The unfolding of the Logos introduced directionality into history
Such as do build their faith upon
The Holy Text of pike and gun
Decide all controversy by
Infallible Artillery
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By Apostolic blows and knocks
call Fire and Sword and Desolation
A godly-thorough-Reformation.
Samuel Butler.
This monster-post, inspired by the book The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, has been in the works for a long time. I have been reading it for an even longer time (it is not quite a book one finishes). The history he tells bursts with anecdotes, people and ideas; they combine headily during a heady time. Writing about it was intended to illustrate the principle of Fortitude, eleventh in the Tarot; that one must practice what one preaches. Often in the reading I felt like a lone sailor lost upon a vast vessel, nipping between coasts and trading information: had the priests became pastors and wives replaced concubines? Were they likely to? Who was invading whom? Had the Habsburgs blitzed through yet?
.
I am caught within the wave of the large book. There are primarily two reasons people read non-fiction, discounting the obvious motive of pleasure: one is to figure out a ‘position’ to a specific question/ related set of questions (what can you do about a problem like Sarah?), the hunt-for-data; the other is to get an inkling of perspective, context, the hunt-for-the-idea (How is American Conservatism different today from 100 years ago?). I defy you to find anyone willing to undertake a book longer than 300 pages for the former cause. If polemic cannot be condensed down to that size, it has no right for exist: any heft will simply be more excuses for the opinion, all the more suspect for being disguised. Passionate manifestos, incendiary reporting, pithy histories, reasoned commentary — these are all excellent reasons to read a book, but they are limited by the demand for relevancy, this devotion to defining the conventional wisdom of the times.
The pleasures of weighty tomes are that they allow detail and deliberation to build rather than argue. A long history, a sustained piece of philosophy, these are written with the desire to enable the fashioning of an autonomous hypothesis from the broad welter of fact. An essayist marshals facts that suit her story, a historian marshals stories that surround her every “fact”.
McCulloch’s history, in keeping with his tradition, doesn’t short-circuit by telling you who to side with in the multifaceted debates of his chosen time: it just lays them all out, in sometimes interminable detail, within a complex web of shared relationships and assumptions. He describes events and their ripples, ideas and their diaspora, people and their migrations; all set within a narrative best described as Transylvania talking to Scotland. He demonstrates how the same scriptures led to many forms of worship in one city even as they’re being hacked down to meet the partisan requirements of its neighbour. It is this meandering quality that makes large books, especially those that aren’t anthologies, so damnably hard to write about. They pool in the shadows and form backdrops, but are rarely showpieces. It is impossible to pinpoint what such a book made you think about, which hunches it confirmed and which it dismissed, for the journey is made between amorphous hunches and nebulous conclusions. I don’t know what I thought about the Reformation before I read this book: I began the book because I didn’t know what to think.
I can tell you, instead, why I am reading about the Reformation. First, as devoted readers (hullo parents) know, I am interested in the ways divinity interacts with humanity. Not very much survives the tumult of human passage, save two truths: there are ideas, and there is matter; only a very few entities may transcend both. I am fascinated by the divine as a bridge between human eras: constantly evolving, yet always retaining the core kernel of faith every religion needs to survive.
Does one trick people into believing in the power of the metaphysical; persuade, coerce, or reason? Does one contemplate or act or purify one’s way into a happy immortality? Is there an insurance policy for the family we can invest in while alive? Religion, it is easy to forget in our era of theocrats and evangelists, is the purest free market that exists. It is a barometer of human madness, as variable and contrarian as the spirit it seeks to channel. It is the fallacy of fundamentalism and rationalism alike to imagine that religion can shape the zeitgeist, rather than be shaped by it. Slavery was legalised by Papal Rome while Dominicans in Spain were reviving jus gentium and inventing the concept of human rights.
We live in an era the most determined humans call postmodern; which is unlucky for those of us who only achieved modernity meagre decades ago. Then again, perhaps we ought to be glad to have made the goalpost when so many others are consigned to the pre-modern. In any case, I felt it was time to get to the root of the uprising, back to when modernity was first fashioned. And thus we come to the Reformation, one bridge across time in one small part of the world. Pick any modern ill you find strewn across our conversations- nationalism, secularism, communism, capitalism, fascism, colonialism, liberalism- and you will find analogues or antecedents in the Latin Reformation, that brutal, cold time in history. So, really, my question is: why aren’t you reading 800 pages about that?
Which is my way of saying I can’t think of any earthly reason you would want to know this stuff, so I shall just plug along and hope that I am entertaining enough to reward the effort this enterprise involves. If I must have fortitude, after all, so must you. What follows is my mini-history of the Reformation, for the curious, the insane, and the bored. It’s the broad outline of an infectious revolt, beaten back here and then there but never everywhere.
