fact dependent on a vast number of relationships, a vast number of ideas, a whole network of trust. No economic or political revolution could, in itself, destroy these things; but it could certainly unsettle them, and make their dissolution, for the first time, a clear possibility.

Then, too, both colonialism and nationalism did something very important as well; they provided new forms of identity, for persons and institutions alike, that were no longer dependent, at least directly, on the Church for their coherency and pull. A government or a person could justify their existence, not as a member of the universal society of the Church, but as a person with a particular ethnic or national identity, a member of the partial body of the nation; or, in similar terms, a government or person could find meaning precisely in its superiority towards, and dominance over, other sorts of persons. Both of these, to be sure, were not unknown to Christendom, or indeed to any age of man; but developments in the 15th century greatly accelerated them. The ancient world had had ethnicities, but not nation-states; it had had empires of cities and peoples, but not precisely the new overwhelming relationship between technologically powerful colonizer and utterly powerless colonized. The new pull of these identities, so sweet to the tongue and to the heart, would be shocks to any society.

Still, if all of these things set the stage for the Reformation, they certainly did not constitute it. Catholicism had done just fine with any number of political and social arrangements, and incorporated into itself any number of intermediate identities and allegiances, and would continue to do so in the future; and, in principle, the new existence of "pagans" out there to be converted and made a part of the universal society of the Church, was not a problem, but a great opportunity.

These things all helped to make the Reformation possible, then. But we must now move beyond this, and begin to narrate what the Reformation was.

The Reformer

If there is truth in the secularist narrative of the Reformation, of inevitable historical change, technological and economic and political, breaking up an older system, there is, naturally also a great deal of truth in the classical Protestant narrative of the Reformation: the story of how a new thing, called Protestantism, came into being, through the efforts of various Reformers.

Certainly, what these extraordinary varied and mutually murderous group of people we call "the Reformers" (a conveniently vague collective noun if ever there was one) accomplished really was extraordinary: taking a united system of theology and ritual and cosmos, firmly and universally established for more than a thousand years throughout a massive swathe of the world, and breaking it up, within only a few years, into a hundred different reflections and refractions and fragments of doctrine and practice, each one convinced of its own rightness and bitterly opposing all others. Luther denied the Papacy and most of the seven sacraments, but kept the Real Presence in the Eucharist; Zwingli bitterly (and violently) opposed both but kept infant baptism; the Muenster Anabaptists denied infant baptism and proclaimed a new Davidic kingdom, expelling Lutherans and Catholic alike but keeping the town government; the leaders of the Peasant's Revolt rebelled against the government, violently murdered landowners, proclaimed a community of goods; later Anabaptists rejected not only infant baptism, but any participation in government, or any use of violence at all. None of these people, to say the least, really got along very well.

Still, all of this represented, really and truly, an intellectual revolution of heroic proportions; rapidly bringing into question and dispute, not just a few particular doctrines, but all that had ever been settled about God and cosmos and society alike. If Medieval Catholics had differed in innumerable things, yet they had agreed, most of the time, on a basic intellectual and theological framework, which seemed to rest, lightly and unquestionably, over their heads, like a stained-glass roof. The Protestant Reformers were not a coherent group setting out to reform or replace this framework; they were a warring and completely heterogenous set of revolutionaries, who succeeded only in destroying it beyond all possibility of repair.

The truth is, there was never a thing called Protestantism at all; certainly, there was never a Protestant Church. If Medieval Catholicism had been a vast set of institutions, places, and peoples, united in a single vast reality called the Church, Protestantism was never, for a single moment, a replacement for this Church. There is not, nor can there ever be, any narrative of the Reformation merely as the origins of Protestantism as a religious system; because there is not, and never has been, any such thing as Protestantism as a religious system. The various manifestations of Protestantism throughout the last five hundred years have differed in almost every respect, almost always far more than any of them ever differed from the Catholic system from whence they arose.

Attempts to articulate shared, ecumenical Protestant principles have a long history, to be sure, going back to the days of Luther himself; and they were always an inglorious failure. Sola Scriptura, Sola Fides, and Soli Deo Gloria are nice as slogans; but they have little or no relationship with the reality they're attempting to describe.

