Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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VI. | CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY |
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Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY
Christianity:
the religion which grew out of the
Jewish faith as transformed by the
worship of Jesus
Christ after the Resurrection, and which, by combina-
tion with Greek culture and the
conversion of a great
part of the Roman Empire, took a systematized
form
as “historical Christianity,” having its chief
basis in
Europe and presiding over the development of Western
civilization until recent centuries.
I. THE EARLY CHURCH
1. Judaic Christianity.
The disciples of Jesus, if they
appeared ready to confess their
despondency and even
weakness at the time of the Crucifixion, made a recov-
ery so rapid that it puzzles the
historians. It altered
did not exactly announce a new religion to their fellow
countrymen, they proclaimed an “event” which
brought the older faith to its culmination, shattering
its traditional framework and calling for a host of new
interpretations. It would seem that, during the lifetime
of Jesus, they may have followed Him without properly
understanding the drift of His teaching; and it would
appear to have been the vividness of their belief in
the Resurrection that transformed the situation for
them, enabling them to feel that now everything could
be fitted into place. It had in fact convinced them that
Jesus was the fulfilment of the famous prophecies on
which the Jews had been relying for a long time; and
that, if the truth had been so difficult to recognize,
it had been because those prophecies—and particularly
the notions of the Messiah and the divine Kingdom—
had been construed in too mundane a manner. Once
this basic insight had been reached, a remarkable work
of intellectual synthesis was quickly achieved, and
there followed an amazing missionary endeavor, which
required considerable bravery at first and cannot be
plausibly accounted for by reference to mundane
vested interests. It is clear to the historian, and it was
amply admitted at the time, that the dynamic behind
all this was the conviction that the beloved Leader
has risen from the dead. There was a strong expectation
that He would quickly return.
It has always been a matter of the greatest difficulty
for
Christianity—and perhaps for any similar form of
faith—to secure by peaceful means and sheer mission-
ary endeavor the wholesale conversion of a people
already dominated by an exclusive form of supernatural
religion. The Holy
Land was in this position, and
though Judaism was in a fluid and
interesting state,
the disciples produced only what appeared to be an
addition to the multitude of sects and parties there—
some of
these latter being impressive on the spiritual
and ethical side, and some
of them so similar in one
way or another that the tracing of influences
among
them is a delicate affair. The Church for a few decades
was
predominantly Judeo-Christian, its members still
attending the Temple and
conforming to the Law, but
meeting also in private houses or the Upper Room
for
instruction, prayer, and the breaking of bread. Until
the war
which led to the destruction of the city in
A.D. 70, it was the group in
Jerusalem (with James,
the brother of Jesus, at its head) which was the
leader.
It seems to have been quickly recognized that con-
verts from paganism were admissible; and pagans were
encountered
in great numbers when the gospel was
carried to the virtually Greek cities,
such as Caesarea,
on the Palestine coast. Communities were soon estab-
lished also in Damascus and the
Hellenistic city of
Antioch, beyond the frontier; and Antioch, where the
term
“Christian” came into use, became the center for
a
wider missionary campaign in the Greco-Roman
world. But also, at this early
stage in the story, Chris-
tian missions
(following previous ones on the part of
the Jews) spread eastwards to
Transjordan and into
Arabia, and they were pushed forwards to the
upper
Euphrates and the Tigris. Here, churches using the
Aramaic
tongue became important during the earliest
centuries. Some difficulty
arose over the question
whether the pagans should be made to conform to
the
Jewish law and this may have created additional diffi-
culty for Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as
Jewish
nationalism became more intense, more exacting. But
the
extension into the Greco-Roman world, together
with the destruction of
Jerusalem, brought the Chris-
tian faith a
higher degree of autonomy, a further scope
for development; and it opened
to Christianity the
possibility of becoming a world-religion. The
early
need for exposition in the Greek language, the marriage
with
Greek ideas, and the contact with a highly devel-
oped culture were to prove important in this connec-
tion. “Historical
Christianity”—the religion as we have
actually known
it in its concrete development through
the centuries—comes in
some respects as a Greco-
Jewish synthesis,
owing part of its power to the combi-
nation
of two such highly different systems. It would
be interesting to know how
the religion would have
developed if, in its early generative period, it
had
combined with a different culture.
The historian is hampered because the Christians in
their very earliest
period produced so little in writing,
or at least preserved so little.
Their leaders knew what
was needed at the time, however, and the whole
future
question of authority in the Church would seem to have
been
decisively affected by the fact that (for the imme-
diate purpose) so much was realized to depend on the
evidence of
eyewitnesses, and the primacy was natu-
rally
given to these. Perhaps it is for similar reasons
that one glimpses the
importance of certain relatives
of Jesus in the earliest days at Jerusalem;
and, of course,
Saint Paul was accepted as an Apostle because his
particular vision of the risen Christ was regarded as
giving him first hand
knowledge. Once the eyewitnesses
had passed off the scene, it was natural
that a certain
primacy should be conceded to those who had been
closest to them—those to whom they had communi-
cated most; and the objective was the preservation
of
what had originally been delivered at first hand—what
in
the course of time could only appear in a less cogent
form as
“tradition.”
The attempt to secure uniformity in the Church
would seem to go back to the
jealousy with which the
Judeo-Christian leaders in Jerusalem regarded the
had been affected by Hellenization or pagans who
(before becoming Christian) had been converts to
Judaism. When the “Hellenizers” carried the gospel
to pagans in the Greek coastal cities of Palestine or
in Syria, it would appear that the Church at Jerusalem
would send a “Hebrew” to check on the result of their
work. But, in spite of the care that was taken, there
were aberrations even amongst the Christians in
Palestine; and in Samaria, which had already been
heterodox in its Judaism, an irregular form of Christi-
anity slid away and became the origin of Gnosticism—
this after A.D. 70, when the failure of Jahweh to grant
victory in an apocalyptic war helped to produce a
movement partly directed against the Old Testament
deity. Henceforward, the rise of Christianity was par-
alleled by the multiplication of Gnostic sects which,
in spite of their fantastic character, proved imposing.
Now, more than ever, it was necessary to safeguard
the original doctrines of the Church.
2. The Church in the Roman Empire.
The Chris-
tians would appear in the
empire as a strange small
sect and for a time their recruits were perhaps
chiefly
amongst the lowly, though churches for which the
epistles of
Saint Paul were written can hardly be re-
garded as unimpressive. In the Roman Empire the
believers might be
hated because they were confused
with the Jews or because the Jews incited
the pagans
against them; but in the first two centuries they suffered
from the hostility of the populace rather than the
intolerance of the
emperors. After the fall of Jerusalem
it was in Asia Minor that they came
to appear most
numerous, most lively, and most capable; and for a
long
time this was the most impressive seat of the
Church. In various parts of
the empire the teaching
in the apostolic period itself would tend to vary,
at
least in its emphases, and the tradition came to develop
on
differing lines. Also, as time went on, one great
region (almost as a
matter of temperament) would be
preoccupied chiefly with doctrine while
another con-
centrated on asceticism and
another became interested
in organization.
From the middle of the second century, Helleniza-
tion—which found its climax in Alexandria—had
cap-
tured the mentality of churchmen, who,
instead of
appearing as a mere sect came out into first-class con-
troversy with leading intellectuals. They
had taken
Platonic ideas into their own system, but they set out
to
show where pagan thought had gone wrong, and
claimed that Christianity was
the culmination of Greek
culture, the real heir of ancient philosophy.
While this
was happening, and the Church was settling down to
a
long-term role in the world, there arose in Asia Minor
the Montanism which
in a sense implied a reversion
to the primitive spirit, the exultant early days. It meant
a
wave of “prophesyings,” a reawakening of more
immediate eschatological hopes, a severity in disci-
plinary matters and something like an actual thirst
for
martyrdom. Dealing with these problems was part of
the larger
process by which a sect that had envisaged
an imminent eschatological
climax gradually turned
into a sedentary Church, realizing what it needed
if
it were to exist on a permanent footing. Controversies
in the third
century about penance, about relapses in
time of persecution, about the
validity of baptism by
heretics, and about the rights of bishops, were part
of
the consequences of this transition.
Christians were beginning to develop a larger world
view; scholarship was
accumulating; the interest in
history was rising. Confronted by the
multiplicity of
theological opinions, towards the end of the second
century, Irenaeus had insisted on the steadying influ-
ence of bishops, who were still regarded as the reposi-
tories of the original apostolic
tradition. In spite of the
varieties at a certain level, an impressive
uniformity
and consistency had been made possible by such pro-
cedures as the communication from one
region to
another of the decisions made by local councils of
bishops.
At the same time, the heads of great sees
attempted on occasion to secure
the support of Rome
in a doctrinal controversy, and this was capable
of
being construed later as an appeal to Rome. The
church in Rome,
very much a church of foreign colon-
ists at
first, was for a long time cosmopolitan—
consisting of groups
that had brought their local tradi-
tions and
customs with them. Like Christianity itself,
all new sects, all heresies,
all novel teaching sought
to reach the capital of the empire; and the
bishop of
Rome would have to meet early at a local level the
challenge
that these were later to present to the
Church in general. When Christians
from further east
brought to Rome their different dates for the celebra-
tion of Easter, he was in a position
to be highly aware
of the inconvenience of this anomaly. Perhaps
because
he was inclined to be less speculative than the bishops
of the
Greek-speaking East, and more concerned for
tradition and order, he not
only met problems early
but seems often to have commanded respect by
his
actual decisions. In the remarkable period in which
the universal
Church was developing its organization,
he gains in importance, though all
his claims do not
go unchallenged. To us it might appear that the lead-
ership which he asserted was likely to
become due to
him by reason of his merits. At the same time, it was
still recognized that the authority of a bishopric—or
a local
tradition—depended primarily on the distinc-
tion of its apostolic origin. Rome could claim to
go
back to Peter and Paul.
In the middle of the third century the expansion is
remarkable in Africa and
in Western Europe, as well
as in the lands to the east of the
Mediterranean. Further
east again, the missionary work pushes across
Iraq,
though its effect is to be gravely limited from this point
by a
Persian dynasty that is committed to Zoroastrian-
ism. At a time when the Roman Empire was
coming
under pressure on the frontiers and was moving to-
wards a grim development—while in any case
this
empire held hosts of déracinés, people feeling lost, not
quite at home
in the world—the older paganism was
coming into decline.
Oriental mystery cults attempted
to answer the need for a salvationist
faith with its
mysticisms and forms of sacrament; philosophy outside
the Church was running to religiosity. By the second
half of the third
century the Church had become an
imposing body and a powerful influence in
the empire,
with important government and court officials amongst
its
members. Amongst its assets in the great conflict
of religions were the
possession of a sacred book; the
attachment not to a mythical figure or a
demiurge but
to a Person who had walked in the world and could
be
identified in history; the assistance of an imposing
organization; and the
fact that this religion, besides
producing its martyrs and issuing in an
expressive kind
of devotion, had become intimately connected with the
moral life and works of charity. The Church was be-
ginning perhaps to suffer even from its prosperity, and,
to
some, the rise of heresies seemed to come as a
retribution for this.
Already the controversies had
opened which led to the long conflicts over
the Holy
Trinity and the Person of Christ.
Christianity had profited from the meeting of Jewish
religion, Greek
philosophy, and the Roman Empire—a
conjuncture that seemed to
coincide with the Incarna-
tion. It had
profited from the defects of all three—
Jewish legalism, the
tendencies of Greek philosophy
at this late period, and the frustrations
and distracted-
ness of the Roman world.
It had appeared at an ad-
vanced date in that
long period in which much of the
ability and the yearning of the human race
in Asia,
and now even in Europe—the result of a great
anxiety
about man's destiny—had been directed to the explor-
ing of the possibilities of the
spiritual realm. At a
turning-point in the history of man's religious conscious-
ness, Christianity, moreover, had
moved into a highly
civilized world which had an advanced form of
urban
life—a world which could support it with a certain
refinement of intellect.
Its success was bound to affect the mentality of
men—bound to
alter their way of experiencing life,
their attitude to nature, their
posture under the sun,
and their notions of human destiny. Since
Christians
believed in the Incarnation, they were bound to deny
the
gulf which the pagans had so often presumed to
exist between God and Nature—bound to reject the
view that matter is evil and that salvation must consist
in escape from the
body. They could not believe that
in an eternity of cyclic repetitions
Christ would go
on dying over and over again for sinners; so they were
released from extreme cyclic theories, while the Old
Testament presented
history as moving forward, mov-
ing to an
objective, an unrepeatable and irreversible
thing. The Old Testament
indeed, forced them to look
at history and regard it as important, and it
cannot
have been without significance that in Europe, for
generation
after generation, men could not learn about
their religion without turning
to what was really very
ancient history. Instead of a great emphasis on
Fortune,
Christianity gave currency to the notion that the hand
of
Providence was in everything and (as had already
happened) this might mean
that retrospective reason-
ing could
ultimately make sense of that kind of history-
making which goes on over people's heads, overriding
their
conscious purposes and their predictions. Christi-
anity stressed the sanctity of human life, the impor-
tance of the family, the inadmissibility of sexual
license
and the evil of such things as gladiatorial contests and
the
murder of infants. It regarded suicide as wicked.
It insisted that man's
life had a spiritual dimension,
but it combined a high view of personality
and its
potentialities with an insistence on man's universal sin.
It
must have affected the world—the very conception
of a human
being—when, week in and week out, in
numberless localities, men
were reminded to reflect on
their own sins, on forgiveness, humility,
mercy, and
love.
3. The Christianized Empire.
After the failure of
a great persecution and a tyrannical development
of
the empire, the Emperor Constantine granted to the
Church in A.D.
313 full freedom of worship and the
restitution of confiscated goods.
Henceforward, he in-
creased his favors to the
Christians, and the Church
began to move into a privileged position. It
could be
argued that his interests as an emperor would recom-
mend an alliance with an institution that
carried
power; but there are signs that he was a sincere be-
liever, though pagan in his manner of
believing—too
sure that the Christian God was the one who
was
victorious in battle and helped him to outwit his ene-
mies. All this came as the climax of the Christian
interpretation of history that had been developing—
with the
Hebrews regarded as the fathers of civili-
zation, their language the original one, the language
of God;
Christianity being the return to the original
religion of mankind, the one
from which the Jews had
lapsed (only to be partially rescued by Moses)
while
the Greeks had declined still more—the Church being
the heir of the wisdom of both Jews and Greeks, how-
ever, and the Incarnation coinciding neatly with the
It seemed that, at this culminating moment, when the
empire itself was becoming Christian, churchmen were
willing to attribute to a Christian emperor the kind
of divinity that they had refused to concede to his
predecessors.
Henceforward it became almost consistently true
that all who wished to gain
imperial favor or to hold
office or to make their way in society would have
every
motive for joining the Church; and the conversion of
the Roman
Empire—hitherto a matter of persuasion
and not without its
risks—was to be continued by the
strong arm of the state. This
was almost bound to
introduce corruptions in the Church itself, and to
in-
crease the danger of a formal
Christianity, mixed with
paganism and thinking in pagan
terms—the danger also
of official compromises with paganism. It
was perhaps
natural, but it was unfortunate, that when there were
parties in the Church, one or more of these (not merely
the orthodox, but
sometimes the heretical) should ap-
peal to the
emperor, even when he was not inclined
to intervene. This had its special
dangers, for in A.D.
325 Constantine himself, having called the first ecu-
menical council at Nicaea, put himself
behind the
decree of that Council, condemning the Arian heresy,
but
within less than three years was induced to change
his mind.
Stranger still, men so convinced that they spoke for
the right
religion—and so sure that government and
power should be at the
service of God—were soon
advocates of persecution; and the
process in this case
was so understandable that nobody today can feel
sure
that, living in the same period and sharing the same
assumptions
about religion, he would have decided
differently. Some who were slow in
their conversion
to the practice appear to have been brought over when
the victims of persecution declared later in life that
they were now glad
that they had been coerced.
Already, in the reign of Constantine, there arose
issues which were to
trouble the Church for a long
time. One of them was the Donatist schism,
which
arose out of the later persecutions and was directed
against
bishops who had consented to the handing over
of sacred books to the
magistrates. It led to the erection
of a counter-church in
Africa—bishop confronting
antibishop—with violence,
persecution, atrocities,
self-immolation, and streaks of the revolutionary
and
the apocalyptic. An extravagant, though serious and
understandable, religious issue received tremendous
leverage from social
discontent and possibly a sort of
nationalism, and from hostility to the
Roman establish-
ment. The trouble lasted
for a century, almost until
the barbarians overran the province.
Shortly before 325, Arius, who wished to guard the
sovereignty of God the
Father, and may not have been
far enough from paganism to reject all ideas of subor-
dination in the deity, produced a
doctrine which, while
asserting the divinity of the Son, secured a clear
reduc-
tion of status for Him. The
controversy tore the Church
apart until A.D. 381, and it is perhaps not too
much
to say that for a longer period than this a great deal
of the
ecclesiastical conflict lay between men who
wished to assert both the
complete divinity and the
complete humanity of Christ, but could not agree
on
the formula that would ensure the one without deplet-
ing the other. The formula adopted at Nicaea,
homoousion (consubstantial with the Father) had al-
ready been rejected in a part of the eastern Church
that had
reacted against a heresy of an opposite tend-
ency. It was uncongenial to some because in any case
it could not
claim to be scriptural. Various shades of
the Arian and Nicene formulas
were attempted by one
party and another, who suggested “like the
Father”
and “of like substance with the
Father,” though there
emerged one group that diverged further
than Arius
and declared that there was no likeness at all. The
emperors provided a complicating factor—now hesi-
tating, now changing their minds, now plumping for
a
form of Arianism. The West remained firm in its
support of the Nicene
formula, but subtle differences
arose when technical terms had been
translated into
Latin, and the West was later than the East in con-
fronting the earlier heresy that had
constituted the
opposite danger. At a moment when a great work of
reconciliation was being achieved, there emerged an
emperor who was a
Westerner and a pious man, and
he clinched the matter by an edict in 380,
and a second
ecumenical council, that of Constantinople, 381, which
confirmed Nicaea.
If the Church had become more worldly and more
contentious, its power to
inspire renunciation and the
life of the spirit was reasserted in the
development of
monasteries. There had been analogies to this in other
parts of the globe, but Christianity had had from the
first an ideal of
chastity and poverty, and the sufferings
of the martyrs had kept its
self-denying aspects alive.
The Egyptian anchorites are anterior to the
victory
of the Church in the empire, and, when they appear,
they have
strange features, particularly their obsession
with the battle against the
vast multiplicity of
demons—a battle which could only be won by
the
repudiation of the world, a tremendous disciplining of
the body,
and a conquest of all ordinary emotions. It
was a battle not to be won by
the man who lived as
a citizen in society; and, though
prayers—sometimes
repeated in what seems to be an incredibly
mechanical
manner—contributed to the objective, the
movement
was one which needed the greatest care by the Church.
Nor is
it clear how much of its deeper Christian char-
acter may not have been contributed retrospectively
told, however, that Saint Anthony, when he went to
a solitary life in the desert in A.D. 271, was moved by
the injunction: “Sell all that thou hast and give to the
poor and follow me.” The Egyptian desert offered a
remarkable opportunity, and great numbers followed
his example. Something that almost seems like a com-
petition in asceticism may have developed here and
there—and warnings against spiritual pride in this
connection appear early in Egypt—but out of his very
loneliness the hermit was to contribute something of
rare quality to the inner life of the Church.
The anchorites came to rudimentary forms of
grouping for certain purposes,
but it was Saint
Pachomius who, in about A.D. 320 or 323, brought to
the problem an essentially organizing mind and estab-
lished the community principle. He prescribed rules
for a whole order of monasteries; and, now not only
renunciation but also
obedience was important, while,
besides vigils, readings from the Bible,
prayer, and
contemplation, there was greater emphasis on manual
labor.
The hermit was to have a significant history in
Palestine and Syria, but
Saint Basil the Great, from
about A.D. 357, produced a community ideal
which
superseded this and became current throughout the
Greek world.
