5. The Results of the Reformation.
It is more clear
to the twentieth century than it was to the
sixteenth
that a great deal of the evil and the suffering which
arose
from the Reformation—a great many of the wars,
atrocities and
crimes that came to be associated with
it—arose from the beliefs
that the various parties had
in common. The world had changed greatly since
New
Testament days, and all were agreed that religion was
not a matter
for the Individual only; that the uniform
“Christian
Society” was the important thing; and that
only one form of
faith could be true, the rest standing
not merely as errors but as
diabolical perversions. It
was the duty of rulers to support the true faith
and
there were precedents for the view that when all else
failed—when the ecclesiastical system was too deca-
dent to rectify itself—the secular arm should
reform
the Church. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the Ana-
baptists sought to capture the government—if
only the
government of a city-state. And this only highlighted
the
fact that the papacy needed the support of the
secular authority too.
Many of the results of the Reformation—particularly
the more
paradoxical results—sprang from the fact that
neither the
papacy, on the one hand, nor Luther (or
any other Protestant leader) on the
other, was able to
secure a total victory that would have
reestablished
unity in the West. This itself contributed to the power
of princes, for it left them the choice in matters of
religion, so that
they tended to become masters rather
than servants at the most crucial
point of all. A mon-
arch like Henry VIII of
England could evade the alter-
natives
before him, simply setting up a system of his
own.
Furthermore, besides confiscating much of the prop-
erty of the Church, they became accustomed to con-
trolling religious affairs—even (in the case of
Lutheran
princes and Henry VIII, for example) replacing the
pope as
the superior over bishops. Each state tended
to become its own “Christian Society,” and
authority—
being now closer at hand—was liable to
become more
tyrannical than before. Although the tendencies were
already in existence and may have contributed to the
growth of an antipapal
movement, the Reformation
gave a fresh stimulus to the rising power of
kings, and
the development of nationalism. It was a great blow
to such
international order as had previously existed.
A revival of religion had occurred, and both pub-
lished works and private letters bear evidence of in-
spiring thought and deep
sincerity—a tremendous re-
exploring of Christianity. But it was also a revival of
religious
passions, religious hatreds and religious wars,
and it showed what a
scourge a supernatural religion
could be to the world if it were not
tempered by the
constant remembrance of the dominating importance
of
charity. In sixteenth-century Europe the rivalry
between one set of
doctrines and another, and even
the negotiations between the
parties—indeed all the
transactions which related to doctrinal
tests—inaugu-
rated a period
in which the confessional issue was too
momentous, and there was too hard
an attitude toward
intellectual statements of belief.
In the long run, the very conflict of authorities was
bound to leave a
greater opening for individ-
ualism—even a tendency to see all the religious parties
with relativity. But the process to this was slower than
one would have
imagined and for nearly two centuries
the conflict had a politico-religious
character. In a
given country the Reformation, particularly in its
Calvinist form, was likely to arise in the first place
amongst a minority;
and there were signs of it even
in countries that were to remain
Catholic—signs in
Italy and even Spain, and a formidable
movement in
France. The irrepressibility of these nonconformists,
even
when they failed to capture the government,
added a dynamic quality to the
history of a number
of states, particularly England. Yet for the most
part
it was due to their predicament rather than to their
theology
that the dissenters made their great contri-
bution to the modern world. They wished to capture
the whole
body politic; and because they failed they
were in the mood for opposition
to the Establishment,
both Church and State; and they could better
afford
to judge society and government by reference to
Christian
principles and fundamental ideas.
The elevation of the Bible by the Protestants, and
particularly the
Calvinists—what has been called the
bibliolatry of the sixteenth
century—was to have im-
portant and
widespread consequences. Even the trans-
lation of the book had a wide general significance,
especially in
France and Germany. In an age when
everything is being thrown into the
melting pot, it
becomes more easy to note the equality of men before
God, the Christ who makes men free, the idea of
communism in
the New Testament. One of the effects
of the concentration on the Bible was
the unprece-
dented importance which the
Old Testament acquired
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In
some
respects it replaced the volumes of canon law which
Luther had
burned, and it proved less flexible than the
canon law, to which Luther
objected, partly because
of the development that had taken place in it;
he
objected not to its prohibition of usury but to the
loopholes which
it had come to admit. Now, economic
regulations, political theories,
ethical ideas—and even
science, even one's views about the
physical universe—
would be taken from the Old Testament, which
was
more relevant for these mundane purposes than the
New. Monarchy
itself found its justification there and
Luther's view of what we should
call the state was
Old Testament rather than medieval—the king
having
the power while being expected to listen to the prophet
(the
Reformation leader) at his side. And over and over
again the early
Protestants would refer to their mon-
arch as
the King Josiah, who had reformed the Church
after discovering the books of
the Law.
