Tag: Reformation (page 1 of 1)

Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to deny the value of absolute sovereignty or the lone nation-state. Tragically, the Reformation, Roundhead, nonconformist, puritan, whig, capitalist, liberal version of Britishness last night triumphed over our deep ancient character which is Catholic or Anglican, Cavalier, Jacobite, High Tory or Socialist. The spirit of both Burke and Cobbett has been denied by the small-minded, bitter, puritanical, greedy and Unitarian element in our modern legacy. Unfortunately it has duped the working classes, once again to their further ruination.

— John Milbank. Aside from its rather massive condescension — We of the cultural elite know what’s best for those poor duped working-class folk who simply can’t be trusted to act in their own self-interest — this comment perfectly embodies what we might call Zombie Hegelianism. The genuine and full-blooded belief in the irresistible forward march of the Weltgeist has long-since died, but here’s its reanimated corpse: a vague notion that there’s some correspondence between the current European project and the transnational, transcultural Body of Christ. But if we’re going to immanentize the eschaton can’t we ask for something more robust than a bloodless bureaucracy?

Better still, perhaps we could think of the European political order as a set of practical arrangements for improving the common weal and evaluate them in that pragmatic spirit, rather than as spiritual prostheses, extensions of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps we are witnessing a return to a mode of more immediate access that in turn informs a sort of faceless orality—to the sort of thing we might associate with (for instance) social media such as Twitter. Online interactions lose the old alphabetic sequential rigour and logic; they function as emotional rather than intellectual megaphones. Poke your head into online interaction—about the new Star Wars movie, about Doctor Who’s representation of women, about Gamergate, about the 2015 Hugos, anything you like—and what comes across most strongly is that people feel intensely and are moved to express those feelings with a vehemence that cannot comprehend that others might feel just as strongly in a different way. ‘The characteristic mental disorder of alphabetic societies,’ according to Ong, ‘is schizophrenia, but of analphabetic societies it is anger and polemicism. Old oral was very angry.’ I really can’t think of a neater encapsulation of the online culture surrounding genre in the twenty-teens than ‘Anger and Polemicism’. Perhaps we are indeed moving towards a combination of oral choler and typographic flatness. Renaissance and Reformation scholars attacked one another with furious rage over things they believed mattered intensely—God in the world, how we are saved, how we must live. People today employ the same furious rage, and many of the same rhetorical tactics, over the issue of the crossguards on the lightsabre glimpsed, for less than a second, in the trailer to the forthcoming Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens.

— Adam Roberts. “A combination of oral choler and typographic flatness” — that sounds really, really awful and really, really plausible. But I wonder if it’s true that this anger arises when people “cannot comprehend that others might feel just as strongly in a different way.”  Maybe they comprehend just that, and they simply hate others for feeling differently, and want to punish them for it, and drive them from the field of battle, and pour salt on the foundations of their city. Carthago delenda est.

This is one of my placeholder posts, in which I lay out the barest outline of thoughts that I hope to develop in detail at some later date. Points here will be asserted rather than supported.

Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation retell a story that’s about a hundred years old now. I am not certain when and with whom it originated, though its most influential early proponent was probably Etienne Gilson. The story goes like this: thanks largely to the rise of the great European universities, the High Middle Ages saw the gradual emergence of a fully-orbed philosophical theology that reached its omnicompetent fullness — insert here the inevitable comparison to Chartres Cathedral — in the work of Thomas Aquinas. In the mind of the Doctor Angelicus the greatest pagan thinkers found their proper place and their teleological fulfillment as buttresses of a Christian theology that adequately accounted for (which is not to say explained or explained away) all that we know and believe about God, humanity, and the rest of Creation. But cracks in this great edifice soon appeared, thanks to the ongoing rivalry between philosophy and theology. This division in turn allowed nominalism to emerge, primarily in the work of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and their ideas widened the cracks dangerously. Then Luther, trained in this destructive nominalism, stuffed explosives in the gaps and blew the whole thing to smithereens. This is called “The Birth of Modernity.” It is the disaster from which our culture has never recovered.

