thing, the Gothic, arises. The conception of representative assembly,
monastic in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, appears in
the institutions of Christendom. The vernacular languages appear, and
with them the beginnings of our literature: the Tuscan, the Castilian,
the Langue d’Oc, the Northern French, somewhat later the English. Even
the primitive tongues that had always kept their vitality from beyond
recorded time, the Celtic and the German [Footnote: I mean, in neither
of the groups of tongues as we first find them recorded, for by that
time each—especially the German—was full of Southern words borrowed
from the Empire; but the original stocks which survived side by side
with this new vocabulary. For instance, our first knowledge of Teutonic
dialect is of the eighth century (the so-called Early Gothic is a
fraud) but even then quite half the words or more are truly German,
apparently unaffected by the Imperial laws and speech.] begin to take
on new creative powers and to produce a new literature. That
fundamental institution of Europe, the University, arises; first in
Italy, immediately after in Paris—which last becomes the type and
centre of the scheme.
The central civil governments begin to correspond to their natural
limits, the English monarchy is fixed first, the French kingdom is
coalescing, the Spanish regions will soon combine. The Middle Ages are
born.
The flower of that capital experiment in the history of our race was
the thirteenth century. Edward I. of England, St. Louis of France, Pope
Innocent III., were the types of its governing manhood. Everywhere
Europe was renewed; there were new white walls around the cities, new
white Gothic churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law
codified, the classics rediscovered, the questions of philosophy sprung
to activity and producing in their first vigor, as it were, the summit
of expository power in St. Thomas, surely the strongest, the most
virile, intellect which our European blood has given to the world.
Two notes mark the time for anyone who is acquainted with its building,
its letters, and its wars: a note of youth, and a note of content.
Europe was imagined to be at last achieved, and that ineradicable dream
of a permanent and satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh
and to have come to live forever among Christian men.
No such permanence and no such good is permitted to humanity; and the
great experiment, as I have called it, was destined to fail.
While it flourished, all that is specially characteristic of our
European descent and nature stood visibly present in the daily life,
and in the large, as in the small, institutions, of Europe.
Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or
all; we produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman;
we founded coöperative industry. In arms that military type arose which
lives upon the virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may
breed. Above all, an intense and living appetite for truth, a
perception of reality, invigorated these generations. They saw what was
before them, they called things by their names. Never was political or
social formula less divorced from fact, never was the mass of our
civilization better welded—and in spite of all this the thing did not
endure.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was
tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere
intrigue successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of
sophistry in philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not
an institution of the thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it; the
Papacy professional and a prisoner, the parliaments tending to
oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed in the minds of the rulers, the
new and vigorous and democratic monastic orders already touched with
mere wealth and beginning also to change—but these last can always, and
do always, restore themselves.
Upon all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Here half
the people, there a third, there again a quarter, died; from that
additional blow the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not
recover.
Men clung to their ideal for yet another hundred and fifty years. The
vital forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material
perfection to another; the art of government, the suggestion of
letters, the technique of sculpture and of painting (here raised by a
better vision, there degraded by a worse one), everywhere developed and
grew manifold. But the supreme achievement of the thirteenth century
was seen in the later fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in the fifteenth
it was apparent that the attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe
had failed.
The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that
science and history were too slight; that the material side of life was
insufficient; that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to
permanence was lacking—or one may say that the ideal was too high for
men. I, for my part, incline to believe that wills other than those of
mortals were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat
daily for the souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual
battle, fought over our heads perpetually, some accident of the
struggle turned it against us for a time. If that suggestion be
fantastic (which no doubt it is), at any rate none other is complete.
With the end of the fifteenth century there was to come a supreme test
and temptation. The fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek:
the rediscovery of the Classic past: the Press: the new great
voyages—India to the East, America to the West—had (in the one lifetime
of a man [Footnote: The lifetime of one very great and famous man did
cover it. Ferdinand, King of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of
the noblest of English queens, was born the year before Constantinople
fell. He died the year before Luther found himself swept to the head of
a chaotic wave.] between 1453 and 1515) suddenly brought Europe into a
new, a magic, and a dangerous land.
