SECTION 5. CONCLUDING ESTIMATE
The reader will expect me, after having given some account of the estimates of others, to make an evaluation of my own. Of course no view can be final; mine, like that of everyone else, is the expression of an age and an environment as well as that of an individual.
[Sidenote: Causes of the Reformation]
The Reformation, like the Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Social Revolution, was but the consequence of the operation of antecedent changes in environment and habit, intellectual and economic. There was the widening and deepening of knowledge, due in one aspect to the invention of printing, in the other to the geographical and historical discoveries of the fifteenth century and the consequent adumbration of the idea of natural law. Even in the later schoolmen, like Biel and Occam, still more in the humanists, one finds a much stronger rationalism than in the representative thinkers of the Middle Ages. The general economic antecedent was the growth in wealth and the change in the system of production from gild and barter to that of money and wages. This produced three secondary results, which in turn operated as causes: the rise of the moneyed class, individualism, and nationalism.
All these tendencies, operating in three fields, the religious, the political and the intellectual, produced the Reformation and its sisters, the Renaissance and the Social Revolution of the sixteenth century. The Reformation—including in that term both the Protestant movement and the Catholic reaction—partly occupied {744} all these fields, but did not monopolize any of them. There were some religious, or anti-religious, movements outside the Reformation, and the Lutheran impulse swept into its own domain large tracts of the intellectual and political fields, primarily occupied by Renaissance and Revolution.
[Sidenote: Religious aspect]
(1) The gêne felt by many secular historians in the treatment of religion is now giving way to the double conviction of the importance of the subject and of its susceptibility to scientific study. Religion in human life is not a subject apart, nor is it necessary to regard all theological revolts as obscurantist. As a rationalist[1] has remarked, it is usually priests who have freed mankind from taboos and superstitions. Indeed, in a religious age, no effective attack on the existing church is possible save one inspired by piety.
[Sidenote: Parallels to the Reformation]
Many instructive parallels to the Reformation can be found both in Christian history and in that of other religions; they all markedly show the same consequences of the same causes. The publication of Christianity, with its propaganda of monotheism against the Roman world and its accentuation of faith against the ceremonialism of the Jewish church, resembled that of Luther's "gospel." Marcion with his message of Pauline faith and his criticism of the Bible, was a second-century Reformer. The iconoclasm and nationalism of the Emperor Leo furnish striking similarities to the Protestant Revolt. The movements started by the medieval mystics and still more by the heretics Wyclif and Huss, rehearsed the religious drama of the sixteenth century. Many revivals in the Protestant church, such as Methodism, were, like the original movement, returns to personal piety and biblicism. The Old Catholic schism in its repudiation of the papal supremacy, and even Modernism, notwithstanding its {745} disclaimers, are animated in part by the same motives as those inspiring the Reformers. In Judaism the Sadducees, in their bibliolatry and in their opposition to the traditions dear to the Pharisees, were Protestants; a later counterpart of the same thing is found in the reform the Karaites by Anan ben David. Mohammed has been a favorite subject for comparison with Luther by the Catholics, but in truth, in no disparaging sense, the proclamation of Islam, with its monotheism, emphasis on faith and predestination, was very like the Reformation, and so were several later reforms within Mohammedanism, including two in the sixteenth century. Many parallels could doubtless be adduced from the heathen religions, perhaps the most striking is the foundation of Sikhism by Luther's contemporary Nanak, who preached monotheism and revolted from the ancient ceremonial and hierarchy of caste.
What is the etiology of religious revolution? The principal law governing it is that any marked change either in scientific knowledge or in ethical feeling necessitates a corresponding alteration in the faith. All the great religious innovations of Luther and his followers can be explained as an attempt to readjust faith to the new culture, partly intellectual, partly social, that had gradually developed during the later Middle Ages.