Before the middle of the century the
news had reached the West and very
soon ascetic
groups were being founded there, though it was not
until
something like two hundred years later that Saint
Benedict established his
famous Rule that became the
guide for Westerners. The whole movement, the
liter-
ature that arose from it, and the
spiritual teaching it
produced had a great effect on the Church in
general;
and in the fourth century important people, including
a
surprising number of the leading intellects, associated
themselves with it,
at least during part of their lives.
In its ultimate extension, it was to
have by-products
of an unpredictable kind—especially its
contributions
to cultural and even economic life. It may have been
in
one sense a protest against the growing worldliness
of the fourth-century
Church, or an attempt to find
a new pattern of renunciation, in some cases
perhaps
even an escape from civic obligations. But it became,
from the
religious point of view, an eminently creative
thing.
It is a whole Christian version of civilization that
comes to the front in
the fourth century. Biblical
scholarship has advanced and become a
technical affair.
Eusebius not only reconstructs the story of the
Church
but has an interpretation of world history. The ancient
culture
receives a Christian shape, and the transmuta-
tion sometimes shows originality. The greatest intel-
lects of the time, and some of the most imposing Chris-
tian figures of any age are the Fathers
of the Church
who cluster in the latter half of the century—almost
all of them highborn, enjoying the best education of
the time, and trained
in the monastic movement, yet
emerging also as great men of the
world—Saint Basil,
Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine,
and
many more. In a period of influential bishops, particu-
larly Saint Ambrose in Milan, the reign of
Theodosius
I (379-95) saw paganism forbidden, heretics pursued
by the
government, Catholic orthodoxy the official
religion of the whole empire,
and the spiritual author-
ity boldly asserting
its right against the temporal. The
piety of the lower sections of society
made itself evi-
dent in the further development
of the cult of martyrs
and the veneration for relics, as well as in the
eagerness
for pilgrimages.
Early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine had to
meet an important
accusation from the paganism that
still asserted itself, particularly in
some of the aristoc-
racy. Barbarian raiders
had even reached the city of
Rome. The tragedy that was falling upon the
West was
being ascribed to the desertion of the pagan deities.
Augustine answered the charge in his City of God.
II. THE MIDDLE AGES
1. The Church and the Barbarian Invaders.
Be-
tween the fifth and the tenth centuries, the
downfall
of the Roman Empire in the West, the eruption of
barbarian
hordes from Asia, the establishment of
Teutonic monarchies and the long
period of wars and
migrations threw the map of the European continent
into the melting pot, until it finally emerged with a
general pattern that
is still recognizable today. From
the seventh century, the rise of Islam
and the expansion
of the Arabian Empire produced a drastic and perma-
nent division in that Mediterranean world
which had
been the seat of the Greco-Roman civilization and had
formed
the original Christendom. In the eastern half
of the ancient Roman Empire,
the imperial system
maintained itself at Byzantium, and, though it lost
to
Islam most of its territory bordering on the eastern as
well as all
the southern Mediterranean, it retained its
cultural continuity (and
preserved Christianity in
Constantinople) for a further period of something
like
a thousand years.
In a sense it is now the history of Europe that really
opens, and this
Europe is to emerge as the new form
of “Christendom”
though it is only very slowly that
the northern part of it becomes
Christianized. The
centuries of upheaval produced a grave decline of
culture even in the south, and much of what had been
subtle and profound in
classical thought—much even
of the scholarship and
science—was to disappear for
a long period. Henceforward, there
is a separate history
of the West and we trace the rise of a Western civili-
ety itself has returned in many respects to primitive
forms. Compared with the Byzantine world, and even
later with the rapidly developing culture of Islam, the
West appears as a backward region for a long time,
its backwardness illustrated by the appalling collapse
of its city-life, at a time when Constantinople, and later
Bagdad, were of tremendous prestige and size. For
special reasons this Western civilization at its formative
period, when everything was still malleable, found
itself under the presiding influence of a Christianity
that had acquired greater power over mundane affairs
than ever before.
Some of the Teutonic invaders had become Chris-
tianized before their eruption into the Roman world,
but they
had been converted by Arians and had re-
ceived
the faith in a heretical form. This would seem
to have created difficulties
with the populations they
subjected, for no Arian dynasty survived, though,
in
the case of Spain, the Visigoths maintained themselves
by going
over to Catholicism. The Frankish invaders
of Gaul may have owed some of
their success to the
fact that their dynasty was converted only after
their
migration into the Roman Empire, so that from the
very first,
they adhered to the Catholicism of their
Gallo-Roman subjects. For
centuries the reigning
dynasties were to have an exceptional part to play
in
the shaping of the map, the history and the culture
of Europe, and
it was they who brought their peoples
over to Christianity in those more
primitive conditions
under which it was inevitable that religion should
be
regarded as the affair of the group.
If Christianity had won its way in the Roman Empire
through individual
conversion, it owed its spread over
Europe sometimes to mass-conversion,
i.e., to the de-
crees, perhaps the example,
sometimes the pressures
and persecuting policies, of those who held the
govern-
ment. It was to be extended
further in the north of
Europe in subsequent centuries by movements
from
both the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, so that,
when the
thirteenth century opened, only a small
wedge of paganism remained, near
the point where
the southern coast of the Baltic turns north.
Lithuania
resisted longest of all, balanced for a considerable
period
between the influence of Rome and the influ-
ence of Byzantium. From the western side the advance
was sometimes
made through military conquest and
colonization policies, particularly in
the east of what
the modern historian knows as Germany. Here the
warfare between Christian and pagan might be of a
brutal kind, down to the
time when, in the thirteenth
century, Prussia was
“converted” by the Teutonic
Knights.
A considerable part of Europe was Christianized,
therefore, by methods not unlike the ones by means
of which a
similar area was brought over to commu-
nism
in the twentieth century. As in the case of
communism—though
with greater effect in those ear-
lier stages in
the history of society—the Christian
control of education, the
procedures of indoctrination,
and the withholding of knowledge about
possible al-
ternative systems (or the
treatment of all alternatives
as merely disreputable) ensured the
maintenance of the
authoritarian creed in subsequent centuries,
without
the need to continue perpetually the forcible methods
that had
been required for its installation. Granted the
conditions of the time, one
could say, however, that
those countries which became Christian were fortu-
nate. The existing alternatives would
hardly have been
more happy for them. Indeed, it was their conversion
that brought them into the orbit of civilization.
In the Byzantine East, Roman Emperors, continuing
a regime that had
developed from the time of Con-
stantine,
were able to exercise in some respects (though
perhaps less than was once
thought) a species of
“caesaropapism.” But in the
West the Roman Emperor
had disappeared, while the bishop of Rome
maintained
his spiritual ascendancy amongst Christian believers
and
acquired during the invasions even a certain lead-
ership in some secular matters. Pope Gregory the Great
(590-614)
was fervent in his religious duties, extending
his influence over western
countries, directing the con-
version of
England, and asserting the spiritual su-
premacy of Rome as the see of Saint Peter. But in
default of anybody
else, at a time when Byzantine
authority in Italy had become inert, he was
compelled
to negotiate with the Lombard invaders of Italy and
to
administer Rome as a governor, inaugurating the
temporal power of the
papacy. It almost seemed as
though the Church in the centuries before the
barbar-
ian invasions had unwittingly been
developing an or-
ganization exactly
calculated to survive, and to pre-
serve the
faith, through just such a period of cataclysm
as had now occurred.
In a world where civilization had suffered such a
recession, Christianity
itself shared in the “barbariza-
tion,” coming closer sometimes to those pagan super-
stitions that governed primitive
minds. Neither the
spiritual life nor examples of saintliness were impossi-
ble, but the intellect was ready to
accept magic and
legend even more easily than before; and, since
ancient
thought itself was now imperfectly known and imper-
fectly understood, something of
superstition was run
into the interstices, and there was produced an
outlook
which entangled the material with the spiritual, mak-
ing religion more earthy, in a way, and nature
herself
a field for the miraculous.
On the other hand, whatever may be said about the
verted, there was a sense in which the spread of
Christianity was the kind of conquest that justifies itself
retrospectively. The most impressive part of the story
is the tremendous internal missionary work which the
Church conducted in the succeeding centuries in the
countries into which it spread—work calculated to
bring religion home to the individual, and to make it
gradually more genuine and profound, even if it had
been shallow and unreliable at first. It was not merely
a case of eliminating all the superstitions that could
not be harnessed to Christianity or preventing lapses
into paganism, but also teaching the belief that had
been handed down, influencing manners and morals,
and deepening sincerity, deepening the appreciation
of the faith. Part of the curious charm of Bede's Eccle-
siastical History (including those papal letters which
provide guidance for the conversion of England and
prescribe special consideration for those who need
careful weaning from paganism) lies in an amazing
gentleness that stands out (early in the eighth century)
against a background of violence; in it also is found
a combination of high ideas at the spiritual level with
crude notions about the universe, a simple love of
amiable miracles. The great support of the Church in
the Middle Ages was to be the sheer fidelity of the
mass of the people to their beliefs, and whether the
faith were superstitious or not, its genuineness was in
the last resort the real weapon that popes were to have
against kings.
During its earliest centuries, the Church had devel-
oped in a highly civilized world, and its theological
teaching
had come to require a considerable degree
of sophistication. The literature
to which it was at-
tached, and its own
insistence on the continuity of its
doctrinal tradition, gave it a vested
interest in the
preservation of the Greco-Roman culture. It could not
prevent a serious relapse even within its own ranks;
but in a sense it had
from the first been particularly
organizing itself for the preservation of
a creedal system;
and this—indeed the maintenance of the whole
tradi-
tion—called for a staff
of trained ecclesiastics. These
latter, precisely because of the education
that was so
essential for them, were to become indispensable also
in
the work of secular government. The attachment
to the Scriptures made the
Christian Church the enemy
of illiteracy at a crucial stage in the
development of
peoples; and the need to have translations for mission-
ary purposes secured that it might
even be the chief
agency in the development of a literary language.
The whole situation, in fact, imposed upon church-
men the tasks of educating the “barbarians” and
they
became the principal instrument by which the culture
of the
ancient classical world was transmitted to the
Teutonic peoples who had acquired the predominance
in Europe.
In the most violent days the monasteries
stood like fortresses, preserving
the tradition of learn-
ing—preserving, sometimes without knowing it, the
manuscripts of classical works that went out of circu-
lation for centuries. And for centuries it was church-
men—people with minds
primarily shaped by their
religious beliefs and religious
training—who took the
lead in the gradual recovery and deepening
apprecia-
tion of the thought and
learning of antiquity. The
ancient materials were now envisaged in a
framework
of Christian ideas. It was as though, in Western Europe,
a
civilization was being constructed from old materials
but to a new
architectural design. There emerged in
the Arabian Empire a parallel
culture, closely con-
nected with that of
ancient Greece, but under the
presidency of the Islamic faith. These two
imposing
examples of a culture which developed in a religious
setting
almost under the eye of the historian, offer
promising material for a
resort to the comparative
method.
During centuries of tumult and upheaval, however,
the framework of medieval
culture (like the pattern
on the map of Europe itself) was slow in taking
shape.
There was a period in the eighth century when
England and
Ireland seemed to be the last refuge of
civilization, and missionaries
particularly from Nor-
thumbria (often in
the tradition of Bede) carried the
light back to the continent, converting
parts of
Germany that had never been Christianized, and con-
tributing to the emergence of the
“Carolingian Renais-
sance” at the end of the century. At this latter date,
a
long alliance between the papacy and the prede-
cessors of Charlemagne had resulted in the re-creation
of an
“empire”—one in which Charlemagne was able
to exercise a sort of “caesaropapism,” controlling
the
Church even in essential matters and expecting from
it spiritual
support—as though the function of the laity
was to fight the
battles while the function of the clergy
was simply to assist the warfare
with their prayers.
A “Carolingian Renaissance,”
which did not itself open
out into a long-term cultural development,
established,
through the emperor's edicts, the enduring principle
that
monasteries and cathedrals should accept the re-
sponsibility for education.
Then further waves of invasion in Europe—and even
in
Britain—in the ninth and tenth centuries brought
a renewed
period of turbulence; and in the tenth cen-
tury
the papacy, having no longer an emperor to pro-
tect it, came to “the saddest period in its
history” when
it met something worse than
“caesaropapism,” becom-
ing the victim and the plaything of the local Roman
aristocracy. The
danger from violence of this immedi-
ate sort
was doubled by the spread of the doctrine that
even the land that was devoted to religious use. David
Knowles (in a paper, “Some Trends of Scholarship,
1868-1968, in the Field of Medieval History”) has
described how
The ownership and control of all churches, not excluding
monastic and
canonical foundations, passed gradually into
the hands of individuals
who, whether laymen or ecclesi-
astics, were lords of the land. Thus from the eighth century
onwards there was gradually established in western Europe
the regime of
the private or proprietary church, of which
the lord enjoyed many of
the fruits and to which he ap-
pointed a
priest (or abbot or bishop) of his choice, and which
he could give,
sell or divide like any other real property.
When the system was linked
at the summit to the extreme
claims [of] the emperors to appoint
bishops and even popes,
there existed in perfect form the
“church in the hands of
laymen.”
2. The Establishment of the Medieval Order.
The
real recovery of Europe from what can justifiably be
regarded as “Dark Ages” dates from the latter half of
the tenth century, when the Germans halted the
Magyars, nomadic hordes from
Asia, who had carried
their raids across the length and breadth of the
conti-
nent. Henceforward the west of
Europe was guarded
against the worst of its dangers by the
consolidation
of Germany and the establishment of the Magyars in
a
sedentary Christian state in Hungary, as well as the
development also of
Christian monarchies in Poland,
Bohemia, and Scandinavia. The establishment
of a
“Roman Empire” under Otto I in 962 opened at
last
a period of comparative stability, and there emerged
something
like the shape of the Western Europe we
know—a Europe which by
1053 had lost a great deal
of its connection with the Orthodox Church.
Trade and
industrial production increased again, and the Medi-
terranean, which in 972
“like the Baltic, was a hostile
sea,” saw important
developments which brought
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to the front. The period
be-
tween 1050 and 1150 was to prove one of
the most
creative epochs in European history, and its great
achievement was that it established the real bases of
the medieval system.
In this period intellectual influ-
ences from
the more highly developed Islamic world
provided an important stimulus; but
it was only one
factor in the case. The intellectual leadership had
passed to the northern part of France and to Lorraine.
The promotion of the
study of logic (which goes back
to Gerbert in Rheims, A.D. 972, and was
based at first
on the writings of Boethius) became “the most
impor-
tant feature in the advancement of
learning in northern
Europe.”
But from the time of Otto I the Church had become
still more the prey of the
laity and a low-water mark
was reached when the Emperor Henry III (1039-56)
deposed three
popes and installed his own nominees.
From the Church's point of view, the
main problem
to be solved was the question of the independence of
the
spiritual authority; for the existing system led to
many abuses and
obstructed any attempt to bring the
clergy under discipline. A monastic
reform which
started in Cluny in 910, though it did not attack this
problem, established centers of piety over a very wide
area. Another such
movement in Lorraine can be seen
from 1046 making a specific call for the
absolute inde-
pendence of the spiritual
authority. The demand for
change arose in the provinces therefore, and it
was
a band of people connected with the Lorraine move-
ment who brought this latter program to Rome and
became influential in that city. They supported their
cause by a study of
the canon law, and if on the one
hand they made use of what we know as the
“False
Decretals” (produced two centuries earlier in
the
province of Tours) they also found more imposing
evidence,
including documents from the time of
Gregory the Great.
Perhaps their labors would have been ineffectual if
the Emperor Henry III,
though nominating popes, had
not appointed some worthy people to the Holy
See.
Their efforts at a time when the next emperor, Henry
IV, was a
minor, led in 1059 to a crucial decree which
excluded the
laity—whether the emperor or the Roman
aristocracy—from any part in the appointment of a
pope and
prescribed an independent election by cardi-
nals. A great development of ecclesiastical litigation
and an
increasing number of appeals to Rome may
have represented another way in
which action from
the provinces helped to elevate and transform the
papal office. The Lorraine reformers had been equally
anxious—indeed, it would seem to have been their
initial
anxiety—that local ecclesiastical authorities
should be
liberated from subservience to a powerful
laity. During the pontificate of
Gregory VII (1073-85)
the zeal of the pope for the reform of the Church
at
large, and particularly the Church in Germany—the
determination to get rid of such evils as simony—led
to that
conflict between papacy and empire which was
to form one of the great
themes of medieval history.
In any case, the essential system of the Middle
Ages
now took shape.
At first it was a controversy as to whether the mon-
arch should choose his own bishops and invest them
with the
insignia of the spiritual office. And here the
Church was faced with
problems that arose out of the
character of its new entanglement with the
world.
Bishops in Germany had vast temporal possessions and
might be
the heads of considerable principalities. An
emperor could not be
indifferent to the appointment
“Investiture Contest” was in fact open to compromise,
and one pope, in what seems like a fit of absent-
mindedness, accepted the interesting idea of turning
the bishops into purely spiritual officers—a thing which
had no chance of being tolerated by the German epis-
copate. The pope possessed weapons—he could use
discontented magnates, or incite foreign powers, or
foment public opinion, against an emperor. Before
long, pope and emperor were presuming to depose one
another.
There can be little doubt that the assertion of the
independence of the
spiritual authority, and the result-
ing
conflict between “spiritual” and
“temporal,” were
amongst the factors that were to
give to Western his-
tory its remarkable dynamic
quality. The controversy
directed the thought of men to the question of
the
origin and basis of government, whether secular or
ecclesiastical,
and produced a literature that has little
parallel in the history of
Byzantine Christianity. At
times it led to a confrontation between the
theory or
the assumptions of the canon law and the principles
that lay
behind Roman Law. The fervor for political
theory in Europe in the
centuries from the time of
the Renaissance may owe something (just as
medieval
thought itself owed something) to the influence of the
ancient world. But many of the modern ideas rise more
directly out of the
politico-ecclesiastical controversies
of the Middle Ages. This point became
a great feature
in the historical thinking of Lord Acton, who summed
up the matter by saying that Saint Thomas Aquinas
had been “the
first Whig.”
In the age of the Reformation many of the medieval
patterns of thought are
still visible, whether in the
theory of the divine right of kings, or the
notion of
a contract between king and people, or the idea of
constitutional limitations on monarchical authority, or
the controversy
over tyrannicide. At a later period still,
it is possible to trace the
actual secularization of what
had once been politico-religious ideas.
Without what
under various forms was an epic conflict between the
secular authority and the spiritual, a Western Europe
under a predominant
religious faith might have
hardened into something like the Byzantine or
oriental
systems.
Gregory VII and the restored papacy stood for the
idea of a Christian
Commonwealth—not a “state” but
a
“religious society” existing for the glory and the
service of God. The whole was to be managed by a
secular arm and a
spiritual arm, and these were sup-
posed to
cooperate with one another. Often the two
did cooperate, the Church not
only offering its prayers
and its spiritual services—not merely
giving a vague
support to the whole order of things—but allying with
the monarch because, for example, it had an interest
in
preserving the larger territorial unit from disruption.
The ecclesiastics
might introduce the monarchy to
ideas of law, notions of property, the use
of written
deeds—techniques of an older civilization which
they
were in a position to remember, and perhaps to need
for
themselves. Monarchs in turn defended and
endowed the Church; and at a
desperate moment an
emperor had helped to produce that reformed papacy
which was to harass his successors. When the two
clashed, it was almost in
the logic of the medieval
system that the conflict should be long and that
the
spiritual arm should ultimately prevail, but only to its
own
detriment. Already, for Gregory VII, the pope
represented Christ, the real
governor of the world, and
it was for him to guide the destiny of the
“religious
society,” directing and coordinating its
larger purposes.
The most signal illustration of this in the latter
half
of the eleventh century was the way in which Gregory
VII and his
successor took up the idea of a Crusade
assuming that Rome should have the
role of inspirer
and director. At a time when monarchs were in revolt
against the Holy See, and Germany in particular with-
held its support, it was the pope, not the emperor, who
launched
the First Crusade (1096-99) and showed
himself the leader of Western
Europe.
