The Age of the Reformation Part 57

[Sidenote: Baur]

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of whom it has been said that he rather deduced history than narrated it. With much detail he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far as the subject of church history was concerned. He showed that the Reformation (a term to which he objected, apparently preferring Division, or Schism) was bound to come from antecedents already in full operation before Luther. At most, he admitted, the {721} personal factor was decisive of the time and place of the inevitable revolution, but said that the most powerful personality would have been helpless but for the popularity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he deduced the causes of the movement from the corruption of the medieval church, and like him he regarded all later history as but the tide of which the first wave broke in 1517. The true principle of the movement, religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he believed, had been achieved only for states in the sixteenth century, but thereafter logically and necessarily came to be applied to individuals.

[Sidenote: Ranke]

From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"--coined in 1770 and obtaining currency later on the a.n.a.logy of "counter-revolution."

The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely a.s.senting faith and service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the a.s.sertion of the {722} rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and establis.h.i.+ng in its stead "a completely autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective.

Would he have thought so after 1919?

[Sidenote: Buckle]

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the ma.s.s, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though diminis.h.i.+ng, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic [sic]," it has not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment, and a democratic rebellion.

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best cla.s.sified as a member of the new school. His _History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism_ is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done more than any other movement to emanc.i.p.ate the mind from superst.i.tion and to secularize society.

[Sidenote: Protestants]

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short s.p.a.ce at my command, the princ.i.p.al Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old "truths," Merle d'Aubigne won an enormous and unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won its enormous circulation.[1]

[Sidenote: Dollinger]

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by the Catholic Dollinger, the most theological of historians, the most historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really {724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.

[1] The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 were sold in England and America.

SECTION 4. THE ECONOMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY INTERPRETATIONS.

(1859 TO THE PRESENT)

The year 1859 saw the launching of two new theories of the utmost importance. These, together with the political developments of the next twelve years, completely altered the view-point of the intellectual cla.s.s, as well as of the peoples. In relation to the subject under discussion this meant a reversal of historical judgment as radical as that which occurred at the time of the French Revolution. The three new influences, in the order of their immediate importance for historiography, were the following: 1. The publication of Marx's _Zur Kritik der politischen okonomie_ in 1859, containing the germ of the economic interpretation of history later developed in _Das Kapital_ (1867) and in other works. 2. The publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, giving rise to an evolutionary treatment of history. 3. The Bismarckian wars (1864-71), followed by German intellectual and material hegemony, and the defeat of the old liberalism. This lasted only until the Great War (1914-18), when Germany was cast down and liberalism rose in more radical guise than ever.

[Sidenote: Marx]

Karl Marx not only viewed history for the first time from the point of view of the proletariat, or working cla.s.s, but he directly a.s.serted that in the march of mankind the economic factors had always been, in the last a.n.a.lysis, decisive; that the material basis of life, {725} particularly the system of production, determined, in general, the social, political and religious ideas of every epoch and of every locality. Revolutions follow as the necessary consequence of economic change. In the scramble for sustenance and wealth cla.s.s war is postulated as natural and ceaseless. The old Hegelian ant.i.thesis of idea versus personality took the new form of "the ma.s.ses" versus "the great man," both of whom were but puppets in the hands of overmastering determinism. As often interpreted, Marx's theory replaced the Hegelian "spirits of the time" by the cla.s.ses, conceived as ent.i.ties struggling for mastery.

This brilliant theory suffered at first in its application, which was often hasty, or fantastic. As the economic factor had once been completely ignored, so now it was overworked. Its major premise of an "economic man," all greed and calculation, is obviously false, or rather, only half true. Men's motives are mixed, and so are those of aggregates of men. There are other elements in progress besides the economic ones.

The only effective criticism of the theory of economic determination is that well expressed by Dr. Shailer Mathews, that it is too simple.

Self-interest is one factor in history, but not the only one.

[Sidenote: Bax]

Exception can be more justly taken to the way in which the theory has sometimes been applied than to its formulation. Belfort Bax, maintaining that the revolt from Rome was largely economic in its causes, gave as one of these "the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obviously due to its increasing exactions." Luther would have produced no result had not the economic soil been ready for his seed, and with that soil prepared he achieved a world-historical result even though, in Bax's opinion, his character and intellect were below those of the average English village grocer-deacon who sold sand for sugar. Luther, {726} in fact, did no more than give a flag to those discontented with the existing political and industrial life. Strange to say, Bax found even the most radical party, that of the communistic Anabaptists, retrograde, with its program of return to a golden age of gild and common land.

