The Benefits and Deficits of the Reformation

Read a lecture I delivered in beautiful Wells Cathedral to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day, back in 2017

Reformation Day (October 31st) is approaching. It commemorates the most famous act of flyposting in history: when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, an act that's generally considered to have begun the most momentous schism in the history of Christianity.

Back in 2017, while still a doctoral student at Oxford, I had the distinct honour of being invited by the dean and chapter of stunning Wells Cathedral to deliver a special 500th anniversary lecture, in the cathedral, on the "benefits and deficits of the Reformation."

I consider the Reformation to be the most important event in modern history: spiritually, politically, mentally, morally. It left no aspect of life untouched and set the modern world on its course. We still deal with the effects of the Reformation today in every facet of our lives. It's impossible even to think about politics or religion without categories that were created or shaped by the Reformation.

Sadly, the event wasn't filmed. I wore a beautiful silk tie I bought from I Boggi in Milan. I also had a tremendous beard which required far too much maintenance. Luckily, I still have my transcript for the lecture, which lasted an hour, followed by questions from the audience.

What follows is the lecture in its entirety.

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A special day it is, 500 years to the day since what is arguably history’s most famous act of flyposting: on October 31 1517, the de-cloistered monk Martin Luther is said to have taken a list of 95 points of doctrine – the 95 Theses – and nailed them up on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. At that time Wittenberg was an important university city, and the principal seat of the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg, within the Holy Roman Empire; Luther, now a university doctor, would have been following an academic tradition of advertising controversies in such a way. We generally take that event – that broadside against abuses in the medieval Church, especially the sale of indulgences to reduce time spent in Purgatory – as marking the beginning of the far larger and longer event called the Reformation; the most momentous schism in the history of Western Christianity, far more so than the Schism of 1054 that has separated Western Christianity from the Eastern Orthodox churches. New churches emerged, the Lutheran and the Reformed, so-called because, under the leadership of men like Jean Calvin, they cut deeper and more extensively into the body of medieval Christianity than Luther was prepared to. In England, there emerged a national reformed church under the government of the monarch, the Church of England, in a process that saw, among other things, the authority of Rome thrown off; the religious houses dissolved and their assets confiscated; the cult of the saints destroyed; the creation of an English liturgy; and the first authorised English translations of the Bible. Nor, in an age that could hardly conceive of a separation between politics and religion, were the effects confined to the religious sphere: the map of Europe would be re-drawn, and two centuries of warfare would follow, in the Old World and the New.

In truth, the story of the Reformation’s roots and its beginning, and also what it actually was, is rather more complicated and disputed; academics, contentious creatures by design, agree on very little. Our choosing to celebrate a Reformation Day is really perhaps just a result of our human propensity to want to nail things, not only up as Luther did, but also down. But Reformation Day serves as a marker to focus our attention, as do all such anniversaries – birthdays, wedding anniversaries, jubilees, bonfires – so long as their placement is not entirely arbitrary; they draw thoughts, things and people towards them, moth-like to a flame.

For those of you who don’t know me – and I hope that should be everybody here, less two or three – I’m a PhD student at Oxford. I study the Reformation as it affected the town and parish of Wimborne Minster, in my native Dorset. Wimborne has an excellent run of medieval and early modern records, including medieval churchwardens’ accounts; and I’m using these records to see whether the religious changes usually thought to have been caused by the Reformation were actually prefigured over a longer span of time. As a member of the French Annales school of history might put it, I’m studying the Reformation ‘dans la longue durée’.

I’ve been tasked this evening with telling you about the ‘benefits and disadvantages of the Reformation’, which strikes me as a neat little topic with which to fill a spare three quarters of an hour. So: What did the Reformation do? And were or are those things good or bad? This is not going to be a balance sheet: how boring that would be. Instead, I want to tell you some things you may not know, and to throw fresh light on some things you do know or think you know. If I seem at times to move crab-wise and then by wild leaps, it is only because there are so many different paths by which an historian might travel in attempting to answer those questions. There is just too much space and time to cover; a scattergun approach, at least, will not impose a false coherence on an event whose very boundaries, let alone the extent of its influence, still remain uncertain. Common threads should, I hope, be nonetheless apparent.