3. The Culmination of the Middle Ages.
What was
now in the process of formation was a Christian culture
based on the universal acceptance of the faith and
typified in the twelfth
century by the rise of scholas-
ticism,
the great cathedral building, and the gradual
transition to what we call
universities. Behind it lay
the revival of Western economic life in the
eleventh
century; the growth of towns; the emergence of some-
thing like city-states in Italy; the
development of
Mediterranean trade by some of these as Moslem
power in
that sea declined; the success of the First
Crusade; the wider view of the
world; the contacts
with Arabian civilization; and the recovery of impor-
tant areas of ancient
thought—all these, together with
the fact that both men and
society had come to the
stage of general intellectual awakening, or had
found
the kind of exhilaration which lights the spark. Starting
from
the discovery of Aristotelian logic—and greatly
relishing
this—while lacking the concrete knowledge
of the world and
nature which Aristotle had possessed,
men ran to a great amount of
deductive reasoning from
little material; and, as the more scientific work
of
Aristotle emerged, they accepted virtually his whole
system of
nature, which became to them an inherited
“authority,” almost like the Bible—an authority
all the
firmer because it was in schools that medieval thought
developed. The great achievement was the degree to
which the natural
science and the philosophy of Aris-
duce a “scholasticism” which was bound to have a
character of its own, if only because the philosophy
(always remembering theology in the background)
tended to concentrate on such problems as the exist-
ence of God, the immortality of the soul, the question
of free will.
The pontificate of the statesmanlike Innocent III
(1198-1216) sees the
“religious society” of Western
Europe in all its
majesty, and it is this that sets the
stage in the thirteenth century for
the development
of scholasticism to its culmination in Saint Thomas
Aquinas, the renewed cathedral building, and the
spread of
universities—the climax of that Christian
culture which, a
century after Innocent, was to pro-
duce a
Giotto and a Dante. Innocent more than once
chose an emperor, and he forced
Philip Augustus of
France to recognize as a queen the first wife whom
he had tried to divorce. He had the kings of Aragon,
England, Portugal,
Castile, Denmark, and Sicily as his
vassals. He launched two crusades
against the infidel,
as well as a third against the heretics in the south
of
France. He also dominated the whole European diplo-
matic situation. His Lateran Council of 1215 was at-
tended by over 1200 bishops, abbots, and
priors (in-
cluding representatives from
Armenia and the Latin
churches that the crusaders had established in
Syria
and the Balkans) as well as many other people from
European
countries—proctors from the Emperor at
Constantinople, for
example, and from the kings of
France, England, Hungary, and Poland. In
other words,
it was “like a representative Parliament of
all
Christendom.” It was entirely the pope's council and
it
passed judgment between rival candidates for the
empire, and between King
John of England and his
barons. It also allotted the major part of the
county
of Toulouse, besides taking measures for the reform
of the
Church, and planning a new crusade.
The activities of the papal curia and its agents were
now undergoing a great
expansion. The multiplicity
of the appeals to Rome and the constant
despatch of
delegates from Rome to all parts of Europe secured
the
authority of the canon law throughout the system,
and kept the papacy in
touch with all regions. The
increasing organization and the increasing
circulation
of money assisted the development of papal finances
and
enabled Innocent to draw on the great wealth of
the Church.
This mundane success had its darker side, and, in-
deed, for some time the protests against the worldliness
of
ecclesiastics had been rising—protests that took
shape as
heresies. In the case of the Cathari, who had
brought Manichaeism from the
East and had captured
much of society in the south of France, as well as
spreading into neighboring regions, the class of austere
perfecti were a reproach to the Church, while the
ordinary credentes were allowed excessive license,
and
the whole movement could be regarded as a threat
to society
itself. The menace was so formidable that
the idea of the crusade was now
directed to the conflict
against the heretic as well as against the
infidel. A cruel
suppression took place and the Inquisition was gradu-
ally developed to cope with the
aftermath.
In the case of Peter Waldo and his followers who
from about 1170 took to
poverty and began to draw
doctrine straight from the New Testament, the
sup-
pression of the unauthorized
preaching drove a band
who had erred only through their enthusiasm,
into
revolutionary ways and actual heresy. When Saint
Francis
dedicated himself to poverty in 1208, Innocent
III took care not to repeat
the error, though Francis
and his followers had found their own way of
imitating
the apostolic life and they, too, had preached without
license. They were harnessed to the Church, and the
organization of the
movement was gradually taken out
of Saint Francis' hands. The monastic
system, based
on poverty, chastity, and obedience, was adapted to
the
purpose of men who went out into the world to
preach; and so the friars
found their way into the
medieval landscape.
Similarly, Saint Dominic in 1215 received permission
to establish an order
which should meet heresy with
argument and learning, and the members of
this order
were particularly trained for a preaching and teaching
role. These new orders of wandering friars, who served
under the direct
command of the pope and constituted
his special sort of army, quickly
became important and
numerous. They brought religion home to the
people
and acquired a popularity that sometimes weakened
the position
of the parish priest. They recruited bril-
liant men, some of the Dominicans leading in the
development of
scholasticism; and they came to ac-
quire an
important place in universities. The Francis-
cans soon carried their missionary work into northern
Europe and
North Africa. Before long they were in
China.
This was a period when religion was so imposing
in the way in which it was
handed down and presented
to people—and was so powerful in its
forms of current
expression—that, in spite of some strange
deviations,
it hardly occurred to the great mass of human beings
(even
to the rebels and the powerful intellects) that
there was the alternative
of disbelief. A religion that
has soaked itself into the minds of men, and
almost
become second nature to them, can work like a chemi-
cal in society, inspiring original thought, giving
wing
to the imagination and inciting the believer to strange
adventures, curious experiments in living. In the Mid-
world—Christianity with the whole mundane order—
produced a supra-national religious society that was
itself an amazing structure and can now be envisaged
as a work of art. If we have in mind all the external
apparatus of the religion as it existed at that time—its
symbolism and its ceremonial, its biblical personalities
and famous saints, its associations with a peculiar pat-
tern of the cosmos, even its view of the hand of God
in history—we can entertain the hazardous idea of a
“Christian civilization,” which, culminating in the
thirteenth century, affected the landscape of town and
country, governed the calendar of the year, touched
the home, the craft guilds, the universities, and even
put a stamp of its own on the most idle superstitions.
This civilization carried its own ideas about the nature
of personality and about the right posture to be
adopted by human beings under the sun. It provided
the conditions for the development of piety and the
inner life—for the deepening of religious thought and
religious experience—and for the expression of all this
in cathedrals, in painting, and in poetry.
Even the papacy, which can seem so unattractive
to us as it asserts its
claims against powerful monarchs,
stood in many ways as a beneficent
influence, insisting
on certain standards, raising the quality of the
clergy,
checking forms of tyranny, providing antecedents for
modern
international law, and directing governments
to objects that transcended
the ambitions of secular
rulers.
4. The Beginning of Decline.
However, in this
whole medieval order of things Christianity was
gravely entangled with the systems of the world, its
bishops, for example,
being great landholders and
feudal lords. Even if men in general had been
more
otherworldly, the conditions in the terrestrial sphere
itself
were bound to suffer changes as time went on.
Because even the
ecclesiastics (by the very character
of the situation) were not
sufficiently otherworldly, the
Church itself came under the operation of
some of the
laws which govern other religions—govern human
systems generally. In a sense it became the victim of
the remarkable
success that it had achieved in the
preceding period. To the upholders of
the existing
order of things, the changes that were brought about
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were
bound to appear as a
decline; and in certain respects
the medieval synthesis can be seen to be
breaking
down. But the story of religion—even the story of
the
state as essentially a “religious”
society—had by no
means come to its end. The downfall of the old
order
is difficult to disentangle from the interesting move-
ments that were reassembling the materials
and bring-
ing about the creation of a new one.
In some respects
the medieval period moved into what we call modern
times on its
own momentum, as a result of impulses
within itself. Amid much confusion,
we see deeper lines
of continuous development, as though the logic of
events were working itself out.
It was in the realm of thought—indeed, it was at
the heart of
scholasticism itself—that the most fateful
changes occurred. And
these changes were calculated
to affect the actual character of religion,
not merely
the relations between Christianity and the world. Saint
Thomas Aquinas, by his reexposition of Aristotelianism,
had provided
believers with a philosophy which ex-
plained
the cosmos and was crowned by a theology;
but the result had been to make
philosophy an autono-
mous affiar. Even while
he was at work there were
men who were more down-to-earth, more prepared
just
to hold their Aristotelianism neat; and perhaps a cer-
tain worldly-mindedness made them a danger not only
to an ecclesiastical system but also to religion itself.
Others who were
not worldly-minded or unbelieving
tended to argue their way behind the
tradition of
classical philosophy itself, and to question its
basis—to
doubt even the possibility of metaphysics. It
meant
denying the ability of the human mind to reach the
kind of
truths that were associated with “natural reli-
gion,” or to reason in any way about God.
Under the influence of William of Ockham a great
section of the academic
world went over to a system
which, without denying the revelation, cut away
the
forms of rationalization hitherto current, making reli-
gion a matter of pure fideistic acceptance. Even the
difference between right and wrong was removed from
the domain of
reason—it came to be held that a thing
was good because an
arbitrary God had decreed it so.
If scholasticism itself had emerged too
directly out of
a passion for logic, and had lost something by its devel-
opments in an abstract realm, too
remote from life and
from general culture, the fourteenth-century develop-
ments increased the gulf and helped
to make the whole
system curiously arid. Even the content of religious
thought came to be altered, for reflection was now
concentrated on the
absolute power of a God who was
beyond man's reason, and who, from a state
of uncon-
ditioned freedom, settled all
things by sheer arbitrary
decree. The will of God, the power of God,
became
the great theme, and the result was by no means the
same as
when the emphasis is placed on the thesis:
“God is
love.” Even in the discussion of human beings,
attention was
fixed on the role of man's will and that
of God's grace in the work of
salvation.
These preoccupations help to explain some of the
peculiar emphases and
developments in the sixteenth-
century
Reformation. In any case, the separation be-
tween faith and reason was bound to create difficulty—
unreal, God himself more remote—a situation which
could encourage secularism and religious indifference.
Perhaps more dramatic at the time, however, were
the changes in the
relationship between the Church
and the world, and even the appearance of a
tremen-
dous controversy concerning the
nature of the Church
itself.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the
papacy both presumed too much
on the success that
it had achieved, and discovered what it had lost
by
the discomfiture of its chief rival, the empire in
Germany.
Henceforward, it had to confront the rising
national monarchies without the
powerful assistance
which, ideally, should have come from the ancient
partnership between pope and emperor. In the bull
Unam Sanctam of 1302, Pope Boniface VIII
(1294-1303), relying on the assertions and on the victories
of his
predecessors, issued too high a challenge to
monarchs—claiming
too boldly the right to direct and
judge them even in the exercise of their
temporal
power. The resulting conflict, in which the French
government
accused him of appalling crimes and
demanded his trial before a general
council of the
Church, brought him to humiliation in 1303 at the
hands
of a body of desperadoes, and he died within
a few weeks after he had been
released.
In 1305, an archbishop of Bordeaux who was elected
as Pope Clement V proved
to be a creature of the
French king; and, besides creating many French
cardi-
nals, he took up his residence at
Avignon, which was
then just outside the frontiers of France. Owing
partly
to the political confusion of Italy, a return of the
papacy to
Rome proved impracticable for a long time.
Gregory XI went back there in
1377, but he died in
the following year and then the cardinals in Rome
elected a pope, but another was elected in Avignon.
Now, therefore, the
system reached its reductio ad
absurdum, two
successors of Saint Peter making con-
current
claims and exercising concurrent power. Noth-
ing could have been more injurious to the Church and
more damaging
to prestige than the existence for over
thirty years of the Great
Schism—some parts of Europe
attaching themselves to a pope in
Avignon, others to
a pope in Rome, with the further complication of
overlappings here and there, so that a diocese might
not be sure which of
two rival claimants was its duly
appointed bishop. There now arose the
question: What
means of rescue were open to a Church that seemed
to
have been struck at its very heart?
5. The Conciliar Movement.
It was natural that
there should be some tension in the Middle Ages
be-
tween the idea of the Church as the
entire community
of believers, collectively sustained and inspired by the
Holy Spirit, and the notion of a clerical hierarchy,
imposed
from above, and deriving a special authority
from outside the system, i.e.,
direct from Christ. It had
been noted that if Peter had received the power
of
“binding and loosing” (in Matthew 16:18-19)
this
particular prerogative had been extended after the
Resurrection
to all the Apostles (in John 20:22-23);
but though the effect of this was
to widen the basis
of authority in the Church, it did not in reality
override
the prevailing view that the bishop of Rome, as the
representative of Saint Peter, had the effective power
of government. The
term “Roman Church” was
ambiguous—it could
mean the local church of the city
of Rome but also it could signify the
entire congrega-
tion of the faithful. It
was the latter that was supposed
to be preserved against error, not in the
sense that
lapses here and there were impossible, but in the sense
that the Church in its entirety would never go astray—
there
would never be heresy in all its parts at a single
time.
Even this stress on the wide-ranging community of
believers, was not taken
to mean that the community
as such could carry on the work of government
without
the directing hand of the papacy; and those who glori-
fied General Councils of the Church
normally assumed
that the pope himself would actually summon these
bodies and lead them—that, indeed, his own authority
came to its
maximum when he worked through a
General Council. On the other hand, it was
possible
to consider that, though the church in Rome had played
a
distinguished part in the establishment and mainte-
nance of orthodoxy, the pope as a man might fall into
error; and
if he notoriously supported what had long
been regarded as heresy, his
authority would be ipso
facto at an end. It
came to be asserted that the same
would be true if he were publicly and
obviously guilty
of serious crime.
The possibility of such contingencies raised the
question of the part which
the College of Cardinals
or General Councils might have to play at the
moment
when the incapacity had to be declared. It has been
pointed out
that in canonist writers of about A.D. 1200
are to be found anticipations
of all the main assertions
of the Conciliar Movement. Yet this was the time
when
the papacy under Innocent III was making the highest
possible
claims and asserting that all other jurisdictions
in the Church were only a
derivation from Rome.
In the thirteenth century, however, the development
of the kind of canon law
which treated the Church
as a corporation tended to increase the possible
lever-
age of conciliar ideas. There now
appeared more of
the suggestion that a corporation is the source of
the
authority of its head, that all members of a corporation
should
take part in decisions which affect the whole
it lost its head, and could take the necessary measures
to rectify the default in the leadership. Such ideas were
able to develop at the very time when papal publicists,
for their part, were continuing the line of thought
which had brought the authority of Innocent III to
its height. Amongst writers hostile to the papacy the
idea arises not only that the cardinals could act on
behalf of the pope when he himself was defaulting in
some way, but also the idea that in serious matters
the pope should always act in consultation with the
cardinals—and moreover the idea that the cardinals
had the authority to summon a General Council.
In all this we find the insertion of what the modern
student would regard as
“constitutional” ideas into
canonist reflections on
Church government. The sup-
porters of the
Conciliar Movement at the beginning
of the fifteenth century could feel
that they were by
no means innovators—that, indeed, they were
follow-
ing principles with a long and
respectable ancestry,
principles essentially orthodox.
In any case, the Great Schism—the scandal of two
lines of
successive popes reigning contemporaneously
and dividing the
West—made it necessary to turn to
just that kind of thinking
which envisaged the Church's
power of self-rectification during a failure
in the su-
preme leadership. The Schism lasted
for nearly thirty
years, and, though almost all of the popes elected
during this period had sworn to resign if their depar-
ture would help the cause of unity, the promises
were
not kept. If either of the rival popes summoned a
General Council
it could only be a party affair and
the two colleges of cardinals failed in
their attempts
to persuade their respective popes to issue a joint
invitation to a Council. When in 1409 a Council was
called by cardinals at
Pisa, its legality was doubtful,
and though it pretended to depose the two
existing
holders of the papal office and secure the election of
a
third, the real effect of this was to make the situation
worse—there were now three claimants to the dignity
instead of
two. It is understandable if such an im-
passe
provoked much discontent with the general con-
dition of the Church, and stimulated a great deal of
thinking about
the position of both popes and General
Councils.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the
nation-states were now
becoming more important and
governments that had the choice of adhering to
one
pope rather than another acquired more power over
their national
churches. Their diplomacies (particularly
during the Hundred Years' War
between France and
England) affected their ecclesiastical loyalties
(the
English disliking a pope at Avignon, for example); and
when the
Emperor Sigismund combined with one of
the rival popes to summon the more imposing Council
of
Constance, it was through diplomacy conducted
with various national
governments that he secured a
broad basis for the assembly. This body
attacked the
papal problem in 1415, and began by deposing the
successor of the pope who had gained office as a result
of the Council of
Pisa—they struck at the very pope
who had joined Sigismund in
summoning the new
Council. The resignation of another claimant was
then
secured; and, though the pope at Avignon refused to
give way, the
diplomacy of Sigismund prevented his
having the support of reigning
monarchs.
The Great Schism was for practical purposes healed
and a new pope, Martin V
(1417-31), was appointed—a
man who, once in authority, opposed
the conciliarist
ideas then prevalent. The cry had gone up that a
General Council was superior to the pope and it was
decreed at Constance
that a Council should be sum-
moned at least
every ten years. There were some who
urged that even laymen should have a
place in such
a Council, which was being regarded as a repre-
sentative body. Another Council
which assembled at
Basel in 1431 refused to be dissolved at the
command
of another pope, and it brought absurdity to a higher
degree
than before, for it threatened a renewal of
schism by presuming to depose
the pope and to ap-
point another one. The
excesses of the radicals fright-
ened some of
the moderates into conservatism, how-
ever, and
in any case it was the pope rather than the
Council who had the power to
execute a policy ef-
fectively.
In 1439 a rival Council which the pope had sum-
moned to Ferrara decreed that a Council was not
superior to a pope;
and though a dwindling body went
on meeting at Basel, they came to terms in
1449,
abandoning their adhesion to the man whom they had
presumed to
appoint to the papal office. They had
humiliated a supreme pontiff and
compelled him to
treat with them after he had decreed their
dissolution;
but they brought the whole Conciliar movement to
a
miserable end.
6. The Transition to a New Order.
In the meantime
new forms of heresy had been arising, and they
gained
additional strength from the abuse that was being made
of such
things as indulgences, from the jealousy felt
toward ecclesiastical
property, and from national feel-
ing against
the intrusions of papal power into one
country and another. From about 1374
John Wycliffe
in England was preaching against the excessive wealth
of
the Church and claiming that the monarch should
decide how much of this
should be retained—a gospel
that brought him the patronage of a
powerful and
covetous nobility. He lost some of his humbler allies
when he attacked the problem of the eucharist, declar-
bread and wine retained their former substance. Em-
phasizing the absolute power of the will of God—a
form of emphasis which the influence of Saint
Augustine as well as contemporary movements in phi-
losophy encouraged—Wycliffe ran to predestinarian
views which were calculated to lessen the role of
church offices in the work of salvation. He encouraged
the reading of the Bible (and its translation into the
vernacular) because the Scriptures were of higher au-
thority than the traditions of the Church.
Some analogies to the later Protestantism are appar-
ent in all this; but the first Lancastrian monarch of
England,
Henry IV (1399-1413), desired the Church's
recognition of his title to the
throne of England, and
his parliament carried a new statute, requiring
the
burning of heretics—a statute which was severely exe-
cuted during the reign of his son. The
“Lollard” fol-
lowers of
Wycliffe, some of whom had tended to revo-
lutionary ideas, could survive only as ineffectual secret
heretics.
Partly under the influence of the English movement,
John Hus led a similar
revolt against ecclesiastical evils
in Bohemia, and, though he avoided some
of Wycliffe's
doctrinal innovations, he was burned in 1415 by the
Council of Constance, which wished to show that at
least it did not
tolerate heresy. Some of Hus's associates
came nearer to the ideas of
Wycliffe, and there
emerged a popular radical movement which attacked
monasticism, the adoration of saints, purgatory, indul-
gences, etc., on the ground that these things were
not
authorized by the actual words of Scripture. And here,
as in
England, a powerful and richly endowed Church,
rife with obvious abuses,
was challenged by a danger-
ous picture of
Apostolic Christianity—the concept that
the clergy should be
poor men leading a simple life
as they guarded their flocks.
