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?

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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.

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