Luther himself is a fascinating historical figure; but he's really extremely deceptive as a focal point for the Reformation or Protestantism. His career as an academic theologian and violent popular preacher was far from unprecedented in the Middle Ages. As an academic theologian, he was far from the first to have a seemingly inexhaustible confidence in his own intelligence; nor was he anywhere near the first such person to read the Scriptures and come up with numerous points of novel theory for public controversy. Likewise, as a public controversialist, his boisterous, insulting manner, covering his opponents in shit and declaring them inspired by the devil, had certainly been done before. And, indeed, like many such people before him, he ended up crossing some lines in the course of controversy--those very delicate lines that marked the edges of the vast, diverse, and violent theological world of the Middle Ages--and getting excommunicated by the Pope.

It is somewhat deceptive, though, even to think of Luther as a Reformer, as we commonly understand that term. It is commonplace for people to say that Luther had no desire to break off and found his own Church, but only to reform the Church as a whole. This is certainly true, but still deceptive; for Luther, as far as I can tell, seems to have little desire to do the latter, either. He was a theologian and controversalist, not a reformer in the vein of the innumerable penitential preachers and founders of reforming institutions and movements that had peppered the Middle Ages. These all had clear goals and produced clear effects in their efforts to make the Church on earth tangibly different and better. Luther neither had such goals, nor did he ever found such institutions or produce such effects. His effort was not to reform the entire Church on earth, the people of God with head and members; it was, mostly, to have his theories and his expertise respected, and to win arguments.

For this end, as befits a professional controversialist, he made any number of different and mutually contradictory arguments and appeals at different times; appealing to the Papacy and then calling the Pope the Antichrist, appealing to an Ecumenical Council and then rapidly denying any authority to Ecumenical Councils, appealing to the peasantry and then condemning the Peasant's Revolt in the harshest of terms, appealing to the private interpretation of Scripture alone and then violently cursing those who read Scripture and disagreed with him. In all of this, he made a rather enormous amount of enemies: the chief and most lasting among them being the Papacy itself, but quickly expanding to include practically all the other "reformers" and their followers as well.

Sola Scriptura, for all its much-vaunted greatness and influence, was, in reality, little more than one such inconsistent debating tactic of this very inconsistent controversialist: by claiming that anyone whatsoever with the Holy Spirit could read the Scriptures and find his conclusions correct, and by refusing to accept any other authority whatsoever, Luther certainly succeeded in confounding his opponents and their arguments (based, as they were, on the Church's consensus and innumerable authorities accepted by all parties in the world of Medieval Christendom). Unfortunately, this appeal failed practically as soon as he made it; for manifestly, most people who read the Holy Scriptures manifestly did not find in it precisely what he found in it. At this point, of course, recourse was had to more fundamental debating tactics, and these interlocutors became Anti-Christs inspired by the Devil. Sola Scriptura was barely even successful as a debating tactic; certainly, it was never, and never has been, successful as a theology, let alone a source of unity for Protestantism as a whole. In every way, it failed almost as soon as it existed.

I don't, though, really, wish to give too harsh a portrait of Luther himself. As a historical figure, Luther is deeply human and rather affecting; and I have a lot of sympathy for him, on many levels. We are all familiar with the conventional story of the pathologically neurotic and scrupulous monk and his journey to find some peace from his egregious mental suffering; exaggerated as this may be, such a story cannot but generate sympathy. Likewise, the colorful, insulting reformer, with his bawdy conversation and his tendency to insult his opponents with scatalogical languae, is, for most people, a fun and ultimately likable figure to look back on and make jokes about. This is, I think, one reason why stories of the Reformation tend to focus on Luther himself, and not any of the other people whose personalities and beliefs were rather more important in the shaping of the Reformation (Thomas Cromwell, say, or Cardinal Richelieu).

All this is, again, though, mostly, beside the point; for whatever larger process Luther touched off in the Europe of the 16th century, he was among the first to condemn and be made miserable and confused by it. If Luther and his arguments and his 95 theses, posted on the parish bulletin board, is the Reformation, then we must conclude that the Reformation was a failure.

Luther did not win the argument. His theology was not triumphant; it was, in fact, more controverted, by more people, than ever before; his debating tactics and bluster were laughably unsuccessful at convincing either Papists or other Protestants; he did not succeed in beating Zwingli, let alone the Pope.

Still, Luther did have something to do with the innumerable religious groups and state institutions that emerged in the course of the 16th century, and would later trace their ancestry in some way back to him. For that, though, we need to think much less about Luther the man, and more about all the other people and things over which Luther had no control at all, for which he had even less love.

The Shipwreck, or the Great Liberation

What was it, though, that actually broke up Christendom, and destroyed the Church? What was it, that in only a few decades had broken up Europe into warring camps, caused the Thirty Year's War, and founded the Anglican Church? Was it Luther's theology? Zwingli's? Henry VIII's?

