The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than creed, adopted the Protestant standpoint. Eucken thinks that "the Reformation became the animating soul of the modern world, the principle motive-force of its progress. . . . In truth, every phase of modern life not directly or indirectly connected with the Reformation has something insipid and paltry about it." Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, and that the stamp of the conflict between the inner grace and the outward support is of the esse of Protestanism. William James was also in warm sympathy with Luther who, he thought, "in his immense, manly way . . . stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility." James added that the Reformer also invented a morality, as new as romantic love in literature, founded on a religious experience of despair breaking through the old, pagan pride.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher and Gasquet, labored fruitfully in the field of the Reformation by uncovering new facts, few or none of them had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the period. Janssen [Sidenote: Janssen] brought to its perfection a new method applied to a new field; the field was that of Kulturgeschichte, the method that of letting the sources speak for themselves, but naturally only those sources agreeable to the author's bias. In this way he represented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of the German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting frost to both culture and morality. Pastor's [Sidenote: Pastor] work, though dense with fresh knowledge, offers no connected {741} theory. The Reformation, he thinks, was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned classes and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat. From the learned uproar of Denifle's school emerges the explanation of the revolt as the "great sewer" which carried off from the church all the refuse and garbage of the time. Grisar's far finer psychology—characteristically Jesuit—tries to cast on Luther the origin of the present destructive subjectivism. Grisar's proof that "the modern infidel theology" of Germany bases itself in an exaggerated way on the Luther of the first period, is suggestive.

[Sidenote: Acton]

Though the Reformation was one of Lord Acton's favorite topics, I cannot find on that subject any new or fruitful thought at all in proportion to his vast learning. His theory of the Reformation is therefore the old Catholic one, stripped of supernaturalism, that it was merely the product of the wickedness and vagaries of a few gifted demagogues, and the almost equally blamable obstinacy of a few popes. He thought the English Bishop Creighton too easy in his judgment of the popes, adding, "My dogma is not the special wickedness of my own spiritual superiors, but the general wickedness of men in authority—of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Cranmer and Knox, of Mary Stuart and Henry VIII, of Philip II and Elizabeth, of Cromwell and Louis XIV, James and Charles, William, Bossuet and Ken." Acton dated modern times from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, believing that the fundamental characteristic of the period is the belief in conscience as the voice of God. He says, that "Luther at Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," but he confesses himself baffled by the problem, which is, to his mind, why Luther did not return to the church. Luther, alleges Acton, gave up {742} all the doctrines commonly insisted on as crucial and, then or later, dropped predestination, and admitted the necessity of good works, the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin Mass. In fact, says Acton, the one bar to his return to the church was his belief that the pope was Antichrist.

It is notable that none of the free minds starting from Catholicism have been attracted to the Protestant camp. Renan prophesied that St. Paul and Protestantism were coming to the end of their reign. Paul Sabatier carefully proved that the Modernists owed nothing to Luther, and their greatest scholar, Loisy, succinctly put the case in the remark, "We are done with partial heresies."

[Sidenote: Anglicans]

The Anglicans have joined the Romanists to denounce as heretics those who rebelled against the church which still calls Anglicans heretics. Neville Figgis, having snatched from Treitschke the juxtaposition "Luther and Machiavelli," has labored to build up around it a theory by which these two men shall appear as the chief supports of absolutism and "divine right of kings." Figgis thinks that with the Reformation religion was merely the "performance for passing entertainment," but that the state was the "eternal treasure." A far more judicious and unprejudiced discussion of the same thesis is offered in the works of Professor A. F. Pollard. He sees both sides of the medal for, if religion had become a subject of politics, politics had become matter of religion. He thinks the English Reformation was primarily a revolt of the laity against the clergy.

[Sidenote: Other schools]

The liberal estimate of the Reformation fashionable a hundred years ago has also been revived in an elaborate work of Mackinnon, and is assumed in obiter dicta by such eminent historians as A. W. Benn, {743} E. P. Cheyney, C. Borgeaud, H. L. Osgood and Woodrow Wilson. Finally, Professor J. H. Robinson has improved the old political interpretation current among the secular historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essence of the Lutheran movement he finds in the revolt from the Roman ecclesiastical state.