On the title page of this paper, submitted to Professor Kenneth Cousland, Frye wrote “Church History Essay I.” It was the first of two papers he submitted for Church History 2, “History of the Christian Church from the Reformation Era to the Present Day.” At the end of the paper, Cousland wrote, “An excellent interpretation,” and he gave the paper an “A.” The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 9.
The chronicler differs from the historian in that he sees history in two dimensions, as a series of pictures. Every movement or occurrence, regardless of size or importance, can be understood only with reference to whatever precedes it, so that the chronicler has no standard by which he may avoid confusing a “cause” with the precipitating event. According to him history is a grotesque series of accidents arising from the whims of court favourites, the sudden resolves of heroes, or the vanity of princes. Responsible historians, from Voltaire on, have summarily rejected this approach, but as school textbooks and popular romances continue its tradition, it remains accepted by the rank and file, though perhaps the Great War has brought a saner attitude. There cannot be more in the effect than in the cause; and the contrast between the murder of an imbecile noble and a world bent on suicide is too glaring even for the careless or unthinking.
True, the educated have a deeper view of causation;1 but in dealing with a movement like the Reformation it is as well to be on our guard, in a world overrun with prejudice. All prejudices are either religious or antireligious, and history, past or present, is the only sphere in which they may be worked out. Hence, those who on religious grounds are utterly opposed to Protestantism have a definite interest in making the Reformation which gave it birth appear as superficial a movement as possible.2 A glib-tongued fakir sells spiritual patent medicines to credulous rustics, and the greatest political and cultural ideal in human history is overthrown! A tempting gesture, even if it is rather melodramatic and perhaps a little fatuous. It tempts, however, not only the apologists of an older church, but those opposed to religion in general, who also have an interest in tracing the growth of a Christian ideal to the exploiting of the discontent of the ignorant and superstitious by greedy nobles.3 But at the same time the Protestant himself is by no means likely to err too far on the other side.4 For he would tend to think of the Reformation as a movement so natural, so inevitable and automatic a reaction from a system of intolerable abuse, that he too would see nothing incongruous in the indulgences controversy being its inception. For him the precipitating event is a genuine causal agent, by no means merely a catalyser.5
But with a great and wide movement like the Reformation, which brought about such momentous results in both the religious and the social fields, we have to look for underlying causes much deeper, and we must treat the indulgences controversy as merely an emblem of them. At the same time, we cannot altogether treat the transubstantiation and other theological debates too exclusively as merely symptoms of social unrest or regard the whole question of religion as the façade of an economic change. The economic determinist finds little difficulty in separating the economic motive for any great event; it is invariably present, and it is quite plausible to regard it, therefore, as the only essential one. But no historical movement is an unmixed effect, and if it spring from a number of forces then its cause is not any one of them, in itself passive, but the fact or occasion of several coming together. Thus, economic dissatisfaction results from injustice, and injustice is a moral issue. The moral decay of the papacy would not have been responsible for an organized attempt to throw off its power; a few of the sensitive would protest, the vast majority would remain apathetic.6 The ambitions of princes and the exactions of Rome, though more obvious evils, would have stirred the masses, but would not have provided dynamic leadership as long as the pope retained his spiritual ascendancy. But both material and spiritual needs, insofar as they are expressed in revolt, are in themselves significant of the unrest of a gradual and general feeling of the necessity for and compulsion to a change of state.
Only with this basis is a harmony of mental and physical revolution possible. The realization of this ultimate basis is an intellectual formulation of new ideas. The Middle Ages were essentially a religious era, and the Protestant revolt was basically a new religious idea. Hence, the purely religious aspect of the Reformation is really the essential part of it, and not a mere carapace of a social and political compulsion.7 A religious change does not mean a new set of theological doctrines, but an alteration in the view men take of their relation to God and their fellowman.8 The only thing that will bring about so far-reaching a change is not a class struggle, but a larger movement in which the class struggle is implicated—an organic change in the development and maturation of a culture.