No two thinkers tell this story in exactly the same way — there are disagreements especially about who the chief villains are — but the account has been remarkably consistent over time, and pretty much impervious to scholarship that would complicate the picture. See for instance the incisive, assured, and masterful work of Heiko Oberman, who long complained that people committed to the story I have just related simply would not listen to a more nuanced and complicated account of nominalism. (Oberman demonstrated again and again that widely divergent thinkers get lumped together in the “nominalism” category.)

All this as background for my complaints.

Complaint 1: The story that Pfau and Gregory tell is nearly a hundred years old now, and people who praise their books don’t often enough acknowledge the earlier embodiments of it, by Gilson, by Jacques Maritain, by a whole range of largely Thomist theologians who see their account as the authentically Catholic one — despite the fact that, as Oberman points out, there is an almost equally longstanding Franciscan counter-narrative that defends the orthodoxy and the intellectual coherence of some of the nominalists.

Complaint 2: I simply don’t agree with the story. I do not see Thomist thought as the intellectual equivalent of Chartres cathedral; I believe the dialectical structure of Thomas’s thought, imposed on him by the institutional structures of the medieval university, yields a categorical rigidity that renders certain vital insights inaccessible to him. The nominalist critique of Thomas is far, far stronger than the neo-Thomist narrative of modernity’s emergence acknowledges.

Complaint 3: Relatedly — though in terms of influence rather than philosophical coherence — I think the systematic ambitions of Thomist thought are misplaced and ultimately destructive. I am deeply sympathetic to the argument made by Simone Weil, most fully in her essay “The Romanesque Renaissance,” that the High Gothic era, rather than achieving an admirable completeness of philosophical and theological understanding, fell victim to the temptations of a “spiritual totalitarianism.” The much-admired synthesis of Thomist thought carried with it, necessarily, a lamentable arrogance (which perhaps Thomas realized in his famous end-of-life self-denigration: “all that I have written seems like straw to me”). That synthesis — which never achieved its own aims — needed to be broken; we would not benefit by its restoration.

Complaint 4: Gregory and Pfau want to tell us, along with Dostoevsky, that ideas have consequences, and indeed they do. But other things have consequences too: the organizational structures of institutions (like universities) and of whole societies; the emergence of technologies that enable widespread communication, travel, and trade; the rise of the nation state, a topic whose importance for evaluating religious experience and conflict has been powerfully described by William Cavanaugh. Too often Gregory and especially Pfau write as though ideas can be neatly detached from these and other forces.

Complaint 5: Modernity, and the Reformation, have their good sides — their very, very good sides, their contributing-to-human flourishing sides, their advancing-the-Gospel sides — that neither Gregory nor Pfau, despite occasional tips of their scholarly chapeaus, treat with sufficient seriousness.

Complaint 6: Gregory and Pfau, again with infrequent half-hearted chapeau-tipping, treat Modernity as effectively monolithic. In fact there were always powerful forces resisting or countering what we now think of as the mainstream of modernity, just as a little later on there was a “Counter-Enlightenment” that existed alongside and in constant creative tension with what we usually (loosely, vaguely, inaccurately) call the Enlightenment, Isaiah Berlin being the best describer of that vital and neglected movement. There were many modernities, many Enlightenments, and many ways of dissenting from them all.