Most of what happened in the 16th century, by modern standards, was far more political than religious; and as political revolutions went, few have been as broadly destructive and unsettling as this one. Innumerable towns rebelled against the Holy Roman Emperor; France was divided by bitter civil war; the Netherlands broke away from Spain; a Peasant's Revolt violently murdered and pillaged and was even more violently repressed; Rome itself, the jewel of Christendom and of the ancient world alike, suffered the worst sack in its entire history at the hands of the Spanish Empire and its German Lutheran mercenaries; in England, the Pilgrimage of Grace rose up in arms over the changes in religion and was butchered mercilessly; the Muenster Anabaptists took over a great city, slaughtered and exiled and starved its inhabitants, and were butchered in turn; and in innumerable towns and cities and households, a strange struggle was acted out between town councilmen, priests, abbots, local lords, and different kinds of new religious leaders, trying to decide for themselves what religious group to align themselves with.

This was a horribly, monstrously violent and unsettled time; and it would be extremely strange, in historical terms, if we were to ascribe all of this to the theological programme of a single German monk.

For here is the crux to the whole thing: not even this one monk would have survived long, or reformed anything, or had any power or notoriety at all, if he had not been, at every turn, protected and supported and submitted to by the partial political authority of his local lord, the Elector of Saxony. Luther was never a reformer in the Medieval sense; and what made him a Reformer in an entirely new sense was not his theology or his style or his actions, but his Prince.

Again, we must have recourse to the sketch of the political and economic conditions I talked about earlier; the sense in which all Europe, at this time, was gaining in power, finding new and powerful sources of knowledge and identity. Nation-states and town councils alike benefited from this infusion of wealth and technological power; a power that paradoxically bound more people in more constricting ways than ever before.

The chief limitation to the power of all of these partial institutions, all of these intermediate authorities, these individual men, lords and academic theologians and popular controversialists, was always the Church; that is, the vast, interconnected network of relationships and ideas that bound together God and cosmos and human community on every level, as we have described it above.

This limitation was most obviously visible, to most people, in the actual power and influence of the clergy in everyday life; the land owned by monasteries, the institutions run by priests, the doctrinal and public authority of bishops and the Pope. The separation of the clergy from the temporal world, and their paradoxical presence throughout it, was, as it had been designed to be by the architects of the Gregorian Reform, the spine and backbone of Christendom. At every point, in every place, it reminded people that the Church was the ground and foundation of everything they built and possessed; that it alone could bless, sanction, bestow, and guarantee ultimate and lasting value and worth and authority in this world and in the next. The Church was greater than the world, and had conquered it.

This was still true, in the abstract, for most people prior to the Reformation; but certainly, all these institutions and people felt less dependent, practically, on the Church than ever before. Prosperity and wealth and the power of man over man, after all, have their appeal in every age. The corruption of some clergymen, the entanglement of the Papacy as an equal player in the affairs of European politics, all made this need for sanction, this need to stay within the framework of the Church, less urgent, and more of a burden. Nationalism, the pride of man in his own ethnicity, and the new (derived remotely from the Classical world) theories of despotism and Kingship, all helped to give a sanction to power and authority less directly tied to the Church. The failure of the Crusades, the downfall of the Byzantine Empire to the conquering and encroaching Ottoman Empire, also made the Church seem a smaller thing, more tied to place and culture, an equal to its enemies rather than a grand structure spanning the heavens.

Still, for all of that, social systems and institutions, wealth and power, do need in every society some sanction for their operation, some justification; and in a Christian Europe, this could only be grounded in a cosmic system, mediated through human institutions, coming, ultimately, from God. Such sanction could only come from the Church.

This is why, in my judgment, only the combination of economic and intellectual causes will do; only the combination of new power and wealth on the one hand, and new claimants to divine authority on the other, could possibly have produced the revolution in Europe, and unseated the Church.

For what happened when Luther began his revolt--what happened when others began their revolts--is that innumerable people, institutions, and powers throughout Europe discovered a strange and astonishing fact: they could be set free.

Local lords and town councils found that, if they sponsored a Reformer, they could not only act with far more impunity than before; they could also seize for themselves the vast amount of wealth and institutional power found in the clergy and the Church in their area. On the one hand, the Reformer would be free from his enemies, Catholic and "Protestant" alike, and would have full power to implement his own vision of the cosmos in the Churches and minds of its people by force. The old altars would be destroyed, images defaced, and all rivals driven away; and in return for this great boon, the Reformer would sanction, publicly and without question, with the very authority of the Lord himself, every action taken by the political authority.

