This book began by suggesting that Reformation created the Europe we recognize today. A sceptic posing the rhetorical question ‘what has the Reformation ever done for us?’ is still likely to hear in reply a litany of monumental achievements: modern capitalism, the concept of political freedom, the advancement of science, the decline of magic and superstition. All of these have long been regarded as the precocious and unruly children of the (Protestant) Reformation. However, things are not so clear-cut, and the Reformation’s imagined role as mother of modernity raises thorny issues about parentage and nurture. As a religious movement, the Reformation was fundamentally concerned with old not new questions, and Luther himself, one suspects, would vigorously contest any paternity suit the modern age might bring against him.
The relationship between our world and Luther’s revolution seemed more straightforward in the days when scholars generally subscribed to a notion of ‘progress’ in human affairs, a benevolent and linear historical journey in which the Reformation served as mile-stone not millstone. Although his ideas are sometimes simplistically misrepresented, the late 19th-century German sociologist Max Weber proposed the influential theory that ‘the Protestant ethic’, specifically its Calvinist and Puritan forms, encouraged the ‘spirit of capitalism’: material success was interpreted by anxious Calvinists as a possible sign of election to salvation. The evident economic advances enjoyed by England and the Dutch Republic in the 17th and 18th centuries offer some support for the thesis, but recent historians have largely come away unpersuaded. There was no necessary connection between Calvinistic culture and capitalistic prosperity, as the backward condition of godly Scotland testifies. The 17th-century dominance of the Atlantic powers (including Catholic France) more plausibly looks like part of a longer-term economic and political shift away from the Mediterranean, in the wake of Ottoman expansion from the 15th century onwards.
Another of Weber’s modernizing concepts now seems less persuasive than once it did: the notion that Protestantism, as a transcendent and rationalistic religion, fatally undermined supernatural and magical beliefs about the lived environment, and promoted a far-reaching ‘disenchantment of the world’. It is true that – officially – the Protestant Reformation set its face against the inherent sacral power of objects and rituals, the intermediate spiritual agency of the saints, and the notion of ‘sacred’ times and spaces disrupting the predictable rhythms and patterns of God’s created universe. But right across Protestant Europe, and into modern times, scholars have found evidence of religious cultures saturated with the presence of the supernatural, alive with signs and portents, and the imagined activity of demons and angels. Protestant villagers, like Catholic ones, continued to rely on quasi-magical rituals to protect themselves from evil forces or to cure disease, they believed in ghosts and poltergeists, and they saw sacred significance in particular days and seasons. This was not just the failure of ‘ignorant’ people to grasp the true meaning of the Protestant message. The usual Protestant teaching on miracles was that they became unnecessary with the establishment of the early Church and writing of the bible: the ‘age of miracles’ ended after the time of the apostles, and the Catholic ‘miracles’ of recent times were frauds or delusions. But Protestant intellectuals shared with the common people an intense interest in ‘providence’ – the signs of God’s will, favour, or displeasure that could be inferred from strange occurrences in the natural world, such as the oak tree in late Elizabethan Essex which for three days moaned like a dying man, and was interpreted locally as a warning from God against sinfulness and pride. In practice, remarkable providential events were not so very different from the traditional miracle, a word which steadily seeped back into Protestant vocabulary over the course of the Reformation period.
The acceptability of the notion of miracles, along with belief in the intervention of the devil and other spiritual powers in human affairs, did come increasingly under strain, in educated circles at least, as a concomitant of the phenomenon conventionally shrink-wrapped with the label ‘the Scientific Revolution’. This epoch of remarkable if sporadic intellectual advances – encompassing the discovery of the circulation of blood around the human body, and of the Earth around the Sun – coincides almost exactly with the period of the Reformations, but the nature of their dependence on each other is difficult to pin down. Protestantism’s sponsorship of modern science is in some circles as axiomatic as Catholicism’s hostility to it. The 1633 papal condemnation of Galileo for the ‘heresy’ of teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun is for many people an iconic moment in the history of intellectual freedom. Yet Galileo was no Protestant, but a devout Catholic, as was Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), the original proponent of the heliocentric theory, and René Descartes (1596–1650), the French philospher whose thesis that the created universe was a kind of machine severely problematized the role within it of spirits and occult forces. Some Catholic thinkers continued discreetly to teach heliocentrism even after the Galileo condemnation (an affair in which politics and personalities played as great a role as any clash of fundamental principles). Catholic universities were centres of some of the most advanced ‘scientific’ learning, and the expertise of the Jesuits in astronomy was highly prized as far away as the Ming and Manchu courts of China. It is undoubtedly true that there was more scope for scientists (or as they were called at the time, natural philosophers) to develop innovative theories in some parts of the Protestant world – for example, 17th-century England – than in parts of the Catholic one, such as Inquisitorial Spain. But the notion of Protestantism as a precondition for science is a specious one, not least because of the lively traditions of speculation and experiment to be found in medieval Europe. The beating heart of Protestantism was not in any case unfettered enquiry, but deference to an authoritative text, and throughout our period there were plenty of Protestants who opposed heliocentrism on the basis of the Book of Joshua’s reference to the Sun ‘standing still’ at Gibeon, just as today plenty of Protestants oppose evolution on the basis of the Creation account in Genesis. Christian fundamentalism has its roots in the certainties of the Reformation.
Protestant intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries were by no means all inflexible scriptural literalists. There was a real effort in some quarters to find explanations for biblical miracles consistent with the laws of nature, and to promote a ‘natural theology’ in which God’s creation and governance of the universe could be seen to be entirely rational and reasonable. It has become almost obligatory to point out that luminaries of scientific discovery, such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, respective fathers of modern physics and chemistry, were deeply religious men who saw no contradiction between their faith and their work. Yet the reluctance of nearly all natural philosophers of the Reformation era to differentiate ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as modes of explanation may ultimately have done religion no favours. In the long term, it encouraged a perception of the incompatibility of religion and science, when some of the presumptions about the creation of the world on which early modern science had based itself were shown in due course to be simply untenable. Modern Darwinism seems less a culmination of Reformation scientific insights than a thorough-going refutation of them.
