‘Gud Religion’
‘He was also of gud religion for a poet,’ says Sir James, when adding the last item to the creditor side of his profit and loss account of Buchanan’s qualities. ‘Gud religion for a poet’ is good, and characteristic of the times which said Ubi tres medici, duo athei,—‘Three Physicists,[4] two Atheists.’ Humanists, and still more Humanist poets, were also suspect, and for the same reason. The rebellion against Scholasticism, the resuscitation of the old Pagan spirit in thought and art and science, involved a staggering blow to Ecclesiastical Faith. Men whose minds were steeped in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome could not take sympathetically, I will not say, to Christianity, but to the dogmatic system of the Church, and even to much of its ethical teaching. ‘Humanity,’ in the sense of ‘the humanities,’ really meant the antithesis of Divinity. The Renaissance was a wakening up of the human intellect, an assertion of ‘private judgment’ in every possible sphere of its exercise, and in innumerable instances the Humanist created a faith and a code of morals for himself, although for comfort and convenience he might conceal his spiritual interior from the view of the ignorant and the unenlightened. In many an instance he held that there was one law for the men who understand, and another for the ‘vulgar’ who cannot understand. Popes and priests were often at heart Humanists of the most ‘advanced’ type, pushing the right of ‘private judgment’ to its furthest limit, discarding the public creed, and in morals, exercising, in favour of their appetites, that dispensing power which ‘private judgment,’ the Pope’s successor in so many awakened intellects, carried over with it, at all events extensively into practice, while simultaneously a silent outward conformity with the established system was carefully maintained.
Not that it did not sometimes betray itself. It is a Roman dignitary who is credited with the famous remark about the profit brought in by ‘this fable of Christ’; and everybody remembers how horrified poor Luther was in Rome when he heard the priests at Mass saying panis es, panis manebis,—‘bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain.’ The open licentiousness of many Church dignitaries of those days is too notorious for special mention. ‘Private judgment’ may be a primary human right and a duty owing by reason to itself of the highest order; but to cast off in its favour an inveterate obedience to authority, is a psychological problem surrounded with the greatest difficulty and danger, and unless when under the control of an adequately strong judgment and will, may cause much wreckage of faith and conduct. I do not think that Buchanan suffered much in this way—certainly not so much as many others among the leaders and supporters of the Reformation; while any damage he sustained was amply compensated by his gains. Knox and other Reformers—I speak of Scotland—were driven by the violence of the recoil involved in their assault on the Catholic and Feudal system into extreme positions, necessarily harmful to themselves, and bequeathing legacies of disadvantage to their successors.
They needed, through polemical necessities, an authority equal to that of Rome, which they had overthrown, and this drove them into placing Scripture in a position which the speculative and historical criticism of the last two centuries has made highly uncomfortable for many people of intelligence, including Broad Churchmen, whom it has driven into crypto-scepticism, and Evangelicals and Ritualists, whom it has moulded into wilful believers. Their denunciation and destruction of ‘idolatry’ and every rite ‘not appointed in the Word,’ with the necessity they lay under of maintaining a high standard of Biblical morality as a proof that Antinomian licence was not the necessary result of Justification by Faith, engaged them in a war against Art, Literature, and Natural Beauty and Pleasure, which, while it stamped the national consciousness with a grave, deep, and serious habit of regarding life, which is of the greatest value, produced also an immense amount, not yet exorcised, of official Pharisaism, popular hypocrisy, and practical pessimism, with all its miserable consequences. These were unfortunate results of the great rebellion against authority and claim of ‘private judgment,’ apparently suggested, in part at least, by self-defence; while the Nicene and Predestinarian dogmas were put forward with an emphasis and detail which would not be attempted in the present day, but were very seasonable in times when immaculate and even strained orthodoxy was both weapon and armour in a degree that does not prevail now.
Knox, it must be remembered, did not discourage the belief that he could predict the future and had a good deal of the ‘second-sight’ in him. He had a powerful political instinct, and he and his chief associates knew that if they went ‘too far’ in their destructions, the alarm would be taken, and the life and death struggle in which they were engaged would for them be lost for ever; and every man of any depth of thought or feeling is aware that the ‘doctrines of grace,’ in their inner, perhaps mystical, interpretation, and apart altogether from the stupendous metaphysical and historical setting assigned them in systems of Christian dogma, have a consoling, strengthening, and guiding influence on that vast body of serious, simple, if often practically powerful natures, to whom Criticism is neither a necessity nor a possibility. Such a union of accommodation and exaggeration need not be construed as of set purpose propositional in form, and deliberate in execution. In the transition from authority to private judgment initiated by Humanism and the Renaissance generally, special Reformation exigencies may be conceived as leading to such a union, so that in thought and action it was only semi-conscious and instinctive, and there was little time for the minutiæ of introspective scrutiny. On the ethical side, however, there was no Renaissance loosening among the mass of the leading Reformers. The value of the controversial mendacities propagated about the morals of Knox may be judged of by the fact that the coryphæus of the revilers maintained that he won his second wife by magic! As a rule they kept the ten commandments, and especially the seventh, rigidly. They failed a good deal on the new one of Charity. They preached the ‘Gospel’ with technical accuracy, but they mostly practised the ‘Law,’ and if Paul had returned among them, he would probably have re-edited his Epistle to the Romans, with up-to-date applications, as indeed he might have to do still.
CHAPTER V
BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM
In Buchanan’s case, the revolt from authority seems to have produced different effects. As regards dogma, it appears to have led him into an attitude of mind that was mainly negative. He had none of the ‘Evangelical’ fervour which marked the utterances of Knox, Luther, Calvin though to a less degree, and the Reforming preachers of Scotland. He never preached, in the popular sense of the word, although as Principal of St. Leonard’s and ‘doctor in the schools’ he could easily have had himself ‘called’ and ordained, if he had been animated by any zeal for the function. He could not have written such letters as Knox wrote, full of pious sentiment and sympathy, in phraseology that was absolutely unctuous, to Mrs. Bowes, and Mrs. Locke, and other women, who leant on him for a sort of semi-priestly or confessorial guidance. He was a critic, not a sentimentalist. You may read his whole works through, prose and poetry both, without knowing that he laid any stress on the Calvinism of the Scottish Church, except on its destructive side. Indeed, much of his literary work was done before he openly and formally broke with Rome, which he was in no hurry to do. He satirises the clergy, especially the monks, and ridicules such doctrines as those of Indulgences and Transubstantiation, the latter especially in the Franciscanus, where it is stated with a grossness and extravagance of literalism which would probably be disowned by the highest order of Catholic dogmatist. As the Franciscanus was published, after revision and completion, in his Protestant days, this may have been an addition of the period; but nowhere, in anything he wrote during the Protestant part of his career, does he emphasise, or almost even allude to, such doctrines as Justification by Faith, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Election, and Reprobation, or any of the positive dogmatic propositions most prominently characteristic of Scottish Protestantism.