Luther, famously, was ready to bless and approve bigamy in exchange for the support of a local prince; and he was far from the only one. This new arrangement turned out to solve all the problems of revolutionary intellectuals and powerful intermediate powers alike: and it quickly, like fire, caught on, not only with local governments, but with national governments and Empires as well. Like many a prince before him, Henry VIII was caught in the bind created by his own lust and dynastic ambitions on the one hand, and the power of the Church and Papacy over even royal marriages and annulments on the other. This would have been a thorny problem at any time; but Henry VIII was a man of a new age, and so quickly found innumerable intellectuals and radical theologians who were willing to bless and approve every single action of his, no matter how violent, brutal, or self-contradictory, in exchange for power to implement their own theological vision. Drunk with this power, Henry went on to plunder and destroy, not only the vast monasteries and ecclesiastical holdings of his nation, but even the prosperous guilds of tradesmen that had governed economic life.

The Peasants of Germany too looked at this new power, the power to define intellectually a new system of theology, defying all the authorities of Church and society alike, and saw it as their path to economic liberation; the lords that broke the Peasant's Revolt and hunted the peasants like beasts saw, in turn, and with far more success, this same power as securing their despotism and economic power forever.

If Christendom had been a vast network of relationships, binding together everyone in a vast network stretching from earth to heaven, the Reformation was the almost pervasive breaking of those bonds. It was not, generally speaking, the liberation of the individual, or even the liberation of the oppressed; it was, overwhelmingly, the liberation of people and institutions already powerful and prosperous, but held back by the constraints of the Church.

This was, in truth, a dizzying power to be handed to human beings: the power to have God himself bless and approve your group, your ideas, your identity, and all your actions, and at the same time curse and despise those of your enemies. And it quickly came to apply, importantly, not just to those regions and peoples that happened to adopt a non-Catholic heretic as their own; for Catholic princes and Emperors quickly found that the situation of general religious distress gave them more power over the bodies and souls over their subjects than they could ever have imagined. The Papacy, the guaranteeing central institution of the Church on earth, was weak and harried and desperate for any support; and the implied threat of the withdrawal of such support, buttressed by the very visible actions of Henry VIII and others, was as powerful a negotiating chip as any prince had ever had in the Church's history. Lands and wealth could be stolen or nationalized, it turned out, even by Catholic monarchies and towns. Even the Papacy itself, in this new world, seemed less and less necessary; it looked, increasingly, like a weak and defunct institution, superseded by the overwhelming power and influence of governments small and large. Catholic princes, inspired by their Protestant rivals, took more power over religion than ever before; and they built up institutions, and found theologians, to support them and sanction their efforts. Gallicanism was born; the University of Paris was quick to condemn anyone appealing too much to the authority of the Papacy against the "ancient rights and traditions of the Gallican Church," and the Spanish Inquisition, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Spanish Crown, was known to specially target Jesuits and other people thought to be too closely connected with the Papacy. Everywhere, the divine power of the Church was broken down and passed out to intermediate powers far and near, both Protestant and Catholic.

In truth, throughout this seemingly endless process of dissolution, a vast, cosmic change was taking place. At some point, inevitably, in this breaking of bonds and relationships, people ceased thinking of Christendom as a whole, and began thinking of nations, of towns, of peoples. They stopped thinking of the Church at all, and began thinking of churches. Are you Catholic, or Protestant?

If, indeed, they did not start asking instead: are you Spanish, or French, English or Dutch, a subject of the Empire or a vassal of the Pope? The so-called Wars of Religion, when they happened, were very far from a mere civil war between Catholic and Protestant. For much of the Thirty Years War, the Papal States were on the "Protestant" side--and the main determining factor in the defeat of the Catholic Emperor and the survival of the German Protestant states was the intervention of supposedly Catholic France on their side. These were all old rivalries, as much ethnic and political as religious. Like clockwork, rival peoples and powers tended to chose opposite sides of the religious quarrel: Dutch rebels breaking off from the Spanish crown conveniently became Protestant, while oppressed Irish clung tenaciously to their ancestral Catholicism. Religion certainly did not create these conflicts: but it did justify them. No longer were Dutch and Spanish, English and Irish, French and German, united by a single, universal religion, honoring the same saints and martyrs and worshiping in the same churches; the heroes of one nation were now to be hobgoblins to the other. No longer were there shared, universal institutions binding them together; increasingly not even the Catholic nations of Europe wanted their power over their own people limited by the interventions of an Italian Pope. What was born out of the fire of the religious wars were, for the first time, nations in the modern sense; divided peoples with their own separate stories and places and loyalties and identities.