My aim is to sketch how this time folds into ours: how movements born with radical visions were trapped in fresh prisons woven out of ‘purity’, patriarchy, and racial pride. The Reformation is a study in how rights can grow broader even as the communities they accrue to grow ever narrower. My perspective diverges slightly from MacCulloch’s. He observes, with a tinge of triumph, the birth of tolerance amidst all the sectarian violence. You will forgive me for being less impressed by the miracle of pluralism. As with ‘plural’ Hinduism, tactical freedom was accessible only to the elite, not the general mass of humanity, upon whom most behaviours are imposed. MacCulloch, to give him due credit, ably argues that most lives were increasingly constrained by the renewed interest everyone had in their private life and souls. The “Reformation of Manners” had a dramatic impact on longstanding social and sexual practices, and steadily degraded the rights of women. Many Free Cities, for instance, revoked the right to female citizenship during this era, as women began to be considered legal chattel.
Patriarchy was ceasing to be a microcosm of the God’s purpose and an expression of what was considered the the natural make-up of a mechanical universe… Society, once integrated by the cosmology of humours and by Galen’s theories, with gender a continuum, was from around 1700 conceived in terms of rigidly divided opposites- especially gender. By 1800, men were told that they must exercise rigid self-control and never shed tears; women that, after all, they were not uncontrollable and lustful like Eve, just passive and gentle crybabies, to be shielded from life’s brutalities.
Church weddings and the legitimacy of children rose in importance, as every Church rushed to exert their influence among the faithful, and marriage was now seen as a necessary sacrament, a ‘holy contract’. Cohabitation and premarital sex, once encouraged by the practice of long engagements, came under much fire in this era, as the clergy discovered the pleasures of marriages and insisted everyone ought join their state of bliss. Brothels found their licenses revoked across cities (rampant and fatal syphilis probably helped that along). In the protestant world, clerical wives replaced nuns as the apogee of a pious woman’s ambition; the brides of god had become wives of men. The growth of nuclear families proceeded apace in these lands, and the new justification that marriage was the ‘natural state of man’ made the social stigma surrounding homosexuality worse. The patriarchal order within the family was emphasised even by so-called humanists, who would, one might think, feel compelled to ‘humanise’ women simply to be consistent. Not a bit of it:
A good example [of humanist scholarship] is Mary I of England’s tutor Juan Luis Vives. He wrote the popular treatise The Education of a Christian Woman, which did indeed recommend education for all women, but that thought was overwhelmed by a good deal of talk about women’s need to control their passions, battle against their weak nature and obey their husbands. Vives also made explicit a double standard in chastity: ‘human laws do not require the same chastity of the man as the woman’, he said reassuringly, ‘men have to look after many things; women only for their chastity’
Yet, for all such instances of subtly reorganised dogma, it remains a revelation to learn how inexhaustibly diverse people are, even within close confines. What could more claustrophobic than the revealed scripture of the Only God? Yet the ruckus, once raised, took two centuries to resolve. Some bits of this story, it must be said, are right out of the plot of Lost: consider Martin Luther stamping out of the Diet at Worms in fury, declaring the Pope to be the Devil masquerading as the Saviour (the original ‘AntiChrist’) and suggesting that the faithful ought to follow his own example, stampede the false Church, and recreate the true Church. Substitute Jack Shepherd for Luther, John Locke for Pope, and the Island for the Church, and tell me that isn’t the final season in a nutshell. Here I stand, and I can do no other, like the man (apocryphally) said.
The Grand Old Church
By 1300, the Latin church was more integrated and centralised than any institution that came before it in Western Europe. By integrating the ‘barbarian’ North as well as the sunny lands of the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, it introduced new lands to old civilisations. The eastern frontier of Latin Christianity was Lithuania; the Teutonic Knights had waged war with the pagan kingdom in 1386, finding no other outlet for their aggression in the gap between crusades. When Lithuania came under Poland’s relatively benign authority, the Knights fought again, only to be trounced. The crusading spirit, however, died with Henry VIII and Charles V’s aborted war-as-peace program. Despite the complex seduction of holy, just war- Europe scheduled Crusades well into the 16th century- they were of little avail, as Ignatius Loyala discovered before he turned his energies upon fresher pastures.
The spread and hold of the Church consolidated, popes began to deploy the institution politically. It was a simple, direct system: the pope was divinely ordained temporal and spiritual emperor, kings were subject to his authority, lay people and lower clergy were subservient to king. In effect, the church divided up ‘secular’ jurisdiction between assorted powers (itself included) and dynasties; granting them, in turn, sacred authority over their subjects. Naturally, this being a bureaucracy, there were elaborate aristocratic ranks: a duke here, a baron there, a lord next door, a few kings tossed in for effect. To whip this royal menagerie into shape, there existed the caste of Electors, men whose confluence produced Emperors.
