This paper was written for Professor Kenneth H. Cousland, who taught Church history at Emmanuel College. Frye submitted it for Church History 2, “History of the Christian Church from the Reformation Era to the Present Day,” which was one of two required courses in Church history for all Emmanuel students. Cousland wrote this note at the end of the paper: “A penetrating and comprehensive piece of work though it does not seem to me to be up to your best standard either in construction or treatment.” Frye received an “A-” for the paper, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 9.
The gains and losses of the Reformation are, of course, inextricably bound up with gains and losses more directly brought about by other movements contemporary with it. The Renaissance brought tremendous gains and losses in art, science, philosophy, and scholarship, which were not altogether the work of the Reformation: so did the rise of nations and of the middle class: so did inventions and discoveries. Many of the greatest men of the time—Machiavelli, Erasmus, Copernicus—either remained aloof from the Catholic versus1 Protestant struggle or refused to commit themselves to it. We owe incalculable debts to Gutenberg, Columbus, Magellan, and other neutrals that we can hardly be said to owe to religious reformers or reactionaries. Let us consider only such gains and losses, then, as we can definitely associate either with the birth of Protestantism, or its corollary, the overthrow2 of the Catholic world.
In the first place, it can hardly be denied that Protestantism was, far more than Catholicism, on the side of liberalism and tolerance, imbued more than its adversary with the spirit of free enquiry and the use of critical intelligence in religious matters. Its record, particularly that of the Calvinist branches, is not snow white in this respect, but any rational comparison between Protestant rule in England under Elizabeth or even Edward and Catholic rule under Mary, or between the treatment of Catholic minorities in Scotland and Protestant minorities in Spain, should establish the point. There is probably no more inherent cruelty in one tradition than in the other, nor more sadism in Latins than in Nordics, but Protestant3 emphasis on the direct responsibility of the soul to God made heresy far less an outrage on society, and its punishment, consequently, less a venting of popular fury on its victims. The Catholic tradition of apostolic infallibility once denied, the enormity of the crime took on far less cosmic proportions. Another reason for the somewhat cleaner Protestant record is without doubt the influence of its intellectual and sensitive progenitors among the mystics and humanists. Protestantism contains, at its finest, the refusal of a fine mind to be bullied by inferior interpreters of tradition. Erasmus is a great Protestant in this sense; so more obviously is Zwingli; and so is Luther when we admire him most.
The overthrow of a tradition alleged infallible and divinely inspired was an immense advance toward the assumption of individual responsibility in thought and action. Hence, the influence of Protestantism on the growth of empirical science was very considerable, despite the obscurantist tendencies of some of its leaders. It also provided for a greater variety of opinion and directly advanced the development of a reading public for the new printing press. It fostered, generally, a spirit of critical analysis, often among minds not purely Protestant, which eventually bore rich fruit. Consequently, the complexity of philosophical and social questions was better realized. Naivety, as a quality of first-rate minds, largely disappeared, and a more numerous class of people may be perhaps said to have become more intelligent, if we understand what we mean by that.4
The shift in authority from Church to Scripture may not have been a gain in consistency, necessarily, but it did bring the Bible, which remains the quintessence of the written word, into the vulgar tongues and into the possession of the commoners. The rise of nations, and, consequently, of modern languages, is a movement associated only with the Reformation and perhaps not directly caused by it. But of the great influence of the Bible in moulding our own tongue among others there can be no question. An even more significant gain was the advance in historical consciousness it brought about. With all their respect for tradition, the Middle Ages were historically unconscious. The sense of the organic development of an alien culture afforded Protestants a better perspective and a wider tradition, and the vigour, power, and compression of Hebraic literature is by no means a negligible factor in the growth and development of the poetry and philosophy of England or Germany as compared with Spain or Italy in the centuries following the Reformation. Sympathy with Jewish traditions probably helped a decline of anti-Semitic pogroms and massacres, though again it is hard to say how much of this was due to the rise of a middle class better able to take care of itself.