Cuius regio, eius religio: "Each man's region is his religion." This maxim would have been as bizarre and revolutionary in the 12th century as it seems to us now. Each nation, each town, began to shape for itself, or have thrust upon from it outside, a particular church, a particular religion. The cosmic Church was gone; in its place were innumerable churches, each one different from and contradictory to all the others. "Religion," in our modern sense, was born; the presence in a given society of a particularized viewpoint and theological and social system, or even multiple such, under the power of a single, particularized governing authority.

The early Reformers had had no concept of this, of course; for them, their own particular theologies, implemented wherever and whenever they could (typically in a single town or region whose political authorities would make deals with them), was the one, universal form of Truth for all times and all places. This might suffice for a time; but it quickly began to look, to more and more people, like an obviously, risibly foolish and self-contradictory delusion. This particular Reformer got his own region, he got to make their own religion, and enforce it at gunpoint; that was the reality, whatever his protestations to the contrary, his appeals to God or man.

In time, of course, over the course of the centuries, this neat division broke down. Governments both Catholic and Protestant, it turned out, found it impossible to enforce total uniformity in religious matters. In the Middle Ages, when the Church had stood over all, it had seemed to make good sense to everyone to suppress, by force if necessary, the occasional dangers of a revolutionary heretic, a fanatic dedicated to the overturning of universal society--or even, if necessary, to bring back by force a particular region or group breaking off from the whole. Now, though, there was no such whole anymore; heresies had become religions, rooted in memory and ancestry and tribal and ethnic memory. Killing one random Dutch Protestant or French Catholic, it turned out, did little to deal with this: only genocide would gain the retired results, and while at times governments gave it a go (the policies of England in Ireland being the most outstanding example), such genocide was highly impractical, not to mention difficult to gain religious sanction for.

In this way, a new world was established, with heterogenous religious populations ruled over by political authorities that, for the first time, were in any real sense secular, standing head and shoulders over all concerns related to God or the cosmos. You could believe whatever you wished about these things, or worship however you wished; so long as you obeyed the prince. His authority, then, could not established by God, founded on a universal Church binding together God and cosmos: at least not solely. There had to be some other grounding for it, some shared cosmos in which it found a home--one not tied to any one of the particular religious conceptions it claimed the right to rule over.

This last came much later, though; at first, things moved more gradually. Still, the bond was well and truly broken; Christendom was destroyed. The Church, and the world, had been well and truly reformed.

The Aftermath, or Talking 'Bout My Generation

Part of the confusion in talking about the Reformation, as I already discussed, is the amount of storytelling and mythmaking that has taken place around it (storytelling and mythmaking that this essay is, inter alia, contributing to). None of this storytelling or mythmaking, though, has ever really done by people objectively interested in the pure facts of a distant historical epoch; and vanishingly little of it, even, has ever been done by religious Protestants or Catholics actually interested in the precise points of theological debate in the 16th century. The overwhelming proportion of talk about the Reformation, and especially praise of the Reformation, is and has been not really about the Reformation at all; it has been, rather, about the Enlightenment that followed, and the various political and social revolutions that followed that. It has been about, not Protestantism, but modernity.

The vast majority of discussion I've seen so far over the Reformation and its anniversary recently, in fact, has been over the question of religious violence or toleration, secular society versus non-secular, and writ large, that vast collection of vague ideas known as political liberalism (in the sense of the valuing of contractual-voluntaristic freedom as the basis at least of civil society, if not of human society in general). Even quite religious Protestants praising the Reformation today praise, not the actual beliefs or actions of the Reformers, but these rather different, if not contradictory, developments.

Now this is, really, extremely strange on a number of different levels; for none of these things, after all, were supported by anyone at the actual time of the Reformation--certainly not by any of the principal Reformers. The Anabaptists, to be sure, strongly protested their persecution by Catholics and Protestants alike in the name of freedom of conscience; but as this was done in the name of a theology that refused to take any part whatsoever in public life, this did not really go very far towards establishing an actual civil system of toleration.