The balance of the Imperial Election was the politics of the time, and these folk wielded awesome power. It was the intervention of the Elector Palatine that saved Martin Luther’s skin from the combined fury of a mad pope and a prudent emperor. In the midst of all the scheming, small Free Cities everywhere rested precariously: the lord’s rule began at the city’s gate. Perched atop this vast edifice was the Holy Roman Emperor. In the onset of our era this was the doleful Charles V, of whom you could only ask: which country did he not rule?
This map is a bit after Charles V’s reign, but the yellow bit combined with the pink one maps out Habsburg influence in this time
The Holy Roman Emperor was the ostensible war-chief of a swathe of North-Central Christendom, as well as direct ruler of the dynastic Habsburg territories (Spain, Bohemia, Austria). It is a peculiarity of medieval and early modern European politics that empires could be run from geographically diverse locations with few contiguous borders. Witness the weird conglomeration of rag-tag territories that made up the Habsburg empire(s) after Charles V retired and split up his incredible domain. However, all kings, not only the Holy Roman one, had to be crowned in liturgical ceremony, i.e., they had to be approved by the Church and the pope. In the 14th century, rampant abuse of this aspect of the pope’s jurisdiction led to sniping and power-brokering, and by 1378 the Latin West had three distinct popes laying claim to Rome, each supported by a different secular authority. This was the “Avignon Affair” or “Great Schism” that haunted the 15th and 16th century church.
Church organisation by the time of the Reformation was divided into a threefold system: The Curia, various Holy Orders, and Bishoprics (or dioceses). Reformed churches overturned this established triumvirate. They dissolved the holy orders, sacked abbeys and monasteries, trampled on the holiness of saints and popes, some even sent their Bishops packing and sacked cathedrals. They rejected papal authority in favour of that of the ‘landesvater’ (connected to the land; local) leaders and city councils, and were most successful in areas where such leaders felt themselves ignored or disrespected by the church. This was the case, famously, with Henry VIII- but was equally true, for historically sounder reasons, in the German and Swiss lands, in the Low Countries, in all territories forced to pay allegiance to distant masters. The mainstream Reformation, Lutheran and Presbyterian alike (more on the difference later) is often called the “magisterial” reformation- it favoured nearby magistrates, at the expense of both the old Church and the peasants. Such rulers, in turn, supported local reformers for the promise of church funds and enhanced influence in decisions made by local ecclesiastical courts.
Martin Luther, for instance, was as alarmed as any authority by the anarchy he unleashed: the ‘heretic Anabaptists’ of Munster, the iconoclast Lutheran sects of “Schwarmerei”. Across the Empire, huge tracts of countryside, inflamed by the scent of up-chucked orthodoxy, rebelled against church and ruler alike during the Peasants’ Wars of the 1520s; Luther, for his part, heartily supported brutal reprisals by the authorities. In a very real sense, his Reformation pivoted on rulers more than on the ruled populace. This dependence was responsible for the formula of “cuius regio, eius religio” settled upon by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which made the religion of the land that which was decided upon by its ruler. This peace, designed as a reluctant concession between Catholic and Lutheran elites in the Holy Roman Empire, drew religious front-lines that never came undone, despite dozens of ‘third way’ attempts across the span of this tortured century. The brokered truce ignored the Calvin-style Reformed altogether, which makes it odd and perhaps apt that it became the dominant motif within later reformations.
This new principle was a neat switcheroo of the old formula: where the church had once to approve a king, a king now had to approve a church; a state of affairs that had a lasting impact on political equations in Europe. It helped convert vague confederations of lands that characterised medieval Europe into the state-nations of early modern Europe, which in turn were the genesis of the post-French Revolution nation-states of the 19th century. The wars fuelled by the Reformation (it was another century of almost incessant warfare between Augsburg and Westphalia) strengthened administrations and bureaucracies across Europe, by dint of forcing them to develop sophisticated armies and taxation systems. It was the first arms-race, and a brutally effective one. Only the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the most cosmopolitan of European empires, was able to escape these divisive lines being drawn across the map of Europe, mostly by being serenely liberal about the whole affair: their lands, after all, accommodated far greater diversity than Latin Europe was used to: Jews, Muslims, radical Protestant sects, and the Orthodox Eastern churches all thrived in Jageillon lands. The story of its downfall will take us well into the 18th century, and much as I love you all, you couldn’t drag me there for love or money in this essay.
An Interlude.
By 1648, the Holy Roman Empire was in shatters. The great France-Spain rivalry that had animated so many events in the last century was won, soon the Anglo-Dutch rivalry would take the battle to colonial seas.
The Spanish dynasty was replaced in 1700, though the Eastern Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary and North Italy made it all the way to 1914. France was the newly triumphant star; Britain still recovering from civil war, but would begin the 18th century united both with Scotland and itself. Scandinavia was Lutheran and then Reformed and then Lutheran again; Belgium was both Spanish and catholic, while the Dutch up north were republicans and Reformed. The ravaged German Confederation was Lutheran here and Catholic there, the free Cities that survived sometimes became free States. Transylvania’s passionate reformed movement, the ‘flower of Israel in the East’, was about to became an even smaller smudge of the map: in the 1650s, the king gave into delusions of grandeur and attacked, in turn, the Poles, the Turks and the Tartars.