The overthrow of the priesthood as a separate class of society took a good deal of temporizing and half measures out of the practice of religion. The mechanical process of absolution and indulgence had tended, by the time of Tetzel,5 to put too much of religion on a commercial basis, the indulgence scandal being more notorious, but hardly less grotesque, than the treasury of merit concept6 or the purchase of masses to liberate souls in purgatory. That there was a general decline of superstition is evidenced, too, by the disappearance of the “relics” swindle and alleged miracles of priestcraft, such as the St. Januarius blood liquefaction,7 from Protestant countries. The general clearing out of spiritual intermediaries, such as the sacraments and the interminable catalogue of intercessory saints, with their shrines and holy days, did much to pull the practice of religion out of anthropology into ethics.
The secularization of the arts of music and drama is probably due in large measure to the Renaissance. Of the drama this is obviously true, but that the Protestants did give a tremendous impulse to music, and that in a forward direction, can hardly be denied. The Middle Ages had never made a working unity out of popular song and sacred chant, the unity of the Lutheran hymnody, which combined the great rhythmic and contrapuntal traditions in music. Luther stands directly at the head of a procession of composers in Germany which culminates in Bach; Palestrina, great man as he was, sums up the sixteenth century without being a pioneer for the seventeenth. The remainder of artistic developments are not specifically Protestant, though the rise of nations, which it encouraged, gave art a possible advantage in more clear-cut national units.
Even from a Catholic point of view it is difficult to believe that the elevation of Catholic moral tone, the abolition of the scandals of papal secularization, the doctrinal achievements of the Council of Trent, the consolidating and organizing power of the Jesuits, could have taken place purely as a result of internal reform.8 For the rest, the more fluid society brought about by the rise of a capitalistic money economy and the abolition of the feudal hierarchy was certainly not hindered by Protestantism, though the political and economic nature of the Reformation itself is perhaps exaggerated.
It is by no means difficult to paint a very black picture of the Reformation, even when we are by no means9 prepared to say that it would have been better for the Reformation never to have been born. In the first place, Protestantism cannot be entirely absolved from complicity with the self-seeking aggrandizement of princes as against the great cosmopolitan theory of the Middle Ages. We cannot answer the charges against the motives of Henry VIII,10 nor refute altogether the Erastianism11 of Luther, except by a tu quoque argument.12 For on the question of the rise of tyranny honours are about even. If the English Reformation was the work of a selfish ruler, the Scottish Reformation was not; and if the Scotch and Dutch Reformations were national movements, so was the Catholic reaction in Ireland under O’Neill.13 The Elector of Saxony can hardly be proved more of a jingoistic imperialist than Philip of Spain or any Valois,14 and, after all, the petty princes who started the Reformation in the first place were not German, but the popes of Renaissance Rome; and the apologist of the petty prince was Machiavelli, whose hero was Cesare Borgia, son, or nephew by courtesy, of the worst of those popes.15 The charges of such Catholic historians as Chesterton, Belloc, and Tawney, essentially that Protestantism broke the unity of Europe, should be made with more caution and fairness.16
The growth of responsibility of the individual, however, necessarily carried with it grave dangers. The abolition of the confessional, though perhaps an inevitable step under the circumstances, was no unmixed blessing. The confessional is psychologically one of the soundest of religious institutions, and psychoanalysis is beginning to realize it, along with its corollary theory of the terrific neuroses desire can form when repressed by a self-justifying ego. An unhealthy and morbid introspection disfigures too much of Protestant religious experience, the terror and gloom of many Calvinist traditions being proverbial. In the same way the awakened self-conscious awareness of religious life brought with it an overemphasis on Christian duties to one another, that is, a tendency to push the mystic and transcendent experience of Christianity away in favour of ethics. There can be little doubt that Protestantism did not produce enough saints or mystics. Too much energy was expended by covenanted congregations over doctrinal quibbles, instead of leaving such matters to schoolmen who had nothing better to do with their time. It is possible, of course, that we are now just completing an ante-Nicene period of Protestantism,17 but a survey of the past, without regard to the future, does show a disproportionate stressing of good works.