In regard to the Reformation it might be said that the whig fallacies of secular historians have had a greater effect over a wider field than any theological bias that can be imputed to Protestant writers. And the tendency is to magnify the Reformation even when it is not entirely complimentary to the Protestants to do so. It is easy to be dramatic and see Luther as something like a rebel against medievalism. It is pleasant to make him responsible for religious toleration and freedom of thought. It is tempting to bring his whole movement into relief by showing how it promoted the rise of the secular state, or to say with one of our writers that without Martin Luther there would have been no Louis XIV. It may even be plausible to claim that Protestantism contributed to the rise of the capitalist; that in its ethics were evolved the more than seven deadly virtues which have helped to provide the conditions for an industrial civilization; and then to bring this to a climax in the statement: “Capitalism is the social counterpart of Calvinist Theology.” So we complete the circle and see Protestantism behind modern society, and we further another optical illusion – that history is divided by great watersheds of which the Reformation is one. Sometimes it would seem that we regard Protestantism as a Thing, a fixed and definite object that came into existence in 1517; and we seize upon it as source, a cause, an origin, even of movements that were taking place concurrently; and we do this with an air of finality, as though Protestantism itself had no antecedents, as though it were a fallacy to go behind the great watershed, as though indeed it would blunt the edge of our story to admit the working of a process instead of assuming the interposition of some direct agency. It is all an example of the fact for the compilation of trenchant history there is nothing like being content with half the truth.

What I’m offering here is a mere outline of an an argument that I want to make in more detail later. It is inadequate on its own because of its dearth of quotations from and detailed analysis of the books under consideration. I’m posting it now more as a reminder to myself than anything else, though I would welcome thoughtful feedback too.

Two of the most ambitious and widely-discussed works of intellectual history in recent years are Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (2012). The books are interestingly comparable in many ways. Both are written by Catholics; both rely on a very old and simplistic story about what the Reformation brought into being; both are strangely incurious about developments in Protestant thought after, and even during, the sixteenth century.

For Gregory, the cardinal error of the Reformation — which he tends to present as a uniform agent, as I’ll show below — was to apply intellectual remedies to a moral problem. In dismissing alternative views to his own, he writes that “the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the demonstrated or demonstrable falsity of central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church”; nor were there any problems stemming from too great diversity in religious practice or “an enforced uniformity of piety and religious practice.”

The failure of medieval Christendom derived rather from the pervasive, long-standing, and undeniable failure of so many Christians, including members of the clergy both high and low, to live by the church’s own prescriptions and exhortations based on its truth claims about the Life Questions. It was at root a botching of moral execution, a failure to practice what was preached.

Gregory doesn’t, as far as I can tell, do anything to establish the truth of his claim that the only failings of the medieval church were moral — though it is clearly vital to his understanding of the period. (“The Reformation ended more than a thousand years of Christianity as a framework for shared intellectual life in the Latin West.” All by itself, with no assistance from the Catholic Church.) Certainly many people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to believe that at least some Catholic teachings were false. In a book about the consequences of the Reformation, the assertion that such falsehood was not established — or maybe that (Gregory’s prose is vague here) any such demonstrations of falsehood were inconsequential — seems to be the mootest of moot points.

But let’s waive all that and assume that these claims of Gregory’s are correct. Even if so, these scarcely exhaust the possible explanations for “the failure of medieval Christendom.” It’s perfectly possible — indeed, one would think, quite likely — that the “central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church” were imperfectly and inconsistently understood by many medieval priests, whose education was highly variable and in some cases almost nonexistent. And what did those clergy actually teach the laypeople of medieval Europe? The historical record seems to indicate pretty clearly that actual teaching, from pulpit or elsewhere, was highly variable too. It seems strange that Gregory doesn’t consider the possibility of this kind of intellectual failure, serious though it could be. Instead, he takes refuge in what seems to me to be nothing more than a consoling fiction: that there was one “framework for shared intellectual life” everywhere in the Latin West that stood consistently for an entire millennium.

But to acknowledge variability in this monolithic structure of belief, in time or space — or, even if this story of fixed truth were true, to consider failures in the understanding and transmission of Catholic doctrine — would be to undermine Gregory’s whole argument, which is, again, that in trying to apply intellectual remedies to moral problems the Reformers inadvertently generated tragic cultural consequences. If the medieval Western church was in fact beset by doctrinal inconsistencies and incoherences, in addition to its moral ones, then the magisterial Reformers’ strategies become easier to understand and defend, and it becomes harder to blame the whole of Infamous Modernity on them.

