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The Great Reformation

A Prequel to Emergence

As we know, the Great Reformation no more began on October 31, 1517, than adulthood commences on the morning of one’s twenty-first birthday. Both are convenient place markers. Both put a useful handle on a major event that spreads out on either side thereof like a square parcel being carried by a single strap. There’s a kind of convenient shorthand involved in that, however. When (and assuming) Martin Luther tacked his theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg Castle, he was responding to pressures that had been building around his natal form of Christianity and culture for over a century. The story and the common imagination of Catholic Europe had been pounded over and over again until they had both pocked at the same time. All Luther did on October 31, 1517, was say, “Look, there’s a hole!” followed by the observation, “We’re shipping water here, folks.”

When the Great Reformation actually began varies in accord with which historian one is reading at the time.[4] There is a kind of consensus, though, that the closing years of the fourteenth century were those in which the die was cast. After 1378, there probably could not have been any turning back. That year was so fraught with disaster, in fact, that it is frequently referred to as “a Great Schism” itself, or sometimes as “the Second Great Schism.”

Tensions between the peoples and powers of Italy and princes and powers of France led in 1378 to the simultaneous election of two men to the Chair of Peter: Urban VI, the Italian pope, and Clement VII, the French one. Each ferociously defended his claim to the papal throne while lambasting the other as illegitimate and heretical. Not only did each wage war against the other, but so too did their factions. The resulting chaos was as much cultural, political, and social as it was religious. The primacy of the papacy and the relative unity and stability its authority had formerly exercised in European affairs were both shattered. The phenomenon of two warring popes would not be resolved until 1418. By that time an Italian with the apostolic name of Gregory XII would be contending against a French pope known as Benedict XIII; and both of them would be in contention with another Italian with the apostolic name of John XXIII.

While having three warring popes all claiming to be the one, true Pope may seem somewhere between quaint and downright ludicrous to us now, it did not seem so to the Church and citizenry of the early fifteenth century. And though they might not have had the perspective from which to analyze their circumstances, we do. The presence of three sitting popes is an almost perfect example of what established forms of religion do during the run up to a hinge time. In the case of the Great Reformation, by contending among themselves, the multiple popes did two, intertwined things. First, they simultaneously pocked both the story and the consensual illusion that has been functional up until 1378. (Up until then, the world of human affairs had run on the principle that there was one Pope and that he was directly and specifically chosen of God to be the final arbitrator, not only of religious matters, but also of political ones. The Christian story asserted this . . . or it always had when it was interpreted to the people by their clergy.) Second, two or three popes evoked the one question that is always present in re-formation: Where now is the authority?

Negotiating Authority

Always without fail, the thing that gets lost early in the process of a reconfiguration is any clear and general understanding of who or what is to be used as the arbitrator of correct belief, action, and control. So long as that question remains unanswered, the lens of the common or shared imagination through which we view life in our own time and place is so opaque that we stumble and fall over and over again. The Reformation, when it finally and fully arrived after 1517, was to answer the question almost immediately. Sola scriptura, scriptura sola. Only the Scripture and the Scriptures only. Luther and the reformers who followed after him would build their reformed Church on that principle, joining it in good time with the concept of the priesthood of all believers. No more Pope, no more magisterium, no more human confessor between humanity and Christian God, only the Good Book.

The obvious, general benefit of “Scripture only and only Scripture” was that once a new source of unimpeachable authority has been duly constituted and established, things always begin to wind back down from chaos to relative stability again. A more long-range benefit of the Reformation’s placing ultimate authority in Scripture was that, when coupled with the principle of the priesthood of all believers, sola scriptura required absolute and universal literacy if it were going to work. The Protestant imperative toward every believer’s being able to read Holy Writ for him- or herself excited the drive toward literacy that in turn accelerated the drive toward rationalism and from there to Enlightenment and from there straight into the science and technology and literature and governments that characterize our lives today. There were, of course, some disadvantages.