That there was a gradual infiltration of tolerance into a distracted world at this time is a generalization which must be cautiously accepted. The split in the Christian camp forced both sides to defend themselves, nervously and self-consciously, against mental and physical attack. On the theological side this largely accounts for the comparative half measures of Protestantism, and its failure to become definitely a liberal and tolerant movement. Through what must be called sheer terror of going too far, Anglicans and Lutherans solidified into national sects, Calvinists into a tradition too rigid to deserve its name of Protestant. There are many ideas of the time which strike a responsive chord in our day, but which were sacrificed to the forces of reaction: the social theories of the more radical sects, the insistence of the Anabaptists on a continuing and vital tradition of Christian revelation, the sympathy with tolerance and free enquiry evinced by Erasmus and Zwingli, the demand of the peasants for social justice rather than theological subtleties, the obvious possibility of a new synthesis of religion and science, all ignored or subordinated to, so it seems to us, less worthy ends.
But if the Protestants were prevented by fear from attaining to the ideals implicit in their religion, the Catholics were driven back on a program of ferocious persecution and intolerance. The development of the Jesuit order, while achieving much in the way of education and missionary enterprise, also too often resorted to a policy of terrorism backed up in many cases by the abnegation of the most fundamental decencies of society in favour of dishonesty, intrigue, abuse of confidence, and cruelty, to advance what it thought to be the cause of its Church. The cold-blooded extinction of culture by the Jesuits in Bohemia18 is one of the grimmest tragedies in history, and in priggishness, that is, the crime of belief in an inflexible moral code to be administered by man, the Jesuits compare unfavourably with John Calvin’s Geneva at its worst. The development of the Inquisition brought in a regime of unspeakable horror and sadistic cruelty, which we cannot yet refer to without a shudder, and the long intransigent policy of the Catholics, the stifling of innovation by the Index,19 the bitter opposition to the scientific thought of Galileo and Bruno, and the general anachronistic tendency of the Church ever since, accounts in no small measure for the cultural decline of Italy and the stupefaction of Spain.
These evils are not, of course, purely Catholic: there was a general tendency toward the bloodless corporate aristocratic society of the baroque in the north as well. The point is that the opposition of Catholic and Protestant intensified the bitterness and suffering of the universal cultural transition. The same principle holds good for the overthrow of the medieval cosmopolis and the rise of capitalism and monarchy. The association of Protestantism with the rising bourgeoisie forced the religion to connive at many of the excesses of the class. Thus, the famous encouragement of private enterprise in Calvin’s doctrine of material prosperity as a sign of grace, a blunder committed by many Christians in defiance of the New Testament.20 What Calvin did for capitalism Lutheranism did for the monarchy, playing directly into the hands of petty tyrants. In the same way the religious motive was a powerful one in fomenting imperialistic wars, a motive which remained a strong one till the eighteenth century, as evinced in the wars of England and Holland against Spain.
The revolt against medieval culture and thought on the part of the Protestants was perhaps carried too far. Granted that much unreadable scholastic rubbish was cleared out of philosophy, the extreme and capital importance of synthetic thinking as we have it in Aquinas was overlooked, which led directly to the hopeless bankruptcy of Christian theology in the nineteenth century, and its utter failure to assimilate scientific developments. In art, a gain in variety did not altogether atone for a loss of depth and balance. The tendency was too much, in Protestant countries, to regard the Middle Ages as a nightmare of superstition and cruelty, and to consider all its products primitive, crude, and distorted by its savage religious censorship. Hence, a contemporary interest in things medieval is long overdue, for art, philosophy, and economics.
Historic growth is a painful process, and much of its pain is caused by those who are too convinced of the finality of their present stage. If it were possible for humanity to learn anything from history, then one of the greatest gains of the Reformation, from our point of view, would be the singular applicability it bears to our own day. It was an age when everyone thought that the religious struggle was the paramount one; an age when those who would not commit themselves to a definite religious attitude were deemed behind the times; an age when amateur prophets were prophesying a future struggle between Catholic and Protestant as the major issue of the next generation; an age rich in great religious personalities engaged in beating each other’s brains out. The religious problem was finally solved, not by one party’s having the correct solution and all the rest being wrong, but by the problems themselves becoming obsolete in the course of the struggle about them. The great artists and scientists worked on unheeding, leaving us to choose between the Copernican theory of the solar system and the Lutheran theory of consubstantiation, if we like, as representative of the best thought of the time. Substitute “economic” for “religious,” and we have the contemporary scene.21