The Age of the Reformation Part 55

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rough fun of these artless scenes than in the apothegms and sound advice in which they abounded.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the Sixteenth Century]

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To all, the exile in the far country, the riotous living with harlots and the feeding on husks with swine, meant the life of this world with its pomps and vanities, its l.u.s.ts and sinful desires that become as mast to the soul. The return to the father is the return to G.o.d's love here below and to everlasting felicity above. To those who can believe it, it is the most beautiful story in the world.

[Sidenote: Faust]

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know everything, to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world.

{697} The first printed _Faust-book_ (1587) pa.s.sed for three centuries as a Protestant production, but the discovery of an older and quite different form of the legend in 1897 changed the whole literary problem. It has been a.s.serted now that the Faust of this unknown author is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor at Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with Helena recalls the Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in early Christian literature Simon Magus is the ant.i.thesis of Peter.

Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of G.o.d; their adventures are somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose.

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as the Prodigal or Pantagruel. To live to the full; to know all science and all mysteries, to drain to the dregs the cup crowned with the wine of the pleasure and the pride of life: this was worth more than heaven! The full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for human experience was not brought out until Goethe took it up; but it is implied both in the German Faust-books and in Marlowe's play.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the Sixteenth Century]

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do justice to the age of the Reformation. We are now at the end of the period inaugurated by Columbus and Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place that it then did, nor does the difference between Catholic and Protestant any longer seem the most important thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the state, both of which started on their paths of conquest then, are now attacked.

Again, the application of any statistical method makes the former ages seem to shrink in comparison {698} with the present. In population and wealth, in war and in science we are immeasurably larger than our ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than had Henry VIII, and many a college boy knows more astronomy than did Kepler. But if we judge the greatness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets dreamed and by what its strong men accomplished, the importance of the sixteenth century can be appreciated.

[Sidenote: An age of aspiration]

It was an "experiencing" age. It loved sensation with the greediness of childhood; it intoxicated itself with Rabelais and t.i.tian, with the gold of Peru and with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was a daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for spiritual liberty, or they gave their lives with Magellan to compa.s.s the earth or with Bruno to span the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed with Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ-like, or with More of the place where they should be just; or with Michelangelo it pondered the meaning of sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. And of this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, was born the world's supreme poet with an eye to see the deepest and a tongue to tell the most of the human heart. Truly such a generation was not a poor, nor a backward one. Rather it was great in what it achieved, sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in ripe wisdom and in heroic deeds; full of light and of beauty and of life!

{699}

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be cla.s.sified in a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our present purpose it will be convenient to cla.s.sify them, according to their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most, historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When different philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and Darwinians began to a.s.sert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS.

(SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based on the a.n.a.logy of Scripture. G.o.d, it was thought, had chosen a peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance, particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a {700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs.

G.o.d's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation"]

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies _par eminence_, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he incorporated it in the t.i.tle of his greatest German pamphlet. The other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive away the foggy mists of superst.i.tion and to restore the purity of the primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply _ad libitum_ quotations showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of G.o.d, or to the impertinent but more a.s.siduous activity of the devil. It is interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes.

Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such as Munzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary, natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the "first push and a.s.sault" given by the unG.o.dly humanists. Burnet followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many doc.u.ments he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf, was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student for the doc.u.ments it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced, prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His _History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches_, written without that odious defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions.

Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth, but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors.

Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged, as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original sin and his lat.i.tudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much bia.s.sed by creed was written on the Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion.

Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou pa.s.ses over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his _History of Italy_ mentions Luther merely to show how the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini [Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther, carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party.

The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantome says that he leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther won over a good many of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin Du Bellay found the cause of the English schism in Henry's divorce and the small respect the pope had for his majesty. Davila, de Mezeray and Daniel, writing the history of the French civil wars, treated the Huguenots merely as a political party. So they were, but they were something more. Even Hugo Grotius could not sound the deeper causes of the Dutch revolt and of the religious revolution.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

The first of all the histories of the German Reformation {705} was also, for at least two centuries, the best. Though surpa.s.sed in some particulars by others, Sleidan united more of the qualities of a great historian than anyone else who wrote extensively on church history in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: fairness, accuracy, learning, skill in presentation. In words that recall Ranke's motto he declared that, though a Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth simply "rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing religious affairs," he continues, "I was not able to omit politics, for, as I said before, they almost always interact, and in our age least of all can they be separated." Withal, he regards the Reformation as a great victory for G.o.d's word, and Luther as a notable champion of the true religion. In plain, straightforward narrative, without much philosophic reflection, he sets forth,--none better,--the diplomatic and theological side of the movement without probing its causes or inquiring into the popular support on which all the rest was based.

[Sidenote: Sarpi]

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration than Sleidan compa.s.sed is found in the writings of Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the Tridentine Council," as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose book could only be published on Protestant soil, this historian admired by Macaulay as the best of modern times and denounced by Acton as fit for Newgate prison, has furnished students with one of the most curious of psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion of his learning and accuracy, which have recently been severely attacked and perhaps discredited, let us ask what was his att.i.tude in regard to his subject?

It is difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explanation of his attacks on the creed in which he believed and of his favorable presentation of the acts of the {706} heretics he must have anathematized, is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of their own church; one may also find in Dollinger a parallel to him.

Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant antic.i.p.ation of the modern economic school of historical thought is found in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, who suggested that the causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social.

When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and n.o.ble into the hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed the ancient balance of power in the const.i.tution, and, while leveling feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more dangerous enemy.

SECTION 2. THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE. (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and to point out instructive a.n.a.logies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]