The most obvious problem of universal literacy is that if one teaches five people to read and then asks them each to read the same document, there will be at least three different interpretations of what the five of them have read. While we may laugh and say that divisiveness was Protestantism’s greatest gift to Christianity, ours is a somber joke. Denominationalism is a disunity in the body of Christ and, ironically, one that has a bloody history. And there is another irony as well.

Now, some five hundred years later, even many of the most die-hard Protestants among us have grown suspicious of “Scripture and Scripture only.” We question what the words mean—literally? Metaphorically? Actually? We even question which words do and do not belong in Scripture and the purity of the editorial line of descent of those that do. We begin to refer to Luther’s principle of “sola scriptura, scriptura sola” as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one. And even as we speak, the authority that has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands. “Where now is the authority?” circles overhead like a dark angel goading us toward disestablishment. Where indeed?

The century or so of peri-Reformation running up to Luther and to a fully articulated Reformation was rife with more challenges to the authority of the common illusion and the extant cultural story than just the presence of three warring pretenders to the papacy. Perhaps, in aggregate, the largest number of these assaults was tied directly to Islam and the almost constant warfare between Christian Europe and an Islam that wanted to occupy it. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks finally succeeded in capturing Constantinople with the result that thousands of Greek Orthodox scholars, traders, and intelligentsia fled what is now Turkey to take up residence in Europe. What they carried with them was threefold. First, they brought copies upon copies of the ancient writers who had informed their hereditary culture—Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the great dramatists, Euclid, Demosthenes, and their kind—along with the great Roman writers—Lucretius, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, and their kind.

In addition to possessing those codices, the exiled Greeks possessed the ability to read the ancient, classical tongues with sophisticated accuracy. Beyond both those things, however, and arguably of even greater importance in the long reach of history, they brought with them the spectacular scientific and mathematical knowledge of the Arab/Islamic culture in which they had been living. Theirs was, in sum, an accumulated base of pure knowledge that was far in advance of anything medieval Europe had even dreamed of up to that point. And it would be the twentieth century, with its burgeoning sciences, before the West would experience again such an inundation of knowledge.

While no one can talk about the Great Reformation without talking about the Renaissance, no one can date the Renaissance precisely either. Like the Reformation, it more slid into or glided over or subtly infiltrated European ways of being than it commenced at any one given point. The changing sensibilities we recognize as the essence of “re-birth” were discernible in Italy by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Byzantine Empire had begun its slow decline by 1204, and the products of its genius had begun their trek westward at the same time, in other words. But when a general date of its beginning in continental Europe is attached to the Renaissance, as with Luther and the Great Reformation, so here; and the actual fall of Constantinople is a strong candidate for being that point.

Tension and Conflict

It must be noted here as well that tensions between the stories and imaginations of near-Eastern culture and those of continental European culture have informed and shaped each of the West’s hinge times. Characteristically and predictably, since Islam’s founding in the sixth century, those tensions have been defined religiously. That is, they are most frequently spoken of as ones between Islam and Christianity, rather than being defined geographically as territorial fights. By either way of naming, the concurrence of the Great Emergence with a renewed, bellicose engagement with Islam is par for the course; and then, as now, the hands on both sides were and are equally bloody.

The whole history of the Iberian Peninsula in the fifty or sixty years before Luther is one long catalog of scrimmages between the regional Iberian kings and the Mussulmen (not to forget an equal push to drive out those other Near-Easterners, the Sephardic or Spanish Jews) leading to their expulsion, conversion, and/or slaughter. Yet the course of Christian Europe’s rebirth was aided not only by the influx of Greeks fleeing Constantinople but also by the Spanish monarchs’ retaking of the Moorish culture in Spain, especially of the city of Cordoba. There, in their flight, the Moors left behind a library of over four hundred thousand volumes, a wealth of knowledge far in excess of anything Christian scholars ever had access to since the destruction of the library in Alexandria. But the struggle between the two stories and two imaginations was not destined to be so easily put to rest.