In 1419 the Czechs revolted and their religious
grievances, which gave the
conflict at times something
of an apocalyptic character, combined with a
tremen-
dous national hatred against the
Germans, who had
acquired a strong position at court, in the
university
of Prague, and in the industry of the towns. Successive
campaigns against the rebels came to disaster, and
though the extremists
were defeated in 1434, an agree-
ment had to
be made with the moderates which put
the Bohemian church in a special
position (e.g., in
regard to the reception by the laity of communion
in
both kinds). Bohemia remained, indeed, a region of
potential
revolt, potential heresy.
It might have been argued that the fifteenth century
had a special need for
the Christian religion at its best,
since deep forces in society were
producing a great
secularization of life—producing indeed a
society that
increased the mundane claims on human beings. The
growth of
industry and commerce, the development
of high finance, the increasing
importance of a bour-
geois class, and the
blossoming of virtual city-states in
Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands
provided a new
dynamic for the secular activities of men. The
resulting
erosion of the traditional feudal forms of society was
bound
to produce disorder in the period of transition,
and the Church had tied
itself unduly to the older order
of things—the very pattern of
its organization ceased
to correspond with the systems that were
developing
in the world. The exile of the papacy in Avignon, the
ensuing Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement had
increased the tendency
of separate regions to look after
their local religious affairs, and the
national govern-
ments were growing in
strength and importance, legis-
lating
against papal interference or making their own
terms with the popes.
The principle of nationality was itself receiving
recognition, even in the
organization of General
Councils and universities. The Renaissance in Italy
and
the more effective recovery of the thought of antiquity,
assisted
a secularization which, however, had also been
showing itself in the
development of vernacular litera-
ture and
its advance to high artistic status. And the
secularization showed itself
within the great develop-
ment of the visual
arts, especially in Italy—perhaps
also in the tendency of some
scholastic writers to move
over to science, to problems of celestial
mechanics, for
example.
But all this—and the palpable abuses in the Church
itself—did not mean that Christianity was coming to
its terminus
or that there had been a serious decline
of religious faith as such. The
very revolts against the
Church were born of religious
zeal—themselves signs
of a questing kind of religion that gets
behind the
conventions and seeks the original fountain of the faith.
The interesting eruptions of spontaneous life are not
antireligious but are
more like a groping for fresh
adventures in religion, longings for an
almost noninsti-
tutional kind of
piety, as though it were felt necessary
to cut through the artificialities
and go direct to the
essential things. Most significant of all are the
devo-
tional movements, that press for
contemplation and
austerity, or seek a mystical apprehension of
Christ.
And the Imitation of Christ which has been
the inspi-
ration of both Protestants and
Catholics—written in
the mid-fifteenth century, and more widely
published
and translated than anything in Christianity except the
Bible—contains hardly a reference to the Church in
spite of its
devotion to the Eucharist. An interesting
feature of the new age is the
involvement of the laity
in the new religious movements, and the
association
of these with municipal life.
III. THE REFORMATION AND
COUNTER-REFORMATION
1. The Pre-Reformation Church.
The Church at the
beginning of the sixteenth century confronts us
with
the variety which we should expect to find when we
look at the
manifold life of a whole continent. There
were abuses and
disorders—indeed an unusual number
of grave scandals at certain
levels—but also in many
places even deep piety and reforming
zeal. The
Renaissance itself could bring attempts to enrich the
Christian outlook with the new humanism, projects
for a further alliance
between Platonism and religion,
and a fresh interest in the ancient
texts—the Scriptures
and the Fathers of the Church. Even in
Italy there
were many localities that had their religious revivals,
some of them medieval in character, popular and even
perhaps superstitious,
though the one associated with
Savonarola in Florence captured some of the
famous
figures of the Renaissance. The monastic system, from
its very
nature, was subject to ups-and-downs, espe-
cially as its rules took for granted a certain intensity
of
spiritual life. But if in some regions monasteries had
sunk into
immorality, there had been a number of
reforming movements, some of them
emerging from
within and arising spontaneously. There had been edu-
cational developments—the
religious schools under the
Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands,
for
example, and the founding in fifteenth-century
Germany of
universities under the patronage of the
clergy or the pope. Many of these
movements were
local in character, arising from below. Even a wicked
pope would normally have no reason for checking
them, or for discouraging
piety as such.
On the other hand, the leading officers of the Church
could be too remote
from these things and ordinarily
too indifferent in respect to them. It is
doubtful
whether the directors of the Catholic system took even
the
minimum measures that were required to maintain
their guidance over
religious life or ensure the survival
of the system as a whole. In some
regions the state
of the priesthood and the work of the pulpit had
sunk
so low that a prince who wished to plunder the Church
had only to
open the door to the missionaries of
Protestantism, who might bring an
awakening or a
revolt without meeting with an adequate reply. Too
much
of the burden of the Church had come to be
borne by a lower clergy who
seemed sometimes hardly
trained to realize the nature of their own
religion, and
had every reason to be discontented with their lot. A
surprising number of them (and particularly of those
who belonged to the
minor and mendicant orders) were
to become Protestants, and some of those
who had been
unsatisfactory before their conversion were by no
means
contemptible after it. It would appear that there
was often too much of what might be called paganism
or
superstition still mixed into the popular Christianity
of the
period—too great a readiness on the part of the
authorities to
exploit the willingness of ignorant people
to rely on wonders that were
mechanically operated,
salvation-devices that had lost their connection
with
the inner man.
Apart from the more technical controversies at a
higher level the Reformers
were to attack in the world
at large the attitude which the lowest classes
were
encouraged to take towards images, relics, indulgences,
the
invocation of saints, and the like. There were now
too many people who were
coming to be too mature
for this; and the Reformation (which could
have
achieved nothing without the success of its preaching)
came in
one aspect as a religious revival, a call to a
more personal faith, a
demand for a more genuine
“Christian society.” The
Reformation was to have its
dark sides but it was to secure its successes
because
so many people were ready to be earnest, ready (when
called
upon) to bring religion home to themselves and
to feel that they had some
responsibility in the matter.
In a sense the Reformation occurred because
(on a
long-term view) the medieval Church had done its
work so well,
producing out of barbarian beginnings
a laity now capable of a certain
self-help, a certain
awareness of responsibility. And as the Church of
Rome, once it had been provoked into reexamining
itself, was to recover its
hold on people by its own
preaching and its spiritual intensity, the
opening cen-
turies of modern times see the
reassertion of religion
both in the individual and in society.
The Reformation was to be helped at the same time
by what on the one hand
was a colossal envy and
covetousness, and on the other hand a great resent-
ment. The abuses in the ecclesiastical
organization
itself were sufficient to provoke a revolt, and if they
offered an opening for zealous reformers they pre-
sented too great a temptation to monarchs and mag-
nates. In the Middle Ages there had been serious oppo-
sition to the development of the power of
the papacy
in particular—the capture of the spiritual
prerogatives
into a single center and the insertion of papal authority
into every corner of the European system. At a certain
stage in the story
the process had been understandable;
the papacy had often stood as the most
beneficial
agency on the continent; abuses, disorders, and lapses
into
superstition had tended to occur in the regions
which the hand of the pope
could not reach.
But the centralization did not prevent benefices,
offices, indulgences,
dispensations, etc., being used as
a means of making money, and new offices
being cre-
ated in order that they could be
sold—the Church, and
particularly Rome, being saddled with
dignitaries who
initial outlay. Early in the sixteenth century the posi-
tion of the papal states was so difficult that the pope,
as the ruler of a principality, had a desperate need
for money; and he used his spiritual prerogatives in
order to procure it—an evil that was liable to show
its consequences throughout the length and breadth of
Western Christendom. A higher clergy who were too
often like the sharers in a colossal spoils system did
too little for the earnest people, though they seemed
to stamp very quickly on any enterprise that might
threaten their own profits. The Church lost much,
therefore, through the nature of its entanglement with
the world; and its vested interests—the mundane pos-
sessions that were supposed to guarantee its position—
became in fact a terrible weakness, an abuse to some
people, and, to others, the primary object of cupidity.
2. The Reformation in Germany.
The Reformation
is to be regarded as essentially a religious
movement
and all our history becomes distorted unless we see
it as
arising primarily out of the spiritual needs and
aspirations of earnest
men. Social conditions might
place certain sections of the population in a
favorable
position for hearing propaganda or for welcoming
it—rather in the way that townsmen may be more
ready than
peasants to open their minds to a new
thing—and such factors
might have an effect on the
social or geographical distribution of a new
religious
system. The current forms and the current needs of
society
might affect that fringe of ethical ideas and
practical precepts in which a
new form of faith works
out some of its more mundane implications.
In history, everything is so entangled with every-
thing else that for many students the political or eco-
nomic consequences of the Reformation might
appear
more momentous than any other aspect of the move-
ment. But religion is the stone that is thrown into
the
pool, the agency that starts all the ripples. In the
Reformation
itself we are dealing with people for
whom religion was not merely a matter
of opinion or
speculation, leaving an opening for alternatives. They
were people who superstitiously feared the powers of
hell, and reckoned the
afterlife as clear a vested interest
as anything in the
world—people, also, who believed
that only one form of religion
could be right, and
regarded it as a matter of eternal moment that God
should be served and propitiated in the proper way.
Martin Luther, while still a young man, and a mem-
ber of the Augustinian order which was to produce
so many supporters
of the Reformation, became re-
markable
through the intensity of his inner experience
and his exaggerated attempts
to secure the salvation
of his soul by his own works and religious
exercises.
In this whole endeavor he would seem to have over
looked certain aspects of theological teaching that had
not been
lost in the Middle Ages, and he was brought
into the predicament of Saint
Paul—powerless to
achieve the good that he so greatly wanted to
achieve.
After a distressing time, the help of his own superior
and
the study of the Epistle to the Romans brought
him further light, and he
came to the view that man
is justified by faith alone, but that the
Catholicism of
his time was preaching salvation by
“works,” even by
religious exercises.
In reality historical Christianity had always excluded
as Pelagianism any
idea that a man could save himself
by his own efforts; and Luther, though
he had seized
on something that had been part of the Church's tradi-
tion—going back to certain
aspects of Saint Augustine
and Saint Paul—went to the opposite
extreme, insisting
on the corruptness of man and his inability to have
a part in his own salvation, so that he ran to predes-
tinarian ideas which were later systematized by
Calvin,
and which gave the Reformation an antihumanist
aspect. The
later Middle Ages had seen a concentration
on the problem of both freedom
and the will in both
man and God; and it seems clear that unfortunate
consequences followed from too intent a consideration
of the power and
sovereignty of God, if these were
regarded as separate from His love.
In a sense Luther's views sprang from the intensity
of his own spiritual
experience and his feeling about
what had happened in his own case; and
they answered
to what many people throughout the ages had felt to
be
their own experience—the sense of being drawn
by a power greater
than themselves, pulled into salva-
tion by
forces which they tried in vain to resist. Luther
therefore had been open
to the criticism that he in-
ferred too much of
his theology from his personal
experience.
In Wittenberg he was one of those people who
promoted a local religious
revival, and his immediate
superiors were encouraging him in his work,
advancing
him to a professorship so that his influence would be
enlarged. He was a mountain of a man, capable of great
profundities and
giant angers, but possessing a vein of
poetry, and, at times, the heart of
a little child. But
he was liable to be intellectually erratic, and when
in
1517 the abuses of indulgence-selling led him to offer
his
ninety-five theses as a debating-challenge, he en-
larged the issue by his theological assertions and pro-
vided his enemies with a basis for attack.
Instead of
calmly reasoning with him, they too set out to enlarge
the
issue, driving him from one logical conclusion to
another and into
positions that he had not anticipated.
And he—incited by the
wave of feeling that he had
aroused in Germany as well as by his own
mighty
passions—was glad to be provoked, moving forward
and denounced the condition of the whole Church.
Carefully measuring his power, he enlarged the
whole campaign in 1520,
setting out to undermine the
sacramental system of the Church which
contributed
to the power of priests. He called in the secular au-
thority to carry out the work of reform
which the
Church seemed unable to achieve for itself. Against
the
power of a vast organization that had long had
the governments of Europe
behind it, he asserted what
he called “the liberty of a
Christian man.” Soon he
was attacking the monastic system to
which he had
once been devoted. And he convinced himself that the
pope
was Anti-Christ.
He was helped by a certain religious dissatisfaction
and by the anger,
particularly in Germany, against
ecclesiastical abuses that were associated
with Italy.
He was enabled by the printing press, and by his own
prodigious energy, to conduct what was perhaps the
first really large-scale
publicity campaign of the kind
that makes its appeal to general readers.
An enormous factor in the case was the weakness
in Germany of the Emperor
Charles V, who was dis-
tracted by the
problems of the many countries over
which he ruled, and by the princes of
the separate
states in Germany who sought to aggrandize their
authority and were sometimes ready to see the advan-
tage of an alliance with Lutheranism. The Emperor
was to be held
up still further by the advance of the
Turks, which made it necessary for
him to postpone
the solution of his German problems. When the cause
of
the Reformation came to be preached—in the cities
of South
Germany for example—it found an eager
reception; and for a
considerable time even regions
like Bavaria and Austria—regions
that later became
renowned for their Catholicism—seemed to be
moving
over to Protestantism.
In reality Luther seems to have been a man of con-
servative and perhaps authoritarian disposition. He had
been
moved to action because he could not bear the
manner in which the Church
was tolerating both prac-
tical abuses and
misrepresentations of the faith. But
in the period of the great revolt he
put forward certain
theses which were to be remembered as the great
Reformation principles, and were to have a broader
historical influence
than even his theology. They as-
serted the
right of the individual to interpret the
Scriptures; the priesthood of all
believers; and the
“liberty of a Christian man.” When
others took these
theses according to their obvious meaning but at the
same time came to conclusions that were different from
his, he made it
plain that he could not tolerate their
individualism, and that indeed he
had no use for rebels.
There was one interpretation of Scripture, and that
the true one; and only sheer perversity could induce
a man to
read anything else into the text. Neither the
Roman Catholics nor the
Zwinglians nor the Ana-
baptists were free
to interpret the Scriptures for them-
selves.
And when Luther came to the construction of
his own system, he showed
himself in many respects
a conservative at heart. Clearly it had not been
his
desire to divide the Church, but his theological
teaching—and his persistence in it after it had been
condemned—was almost bound to produce that result.
The general
historian of Europe would have to say that
the most momentous consequences
of the Lutheran
revolt were things of which Luther would have
disapproved.
Lutheranism itself remained essentially Teutonic,
and, outside Germany, it
established itself at the time
only in Scandinavia. There was a moment when
it
seemed likely to sweep over Germany, a politico-
religious unheaval of the kind that can create a
nation.
Once it failed to carry the whole country however,
it was
bound to have the opposite effect, creating a
new, confessional division,
in some respects more bitter
than any of the others, more difficult to
overcome. It
resulted in one important contribution to the German
nation, however—Luther's translation of the Bible into
a
language which was to prevail over local dialects
and to have a unifying
effect. But, though Luther, when
he called for the aid of princes, thought
of them as
servants of the Church, bound by duty to serve the
lofty
cause, he produced a situation in which princes
had the power to choose
between competing systems
and so acquired great authority in religious
matters.
His pessimistic ideas about man and the world may
have had
the effect of diminishing the role and the
influence of religion in the
political realm, making
Lutheranism too uncritical an ally of monarchy.
In the period immediately after his condemnation
at the Diet of Worms (April
1521), Luther was in
hiding at the Wartburg castle, and during his
absence
more radical developments began to take place. In
Wittenberg
itself, Andrew Karlstadt (or Carlstadt)
promoted a further movement against
the Mass and,
on the strength of the Old Testament attacked images
and
called for a stricter sabbatarianism, so that signs
of the later Puritanism
were already visible. This, in
March 1522, provoked Luther's return to
Wittenberg,
for he did not give the same authority to Old Testament
law, and, in regard to the things that the populace
loved, he deprecated a
destructive policy conducted
without sufficient previous explanation. In
the mean-
time the reform movement had been
establishing itself
in towns where the social conflict had made the situa-
tion almost revolutionary; and by the
spring of 1521
Thomas Müntzer had combined the religious cause
end of the year he had proclaimed in an apocalyptic
manner the downfall of the Church; he insisted that
a scriptural religion was not enough since the voice
of God spoke directly within the believer, and he
threatened the opposition with punishment at the
hands of the Turk. Also some of the other “prophets”
of Zwickau moved in 1522 to Wittenberg, where they
produced trouble for the Lutherans. Soon the objec-
tions to infant baptism became significant.
Forms of apocalypticism and mysticism had made
their appearance in various
regions in the later Middle
Ages, and in Germany not only the peasantry but
the
lower classes in the towns provided promising soil for
these
movements. Now, as so often in history, religious
radicalism could quickly
lead to political extremism
and to the feeling that the time had come for
the
destruction of the godless. Thomas Müntzer came to
be
connected with the Peasants' Revolt in 1525, and,
when speaking to the
rebels about the enemy, could
say: “They will beg you, will
whine and cry like chil-
dren. But you are to
have no mercy, as God com-
manded through
Moses.” Yet he is deeply moving when
he writes of his spiritual
experience and the voice of
God in the believer: “Scripture
cannot make men live,
as does the living Word which an empty soul
hears.”
The sects for which Luther so unwillingly opened
the
way did not know how to apply the brake, and when
they captured
Münster in 1534 they established polyg-
amy, while in Moravia they experimented in commu-
nism. It was they who carried the seeds that were
to
be so important to the far future—the insistence that
God regarded men as equal, that Christ had made them
free and that there
was an Inner Light which men had
to obey. The twentieth century has shown
that even
the apocalypticism can be deeply ingrained in man and
admits
of being secularized. It goes back to biblical
times, but (at least when
the pattern has once been
established) it can exist without a supernatural
religion.
3. Calvin.
In the Swiss Reformation the city-state
made its last contribution to
history; for it communi-
cated to a nascent
church something of the pattern
of its own organization (and particularly
government
by councils) as well as something of its spirit, so that
the secular and the spiritual seemed to have kinship
with one another, just
as the development of the Cath-
olic hierarchy
had fitted neatly into the feudal world.
Here, moreover, the transformation
that occurred was
more radical—organized Christianity reshaped
itself,
producing a palpably different landscape.
Signs of this are apparent in the case of Zwingli,
the original leader of
the revolt within the Swiss Con-
federation. The initial breach occurred on matters of
discipline,
but the changes in doctrine and thought
were more radical, more rationalistic than in the case
of the
Lutheran Revolt. Here, however, the identifica-
tion of the movement with the political ambitions of
Zürich turned the Reformation into a politico-religious
affair—a patriotic cause—Zwingli meeting his death
in
battle.
What we might regard as the international Refor-
mation is associated with John Calvin and with
Geneva—a city which was not yet part of the Con-
federation, and which belonged to no country, though
it stood at the point where France, Germany, Italy
and Switzerland came
together. After trying to estab-
lish himself
in the city from 1536 and being driven
out in 1538, Calvin from 1541 gained
the mastery, and
held it till 1564, though this involved the expulsion
of many of the ancient families and the granting of
citizenship to hosts of
refugees from abroad. At the
beginning of this period, the Reformation
itself had
arrived at a critical stage. Many people had become
weary
of the conflict, and there were distinguished
intellects as well as
political leaders who had come
to desire ecclesiastical reunion. Under
Melanchthon,
the Lutherans seemed to be trying to discover how
far
they could go towards a reconciliation with
Catholicism. After the
Peasants' Revolt in Germany
in 1525 there had been the spectacle of the
revolu-
tionized city of
Münster in 1534, and this had shown
what could happen if religious
rebellion was not re-
strained. Calvin
represented a new generation, and an
important part of his work was the
stabilizing of the
Reformation—conceiving it as an international
affair,
and erecting it if possible into an international order
comparable to the Catholic one of the Middle Ages.