Movements allied with the Reformation, the Renaissance, the rise of capitalism, the middle class and a money economy, inventions and discoveries, usually treated by historians of the Reformation in their introductory chapters, show clearly enough that the birth of Protestantism is inseparable from its general cultural Urgrund, which we can hardly define, but can only describe, like a colour. Whether we call it the birth of the modern age, or simply an awakening, it is a subtle, pervasive, and decisive change. The growth of a culture is analogous to the development of an individual, with this difference: that in the individual maturity brings with it a steady linear growth and perfecting of intellect, creative ability, and moral responsibility, while in the culture, which is the work of mature men in every age, those values are preserved, maturity being reflected only in the growth of self-conscious awareness in space and time. Art, systematic philosophy, and ethical ideals cannot advance or improve, but history and science do. It is impossible to improve on Aquinas or Shakespeare, but it is possible to supplement Froissart and the Bacons. The general principle of this contrast is that religion, in the cultural sense, the religion in which philosophy and art are embodied, is an organic growth; while the social order, in which history and science are compounded, is a gradual advance.
With this proviso, it will seem more acceptable to consider the growth from childhood to adolescence as the most valid symbol we can obtain of the movement we are examining.9 In its historical unconsciousness and its utter lack of curiosity concerning the world beyond Christendom, in its egocentric preoccupation with the problem of individual salvation, in its ready acceptance of temporal and spiritual authority, in its tendency to argue endlessly from unexamined premises, in the selfcontained, complete, and secure view of the universe, in the preoccupation of its painters with the theme of God as an infant in the arms of his mother, in its melodic and rhythmless chanted music, in its interest in commodities rather than money, in its sudden fits of irrational barbarity, in its literature of interminably wandering and adventuring knights, the Middle Ages, with all their subtlety and mysticism, form the childhood stage of Western culture. Similarly, in its contemptuous sceptical revolt, in its sudden awareness of the body and its pari-sexual eroticism, in its tendency to hero-worship, in its gradual consciousness of its actual place in the scheme of things, in its transformation of static ecstasy of perception to a subjective search for reality, in its substitution of a calculated sadism for instinctive cruelty, the Renaissance-Reformation is to that childhood stage the adolescent succession.
This movement is, therefore, the beginning of self-reliance. The child’s consciousness and his environment are shaped for him by intermediaries; and the underlying pattern of the new awakening was the throwing off of those aids by which medieval man comprehended his position. From a static consciousness and a static environment man emerges into a new responsibility, more troublesome and insecure, but more intellectually satisfying. From this point of view, the Reformation is simply the articulated religious expression of a general movement of which another aspect is the Renaissance, and still another the rise of capitalism.10
First, then, the revolt against intervention, against aids to thought, creation, and action, which sustained the medieval civilization. Religion under Protestantism became a direct relation between God and worshipper. The intercession of saints, the supreme authority of the Church tradition, the automatic and irrevocable force of the sacraments, including holy orders which gave the priest his exalted powers of absolution, were thrown to one side. Government in the new age became a direct relation between the leader and his people. Monarchies were consolidated on the ruin of the old intervening class, the nobility, and the Machiavellian prince took control. Philosophy became a direct and empirical search for reality. The medieval realism postulated two helps which the Renaissance banished: faith and the universal, which enabled reality to become accessible to reason. The new philosophy, nominalistic in inception, pushed theology out of the field of speculation altogether; and by getting rid of this element of faith, it also abandoned the idea of a general concept’s being the concretion of its manifestations. Henceforth the mind would deal directly with the fact, the object, as in itself an entity, without prepossessions of any kind and without interposing abstractions made solid by prejudice. The arts followed the same course. Where realistic philosophy had relied on faith, painting relied on religious symbolism; and where the realists had trusted the universal concept, the painters treated decoration, the geometric ordering of the aberrations of nature, as an end in itself. The Renaissance introduced a style more vital and flowing, dealing, again, directly with the model or subject.