Early modern Europe was definitively mapped, and Poland loomed large as ever at its boundary.
Renascita and Reconquista.
It was not simply that Jerome (of the Latin Vulgate Bible) gave misleading impression of the Greek text: the mere fact that for a thousand years the Latin Church had based its authority on a translation was significant when scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street-greek of Paul of Tarsus as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God. The struggle sounded so much less decorous in the original than in Latin: the shock was bound to stir up new movements in the Church and suggest that it was not authoritative or normative an interpreter of scripture as it claimed. If there is any one explanation as to why the Latin West experienced a Reformation and the Greek-speaking lands did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the New Testament text.
The difference between scholasticism and humanism, the two traditions that squabbled across every divide of the Reformation, has persevered down the ages: the importance of dialectics and reasoning vs that of rhetoric and persuasion. The former in this case was represented in the Catholic Church’s Thomist orthodoxy, and it increasingly came under fire from humanists, who were recovering the Greek and Hebrew canons (such scholars were as likely to be mystics and cynics as reformers). The Thomist revival in the traditional Church, overseen by the talented Italian Dominican Cajetan, with its emphasis on contemplation and restraint, was intended to introduce theological discipline in an era of exuberant religion.
Where Thomism prized Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, the humanists drew upon Plato and the hermetic and gnostic thinkers of the Early Church. Some of the contradictions inherent in the debate had plagued Christianity from birth, were reconciled by Augustine, only to be reopened when ‘classical‘ learning was again the order of the day. These two traditions were inevitably dragged into personal and political battles, to the point where everyone justified their opinion on a fresh reading of Augustine, and he was allocated the rare genius of fooling all people at all times. Their ideological contests were incredibly fraught and often contradictory- for instance, it was the Thomists (Dominicans) in the church rather than the humanists who fought against Spanish colonialism.
The millenarian century that gave birth to the Reformation is best exemplified by Italy in the 1490s, racked by civil war, the ‘French pox’ (syphilis) and imperial interferences. Florence, beloved Republic, was living through typically exciting times: The Last Days of Savonarola were on. Machiavelli’s ‘unarmed prophet’ was later burned by the reinstated brothers Medici, one a Cardinal, the other royal: a perfect example of the venal Church-Commonwealth liaisons in late Medieval Europe (the Cardinal went on to become the despised pope Clement, the Prince was the ungrateful recipient of Machiavelli’s masterpiece). A group called the Piagnoni sprang up to preserve Savonarola’s memory. They ousted the Medici again in 1527, to establish Machiavelli’s beloved republic, only to have it relapse back to the Medici. Statesman though he was, the old Machiavelli could not keep up with rapidly shifting allegiances, and he died an exhausted and broken man.
The anarchy across Europe this late in the decay of the old system was hard to stanch, even had the church extended itself considerably more than it did. It is telling that the first Lateran Council to consider the questions reformers raised was only after the first round of military showdowns: the Council of Trent met in the 1550s, by which time the broad fabric of the old church was irretrievable. What followed instead was the relentless narrowing of, paradoxically, all three churches: as each entrenched itself against the others both territorially and doctrinally. Tridentine Catholics are thus as removed from the ethos of the medieval church- expansive ‘Christendom’- as any Lutheran or Calvinist. Unfortunately, as with 15th century Spain (below), conformity was imposed at the cost of great violence: a purging at which all mainstream churches proved proficient (witch-burning, as MacCulloch points out, had no theological boundaries.)
Moros y Christos.
The Portugese… discovered new islands, new lands, new peoples; and what is more new stars and a new heaven. They freed us from many false impressions and showed us that there were antipodes, about which even the saints had doubts; and that there is no region that is uninhabitable because of heat or cold
Pedro Nunes, cosmographer, 1537
The English king Edward I expelled the Jews 1290, the first in a long line of anti Semitic monarchs in Latin Christendom. The most alarming of these itinerant expulsions was the Iberian persecution of Jews (and Moors) within Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly unified kingdom: the infamous Sephardic diaspora. From that day to this, the bane of “blood-libel”- the notion that Jews (or Roma) regularly kidnap christian kids for sacrifices- has remained an enduring theme of racial prejudice.
Post the Reconquista, while moors and jews were driven out or converted by the Inquisition, Spanish religion (more accurately, the Spanish church) acquired a discipline unique to Latin Europe at the time. Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, the force behind the original Spanish Inquisition, anticipated the mangled debate during the Council of Trent. His outlook, similar to, say, Calvin or Zwingli, had consequences closer to the Counter-Refomation: it obliterated rival civilisations on that cosmopolitan peninsula. Ironically, new ‘racial purity’ laws required people interested in a career within the church to prove limpieze de sangre or freedom from converso blood, a claim few within the settled nobility could make. Ximenes, in the bibliophilic side of his personality, was instrumental in the creation of the Complutensian Polyglot in 1517, a compendium of the Bible in all the ‘original’ languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. This great masterpiece in erudition opened up many doors for later reformers that his descendants in the institutional church would’ve kept emphatically shut.