In 1536, by the first version of his Institutes of the
Christian Religion (which was to prove the best-seller
of the
sixteenth century), and then, in the following
year, by his part in the
“reunion” discussions in
Germany, he had been
qualifying himself to become
an international leader. In 1539 his Letter to Cardinal
Sadoleto had proved to be the
most successful of the
popular defences of the Reformation. The wheel
had
come into full cycle, and he saw that what was needed
was the
reestablishment of ecclesiastical authority. He
realized that the situation
called for three important
things: a confession of faith, a doctrine of the
Church,
and an ecclesiastical discipline. His originality lay not
in
the generation of new doctrines but in the better
coordination of received
ones, and their adaptation to
the purpose of achieving a coherent system.
Difficulties
concerning the question of the “real
presence” in the
Eucharist prevented a union with the Lutherans,
who
preserved something of the Catholic point of view, and,
for a long
time, also, with the Zwinglians, who treated
the sacrament as rather a
symbol and a remembrance
from 1549.
It is in Calvinism that the Reformation, at least in
externals, begins to
wear the aspect of almost a new
type of religion—like a new
style in art or, as some
would think (perhaps unfairly) a change from
poetry
to prose, if not a reaction against aestheticism itself.
It
becomes clear now that religion is a very serious
matter; the preaching
holds a great importance; and,
under the tighter authority that is possible
in the city-
states, there arises a severer
control of private life.
Calvin was ready (as Zwingli had been) to follow
the
Bible more consistently than Luther, and this was
bound to give an
increased importance to the Old
Testament. He put the idea of the
sovereignty of God
at the center of his whole system, whereas Luther
might be said to have been preoccupied by the idea
of Grace. The emphasis
on sovereignty had its
counterpart in the demand for obedience from
the
human side. Here was the basis for a firm authoritar-
ianism—an insistence that the Christian
life should be
a severe discipline.
It has been said that Catholicism is the religion of
priests, Lutheranism
the religion of theologians, and
Calvinism the religion of the believing
congregation.
In spite of its inaccuracies, this comparison throws
light
on the Calvinist system in which, theoretically at least,
the
Church was the congregation of believing Chris-
tians, independent of mystery and ceremony and ex-
ternal paraphernalia. The system governed through
assemblies, synods, consistories; pastors were elected
by congregations;
and all pastors were equal, just as
all churches were equal. The layman was
given a part
to play in ecclesiastical affairs; and the ministers were
to have no special immunities, no territorial lordships,
and they were to
pay taxes like anybody else. The
ecclesiastical system was to have no
prisons, no instru-
ments of mundane power;
their sole weapon against
the offender was to be exclusion from the Lord's
Sup-
per. In other words, sacerdotalism was
at an end; and
it was Calvin rather than Luther who broke the power
of
priests. It was all congenial to the pattern of a
city-state, and suggests
a Christianity that is being
reshaped in the context of a more modern
world.
Yet it was authoritarian, and only with the greatest
difficulty did Calvin
impose it on an unwilling city.
Coming later than Luther, and having a more
re-
morselessly logical mind, he did
not pretend that the
individual might interpret Scripture for himself.
If
congregations elected their ministers the qualifications
of these
had to be approved, and their ordination
carried out, by other ministers,
and in Calvin's time
the congregation would be provided with a
nominee;
all it could do was to give or refuse its consent. In
reality, the system was governed by an oligarchy which
recruited itself by cooptation and closely superintended
its members,
entering private houses, and exercising
control over private life. It was
even something like
a police-state, with spies, informers, and occult
agents,
and with neighbors and members of families betraying
one
another—the culprit being handed over to the civil
magistrate,
who carried out the requirements of the
Church. If the influx of foreign
exiles enabled Calvin
to clinch his mastery of Geneva, it also provided
him
with the means of extending his influence abroad. The
city became
like a modern nest of international revo-
lution, where the foreign guests received their training,
and then
departed to continue the work in their home
country.
Though he repressed freedom of conscience and
personal liberty, and, like
Martin Luther, gave the
individual no right to rebel, he did allow
disobedience
to rulers who commanded what was contrary to the
word of
God, and he gave currency to a theory of
resistance to monarchy which was
to be of great im-
portance in the subsequent
period. Individuals had no
right to rebel but representative institutions
(the
States-General in France, the Parliament in England,
for example)
were justified in fighting the king. The
doctrine was quoted from Calvin by
the early Whigs
and debated by the nascent Tories in seventeenth-
century England and it
had already been significant
in other countries. It inaugurates the modern
theory—
the modern paradox—of
“constitutional revolution”
where the organ of revolt
(as in France in 1789) is
the representative system itself.
It happened that, in various countries, Calvinism
spread originally in
opposition to government, and its
leader approved of these movements and
guided them.
Calvinism, in fact, often emerged in the attitude of
rebellion, and Calvin's warnings against this were not
always heeded, if
indeed he himself was quite consis-
tent
about the matter. It is not an accident that liberty
extends itself in the
modern world via Holland, Great
Britain and the United
States—countries where politi-
cal
rebellion was allied to Calvinism.
4. The Counter-Reformation.
The Catholic revival
of the sixteenth century has two aspects. On the
one
hand, like the Protestant Reformation itself, it can be
regarded
as a religious revival, a reaction against the
ecclesiastical abuses that
had been accumulating, and
a protest against the secularization of Church
and
society. In this sense, if it ran parallel to the Lutheran
movement, it had in fact begun at an earlier date. And
one of its important
features had been a purification
of the Church in Spain—a
remarkable reform of
monasteries for example—before the end of
the fif-
teenth century, that is to say, under
Ferdinand and
One result of this was the fact that even the “Renais-
sance” in Spain had a peculiar character—it was
largely a regeneration of ecclesiastical scholarship, and
for a time it gave Erasmus a considerable influence
on the religious life of that country. In their program
for the New World the Spaniards gave a high place
to the idea of transplanting Christianity and a Christian
civilization to the other side of the Atlantic. Spanish
monks, using the Bible, canon law, and scholastic writ-
ings, assisted the transition to modern international law
by their works on the laws of war and the rights of
the native population, as they related to the overseas
empire. At the same time, the fanaticism and intoler-
ance of the Spaniards seems to have been an acquired
characteristic, a product of history. At an earlier date
they had been reproached by other Christians for their
laxity, their resort to infidel doctors, their visits to
Moorish courts, so long as the Muhammadans remained
in the peninsula. The enduring conflict with the infidel,
and the religious propaganda connected with it, helped
to make Spain more firmly Catholic, more intolerantly
orthodox, than any other country.
On the other hand there was a Counter-Reformation
in a stricter
sense—the reaction against the Protestant
movement, which, to a
Catholic was the greatest of
the disorders of the time. There was a moment
when
some men were able to feel that the Catholic revival
might
combine with the Lutheran movement, espe-
cially when more radical revolts had broken out and
a section of the
Lutherans had taken a conservative
turn. A group of important Catholics
were even sym-
pathetic to a certain form of
the doctrine of justifica-
tion by faith;
and when the accession of Pope Paul
III brought something of a turn towards
a reformation
at Rome itself, the appointment of a number of cardi-
nals in the year 1534 was significant in
the story, for
a handful of these belonged to this more liberalizing
group, including Cardinal Contarini and the English-
man, Cardinal Pole. The years 1537-41 saw the failure
of reunion
negotiations which had been promoted in
France as well as Germany, and,
from that time, the
men who had seemed prepared to broaden the basis
of the Church were in disrepute—indeed, more than
one of the
Cardinals involved in this aspect of the
reforming movement was himself in
danger from the
Inquisition.
The years 1540-43 have special importance in the
history of the
Counter-Reformation. In 1540 the Soci-
ety of
Jesus was formed, and quickly attained an influ-
ence, though its widespread results were only to be
apparent in the
second generation. In 1541 came the
failure of conferences between
Catholics and Lutherans
at Ratisbon, so that the movement for comprehension
and reunion was now virtually at an end. And though
at this
time there were disturbing manifestations of
Protestantism in a number of
localities even in Italy,
effective action was now taken against the
movement.
In 1542, Cardinal Contarini, the leader of the reformist
group died, and at about this time the stronger mem-
bers of that party passed off the stage, leaving Cardinal
Pole—a less effective personality—in the leading posi-
tion. In 1542, moreover, a General Council
of the
Church was summoned; and, by this time, it had be-
come apparent that it would not represent an opposi-
tion to Rome in the way that the
conciliar movement
of the fifteenth century had done. It would itself
be
under the leadership of Rome.
Some controversy has been caused by the question
how far the leadership of
Spain was responsible for
the turn which the Counter-Reformation took.
Every-
where—in the peninsula
itself, in Africa, in the Medi-
terranean
and in America—Spain's enemy seemed to
be the infidel and the
championship of orthodoxy had
become a major part of the national
tradition. The
Jesuit Order was founded and organized by Spaniards
and
its first generals were Spaniards. The new form
of papal Inquisition was
influenced by the more pow-
erful and modern
form of Inquisition that had been
established in Spain. The pope's chief
assistants and
advisers at the Council of Trent, particularly on theo-
logical questions, were Spaniards. In
the latter half of
the sixteenth century the Catholic party in the
French
Wars of Religion and the supporters of Mary Tudor
in England
looked to Spain, and the Counter-Reforma-
tion came to be identified with the aggressive policies
of
Philip II.
At the same time one must not overlook the deter-
mined manner in which the popes set out to hold the
leadership
in the Counter-Reformation. They were not
Spaniards; they were often
anti-Spaniards, and now,
as in the past, they tended to be hostile to the
Spanish
preponderance in Italy. The severest of the anti-
Protestant popes, Paul IV (Caraffa)
had been a Domin-
ican and his religion may
have been affected by his
residence in Spain at an earlier period in his
life. But
even as Pope he found himself at war with Philip II,
and
Spanish troops besieged him in Rome, where he
was defended by Lutheran
mercenaries. The popes
were even a little hostile and jealous in their
attitude
to the Jesuit Order at first, and this was partly because
that order seemed so closely connected with Spain. The
popes indeed would
have liked to see the reform of
the Church carried out through committees
and com-
missions in Rome, where in 1552
Julius III established
a Congregation of Reform.
Important sections of the Catholic world, headed by
the Emperor Charles V,
had long wanted the summon-
abuses, particularly the abuses in Rome. On various
occasions—in Germany early in the 1520's and in
France early in the 1550's—there had been threats of
a National Council of the Church to bring about eccle-
siastical reform within a single country. When the
Council met at Trent it made sure that its decrees
should reserve the rights of the pope, and should be
subject to his confirmation; also that he should have
the sole right of interpreting them. Throughout the
proceedings (which took place in three sessions be-
tween 1545 and 1563) papal diplomacy proved to be
remarkably effective. Perhaps the great dynamic fea-
tures of Protestantism, as it developed in later cen-
turies, lay in the way in which it confronted a man
with the Bible and allowed him to seize upon the things
which he internally ratified, the things which in his
spiritual experience he grasped as living and true; the
way also in which it could cut its way to the original
sources, and, by returning to the fountain of the faith,
disengage Christianity from the accidents of a long
period of intervening history.
Perhaps the great stabilizing feature of Catholicism
has been that it sought
rather to preserve a tradition
of doctrine, so that a man did not just
think out the
things he was to believe—he sought to discover
the
teaching which had united Christians throughout the
centuries. On
this system, at least one did not persecute
on behalf of doctrines that one
had only recently
worked out for oneself. The impressive feature of
the
Council of Trent is the way in which doctrine, instead
of issuing
from some brilliant book by an individual
theologian, was threshed out by
commissions that
sought to discover what had really been the tradition
of the centuries. On questions of dogma, a conservative
position was
maintained. Against Luther's teaching
about the interpretation of the Bible
it was agreed that
the Bible must be interpreted by the tradition and
conscience of the Church. And the authoritative ver-
sion was the Vulgate, which had been related to the
development
of Church doctrine through so many
centuries. The Bible in the original
languages was
available for academic work, but the decision of the
Church's doctrines was not to be transferred in a spirit
of literalism to
the experts in philology.
Luther's doctrine of justification by faith was con-
demned at the first session of the Council in 1545, but
an
opening was still left for the resurgence of the
tradition of Saint
Augustine in the Jansenism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
doctrine of
predestination was condemned, but the Church had
never
tolerated Pelagianism, and there was still room
in Catholicism for long
quarrels between the Jesuits
and the Dominicans about the proportion to be attrib
uted to Divine Grace and to a man's free will in the
work of
salvation. And though transubstantiation was
confirmed there was still room
for controversy within
Catholicism about the interpretation of even this
doc-
trine. In regard to an important
dispute concerning
the question whether bishops held their power
direct
from God or only through the pope—a controversy
in
which the Spanish bishops were hostile to the
papacy—the Council
failed to come to a clear decision.
In order to have a picture of the Counter-Reforma-
tion, however, it is not sufficient to see
what was
happening at headquarters and in the central institu-
tions of Catholicism—one
must have some impression
of what was taking place in the world at large.
One
thing that was involved was the revival of preaching,
and in this
connection some of the Observantine section
of the Franciscans, who
reformed themselves in 1525
and became known as the Capuchins, become impor-
tant amongst the common people in Italy,
France, and
Germany. During the numerous outbreaks of plague
that
occurred in Italy, their fidelity and courage made
a great impression.
The Jesuits attacked the problem at a different level
and became important
at first through their teaching
and influence in universities, though later
they became
powerful at royal courts. Even in Spain where they
gained
most adherents, and in France, where the sup-
porters of Gallican claims and particularly the Parle-
ment of Paris had special reasons for jealousy,
they
suffered some opposition at first. When they went to
Cologne in
1544, some said that the urgent need was
rather for good bishops and parish
priests. Just after
the mid-century, not only were many of the German
bishops still worldly-minded and indifferent to the
religious cause, but
there were regions where it was
impossible for good Catholics to be served
except by
priests who were actually married or living with con-
cubines, and preaching semi-Lutheran
ideas. In the
1550's, however, the famous Jesuit, Canisius, began the
important work which saved the city and university
of Vienna from the
Protestants who had come to ac-
quire almost
absolute control. His influence extended
to Prague as well as to
Ingolstadt, which became the
great Catholic educational center in the next
genera-
tion. The same Canisius was
responsible for the issue
of a catechism which was to be of great
importance
in Catholic teaching. At the humblest level of all,
moreover, great efforts were made to inspire and nour-
ish popular piety.
Even so, it is difficult to see how the new influences
could have found a
footing if they had not been
patronized by princes, particularly the
Wittelsbachs
in Bavaria and the Habsburgs in Austria. The papacy
was
wise enough now to make concessions to princes
spoils; and the Bavarian princes were to acquire a good
deal of revenue from ecclesiastical sources on which
they were now permitted to draw. For a few years
from about 1563 the Duke of Bavaria sought to bring
his principality back to Catholicism but this imposed
upon him a difficult conflict with his parliamentary
estates and with the nobility. He succeeded in restoring
the Church only by high-handed measures and by
making encroachments on ecclesiastical jurisdiction
himself. In general, the restoration of the clergy and
the care for the educational work were calculated in
themselves to have a great effect, and even in Bohemia,
a traditional home of heresy, Catholic preaching and
Catholic saintliness began to exercise their influence
again.
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
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
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.
IV. THE MODERN WORLD
1. The Age of the “Wars of Religion.” The principle
of cujus regio ejus religio (religion is
determined by
the ruler) prevailed from 1559, not because the aspi-
ration for a
“universal” Church, a single form of
Christianity,
had been surrendered, but because some-
thing
of a stalemate had been achieved. The various
states now blossomed out as
differing forms of “Chris-
tian
Society”; and it might be the accidents of history
and geography
(rather than any antecedent national
“spirit”) that
led e.g., England and Scotland or the two
halves of the Low Countries to
diverge from one an-
other. It might be the form
of confession then adopted
which, for the future, conditioned the
developing
character and tradition of a country. The process of
nation-making was still continuing, and religious
differentiations still
tended to play a considerable part
in this. With the breakdown of the medieval “univer-
sal” idea, the overall
picture became more disturbing;
Europe had very slowly to find its way to a
new kind
of international order, a new conception of the society
of
states. For the time being, a momentous religious
issue had arisen to
complicate the relations between
governments and to embarrass European
diplomacy.
For nearly a century the world was torn by a succession
of
wars in which religion (however closely it might
be combined with other
factors) was the primary
motor, or the real source of the fanaticism and
bitter
feeling.
But monarchs—though they were greatly elevated
under the system
of cujus regio ejus religio—were
not
always masters of the situation. Mary Queen of Scots
was unable to
prevent Scotland from being Calvinist,
and the rulers of England could not
prevent the Irish
from remaining Roman Catholic. In the northern
provinces of the Low Countries a minority of Calvin-
ists, using sometimes almost gangster methods, cap-
tured the magistracies in the cities and reduced a
majority of Catholics to the status of “second-class”
citizens, during the rebellion against Philip II. By the
end of the
sixteenth century, the humane and scholarly
tradition that was associated
with Erasmus had asserted
itself in this region, and brought distinction to
the
University of Leyden. There emerged the Arminian
movement, which
sought to soften the severities of
predestinarianism amongst the
Calvinists, and this was
supported by a burgher aristocracy whose
culture
acquired a leading position in Europe in the first half
of the
seventeenth century. The movement was re-
sisted, however, by the populace, who were incited
by the
intransigeance of the Calvinist ministers and
supported by the House of
Orange. The defeat of
Arminianism was registered in 1619 at the Synod
of
Dordrecht, which was attended by representatives of
so many foreign
countries that it almost looked like
a Calvinist attempt at a General
Council of the Church.
Because religion was such a momentous matter in
those days, and was
supported by such grim sanctions,
it had the capacity to bring public
opinion to new
importance in the state, and it often increased the
tensions within the body politic. In countries like
England and Bohemia the
resistance of a religious
minority represented virtually the beginning of
modern
political opposition to the reigning monarch. Calvinism
in
particular was no more willing than Catholicism to
be checked by the power
of the king.
This being the general situation, the peculiar pre-
dicament of France was to give this country a signifi-
cant role in the transition to a new order of
things.
Here, the action of the government against heretical
movements
at home had been delayed, partly by one
partly by another who had had a political quarrel with
the pope. When serious attention came to be given
to the problem in 1559, it transpired that the Reformers
had become too strong to be dealt with by any ordinary
police methods. In a way that often happened, an
unhappy social position made sections of the nobility
particularly ready for refractoriness in religion, and
these not only took up the cause of the Calvinists but
endowed it with a military organization. The whole
issue became involved in further disputes concerning
the rights of princes of the blood and the question of
the Regency during a royal minority. On the whole—
and especially in the desperate days of Catherine de'
Medici—the government would try to maintain itself
by holding the balance between the overpowerful
Catholics and the overpowerful Huguenots. For poli-
tique reasons, it was prepared, in a time of great dan-
ger, to adopt a policy of toleration which was anoma-
lous for a Catholic ruler, and which in any case nobody
would have regarded as the ideal.
In these circumstances, not only did repeated civil
wars occur, as the one
side and the other attempted
to capture the government, but the two
religious
parties would look abroad for allies, the ardent Catho-
lics working with Philip II of Spain. At
a time when
France needed to safeguard herself against the pre-
dominance of Habsburg Spain, those who
were gov-
erned principally by love of their
country might be
inclined to a politique foreign
policy too—an alliance
with Dutch and German Protestants, for
example. In
these circumstances the extreme Catholics, looking to
Philip II, tended to behave rather as a hostile force—a
kind of
“fifth column”—within the country itself.
In
France, therefore, the problems of the age of religious
conflict
took an extreme form, and came near to ending
in the destruction of the
state.
Religious toleration begins to emerge as a politique
policy, and some of its upholders recognize that it
contravenes the whole
ideal of the state as a religious
society. They argue, however, that the
killing has gone
on too long and that the body politic itself is being
too radically disrupted. It was as though a terrestrial
morality was being
used to challenge an alleged
supraterrestrial morality, and at first it was
unscrupu-
lous rulers, like Catherine
de' Medici, and not the pious
ones, like Mary Tudor, who were prepared to
allow
religious dissidence. The members of a persecuted
religious
party might protest against the intolerance,
but even so, they sometimes
made it clear that their
objection was not to persecution as such but to
the
persecution of the right religion by the wrong one.