A somewhat better grounded, but still inadequate, solution of the problem was offered by Karl Kautsky. [Sidenote: Kautsky] He, too, found the chief cause of the revolt in the spoliation of Germany by Rome. In addition to this was the new rivalry of commercial cla.s.ses. Unlike Bax, Kautsky finds in the Anabaptists Socialists of whom he can thoroughly approve.

The criticism that must be made of these and similar attempts, is that the causes picked out by them are too trivial. To say that the men who, by the thousands and tens of thousands suffered martyrdom for their faith, changed that faith simply because they objected to pay a t.i.the, reminds one of the ancient Catholic derivation of the whole movement from Luther's desire to marry. The effect is out of proportion to the cause.

But some theorists were even more fantastic than trivial. When Professor S. N. Patten traces the origins of revolutions to either over-nutrition or under-nutrition, and that of the Reformation to "the growth of frugalistic concepts"; when Mr. Brooks Adams a.s.serts that it was all due to the desire of the people for a cheaper religion, exchanging an expensive offering for justification by faith and mental anguish, which cost nothing, and an expensive church for a cheap Bible--we feel that the dish of theory has run away with the spoon of fact. The climax was capped by the German sociologist Friedrich Simmel, who explained the Reformation by the law of the operation of force along the line of least resistance. The Reformers, by sending the soul straight to G.o.d, spared it the detour via the {727} priest, thus short-circuiting grace, as it were, and saving energy.

[Sidenote: Lamprecht]

The genius who first and most fully worked out a tenable economic interpretation of the Lutheran movement was Karl Lamprecht, who stands in much the same relation to Marx as did Ranke to Hegel, to wit, that of an independent, eclectic and better informed student. Lamprecht, as it is well known, divides history into periods according to their psychological character--perhaps an up-to-date Hegelianism--but he maintains, and on the whole successfully, that the temper of each of these epochs is determined by their economic inst.i.tutions. Thus, says he, the condition of the transition from medieval to modern times was the development of a system of "money economy" from a system of "natural economy," which took place slowly throughout the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. "The complete emergence of capitalistic tendencies, with their consequent effects on the social, and, chiefly through this, on the intellectual sphere, must of itself bring on modern times." Lamprecht shows how the rise of capitalism was followed by the growth of the cities and of the culture of the Renaissance in them, and how, also, individualism arose in large part as a natural consequence of the increased power and scope given to the ego by the possession of wealth. This individualism, he thinks, strengthened by and strengthening humanism, was made forever safe by the Reformation.

It is a momentous error, as Lamprecht rightly points out, to suppose that we are living in the same era of civilization, psychologically considered, as that of Luther. Our subjectivism is as different from his individualism as his modernity was from medievalism. The eighteenth century was a transitional period from the one to the other.

{728} One of the chief characteristics of the Reformation, continues Lamprecht, seen first in the earlier mystics, was the change from "polydynamism," or the wors.h.i.+p of many saints, and the mediation of manifold religious agencies, to "monodynamism" or the direct and single intercourse of the soul with G.o.d. Still more different was the world-view of the nineteenth century, built on "an extra-Christian, though not yet anti-Christian foundation."

In the very same year in which Lamprecht's volume on the German Reformation appeared, another interpretation, though less profound and less in the economic school of thought, was put forth by A. E. Berger.

[Sidenote: Berger] He found the four princ.i.p.al causes of the Reformation in the growth of national self-consciousness, the overthrow of an ascetic for a secular culture, individualism, and the growth of a lay religion.

The Reformation itself was a triumph of conscience and of "German inwardness," and its success was due to the fact that it made of the church a purely spiritual ent.i.ty.

