The Protestant Self

1517

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

When the Catholic monk Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, condemning the practices of the Catholic Church, he set into motion momentous changes, not only in religious practices but also in the understanding of human identity. Each person now stood alone before God, each person’s justification was through faith alone, and one’s relationship with the deity was defined in personal terms. By contrast, salvation, in the Catholic faith, was mediated by the church; thus the individual identity was submerged in the collective identity of church membership.

While Luther’s immediate aim was to challenge what he considered false practices by the church, the consequences of his actions spread far beyond the church and matters of religion. The implications of the Reformation contributed to a new sense of self. The emergent Protestant faith demanded that its followers focus on their inner lives and devote themselves to spiritual practices. The emphasis on a personal, private relationship with God facilitated a need to pay attention to one’s thoughts and emotions, thus increasing a sense of subjectivity. The practices of everyday life attained a new importance, as one’s faith was manifested as much in the way one conducted business and attended to the tasks of daily living as in the number of times one attended church. New tools, such as conduct books and diaries, were introduced to help Christians maintain their personal relationships with God.

The most popular devotional aid was the conduct book, which was filled with maxims and proverbs meant to guide spiritual reflection and help each person judge his or her own spiritual progress. Both conduct books and diaries were ways to help the believer pay careful attention to the inner life and so enhance self-control of sinful thoughts and impulses. The emphasis on a personal, private relationship with God and its maintenance helped facilitate a sense of inwardness, of the need to pay attention to one’s interior life, thus increasing a sense of subjectivity, which helped pave the way to modern psychology and its emphasis on the private self.

SEE ALSO Montaigne’s Essays (1580), Leviathan (1651), Tabula Rasa (1690), The Familiar and the Novel (1719), The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), The Organism (1939)

Christian Reading in His Book, an illustration by English poet and printmaker William Blake, appearing in a nineteenth-century edition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). This monumental Christian allegory encouraged newly literate Christians to focus on their private, interior lives, which helped eventually to create a sense of a psychological self.