The Inquisition, it was made clear, was beholden to court and church alike, preferably in that order. This was likely the chief reason Spain never seriously considered ‘reforming’; it was, as far as her rulers were concerned, very well reformed already. As a result, while some of the great Reformation mystics (the ones I found the most interesting, anyway) were fuelled by the Spanish alumbrados and their Italian counterparts, the ‘reformation’ as such died in both lands almost on inception. In Italy, the pope was ever too close, in Spain he was already redundant. Another philosophical tradition within the broader converso experience was heralded by Spinoza and his Amsterdam, birthplace of modern rationalism.
The Spanish Empire introduced plantation slavery to Latin Europe in 1443 by creating the first Atlantic slave route. As a favour to the expansionary and devoutly Catholic empire, the pope handed over the Patronato (Padroado in Portugese): the exclusive right to preach the gospels in the new territories. Ironically, the priests who arrived were mostly from Andalusia, where two generations ago the Moors had ruled. It was such a Dominican priest- Bartolome de las Casas- who first spoke out against the cruelty meted out to the indios and started the first, unsuccessful debate about the ethics of colonialism by suggesting that Spaniards and Indians were equally rational. He did then go on to advocate black slaves instead of brown ones, which is I guess the glass half-empty way of looking at it. Another Spanish Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, developed this thought. He argued that war was only justified in response to a wrong, which the indios had not offered the Spanish. It was characteristic of Iberian Catholicism’s developed sense of statehood that he analysed this in terms of sovereignty rather than evangelism: the Aztecs were as much rulers as the Spanish, and the pope was, after all, only the pope. It was the first wisps of IL, for Vitorio re-introduced the Roman law concept of jus gentium into a system obsessed of divine law for 1000 years.
Theological Cleavages.
The earliest inklings of the reformation were in Bohemia: The “Hussites” or “Ultraquists” who demanded nothing more radical than wine and bread during communion, as well as sermons in Czech, not Latin. Later, in England, the “lollards” followed John Wyclif in insisting upon universal access for the Bible, even for the laity. Only small enclaves of these movements remained at the turn of the 15th century, but they had important implications for the ‘reformation’ proper, which was initiated by various clergy (even Erasmus was a failed monk) questioning the more mystical aspects of Mass and the authority of Vulgate Bible. The Church orthodoxy believed only the Latin Vulgate Bible should exist for scriptural purposes; further, it was to be solely accessible by the clergy. The enterprising Lollards successfully managed to produce the first English Bible- ‘Tyndale’s Bible”- which everyone who was anyone was reading by Henry VIII’s reign.
The beginning of the reformation seems to have been a kinetic chain reaction spread across the late 15th and early 16th century: political decay; incipient urbanisation; the discovery of new cartography and old philosophy; the very first editions of printed books, which encouraged a contemplative rather than demonstrated practice of religion among those elite who could read and buy them. This order of importance is my own: most people would read into wars and plague the importance I place on the written word. All this, moving on, fed into what the first battles of the Reformation were about: access to the Bible, local flexibility in ritual, clerical indiscipline. Much later, the counter-reformation’s Jesuits turned the tide of literacy in their favour with renewed emphasis on elite education and rearranged the battlefield. Even later, the first theological seminaries were set up, to create the new brand of Tridentine priest. But between that day and this, almost a century had passed, and much hay had been made under the blasphemers’ sun.
Mass And Purgatory.
The particular power of the Mass in the medieval west comes from its association with another idea peculiar to the Western church: this most powerful form of public liturgical prayer may be concentrated and directed to steer individuals through the perils of death to God’s bliss in the after-life.
Mass was the epicentre of the “intercession” industry in Latin Europe, where the living bartered with the church on behalf of their dead. In a foreshadowing of later events, and perhaps causing them, this trading of worldly benefits for otherworldly comfort caught on more in Northern lands than in the sunny Mediterranean. Plenty of things could be exchanged the market for Purgatory, the Sistine Chapel among them: remember the ‘indulgence’ grants that so enraged Martin Luther? Good-works and prayer were also part of this trade between church and death, which explains why Reformers were so hell-bent in justification by faith alone, and why their message was more actively heard in the North than in the Mediterranean lands. The ‘Purgatory’ industry developed in very different ways in the North and the South. In the former, the priest was judge and arbiter of all the busy work involved in redeeming yourself and being appropriately penitential. In the South, on the other hand, the priest was the mediator of grace and absolution, not someone who had to prod his audience into goodly activity. This idea that damnation could be staved off by appropriate and judicious activity- the doctrine of good works – was Martin Luther’s chief bugbear; on most other theological matters- the sacraments, iconography, church hierarchy- he was terribly Catholic and quite horrified by the naked glee other Reformers evinced in abandoning the old ways wholesale.
