The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

[Sidenote: Faith vs. works]

The first shift, and the most important, was that from salvation by works to salvation by faith only. The Catholic dogma is that salvation is dependent on certain sacraments, grace being bestowed automatically (ex opere operato) on all who participate in the celebration of the rite without actively opposing its effect. Luther not only reduced the number of sacraments but he entirely changed their character. Not they, but the faith of the participant mattered, and {746} this faith was bestowed freely by God, or not at all. In this innovation one primary cause was the individualism of the age; the sense of the worth of the soul or, if one pleases, of the ego. This did not mean subjectivism, or religious autonomy, for the Reformers held passionately to an ideal of objective truth, but it did mean that every soul had the right to make its personal account with God, without mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and credit balance of outward work and merit was done away, and for it was substituted the nobler, or at least more spiritual and less mechanical, idea of disinterested morality and unconditioned salvation. The God of Calvin may have been a tyrant, but he was not corruptible by bribes.

We are so much accustomed to think of dogma as the esse of religion that it is hard for us to do justice to the importance of this change. Really, it is not dogma so much as rite and custom that is fundamental. The sacramental habit of mind was common to medieval Christianity and to most primitive religions. For the first time Luther substituted for the sacramental habit, or attitude, its antithesis, an almost purely ethical criterion of faith. The transcendental philosophy and the categorical imperative lay implicit in the famous sola fide.

[Sidenote: Monism]

The second great change made by Protestantism was more intellectual, that from a pluralistic to a monistic {747} standpoint. Far from the conception of natural law, the early Protestants did little or nothing to rationalize, or explain away, the creeds of the Catholics, but they had arrived at a sufficiently monistic philosophy to find scandal in the worship of the saints, with its attendant train of daily and trivial miracles. To sweep away the vast hierarchy of angels and canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic, and to preach pure monotheism was in the spirit of the time and is a phenomenon for which many parallels can be found. Instructive is the analogy of the contemporary trend to absolutism; neither God nor king any longer needed intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Political and economic aspects]

(2) In two aspects the Reformation was the religious expression of the current political and economic change. In the first place it reflected and reacted upon the growing national self-consciousness, particularly of the Teutonic peoples. [Sidenote: Nationalism and Teutonism] The revolt from Rome was in the interests of the state church, and also of Germanic culture. The break-up of the Roman church at the hands of the Northern peoples is strikingly like the break-up of the Roman Empire under pressure from their ancestors. Indeed, the limits of the Roman church practically coincided with the boundaries of the Empire. The apparent exception of England proves the rule, for in Britain the Roman civilization was swept away by the German invasions of the fifth and following centuries.

That the Reformation strengthened the state was inevitable, for there was no practical alternative to putting the final authority in spiritual matters, after the pope had been ejected, into the hands of the civil government. Congregationalism was tried and failed as tending to anarchy. But how little the Reformation was really responsible for the new despotism and the divine right of kings, is clear from a comparison with {748} the Greek church and the Turkish Empire. In both, the same forces which produced the state churches of Western Europe operated in the same way. Selim I, a bigoted Sunnite, after putting down the Shi'ite heresy, induced the last caliph of the Abbasid dynasty to surrender the sword and mantle of the prophet; thereafter he and his successors were caliphs as well as sultans. In Russia Ivan the Terrible made himself, in 1547, head of the national church.

[Sidenote: Capitalism]

Protestantism also harmonized with the capitalistic revolution in that its ethics are, far more than those of Catholicism, oriented by a reference to this world. The old monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude, mortification of the flesh, prayer and meditation, melted under the sun of a new prosperity. In its light men began to realize the ethical value of this life, of marriage, of children, of daily labor and of success and prosperity. It was just in this work that Protestantism came to see its chance of serving God and one's neighbor best. The man at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.