Mainstream Protestantism, though, certainly did not believe in religious toleration or freedom; its very lifeblood, its chief and most central goal, was in the gaining of political power, the overthrowing and destruction of all rival religious institutions and the theft, by bare force, of the property and authority of the old religious system. Unitary state coercion of conscience was perhaps the most basic and universally shared Protestant tenet; it was what practically every Protestant reformer aimed at, the solid grounding of whatever success they had in shaping society.

Certainly, no Catholic at this time was remotely committed to religious toleration either; and the new Catholic sovereigns, invested with power over the Church stolen from the Papacy and the clergy and dedicated to extending their empires by any means necessary, had no qualms about using religious violence to gain their ends. If anything, though, Protestant societies tended to be far more dependent on direct state power and coercion for their maintenance than Catholic ones. The Anglican Church, to take only the most egregious example, was infinitely more of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the state, its doctrines and rites put in place by Parliament and the Crown, absence from state-sanctioned services punished by ruinous fines and all rivals ruthlessly suppressed through the bloodiest sort of violence, than any Catholic society in Europe. Full civil rights for Catholics in England did not come about until the mid-19th century; and a vicious, full-blooded anti-Catholicism, framed in racial and ideological as much as religious terms, is still to be found in parts of England and Northern Ireland.

When religious toleration did come about, it was, as I've said, the result mostly of the practical realities seen clearly by both Protestant and Catholic sovereigns; if there are enough members of a rival religious group in your territory, killing them all or forcing them all to convert is simply not practical. Certainly, you can try; but eventually, you will give up.

Everything else was a mere side-effect of this basic, underlying reality. Once religious toleration was a practical reality, once states got used to practically making use of members of different religious groups, basic toleration became a way of life for all of Europe. This happened relatively quickly, well before the onset of secularization; it continued the longest where populations were relatively homogenous enough to make such violence very small-scale and so practical (such as Spain, where there were never really any Protestants to speak of), or the minority religious group so ground-down that one could pretend otherwise (such as English-controlled Ireland). Still, as soon as Europe broke up into different regions with particular religions, some kind of toleration became a simple necessity for governance as such: not to mention diplomacy.

The theorization of complete religious neutrality on behalf of the state was a rather different development, and came much, much later, as a relatively minor offshoot of the theory of state secularity and voluntaristic-contractual liberalism: a theory that did not prevent persecution and discrimination against all manner of religions, especially Catholicism, in secular America and anti-clerical France alike. But we are straying from our subject.

Secular societies and governments themselves, though, can be understood as a side-effect of the Reformation; though they were relatively long in coming. What the Reformation actually meant, in its actual heyday, was not the secularization of government in our modern sense, but the complete takeover of religion by the government. The Catholic Church in the West had for centuries theorized and made a matter of deadly practicality the institutional separation of Church and State and the total primacy over the spiritual over the temporal: inasmuch as a state existed at all, it was only a partial institution, one authority in a large network of authorities dependent ultimately on God and nature, its powers relentlessly divided, questioned, and judged by the Church and her representatives. If the Reformation did anything, it was to destroy this separation, and to merge Church and State entirely into one. The King now had all the power over religion he had ever wanted, with all his actions sanctioned by it, and clergy and businessmen equally his subjects. In the short term, heretics against the state and its religion, were, in fact, treated far, far worse than before, and in infinitely greater numbers.

While this state of affairs was to eventually contribute, in relatively torturous fashion, to governments, and latterly other social institutions, deciding they no longer needed even the barest sort of religious sanction to exist or command, this hardly makes secularization an achievement of the Reformation, let alone of Protestantism.

As for political liberalism--well, here, we enter what is, perhaps, one of the greatest debates of our own time. We live in a period where the unquestioned reign of political liberalism--the belief that society and government is grounded, ultimately, in the free choices and contracts of independently acting subjects--is being questioned more than ever, even as it remains on many levels an unchallengable basis of much of our political and social life. For most people, affirming the goodness of the Reformation is little more than a rote act of loyalty to the modern, secular liberal state; equivalent to saluting the flag or posting a meme on Facebook on the 4th of July. We assume, most of us, Catholic and Protestant alike, that the Reformation has something to do with its existence; we make the Reformation the birth, not of Protestantism or even of secularism, but precisely of our selves: the miserable, atomized inhabitants of a society devoted first and foremost to technological power and its infinite extension.

