The Reformation: A History Diarmaid MacCulloch 2004

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53946.The_Reformation

This is the third book I’ve read in as many months that really shook me. The previous two reviews are certainly not my best efforts but these last few months have been like drinking from a firehose. Each of the books were over 600 pages with this one clocking in at just over 700. I have tackled history books of this length before and enjoy the depth and detail. What I was not prepared for was the complete shattering of my conviction that freedom and democracy was ever a goal for western civilization. I am at a loss for words. So much information. It’s hard to focus on any particular narrative. What lessons do I draw from the chaos of the past?

Msgr. MacCulloch has delivered on all the reviews praising his work. He has done exhaustive research and created a magnum opus concerning the events of what we know as the Protestant Reformation. He starts with an excellent prolog as to the situation of the western Christian church at the time of Martin Luther’s appearance in 1517. The Catholic church was the not the state religion, it was the religion of all states. There was the Orthodox Church in the east, but its dominance of the state was erased in 1454 when the Ottomans finally defeated the last of the Eastern Roman Emperors and Constantinople was conquered. In the west, life had been pretty miserable for a really long time, but it was improving. By 1500, the Reconquista had retaken the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, commerce, trade and agriculture were rebounding from the Black Plague and the variety of wars, conflicts and invasions that had swept back and forth across the Mediterranean for centuries were slowing.

The real genius of the Christian Church was its structure. The collapse of the Roman Empire is blamed on thousands of things, but the breakdown of the bureaucratic state infrastructure was what disintegrated. All the parts of the whole lost touch with each other. The notion of citizen, soldier, farmer was so inadequate for holding the vastness of the Roman Empire together. One of the first memorable quotes from the book was how he framed Christianity’s adoption by the Roman Empire, he called it an unprecedented and unexpected favor from the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine needed something to stabilize the Empire, give it something to coalesce around. He looked around and there was the nascent Christian Church. Thing was, they were ready. They had dogma, treatise and most of all, structure. By being baptized into the Christian church, you become one with God, society and the Roman Empire. All was good and the emperors could get on with it. A millennium had passed and things had changed both for the better and for worse. There was more prosperity and growth which in turned resulted in new conflicts and old unresolved ones. All the various small forces of history were tugging at the structure of society. The clarity and authority of the Catholic that had worked so well in the past had ossified and not been able to adapt as the society prospered and grew.

The printing press had been developed a century before, and books were incredibly popular. This led to a general rise in literacy. It was an information revolution. The Church had provided for the spiritual care of Christendom through priests, bishops, friars, monks and a variety of other representatives and proxies. The problem was Rome’s need for revenue outstripped its ability to deliver for the flock. Its ministry had devolved into the success of the Reconquista on Iberian Peninsula, the failure of anything to stop the Ottomans in the east combined with illiterate clergy or corrupt parishes north of the Pyrenees and the Alps just as these areas were accelerating culturally and financially. Perhaps the Church was stuck in crusader mode. The Islamic Empire that had swept away most of Eastern Christendom and had been unstoppable as it advanced across the Balkans towards Vienna. The Papacy pushed back with infallibility and a bit of absolutism. Christendom needed to be united against this outside threat. And yet the Iberian Catholic Church were pushing for their own autonomy in things locally as well as the ongoing Pope fights between France and Rome. Things were stuck. Martin Luther stepped up and proposed reforms. He loved the Christian faith and felt we could all be better at practicing the Word and therefore have better outcomes. The Catholic Church responded… poorly. As usual, they couldn’t abide constructive criticism and decided to put him on trial concerning the audacity to have any questions in the first place. Obedience to the papal authority, Luther was an ordained Catholic priest after all. It was a circus with Luther being convicted on lesser charges through a series of debating points. Rome was pretty adamant in its view that things were going to stay the same. The aristocracy started choosing up sides because of their own disputes with Catholic authority through vast agricultural and business holdings in addition to the tithes and fees levied on the secular world.     

The situation exploded in bloodshed. Impassioned expressions of devotion and faith. I shake my head in disbelief. Msgr. MacCulloch explains that in addition to the physical world around them, humans knew that there were additional forces that could be accessed and used to influence the physical world. The instructions were encoded in the Gospels, and it was only in the correct interpretation of scripture that salvation could be achieved. The final days started tomorrow and there seemed to be too many inconsistencies in the Mass as currently practiced. He then went onto explain Luther’s point of view on the Eucharist, Infant Baptism, and Preordination. Transubstantiation of the Eucharist; at what point was it the body and blood of Christ? John Calvin posited that it was a metaphor, I think he was the one who thought that, maybe Zwingli. There were a bunch of conflicting opinions. Baptism had something to do with being born into sin and salvation and infants couldn’t be baptized cause… I don’t know. The details are excruciatingly small and nuanced. The horrific part was the best way to deal with a differing opinion was to that person declared a heretic, tie them to a post and set them on fire. I’d heard that the fire was to save the victims’ soul. No. It was intended to inflict as much pain and cruelty as possible. That I can except, what I couldn’t except was the triviality of what determined the difference between a right minded Christian and a heretic. The author lays out chronologically the development of the Protestant ethos, philosophy and practices. The theological arguments and the responses from the various main parties are all summarized in detail. All the various players also had prescriptions of how to integrate these philosophies into the practice of government. Was this a separation of church and state? Not really. The book does a good job of sticking to the theology and didn’t leave much of an impression on the secular governance nor on any battles. He describes what it was doctrinally that splintered Luther from the Pope, Calvin from Luther, Zwingli from Calvin, etc. ad nauseum. Christendom splintered into dozens of sects and creeds. It all revolved around the message one derived from the New Testament. A message that was being read by a larger and far more sophisticated public instead of the highly controlled and filtered method of the Roman Catholic Church.

My interest in the details fell away pretty quickly. The years of the Reformation were complicated and well documented. A fact that surprised me was that until the translation by Luther, there was only one translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. The Old Testament had translations and copies all over Europe. The Jewish communities dotted though out Europe provided a ready example in the form of the Torah. It was the completion of the Reconquista in addition to those books brought back from earlier Crusades that renewed the interest in the Greek Classics. I had thought that the Reconquista added to an existing interest in the Greek and Arabic writings. It seems to be the opposite; they had all these books lying around that nobody could read and they weren’t dead languages. Greek. Arabic, stuff still in common use. So it was that Luther sat down and hammered out a translation. The author described, I thought, an angry Luther writing something in all caps. This was the period when all that interest in Jewish Kabal stuff really took off. That notion that with a fresh examination of ancient texts, hidden and lost knowledge could be decerned. Of course, the Catholic Church had a say in all this. They called it the counter-Reformation.

I can’t pretend that this is any kind of reasonable summation of the book. Not even sure it can qualify as a review. Is it even an essay? I look at the world around me today and ask, “How did this happen?” The last three books I’ve read answered that question with a “Duh.”