I find Gregory’s book massively tendentious and unfair in its determination to see intellectual Catholicism as a simple victim of the Reformers’ acts of (however inadvertant) destruction. Taylor’s A Secular Age strikes me as a much richer, deeper, and more fair-minded book. Taylor is much less ready than Gregory to dismiss the achievements of modernity: he knows, as Gregory often seems not to, that if the Catholic Church had been able to stifle the Reformation in the cradle we might be living in a world that few of us would want to live in. (One of the oddest features of Gregory’s book is that its concluding chapter, “Against Nostalgia,” could scarcely be more nostalgic about the Catholic Middle Ages.)

But there is a flaw that Taylor’s book shares with Gregory’s: a failure to recognize that from Martin Luther on the most intelligent Protestants have been quite aware of, and concerned or alarmed about, the forces that they unintentionally unleashed, and have devoted constant and rigorous thought to these issues and how they might be addressed in light of biblical truth and (often enough) Catholic tradition.

Consider this: Taylor’s 900-page book about the varieties of secularization and secularity that have arisen in the past half-millennium, and the varieties of actual or possible Christian response to them, does not mention the name Kierkegaard. Not once. (Gregory mentions him a single time, in a mere list of Protestant thinkers.) Yet it would be impossible to name anyone who thought more deeply, more rigorously, and more critically about the relationship between Protestantism and the emergent secular — though the other names that one might mention in that context, for instance Barth and Bonhoeffer, are equally ignored by Taylor and Gregory.

Moreover, the magisterial Reformers themselves, from Luther to Calvin to Richard Hooker, even in the midst of social upheaval, are often quite acute on the very matters that concern Gregory and Taylor.

Both Gregory and Taylor construct stories in which “the Reformation” is the one historical actor, while poor Catholicism stands by, helpless to prevent the birthing of Modernity (understood by Gregory as a monster simpliciter, by Taylor as something more ambiguous, rather like Doctor Frankenstein’s creation as described by Mary Shelley). A more truthful account of the past five hundred years would acknowledge (a) the full range of ways in which Catholicism participated in its own dethronement, (b) the remaining power and influence of Catholicism both intellectually and as a set of forms of Christian practice, (c) the deep, lasting commonalities between at least the magisterial Reformation and the doctrinal inheritance of the Christian west going back to the Fathers, and (d) the immense devotion, creativity, and intellectual rigor which the deepest Protestant thinkers have brought to the very problems which Gregory and Taylor address.

Laypeople also had an active role in announcing the reassurance of God’s forgiveness to one another. When a Christian was suffering spiritually over a sin he had committed, absolution from a pastor after a private confession was ideal. But since confessing to a clergyman was not always possible, the church made provision for lay absolution. (A fascinating example, which one can trace from Rittgers’ book to a 2004 article by Christopher B. Brown, is the authority of midwives to pronounce absolution: as quoted in Brown’s article, “In order that the mother in labor may be assured of such divine grace and of the forgiveness of her sins, the midwife or another knowledgeable person may, in such danger and necessity, where no minister is available, absolve and remit her sins herself: ‘Dear sister, since our dear Lord Jesus Christ has given us Christians this power here on earth, that each should and may, in necessity, absolve and remit the sins of another who confesses her sins, believes in Christ, and desires the grace of God, and that the same is then absolved in heaven … [and] since you have made such a confession before me, and in true faith desire the grace of God and the forgiveness of your sins, I therefore, in the stead and by the command of Christ, hereby release and pronounce you free of all your sins, in the Name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.’ ”) In such lay absolution, ordinary men and women were taking up the seemingly clerical work of giving God’s consolation to one another.