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-fashioned 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 passion 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 superstitions 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 debasement 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 surpassed, 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 Zwangskultur), 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 assurance 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 assent 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 naïvely by Luther, that of the existence of a personal, ethical God. 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 godly. 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-fashioned 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.
Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote: Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the latter left much open. "The Reformation," according to H. A. L. Fisher, "was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive communities of the West."
Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.