We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
"THE UNINTENDED REFORMATION – How a Religious Revolution
Secularized Society” by Brad S. Gregory (The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press; available from The Book Depository International at $NZ43:38)
“I know that history at all times draws /
strangest consequence from remotest cause” says Thomas Becket in
T.S.Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.
And though the phrase has been quoted often enough to become a cliché, that
doesn’t make it a whit less true. Where we arrive at in history is the result
of a complex chain of actions and decisions that were meant to drive us in
quite a different direction. We are always wrong about where we think we are
going in history. Decisions made and actions taken now will have consequences
that we cannot remotely foresee. They will make a world quite disconnected from
any intentionality.
Brad
S.Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation
is a long, scholarly and very demanding illustration of this thesis. Its 400
large and closely-printed pages of text are followed by nearly 200 pages of
end-notes and index. Gregory is a Professor of Early Modern History at Indiana’s
Notre Dame University and his book has been published by Harvard University
Press. This is not light popularisation, yet its theme is quite simply stated.
Five
hundred years ago, argues Gregory, Protestant Reformers believed they were
reviving an authentic Christianity, which was being stifled by a corrupt and
superstition-laden Catholic church. They believed their revolution would make
Europe more authentically Christian. Instead of making Europe and Western
civilization more Christian, however, their efforts inadvertently secularised
society and created the conditions for a consumer-driven capitalism in which
religion is privatised and marginalised. After an initial period of fiercely
partisan zealotry, the Protestant Reformation made the West less Christian.
Notre Dame is a Catholic
institution and the odd reference in The
Unintended Reformation suggests to me that Gregory is a Catholic. However,
this is in no sense a partisan work. When he discusses the Reformation, Gregory
includes contemporary Catholic attitudes thereto and sees them as part of the
problem. He is not fantasising about “a world we have lost” and his Conclusion
is called “Against Nostalgia”, making
the obvious point that, however much we may regret a corporate, public and
generally-accepted system of belief and morality, it is not coming back any
time soon. (And for the record, this book was awarded a scholar’s prize by
Indiana’s Wesleyan University – not a noticeably Catholic institution.).
In his introduction Gregory
declares:
“As a whole this book constitutes an explanation about the makings of
modernity as both a multifaceted rejection and a variegated appropriation of
different elements of medieval Christianity…. This is neither a study of
decline from a lost Golden Age nor a narrative of progress toward an even
brighter future, but rather an analysis of unintended historical consequences
that derived from transformative responses to major perceived human problems.”
(pg.20)
Each of the book’s six long
chapters begins with a reflection on the present and asks how it came about.
Each then goes back to intellectual and social conditions in the later Middle
Ages and follows their consequences through to the present. At least in part, The Unintended Reformation is a protest
against current periodization employed by most historians; and their notion
that the modern world can be explained solely with reference to the “Early
Modern” world and Enlightenment, while everything before that is relegated to
irrelevance. Further, Gregory is concerned to interrogate the pervasive use of
“we” by socio-historians when they refer to the present and assume that a
secular, non-religious view is now normative and uncontested. In reality, “we”,
if used honestly, would have to include a hyperplurality of world-views
including many directly related to the religious past.
The opening chapter “Excluding God” sees the origin of a
major philosophical problem in the late medieval adoption of Duns Scotus’
conception of God not as being itself
(esse) but as a being (ens). “If real”, says Gregory, “a transcendent God is not subject to empirical discovery or proof.”
But when Scotus’ conception of God was backed by William of Occam’s
univocalism, God was sidelined and became just another aspect of nature – a
being greater than other beings, but still a being.
This would have remained a matter
for the academies, with little wider impact. But comes the Reformation and
“…the intractable doctrinal disagreements among Protestants and
especially between Catholics and Protestants…. had the unintended effect of
sidelining explicitly Christian claims about God in relationship to the natural
world. This left only empirical observation and philosophical speculation as
supra-confessional means of investigating and theorizing that relationship.
With this unplanned marginalization of disputed Christian doctrines, widespread
univocal metaphysical assumptions and the nominalist principle of parsimony
became unprecedentedly important as the de facto intellectual framework within
which such observation and speculation would unfold – and within which modern
science would emerge.” (Pg.40)
Gradually God was squeezed out of
discourse concerning nature even though, as Gregory observes, there is
absolutely no way that the modern natural sciences have in any sense
“disproved” God’s existence. Further, the God rejected by “science” is not the
Christian God.