This is, in truth, mostly a matter for a very different essay. Suffice it to say that neither the Reformers, nor their Catholic opponents, nor even the numerous people who took advantage of their quarrel for their own liberation from restraint, were modern secular liberals--let alone atomized, technology-worshiping moderns. If we wish to have that debate, over whether we are really better off under our technocratic capitalist regime than we we were before (at whatever time in history we're thinking about), then it behooves us to have it rather more honestly, without summoning long-dead Reformers to our aid. Certainly, Luther would have been as horrified by our society as any Catholic priest of the Middle Ages; surely, he suffered enough in life without being made, in death, a proponent of our universal individualist liberation and hedonistic nihilism.

Before I finish this absurd essay of mine, though, I will attempt to sketch, in just a few brief words, what it was about the Reformation that it is right to link, in some way, to our present state of affairs and our present plight.

The End of Man

The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory is, really, quite a good book, and worth reading; though not without its flaws or simplifications. Its basic thesis is to explain modernity, capitalism, and secularism through the completely unintended and unpredictable effects of the Reformation on social, political, and religious life throughout Europe. This is, to an extent, a thesis I can get behind.

Certainly, secularism and liberalism and modernity did, in remarkably little time, result from the social and political and religious world produced by the Reformation; a development that never would have seemed even remotely possible during the thousand years of Catholic Christendom. Within less than a hundred years of Luther's death, Thomas Hobbes was denying Christianity and proposing a completely secular basis for a state vested with absolute power, Rene Descartes was building a new philosophy based on atomized individualism and complete, pervasive skepticism towards reality, Francis Bacon was establishing modern science as a system of indifferent dominance of active male technician over passive female nature, and John Locke was discoursing on political liberalism to anyone who would listen. One would hardly suppose this to be a coincidence.

The various dueling philosophers of the Enlightenment do not, in truth, really have all that much more to do with our present society than poor Luther does. Their most radical and speculative theories have become, to a degree, our realities, or at least our debate-team answers; but the lives they led, and the things they believed in, are as far removed from us as the Reformers themselves. Like the Reformers, they theorized, and described, some things that are reflective of who and what we are now; and many more things that are radically contradictory to it. In the same way, the Enlightenment has little or nothing substantively in common with poor Luther, as a theologian or an ideologue; but we, and they, share something all the same.

Science, in the sense that most of us mean it, is mostly a myth; as an ordered, structured, rationalistic attempt to make sense of the world and know the truth of things, it goes back to Ancient Greece. As a system based principally on empirical observation and mathematical calculation and trust in the regularity of nature, it dates to the European High Middle Ages. As a more or less practical affair dedicated to the curing of diseases and the erecting of mechanical wonders for general benefit, it dates to around this time, too.

As the a-moral, unlimited progress of technological power based on domination and control of natural phenomena we know and love, though, the thing responsible for atom bombs and cancer treatments and iPhones, it dates, admittedly, to sometime a bit after the Reformation.

It is certainly unfair to blame Luther, or John Calvin, or even Henry VIII, for a thing like Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, let alone a little thing like the atom bomb. Thomas Hobbes was only one in a very long line of sect leaders, political ideologues, and radically new philosophers, that began before him and continued long after him; and the atom bomb, of course, was only one in a long line of advances in technological dominance in the service of unlimited power, both before and after.

It is, really, only in this sense that the Reformation can be said to have produced the Enlightenment, or modern science, or modernity, or capitalism, or colonialism, or Naziism, or any of the other strange and baffling developments of our powerful and lonely last five hundred years: that it broke the Church.

Everything, really, comes down to this: and its importance, to history and theology and philosophy and ordinary life, cannot be overrated. The fundamental, overarching reality of the Incarnate God, spanning all of human society and every area of life, binding together this life and the next, the living and the dead, foreigners and one's own countrymen, God and the cosmos and ordinary life, ceased to be the underlying reality of society. It was replaced by the ultimately lawless, unlimited, and self-justified power of innumerable petty intellectuals and intermediate institutions, each of whom had succeeded, to some extent, in wresting themselves free from the living network of the Church; and all that has followed has been no more than the gradual working out, and gradual unmasking, of this power.

The Enlighteners were successors to the Reformers, not in any profound intellectual sense, but far more so in their status as petty intellectuals whose thought was based on their power and independence from the Church; so too was Adolf Hitler; so too is Alex Jones. Political liberalism and absolute monarchy were equally attempts to justify and contextualize, in theoretical terms, the limitless power experienced by nation-states newly freed from the Church. Radical individualism and radical collectivism are both attempts to situate the self in the confused world of broken relationships and cosmic skepticism left after the Church's removal.