To the provinces of Europe, shaken by an intellectual tempest of
physical discovery, disturbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement
in the material world, in physical science, and in the knowledge of
antiquity, was to be offered a fruit of which each might taste if it
would, but the taste of which would lead, if it were acquired, to evils
no citizen of Europe then dreamt of; to things which even the criminal
intrigues and the cruel tyrants of the fifteenth century would have
shuddered to contemplate, and to a disaster which very nearly overset
our ship of history and very nearly lost us forever its cargo of
letters, of philosophy, of the arts, and of all our other powers.
That disaster is commonly called “The Reformation.” I do not pretend to
analyze its material causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were
wholly material. I rather take the shape of the event and show how the
ancient and civilized boundaries of Europe stood firm, though shaken,
under the tempest; how that tempest might have ravaged no more than
those outlying parts newly incorporated—never sufficiently penetrated
perhaps with the Faith and the proper habits of ordered men—the outer
Germanies and Scandinavia.
The disaster would have been upon a scale not too considerable, and
Europe might quickly have righted herself after the gust should be
passed, had not one exception of capital amount marked the intensest
crisis of the storm. That exception to the resistance offered by the
rest of ancient Europe was the defection of Britain.
Conversely with this loss of an ancient province of the Empire, one
nation, and one alone, of those which the Roman Empire had not bred,
stood the strain and preserved the continuity of Christian tradition:
that nation was Ireland.
VIII
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?
This is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions, after the
original question: “What was the Church in the Empire of Rome?” A true
answer to this original question gives the nature of that capital
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity and attained
to a full consciousness of itself. An answer to the other question:
“What was the Reformation?” begins to explain our modern ill-ease.
A true answer to the question: “What was the Reformation?” is of such
vast importance, because it is only when we grasp _what the Reformation
was_ that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the
united body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a
wound. The abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital
by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of modern
discovery to serve the end of man; the series of larger and still
larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and
destruction—till the dead are now counted in tens of millions; the
increasing chaos and misfortune of society—all these attach one to the
other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller phenomena as
well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the magnitude
of that fundamental catastrophe.
It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to its end,
and that (though those now living will not live to see it) Christendom
may enter into a convalescence: may at last forget the fever and be
restored. With that I am not here concerned. It is my business only to
explain that storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago and
within a century brought Christendom to shipwreck.
The true causes are hidden—for they were spiritual.
In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human kind, in
that proportion does it spring not from apparent—let alone
material—causes, but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit.
To pretend an examination of the secret springs whence the human mind
is fed is futile. The greater the affair, the more directly does it
proceed from unseen sources which the theologian may catalogue, the
poet see in vision, the philosopher explain, but with which positive
external history cannot deal, and which the mere historian cannot
handle. It is the function of history to present the outward thing, as
a witness might have seen it, and to show the reader as much as a
spectator could have seen—illuminated indeed by a knowledge of the
past—and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events. The historian
answers the question, “_What_ was?” this or that. To the question,
“_Why_ was it?” if it be in the spiritual order (as are all major
things), the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other
aptitudes than those of historic science.
It is the neglect of this canon which makes barren so much work upon
the past. Read Gibbon’s attempt to account for “why” the Catholic
Church arose in the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure.
[Footnote: It is true that Gibbon was ill equipped for his task because
he lacked historical imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a
past age. He could not enter into any mood save that of his master,
Voltaire. But it is not only true of Gibbon that he fails to explain
the great revolution of A.D. 29-304. No one attempting that explanation
has succeeded. It was not of this world.]
Mark also how all examination of the causes of the French Revolution
are colored by something small and degraded, quite out of proportion to
that stupendous crusade which transformed the modern world. The truth
is, that the historian can only detail those causes, largely material,
all evident and positive, which lie within his province, and such
causes are quite insufficient to explain the full result. Were I here
writing “Why” the Reformation came, my reply would not be historic, but
mystic. I should say that it came “from outside mankind.” But that
would be to affirm without the hope of proof, and only in the
confidence that all attempts at positive proof were contemptible.
Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an issue, but only in the
presentation of the thing as it was. Upon this I now set out.
With the close of the Middle Ages two phenomena appeared side by side
in the society of Europe. The first was an ageing and a growing fatigue
of the simple mediæval scheme; the second was a very rapid accretion of
technical power.