Only the
Socinians in Poland in the latter half of the
sixteenth century proclaimed
toleration as a principle,
and that was because they could claim to be preaching
a
religion without any dogma.
Given the structure of society as it existed in those
days, toleration
itself did not always imply what it
means today. It could involve giving
the nobles a free
hand to force their tenantry to a change of
religion.
And only very gradually did the various Reformation
parties
learn to tolerate one another.
Early in the seventeenth century both Catholics and
Protestants could hope
that, by a special effort, they
might turn the balance in their favor
(particularly in
Germany and the imperial territories). There are
signs
of anxiety and a special fear of war, as though one
were already
conscious of the looming shadow of the
coming conflict—the
struggle that was to last for thirty
years. Plans for the establishment of
perpetual peace
or a remodelling of the map of Europe, the inclination
of the Lutherans to work for appeasement, and the
similar policy which
helped to make James I so un-
popular in
England, are features of the time which
seem to show the effect of these
apprehensions. Projects
for the reunion of Protestants and Catholics
were
brought out by Grotius in Holland, John Drury in
England, and
later by Leibniz in Germany.
2. The Characteristics and Controversies of Re-
vived Catholicism.
The intellectual advances of
Catholicism, its successful missionary
work in Europe
and elsewhere, and the victories of the Habsburg sup-
porters of the papacy in the early stages
of the Thirty
Years' War, brought about a fine feeling of exultation
in Rome when the new basilica of St. Peter's had been
completed there, and
was consecrated in 1626. This
“greatest architectural wonder of
the world” still re-
mained the real
center of artistic activity in Rome
which, under Urban VIII (1623-44) and
his two suc-
cessors, was turned into a
baroque city. The sculptor
and architect, Lorenzo Bernini, and the painter,
Pietro
da Cortona, had a great part in this; and the new
style—which came to be associated with the Jesuits—
imprinted its character on the city more strongly than
any previous style
had done. It was dynamic and sought
dramatic effects, loading churches with
ornament and
gilding, colored sculptures and sensuous curves. It
spread from Rome to Spain, Portugal, Austria, Catholic
Germany, and Poland;
though its influence seems to
have been smaller in France. This whole form
of art
still seems to convey to us something of the exuberant
spirit
of the Counter-Reformation. Here, therefore,
Christianity, entangling
itself once again with the
world, presents pictures and scenic displays
quite
different from the religious landscape of England and
Holland.
In France there emerged in the seventeenth century
a “Catholic
Renaissance” which helped to enhance the
Europe in general. The intellectual strength of the
movement is illustrated by the fact that the clergy
moved over so naturally to the leadership of the state
itself in peace and war. From 1624 to 1642 Cardinal
Richelieu was the effective ruler, and he surrounded
himself with priests and monks—a cardinal becoming
a general, while an archbishop was made admiral—the
most intimate counsellor, especially in diplomatic
matters, being the famous Father Joseph. The new
spirit showed itself in charitable foundations, attempts
at reform and Christian missions to the native peoples
of French Canada; and the beneficent work of Vincent
de Paul was perhaps the most characteristic feature
of the revival. Also there began, amongst the congre-
gation of St. Maur, that scholarly work which was to
bring so much distinction to the Benedictines in the
seventeenth century.
Richelieu himself illustrates the way in which France,
through her special
problems and special position, was
mediating the passage to a new order of
things in
Europe. In spite of his severities in desperate times,
he
was a pious man and he gave the politique policy
a
turn which made it more admissible for the Christian.
He destroyed the
military establishment by means of
which the turbulent Huguenots had
secured their posi-
tion within France; but he
continued the religious
toleration which this party had been enjoying
since
1598, and he seems to have been sincere in his hope
that this
example of generosity would be conducive
to their ultimate voluntary
conversion. In respect of
foreign policy, he judged that France would be
eclipsed
for an indefinite period if Spain were not checked; so
he
gave priority to the policy of war against the
Habsburgs, though, again, he
seems to have been sin-
cere in his
determination to see that this should do
as little harm as possible to the
cause of Catholicism.
In both these cases his formulas more carefully pin-
pointed the valid role of force and
discriminated be-
tween the objectives of
foreign policy, imposing at
home and abroad the idea of warfare for limited
ends.
It was a stage in the formation of a different kind of
international order and in the transition by means of
which even earnest
Christians could find their way out
of the Wars of Religion. It was to end
in the virtual
abstraction of religion from the game of power-politics.
If the Western Church had come to a tragic cleavage
at the Reformation,
however, and if the Calvinism of
the Dutch had later been brought to a
serious crisis
by the emergence of Arminianism, it is interesting to
note that the seventeenth century saw great conflicts
within the revived
Catholicism—conflicts, moreover,
on patterns already
familiar—and that the chief arena
for these should have been
France. Firstly there came
to the forefront again that assertive spirit of nationality
which had been refractory to the papacy before the
close of the Middle
Ages, and which had then been
a factor in the Reformation itself.
“Gallicanism” was
medieval in origin, and it stressed
the national charac-
ter of the French
Church—stressed the authority of
the French bishops as something
more than a mere
delegation from Rome. The movement also had its
internal constitutional aspect, and regarded the French
king as holding his
temporal authority direct from God,
and therefore as not amenable to the
pope in his exer-
cise of it. In a sense, the
king was the protector of
the French bishops against the pope, but they
were
his subjects and if they gained ground from Rome, he
himself
stood out more clearly as their leader and chief.
Also the Gallican cause
was assisted by the fact that,
since the Council of Constance, the king had
more than
once settled the position of the French church in sepa-
rate agreements with the papacy. It had
come to be
easy to see that church as a national affair, to be
conducted for the most part by French bishops under
the French king; and
even the idea of a national
ecclesiastical council had been used as a
possible
weapon against the pope. The Spanish Church had
already
acquired a remarkable independence, and the
French became the chief
mouthpiece of the nationalist
program, though a parallel form of protest
against
Rome distinguished the Venetians, particularly at the
beginning of the seventeenth century.
From the fifteenth century, the French enemies of
the Gallican principles
were beginning to be known
as “Ultramontanes,” and,
after the Counter-Reforma-
tion, it
was the Jesuits who distinguished themselves
in this capacity. In the
period of the “Catholic Renais-
sance” the propaganda campaign involved an interest-
ing development of
politico-ecclesiastical thought; but
Gallicanism rose to a new height when,
firstly the
monarchy came to its climax under Louis XIV, a king
who
received continual incense from a great part of
the clergy, and, secondly
when the movement became
associated with the famous name of Bossuet, who
tried
to hold it within reasonable limits. A “Declaration
of
the French Clergy” in 1682 asserted the principles:
that
the king's temporal sovereignty was independent
of the pope; that even in
matters of faith the papacy
needed the concurrence of the bishops; that a
General
Council was superior to the pope; and that the ancient
Gallican liberties (e.g., the exclusion of papal bulls and
briefs that had
not received the consent of the king)
were to be regarded as sacrosanct.
The result was a
violent conflict with the papacy at a time when Louis
XIV was beset by other serious difficulties, and the
Declaration was
formally withdrawn. Its tenets con-
tinued to
prevail in France, however, and Gallicanism
as setting an example for nationalistic aspirations else-
where.
The posthumous publication in 1640 of Augustinus
by
Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) was to have tremen-
dous and far-reaching effects for a long period in
France and
neighboring countries. The work tried to
show that Saint Augustine's
teaching conflicted with
that of the seventeenth century (and particularly
that
of the Jesuits); and by stressing the helplessness of man
it
moved to predestinarian ideas, though an admixture
of Catholic doctrine
still distinguished it from Calvin-
ism. The
cause was taken up by theologians at the
Sorbonne, and then by important
scholars as well as
the nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs. When five propo-
sitions were condemned by Pope
Innocent X in 1653,
the French leader of the movement agreed that the
propositions were heretical and that the Church had
the authority to
condemn them; but he denied that
they were contained in Jansen's Augustinus and
claimed that this was a historical
point on which the
pope's ruling was not authoritative.
The whole controversy flared up again at the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century, when a number of
theologians at
the Sorbonne claimed that absolution
need not be refused to a priest who
maintained this
distinction between questions of doctrine and
questions
of fact. Pope Clement XI denounced this thesis in 1705
and,
as he had the support of Louis XIV, the campaign
against Jansenism was a
powerful one, culminating in
the bull Unigenitus
which in 1713 condemned 101
propositions. Jansenism, which had spread
widely
amongst the people and the lower clergy, was sup-
ported at times by the Sorbonne and the Parlement
of Paris, and for some years the Archbishop of
Paris
refused to submit to the bull Unigenitus. The
persecu-
tion aroused great passions and
led to an enlargement
of the area of the controversy, its victims
appealing,
for example, for a General Council of the Church.
Under
desperate pressures the movement tended to
change character, claimed to
produce miracles, and
had convulsionist manifestations. It turned into
a
broader kind of opposition to Church and monarchy
in the eighteenth
century and achieved at times an
almost revolutionary atmosphere.
At the same time a great number of French Jan-
senists fled to Holland where a permanent schismatic
organization was established in Utrecht. The move-
ment spread to North Italy and the system which it
established
at Pistoia was condemned by Pope Pius VI
in 1794. The
“Jansenism” which was supposed to influ-
ence the ecclesiastical policy of the French
Revolution
had departed far from the original movement, and
involved
Gallican ideas and democratic claims in re-
spect of the rights of the lower clergy. It has been
suggested that “Jansenism” in North Italy in
the nine-
teenth century became transmuted
into a kind of secu-
lar religion.
3. The Transition to the Age of Reason.
Because
the practice of the right religion was considered so
important, and because there was such a conviction
that only one form of
religion could be right, it was
only by a very slow process (and by certain
changes
in the very structure of Christian thinking) that tolera-
tion could come to be itself a
religious ideal. In the
middle of the seventeenth century it seems to
come
almost as a “discovery” to some people that the
other
man's creed, instead of being the product of perversity,
might
be as much a case of conscience as one's own;
and perhaps it required the
standing presence for a
considerable period of rival sects to produce the
per-
suasion that, though a man may hold
his own faith as
an absolute, he must treat the matter with a certain
degree of relativity in his relations with other men,
who have the same
right to follow their conscience.
Some progress was made through pondering on the
current doctrine that ethics
required the granting to
others of the treatment one expected to receive
from
them. It was more easy for the various branches of
Protestantism
to adopt this attitude towards one an-
other
than to give Roman Catholics the benefit of it.
When sects were
multiplied—as in Puritan England—
and when religious
variety had become a standing
phenomenon, it was more easy to see that the
individ-
ual judgment had come to have
preponderant signifi-
cance; and some sects
were individualistic, some highly
insistent about the Inner Light. It meant
a kind of
intellectual revolution, but when one came to see that
voluntariness of belief was itself an essential thing (and
that the quality
of belief even had some relation to
its voluntariness), Christians in the
course of time could
come to wonder why they had ever permitted perse-
cution at all. Protestants came to feel
that diversity
itself might be enriching for Christendom, that truth
might be served by the clash of controversy, and that
the right could be
brought to prevail in the long run
by force of mere persuasion.
But the laymen played a great part in the coming
of toleration. In England,
a certain religious indiffer-
ence—or a reaction against fanaticism—was
visible
from the 1650's. There may have been an increasing
squeamishness about the infliction of suffering for reli-
gious reasons and a feeling that extravagant sects
had
exposed the pretentions of authoritarianism. The set-
tlement in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the need
for manpower in Germany to aid in the work of eco-
nomic recovery after the devastation of the Thirty
Years' War,
the growing importance of the laity in
society and the decline in the
general prestige of the
clergy—these, as well as special
political conjunc-
which still left dissenters penalized in some ways. As
the eighteenth century proceeded a country like
England ceased to have the appearance of a “Christian
Society” and the Church of England became more like
a privileged “Establishment” in a secular state. In both
England and Ireland, the Catholics were still harassed
by cruel penal laws. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the
Edict of Nantes, and deprived his Protestant subjects
of the toleration they had enjoyed for nearly a century.
In the meantime, however, other factors had been
altering the place of
religion in society and in life, and
making the survival of religious
intolerance all the
more anomalous. Christianity had successfully con-
fronted the superior culture of
Greco-Roman antiquity.
In the Middle Ages it had subjugated Aristotle to
its
own purposes and had survived the contact with what
had been in
some respects the higher civilization of
the Arabs. At the end of the
seventeenth century it
was to find itself more seriously embarrassed by
a
scientific movement which sprang in a sense from its
own
bosom—a movement absolutely and uniquely
European, rising from
the traditions of the Western
world itself. The scientific movement of the
seven-
teenth century carried human
thought beyond anything
that ancient Greece or ancient China had ever
given
the promise of producing, and the student of its ante-
cedents would find himself carried back
to some of the
subtle thinking of the scholastic writers.
The movement was promoted to a considerable
degree by men who often believed
that, by concrete
enquiries into history and nature, they were
glorifying
the Creator and illuminating the work of Providence.
It was
one of its essential principles that men should
turn away from the
discussion of final causes and the
ultimate essence of things, topics which
had hitherto
proved so tantalizing and distracting. They should
observe how one particular thing in the natural world
acted upon another,
and by reflection and inference
upon the observed results, they should
climb to a range
of important intermediate generalizations. So they
freed their minds for a more specialized form of re-
search, freed science itself from its compromising en-
tanglement with “natural
philosophy.” Some of them
were looking for laws before they
properly knew how
to discover them, and were seeking to embrace every-
thing in the realm of
law—leaving no gaps in the
clockwork universe—before
they had found the clue
that might lead them to such a system. And they
said
that they were vindicating the rationality of God the
“Creator,” a God whom they could not believe to be
guilty of arbitrariness or caprice in his arrangement
of the cosmos.
It was Sir Isaac Newton who, when he had estab-
lished the automatic working of the solar system, was
seized with misgiving, because he realized that instead
of
leading to the greater glory of God, it might tempt
men to think that a
deity was henceforth a superfluity.
At this point he seemed to show an
uncommon anxiety
to find some loopholes in the system that he had pro-
duced. The inferences from the system
itself, and the
victory of the mechanistic (or, as it called itself,
the
“geometrical”) kind of thinking that now
became
fashionable—the overall result of the seventeenth-
century revolution in
science—opened the door to a
“deism” which
allowed the existence of a Creator who,
after setting everything in motion,
had become the
complete absentee.
The Church confronted the crisis at an unfortunate
moment, a moment when
religion in general had come
to an exceptionally low state. Fanaticism had
continued
until the middle of the seventeenth century and it had
added
to the bitterness of war in Europe, as well as
the constitutional struggles
in England. The Puritan
regime in England had been followed by the
relaxation
and license that is associated with the reign of Charles
II. The religiosity of the latest period of Louis XIV's
reign was followed
by a similar reaction—the levity
and the laxity of the
subsequent Regency. The conces-
sion of
religious toleration in England at the end of
the seventeenth century
coincided paradoxically with
the decline of the body who were to have been
its
main beneficiaries—the Presbyterians—some of
whom
began to move into Unitarianism. Only the advent of
John Wesley
put an end to what had been a serious
religious setback in the country at
large. The conflict
between the Protestant and the Catholic versions
of
religious authority would seem in any case to have had
the effect
of undermining confidence in any kind of
claim to authoritativeness.
The results of the scientific revolution were some-
times popularized and transmuted into a new world
view by men
like Fontenelle in France, who had caught
skepticism not really from
science itself but from the
writings of classical Greece. The wider
knowledge of
the globe, the writings of travellers, the study of primi-
tive peoples and distant civilizations,
and developing
notions of comparative religion, made it possible to
reckon with cultures that had never been touched by
Greece and Rome, and to
envisage the traditions of
Christendom as not in any sense universal, not
neces-
sarily even central, but
something of a regional phe-
nomenon. On this
view, all religions were merely the
effect of an original and basic
“natural religion” which
in every place had come to
be overgrown with peculiar
local accretions, local mythologies, local
legends.
When Sir Isaac Newton clinched the success of the
seventeenth-century
scientific revolution, there was a
sense in which, in any case, the
authority of both the
Middle Ages and the ancient world was at last over-
rapidly; and at the end of the seventeenth century the
intellectual leadership passed to the regions which
were industrially and commercially the most advanced
—England, Holland, and France, particularly the
Huguenot part of France. The learned world had lost
its leading position; the arbiters in the realm of thought
were a wider reading-public, a bourgeois class that
prided itself on a worldly-minded kind of common
sense.
4. The Eighteenth Century.
From this time we see
the spread of unbelief amongst the
intelligentsia, and
in the latter part of the eighteenth century the
deism
is sometimes changing into atheism, though it is too
easily
forgotten that the nineteenth century was still
to be a great epoch in the
history of religion and that,
in England, for example, the churches still
had a great
hold on the masses at the beginning of the twentieth
century. From this time, too, the Church—and partic-
ularly the Catholic Church—came to be afraid
of
science and discovery, beginning what was to be a long
and unhappy
rearguard action against the forces of
modernity. In France, where the philosophe movement
brought the Age of Reason to its
climax, the conflict
between the Roman Catholic and the liberal or pro-
gressive sections of society seems to
have produced an
almost permanent sundering of the national tradition.
In England the antithesis in the eighteenth century was
less severe, partly
because the churchmen there proved
to be no mean antagonists, and partly
because the
influence of nonconformity helped to bridge the gap
between religious conservatism and secular liberalism.
In Methodism a
strong desire to awaken the social
conscience of the country was balanced
by a moderate
political outlook which is sometimes regarded as hav-
ing helped to save the country from the
turmoil of
a French Revolution. Protestantism, moreover, proved
more
flexible than Catholicism at the critical period.
There emerges now a
Protestantism in many ways
radically unlike that of the sixteenth century.
It claims
to be the ally of humanism, rationalism, individualism,
and
liberty.
At this point in the story a significant part was
played by that interesting
figure, the “lapsed Chris-
tian”—the man who has thrown overboard the theo-
logical dogmas, but has not been able to
jettison a host
of assumptions, mundane evaluations and ideals, views
about personality and the structure of the human
drama, which had been
associated with the Christian
tradition. One aspect of the eighteenth
century is the
more or less unconscious attempt to provide a counter-
system to
Christianity—at least to fill the gap which
was left when the
Church was taken out of the picture.
It showed itself in minor writings,
provincial move
ments, local activity—an interesting attempt for ex-
ample to teach a secular morality, a kind of
public
spirit, and to promote virtue by rewarding it with civic
prizes.
Sometimes the rivalry became conscious and the
enemies of the Church would
claim that they were
the better Christians; they were solicitous for the
hum-
ble and poor, while the church-people
were intent
on mere ceremonies. Sometimes the critics were justi-
fied in their accusations and it would
seem that they
themselves, by breaking with the Church, had disem-
barrassed themselves of conventions
which hindered
the realization of what Christian charity really did
require. One enemy of the Church still made the curi-
ous note that it would be good for men to meet once
a week for a
homily on morality. And the famous
“philosophies of
history”—the attempts to lay out the
shape of the
whole course of centuries—were (down
to the time of Hegel) a
curious reflection of earlier
Christian attempts to lay out the plan of
world history,
the design of Providence. A number of
ideals—liberty,
democracy, egalitarianism, socialism,
communism—
had been caught first from biblical sources and Chris-
tian principles by religious dissidents
who, as a minor-
ity, could more easily dare to
follow principles to their
logical conclusion. But the real battle for
their actual
realization was often fought either by non-Christians
or
by religious nonconformists, and by a curious para-
dox the official church sometimes seemed to be the
principal enemy
that had to be fought. In this realm,
too, the churches too often committed
themselves to
a lengthy rearguard action. Having imagined that
Christianity could not survive the destruction of the
Aristotelian cosmos,
they easily convinced themselves
that it might not survive the destruction
of a particular
kind of regime. In other words, they had tied their
religion too closely to various types of mundane sys-
tems. And the course of history drove them to enquire
more
deeply into the question: What was the essential
thing in the Christian
faith?