So I’ll begin and end this talk with what I see as two very determined attempts to imagine away the Reformation, one to reveal its benefits to world history more clearly, the other to show that it was a grave misstep – and thank God we weren’t involved in it. By challenging, with the help of my Oxford supervisor Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, the ‘myth of the English Reformation’ – one of the most persistent myths of English exceptionalism there is – I hope to tell you something about the enduring effects of the Reformation on the Church of England.

One man who certainly thought he knew the benefits and the disadvantages of the Reformation was Kingsley Amis. In 1976, Amis wrote arguably his strangest novel, The Alteration. It is an alternative history novel, much like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, recently dramatised by Amazon, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America; the former an imagining of an America that had lost the Second World War, the latter of an America that had never entered it in the first place. The premise of the Alteration is also quite simple: What if, for some reason, the Reformation had never happened?

In fact, there are two reasons. First of all, Henry VIII never succeeds to the English throne. The short-lived union between his elder brother, Arthur, and the first of Henry’s six wives, Catherine of Aragon, produces a male heir; and Henry’s brash attempt to usurp the throne from the young nephew is rebuffed by a Papal crusade. So no Henry VIII – rather Henry ‘the Abominable’, an epithet I’m sure we could apply to him anyway; and no ‘Great Matter’ either, no reason to break with Rome.

Which is to say, the touch-paper for the English Reformation is never lit; nor, more fundamentally, is that of the Continental Reformation. Martin Luther does not go on to become a ‘renegade and prophet’, as one recent biography has him; instead, he is reconciled to the Catholic Church, becoming Pope Germanius I. No 95 Theses; no Diet of Worms – ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’; no Lutheranism.

Amis-père, like Amis-fils, had a great taste for double-meanings; and the title of the novel refers not just to a drastic alteration to the course of history, but also to another alteration – equally drastic in its own way. Hubert Anvil, a ten-year-old chorister whose voice has been judged too heavenly to sacrifice to the normal course of adolescence, is scheduled for castration, to become one of the castrati; this provides the main plot, as young Hubert attempts to avoid the chop with the aid of his dissident brother.

So what is 1976 like without the Reformation? Judge for yourself.

Politically as well as spiritually, the Church’s rule is absolute. Instead of being a parliamentary democracy, England is administered by a convocation of clergy reporting to the Catholic hierarchy. Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria have found themselves in charge of the Holy Office, the Church’s own secret police, rather than the SS and KGB. Europe, united under the supreme spiritual authority of the pope, is still a Europe of kings and emperors; and further abroad, in the New World and the East, the people still groan under the yoke of colonialism and direct rule by European powers.

Shades of 1984, too: for cynical motives of powers, Christendom maintains a permanent cold war with the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Like INGSOC, the Papacy does so as a means of distracting ordinary people from their real problems at home, and of preventing them from questioning the established order and rebelling. Secretly, however, the new pope – a scheming Yorkshireman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Harold Wilson – plans to make that cold war a hot one: with the papal prohibition on birth control, a harsher prophylactic is needed to reduce Europe’s spiralling and increasingly agitated population.

Science is, of course, banned – and with it electricity. Catholic Europe is a steampunk-esque world of airships, diesel cars – because they require no electrical spark to begin combustion – and coal-powered trains. Accompanying the ban on science is a broader repression of intellectual, artistic and sexual freedom. Shakespeare’s work has been suppressed, although Hamlet is still performed in secret; Blake, Mozart, Beethoven, Shelley and the majority of other great artistic and literary figures have bent their necks to religious authority. No prizes for guessing the real-world counterparts of the following titles culled from the novel: ‘Father Bond’; ‘The Lord of the Chalices’; and, my favourite, ‘The Wind in the Cloisters’. Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit; A.J. Ayer, the louche philosopher and atheist, professor of dogmatic theology at New College, Oxford.