Gregory notes that late medieval
intellectual life was not static or sterile:
“Any picture of medieval Latin Christianity as a homogenous, uniform set
of rigidly prescribed, strictly enforced, and closely followed practices is
deeply misleading, however much this myth survives as a vestige of
nineteenth-century liberal views of the Reformation or of nostalgic romanticism
in Catholic notions of the Middle Ages.” (Pg.83)
However, intellectual diversity
in the Middle Ages was largely anchored on teleological, Aristotelean-Thomist
assumptions and more was shared than was contested in intellectual life. In his
second chapter “Relativizing Doctrine”,
Gregory argues that this framework was stripped away and teachings became so
diverse as to be mutually-exclusive. Protestant reformers attempted to attack a
corrupt church by attacking what they saw as an accretion of non-biblical
traditions, because in one form or another they believed in the concept of sola scriptura – the concept that a purer
Christian doctrine would emerge if the Bible alone were referenced and
non-scriptural traditions and canon law jettisoned. But it was soon evident that scripture, despite a frequent
and erroneous claim, was not and is not “self-interpreting”. Among Protestants,
cutting loose from tradition and in most cases from church councils meant
strong disagreement on essential doctrines. The short-term solutions were
various confessional formulations and local enforcement of these using the
power of the state. Another solution was to lean on the Holy Ghost as arbiter –
God would directly reveal the truth of scripture. So we go down the Pentecostal
path, or come to the “inner light” of Quakerism. But none of these resolve the
multiple doctrinal differences between Protestants (let alone between
Protestants and Catholics); and opportunity is given to the sceptic claim that
therefore all confessional truth
claims are wrong. This leads ineluctably to the more recent superstition that
reason alone with tell us moral and intellectual truths. But this proves to be
as much of a chimera as sola scriptura,
creating a world in which there is no objective moral or intellectual truth,
but only opinion based on personal preference.
Gregory’s argument here is a
densely-referenced historical one. But along the way, he demolishes handsomely
those who claim that morality is based only on evolutionary urges; and the
notion of “freedom” as being disconnected from essential values. More than
anything, there is the bankruptcy of unanchored reason:
“Attempts to salvage
modern philosophy by claiming that it is concerned with asking questions rather
than either finding or getting closer to finding answers might make some
sense – if one just happens to like asking questions in the same way that
thirsty people just happen to like seeking water rather than locating a
drinking fountain, or indeed having any idea whether they were getting closer
to one. Appeals to philosophy as a “quest” or a “journey” toward the truth
about morality, meaning, or metaphysics by means of reason presuppose a
promising path to follow. Neither the history of modern philosophy nor the
state of contemporary philosophy suggests any reason to think that reason alone
offers one. The evidence of nearly four hundred years suggests that those who
persist nonetheless are as Pollyannaish as those who doggedly continue to
maintain the sufficiency and perspicuity of scripture as a basis for Christian
truth despite a half-millennium of irreconcilable biblical interpretation, and
a lack of any consensual means of deciding among them. The reasonable
conclusion is that it is irrational to go on thinking that reason alone might
yield truth about human values, priorities, meaning, or purpose.” (Pg.126)
In his third chapter “Controlling the Churches”, Gregory notes
that despite co- existing with many different polities, the Catholic Church was
never absorbed by or coterminous with a given state. Also the doctrine of ex opere operato taught that the
workings of grace and the efficacy of sacraments never relied on the personal
holiness of those administering them. But emphasising individual “godliness” in
its ministers, and having broken with church traditions, Protestantism could
survive only by leaning on the coercive arm of the state. At this point,
Gregory distinguishes between “magisterial Protestants” and “radical
Protestants”. By “magisterial Protestants”, he means those able to create confessional
states with the help of political patrons – Luther in Germany, Calvin in
Geneva, the Church of England etc. By “radical Protestants” he means those who
gained no such political support. The doctrinal problems of magisterial
Protestants were apparently “solved” only because they had the secular
political power to impose a local orthodoxy, and stamp out alternatives.
“The very success of confessional regimes, magisterial Protestant as
well as Catholic, in suppressing radical Protestants between Munster in 1535
and England in the 1640s kept the number of radical Protestants small and their
socio-political influence minimal. Thus the fact of political approval and
support, essential to long term success in forging Lutheran or Reformed
Protestant confessional identities across a wide swathe of the population, has
for centuries been conflated with doctrinally and theologically normative
Protestantism in the Reformation era. This is analytically unfortunate,
because there is no intrinsic, necessary, or logical connection between
enjoying political support and rightly interpreting God’s word…” (Pg.151)
To put it more simply, the
“success” of Protestantism was not the victory of a purified doctrine, but of a
secular power to enforce highly-contested doctrines. Please note that in this
analysis, Gregory says the same was true of Catholic countries as they
regrouped and reacted to the Protestant Reformation. Philip II’s Spain was as
much a confessional state, with orthodoxy enforced by the royal government, as
Elizabeth I’s England was. But Catholic doctrine was not engendered by the
state or its appointees, as the doctrine of magisterial Protestant countries
was. The essentially Erastian relationship between church and state in
magisterial Protestant countries set the pattern for a secular control that
would gradually compartmentalise and minimalise the role of religion in life.