Protestantism fared better than Catholicism in the
eighteenth century; for
in Britain's American colonies
the earlier half of the century saw a
religious awaken-
ing in which Jonathan
Edwards was a central figure;
it might be said that the Seven Years' War
(1756-63)
decided that the northern continent of America should
be
predominantly Protestant; and the rise of Prussia
and Russia added great
weight to the non-Catholic part
of Europe. Even in the religious and
devotional life,
it was Protestantism that showed itself the more dy-
namic throughout the period. On this side, the
story
illustrates the point that one can hardly put limits to
the
conditions which provoke a religious revival. The
thing can come by
surprise at the moment which seems
the routine of religion in official churches may be just
the kind to bring out a spontaneous growth, a develop-
ment outside the recognized program.
In the later decades of the seventeenth century (just
as deism was coming to
the front) there emerged in
Germany a pietism which may have had
antecedents
in the later Middle Ages, and which, as it spread to
neighboring countries, may have owed something to
English Puritanism and to
movements in Holland. It
first became important in the Lutheran church
in
Germany, but in the Netherlands and then in Germany
it spread to
the Reformed churches, and its influence
was increased by the ascendancy
that it acquired in
the university of Halle. A similar movement was
that
of the Moravians, who were established in the lands
of Count
Zinzendorf and extended their influence
abroad, even to England and
America; John Wesley
was one of the people who acknowledged a debt to
them.
Evangelicalism in the English-speaking world is in
fact a parallel
phenomenon. It was an essential feature
of the movement that mere
membership in organized
churches and the routine participation in the
offices
of these were not sufficient for the authentic Christian.
The
nominal believer still needed to be properly
“converted” and to bring the matter home to himself;
and the “conversion” should come after he had been
seized with a vivid conviction of his sinfulness. No
great interest was
shown in theological discussions and
dogmatic controversy—there
was just an insistence that
a man should be born again, and that he should
have
a personal experience of Christ. At the same time Bible
reading
was emphasized, there was a great love of
hymn singing, great importance
was attached to
philanthropic work. One might remain a member of
the
state-church, but in any case one would join little
informal groups which
were meant for fellowship,
study, and prayer.
An important feature of eighteenth-century Protes-
tantism was the formation of religious societies, some
of which
would comprise members of various denomi-
nations—societies which would promote foreign mis-
sions, educational work, the care of the
poor, or a
particular measure of reform, and which became more
numerous as the century drew to its close. From evan-
gelical circles in England there arose the demand
for
an improvement in prisons, the attack on slavery and
the
slave-trade, and the later cry for industrial legisla-
tion. And from laymen who had been trained by
their
activity in religious groups there emerged some of the
working-class leaders of the nineteenth century.
5. Roman Catholicism and the State, 1760-1815.
In the closing decades of the eighteenth century the
secular character of the state was becoming more clear,
and the
Enlightenment itself, which acquired particular
prestige amongst monarchs
and statesmen, seemed
almost to take the place of religion as the
fountain
of influence at royal courts. There now occurred a
series of
dramatic attacks by the modern state upon
the Roman Catholic system; and
the church, which in
any case was hardly in a condition to meet the chal-
lenge, was badly crippled by an initial
strategic blow
in the 1760's, when the Bourbon courts of France,
Spain, Naples, and Parma (following the example of
Portugal) expelled from
their European and overseas
dominions the Jesuits who had once wielded so
much
power as the confessors of kings. It was easy to raise
suspicion
against them because of their alleged views
on tyrannicide, or their
casuistry, or their recent com-
mercial
operations, or the antinational character of
their constitution; but their
impressive importance now
was due to the virtues of their educational work,
which
made Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine
of Russia
delighted to receive the exiles.
By this time the governments of Europe were exer-
cising immediate influence on papal elections, and in
1769 they
secured the elevation of Clement XIV, who
could be expected to abolish the
order, and who signed
the Brief of Suppression in 1773. The pope was
now
in the position of having to protest against a Protestant
state
and a schismatic empire that gave the Jesuits a
field in which to work;
but, though he induced the
Prussians to secularize them, he had to agree to
a
subterfuge which enabled the order itself to continue
in Russia and
even to recruit novices (in spite of its
formal suppression), its members
being needed for the
care of Catholic subjects taken over by Russia in
the
first Partition of Poland.
In 1763 an important and influential work by
Nikolaus von Hontheim combined
the teaching of the
Conciliar and Gallican movements in the program
known as “Febronianism” and made Germany a sig-
nificant field of conflict; but similar
writings in Italy,
the Netherlands, and even Austria reveal the tremen-
dous change of outlook that had been
taking place in
the Catholic world. Even Maria Theresa of Austria (the
one great ruler who had been unwilling to see the
destruction of the
Jesuits) was ready, in spite of her
piety, to take action against a
monastic movement that
had run to excess. But in 1780 she was succeeded
by
her son Joseph II—himself a sincere Christian though
in
so many ways a disciple of the philosophes—and
it is astonishing to see the speed and
consistency with
which he not only excluded the authority of the pope
and controlled a movement of ecclesiastical reform,
but established what
was virtually a national church,
in which he decided the character of the
training in
tions of the priesthood, attacked images, etc., in
churches, and insisted on an austere type of piety quite
different from the baroque piety that he regarded as
idolatrous.
In Austria, as elsewhere, what was called Jansenism
implied Conciliar and
Gallican ideas but also a stress
on devotion and on works of charity and a
genuine
desire to raise spiritual standards. At the same time,
the
ecclesiastical work of Joseph II was a remarkable
anticipation by a
“benevolent despot” of the attempt
by the French
Revolution at an overall reconstruction
of the Church. An ecclesiastical
congress in Germany
in 1786 produced the Punctuation of Ems, a program
for which Joseph II lost his enthusiasm when he saw
that the powers it took
from the pope might serve to
aggrandize the metropolitans and bishops of
Germany
rather than the secular authority. A synod of 234 clergy
held
at Pistoia in the same year under the patronage
of Joseph's brother,
Leopold, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, combined the tenets of the Jansenists
with
those of Gallicanism and called for the abolition of all
religious orders founded since the time of Saint Bene-
dict. But the great mass of the population refused to
follow
Joseph II in his religious policy; and the exten-
sion of this to his Belgian territory led in 1786 to a
revolt of
students at the nationalized seminary of
Louvain—a revolt which
was to prove the prelude to
a wider rebellion. And though Joseph's
brother,
Leopold, was more careful of public opinion, his reli-
gious reforms led to a popular upheaval in
Florence
in 1787.
All this was only the prelude to the cataclysm of
the French Revolution. In
view of the existing distress
and the bankruptcy of the state, it was not
easy for
the French after 1789 to treat as property dedicated
to God a
great deal of the wealth which had for so
long supported luxury and
immorality amongst the
clergy. Church property was nationalized on 2 No-
vember 1789, and then the state, which
proposed to
take the responsibility for clerical stipends, thought to
rationalize the whole system in the interests of the
taxpayer and the
public in general, dissolving religious
orders that had no utilitarian
function, rearranging
bishoprics, fixing stipends, and regulating
discipline.
The Church, under this Civil Constitution of July 1790
was
to retain its communion with Rome, but the pope,
who had not been consulted
about the reforms, was
no longer to invest bishops with their spiritual
author-
ity, and bishops and clergy were
to be selected by
popular election. The clergy were required to accept
this Civil Constitution on oath, but, though the new
system greatly
improved the financial position of the
lower clergy, half of the curés refused to conform. The
government was committed therefore to a policy of
persecution,
and the revolution was jeopardized by a
first-class religious conflict
which helped to provoke
a civil war. Early in 1798 the French invaders of
Italy
established the revolution for a short time in Rome
itself, and
in 1799 Pope Pius VI died an exile and
prisoner of France.
Napoleon Bonaparte, as First Consul, was deter-
mined to make capital out of the errors of the revolu-
tion, which had reorganized the Church without con-
sulting the pope and had brought on itself
the trouble
of a religious war. He determined to secure the credit
for
restoring the Church, and this in fact enabled him
to put greater pressure
on the papacy, which was
anxious for such a settlement. By his Concordat of
1801
he saved essential features of the revolutionary settle-
ment, and acquired for these the assent
of the pope,
while recognizing Catholicism as “the religion of
the
great majority of French citizens.” But when he fol-
lowed this by unilateral action in his 77
Organic Arti-
cles, which asserted Gallican
principles and the pre-
dominance of the
state over the church, the pope and
the French Catholics could do little
unless they pro-
posed to destroy the effect of
the whole settlement.
From 1806 the spread of the Napoleonic Empire
brought a conflict with the pope as a temporal prince;
because of his
spiritual primacy, he felt unable to put
his territories at the service of
the French in their war
against England. The conflict became a dramatic
one,
and in 1809 Napoleon decreed the end of the temporal
power and
declared Rome a Free Imperial City. Very
soon, Pope Pius VII was himself a
prisoner.
6. The Nineteenth Century.
A course of curriculum
history which concentrates on governmental
affairs and
on the writings of the intellectuals in eighteenth-
century Europe may do less
than justice to the ordinary
life of town and country, and the mood of a
great part
of society. It is easy to forget the famous hymns which
the
eighteenth century produced, the choral music of
Bach, Handel's Messiah, the tremendous momentum
of the Methodist
movement, and the way in which
religion itself could even come to terms
with the new
outlook. At the same time, human needs, which the
hard,
dry thinking of the Age of Reason failed to satisfy,
are to be recognized
in the quasi-religious aspirations
of Rousseau and in certain aspects of
that romantic
movement which was sometimes associated with the
nostalgias of lapsed Christians—even (particularly in
Germany)
lapsed sons of the manse. Almost at the very
time when Napoleon was
realizing the political capital
that he might gain within France itself
from a Con-
cordat with the papacy,
Chateaubriand, in his Génie
du
Christianisme (1802) registered a new mood which
was capable of
reviving the power of religion, and his
gave more place to sentiment than profound reasoning.
At the same time the cataclysms of twenty-five years
were calculated to
revive both a religious awe and a
distrust of human systems; and, after
1815, it became
easy (while, for many, it was a matter of high policy)
to preach that the writings of the philosophes had
been
responsible for the recent tragedies, and that the
human race
cannot afford to turn its back on history.
The new situation helped to
increase the significance
of history and—particularly when
combined with the
romantic mood—it tended to alter the character
of
the historical endeavor, creating a disposition to turn
it into
what was much more a study of the past for
its own sake. One result of this
was the awakening of
interest in the Middle Ages and a discovery of
the
achievement of the medieval Church; and this was
initially the
work of Protestant scholars, though it
became a source of considerable
stimulus to Roman
Catholicism. After the example had been set in
England
by Edmund Burke before the end of the eighteenth
century, the
cause of tradition in both the political and
the religious field came to
find its expositors amongst
the European intelligentsia, and conservatism
itself
acquired a more imposing intellectual support. These
factors
help to explain why, in the nineteenth century,
religion again became a
power in the world, and why
also the most remarkable features of the story
were
the revival of Roman Catholicism and the emergence
in the 1830's
of the Oxford movement.
Yet, to a considerable degree, the movement against
Christianity increased
in power, and the hostility to
ecclesiastical systems now turned more
definitely into
an attack on religion as such. The formidable
character
of the secularizing forces helped in fact to provoke
a
counter-movement (to alarm the Tractarians in
Oxford, for example) and the
conflict between belief
and unbelief became a more profound and
serious
affair. It is interesting to see that in France, where the
hostility to Rome and to Christianity itself was still
so strong, the
growth and the assertiveness of Catholic
piety became particularly evident;
and the very power
which the state acquired over the church in the
Napoleonic settlement drove Catholics to recognize
the papacy as their true
support, the old Gallican
prejudices giving way to Ultramontanism.
The century saw the continued enlargement of the
power and the scope of the
state—a state now by
necessity increasingly engrossed by secular
preoccupa-
tions—and this
became irksome at times even to
Protestants, irksome even to sections of
that highly
national body, the Church of England. Precisely be-
cause the state was so obviously no longer a
“religious
society,” virtually coextensive with a
church, Christians
were thrown back on the idea of the Church as a
separate body,
functioning for special purposes and
existing by virtue of a divine
commission. Something
of the resulting aspiration for autonomy is visible
not
only in the Oxford movement but even in Germany,
where princes in
the period after 1815 still had great
power over their churches, and were
able to bring
about the unification of the Lutheran and Reformed
systems in many regions.
At the same time the natural sciences, and the out-
look that was associated with them, began to present
more serious
difficulties. In the 1830's and 1840's geol-
ogy
challenged the book of Genesis, though progressive
Christians were able to
meet the difficulty by reverting
to more flexible ideas about biblical
inspiration—ideas
which had been held before, and the resort to
which
was coming to be necessary for other reasons. But the
doctrine
of evolution, particularly as developed by
Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (1859), seemed
to involve a more
radical change in one's views about
the nature of man, the character of the
universe, and
the potentialities of science. All the while the develop-
ment of biblical study and the
application of the his-
torical method in
that field—including a closer analysis
of the
Gospels—was producing equally disturbing re-
sults, especially in the work of the Tübingen school,
for example the Life of Jesus (1835) by David
Friedrich
Strauss. Some people met all this with blind con-
servatism, some left the Church, and
from memoirs,
biographies, and fiction we can see how often this was
accompanied by great heart-searching, carried out as
though it were itself
a religious act. Some kept the
old belief that in the long run religion
would become
compatible with both science and history, and were
driven
to think more deeply about the essential nature
of their faith.
Apart from the ferment of the liberal and democratic
ideas which had come
down from revolutionary France
and had been disseminated over Europe
through the
victories of Napoleon, the rise of industrialism, the
emergence of vast urban concentrations, and the plight
of the new working
classes resulted in an environment
more hostile to religion, more
refractory to ecclesias-
tical teaching.
For many centuries it had been almost
too easy to be a believing Christian.
Now, it was not
so easy, and those who adhered to the faith had to
think more deeply about the nature of it and revise
their notion of the
duties that it carried with it.
Roman Catholicism may have gained considerable
strength from the fact that
it set itself so consistently
against the very things that were to become
the pre-
vailing tendencies of the nineteenth
century. It seems
to have acquired internal depth and spiritual
intensity
from the fact that it stood so firmly by its ancient
Its revival had begun before 1815, and it produced a
restoration of religious orders (including the general
reestablishment of the Jesuits in 1814); also an intellec-
tual revival in Germany which made Munich an ex-
hilarating city before the middle of the century. The
creation of an unprecedented number of congregations,
societies, etc., meant that the activity and support of
the laity as well as the clergy were recruited, as never
before, for the care of the distressed, the carrying of
the gospel to neglected areas in the towns, and the
missionary work abroad.
Attempts to reconcile the religion and the authority
of the papacy with a
program of modern democratic
ideas were firmly suppressed, however. For a
little while
after his elevation in 1846 Pope Pius IX tried to coop-
erate with liberalism in the Papal States;
but the drift
to extremism, and the crucial demand that
he—a
prince of peace—should turn
“nationalist” and help
to drive the Austrians from
Italy, showed the impos-
sibility of this.
In 1864 his Syllabus of Errors made
clear how Rome had been setting itself
against the
encroachments of the state in ecclesiastical matters,
including education; it was also against the views of
liberals on
toleration, and against any qualification of
the claim that Roman
Catholicism was the single true
religion. There was specific condemnation
of any sug-
gestion that the Supreme Pontiff
either could or ought
to reconcile himself with “progress,
liberalism, and
modern civilization.” If the year 1870 saw the
great
humiliation of the pope—his loss of Rome and his
disappearance as a temporal power—it saw also the
Infallibility
Decree of the First Vatican Council and
the explicit recognition of his
supremacy in the spirit-
ual realm.
All this would have been impossible if he had not
now found in faithful
Catholics throughout Europe a
support more reliable than his predecessors
had re-
ceived from actual governments, and if
there had not
been a widespread resolve to rescue the traditions and
doctrines of the Church from current, fashionable,
intellectual movements.
On the theoretical side, the
conservative attitude itself became imposing
through
the reassertion and reexposition of the scholastic
teaching of
Saint Thomas Aquinas. Before the end of
the century Pope Leo XIII
encouraged French Catho-
lics to cooperate
with the French Republic, but this
did not prevent the complete separation
of Church and
State and further attacks on the religious orders in
that
country. In the ten or fifteen years from 1893 an effec-
tive resistance was made to the Catholic
“Modernist”
movement, which attempted to take account
of
achievements in biblical scholarship and historical
criticism (and
in particular to introduce the more
flexible views of biblical inspiration now familiar
amongst the
Protestants). Though there were features
in this Modernism which disturbed
even enlightened
Protestants, the radical nature of its suppression
lent
color to the view of Baron von Hügel that the Curia
was
carrying reaction too far.
In England and Germany the Pietistic and Evangel-
ical movements went on increasing their power. In
England the
nonconformists had been growing rapidly
in numbers, embracing a quarter of
the population at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Their expan-
sion became still more remarkable from
this time,
especially in the newly industrialized regions, and it
was
now that “the nonconformist conscience” became
a
formidable affair. From 1833, however, when as a
result of the Reform Bill
it was less easy than before
to regard Parliament as the lay assembly of
the
Anglican Church, and when the Whigs seemed partic-
ularly menacing, the Oxford movement reasserted
the
idea of the Church as a separate, divinely constituted
body to be
governed by bishops who held authority
as the successors of the Apostles.
Still more, they
wished to reassert the Catholic side of the Anglican
tradition, to revive the spiritual life that had been
manifested in the
ancient saints and to restore the
beliefs and ceremonies of earlier times.
The very epis-
copal authority which they
invoked declined on the
whole to tolerate them, and in this predicament
some
of their distinguished representatives—men like
Newman
and Manning—moved over to Rome. Like
the nonconformists, the
Oxford Tractarians had an
influence that extended far beyond their own
circle,
and in their case it was an influence out of all propor-
tion to their numbers.
Germany, on the other hand, not only saw a
quickening of religious life, but
also acquired a re-
markable intellectual
leadership in the Protestant
world. The predominance that she had achieved
in
philosophy and historical science gave her resources
for
adventurous attempts to vindicate the Christian
outlook, and made
Lutheranism more creative than it
had been since the days of its founder.
The German
thinkers tried to meet the challenge of the age by
examining the bases of religion itself—some grounding
theology
on inner experience, some insisting on a
creatureliness and a feeling of
dependence in man,
some stressing the direct apprehension of the
divine,
some holding that all thinking should start with Christ
and
the Gospel. Certain writers raised the question
whether the surrender of
Christianity to Greek thought
in the early centuries of the Church had not
been a
misfortune. Others carried further than ever before the
study
and criticism of the Bible, the examination of
the early Church, and the
history of Christian dogma.
nineteenth century; but even more than Roman
Catholicism it expressed itself in movements to assist
the distressed classes, to reform society, to carry reli-
gion into neglected areas, and to enlarge the missionary
work abroad.
The nineteenth century was important in the history
of religion, partly
because it saw advances in thought
on both the Catholic and the Protestant
sides, and
partly because the conflict with secularism and unbelief
had become so formidable. In spite of the great seces-
sions that took place, both Catholicism and Protes-
tantism appeared stronger at the end
of the century
than at the beginning, besides involving far greater
numbers of their adherents in a clearer act of affirma-
tive decision, and stimulating greater activity in
the
laity. In both great sections of the Church, the clergy,
in their
combination of earnestness, intelligence, and
training, may have reached a
general standard rarely
known in the history of the Church. It would not
be
easy for people today to realize the degree to which,
down to 1914,
the local church was for most people
the hub of their social
life—the place that often pro-
vided
the only societies, sporting clubs, festivals and
parties, informative
lectures, and musical evenings—
the place where men met their
sweethearts and
gathered their circle of friends. A tremendous foreign
missionary endeavor from the 1790's, particularly in
Protestantism (and
facilitated to some degree by the
opportunities open to colonialist
nations), had far ex-
ceeded all precedents and
had carried Christianity into
every quarter of the globe.
In the United States the number of Christians and
the percentage of the
population that were church
members, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century,
were remarkably low and ecclesiastical systems did not
possess the privileges that they so often enjoyed in the
European states.