I shall allow the grand Diarmaid to elucidate on the finer points of the after-life ladder:
The New Testament’s picture of life and death is of stark choice: Heaven, or Hell. Humanity’s general experience is that such finality ill-matches the grimy mixture of good and bad that makes up most human life.
It was natural for creative Christian thinkers to speculate about some middle state, in which those whom God loved would perfect the hard slog towards holiness that they had begun so imperfectly in their brief earthly life. Although the first thought along these likes came from eastern Greek-speakers in Alexandria, the idea blossomed in the West, and this place of purging in wise fire, with its promise of an eventual entrance to heaven, was by the twelfth century given a name: Purgatory. Further refining of this system added a ‘limbus infantium’ for infants who had not been baptised but who had no actual sins to send them to hell, and a ‘limbus patrum’ for the Old Testament patriarchs who had the misfortune to die before the coming in flesh of Jesus Christ, but these two states of limbo were subordinate to what had become a threefold scheme of the afterlife. Such theological tidy-mindedness suggests there is something to be said for the view that when the Latin-speaking Roman empire collapsed in the West in the fifth century, its civil servants transferred to the payroll of the Western Church.
Trans-substantiation
Is the grisly idea that one can, literally, eat one’s god (imagine the metaphorical possibilities of such an idea). This was an issue which, unfathomably, was to destroy the unity of the old and new churches alike. It was first proposed by Thomas Aquinas, the father of the ‘scholastic’ tradition (as opposed to the aforementioned ‘humanist’ tradition of Erasmus and the renaissance) that dominated the early medieval church. Its logic runs as follows:
Consider the sheep.
Its substance, which is its reality, its participation in the universal quality of being a sheep, is manifested in its gambolling on the hills, munching grass and baaing. Its accidents are things particular to the individual sheep at which we are looking: the statistics of its weight, the curliness of its wool, or the timbre of its baa. When the sheep dies, it ceases to gambol, munch, and baa: its substance, its “sheepiness” is instantly extinguished, and only the accidents remain, including its weight, curly wool, or voice-box- and they will gradually decay. They are not significant to its sheepiness, which had ended with the extinguishing of its substance in death. It is no longer a sheep…
Now consider bread (equally wine).
Bread consists of substance and accidents: its substance is its participation in the universal quality of ‘breadness’, and its accidents are the particular appearance of a piece of bread (being round, wafer-like, white). In the Mass, substance changes, accidents do not- why would they? They are not essential for being. Through the Grace of God, the substance of the bread is replaced by the substance of the Body of Christ. It is a satisfying and reverent explanation, providing one accepts Thomas’s scientific and philosophical premises of the language of substance and accidents, affirming the conception of universal realities which are greater than individual instances….
Consider the controversy.
From the 14th century, many philosophers and theologians, especially in Northern Europe, did not in fact believe this. They were ‘nominalists’ who rejected Aristotle’s categories and thought words like ‘sheep’ and ‘bread’ are simply nomina (names) which we choose in arbitrary fashion to use as labels for collections of objects which we have decided to say are like each other. Nominalists could only say of trans-substantiation as a theory of the Mass that it was supported by the weight of opinion among very holy in the Church, and therefore it ought not be approached through Thomist paths of reason, but must be accepted as a matter of faith.
Various people, let it be said, found various portions of this doctrine unsettling, though the debate involves such theological niceties it is probably best avoided. Radical types tended to praise the symbolism of Mass, which everyone else found deeply offensive. Faith, after all, came at a high premium. In any case, it was the doctrine that broke the Reform movement, so it is safe to say there is some scandal in it that escapes me. It’s influence was so pernicious that it destabilised the sacrality of all sacraments: if the communion couldn’t be biblically verified and justified, what could be? You mean Jesus didn’t tell an apostle he was going into the baking business? Goodness, how much of what the Church said is authentic? How much had they simply made up- tithes, indulgences, canon law, bloody Purgatory!– simply to suit papal needs? These questions were further insidious because they festered and burrowed deep within the clergy; it was an argument between nerds turned to vitriol by the times.
Mary’s bodily Assumption
This is the notion that the virgin mother entered heaven with the unique dispensation that she would not suffer the ravages of death, her body would show up in heaven with no worms and maggots to mar its perfect beauty (also why Mary-visions are always popular, and why Marian relics are forbidden in both Eastern and Western churches). The rest of us, one assumes, are best consigned to postmortem corpse-bride syndrome. The cult of Mary was a potent current within the old belief; she was, after all, the“neck of the Church”. The intense Marian cult was the most popular in medieval christendom, and a battle-ground for the new and old faiths. In a more general sense, all cults were similarly contentious; the faithful, assuming heaven to be as closely stratified society, figured that saints were useful chaps to ply with prayer, and then they could intercede with God when the time came. Humanists loudly decried this: the Bible said nothing about needing messengers between souls and their god; besides, God’s mind is implacably certain and predestined, so what is the purpose behind such whispers in the night? Demagoguery aside, however, protestantism retained essentially the same premise, substituting saints with biblically verifiable angels.
