THE REFORMATION
Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves.
One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single
motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse
a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of
intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never
again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black
white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons
which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our
hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with
the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with
ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable
and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public
consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason
why we did so and so.”
But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible
to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered
a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a
few minutes.
We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore
ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with
each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to
in public.
What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we
maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied
with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs
and I will believe yours.”
Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous
rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the
sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been
a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull
life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less
respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been
invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course
has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her
own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.
A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very
expensive in the matter of human lives and property.
For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying,
continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with
the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once
enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry
begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers
commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people
have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole
countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been
drained down to the last kopek.
Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the
members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is
therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus
far have only been respected in chemical laboratories and astronomical
observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful
scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all
coming generations.
Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this
chapter, to wit: the Reformation.
Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this
great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly
bad.
According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result
of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble
theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality
of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own
where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were
seriously trying to be true Christians.
Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.
The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the
result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a
number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides
hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their
Holy Mother the Church.
As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.
The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of
motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to
realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great
upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic
revolution with a slightly theological background.
Of course it is much easier to teach our children that good Prince
Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest
in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated
machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the
help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In
consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a
magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see
the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of
Hapsburg.
On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a
loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength
trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to
depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded
the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used
the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian
fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure
smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.
But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate
settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors
of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions
of our own.
Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther,
was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not
necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.
By no means.
When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew
as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves
to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the
scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he would
never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.
But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly
difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or
for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound
knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he
has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.
The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive
everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an
amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand
everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who
ages ago reserved that right to himself.
Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more
than enough for our limited human ability.
And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this
slight detour.
As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation
of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and
political development of the last three centuries and which came to be
known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that
foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced
during the course of the last five centuries.
Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never
have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and
Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party,
strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had
been held for such a long time.
If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements had not been
temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their
own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have
succeeded.
It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily
suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic
inquisitors.
The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would
have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had
been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored
another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those
guilty of a “breach of discipline.”
Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of
all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the
menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been
removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number
of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat
all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of
their power.
A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise
fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.
To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this
era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the
sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the
scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be
realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure
citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the
utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more
liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most
severe test.
For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world
many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great
many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of
making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made
it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much
the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the
mental habits of most people.
They refuse to be hurried.
They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.
They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the
bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do
so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral
furniture as they can possibly carry.
As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new
relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was
to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone
era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its
trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and
soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment
which it held in such great abhorrence.
For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could
not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its
adherents.
And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not
progress as much as might have been expected.
Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave
the world a book which was held to be infallible.
Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and
one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule
supreme.
Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the
ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless
little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense
hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of
establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early
Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched
behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter
warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established
doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.
All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.
But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists
only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”
A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college
somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns
a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a
church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a
fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such
men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world
can offer no adequate comparison.
That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a
purpose of their own and supporters who hoped to fish successfully in
troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.
When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their
conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most
of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.
But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making,
they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.
Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of
their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this
contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal
quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue
on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many
creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called
together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast
and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the
rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and
fight.
It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a
desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at
one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,”
a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the
wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the
ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.
The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must
not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an
opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.
The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.
And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last
followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of
the Middle Ages as long as they lived.
Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light
of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing
to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use
it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this
trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant
junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had
been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected,
until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk
full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the
rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from
those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth
century.
And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of
tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the
gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were
all on the side of progress.
In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church
had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had
it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at
last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the
holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw
his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.
Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and fear which we
feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred
years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants
believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass
to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the
“inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than
to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not
because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant
pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and
the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very
serious, not to say disastrous.
Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was
really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders
was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had
never foreseen.
If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike
of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of
the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of
serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly
interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales
of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been
inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of
a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.
After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the
Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free
speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation,
dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural
channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman
philosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries
before.
And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point
of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western
Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a
religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and
highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.
With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But
they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only
unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their
own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic
effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name
a byword for rapacity and tyranny.
And she succeeded most brilliantly.
After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated
in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A
deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman
proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals
entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a
Frenchman or any other foreigner.
The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only
candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And
these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries,
began a thorough house-cleaning.
The sale of indulgences came to an end.
Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules
laid down by their founders.
Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.
And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by
an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble
service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to
carry the burden of existence by themselves.
Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never
regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half
of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.
But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language
of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more
clearly revealed.
During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and
intellectual prison-house.
The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of
the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.
After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved
exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.
At least that had been the original plan.
But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of
training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make
their lockup dissenter-proof.
Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the
unruly inmates escaped.
Ere long the entire building was a wreck.
At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and
beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little
fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of
that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory the
Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.
No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of
rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale
walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now
called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline
(excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were
absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand
by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their
own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened
to suit their temporary convictions.
This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of
spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls
could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they
pleased without hindrance or molestation.
And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause
of tolerance.
It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.