CHAPTER XIITHE REFORMATION
Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves. One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason why we did so and so.”
But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a few minutes.
We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to in public.
What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs and I will believe yours.”
Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.
A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very expensive in the matter of human lives and property.
For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying, continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been drained down to the last kopek.
Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus far have only been respectedin chemical laboratories and astronomical observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all coming generations.
Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this chapter, to wit: the Reformation.
Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly bad.
According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were seriously trying to be true Christians.
Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.
The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their Holy Mother the Church.
As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.
The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic revolution with a slightly theological background.
Of course it is much easier to teach our children thatgood Prince Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of Hapsburg.
On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.
But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions of our own.
Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther, was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.
By no means.
When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, hewould never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.
But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.
The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who ages ago reserved that right to himself.
Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more than enough for our limited human ability.
And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this slight detour.
As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and political development of the last three centuries and which came to be known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced during the course of the last five centuries.
Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party, strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had been held for such a long time.
If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elementshad not been temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have succeeded.
It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic inquisitors.
The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those guilty of a “breach of discipline.”
Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of their power.
A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.
To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most severe test.
For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most people.
They refuse to be hurried.
They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.
They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as they can possibly carry.
As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment which it held in such great abhorrence.
For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its adherents.
And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not progress as much as might have been expected.
Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, theReformation gave the world a book which was held to be infallible.
Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule supreme.
Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.
All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.
But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”
A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world can offer no adequate comparison.
That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a purpose of their own and supporters whohoped to fish successfully in troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.
When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.
But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making, they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.
Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and fight.
It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,” a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.
The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.
The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.
And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of the Middle Ages as long as they lived.
Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected, until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth century.
And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were all on the side of progress.
In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.
Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe andfear which we feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the “inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very serious, not to say disastrous.
Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had never foreseen.
If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.
After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation, dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Romanphilosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries before.
And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.
With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name a byword for rapacity and tyranny.
And she succeeded most brilliantly.
After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a Frenchman or any other foreigner.
The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries, began a thorough house-cleaning.
The sale of indulgences came to an end.
Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules laid down by their founders.
Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.
And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to carry the burden of existence by themselves.
Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.
But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more clearly revealed.
During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and intellectual prison-house.
The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.
After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.
At least that had been the original plan.
But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make their lockup dissenter-proof.
Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the unruly inmates escaped.
Ere long the entire building was a wreck.
At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregorythe Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.
No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their temporary convictions.
This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they pleased without hindrance or molestation.
And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause of tolerance.
It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.