The Ottomans would conquer more or less all of the southern rim of the Mediterranean even while Luther was pondering his Theses. Five years later, in 1522, they would drive the Knights of St. John, or the Hospitallers as they were popularly known, from a heavily fortified Rhodes to Malta, where we tend to think of them (when we think of them at all) as having always been, complete with a Maltese cross and an antique history. The importance of their defeat to the Europe of 1522, however, was less conversational and charming; the Hospitallers were the order of knights stationed in Rhodes specifically to defend Christian Europe from Muslim encroachment. Their defeat was the defeat of territorial, cultural, economic, and subjective safety.

Four years later, the fall of Rhodes would pale before the final fall of Hungary when the brother-in-law of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire would himself be killed, as would many of his bishops and clerics, not to mention thousands of his soldiers and citizenry. What was then known as Buda was destroyed, and the seeds for the contemporary conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina were planted. Five years later, in 1529, Muslim Turks penetrated as far into Europe as Vienna, where they were eventually repulsed. They would return several times, however; and it was not until 1683 that the Ottomans were finally driven off. In that year, they managed to penetrate the city’s defenses and torch about a fourth of it before they were defeated and Vienna was at last secured from further attacks.[5]

The intercultural, interreligious clashes of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, combined with the rediscovery of Classical writers and the vulnerabilities of exaggerated human suffering, led the people of the peri-Reformation to a reconsideration not only of the Church but also of the state and of social and economic order. What had been merchant republics like Venice or Florence in Italy, or city-states or, in more central and northern Europe, fiefdoms and duchies, began to centralize. Especially was there a push to unify the independent duchies into something like nation-states. The impetus behind that push may have been as much the greed of hereditary political and mercantile princes as anything else, but it also had the distinct advantage of increased physical protection for increasingly productive, urban areas. The importation, and then rapidly expanding use, of gunpowder had rendered the old ways of feudal warfare pathetically obsolete. There was protection in numbers and alliances and in access to contemporary weapons wielded by contemporary soldiers, not in sword-carrying knights.

The Rise of Protestantism

The shift from manor or fiefdom or duchy organization was, for the proletariat, a shift in loyalty, identity, and social arrangement. Serfdom, which had depended on the manor and fiefdom system, disappeared; and with it, the serfs, who became the new city dwellers. No longer the property, literally or psychologically, of the lord of the manor, they now became subjects of a distant king. As subjects, they transferred their loyalty in time, but it was loyalty at a far greater remove. The ready-to-hand stability and authority of a nearby owner-lord overseeing the particulars of life was gone. As a result, each man eventually had to become more or less responsible for himself and for his own. The serf-turned-townsman came to be conceptualized as a tiny king of a tiny kingdom, a miniature of the emerging, larger political paradigm. Where once upon a time the peasant or serf or slave and all around him had been merely dependent, producing parts of a largely self-sustaining mini-economy, now the source of order and authority had to be relocated to some point within daily process. Individualism was born. Cash money, not blood and land, became the basis of power. An entrepreneurial “middle” class emerged to fill up the space between the largely bankrupt hereditary aristocracy and the abject, unempowered poverty of the peasantry. The nuclear family replaced the tribe or clan as the center of physical organization. And on and on it went.

The processes which began and solidified in the decades surrounding the Great Reformation became our new common illusion, our new shared imagination as Westerners about how the world works and how the elements of human life are to be ordered. Protestantism, when it finally arrived, was both the religious expression and the religious reflection of those processes. It survived and grew to dominance because, as the meaning-bearing part of society, it gave the reconfigurations of the late peri-Reformation their authority by sacramentalizing them during the Reformation. There is, in other words, a very good reason why most general lectures about the Great Reformation today commence with the simplistic, but accurate observation that as a hinge time, it was characterized by the rise of capitalism, of the middle class, of the nation-state, and finally of Protestantism.