Secondly came the overthrow of the static suspension or balance which medievalism had assumed to be the end of knowledge and had come so near to achieving in Aquinas. As a necessary corollary of this achievement of poise, the universe, that is, the environment as a whole, or space, was conceived as having an absolute centre in the world. Copernicus stripped away the onion-skin layers of the Ptolemaic cosmos, tore off the embroidered garment of sun, moon, and stars, and flung the earth into an infinite space. This was the central and focal expression of a growth of self-conscious awareness which also woke up to the discovery of other continents, other civilizations, other religions, and of a new realization of tradition and a new perspective of history.
All this was a reinforcement and strengthening of the individual. It was, therefore, a step in breaking down the social order into smaller units. The growth of self-consciousness brings with it an awareness of others as entities, and the consequent emergence of smaller and more concrete loyalties. The basic feature of this was the development of the town from a market town into a culture-town. By a market place I mean a nexus for a fundamentally agricultural, landed society; a centre for the exchange of goods and of ideas. The culture-town is a separate, self-contained unit, autonomous alike in government and ideology. Hence, the great age of architecture, the communal and anonymous art, ended, and gave place to the development of specialized arts in the hands of the “great masters,” a purely urban and sophisticated development. Hence, too, of course, the city republics of Italy and the Hanse towns11 of the North Sea, without which the Renaissance and Reformation respectively would have been abortive.
It is undoubtedly true that both Renaissance and Reformation were conditioned by the growth of nationality and the rise to absolute power of the prince. But the problem has usually been approached from the wrong end. What caused the rise of the nation was the emergence of the culture-town. The new nations were not groups of cities; they consisted of one culture-town,12 arrogating to itself as much of the countryside as possible to feed it materially and spiritually.13
Therefore, the essential individual with whom we have now to deal is the burgher, or the inhabitant of the town, of whose individuality the prince is a symbol.14 As a townsman he is committed to living in a society; hence, the summary close, particularly in England, of the monastic tradition. His whole life is one of social exchange on equal terms; the burgher is a trader through and through. He can trade in two commodities—materials and ideas—and to provide for a free circulation of both he develops a money economy and the printing press. His religion is fundamentally ethical: he knows little of saints or mystics.
The factors which bind the Reformation to the birth of the modern age generally seem to comprehend it entirely, save for the one differentiating factor that makes it the Reformation and not the Renaissance. The opposition between Renaissance pope and German reformer is a real one and has to be accounted for. What is the source of the opposition? The birth of the modern age was a movement towards the breakup of the rather vague cosmopolitanism of the Middle Ages. Now, if the great medieval civilization held together in tension any large antithesis, political or speculative, one would expect the new era to break along the boundaries of that antithesis, like a cell separating from its parent.
One thinks at once of the quarrel of pope and emperor. The Reformation was not the outcome of that quarrel, but of the deeper cleavage it signified. The Roman Empire had been politically destroyed by the Germans and spiritually annihilated by Christianity. These two movements, being fresh and vital and having a common cause, had met and fused. Whether it was the Lombards, the Franks, or the union of German states under the Hohenstaufens which took the lead, Western civilization was definitely consolidated on a synthesis of Latin and German traditions. With the Renaissance and Reformation these elements separated. The Reformation was the assertion of Teutonic independence against the pretensions of an Italian prince, and the Renaissance was the reinforcement of the Latin tradition by the realization of its pre-Christian achievements. The Renaissance proper, then, works toward the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation; its much-heralded paganism is simply an accretion of Latinism.15 This may broadly be said to be the only important factor distinguishing the Reformation, and only by reference to it can we account for the utter collapse of Catholicism in Scandinavian countries or that of Protestantism in Italy. It is possible that the contemporary race-consciousness of Germany and Italy, obviously descendant from Luther and Machiavelli respectively, represents a catharsis preliminary to a new and more permanent cosmopolitanism.