This redirection of deities also had a profound impact on the arcane field of Christology, the study of the body of christ. With the fall of Mary came the rise of Christ, and in the battle between his humanity and his divinity, the former (mostly) won. Early medieval art had shown him to be a monarch even in his extreme agony: he shows up on the cross crowned and splendid. Now, with vast wars, upheavels, plagues and new diseases, his humanity and suffering won out. This, as we will see, has led to dramatic revivals of old arguments about the Trinity and much radical retooling of doctrines that had been handed down to the Latin Church from the Council of Chalcedon in the early centuries A.D. This further provoked heated controversy regarding the decisions and formulae of all the early councils of the united (‘ecumenical’) church, which were considered by the magesterials and the catholics alike to be canon. Such feuding was harnessed to surreptitiously repair the steady degradation of the relationship between the Eastern and Latin Church, which had reached a nadir with the Sack of Constantinople. The Uniate experience in the wilder reaches of the Polish empire proved that a synthesis between the Orthodox and Rome was possible, but it was hardly widespread. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the fervour of the age could be deployed to unite as well as divide.
Among the Reformed.
It is important, conceptually, to separate the ‘reformers’ and the ‘Reformed’. The former category refers to everyone who rebelled in the 16th century against the pope and the Catholic orthodoxy, while the latter refers only to one branch within developed Protestantism. The differences, and animosity, between the official protestant churches was as strong as the Catholic/Protestant divide. They disagreed on pretty much every major theological question save the venality of the pope, despite concerted efforts by many protestant rulers in the 16th century to unite them in common cause. The distinction began with the figureheads of Luther (who died in 1546) and Calvin (who died in 1564) and was carried forward by their heirs to the point that Luther and Calvin themselves probably agreed on a whole lot more than is conventionally let on. Here is the received list of cleavages: Luther was no iconoclast, Calvin never met a church he didn’t want to deface; Luther believed in clerical hierarchy, Calvin in tightly controlled populism; Luther believed that faith, not good-works, ‘justified’ Christians; Calvin that the saved and and the damned alike were predestined and church had to keep the saved ‘Elect’ pure; both had highly convoluted notions about communion I couldn’t explain to save my soul, so suffice it to say it is not the same convoluted notion. (In rare solidarity they would probably agree that my soul is predicated upon providing this explanation, so I guess I have that to add to my formidable list of sins).
It was both a territorial divide and a doctrinal one, and while both survived alongside in some areas, it was only reluctantly and based on the bond of a common hatred of Catholics. It must be remembered that Protestantism only survived in a beleaguered strip of Continental Europe, forced to cede many heartlands of the original revolt (Bohemia, modern Belgium, Poland-Lithuania, even France) to the Counter-Reformation by the time the Peace of Westphalia rolled around in 1648. Its successes existed at the fringes: Transylvania (which would shortly implode), Scandinavia, the Netherlands, North Germany, and the Atlantic Isles with the exception of Ireland. But I digress- as I noted, the German lands, following Luther, were “Lutheran”, or evangelical ( note to the wary: this lot are not to be confused with American evangelicals of today; though the latter did borrow the word from their Lutheran forbears, their doctrines are a complex blend of Luther and Calvin, often with a splash of the Catholic. Jeremy Scahill’s coinage ‘theoconservative’ for the bleeding between Catholics and Evangelicals within the white Christian Right in the US indicates how much old lines have faded in some circles.) Calvin’s Geneva, on the other hand, usurped the title “Reformed”, and all reformations styled after his principles, like the Scottish, the Dutch, or the Transylvanian, retain that name. The English church, for its part, is usually called Anglican, since it is neither wholly Reformed, nor wholly Catholic, thanks to the compromise worked out by Queen Bess.
Queen Elizabeth inherited a torn kingdom and an even more broken church. Her father, Henry VIII, had warmed to reformers early on when they offered him hope for a divorce. (Hilariously, Martin Bucer of Strassburg and Luther’s protege Phillip Melanchthon, both pioneer reformers, suggested he try bigamy instead; advice that would later destroy their reputations when they suggested it to another licentious ruler- Philipp, the Landgraf Hesse- a more committed reformer). However, Henry never actually gave up on Catholicism, except insofar as it refused to feed his megalomania, and he burned establishment Catholics and Protestants alike as heretics. His schizophrenia grew so acute that he was mocked across Europe for celebrating his marriages with conflagrations, as indiscriminate as they were numerous.