The Church was the greatest thing in the world; the Church was greater than the world. It had conquered the world, subdued its powers by force and by the blood of the martyrs. After that, every power and every institution had to justify itself, had to find sanction and a place in a vast, universal network of relationships spanning the whole cosmos, this world and the next. Then this bond was broken, and all the powers of the world set free.

What was set free in the Reformation was not individualism, or human rights, or any settled or ordered liberty; it was the freedom of lawless power, and we have lived in its sway ever since.

What this lawless power, infinitely divided against itself from the days of the Thirty Years War to the present days of Facebook debates, has done since then has not been at the command of a God supporting the Free Will Baptist Church above all others, or under the compulsion of a necessary law of historical development; it has been done, not under the sway of a great belief, or the presence of a great reality, but in its most profound absence.

Declaration of Faith

This has been a dire essay, in many ways; and by now it should be clear that I am very much not a fan either of the Reformation, as a historical event, or of the contemporary society in which we live.

Still, I would be a bad historian, and even more so a very bad Catholic, if I confined myself to the dismal side of things. So here, speaking emphatically as a Catholic, is my positive statement about the last five hundred years and the future of the world:

There is one, rather technical sense in which the Catholic Church, in the sense I have described it, was destroyed at the Reformation; in the sense that it ceased to be the underlying and determining reality of society for much of the world for which it had formerly served that role. In a rather more important sense, though, and infinitely more senses besides, the Catholic Church was not destroyed; or if it was, it rose quickly from the dead, even greater than before. The movement called the Counter-Reformation was something more than a reformation; it was a profound revolution in human history, unleashing never-before-seen forces on the world. A new, empowered laity, led by the most disciplined and educated clergy in the history of the world, and new religious orders of astonishing fervor and intensity, laid claim in short order, not just to the ruins of Europe, but to the whole world. Almost within Luther's lifetime, there were Jesuits in China and India, and Theresa of Avila reaching the heights of mystic contemplation in Spain; and much greater things were to follow.

The increase in technological and social power, already well on its way before the Reformation, was more than met by the Church's efforts; such liberation and empowerment, set in a limited context with limited ends, and kept within the vast relational network of the Church, turned out to have truly amazing potential for good. With every progressive increase in the world's power and prosperity, the Church has managed, to some degree, to turn it to the good; even with the very greatest and most lawless of the world's works. Her greatest struggle in this new world has been simply to convince her sons and daughters that she is what she says she is--the actual Church of Christ, a true and living bond between all of God and all of humanity--and not another merely partial and intermediate institution among innumerable others. Wherever and whenever she has succeeded, though, even to the smallest degree, she has worked wonders.

If at times and in many places she has become, and remains, a minority, even a persecuted minority, the Church that had endured the Roman Empire for centuries is hardly unequipped for such a vantage point; generations of Medieval Catholics had looked back, with longing, at the simplicity and struggles of the age of the martyrs, the age of the seeming dominance of the world over the Church. Increasingly returned, in nation after nation, to such an age, the Church endured, such saints were very far from disappointed; for their hope for the world was precisely, as for all Medieval saints, in defeat, in persecution, in utter extinction at the hands of the world: in short, in the Cross of Christ. It is there that the Church has always looked for peace, for victory, and for salvation.

In short, the Catholic Church still exists today; and remains still, in your essayist's humble opinion, a thing infinitely greater than the world, the only thing to truly bring together into one all of humanity throughout time and space, the present cosmos and the world to come, God in all of his transcendence and humanity in all his wretchedness and complexity. She is the path to salvation for all mankind, Catholic or Protestant or anything else under heaven; and there is no other.

Please, Dear Waru, Let This Essay Be Over Now

So, it has been five hundred years, more or less, since something happened. This great set of events I choose, mostly for convenience, to call the Reformation, was united, first and foremost, by a set of shared causes and effects. Innumerable institutions and peoples utilized the new power and prosperity given them to break free from the ancient and universal network of relationships called the Church; as a result of this, the basic conception of the world and reality and society present in Europe shifted wildly, from one based on a fundamental, underlying perception of a truly universal bond embodied in society and spanning God and cosmos, to far more fractured, uncertain, and shifting one, based to an ever-increasing extent on intermediate powers and authorities and identities. This, more or less, was the Reformation; and it set the stage for all that followed.

Or, at least, that's what I think.

Whether we should celebrate this event, or mourn it, I leave to your judgment.

Deus misereatur omnibus nobis. Amen.