The novel, for what it’s worth, embodies a great many deep-set prejudices about the Catholic Church, both at the time of the Reformation and in the present-day: its authoritarianism; its cultivation of popular ignorance and its abhorrence of secular Progress with a capital ‘P’; its twisted sexuality and sexual frustration. (Interestingly enough, it may have been sexual frustration that motivated Amis himself to write the novel. The story goes that not long before he began writing The Alteration, Amis was played a recording of the last ever castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922; taking issue with the claim that the music could be considered great art, because Moreschi had been castrated to produce it, Amis asserted that art could only be great if it celebrated instead of repressing human sexuality. According to Richard Bradford, a recent biographer, proving that this was so took on an added importance for Amis, who was experiencing sexual dysfunction at that time, probably impotence, in his marriage. And when we consider that the next novel Amis wrote, Jake’s Thing, is about an aging don who struggles to overcome the loss of his mojo – well, Bradford’s theory about art imitating life gains considerable traction.)

I said ‘prejudices’ because they are, for the most part, just that. In my field of English religious history, historians like Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh and Jack Scarisbrick have been doing their level best for some time to show the vitality and popularity of the Church in the immediate period before the Reformation. Within academia at least, the achievements of these historians have been impossible to ignore; but the effects of recent scholarship on popular understanding of the Reformation, by contrast, appears to have been minimal. Witness, for instance, the recent comparisons of Brexit to Henry VIII’s brave defiance of the papacy, the first united states of Europe; or the Elizabeth films starring Cate Blanchett, especially the second, with its babbling, dribbling King Philip of Spain, a bejewelled crucifix plunging into the depths as the Armada burns. The Reformation is not obviously a simple story of light versus dark; although all stories worth telling are, as William Faulkner recognised, variations on that theme.

Whatever its faults as an appraisal of the Catholic Church, the Alteration is, at least, a sideways acknowledgement of an important truth about the Reformation: that it was a world-historical event, with untold ramifications – religious, political, intellectual and social; the world would be very different without it.

I am going to set aside the question of whether the Reformation was what Martin Luther and the other reformers – Jean Calvin, Philip Melancthon, Huldreich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Martin Bucer, Thomas Cranmer, John Hooper – wanted it to be: a return to a Christianity uncorrupted by the Papacy. Is Protestantism of one variety or another a better or truer version of Christianity? Is the great benefit of the Reformation that it saved Western Christianity from the medieval Catholic Church? These are hardly the sorts of question a historian can answer as an historian, especially not a liberal-agnostic historian with an increasingly less youthful Nietzschean streak. On the other hand, for a believer to engage spiritually with the Reformation is to reveal it to be a still-living narrative. The Reformation dramatised and dramatises some of the central, indeed eternal, issues of Christian life; it is a journey to the heart of what it means to be a Christian. What is the proper relationship between the individual and God? What place should human authority and tradition have within that relationship? Where is the real locus of the Christian life: in monastic contemplation and prayer; or in and of the world? What is sufficient for salvation: a life of good works and charity; or nothing without faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice?

But, still, there is plenty for this liberal-agnostic historian to talk about. Let me tell you about some of the unintended, longer-term effects of the Reformation. Good or bad, you decide.

Nationalism and the modern state. In order to finance the nearly two-hundred years of religious warfare unleased by the Reformation, government naturally had to grow in its complexity and its power. It became possible, perhaps for the first time, to see government as something autonomous, ‘the state’, with its own monopoly on the use of force within a given territory. First there emerged ‘state-nations’, and then ‘nation-states’. To strengthen the enthusiasm of their subjects to fight the subjects of other monarchs, the monarchies of Europe deployed cultural and religious identities, standardising and creating national religions, languages and cultural practices. These techniques of homogenisation are the archetypal techniques of state-formation; they are still in use today, whether with horrifying effect in Myanmar or not entirely successfully, despite the so-called Braveheart-effect, in Scotland.

I could talk about the north-south cultural divide in Europe, which was accentuated as the battle lines of religious allegiance became fixed. This divide still persists; and in recent years its moral associations have been re-asserted with a vengeance, as a result of the financial crisis and the bankrolling of feckless and indolent southern Europeans by the industrious and prudent heirs of Luther and Calvin.