It is the business of any rummage sale first to remove all of the old treasures that belonged to one’s parents so as to get on with the business of keeping house the new way. As a result, there is also a very good reason why much commentary about the Great Emergence today remarks first that it has been both characterized and informed by increasing restraints upon, or outright rejections of, pure capitalism; by traditional or mainline Protestantism’s loss of demographic base; by the erosion or popular rejection of the middle class’s values and the nuclear family as the requisite foundational unit of social organization; by the shift from cash to information as the base of economic power; and by the demise of the nation-state and the rise of globalization. Well, of course it has been! We are holding a rummage sale, for goodness’ sake! Cleaning out the whole place is the first step toward refurbishing it.

But religion in a time of reconfiguration responds to, and is informed by, more than external shifts in the consensual illusion and our human imaginings about how the world is. Indeed, more than any other construct in human life, religion is sensitive to any and every pocking that takes place in the community’s story. When we look at the changes in sixteenth-century Europe’s community story, we must look first at fifteenth-century Christendom’s prevailing stories and specifically at how they came to be so swiftly, broadly, and violently overthrown.

The Influence of Gutenberg

The Great Reformation was intimately tied to matters of the written word from its very onset and long before Martin Luther came upon the scene. John Wycliffe, who died in 1384, was one of the peri-Reformation’s more radical clerics. An Englishman, Wycliffe probably did not create the Bible that bears his name; but he undoubtedly inspired its creation by his followers. Certainly, for as long as he lived, he argued the case for presenting Scripture in the common tongue. But Wycliffe’s cause, powerfully presented as it was, was limited in a way that the messages of the later reformers would not be. Wycliffe lived before Gutenberg. They lived after him.

It would, quite literally, be impossible to exaggerate the central importance to the Great Emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. By the same token and in absolutely analogous ways, it would be impossible to overstate the importance to the Great Reformation of the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440 and his subsequent development of movable type and oil-based inks. We laud today, almost to the point of tedium, Gutenberg and the fact that his inventiveness made Holy Writ more or less available to everyone, thereby enabling sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers.

We recognize, correctly, the enormous significance of the Gutenberg or Mazarin Bible as both the beginning of the Age of the Printed Book and also the commencement of the relocation, to the book, of authority in human affairs. What we often forget to mention is that Gutenberg’s converted winepress with its trays of movable type and more permanent ink was what made it possible, seventy-five years later, for Luther’s Theses to jump down from the door of Wittenberg’s church and circulate to people hundreds of miles away. The same Gutenberg process also allowed those distant readers to write, print, and circulate, in multiple copies to multiple readers, their own thoughts, reactions, and additions to what Luther was saying.

For that matter, we tend to forget, too, that much of the passion as well as the theological underpinnings of the Reformation was disseminated by means of popular music. With the Great Reformation, as has been true with the Great Emergence, music was often a more effectual vehicle of transmittal than was the learned treatise or the well-honed sermon. It was so effectual, in fact, that one of the first things the Roman Catholic Church did to counterattack the surge of Protestantism in the decades immediately after Luther was to address the issue of musicology. Gone, by decree, were the unintelligible elaborations that had been the pride of the Latin liturgy. In were the semantically open, more restrained works that taught as well as impressed.[6]

Because we so honor the printing press as the means by which the Bible became available to every believer, we sometimes forget something else as well. We forget, almost by default, that, decades before Luther, far more than the Bible was circulating, like a brush fire out of control, among Europe’s readers. In the closing years of the fourteenth century, men like Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) were thinking deeply, and writing influentially, about theories of sound governance and moral leadership that were more pragmatic than holy. The push toward realism and away from Platonic idealism was rampant. Christian/Aristotelean emphasis on teleology or some vague but vital final cause for the whole panorama of human existence was being jettisoned for a mechanical philosophy of empiricism. Combined with the West’s increased access to mathematics, that attitudinal shift in fairly rapid order made way for Copernicus, whose attack upon the story was, for many, to be the most unholy of all.