This had huge effects on personal
morality. Gregory’s fourth chapter
“Subjectivizing Morality” considers again
the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of canon law and attempt to build a
purely Bible-based system of morality. But no such unified system developed
because there were so many differences among Biblical interpretations. The way
was opened for morality to be relativised. After the hugely destructive wars of
religion, the solution (pioneered in 17th. Century Holland) was to
separate something called “religion” from the rest of life. Once Christianity
and worship were compartmentalised as purely private activity, codes of morality
became simply matters of personal preference. Self-interest became the dominant
morality, with no moral system to unify society or internalise social duties.
In detailing the long-term consequences of this, Gregory can become quite
satirical, but justifiably so, as in:
“… the widespread default in
Western societies at large is emotivism, an ethics of subjective,
feelings-based, personal preference, which only exacerbates the unresolved and
irresolvable disagreements. The de facto guideline for the living of
human life in the Western world today seems simply ‘whatever makes you happy’ –
‘so long as you’re not hurting anyone else’ – in which the criteria for
happiness too, are self-determined, self-reported, and therefore immune to
critique, and in which the meaning of ‘hurting anyone else’ is assumed to be
self-evident, unproblematical, or both. Because there is no shared framework in
which such disagreements might be rationally debated and perhaps overcome, and
yet life goes on, moral disagreements are translated socially into political
contestation within an emotivist culture – one that is closely related to if
not largely identical with the individualistic ‘therapeutic culture’ diagnosed
by Philip Rieff.”(Pg.182)
Or again, addressing the
foundational incoherence of secular morality:
“It is not uncommon to hear people insist on the constructed
arbitrariness of moral values and yet denounce certain human actions as wrong
because they violate human rights. That such a self-contradictory absurdity
seems to be widespread and tends to escape the notice of its protagonists
suggests both that it is deeply rooted and that it fulfils an important
function. Its latter half depends on…’smuggling’: the importation of
unacknowledged premises and convictions from normative religious worldviews
that its protagonists have ostensibly discarded, and which are inadmissible on
the protagonists’ own terms.” (Pg.225)
In what may be the book’s most
pungent chapter, “Manufacturing the Goods
Life”, Gregory notes that the medieval world-view condemned avarice and
acquisitiveness. And, despite belittling the chosen poverty of monastic orders,
so did the early Protestant Reformers:
“The bottom line is clear; like radical Protestants, the magisterial
reformers, including Calvin, unambiguously condemned avarice, acquisitive
individualism, and any separation of economic behaviour from Biblical morality
or the common good. Despite their rejection of voluntary poverty as a means to
and expression of Christian holiness, their attitudes about the proper human
relationships to material things and acquisitiveness are much closer to those
of medieval Christianity than to the central assumptions of modern Western
capitalism and consumerism…” (Pg.269)
But the individualisation and
privatisation of belief in the Reformation led to the idea of personal merit
unconnected with the greater social good. Hence, in societies where religion
was privatised, the greater pursuit of individual profit became first
acceptable, then the norm, as religion’s restraining caveats were also
privatised. In chronicling all this, and especially in his analysis of early
mercantile Holland, Gregory is not merely restating Max Weber’s famous
century-old thesis on the connection between Protestantism and capitalism. Certainly
there’s a Weberian tone to his account of Calvinism seeing the individual soul
as depraved, seeking signs of God’s favour and “election”, and ultimately
finding them in personal wealth. But Gregory is always aware, as Weber wasn’t,
that rise of a consumer capitalism was an unintended
outcome of the Protestant reformation – not intrinsic to it. For all that, he
can trace a direct line from the privatised, individualised morality of the
Erastian Protestant state to “shopping therapy” in the mall.
The book’s last chapter “Secularizing Knowledge” essentially
restates some of the intellectual themes of the opening chapter– the journey
from universities built around a shared Thomist-Aristotelean base to
confessional Protestant states first privileging Bible studies in universities
and then becoming secularised so that eventually theology was banished from the
academies.
Despite the different materials
of each chapter, there is a common theme. Privatised Biblical interpretation
led to privatised religion, which in turn led to privatised morality,
unconnected to corporate belief, Christian tradition or shared values. The
disconnected individual became the centre of the universe and therefore the
prime value became self-interest (whether spiritual or material). From this
grew not only consumer capitalism, but also secular liberalism, which
emphasises individual rights, but which, in and of itself, has nothing to say
about the corporate good of the community as a whole. None of this was foreseen
by Protestant Reformers and certainly none of this was intended, but it was the
clearest long-term outcome of their efforts. To claim that Protestantism
revivified Christianity, one would have to arbitrarily stop the clock at the
relatively early point where reformers were attacking the many, gross and
obvious abuses of the Catholic Church. But beyond that early phase, the
Protestant Reformation did not work to perpetuate the Christian community.
How do I criticise this as a
book? Of course, like all books which argue a case, it is in part a polemic,
but it is a well-researched one and the case it makes is a good one. In future,
those who disagree strongly with its conclusions will still have to grapple
with its argument. In that sense it is bound to be seminal.
I do sometimes regret the
author’s style. He can allow sentences to run on too long in too many
subordinate clauses. But he can also makes points forcefully and pithily, as I
hope the short passages quoted in this over-long notice prove.