What then, amidst all these discordant notes, is left of the Reformation’s claim to be the resounding overture to the modern world? The final suggestion of this book is that if the melody is still to ring out loudly, its key-signature should be sought not so much in the inherent qualities of Protestantism (or Tridentine Catholicism) as in the dynamic interplay of forces conjured up by the Reformation era, and in the laws of unintended consequences. The most significant outcomes of the Reformation can in fact be expressed as a succession of paradoxes. The Reformations, Protestant and Catholic, aimed at the creation of social and religious uniformity, and ended up producing forms of pluralism that were subsequently exported to, and replicated in, the farthest-flung parts of the world. They promised to intensify the political and spiritual power of the state, and yet they generated a grammar and vocabulary by which its authority could be challenged. They sought to eradicate heresy and false belief, but falteringly permitted the toleration of error to a previously undreamt-of degree. They set out to sacralize the whole of society, and ended up creating the long-term conditions for its secularization.
These are all ways of saying that the principal legacies of the Reformation were the fact of division, and the emergence of strategies for coping with that fact. The medieval ideal of a unified ‘Christendom’ – a family of local societies fully integrated within and between each other by shared Christian political and social values – was perhaps always more of an aspiration than a reality. But the Reformations, by advancing irreconcilable schemes for how humans should try to reconcile themselves to God, permanently shattered both the aspiration and its dim reflection in social practice. The period of intense confessionalization and prolonged religious warfare nurtured the hope that a new unitary ideal could be imposed on society by persuasion and force of arms, and in a few places that ambition was temporarily achieved. But total victory eluded all sides in Europe’s home-grown clash of civilizations. When the convulsions stopped, in about 1700, the patterns of the kaleidoscope were intricate and dappled. Protestants were a large minority in Western Europe as a whole, and dominant in much of its northern half. But (other than in the confessionally homogeneous kingdoms of Lutheran Scandinavia) Protestant societies often contained substantial Catholic, Jewish, or radical minorities, as well as reflecting the permanent split between the confessional traditions of Lutheran and Reformed. The Mediterranean societies of Catholic Southern Europe were less diverse, but officially Catholic territories in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in France, contained many open or covert dissidents. Moreover, all the Reformations had spawned their own more rigorous internal reformations, with the emergence of Lutheran ‘pietists’ and Catholic Jansenists, and the seeping out of the non-conformities of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers from the wounds of the doctrinally unstable Church of England. With considerable significance for the future, Europe’s plural patterning was evident already in the fledgling colonies of what would later become the United States of America: Puritan Massachusetts, Episcopalian Virginia, Catholic Maryland, Quaker Pennsylvania.
The religious stalemate in Europe and America had consequences for what we can recognize as the emergence of the ‘secular’ state and the practice of religion within it. If no single religious ideal was able to serve as the unifying and integrative principle of society, then shared identities, rights, and obligations had to be reconstituted on some other basis, like respect for an abstract concept of law, or common national pride. Social peace required practical toleration of religious difference, and a renegotiation of religion’s relationship to public and community life. Modern Europe’s pluralistic and broadly tolerant society does not represent an inevitable triumph of progress, but the specific historical outcome of a contested religious past. If religion gradually ceased to be the official ideology of the state, and faith a necessary badge of citizenship, then increasingly it lent itself to domestication and privatization. It also, inevitably, began to acquire an optional character. When the state no longer by law required people to attend a particular church, then some seized the opportunity not to frequent places of worship at all. When the state ceased to support the religious authorities in sanctioning prosecutions for heresy, a few intellectuals abandoned orthodox Christianity altogether. Some adopted the religious philosophy known as ‘Deism’, which rejected ‘revealed’ truths such as the Trinity and divinity of Jesus, denied all manifestations of the supernatural, and held that God was knowable only through the application of reason to his immutable laws of nature. A handful of atheists went further, openly questioning whether religious belief of any sort was either necessary or true. We should be wary of exaggerated claims about ‘secularization’ in Europe, in the sense of widespread indifference about religious truth, or any dramatic social marginalization of the Christian churches. Such phenomena are hardly discernible before at least the end of the 18th century. Atheists were a tiny minority even in Enlightenment Europe, and Christian belief and practice remained normative for most Europeans well into the 20th century. At the close of the early modern period, religion remained an important part of many people’s identity, but increasingly perhaps it did so as a component of a more variegated whole, just as religion itself was starting to become a discrete component of society and not its basic structure and grammar. Even within ostensibly united confessional cultures, religion was losing traction in the decades around 1700 as a vehicle for shared meanings across society as a whole. Economic and educational changes were widening social divides, and some members of the elite felt an increasing need to distance themselves from the beliefs of the common people, to scoff at religious ‘enthusiasm’, and to express scepticism about witches, miracles, and demonstrations of divine providence. The tendency was more marked in Protestant societies, but was not absent from Catholic ones.
The Reformations, Protestant and Catholic, thus made the modern world in spite of themselves, and their founding fathers would neither have expected nor welcomed the eventual outcomes. Even among Christians, only the most die-hard of sectarians today cling to the absolute certainties of the Reformation era. But the age-old questions which the Reformation framed in new ways – about the ultimate meaning and purpose of human existence; about the mutual obligations one to another of people constituting a society; about the balance between conscience and political obedience – these remain compelling ones for all right-thinking people.