Ultimately, what determined affairs was that his government was composed of reformers: especially his last queen, Catherine Parr, her last husband Thomas Seymour and his brother, the Regent, and the Archbishop of Canterbury- Cranmer- an indefatigable Reformer who defied the church twice by getting married. His son, Edward, was Seymour as much as Tudor (his mother had been Jane Seymour), was thus militantly Reformed, and his kingdom was home to many embattled Protestants from the continent in the black years of the 1540s, when the ‘Holy Roman’ Habsburg emperors, encouraged by the pope, went on the offensive against the Protestants in the heartlands of the clerical revolt. Edward was not long for the world, and by 1553, he had been replaced by the equally militant Queen Mary, as Catholic as he was Reformed, who sealed the deal by marrying her cousin Phillip of Spain. Her reign reconstructed a fragile Catholicism in England, helped along by the crafty Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had spent much of his life in Roman exile. Naturally, her rule resulted in fresh flight to the continent by the “Marian exiles”. Her rule too was short, and by 1559, Queen Elizabeth, a quintessential moderate, was on the throne of a bewildered country. She slowly, but surely, worked out a religious compromise, the practical consequence of which was that the English church never quite made up it’s mind on doctrinal matters: it accepted the throne as the head of the church on the one hand, but it refused to either abandon its bishops or its cathedrals, like the Reformed elsewhere had done. One year after her accession, the Scots threw over her cousin, the Catholic Mary Stewart, and declared themselves Reformed, infinitely more radically and definitively than the Brits ever managed.
The Elizabethan compromise, while it did stabilise her country, had other long-term consequences. It set the tone for a whimsical church establishment, Puritan (militantly Reformed) on the one hand and Arminian (quasi-catholics) on that one. All this wavering was brought to a head in the 17th century, during the reign of Charles I, who tried to sneak Catholicism back into the country and was beheaded for his efforts. Later in that turbulent century, Louis XIV attempted to invade England in the name of Catholicism and the later Stuarts, infuriating William of Orange enough to set the Glorious Revolution into motion. And yet again we bound across centuries, which we simply cannot afford, my loves. If we must be so chaotic, let us jump instead right into that lab of curious Christianity, North America. Europe, we all know, prays no more.
The Elizabethan compromise had the effect of setting off another kind of exile, when puritans (and the later methodists, the 18th century’s Arminians) set off for the New World determined to lead a pure life unhindered by official Anglicanism’s blasphemies. By the same coin, this new world was a haven (part-playground, part-cathedral) for heretics and dissenters of every kind, from Quakers to Anabaptists. It allowed a revival of old controversies, such as with the Unitarians, whose alternative Christology retools the painstaking formulae of Chalcedon. Apart from the obvious admixture between Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox of every stripe in the New World, the various Protestantisms bred into each other in the colonies. German Lutherans met Dutch Episcopalians (people who believe in the episcopate, or bishopric, structure of church government but otherwise adhere to Calvin more than Luther) and New England Puritans married Boston-Brahmin Presbyterians (Calvinists, also called Congregationalists because of their belief in a “congregation-led” church government).
Uniates from Eastern Europe were introduced to Unitarians, who had been hounded out of everywhere until they finally turn up in the New World out of sheer exasperation (they offend pretty much everyone by rejecting the trinity, and follow either the “Arian” heresy that Christ was wholly human, or the “Docetism” heresy that he is wholly celestial). All this cross-pollination led to completely new kinds of churches, such as the Pentecostals, who combine Methodist doctrine and Reformed zeal, and the polygamous Mormons (I’m not entirely sure what they believe, despite my devotion to Big Love: it’s a weird combination of hardline Calvinism and Judaism, from what I can figure).
As another bewildered soul explained:
And the dogmas of Mitt Romney’s sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a young man named Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden plates covered with indecipherable writing; that, with the help of a pair of magic spectacles, he “translated” the plates from an otherwise unknown language (Reformed Egyptian) into an Olde English that reads like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible; that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri; that American Indians descend from Hebrew immigrants; that Jesus reappeared in pre-Columbian America and converted so many people that the result was a series of archeologically unconfirmable wars in which millions died; that while polygamy had divine approval for most of the nineteenth century, God changed his mind in 1890, just in time for Utah to be allowed into the Union; and that God waited until 1978 to reveal that it was O.K. for blacks to be fully paid-up members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The South, on the other hand, was traditionally Anglican, because of its ties to the mothership in England. That was until the nascent black churches revived Anabaptist theology, so-called because it believes in adult baptism. The story of the black churches, about which I know very little, (though the link to Pastor Wright’s profile below was a good introduction) is the story of an wholly alternative theology developing within Christian thought, one which owes as much to the Black Panthers and Frantz Fanon as to the gospels. The tension in this tussle between black ‘liberation’ theology and white ‘evangelical’ theology is exemplified by Obama’s controversial pastors: Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Rick Warren. I wonder: what will later historians of race and religion make of the direction in which his faith evidently moved?