In 1514, three years before Wittenberg, Copernicus, a clergyman as well as an astronomer, gave written (though not at that time published) form to the heretical idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe and that, because of that, the earth was no more than just another planet circling the larger sun. Copernicus’s theory, which he developed and gave fuller expression to in 1543, was just a theory at first. Like Darwin’s early musings about evolution, Copernican astronomy would be confirmed by later scientists, in Copernicus’s case by men like Kepler and Galileo and Newton. Yet even as theory it was compelling enough to shatter not only the common illusion about how the world worked but also, and more disastrously, the accepted story about how it was constructed and why.

We forget sometimes that such blows level everybody, reformer and reformed alike. One of the great curmudgeons of Lutheranism, Andreas Osiander, somehow managed to attach, without Copernicus’s knowledge, a foreword to Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (once it was finally printed) that asserted the whole thing was no more than hypothetical, having no relation to reality. Yet the significant point here just may be that, because of the printing press and the access to the work of others which it enabled, every learned man who wished to, could read Copernicus and, just as readily, Osiander’s foreword of rebuttal. Public cacophony was the result. Shades of Darwinism and the Great Emergence.

Rethinking Church Authority

Copernicus’s theory was hardly the only body blow to the story that had prevailed between the Great Schism and the Great Reformation. For one thing, that fool Columbus had insisted on sailing west, the tragedy for the story being that he failed to fall off the edge of the earth. There is, of course, a good deal of doubt about just how many thinking men really believed the earth was flat by the time Columbus decided to test the assumption. The operative point is, instead, that common folk probably thought so and that, without doubt, the Church’s cosmology and theology had been solidly grounded on a flat earth, a tiered universe, and the centrality of Earth to the creation. What the parish priest had taught for centuries put Heaven above and in several rings of ascending grandeur, and then put Hell below, likewise in several descending levels of horror. A round earth might encircle Hell in some way, but where was Heaven? Where was God, if He were no longer right upstairs? Was there, to use Amerigo Vespucci’s words, really a “New World” out there that neither the Church nor humankind had ever known of before? Had Christian priests and the holy fathers been subject to error and ignorance all along? Was the Church capable of being wrong?

Yes.

It was that simple and that devastating.

The story was broken, the common imagination dispelled into a thousand wisps of half-remembered and now ludicrous fantasy.

But in such a time, always there emerge the ideas and the clerics who will repair the rips in first the mesh sleeve and then the waterproof casing. There will be an adjusted, largely new, story and an adjusted, largely new, imagination. For the Great Reformation, once it had fully arrived, sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers were two of those repairs, but they were only two among many. Luther was one such cleric, but he too was but one among many.

The number and order of the sacraments, the role of faith and works in salvation, the buying of Church positions and of forgiveness, the nature of the host and what it was by inherent constitution, the proper instruments of prayer, the efficacious timing of baptism, even the correct numbering and definition of the Ten Commandments . . . the list goes on and on, all of its items having to do with the reframing and reconceptualizing of the story and the imaginative consensus. What we so blithely name as “Reformation Protestantism” was theologically a many-headed hydra. By the same token, it was also many-armed.

Before the dust of reformation had all died down, the unity of Luther’s vision of a reshaped Church was already transmuted into a Protestantism that was itself broken into Lutheran, Reformed/Calvinist/Presbyterian, Anglican, and Anabaptist Protestantism. Each of them would splinter as well, feathering out into innumerable divisions and often warring, daughter sects. Likewise, there were many men and even a woman or two who rose to positions of leadership that at the time rivaled that of Luther. Some came to support and expand Luther’s work; others rose up to bitterly oppose it—Philipp Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Matthias and Katharina Schütz Zell, Heinrich Bullinger, Richard Hooker, the roll call of their names is almost without end. Shared sensibilities and common theological affinities did not prevent their dissenting, one from another, either. Luther, in particular, was a contentious antagonist, at one point calling John Calvin a “cow,” Bullinger a “bull,” and proclaiming that Zwingli was from the Evil One simply because the two of them differed violently on the true nature of the host or bread of the eucharist.

Such compliments were frequently returned then, just as they tend to be volleyed back and forth in our own time. The work of God may be pure, but its earthly application, as often as not, isn’t. That certainly was made clear not only in the Great Reformation, but also in the Counter-Reformation that was Rome’s response to it.