The most brilliant essay in the economic interpretation of the origins of Protestantism, though an essay in a very narrow field, was that of Max Weber [Sidenote: Weber] which has made "Capitalism and Calvinism" one of the watchwords of contemporary thought. The intimate connection of the Reformation and the merchant cla.s.s had long been noticed, _e.g._ by Froude and by Thorold Rogers. But Weber was the first to ask, and to answer, the question what it was that made Protestantism particularly congenial to the industrial type of civilization. In the first place, Calvinism stimulated just those ethical qualities of rugged strength and self-confidence needful for worldly success. In the second place, Protestantism abolished the old ascetic ideal of labor for the sake of the next world, and subst.i.tuted for it the conception of a calling, that is, of doing {729} faithfully the work appointed to each man in this world. Indeed, the word "calling'" or "Beruf," meaning G.o.d-given work, is found only in Germanic languages, and is wanting in all those of the Latin group. The ethical idea expressed by Luther and more strongly by Calvin was that of faithfully performing the daily task; in fact, such labor was inculcated as a duty to the point of pain; in other words it was "a worldly asceticism." Finally, Calvin looked upon thrift as a duty, and regarded prosperity, in the Old Testament style, as a sign of G.o.d's favor. "You may labor in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain," said the Protestant divine Richard Baxter, "for you are bound to improve all your talents." And again, "If G.o.d show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be G.o.d's steward."

It would be instructive and delightful to follow the controversy caused by Weber's thesis. Some scholars, like Knodt, denied its validity, tracing capitalism back of the spirit of Fugger rather than of Calvin; but most accepted it. Fine interpretations and criticisms of it were offered by Cunningham, Brentano, Kovalewsky and Ashley. So commonly has it been received that it has finally been summed up in a brilliant but superficial epigram used by Chesterton, good enough to have been coined by him--though it is not, I believe, from his mint--that the Reformation was "the Revolution of the rich against the poor."

[Sidenote: Darwinism]

Contemporary with the economic historiography, there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers"

had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching than had been that of the old deism.

Until Nietzsche, the prevailing view had been that the Reformation was the child, or sister, of the Renaissance, and the parent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. "We are in the midst of a gigantic movement," wrote Huxley, "greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only a continuation of that movement." "The Reformation," in the opinion of Tolstoy, "was a rude, incidental reflection of the labor of thought, striving after the liberation of man from the darkness." "The truth is," according to Symonds, "that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emanc.i.p.ation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important, indeed, in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than was the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same grand influence." William Dilthey, in the nineties, labored to show that the essence of the Reformation was the same in the religious fields as that of the best thought contemporary to it in other lines.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche]

But these ideas were already obsolescent since Friedrich Nietzsche had worked out, with some care, the thought that "the Reformation was a re-action of old-fas.h.i.+oned minds, against the Italian Renaissance." One might suppose that this furious Antichrist, as he wished to be, would have thought well of Luther because of his opinion that the Saxon first taught the Germans to be unchristian, and because "Luther's merit is greater in nothing than that he had the courage of his sensuality--then called, gently enough, 'evangelic liberty.'" But no! With frantic pa.s.sion Nietzsche charged: "The Reformation, a duplication {731} of the medieval spirit at a time when this spirit no longer had a good conscience, pullulated sects, and superst.i.tions like the witchcraft craze." German culture was just ready to burst into full bloom, only one night more was needed, but that night brought the storm that ruined all.

The Reformation was the peasants' revolt of the human spirit, a rising full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. It was "the rage of the simple against the complex, a rough, honest misunderstanding, in which (to speak mildly) much must be forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore apart a culture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not relish.

Behind the formula "every man his own priest" lurked nothing but the abysmal hatred of the low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at its worst.

[Sidenote: Acceptance of Nietzsche's opinion]

Quite slowly but surely Nietzsche's opinion gained ground until one may say that it was, not long ago, generally accepted. "Our sympathies are more in unison, our reason less shocked by the arguments and doctrines of Sadolet than by those of Calvin," wrote R. C. Christie. Andrew D.

White's popular study of _The Warfare of Science and Theology_ proved that Protestant churches had been no less hostile to intellectual progress than had the Catholic church. "The Reformation, in fact,"

opined J. M. Robertson, "speedily overclouded with fanaticism what new light of free thought had been glimmering before, turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries and forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance of their age."