As to the first I have suggested (it is no more than a suggestion),
that the mediæval scheme of society, though much the best fitted to our
race and much the best expression which it has yet found, though
especially productive of happiness (which here and hereafter is the end
of man), was not properly provided with instruments of survival.
Its science was too imperfect, its institutions too local, though its
philosophy was the widest ever framed and the most satisfying to the
human intelligence.
Whatever be the reason, that society _did_ rapidly grow old. Its every
institution grew formal or debased. The Guilds from true coöperative
partnerships for the proper distribution of the means of production,
and for the prevention of a proletariat with its vile cancer of
capitalism, tended to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of
Christian Europe, the village, showed faint signs that it might become
an oligarchy of privileged farmers with some land and less men at their
orders. The Monastic orders were tainted in patches up and down Europe,
with worldliness, with an abandonment of their strict rule, and
occasionally with vice. Civil government grew befogged with tradition
and with complex rules. All manner of theatrical and false trappings
began to deform society, notably the exaggeration of heraldry and a
riot of symbolism of which very soon no one could make head or tail.
The temporal and visible organization of the Church did not escape in
such a welter. The lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that
organization suffered, has been both grossly exaggerated and set out of
perspective. A wild picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But in
a degree the temporal organization of the Church had decayed at the
close of the Middle Ages. It was partly too much a taking of things for
granted, a conviction that nothing could really upset the unity of
Europe; partly the huge concentration of wealth in clerical hands,
which proceeded from the new economic activity all over Europe, coupled
with the absolute power of the clergy in certain centres and the
universal economic function of Rome; partly a popular loss of faith.
All these between them helped to do the business. At any rate the evil
was there.
All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their origins, or
they fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of
united Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic attempts to
revivify the common life, especially upon its spiritual side, by a
return to the primitive communal enthusiasms in which religion
necessarily has its historical origins.
This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it remarkable that each such
sporadic and spontaneous outburst should have its own taint or vice or
false color.
What was remarkable and what made the period unique in the whole
history of Christendom (save for the Arian flood) was the incapacity of
the external organization of the Church at the moment to capture the
spiritual discontent, and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of which
these errors were the manifestation.
In a slower time the external organization of the Church would have
absorbed and regulated the new things, good and evil. It would have
rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have canalized the
exaltations, it would have humanized the discoveries. But things were
moving at a rate more and more rapid, the whole society of Western
Christendom raced from experience to experience. It was flooded with
the newly found manuscripts of antiquity, with the new discoveries of
unknown continents, with new commerce, printing, and, an effect perhaps
rather than a cause, the complete rebirth of painting, architecture,
sculpture and all the artistic expression of Europe.
In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted return to early
religious enthusiasm were not digested and were not captured. The
spiritual hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not
exposed to the solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient
indignation: they were therefore neither withered nor eradicated. For
the spirit had grown old. The great movement of the spirit in Europe
was repressed haphazard and, quite as much haphazard, encouraged, but
there seemed no one corporate force present throughout Christendom
which would persuade, encourage and command: even the Papacy, the core
of our unity, was shaken by long division and intrigue.
Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of special
heresies the business was local, peculiar and contemptible. Wycliffe,
for instance, was no more the morning star of the Reformation than
Catherine of Braganza’s Tangier Dowry, let us say, was the morning star
of the modern English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of
men who were theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society
and morals, each with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each
with his “system.” Such men have always abounded; they abound today.
Some of Wycliffe’s extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen,
later, to have held; others (such as his theory that you could not own
land unless you were in a state of grace) were of the opposite extreme
to Protestantism. And so it is with the whole lot: and there were
hundreds of them. There was no common theory, no common feeling in the
various reactions against a corrupted ecclesiastical authority which
marked the end of the Middle Ages. There was nothing the least like
what we call Protestantism today. Indeed that spirit and mental color
does not appear until a couple of generations after the opening of the
Reformation itself.
What there _was_, was a widespread discontent and exasperated friction
against the existing, rigid, and yet deeply decayed, temporal
organization of religious affairs; and in their uneasy fretting against
that unworthy rule, the various centres of irritation put up now one
startling theory which they knew would annoy the official Church, now
another, perhaps the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied
something as old as Europe—such as the right to property: now a new
piece of usage or discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a
partial regional rule, such as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others,
at the contrary extreme, did no more than expose false relics.
