Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

and argument, all the fashions of science and philosophy, and holds

her regathering flock together against the time when those of you

who have come to understand, and are really Christians, will submit

your pride of individuality and intellect to the religious needs of

mankind, and will come back to the one fold that can preserve religion

despite the blasphemous ideologies of this unhappy age."

Can the Protestant answer this indictment? "Let us not forget the

cause of our divergence. Your Catholic Church had become corrupt in

practice and personnel, your priests were not functioning, your

bishops were worldlings, your popes were the scandal of Christendom;

do not your own historians confess it? Honest men called upon you to

reform, and meanwhile kept their loyalty to the Church; you promised

and pretended to reform, but you did not; on the contrary, you

burned at the stake men like Huss and Jerome of Prague because they

cried out for reform. A thousand efforts were made to reform the

Church from within; they failed until our Reformation forced you to

act; and even after our revolt the pope who tried to cleanse the

Church became the laughingstock of Rome.

"You pride yourself on producing the Renaissance, but everyone

agrees that the Renaissance was issuing in such immorality,

violence, and treachery as Europe had not known since Nero; were we

not right in protesting against this paganism, flaunting itself even

in the Vatican? Granted that morals declined for a while after our

Reformation began; it took time to rebuild a moral life whose

religious foundations and ministrations had decayed; ultimately the

morality of Protestant lands became far superior to that of Catholic

France and Italy. We may owe our mental awakening to the

Renaissance, but we owe our moral recovery to the Reformation; to

the liberation of the intellect was added the strengthening of

character. Your Renaissance was for the aristocracy and the

intellectuals; it scorned the people, and winked at their

hoodwinking by indulgence peddlers and monkish profiteers on

mythology; was it not good that this crass financial exploitation of

human hopes and fears should be challenged? We rejected the

paintings and statues with which you had littered your churches,

because you were allowing the people to worship the images themselves,

as when you required them to fall on their knees before the sacred

dolls carried in procession through the streets. We dared to base

our religion on a strong and active faith, rather than try to drug the

mind of the people with liturgy.

"We acknowledged the secular authority as divine- as your own

theologians had done before us- because social order requires a

respected government. We rejected the international authority of the

popes only after they had flagrantly used it not to arbitrate

justice among nations but to advance their own material interests. The

inability of your self-seeking popes to unify Europe for a crusade

against the Turks shows that the dishonesty of the papacy had broken

the unity of Christendom long before the Reformation. And though we

supported the divine right of kings, we also, in England, Scotland,

Switzerland, and America, favored the development of democracy,

while your priests in France, Italy, and Spain were truckling to

kings; and our rebellion against the authority of your Church broke

the spell of despotism, and prepared Europe to question all

absolutisms, religious or secular. You think we made the poor

poorer. But that too was a passing phase; the same capitalism that for

a while exploited poverty learned to enrich the average man as never

before; and the standard of living is surely higher in Protestant

England, Germany, and America than in Catholic Italy, Spain, and

France.

"If you are stronger today than yesterday, it is because of us. What

but the Reformation compelled you to reform the Curia, to redeem

your clergy from concubinage, to seat men of religion, instead of

pagans, in the papal chair? To whom do you owe it that your clergy

today have so high a repute for integrity? To the Council of Trent?

But to what did you owe the Council of Trent, if not to the

Reformation? Without that check your Church might have continued its

degeneration from Christianity into paganism until your popes would

have been enthroned over an agnostic and epicurean world. Even with

the regeneration which we forced upon your Church, the peoples that

accept your creed are more negligent of religion, more skeptical of

Christianity, than those that adopted the Reformation; compare

France with England.

"We have learned to reconcile our piety with the freedom of the

mind; and it is our Protestant lands that have seen the greatest

flowering of science and philosophy, We hope to adjust our

Christianity to the progress of knowledge- but how is this possible to

a Church that rejects all the science of the last four centuries?"

Here the humanist enters the argument, and brings both houses down

upon his head. "This is the honor and weakness of Protestantism,

that it appeals to the intellect, which is always changing; and the

strength of Catholicism lies in its refusal to adjust itself to the

theories of science, which, in the experience of history, seldom

survive the century in which they were born. Catholicism proposes to

meet the religious demands of the people, who have barely heard of

Copernicus and Darwin, and have never heard of Spinoza and Kant;

such people are many and fertile. But how can a religion that speaks

to the intellect, and centers around the sermon, adjust itself to an

expanding universe in which the planet that claimed to have received

God's Son has become a transitory speck in space, and the species

for which He died is but a moment in the phantasmagoria of life?

What happens to Protestantism when the Bible that it took as its

sole and infallible basis is subjected to a Higher Criticism that

turns it from the word of God into the literature of the Hebrews and

the transformation of Christ in the mystical theology of Paul?

"The real problem for the modern mind is not between Catholicism and

Protestantism, nor between the Reformation and the Renaissance; it

is between Christianity and the Enlightenment- that hardly datable era

which began in Europe with Francis Bacon, and hitched its hopes to

reason, science, and philosophy. As art was the keynote of the

Renaissance, and religion the soul of the Reformation, so science

and philosophy became the gods of the Enlightenment. From this

standpoint the Renaissance was in the direct line of European mental

development, and led to the Illumination and Aufklarung; the

Reformation was a deviation from that line, a rejection of reason, a

reaffirmation of medieval faith.

"And yet, despite its original intolerance, the Reformation rendered

two services to the Enlightenment: it broke the authority of dogma,

generated a hundred sects that would formerly have died at the

stake, and allowed among them such virile debate that reason was

finally recognized as the bar before which all sects had to plead

their cause unless they were armed with irresistible physical force.

In that pleading, that attack and defense, all sects were weakened,

all dogmas; and a century after Luther's exaltation of faith Francis

Bacon proclaimed that knowledge is power. In that same seventeenth

century thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke offered

philosophy as a substitute or basis for religion. In the eighteenth

century Helvetius, Holbach, and La Mettrie proclaimed open atheism,

and Voltaire was called a bigot because he believed in God. This was

the challenge that Christianity faced, in a crisis far more profound

than the debate between the Catholic and the Protestant version of the

medieval creed. The effort of Christianity to survive Copernicus and

Darwin is the basic drama of the last three hundred years. What are

the struggles of states and classes beside that Armageddon of the

soul?"

-

And now, as we look back over the meandering narrative of these

thousand pages, we perceive that our sympathy can go to all the

combatants. We can understand the anger of Luther at Roman

corruption and dominance, the reluctance of German princes to see

German collections fatten Italy, the resolve of Calvin and Knox to

build model moral communities, the desire of Henry VIII for an heir,

and for authority in his own realm. But we can understand, too, the

hopes of Erasmus for a reform that would not poison Christendom with

hatred; and we can feel the dismay of devout Roman prelates like

Contarini at the prospective dismemberment of a Church that for

centuries had been the nurse and custodian of Western civilization,

and was still the strongest bulwark against immorality, chaos, and

despair.

Nothing of all these efforts was lost. The individual succumbs,

but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.

Protestantism, in time, helped to regenerate the moral life of Europe,

and the Church purified herself into an organization politically

weaker but morally stronger than before. One lesson emerges above

the smoke of the battle: a religion is at its best when it must live

with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is

unchallenged and supreme. The greatest gift of the Reformation was

to provide Europe and America with that competition of faiths which

puts each on its mettle, cautions it to tolerance, and gives to our

frail minds the zest and test of freedom.

-

COURAGE, READER: WE NEAR THE END

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Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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