"Before the Lutheran revolt," said Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought and speech was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after." Similar opinions might be collected in large number; I {732} mention only the works of Bezold and the brief but admirably expressed articles of Professor George L. Burr, and that of Lemonnier, who places in a strong light the battle of the Renaissance, intellectual, indifferent in religion and politics, but aristocratic in temper, and the Reformation, reactionary, religious, preoccupied with medieval questions and turning, in its hostility to the governing orders, to popular politics.

The reaction of the Reformation on religion was noticed by the critics, who thus came to agree with the conservative estimate, though they deplored what the others had rejoiced in. Long before Nietzsche, J.

Burckhardt had pointed out that the greatest danger to the papacy, secularization, had been adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. It was this that roused the papacy from the soulless debas.e.m.e.nt in which it lay; it was thus that the moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies.

[Sidenote: Troeltsch]

The twentieth century has seen two brilliant critiques of the Reformation from the intellectual side by scholars of consummate ability, Ernst Troeltsch and George Santayana. The former begins by pointing out, with a fineness never surpa.s.sed, the essential oneness and slight differences between early Protestantism and Catholicism. The Reformers asked the same questions as did the medieval schoolmen and, though they gave these questions somewhat different answers, their minds, like those of other men, revealed themselves far more characteristically in the asking than in the reply. "Genuine early Protestantism . . . was an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization (kirchliche Zw.a.n.gskultur), a claim to regulate state and society, science and education, law, commerce, and industry, according to the supernatural standpoint of revelation." The Reformers separated early and with cruel violence from the humanistic, philological, and philosophical {733} theology of Erasmus because they were conscious of an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was with a.s.surance of salvation, and this could only be won at the cost of a miracle, not any longer the old, outward magic of saints and priestcraft, but the wonder of faith occurring in the inmost center of personal life.

"The sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its stead appears the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and confidently a.s.sent to such a thought." Thus it came about that the way of salvation became more important than the goal, and the tyranny of dogma became at last unbearable. Troeltsch characterizes both his own position and that of the Reformers when he enumerates among the ancient dogmas taken over navely by Luther, that of the existence of a personal, ethical G.o.d. Finely contrasting the ideals of Renaissance and Reformation, [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] he shows that the former was naturalism, the latter an intensification of religion and of a convinced other-worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was based on "affirmation of life," that of the latter was based on "calling."

Even as compared with Catholicism, Troeltsch thinks, supererogatory works were abolished because each Protestant Christian was bound to exert himself to the utmost at all times. The learned professor hazards the further opinion that the spirit of the Renaissance amalgamated better with Catholicism and, after a period of quiescence, burst forth in the "frightful explosion" of the Enlightenment and Revolution, both more radical in Catholic countries than in Protestant. But Troeltsch is too historically-minded to see in the Reformation only a reaction. He believes that it contributed to the formation of the modern world by the development of nationalism, individualism (qualified by the objectively conceived sanction of Bible and Christian community), moral health, and, {734} indirectly, by the introduction of the ideas of tolerance, criticism, and religious progress. Moreover, it enriched the world with the story of great personalities. Protestantism was better able to absorb modern elements of political, social, scientific, artistic and economic content, not because it was professedly more open to them, but because it was weakened by the memory of one great revolt from authority.

But the great change in religion as in other matters came, Troeltsch is fully convinced, in the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: Santayana]

If Troeltsch has the head of a skeptic with the heart of a Protestant, Santayana's equally irreligious brain is biased by a sentimental sympathy for the Catholicism in which he was trained. The essence of his criticism of Luther, than whom, he once scornfully remarked, no one could be more unintelligent, is that he moved away from the ideal of the gospel. Saint Francis, like Jesus, was unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; Protestantism is remote from this spirit, for it is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity, abominates the disreputable, thinks of contemplation as idleness, of solitude as selfishness, of poverty as a punishment, and of married and industrial life as typically G.o.dly. In short, it is a reversion to German heathendom. But Santayana denies that Luther prevented the euthanasia of Christianity, for there would have been, he affirms, a Catholic revival without him. With all its old-fas.h.i.+oned insistence that dogma was scientifically true and that salvation was urgent and fearfully doubtful, Protestantism broke down the authority of Christianity, for "it is suicidal to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking the other part." It is the beauty and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism.

Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both disappear, and only "consecrated worldliness" remains.