The material preoccupations of a
pioneer society, and the industrial and
urban develop-
ments as the century
proceeded, would have seemed
calculated to check the development of
religion; yet
a tremendous internal missionary work made the ad-
vance of the churches in the United States
more re-
markable than in the Old World. This
missionary work
accompanied the westward movement, and the pecu-
liar needs of the frontier and of pioneer
conditions
helped to produce “revivalist” methods,
camp-
meetings, circuit riders, and
travelling evange-
lists—techniques of mass-conversion often supported
by
the fervor for “Gospel hymns” and negro “spirit-
uals.” The effect of all
this was to alter the balance
of forces and in general to change the
physiognomy
of American religion. Victory came to the denomi-
nations that had missionary ardor
and the ability to
offer the kind of message that could reach the people.
Within
Protestantism it was now the Baptists and
Methodists who multiplied,
swamping the Congrega-
tionalists,
Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, who had
predominated at the beginning of
the century.
Roman Catholicism from being one of the smallest
became the largest single
religious body in the country,
partly as a result of the great number of
immigrantss.
Protestantism now acquired a remarkable
“popular”
shape which corresponded to the
“popular” side of
Catholicism, though it bore a
vastly different character,
which contributed similarly to the cause of
intellectual
conservatism in the churches. The whole movement
led to a
great splintering of the older denominations
and the founding of new ones,
particularly Mormonism
in 1830, the Seventh Day Adventists, organized
in
1863, and the Church of Christ Scientist in 1879. In
the nineteenth
century and the early decades of the
twentieth there was a vast increase in
the percentage
of the population that was actively connected with
some
church, and, by the close of that period religion—
with its
Social Gospel and its colossal philanthropies—
had done much to
shape the American outlook, helping
first to generate the American ideal
and then, perhaps,
to fasten Christianity itself within the limits of
that
ideal.
7. The Twentieth Century.
In the twentieth century
two World Wars, centered at the heart of
European
Christendom, shook the earth and made history more
dynamic.
Christianity was faced by organized systems
such as Communism and Nazism,
which constituted
a more powerful threat to it, and cleared away more
of the traditional fabric of society, than anything hith-
erto known. The acceleration of scientific progress,
the
resulting change in one's notions of the physical uni-
verse, the great power that man had acquired over
nature, the enormous advances of educational systems
that were essentially
secular, and the influence of the
popular press, radio, and television in
the dissemination
of a new world view—all these produced a
greater
intellectual challenge than religion of any sort had ever
had
to meet before. Now, also, the ethical ideas of
society, though so many of
them still carried the marks
of Christian influence, came to conflict in an
unprece-
dented way with some of the
longest and most consist-
ent traditions of
the churches. The fact that the
churches had so often been engaged in a
rearguard
action—sometimes against liberty, sometimes
against
science itself—became a disadvantage, since it left
(as
an additional obstruction to the hearing of the Gospel)
a
resentment in intelligent people, even a fear lest the
Church should ever
recover its power. In other conti-
nents, the
great missionary endeavor (in which man
may sometimes have tried
unthinkingly to tie Christi-
zation) came to be charged understandably, but un-
justly, with having sought to provide cover for
imperialist purposes.
The resulting issues are as momentous as in the days
when the faith of the
first disciples had to confront
the culture of the Greco-Roman world, and
it is not
easy to say what will be the long-term effects of the
new
situation on the intellectualization of the faith and
the attempt to run it
into a new world view. The actual
experiences of the human race, as it
develops the
implications of its current systems, may affect the
story;
and it is not clear that Christianity may not have to
confront
a world somewhat similar to the one which
the early Church had to face in
the Roman Empire—a
hostile world, but suffering strange
nostalgias and
harassed by competing forms of faith.
In some respects the churches may have drawn in
upon themselves as though
determined not to lose
anything essential in their ancient heritage. A
liberal-
ism which, before and after the
First World War, may
have been too directly rationalistic, soon came to
ap-
pear “dated,” and
even Protestants—even noncon-
formists—became somewhat more interested in their
tradition. The situation of the world may help to ex-
plain why Karl Barth in 1918 began to present the
“theology of Crisis,” directly attacking liberalism
and
reviving some of the profounder aspects of early
Lutheranism. But
historiography raised radical prob-
lems,
especially when from 1919 the teachers of
Formgeschichte examined the shape which the early
Church had given to the packets of oral tradition that
lay behind the
Gospels. History emerged again as a
crucial issue for an
“historical religion” in the much
controverted work
of Rudolf Bultmann. He called for
“de-mythologizing”
and presented existentialist ideas
which threw light on some aspects of
Christianity if
not also on history itself.
The Bible retained its influence even amongst people
(including Roman
Catholics) who had accepted the
kind of criticism that could be described
as central.
In the United States the churches retained their high
membership and remarkable vigor for further decades,
the country acquiring
a recognized leadership in the
Protestant world. But, even amid
technological
progress and booming prosperity, influential teachers
issued their moral challenges, took their stand on the
Bible, and
reasserted the pessimistic view of human
nature. The spectacular scandals
and crimes in certain
sections of society did not nullify that compassion
and
that American idealism which owed so much to an
ultimate Christian
influence.
It was natural that, in the new situation, the various
sects and
denominations should lose much of their
former fanaticism and hostility, and should come to
feel one
another as allies against a world of hostile
forces. To a considerable
degree it was coming to be
the case that, within Protestantism, the
differences
between the liberals and the conservatives in the vari-
ous churches were deeper than the
differences between
one denomination and another. Even in the decades
after 1914, it became an important consideration that
the work of foreign
missions was being hampered by
the divisions within Christianity. Unions
between de-
nominations and cooperation
for special objects,
though not unknown before, now became much more
frequent and significant. The Ecumenical movement
was a natural development
of this and a typical feature
of it was the preparation in 1938, and the
official
constitution at Amsterdam in 1940, of the plan for a
World
Council of Churches. The work of Pope John
XXIII and the Second Vatican
Council of 1962-65
stand as one of the most remarkable features of the
twentieth-century story—a significant change in the
relations
between Catholic and Protestant, who (in
spite of rivalries and
hostilities) had never, throughout
the centuries, quite ceased to exert a
beneficent influ-
ence on one another.
Lord Acton once remarked that he saw Providence
in general history (saw it
in the march of “progress,”
as he explicitly stated
on a number of occasions); but
he added that he did not detect it in the
history of
the Church. His attitude is understandable, for ecclesi-
astical systems have not been
exempted from scandals
and crimes; and (at least in those tangible things
which
the secular historian has chiefly in mind) they would
seem to
have been subject to the laws which govern
other religions, including that
of the Old Testament.
Acton may have been misled because he tended to
be
interested in the kind of history that deals with
“public
affairs” and perhaps saw the historical
Church too
much as a politico-religious institution. All the same,
he
must have known in his heart that its essence lay
in the spiritual life
which presumed the immediacy of
divine activity, though it might be
unrelated to
“progress”—a spiritual life
which might be at least as
profound in the fifth or the fifteenth century
as in the
twentieth. He was prepared also to see all history as
the
development of the scope and the quality of the
human conscience, this
conscience being a key to
progress itself and the effective dynamic behind
even
modern revolution, in his view. The enlarged scope
for the
individual conscience had been achieved by the
influence of Christianity,
making the great contrast
with classical antiquity where, he said, man's
duty had
been prescribed to him by the state.
Mazzini regarded the French Revolution as the cli-
max and fulfilment of Christianity which, by making
thing else in the created universe, could be regarded
as working throughout the centuries for the principle
of “individualism,” working for it at times even when
ecclesiastical systems were resisting it. On this view
a Christian civilization operates (as Acton believed) to
produce a regime of freedom, and the effect of its
advance is to bring about a greater differentiation in
personalities, a world in which each man decides the
object he will work for and the God whom he will
serve. Mazzini was not content with this, however, and
insisted that a new stage had been reached—a stage
at which the individual ought to give way to the “or-
ganic People.” And this is perhaps the great issue;
whether men shall be organized, and even herded like
cattle, to carry out a single all-consuming purpose that
is imposed on everybody.
There are elements or patterns of Christian thought
that appear in a more or
less secularized form in a
Voltaire, a Rousseau, a Hegel, a Mazzini, a
Ranke, and
a Marx; and perhaps they come to an end there. From
the
middle of the twentieth century, the world moves
on its own momentum to new
patterns of thought, new
notions of the enterprise of living, new realms
of
human experience. Behind the technological age and
the attempt to
explore the outer universe, and behind
the permissive society are elements
which were part
of the Christian outlook, but which, having become
autonomous, have moved far forward on their own
account. Perhaps the great
compassionateness now
visible in contemporary society will stand as the
most
palpable result of fifteen hundred years of Christian
predominance in Europe. And now, perhaps, for the
first time during those
fifteen hundred years, Christi-
anity
returns to something like its original state—a
world in which it
cannot be objected that, for the great
majority of people, things are
unfairly disposed in favor
of conventional or habitual or hereditary
belief.
V. THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
In the Byzantine or Orthodox Church of the East
the situation was seriously
affected by the fact that
the culture, the imperial system and religion
itself
enjoyed a continuity which the barbarian invaders had
badly
broken in the West. The Eastern Emperor re-
mained still in a sense the Pontifex Maximus; he could
virtually
choose the Patriarch of Constantinople, he
legislated on ecclesiastical
matters, initiated such leg-
islation, and
could behave tyrannically on occasion. It
gradually became explicit that
the ordinary adminis-
tration of the
Church was regarded as shared by the
five Patriarchates of Rome,
Constantinople, Antioch,
Alexandria, and Jerusalem; though a place of
special
honor was conceded to Rome, and, from the eighth
century it was true for the most part that the Patri-
archate of Constantinople covered the
area effectively
ruled by the Eastern emperor.
Elements of an earlier democracy continued in the
ecclesiastical system, the
laity having a part in the
election of a priest, the lower clergy in the
choice of
a bishop. The laity—and perhaps, in particular,
the
mob in Constantinople—were a force in religious
affairs, and were not regarded as incapable of holding
views on theology.
They were greatly under the influ-
ence of the
lower clergy and the monks, and able to
resist even a Patriarch, even an
emperor. Perhaps the
most effective practical difference from the West
came
from the continuance of secular education in the
Byzantine
Empire: the fact that high civil servants
might be more cultured than the
bishops and might
be appointed to high ecclesiastical office. On
doctrinal
matters Constantinople was disposed to have respect
for
Rome, but in the East, the final authority in this
field was an Ecumenical
Council, and there was a
greater desire not to allow minute differences of
doc-
trine to ruin charitable relations
with other parts of
the Church. Greater value was attached to
mysticism,
and there was less suspicion of it, than in the West,
the
emphasis being more definitely on the otherworldly
aspect of religion.
When the Church had settled down after the Icono-
clastic controversy in the eighth and early ninth cen-
turies, the missionary work amongst the
Slavs was
taken up, and with it went the general civilizing influ-
ences of Byzantium, producing a distinct
differentiation
in culture between the two halves of the whole conti-
nent. Soon after 860 Cyril and Methodius
carried to
the swollen Moravian empire the Slavonic literary
language
which they had constructed apparently on
the basis of a dialect in
Macedonia. Both here and in
the conversion of Bulgaria the competition
between
the Eastern and the Latin church is visible, and it
brought
out a tendency to mutual criticism, but did
not produce anything like the
serious schism once
associated with the name of Photius.
Over a century later the conversion of a Russian
prince and his marriage to
a Byzantine princess
heralded the Christianizing of Russia and brought
that
country into the orbit of Byzantium, though Latin
missionaries
had appeared there at an earlier date.
Earlier than all this the rule of
Byzantium in southern
Italy, and the policy of taking over for the
Orthodox
church that region, together with Illyrium (which had
been
part of the Roman Patriarchate), had begun to
lead to serious trouble.
Furthermore the conquests by
the Normans in southern Italy in the eleventh
century,
together with their threat to move into the Balkans,
complicated still further the relations between Latin
produce the real schism or the enduring estrangement
that the Western church later alleged to have taken
place. Political events and purely ecclesiastical rivalries
and disputes would lead to polemical quarrels between
Rome and Constantinople over points where each side
had often been content to allow differences. The em-
perors in Constantinople, however, often needed help
from the West, and tended to be an influence on the
side of reconciliation.
The chief difficulties had reference to some things
which had received
general recognition in the Western
church only comparatively recently, so
that in a sense
they were the result of the separate life that had
been
developing. This was true of the most serious theolog-
ical difference, the famous filoque clause, the Western
view that the Holy Spirit proceeds from
the Son as
well as from the Father. Fundamental differences in
mentality and language between the Greeks and the
Latins obstructed any
agreement on this; but in any
case the East had a still stronger hostility
to the West-
ern policy of adding to the creed
without reference
to a general council.
The reform of the Western church and the tremen-
dous advance of papal claims in the latter half of the
eleventh
century (at a time when conditions in Rome
for a long period had led
Easterners to have a low
opinion of the papacy) provided a substantial
cause
of further alienation, especially as the claims involved
the
right to appeal to Rome from ecclesiastical courts
in Constantinople. For
the rest the Orthodox Church
tended to feel strongly about the
comparatively recent
development which had brought the West to the use
of unleavened bread in the sacrament. And, once hos-
tility was awakened, there were numerous differences
in custom
that could be turned into debating points
against the West—the
fasting on Saturdays, the clerical
shaving of beards, the question of the
celibacy of the
clergy, etc.
Though the first Crusade was an answer to a call
for help from
Constantinople, it increased the es-
trangement. The establishment of a Latin bishop of
Antioch, while
the Orthodox one went into exile, pro-
duced a
real schism in one of those eastern Patri-
archates that had hitherto tried to avoid participation
in the
quarrels between Rome and Constantinople. The
Fourth Crusade, involving the
sack of Constantinople
and the establishment for a time of a Latin
empire
there, made the estrangement enduring and profound,
and marks
the fundamental breach.
From the thirteenth century Byzantine culture was
brilliant, as the empire
declined. The Emperor Michael
VIII Palaeologus in 1273-74, hoping to stave
off an-
other attack from the West, overbore
both the Patri
arch and the Synod and, in an agreement for ecclesias-
tical union, admitted the full
primacy of the Roman
See. But the Church refused to hold to this. The teach-
ing of Gregory Palamas, which gave
Orthodox
mysticism a dogmatic basis and was adopted as official
doctrine, provided a new obstruction to union; but the
need for help
against the Turks made the issue a live
one in the fourteenth century and
the Conciliar Move-
ment in the West produced a
situation somewhat more
favorable to the policy. Representatives of
Byzantium
appeared at the Council of Constance. In 1439 a union
was
achieved at the Council of Florence. The Russians
rejected this; however,
the Byzantines were unrecon-
ciled;
Constantinople fell in 1453; and in 1484 the
agreement was formally
repudiated there.
Before 1453 a great part of the flock of the Patriarch
of Constantinople (in
Asia Minor, for example) had
been living under Turkish rule and the
Patriarchates
of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem had long been
under the infidel. After the conquest, the Christians
were allowed to exist
as a separate nation, governing
their own affairs according to their own
laws and
customs, the Patriarch being responsible for the ad-
ministration, the securing of the
payment of taxes, and
the maintenance of a proper attitude towards the
gov-
ernment. The Turkish government
itself was not hostile
but the local authorities in Asia seem to have
been
more intolerant than those in Europe. Also, in their
reduced
position, the Christians were unable to keep
up their educational system,
and the church suffered
disastrously for this, though before long some use
was
being made of facilities in Venice.
The Russians were more passionately Orthodox than
the Greeks, and more
hostile to other forms of Christi-
anity,
so that they regarded the fall of Constantinople
as the punishment for the
union attempted with Rome.
The Christians under Turkish rule might have a
Patri-
arch, but they no longer had the
leadership of a Chris-
tian emperor, and as
the rulers of Russia increased in
power—becoming Tsars from
1480—they saw them-
selves as
heirs of the Byzantine emperors, Ivan III
having married the niece of the
last of these in 1472.
They appointed their own Metropolitan of Kiev
(after
a nominal election) and though Ivan III had declared
that the
Patriarch of Constantinople had no authority
in Russia, the Metropolitan
acknowledged the superior
position of the latter. The Russian clergy came
to have
a certain contempt for the Greeks, and the Tsar
claimed to be
the royal leader of Orthodoxy. In 1587
Constantinople recognized Moscow as
a Patriarchate.
After the Time of Troubles, the first Romanov Tsar,
Michael, made his able
father Patriarch, and from 1610
to 1633 these two ruled together, to the
great advan-
tage of the Church. Orthodoxy had
suffered a great loss
Ukraine, including Kiev, had passed to Poland, which
was attempting to impose upon it a Uniate system,
agreed upon in that country in 1595. This involved
the recognition of papal supremacy but the retention
of the Orthodox liturgy, marriage of the clergy, etc.
Between 1652 and 1658 Nikon, the Patriarch of
Moscow, made a thorough reform of the Russian
church, and even pressed ecclesiastical authority in the
spirit of the medieval papacy. Peter the Great saw the
danger, however, and, from 1700, he and his successors
refused to nominate a Patriarch.
Relations with the West are illustrated by the fact
that Cyril Lucaris, who
was Patriarch of Constanti-
nople from
1620 to 1635 and in 1637-38, put out a
distinctly Calvinistic
“confession of faith.” Before 1640,
Peter Moghila,
Metropolitan of Kiev drew up (in Latin)
a similar
“confession” which showed a curious sympa-
thy with Catholic doctrine. From 1672, Dositheus,
the
Patriarch of Jerusalem, was working to secure the
production of a
“confession” which should at least
avoid these
aberrations. In the eighteenth century
progress was limited by the fact
that in Constantinople
the lay intelligentsia acquired the leading
position
amongst the Greeks, while Catharine the Great in
Russia
tended to elevate free-thinkers to high ecclesi-
astical appointments. In 1774 Russia created trouble
for the
future by securing treaty-recognition of her
right to intervene on behalf
of Orthodox subjects of
the Ottoman Empire.
The prosperity of the Phanariots, the great influence
they acquired over the
church in Constantinople and
their dream of a revival of Greek imperialism
brought
embarrassment to the Patriarchs; and the opening of
the Greek
revolt—which the Patriarch could not bring
himself actually to
denounce—led to the execution of
the head of the church, two
metropolitans, twelve
bishops, and all the leading Phanariots in 1821.
The
Patriarchate never recovered from this blow and began
to lose many
of the features that had made it generally
important in mundane affairs.
With the establishment
of a Greek kingdom not only the Orthodox Greeks
of
the country itself but also those in Turkey tended to
look towards
the Metropolitan of Athens. The twenti-
eth
century has seen an important squeezing out of
Orthodoxy in Turkey and
Egypt, and this has been
helped in both cases by the departure of so many
of
the Greeks from these two countries. The See of Anti-
och has become much more important because it con-
tains along with the Patriarchate of
Jerusalem, the
main Arabian section of Orthodoxy, and has itself been
in Syrian or Lebanese hands throughout the present
century. The Orthodox
church in Europe became
closely associated with nationalism in the Balkans, and
this worked to the detriment of the Patriarch of Con-
stantinople, who, however, was perhaps
too Greek to
be truly ecumenical. It was even Arab-speaking mem-
bers of the Orthodox church who played a
leading part
in the rise of Arabian national movements.
The Church has suffered of late from the secularizing,
tendencies of the
modern world, and in the 1960's it
has in the Middle East only a fifth of
the numbers it
had fifty years ago. Though the Patriarch of Constanti-
nople has only a small immediate
flock, the very mis-
fortunes of the office
seem to have freed it for a more
ecumenical role, especially as the
Orthodox in Western
Europe, in America, and in Australia are under its
jurisdiction. And at least, in spite of all that has hap-
pened in recent centuries, the Church has maintained
its spiritual power and its ability to play a part in the
ecumenical
movements of the present day.
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HERBERT BUTTERFIELD
[See also Church as Institution; Gnosticism; God; Heresy;Millenarianism; Myth in Biblical Times; Religious Tolera-
tion; Sin and Salvation.]
Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||