Religious toleration, believe it or not, was one by-product of the Reformation, despite the massive bloodshed in the name of true religion; or, rather, because of the massive bloodshed. The desired aim of religious monopoly proved unachievable, people sickened of persecution, and so concessions to minorities were made – albeit grudgingly. Soon the benefits of a happier kind of toleration made themselves known by the mercantile success of tolerant societies like the Netherlands. We should be careful, though, not to see this as a simple climbing path to today’s sunny multicultural uplands. (An interesting fact: Transylvania, now remembered only as the home of Count of Dracula and, more recently, the Cheeky Girls, was once a beacon of toleration in a Europe that was still at war over the Reformation. As early as 1568, the Edict of Torda allowed local communities there to choose their own preachers, in an acknowledgement of the existence of radical Christian religion; ‘faith’, stated the Edict, ‘is a gift of God’. Transylvania’s status as a borderland of cultures and religions was an important factor, and the pragmatism that status engendered in its rulers. Of course, in time persecution came, largely forced upon the area from the outside, but it is still true that Transylvania remained for a while one of the least dangerous places in Europe to be a religious radical.)

While we’re on the subject on enlightenment in unlikely places, what about enlightenment with a capital ‘E’ – the Enlightenment? Religious fragmentation certainly allowed radical thinkers room for manoeuvre; for one thing, the Protestants had no Inquisition. Which is not to say that the Protestants did not persecute fiercely too; in a cruel parody of the adult baptism they proclaimed necessary to individual salvation, radical anabaptists were often sentenced to be drowned by Protestant and Catholic authorities alike. But it would be wrong to see the Enlightenment and the growth of science as being against religion; they grew out of it, not from unbelief but from ‘sincere and troubled belief’. ‘Much of the Enlightenment was not anti-Christian at all’, writes Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, and ‘to look at the eighteenth century Enlightenment in England, Scotland or Germany is to see a movement which was as much an ally of Protestant Christianity as its opponent’. Perhaps most emblematic of the intertwining of the Reformation and the Enlightenment is not a Christian thinker but a Jew, Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher. His Portuguese ancestors had been banished with the rest of Iberia’s Jews – or, rather, those who refused to convert – after the Reconquista of the peninsula from the Muslim Moors, completed in 1492. Spinoza’s whole philosophy of pantheism – in which God is the infinite universe, in both of its aspects as matter and thought – arrived out of a long internal struggle with his faith, which was held in dialogue with Christian radicals. Exile, resettlement, cultural exchange, doubt – all fostered by the Reformation and its aftermath, all influences on one of the most individual thinkers in Western philosophy.

I could go on and on, accruing consequences unintended. What about the birth of America: the emigration of persecuted radicals from the Old World to the New? Or the notion of Manifest Destiny, which later drove pilgrims west and created a nation on a continental scale? A promised people conquering and taming its promised land – it’s hard not to see that as a religious conception; or not to see the fervour of its pursuit among the Protestant men and women who first set foot in Massachusetts. What about the so-called Protestant Ethic, most famously elaborated by the German sociologist Max Weber? An ethic of diligent worldly vocation delivered from the womb of Calvinist predestination – the theory that God has decided before human history who will be saved and who damned – before the severance of its theological cord allowed it to grow into the defining ethic of modern capitalism. Weber’s account has not been without its challenges and its detractors; but the mutation of religious into secular values, and the subsequent occlusion of their now supposedly shameful origins, remains an issue of the utmost relevance – an issue new atheists and liberal ‘humanist’ opponents of religion would do well to think just a little bit harder about.

What I have really been saying is that, like all world-historical events, the Reformation has an octopus-like quality – it has tentacles everywhere. Before you can even know the advantages and disadvantages of an event, first know what happened; and the complicated act of disentanglement principally falls to the unfortunate historian.

It is not an easy task. The notion of a first and ultimate cause is, of course, seductive – just ask Aquinas; but how far along the chain of causality is too far? When is explanatory power exhausted?

Consider this claim: no Reformation, no Buddhism. Really.