The Age of the Reformation Part 56

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed.

The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican because of the circ.u.mstances in which each arose. The suppression of church festivals in Protestant countries he thought due to the greater need and zest for labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by saying that their unadorned cult naturally aroused a less warm attachment than the sensuous ritual of Romanism.

[Sidenote: Voltaire]

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. None other has made history so nearly universal as did he, peering into every side of life and into every corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, no fact was admitted to be inexplicable by natural laws. It is true that he was not very learned and that he had strong prejudices against what he called "the most infamous superst.i.tion that ever brutalized man." But with it all he brought more freedom and life into the story of mankind than had any of his predecessors.

For his history of the Reformation he was dependent on Bossuet, Sarpi, and a few other general works; there is no evidence that he perused any of the sources. But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. {708} Beginning with an enthusiastic account of the greatness of the Renaissance, its discoveries, its opulence, its roll of mighty names, he proceeds to compare the Reformation with the two contemporaneous religious revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the other in Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one else had even thought of looking to comparative religion [Sidenote: Comparative religion] for light. In tracing the course of events he is more conventional, finding rather small causes for large effects. The whole thing started, he a.s.sures us, in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the spoils of indulgence-sales, "and this little squabble of monks in a corner of Saxony, produced more than a hundred years of discord, fury, and misfortune for thirty nations." "England separated from the pope because King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted because of the painful impression produced by the Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in Voltaire's opinion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal to the pa.s.sions of the mob. The dogmas of the Reformers are considered no whit more rational than those of their opponents, save that Zwingli is praised for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for Christianity.

Of course he erred," wittily comments our author, "but how humane it is to err thus!" The influence of Montesquieu is found in the following early economic interpretation in the _Philosophic Dictionary_:

There are some nations whose religion is the result of neither climate nor government. What cause detached North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences . . . were sold too dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion.

[Sidenote: Scotch historians]

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote: Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity."

Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther for his violence, but praised him--and here speaks the middle-cla.s.s advocate of law and order--for his firm stand against the peasants in their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the spell of the supernatural. His a.n.a.lysis of the nature of ecclesiastical establishments, with which he begins his account of the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and pa.s.sions of the populace, and to mix error, superst.i.tion and delusion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore inc.u.mbent on the civil power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to {710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to the prejudices of the mult.i.tude. They secured the support of the ma.s.ses by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abas.e.m.e.nt of the wors.h.i.+pper. Tory as he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted "those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his great history of _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their merit [_i.e._ of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers."

They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six first councils, the Athanasian creed with its d.a.m.nation of all who did {711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is G.o.d than that G.o.d is a cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty fabric of superst.i.tion, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both s.e.xes of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of images and relics; a simple wors.h.i.+p "the most worthy of man, the least unworthy of the Deity" was subst.i.tuted for an "imitation of paganism."

Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, antic.i.p.ating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in r.e.t.a.r.ding the progress of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression on the ma.s.ses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the courage to stand firmly on G.o.d's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing]

apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German Protestant could then be.

{713}

SECTION 3. THE LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION. (CIRCA 1794-c. 1860)

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic Dollinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution]

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

[Sidenote: Condorcet]

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was Condorcet in his n.o.ble essay on _The Advance of the Human Spirit_, written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he, punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, banded together against the {714} revolt.

He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to political science and that it purified morals by abolis.h.i.+ng sacerdotal celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Inst.i.tute of France announced as the subject for a prize compet.i.tion, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general philosophical enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to think and judge freely and independently of all ideas and opinions, which until then Europe had received or been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It was a great endeavor to emanc.i.p.ate the human reason and to call things by their right names. It was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the limits of the cla.s.sic spirit, to search for the infinite, to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Stael]

All this is reflected in Mme. de Stael's enthusiastic appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and brain.

[Sidenote: Heine]

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature, Heine points out that the place taken in France by _belles lettres_ is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks of h.o.a.ry tyranny; his hymn was the Ma.r.s.eillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of G.o.d: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet, [Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His _History of France_ is like the biography of some loved and wors.h.i.+pped genius; he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question, "What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle cla.s.s with some small property and with the vote. For the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as he had small patience with king and n.o.ble and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he a.s.sures us, were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I owe the power of publis.h.i.+ng what I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude.

Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the English Protestant middle cla.s.s, _The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada_ won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a superst.i.tion which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard, once "the n.o.blest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there s.p.a.ce, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle wors.h.i.+pped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the conscience of millions, the pulse pa.s.sed into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent _Speeches to the German Nation_, called the Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its "perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once national and liberal. In his _Pictures from the German Past_, largely painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on "Deutschtum" and "Burgertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be cla.s.sed D. F.

Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to sink into the background, and that of other influences to be preponderant.

[Sidenote: Hegel]

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel, pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable "time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit, or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720} Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show that the cause of the Protestant revolt in the corruption of the church was not accidental but necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of progress, that which is adored must necessarily be sensuous, but at the lofty German level the wors.h.i.+pper must look for G.o.d in the spirit and heart, that is, in faith. The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity manifesting the self-consciousness of the world-spirit; his doctrine of the eucharist, conservative as it seems to the rationalist, is in reality a manifestation of the same spirituality, in the a.s.sertion of an immediate relation of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of the Reformation is said to be that man in his very nature is destined to be free, and all history since Luther's time is but a working out of the implications of his position. If only the Germanic nations have adopted Protestantism, it is because only they have reached the highest state of spiritual development.