A general social ill-ease was the parent of all these sporadic
heresies. Many had elaborate systems, but none of these systems was a
true creed, that is, a _motive_. No one of the outbursts had any
philosophic driving power behind it; all and each were no more than
violent and blind reactions against a clerical authority which gave
scandal and set up an intolerable strain.
Shall I give an example? One of the most popular forms which the
protest took, was what I have just mentioned, a demand for Communion in
both kinds and for the restoration of what was in many places ancient
custom, the drinking from the cup after the priest.
Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation against the
external organization of the Church was the power at work? Could any
point have less to do with the fundamentals of the Faith? Of course, as
an _implication_ of false doctrine—as that the Priesthood is not an
Order, or that the Presence of Our Lord is not in both species—it had
its importance. But in itself how trivial a “kick.” Why should anyone
desire the cup save to mark dissension from established custom!
Here is another example. Prominent among the later expressions of
discontent you have the Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities
is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one
hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of
various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling
rapidly in numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred
years, others like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime:
others like the Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons
near a century, their close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado
in 1891 whose friends thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Wycliffites
certain members of the Adamites until lately survived in Austria.] who
among other tenets rejected clothes upon the more solemn occasions of
their ritual and went naked: raving maniacs. The whole business was a
rough and tumble of protest against the breakdown of a social system
whose breakdown seemed the more terrible because it _had_ been such a
haven! Because it _was_ in essence founded upon the most intimate
appetites of European men. The heretics were angry because they had
lost their home.
This very general picture omits Huss and the national movement for
which he stood. It omits the Papal Schism; the Council of Constance;
all the great facts of the fifteenth century on its religious side. I
am concerned only with the presentation of the general character of the
time, and that character was what I have described: an irrepressible,
largely justified, discontent breaking out: a sort of chronic rash upon
the skin of Christian Europe, which rash the body of Christendom could
neither absorb nor cure.
Now at this point—and before we leave the fifteenth century—there is
another historical feature which it is of the utmost importance to
seize if we are to understand what followed; for it was a feature
common to all European thought until a time long after the final
establishment of permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature which
nearly all historians neglect and yet one manifest upon the reading of
any contemporary expression. That feature is this: _No one in the
Reformation dreamt a divided Christendom to be possible_.
This flood of heretical movement was _oecumenical_; it was not peculiar
to one race or climate or culture or nation. The numberless uneasy
innovators thought, even the wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a
whole. They desired to affect the universal Church and change it _en
bloc_. They had no local ambition. They stood for no particular blood
or temperament; they sprang up everywhere, bred by the universal
ill-ease of a society still universal. You were as likely to get an
enthusiast declaring himself to be the Messiah in Seville as an
enthusiast denying the Real Presence in Aberdeen.
That fatal habit of reading into the past what we know of its future
has in this matter most deplorably marred history, and men, whether
Protestant or Catholic, who are now accustomed to Protestantism, read
Protestantism and the absurd idea of a local religion—a religion true
in one place and untrue in another—into a time where the least
instructed clown would have laughed in your face at such nonsense.
The whole thing, the evil coupled with a quite ineffectual resistance
to the evil, was a thing common to all Europe.
It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or to recede. But
this movement was destined to advance with devastating rapidity, and
that on account of what I have called the _second_ factor in the
Reformation: the very rapid accretion in technical power which marked
the close of the Middle Ages.
Printing; navigation; all mensuration; the handling of metals and every
material—all these took a sudden leap forward with the _Renaissance_,
the revival of arts: that vast stirring of the later Middle Ages which
promised to give us a restored antiquity Christianized: which was burnt
in the flame of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing but ashes
and incommiscible salvage.
Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical experience and technical
skill, were moving in the century before the Reformation at such a rate
that a contemporary spiritual phenomenon, if it advanced at all, was
bound to advance very rapidly, and this spiritual eruption in Europe
came to a head just at the moment when the contemporary expansion of
travel, of economic activity and of the revival of learning, had also
emerged in their full force.
It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that the
coalescing of the various forces of spiritual discontent and revolt
began to be apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to burst and
the Reformation proper to be started on its way.
But as a preliminary to that matter, the reader should first understand
how another and quite disconnected social development had prepared the
way for the triumph of the reformers. This development was the advent
of Absolute Government in civil affairs.