The conception of the covenant, which was so fa-
miliar amongst the ancient Hebrews, was now revived
and seems to
have played its part in the development
of the Social Contract theory. When
the Pilgram Fa-
thers went to America, they
signed what they called
a “covenant,” in which they
constituted themselves as
a body politic. Amongst the Puritans the
prohibition
of images may have tended to the discouragement of
the
visual arts. In England, Sundays (which had at first
been deprecated, along
with the excessive number of
saints' days) came to be equated with the
Jewish
Sabbath. The Old Testament provided textual bases for
witch-burnings, which multiplied at this period, as well
as for religious
intolerance and severe theories of per-
secution, including the view that heretics should be
destroyed as
blasphemers.
It has been held by Max Weber and others that
something in the nature of
Protestantism itself played
an important part in the rise of capitalism,
and the
advance of England and Holland (together with a
decline in
Belgium and a backwardness in Spain and
Italy) has lent plausibility to
this view. But capitalism
and the spirit of capitalism were highly advanced
in
Italy and the Netherlands before the Reformation, and
the famous
Fugger family in Germany was Catholic.
Luther, joining in the hostility
that had already arisen
against it—said that the greatest
misfortune of the
German nation was the traffic in usury, and he
blamed
the pope for having sanctioned the evil. Calvin, coming
at a
later date, recognized the changed condition of
the world and attacked the
Aristotelian view that
money is “barren” but he was a little troubled
lest this
should assist the capitalists and encourage usury. He
would
have liked to drive the latter out of the world,
but since this was
impossible, he said that one must
give way to the general utility. He
sought to prevent
the evil which explained the antipathy of
agricultural
societies to usury—namely, the practices which
took
advantage of the misfortunes of the poor—and to him
Venice and Antwerp were an exposure of the mam-
monism of the Catholics.
In fact the traditional medieval policy was pursued
in Geneva in Calvin's
day; and, after his time, the
prejudice against usury continued in that
city, where,
indeed, business life proceeded as formerly, without
receiving any great impetus from the religious move-
ment, and in 1568 the influences of the Calvinist parties
prevented the formation of a bank. In Amsterdam the
biggest capitalists
belonged to families that were
working on a large scale before the
Reformation and
it was the poor who became the most fanatical Calvin-
ists. It was preached that everything
beyond a reasona-
ble subsistence should be
set aside for the poor, and
disciplinary action was taken against
bankers—the old
prejudices continuing until the middle of the
seven-
teenth century. So long as a
religious revival retains
its character, it is not in its nature to
encourage mam-
monism, a point which even the
Puritans of seven-
teenth-century
England illustrate.
The view that a believer should praise and serve God
in his daily avocations
should not be strange in any
religion; and the Middle Ages (as well as the
Jesuits
later) began wisely to adjust their ethical
precepts—
their views on commerce and man's daily
tasks—to
the needs of a changing world. It is surprising
that
anybody should hold the view that capitalism was
encouraged
because the Reformers separated salvation
from
“works”; for the Puritans were far from repre-
senting an easy view of Christian
conduct, though they
held that a man did not win salvation by the
effort.
When Baron von Hügel read Bunyan he said that the
book was “curiously Catholic in its ideas... certainly
very
strong about the necessity of good works.” Puri-
tanism encouraged work, reprobated waste of time in
idle talk and mere sociability, and held that leisure was
equivalent to
lasciviousness. It also reprobated luxury
and promoted virtues like thrift,
no doubt giving reli-
gious sanction to
qualities that were particularly useful
in the capitalistic world that had
been developing. It
is therefore open to the charge of regarding the
making
of money as laudable while the spending of it was a
vice.
John Wesley, when he drew up his first printed rules
for Methodists in the
eighteenth century, condemned
usury on biblical grounds and had to be made
to see
that this was demanding the impossible, so that he
retreated
and prescribed only a moderate rate. He
sketched out the view that the very
virtues of Chris-
tians might lead to
prosperity and thence to a decline
of religion. But it is only very late in
the day that
Puritanism is in any sense the ally of mammonism.
Apart from the fact that Protestantism could spread
more easily in town than
in country, it provided an
example of a new movement in religion which, in
its
formative period, when so many things were malleable,
confronted
what men were recognizing to be a new
economic world. Besides its
theological doctrine, it was
bound to acquire an attendant social
outlook—a fringe
of more mundane prejudices and
associations—and
these showed it in the first place bitterly
hostile to
capitalism. But, as time went on, it was almost bound
to
give the support of religion to the ethical ideas
which corresponded to the
needs of the new social
world. Catholicism had fixed many of its principles
in
a different state of society, and was likely to be less
malleable,
though it, too, made its adjustments (perhaps
more slowly) as society
changed. Late in the day, and
almost as ratifying a fait accompli, Puritanism did
perhaps become the support of
a capitalist society; and,
even so, it was a Protestantism that had changed
its
character; in a sense it was not religion but a decline
in
religion, or an injection of secularism which had this
result.
Protestantism, more than Catholicism, tended to
change its general character
as the centuries passed;
it moved from its initial sixteenth-century form
and
preoccupations, and at least presented a different
spectacle and
assumed a different role. It was at a later
stage that it became
consciously and avowedly the ally
of individualism, liberty, rationalism,
capitalism, and
the modern kind of state.