Counter-Reformation

The Counter-Reformation is also called the Catholic Reformation, the choice depending largely on whether one is Protestant or Roman Catholic. By either name, the phenomenon being referred to is one of reaction. The truth of the thing is that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century thrust toward reform in the Church was not “Protestant” per se in the beginning. It simply was a push toward change that, in the end, managed to burst out in two directions. Luther and his fellows, believing deeply in the Church and in its urgent need of reform, pushed forward and out from the extant Church with a vision of what it could become. At the same time, however, other men like John Colet and Gasparo Contarini or the churchmen who composed the Fifth Lateran Council pushed inward to clean up and out what was already there. Protestantism resulted from the first. A renewed—or to use Butler Bass’s term, a re-traditioned—Roman Catholicism flowed out of the second.

Like many other things we have noted, the tension toward changing things externally into new forms, as opposed to reworking them internally into what should be, has been a major characteristic of each of our previous hinge times and will continue to be part of our present one. The imperative for us in the twenty-first century, therefore, is not to fear either of the two coursings, but to fear with all our hearts and minds and souls the pattern of bloodiness that has in the past characterized the separation of innovators and re-traditioners from one another.

The Catholic Reformation can hardly be said to have been anything other than beneficial in many ways not only for Roman Catholics but also for the Protestors as well. It was the passion of counter-reform that gave all of Christendom the beauty of the Spanish mystics. St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila belong here and come directly out of this tension, for instance, as does much of French spirituality. The Jesuits, without whom so much of Western history would be diminished, were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in direct response to the needs of the Church and were authorized by Pope Paul III in 1540 for the same reason. The five Councils of Trent were godly assemblies of churchmen trying to purify both doctrine and practice. Matters from private devotion to corporate celebration of the mass to indulgences and to even Purgatory itself, along with dozens of other things in between, were addressed, clarified, and largely purified by the Council. And out of the Fifth (and last) Council in 1562–63 came some of the same major reforms that Luther would have loudly applauded, had he lived to see them. Seminaries were established for the actual training of clergy, something the Protestors had seen as absolutely essential. A system of appointment for bishops and dioceses that was based on vocation and not birthright was instituted. The various factions within the episcopacy—Imperial, Papal, Spanish, and French bishops—were drawn into something approximating a unity of purpose. The reform was genuine, sincere, and in many ways beneficent.

Seeking Hegemony

We cannot look, however, at the huge gifts to Western civilization of either Protestantism or a renewed Roman Catholicism without looking as well at how our forebears on both sides of the divide chose competition over cooperation. Hegemony, by definition, can belong only to one among, and above, others. Pride of place, it is called; and it drove all the contenders who were the Great Reformation, just as it had always driven the contenders in Christianity’s previous eras of upheaval. Five hundred years before the Great Reformation, we called the wars that followed the Great Schism by the name of “Crusades.” By choosing that name, our Christian forebears colored their wars as a holy campaign to rescue Jerusalem and the Middle East from Islam. They neglected to mention, of course, to themselves or to us, that by “rescue” they meant “placed under the control of Christianity in general and Western Christianity in particular.” When we come to the resolution and spin-down of the Great Reformation, we find the drive to war called by several names.

The revival and revitalization of the Inquisition, especially in Italy and Spain, is perhaps the most vicious of those presentations. The marriage of doctrinal purity with political loyalties is always an unholy union, even in the best of circumstances. In the case of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, it took on a singular viciousness and horror. And the bloodiest of the contentions we label the Thirty Years’ War. By the time it and the Dutch Revolt—also known as the Eighty Years’ War—were more or less concluded in 1648 by the Treaty of Münster and later the Peace of Westphalia, almost half of Europe’s citizenry would be dead. Now, a rummage sale later, we cannot—must not—shake our heads, as if in confusion about how such things could ever have been and then, with an assumed innocence, look the other way. Those who do not learn from the past, it has been wisely said, are destined to relive it.